The Girl You Left Behind (49 page)

‘April 1945.’

He feels almost dizzy with the enormity of
what he has done. TARP, the Lefèvres, will now lose the case. They have to, based
on what he has seen.
Is it still a betrayal if
you’re doing
it for the right reasons?
He needs a drink. He needs some air. Something.
Have I gone crazy here?
All he can see is Liv’s face, her relief. He
wants to see that smile breaking out again, slow and wide, as if surprised by its own
arrival.

He picks up his jacket to leave, holds out
the cupboard keys. Marianne touches his elbow, halting him. ‘You know, I’ll
tell you something about being married five times. Or married five times and still
friends with my surviving ex-husbands.’ She counts them on gnarled fingers.
‘That would be three.’

He waits.

‘It teaches you damn all about
love.’

Paul begins to smile, but she hasn’t
finished. Her grip on his arm is surprisingly strong. ‘What it does teach you, Mr
McCafferty, is that there’s a whole lot more to life than winning.’

Henry meets her at the rear gate of the
courts. He is speaking through a cloud of
pain au chocolat
crumbs. His face is
pink, and he is almost incomprehensible. ‘She won’t give it to anyone
else.’

‘What? Who won’t?’

‘She’s at the front entrance.
Come.
Come.
’

Before she can ask any more, Henry is
propelling her through the back of the courts, through a network of corridors and
flights of stone stairs, out to the security area at the top of the main entrance.
Marianne Andrews is waiting by the barriers, dressed in a purple coat and a wide tartan
hairband. She sees Liv and lets out a theatrical sigh of relief. ‘
Lord
,
you’re a hard woman to get hold of,’ she scolds, as she holds out a
musty-smelling satchel. ‘I’ve been calling and calling you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Liv says,
blinking. ‘I don’t answer my phone any more.’

‘It’s in there.’ Marianne
points to the journal. ‘Everything you need. April 1945.’

Liv stares at the old books in her hand. And
looks up in disbelief. ‘Everything I need?’

‘The painting,’ the older woman
says, exasperated. ‘For goodness’ sakes, child. It’s not a recipe for
prawn gumbo.’

Events move at some speed. Henry runs to the
judge’s chambers and requests a brief adjournment. The journals
are photocopied, highlighted, their contents sent to the Lefèvres’ lawyers
under the rule of disclosure. Liv and Henry sit in a corner of the office, scanning the
bookmarked pages, while Marianne talks non-stop with some pride of how she had always
known her mom was not a thief and how that darned Mr Jenks could go boil his head.

A junior lawyer brings coffee and
sandwiches. Liv’s stomach is too taut to eat. They sit untouched in their
cardboard packet. She keeps staring at the journal, unable to believe that this
dog-eared book might hold the answer to her problems.

‘What do you think?’ she says,
when Angela Silver and Henry have finished talking.

‘I think it could be good news,’
he says. His smile belies his cautious words.

‘It seems fairly
straightforward,’ Angela says. ‘If we can prove that the last two exchanges
were innocent, and there is inconclusive evidence for the first exchange, then we are,
as they say, back in the game.’

‘Thank you so much,’ Liv says,
not daring to believe this turn of events. ‘Thank you, Ms Andrews.’

‘Oh, I could not be more
delighted,’ Marianne says, waving a cigarette in the air. Nobody has bothered to
tell her not to smoke. She leans forward, places a bony hand on Liv’s knee.
‘
And
he found my favourite handbag.’

‘I’m sorry?’

The old woman’s smile falters. She
busies herself with refixing a brooch. ‘Oh, nothing. Take no notice of
me.’

Liv keeps staring at her, as the faint flush
of colour dies down. ‘Don’t you want these sandwiches?’ Marianne says
briskly.

The phone rings. ‘Right,’ says
Henry, when he puts down the receiver. ‘Is everyone okay? Ms Andrews – are you
ready to read some of this evidence to the court?’

‘I have my best reading glasses in my
bag.’

‘Right.’ Henry takes a deep
breath. ‘Then it’s time to go in.’

