by Alan Elsner
“I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. And if you dare repeat in public what you just said, I will sue you for slander and defamation, and I will take you to the cleaners. By the time I'm done with you, you'll be lucky to own your own yarmulke.”
“Nobody's going public. In fact, I'm your biggest fan. You deserve a lot more than three million dollars. Not only did you fool me, you fooled your father as well, to say nothing of the FBI. You ran rings around everybody. You were brilliant.”
“You really are crazy.”
“Maybe. But you might as well humor me and listen to what I have to say. What have you got to lose? I can't prove a thing. At worst, you lose a few minutes of your precious shredding time. At best, you get a great final chapter to your book.”
“Why are you here, Cain?”
“I want to offer my congratulations. Not many people get away with murder. You appear to be one of the exceptions. Like father, like daughter—although his was on a much grander scale. But even he paid the price eventually.”
“You're wearing a wire. You're trying to trick me into saying something.”
“You've been watching too many cop dramas. The FBI would laugh in my face if I went to them with my theory. They closed the case weeks ago. You can search me if you like. Do you want to check?”
She sunk down in her seat, a smug half-smile on her face.“No, it's not necessary, because I'm not going to admit anything. I'll listen to your crackpot ideas if it makes you happy, but I'm not confirming anything, I'm not accepting anything, and I'm not stipulating anything. If you say something and I'm silent, it doesn't mean I agree. Ms. Daniels here can be our witness, though she looks as surprised as I am. Did your geeky boyfriend keep it from you too, Lynn?”
“We don't have secrets,” Lynn said.
“Ah, young love. How sweet. Go ahead, Mark. This is your Hercule Poirot moment. Give it your best shot.”
“For the longest time, I was sure this case was about your father's attempt to cover up the truth. But it was really just about money. That's how it started, and that's how it will end.”
“Good dramatic intro,” Susan said, relaxing in her chair.“Do go on.”
“When Sophie Reiner appeared in your life that day, you were in a deep hole. You have expensive tastes. You like designer clothes, jewelry—you stay in the swankiest hotels. A room at the Four Seasons goes for $350 a night, minimum. But your business was going down the tubes. And then Sophie came along. I think you told the truth when you said how shocked you were. Who wouldn't be? But after she left, you got to thinking. That's when you called your father.”
“None of this is new. I told you myself,” she parried.“Come on, nerd boy. Surely you've got more than that.”
“At some point, you and your father struck a deal. You'd take care of Sophie for him in exchange for a hefty payment. How much did he fork over? A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? How much was her death worth to him?”
“Don't be ridiculous. I'm a literary agent, for God's sake. You told me yourself you can't look up hit men under H in the yellow pages.”
“True,” I agreed. “But you have a very special friend. What was his book called?”
“From the Hood to the Joint and Back Again,” Lynn chimed in. For the first time, Susan looked rattled. She swallowed hard, and her fists clenched and unclenched. “Jimmy had nothing to do with this,” she said. “Ask him yourselves. He'll be here in a few minutes. And he can be quite unfriendly when he's pissed off.”
“I'm sure he can. That's what made him so valuable to you. Jimmy Williamson had the gangland and neo-Nazi connections you needed. I suppose you offered to split the money with him fifty-fifty or sixty-forty. He called one of his buddies to do the hit. But there was a wrinkle. You weren't interested in a onetime payment from Daddy Dearest. A hundred thousand, or whatever he paid you, wouldn't go very far in financing your lifestyle. Hell, it probably wouldn't even clear your debts. You needed him to keep on giving. That's where I came in.”
“I was waiting for that,” Susan said sardonically, looking at her watch.
“I was a little suspicious that first day when Sophie came to my office. She told me she'd come to me because she'd read my name in the German press. I've been quoted there a couple of times, but not for a long time. On the other hand, the New York Times had just run a profile of me a month before, which I saw lying right here.” I slapped my hand on the desktop for emphasis.“You tried to hide it, which made me suspicious, although not until much later. My boss thought maybe that article had been translated into German. I checked, and it wasn't. All of which led me to conclude you suggested to Sophie that she come to see me.”
