Once Upon a Time (28 page)

The question was what did she know that he, Green, did not?

Fourteen

October 12th, 1942

The quiet is eerie now.

In my mind, I hear the beggar on the curb,
the children at play,
the old men arguing on the bench.

All gone.

Now ghosts scuttle along the street,
living and dead, hollow-eyed and empty.

I push the cupboard aside with a twinge of fear.

Always the twinge of fear.

But they're still there.

I gather them in my arms, caress them back to life.

My princess is over the wall,
To trade for supper, maybe something special again.

An apple, an egg.

I set the Shabbas candles, the chipped cup.

Voices overhead, floorboards creak,
And somewhere,
A single shot.

Green was halfway
to Montreal again when his cell phone rang.

“Where are you?” Sharon demanded. He had left the house that morning before she was even awake.

He glanced out at the passing trees. “At work, honey.” Not a lie, exactly.

“I tried there. They said you took off like a bat out of hell about an hour ago.”

“Oh, well, I'm actually on my way to a meeting that just came up. You know how I await them with bated breath.”

“Did you even bother coming home last night?” She was clearly not up to levity.

“Yes, and I saw your note. I'll be home on time to do that, I promise you.”

“I hope so, Green. And on your way, could you pick up some more wine?”

“No problem. How about I pick up bagels too?”

“Bagels and wine?” This time she chuckled. “Why not? It's a Jewish party, and there can never be enough food, right?”

He rang off with a sigh of relief that he had survived, then turned his cell phone off to stave off further interruptions. The effort of deceiving her and pretending to be cheerful on three hours sleep and a triple dose of caffeine had left him drained. Thinking ahead to what he had yet to face that day, he wondered where he'd find the strength.

Rachel Walker had obviously gone to work, because it was Howard himself who, after several rings, cracked open the front door with a bleary scowl. When he saw Green, he groaned, dropped his hands limply to his sides, and stumbled back inside without a word. Green followed him in and shut the door. The doctor walked past the living room into the kitchen, which was small and crowded with the latest gadgets.

“Before you even start on me, Green, I need some coffee.”

Howard was dressed in an expensive beige velour bathrobe which gaped open to reveal his naked torso. He seemed oblivious as he measured beans and operated various machines. Soon the fragrant scent of coffee filled the room.

“Rachel had a feeling you'd come,” he said. “She wanted me to barricade the house. She was on the verge of calling in her father.”

“Well, you've got your own guard dog,” Green replied, trying to keep his tone light. He wanted to slide into this interview casually. “Your mother. She's being very protective of you.”

Howard flushed. “Yeah, well, I spoke to her last night, after you left, and told her a few things I wish I hadn't.”

“Oh?”

“About writing the letter, about how furious I'd been with him,” Howard replied vaguely. “It upset her needlessly.”

Green wondered how much detail Ruth had learned, and if that was what had aroused her fears. “She knew none of that before?”

Howard drooped over the counter, watching the coffee drip. He looked too tired to make sense of things. “I don't know if she suspected anything. Sometimes I think she did— she never wanted to discuss his past. She'd shut us all up really fast if we got angry at him or started to speculate about him. As if he could do no wrong.”

“I think your mother feels guilty now for all the hell your father put you through.” Green probed ahead very carefully. “She'd forgive you anything, you know.”

He watched closely, but Howard showed not so much as a quiver of guilt. Instead, he raised his head and gazed at Green with blank bemusement. Green debated how to proceed. Howard's activities in the days surrounding his father's death had certainly been suspicious, but Green had very little concrete evidence on which to hang a motive, let alone the actual murder. Without evidence to back up an accusation, he'd accomplish nothing other than tip his hand and give the man plenty of chance to cover his tracks. If there were any to cover.

