Once Upon a Time (14 page)

Futile. “So why am I trying so hard to find him?” Green wondered aloud. The mystery Pole who had come to be known as Eugene Walker had probably bought a tool box from Kressman in the years before the war. That was probably the extent of the connection between them. There was no evidence that Walker was even from Ozorkow; this may have been assumed for immigration purposes because of the black box in his possession. Even if Kressman were still alive and Green could find him, what light would he be able to shed on Walker's identity and on the conflict between him and Mr. G.?

Perhaps, Green thought, I'm just trying to find him because I want to know the fate of one humble, small-town Jew caught up in the maelstrom of Nazi terror. Because he was one more nameless, faceless victim marched to his unremembered death. Is that all it is? An ancestral tug through time? Perhaps a search for the story my mother and father would never tell me?

He found himself too numb to think reasonably, so he rose and went downstairs to prepare a cup of tea. Cradling the cup, he slipped a CD of Chopin Polonaises into his player, sank back in the easy chair and shut his eyes. He rarely played classical music nowadays, preferring the raw pulse of rock, but the lyrical piano brought with it the presence of his mother, bent over the keys of their aging Heintzman and swaying to the melody beneath her hands. Chopin had been her greatest love.

As the warm tea spread through him, he felt some return of perspective. No, there was more to this search than personal curiosity. Intuition had always been a powerful ally in his detective work, and his intuition told him the black box was important to Walker. It was all that remained of his pre-war life, and he had clung to it even when he could no longer remember what it had meant or what he had endured.

A simple tool box, purchased from an unknown blacksmith years ago, could hardly have had such meaning.

Just as he had gathered the energy to return to the history books, the front door opened and Sharon and Tony spilled into the hall.

“Da-da-da-da,” Tony crowed.

“Yes, Daddy's home. Incredibly,” Sharon said. “Let's go find him.”

Green poked his head through the hall archway just as Sharon was pulling off the baby's boots. She gestured to him to take over and disappeared back out to the car, returning with an armload of shopping bags. Among them, he noticed with a sinking feeling, one from the local paint store. As much as the old wartime mystery beckoned, he knew he owed Sharon some time. He'd promised her Sunday, and now Sunday was half over.

Home improvement had never been his forte, and by the time he had the gallon of blue paint up on the living room walls, he had nearly half of it on himself as well. Sharon had left him alone so that he could swear in peace, but she'd come downstairs briefly to snap some pictures of him perched precariously on a chair as he stretched to reach above the window. “I need some proof for the skeptics at work,” she said. Green knew that his domestic antics provided comic relief in the staff cafeteria of the Royal Ottawa Hospital.

By the time he had finished the first coat, the early winter darkness was already descending, and the house was uncharacteristically silent. No baby babble, no whining, no background bustle. It must be Tony's afternoon nap time, and perhaps Sharon had slipped into bed for a brief rest herself. Feeling very virtuous and not a little sore, he washed up and went in search of her to collect his brownie points. Four hours of hard labour ought to be worth something.

But the master bedroom was empty, and as he passed by his study, he saw Sharon hunched over his desk, engrossed in his notes. She raised her head, looking as dazed as he must have earlier.

“Mike, what are you doing here?”

Normally Green tried to keep the grim realities of his police work separate from his home life, especially since the baby's birth; he needed his home as a haven to which he could escape. Sharon too needed a haven, because psychiatric nursing drained the soul as surely as investigating death. But today, still raw from his own glimpse into his past and sensing a rare moment of intimacy in the house, he told her the whole story.

Sharon was not a child of survivors. Her own parents had spent their childhood in Toronto during the war and raised her in the safe, antiseptic suburb of North York. But her empathy was what had first drawn him to her and now, as she sat listening with her chin propped in her hands, her eyes narrowed astutely.

“This is a lot closer to home for you than your average gang execution, isn't it, honey?”

