On their way back, Jack notices the two other bedrooms. They are the only tidy rooms in the house. One is obviously Rick’s — guitar in the corner, red bedspread, cowboy boots. And across the narrow hall, a room with twin beds — one with metal rails.
In the kitchen once more, Froelich is feeding Elizabeth, and Jack is trying to avoid the sight without appearing to do so. Froelich puts down the spoon. “You’re not so hungry, bubby?” He wipes her mouth with a tea towel, takes her face in his hand and kisses her on the cheek. “Not too full for dessert, I think.” Elizabeth’s head moves diagonally from side to side. He puts his ear close to her lips, listens, then replies, “Soon, ja, don’t worry, Lizzie, look at Poppy, do I look worried?”
“Yeahh,” she groans, and Froelich laughs. “Okay, dizzy Lizzie”—and the girl smiles—“frizzy Lizzie,” says Froelich, and scoops her up in his arms. Her hands find one another around his back as Froelich carries her from the room.
After a moment, Jack hears him put a record on the hi-fi. He recognizes the throaty alto voice, “Du, du, du, macht mein kleines Herz in Ruh….” A popular German love song. It reminds him of what a beautiful language it is when women speak it. Like a woman in a man’s shirt.
Returning to the kitchen, Froelich reaches into the cupboard under the sink and lifts out a bottle of red wine. He fills two odd glasses and passes one to Jack, who politely raises it to his lips, though he can feel the home-brewed tannins working on his gut already.
“What does your lawyer say?” he asks. “About the chances of this going to a — what are the chances of an actual trial?”
“I think I need a detective.” Froelich leans back in his chair, cradling his wine against the crook of his shoulder. “I think this is a better idea.”
“You mean a private detective? Why?”
“Because the police don’t find this man from the camp.”
Why does Froelich use the word “camp?” Jack wonders. Dora was the code name for an underground factory, wasn’t it?
“Is this the … the ‘war criminal’ you were mentioning last night?” Jack is startled by a hot breath on his hand under the table. The dog has come in.
Froelich begins to speak, staring at the kitchen wall as though describing a scene unfolding there, and he tells the story of seeing Oskar Fried at the marketplace. “If I had told the police immediately,” he says finally, “perhaps the little girl would be alive today.”
“Why?”
“Because he is a killer.”
“You told this to the police?”
“Yes, but they don’t believe me.”
“Why not, why would anyone lie about a thing like that?”
“They think I protect my son’s alibi.”
Jack takes a deep, even breath, willing his face to stay cool, his voice merely concerned.
“Which camp was this, Henry? If you don’t mind my asking?”
“Dora.”
“Dora?” Jack repeats, as though hearing the name for the first time. And in a way he is.
Froelich bites his moustache where it straggles at the corner of his mouth, wine-stained. “The police have not find him — found him”—he reaches for the bottle again, pours—“and they don’t find either the air force man — forgive me, Jack, my English suffers this evening.”
“I wish my German were half-decent, Hank, you must get sick of speaking English all the time.”
“Not so much. I miss my language, but it is dead in any case, nicht wahr?” And drinks.
“What do you mean, ‘dead’?”
“You cannot use a language and make it to mean many things except the truth, you cannot—” Froelich stares at Jack then says, as though uttering a password, “Deutsch.”
Jack nods carefully in response.
“They torture it. The Nazis. And now there are many words that cannot any more remember themselves. The other meaning, the false one, is there always behind it like a coat, like a—nein, wie ein Schatten….”
“A shadow.”
“Ja. But I forget nothing. This is how I will help my son.”
He tips the bottle over Jack’s glass. “This man from Dora is here, and someone on this station knows this.” He looks up. “But they do not say it. And I know why.”
Jack refrains from swallowing. He waits.
Froelich says, “The West has need of these people.”
“What people?”
“People who have worked on technologies such as the rockets.” Jack keeps his gaze level. He knows the answers to the next questions, but it’s advisable to ask them anyway. “This guy worked on rockets?”
“Ja.”
“What? The V-2?”
“Ja.”
“At Peenemünde.”
“At Dora.”
“Dora?”
“Peenemünde is bombed.”
“That’s right, we bombed it. Canadians did that,” he adds, feeling foolish, like a schoolboy boasting. He wasn’t there. He was in England behind a desk, managing supply at an RAF station.
“The factory moved underground after the bombs, inside a mountain. The Nazis called it Dora,” says Froelich. “I was there.”
“With the V-2s?”
Froelich nods and falls silent.
Jack’s interest could almost douse his anxiety. If only he were simply sipping wine with Henry Froelich, listening to tales of a subterranean rocket factory. He pictures it: pristine concrete floor twelve storeys deep. A fifty-foot V-2 cradled on a rail car, its guts and brain exposed, triple gyroscope to guide it through space and time in a slow minuet. He sees the rocket roll up the sloping tracks to meet the night sky, through hatches camouflaged with rocks and pine trees; war is the grandmother of invention. Carefully the rocket is winched until it is erect on the test stand, pointing at the stars, tanks replete with the secret, crucial mix that will produce enough thrust to take it across the Channel to London in five minutes. Vengeance-2. Hitler’s secret weapon. Yet this is what will take us to the moon. This is what will keep us free. And Henry Froelich worked there.
“Did you work on the rockets themselves?”
Froelich nods.
“Holy liftin’,” says Jack quietly. Then, because he cannot resist, “Did you ever see one of them fired?”
Froelich shakes his head. Beneath the table, the dog groans and rests its chin on Jack’s foot.
“When I saw Dora, it was no longer a mystery how the pyramids were built. The rockets are built by slaves.”
“Slave labour,” says Jack. Somehow the addition of the word “labour” blunts the force of the first word, and he wonders if this is what Froelich meant a moment ago when he talked about words losing their memory.
“Hitler’s ‘secret weapon,’” says Froelich, draining his glass, getting up. “Slaves only are trusted to work, because we arrive but we do not leave.” He almost smiles. “We leave through the chimney.” He makes an upward spiralling motion with his finger.
“They had a crematorium? At Dora?” Jack swallows. “I didn’t know it was … a death camp.”
“Not extermination, no, but many workers die, and they burn bodies, otherwise more disease.” Froelich lifts the lid of a pot on the stove and stirs. “So you see they are not afraid that we will tell the secret, but they are terrified of sabotage. They are right, there is sabotage, but often they hang the wrong ones.” He picks up the bottle, finds it empty and bends to the cupboard once more. “Mornings, when I finish the shift, there are men hanging from ropes. Do you know how they hang them?”