Read A Place Of Strangers Online
Authors: Geoffrey Seed
‘I didn’t spot your Mr Minsky.’
‘Maybe not. But he’ll be there... wherever it is.’
Evie had not seen McCall’s journo blood lust before. It was
not attractive. The story was everything and he would get it. She did not doubt
that. His callousness frightened her. It took no account of casualties along
the way – especially those on his own side.
‘What are you going to do, now?’
‘I’m going to go to Germany.’
‘No, you can’t do that, Mac. Please don’t.’
‘I have to. That’s where the evidence leads.’
‘Think about what this could do to Bea. She doesn’t deserve
any of this.’
‘Maybe not. Then again, neither did I.’
Rösler’s death was reported in a regional paper, Schwäbische
Zeitung, in March 1955. A young assistant in the Dusseldorf library saw McCall
struggling with a pocket dictionary so volunteered to help with his research.
Later on, he bought coffee in a pavement café and re-read
his note of the translation.
A businessman, Jakob Rösler, had a fatal car
accident with his wife yesterday on the autobahn south of Düsseldorf where they
lived. The police say that for as yet unexplained reasons, their Volkswagen
crossed the median line, narrowly missing other traffic, and crashed into a
tree on the other side. Through the force of the collision, Herr Rösler’s car
caught fire and his wife was thrown thirty metres. Both were pronounced dead at
the scene. They leave a son, Theo.
Those five words – for as yet unexplained reasons – gave
McCall reason to be cheerful.
He watched the strolling passers-by... the elegant, the
fashionable and the elderly in whose name the Nazis put the feeble minded to
death to supposedly rid the Reich of all its social undesirables – Jews,
gypsies, homosexuals, communists.
Most Germans he had met so far made special efforts to help
him, as if by such little acts of penance their inherited guilt for history’s
greatest crime might be mitigated. But McCall’s hostility to their nation was
absorbed osmotically from childhood comics but more so from Bea and Francis. It
was impossible for him to unlearn it overnight. Francis had taken a lifetime.
The burning rubble he and his crews left behind was buried
beneath shimmering glass offices now. The stench of the entombed dead had long
since blown away. For those taking their ease in the Königsallee that sunny
day, only the future mattered. The old will die, the world shall move on. The
God of Profit forgives all in the end.
McCall paid his bill and plotted a route on his street map.
He crossed a paved square towards a district of solid, four-storey tenements
built of red engineering brick during the Kaiser’s time.
It took only a few minutes to locate Bruckner Strasse.
Inside the large communal hall of Number 7, a row of mail boxes showed
Herr
Theo Rösler
living in Flat 5 on the first landing.
McCall walked up the wide stone steps to Rösler’s door. The
sound of a piano being played grew louder the closer he got. He knocked and the
music stopped. Someone approached a Judas hole to peer at him. Here was the joy
of journalism... waiting to be either told to go forth and multiply or offered
the key to a box of secrets unopened for years. Whatever it would be, McCall
got ready to pitch.
*
Evie could tell Bea was improving. Her eyes sparkled again.
The depression of those first days in hospital was much less evident. She tried
her hardest to speak, struggling to make herself understood and not depend upon
scrawling near illegible messages. But the speech therapist still had much work
to do.
‘Gone, Mac. Not here, why?’
‘He’s working on something, Mrs Wrenn... a story he’s picked
up.’
‘See me, when?’
‘As soon as he comes back. I’m sure he’ll be in to visit you
straight away.’
‘Where gone?’
‘I’m not sure. Abroad somewhere, I think.’
‘Why?’
Evie lied for her country but confronted by Bea’s unblinking
stare, her hesitation was an answer in itself. Bea’s mood changed. She became
quite distracted. Evie already knew McCall had shown her the photograph of
Minsky and asked his name. Bea must suspect a link between that and why McCall
was overseas.
‘He’ll be home soon, Mrs Wrenn. Please don’t worry.’
Bea’s face suggested it was too late for that. She found her
pad to write a note.
Stay, you stay.
‘Of course I’ll stay.’
Talk, us. Talk.
