Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  Shoving me so I’d get off the man, Yuli pressed the middle and index fingers of her right hand to the side of his windpipe. I stood as she rifled through his pockets, glancing at his passport, dropping it on the sand, and taking a thick envelope, then sliding her hand under his windbreaker, removing a pistol, and telling me to take off my shirt and wipe my face and get in the car and go, go, Misha, drive.

  52

  I sat on the bed in our room at the Landmark, blinking against the sunlight angling through the glass door to the balcony.

  “I killed him,” I said, and scraped at the dried blood under my fingernails with my Swiss Army knife.

  Yuli ran her fingers up my neck and through my hair. “And saved my life.”

  “Why didn’t he shoot you?”

  “He would have—after taking me somewhere in his truck and interrogating me.”

  “He was in the lobby at the Georgian. I should have—”

  “Don’t blame yourself. If I hadn’t fallen asleep in the car . . .”

  I gave up on the dried blood and tossed the penknife on the night table. “Who sent him?”

  The automatic pistol Yuli had taken from the man was on the desk. It was black, no more than six or seven inches long, and she brought it over, showing it to me in her outstretched palm.

  “This is a Makarov.”

  “Soviet?”

  She nodded. “Other Communist countries also manufacture it. The Soviet model has a brown grip. This grip is black and the pistol has a DF prefix with the serial number. It is East German.”

  “So he was from the Stasi?”

  Yuli dropped the pistol in her leather shoulder bag and put the bag on the bed. “His passport was from West Germany. Probably forged or stolen and altered. To fly to U.S. a Stasi agent only has to cross from East to West Berlin. What is unusual is that he had three thousand dollars in crisp hundreds in that envelope.”

  “Why unusual?”

  “If you are tracking someone, you should avoid attracting attention. And nothing attracts attention like paying with big new bills at a store or restaurant. Cashiers remember the crisp money and that they had to give you back a lot of cash, and this can also help them remember your face.”

  With the work she had done for Der Schmuggler, I wasn’t surprised that Yuli knew such things. I just didn’t like picturing her doing them. “Maybe the guy was a screwup.”

  “I say he got the bills from KGB agent he works with. Your government leaves alone many KGB agents because all they do is pass information you can discover by reading newspapers, magazines, reports from government agencies and businesses. In Soviet Union, real information is hidden, so Kremlin believes this American information is valuable, and the KGB here can get comfortable and lazy and forget about not attracting attention.”

  I went to look out the balcony door. The swimming pool and chaise lounges were empty. “But this KGB agent, he could be looking for Hildegard?”

  “Probably, but he was not in Malibu or he would have helped the Stasi agent grab me.”

  “And what about me getting arrested by the L.A. cops? I kill—”

  Yuli placed a finger over my lips. “When the police find him, they will check his passport, learn it is fake, and call federal investigators, who will learn he was Stasi. America has no diplomatic relations with East Germany. The federal investigators will not look hard because your government will be angry the Stasi was here and maybe they assume a freelance killed him—someone hired by CIA or Mossad.”

  “Someone like you?”

  “Like I was.”

  I sat on the bed. “What about witnesses?”

  “If our license plate was seen, the police would be chasing us already. It took two hours to drive here from Malibu, and on the way I saw seven police cars.”

  “Are we still going to Hildegard’s?”

  “Not today. To be safe we will stay in and watch the news on television and read the Herald Examiner. It comes later in the day, and there is a vending machine in the lobby.”

  I walked back to the balcony door. “And tomorrow?”

  “Very early, we will go watch the house. To see who comes out.”

  I gazed down at the pool. “That man could’ve had a wife and kids.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did I really save your life? Or are you saying—”

  “Once he got me in that truck, Misha, I was dead.”

  The sun shining through the door was hot on my face. “I still feel . . . not quite guilty but—strange? Strange to myself.”

  “Like you are living in a different place?”

  “Yes.”

  Yuli put her arms around my waist. “You are. But that does not mean what you did to travel there was wrong. Take a shower, you will feel better, and I will order a pizza for delivery.”

