by John Smolens
As he got up out of the chair, I said, “Years ago you asked me about an agent in northern Michigan.”
He was backed by winter light, gray buildings, gray sky. “The one that disappeared.”
“Yes, Roy Ferris. I don’t know why, but being here in Berlin makes me want to tell you this. He was a rapist and we got caught in the middle of a long-running family feud. He shot Claire as she was running away in a cornfield.”
“So what happened to him?”
“He’s pig shit. That’s all I’m telling you. He’s pig shit.”
Giannopoulos went to the door, but paused with his hand on the knob. “I’m sorry I brought you into this, Frank. I really am.”
“I’m not.”
He glanced over his shoulder at me as he opened the door. “Maybe after tomorrow it will have been worth it.”
By that evening Valeria looked better. She was more alert and she was able to eat a little soup. She spoke with the two men from the embassy, Randolph and Gidge—they spoke rapidly in German, but I understood that she was demanding that they take her back to Berlin immediately. When the doctor visited that night there was a long discussion, everyone sounding angry and disgusted, but when the doctor finally stormed out of the room, Valeria attempted a smile, though clearly it was painful. “She will release me tomorrow morning,” Valeria whispered to me, “because I can be such a pain in the ass.”
Randolph and Gidge didn’t appreciate the fact that she and I spoke Italian together, but we pretty much ignored them, and finally they went out into the hallway and sat on a bench there. Much of the time Valeria was on her cell phone, I presumed with people at the embassy, and once I was certain she was speaking in German to Pomeroy. Around ten o’clock she sent me back to my room at the inn—Randolph tagging along—where I collapsed into bed.
In the morning, Valeria was released from the hospital and we were driven back to Berlin. I had been wearing the same clothes since Saturday; though there was dried blood on Valeria’s jeans, somehow she had obtained a clean blouse. “That doctor was so eager to get rid of me,” she said, attempting a smile, “she was kind enough to give me one of her blouses.”
The trial resumed at ten o’clock, and we arrived at the courthouse with only minutes to spare. We entered the courtroom and sat in the gallery directly behind Pomeroy’s table. He spoke to Valeria for a moment, making a fuss about her injuries, primarily for the benefit of journalists who were gathering behind us. He looked at me and said, “I hope you’re not too disappointed that we didn’t send you home right away.”
“I’m in no hurry to leave,” I said. “If it will help, put me back on the stand.”
Pomeroy seemed distracted, and I realized that he was one of those men who often thought three steps ahead of the moment. “We’ll see,” he said.
Vogel and his lawyers hadn’t arrived yet and Pomeroy was clearly concerned; once he returned to his table to sort through papers with his assistant, he kept looking around toward the doors to the lobby.
Next to me on the bench, Valeria sat rigid yet weary. “Are you all right?” I asked. She only took my hand and kept staring toward the bench, though the judges hadn’t yet arrived. Her face was terribly swollen, the skin beneath her eyes discolored, and black stitches were visible at one corner of her distended mouth.
When the doors at the back of the courtroom opened, the gallery stirred and we looked around—harsh sunlight reflected off the marble floor in the lobby, making it difficult to see as Vogel’s wheelchair rolled slowly down the aisle. There was so much light behind him, he was just a dark silhouetted figure, seemingly larger than the frail old man I recalled from a few days earlier. The journalists in the gallery were reacting to something—I knew not what—and several stood up to take photographs.
Two guards swung the large double doors closed, cutting off the glare from the lobby. Valeria was staring at me now, and she gave my hand a squeeze before letting go, and then she took my arm, helping me as I struggled to get to my feet. I moved past her into the aisle and shuffled toward the wheelchair, causing the gallery suddenly to become silent.
“Ciao, amico mio,” he said, now an old man who seemed pinned by his own weight into the wheelchair. Yet the eyes were still the same, boyish and teasing.
“Adino?” I whispered.
