EQMM, May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "This is all most interesting, sir. But where are you going with it?"

  "I shall get to the point. First, you must understand that I am intensely proud of my name and of the Teitlebaum family. But growing up with such an unusual name, I was the target of teasing from my fellow children, which I accepted with a dignity and stoicism beyond my years. At least I could console myself that I would never be confused with anyone else. The name Ignatz Teitlebaum was surely unique and throughout my life would be mine alone. Do you ever Google yourself, Detective? By that I mean—"

  "I know what it means. And yes, I did it once. Or twice. Just to see."

  "You have an unusual surname, though you share it with another Thirties football player, Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago, who won the first Heisman Trophy. Is he any relation?"

  "Distant, I think. But we're getting off the subject."

  "Not really. I'm making a point. I live in a city several hundred miles from here, and I am a minor, unimportant schoolteacher. Occasionally, though, my name would appear in the news, and I would succumb to the temptation of looking myself up on the Internet. Few items would come up, but they would all be about me. When I was named teacher of the year, I was very proud. I had my picture in the paper. This called for another Googling, did it not? But this time I discovered your Ignatz Teitlebaum, the one who lives in your city, the one who has only recently become so prominent in your civic affairs, on every committee of every charity, asked his viewpoint on every matter of public interest. Suddenly, his achievements outweighed my own to the extent that of forty Google references, thirty-five referred to him and only five to me! The one thing that I could call my own, my unique name, was suddenly taken from me. I came to your city determined to meet this other Ignatz Teitlebaum."

  "Intending what?"

  "I don't really know. Not murder, if that's what you're asking."

  "It certainly is what I'm asking. Why would that surprise you?"

  A shrug. “I could have wondered if he was a long-lost relative, could I not? Perhaps I hoped to get him to change his name, or at least start using a middle initial to distinguish him from me. Perhaps I wanted to commiserate with him over our situation, which must have been as annoying to him as it was to me. Well, not quite, with his thirty-five to five advantage. Maybe I was just curious about what another Ignatz Teitlebaum would look like. In any case, I had no intention of killing him. I had looked up his address in the phone book and was able to find it fairly easily with the aid of a city map. I walked up to his front door and knocked, wondering if I should have telephoned first. But I was pleased that he greeted me quite cordially, invited me in. He was home alone, said his wife was out at some sort of charity meeting. He offered me a drink, and we sat down to have what began as a nice chat.

  "But as I sat there across from him, things gradually began to change. I suppose the horrifying reality that there could be another Ignatz Teitlebaum began to dawn on him. His manner became more and more agitated, hostile, and suspicious. A glint of madness came into his eye, and his attitude could only be called threatening. He came up out of his chair, shouting the most horrible things. ‘You are not Ignatz Teitlebaum! I am the only Ignatz Teitlebaum!’ He grasped a letter opener and came at me like a homicidal maniac, ranting insanely as he came nearer. ‘You have no pride in the name of Teitlebaum!’ he cried. ‘You disgrace the name of Teitlebaum! You have no right to the name of Teitlebaum! You are an impostor and haven't the right to live!’ I was in fear for my life, Detective. I had no choice but to defend myself."

  "He attacked you?"

  "Yes, Detective, he did."

  "He suddenly went ballistic in the middle of a friendly conversation?"

  "A cliche, but apt enough, yes. Don't you believe me?"

  "I half believe you. I think somebody went ballistic, but I think it was you."

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  "You're the one who came into his house carrying a handgun. Do you usually do that when paying a friendly social call?"

  "I honestly don't remember taking the gun in with me. I'm somewhat absent-minded at times. But it's certainly lucky I had it, isn't it?"

  "Those things he shouted at you, Mr. Teitlebaum. About lacking pride in the name and disgracing the name. Where did that come from? What was it that set him off exactly?"

  "Uh, I think it was the vanity plate."

  "The vanity plate? You mean a personalized license plate?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "But you didn't have a vanity plate on your car, Mr. Teitlebaum."

  "No, no. It was his vanity plate. He took me to his garage to show it to me. He seemed pleased with it, amused by the way he had abbreviated his surname. But I found it most offensive and insulting. It said, ‘TITLE BUM'! Can you imagine that? What sort of man makes fun of his own proud name?"

  "So let me get this straight. He was insulted by something on his own license plate?"

  A moment of disorientation. “What?"

  "You said the maniacal outburst came because of his license plate. So whose outburst is it you've been describing, Mr. Teitlebaum? Yours or his?"

  A long pause, the two combatants staring at each other.

  "Tell me the truth, Mr. Teitlebaum."

  "I have been.” A shorter pause. “Mostly.” A sigh of resignation. “All right, all right. Something came over me, Detective. Something over which I had no control. Maybe something in my subconscious was planning what happened, but I certainly knew nothing about it. I don't even remember the moment of pulling the trigger, but I must have done it, because he was lying there in front of me dead. Through no volition of my own, through a strange insane impulse, I was a murderer. My immediate thought was to call the police at once, give myself up. But then I considered my family, my students, my responsibilities. That Ignatz Teitlebaum was dead, but this Ignatz Teitlebaum could still carry on a useful life. What would be gained by taking the teacher of the year out of circulation, eh? So I decided to flee. Who knew me in town? No one. Who could connect me to the crime? As far as I knew, no one. I began to drive back to my hotel, intending to check out and head home immediately. I even believed I was driving at a reasonable speed, but apparently you are strict about speed limits in your city, and your Officer Dawes pulled me over. So here I am.

