The Tenth Witness Read online

  “You’re shivering,” she said. “I’ll draw you a bath when we get home.”

  Draw me a bath? I added up what little I knew until I felt certain of my hunch and said, “Kraus Steel.”

  She did not deny it. Her auburn hair was flying.

  “Do you know,” I yelled over the noise, “that I used Kraus steel on the dive platform? I looked everywhere for marine-ready steel. You’re that Kraus!”

  She shrugged, then smiled.

  Now I could look. What an excellent coincidence it was. Liesel explained that she ran the family foundation, and I guessed— correctly—that she gave away more money each year than I would make in several lifetimes. She talked about her work, then stopped and pulled the car off onto a modest rise, little more than a mound that brought us to all of twelve or fifteen meters above sea level. On an island as flat as Terschelling, that offered a sweeping view to the east.

  I wondered why we stopped until, gaping, I looked beyond her. “No way!” I said.

  It made perfect sense.

  “My family’s summer home.”

  In the distance rose an estate built on dunes rolling down to the North Sea, as strange in that setting as the Emerald City rising over a field of poppies. The main house formed a massive gull’s wing, with a pair of two-story corridors angled east and west that met at a central, turreted tower: an arrowhead, essentially, fronted by a stone turret. I had seen this tower, an old lighthouse sitting atop a promontory formed by the letters K R A U S. It was the logo burned into every piece of steel I received while building the dive platform.

  I counted seven fireplaces and, connected by a series of boardwalks to the main house, a dozen freestanding, single-story cottages cut into the dunes like satellites around a mother ship.

  “Löwenherz,” she said.

  My German was passable: “Lionheart?”

  She nodded. My eyes followed a long stone jetty to a dock, where I saw a boat that serviced three yachts moored offshore.

  Liesel removed her sunglasses and turned toward me. “I want to tell you something and ask you something.”

  Before she began, she hit the hazard button with her fist and pointed. “This is what you’re dealing with. I need to get it out in the open because I’ve been around too long not to know that my family’s wealth screws things up. Half the men I meet see Löwenherz or my apartment in Munich and run because they’ll never make as much money as I do. The other half think they’ve hit the lottery, and I kick them out because I can’t stand them getting fat on bonbons and calling the staff at two in the morning for sandwiches. And this is good German stock I’m talking about. Which sort of man are you?”

  It’s not a question often asked on a first date, and I didn’t walk around with a ready answer in my pocket. What kind of man was I? My father was a civil servant, an analyst for French naval intelligence; my mother, a university biologist. Our family read books, attended the symphony, and camped most August holidays in the mountains or at the beach. I owned a twelve-year-old Peugeot with torn upholstery. I owned no summer home and never knew anyone who named their home, summer or otherwise.

  I told her this and said, “Does poverty disqualify me?”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “Not unless money disqualifies me.”

  I worked out a math problem on the palm of my hand with an imaginary pencil. “I may be wrong,” I said, looking up. “But if half the men in your life run and the other half get bounced, you’re talking one hundred percent. This would mean there’s no man in your life. Currently.”

  My hopes soared.

  “My brother’s getting nervous I’ll die an old maid, if that’s your question. Which explains Anselm’s friend from Vienna. He comes from the family that owns Bayer Pharmaceuticals. You know, the aspirin people. Their summer home is larger than Löwenherz, and they call it a cottage.” She rolled her eyes. “There’s something else,” she said.

  I waited.

  “My father ran a steel mill during the war. In the late forties, factory owners all over Germany were being tried and sent to prison for using slave labor. Not Otto, because he saved people’s lives like that man Schindler. Ten witnesses came forward to vouch for him. They signed an affidavit, and he was never charged with war crimes. But he was a member of the Nazi party. Some people, some of the men I’ve met, can’t get past that. You should know now.”

  I knew her father’s story, more or less, the instant I learned she was a Kraus. A few years earlier, there had been a boycott in Paris of products from German companies that profited through business with the Third Reich. The action was meant to force the companies to examine their wartime dealings, publish accounts, apologize and—if warranted—compensate slave laborers. The biggest names were easy to recall: Krupp, Siemens, and the I.G. Farben subsidiaries, including Bayer, which splintered after Germany’s defeat. Kraus Steel was mentioned, which I had reason to recall when ordering beams for the dive platform.

