Once Upon a Time (25 page)

“It has no relevance.”

“What!”

Howard hesitated. The thread came loose, and he crushed it into a ball between his fingers. “I had written my father a letter. A personal letter which had taken a lot of effort to write. I mailed it on the previous Friday, and I anticipated that he should have received it Tuesday or Wednesday. I called Margaret on Wednesday night to see if she'd heard anything, because I expected there would be shock waves. When she told me he was dead, I couldn't believe it. I was afraid—” He broke off, then shook his head as if to banish a thought. “Anyway, I didn't want my mother to read the letter. There was no point in stirring things up now that he was dead. So I arranged to borrow Margaret's car to go and get it.”

“Why not send Margaret? Why travel all the way from Toronto?”

“Margaret had her hands full with mother and the funeral arrangements. I didn't see what excuse she could give.”

“And you didn't want her reading the letter.”

Howard dropped the thread and clasped his hands tightly together in his lap to hide their trembling. “That too.”

“Can I see the letter?”

“I burned it.”

“What did it say?”

“Just personal things.”

“Such as that you knew he was Jewish?”

The young doctor's eyes bulged. “What!”

“Last time we talked, you called him a hypocrite. That's a hell of an understatement, wouldn't you say?”

“Darling!” Rachel cried. “What's he talking about?”

Howard flushed red, his hands shaking despite his grip. “Where did you get this crazy idea, Inspector?”

“That's how the pieces fit. You tried to suppress the autopsy report because you didn't want me wondering why your father was circumcised.”

“Suppress the autopsy?” Howard tried to rally some spark. “I did no such thing.”

“You were afraid I might put two and two together—”

“I simply asked the pathologist to give us some privacy. Because of Dad's drinking, I knew the autopsy report would be brutal.”

Green regarded him thoughtfully. “Howard, it's a hell of a lot more than that. You've known—at least suspected—that your father was Jewish for several weeks. You see,” he added quietly, “I have this phone message from Naomi Wyman saying ‘funny you should ask about Orzokow, a young man named Howard Walker was just in a couple of weeks ago'.”

“Oh…God.”

Green's expression softened. “So you wrote him a letter asking him?”

Very faintly, Howard nodded.

“And you thought your letter killed him?”

Unexpectedly, Howard strode to the window and pressed his forehead against the cold pane. It was a moment before anyone spoke. Rachel was sitting rigidly still, but her ragged breathing punctuated the silence. To her credit, it was the first time she didn't rush in to rescue him.

Finally, Howard raised his head to stare into the darkness. “I think it probably did. I found the letter hidden in his drawer. It was open.”

“So he had read it.”

Howard nodded wretchedly.

“How did you discover your father was a Jew?”

“Anton Gryszkiewicz!” Rachel exclaimed, startling them both.

Green's thoughts began to spin excitedly. “Gryszkiewicz?”

Still Howard was silent, as if casting about for a safe path.

“Darling, tell him! For God's sake, you've got nothing to hide!”

Green remembered Sullivan's conversation with Mrs. Gryszkiewicz, in which she had told him so proudly about her son the doctor. “A young doctor from Hamilton?” he asked.

Howard swung around in dismay. “What do you know about him?”

“Nothing. But his father knew yours.” Green's face hardened. “Now I'm not just filling in odd bits of the puzzle. This could be crucial to the case. You must tell me exactly what happened between Anton and you.”

Howard's dark eyes searched Green's worriedly. “He's a nice guy,” he pleaded. “I don't want to get him in trouble.”

“There's trouble enough already!” Green snapped. “I need the truth! Where did you meet him?”

“At the Montreal Neurological Institute. He's a resident in surgery, and I was called in to look at a patient on his floor who had slipped into a coma and begun seizing. It was a hell of a night. We were both scared, out of our depth, wondering why this always happens at two a.m. when there's not a staff man within miles. Anyway, the patient died, and it created a kind of bond. We became friends, and we found out we had a lot in common. We both had immigrant fathers from Poland we didn't get along with. We both found our fathers remote and cruel. It was amazing how similar they were, even down to the anti-Semitism. We got to talking about the war and wondering if they'd lived through something terrible that had twisted them. I told him my father didn't even remember who he was, that all we had was this box from a place named Ozorkow. He said his father was from Ozorkow, and we got really excited. Maybe his father would know mine.”