  "Yes, I killed him. Ironic, isn't it? Now, our names are joined forever. And you know what, Detective Berwanger? I won. You may try me and fry me or send me to some place where the criminally insane are sent, but it won't matter because I won.” Contorted face, maniacal laughter, an insane look in the eye. “Do you hear me? I won, I won, I won!!"

  When Foley had finished and dropped his chin to his chest to signal a falling curtain, the audience gave him a standing ovation.

  When the applause had subsided, Berwanger said, “Really like to chew the scenery, don't you?"

  Foley smirked at the audience and said, “Jealousy is so unbecoming."

  "But you forgot the punch line, Foley. Why did out-of-town Teitlebaum think he'd won?"

  "Oh, that's easy. The murderer always gets more Google hits than the victim."

  ©2009 by Jon L. Breen

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  Passport to Crime: WITHOUT ANESTHESIA by Maceias Nunes

  Maceias Nunes is a graduate of the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, where he has lived for fifty years and where he is a community organizer in the poor areas of the city. In his free time he is a prolific creator of challenge-level crossword puzzles in Portuguese. “Without Anesthesia” is his first published work of fiction, so it also qualifies for our Department of First Stories. It was one of the finalists in a contest run by O Globo Rio de Janiero's, leading newspaper.

  Translated from the Portuguese by Cliff Landers

  Eichmann had been captured just two weeks earlier, and that added to the astonishment that sent a chill through me when Herr Weber began fishing through the trunk of objects that would establish his true identity. Herr Weber was more than jus
t the gringo who lived with his wife and daughter in a masonry house in the Jacarezinho favela and worked as a machine mechanic at the nearby textile factory. Frau and Fraulein Weber would be away for a couple of hours before returning from their Friday outing, which would allow enough time for the ritual that the German was executing with an economy and precision of gesture characteristic of his six-foot three-inch frame. Next to the trunk, on the cheap wooden table, were three bottles of red wine.

  He placed on the table a blackletter copy of Mein Kampf, with a brown cover, and said in a neutral tone, “I've read it three times, but I didn't need to. The Fuhrer's ideas were telepathic."

  He took from the trunk a yellowed copy, also in blackletter, of the “Horst Wessel Song.” And he lined up on the table other items—an aluminum mug with a swastika in bas-relief on its sides, a Parabellum, and a red banner with the inscription in yellow: Deutschland uber alles.

  His hand trembled slightly as he took out a photograph. In it, Heinrich Himmler was smiling discreetly and benignly. Beside him, tense and martial, was Herr Weber.

  He left the photo on the table, his eyes now bloodshot from the wine that he sipped straight from the bottle, then plunged his hand into the trunk again and emerged with a black velvet sack, spilling part of its contents onto the table.

  "Gold teeth taken from the dirty mouths of those Jews that Himmler and Heydrich did the favor of annihilating. Bergen-Belsen. I was a guard there. Pulled without anesthesia, some of them from the living. A lovely sight. From the dead it wasn't necessary."

  He exploded into harsh, cold laughter, humorless and joyless. I wanted nothing more than to get out of there. He saw my anguish, picked up the Parabellum, placed the barrel against my forehead, and said, “My name is Wilhelm von Gutwelt. Frau Brunhilde is actually Lina Knupp von Gutwelt. Fraulein Elke is Gudrun, the name of Himmler's daughter. What matters from now on is your future, Herr Gabriel, with Elke."

  The ironic emphasis on Herr served as preamble to the torrent of insults that he proceeded to pour out, saying that he'd chosen me because I was dark skinned and would serve as alibi; that I was a nobody, incapable of refusing the offer he was about to make me; that Brazil was the end of the world and a favela in Rio de Janeiro was the end of the end of the world; that he felt revulsion at the thought of seeing Gudrun married to a maggot such as me, but the hell of it was that she seemed to like me; that women are like that: The less something is worth, the more they value it; that, to terminate the conversation, this was the deal: two kilos of gold, a house to live in outside the favela, a job at the textile factory to learn the trade of machine mechanic, twenty thousand dollars in cash, plus everything that he and Frau Lina would leave their daughter as inheritance. In exchange, I'd keep my mouth shut for the rest of my life.

  "I'm not a fool. It's no good trying to hide using the traditional methods. Where Eichmann and the others went wrong is that they didn't succeed in being average enough."

  He picked up the mug, filled it with wine, handed it to me, and said, “We have a pact. I give you the future you could never have on your own and you give me the chance to acknowledge my past openly. At least with you."

