The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (16 page)

I took the basket that Frau Kessel offered me with one beringed claw; it was packed with brown-paper parcels that appeared to be filled with stones, judging by the weight. Frau Kessel herself, who was a head taller than me and considerably heftier, loaded herself down with a folded copy of the
Kölner Stadtanzeiger
and a very small handbag.

Having accomplished this, she lifted her chin a little and proceeded in a majestic fashion across the cobblestones. I think she could only have been more pleased with herself had I been a little Moorish boy in satin knickerbockers and a jeweled turban, following her with a peacock-feather fan. We called in at the baker’s on the Salzmarkt, where Frau Kessel purchased a small loaf of gray bread, and then to the grocery store on the opposite corner for a half liter of full-cream Eifel milk.

After that, Frau Kessel had finished her shopping, and she headed for home, with me staggering along behind her. When we arrived at her home, a very narrow traditional half-timbered house jammed between two others in a corner of the Orchheimer Strasse, she favored me with another of those looks over her spectacles.

“You’d better come in,” she informed me, and when I hesitated she said rather tartly, “Don’t just stand there. I won’t eat you.” I followed her inside with slight trepidation; the idea of being eaten had not occurred to me, but now I found myself wondering whether Frau Kessel had had anything to do with the disappearance of the two girls. Perhaps she lured them home by asking them to carry her shopping, and then
kept them locked up indoors, slaving away forever, like some sort of evil Frau Holle.

“You can put the basket on the table,” said Frau Kessel, leading me into the kitchen, which was excruciatingly neat and decorated in unrelenting shades of brown. A crucifix hung over the countertop; even the Jesus on it looked unnaturally clean-cut.

“I expect you would like a glass of milk and a cookie?”

I dared not say no, and the milk and the cookie were produced. I sat at the table trying very hard not to make crumbs or drip milk on anything. The cookie was soft and seemed to expand to fill my mouth; I tried to smile but it was difficult, like trying to grin with a mouthful of cotton wool. Eventually I managed to wash the cookie down with the milk.

“Frau Kessel?” I said as politely as I could.

“There aren’t any more cookies,” was the instant reply.

“I didn’t want another cookie,” I said hastily, then: “It was very nice, though.” I cleared my throat. “I just thought … it was very interesting what you were telling Mama and Papa when you visited us.”

“Hmm, and what was that?” inquired Frau Kessel. She was poised with the jug from the coffeemaker in one gnarly hand.

“About the town … after the war. And Fräulein Schiller.”

“Hmph,” said Frau Kessel. “Well, she was actually Gertrud Düster, of course. Herr Schiller changed his name afterward, after it all happened.”

“What was she like? Can you remember her?” I asked.

“Meine Gute
, I’m not senile,” snapped Frau Kessel. “Of course I remember her.” She sniffed. “She was about your age when she disappeared.” She eyed me thoughtfully. “She was not unlike you, Pia Kolvenbach; she had the same brown hair, although she always wore it in
Zöpfe
, little braids, which she had fastened on top. It’s such a shame these things went out of fashion. Why, there’s that little Meyer girl who has her hair cut short, like a boy’s! What her mother was thinking of, I can’t say.”

“And Gertrud Düster …?” I prompted.

“Tsk!” clucked Frau Kessel in irritation. “I was just getting to that. She was a very pretty little girl, the image of her mother. Hannelore—that was the mother’s name—well, she was a very beautiful woman.
There were a few hearts broken when Hannelore married Heinrich, or so my mother used to say.

“She also told me that Herr Düster, and I mean the current Herr Düster, not poor Heinrich, was one of the ones whose hearts were broken. Both brothers were mad about the girl, but she chose Heinrich.” She sniffed again. “Who can blame her? By all accounts, he’s always been the best of the two of them. Cain and Abel, that’s what those two are, and I don’t need to tell you which one Cain is.”

Frau Kessel lifted her chin. “They say that’s why he did it. He was bitter with jealousy, never got over it.”

“Really?” I said, in a fascinated tone of voice, hoping that she would go on. She did.

“Of course, he couldn’t get at Hannelore, because she died.”

“Mama said she died in the war,” I offered. Frau Kessel gave me a sideways look, a look that said
Just who is telling this story?
I shut up.

“She died in the war,” Frau Kessel went on, as though I had never interrupted. “Not
from
the war; she got sick. I don’t know what it was she had, though of course they didn’t have all these modern medicines then, no antibiotics, so it could have been anything. I saw her a few times in the street and I remember thinking she was very beautiful but terribly thin; I even noticed that as a child, though a lot of children”—here she eyed me balefully—“never notice anything outside themselves.” She shook her head. “It was dreadfully sad. Gertrud had to come to school anyway, even after her mother had died; there was nowhere else for her to go. It was wartime, and even her grandmother had to work.”

She fell silent, and I pondered the story of poor Gertrud, wondering whether she had endured the same prurient interest and probing questions about her mother’s death as I had about Oma Kristel’s. I pictured her sitting at her desk with her head crowned with its brown
Zöpfe
bent forward as though to shut everyone else out. Had some contemporary Thilo Koch in white shirt and lederhosen made her life a misery too? Poor Gertrud.

“What happened to her?” I asked at last.

Frau Kessel looked at me. “No one knows exactly.”

“Was it the war too?”

“It was after the war
ended,”
said Frau Kessel, with irritation, as though I had not been listening. “And,” she added with asperity, “when
you children make such a fuss about what you will and won’t eat, you should think of what it was like in those days. Bread, eggs, meat—all of it rationed. Chocolate—we never ever
saw
chocolate for years, even after the war. What do you think of that?”

