Max quickly perused the first few pages, his anger growing silently. Finally he could no longer hold it in. “How dare you pry into my private life in this way.”
“You are a public figure,” Danielle replied. “I used only public sources. A scholar must do research on her subject, and you are my subject. I make no apologies.”
“How would you like it,” Max sputtered, “if I did research on your background?”
“I am not a public person,” Danielle replied defensively, raising her voice a bit. “At least not yet.”
To Max, Danielle seemed to be protesting too much, almost as if she had some secret in her own past that she did not want uncovered. He had no idea what it might be, and at this point he did not care. Still, he regarded himself as a pretty good judge of such matters.
“You would have no legitimate reason for researching me,” Danielle continued, “other than to satisfy personal curiosity.”
“But I am curious. Why are you so obsessed with a nobody like me? I sit in my study and write about an old, obscure book of the Bible. I bother no one. Why must you bother me?”
“Because I need to understand you, in order to understand your work.”
“My work stands or falls on its own merits or demerits,” Max insisted.
“I cannot believe that your past, with all of its tragedy, has no bearing on how you think and what you write.”
“I have no patience for such psychological speculation,” he said dismissively. “The past is gone. We must not allow it to burden us with its sins. We must move on.”
Danielle could see that Max did not mean what he was saying. She knew from her research that it would be impossible for him not to be burdened by his past. Just how burdened he was, she would later learn.
“I cannot help you,” Max said.
“You can, but you won’t,” Danielle shot back angrily.
“I will not cooperate with your project,” Max insisted. “I will not even read it.”
That had been Max’s last serious conversation with Danielle. There had been polite hellos and cordial chitchat, but no substantive discussions. Max had followed Danielle’s progress. How could he avoid it? She was the department’s young superstar. Professors had competed to supervise her Ph.D. Though Max admired her work, he regarded her as eccentric. He was content to watch her from a distance—until today. Now he needed her, more than she could ever understand. He could not sort this all through by himself. He needed another head—dared he think, another soul—to help him puzzle through the justice of what he had to do. Of course, there was Abe Ringel, but he was a lawyer who always considered issues from a strictly legal perspective. Max needed someone who could go beyond legalisms—someone who could tell him whether a course of action might be just even if it were illegal. Max knew no human being more qualified to help him than Danielle Grant. Yet even he could not have foreseen that she would become so essential in plotting—and implementing—his revenge against the dying Marcelus Prandus.
Chapter 13
THE TEAM
Abe knocked on Emma’s door, and a young woman wearing a “Che Guevara” T-shirt appeared.
“Angela Davis Bernstein, I presume,” Abe said, extending his hand.
“Mr. Ringel, what are you doing in New Haven? Is everything okay?”
“I’m here to take Emma out for a pizza at Pepe’s.”
“Was she expecting you? I think she’s out with Jacob.”
“I should have called. It was spur of the moment. I’m on my way down to New York. Do you know where they went?”
“I guess. They tend to spend their time at a European coffee shop on York Street. C’mon, I’ll take you there.”
Angela got into Abe’s car and they drove the five minutes to the Milano. “So, are you applying for an internship with Cravath?” Abe asked with a smile.
“No, I’m suing them,” Angela replied dead seriously. “They’re representing the Swiss banks that kept all that gold that Jews left behind during the war, and our Lawyers Guild chapter is trying to attach their legal fees on the ground that it’s blood money.”
“What’s your legal theory?” Abe asked professionally.
“We’re working on that.”
The conversation ended as they entered the café, where Emma and Jacob were deep in conversation.
“Hey, Dad, is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine, sweetie, but I need to talk to you. Actually, I can talk to all three of you.”
“Grab a couple of chairs and order a cappuccino. They make them great here.”
After the waiter took their orders, Abe began. “It’s about Max.”
“Is he okay? I worry about him,” Emma interjected.
“He’s okay physically, but something has happened.”
