The Night Gate

Chapter Twenty

It was late afternoon by the time Enzo was driving east again on the Boulevard de l’Hautil at Cergy-Pontoise. The flight back to Paris from Berlin had taken under two hours, but followed a five-hour drive back from Würzburg, and Enzo was feeling the travel stress of the last two days catching up with him.

He had cleaned off Greta Jung’s folder and its contents with disinfectant wipes before handling them, then spent the evening in his hotel room reading through her researches. Twice. And once again on the plane. He had been fascinated by the story of revenge recounted in a memoir by a friend of Wolff. The trip to Paris to exact retribution on the man who had made Wolff’s sister pregnant. The art critic, Georges Picard. The frenzied display of violence that could so easily have led to the man’s death.

Enzo could see how Bauer would have been seduced by all of this. He had followed his grandfather’s footsteps into the world of art. Had that been inherited? It certainly wasn’t environmental, since grandfather and grandson had never met. And artistic talent was often passed on through a family, sometimes skipping a generation. Bauer, Enzo was sure, must also have wondered if he had inherited his grandfather’s temperament, a tendency towards irrational and uncontrollable violence. Wolff, his friend had written, would certainly have killed Picard had his companions not stopped him.

The sky to the west was painted red by the late autumn sunset, a few bruised and purple clouds bubbling up along the horizon. And the traffic was still light as Enzo turned into the campus of the Institute de Recherche Criminelle Gendarmerie Nationale. At the airport he had put Kirsty in a taxi, and driven straight out to Cergy-Pontoise.

A call to Magali Blanc’s office on landing at Charles de Gaulle confirmed that she had, indeed, followed Enzo’s suggestion of extracting DNA from the bones of the Carennac remains. Her assistant, however, was not privy to the results, and Magali was on a conference call that was likely to last most of the afternoon. Hence his drive out to the IRCGN. Enzo had grown increasingly impatient with age.

By the time he had cleared security and been taken up to her first-floor lab, darkness had fallen, and cold night air pushed against all the windows of the Human Identification wing. Her assistant was gone, and Enzo was left sitting in her office replaying everything he had learned in the last forty-eight hours. It was there, while he waited, that he made a decision that would probably haunt him for the rest of his days.

He placed a call to the Ministry of Justice and found himself talking to someone who had reason to be grateful to him for services previously rendered. A favour owed, now called in.

He hung up as Magali breezed into her office. She seemed surprised to see him. ‘Two visits in one week,’ she said. ‘I’m flattered. What are you after?’

‘I’m told you took my advice. About the DNA.’

‘I did,’ she said. ‘Developed a complete profile.’

‘And?’

‘Asked the boys across the way to run it through the European database.’

‘And?’

She laughed. ‘You never have learned the art of patience, have you, Enzo.’ Then sighed. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t had the results back yet. Unless...’

She sifted through fresh piles of documents on her desk.

‘Ah yes, here we are. Must have come through this afternoon.’

Enzo was annoyed to think that they had been sitting there under his nose the whole time he had been waiting. He could certainly not have resisted taking a look. He watched Magali’s eyes as she scanned the paper in her hand, and saw her eyebrows push up on her forehead.

‘Well, well. You were right.’ She looked at him and grinned. ‘As always.’ Then turned back to the document. ‘It seems that the search turned up a familial match in the German database. A teenager with a record for assault in Berlin. His DNA has been on file for the last seven years.’

Enzo said, ‘And his name is Hans Bauer.’

Magali’s head snapped up and she looked at him in astonishment. ‘How can you possibly know that?’

‘An educated guess,’ he said. ‘But since I seem to have hit the mark, then I know more than that. I know that the remains you have in your lab belong to a man called Karlheinz Wolff. A Hauptmann in the Luftwaffe, employed as a procurer of art by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, and listed as missing in action somewhere in France in the summer of 1944.’

The document she was holding went limp in Magali’s hand, and if it were not hidden by her mask, Enzo was sure he would have seen her mouth hanging open. But he wasn’t finished yet.

‘He is also the grandfather of the murder suspect in the case I’ve been consulting on. Which bears out my instinct to be sceptical about coincidence.’

