I couldn’t get hold of Ellis. Five calls had gone straight to voicemail. It wasn’t like him; he’d never ignored a phone call or a voicemail or a text in his life. Granted, I’d been out of his life for a few years now, but even after he went to Sydney he’d answer as quickly as he could. It might just be a text saying, Call you later, but something. Not silence.
Pacing across Oma’s kitchen, I cursed and muttered and reasoned all in succession. Why didn’t he answer? What could he be doing? He was working, my rational brain suggested, researching a story, or visiting family, on a date, cleaning his apartment. But if so, why didn’t he answer? Or at least check his voicemail? Send me a text? Visions of the night we’d encountered that man outside his flat ran through my head. Ellis had said that he knew him, but he hadn’t been happy to see him. What the hell was happening?
‘Fuck it,’ I said. ‘Just fuck everything!’ I collapsed onto a chair, head in my hands. Breathe. Just breathe.
Ellis had texted me earlier that day, said he’d found something, didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. I’d told him I was going to Oma and Opa’s. I wanted to look around some more for something to fit that key I’d found. He’d said he’d meet me there later. Well later had come and he wasn’t here, wasn’t answering his phone, wasn’t answering his texts.
Lily’s disappearance had shattered me. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. But in the context of Oma and Opa’s murders, it made sense. Hideous, gut-wrenching sense but logical nonetheless. If Ellis disappeared though . . . Gentle, compassionate, straight-shooting Ellis. He’d pushed me to follow my dreams, study creative writing when I’d thought I should choose something sensible like psychology or education, recommended me to his uncle who ran the café where I got my first job, told me I was crazy for going out with Jason, that he was driven by ambition and would never understand me, that I could never be truly happy with him. We’d fought about that. I’d been hurt, resentful. Had that been the beginning of the end? When we’d started drifting apart? He’d gone back to Sydney, and I’d thought everything was fine between us, but somehow he’d slipped away, quietly, without fuss, as he did everything. Fewer texts, fewer phone calls, until weeks and then months passed without us contacting each other. I’d thought he was out of my life, hadn’t even known he’d moved back to Adelaide. Now we’d reconnected and I realised how much I’d missed him. If anything happened to him . . . I wouldn’t be able to stand it.
I started pacing again. Inaction left me restless, crazy, and these past days I seemed to be stuck in limbo a lot. Should I call Detective Norton? Could you even report a person missing after only a few hours? Just because he hadn’t answered his phone? He’d probably laugh in my face. But I couldn’t just sit there like some wallflower at a school dance, waiting for Ellis to show up. I’d go over to his place. If he was there, and was just ignoring my messages, then at the worst he’d tell me to piss off. And if he wasn’t there . . . Well, I’d figure that out when the time came.
Grabbing my keys, I was almost out the door when my mobile rang. Not Ellis, but Jason. My hand closed over it tightly. There’d been a tension between us since last Friday when I’d walked out on him and spent the night at the Hilton. Neither of us had mentioned it, but there was a coolness to our conversations, a distance I hadn’t felt before. Staring at the phone, I let it ring three, four times, before accepting the call. He was a lawyer, after all, he might just have a useful suggestion.
‘Whoa, slow down,’ he said as I tried to blurt out everything at once. He sounded breathless, like he was walking. ‘What’s going on? Start at the beginning.’
I took a deep breath. ‘There is no beginning, Jason, except Oma and Opa’s murders. But the long and the short of it is that Lily’s still missing, and now Ellis has disappeared too.’
‘Ellis Fischer?’
I heard the tension in his voice, as I knew I would. He’d never been able to understand our friendship.
‘Yes, Ellis Fischer. Who else? He was at the funeral, remember? Look, I don’t have time to explain it all to you, Jason. I’ve gotta go.’
‘Hold on. I called to see how you are, and you just dump all this on me and then hang up?’ He’d stopped walking. I could hear traffic in the background. ‘You’re starting to worry me, Juliet. Tell me what’s going on. Where are you going?’
‘To Ellis’s place to see if he’s all right. He’s not answering his phone or his texts.’
‘Maybe he’s busy. He’s got a life, doesn’t he? Family, friends, a job?’
‘Of course he does, but I’ve been trying to get him for hours . . . It’s not like him.’
‘Okay, you’re worried, and fair enough.’ He hesitated, and I imagined him checking his watch. ‘Just give me five and I’ll come with you.’ I started to protest and he interrupted me. ‘No, listen. You’re upset, and with everything that’s happened to your grandparents and Lily, I don’t blame you. Besides, if you really think something has happened to him, it might not be safe to go over there on your own.’
I hesitated.
