by John Smolens
“And no one has a past,” I said, “until a man like Vogel shows up.”
“How do you know about Vogel?” he asked.
“Word gets around,” I said. “What is it that you and Brosnic have in common? Faith? I think it’s more than that. And this other person you called—you were all members of the Nazi Party?”
“I did my duty, Mr. Green. We all did.”
“Vogel believes he’s still doing his.”
“How did you know him?” he asked. “Were you in the Wehrmacht?”
“No, I was in the Italian army. I knew him in prison. But you and Brosnic, you knew him during the war?” He merely stared at me. “And perhaps even before?” Still nothing. “And you did something—something that he has never forgiven.”
“The Bird does not forget, or forgive.”
“Like the Party. Long ago you and the others were tried and sentenced.”
Reluctantly, Simmons nodded.
“Vogel is here to carry out your execution.”
He was staring at me, helpless. “And the same is true for you?”
“The same for me, Herr Stemple.”
“So. We are condemned men. New identities mean nothing. We cannot conceal our flaws, our runs in ambient light.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “The war isn’t over for men like Vogel. They’re all waiting for the opportunity to rise up again.”
“Your eye and cheek,” I said. “You were wounded.”
“Like so many, I sustained many wounds, some that are visible, some that are not. Scars and physical disabilities may not be the worst things we took away from this war. We are all blind men here, groping in the dark.”
“What will you do? Run?”
Now Stemple got up from the table. He seemed weary, even exhausted. “I would like to think I am through with running. This is a great country, is it not? We live here now, but we are from a different time and place.” He picked my business card up off the table. “We sell pork chops and lampshades. But we all still carry the past with us, concealed like a secret, hoping that it doesn’t come back to haunt us. Maybe we can help each other?” He tried to smile, though with little conviction. “Perhaps, Mr. Green, you are the one who should run?”
“I ran once before. Not this time.”
“Very well then.” He gave me a curt, polite nod, a formal Old World gesture that here seemed savagely out of place, and then he walked back through the swinging kitchen door.
18.
The following morning I was getting dressed for work when the doorbell rang. I finished knotting my tie as I opened the door. Giannopoulos stepped into the apartment and handed me a copy of the Free Press. “See this yet?” On the front page was a photograph of Father Brosnic, wearing his vestments as he stood in front of St. Stanislaus, welcoming parishioners to Sunday Mass. “He’s dead,” Giannopoulos said. “Heard confession from six to eight last night, and about a half hour later he was in the sacristy. The church janitor found him. The police believe that two men entered the church and repeatedly stabbed him in the hands, feet, and chest. That symbolic enough for you?”
I got my sport coat and we went down to the street to Giannopoulos’s Ford Customline. Jack sat behind the steering wheel, and once Giannopoulos and I were in the back seat he pulled out into the street and headed west.
“I talked to a friend with Detroit police,” Giannopoulos said. “There was a lot of blood in that sacristy, and the police found two sets of footprints. One set—the smaller of the two men—seemed accompanied by a series of red dots.”
“Red dots, in the blood?” I said. “Dots—a cane?”
“I’ve never seen anything about a cane in Vogel’s files,” Giannopoulos said. “Another thing: Brosnic wasn’t any priest. We’ve been checking him out and he never attended a seminary, was never ordained. His real name was Mile Ionescu and he donned the collar to get himself out of Europe after the war. A lot of Nazis traded one uniform for another. In their fear and abhorrence of communism, the Church provided their only refuge. Nice irony there, I suppose.” Giannopoulos took out a pack of Lucky Strikes and offered one to me. After lighting them, he said, “You know what this means.”
“Vogel’s only begun,” I said, “and he won’t stop until he’s taken care of all of us—and it doesn’t matter who dies as long as it leads you to Vogel. Nobody’ll be sorry when it’s my turn. America will be a safer place without us, right?”
“I don’t believe that, Frank.”
“Where’re we going?” I asked. “The Black Forest?”
