Voices of the Dead (17 page)

She led him to the elevator and up to the fourth floor. The door to Hess’ apartment was unlocked. “How’d you do it?”

“I turned on the charm.”

Harry grinned. She had it to turn on.

The interior was big and spacious, professionally decorated, with views of the ancient spires of Altstadt on one side and the modern glass office buildings of downtown Munich on the other. They walked through the apartment. There were two bedrooms, one larger than the other, an office, kitchen and living room.

Harry checked the closets and drawers in the bedrooms, looking for a gun, a Nazi uniform, but didn’t find anything incriminating. Colette checked the other rooms, went through the utility closet, refrigerator, oven. Nothing. They met in the office. It had a sleek desk with a black granite top on a chrome frame. Behind the desk was a credenza with a matching top and custom wooden file drawers, two banks of three. The drawers on the left were unlocked. Envelopes, stationery, stamps, letter opener in the first one. Pens, paper clips, tape, stapler in the second drawer, and files in the deep third drawer.

The drawers on the other side were locked. He took out the letter opener, jammed the tip in the lock and tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t budge. Colette walked out of the room without saying anything, came back a few minutes later with a hammer and a screwdriver.

“Let me try.” She got on her knees and pounded the screwdriver into the lock, gripped the handle, turned left and it opened.

Harry said, “Where’d you learn that?”

“A few years ago I wrote an article on how to pick a lock.”

He opened the first drawer and found a box of 9 mm Parabellum cartridges. Now they were getting somewhere. The next one was filled with a strange assortment of things. He reached in, taking the stuff out, putting it on the desktop: a couple pairs of eyeglasses, woman’s suede gloves, gold Star of David, watches, bracelets, women’s panties, necklaces, a diamond ring, a wedding ring, silver locket.

“Harry, what is all of this?”

“I don’t know.”

Colette opened the third drawer, took out a file folder with several cracked sepia-tone photographs, shuffled through them.

“Harry, look at these.”

The first one was a young SS officer in uniform, posing, blank expression. Harry recognized him immediately. Took out the mug shot Taggart had given to him and unfolded it. Now he could see the young Nazi in the older man’s face.

“Harry, who is that?”

“Unterscharführer Ernst Hess,” Lisa said.

Harry was in her office at the ZOB. He’d dropped Colette off and come right over. Why didn’t he recognize Hess before? Sitting across the table from him at Les Halles. Harry showed her another shot, Hess grinning, dead bodies behind him, piled up in a mass grave. “I remember the look of satisfaction on his face,” Harry said, “after shooting my father and eleven others with a machine gun, saying, ‘This is how you kill Jews.’”

“He looks so ordinary,” Lisa said. “He could be a plumber or a taxi driver.”

“What did you expect?” Harry said. “He’d have horns and a tail?”

“Hess was only there for a short time,” Lisa said, “a few weeks, touring Dachau and its sub-camps.”

Martz turned his head a couple times left to right and rubbed his neck. “Harry, don’t get old. It’s no fun.” He paused. “It was very unusual—I would say unheard-of for the SS to murder Jews en masse outside the camp. Why go to the trouble? They would just shoot us in the yard, the
Schiesstand
, sending a message, scaring the hell out of those who saw it or heard about it.”

“Maybe they were experimenting,” Lisa said. “Dachau was the prototype for other camps, the training ground for the SS. Many well-known Nazis learned their trade there.”

“There have been no corroborating accounts that Hess was a mass murderer until now,” Martz said. “The voices of the dead can’t speak, Harry, but you can.”

“What do you know about him?” Harry said.

“His father was a career soldier. His mother was a music teacher,” Lisa said. “He was raised in a strict German household. His middle name is Tristan after Wagner’s opera.”

“Seems appropriate when you realize Wagner was an anti-Semite,” Martz said.

Lisa said, “Hess fell out of a tree when he was a boy of nine or ten. His mother heard him crying and beat him with a stick for being weak. Later, a doctor came to the house, examined him, and discovered he had broken his leg.”

