“Congratulations,” I called up to her.
“Are you going to come up here and celebrate with me, or are you going to stay down there?”
The answer to that was clear.
27 – Urban Myth
Tuesday morning I left a message for Rick. I wanted to talk over my suspicions with him, but he hadn’t called me back by the time I had to leave Friar Lake for the Jewish Lit class.
I dropped Rochester at Lili’s office, and kicked off the discussion in class by mentioning my search into name origins. “That made me think about how our names are such an integral part of our identity. How does having a name that identifies us as part of a religion or an ethnicity make us think about ourselves?”
“My uncle changed his name from Plotnick to Platt when my cousins were little,” Noah said. “He said he didn’t want his kids to be discriminated against.”
“My father’s family is Italian,” Ryan Giordano said. “Sometimes it’s weird for me, having an Italian name but being Jewish.”
A young black woman named Shonda Levy said, “My great-great-grandfather was a Portuguese Jew who married a Jamaican woman, and nobody in my family is Jewish. But people always assume that my father’s a white guy, or that somehow my family converted.”
I didn’t want to tell her that in Yiddish a “shonda” was a sin, so it was unlikely a Jewish child would ever have been given that name. But Noah didn’t have the same inhibition and he blurted it out.
I had to quickly change the subject, reading out from a website I’d found, which indicated that while some German-speaking Jews took last names as early as the 17th century, most Ashkenazi Jews were among the last Europeans to take family names. They were accustomed to the patronymic – son of, daughter of, and didn’t change until they were forced to, first in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1787 and then in Czarist Russia in 1844.
“There are people whose names were changed when they immigrated,” Jessica said.
“That’s an urban myth,” Noah said. I wanted to disagree with him, because I remembered an incident I knew of when an American draft-dodger went to Canada—his last name had been misspelled on his paperwork, and he’d adopted that new name.
Instead, I pulled up a website which agreed with Noah, and that led us to all kinds of other reasons why people changed their names. To avoid the law, because their gender changed, or because they didn’t like the name they’d been stuck with at birth.
We segued into the names of characters in the works we’d read, as well as their authors. As students called out names, I put a list on the board, and then I assigned them to do some research on their phones and laptops and then make brief presentations. The diversity of names on the board was fascinating, from Emma Lazarus and her connection to the dead man Jesus had risen from the grave, to the expected Biblical references like Abraham Cahan, to all the names that ended in –stein, -ski and so on.
By the end of class I had tied it all back to the questions of identity that Jewish American authors explored. I used names as well as Jewish stereotypes like big noses or greedy behavior, which went all the way back to Shakespeare’s Shylock and before that.
When I stopped at Lili’s office to retrieve Rochester, Lili was standing by her secretary’s desk. “How’s your class going?” she asked.
“It’s interesting. We talk a lot about identity, what it means to be a Jew, or an American. It’s so relevant to what’s going on in the world today.”
“I agree. I have a girl from Syria in my introduction to photography class and she has a great eye, and a real aptitude for the technical aspects, too. If her family hadn’t had the opportunity to come to this country she’d have no chance at an education.”
I told Lili I’d see her at home and attached Rochester’s leash to his collar, and we walked back to where I’d parked. On the way I checked my phone and realized that Rick had finally returned my call. Instead of calling him back, though, I drove directly to the Stewart’s Crossing Police Station.
The desk sergeant there was an old friend of Rochester’s, and usually slipped him one of the biscuits he kept in his desk for the K-9 officers. The big golden settled behind the desk as the sergeant called Rick. “You can go on in,” he said to me, and I walked past the bullpen to the small office Rick used.
“She said yes!” Rick crowed when I stepped in the office. We fist-bumped.
“I expected she would. Did she like the ring?”
“She loved it. She said it’s just what she would have picked out herself. And she was impressed that I knew her birthstone.” He sat down in his chair and I sat across from him.
“At least that’s one good thing going on,” he continued. “You know the mayor lives in Crossing Estates, don’t you? Only a couple of blocks from Daniel Epstein’s house. He’s called the police chief a half dozen times, stressing about somebody breaking into a neighbor’s house and killing him.”
“You said it wasn’t a break-in,” I reminded Rick. “That Epstein let his killer in.”
“Semantics,” Rick said. He groaned. “Jesus, I’m starting to talk like you. Worrying about grammar and word choice.”
“That must be a sign you’re feeling better. If you’re emulating me.”
“So what brings you down here?”
“I have a theory I want to run past you.” I explained the idea that concentration camp guard Karl Kurtz had usurped the identity of a dead neighbor after the war.
“What proof do you have?”
“It’s not so much proof as absence of proof,” I said, and Rick groaned. I went through all the steps I’d taken to establish what had happened to both Kalman Feinberg and Karl Kurtz after the war. That work had been legit, which I made a point of mentioning. “Kurtz drops off the radar,” I said.
“If he really was a concentration camp guard, there’s a good reason for that,” Rick said. “He could have gone underground in Germany. Why go to the trouble of claiming someone else’s identity?”
“Because he wanted to come to the United States? It was still hard to emigrate here from Germany, and only the Jews got preferential treatment and help from aid agencies.”
