Free The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) by Leonard Rosen

separated by the Kraus logo: S T E E L and S T R E N G T H. I’d seen this arch, or one very much like it. We stepped into the limousine, and I dozed on the ride back to the city. It wasn’t until I closed my eyes that evening on the too-soft bed of a cheap hotel that I remembered another steel arch with other words: Arbeit Macht Frei.
    Work sets you free.

fourteen
    “Z eligman’s dead? How is this possible?”
    “How is it possible? He fell from a courtyard window at his home in Bruges. What can I say? He was an old man, and old men die.”
    “Papa, it can’t be. You saw how fit he was. Days ago. Days .”
    My father could only repeat the news and advise me to calm down. “Zeligman must have had some sort of fit and fell from an open window. It’s sad, but there it is. Tell me, how did your trip go?”
    I had called from Munich to share the good news that Alec and I had likely won our contract, pending final approval from the parent company. The Stuttgart plant would move its manufacturing to Hong Kong and save seventy percent on labor costs. P&C Consulting Engineers would play a crucial role. We were launched, but the news from Paris shocked me.
    I called Freda and discovered that Zeligman had apparently staggered from his chair and fell three stories to his death. I didn’t much care for my reaction to the news—not at all, because I didn’t feel sad for Zeligman or his widow. I didn’t know them. My main concern was that without Zeligman, I had no direct route to Isaac. The search for my uncle had become that much more difficult.

    M Y OWN troubles preoccupied me when I called on Anselm Kraus at his estate. It was the first Sunday in June. Liesel hadn’t arrived yet, which in retrospect must have been by design. Anselm gave me a tour of the home, then led me to a living room dominated by a large fireplace on either side of which hung, if I was not mistaken, an original Holbein and El Greco. He watched as I studied them.
    “The Holbein my father bought. The El Greco was my doing. Look at the scarlet robe against that sky. And the priest’s eyes. His backgrounds are always stormy, aren’t they? Unsettled. And the priest knows it. I swear this could have been painted yesterday by someone on drugs. I love this painting.”
    He pointed to a desk on which sat two hard-shell plastic boxes, two keyboards, and a pair of portable television screens. Standing on the stamped and approved side of the customs line in Hong Kong, I hadn’t seen what lay in Schmidt’s cardboard boxes. But from that little drama, I gathered the contents looked very much like what sat before me.
    “You’re looking at the future,” said Kraus.
    The word Apple was stamped onto the side of one plastic shell. Commodore was stamped onto the other. On an adjacent table lay the electronic guts of a third machine, its plastic casing gone. “Personal computers, Henri. This is what they call the motherboard, this circuitry that makes the thing run. Look closely.” Using the tip of a pencil over which he positioned a magnifying glass, he pointed to a series of slender wires attached to a small chip. “Damn if it doesn’t look like an insect, like it couldn’t just skitter across the room! Do you see it, the sheen on these connectors?” he said. “It’s a thin layer of gold. These Apple people and the others use precious metals in their electronics because precious metals are the best conductors. And this here—” he pointed to another connector. “It’s platinum. Yesterday, the gold markets in New York closed at $180 US dollars per troy ounce. Platinum at $220. Palladium at $65. Plus there’s copper, glass, aluminum, and steel to strip from these machines. I’ve done my research. There’s more gold in one metric ton of electronic scrap than there is in seventeen tons of raw gold ore. You saw the breaking yard in Hong Kong?”
    He knew I had.
    “I’m going to pursue the same model, but this time a salvage business for