“Why would I do that?” Susan asked.“Seems like a pretty dumb move to me, and I'm not dumb.”
“You're not dumb, but even brilliant minds make mistakes. My guess is that after you got over the initial shock, your first thought was to blackmail your father. But Sophie wouldn't go along. She wasn't interested in money. She wanted love—the love of the father she'd never had.”
“Drivel,” said Susan.
“We'll see. Plan B would have been to get hold of Sophie's documents after you had her killed. Then you would have had your father over a barrel, and you could have collected regular monthly payments for as long as he lived. But Sophie had hidden the documents, and you didn't know where they were. You needed another way of squeezing him.”
“Is there much more? This is getting tedious.” She glanced again at her watch.
“Not that much. For it to work, you needed your father to believe he was still in danger of being exposed. That's where I came in.” I had her full attention.“You knew Sophie had come to see me. Now you had to convince your father that I was actually investigating him. If he believed that, he might be persuaded to part with another chunk of money. To tweak my interest a bit more, you had someone plant that 6-6-6 on my car, which created a link to the 6-6-6 the police found in Sophie's pocket.”
“Boy, I was smart, wasn't I? What did I do next?”
“You called your father again and told him how you learned that I was investigating him. You told him that I'd attended his master class at the University of Virginia, that I'd seen your mother splatter him with red ink, and that I'd even invited your mother to lunch to talk about him. That sends him into a total panic. He asks if you can arrange to have me silenced. The two of you agree on a price. Only you're much too smart to actually assassinate a U.S. government official, which would bring the whole system down on your head. You tell the two neo-Nazis who attacked me in my apartment lobby to make it look like an assassination attempt but not to kill me.”
“You're getting nuttier and nuttier. Who'd believe such baloney?” Susan snorted.
“At the same time, Jimmy gives my name and Rosen's to a neo-Nazi newsletter. We're getting a flood of hate mail and threatening phone calls, which makes us even more scared and confused. We didn't know who was after us, and we certainly would never suspect it was you. If you'd stopped there, you would have gotten away with it.”
“Have you thought of trying to write a thriller? You have a real talent for fiction. The Nazi Hunter: A Novel. I like it—I can hardly wait to hear what happens next.”
“What happens next is that Lynn and I arrived here to interview you, catching you by surprise. You couldn't make up your mind how much to tell us, but then, as we spoke, you figured it was another golden opportunity to put the squeeze on Daddy. You asked me if I knew his real name, and stupidly I told you. At the same time, you let slip that your father had once hired an ex-con as his gardener. I passed the tip on to the FBI, just as you had hoped I would, and they started asking him questions. Now, he's totally freaked. You call him one more time and offer to try to get rid of me again—for another big fee, the biggest yet.”
I smiled at her. She smiled back, a ghastly, joyless grimace.
“Arranging that attack on us in West Virginia was your biggest mistake. You got greedy. Before t
hat, I didn't suspect you at all. But you were the only one who could have engineered it. Apart from my boss and the FBI, you were the only one who knew I was there.”
“How could I have known that?” Susan protested.
“The day we arrived there, you called Eric Rosen and told him you needed to speak to me urgently. Eric gave you my dad's phone number, but you never called. Instead, you used it to get his address. A day later, your gaggle of amateur hit men showed up at the cabin. Unfortunately, it didn't go as planned. When it turned into a firefight, they lost their tempers and burned the house down.”
“Absolute crap.”
“Maybe I have some details wrong, but that's basically the way it went down. What complicated matters was that the skinny guy had his own agenda. He had a shitload of ammonium nitrate sitting in his truck, ready to blow up a government building. All of a sudden, he's forced underground. The FBI is on his trail. He decides to go ahead and carry out the big attack before he's caught.”
“So that was my fault, too?”
