The Nazi Hunter

by Alan Elsner

  “Never mind me. Dad, get those skis on,” I ordered. The flames leapt twenty feet in the air, casting a glow on the two dark figures who had appeared at the top of the slope. One lifted his weapon to fire. I motioned Lynn to drop down. A shot sounded, then another. I aimed at the distant figures and let off a couple of rounds. There was little chance of hitting anyone, but maybe it would give them pause. The recoil slammed the rifle butt into my bruised shoulder. It felt like lightning shooting through my body.

  “Faster, Dad!”

  “I'm trying,” he said, bending down to strap on his skis. We were on a kind of ledge—a natural hollow in the hillside that gave us some protection. We also had a clear view down the mountain, which continued to fall steeply away.

  “Where should we go?” I asked.

  “See those lights in the valley?”

  He was pointing to a distant glow impossibly far away, beyond a dense wood, hundreds of feet below us. “Can you make it?” I said, as a shot echoed from above.

  Dad nodded. “I hope so. The fresh snow will slow me a bit; that will help.”

  “How do we get through the woods?”

  “Follow the slope down as far as it goes. There's a trail at the bottom.”

  “Once we get on that slope, I don't think we'll be doing much steering,” Lynn observed. “You'd better say a prayer. If there was ever a time for your God to help us, it's now.”

  There was no time for praying, and God helps those who help themselves. A shout echoed over our heads, followed by a burst of gunfire as the pursuers came nearer, two figures slipping and sliding down the hill.

  “Go!” I yelled. Dad launched himself into the darkness and was gone with a whoosh. Lynn plopped down on the sled. I sat behind her, my legs on either side of her body, pressing myself against her back, my arms around her waist. A tight fit, but it was our only chance. I wedged the rifle in between us.

  “Ready?” I shouted. Another burst of gunfire kicked up snow around us. I didn't wait for her reply. I shoved off… and we sank. We each shoveled furiously with both arms to pick up speed. Then we cleared the ledge and hit the steep grade. Instantly we were plunging down the hill like Olympic lugers. I tried to follow my father, but we couldn't steer the sled. It was hard enough just staying on it as it bucked and bumped its way down the mountain, sending jolts into my tailbone.

  The moon was a glint of light in the corner of my eye. My legs were kicking up a shower of powder into Lynn's face. I lifted them clear of the snow, and suddenly, the speed was exhilarating. My fear evaporated. Like a little kid, I whooped aloud. With every second, we were putting more distance between ourselves and the thugs. We sliced through the night as clean as a scalpel. I caught a peripheral glimpse of Dad, bent over his skis. He shouted something, but the night swallowed it. The woods were hurtling at us, faster than I anticipated. There was no way to stop. As we reached the first trees, I tipped the sled sideways and we both cascaded out. A moment of panic washed over me as I released Lynn and rolled blindly, head over heels, mouth full of snow, face in the cold until… CRACK!

  I stopped with a deadening thud.

  My head was splitting, my mouth warm and wet. I spat, staining the snow red with blood. I must have bitten my tongue. Everything was fuzzy; I'd lost my glasses in the crash. Shit! That was all I needed.

  “Lynn?”

  “Over here,” a faint reply. She was lying a few feet away.

  “You all right?” I asked. She rolled over, groaning, and tried to sit up.

  “I… I think so. Are you?”

  “Lost my glasses. Help me find them. I don't have another pair, and I'm blind without them.”

  “You're kidding, right?” she said. “How am I supposed to find them in the dark, with a band of killers after us? I'll be your eyes until you can get a new pair.”

  “Just look for a minute, will you? I need them. They've got to be somewhere around here. I had them until we overturned.”

  We started scrabbling around in the snow. Lynn was getting edgy. “Mark, I'm scared,” she said.

  “Keep looking. I promise we're safe.”

  “How would you know? You can't see anything! Wait a minute, what's this?”

  “What's what?”

  “You're lucky. They're not smashed.”

