Paul’s father must have made a fortune doing whatever he did for the son to afford this house on this street, but either depression or lack of money made Paul let it go. The garden was a tangle of overgrown bushes and knee-high weeds. As I waded through them to the kitchen entrance, several cats snarled at me and moved off. A shiver ran down my spine.
The lock here seemed identical to the gate, so I used the same combination of picks and had it open in less than a minute. Before going into the kitchen, I pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Just so I wouldn’t forget to do it later, I grabbed a dish towel from above the sink and wiped the outside knob on the back door.
The kitchen cabinets and appliances hadn’t been replaced in a good thirty years. The pilots on the old stove glowed blue in the dim light; the enamel was chipped down to metal along the edges of the oven door. The cabinets were the kind of thick brown pressed wood that had been popular in my childhood.
Paul had eaten breakfast here this morning: the milk hadn’t begun to curdle in the cereal bowl he’d left on the table. The room was cluttered with old newspapers and mail; a 1993 calendar still hung near the pantry. But it wasn’t filthy. Paul seemed to keep on top of his dishes, more or less, which was more than could be said for me much of the time.
I went down the hall, past a dining room with a substantial table that could have seated sixteen. A breakfront held a collection of china, a delicate pattern of blue flowers on a creamy background. It looked as though there was enough china to give sixteen people a five-course meal without stopping to wash any plates, but the dust on the dishes showed that nothing like that had been attempted recently.
All of the rooms on the ground floor were like this, filled with heavy, carved furniture, but covered in dust. Haphazard stacks of paper stood everywhere. In the living room, I found a copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung dating back to 1989.
A photograph on the wall by the fireplace showed a boy and a man in front of a cottage, with a lake in the background. The boy was presumably Paul, around ten or eleven, the man presumably Ulrich, a barrel-chested, balding figure who stood next to his son, smiling but stern. Paul was looking anxiously up at his father, but Ulrich stared straight ahead at the camera. You wouldn’t look at the picture and say, Oh, these two must be related—either physically or by love.
A sitting room next to the main living room had apparently served as Ulrich’s study. Originally he’d probably decorated it to look like some period-film version of an English country library, with a double leather kneehole desk, a leather armchair, and shelves for books covered in tooled leather—a complete Shakespeare, a complete Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope in English, and Goethe and Schiller in German. The books had been flung about with a furious hand; pages were crumpled, spines broken—a wanton display of destruction.
The same violent hand had taken the desk apart: the drawers stood open, papers pulled from them and tossed on the floor. Had Paul done this, attacking his dead father by pounding on his possessions? Or had someone been searching the house ahead of me? And for what? Who besides me cared about the papers linking Ulrich to the Einsatzgruppen? Or had Ulrich had other secrets?
I couldn’t take the time right now to sift through the books and papers, especially since I didn’t know what I was looking for. I’d have to get Mary Louise and the Streeter brothers to sort them later, if we could get Paul out of the house long enough.
Radbuka’s silver mountain bike stood in the formal tiled entryway. So he’d come back here after snatching Ninshubur. Perhaps the morning’s emotional upheaval had exhausted him and he’d tucked himself in bed with the little blue dog.
I went up a carved wood staircase to the second floor and started with the rooms at the south end of the hall, where the stairway opened. The biggest, with its set of heavy silver brushes monogrammed with a curlicue U and what looked like either an H or a K, must have belonged to Ulrich. The bedstead and wardrobe were massive carved pieces that might have been three hundred years old. Had Ulrich brought all this heavy furniture with him from Germany, from some opulent wartime looting? Or was buying them his sign to himself of success in the New World?