‘Humour me, all right?’ he said. ‘I know things have been a bit strained between us lately, but I love you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.’
As usual, he knew the right thing to say to persuade me. Or maybe I just couldn’t be bothered arguing with him. ‘All right. If you have to come, meet me there.’ I gave him the address and pocketed my phone.
Heading out the door, keys in my hand, I was surprised and confused to see two strangers on the porch.
‘Juliet Dunne?’ the shorter one asked, a slight frown on his brow. He had a bookish air, square-framed glasses making his eyes seem too large for his face. I had a flashback to the day Detectives Norton and Romanos showed up on my doorstep, confirming my identity in exactly the same way and a cold dread gripped my insides. When I didn’t speak, he continued. ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions.’
‘Is it Lily?’ I asked, trying to sound calm. ‘Have you found Lily? Is she alive?’
He flicked a glance towards his partner, taller, skinnier and younger, with heavy eyebrows that overshadowed his face. ‘No, it’s about your grandfather, Karl Weiss.’
I looked from one to the other, confused, becoming wary as I realised they hadn’t introduced themselves. ‘Did Detective Norton send you?’
He hesitated. It was only a split-second, but enough to put me on guard.
‘No, we’re not police.’ He pulled his wallet from his coat and handed me a business card. ‘Rudolf Henschke,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘I’m a historian. This is my research assistant, Simeon Dof.’ The younger man nodded in greeting. ‘My specialty is World War II migration. We’re searching for persons who may have come to Australia from Europe in the late 1940s following the Second World War.’
The card was glossy, embossed with his name: Professor Rudolf Henschke, International Historical Institute Berlin.
‘You’ve come from Berlin?’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m based in Sydney.’
Berlin. Sydney. The place names rang warning bells in my head. The calls on Lily’s phone were from Berlin and Sydney. And she’d gone missing, fearing for her life.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t help you.’
The younger man stepped closer as I started to ease the door closed. ‘But your grandfather migrated here, did he not? In 1949? Aboard the Fairsea?’
My gaze flew to his face and the adrenaline started flowing again. He had a strange accent that I couldn’t place.
‘We have been studying ships’ manifests from that time,’ he said. ‘Karl Weiss boarded the Fairsea in Naples on the third of December 1949, and disembarked in Sydney on the thirty-first of December of the same year. Karl Weiss was your grandfather, wasn’t he?’
‘My grandfather is dead. I can’t help you.’
I had the door half-closed when Dof stuck his foot in the gap. ‘Yes, you can,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to speak to your grandfather. We’ve come about the ring.’
The shock must have registered on my face, for Henschke’s expression changed, a flicker of satisfaction, a doubt confirmed. ‘We won’t take but a moment of your time. We’d just like to see the ring.’
‘What ring?’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He sighed. ‘Your grandfather’s signet ring. We know you have it. Your sister told us herself.’
I caught my breath. ‘You talked to Lily? Where is she? What have you done to her?’
‘We didn’t do anything to her. We asked about the ring; she told us what we needed to know. That she gave it to you.’
‘Then where is she?’
He exchanged a glance with Dof.
‘Where is she?!’
‘Your sister drives a hard bargain,’ said Dof. ‘We gave her some money. That is all. Now, the ring?’
I didn’t believe him. How could I? They’d made it clear they wouldn’t leave before they got what they wanted. Why would their treatment of Lily be any different? Only Lily wouldn’t have taken it, would have fought back, as Opa had fought back.
‘I don’t have it,’ I said, gripping the door tightly so they wouldn’t see my hands were shaking. ‘I gave it to the police. What do you want with it? Why is it so important?’
Henschke hesitated, eyeing me thoughtfully through his glasses. ‘The ring belonged to Major Walter Kubel, a Nazi officer responsible for looting Jewish and Masonic artefacts during WWII. He’s wanted to stand trial for war crimes in relation to the death of prisoners used in transportation of the goods. We believe he used a pseudonym to escape Europe after the war.’
I couldn’t quite take in what he was saying. ‘A pseudonym?’
‘Karl Weiss.’
Something erupted inside me. A volcano filled with all the emotions that had been building since the day of the murders, tightly held and straining to get out. ‘My grandfather was not a Nazi war criminal. He was a kind and gentle man. He would never hurt anyone.’
‘I know it is difficult to believe,’ said Henschke. ‘It’s a common reaction, and the man you knew may well have been as you say. These men, the ones who’ve remained hidden all these years, they’re masters of deceit; they take on the persona of their pseudonym, live it so fully, it becomes part of who they are. Walter Kubel was a master. He’s slipped out of our grasp more than once over the years, and if it hadn’t been for this ring, we would never have found him now, even if it is too late. There’s an inscription on the inside that will confirm it was him.’ He said it calmly, as if accusing people of being Nazi war criminals was an everyday occurrence.
