Skin Deep

by Jerome Preisler

  “Let’s not quit on the idea,” he instead heard himself say to his own consternation. “There might be sources that haven’t occurred to us.”

  Nick rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.

  “You’re starting to remind me of Sleepy the dwarf,” Archie said.

  “I’m just a little dog-eared,” Nick said. “Look, I need to track down Sara and Hodges—they’ve been working on some skin samples together. Then I’m supposed to head over to city hall with Catherine.” He shrugged. “I guess Ecklie and the mayor want us to be stage props while they do their song and dance.”

  “Glad I don’t have tickets to that show,” Archie said.

  “With luck, I’ll stall out in heavy traffic on the way,” Nick said. “In the meantime, I’m gonna keep racking my brain for places that might—”

  Archie snapped his fingers and poked a finger through the air at him. “Wham!”

  “Wham?”

  “Wham, pow, you hit it right on the head,” Archie said.

  Nick looked at him. “Think you can explain what this is about?”

  Archie spun around toward his displays and began typing away at his keyboard. “Traffic,” he said. “It’s about Las Vegas traffic.”

  Nick slapped his brow as Archie briefly explained what had started him blurting out cheesy comic-book sound effects. “Hoss, you’re the best,” he said. “Can’t believe I never thought of it.”

  “Goes to show why you need techs around here,” Archie said.

  “Definitely. I—” Nick was interrupted by his cell phone’s call-forwarding ringtone. He got it out of his pocket, glanced at the caller ID display, and his eyes grew large. “Hello?” he said.

  “Hi, this is Karen Esco. The banquet manager from the Starglow.”

  “Yes, ma’… uh, Karen.”

  “I hope I’m not reaching you at an inconvenient moment.”

  “No, no, this is fine,” Nick said.

  “Could you possibly come over here? To the hotel? I can free up about half an hour around eleven-thirty, a quarter to twelve.”

  Which, Nick thought, was right when he and Catherine were supposed to show up at city hall together. Although, judging from her excited tone, he knew he wouldn’t have said no even if he hadn’t wanted an excuse to skip out on Ecklie’s press conference

  “Did you find something?”

  He waited, hearing her lower the phone from her mouth and speak to someone at her end. “Sorry, we’re getting the floral arrangements ready for a party, and it’s a little hectic,” she said after a moment. “What was it you asked?”

  “I just wondered if you’d found something.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “And not only that, but got the blessing of corporate counsel to show it to you. That’s why I called right away, Mr. Stokes. I think it might be exactly what you need.”

  Catherine heard her office phone ring and grabbed the receiver. “Crime lab,” she said. “Catherine Willows.”

  “Cath, it’s Sara. I’m at the storage warehouse. And I’ve got some good news.”

  Catherine sat up straight. “I’m listening.”

  “The Ilse Koch material was right where I thought it would be. Luckily, I’m the one who did that packing and filing, or it might’ve been buried forever.”

  “I won’t tell Gris you said that.”

  “Appreciated,” Sara said. “Anyway, I’m uploading the information to his computer with my palmtop. His notes, images, everything. He’s back from his dinner with the museum honchos, so hang tight at the office while he sets things up for a videoconference. It shouldn’t be too long—Gris did a lot of work on the minivid for his own reference.”

  Catherine held on to the phone, nodding. “I’ll be here,” she said.

  “Okay, Catherine, I should be watching the same images you are, so let me know if there are any syncing problems at your end,” said Grissom’s digitally transmitted voice over the Internet telephone connection. “Right now, you should be looking at Frederick Bachmann in nineteen forty-three. Approximate age twenty-seven. The photo was taken outside his home in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin… the same lovely town where German officials met to plot out their blueprint for the Final Solution about eighteen months earlier. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not.”

  About an hour after Sara had called from the storeroom, Catherine sat at her desk looking at the grainy black-and-white photo on her computer monitor. Posing with a small dachshund snuggled between his arm and his side, Bachmann was a tall, thin man in a double-breasted suit, his dark hair slicked back from his forehead in a sharp widow’s peak.

