“How long has he been a toddler?” Mary asks, shrugging as she passes me the sugar. “He never gets old. Clearly he made a deal with the Devil.” She holds my hand across the table. “It means a lot to me, you know. That you called me.”
I choose not to point out that the police were the ones who called.
“I thought you were angry at me, because I told you to take time off. But really, it’s for your own good, Sage.” She smiles a little. “Sister Immaculata used to say that to me all the time when I was a kindergartner in parochial school. I never stopped talking. So one day she put me in the trash can. I was short enough that I fit. Every time I complained, she kicked the can.”
“I’m supposed to be grateful that you didn’t throw me in the Dumpster?”
“No, you’re supposed to be grateful that someone cares enough about you to help you get back on track again. You know it’s what your mother would have wanted.”
My mother. The reason I had gone to grief group in the first place. If she hadn’t died, I might never have cultivated a friendship with Josef Weber.
“So what happened tonight?” Mary asks.
Well, that’s a loaded question. “You know. I hit a deer, and my car swerved into the guardrail.”
“Where were you headed? The weather was awful.”
“Home,” I say, because that isn’t a lie.
I would like to tell her all about Josef, but she already dismissed me once when I tried to confide in her. It is like he said: we believe what we want to, what we need to. The corollary is that we choose not to see what we’d rather pretend doesn’t exist. Mary can’t accept the thought that Josef Weber might be a monster, because that implies that she was duped by him.
“Were you with him?” Mary asks tightly.
At first I think she is talking about Josef, but then I realize she means Adam. “Actually I told Adam I didn’t want to see him for a while.”
Mary’s jaw drops. “Amen!”
“But then I drove to his house.” When Mary buries her face in her hands, I grimace. “I wasn’t going to go inside. I swear it.”
“Hello? Why didn’t you come here?” Mary asks. “I have enough herbal tea and Häagen-Dazs to compensate for any breakup, and I’m more emotionally available than Adam ever was.”
I nod. “You’re right. I should have called you. But instead, I saw him with his wife and kids. I got . . . rattled, I guess. And I was distracted, which is why I hit the deer.”
I realize that I’ve crafted this entire story without even mentioning Josef’s name. I have more in common with my grandmother than I originally thought.
“Nice try,” Mary says. “But you’re lying.”
I blink at her, my breath caught in my throat.
“I know you. You were driving to see him because you wanted to tell him you’d made a mistake. If you hadn’t Peeping Tommed the whole happy family scene, you probably would have climbed a trellis and thrown pebbles at the window until he came outside to talk to you.”
I scowl at her. “You make me sound like such a loser.”
Mary shrugs. “Look, all I’m saying is that it wouldn’t hurt you to hold a grudge longer than a single breath.”
“Isn’t that a little Old Testament for a nun?”
“Ex-nun. And let me tell you, that serenity crap from The Sound of Music? Bullshit. Inside the cloister, the sisters are just as petty as people on the outside. There are some you love and some you hate. I did my share of spitting in the Holy Water font before another nun used it. It was totally worth the twenty rosaries I said for penance.”
I rub my left temple, which is throbbing. “Can you get me my phone?”
She gets up and rummages through my purse to find it for me. “Who are you calling?”
“Pepper.”
“Liar. The last time you talked to your sister she hung up on you because you said tutoring a four-year-old to get into an exclusive preschool made as much sense as hiring a swim coach for a guppy. You wouldn’t call Pepper if you were trapped in the car and it was about to catch fire—”
“Just let me check my messages, will you?”
Mary thrusts the phone at me. “Go ahead. Text him. By tomorrow morning, you’re going to be begging him to forgive you anyway. It’s your M.O.”
I scan my contacts for Leo’s number. “Not this time,” I promise.
• • •
Apparently even Nazi hunters take a breather. Although I leave three voice mails for Leo that night and the next morning, he does not answer, and he does not call me back. I fall into a fitful sleep in Mary’s guest bedroom, where an elaborate carving of Jesus carrying his cross hangs over my head. I dream that I have to drag a crucifix up a Sisyphean hill, and look down from its peak to see the bodies of thousands of naked men, women, children.
Mary drives me home on her way to the bakery, even though I insist that it would just be better for me to join her there. Once I’m back in my house, though, I am restless. I don’t think I can handle another session with Josef today; I don’t want to talk to him until I have connected with Leo, anyway.
I want to get my mind off Josef, so I decide to bake something that requires my undivided attention: brioche. It’s a bread that is an anomaly—50 percent of it is butter, yet instead of being a brick of a loaf, it is melt-in-your-mouth, sweet, airy. To make it on a hot, humid day like this is an added challenge, because it requires all ingredients to be cold. I even refrigerate the mixing bowl and the dough hook.
I begin by beating the butter with a rolling pin while the dough is mixing. Then I add it, in small portions, to the mixer. This is my favorite part about brioche. The dough doesn’t quite know what to do with all that butter, and begins to come apart. But with enough time, it manages to bring itself back to center, to a satin consistency.
