‘We did?’
Jean nodded. ‘His old wartime friend, Volker Strobel, must still be alive. Why else would Die Freunde der Waffen-SS Kriegsveteranen send a gang of neo-Nazi thugs to warn us off?’
‘Hey, that’s not a bad accent you’ve picked up there. Spoken like a true local.’
Jean laughed into her drink. ‘How would you know? You’ve hardly looked at my “Teach Yourself German” app.’
‘Ja, das ist true,’ Tayte said with a grin. He heaved a sigh. ‘So what are we going to do?’
‘What do you usually do? This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to warn you off an assignment.’
‘That’s also true, but I’m a stubborn fool and things are a little different now.’
Jean sat up. ‘I knew you’d say that.’
‘What?’
‘That because I’m here, working on your assignment with you, things are different—that you have me to look out for now, as well as yourself and you’re not comfortable with that.’
‘Well, up until now, I’ve never had anyone else to look out for,’ Tayte countered. ‘I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, that’s all.’
Jean sighed, as if she understood where he was coming from, and was even a little touched by it, but Tayte could see she was frustrated.
‘I signed up for this, didn’t I?’ Jean said. ‘I told you it had to be all or nothing if we’re going to make a go of things together, and you’ve told me several times that your mother said she gave you up for your own protection. I knew it could be dangerous. And besides, you’re not about to pack up and go home, are you?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Exactly, and I wouldn’t ask you to.’
‘We’re on to something here,’ Tayte said. ‘I know we are. Maybe for the first time in my life I have the chance to find out who I am.’
‘I know how much this means to you, JT, but I can’t just go home and leave you to it.’ She reached across the table and squeezed Tayte’s hand. ‘I don’t want to, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, either.’
Tayte swallowed the ice cube he’d been sucking. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll go on together, but we both need to be extra careful. These people aren’t playing games.’
Jean nodded. ‘So what’s our next line of research?’
‘Don’t you want to get an early night?’ Tayte blushed. There was no way he could have said that without it sounding suggestive.
Jean smirked at him, but she quickly got all serious again. ‘It isn’t even dark outside. Where’s your laptop?’
‘Right here in my briefcase.’
‘Of course it is. So let’s get another drink and go over what we’ve learned so far.’
She laughed as Tayte pulled his briefcase up onto his lap. ‘Will you be bringing your “special friend” to dinner with you every night?’
Tayte’s travel-worn briefcase went everywhere with him. They had shared many adventures and discoveries on one assignment and another, and he was having a hard time leaving it out of their relationship.
‘It saved me a trip to the room, didn’t it?’
Jean shook her head. ‘You really are incorrigible. So where should we start?’
‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Tayte said as he opened his laptop. ‘While I’ve traced the roots of many of my American clients to Germany, their immigrant ancestors have usually been as far back as I was required to go, and for those assignments where I’ve been asked to look further back, the records I’ve needed to see have typically been prior to the time when German civil registration began. Records were held in church archives prior to that, and because the records are so old, no time-based restrictions are imposed. Germany’s civil registration records, on the other hand, aren’t all that easy to get at. In fact, if you’re not a direct family member, or if sufficient time hasn’t passed since the event you’re looking for, you’re flat out of luck. Germany’s privacy laws around civil registration records were relaxed a little towards the end of the last decade, but for non-direct family members to access these records, 110 years have to have passed for births, eighty years for marriages and thirty years for deaths, which would be okay for the period we’re interested in if you didn’t first have to show that the person you’re interested in was deceased.’
‘I see,’ Jean said. ‘So what can we do?’
‘I think most of the information we can hope to gather will come from talking to people who knew Strobel and Langner, or those people who already have an interest in them, such as the man we’re going to see in the morning, Tobias Kaufmann. I’m hoping he’ll be able to tell us a thing or two. All we really have for now is what we’ve already heard from Johann Langner, and that only took us as far as 1938.’