Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  * * *

  Martin’s Tavern was all dark wood, hanging Tiffany lamps, and hushed voices. In the front room the booths were marked with plaques for the tourists—the rumble seat where a callow Jack Kennedy breakfasted after Sunday mass; the booth where he proposed to Jackie; the booth where Harry Truman dined with his wife, Bess, and their daughter, Margaret; and the booth where Richard Nixon enjoyed his meat loaf when he was in Congress and while he was Ike’s vice president.

  From the waiting line, Taft concluded, nostalgia was good for business, though he was baffled by the American propensity for worshiping the future while grieving for the past. No reconciling it, Taft thought, going to the Dugout, a private back room. Here, as a congressman and senator, Lyndon Johnson had once done his wheeling and wheeler-dealing, and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Taft’s boss at the Office of Strategic Services, had assembled his underlings to evaluate wartime intelligence.

  Now a CIA agent, the size of a linebacker and dressed like an investment banker, was leaning inside the doorway, and Taft went by him and slid into a booth across from the CIA director’s top assistant for overseas operations. He was a gimlet-eyed, pouch-necked man who two generations of agents referred to as the Bookkeeper, due to his habit of chewing on No. 2 yellow-wood pencils and regarding friend and foe alike as nothing more than entries on history’s balance sheet.

  “We couldn’t do this at Langley?” the Bookkeeper asked.

  “Does the cafeteria serve bread pudding with hot bourbon-caramel sauce?”

  The Bookkeeper called out to the guard, “Tell the waitress I’ll have tea with skim milk and a fruit cup, and to bring a coffee and bread pudding.”

  “You on a diet?”

  The Bookkeeper said, “Thanks to our buddy Julian Rose. A few weeks ago I had to be in New York and met up with him in Jersey twice to eat. At this diner in some town—Verona? Jesus, the cheesecake. We’re reminiscing about dynamiting railroad tracks in Normandy with the French Resistance, and I ate two huge slices both times.”

  Taft asked, “You got me here from Munich to talk cheesecake?”

  Reaching into his navy chalk-stripe suit coat, the Bookkeeper took out a shortened No. 2 pencil. “Let’s start with how the director wasn’t pleased that Joost Ter Horst wound up floating in a canal.”

  “I bet Joost wasn’t pleased, either.”

  “His information was solid.”

  “What information? That American, West German, and Italian teenagers with a crush on Che Guevara go to Amsterdam to smoke hashish and stuff their mouths with stroopwafels?”

  The Bookkeeper clamped the eraser end of the pencil in the side of his mouth like a cigar. “They can set off bombs like any Commie revolutionaries, and East Germany’s funneling them money and advice. There’s going to be trouble.”

  “No trouble that Joost Ter Horst could’ve helped with. Or any of those other Nazi clowns we hired.”

  “Clowns, Taft?”

  “Sadistic clowns, for Christ’s sake. One of them was Einsatzgruppen, another used to execute POWs for laughs, and we had to get their sentences commuted to hire them. When I ran the Soviet spy section in Munich, most of the jackboot boys still thought Hitler was on the right track, and they were more devoted to bedding call girls than spying.”

  The Bookkeeper removed the pencil from his mouth. “Did the Mossad go after Joost?”

  “The CIA still monitors foreign newspapers, doesn’t it? You read the letter that was sent—it’s a safe bet the Israelis haven’t lost their minds or their memories.”

  “The Mossad hasn’t chased any Nazis since Eichmann. And he was a special case.”

  Taft said, “If West Germany doesn’t extend the statute of limitations for war criminals, the Mossad’s going to open a whole new division. And there’s no shortage of targets. Lots of them in the U.S. Chemists who made Zyklon B for the gas chambers; doctors who experimented on babies; scientists who used slaves to build rockets.”

  “Didn’t you help put together the project to bring them here?”

  Taft recalled those interminable planning sessions with the erstwhile director of central intelligence, Allen Dulles, a bow-tied, pipe-smoking product of Princeton in love with listening to himself talk about realpolitik, a term that Taft had come to regard as a pretentious euphemism for forgetting every lesson he’d learned in Sunday school. “I did my share on Operation Paperclip. Doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”

  The Bookkeeper asked, “Would you and the Israelis rather have them working for the Kremlin?”

