Paul Hankar said, “They didn’t seem to know exactly what this infection was, but they were very excited about it. Apparently they had used it against the resistance in Poland and also in France. They said that it had come from Romania.”
“I see. Any mention of mensen van de nacht?”
“The night people? As far as I’m concerned, that was only a hysterical rumor. It started to spread when people were discovered around the city with all of the blood drained out of them. Sometimes a whole family would be found in their apartment, grandparents, mothers and fathers, even babies. cut open, and their hearts pulled out. But in many cases their doors were locked on the inside and nobody could work out how anybody could have gotten in or out.”
“How do you think they were killed?”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe in anything supernatural. Once or twice, some of our people who had gotten sick were seen by witnesses in the vicinity of these tragedies, but we never found any conclusive evidence that they were responsible.”
I said, quietly, “Ann was killed like that.”
“What?”
“They opened her up. Then they took out her heart and drained all the blood out of her.”
Paul Hankar’s mouth tightened, but he didn’t say anything. I watched him, and smoked, and eventually I said, “Is there anything else you can tell me? It doesn’t matter how trivial you think it is, it might help me to find out who killed her.”
“And then what, after you’ve found out who killed her? That won’t bring her back.”
“I know. But it might stop it from happening again.”
He blew out smoke, and shrugged. “I know very little, really. Ann kept her ears open whenever she was in the company of German officers, and once or twice she heard them discussing the killings, especially the one on Minderbroeder Straat, when twenty-three people died, including two nuns.
“The Germans never said anything to connect these massacres directly with their Romanian infection, but Ann told me more than once that she had a feeling that they might be associated. One of the SS officers said something like, ‘At last the Romanians are being of some use to us.’ And, ‘The sicker they are, the more blood they want.’ Also, one of our wireless operators managed to intercept some coded messages which were sent to Antwerp from the Sixth Army in Bucharest.”
“Really?”
“We could only pick up bits and pieces. But they kept referring to ‘carriers,’ in the sense of people who carry an infection.”
“These messages. did they contain any names?”
“What do you mean?”
“Romanian names. It could help us to find out what this infection actually is, and where it came from.”
“As I remember, only one Romanian name. Dorin Duca. It came up several times. It was not completely clear, because the messages were so fragmentary, but it appeared that somebody called Duca was supposed to be assisting the operation in Antwerp. However we never came across any Duca, so I doubt if he actually came here. We keep a very close check on who comes into Antwerp, believe me, and who leaves.”
The boy arrived with a bottle of apple schnapps and a bottle of lemonade, and two very small glasses. Paul Hankar immediately filled up his glass, knocked it back and filled it up again. “If the Allies hadn’t taken the city, there would have been no resistance left by Christmas.”
“What did you do when your people became infected?”
“I told you. We isolated them, broke off all contact. We couldn’t jeopardize any of our operations.”
“So I could talk to some of them, if I needed to?”
Paul Hankar shrugged. “I think many of them got very sick indeed, so maybe not.”
“How sick?”
Paul Hankar looked from left to right, avoiding my eyes. “Well, they are dead now,” he said at last. “You understand for our own protection that we had to dispose of them.”
“How many?”
“Altogether? Maybe thirty-five, thirty-six.”
“Do you want to tell me how you did it?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you want to tell me how you disposed of them?”
“Does it matter?”
“Actually, yes, it matters a great deal.”
He lifted his hand with his finger pointing like a pistol. “We shot them in the back of the head. Then we threw their bodies into the Scheldt.”
“OK. I was afraid of that.”
“We did something wrong?”
I shook my head. “You did what you thought was right. I can’t blame you for that.”
“You think this was possibly easy? All through the darkest times of the occupation, we had trusted these same people with our very lives, and they in their turn had implicitly trusted us. They were not only friends but relatives, some of them — fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters.”
“Sure.” I didn’t like to tell him that shooting a Screecher could only make things a thousand times worse. The only saving grace was that they had thrown their bodies into the river.
We sat in silence for a while. Eventually Paul Hankar picked up another paper napkin and blew his nose on it. “I am very sad about Ann,” he said. “She was always so careful not to compromise herself. I always thought that she and I would both survive.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t think that I was old enough to tell him how obvious it was that he had loved her.
He finished his drink and stood up. “I have to go now. I hope I have assisted you. If you find the people who murdered her — ”
“We will. But you won’t find out about it. Besides, what’s the point of telling an art-nouveau jewelry designer who died in 1901?”
He nearly managed to smile. “You know the name Paul Hankar?”
I nodded.
“I’m impressed. I didn’t know Americans had such culture.”
Man-trailing
We left the hotel just as the pregnant-looking longcase clock in the lobby chimed eight. Frank was straining so hard on his leash that he sounded like a Cajun squeeze-box. It hadn’t rained hard, but a fine wet mist had descended over the city, and the cobbles were all slippery and shiny. I could hear heavy bombers somewhere in the distance, but they were very far away. Drone, drone, drone. Then that crumpity-bump-crackle sound of anti-aircraft fire.
Corporal Little said, “Thirty-six of them, sir. Jesus. Do you know how far this could have spread? Half the city could be Screechers by now.”
“I don’t want to think about it. Let’s just concentrate on picking up the scent from Markgravestraat.”
We jolted our way back to Ann De Wouters’s apartment building. Somebody had taken the dead horse away. We were flagged down three times on the way by Canadian troops who wanted to check our papers, so it took us almost twenty minutes before we arrived there. “US Counterintelligence?” they asked, half respectfully and half disdainfully. Some of them were so young that their cheeks were still pink.
We were admitted to No. 5 by an old man in a saggy beige cardigan with a face the color of liver sausage. Frank snapped furiously at the old man’s worn-out slippers so that he almost had to dance upstairs to get away from him.
“He won’t hurt you,” I reassured him. “I promise you, he’s a friend to everyone.”
“I don’t have any friends who try to bite my feet,” the old man retorted.
“It’s not your feet, sir, it’s your slippers. He thinks they’re dead rats.”
We allowed Frank to have a good snuffle around Ann De Wouters’s room. We said nothing while he crossed from one side of the linoleum to the other, thrusting his head underneath the bed and into the curtained-off space where Ann De Wouters had hung her clothes. He spent a long time licking the dried blood that was spattered over the floor. Bloodhounds don’t identify scents with their noses, but with their tongues. I was hoping that the Screechers had left plenty of traces of saliva for him to pick up on.