Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

I wondered what Johnny’s teacher would say if Johnny revealed that his source was a homeless schizophrenic with no more than a high school education. Perhaps that wasn’t quite fair to Joel – according to his brother, Joel was very intelligent, and the material he’d provided to Johnny was based on his own empirical research. But still – if I were the teacher I’d prefer a more credible source.

  The only one of Joel’s correspondents who really intrigued me was a man who went by the clunky handle of Not Who I Think I Am – though with all the words jammed together without capitalization. He had grown up in Trenton, the son of a Holocaust survivor, and he was interested in learning anything he could about Auschwitz, particularly during the years 1943-45. His family had come from Berlin and he sought anyone who might have known an inmate named Karl Kurtz.

  Joel had apparently done some research on the man’s behalf, because he wrote that he had checked the archives in Trenton and been unable to find any record of Kurtz. He did include a note that mentioned the name was both German and Ashkenazi Jewish, derived from the German word for short. He had asked NotWho if he was a short man, but NotWho had not responded.

  Reading Joel’s emails about the after-effects of the Holocaust was fascinating, and I wanted to know more about what was going on in Trenton at that time. Were lots of survivors showing up? Was Shomrei Torah a place that they congregated? Was that how Myer Hafetz’s testimony had showed up there?

  By then, though, I’d had enough for one night. I looked over at Rochester. “Our last night of being temporary bachelors,” I said, as he lay on his side, his golden flanks rising and falling. “Do you miss Mama Lili?”

  He sat up.

  “Is that a yes?”

  Rick called as I was rubbing Rochester’s tummy. “My buddy told me that all the cold case files were digitized by a non-profit agency but right after that budget cuts came through, and the squad got scaled back, focusing only on cases in the last twenty years.”

  “Can he get you the digital file?”

  “He gave me the name of the group and I looked at their website. In order to request the file I’d need a subpoena, and you and I both know we don’t have enough to convince a judge to open that investigation.”

  “What’s the name of the website?”

  “Steve.”

  “I just want to look,” I said, though I knew I was lying.

  Did Rick know, too? He hesitated for a moment, then blew out a deep breath. “It’s called the Agency for Records Digitization. But Steve. You cannot hack into them. Do you hear me? That is illegal and I cannot be involved and I don’t want my best friend to get arrested and sent back to prison.”

  “I guarantee you, I don’t want that either,” I said. He was right; hacking into the site was a very bad idea and I couldn’t jeopardize everything I’d built in the last two years. “I give you my word, I won’t hack their site.”

  “Good.”

  I ended the call. It wasn’t illegal to do some research on the organization, though. To prove to myself that I was going to keep my word to Rick, I left the old laptop with my hacking tools in the attic, and used the legitimate computer to search.

  There was very little online about the ARD beyond a contact button, a log in for law enforcement officials and a mission statement that read: “To assist law enforcement by providing digitization services for paper files relating to unsolved crimes from the distant and recent past. Advances in forensic technology and evidence analysis may lead to the solution of cases that could not be properly investigated at the time of commission.”

  I went back to my search results. If I was interested in hacking this site, maybe someone else on the dark web had wanted to also – and didn’t have the same legal or ethical restrictions I did.

  There is a lot of information out there that doesn’t come up in search results. Experts call that the “deep web” – things like your bank information, your medical records, anything that requires a log in and ID to retrieve. If you pull them up yourself, it’s not illegal. But if others do, that’s a whole different story.

  There is another part of the deep web called the dark web – the place where hackers and crackers and script kiddies hang out, those who are interested in getting into those places where you ought to have permission. It’s where I find my hacker tools, where I visit forums to keep up my skills, and where all manner of nefarious deeds take place, from supplying fake ID to money laundering and more.

  It took some digging but eventually I found a forum dedicated to the Agency for Records Digitization. There were a lot of wild theories bandied about there – it was a front for the FBI or the CIA, further evidence of Big Brother’s incursion into our lives, and so on. Several hackers had tried to break in, with varying levels of success, and I found after some more digging that I could access the records they’d found.

  So I wasn’t hacking, I told myself. I was just using my talents for discovering information that was out there to be found.

  Whatever. My fingers were itching as I dove in the database that had been unlocked and reposted on a quasi-public site. The interface was rudimentary, very Web 1.0, with a simple search box and a button to click – not even the icon of a magnifying glass to glamorize your experience.

  I typed in “Sapinsky” and clicked the button. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until a single record popped up: Sapinsky, Morris, underlined and hyperlinked.

  I clicked on the link and was taken to a simple list of documents, each one a PDF file which could be read or downloaded. I saved each of them to a folder on my laptop, then exited the site.

  Adrenaline was coursing through my system. I hadn’t hacked in the sense that I hadn’t broken through any security measures set up by the ADR to prevent access to their data. All I’d done was benefit from someone else’s illegal act. I knew from reading legal opinions on the Wikileaks material that downloading and reading public available material was unlikely to be viewed as a crime unless you used material to steal someone’s identity or commit a collateral crime.

