Max nodded in agreement. “He’s right, Jake. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. The Americans play by the rules.”
“Not anymore,” one of the prisoners said. “They’ve gone berserk. They’re shooting anyone in an SS uniform on sight. No questions asked.”
Max winced. “That’s hard to believe. Are you sure?”
“Positive,” the other prisoner replied. “They lined everyone up in front of a wall and machine-gunned them. Dozens of SS men executed in cold blood.”
A gasp of disbelief came from the group.
‘It’s not just the Americans. Bands of prisoners are roaming the compound beating SS guards to death. I was over by the—”
He was interrupted when a man in an SS uniform, supported by two prisoners, stumbled into the meeting room and fell face down across the table. They turned him over, revealing he had been severely beaten about the head. His scalp was, deeply, slashed, soaking his hair and the front of his uniform with blood.
“Otto!” Max gasped, recognizing Kruger despite the carnage. “What happened? he asked, as Hannah and the medical staff began tending to Kruger’s wounds.
“We found him on the ground next to the tanker truck,” one of the prisoners who had helped Kruger replied. “He’s lucky to be alive.”
The other nodded. “If we hadn’t seen him with you, we’d have finished him off.”
“We have to find a place to hide Max,” Hannah said.
“Hide him?” one of the staff members echoed with concern. “What happens to us if the Americans find out we’re hiding an SS officer?!”
“He’s right,” Max said. “I’ll just have to take my chances. If I can get back to my quarters…I…I could change into some civvies, and—”
“Forget it, captain,” a prisoner interrupted. “The Americans are already searching every nook and cranny of the SS camp. They’ll be all over this place, next.”
“They’re not the problem, yet,” Cohen said, taking command. “The Americans have orders to stay out of here. It’s the mobs of prisoners I’m worried about.”
“Either way Max doesn’t stand a chance,” Hannah said, clearly alarmed.
“We haven’t much time,” Cohen said. “We better come up with something.”
Jake looked off in thought, then brightened at an idea. “I have it,” he said, hurrying from the meeting room. Cohen and Hannah followed, leaving the staffers to care for Kruger. Max paused to check on his friend and winced at his condition. “He’s a good man. Do everything you can for him,” he said before hurrying after the others who had followed Jake to his quarters.
Max had just entered, and was closing the door when the sound of people running rose in the corridor. Loud voices and more thunderous footsteps erupted. Dr. Cohen guided Max aside and peered out the door to see clusters of frenzied prisoners dashing from block to block at the far end of the corridor. Many were wielding clubs. Some carried guns. “Where’s the SS man?!” one shouted on entering one of the blocks.
“We heard one of those SS bastards is in here!” a second yelled, pushing his way into another block.
“We know he’s in here somewhere!” the leader of a third group shouted.
Like packs of rabid dogs, the frenzied bands of prisoners were leap-frogging their way down the long corridor from one block in the Revier to the next. In a few minutes they would reach the one where Jake’s quarters were located—the one where the SS man they were looking for was now trapped.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
If Adam’s question had confused Dr. Epstein and stunned those gathered around him at the launch party, the old fellow’s answer landed an even more staggering blow. Few, if any, other than Ellen Rother with her in-depth knowledge of the Holocaust, knew of the massacre and execution of SS troops at Dachau by outraged GI’s, let alone of the revenge-driven prisoner rampages.
“I’ve got chills,” Stacey whispered to Adam as the crowd, shaken by the terrible thing that happened all those years ago, dispersed into smaller groups.
“Well, according to the GMA, Max Kleist was killed in action,” Adam said. “Now, I guess we know how.”
Stacey frowned in condemnation. “Executed in action sounds more like it.”
“So why do I still have a weird feeling in my gut about this?”
“Come on Clive,” Stacey said with an exasperated sigh. “It’s over. Don’t let it become an obsession. That was Hitler’s problem.”
“Hitler? Hey, no need to sugarcoat it,” Adam said, good-naturedly. “Look, it’s more than a feeling. Dr. Epstein said Max took the snapshots of the tattoos—his included. That means the handwriting should match; and it doesn’t. How can I ignore it?”
