Once Upon a Time (29 page)

Two old men were missing, their whereabouts a mystery. Mendelsohn had no friends or family beyond an estranged son in Philadelphia and a handful of pinochle-playing cronies at the synagogue. He had no place to go, no one to visit. Gryszkiewicz was a retired, reclusive immigrant who had rarely ventured from his neighbourhood since moving to Canada. His wife was completely baffled about the mystery friend who had invited him to visit. Green had not been baffled. Despite the man's denial, Green had assumed the mystery caller was Dubroskie, warning his cousin about the police inquiry. Gryszkiewicz had every reason to fear a police inquiry into his connection with Eugene Walker, and every motive to track down the sole survivor who could reveal his Nazi past. The theory fit all the known facts. Gryszkiewicz had received a warning phone call from his cousin, had tracked down and assassinated his only witness, and then dropped neatly out of sight into the underground safety net of the party faithful.

But what if the phone call had not been Dubroskie, but a voice from the past? Not arranging safe passage to some Nazi haven in the jungle, but setting up a secret rendezvous from which Gryszkiewicz would never return.

Do I really want to know why he never returned? Green asked himself. I could just walk away from this. Forget Hamilton and Mr. G., drive back to Barrhaven and be all ready for my son's birthday. Let Mendelsohn's form of justice prevail.

After the Second World War, a small underground cadre of Jews had scoured the globe, relentlessly tracking down war criminals and executing them. As an officer of the law, Green knew he was sworn to uphold the system, but he'd battled evil on the streets long enough to understand why others might choose another route. Not simply revenge or redemption, but a swift, effective justice far more efficient than the clumsy legal apparatus over which the Department of Justice presided. So far, the War Crimes unit had managed to charge only a handful of the two hundred potential war criminals living in Canada. Of those cases which had actually reached the courts, one trial had resulted in an acquittal, another had taken more than two years to render its guilty verdict, and the rest had floundered in the legal maze.

Perhaps Bernie Mendelsohn thought he had found a better way. Sixty years later, on the eve of his own death, he had righted a wrong. And now, driving home dizzy from exhaustion, late for his son's birthday, and running counter to everyone else on the case, Green wasn't sure he wanted to argue the point.

His car tires hit gravel and he jerked alert to discover that the car had drifted onto the shoulder. He blinked his eyes and shook his head repeatedly to clear it, but heaviness weighed his eyelids. He pulled off at the Casselman exit and stopped at the Tim Hortons doughnut shop next to the gas station to order the largest jolt of caffeine possible. Slumped in a corner booth, he cradled his cup, leaned against the wall, and let his mind roam in endless loops through the facts. Sometimes, in free fall, his thoughts snagged on facts he'd never seen. Justice, betrayal, dying, balance, strike…

A long, dingy hospital ward stretched before him, where the patients lay on rows and rows of narrow cots. He ran desperately between the rows looking for Sharon, searching the hollow faces and calling her name. The cots transformed into wooden bunks and hands reached out, clutching at him as he passed.

“Mishka!” A voice cried out, loud and firm, and he turned to see his father standing at the side of one of the bunks. He wore pyjamas and carried a stick loosely in his hand at his side. He said nothing more, merely gestured to the figure on the bottom bunk. Green looked and saw Sharon gazing up at him. Her eyes were fevered and her colour grey, but there was a smile of joy on her face. Nestled in the crook of her arm was Tony, tiny and fragile again.

“Sharon! Tony!” Green cried and rushed forward. But as he reached to embrace her, he saw it was not Sharon but his mother, gaunt, hairless and yellowed with jaundice. As he recoiled with a cry, there was a shout from the other end of the ward and a man in black uniform came striding over. The man shouted in a foreign tongue, raised a pistol and fired a bullet through his mother's forehead. Green found himself paralyzed, unable to cry out in protest as the guard raised the gun towards him. But with a roar of rage Sid Green swung his stick with all his might and struck the man, sending the gun clattering. The guard slumped to the floor, and only then did Green feel his movement return.

“Dad!” he cried. “Where is Sharon! Where is the baby!”

Sid had fallen to his knees at his wife's side and had gathered her into his arms, but now he looked up at his son. His face had aged, his eyes grown weary. Slowly, he clambered back to his feet.

“Come, I'll show you.” He took his son's arm and led him out of the hospital into the sunshine. Stretched out in front of them as far as the eye could see was a barren, muddy field covered in tombstones.

“This is where we all are.”