I am not a man who cries easily, and certainly not in public, but somehow I was on my knees embracing Adino’s thick shoulders, and we both wept while there was much jostling in the gallery as journalists tried to get a better view. “No one told me,” I said. His warm jowl was pressed against my cheek, and he replied, “I told them I wouldn’t come unless it would be a surprise—I wanted to see if you still had a strong heart.” He laughed. “If not, then I could at least say farewell.”
After perhaps a minute, hands took me by both arms—it was Giannopoulos—and I was helped to my feet, while Adino’s wheelchair was rolled down the aisle to Pomeroy’s table. Giannopoulos and I returned to the bench, and I sat between him and Valeria. She gave me a handkerchief, and it took me several minutes to calm myself.
When the doors to the lobby opened again, the gallery swelled with the sounds of murmuring and more jostling, and we stood up like everyone else. It was difficult to see at first, but slowly Vogel was wheeled down the aisle on a hospital gurney. There was something majestic about this entrance as he was accompanied by a medical staff of three, two men and a woman. The young woman, blonde and wearing a snug nurse’s uniform, pushed a stainless steel cart upon which sat an electronic monitoring system that was connected to Vogel by wires. His head was propped up on pillows, and below the large sunglasses, his face was as grim as it had been during the last session in court.
Pomeroy turned to me and whispered, “This is an even better photo op than the tearful reunion between you two paisans.”
“Had I known there was going to be a competition, Herr Pomeroy, I would have shown up in a coffin.”
It took considerable time to get Vogel’s gurney in place, and everyone in the courtroom settled. Finally, the judges came from a side door and took their seats on the bench, and this was followed by at least a half hour of haggling between the lawyers—to the point where it seemed that the session might not ever really begin. Eventually, though, Adino’s name was called and he was wheeled up to where he was positioned in front of the witness stand.
He testified for nearly two hours, confirming everything I had said about Gerhardt and Ruup and Vogel’s midnight tribunals. Medical records were introduced, all confirming that his Achilles tendons had been severed while he was a prisoner at Camp Au Train. Pomeroy led him through a series of questions that allowed him to describe in detail the night that he had been held down by several German soldiers while Vogel ordered that the tendons be cut. At this point Adino’s voice broke, and he had to pause to control his sobs as he explained that my crime of treason was saving an infant from a house fire.
During cross-examination, Fraulein Bok was unable to undermine Adino’s testimony. I came to realize that this had been Pomeroy’s strategy, to put me on the stand first, knowing that Fraulein Bok would raise doubts about my testimony, all to be neutralized by Adino’s appearance in court. He had not escaped the prison camp, and there were no questions about whether he was involved in the death of another prisoner. Upon Vogel’s orders, Adino had been horrendously maimed, and then he was sent home; decades later, the result of those inflicted wounds were still evident in the courtroom, and Fraulein Bok could do nothing with this large, simple, honest man who for decades had been confined to a wheelchair.
Seemingly on cue, Vogel’s medical staff became frantically active around his gurney, and soon the judges called for a recess so that he might be taken to the hospital.
We had lunch together before Adino was to fly back to Naples—the following day he was to attend a granddaughter’s christening. He and I emptied our wallets, showing each other photographs of children, grandchildren, pets, a store showroom in Marquette, a
butcher shop in Naples, each photo offered as further proof that what we had endured in Camp Au Train decades earlier had been rewarded. Adino could not eat much, a little soup, but he did have a glass of wine. He had learned a little English from his daughters when they were in school, and when we’d put our wallets away he asked Pomeroy, “The court will decide Vogel to be the guilty?”
Pomeroy seemed pleased with how Adino’s testimony had gone, but he shrugged. “There’s no knowing. It has taken years to get this far. It may take longer. But that stunt—rushing him out of the courtroom due to a medical ‘emergency’—it’s a sign that they fear things won’t go their way.”
After Valeria translated this for Adino, he shifted in his wheelchair and placed his hand on my wrist. In Italian, he said, “Did you see him there on that bed with all those wires? Do you wonder if he has suffered enough, that further punishment is no longer necessary?”
