Kingdom Page 11

  ‘What story? What do you mean? What are you talking about? You mean the story about the glaciers melting?’

  Maya wiped her eyes and regained her composure enough to speak:

  ‘No. It was nothing to do with glaciers – that was just his normal work. It was far, far bigger than that.’

  She stood and walked over to the chest of drawers that leaned against the far wall of the room. In mounting confusion, Nancy looked on as Maya knelt down and pulled open the bottom drawer. It was stuffed with neatly folded and ironed linen. She carefully removed several layers of napkins and tablecloths and placed them on the top of the chest of drawers, and then she pulled out a medium-sized brown envelope.

  ‘He left me this. He said if he wasn’t back within two months then I should open it. He said if he wasn’t back by then, then I should forget all about him – I should get on with my life.’

  She laid the envelope reverentially on the sofa.

  ‘Have you opened it?’

  ‘No. I was afraid, afraid that if I opened it he would never come back. I was afraid that I would curse him.’

  A thousand thoughts rushed through Nancy’s brain, all her attention focused on the innocuous-looking manila envelope.

  ‘But what could be inside?’ she said, thinking aloud.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Nancy looked up at Maya. But the woman would not meet her gaze. ‘Maya – we have to look. You have to open it. Anton’s been gone more than three months now. There might be something here that can help us find him.’

  As Maya began once more to sob, Nancy put her arm around her and tried again to console her.

  ‘Please don’t cry. We will find him. I promise. That is why I have come to see you; I am trying to help. But we must look inside in case there is anything that might help us.’

  Maya’s sobbing slowly ceased. Very delicately Nancy pressed the case again:

  ‘Maya, listen to me. You have to open it for Anton’s sake.’

  There was a long pause and then finally Maya spoke again. ‘Please, you open it. I can’t.’

  Nancy didn’t need a second invitation. She swept up the envelope, carefully opened it and pulled out the contents. A letter several pages long, and then a photograph and some small metal objects.

  She unfolded the letter. At the top were written the fateful words ‘Last Will and Testament of Anton Herzog’. Her heart pounding, Nancy glanced down the page. An Indian solicitor was the executor and a second solicitor from the same firm had witnessed Herzog’s signature. It was brief and to the point. All the statues and antiques were to be left to the Delhi museum, while the contents of Herzog’s Indian and US bank account, which came to just under $70,000, were to be left to Maya. That at least was good news, if good news could ever come from the pages of a will. The remainder of the letter was an inventory of the antiques that Herzog kept at the office and the flat. Nancy swiftly turned her attention to the photograph. It was faded and dog-eared, and in black and white. A man, tall, slim, handsome, in his fifties, was standing on the steps of a building. He supported himself with a walking stick. He was smiling. At the top of the steps, above the building entrance, were the words, ‘Buenos Aires Hotel’. Nothing else. She turned the photo over. On the back in pen was written ‘Felix at mother’s birthday, B.A. 1957’.

  Happier days in Buenos Aires thought Nancy. But who was Felix? She fished into the envelope again. Medals. Two old war medals. She pulled them out, and to her horror she recognized one instantly and it made her recoil in fright. It was an Iron Cross, the distinctive award given to soldiers in the German army. But it was only when she saw the design of the second medal that she lost her composure altogether. It was a simple design, and yet she felt suddenly as if ice had been poured into her veins: it was a dagger emblazoned on a swastika, the exact same design as the one on the mouthpiece of the ancient bone trumpet. Quickly, she tried to pull herself together, but Maya had noticed her momentary panic.

  ‘What’s wrong? What have you seen?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What does the letter say?’

  ‘It’s Anton’s will. He has left money for you, to look after you.’

  ‘But he’s dead then?’

  ‘No. We don’t know that. He must have done this as insurance. In case something happened to him. But it doesn’t mean he’s dead. You mustn’t give up hope.’

  She could see that Maya was about to burst into tears again. Quickly she handed her the photograph.

