Authors: John Connolly
‘That one should always be on one’s guard?’
Riese’s fingers dug painfully into Baulman’s thigh.
‘No,’ said Riese. ‘The lesson is that, in the end, nobody escapes.’
He picked up the clicker, and raised the volume on the television.
‘Go now,’ he told Baulman, ‘and don’t come here again.’
56
A
manda Winter was playing with a small white mongrel dog in the yard of her grandmother’s house when Parker arrived. Like his temporary home in Boreas, Isha Winter’s house overlooked the sea, but it was separated from the beach by a road. A gap in a fence opposite gave access to a wooden path that led through the dunes to the strand. The Winter house was painted white with blue trim. The paintwork was fresh and the garden was neatly tended.
Amanda seemed not to recognize him at first, and he thought that she looked thinner than when he’d last seen her, even though only a short time had passed. The dog barked at him, but not in a threatening way. As far as the dog was concerned, he was simply another potential playmate. The gate was closed, and it pressed its muzzle between the bars, its tail wagging.
Amanda squinted at him. The sun was behind him, and shone in her eyes.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hi. Do you remember me?’
She nodded. ‘You’re Sam’s dad.’
‘That’s right.’
He leaned against the gatepost, but did not enter.
‘How are you doing, Amanda?’
‘I’m okay,’ she said. She couldn’t hold his gaze, so she knelt down and patted the dog instead.
He didn’t want to offer her platitudes. They wouldn’t have meant anything to her anyway. Instead he asked,
‘Who’s the dog?’
‘Milo.’
‘Is he yours?’
She shrugged. ‘Not really. He belongs to the Frobergs. They just got him yesterday.’
‘Who named him?’
‘I thought of it, but everyone had to agree.’
‘It’s a good name. He looks like a Milo.’
An elderly woman appeared at the door of the house, flanked by a younger couple. The man stepped past the two women and came down the drive toward Parker. He was in his forties, and already had a small belly that strained against his polo shirt. He was wearing cargo shorts, even though it was still a little cold for them.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
‘I’m here to see Mrs Winter. My name is Charlie Parker.’
Recognition dawned in the man’s face.
‘Please,’ he said, opening the gate, ‘come in. My name is Christian Froberg. Amanda is living with my family now.’
They shook hands. Amanda held on to Milo to prevent him from jumping up, or making a break for freedom through the open gate. Froberg made the introductions to his wife, Dora, and to Isha Winter. It appeared that the Frobergs were about to leave – each day they brought Amanda to sit shiva for a time with her grandmother – but they felt obliged to exchange some stilted small talk with Parker, made more awkward by the fact that Mrs Winter appeared unable to speak to him. She just stared, and wrung her hands as though trying to clean them of a stain.
‘Whose idea was it to get a dog?’ asked Parker.
Christian Froberg smiled at his wife. ‘Our kids have been nagging us to get one for the last year, but we’d resisted. Then, when we took in Amanda, we thought it might be good for her.’
‘I heard that she was staying with foster parents.’
‘We’re in touch with Child and Family Services,’ said Dora. ‘We’re hoping to start the adoption procedure next month.’
‘We don’t want to rush anything,’ said Christian. ‘For Amanda’s sake.’
Again, Parker avoided platitudes. They didn’t seem like stupid people. They’d know how hard it was going to be for Amanda – and for them. What had befallen her mother would never leave her, and there would be difficult times ahead.
‘I wish you luck,’ was all he said.
The Frobergs made their farewells, gathered up Amanda and Milo, and headed for their station wagon, which was parked in the drive. Amanda put Milo on a leash, and he trotted along at her heels. Something in Parker broke away at the sight of her, a fragment of his heart that went out to the girl. It was in the way that she walked, the way she held her head, like a boxer who has taken a ferocious blow and is trying only not to fall. Now he wished that he could have found the right words, some consolation to offer. The certainties that he had felt at Green Heron Bay slipped away. If only he had been able to run faster, if only he had not been injured …
Behind him, Isha Winter spoke her first words to him since ‘Hello.’