  * * *

  That evening, the East German was not mentioned in the newspaper or on the local TV news. We left a wake-up call for five A.M., and before getting in the Country Squire, we walked around the Landmark twice without spotting anyone staking out the hotel. In the Herald Examiner I had seen an ad for Canter’s saying that it was open twenty-four hours, so we drove over for breakfast. At rush hour, Los Angeles was a cranky mess, and sometimes the smog was so hideous it seemed like nothing less than divine retribution for the sins of vanity and greed. Yet before dawn, with the orange fire of the sun heating the sky to a smoky sapphire and the streets quiet with the yellow, red, and green traffic signals flashing like fireworks celebrating the new day, and kitchen lights winking on inside the houses as paper boys pedaled under palm trees along the sidewalks, you feel, just before the Earth spins faster and the mundane rituals begin, that you are lucky to be here, a privileged wanderer in a pastel land.

  Even at this early hour, Canter’s drew a crowd, a line at the display cases in front waiting for pastries, rolls, and bagels to go, and sleepy-eyed men and women in the brownish-red leatherette booths, under ceiling panels of paint-drizzled glass, as if Jackson Pollock had seen to the lighting. The waitresses were zipping around like roadrunners, and Yuli and I opted for Nate’s recommendation, the challah French toast. We were finishing up when the woman behind the register put out a stack of the Los Angeles Times. I went over and bought a copy.

  “Anything?” Yuli asked when I came back flipping through the paper.

  The three-sentence story was below the fold on the second page of the local section, and I read it with fear shaking me like the chills:

  A German tourist was bludgeoned to death near Point Dume in Malibu in an apparent robbery. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is investigating. Anyone with information please call (213) 555-9600.

  I gave the section to Yuli. After scanning it, she said, “We talk outside. I’m going to the bathroom.”

  I paid the bill and bought a large bottle of seltzer at the register, then used the men’s room upstairs. The station wagon was in Canter’s lot, and as I pulled onto Fairfax, Yuli said, “The man had a passport. That means the police had his name. But they did not tell the newspaper.”

  “The sheriff could have been waiting until his next of kin was notified.”

  “The police would contact your State Department to do that, and the State Department would find the passport to be fake. That is why the reporter did not receive a name. Trust me, we won’t be hearing about that dead man again.”

  I drove into the San Fernando Valley, past flat-roofed ranch houses aligned on fields like armadas of flying saucers. Below the San Rafael Hills was the neighborhood of Eagle Rock, which was more Norman Rockwell than George Jetson—the shopping district with a movie theater, pharmacy, hardware store, bowling alley, diner, and an adobe church that could have been left behind by Spanish missionaries. Our destination was above Colorado Boulevard, where roads zigged and zagged through hills far less built up than the Hollywood hillsides. Deer trotted over grasslands, pausing to peek into quirky houses inspired by Buddhist temples and imposing glass-walled cathedrals of
that new American religion—the future.

  Falcon Lane was hemmed in by bushes, firs, and rubber plants. At the end of the narrow graveled road, behind an iron gate on a square of lawn, was an A-frame sided with fluted straw-colored plywood and a carport outside the bright-red double front doors—the exact shade of red, I thought, as the Nazi flag. It was the only house on Falcon Lane, and about thirty yards from the gate was a clearing, and we parked there, partially hidden by the trees and with a view below to rooftops, hills bright with patches of yellow flowers, and, in the distance, through a brown haze, the office towers downtown.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “We wait.”

  During the next fifty-three minutes I checked Emma’s watch six times and listened to the Top Ten songs on the radio—moving up from Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Hurt So Bad” to the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week,” and heard on the news that American planes had bombed a munitions depot in North Vietnam, and a white minister from Boston helping to register Negro voters in Selma, Alabama, had been beaten to death.

  “Suppose someone sees us?” I said, switching off the radio.

  “There are no neighbors.”

  “We should pretend to be doing something.”