  What a relief. The world was in focus again. Now I could see there was a dark trickle of blood running down her face.

  “You're hurt,” I said, wiping away the blood and finding a shallow graze around her hairline.

  “It's just a scratch,” she said, then laughed.

  “What's so funny?”

  “Oh, nothing. That was some ride. We're still alive.”

  I kissed her. “I know. I can't believe we did that. Where's my dad?”

  “Don't know. Come on, get up. We have to find him.”

  The burning house was a distant glow. There was no sign of our pursuers.

  “Listen,” Lynn said. “There, did you hear? Over there.” She was pointing at him, eighty yards below us, at the bottom of the hill.

  “We're here!” I yelled.

  “He can't get to us,” Lynn said. “We have to go down to him. Do we need the sled anymore?”

  “Leave it. Have you got the rifle?”

  She nodded. As we approached, Dad was gazing blankly at the glow in the distance. His shoulders were heaving. I had never seen my father cry. I didn't know what to do. I put my arm around him. “You have insurance, don't you, Dad?”

  He turned on me. “You don't understand a damned thing, do you? Do you have any idea what this feels like?”

  I thought I did. His memories, his possessions, his treasures, the very fabric of his life—all of it was going up in smoke. Twice now, I had been the catalyst by which his life had been destroyed. How would we ever overcome this new blow? It didn't seem possible.

  “I'm sorry. Poor choice of words,” I stammered. He seethed, too angry and too upset to listen to my apology.

  “You are a hunter of the Nazis, but what do you really understand? Do you know what it is to lose a home? This is the story of my life played over again. Sixty years ago, I ran away just before the Nazis destroyed my home, destroyed my whole world. Now the same thing again in America! America! The only difference is, this time I get to watch it happen. Do I have insurance? Yes, I have insurance. Thank you so much for your concern.”

  I was crushed.

  Lynn put her arms around my father, who was shaking, with anger, fear, cold—who knew what? She kissed his cheek. “Jacob, he didn't mean it like that,” she said. “Mark—Marek cares about you. Very deeply. He loves you so much.”

  He sighed heavily. “And you are a very good, very kind young woman.”

  “And luckily we put your photo albums in our car. They're the most precious thing of all—except your life. You still have that. And you have a brave son who loves you. You have a lot,” she said, hugging him, trying to inject some optimism into the situation.

  “Yes, I'd forgotten about the albums,” he said.

  “And Mark—Marek was very resourceful. He saved our lives, Jacob.”

  “I know that, too. I do give him credit. But right now, it doesn't help. It doesn't help at all.”

  We stood for a moment, watching the distant glow. Still no sign of pursuit.

  My father turned to me. “Marek, I was harsh. Forgive me.”

  “Dad…”

  “A house you can always build again. Come, we must go now.” He turned to the woods.

  He said it would take less than an hour to reach the highway, but it seemed a hell of a lot longer. We were soaked and aching from every limb. My shoulder pounded; a numb pain stabbed behind my eyes. Dad showed no sign of fatigue, guiding us around tree stumps, through undergrowth, over fallen branches. I had been magically transported back to childhood: a skinny, unathletic kid forced to go on one of my father's endless weekend hikes.

  Eventually we reached the edge of the wood and stepped onto the road.

  �
��Stop,” I called. “They may be waiting for us.” I peered up and down the deserted highway, but nobody seemed to be around. We had made a large circle and came out only a couple hundred yards from the 7-Eleven where I had parked my car.

  “Which way, Dad?” I asked as he climbed into the passenger seat. He pointed backward.

  About a half mile down the road, we passed a battered old Ford pickup, parked under a tree. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Pull over.”

  “Dad?”

  “I know most of the vehicles in town, but not that one.”

  The flatbed was loaded with large plastic sacks, fifty or sixty of them. The labels meant nothing to me. Lynn spotted a sticker on the rear bumper: two clenched fists on a red sun rising over a line of hills. Lynn wrote down the license plate and made a quick sketch of the bumper sticker.

