A Song Of Shadows Part 13

It is an unpopular point to make in some circles, but both the best and worst thing to happen to n.a.z.i hunting was Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal was, in many ways, a kind of fantasist: his various memoirs contradict one another, and it is likely that he lied about some of the details of his early life, including his professional qualifications as an architect, and his many brushes with near-death during the Holocaust. One of his most famous sketches the murder of three Jewish prisoners by a firing squad at Mauthausen concentration camp, their bodies slumping against the stakes to which they had been tied was plagiarized from a Life photograph of the execution of three Germans by American forces. He exaggerated his role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, to the extent that he told stories about wrestling Eichmann into a ditch during his capture in Buenos Aires in 1960. In actuality, Wiesenthal had been in Europe at the time, and was convinced that Eichmann was in hiding in Cairo. Although he did nothing to deny credit for helping to capture more than 3000 former n.a.z.is, his actual achievements in that field can be counted on one hand two, if one were being generous. His exaggerations and inconsistencies provided valuable ammunition to his enemies, including neo-n.a.z.is and Holocaust deniers.

And yet ...

Wiesenthal was a driven man, and the justice of his cause is beyond any criticism. He was also ahead of his time in recognizing that, if interest in n.a.z.i war crimes was to be sustained, the news media required not just a story but a legend in all the senses of the word: a figure somehow real yet beyond history, a human being of extraordinary achievement, and, in the language of the intelligence field, a legend in the sense of an ident.i.ty that is not entirely one's own. By regularly conjuring up the specters of Josef Mengele and Martin Bormann, the bogeymen of n.a.z.ism, Wiesenthal was able to keep the crimes of the Third Reich in the limelight, and allow a little of it to s.h.i.+ne upon himself in the process. He was the Man Who Would Not Forget, the Detective with Six Million Clients, the lone hunter with a mission to bring to justice a regime of unquestionable evil. Such an image, such a story, was irresistible to the media, and in helping to perpetuate it even through the occasional use of tall tales Wiesenthal performed a valuable service to the world.

But the reality of hunting n.a.z.is is far more mundane, and its history is largely shameful. In 1942 the United Nations War Crimes Commission was formed by the Allies to create a list of 'ringleaders' to be tried for ma.s.s murder when the war was over. It took the Commission two years to complete its work, by which point it had come up with a grand total of only 189 names. As if this wasn't embarra.s.sing enough, it had to be pointed out to the list's compilers that they had forgotten to include Adolf Hitler.

But the Allies showed little interest in devoting valuable resources to tracking down war criminals in the aftermath of World War II, and even less as the distance from the conflict grew greater. There was no one reason for their absence of drive, although laziness and inefficiency loom large, and later sheer political expediency, for in the fight against Communism, my enemy's enemy became my friend. German operations on the Eastern Front provided the West with a valuable information bank upon which to draw, and it is common knowledge that German scientists were recruited for the rocket program in the United States.

Eventually, though, the US was spurred perhaps even shamed into acting. The result of pressure from both inside and outside the U.S. was the establishment in 1979 of the Office of Special Investigations, tasked with investigating n.a.z.i and Imperial j.a.panese crimes of persecution, and removing the perpetrators of such crimes to countries with criminal jurisdiction over their alleged offenses. But the individuals they were pursuing were already beginning to die by 1979, and the OSI and later the HRSP were instructed to work 'as fast as you responsibly can' to bring their quarry to justice before mortality intervened, a task that was compared to running a mile in four minutes one year, then in three-fifty-five the next, then three-fifty ...

It is a curious fact, but war crimes cases are generally a direct inversion of most standard criminal investigations. The latter begin with a crime and end with a suspect, but war crimes inquiries usually begin with a suspect and end with proof of an atrocity. Names of wanted individuals would be checked against the records of the immigration services by birth date and variations in spelling, since the Cyrillic alphabet offered many possibilities for error or deliberate obfuscation. When hits, or potential hits, came back, the OSI would determine whether the suspect in question was still alive and then, usually through a nonidentifying phone call, check on the health of the person. Once it was confirmed that he or she was still living, and reasonably compos mentis, an OSI investigation number would be a.s.signed, and a team of attorneys and historians would commence pulling apart the details of his or her life. Record checks would be requested from Berlin or the ZS, the Central Office of the State Justice Adminstrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg. These would include, where available since the n.a.z.is did their best to burn most of their paperwork in the final months of the war the records of the actions of units of the German military; while individual soldiers and officers might not be named, it was possible to connect a soldier to the crimes of his unit through its presence at a particular location, and its actions while it was there.

