But if Howard were the killer, his motive was still a mystery. His father had been mistreating him for years and had rejected his wife, but that was nothing new. His recent discovery of his father’s hidden identity had shocked and outraged him, but it hardly seemed a motive for murder either. Had Howard discovered something else, perhaps in his discussion with Bernie Mendelsohn? Mendelsohn’s building super had said Howard was in tears after his meeting with Mendelsohn. Had Mendelsohn told him something about his father’s appalling cruelty—cruelty which began in the camps but continued with his son even fifty years later? And now, to cover up all the information that might give him a motive, Howard was denying the meeting ever took place.
The theory had a twisted logic, far-fetched and tenuous, but it was all Green had.
“Howard,” he began, accepting the coffee Walker held out to him, “why did you say you never met Bernie Mendelsohn?”
“Because I didn’t.”
“But the building super saw you. He described you to a tee.”
Howard put his cup down with a thud. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“He saw you coming out of Bernie’s room crying. You must have learned something terrible.”
Howard’s eyes filled with tears, and for once Green welcomed them. Maybe some of the man’s defences would wash away.
“You did see him, didn’t you?”
Howard fell into a chair, his head in his hands. “I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d never learned any of this stuff. I wish I could just remember my father as the drunken bastard I’ve always known. I can’t ever talk this out with him, find out why, or try to understand.”
“So Bernie knew him?” Green asked gently.
“Yes, he knew him. He said he’d never forget him, poor man. Such a sad old man. He invited me in, sat me down and made me coffee, no questions asked, as if just having a visitor was a treat. Then when I showed him a picture of my father, it was like he’d been struck by lightning. He went white, he fell into a chair, he started to shake, and I was afraid he would go into cardiac arrest.”
Green’s pulse quickened. Something major must have happened to sear Walker so indelibly into Mendelsohn’s emotions.
Howard fought for control a moment before heaving a deep sigh. “He wasn’t a well man, I could tell that just by looking at him, and I was afraid to push him, but I had to know. I couldn’t get this far and then leave all these questions unanswered. But he wouldn’t say anything for a while, just sat there staring. I finally got some brandy, and after a bit of that he came around. He apologized and said he’d lost his wife and children in the Holocaust, and recently he’d been thinking about them more and more. Seeing my father had reminded him.”
He fell silent, his head bowed, and Green forced himself to be patient. Finally, he couldn’t stand the suspense. “Why?”
“My father…my father…” a mere wisp of sound “…was a Nazi whore.”
Scraps of conversations raced through Green’s mind. No one is a saint who survived the ghetto… Leib turned his own father and brother over to the Nazis… Maybe the thing you want to hide from most is yourself.
“Was your father responsible for sending Mendelsohn’s family away to their deaths?”
Mutely, Howard nodded. “Them. And thousands more.”
Green chose his words carefully. “In the ghettos, the Nazis made the local Jewish leaders run the day to day business of the community and choose the candidates for forced labour and deportation. Some leaders cooperated because they hoped that by maintaining Jewish control, they could protect the entire community better. Slowly, they found themselves in a trap. They didn’t know deportation meant death.”
Howard had been shaking his head vigorously, and now he burst in. “No! I’ve been doing some reading, and I know all about the Judenrat. That was the Jewish municipal council the Germans set up to run the ghettos. But this was worse than that. My father was part of the Ordnungsdienst, Bernie Mendelsohn called it.”
“The Jewish police.” Green stifled his excitement as more pieces tumbled into place. The Jewish police had been set up by the Nazis to maintain order in the ghettos. They carried no weapons and were charged initially with enforcing bylaws, checking papers, directing traffic and other petty functions. At first, the ghetto residents saw them as a welcome alternative to the Germans, but when Nazi brutality, starvation and forced evacuation to the death camps increased, the Jewish police became vilified as mere enforcers of the SS. The paradoxes in Walker’s life suddenly made sense. His fear of exposure, his avoidance of Jews. His possession of German keys.