Howard paused, as if debating how much to divulge. Green could barely contain himself, for finally the case was breaking open in front of his eyes.

“So about a month ago,” Howard resumed, “when he went to visit his parents for the weekend, he took an old picture of my father with him. At first his father denied knowing him, but a while later he got drunk—another thing he had in common with my father—and he got mad about the government charging some war criminal. He blurted out that the Jews were behind it all, even passing themselves off as Poles to hide their own guilt, like my father. Anton tried to get him to tell him more, but his father clammed up again. Said the picture just looked Jewish. I didn't believe it. Neither did Anton. He said his father's outburst was very convincing.”

Green frowned at him. “Why the hell were you reluctant to tell me this?”

“Because Anton's father would be angry with him, and his father could be cruel, even crueler than mine, if he found out Anton had betrayed him.”

“Betrayed him? A strong word. How does this betray him?”

“Because his family isn't supposed to talk about the war outside the family, or about Poland, or anything about the past. The father's very secretive and suspicious of outsiders. He says there are still lots of people from the old country— Communists—who have it in for him. There are spies everywhere, maybe even the neighbour next door. Anton thought he'd gone a bit paranoid because of all the years of hiding from Communist persecution.”

Or from something else, like Simon Wiesenthal or the Mossad, or even our own rather polite, grey-suited Nazi hunters, Green thought privately, but he hid his excitement. “So you wrote to your father asking if it was true.”

“Not right away. I didn't believe it. My father, the anti-Semite who had driven me out for converting to Judaism. Himself a Jew?”

“So that's why you asked my father if there was any record of Holocaust survivors!” Rachel cried. “Darling, why didn't you tell me!”

They had forgotten her presence, and her sudden, vehement interruption caught them off guard. Howard's gaze flickered towards her.

“I don't know,” he began lamely. “I needed to be sure, and I needed to understand why he had lied. My father's prejudices had hurt you so much.”

“But now! Once you found out, why didn't you tell me!”

“I was waiting for my father's answer. I still don't understand why he lied.”

“Howard, what am I here for? Spouses are supposed to share!” Rachel's eyes flashed with reproach that Green suspected would linger far beyond his visit. But as interesting as this slice of domestic discord was, it was irrelevant to his own quest. And the reference to spouses served to steer him back on track. By this time Sharon would be home from work and making serious progress on her murder plot.

“So you contacted Naomi Wyman?” He prompted brusquely, causing them both to stare at him blankly. Howard's eyes were glassy, but with a deep breath he composed himself.

“I asked her if she had records of anyone in Canada who came from Ozorkow. She didn't, but she gave me the names of three people who'd been in Lodz, a large ghetto where many of the Jews from Ozorkow had been sent. Two are now dead, but one lives here in Montreal. I showed my father's picture to him, and he remembered him. Not well, but they'd been in the ghetto together, and he confirmed my father was Jewish. That's when I wrote the letter.”

“What was this survivor's name?”

Howard chewed his lip. “Look, I don't want to get him involved—”

“His name!”

Howard recoiled before Green's sudden anger, and his hands shook. “Isaac Perchesky.”

“This Isaac Perchesky, did he give you any details about your father? His name? His occupation?”

Howard's head whipped back and forth. “He said he didn't remember much,” he stammered. “He didn't want to talk about those times. That's why I don't want you to… He said that the Holocaust did strange things to all of us, and that it was better to leave it all in the past.”

“And in your letter, did you leave it in the past?”

He had his answer when Howard abruptly left the room.

