Barely noticing where he was walking, Max recalled the worst Prandus “sighting,” which had occurred one evening a few years earlier. Max was soaking in the bathtub and was flipping the channels when he heard the name. He had gone past CNN before the name registered. Then it had struck him like a kick to the groin. For an instant he was immobilized, staring at the shopping channel as the name of the devil pulsed through his brain in a pounding rhythm: Prandus, Prandus . . . a name that had brought terror to thousands and that was still capable—fifty years later—of making Max lose control over his bladder.
By the time he regained CNN, the announcer was on to another story. A phone call to CNN confirmed that there had indeed been a story about a Nazi collaborator named Prandus, who was deported back to Lithuania for lying about his wartime role in dealing with the Jews of Kovno. On his immigration form Prandus had claimed to be a grocer, but the Justice Department Office of Special Investigations had proved he was a death camp guard at Sobibor.
The intern at CNN had been kind enough to fax Max a sheet from the Internet newsline that contained a picture of the seventy-seven-year-old Prandus outside his modest home in a Chicago suburb. A quick look at the grainy photograph of the short, dark-complexioned old man was proof enough that this Prandus, whose American name was Michael, was not the Marcelus Prandus who had murdered Max’s family. This Prandus had murdered other Jewish families. Perhaps he was even related to Marcelus. But he was not the object of Max Menuchen’s obsession.
This false sighting turned Max into an emotional cripple for several weeks, as he obsessed anew over whether his life might have been different had he managed to take revenge against Prandus.
Max had tried to combat this emptiness by occupying every waking hour with his work. Instead of thinking about his own lost family, he was content to serve as mentor to the many students who regarded him as their academic father. This he could do, because it did not require emotional involvements or sharing his personal life. His students knew not to probe too deeply—all but one: Danielle Grant, who was, ironically, his most brilliant protégée. As his thoughts returned to the present, Max wondered with a tinge of regret how his former student was faring—never imagining that she would soon become an integral part of his quest for revenge.
Part III
Confronting the Truth
Chapter 10
THE CHANCE ENCOUNTER
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,
SIX WEEKS LATER: MID-MAY 1999
It was a beautiful Sunday morning, an ideal day for a walk along the Charles River. Max was out walking by eight-thirty. As he reached Memorial Drive, he encountered an AIDS walk-a-thon. The participants were wearing T-shirts carrying the logo “Fight AIDS, Not Gays.” Small groups of walkers represented various institutions—corporations, schools, churches. There was a Harvard Divinity School contingent, in which Max spotted Danielle Grant. They greeted one another warmly, and she asked him to join her. Max demurred. He decided to sit on one of the benches until the walkers passed, and then he would continue his stroll.
Had Max turned his head during the next few seconds—perhaps to observe a robin in a tree—he might have missed the sight that was to reshape his future. His life would have continued on its well-trodden path to a comfortable retirement and an uneventful death, with a respectable obituary commemorating his successful career as a professor of Bible studies at the Harvard Divinity School. If their spirit of generosity prevailed over their usual academic competitiveness, colleagues might even have acknowledged that it was Dr. Max Menuchen who had finally uncovered the mystery of how the iconoclastic Book of Ecclesiastes had come to be written.
Max did not turn his head. Hence his obituary would be quite different from those accorded successful, but otherwise unremarkable, academics. His academic career, his books, his teaching—they would all be squeezed into a short paragraph at the end of the kind of obituary reserved for infamous men who have made their mark on history by one terrible crime.
Max looked straight ahead at the marchers in the walk-a-thon. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a profile—it was just a fleeting image, yet it immediately conjured in his mind the face that had filled his nightmares for half a century. The marcher turned his face in Max’s direction—a face with characteristic Lithuanian features and the steel blue eyes that had peered deeply into his as Marcelus Prandus pronounced the death sentence on his family. He was tall and well built. Like Prandus. Yet it wasn’t a particularly close resemblance. This man wore glasses, had a different hairstyle and a slimmer face. For an instant Max fought to ignore his shock of recognition. After all, he had “seen” Marcelus Prandus so many times over the years—in bathroom mirrors, on television, and in his nightmares. Maybe this man was just another tall, blond Ukrainian. He remembered that at the trial of Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, the defense had argued that to Jewish victims, all Ukrainians looked alike. This time, however, Max was “seeing” something else about this face in the crowd. This time there was no mistaking his visceral certainty that a trace of Marcelus Prandus was near at hand. Marcelus Prandus would be a bit older than Max—late seventies. This man was in his forties. Could he be a relative? The man was walking behind a banner bearing the words “Social Gospel Group, Lithuanian Church of Salem.”
Almost automatically, as if his legs were making the decision for him, Max walked behind the group of marchers. He kept a discreet distance between himself and the man he was following. Suddenly they stopped for a light at the Western Avenue Bridge. Impulsively Max tapped the man on the shoulder.
“Excuse me, sir. I hope you do not think me presumptuous. But you look familiar. Might I please inquire as to your name?”
“Paul Prandus,” the younger man responded in a soft voice, extending his hand politely for a shake. “Do I know you?”