“Thugs!” Howard retorted. “That’s all they were! Doing the Nazis’ dirty work, ferreting out those in hiding, catching smugglers, informing on their neighbours. I had hoped that my father’s suffering in the Holocaust was what had made him the cruel, warped human being that I knew. But it appears he was like that all along. Leib Kressman, king of the sewer.” Howard’s eyes were blazing now, and he shook his head bitterly.
But Green looked up in astonishment. “Kressman?”
“That’s what Mr. Mendelsohn said his real name was.”
Green’s mind raced. Not Joseph, the middle-aged blacksmith, but Leib, another generation altogether! In a flash of insight he understood who Walker was, and what the black box had meant to him. And another facet of the Russian doll was revealed.
Howard was pacing now. “My father, a goddamn collaborator!”
Green forced himself to be calm. “It’s not as simple as that,” he replied. “It never is. He was still a teenager when the war began. A kid, afraid to die.”
“And that makes it okay? Millions died because they refused to betray.”
“The Nazis had their ways of persuading, Howard. They wouldn’t shoot you, they’d shoot your child. Or hang an entire village for the defiance of one man. They always seemed to know just where the weaknesses lay.”
“No, this was more than weakness, Inspector. This was cruelty. Bernie Mendelsohn told me how his family died. One night his wife was trying to smuggle some food into the ghetto for their children, because there were no rations for them any more. My father was patrolling the wall and caught her. He turned her in, and the SS guard shot her on the spot.”
“And if he hadn’t turned her in, he would have been shot himself.”
“Only if the guard found out.”
“It’s easy for us to say that, Howard, but there, with the machine guns pointing and spies hidden everywhere—”
“You still don’t get it!” Howard cried distractedly. “He wasn’t just saving his own skin! He was carving out a life of profit and ease—”
“But Howard—”
Howard barrelled on obliviously. “By selling his fellow Jews to the Nazis! After Mendelsohn’s wife was shot, my father went into their house, found his two children and brought them to the guard. To set an example, the guard shot them! Two little children, right before their father’s eyes!” Howard sagged back in his chair with his head in his hands and the fire of a moment ago quite gone. “How can I look Rachel in the eye? That’s the greatest irony of it all. I finally discover that I really am a Jew…and all I can feel is shame.”
“Enough to kill him?”
Slowly, Howard lifted his head as Green’s meaning sank in. “You think I killed him?”
“Did you?”
“No!”
“Then why did you refuse to tell me about the meeting? Why did you say you’d never heard of Bernie—” Abruptly Green broke off, as the full significance of this latest twist struck him. For here was the centrepiece of the whole puzzle! The moment when the lives of these three old men had come together. And with the placing of this piece, much of the rest of the picture suddenly made sense. Walker’s misanthropy and inner torment, his denial of his Jewish identity, his panic at Howard’s marriage, his assault on Gryszkiewicz and the pact of secrecy between the two men.
At the edges of his thoughts, Green was aware of Howard’s pain as the
son struggled to assimilate the picture of pure evil into which he had cast his father. Green knew that it wasn’t true, that the human psyche is rarely that black, and that much of Walker’s later behaviour was the result of the war within himself. Of the anger, the despair, the self-loathing which tinged everyone around him in black. After the war, the only remnant of himself that he could handle was the special tool box his father had made, probably as a gift to his teenage son with the hope that its secret contents might keep him safe.
The father whom he himself had sent to the gas chamber.
But Green was in no mood to try to explain all this. For as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, he put together something that the Civic parking lot attendant had said with something Mendelsohn’s superintendent had said, and their significance began to shift. A hazy alternative began to emerge, and he felt himself grow cold with dread.
“My God,” he breathed, “you think Bernie did it, don’t you?”
* * *
Green drove like an automaton through the farm country between Montreal and Ottawa. Even at noon, the highway was largely deserted, and the boredom of white fields and trees had a numbing effect on the senses. There was little to distract him from his tumbling thoughts. Yet after an hour of thinking, he was no closer to knowing what to do than he’d been when he’d left Howard.
