The Storyteller

by Picoult, Jodi

  • • •

  As the doctor relays the post-discharge instructions to us, I wonder if Josef is thinking the same thing I am: that a dead man, which he hopes to be, does not have to worry about salt intake or rest or anything else on the printout we are given. The candy striper who wheels Josef down to the lobby so I can bring my car around recognizes him. “Herr Weber, right?” she asks. “My older brother had you for German.”

  “Wie heißt er?”

  She smiles shyly. “I took French.”

  “I asked for his name.”

  “Jackson,” the girl says. “Jackson O’Rourke?”

  “Oh yes,” Josef says. “He was an excellent student.”

  When we reach the lobby, I take over and wheel Josef to a spot in the shade outside. “Did you really remember her brother?”

  “Not one bit,” he admits. “But she didn’t need to know that.”

  I am still thinking about this exchange when I reach Leo’s car in the parking lot and drive it under the portico so that Josef doesn’t have to walk as far. What made Josef such a memorable teacher, and such a devoted citizen, was his ability to make these connections with individuals. To hide in plain sight.

  In retrospect, it’s been a brilliant plan.

  When you look someone in the eye and shake his hand and tell him your name, he has no reason to think you are lying.

  “This is a new car,” Josef says, as I help him into the passenger seat.

  “It’s a rental. Mine’s in the shop. I totaled it.”

  “An accident? You are all right?” he asks.

  “I’m fine. I hit a deer.”

  “Your car, and your relative passing . . . so much has happened in the past week that I do not know about.” He folds his hands in his lap. “I am sorry to hear of your loss.”

  “Thank you,” I say stiffly.

  What I want to say is:

  The woman who died was my grandmother.

  You knew her.

  You don’t even remember, probably.

  You son of a bitch.

  Instead, I keep my eyes on the road as my hands flex on the steering wheel.

  “I think we need to talk,” Josef says.

  I slide a glance toward him. “All right.”

  “About how, and when, you are going to do it.”

  Sweat begins to run down my back, even though the air conditioner is on full blast. I can’t talk about this, now. Leo isn’t close enough, with the receiver, to record the conversation.

  So instead I do exactly what he told me not to do.

  I turn to Josef. “You said you knew my mother.”

  “Yes. I should not have kept this a secret.”

  “I’d say that little white lie is the least of your problems, Josef.” I slow at a yellow light. “You knew my grandmother was a survivor.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Were you looking for her?”

  He looks out the window. “I did not know any of them by name.”

  I sit at the red light long after it turns green, until a car behind me honks, thinking that he has not really answered my question.

  • • •

  When we pull up to Josef’s house, the carpet van is exactly where it’s supposed to be, across the street. I cannot see Leo; he’s somewhere in the cavernous back with his receiver ready and waiting.

  I help Josef up the porch stairs, giving him an arm to lean on when he cannot bear his own weight. Leo, I’m sure, is watching. In spite of his earlier superhero story, I know he’s ready to rescue me if necessary, and he doesn’t find it unreasonable to think an elderly man who can barely walk is capable of doing harm. An eighty-five-year-old subject once came out of his house and started shooting, he told me, but luckily he had cataracts and lousy aim. We have a saying in our office, Leo had said. Once you’ve killed six million, what’s six million and one?

  As soon as the key turns in the lock, Eva comes running to greet her master. I lift her squirrelly little body and place her in Josef’s arms so that she can lick his face. His smile is as wide as the sea. “Oh, mein Schatz, I missed you,” Josef says. I realize, watching the reunion, that this is the perfect relationship for him. Someone who loves him unconditionally, who has no conception of the monster he used to be, and who can listen to any tearful confessions without ever betraying his confidence.

  “Come,” Josef announces. “I will make us tea.”

  I follow him into the kitchen, where he sees the fresh fruit on the counter and then opens the refrigerator to find milk, juice, eggs, and bread. “You did not have to do this,” Josef says.

  “I know. But I wanted to.”

  “No,” he corrects. “I mean, you did not have to.”

