The Storyteller

by Picoult, Jodi

  Of course, that’s still an enormous longshot.

  “What’s his name?” I ask again.

  “Josef Weber.”

  I ask her to spell it and then I write it down on a pad, underline it twice. “Did he say anything else?”

  “He showed me a picture of himself. He was wearing a uniform.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “An SS uniform,” she says.

  “And you know this because . . . ?”

  “Well,” she admits. “It looks like the ones you always see in movies.”

  There are two caveats here. I do not know Sage Singer; she could be a recent escapee from a mental hospital who is making this entire story up. I also do not know Josef Weber, who himself might be a mental hospital escapee seeking attention. Plus, there’s the fact that I’ve never, in a decade, received a cold call like this from an ordinary citizen about a Nazi in the backyard that actually panned out. Most of the tips we go on to investigate come from lawyers representing women in divorce suits, hoping to allege that their husbands—who are a certain age and from Europe—are also Nazi war criminals. Imagine the payout, if you can get a judge to believe how cruel the guy was to your client. And always, even these allegations turn out to be total crap.

  “Do you have that photo?” I ask.

  “No,” she admits. “He does.”

  Of course.

  I rub my forehead. “I’ve gotta ask . . . does he have a German shepherd?”

  “A dachshund,” she says.

  “That would have been my second choice,” I murmur. “Look, how long have you known Josef Weber?”

  “About a month. He started coming to a grief therapy group I’ve been going to since my mother died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say automatically, but I can tell it is a kindness she isn’t expecting. “So, it’s not as if you really have a thorough understanding of his character, or why he might say he did something he didn’t actually do . . .”

  “God, what is with you people?” she explodes. “First the cops, then the FBI—shouldn’t you at least be giving me the benefit of the doubt? How do you know he’s not telling the truth?”

  “Because it doesn’t make sense, Ms. Singer. Why would anyone who’s managed to hide for over half a century just suddenly drop the pretense?”

  “I don’t know,” she says frankly. “Guilt? A fear of Judgment Day? Or maybe he’s just tired. Of living a lie, you know?”

  When she says that, she hooks me. Because it’s so damn human. The biggest mistake people make when they think about Nazi war criminals is to assume they were always monsters; before, during, and after the war. They weren’t. They were once ordinary men, with fully operational consciences, who made bad choices and had to fabricate excuses to themselves for the rest of their lives when they returned to a mundane existence. “Do you happen to have his birth date?” I ask.

  “I know he’s in his nineties . . .”

  “Well,” I tell her, “we can try to check his name and see if we get a hit. The records we have aren’t complete, but we’ve got one of the best databases in the world, with over thirty years of archival research in it.”

  “And then what?”

  “Assuming we get confirmation or for some other reason think there might be a legitimate claim, I’d ask you to talk to my chief historian, Genevra Astanopoulos. She would be able to ask you a host of questions that would help us investigate further. But I have to warn you, Ms. Singer, even though my office has received thousands of calls from members of the public, none have panned out. In fact there was one call, prior to this office’s creation in 1979, that led the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago to prosecute the alleged criminal—who turned out to not only be innocent but a victim of the Nazis. Out of all the tips we’ve received since then from citizens, not a single one has actually become a prosecutable case.”

  Sage Singer is quiet for a moment. “Then I’d say you’re due for one,” she says.

  • • •

  All things considered, Michel Thomas was one of the lucky ones. A Jewish concentration camp inmate, he escaped the Nazis and joined the French resistance and then a commando group before assisting the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. During the last week of World War II, he received a tip about a truck convoy near Munich, believed to be carrying some sort of important cargo. Arriving at a paper mill warehouse in Freimann, Germany, he discovered heaps of documents that the Nazis had planned to have pulped: the worldwide membership file cards of over ten million members of the Nazi Party.

  These documents were used at the Nuremberg Trials, and afterward, to identify, locate, and prosecute war criminals. They’re the first stop for the historians who work with me at HRSP. That’s not to say that if we do not turn up a hit on a name that individual was not a Nazi—but it does make building a case a hell of a lot easier.

  I find Genevra at her desk. “I need you to run a name,” I say.

  After Germany was unified in the nineties, the United States returned the Berlin Document Center, the central repository of SS/Nazi Party records that had been seized by the U.S. Army after World War II . . . but not before microfilming the whole damn thing. Between the Berlin Document Center and the information that came to light after the breakup of the USSR, I know Genevra’s bound to unearth something.

  That is, if there’s something to be unearthed.

  She looks up at me. “You spilled coffee on your tie,” she says, pulling a pencil out of the bird’s nest of frizzy yellow hair piled on top of her head. “Better change it before your date.”

  “How do you know I have a date?” I ask.

  “Because your mother called me this morning and told me I should push you out the door with brute force if you were still here at six thirty p.m.”

  This doesn’t surprise me. No cable, Ethernet, or FiOS system is as blisteringly fast at spreading news as a Jewish family.

  “Remind me to kill her,” I tell Genevra.

