If Bruchner had flown, I had blown it. Armed with a theory that I believed would disprove his identity as Gualtieri Bruchner, I had established a clear and compelling motive for murder. But without the quarry, I could prove nothing.
I knew nothing about Bruchner’s personal life. Where might he go in a pinch? Walking down Lexington in the wet flurries, I reviewed everything I’d learned about him, from visa information to the letter of support from Professor Nardone. Little there.
The wind picked up as I crossed Thirty-Sixth Street. I pulled my neck into my collar like a turtle and cut through the cold slush falling from the sky. A man crossing Thirty-Sixth heading north huddled in his brown overcoat, fedora tilted down to the wet pavement. He wasn’t looking where he was going. I stopped myself just before plowing into him, and we brushed against each other.
“Excuse me,” we muttered in unison, and our eyes met.
“Professor Bruchner,” I said in the middle of Thirty-Sixth Street. “I was just wondering where you might be.”
He squinted at me through the wind and precipitation, and a taxi blasted its horn at us as the light changed. We scooted to the north corner, out of the path of the slippery traffic, and faced each other.
“What do you want now?” he asked, hands jammed deep into his pockets.
“To talk,” I said. “I’ve discovered something you’ll find interesting.”
“Interesting how?”
“About your lunch last Friday, the attack on my father, and Ruggero Ercolano’s murder.”
Bruchner sighed. “Let’s not stand here in the wet. Come, we’ll talk in my flat.”
We tramped two blocks through the collecting slush to his building, and five minutes later, he was boiling a kettle of water for tea. Taking a seat near the small kitchen, I glanced at his overcoat and hat, dripping from the rack by the door. Then I looked at my own coat on the next hook: streaked with water, but not soaked. I figured he’d been out walking for some time.
“Why do you say murder?” he asked, warming his hands near the flame on the stove. “Professor Ercolano died accidentally.”
“I don’t think so.”
He paused, looked at me, then took his hands away from the heat and rubbed them together. “What do you think happened, Miss Stone? I’m sure it ends with me throwing a radio into his bath.”
His boldness surprised me. He joined me outside the kitchen, eschewing a seat, standing above me instead.
“I know Ruggero Ercolano was the man with my father at lunch last Friday.”
His jaw tightened.
“His presence at that lunch creates a problem for you. You insisted you didn’t know who the man was.”
“I didn’t,” he said, flustered. “Your father jumped at me, and I never saw anyone else.”
“Are you telling me you didn’t see the man who pried my father’s hands off your throat? A man you work with every day?”
“There was a big commotion,” he said, turning away. “I didn’t see anything. I was in shock.”
“Not so much that you didn’t realize Ruggero Ercolano represented a threat to your security. My father surely gave him the whole story about your tattoo and your false identity at lunch that day. He must have found the damning evidence he’d been looking for, probably that very morning in the mail.”
“You’re mad!” said Bruchner, turning to face me again. “You have no evidence, nor has your father.”
“You’re right; I don’t have the letter. I think you found it last Friday night when you paid an unexpected visit to my father. You took the letter with you after you clubbed him on the head.”
“Preposterous! Alles erlogen! Sciocchezze! You have no proof, not for your father or for Ruggero Ercolano. I had no reason to hurt either one, especially Ercolano, who never did me any wrong.”
“But you did have a reason,” I said. “My father believed he had the definitive proof of your masquerade, and when you showed up at the Faculty Club last Friday afternoon, he exploded. Ercolano was with my father, heard everything, saw everything, then left with him. Don’t you think my father might have explained the situation to him, especially after he’d tried to strangle you? He may well have shown him the letter. At the very least, you had to assume Ercolano knew.”
“Knew what, Miss Stone?” shouted Bruchner, veins bulging in his forehead. “What proof have you that I am not who I say? I have a passport, visa, Italian driver’s license, and a tattoo on my wrist for proof!”
“And you have the tattoo on your chest.”
Bruchner’s anger gave way to alarm. The vein receded into his head and some of the red drained from his face. His expression begged for elucidation.
