buildings. The gravel crunched as they walked.
‘What happened to your father is sad, Helena. I’m
really sorry. I wish there were something I could
do for you and your mother.’
You could have invited us to the Christmas party
last winter as you used to, Helena thought, but she said nothing. She would have been pleased
because then she wouldn’t have had to put up with
her mother’s insistence on going.
‘Janjic!’ Brockhard shouted to a black-haired boy
standing in the sun and polishing saddle gear. ‘Go
and fetch Venezia.’
The boy went into the stable while Brockhard
stood still, whacking his whip lightly against his
knee and rocking on his boot heels. Helena cast a
glance at her wristwatch.
‘I’m afraid I cannot stay here long, Herr
Brockhard. My shift . . .’
‘No, of course. I understand. Let me come to the
point.’
From inside the stable they heard fierce
whinnying and the sound of hooves clattering on
wooden boards.
‘Your father and I used to do a fair amount of
business together. Before the sad bankruptcy, of
course.’
‘I know.’
‘Yes, and you probably also know that your father
was in a lot of debt. Indirectly, that was why things
happened as they did. I mean this unfortunate . . .’
He searched for the right word. And found it. ‘. . .
affinity with the Jewish loan sharks was of course
very damaging for him.’
‘You mean Joseph Bernstein?’
‘I can’t remember the names of these people.’
‘You should do, he went to your Christmas party.’
‘Joseph Bernstein?’ André Brockhard smiled, but
the smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘That must have
been many years ago.’
‘Christmas 1938. Before the war.’
Brockhard nodded and darted an impatient glance
towards the stable door.
‘You have a good memory, Helena. That’s good.
Christopher could do with a good head. Since he
occasionally loses his own, I mean. Apart from
that, he’s a good boy, you’ll see that.’
Helena could feel her heart beginning to pound.
Had something gone wrong after all? Brockhard
Snr was talking to her as if she were his future
daughter-in-law. Instead of feeling terror, she felt
anger gaining the upper hand. When she spoke
again, she meant to sound friendly, but anger had
her larynx in a stranglehold and made her voice
sound hard and metallic.
‘I hope there has not been a misunderstanding,
Herr Brockhard.’
Brockhard must have noticed the timbre in her
voice; at any rate there was not much left of the
warmth he had greeted her with when he said:
‘In that case let us clear up these
misunderstandings. I would like you to look at
this.’
He pulled a sheet from the inside pocket of his
red jacket, straightened it and passed it to her.
Bürgschaft, it said at the head of what appeared
to be a contract. Her eyes ran across the dense text.
She didn’t understand much of what was written
there except that the house in the Vienna Woods
was mentioned and that her father’s and André
Brockhard’s names were at the bottom with their
respective signatures. She sent him a quizzical
look.
‘This appears to be a surety.’
‘It is a surety,’ he acknowledged. ‘When your
father thought that the Jews’ loans were going to be
called in, and thereby his own, he approached me
and asked me if I would stand security for quite a
large refinancing loan in Germany. Which,
unfortunately, I was soft-hearted enough to do.
Your father was a proud man, and to ensure that the
security did not appear as pure charity, he insisted
that the summer house you and your mother live in
now should be used as a surety against the
security.’
‘Why against the security and not against the
loan?’
Brockhard was taken aback.
‘Good question. The answer is that the value of
the house was not enough as a guarantee against the
loan that your father needed.’
‘But André Brockhard’s signature was enough?’
He smiled and ran his hand down his powerful
bull neck which, in the heat, was now covered in a
shiny layer of sweat.
‘I own the odd property in Vienna.’
A massive understatement. Everyone knew that
André Brockhard had large holdings of shares in
two of the largest Austrian industrial companies.
After the Anschluss – Hitler’s ‘occupation’ in
1938 – the companies had transferred their
production of toys and machines to production of
weapons for the axis powers, and Brockhard had
become a multi-millionaire. And now Helena