“If those two guys have turned, for one reason or another,” he said gravely, “then they’ll have gone to ground, and you’ll never find them. If they’re playing it straight, you won’t have any trouble.”
“Meaning?”
“Call the name-brand hotels and find out if they’re registered guests under their own names, or at least under the names they gave those two kids up in Bellingham,” Freeman answered. “If they are registered, most likely they’ll be eating kosher meals, and that takes special arrangements. One of the local caterers that keeps a kosher kitchen would be providing the meals and delivering them, ready-to-eat, to the hotel. I could probably get you a list of the possible caterers if you like, but at this hour on a Saturday, that might be tough.
“So, if I were you, I’d start by calling area hotels. Call, ask for them by name, and see if the hotel operator puts you through to a room.”
“Good idea,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself. I’ll see what I can do.”
“One more thing,” Tony Freeman added. “I don’t think the Wiesenthal group operates under any strict budgetary considerations, so I’d start at the top. Don’t bother checking with Motel Six. Their expense account would do much better than that.”
If you ask for advice, my position is you’d better be prepared to take it. So I started at the top, both in terms of quality and alphabet—with the Alexis. I figured I’d end up at the Westin when I hit the bottom of the list, but it turned out I didn’t have to go that far. I hit pay dirt in the S’s when I got as far as the Sorrento.
As soon as the phone started ringing in a room, I slammed down the receiver. They were there, in a local hotel, and checked in under their own names—or at least under their most recent aliases. That meant Captain Freeman was right. Had Moise and Avram been crooked, they wouldn’t have been nearly that easy to find. Now what?
I sat there for several minutes, pondering my next move. Should I hie myself up to the Sorrento, call from the lobby, invite them down for a drink in the bar? No, that didn’t seem wise. After all, although these two men weren’t really police officers, I had to believe they were trained professionals. They might take a very dim view of being tracked down in a strange city by a lone local cop who shouldn’t have had any idea who they were or what they were up to. And if they decided to get physical about my interfering in their lives, no doubt they would both be fully capable of handling themselves in a crisis.
Once upon a time, I wouldn’t have thought twice about waltzing up to the Sorrento all by myself, but age and wisdom and scars all go hand in hand. In this line of work, you either get smarter or you die, so after a few moments of consideration, I looked up Sue Danielson’s home number and dialed it.
“’lo,” a surly young male voice answered.
“Hello,” I said. “Is your mother there?”
“I’m on the other line,” Jared Danielson said. “Could you call back later, after I’m done?”
“No,” I said. “I can’t call back later.”
I have very little patience with the self-appointed gatekeepers of the world, whether they be officially sanctioned receptionist types or simply self-centered teenagers who don’t want to relinquish the phone to anyone else, especially to someone so undeserving as a mere bill-paying parent.
“This is business,” I answered abruptly. “And it’s important. I need to speak to your mother right away.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just a minute.”
It was actually quite a bit more than a minute. It was more than two minutes, but I’ll be damned if I was going to give up.
Eventually, Sue’s voice came on the phone. “Hello. Is this call for me?”
“Yes, it’s for you, dammit!”
“Beau?”
“Yes. I’m calling from down at the department. Tell Jared the next time he doesn’t put me through to you right away, I’m going to come over and personally ream his ass.”
“What a good idea.” Sue laughed. “I’ll pass the word. Now, what’s happening?”
“Have you had dinner yet?”
“No. We spent the afternoon painting the kids’ bathroom. I told the boys we’d order a pizza later on, but I haven’t quite gotten around to that yet. We’re still cleaning up.”
“Go ahead and order pizza, but just enough for the boys.”
“What about me?” she objected. “I’m starved.”
“Put on your glad rags. We have to pay a call on yet another joint, but don’t wear your salsa-dancing costume. I don’t think the folks who hang out in the Hunt Club at the Sorrento speak salsa dancing. How long will it take for you to meet me there?”
“An hour maybe. I’ll have to jump in the shower.”
“I’ll see you there, but tell that son of yours for me that this isn’t a date, either.”
When Sue hung up, I thumbed through my notebook until I found Michael Morris’ telephone number at his parents’ home on Mercer Island. A woman answered my ring. When I asked for Michael, I could hear the curiosity in her voice as she handed him the phone.
“Hello, Michael,” I said. “Detective Beaumont. Are you busy?”
“We were about to sit down to dinner,” he answered. “I’m not home all that often, and my mother invited friends over.”
“What are the chances of your bailing out?”
“Maybe my mother wouldn’t kill me if I told her it was urgent, but why? What’s up?”
“I need you to come down to the Sorrento with me to help identify the two men who visited you and Kari up in Bellingham.”
“You’ve found them?”
“I think so, but I need your help to be sure.”
“How soon do you need me?”
“As soon as possible. Don’t go to the hotel. I’m here in my office in the Public Safety Building. Come here first,” I told him. “There’s a guard downstairs. You can’t come up to the fifth floor, but he’ll call to let me know you’re here. We’ll ride over to the hotel together.”
“Don’t you want me to go get Kari so she could be there, too?”
“No,” I said, “let’s leave Kari out of this for the time being. She might have more of a conflict than you do when it comes to all this.”