Instinctively Max pulled away as the reality set in. His heart was racing. His hand began to shake. He felt dizzy. Yet he marshaled the courage to proceed.
“No, I do not think so. I used to know a man named Prandus in Vilnius, Lithuania. And you bear a resemblance to him.”
“That’s where my father is from. Maybe your friend was Papa’s cousin or something. What was his name? I’ll ask my father when I see him tonight.”
“His name was Marcelus Prandus.”
“Hey, that’s my dad. You knew him?”
Now Max was shaking visibly. He could barely speak. But he got out the words, trying his best to hide his anxiety: “Yes, I did. I gather he lives nearby?”
“In Salem. Why don’t you call him? I’m sure he’d love to hear from someone back in the old country. What’s your name?”
Max froze. What should he say? He was not a good liar. But he needed to continue the conversation.
“He wouldn’t know me by my current name. I changed it when I came to America after the war.”
“Lots of people did. We kept ours. What was your name in the old country? I bet Dad will remember. He’s still as sharp as a tack.”
“Lukus Liatus,” Max replied, conjuring up the name of the boy he had taken care of during his recuperation.
“I’ll ask Papa. Here’s his phone number,” the younger man said, scribbling on a business card. “He loves talking about what he calls the ‘good old days’ back in Lithuania. Dad’s spirits could use a lift. I’m afraid he’s quite sick. Pancreatic cancer. Not a good prognosis.”
The word cancer sent a shock through Max’s entire body. How many times had he wished for Marcelus Prandus to die a lingering death from a painful illness. But not now, in his late seventies, after living a long, happy life surrounded by his family. That was too good a way to die.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Max said, only partially dissembling.
“We’re all sorry.”
“You have a family?” Max asked, trying not to think of his own lost family.
Paul nodded. “The grandchildren are taking it the hardest. They love him so much. My son, Marc, is named aft
er him. He’s the apple of Papa’s eye. His life is his children and grandchildren. We all live near each other in Salem. Papa’s a real family man. I bet it’s the same with you,” Paul said, smiling.
“Yes, it is,” Max lied.
“I have to be walking,” the young Prandus said. “I’m leading this motley group. It was really fortuitous running into you, Mr. Liatus. I know it will make my father’s day.”
“Thank you, Mr. Prandus. Send my best to your father,” Max said, grasping the business card with the phone number of his family’s murderer and turning in the direction of Abe Ringel’s home.
Chapter 11
SEEKING JUSTICE
Abe heard the pounding as he was completing a running program on his treadmill. He came to the door huffing and puffing in his sweatsuit and sneakers.
“Max, is everything okay?” Abe said, showing the old man in.
“I don’t know. I’m dizzy.”
“Sit down. I’ll get you some seltzer.”
When Abe returned with an old-fashioned seltzer bottle and a glass, Rendi was with him. “You don’t look good,” Rendi said to Max. “Should I call a doctor?”
“No, I’m fine. I just learned something that is making my heart race.”
“What is it?” Abe and Rendi asked in unison.
“He is alive,” Max declared slowly.
“Who’s alive?”
“Marcelus Prandus. The man who killed my family.”
“How do you know he’s alive?”
“I saw his son.”
“Where? How do you know it was his son?” Abe demanded in his staccato style of cross-examination.
“Right here in Cambridge,” Max said, pointing to the door. Now he was speaking very quickly. “In a walk-a-thon. Something about him reminded me of his father. I asked him. He told me. He is the son. He wrote his father’s phone number on his card. Here, look.” Max produced the crumpled card. “Marcelus Prandus has been living in Salem for years. Now he’s dying of cancer.”
“Divine justice, I guess,” Rendi observed. “No one is going to be shedding any tears.”
“No. No. That’s exactly the point. He has lived a happy life. He had children and grandchildren. They will miss him. He will die content. We must do something before he dies,” Max demanded, grabbing Abe’s arm. “Can you get him deported? That way he will die alone.”
“Settle down,” Abe said reassuringly, loosening Max’s grip. “I know how traumatic this must be for you. I will do everything possible.”
“So will I,” Rendi added. “I have some sources. I’ll find out everything I can.”
“Will you get him deported?” Max persisted, his voice rising.
Abe placed his arm around the old man and said: “Look, the legal system works slowly. It could take some time to undertake an investigation. How sick is he?”
“Pancreatic cancer.”
“I don’t know whether he will live long enough to complete an investigation. I’ll make some calls—I know someone in the Justice Department who investigates Nazi crimes. Give me Prandus’s phone number. I’ll give it to my friend at Justice. It will be a start.”
“Yes, yes, a start,” Max said enthusiastically.
Abe worried that he might be creating unrealistic expectations. “I must tell you, Max, it may be too late for legal justice. He’s being punished. He’s dying. Maybe you should leave it alone. Just let nature take its course.”
“Can they arrest him? Hold him while they investigate?”
“I’ll try,” said Abe. “But I can’t promise anything.”
“You can get him deported, Abe. I know you can. You must,” Max said as he left the Ringel home.
