Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I pulled it out of my messenger bag. The spot of drool Rochester had left on Kalman Feinberg’s name was dry but still discolored. I handed the paper to Rick.

  “See here?” he said, after he’d read for a moment. “This guy Hafetz says that Kalman Feinberg died at Auschwitz. So how did he end up at this Feldafing place?”

  I looked at the paper with him.

  “Hold on,” I said after a minute. “Suppose Kurtz was lying about being Jewish when he entered the camp. I read about it, and it was the first all-Jewish displaced persons camp set up. Once you got in there, you had a golden ticket to go to Israel or the United States.”

  “So Kurtz pretended to be Jewish to get in,” Rick said. “But isn’t there a basic problem with pretending something like that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed to the place in Hafetz’s testimony where the police had forced him to drop his pants. “Wouldn’t they check that in the camp?”

  “You mean to see if he was circumcised?” I turned to my laptop. “Hold on a minute.”

  I did a quick search, then turned the screen so Rick could read. “This says that some German Jews didn’t circumcise their sons because they wanted to be modern. He could have said that.”

  “OK. So this Kurtz, a German, not Jewish, shows up at the camp and convinces them to let him in so that he can take advantage of the immigration options.”

  “And he changes his name to someone he knew back in Berlin who died. Maybe to honor his memory or hide his background. Maybe just because it was easier.”

  “And he comes to Trenton as Kalman Feinberg. Then what?” Rick asked.

  “He gets a job, he gets married. And then Myer Hafetz shows up.”

  “Who was also from Berlin, and knew that the real Kalman Feinberg died at Auschwitz.” Rick nodded. “But why does that matter to Kurtz-slash-Feinberg?”

  “Because he lied,” I said. “He married a Jewish woman. He named his son after the dead man’s brother. In the two years before Hafetz arrived, he had become a big shot at Shomrei Torah.”

  “It’s a big step from that to killing someone – to killing two people,” Rick said. “And right now this is all just conjecture. We could be totally on the wrong track.”

  “I need to talk to Saul Benesch,” I said. “He might have the key here. Why was he looking for Karl Kurtz now?” I told Rick about my plan to speak with Benesch at the Talmud study group on Wednesday morning.

  “Be careful what you say,” Rick said. “You don’t want to be the next one in this killer’s crosshairs.”

  26 – Everything Lost

  The dogs were still having fun and Rochester resisted my call to get him to leave. Twice. The third time I walked up to him and grabbed a hank of fur from the back of his neck. “March, mister,” I said. He looked up at me with those soulful big brown eyes, like I was destroying all chance of him having happiness in this world.

  I relented, as I almost always do. “Fine. You can have five more minutes of play.”

  I released my grip on him, and he immediately went down on his front paws in the play posture. Rascal yipped, and then they took off.

  “Puppy whipped,” Rick said. Then he held up his hand. “And before you say anything, I know, I’m just as bad as you are.”

  Five minutes turned into ten, as Rick and I sat and talked about nothing in particular. When Rochester was momentarily tired out, he and I left.

  When I got home, Lili wanted to know about Rick. “He seems to be okay, but he’s got to take some pills for stress.”

  “He’s got to ask Tamsen to marry him,” Lili said. “She’ll take care of him.”

  It was funny – I’d thought Rick and Tamsen were a good match, because he had a caretaker personality, and as a young widow with a son, she needed someone to take care of her. But she was a strong, independent woman, accustomed to being a mother, and I realized that they could take care of each other.

  Lili and I were each other’s best friend, backup and sounding board, and I knew first-hand that the stress relief Dr. Chen had prescribed for Rick was very therapeutic.

  Sadly, Lili was still catching up on all the work she’d missed while she was in Florida, so there was no kissing or cuddling for us. Instead she went up to the office to grade papers online, and I stayed downstairs with Rochester.