After the justification for a full OSI investigation was established, a file would be opened, and at that point the office would begin to engage personally with the suspect. Originally a letter would be sent, requesting attendance for an interview, which was non-compulsory. But after a couple of years, the question was raised of why the OSI was effectively warning suspects in advance, and from then on 'knock and talk' interviews became the standard approach. At first most of those interviewed were surprised to find Justice Department officials sometimes accompanied by a discreetly armed investigator on their doorsteps, for the unheralded creation of the OSI had pa.s.sed by unnoticed. But very quickly the OSI's existence became common knowledge, and the section was attacked on a regular basis in the newspapers of the Baltic American and Ukrainian communities for allegedly collaborating with the Soviets, to the extent that one Ukrainian American newspaper even published a list of investigators' names.

Over the thirty-five years of its existence, the OSI succeeded in winning more cases against suspected n.a.z.i war criminals than all other governments in the West combined. It was, as Marie Demers recognized, still not enough. She had joined the OSI as an intern, and now, despite her relatively youthful looks, had been working with it for over fifteen years, transitioning to the so-called 'legacy' n.a.z.i team after the formation of the HRSP. That team now numbered only four attorneys, two historians Toller was one, despite any appearance to the contrary and a handful of paralegals, but could draw on additional personnel where necessary.

Those instances, though, were becoming increasingly rare. The old n.a.z.is were slipping through their fingers one by one, like the last grains of sand held in a fist. The apprehension of Engel and Fuhrmann had been the result of two years of meticulous investigation. In the entire history of the OSI and the HRSP, only one prosecution had ever resulted from a tip-off: that of Jacob Tannenbaum, a kapo at the Gorlitz concentration camp who had brutalized his fellow Jews, and was recognized by a former inmate. The reality of their work would have made poor drama.

It was also hugely frustrating. She had been warned about that on her first day. 'You'll require a high frustration threshold,' she was told, but she really had no idea of what was meant by it, not then. So many had evaded them, and at the lowest points it sometimes seemed that Europeans were engaged in a form of collective denial of responsibility, demonstrating an unwillingness to step up and do their duty that bordered on the shameful.

And now they had Engel and Fuhrmann, both discovered living about a two hour drive from each other, Engel in Augusta and Fuhrmann farther south in Durham, New Hamps.h.i.+re. Fuhrmann, who had served as a guard at Sachsenhausen, gave his interrogators nothing. He was a serious name, rank, and serial number type. He also had few family ties in the States. Two wives had predeceased him, and one son. He was entirely estranged from his other children, all daughters. The evidence against him was solid, and the Germans were confident of a successful prosecution. Fuhrmann fought the extradition proceedings against him more as a matter of course than anything else, accepting the role that he was required to play without complaint. He lost his appeal with little more than a shrug.

Engel was different. His wife was still alive, and he had a large family. He was active in various local organizations, and was an advocate for the rights of seniors. His prosecution sent fissures running through his community and even his own family, creating complex, angry divisions among those who believed him guilty, those who blindly declared him innocent, and a strange, gray collective of those who could not make the connection between the lively, jovial old man they knew, and the SS guard alleged to have marched naked men and women to a pit at Lubs...o...b..fore shooting them in the back of the neck. Somehow they managed to accept the guilt of the younger man while regarding the older as a different being entirely.

So Engel had battled them all the way. While denaturalization and deportation prosecutions were civil, not criminal, they required prosecutors to reach an evidentiary standard that had been ruled by the Supreme Court as 'substantially identical' to the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt. With each battle won against Engel, the opposing forces simply moved on to the next field, from district to circuit court, from the Board of Immigration Appeals to the federal appellate system, until finally only the Supreme Court remained, at which point Engel appeared to concede, possibly because he had exhausted his finances. But then came the call from his lawyer, and the offer to name names. Engel would sell out other war criminals in order to remain in the United States.