  “Do you still have any bullets in your gun?” I asked her.

  “Sure, I only shot two or three rounds up there.”

  “Could you spare a couple more to shoot out this guy's tires?”

  “It would be my pleasure.” She beamed.

  She extracted the weapon and carefully discharged a bullet into each tire. The gunshots were deafening in the silent night. Hissing loudly, the tires crumbled.

  “Let's get the hell out of here,” I said.

  “What now?” Lynn asked after we had been driving for a while.

  “We disappear. Properly this time,” I said.

  “But where?”

  “Germany. I was scheduled to leave Tuesday night, but I'm going to change it to tomorrow.”

  “I'm coming with you,” said Lynn.

  “I also,” my father added.

  “What about your house?” I said. “There's sure to be police and insurance reports to fill out—all kinds of forms and formalities.”

  “Those can wait. I'm coming, no matter what.” My father's voice was unyielding. Useless to try to dissuade him. And he was right. He deserved to come. They both did.

  “Do you have your passport?” I asked Lynn.

  “In Washington.”

  “What about you, Dad?”

  “In a safe deposit box in the bank in Elkins.”

  “Okay, let's drive to Elkins then.”

  We spent the night in a cheap motel. Lynn insisted on sharing a room with me, saying she was too terrified to be alone. As soon as we closed the door, she disappeared into the bathroom, and I heard the water running. My brain felt like it was wrapped in steel wool. Still, the thought of her undressing and stepping into the bath made me quiver. I took off my glasses and flopped down on the bed. What was stopping me? Religion? No. Sheer cowardice. I could deal with gunmen on a hillside, but not with rejection.

  I realized I had lost my kippah somewhere on the hillside. The room started spinning, and I closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, a hand was stroking my cheek. She was rosy and fragrant, wrapped in a towel.

  “Your turn,” she whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “The bath. Get those wet clothes off and warm up in the tub.”

  “Help me.”

  She pulled my shoes and socks off and warmed my freezing feet. I sighed, feeling another fierce jolt of desire. How easy it would be to pull away that towel, how easy for her to let it slip.

  “Go on, Mark, get in the bath, warm up,” she chivvied me. A strange feeling suddenly engulfed me, and I knew that I loved her. Now's the time, tell her! But I couldn't. “Hell of a romantic weekend,” I said. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Germany,” she said and started laughing, but her laughter turned into a sob. I kissed her long and deep, feeling her heart beat fast against my chest beneath the towel. It gave me just enough courage for just long enough to spit out the words.

  “I love you,” I whispered, then again louder. “I love you, I absolutely love you.”

  She stiffened in my arms. “You are such a dork! Couldn't you have picked a more romantic moment to tell me?”

  What? Didn't she realize what I had just said, what it had cost me to say those words? But she was smiling. Her eyes were larger and more lustrous than ever. She would find her own way to tell me when she was ready. “I just wanted to seize the moment,” I said. “It's the new me.”

  “You don't have to reinvent yourself for me. I liked the old you well enough.”

  “It's the true me, the real me,” I said. “You might as well get used to it.”

  We kissed again. But she wasn't going to return my declaration of love. My ardor cooled. “I think I'll take that bath,” I announced.

  “I'm going to check on your father. I don't like the idea of him being alone after the night he's had. I want to make sure he's okay.” He was such a loner, it hadn't even crossed my mind. When I emerged, warm and clean, she was in bed, asleep, muttering to herself as she thrashed around in the bed.

  At 5:30, I woke and thanked God for returning my soul to me. That short and simple prayer had never seemed so appropriate. I closed my eyes and added an even more heartfelt blessing on behalf of Lynn and my dad. Then I said the Shehechayanu blessing, which praises God for keeping us alive, sustaining us, and bringing us to this day. Then I called Agent Fabrizio. No reply. I didn't leave a number for her to call me back. After what had happened, I didn't trust anyone, not even the FBI. Wherever I went, someone seemed to know ahead of time.