  Would Rick see it the same way? Good thing I was no longer on parole, so I didn’t have to worry about what my parole officer would say—or what he could have done to me if he’d discovered something like this on his watch.

  19 – Big Questions

  It was only nine o’clock, still early enough to pay an impromptu visit to Rick. “How’d you like to go for a ride?” I asked Rochester. “Go see your buddy Rascal?”

  Rochester recognized the key words in that sentence and began hopping around like a demented kangaroo. I thought I’d get a better response from Rick if I came carrying beer, so we made a pit stop on the way to pick up a six-pack of Dogfish Head. I parked in Rick’s driveway and then stepped up to his door, ringing the bell while holding the six-pack in one hand and my laptop in the other.

  He opened the door and Rochester rushed past. He looked at the beer and the computer, then back up at me. “This does not bode well.”

  “All legal,” I said. “I promise.”

  He blew out a long breath. “You’d better come in, then.”

  He popped the tops off a couple of beers for us while I turned on the laptop and opened the file directory. When he joined me at the kitchen table I explained to him how I’d found the files.

  “So someone else hacked the site before you did,” he said. “And you think that makes it okay.”

  I used the Wikileaks analogy.

  “That material was sent to the news media and posted everywhere,” Rick said. “You had to go digging for this.”

  “I did. But I didn’t break any laws to find it. If anyone committed a criminal act it was whoever did the original hack. And I have no knowledge of who that was or how they did it.”

  He frowned at me and thought for a while. “Fine, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Morris Jacob Sapinsky was a white male, age 31, with a home address in Trenton. His occupation was Rabbi, his death was classified “violent,” and the box tha
t read “found dead” was also checked.

  We read the description of the body and the visible wounds. Sapinsky had been shot in the chest by a small-caliber handgun. Stippling was observed around the wound, consistent with a shooter at close range. The manner of death was homicide, and an autopsy had been performed. The file was signed by the county medical examiner.

  The investigating detective was a man named Bernard Parker. He had spoken with a man who discovered Sapinsky’s body in the temple when he arrived for morning services, then called the police. In addition to that man, who spoke little English, Parker interviewed a number of men who had been at the evening minyan, or worship service, with the rabbi.

  Only one man provided any information. Sandor Rabinowitz, aged 52, a native of Hungary now residing in Trenton, said that Rabbi Sapinsky had been attempting to build bridges between new immigrants and more established residents. This effort had been controversial, resulting in many arguments among members of Shomrei Torah.

  Parker added that he spoke with a young boy named Solly, who had been studying with the rabbi that evening. He had a feeling that the boy knew something, but was too frightened to speak up, and Solly’s parents either didn’t speak English, or pretended not to.

  He concluded his report with his belief that the rabbi had been killed due to this controversy, and that the insularity of the Jewish community would prevent an outside investigator from discovering the perpetrator.

  “You believe this?” Rick asked me, when we’d read through everything.

  “It doesn’t seem reasonable that a Jew would kill his rabbi for doing charitable work. Even if members of the congregation were upset, they’d fire the rabbi before killing him.”

  “But it was an insular community, wasn’t it?” Rick asked. “So it’s possible that no one was willing to speak to this detective, and he made a conclusion based on the only facts that he had at hand.”

  Rochester and Rascal had been snoozing in the kitchen doorway, but Rochester woke up then and came over to me and woofed. “What do you want, boy?” I asked.

  “He probably wants a treat,” Rick said. He stood up and opened the jar in the shape of a dog where he kept biscuits, and Rascal recognized the sound and jumped up, too.

  He gave each of the dogs a treat, and I marveled at how easily our dogs could communicate with us without actually speaking.

  “There might have been a language problem, too,” I said. “I’ll bet most of the more recent immigrants didn’t speak much English so it was hard for Parker to interview them.”

  Rick nodded. “They didn’t have interpreters back then either. This is all you found?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me how you found this information.”

  I went back to the deep web database where the hacker had posted what he’d retrieved from the Agency for Records Digitization, and typed into the search box. But Rochester was nosing my elbow and made me hit the enter key before finishing the rabbi’s last name, sending a request for “Sapins” instead of Sapinsky.

  This time, two results came up – the one I’d found earlier, and a second one called Hafetz, Meyer.

  “That’s the guy who wrote the Holocaust survivor document,” I said. “At least, I think it’s the same guy—the name is spelled a little differently.”

  I clicked the link and downloaded a folder similar to the one on Sapinsky. The first document was another medical examiner form, dated about a month before Sapinsky’s death. Hafetz, too, had been killed by a shot at close range from a small caliber weapon. One of those whom the detective spoke to was a Rabbi Sapinski.

  My brain was buzzing with connections and I had to stop reading and pull out the translation Daniel Epstein had prepared for me. It was dated September 12, 1948. Then I looked back at the ME’s form, and pointed it out to Rick. “Hafetz was killed a month after he wrote up this document.”

  “You think there’s a connection?”

  I went back to the rabbi’s file. “See here? Another month later, the rabbi is murdered. Two dates that match could be a coincidence, but not three.”

