The front gate into Schloss Schwansee was locked, but hefound the collapsed portion of the wall that he’d climbed over often before the war, between the forest and the sheer cliff at the foot of Sarstein.
He hadn’t thought he would ever come back here, not after that night in 1939 when he’d crept down and found both his home and his heart in ruins. When he discovered the house ransacked, Annika and Luzi gone, he’d snuck over to Hermann’s house in the dark. His friend told him the news that haunted him for the past fifteen years. The Gestapo had found Luzi, hiding in the wall, and they’d taken her away to a place where he could no longer protect her. A place of no return.
He’d sobbed then, like a wounded animal, and the thought of Luzi, suffering at their hands, still flooded his eyes with tears. For days he hadn’t been able to eat. And he’d wished he were dead, begged God for the ultimate mercy of taking his life.
God’s mercy proved to be different from his own.
Over his shoulder this morning was a rucksack, one that he’d purchased in America, and inside was all the paperwork for the estate. He was transferring this place to Annika. Frau Stadler now, he’d learned.
He hoped Annika was as happy as possible in these tumultuous years after the war, while their entire country tried to right itself after it fell. Hitler had marched into their country without a fight in 1938, but oh, the war that had been waged to get him back out again. The man had stripped this country bare, though Max could still see the beauty as he’d taken the train from Salzburg. The soul of Austria—it was still here.
His family’s old home rose in the distance, above the pine trees. These past years he’d traveled plenty and seen castles much older—and much larger—than Schloss Schwansee, but if the original ownerhad wanted to call his home a castle instead of a manor, then who was Max or anyone else to stop him? His family, and those before the Bettauer and Dornbach families, had certainly played along with the game, pretending that this place was meant for royalty.
If only he could pretend again and bring Luzi back to him. Unlike what Frau Weiss told him, he never should have let her go.
After multiple inquiries, he’d discovered that Luzi had died at Ravensbrück days after she arrived at that camp. She had suffered—how could she not?—but it comforted him in one sense that she hadn’t suffered for long.
After years of searching, he found his mother in New York. She had remarried before the Germans occupied France, and she’d been able to hide her secret with her forged paperwork and newly acquired last name. Her husband, a French professor, hadn’t been enamored of the Nazi Party. He led a group of resisters in their village, thwarting the Nazis whenever possible while married to an Austrian woman no one knew was a Jewess.
Max’s father had died in the weeks when Berlin was gasping for its last breath, when the city was being slowly suffocated by the Russians in the east and the Allies pressing in from the west.
He’d searched and searched for Marta, after his mother told him that she had taken the child to an orphanage when she’d crossed into France, unable to care for her after the border guards took most of her money. She’d feared for both of their lives.
He’d traveled to the orphanage, but the place was closed now, any records destroyed. Then he’d learned the sad, awful truth. Most of the children had been sent to Auschwitz in April 1944, near the end of the war. He refused to believe that Marta was among them; he’d spend his life pretending, if he must. Taking solace in the unknown.
Before he finished his walk to the castle, he stopped at the old pet cemetery. People had relied on him—him and Dr. Weiss—but how naive he had been. Thinking of himself as some sort of hero when the enemy wasn’t really after the heirlooms of their Jewish friends. The enemy was after their lives.
A white cottage had been built on the land where all the treasure was once stored, a neat-looking place with geraniums trimming each window and a garden plot that stretched across the land where he’d buried the heirlooms.
What had Annika done with the items hidden there?
Not that there was anyone left to return them to, but he wanted to ask her that question today, along with many others that had haunted him for the past fifteen years.
He knocked tentatively at the castle’s front door, hoping Annika would greet him, but a housekeeper opened it instead, directing him back toward a renovated library. As he waited for the Stadlers, he crossed the room to the secret panel and pressed, but the seam had been sealed shut.
The books were in good order on the shelves; some of them he recognized from his youth. This place had been a refuge for him and Annika in their younger days, and he hoped it would be a refuge for generations to come.
He and Annika had been the best of friends as children and then awkward acquaintances of youth. But he’d trusted her with his greatest secrets. The treasure and then Luzi. He didn’t know what happened to their treasure, but she hadn’t failed him on Luzi’s account—no one could stop the Gestapo.
He wandered to the bookshelf and perused the familiar titles, some new ones among the old books that his parents had collectedover the years. Among them, he foundBambi, the story he’d loved as a boy.
He was beginning to open the cover when someone walked into the room.
“Max?”
Turning, he saw Hermann, but if he had expected a warm welcome—and if he were truly honest, he’d hoped for one—the doubt in his friend’s eyes was more like a chill.
Was Hermann afraid that Max would take this old place from him? Hermann could have it. Could have everything inside it as well.
He glanced down at the book in his hands. Except, perhaps, this.
“I only have a short time,” Hermann said. “I have business to attend to.”
“Of course.” Today’s order was all about business.
“You are well?” Hermann asked.
“I am settled. On an American lake that reminds me of Hallstatt.”
