Lineage (37 page)

“Do you remember him? Gerald Rhinelander?”
Nothing.
Lance looked at the crossword and an idea struck him. “Who is
Wulf
?” he asked, holding the black-and-white checkering within a few inches of her nose.

Several seconds crept by and then the wrinkled eyelids blinked in their sunken sockets. Her tongue scratched across her lips again.

“
Wulf
is Metzger. Heinrich is Erwin.” Her voice had cleared some, like an unused engine finally firing on all cylinders. “He told me that over and over before we crossed the ocean.”

“Who told you that?” Lance asked, his voice low and, he hoped, soothing. Annette seemed to slip away and then return, her eyes blinking.

“Erwin, Heinrich.
Both the same.
We came on the ship with the others. Heinrich’s face was still bleeding. I remember the bandages he would change, sopping with blood.”

Lance nodded. “Where the SS cut him?” Annette turned a surprised gaze in his direction, actually seeing him for the first time.

“He did it himself,” she said.

“What?” It was the only word that could articulate the confusion ravaging his mind. “John said that you’d owned land during the war. You employed Jews to keep them safe. He said the Nazis made an example of Erwin.”

Annette closed her eyes and shook her head in a quick movement.
“Lies.
His lies to keep us safe.
To keep him safe.”

“What do you mean?”

Annette sighed, and it sounded like ancient tissue paper being crumpled. Her head tilted forward and Lance feared that she would succumb once again to the silence, but soon words began to float out from beneath the veil of translucent hair enclosing her face.

“There was something wrong inside him. I knew it from the beginning. Maybe it was what drew me to him. I thought I could change it. But it was too deep, like a splinter that only slips farther in when you dig at it. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what he was.”

She paused, and Lance noticed that she had begun to rock in the chair. She reminded him of a child relating a particularly bad dream to a parent.

“He joined the army young. He told his family and friends that it was idealism. That he wanted to serve the
Führer
.” Annette raised her head so Lance could see her eyes through the curtain of hair. “He wanted to kill.”

Lance shifted in his chair. The pressure in the room felt nearly unbearable. He opened his jaw and tried to alleviate the discomfort in his ears, but to no avail. He was about to ask Annette if she felt it too when she continued.

“A blood lust.
That’s what it was. He needed to see it. He loved to watch it drain from someone. He’d cut himself sometimes too, just to mingle his own with someone else’s. He never told me what he did at the camp he watched over. I can’t imagine. He had unlimited numbers to work on, to carve up, without anyone to answer to.”

Lance sat back in disbelief. “He was a war criminal?
My grandfather?
He presided over a concentration camp? Fuck me,” he said, putting his face in his hand and relishing in the darkness it
brought,
the oblivion. He wished that he could sink into it and out of the world without a trace. He wished none of it had ever happened. He wished his existence had been an idea never fully realized.

“The call came one day after I’d gotten home from the market,” Annette said. “It was snowing. I remember the flakes falling outside, and I wondered how something so beautiful could be, while something else so terrible happened around it. The phone rang, it was Heinrich. He told me it was time. We’d gone over it many times before he’d left for his post. We had our story and Heinrich had documents forged before he left. Our pictures with different names he’d picked out. My name is Gisela. I never liked Annette.” She stopped again, her gaze clouding over and her brow pulling down into a grimace.

Lance watched her—an enigma of a woman from a time he knew next to nothing about, her words spilling out from deep within where they’d been held for years. She struggled with whatever memory plagued her, and at last she won out as she swallowed and spoke again.

“He came home in a rush that night. He said the allies were advancing and that we had to leave. The war was lost. I went to get my mother’s silverware from under the stairs, but he said there wasn’t time. A car that would take us to the coast was leaving in an hour for
France
, but I had to do something first. He took me into the bathroom and had me stand by the sink with my mirror. He told me to hold it steady and to not let it drop, no matter what. He had his knives.” Her voice fell to a whisper and Lance saw that her eyes no longer registered him, or even the walls surrounding her. She was back in that bathroom, her hands, white-knuckled, gripping a mirror while her husband drew a blade out and lifted it toward his face.

“He made me watch as he sawed through his nose. He cut it right off. I can still hear it hitting the floor like a dead mouse. And he took his lip too. He cut it from his gum, and he told me he would always smile this way.” A tear so delicate and fine that Lance thought it would shatter rolled out of one eye and into the lines of skin on her face. “They took one look at his face before we got on the boat and let us pass. He couldn’t be recognized. Besides, who would turn a man away with the proper documents and missing his nose? We came here and had just enough money to build our house and start a business.”

Annette fell silent and closed her eyes. Lance didn’t know what to say. His mind attempted to grasp everything she’d said, but it felt huge and he was unable to organize it into anything that neared cohesion.

“Why the shipping company?
Was he trying to start a new life?” Lance shrugged his shoulders with the question, and Annette responded by shaking her head again.

“That company was nothing but a cattle farm. He knew all along what he wanted to do. He wrote the applications himself. He put questions on them that meant something to him.”

“Questions?
Like what?” Lance asked.

“Questions about their family and next of kin.
He was looking for something in each of the men he hired. He was looking for isolation.
Someone who had no family or that had moved far away from anyone of relation.”
Annette stared at Lance again,
an intensity
in the look that told Lance she needed him to understand. That something was coming, like a tsunami he couldn’t see in the darkness. “He was singling them out, one by one.
Selecting the ones who were alone.”

“So he could kill them,” Lance finished. He watched his grandmother nod, her guilt so palpable he could almost see the word etched across her face. “And you helped him, didn’t you?”
Again the nod.
“Tell me.”

