parked.
Back indoors, he examined the papers strewn across the floor. They were printouts in German, heavily corrected and annotated in Horst’s spiky handwriting. Bruno recognized the words Archaeologie and Neanderthal, but that was all. The bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling, but one of them had a cupboard where the lower shelves should have been. Inside were more files, marked “Bank” and “Tax” and another marked “Clothilde,” which contained letters and photos. Beneath them was an old photo album, and as Bruno leafed through he saw pictures of Horst as a young man getting his university degree and as a student with long hair and one of those curved mustaches that had been popular back in the sixties. The photos were chronological, so as Bruno turned the pages back he saw Horst as a schoolboy and as a child. There were family snaps of Horst with an older woman, presumably his mother, and several in which he had his arms around the shoulders of another boy, a year or two older.
There seemed to be no pictures of a father, until he turned one page and stopped in surprise at a family group, of Horst as a baby in his mother’s arms. The older boy was sitting on the knee of a man in black uniform with a swastika armband. On the lapels were the two jagged lightning flashes that Bruno knew stood for SS.
Horst was in his mid-sixties and had already stayed on at his university beyond the usual age of retirement. He’d have been born close to the end of the war, so he shouldn’t be surprised at Horst’s father, if that was indeed who he was, being in uniform. Being in the SS was somewhat different.
He and Horst had never talked about the war, nor had Horst discussed his parents, although once or twice he’d remarked on the occasional incident of anti-German prejudice. But he seemed to understand it as the result of the ferocity with which the local Resistance had been crushed by the Wehrmacht. Bruno leafed back quickly through the remaining photos. There was one, clearly a wedding day with a younger, prettier version of Horst’s blond mother holding the arm of the same man, still in uniform and with an Iron Cross around his neck.
Bruno eased the photo from the little corner tabs that held it in place, and on the back was a faded stamp of a photographer with an address in Friedrichstrasse, Berlin. There was no date, but tucked beneath it was another photo, the same man sitting on top of a tank with some other men in overalls, all of them grinning for the camera. Behind them was a burning house and one of the old French road signs. Bruno strained to read the words on the concrete arrow and was pretty sure it was Dunkerque.
This could put a different perspective on Horst’s disappearance. Some local with long memories might consider this as a motive to do Horst harm, although Bruno had never understood those who sought to blame young Germans for the sins of their fathers. He’d have to get an expert to look at the photos to see if they could identify the units Horst’s father had served in. Some of them, like the SS Panzer Division Das Reich, were infamous in this part of France for the atrocities they had committed while heading for the Normandy beaches to attack the allied beachheads after D-day in June 1944.
Bruno closed the family album and went to the printer, but the out-tray was empty. Beside it on the wide shelf was a tray where Horst kept his keys for house and car and museum, and they were still there, along with his mobile phone, his passport and wallet, cash and credit cards inside. Whatever had happened was no burglary. He pulled out his own phone and called Clothilde at the museum.
“I’m at the house now and I’m worried. His wallet and passport and keys are all here, along with the car. When did you last see him?”
“Yesterday morning. We spent the night together and had breakfast at Fauquet’s, then he drove me to the dig where I saw you, and he went to the museum to deal with all the phone calls. He was out somewhere for lunch, and when I got back to the museum he’d gone to the dig.”
“Had you been cooking? There’s an onion half sliced and an open bottle of wine.”
“That’s not like him. Horst is positively anal about corking his wine and leaving his kitchen clean. And I told you, we went to Fauquet’s for coffee and croissants.” She sounded as if she were going to add something but then remained silent.
“What is it, Clothilde?”
“I suppose you ought to know. We had a row over breakfast, about that damn girl who caused all the trouble, the Dutch one. I wanted her sent home, off the dig, but Horst said I was overreacting. Her professor back in Leiden is a close friend of his, and he didn’t want to offend him.”
“It doesn’t sound too serious.”
“It got serious. It was my fault. I said he was giving her a break because she was young and pretty. It wasn’t fair, but I suppose I was worried about the farmers doing something to damage the dig or the museum. It had been on my mind overnight and I raised it when we woke up. We started to argue, and it got worse in the car and over breakfast. By the time we got to Les Eyzies we were hardly speaking.”
“So he was upset?”
“Yes, but he was much calmer than me. I tend to get emotional and he doesn’t, or at least he doesn’t show it. When we have rows he usually goes off to that friend of his for a few hours and lets me cool down.”
“What friend?”
“The Danish guy, Jan. You know him.”
“The blacksmith?” Bruno asked.
“Yes, they’re pretty close. But I called him before I called you, and he said he hadn’t seen Horst since the night at the museum. That was when I got worried.”
“Anything else that might have upset him?”
“Not that I know of. I’m worried sick now. If I hadn’t gotten so worked up… And that damn girl has gone anyway.”
“You mean the Dutch girl? Gone where?”
“Back to Holland, according to Teddy. She’s on the train to Paris now. She had a big fight with some of the other students when she turned up at the dig this morning because she hadn’t done the cooking and it was her turn. And then Kasimir attacked her about the animal rights stuff and somebody else complained they’d had to buy pizzas last night because there was no food and she tossed a fifty-euro note at them. Then it was ‘poor little rich girl,’ and she stormed off. Teddy persuaded one of the boys to give them a lift to the station.”
“Has he gone too?”
“No, just her. She wasn’t much use anyway. But Teddy’s good, in fact Horst and I had talked about offering him a research post at the museum once he graduates.”
“Time for a visit to Jan, I think. See if he can throw any light on Horst.”
Jan had been in the district for twenty years or so, much longer than Bruno, and his smithy had become a modest tourist attraction. The credit should go to his late wife, a local schoolteacher, who had started taking schoolchildren to watch a blacksmith at work and arranged for the departement ’s educational budget to pay a small fee to Jan for each visit. Then she began running guided tours of the smithy in the tourist season, with herself as guide. She had pushed him to make candlesticks and boot scrapers, table lamps and crucifixes and name plaques for houses, items that the tourists would buy. They soon started bringing in more money than the horseshoes and plow repairs and door fittings for house restorations that had so far made Jan a bare living. Eventually Jan realized that Anita had made herself so indispensable to his life that he’d married her.
He still lived in the small farmhouse that he had bought and restored when he first arrived, but it had been Anita who had cajoled and bullied him into restoring the huge barn so that it looked like a smithy of the nineteenth century. The fire was stoked with a vast bellows that Jan could operate with a foot pedal. Jan was about Bruno’s height, but heavier, with massive arms and shoulders from his work, and with a healthy belly that looked as firm as rock despite his age. He wore wooden sabots on his feet and a heavy apron of cowhide, black with age and scorch marks. A black bandanna kept the sweat from his eyes, and the great bucket where he cooled the red-hot iron was made of wood and leather.
The only modern item in the barn was the computer that Anita had installed in the small office behind the showroom for his work, where she had kept the accounts and taken care of orders that came in over Jan’s website. Bruno had known Anita only briefly before her death but admired her bustling energy. Jan probably had to do all that for himself, these days.
Bruno could understand why Horst enjoyed his visits, the tap-tap sound of Jan’s hammer as he worked, the throat-catching sharpness of the coke dust in the air, the sudden burst of Danish curses that mixed with Jan’s accented French. Bruno had not been to the place since Anita’s funeral some years earlier. Jan had always worked alone so Bruno was surprised to find beside him in the smithy a slim, dark-haired young man whose arms so far