“Thought we’d drive by.”
“I doubt it’s the kind of restaurant that serves breakfast.”
When we reached the Black Forest, it wasn’t open, but Giannopoulos told Jack to park in front of a coffee shop down the block. We left Jack with the car and went into the coffee shop. We sat in a booth by the windows, where we could watch the street. After he ordered coffee, Giannopoulos said, “Tell me about Vogel, when he was in that prison camp up north.”
“Don’t you know? You think you know everything about me—why not Vogel?”
“Oh, I know what he did before he was a prisoner of war. I know why he’s still on a list of war criminals that are wanted to be brought to trial in Europe. Israel wants him, too. And I know that he has a lot of support over here—financial support that has kept us from finding him. A lot of these Nazis that get into the United States find a small, inconspicuous life and become model citizens. Smart, like you. But not Vogel. He leaves no trace. We have nothing in terms of employment or an address. No driver’s license or checking account. What was he like up at Camp Au Train?”
“Kommandant Vogel ran the place,” I said. “You told me you know about my friend Adino, back in Italy. What happened to him in camp says it all. When Vogel finally got fed up with him, he had Adino’s Achilles tendons slashed. It’s the same thing with Brosnic—the stab wounds through the hands and feet. Vogel doesn’t just carry out a sentence, he makes a statement. Mere execution isn’t good enough. Tell me, what do they want to try Vogel for?”
“The Romanians want him bad, but so do the Germans. When Hitler’s army first went into Romania, Vogel was an officer who worked with the Croat Iron Guards. It was their job to round up Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs. This is before the concentration camps had been set up. Executions were mostly carried out with a bullet in the brain. To save ammunition, they sometimes lined people up in two rows, one standing and the other kneeling right in front of him, so the bullet would pass through the brain of one and into the chest of the other. But the Iron Guard wanted blood and they used knives. They held competitions. One of them cut the throats of over thirteen hundred people in one night—in one night. There’s evidence that Vogel helped organize and promote such events.”
The waitress came to our booth and asked if we wanted a refill. Giannopoulos said yes as he tapped out two cigarettes. I was lighting up when I saw a delivery truck stop down the street. The driver, wearing a tan uniform, got out and went to the front door of the Black Forest. He knocked, and after a moment the door was opened and he was let inside the restaurant.
Giannopoulos turned and looked out the window. “What?”
“Someone’s over there. I saw Stemple there yesterday. He tells me that he refuses to run. So your money’s on Stemple. Stick with him and Vogel will show up eventually.” I put the unlit cigarette on the table and began to slide out of the booth. “Thanks for the coffee.”
For the first time I saw genuine surprise on Giannopoulos’s face. “Where are you going?”
“I’m through with this. You and Jack are on your own now.”
“You’re going to run, too?”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“You don’t understand, Frank.” Giannopoulos took some coins out of his pocket, put them on the table as he got out of the booth. “We’re not sure what Vogel looks like.”
“If you know his war record, you must have photographs.”
“Well, it’s like
this,” he said. “There were photos, but they’re gone. This is not the first time that our files have been tampered with. There are people in our agency—throughout the government—who help these Nazis out. You might think that we’ve been infiltrated, or you might think that since the war, some of these Nazis have been put to work by us—the CIA, the FBI, whatever—to fight against the communists. I think it’s probably both. The fact is, we have no photo and no idea what Vogel looks like these days.”
“I haven’t seen Vogel in twelve years. He must be fifty, at least.”
“He’s going on fifty-two.”
“I probably wouldn’t recognize him if he sat down next to me. Sorry.”
I went out to the curb and began looking up the street for a taxi. Giannopoulos stayed right with me. Jack stood by the car, alert. When a cab pulled up, I opened the rear door and was about to get in the back seat, but Giannopoulos took hold of my arm.
“Just go over there with me now,” he said. “I want to see this Stemple. Do that, and then if you want, you run and hide, I won’t bother you anymore.”