“What?”
“Marcelus Prandus is alive.”
“Oh, my God. Did they find him in Vilna?”
“No. He’s living in Salem, Massachusetts—just a few miles from Cambridge.”
“But he’s a war criminal. A mass murderer. How can that be?”
“That’s what I’m here for. When are your finals over?”
“Two weeks.”
“Would the three of you consider working on this case for a few days?”
“I will!” Emma shouted.
“But we’re supposed to go to Amsterdam, to meet my parents,” Jacob whispered.
“We’ll go after we finish this. I want to nail that bastard Prandus. Please, Jacob, for me?”
“Yes, yes, I will do it. My parents will understand,” Jacob said.
“How about you, Angie? You would be great. We’ll be a team, please,” Emma pleaded.
“Hey, I got nothing better to do. No boyfriend is taking me to Amsterdam or anything. I’m in.”
“We’re a team. What do we do? How do we get Prandus’s ass in jail?”
“It’s not going to be easy. And there is a big timing issue. He’s got cancer, and Max wants to see him deported and prosecuted before he dies.”
“I can cut classes and start today,” Emma said.
“No need, sweetie. We have to start with some library research, and there are few better places for that than the Yale library.”
“What should we be looking for?” Jacob asked. “I have a lot of experience in research, since I’m working on my thesis.”
“We need several things. First, we need proof that Prandus killed Jews. Max will identify him, but he hasn’t seen him in more than fifty years. His ID will have to be corroborated. I’m on my way to New York, where they have files on every European city in which Jews were murdered by the Nazis. I don’t know what I’m going to find in those dusty old files. I need your help.”
“What can we do?” Angela asked.
“You kids know how to use computers, and there must be loads of stuff on the Internet. Rendi is going to do some snooping around Salem, where this man lives. But Prandus can’t know we’re tracking him—not yet. By the end of next week, I want to know more about Marcelus Prandus than his children know.”
“That may not be very much,” Jacob said. “There are still lots of Nazi collaborators in Amsterdam, and their children think they were all doing ordinary jobs during the war.”
“Find out everything you can. Here’s his home phone number. So far that’s all I have.”
“It’s a start,” Emma said. “Let’s nail the son of a bitch before the angel of death beats us to him.”
Chapter 14
THE EVIL KING
“What an unexpected pleasure,” said Danielle. “After so many years. I rushed straight over here after getting your message.”
“Thank you,” said Max. “I need your help.”
“My help? I know very little about Ecclesiastes. Even after reading your books, I have great difficulty understanding how it made it into the canon.”
“So do I. So do I. We don’t know all we should about the canonizers.”
“Is that what you summon
ed me for? To discuss Ecclesiastes?” Danielle asked.
“No. I need your help with an intellectual puzzle that I am trying to work through. It’s in your area of expertise.”
“My area is a three-thousand-year-old book called Genesis. I remember you once lecturing me about not wallowing in the past.”
“Can we put that behind us? I was insensitive. You touched a raw nerve. I would like to move on.”
“That’s okay with me. What can I do to help you?”
“Here is the intellectual challenge. It’s rather simple. But I don’t know that it has ever been adequately addressed by the biblical commentators or even the philosophers.”
“Quite a compliment. Asking me to go where none have gone before,” Danielle said, twisting her ring nervously.
“Here is the question,” Max began in his academic style. “An evil king orders the killing of an entire village—men, women, children, infants.”
“An all too frequent occurrence in history,” Danielle interjected.
“Yes. The king’s evil command is carried out, and the village is destroyed. Then the king is defeated in battle, captured, and put on trial.”
“Before a court, like the Sanhedrin.”
“Precisely. But there is a catch. The king is dying of a painful illness. He laughs at the prospect of execution. What can the court do to punish him?”
“I guess they could torture him. Make it a lingering death.”
Max shook his head in dissatisfaction. “That would just allow him to become a martyr, enduring pain. It still would not be proportional to the king’s evil act of murdering innocent children.”