  Yuli smirked, guessing what I had in mind, but as I put my arms around her, the gate swung inward and an MG drove onto Falcon Lane and stopped. The sports car was a milky toffee color and the ragtop was off, and a young woman in a stylish loose-fitting dress climbed out and flipped down the lid of the mailbox. I stared at her shoulder-length dark-gold hair and pale round face as she bent to look inside the box, then left the lid down and got behind the wheel.

  “Holy shit,” I said, hugging Yuli so she couldn’t turn around as the MG kicked up gravel as it passed us.

  “What? What is it?”

  “The woman from Paris, the woman I ran after on Quai Bourbon.”

  “Who looked like your grandmother?”

  “Exactly like. She could’ve come from one of the paintings on Gak’s walls.”

  I let go of Yuli. We were silent, our eyes glued to the A-frame.

  “That’s Darya. My aunt Darya. Bashe told us Hildegard took Emma’s daughter, so now we know Darya survived the bombing in Nuremberg. And I bet Hildegard also survived, and she’s in that house.”

  “Misha, we sit here until we see her.”

  “We—”

  “We wait.”

  Grabbing my canvas rucksack off the back seat, I removed a Bic and a pad, and wrote:

  To the woman in the MG: Your real name is Darya Gak. You are the daughter of Emma Dainov and Alexander Gak, a painter who is still alive and lives in Nice, France. He believes you died in the Ukraine with your older sister Alexandra during the war. The woman who brought you to Germany is Hildegard Ter Horst, a Nazi guilty of war crimes. She probably murdered your mother, last September, in South Orange, New Jersey. My name is Michael Daniels. Emma was my grandmother, the mother of your late half brother. You are my aunt.

  Yuli had been reading as I composed the note. “What is this?”

  I tore off the page. “Insurance.”

  “This is reckless. Don’t—”

  I jogged down the road and stuck my note in the box, shutting the lid, hoping that Darya would notice and check inside.

  Whatever happened, my aunt was going to know the truth.

  53

  Ten minutes later I was drinking seltzer out of the bottle when Yuli said, “Misha, look.”

  Ambling across the lawn was a man in a dark blue baseball hat and trench coat. He must have hiked up from the street below the hill. “Is that—”

  “Pyotr Ananko.”

  A beefy blond thick-necked man in a T-shirt and baggy trousers lumbered over to meet Pyotr, clasping a trowel in his right hand. They spoke, the blond man gesturing with the trowel, thrusting it down toward the hill from where Pyotr had come. With his hands in his coat pockets, Pyotr turned, as if to go, then spun toward the man, pointing a short metal tube at him that jerked in his hand. The blond man lurched backward, wobbling, and fell over on the grass while Pyotr hurried toward the front door.

  “Gas gun,” Yuli said, taking the Makarov from her bag and getting out of the Country Squire.

  I trailed her along the edge of Falcon Lane, and we kept out of sight by stepping between the trees. “You thought that’s how Taft died. Did Pyotr—”

  “Odds are, yes.”

  “Could Pyotr have—”

  “Not Papka.”

  “Why not?”

  When Yuli turned, there was something chilling in her eyes, as if ice could catch fire. “Pyotr knows if he hurt Papka, I will find him wherever he is. And kill him.”

  At the mailbox, as we left the cover of the trees, Yuli held up the Makarov. “I have the pistol. Stay behind me. Promise?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Misha!”

  “Okay. Go!”

  Yuli skirted the lawn so that we were walking below the crest of a hill and not visible from the windows of the A-frame. In back, there was a cedar deck with sliding glass doors that led to a beamed, carpeted living room with a couch and sling chairs covered in tempestuous patterns of flaming sabers, lightning bolts, perched eagles, and serpent’s tongues. The doors were moved aside to let in the morning air, but the screens were locked. I forearmed the mesh, separating it from the frame, and unlocked the sliders. We went down a wide hall with the murmur of voices up ahead, and to our left, as we were going by an iron spiral staircase, there was the crack-crack-crack of gunshots. Yuli tugged me into a den with shelves of bric-a-brac, crystal vases of silk flowers, and a TV built into a wall. Across the den, through partially open pocket doors, I saw a tall brunette in a blazer and skirt as pale as celery. She was standing, with her back to us, next to a rolltop desk, and in her right hand, which hung at her side, she held a small silver automatic.

