Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  Hildegard glanced at Yuli, whose arms were trembling from holding up the Makarov. “Tiring, ja? Why don’t you put down your pistol?”

  Yuli cocked the hammer. “Because you’ll shoot us. Michael, there’s a phone on the table behind you. Call the police.”

  I hesitated, disgusted with myself for wanting Yuli to kill Hildegard.

  In Russian, Yuli said, “Public shame is worse than death. Let her be alive to lose Darya and for a government to humiliate her with a trial and hang her.”

  She was right, I knew it, but before I started for the phone, Hildegard, perhaps frightened at hearing Russian and surmising that Yuli was also KGB, began talking about my grandmother, and though in all likelihood she was playing for time, I’d waited too long to hear the story to scare her silent by calling the cops.

  “My plane was delayed,” Hildegard said. “I was late for my talk at the temple. I get out of my rented car, there’s hardly space to park. Everyone is inside at dinner. Except Emma. She comes up this walk. We see each other—only a moment—but she knows who I am, turns, and goes away. I was stunned, I thought she—”

  Hildegard saw me eyeing her and didn’t complete her sentence. That was when it hit me: I should’ve seen it the instant I knew Hildegard was alive. “You thought—you thought my grandmother and Bashe were dead. The guard was supposed to shoot Bashe, the soldier and the SS girl were supposed to shoot Emma. Which is why you didn’t worry about being recognized. If Joost had survived, you knew he’d keep his mouth shut or the West Germans might arrest him, or the Russians or—”

  “Stop your talking!” Hildegard snapped, and the hand holding the pistol against her side moved, and I thought she was going to shoot me.

  Yuli stepped closer to the desk, keeping the Makarov on her, and in English said, “Misha, let her talk.”

  Hildegard looked at Yuli, then at me. “It is not so simple,” she said, her voice shaking. “Why are Americans so simple? ‘This is black, that is white.’ You should listen, not judge. You were not in the East during the war.”

  She stared at me, and I stared at the automatic in her hand.

  “Your grandmother leaves, and I meet the people in the temple, going table to table to say hello, and I see Emma’s name card and empty chair, and two women, they talk about her, saying she must be tied up at Sweets, owning a candy store is tough work. That night I sleep at a hotel in Morristown—I have to be in Philadelphia next evening—but I can’t sleep. I have to explain to Emma. I get the address for Sweets in a phone book and leave before dawn. She was in her store. I go in. She yells, ‘Where is my daughter?’ And I say, ‘I will tell you everything if you do not yell.’

  “She is quiet, and I tell her the truth. Hitler wants us to wage a war of annihilation, and Joost ordered the SS to kill every Russian and Ukrainian on the estate—man, woman, and child. I heard him give the order. ‘Emma,’ I say, ‘both your daughters would have died if I didn’t take Freya. This is why I take her. To save her. And I gave her everything. I sent her to boarding school in Switzerland. Would she have been better off with you in one of those horrid camps where they kept the Jews after the war?’

  “Emma spit in my face. But I am not angry at her, I understand, and explain that the war is over, and I am different now, I am not Hildegard. I help the survivors. She screams at me, and I say, ‘Emma, please, please listen. Doesn’t the good I do cancel out the bad?’ But all Emma do is scream. Screaming I am murderer, screaming I am kidnapper, screaming about contacting authorities, screaming and looking at scissors on the counter. This is what happen.”

  “So you had to shoot her?” I asked, and learned something new. It was possible to be boiling and numb all at once.

  “Self-defense, this is an American right. And I, I alone—not a father, not a husband, no man—take care of myself.”

  “And the man who shot at me and killed my friend in Munich? Was that self-defense? Were you afraid my grandmother had told me who you were?”

  Hildegard glared at me and didn’t answer. I heard the throaty rumble of the MG and then silence, and I hoped Darya had stopped to get the mail.

  I smiled. “It will be fun to hear you explain yourself to Darya. And in court.”

  As I turned toward the end table with the phone on it, Hildegard flicked up her wrist and fired the automatic. The bullet zipped past me, and I saw Yuli in her shooter’s stance stagger back a step and puffs of smoke from the barrel of the Makarov. With my ears ringing, I looked for Hildegard, who was no longer standing. She was on the floor, and bloody fragments of her head, mixed in with strands of brown hair, were plastered on the white wall behind her.

