‘Yeah, I know.’
‘And he ain’t in trouble.’
‘No.’
‘’Cause the reason he’s a little squirrely, they say, is he was in one of them camps during the war. Them camps over there in Germany, the death camps. Spent the whole war in a death camp. Imagine, a kid, seven or eight when he went in. Come out alive but maybe a little bit off.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Could fuck up anybody from what I heard.’
Rhonda was no longer in front of Dudek’s building. The woman with the knitting gestured with her head toward the front door. He went in.
The hall was dim and smelled of fried onions and disinfectant. A staircase rose against one wall. The risers were worn to hollows by generations of feet. A door was open at the end of the hall. He heard Rhonda say something too quietly to understand.
‘Rhonda?’
‘In here, Mike.’
The apartment was shabby but neat. A small living room held a sagging sofa covered in faded chintz with a low wood table in front of it, a wooden armchair with a seat and back cushioned in brown corduroy, and a cracked leather ottoman. A cheap print of a rabbit hung above the sofa. The room smelled of furniture polish and cigarette smoke. He rapped the doorframe with his knuckles.
‘Back here,’ Rhonda called. ‘The kitchen.’
The kitchen was a long, narrow room with a big, black stove on one wall, and a deep metal sink flanked by zinc-topped counters on the other. Rhonda sat at a small table near a window that opened on the airshaft at the back of the building. A small, gray-haired woman ironed shirts at an ironing board. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth, and her head was tipped to one side so the smoke didn’t get in her eyes.
‘Mike, this is Mrs Tanenbaum. She’s kind of the super here. Mrs Tanenbaum, this is Detective Michael Cassidy who I told you about.’
Mrs Tanenbaum nodded to Cassidy and flipped the shirt so she could iron the other side. Her cigarette ash fell to the floor.
‘She has a key to Leon’s apartment. As soon as she’s finished ironing, she’ll take us up.’ She looked at Cassidy to make sure he understood the priorities in this kitchen: ironing, and then homicide.
Leon Dudek’s place was on the top floor of the tenement, where it would get all the heat that rose through the building in the summer, and little of the heat that rose through the radiators in the winter. Mrs Tanenbaum opened the door with a key from a ring that jangled with many other keys. She stepped back to let Cassidy and Rhonda in.
The apartment was one small room that had been chopped out of a bigger apartment next door. The only window looked out at a taller building and at the sliver of sky that showed over its roof. There were hooks along one wall near the door that held Dudek’s clothes. A small chest of drawers stood against the wall just past the end of the narrow iron cot where the dead man had slept. The cot was neatly made up. Three big pillows in faded red plaid lined up against the wall to give it a semblance of a sofa. A counter held a two-burner electric hotplate. Rough wooden shelves above it held a few pots and a frying pan and a mismatched assortment of heavy china and glasses. The toilet and sink were in the corner behind a curtain. An old wooden armchair was positioned next to a standing lamp with a torn shade. A small table next to the chair held a tobacco jar and two pipes in a wooden rack and three paperback books that were not in English. It was the room of a lonely man waiting out his days.
‘Mrs Tanenbaum, did Mr Dudek have any family in New York?’
‘Family? No. They killed all his family.’ Her voice was heavily accented.
‘Who did?’
‘The Nazis.’ Her look condemned him as an idiot. ‘You remember the Nazis, Detective?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Leon was in Auschwitz. So were his wife and daughter. They did not survive.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you? No. If you were not there, you cannot see.’ She rolled up her sleeve to show the blunt black numbers on her arm.
‘Did you know Leon?’
‘In camp, no. The men and women were apart.’
‘His wife or daughter?’
‘No. There were many of us. Too many to know. So, no.’
Rhonda prowled the room, touching the books, looking behind the curtain that gave privacy to the toilet, running her hand along the clothes on the hooks as if she might feel something left by the dead owner.
‘How long did Leon live here?’
Mrs Tanenbaum shrugged. ‘Five year. Since he come to America. He in displaced person camp in Germany four, five years. Then here.’
