Once Upon a Time

by Barbara Fradkin

  “What?”

  “I haven’t a clue. Yet.”

  “You think Howard bumped off his father?” Sullivan asked with disbelief. “Left the convention Wednesday, bumped him off, returned to Toronto, called his sister, and then the next day drove all the way back to get something out of the country house?”

  Green made a face. “No, I don’t. Howard despised his father, and he never wanted to see him again, but I don’t see him as the murdering type. No matter what you say, I still think the paranoid Mr. G. is the one we’re looking for.”

  Back at the station an hour later, however, he made a startling discovery which cast Howard’s actions in an whole new light. Sullivan had gone home, and Green was doing a quick review of the accumulated reports before he too went home, hoping for some small fact they could link to Gryszkiewicz. The first reports revealed little new. Forensics reported no fingerprints other than the Walkers’ and Don Reid’s anywhere outside or inside the Dodge Aries. Bank records confirmed that Don Reid had withdrawn money Wednesday afternoon, but at 1:30, not noon as he’d claimed. But then, coke addicts spent their lives fudging the truth.

  Just when Green was beginning to fear the case might never break open, he came across two phone messages near the bottom of the pile. One was a brief memo from Detective Gibbs reporting on his visits to antique dealers in Toronto. The other was a phone message from Naomi Wyman. He was so astounded that he nearly shouted aloud.

  Usually keep inquiries strictly confidential but since possible war crime involved, thought should tell you two weeks ago a Howard Walker came in requesting info on survivors Ozorkow.

  Twelve

  September 1st, 1942

  My hands bleed, my arms scream mercy.

  Still my liebling digs. Half mad.

  It must be big enough for them to breathe.

  The walls thick enough to hide their cries.

  She clambers in and shakes her head.

  Footfalls on the stair, she dives out and shoves the cupboard

  back in place.

  No one must know, she hisses. No one.

  But we’ll need someone to care for them while we work.

  No one, she says.

  Traitors and madmen are everywhere.

  What price a Jewish child these days?

  A bowl of soup?

  A chance to live another day?

  The Darkness has stolen our souls,

  but not these children.

  Not if it takes a thousand days in this cave until

  the British come.

  The drive to Montreal took less than two hours along the nearly deserted four-lane Trans-Canada highway, and Green arrived at the western outskirts of the city around supper time, happy to see the rush hour traffic heading in the opposite direction for once. Sharon had been working today and he had left her a cryptic message on the answering machine to the effect he’d be home sometime but perhaps not until ten. She’d be annoyed. No, that was an understatement. Tony’s birthday party was tomorrow, and Green was supposed to be home tonight to help her get ready. Since he was missing two family dinners in a row, she’d be plotting his demise.

  As he drove, Green tried to integrate the new information with what he already knew, but this new revelation about Howard threw a completely different twist into his theories to date. At least Gibbs’ report from the Toronto antique dealer confirmed much of what Fine had already said; the tool box had been handmade by a fine craftsman, almost certainly Joseph Kressman himself, who had made the false bottom to conceal something precious. Probably secret papers or jewels, a common enough subterfuge during wartime. The keys had been mass-produced by a German company which went bankrupt after the war, and they may have been used by the military for storage depots, gates and barracks.

  Or concentration camps, he thought with a chill. What would Eugene Walker, Jewish camp inmate, be doing with such a key? And what the hell did Howard know about any of this?

  Twenty minutes later, Howard Walker stood in the doorway of his modest brick house, his eyes widened in astonishment at the sight of Green.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Following unanswered questions,” Green replied, and when Howard continued to gape, he inclined his head politely. “May I come in?”

  “Is this legal? Aren’t you out of your jurisdiction or something?”

  “It’s done all the time,” Green replied patiently. “Have you got a problem with talking to me?”

  “Not at all, not at all.” Flustered, Howard drew back into the house and gestured for Green to follow. He led him through a vestibule crammed with shoes and coats into a long, narrow living room.

  Howard Walker’s home created a curious feeling of contradiction. It was a two-storey brick semi tucked into a narrow lot in Lower Westmount, a house much like the one in which Green had grown up in the slums of Ottawa’s Lowertown. Also like his, this one was sparsely furnished in aging hand-me-downs, and home-made bookshelves lined the walls. But the similarity ended there. Green knew this modest little home had probably cost the new doctor and his wife three hundred thousand dollars, and represented Howard’s first step up the ladder of yuppiedom. Furniture would come later, when his lucrative specialty of neurology began to pay dividends.

  As Green entered the living room, he wondered how a penniless shopkeeper’s son from Renfrew who had just completed his residency had managed to scrape together three hundred thousand for a house in the gentrified downtown, when he and Sharon could scarcely afford a vinyl cube at the End of the Earth. But in the next instant he had his answer. Curled up in an overstuffed chair in the corner of the living room, her feet tucked under the generous folds of her designer skirt, was Rachel, the picture of Daddy’s Girl. The astonishment in her amber eyes mirrored that of her husband.

  “I don’t understand why you keep on about my father’s death,” Howard said as he sat down. “My father was not a well man. Since I’ve studied medicine, I’m amazed that he didn’t collapse sooner.”

