Josef Gryszkiewicz 230
* * *
Sharon was asleep when Green stumbled back into his house at two a.m. Balloons and streamers festooned the walls and ceilings of the living room, and more were piled on the dining room table, awaiting his help. In case he had missed the message, she had propped a big card in front of the pile— Green, take note.
He lay awake in the darkness, anguishing over what he should do. He’d already filed a preliminary missing persons report on Mendelsohn downtown and alerted the street patrols. He’d also phoned the Hamilton Police and reached some desk-bound detective who was propping himself awake with caffeine and who informed him there was no news. Gryszkiewicz was still missing. The gun was still missing. In the morning, Green knew he’d have to contact the actual investigators assigned to the case, might even have to go down to Hamilton to nip at their heels a bit. But he also had to intensify the search for Mendelsohn, and he had to talk to Howard again. All that would be enough to keep him busy until late tomorrow night, but his wife, curled peacefully beside him, needed—no, deserved—his help, and his son deserved his presence at the first major birthday of his life.
Daybreak had barely touched the eastern sky when Green, after an almost sleepless night, made his way into the police station. First on his list of imperatives was to get an APB out on Bernie Mendelsohn. Second was a call to Sullivan’s contact on the Hamilton force. Sergeant Strauss was just signing in and was not surprised to hear from him.
“Yeah, I was getting to you,” he said. “We did a check on our guy’s activities last Wednesday, to see if he had an alibi for your homicide up there. Well, he does and he doesn’t. Usually he and the wife stay alone at the house during the day while their daughter and her husband work, but that day the wife was in town most of the day for some medical tests.”
“So how many hours does he have unaccounted for?”
“Looks like at least six.”
Green did some rough calculations. He’d have to check with the airlines, but it was theoretically possible to fly to Ottawa Wednesday morning, murder Walker and fly back before any of his family returned home. It was a long shot, but a call to the airlines would tell him if it could have been done. With any luck, Mr. G. had even used his own name to buy the tickets.
“Good work,” Green said. “Was anyone in the family nervous that you were asking?”
“Nervous?” Strauss gave a short laugh. “They’re totally freaking out down here. The old guy hasn’t come back yet, and we’ve called just about every person he ever said hello to.”
“Did you check with his son, Anton? He’s a doctor in Montreal.”
“Yeah, twice. He’s been away at a conference and hasn’t spoken to his father in over a week.”
“Well, the old man’s internationally connected in ways they may know nothing about, so if he’s decided to drop out of sight, it’s a phone call away.”
“The family is scared he’s dead.”
“Why? Was his health bad?”
“No, he’s as strong as an ox, but when you’re over eighty, anything’s possible, eh? We’ve plastered his name around and alerted the hospitals, but so far no leads.”
“Trust me, you won’t get any. He’s probably half way to Paraguay.”
“What the fuck did you boys unearth up there in Ottawa? Some underworld conspiracy?”
Something like that, Green thought as he rang off and sat staring at his notes. It was a conspiracy of sorts, but he had a sick feeling not everybody was on the same side. Three old men were bound together by a common place at a common time— Lodz, 1942. Two were Jews in the ghetto, the third a Fascist guard. One Jew had been murdered on Wednesday, and the other had disappeared on Friday. The guard had dropped out of sight Saturday, after being tipped off by a friend.
Gryszkiewicz had both motive and opportunity to kill Walker, but how could he have known Walker would be in the Civic Hospital parking lot at that time? Only Ruth, Margaret and Don had known. So had Walker himself, of course, but what sense did that make? Would Walker himself have invited Gryszkiewicz?
Green’s mind raced over the idea, ferreting out the implications. Walker had received the letter from Howard on Monday or Tuesday. What had he done? He had not told his wife, that much was clear. He had not called his son. Had he called Gryszkiewicz? Why? If there was a pact between the two men to hide the past, why call him now? To tell him to keep quiet if Howard asked him? Why ask the man to travel over four hundred miles to make a request that could be done over the phone? Why make a face to face meeting? Unless…!
