A Song Of Shadows Part 21

'You have a good memory for names,' said Toller.

Had he made a mistake? No. A little anger. Just enough.

'I'm an old man,' he replied, 'but I'm not senile. I still read newspapers and watch the news, and Boreas is not so far from where I live. A lot has been happening there lately. Perhaps you should read the newspapers too.'

He sat back in his chair and let them see that he thought he had scored a point.

'And Ruth Winter?' said Demers. 'You knew of her, didn't you?'

'Yes,' he said. 'She was murdered. Again, I saw it on the news. This was a terrible thing.'

'Did you ever meet her?'

'No.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yes. Or I don't think I ever did.'

'So you're sure that you never met her, or you think you never met her?'

'I don't know!' He raised his hands in helplessness. 'Could I have pa.s.sed her on the street? Yes. Could I have raised my hat to her? Yes. Do I remember these things? No.'

'And her mother, Isha Winter?'

'Again, I may have pa.s.sed her on at the street, but I could not put a face to that name.'

Demers made a note on her legal pad with a pencil. He watched her write, and wondered what he might have said that was important enough to set down in print when a device on the table before them was recording everything. Nothing, he decided. It was another move in the game.

'Bruno Perlman,' she said, 'whom you say you did not know-'

'I did not know him. I do not "say" this. It is true!'

Demers continued as though he had not interrupted her '-had four numbers tattooed on his arm. They were Auschwitz identification numbers, and corresponded to the names of four members of his family, the Nemiroffs. Does that name mean anything to you?'

'No.'

'They were transferred from Auschwitz to Lubsko at the end of 1944.'

'I told you before, I knew nothing of this place until you came to me and began speaking of it.'

'I thought that you kept up with the news,' said Demers. 'It's been mentioned a lot lately. Thomas Engel served as a guard there. You know who Thomas Engel is, don't you?'

'I think I remember now. I have seen him on TV. They say he may be a war criminal.'

'He is a war criminal, Mr Baulman. We have no doubt of that. Have you ever met Thomas Engel?'

'No.'

'Are you certain?'

'Yes.'

'He lived in Augusta. That's not too far from you, is it?'

'Lots of people live in Augusta,' said Baulman. 'I haven't met most of them either.'

'So you know of him?'

'Yes, but only from what I have learned on TV.'

'Which mentioned Lubsko.'

'I suppose it must have.'

'Just to bring you up to speed, then. Lubsko was a nasty piece of SS trickery, designed to make prisoners wealthy prisoners believe that an alternative to being worked or ga.s.sed to death might be available, and their families might be also be saved. Small, clean huts, with gardens in which vegetables could be grown. No mistreatment. No brutality. No gas chambers. But you had to be willing and able to pay for it. Those who were sent there were very carefully selected. They were prisoners who were strongly believed to have squirreled away significant wealth, maybe in the hope that, even if they didn't survive the war, their children might, and they would be looked after. So these wealthy men and women would be brought from other concentration camps and shown an alternative way of seeing out the war along with their families if only they could afford it, the clear implication being that, if they chose not to reveal the whereabouts of their gold, or their paintings, or their gemstones, they, and their children, and anyone else related to them by blood, would be dead within days.

'Most paid up, Mr Baulman. They died anyway, of course, once they'd been bled of whatever they had managed to hide. Lubsko operated on a regular cycle, so every month a new set of families would be transferred once the camp had been scrubbed of their predecessors. To further strengthen the illusion of possible salvation, a pair of Judas goats was kept there: a German couple masquerading as liberal intelligentsia, victims of political rather than religious persecution, as it was deemed too difficult to have Aryans pretend to be Jews for fear their imposture would be discovered.

'Only one person survived the camp: a young woman named Isha Gorski. The Russians were advancing, and the guards were ordered to get rid of all remaining prisoners and torch the camp. Isha survived by hiding among corpses. Later, when she came to this country, she married a Jew named Isaac Winter and-'

'Isha Winter,' said Baulman softly, as though he had just made the connection.

'Mother of Ruth Winter. You're telling me that you did not know her history?'

'No, I was aware of none of this. How could I be? I was a not friend of hers. I do not think I ever met the woman.'

'Were you avoiding her?'

'No! Why would I avoid her?'

'For fear that she might recognize you.'

'But how could she? I told you: we did not know each other.'

'You live what, maybe ten miles from Pirna? Surely you must have visited the town.'

Baulman didn't even have to pretend to sound weary. 'I rarely go into Pirna. It is a small town. Things are expensive there. When I shop, I shop at the big supermarket outside Boreas, or maybe go to Bangor.'

'And you don't socialize?'

'Miss,' said Baulman, 'I am over ninety years old. My wife is dead. My friends are dead. Whom do you suggest I socialize with?'

He thought that he caught the man named Ross smiling. Demers did not smile.

'I still do not understand what all of this has to do with me,' Baulman continued. 'I think someone has been telling lies.'

'Reynard Kraus, the man whom you deny that you are, was sent to Lubsko as a general a.s.sistant with "special duties" at the start of 1944. Those duties included murdering children by lethal injection. We have confirmation of that in a note from Josef Mengele to the RSHA inquiring after Kraus's progress, and confirming that Kraus had attended the killing by injection of groups of children at Auschwitz, following which he had been permitted to perform the procedure himself, under Mengele's expert gaze. Apparently Mengele was concerned that his pupil might embarra.s.s him, but the RSHA's response was entirely positive: Kraus had given no cause for complaint at Lubsko, and his conduct reflected well on his tutor.

