by Rex Miller
There were at least two other nearby leads, a veterinarian of Shtolz's approximate age, and a surgeon with the name Raoul Babajarh. He decided to check those two out next and, if time permitted, look up a party in a community called Kewanee. That would bring him into line with New Madrid, and from there he could swing back through Bayou City. If none of his semi-leads checked out, he'd call it a day and tackle the rest tomorrow. Then he saw another stop he reckoned would be on his way and inserted it into his itinerary. With that he pulled back into a stream of trucks and headed for the vet's.
Three hours later Aaron Kamen was winding up a conversation with a retired general practitioner in New Madrid, and for the first time he found someone opening up to him a bit.
“If you don't mind my asking, is this fellow you're looking for in some kind of trouble?” Kamen's day had convinced him that physicians were even more clubby and protective of their own brethren than lawyers or cops. His methodology had been to do a quick thumbnail profile of the type of man he was looking for, one who might have background or expertise in the medical or experimental disciplines, at least fifty years old—he ruled nothing out—and he might have a slight European accent, “a little like mine, perhaps."
None of the persons he'd personally contacted could have been Shtolz, but Nate Fletcher, retired from a lifetime of private practice, was physically excluded by his size. He was all of five feet tall. Many things about a person can be altered or faked, but among the most difficult is the simulation of diminutive stature. Spinal compression notwithstanding, a man who stood nearly six feet tall in 1944 could not have shrunk a foot in fifty years. When he asked if the man in question had been in trouble, it was not in the usual AMA tone.
“The man I'm looking for was a Nazi doctor. He was tried as a war criminal for the torture and murder of many, many persons. He was in his early twenties then, and we know he made his way to North America.” He told the man, Dr. Fletcher, about Alma Purdy.
“You need to go to the po-leece,” the man squeaked at him in a high-pitched voice. “That's the first thing.” Kamen assured him he had and showed him his list of doctors over fifty within fifty miles of Bayou City, his arbitrary parameters.
“I can name about a half dozen doctors over fifty you don't have on that list. And there'd be another two dozen between here and Cape if you'd include Dexter, ‘n’ places like Scott City. You want to make some notes?” He paused to give the youngster time to get his pen out and keep up with him.
“How'd he get his Missouri license? What's this fella got for a diploma to hang on his wall, one of them fakes? Here's what the real thing looks like.” He gestured behind him at a wall full of framed, gilt-edged certification. “Have you thought about sales? Fella like that would do right well in sales. Probably like it, too,” he snorted. “Check out your oddball ministers, too. Be a natural for him.” It was clear that Nate Fletcher was not overly fond of salesmen or men of the cloth. “Fella come through here once claimed to be a Baptist minister, turned out he was nothing but a—what do you call the perverts who molest little boys? Check out your priests and ministers. Bunch of charlatans."
“Well, I sure appreciate your taking—"
“And another thing, I'd run up to Farmington. They've got some older people in there. And I'd—"
“Sure do thank you, Dr. Fletcher.” He was gathering up his materials. Leaving the blow-ups of the old passport and driver's license photos. “If you think of anything else—"
“Talk to some of the old-timers around Bayou City. They can give you lots of names of people emigrated over back in the olden days."
“That's a good idea,” Kamen said, smiling, pulling his raincoat back on.
“I reckon you already talked to Doc Royal."
“Who's that?"
“Be sure to go see Dr. Royal. He's still up there in Bayou City. Been there all his life. He'd know all the old-timers."
“I don't think he's on my list,” Aaron Kamen said, not being totally successful at swallowing a yawn as he made his way to the door.
“He's the first one I'd talk to. Been here since God was a pup. Somebody told me he still works a couple days a week. He's probably like me, a good bit past retirement age. Got the clinic there."
“What clinic is that?"
“The Royal Clinic they used to call it.” He made a face. “But I don't rightly know what the name is now. Some younger fellas got ‘em a practice there in town, too, so I don't really know if Doc Royal's still open but go talk to him."
