Part 28 (1/2)

G.o.d help anyone who went up against him now.

G.o.d help them all.

53.

Bernhard Hummel was currently residing in the special care unit of the Golden Hills Senior Living Community just outside Ellsworth, Maine.

Of the many ends that he might meet, Baulman had always been most fearful of dementia. The idea of slowly losing himself appalled him, and he had done all he could to ensure that such a fate was not destined to be his: he exercised regularly, ate well, and was never without a newspaper or a book. He played memory games reciting the fifty state capitals, listing the names and numbers of beloved symphonies, or the German soccer teams of various vintages and, although he was right-handed, he forced himself to perform many tasks using his left. His arthritis he could live with. His bladder was little better than a thimble, but he could calculate almost to the minute how long he had before he would need a men's room. He couldn't recall the last time he'd had a good night's sleep, but he'd learned to grab a nap whenever he could, and anyway, it left more time for reading.

But still he was troubled when he forgot the name of an acquaintance, living or dead, or couldn't bring to mind quickly enough a favorite film, or the t.i.tle of a novel. Unlike poor old Bernhard Hummel, he had n.o.body around who might notice any deterioration in the quality of his mental functioning. He had to be his own guardian, his own monitor. He could only hope that, if it happened, he would recognize the symptoms before it was too late, giving him time to kill himself.

Golden Hills wasn't the worst such facility that Baulman had visited in his time. It did, at least, have hills of a sort, and the buildings and gardens were well maintained. One half of the property consisted entirely of apartments and small cottages for those individuals or couples that needed a little help with day-to-day activities, yet didn't require round-the-clock care, but Hummel was in a secure annex at the rear of the main building. Baulman was admitted without any trouble. He wasn't even required to show ID, and for an instant he considered signing in under a false name. But what if the people from the Justice Department were tailing him? He would only bring down suspicion on himself if they checked the visitors' register and found that he had signed in under an alias. He had grown increasingly paranoid about such surveillance not without cause and now found himself searching the faces of strangers for signs of excessive interest and monitoring the cars that followed him on both local roads and the freeway. He incorporated the routine into his memory games, filing away the license numbers, makes, and colors of cars. If they were keeping an eye on his movements, he had given them no cause to suspect him, and was not about to start today. He was ent.i.tled to visit his old friend Bernhard. What kind of man doesn't visit his friends in the hospital? To h.e.l.l with them if they did question him about it.

He hadn't seen Hummel in two years, not since he'd been admitted to Golden Hills at the instigation of his daughter, Theodora. Baulman had never liked her. He hadn't liked Hummel's wife much either, but at least she had the decency to stop bothering people by dying. Theodora had always struck Baulman as too selfish even for mortality. She would outlive them all, like a c.o.c.kroach. At the first sign of her father's deterioration she had packed him off to Golden Hills without a second thought, or so it appeared to Baulman. It made him glad that he would die without issue.

The receptionist gave him a four-digit code to get past the first door, but he had to press a b.u.t.ton and wait to be admitted through the second. He smelled cooked food, and human waste, and disinfectant. No matter how well-managed they were, all these places smelled the same. He tried to shut his ears to the wailing of an old woman somewhere to his left 'No!' she cried. 'I don't want to! No, no, no, no, no ...' and barely glanced into the lounge where an a.s.sortment of residents younger than he sat slumped like zombies in chairs. He felt uncomfortable even being within these walls, as though one of the staff a pa.s.sing doctor, an orderly might mistake him for a patient and refuse to let him leave. He had always hated confinement. It was why he would fight Demers and her kind until the end.

He found Hummel's room and paused on the threshold. He hadn't been sure what to bring. He had decided against hard candy or salt.w.a.ter taffy even he didn't care much for gnawing on such delicacies at his age and opted instead for marshmallows and seedless grapes. He took a deep breath and entered the room.

His friend was seated in a comfortable chair by the window, smiling beatifically. Outside was a line of trees, masking the wall of the property. Either he liked trees a lot, though Baulman, or Hummel was communing with the birds. He had aged terribly since Baulman had last seen him. His clothes no longer fitted him properly, and his tiny bald head on its wrinkled neck poked from the collar of his s.h.i.+rt like the skull of some ancient tortoise.

Baulman coughed, but Hummel didn't react.

'h.e.l.lo?' said Baulman. 'Bernhard?'

Hummel's head turned slowly. The smile faded. He grew confused. Baulman wondered if he even knew who he was any more. As far as Hummel was concerned, Baulman might as easily have called him by his wife's name and received something of the same response.