  Rick sat back in his chair. “You know when Hafetz came to Trenton?”

  “According to the document that Epstein translated, Hafetz spent a year in a displaced persons camp in the American zone in Germany after he was liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945. Then he made a connection with a relative in New York who sponsored him to come to the States. Probably no earlier than some time in 1946.”

  “So Hafetz comes here, then dictates his testimony in September 1948. A month later he’s killed outside the junkyard where he worked. Then a month after that, the rabbi is also shot dead in his synagogue. Anything after that?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Any connection between Hafetz and the rabbi?”

  “Both Jews, both living in Trenton. It was a small community then. And the rabbi worked at the Hebrew Sheltering Home, helping refugees. So it’s a reasonable assumption that they knew each other.”

  “Which still doesn’t get us anywhere in the present.”

  “Suppose after Hafetz dictated this document he gave it to the rabbi,” I said. “Then Hafetz was killed, and the rabbi was worried, so he hid the document in the wall at the old shul.”

  “I can give you that. Then what?”

  “Whoever killed Hafetz discovered the rabbi knew about the document, and killed him, too.”

  “Why?”

  “That part I don’t know. But then Joel found the document when he was camping out at the old shul. Totally random, I know. But that opened this old wound, whatever it is.”

  “But we’re talking about something that happened almost sixty years ago,” Rick said.

  “There’s no statute of limitations on murder. Suppose there was something else at the shul, some other document or connection to the two murders, and Joel Goldberg found it while he was sleeping there. If it was hidden behind the Belgian block wall like the photos were, no one would have known to remove them when the synagogue moved, or before the demolition started.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I’ve been reading through Joel’s emails, and it’s clear he was obsessed with the Holocaust,” I said. “And you yourself said that it’s hard to know what’s going on in the mind of someone with schizophrenia.”

  “Let’s go back to the stuff about Hafetz’s death,” Rick said, and we looked again at the information from the digitized file. Hafetz’s body had been discovered in an alley next to the junkyard where he worked, and the detective – Parker again – had assumed that someone had tried to rob Hafetz, and in the scuffle Hafetz had been killed.

  “Well, this answers one question you had,” I said, once I located that reference to Rabbi Sapinski. “The rabbi and Hafetz knew each other. Since immigrants were less trusting of authority, it’s reasonable that Hafetz took his suspicions to the rabbi rather than the police. Sapinsky even told Parker that he had discussed the Holocaust many times with Hafetz, trying to counsel him and help him recover from his trauma.”

  “I can’t imagine going through something like that,” Rick said. “How can you go back to ordinary life after you’ve lived through what these people did? Seeing your friends and family slaughtered, being subjected to such awful conditions?”

  “We spent all of eight grade in Sunday school studying the Holocaust,” I said. “The big question was where was God when all this stuff was happening to his chosen people.”

  “And the answer?”

  “There is no one answer.” I tried to put myself back in that classroom in the school building at Shomrei Torah. Those small wooden desks, the chalkboard at the front of the room, the way the late afternoon light slanted in through the windows that looked out at the railroad tracks, the way our teacher had to pause when a loaded train came by and shook the walls.

  “Some people said that God abandoned the Jews,” I said finally. “Others said it was his way of testing us to make sure that we stil
l believed in him.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I thought a lot about God after Mary had the first miscarriage,” I said. “How could he do this to us? How could he kill that innocent baby?” I felt my voice choking up as I remembered the horror of that time. “I went to services a couple of times after that, out in California, and I spoke to the rabbi there. He reminded me that God moves in mysterious ways, that it wasn’t all about me, or Mary, or the baby. That there were larger forces at work in the world, that we were all part of that.”

  Rochester got back up from the floor, stretched his paws in front of him and yawned, then came over to nuzzle my knee. I stroked his soft fur, glad that I had him in my life.

  “And did that help?” Rick asked.

  “Eventually. When I was in prison, I recognized that Mary and I didn’t belong together, and having a child wasn’t going to solve the problems between us. That maybe this was God’s way of telling us that.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t like that idea, that this tiny baby had to suffer because of us. But I had a lot of time on my hands then, and I started to read bits of the Bible and the commentary, and I realized that the rabbi I’d spoken to was right. It wasn’t about us, or the baby. That God is not vindictive, or benevolent. He – or she – just is. And as long as we believe, we have to keep moving forward.”

  “I still go to St. Ignatius sometimes, you know,” Rick said. That was the Catholic church in Yardley. “And every now and then the priest will say something that resonates with me. That God handles divine justice, but that we are responsible for earthly justice. It’s why we have police and courts and prisons.”

  There didn’t seem to be much more we could do then, so I closed up my laptop. “Good job finding that information,” Rick said as I did. “And I’m glad you didn’t have to hack into anywhere to find it.”

  “I’m doing my best to stay on the straight and narrow,” I said. “Though I have to admit, it’s not always easy.”

  “That’s what makes us human,” Rick said. “Knowing the wrong that we can do, and resisting it.”