“Furchtbar,”
I said dutifully.

“Doch,”
agreed Frau Kessel. “And the town … parts of it practically in ruins from the bombs. There used to be some lovely old houses right where the Rathaus Café stands, did you know that? Bombed flat. And men coming back from the war, and finding their homes completely gone.”

“Maybe Gertrud got hit by a bomb,” I offered.

“It was after the war ended,” Frau Kessel reminded me again. “If things had been better, more might have been done to find her, to catch the person who did it—as though we didn’t all know who it was! But with things in the state they were, and some soldiers coming back, and others passing through, and the Americans coming in with tanks—everything was such a mess for ages, for years afterward in fact … they never even caught all the war criminals, let alone anyone else, and by the winter of the next year we were all starving and nobody cared anymore.” She shook her head. “Perhaps now people will start to think back to that time, and wonder whether it was such a good idea to let
him
carry on living here just as though he was as innocent as a lamb.”

“Maybe he
didn’t
do it,” I suggested tentatively; in my imagination any number of ghouls might have come creeping up out of the darkness of the forest to snatch a child, in those long-ago times when war had devastated the land like one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse and all the adults’ efforts were concentrated elsewhere.

“Maybe,
maybe,”
sneered Frau Kessel. She put her hands on her hips. “Listen to me, Pia Kolvenbach. The day Gertrud vanished, she was supposed to be going for a walk with someone. Do you know who that someone was? It was her loving uncle, Herr Düster. He was going to take her for a stroll in the Eschweiler Tal. Only she never came back, did she?”

“Well … then didn’t everyone
see
that it was him?” I asked doubtfully.

“He denied it, of course,” said Frau Kessel indignantly. “He said he never took her out at all. And Herr Schiller—Heinrich Düster as he was
then—well, my mother told me you could see what a blow it was for him, his own brother doing that, but he never lost control for an instant. Some men would have gone for him with their fists if they had nothing else to hand, but Herr Schiller remained the gentleman to the last. My mother said he looked sad more than angry. He even defended Herr Düster, though I think that was beyond what most Christians could bring themselves to do.” She frowned, pursing her lips. “I’m sure the poor man thought he was doing the right thing—it wouldn’t bring Gertrud back, whatever he did, and he didn’t want to be the one to condemn his own brother, but perhaps if he
had
, none of the other girls would have disappeared. It makes you think, doesn’t it? Turning the other cheek is all very well …”

“The other girls?” I repeated. “Katharina Linden, and Marion Voss …?”

“Oh, no.” Frau Kessel turned the unwinking eyes of her spectacles on me. “Not those two. I mean the
other
ones.”

T
he other ones?” I repeated slowly.

Frau Kessel looked at me sharply, as though I were being purposely obtuse. “Yes, of course. There was the little Schmitz girl, I don’t remember what her first name was. And Caroline Hack. Not,” she added, “that it was a surprise when
she
disappeared. Always running around the town on her own at all hours, and her stepmother never doing a thing about it—though I suppose perhaps she was pleased to have Caroline out of the way.” Frau Kessel’s sniff of disapproval implied that she could barely begin to imagine the depths of depravity into which other inhabitants of the town might fall.

“I’ve never heard of anyone called Caroline Hack,” I said doubtfully. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the
Grundschule
called that.”

“Silly girl, of course there isn’t,” said Frau Kessel. “This was years ago. If Caroline Hack were still alive, she’d be nearly your mother’s age.”

“Oh.” I thought about this. “The Schmitz girl, is she also the same age?”

“No, younger—well, she was younger at the
time,”
said Frau Kessel. “Though I suppose she would be older than Caroline Hack now.” She brushed her hands together, removing invisible dirt. “You do ask a lot of questions, Pia Kolvenbach. Do you ask as many questions in class?”

“Um …” There was no answer to such questions posed by Frau Kessel, none at any rate that would not merit another lecture.

“Well, I suppose you think I have nothing better to do than stand here gossiping,” said Frau Kessel. “Come along, Pia; I’ll show you out.” I was dismissed. She led me back down the brown hallway and let me out the front door.

“Bianca, that was her name,” she said suddenly, poised with one hand on the doorknob.

“Wie, bitte?”
I looked at her in confusion.

“The little Schmitz girl.”

“Oh,” I said, and then:
“Tschüss
, Frau Kessel,” as I stepped thankfully into the sunlight.

“Auf Wiedersehen,”
said Frau Kessel emphatically, managing to inject disapproval of my informal language into her tone. Then she shut the door.

It was too late to visit Herr Schiller now, I decided; and though I wanted to find out a little more about Caroline Hack and Bianca Schmitz, Herr Schiller was the last person I could ask, considering the furor caused by my inquiry about Katharina Linden. Instead I went home, scuffing my shoes along the cobblestones and mulling over what I had just heard.

Was it true? My mother always said you had to take what Frau Kessel said with a pinch of salt. She was prone to take a very small seed of rumor and grow it into a veritable aspidistra of supposed fact, like the time that Frau Nett’s teenage daughter had gastric flu and threw up at school one morning, and Frau Kessel told at least six different acquaintances that she had it on good authority that Magdalena Nett was four months pregnant. Frau Nett had not spoken to Frau Kessel for months after that enormity. All the same, it was hard to imagine her
making up
someone’s disappearance. Either a person was there, or they weren’t. I wondered whom I could ask.