Dry Bones

by Peter Quinn

  “Bleier had no success in making an appointment under some business pretext to meet Hemmer face-to-face. When he learned Hemmer had put his villa up for sale in preparation for his return to Europe, he pretended he was interested in buying it. The house was in the process of being emptied of its contents when he visited. He managed to make an impression of the key used by the real estate agent who showed him around.”

  The day was warm. Dunne had started to perspire. “Let’s sit.” He indicated a shaded bench directly ahead. The Reptile House was directly behind them. Schwimmer reopened his cigarette case and offered another to Dunne, who declined. Schwimmer took one for himself, pounded the tip on silver cover, and lit it.

  “Bleier returned that night and had a look around. Most of the furnishings had been removed. He opened the drawer of a battered desk left behind. There were scraps stuck in the back that looked to be pieces of a torn-up photo. He slipped them in his pocket.

  “When he got home, though a few pieces were missing, he was able to reconstruct a photo of five German officers in a wooded glade. On their collars were the distinctive SS runes. The one in the middle, who appeared to be in charge, was laughing. On the back, in faded ink, was printed: AUSCHWITZ, APRIL 1944.

  “Bleier called the real estate agent and made a large bid for the villa—so large he was able to wrangle a short meeting with Hemmer. He attached enough conditions to the bid to guarantee it would be rejected. Yet, seeing Hemmer, Bleier was convinced he was the same person as the laughing SS officer in the photograph. He wrote a letter to the Mossad and included a touched-up copy of the photo, one of several he made.

  “Months went by before Bleier got a letter back, short—far from sweet—thanking him for the information he’d sent and reminding him that the service’s current priorities centered on the threats posed by Israel’s hostile neighbors.

  “The Mossad stated it had neither the time nor the resources to track down every sighting of alleged war criminals. Hitler’s secretary, Martin Bormann, for example, had been sighted in South Africa, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia—all in the same week. They had no record of an SS officer named Oscar Hemmer. Karsten Heinz was already dead.

  “In the future, Bleier was advised, all inquiries, information and/or photos should be sent directly to the West German BND, which had formal responsibility for apprehending and prosecuting alleged war criminals.

  “Hemmer, as far as Bleier knew, had gone home and opened an import-export firm specializing in chemical fertilizers. Whatever the truth about Hemmer, the war was over. Nobody seemed interested in revisiting the particulars of what had taken place. Bleier gave me his copy of the photo. ‘I don’t need any souvenirs of those bastards,’ he said.

  “I stuck it in my suitcase and forgot about it. One morning, several months later, I heard Frieda screaming. I ran to her. She was yelling over and over, ‘Heinz, der Blaue Teufel! Der Blaue Teufel!’ Before her on the table was the picture Bleier had given me. Frieda had gone to use the suitcase and had found it.

  “I had no idea she’d had any personal acquaintance with Heinz at Auschwitz. I never questioned her about her experiences. I decided to do some investigating of my own. I traveled to Hamburg. Oscar Hemmer was indeed in the import-export business. Yet he rarely came to his firm’s offices. I found his home address. It was a substantial house on the outskirts of the city surrounded by a high wall. It was clear that the chauffeur who drove him around also acted as a bodyguard.

  “I contacted the BND and made a formal inquiry about SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Karsten Heinz. The officials with whom I spoke seemed nonplussed by my interest. The file they had on him was thin. I was told that British intelligence in London, where Heinz died, probably held the bulk of the records.

  “In Bonn, I asked to speak with someone at the American embassy about a possible war criminal. Nobody seemed to know what to make of my request. After I persisted, an official from the ‘special interest section’ came to speak with me. I presume he was CIA. He told me to consult with the West German government. I said I had.

  “There was really nothing he could do, he said. The primary war criminals had been dealt with at Nuremberg. If I was serious about pursuing the issue further, I should contact Louis Pohl, who worked with a consulting firm in New York and still seemed interested in the subject: ‘An old colleague—nice guy—he’s off the wall on this one, like those paranoid types on the lookout for UFOs.’