‘Did he have any enemies?’
‘Yes, but he no find them.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’
‘Enemies. He look for enemies, but he no find them.’ Again her look condemned him as an idiot.
Rhonda spoke to Mrs Tanenbaum in Yiddish and received a long reply.
‘She says that Leon was looking for people from the camp who killed his wife and daughter. She says he was a little bit crazy about it, that he followed people on the streets and sometimes confronted them, but they were never the people he was looking for.’
‘Guards?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Tanenbaum said. ‘People from camp. This is all I know. He said it to me, but not so clear.’
‘So he’d see someone on the streets here in New York and follow them thinking they were people from Auschwitz, but then he’d discover they weren’t?’
Mrs Tanenbaum looked to Rhonda for clarity. When Rhonda finished, the old woman turned to Cassidy and nodded.
‘Nazis in New York?’ he asked.
‘You think no Nazis in America?’
‘I don’t know. I never thought about it.’
‘Millions of Nazis. Millions. Not all dead. Not all in Germany now. Why not New York?’ She took a cigarette Cassidy offered and bent her head to his lighter for a moment. She looked at him with bright eyes through the smoke. ‘Leon a little meshuge maybe. Chase people in street. But he was good man.’
‘Did he have any friends I could talk to?’
Another shrug. ‘Maybe Friedrich.’
‘Who is Friedrich?’
‘Live here sometimes, there sometimes. He in Auschwitz too.’
‘Do they call him Freddy?’
‘Ja. Freddy.’
‘Where can I find him?’
‘Sometimes here. Sometimes not. Freddy a little …’ She tapped her temple, the universal sign of craziness.
‘Okay. Thank you, Mrs Tanenbaum. You’ve been very helpful. I’m going to look around the apartment for a while.’
‘Okay. You look. This weekend all go. Monday I rent.’
She left trailing smoke, and they could hear her slow tread down the stairs.
‘On Monday when this is gone, there won’t be a trace that Leon Dudek ever lived,’ Rhonda said. ‘One of millions.’ She followed Mrs Tanenbaum downstairs leaving Cassidy to search the room.
He did not know what he was looking for or if there was anything to find, but he set about it methodically. He went through the pockets of the clothes hanging on the wall hooks, and pinched the seams and shoulder pads to see if anything might be hidden there. He checked the undersides of the furniture for anything taped there. The toilet cistern revealed nothing but the float in rusty water. He lifted the thin mattress from the bed and put it back. He checked to see if anything hung outside the single narrow window. There were no papers in the table drawer, no diary or calendar, no scrap hidden between pages of the few books saying the butler did it. At the end of twenty minutes he decided he was wasting his time. There was nothing to find. Leon Dudek was one of those deaths that happened all the time, deaths that were only important to the person who died and that importance died with him, a death that did not leave a ripple. So why did it grind him? What did one man’s death matter out of the tens of millions who had died in the war? Leon Dudek was dead and there was nothing he could do about it. Anger twisted
up through him.
Cassidy sat down in the chair by the table and looked around the room. What had he missed? Where had he not looked? He lit a cigarette while he let his eyes wander the room. Sometimes you find something not by looking at it, but by letting your eyes brush by without focus.
A piece of cloth lay on the shelf next to the two-burner hotplate. He had passed over it in his search as a makeshift potholder. He got up to take a closer look. The cloth was about a foot square. It was made of faded pale coarse cotton with wide faded blue stripes and it had been worn thin and soft by use. Cassidy had seen shirts made from cloth like this on the dead and the nearly dead outside a small town in Germany in April of 1945.
The platoon rode in three Jeeps and an M9 half-track mounting a .50 caliber machinegun over the cab. Cassidy’s orders were to patrol east ahead of the battalion’s advance. If they met resistance they were to pull back and report. They had seen nothing of note all morning. They had driven through two small German towns, but word of their advance had cleared the streets and only occasional movement behind windows, the flick of a curtain, a child’s face pulled back by an adult hand, showed that people watched their passage.