“I’ve already told you about that tattoo,” he said guardedly.
“You said it was an error of youth, if I remember correctly.”
“That’s right. The name of a girl I knew: Chiara.”
“I’m sure your tattoo was inspired by youthful zeal,” I said, “but not over a girl. Chiara is one word, and you’ve got two lines covered. Please don’t tell me you had her family name tattooed on your chest; it’s not very romantic.”
“How about Chiara mia?” he asked. “That’s what it said before I had it covered with this hideous tattoo that obsesses your father and you.”
“It never said Chiara mia, or any other such nonsense,” I said, shaking my head. “I didn’t know whether to believe you at first. You had more documentation than a double agent. You were a victim, a survivor of the Holocaust, I didn’t dare suspect the worst. I was so blinded by the belief that you were Jewish that I couldn’t see what my father saw in your tattoo. Then it hit me, like a bolt of lightning.” His eyes grew in horror. “Or should I say, two bolts of lightning?”
He jumped, and his hand reached for the upper-left corner of his chest, just where the tattoo was branded into his skin, then he pulled it away quickly.
“What are you implying?” he asked. “That I am not a Jew? What am I if you deny me my identity?”
I stared coldly into his burning eyes. “You, Professor, are a Schutzstaffel. A former SS man.”
“Ridiculous,” he said, though not very convincingly.
“I couldn’t figure it out until this morning,” I said. “The tattoo on your wrist kept derailing me. But then I realized your mistake: you took Gualtieri Bruchner’s number. It suddenly became clear that you had never been an inmate, or Jewish, because you didn’t have a number of your own on your wrist.”
“No,” he turned away slowly, facing the wet, gray window.
“Then I decided my brilliant father deserved more credit than I had been giving him. He suspected the tattoo on your chest from the moment he saw it in the steam bath. He knew what was underneath.”
“You are as delusional as your father, Miss Stone.”
“SS men often had themselves tattooed with twin lightning bolts, isn’t that right?”
He said nothing.
“What is your real name?”
Bruchner rubbed his tired eyes with the heels of his palms, drawing a deep sigh. “My name is Gualtieri Bruchner.”
“Officially, yes. You have a passport, a driver’s license, and a library card. I may never find out your true name, but I’m sure Immigration and the State Department will be interested just the same.”
“But you have no proof!”
“Enough for an investigation, and the truth will come out. The government is particular about letting ex-Nazis into the country. With you and Caronte Bruchner claiming the same identity, they’ll want to know who’s who.”
“Since you believe I killed Ruggero Ercolano, and tried to kill your father, aren’t you afraid I will kill you too?”
“The thought crossed my mind,” I said.
Bruchner sat down—collapsed into a chair was more like it. He hung his head low, chin nearly touching his chest. His thin fingers drew imaginary circles absently on the table before him. We sat silently for several minutes, as I let him think abou
t the power I held over him. One phone call to Immigration, or even the Italian Embassy, would set the wheels in motion, and in the end, the good professor would be deported or worse.
“You may think this tattoo was once two lightning bolts, but that’s not true,” he said finally. “Not all SS men were tattooed, and I . . . already had a tattoo there: viel geliebt Katia.”
Had he just admitted he was SS?
“My name was Gustav Emmel,” he said suddenly, his voice weak, eyes bone dry. “I was born in 1910 in Sillian, Austria, in the southern Tirol, just on the border with Italy. There were Italians in our town, and my mother was from Udine, in the Friuli on the Italian side. I learned Italian as a child, imperfectly, from my mother and her family. We traveled frequently to Friuli and even as far as Venice. My father, you see, was a builder. His father, and his father before, had been masons and bricklayers.” He paused to wipe his brow, which had boiled up a sheen of perspiration. “My mother’s family were early supporters of the Camicie Nere, the Blackshirts, in Italy. When I was in school, Mussolini was greatly admired, revered in our home. And then . . .” Bruchner shifted in his seat, let his head fall backward over his shoulders, and he stared at the ceiling for a moment.