“Is that a promise?”
He nodded as he shut the taxi door. We walked across the street, leaving Jack with the car. There were Venetian blinds in the windows of the restaurant, all closed. The delivery truck was still idling at the curb.
“They must have a door around back,” Giannopoulos said.
We walked around to the alley behind the building and found the back door wide open. The kitchen was clean—stainless steel tables washed down, pots and pans hanging above stoves. Giannopoulos pushed through the swinging door and led me into the dining room, which was dimly lit and empty. I walked past him, quickly weaving in and around the tables, toward the front of the room. When I reached the window I grabbed the cord, yanked up the Venetian blind, and watched the delivery truck pull away from the curb. At the intersection, it barely slowed down, causing other cars to stop suddenly, horns blaring, as it burst through a knot of traffic.
Giannopoulos had already opened the front door, and he was jogging across the street to his car, shouting instructions to Jack. I ran outside, and we got into the car and followed the delivery truck through the intersection. We went for about a half mile without seeing the truck ahead of us. Giannopoulos hunched forward next to me in the back seat, and we looked down each side street we passed, but didn’t see any sign of the truck.
After another dozen blocks Giannopoulos told Jack to turn around. “Did you see who got in the truck?” he asked him.
“Not well,” Jack said. “Two men, but someone else could already have been in the cab of the truck. The driver wore a uniform, like a delivery man. Couldn’t see the other one because he got in the passenger side.”
“He didn’t have a cane?” Giannopoulos asked.
“I didn’t see any cane, but then I didn’t really see him at all. Just the driver.”
Giannopoulos sat back in the seat and took his pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. “At St. Stanislaus, two men went into the sacristy. One with a cane. If he’s blind, he’s going to have a hard time stabbing someone through the center of the palm. Maybe being blind, he leaves it up to the other man. He’s only there as a witness.”
“More like a judge,” I said, taking the offered cigarette pack. “To them, this is an official act. Vogel’s there to pronounce sentence before the execution is carried out.”
We went back to the Black Forest, leaving Jack in the car at the curb. Inside, before my eyes had time to adjust to the dark, a woman said, “We’re closed.” Her voice was young and peevish.
Like a couple of blind men, Giannopoulos and I felt our way around the tables and moved toward where her voice had come from—and I began to make out the woman standing at the far end of the bar.
“You cops?” she asked.
“Immigration and Naturalization Service,” Giannopoulos said. He flipped open his wallet, but she barely looked at it, turning her head away in disgust. I could see her now and realized she had waited tables the night before—in her mid-twenties, with her blond hair pulled back in a bun. “I’m looking for Carl Simmons,” Giannopoulos said.
“Well, he’s not here,” she said. “Just me, it seems.”
“Why’s that, this early in the morning?”
“Hans calls me and says get down here right away, and he’s not here.”
“Hans?” I asked.
“The manager.”
“Simmons is the owner,” I said. “Hans, he’s the manager. Waits tables as well. Large man. Oiled hair.”
“He’s always here early, always punctual.” She gestured toward the kitchen with a graceful hand. “I get here and the back door’s wide open.”
“How long ago did he call you?” Giannopoulos asked.
“Maybe forty minutes.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?” he asked.
“Last night, when we closed. What do you want with him anyway?”
I eased myself onto a bar stool. “He say why he wanted you here early?”
She lit a cigarette, and I could see her face clearly as she leaned into the flame. She had green eyes and dark red lipstick, painted on to make her mouth look fuller than it really was—and when she took the cigarette from her lips her front teeth were slightly pink. “Yeah,” she said sarcastically. “One of the cooks is sick, and he needed me to come in and help with the prep. I hate prep. You chop onions and you can’t get the smell off your hands all night, plus your eyes run, messing up your mascara. I told him forget it, I closed last night, but he was insistent. Then I show up and he’s not even here.”
Giannopoulos walked back toward the kitchen. “Mind if we have a look around?”
