The Lie (18 page)

“You mean you want to tell me more lies?”

“No. I want to tell you the truth.”

“I already know the truth.”

“All you know is what happened,” Kate said. “That’s bad enough, but still a long way from the truth.”

Paulie remained silent.

“You may as well let me in,” she said, “because I’m not going away until I’ve told you everything.”

Paulie abruptly turned and walked back to his studio. He heard the door close behind him, then Kate’s footsteps on the tile
floor as she followed.

Paulie sat down and watched her enter the big, sky-lighted room. She looked at the paintings scattered about, studiec the
unfinished canvas resting on the easel, and gazed througa the wide picture window at the sea sparkling in the sun far below.
This was the first time she had ever been to his house, and he thought she might be trying to memorize everything because
she knew she would never be there again.

Finally, she sat down. “I did kill your mother and father,” she told him. “I shot them, but it wasn’t the way you think. I
was tricked… used. I was played for the worst kind of dunce.”

“By whom?”

“By the man you’ve been looking for. Klaus Logefeld.”

With effort, Paulie kept his emotions as controlled as Kate’s. “Exactly how did he do all this to you?”

“By lying about how my parents died. By telling me your father shot them in cold blood when they were unarmed and coming out
to surrender.”

“So you went to avenge their deaths by shooting my father while he was asleep in bed?”

“No. I wanted to talk to your father. I wanted to hear from his own lips exactly how my parents died.”

“With a gun in your hand in the middle of the night?”

“How else? By knocking on the door and inviting myself to dinner?”

Paulie swallowed dryly. “What did my father tell you?”

“That I’d been lied to. That my parents had actually come out shooting from behind a white flag. That they killed two of his
men and wounded him three times before he began firing back.”

“Did you believe him?”

“No, not really. But your father said he had photographs right there in a safe that would prove it was true.”

“So?”

Kate looked at Paulie. Her expression was one of thoughtful, cool reserve.

“So I let your father get out of bed and open his safe,” she said. “But then your mother started shooting from under her bedsheet,
and your father was diving at me, and I was rolling on the floor shooting for my life.” Kate paused and breathed deeply. “When
it was over, I’d ended up doing what I swear to God I hadn’t wanted to do at all.”

Paulie said nothing.

Her eyes were moist. “You think. I’m lying, don’t you?”

“You’ve lied about everything else. Why not this?”

“What if you saw photographs and heard tapes of everything I’ve just told you?”

“You mean you actually have such things?”

“No. But I know who does have them.”

“You mean we’re back to Logefeld again?”

Kate nodded. “Those pictures and tapes are his entire reason for setting me up.”

“So he could do
what
?”

“So he could pressure Nicko Vorelli through me. So he could tell Nicko I’d be jailed for two murders if Nicko didn’t do as
he asked.”

“What was he asking for?”

“For Nicko to include him on his staff for that big human rights conference at Wannsee on the thirteenth.”

“Vorelli agreed?”

“Yes. If he didn’t agree, or if anything were to happen to Klaus, three extra copies of the pictures and tapes would be hand-delivered
to the authorities. What else could Nicko do?”

“What your dear Nicko could have done,” said Paulie softly, “is just say to hell with you, and either turn the bastard over
to the police or quietly blow him away and bury him somewhere.”

“Is that what you would have done?”

Paulie blinked, feeling slow and tired. “I have a much more important question. I’d like to know why an old-time terrorist
hood should be going to so much trouble to get himself invited to some bullshit human rights meeting.”

“Klaus doesn’t look at it as a bullshit meeting. He sees it as something he’s been preparing for all his life.”

“How has he been preparing? By making bombs?”

“In all fairness, he’s been away from that sort of thing for more than sixteen years.”

“Doing what? Preaching the Gospel?”

“Hardly. According to Nicko Vorelli, he
has
made something of a name for himself as a professor of political science.”

“Where?”

“Currently, at the University of Rome.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“Have you heard of Professor Alfred Mainz?”