  “Misha.” Blood was seeping from Yuli’s left side as she wiped off the Makarov with the bottom of her turtleneck and, with a finger in the barrel, bent to place it in Pyotr’s right hand.

  Helping her onto a couch, I grabbed the phone, held it between my shoulder and ear, and dialed the operator while I flattened my palm against Yuli’s wound.

  “There’s been a shooting. One Falcon Lane. In Eagle Rock. Send an ambulance. Please.”

  “Sir—”

  “I can’t talk. My friend’s bleeding. Please, please hurry.”

  I dropped the phone in its cradle. Yuli was gasping for breath, and dread settled on me as I fought against the idea that I was losing her.

  “Misha, listen. We met in—”

  “Stop talking.”

  “Remember what I say. We met in Rostov when you were a student. We became boyfriend and girlfriend and have been traveling. We are here because you thought Ursula knew your grandmother.”

  Her chest was rising and falling faster and faster, and she wheezed, “Misha, we came in the back, we didn’t see the dead man out front. The screen was broken, we were worried, we hurry into this room as Ursula shot Pyotr, then me, and before he died, Pyotr killed her.”

  Her blood was warm and running along my arm. “I love you.”

  “Remember, Misha, we were never in Malibu.”

  The front door opened, and a woman called out, “Mother, Mother,” and entered the room. She looked at Yuli and me and the blood-splattered wall. I couldn’t stop staring at her. Despite the shock on her face, as she bent over Hildegard, her resemblance to Emma was uncanny.

  54

  For ninety-six hours it was touch and go with Yuli due to blood loss and a postsurgical infection that set in while she was in the intensive care unit at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank. The bullet had gone through her, exiting above her hip, and her surgeon told me that this was fortunate, as less tissue was damaged and no arteries or her spine or vital organs had been hit. I was hard-pressed to appreciate how getting shot was indicative of fate smiling on you, but I told myself that a trauma surgeon, particularly one in a bolo tie, cowboy boots, and the equanimity of a sheriff from the Wild West, would have an altogether different take on what constitutes good and bad luck.

  One major stroke of luck was that Darya was a fourth-year medical student at UCLA, and even after seeing that Hildegard was missing the top of her skull, she assumed a professional air, her face an unreadable mask, and tended to Yuli, bringing rolls of gauze from a bathroom and compressing Yuli’s wound with both hands, assuring her that she would be fine, and directing me to a downstairs bedroom to grab a blanket and wrap Yuli in it. The ambulance arrived, the attendants lifted Yuli onto a stretcher and hooked her up to an IV, but when I accompanied them outside, the driver told me I couldn’t ride to St. Joe’s with them, and I should wait at the house for the cops—they would be along shortly.

  Darya was standing in the doorway, as long and lean as my grandmother, her eyes with the same lovely slant and sparkling green color, but unlike Emma there was more gloom in them than amusement—fitting, given the circumstances.

  “Thank you for helping,” I said.

  Turning her head to look outside, she nodded. My note was in her hand, but she had crumpled it into a ball.

  “We should talk,” I said.


  She shook her head and kept looking at the lawn.

  “Every word in that note is true.”

  “I don’t want to talk,” she replied, a symphony of European countries in her accent, though I couldn’t pinpoint which one.

  “I have to make a call. Can—”

  “Go to the kitchen.”

  I phoned the candy store, person to person to Eddie, and reversed the charges. His wife answered and accepted the call.

  “Michael, you and Yulianna are all right?”

  Hearing the familiar lilt and the concern in Fiona’s voice, I nearly burst into tears, and I had to swallow twice before saying, “Yuli’s been shot,” and adding, with no evidence to support my claim, “She’ll be okay.”

  “Oh, darlin’, Eddie and I can be on a plane today.”

  “No, no, I just need to talk to him.”

  Eddie came on, and I gave him the highlights, telling him that he was going to have to wire some real money to me to pay the hospital.

  “Let me know how much.”

  “And I’m gonna have to talk to the cops.”

