“A lot of people have had that prejudice, over the years. But I’m not as easy to get rid of as they generally suppose.”
“Are you again on the run?”
“I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell for sure, but the cop who wanted me is dead now, and I think that’s the end of it.”
But then, you already know that.
“The coffee is ready, I think.”
I held out my cup and he poured steaming black liquid in it, leaving room for the obligatory spike. As he did so, I watched his hands and again saw the steady power and control. No wonder I hadn’t noticed his age. I could see it now, easily enough. The shoulders were stooped a bit, even when he wasn’t bent over his work, and the slicked back hair was obviously dyed. And he had strong facial bone lines, but like my Uncle Fred, he flashed intelligence and energy from eyes that were nevertheless trapped in a matrix of wrinkles. He poured coffee for himself after serving me, then put the pot down and added booze to both cups, taking a swig directly from the bottle first.
“This is excellent brandy,” he said.
“Technically, it’s five-star cognac, but I have to admit the distinction is somewhat lost on me. Brandy is brandy. The only difference is who you drink it with.”
“I think I like that.” He clinked his cup to mine. “To present company.”
“To old friends,” I said.
“You think so?” He smiled and took a large drink. “I like to think we might have been, in another world. But our history did not go that way, yes? It is a terrible burden, history.”
“It can be,” I said, meaning it more deeply than he would ever know. I took a gulp of the steaming brew and savored the familiar hot rush. “But are you talking about you and me, or about the history of a place called the Ardennes Forest?”
“You know this story, then? I am impressed.”
“I know a version of it, anyway. Shall I tell you?”
He nodded and took a bite of roll, settling down on a corner of a workbench. I retold Stefan Yonkos’ story for him, including where and how I came to hear it. As I did so, he alternately shook and nodded his head, smiling sadly the whole time. At one point, he may have blinked back a tear. He waited until I was done before he said anything.
“Well, that’s the way he would tell it, wouldn’t he? And he’s had a long time to polish it up. But he left out the most important part.”
“Which was?”
“When he killed the real Gerald Cox.”
End Game
March 17, 1945
The American was on the road when they first saw him, walking with his head down and his rifle at sling-arms. They spotted him in the mist before he was aware of them, and they immediately ducked behind a tree.
“Give me your rifle,” the Gypsy whispered in German.
“But he is not a Russian. We do not need the charade that you planned.”
“We need another one, if we want to be treated well.”
“But we…”
“Trust me, this will be better. I will say that I am a partisan, a resistance soldier, and that I have captured you. Then he will take us both to his superiors, not just to a prison camp, and the war will be over for us.”
“You think you can convince him of such a story?”
“I speak enough English, and he looks stupid enough. And he will want to believe it.”
“If you are sure…”
“I’m sure. Quickly now!”
The German handed over his Mauser and felt the power of it pass to the other man as well. He immediately wondered if he had done a foolish thing, and he felt in his coat pocket for the reassuring bulk of the 7 mm Luger he had taken from a dead SS officer. But he didn’t know if he could bring himself to use it, even to save his own life. A gangly youth with a hooked nose and dark hair, trying to be a grown up soldier in an army that worshipped tall, square-featured blond goons, he had never had any confidence in anything. He let the Gypsy push him out onto the road, hands aloft, rifle poking in his spine.
“Hey, GI! I have a prize for you. I make you a hero, okay?”
The American, probably ashamed at being caught off guard, snapped his rifle up to his shoulder and went down on one knee and into a firing position.
“Who the hell are y’all? I mean, who goes there? Halt, is what I mean.”
“Okay, Joe. It is okay,” the Gypsy crooned, and his voice became progressively lower and more rhythmic. “I am partisan, okay? I capture Nazi bad guy for you. Here he is, you see? He is halt already.”
The American got up and advanced warily, keeping his rifle trained on both of them, but mainly pointed at the German.
“He don’t look like much of a soldier to me.”
“He is a boy, is all. The Nazis are all out of men. Now they send children to fight. You take him for a prisoner, yes?”
“He’s all disarmed and all? He ain’t got no knife or nothing?”
“I have his rifle,” said the Gypsy. “Is all he had.”
The German continued to hold his hands up, looking fearful, understanding small bits of the conversation but mostly wondering if both he and the Gypsy were about to be shot. The GI came up close to him, stared into his eyes, spat on the ground, and finally lowered his weapon. The moment he stepped back, the Gypsy raised the Mauser and pressed it to the side of the American’s head. “Now you give us your weapon,” he said.
“What are you doing?” said the German. “He wasn’t going to shoot us. I’m sure of it.”
“Take his gun.”
“Have you gone mad?”
“Take it, or I’ll shoot both of you.”