“I’ve read one of his books. What about him?”

“He’s Klaus Logefeld.”

Paulie was stunned.

“When did he change his name?”

“I don’t know. I never knew him as Alfred Mainz until he set out to use me,” Kate explained.

“Do you at least believe what I said about how I shot your parents?” she asked.

Paulie turned to look at her. “How would my believing change anything? My mother and father would still be dead. And you would
still be the one who killed them.”

P
AUL
W
ALTERS DROVE PAST
the building on Rome’s Via Sistina where Professor Alfred Mainz had his apartment, parked three blocks away, then walked
back through the early afternoon sunshine.

A block from the house, he stopped at a pay phone and called Mainz’s home number. He did not expect any answer. Having checked
the professor’s lecture schedule, he knew that Mainz would be busy at the university for another four hours. But Paulie was
still cautious about possible surprises.

After six rings, he hung up and began walking again, trying to keep himself still inside. He had decisions to make, and thinking
about them had kept him awake for most of the night. Now all he was left with were tired eyes and an aching head.

He opened a huge, nineteenth-century door, crossed a cobbled courtyard, and entered a dimly lit vestibule. A brass-trimmed
directory listed Dr. Alfred Mainz as being in apartment 4-B, and Paulie climbed three flights of stairs without meeting anyone.
When he reached Mainz’s apartment, he picked the lock and entered.

Paulie did a quick run-through: foyer, living room, kitchen, dining area, bathroom, study, bedroom, a closet made into a photographer’s
darkroom. Klaus Logefeld lived alone, a seemingly orderly man with no frills or female touches. The bright apartment had sunlight
streaming in from the south and high-key prints and paintings on the walls.

Paulie began a detailed search of one room at a time. In a closet of the study, he came upon a locked metal file cabinet.
He worked it open with one of his skeleton keys. The cabinet had three drawers, which Paulie went through front to back. He
found a cluster of notebooks filled with handwriting, along with groups of manila file folders and some video-and audiocassettes.

Paulie found what he was looking for at the rear section of the bottom drawer, in a folder labeled with the single word
Kate
. A large white envelope contained still photographs and two small audiocassettes held together by rubber bands. He put them
on Logefeld’s desk, took a cassette player from a wall cabinet crammed with audio and phonographic equipment, and sat down
with what he had.

Paulie started with the infrared pictures of Kate in the dark of the woods and slowly followed each shot in sequence as she
entered his parents’ house and climbed the stairs to their bedroom. The first voice he heard on the audio was his father’s,
saying, “Peg? We have company.”

From there on Paulie did his best to synchronize the dialogue with the photographs. His hands were shaking so badly that everything
was soon hopelessly out of synch.

Not that it really mattered. Little doubt remained as to what was happening and who was saying what to whom.

So Kate had
not
lied. Logefeld
had
tricked and used her. She
had
fired only when she would have been shot dead herself if she had not. Logefeld had all but squeezed the trigger.

Heart pounding, he rose from Klaus Logefeld’s desk and replaced the pictures and audiotapes in the files exactly as he had
found them. Then he took a last careful look around to make sure that everything was just as it had been when he arrived,
and left the apartment.

Paulie had seen where Klaus Logefeld lived. Now he wanted to see him in the flesh, hear the sound of his voice, listen to
what Professor Alfred Mainz had to say.

* * *

A lot of standees were pressed into the rear of the university auditorium. Paul Walters edged in among them and looked at
the man behind the lectern.

Dr. Mainz was tall and well-built, with a strong, sculpted head and a graceful way of using his hands, arms, and even his
body as he spoke. His Italian held no trace of a German accent, and his amplified voice was both grave and portentous.

The professor was the quintessential public man, a speaker, a solid presence. His audience of hundreds was totally still.
Alone on the platform, he projected his beliefs with the weight of an unstoppable force. This afternoon his words were delivered
in the nature of a warning: fascism, once thought to be dead, suddenly had a new and frightening future in the world.