“I will,” he said, thanking the old gentleman and opening the door. As he headed down the sidewalk toward his car, the high screech of Nate Fletcher called out behind him.
“Don't forget some of the old preachers!" Kamen assured him he wouldn't and waved farewell.
The rain had slackened off somewhat, tapering to a fine mist that was just enough to keep the windshield wipers hypnotically sweeping back and forth across his field of vision. He was getting an eyestrain headache again, and felt unusually tired for no reason.
After fifteen minutes of driving along a slick levee road it occurred to him the terrain looked vaguely familiar, and it dawned on him he'd driven past these landmarks before, only from the opposite direction, when he'd visited Raymond Meara.
A pickup truck shot around him, the men in the front seat looking at him quizzically as they went around the irritatingly slow-moving car. Aaron rubbed his eyes under his glasses and turned the car radio on.
“—rain belt. Widespread heavy rain is flooding the lower Ohio River Valley and the thirty-day forecast indicates greater-than-average precipitation and warm temps for the next thirty days.
“Southeastern Missouri has been drenched with rain for the last five days, and the Mississippi is swollen by more than ten feet, threatening to flood its banks in many places.” Interference crackled. “—expected to reach the flood stage tomorrow. Flood stage there is forty feet. The Missouri Highway Patrol reports—” He switched to music and that irritated him even more, so he shut the radio off.
As he looked to his left he wondered if he'd have to drive through any water on the way back. He'd lost his directional bearings. If Aaron Kamen had glanced to his right instead of his left, far along the horizon he'd have seen a silver band glistening like a knife edge in a break between the distant tree lines. The slim, bright sliver was the edge of the mighty Miss pushing inland. He had sensed danger, true enough, but he'd looked in the wrong direction.
28
Kansas City
It was an ominous-looking day. Sharon Kamen picked up the phone in her apartment and dialed the weather number. A male announcer's voice told her in computerized neospeak that she should “ask Kansas City Federal Savings about a money-saving IRA account. Time ... seven nineteen. The forecast is ... cloudy with thundershowers likely. Turning colder tonight.” She hung up and put the small, collapsible umbrella in her briefcase.
An invisible photographer, snapping a shot of Sharon as she walked across the room with her cute little foot-long maroon-and-silver umbrella in hand, could have captured one of those fantasy poses one used to see on the calendars in gas stations. A beautiful, near-nude woman with long, lovely legs and a traffic-stopping pair of high, firm breasts saluting, tiny parasol covering the essentials, a cutesy caption beneath the artwork.
Or catch her with the phone in her hand and wrap the cord around that showgirl body and call it Telephone Trouble. No man could walk past such a pose without doing another take. The ideal female sex symbol, posing coquettishly from all the Vargas, Petty, and Moran paintings; forty years of centerfolds, going back to the era of Mutoscope arcade cards. The eternal cheesecake shot.
Post-feminist-era Sharon stood with bumbershoot, pantyhose, black high heels, and a whole lot of Sharon, surveying the choices in her closet. She began to dress, stepping into her underpants and pulling a bra over the chest that made otherwise mature men turn goofy.
But gorgeously coiffed, marvelously stacked, model-lovely S
haron was many people, as real people are, and none of them was the big-boobed bimbo on the calendars. What you saw, with Sharon Kamen, was most assuredly not what you got.
At that moment her mind was as far from her own sexuality as it could take her, dressing for her job at the Kansas City Emergency Shelter, and thinking about the night before at her father's apartment. Missing her mother, taken by cancer, missing their cozy rural home outside Kansas City, which her dad now professed to loathe.
To others, her dad was inevitably the Nazi hunter, but to her he was the wise, good, and fearless man who represented so many positive things in her life. Others compared him to a Midwest version of Simon Wiesenthal or Elie Wiesel, because their names were known, but he was nowhere near the level of the top luminaries in the field. Aaron Kamen had achieved a degree of notoriety in the heartland by helping to find two low-level war criminals who'd been at the death camps half a century ago. People could not see beyond his notoriety so they often couldn't see the real man, just as they couldn't see the real Sharon for her physical package.