  Lili was pragmatic about my hacking. She understood that I had a compulsion to sneak into places online where I shouldn’t be, that I was trying my best to control behavior that might get me sent back to prison. So I did my best not to do things in front of her that might upset her or provoke an argument.

  With her safely upstairs, though, I could I turn on the laptop that contained my hacking tools. As I did, I thought about the conclusions I’d come to. How could I verify that Karl Kurtz, who entered Feldafing camp, was the same man as Kalman Feinberg, who left it? There was no exit record for Kurtz, or entry record for Feinberg, but that was just the starting point for a hypothesis.

  I went back to the results of the database program I had set up to search for Kurtz and Feinberg. I’d stopped paying attention to it when I discovered the reference to Kurtz at Feldafing, but now I check the full results, which had been saved in a text file on the laptop’s hard drive.

  There were no more records of the Karl Kurtz who had been born in 1922 in Berlin after his entry into the Feldafing camp. I did find a couple of places that had mentioned someone by his name as one of the guards at Auschwitz, but I dismissed those, because the Kurtz I was looking for was Jewish, and I’d already established that the name Kurtz could be used by Jews and non-Jews alike—as long as they had a short ancestor.

  The Kalman Feinberg who had been born in Berlin that same year had a much fuller life story. He had been recorded as entering Auschwitz, though his name was not among those on any list of prisoners freed.

  I looked at Rochester. “What do you think, boy?” I asked. “Did Feinberg slip through the cracks? Maybe his record is here, but his name was misspelled.”

  Rochester woofed and shook his head.

  “No? Then you think he died in the concentration camp?”

  He woofed again, louder, and this time he went down on his front paws in the play posture. I got up and fetched him a treat from the box in the kitchen, and he sat beside me crunching noisily.

  I looked back at the screen and the name Auschwitz jumped out at me. I couldn’t hear or say that name without a bit of a shudder, and a thank you to the Lord who had thus far kept me from suffering that kind of horror.

  Auschwitz. Auschwitz.

  I went back to the records on Kurtz and looked at the statements by survivors that said he had been a guard there. Suppose that was true, and that after the war was over Kurtz had appropriated Feinberg’s identity. They were the same age, after all, both from Berlin. How hard would it have been during that chaotic time after the camps were liberated to step up and pretend to be someone else?

  Someone whose whole family was dead. Who was left to know of the deception? He had known Feinberg as a boy, knew that Feinberg’s whole family had been killed.

  The answer came to me in flash that felt almost like the onset of a headache.

  Myer Hafetz knew. He had known both Feinbergs in Berlin and seen both die at Auschwitz. Then he had the bad luck to be sent to Trenton, New Jersey, where a man was pretending to be his old friend.

  A man who had been a guard at the very camp where his friend had died.

  What would Hafetz do if he discovered Kurtz masquerading as Feinberg? Write up the testimony for Yad Vashem? Then use that paper to confront Kurtz?

  Kurtz had already started a new life by then. I checked the records and discovered that he had married by then, a woman named Hina Levine, and begun working in the furniture store owned by his father-in-law.

  I knew that eventually Hina’s father would die, that Kalman would inherit the company and rename it Feinberg’s Fine Furniture, that he would become president of Shomrei Torah.
r />   But back then, he was a young man with a terrible past that anyone would want to forget, and a bright future ahead of him. If Hafetz told the community who he really was, he might be arrested for his role in the camp. Tried, sentenced, deported. Divorced.

  Everything lost. If only there was some way to keep Hafetz quiet.

  Kurtz had found that way. But what if before he died, Hafetz had confided in Rabbi Sapinsky? That was very believable – who else would Hafetz be able to confide in?

  With Hafetz dead, the rabbi might have spoken with Kurtz himself—which triggered his death. Because of the tensions between immigrants and natives, it was logical to me that the rabbi would have tried to solve the problem within his community, rather than involve the police.