Evie was about to reply when she heard the sound of a metal
tipped walking stick striking the tiled floor behind her. She turned quickly.
And there stood Arie Minsky, the missing mourner, smiling at them both.
*
Theo Rösler was his father’s son. He had the same silvery
hair and strong, intelligent features but much warmer, kinder eyes. McCall said
he was researching a possible television programme for the BBC and would like
to discuss it with him. Rösler pondered, but only for a moment, then stood
aside and gestured him in. McCall had not expected it to be that easy. He
offered McCall English tea and left him alone in the main living area. It was a
room of rare serenity. The pale walls were empty save for a single oil painting
of a child by a tree in a garden. Six vermilion tulips in a glass vase formed a
centrepiece on a table of plain alpine sycamore and one entire corner of the
apartment was dominated by the Bechstein piano he had heard being played.
Rösler returned from his kitchen and served tea in white
Wiesenthal cups with chocolate biscuits on matching plates.
‘So, this is about my father, yes?’
‘If it’s painful for you, I apologise.’
‘All pain passes one day but it is strange to me that you
should come all this way to talk about him all these years later.’
Hacks always play with a marked deck. They also hide cards
up their sleeves then deal from the bottom. It is what detectives do, too. But
with Rösler, McCall could hear Mrs Bishop’s voice. Honesty is always the best
policy. McCall needed Rösler more than Rösler needed McCall.
‘It’s about the car accident in which your parents died.’
‘Why is that now important to create such an interest for
you?’
McCall told him of the covert footage – but not his true
relationship to the man who shot it.
‘It was filmed by someone who was then working for the
British government.’
‘I do not understand why such a person should make a film
like this.’
‘Nor me – but he did.’
‘For what purpose would he do such a thing?’
‘I would love to have asked him myself but unfortunately he
is dead so I can’t.’
‘How do you know what you have seen is the same accident of
my parents?’
‘I’ve checked your father’s picture in the public record and
he is the man in the film.’
‘And tell me, please, how this material came into your
hands.’
‘A lawyer gave it to me but I cannot give you more than that
just yet.’
‘So, will you tell me what sort of motor car my parents
had?’
‘We call them Beetles, a Volkswagen from the early 1950s...
split rear window.’
Rösler nodded then put down his cup. He told McCall to wait
and went into another room. A short haired cat with only half a tail moved with
stealth across the dove-grey carpet and lay in a patch of sunlight by the glass
doors to a narrow balcony. Rösler returned with a box of photographs. He spread
them on the table – women in long frocks and big hats, men with whiskers, all
self-importance. McCall immediately recognised several pictures of Rösler
senior – strolling across a lawn, seated at a desk then standing with his wife
by the very car in which they were to die.
‘Is this the man in your film?’
‘Yes. That’s him.’
Theo Rösler went to his piano as if distracted and needing
refuge. He began the opening bars of a prelude. McCall knew Rösler was
stalling, playing for time.
‘Do you know the works of Schumann?’
‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t.’
‘Some of it is said to represent the opposite states of
mind... even the duality of characters he saw within his delusional self... you
might think that quite fitting for us Germans.’
Even to McCall’s tin ear, Rösler’s playing was sublime.
‘You must understand we were not always barbarians in this
country... always having to atone for the sins others committed. I was a child
when Hitler rose to power and I can remember the excitement and those parades
and my father being swept up in the fervour of this great national renewal. Only
later did we begin to understand... about the camps and the Jews. You will know
the Jews wore yellow stars to mark them out as the damned but there were other
coloured badges in the camps.’
Rösler suddenly stopped playing and advanced on McCall.
‘The criminals wore green triangles and the political
prisoners red and homosexuals pink. What colour badge do you think I would have
been made to wear?’
‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t say.’
‘A pink triangle. That is what I would have been made to
wear before I was shot or gassed and thrown into the ovens.’
‘But your father was in the SS, wasn’t he?’
‘And do you think that would have saved me?’
‘Your politics were obviously not his.’
‘No, not then, not later. I became a music teacher and I
would never talk to him about those days.’
‘Do you think he was guilty of war crimes?’
‘My mother swore to me he never killed anyone. He was in
business before the war and then in the army and was no more than a clerk. That
is what she said.’
