by Alan Elsner
Washington is used to murders, but they usually take place well away from the tourist areas. Sophie's body had been found almost within sight of the Capitol. The police commissioner promised speedy action. The mayor insisted the city was safe and urged tourists not to change their plans. Mitch Conroy, who had an opinion on everything, had also joined the act. Crime was out of control, he opined. We needed zero tolerance for criminals and swift executions for murderers. Someone needed to clean house, and, like a Texas sheriff, Mitch was the man to do it.
I had not really known this woman—we spoke only for ten minutes—yet I felt strangely bereft. Why had she been killed? I felt disoriented, out of my depth. I write everything down, puzzle it out step-by-step. But I could see no logic here.
And it's different when the victim was sitting in your office two days before, dripping on your carpet. The whole thing seemed so bizarre, so random, and I might be the only person able to identify her. I reached for the phone, but decided to drive to work and call from the office. I needed time to digest all this.
A sheet of paper had been stuffed beneath one of the windshield wipers of my car. I unfolded it, thinking it was a flyer from a local business, and saw written in large red characters “6-6-6.” Probably a prank by some neighborhood kids, I figured, screwing it up in a ball and shoving it in my pocket.
It started to rain as I drove, a freezing, wind-driven rain. Crawling along Connecticut Avenue in my battered Civic, I mentally replayed my conversation with Sophie Reiner, as waves of water smacked like drum rolls against the roof and windshield. Had she seemed fearful? Had she known death was stalking her? There was no sign of it that I could recall. She had been nervous, certainly, but fearful? No, she fully expected to meet me the following day.
Washingtonians hate the rain. They somehow feel that in the nation's capital, everyone has the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and perpetual smoggy sunshine. People rarely complain about the summer's stifling humidity and polluted air. But if it rains—or, even worse, snows—it's an offense against the natural order. Traffic slows to a stately five miles an hour. Normally, this doesn't bother me—I like to think in the car or listen to the radio—but I was jumpy, and the slow crawl made me even edgier.
Forty-five minutes later, I finally reached the office, shucked off my coat, and sat down behind my desk. I thought about a cup of coffee, decided against it, and adjusted my tie, even though it was already straight. I knew I should call the police, but first I wanted to speak to Eric Rosen, my boss and the head of the OSI. He should know if I was about to get involved in a news story.
It was already almost ten o'clock. Eric was in his office, sitting behind one of the larger desks in Washington, D.C., where outsize desks match outsize egos, reading a piece of paper. “What's going on?” I asked.
“Just another hate letter,” he said, waving it at me, “which I'm about to send over to the FBI, where they will no doubt shove it in a folder with all the other dreck I've been sending them and forget about it. We've been getting more than usual recently.” I caught a glimpse of a swastika scrawled in red crayon.
“I've received a few, too,” I told him. “I've been collecting them in a file under W for wackos.”
“Send them to me. I'll pass them all on to the FBI. Maybe they'll find a pattern. Anyway, what do you want? Make it quick. I'm leaving for the airport soon.”
“Where to this time?”
“Boston. I'm the keynote speaker for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Fascinating group. Should be an interesting discussion.”
Eric was a macher—a mover and shaker, a man who gets things done. He was in constant demand as a speaker, which suited him just fine. He fed his Napoleonic self-image on a steady diet of public acclaim, while I stayed in the background and kept the office functioning. A hyperactive little man, Eric was certainly a commanding orator. No one was better at whipping up an emotional froth. Afterward, he would stand on the podium, thrusting his barrel chest out, smiling with satisfaction, letting the applause wash over him in warm waves.
“Concerned scientists, eh? How many concerned scientists does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“How many?”
“One. All the rest will be so enthralled by your speech they won't notice the dark,” I said.
“I hope that awful joke isn't why you came to disturb me,” Eric said, frowning.
“No, I came to ask whether you saw that item in the Post today about the woman murdered on the Mall.” I sank irrevocably into his overstuffed plush leather couch.
