‘Mein Sohn,’ Strobel said under his breath.
Tayte thought Strobel’s expression looked as confused as his own. ‘He’s not your son.’ He watched the old man cower from Rudi as he strode towards them, his enraged face red and glistening with tears. For the first time Tayte thought Strobel looked terrified. Tayte noticed then that Rudi had a gun in his hand. He thought it was Ingrid Keller’s gun. He was just thinking that his day couldn’t get any more complicated when he saw someone he’d thought he would never see again.
‘Jean!’
She followed into the room soon after Rudi, shaking her right hand, as though she had just hit it on something, or someone. Beyond the door, Tayte could see Keller lying on the floor. Jean ran to Tayte as soon as she saw him, and by now Rudi had already arrived at Strobel’s side. Words were exchanged in German, which Tayte couldn’t understand, but he gathered from Rudi’s tone and body language that he was both angry and distraught. A moment later Tayte flinched as Rudi slapped his father across the face. Suddenly Jean was beside him.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked her. ‘How did you find me?’
Jean leaned in and kissed Tayte hard on the lips, as if she, too, thought she might never see him again. ‘I’ll explain later,’ she said. ‘We have to get you out of here.’
She removed a shoe and smashed the heel into the portrait of Adolf Hitler. The glass shattered and she began to cut Tayte free with one of the pieces. In the background, the conversation between Rudi and Strobel was growing more and more aggravated, the gun in Rudi’s hand waving with abandon.
‘Rudi knows who his adoptive father is,’ Jean said. ‘He’s inconsolable.’
‘I’ll bet he is,’ Tayte said, thinking that was only the half of it. ‘He’s my brother. Rudi’s my fraternal twin.’
Jean stopped cutting away at the tape for a moment and just stared at him, motionless and clearly dumbfounded. Then she continued working the piece of glass. ‘Well you’d better hold off telling him for now,’ she said. ‘He’s too wound up. I don’t think he can take any more surprises today.’
As soon as Tayte’s arms and chest were free, Jean went to work on the tape around his legs. ‘I could smell some kind of fuel when we came in,’ she said. ‘It’s what led us down here.’
‘Strobel plans to turn the place into his own cremation oven.’
Their attention was drawn to Rudi then as he aimed the gun at Strobel.
Strobel’s hand shot out in front of him. ‘Mein Sohn, bitte!’
‘Sie sind nicht mein Vater! Ich kenne Sie nicht!’ Rudi replied, and Tayte could see in his eyes that he was going to pull the trigger. He saw that Strobel knew it, too.
‘Don’t do it, Rudi!’ Tayte called, but his words didn’t seem to reach him.
All Tayte could think at that moment was that Strobel had to face his accusers—justice had to be served. And for Rudi’s sake, Tayte couldn’t sit there and witness another innocent life, his brother’s life, being destroyed because of Strobel. As Rudi stepped closer, his gun arm stiffened with determination, and before Tayte’s bonds were fully cut, he leapt out of his seat, taking the wheelchair with him. There was a clatter and the gun went off as both men fell to the floor, and it was then Tayte knew he’d been shot.
The pain in Tayte’s side from the bullet that had just hit him was surprisingly mild at first, but it soon intensified. He thought perhaps he was merely having a psychosomatic reaction to the stress he’d been under since going to see the man whom he'd thought was his grandfather, Johann Langner, but the sight of his own blood seeping through his shirt as Jean knelt beside him and lifted his suit jacket away told him the trauma was very real.
Jean grabbed his hand and placed it over the wound. ‘Keep it there,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it hurts, but you need to put pressure on it to slow the bleeding.’ She shook her head at him. ‘What were you thinking? You could have been killed.’
‘Sorry,’ Tayte offered. He winced. ‘I’ll think twice before I do it again, believe me.’ He lay still as Jean cut the rest of him free from the wheelchair. As he looked up, he saw Rudi, who was already on his feet.
‘It’s me who’s sorry,’ Rudi said. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t mean to—’
‘It’s okay,’ Tayte cut in, smiling, despite the circumstances, at the man he now saw as his brother. ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’
Tayte hoped he was right. He saw Volker Strobel again then, now ashen faced as he peered down from his wheelchair. Tayte thought it ironic that he’d just taken a bullet for this man, not that he expected any gratitude for it. From the look on Strobel’s face, Tayte thought his actions, and the fact that he’d just saved the old man’s life, had only served to annoy him, which was fine with Tayte.