by Peter Golden
I thought about killing that East German with a brick, and then I didn’t want to think about it anymore. Still, I couldn’t imagine being Hildegard—forcing those young girls to have sex with the soldiers and shooting children. I sipped my coffee, but I was in no mood for the Danish. “Yuli can’t go home.”
“That business with what’s-his-name?”
“The Smuggler.”
“Did Taft have a theory about the Smuggler’s demise?”
“Taft only had a theory. He said there are a million Soviet Jews who want to leave, and the Smuggler was stirring the pot by arranging to bring in Yiddish and Russian translations of Exodus. He was also helping a missile designer who wanted to defect to Britain. The Kremlin didn’t like it.”
He ate two forkfuls of the cheesecake. “And where does that dead fellow in Hildegard’s yard fit in?”
“Working for her. She had him shoot at me in Munich, and he killed a friend of mine.”
“The producer at Four Freedoms Radio?”
“Dmitry Lukin. But Pyotr Ananko evened things up. He shot the guy with a gas gun when he ordered him off the property. Yuli and I saw Ananko do it. Yuli thinks he did the same to Taft, because the KGB wanted to stop Taft running agents in Russia and wanted to use Hildegard to spy on American Jewish organizations who assist Soviet Jews.”
“That checks out. The night before Taft was killed, Ananko was seen at the Bohemian Caverns in D.C. Allegedly to do a story on John Coltrane. But tell me something: Yulianna is here on a—creative passport?”
“She also has a real one. And we want to get married.”
Most of his cheesecake was gone when he said, “The crime-scene unit from the LAPD can’t say for certain that it was Ananko who shot Hildegard. You sure it was him?”
“Absolutely.”
“Strange—a KGB agent using a Makarov manufactured in East Germany.”
“The Makarov—that’s the pistol?”
“That’s the pistol.”
He had to know I was playing stupid, and I thought he’d be angry about it, but his expression was only mildly curious, as if he were a long-lost cousin listening to me catch him up on the family. “I can contact a fellow at the FBI who can discourage the LAPD from proceeding with its investigation.”
Obviously, he wasn’t buying all of my answers, which made me nervous. Until he asked his next question. Then I was scared shitless.
“A German tourist was beaten to death in Malibu. Turns out, he wasn’t a tourist. He was an agent for the Stasi. Know anything about that?”
“What I read in the L.A. Times. And Taft did tell us the East Germans might be working with the KGB on Hildegard.”
He studied me with his watery eyes. “I am of the opinion that you and Yulianna should retire from the Nazi-hunting business.”
“We are retired. Can Yuli stay in the States?”
He glanced at his watch. “I’d like to chat with her when I get back.”
“Will you be gone long?”
His tone amused and indignant, he said, “Michael, we’re not playing Twenty Questions.” He smiled—not much of one, but a smile nonetheless. “We’ll get the paperwork to classify Yulianna as a refugee started. But she’ll have to be careful for a while. The KGB and the Stasi lost agents. The press has some of it, and we’ll leak more to embarrass the Soviets and East Germans—they hate getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar. They’ll blame someone for what happened, and the KGB knows who Yulianna is. I suspect she’s aware of this, but mention it to her, and I’ll have the LAPD keep the uniform outside her door until she’s discharged. Anything else comes up, let Julian know. He’ll get in touch with me.”
I thanked him, and he replied, “Taft and I fought together in the war. He was one of my closest friends for over twenty years, and I’m helping you and Yulianna for him—because Taft would’ve done it. But I’ll only do it once. So don’t forget and tell your future bride. No more hunting Nazis.”