“I don’t know, Adino.” I glanced at Valeria’s swollen face. Her eyes were welling up. “If you’re asking if we’ve all suffered enough, I just don’t know.”
Adino looked down the table toward Pomeroy and Giannopoulos, and then said in English, “We have all suffered enough.” He smiled then and whispered in Italian. When Pomeroy and Giannopoulos looked at me, I interpreted for them. “But I would have come here if it killed me.”
Adino held out his glass and I poured him some more wine.
27.
I returned home exhausted.
After Mary had her second child, a boy, Braun and I spent much of July down in East Lansing trying to help out. In August, Tony and his family drove in from Minneapolis for a visit. Labor Day morning I was eating a hardboiled egg at our kitchen sink when I collapsed from a heart attack. They put a stent in one blocked artery and I barely left the house for the next three months. In December we received a Christmas card from Giannopoulos. Inside the card he had placed a folded newspaper clipping from the International Herald Tribune about Heinrich Vogel, alias Horst Albrecht, receiving a life sentence in Germany.
After New Year’s I began to feel stronger. For the most part I’d managed to keep my days remarkably uneventful and uniform. I just tried to keep my life pared down, wanting clarity and simplicity, not complication. Every afternoon, regardless of the weather, I walked our dog Gordie down to the beach. Sometimes on warm days Braun would accompany us as far as McCarty’s Cove, where she would sit on one of the park benches overlooking the beach and read. Rarely was she interested in the walk up to Presque Isle. By spring I could maintain a steady pace from the cove to Presque Isle and back, about five miles. That year I sold my share of the store to Lloyd Wiegand.
One afternoon in April, I was sitting at the kitchen counter while leftover lasagna heated in the oven. Braun was out doing errands. I was sorting through the mail—bills and advertisement fliers—when the phone rang.
When I answered, Giannopoulos said, “Frank, it’s me.”
“Where are you?”
“Florida.”
I could tell from his voice that something was wrong. “What is it?”
“Klaus Stemple. I just learned that he’s dead,” Giannopoulos said. “I’ve kept up with him over the years, just as I have with you. After he left Detroit, he lived in Mexico for a number of years, but about ten years ago he moved to Tucson.”
“And?”
“His daughter Juanita called me. She said he had been at his cabin up in the mountains somewhere outside Tucson and went missing for a day or so. The police finally found him. He’d been attacked by some animal—a mountain lion or something like that. He was really torn up. But when the police looked in his cabin they found signs of a struggle. Seems he’d been beaten first, then dragged outside. This girl, Juanita, called me from Mexico City, where her mother was from—Stemple had told her to go back there because she wasn’t safe in Tucson.”
“Anton Vogel.”
“Over the years we’ve lost track of him,” Giannopoulos said. “Once or twice there was some sign that he was in South America. During his father’s trial, he may have gone to Europe, flying through Amsterdam.”
“His father set him loose.”
“I think so. I never told you—I’m not supposed to—but Stemple also came to Washington to testify against Vogel, but not to Germany.”
“Any idea where Anton is now?”
“None.”
“We’ll never really be sure who killed JFK or what happened to Glenn Miller, and we can’t keep track of Anton Vogel.”
“Frank, I would get out of there.”
“And go where? I don’t have relatives in Mexico City, if even that’s safe.”
“There’s no knowing how many passports he has—there’s no sure way of finding him.”
“Well, guess where he’s headed. I was bait in Detroit. I’m still bait up here.”
“You want to call the police?”
“Get serious.”
“I can have an agent sent up there.”
“It’s a long way.”
“Tell me what I can do.”
Out the window, I could see the lake at the end of the street, raked by a gusting north wind. “I’ll let you know,” I said. “Thanks for the call.”
I would meet people during my daily walk on the beach. There were the regulars: people who walked their dogs, and people who were drawn to the beach in any weather because they needed to be close to the lake. I came to look forward to seeing them, and we would talk as we strode along the sand—talk about anything: our families, sports, anything but politics. There is nothing more therapeutic than walking a beach, preferably with the wind at your back.
