The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Nathan is dead, Nathan is dead, Nathan is dead. The words had long since set themselves to the rhythm of wheels on rails. And Marcus was dead. Longer dead, yet dead more recently. She allowed her head to bump against the window more and more violently as though the sound might go away with pain. God knew what violence she had tried to do his memory and herself in marrying Nathan Reiss. There are darkness within into which one cannot go even during the eclipse of day. The burden of that violence now lay on Tad, and the terror of it was he had in all the years of his precocity been trying to embrace it.

  The porter brought her coffee. She could not drink it having a mouth of gall. She could only wait to be taken to one who could not come to meet her.

  The afternoon tabloid was put aboard at Harmon. The train floor and seats were strewn with copies when at last she left the compartment as the train pulled into Grand Central Station. She tried not to look at them. But Tad’s face stared up at her, startled and angry as though it were himself that even she was treading on.

  George Bergner met her at the station, unshaven, his eyes bloodshot. Nor was his speech coherent as he wobbled alongside her bumping into people with her suitcase. “I’ve made a reservation for you at the Imperial. The police. Nathan’s things are there. All night, all day, nothing but questions. I can go, they say now. I’m going.” In the ramp he put her into the first taxi. “I’m going home, Martha. The lawyers, they’ll do everything.”

  To Martha’s shock, he closed the cab door between them and directed the driver to take her to the Imperial Hotel. The vision of him on the curb, limp and gaping, as she was driven off did much to help Martha take hold for herself. Sylvia had put her on the train. For years till now, it seemed, she had not acted of her own volition. Now she was on her own, her son to find.

  At the hotel, Lawrence Covington and the attorney, Redmond, were waiting for her.

  It was Covington who asked her as soon as he had introduced the lawyer: “Where’s Bergner? Didn’t he meet you?”

  “He put me in the taxi,” Martha said, “and then he said that he was going home.”

  Covington and Redmond exchanged glances. Redmond said: “I knew we weren’t going to get at him, not till cross-examination.”

  Which, Martha thought without specifically understanding, portended ill for Tad.

  “It will probably be easier for you,” the lawyer said, “if we talk here.”

  “I do not want things made easier for me, Mr. Redmond. I want only to do what I can quickly—and I want to see my son.”

  “I want you to see him, too,” Redmond said. “Maybe he’ll tell you things he won’t tell me.”

  “Or Mr. Covington?” Martha said.

  “The fact is,” Covington said. “He doesn’t want to see either you or me.”

  They moved quickly out of the hotel lobby to Martha’s room, Redmond aware of the sudden presence of newsmen. Between them he and Covington told Martha as much as they felt she should be told. Redmond had requested the switchboard to withhold all calls. When the room phone rang despite this order Redmond answered it. Martha and Covington waited.

  Redmond said to Martha: “Madame Johanna Schwarzbach wishes to speak with you. I think you’d better take it.”

  “So do I,” Martha said, and crossed the room with a firm, quick step.

  10

  THE SIFTING OF SUCH evidence as was available by noon of the day following the crime enabled the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to set up such a pattern of motivation as Reginald Tripp had indicated to Covington. And there was upon the investigators the pressure of having either to charge Hogan or to release him: he could not be held long on suspicion of murder. Each item, however, had to be checked out.

  If Hogan could have taken the murder weapon from the hotel room, so also could Bergner or Reiss himself. Bergner had not left his hotel room, going to it directly after putting Reiss and Hogan in a taxi. A woman had spent the evening in the room with him. If Reiss had carried the weapon, his assailant needed to take it from him before using it. This was possible according to the medical examiner, but only for a person much stronger than Thaddeus Hogan.

  The driver of the taxi was located. He corroborated the boy’s story that the choice of restaurant was actually Reiss’. When asked if he thought his car might have been followed to the restaurant, the driver recalled the screeching of brakes of a car behind him when he stopped suddenly at Schlaacht’s. Not much, but in combination with Hogan’s recollection of a car driving slowly past the restaurant as soon as Reiss left it, a car Hogan said he would have hailed himself had it been a taxi, needed to be noted.

