The Nazi Hunter

by Alan Elsner

  After about an hour, my fax machine started buzzing again and slowly spat out an image of a young man. Eric's FBI friend had come through. It was Delatrucha, without a beard, as he might have been as a young man. I made a few photocopies and stuffed them in my wounded briefcase.

  The sickly gray light of day began seeping into the office. Lynn came in, yawning and stretching. She sat on my lap, put her arms around my neck, and wished me a good morning.

  “How did you sleep?” I asked, as she laid her head on my shoulder.

  “Not bad, considering. God, I must look awful.”

  She did, but I didn't care. There was something precious about her disheveled hair and puffy eyes. She smiled. Despite everything, she was happy to be here, happy to be alive, happy to be with me. My glasses were steaming up again. “Take me with you to Boston,” she said.

  “Absolutely. Especially after what happened last night. But don't you think we should call ahead and let her know we're coming?”

  “I think we should surprise her.”

  “What if she's not there?”

  “We have to take that chance. If we call to say we're coming, she might disappear on us again.”

  “Okay. We'll go this afternoon. That'll give us both time to go home and freshen up.”

  “Before we ambush her.”

  “Right.”

  14

  At night, when they locked us into the barracks, we heard from the pallets whispers of the Kaddish. We prayed in memory of the dead.

  —TESTIMONY OF RUDOLF REDER

  SUSAN'S OFFICE TURNED OUT TO BE IN MEDFORD, a suburb north of Boston, on the third floor of a shabby building on Main Street. A sign announced that this was “The Scott Literary Agency.” Underneath it, a piece of paper taped on the door promised that someone would be “Back Soon.” The door itself was unlocked. We walked into an empty waiting room that contained a couple of ancient leather armchairs and a sofa. Old issues of Editor and Publisher and the New York Review of Books lay strewn on the coffee table. An adjoining workspace was empty, the desk bare except for a computer monitor covered in plastic. Lynn said Susan's business had gone downhill in recent years. Judging by the clothes and jewelry she wore and the hotels she stayed in, she hadn't let it affect her lifestyle too much.

  Two walls of the waiting room were decorated with framed covers of books by some of Susan's more notable clients. My eyes landed on one that had achieved notoriety a few years back, Surviving Daddy: A Poet's Experience with Sexual Abuse.

  “This is the book that got her in trouble,” Lynn pointed at another cover showing a menacing individual, his head covered in a dark blue bandanna, his outrageously muscular forearms festooned with tattoos.

  “Who is this guy?” I asked.

  “Her former lover, Jimmy Williamson.” There was some kind of bird, perhaps a crow, tattooed on one arm, and a spider's web on the other. The image glared at us with undisguised hostility. Williamson's memoir was entitled Gangster: From the Hood to the Joint and Back Again.

  “I wonder what Susan saw in him,” I said. “He doesn't seem the type for sunset walks along the beach and evenings in front of a log fire. I think he may have been the guy with her at the restaurant last week.”

  “I thought I'd read somewhere that they weren't an item any more,” she said.

  Shadows obscured a third wall. As I walked toward it, three small framed photographs of Roberto Delatrucha came into view. In one, he was bowing to the audience at a concert hall; the second showed him singing, his arm stretched out in that characteristic pose I had come to know so well. And there was another of a more youthful Delatrucha with his arms around a young girl, both of them smiling broadly.

  “Take a look at this,” I said. “It's Delatrucha and Susan when she was a girl. Makes you wonder whether she really hates him or worships him, like an adoring daughter.”

  “Could be both,” Lynn said. “Fathers and daughters are complicated stuff. Very Freudian. Look at me and my dad with his guns, wishing I was the son he never had.”

  “Fathers and sons can be problematic, too,” I said.