  I kept calling every ten minutes.

  “We were attacked again last night,” I told her when I was eventually patched through. “They shot at us, then burned down my dad's cabin. I think one of them was the same guy who attacked us outside my apartment. We're lucky to be alive.”

  “Christ,” she said. “Are you all okay? Where are you?”

  “We're fine, but I'm not going to tell you where we are. We had to climb out a window and slide down a mountain.”

  “Tell me exactly what happened. From the beginning.”

  “Listen, I don't want to talk about it now. I'll meet you this afternoon, Dulles Airport, Departures Lounge, United Airlines check-in desk, five P.M. Come alone, no colleagues, especially not Reynolds. We can talk then. If you want more details before we meet, you can get them from the local cops. They're probably on the scene by now. When you call them, tell them my dad is okay. He's with me.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Four, five maybe.” I read her the license plate of the suspicious truck. “That's it for now. I'll tell you the rest at the airport.” When Lynn woke up, she smiled and kissed me as if nothing had changed between us. I asked her if she still wanted to come to Germany with me. “Totally,” she said, surprised I had even asked. “We're in this together until the end.” The end of what? I wondered. The end of the Delatrucha case? The end of our romance? The end of the world?

  We collected my father's passport as soon as the bank opened. He asked for a notary public and wrote out an affidavit stating he was alive and well and would be back to take care of his affairs within a week or two. He mailed one copy to the local police, and another to a neighbor in the village. We dashed to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy some clothes before heading back to D.C.

  We picked up our own passports and packed, and I called the airline to book tickets for Lynn and my dad.

  “There's one more stop I'd like to make before we go to the airport,” I said. “My friend David Binder from the Anti-Defamation League is an authority on neo-Nazis. He may be able to identify that bumper sticker.”

  David welcomed us into his office and supplied us all with hot coffee and doughnuts. He greeted my father with enthusiasm. When we'd been at law school together, he'd occasionally stayed at our place on vacations. I introduced him to Lynn; he winked approvingly at me when she wasn't looking. I told him the story of our ordeal. It was the first time my father had heard it all from the beginning. His face betrayed amazement as each detail emerged, but he said nothing. David took notes, blinking solemnly through thick glasses like a great owl.

  “So you want to know who you're dealing with?�
�� he said when I finished.

  “That would be good.” I said. “Lynn, show him the sketch you made of the bumper sticker.”

  “I don't recognize this off the top of my head, but let me make a photocopy, and I'll do some research. It may be in our database or somebody else's.”

  “Lynn, make two copies. We'll give one to the FBI,” I suggested. “Whoever attacked you is not very good at this,” David said. “They may be thugs, but they're amateurs.”

  “So we're being persecuted by incompetents?”

  “Think about it,” he continued. “Do you suppose for a moment you would be alive today if you were dealing with terrorists of even average technical ability? If they were any good, they would have killed you before you thought you were being followed. They had surprise on their side, and still they bungled it.”

  “They murdered Sophie Reiner.”

  “Assuming it's the same group. And even there, instead of killing her quietly and disposing of the body, they managed to carry out the murder in a way that attracted maximum publicity. Was that their aim? Not if they were working for this Delatrucha character. If she had disappeared without a trace, nobody would have missed her for weeks.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  At the airport,Agent Fabrizio was waiting by the check-in desk. She hustled us into a meeting room.

  “You must be Mr. Cain, Senior,” she said, addressing my father. “The police down in West Virginia say your cabin was pretty badly devastated. The fire department tried to salvage whatever they could. The police want to speak to you, of course.”

  “They'll have to wait,” he said, yawning. “I'm going to Germany with my son. I'm boarding in an hour, and I'm going to sleep all the way to Frankfurt. Tell them you saw me, and I'm safe.”

  “What else did they find there?” I asked.

  “Empty shell casings, and of course the remains of the fire. I gotta hand it to you, Cain. You may seem like this mild, scholarly type, but mayhem goes wherever you go.”