56
Two weeks after surgery, Yuli was walking the halls of St. Joe’s with me, moving with her normal graceful stride, but stopping to catch her breath and wincing occasionally from pain in her left side. She had asked me to pack her clothing and makeup bag and to bring her suitcase to her, so she could feel like herself again, trading her hospital gown and slippers for her Breton-striped shirt, Levi’s, and red sneakers. Watching her brush her hair in front of the mirror in the bathroom, I was excited about leaving Los Angeles and beginning our life together. Taft’s friend must have shut down the investigation, because while the LAPD kept an officer outside the hospital room, no one ever came to interview Yuli. I told her about my conversation with the CIA man, and his warning that the KGB and Stasi might chase her, but she dismissed it with a roll of her eyes. “They fry big fish, Misha. I’m a minnow.”
On the day before Yuli was discharged, we strolled the grounds of St. Joe’s, listening to the sizzle of traffic in Burbank, Yuli placing her hand in mine, toying with my fingers. A fleeting shadow of sadness fell across her face, but I ascribed it to the letdown of completing a task. With Hildegard dead and her Nazi past exposed, I was no less angry about the circumstances of how I lost Emma nor any less grief-stricken about losing her. So my vengeance wasn’t free—is it ever? And I hadn’t heard from Darya.
At lunchtime, the orderly delivered a tray for Yuli, but she was sleeping. I was reading an article in the Herald Examiner about Dodger spring training and the tenuous condition of Sandy Koufax’s left elbow when the cop came in, pointed outside, and mouthed, “Visitor.”
Darya was there dressed for doctoring, a short white lab coat over a dress, and her hair was in a loose bun. I was surprised and pleased to see her: I’d worried that the whole business was so painful to her that she wouldn’t be in touch, and I’d never get to know my aunt.
“How is Yulianna?” she asked.
“Tired, but she’s leaving in the morning.”
“Good, good. I have to get back to work. Do you have a minute to talk?”
“I do.”
We walked past the nurses’ station toward the elevators.
Darya said, “Your note in the mailbox. That dead man I saw in the yard. I didn’t know what to think.”
“I just wanted you to have the truth—in case Yuli and I didn’t make it out of the house.”
She stopped outside the bank of elevators and turned to me. “I couldn’t speak to you then. I should have, but—”
“Please, don’t worry about it.”
“I’ve been reading the papers, those terrible things that my moth—that Hildegard did. I feel like I wandered into the middle of a freakish play, and I can’t get off the stage.”
I wanted to comfort her, to touch her arm or put my hand on her shoulder, but she was standing so straight and still, it was as though there was a fence around her, borders that couldn’t be crossed.
Darya said, “I would like to see my father. Can you help arrange this?”
“He doesn’t speak, but I can call his caretaker or give you the phone number in Nice. You should know: he’s done paintings that an art dealer in South Carolina says are worth a lot. And he lives in a building Emma bought. It will belong to you.”
“It’s not his estate I’m interested in.”
“Emma would want the paintings to survive after he’s gone. And she would want to leave you something.”
She pressed the down button. “I have a break in mid-April—the week of Easter and Passover. Would you and Yulianna be interested in coming with me? I’ll buy the tickets.”
“I’ll ask her, but if she’s busy, I’ll go. And pay my own airfare.”
Darya smiled the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “I insist. And you must listen to me. I’m your aunt.”
The elevator opened, and Darya got in, and the doors closed.
Bob’s Big Boy was five minutes from the hospital, and I brought in takeout for dinner. As we ate, I told Yuli about Darya’s offer and asked her if she’d like to
see Nice again.
She looked away toward the window. “I would, but maybe it would be better for you to go by yourself with Darya.”
“Yuli, I feel guilty, too. But Hildegard didn’t give you a choice.”
“What difference does that make to Darya? The woman she thought was her mother is gone, and it isn’t Darya’s fault that Hildegard was a monster. She must have so many questions about Emma. And you should answer them.”
Yuli was quiet for the rest of the evening, and after we watched Gunsmoke on TV, I bent over the bed to kiss her.
She brushed the hair off my forehead. “I wish I was going back to the hotel with you tonight—even for an hour.”
I chuckled. “An hour. That’s all?”
She threw her arms around me and held on, pressing her lips to mine.