  “Can’t,” she muses. “Don’t want to be roped in as an accomplice.” She grins at me over her glasses. “Besides, Leo, your mom’s a breath of fresh air. All day long I read about people who craved world domination and racial superiority. By comparison, wanting grandchildren is sort of sweet.”

  “She has grandchildren. Three, courtesy of my sister.”

  “She doesn’t like the fact that you’re married to your job.”

  “She didn’t much like it when I was married to Diana, either,” I say. It’s been five years since my divorce was final, and I have to admit, the worst thing about that whole experience was having to admit to my mother that she was right: the woman I believed to be the girl of my dreams was not, in fact, right for me.

  Recently, I ran into Diana in the Metro. She’s remarried, and she’s got one kid and another on the way. We were exchanging pleasantries when my cell phone rang—my sister, asking me if I was going to be able to make it to my nephew’s birthday party that weekend. She heard me say good-bye to Diana, and within the hour, my mother had called to set me up on a blind date.

  Like I said, Jewish family network.

  “I need you to run a name,” I repeat.

  Genevra takes the paper from my hand. “It’s six thirty-six,” she says. “Don’t make me call your mother.”

  I stop back at my desk to grab my briefcase and laptop, because leaving without them would be as foreign to me as leaving without my arm or leg. I instinctively reach for the holster on my belt to make sure my BlackBerry’s there. I sit down for a second, and Google Sage Singer’s name.

  I use search engines all the time, of course. Mostly it’s to see if someone (Miranda Coontz, for example?) is a complete whack job. But the reason I want to find information on Sage Singer is her voice.

  It’s smoky. It sounds like the first night in autumn when you build a fire in the fireplace and drink a glass of port and fall asleep with a dog on your lap. Not that I have a dog or port, but you get what I mean.


  This, if nothing else, is proof that I ought to be running out the door to go to that blind date. Sage Singer’s voice may have sounded young, but she is probably in her dotage—she did say, after all, that this Josef Weber guy was a friend of hers. Her mother had recently died, after all, probably of old age. And that husky rasp could be the mark of a lifelong cigarette addict.

  The only Sage Singer in New Hampshire who pops up, though, is a baker at a small boutique café. Her berry tart recipe is in a local magazine as part of a summer cornucopia piece. Her name appears in the business listing of the newspaper heralding the opening of Mary DeAngelis’s new bakery.

  I click on the News link and find a video from a local television station—one uploaded just yesterday. “Sage Singer,” the reporter says in a voice-over, “is the baker who crafted the Jesus Loaf.”

  The what?

  The clip is an amateur video of a woman with a messy ponytail, her face turned away from the camera. I can see a mark of flour on her cheek the moment before she completely ducks out of the spotlight.

  She isn’t what I expected. When ordinary citizens call HRSP, it usually tells you more about them than about the people they are accusing —they want a conflict resolved, they hold a grudge, they want attention. But my gut tells me that’s not the case here.

  Perhaps Genevra will turn up a hit after all. If Sage Singer can surprise me once, maybe she can do it again.

  • • •

  My car has, I am sure, the world’s last eight-track cartridge player. As I sit in traffic on the Beltway, I listen to Bread and Chicago. I like to pretend that everyone in all the cars around me is listening to eight-tracks, too, that the years have been rolled back to a simpler time. I realize how strange this is, given how much smaller the world has become as a result of technology and how my office has benefited from it. Even better, having an eight-track player isn’t just strange anymore; it’s retro.

  I’m thinking of this, and whether I should tell my blind date that I’m so tragically hip I buy my music on eBay instead of iTunes. The last time I went out (a colleague who set me up with his wife’s cousin) I spent the whole dinner talking about the Aleksandras Lileikis case, and the woman begged a headache before dessert and took the Metro home. The truth is, I’m lousy with small talk. I can discuss the fine points of the Darfur genocide, but the majority of Americans probably can’t even tell you the country where that’s taking place. (It’s Sudan, FYI.) On the other hand, I can’t talk football, or tell you the plot of the last novel I read. I don’t know who’s dating whom in Hollywood. And I don’t really care. There are so many things in the world considerably more important.

  I check the name of the restaurant against the note in my Black-Berry calendar and walk inside. I can tell it’s one of those places where they serve “precious” food—appetizers the size of a mushroom cap, unpronounceable ingredients listed for each menu item that make you wonder if someone sits around making these up: cod semen and wild-fennel pollen; beef cheeks, meringue grits, ash vinaigrette.

  When I give the maître d’ my name, he leads me to a table in the rear of the dining room, a place so dark I wonder if I’ll even be able to tell if my date is attractive. She is already seated, and as my eyes adjust to the lack of light I notice that yes, she’s cute, except for her hair. It’s styled with a big pouf on the top, as if she’s trying to fashionably mask encephalitis. “You must be Leo,” she says, smiling. “I’m Irene.”

  She is wearing a lot of silver jewelry, much of it caught in her cleavage. “Brooklyn?” I guess.

  “No,” she repeats, more slowly. “I-rene.”

  “No—I mean, your accent . . . are you from Brooklyn?”

  “Jersey,” Irene says. “Newark.”

  “The car theft capital of the world. Did you know more cars are stolen there than in L.A. and NYC put together?”