“Well you can begin to understand why he turned out the way he did,” Harry said, moving his chair back from Lisa’s desk so he could cross his legs.

“So if you have a bad upbringing murder is justified?” Lisa said, raising her voice.

“My dear, think how sensitive it is for Harry,” Martz said. “He is a civilized man, showing compassion.”

“The hell I am. He killed my parents,” Harry said. “And my daughter. I’m going to get the son of a bitch.”

Martz said, “What do you mean, your daughter?”

Harry told them what happened to Sara.

“Harry, I’m so sorry,” Lisa paused, eyes holding on him.

“I am, too,” Harry said.

“I can’t imagine—”

“Tell me more about Hess,” Harry said, changing the subject.

Lisa glanced at the open binder on her desk. “He joined the SS in 1939 at age twenty-two. He was on a fast track, an up-and-comer. Everyone thought he was related to Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy. It helped his cause until May 10th, 1941, when Rudy flew a plane to Scotland to negotiate peace with the British. Then, of course, Ernst tried to distance himself from his famous namesake.” Lisa took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. “After Dachau, he was transferred to Berlin. Assisted Adolf Eichmann in organizing the Wannsee Conference. Reinhard Heydrich brought top Nazi leaders to a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. He wanted their buy-in on deporting all the Jews of Europe to extermination camps like Auschwitz.” She paused, put her glasses back on. “After the war he started a construction company to rebuild the cities that were bombed by the Allies.”

“And profited handsomely,” Martz said.

“He sold the company in 1967 for thirty-six million marks,” Lisa said. “And then bought an airship factory, started building Zeppelins.”

Harry said, “Tell me more about this Dachau survivor.”

“She saw an SS officer murder dozens of Jews. That’s why she’s anxious to talk to you.”

“Where does she live?” Harry said.

“Palm Beach, Florida,” Lisa said. “I’ll set up a phone call for today at 5:30. We’ll do it at the house. Harry, can you be there?”

“Of course.”

“With the photographs and your testimony we have a strong case against Hess.”

“Harry, do you remember where they took you in the forest the day of the massacre?” Martz said.

“It was a few miles outside Dachau.”

Martz looked at him. “Do you think you could find it?”

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “It’s been a long time. I don’t know if I can trust my memory. Let me think about it.”

Martz dabbed his wet eyes with a Kleenex.

“Were you at the camp during the liberation?” Harry said.

“I had been transferred to Ampfing to work in the munitions factory, but was brought back to Dachau in the autumn of 1944. I was in a barracks with Léon Blum.”

“The premier of France?” Harry said.

“The very same,” Martz said. “The Americans liberated us on April 29, 1945. They were so horrified by the conditions, they made the citizens of Dachau feed and clothe us. Made them come to the camp to see the naked, emaciated bodies of the dead piled up in the mortuary room next to the crematorium.”

“What did you do after?”

“I went home,” Martz said. “Whoever had been living there was gone.”

Just then, a bear of a man, mid-thirties, came in the room. He had dark curly hair and a full beard. Wore black horn rims and a white yarmulke.

“What did I miss?”

“Meet Harry Levin, Dachau survivor. Harry, this is Leon Lukiski, our other partner.”

“It’s an honor, sir,” he said.

“Harry has identified Ernst Hess, and has agreed to help prosecute him.”

“Great news,” Leon said. “Mazel tov.”

“I’ll fill you in,” Lisa said. “Harry, is there anything else?”

“Yeah. Do you have a shovel I can borrow?”

Harry went back to his hotel, showered, changed and called Cordell.

“Yo, Harry, where you been at? Thought the ’shirts came back for a three-peat.”

“I had a date.”

“You sly dog. She got any friends?”

“I’ll ask.” He paused. “Doing anything today, want to go on a field trip?”

“Field trip? We back in middle school?”

“Dachau,” Harry said. “The concentration camp.”

“Why you want to go there?”