The German lowered his arms and took the US Army carbine, holding it uncertainly. And he noticed the man’s name, stenciled on his fatigue jacket: G. B. Cox.
“Do you think this American will give me his clothes now?” said the Gypsy. “Will he give me his identity?”
“Of course not. Why would he do that?”
“I don’t think so, either.” The Mauser was still at the American’s head, and he pulled the trigger, sending the man’s helmet flying off into the trees, along with large pieces of his skull and brains.
The German soldier didn’t wait to see what would happen next. He fled into the forest as fast as he could run. More shots from his own gun slammed into the trees around him, but he never slowed down and never looked back. Finally, miles later, when he could run no further, he fell to his hands and knees and retched uncontrollably onto the carpet of pine needles. And he wept. He wept the tears of a boy who has realized his own fear and a man who has witnessed an obscene atrocity and was utterly unable to do anything about it. He judged himself and found himself lacking, and he wept and trembled and vomited until he was empty and spent.
He slept then, on the rough forest floor, through the day and into the darkness. When he finally rose again and left that place, he vowed that he would never weep or tremble again.
He may have never trembled again, but he had tears running down his cheeks as he finished the story. He turned his back to me and busied himself with making a fresh pot of coffee.
“Good lord,” I said. “You were right about Yonkos leaving out the most important part. What happened after that? Did you also vow to kill the Gypsy?”
“No. That did not happen until much, much later. The rest of my war story is not so interesting, I’m afraid. I went back to the place where Cox had been shot. The Gypsy had left his own clothes there, and I took them. I threw my own uniform away and I became what he had said he was going to pretend to be, a partisan living off the land. I also threw away the American gun, which I didn’t know how to use, and found another Mauser. It was a hard life for a while, but I didn’t care any more. I found my way to an American army camp, a staging area, and they kept me around, like a mascot. That was when I took the name of Feinstein. I thought they would be more likely to believe I wasn’t a Nazi if I had a Jewish-sounding name. And I added the G. B. so I would always remember the name of the dead American.”
I poured myself some more coffee and thought of Rosie and her many aliases.
Doesn’t anybody or anything in this damn world go by its real name anymore?
Then I remembered my own past and bit my tongue. Feinstein, for that was now his only name, continued.
“I worked on their trucks and did menial jobs, and they taught me bits of English. You wouldn’t believe how long it was before I learned that ‘fuckin’ A’ was not the correct way to say ‘I agree.’ And when the unit was sent back to the United States, I stowed away on the transport ship.”
“Along with the Mauser?”
“Yes. And the Luger. There were many, many souvenir guns being taken back. A few more didn’t matter. I never got a visa or any citizenship papers, and I never will. Your wonderful government gave me a Social Security card anyway. After you have that, you can get anything.”
“Under your assumed name.”
“Of course. I got a job cleaning up and doing general labor in a guitar factory, and I decided to teach myself luthiery. It seemed like a way of coming to terms with my great downfall, you see. A calling, if you will. The rest is pretty much what you would expect.”
“How old were you, back when you met the Gypsy in the forest?”
“I was born in 1931.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You really were just a kid.”
“Not after that, I was not. After that, I was never young again.”
“No. You wouldn’t be, would you?” I stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and braced myself. Sooner or later, somebody had to say the obvious, and I decided it might as well be then.
“So you killed Stefan Yonkos, finally…” I began.
“And his daughter and son, don’t forget.”
“No. I definitely didn’t forget. You killed them all for revenge? Revenge for your lost youth and innocence?”
“Revenge? Oh no,
Herr Herman
. I never thought of it in that way for a moment. It was setting things right, you see, making up for my own past failure. War is all about guilt. People talk these days about post-stress something…”
“Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome,” I said.
“Ya ya, that is it. Thank you. But it’s always about the guilt of killing. They think that’s all there is, the doctors. Backwards, for me, all wrong. All those years, all the places I went, I carried the guilt of who I did
not
kill. I should have killed the Gypsy.”
Where had I heard that before?
“You could have been killed yourself, trying to,” I said.
“Very true. But then, also, I would have been free of the guilt. And the poor man named Gerald Cox might also have lived.”
“Might have, could have, should have,” I said. “You take all those ‘haves’ and put them with three dollars, and you can buy yourself another package of these cinnamon rolls. Why bother with it, after all these years? I mean”—I swept my hand around, indicating the shop behind us—“you have a vocation here, a real life. A calling, even. Most poor working stiffs never find that. Couldn’t you let the past go its own way?”
“You would think so, wouldn’t you? And believe it or not, I tried. But the past would not let me go. Twenty some years ago, it came to claim me.”
“The certificate of authenticity,” I said.
