The Crowded Grave: A Mystery of the French Countryside by Martin Walker

Author:Martin Walker [Walker, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Thriller
ISBN: 0307700194
Amazon: B006V3E1LE
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2012-07-10T05:00:00+00:00

18

Although it was the smallest of the security committee meetings so far, for the first time the video conference link with the ministry in Paris was being used, and Bruno looked at the brigadier’s familiar face on the screen with interest. Most unusually, the brigadier was smiling.

His voice was normal, but his image on screen kept jerking in a disconcerting way as he explained that Horst’s name had raised an alarm in Berlin. Bruno was startled to learn that the quiet archaeologist had been a student militant in the sixties and a suspected sympathizer with the Red Army Faktion in the seventies. Isabelle gasped when the brigadier said that Horst had a brother called Dieter, now believed dead, who was an associate of the Baader-Meinhof Group and possibly even an active member. The brother got to East Germany, and the Stasi files reported him dying of a heart attack in 1989, the year the Wall came down. There were no specific links to ETA from his known record, although there was a well-documented history of cooperation between ETA and the Red Army Faktion.

“This Dieter was known to have attended a Palestinian training camp in the Beka’a Valley in the seventies, at a time when several ETA militants were there,” the brigadier said, and looked up from the file. “I think we have a connection.”

“Perhaps Señor Gambara can get us some more information on this,” Isabelle interjected.

“We never came up with much on this so-called cooperation,” Carlos said. “There were personal contacts and some visits, stemming from those training camps in Libya and Lebanon, but no real collaboration. No joint operations, no sharing of munitions, nothing useful that we could get hold of. Remember those Palestinian training camps were over thirty years ago. But if you can get me the name of the camps and the dates, we’ll check from our side.”

“Our German colleagues have also tracked the father’s war record for us,” the brigadier went on. “He was Waffen SS, the military arm, and served his entire war in the Totenkopf armored division, which spent most of its time on the Eastern Front.”

“But there was a photo of him in France, on a tank with a Dunkerque signpost,” Bruno objected.

But that had been in 1940, when Heinrich Vogelstern was a junior officer, an Untersturmführer, the brigadier explained. After the fall of France his unit was stationed south of Bordeaux near the Spanish frontier until April 1941. Then they were moved to the east, to take part in the invasion of Russia, where they stayed until the end of the war. By 1945 he had risen to be a Standartenführer, the equivalent of colonel, and was killed in Hungary at the end of the war, in March 1945.

“Anything known of his time in France, anti-Resistance operations or anything that could have made his son a target for vengeance?” Bruno asked.

“There wasn’t much Resistance at that time,” the brigadier said drily. Until quite late in the war, the Communists had dominated the Resistance.

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