“She had nothing to tell us.”
“You, perhaps, but she had plenty to tell me.” He wrapped his fingers around the glass ball of his paperweight and squeezed it. These idiots had sent Luzi away even though he’d never once told them to send her to a camp. She was supposed to be collateral to draw Max out of his hiding place.
“Our commander put her on a train.”
“My commander said she was supposed to stay!”
“Then he should have communicated that to Salzburg.”
He’d overstepped his bounds, perhaps a meter or two, and as he paced in front of the desk, the phone cord scraping the edge of the wood, Ernst decided to change tactics.
“What else did you find?”
“Nothing of significance.”
“Nothing at all?”
“If you are referring to the jewelry and other valuables, there’s nothing of worth in that castle.”
If it wasn’t in the house, it must be nearby. He only needed to retrieve it, and then he would find Max and send him off to a camp like Luzi.
Ernst no longer cared what his commander said. He’dbeen patient long enough, sending photographs and memos to Salzburg that were promptly ignored. Major Rosch would showhis gratitude once Ernst returned with something to lineboth their pockets.
Early the next morning, Ernst left Vienna via train and traveledalmost four hours to the desolate ObertraunBahnhof. No automobiles or even a bicycle were available for hire, so he hiked through the forest until he located the gates of Max’s summer estate and walked right through them.
One day he’d own a castle much like this one ... or perhaps this estate would be his home. He would marry someone much more prominent, more beautiful, than Luzi Weiss. An Aryan, of course, with the purest of blood to make Hitler himself proud. Someone who would show Ernst the honor and respect that he deserved.
Luzi deserved whatever the work camps gave to her.
He searched for a day but found nothing from Max and Dr. Weiss’s cache. The Gestapo, it seemed, had emptied the house of anything that would be of value, and they’d dug up a plot of land near the chapel. Perhaps they’d found things there and kept them.
Or perhaps Max was smarter than he imagined and stole the treasure himself.
His return ticket to Vienna was tonight, 22:00Uhr. On the trip home, Ernst concocted and schemed and determined his course forward. Max, he knew, would return eventually to Schloss Schwansee. Ernst could wait for weeks, even months, if he must. He would travel to the castle again and again until he found Max Dornbach and his treasure.
His plans had solidified into stone by the time the train reopened its doors under the iron awning in the Wien Westbahnhof. But when he returned to Hotel Metropole the next morning, his commander wasn’t pleased that he had traveled to the lakes without permission.
If he wanted water, Major Rosch said, he could have the entire North Sea. Then he reassigned Ernst to an office in Hamburg, athousand kilometers north of Hallstättersee.
CHAPTER 40
Hours passed as she sat in the library recliner, staring at the instrument handcrafted from black willow by Karl Lang, a master violin maker from Salzburg. She’d had Sigmund remove it from the dressing room and place it on the upholstered window seat. Then he slipped away to let her rest.
Sleep wouldn’t come, though. Not that she wanted it to.
She twisted the ivory chiffon of a handkerchief between fingers that grew stiffer each day as she eyed the violin. Decades ago, when this violin showed up at their door, it had terrified her. Someone knew her secret, and this gift... at the time it felt more like a threat than a present, but over the years she’d wondered if it was actually a gift, from the man who had saved her life.
The music had begun returning to her mind in small pieces after Sigmund was born, the notes on her music sheets dancinglike ballerinas in her head. God had used that child to breathe life back into her as well. Still she hadn’t touched this violin or any other, though every week she attended a concert—outside at Mirabell Gardens, inside the gilded Stiftung Mozarteum, it didn’t matter.
She lived in Salzburg now, had for decades. While she came each week to tend the garden plots, she hadn’t been inside this castle in more than fifty years.
Hermann’s mother had gently cared for her back in 1939, and then she and Hermann had married, a month before Sigmund was born. The pastor in Hallstatt had been quite willing to certify them after Hermann shared a glimpse of their story.
When the war began, the Nazis asked—no, they commanded—the caretaker’s daughter and her husband to oversee the estate and their new camp since the caretaker seemed to be missing. She and Hermann built a new cottage by the castle, and he tended the landwhile she cleaned the house and prepared meals for boys forced to grow up too soon.
Her little family stayed here after the war, having no place else to go in their divided country, a new Austria parceled out for occupation by the United States, France, England, and the Soviet Union. The entire country gained independence again in 1955, more than a decade after the war, but she and Hermann didn’t leave the estate until 1962, after Hermann was offered a position in agricultural sciences at the newly reestablished University of Salzburg.
They’d locked the front door and handed the keys over to Sigmund, the year he’d turned twenty-three. Thirty years later, Sigmund gave the keys to his son.