  “Do you understand?” she said. “My father wore a swastika lapel pin.”

  How could I understand? My father fought in the French Resistance. I was born in 1950 and had no direct memories of the war, though I may as well have lived through it for all of the stories I’d heard about the occupation. So, no, I couldn’t understand Liesel or the German view of things much beyond this: that as a child, when I asked my father what he did during those years, I got answers that made me proud. When Liesel asked, she got news of affidavits and proofs of innocence. She had inherited a heavy burden along with that mansion in the distance.

  “I enjoy your company,” she said. “You liked me well enough yesterday, when I was just a guide. And today, in town and on the flats. You liked me, didn’t you?”

  This was true.

  “Well, then.” She hitched a thumb over her shoulder, pointing to Löwenherz. “Perhaps you could like me, even with that. But I want to make sure you understand. Hitler shook my father’s hand. My father held my hand as we walked on the beach or in the city. At the café, I shook your hand.” She fell against the seat as if she’d pushed a boulder up a hill, fully expecting it to roll back down and crush her. “That’s it. That’s all my monsters. I’m thirty years old. I was born in 1948, three years after the war, and sometimes I feel like I’m running from my Nazi past. It isn’t fair.”

  It wasn’t.

  “I’m no German industrialist,” I said.

  “Thank God.”

  “Your brother won’t be pleased.”

  “Sure he will. You work on the Lutine. That trumps everything.”

  Yachts rode their moorings as the tide ran. Farther out to sea, sails leaned into the wind while under the platform, a lost ship waited to yield her secrets. The broad Terschelling sky held it all: Liesel’s burden and Liesel’s beauty, honest work for my young firm, and the memory of a war that would not let go.

  “I do have a question,” I said.

  She turned, her eyes red.

  “I know we’re playacting tonight. But will I have to kiss you?”

  five

  The estate buzzed with guests and staff preparing the banquet hall and ballroom. Anselm had run a bus service from the ferry landing that afternoon, and some thirty couples would be staying the night. I nodded my hellos to several as I made my way to the beach, where, after the promised bath and a change into borrowed clothes, I walked the tidal line.

  Not five minutes later, I saw a boy, seven or eight years old, running with arms spread wide, making airplane sounds. He buzzed in and out of the dunes, onto the open beach, then back again making eerrrrrm, zooming noises. When he saw me, he banked right with a long sweep toward the sea, then back to his visitor. He was flushed and sweating when he arrived, his hair matted with sand.

  This could only be Anselm’s son. Liesel had run through the family I’d be meeting, and only one eight-year-old with wavy blond hair was on the roster: Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Kraus. He’d blown through one knee of his pants and stained his otherwise white shirt purple wit
h a juice of some sort.

  “The beach plums are ripe,” he said.

  I looked for and found a hint of Liesel in his face. “Where can I find them?”

  She had explained that the boy came into the world wearing the goggles and leather helmet of a combat ace. All he wanted to do was fly. He pointed to a dune fence half buried in sand and some low, scrubby bushes with flowers. “Magda and I are going to make plum jam tomorrow,” he said. “You can have some. Come on, I’ll show you. I’m a Stuka.” He raised his arms and buzzed ahead, looking over his shoulder to see if I would follow. “Make machine-gun sounds,” he called.

  It was a fine afternoon in late May, the sun fat and yellow. We cast long shadows over the beach and dunes as we ran. I kept pace and gave him a lusty Rat-atat-tat-tattt, surprised I could move at all after my hike that morning. Friedrich was agile. He stalled to let me catch up, then banked hard right, dipping and pirouetting until he was on my tail. “I got you!” he cried.

  When I banked into the dunes to lose him, I looked up the beach—and stopped dead on seeing a pair of large, heavily muscled dogs streaking toward me. My pulse rocketed. When Friedrich cried, “You’re dead!” and caught up to me, I placed myself between the boy and the onrushing dogs, then reached into my pants pocket for a trusted, compact weapon.