He moved into the room, but did not approach Hummel too closely, for fear that he might frighten or distress him. It pained him to see his former colleague and friend this way. Hummel had always been so strong, so vital. At Lubsko, Baulman had watched him fight to the death with a Jew named Oppert, a former wrestler, just to prove that he could beat him. By then, Oppert had seen the bodies of his wife and children, and even though they promised to let him live if he won, Oppert knew better. He accepted the challenge because to do otherwise would be to accept a bullet in the back of the head, and he entertained the hope that he might go to his grave after breaking Hummel's neck. He was mistaken. Weeks at Lubsko had given Oppert back some of his strength, but he was still no match for Hummel, who had later been severely reprimanded for such a breach of regulations. Now look at him, thought Baulman: it's hard to believe that this is the same man.

A flicker of recognition ignited in Hummel's face, but still he did not speak.

'Bernhard, it's me. Marcus. Marcus Baulman.'

The smile returned to Hummel's face.

'Kraus!' he said. 'My friend, how good to see you!'

You have condemned yourself, thought Baulman. You are a dead man.

54.

It did not take them long to pack up most of Parker's possessions. He kept with him only toiletries, one canvas bag of clothes, some food and books, and his gun. Angel and Louis returned to Portland with the rest, leaving him alone. It was as he wished it to be. They would come back if or when he needed them.

Night had already fallen by the time they were gone. He took the flashlight from under the sink in the kitchen, and slipped the gun into the pocket of his jacket. He walked north until he came to the house in which Ruth Winter had died. Crime scene tape sealed off the doors and the steps up to the porch. A printed notice advised anyone even thinking of trespa.s.sing that they would be subject to arrest.

He did not enter, but merely stood for a time beneath the window of Ruth's room. He had visited too many houses like this one, had stood at too many such scenes, not to feel that the building itself had suffered a form of psychic shock, that the crime committed under its roof had affected the physical s.p.a.ce it occupied. Wood and brick had a kind of memory: blood seeped into their grain, their dust, and transformed them. Perhaps some people were just more sensitive than others, but he was willing to bet good money that it would be a long time before anyone settled easily into this place.

If he ever had any doubts about the sanity of such observations, he had only to remember the house in which his wife and their child died, and what he had witnessed there when he returned after many years. Some might have called them ghosts, or specters, but he didn't hold with such labels. They suggested incorporeality, and what he had seen in those rooms and elsewhere too had a substance to them, a lethality. Ethereal wisps couldn't write warnings to the living or draw blood from hunters and killers.

He pictured again Ruth Winter's body on the bed, and the great arterial spray on the wall above. He felt no guilt for what had befallen her. He had tried his utmost to save her. He could have done no more. The stain of her death lay on the souls of others. One of them was already dead. He would find the rest.

He moved on until he came to the dunes. The place at which that great weight of sand had sheared off to bury Earl Steiger was still distinct from the rest, although the mound beneath which he died had been destroyed and scattered during the retrieval of his body. Parker realized that he was standing in almost the same spot his daughter had occupied that night. He thought again about their conversation in Vermont. There, with the backdrop of the Wolfes' beautiful old home, in warm light hazy with the advent of summer, he could convince himself that the culmination of the events at Green Heron Bay was a freak act of nature, one that had saved his life by snuffing out another's. But here, on this dark strand, the memory of those moments came back to him with a palpable force, and he knew that his suspicions about his daughter were not without foundation. He had glimpsed something in her face that night which was not entirely human, something he had never witnessed before- No, that was not true. He had caught hints of it in others, in men and women who were and this, too, was easier to deny in daylight than darkness infested by ent.i.ties, by supernatural agencies. They had an otherness to them, and he had caught a hint of that same essence in his own daughter as she caused the death of Earl Steiger. There: it was said. It was what he believed. His daughter was not what she appeared to be. She was carrying something inside her of which she might not even be aware.

The realization numbed him, but he could already sense his emotions straining to break through. What was it? Was it evil? Was it some ancient, rotten spirit cast down to earth, burning as it fell, that had curled up amid rock and lava to wait until men arrived, and it found a host among them? Or had it come from him? Had he infected his own child with a pollutant in his own nature, one that he himself had not yet been able to identify? So lost was he in his own fear and pain that it was some moment before he could bring himself even to consider the possibility of a more benign context for what he had witnessed.

A figure moved amid the dunes, dancing just beyond the reach of his flashlight, and he felt the presence of the dead daughter, and thought that he could hear her singing to him from the shadows. The numbness receded, and in its place came not anger and grief, but a kind of solace that brought him back to the bench by a lake, where she had held his hand and promised him that all was not in vain, and if he returned to this life she would find a way to remain with him.

