“What happened last night?” the soldier asked, his voice stern and demanding.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”
“With the girls.”
“Oh, nothing happened.”
“Nothing?”
“I bought them dinner, we ate. I flirted, but then I went back to my room.”
“What is an old man like you doing with two teenagers?”
“Nothing. I just like to flirt. But I would never do anything inappropriate.”
“I see. You just like to flirt? To spend your money taking two girls to dinner, and then you expect nothing in return. Is that right?”
“Yes. That’s all that happened.”
“The girls have gone missing. They never returned to their hotel room last night. I have to take you to headquarters for questioning.”
“Missing? What do you mean?”
“Get dressed, Mr. Helmut. You have five minutes.”
***
Two hours later when Elan arrived at the police station, it was filled with people. The stale odor of nervous energy mixed with cigarette smoke lingered in the air.
Everyone from the tour group that Bari had come to Israel with was now being questioned. There were teenagers and adults lined up in seats around the printer of the room. Some of the women were crying.
Elan had expected as much. His feelings were strange to him. On one hand, he felt terrible for the missing girl and Janice, but he really didn’t know the child. Although she was his own blood, he had only just learned the news, and his heart was not grieving. Elan was angrier with Janice than he was upset about the kidnapping. How could she have lied to him for so long? If this tragedy had not occurred, he never would have known that he had a daughter in America. That was Janice...a selfish, spoiled, rich girl.
Well, it wasn’t Bari’s fault, and he would do everything in his power to find her, of course. But he could not feel the same toward her as he did toward Noa. He’d raised Noa, held her as a baby when she cried, bathed her in rubbing alcohol to bring down her fever, and then walked the floors through the night with her when she was sick. Elan had been the one to take Noa to school on her first day. He’d helped her to pick out a dress and all of her supplies. These were events that would always be branded in his heart.
If Noa were missing, he would be out of his mind right now with worry and fear. In fact, he would undoubtedly be so shaken that he might be of no use to the police.
As angry as he was with Janice, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. In one of the private rooms, he saw a middle aged, fairly attractive man being questioned by a female police officer who he believed he recognized. If he remembered correctly, her name was Tova Ben-Levi, but he couldn’t be sure if it was her or not.
The night he’d met Tova, he’d been drunk. It was a long time ago when they were both much younger. It was before he’d met Nina. They spent a few hours together. He couldn’t even remember if they’d been intimate. They probably had, and like most women from his past, she probably hated and resented him.
Yes, Elan had the reputation of being a cad. But that was before he’d married his dearest Nina. Now he had no desire to spend intoxicated nights with random women. Instead he stayed at home and watched his daughter, Noa—his beautiful precious daughter who was growing up to look like her mother more every day.
“You must be Elan Amsel?” A young, very attractive Israeli man walked over and extended his hand. Elan assumed that it was Ido.
“Yes.”
“I’m Ido.”
“I thought as much.” Elan smiled and shook Ido’s hand. He studied Ido and was surprised at how much Ido reminded him of himself when he was younger.
“Come, I’m working out of a makeshift office here at the police station. It’s not the best, but at least, we’ll have some privacy and I can tell you what we have learned so far…”
Elan followed Ido into a small room with a desk and three chairs. Both men sat. The door opened, and a girl entered. Elan felt his heart stop. She was the spitting image of his first love, his first fiancé. How could anyone look so much like Katja did when she and Elan had first met?
The girl’s blond hair fell into the same golden curls that Elan had never been able to forget. She had the same bright-blue eyes. Elan looked at her and felt a deep emptiness, the loss of his youth and a sting of regret for all of the mistakes he’d made. He had made terrible mistakes with Katja. He’d hurt her badly, and he was so sorry that he had.
But, if he had married Katja, then he would never have met Nina...so perhaps everything worked out the way it was supposed to work out. But still, he wished that he had been kinder, more understanding.
As Elan was aging, his heart was becoming softer. He assumed that was because of Noa. He would never want any man to treat Noa the way that he had treated women in his youth.
“Ido, we are detaining the German until we have further information. Tova is working on him, trying to find out everything she can,” the lovely blonde who looked like Katja said.
“Thank you, Ima. I’ll speak with Tova in a few minutes.” Ima left the room.
So it was Tova, Elan thought. At least, his mind was not going. Elan sighed. Then he looked at the blonde again. Hadn’t Katja mentioned that her daughter’s name was Ima? Could that possibly be her daughter? He had to ask.
“That girl, the blonde who was just here, what’s her last name?”
“Hadar. She’s my wife,” Ido said, bristling a little at the question. He wanted to be sure that Elan knew that Ima was his wife and not available for Elan’s romantic pursuit.
“Oh…she just looks so much like someone I’ve known for a long time. Was her maiden name Zaltstein?”
“Yes, in fact, it was.”
“I know her mother…” Elan said. What a small world. He wondered if Ido knew about Katja’s real parents. If he did, that would mean he was a bigger and smarter man than Elan. He’d married the woman he loved in spite of her bloodlines. But if he didn’t, was it Elan’s responsibility to tell him? Did Ido have a right to know? If Elan did tell him, what would be the consequences? No, Elan would not tell him. Why? There was no point. It was best to mind his own business.
