The Storyteller (11 page)

His brother paused, distracted. It was enough of a hesitation for Damian to land a solid punch. The man’s head snapped back, but he staggered to his feet and chased after the boy.

“You can run,” Damian said, wiping the blood from his mouth. “But you can’t hide.”

LEO

The woman on the phone is breathless. “I’ve been trying to find you for
years,
”
she says.

This is my first red flag. We’re not that hard to find. You ring up the Justice Department, and mention why you’re calling, you’ll be routed to the office of Human Rights and Special Prosecutions. But we take every call, and we take them seriously. So I ask the woman her name.

“Miranda Coontz,” she says. “Except that’s my married name. My maiden name was Schultz.”

“So, Ms. Coontz,” I say, “I can hardly hear you.”

“I have to whisper,” she says. “He’s listening. He always manages to come into the room when I start trying to tell people who he really is . . .”

As she goes on and on, I wait to hear the word
Nazi
or even
World War II.
We’re the division that prosecutes cases against people who have committed human rights violations—genocides, torture, war crimes. We’re the real Nazi hunters, nowhere near as glamorous as we’re made out to be in film and television. I’m not Daniel Craig or Vin Diesel or Eric Bana, just plain old Leo Stein. I don’t pack a pistol; my weapon of choice is a historian named Genevra, who speaks seven languages and never fails to point out when I need a haircut or when my tie doesn’t match my shirt. I work in a job that gets harder and harder to do every day, as the generation that perpetrated the crimes of the Holocaust dies out.

For fifteen minutes I listen to Miranda Coontz explain how someone in her own household is stalking her, and how at first she thought the FBI had sent him as a drone to kill her. This is red flag number two. First of all, the FBI doesn’t go around killing people. Second, if they
did
want to kill her, she’d already be dead. “You know, Ms. Coontz,” I say, when she breaks to take a breath, “I’m not sure that you’ve got the right department . . .”

“If you bear with me,” she promises, “it will all make sense.”

Not for the first time, I wonder how a guy like me—thirty-seven, top of his class at Harvard Law—turned down a sure partnership and a dizzying salary at a Boston law firm for a government pay grade and a career as the deputy chief of HRSP. In a parallel universe I would be trying white-collar criminals, instead of building a case around a former SS guard who died just before we were able to extradite him. Or, for that matter, talking to Ms. Coontz.

Then again, it didn’t take me long in the world of corporate law to realize that truth is an afterthought in court. In fact, truth is an afterthought in most trials. But there were six million people who were lied to, during World War II, and somebody owes them the truth.

“. . . and you’ve heard of Josef Mengele?”

At that, my ears perk up. Of course I’ve heard of Mengele, the infamous Angel of Death at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the chief medical officer who experimented on humans and who met incoming prisoners and directed them either to the right, to work, or to the left, the gas chambers. Although historically we know that Mengele could not have met every transport, almost every Auschwitz survivor with whom I’ve spoken insists it was Mengele who met his or her
transport
—no matter what hour of the day the arrival took place. It’s an example of how much has been written about Auschwitz, how survivors sometimes conflate those accounts with their own personal experiences. I have no doubt in my mind they truly believe it was Mengele they saw when they first arrived at Auschwitz, but no matter how much of a monster the guy was, he had to sleep sometime. Which means that
other
monsters met some of them instead.

“People believe Mengele escaped to South America,” Ms. Coontz says.

I stifle a sigh. Actually, I
know
that he lived, and died, in Brazil.

“He’s alive,” she whispers. “He’s been reincarnated, in the form of my cat. And I can’t turn my back on him, or go to sleep, because I think he’s going to kill me.”

“Good God,” I mutter.

“I know,” Ms. Coontz agrees. “I thought I was getting a sweet little tabby from the shelter, and one morning I wake up to find scratch marks bleeding on my chest—”

“With all due respect, Ms. Coontz, it’s a little bit of a stretch to think that Josef Mengele is now a cat.”

“Those scratch marks,” she says gravely, “were in the shape of a
swastika.
”

I close my eyes. “Maybe you just need a different pet,” I suggest.

“I had a goldfish. I had to flush it down the toilet.”

I am almost afraid to ask. “Why?”

She hesitates. “Let’s just say I have proof that Hitler was reincarnated, too.”

I manage to get her off the phone by telling her that I’ll have a historian look into her case—and it’s true, I will pass this off to Genevra the next time she does something to piss me off and I want to get back at her. But no sooner do I have Miranda Coontz off my line than my secretary buzzes me again. “Is your moon out of alignment or something?” she asks. “Because I’ve got another one for you on line two. Her local FBI office referred her here.”

I look at the piles of documents on my desk—reports that Genevra has turned in. Getting a suspect to trial is a slow and laborious expedition and in my case, often a fruitless one. The last case we were able to bring to prosecution was in 2008, and the defendant died at the end of the trial. We do the opposite of what police do; instead of looking at a crime and seeing “whodunit,” we start with a name, and pore through databases to see if there’s a match—a person who’s alive with that name—and then to figure out what he did during the war.

We have no shortage of names.

I pick up the receiver again. “This is Leo Stein,” I say.

“Um,” a woman replies. “I’m not sure I have the right place . . .”

“I’ll let you know, if you tell me what you’re calling about.”

“Someone I know may have been an SS officer.”

In our office, we have a category for these calls: My Neighbor’s a Nazi. Typically, it’s the neighbor from hell who kicks your dog when he crosses the property line, and calls the town when the leaves of your oak tree fall in his yard. He’s got a European accent and wears a long leather coat and has a German shepherd.

“And your name is?”

“Sage Singer,” the woman says. “I live in New Hampshire, and so does he.”

This makes me sit up a little straighter. New Hampshire’s a great place to hide, if you’re a Nazi. No one ever thinks to look in New Hampshire.

“What’s this individual’s name?” I ask.

“Josef Weber.”

“And you think he was an SS officer because . . . ?”

“He told me so,” the woman says.

I lean back in my chair. “He
told
you that he was a Nazi?” In the decade I’ve been doing this, that’s a new one for me. My job has involved peeling away the disguises from criminals, who think that after nearly seventy years, they should literally get away with murder. I’ve never had a defendant confess until I’ve managed to back him so far into a corner with evidence that he has no choice but to tell the truth.

“We’re . . . acquaintances,” Sage Singer replies. “He wants me to help him die.”

“Like Jack Kevorkian? Is he terminally ill?”

“No. He’s the opposite—very healthy, for a man his age. He thinks that there’s some sort of justice in asking me to be a part of it—because my family was Jewish.”

“Are
you?
”

“Does it matter?”

No, it doesn’t. I’m Jewish, but half the staff in our department isn’t.

“Did he mention which camp he was in?”

“He used a German word . . .
Toten
 . . . Otensomething?”

“Totenkopfverbände?”
I suggest.

“Yes!”

Translated, it means the Death’s Head Unit. It’s not an individual location but rather the division of the SS that ran the concentration camps for the Third Reich.

In 1981 my office won a seminal case,
Fedorenko v. United States.
The Supreme Court decided—wisely, in my humble opinion—that anyone who was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp necessarily took part in perpetration of Nazi crimes of persecution there. The camps operated as chains of functions, and for it to work, everyone in the chain had to perform his function. If one person didn’t, the apparatus of extermination would grind to a halt. So really, no matter what this particular guy did or didn’t do—whether he actually pulled a trigger or loaded the Zyklon B gas into one of the chambers—even confirming his role as a member of the SS-TV in a concentration camp would be enough to build a case against him.

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.