  I drank the wine in the mug in a single swallow and left through the maze of alleys with the sensation of having taken a beating. Even today I still struggle to understand why a small-time Nazi, whose obscurity could have guaranteed his safety, would reveal himself so readily. I conclude that he used me to play a kind of psychological Russian roulette. I was the bullet.

  But it could be that he was merely displaying the Nazi megalomania—to conquer the world at any cost. After all, Eichmann had done that. His name was in all the headlines. Or maybe he'd spoken just to vent, trying to appease the fury of guilt reawakened by Eichmann's capture. It's possible that, thinking himself on the verge of being caught, he was attempting to put his affairs in order. Or might it be a test whose final result would prove the mixed-breed's inferiority, whether in petty tasks or in lacking the courage to denounce a confessed criminal? Could it be just a psychotic display by a half-mad Nazi?

  The first time I saw Elke afterward, I told her that her father had been a guard at Bergen-Belsen and had offered me happiness in exchange for silence. Her eyes brimming with tears, she corrected me.

  "It was Auschwitz, and he was responsible for burning the bodies."

  "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

  "Because I love you and thought the subject need never come up between us. I don't want to lose you. Let's run away. My mother won't leave my father. She was a member of the Nazi party, like him."

  I began to think running away was a good idea. We would go somewhere far away, to the end of the world. Then I remembered Herr Weber's words: “The end of the world is here."

  If he could have seen me hanging from the door of the Central Station train heading to work next day along with the other lunch-pail carriers from the Baixada Fluminense and the outlying districts, Herr Weber would have had even more reason to say that he had sought refuge at the end of the world. And if he'd seen me shouting “I know a Nazi!” at a messenger who worked in the office next to mine on Churchill Avenue, he would have concluded that even at the end of the world there was no refuge for him.

  "I can't hear a thing!” my acquaintance said.

  After we got off the train and won the race that guaranteed us a seat on the Francisco Sobus, I resumed the attempt at dialogue: “I said on the train that I know a Nazi."

  "What's a Nazi?"

  "A man who likes to kill Jews."

  I knew that he worked for a couple of Jewish businessmen named Klein, father and son, who handled the importation of gourmet foods. He said that if there was some Nazi trying to kill his bosses it was best to warn them right away.

  When I spoke to them about the matter, they asked for details about the German's daily routine. He was arrested near the factory at seven-thirty in the morning. Half an hour later they took Frau Brunhilde away, after her husband, without being forced to do so, pointed out the way to the house in Jacarezinho. I never heard anything further about the couple, nothing in the papers. Eichmann, the big fish, dominated the headlines. He was enough for the world not to forget the lesson of the annihilation of the Jews.

  I denounced the Gutwelts because of the German's laughter when he spoke of extracting teeth from the Jews. In my experience, at that time, the greatest possible cruelty was pulling teeth with the worthless anesthesia with which the fake dentists in the favela would try futilely to desensitize my inflamed gums. Even the thought of extraction without anesthesia was too much for me.

  The Jews kept their promise not to touch Elke. When I told her, at the house in the favela, that her parents had been arrested, she hugged me and sobbed for a long time, softly. Then she told me that for them the Nazi party, Hitler, and especially Himmler, came before her. After we got married, we moved to Santa Teresa. The Kleins also moved from their office on Churchill Avenue, but first they called me in and handed me a package containing twenty thousand dollars, saying that they had kept the trunk and the other things as proof. I replied that I needed to consult Elke about whether to accept the money. She said I should.

  We were happy for the forty years we were together. Every month I visit her tomb at the Sao Francisco Xavier cemetery. The Jews never forgot what they considered an act of courage on my part and Elke's. In reality, if not for the fake dentists I'm certain I would've accepted Herr Weber's offer and never have done that favor for the cause of the Holocaust.

  We never had children because Elke didn't want to, and the decision came on the day I told her that I had asked the Jews to spare her because she was an angel, and one of them had commented, bitterly and without irony, that the incredible thing about life is that devils can engender angels. There was no way I could disagree with that.

  ©2009 by Maceias Nunes; translation ©2009 by Cliff Landers

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  Fiction: SHINING ROCK by Blake Crouch


  Blake Crouch makes his EQMM debut this month but he's already created a buzz with his two mystery novels, Desert Places and LockedDoors (St. Martin's). Reviewers hailed him as a new writer to watch, and in 2005 a Rocky Mountain News readers’ poll named him the top suspense writer in Colorado. Mr. Crouch now lives in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, but he was born in North Carolina. Fellow Carolinian author Pat Conroy calls his work a “whacked out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy"

  hey'd been coming to the southern Appalachians for more than a decade, and always in that first week of August, eager to escape the Midwestern midsummer heat. Last year, it had been the entire family—Roger, Sue, Jennifer, and Michelle—but the twins were sophomores at a college in Iowa now, immersed in boyfriends, the prospect of grad school, summer internships, slowly drifting out of their parents’ gravitational field into orbits of their own making. So for the first time, it was just Roger and Sue and a Range Rover filled with backpacking gear heading south through Indiana, Kentucky, the northeast wedge of Tennessee, and finally up into the highlands of North Carolina.