The first name he had given them was that of Marcus Baulman. Baulman was not who he claimed to be, according to Engel. No, Baulman was really Reynard Kraus, who had learned his trade with a one-month a.s.sistants.h.i.+p to Mengele at Auschwitz before moving to Lubsko. Under Mengele's careful tuition, Kraus had learned how to euthanize children: an intravenous injection of the barbiturate Evipal into the right arm to put the child to sleep, followed by 10cc of chloroform injected directly into the left ventricle of the heart. The children barely twitched before they died. Now the HRSP wanted Marcus Baulman. They wanted him very badly indeed.

And Demers was determined to be the one to bring him in.

24.

Rachel and Sam arrived shortly after Parker finished talking with Walsh. He had spent the intervening time walking, trying to balance the pain it caused him with his desire to spur his body toward a full recovery. He despised how slow he had become almost as much as he despised the biweekly physical therapy sessions designed to help him, not so much for the discomfort they caused but because he hated being surrounded by those like himself. He did not want to see his own weakness reflected in others. He hated the headaches and the medication and the scars and the wounds, and he transferred some of this rage to the streets he now walked.

He had always struggled with Bangor as a city. Attempts were being made to breathe life back into downtown, but the Bangor Mall had sucked it dry years before, and the damage would always be hard to undo. It was better now than it had ever been before, but it lacked the students and artists who had sustained Portland's center when the Maine Mall had similarly annihilated the business district along Congress Street.

Eventually he came to St John's Church on York Street, built in the mid-nineteenth century to accommodate the hordes of Irish immigrants who had come to the city. He had not set foot in a church since the shooting. He could not say why. He had been raised Catholic, and still occasionally attended ma.s.s, but mostly he just dropped by a church if he felt the need to offer a prayer for Rachel and Sam, or simply to think in silence. Now he felt himself drawn to the old redbrick building with its great spire and its ornate Tyrolean stained gla.s.s windows, perhaps because it reminded him of St Dominic's in Portland, one of the oldest and most beautiful churches in the state, until the diocese closed it in 1997. His grandfather had taken him to wors.h.i.+p there at Christmas and Easter, when he felt the occasion justified something grander than St Maximillian's in Scarborough, and so, in Parker's mind, redbrick churches were a.s.sociated with his grandfather, and his memories of the old man were entirely fond.

He stepped inside St John's, blessed himself, and took a seat halfway up the aisle. It was empty, and he was alone. St John's was not an austere environment, not with its onyx, bronze, and marble, its ornately decorated walls and ceilings, its sculpted Stations of the Cross. No, this was an architectural hymn to G.o.d.

He asked himself what he was expecting: to feel the immanence of the Divine, to be bathed in His radiance? He had no answer, and no one to whom he could turn to speak aloud his thoughts. He had no father, no mother. Behind him stretched only a column of the dead.

Parker closed his eyes, and in his mind he was once again seated by a lake, but this time his dead daughter was not with him, and from the distant hills a wolf howled, registering his presence once again in that place. While he sat in St John's, his mind recreated a world beyond this one, and he tried to connect the two environments. He was not mad, and neither were his memories the products of trauma, anesthetic, or postoperative medication. He believed that he had, however briefly, and while either dead or dying, found himself stranded between realms. He knew this because of what he kept in a pocket of his jacket. He reached for it now, his eyes still closed, and felt it between his fingers. He removed it and held it in the palm of his right hand, his thumb following its textures and striations.

It was a single black stone, damaged on one side. He had held just such a stone when he sat on the bench by the lake, trying to choose whether to embrace physical dissolution or return to the agony of existence, and when he finally threw it, the in-between world had shattered. The stone had been there with him when his dead daughter held his hand, the warmth of her like a brand against the chill of his own skin, for in that place she was restored to light, and he was the faded one. And he was clutching it in his fist when he returned to consciousness in the hospital in Portland, and no one could tell him how it had come to be there.