Annette sighed the crinkling of dry paper again. “I would approach them after their shift and invite them to dinner at the house. Tell them there was a promotion of sorts that Heinrich had picked them for, and that they must not say a word to their fellow workers about. ‘Tell no one,’ I’d say, and they would answer, ‘Yes, of course,’ thrilled that they were moving up in the company. Only I knew the truth—they were condemned.”

The immensity of what he was hearing overwhelmed Lance, and he felt his gorge rise as his heart began to beat faster. His grandfather had manipulated the woman before him into a femme fatale of sorts.
Luring the young men, expecting a grand promotion, to their home, when all that actually awaited them was death.
Lance nearly stood, unable to be in the presence of a vileness the sort of which sat in the chair opposite him. But he had to know the truth. It was the only possible way that he could extricate himself from the labyrinth of secrets he had discovered.

“So you lured them there and then Erwin killed them? Is that about it?” he asked, no longer able to keep the anger out of his voice. He expected the young nurse to appear at the doorway any moment, concerned with the sounds from within the room, but the hallway remained clear for the time being.

“He didn’t just kill them,” Annette said. “He tortured them. He would sneak up behind them while I engaged them in conversation, and hit them over the head. When they awoke, they would be in the room, lashed to the chair he had built.” Lance saw her shudder, an involuntary movement, and he wondered how a person could subsist in the environment she described, in the presence of evil, without succumbing to madness. “I never went in there while he worked on them. I didn’t want to see. He would emerge, soaked in blood, and tell me it was time.”

“Time for what?”
Lance asked.

“To dispose of them.
He put what was left—just pieces, normally—in their vehicles and we would guide them down the hill to the lake. So slowly would they disappear beneath the
water.
Like an animal submerging.
He knew the lake was deep there. That’s why he bought the land he did, for the depth of the lake, the capacity.”

Annette reached up with an atrophied hand and rubbed the paper-thin skin of her cheek. She frowned, feeling the wrinkles there.
“How long?
How long have I been here?”

“Over thirty years,” Lance answered. He watched her absorb the information.

“So long.
Half a lifetime, gone.”
Her hand drifted back down to the picture of Rhinelander that still sat before her. Lance noticed her attention focus on the face of the young man smiling beside his car.

“What happened to him?” Lance asked, tapping the photograph. Annette remained frozen, her eyes wide, only her mouth moving.

“He was the last. Heinrich was almost fifty by then. His reflexes weren’t as fast, and Gerald noticed him before he could bring the club down on his head. Gerald caught it and sent Heinrich to the floor. He tried to flee, and I was near the door.” The old woman’s breath fell from her dried lips. “The knife was in my hand, and then it was in his throat.
Like magic.
And he looked at me. The look in his eyes, I won’t ever forget it.
Surprised.
So shocked at what I had done, and maybe I looked that way too. Then he was on the floor, his blood covering my feet, soaking into my shoes. Heinrich came to me, held me, and told me I’d done well.
Saved us.
But then I saw Anthony was watching from upstairs. He saw everything. I think it changed him somehow. I think it cursed him.”

Annette looked at Lance, her eyes seeking something from him.
Forgiveness?
Understanding?
He couldn’t hold her gaze for long, and looked down at the desk. He couldn’t give her any of the things that her eyes asked for. She turned from him, shifting in her chair until she almost faced completely away, held in the grip of shame.

“He cut us after that. He had to do something. He knew that he could no longer handle a full-grown man. The tables had turned with time, and he was too slow. I think somewhere inside he loved us, but the other thing that lived in him was stronger. He started with me. He would lock me in the chair and the blade would touch me, at first so gentle, and then horribly deep, until I’d scream for him to stop. And he would, but just barely. I always expected not to come out of that room alive, that he would go too far and then I would be gone. And then one day he took Anthony. I meant to stop him, because I knew. I knew what went on in that room, but I couldn’t, and deep down I was glad. Glad it wasn’t me this time. Glad I wouldn’t have to feel the steel cutting through my skin and hear the patter of my blood as it hit the floor.”

The old woman’s shoulders hitched in a quiet sob, and the revulsion that Lance had felt up to this point eased. He could see the suffering within the shell of the woman before him, and despite her confession, he felt himself leaning forward and reaching toward a bony shoulder. Only then did he notice the single white line extending from beneath the collar of the gown she wore.
A scar.
He changed the trajectory of his hand and drew back the collar.

A congealed mass of puckered flesh snaked its way across the pale skin of her back and vanished from view. He let go of the fabric and sat back in his chair, the pieces falling into place. The pressure within the room hadn’t eased. In fact, it had increased, and he wondered if his head might implode.
The only explanation for its presence the stress of the knowledge that had been laid at his feet.

“They’re still there, you know,” Annette said.

Lance rubbed his temples, trying in vain to ease the pressure. “What are?”

“The knives.
He kept them under the third board into the room. It has a knot shaped like a hand on it. I think he might’ve kept other things there too, things that belonged to the men.”

Lance imagined the dark space and what might lie next to the instruments his grandfather had used to murder and disfigure his family, what he might have kept from his kills as trophies. “Tell me how he died,” he heard himself say.

Annette remained facing away for a while, but at last turned back enough for him to see her profile behind the fan of white hair.

“I can see it better than anything else in my mind. It replays over and over like a never-ending dream in my head.

“Tell me,” Lance repeated.

Annette’s head came up and she turned just enough for him to see the side of her face. “We were sitting in the living room when he kicked open the door. I remember pieces of trim flying in different directions and then he was there, his arm out and the gun in his hand. I can still see his face, a little scar running across his nose and onto his cheek. He made Heinrich kneel before him on the floor.”