Yuli was scheduled to be discharged at nine the next morning. The police would be done guarding her door at eight, so I arrived at the hospital an hour early, stopping by the business office to make the arrangements to pay the rest of her bill. Upstairs, the charge nurse had her paperwork in order and told me that Yuli was ready to go. I walked into her room. She wasn’t there, and her suitcase was gone. I panicked, thinking that something had happened to her. That wasn’t it, though. No one would have been able to grab her without a fight, and there was no sign of a struggle in her room.
Yuli was fine. And Yuli was gone.
Part X
57
Nice, France
April 19, 1965
The Air France flight to Nice left JFK at five thirty in the evening, and we had been flying for an hour before Darya asked me if I had heard from Yuli. I shook my head.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This must be very hard for you.”
It bordered on unbearable, yet I believed that Yuli had to have a good reason for vanishing—perhaps a clue that another KGB or Stasi operative was looking for her. I told myself that she would reappear any day now, because losing her was unthinkable, and I refused to count it as an option.
A steward brought us the glasses of Muscadet we ordered.
“Merci, monsieur,” Darya said.
As he went about his business, I said, “Je parle français.” Darya hadn’t mentioned Hildegard or asked a question about Emma or Gak ever since I’d met her flight from L.A. at Kennedy. All she had talked about was that she would be doing her psychiatric residency in Boston, and when she came back east she wanted to get together in New Jersey. Since the passengers around us were speaking English—any French speakers must have been in the first-class cabin—I thought that Darya would be more comfortable discussing personal matters in a language that made eavesdropping a challenge.
Maybe I was right or maybe it was the Muscadet, but she asked, “The West Germans would have put Hildegard on trial?”
“They have extended the statute of limitations for prosecuting war criminals. So in theory, yes. First, she would’ve been tried in New Jersey. For Emma.”
Darya stared at the seat in front of her. I couldn’t say whether Yuli’s killing Joost and the letters that followed had helped to persuade the Bundestag. But it probably didn’t hurt.
Finally Darya said, “I am having trouble understanding how Hildegard worked with survivors and explained her past to herself.”
“She said the good she does makes up for the bad she did. How did she explain your lives to you?”
“My childhood was a black space with flashes of light. I was told my father died in the war. That seemed true, I had no memory of him. I do recall holding a little girl’s hand—that must be my older sister, Alexandra, you told me about. And speaking to a tall woman in a strange language.”
“That’s Emma. And you were speaking Russian.”
“Hildegard said the woman was my Kindermädchen. I remember that when we arrived in Nuremberg, I was speaking German. But I do not recall learning it.”
“Hildegard had you in a class to learn German.”
“I have no memory of that.”
“A soldier shot your sister in that classroom. And the other children. Whether Joost ordered it or Hildegard did, I don’t know. They each blamed the other. But Hildegard took you with her. Emma had a friend from Rostov-on-Don—Bashe. She was also there and told me about it. You can meet her. She lives in Atlanta.”
Darya held up her wineglass as the steward passed, and he gave her a refill. Darya drank half of it in two swallows. “I remember the bombing in Nuremberg. Being in a basement with other people. And being hungry. That I remember—the hunger.”
“You were with Hildegard’s parents. And her cousin Ursula Becker. Becker’s husband was executed for hiding Jews, and she died in the bombing.”
Darya drank the rest of the Muscadet. “When the bomb hit the house, Hildegard and I were in another basement. Why, I am not sure—I was six years old—but I recall going there and Hildegard stuffing documents in a suitcase. Later, I remember the American soldiers and another camp and Hildegard met an old man with a long white beard. She told me he converted her to Judaism, that we were now Jews, her first name was Ursula and our last name was Becker. From there, we went to Switzerland, and I was enrolled in boarding school, Institut Le Rosey.”
“Her father was a Nazi big shot. He had money hidden in Switzerland.”