  A precinct detective turned up a bookstore proprietor who thought he could identify Hogan as the boy at his outdoor stall who had asked for a Bible and then disappeared when the man went indoors to look for one. (Even Tad did not remember the Bible part of it: he had remembered the bookstall which was why the detective was checking it.)

  There was also the question of Bergner’s reliability as a witness, and it was primarily his testimony that had set the line of inquiry as to motivation. Tripp, who had questioned him most severely, had a sneaking suspicion that he was the kind of man who saw his own faults in other people. Yet his testimony was sworn.

  Lawrence Covington, a professor at one of the country’s leading universities, was another matter.

  And the possible involvement of a woman as socially prominent as Madame Johanna Schwarzbach brought the District Attorney himself into the case. Before he moved, however, a possibly significant piece of information was turned up by the homicide detective checking out her household staff: she had in her employ a man named John Ferrari. On a hunch the detective had the name searched in the police files. John Ferrari had served a good part of his youth in a state detention prison, having been twice convicted of robbery. Ferrari had been missing since eleven o’clock the night before.

  11

  THE LIGHTS WERE COMING on throughout Manhattan when Martha and Covington parted with Redmond to catch a cab in front of the Imperial Hotel. The fog was gone entirely. Evening traffic moved in surges across town released at measured intervals from every intersection.

  Several cars were double-parked in front of the elegant old mansion, so that Covington and Martha were forced to leave the cab a few doors away from it and walk back. It allowed them to observe the arrival and departure of men who by their gait and bearing suggested police business. Covington could not help construing it as a good sign. But he was not yet able to throw off the oppression of his interview with Tripp.

  A maid opened the door to them, a pale and somewhat frightened looking girl, by no means as sure of herself as were the servants he had hitherto observed in the employ of Madame Schwarzbach. Her eyes fairly leaped when Martha gave her name.

  The Baroness received them in the library. She did not rise from the couch where she was propped up in pillows as though recuperating from an illness. Nor was she alone. Three men in business suits arose when Martha entered. The Baroness extended both her hands.

  “My dearest Martha. I am sorry I could not have come to you.”

  Martha crossed the room and gave her hands into the Baroness’, allowing herself to be drawn down to the chair beside her couch.

  “Yes,” the Baroness said, “it would be Mr. Covington. I cannot say I would not have expected him.”

  “I asked him to come,” Martha said.

  The Baroness said: “I like to think he would have come anyway.” She was gowned in silk, an afghan covering her legs. There was very little make-up on her face. She was at the moment, Covington thought, an acknowledged old woman. “May I present Mr. Forester who is the District Attorney of New York?” She barely looked toward the other men, but said: “I am sorry I have forgotten the other gentlemen’s names.”

  It did not matter to anyone. Nor did they bother to identify themselves.

  “Mr. Forester has been kind enough to spend much of his afternoon with me,” the Baroness said, with irony
. She said to him: “I should suppose it must be near your dinner time?”

  “I have no special engagement,” Forester said blandly. He was a lean, balding man in his early fifties. Not without humor, Covington thought, observing the lines at his eyes and mouth.

  “And the other gentlemen?” the Baroness said.

  “I think we might get along without their company for now,” Forester said. “They can wait in another room.”

  “Since you are so considerate, I am sure my cook can arrange dinner for them downstairs.” She rang a small silver bell and gave instructions to the girl. The two detectives left with her.

  Martha said: “Is my son all right, Mr. Forester?”

  “We don’t persecute our prisoners, Mrs. Reiss.” Forester drew his long thin fingers over his cheek where a stubble of blond beard was beginning to show. He had put in a long day. He said: “Madame Schwarzbach?”

  “I should like to have told this story to Martha in privacy,” the Baroness started. “But then I should like never to have told it at all. It should have ended as it began—in quiet anonymity.”

  Covington drew his first moment of solace from those words.