  From the age of eight, I’ve carried a metal T that my father gave me after a nasty episode. At a park in Paris, I was off running when a Rottweiler slipped its chain and chased me down. Before anyone could stop it, the dog had sunk its teeth into my calf and begun to shake me about. My father knocked it senseless with the lid of a trash barrel and would have killed the animal had its owner not tackled him. But the damage was done: my leg had been “tenderized,” according to the emergency room doctor.

  To this day, my calf aches at a change in weather and the approach of angry-looking dogs. It took months to learn how to walk and run again with a mangled calf. After a long convalescence, my father presented me with what he called a tool: a smoothly welded, stainless steel T of his own design that was, in fact, a small but very efficient weapon. He taught me to hold the cross of the T in my fist and to position the trunk between my ring and middle fingers.

  He was more serious than usual the day he presented it, kneeling to my height and taking my shoulders in his hands. Henri, he said. I won’t always be around to save you. When you’re attacked, always face the beast. Never run. If you must, let it bite you once, then aim for the eyes and throat.

  For twenty years I had carried that T in my front right pocket, prepared for an attack that never came. But I had formed a lifelong habit by that point. I’d left my wallet to dry back in my room at Löwenherz, perfectly willing to part with, and even lose, my money, IDs, and credit cards. Yet I took my father’s T onto the dunes because I took it everywhere, just as I take my lungs and intestines with me on leaving a room.

  As I tracked the dogs and set a firm stance, I was glad I had. The animals looked more like small lions than dogs.

  “Hermann! Albert!” Friedrich yelled.

  He ran from behind me and fell to his knees, his arms wide. When the dogs met him, they pranced and whined and licked his face. They were beautiful animals, I must admit: tawny-colored with thick, squarish heads and muscled like pit bulls though easily twice the size of that fighting breed. Friedrich tried climbing aboard the nearer one, which shook him off.

  The dogs ambled over to me, sniffing, and I could guess why: they smelled Anselm’s familiar scent on these clothes, mingled with mine. They turned circles around me, whining.

  Friedrich leapt onto the one he called Hermann. “Giddy-up!”

  A man approached. “Opa!” the boy yelled, slipping off the dog. He ran to his grandfather, already dressed in his tuxedo for the party and looking as out of place on the dunes as Löwenherz itself.

  “Hermann, Albert. Kommen!”

  The dogs trotted to their master, Anselm’s father-in-law and Otto’s partner in Kraus Steel. I bowed instead of releasing the T, keeping my hand in my pocket.

  “A fine evening for a party. Viktor Schmidt, at your service.” He was as kind and jovial as St. Nicholas. He was also short, with a thick bristle of white hair and a bull neck. He leaned forward as he spoke, as if into a stiff wind. “And you’ve come to Löwenherz . . . as a guest of—”

  “Liesel Kraus. Don’t worry. I’m not crashing your party.”

  “Ah! You’re that French stray she pulled in from the flats. I know all about it.”

  “Opa, you promised to teach me to dance tonight!”

  Liesel had never not known Viktor Schmidt—uncle by long association, not blood, just as the man who lived downstairs from my family’s apartment in Paris was uncle to me. Every family seems to have one. Schmidt’s daughter, Theresa, and Anselm had been crib mates after the war while their fathers built Kraus Steel. Their marriage twenty years later consolidated the partnership into a single bloodline.

  “I don’t know the breed,” I said, nodding to the dogs. “Handsome animals.”

  “My boys! Indeed they are! South African Boerboels. Bred as lion hunters, in fact. Outstanding guard dogs. They’re gentle with children and furiously protective of family. My boys. I trained them myself.”

  “Opa, what about dancing?”

  “Yes, Friedrich. Fine. Enough already. The orchestra was setting up when I left the house. We’ll have a grand evening. But I warn you, you’ll have to dance with your sister.”

  The child made a face.

  “Friedrich and I just met,” I said. “He’s a fine pilot.” I reached to tousle Friedrich’s hair, and the dogs growled.

