The Curator's Daughter Read online

  The sun lingered above the vineyard’s ridge, dangling like a marionette over an extravagant theater, as the wine slowly pressed the ache from her head. A man in denim overalls, the owner of this vineyard, refilled their goblets; then he placed a red-stamped Telegramm into Kolman’s hands.

  While many Germans thought the Nazi Party was uniting their land, some saw only the divisions. But Himmler and the others were pursuing history and science and things like homeopathy that her mother had once prized. The World War had demoralized their country, fracturing it into pieces, but Adolf Hitler was reuniting them. Germans were finally moving forward again with dreams and ideas that brought them together. A holy pursuit to bring their world back into order, increase their living space to the east and west, and fight off the Russians who threatened their land.

  Once again, Germany was strong, but at what cost? Hanna wrestled with this daily, hearing rumors about animosity in the Nazi ranks. A dangerous undercurrent flowed below the greater good, Jewish people leaving in droves because they could no longer work or even shop in a country they once called home.

  Her only weapons, a trowel and pocketknife, could do nothing to stop the current. She had to keep her eyes on preserving the past, not trying to control the future.

  In the lull of conversation, Kolman read the telegram before placing his empty glass back on the table. “Walk with me,” he said to Hanna, offering his hand as if she were the marionette, waiting for him to pull her strings.

  Heat flooded her cheeks as the gazes of their colleagues dropped to their goblets, suddenly fascinated by their crystal rims. It was one thing for Kolman to hint at his interest when they were alone, quite another to advertise it. He would blow up their entire team if he propositioned her here.

  She didn’t take his hand. Instead she straightened the scarf over the collar of her blouse and stood. Her profession as an archaeologist was hard-won. She wouldn’t lose this job because Kolman Strauss crossed a line.

  He reached for the bottle of wine and two empty glasses before following her down the slope. While she’d changed into another blouse, she still wore her work trousers and boots on their descent between the grapevines.

  Hanna stopped walking halfway down the hill, in plain sight of the team. While her racing heart might fail her, she must keep her head firmly about her in the presence of this man. She’d speak to him about the excavation and then they’d return to their wine.

  Arms crossed over her chest, Hanna turned to face him. “We need to return to the grotto.”

  Instead of answering, he scanned the vineyard with its posts and vines and sheds knotted on the hill. Then he directed her toward a stone outbuilding. “Let’s talk in there.”

  She glanced up at the patio, her team looking back down over the vineyard, and decided that plain sight wasn’t the best place for this discussion after all.

  Kolman put down the wine bottle long enough to open the door, and she stepped into a room filled with dozens of barrels, a bitter smell permeating the wood.

  “Hanna . . .” With the bottle and glasses resting on an oak lid, he pulled the telegram out of his pocket, and she stared down as if it were soaked in venom.

  “What does it say?”

  He tapped the envelope on one of the barrels. “Your father owns a house in Nuremberg, yes?”

  She blinked, the question far from what she’d anticipated. “My father is no longer alive.”

  “But the property is yours?”

  Hanna’s mother had died when she was three, and her father had passed away seven years back, before she left for the university. The Tillich home, a restored hunting lodge, was being cared for now by Luisa and her husband, Paul. Hanna could return at any time, but home, for as long as she proved her worth, was wherever Himmler sent her and her trowel.

  “It’s being leased,” she told Kolman.

  He tucked the telegram into his front pocket, looking relieved at her words. “You can break a lease.”

  “I’m not breaking this one.”

  “You will do what the Reich requires of you.”

  Her shoulders clenched. What interest did the Reich have in her property?

  He poured red wine into the glasses and lifted one as if he were about to offer a toast, but she had no interest in celebrating. They needed to stay focused on the matter at hand. “At the cavern today—”

  “Hanna.” He lowered his glass, reaching out his hand to her again. “I’m afraid you won’t be going back to Montségur.”

  Whether it was the wine or because she was desperate for answers, she didn’t know, but this time she took his hand.

  Kolman squeezed it gently, as if he might pass along the strength inside him. No matter what happened, no matter what he said, she wouldn’t gasp or cry or give him any reason to accuse her of weakness, because she would return to the cave, once she told him about the Grail. They’d need her.

  He looped his fingers through hers. “The Germanic National Museum has requested your services.”

  She yanked her hand away from his tangle of fingers. “A museum?”

  “In Nuremberg,” he said as if she didn’t know the location. “It’s time for you to go home.”

  She’d known it wouldn’t be long before they pulled her off the field, but the reality still pierced like an arrow straight into her heart. She couldn’t sit in a sterile museum office, no matter how renowned its collection, when they were on the cusp of discovering this relic. She wanted to be the one searching for artifacts to display, not filing paperwork.

  The female curse of tears, a swift current of them, threatened to flood across the banks, and she blinked back the surge before it ruined her.

  She was stronger than the tears.

  “What if I found something, Kolman? Something of significance.”

  His smile was one of amusement. Pity, even, as if she were a child with one more excuse to suspend her bedtime. “Like the Grail?”

