This Is How It Really Sounds (25 page)

Vorster seemed genuinely disturbed, but it was hard to tell how real it was. He wasn't here to find out. “Richter seems to be fat and happy these days. Walks the street like he hasn't got a care in the world.”

“Your people let him go, Charlie. That's what he told me. They arrested him, they gathered evidence, and when the evidence was complete, they freed him and gave him a job with the police. You Americans have an interesting way of punishing people.”

Charlie didn't react. Just as he'd thought: Richter must have gotten a second life as an anti-Communist.

“So what's he really doing in Shanghai?”

“Karl is crazy. He says Maier sold him his business but never turned over all his assets. He talks about it as if Maier stole his property, instead of how it really was.”

So Sassoon had told him that, too.

“Now he thinks he can sell him information about his wife in exchange for what he claims Maier owes him. It's an obsession. He wrote from Germany and I tried to ignore it, and then a few days past he showed up at my office.”

And now Richter was a problem for Vorster. He probably had something incriminating on the black marketeer that kept Vorster from giving him the air. Charlie realized he'd been stupid to offer Vorster the arms connection. Vorster probably would have given him up for nothing. “Is the wife alive?”

Vorster hesitated. “No. He said she was gassed at Dachau in 1942. He kept her name off the lists of the dead because he thought he could get money from Maier someday.” The smuggler raised his eyebrows and glanced briefly at the table. He spoke with an air of confession. “He's a very evil man, Charlie. I am not so very good, I know. But I look at Karl Richter, and I see something different.”

Sure. Everybody wanted to see some daylight between themselves and Karl Richter. At least, now that the Germans had lost the war.

So the wife was dead. Richter was just back here to extract some money and inflict more pain. He felt a wave of disgust for the German. He'd seen a lot of ugly things in the war, and he'd done some of them himself: prisoners being shot, fine young men having their throats cut in their sleep. Wars were made up of millions of individual crimes, but they all got smoothed down by some sense of purpose, because it was for your country so it was okay, whatever your country was. This had no purpose, though. The war was over. Murder had lost its sanctions. Crime was general again.

He said good-bye to Vorster. He'd set him up with Zhou, hoped nothing came out of it. Because if it did, he'd be labeled a traitor by anyone who ever found out, and Vorster would always have that on him. He'd had a hunch the job would turn out like this, and that's why he hadn't wanted it. He still didn't want it. Now he was stuck breaking the news to Hermann Maier and Anna.

The piano was playing when he walked up to the gate of the house on Lane 37. He could hear it flowing out of the open window and across the small green lawn. It was something classical, which was what he'd expect. She must be practicing for her concert. He stood on the sidewalk for a minute, just listening to it. She would break at a part in the middle and then repeat that phrase, trying to get it right. There was something so elegant about it, but someone else's elegant. One that involved music lessons and a quiet home and a world where life's purpose was to create something beautiful. The music swirled out around him. He had the sense of standing there, but at the same time of being somehow in the old house he grew up in, and in the jungle in Burma again, and in a succession of cities whose names were indistinct to him but that scrabbled out into the future in a long string: Berlin, Prague, Sarajevo, Buenos Aires. Others he couldn't even imagine yet. All the places he would someday go, and those he'd been to, existing together in this one beautiful, fragile moment. Someday, he knew, he would be standing and trying to remember this music. This was how it had really sounded.

The maid saw him and came out to open the gate. It was around four in the afternoon, three days after his first conversation with Hermann Maier. He went up the steps and the door was hanging open for him. The music was louder here. Everything was just as it had been, with the dark wallpaper enclosing the furniture in its austere tones of sage green and silver-gray velour. A spray of flowers was in a vase. He could see a pile of Anna's schoolbooks on the chair and a boy's jacket hanging from a hook.

Anna halted her playing when Charlie walked in.

“Don't stop! It's wonderful!” he said, but she stood up and stepped clear of the stool. The maid took his hat and he sat on the couch.

“My father is upstairs. He'll come down in a moment. Would you like something to drink?”