Perhaps Walker had phoned Mr. G., and it was Mr. G. who had insisted on the meeting. Insisted because he was afraid that the truth about his Nazi past was about to be revealed and he needed to eliminate witnesses. So he met Walker and perhaps demanded to know how much Howard knew and how he had found out. At which point Walker might have mentioned another survivor from Lodz who lives in Ottawa. Bernie Mendelsohn.
It would be simple for Gryszkiewicz to call all the B. Mendelsohns in the Ottawa directory. When he found the right one, he would have given him some story about a mutual old friend from Lodz or a search for a lost relative. Mendelsohn would have been easy prey for such a tale of woe. Once Mr. G. had Mendelsohn on the hook, he’d set up a meeting with him at 2:30.
As a theory, it had an elegant simplicity. Mr. G. murders Walker on Wednesday. Tracks down Mendelsohn on Thursday. Murders Mendelsohn on Friday. Tipped off by Dubroskie on Saturday. It fit all the known facts, but its foundation rested on two major assumptions. One, that Walker had indeed contacted Gryszkiewicz when he received Howard’s letter. And two, that Howard had talked to Bernie Mendelsohn then told his father about it.
Howard could not confirm the first assumption, but he could certainly confirm the second. Green did not relish another confrontation with the young doctor. He was afraid it was too late anyway, that if his theory was true, Bernie Mendelsohn was already dead. Unlike Gryszkiewicz, Mendelsohn had no place to go and no friends to call on. But if there were even the slimmest hope that Mendelsohn had eluded Gryszkiewicz and was trying to hide, Green had to find him first.
Howard Walker’s phone was snatched up before the second ring, and a breathy, urgent voice snapped hello.
“Rachel, it’s Inspector Green calling. I need to speak to Howard.”
“He’s asleep.”
“Then please wake him. It’s urgent.”
“Inspector, my husband has been on duty all night, and I’ve only just persuaded him to lie down. He hasn’t been sleeping, he’s exhausted, depressed and near collapse. If your damn phone call hasn’t already woken him, I will not wake him just for your convenience.”
Green was beyond subtlety. He’d managed less than three hours sleep himself and was now wound up into knots with worry about Mendelsohn. Her outrage took him aback and left him wondering what her own night had been like. Full of hurt and accusations, no doubt. I was only the deliverer of this bombshell, he thought, so don’t take it out on me.
“Rachel, I’m not doing this for my convenience. If your damn husband had told me the truth in the first place, I’d be home right now getting ready for my son’s birthday. Now get him!”
“Surely for everyone’s sake then, it can wait.”
“Not if another man’s life is in danger!”
He could almost hear her gritting her teeth as she weighed her next move. “I want you to know I’m not impressed with this,” she said finally. “Two minutes, and please go easy on him. He can’t take much more.”
I’m not impressed either, believe me, he thought with a flash of temper which he reined in quickly. For Mendelsohn’s sake, he had to focus on the best way to draw the information he needed out of Howard. He thought an appeal to Howard’s compassion might be the key, but he was wrong.
“Howard,” he began once he heard the doctor’s guttural croak through the wires, “I know this has been a difficult week for you, and I apologize for waking you, but I need you
r help. Bernie Mendelsohn has disappeared, and I’m very concerned for his safety.”
“Who?”
“Bernie Mendelsohn, the survivor you met with.”
“I met with an Isaac Perchesky.”
Green hesitated. The man sounded drowsy, but surely not so drowsy as to forget an entire meeting. “And Bernie Mendelsohn as well. Up here in Ottawa, remember?”
“In Ottawa? I’ve never heard of him.”
