Maxim wrote down the names, then took out the new camera and fiddled with it; presumably the gravestone was evidence of a sort.
"Are you looking for something?" The old man must have moved very softly to get within twenty yards of him unheard, although the quiet afternoon was in fact a steady rumble and distant clatter of farm machinery.
"Er… I was interested in a name. "
"One of those?" The old man jabbed his stick towards the marble. He had a face like a leather potato, all bumps and creases, and wore a thick clothjacket over-shirt buttoned to the neck, all grey and brown and far too hot for the day. But he was well past seventy, when the blood runs thin even in June.
"Brigitte Schickert. "
"Oh, her. Did he send you?"
He? Whichhe? Of course, the presumably-still-alive Rainer Schickert. Now we find out if they really don't know what became of him. "No, not her husband. Just a London lawyer wanting to know where she's buried. They don't tell you what it's all about, but they pay you for it. " He took a second picture and pocketed the camera. "I have an unfinished beer at the Wirtshaus. Would you like to join me?"
The solid old barrel of a body moved stiffly but not very carefully, like a heavy vehicle in low gear. Seeing the village again, from a new angle, Maxim could see other scars of the blast and its debris. The great linden tree, the traditional place for a village parliament, was lopsided even now from missing branches, and the nearest farmhouse was patched with un-matching brickwork and some of the window frames were too square to be old. But the signs of prosperity far outweighed those of damage: the new BMWs and Mercedes, freshly painted woodwork and the constant noise of machinery from the outhouses.
"A nice village, " Maxim commented. "How many farms is it?"
"It used to be three, now it's two. The Leistritz family packed up and sold out, just after the war. Two of the boys were killed in Russia, then their father was killed by The Bomber. The last boy couldn't keep it going."
"You lost more in the war than we did," Maxim said, and instantly felt he'd pitched it too strong.
But the old man nodded emphatically. "Yes, we did that. You're right. War is a terrible thing."
"What happened about the Leistritz farm?"
"That's it." The stick waggled at a great building nesting among its outhouses at the bottom of the village. "Karl Scholz bought most of the land and my father bought the house and the rest and gave it to me to run. It was a terrible business. "
Maxim said nothing more until they were back at the inn.
The old man's name was Brenner and he chosea Dunkeland a Korn – a very dark beer plus a chaser of the local heart-stopper that tasted somewhere between very young whisky and vodka. Purely out of tact, Maxim braced his brain cells for a kamikaze mission and opted to drink in parallel.
For a quarter of an hour, Brenner talked about the weather, the Common Market and taxes. When he had finished the first beer, Maxim asked: "Did you know the Schickerts well?"
"Not well, no. They only came in the last winter of the war, just a few months. Old Leistritz took them in – he got paid, naturally. Everybody was taking in women and children from the cities, away from the bombing, or storing their furniture for them. My father said he'd never known a season before when chairs and commodes were the best crops." He chuckled, and finished his Korn as well. "After 1941 the village was full of strangers. They even sent us some French and Belgians, people like that, to work the land. Our own lads were getting killed in Russia, so they sent us Belgians to play with their widows. War isn't just terrible, it's ridiculous."
"But you did know them?" Maxim persisted.
Brenner looked at him. "Him, yes, a bit. He had a glass eye. Something of a scholar, and Leistritzsaid he'd done farm work before. He liked him."
"And her?"
"Ach."Brenner banged his right hand on the head of his stick as if to knock some feeling back into it. "I hardly saw her. It was winter, she stayed indoors with the baby. "
"Of course. Would you like another drink?"
While the woman was bringing more beer and the bottle of Korn, three other men came in. One wore a city suit but was carrying the jacket; the other two were in farm clothes. Brenner called the one in the suit over and introduced him as Rolf Scholz.
"This young Englishman wants to know something about Frau Schicken- do you remember her? What was her first name?"
"Brigitte,"Scholz said.
"That's right."
Maxim asked what Scholz would drink. He wa^ a hulk of a man in his middle fifties, inches taller than Maxim and instinctively stooping under the low beams of the tap-room. He moved with a delicacy that emphasised his power, and he had a slow smile and a gentle handshake.
They drank and Scholz asked bluntly: "What did you want to know about her?"
"Nothing much… just that she was killed by the bomb."
"The Bomber." It was said just the way the woman and Brenner had said it,Das Kampßugzeug,like The Event, and Scholz saw Maxim's puzzlement. "It wasn'tjust a bomb, but a whole bomber. An American, a B-26. I don't know what was wrong with it, but it still had all its bombs on board when it came down there, behind the church."
Maxim had wondered about that: the blast effect had seemed pretty widespread for just a bomb. Now they were talking about perhaps four tons of bombs toppling out of the sky one morning when Dornhausen thought the war had passed it by. And not even an air raid warning to send them into the cellars.
Maxim thought of asking if the bomber's crew had bailed out, but decided it might be tactless.
"She didn't actually get killed by The Bomber," Scholz went on. "She died later. Oh, there would be seven or eight who died later, in hospital."
Maxim sat for a while, absorbing that thought. "She didn't die here then?"
"That's what he said." Brenner sounded testy.
"You didn't help take her to hospital, or anything?"
Scholz took out a meerschaum pipe that was burned to a dark orange and blew through it. "The Americans did that. They were quick with it, too. Their medical service was probably the best thing about their Army."
Maxim glanced at him sharply and Scholz smiled a slow smile back. "I was in the Army then. Field engineers. But I picked up glandular fever and liver trouble in Italy that winter and I was still at home on sick leave when the whole thing finished. So… I just privately discharged myself and let the Americans think I'd been here all along. " Maxim instinctively smiled at him, then despised himself for the silly band-of-brother-soldiers stuff. Anyway, they didn't know he was a soldier.
"Do you know how badly she was hurt?", Brenner burst out: "No, we don't! D'you think when The Bomber came down it just killed twenty people and left the rest of us drinking Korn and singing fal-lal-lal? It blew the whole village upside down. They took another twenty people to hospital and I had the dairy roof down on my back and it took them two hours to dig me out. I was in bed for a week with concussion and the doctor said at first he thought I'd got a broken pelvis. And my leg's never been properly better since. No, I don't know how badly she was hurt. Just badly enough to die, I imagine."
Scholz listened gravely, taking pinches of tobacco and pressing each gently into the pipe with his thumb, then sucking noisily to make sure it wasn't too tight. "I think I remember seeing her. She got it in the back of the neck. With neck wounds you can't tell, it could be nothing or everything. Her husband, Rainer, he wasn't hit but he went in with them. He spoke the best English. Then he came back the next day – I think it was the next day – and told us who'd died. Then hecame again a couple of days after and took the baby. "
"He just took it away?" Maxim was surprised. "It was only five months, wasn't it?"