Her dad had enriched her life, to be sure, with his shared philosophy of serving others, with his caring, his genuine belief in man's goodness, and with his deep, challenging desire to help others, which he and her mother had instilled in her. Not only did she love him as a daughter loves her father, she revered him. The latter emotion was not without emotional baggage. It carried a funny ambivalence that swung back and forth between awe and irritation.
There were times she'd give anything to disassociate herself from the overpowering Judaism and Zionist zeal that had shaped such a great part of her life. On the threshold of turning thirty, still unmarried but desired by men since her adolescence, she was torn and confused inside.
This woman, who was so flattered by eye, camera, and mirror, was smart enough to know that mirrors showed nothing. The skin and teeth and hair were wrapping paper. Inside, Sharon was a woman at war with herself,
She worshipped her father but was viscerally antagonized by his unrelenting Jewishness. She knew she believed in God but sometimes she'd watch her father lighting candles and saying the Kaddish, and question why she didn't feel what he obviously felt. Sometimes he behaved as if he personally carried the weight of millions of souls. What gave him the right to impose the dictates of his moral compass or his conscience on her? Also, she found his blind orthodoxy numbing, intolerant, illogical, and judgmental. Temple, she felt, was a guilty irrelevance, and she ignored it. “Israel's rightness,” and the basic implicit wrongness of the Palestinians, was one more piece of dogma that stuck in her craw.
Inside her secret heart this caring, complex, enigmatic woman was troubled by a dark, persistent fear: the daughter of one of America's most prominent Holocaust survivors was afraid she'd become a closet anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew.
Her father had called her at work and asked her to pick up something of hers he'd found in a storage box. His own belongings had remained unpacked when he'd moved following her mother's death. He'd taken the first apartment he'd looked at, and thrown some clothing in the closet and a few utensils and bare necessities into drawers and cabinets, but the rest of the household goods still sat in unopened moving company cartons.
The exception had been his files, which were meticulously arranged and cross-indexed and kept in steel drawers. When she'd dropped by his place after work he'd said he was on the track of “another one,” gesturing at the files and documents that filled the apartment. He was quite animated and in one of his most Jewish moods.
“Hypothesis,” he'd said loftily, sitting her down in the only available chair. “A space vessel lands and aliens disembark. Sentient beings who profess to be extraterrestrial evangelists from a planet beyond our solar system.
“They prove to the satisfaction of the scientific community that theirs is a civilization technologically superior to any dreamed of before.” Her dad's accent became thicker as his excitement grew. “They espouse a religion parallel to Judaism that completely negates the precepts of all other religious beliefs. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, they all go out the window, you see? Their version of the Talmud proves that there is but one religion, let's hypothesize. The question is this: precisely what does that discovery do to the nature of man's faith?"
“I don't know,” she said, shaking her pretty head and shrugging.
“It does ... absolutely ... nothing!” He lit up as if he'd just won the lottery.
“I don't get it."
“Of course you don't. But it wouldn't hurt you to think about it some, eh?” They talked some more and she left him in the opening stages of his latest rat hunt. He'd given her a box of her old 45-rpm records. For this she'd driven across town.
As she dressed for work she thought about the seventies oldies that had now migrated from his closet to hers. Billy Paul's “Me and Mrs. Jones,” which she'd played until the grooves had worn flat. Joni Mitchell. Steely Dan. For some reason the records depressed her even more than her father had.
Her dad's elevator stunk of urine and he didn't even have the sense to move a sofa from the house. Why couldn't he simply retire like everybody else's father? Why did he have to be the big Nazi hunter?
Then she pictured him taking her to shul and her heart was instantly so full of love for him she almost wept. Sharon realized once again that among the conflicting emotions she felt for her very special father was a core-deep, abiding, undiminished pride. So the calendar girl finished dressing, repaired her makeup, and went to work, the lyrics of old tunes in her head—"A Free Man In Paris."