  “Don’t mind them,” said Schmidt, smiling. “Hey now, let’s have some fun. Friedrich, do you see those rabbits over there?” He pointed, and I saw them just before they skittered for the cover of dune grass.

  I could scarcely believe the discipline of these animals, which must have smelled the rabbits or detected movement well before Schmidt did. Yet they didn’t flinch—not until he waited a five-count, then swept the flat of his hand toward the dunes and cried: “Hupt!” The dogs flew from his side.

  Moments later, Friedrich called: “They’ve got one!”

  I followed into the taller grass and found Albert and Hermann crouched on the sand, a rabbit paralyzed in fear between them. Friedrich sat on his haunches, staring.

  “Ach hupt!”

  The dogs closed in but didn’t touch the rabbit.

  “Friedrich. What shall we do?”

  The boy looked at the Boerboels, then to his grandfather.

  “You decide, Opa.”

  I glanced up and down the beach. We were alone.

  “No, you’ll be nine next month. You’re a young man now and it’s time you decide these things. Watch Albert and Hermann closely, their absolute obedience. There’s nothing these fellows want more than a fresh kill. But see how they wait for my command? If you train your animals well, child, they’ll serve you well. Now then, what shall we do?”

  I slipped a hand into my pocket again, then removed it. What was my plan, to attack the dogs and end up in a hospital in order to save a rabbit? I prepared to turn away if Friedrich gave the command to kill.

  “Hermann, unst!”

  The dog nearer to me broke from his crouch and lunged for the rabbit, which bolted into the waiting jaws of the second dog.

  “Brilliant!” cried Schmidt. “Excellent work, Friedrich!”

  The child turned to his grandfather. “Opa, the rabbit’s scared. Look at its eyes.”

  It was true. I, too, was scared. I had killed spiders and assorted bugs. I had fished and watched trout flop on riverbanks until they died. But I had never killed a sentient animal with eyes that suggested a soul. The child’s color changed. The high, ruddy life in him drained.

  Schmidt shifted his weight in the sand and said: “Yes, well, nothing leaves this world without fear. That’s a fact. Shall we have rabbit stew for lunch tomorrow?” He folded his arms and waited.
/>   “The command is Z-I-N-D with a hand movement?”

  Schmidt nodded.

  I was about to excuse myself when the child shouted: “Luft!”

  The dog loosed its hold, and the rabbit escaped.

  Schmidt laughed as he knelt and reached into a side pocket. “You’re a gentle one, aren’t you? Kommen!” he called to the dogs. They loped to his side, and he produced a plastic bag filled with neatly cubed pieces of raw meat. “Good, Albert. That’s my Hermann. Good boys!” He stroked them behind the ears, cooing their names.

  “Off with you, then,” he said. “Take the boys to my apartment and get changed for the party.” He swept a hand toward the mansion and the dogs took off, the child happy—a plane once more— zooming behind.

  Friedrich disappeared into the dunes, and I turned to Schmidt. “Your grandson called himself a Stuka.”

  “A damned good choice! It was the best single-engine prop dive bomber ever built. . . . Isn’t he a fine child! Isn’t he splendid?”

  He leaned toward me as he spoke, and I found myself leaning away. I could only agree. Friedrich was splendid.

  “It’s how we make them,” said Schmidt. “Welcome to Löwenherz. You’re Herr Poincaré in this house, not Monsieur. Make yourself at home.”

  six

  “Shit and shit squared, Henri. We get perfect weather for the last two weeks—and now this for the first day of our dive? Low pressure from Greenland’s going to hit us like a fist by sunrise. I may need that inner tube after all. You said it had a duck on the front?”

  I’d left the beach for Löwenherz, determined to steer clear of Schmidt for the evening. Alec would want to know I hadn’t drowned on the flats and that I’d be making my own way to the platform, so I called. On learning my host was Liesel Kraus, he accused me of gold digging.

  “I should have gone on the trek with you after all,” he said. “Really, between the two of us, would it even have been a contest? Women think I’m a fucking prince, Henri. They can’t resist. And call your father. He’s trying to find you.”