The Traitor's Emblem Page 8

  It was no wonder, then, that on that afternoon the coal man started yelling at Paul the moment the cart came around the corner.

  “There was a huge snarl-up on the bridge.”

  “I don’t give a damn! Get down here and help us with the load before those vultures come back.”

  Paul jumped down from the driver’s seat and started lugging baskets. It took much less effort now, though at sixteen, almost seventeen, his development was still far from complete. He was rather thin, but his arms and legs were pure sinew.

  With only five or six baskets left to unload, the coal men sped up as they heard the rhythmic, impatient clip-clop of the policemen’s horses.

  “They’re coming!” yelled Klaus.

  Paul descended with his final load almost running, dropped it into the coal cellar, the sweat pouring down his forehead, then ran back up the stairs to the street. Just as he emerged, an object struck him full in the face.

  For a moment the world around him froze. Paul noticed only that his body spun in the air for half a second, his feet trying to find purchase on the slippery steps. He flailed and then fell backward. He didn’t have time to feel any pain, because the darkness had already closed over him.

  Ten seconds earlier, Alys and Manfred Tannenbaum had come into the square after a walk around a nearby park. The girl had wanted to take her brother out for some exercise before the earth became too frozen. The first snows had fallen the previous night, and although they hadn’t yet settled, the boy would soon be facing three or four weeks when he couldn’t stretch his legs as he might like.

  Manfred was savoring these last moments of freedom as best he could. The previous day he had retrieved his old soccer ball from his wardrobe and was now kicking it along and bouncing it off the walls, under the reproachful stares of passersby. In other circumstances Alys would have scowled at them—she couldn’t bear people who thought children were a nuisance—but that day she felt mournful and insecure. Lost in thought, her eyes fixated on the small clouds her breath made in the freezing air, she was paying little attention to Manfred, except to make sure he picked up the ball when crossing the road.

  Just a few meters before the door to their home, the boy noticed the gaping cellar doors and, imagining that they were in front of the goal in the Grünwalder stadium, kicked with all his might. The ball, which was made from extremely tough leather, traced a perfect arc before hitting a man square in the face. The man vanished down the stairs.

  “Manfred, be careful!”

  Alys’s angry shout became a scream when she realized the ball had hit someone. Her brother stood frozen on the pavement, terrified. She ran to the cellar door, but one of the victim’s colleagues, a short man wearing a shapeless hat, had already run to his aid.

  “Damn it! I always knew that stupid idiot would have a fall,” said another of the coal men, a larger man. He was still standing by the cart, wringing his hands and glancing anxiously toward the corner of the Possartstrasse.

  Alys stopped at the top of the cellar steps, but she didn’t dare descend. For a few awful seconds she looked down into the rectangle of darkness, but then a figure appeared, as though the color black had suddenly assumed human form. It was the coal man’s colleague, the one who had run past Alys, and he was carrying the fallen man.

  “Holy God, he’s only a child . . .”

  The injured man’s left arm was hanging down at a strange angle, and his trousers and jacket were torn. There were wounds to his head and forearms, and the blood on his face mingled with the coal dust in thick brown streaks. His eyes were shut, and he didn’t react when the other man laid him on the ground and tried to wipe the blood away with a grimy piece of cloth.

  I hope he’s just unconscious, Alys thought, squatting down and taking his hand.

  “What’s his name?” Alys asked the man in the hat.

  The man shrugged, pointed to his throat, and shook his head. Alys understood.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked, fearing he might be deaf as well as mute. “We have to help him!”

  The man in the hat ignored her and turned toward the coal carts, opening his eyes as wide as saucers. The other coal man, the older one, had gotten up onto the driver’s seat of the first cart, the one that was full, and was desperately trying to find the reins. He cracked his whip, tracing a clumsy figure eight in the air. The two horses started up with a snort.

  “Let’s go, Hulbert!”

  The man in the hat hesitated for a moment. He took a step toward the other cart but seemed to think better of it and turned. He put the bloodstained cloth in Alys’s hands, then walked away, following the old man’s example.

  “Wait! You can’t leave him here!” she shouted, shocked at the men’s behavior.

  She kicked the ground. Enraged, furious, and helpless.

  14

  The most complicated part for Alys wasn’t convincing the policemen to let her tend to the sick man in her home, but overcoming Doris’s resistance to letting him in. She had to shout at her almost as loudly as she’d had to shout at Manfred to get him to move himself for God’s sake and go and find help. Finally her brother had obeyed and two servants had cleared a path through the circle of spectators and loaded the young man into the elevator.

  “Miss Alys, you know that Sir doesn’t like having strangers in the house, especially when he’s not here. I’m firmly against this.”

  The young coal bearer hung limp and unconscious between the servants, who were too old to be able to bear his weight for much longer. They were on the landing of the staircase, and the housekeeper was blocking the door.

  “We can’t leave him here, Doris. We will have to send for a doctor.”

  “It’s not our responsibility.”