I turn off the mixer and rip off a hunk of dough the size of a plum. Holding it between my hands, I pull it slowly to see if it sheets—growing transparent as it stretches. I set the dough into a container and cover it tightly with plastic wrap, then place it on my counter and begin to clean up the kitchen.
The doorbell rings.
The sound startles me. I’m not home during the day, usually, and no one ever rings the doorbell at night. Even Adam, when he comes, has his own key.
I am expecting the mail lady or the UPS guy, but the man standing on my porch is not in uniform. He’s wearing a rumpled suit jacket and a tie, even though it’s easily eighty-five degrees out. He has black hair and beard stubble and eyes the color of polished walnut. And he’s easily six foot three. “Sage Singer?” he says, when I open the door. “I’m Leo Stein.”
He is not what I anticipated, in more ways than one. Immediately, I shake my bangs forward to cover my face, but I can tell I’m too late. Leo is staring at me, as if he can see through the screen of hair. “How did you know where I live?” I ask.
“Are you kidding? We’re the Department of Justice. I know what you had for breakfast this morning.”
“Really?”
“No.” He grins, and it takes me by surprise. I would think a person like him doesn’t smile very often. I would think, given all he’s heard, that he’s forgotten how. “Could I come in?”
I don’t know if there’s a protocol here. If I’m even allowed to turn him away. I wonder if I’ve done something terribly wrong; if there have been hidden cameras focused on me and Josef; if I am in trouble.
“Okay, the first thing you have to do is breathe,” Leo says. “I’m here to help you, not arrest you.”
I turn in profile, so that he can’t see the bad side of my face.
“Um,” he says. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Why?”
“Because you’re twisted the way I was when I fell asleep at my desk last month. I couldn’t straighten my neck for a week.”
I take a deep breath and meet his gaze, challenging him to look at me.
“Oh,” he says softly. “Well, that’s not what I expected.”
I don’t know why I feel like I’ve been slapped. Most polite people do not say anything at all when they see my scars. If Leo had done that, at least I could have pretended he didn’t notice.
“It’s silly, but I pictured you with brown eyes. Not blue,” he says.
My mouth drops open.
“I like the blue, though,” Leo adds. “It suits you.”
“That’s all you have to say?” I reply. “Really?”
He shrugs. “If you were thinking I’d run away screaming because you have a few silver cyborg lines on your face, I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“Cyborg?”
“Look, I don’t know you very well, but you seem a little fixated on physical appearance. That’s far less interesting to me than the fact that you brought Josef Weber to my attention.”
At the mention of Josef’s name, I shake my head to clear it. “I talked to him yesterday. He’s done so many horrible things.”
Leo reaches into a battered briefcase and takes out a file. “I know,” he says. “That’s why I thought it was time for us to meet each other.”
“But you said I would have to talk to one of your historians.”
A flush works its way up his neck. “I was in the neighborhood,” he says.
“You were in New Hampshire for something else?”
“Philly,” he replies. “Close enough.”
Philly is eight hours away by car. I step back, holding the door. “Well, then,” I reply. “You must be hungry.”
• • •
Leo Stein cannot stop eating the brioche. The first batch has come out of the oven, impossibly light. I serve it warm, with jam and tea. “Mmm,” he rhapsodizes, his eyes closing in delight. “I’ve never tasted anything like this.”
“They don’t have bakeries in Washington?”
“I wouldn’t know. My sustenance consists of really bad coffee and sandwiches that come out of a vending machine.”
I have spent the past two hours telling Leo everything Josef told me. In between, I have shaped the brioche into a traditional tête, brushed it with an egg wash, and baked it. It’s easier for me to talk when my hands are busy. With each word that passes my lips, I feel less heavy. It is as if I am giving him sentences made of stones, and the more I relay, the more of the burden he is carrying. He takes notes and writes on his legal pad. He scrutinizes the clipping I slipped into my pocket before I left Josef, the one of him eating his mother’s cake that ran in the local paper in Wewelsburg.
And he doesn’t even do a double take when he looks at me.
“Are you going to talk to him directly?” I ask.
Leo looks up at me. “Not yet. You’ve developed a good rapport. He trusts you.”
“He trusts me to forgive him,” I say. “Not to turn him in.”
“Forgiveness is spiritual. Punishment is legal,” Leo says. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”
“So you’d forgive him?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s not my place, or yours, if you ask me. Forgiveness is the imitation of God.”
“So’s punishment,” I point out.
He raises his brows and smiles. “The difference is that God never hates.”
“I’m surprised you can believe in God, after meeting so many evil people.”
“How could I not,” Leo asks, “after meeting so many survivors?” He wipes his mouth with his napkin. “So you saw his tattoo,” he clarifies.
“I saw a mark that could have been a tattoo.”
“Where?” Leo holds up his arm. “Show me.”
I touch his left biceps muscle, below the armpit. I can feel the heat of his skin through the cotton of his shirt. “Here. It looked like a cigarette burn.”
