The Storyteller Page 11

  I am in such a deep sleep, in fact, that even though I reach for the receiver and say hello, I drop it and it rolls underneath my bed.

  "Sorry," I say, after I retrieve it. "Hello?"

  "Sage Singer?"

  "Yes, that's me."

  "This is Leo Stein."

  I sit up in bed, suddenly awake. "I'm sorry."

  "You said that already . . . Did I . . . You sound like I woke you up."

  "Well. Yeah."

  "Then I'm the one who should be apologizing. I figured since it was eleven o'clock--"

  "I'm a baker," I interrupt. "I work at night and sleep during the day."

  "You can call me back at a more convenient time--"

  "Just tell me," I say. "What did you find out?"

  "Nothing," Leo Stein replies. "There are absolutely no records in the SS membership registry for Josef Weber."

  "Then there's been a mistake. Did you try spelling it differently?"

  "My historian is very thorough, Ms. Singer. I'm sorry, but I think you might have misunderstood what he was telling you."

  "I didn't." I push my hair out of my face. "You're the one who said the records aren't complete. Isn't it possible that you just haven't found the right one yet?"

  "It's possible, but without that, we really can't do anything else."

  "Will you keep looking?"

  I can hear the hesitation in his voice, the understanding that I am asking him to find an invisible needle in a haystack. "I don't know how to stop," Leo says. "We'll run checks in two Berlin records centers and our own databases. But the bottom line is if there's no valid information to run with--"

  "Give me till lunchtime," I beg.

  *

  In the end, it is the way I met Josef--at a grief group--that makes me wonder if Leo Stein is right, if Josef is lying. After all, he lived with Marta for fifty-two years. That's a damn long time to keep a secret.

  It is pouring when I reach his house, and I don't have an umbrella. I'm drenched after running to the covered porch, where Eva barks for nearly half a minute before Josef comes to the door. I am seeing double--not a blurriness of vision but a superimposition of this old man with a younger, stronger one dressed in the uniform of the soldiers I have seen on YouTube. "Your wife," I say. "Did she know you're a Nazi?"

  Josef opens the door wider. "Come in. This is not a conversation for the street."

  I follow him into his living room, where the chess game we were playing days earlier remains, unicorns and dragons frozen at my last move. "I never told her," Josef admits.

  "That's impossible. She would have wanted to know where you were during the war."

  "I said I was sent by my parents to study at university in England. Marta never questioned it. You would be surprised at the lengths you will go to to believe the best about someone if you truly love him," Josef says.

  That, of course, makes me think of Adam. "It must be hard, Josef," I say coolly. "To not get tangled up in your lies."

  My words land like blows; Josef shrinks back in his chair. "This is the reason I told you the truth."

  "But . . . you didn't, did you?"

  "What do you mean?"

  I can't very well tell him that the reason I know he's been lying is that a Nazi hunter from the Department of Justice checked out his false story. "It just doesn't add up. A wife who never stumbled over the truth, not in fifty-two years. A history of being a monster, without any proof. Of course the biggest inconsistency of all is why, after over sixty-five years of keeping a secret, you'd blow your own cover."

  "I told you. I want to die."

  "Why now?"

  "Because I have no one to live for," Josef says. "Marta was an angel. She saw good in me when I couldn't even look in a mirror. I so badly wanted to be the man she thought she had married, that I became him. If she knew what I had done--"

  "She would have killed you?"

  "No," Josef says. "She would have killed herself. I did not care about what happened to me, but I couldn't stand thinking of what it would be like for her, to know she had been touched by hands that would never truly be clean." He looks at me. "I know she is in Heaven now. I promised myself that I would be who she wanted me to be until she was gone. And now that this is the case, I have come to you." Josef folds his hands between his knees. "Dare I hope this means you are considering my request?"

  He speaks formally, as if he has asked me to dance with him at a mixer. As if this is a business proposition.

  But I string him along. "You understand how selfish you're being, right? You want me to risk getting arrested. Basically, I give up the rest of my life, just so you can leave yours."

