“What?” Martha went to see.
“Can I take it to him?” Kitty was already on her feet.
Kitty found Father Josef in the hospital. He was sitting at the bedside of a man whose leg was plastered up to the thigh.
“He won’t be much longer, I don’t think,” Delphine said. “They’ve been chatting for ages—about football, of all things. Can you believe a man can spend his days chopping down trees but breaks his leg kicking a ball around a field?”
“I just need to ask him what’s in this.” Kitty held out the letter. “I know I should have waited for him to have picked it up himself, but . . .”
Delphine nodded. “You must be on pins. I’ll go and get him.”
Father Josef stood up before Delphine reached him. He grasped the edge of the bed for support, then made his way slowly across the ward.
“Come,” he said when Kitty showed him the envelope. “Let’s go and open it outside.”
They sat on the low wall in front of the hospital. The priest tore open the flap and slid the letter out. Kitty could see the insignia of the bishop’s palace embossed in the top right-hand corner of the paper—but she could only guess at what the few lines of black type contained.
“I’m afraid the apartment block where your parents lived was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943.” He turned to her. “They might not have been living there, though. It says that many of the apartments were empty when it happened.” He turned the paper over. “They’ve located a person who might have information. They have a name, that’s all. Someone called Clara Schmidt—a former employee at your parents’ business.”
“Yes,” Kitty breathed. “I remember Clara; she wasn’t called Schmidt, but I suppose she must have got married. She would have been about sixteen or seventeen when I left. She lived above the shop.”
“Well, she doesn’t live there now. I’m afraid the shop was destroyed, too.”
“Do they know where she is? Can I write to her?”
Father Josef handed the letter to Kitty. It said that a woman from a church in the Vienna suburb of Floridsdorf had responded to an appeal made from the pulpit for information about the Blumenthals. She knew nothing of their whereabouts, but gave the name of Clara, who had lived with her for a while in 1941 after the apartment was destroyed. Unfortunately, the letter went on, the forwarding address the woman had given was of no use: Clara must have moved on again. But further attempts would be made to trace her.
The words blurred on the page as Kitty stared at them. “Clara,” she whispered. “Where are you?”
“There has to be a way to find her,” Father Josef said. “If the Church draws a blank, we could try placing an advertisement in one of the newspapers.”
“But what if she died? What if the next place she went to was bombed?”
“I know it’s hard, but try to be patient.” He took the letter and folded it back into the envelope. “Is there anything else you remember about her? Did she have relatives in another part of the city?”
“Her mother lived with her—I don’t know of anyone else. And they went to a church called Saint Leopold’s in Alexander-Poch-Platz; I remember that.”
“I’ll let them know,” he said. “I think we should wait at least a few more weeks before we try the newspapers—I imagine they’re being inundated with requests like yours. And in the meantime, there’s another Red Cross list due soon, isn’t there?”
“It should come this weekend.” There had been two more lists since the first one Kitty had pored over. They got shorter each time because fewer people were arriving at the camps. She wasn’t very hopeful of what the latest list would contain.
As she made her way back to the office, Clara was in her mind’s eye. She remembered envying Clara’s auburn hair, wishing hers were that color. And she’d watched, fascinated, as Clara applied scarlet lipstick in the mirror that had hung in the showroom. That was something Kitty had copied as soon as she started earning her own money.
Knowing that Clara could hold the key to what had happened to her parents—that she could be living somewhere in the city, probably not far from where the shop had once stood—was so tantalizing. It made the compulsion to go to Vienna even stronger. It occurred to Kitty that she could go to Saint Leopold’s herself—question every member of the congregation if necessary. She wondered why no one there had responded to the appeal from the pulpit, which surely must have been made, as it was at the church in Floridsdorf. Perhaps no one there knew where Clara had gone. Perhaps going there would be a waste of time. And that was the only lead she had. Father Josef was right: she was just going to have to try to be patient.