  But that didn’t explain why someone had killed Joel Goldberg, or Daniel Epstein. Kalman Feinberg – or Karl Kurtz – was long dead, and beyond any earthly punishment.

  Unless I was wrong about something. I went back to the mysterious online individual who billed himself NotwhoIthinkIam, and had used Saul Benesch’s email address. What was Benesch’s connection to this whole business?

  He had been a boy in Trenton at the time of the two deaths, and I found it hard to believe he was guilty of them. Could he have discovered somehow that his father was not the man he believed, but Karl Kurtz instead?

  That would explain the online moniker. But why commit murder over it?

  “I am so glad to be caught up,” Lili said, from the top of the stairs, and I quickly shut down the laptop.

  “Congratulations,” I called up to her.

  “Are you going to come up here and celebrate with me, or are you going to stay down there?”

  The answer to that was clear.

  27 – Urban Myth

  Tuesday morning I left a message for Rick. I wanted to talk over my suspicions with him, but he hadn’t called me back by the time I had to leave Friar Lake for the Jewish Lit class.

  I dropped Rochester at Lili’s office, and kicked off the discussion in class by mentioning my search into name origins. “That made me think about how our names are such an integral part of our identity. How does having a name that identifies us as part of a religion or an ethnicity make us think about ourselves?”

  “My uncle changed his name from Plotnick to Platt when my cousins were little,” Noah said. “He said he didn’t want his kids to be discriminated against.”

  “My father’s family is Italian,” Ryan Giordano said. “Sometimes it’s weird for me, having an Italian name but being Jewish.”

  A young black woman named Shonda Levy said, “My great-great-grandfather was a Portuguese Jew who married a Jamaican woman, and nobody in my family is Jewish. But people always assume that my father’s a white guy, or that somehow my family converted.”

  I didn’t want to tell her that in Yiddish a “shonda” was a sin, so it was unlikely a Jewish child would ever have been given that name. But Noah didn’t have the same inhibition and he blurted it out.

  I had to quickly change the subject, reading out from a website I’d found, which indicated that while some German-speaking Jews took last names as early as the 17th century, most Ashkenazi Jews were among the last Europeans to take family names. They were accustomed to the patronymic – son of, daughter of, and didn’t change until they were forced to, first in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1787 and then in Czarist Russia in 1844.

  “There are people whose names were changed when they immigrated,” Jessica said.

  “That’s an urban myth,” Noah said. I wanted to disagree with him, because I remembered an incident I knew of when an American draft-dodger went to Canada—his last name had been misspelled on his paperwork, and he’d adopted that new name.

  Instead, I pulled up a website which agreed with Noah, and that led us to all kinds of other reasons why people changed their names. To avoid the law, because their gender changed, or because they didn’t like the name they’d been stuck with at birth.

  We segued into the names of characters in the works we’d read, as well as their authors. As students called out names, I put a list on the board, and then I assigned them to do some research on their phones and laptops and then make brief presentations. The diversity of names on the board was fascinating, from Emma Lazarus and her connection to the dead man Jesus had risen from the grave, to the expected Biblical references like Abraham Cahan, to all the names that ended in –stein, -ski and so on.

  By the end of class I had tied it all back to the questions of identity that Jewish American authors explored. I used names as well as Jewish stereotypes like big noses or greedy behavior, which went all the way back to Shakespeare’s Shylock and before that.

  When I stopped at Lili’s office to retrieve Rochester, Lili was standing by her secretary’s desk. “How’s your class going?” she asked.

  “It’s interesting. We talk a lot about identity, what it means to be a Jew, or an American. It’s so relevant to what’s going on in the world today.”

  “I agree. I have a girl from Syria in my introduction to photography class and she has a great eye, and a real aptitude for the technical aspects, too. If her family hadn’t had the opportunity to come to this country she’d have no chance at an education.”

  I told Lili I’d see her at home and attached Rochester’s leash to his collar, and we walked back to where I’d parked. On the way I checked my phone and realized that Rick had finally returned my call. Instead of calling him back, though, I drove directly to the Stewart’s Crossing Police Station.