“Yeah, I saw it, but I didn't pay much attention. I was more interested in who the Republicans want to appoint as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I assume you've been following the speculation. They're talking about Senator—”
“She was here a couple of days ago,” I said, puncturing his stream of consciousness.
“Who was here?”
“The dead woman, the one in the article.”
“She was what?”
“She came to see me in my office. At around four o'clock.”
“Here? In this building?”
“I recognized her from the description in the paper. The police said she was wearing a red pin. She was wearing it when she came to see me.”
“Gotenyu! Have you called the police?” In moments of stress or surprise, Eric always lapsed into Yiddish.
“I wanted to tell you first. And I really need some coffee.”
“Help yourself.” He indicated the machine in the corner. I pulled myself off the couch and asked if he wanted a cup.
“Mark, what on earth did she want from you?” My name is Marek, but everyone except my father calls me Mark. I poured the coffee and sat back down.
“She said her name was Sophie Reiner, and she had some documents she wanted to show me. She said they concerned Belzec.”
“What documents? Where are they?”
“She never handed them over. She said she would bring them the next day—that would have been yesterday. But she never showed up. Now I know why.”
“Why did she come to see you? I'm the balebos, the one in charge here.”
“How the heck do I know? Maybe you were busy. Maybe she was too scared to approach the Great and Mighty Oz himself. Perhaps she was intimidated by the many reports she'd read about your towering intellect.”
“Did you ask her why she came to you?”
“She told me she'd read about me in the German newspapers.”
“You're not supposed to talk to reporters without my permission. Especially not the foreign press. Remember, I speak for this office.”
“Relax, Eric, and let's focus on the dead woman just for a second. Anyway, it's been years since I've been quoted over there—that's what was so strange about her remark.”
“What about that New York Times profile of you last month, which you persuaded me to authorize against my better judgment? A German paper might have picked it up and translated it.”
The Times had latched on to me after a big case I'd won against a former Romanian priest. He'd organized a mob to kill a couple of hundred Jews in 1944. The judge had stripped him of his U.S. citizenship and expelled him from the country. Eric had wanted to do the interview himself, but the reporter insisted that I was the focus of the story, since I was the one who had argued the case in court.
“Well, that might explain it,” I said thoughtfully.
Eric asked, “Are you sure she said Belzec? Maybe she meant Bergen-Belsen.” This was the concentration camp in Germany where 70,000 people died of starvation, exposure, and disease. Anne Frank died there, so it was better known to the public than Belzec, though less significant in the history of the Holocaust. People often confused the two.
“No,” I told him. “She said Belzec, although she mispronounced it. She was quite definite about it.”
Eric fell silent. I took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. I should have known better. It was extremely hard to get a decent cup anywhere in
any government building. I brought my own beans to work and ground them fresh each morning. I knew Eric and I were both thinking the same thing. Where were the documents? Did they even exist?
He sighed. “Do you need me to be there when the police come? I can cancel Boston.”
I took off my glasses and started polishing them. I was feeling a little better now that I had talked to someone. “No, I can handle it. You go ahead and speak to your concerned scientists. They need you more than I do,” I said.
An hour later, I was telling the story to two detectives. Sam Reynolds, a burly black man with gray hair, had the weary look of a man who wanted you to know he had seen and heard just about everything. The other detective, Connie Novak, was half his size and not much more than half his age, with twice as much hair and bright red lipstick. They both sat up straight in their seats when I said I could identify their Jane Doe.
“She was here in your office?” Reynolds asked, chewing gum furiously.
“That's right. Two days ago. She sat on the same chair you're sitting on now. She was wearing the red pin they described in the newspaper. That's how I knew it was her. She said her name was Sophie Reiner.” I spelled it out for them. “She was German.”
“Shit. That means the State Department, ambassadors, political pressure, all kinds of crap,” Reynolds said grimly.