“Well, Kressman is, yeah. I mean, it's just a box, and the rest is just some big fairytale I've made up, but it feels real to me.”

Her dark eyes were gentle. “Because of your parents.”

He shook his head, pushing sentiment aside. “Maybe, but I feel it's connected to this case. If I'm going to find out who Walker really was, so I can figure out who killed him, I might have more luck by tracking down Kressman. At least I have a name.”

“And you think this Kressman might still be alive?”

“Think?” He paused to consider. No, he didn't think Kressman was alive. He hoped, against all reasonable odds. He flipped the books open and bent over to show her the charts and maps depicting the last days of the war. “It's possible. In the spring of 1945 the Allies were pushing eastward across Germany towards Berlin, liberating the camps in West Germany. Now, we know that the Nazi camp commanders were in a panic, so some of them killed all the inmates before the Allies arrived, but some of them forced them to march eastward to camps deeper inside Germany.”

“That's nuts!”

“Well, they were desperate to destroy all the evidence and witnesses to their atrocities. And at the same time, the Red Army was advancing across Germany from the east, overtaking all the work camps and death camps in Poland along the way. Some of those inmates were also driven westward towards central Germany.”

“On a collision course.”

“Right. And that's what led to the eventual partition of Germany. On May 9, the advancing armies converged in the middle, Germany surrendered, and the partition line was drawn right down here. But the ending wasn't neat, like these charts. German soldiers were deserting in droves, Nazis and SS officers were trying to escape the country, civilians were fleeing the fighting, and right in the middle of this were all these half-dead camp inmates milling around. If Kressman was strong enough to survive, he could have ended up in one of the camps right around the partition line.” He drew his finger through the map of Germany and in the process passed right through Dresden. He stopped, his throat suddenly dry.

“My God.”

She leaned over the map. “What?”

“Two days after Germany surrendered, Eugene Walker was found wearing a German army uniform, hiding in the mountains just south of Dresden.”

“You think he was a German deserter?”

He shook his head vigorously. “Let me think this through. No, the uniform and the papers were stolen from a German soldier who actually did die in the battlefield at Dresden. If Walker'd been a German deserter, or even an Allied soldier who'd escaped from a German POW camp, he'd never have concealed his identity by putting on a German uniform. He risked getting shot either as a deserter by the German military police, or as an enemy soldier by the Allies. That makes no sense.”

“Maybe he was just a civilian—a simple peasant from Poland or Germany—who got caught in the fighting. Maybe he put on the uniform to keep warm, or because he didn't know the Germans had lost and he wanted to protect himself.”

Green forced himself to consider her idea, to disprove it before allowing himself to face the theory that had first leaped to his mind and set his heart racing. Her theory fit the facts well enough, but it didn't feel right.

“Walker was in a state of complete mental and physical collapse,” he said. “He was sick, wounded, starving—”

“Well, he could have been bombed, or he could have been driven hundreds of miles from his home.”

“But he didn't talk for months, and he seems to have blocked out forever his past—and what happened to him.”

“If you believe that.”

“Yes,” he admitted, “if I believe that.”

She looked up at him, pushing her dark curls out of her eyes. “So what are you saying, Mike?”

“What if he was a concentration camp survivor himself? What if he was one of those force-marched across Germany, and on the day of surrender, he was let loose or escaped right at this juncture. Dresden.”

Her eyes widened. “A Jew?”

He pondered that. Something didn't fit right. “No. A Pole.”

“Why?”

Green didn't know why. Walker just didn't feel like a Jew. “He was big and blonde, for one thing—”

She waved her hand in dismissal.

“He was an anti-Semite,” he added. “He threw a fit when his son married a Jew.”

“Stranger things have happened, Mike.”

“By the end of 1942, almost three years earlier, most of Poland's Jews had already been killed, so the odds of a Jew surviving are incredibly slim. And the way he was found…” Green groped to put his intuition into words. “What Jew, no matter how confused, would put on the uniform of their most hated enemy and hide from the Allies who came to liberate them? The Jews welcomed the liberators with open arms.”