  “It is. The accident was Manfred’s fault,” she said, pointing at the boy, who was standing pale-faced beside her, holding the ball very far from his body as though he feared it might injure someone else.

  “I’ve said no. There are hospitals for . . . for people like him.”

  “He’ll be better looked after here.”

  Doris stared at her as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Then she twisted her mouth into a condescending smile. She knew exactly what to say to enrage Alys, and she chose her words carefully.

  “Fräulein Alys, you’re too young to . . .”

  So it’s back to this, thought Alys, feeling her face color with rage and shame. Well, this time it’s not going to work.

  “Doris, with all due respect, get out of the way.”

  She moved toward the door and pushed it with both hands. The housekeeper tried to shut it, but she was too late, and the wood struck her shoulder as it swung open. She fell on her backside on the entrance hall rug, watching powerlessly as the Tannenbaum children led the two servants into the house. The latter avoided her gaze, and Doris was convinced they were trying not to laugh.

  “This is not how things are done. I shall tell your father,” she said, furious.

  “You don’t have to worry about that, Doris. When he comes back from Dachau tomorrow I’ll tell him myself,” replied Alys without glancing back.

  Deep down, she wasn’t as confident as her words seemed to suggest. She knew that there would be problems with her father, but at that moment she was determined not to allow the housekeeper to get her own way.

  “Close your eyes. I don’t want to get iodine in them.”

  Alys tiptoed into the guest room, trying not to interrupt the doctor, who was cleaning the injured man’s forehead. Doris was standing angrily in the corner of the room, constantly clearing her throat or tapping her feet to show her impatience. When Alys came in, she redoubled her efforts. Alys ignored her and looked at the young coal bearer stretched out on the bed.

  The mattress is completely ruined, she thought. At that moment her eyes met the man’s and she recognized him.

  The waiter from the party! No, it can’t be him!

  But it was, because she saw him open his eyes
wide and raise his eyebrows. More than a year had passed, but she still remembered him. And suddenly she realized who the fair-haired boy was who had slipped into her fantasies when she tried to visualize Prescott. She noticed Doris glaring at her, so she faked a yawn and opened the bedroom door. Using it as a screen between her and the housekeeper, she looked at Paul and brought a finger to her lips.

  * * *

  “How is he?” Alys asked when at last the doctor came out into the corridor.

  He was a skinny man with bulging eyes who had been in charge of the Tannenbaums’ care since before Alys was born. When her mother had died of influenza, the girl had spent many sleepless nights, hating him for not having saved her, though now his strange appearance produced in her only a shiver, like that of a stethoscope on skin.

  “His left arm’s broken, though it seems like a clean break. I’ve put a splint and bandages on him. He should be all right in six weeks or so. Try to stop him moving it.”

  “What about his head?”

  “The other injuries are superficial, though he’s bled a lot. He must have scraped himself against the edge of the steps. I’ve disinfected the wound on his forehead, though he should have a good bath as soon as possible.”

  “Can he leave straightaway, Doctor?”

  The doctor nodded a greeting to Doris, who had just closed the door behind him.

  “I’d recommend that he stay here tonight. Well, good-bye,” said the doctor, pulling his hat on firmly.

  “We’ll see to that, Doctor. Thank you very much,” said Alys, bidding him good-bye and throwing Doris a challenging stare.

  Paul twisted in the bathtub, uncomfortable. He had to keep his left arm out of the water so as not to get the bandages wet. With his body covered in bruises, there was no position that didn’t make some part of him hurt. He surveyed the room, stunned by the luxury that surrounded him. Baron von Schroeder’s mansion, though it was in one of the most highly prized areas in Munich, didn’t have the amenities this apartment had, beginning with hot water that flowed straight from the tap. Paul had usually been the one to carry hot water from the kitchen each time someone in the family wanted to take a bath, which was a daily occurrence. And there was just no comparison between the bathroom in which he found himself now and the cupboard with a washstand and basin in the boardinghouse.

  So this is her house. I thought I’d never see her again. It’s a pity she’s ashamed of me, he thought.

  “That water’s very black.”

  Paul looked up, startled. Alys was at the bathroom door, an amused expression on her face. Although the bathtub came almost to his shoulders and the water was covered in a grayish lather, the young man couldn’t help blushing.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Redressing the balance,” she said, smiling at Paul’s feeble efforts to cover himself up with one hand. “I owed you for having rescued me.”

  “Bearing in mind that it was your brother’s ball that knocked me down those stairs, I’d say you still owe me one.”

  Alys didn’t reply. She looked at him carefully, focusing on his shoulders and the pronounced muscles of his sinewy arms. Without the coal dust, his skin was very fair.

  “Anyhow, thanks, Alys,” said Paul, taking her silence to be a mute reproach.

  “You remember my name.”

  Now it was Paul’s turn to be silent. The shine in Alys’s eyes was striking, and he had to look away.

  “You’ve bulked up quite a bit,” she continued after a pause.

  “It’s those baskets. They weigh a ton, but carrying them about makes you stronger.”

  “How did you end up selling coal?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  She took a stool from the corner of the bathroom and sat down close to him.