Stacey sighed again. This time in concession. “Fuck. I knew you were going to say that. Every time this thing gets resolved it comes undone.”
“Tell me about it.”
“But Dr. E seems so honest, so…so convincing. I mean there’s nothing mendacious about him. I just can’t believe he’s been lying all this time.”
“Maybe he wasn’t…”
Stacey looked baffled.
“…maybe he’s been living the lie for so long he actually believes it,” Adam concluded.
Stacey tilted her head considering it. “Sixty-five years…Yeah, I suppose it’s possible, isn’t it?”
Adam nodded. “I can’t let this go, Stace. I can’t.”
“Me neither; but like I said, you can’t destroy someone over a feeling. You need proof—beyond any doubt—and you don’t have it.”
Adam scratched at his two-day growth. “I think it’s time to take Paul up on his offer. He edited the Heim piece. He might have an angle on peeling this onion that hasn’t occurred to me.”
The launch party was winding down. Stacey and Adam slipped away and, twenty minutes later, were getting out of a cab on East 41st Street in front of Motenapo, the chic Italian eatery in the lobby of the Times Building. They picked-up a visitor’s pass at the security desk and headed for the elevators. The typography tracing across many of the 560 screens read: OBAMA COMMEMORATES 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF STONEWALL UPRISING. MEETS WITH PROMINENT GAYS AND LESBIANS IN WHITE HOUSE. Other screens displayed related stories from the archives: AHMADINEJAD CLAIMS NO HOMOSEXUALS IN IRAN — CONGRESS PASSES MATTHEW SHEPHERD HATE CRIME LEGISLATION — MILITARY’S DON’T ASK DON’T TELL TO BE REEVALUATED.
The next day’s edition of The Times was being put to bed. The patter of conversation and the muted clack of keyboards filled the well above the newsroom. As they approached Diamond’s cubicle, Adam and Stacey were confronted with a disconcerting sight: File boxes were everywhere. On the desk, on the floor, on the chairs; as were documents, books, and toppling stacks of folders. If Adam didn’t know better he would have thought the tall, thin fellow with the bald pate in the midst of it all, was—as the saying goes—cleaning out his desk.
“Hi…” Adam said gingerly. “What’s going on?”
Diamond tossed some books into one of the boxes then craned his neck around. “What’s it look like?”
Adam’s eyes crinkled in disbelief. “You’ve been downsized?”
“Furloughed,” Diamond corrected. “It’s the newly anointed word. See tomorrow’s story on…downsizing.”
“You’re kidding…”
“Nope. I dodged the first bullet,” Diamond said, referring to the merger of the Metro and National desks earlier in the year. “But the next one…right through the heart. Hey, for every one of me they execute, they can hire three of you. They’ve got to pay all those biz-bloggers, somehow.” The latter was a reference to the recent hiring of twelve on-line reporters despite an across the board hiring freeze. The unpopular move had been pushed by executives on the business side who argued that the blogs drew the kind of compulsive readers who were highly prized by advertisers.
“Geezus, Paul,” Adam said with a look to Stacey, “I’m…I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say, I…”
“Say whatever you came here to say,” Diamond
said with a glance to his watch. “I mean, they still own me for the next hour and twenty-two minutes. What’s up?”
“The suitcase story…”
“Nazis. Holocaust survivor. Ad Campaign…And?”
“Well…we’re not sure Dr. Jacob Epstein is who he says he is.”
“Oh dear…” Diamond said caught off-guard. “We aren’t talking the Heim thing, here, are we?”
Adam waggled a hand. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. It’s possible someone stole Dr. E’s identity. The evidence points to his med school buddy who was a Captain in the SS. A guy named Max Kleist.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“According to the records, Max Kleist is dead…”
“How convenient,” Diamond said with a knowing smile. “You have recent photos of Dr. Epstein, right?”
“Sure,” Stacey chimed-in. “Dozens of ‘em.”
“You have an old one of Dr. E or this Kleist guy?”
“We might,” Adam replied. “Why?”
“Well, when we were developing the Heim piece, we needed to be sure it was really him. We had a shot of young Nazi Heim and one of wrinkled old Heim taken in Cairo years later; and had them computer analyzed.”