30 April 1945

Well, today sure didn’t turn out like I expected. Four days ago, Lt Col
Danes had told me I could go into Konzentrationslager Dachau with them.
He’s not a bad guy, Danes. A little sniffy at first about hacks, as most
of them are, but since I came ashore with the Screaming Eagles at Omaha Beach,
and he’s worked out I’m not some green housewife who’s going
to press him for cookie recipes, he’s backed off a little. The 102nd
Airborne call me an honorary fellow now, say that when I have my armband on,
I’m just one of them. So, the deal was, I was going to follow them into
the camp, write my piece about the folks inside, maybe get a few interviews with
some of the prisoners about the conditions, and then file. WRGS radio wanted a
short piece too, so I had my tape all wound up and ready.

Well, there I was, ready at 6 a.m., armband on and almost shipshape, and darned
if he didn’t knock on my door. ‘Why, Lieutenant,’ I joked. I
was still fixing my hair. ‘You never told me you cared.’ It’s
a running joke with us. He says he’s got pairs of marching boots older
than I am.

‘Change of plan, Toots,’ he says. He was smoking, which was unlike
him. ‘I can’t take you.’

My hands stilled on my head.
‘You are kidding me, right?’ The
Register’
s editor
was all lined up for this piece. They’d cleared me two pages and no
ads.

‘Louanne, it’s … it’s beyond what we thought
we’d find. I’m under orders to let nobody through till
tomorrow.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘Seriously.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You know I’d have
you in there with me. But, well, you wouldn’t believe what we saw in there
yesterday … I’ve been up all night, me and the boys. There are
old ladies, kids walking round in there, like … I mean, little
kids …’ He shook his head and looked away from me. He’s a big
man, Danes, and I swear he was about to sob like a baby. ‘There was a
train outside, and the bodies were just … thousands of
them … It ain’t human. That’s for sure.’

If he was trying to put me off it had the opposite effect. ‘You gotta get
me in there, Lieutenant.’

‘I’m sorry. Strictest orders. Look, one more day, Louanne. Then
I’ll give you all the access you need. You’ll be the only reporter
in there, I promise.’

‘Yeah. And you’ll still love me afterwards. Oh, come
on …’

‘Louanne, nobody but the military and the Red Cross is going in or coming
out today. I need every man I have to help out.’

‘Help out with what?’

‘Taking the Nazis into custody. Helping the prisoners. Stopping our men
killing those SS bastards for what they seen. Young Maslowicz, when he saw what
they done to the Poles, he was like a madman, crying, going crazy. I had to put
a non-com on his gun. So I gotta have an airtight guard. And –’ he gulped
‘– we gotta work out what to do with the bodies.’

‘Bodies?’

He shook his head. ‘Yeah, bodies. Thousands of them. They made bonfires.
Bonfires! You wouldn’t believe …’ He blew out his cheeks.
‘Anyway, Toots. This is where I need to ask you a favour.’

‘You need to ask me a favour?’

‘I need to leave you in charge of the storage facility.’

I stared at him.

‘There’s a warehouse, out on the edge of Berchtesgaden. We opened it
up last night and it’s pretty much stacked to the gills with works of art.
The Nazis, Goering, have looted stuff like you wouldn’t believe. The top
brass reckons there’s a hundred million dollars’ worth of stuff in
there, most of it stolen.’

‘What has this got to do with me?’

‘I need someone I can trust to watch over it, just for today. You’ll
have a fire crew at your disposal, and two marines. It’s chaos in the
town, and I need to make sure nobody goes in there and nobody goes out.
There’s some serious haul in there, Toots. I don’t know much about
art, but it’s like – I don’t know – the Mona Lisa or
something.’

Do you know how disappointment tastes? Like iron filings in cold coffee.
That’s what I tasted when old Danes drove me down to the facility. And
that was before I found out that Marguerite Higgins had got into the camps the
previous day, with Brigadier General Linden.