Green abandoned all attempt at gentleness. “Dr. Walker, stop playing games. Bernie Mendelsohn happens to be a friend of my father’s. He’s old, he’s sick, he’s got nobody in his life who cares about him, and now he’s disappeared. He greeted you with open arms, so the least you can do—”
Unexpectedly, he heard weeping at the other end of the line, followed by a crash. Rachel Walker’s voice came back on the line.
“Green, that’s it. Your two minutes are up!” she said and slammed the receiver down.
“Rachel!” he shouted, then glared at the phone in frustration, swearing.
“You won’t reach her by yelling at her,” came a voice from his doorway. Rich, precise and British public school. He jerked his head up to see Ruth Walker leaning against the doorframe. “We women in the Walker family are a strong-willed lot.”
“How did you get in here?” he demanded.
She stepped through the door into his office and drew back the extra chair from his desk. She eased herself into it stiffly, and for the first time he noticed she used a cane. She propped it against his desk.
“You don’t think I negotiated all those hurdles during the war, or tracked down Eugene’s past or immigrated to Canada, without learning a thing or two about bureaucracy. Your desk sergeant downstairs is a pussy cat in comparison.”
Looking at her sculpted grey hair, her soft blue eyes, and her long woollen cape, he realized she was probably right. Sergeant Simms wouldn’t have suspected her of anything nefarious in a million years. She sat back, removed her gloves and folded her hands in her lap.
“Inspector, it’s time to stop all this nonsense.”
“You mean the way you’ve all blocked my path at every step of the way, withheld facts, misdirected me, and even tried to convince me your husband wasn’t murdered in the first place?”
“No,” she countered without missing a beat, “your insistence that he was murdered. You’ve got my daughter positively scared silly, and my son on the brink of nervous collapse. It’s time it stopped.”
“It stops when I’m convinced that justice has been done.”
“Justice. That’s an interesting point.” She thrust out her delicately pointed jaw. “Look, for the last time—Eugene had been courting disaster for months. He collapsed that day, but the truth is, it could have happened any day. He’d been racing headlong into death for months. That’s what I tried to tell you on your very first visit to the house. I know all about the whiskey in the basement, I know all about the pact with Don and all about the investment certificates.”
When Green raised a surprised eyebrow, she nodded. “I don’t know what kind of fool Eugene thought I was that I wouldn’t notice. He was dragging himself down, and he was dragging the rest of us down with him—Margaret, Don, Howard, even our grandsons. Perhaps this all ended as it was meant to end.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, did it ever occur to you that perhaps God had a hand in it?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I didn’t. Because if there is a God and he has any power over what his creations are doing in their world—if he lets the horrors and the injustices prevail—then his purpose makes no sense to me. But, if at some other time and in some other way, a balance is struck, then perhaps there is a kind of divinity at work after all.”
“God doesn’t commit murders, Mrs. Walker,” he countered flatly. “People do, and for the most prosaic of reasons.”
She collected her purse and her cane, then rose to her feet. “You’re not listening. Eugene died of natural causes, not murder.” She paused in the doorway, pointing her cane at him. “Think about it, Inspector.”
Green rose from his chair and stared after her as she walked across the squad room, her cane swinging and her step surprisingly spry. Almost liberated. What the hell was all that about, he asked himself? She was asking him to drop the investigation. Fair enough—it was uncovering a number of shocking truths. She was asking him to stop harassing her children. Again, fair enough—a mother’s instinct to protect her children could be a ferocious force. But what was all that business about God, and the cryptical allusion to a balance being struck? What was she hinting? That his death was some sort of divine stroke of luck?
Or that she knew why he had died, and who had killed him? And more than that—she didn’t want it investigated. Because a balance had been struck.
Green looked at the notes he had scribbled in front of him. Notes about Gryszkiewicz detailing how and why he could have committed the crime. Surely if a Nazi collaborator had killed her husband, she would not be alluding to some sort of divine justice, but would be demanding a very human kind. But what if the killer was someone else? Someone she didn’t want revealed, or punished.
Howard.