“The Anschluss?” I prompted.
He nodded slowly and continued his narration. “Had I been born Italian, I would have joined the Fascists. In Austria, it was the Heimwehr, and I joined a few years before the Anschluss. When Austria became part of Germany, I saw a greater opportunity. The country was alive, burning with excitement for the future. I wanted to be part of that future, of a pan-Germanic revolution and renaissance in Europe. I believed in the words, Deutschland über Alles. So, at twenty-eight years of age, I joined the Schutzstaffel.”
Bruchner looked at me for the first time since he’d begun his statement, his expression humble, his shoulders drooping. I wondered if he wanted absolution from me, as if my forgiveness would erase the sins from his forehead.
“And the war?”
He looked away again, perhaps speechless before a Jew as he catalogued his past. “I was in Poland at the beginning, a radioman in a Panzer division. Then, because of my back, I was sent home for convalescence, where I stayed for several months. When my health improved, I was assigned to Funkmesstechnik—radar. But then the camps in the East were ready to become operational. For some reason, maybe because I had been in Poland, maybe because I had lost some hearing in my left ear, they decided I was not to be a radar technician, and they sent me east as a guard at Auschwitz.”
“Did they brief you about what you were going to do?”
The gray man before me thought for a long moment before answering. “We understood what was to happen, but there was no option to protest. It’s not like here. You don’t understand that. One did as they said, or one faced death.”
“How did you feel about it? Did the idea of murdering hundreds of thousands, millions, bother you?”
“Of course it did,” he muttered. “I had no choice. I did not wish to be there. It was hell, I can tell you that, for us too.”
“You’re pushing the limits of my sympathy,” I said. “Three of my cousins were gassed at Auschwitz.”
“I am truly sorry, Miss Stone,” he said, almost pleading. “I pitied those poor Jews, dying as they did, stripped of their clothes, possessions, and dignity. Even in death, the affront was bestial: piles of bodies, roaring crematoria, body parts used for . . . It was infernal, Miss Stone. My descriptions cannot convey the horror of walls of naked corpses, stacked with less care than if they had been firewood.”
Bruchner’s eyes, burning like coals, stared out the window, his breathing becoming shorter as his voice gained strength from the disgust. His mouth twisted in revulsion at his memory.
“Near the end,” he continued, “as the Russians approached from the east, time became short. We stoked the ovens with the fury of Vulcan, burning flesh ad nauseam, literally. But the worst nightmare of all was when we had the work gangs dig up the mass graves that had been filled before the crematoria were in place. Those bodies had to be destroyed. No evidence could remain.”
He paused, head still, no movement besides the rise and fall of his strained breathing.
“But you carried out your orders,” I said. “It never became so inhuman that you said ‘Enough, these are men.’ You’re here today to bear witness to the horror, theirs and yours, but they’re gone, dead, exterminated like vermin.”
“Yes,” he said, looking at me, eyes sparkling now.
“Did you ever drop the gas in the chambers?”
He shook his head. “No, other men were assigned that duty. Always the same technicians.”
“What exactly was your job at the camp?”
He shrugged. “In the beginning I was with the work gangs in the mines nearby, but a relapse of my back problems ended that. From July 1944 until the Russians liberated the camp in late January ’45, I held a machine gun and drove the Jews from the train to the showers. I . . . ,” he wiped an eye, “I even closed the doors and . . . bolted them shut. Oh, the screams and the wailing . . .”
I couldn’t speak. My hostility had somehow vanished, supplanted by the horrible fascination of listening to an eyewitness to history. One, who, like Aeneas and Orpheus and Dante, had descended into the netherworld and come back out again. Indeed, Gualtieri Caronte Bruchner, too, had made the trip to hell and back. The professor—Emmel—continued:
“The showerheads were fakes,” he said, voice hoarse and tormented. “Once, one fell out of the wall. It was a length of pipe, sealed on one end, leading nowhere. The fraud was complete, right down to the counterfeit drain in the floor and the hooks for towels they would never need. In the ceiling, at the center of the chamber, was the trap. The technician would drop a cylinder of Zyklon-B—a pesticide—through the slot, then close the opening. The crystals reacted with the air, producing a fog of deadly gas. Then the screaming began, and lasted for as long as ten, twelve minutes, until the hardiest had succumbed to the poison. We waited thirty minutes more before opening the doors to be sure they were dead. They died like cockroaches; Zyklon-B.”