Green started awake in a clammy sweat. Lukewarm coffee spilled over his hand. His heart was hammering, and his body went limp with relief as he realized where he was. Not in Auschwitz staring at the graves of his wife and child, but huddled in the corner of a doughnut shop on the Trans-Canada. He glanced at his watch. Two o'clock! His son's birthday was due to start in three hours. He had barely enough time to get home and help Sharon prepare the house for the party. He had no time for Hamilton, no time to figure out where Mendelsohn was. Fate had intervened.

The dream had jolted him thoroughly awake, but his limbs were weak as he returned to his car and headed back onto the highway. He wanted nothing more than to revel in the comforts of the present and look ahead three hours to when he and Sharon would cuddle Tony in their arms and give him his first birthday present.

What present? he thought with dismay. What a prize father you are, and what the hell was that dream trying to tell you about that? He let his mind drift back to the images in the dream. And suddenly, one more tiny piece of the puzzle of Walker's death fell into place. The cane! Amazing, even when his conscious mind was too tired to make sense of the facts, his unconscious mind kept right on at work. Somehow, Ruth's brandishing her cane and the building super's commenting on Mendelsohn's cane had come together in his dream. He smiled in spite of himself. “How did you find the solution to this latest murder, Inspector Green?” “It came to me in a dream.” Where things are never quite what they seem. Where a stick is a cane, and years collapse into seconds.

Another image came to him, of the field of tombstones, of his father's voice in the dream: “This is where we all are.” Of something Mendelsohn's son had said: “He's got plenty of dead ones to keep him company.”

Suddenly he knew where Bernie Mendelsohn was.

Fifteen

November 25th, 2001

I am old, a spent and soulless shell,
trapped too long in a web of memory.

Too late, my son, I sit on our street corner,
watching little boys at play.

Hearing you, seeing you,
but unable to reach
Across the dead and the damned
that clutter my world.

A single shot
resounds across the arid decades of my life.

The web is pierced,
And I slip beyond its grasp,
to nothing.

For you are gone.

Green kept his foot
close to the floor all the way along the 417, hoping that none of his brothers in blue were waiting in ambush. The little Corolla covered the remaining distance to Ottawa in less than an hour and was slowed only by the trucks and traffic lights along Hunt Club Road. By the time he reached the cemetery, the winter sun was slanting into the western sky, casting a yellowish mist over the graveyard.

Once inside the wrought-iron gates, Green stopped in dismay. The Ottawa Jewish cemetery was huge, and he had no idea where Mendelsohn's second wife was buried. He tried to remember what his father had said about her. It had not been a happy marriage. She had been sickly from the start, and after the one child, she had more or less taken to her bed. She was a kind woman, Sid had said, but no match for Mendelsohn's moods. Green remembered she had finally succumbed to pneumonia around the time his own mother had died, and it had been that bond which had brought the two elderly men together.

Since the two women had died around the same time, perhaps they had been buried in the same general section of the cemetery. Purposefully, Green set off across the snowy slope. He had covered about half the distance to his mother's grave when he heard a slight scraping sound to his right. His eyes strained through the pallid light. It took a few seconds for him to distinguish a light-coloured tombstone in the distance with a dark, bulky shape obscuring one corner. He drew closer until he could distinguish the outlines of a human form huddled against the stone. It took only a second longer to recognize Bernie Mendelsohn.

Green's first instinct was to rush to his side and bundle him in his warm, dry parka, but he stopped himself. Mendelsohn was snoring peacefully, his head resting back against the stone beside his wife's name. He was wrapped in a long, warm parka with boots, mittens and hat. Although he was gaunt and unshaven, he looked at peace. When Green came to stand at his side, he opened his eyes and came to slowly. Focussing on Green's face, he managed a smile.

“
Nu
, Mishka,” he murmured. “So. You figured it out?”

“Some of it, Bernie.” Green knelt beside him. “Are you in pain?”

Mendelsohn shook his head. “Not now. I have my pills.”

“Maybe you should visit your son before you go.”

“And say what?” Mendelsohn sighed. “Some things I cannot fix. Would you talk to him?”

Green tried to hold his gaze. Remembering Irving Mendelsohn, he could have said “I don't think he'll listen,” but instead he nodded. “Sure I will. And he'll understand, Bernie. Don't you worry.”

“I didn't mean to kill Kressman, you know,” Mendelsohn remarked in a musing tone.