“Just some water.” She poured it, and Charlie's fingers touched hers as she handed him the glass.

“Have you found out something?” she asked.

“Let's wait for your father. I'd rather say it once, if that's okay.”

“As you like, Charlie.” He was impressed that she could put it away like that. “We are grateful for everything that you have done. Or, I should say, my father is grateful, and
I
am grateful. Me, on my own.”

“I'm happy to help out.”

“My father says you refuse to be paid.”

“My employer doesn't like me taking side jobs. It's safer for me to do this as a favor. Besides, I haven't done much. Just talked to a few people. That's nothing.”

“I think it is much more than nothing.” She closed the cover to the keyboard, then opened it again. “I was thinking about what you said. About your farm. I find it very hard to imagine you there.”

He thought of the house with the porch and the red barn across the field where he'd jumped in the hay as a kid. Fresh, sweet hay. Best smell in the world. Always would be. He thought of his parents, waiting there for him. “Lots of good things about farm life. It's peaceful.”

“My father says we're moving to the United States. Maybe you can show me your farm one day.”

In that moment, he imagined she was inviting him. He should have known she was only an eighteen-year-old girl, that she couldn't make a claim on anything in her future life, but for just a little while he lived it all out. Anna, miraculously, who'd never been to a farm, walking up the wooden steps of the porch to the front door. Her radiance, the surprise of his parents when they met her, her miraculous contentment. And then they would just be there, year after year. They'd have a son whom he'd teach to be strong and brave and a daughter who starred in the school plays. He could imagine the holidays without reckoning that she was a German who didn't celebrate Thanksgiving and a Jewess who didn't celebrate Christmas, and later on he'd realize that they didn't really have much outside Shanghai and that one monstrous crime that went to the heart of her family, and every family. But he didn't know that at the time. At twenty-two. At that age, it was all still possible.

She smiled and began playing again, something bright and joyful, with quick flurries of notes that bounded through his head in bright colors. He watched her, and she looked away from the music for a second and smiled at him, then turned back to the page. They both knew that he was about to deliver the worst news a child could hear.

She stopped playing as her father walked into the room, wearing a gray jacket and a maroon tie. He had a nervous feel to him. “Mr. Pico!” He extended his hand. “A pleasure to see you again! Anna! Didn't you offer Mr. Pico a drink?”

“She's been the perfect host, Mr. Maier. I asked her for water and she gave it to me.”

They made small talk about the latest rumors of the fighting in the North, where Chiang was claiming to have inflicted a devastating blow to the Communists, which didn't explain why the remnants of his army were pulling back to Tianjin. The conversation faltered, and Charlie decided to be brief.

“Mr. Maier, I'm afraid I have bad news for you.”

Maier blanched and waited. Charlie glanced from him to Anna, whose hands rested idly on the piano keys. At the last minute, he couldn't bear to tell them Lille Maier had been gassed. “I'm sorry. Your wife died of typhus in a concentration camp in 1942. There's no record because Richter used his influence to keep her off the lists. He came here to try to sell you phony information about her whereabouts.”

Maier tightened his jaw. “How do you know?”

“There's a black marketeer named Matthias Vorster—”

“I know Vorster.”

“He and Richter did some business during the war, and Richter came here looking for his help. Richter told him his scheme and Vorster relayed it all to me. I believe Vorster's telling the truth.”

“Vorster,” the old man said softly. Because now he did look old. “I suppose it's better to know.”

Charlie softened his voice. “Richter can't get at you now.”

Anna suddenly let loose a low, painful, feline sound that turned into a sob, then bent her head down toward the keyboard and put her hands over her eyes. “Mama!” She began bawling uncontrollably, and her crying pressed Charlie to the couch like a heavy stone. She could have been a ten-year-old. Her father went over and put his hands on her shoulders, but he, too, began weeping with a soft huffing sound. At that point an adolescent boy peeked into the room, alarmed, and Maier said a few words in German. The son's face fell and he perched himself desolately on a wooden chair at the edge of the room.