It was his proof, and his alone.

He opened his eyes. The church remained empty. He still had questions, but no doubts. His thumb continued to brush the stone as he prayed for Sam and Rachel, and for those whom he loved. Finally, he offered up a prayer for Amanda Winter and her mother, although he could not have said why, beyond his knowledge of the daughter's illness, and a feeling of disquiet about the mother. When he was done, he placed the stone back in his pocket, knelt, blessed himself once again, and left.

His pain had dulled. The brief respite had done him some good.

The handover of Sam was brusque, like the delivery of a hostage, although he could see that Rachel was worried about him, and she found a moment to ask if he was sure that he would be okay with Sam (and unspoken, and more to the point, that Sam would be okay with him). He a.s.sured her they'd both be fine. He even managed to ask after Jeff, Rachel's boyfriend, without retching. Rachel spotted the effort that it required.

'You almost sounded sincere there,' she said.

'I am sincere,' he replied. 'I think.'

He didn't wish Jeff ill. Jeff was an a.s.shole, but there was a lot of that around, and if he condemned everyone who was sometimes an a.s.shole then the prisons would be full and the streets empty. In fact, Parker was pretty certain that, in such a brave new world, he'd have a cell all to himself.

He and Sam waited for Rachel to drive away, then Sam got in the front seat of the Mustang beside her father.

'You know your mom likes you to ride in back,' said Parker.

'I know. You're going to let me ride up front, though. With you.'

'Really?'

'Yes.'

And, figuring that the issue had been dealt with, he pulled away from the curb.

The detective's relations.h.i.+p with his daughter was a construct of great complexity, of nuance and shadow. He could never see as much of her as he might have wished, and yet curiously he did not miss her as deeply as he might have done under other circ.u.mstances, for she was always with him. In that, he thought, she was like his first daughter, his dead daughter. He carried Sam in his heart, and when he conversed with her in her absence alone at night, or when driving along I-95 with the music down low he heard her responses as a.s.suredly as if she were seated next to him.

And while there was much about Sam that he did not know and this was both a consequence of the physical distance between them and the natural gap in comprehension between a father and a growing daughter he also felt that he understood her in ways that her mother did not. The workings of Sam's mind somtimes baffled Rachel, but not Parker. Sam was a child of the unsaid, and perhaps because they were away from each other for such long stretches, he had learned to read the s.p.a.ces, the gaps, and the silences; to listen to what was unspoken as much as to what was offered aloud. She said nothing without thinking about it first, which meant trying to trace the thought processes that had led to whatever p.r.o.nouncement finally emerged. He regarded her as strangely fearless, and even her concerns for his health were tempered by an apparent conviction that all would be well, in part because she willed it to be so.

She was older than her years Rachel, too, saw that but this did not manifest itself as a self-aggrandizing precociousness. She simply came across as unusually self-possessed, gifted with stillness, quiet, and the ability to watch and absorb without involving herself. But, when she chose, she could inhabit the role of a child, even if Parker always felt that she was often playing to the gallery when she did so. On the drive back to Boreas, though, she was unselfconsciously herself or herself as a six year old entertaining him with a stream of observations, questions, and non sequiturs that took in everything from the height of fencing in relation to cows to how badly everyone must have smelled at the end of the first installment of The Hunger Games, which she had watched on Netflix with a babysitter, and of which she had subsequently denied all knowledge to her mother in order to protect the guilty.

They stopped along the way to buy supplies, and it was dark by the time they reached the house. Sam liked preparing pizza, so they made and rolled their own dough, divided each pizza into four sections, and experimented with toppings. They ate outside, wrapped up warm against the sea breeze, the whiteness of the breaking waves like hope made manifest in darkness, the sound and movement of them like that of living creatures. Later Sam fell asleep on the couch while her father read and listened to music. He carried her up to the room that he had set aside for her use and carefully undressed her, although she remained lost to the world throughout. He left a light on by the door, and another in the hall, in case she needed to use the bathroom during the night.

Then he went to his own bed, and slept more soundly than he had in months.