“What are you driving at, Professor?”
“This. Would it ever be just to hurt the king’s children, as a way of taking revenge on what the king did to other people’s children?”
Danielle raised her eyebrows in apparent shock over Professor Max Menuchen’s suggestion that it might be appropriate to hurt innocent children in order to punish their evil father.
“Well, there is certainly enough historical precedent for killing the children of kings,” Danielle replied. “The Russian revolutionaries executed all the czar’s children to assure that there would be no claimants to the throne. Plenty of other regicides killed the princes and princesses.”
“Ah. But those killings—whatever one should think about them—were designed to prevent future claims, not to punish the king for his past evil.”
“Does that make a difference?”
“To me it makes all the difference in the world. My question is whether it can ever be just to kill an innocent child solely in order to punish his evil parent for killing someone else’s innocent child.”
“It does not sound just to me, although history is full of examples of using children to take revenge against parents. In some Arab countries, even today, the blood revenge requires a father whose son was killed to kill the son of the killer. God himself kills Pharaoh’s firstborn son—and the firstborn son of every other Egyptian—in order to get at Pharaoh. He kills the innocent child of David and Bathsheba’s illicit relationship in order to punish David. But that’s God’s way. We can’t always understand divine justice. For humans, there must be a fairer way than to kill innocent children. Remember Camus’ just assassin, who refused to blow up the evil duke’s carriage when he saw an innocent child sitting alongside the duke?”
“Ah, yes,” Max replied, “but he thought he would have another chance to kill the duke when he was alone. What if there is no other chance, no other way? What if the only punishment that will be painful to the evil king is to hurt his children?”
“Kant would say it is never proper to use one human being as a means toward achieving justice toward another.”
“Yet he also demanded that every murderer on an island kingdom be put to death before the kingdom disbands so that injustice will not remain unpunished,” Max said in a frustrated voice.
“It seems obvious that human beings are incapable of solving this problem. It must be left to divine justice,” Danielle snapped in equal frustration.
“But I don’t believe in divine justice. After what I saw during the Holocaust, it would be insulting God to believe in him as an omniscient and omnipotent power. It would mean that he had the power to intervene, yet he chose not to.”
“How can you not believe in divine justice?” Danielle asked angrily. “If you don’t believe in God, why do you remain Jewish?”
Max stood up, took a few paces, and then replied in a soft tone, as if he were speaking to himself rather than to Danielle, “After the Holocaust, it is imperative for a Jew to remain Jewish, even if he has lost faith in God. I still admire many of the teachings of the Bible. As Ecclesiastes says: ‘All go into one place; all are of the dust, and all return to dust.’ The author of Ecclesiastes was a Jew who also did not believe in divine justice.”
“I know what you don’t believe in,” Danielle said stridently. “Tell me, Max, what you do believe in. Do you believe in human justice?”
“Not after what I have seen humans do to each other without other humans intervening.”
“So you don’t believe in divine justice or in human justice. Where does that leave you?”
“It imposes on me a great responsibility to think for myself about personal justice,” Max said, shaking his head. “That is why I am writing about this intriguing problem.”
“If you did believe in God’s justice, you wouldn’t have the problem you now face,” said Danielle as if she were trying to convert a young friend.
“Perhaps, but it is my hypothetical,” Max responded gently. “Please try to help me on my own terms. What is personal human justice for my king?”
“I am not certain there can ever be human justice in the case you pose. Perhaps you have to wait for what Isaiah called ‘the day of vengeance of our God.’ ”
“That may be acceptable to you as a believing Christian, but I cannot accept that answer. Please think some more about it. See if the commentators discuss it. Try to come up with something better, please.”
There was a desperation in Max’s voice that belied the academic nature of his question.