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Thank you for what you tried to do.’
Then she began to cry.
He sat with her in the kitchen. It still bore the remains of the food that she had shared with the Frobergs. He accepted her offer of some water, but declined anything more. She told him to call her Isha, but could not bring herself to address him as anything other than ‘Mr Parker.’ It was like being with the Fulcis’ mother.
‘I thought of visiting you in the hospital,’ she said. ‘But there was so much to do – the funeral, taking care of Amanda. I’m sorry, I—’
‘It’s not necessary,’ said Parker. ‘Really.’
‘No,’ she insisted, ‘it is. You risked your life for my daughter, and my granddaughter. You were hurt for them. I wanted to thank you for it. I’m glad that you have come.’
She took his right hand in her own, and squeezed it briefly before releasing it.
‘I know that you’ve spoken to the police,’ he said.
‘They have been very good. They asked many questions, but some of them I could not answer.’
‘Such as?’
‘I could not tell them why my daughter was murdered.’
She appeared to be on the verge of tears again, but she forced them back.
‘All I could tell them,’ she continued, ‘was that there have always been those who hate us, and I think there always will be.’
‘By “us”, you mean Jews?’
‘I told the detectives – I told them at the cemetery, and I told them again here, at this table – that they will never leave us in peace.’
‘Have there been incidents in the past?’
Only after he spoke did he realize the absurdity of what he had said. Adding ‘apart from the Holocaust’ wasn’t really an option. Isha guessed his thoughts. He saw her smile.
‘You mean recently?’ she said. ‘You mean here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not so much. Someone once sprayed a swastika on the wall, but that was years ago, and we would sometimes find literature in the mailbox – vile letters and pamphlets. But the men and women who do that, they are cowards. They can’t even find the courage to face an old woman during the day. They sneak by at night to spread their hatred.’
‘The man who killed your daughter was a professional,’ said Parker. ‘I don’t think he was the kind to paint swastikas on walls, then run away.’
‘I know this. The detective told me.’
‘Detective Walsh?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a good man.’
‘He said the same thing about you.’
‘Did he have to grit his teeth first?’
‘
Na, na!
’ Isha Winter looked appalled at the thought. She slapped his hand gently, scolding him. ‘He meant it.’
‘Did he also tell you that a connection might exist between your daughter’s murder and your time in the camp at Lubsko?’
‘He said this, but I could think of nothing.’
‘What about the man the Justice Department is investigating – Kraus?’
‘But I looked at the photograph, and it was not who they said it was. They wanted me to say that it was Reynard Kraus, but it was not!’
He let it go. Perhaps he was coming at this from the wrong angle. Could Ruth Winter have discovered something, independent of her mother’s past that had then brought her into contact with Bruno Perlman? It seemed unlikely.
He asked her about Perlman, and she described again her only encounter with him, at that same kitchen table. From what she told Parker, Perlman was fascinated – even obsessed – by Lubsko, and by the hunt for the last surviving Nazi war criminals hiding in the United States.
‘He told me,’ she said, ‘that he had helped to find Nazis in the past. He said that he had provided information to the government.’
Parker didn’t know if that was true. He suspected it wasn’t. Epstein had said nothing about it, and neither had Walsh.
‘He showed me the tattoos on his arm,’ said Isha.
‘The Auschwitz numbers?’
‘Yes, the numbers.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think he understood why I found it such an odd thing to have done. He knew so little of his people, only their names. He did not do it for the purpose of commemoration. I think he was looking for something to be angry about. I think’ – she tapped a forefinger to her right temple – ‘in his mind, he had almost convinced himself that he was there with them, at Auschwitz and Lubsko.’
‘Did he meet your daughter while he was here?’
‘Yes, but just for a short time.’
‘Your daughter and granddaughter used to live with you, didn’t they?’ he asked.
‘For many years, yes. My husband owned all of this land.’ She gestured through the walls at unseen fields. ‘He built a guest cottage so that friends could come and stay with us, and enjoy the sea, but not many ever did. We rented it out, but after he died it seemed like so much trouble. I just left it empty, but then Ruth came back here with Amanda, and it was a good place for them to live.’
