The Schirmer Inheritance

George smiled. “After reading it I made a resolution. If I have children, I’m never going to tell them a thing about my war experiences.”

The old man chuckled. “They’ll get it out of you. The thing you want to watch out for is having a drip of a son like Hans who writes down what you say. That’s dangerous.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you. I was administrator all right, but I went to Germany because my partners sent me. Tail wagging the dog. The case had been in our hair too long and they wanted to have done with it. My instructions were to confirm what we already believed-that there was no legitimate heir to the estate. Well, when I found that Hans was probably a son of Franz Schneider’s first marriage, I had to know about that marriage in order to complete the picture. As you know, I went to Potsdam to see if I could trace him through the regimental archives. To begin with, I failed.”

“But next day you went back for another check through.”

“Yes, but I’d had a night to think. And I’d thought again about what Hans had written. If there was any truth in the thing at all, Sergeant Schneider had become a casualty at the Battle of Eylau and been lost in the retreat. Surely the war diary would record that fact in a casualty list. So that next day, instead of going all over the nominal rolls again, I got the interpreter to translate the regimental account of the battle for me.” He sighed reminiscently. “There are some moments in life, my boy, that always feel good no matter how many times you go over them again in your mind. That was one of them. It was late in the morning and getting very warm. The interpreter was having trouble with that old writing and was stumbling over the translation of it. Then he began on the account of the long march from Eylau to Insterburg. I was only half listening. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about a bad march I’d done in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. And then something the interpreter had said made me jump right out of my skin.”

He paused.

“What was that?” George asked.

Mr. Moreton smiled. “I remember the words exactly. ‘During this night’-I quote from the war diary-‘Franz Schirmer, a Sergeant, left the detachment under his command, saying that he was going to succour a Dragoon who had lagged behind because of a lame horse. When morning came, Sergeant Schirmer had not rejoined his detachment. There was found to be no other man missing from it, nor any who had lagged behind. Accordingly, the name of Franz Schirmer was posted in the list of deserters.’ ”

For a moment or two there was silence. “Well?” added Mr. Moreton. “What do you think of that?”

“Schirmer, did you say?”

“That’s right. Sergeant Franz Schirmer, S-c-h-i-r-m-e-r.”

George laughed. “The old bastard,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“So all that stuff he told his son Hans about the cowardly Prussians leaving him for dead was-”

“Bull,” said Mr. Moreton dryly. “But you see the implications.”

“Yes. What did you do?” George asked.

“The first thing I did was to take security precautions. We’d already had trouble enough with the newspapers’ finding out stuff about the case and printing it, and before I went to Germany I’d agreed on a policy with my partners. I was to keep what I was doing as secret as possible; and to make sure that I didn’t get an interpreter with German newspaper contacts, I was to engage him in Paris. The other thing we’d agreed on was a cipher for confidential matters. It may sound funny to you, but if you’ve ever had experience of-”

“I know,” George said. “I saw the newspaper clippings.”

“Ah. Well, I’d been sending my partners progress reports in diary form. When I found out about Schirmer, I began to use the cipher. It was a simple key-word affair, but good enough for our purpose. You see, I had visions of the newspapers’ getting hold of the Schirmer name and starting another flood of claims from Schirmers, Shermans, and the rest. The final thing I did was to fire the interpreter. I said I was abandoning the inquiry and paid him off.”

“Why was that?”

“Because I was going on with it and I didn’t want anyone outside the firm to have a complete picture. It was just as well I did fire him, too, because later on, when the Nazis were after the estate and France was occupied, the Gestapo pulled in the second man I used, for questioning. If he’d known what the first one knew, we’d have been in a spot. I got the second one through our Paris Embassy. By the time he arrived, I’d had the war-diary entry photographed-you’ll find it in the file-and was ready to move on.”

“To Ansbach?”

“Yes. There I found the record of Franz Schirmer’s baptism. Back in Muhlhausen again, I found the register entries for the marriage of Franz and Maria Dutka, the births of Karl and Hans, and the death of Maria. But the really important thing I found was when I went back to Munster. The boy Karl was down in the recruits’ muster-roll for 1824 as Karl Schirmer. Franz had changed his own name but not his eldest boy’s.”