For now, Elan would try to keep his mind on the case. He had a daughter, who was somewhere in Israel, a child of his blood. Elan was having enough trouble trying to process all of the new information about his newly discovered daughter, who was now in danger.
“All right, Ido. Show me everything you have about the case so far. Also, I want all of the information that you got from each of the other tourists from the synagogue. I need to know what the German said when he was questioned. Then, I will take everything and go to Mossad. We will review it and go from there. Can you have everything for me by this afternoon?”
“Yes, sir. Would you like it sent to your office?”
“Yes, as soon as you can.”
“Okay, Mr. Amsel. I will have all of that compiled and brought to you, and I will stay in touch and make sure that you are informed of everything as new information is gathered.”
Elan nodded, and got up and walked out of Ido’s office. As he turned to leave the police station, he glanced at Tova. She was intent in her conversation with the German. Elan studied her for a moment.
Tova was plain, not ugly, not beautiful, but she had an honest face. Her body was heavyset and a little flabby, but she wasn’t really fat. He remembered now. He had slept with her once long ago, now as he looked at her, he wondered why he’d even done that. Had she been more attractive then? Or was he just drunk and careless as he had been so much of the time in his youth?
In fact, now he wondered how he could have gone through a string of sexual partners without any feelings, names and faces he couldn’t even remember. He had hurt a lot of people when he was a young man. Then Nina had awakened something in Elan that would never allow him to be callous about love again. Poor Tova. Elan hoped that she’d gone on to find happiness in her li
fe.
***
Tova Ben-Levi had interrogated many criminals in the past fifteen years that she’d worked for the Israeli police. She was known amongst her coworkers, to be tough and relentless. Most of all, she was blessed with a keen instinct that enabled her to spot a liar, and she was almost never wrong.
She’d been handpicked for this investigation because she spoke perfect English and was also fluent in German. This suspect was of German decent. She would try to talk to him in English, and if that didn’t work, she could easily switch to German. Now, sitting across from Gerhard Helmut, the more she questioned him, the more she was convinced that he was not involved in any kidnapping or illegal activity with the missing girls.
He’d taken them to dinner. Why? He admitted that it made him feel young and desirable to be seen with two girls half his age. Disgusting perhaps, criminal, no. Gerhard had told her, that after dinner, he went back to his room alone. Tova had been browbeating Gerhard for four hours, asking the same questions repeatedly, rewording them, and trying to get a different answer. His story remained the same and by what she could see in his eyes, Tova believed him.
“So you came here Israel to take young girls to dinner?” she asked, tapping her pencil on the desk and biting her lower lip as she watched his reaction to her questions. Tova was thorough, and she knew from experience that the answers were less important than the facial and body expressions of the person she was questioning. She was determined to find out anything and everything about this Gerhard Helmut before she would allow him to leave the police station.
“No, of course not. I just happened to meet the girls in the lobby. I was going to eat alone. But when they started to talk to me, I figured, well, at least, I would have some company.”
“Hmm,” Tova said. “And you wanted nothing from these girls in exchange for the thirty dollars that you spent on them for dinner?”
“I knew they were too young for anything like that.” He blushed. Gerhard came from a conservative background. Things like this were never discussed aloud. “But I am a lonely man,” Gerhard said. “I just wanted to talk to someone to take my mind off of things,” and he wasn’t lying. When he met the girls, he just wanted to relieve the constant chatter in his brain by spending a few hours talking with other people, rather than going over his thoughts like a broken record.
“What kind of things were you trying to take your mind off of?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Just things.”
“You are a visitor here in Israel?” She got up and walked behind him. Tova knew that having a police officer standing behind a suspect always put the suspect on edge. When a person was nervous, they sometimes blurted out things they were trying to hide.
“Yes,” Gerhard said. He was uneasy being questioned like a criminal. He had done nothing to those girls. In fact, now that he learned that they were missing, he was worried about them.
They were two nice, American kids. For an hour or so, they’d humored him. They laughed at his jokes and listened to his amusing stories. It had made him feel young and still attractive. But it was best not to talk too much about this to the police. Although his intentions were honorable, he felt that his behavior might make him seem a little perverted, and Gerhard was afraid that he was about to be terribly misunderstood.
“Your passport says that you are here from Germany. It seems strange to me that you arrived on the same day as Demjanjuk. Do you know who that is?” Tova had done some research before going in to interrogate Helmut.
Gerhard took a deep breath and ran his hand through his thinning, blond hair. “Yes. I know who he is.”
“And perhaps, you have come here because of him?”
“Yes. I’ve come because of him.” Why lie? He might as well just come clean with the truth. This was his opportunity to ask for an audience with Demjanjuk. He hoped his madness wouldn’t end in his incarceration for some crime he had not committed. But he had come so far and this need to understand his father had haunted him too long.
