The Coldest Case by Martin Walker (mobi reader android txt) 📕

between what they read in the French media and the spoon-fed propaganda in their own East German press. Looking back, there were some clues that their thinking was a bit dissident.’

‘Did Jacques and Sylvie encourage this kind of free thinking?’

‘Yes, I think they did but not in any subversive way. They had no children of their own but they were really proud of the kids they taught and loved to see the way they interacted with us.’

Jacques and Sylvie had kept a scrapbook with sections on each of the youngsters, growing up, playing sports, their school reports, their work in the vineyards. Leafing through it one day with Sylvie, Rosa said she’d seen photos of a couple of boys, almost young men, whom she recognized.

‘I’d seen them in the Mairie back in Belleville where they were working in registrations,’ she said. ‘I’d thought they were French. I assumed it was some sort of exchange scheme. It took some time for me to realize what their presence really meant.’

‘Which was . . .?’ asked Bruno.

‘To insert them into French life as French citizens, presumably while still taking their orders from East Berlin.’

‘What year was that?’ Bruno asked.

‘Nineteen eighty-six, a time of great controversy in the Belleville Mairie with most of the younger people thinking Gorbachev was wonderful and most of the old guard fearing that he was betraying the Revolution.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I was confused. Gorbachev was such a breath of fresh air, an idealist, a believer in peace after all those dreadful old men in the Kremlin. But I was worried that he was naive and that he could end up destroying the good things about socialism along with the bad.’

She sat forward and tapped Bruno on the knee. ‘You have to understand that I was born in the war. It was clear to me that the Nazis had been defeated in the field by the Red Army and in France by the Resistance, which was mainly Communist. You’re too young to remember but the Party used to call itself the party of les quarante milles fusillés, the forty thousand martyrs, executed by the Nazis for their courage. That was how I was brought up – that it was Communism that beat Hitler, not American capitalism and British imperialism. And without the Soviet Union, what would save us from the new fascism that we could all see at work in the Vietnam war?’

‘So you were torn,’ Bruno suggested. ‘You were trying to believe two contradictory things at the same time, that Gorbachev was great but that he could imperil everything the Soviet Union stood for.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. And everything in my life, all my friends, my workmates, even friends who were not in the Party, we were all instinctively on the left. We’d all been thrilled by ’68 in Paris, the general strike, the state giving in to the workers’ demands, the Americans getting a bloody nose in Vietnam. I got married then to a comrade who worked on l’Humanité, the party newspaper. We had our son. It seemed we were on the right side of history. And yet at the same time, Belleville was changing. New housing estates, new people, a lot of hostility to the Algerians and you could feel the Party’s grip on the working class start to weaken. You could see the old working class starting to dissolve, just like my marriage. We divorced in ’84.’

‘How long did you stay at the Mairie?’

‘My department was closed at the end of ’89 after the Berlin Wall came down. I got a job in a travel agency and then an old comrade helped me into a better job on the railways, the international office where my languages were useful. When I retired, I came down here where my son works in the tourism office. He married a woman from Sarlat, so I have my son, my grandchildren, my garden.’

‘Did you ever hear again from Jacques and Sylvie Lefort at the orphanage?’ he asked.

‘No, although I wrote to them a couple of times, but never had a reply. I tried to telephone the orphanage but it had been closed.’

‘How many French-speaking youngsters did you see at this orphanage?’

There had been at least twenty that she had seen but there may have been more, Rosa explained. The Leforts had been running the orphanage for more than twenty years, for girls as well as boys. There had been a separate small house for girls.

‘And those faces at the Mairie whom you recognized from the Leforts’ scrapbook, did you ever see them again?’

‘No, and the Party was dying along with the old guard. So many Mairies were lost as the Party shrank. Mitterrand killed it. He brought the Party into his government in ’81. We thought it was the start of great things but he slowly embraced us to death. No, I never saw the Leforts again, but I often wondered what had happened to those young German boys with their perfect French and French identity cards. What on earth they must have thought as their own country dissolved and they were stuck in France.’

‘Did you recognize those names, Henri Zeller and Max Morilland?’

She shook her head. Bruno pulled from his small briefcase a file with the reconstituted photos of the two men. ‘Do you recognize either of them?’

She took them and examined them closely, then extracted a pair of spectacles from her shirt pocket and peered at them again. ‘I remember this one,’ she said, pointing at Max. ‘He was a favourite of Jacques and Sylvie and I met him with them, but neither of the two names you mentioned rings a bell. And I don’t recall ever seeing the other one. Which was the one you think was murdered?’

‘Max, the one you recognized. Like Henri, he had a fake French identity, birth certificate, school records and reports – all simply made up at the Mairie.’

‘Do you know what happened, how Max was killed?’ she asked.

‘He and Henri had been