‘Did you believe her?’
‘I cannot know what the truth was from those times and if
you ask me if my mother did then I would say she probably did not, either. It
was convenient for all people to forget.’
McCall asked if he thought his parents were killed
accidentally.
‘What is behind your question?’
‘I’ve looked at a newspaper of that time and it reported
that your parents’ car veered off the road for no reason.’
‘That is so. The car was not old, nothing was found wrong
with it.’
‘So how was the accident explained officially?’
‘It wasn’t but if you are saying someone made it crash
deliberately, why should anyone do such a thing?’
‘Your father had been an SS man. Maybe he had enemies?’
‘No, he was not important in the war or after it. He was in
jail for what he did and it makes no sense for anyone to kill him, whatever you
are seeing in your bits of film.’
Rösler stood up almost angrily. He insisted McCall should
see the place where his parents died. It was if he needed to convince not just
McCall of what he believed but himself, too.
They drove into undulating farming country in Rösler’s Audi,
parked off the main road then walked towards a large tree half way down an
embankment. It was a Norway maple, the sort which folklore says protects
against witches.
This was where Jakob Rösler burnt to death like a heretic.
His cultured son went very quiet.
‘Beyond the tree, my mother was thrown there... .they told
me she did not suffer.’
McCall began to detect a profound need in Rösler to believe
his parents died through an act of God, not man. The alternative was unbearably
bleak.
They would have been murdered. Their sensitive, artistic son
would then have to ask why anyone should do such a thing... and the answer
would scar him for life.
And so it was with McCall.
*
When Evie left Bea and Arie, her affection and regard for
the old lady was boundless. They were sure it had been right to tell her the
truth, as much for their sakes as for Evie’s. When they waved her from the
ward, Bea felt her soul being released from its cell.
Arie explained everything when Bea’s words wouldn’t come and
she couldn’t write quickly enough to keep pace with her jumbled thoughts. Evie
listened and questioned until at last she, too, understood. They did not bind
her to secrecy but urged discretion about how and when she let McCall into his
own life.
With Evie gone, Bea had a final confession to make. She had
Arie push her wheelchair into the patients’ lounge. The view was across the
Shropshire hills, to all that was and all which might have been. She drew him
to her and kissed his face again and again then held his hand to her belly.
He was not sure why Bea was doing this then she pointed at
him, at herself, at her womb. She sketched the outline of a baby on her pad...
a boy baby. Arie began to speak. Bea shook her head. Below the image of the child,
her uncertain hand formed the crudest representation of a gravestone.
On it, she wrote
Liad, RIP September 3rd 1939.
Now she had told him. They had had a son. Arie shut his eyes
and all those he once loved came to him again and in their arms, each cradled
this unbodied child, this new holy innocent whose smile he had never seen,
whose hand he had never held.
Arie knelt
and held Bea close.
The Röslers were killed thirty years earlier. Police, fire
and ambulance officers who might have attended the crash had retired or died.
Their records no longer existed, either. McCall checked. Even the back-street
garage where Francis filmed the Volkswagen being scrapped had closed down. No
independent evidence existed to cast doubt on Jakob Rösler and his wife dying
in anything other than a freak accident. On its own, Francis’s footage proved
nothing. But there had to be links, common factors in a bigger story.
Somewhere. McCall just needed to find it.
He caught a train to Munich then a connection seventy
kilometres south to the little town of Murnau on the edge of the Bavarian Alps.
Here he waited on a bench – newly vandalised by a swastika cut in the blue
paint work – for a local service to Oberammergau.
This train passed through rich green pastures spotted with
yellow and white alpine flowers. The landscape got steeper and more wooded as
they clattered through tidy little villages – Bad Kohlgrub, Saulgrub,
Unterammergau. Each had neatly ordered houses with neatly tended gardens and
long stacks of split logs, drying for winter fires to come.
Most of McCall’s fellow passengers were elderly. None would
meet his gaze with their watery eyes. He wondered if these people were as
guiltless as Theo Rösler wished his father to be or if their hands, bent and
liver-spotted now, had saluted the Fuhrer and torn down his enemies.