  The door opened behind us, and Susan walked in, looking brisk and businesslike in a navy suit and crisp white blouse with an elegant string of pearls around her neck that matched her silver fingernails and dangly earrings. She was clutching a leather briefcase in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. For a moment, she appeared not to recognize me. Then a sharp intake of breath, and a splash of coffee down the outside of the cup. “Mr. Cain. What are you doing here?” she asked harshly. “I told you to leave me alone.”

  “I respect your wish for privacy, I honestly—”

  “Then why are you here?” she snapped. This was the Susan who had accosted me in the restaurant, not the tearful creature I had spoken to on the phone.

  “Last night we were attacked in the entranceway to my apartment,” I said.

  “How terrible. By whom?” The right words, but she didn't sound concerned.

  “Perhaps the same men who were following you. We weren't hurt, though we might have been.”

  “I don't see what this has to do with me.”

  “What about the man who was following you?”

  “Maybe business problems. It was probably my mind playing tricks on me.”

  “I don't think you were imagining it,” I said. “And running away to Boston won't make you safe.”

  “But why would anyone threaten me? I haven't hurt anyone. It's absurd.”

  “I believe it has something to do with Sophie Reiner,” I said. “We haven't hurt anyone either, but that didn't stop two men with knives from coming after us. This is what one of them did to my briefcase.” I held it up. “That could have been my throat. Now, I must ask you to cooperate. We are government agents on Department of Justice business. Whatever passed between you and Sophie, even if it's distasteful or personally embarrassing, could be vitally important. If you require protection, I can arrange it.”

  “I don't want your protection,” she said dismissively.

  “That's your choice, of course. I will keep whatever information you give us strictly confidential.”

  “I don't believe you. I asked you to stay away, and here you are. Why should I trust you? Give me one good reason.”

  “You don't have a choice. The FBI is involved. If you don't speak to us, we'll get a subpoena, and you'll have to speak to them.”

  “What information do you think I might have?”

  “I don't know. Perhaps it involves your father. Whatever it is, someone may be willing to kill you to stop it.”

  Susan lifted both her palms. “I don't want this. I told you I can't be a part of it. I have a right to privacy, a right to remain silent. You may be used to this kind of thing, but it's not part of my life, or my world.” Under the veneer of anger, she was fighting to hold herself together.

  Lynn intervened, “Maybe we could sit down and discuss this more calmly? Perhaps over a cup of coffee. There's a café across the street. We're all too stressed out to think straight right now.” Susan looked at her, exhaled, then nodded her agreement.

  Lynn and I ordered black coffee; Susan asked for a cappuccino. We sat for a couple of moments. Susan's hands were in constant motion, tapping the table, fiddling with cutlery, picking up and putting down the salt and pepper shakers. Just watching her made me nervous.

  I wanted Lynn to take the lead in the questioning. She had established a tenuous rapport with Susan. I nodded discreetly for her to go ahead.

  “The point is this,” Lynn resumed. “You're no safer in Boston than in D.C. We found you in the phone book, and anyone else could easily do the same. You can't run away from this. You're totally part of it now, whether you like it or not. We can help you try to deal with the danger, but you need to help us as well.” Susan sighed deeply, shrugging her shoulders in defeat.

  “Okay, Mr. Cain, you win. What do you want to know?”

  “Sophie Reiner. How did she contact you?”
/>   Susan glanced around the room, picked up her coffee cup, replaced it without taking a sip, and ran her fingers through her short hair. “In November, just before Thanksgiving, I was in my apartment when I got a phone call out of the blue,” she began. “I could tell from her accent she was German. She sounded excited—she said she had to see me.”

  “Did she say why?” Lynn prompted.

  “She said it was personal, that it concerned my father. I told her I hadn't spoken to him for years. She said it was important and she wouldn't take much of my time, but it concerned me as well.” Susan fell silent again, played with a stray lock of hair, looked around the room. “She told me she had something to show me,” she said.

  “What was it?”

