by John Smolens
“Mary, I said it first. And, listen, we have to think of Mary, right?”
I looked away, nodding my head again.
Mary lay on her back in the nursery. Her eyes were blue-gray, and they searched the ceiling above her relentlessly. Her bassinet had a plastic housing; an oxygen tube was fitted to her tiny nostrils, and she was attached to a series of wires and an IV. Mr. Zampa said she looked like they were going to launch her into outer space like one of those Russian dogs. Her lungs were underdeveloped and there was an irregular heartbeat. I worried that she wasn’t feeling the touch of human hands, other than the brief visits to Claire’s room and when a nurse’s aide changed her diapers. She didn’t cry—not when I watched her—though she made little grunting noises. Every moment was a struggle to exist.
Claire died in the afternoon. She fought for each breath for a minute or so. Though I had pressed the buzzer pinned to her bedsheets, a nurse didn’t come to the room. And then Claire was still. Hospital staff arrived and asked me to wait out in the hall. I sat on a bench across from her door until the doctor came out and told me what I already knew.
Braun had gone back to the apartment to get me a change of clothes, and when she came down the hall and saw me, she must have known immediately. She sat down beside me and we didn’t move, didn’t speak. Finally, we helped each other stand up and walked out of the hospital.
In so many ways, Mary was a blessing. The immediate job of organizing Claire’s funeral was complicated by the fact that the baby was still in the hospital, which meant that Braun and I continually returned to watch her through the glass. The doctors suggested an operation to deal with some constriction in her lungs, but several days after Claire was buried, Mary made remarkable progress. Nine days after she was born, we brought her back to the apartment.
There was a period of sorrow, confusion, and dismay where I don’t think either of us was seeing things too clearly. We were too busy, too exhausted, too buried inside ourselves. The days and nights were devoted to diaper changes and feedings. The apartment became a cocoon that smelled of baby powder and milk formula. We more or less worked in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. There were, however, moments of unexpected solace: dancing with Mary in my arms while on the radio Vic Damone sang “On the Street Where You Live.” By late April, winter showed signs of loosening its grip.
It was Mr. Zampa who managed to help me break through all this. Afternoons, when Mary was napping, I’d often go downstairs to his workshop. He believed anything could be fixed—furniture, windows, any appliance—and I liked to give him a hand. He would keep a bottle of grappa on the shelf.
One day we were gluing the joints of a footstool and he said, “You looked in a mirror lately?” Before I could respond he said, “The pants, they’re like flags snapping in the breeze, you’ve lost so much weight. The girl, too. It’s not healthy, but I realize some men like it when a woman gets that way.” He had thick, calloused fingers, but there was a delicacy to them when he handled wood. After applying a daub of glue to a leg of the footstool, he inserted the end into a slot in the frame, and then I held the clamp in place as he tightened it. “Dio mio, she loves that child like she was her own. She could have returned to Detroit. I heard her arguing on the phone with her mother, but she doesn’t want to go.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What are you afraid of?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your lovely dead wife isn’t going to come back and haunt you.” He glanced up at me through his thick glasses. “Know what Braun told Louisa? She said Claire told her it was all right before she died. She knew, Claire did.”
“I don’t know, Carmen. What am I afraid of?”
“You’re not going to insult Claire’s memory by living your life.”
I took a swallow of grappa. “You know how old Braun is?”
Carmen smiled. “I should be so lucky. It’s getting warm—I saw her wearing a dress the other day. She has better legs than Cyd Charisse. You didn’t notice?” He took the stool, which was now held together by four clamps—looking like some crazy science experiment—and set it on the floor next to the worktable. Then he splashed a little more grappa in our coffee mugs. “Senti. When you make a sacrifice you learn who you are. It’s the best thing that can ever happen to you. You live for others, you live for God, and you find yourself. She already loves Mary, and the baby adores her. It will take time, but you must be patient. You have much to hope for.” When he looked up at me again, his eyes were moist. “You’re what, thirty-six, thirty-seven? My father, he waited till his mother was dead before he married my mother; nineteen years younger than him she was, and they were happily married for over forty years. Seven children, all of them strong.”
