Kingdom of the Blind

CHAPTER 22

“Ruth, what’re you doing?” asked Myrna.

Clara and Gabri stopped tapping on their computers and looked up from their screens.

All four had driven in to Cowansville and now sat in the computer room of the local library, each at a laptop around the large conference table.

They’d come in not for the computers but for the high-speed connection.

Ruth had joined them when she found out where they were going.

Now the elderly poet sat at her laptop, fingers moving swiftly and noisily over the keys as she pounded rather than tapped. A look of satisfaction on her face that would have frightened Genghis Khan.

“Nothing,” said Ruth.

Far from being computer-illiterate, Ruth in her early eighties had embraced the Internet.

“As a way,” Gabri had guessed, “of spreading her empire.”

If there really was a darknet, Ruth Zardo would find it. Conquer it. Become its empress.

“Queen of the Trolls,” Gabri had said, and Ruth had not contradicted him.

Though they knew for whom she trolled. Not schoolchildren. Not people who were scorned for being different.

She trolled people who trolled them.

She attacked the attackers.

“Madame Zardo,” the librarian had said, practically bowing when Ruth limped in. Elderly, unsteady. Stooped.

But when she sat at the table, behind “her” laptop, she was nimble. Strong. Unyielding. Relentless. No bully could hide. Ruth’s hat was so black it was white.

The library was in the process of renaming this room: A F.I.N.E. Place.

“What’s she doing?” Clara whispered to Gabri.

“I have no idea,” he said.

“Anything?” Myrna asked, and Clara turned her laptop around.

Both Gabri and Myrna took a look.

Clara was in the Austrian registry of births, deaths, and marriages. With a worldwide interest in ancestry, these records were being made available online.

She was following the Baumgartner family, root and branch. Back in time.

To where it grafted onto the Kinderoths.

And then she followed them. To see where, and if, they became the Rothschilds.

“It’s interesting, but I’m getting a bit lost. Who’s related to whom, and then names change not just with marriage but to avoid discrimination. Obviously Jewish names become Christian. In fact, not only do the names change, but lots of them actually converted. But you see here?”

She pointed to one old document. A name changed from Rosenstein to Rose. But a Star of David remained above Rose. And followed it, through the generations.

And then it stopped. And there was just blank space. Except for the notation “10.11.38.”

“What does that mean?” asked Gabri.

Myrna sat silent. Staring. She knew but couldn’t say it. She was looking at the names. The ages.

Helga, Hans, Ingrid, Horst Rose. All born in the 1920s. With stars beside their names.

And then the simple notation. 10.11.38.

And then nothing.

“It’s a date,” Myrna finally said.

Ruth leaned over and looked. Then returned to her computer.

“Kristallnacht,” she said, tapping even harder. “November tenth, 1938. When good, decent people revealed themselves for who they really were and turned on their neighbors. The Jews.”

“Kristallnacht,” said Myrna. “Because of all the broken glass.”

“More than glass was broken that night,” said Ruth. “It was particularly brutal in Austria.”

She spoke as though she’d been there, and while her face was blank and her voice flat, her fingers pounded the keys even harder. In pursuit.

“The Baumgartners?” asked Myrna. “The Baroness’s family?”

“Looks like they got out before the Holocaust,” said Clara. “I’m trying to track them. Interesting thing is, they aren’t called Baron and Baroness.”

“So maybe they lost the case?” said Myrna.

“Seems obvious they must have,” said Gabri.

“Shlomo Kinderoth left his fortune to both his sons,” said Myrna. “You’ve found the part of the family that became the Baumgartners. How about the other branch?”

Clara spent some moments clicking through. “It’s going to take time, but so far I can’t find any more references to Baron or Baroness Kinderoth.”

“You don’t think—” Gabri began.

10.11.38.

“I don’t know,” said Clara.

“Any luck with the will?” Myrna asked Gabri.

“I have no idea,” he said. “I got into the archives, but they’re in German. I can’t read them.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Myrna.

Armand Gamache sat in the quiet back room of the National Archives. The records he was looking for weren’t Canadian. Or Québécois.

He’d used his pass code to get into Interpol. Then over to the Austrian records. The ones he had access to were more detailed than those available to the public.

But he quickly ran up against the same problem Gabri was having.

He could read the names. Baumgartner. Kinderoth. But he couldn’t understand the court judgments.

What he did understand was that there were judgments. Plural. Lots of them. From 1887. Then 1892. Then another. And another. All involving Baumgartners and Kinderoths.

Against each other.