“It may have been, indirectly. And now the most brilliant part of your scheme, the part I couldn't see until Lynn pointed it out yesterday. What had me confused through all this was the way you helped me along. Without those photocopies you gave me, and without telling me about Sophie being your half sister, we would never have gotten as far as we did. So I asked myself,Why would you help me?”
“Why?” Susan sighed.
“You wanted me to believe your father had a motive to get rid of Sophie, which of course he did. But the clever part came when you realized how much more money you could make if I actually succeeded in exposing your father as a Nazi. Like a lightbulb going off in your head. There was a limit to the number of fake assassination attempts he'd be willing to pay for, but, if my investigation were to succeed, you'd have something really good to sell.”
“Which is?”
“Your story. You knew how much money a juicy memoir of child abuse could bring in. You'd already sold one. What was it called?”
“Surviving Daddy: A Poet's Experience with Sexual Abuse,” Lynn offered with a smile.
“That was a big bestseller, wasn't it? But you had a much better version—a story about being molested by a Nazi war criminal. It doesn't get any juicer than that. When he won a McCready Award, he became a national figure. Soon, he'd be shaking hands with the president. What a great picture for the insert that would make! The market value of your memoir skyrocketed. You not only wanted me to succeed, you needed me to succeed. And when I did, it worked out better than you could ever have imagined. Daddy killed himself on national TV. Suddenly, the whole world is talking about him. And now you're three million dollars richer, and all your troubles are over.”
“Well, this is all very ingenious, Mark, but as you say, you can't prove any of it,” Susan said as she looked at her watch again.
“If you're waiting for Jimmy, he's been unavoidably detained,” said Lynn. “I believe the FBI may be having a few words with him right now.”
Susan hit back with her old defiance. “They're wasting their time. Jimmy won't talk. And without Jimmy, you can't prove a damn thing.”
“Maybe Jimmy won't talk,” I said. “On the other hand, if he's looking at the death penalty or life without parole, maybe he will. It'll be interesting to see.”
“He won't talk,” she said stubbornly.
“Even if he doesn't, something else will,” I said.“I told you this case was all about money, and that's how it will be solved. The FBI will follow the money. Those checks your father sent you for killing Sophie and trying to kill me—they'll tell the story. The checks you wrote Jimmy, the money he transferred to his neo-Nazi buddy—it's all going to add up. Jimmy may not talk, but the money will.”
We walked out, leaving the door open. I smiled at Agent Fabrizio and the three cops with her as we passed them on the stairs.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book is fiction, but Belzec is not. My grandparents, Adolf and Bertha Elsner, died there in 1942. All the chapter epigraphs about the extermination camp are authentic, as are the details of the camp itself and Operation Reinhard. Himmler really did witness gassings in Poland. The Nazis also organized small orchestras at extermination camps, including Belzec. According to Rudolf Reder, one of only two men to survive the camp, the orchestra at Belzec consisted of six musicians who usually played in the area between the gas chambers and the burial pits. The description of the camp memorial in chapter 21 is based on a visit I made there with my father in 1993. Fortunately, we were also privileged to attend the unveiling of a new, much more appropriate memorial in 2005, which finally honors the victims in a fitting way.
Give Schubert a try. You won't be disappointed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks are due.
Eli Rosenbaum, the real head of OSI, explained some of his bureau's investigative techniques to me. Mark Egan read an early draft of the manuscript and gave valuable suggestions. John Zogby made a crucial introduction, Cari Parven offered many positive editorial ideas, and Paul Holmes transferred me to a job where I finally had the motivation to write this novel. Paul Hamburger, Debbie Fox, and Justin Epner shared their thoughts on the experience and meaning of prayer. My rabbi and teacher, Stuart Weinblatt, has increased my love and appreciation of Judaism immeasurably.
I'd like to thank my agent, Fred Hill, for invaluable suggestions and constant support. Richard Seaver is a wonderful editor; he and his colleagues at Arcade worked hard to make this book the best it could be. Thanks to James Jayo for shepherding the book through to publication.
As always, I thank my wife Shulamit, who makes my life meaningful.