McCall checked into the
Hotel Alte Post
in
Oberammergau where he had stayed with Bea all those years before. He walked
into its remembered streets, a religious toy town of a place, hardly more than
a painted backdrop to the Passion play its people staged every ten years since
escaping the plague three centuries back.
He stood once more by buildings decorated with high priests
and garishly coloured angels then gazed again at Christ’s execution – an image
of mob hatred, intrigue and revenge which had so terrified him as a child.
*
‘They’ve banged nails into him, Bea... he’s bleeding all
over himself.’
‘It’s only a picture.’
‘But why are they hurting him?’
‘They were cruel times, Mac. Horrible things were done.’
He doesn’t like Germany or Germans. This is where murderers
come from. He is frightened but must never show it. The Germans tried to kill
Francis and his other Daddy but they were more clever and killed the Germans
first.
People passing by look ordinary enough but they could try
and murder him at any time because that is what they do in the comics. But he
has his cowboy gun and they will not take him without a fight.
‘Bang! Bang! You’re dead.’
*
McCall headed to the outskirts of Oberammergau and
the NATO school where Francis once taught. It was a fortress, bulwarked on two
sides by walls of the blackest stone he had ever seen. The Nazi secret police
once used it and all of Bavaria’s mountain air would never cleanse its residual
stench of evil.
Then he hurried on up the dirt path to the marble statue of
Christ on the cross, high in the woods above the village. It was as he
recalled, a brooding, silent place with rags of misty clouds caught in the fir
trees. He went to the same bench where he had sat with Bea and looked across to
Francis passing something to Arie Minsky –
Uncle Harry
. They said it was
not him. But even as a child, he knew different.
After dinner in the hotel, he rang Evie. She wanted to know
what he had discovered about Rösler.
‘Quite a lot – and Frau Rösler died in the crash, too.’
‘You can’t still feel this is worth all the effort, McCall.’
‘I’ve only just started.’
‘Bea’s coming out of hospital tomorrow. She’s still very
feeble.’
‘She’s bound to be.’
‘I’m going back up there this weekend. Shall I give her your
love?’
‘Sure. Why not?’
*
McCall’s search of the
Garmisch Partenkirchner Tagblatt’s
files for the six months after the holiday he and Bea had in Oberammergau
failed to produce a single story about a suspicious death like Rösler’s. The
village librarian, a woman of infinite goodwill, tracked through every copy of
the paper then opened her hands to heaven.
‘Nothing. We find nothing, I am so sorry.’
McCall tried to stay positive. He walked the streets till he
found where the toy shop was – or used to be. It had been converted into a
private house. An elderly man answered his knock but understood nothing of
McCall’s phrase book German. He called inside for his young granddaughter who
was learning English. McCall said he was searching for the two wood carvers who
ran the toy shop in the mid 1950s. She translated for the old man who gabbled a
defensive reply and turned back indoors.
‘My grandfather says he doesn’t know anything.’
‘About the wood carvers?’
‘No, about all that happened.’
‘I don’t understand.
What
happened?
’
‘We only live in this place for nine years.’
‘You mean something happened here before you came?’
‘Yes. There is a policeman, very old now. You can talk to
him.’
She gave directions to a house beyond the church on Ettaler
Strasse, under the shadow of Mount Kofel. When McCall reached it, he saw a
sandy-haired man digging manure into his front garden. His hands were chapped
red and soiled by the shit of cows. He had been a big man once, well over six
feet, but was shrinking with age and wore his skin like an overcoat several
sizes too big.
McCall smiled and got out his deck of marked cards.
*
They sat in an untidy, widower’s kitchen eating cold veal
and cheese. Konrad Wetzel had been a sergeant of police – steady, astute, the
sort of dependable country cop the authorities leave alone. Not that crime was
rife in a village devoted to the glory of God.
Wetzel chewed with ruminant efficiency and waited for McCall
to open.
‘I came here with my parents when I was very young and my
father has just died. My mother is very ill now so I’m on a kind of pilgrimage,
I suppose.’
‘But why are you looking for the wood carvers?’
