Heidelberg Effect (6 page)

Came to visit her?

“You did not all live together?” Ella
asked.

Frau Weiss smiled sadly. “Mine was not a sad
childhood,” she said. “I knew love. I was cared for.”

Ella looked at Hugo and her eyes were wide
with concern. He was not looking at Ella. He was focused on the old
woman. Ella watched him lean out and take her hand and she smiled
at him and patted his own hand with her withered, spotted one.

“What’s going on, Hugo?”
Ella asked. “I’m confused. I don’t know any
Vogel
in my family tree. Does this
make any sense?”

Hugo spoke softly to the old woman and she
nodded and turned to Ella. She spoke in slow, methodical German and
Ella understood only snatches of it.

“She says when the war
ended, she saw her mother and Jana a final time. She was ten years
old and Jana told her that they were going by the name
Klaus
again which made
Frau Weiss happy because they all had the same name
again.”

Ella looked at Hugo. “Who was Klaus?” she
asked. “I thought he was my mother’s father. But then who’s Vogel?
And why call themselves Klaus again?”

“We don’t yet know the relationship between
your mother and Frau Weiss,” Hugo reminded her. Ella could see he
was not one bit bored and she wondered what had changed and what
she had missed.

“My mother had a little brother named Hans,”
Ella said to her. “My grandmother’s name was Elise.” Ella held her
breath as she waited for the old woman’s response.

Frau Weiss said simply, as
if she had known it all along:
“Sie sind
meine Nichte.”

“She says you’re her niece,” Hugo said,
frowning.

Ella reached out and took the old lady’s
hand. “That’s amazing! How come you’re not acting like this is
incredible, Hugo?”

Hugo shook his head. “No, of course, it is
wonderful. Truly.”

“My name is Ella Stevens,” Ella said and the
woman clapped her hands together in delight.

“Abe rich heisse
Ella
.”

“Mein
Gott
,” Hugo said. Ella looked at him in
surprise.

“She says her nickname is Ella.”

Ella felt as if her mother had reached out
beyond the grave to the two Ellas sitting there and touched them.
Ella searched the woman’s face for any trace or resemblance of her
mother.

“I can’t believe I’ve found you,” Ella said,
tears filling her eyes. “Ask her why she didn’t live with my
mother. Why they didn’t live as a family.”

“Are you sure, Ella?” Hugo said. “It may be
embarrassing to her.”

“Then ask her who visits her here,” Ella
said. “What family comes to see her.”

Frau Weiss listened intently to Hugo’s
question and then turned back to Ella.

“They are all dead,” she said. “My husband
had a large family but all I had was my mother, my sisters and my
brother.”

“What happened to them?” Ella asked.

“My brother, Hans, died as a little boy,”
Frau Weiss said. Ella knew that her mother’s brother died young.
“The rest emigrated to America after the war.”

“Ask her why she didn’t come too,” Ella
said.

“Ella,” Hugo protested. “It may be too
painful for her.”

“It was seventy years ago,” Ella said.
“Please ask her.”

When Hugo asked, Frau Weiss began to
cry.

“I was to stay in the orphanage in Germany,”
she said. “It was my mother’s wish.”

Orphanage?
Ella looked at Hugo and he made a
face.

“I knew there couldn’t be a happy reason why
she wasn’t with the rest of the family,” he said. “Since she
obviously wasn’t mentally impaired or crippled. I figured it meant
she was probably illegitimate.”

Ella looked back at her aunt who was looking
at Hugo as if trying to figure out what he was saying.

“So, my grandmother had a child by another
man,” Ella said, “while married to my grandfather? Couldn’t she
have just passed her off as his?”

“Love the way your mind runs,” Hugo said
wryly. “Good to know. But if her husband was away because of the
war, he probably would have figured out it couldn’t be his.”

“So she was
institutionalized. This is sad, Hugo.
Really
sad.”

“A lot about that war was sad,” Hugo said.
Ella had to look twice to register that the always-jolly Hugo was
making such a serious comment.

