The Night Gate

Chapter Ten

It was dark outside the apartment, but Bauer could see street lights reflecting on the black waters of the canal, the lights of the city beyond diffused by low-lying cloud. He turned back to his laptop which sat in a circle of lamplight on his desk. The rest of the room lay in darkness. Somewhere in the apartment he could hear Lise moving around, cupboard doors being opened and closed, drawers opening and shutting.

A cursor winked on the email that stood open on his screen. The reply from the diocesan archive in Würzburg. He had written to make an appointment to view his father’s family records, and those of the man Klaus Bauer’s mother had named as her son’s father on the original birth certificate. Karlheinz Wolff.

An administrator had made a rendezvous for him at 9 a.m. the day after tomorrow. It was normal, it seemed, for the archive to appoint a Mitarbeiter, or volunteer, to help applicants navigate the labyrinthine records held by the diocese. In this case, a woman called Greta Jung. She would meet him outside the archive building at the appointed time.

Ever efficient, the archive had provided him with her email address and asked that he scan any and all relevant documents and send them to her as PDF attachments, so that she might prepare. Several scanned documents lay on his desk, half in, half out of the circle of light. The scans themselves were selected on his virtual desktop, ready to drop into his responding email. He would fetch the remaining documents from his mother’s house tomorrow and ask Lise to send them.

He clicked Reply to confirm the appointment and attach the first tranche of PDFs. The sent mail left a whoosh in its wake that moved from left speaker to right, like an audible contrail, and he navigated along the dock to select Google Maps.

The route from Berlin to Würzburg would take him via the A9 and the A71 and would be a five-hour drive. He closed the lid of his laptop and got stiffly to his feet. The only other light in the apartment came from the bedroom. He crossed the hall and pushed open the door. Lise turned, startled, from open drawers in the dresser. Folded underwear and T-shirts sat in neat piles on top of it. Had he been less distracted, he might have interpreted her nervous response to his unexpected interruption as guilt. But his mind was elsewhere.

He dropped on to the bed and said, ‘I’m going to Würzburg tomorrow. I’ll be staying overnight for an appointment the following morning. So I’ll be gone for the best part of two days.’ He paused. ‘Unless you want to come with me?’

‘No,’ she said quickly. Then hurriedly justified her too rapid response. ‘I’ve got a pre-production meeting at the theatre tomorrow. We’re going ahead with prep in the hope that they’ll let us reopen for the Christmas season.’

He nodded. Relieved, though he wouldn’t have said so. This was something almost too personal, a search in the past that might shine unexpected light from history on his present. He was not sure he wanted to share whatever it might reveal.

But Lise put his thoughts into words. ‘You think maybe this... your predilection for violence is inherited somehow from your paternal grandfather.’

His eyes flickered reluctantly in her direction, then quickly away again, anxious not to meet hers. ‘Until I know more about him, it’s impossible to say.’

‘But you think it’s a possibility.’

He nodded, hesitant to concede. In truth he was almost afraid to know. In some ways it would be a relief. To learn that his behaviour was conditioned by something beyond his control. But if it was, then it was in his genes, and there was nothing to be done about it.

The Bavarian city of Würzburg nestled in the valley of the River Main, capital of the administrative district of Lower Franconia. Its old town was a shambles of red roofs and spires, dominated by the Marienberg Fortress. It was drizzling as Bauer made the short walk from his hotel through the blackened trees of the Hofgarten to the archive and library of the diocese of Würzburg on Domerschulstrasse.

He had barely slept the night before, rising at 6 a.m. to pass three impatient hours in the hotel’s breakfast room drinking coffee and watching twenty-four-hour TV news that repeated every fifteen minutes. But he wasn’t in the least fatigued. He was buzzing from the caffeine and the anticipation. As well as his nerves.

He was early for his meeting with the Mitarbeiter, and paced impatiently on the pavement outside the main entrance to what was a large building of glass and steel that spilled around the corner on to Bibrastrasse. Looking up, through large windows he could see researchers sitting at desks gazing at computer screens and tapping on keyboards. Buried away on hard drives and microfiches in the depths of this building were the histories of millions of people from Central Europe and beyond, dating as far back as the 1700s. But he was really only interested in one of them, and the genetic connection that led directly to him.

‘Herr Bauer?’

He turned, startled, to find himself face to face with a pretty young woman whose straight, dark, club-cut hair fell short of square shoulders, a slash of virulently red lips in a pale face. She wore a short navy-blue coat above green leggings. A yellow face mask dangled from one ear. Her smiling blue eyes were disquieting and seemed to pierce right through him. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty or twenty-one. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Greta Jung?’

She nodded and looped her mask over her other ear.