  “The picture came up fine, Gris,” she said.

  “Excellent.” A pause. “Frederick—or Fritz, as he preferred to be called—was a third-generation dealer of fine art,” Grissom explained. “When the Nazis began looting the homes of prominent Jewish families, he cut deals that allowed him to acquire confiscated paintings, sculptures, and antiquities and ship them off to family-owned warehouses in Switzerland or vaults in Swiss banks where they were favored account holders. In some instances, he was a commissioned middleman. In others, he bought the pieces outright from the Germans. Fritz sold works by Picasso, Cezanne, and Monet and hundreds of masterpieces by Rembrandt, relics from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome… I could go on and on. Some of them even wound up in American museums. What’s interesting is that these upright institutions weren’t concerned with the provenance of the works—their history of ownership running back to the creators. The only time that isn’t a normal part of the authentication process is when you’d rather not know.”

  “Selective blinders,” Catherine muttered. “Gotcha.”

  The still photo faded out, and another black-and-white image—or a series of movie images—faded in. The jerky film clip’s upper margin was stamped with a serial number that read, “OMGUS Headquarters, Administrative Meeting, Frankfurt, ca Sept. 1945.”

  Catherine saw a group of American and German military representatives around a large conference table, engaging one another with the brittle cordiality typical of such official occasions. Then the moving picture froze.

  “Bear with me, Catherine. I’m going to use my digital equivalent of a Telustrator, and you’ll recall I’m not very adept with electronic contraptions,” Grissom said as a circle appeared around a pair of men seated at one end of the table—one a German, the other in an American uniform. “It took me months to pry the snippet of film you’re seeing out of our National Archives using the Freedom of Information Act. The American officer is Colonel Jonas Whitney Stevens. The German is Oberst Gunter Bachmann.”

  She crooked an eyebrow. “Bachmann?” she said.

  “Right, there’s that name again. Gunter was Fritz’s older brother. Presumably, he hadn’t been keen on the family art trade and decided to attend the German Army’s Offizierschule in Dresden. Immediately after the war, he was appointed an official liaison to the Office of Military Government, United States—”

  “OMGUS,” Catherine said.

  “—and struck up a chummy relationship with Colonel Stevens that lasted for decades, as I’ll show you in a bit,” Grissom said. “A few years ago, I had a genealogist do up the Bachmann genealogical tree and discovered that Gunter Bachmann was married to a Hetta Köhler, who happened to be a close cousin of Ilse Köhler, who married Karl Otto Koch, a Standartenführer in the SS, who became—”

  “The commander of Buchenwald,” Catherine said. “That means our ghoulish Frau Koch—”

  “—née Köhler was tied to the Bachmann clan through marriage,” he was explaining over her speakers. “If you’ve followed me this far, Catherine—and you have, of course—then you probably see where this is headed. You should know that Gunter’s buddy Colonel Stevens was a major figure with OMGUS. Which is to say that besides being one of the top brass in the U.S. constabulary that policed occupied Germany, he was influential with the panel that let Ilse Koch skate on some of her most heinous offenses. Another thing—the Bachmann
family business thrived for decades after the war, with Gunter eventually retiring from the German army to rejoin the fold. In the nineteen-fifties, they went transcontinental. Gunter continued to run the galleries in Europe, while Fritz Bachmann moved to America with his wife, legally changed his name to Bockem, became a proud father, and opened an exclusive auction house in New York’s Upper East Side with branches in London and Berlin. He was a mainstay of Park Avenue society there until his passing in the mid-nineties… and if there’s a good time to have your ticket punched, Fritz couldn’t have done better. Because only a couple of years later, an investigative article in the New York Times revealed that he’d hung on to half a billion dollars’ worth of artwork plundered from the Jews and continued quietly dealing it off to collectors.”

  Catherine inhaled through her front teeth. Fade out, fade in, and the freeze-framed image of the OMGUS conference was replaced by a color photograph of three elderly men eating at an outdoor café or restaurant. The man at the right of the screen, his hair turned silver but still dipping down the middle of his high brow in a kind of point, was instantly recognizable.