“The pieces fit together,” Rick admitted. “But we’re still not seeing the whole outline of the puzzle.” He leaned back in his chair. “I was able to track down the woman with the hair that Gail mentioned. We found some fingerprints in Mr. Epstein’s house, and one of them led us to her. Her name is Shenita Durban and she says that Epstein was mentoring her as she tried to start a business. She said that she went over to Epstein’s house once so he could give her some books.”
“But her fingerprints were on file?”
“She was arrested a couple of years ago for petty larceny,” Rick said. “She put all the blame on her boyfriend and she got off with some hours of community service.” He sat back. “The boyfriend’s a different story, though. We didn’t find his prints at the house, but he has a record for breaking and entering.”
“But if this woman is involved, that would mean that Joel Goldberg’s death is not connected to Daniel Epstein’s. And that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Sense or not, I have to follow every lead. When are you going to talk to that other guy, Benesch?”
“Tomorrow morning after Talmud study,” I said. “I want to ask him if that online ID belongs to him, and see where the conversation goes after that. I still don’t see what connection he has to Kurtz.”
“If you find out anything – anything at all – I want you to call me right away. Don’t go off in your usual half-assed way.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. “But I agree. I’m not interested in chasing any more killers, thank you very much.”
I retrieved Rochester from the sergeant’s desk and we drove home, where Lili was already in the kitchen sautéing chicken breasts. I kissed her hello. “She said yes.”
“That’s great! Keep an eye on these breasts and turn them over before they burn. I’m going to
call Rick.”
I heard her side of the conversation as I studied the chicken. How I would I know when they were about to burn? Why not just turn them over now and avoid a problem?
“The football field?” I heard her say. “What possessed you to propose to her there?”
I knew why. Rick had met Tamsen when he coached her son’s Pop Warner football team. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable guy choice to make—it was romantic, because of their history there, and also because it brought her son Justin into the picture, too.
I lifted one corner of a breast up and peered at it. Looked pretty done to me. So I flipped both of them, with a satisfying sizzle as the raw meat hit the hot surface.
Lili returned to the kitchen and took over, and my mind drifted back to the conversation we’d had in class about names, and then how Henry Namias had remembered my mother when I gave her maiden name.
“Do you think Tamsen will change her name?” I asked Lili.
“I doubt it. She’s already established in her career, and she has a son by that name. I doubt Rick would mind. Would you?”
I shook my head. “These days it seems weird to me when a woman takes her husband’s name after marriage, the way Tamsen did. Every now and then I’ll be in some female faculty member’s office and see her diploma on the wall and realize that’s her maiden name. I wonder if it’s different when she’s coming into the marriage with another man’s last name.”
“I never changed mine,” Lili said. “Thank god. At the time I didn’t want to bother with the paperwork. Now I’m grateful. If I’d started my career under either Philip’s or Adriano’s last name I’m not sure what I’d do.” She smiled. “Although my mother could never figure out why I didn’t. ‘You aren’t a real wife unless you take his name,’ she said, more than one time.” She shrugged. “I guess she was right, and I never was a real wife.”
I was able to avoid that minefield because the breasts were done, and I had to help Lili serve them up over a bed of wild rice. As we ate, I asked, “How is your mother doing?”
“She’s in therapy every morning. They have her up and moving around with a walker. She hates it, of course, but I keep reminding her that the quicker she gets better, the quicker she can go back to her apartment.”
“Is she going back there? Or to Fed’s?”
“I don’t know. If we can get an aide to stay with her, maybe she can stay in the apartment for a while longer. She doesn’t want to move in with Fedi and Sara, and I’m pretty sure Sara doesn’t want that either.”
I understood Sara’s position, while at the same time I hoped that if her mother-in-law had to come live with them, she’d adjust. I’d never met the woman myself, but I knew from long experience what Jewish women were like. I remembered that Victor Namias had called his wife a balabusta, and I was pretty sure both Lili and Sara fit that category as well.
The next morning, I took Rochester for a quick walk before I had to leave for Shomrei Torah. As we stopped and started around River Bend, I thought about names and what they said about us. My own name, Levitan, came from the Polish for Jew—Levite, plus a Slavic suffix of -an. Couldn’t get more Jewish than that.
The most famous person I’d found with my name was a Russian landscape painter named Isaac Levitan, who had been born in Lithuania, where my ancestors had lived, though I had no idea if he was related to me. My mother’s maiden name, Gordon, was even more common, deriving, I believed, from the city of Grodno in modern-day Belarus. And of course there were tons of non-Jewish Gordons coming from England, Scotland and other countries.
Rochester and I were among the first to arrive at Talmud study, and Rabbi Goldberg pulled me aside to asked if I’d made any progress in figuring out what had happened to Joel. I had to admit that I still had more questions than answers, but that I hoped to know more soon.
I didn’t pay much attention to the conversation among the group, thinking about how I was going to approach Saul Benesch. I made sure to walk out with him, and as soon as we were away from the building, I said, “It’s so sad about Daniel Epstein. I can’t stop thinking about him. But at least he had a good sense of who he was, and where he belonged in the community.”