“I spoke to her in German. She had a north German accent, I would say.”
Novak immediately got on the phone. “If she was staying in a D.C. hotel, we should be able to track her down pretty quickly,” she said.
There was a knock on the door, and my assistant poked her head in. “Got a sec, Mark?” she asked, flashing an infectious grin in my direction.
“Not now, Lynn. Maybe in an hour. I'll give you a call when I'm free.” She left, and I turned back to the detectives.
“What did this Reiner woman want with you?” Reynolds asked. I described our conversation as well as I could remember, referring to my notes.
“You're a pretty careful guy, Professor, writing it all down like that,” Novak said. I wasn't sure if her voice held a note of approval or censure.
“I try to be.”
“Tell me about this Belzec place,” Reynolds said. I explained how it was the first real extermination camp, the first place where the Nazis had erected gas chambers, early in 1942. I described how they murdered their victims with carbon monoxide pumped from a large truck engine, how it sometimes took as long as thirty-five minutes to kill them all, and how they dumped the bodies in trenches, first wrenching the gold fillings out of their mouths. In the middle of my recitation Reynolds stopped paying attention. The Holocaust often has that effect on people. So I shut up.
Novak shivered. “My husband is Jewish,” she said, somewhat irrelevantly. There was a pause. The detectives spat out their gum, inserted new sticks, and resumed chewing. Novak offered me a stick, which I declined.
“Were these documents worth killing someone for?” Reynolds asked.
I shrugged. “I never saw them. If they named people who are still around… but it seems so unlikely. I've never heard of such a thing.”
Reynolds frowned. “On the other hand, it may just have been a robbery gone wrong. Although a slashing murder like this is uncommon in a robbery. Usually the perp uses a gun.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Not much. As I said, you usually only see stabbings in domestic abuse, but to be honest, Professor, we still have a long way to go in this case. Until ten minutes ago, we didn't even know who she was. Tell me more about these papers. What do you think they could have been?”
“I wish I knew. There aren't many documents about Belzec. Only two people survived, and they both died years ago. That's why any kind of firsthand testimony could be so significant. If it's legitimate, that is. If you do come across any old papers or documents, I'd ask you to be careful with them and call me immediately.”
Reynolds nodded. “Okay, Prof, we'll take it from here. Just keep your mouth shut. Don't talk to the media. We may need to come back to you if this Belsen stuff adds up to anything.”
“Belzec,” I corrected him.
“Whatever,” he said.
I had done my civic duty. My part in the whole horrible mess was over. The police would handle it from here.
Wrong again.
3
I must pick my way myself
Through this darkness.
—“GOOD NIGHT” BY WILHELM MÜLLER, MUSIC BY FRANZ SCHUBERT
A WEEK PASSED before I heard from Lieutenant Reynolds again. As usual, I was busy shuffling papers, attending committees, and reviewing documents. But Sophie Reiner never quite left my thoughts. Impatient to learn something one afternoon, I called the number the lieutenant had given me to ask what was happening. I was put on hold, to seasonal elevator music—“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” Christmas spirit had spread to every corner of the land, turning the entire country into a vast shopping mall. After a few minutes, since I was neither merry nor a gentleman, I grew tired of waiting and hung up. The rest of the day we played phone tag.
Next afternoon, we had our weekly staff meeting. For once, most of the department's nine historians and thirteen lawyers were in town, which meant we could fully review our current caseload. As we sat down, I looked around the conference table. It was interesting to see the difference between the two tribes. The lawyers, both men and women, wore the same uniform as me—dark suits with white shirts or blouses, sober ties and gold cuff links for the men, silk scarves and discreet jewelry for the women. Some of them, not me, had their monograms stamped on their custom-made Egyptian twoply cotton shirts. Most of us sat up straight, writing copious notes on yellow legal pads. The historians, mostly younger, wore their own uniform: jeans or cords, tweedy jackets, and loud shirts with their top buttons undone. They sprawled in their chairs, occasionally sitting up to scrawl hieroglyphics in spiral notebooks. If they bothered to wear ties, the men always left them hanging several inches below their necks. For that reason alone, I could never have been a historian. That and the fact that there was no future in history.
