Chapter 28 Names

01:12

Adel Neuman appeared to have been very knowledgeable about Germany’s castles, palaces, and aristocracy’s villas. He spent his free days organizing sight-seeing excursions, describing the knights’ chambers, gaping at beautiful ceilings and garlands, exploring high towers and armory. From medieval ages to nineteen-century facades, from walls and bascule bridges to moats and tournaments’ spears: he rarely had time for himself in the endless excursion along the Europe’s past.

Robert and Lena couldn’t possibly visit all the castles that Adel Neuman was so well acquainted with, so they decided to stay in Munich. It allowed them to collect all necessary data and ponder over the reasons for historians’ disappearances. Lena could drink as much German beer as she wanted and soon she had another theory.

‘I think it’s all homophobic killing. You mentioned that Pieczka was gay. Maybe someone found homosexual academic employees and decided to get rid of them.’

‘But we have no clue whether any, apart from Pieczka, had also been gay. I strongly doubt that Woźniak was anything but heterosexual man fond of romances. Neuman was single. Hanna Weber told me that she suspected that Koch might have eloped with someone, but we have no certainty that this someone might have been another man...’

‘You know, they could have been in hidden relationships and have fun during the night. Undercover.’

‘Yeah, but I strongly doubt that they were all gay. They were good at what they were doing. Maybe someone saw a threat in that.’

‘I tell you, it was homophobia. Or else we really deal with a time machine or some top-secret government project, involving a time machine.’

Robert rolled his eyes. But so many disappearances had to finally bring them closer to a common denominator.

The journey between the cities was tiring. Little German cottages popped up here and there across the fields. Sometimes they noticed cows grazing in the sun, at other times they passed vast forests of white windmills, producing eco-friendly energy for German citizens. The country was cleaner than their mother Poland, but people seemed to enjoy their lives just the same, minding their business, sipping a cup of coffee at the terrace of their house or preparing their gardens for the summer.

Lena mentioned that they had no sensible order in their travels, as they checked historians not according to date of missing or proximity, but by a simple toss of a coin, which made them cover longer distances, waste time and petrol, as if they were barking mad.

‘With German highways, this is not really such a problem. But that’s true, we are traveling without any plan. We are driving back and forth.’

‘We are hopeless at logistics.’

‘This is not the only area we are hopeless at.’

At least they were getting better at understanding personalities of historians.

Markel Lang was interested in the ancient times, having spent a significant amount of time in Egypt and Syria during excavation works. He liked digging and loved attaching the story to every dugout artifact. His passion were also Gothic Cathedrals in his home Cologne, Roman and Greek accomplishments in mythology, architecture, and religion. He was obsessed with ancient libraries and the Greek theater he loved to the point of idolatry.

Seligh Roth, on the other hand, was a fan of two World Wars; he was besotted with Gestapo and SS uniforms, planes, tanks, army formations, weapons, old photographs, memoirs, documents, films and everything connected with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi ideology. He was a frequent guest at the Bunkermuseum in his home Hamburg, as well as a visitor in numerous Concentration Camps throughout Germany and Poland.

Lena even suggested that he might have killed all of the missing historians, but after the interviews with his family members and coworkers, it appeared that he was a gentle fellow, with a mild disability after a childhood accident and his bark was definitely louder than his bite. According to his co-workers, he couldn’t kill a fly.

Meanwhile, Johan Yzerman checked the conferences and, while one was attended by three of the missing university employees, there were hundreds of events which they simply couldn’t visit together, as those who were missing couldn’t come and those who actually turned up weren’t aware that they would be missing soon.

They were still in Hamburg, having reached their final stop of the journey, this time having ordered a pizza, letting go of the traditional food, filling their stomachs with something they really enjoyed.

Lena was looking at the back of the picture, given to Robert by Hanna Weber and at the list of students who borrowed the same books as Gelard Meler did in his most productive years.

‘Have you got the names of students of Markel Lang, Adel Neuman, and Seligh Roth?’

Robert handed Lena the list. She studied it for hours, but she wasn’t able to find two identical names. Then she grouped the names into categories. Boys, girls. Then into alphabetical categories according to the surname.

‘It doesn’t make sense. The chances that these people had anything in common with each other are terribly low...’