  “Keep it short, boyo—don’t write ’em no novel. And I’ll get the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office to call L.A. Homicide. To check out the ballistics on that Nazi bitch’s gat.”

  “Does Mr. Rose have any other pals who worked with Taft?”

  “Julian knows a guy. A big wheel that loves cheesecake.”

  Darya came into the kitchen with a young, strapping uniformed cop behind her. I said good-bye to Eddie and hung up.

  “I’m Officer Crolik. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Will it take long? I want to get to the hospital.”

  “I spoke to my lieutenant on the radio. The woman”—he flipped up the black cover of his pocket notebook—“Yulianna Timko is in surgery. The hospital says it’ll be a while.”

  We sat the chrome-plated table, and Officer Crolik asked Darya if she lived in the house.

  “I have an apartment in Westwood. I was visiting my mother.”

  “Ursula Becker?” he asked.

  “Hildegard Ter Horst,” I replied.

  Darya winced, and guilt roared through me. While I was on my crusade to see that Hildegard was punished, it didn’t occur to me that my success would compel Darya to confront the macabre reality that the woman who raised her, who presumably provided her with food and shelter and attention, all of which children interpret as love, was a murderer who had shot her mother. Unavoidable given the circumstances, I thought, another example of the moral perversity of the universe—punish the guilty, crush the innocent.

  Officer Crolik said to me, “We got a difference of opinion here? Who are you?”

  After telling him my name, I launched into the spiel that Yuli had given me before the ambulance showed up. The officer seemed to buy it, but he did ask, “And the dead guy on the floor who shot Miss Ter Horst. You say he’s a KGB agent?”

  “Hildegard was saying it before he killed her.”

  Officer Crolik had written my statement in his notebook, but he had seemed befuddled as he wrote, sighing and shaking his head. The doorbell rang, and Darya went to answer it.

  “That’s the crime-scene unit,” Officer Crolik said. “And a detective.”

  Detective Gasquet was his name. He had a brush cut and hangdog eyes, and after he introduced himself and read my statement, he asked me to go over everything again.

  Darya said, “Sir, do I have to be here for this?”

  He shook his head, and both of us watched her leave the kitchen. Then I retold my story. Since all I was lying about was that Pyotr Ananko shot Hildegard and he most likely had that gas gun in his trench coat, I was only moderately concerned. When I was done, the detective said, “You can get over to the hospital now. And my boss heard from an Essex County detective about Mrs. Becker’s pistol.”

  “Mrs. Ter Horst. Hildegard Ter Horst.”

  “Whatever her name is. We’ll run the ballistics here and get the report to New Jersey. Also, we’ll have a uniform at the hospital guarding Miss Timko. That’s it. We’re done.”

  Darya was sitting in a chair, watching the men and women in blue uniforms and rubber gloves in the study.

  I gave her a slip of paper. “This is my phone number at the hotel and at home.”

  She stared up at me. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying.

  “When you’re ready, I have a lot to tell you.”

  She stood. “I’ll see if the detective needs anything else,” and headed for the kitchen.

  55

  When I got to St. Joe’s, Yuli was still in surgery. Two hours later, she was wheeled into recovery. She spent an hour and a half there, and then they brought her to the intensive care unit. During that first day, I was permitted to visit her for ten minutes every hour. She was as wan as the bed linen, with so many tubes going in and out of her that she looked like a science experiment. I sat next to her bed while she slept and held her hand.

  For the next four days, I was at the hospital from eight in the morning until eight at night, watching Yuli sleep, speaking to her and hoping that she heard me, my heart almost leaping out of my chest whenever she stirred, mumbling incoherently in Russian. She was connected to monitors, and I stared at the luminous numbers and lines as though God were sending me clues as to whether she would live or die. When I wasn’t in the ICU, I was eating bad food and drinking worse coffee in the cafeteria or calling Fiona and Eddie to update them, and sitting silently beside the cop stationed outside intensive care.

