“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.”