“Why should I mind?” She watched him push through the swinging door. “While you’re back there, grab an apron and take care of those onions for me.”
“A couple of nights ago,” I said, “I was in here. You waited on that table back there. Three men: Simmons, Hans, and a priest.”
“So?”
“You know the priest’s name?”
“Everybody calls him Father Lou.”
“You haven’t heard,” I said.
“Heard what?”
Giannopoulos came out from the kitchen. “Simmons didn’t mention it when he called?”
She was still staring at me, and I believed she really didn’t know. “Mention what?”
“Father Lou’s dead,” I told her.
At first it didn’t seem to register. She just looked at me with those green eyes, and then her entire body went slack. I was off my stool and caught her as she fell and eased her down to the floor.
Giannopoulos stepped around her, went behind the bar, and began sorting through the bottles of liquor. She opened her eyes and tried to sit up, but then she started to cry, burying her face in my shoulder. Giannopoulos came to the end of the bar and poured out a shot of Scotch. “What’s your name?” he asked.
After a moment, she lifted her head off my shoulder. “Braun.”
“Right,” he said. “And it’s followed by?”
She put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself as she sat up. “Collins.”
“Father Lou was your uncle?” Giannopoulos asked. “So you knew his name was really Mile Ionescu.”
She looked at me, and I took a handkerchief from inside my coat pocket and handed it to her. She daubed the mascara coursing down her cheeks. “No,” she said. “I knew his name was Mile Ionescu, a name I was never to repeat. Never, because he was my father.” She started to gather her feet under her, and I helped her stand up. “Simmons, he’s my uncle.”
“Klaus Stemple,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” she said wearily. “We must tell Onkel Klaus.”
“And Hans?” Giannopoulos asked. “Tell me he’s related, too.”
“No, just a good friend. He grew up with my father and uncle, so he’s like family.”
“What’s Hans’s real name?” I asked.
“I think I’m s
aying too much.”
“New names don’t always work, Braun, even here,” I said. “Whatever his name was, Hans was taken away just now. By Vogel, or someone working with him.”
“Vogel,” she whispered. For a moment I thought she was going to begin crying again. But she straightened her shoulders, picked up the shot glass, and drank it down. “They’re all so afraid of him. It has to do with the war. Where would they take Hans?”
“We don’t know,” Giannopoulos said. “It would help to know his real name.”
She touched her fingertips to her forehead a moment, and then said, “Krantz.”
“Hans Krantz?” Giannopoulos looked pleased. “Used to be one of Hitler’s chefs,” he said to me. “Until he was suspected of plotting to poison his vegetarian dinners. Somehow he managed to slip away and get to the States, where he could serve Wiener schnitzel.”
“What will Vogel do to him?” she asked. When Giannopoulos didn’t answer, she said, “Vogel. He killed my father, and now he’ll kill Hans?”
“The other night,” I said, “Stemple came to the bar here and made a phone call. Spoke German. Who would he call?”
Her eyes began to well up again, and this time when I offered her the handkerchief she waved it away. “My mother,” she whispered. “She has refused to speak to my father for years, so it’s always Klaus who communicates between them.”
Giannopoulos leaned toward her and spoke softly. “Braun, we should find your mother before Vogel does. She goes by Collins now? Where is she?”
“She lives in Grosse Pointe Farms,” she said. “She’s married to an American. Her name is Elena Collins.”
“And before?” I asked. “What was her name before she married Mile Ionescu, who became Father Lou Brosnic?”
“And before?” Braun said. “So many names, but nobody really changes, do they. My mother’s maiden name was Saller.” She wiped the tears away with one hand, smearing red lipstick across her cheek, which was already streaked with black mascara. “But before the war, before Mile, she married when she was very young, younger than I am now.”
She stared at me, waiting, and when I said it, it wasn’t a question but an answer, the answer none of us wanted to hear. “Her name was Vogel.”