29
Kansas City Emergency Shelter
“You know, I didn't do anything to provoke him. I would never flirt like that in front of him. Honest.” It hurt Sharon to look at the girl. “But he got so worked up. When we left the party he called me names and stuff all the way home, telling me I was a whore and that I made a fool out of him in front of his friends. And Duane was calling me all these names and I guess I talked back to him so he hit me. You know, like in the stomach.
“I fell down and I knew I was hurt real bad. I tried to get him to take me to the hospital and he wouldn't do it. He said the cops would investigate and because of his record he'd be thrown in jail. He said I wasn't hurt that bad, but I was bleeding and everything. I tried to call a cab and he knocked the phone out of my hand and started hitting me in the face.” Stacey Linley. A twenty-two-year-old womanchild.
“Did Duane know he'd caused you to miscarry, Stacey?"
“Yes, Miss Kamen, I told him. I'd passed tissue in the commode. He joked about it. Said it was a Kansas abortion. He thought it was real funny to call it that."
“You know you're lucky, Stacey. I don't suppose I have to tell you."
“I know.” Her face was a mottled collection of dark purple-blue and black bruises, but it was nowhere nearly as swollen as it had been in the police photos taken at the hospital.
“Okay, hon, first things first,” Sharon said gently. “We want to get you safely relocated.” The young woman was clearly frightened. “Just as we talked about on the phone, first we have to go to the Circuit Clerk's office and file the papers, right?"
Stacey Linley looked down at the floor. Sharon could see a tear in the corner of one of her blackened eyes. The bruises went down under the clothing. She'd been very lucky indeed.
“We can't put it off, Stacey,” Sharon said, a bit more firmly.
“I don't want to."
“You don't?"
“I don't have to, do I, Miss Kamen?” She'd asked in the softest possible voice.
“I told you what you have to do, honey. I'll be right there with you."
“I just want to get away from Duane.” The tear trickled down her cheek.
“That's what I want for you, too. We want all the law we can get on our side. We want you protected, right?"
The Linley girl only shrugged.
“Stacey, Duane is very dangerous. Look at what he did to you. You have to deal with that.�
� It was unusually still in the office. Sharon was aware of the thrum of the outside traffic, her clock, a door closing loudly in the foyer, a phone ringing, the small refrigerator in their makeshift lounge.
“Can't you make them put him in jail and keep him there until I can get away safely?” She sniffed back the tears.
“You don't have any money, Stacey. Nowhere to run to. No resources. Nothing. How can you get away?"
“Like I said on the phone, I have a girlfriend. She'd loan me a few dollars. I could take a bus somewhere. Anywhere. How could he find me?"
“Look,” Sharon said, “you're twenty-two. You don't have any money. I spoke with your friend and she said she could loan you about twenty dollars. You can't travel far enough to hide if this guy decides he isn't ready to call it quits and makes up his mind to find you. Not looking like this."
“I could wear lots of makeup and dark glasses. Just get on a bus...” Her TV fantasy.
“I've been through this a hundred times, hon. These guys can get very persistent about tracking people down. Duane's obviously violent. His record of prior arrests has to be considered. You need to go over with me to the Circuit Clerk. We'll file an ex parte. He won't be able to touch you, come near you, go anywhere near the apartment—"
“You don't know him,” Stacey Linley whined. “He's not gonna care about a piece of paper. It'll just make him mad.” Even through the discolored meat of her face, Sharon could see she was attractive. So many who came into the Kansas City Emergency Shelter were good-looking, bright, decent women. But they'd been called whores, ugly sluts, tramps, worthless, stupid bitches, and no-good mothers so many times they'd begun to believe it themselves. It was what her father termed the concentration-camp mentality, the breaking down of one's esteem, the first step on the road to domination.
Sharon Kamen was a caring and loving woman. She'd been part of the shelter since it originated. She was twenty-nine, and it was really the only job she'd ever held. She loved it and, at times, hated it for the frustrations. The Linley woman had been a referral from the Missouri Coalition's crisis team. They'd recommended Sharon immediately house this outpatient in the domestic violence ward they maintained for the extreme abuse cases.