  “That's what I asked. She said her mother had known my father as a young man in Germany—they were quote unquote dear friends—and she had some pictures she wanted me to see. I was intrigued. You were right, what you said the other day. My dad never spoke about when he was young. Not to me, not even to my mother. And we knew never to ask. It was as if his life only really began when he arrived in the United States. Anything that happened before was a closed book, off-limits. Occasionally, reporters or music critics asked about it, but he always avoided the questions. So I was curious. I said I would meet her the next day in my office.”

  “Then what happened?” Lynn asked.

  “She showed up and started babbling about her mother, how she had recently died, how sad it was and how she had been close to my father many years ago when they were both young. It was hard to understand her. She kept breaking into German. So I asked her to show me what she had come to show me. And then…And then she did.”

  “What was it?”

  “She brings this huge packet of papers out of her bag and starts spreading them across the desk. They were all photocopies, nothing original. I asked, ‘What's all this?’ She said they were his letters to her mother and a journal from the war. All in German, of course. I asked, ‘Where are the originals?’ She said they were safely hidden someplace. I was suspicious. I mean, they could have all been forgeries. How was I to know? She picked up one of the letters and started reading from it. I told her I didn't speak German, so she tried translating it, but her English wasn't good enough. She didn't know half the words and said them in German. I was getting impatient. She was getting more and more emotional; she had tears dripping down her face, and she was waving her arms around like a demented woman.”

  “Were the letters dated?”

  I asked. “The one she read from was from 1941, June or July, I think.”

  “Did you see who signed the letter? Was there a name on it?”

  “I didn't even think to look. Neither one of us was thinking rationally by that time.”

  “I understand. So what happened next?”

  “I was just about to show her the door when she pulled out a photograph—a small print not much bigger than a passport photo. And that's when I realized that she did have a connection to my dad. He was sitting with his arm around a young girl in her early teens. Sophie pointed at the girl and said it was her, aged thirteen. It must have been taken around 1957 or 1958.”

  I fell back on my courtroom training. Rule number one: never betray surprise, no matter what the witness says on the stand. I took a sip of coffee—by now getting cold. My thoughts were racing. I focused on my next question and on keeping my voice neutral.

  “Okay, she had a picture of herself as a girl with your dad. Then what happened?”

  “I asked where she had gotten all this stuff and what she wanted from me. She embarked on this long, drawn-out story of her life.” Susan looked at her empty coffee cup.

  “Do you want another cappuccino?” Lynn jumped in.

  “No, thanks. Let's go back to the office. We can continue there.”

  I wasn't sure we should break the flow of the conversation, but Susan had already stood up and was leading the way. We filed back across the street and up the three flights of stairs. Susan sat down behind her desk. She clearly liked to be in control. She quietly slid a manila folder sideways under some papers, then looked back at us, expectantly.

  “You were saying how Sophie told you her life story. What do you remember about it?” I asked.

  “She said she was born in 1945. Her mother was called Hildegard Reiner. She brought Sophie up alone. They lived from hand to mouth in West Berlin. Hildegard told Sophie her father died in the war. When Sophie was a girl, a man used to show up from time to time for quick visits—maybe once a year. I figured it out. He visited whenever he was in Germany on tour. It must have been tough; my mother was his accompanist, so she was usually with him. He must have snuck away for an hour or two at a time.”

  After a knock on the door, the man with the ponytail stuck his head in.

  “Not now, Jimmy,” said Susan. Then turning to us, “Excuse me a minute.” She grabbed him by the arm and hustled him back outside. I could hear heated conversation, but I couldn't make out the words. Lynn crept to the door to see if she could hear, but I wanted to see what was in that manila folder. I picked it up and peered inside: a single newspaper clipping. Reading upside down, I deciphered the headline, “Canadian Ranchers Fear Mad-Cow Disease.” Why would Susan want to conceal that? Puzzled, I replaced the folder.

  Lynn dashed back to her chair just before Susan returned to the office and sat back down behind her desk. “Sorry about that. Where were we?” she asked.