He picked Cordell up at the Pension Jedermann on Bayerstrasse at 11:30. Cordell in a powder-blue leisure suit with beige stitching and a beige polyester shirt with musical notes scattered all over the front. “Man, you’re a dresser, aren’t you?” he said when Cordell got in the car.

“I’m fly, Harry. Got my fly on.”

“You sure do.”

“You know what fly mean, Harry?” Cordell said, grinning.

“Let me guess. Fashion-conscious. Am I in the ballpark?”

“OK, you in the right direction,” Cordell said. “I can hook you up with some cloth, style you.”

“Guys selling scrap don’t dress like that.”

“You be the first. They be looking at you with envy and shit.”

Harry wondered what Michalski, the buyer at the steel mill, would say if he showed up in a powder-blue leisure suit. It wouldn’t be pretty.

Harry drove through Altstadt, and once he had cleared the ancient spires he saw a Zeppelin hovering high above. “Look up there.” He pointed to the top edge of the windshield. “See it?”

“Yeah. More Nazis, Harry? Think it’s following us?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.”

They got on the highway and drove northwest out of the city, Cordell looking through the windows, checking to see if the Zeppelin was still up there. “Don’t see nothing, Harry. We cool.” Cordell took a red Nazi armband out of his pocket. “Souvenir from the other night. Check it out.”

“Hitler said the red symbolized the social idea of the movement. White was the nationalistic idea, and the swastika represented the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, that was a victory of the idea of creative work, which always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.”

“Huh? What was the Führer smoking he wrote that? Must’ve been some good shit.”

“All of them were smoking it.” Harry paused. “They listened to the lunatic, believed him. Hitler thought Jewish men purposely seduced German girls to pollute the Aryan race.”

“What would he’d a thought about brothers doin’ the fräuleins?”

A few minutes later they were cruising along the northern perimeter of Dachau concentration camp. “When I was here there were thirty-four barracks. There’s only one left.”

“When was that?”

“Got here in November 1941, escaped in April 1942.” He pulled the BMW over on the side of the road, looking past Cordell at the entrance gate. “There’s the guardhouse, and that brick building with the chimney is the crematorium.”

“Hold on, Harry, rewind.”

“It was the beginning of November. The Nazis came to our house, ten armed men, banging on the door, seven in the morning. I got out of bed, looked out the window and saw them in front of the house. An SS sergeant told us to get dressed and come downstairs, bring what we could carry but no food.

“We started walking through Altstadt, joined now by other families, friends and neighbors forced out of their homes. Fifty of us, I counted. People were stumbling along, weighted down by layers of clothing, carrying suitcases and duffel bags. We walked through town and then we were outside of the city. I was thirteen, no idea what was happening. None of us did. They marched us sixteen kilometers to Dachau. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the walls and towers of the camp.”

“What’s that mean:
Arbeit Macht Frei
,” Cordell said, trying to pronounce it, pointing to the words on the gate.

“Work makes you free. That was the irony,” Harry said. “The harder you worked the weaker you got. Only way to be free was to die.”

“What you do, they put you in here?”

Harry turned his head, held Cordell in his gaze. “I was a Jew.”

“You got a tat?”

“They didn’t do that here. They put your number on your uniform.” He paused. “Morning roll call was four a.m. in the summer and five thirty in the winter. After going to the bathroom we were given a cup of black coffee, then marched to the assembly area for roll call. After roll call the work commander, a prisoner, called out names for work details. If your name was called you were given a slice of bread and maybe a little piece of sausage. We worked, usually in the Plantage, farmland near the camp until eleven thirty. Marched back to the barracks for dinner, a small serving of cabbage or carrots and a small piece of potato. At twelve thirty we marched back to work until six, then back to camp for roll call, and back to the barracks for supper: watery soup, sometimes a bit of cheese.

“I saw a man beaten to death by a guard for stealing potato peelings, stuffing them in his pockets ’cause he was starving. I remember bodies that looked like skeletons stacked on top of each other outside the crematorium.