‘Because when we were here many years ago, we bought some
religious carvings from these people and I would like to take some home for my
mother.’
‘Many shops sell carvings in Oberammergau. Go there.’
‘Yes, but I want my carvings from these same people.’
‘Well, it is not possible now.’
‘Why not?’
‘Tell me first, what is your profession?’
‘I am a legal representative. I work with many lawyers and
the police.’
Wetzel left the table. His head almost bumped into the beams
of his ceiling. He lit a briar pipe and moved to an armchair by his kitchen
range. Old policemen like talking about old cases.
‘The wood carver was Wilhelm Frank... him and his daughter.
One day, he goes.’
‘He goes? You mean he left Oberammergau?’
‘Goes, disappears. His daughter is upset, wanting us to
search for him.’
‘And did you?’
‘Of course. We look in the mountains and the rivers... in
all places but nothing. His daughter gets a husband and closes the shop and she
goes away also.’
‘Is that the end of it, then?’
‘No. Many years pass and some children, some bad children,
got into our tunnels.’
‘What tunnels are those?’
‘In the war, we have much secret work in Oberammergau to
make a jet plane in a factory under the mountains here, in tunnels so your
English bombers cannot see it.’
‘So did the children find something in the tunnels?’
‘You are a lawyer, you say?’
‘I do para legal work in London, yes.’
Wetzel went to a cupboard and brought out a file of papers
with two black and white photographs attached. These he unclipped and pushed
across the table to McCall.
‘Wilhelm Frank... the wood carver.’
All McCall could see were the bleached white bones of a
crucified skeleton assembled unnaturally on the stone floor – both arms
outstretched, right foot over the left and the jaw of the skull open in a
scream which could never end.
And in the claw of his right hand was a copy of one of the
same photographs Bea dropped on the orchard lawn when she collapsed. It showed
nine uniformed soldiers, newly arrived in a town square, boots polished,
handguns in holsters, standing by their rifles and stout leather suitcases. All
keen to get on with their work.
But there was a difference. A cross had been pencilled on
the face of one of the soldiers... Wilhelm Frank. The man who had once carved
the face of Christ with such delicate perfection would have known the agony of
his saviour as he died alone in the dark.
McCall broke the silence.
‘So you had a gruesome murder to investigate, Herr Wetzel?’
‘Not a murder, no – an accident.’
‘An accident? How could this man’s death have been an
accident?’
‘A fall of rocks, probably. That is what we felt.’
‘But the way the skeleton was left... crucified like that.
How could that be from a fall of rocks?’
‘Those children could have done it... or others before. A
joke in poor taste.’
‘But the photograph in his hand – how do you explain that?’
‘Anyone could have put that there.’
Wetzel stared through the foul smoke of his pipe with
peasant defiance.
‘Herr Wetzel, you couldn’t possibly believe this was an
accident, could you?’
‘Officially, that is what was decided.’
‘But unofficially, it must have been murder... surely?’
‘That is your opinion – ’
‘– but based upon these pictures.’
‘The police in any country need evidence, proof. We find no
proof of murder.’
‘But did Wilhelm Frank have enemies, someone who hated him
enough to do this?’
‘Who is to say? We found no obvious cause of death so we
found no murderer.’
The camera flash in the confined tunnel caused the skeleton
to appear luminously pale against the black rock. The image seemed almost
painted, like a crude medieval depiction of man’s descent into hell.
‘Was this man an old Nazi, Herr Wetzel? Is that why you
didn’t start a proper murder investigation?’
Wetzel removed the pipe from between his yellow teeth and
knocked its bowl of burnt ash into the hearth.
‘There were meetings here afterwards, many meetings. Important
people came.’
‘You said this was only an accident. Why would important
people come for that ?’
‘Oberammergau is a holy place, religious people visit us
from all places in the world and we want it to stay like this.’
‘You mean you didn’t want any fuss?’
‘Only good Germans are here, only good things.’
‘So you covered up this man’s murder?’
Wetzel rose out of his chair and opened the door to signal
his hospitality had run out.
‘I do not know who you are or why you are really here but
you should know the past is best buried... like Wilhelm Frank himself.’