  If, that is, I was willing to kill him anytime soon.

  Here goes nothing, I think.

  “Josef.” I pull out a chair and gesture for him to sit down. “We have to talk.”

  “You are not having second thoughts, I hope?”

  I sink down across from him. “How could I not?”

  I hear the drone of a lawn mower outside. The kitchen windows are open.

  Shit.

  I fake an enormous sneeze. Standing up, I walk around and start ratcheting the windows shut. “I hope you don’t mind. The pollen’s killing me.”

  Josef frowns, but he is too polite to complain. “I’m afraid of what will happen after,” I admit.

  “No one suspects foul play when a ninety-five-year-old man dies.” Josef chuckles. “And there is no one left behind in my family to ask questions.”

  “I’m not talking about the legal aspect. Just the moral one.” I find myself fidgeting and force myself to stop, thinking of the rustling of fabric that Leo must be hearing. “I feel a little silly having to ask you this, but you’re the only person I would know who might even understand, because you’ve been there.” I look up at him. “When you kill someone . . . how do you ever get over it?”

  “I asked you to help me die,” Josef clarifies. “There’s a difference.”

  “Is there?”

  He exhales heavily. “Maybe not,” he admits. “You will think of it, every day. But I would hope you could see it as mercy.”

  “Is that how you thought of it?” I ask, the most natural flow, and then I hold my breath for his answer.

  “Sometimes,” Josef says. “They were so weak, some of them. They wanted to be released, like I do now.”

  “Maybe that’s just what you told yourself so you could sleep at night.” I lean forward, my elbows on the kitchen table. “If you really want me to forgive you for what you’ve done, you have to tell me all of it.”

  He shakes his head, his eyes growing damp. “I have already. You know what I was. What I am.”

  “What was the worst thing you did, Josef?”

  It strikes me, as I ask the question, that we are gambling. Just because Darija’s murder was the one written up does not mean it was the most heinous crime Reiner Hartmann committed against a prisoner. It only means that it was the one where he got caught.

  “There were two girls,” he says. “One of them worked for . . . for my brother, in his office, where he kept a safe with the currency that was taken from the prisoners’ belongings.”

  He rubs his temples. “We all did it, you know. Took things. Jewelry or money, even loose diamonds. Some officers, they got rich working in the camps for this reason. I listened to the news; I knew that the Reich was not going to last much longer now that the Americans had gotten involved. So I planned ahead. I would take what money I could, and I would convert it to gold, before it was worthless.”

  Shrugging, Josef looks at me. “It was not hard to get the combination to the safe. I was the SS-Schutzhaftlagerführer, after all. There was only the Kommandant above me, and when I asked for something, the question was not whether I would get it but how quickly. So one day, when I knew my brother was not at his desk, I went to the safe to take what I could.

  “The girl—the secretary—saw m
e. She had fetched her friend from her job outside, and brought her to the office while my brother was gone, to warm up, I suppose,” he says. “I could not let the girl tell my brother what she had seen. So I shot her.”

  I realize I am holding my breath. “You shot the girl who was the secretary?”

  “I meant to. But I had been injured, yes, on the front line—my right arm. I was not as steady with the pistol as I should have been. The girls were moving, frantic, they were clutching at each other. So the bullet went into the other girl, instead.”

  “You killed her.”

  “Yes.” He nods. “And I would have killed the other one, too, but my brother arrived first. When he saw me there, with the gun in one hand and the money in the other, what choice did I have? I told him that I had caught the girls stealing from him, from the Reich.”

  Josef covers his eyes with one hand. His throat works, the words jamming. “My own brother did not believe me. My own brother turned me in.”

  “Turned you in?”

  “To the disciplinary committee at the camp. Not for stealing, but for shooting a prisoner against protocol,” he says. “It was nothing, a simple meeting where I was reminded of my orders. But you see, don’t you? Because of what I did, my own brother betrayed me.”

  I am not sure what element of this story makes it, in Josef’s warped mind, the worst thing he ever did—that he murdered Darija, or that he destroyed the relationship he had with his brother. I am afraid to ask. I’m more afraid to hear the answer.