‘And Amanda’s father?’
‘He was not her husband,’ said Isha, answering another question entirely, but one that was apparently important to her. ‘They were not married.’
‘What did he do?’
She leaned forward, and lowered her voice.
‘He beat her.’
‘I meant for a living.’
‘Oh, he worked in a
garage
,’ she said, putting all of the contempt she could muster into the last word. ‘But really, he was a criminal. Ruth told me. Stolen cars, drugs. He was a
Kriecher
. You understand
Kriecher
? A lowlife. She almost lost the baby once, he hit her so hard. When he died, it was a blessing.’
‘As I understand it, he didn’t just die: he was murdered.’
‘The police said it was over drugs. He was shot.’
Her tone suggested that it was the least he deserved.
‘And so Ruth came to live with you?’
‘Not immediately. But it was hard for her with the baby, and money was a problem. Why would she live in a dirty apartment when she could use the house here? It was just common sense.’
‘And why did she then move to Boreas?’
Isha began wringing her hands again.
‘Because I am a nosy, demanding old woman. Because even in separate houses, there was not enough space for us. I think she felt that I was always looking over her shoulder, always criticizing.’
‘And were you?’
The tears came again.
‘I think that I was. And now she is gone.’
They spoke for a short time longer. Isha Winter talked to him of Lubsko, of her first sight of it with her parents – ‘the little houses, the gardens – there were even bathtubs!’ They arrived with four other families, each of them unable to believe quite what they were seeing. Within days, pressure was being placed upon them: discreet at first, then more insistent. Lubsko was not free. A life there had to be paid for.
‘My father did not trust them,’ said Isha. ‘But he paid up, like the rest. He was an art dealer in Aachen before the war, and he had hidden paintings in two vaults in Düren, the old cemetery. One of them was a Bellini Madonna; another was a nude by Rubens. These are only the ones that I can remember. The other families, they offered money, jewelry, and diamonds, whatever they had put away in the hope that they might be able to come back for them after the war.
‘I know now that most families lasted a month, but we were given only two weeks. Before us, the Nazis had taken their time in the hope that more hidden treasures might be revealed to them, or so they could convince men with secret wealth to name others with the promise that they, too, could be brought to Lubsko. But it was 1945, and they knew that the end was coming. Lubsko was to be closed, so they were in a hurry to bleed us dry and be gone. They held on just too long, though, because they were greedy, and by then
die Russen
were almost at the gates.’
Although she remained a presence in the room, a part of her was now elsewhere, lying in a shallow grave beneath a layer of dirt.
‘I saw Kraus take the children away first,’ she said. ‘Then the shooting started. They were going from hut to hut. My father told me to run and hide. I did not even have time to say goodbye, and when I saw them again they were dead.
‘I think I heard the shots that killed the commandant and his wife. I was near their house, and I heard the sound of a pistol firing twice. Later, I could smell their quarters burning.
‘And then I found the grave. They must have opened it that morning, or the night before, so that they could save time and bury us quickly. I remember the smell, and the sight of the bones, and the bodies that had been revealed by the digging. I took off my clothes so that I would look like all the rest. I threw myself in, and covered my body with dirt, and I lay there and waited.
‘Soon everything went quiet, but I stayed in the grave until it was dark. That was when I saw all of the bodies: not just our people, but the Germans too. They had turned on their own, like animals. They had not even bothered to hide what they’d done. The Russians found me two days later. I was sitting by the bodies of my mother and father. They tell me that I was eating an apple, but I don’t remember this. I was the only one left alive. The only one. I was dirty, and in shock. I looked younger than I was. I think that was the only reason they did not rape me. Then one of their officers came, and he made me tell my story. I think he realized that I had some propaganda value, and he made sure that I was protected until his superiors had spoken with me. Finally, I made it out of Poland into Germany. I told my story again to the Americans, and they let me come here.’
‘When did you arrive?’
‘Nineteen fifty-one.’
‘Can I ask how you came to Maine?’