Winner Take All (25 page)

“Erin?”

She plucked a diary of some kind from the top shelf. The volume was so worn she had to hold the pages in place. She leafed through a series of letters bundled in the front. She found what she was looking for, unfolded the yellowed page, and reached for the phone. When someone answered, Erin switched to French and said, “I wish to speak to Sister Agnes, please.”

Whatever it was she heard, it was enough for Erin to spill the diary in a heap of tattered pages at her feet. “You can’t be serious.” Then, “No, no, forgive me, that was not what I meant at all. It’s just, well the news is so unexpected.”

Erin hesitated a moment, then decided, “No, please do not tell the Mother Superior anything. I want this to be a surprise for her as well.”

She hung up the phone, and resumed her blind stare out the front bay windows.

“Erin, you must permit me to call New York and cancel—”

She turned to him and revealed a smile that would only have confirmed his wife’s worst fears. “Go and bring the car around,” she ordered. “Then come back for the baby.”

From the safety of his Mercedes Reiner witnessed a remarkable departure scene, something that truly belonged upon the stage. The Polish housekeeper was transformed into a dreadful maniac by the realization that Erin was going off with her own baby. Goscha followed Erin down the front stairs of their jewel-box home, wailing and shrieking so loud the baby had no choice but to scream in reflected fear. Erin marched with determined fury toward the car while the housekeeper played the diva herself, gripping the wrought-iron railing and clawing the air and shrieking her grief to a cloud-flecked sky.

The journey south held to a travesty of calm. By the time they passed Neuss on Düsseldorf’s southern border, the baby had cried itself to sleep. Erin fed Reiner instructions in terse little bites. But underneath, the diva raged as Reiner had seldom seen.

Reiner felt his heart wrenched by the baby’s occasional whimpers. His own father had remained a closet Nazi all his life, his mother a hapless Rheinlander hausfrau who relied on her husband for all strength and every opinion. One of the things Reiner liked most about his own wife was her fervent desire never to have children. Yet there was no mistaking the gentle pull this child exerted. Only Erin remained obstinately aloof.

South of Bonn, Erin instructed him to exit off the A61 and head west toward nowhere. Reiner cast her a quick glance and said, “Are you sure?”

Erin said nothing. She had aged twenty years that morning, and carried her silence with the determined grimness of one being fitted for a future shroud.

“I have lived in the Rheinland-Palatinate all my life,” Reiner said, steering his way up into the forest and the sky. “And I have successfully managed to avoid ever entering the Eifel.”

“Then you were very lucky indeed.”

“You lived here?”

“Nine measureless, miserable years.”

Between the Mosel and Ahr rivers, stretching from Koblenz westward to the four-country juncture of Luxembourg, Germany, Holland, and Belgium, lay the Eifel. Time-softened hills rose and fell in forested waves, drawing the visitor into a hoary land which mocked Germany’s
high-impact industrial might. From Aachen southward the region was little visited, save for morel hunters and local hikers. Even the road signs, such as they were, were inscribed in the old cursive script. But Erin’s directions remained bitterly constant.

“Why did your parents choose to live here?”

“Did I say my family? Did I mention them at all?”

“Erin, softly please, the baby.”

“My mother never came here. Not one time.” She was silent so long Reiner assumed it was all he would learn of her past. Which was already more than she had ever said before. “My mother was a true Prussian blueblood. My father was Belgian. They divorced before I was born. I never met him. He was rich, an industrialist. Textiles, I believe she once said. When he left, she kept the money, which was all she wanted from him. She hated me.”

“I doubt very much—”

“She loathed the sight of me.” Erin used both hands to sweep her hair back, tilting her head in the gesture he had come to know so well, dismissing everything about the world she did not find to her liking. “Summers we moved to Antibes. Every September when my mother returned to Germany I was sent off to a horrible school in the middle of a forest. The driver brought me down. He never spoke. I hated him. I hated every one of them, my mother and all her little playmates. But I hated the convent most of all.”

A few kilometers past the Belgian border, they entered a valley with a lake at either end. The middle portion was well-tended pasture, with horses gamboling in the knee-high grass. Wildflowers shimmered in an earthbound rainbow ballet under the light summer breeze. The air was fresh and full of country smells. The road was rough and poorly kept. The tires scrambled around a tight corner and entered through a high stone wall. Beyond, the tree-lined drive seemed endless. Erin’s hands were gripped fiercely in her lap as they halted before a second stone wall. Somewhere in the distance a church bell rang a doleful welcome or dismissal, he could not tell which.

“A convent,” Reiner murmured. “So the rumors are true.”

Erin was already climbing from the car. “Come with me,” she said curtly. “Bring the child.”

They crossed a curved stone bridge over a stillwater moat. Birdsong
sounded loud and raucous. The wind was a mysterious undertone that only accented the quiet.

Reiner felt pressured from all sides by the city’s absence. “Horrid,” he declared. “Utterly hideous.”

Erin remained upon the stone bridge, staring eastward to where the high wall bowed inward to permit a tiny garden. Watched over by a pair of moat-fed willows were three flower-bedecked graves. “You can’t imagine.”

“Why are we here, Erin?”

She marched past him to where a bellpull dangled. She wrenched it down, once, twice, three times, pulling so hard the cord almost touched the earth. From within the bell sounded strident.

A narrow portal set within the massive front doors opened to reveal an elderly nun in formal black habit. “Yes?”

“We are here to see the Mother Superior.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“The Mother Superior,” Erin declared, “will see us.”

Something in her tone did not sit well with the nun. “Your name?”

“Erin Brandt.”

“One moment.”

But before the nun could shut the door, Erin was already pushing through. “We will wait inside.”

