The place was quiet. There was no sound of hammer on iron nor of Jan’s salty curses, and none of the usual smell of burning coke. The smithy was empty, the tools all neatly tidied away and the fire cold. There was no car in the other barn, and the door to the main house was locked and the windows shuttered. Bruno signaled to the truck and men in black with weapons pointed deployed around the rest of the property. As the sergeant approached, Bruno gestured to the locked door. The sergeant turned back to the van and returned with a heavy ram. He took one side, Bruno the other, and they smashed it into the lock while another trooper stood cover behind them, his weapon aimed into the doorway. The door toppled open, but no sound or sign came from within.
The sergeant went in first, flicking the button on the flashlight taped beneath the barrel of his rifle to illuminate the room. Bruno followed, and once the sergeant came down from upstairs and pronounced the premises clear, Bruno flicked on the switch inside the doorway, and the room blazed with light. He felt relieved. He’d begun to expect that they’d find Jan’s dead body in the abandoned house.
“I’ll search the house,” Bruno told the sergeant. “I’d be grateful if your team could search everywhere else. Hold any papers that you find for me, and let me know of any signs that other people have stayed here. There’s an office with a computer in the barn by the smithy. Leave that to me.”
Bruno took off his jacket, wriggled out of the flak jacket and handed it to the sergeant. “I’d have thought they’d have improved these things since my day,” he said.
“You ought to see the new German ones,” the sergeant said. “My brother’s in the paratroopers in Afghanistan. He brought one back, light and terrific. He said it would stop anything short of an RPG.” He paused. “What unit were you in?”
“Combat engineers, then attached to paratroopers,” said Bruno.
The sergeant raised his eyebrows and nodded slowly. “You can count on us, then,” he said.
“Check in the smithy for any false walls or trapdoors or anything like a basement,” Bruno said. “Get two of your men to take a good look in that lean-to where he stores his coke. Shift some of it if you have to.”
The sergeant nodded and Bruno went into the house, but there was no study, no box of family files and documents. Jan must have kept everything in the office in the smithy. There was a bookshelf of well-thumbed paperbacks, some in Danish and some in German, and a row of political books in French, presumably Juanita’s.
The drawers in the main bedroom contained only clothing, and standing on the chest there were a lot of photos of Juanita. They seemed the only items in the house to have been dusted, which reminded Bruno that he’d always liked Jan. There were two other bedrooms, each with two single beds made up with creased and grubby sheets. Another four people had been staying here. In the spare bathroom he found soiled towels and the discarded wrapping in Spanish of a disposable razor. In the bottom of the bath was a small, empty plastic bottle of shampoo, marked with the name of a hotel in Bayonne. That might be useful.
Still looking for documents, Bruno checked the usual places, the attics and the freezer, the water tank of the bathroom and beneath the plastic bags of the garbage bags. There was nothing. The smithy office contained paperwork from the business and all the household bills, each loosely stuffed into separate file boxes marked for water, gas, electricity and taxes. Bruno pulled the drawers out of the filing cabinets. Wrapped in plastic and taped to the underside of the lower drawer were three passports. A West German one and an East German one were a decade out-of-date, both bearing the photo of a much-younger and much-slimmer Jan and identifying him as Dieter Vogelstern. That settled any lingering question of whether Jan was Horst’s brother. There was also a valid Cuban passport, with a more recent photo, in the name of Jan Pedersen, the same name as on the Danish passport he had used to obtain his French residency. Tucked inside it Bruno counted eighty one-hundred-dollar bills.
He went outside and called Isabelle, asking if she could get a forensics team to Jan’s place. There might be fingerprints or DNA traces that could help identify Jan’s guests, and maybe even a credit card number from the stay at the Bayonne hotel. He gave her the various passport numbers, marveling at the vast international bureaucratic machine that he could summon into action for such an investigation.
“The fact that Jan left the cash and the Cuban passport suggests that either he thinks he’s coming back, or he left involuntarily,” he said.
“Or he doesn’t suspect we know about him,” said Isabelle.