“So they just left her here in Germany.”

“Appears so.”

Ella leaned out of her chair and put her
arms around the woman and hugged her tight and felt the shaky arms
of her aunt clutching tightly around her. With a shock, Ella
realized that, for the first time ever, she felt like she was
embracing her mother.

An hour later, after assuring her aunt that
she would be back to see her, Ella and Hugo were in his car and
heading back to Heidelberg. Ella was emotionally exhausted but
exhilarated.

She had found a piece of
her mother!
She had found the woman she
had been named after.
Her
blood ran in Ella and vice versa. For an only
child, whose only family had come from her father’s side of the
family—and none of them had she ever had anything in common with—it
was nothing short of a miracle. Ella could not stop
smiling.

“Well, I’m probably not going to do it right
away,” she said to Hugo, “but now I’ve got another name to track
down to see if I have any more relatives around here. Who did she
say my Grandmother married? Rudolf Vogel? I cannot thank you
enough, Hugo, for spending the full day doing this with me. I
definitely owe you dinner.”

“You really don’t know who Rudolf Vogel
is?”

Ella looked at him. “You recognize that
name?”

“Every school child in
Germany would recognize that name,” he said, keeping his eyes on
the road and both hands on the steering wheel. “It is the name of
the
Butcher of
Auschwitz
who was hanged by the
Allies at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945.”

Chapter Four

Well, it explained a lot.

Ella stood in her kitchen late that evening
and fried up a couple of eggs for dinner.

It explained why her mother’s family left
Germany, why they changed their name—and why it had been impossible
to do a successful genealogy search before now.

Ella sat down with her eggs and a can of
lager and stared out the window into the dark. It also explained
why her mother had taken every dangerous assignment the CIA could
possibly hand out. She had been wracked with shame and determined
to make it up in some impossible way—right up to the moment she
gave her life for her new country.

Ella thought about calling Rowan but
resisted picking up the phone and found herself wondering why. It
was true that the last couple of calls had been awkward. She
realized that she’d found excuses not to call him in the last week
or so and more than once she had screened calls from him. So now
when she had a real reason to talk with him, to someone she was
genuinely and personally connected to, she no longer felt
comfortable doing it. Somewhere between the boring drudge that was
her nine to five and the shallow activities that were her evenings,
she realized she had let go the idea of him, let go of the magic,
the warmth, the wonder of him.

She pushed her uneaten
plate of eggs away and sat down on the couch with her beer. Her
cellphone was on the coffee table but she tried to remember the
last time he had called. Had
she
pulled away first or did he?

He had been back in Dothan
three weeks by now. If she looked at the situation realistically
for just a minute, she couldn’t imagine a hot guy like Rowan
sleeping alone every night. Even if he had intended to, there’d
always be somebody winking or flirting with him.
You don’t get to be that cute without a lot of
women paying attention to you. No way he was still
alone
. In fact, now that she thought about
it, she was sure
he
was the one who had stopped calling
her
. What a fool she was to think he
was back home waiting for her. He’d obviously hooked up with
someone in Dothan—someone real and in his own continent—and like
every other guy she ever met, he didn’t want to break the news to
her.

She thought back on her
college boyfriend. She had been convinced that he was
the One
. And for awhile
it had been pretty perfect. But when he dumped her—taking her
totally by surprise—he said it wasn’t because he didn’t love her
any more.
How’s that for an original dump
line?
she thought, ruefully. He said it
was because she didn’t need him and he needed a girl who did.
Bizarre. She thought so then. She thought so now.

As for Rowan, it probably
was never real anyway.
How could it
be?
How could you know a person in just
one weekend? She glanced over at the lamp table where she kept a
framed photo of the two of them. A waiter had taken it the Saturday
before she left. Sure, he was good looking. The crooked smile, the
twinkle in the eyes, she could see how she—or some other
love-starved woman—would be charmed by that.

Doesn’t mean it’s real.