25.

The wind died. The night was still. The breaking of the waves was a distant thing now, and in their retreat they sounded a whisper of warning.

In the darkness, Sam awoke. The dead daughter stood at the end of her bed. Sam rose on her elbows. She looked at the being in the shadows and yawned. She had been dreaming. It was a good dream.

'You don't have to stay,' she told the dead daughter. 'I'm here now. I'll keep him safe.'

She fell back on her pillow and was instantly asleep again.

The dead daughter turned away, and was gone.

26.

Steiger had lunch in a secluded corner booth of an all-you-can-eat buffet. He liked buffet restaurants because their clientele allowed him to blend in easily, especially at lunch and dinner when there was a high turnover on the tables. With his straw hat pressed low on his forehead he could almost pa.s.s for normal, and few other customers ever gave him a second look in these places, so focused were they on the plates before them. As for the food, well, Steiger didn't really care. He suffered from a number of ailments and impairments, including both hyposmia and hypogeusia decreased abilities to smell and taste. Only very rich and spicy dishes impacted on his senses, but he couldn't eat them due to his delicate guts. Food for Steiger was purely functional. It was necessary fuel, and he consumed it without either joy or displeasure.

Now he sat with his back to the wall, a cup of lousy coffee growing cold before him. The check had been brought to his table, but he wasn't ready to leave yet. The noise of the restaurant and the ugliness of its decor allowed him to retreat into himself. It gave him s.p.a.ce to think.

He now knew the ident.i.ty of the man living next to Ruth Winter, and Steiger was troubled by his presence there. His instructions were to observe but not to intervene, not yet, but this man Parker was potentially dangerous. Who knew what the Winter woman might be sharing with him? Nevertheless, Steiger's attempts to convince the one Amanda Winter knew as the Jigsaw Man of the risks involved in leaving Parker alive had proved fruitless. He was too busy playing his games with the police. Dead families, burning houses: Steiger would have counseled against all of it, had he been asked, but the Jigsaw Man was both client and accomplice, which made Steiger a compromised employee. Steiger also knew that the Jigsaw Man was deliberately freezing him out, making abundantly clear his continued unhappiness with what had been done to the Tedesco woman down in Florida.

Someone nudged Steiger's table in pa.s.sing, causing his coffee to slop into his saucer and splash on the Formica. Steiger reacted with a jerk of his head, and briefly stared into the face of a middle-aged man carrying a plate of salad. Their eyes met, and the other man quickly looked away. Gazing into Steiger's eyes was like peering into a pair of sump ponds. Still, Steiger was more amused than annoyed. Who came into a buffet restaurant and ate the salad? Any nutritional value had probably been scoured from the leaves and raw vegetables anyway. They had the artificial regularity of decorative plastic.

Steiger returned to the problem of Parker. The private detective was recovering from grievous injuries, but he remained the kind of individual who was driven to act on behalf of others. If Ruth Winter revealed to him the truth behind her retreat to Boreas, then Steiger was certain that Parker would take action. To do otherwise would make him complicit in a greater evil. So if Winter talked, Parker would become a threat.

But would she talk? The appearance of the body on the beach had been both fortunate and unfortunate: unfortunate in that it would have been better had Perlman not surfaced at all, but fortunate in that it had provided an opportunity for the Jigsaw Man to warn Ruth Winter of the importance of remaining silent, for her daughter's sake as much as her own. Winter was now well and truly frightened, of that Steiger had no doubt, yet the current situation could not persist. The central issue Winter's daughter, Amanda had not been resolved, which meant that, ultimately, either the mother would act, which would present enormous difficulties, or someone would be forced to move against her before that happened.

Thus Steiger's personal view was that it would be best for all concerned if Ruth Winter ceased to exist. The detective was another matter. If the opportunity presented itself, and it could be achieved without further complication, then Steiger would kill him too, regardless of what the Jigsaw Man wanted. It would be easiest, though, if Ruth Winter died before she had the opportunity to share anything significant with Parker. But this was not a move that Steiger could make without the consent of others.