  She didn’t dare tell him what she thought was in that chamber. Not yet. “Any artifact important to Himmler.”

  “He’d be thrilled with the find.”

  “But it wouldn’t influence this reassignment . . . ?”

  “I’m afraid that decision has already been made.”

  A chill swept across her skin. “I need to find the Holy Grail, before I return to Nuremberg.”

  “The Ahnenerbe needs to find it, Hanna.” He took a sip of the wine. “This is a good position waiting for you.”

  “A good position for a woman . . .”

  “For anyone,” he countered. “You’ll be an excellent archivist.”

  The cave, the dirt, her pack lying in that hidden corridor. The possibilities that rested under the soil.

  “Did Himmler say why he wanted me to do this job?”

  “The telegram wasn’t from Himmler. It was from the director of the museum.”

  “So Himmler has stepped away . . .”

  “All the archaeologists are required to be members of the Schutzstaffel,” he said.

  “For which I’ll never qualify.” She moved toward the window. She needed to find strength inside herself, not siphon it from him.

  A hundred shades of sunset swept across the sky, but all she wanted right now was to surround herself again with the darkness of the cave, the pile of dirt swelling beside her.

  “It’s not just you.” Kolman curled his arm over one of the barrels. “Eventually Himmler will call all of us back to Germany.”

  “For another dig.”

  “For whatever he sees fit.”

  How was she going to tell their team that she wasn’t returning to dig? Even worse—what if they already knew?

  They all could have known except her.

  Tears spilled out now, flowing beyond her control. She grabbed the wine bottle and rushed from the building, not caring if any of the men above saw her.

  The chamber was a secret that she’d keep. One day she would return to the cavern by herself.

  “
Hanna!” he called as he trailed behind her. She gulped the wine as she ran, the liquid warming her throat and head, dribbling down her chin. If they were in Berlin, she’d sweep down into the U-Bahn station, take the next train out. And she’d stay on board until the end of the line.

  Kolman was no longer her superior. She didn’t have to answer to him.

  Her feet delivered her to the bottom of the hillside, to a stream she wished would carry her away like a train.

  “Hanna,” he said again, stepping up behind her.

  She threw the bottle into the river, the glass shattering on a rock, and wiped the stream of tears with her scarf. Why must she cry in the face of this man who always remained strong? “Leave me alone.”

  He was beside her now, his breath warm on her neck. She didn’t dare breathe, angry at her heart for betraying her. Racing when she willed it to be still.

  The dirt, she could control. The digging. But not the pounding inside her.

  When he turned her around, she began backing into the grass. Leave—she needed to run again before she did something she’d regret for a lifetime.

  But Kolman didn’t waver. Her eyes on him, she didn’t see the stone in the grass until her heel stubbed the edge of it, and she stumbled. Her arms flailing, she grasped for a branch, a wall, a boulder, a strong arm to catch her.

  Kolman reached out, and with his arms around her, she rested against his chest. A rock in human form.

  “Kolman—” Her breath seemed to escape her as he straightened her scarf, the fabric brushing against her skin.

  “There’s a silver lining in this,” he said.

  “What possible good could come of it?” Finding things was her dream, not curating them. She was no good at the keeping.

  “Marry me,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “Marry me, Hanna.”

  “Why would I want to marry you?” she asked, trying to lighten the weight in her voice, the heaviness in her heart.

  “Because you like relics,” he said, his blue eyes fading into gray with the setting sun.

  “You’re not a relic.”

  Kolman was ten years older than her twenty-six, but they’d been colleagues on three digs now. She’d almost forgotten their age difference.

  But to marry him?

  “We’re good together, Hanna.” He took both her hands. “We can change this world.”

  Kolman had been married once before; he’d told their team about his former wife on their expedition in Nepal. The travel, he’d said, had been the demise of their union.

  Her obsession with the past, her quest to change the world, would ruin their relationship as well.

  “This doesn’t have to end,” he said.

  “You can’t be serious.” She shook her head, tried to step away. “I’m being sent back to Nuremberg.”

  He held her hands. “I will go to Nuremberg with you.”

  Her head felt as if it were sinking with the sun.

  “Himmler needs you here.”

  “I’ll return the moment we’re done in France.”

  A picture flashed in her mind of impeccably dressed women who’d attended Berlin’s Reichsbräuteschule before they married SS officers, learning how to polish buttons and daggers, cook German meals, raise Aryan heroes to take over the world.

  “I’m not going to the Reich bridal—bride’s school.” Her words slurred as she tried to speak.

  What was wrong with her? She knew exactly what she wanted for her life, had spent a lifetime preparing for it. Kolman was a worthy suitor for another woman, but marriage itself didn’t suit her. Would never suit her.

  “You already have enough education,” he said, a smile on his lips, but there was nothing amusing about this. Instead of condemning her tears, he wiped them away. “Please, Hanna.”

  She dug her heel into the stone so she wouldn’t stumble again. “I can’t give up my work.” Even if she was caged inside a museum.