  In a voice no louder than a sigh, Yuli said in Russian, “Follow me,” and darted across the oak floorboards, shoved at one of the pocket doors, and barged into a white room with the sun blazing in through a bank of triangular windows.

  “Do not move,” Yuli said to the woman, aiming the Makarov at her. “Or I will shoot you in the head.”

  Keeping about ten feet between herself and the woman, Yuli circled around to face her while I bent over Pyotr Ananko. He was on his back, his arms and legs splayed across a colorful woven rug, his cap off, his whitish-blond hair neatly combed, his eyes and mouth ajar, and three blackened, chest-high bullet holes leaving rivulets of blood on his trench coat.

  I felt for a pulse in his neck. “He’s gone.”

  “So I shoot a robber,” the woman said.

  I hadn’t seen her face yet, but hearing her faint German accent, I discovered, to my horror, that I was unprepared for my fury—a fury so vast that I knew caving in her skull with a brick wouldn’t satisfy me.

  Nor was I prepared, as I stood and swiveled toward her, for the fact that I recognized the middle-aged woman standing by the desk, her lustrous brown hair with its au courant messiness, her big, dark penetrating eyes, upturned nose, and full lips red with lipstick—the kind of icy beauty that Walt Disney must have had in mind for the evil queen in Snow White.

  “You were at Dachau,” I said. “During the press conference. When I was asking the mayor a question.”

  “I do not recall you. But I was there with many other survivors when the convent was dedicated.”

  “And that ape dead on your lawn, he was with you at Dachau. Is he the one who shot at me in Munich and killed my friend?”

  “You make no sense. I am Ursula Becker.”

  Leveling the Makarov at the woman, Yuli said, “Put that pistol on the desk.”

  “Why? I have rights to protect myself. First this burglar breaks in my home—”

  I cut her off. “That burglar is KGB. What did he want? To sign you up as a spy? Doesn’t matter now. His bosses will be unhappy with you. Do you think he’ll be the last one they sen
d?”

  “I will shoot them as well.”

  “Why not? Hildegard Ter Horst is an accomplished murderer.”

  “And you believe I am this Hildegard?”

  “I do.”

  She gave me a small, hesitant smile. “Prove it.”

  “We will when the police check your pistol and see the bullets match the slugs taken from my grandmother. And there’s always Bashe.”

  Hildegard flinched when she heard the name.

  “Remember Bashe? Who copied Mein Kampf in the Jew Room?”

  “Bashe is dead.”

  “Then we must’ve been speaking to her ghost, and she’d be glad to identify you. To the Americans, who will deport you. To the West Germans, who may put you on trial. To the Israelis, who dumped your husband in a canal. And to Darya, who will never forgive you for murdering her mother.”

  “Darya? There is no Darya. You mean Freya.”

  “I saw your Freya in her MG. She looks just like Emma Dainov. There are photos and paintings to prove it—paintings done by Darya’s father. Did I mention he’s alive?”

  She was muttering, as if debating with herself whether I was telling the truth. She must have decided that I was because she replied, “I am no longer Hildegard. She is dead. Ursula is a Jew who helps survivors. And is beloved for it.”

  “Ursula Becker was your cousin, and she died in Nuremberg. You became her and got yourself—and Emma’s daughter—to America. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t hide. Why you ran around the country speaking when you could’ve been recognized. Is that what happened? My grandmother recognized you?”

  Hildegard startled me with her laughter. “You Jews, you Jews and your memory. You believe people hate you for crucifying Christ or being rich and your spend, spend, spend. No, they hate you for your memory. Learn to forget, less people will hate you.”