'Tell me,' he said to the dark. 'Tell me what she is.'

The singing stopped, but no reply came. He pa.s.sed the flashlight's beam around, trying to catch sight of her again, but what he could see of the dunes remained empty, and the only sound left was the breaking of waves.

The flashlight flared, the bulb glowing gradually brighter and brighter until he could feel the heat of it, and it did not so much illuminate the night as burn a column of light through it; and just as the bulb exploded he caught a glimpse of the dead daughter at the very edge of the beam's reach, and all dread and doubt were banished as she was absorbed into the dark.

He turned away, walked back to his house, and did not fear the shadows.

IV.

Had I turned into a soulless person, a wicked man, a murderer? I went on plying my conscience with questions. Had I done anything in the war but my duty and my obligations? Had I done anything but remain loyal to my oath and obedient to my orders? And my conscience answered me rea.s.suringly. No, nothing else. Had I killed defenseless people, or ordered them to be killed. No, no, no. What in the devil's name did they want of me?

Extract from the memoirs of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution, published in The People newspaper, 1961

55.

Even by his poor standards, Baulman was enduring a difficult night. He replayed his conversation with Hummel over and over, the horror of it repeatedly unfolding before him. Baulman had been able to endure Hummel's company for only fifteen minutes, but throughout their entire conversation Hummel was unable to refer to him as anything other than 'Reynard' or, occasionally, 'my dear Kraus.' It was a nightmare, and when at last Baulman had made his escape, he felt physically weakened by the encounter. He sat in his car and wondered how quickly Hummel could be put out of both of their miseries. While in the room he made a quick search of Hummel's belongings, just in case any mail might have arrived from the Justice Department, but there was nothing. Baulman thought Hummel's d.a.m.ned daughter had probably requested that all of her father's mail be redirected to her. What if the Justice people got in touch with her, and that b.i.t.c.h Demers came calling? Baulman could only hope that Theodora would be smart enough not to let Demers within fifty feet of her father.

He calmed himself, and tried to consider the problem logically. Theodora Hummel might have been as unpleasant as s.h.i.+ngles, but she wasn't stupid. Who knew what Hummel, in his dotage, had let slip to her about his past? Even after only a quarter of an hour with him, Baulman was convinced that he had regressed to his wartime service. Every word from Hummel's lips had concerned his time in uniform and, stirred by the presence of his old comrade, their time together at Lubsko, although Hummel spoke only of the flowerbeds, and the good food, and the relaxed regime, excluding from his memory entirely the walking corpses that justified the camp's existence. Sometimes he even forgot that he was now Bernhard Hummel and corrected Baulman when he called him by that name ...

Slowly, Baulman became convinced that Theodora must have some awareness of what her father had really done during the war. Hummel's cover story was that he had been persecuted for trade union activism, and forced to wear the red inverted triangle of a political prisoner. He had been imprisoned, first in Kuhberg and Flossenburg, and then in Dachau. This story had initially caused him some difficulties with the Americans, due to the inevitable communist connotations of trade union activism, but the supporting doc.u.mentation from various sympathetic members of the clergy, as well as his American sponsors, had made it clear that Bernhard Hummel was as anticommunist as it was possible to be, and had, in fact, become involved in workers' rights as much to fight against unwelcome Marxist influences as fascism. By now Theodora Hummel certainly knew this to be a lie, but she had remained silent, as any good daughter would.

And what if Demers did manage to interview Hummel? The ravings of a demented man would not stand up in court. But did they have to stand up? Again, it came down to the burden of proof required for deportation. Maybe even Hummel's ramblings would be enough to d.a.m.n Baulman. If, as he believed, Engel had betrayed him, then Hummel would give them the confirmation Demers needed to continue her investigation. Once they began pulling threads, some unraveling was inevitable.

He went over all this again as he lay sleepless in his bed, Lotte snoring peacefully on her cus.h.i.+on under the window. He concluded that Theodora Hummel's instinct for self-preservation, and her desire to maintain her status in the community she was an a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al at an elementary-middle school meant that she had decided to conceal whatever she might have learned about her father's true ident.i.ty. He could approach her, of course, and sound her out to confirm this, but it seemed inadvisable, just in case she actually did not know the truth about her father, or had decided to leave it unacknowledged even to herself, and because she had no more love for Baulman than he had for her.

There was another way, though, another person to whom he could speak about Hummel, one who was closer to him than Baulman had been: Riese. Yes, just as he had been instructed to do, Baulman would consult with Riese, and on the basis of what he learned he would be able to gauge the best way of dealing with Theodora.

With that, Baulman's body and mind began to relax at last, and he fell asleep.