But if Howard were the killer, his motive was still a mystery. His father had been mistreating him for years and had rejected his wife, but that was nothing new. His recent discovery of his father's hidden identity had shocked and outraged him, but it hardly seemed a motive for murder either. Had Howard discovered something else, perhaps in his discussion with Bernie Mendelsohn? Mendelsohn's building super had said Howard was in tears after his meeting with Mendelsohn. Had Mendelsohn told him something about his father's appalling cruelty—cruelty which began in the camps but continued with his son even fifty years later? And now, to cover up all the information that might give him a motive, Howard was denying the meeting ever took place.

The theory had a twisted logic, far-fetched and tenuous, but it was all Green had.

“Howard,” he began, accepting the coffee Walker held out to him, “why did you say you never met Bernie Mendelsohn?”

“Because I didn't.”

“But the building super saw you. He described you to a tee.”

Howard put his cup down with a thud. “That doesn't make sense.”

“He saw you coming out of Bernie's room crying. You must have learned something terrible.”

Howard's eyes filled with tears, and for once Green welcomed them. Maybe some of the man's defences would wash away.

“You did see him, didn't you?”

Howard fell into a chair, his head in his hands. “I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd never learned any of this stuff. I wish I could just remember my father as the drunken bastard I've always known. I can't ever talk this out with him, find out why, or try to understand.”

“So Bernie knew him?” Green asked gently.

“Yes, he knew him. He said he'd never forget him, poor man. Such a sad old man. He invited me in, sat me down and made me coffee, no questions asked, as if just having a visitor was a treat. Then when I showed him a picture of my father, it was like he'd been struck by lightning. He went white, he fell into a chair, he started to shake, and I was afraid he would go into cardiac arrest.”

Green's pulse quickened. Something major must have happened to sear Walker so indelibly into Mendelsohn's emotions.

Howard fought for control a moment before heaving a deep sigh. “He wasn't a well man, I could tell that just by looking at him, and I was afraid to push him, but I had to know. I couldn't get this far and then leave all these questions unanswered. But he wouldn't say anything for a while, just sat there staring. I finally got some brandy, and after a bit of that he came around. He apologized and said he'd lost his wife and children in the Holocaust, and recently he'd been thinking about them more and more. Seeing my father had reminded him.”

He fell silent, his head bowed, and Green forced himself to be patient. Finally, he couldn't stand the suspense. “Why?”

“My father…my father…” a mere wisp of sound “…was a Nazi whore.”

Scraps of conversations raced through Green's mind.
No one is a saint who survived the ghetto… Leib turned his own father and brother over to the Nazis… Maybe the thing you want to hide from most is yourself.

“Was your father responsible for sending Mendelsohn's family away to their deaths?”

Mutely, Howard nodded. “Them. And thousands more.”

Green chose his words carefully. “In the ghettos, the Nazis made the local Jewish leaders run the day to day business of the community and choose the candidates for forced labour and deportation. Some leaders cooperated because they hoped that by maintaining Jewish control, they could protect the entire community better. Slowly, they found themselves in a trap. They didn't know deportation meant death.”

Howard had been shaking his head vigorously, and now he burst in. “No! I've been doing some reading, and I know all about the
Judenrat
. That was the Jewish municipal council the Germans set up to run the ghettos. But this was worse than that. My father was part of the Ordnungsdienst, Bernie Mendelsohn called it.”

“The Jewish police.” Green stifled his excitement as more pieces tumbled into place. The Jewish police had been set up by the Nazis to maintain order in the ghettos. They carried no weapons and were charged initially with enforcing bylaws, checking papers, directing traffic and other petty functions. At first, the ghetto residents saw them as a welcome alternative to the Germans, but when Nazi brutality, starvation and forced evacuation to the death camps increased, the Jewish police became vilified as mere enforcers of the SS. The paradoxes in Walker's life suddenly made sense. His fear of exposure, his avoidance of Jews. His possession of German keys.