He called from a phone booth by the men's room. He was going over the Jigsaw Man's head, but in his way the Jigsaw Man, too, was an employee. Steiger detected hardly a moment's hesitation before the voice on the other end of the line told him to do whatever he deemed necessary. But Ruth Winter was not to suffer. That was made clear to him. There was to be no repeat of the business in Florida.

On his way through the restaurant he pa.s.sed the man who had jostled his table. Either he had piled high another plate with salad, or had not made much progress on the original portion, because it was largely untouched.

Steiger stopped at the table. The man looked up, his fork poised midway between his mouth and the plate. Steiger decided to spare him the effort of consuming any more of the salad. He leaned over, and spat heavily on the lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. His sputum, he noticed, bore worm-twists of blood.

'You ought to have apologized for spilling my coffee,' he said.

He didn't wait for the man's reaction. He knew what it would be: none at all. He could see it in his face. Steiger was aware that he exuded an essence potent and vile from his pores, like the poisons secreted by certain amphibians to discourage predators, except that he had yet to encounter any threat worse than himself.

He walked to his car. The sun shone with growing warmth on the parking lot. Steiger's guts hurt. They always hurt after food. Steiger knew that he was dying. He didn't need a doctor to tell him, and he wasn't about to submit his body to more suffering through needles and therapies. When the pain became too much to bear, he would end it all himself. For now, he could go on.

He opened the glove compartment, removed a fresh bottle of Mylanta, and drank half of it down. He still had a couple of Vicodin and Percocet in there as well, but he wanted to keep a clear head. The Mylanta helped some, although he suspected that the effects might be psychosomatic as much as actual. He thought back to the man who had struck his table. He should simply have let him be. There was no percentage in threatening him that way, just as there had been no point in making the Tedesco woman suffer so much. Perhaps, thought Steiger, he was simply growing ornery in his old age, or maybe one way to dull one's pain was to inflict it on another. Whatever. Like the Mylanta, it seemed to work, and that was enough for him.

He started the car and headed back to Boreas.

27.

Parker took Sam to Olesens for a late brunch, where Larraine made a fuss over her and Greg produced a pile of used children's books from some box in the bas.e.m.e.nt, only a few of which Sam had read and all of which she was happy to accept as gifts, once it became clear that Greg didn't want money for them. Another thing Parker had noticed about his daughter, and which amused him, was that she was careful with money. She wasn't stingy she would happily insist on buying ice-cream or treats, and liked the sense of perceived authority that came with paying for other people's pleasures but she was acutely conscious of value. She wouldn't have bought the book for herself, and was too young to feel obligated to pay for something that she didn't want, but free was free.

He watched her as she examined the books carefully, separating them into two piles: those to be read as soon as possible, and those that could wait perhaps indefinitely, in a couple of cases, judging by the expression of disapproval that crossed her face.

'Are the lady and the man married?' she asked, when she was certain that they were out of earshot.

'No, they're brother and sister.'

'Oh. They act like they're married.'

'But they're not.'

'Because they're brother and sister.'

'Yes.'

'If they weren't brother and sister, would they get married?'

'I don't know. I have to say, it's kind of a strange question.'

'I don't think it's strange,' she said.

'Maybe not, then.'

She seemed satisfied that her father had conceded a point to her.

'What do you want to do today?' he asked.

'Can we go and meet Amanda?'

He had told her about Amanda when he and Rachel were working out the details of where and when they'd meet in Bangor. He didn't think that Sam would have minded coming to Boreas for a few days, even without the promise of another child's presence, but it certainly added some extra appeal to the visit.

'I'll call her mom, just in case,' he said. 'But I'm sure you'd be welcome whenever you'd like to go over.'

'Good.' She picked a collection of old Peanuts cartoons from the 'to be read' pile. 'I'm going to give Amanda this one.'

'I think she'll like it.'

'It's Snoopy. Everyone likes Snoopy. Do you have a pen?'

He took one from his pocket and handed it to her. Inside the cover of the book, she inscribed the words 'To Amanda, From Sam,' and added an 'X.'

'But I'll tell her that Greg gave it to me for free,' she concluded, when she was done.

'You don't have to do that.'