The Storyteller (55 page)

“Not
all
people,” I say, and we both know I’m talking about last night.

Sage hesitates, as if she is about to tell me something, but then turns and walks into the kitchen. “So what color did you decide on?”

“Color?”

“For your nail polish.” She picks up a mug of tea and hands it to me. I take a sip and realize she’s put in milk but no sugar, just the way I took it last night at the café. There’s something about that—her
remembering
—that makes me feel like I’ve taken flight.

“I was going to go with cherry red, but that’s so FBI,” I reply. “A little too flashy for us DOJ folks.”

“Wise decision.”

“And you?” I ask. “Did you glean any wisdom from
People
magazine?”

“I did what you told me to do,” she answers, and suddenly the mood has dropped like a stone in a pond. “I saw Josef.”

“And?”

“I can’t do it. I can’t talk to him and pretend I don’t know what I know now.” Sage shakes her head. “I think he might be upset with me.”

Just then my cell phone rings, and I see my boss’s number flashing. “I have to take this,” I apologize, and I drift into the living room to answer the call.

He has a logistical question about a prosecution memo that I edited on a different case. I walk him through some of the changes I made, and why, and by the time I hang up and walk back into the kitchen, I see Sage drinking her coffee, perusing the front page of Reiner Hartmann’s SS file.

“What are you doing?” I ask. “That’s classified.”

She looks up, a deer in headlights. “I wanted to see if I could identify him, too.”

I grab the folder. I can’t show her Reiner’s file; she is a civilian. But I hold up that front page, the one from his SS file that gives his name, address, birth date, blood type, and photo. “Here,” I say, offering a quick peek of the image—the parted hair, the pale eyes you can’t quite see.

“He looks nothing like Josef now,” Sage murmurs. “I don’t know if I could pick him up out of a lineup.”

“Well,” I reply, “let’s hope your grandmother doesn’t agree.”

 • • • 

Once, a historian in my office named Simran brought me a picture of Angelina Jolie. It was on his iPhone, and it was a party scene. There were balloons all over the place and a birthday cake on the table, and in the foreground pouting was Angelina. “Wow,” I said. “Where’d you take that?”

“She’s my cousin.”

“Your cousin is Angelina Jolie?” I asked.

“Nope,” Simran said. “But she looks just like her, don’t you think?”

As it turns out, witness identification is frequently total crap. It’s often the weakest part of the proof phase of criminal law enforcement. It’s why DNA testing is continually overturning the convictions of rapists who were identified positively by their victims. There really are a very limited number of facial variations, and we tend to make errors of judgment. Which is great for Simran’s cousin, but less great if you work for the Department of Justice and you’re trying to get an eyewitness ID.

Minka’s cane hangs over the edge of the kitchen table, upon which is a glass mug of tea and an empty plate. I’m sitting beside her; Daisy, her caretaker, stands with her arms crossed in the doorway of the kitchen.

“Voilà,” Sage announces, and she sets down one perfectly baked roll on the china.

The roll is knotted on the top. Crystals of sugar dot the surface. I don’t have to wait for Minka to break it open to know that inside is cinnamon and chocolate, that this is the roll her father once baked for her.

“I thought maybe you’d missed these,” Sage says.

Minka gasps. She turns the small roll over in her hands. “You made this? But how
 . . . ?”

“I guessed,” Sage admits.

When did she have time to bake this? During the morning, maybe, after she met with Josef? I stare at Sage, watching her face as her grandmother breaks open the pastry and takes the first bite. “It’s just like my father used to make,” Minka sighs. “Just like I remember . . .”

“Your memory is what I’m counting on,” I say, sensing a perfect segue. “I know this isn’t easy, so I really appreciate you making the sacrifice. Are you ready?”

I wait for Minka to meet my gaze. She nods.

In front of her, I place a photo spread of eight Nazi war criminals. Genevra has outdone herself, in both speed and precision. The picture of Reiner Hartmann—the same one Sage had been looking at earlier in his SS file—is on the bottom left. There are four photos in the row above it and three more beside it, which depict other men of generally similar appearance, wearing identical Nazi uniforms. This way, I am asking Minka to compare apples to apples. If Reiner’s photo was the only picture of a man in uniform, it could be seen as prejudicial.

Sage, sitting beside her grandmother, looks down at the spread, too. The eight individuals all have the same parted, slick blond hair as Reiner Hartmann, they are all facing the same direction. They look like young movie stars from the 1940s—smooth-shaven and strong-jawed, matinee idols for a macabre documentary. “It’s not necessarily the case that anyone in this photo array was at the camp, Minka, but I’d like you to look at the faces and see if anything jumps out at you . . .”

Minka picks up the paper with unsteady hands. “We did not know them by name.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

She passes a finger over each of the eight faces, as if it is a pistol held to the forehead of each man. Is it my imagination, or does it hover over Reiner Hartmann’s portrait?

“It’s too hard,” Minka says, shaking her head. She pushes away the photo spread. “I do not want to remember anymore.”

“I understand, but—”

“You do
not
understand,” she interrupts. “You are not just asking me to point to a photograph. You are asking me to poke a hole in a dam, because you are thirsty, even though I will end up drowning in the process.”

“Please,” I beg, but Minka buries her face in her hands.

The anguish on Sage’s face is even more profound than it is on Minka’s. But that’s what love is, isn’t it? When it hurts you more to see someone else suffer than it does to take the pain yourself? “We’re done,” Sage announces. “I’m sorry, Leo, but I can’t put her through this.”

“Give her a chance to make up her own mind,” I suggest.

Minka has turned away, lost in a memory. Daisy swoops in like an avenging angel and wraps an arm around her fragile charge. “You want to rest, Ms. Minka? Because it sure looks to me like you need to lie down a bit.”