‘Yeah, plus they could have changed their surname.’

‘Wait, what?’

‘We have names of the students, right? Girls after studies were most likely to get married and take their husbands’ surname. Some men could also do this, for political or personal reasons.’

Lena ignored Robert’s comments and created another group, this time using only the first name. A few of the names repeated themselves in each of the time periods. She had three Franzes, two Zygfrids, and five Barbaras. ‘There’s one woman but five different surnames,’ Lena noticed ‘Schmid, Schultz, Shneider, Schwarz, Stein...’

Robert called to Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and Cologne to get an information about students, whose names appeared more than once on each of the lists. Lena tried to identify Barbara Schmid among the faces of Hanna Weber’s photograph.

Robert decided to wait inside the hotel in case there were any responses. Lena went out for a walk to get her head clear from the abundance of thoughts. She received a “Get better!” message from her boss and she had already forgotten that supposedly she was sick. Warsaw was far away and Hamburg was surrounded by a fresh breeze from the sea. Her MA thesis was lying untouched waiting for better days. She held Hanna Weber’s photograph and looked at it again.

‘Wait for a second...’ she said to herself and rushed back to the hotel.

Robert had already received four messages. One was a fax message from Frankfurt’s library, for which he had to walk down to the hotel’s lobby. Then he received two e-mail messages from Berlin and Cologne. And a few minutes later a picture taken by the phone of Munich’s University employee appeared on Robert’s phone screen. Even though the surnames were different, on each document photograph there was the same, dark-haired girl, smiling numbly with piercing eyes. And it didn’t matter whether the picture was taken in 1979 or in 2007, the girl looked just the same.

Lena found Robert looking at the photographs. She added to the pile Hanna Weber’s photograph from Berlin museum escapades with Conrad Koch.

While Robert was shocked that all these photographs were showing the same girl, Lena was in another state of shock.

Each of the pictures showed no one else but her own dorms’ roommate Barbara, who looked exactly the same in every single photograph. Not only did she look identical in every single photograph taken at five different places, at five different time periods, but she looked exactly as Lena remembered her from their days spent together, despite a simple calculation that even then she should have been way over sixty.

‘You really must be joking.’ she gasped and looked at Barbara smiling from the photograph just next to Hanna Weber.

They were making phone-calls on the way.

‘Maybe they are related. It cannot be the same girl. Maybe we deal with a generation of women. Grandmother, mother, daughter... Think about the surnames. They are different.’

Lena looked at the photographs again and again.

‘Either we deal with extreme genetic heritage or I doubt it. Even twins are slightly different. Even identical twins are different. These pictures don’t show us five different people.’

Robert didn’t know what to say.

‘And you’re sure that she was your roommate?’

‘I remember people who I share my room with. She was terribly pedantic. She cleaned the room with Domestos.’

‘You mentioned that Woźniak’s flat was clean. Do you think she cleaned it for him?’

‘Most likely.’

Robert called Hanna Weber to ask about Barbara next to her in the photograph.

‘O yes, I remember her. She was ambitious but slightly reserved. She wasn’t German. Someone told me that she was Polish. Her German was perfect. No accent. You really couldn’t tell.’

‘I told you she studied German philology!’ Lena shouted over Robert’s head.

Robert called to Frankfurt to ask the library woman about Barbara.

‘Certainly. There was a girl, black haired girl. I thought she was German. She borrowed books in the library. But she was very quiet. She rarely took them with her. She spent time in the reading room, read for some time. Then she went away. I remembered her being irritated when I couldn’t find what she was looking for. She complained.’

Finally, Robert called the employee of Museum Island.

‘I don’t remember her at all, to be honest. Possibly it was some quiet student who wanted to write a good thesis and needed time spent with museum’s artifacts. Little invisible girl. Don’t blame me.’

Robert didn’t blame the man for not remembering Barbara.

‘If we calculate, and it’s really the same person’ Robert concluded, ‘She must have graduated from at least six universities. She’s a walking history professor.’

‘If we calculate, Robert, she must have killed at least six people. She’s a walking serial killer.’

With this conclusion, computers still working, phones ringing, Johan Yzerman engaged from Berlin police department and all photographs of Barbara stuck behind the windscreen, they rushed back to Warsaw.