  She laughs. It sounds like a wheeze. “And my mother’s worried about me living in Prince George County.”

  A waiter comes over to rattle off specials, and to take our drink order. I order wine, about which I know nothing. I choose one based on the fact that it’s not the most expensive one on the list, and it’s not the least expensive, either, because that would just look cheap.

  “So this is weird, huh?” she says. Either she is winking at me or she has something in her eye. “Our parents knowing each other?”

  The way it has been explained to me, my mother’s podiatrist is the brother of Irene’s father. It’s not like they grew up next door. “Weird,” I agree.

  “I moved here for a job, so I don’t really know anyone yet.”

  “It’s a great city,” I say automatically, although I do not entirely believe this. The traffic is insane, and there’s a protest every other day about some cause, which quickly stops being idealistic and starts being a pain in the neck when you need to get somewhere in a timely fashion and all the roads are blocked off. “I’m sure my mom told me, but I’ve forgotten—what do you do?”

  “I’m a certified bra fitter,” Irene says. “I’m working at Nordstrom.”

  “Certified,” I repeat. I wonder where the legitimizing agency for bra fitters is. If you get grades: A, B, C, D, and DD. “It sounds like a very . . . unique job.”

  “It’s a handful,” Irene says, and then she laughs. “Get it?”

  “Um. Yeah.”

  “I’m doing bra fitting now so I can put myself through school and do what I really want.”

  “Mammography?” I guess.

  “No, be a court reporter. They’re always so stylish in the movies.” She smiles at me. “I know what you do. My mother told me. It’s very Humphrey Bogart.”

  “Not so much. Our department isn’t Casablanca, just the poor bastard stepchild of the DOJ. We don’t actually have Paris. We barely even have a coffeemaker.”

  She blinks.

  “Never mind.”

  “So how many Nazis have you caught?”

  “Well, it’s a little complicated,” I say. “We’ve won court cases against a hundred and seven Nazi criminals. Sixty-seven have been removed from the U.S., to date. But it’s not sixty-seven out of a hundred and seven, because not all of them were U.S. citizens—you have to be careful about the math. Unfortunately, few of the people we’ve deported or have had extradited were ever prosecuted, to which I say, shame on Europe. Three defendants have been tried in Germany, one in Yugoslavia, and one in the USSR. Of those, three were convicted, one was acquitted, and one had his trial suspended for medical reasons and died before it could continue. Before our department was created, one other Nazi criminal was sent from the U.S. to Europe and prosecuted there—she was convicted and imprisoned. We’ve got five cases currently in litigation and many more people under active investigation and . . . Your eyes are glazing over.”

  “No,” Irene says. “I just wear contacts. Really.” She hesitates. “But aren’t the guys you’re chasing, like, really old now?”

  “Yes.”

  “So they can’t be moving all that fast.”

  “It’s not a literal chase,” I explain. “And they did horrible things to other human beings. That shouldn’t go unpunished.”

  “Yeah, but it was so long ago.”

  “It’s still important,” I tell her.

  “You mean because you’re Jewish?”

  “The Nazis didn’t just target Jews. They also killed Gypsies and Poles and homosexuals and the mentally and physically disabled. Everyone should be invested in what my department does. Because if we’re not, what message is America sending to people who commit genocide? That they can get away with it, if enough time passes? They can hide inside our borders without even a slap on the wrist? We routinely deport hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens every year whose sole offense is that they overstayed a visa or came without the right paperwork—but people who were involved in crimes against humanity get to stay? And die peacefully here? And be buried on American soil?”

  I don’t realize how loud and impass
ioned I’ve become until a man who is sitting at the next table starts to clap, slowly but forcefully. A few other folks at tables around me join in. Mortified, I slink lower in my chair, trying to become invisible.

  Irene reaches for my hand and threads her fingers through mine. “It’s okay, Leo. Actually, I think it’s really sexy.”

  “What is?”

  “The way you can wave your voice around, like it’s a flag.”

  I shake my head. “I’m not some big patriot. I’m a guy who’s doing his job. I’m just tired of defending what I do. It isn’t obsolete.”

  “Well, it is, kind of. I mean, it’s not like those Nazis are hiding in plain sight.”

  It takes a moment for me to realize she is confusing the words obsolete and obscure. At the same time, I think about Josef Weber, who— according to Sage Singer—has done just that, for decades.

  The waiter arrives with the bottle of wine and pours a taste for me. I swish it around in my mouth, nod my approval. At this point, frankly, I’d have given the thumbs-up to moonshine, as long as there was a valid alcohol content.

  “I hope we’re not going to talk about history all night,” Irene says breezily. “Because I’m really bad at it. I mean, who really cares if Columbus discovered America instead of Westhampton—”

  “The West Indies,” I murmur.

  “Whatever. The natives were probably less bitchy.”

  I refill my wineglass, and wonder whether I will survive until dessert.

  • • •

  Either my mother has a sixth sense or else she implanted a microchip in me at birth that allows her to know my comings and goings at all times. It’s the only way I can explain the fact that she times her phone calls for the very moment I walk in my front door, without fail.