“But you are not—”

“Will you tell the Mother Superior we are here? Or shall I?”

Within the compound, the silence was only more intense. The nuns Reiner could see moved without disturbing the serenity, as though they had already been swallowed and lost. He wanted to shout, rage, scream, burn. Anything to add a bit of comforting chaos.

By the time the sister returned, Reiner’s skin felt attacked by a million roaches, all crawling and scrambling with a shared urge to flee. The nun gave him a look that suggested she knew exactly what he was thinking, but all she said was, “This way.”

“I know precisely,” Erin announced, striding rapidly away from the nun, “where the Mother Superior’s offices are located.”

The nun released Erin with a huffed indignation, leaving Reiner to catch up alone. They passed through an inner portal and entered a much larger courtyard filled with colorful playground equipment. “A school,” Reiner said.

“A prison.” Erin turned into a passage so ancient the outer walls were thicker than Reiner was tall. “A scourge.” She hammered her heels into each stone stair, so that they echoed with her words. “A pestilence. A misery. A torture. A place of hatred and pain and fear.”

“Only for some,” announced a quiet voice at the top of the winding stairwell. “Only for a very few.”

“You felt the exact same way.” Erin would have barreled right through the sister, had she not stepped away.

“Only for a time.”

“For years.” Erin marched into the office occupying the stone-lined corner. “How often were we whipped together?”

“Too often.” The Mother Superior held the door for Reiner and gave the baby a startled glance. “And not often enough.”

“Just exactly the sort of miserable response I would expect from someone who joined the enemy.”

“Sit down, Erin.”

“I will not be here that long.”

“Sit. Please.”

She crouched into the seat, her backside barely scraping the wood’s edge. Her hands formed claws around the carved armrests as she watched the Mother Superior step behind her desk. “I need your help.”

“You are looking well.” The few strands of hair escaping from beneath the nun’s habit were almost transparent, as though the silence had sufficient force to wash away all color, all pretense of freedom. Her voice held the eerie quality of being able to speak without ruffling the stillness. “I have heard you are doing great things.”

“Someone is after my baby,” Erin continued grimly. “I need you to look after her.”

Agnes looked at Reiner for the first time. Her gaze was as excruciating as the rest of this place. “Your husband?”

“My manager.”

“Ah. Of course.” She dismissed him. “You know we do not care for infants.”

“She is a child. You take children. She is merely a bit younger than most.”

“This is not possible.”

Reiner watched with the experience of years. He knew Erin had come expecting these words. And was prepared.

She leaned forward and said in the musical tone that marked Erin
at her most dangerous. “It was nice to see how well the cemetery remains tended.”

The Mother Superior’s eyes were gray in the manner of a cloudless sky the hour before dawn, so clear Reiner could look and see nothing but the hated stillness of this place. “The parents still come. Three of their next generation are with us now.”

“How utterly calamitous,” Erin spat back, “that not even they could learn the mistake of their ways.”

Agnes started to reply, then changed her mind. “I will help you,” she decided. “But not for the reasons you think.”

“Of course not.”

“How long do you need us to care for your child?”

“Not long. A week. Perhaps two. Then all this will be settled and behind us.”

Agnes walked around her desk and reached for the child. Reiner’s relief at turning Celeste over must have been evident, for the nun shot him a severe look. Nothing escaped her. Nothing. “How old is she?”

“Sixteen months.”

“Her name?”

“Celeste.”

“She is a beautiful child.”

Erin rose from her chair. “I will pay you, of course.”

“You will do no such thing. When did the child last eat?”

Erin faltered for the first time since entering. She glanced at Reiner, who could only shrug. Agnes observed this as well, and hardened. “Two weeks, Erin. Any longer and I will be forced to ask questions of my own.”

J
UST BEFORE
K
IRSTEN
’
S
last visit, the Düsseldorf airport had caught fire and been largely destroyed. She passed through the new soaring steel-and-glass structure with a threatening sense of entering enemy territory.

In her previous existence, Kirsten had made the pilgrimage to Düsseldorf twice each year. The
Igedo
was the largest fashion event in northern Europe. For five days Düsseldorf’s hotels and restaurants and limo companies and nightclubs and cafés were dominated by the rich and beautiful and impeccably dressed. Cruise boats from as far away as Sicily were moored along the Rhein docks, serving as additional hotels and reception venues. A model with Escada or Ferragamo or Hermès or Jil Sander was queen for a week. The entire city became a runway for the newest and latest. Porsches and Ferraris outnumbered Opels. The moneyed crowd from all over Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Eastern Europe came to be part of the spectacle.

She took a taxi to the antiseptic European-style commercial hotel where the London embassy had booked her a room. Once checked in, Kirsten walked the seven blocks to the American Consulate, which through downsizing had relocated from its massive building on the Rhein to a series of rooms above a bank. Kirsten sat in the office of an assistant commercial consul who made no attempt to hide her curiosity. The sealed windows were inch-thick glass embedded in steel frames. A building of dark gray brick rose directly opposite, close enough to touch. The air conditioner’s soft sigh only heightened the claustrophobic closeness.
Kirsten waited the woman out, giving nothing in response to her questions.

On the way back to the hotel, she used a pay phone to call the detective. She wanted to meet this man in person. The consulate had obviously alerted him, for he was ready to roll as soon as he heard her name.

Back at the hotel, she called the German lawyer and explained enough to justify the woman shifting her schedule around. As soon as she cut the connection, the front desk rang through to say the detective was downstairs.

In the instant between hanging up and reaching for her purse, the phone rang once more. Kirsten hesitated a long moment, for no one save the consul knew she was here. “Yes?”