  “This heartwarming reunion occurred at a swank resort in Hilton Head, South Carolina, about six months before Fritz passed away. The image isn’t widely known to exist. I don’t have it in my possession and therefore can’t be showing it to you right now,” Grissom said. “If we could somehow get a look at it, however, it would be courtesy of someone I know with Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks.”

  “The Mossad,” Catherine whispered as a large cursor arrow appeared onscreen. The arrow moved to the silver-haired figure.

  “I probably don’t have to point out Fritz to you, so let’s move on,” Grissom said. An instant later, the arrow went to a heavy, bearded man on Bachmann’s right, caught eating with his fork midway between his plate and his mouth. “This old fellow enjoying what appears to be pasta primavera is a little harder to recognize. But strip away the beard, about seventy pounds, and a half-century’s worth of wear and tear on the skin from heavy drinking, and you’ll see another familiar character. He, incidentally, is also now among the departed. Liver cancer.”

  Catherine read the name in the box and nodded her head. “Colonel Jonas W. Stevens,” she said. “So, Gris, who’s the other guy? Brother Gunter?” She was thinking that if he was Gunter Bachmann, he resembled his old self even less than Stevens did.

  “The third man’s a latecomer to the story… as I’m telling it,” Grissom said. “His neighbors in Elm Creek, Illinois, knew him for forty years as Wallace Tindler, the owner of a moderately successful small-town contracting outfit before his retirement four or five years ago. But once upon a time, he was Oberstleutnant Kurt Deil, an SS guard in Block Two at Buchenwald, otherwise known as the Section of Human Pathology. Deil reported directly to Ilse Koch—he was her main henchman, in fact. No atrocity was committed without his approval. But like many lower-ranking men in the chain of command, he slipped off the radar and was able to live comfortably for more than sixty years. Then, last year, a criminal-justice grad student at Northwestern recognized him and reported him to authorities. He’d been working on a dissertation on former Nazis hiding in plain sight. After his arrest, Deil was extradited to his native Austria and convicted of war crimes that included the killing and torture of thousands of inmates.”

  But the Mossad knew about him more than a decade ago, Catherine thought. Why not bring him in then?

  “I know what you must be wondering, Catherine. Bet you’re rubbing your chin right now.”

  She lowered her hand. Son of a bitch.

  “The Israelis didn’t want Deil nabbed or deported,” Grissom said. “They were casting a wider net. Holocaust deniers insist that Ilse Koch was a maligned, innocent victim of Zionist propaganda. That her human-skin lampshades and album bindings were mythical. And that Billy Wilder faked the documentary footage Phillips told you about. They say the tattooed skins in U.S. possession are also phonies. Instead of Jews, they claim they belong to German prisoners of war who were killed and mutilated to further the deception and point to the Jewish prohibition on marking the flesh as proof of the sham—ignoring documentation that hundreds of thousands of inmate Jews who’d culturally assimilated to one degree or another had decorative tattoos.”

  Catherine was nodding her head. “Israel was after the missing items from Frau Ilse’s collection,” she said. “They figure Deil must have delivered them to Fritz Bachmann before the U.S. liberation force could get its hands on them…”

  Or possibly afterward. It was obvious that the Bachmanns had gotten to Stevens during the occupation. Could be they’d blackmailed him somehow, could be he’d been war profiteering in the most monstrous way imaginable—it made no difference. One way or another, he’d assisted them. And sustained a relationship with them and Deil for half a century.

  But Fritz Bachmann—Bockem—was dead now. Stevens, too. And Catherine was sure it would have made international headlines if Deil had confessed his role in seeing that crucial evidence from Ilse’s chamber of horrors vanished before her trial. Catherine frowned. Vanished? Or was sold off?

  “Gris, where are we going with this?”

  “Fritz Bockem’s auction house closed a year or two after he died. His wife, Hetta, survived him and returned to Germany, where she might or might not be alive to this day. I mentioned they had a son after coming to this country, though. William Bockem. My records indicate he’s in his middle to late fifties. He went to Columbia University in New York, helped his father run the company. But once Fritz died, he dropped out of sight.”