“That’s consistent with Waffen-SS Blutgruppe tattoos,” Leo says. “And with the file we’ve got so far. As is his claim that he was with the 1.SS Infantry Brigade in 1941, and that he worked at Auschwitz Two after 1943.” He opens the folder on the table between us. I see a grainy photograph of a young man in a Nazi uniform with skulls on the lapels of his coat. It could be Josef, I suppose, but I can’t tell. HARTMANN, REINER, I read, peeking as he slips the photograph from its paper clip. There is an address in spiky handwriting I cannot read, and the letters AB, which must be his blood type. Leo closes the folder quickly—classified information, I suppose—and sets the photo beside the newspaper clipping. “The question is: Are these the same guy?”
In the first, Josef is a young boy; in the second, he’s a man. The quality of both photos is shoddy at best. “I can’t tell. But does it really matter? I mean, if all the other stuff he’s said fits?”
“Well,” Leo answers, “that depends. In 1981 the Supreme Court concluded that anyone who was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp took part in supporting the activities that occurred there—including murder, if we’re talking about Auschwitz Two. The court’s analysis was reminiscent of a trial in Germany years earlier in which a suspect said that if German authorities prosecuted him, they should prosecute everyone at the camp, because the camp operated as a chain of functions and everyone in that chain had to perform his function, or the whole apparatus of annihilation would have ground to a halt. So everyone from the guards to the bean counters at Auschwitz is culpable for what happened there, simply because they were aware of what was going on inside its fences, and performed their duties. Think about it like this—let’s say you and your boyfriend decide to kill me in my office. The deal is that your boyfriend is going to chase me around the room with a knife while you stand outside holding the door closed so I can’t escape. Both of you are going down for Murder One. It’s just a division of labor about how you each participated.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I blurt out. It turns out that it is easier to say aloud than I would have expected, and instead of feeling as if my heart has been ripped out of my chest, it seems as if I am made of helium. “I mean, I did, but things aren’t . . .” I shrug. “Anyway. He won’t be killing you in your office anytime soon.”
Leo blushes. “Guess that means I’ll be able to sleep well tonight.”
I clear my throat. “So all we have to do is prove that Josef worked at Auschwitz,” I say. “If he’s confessed to that, isn’t it enough?”
“That depends on how trustworthy his confession is.”
“Why would any court think he’d lie about that?”
“Why does anyone lie?” Leo says. “He’s old. He’s got mental issues. He’s a masochist. Who knows? For all we know, he wasn’t even there. He could have read a book and regurgitated that history to you; that doesn’t mean it’s his own.”
“Even though you have a file with his name on it?”
“He’s already given you one false name,” Leo points out. “This could be another.”
“So how do we make sure he’s really Reiner?”
“There are two ways,” Leo says. “Either he has to keep talking to you and eventually spill information that’s inside this file—up-close SS information that isn’t the kind of stuff you can glean from watching the History Channel 24/7. Or we need an eyewitness who remembers him from the camp.” He touches the newspaper clipping and the Nazi Party registration photo. “Someone who could say that these two men are one and the same.”
I look at the loaf of brioche, no longer steaming but fragrant and warm. The jam, staining the maple table. My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle: What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together?
Bread, of course.
I think of this, and even though I am not religious, I pray that she will forgive me.
“I think I know someone who can help,” I say.
“Say what you want,” Damian argued. “I am only trying to keep you safe.”
I had opened the door, expecting Aleks, only to find the captain of the guard instead. I had told him I was busy, and this was true. This week, business had grown stronger. We could not produce enough baguettes to feed demand. The
loaves, like my rolls, were sweeter than anything my father had ever baked. Aleks joked with me, and said he had a secret ingredient, but he would not tell me what it was. Then it would only be an ingredient, he said.
Now, I listened to Damian as he lectured me in my kitchen. “An upiór?” I said. “Those are folktales.”
“There’s a reason tales get told. What else makes sense? The livestock was one thing, Ania. But this . . . this beast is going after humans.”
I had heard of them, of course. Of the undead who rose from their coffins, unsatisfied, and gorged themselves on the blood of others. An upiór would eat its own flesh, if it had to.
Old Sal, who sold baskets in the village square, was superstitious. She never walked near a black cat; she threw salt over her shoulder; she wore her clothes inside out the night of the full moon. She was the one who buzzed about this upiór that was terrorizing our village, whispering every time we set up shop beside each other at market. You can spot them in a crowd, she had said. They live among us, with their ruddy cheeks and their red lips. And after their death, they complete their transformation. If that’s already happened, it’s too late. The only way to kill an upiór is to cut off its head, or cleave open its heart. And the only way to protect yourself from one is to swallow its blood.
I had dismissed Old Sal’s stories, and now, I would dismiss Damian’s. I folded my arms. “What is it you want me to do, then?”
“It’s said that you can catch an upiór if you can distract it,” he explained. “Once it sees a knot, it has to untie it. If there’s a pile of seeds, it has to count them.” Damian reached above my head, took a bag of barley grain, and dumped it on the counter.
“And why would the upiór happen to wander into my bakery?”
“It’s possible,” Damian said, “that he’s already here.”
It took me a moment to understand. And then, I was furious. “So because he’s an outsider, he’s the easy target? Because he didn’t go to school with you like all your soldier friends, or because he has a different way of pronouncing words? He’s not a monster, Damian. He’s just different.”
The Storyteller Page 18