  “Can’t speak for Israel, but I’d rather they were shoveling coal in hell.”

  The Bookkeeper had a sour, pained expression on his face, as if suddenly afflicted with hemorrhoids. “Hitler’s been gone twenty years. I thought the Israelis would get over it.”

  “What the heck. Only six million.”

  “Lots of enemies let bygones be bygones. And your sympathies are well known. You caught a break not getting court-martialed for that crap you pulled at Dachau.”

  “Nobody saw me shoot anyone,” Taft said, and heard the defensiveness in his tone. That was because even though those SS guards had been repaid in kind, Taft felt guilty for his part in it, a guilt that had crawled inside him ever since, spiny and venomous, like the lime-green io-moth caterpillars he’d caught as a child until he stuck himself on the spines, and his skin swelled and blistered.

  As Taft pulled a Lucky Strike from a pack, the Bookkeeper took another shortened pencil from his suit coat. “Try this. It won’t give you cancer.”

  Taft lit the cigarette. “That’s because you can’t smoke it.”

  Frowning, the Bookkeeper put away the pencil. “Bottom line: do we want the Mossad running around assassinating people?”

  “What do you expect? Joost supervised the slaughter of twenty-seven thousand civilians, most of them Jews. The biggest massacre in Russia. And his wife, Hildegard, was a butcher.”

  “Hildegard is dead. Along with her mother and father. Died the second of January, 1945, when the Brits bombed Nuremberg. Seven witnesses said she was in the house, and the house was obliterated. I read her file, and you did, too.”

  Taft blew a smoke ring, deciding that if he shared his theory that Hildegard was alive, the Bookkeeper would order him to get a psych evaluation.

  The Bookkeeper had his pencil back in the corner of his mouth. “The director wants to know how we can prevent any future incidents like Ter Horst. The president requested it, and you’re the man to write it up.”

  “I’m supposed to give the director and LBJ the news we know they—and the West Germans—don’t want to hear? That if the Bundestag extends the statute of limitations, the Mossad will stand down?”

  “Write that. But present options. Presidents love options.”

  “How about LBJ invites Simon Wiesenthal and the press to his ranch for a barbecue, and Wiesenthal can show off his lists of Nazis he’s tracked down? Or get West Germany to arrest Ilse Schmitz. Her métier was murdering children. Ilse got a kick out of teaching kids songs as she led them into gas vans, and now she works in a kindergarten in Cologne. If that irony doesn’t light a fire under LBJ’s ass, he can start a war and then Americans won’t give a damn about the Mossad.”

  The Bookkeeper shook his head with disgust. “The president’s already doing that in Vietnam. And the bigger the screw-up, the busier I get—I’m going to Saigon again in a couple of weeks. So write this for me, will you?”

  The waitress brought their order. Taft looked down at a doughnut-shaped pudding under a syrupy brown glaze. “Dessert of the gods,” he said, and picked up a spoon.

  * * *

  Taft should have caught a cab back to the Hays-Adams and started his report, but it was less than two miles to his hotel and he wanted to clear his head, so he walked down Wisconsin Avenue, calculating, on a scale from one to a hundred, how insane it was for him to believe that Hildegard Ter Horst was alive. Ninety-five percent nuts—because Taft had no hard evidence
. He had a theory based on a comment by Emma Dainov, when she was a half-dead inmate at Dachau, that Hildegard had stolen her daughter; Emma traveling to Europe in the summers and applying for a visa to the Soviet Union, Taft assumed, to search for the girl; and Emma being shot to death in a candy store that wasn’t robbed.