“Oh? You are a Nazi supporter, then?” Tova came back to her seat behind her desk, but she remained standing and stared into Gerhard’s eyes.
“No—not a supporter,” Gerhard said, shaking his head, his shoulders slumped. Then in a soft cracking voice, he said, “I am the son of an SS officer. I’ve come here to try and find out what made my father do the things he did. I’ve been carrying his guilt since I learned what happened. My father is dead. So I cannot ask him why…” Gerhard coughed and cleared his throat...“or how, how he could do what he did…”
“So, you came here to do exactly what?” Tova leaned forward so that her face was close to Gerhard’s.
“I was going to see if I might be able to go to the prison and ask to see Demjanjuk. I remember meeting him once as a boy. I was just a child when he came to my house as a friend of my father’s. But you see, I had no idea what was going on in the camps. To me, and to my family, my father was a kind and loving man. I have to know first if it is true that my father did these things, and then I have to know why. In order for me to make peace with life, I must have answers.”
Gerhard’s skin had turned the color of ripe radishes. His body was trembling, and his hands were gripping the arms of the chair.
“You don’t believe that the Holocaust happened? You don’t believe that innocent people were killed?” Tova had heard this bullshit before. She wasn’t going to let him get away with perpetuating this lie, not when so many of her friend’s parents had been murdered by Hitler and his henchmen.
“I didn’t want to believe that anything so horrible could be real. I wanted to deny it. God knows, I wanted to deny it. So many of my friends and family deny it. That is the only way that they can go on living without the constant guilt.
But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t. In fact, I’ve been so obsessed with shame that I went to the camps and saw everything… with my own eyes. I am heartsick. I know, deep in my gut, that it is true, that my father did these things. But I came here in hopes that somehow, someway, perhaps this man Demjanjuk can make things clear to me so that I can pick up the pieces of my broken life...” Gerhard was speaking loudly, his voice cracking with emotion.
“An apology from me to your people is hardly enough. I’ve even had myself sterilized so that I can never spread the seed of my father. And yet, I still love him. That’s part of the guilt, I guess. You see, no matter what he was, he was my father…” Gerhard was weeping now.
Tova had never seen a man weep like this. She was not a soft woman, not at all, she’d been in the IDF, worked at the police department, and seen hardened criminals. And yet, this man had touched a soft place inside of her with the sincerity of his pain.
“Okay, why don’t we take a break for a while? I’ll have someone bring you a glass of water,” she said, and left the room.
Outside the interrogation room, Ido approached Tova and pulled her over to the side of the building, away from the crowds of people.
“So what do you think?” Ido asked.
“I say he’s not guilty of anything. He took a couple of young girls to dinner. But I really believe that’s all he did.”
CHAPTER 28
Elan left the police department and drove directly to his office at Mossad. When he arrived, he walked in to find people rushing in all directions. Elan had been with Mossad long enough to know by the electric atmosphere that something was happening. Elan grabbed the shirtsleeve of one of his coworkers, stopping him in his tracks.
“What the hell is going on here?” Elan asked.
“A letter was dropped at the door less than five minutes ago. Those two American girls that were here with their synagogue…they were kidnapped by the FPN. We just got a letter from the FPN. They are demanding that we release ten of their top members, or they will kill the girls.”
The FPN was a group of radical Palestinians whose specialty was bombings and kidnappings. The letters stood for Free Palestine Now. It was a small faction of radical and v
iolent people who were determined to take back the land along the Gaza strip. Israel was well aware of their tactics.
The group did not boast large numbers, but the Palestinian community often offered moral support, food, and even money when needed. However, not every Palestinian supported terrorism. Some people wanted an end to the violence so they could live in peace.
“Who dropped off the letter?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody saw anything.”
“One of those girls who was kidnapped is my daughter. Where is this letter?”
“Your daughter, Noa? No, it can’t be Noa, these are American girls. They came here with a synagogue from the United States, from Chicago in Illinois.”
“Yes, I know. Never mind. It’s a long story. Which prisoners do the FPN want us to give them, and how long do we have?”
“I have a list. They’re defiantly FPN. The men they want released are radical terrorists. They’ve committed horrible crimes that resulted in the deaths of many innocent people. We can’t just release them. They’ve given us seventy-two hours. It’s hardly enough time, but if we agree to their demands and exchange prisoners for hostages, it will open up an avenue where terrorists will think all they have to do is capture some prisoners, and Israel will bend to their will.”
“I know all of this. You’re wasting my time. Where in the hell is the letter?” Elan growled.
“Come on, let me show you. You can read it for yourself.”
CHAPTER 29
Bari Lynn awakened with a ferocious headache. Her hands and feet were bound, and she was blindfolded. Bari Lynn felt a shock of panic grip her stomach. The restriction of her bonds heightened her fears. She suddenly felt as if she couldn’t breathe. Slow down, Bari. Try to remember what Dad taught you about meditating. Stay calm. God, she wished Lucas was here with her.
Forever, My Homeland: The Final Book in the All My Love, Detrick Series Page 13
