The Crowded Grave

invasion of Russia, where they stayed until the end of the war. By 1945 he had risen to be a Standartenführer, the equivalent of colonel, and was killed in Hungary at the end of the war, in March 1945.
    “Anything known of his time in France, anti-Resistance operations or anything that could have made his son a target for vengeance?” Bruno asked.
    “There wasn’t much Resistance at that time,” the brigadier said drily. Until quite late in the war, the Communists haddominated the Resistance. And until Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, the French Communist Party had been under orders from Moscow to accept the German occupation. So the brigadier saw nothing relevant from Vogelstern’s time in France. And although most of the Totenkopf division came from concentration camp guards, Horst’s father had come from a different unit, the SS-VT, or Verfügungstruppe, a special force that trained alongside Hitler’s Leibstandarte bodyguard. He had been a devoted Nazi from the beginning, but as a soldier, not in the death camps.
    The brigadier looked up. “These German records are remarkably thorough. It makes me envious. Horst’s university hasn’t heard from him nor have his neighbors in Germany and there’s been activity on his credit cards …” The screen and the audio went blank and then cleared, and Bruno heard the brigadier’s voice, sounding distorted, saying “… because it seems like there’s no obvious connection. But we have to assume there is a connection here somewhere that could be relevant to our security mission. The coincidences are too strong.”
    “I’ve got another coincidence for you,” said J-J. “I got the forensic report this morning on that unidentified corpse at our German professor’s dig. They did a DNA analysis and there’s a better than eighty percent probability that he was a Basque. Don’t ask me how they know, but apparently there are some distinctive genetics.”
    “Anything on the identity?” asked Isabelle.
    J-J shook his head, leafing through the file. “No, but they think he was shot sometime between 1984 and 1987.”
    “And once again our German professor is the connection,” said the brigadier. “His brother, his dig and now his disappearance.”
    “This Basque, the unidentified corpse, wasn’t he shot at thetime of the dirty war?” Bruno asked the flickering video image, and then he turned to Carlos. “Remember, we talked about it the day we first met. If he was a victim of the dirty war, maybe there is something that could identify him in the Spanish records.”
    “Not many records were kept, for obvious reasons,” Carlos said, scribbling a note to himself. “And then they were very thoroughly sanitized. The commission of inquiry in the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación had a terrible job trying to reconstruct it all. But I’ll check with Madrid, see if they have anything.”
    “I’ll e-mail you the forensic report,” said J-J. “There’s some detail on the clothing, but nothing that really helps us beyond giving us a rough date, like the Swatch he wore. His nose had been broken in childhood, that’s about it. And the electric wire that was used to bind his hands was made in Germany, but it was on sale all over Europe.”
    “And I’ll arrange a search of our own files,” said the brigadier. “A lot of those killings took place on French soil. I remember we even arrested four of your agents in Bayonne, Carlos, trying to kidnap somebody they claimed was the head of ETA. Some of their colleagues then kidnapped somebody else to secure their release.”
    “José Mari Larraetxea,” said Carlos, his voice somber. “He was the head of ETA at the time. It was a very embarrassing operation.”
    “Our German professor could be a kidnap victim,” said Bruno, thinking that nobody else seemed much concerned about Horst’s fate. “You saw my report on the scene at his house, the bloodstains and the marks of someone being dragged.”
    “All that could have been staged,” said Isabelle. “But what worries me most about all this is our almost complete lack ofintelligence on this ETA active service unit. It’s said to have been based in France for months now, and all we have is one name, Michel—I can’t pronounce this—Goikoetxea, and a photograph of him at age eighteen. He’s now what, almost forty.”
    “Mikel Goikoetxea, he’s named after his father, one of the ETA leaders,” said Carlos, “killed by a GAL sniper in