It wasn’t a warehouse as such, more a huge grey slab of a municipal
building, like a huge school or town hall. He pointed me towards his two
marines, who saluted me, and then the office near the main door where I was to
sit. I have to say, I couldn’t say no to him, but I took it all with bad
grace. It was so obvious to me that the real story was going on down the road.
The boys, normally cheerful and full of life, were in huddles, smoking and
whey-faced. Their superiors talked quietly with shocked, serious expressions. I
wanted to know what they’d found there, horrific as it might be. I needed
to be in there, bringing the story out. And I was afraid: every day that slipped
by made it easier for the top
brass to decline my request.
Every day that passed gave my competitors a chance.

‘So, Krabowski here will get you anything you need, and Rogerson will
contact me if you have any trouble. You okay?’

‘Sure.’ I put my feet up on the desk and sighed theatrically.

‘It’s a deal. You do this for me, and I’ll get you in there
tomorrow, Toots. I promise.’

‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ I said. But, for once, he
didn’t even crack a smile.

I sat there for two hours, watching through the office window. It was a warm
day, the sun bouncing off the stone sidewalks, but there was a strange feel to
it that seemed to drop the temperature. Military vehicles whined up and down the
main street, packed with soldiers. German soldiers, their hands on their heads,
were marched in the opposite direction. Small huddles of German women and
children stood stock still on street corners, apparently wondering what was to
become of them. (Later I heard they were called in to help bury the dead.) And
all the while, in the distance, the shrill siren of ambulances told of unseen
horrors. Horrors I was missing.

I don’t know why Danes was so worried: nobody seemed to give this building
a second look. I began a piece, screwed up the paper, drank two cups of coffee
and smoked half a pack of cigarettes, and my mood grew darker and darker. I
began to wonder if this wasn’t all a ruse just to keep me away from the
action.

‘Come on then, Krabowski,’ I said, finally. ‘Show me around
this joint.’

‘Ma’am, I don’t know if we –’ he began.

‘You heard the lieutenant colonel, Krabowski. The lady’s in charge
today. And she’s telling you to show her around.’

He gave me the kind of look my dog used to give me when he
thought I was going to kick him up the you-know-what. But he exchanged a word
with Rogerson and off we went.

It didn’t look like much at first. Just rows and rows of wooden stacking
systems, a load of grey, military-issue blankets slung over the contents. But
then I went closer and pulled a painting out of one of the racks: a modern piece
of a horse against an abstract landscape, in a heavily gilded frame. Its
colours, even in the dim light of the vast room, glowed like treasure. I turned
it over in my hands. It was a Braque. I stared at it for a moment, then placed
it carefully back in its rack and kept walking. I began to pull things out at
random: medieval icons, Impressionist works, huge Renaissance canvases, the
frames delicate, in some cases supported by specially built crates. I ran my
fingers over a Picasso, astonished at my own freedom to physically touch art I
had previously seen only in magazines or on the walls of galleries.

‘Oh, my God, Krabowski. You seen this?’

He looked at it. ‘Um … yes, ma’am.’

‘You know what it is? It’s a Picasso.’

He was completely blank.

‘A Picasso? The famous artist?’

‘I don’t really know much about art, ma’am.’

‘And you reckon your kid sister could have done better, right?’

He shot me a relieved smile. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

I put it back, and pulled out another. It was a portrait of a little girl, her
hands folded neatly in her skirts. On the back, it read: ‘Kira,
1922’.

‘Are all the rooms here like this?’

‘There are two rooms upstairs with statues and models and stuff instead of
paintings. But, basically, yes. Thirteen rooms of paintings, ma’am. This
is one of the smallest.’

‘Oh, my good Lord.’ I gazed around me at the dusty shelves,
stacked in neat lines back into the distance, and then down
at the portrait in my hands. The little girl stared solemnly back at me. You
know, it only really hit me then that every one of these paintings had belonged
to someone. Every one had hung on someone’s wall, been admired by someone.
A real live person had sat for it, or saved money for it, or painted it, or
hoped to hand it down to their children. Then I thought of what Danes had said
about disposing of the bodies a few miles away. I thought of his haunted, craggy
face, and I shuddered.