Green thought of Ruth Walker's comment that things had ended as they were meant to end. That perhaps by some power beyond ours, the wrongs had been righted. “You didn't really,” he said. “You were just fending him off with your cane. He died of hypothermia.”

Mendelsohn looked at him in surprise. “He was scared I was going to tell the whole story to the police. He still had the same coward's temper he had when he was young. Always his fists was the first way out. In Lodz there was a story that he used to go with the Christian peasants before the war, trying to be one of them because he was tall and blonde. Such a
mensch
, too much a coward even to call himself a Jew.”

“Did he call you to arrange a meeting?”

“Him? To face me? Oh no. I called him. I wanted to see him, to see if this Eugene Walker was really Leib Kressman, and also to ask him why.”

“And did he remember you?”

“When he saw my face, oh yes. We don't forget those days, Michael. They are burned into our brains like a hot iron. He got very scared. He said he had to do those things or the Nazis would kill him. Hah!” Mendelsohn's eyes glowed in his pale face as he struggled to sit up. “I knew his kind. Whores! They thought they could stay nice and warm by getting into the Nazis' bed. Little men inside, trying to be big. He had an older brother, short and fat but ten times the man, a councilman in the ghetto. People looked up to him. He was trying to protect us by giving false names to the Germans of who should be deported. The SS shot him, and then they had no such trouble with Leib. He sent his own father to the trains so he wouldn't have to see the shame in his eyes. Leib rolled over like a good dog and spread his legs. And worse, Mishka, he got to like it! He stopped being one of us, he thought he could be one of them and make a nice little profit out of both sides.”

He stopped to catch his breath, his chest heaving from the effort of his outburst. Spittle had formed at the edges of his mouth, and he wiped it away. “But he was a fool. In the end they sent him away to a camp just like the rest of us. Even now, fifty years later, the fool still doesn't know who to hate. I didn't kill your family, he shouts, and I think he's going to jump over the car seat at me. He's drunk, and he's getting all red. I'm not such a healthy man, so I get out of the car, and he gets out too. He says if I want the real murderer of my family, he is here in Canada living happily with his family.”

“And he told you about Josef Gryszkiewicz.”

“Gryszkiewicz.” Mendelsohn spat the name out. “Called himself Fritsch back then, a Nazi halfbreed who thought his blood was pure enough for the super race. They gave him a fancy uniform and a job at the gate, keeping Jews in their place. He loved it! Thought he was born to catch the young boys smuggling blankets and the mothers sneaking potatoes to their children.”

The sun sank slowly, carving hazy shadows across the snow, and on Bank Street the homebound traffic gathered strength. Green asked the question he knew he should leave unasked. “Where is Gryszkiewicz, Bernie?”

Mendelsohn lay back against the gravestone and gave him a long, searching look. “Michael, I don't want jail. And I don't want hospitals and machines and people not letting me die. I want to stay here with Lydia. This is where I belong. It won't be long now.”

Green studied his hands. He could feel the old man quivering beside him, whether from cold or fear he couldn't tell. He sensed Mendelsohn was right, that he didn't have long. In this cold and with the disease closing in, maybe only hours. It took Green mere seconds to reach a decision. “There won't be any jail, Bernie. I wasn't even here. I'll have to report what I learned from Howard Walker, and the whole police force knows I'm looking for you, because I was afraid you were in danger. But no one has any idea where you are, and it may take a day to figure that out.”

Mendelsohn stared a long time into the mist. “A day is enough. I have my pills. I want to sit awhile with Lydia. If there is a God, where I'm going I won't see her again. When I have said goodbye, I will take them.” He shut his eyes and took several breaths as if gathering strength. “I shot Gryszkiewicz. It was very easy, and I don't feel bad about it. I was afraid I would. Maybe I should be afraid, because I don't. But he showed no regret, Mishka. That was why I did it. When I went to meet him, I didn't think I would kill him. I planned to tell the RCMP when I was sure who he was. They had the name Fritsch, but not his real Polish name. So I phoned Fritsch, I told him I was Walker and we had to talk in secret. I took the train to Hamilton, and I met him behind a small warehouse that was closed for the winter. He looked at me, and he said I was not Walker and so I told him that I was in Lodz and that he had shot my family, and he said ‘What do you think you can do about it?' So I said ‘This' and I pulled out the gun and shot him. I had the gun for years, I had never shot it, but I didn't give one thought. Just—bang.” Mendelsohn shook his head in wonder. “I killed two people, Mishka. I'm eighty-four years old, I just killed two people and I feel…nothing.”