Pressure Drop (46 page)

“Doctor.”

“I didn't catch that.”

“Doctor,” he said. “Not Mister.”

“What I'll do then, Dr. Muller, is—”

“Müller. It is Müller, Dr. Müller.”

“Müller? Maybe I've got the wrong number.”

“This is the correct number. I am Dr. Müller.”

“Could you spell that? I'm going to send the tape on to Bernie care of you when it's ready.”

“M-U-L-L-E-R. With an umlaut.”

“Over the U?”

“Where else would it be, then?”

“Right. I'll just need your first name for the shipping department and we'll get this out next week.”

“Gerd.”

“G-E-R-D?”

“Yes, yes.”

“All right. Dr. Gerd Müller, with umlaut. Tell Bernie he'll have the dub in two weeks and give him my best.”

“One moment, please,” said Dr. Müller.

“Yes?”

“What is this dub?”

“A story we did a while back on child kidnapping. Bernie's doing something similar.”

“Something similar?”

“For Australian Broadcasting. Nice talking to you, Dr. Müller. I've got a call waiting.”

“Your name was what, again?” he asked.

But Nina was already hanging up the phone. She turned to N. H. Matthias, saw admiration in his eyes. “You lie beautifully,” he said.

“It's my job.”

He held out his hand. “Mary Good?” he said.

“Nina Kitchener,” she replied, taking his hand. It was big and warm; she thought of the expression “safe as houses.”

“You were perfect, Ms. Kitchener.”

“Call me Nina.”

“Nina.”

“Do I call you N. H.?”

“Matt would be better,” he said.

“Well, Matt. You've flattened my tire. You've changed it. You've found out that Bernie Muller's father is Dr. Gerd Müller. Are you going to tell me what's going on?”

He laughed. “Gerd Müller was on the faculty of the University of Heidelberg with Inge Standish's father in the thirties. Happy Standish's father studied under them. How's that for a start?”

“Obstetrics?”

“Obstetrics.”

“It's a start,” Nina said. They got in the car. Nina drove south and parked in front of 216 East Thirty-third Street. “What was the name of Inge's father?”

“Von Trautschke,” Matthias said. “Wilhelm von Trautschke.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Not according to my friend Hew. Von Trautschke didn't survive the war.”

They got out of the car and walked up the steps of 216. It was a brick apartment building, nine or ten stories high, shabby and unadorned. Inside there was no doorman, just a locked inner door with a row of buzzers and a list of residents. Matthias was running his eyes over it when a man in a yarmulke came out, lighting a cigar. Matthias caught the door before it closed. Nina followed him in. “He was a bad egg,” Matthias said.

“Who?”

“Von Trautschke. That's what Hew said, although he didn't say why.”

Apartment 234, on the second floor, had a plain wooden door with a fisheye peephole and an empty nameplate frame. A mezuzah was nailed to the doorjamb. Matthias knocked.

A wide-angled eye appeared in the peephole, then vanished. Matthias knocked again. The door remained closed. Nina heard nothing on the other side.

“My name's Matthias,” Matthias said in a normal tone. “I called you from the Bahamas. About Felix.”

The wide-angled eye reappeared. A bolt slid. A lock clicked. Then another. The door opened three inches, held there by a brass chain. Through the gap, Nina saw a tiny white-haired woman clasping her hands.

“Mrs. Goldschmidt?” Matthias said.

The old woman looked up at him and didn't like what she saw.

“I've been in a minor accident,” he said. “Nothing to be concerned about.” He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and handed her an envelope. “I think these belonged to Felix.”

The old woman opened the envelope and took out two plastic cards. One looked like a Visa card, the other Nina didn't recognize. Eyeglasses hung on the woman's thin chest. She raised them to her face, examined the cards. Her lips moved slightly as she read. Somewhere behind her a man with a Yiddish accent said, “What is it, Hilda?” For a moment the old woman's eyes filled with tears, but they dried up so fast Nina wondered whether she had imagined them.

“What do you want from us?” the old woman asked.

“To talk,” Matthias answered.

“About?”

“Felix.”

“He drowned, you said.”

“Yes.”

“So what talk?”

“I don't think he drowned by accident, Mrs. Goldschmidt. I think someone did it to him.” The old woman twisted the plastic cards in her hands, but said nothing. “Don't you want to find out who, and see that they're punished?”

