He caught his breath. Several seconds had passed. He had scratched himself on the face and it stung. It bled a little, but he was not worried about the injury. He was used to such things.
It was perhaps ten meters up to the house. He could move in deep shadow except for where a narrow band of faint light came in from the street. He let his heart quiet down before he made a run for it.
He pressed himself against the wall, slipped carefully up to the cellar access he had aimed for. It was a classic old design with two doors that raised up. Perhaps in the past they had brought in wood and coal this way. An iron rod sat over the doors, secured with a padlock. Cutting open the lock with the powerful bolt cutters was a moment’s work. He put it in his pocket and then lifted away the iron rod, opened one door, and slipped down. The stairway was narrow and steep. He listened but heard nothing, then turned on the flashlight which he had covered with a cloth so that it only shone with a thin beam. Along the side of the stairs ran a slide that confirmed his theory that the cellar doors had been an intake for fuel.
The door into the cellar was unlocked. When he opened it he was met by an odor of paint. He let the flashlight play across floor and walls, then took the cloth off the flashlight so he could form an impression of how the room looked. Sure enough, along one wall cans of paints were stacked.
A passage led into the inside of the cellar. On either side openings could be seen. He passed a space that was almost completely filled by an old oil furnace. Next was a spacious laundry room with a large, obsolete semiautomatic washing machine, a couple of stainless-steel rinse tubs and a dryer of a centrifuge type he remembered from his childhood. The laundry room had surely not been used for many years.
He could picture his mother lugging wash back and forth in the passage. She had always been slender, but tough when it came to physical work.
At the far end was a storeroom for old garden furniture and other leftover rubbish and at the end of the passage a door. He opened it and was met by a landscape of furniture, boxes piled on each other, antique trunks and much else. From the ceiling garment bags and chandeliers were hanging. On the opposite wall a stairway led up to a door.
He looked around and quickly determined that he was in luck. All the windows were covered with black paint. He could turn on the lights without anyone seeing from outside. The switch was most likely at the top of the stairs. He made his way there and turned on the lights. The cellar was bathed in a clinical white glow.
Here his mother had undergone an abortion in 1944.
He could spot where the operation occurred. In her diary she described the pipes that ran along the ceiling above the place where it all happened-the rape, the conception, as well as the expulsion of the ten-week-old fetus. Two pipes that ran parallel along the entire long side and the bed had stood where the one pipe suddenly turned off. It all tallied. Perhaps the bed that stood not far from there was the same one? A solid piece of furniture in some kind of dark wood.
It was Bertram von Ohler who committed the rape, but for the abortion he had help from his father, the renowned skillful gynecologist Carl von Ohler, and Bertram had served as his assistant.
Two days later Anna Andersson had turned twenty.
Karsten Haller went down the stairs and collapsed on the bottom step. He wept. Was this what he had wanted to see? Was it the cellar that subconsciously had been his goal?
Suddenly steps were heard that echoed from the house. Karsten got up quickly and took a few steps up the stairs, but realized that he would never make it up in time to turn off the lights. The steps were heard more and more clearly. Instead he ran back down in the cellar and looked around for someplace to hide. The door to the cellar opened and he positioned himself behind some hanging garment bags.
He tried to breathe calmly. The bags smelled of mothballs. He had bumped into one of them and it rocked slowly on its hook. He reached out his hand to stop the movement.
Careful steps were heard from the stairs. In a gap between the bags he glimpsed first a pair of legs, then the trunk, and finally Professor von Ohler’s dogged face. He recognized him from the newspaper. Karsten suspected, considering the strained expression, that the stairs were a worry for the Nobel Prize winner.
Where did the professor intend to go? What was he doing in the cellar? It did not seem normal, staggering down into a cellar this late. It was past ten. Karsten peeked out. They were perhaps seven or eight meters from each other. If Ohler were to turn in behind the massive dining room chairs that were to the right of Karsten, there was a great risk that he would be discovered. A narrow corridor, surrounded by moving boxes, led straight up to the hiding place.
The old man shuffled along, supported himself against something and muttered angrily. He was coming closer and closer. By the chairs he turned and in doing so came into the corridor. Haller held his breath. What should he do? Silence the old man and run away? He had an advantage and that was the element of surprise. True, the cellar was illuminated but with a quick charge out of the cellar, the same way he had come, the professor would perhaps not even have time to realize what happened, much less create an impression of the fugitive’s appearance.
He would fling himself forward, bump into the old man so that he fell over the boxes and then take to his heels.
Suddenly the professor stopped. Karsten heard a rattling, metal against metal. The old man was muttering something again and with his feet dragging went back toward the stairs. It took him a minute to make his way up to the door. Karsten could see how he rested between every other step and he heard the labored breathing.
The light was turned off and the door up to the house closed. Karsten exhaled. The beating of his heart slowed down somewhat. His armpits and palms were soaked with sweat. The sense of unreality made him collapse on a trunk. He had found himself perhaps two meters from his mother’s tormentor, the rapist and illegal abortionist Bertram von Ohler.
What had the old man been doing in the cellar? The whole thing seemed suspicious. That clanging of metal could mean only one thing: The professor had left something behind in the cellar, a metal object, most likely a smaller item.
Karsten waited for ten minutes before he once again slipped up the stairs and turned on the lights. He followed the professor’s path, turned by the chairs and took the narrow corridor between the boxes, searching with his eyes for an explanation.
In a carton, one tab of which was open, he found the answer. In the bottom of an old can that had once contained a kilo of ground coffee was a sturdy key and two smaller ones, connected with a ring.
Karsten Haller immediately saw where they would lead. To a Hauptmann safe. He had seen a similar set of keys at his uncle’s office in Windhoek. Hauptmann was one of the more well-known manufacturers of safes during the interwar period, and according to his uncle the most reliable producer. Karsten recognized the H that formed the bit of the key.
According to Uncle Helmuth this was a foolproof safe with triple-locking mechanism made of the most refined Krupp steel.
Karsten fished up the keys and weighed them in his hand. He smiled. Uncle Helmuth, he thought, you and your safe, whose contents you so anxiously guarded: an old revolver, a bundle of South African rand and an even thicker pack of American dollars, the family photos from Germany, and a stack of pornographic pictures. You thought no one knew that you were a relatively rich man and that, despite your racist rhetoric, you had a certain fondness for pictures of young black boys. But Karsten had figured out where the key was. One day when his uncle was out on the farm in Bero he had opened to check what it was that Helmuth so carefully concealed from the rest of the family.