‘So that explains what Bauer was doing in Carennac,’ Raffin said. He stuffed another forkful of chou farci into his mouth, quickly followed by a mouthful of Vin de Savoie rouge. Enzo hadn’t seen him this animated since his illness.

He and Kirsty, and Enzo and Alexis, were all seated around the dinner table in the apartment in the Rue de Tournon, well separated despite the almost negligible risk. Alexis had his father’s hair and his mother’s dimples, and his latest hearing aids were both highly efficient and almost invisible. It would have been impossible to tell from his ease of interaction that the boy had hearing difficulties caused by the Waardenburg syndrome inherited from his grandfather. Ten years old now, he was sprouting rapidly, and demonstrating that he had also inherited his grandfather’s intelligence. But for the moment, he was engrossed in the stuffed cabbage.

‘It might explain what led him to Carennac,’ Enzo said, ‘but it doesn’t tell us what he was doing there. Or what passed between him and Narcisse in Paris. Or why both men were in Anny Lavigne’s house the night of the murder.’

‘Not yet. Though I’m sure you’ll find out,’ Raffin said. ‘The possibilities are intriguing. All the players in this little narrative have some connection with art. Narcisse was a dealer. Bauer ran an art gallery. Karlheinz Wolff stole art for the Nazis. I mean, do you think this whole thing could have something to do with stolen Nazi art?’

Enzo didn’t respond. For the moment he seemed lost in thought and forked his chou farci absently into his mouth. Raffin noticed that his wine glass was still full.

‘Drink up, man,’ he said. ‘You haven’t touched your wine.’

Enzo looked up to find Kirsty watching him, concerned. A daughter’s instinct. ‘What is it, Papa?’

Very quietly he said, ‘I’m going to visit Charlotte in prison tomorrow.’

The silence around the table was broken only by the scrape of Alexis’ fork on his plate. He was oblivious to the bombshell that his grandfather had just dropped into the middle of dinner.

‘You have got to be joking!’ Kirsty stared at him in disbelief. ‘I mean, really, you’re not serious? You can’t be.’

‘I am.’ Enzo glanced at Raffin and saw that the blood had left his face. It was easy to forget that Raffin and Charlotte had once been lovers, before Enzo ever met her.

Kirsty turned to Alexis. ‘Go to your room.’

His face crumpled in dismay. ‘Aw, Mama, I haven’t finished my dinner.’

‘Take it with you. You can watch TV while you finish it.’ Which broke a golden rule. Dinner was always eaten as a family, around the table. Alexis’ dismay was displaced by delight. He grabbed his plate and made off with it before his mother changed her mind. When he had gone, Kirsty turned back to her father and scrutinised his face. ‘You really are serious.’

He nodded.

‘Papa, she tried to kill you. Twice!’

Enzo closed his eyes and the image of the dark figure who very nearly drove a knife through his heart high up in the Château des Fleures in Gaillac flashed painfully through his memory. And then Charlotte standing over him in the rain, a gun pointed at his head, ready to pull the trigger. And he knew that she would have done it if Sophie had not knocked her to the ground with a wheel brace.

Raffin found his voice, finally. ‘You can’t just go visiting prisoners at a moment’s notice, Enzo. It takes time to set these things up.’

‘Which is why I called in a favour earlier today. I’m cleared to visit her tomorrow morning.’

‘But why?’ Kirsty wouldn’t let it go. ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘Because Bauer is an enigma, Kirsty.’ He laid down his knife and fork. ‘Here is a man prone to reckless violence and then instant regret. He is accused of a murder that I have reason to think he might not have committed. He is the grandson of a wartime art thief, obsessed with the idea that such a thing as an evil gene might actually exist. Or, at the very least, an inherited propensity for violence. The only person I know who can give me an insight into the psyche of a man like that — a man who is still missing, by the way — is Charlotte Roux.’

‘Don’t do it, Papa.’ Kirsty reached out to place a hand over one of his. ‘There are other forensic psychologists you could consult.’

Enzo nodded. ‘Yes. There are. But none of them is the mother of my son. And I haven’t set eyes on her for nearly ten years.’