“That’s true,” Benesch said. “We old-timers, we have deep roots here. I wish my children hadn’t moved away, that my grandchildren could grow up here, where our family history is, and all around each other.”
“So you really know who you are,” I said.
“I do.”
“Then why did you use the online ID NotwhoIthinkIam?” I asked.
He looked at me curiously. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You haven’t been searching through online databases for information about Holocaust survivors?”
“Sonny, you’ve got the wrong guy. The only thing I do on the computer is send emails and look at pictures of my grandchildren on Facebook. I’m so computer illiterate that Aaron had to come over and set everything up for me.”
The wheels started turning in my head. “So Aaron Feinberg knows your email ID and password?”
Benesch appeared to have figured out what was going on, because he looked around furtively. “I can’t talk here.”
“I’ll buy you a cup of coffee at the Chocolate Ear,” I said. “I can take Rochester inside there. I have some information you need to hear.”
“I’m afraid of that,” Benesch said, but he agreed to meet me.
28 – Three Shots
On the way to the Chocolate Ear, I kept going back to NotwhoIthinkIam. If Aaron Feinberg knew Benesch’s ID and password, he could have used them to shield his identity for his online searching.
What was he looking for, though? Was his father really Karl Kurtz? Why would he look online for verification otherwise?
I got to the café before Benesch, and parked Rochester in the doggy annex. Then I met Benesch at the counter in the café. “What can I get for you?” I asked, as I pulled out my credit card.
“Just a small coffee.” I ordered a grande mocha for myself and the coffee for him, and we stepped aside to wait.
“All these fancy coffee drinks,” Benesch said. “Seems silly to me. Your generation, you’re so spoiled. You want everything the way you want it.”
“And if we can afford it, why not?” I asked. “It must have been tough growing up in Trenton during the war years and afterwards.”
“I saw a man be murdered,” Benesch said abruptly. “I never told anyone because I was too scared.”
My heart skipped a couple of beats. Gail’s assistant handed us our coffees and I handed Benesch his. “I’d like to hear about that, if you feel like you can tell me.”
“It’s time,” he said. He followed me into the annex and we sat down at a table, with Rochester on the floor beside me.
“I wasn’t a very good Torah student,” he said after a moment or two. “All I wanted to do was play sports. Baseball, football, stickball. For my bar mitzvah, I had to study extra hours with Rabbi Sapinsky.”
His eyes clouded over, as if he was remembering those days.
“I used to have to go over there after school was out. But one day I joined a ball game and I was late. I got to the shul and went looking for the rabbi. I heard him arguing with someone and then a noise.”
He stopped for a moment.
“What kind of noise?” I asked gently.
“Today I’d probably recognize it as a gunshot, but back then all I knew was that it was like the sound the bat makes when you hit the ball with it.” He took a deep breath. “And then a man came running past me. He didn’t see me, because I was in the corner. I didn’t recognize him but I was worried about the rabbi so I went back the way he’d come. I found the rabbi on the floor of his office, blood pouring out of his head.”
Benesch began to shiver. “I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do. I rushed home and told my mother, and she went to the shul. When she came home she asked me, Solly, do you know what happened to the rabbi?”
Of course. Saul, Solly. Saul Benesch was the boy mentioned in the police reports. I pulled out my cell phone while Benesch was lost in his memory and texted Rick, asking him to come to the Chocolate Ear ASAP. If he didn’t arrive to speak with Benesch himself, I’d have to make sure he heard Benesch’s story at some point.
“I didn’t want to admit that I’d been playing ball when I should have been studying, and I was too scared that the man would come after me if I told anyone I had seen him. So I said nothing.”
Then he looked up at me. “It wasn’t until years later, when my wife and I joined Shomrei Torah, that I recognized the man I saw running away from the rabbi.” He took a deep breath. “It was Kalman Feinberg, Aaron’s father.”
“Have you ever told anyone else?”
He shook his head. “Who can I tell? Aaron is my friend, and he idolized his father. It would destroy him if he learned something like this.”
I had a feeling that Aaron had learned a lot more about his father.
“Did you know a man named Myer Hafetz?” I asked. “He was a cousin of Henry Namias’s family.”
“No. What about him?”
“I think Kalman Feinberg killed him, too.”
I explained my theory. “I think Aaron Feinberg’s father was really a German man named Karl Kurtz, who had been a guard at Auschwitz. After the real Kalman Feinberg died, Kurtz assumed his identity and came to the United States to start over. Then he ran into Myer Hafetz, who recognized him, and he killed Hafetz, and then the rabbi, to protect himself.”
I looked up and saw Rick walk into the café, and motioned him over. As he petted Rochester hello, I introduced the two of them. “Mr. Benesch, would you tell Detective Stemper what you told me?”
He nodded. “Yes, it’s time.”
I stood up and Rick took my seat. I caught his eye and he nodded slightly.
As I drove up to Friar Lake with Rochester by my side, I talked out my ideas with him. “Aaron Feinberg must be the man behind NotwhoIthinkIam,” I said. “He helped Benesch set up his email account so he knew the ID and password, and he could use it hide his own identity on line.”
Dog is in the Details Page 18