“That would explain why she came to Zürich twice a year. I realized how odd my story was. My friends had families. I didn’t, and my God, did I yearn for one. When my girlfriends’ mothers came to visit, they were inseparable and chatting away. I felt so alone, unrooted, as if gravity didn’t apply to me, and if I floated away, no one would notice. Every summer I went to L.A. for a month. Hildegard was busy, and even if we had dinner together, she had no interest in discussing the past. She was distant, strangely so. I knew that as a child, but then for a few days a year she was—I don’t know—more alive?”
“How so?”
“A few days before I returned to school, she flew to New York City with me. We’d check into the St. Regis, and she’d take me shopping at Bonwit Teller, and to Pearl’s for Peking duck and to Lutèce—she liked to hear me order in French. And she always wanted to go downtown—to this little store on Seventh Avenue—the Surma Book & Music Company. The books were in Ukrainian; there were Christian icons and ceramic eggs. None of these interested her. But in back was a display of wooden Russian dolls. You stack one inside the other, and she loved those. She bought dozens of them over the years. They are on shelves in her bedroom. The dolls have a name, but I don’t—”
“Matryoshka. Hildegard discovered them during the war. She told Bashe the dolls nested inside each other represented different aspects of the same woman.”
“I never knew any aspect of her, not really. And I believed she didn’t want me to. I felt terrible about it for years. But after college I chose UCLA for medical school so I could get to know her. I’d already decided to become a psychiatrist, and since I needed to explore my own childhood, I had to learn more about my mother. After Le Rosey, I had gone to the Sorbonne.”
“You lived in Paris? Were you there in January? On the Quai Bourbon?”
“Briefly. I was ending an unfortunate long-distance relationship.”
“I saw you. And I bet Emma did, too. That’s why she kept her apartment on the Place des Vosges. Every summer she came to see your father and to look around Europe for you. And she always started in Paris.”
“I have a hazy memory of speaking French to a smiling man with a little beard.”
“That’s Gak. You had to be a baby when your parents relocated to Nice. I don’t know where you lived then, but in early June 1941, Emma brought you and your sister with her when she went to visit Rostov-on-Don, and it was impossible for her to return to France when the Germans invaded.”
Darya glanced at the overhead console, the reading light illuminating the gold of her hair and her face, Emma’s face. I looked at her, and she peered back at me with a curious squint, as though puzzled by my presence.
; I laughed.
“What is funny?”
“Emma used to look at me like that when I got caught cutting class or left the store without mopping behind the soda fountain.” I removed my grandmother’s Rolex from the pocket of my blazer. “Here. Try it on. I had some links taken out so it’ll fit you.”
“Michael, no. This is yours. And it is very expensive.”
“It belonged to Emma. That red arrow pointing to numbers on the bezel is for keeping track of another time zone. Emma set it for Europe. She thought you were there, and I think she wanted to know the time where you were living. She checked this watch constantly.”
“I can’t—”
I held my left arm toward her, pulling back the sleeve of my blazer. “Emma bought me a different Rolex. An Explorer. Like Sir Edmund Hillary. So I’d learn to climb high.”
Darya had a watch on her left wrist, so she fastened the oyster bracelet of the GMT on her right, then stared at the crystal. “Merci, merci beaucoup.”
Feeling as though I had closed some meaningful circle and made my grandmother, wherever she was, happy beyond measure, I replied, “Pas de problème.”
* * *
In the taxi from the airport, I was blindsided by a feeling of loss, remembering my trip to Nice with Yuli. It got worse when Darya and I stored our bags with the concierge at the Hôtel Ruhl, and the memories of that first afternoon Yuli and I had made love floated behind my eyes, as sharp and clear as the Mediterranean light.
“Coffee first?” Darya asked as we walked up the Promenade des Anglais.
“Sure. I have to call Sister Bernadette. Would you order me an espresso?”
She sat on a terrace of a café in the Cours Saleya while I went in to use the phone. When I came out, Darya was drinking a cappuccino and watching the shoppers in the open-air market.