He felt suddenly self-conscious not to be wearing his and quickly dug it out of his pocket. ‘Are we going straight in?’

She shook her head and patted an orange folder under her arm. Everything about her seemed painted in primary or secondary colours. ‘No need. I did all the necessary searches yesterday, but really most of what you need to know about your grandfather can be found on the internet. I’ve compiled a dossier for you. Have you had breakfast?’

‘No,’ he lied. He liked the idea of having breakfast with this girl.

‘Good. Neither have I. I’m starving. There’s a café just a block away. Zweiviertel. They do great breakfasts. I can go through the file with you there.’

On the five-minute walk to Zweiviertel, she told him that she was a student at the University of Würzburg, studying computer science. Working as a Mitarbeiter was a part-time activity, a bit of fun that gave her the opportunity to exercise her computer skills.

In the café they sat well apart at a table below a chalkboard with a handwritten menu, and she ordered a platter of cold meats, a basket of croissants and a coffee that arrived in a tall glass revealing alternate layers of milk, coffee and whipped cream. Bauer assured her that he would be paying, and she seemed anxious to make the most of it. He told her he wasn’t hungry, and ordered an espresso to top up his caffeine. He downed it in a single draft, and replaced his mask to sit and watch her while she ate hungrily and talked. Most students, he recalled, did not have the money to treat themselves to extravagant breakfasts like this.

‘Karlheinz Wolff,’ she told him, ‘was born in Dresden in 1898. His father was an architect, his mother a watercolour artist. He had an older brother and a younger sister. The family moved to Würzburg just before the outbreak of war in 1914, and Wolff served in the army on the Western Front during the last two years of it, winning himself an Iron Cross for bravery. After the war he went to the University of Frankfurt to study art. His brother, Hildebrand, became the curator of a provincial museum in Bremen, and his parents indulged his sister’s desire to paint by installing her in a small apartment in Paris and enrolling her at the Beaux-Arts.’ She looked up from a slice of salami sausage that was halfway to her mouth on the tines of her fork. ‘Art seems to have run in the family.’ She smiled. ‘All the way down the generations to you.’

He was taken aback. ‘What can you possibly know about me?’

She shrugged. ‘I did a little research on you last night. You have your own gallery in Berlin.’

He felt uncomfortable to know that he had been placed under someone else’s microscope. But she gave him no time to dwell on it, popping the sausage into her mouth and opening up her orange folder on the table.

‘Interesting story I came across about his sister. Erika.’ She leafed through several sheets in her file. ‘Here we are. It seems she was having an affair with an older man. A well-known art critic in Paris called Georges Picard. He was married and had several children.’ She cocked an eyebrow at Bauer. ‘Some men just can’t keep it in their lederhosen, can they?’

Bauer found himself embarrassed by her directness. ‘And?’

‘She got pregnant by him. And when he wouldn’t leave his wife and family, she killed herself.’ Greta Jung clearly didn’t have much sympathy. ‘Very dramatic,’ she said flippantly. ‘Anyway, Karlheinz was incensed. This was his little sister, after all. So he and a group of friends travelled to Paris where he very nearly killed Picard. Accosted him in a bar somewhere, and from all accounts beat him to a pulp. It was said he had a terrible temper and would certainly have killed him if his friends hadn’t dragged him away. They had to smuggle him out of France before he got arrested.’

Bauer felt his face stinging as if he had been slapped. In a fit of temper his grandfather had very nearly killed the man he blamed for his sister’s suicide. Was this a manifestation of the same volatile temperament that had so afflicted Bauer through all of his youth, and now into his twenties? An inherited intemperance that led to violence?

‘Hello? Are you still with me?’

He looked up to see Greta Jung looking at him quizzically.

‘You want me to go on?’

‘Yes. Please.’

She consulted her notes again. ‘After he graduated from Frankfurt his brother gave him a job at his art gallery in Bremen. And that was where he met the man who would change his life. The industrialist Guido Fischer.’ She looked up. ‘You’ve heard of him?’

He shook his head.

‘No, neither had I. I had to look him up.’ She drained her glass. ‘Do you think I could have another coffee?’

‘Of course.’ Bauer signalled the waiter and placed the order. She returned to her folder.

‘Fischer invented engine seals and brake pads made from some kind of woven asbestos. They were gobbled up by the army during the First World War when supplies from traditional British manufacturers not surprisingly dried up. By the end of the war he was fabulously wealthy, and being courted by whoever was in government. And, of course, when the Nazis came to power they realised that they were going to need him to supply the whole mighty war machine they were building in the thirties. Which, in turn, gave Fischer enormous power and influence.’

‘So how did Karlheinz get to know him?’