  During the drive, Green had planned his approach carefully. Howard’s visit to Naomi Wyman raised a number of serious questions, but they would have to be sequenced carefully lest he send Howard running for cover. A blend of bullying and coddling was in order.

  “Dr. Walker, I want to know why you went out to your parents’ house last Thursday,” he began bluntly.

  Rachel uncurled herself in annoyance. “Last Thursday Howard was in Toronto at the medical convention. We’ve been through this.”

  “No, he wasn’t.” Green kept his eyes fixed on her husband. “He wanted everyone to believe that, but actually he flew up to Ottawa, borrowed his sister’s car, and drove out to the country house.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Rachel said. “He didn’t even know Eugene was dead then.”

  “His sister told him when he called her Wednesday night.” Green pulled a folded invoice from his pocket and turned to Howard. “There’s a record of that phone call on your hotel bill.”

  “Howard!” Rachel cried. “What is this?”

  Howard was looking at him in mute horror. “My God. You think I killed him.”

  “You tell me,” Green countered. “What conclusion should I draw from all the lies and subterfuge?”

  “That’s outrageous, Inspector! Howard couldn’t kill anyone, least of all his own father.”

  “There was no love lost—”

  “There was a great deal of love lost!” she shot back. “That was the tragedy.”

  “Rachel, please.” Howard’s weary voice caught them both by surprise. He reached for a loose thread on the sofa arm and twisted it in his long, fluid fingers. “I did call Margaret, and I did leave the convention to go out to the house. I had to retrieve something.”

  “What?” Green demanded.

  “It has no relevance.”

  “What!”

  Howard hesitated. The thread came loose, and he crushed it into a ball between his fingers. “I had written my father a letter. A pe
rsonal letter which had taken a lot of effort to write. I mailed it on the previous Friday, and I anticipated that he should have received it Tuesday or Wednesday. I called Margaret on Wednesday night to see if she’d heard anything, because I expected there would be shock waves. When she told me he was dead, I couldn’t believe it. I was afraid—” He broke off, then shook his head as if to banish a thought. “Anyway, I didn’t want my mother to read the letter. There was no point in stirring things up now that he was dead. So I arranged to borrow Margaret’s car to go and get it.”

  “Why not send Margaret? Why travel all the way from Toronto?”

  “Margaret had her hands full with mother and the funeral arrangements. I didn’t see what excuse she could give.”

  “And you didn’t want her reading the letter.”

  Howard dropped the thread and clasped his hands tightly together in his lap to hide their trembling. “That too.”

  “Can I see the letter?”

  “I burned it.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Just personal things.”

  “Such as that you knew he was Jewish?”

  The young doctor’s eyes bulged. “What!”

  “Last time we talked, you called him a hypocrite. That’s a hell of an understatement, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Darling!” Rachel cried. “What’s he talking about?”

  Howard flushed red, his hands shaking despite his grip. “Where did you get this crazy idea, Inspector?”

  “That’s how the pieces fit. You tried to suppress the autopsy report because you didn’t want me wondering why your father was circumcised.”

  “Suppress the autopsy?” Howard tried to rally some spark. “I did no such thing.”

  “You were afraid I might put two and two together—”

  “I simply asked the pathologist to give us some privacy. Because of Dad’s drinking, I knew the autopsy report would be brutal.”

  Green regarded him thoughtfully. “Howard, it’s a hell of a lot more than that. You’ve known—at least suspected—that your father was Jewish for several weeks. You see,” he added quietly, “I have this phone message from Naomi Wyman saying ‘funny you should ask about Orzokow, a young man named Howard Walker was just in a couple of weeks ago’.”

  “Oh…God.”

  Green’s expression softened. “So you wrote him a letter asking him?”

  Very faintly, Howard nodded.

  “And you thought your letter killed him?”

  Unexpectedly, Howard strode to the window and pressed his forehead against the cold pane. It was a moment before anyone spoke. Rachel was sitting rigidly still, but her ragged breathing punctuated the silence. To her credit, it was the first time she didn’t rush in to rescue him.

  Finally, Howard raised his head to stare into the darkness. “I think it probably did. I found the letter hidden in his drawer. It was open.”

  “So he had read it.”

  Howard nodded wretchedly.

  “How did you discover your father was a Jew?”

  “Anton Gryszkiewicz!” Rachel exclaimed, startling them both.

  Green’s thoughts began to spin excitedly. “Gryszkiewicz?”

  Still Howard was silent, as if casting about for a safe path.

  “Darling, tell him! For God’s sake, you’ve got nothing to hide!”

  Green remembered Sullivan’s conversation with Mrs. Gryszkiewicz, in which she had told him so proudly about her son the doctor. “A young doctor from Hamilton?” he asked.

  Howard swung around in dismay. “What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing. But his father knew yours.” Green’s face hardened. “Now I’m not just filling in odd bits of the puzzle. This could be crucial to the case. You must tell me exactly what happened between Anton and you.”

  Howard’s dark eyes searched Green’s worriedly. “He’s a nice guy,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

  “There’s trouble enough already!” Green snapped. “I need the truth! Where did you meet him?”