  “You were saying how your father must have snuck away to visit Sophie's mother during concert tours.”

  “That's right. Hildegard told Sophie the man was one of her father's old army buddies. She called him Uncle Robert. He used to bring her presents—dolls, toys, later nylons, and once he brought a gold bracelet. He gave her a big red pin that she was wearing that day.”

  Rule number one: Remain calm. “She was wearing it when she came to see me as well,” I said carefully. “She was wearing it when she died.”

  “Oh, God,” Susan held her head in her hands.

  “What else did she tell you about your father's visits?”

  “She said he would kiss and hug her—she liked him because he always came with a gift, and he would also leave money for her mother. She didn't know he lived in America or anything else about him. Then the visits stopped, and she rather forgot about him.”

  “And then?”

  “Then, about a year ago, her mother got very sick. She told me the name of the disease in German. Some kind of cancer maybe. Sophie nursed her until she died. A few weeks later, Sophie was going through all her mother's things and she found a suitcase hidden away at the back of a closet—it was stuffed full of photos, letters, postcards, even a journal dating back to 1940. Also a couple of my father's old records.”

  “Go on,” I said, struggling to keep my poker face in place.

  “When she saw the photos, she recognized the man she vaguely recalled from her childhood—Uncle Robert. Then she looked at one of the record sleeves and recognized my father. She started reading the letters and realized… and realized…” Susan broke off, reaching for a tissue.

  The letter Sophie had left in the hotel now made sense, the letter she had been writing to her dead mother but had never finished. “You could have trusted me. I would have kept all your secrets. Now, I wrestle with them night and day, trying to find my way through the forest…”

  “She realized Robert wasn't her uncle,” Lynn said gently.

  “That's right.”

  “I can't imagine,” Lynn continued. “You must have been totally freaked out.”

  “You could say that.”

  “And did you believe her?” I asked.

  “Of course not. I still don't quite believe it. It's like one of those movies about someone leading a double life.”

  “So what did you tell her?”

  “I was angry. I thought she was trying to get money out of me. I was ready to give her some just to make her go away. I took out my checkbook an
d asked her how much she wanted. She said she wasn't interested in my dirty money. She wanted us to be real sisters. I mean, can you imagine? Sisters?”

  It was hard to imagine the dowdy, bedraggled Sophie as sister of this sophisticated creature. Susan gathered herself, speaking in a low monotone. “That's when I told her to leave. I shouted at her to get the hell out.”

  “And did she?” I asked.

  “Not at first. She said I was making a mistake. All she wanted was to be a sister to me and a daughter to my father. She knew it was a shock, but she'd give us time to get used to the idea. Imagine it—she wanted us to be one big happy family. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. We haven't been a happy family for years. The last thing my father would have wanted was a new daughter, especially not a Raggedy Ann like her. He gets all the fathering he needs with Elissa. The child bride, I call her. I told Sophie she was crazy, but she wouldn't listen. She said she was going to Florida to see him—she already had her ticket—and if he wouldn't listen to her, she would make him sorry.”

  “How?”

  “She said she'd go to you and tell you all his secrets.”

  So much for rule number one. I was stunned, and my face showed it. “Me? She mentioned me?”

  “Marek Cain, the Nazi hunter, she called you. I'd never heard of you. She said you'd be very interested to hear what she had to say. She said there were some things about my father—awful things—that would be of great interest to the U.S. government. At that point, I completely lost it. I started yelling and throwing her papers on the floor. We were both crying….”

  “And then?”

  “She picked up all the papers, stuffed them in her bag, and slammed the door behind her. After she'd gone, I noticed she'd missed a couple of pages that had fallen behind the desk.”

  “Did she leave the photograph she showed you?”

  “No, she took it.”

  “When she said she knew some awful things, do you have any idea what she might have been talking about?”

  “I've been trying not to think about it.”