“Thugs!” Howard retorted. “That's all they were! Doing the Nazis' dirty work, ferreting out those in hiding, catching smugglers, informing on their neighbours. I had hoped that my father's suffering in the Holocaust was what had made him the cruel, warped human being that I knew. But it appears he was like that all along. Leib Kressman, king of the sewer.” Howard's eyes were blazing now, and he shook his head bitterly.

But Green looked up in astonishment. “Kressman?”

“That's what Mr. Mendelsohn said his real name was.”

Green's mind raced. Not Joseph, the middle-aged blacksmith, but Leib, another generation altogether! In a flash of insight he understood who Walker was, and what the black box had meant to him. And another facet of the Russian doll was revealed.

Howard was pacing now. “My father, a goddamn collaborator!”

Green forced himself to be calm. “It's not as simple as that,” he replied. “It never is. He was still a teenager when the war began. A kid, afraid to die.”

“And that makes it okay? Millions died because they refused to betray.”

“The Nazis had their ways of persuading, Howard. They wouldn't shoot you, they'd shoot your child. Or hang an entire village for the defiance of one man. They always seemed to know just where the weaknesses lay.”

“No, this was more than weakness, Inspector. This was cruelty. Bernie Mendelsohn told me how his family died. One night his wife was trying to smuggle some food into the ghetto for their children, because there were no rations for them any more. My father was patrolling the wall and caught her. He turned her in, and the SS guard shot her on the spot.”

“And if he hadn't turned her in, he would have been shot himself.”

“Only if the guard found out.”

“It's easy for us to say that, Howard, but there, with the machine guns pointing and spies hidden everywhere—”

“You still don't get it!” Howard cried distractedly. “He wasn't just saving his own skin! He was carving out a life of profit and ease—”

“But Howard—”

Howard barrelled on obliviously. “By selling his fellow Jews to the Nazis! After Mendelsohn's wife was shot, my father went into their house, found his two children and brought them to the guard. To set an example, the guard shot them! Two little children, right before their father's eyes!” Howard sagged back in his chair with his head in his hands and the fire of a moment ago quite gone. “How can I look Rachel in the eye? That's the greatest irony of it all. I finally discover that I really am a Jew…and all I can feel is shame.”

“Enough to kill him?”

Slowly, Howard lifted his head as Green's meaning sank in. “You think I killed him?”

“Did you?”

“No!”

“Then why did you refuse to tell me about the meeting? Why did you say you'd never heard of Bernie—” Abruptly Green broke off, as the full significance of this latest twist struck him. For here was the centrepiece of the whole puzzle! The moment when the lives of these three old men had come together. And with the placing of this piece, much of the rest of the picture suddenly made sense. Walker's misanthropy and inner torment, his denial of his Jewish identity, his panic at Howard's marriage, his assault on Gryszkiewicz and the pact of secrecy between the two men.

At the edges of his thoughts, Green was aware of Howard's pain as the son struggled to assimilate the picture of pure evil into which he had cast his father. Green knew that it wasn't true, that the human psyche is rarely that black, and that much of Walker's later behaviour was the result of the war within himself. Of the anger, the despair, the self-loathing which tinged everyone around him in black. After the war, the only remnant of himself that he could handle was the special tool box his father had made, probably as a gift to his teenage son with the hope that its secret contents might keep him safe.

The father whom he himself had sent to the gas chamber.

But Green was in no mood to try to explain all this. For as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, he put together something that the Civic parking lot attendant had said with something Mendelsohn's superintendent had said, and their significance began to shift. A hazy alternative began to emerge, and he felt himself grow cold with dread.

“My God,” he breathed, “you think Bernie did it, don't you?”

*    *    *

Green drove like an automaton through the farm country between Montreal and Ottawa. Even at noon, the highway was largely deserted, and the boredom of white fields and trees had a numbing effect on the senses. There was little to distract him from his tumbling thoughts. Yet after an hour of thinking, he was no closer to knowing what to do than he'd been when he'd left Howard.