I was shaking with fury. ‘No. You’re wrong. You’re dead wrong. And you came here looking for him, didn’t you? You came here and you killed him!’ I could barely breathe.
Dof moved closer, and Henschke put a hand on his arm. ‘Believe me, if we had found Karl Weiss before he died, killing him would have been the last thing on our minds. He would have been extradited to Germany and made to face up to what he did.’
‘He did nothing. Nothing, do you hear? He was not a Nazi. Now get out. Get off this property!’
Henschke looked like he wanted to say more, but I slammed the door shut, leaning my head on the cool wood. I heard their footsteps on the stairs, and then car doors slamming and an engine starting up. They drove away.
It couldn’t be true. They had the wrong Karl Weiss, the wrong man entirely. The man I knew would never have been involved in stealing artefacts and killing prisoners. He wasn’t capable of murder. It was unthinkable.
And yet, as I stood and listened to the grandfather clock tick away the minutes in the lounge room, my heartbeat rapid, breath shallow, I couldn’t rid myself of the image of the ring on Opa’s finger, the ornate W on a plain circlet of gold, and inside, the inscription: WK 1935. I’d thought it was the jeweller’s mark, carved in its creation. I’d been wrong. The W didn’t stand for Weiss or for Whemar, but for Walter. Walter Kubel.
~
‘There you are,’ said Jason when I arrived at Ellis’s flat. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, dropping my keys into my handbag. ‘I would have been here earlier but these guys came to the door as I was about to leave and—’
‘Okay, okay. I get it,’ he said. ‘I have to get back to the office, so let’s just get on with it.’
I snapped my bag shut. ‘I didn’t ask you to come, Jason.’ If he hadn’t called when he did, delayed me as I was walking out the door, I would have been long gone before so-called Professor Henschke and his side-kick knocked on my grandfather’s door.
‘No, I offered. But I didn’t know it would take you an hour to get here.’
‘Have you buzzed his apartment?’
‘I was waiting for you.’ He opened the gate with exaggerated aplomb and ushered me through.
When Ellis didn’t answer the intercom I tried the outer door and, finding it unlocked, went in. The corridor was dim, the light from the skylight above the door showing a wide entranceway with high ornate ceilings. A staircase rose directly ahead of us to the upper floors. I bypassed the stairs and went through an arched doorway and down a narrow corridor to Ellis’s flat at the back of the house.
‘Ellis?’ I called, giving a loud rap on the door.
‘Shhh,’ said Jason, glancing behind him at the door opposite. ‘Give him a minute, will you?’
I knocked again, louder. ‘Ellis! It’s me, Juliet.’
‘He’s not home,’ said Jason. ‘Let’s go. This is a waste of time.’
‘Not yet.’ I knocked again. ‘Ellis!’ Following a hunch I reached up and felt around on the top of the doorframe. His family always kept a spare key above the door. With any luck, Ellis hadn’t changed his habits. There was no key there, but a quick search revealed one taped behind a picture frame.
‘You can’t do that,’ said Jason as I showed him my find. ‘It’s breaking and entering.’
‘I’m not breaking anything. I have a key.’
‘Juliet, don’t.’
‘Look, I’m not going to just go away because he hasn’t answered the door. What if something’s happened to him?’
‘What makes you think something might have happened to him?’
‘He said he’d found something out about my grandparents that he needed to tell me. It sounded important.’
‘Yeah, so? He got held up.’
‘You don’t know Ellis. He would have texted me. My grandparents are dead, Jason; Lily is still missing. Even MacKenzie hasn’t found her. I assume she would have told you if she had.’
His face registered surprise. ‘MacKenzie? You texted me you’d found Lily. I didn’t know you still wanted her on the case.’
I gaped at him. ‘You called her off?’
‘Lily left of her own accord. It seemed to me like she didn’t want to be found.’
I glared at him. ‘Oh my God. Lily may have left of her own accord, but she’s in fear for her life. Tell MacKenzie to keep looking.’
‘Okay, I will.’
Turning my back on him, I grabbed the door handle to insert the key into the lock. I was surprised when it turned in my hand.
‘It’s open,’ I whispered. Either Ellis was inside and wouldn’t or couldn’t answer the door, or something had happened. He would never go out without locking up. I eased the door open.
With the afternoon sun rapidly disappearing, the apartment was in semi-darkness. Ellis was nowhere to be seen. On the table by the window, a light was on, illuminating papers strewn across the surface and a full cup of coffee. I touched the cup. It was cold.