“Bio-metrics,” Stacey said, smartly.
Diamond nodded. “Facial Recognition Technology to be precise. FRT matches dozens of points of coincidence in facial structure; then rates the chance of a match from zero to a hundred percent. We emailed the photos to this company in L.A. Couple of hours later it came back ninety-something percent; so we knew we had him.”
“So…” Stacey said, assembling the pieces, “If we can get our hands on a photo of the real Dr. Epstein…like one taken during the war…we do an FRT analysis with the one from the ad campaign. If they match, he’s the real deal; if they don’t, he’s an imposter.”
“Exactly,” Diamond said. “The technology’s highly reliable. It’s used routinely in casinos to ID gamblers who’ve been barred. They’re picked-up by surveillance cameras and run against a data base. Soft tissue changes dramatically over time, but bone structure doesn’t. Even after decades, FRT can ID one of these sharks in a couple of minutes. Works just as well on war criminals. It identified Mengele, who had plastic surgery and sported a bushy mustache, forty years after the war. Of course he wasn’t out to break the bank at the Mirage.”
“Well, Dr. E went to Med School at the University of Munich,” Adam said with a glance to Stacey. “Didn’t he say the Nazis used a photo from his student file on a fugitive alert?”
Stacey nodded. “Yeah, and, with luck, by now, it’s all stored in a database…”
“Be my guest,” Diamond said indicating his computer.
Within minutes Adam had accessed the University’s student database. He typed Jacob Epstein in the name block and 1943-1945 in Years of Attendance, then clicked on Search. Several seconds later, his shoulders slumped in disappointment. “Shit.”
“What?” Stacey prompted.
“We struck out,” Adam replied, tapping the screen. “The city was heavily bombed in April of ‘45. Most of the University was leveled. All student records were destroyed. Now what?”
“Well Dr. E’s passport and travel documents were in the suitcase,” Stacey replied, sounding optimistic. “Every one of them has a photo that was probably taken during the war.”
Adam brightened. “Yeah, and they’re all on the CD. All we have to do is—”
“Hold it—hold it,” Diamond interjected. “This is where it gets tricky. If someone stole Dr. Epstein’s ID, chances are they replaced the original photo with one of their own—which FRT would determine a perfect match. Which would give you absolutely nothing.”
“Yeah, but if it isn’t a match,” Adam reasoned, “….we’d know for sure someone’s been impersonating him. We just wouldn’t know who.”
“Point well taken,” Diamond conceded, gesturing to his computer again. “One way to find out.”
Diamond went back to packing up file boxes, and Adam went back to work on the keyboard. He accessed the computer in his cubicle on the mezzanine above, and searched the data he had downloaded from the Wiesenthal CD for documents with photos of Jacob Epstein. The one on his Austrian passport was the sharpest and least faded. Next, he downloaded the ad campaign photo he had used to compare the handwriting of the ID number tattooed on Dr. Epstein’s forearm to the handwriting of the ID number in the snapshot found in the suitcase. “Wow,” he said, on seeing the two faces side by side on the screen. “They don’t look like the same person at all. Maybe we’ve got something.”
“Maybe,” Stacey cautioned.
“What does that mean?”
“Just being realistic. I mean, a couple of months ago, I’m watching this movie on TCM. “The Seventh Cross”? Spencer Tracy, Jessica Tandy? He’s on the run from the Gestapo. She and her husband take him in?”
Adam nodded. “Hume Cronyn…her husband in real life too. Where you going with this?”
“Point is, I had no idea it was her. I mean, she looked just like Liv Ullman in her prime. Just like her. You’d never know it was the same actress in “Driving Miss Daisy” forty-what years later. Totally different.”
“I second that,” Diamond said. “Bill Gallo the sports cartoonist? He’s been writing a wartime memoir in his column. Had a couple of photos of him: How he looks now and back then when he was in the Marines. Not the same guy. No way.”
“Well, thanks for your support,” Adam said with a weary smile and a mouse-click that emailed both photos to the Bio-metric lab in Los Angeles. “It took, what, a couple of hours to hear back on Heim right?”
Diamond nodded and raised a brow. “You have any idea what time it is?”