  “So it has passed the time for privacy and perhaps it is best this way. Perhaps the whole world should know it.” The Baroness lifted a handkerchief to her nose, the scent from which wafted far in the room. As Covington watched her and saw her hand then fall heavily back to her lap, it struck him that she was not recuperating from an illness, but sinking into one—and knew it.

  “Mr. Forester will want to see if I tell you the same story that I have already told him. Am I right?”

  Forester nodded assent and settled himself in a chair opposite Covington, a position from which he could watch all three of them. He reached out and turned on a lamp that stood on the table beside him, murmuring: “Does the light bother you, Madame Schwarzbach?”

  His solicitude reinforced Covington’s suspicion of the woman’s illness. She did not answer, seeming to compose herself for the task ahead.

  “I must begin, I think, before there ever was such a person as Nathan Reiss. And that would be at the end of the first World War on an occasion when my husband, the Baron, and I were at our lodge some miles away from Vienna. You must know the kind of people we were in order to understand. But perhaps you do, from knowing me. There is no one in this room who is not—and would not always have been—a little uncomfortable in my presence. I am sorry—for myself in that.”

  Again she refreshed herself with the scent before going on. “I must tell you—it was a hunting lodge, ours, but the Baron, poor man, loathed hunting. We were ourselves hiding in fact from the company of his peers who expected the impossible of him. But one morning we discovered ourselves host and hostess to a wild and beautiful young boy. He was starving, and he too was hiding—as we learned from the police. It suited us to give him refuge. I cannot tell you all. I have not the strength. I do not even remember all: but it posed a problem which intrigued my husband. The boy confessed to him having killed a man—to my husband, he confessed it, to a man who was not able to kill a rabbit. He was a street urchin, an orphan and at a time of war-hunger in the streets, a nobody who then became a somebody to the police—and so also to my husband. He acquainted himself with the facts of the crime—as well as the criminal. What, he asked him, will you do with your life if I save you? His protégé, as we may now call him, wished more than anything in the world to be a doctor, a surgeon. He could not have answered the Baron better. It became a question of finding a new identity for a boy who could not use his own—such as it was. But there was always—to my husband—the matter of justice—of which he considered himself sufficient arbiter. His protégé had killed a Jewish merchant in trying to steal from him. What more fitting compensation than that he become himself a Jew?”

  The Baroness paused, looking briefly from Covington to Martha who did not raise her eyes from her own hands where they were tightly clasped in her lap.

  “I must say it was much easier to start from anonymity as a Jew. A birthplace where there could be no records was easily found for him—a border village which had been destroyed, its inhabitants dispersed in the pogroms of the early nineteen hundreds. And we gave him a name: Nathan Reiss.

  “Nor was the Baron, I should tell you, unaware of the problems to be confronted by a Jew in acquiring a medical education: that, too, was part of his scheme of justice. It is rather odd to think about it now: he was trying to give a life for a life—instead of taking one.

  “We took him to Naples with us, to Ischia, and for a year the Baron himself attended the boy’s preliminary education.

  “But I suppose I had better tell the truth entirely to you, Martha. For me the story begins only in Naples. Until then I was an observer, a somewhat cynical observer. And I had other interests. Those do not matter now. But in Naples one day something happened. There was an automobile race. Our society, you must understand, worshiped the mad and desperate escapades. This boy understood it very well. But this wild, rash young man, who could only drive a car after my husband had taught him how, entered that race and won it! Yes, won it.” Sitting there on the sofa, propped up like a faded mannequin, the Baroness gave a toss of her handkerchief. It was the only moment in her whole story, Covington thought afterwards, that she participated in what she told.

  “I was in love with him and he was my equal thereafter.”

  Her voice grew listless again, raspy with the effort of talk. “What do I need to tell of the intervening years? He succeeded in doing the most difficult, for he wanted to play almost as much as he wanted to be a doctor, but not quite. I was one part of his life, the Baron another: and we each understood. If anything is to be said of our world, it is that we all understood one another. The Baron died and Nathan grieved—in his fashion. And I in mine. Alone, we were no longer to one another what we had been when we were three of us. And then suddenly—in our world at least—there was Hitler … and poor Nathan had to cope with his patriotic soul. That, I do believe, was his darkest hour.”