I swallowed back a dry mouth. “Then what?”
“We brought in the gangs to clear the bodies, to check for gold in the teeth, and then carry them to the crematoria. The bodies were still warm, their expressions still human. Men, women, and children in heaps, naked like the damned souls of hell. The incinerators’ smokestacks vomited black clouds, and the smoke billowed so thickly and smelled so bitter you could taste it on your tongue. It tasted like agony and perdition.”
As Emmel finished his sentence, he did the strangest thing: he reached into his breast pocket, retrieved a handkerchief, and wiped his flat tongue with it. Then he spat into it. Relief softened his rigid features after he’d expelled the taste.
“The so-called Final Solution was to be executed by the Schutzstaffel. With the debacle at Stalingrad in January 1943, the tide had turned, and the Jewish Question acquired more urgency, sometimes even at the expense of the war effort. As the Red Army pushed back our troops, we in the camps became more aware of the danger we faced. The crimes we had witnessed,” he paused to consider his words. Then he amended his statement: “The crimes we had committed would demand justice and punishment. We tried to destroy the evidence, even as we hurried to gas and burn thousands per day. It was a factory; we were specialists in extermination and disposal. We exhumed the old mass graves and stuffed the decayed corpses into the ovens.”
Again he spat into his handkerchief. I could see his eyes watering, but I wasn’t sure if he was crying or choking on the memory of human smoke.
“Did you know Gualtieri Bruchner?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, I never met him.”
“Then how did you come to take his name?”
“As the Russians approached in January 1945, I planned my escape. I stole a tattooing pen and ink from the registration office and hid them in my bunk. Later, when the Kommanda
nt quit the camp and we received orders to destroy all evidence of our actions, we burned paper documents. I thought my best chance for escape was a new identity, non-German. Since I spoke Italian, I looked through the records of the Italians. Gualtieri Bruchner was the first northern Italian I found with a birth date close to mine. It was the night of January 25, two days before the Red Army reached the camp. I scratched Bruchner’s number into my arm and memorized his birth date. Then I destroyed his records. The next night, I moved to the other side.” He drew a deep breath, but didn’t seem to exhale. “I pulled the uniform off a prisoner who had dropped that afternoon on a work detail. His body was piled with the others, waiting for cremation. Then I crossed the camp to the women’s barracks, because I feared the male prisoners would recognize me. I passed two sentries on the way, but they let me pass because they knew me. Finally, I found an isolated spot where I stripped out of my uniform, buried it under the corner of one of the women’s barracks, and dressed in the prisoner’s filthy clothes. The lice began to bite immediately, as I was fresh and alive.” Emmel scratched his side, then his leg. A vestigial memory.
“I slipped inside the barracks,” he continued, “and begged the women not to turn me in to the guards. I told them the Russians were near, that the camp would be free by morning, and they hid me. The confusion was great at that time, and the only organized security was in the towers; no guards entered the barracks that night, nor the next morning. By noon, the Russians had arrived, and most of my old comrades were dead.”
“How did you get out?” I asked.
Emmel shrugged his shoulders, a bewildered fatigue on his face. “I wandered out the front gate with some other prisoners. Hungarian Jews, among the last to arrive. They were strong, like me, but we couldn’t communicate; I pretended not to know German. Four of us walked for three days, until a Russian patrol picked us up. They sent us south to a refugee camp. By May, when they shipped me to a displaced-persons camp in the British zone, no one would have doubted I was a deportee. I had lost twenty kilos, and I had tuberculosis, worms, and lice. The British sent me to Milan and helped me get new papers. There was never any question that I was not Gualtieri Bruchner.”
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