  The desk sergeant there was an old friend of Rochester’s, and usually slipped him one of the biscuits he kept in his desk for the K-9 officers. The big golden settled behind the desk as the sergeant called Rick. “You can go on in,” he said to me, and I walked past the bullpen to the small office Rick used.

  “She said yes!” Rick crowed when I stepped in the office. We fist-bumped.

  “I expected she would. Did she like the ring?”

  “She loved it. She said it’s just what she would have picked out herself. And she was impressed that I knew her birthstone.” He sat down in his chair and I sat across from him.

  “At least that’s one good thing going on,” he continued. “You know the mayor lives in Crossing Estates, don’t you? Only a couple of blocks from Daniel Epstein’s house. He’s called the police chief a half dozen times, stressing about somebody breaking into a neighbor’s house and killing him.”

  “You said it wasn’t a break-in,” I reminded Rick. “That Epstein let his killer in.”

  “Semantics,” Rick said. He groaned. “Jesus, I’m starting to talk like you. Worrying about grammar and word choice.”

  “That must be a sign you’re feeling better. If you’re emulating me.”

  “So what brings you down here?”

  “I have a theory I want to run past you.” I explained the idea that concentration camp guard Karl Kurtz had usurped the identity of a dead neighbor after the war.

  “What proof do you have?”

  “It’s not so much proof as absence of proof,” I said, and Rick groaned. I went through all the steps I’d taken to establish what had happened to both Kalman Feinberg and Karl Kurtz after the war. That work had been legit, which I made a point of mentioning. “Kurtz drops off the radar,” I said.

  “If he really was a concentration camp guard, there’s a good reason for that,” Rick said. “He could have gone underground in Germany. Why go to the trouble of claiming someone else’s identity?”

  “Because he wanted to come to the United States? It was still hard to emigrate here from Germany, and only the Jews got preferential treatment and help from aid agencies.”

  “The pieces fit together,” Rick admitted. “But we’re still not seeing the whole outline of the puzzle.” He leaned back in his chair. “I was able to track down the woman with the hair that Gail mentioned. We found some fingerprints in Mr. Epstein’s house, and one of them led us to her. Her name is Shenita Durban and sh
e says that Epstein was mentoring her as she tried to start a business. She said that she went over to Epstein’s house once so he could give her some books.”

  “But her fingerprints were on file?”

  “She was arrested a couple of years ago for petty larceny,” Rick said. “She put all the blame on her boyfriend and she got off with some hours of community service.” He sat back. “The boyfriend’s a different story, though. We didn’t find his prints at the house, but he has a record for breaking and entering.”

  “But if this woman is involved, that would mean that Joel Goldberg’s death is not connected to Daniel Epstein’s. And that doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Sense or not, I have to follow every lead. When are you going to talk to that other guy, Benesch?”

  “Tomorrow morning after Talmud study,” I said. “I want to ask him if that online ID belongs to him, and see where the conversation goes after that. I still don’t see what connection he has to Kurtz.”

  “If you find out anything – anything at all – I want you to call me right away. Don’t go off in your usual half-assed way.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. “But I agree. I’m not interested in chasing any more killers, thank you very much.”

  I retrieved Rochester from the sergeant’s desk and we drove home, where Lili was already in the kitchen sautéing chicken breasts. I kissed her hello. “She said yes.”

  “That’s great! Keep an eye on these breasts and turn them over before they burn. I’m going to call Rick.”

  I heard her side of the conversation as I studied the chicken. How I would I know when they were about to burn? Why not just turn them over now and avoid a problem?

  “The football field?” I heard her say. “What possessed you to propose to her there?”

  I knew why. Rick had met Tamsen when he coached her son’s Pop Warner football team. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable guy choice to make—it was romantic, because of their history there, and also because it brought her son Justin into the picture, too.