  The Baroness sat a moment in bitter, amused contemplation.

  “I am not entirely Jewish myself, you know? That has never mattered to my friends … or to my enemies.

  “But you see, Martha, it did not happen quite as Nathan told it, either of our escapes from the Nazis. He did not wait for me. He tried to stay himself, but when he could not, I proposed to save him and went back across the border to do it, having already left Austria. I was the price he had promised to pay the Nazis for his own freedom. It must been a very great shock to him to discover afterwards I had never reached a concentration camp.

  “I must tell you something else which you may have heard not quite as it happened: there was a German soldier who risked his life to help me escape when he was supposed to take me into custody. I rightly supposed that such a man wished also himself to escape for his own reasons. We crossed with much travail, you may imagine, through Switzerland and Vichy France and finally to Ischia. There we lived alone and remote. But he paid a dreadful price in the end to the Italian partisans who heard but did not know … who perhaps did not want to know. Vengeance does not always ask on whom it is avenged. Is that not so, Mr. Forester?”

  Forester merely uncrossed and recrossed his knees.

  The Baroness rested her head back for a moment. “I am tired,” she said. “I have been tired always since then. But I knew what I had to do.

  “I came to New York and sought out Nathan. I could not go to him since he was married to you. I had to bring him to me. And sometimes, I could not believe what I knew. Maybe you can understand that, Martha. One could not believe what one knew about him. It is so?”

  Martha did not look up.

  “I did not admit to him I knew of his betrayal of me to the Nazis. He told me he had tried to reach our rendezvous—and arrived too late, like all his heroic failures … escaping alone afterwards. I gave him my pity for his failure: it is the easiest emotion to simulate befor
e those who are themselves without it.

  “It was interesting to see what Nathan had become in America … I was remembering, you see, what my husband, the Baron, had made of him. And when I saw how distinguished a person he had become in his own right: I told him of my knowledge of his collaboration. It was at this point, I should say, I had hired John Ferrari as my … servant.

  “I am not a good person, Martha, in any way. And in your own mind you must not make excuses for me—ever. But I do not think you will be so tempted.

  “I wanted only my own kind of vengeance. I opened to Nathan a new door, and proposed that he enter it: It is very easy for someone like me to open doors. It was to a world I mocked, mocking him. But that I did not see at the time. It was only he I wished to watch behaving like a Jew. Who would believe Nathan Reiss was a Zionist? Only those who did not know him. I doubt he could spell the word Israel. No more could I. But who denied him? I ask you: who denied him?”

  For the first time Martha spoke: “My son.”

  “Your son,” the Baroness repeated. She fell back upon her cushions and was a long moment silent. Footsteps could be heard upon a stair, a bell rang in another part of the house, and the clock on the mantel ticked.

  “You are right. If that were not so I should not have had to tell this monstrous tale. There is a blame even beyond my own that I will mention, for if it were not so, what has happened could not have happened. There are people who justify themselves in a cause sufficient to the burden of their conscience, and therefore to them lip service and heart service make very little difference. Only the forms matter, and there was no form ever devised by God or man to which Nathan Reiss could not accommodate himself.

  “What else must be told? Before my arrival in this country I had determined that Nathan must be destroyed. I have told you of my procrastinations. But I made my arrangements. I hired a man in my house capable of protecting me—and of killing for me. And yet, I could not say the word … until yesterday. When Nathan began to deride to me the women who had gathered to pay him tribute, it was enough. Fools I do not doubt some of them are. But from Nathan Reiss I could not tolerate any longer such arrogance and cruelty. He brought even a souvenir of the occasion: the small surgical knife. And to Mr. Forester I could only say when he asked me, this afternoon: Oh, yes! I had indeed seen it before.”