“Oh,” Michael Morris said after a moment’s thought. “I see what you mean,” he added. “I’ll be there just as soon as I can.”
Michael and I arrived early, even after swinging by Belltown Terrace so I could put on something a little more appropriate for the rarefied atmosphere of the Sorrento. We commandeered a table in the well-appointed lobby—a table that allowed us an unobstructed view of both the front entrance and the elevator. We drank coffee, watched, and waited until Sue arrived.
Once again, she looked surprisingly good. After I ordered another coffee, one for Sue, I told her so.
She grinned. “Every woman looks good in a little black dress,” she said. “But I came prepared.” The matching evening bag that dangled by a string over one shoulder had a peculiar bulge and weight to it. I was glad to see she was carrying.
“Good,” I said while Michael Morris’ eyes bulged. I don’t think the idea of real guns and real bullets had ever crossed his mind until that very moment.
The plan was simple. Sue and I took our positions—Sue in the wing-backed chair nearest the door that entered the lobby from the stairwell, and I at a point across from both the elevator and the main entrance. Michael’s job was twofold. First he was to use the telephone and call to see if either Moise or Avram would answer the phone. If so, Michael was to tell them that he had important information to share with them. Hopefully, using that ruse, he could charm one or the other of the two men into coming down to the lobby for a conference.
That done, Michael was to position himself so he could see as much of the lobby area as possible and give us a prearranged signal as soon as either man appeared in the lobby. From that point on, Michael was ordered to leave everything else to Sue and me.
When M
ichael went over to use the phone, my heart started beating faster in my chest. The prospect of some kind of physical confrontation always gets the adrenaline flowing. I’m sure Sue was affected the same way. That’s a conditioned response with cops—a way of life.
We couldn’t hear exactly what Michael was saying while he was on the phone. When he finished the call, he retreated to his assigned chair and slumped down in it while Sue and I kept watch on the lights over the elevator door. Moments after Michael regained the chair, the elevator began rising from the ground floor in answer to a summons. It stopped on Four, and the down arrow came back on.
When the elevator door slid open, only one man stood revealed in the opening—a man of about my age, weight, and height. Glancing warily from side to side, he stepped into the lobby. Michael Morris rubbed his chin—the affirmative signal we’d been looking for.
As the man moved forward, so did I. “Mr. Steinman,” I said, cutting off his access to the entrance and holding out my I.D. “I’m Detective J. P. Beaumont with the Seattle Police Department.”
He stopped and glanced toward the door that opened from the stairwell where Sue Danielson—fetching, in her “little black dress”—was watching for Moise to make a not-unexpected appearance.
There is a tense life-and-death moment in every police officer/citizen contact—even the simplest traffic stop—when everything hangs in the balance. It must be similar to the way a tightrope walker feels suspended above a gasping crowd, frozen in the blinding glare of a spotlight. One misstep, one slight miscalculation, and disaster follows.
For a moment, we were all frozen in time and place, then the door to the stairwell swung open, and Moise appeared in the lobby. He stopped just inside the door and stood, reconnoitering. He reminded me of a lithe young cat—prepared to lunge forward but hanging back, waiting to see if it was necessary.
With his backup in position, the older man’s shoulders relaxed, and he turned to me. “What can I do for you, Detective Beaumont?” he asked.
“You can tell me exactly who you are and what you’re doing here.”
“Would you like to see my identification?” he asked.
“Yes, but take it out very carefully.”
He slid his hand into the inside breast pocket of his coat and brought out a slim leather holder. He flipped it open and handed me an embossed plastic card. One side I couldn’t read at all—it was written in Hebrew. The other side said only, Avram Steinman, Simon Wiesenthal Associates. There was no address—only telephone and fax numbers with a prefix that belonged to neither New York City nor L.A.
I looked at the I.D. card for a moment, then handed it back. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I’m a hunter,” Avram Steinman said. His speaking voice carried only the slightest hint of an accent. “I’m here investigating missing Nazi war criminals. How about you?”
“I’m with the Seattle Police Homicide Squad,” I said. “I’m looking for a murderer.”
Avram Steinman’s eyes never stopped scanning the room. He was every bit as on guard as I was, maybe even more so, but his anxiety didn’t carry over into his speaking voice.
“Maybe we should talk then, Detective Beaumont,” he said, with a smile of wry amusement touching the corners of his mouth. “It sounds to me as though you and I are both in the same business.”
22
Tim, Ralph Ames’ favorite waiter on the staff at the Georgian Room, once told us about his most surrealistic shift in a lifelong career of waiting tables. It happened, he said, the first night of Operation Desert Storm. While bombs were tearing hell out of the swimming pool in the El Rashid Hotel over in far-off Baghdad, war protesters were swirling in a riotous mass up Seattle’s Fifth Avenue right outside the gracious walls of the Four Seasons Olympic. War or no war, protesters or no protesters, the niceties of hospitable dining remained unaffected. Inside the Georgian Room, all that happened was that a piano player upped the volume.