  "This is not the case. No one is going to think twice if an old man turns up dead."

  "Murder isn't legal, in case you've forgotten in the past sixty-eight years."

  "Ah, but you see, this is why I have been waiting for someone like you. If you do it, it's not murder, it is mercy." He meets my gaze. "You see, before you help me die, Sage, I need one more favor from you. I ask you to forgive me first."

  "Forgive you?"

  "For the things I did back then."

  "I am not the one you should be asking forgiveness from."

  "No," he agrees. "But they are all dead."

  Slowly, the cogs turn, until the picture lines up clearly for me. Now I see why he turned to me for his grand confession. Josef does not know about my grandmother; however, I am the closest thing to a Jew he can find in this town. It is, I realize, like the victim's family in a death row case. Do they have the right to seek justice? My great-grandparents had died at the hands of Nazis. Did that make me, by proxy, the next best thing?

  I hear Leo's voice, an echo in my mind. I don't know how to stop. Is his work vengeance? Or justice? There is the finest line between the two, and when I try to focus on it, it becomes less and less clear.

  Repentance might bring peace to the killer, but what about the ones who've been killed? I may not consider myself a Jew, but do I still have responsibility to the relatives of mine who were religious, and who were murdered for it?

  Josef confided in me because he considers me a friend. Because he trusts me. But if Josef's claims are legitimate, the man I befriended--and trusted--is a shadow puppet, a figment of the imagination. A man who has deceived thousands of people.

  It makes me feel dirty, as if I should have been a stronger judge of character.

  In that moment I make myself a promise: I will find out if Josef Weber was an SS soldier. Yet if he does turn out to be a Nazi, I will not kill him the way he wants. Instead, I will betray him the way he betrayed others. I will pump him for information and feed it back to Leo Stein so Josef will die somewhere in a prison cell.

  But he doesn't have to know that.

  "I can't forgive you," I say evenly, "if I don't know what you did. Before I agree to anything, you're going to have to give me some actual proof of your past."

  The relief that floods Josef's features is palpable, almost painful. His eyes fill with tears. "The photograph--"

  "Means nothing. For all I know it's not even you. Or it came from eBay."

  "I understand." Josef looks up at me. "So the first thing you will need to know," he says, "is my real name."

  *

  If Josef thinks it is strange when I jump up moments later and ask to use his bathroom, he doesn't say so. Instead he directs me down the hall to a small powder room that has wallpaper blooming with cabbage roses and a little dish of decorative soaps still in their plastic wrap.

  I run the water in the sink, and then take my cell phone out of my pocket.

  Leo Stein answers on the first ring.

  "His name isn't Josef Weber," I say breathlessly.

  "Hello?"

  "It's me, Sage Singer."

  "Why are you whispering?"

  "Because I'm hiding in Josef's bathroom," I say.

  "I thought his name wasn't Josef . . ."

  "It's not. It's Reiner Hartmann. With two n's at
the end. And I have a birth date for him, too. April twentieth, 1918."

  Same as the Fuhrer, he had said.

  "That would make him ninety-five," Leo says, doing the math.

  "I thought you said it's never too late to go after them."

  "It's not. Ninety-five is better than dead. But how do you know he's telling you the truth?"

  "I don't," I say. "But you will. Stick it in a database and see what happens."

  "It's not quite that easy--"

  "It can't be that hard. Where's your historian? Ask her to do it."

  "Ms. Singer--"

  "Look, I'm hiding in an old man's bathroom. You told me that with a name and a birth date records are easier to find."

  He sighs. "Let me see what I can do."

  While I am waiting I flush the toilet. Twice. I am sure that Josef or Reiner or whatever he wants to be called now is wondering if I've fallen in; or maybe he thinks I'm taking a sponge bath in the sink.

  After about ten minutes, I hear Leo's voice. "Reiner Hartmann was a member of the Nazi Party," he says.

  I feel oddly euphoric, knowing that there's been a hit, and also leaden, because it means that the man on the other side of that door was involved in mass murders. I let out the breath I've been holding. "So I was right."