None of them said anything for a few minutes. In the grief-soaked room, Charlie was aware that there was a problem. The problem was that Karl Richter had committed any number of atrocities and been cleared of them. The problem was that he had murdered Lille Maier and the happiness of her family. The problem was that there was evil.

He asked Maier to send the boy away, and then they closed the doors to the other rooms. He'd started coming up with a plan as soon as Vorster told him that the wife was already dead. He assumed correctly that Sassoon would be helpful. And he guessed that Richter was still so obsessed with the Lille Maier he'd known in 1922 that he'd let his guard down if he saw her image in the streets of Shanghai. But planning revenge and executing that plan were very different things. One was a fantasy; the other was a crime, and it would feel like a crime.

“Are you sure you can do this, Anna? It's going to be ugly.”

It was the next morning, and they were sitting in a pastry shop across the street. Anna was wearing her schoolgirl outfit. The ankle-length pleated skirt. The blue ribbon at her neck. She nodded, but after that neither of them said anything else.

Just after nine, Sassoon's man came out to the sidewalk and started sweeping, the signal that Richter had come down to the lobby. Twenty minutes later, they picked him up exiting the Cathay and heading down Nanjing Lu. Anna went straight for him. Nanjing Lu was always crowded, and it was hard to keep her and Richter in sight from a safe distance. Even from a hundred yards away, though, he could see the shock on Richter's face as Anna caught up with him. They'd fixed her hair up the same as in her mother's wedding picture, and Richter stared at her as if his life had skipped backward to 1922 and all the buildings that were Shanghai had turned suddenly to Kiel. His mouth hung open as she talked to him, and after an exchange the two of them started walking together. Charlie hung behind. Richter glanced behind him at one point, but he didn't seem overly cautious. Anna knew where to lead him.

She walked him two blocks and then turned left and walked him three more. The streets were less crowded here. That morning they'd swapped out one of the brass plaques on a near-empty office building, and as they reached the door Anna motioned toward it and led him inside. He would think it was Maier's place of business. Charlie started running. He reached the door in ten seconds and entered to find Richter and Anna standing together in the dim, narrow hallway while she pretended to fumble with her keys. Richter looked at him, surprised.

“Mr. Richter!” Charlie said as he approached. “I'm glad you two found each other!”

Richter was doubtless trying to formulate an appropriate lie. Charlie kept smiling as he crossed the few paces toward him. In a life-or-death situation, the best actor always won. “Have either of you got a light? I'll trade you a cigarette.”

He got the knife out just as Richter accepted, and he'd sunk it in under his lungs before the man realized what was happening. Richter gasped and teetered on his feet. Charlie grabbed him and spun him around, then clamped his hand across his mouth and dragged the knife through his carotid artery. The blood went surging down his neck and ruined the overcoat Charlie had worn. He let go of him, and the heavy man careened against the wall with his hand out, then fell heavily onto the tile floor on his back, with one leg tucked under him and his eyes moving hazily from one point of the ceiling to another.

Anna was staring down at him, transfixed by the sight of the dying man. “Anna,” he said calmly, “you'd better go outside.”

She looked up at him. She seemed far away, but she marched quietly out the door, imprinting little ovals of blood across the tiled hallway.

Charlie grabbed a huge steamer trunk they'd stashed in the stairwell and pulled out an oilskin tarp. He spread it out and dragged Richter onto it. He was trying hard not to think. He'd taken the lives of at least a half dozen men with a knife, always in situations where he was terrified, inside an enemy base, surrounded by people who wanted to kill him. Now it gave him a feeling of disgust. In half a minute he'd wrapped Richter in the tarp, put him in the trunk, and wiped up the blood with a sponge and a cloth. He threw his bloody overcoat in the chest with everything else. He signaled to the truck Maier had placed outside, and one of Maier's Chinese men helped him get the trunk aboard. He and Anna watched as he drove it away to the docks. One more missing person in Shanghai that nobody was going to be looking for. There were a lot of them in 1946.