“Don't I know already?” Mrs. Goldschmidt asked. “Doesn't the whole world know?”

“Tell me,” Matthias said.

“Tell you? Why should I tell you? Read your schoolbooks. They all died in 1945.”

“What do you mean, Mrs. Goldschmidt?”

Behind her the man said: “Hilda, what is it?”

Mrs. Goldschmidt made an impatient noise with her tongue and unhooked the chain. Matthias and Nina stepped into the room.

A small room: a couch and chair along one wall, stove and refrigerator along the other. Framed photographs hung in one corner, all showing a man with dark hair and a dark mustache, thin and unsmiling. Beneath the photographs sat an old man in a wheelchair. He looked no bigger than Mrs. Goldschmidt, perhaps even smaller. He wore a blue shirt buttoned to the neck and a brown woolen tie; a blanket covered him from the waist down. He had soft white hair and soft dark eyes.

“This is Mr. Goldschmidt,” the old woman said. “My husband.”

“Matthias,” Matthias said, crossing the room and shaking hands. Mr. Goldschmidt's pale hand disappeared in Matthias's tanned one, reappeared, slipped back under the blanket.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. He looked at Nina and smiled. He had a nice smile. “And this is your wife?” he said.

“No,” Matthias replied. “Nina Kitchener. Mr. and Mrs. Goldschmidt.”

Mr. Goldschmidt smiled at her. “A Jewish girl.”

“No,” Nina said.

“And so pretty,” Mr. Goldschmidt continued, seeming not to have heard her. “Please sit.”

Nina and Matthias sat on the couch. Mrs. Goldschmidt stood frowning by the door. Then she closed it, moved slowly to the chair and sat down: on the edge, upright and stiff.

“Did you know my son, Mr. Matthias?” the old man said.

“No. I was away when he …”

“Died?”

“Yes.”

“Don't be afraid of saying the word, Mr. Matthias. If it's the truth.” Nina saw how closely the old man was watching Matthias at that moment.

“It's the truth,” Matthias said.

The old man tried to smile again, but it wouldn't come. He gestured to the photographs around him. “Then look,” he said. “That is Felix.”

They looked, and saw: Felix sitting on a bench with a stack of books beside him; Felix bent over a chessboard; Felix at the wheel of a Deux Chevaux; Felix writing on a blackboard—he had underlined the words “
avant le pogrom
”; Felix in cap and gown shaking hands with another man in cap and gown.

Mr. Goldschmidt had swung his wheelchair around and was gazing at the photographs too. “He was a professor. A full professor.”

“Mr. Matthias knows already,” said Mrs. Goldschmidt.

“A full professor at the University of Aix,” the old man continued, as though he hadn't heard her.

“Aix-en-Provence?” Nina said.

Mr. Goldschmidt wheeled round to face her. “Is it so surprising?”

“No. It's just—”

“Felix was brilliant. He won fourth place in all of Paris in the
bac
. As a boy, he could add vast sums in his head.” He licked his lips. “Three-hundred-and-eighty-two plus seven-hundred-and-twenty-seven plus two-hundred-and-six plus one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eleven equals?”

“Couldn't tell you,” Matthias said.

Mr. Goldschmidt turned to Nina. “Equals?”

“I don't know.”

“Felix would know. Felix could tell you.”

Mr. Goldschmidt's face had reddened and his blanket had slipped to the floor, revealing skinny legs, the color of bone; he was in his underwear. Mrs. Goldschmidt crossed the room and replaced the blanket, tucking it around his fleshless hips. “This gentleman and lady aren't interested in such stories, Pinchas.”

“I'm interested,” Matthias said. “I'm interested in Felix.”

The old man smiled. “Good,” he said. “It's good to talk about Felix.”

“Then tell me what Felix was doing in the Bahamas.”

Mr. Goldschmidt glanced at his wife. “We know nothing about that,” she said.

“How did he know Happy Standish?”

“I told you before. The name is unknown to me.”

“Hiram Standish, Junior.”

“This is someone else?”

“The same man.”

“And the same answer.”