Two old men were missing, their whereabouts a mystery. Mendelsohn had no friends or family beyond an estranged son in Philadelphia and a handful of pinochle-playing cronies at the synagogue. He had no place to go, no one to visit. Gryszkiewicz was a retired, reclusive immigrant who had rarely ventured from his neighbourhood since moving to Canada. His wife was completely baffled about the mystery friend who had invited him to visit. Green had not been baffled. Despite the man’s denial, Green had assumed the mystery caller was Dubroskie, warning his cousin about the police inquiry. Gryszkiewicz had every reason to fear a police inquiry into his connection with Eugene Walker, and every motive to track down the sole survivor who could reveal his Nazi past. The theory fit all the known facts. Gryszkiewicz had received a warning phone call from his cousin, had tracked down and assassinated his only witness, and then dropped neatly out of sight into the underground safety net of the party faithful.
But what if the phone call had not been Dubroskie, but a voice from the past? Not arranging safe passage to some Nazi haven in the jungle, but setting up a secret rendezvous from which Gryszkiewicz would never return.
Do I really want to know why he never returned? Green asked himself. I could just walk away from this. Forget Hamilton and Mr. G., drive back to Barrhaven and be all ready for my son’s birthday. Let Mendelsohn’s form of justice prevail.
After the Second World War, a small underground cadre of Jews had scoured the globe, relentlessly tracking down war criminals and executing them. As an officer of the law, Green knew he was sworn to uphold the system, but he’d battled evil on the streets long enough to understand why others might choose another route. Not simply revenge or redemption, but a swift, effective justice far more efficient than the clumsy legal apparatus over which the Department of Justice presided. So far, the War Crimes unit had managed to charge only a handful of the two hundred potential war criminals living in Canada. Of those cases which had actually reached the courts, one trial had resulted in an acquittal, another had taken more than two years to render its guilty verdict, and the rest had floundered in the legal maze.
Perhaps Bernie Mendelsohn thought he had found a better way. Sixty years later, on the eve of his own death, he had righted a wrong. And now, driving home dizzy from exhaustion, late for his son’s birthday, and running counter to everyone else on the case, Green wasn’t sure he wanted to argue the point.
His car tires hit gravel and he jerked alert to discover that the car had drifted onto the shoulder. He blinked his eyes and shook his head repeatedly to clear it, but heaviness weighed his eyelids. He pulled off at the Casselman exit and stopped at the Tim Hortons doughnut shop next to the gas station to order the largest jolt of caffeine possible. Slumped in a corner booth, he cradled his cup, leaned against the wall, and let his mind roam in endless loops through the facts. Sometimes, in free fall, his thoughts snagged on facts he’d never seen. Justice, betrayal, dying, balance, strike…
A long, dingy hospital ward stretched before him, where the patients lay on rows and rows of narrow cots. He ran desperately between the rows looking for Sharon, searching the hollow faces and calling her name. The cots transformed into wooden bunks and hands reached out, clutching at him as he passed.
“Mishka!” A voice cried out, loud and firm, and he turned to see his father standing at the side of one of the bunks. He wore pyjamas and carried a stick loosely in his hand at his side. He said nothing more, merely gestured to the figure on the bottom bunk. Green looked and saw Sharon gazing up at him. Her eyes were fevered and her colour grey, but there was a smile of joy on her face. Nestled in the crook of her arm was Tony, tiny and fragile again.
“Sharon! Tony!” Green cried and rushed forward. But as he reached to embrace her, he saw it was not Sharon but his mother, gaunt, hairless and yellowed with jaundice. As he recoiled with a cry, there was a shout from the other end of the ward and a man in black uniform came striding over. The man shouted in a foreign tongue, raised a pistol and fired a bullet through his mother’s forehead. Green found himself paralyzed, unable to cry out in protest as the guard raised the gun towards him. But with a roar of rage Sid Green swung his stick with all his might and struck the man, sending the gun clattering. The guard slumped to the floor, and only then did Green feel his movement return.
