Once Upon a Time (11 page)

“What about Wednesday night at the hotel? Why didn't she call you there?”

“Mom couldn't reach Rachel till Thursday morning at work. She had stayed over at a friend's house Wednesday night.”

It seemed an innocent explanation, yet there was a strange, evasive look in Howard's eyes. Green took a wild guess.

“Male or female?”

Howard frowned. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“I've been a detective a long time. I've seen a lot of less than perfect marriages.”

Howard leaned his head back with a laugh that sounded oddly relieved. “Way off base, Inspector. It was all prearranged—a rare time for two friends to get together. Rachel and Maxine had theatre tickets and late dinner reservations.”

The evasive look had meant something, Green was sure, but he sensed a direct demand for the truth would get him nowhere, so he jotted the question in his notebook for future use and leaned back with a soothing smile.

“Sorry, Howard, I had to ask. Getting back to your father, I'd like to know a bit more about his background. Where is he from, and how did he and your mother meet?”

But rather than being soothed, Howard tensed. “Why?”

“Well, she's British and he's…what?”

“They met in Surrey, just after the war,” he replied curtly.

“During the war my mother worked as a nurse, although she never had much formal training, and she was working in a convalescent hospital in the country. My father was a patient there. She nursed him, and I guess they fell in love. When he was better, they came to Canada to start a new life. Neither of them had much left of their old ones.”

“What do you know of your father's background?”

Howard rose and refilled his glass with club soda, perhaps to occupy his hands. “Nothing. He had been evacuated to England from somewhere in Germany to receive medical care, but he arrived in England with no memory of who he was or where he came from.”

“What language did he speak?”

“No language at all.” It was Ruth who spoke, suddenly appearing in the archway to the kitchen as if she had been listening on the other side. She was wearing a soft blue print dress with a silver brooch at the collar, and her curly grey hair was sculpted neatly around her head. Her well-bred smile barely masked her annoyance.

“Why do you want to know, Inspector?”

Green rose and extended his hand. “I apologize for intruding at this time, Mrs. Walker. Had I known, I would have waited, but I received a message that Howard was anxious to speak with me.”

“As am I.” She sat with great dignity and her eyes held his. “Because if you think he was murdered, I want to know why. You're asking about ancient history, most of which we know nothing about—”

“Why is that?”

“He didn't lie, if that's what you're implying.” She paused as if waiting for his explanation, but when he offered none, she seemed to reach a decision. She turned to her son, who was still propped against the sink, drink in hand. “Howard, this may take a few minutes, and I don't like to leave Margaret to cope with our guests alone. She's worn out.”

Howard's grip tightened on his glass, and he opened his mouth to protest, but Ruth's steadfast look never wavered. In the end, he set the drink down on the counter, nodded and strode out without a word. Ruth turned back to Green and clasped her hands in her lap as if to brace herself.

“There are things my children don't understand, and right at the moment, with everyone's nerves frayed, it is not the time to add to their burdens. Whatever his background, Eugene was clearly a casualty of the war and remained one until his death. When he arrived in Surrey, he was severely depressed. It happened to people, both soldiers and civilians, who had been traumatized so severely, and for so long that they no longer responded to the outside world. They didn't talk, they didn't move, they just seemed to pull into themselves.”

“Your son said he was picked up somewhere in Germany?”

She nodded. “A Red Cross relief unit found him hiding in the mountains near Dresden, in the eastern part of Germany. He was beaten, starving and sick with typhus. He was taken to a hospital in Belgium where he stayed about three months. By that time he was physically on the mend but still would not speak. That's when they decided to move him to our convalescent hospital. There was a great deal of confusion after the war, Inspector. You have to understand it didn't end neatly, and everyone went back home.”

Green did not interrupt her to tell her that he was very aware of the chaos after the war, of the hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees wandering the devastated continent. Of concentration camp survivors with no place to go, of families who'd been torn apart by the war and who were hunting for one another across Europe, of German army deserters shedding their uniforms and Nazis fleeing for their lives. Of lies and lost papers and frantic bids for asylum. Green's parents rarely talked about it, but they had been there.

“Eugene was just one of thousands of refugees without papers,” she said. “And he wouldn't talk or tell the Belgian doctors where he came from.”

He kept his voice casual, as if he were just probing to understand. “Did he have any personal effects? Clothing? Anything to give them a clue where he was from?”

She wavered. “Well…when they picked him up, he was wearing a German regular army uniform. But it was very bloody, and the Red Cross thought it was likely stolen from a corpse. He had no…” She paused, twisting her wedding ring convulsively. “No soldier's tags around his neck. In fact, nothing but a small plain gold cross. That…that was all we had from his past.”

Green waited in silence. He wanted her to present whatever cover story she had fabricated, and he would spring the black box with its identity papers once she was committed to her lie. It was an old cross-examination trick he'd learned watching the local lawyers in court.

She shook her head at the memory. “It took him a long time to speak, even to react when spoken to. But after a while he started coming out into the sunshine to watch the others at play, and eventually he'd join in a game of cards. When he finally spoke, it was in English, with an accent. He never spoke Polish. To this day he only spoke Polish if he absolutely had to. For instance, if an immigrant came into the hardware store who spoke no English.”

Green frowned. “Polish? If he was found in Germany wearing a German uniform, why did you even think he was Polish?”

She smoothed her skirt and rubbed the joints of her fingers. Her face reflected pain, but something else as well. She's wondering what I know, he thought. She's a woman used to the necessity of lying, but not comfortable with it.

“He understood Polish at the hospital. Polish is not that common a language. Few foreigners speak it. He understood German as well, but that's not uncommon for educated Poles. And he was clearly educated. He could read and write and do mathematics, even book-keeping. So he was probably from the city. But he didn't understand French or Dutch or Czech or anything else we tried on him. There was just something ‘unGerman' about him. He just didn't seem like a German to me, perhaps because I didn't want him to be.”