The day was warm. The sun was bright in a blue, blue, cloudless sky. A narrow river ran fast with snowmelt down the center of the valley. Neat farms with whitewashed buildings occupied the flatlands along the river. The fruit trees in the orchards were in blossom, and brown-and-white cows roamed the green pastures. The war seemed far away, but it wasn’t. Once when the platoon rounded a bend in the road, crows hopped away from the pecked head of a dead Wehrmacht soldier sprawled in the ditch with a bloody bandage around his neck. He was a scrawny example of the Master Race. Someone had stolen his boots but had left the shreds of filthy socks on his bony feet.
A couple of miles down the road, the wind brought them the stench of rot and death and shit. Men covered their faces with handkerchiefs wetted from their canteens. A mile farther they found the source.
A high fence topped by razor wire and pierced by a wide gate led to the concentration camp. They knew of units that had liberated other camps like this, but nothing they had been told prepared them for what was in front of them now. Human skeletons in striped rags clung to the fence and stared at the Americans with uncomprehending eyes. The camp gate was open, but none of the prisoners clustered there came out. No one dared to take the first step to test the freedom offered.
‘Mendel,’ Cassidy said. ‘Tell them we’re Americans. Tell them it’s over. Tell them they’re free.’ He got out of the Jeep and waved his men out of the other vehicles.
Saul Mendel had been born in Germany, but his parents, sensing what was to come when Hitler came to power, sold their pharmacy and got the family out of the country. ‘Yes, sir.’ Mendel walked past Cassidy and stopped ten feet from the gate and began to speak in German. When he stopped, a murmur ran through the crowd. A woman, so emaciated she was beyond age, crumpled to the dust. Men and women in the crowd began to weep. They parted by some unspoken command as if to invite Cassidy and the platoon in.
A man attached himself to the platoon as guide. His head was like a skull, and when he smiled he showed the four teeth left in his mouth. His arms and legs were sticks. He was so thin he was nearly transparent. His name was Simon. He often reached out to touch Mendel as if to reassure himself that he was not dreaming.
There were rows and rows of low barracks on the bare, beaten earth of the camp, enough for tens of thousands of prisoners, but there seemed to be only a couple of thousand people inside the wire. ‘Ask where the other people are,’ Cassidy said.
Mendel listened as Simon spoke at length gesturing to the gate and then to another part of the camp. ‘He says that a lot of the prisoners were forced to leave in the last few weeks when the Allies started to get close. He says the rumor was they were being transferred to a camp called Dachau. The ones who are left were too weak to make the march. And the others are over there.’
Simon led them past an imposing three-story building of cut stone to where bodies were stacked near the wire. There were hundreds of them, men and woman, some naked, some in the striped pajamas the living prisoners wore. They had been piled up haphazardly like discarded waste. Their arms and legs were askew like broken branches. Their skull heads lolled and their eyes stared as sightless as stones.
Some of the platoon turned away. Some could not. Cassidy knew these were sights and smells and sounds that would never leave them.
‘Ask him if any of the guards are still here,’ Cassidy said.
‘Some of them are in the headquarters building, the big one we passed,’ Mendel translated.
‘Do they have weapons?’
‘Yes. He thinks so.’
Cassidy deployed the platoon in front of the stone headquarters building in a show of force. Someone moved behind the windows on the first floor. Mendel went forward and demanded that the occupants of the building come out one by one with their hands up. They were to leave all weapons behind. He shouted it twice and then stepped back to join the rest of the platoon.
Prisoners gathered behind them. They waited.
‘Burchard,’ Cassidy said. ‘Put a couple of rounds through the window to the left of the door.’
The BAR gunner sprawled in the dirt behind his weapon. He shifted the barrel, checked his aim, and squeezed off a short burst that blew the glass out of the window. Moments later, the front door opened, and a hand waved a white handkerchief in the gap. Mendel yelled for them to come out. The door opened, and an SS major stood there for a moment and then walked out into the open space between the building and the platoon. He was a tall, thin man with a high forehead and a bony face. He wore steel-rimmed glasses. His uniform was immaculately tailored. The trousers were tucked into polished, black boots. He held his hands at shoulder height as he came. He was followed by ten other SS officers and enlisted men. The major stopped in front of the platoon, drew himself up, and saluted crisply. ‘I am Major Heinrich Weber. Who am I addressing, please?’ His English was lightly accented.