“Aw shit,” Adam groaned, glancing to his watch.
Diamond nodded. “Even with the time difference they’ve already been shut down for hours out there.”
“Then when? Tomorrow? By noon?”
“If you get lucky and they run it first thing.”
“And if we don’t?”
Diamond shrugged. “What’s the difference? You’re not on deadline right?”
“Not yet…”
“Well, unless you need the info to stop Al Qaeda from blowing up the Vatican…” Diamond let it trail off; then, reflecting on the Church’s weak response to the ongoing pedophile priests scandal, he smiled and added, “Of course, these days, that might be a close call.”
“Easier than this one,” Adam said, glumly.
“Come on, it’s payday,” Diamond enthused. “Lighten up and enjoy the fact that you’re still employed.”
“While I still can, huh?” Adam quipped.
“Hey, Clive may not be on deadline, but I am,” Stacey said, her voice taking on an edge. “We just launched a global ad campaign; and if Dr. E turns out to be another Dr. Heim, it’s going to blow up right in our faces.”
Diamond started to laugh, then stifled it, and held up a hand in apology. “Sorry, I was just picturing all those unsold suitcases with bombs in them.”
Stacey’s blond spikes were bristling, now. “Just because this isn’t in the same league as stopping St. Peter’s from being cratered doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. The sooner I know whether or not I’ve got a disaster on my hands, the better.”
“Spoken like a staunch advocate of truth in advertising,” Diamond said with a sarcastic cackle.
“Just doing my job,” Stacey said pointedly.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
It didn’t take long for the groups of prisoners searching the Revier for Max to reach the end of the corridor where Jake’s quarters were located. Dr. Cohen was standing in front of the door, now, his face covered by a surgical mask as they rushed toward him.
“There’s an SS man in here!” a prisoner, waving a pistol, shouted. “Have you seen him?”
“No, no I haven’t,” Cohen replied, his eyes darting to the weapon, warily.
“What’s in there?” the prisoner asked, gesturing
to the door as the others surged around him.
“Doctor’s quarters,” Cohen replied, holding out a hand to stop them. “You can’t go in there.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Dr. Ezra Cohen, Chief of Staff. I’m in charge of the Revier, and—”
“Not anymore!” the prisoner shouted. He pushed Cohen aside and charged through the door followed by his club-wielding colleagues.
“Wait! Wait! Don’t go in there!” Cohen shouted, trying to stop them. “There’s a patient in there. He—”
Inside the room, Jake and Hannah were standing on opposite sides of the bunk tending to a patient. They whirled, as if startled by the intrusion, peering above surgical masks as the group of rabid prisoners encircled the bunk where the outline of a figure could be discerned beneath the pile of ragged blankets that concealed it.
The ringleader, brandishing the pistol, grabbed a fistful of the bedding. His eyes darted to an SS collar insignia peeking from beneath it. Instead of firing his weapon or pulling the covers off, he flinched and froze in place at the sight of the SS man’s face. The prisoner’s eyes were wide in startled recognition. And so were Max’s. The prisoner hovering over him was pasty and gaunt now, and his head had been shaved, but Max had no doubt that the man with the pistol, the man who was about to execute him was the farmer he had spared during his first shift on the ramp, along with his robust wife, sickly teenage son, and elderly grandparents—the latter subsequently culled-out and executed by Radek.
The two men’s eyes were locked in tense uncertainty when Cohen dashed into the room after the prisoners. “You fools!” he exclaimed, breaking the moment. “That patient has full-blown typhus! It’s lethal and highly contagious! I tried to warn you. The sooner you leave, the better!”
“Typhus?!” one of the prisoners exclaimed.
“He’s right. Let’s get out of here!” the farmer exclaimed, acknowledging Max with a veiled smile as he lowered the pistol and headed for the door. “Check the meeting room,” he ordered the others who were already hurrying toward it.
“Wait!” Hannah called out stepping to the supply cabinet. “You must all scrub down.” She removed a bottle of disinfectant from the cabinet and handed it to one of the prisoners. “Head to toe, clothing, everything. Go to the shower hall, now! Right now! Or you’ll all die!”
The German Suitcase Page 27