“Of course,” Danielle said as she turned to leave. “It’s a fascinating hypothetical.” She paused, fixing Max with a penetrating stare. “A real mind twister,” she continued with a tone of academic cynicism. “I’ll come back in a few days with some research and maybe even an idea or two.”
“I really do value your insights,” said Max. “This problem is keeping me up at night.”
“I can see that,” Danielle said as she walked into the chilly evening.
Chapter 15
DOUBTS
As Danielle pondered the abstract discussion about the hypothetical king, Max’s thoughts turned to the real subject.
He knew that Marcelus Prandus did not deserve to die a natural death surrounded by loving children and grandchildren, as so many Nazi murderers had.
Prandus, like Max’s hypothetical king, would welcome death. He was dying anyway. A quick execution would spare him and his family the pain of cancer or the religious purgatory of suicide. If Max killed him, he would become his Dr. Kevorkian. He recalled an old Yiddish blessing: “May your family die in the correct order.” Prandus was about to experience this blessing, though he had denied it to so many others, including Max’s family.
Max wondered if he was capable of torturing Prandus. He decided he was. All he would have to do was think about the scene in the Ponary Woods, and he would become capable of the most barbaric behavior. As soon as he thought these words, Max realized that even Prandus had not tortured, except perhaps when he’d refused Grandpa Mordechai’s request to die first. There seemed to be no hatred in Prandus, Max recalled. Only a maniacal obsession with seeds and genes.
No, he would not torture Prandus. He would not kill him. That was too good for the man who had murdered his family. There was only one just punishment for Marcelus Prandus. Max shuddered
as he silently pronounced sentence on the man who had shot his child: Max Menuchen would kill one of Marcelus Prandus’s grandchildren. A chill ran through Max’s body as he pictured himself killing an innocent child. Could Max Menuchen, a just man, actually murder an innocent child? He thought of Ivan’s abstract question in The Brothers Karamazov: Would it be just to kill a little child if that were the only way to create a happy world? Then he thought of the very real question confronted by Jews hiding from their Nazi pursuers: Would it be just to kill a child whose cries would endanger an entire family? Many families had had to answer that excruciating question by smothering an innocent baby.
Max began to consider how he might go about killing Marcelus Prandus’s grandchild. He could run him down with his car, killing him instantly and painlessly. The child would never know what happened. The child would not suffer. Marcelus Prandus would suffer, because he would know why his grandchild had been killed. Prandus would know that it was his own fault his grandchild’s life had been taken. That would be just punishment. It would not be quantitatively proportional to the evils he had inflicted, but it would be qualitatively proportional.
Max understood that others would suffer—the murdered child’s innocent parents and siblings. But suffering by innocent loved ones was an inevitable by-product of justice. Besides, the family would blame the old man and his evil past for the death of their child and brother, which would increase the suffering of Marcelus Prandus, and that would make it worth it. Marcelus Prandus would die miserable and unhappy, cursing the day he was born. That would be exquisite justice.
There was only one way for Max to learn whether he was indeed capable of killing a Prandus grandchild. He would have to see him with his own eyes, confront him, follow him—stalk him. But first, of course, he would have to be sure that this Marcelus Prandus was the right one, not like the other Prandus he had seen on TV.
It was a simple matter for Max to get close to Marcelus Prandus. He found out where he lived by calling the phone number given to him by Paul Prandus, pretending to be a visiting priest from Lithuania who wanted to put Marcelus Prandus on a mailing list for free religious books from the old country. Max then walked up and down English Street in Salem, the block on which Prandus lived, until the old man emerged for an afternoon walk to the Lithuanian-American Social Club. As soon as Max saw him he knew. Though he was stockier and grayer, there was no mistaking the face—the face Max had seen a thousand times in his dreams. Max began to shake in fear and anticipation. It took all of his self-control not to attack the tall man in the street, but he knew that giving in to his impulse for immediate gratification would prevent him from exacting the revenge he needed. Max thought of Goethe’s admonition to act “Without haste, but without rest.”
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