I stared into my coffee mug of grappa.
“She put on a dress. Now take her someplace nice for dinner. We can watch the baby for an evening.”
24.
I did take her to dinner and we did marry the following year. In 1959 we had a son, Adino, whom we usually called Tony. By that time we had moved four hours west to Marquette, the largest town in the Upper Peninsula. I opened a shop that sold household furnishings and carpet. We bought a house on the East Side, the peninsula that juts into Lake Superior. We tried to have another child, but Braun miscarried. Mary had become strong and healthy, and Tony was an absolutely fearless boy.
Over the years I kept in touch with James Giannopoulos. Each spring I attended a sales convention in Detroit and would see him then, often having a meal at Tony’s Grill. The food wasn’t the same after Paolo went in on a restaurant with his cousin in Ann Arbor, but I never let on. Tony and Ginger eventually sold the bar and moved to Hawaii, where they opened a place called Mr. T’s Bistro. Giannopoulos made sure my past remained buried—Vogel was, evidently, still alive and at large.
The children consumed our lives. Mary studied the piano and Tony played hockey. For years, compositions such as Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave” resounded from the baby grand in the living room, and we spent countless hours watching hockey games. From the time the children were small, there were photographs of Claire throughout the house. Mary’s eyes were dark, her hair fine and black, like her mother’s, while Tony had Braun’s fairness. As the children grew to understand that they had different mothers, they developed an unusual bond—siblings, but friends, too. By the time they were in high school, my health began to deteriorate. It started with my lungs, which had never been good since the shooting. But I began to have circulatory problems, and one summer I spent months on my back with a severe case of sciatica in my right leg. The children thought I was becoming forgetful, but Braun knew that wasn’t really the case; I was becoming more distracted and, it seemed, a bit hard of hearing.
One morning in the spring of 1973, I noticed an article in the Detroit Free Press about a suspected war criminal being apprehended in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Horst Albrecht had worked for years as a clerk in the state capitol until he was arrested by the INS. Albrecht claimed to have emigrated from Austria at the conclusion of the Second World War, but the government believed he was actually Heinrich Vogel, who was wanted for the murder of Father Lou Brosnic and Hans Krantz. There was a photograph in the paper—an old one, of Vogel in military uniform, looking severe and erect—and it was accompanied by a photograph of an elderly man wearing sunglasses and walking with a white cane. I had no doubt that they had captured Vogel.
The Albrecht/Vogel story came and went in the press over the course of several months. I cut the articles out of the newspapers and magazines and kept them in a scrapbook. Vogel’s blindness, not to mention his frailness, brought out an element of sympathy in some articles, and it was noted how he had been instrumental in making Braille an operational language in Pennsylvania state government. The German, Romanian, and Israeli governments all wanted him extradited to stand trial. I wondered why there was no mention of his son Anton.
Mary received a scholarship to study music at Michigan State. Tony
could barely think beyond hockey, and at sixteen he got an offer to play for one of the junior teams in Canada. Braun was against this at first—it would mean that he would live with a family in Ontario, attend school there, and travel throughout the province—but I suggested that we let him go. A shot at the NHL was his dream and you can’t tell a kid not to dream. He’d probably be back after a couple of seasons. To not let him try would create a deep resentment.
So Tony moved down to Brantford, Ontario, leaving just the two of us living in the house on Marquette’s East Side. It was too quiet. No piano, no hockey pucks rattling off the garage door for hours on end. But after a few months I realized that, as much as I missed Mary and Tony, I accepted that they wouldn’t be there to witness their father’s decline. My breathing became increasingly difficult. My circulation was so poor that I was constantly cold, wrapped in blankets in my recliner in the den. I had pretty much turned the daily operation of the store over to my business partner, a man named Lloyd Wiegand, who colored his hair and wore too many rings on his fingers. I was constantly looking for something in the news about the Vogel case. For years I filled scrapbooks, which lined a shelf in my study—one of those cases that went on forever, and got nowhere.