I placed the picture of the little girl carefully back on the rack, and covered
it with a blanket. ‘Come on, Krabowski, let’s go back downstairs.
You can find me a decent cup of coffee.’

The morning stretched across
lunch and then into the afternoon. The temperature rose, and the air around the
warehouse grew still. I wrote a feature for the
Register
on the
warehouse, and I interviewed Krabowski and Rogerson for a little
W
oman’s Home Companion
piece on young soldiers’ hopes for their
return home. Then I stepped outside to stretch my legs and smoke a cigarette. I
climbed up on the bonnet of the army Jeep and sat there, the metal warm beneath
my cotton slacks. The roads were almost completely silent. There were no birds,
no voices. Even the sirens seemed to have stopped. And then I looked up and
squinted against the sun as a woman came walking up the road towards
me.

She moved like it required some effort, with a pronounced limp, even though she
couldn’t have been more than sixty. She wore a headscarf, despite the warm
day, and had a bundle under her arm. When she saw me she stopped and glanced
around. She saw my armband, which I had forgotten to take off when my trip out
got cancelled.

‘Englische?’

‘American.
’

She nodded, as if this were acceptable to her. ‘Hier ist where the
paintings are stored, ja?’

I said nothing. She didn’t look like a spy, but I wasn’t sure how
much information I should give out. Strange times, and all.

She pulled the bundle from under her arm. ‘Please. Take this.’

I stepped back.

She stared at me for a moment, then removed the coverings. It was a painting, a
portrait of a woman from the brief glimpse I got.

‘Please. Take this. Put in there.’

‘Lady, why would you want to put your painting in there?’

She glanced behind her, as if she were embarrassed to be there.

‘Please. Just take it. I don’t want it in my house.’

I took the painting from her. It was a girl, about my age, with long reddish
hair. She wasn’t the most beautiful, but there was something about her
that meant you couldn’t tear your darned eyes away.

‘Is this yours?’

‘It was my husband’s.’ I saw then she should have had one of
those powder-puff grandmother faces, all cushions and kindness, but when she
looked at the painting her mouth just set in this thin old line, like she was
full of bitterness.

‘But this is beautiful. Why do you want to give such a pretty thing
away?’

‘I never wanted her in my house,’ the woman said. ‘My husband
made me. For thirty years I have had to have that woman’s face in my
house. When I am cooking, cleaning, when I am sitting with my husband, I have
had to look at her.’

‘It’s only a painting,’ I told her. ‘You can’t be
jealous of a painting.’

She barely heard me. ‘She has mocked me for nearly thirty years. My
husband and I were once happy, but she destroyed him. And I have had to endure
that face haunting me every single day of our marriage. Now he is dead I
don’t have to have her staring at me. She can finally go back to wherever
she belongs.’

As I looked, she wiped at her eyes with the back of a hand. ‘If you
don’t want to take it,’ she spat. ‘Then burn it.’

I took it. What else could I have done?

Well, I’m back at my desk now. Danes has been in, ghostly white, promising
I’ll go with him tomorrow. ‘You sure you want to see this, though,
Toots?’ he said. ‘It’s not pretty. I’m not sure
it’s a sight for a lady.’

‘Since when did you start calling me a lady?’ I joked, but he was
all out of jokes. Danes sat down heavily on the edge of my bunk and sank his
head into his hands. And as I stared at him, his big old shoulders began to
shake. I stood there, not knowing what to do. Finally I pulled a cigarette from
my bag, lit it and handed it to him. He took it, signalled his thanks with a
palm, and wiped at his eyes, his head still down.

I felt a little nervous then, and believe me, I never get nervous.

‘Just … thanks for today, that’s all. The boys said you
did a fine job.’

I don’t know why I didn’t tell him about the painting. I suppose I
should have done, but it didn’t belong in the darn warehouse, after all.
It wasn’t anything to do with the darn warehouse. That old German woman
couldn’t give two hoots what happened to it as long as it wasn’t
looking at her any more.