“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.”