  ‘Do you know this man?’

  She studied it for a moment.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does the name Felix mean anything to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And these?’

  She looked at the medals and nodded.

  ‘Yes. Anton used to keep them in his desk drawer. I once asked him what they were and he said they were family heirlooms, that was all. He said one day he would give them to our child.’

  She blushed and fell silent, her hand still caressing her swollen belly. Nancy’s heart was pounding. She was certain the swastika and dagger medal was identical to the design on the mouthpiece of the bone trumpet, but she could not imagine why this was so. And who was the old man in the photograph and was he connected to the medals? Had they once belonged to him? Clearly he was someone enormously significant – but not Herzog’s father – surely it would have been too odd for Herzog to call his father by his forename if in the same sentence he referred to his mother as ‘mother’.

  But what was she thinking? Krishna had said Herzog’s father was killed at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1944. Perhaps it was Herzog’s stepfather, or uncle.

  Carefully she replaced the letter and the fateful medals in the envelope and laid it back down on the sofa.

  ‘Maya, I beg you: please try to remember. Did Anton ever mention anything at all about the story that he was working on?’

  ‘No. He hardly spoke about his work. Sometimes he’d talk about it a little bit, but this time he did not even tell me he was going till the last minute, and then he was so different from normal. He told me he had to go – for mankind’s sake. He felt very bad but it had to be done.’

  A chill ran down Nancy’s spine. It sounded like the journalist’s holy grail. Anton Herzog’s biggest-ever story – surely it could be her story too, if she just had the courage to seize the opportunity? She became aware that her pulse was racing as the two conflicting sides of her character battled with each other. The risk-taking, ruthless side, the side that had made her an excellent journalist, was already dreaming of the glory; this could make her name for ever, she could rescue Anton Herzog and sweep the international prizes as well. But the more sensible, conservative side tried desperately to rein in her ambition, aware of her near-total ignorance of what was really going on, except that Herzog was a wanted man accused of espionage and that only hours earlier she had been sitting in a police station being threatened with decades in jail.

  As ever she reached a compromise with herself, the same compromise that she always ended up making, that perpetually tipped her life towards further adventure, that allowed her to pretend that she was not about to make any rash moves. She would continue to investigate the Herzog affair. There was too much now to ignore, too many bizarre coincidences and tantalizing leads. She could not abandon him to his fate, even if that was what Dan Fischer wanted her to do, particularly now she had met Maya – she had to find out more for her. But she would not leave Delhi, not yet anyway – she would not yet ignore the police. The mere thought of seeing the interior of the police station again filled her with dread. If she was taken in for a second time, she knew that she wouldn’t see the light of day for a very long time.

  ‘Maya, you mustn’t worry. I am going to find out what’s happened to Anton one way or another.’

  Someone had turned a radio on, somewhere in the courtyard beyond. Soothing strains of Indian classical music intruded on the sepulchral atmosphere – Nancy was gla
d of it. Maya picked up the envelope and they walked into the hall. Nancy opened the door and stepped back out onto the street. The air was hot and thick. She was glad to have escaped the oppressive dusty interior of the house, a place reeking of anxiety and pain.

  She was just about to say her farewells when Maya spoke in a whisper, ‘Don’t turn your head. They’re following you as well.’

  Panic flooded through Nancy’s body.

  ‘What? Who?’ she whispered back, looking deep into the woman’s eyes.

  Maya cast her eyes up the street, barely moving her head. Now, trying to appear as if she was simply looking for her driver, Nancy scanned the street. A smart-looking station wagon with blacked-out windows was parked thirty yards down the road. It hadn’t been there when she first arrived. It looked completely out of place in such a poor neighbourhood. All her confidence and recklessness of only moments before melted away in an instant. She turned back to Maya, aware that she was now deeply afraid.

  The Indian woman spoke again, her head bowed. ‘I don’t know who they are, but they follow me too. Goodbye.’

