The Schirmer Inheritance

George thought quickly. “I suppose Franz changed his name when Muhlhausen was ceded to Prussia.”

“That’s what I thought. As far as the Prussians were concerned, he’d be a deserter. But I guess he just didn’t trouble about Karl.”

“He changed Hans’s name.”

“But Hans was a baby then. He’d naturally grow up a Schneider. Anyway, whatever the reason, there it was. Hans had had six brothers and five sisters. All were surnamed Schneider except one, Karl. His surname was Schirmer. All I had to do was to find out which of those persons had had children-cousins of Amelia-and whether any one of those children was alive.”

“That must have been quite a job.”

Mr. Moreton shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds. Death rates were higher in the last century. Out of the eleven brothers and sisters, two boys and two girls died in a typhoid epidemic before they were twelve, and another of the girls was killed by a runaway horse when she was fifteen. That meant I had only six to worry about. Four of them I handed over to a private inquiry agent specializing in that kind of thing. The other two I looked after.”

“Karl Schirmer was one of your two?”

“He was. And by the middle of July I had finished with the Schneiders. There had been children all right, but none of them had survived Amelia. So there was still no heir. The only one left to check on was Karl Schirmer.”

“Did he have any children?”

“Six. He’d been apprenticed to a printer in Coblenz and married the boss’s daughter. I spent from mid-July on, chasing around the towns and villages of the Rhineland. By mid-August I’d traced all but one of the six, and there was still no heir. The missing child was a son, Friedrich, born in 1863. All I knew about him was that he’d married in Dortmund in 1887, and that he was a bookkeeper. And then I had trouble with the Nazis.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Well, in the summer of 1939 any foreigner who traveled about the Rhineland asking questions, checking official records, and sending cables in cipher was bound to become suspect, but, like a dope, I hadn’t thought of that. In Essen I was interviewed by the police and asked to give an account of myself. I explained as best I could and they went away, but the next day they came again. This time they had a couple of Gestapo boys with them.” Mr. Moreton smiled ruefully. “I don’t mind telling you, my boy, I was glad I had an American passport. Still, I made them believe me in the end. The fact that I was trying to prevent the papers’ knowing what I was doing helped, I think. They didn’t like newspapers either. The main thing was that I managed to keep the name of Schirmer out of it. But they made trouble all the same. Within two weeks I had a cable from my partners to say that the German Embassy in Washington had notified the State Department that in future the German government would represent any German national claiming the Schneider Johnson estate, and had requested complete information about the present state of the administrator’s inquiries in the matter.”

“You mean the Gestapo had reported what you were doing to their Foreign Office?”

“They certainly had. That’s how that phony Rudolph Schneider claim of theirs started. You have no idea how difficult it is, politically and in every other way, to challenge the validity of documents produced and attested by the government of a friendly power-I mean a power enjoying normal diplomatic relations with your own government. It’s like accusing them of forging their own bank-notes.”

“And what about the Schirmer side of the family, sir? Did the Nazis ever get on to that?”

“No, they didn’t. You see, they didn’t have Amelia’s documents to help them as we did. They didn’t even have the right Schneider family, but it was difficult to prove.”

“And Friedrich Schirmer, Karl’s son? Did you trace him?”

“Yes, my boy, I traced him all right, but I had hell’s own job doing it. I got on his trail at last through a clerical employment agency in Karlsruhe. They found out for me that there had been an elderly bookkeeper named Friedrich Schirmer on their files five years previously. They’d found a job for him in a button factory at Freiburg-im-Breisgau. So I went to the button factory. There they told me that he had retired three years earlier at the age of seventy and gone into a clinic at Bad Schwennheim. Bladder trouble, they said. They thought he’d probably be dead.”

“And was he?”