“I don't see why a Pole would be any different,” she observed.

“He might have been afraid he'd be accused of helping the Third Reich.”

“Helping?” She looked skeptical. “How?”

“By working in one of their labour camps. Walker would have been eighteen years old when the Germans invaded Poland. A young man just entering his prime. We know that the Nazis exterminated or incarcerated millions of non-Jews as well as Jews, usually for assorted political or religious reasons, and they were especially harsh towards the Poles, because they wanted to assert the superiority of the
Volksdeutsch
—the ethnic Germans living in Poland. But what is less well known is that the Nazis seized two and a half million able-bodied young Polish men to work in their labour camps. They needed that labour to run their war industries, to build planes and tanks, to make bullets and guns. First they used Jews, but by the end of 1942 they'd worn out or killed off many of their able-bodied Jews, so they had to find another source of slave labour. Young, strong, healthy Poles.”

“And you think Eugene Walker was one of them.”

He nodded. “It feels right. He was a big, strong ox of a man even at the end, and because he worked to supply their war machine, he might have thought he'd be called a traitor. In fact, maybe people even did. As you said, in torture situations, stranger things have happened.”

She ran her hand through her hair, making her curls stand on end. She looked unconvinced. “But you'd think in the fifty-five years since, surely someone would have noticed the prison number tattooed on his arm.”

*    *    *

Thirty minutes later, with the paint flecks still in his hair and a yellow ski jacket thrown hastily over his jeans, Green mounted the Reid porch. The Walkers' old Dodge sat alone in the driveway, and Green was relieved when Ruth herself answered the bell. He didn't relish another verbal joust with Don Reid.

Ruth was filling out the endless forms that seem to follow death, and to his surprise she set aside the chore without protest to fix them both a cup of tea in her daughter's spotless kitchen. When he explained his theory, she remained quiet a minute, eying him intently. Wisps of grey hair framed her face.

“A concentration camp victim,” she murmured finally.

“It never occurred to you?”

She gestured vaguely. “There were so many possibilities. Dresden was horribly bombed. Civilians lost their houses, whole families, even whole neighbourhoods were demolished. Lots of people were wandering around Europe in shock.”

“But I thought you assumed he was Polish, not German.”

“Well, yes, but—” She broke off, flustered. “It was an assumption. He could have been a DP from anywhere.”

“What made you think he was a DP and not a camp survivor? Surely you were seeing lots of survivors, or at least hearing about them.”

“Yes, we were.” She coloured. “And yes, the thought did cross my mind, especially later when people began to document the emotional after-effects of the Holocaust. Eugene was literally one of the walking dead for a long time.”

“Did he have a number tattooed on his arm when he arrived in England?”

She shook her head. “Obviously, if he'd had one, I would have been sure, wouldn't I?”

“He had nothing? No marks?”

“Well…” She vacillated. “Actually, he had dreadful scars on his arms. The doctor said he probably got them on barbed wire. The wounds were on the mend when he came to us, but certainly the skin had been ripped away in strips along his arms and wrists.”

“So it is possible there had been a tattoo.”

“Yes, it's possible. It is possible.” She repeated the assertion with more vigour, her eyes clearing. “I had thought the barbed wire rather supported the wounded soldier story, perhaps that he'd escaped from a German POW camp. Many Poles did fight under British command. But if he were a survivor, a number of other strange behaviours would make sense.”

He hid his excitement. “Like what?”

“For a long time after he came to our hospital in England, he huddled in the dark in his room with that wretched black box. He hated to come out into the light, as if he only felt safe unseen. And the strangest things would set him off—a dog barking, the scream of another patient, the whistle of a train. He'd fly into these fits, and we'd need a straitjacket. Didn't they patrol the camps with dogs? And they brought the prisoners in on trains. He could never stand to ride on a train.”

“Did he ever go back to Poland or Germany?”