Part 37 (1/2)

And Walsh understood. He had shown Steiger's body to Louis and Angel, and afterwards he ate and drank with them. He was complicit. He had made himself so, step by step, ever since he had taken sides with Ross, but Ross would not protect him. To turn on Parker, and by extension on Angel and Louis, was to initiate the destruction of his own career.

And to what end: for a killer of children?

Walsh's anger began to ebb, to be replaced by a sense of vertigo, of a spinning, nauseating world. He believed in good, in morality, but so too did the man standing before him, and Walsh found himself unable to balance the two perspectives. Was this how it had to be? To eradicate a little of the evil from the world, did you have to sacrifice something of your own goodness? He had thought that he could consort with men like this, yet keep a moral distance. He had been wrong.

Walsh's cellphone rang in his pocket. He answered it, listened, and said only 'I'm coming down there' before he hung up.

'Baulman is dead,' he said. 'He shot himself before they could get to him.'

He stared at the phone in his hand, as though expecting another call that might explain everything to him.

'I'm going home,' said Parker. 'It's time.'

The Fulcis had done a good job, even in the few days allowed them. The plywood over the busted window in the kitchen door was gone, and there was new gla.s.s in its place. The holes left by bullets and shotgun pellets had been filled in, and the kitchen repainted. His office had a new door. They had even bought milk, bread, and coffee, and put a six-pack of s.h.i.+pyard Export in the refrigerator. Two bottles of wine stood on the kitchen counter. A note, signed by both of them, wished him well, and advised that they had one or two small tasks to finish up whenever it suited him.

And here, in the place in which he had almost died, the home that he had once shared with Rachel and Sam, he felt suddenly overwhelmed by emotion rage, grat.i.tude, guilt, regret. He sat in his office chair, buried his face in his hands, and did not move for a long time.

70.

Werner's property was searched with radar to detect anomalies in the soil. Three holes were dug as a result, but only an old tarp and some animal remains were found. On the second day, the compost pile was noticed. Werner had built himself a wooden composting unit and placed it at the end of his yard beneath a copse of trees. There was concern that the heat from the pile would play h.e.l.l with the equipment, so it was decided to make an exploratory dig once the unit had been moved.

They discovered Oran Wilde's body buried just two feet below the ground.

Sometimes convictions come from meticulous police work, from thousands of hours of effort. Sometimes a witness emerges. Sometimes a confession is made.

Sometimes you get a break.

One week after Werner's death, a letter arrived at Bruno Perlman's old address from a mailbox company located two miles from his house, notifying him that his two-month rental agreement was about to expire, and offering him one year for the price of six months should he choose to extend. A court order was obtained to open the box, which was found to contain paperwork relating to the late Bernhard Hummel, aka Udo Hoch, a former guard at Lubsko concentration camp; and another Maine resident named Ambros Riese, tentatively identified by Perlman as Anselm Trommler, an Obersturmbannfuhrer and engineering specialist at Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Perlman, it seemed, had not been such a fantasist after all, although it was not clear at first how he had come to find these men. Eventually it was established that his was the most basic kind of investigation: in the aftermath of Engel's arrest, he had used voter records to create a short list of German Americans living in Maine whose ages corresponded to Engel's. He then appeared to have surrept.i.tously begun photographing them, and comparing them with available photographs of men and women who had served on the staff at Lubs...o...b.. using a fairly simple piece of face-aging software.

Perlman's mailbox also contained two high-quality copies of photographs that were neither from official n.a.z.i party identification doc.u.ments, nor taken by Perlman himself. One showed a woman in profile, her face almost entirely hidden by her blond hair, her left hand raised to fire a pistol. She was surrounded by a small crowd of SS officers and men. It was unclear at what exactly she was firing, but when enlarged, two shapes on the ground to her right were revealed to be the bodies of naked men. The second photograph showed another woman standing at a chalkboard, pointing at some writing with a piece of chalk held in her right hand. Her light hair was pulled back in a bun. In front of her were two rows of teenagers, the first standing, and the second kneeling. The writing on the board read: 'Der Jahrgang 1938, Kla.s.senlehrer Fraulein Gorski.' It was a picture of the graduating students of 1938, with their homeroom teacher, Isha Gorski, later Isha Winter, at the Bierhoff Jewish Private School in Aachen. On the back of the photo, Perlman had written down the names of each of the students, and the camps to which they had been taken.

None had survived the war.

Marie Demers called on Charlie Parker as she was heading to Portland Jetport to catch her flight back to DC. Ambros Riese had been questioned at his home, and denied all knowledge of Anselm Trommler. But Demers had unearthed a labor requisition form from Mittelbau-Dora with Trommler's name signed on the bottom, along with photographs and doc.u.ments that traced his journey from Germany to Argentina, and on to the United States, during which time Trommler became Riese. Trommler's photograph on his n.a.z.i party members.h.i.+p doc.u.ments was almost identical, a little less weight on the face aside, to the picture on his INS paperwork. There was enough evidence, Demers believed, to begin denaturalization and extradition proceedings against him, a.s.suming he lived long enough. All this was explained to Riese as he sat in his chair, the oxygen hissing into him, while his son advised him to say nothing until they hired a lawyer, and his daughter-in-law looked on in silent shock.