There was a silence. Nina saw Matthias looking first at the old woman, then at the old man. She didn't know anything about Felix Goldschmidt, didn't know what Matthias was aiming at. But she knew that the Standishes had controlled the Human Fertility Institute, and anything about them concerned her. So she turned to Matthias and asked: “When did the diving accident happen?”

“A year ago September,” he said. “September third.”

“Happy Standish was in Aix in July, covering a festival of North African music for
The Village Voice
,” Nina said. “I've seen the clipping.”

Something changed in Matthias's eyes; they fixed on her, expressing complexities there was no time to analyze. Then he spoke to Mrs. Goldschmidt: “Is that when they met?” Mrs. Goldschmidt said nothing, but she was twisting Felix's plastic cards in her hands again.

Matthias got up and approached her. He dwarfed the old woman. She backed away: backed away from his size, his bloody face, his questions. He stopped. “I wouldn't hurt you.”

“Then go away, please.”

“I can't do that.”

“Why?” she said. “Why can you not do that?”

“You may not want to know what happened to your son, Mrs. Goldschmidt. That's your right. But he wasn't the only one who died. I want the people who did it to feel the consequences.”

Mrs. Goldschmidt's eyes again filled with tears. “These people feel no consequences,” she said. Again the tears dried up. Bitterness sharpened her tone. “You are an innocent.”

Matthias's tone remained mild. “Give me the chance to prove you wrong,” he said.

“Please, Hilda,” said Mr. Goldschmidt, wheeling his chair toward her. The blanket caught under the wheels, slipped off him, revealing the skeletal legs. “Please.”

“God in heaven,” Mrs. Goldschmidt said. Her eyes filled with tears once more. This time they overflowed. The old woman covered her face with her hands and began sobbing hoarse, ragged sobs. The plastic cards fell to the floor. Nina rose and picked them up. She picked up the blanket too, and covered Mr. Goldschmidt's legs.

“
Shayna maidel
,” he whispered to her: “
Shayna maidel
.”

“Yes,” cried Mrs. Goldschmidt. “Yes, yes, that's when they met. Horrid day.” She ran from the room. Nina thought of going after her. Mr. Goldschmidt laid his icy hand on hers.

“No,” he said. “It's good. She cries.” He wheeled himself back to the corner. Matthias pulled back the curtain, looked out. Nina sat on the couch and drew a calendar in her mind. July: Happy meets Felix. September: Happy falls into a coma, Felix dies. October: Laura is impregnated in Boston. February: Nina impregnated in New York. Like the calendar of an alien culture it resisted interpretation.

The walls of the Goldschmidts' apartment were thin. Sounds came clearly to the living room: water running in a sink, a drawer opening and closing, footsteps. Mrs. Goldschmidt returned with a Kleenex tucked inside the wrist of her sweater and a worn briefcase in her hand. Without a word, she gave the briefcase to Matthias. He sat beside Nina, opened it and withdrew the contents.

Contents: a manuscript, not quite as thick as
Living Without Men and Children
…
and Loving It
; a few loose pages that appeared to be Xeroxes of official documents. Nina read the title page of the manuscript.
Wilhelm von Trautschke: Histoire d'un Homme de la Science Moderne
. She looked at the copies of the documents. One had a swastika at the top, all were in German, all had the name Wilhelm von Trautschke displayed somewhere on the page.

Matthias flipped through the pages of the manuscript. “I don't read French,” he said.

“I do,” Nina said. She scanned a paragraph that seemed to be a description of the structure of the department of medicine at the University of Heidelberg after World War I.

“Do you know of this man, von Trautschke?” asked Mr. Goldschmidt.

“The obstetrician who invented the fertility drug?” said Nina.

Mrs. Goldschmidt snorted. “Obstetrician.”

“What do you mean?” Nina said.

“The fertility drug. Such a blessing.” Suddenly she reached down and snatched the manuscript out of Matthias's hands. “You do not understand. Perhaps you cannot understand. This is a masterpiece. Felix's masterpiece.”

“A biography of von Trautschke?” Matthias said.

Mrs. Goldschmidt hugged it to her breast. “What better subject for biography in such a world?” she said. “Obstetrician,” she repeated. “Even he did not so describe himself.”

“What did he call himself?” Nina asked.

“A eugenicist,” Mrs. Goldschmidt answered. “Do you know what that is?”