  20

  They had hardly spoken to each other the entire way back from the Bazaar. Nancy assumed she looked rattled by her experience at Maya’s house, but she hoped that Krishna would put this down to her meeting with Maya and not to the fact that some unknown agency was now shadowing her every move. Discreetly, as their car nosed its way through the Delhi traffic, she had checked to see if they were still being tailed. Every time she sneaked a look, she could see the black station wagon just behind them.

  Krishna was content to let her be silent, she thought. He was perhaps relieved she had stopped asking questions. For her part, Nancy chose not to tell him about the will and the medals, or indeed the details of the conversation: the suggestion that Anton Herzog had knowingly left Delhi on a do-or-die mission from which he had not expected to return. If she told Krishna all this, she knew it would only make him more nervous about what she was going to try next – and maybe he would even call Dan Fischer and report back that she was disobeying orders. It was hardly the ideal working relationship to have with her new colleague, but in truth, what else could she do? And so the burden of worry – worry about what was really going on, worry about who was trailing her, worry about the whole wretched business – all had to fall on her shoulders alone.

  Back at the office, Krishna paced around the untidy room. Nancy was sitting at Herzog’s desk, her head in her hands, wondering what on earth she should do next and who was monitoring her every move. In one sense, she even hoped that it was the police: that seemed the best of a series of dark possibilities, and she preferred it to the thought of an unknown enemy. But either way it made her life more difficult, for she had no doubt that in the eyes of the police her activities would be construed as guilt, attempts to make contact with what they thought was her fellow spy.

  Krishna had slumped onto the sofa, looking exhausted. She looked up at him through her interlaced fingertips. What did he expect her to do? Just forget the whole thing? Involuntarily, for the hundredth time, she turned over everything in her mind. Now her eyes fell on the photo of Anna Herzog, widowed within a year of her marriage, forced to flee to Argentina before her child was three years old. She wondered suddenly why this young woman had gone to Argentina, of all the places she might have chosen. Maybe she had relatives there. Maybe she just wanted to leave the war behind. But perhaps there was something else. Her journalist’s mind could not help worrying away at these matters. An idea flickered into her head.

  ‘Krishna, is “Herzog” Anton’s mother’s maiden name?’

  He sighed and looked up.

  ‘I don’t understand your meaning.’

  She saw his reluctance, the awkward way he turned to speak to her, but she couldn’t stop herself:

  ‘Was Anton Herzog given his father’s surname or his mother’s surname when he was born? Sometimes, if a woman loses her husband before their child is born, she gives it her own surname – her maiden name – the name she had before she was married. Or perhaps they were never even married? I guess in the Second World War things could be tough to arrange, even finding time to tie the knot.’

  ‘Funnily enough, Nancy,’ responded Krishna tersely, ‘it’s never occurred to me to investigate the marital status of Anton’s parents.’

  The irritation was plain in Krishna’s voice. Nancy regretted the fact that she had blasted into his life, and made him so uncomfortable. He was eyeing her with something that might even be dislike, she thought. As if her approach, her personality, were somehow distasteful to him. The visit to Maya had clearly been the final straw. He had obviously thought that it was hugely insensitive, no matter how she had tried to dress it up as being a mercy mission to help Anton’s fiancée.

  She was sorry about that. But there was something dogged in her, some elemental tenacity which meant she had to know. The truth compelled her. Always she had to hunt it out, piece everything together. She had been in tricky situations before: she had been threatened on several occasions by people that she was investigating for stories. Danger was part of the job of being a good investigative journalist. Though, she had to admit to herself, getting embroiled in suspected international espionage was a much, much bigger deal, and as for the ever-expanding collection of bizarre and utterly unnerving clues – the medals, the bone trumpet, the talk of the greatest story ever – she had never come across anything like it before.