  Nonetheless, if Hildegard was alive, then where was she? On his last trip to New York, Taft had searched immigration records for a woman with the surname of Ter Horst or Kreit—Hildegard’s maiden name—who had emigrated to America with a young girl between 1945 and 1955. He drew a blank and checked her file at Langley again to see if any recent sightings had been reported, but there was nothing beyond the statements of the witnesses who claimed that Hildegard had died in Nuremberg. That was why Taft had told Michael Joost was in Amsterdam. He knew that Der Schmuggler also freelanced for the Mossad if the job wouldn’t irk the Kremlin, and he guessed that Yulianna did the heavy lifting, so when Taft gave Michael the address of the Magic Dragon, he was confident that Joost would die, because the Bundestag was scheduled to vote on the statute of limitations at the end of March, and it would be a timely chance for Israel to demonstrate its future response if West Germany chose to give Nazi killers a pass. Joost’s assassination could scare Hildegard enough for her to make a mistake that would reveal her whereabouts or to seek a deal with the West German government to save herself. Luckily for Taft, the Bookkeeper hadn’t questioned how the Mossad had located Joost, because if anyone at the Agency uncovered that Taft had made it possible for a CIA source to be terminated, he was finished as an agent and might well spend his golden years in prison.

  A young goateed man in a Greek fisherman’s hat, crewneck sweater, and jeans was standing on the corner of Wisconsin and M Street, playing the guitar and singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He had a rich, poignant voice perfect for that song, and maybe twenty men and women, probably students at Georgetown, had circled him, joining in on the chorus and tossing coins into an open guitar case.

  Nice world they live in, Taft thought, detouring into the street to skirt the gathering and going down M toward Pennsylvania Avenue.

  A moment later, there were footsteps behind him, moving quickly, and Taft stepped closer to the plate-glass windows of the stores to let the person pass. A man said, “Excuse me,” and Taft watched him go by. He was wearing a trench coat and dark blue Washington Senators baseball cap and carrying a rolled-up newspaper, none of which appeared out of the ordinary to Taft until the man spun around, pointing the newspaper at him, and Taft heard a dull pop, as if someone had pinpricked a partially deflated balloon. The cyanide spray hit his face, and he collapsed on the sidewalk. Unable to move his limbs or cry out, Taft knew that his life was beginning its final ninety seconds, and as the blood slowed to his brain, his biggest disappointment was that he had believed that in his closing moments the purpose behind his earthly strife would be revealed. A fantasy, perhaps, but an understandable one for a boy growing up in a parsonage with a father who regularly spoke about everlasting life in God’s embrace, yet now, staring up at the gray sky and hearing the traffic on M Street, Taft realized that his valedictory revelation was that we depart this world as ignorant of the great mysteries as the day we are born.

  And far more than the end of his days, this was his greatest regret.

  44

  Atlanta, Georgia

  March 6, 1965

  “Let’s get going,” I said. “Bashe should be there by now.”

  We had been killing time at the Golden Horn, a dimly lit coffeehouse, where onstage a reed-thin girl in a checkerboard pinafore was reading a poem so unintelligible it could have been composed in Sumerian. Before driving down from Charleston, Yuli had phoned Jack’s Watch and Clock Repair, and Jack had told her Bashe would be in at three. It was almost four now, and Yuli was still dawdling over her tea.

  “You will miss the end of the poem,” she said quietly.

  I knew Yuli was joking, but it didn’t show on her face. “I’ll live.”

  We walked through a hushed leafy neighborhood, with many of the stately old homes divided up into apartments, and the noise of the city didn’t hit us until we reached Peachtree Street.

  “Bashe makes fun of me,” Yuli said, which explained why she had been dragging her heels about going.

  “What does she say?”

  “Nothing I like to hear.”

  I put my arm around her. “We’ll hear her story and leave.”

  As we entered the store, the cuckoo clocks on the knotty pine walls were crying out as though someone had taken a match to their tails. Behind a long glass case of watches, a woman in a shapeless black dress with her hair tucked up under a brown scarf was perched on a stool, peering at us over her bifocals. She had a high-spirited lewdness in her expression, and the frankness of it was appealing, the unabashed pleasure of an older woman seeing a young couple and recalling her youth. Yet the longer I looked at the woman, the less appealing her expression became. There was something both troubled and troubling in her hooded eyes, a shiny hardness buffed up by sorrow and outrage.

  “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit,” the woman said to Yuli, her voice rough, as if her throat were coated with ground glass. “The wild girl does Bashe a favor and pays a visit.”

  I assumed Bashe was referring to her past, and I guessed Yuli was worried about my reaction. It was irrelevant to me, and all I wanted was to hear what Bashe had to say about Emma.

  “Wild girl,” Bashe said. “Does the cat got your tongue?”