She glares daggers at me as she helps Sage’s grandmother to her feet, hands her the cane, and leads her down the hall.

Sage seems as if she is breaking in half, watching her grandmother go. “I should never have brought you here,” she whispers.

“I’ve seen this before, Sage. It’s a shock to the system, seeing the face of someone who hurt you. Other survivors have had the same reaction, but have managed to pull themselves together and make a valid ID. I know she spent over half a century keeping these feelings buried. I get that. And I understand that it’s painful to rip the Band-Aid off the wound—”

“This isn’t a Band-Aid,” Sage argues. “This is surgery without anesthesia. And I don’t really give a damn about the other survivors you’ve seen going through this. I just care about my grandmother.” Standing abruptly, she heads down the hallway, leaving me with the photo array.

I look down at the spread, at Reiner Hartmann’s face. There is nothing in it that suggests the evil beneath the surface. Instead, we are forced to approximate what toxic cocktail of cells and schooling might allow a boy raised with scruples to be led to an act of genocide.

The uneaten roll that Sage baked lies on the plate in two halves, like a broken heart. I sigh, and reach for my briefcase, ready to slip the photos inside. But at the last minute, I stop. I pick up the plate with the roll on it and walk to Minka’s bedroom. Behind the door are soft voices. Taking a deep breath, I knock.

Minka sits in an overstuffed chair, her feet raised on an ottoman. “Stop fussing, Sage,” she says, exasperated, as Daisy opens the bedroom door for me. “I’m all right!”

I love that she’s full of piss and vinegar. I love that she’s tough as nails one moment and soft as suede the next. It is what got her through the worst era of history, I’m sure; and what has kept her going since.

And it’s what she’s passed down to her granddaughter, even if Sage doesn’t know it.

They both look up as I enter, holding the roll and the photos. “You have
got
to be kidding me,” Sage mutters.

“Minka,” I say, handing her the plate, “I thought you might want this. Sage went to the trouble of baking it because she thought it would give you a bit of peace. That’s what I wanted to do today, too. What you lived through? It wasn’t fair. But it’s also not fair for you to live in a country where you have to share your homeland with your former tormentors. Help me, Minka. Please.”

Sage gets to her feet. “Leo,” she says tightly. “Get out of here
now.”

“Wait, wait.” Minka waves me closer and holds out her hand for the photo spread.

The plate with the roll lies balanced on her lap. In her hands is the photo array. She traces the faces, as if the names of the men could be read in Braille. Slowly, Minka brings her finger down on the photograph of Reiner Hartmann. She taps his face twice. “This is him.”

“Who?”

She glances up at me. “I told you. We did not know the SS officers by name.”

“But you recognize the face?”

“Anywhere,” Minka says. “I would never forget the man who killed my best friend.”

 • • • 

We have tuna sandwiches with Minka for lunch. I talk about how my grandfather taught me to play bridge, and how bad I was at it. “To say we lost catastrophically would be an understatement,” I tell her. “So when we left, I asked my grandpa how I
should
have played the hand. He said, ‘Under an assumed name.’ ”

Minka laughs. “One day you will come back here, Leo, and you will be my partner. I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

“It’s a date,” I promise. I wipe my mouth with my napkin. “And thank you for . . . well, for everything. But Sage and I probably should be going.”

She hugs her grandmother good-bye. Minka holds Sage a little tighter than normal, which is something I’ve seen other survivors do. It’s as if, now that they have something good in their lives, they cannot bear to see it go.

I hold her hands, cool and brittle as fallen leaves. “What you have done today . . . I can’t even begin to thank you for. But—”

“But I am not finished,” Minka says. “You want me to go to court to do it all over again.”

“If you’re up to it, yes,” I admit. “In the past, the testimonies of the survivors have been hugely important. And yours isn’t just an identification. You have direct experience watching him commit a murder.”

“Will I have to see him?”

I hesitate. “If you don’t want to, we can arrange to videotape your testimony.”

Minka looks at me. “Who would be there?”

“Me. A historian from my office. A cameraman. Defense counsel. And Sage, if you’d like.”

She nods. “This I can do. But if I had to see him . . . I don’t think . . .” Her voice trails off.

I nod, respecting her decision. On impulse, I kiss her good-bye on the cheek. “You’re a class act, Minka.”

In the car, Sage pounces. “So? What happens next? You got what you needed, right?”

“We got
more
than we needed. Your grandmother was a gold mine. It’s one thing to give eyewitness identification and to have her point out the
Schutzhaftlagerführer. But she did something even better. She told us about something in his SS file that no one—except my
office—would have known.”

Sage shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”

“It seems almost ludicrous, but there was a right way and wrong way to kill the prisoners at the concentration camps. Officers who did not follow the rules would find themselves written up with disciplinary infractions. It was one thing to shoot a prisoner who didn’t have the strength to stand up anymore, but to kill a prisoner for no reason was to kill a worker, and the Nazis needed those workers. Granted, no one in charge cared enough about the prisoners to do much more than give the offending officer a slap on the hand, but every now and then in an SS man’s file, there’s a mention of the disciplinary proceeding.” I look up at Sage. “In Reiner Hartmann’s file, there’s a paragraph about him going in front of a review committee for an unauthorized shooting of a female prisoner.”

“Darija?” Sage asks.

I nod. “With your grandmother’s testimony that’s a pretty airtight lock that this particular guy she identified—and the man who told you his name used to be Reiner Hartmann—are one and the same.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that was in the file?”

“Because you don’t have government clearance,” I say. “And because I couldn’t risk you influencing what your grandmother had to say.”