  But this bloody-mindedness – she supposed it was that – had stood her in good stead as a journalist so far. No matter how tedious and irrelevant a line of inquiry might seem to be, sometimes you would get lucky and some priceless pearl would fall into your lap. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, fretting at the minor details would get you nowhere, but there was always the one time when tediously checking someone’s story would suddenly reveal a crucial inconsistency or biographical detail that would reveal their real motives or true nature. She needed any clue she could find; she was like a climber on a rock face, searching for handholds, feeling about on the smooth surface of her ignorance.

  Reluctantly, Krishna got up and turned on Herzog’s computer for her. As soon as it had booted up she began the process of logging on to the digital foreign cuttings databases that the Trib subscribed to. As she worked she thought out loud, aware all the time of Krishna’s demoralized presence beside her.

  ‘I think the Süd-Deutsche Zeitung is the newspaper of record in Munich nowadays. It probably was back then as well. Let’s search their digital archive and see if there is any record of the Herzog family in there.’

  She began to type.

  ‘So, if Anton’s father died in Stalingrad that would have been in 1944. We can assume then that his parents were married in ’43 and that Anton was born in ’43 or ’44. So let’s take a guess and search the Births, Marriages and Deaths announcements in the digital archive for the summer months of 1943. People married and had children in a hurry in those days, you never knew if the father was going to come home again . . .’

  Nancy entered her keyword search and pressed Return: ‘Herzog, marriage’ she had typed in German. Nothing for May. Nothing for June. Then: jackpot.

  ‘Here! This must be them. Engagements: “Anna Herzog, daughter of Karl Heinz and Maria Herzog, to Felix Koenig, August 12th, 1943.” ’

  She could hardly believe what she was reading. So the old man in the photo was Anton’s father after all – his name was Felix Koenig. That’s why Anton had kept the photo all those years, guarded it jealously along with the medals. But it made no sense at all. Anton’s father was supposed to have died in Stalingrad in 1944 and yet the photo had definitely been dated Buenos Aires 1957. She was shaking her head, thinking out loud now, her voice filled with uncertainty as she reread the notice.

  ‘That must be her – there can’t be two Anna Herzogs getting married. So, Anton’s father was called Felix Koenig. Herzog was his mother’s maiden name.’

  Krishna chipped in
. ‘Good, well now you know that, can you content yourself with research from Delhi and some local stories while we deal with the police?’

  ‘Yes, yes, whatever you say.’ But Nancy was hardly listening to Krishna’s entreaties. She had no idea quite how any of this was meant to help, but experience told her she was on the right track. She had found a sore spot and she should keep pressing. She continued: ‘Now the next question is: who was Felix Koenig?’

  She fell silent as she scanned through the search results. There were plenty of Felix Koenigs knocking around in cyberspace – academics with their dour pages, an artist, a chef from Hamburg. But there was no one who could plausibly be Anton’s father. She felt Krishna waiting, and she knew he was hoping that the trail would be cold.

  Finally, she turned to him. ‘Nothing. There’s absolutely nothing.’

  21

  The monks had paused again, under a vast, lichen-covered overhang of rock in the depths of the jungle. It was a relief to be out of the rain that was still teeming down on the forest canopy, its noise on the lush foliage so great that they had almost to shout at each other to be heard at all.

  Exhausted, they lay like casualties on a battlefield, contorted this way and that into strange postures, resting as best they could. Only the Abbot’s deputy remained standing, his suspicious eyes still scanning the forest. The schoolteacher was also still alert, patiently squatting on her haunches, studying the slow rise and fall of the white man’s chest, expecting every exhalation to be his last. Just as the Abbot’s deputy had instructed, she had not left his side throughout the march, even as the monks had carried him slipping and tripping their way across the tangled forest floor.

  Gingerly she removed the wet towel that covered his forehead and his eyes and began to dab tenderly at his forehead. Just then, a mosquito landed on his collarbone and began to walk in circles around the man’s Adam’s apple. She gently placed the towel to one side and very gingerly tried to brush the fly off.