Feeling more alone than she had since she
first moved to Heidelberg, Ella ate her cold dinner in front of the
television set and focused on trying to decipher the German
dialogue to keep herself from thinking.

Even though he’d officially been back on the
job three weeks, the guys were just now getting around to the
official welcome at their local Dothan watering hole. It was great
to be back. Not that he needed an enforced administrative leave of
absence to tell him he didn’t like to be idle. But the time away
from work had been particularly hard on him. He joked with the guys
at the bar tonight that the next time he was shot, he’d remember
that the bullet was the least painful part of the whole process.
That got a few wry laughs. Fact is, he was the only one in his
office to ever take a bullet. That put him in sort of a special
class as far as the other Deputy Marshals were concerned.

“
How ya doing, sport?” Gary
Shipley smacked another frosted beer bottle down on the bar in
front of Rowan to join the dozen or so other full bottles that
people had been buying him all evening. “Pacing yourself, I
hope?”

Rowan grinned at him and took a long pull on
the beer. He felt talked out and was happy to just sit and drink
tonight. Fact is, the more he drank, the less he felt like
talking.

Gary had been on assignment the last month
and this was the first time Rowan had seen him since before he was
shot. Gary looked different. He was tan and lean, like he’d been
working out instead of just bragging about it. His hair was cropped
close but not shaved like it often was. And there was something
else.

Gary settled himself down on the barstool
next to Rowan.

“Seriously, man,” he said. “You really ready
to come back? You look kinda…I don’t know, unhappy.”

Now that was different. Gary was the least
perceptive person Rowan knew.

“I’m great,” Rowan said.

“Well, no sir, anyone can
see that you are
not
great. You look all hangdog and…holy shit. You’re in love.
Son of a bitch!”

Rowan stared at him.

“Who the fuck is it?” Gary
said. “Do I know her? Did I
do
her?” He laughed. “No, seriously, Ro, who is she?
You meet her in Atlanta?”

“Stop talking.”

“Soon as you
start
talking.”

“You don’t know her.”

“So it
is
a woman. I knew it! She in
Dothan?”

“No.”

“So, Atlanta. Well? What’s the problem?”

“There is no problem.”

“Okay, Ro, I’ve never seen you like this,
like ever. You look like some kind of fucking poster child for
lovesick puppies or something. Talk to Uncle Gary.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Well, it’s a start. Hey, you hear I’m
engaged?”

Rowan’s hand was poised in midair as he
lifted the bottle to his lips. He brought it down without drinking.
So that’s the difference he was seeing. Gary was in love. Rowan
smiled and tapped his bottle to the heel of Gary’s bottle.

“Cheers, man,” he said. “That’s great. Who’s
the lucky girl?”

“It’s me that’s lucky, man,” Gary said, his
eyes glittering as he thought about his girl. “She’s an angel. I
can’t believe she said yes.”

Wow
, Rowan thought. The transformative power of love. It truly
was a sight to behold.

“Well, that’s just fucking awesome, Gary,”
he said. “Just awesome.”

The bar maid approached both men from behind
and put her hand on Rowan’s shoulder. “You guys okay?” she said.
She was petite like Ella, with a killer figure and very little in
the way of the costume covering it. Rowan couldn’t help but notice
that she was falling out of her “merry widow” bra and directing
both barrels right at him.

Rowan turned to her and
smiled, his eyes boldly tracing her figure. “You know?” he said.
“Now that you mention it, I’m thinking that maybe we
could
be a little
better.”

The next day, after a grueling morning of
work that failed to occupy her thoughts, Ella ate lunch at her
desk. As she spread out the waxed paper of her tuna sandwich and
her apple, she got a thumbs up from Heidi leaving for lunch with
several office mates. Hugo was with them. He winked at her and Ella
found herself wondering exactly what it was that he did for their
company. He wasn’t an investigator like she was and he was only
sometimes in the office. If he was still speaking to her after
learning about her notorious lineage, she would have to ask him
about it. It surprised her that she didn’t know.