  “Don’t call her that,” I snapped.

  Bashe smirked, her eyes gleaming like waxed ebony. “You are her defender?”

  I said, “Bashe, you deaf or stupid?”

  She seemed tickled by the insults. “And you, who are you?”

  I answered in Russian, “Misha Daniels. Emma Dainov was my grandmother.”

  The smirk disappeared, the sorrow and outrage stuck around. “Your father was Lev. The little boy Emma’s thief of a husband took to America.”

  “Why didn’t she go after him?”

  “Because her bastard husband stole her and her father’s money, and he had connections with the Communists and paid off a son of a bitch to alter her records saying she was a criminal, and she couldn’t get into the States. Then she fell in love with Gak and got pregnant. She was something, your grandmother. It’s a shame you didn’t meet her.”

  She had been speaking English, and for one awful moment, I wondered if Emma was really my grandmother. That, at least, would be a reason for her secrecy.

  Yuli was also mystified. “Bashe, what are you saying?”

  “That he couldn’t have been no more than a baby when Emma was executed at Dachau.”

  “Is this Emma?” I placed a color photo of my grandmother on the display case, the one I’d taken of her behind the soda fountain.

  Bashe stared at the snapshot, her right hand fluttering up like a hummingbird to her heart. “But the guards shot her. I saw her die.”

  “Emma survived and came to New Jersey and owned a candy store. She was murdered there, in September, and it might be connected to her past. That’s why I’m here.”

  Bashe sighed so deeply I thought she’d fall off the stool. “How did you find me? Der Schmuggler? I ain’t talked to him in a while.”

  I started to give her the news about Der, but Yuli stepped on my foot, signaling me to be quiet. “Papka told us you are here, but we heard about you and Emma from Joost Ter Horst.”

  “I left that wild animal alive—thank God the Mossad drowned him. I wanted to shoot him again, but Joost’s wife, Hildegard, was taking Emma’s daughter. Did Joost tell you his whore of a wife was in the SS?”

  “He didn’t tell us much,” I said. “Can you start at the beginning?”

  Bashe slid off the stool. “Come.”

  She pushed aside the purple doorway curtain behind the display case, and before we followed her, Yuli whispered, “Bashe gossips, so nothing about Papka.”

>   The room had filing cabinets on both walls and a workbench, where a man in a skullcap with long white side curls, a beard, and a loupe in his left eye was probing the guts of a watch with a tweezer.

  “Yankel,” Bashe said, “if we get a customer, maybe you could go see what he wants?”

  He waved at her, and Bashe said, “My husband, he works on watches and clocks all day and doesn’t know what century it is.”

  Bashe opened an unvarnished plywood door and went into a small room with a barred window. From a pea-green refrigerator, she removed three bottles of Coke, popping off the caps with a magnetized church key stuck to the fridge, then sat at the metal table with us, taking out a pack of Winstons and a matchbook. Her hand trembled as she tried to light the cigarette, and she burned her finger.

  “Blyat!” she said, using the all-purpose Russian curse and tossing the match into the tin ashtray.

  Yuli got up and sat in the chair next to her, striking a match and holding it for Bashe while she put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

  Bashe blew smoke at the beadboard ceiling. “From the beginning?”

  “Please,” I said.

  45

  Bashe

  You want beginnings? I got a beginning. June 22, 1941. That’s the day we hear on the radio that Hitler sent his animals to invade the Soviet Union. Stalin, he vanishes, and his foreign minister, Molotov, tell us the fascists will be repulsed by our glorious army, navy, and air force.

  I’m shitting hay bales. In 1939, when the Nazis march into Poland, my husband’s in Lodz with our son, visiting his mother. They disappear. I’m frantic, make phone calls, send telegrams. Nothing for over a year. Then I get a letter from my mother-in-law’s neighbor saying some drunk German soldiers shot them. The truth? After that, I don’t want to live. So Emma, my closest friend, comes to Rostov-on-Don from Paris. To comfort me. To tell me to keep living. And to see her sister Maria. Emma was nine, ten years older than her sister. She raised her after their parents died. Maria still lives in the Adaskin home on the Street of Jews. My house is a few blocks over, and I’m there with Emma and her two daughters when we hear Molotov.