  Everyone loves a murder mystery and a spy thriller, which wasn’t lost on the editors of the L.A. Times and Herald Examiner. The papers banged out daily stories about Hildegard Ter Horst, the Nazi war criminal masquerading as a Jew active in the survivor community, and Pyotr Ananko, a foreign correspondent for Novosti and a KGB officer, who brought the roughest brand of justice to Mrs. Ter Horst. The Soviet ambassador to Washington denied this claim, and neither the State Department, the FBI, nor the CIA had any comment. Holocaust survivors in Los Angeles were shocked, opining that the woman they knew as Ursula Becker was generous and compassionate. There were two stories about the late Joost Ter Horst, but there were no official comments on him, and a brief profile of Hildegard’s daughter appeared, saying that Freya Becker would be graduating from UCLA Medical School in May and entering a residency program in psychiatry. Darya wasn’t quoted, and there was nothing about her real identity, and I assumed that she was laying low and wondered if I would ever hear from her. Yuli and I were mentioned in the articles, but we were characterized as visitors to the home of Ursula Becker who were ignorant of her true history, and Yuli had regrettably been caught in the cross fire. When a reporter chasing that aspect of the story showed up at the hospital, the cop shooed him away.

  By the fourth evening, Yuli’s infection had receded, her fever broke, and on the morning that she was scheduled to be transferred from the ICU to a private room on a regular medical floor, my phone rang at seven, and I woke up terrified that she had suddenly gone downhill and died.

  I grabbed the phone, and a man with a deep voice said, “I was a friend of Taft Mifflin. I’m in the lobby and would like to take you to breakfast.”

  “Give me five minutes.”

  If Taft Mifflin had resembled a high school chemistry teacher, this guy could have passed for a principal—wash-and-wear suit as dull as an oyster shell, a gray comb-over stiff with Vitalis Hair Tonic, and his neck flabby over the collar of his white button-down. When he folded his newspaper and pushed himself up off the couch, I noticed that he had the stub of a yellow-wood pencil sticking out from the corner of his mouth.

  “I have a car,” he said, and we went out and got into the plush leather back seat of a Lincoln Continental with a driver up front.

  “What’s your pleasure?” he asked. “It has to be close by. I have another plane to catch.”

  “Canter’s has cheesecake.”

  He studied me—not happily—as if wondering ho
w I’d dug up this information.

  “Eddie mentioned it,” I said.

  “Oh,” he replied.

  I directed the driver to North Fairfax. He remained in the Lincoln when we went in and found a booth against the back wall. The man ordered cheesecake, and I asked for a cinnamon Danish. When the waitress had poured our coffee and gone to put in our order, he said, “You and Yulianna were Taft’s project? The way he located Hildegard Ter Horst?”

  “She murdered my grandmother.”

  “So I hear. And Joost Ter Horst?”

  “I read about Joost. How supposedly the Mossad assassinated him in Amsterdam. To send a message to West Germany about extending the statute of limitations on war criminals.”

  “You and Yulianna were in Amsterdam when Joost went for a swim.”

  It was no surprise that he was aware of our itinerary, but it was unsettling, because I had to mislead him, and I couldn’t tell what he knew and didn’t know. My best bet was to stick to partial truths. “Taft suggested we talk to Joost. To see if he thought Hildegard was alive. Joost told us she’d died when Nuremberg was bombed, and he was sitting in his wheelchair in the Magic Dragon when we left.”

  He removed the pencil from his mouth and put it in the inner pocket of his suitcoat. “Taft had a bee in his bonnet about the Nazis and the Jews.”

  “You say that like it was a moral failing.”

  He didn’t answer until the waitress brought our breakfast, and he tasted the cheesecake, nodding his approval as though he was sampling an exquisite wine. “People look at pictures of the SS guards at the camps and the gas chambers and the firing squads and the piles of corpses, and all of it scares them.”

  He sounded as though it was an overreaction. “Because it was horrible.”

  “That it was, but the faces of the killers are just as scary as the sight of the victims.”

  “The faces—”

  “The ordinary faces of the killers. Decent people look at them and somewhere, deep inside, they say to themselves, ‘That could be me. I’ve hated that much. I’ve felt that murderous.’ Such thoughts frighten most of us, and we should be grateful that no Hitler has come along here to provide the permission to act. Taft, he was a good man, he expected more from people. I never have.”