  "Just because his name turned up in the Berlin Document Center doesn't mean he's a legal slam dunk," Leo says. "This is just the beginning."

  "What happens next?"

  "That depends," Leo replies. "What more can you find out?"

  It felt like a blade along the side of my neck.

  I heard the rip of my own skin; felt the blood, sticky and hot, dripping down my chest. Again he dove toward me, snapping my vocal cords. All I could do was wait for the razor of his teeth, know that it was coming again.

  I had heard the stories of upiory who rose from the dead and ate through their linen shrouds in search of the blood that would sustain them, because they no longer had any of their own. They were insatiable. I had heard the stories, and now I knew they were true.

  This was no piercing of fangs, no draining. He gorged on me and brought me to the edge of death, the brink he skated on for eternity. So this was what Hell was like: a slow, silent scream. No strength to move, no voice to speak. Just my other senses heightened: touch and smell and sound, as he shredded my flesh. He banged my head against the ground: once, twice. My eyes rolled back; darkness dropped like a guillotine . . .

  Suddenly, I bolted upright. I was bathed in sweat, my cheek dusty with flour where I had fallen asleep waiting for the dough to rise. But that banging was still in my head. I grabbed for my throat, relieved to feel it smooth and whole, and heard it again: someone was knocking on the door of the cottage.

  The man with the golden eyes was standing at the door, silhouetted by the moon. "I could bake for you," he said. His voice was deep, soft. Accented. I wondered where he had come from.

  I was still partly in a dream state; I did not understand.

  "My name is Aleksander Lubov," he told me. "I've seen you in the village. I know about your father." He looked over my shoulder at the baguettes couched in linen, lined up like waiting soldiers. "During the day, I have to watch my brother. He isn't right in the head, and he'll harm himself if he's left alone. But I have to find work, too. Work I can do at night, when he is asleep."

  "When will you sleep?" I asked, the first question to pierce like an arrow through the fog of my mind.

  He smiled, and just like that, I could not breathe. "Who says that I do?"

  "I cannot pay you--"

  "I'll take what you can give," he replied.

  I thought of how tired I was. I thought of what my father would say if I let a stranger into his bakery. I thought of Damian and Baruch Beiler, and what they each wanted from me.

  It is said that you're safer with the devil you know than with the devil you don't. And I knew nothing about Aleksander Lubov. So why would I agree to his proposal?

  "Because," he said, as if he could read my mind. "You need me."

  JOSEF

  I will not answer to the other name. That person, he is someone I like to think I have never been.

  But this isn't true. Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

  To understand what I became you must know where I came from. My family, we lived in Wewelsburg, which was part of the city of Buren in the district of Paderborn. My father was a machinist by trade and my mother kept house. My earliest memory is of my father and mother fighting over money. After the first Great War, inflation spiraled out of control. Their savings, which they had diligently put away for years, were suddenly worth nothing. My father had just cashed in a ten-year insurance policy, and the proceeds did not even cover the cost of a newspaper. A cup of coffee was five thousand marks. A loaf of bread, two hundred billion marks. As a boy, I remember running with my mother to meet my father on payday, and then began the mad rush to the shops to purchase goods. Often, the shops had run out. Then my brother, Franz, and I would be sent at twilight into the fields of farmers who lived outside of Wewelsburg, to steal apples from the trees and potatoes from the ground.

  Not everyone suffered, of course. Some had invested in gold early on. Some speculated in fabric or meat or soap or produce. But most middle-class Germans, like my family, were ruined. The Weimar Republic, shiny and new after the war, was a disaster. My parents had done everything right--worked hard, saved well--and to what end? Election after election, no one seemed to have the answer.

  The reason I tell you this is that everyone always asks: How could Nazis come to power? How could Hitler have had such free rein? Well, I tell you: desperate people often do things that they normally would not do. If you went to the doctor and he said you had a terminal disease, you'd probably walk out of that office feeling pretty low. Yet if you shared this news with friends, and one told you, "You know, I had a friend who was diagnosed with that, too, and Doctor X cured him right away." Well, maybe he is the biggest quack, maybe he charges two million dollars for a consultation--but I bet you'd still be on the phone to him immediately. No matter how educated you are, no matter how irrational it seems, you will follow a glimmer of hope.