At McCarty’s Cove, there is a stand of woods just above the beach. Gordie, who was always running ahead of me, loved to wander up into the woods, sniff around, and then sprint back down the beach to greet me. One afternoon, several days after Giannopoulos’s call, I heard him barking. He’d gone out of sight up one of the paths. I went to the edge of the woods and called him, but he only kept barking. I looked back toward McCarty’s Cove, where I could see, about a quarter mile away, Braun sitting on her bench, reading.
Gordie suddenly yelped and then I heard nothing. I went into the woods and followed the path. When I came to a small clearing, I found Gordie lying on the pine needle ground. He slowly got to his feet, and when he tried to walk he favored his right foreleg. I looked him over but couldn’t determine what had happened. There were no bite marks, no blood, so I didn’t think he’d gotten into a scrap with another dog. I looked around but saw no one.
I was having difficulty breathing. Slowly, I walked him back down to the beach. The bench in the cove was empty. Sometimes, if she were cold, Braun would go back to the house before Gordie and I returned. It took a long time to get him home. As we went along the beach, I kept looking back toward the woods where I had found him. When we finally got to the house I was relieved to find Braun at the stove making hot chocolate.
“I felt chilled suddenly,” she said, without looking away from the stove.
“Wonder if you’re coming down with something,” I said as I took off my coat.
“No. Just the change of the season.”
As I had, Braun looked Gordie over carefully. He seemed all right, though tired, and he curled up on his blanket by the back door. She returned to the stove and I sat at the kitchen table. There was only the sound of the whisk, which she swirled in the bottom of the sauce pan, a light metal-upon-metal sound that for some reason I have always loved.
“Why don’t you go away for a bit?” I said. The whisk continued its slow work. “Someplace warm.” Braun’s arm stopped moving but she didn’t look away from the stove. “Maybe San Diego? Your cousin’s always asking you out. You haven’t seen Marta in what?”
“Three years.” The whisk resumed its slow, circular revolutions. “I went out at Christmas.” She turned off the stove. “Want a cup?”
“Sure.”
She poured the hot chocolate into two mugs, added some
whipped cream, and sat across from me at the table. I gazed out the window at the backyard, where patches of snow still lay beneath the trees. She was watching me now. “You’d go with me, to San Diego?”
“I’ll stay put.” I could feel the heat coming up from the mug of hot chocolate. “I’ll look after Gordie here.”
“You don’t really care for Roger.”
I shrugged. “We don’t have much to talk about, and I don’t play golf. But you and Marta—you should see each other more.”
All the years together, we’d been honest with each other, but now I was lying. Not outright, but I wasn’t telling her the real reason I thought she should leave Marquette. It was a lie nonetheless. She picked up her mug and blew on the steam rising from the whipped cream. “I’ll give it some thought.”
Seldom did Braun decide things immediately anymore. Now in her fifties, she’d curbed her youthful impetuosity, but after several days she decided to go to San Diego, not because she wanted to, really, but because she couldn’t find any good reason not to go. She would be gone twelve days, and if she had any regrets about the trip, they evaporated soon after she arrived in the California sunshine. Roger, it turned out, was away on business, and Marta was teaching Braun how to make fish tacos and mix the perfect margarita. After telling me this on the phone—while drinking her second perfect margarita—I sat at the kitchen table and finished cleaning my Colt Python, which I’d bought years ago.
I didn’t have a plan. I was more concerned with the possibility that Anton Vogel wouldn’t show up before Braun returned from San Diego. Giannopoulos had called again, twice. Both times he’d asked if I wanted him to send someone up to Marquette. I declined. We didn’t know for certain that Anton would come here, I said, and if he did, we had no idea when he would do so. After I explained that I was alone at home for a dozen days, there was silence on the line, until he said, “Frank, you’re too old to be bait.”
I didn’t change my daily routine. Gordie and I walked the beach several times a day. Sometimes I felt up to cooking for myself, but other nights I’d go out to eat. It seemed strange to sit alone in a booth and order dinner for one—even stranger with the weight of a revolver beneath my jacket.