*    *    *

Isaac Perchesky's wife was no more pleased with the intrusion than Howard had been, but when Green explained his purpose, she reluctantly went to rouse her husband, who was asleep in front of the TV. Isaac had some initial difficulty recognizing his wife, let alone recalling Howard's visit, but finally the fog began to lift.

“So…the old man is dead?” Perchesky shook his head dolefully. “It's hard to imagine him dead. In my memory, he was so strong. I can still see him over there in the doorway— like Goliath, with shoulders so wide he could pick up a man and throw him against the wall with one hand. I never forget him doing that.”

“But he would have been little more than a boy. Barely eighteen when the war broke out.”

The old man shrugged. “Boys grew up fast in the ghetto. The man took his blanket. That's the way it was in Lodz. If you didn't have a blanket in the winter, you died.”

“You say your memory of him is very vivid. Howard Walker said you hardly remembered him.”

Perchesky's face darkened, suffusing his mottled skin with grey. He sucked on his dentures for a moment as if debating. “That's what I told the boy. Why bring up the rest? Better he should think his father was a victim who covered up his past because of his suffering.”

Green sucked in his breath. “You're saying he wasn't a Jew? He wasn't a survivor?”

“Oh, he was a Jew. And he was certainly a survivor. It was other people who didn't survive.”

“What are you saying? Tell me what you know!”

Perchesky raised his head at the sharpness in Green's tone and focussed his flat grey eyes on him. “What I know is that in 1942, when the Nazis were sending all the Jews over sixty-five and under ten to the death camp of Chelmno, Leib turned his own father and youngest brother over to the Nazis. The boy would have been ten in two months.”

The outrage of the act derailed Green's train of thought briefly. It was another era, he told himself, and in 1942 very few knew the full horror of the Nazi plan. Then the rest of Perchesky's words sank in, and Green's excitement rose.

“Leib? Do you know his last name?”

Perchesky shook his head in contempt. “I remember Leib, because it means lion and he thought he was the king of the jungle. More like a sewer rat.”

“You're sure it was the same man?”

“Oh, yes. The doctor showed me his picture and even if he was thirty years older, I recognized him. Those cold eyes, they never changed.”

Green showed him the wedding picture Ruth had supplied, taken in 1948 outside the little village church in Surrey. Walker looked hunted even then, gaunt and hollow-eyed. He had tried to smile, but it was pasted on like a slash of pain across a frozen mask.

Isaac stared at it a long time. “Look at what the war did to him by the end,” he whispered. “He was a big man, strong, proud. But the Nazis got us all in the end.”

“What else can you tell me about him?”

Perchesky raised his wizened face to study Green. His eyes were appraising. “I know little about him,” he replied finally. “No one is a saint who survived the ghetto. The saints all died. Now he is dead too, and what I know is not important any more.”

Quietly, Green removed the photo and laid in its place one that Sullivan had given him. “Do you recognize this man too?”

He heard Perchesky suck in his breath, but the old man said nothing for a time. The picture trembled slightly in his hand as he studied it. Finally, he stared into space, casting his thoughts back in time. “This man is from Poland?”

“Yes.”

“From Lodz?”

“Do you recognize him?”

“I think he was one of the SS officers who guarded the entrance to the ghetto.”

Inwardly, Green was cartwheeling in triumph. “SS officer? You mean Polish Police officer?”

Perchesky squinted in his effort to remember, then slowly shook his head. “Maybe. It was the same everywhere— Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia—the local Fascists helped the SS with their dirty work. They helped seal the ghettoes and guard the gates to make sure no one escaped or smuggled things in. If they caught you, the SS shot you.”

“And you think this man was one of these guards?”

Perchesky studied the photo again with obvious discomfort. “It looks like him, but I was only in Lodz for a little time when he was there. He came to the ghetto only in 1942, and I was sent to another camp in October. But you could ask the other man Dr. Walker had on his list. He was in Lodz longer. He knew Leib better, and maybe this guard too.”

Green had been putting the photo of Gryszkiewicz back into his jacket pocket, and he looked up sharply. “What other man?”