‘He’s not in the bedroom or the kitchen,’ said Jason, coming to join me at the desk. ‘Jeez, he’s a slob, the kitchen looks like he hasn’t cleaned in a week.’
‘Looks like he left in a hurry, is what it looks like,’ I said, gazing around the room. An empty plate lay on the coffee table, along with a book, face-down, holding his place.
‘He probably just ducked out to Jetty Road for a coffee.’
‘He had coffee here.’ I shuffled through the papers, handwritten notes mostly, Ellis’s thoughts on paper. Karl and Grete with a big red circle around them, arrows pointing downwards like a family tree. Lily, arrows to Berlin, Munich and Sydney, and the signet ring, Hans Whemar, with another connection to the ring, and connected again to the ring, Walter Kubel, accompanied by the Nazi swastika. So he’d found that out on his own. The notes I’d made on Hans were there, and the passenger manifest for the Fairsea we’d found. And notes on Walter Kubel, a major in the SS.
‘What are you doing in here?’
I spun around to see a young Asian woman with short blonde hair standing at the door. She wore bike shorts and shoes and had a helmet and a backpack slung over her shoulder.
Jason stepped forward, but I put a hand on his arm to stop him. ‘I’m Juliet, a friend of Ellis’s,’ I said. ‘You must be Jeong.’
‘Yeah.’ She squinted at me. ‘How did you know?’
‘Ellis told me about you.’
‘Right, I saw you here the other day.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jason glance over at me.
‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ she continued. ‘What are you doing? Does Ellis know you’re here?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘He asked me to pick up some papers for him.’ I scooped the papers up off the desk. ‘He gave me a key, see?’ I held it up for her, wondering how I’d become such a good liar.
‘Hmph. That’s not like him at all. He doesn’t usually let anyone touch his stuff.’
I nodded noncommittally.
‘He’s been a little weird lately,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think he’s been a bit weird?’
‘Weird how?’
‘I don’t know. Secretive. Sneaking around. I mean, I know he’s working on something, and he’s always a bit snappy when he’s working, but . . . he almost bit my head off when I saw him leaving with that guy this morning.’
‘What guy?’
‘I don’t know. Tall dude, built like a boxer. Not the type Ellis usually hangs out with, you know? Gave me the creeps.’ She made a face.
A prickle went up my spine, remembering the guy we’d run into the night I was here. ‘That does sound strange. How old was this guy?’
‘Hell, I only got a glimpse of him. Young, I think. Twenty-something.’
Not the same guy then. ‘And you’d never seen him around before?’
‘What are you? A cop?’ She suddenly looked suspicious.
‘No, no, I’m just worried about him, like you are.’
She shrugged. ‘Look, I gotta go. When you see Ellis, tell him I picked up that stuff he wanted.’
‘I’m going to see him now,’ I said quickly. ‘I could take it to him.’
She stared at me for a minute as I tried to look trustworthy. ‘Yeah, all right. Hang on a sec.’ She went out the door and into the apartment across the hall, returning with a small brown package. ‘Tell him he owes me.’
She stumped out the back door in her bike shoes and a minute later I heard the side gate crash closed.
‘Are you done?’ said Jason. ‘Now that we have a witness to our break and enter and you’ve promised to deliver some unknown package that could contain anything from drugs to live ammunition?’
‘No one is going to charge us with breaking and entering,’ I said, gathering up the rest of the papers.
‘You’re not taking those, are you?’ He grabbed my arm. ‘Juliet, that’s theft. I could be disbarred.’
I stared at him. ‘I didn’t ask you to come down here, Jason. What did you think I was going to do, just knock on his door and go away when he didn’t answer?’
‘No, but I didn’t expect you to commit a felony either.’
‘They’re papers, Jason. Research he was doing for me. It’s hardly a felony.’
He didn’t reply, just glanced at his watch, then swore under his breath.
‘I’ve gotta go. I’m late for a meeting.’ He rested his hands on my shoulders and looked down at me, exasperation clear on his face. ‘We’ll talk about it later, all right?’ With a peck on the forehead, he hurried out before I could say anything else.
‘You can talk about it later,’ I muttered, scowling at the empty doorway.
I tucked the papers into my bag and took a last look around the apartment. Yeah, maybe Ellis had just gone down to Jetty Road, or been called out for work, or got held up with whomever he’d gone out with that morning. Maybe he’d forgotten to text me. But I didn’t think so. I locked the door and returned the spare key to its hiding spot. If Ellis had left that quickly, he may need it to get back in when he returned.