“Dad!” he cried. “Where is Sharon! Where is the baby!”
Sid had fallen to his knees at his wife’s side and had gathered her into his arms, but now he looked up at his son. His face had aged, his eyes grown weary. Slowly, he clambered back to his feet.
“Come, I’ll show you.” He took his son’s arm and led him out of the hospital into the sunshine. Stretched out in front of them as far as the eye could see was a barren, muddy field covered in tombstones.
“This is where we all are.”
Green started awake in a clammy sweat. Lukewarm coffee spilled over his hand. His heart was hammering, and his body went limp with relief as he realized where he was. Not in Auschwitz staring at the graves of his wife and child, but huddled in the corner of a doughnut shop on the Trans-Canada. He glanced at his watch. Two o’clock! His son’s birthday was due to start in three hours. He had barely enough time to get home and help Sharon prepare the house for the party. He had no time for Hamilton, no time to figure out where Mendelsohn was. Fate had intervened.
The dream had jolted him thoroughly awake, but his limbs were weak as he returned to his car and headed back onto the highway. He wanted nothing more than to revel in the comforts of the present and look ahead three hours to when he and Sharon would cuddle Tony in their arms and give him his first birthday present.
What present? he thought with dismay. What a prize father you are, and what the hell was that dream trying to tell you about that? He let his mind drift back to the images in the dream. And suddenly, one more tiny piece of the puzzle of Walker’s death fell into place. The cane! Amazing, even when his conscious mind was too tired to make sense of the facts, his unconscious mind kept right on at work. Somehow, Ruth’s brandishing her cane and the building super’s commenting on Mendelsohn’s cane had come together in his dream. He smiled in spite of himself. “How did you find the solution to this latest murder, Inspector Green?” “It came to me in a dream.” Where things are never quite what they seem. Where a stick is a cane, and years collapse into seconds.
Another image came to him, of the field of tombstones, of his father’s voice in the dream: “This is where we all are.” Of something Mendelsohn’s son had said: “He’s got plenty of dead ones to keep him company.”
Suddenly he knew where Bernie Mendelsohn was.
Fifteen
Nov
ember 25th, 2001
I am old, a spent and soulless shell,
trapped too long in a web of memory.
Too late, my son, I sit on our street corner,
watching little boys at play.
Hearing you, seeing you,
but unable to reach
Across the dead and the damned
that clutter my world.
A single shot
resounds across the arid decades of my life.
The web is pierced,
And I slip beyond its grasp,
to nothing.
For you are gone.
Green kept his foot close to the floor all the way along the 417, hoping that none of his brothers in blue were waiting in ambush. The little Corolla covered the remaining distance to Ottawa in less than an hour and was slowed only by the trucks and traffic lights along Hunt Club Road. By the time he reached the cemetery, the winter sun was slanting into the western sky, casting a yellowish mist over the graveyard.
Once inside the wrought-iron gates, Green stopped in dismay. The Ottawa Jewish cemetery was huge, and he had no idea where Mendelsohn’s second wife was buried. He tried to remember what his father had said about her. It had not been a happy marriage. She had been sickly from the start, and after the one child, she had more or less taken to her bed. She was a kind woman, Sid had said, but no match for Mendelsohn’s moods. Green remembered she had finally succumbed to pneumonia around the time his own mother had died, and it had been that bond which had brought the two elderly men together.
Since the two women had died around the same time, perhaps they had been buried in the same general section of the cemetery. Purposefully, Green set off across the snowy slope. He had covered about half the distance to his mother’s grave when he heard a slight scraping sound to his right. His eyes strained through the pallid light. It took a few seconds for him to distinguish a light-coloured tombstone in the distance with a dark, bulky shape obscuring one corner. He drew closer until he could distinguish the outlines of a human form huddled against the stone. It took only a second longer to recognize Bernie Mendelsohn.
Once Upon a Time Page 22