  “What happened to your brother?”

  “I never talked to him again, after that. I heard he died a long time ago.” Josef is crying silently, his hands trembling where they rest on the table. “Please,” he begs. “Will you forgive me?”

  “What will that change? It won’t bring back the girl you killed. It won’t fix what happened with your brother.”

  “No. But it means that at least one person will know I wish it had never happened.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I reply.

  • • •

  I get into the rental car and blast the air-conditioning. At the end of Josef’s block I turn right, into a cul-de-sac, and pull over at the curb. Leo is driving toward me in the van. He swerves so fast that the van goes over the curb, then hops out and pulls me out of the car and twirls me in a circle. “You did it,” he crows, punctuating each word with a kiss. “Goddamn, Sage. I couldn’t have done a smoother job.”

  “Are you hiring?” I ask, relaxing for the first time in two hours.

  “Depends on what position you’re looking for.” Leo frowns. “Wow. That came out wrong . . . C’mere.” He opens the back of the van and rewinds the digital recorder so that I can hear my own voice, and Josef’s.

  You killed her.

  Yes, and I would have killed the other one, too.

  “So it’s done,” I say. My voice sounds hollow, with none of the bright ring to it that Leo’s has. “He’ll be deported?”

  “There’s just one more step. I already called Genevra, my historian, and she’s headed here tonight. Now that we’ve got Josef on tape confessing, we’ll see if he’s willing to cooperate and talk to us voluntarily. We drop in unannounced—usually to see if the subject has an alibi, but clearly that’s not the case here. It’s just a way for us to get even more information, if that’s possible, to secure the case. Then Genevra and I head back to D.C. . . .”

  “Back?” I echo.

  “I need to write a pros memo, so that the deputy assistant attorney general can approve it, start legal proceedings, and issue a press release. And then, I promise you, Josef Weber will die,” he says. “Miserably, in prison.”

  • • •

  Genevra the historian is arriving in Boston rather than Manchester, because that was the quickest flight she could book. That means a five-hour round-trip drive for Leo, but he says he doesn’t mind. He will use the time to fill her in on the aspects of the case that she’s missed.

  I stand behind him, watching him knot his tie in the bathroom mirror. “Then,” Leo says, “I will drop her off at the Courtyard. From what I understand the beds are pretty comfortable.”

  “Are you going to stay there, too?”

  He pauses. “Did you want me to?”

  In the mirror, we look like a modern American Gothic. “I thought you might not want your historian to know about me.”

  He folds me into his arms. “I want her to know everything about you. From the way you are the consummate double agent to the way you rock out to John Mellencamp in the shower, and sing all the wrong words.”

  “They’re not the wrong—”

  “It’s not ‘you pull off those Barbie books.’ Trust me on this. Besides, Genevra’s going to get to know you when we go out after work in the District . . .”

  It takes me a moment before the words sink in. “I don’t live in the District.”

  “Technicality,” Leo says, shyly. “We have bakeries in D.C.”

  “It just . . . doesn’t feel right, Leo.”

  “You’re having second thoughts?” He freezes. “I come on strong. A hundred and forty percent. I know that. But I just found you, Sage. I don’t want to let you go. It can’t be a bad thing to know what you want, and run with it. One day, years from now, we can read the press release about Reiner Hartmann aloud to our babies and tell them that Mommy and Daddy fell in love because of a war criminal.” He looks at my face and winces. “Still too over the top?”

  “I wasn’t talking about moving. Although that’s still up for discussion . . .”

  “Tell you what. If you can find a Department of Justice job up here, I’ll move—”

  “It’s Josef,” I interrupt. “It just doesn’t feel . . . right.”

  Leo takes my hand and leads me out of the bathroom, sits me on the edge of the bed. “This is harder for you than it is for me, because you knew him as someone else before you knew him as Reiner Hartmann. But this is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  I close my eyes. “I can’t remember anymore.”