They stopped for a few years. And then started up again. Like trench warfare, only pausing to retrench. And then the combatants went at it again. More fiercely each time, he guessed. Such was human nature.

While he could understand the larger issues, the fact this was a case that was tried over and over again, he couldn’t get the details. And it was the details that interested him. Though it was far from clear that they’d lead him to whoever had killed Anthony Baumgartner, 132 years after the death of Shlomo, the Baron Kinderoth.

Gamache knew he needed help. He did another search, and then, after finding what he was looking for, he got up and paced.

He was alone in the room, so no one saw him muttering. Gesturing. Finally, after a few minutes, he pulled out his phone and placed a call.

“Guten Tag,” he said, and asked for the Kontrollinspektor.

“Am pursuing powerful informations about a resolve.”

The voice at the other end of the line was deep, calm, apparently intelligent. And yet Kontrollinspektor Gund couldn’t help feeling he was dealing with a lunatic.

“And you are who again?” he asked.

The call had been put through to him by his subordinates. Who enjoyed playing jokes like this in the middle of a long shift, in the middle of the night. It was far from clear this was even a real call and not one of his own agents seeing how far they could push him.

“I be Armand Gamache, Head Chief of that Sûreté du Québec.”

“In Canada?”

“That is the direction” came the voice, sounding relieved. “Canada.”

Gamache rolled his eyes. He knew he was making a balls-up of this.

He’d asked, at least he thought he’d asked, for a senior officer who spoke French. Or English. And had been put through to someone who clearly spoke neither.

It might’ve been the receptionist’s idea of a joke, though the Austrians, renowned for many things, were not famous for their hilarity.

Before calling he’d practiced, dragging up from the mists of time whatever German his grandmother had taught him.

He’d sit at the kitchen table, and she’d chat away, in French. And then in German. With a smattering of Yiddish. Of course, as a child, Armand hadn’t made the distinction.

As he paced the small room in the National Archives, he mumbled to himself. Repeating the words and phrases as they surfaced. Trying to cobble together an intelligible sentence or two. As he paced, and muttered, the scent of fresh baking became more and more pronounced. Wafting to the surface along with the words. And images.

He could smell, more and more clearly, the madeleines his grandmother had made every Friday.

She’d give him one fresh from the oven, but not before dribbling a spoonful of cod liver oil over the top and letting it soak in. So that when Armand took a bite, it was both delicious and vile. Comforting and gagging. It was like being hugged and shoved at the same time.

“Sehr gut, meyn tayer.”

“Very good, my darling,” she’d say in Yiddish, and hug him to her so that his eyes came within inches of the tattoo on her left forearm.

“I’m investigating a murder, and a will is part of it,” said Gamache into the phone. Or at least thought he was saying. “I need to find out how an estate was settled. It’s an old case.”

“Me inspecting a dead murder body, and a resolve is…”

There was a pause as Gund’s subordinate at the other end pretended to search for a word. One that, Gund was sure, would be ridiculous.

“… measure. No, that’s not right. Is a…”

Gund almost hung up. Enough was enough. And yet he was curious. And not completely convinced anymore that this was a bored agent playing a joke.

As the man on the other end struggled with what he was trying to say—

“… amount. No. Quantity?…”

Gund turned to his computer and put in “Sûreté du Québec. Gamache.”

“… part. That’s it. A resolve be part of it. But resolve might be quite not right. Oy gevalt. What’s the word?”

Gund read, raising his brows, then looked at the phone and tried to reconcile what he was reading with what he was hearing. Now the deep voice was saying, “Force. Nein. I almost have it. Will. That’s it. Gott im Himmel. Danke.” There was a sigh. “Will. A will be part of it.”

“Chief Superintendent Gamache,” said Gund. “If I understand correctly, you would like me to look into a decision about a will?”

He spoke slowly. Clearly.

“Ja, ja. That is correctly. It is an elderly event.”

Gamache winced, as much from the scent of cod-infused cakes now surrounding him as the stream of near nonsense coming out of his mouth.

“An old case,” said Kontrollinspektor Gund.

“Ja.”

“Can you give me the name of the deceased and the date of the will?”

Gamache did, reading from the printout in front of him.

He also gave Gund his personal email address.

“I’ll get back to you as soon as I have the information. It’s a murder case, you say?”

“Ja. Danke schön.”

“Bitte schön.”

As Gamache hung up he felt that conversation had gone both well and badly. Was comforting and nauseating. Successful and humiliating. And almost certainly not German.

“Such a tuches.”