Green reached into the briefcase at his feet and withdrew the plastic bags with the black box and the identity booklet. Even before he could say anything, the widening of her eyes betrayed her. She looked at the things in silence for a moment, then swallowed.

“You were thorough, weren't you.”

“Maybe you'd better tell me the whole story.”

She rose and began to clear teacups off the table. They rattled in her hands. “I wish Eugene had destroyed those things before we came over. I was always afraid they'd come back to haunt him.”

“And did they?”

She placed some cups in the sink and swung around to face him. “That depends on you.”

“I'm an officer of the law. If a fraud has been committed—”

“But it hasn't!” She coloured. “At least…not knowingly. Eugene didn't remember anything! The box, the name on the papers were meaningless to him. Was it a crime just to begin anew with a clean slate?”

“Eugene may not have remembered anything, but you knew he might be an officer in the enemy army.”

She sat down again opposite him and massaged her joints. Finally she shook her head. “At the convalescent home, when Eugene and I were engaged, he showed me those papers. The Red Cross had wanted to take them away from him in Belgium, and he had hidden them in that secret compartment. Eugene was absolutely paranoid about his possessions. He clung to them as if his life depended on them. He actually believed he was Wilhelm Ganz. He said we had to keep it secret because they wouldn't let us into Canada, and the British would send him back to Germany. He insisted on taking my name. But I couldn't leave it like that. Somewhere in Germany a family was wondering what had happened to their son. My brother was killed in the war, and I saw what it did to my parents. So I wrote to Wilhelm Ganz's address in Potsdam, simply saying that we had a wounded man at the hospital who might be their son, and could they please send a picture.” She hesitated, then rose, wringing her hands. “They wrote back that their son was dead. He had been killed in action defending a bridge outside Dresden on May 8, 1945. They had seen the body, and there was no mistake. They sent me a picture of him in his uniform, and it didn't look anything like Eugene.”

Another twist in the trail, he thought. “So the papers were stolen?”

She inclined her head slightly. “But perhaps not knowingly. When Eugene, in his state of shock, took the uniform off the soldier's body to clothe himself, perhaps the papers were in the pocket and he only found them later. By which time he had forgotten where they came from and what he had done.”

“Did you tell him what you had found out?”

“That he wasn't Wilhelm Ganz? Yes.”

“And how did he react?”

She cocked her head in thought. “He didn't. At least not to that. He was cross at me for writing. He didn't seem to care who he was or wasn't.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes,” she replied, too quickly.

“No, you didn't. You thought he was hiding something.”

“From himself!” she shot back, then checked herself. Facing him, she propped herself against the sink and folded her arms over her chest. Buying herself time, he thought, and waited. “Honestly, Inspector, I don't know what else I can tell you. I don't know how he got those papers, or why. But I do believe he was as much in the dark about his past as I.”

Green slid the box out of the bag and turned it in his hands, letting the tools slide out. “What about these things inside? Did you try to trace anything? Or check out this name engraved on the bottom?”

Her arms fell to her sides as if the tension had drained from her. Something about those papers bothers her, he thought. Some fear, some remnant of doubt. Her colour returned as she turned her mind elsewhere. “Before we emigrated to Canada, I wrote to the Polish embassy in London asking them to check the existence of such a company in Ozorkow. It took a long time, but eventually they informed me that there had been a tool and blacksmith shop in Ozorkow run by a man called Kressman. The Kressman family, however, had disappeared during the war, and no one had yet turned up to claim the shop.”

“Disappeared”. Green grimaced inwardly at the euphemism. No one had turned up because they were probably Jewish and lying at the bottom of a lime pit somewhere. Ninety per cent of Poland's Jews had perished in the Holocaust.

“Did the Polish authorities give you any details on this man Kressman? His full name or age?”

She frowned in dismay. “At the time, yes, but I'm afraid I can't remember much.” Her delicate brows drew together as if in an effort to concentrate. “Joseph, I think that was the shopkeeper's name. He'd been in business for over thirty years, so he had to have been middle aged.”

“And you didn't try to find out if there was a connection? There was a whole chunk of your husband's life missing.”

He had tried to sound gentle, but when she looked up, she was flushed and her tone was defensive. “There was chaos in post-war Europe. It took years for the dust to settle and for the fate of people to be uncovered. And Poland was in Stalin's hands. You didn't simply ask for information.”

“But later. In all this time, did you never check?”

“Eugene was a fragile man, Inspector. I helped him to live again, but I never made him whole. Whoever he was, he was a victim of this war, and he had suffered dreadfully. I wanted to put all that behind us—the papers, the box—and try to help him turn towards the future.”

“He had no desire to know his past?”

She shook her head. “On the contrary. Whenever I broached it, he'd become very upset. In fact, the merest hint of Poland and his youth would send him over the edge. I decided if the past was so terrible that Eugene couldn't face it, it was better left alone.”

He laid his notebook down and reached out a soothing hand. “I didn't mean to be critical, Mrs. Walker. I'm just trying to find out as much as I can, and we've got a huge chunk of the picture missing.”

To his surprise, she didn't soften. She pushed the box away with distaste. “I don't see how it's relevant. After all this time, to dredge up all these questions seems needlessly cruel. He was probably just some innocent peasant or handyman living out a quiet life in the Polish countryside, and then the Nazis came along and turned his world upside down. Whoever he was and whatever he had done during that time, it had no bearing on who he was today.”

Her vehemence surprised him. He had merely asked about the black box, but she had reacted as if he had accused her husband of something heinous. Of what? Of stealing a dead man's ID? People had done far worse in the middle of war.