Page 47 of Hell to Pay

Dr. Eltschig looked at the other trustees, then at me, and said, “You’ve told a most compelling tale. The board will have to confer.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Alix said. “Confer about what? Do you want to find the thing or don’t you? You have a window of opportunity here. Otherwise, what’s to stop my grandmother from waltzing through the tunnel again, once you’re not looking, and getting her tiara back?”

I said, “Possibly not the best argument. What would stop me? Oh, any number of things. Sealing the entrance here? Locking the door to the tunnel? Posting a guard? Not wishing to be apprehended at the airport as an international jewel thief? I don’t run very fast these days, and I hear the food in prison is terrible. Or, perhaps, my honor. The one thing we can still call our own, after everything else is lost. I find myself unwilling to place it in jeopardy.”

“How would you be placing it in jeopardy?” Alix was born to argue. “That tiara is yours. It was your grandmother’s, it was your mother’s, and now it’s yours.”

“Not officially,” I said.

“Oh, for—” she began, then threw up her hands. “Fine. Your call.Germans.”

Dr. Eltschig said, “Perhaps you’d like to sit in the cathedral for a bit, Frau Stark, while the board confers.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

How to describe the feeling of standing in the nave again after nearly eighty years? The columns, walls, and arches of pure white, and the dome overhead. The magnificent altar, which I’d once told my mother was “as beautiful as an Easter egg,” with its pink and green marble. The gilded pulpit, too, its solemnity considerably reduced by theveritable army of naked cherubs that frolicked around it. I walked slowly to the front, to the family pew, on Sebastian’s arm. There was, as always, nothing marking it out as special, for we were all, my father had explained, equal in the eyes of God.

How,howhad Hitler, born and raised Catholic, got that so wrong? How had nobody ever set him right?

I genuflected as always, entered the pew, and sat. Just sat, and let the peace and beauty of the place enter me, and the memories, too. The others sat behind me. I could hear them there.

If I’d been better at kneeling, I would have done so, but my kneeling days, alas, are over. I bowed my head instead and said the words silently.

…And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.Oh, how important, and yet how difficult! Even to see one’s own trespasses can take such an effort, and as for forgiveness … forgiveness is harder still. Forgiveness is, for an obstinate person like me, at times nearly impossible.

Footsteps on the stone. Not the board’s; this was one person, and it was a woman. I could tell by the lighter tap of her heels. The footsteps stopped beside my pew, and I turned my head.

It was indeed a woman. Not a young one. Sixty, perhaps, with a mix of blonde and silver hair pulled back, dressed in a tweed skirt and cardigan with sensible shoes. A practical woman. She said in German, “Excuse me. I understand you are Marguerite von Sachsen.”

“Yes,” I said cautiously. “And you are?”

“You’re wondering how I know,” she said. “Dr. Eltschig told me. He’s a member of this congregation, you see, and I am the organist, Frau Martin.”

“Ah,” I said, and extended my hand. “You have a beautiful instrument.” Her fingers were long, as an organist’s should be.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m very fortunate. But if I may say—if I may tell you?—”

“Yes?” I said.

“My great-grandfather,” she said, “was the organist here when you were young. Herr Rudolf Ortmann. You may not remember, of course.”

“But of course I remember,” I said with delight. “How beautifully he played. I was just thinking of it. And you caught the love of the organ from him? Or from your grandfather or grandmother, perhaps?”

“No, I’m afraid not. It’s a bit of a tale.”

“Sit, then, and tell me.”

She sat beside me in the wooden pew. Two practical, sensible German ladies, at ease in God’s house, because its rituals, the sights and sounds and scents here, had been part of our lives forever.

“He was killed in the war,” she said. “Great-Grandfather. I didn’t know him.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “He was an older man, I think. Of course, to a young girl, all adults seem old. Was it the fire?”

“No. He was called up to theVolkssturm,there at the end, to defend the city. When the Russians came.”

“But surely he was too old.”

“Sixty. And a gentle person, by all accounts. I doubt he did much damage to anyone, but he was killed all the same.”