Chapter 12
DANIELLE GRANT
Max knew there was still time for justice. As he walked toward his home, a sentence from Ecclesiastes popped into his head: “All things I have seen in the days of my vanity; there is a righteous man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his evil-doing.” Max knew he could not be as accepting as the author of Ecclesiastes. He would have his justice. Now that he knew where Marcelus Prandus lived, he no longer had an excuse for postponing his revenge. It was as if fate had put Prandus so near as to challenge him: Can you satisfy your grandfather’s last wish—for nekama?
Max had to accept the challenge. He had to act, whatever the consequences, and he had to act quickly, before Prandus’s death deprived him of the opportunity. He would let Abe Ringel pursue legal justice, Max decided. Abe was a great lawyer. If anyone could bring about legal justice, he could. But if Abe failed, then Max would find his own justice. How does one achieve proper revenge against a dying man? Max wondered. He knew that there was only one person to whom he could turn. He also realized he could never ask for her help directly.
Danielle Grant had been Max’s most brilliant student—before she broke his cardinal rule never to probe his private life, especially his past. Her brilliance was a surprise to Max, who at first could not imagine a southern girl from a fundamentalist Christian background ever becoming a scholar in his fashion. Max was an agnostic by professional training. According to Professor Menuchen, one must be a skeptic, a doubter, and an open-minded scholar in order to pursue biblical criticism. Although many of his colleagues were personally religious—why else would they be motivated to devote their professional studies to the holy books?—they maintained a healthy skepticism in their scholarship. Max was different. He was an atheist in his personal life, while his professional work allowed for the possibility of divinity.
From the start, Danielle simply would not abide by Professor Menuchen’s rule.
“Tell me about yourself,” she asked him during their initial meeting, when she was just a freshman at the college.
“Read my books,” he replied, taken aback by her audacity. “And you will learn all you need to know about me.”
“I have read your books, and they are a wonderful window into your mind. But they reveal only your rational side. Now I want to learn about your soul.”
“My mind is your concern, as my student. My soul remains my own concern,” the professor said without a hint of harshness.
There was never any harshness in any aspect of Max Menuchen’s affect. His face was round, with deep-set eyes, bushy gray eyebrows, and a warm, open smile. Despite its openness, however, it was a smile that seemed to hide a secret—as if he always knew something no one else was able to understand. And although there was certainly nothing sexual about Max Menuchen, there was passion. During the previous forty years it had been a passion for scholarship. Now, as Max walked back to his home, it was quickly becoming a passion for revenge.
He needed to talk to Danielle. She was now an assistant professor of Bible studies. Though they had grown apart over her persistence in prying into her teacher’s private life, he had remained interested in her. It was Danielle’s love of learning and her unique approach to scholarship that first distinguished Danielle. She believed strongly that scholarship could not be understood without a deep knowledge of the scholar. That was not an unusual weltanschauung in her generation, which was peopled with psychologically oriented literary critics, but it was a bit odd in a biblical scholar who believed—as Danielle did—that God wrote the Bible. Her special academic interest was in concepts of justice in the Book of Genesis. Danielle’s graduate seminar on this subject was among the most popular in the department. She was being considered by several major universities—including Harvard—for a full professorship.
Danielle had another oddity: she managed to fit in a full-time hobby as a photographer of multimedia video collages. Danielle had shocked the rather staid Bible department with her collage of the creation. Employing images from outer space provided by NASA, time-lapsed photography from the nature channel of flowers blooming, and computer-generated art that she herself had designed, Danielle had managed to illustrate the biblical account of creation. Entitled “Terem Kol”—ancient Hebrew
for the abyss before the time of creation—it was a tour de force that even the most skeptical and the most fundamentalist members of the department had to admire. As Max had observed after watching it, “This would surely win a prize if there were any category of art into which it fit.”
Danielle was utterly unpredictable. She talked with the urbane southern accent of her paternal grandfather, whose ancestors owned plantations on the outskirts of Charleston and had served in every political office from delegate of the Confederate Congress to mayor of Charleston. Yet she thought like her paternal grandmother, whose family had been southern Catholic abolitionists since the turn of the nineteenth century.
All in all, Danielle had quite a background. Max had never encountered anyone quite like her. Still, he would not give in to her polite demands that he bare his soul to her.
The conflict reached a head when Danielle decided to do her senior honors thesis on the scholarship of Max Menuchen. Her goal was to deconstruct his deconstruction of Ecclesiastes. In order to do this, she claimed, she would have to know a great deal about his background, his experiences, his family. Before confronting him with the project, Danielle did library research on the Menuchen family. She traveled to New York and went through the archives of the Jewish Research Institute, which had moved from Vilna to New York at the end of the war and which contained an extensive history of the Vilna Jewish community. She arranged for an Israeli friend to translate records from the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem. It was all very frustrating since there was scant documentation of individuals or even families, only of entire communities that had perished. After weeks of prodigious research, Danielle managed to come up with a description of the fate of Vilna’s Jews and a sketch of what must have happened to the Menuchen family.
“Here it is, Professor,” she said proudly, handing Max thirty-five neatly organized pages. “My memorandum on how your interpretation of Ecclesiastes reflects your own experiences as a young man in Vilna.”
Just Revenge Page 6