“Jan’s no fool. He must have known his real identity was likely to emerge once I started asking about Horst’s father and brother and said we’d be contacting the German police.”
“So if we assume that Jan’s guests were the Basque unit, does that mean that the two brothers are in this voluntarily? You know them both, what’s your assessment?”
“My views aren’t worth much. I never suspected that Jan wasn’t the Danish blacksmith he pretended to be,” said Bruno. “For what it’s worth, and I know him a lot better, I can’t see Horst involved.”
Bruno hung up when he heard the sergeant calling from a small, half-ruined barn some distance to the rear of the smithy. Part of the low roof had collapsed and the rest was bowed, a sure sign that the laths had rotted; the windows were covered with stout wooden shutters. Bruno hoped this would not be Jan’s tomb, but the sergeant was pointing at the door itself and the sturdy modern bolt, still bright with newness.
“It stinks of piss inside and there’s a filthy bed,” the sergeant said. “Someone was probably held prisoner here.”
Bruno looked in, and paused, taking the sergeant’s flashlight. He shone it upward to see how much headroom there might be. There was one place where he could stand upright. Moving the light around he saw a bucket, evidently the only sanitation available, and an army surplus camp bed of canvas and thin metal bars. A filthy blanket lay atop it, and there was an empty plastic bottle beneath. Bruno switched off the flashlight and closed the door, trying to assess how much light the room’s occupant might have had. He just knew Horst had been there. There were some cracks in the door and one or two in the apex of the roof, but the sense of darkness was very strong. He must have spent a wretched couple of days in this place, Bruno thought, aware that his own brother was his jailer.
Bruno opened the door again and shone the flashlight around, trying to see if Horst had left any scrap of paper or any scratch marks on the stones of the wall. He crouched down beside the bed, shining the light into every seam and each pouch where the metal bars fit to see if some slip of paper had been squeezed into the gap. There was nothing. He was bracing himself to start examining the contents of the bucket when the sergeant called out to him.
Bruno turned. “See this?” the sergeant asked, pointing to scratches on the inside of the door. The marks were only visible now that Bruno had opened the door wide and folded it back against the outside wall. The sinking sun threw the scratches into relief.
“ETA = Jan = RAF,” he read aloud, adding to himself, “Red Army Faktion.” Easier to scratch that into the wood than “Baader-Meinhof.”
It was proof that Jan had been part of Baader-Meinhof and was now working with ETA and the Basques. And further proof that Horst had been kept there, and that whatever protection he’d been prepared to give his brother had been withdrawn. Horst was a victim, rather than an accomplice.
“Sarge,” came a shout from the lean-to beside the smithy. One of the troopers had emerged and was waving, his face blackened with the coke they had moved, much of it now piled on the bare ground outside. “We got something.”
The floor of the lean-to was made of a solid sheet of cement, except in the rear corner where coke dust in the cracks revealed a large square. The troops must have swept the floor for the cracks to emerge. Bruno was impressed. The sergeant ran a good unit.
“Let’s get a spade and lever it up,” said Bruno. “It’s meant to be opened so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
It took two spades, even though the cement in the square proved to be a thin skim over a wooden trapdoor that opened to reveal a hole about three feet square and half that in depth. There were three bundles inside wrapped in plastic.
“Careful,” said Bruno. “Take a good look for any wires. It could be booby-trapped.”
After a thorough search with flashlights, they swept off the coke dust and took the bundles outside. The first contained a well-oiled Heckler amp; Koch submachine gun with four magazines taped alongside the barrel and a nine-millimeter automatic in a separate plastic wrapping with a box of cartridges, a cleaning kit and a spare magazine. The second bundle contained a wooden box which bore NATO and German markings. It held twelve compartments, four for fragmentation grenades, four for smoke and three for CS gas. The twelfth compartment contained blasting caps wrapped in steel wool. The final bundle was the lightest, and Bruno recognized it as soon as the final layer was unwrapped revealing the familiar waxed paper.