If our lives were a trolley hurtling through the city night, through time itself, it now seemed to be traveling at what my kids called warp speed. So: April 1985, Giannopoulos called from Punta Gorda, Florida. He wanted to visit us in Marquette, and he arrived several days later dressed in the light clothing meant for a Florida climate. Since retiring he’d taken up golf. He was tanned and relaxed, and barely resembled the man in the dark suit and crisp white shirt and tie that I had known in Detroit. Braun made a pot of coffee and we sat in the living room.
“I thought I’d never leave Detroit,” he said, glancing out the window at the snow in the backyard. “But you’d be surprised how easy it is to not miss winter.” His eyes floated toward me. “Ever think of moving south?”
“Where’s Vogel now?” I asked.
“He’s free. But we are building a solid case against him.”
“We?” I said. “I thought you were retired.”
“I am, but I was asked to come up and talk to you. These things take years.”
“Some of us might all be dead before it’s over.”
“That’s a distinct possibility,” Giannopoulos said. “Vogel’s health hasn’t been good.” It seemed to me that he almost said “too,” meaning that Vogel’s health was no better than mine, but prudently he stared down at the oriental rug beneath his shoes. “Nice,” he said. “You’re beyond lampshades now.” It was the closest thing to a joke I’d ever heard from him. He got up and went to the baby grand piano and studied the photographs of Claire, Mary, and Tony, their wedding pictures, their children. “Three grandchildren?”
“And one on the way,” Braun said.
“You’ve a beautiful family. You’re a fortunate man, Frank.”
I heard from Giannopoulos periodically while Vogel fought extradition in the courts. Finally, in 1987, the United States government requested that I testify at a hearing in Washington, D.C. The following spring, after more appeals and legal maneuvering, Vogel was extradited to Germany, and I was asked to testify at his trial in Berlin. When I said my assumed American identity could cause me problems, Giannopoulos said that when I testified in court, I would be Francesco Giuseppe Verdi, former officer in the Italian army and prisoner of war. He guaranteed there would be no difficulties later for Frank Green. When I still balked, Giannopoulos said he’d accompany me to Germany.
“You don’t need to do this,” Braun said, as we walked our dog Gordie along the beach in McCarty’s Cove, which was downhill from our house. This had become my primary form of exercise, walking Gordie.
“My health isn’t going to improve, whether I go or not.”
“What happened, happened decades ago. It haunts you. It haunts me, too. I just don’t want it to kill us.”
“I wonder about Anton, where he’s been all these years. He must still be in communication with his father.” She didn’t say anything, and I knew I was closing in on something she’d always avoided discussing. “He is your half brother.”
“My half brother I’ve never met. Never. I was too small, and there was the war. My mother rarely mentioned him. He was her child, but when they split up Vogel took him away from her. He was raised by some relatives who bred him for the Nazi movement. My mother considered him dead—though nothing could be more painful to a mother, of course.”
“That day on Belle Isle,” I said. “Anton wasn’t what I expected. I thought he’d be a younger version of Vogel. He looked like his father, but there was something else there, more complexity. Doubt, perhaps. But he’d done these things. He’d done as he was told. It tormented him. I wonder if it still does.”
“Sympathy for the executioner. Maybe you are getting old, Frank.”
“I was thinking that people change.”
“Do they?” She watched Gordie as he waded into the lake. It was a fall evening and the pastel clouds on the horizon were reflected on the water. We were holding hands—we often did when we walked, though it was in part because my balance wasn’t very good anymore, particularly on the beach. “Have you changed, Francesco?”
“You tell me.”
“Hiding inside this middle-aged woman there’s still the Detroit girl,” she said. “You know, that brat with too much makeup who was angry at everyone, everything. No matter how much or how often you change your identity, you’ll always be that Italian officer.”
“There are only a few people who know who I really am. But you know all my secrets.”