  “Then let me help you out. If Reiner Hartmann is deported or even extradited, it’s going to be news. Big news. Everyone will hear it—not just in our country, but all over the world. I’d like to think that maybe, the next person who is about to do something horrific—the soldier who is given an order to commit a crime against humanity—will remember that press release about the Nazi who was caught, even at age ninety-five. Maybe in that moment, he’ll realize that if he carries out his order, the United States government or some other one is going to hunt him down for the rest of his life, too, no matter how far he runs. And maybe he’ll think, I’m going to have to be looking over my shoulder forever, like Reiner Hartmann. So instead of doing what he has been told to do, he’ll say no.”

  “Doesn’t it count for anything if Josef wishes he hadn’t done it?”

  Leo looks at me. “What counts,” he says, “is that he did.”

  • • •

  Mary is in the shrine grotto when I arrive. I’m a sticky mess; the air is so humid that it seems to be condensing through my skin. I feel like I’ve replaced all my hemoglobin with caffeine, I’m that jittery.

  I have a lot to do before Leo gets back tonight.

  “Thank God you’re here,” I say, as soon as I reach the top of the Holy Stairs.

  “That means a lot, coming from an atheist,” Mary says. She is silhouetted against the dusk, in the kind of light that would make a painter swoon: fingers of purple and pink and electric blue, like the salvia she is weeding. “I tried to call you, to see how you were doing, with your grandmother and all, but you don’t answer messages anymore.”

  “I know; I got it. I’ve just been really busy . . .”

  “With that guy.”

  “How did you know that?” I ask.

  “Honey, anyone with two functional brain cells who was at the funeral or the gathering afterward could have figured that out. I have only one question for you about him.” She loo
ks up. “Is he married?”

  “No.”

  “Then I already like him.” She strips off her gardening gloves and sets them on the edge of the bucket she’s using to collect the weeds for composting. “So where’s the fire?”

  “I have a question for a priest,” I explain, “and you’re the closest thing around.”

  “I’m not sure if I should be flattered by that or if I should find a new hairstylist.”

  “It’s about Confession . . .”

  “That’s a sacrament,” Mary replies. “Even if I could grant penitence to you, you’re not Catholic. It’s not like you can sashay into a confessional and wipe your slate clean.”

  “It’s not me. I was asked to do the forgiving. But the sin, it’s truly, truly awful.”

  “A mortal sin.”

  I nod. “I’m not asking about how Confession works, for the person who’s confessing. I want to know how the priest does it: hears something he can barely stomach, and then lets it go.”

  Mary sits beside me on the teak bench. By now, the sun has sunk so low that everything on the shrine’s hill is glowing and golden. Just looking at it, at so much beauty in one place, makes the tightness in my chest loosen a little. Surely if there’s evil in the world, it’s counterbalanced by moments like these. “You know, Sage, Jesus didn’t tell us to forgive everyone. He said turn the other cheek, but only if you were the one who was hit. Even the Lord’s Prayer says it loud and clear: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Not others. What Jesus challenges us to do is to let go of the wrong done to you personally, not the wrong done to someone else. But most Christians incorrectly assume this means that being a good Christian means forgiving all sins, and all sinners.”

  “What if, even tangentially, the wrong that was done does have something to do with you? Or with someone close to you, anyway?”

  Mary folds her arms. “I know I’ve told you how I left the convent, but did I ever tell you why I entered it?” she says. “My mother was raising three kids on her own, because my father walked out on us. I was the oldest, at thirteen. I was full of so much anger that sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night with the taste of it in my mouth, like tin. We couldn’t afford groceries. We had no television and the lights had been turned off. Our furniture had been reclaimed by the credit card company, and my brothers were wearing pants that hit above the ankle because we couldn’t afford to buy new school clothes. My father, though, he was on vacation with his girlfriend in France. So one day I went to see our priest and I asked what I could do to feel less angry. I was expecting him to say something like, Get a job, or Write your feelings down on paper. Instead, he told me to forgive my dad. I stared at the priest, convinced he was nuts. ‘I can’t do that,’ I told him. ‘It would make what he did seem less awful.’ ”