“Exactly so. It was 1975, as I recall. The blonde—I forget what she was calling herself back then—wanted me to appraise her old violin, certify it as a real Amati. Which it was, of course. And from what she told me of its story, I knew it had to be the violin from the Ardennes.”
“And she was the Gypsy’s daughter.”
“She said as much, and I had no reason to doubt it.”
“Was that when you switched the violins?”
“
Mein Gott
! You figured that out, also?
Wünderbar
! How?”
“I took off the label. Somebody told me once that the real trademark would be burned in the wood, under it.”
“Ah, so he did,
Herr
Herman. That’s what comes of revealing trade secrets,
ya
? Still, it had to take a lot of confidence to remove a fragile piece of history. But you have surprised me many times now. You are, as you say, not so easy to dispose of. Yes, I switched the violins then. I told the woman I had to keep the Amati for a few days, to do some tests. That gave me enough time to make one of the others in my collection into a very good likeness. It was a small enough bit of sabotage, considering what her family had done. And for a time, I thought it would be enough for me. More brandy?”
“Thank you,” I said. “For the brandy and the compliments. Are we out of coffee?”
“I thought perhaps it was time to get down to essentials.”
“Maybe it is, at that.”
We both took another shot, clinking our cups again.
“But you must have assumed I’d look under the label sooner or later,” I said. “And when I saw the burned-in brand of Roger Baldwin, written backwards, it would point me straight to you.”
“I assumed later, rather than sooner,” he said. “Or possibly not at all. Maybe someday another appraiser would do it, say. In the meantime, it was possible to do one last, um…”
“Con.”
“Yes, thank you. A last con in a world of cons. If I destroyed the instrument that you thought was the Amati and made good on your cash losses, then that would be the end of it. The curse, the killing, and even the past. I wanted you to be free of it, you see.”
“I picked up on that, yes. Thank you so much. Why?”
He shrugged. “I told you when we first met that I liked you. That buffoon, Evans, died just because he got in the way. I didn’t want that to happen to you.”
“Are you saying you didn’t tip him off that I was in Skokie?”
“Tip him off? Oh, no. I was never in league with him or any of them. As far as they knew, I was just a disinterested appraiser, used once and forgotten.”
“You know, that’s really rather wonderfully ironic.” I had another sip from the tin cup, and it seemed even more so.
“It is, isn’t it? The violin that led me to become a fine luthier also led the Gypsy family back to me for a final accounting, and they didn’t even know it.”
“I believe I led you to Skokie, though.”
“On the contrary, I followed Evans to Skokie, not you. He was what the Gypsies call the cop-in-the-pocket, you see. The woman, Amy, was the bait in a sweet fish hook, I think? No, that’s not quite right.”
“A honey trap.”
“
Ya, ya
, that’s it. Thank you again. She was supposed to compromise him, seduce him and make him pliable. But I think she succeeded beyond her own hopes. He not only became her lover, he became insanely protective and jealous of her. And he really did think you had killed her. So when you were looking for the Gypsy connection, he was looking for you, to kill you, I’m sure. I was merely looking for her father, looking to be sure that Yonkos
was
her father. And Evans was so very easy to follow. The man couldn’t go for an hour without calling somebody or other on the radio or phone. Not like you,
Herr
Herman. You were really very clever.”
“Not so clever that you didn’t almost trap me and kill me when I went back to the
officia
.”
“That was you?”
“Me and a friend.”
“Ah, yes, the pretty woman. Perhaps I spent too much time looking at her. Anyway, that was a mistake. I wasn’t sure you hadn’t given your violin to Yonkos, and I thought it might be more of the Gypsy gang, come back to retrieve it. And to be honest, the killing had almost become a habit by then. It wanted to have a life of its own. An evil life, just like the violin that started it all. The hunter of evil becomes evil himself.”
“So you really weren’t part of the original con game at all?”
“Never. Not that one, nor any of the others the brother and sister ran over the years. And there were many.”
“So how did you know about them?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about the ones before I did the appraisal, would I? After that, I followed their career from a distance, you might say. An insurance adjustor or a policeman would come to me to verify the certificate, and so I would get a new set of bogus names, a new bit of a trail. I never knew exactly how the fraud worked or how they kept getting the Amati back. And I didn’t care. I waited and waited for them to lead me back to the father. Finally, when they started using the name Cox for their scams, the name they had stolen, it was just too much. I decided if I couldn’t kill the father, I would kill the children instead. After all, they were my mistake, too. He shouldn’t have lived to sire them in the first place.”
“So you stalked Amy Cox?”
“An ugly word, but yes, I suppose I did. I followed her to your office, and when she finally left with a violin under her arm, I seized my chance. But as you know, that killing was a beginning, not an end.”