  “Of course not.”

  “You don’t want to marry me, Kolman.”

  But he swore that he did.

  3

  EMBER

  A stumbling stone.

  Ember Ellis stared at the photograph on her laptop. At the glitter of brass cemented between Nuremberg’s gray cobblestones.

  Some German towns had allowed residents to replace sidewalk stones with tiny plaques. Stolpersteine, they called these memorials. As if someone might—as if they should—stumble over this reminder of where a Jewish man or woman had lived before World War II. One of the six million who never returned home.

  Her fellowship with the Mandel Center, an extension of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, came with a shared office in the heart of the district and a vast collection of off- and online resources, papers, and photographs. She’d almost finished the dissertation that would add a P, H, and D after her name. Letters that meant after years of trying, she had finally made something of her late-blooming self.

  Ember smoothed her fingers over the screen as if she could feel the cool brass, the ridges of engraving.

  Here lived Paul Gruenewald

  Born 1898, Deported 1938

  Murdered in Auschwitz 1942

  This short tribute was similar to those recorded in Jewish Memorbücher, a tradition started in Nuremberg when entire Jewish communities were being destroyed. These rituals of memory were as important now as they had been for seven hundred years.

  Nuremberg shines throughout Germany like a sun among the moon and stars.

  Martin Luther had written those words in the sixteenth century, after Nuremberg embraced the Reformation. This was a city, he’d written, that moved others to follow. Good or bad, Luther’s words had echoed through the centuries, rays from that renaissance city sparking fire across Germany.

  Yet the cycle of sun rising each morning, the darkness that followed when it fell, cast long shadows in Nuremberg, hurtling across time. For almost a year now, Ember had been searching for the reasons, the patterns, as to why the history of persecution continued to repeat itself in that city. Searching to expose the lies people believed.

  The information was hard to find—most of Nuremberg’s records had been destroyed in 1945 when the Royal Air Force unleashed its bombs. In fact, it was a miracle that anything, or anyone, survived.

  She wanted to find more than stumbling stones in this city where Hitler once held his party rallies, where SS officials and other Nazi leaders were held and tried. Before she completed her dissertation, she wanted to find a hero. A German man or woman who’d snubbed National Socialism and remained strong in the storm of persecution and propaganda. Held on to what was good and right while many of their neighbors had succumbed.

  Ember downloaded the archived photograph, then closed the lid to her computer. Next week she was flying to Nuremberg to interview several people, including the assistant director of the Germanic National Museum. She’d roam inside the ancient walls of this city that occupied a significant space in her head, perhaps even stumble herself over one of these stones that remembered the names of so many Jewish people.

  If she and other researchers did their jobs well, their stories wouldn’t be forgotten either.

  She slipped her laptop into an oversized handbag and slung it over her shoulder. In exactly fifty-eight minutes, Noah would knock on the front door of her condo in Georgetown, and he’d expect her to open it. A minute or two late and her phone would start blasting “Never Give Up.” Over and over until she finally returned his call.

  If she hurried to the Metro, she would make it home a few minutes before Noah arrived.

  “Do you have a minute?” Rebekah May, the head of security, stood outside her office with an iPad and small stack of mail. Her short hair reflected an orange tint like rust rimming this woman of steel.

  “I have to be home by 3:40.”

  Rebekah didn’t waste time. She turned her screen so Ember could see a scan of the vile letter addressed to her, typed in a faded Courier font
as if the printer had been forced, under duress, to comply.

  Ember looked away. “Any return address this time?”

  “None. It was postmarked from Boise.”

  She shivered. Whoever wrote her these letters always sent them from the state where she’d lived two decades ago. The state that she’d spent a lifetime trying to forget.

  The letters started coming ten months ago when she’d taken this fellowship. Someone, Rebekah suspected, had picked her name off the Internet listing of fellows.

  “It’s another empty threat.”

  “Probably.” Rebekah turned off the screen. “But I want you to be careful. Let me know if anyone harasses you outside the mail.”

  “I will.” She checked her phone. Noah would be at her door in forty minutes. Last time she was late, he’d started texting at 3:41. Every thirty seconds, for a full hour while she was stuck on the Metro without cell service. “Thanks for keeping watch over me.”

  Rebekah handed her a newspaper and two journals from the mail room. “Unfortunately it’s getting worse. For everyone.”

  The hostilities were increasing across their country. She’d seen the recent photographs of fraternity men lifting their hands in faux salutes, heiling Hitler decades after the dictator was gone. Of American children wearing swastikas and mothers teaching their toddlers how to salute. Of adult men attacking their Jewish neighbors.

  The side entrance emptied employees into a private alley, but Ember preferred using the museum’s main entrance. The long lines of visitors strengthened her hope in humanity, knowing she wasn’t the only one who wanted to stop this madness.

  A glass elevator delivered her down to the lobby, where hundreds of people waited to remember the terror of all that happened across Europe eighty years ago. And honor those who’d died by remembering their stories.