‘Lieutenant Michael Cassidy, US Army.’
‘We are your prisoners. According to the Geneva Convention of 1929, we are to be removed from the area of combat as quickly as possible.’ It sounded like a speech he had practiced, but it was tinged by fear.
Someone in the crowd behind them translated. A murmur of anger ran like a wave.
‘We must go now before there is trouble,’ the major demanded.
‘We have a medic with us. There are people here who need whatever help we can give,’ Cassidy said.
‘The Convention is quite clear on this matter. Prisoners are to be removed from harm’s way.’
A hiss rose in the crowd like escaping steam, and feet shuffled on the packed dirt.
‘Lieutenant,’ Burchard said with warning.
Cassidy turned. The crowd of prisoners flowed forward. Some passed through the gaps between the platoon members. Some went around the ends of their line. The murmur had become a harsh noise that made the hair on the back of Cassidy’s neck stand up. The SS major stepped toward Cassidy, and his men bunched in behind him. The arrogance was gone and only the fear remained.
‘Do something, Lieutenant. We are your prisoners.’
‘What the hell do you want me to do, shoot them? I’m not going to shoot them.’
One of the men in striped pajamas put a gentle but firm hand on Cassidy’s shoulder, turned him away from the SS men, and pushed him back toward the waiting platoon as more prisoners filtered through and the crowd around the SS men grew dense.
‘Mendel,’ Cassidy said. ‘Tell them these men are our prisoners.’
Mendel shouted in German, but no one paid attention. The prisoners moved forward. They were emaciated, bent, diseased, and dying, but there were hundreds of them. Cassidy could see over their heads to where the SS men stood, tall, uniformed, well fed, strong. He could see in their faces they knew what was coming. The major pulled a small automatic from
his jacket. He pointed it uncertainly at the encircling mob, but they ignored it. When he pulled the trigger, the gun made a thin, flat crack that was swallowed up by the murmur of the crowd. A man went down. The major fired again, and another prisoner folded forward and fell at his feet. The noise of the crowd grew louder and harsher until it became a howl, and they surged forward. For a moment Cassidy could still see the SS men. They began to scream as the prisoners tore at them, and then they disappeared.
Cassidy stood in the middle of Leon Dudek’s room holding the piece of striped cloth that had triggered the memories. Had Dudek cut it from his own uniform? Why had he kept it? To remember? What made him think he could forget? He folded the cloth and put it in his pocket. If he left it in the room, he was afraid someone would throw it out.
As he went to the door, Cassidy noticed a small nail hammered into the wall. The wallpaper around it was discolored in a rectangle. Something had hung there, but there was nothing in the room that would have fit the discolored space.
He found Mrs Tanenbaum in her living room knitting something large and brown and asked her if Leon had had a picture of some sort hanging on the wall.
‘Yes. A print by the artist Albrecht Dürer like this one.’ She pointed to a small framed print of a rabbit that hung above her head. ‘The Dürer – how you say, hare? – is very popular where we come from. It brings luck.’
Not to Leon Dudek.
‘It’s gone.’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe he sell it. Maybe he no like it any more.’
Cassidy and Rhonda ate an early lunch at Katz’s Delicatessen on the corner of Ludlow and Houston. The waiter banged down their plates of food in the traditional manner, and went away to do more important things.
Cassidy took a bite of his sandwich and spoke around the mouthful of pastrami. ‘What did the ladies tell you about Leon?’
‘They liked him. More than that, I think. They didn’t say it exactly, but from the way they talked I think each made a pass at him, but he turned them away, nicely, apparently. They liked him very much, and part of it was that he was still so in love with his wife he couldn’t think of being with someone else. They thought it was sweet, and it made them very sad.’
Night Watch Page 9