  “At the Montreal Neurological Institute. He’s a resident in surgery, and I was called in to look at a patient on his floor who had slipped into a coma and begun seizing. It was a hell of a night. We were both scared, out of our depth, wondering why this always happens at two a.m. when there’s not a staff man within miles. Anyway, the patient died, and it created a kind of bond. We became friends, and we found out we had a lot in common. We both had immigrant fathers from Poland we didn’t get along with. We both found our fathers remote and cruel. It was amazing how similar they were, even down to the anti-Semitism. We got to talking about the war and wondering if they’d lived through something terrible that had twisted them. I told him my father didn’t even remember who he was, that all we had was this box from a place named Ozorkow. He said his father was from Ozorkow, and we got really excited. Maybe his father would know mine.”

  Howard paused, as if debating how much to divulge. Green could barely contain himself, for finally the case was breaking open in front of his eyes.

  “So about a month ago,” Howard resumed, “when he went to visit his parents for the weekend, he took an old picture of my father with him. At first his father denied knowing him, but a while later he got drunk—another thing he had in common with my father—and he got mad about the government charging some war criminal. He blurted out that the Jews were behind it all, even passing themselves off as Poles to hide their own guilt, like my father. Anton tried to get him to tell him more, but his father clammed up again. Said the picture just looked Jewish. I didn’t believe it. Neither did Anton. He said his father’s outburst was very convincing.”

  Green frowned at him. “Why the hell were you reluctant to tell me this?”

  “Because Anton’s father would be angry with him, and his father could be cruel, even crueler than mine, if he found out Anton had betrayed him.”

  “Betrayed him? A strong word. How does this betray him?”

  “Because his family isn’t supposed to talk about the war outside the family, or about Poland, or anything about the past. The father’s very secretive and suspicious of outsiders. He says there are still lots of people from the old country— Communists—who have it in for him. There are spies everywhere, maybe even the neighbour next door. Anton thought he’d gone a bit paranoid because of all the years of hiding from Communist persecution.”

  Or from something else, like Simon Wiesenthal or the Mossad, or even our own rather polite, grey-suited Nazi hunters, Green thought privately, but he hid his excitement. “So you wrote to your father asking if it was true.”

  “Not right away. I didn’t believe it. My father, the anti-Semite who had driven me out for converting to Judaism. Himself a Jew?”

  “So that’s why you asked my father if there was any record of Holocaust survivors!” Rachel cried. “Darling, why didn’t you tell me!”

  They had forgotten her presence, and her sudden, vehement interruption caught them off guard. Howard’s gaze flickered towards her.

  “I don’t know,” he began lamely. “I needed to be sure, and I needed to understand why he had lied. My father’s prejudices had hurt you so much.”

  “But now! Once you found out, why didn’t you tell me!”

  “I was waiting for my father’s answer. I still don’t understand why he lied.”

  “Howard, what am I here for? Spouses are supposed to share!” Rachel’s eyes flashed with reproach that Green suspected would linger far beyond his visit. But as interesting as this slice of domestic discord was, it was irrelevant to his own quest. And the reference to spouses served to steer him back on track. By this time Sharon would be home from work and making serious progress on her murder plot.

  “So you contacted Naomi Wyman?” He prompted brusquely, causing them both to stare at him blankly. Howard’s eyes were glassy, but with a deep breath he composed himself.

  “I asked her if she had records of anyone in Canada who came from Ozork
ow. She didn’t, but she gave me the names of three people who’d been in Lodz, a large ghetto where many of the Jews from Ozorkow had been sent. Two are now dead, but one lives here in Montreal. I showed my father’s picture to him, and he remembered him. Not well, but they’d been in the ghetto together, and he confirmed my father was Jewish. That’s when I wrote the letter.”

  “What was this survivor’s name?”

  Howard chewed his lip. “Look, I don’t want to get him involved—”

  “His name!”

  Howard recoiled before Green’s sudden anger, and his hands shook. “Isaac Perchesky.”

  “This Isaac Perchesky, did he give you any details about your father? His name? His occupation?”

  Howard’s head whipped back and forth. “He said he didn’t remember much,” he stammered. “He didn’t want to talk about those times. That’s why I don’t want you to… He said that the Holocaust did strange things to all of us, and that it was better to leave it all in the past.”

  “And in your letter, did you leave it in the past?”

  He had his answer when Howard abruptly left the room.

  * * *

  Isaac Perchesky’s wife was no more pleased with the intrusion than Howard had been, but when Green explained his purpose, she reluctantly went to rouse her husband, who was asleep in front of the TV. Isaac had some initial difficulty recognizing his wife, let alone recalling Howard’s visit, but finally the fog began to lift.

  “So…the old man is dead?” Perchesky shook his head dolefully. “It’s hard to imagine him dead. In my memory, he was so strong. I can still see him over there in the doorway— like Goliath, with shoulders so wide he could pick up a man and throw him against the wall with one hand. I never forget him doing that.”

  “But he would have been little more than a boy. Barely eighteen when the war broke out.”