  “I stayed a while in Bonn. I met a former colleague of mine from the Czech Squadron. He’d defected from the People’s Republic of Czechoslovakia. He’d been attached to the Warsaw Pact intelligence office in East Berlin. I told him about my interest in Hemmer. He said that the Soviets were convinced that the CIA had set up a special section within the BND to keep an eye on Gehlen and hunt for moles.

  “Rumor had it, he said, that the unit was run by an ex-SS officer who reported directly to Washington. So far, even the ex-SS agents the Soviets had recruited and slipped into the BND had been unable either to confirm the rumor or penetrate the unit.

  “I tracked down Pohl and discovered he was with ISC in New York. Not wishing to get entangled with a devotee of UFOs, I approached him cautiously. I represented myself as the owner of a Swiss medical supply business interested in entering the American market and endured an hour of his generalities and banalities.

  “I had Frieda stay with an aunt of ours in the Bronx. I met with Pohl at the Savoy Plaza and told him that I’d heard of his work in keeping track of Nazi war criminals. He was put off at first. He was there, he said, to discuss my interest in protecting my firm’s patents and pursuing opportunities in the American market, not hunting for Nazis.

  “I revealed we were Hungarian Jews and that, except for my sister, my family had been wiped out at Auschwitz. I told him about my pursuit of Hemmer/Heinz. He remembered hearing about Heinz’s interrogation in London and his death. It was quickly apparent he was no deluded pursuer of UFOs. He understood what I was talking about.

  “He added more details to what I already knew about Heinz’s stint in Mauthausen. He mentioned your name and someone named Van Hull. I recall that because I wrote your names down in the notes I took. I showed him the dossier I’d compiled.

  “That night, I read Frieda the notes I’d taken in my discussion with Pohl. When she heard your name and that of Van Hull, she was sure you were the Americans she’d encountered in Slovakia.”

  Schwimmer finished his cigarette. They resumed walking. Dunne bought two orangeades and a bag of peanuts at a refreshment stand. Schwimmer peeled back the tin-foil cap and took a long drink. “We met again the next day. Pohl filled me in about Carlton Bartlett at the CIA. He told me he intended to confront Bartlett with Heinz’s existence. I thought perhaps he was having sport with me. ‘You can’t be serious,’ I said.

  “‘What other course is there?’ he answered.

  “‘That’s the reason my sister and I sought you out.’ I said. ‘The intelligence I’ve gathered on Hemmer/Heinz is convincing. But we must make it airtight. When we have, we’ll go to the proper authorities.’

  “Pohl grew angry. ‘The proper authorities! By the time you get the BND to pay attention, which in itself is doubtful, Bartlett will have resubmerged Heinz so deep Captain Nemo couldn’t find him. You couldn’t get the Mossad interested in pursuing the case. What do you think it will take to get the BND off its rear?’

  “‘What if we took Heinz into custody ourselves,’ I said, ‘and held him until the authorities were ready to act?’

  “‘Kidnap him?’ Pohl said. ‘And hold him for ten years? Where? Under what authority?’ He accused me of not having thought the whole matter through. Heinz had a bodyguard—probably several charged with making sure he wasn’t snatched.

  “I understood what he was saying. I was frustrated as well. ‘We should kill him then. Assassinate him and be done with it.’

  “‘That’s the worst course of all,’ Pohl said. ‘This isn’t about bringing one crimin
al, however monstrous, to justice. Think about it: When the Jews of Hungary were deported to Auschwitz, they were murdered up to three thousand per gassing. By my tally, about five thousand people have been formally convicted of war crimes and under a thousand—a relative handful—condemned to death, and five hundred or so actually executed. That’s the equivalent of a sixth of the men, women, and children slaughtered in the space of twenty minutes and incinerated in the crematoria.

  “‘When it comes to the larger picture—the mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, the gassings at the other vernichtungslager—Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor—the konzentrationslager network and its slaves, the millions of Russian prisoners starved to death, the untold numbers of civilians murdered in Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus—what will the killing of Karsten Heinz do to bring some measure of justice to those victims?’

  “I suspected Pohl was right. Still, I was confused. How, I asked, would confronting Bartlett make any difference?