  The National Socialist German Workers' Party, it was that ray of light. Nothing else was working to fix Germany. So why not try this? They promised to get people back to work. To get rid of the Treaty of Versailles. To regain the territory we'd lost in the war. To put Germany back in its rightful place.

  When I was five years old, Hitler tried to take over the government at a beer hall--the Munich Putsch--and failed miserably by most accounts. But he learned that the way to lead a revolution was not violently but legally. And at his trial in 1924, every word Hitler spoke was reported in the German newspapers, the National Socialist Party's first propaganda onslaught.

  You will notice I say nothing about the Jews. That is because most of us didn't know a single Jew. Out of sixty million Germans, only 500,000 were Jews, and even those would have called themselves Germans, not Jews. But anti-Semitism was alive and well in Germany long before Hitler became powerful. It was part of what we were taught in church, how two thousand years ago, the Jews had killed our Lord. It was evident in the way we viewed Jews--good investors, who seemed to have money in a bad economy when no one else had any. Selling the idea that the Jews were to blame for all of Germany's problems was just not that difficult.

  Any military man will tell you that the way to pull a divided group together is to give them a common enemy. This is what Hitler did, when he came to power in 1933 as chancellor. He threaded this philosophy through the Nazi Party, directing his diatribes against those who leaned left politically. Yet the Nazis pointed out the linkage between Jews and the left; Jews and crime; Jews and unpatriotic behavior. If people hated Jews already for religious reasons or economic reasons, giving them another reason to hate them was not really going to be difficult
. So when Hitler said that the biggest threat to the German state was an attack on the purity of the German people, and so her uniqueness must be guarded at all costs--well, it gave us something to be proud of again. The threat of Jews was in the mathematics. They would mingle with ethnic Germans in order to raise their own status and in doing so, would bring down Germany's dominance. We Germans needed Lebensraum--living space--to be a great nation. Without room to expand, there was little choice: you went to war to conquer territory and you got rid of the people who were a threat to Germany, or who weren't ethnic Germans like you.

  By 1935, when I was already a young man, Germany had left the League of Nations. Hitler announced that Germany would be rebuilding its army, which had been forbidden after the first Great War. Of course, had any other country--France, England--stepped in and stopped him, what happened might not have happened. But who wanted to go back to war that quickly? It was easier just to rationalize what was happening, to say he was only taking back what had once belonged to Germany. And in the meantime, in my country, there were jobs again--factories for munitions and guns and planes. People were not making as much money as they used to, and they were working longer hours, but they were able to support their families. By 1939, the German Lebensraum extended through the Saar, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Czech lands. And finally, when the Germans moved into Danzig, Poland, the English and French declared war.

  I will tell you a little bit about myself as a boy. My parents desperately wanted their children to have a better life than they had--and the answer, they believed, was in education. Surely people who had learned how to invest better would not have found themselves in such dire financial straits. Although I wasn't particularly bright, my parents wanted me to test into Gymnasium, the most academic education possible in Germany, the one whose graduates were university-bound. Of course, once there, I was always picking fights or clowning around, anything to hide the fact that I was in way over my head. My parents would be called into school weekly to see the headmaster, because I had failed another test, or because I'd come to blows with another student in the hall over a petty dispute.

  Luckily, my parents had another star to hitch their wagon to--my brother, Franz. Two years younger than me, Franz was studious, his head always buried in a book. He would scribble away in notebooks that he hid underneath his mattress and that I would routinely steal to embarrass him. They were full of images I did not understand: a girl floating in an autumn pond, drowned because of a lost love; a deer hollowed by hunger picking through the snow for a single acorn; a fire that started in a soul and consumed the body, the bedding, the house surrounding it. He dreamed of studying poetry at Heidelberg, and my parents dreamed with him.