'You see, Mr Baulman, the difficulty with Lubsko was that, in order for the illusion of possible salvation to be maintained, very particular types of guards had to be used to staff the camp. They couldn't be your usual brutes. They had to possess a degree of refinement, of sensitivity. But that presented problems when it came to disposing of the prisoner intakes because refined, sensitive individuals tend to be bad at executing terrified naked men, women, and children. That was where Engel came in. We think that he and a couple of other men were kept off camp, and were only brought in when the killing needed to be done. But children or the few that had survived the other camps were dealt with separately: a quiet injection was deemed less damaging to morale, even that of a killer like Engel. That became Reynard Kraus's job.'

'I am not Reynard Kraus. I have told you this before.'

'We've struggled to find pictures of Kraus,' said Demers, as though she had not heard him. She flipped through some papers before her, and came up with a single photocopied page.

'Is this your driver's license, Mr Baulman?'

He peered at the doc.u.ment.

'Yes.'

'It's from your most recent renewal, right?'

He looked at the date.

'Yes.' The state required people over sixty-five to renew their license every four years. He had been pleased not to be deprived of it.

'Thank you.'

She put the doc.u.ment back in the pile before her, like a magician hiding a card.

'And this?'

He accepted a photocopied picture from her. It was the photograph taken of him when he first immigrated to the United States in 1952.

'Again, this is me.'

He'd had some work done after the war, just enough to blur his appearance in case anyone might remember Reynard Kraus: a thinning of the nose, a tightening of the eyes, a reduction in the size of his earlobes, which were conspicuously large, a family trait.

'And this one?'

He recognized his party membership photo immediately, even though it was blurred and damaged. He peered at it. He took off his gla.s.ses, wiped them on his tie, and examined it again.

'It is a very bad photo,' he said.

'It was part of a batch that someone tried to burn,' said Demers. 'Thankfully, the fire was put out before it could do too much damage.'

'I cannot tell who this is,' he said, 'but I do not think that it is me.'

'You don't think that it's you,' asked Demers, 'or you know it isn't?'

Baulman was conscious of walking on treacherous ground. He was tempted to deny entirely that this was his photo, but it still bore some resemblance, he supposed, to the man who had come to the United States in 1952. Already he was thinking forward to any possible attempts to deport or extradite him, just in case it came to that. A good lawyer might be able to use that photo in his favor.

'It looks a little like me, but it is not me,' he concluded. 'Is this where the mistake was made?'

'I don't think there is a mistake, Mr Baulman. Is this your handwriting?'

He looked at the doc.u.ment before him. It was some of the paperwork from his Pet.i.tion for Naturalization filed in 1958, after he had lived in the US for long enough to apply.

'Yes.'

'And this?'

Another doc.u.ment, this time is German. It was a requisition from, filed during his time at the RSHA and dated 1942. Again, there were superficial similarities between the handwriting on the American form and the German, but he had practiced hard at changing his handwriting in the intervening years.

'No.'

'We've begun preliminary handwriting a.n.a.lysis, Mr Baulman. Already we've picked up some points of similarity.'

Baulman didn't think 'points' would be enough. He was growing more confident. They had very little on him, and nothing that would stand up as evidence. He was increasingly convinced that all they really had was Engel's testimony against him, but Baulman knew what hearsay was worth in a court of law, especially coming from an old n.a.z.i trying to save his skin.

Demers set the three photographs of Baulman side by side: young, older, old.

'We're thinking of showing these photos around to see if they jog anyone's memory.' Only now did she smile at him. 'We'll be in touch again once we're done. Thank you for your time, Mr Baulman.'

She stood, and the others stood with her.

'Wait!' said Baulman. 'What do you mean by this "showing around"? Showing it to what people? You cannot do this. This is not legal. You are spreading lies about me!'

But they did not reply as they trooped out, and then a uniformed officer appeared at the door to escort Baulman from the building. Still, Baulman knew what they planned to do.

They were going to show his picture to Isha Winter.

45.

The surgeon gave Parker the all-clear, along with more painkillers and some advice about taking it easy, not straining himself, and not chasing armed men over dunes only some of which he intended to take. He made a call to Angel and Louis, and read a newspaper in his room while he waited for them to pick him up.

Only once did he venture from his room, and that was to peer through a window at Cory Bloom. A man was sitting by her bed, his face in profile. He was holding Bloom's hand and speaking to her, even though she was asleep. Parker did not disturb them. Shortly after midday, a worried-looking female nurse appeared at the door, along with an orderly pushing a wheelchair. He looked worried too.

'I don't need a chair,' said Parker. The hospital had given him a crutch, but he had no intention of using it. He had only just decided to rid himself of his stick his fall on the beach conveniently dismissed as an aberration before the encounter with Steiger, and he wasn't about to replace one support with another.

'We thought it might be, um, quicker this way,' said the nurse. She had a detectable Scottish accent.

'You in that much of a hurry to get rid of me?' Parker asked, as he shifted from his seat to the chair.

'No, it's just that, well, the men who are here to collect you are' she struggled to find the right word, and settled for 'large.'

Parker closed his eyes. The f.u.c.king Fulcis. Maybe I should just stay here, he thought. I could barricade the doors. Then he had a vision of the Fulci brothers breaking through like a pair of rampaging monsters, tossing aside fragments of wood and furniture like so much kindling.

'I'm sorry,' he said, although he wasn't sure what he was apologizing for.

'They haven't done any harm,' said the nurse, walking alongside him as he was being pushed. 'They just look intimidating. Are they friends of yours?'