And then, just as Demers and Toller were leaving, Riese confessed. He didn't do so out of shame, or guilt, or even some strange relief.

He did it, Demers thought, out of pride.

The detective interested Demers. She was content to discuss the details of the case with him, and what had been discovered in Perlman's rented mailbox. It was all about to become a matter of public record anyway.

'But you found nothing about Baulman?' asked Parker.

'No, just Riese, and Hummel, and the photographs. We're still working on identifying the second woman, but we think it's almost certainly Magda Probst, wife of Obersturmbannfuhrer Lothar Probst, commandant of Lubsko Experimental Camp.'

She pulled a file from her bag and showed him the photographs.

'That's him on the right,' said Demers.

But Parker was not looking at the picture of the woman with the gun. He was looking at the photograph of Isha Gorski.

And he knew.

V.

[We] will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusers in order that justice may be done.

From 'Concerning Responsibility of Hitlerites for Committed Atrocities,' October 30th, 1943, signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin

71.

He had not expected to be heading north again so soon. He did so with a certain peace, and a kind of a.s.surance. He had no proof or none that would stand up in court but he had certainty. Perhaps he should have told Demers immediately, but it was one thing to have faith in one's own convictions, and another to encourage others to share it. And he held fast to another truth: that there was not one form of justice, but many.

It took Isha Winter a while to answer her doorbell. He thought that she might have been watching his arrival from an upstairs window, for he saw a shadow move against the gla.s.s. She appeared reluctant to admit him, as though she already knew why he had come. As they sat across from each other in the living room, the sun spearing light through a gap in the drapes, he felt like one who had come to bring news of a death.

'You were there,' she said, 'when the pastor was killed.'

'I was.'

'The police came. They told me about him, about Marcus Baulman, about the buried boy ...'

Parker said nothing. He sat back and let her speak while he watched, barely listening to the words that came from her lips, seeing them only as black seeds that dropped to the floor, slipping between the boards to germinate poisonously in the darkness that lay beneath, until at last sound became silence. He took in once again the dark wood, the stained boards, the low ceilings. It reminded him of an animal's lair, a place to hide from hunters.

'Why have you come here?' she asked.

'Because you are not who you claim to be.'

'Then who am I?'

'I don't know, not for sure, but you are not Isha Gorski. I think you probably looked a little like her in your youth, or enough to pa.s.s for her among those who knew her only from photographs. Like you, she was fair-haired. Surgery may have helped, but mostly the deception succeeded because everyone who had once been close to Isha was dead. If I had to guess, I'd say that you were once Magda Probst, who calmed children as they were led in to die at the end of one of Reynard Kraus's needles. Like you, she was left-handed. I've seen a photograph of her firing a gun. Isha Gorski wrote with her right hand. I've seen a photograph of her too, but she was holding only a piece of chalk, surrounded by children who didn't know they were already dead.

'I think you colluded with Kraus and Udo Hoch and Thomas Engel to escape justice, although I've been trying to figure out what part your husband Lothar played in what happened. Maybe he was n.o.ble enough to sacrifice himself so you could get away, but I think that you and your accomplices killed him. I've read up on him. He was older than you, and walked with a limp. He'd only have been a burden, even if he'd agreed to become involved. His body wasn't as badly burned as Isha's because that was who ended up in his bed at the end, I think, although I imagine she was charred flesh before she was even put there and confirmation of his ident.i.ty would have led to an a.s.sumption about the remains found in the house with him: a murder-suicide involving husband and wife, with the Russians at the gates. Anyway, n.o.body was going to look very closely at a pair of blackened bodies in a gutted house, not with Germany on the verge of collapse and plenty of the dead and dying to occupy the Allies, and not with one courageous survivor left alive to tell a tale of how she hid in a grave while SS guards disposed of the evidence of murder, and the commandant and his wife ended their lives together. I still don't know why you didn't flee with the others. Maybe you were ill, or injured, or perhaps you just knew that a whole lot of problems could be avoided if Magda Probst was believed dead, and Isha Gorski alive. The Allies didn't put dead people on wanted lists.

'Of course, for that story to work you had to pretend to be a Jew. Not that it bothered you. You weren't an anti-Semite, and neither was your husband. That's why you were chosen for Lubsko. You were just mercenaries at heart. Still, I suspect you hoped it would only be a temporary arrangement until you could get to the money and disappear because that's what it was all about, right: money? Those poor souls, who thought they could buy their lives from you, gave up the hiding places for whatever wealth they had stashed away, but I'll bet that, toward the end, not all of that information was making its way to Berlin.

But because of the story you had created for yourself the Sole Survivor, the Last Witness to Lubsko you were stuck with Isha's ident.i.ty for the long term. It worked out well, though: what better place to hide than among those you'd tried so hard to wipe out, with a husband who was Jewish by birth but not by observance? I hear that Werner had a quotation from Goebbels tattooed on the small of his back. Werner had lots of tattoos, but I think this one had a particular meaning for him: ”If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” You were the big lie. Your life was the lie.'