His throat went dry with the sudden realization. She thought it was Howard. It had been good theatre she had enacted in his office just now, brandishing her cane and talking about divine intervention. But the truth was, underneath all the metaphysics, she was just trying to save her son’s skin.
The question was what did she know that he, Green, did not?
Fourteen
October 12th, 1942
The quiet is eerie now.
In my mind, I hear the beggar on the curb,
the children at play,
the old men arguing on the bench.
All gone.
Now ghosts scuttle along the street,
living and dead, hollow-eyed and empty.
I push the cupboard aside with a twinge of fear.
Always the twinge of fear.
But they’re still there.
I gather them in my arms, caress them back to life.
My princess is over the wall,
To trade for supper, maybe something special again.
An apple, an egg.
I set the Shabbas candles, the chipped cup.
Voices overhead, floorboards creak,
And somewhere,
A single shot.
Green was halfway to Montreal again when his cell phone rang.
“Where are you?” Sharon demanded. He had left the house that morning before she was even awake.
He glanced out at the passing trees. “At work, honey.” Not a lie, exactly.
“I tried there. They said you took off like a bat out of hell about an hour ago.”
“Oh, well, I’m actually on my way to a meeting that just came up. You know how I await them with bated breath.”
“Did you even bother coming home last night?” She was clearly not up to levity.
“Yes, and I saw your note. I’ll be home on time to do that, I promise you.”
“I hope so, Green. And on your way, could you pick up some more wine?”
“No problem. How about I pick up bagels too?”
“Bagels and wine?” This time she chuckled. “Why not? It’s a Jewish party, and there can never be enough food, right?”
He rang off with a sigh of relief that he had survived, then turned his cell phone off to stave off further interruptions. The effort of deceiving her and pretending to be cheerful on three hours sleep and a triple dose of caffeine had left him drained. Thinking ahead to what he had yet to face that day, he wondered where he’d find the strength.
Rachel Walker had obviously gone to work, because it was Howard himself who, after several rings, cracked open the front door with a bleary scowl. When he saw Green, he groaned, dropped his hands limply to his sides, and stumbled back inside without a word. Green followed
him in and shut the door. The doctor walked past the living room into the kitchen, which was small and crowded with the latest gadgets.
“Before you even start on me, Green, I need some coffee.”
Howard was dressed in an expensive beige velour bathrobe which gaped open to reveal his naked torso. He seemed oblivious as he measured beans and operated various machines. Soon the fragrant scent of coffee filled the room.
“Rachel had a feeling you’d come,” he said. “She wanted me to barricade the house. She was on the verge of calling in her father.”
“Well, you’ve got your own guard dog,” Green replied, trying to keep his tone light. He wanted to slide into this interview casually. “Your mother. She’s being very protective of you.”
Howard flushed. “Yeah, well, I spoke to her last night, after you left, and told her a few things I wish I hadn’t.”
“Oh?”
“About writing the letter, about how furious I’d been with him,” Howard replied vaguely. “It upset her needlessly.”
Green wondered how much detail Ruth had learned, and if that was what had aroused her fears. “She knew none of that before?”
Howard drooped over the counter, watching the coffee drip. He looked too tired to make sense of things. “I don’t know if she suspected anything. Sometimes I think she did— she never wanted to discuss his past. She’d shut us all up really fast if we got angry at him or started to speculate about him. As if he could do no wrong.”
“I think your mother feels guilty now for all the hell your father put you through.” Green probed ahead very carefully. “She’d forgive you anything, you know.”
He watched closely, but Howard showed not so much as a quiver of guilt. Instead, he raised his head and gazed at Green with blank bemusement. Green debated how to proceed. Howard’s activities in the days surrounding his father’s death had certainly been suspicious, but Green had very little concrete evidence on which to hang a motive, let alone the actual murder. Without evidence to back up an accusation, he’d accomplish nothing other than tip his hand and give the man plenty of chance to cover his tracks. If there were any to cover.
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