I recalled Tim’s comment vividly as I sat in the elegant, dimly lighted Hunt Club at the Sorrento while the Simon Wiesenthal manhunters happily devoured their specially prepared kosher meals and spoke, with a physician’s clinical dispassion, of Hans Gebhardt and Sobibor. Plates of regularly prepared Hunt Club-quality food came and went from in front of Sue Danielson, Michael Morris, and me. Maybe Sue and Michael ate some of theirs. I barely touched mine. I have no idea now what the food was or whether or not I tasted it.
In my day-to-day work, I see plenty of common street-thug mentality—the kind of thinking that makes life cheap enough so smart-assed kids regularly blow each other away over something as negligible as a forty-dollar World Series bet.
Moise Rosenthal and Avram Steinman were ostensibly law-abiding citizens—at least when they were on U.S. soil. But I had heard allegations that Wiesenthal tactics occasionally resorted to kidnapping in faraway places like Buenos Aires. What that really meant was that Wiesenthal operatives could be presumed to be both smart and dangerous. When necessity dictated, they were capable of making nice, but they weren’t above going for the jugular, either.
Both men exuded the intensity of hunters on the trail of someone or something. Their brand of single-minded focus was a trait I recognized all too well. I see it in myself every day—whenever I look in the mirror. In the course of my life, I’ve learned that the idiosyncracies that seem entirely understandable and familiar in me are often the very ones I find most disturbing when I encounter them in someone else.
Moise Rosenthal and Avram Steinman bothered me. I found them so troubling, in fact, that at first I had difficulty staying tuned in to the conversation.
“Part of the problem in prosecuting the Germans who participated in Sobibor,” Avram was saying, “was that there were so few survivors, not only among the prisoners, but also among the German personnel who were in charge.
“From the very beginning, the German High Command ran the place with a skeleton crew. Large numbers of guards weren’t necessary because the people who were sent to Sobibor weren’t prisoners in the ordinary sense of the word. They arrived dazed and ill, weak and exhausted from a hellish boxcar trip. In the summer, some prisoners perished in transit from heat and thirst. In the winter, many died of numbing cold. After exiting the trains, they were herded from the railroad siding into Sobibor’s gas chambers within hours of their arrival.”
“In other words, not that many guards were necessary,” Sue Danielson interjected.
Avram nodded. “Right. The ranks of guard survivors were further reduced, not only by the number of those killed during the October uprising, but also by the ones who simply disappeared afterward. At the time, most of those were reported as either dead or missing in action. After all, the Germans didn’t want it known in the ranks that they were having a desertion problem. Things were bad enough for them right then that it could have encouraged others to follow suit.”
“I understand that Hans Gebhardt was among those who either went underground after the war or who were thought long dead,” Sue said. “I’m wondering about the others, the guards and officers who were tried, convicted, and given their obligatory slaps on the hand during the trials at Nuremburg. Was your organization instrumental in bringing any of them to trial?”
“Yes,” Avram said. “We were involved in some of those cases. But what we’re talking about here is another kind of trial altogether, other trials besides the ones at Nuremburg.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Avram ignored my interruption and continued. “While the German High Command was totally focused on waging and losing a war, a few minor details slipped through the cracks. Sobibor was one of them. Those in charge knew approximately the number of prisoners who had been sent to the camp while it was in existence. According to the law of large numbers, they also knew about how much of what they called das neben-produkt—side-product—should have resulted from that many bodies. In the final accounting, gold from Sobibor turned up short.”
“I tho
ught Germans always kept meticulous records,” I said.
“Supposedly, and up to a point, they did. From the time the gold was melted into bars and turned over for shipment, there’s a complete paper trail, even now. The missing gold was stolen long before it entered that officially documented path.”
“Stolen by whom?” I asked.
“Hans Gebhardt, no doubt,” Avram answered.
“Certainly he wasn’t acting alone,” I supplied. “Who else would have helped him? Other guards perhaps? Some of the prisoners?”
“Maybe both,” Avram said. “A young lieutenant named Lars Weber was in charge of Sobibor’s accounting….”
“He was in on it?” Michael Morris interrupted. “I remember his name from Kari’s and my research. Lars Weber was tried in Nuremburg and imprisoned for a while—only for six months or so. According to one of his surviving relatives, he died shortly after being released.”
“He died as a result of one of those other trials I was telling you about,” Avram answered quietly. “The unofficial ones. They were conducted by some of the earliest and most vicious gangs of what we now call neo-Nazis. They wanted to regroup and reorganize. They were broke and looking for money. By then someone must have realized that a large amount of gold from Sobibor was missing.”
“After he was released from prison, Lars Weber got a job doing reconstruction in Berlin. He disappeared one afternoon on his way home from work. A passing car slowed down, a door opened, and he was pulled inside. He returned home three weeks later. His five-year-old daughter found him outside the front door early one morning. He had been dumped off during the night. He had been severely burned over two thirds of his body. All his fingers and toes were missing. Gangrene set in. He died two weeks later.”
A burned body. Missing fingers and toes. This was clearly an identifiable M.O.—an inarguable connection.
Sue’s eyes met mine across the table, but neither of us gave anything away. Unfortunately, Michael Morris wasn’t a cop. He didn’t know better.
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