We had several cases working their way through the system. The biggest involved one Lazarus Bruteitis, who had been chief of the security police in Vilnius Province, Lithuania, during the Nazi occupation. Bruteitis had been living quietly in Rhode Island for the past four decades. We had been investigating him for several years and had compiled a thick dossier of crimes committed under his command. The problem, as always, was proving his personal involvement and knowledge. The typical Nazi document did not generally record the names of the killers. Orders were often disguised in euphemisms. Once, I remember seeing a planning document for “the resettlement” of Jews from a certain village. The proposed location turned out to be two pits. And near the end of the war, when the Nazis and their acolytes realized they were defeated, they built huge bonfires and burned much of the evidence.
“So where do things stand?” Eric asked Janet Smart, our chief historian. “I heard you had a breakthrough. It's about time.”
“A mini-breakthrough, maybe. We dug up a new document with Bruteitis's name typed on it ordering fifty-two Jews to be shot at a place called Paneriai,” Janet said, shoving a photocopy around the table for us to look at. It was written in German, and sure enough, there was “Bruteitis” typed neatly at the bottom. Unfortunately, it wasn't signed.
“Remind me, what was Paneriai?” Eric said.
“It was a wooded hamlet outside of Vilnius, where thousands of Jews were stripped, lined up in trenches, and shot. Only five thousand of Vilnius's sixty thousand Jews survived the war,” Janet said. She looked like a refugee from the 1960s who had spent too much time on the beach without sunscreen. She had to be pushing sixty by now. I had worked with her on a dozen cases, and despite her appearance, she was a formidable partner with a steel trap of a mind, capable of filing away and effortlessly recalling references, citations, facts, and figures in several languages.
“Soviet archives in Moscow,” Janet said.
“Are we sure it's authentic?”
“It matches other similar documents. I'm confident it's genuine.”
“Okay then, let's serve the bastard with papers and issue a press release,” Eric said. “How soon can you get it done?”
“Are you sure?” I asked mildly. “I know we've been waiting a long time, and I see his name on the document, but…”
“But what?” Eric snapped.
“But there's no signature. Is this enough?”
John Howard, a department lawyer who was handling this case with Smart, looked up from the legal pad on which he had been doodling. “I agree with Mark,” he said in a thin, reedy voice. “Personally, I'd feel more comfortable if we had something with his actual signature. We can't go forward on just this. He could always claim that somebody typed this up on his behalf without his knowledge. We've been through this before.”
“Shit!” Eric exploded, slamming his pencil down on the conference table. “How long have we been sitting on this fucking case? Five years? Seven? We all know he's guilty, even if we don't have his signature. We may never get his signature. The world isn't perfect. We need to move ahead before the mamzer dies on us. How old is he now?”
“Seventy-six,” Janet replied.
“The older he gets, the harder it will be to win. No matter how healthy he is, we all know he'll bring a whole team of doctors to court, swearing that his health is too fragile for the poor old man to be deported. They always do,” Eric observed bitterly.
We all took Eric's frequent outbursts in stride. We also knew he was anxious to find a high-profile case that we could take to the media to prove to the new Republican majority that we were still alive and kicking. And we all knew we were in a race against time. The crimes we dealt with happened half a century ago in faraway corners of Europe. The criminals were now elderly immigrants—Germans and Austrians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Hungarians, Romanians—all with their long-repressed memories and secret guilt. A few more years, and they would elude justice once and for all. Then we'd have to shut up shop, unless Congress passed a new law authorizing us to investigate other human rights abuses, like the slaughter in Bosnia or last year's Rwandan genocide. Eric had been lobbying lawmakers to do just that, but it wasn't clear where things stood after the election.