  “Tell me. We have time.”

  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll catch you here?”

  “I went to bed half an hour ago. The housekeeper checked on me. But it wasn’t difficult to sneak past her.”

  Paul picked up the bar of soap and began turning it around in his hand.

  “After the party I had a nasty argument with my aunt.”

  “Because of your cousin?”

  “It was because of something that happened many years ago, something to do with my father. My mother told me he’d died in a shipwreck, but on the day of the party I learned that she’d been lying to me for years.”

  “It’s something adults do,” Alys said with a sigh.

  “They threw us out, me and my mother. This job was the best I could get.”

  “You’re lucky, I suppose.”

  “You call this luck?” said Paul, wincing. “Working from dawn till dusk, with nothing to look forward to except a few pfennig in your pocket. Some luck!”

  “You have a job; you have your independence, your self-respect. That’s something,” she replied, upset.

  “I would swap it for some of this,” he said, gesturing around him.

  “You have no idea what I mean, Paul, do you?”

  “More than you think,” he spat, unable to contain himself. “You have beauty and intelligence and you spoil it all by pretending to be unhappy, a rebel, spending more time moaning about your luxurious position and worrying about what other people think of you than taking risks and fighting for what you really want.”

  He fell silent, suddenly conscious of everything he’d said, and saw the emotion dancing in her eyes. He opened his mouth to excuse himself but thought that it would only make things worse.

  Alys slowly got up from the stool. For a moment Paul thought she was going to leave, but this was just the first of many times he would fail to interpret her feelings correctly over the years. She came to the bathtub, knelt down beside it, and, leaning over the water, kissed him on the lips. At first Paul froze, but soon he began to respond.

  Alys drew back and stared at him. Paul understood where her beauty lay: it was in the glimmer of challenge that blazed in her eyes. He leaned his body forward and kissed her, but this time he opened his mouth slightly. After a while she broke away.

  Then she heard the door.

  15

  Alys jumped to her feet at once and backed away from Paul, but it was too late. Her father had entered the bathroom. He barely looked at her; he didn’t need to. The sleeve of her dress was completely soaked, and even a man of Josef Tannenbaum’s limited imagination could get some idea of what had been happening only a moment before.

  “Go to your room.”

  “But, Papa . . .” she stammered.

  “Now!”

  Alys burst into tears and ran out of the room. On the way she almost tripped over Doris, who flashed her a triumphant smile.

  “As you can see, Fräulein, your father came home earlier than expected. Isn’t that marvelous?”

  Paul felt totally defenseless, sitting there naked in the rapidly cooling water. As Tannenbaum approached, he tried to get to his feet, but the businessman gripped his shoulder cruelly. Though he was shorter than Paul, he was stronger than his chubby appearance suggested, and Paul found it impossible to get purchase on the slippery tub.

  Tannenbaum sat down on the stool where Alys had been seated only a few minutes earlier. He didn’t lessen his grip on Paul’s shoulder for a moment, and Paul was afraid that he would suddenly decide to push him down and hold his head under the water.

  “What’s your name, coal man?”

  “Paul Reiner.”

  “You’re not a Jew, Reiner, are you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Now, pay attention,” said Tannenbaum, his tone softening, like a trainer speaking to the last dog in the litter, the slowest to learn its tricks. “My daughter is heir to a large fortune; she’s from a class far above your own. You’re just a piece of shit that got stuck to her shoe. Understand?”

  Paul didn’t reply. He managed to overcome his shame and stared back, his teeth clenched in fury. At that moment there was no one in the world he hated more than this man
.

  “Of course you don’t understand,” Tannenbaum said, releasing his shoulder. “Well, at least I returned before she did something stupid.”

  His hand went to his wallet, and he drew out an enormous fistful of banknotes. He folded them carefully and placed them on the marble washbasin.

  “This is for the trouble caused by Manfred’s ball. And now you can go.”

  Tannenbaum headed for the door, but before he left he looked at Paul one last time.

  “Of course, Reiner, though you probably wouldn’t care, I’ve spent this afternoon with my daughter’s future father-in-law, finalizing the details of her wedding. In the spring she will marry an aristocrat.”

  You’re lucky, I suppose . . . you have your independence, she’d said to him.

  “Does Alys know?” he asked.

  Tannenbaum gave a snort of derision.

  “Never say her name again.”

  Paul got out of the bathtub and dressed, hardly bothering to dry himself. He didn’t care if he caught pneumonia. He took the wad of banknotes from the sink and went into the bedroom, where Doris was watching him from across the room.

  “Allow me to show you to the door.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” the young man replied, turning into the corridor. The front door was clearly visible at the far end.

  “Oh, we wouldn’t want you to pocket anything by accident,” the housekeeper said with a mocking grin.

  “Give this back to your master, ma’am. Tell him I don’t need it,” Paul replied, his voice cracking as he held out the banknotes.

  He almost ran to the exit, even though Doris was no longer watching him. She was looking at the money and a crafty smile flashed across her face.