  Silence. Catherine stopped herself from asking Grissom what he’d done to track him down, figuring it obviously involved sources he couldn’t disclose.

  “I’m not sure how much any of this has to do with your case,” Grissom said. “It could easily turn out to be nothing. You might be dealing with a lone wolf. A serial killer-collector with a very unusual fetish. But I think it’s worth a follow-up.”

  Catherine looked at the computer display and nodded. “Thank you, Gris,” she said. “Needless to say, we all miss you. Things haven’t been the same around here since you left.”

  “My regards to everyone, Catherine,” Grissom said. “Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow, naught may endure but mutability.”

  Catherine imagined Grissom at his computer in Paris, picturing him as he looked in the recent photos Sara had shown her. There was more gray in his hair nowadays than there used to be, and he’d grown a full beard, also flecked with white. But nothing had changed about those blue eyes that saw so much.

  “Do I get to find out the source of that quote?” she asked.

  “You know I’d never make things that easy on you,” he said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “Good luck, Catherine. I’ll be in touch.”

  And with that, her screen went blank.

  9

  NICK HAD NO sooner left Archie’s boxy little lab than he saw Catherine quickly approaching him from down the corridor. She had on her overcoat and gloves.

  “Nicky,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you high and low.”

  He poked a thumb over his shoulder at the lab entrance. “Me ’n’ Arch been trying to get a handle on some things,” he said. “We saw you zip past us a few hours ago. I need to fill you in.”

  “Let’s swap progress reports heading over to city hall,” she said, tilting her head toward the parking exit. “We’d better get rolling—”

  “I was just on my way out,” Nick said. “But I can’t go with you.”

  “You have to,” Catherine said. “Ecklie wants a couple of token CSIs as a show of interdepartmental commitment.”

  “Cath, we already know the press conference is a clown show.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I gave my word we’d be there,” Catherine said, glancing at her watch. “What’s the problem, anyway?”

  “I need to see someone at the Starglow,” Nick said. “An employ
ee who’s helping me dig up old records. They might connect Stacy Ebstein to Dorset. And maybe the Tattoo Man.”

  She looked at him. “And exactly why didn’t you give me a heads-up?”

  “I would’ve if I’d known ahead of time. But I just heard from the woman at the hotel,” Nick said. “I’m smelling a real break, Cath.”

  A brief silence, then Catherine sighed. “All right,” she said. “It’ll take you, what, two minutes to get to city hall from the hotel?”

  “In slow traffic.”

  “Meet me there if you get through soon enough. The press conference is in that windy little plaza between the front wing and the tower. In the meantime, Jim will be there keeping me company while I freeze my butt off.”

  “Should be some media hounds, too.”

  Catherine frowned. “Appreciate the reminder,” she said.

  The Starglow, one of the original hotel-casinos in what used to be called Glitter Gulch, had undergone three extensive renovations since its grand opening in the late 1940s, a year after the Golden Nugget’s famous pillowtop began slinging neon lights over the shiny limos met by curbside valets a little farther up Fremont Street, their tuxedoed and mink-stoled passengers dropped off with the ushers at its red-carpet entrance.

  Now you couldn’t drive your car along Fremont because of the big high-tech light-show canopy over the mall there, and the closest equivalents to ushers or valets were the slot-room hawkers with their discount coupons and the beautiful smiling showgirls out front of the strip club that Mom complained about on every budget trip to Vegas, while Dad tried not to sprain his neck turning to get a look, and the kids kept tugging both toward the video arcades.

  Doing his best to avoid the usual clog of tourists, Nick had taken Carson Avenue down to South Third, left his car in the lot across the street from the county courthouse, then walked a block, turned left, and went through the Starglow’s comparatively new entrance on South Fourth, adjacent to the mall.

  The resort’s corporate suites were on the eighteenth floor. Nick took the elevator up, found the one Karen Esco had given him over the phone, asked for her with the receptionist while displaying his ID, and was promptly shown back down a carpeted aisle to her office.