He declared that Hitler and Mussolini had descendants springing up after all—that their legacy did not just condone violence,
that it
was
violence; that fascism was a form of revenge that history adopted in an age of indifference and moral failure; that its second
springtime was a new plague, flowering as a doctrine of vengeance; that ethnic cleansing was simply thinking with one’s blood
instead of one’s brains, while more and more blood was being spilled.

From Professor Alfred Mainz, these ideological declamations carried the sound of bugles.

Paul Walters found the accumulated pain of actually seeing and hearing his parents’ final moments, of his unspeakable sorrow,
and of his rage at the man responsible pressing at the limits of his control.

I’d better go before I blow his fucking head off
.

He was well outside the hall and moving fast when he heard the applause behind him.

It sounded like rain.

Not bugles.

K
LAUS
L
OGEFELD WAS IN HIS GRANDFATHER’S HOUSE
. It was late afternoon and they were going over the diagrams and floor plans of the Wannsee Museum and Conference Center.
The doorbell rang.

The two men looked at each other.

“Sometimes people get lost and need directions,” said the major. “I’ll go and see.”

“No. Just wait here. I’ll go.”

Klaus slid his charts into a drawer and walked to a front window. Peering out between closed curtains and some bushes, he
saw the partially obscured figure of a man at the door. He could not see the man’s face. Nor could he see anyone else.

He took an automatic out of a shoulder holster and released the safety. Then he put the piece inside his belt, buttoned his
jacket over it, and opened the door.

Nicholas Vorelli smiled at him. “How nice to see you again, Professor.”

Klaus stood there.

When am I going to learn about this man?

“May I come in?” asked Nicko.

Klaus Logefeld stepped aside and Nicko entered the house. He walked into the room where the old man was sitting and made a
small formal bow with his head.

“I’m Nicko Vorelli,” he said. “You must be Klaus’s grandfather.”

The old man said nothing. Nicko chose a wooden chair facing some windows and sat down.

“What a wonderfully peaceful place you have, Major,” he said. “Just sitting here and looking out over the lake must be comforting.”

“Like the grave,” said the old man.

Nicko nodded. “That too.”

His throat clotted with tension, Klaus spoke for the first time. “You do have a way of surprising me, Dr. Vorelli. What’s
happening now?”

“We’re getting close to the thirteenth, which means we have to do some serious talking.”

“I thought we had already done that.”

“Not really, Professor.”

Klaus went over and sat down opposite Nicko and his grandfather. He had the sense of being shoved onstage in the middle of
a play without a script.

“So far,” said Nicko, “neither of us has been entirely honest. Now it’s time to stop playing games.”

Nicko settled himself in his chair and deliberately studied Klaus. “I know considerably more than you think. I know that you
went into Wannsee again the other night, this time with your grandfather. I know about the weapons and explosives you brought
there. I know exactly where you cached everything. And I certainly know you have a lot of explaining to do.”

Klaus Logefeld sat unmoving, and for several moments he felt as if a devil’s toll had been exacted from his flesh.

“I must say you’re taking it well,” he finally said.

“What makes you think that? Because I’m not ranting and raving?”

Klaus did not answer.

“I’m not a ranter and raver, Professor. If I’m provoked enough, I simply remove the provocation.”

“You mean you’ve removed everything we brought into Wannsee the other night?”

“No. It’s all still there.”

“Why?” asked Klaus.

“Because considering who and what you are, I pretty much expected it.”

“Then it doesn’t bother you?”

Nicko’s smile approached the benign.

“If it bothered me, you’d be floating in the Tiber right this minute.”

“We both know better than that.”

“You mean because of those pathetic pictures and tapes you have of our little Kate?”

Klaus was silent.

“That’s not what’s kept you alive,” said Nicko.

“What then?”

“My feeling that your zealousness, properly controlled, can actually help get us both what we want out of Wannsee.”

They sat in the following silence. A breeze came through the windows, stirring the curtains, and Klaus felt increasingly hopeful.