‘The Wolff brothers were organising an exhibition of contemporary modern art at Hildebrand’s gallery. Guido Fischer himself was a collector, and if a man of his stature asks for a preview, he gets it. That’s when Karlheinz first met him. Fischer wanted to buy several of the works on display, and Karlheinz offered to negotiate their purchase on his behalf. Given his position as brother of the curator, he was able to acquire them at below market value. Apparently Hildebrand was furious, but Fischer was delighted and Karlheinz very quickly became his unofficial art dealer. In the years that followed, the relationship between the two developed and they ended up becoming firm friends, almost like father and son.’

She looked up again and surveyed Bauer with what seemed more than a casual interest. He was glad to be wearing his mask.

She said, ‘It was Fischer’s patronage that bulletproofed Wolff against his Jewish heritage when the Nazis came to power.’

Bauer blinked in astonishment. ‘Jewish?’

She laughed. ‘Well, he had a Jewish grandmother, although the family had long ago converted to Catholicism. But that didn’t matter to the Nazis. To them Judaism was in the blood, so when Hitler came to power, people like Wolff, and the rest of his family, were labelled Mischling. Effectively, mixed blood. To any other family, that might have been the kiss of death. But with a friend like Guido Fischer, Wolff’s unfortunate accident of birth was swept under a carpet of convenience.’ She laughed. ‘How else could a Mischling go on to become a dealer in art for someone second only to Hitler in the Party.’

‘Göring?’

‘Yes. A man, apparently, with an insatiable appetite for art.’ She smiled. ‘Much of which he stole.’

Bauer was physically drained. The hours of sleeplessness the night before and the five-hour drive back to Berlin had taken their toll. But his mind was still buzzing, effervescing like a headache tablet dropped in water. During the long journey he had gone over, and over again, everything that Greta Jung had told him. Her orange folder lay on the passenger seat beside him, and he wished now that he had taken the train so that he could have read it for himself on the way back. He simply couldn’t wait to get his hands on it.

He parked in his reserved space under the trees on the near bank of the canal and crossed the street to his apartment block. He was earlier than expected, and the light was only just beginning to die around him, a scattering of pink and purple clouds fading into a darkening sky. Under his arm he carried Greta Jung’s orange folder, and so distracted was he by everything he had learned today, that he barely noticed the two young men loading boxes and bags into a small van at the kerbside.

He skipped past them and into the entrance hall, taking the stairs to the third floor two at a time. The apartment was oddly cold when he let himself in, as if the heating had failed to switch itself on. The only light in the entrance hall fell through a gap in the door to the bedroom, which stood slightly open.

‘Lise?’ he called. And when there was no reply, strode across the hall to push open the bedroom door.

Lise was stooped over an open, overfilled suitcase on the bed, trying desperately to close it. She turned frightened eyes towards him, darkened by dilated pupils, and almost jumped away from the case as if she had been burned. He stopped and stared at her in consternation.

‘What are you doing?’

She ran her tongue over dry lips but made no attempt to answer. He swivelled his gaze to take in wardrobe doors that stood ajar, coat hangers rattling in the emptiness beyond. Open drawers had been stripped of their contents. All of her personal items had gone from the dresser. He turned his eyes back towards his partner of nearly two years and felt that old familiar anger rising inside him.

‘You’re leaving me?’

Panic was apparent in her face as she glanced at her suitcase and made a decision. To abandon it and get out. She ran for the door. But he grabbed her arm as she passed him, and swung her around violently to throw her on to the bed.

‘You were just going to walk out without a word?’ Anger and incredulity strangled his words. ‘Leave me to come home to an empty house? After everything I’ve done for you?’

‘All you’ve ever done is hurt me.’ She flung her defiance back at him with words she knew would only inflame him further. She scrambled off the bed, yanked the zipper of her suitcase shut and grabbed the handle. ‘I’ve no idea why I even stayed with you this long.’ She heaved it down to the floor.

‘Nothing to do with the money, I suppose.’ His voice was laden with sudden sarcasm.

‘It was never your money,’ she spat back at him. ‘And I never gave a shit about it anyway. I thought I loved you, though God knows why. I’ve just never understood how a grown man with any self-respect could live off his mother. Waiting for her to die so he could inherit.’

Fury spiked through him. ‘You little bitch!’ He stepped towards her, clenched fist raised ready to strike, as it had done so many times before. But strong arms grasped him and threw him back against the wall. His head struck it with a resounding crack. Two young men about his own age crowded the bedroom, tense and all wound up like coiled springs.

One of them half turned towards the girl. ‘Lise, get out!’

Only then did Bauer recognise them as the young men loading the van in the street outside his apartment. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he shouted. ‘Get out of my apartment!’

‘Lise, go!’ The bellow of the young man’s voice reverberated around the bedroom.