  “Bartlett and his associates, he said, would have to face that they’d no choice but to own up to an epic miscarriage of justice and begin dismantling the framework of deceit and denial that stood in contradiction to the very values they claimed to be defending.

  “‘This is about more than retribution for a single criminal,’ Pohl insisted. ‘Heinz is the key to unlocking the dirty secret of those who’ve been allowed to escape justice, who’ve reestablished lives of comfort and security behind reinvented identities and expurgated biographies, confident that the world no longer cares about their crimes, that history has moved on.

  “‘Bartlett must be made to see that the moment of truth has arrived. It can’t be evaded any longer. He can either join the process or stand aside. But he can’t stop it.’”

  Schwimmer tossed the orangeade container in a trash can. “I continued to argue against going directly to Bartlett. I thought I’d convinced Pohl to wait at least a few days. I let him take the dossier. I thought we’d have time to deliberate the alternatives. Two days later, I read in the papers about his ‘suicide.’”

  “He had help getting out that window.” Dunne shelled a peanut, flipped the contents in his mouth, and swigged the orangeade.

  “I’ve no doubt. I was afraid for Frieda and myself. I was concerned Pohl might have mentioned us to Bartlett. But it didn’t seem so. We were left alone. I tried to contact Van Hull but couldn’t find a trace of him. I was told you were semiretired and spent most of the year in Florida. I worried about contacting anyone at all lest I draw attention. Then you called. How you got the number, I have no idea.”

  “From Pohl. He did a good job of hiding it. Almost too good.” Dunne offered the bag of peanuts to Schwimmer.

  Schwimmer broke a peanut shell with his teeth. “And the dossier on Heinz? Did he hide that, too?”

  “Knowing Pohl, I’m sure he did.”

  “Too bad he didn’t leave a clue where that might be.”

  “Maybe he thought we’d be smart enough to figure it out.”

  “It appears he was mistaken.”

  Dunne tossed the container of orangeade into the same overflowing trash can Schwimmer had tossed his. “Maybe we’re not paying attention where we should.”

  “Even if we could find the dossier, it won’t be of use unless we can locate Heinz. By now Bartlett must have hidden him in some remote corner of South America.”

  “The confrontation with Pohl has to have rattled Bartlett. He’s got to figure Pohl had help. We’ve got to keep him rattled. Nervous men are prone to make mistakes.”

  “And to commit murder, it seems.”

  A directional post indicated that to the right were the polar bears, to the left, the Elephant House. “I think it’s inhumane to take creatures from the Arctic and display them in a climate like this. Let’s go this way.” Schwimmer bore left.

  At the entrance to the Elephant House was a large sign: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS. Dunne put the peanut bag in his pocket. “For now, you resume your business travels. Go back to Hamburg. I’ll see what I can stir up on this end.”

  They paused in front of a stall in which an elephant was munching hay. The smell of elephant dung was overpowering. Schwimmer held a handkerchief to his nose. “I’m grateful for your help, Mr. Dunne. I truly am. But this is hardly a plan.”

  “Call me Fintan, and you’re right. This is an aspiration, not a plan. But maybe that’s where all plans begin.” Startled by a sudden tug on his pocket, Dunne swung around, half crouched, poised to throw or avoid a punch.

  The elephant’s trunk curled back inside the bars of the stall and whipped the peanut bag in its mouth.

  Someone was paying attention where he should.

  GRAYBAR BUILDING, MANHATTAN

  AFTER HE LEFT SCHWIMMER, DUNNE TREKKED WEST, ACROSS FORDHAM Road, to Jerome Avenue. He rode the IRT to Grand Central and stopped at his office. Miss O’Keefe was at lunch. He sat at his desk. Pohl was a loner. He didn’t socialize much, but he’d trusted Bassante and Van Hull. Who else did he trust? Dunne opened the top desk drawer and shuffled through the papers until he found the note he’d received from Pohl’s mother. He put it in his pocket.