She squeezed my hand. “And even though I’ve never met him, I know that Anton, whatever he is, whatever he becomes, will always be his father’s instrument. My mother knew this. You ask how can a man use his son in this way, but the war taught her that anything is possible. Her own son killed my father. She suffered unspeakable grief.” She looked at me then, this younger woman who had helped me build my life yet again. “You’ve lived with this so long, Frank—don’t let it be the thing that kills you.”
“I am an old man—and I can live with that. I died once already, so I know something about the alternative. But if I don’t do this, if I don’t go to Berlin and try to see this through, I don’t know if I can live with that.”
We stopped walking. Braun didn’t say anything more—she didn’t have to—but she did turn and put her arms about my neck and press her forehead against my cheek. “Giannopoulos said he would go to Berlin with me,” I said. “He’s protected us all these years, and I owe it to him to help finish this thing.” When she tightened her arms around my neck, I said, “He’s right. I am a fortunate man.”
25.
Giannopoulos and I flew to Berlin in November. There was freezing rain and sleet, the worst imaginable weather. We had a full day to rest from the trip.
The television in my hotel room had channels in perhaps a dozen different languages, several in Arabic. In the evening I found a football match between Juventus and Fiorentina, broadcast in Italian, but there were so many fires and smoke bombs ignited in the stands that the two teams roaming the pitch were no more distinct than warriors doing battle in some impregnable fog that seemed a remnant of the Dark Ages. It might have been the cold, damp weather, and the long flights, but my legs were sore and I was having difficulty breathing.
Thursday morning we took a cab to a courthouse. The building, like so many in Berlin, was impressively modern, the sign of a people determined to rebuild their country. Inside, we were greeted by several American lawyers and officials from the U.S. Embassy, and then we were taken to a small, windowless room to wait until we were called into the court.
A young woman from the embassy, who was a translator, sat with us. Her name was Ms. Campagna, but she asked me in Italian to call her Valeria. She was in her early thirties, about Mary’s age, and she had deep brown eyes that looked right into mine w
hen she spoke. I guessed that she came from Alto Adige—some of her phrasing almost sounded German—and she nodded, her auburn hair moving about her head. “I’m from Sarantino, a village between Bolzano and the Austrian border.” Then all the joy in her face disappeared. “There may be some surprises, Francesco.”
“At my age, it seems I have run out of surprises. What could be left?”
This brought a shy, reluctant smile from her. Here I was, an old wheezing geezer in cold, raw Berlin, and I was flirting with this pretty Italiana. It was the language. I was a different man, speaking my native tongue. Giannopoulos watched us from across the table; he’d never seen me speak Italian before, and he was seeing me for the first time.
“They will ask you questions,” she said. “Keep your answers short. Everything in court must be translated, so there will be a delay which some find unnatural, disconcerting. Please just stick to the question. Don’t elaborate, unless you are asked to do so.”
“I understand.”
“He has very good lawyers.”
“Ex-Nazis.”
“Worse,” she said.
I didn’t fathom her meaning, but then I said, “Their children?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So,” I said, somewhat pleased, “there may be surprises.” On the table were bottles of water; I opened one and drank most of it without stopping. “Tell me,” I said in English. “Will he be there in the courtroom?”
“Yes. And you—”
Giannopoulos did something across the table that caused her to pause. We looked at him, but he was only rubbing his forehead.
“What?” I asked him.
They stared at me, both reluctant to speak first, and then, to their relief, there was a knock on the door.
“It’s time,” Giannopoulos said.
The courtroom was cavernous: enormous slabs of concrete vaulting high overhead, making a person feel infinitesimal, clearly intended to represent our relationship to justice. I had expected more people to be present. Vogel’s case had received international attention, but there were only the judges, three of them, in red gowns and caps; legal staff seated at two long tables facing the bench; and in the back a packed gallery, most of whom Valerie told me were journalists. There was heavy security—standing around the perimeter of the courtroom, almost seeming to blend into the concrete walls, were statuesque men and women in uniform, their expressions neutral, their eyes always staring dead ahead. They were armed.