She lifted her case and hurried out of the room, barely daring to glance in Bauer’s direction.

‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Bauer yelled again.

The young man who had shouted at Lise to go wore a sick smile on his face as he took a step towards Bauer, fists bunched at his side. ‘I’m Lise’s big brother,’ he said. ‘As you’d know if you’d ever bothered to visit the family. She’s finished with you, you fuck! And you’re going to get what’s coming to you.’

His friend took a step to the side as the two of them moved in on Bauer, so that he could only strike out towards one at a time.

Bauer tensed, fuelled by fury and fear in equal measure. He knew he was going to take a beating, but had no intention of going down without a fight.

As she left the apartment, Lise heard his voice raised in a blood-curdling yell, and then a commotion that suggested a level of violence that could only end in blood and tears. She blinked away tears of her own that threatened to blind her as she hauled her suitcase off down the stairs.

It was several hours before the pain in his head eased. His lower lip, sliced open by a broken front tooth, had bled profusely, long after his attackers had gone. One eye was almost closed, although he was sure he had reduced the swelling and the bruising by applying a bag of frozen vegetables straight from the freezer. His ribs ached, and hurt every time he moved, making him wonder if one or more were cracked or broken. But he suspected that the heavy boots that had kicked him repeatedly when finally he went down had inflicted most of their damage on the arms with which he had tried to protect himself.

He too had managed to administer a fair amount of damage, the evidence of which remained in the swollen and bruised knuckles of both hands.

Several paracetamol had taken the edge off most of the pain, but it was only now that it was ceasing to fill his entire conscious world and fade into the background. He sat in the dark of the front room, sipping gingerly at a glass of whisky and sparkling water. It was filled to the brim with ice cubes that numbed his lips as he drank.

His rage had finally subsided, giving way to self-pity, and he felt the first warm tears trickle down his bruised face. The tumbler shook in his hand, and he closed his eyes to try to gather himself. Through the glass all along the front of the apartment, the light of the city spilled in to lay the elongated shapes of his windows across the floor. And only now did the full sense of his loss strike him.

Lise was gone. It was over. She would never be back, and he knew that it was entirely his fault. The regret he had always felt following violent outbursts against her haunted him now. Genuine sorrow for what he had done to her, and in the end to himself. His mother, too, was gone. No one but himself left to blame.

He moved stiffly across the room and went to the kitchen to refill his glass, and when he returned, slumped into the swivel chair behind his desk. His eyes hurt when first he turned on the desk lamp, and he screwed them tight shut to reopen slowly and accustom them gradually to the light. Earlier he had gathered together all the sheets of paper that had spilled on to the bedroom floor and returned them to Greta Jung’s orange folder. It lay now in the circle of light on the desk. He pulled it towards him and opened it. Photocopies of the records she had tracked down in the vaults of the Würzburg archive, printouts of obscure web pages she had unearthed in her search for details on the history of Karlheinz Wolff. The story of his sister, Erika, and of his first encounter with the industrialist Guido Fischer. There was a Wikipedia entry on Fischer, in which Wolff was mentioned, and described as having become a dealer in art for Hermann Göring. But no explanation of how that had come about.

Just beyond his reach, and outside the pool of light on his desktop, Wolff’s diaries lay in an untidy pile. Silent shadows from the past, lying in the dark, inviting him to read. He gazed at them for a very long time before finally succumbing to temptation. His chair creaked as he leaned forward to corral them into the light. He sat back, flicking through each in turn to arrange them in date order. He did not have the concentration to give them his full attention right now, but he riffled through some of the earliest entries, struck by how similar Wolff’s handwriting was to his own.

It seemed that Wolff had begun these diaries sometime during his early years at university. His first entries revealed a youthful lack of self-confidence, an almost obsessive exercise in navel-gazing. A growing awareness of his shortness of temper, and a propensity for violence when he lost it. Bauer found these difficult to read. They were words he might have written to describe himself, yet penned by a man who pre-dated him by two generations.

Wolff’s fascination with his sister verged on infatuation, and was clear in all his entries about her. Unhealthily so. She was beautiful, talented, beyond reproach. He missed her passionately when she went to Paris, and described sleepless nights thinking about her. Sometimes his dreams of her verged on the erotic.

Bauer skipped the account of his trip to Paris with friends to exact revenge on the man who had made her pregnant. It struck far too close to home. And he skimmed forward until he found what really interested him. The entry that described his first meeting with the man who was head of the German air force, the Luftwaffe. The man made Reichsmarschall by Hitler at the start of the war, giving him seniority over all other officers in Germany’s armed forces. Hermann Göring. Described by Greta Jung in the café in Würzburg as an art thief.