  He took a cab to Penn Station. He descended onto the capacious main concourse, with its vaulted, steel-trussed glass ceiling. He turned left, past the shoe-shine stand. It was manned by the same handsome Negro who’d been there since the war and was known as much for the glossy shine he delivered as for the flair he delivered it with, tossing the brush in the air, spinning around, and catching it before it hit the floor.

  Dunne went downstairs and bought a ticket to Forest Hills. Several times more expensive than the subway but three times as fast, the trip on the Long Island Rail Road took barely twenty minutes. He asked a ticket clerk about the return address on the envelope. The clerk said the location was an apartment building only a short walk from the station.

  The faux-Tudor neighborhood was leafy and quiet. Absent rain, warm beer, rumpled clothes, wilted presence of a place worn down by war, it aped rather than replicated an English town. He stopped in a florist shop to buy a modest bouquet.

  He entered the apartment building and examined the names on the brass mailboxes. “Mrs. G.M. Pohl” was in M4. He proceeded through a sunny main-floor lobby decorated with framed prints of English squires and ladies hunting, dancing, and feasting. M4 was two doors down the corridor on the left.

  He pressed the button on the door frame. Nothing. He pressed again. The peephole opened. A gray eyebrow and a pupil the color of an olive pit rose into the round space.

  “Mrs. Pohl?” Suddenly self-conscious about the bouquet he was carrying, he moved it behind his back.

  “Yes, what can I do for you?”

  “My name is Fintan Dunne. I was a friend of your son’s.”

  The eye sank away for an instant, returned. “My son?”

  “Yes, Louis.”

  “He’s deceased.”

  “That’s why I’ve come.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was out of town when he died and never got a chance to pay my respects in person.” He held the bouquet in front of his chest.

  “What did you say your name is?”

  “Fintan Dunne.”

  “You sent me a note after Louis passed, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.” Dunne hesitated to invite himself in but feared their entire conversation would be conducted garden-wall style. “And you wrote back.”

  “Louis spoke highly of you.” The door slowly opened. “Come in, please.”

  An old woman, tiny in stature and badly stooped, Mrs. Pohl steadied herself on a rubber-tipped cane, shuffling in mop-size slippers across rug-less floors. She must have had to stand tiptoe to see out the peephole. At the end of the hallway was a cluttered living room. Directly ahead was an artificial fireplace. On the mantel, amid a company of porcelain figurines of dancers and musicians, was a copper urn—the final resting place, Dunne presumed, of Louis Pohl’s ashes.

  He hand
ed her the flowers.

  “How sweet of you, Mr. Dunne. I must put them in water immediately.” She went into the kitchen, slippers gliding noiselessly across the linoleum, and put water and the bouquet in a ceramic vase. “Would you join me for a cup of tea?”

  He stood near the kitchen door. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  “No trouble. I was about to make one for myself.” She held the kettle under the faucet, half filled it with water, and settled it atop a burner on the stove. “Louis was a wonderful boy.”

  “We met in the service.”

  She came out of the kitchen, put the vase on the dining table, and went over to a hutch. She picked up a thick album, laid it on the table. She sat and put on her glasses. He stood next to her. She turned the thick, cardboard pages with bent, arthritic fingers.

  “This was Louis when he was a little boy, Mr. Dunne.” She touched a gnarled finger to the faded photo of a chubby, thumb-sucking child propped up in a baby carriage. A petite woman in a flower-bedecked hat gripped the handlebars. In the background was a lawn dotted with picnickers. “My husband, George, took this in Prospect Park. ‘Fresh air is the best medicine’ was a favorite saying of his. We went to the park every Sunday in those days, rain or shine, no matter the season. George was like that. Everything regular and on schedule. That was the German in him.”

  She turned the pages slowly. Some of the photos had become unglued. She asked Dunne to fetch a small jar of glue on the hutch. She reattached the photos, delicately pressing them onto the pages. She talked continuously, an uninterrupted commentary on the life and career of her only child, a quiet, cooperative boy whose intellect and academic prowess was a source of great pride to his parents.

  “Here’s Louis when he graduated from high school. First in his class, with a scholarship to Columbia.”

  Short and broad, unsmiling face topped by a mortarboard, Louis stood between beaming mother, expressionless father.