The Shadow Man (17 page)

On the tape Sophie Millstein was once again fighting tears. She held up her hand.

‘I’m sorry Esther,’ Sophie Millstein said. ‘Poor Frau Wattner. She brought us soup when we had none. I do not

think I can speak of that day right now.’

‘Sophie,’ the young woman’s voice coaxed from off camera. ‘These things are important.’

Sophie Millstein nodded toward the camera.

‘Hansi, wouldn’t say much. Not that night. After Mama and Papa were asleep, I crawled over to where he was lying underneath his greatcoat, we had no blankets, really. I asked him: “Hansi, what is it? Who is it?” and at first he wouldn’t answer, but I poked him hard and he held his hand up so that just a little light that came in from the only little window we had threw a shadow on the wall, and then I knew…’

‘Knew what?’ the young woman’s voice prompted.

‘I knew he was out there. And I knew he would sell us to the Gestapo before too long. I knew that. I must have stiffened or gasped or something, because right away Hansi says, “No, don’t worry. I’ve paid him something and he will leave us alone …” But I didn’t believe that and I don’t think Hansi did either.’

‘That man. The one he met…’

‘The one who turned us in.’

‘Yes. How did—’

‘From the academy, I think. Not a classmate of Hansi’s, but perhaps someone a few years older. That must have been it, because my brother cursed, which he never did, and I remember him saying it would have been better never to have learned to read or write at all.’

Sophie Millstein paused, then added coldly: ‘He knew. That night in all that dark. You know, I remember the bombing was going on, off at Templehof, again, like so many times, and we could hear it in the distance, growing closer, and usually that scared me, but not that night. That night I remember praying that perhaps one of the British bombers would get hit and drop its load short and have it

all come down on us just quickly and painlessly and it could all be over.’

She continued quietly: ‘Hansi knew, and I knew and I suppose Mama and Papa knew that we were all dead already. We were dead at the very moment that he’d first spotted Hansi. Dead each moment that he’d followed my brother around the city, every stop on the streetcar, every step on the sidewalk. Dead every second that he’d watched and waited for his opportunity. Dead when he’d trapped my brother in a corner in some alleyway and hissed at him “Jew! I know you!” in some snake’s voice. We were dead when Hansi pleaded with him. We were dead when he forced Hansi to take him to Frau Wattner’s basement and dead when he demanded a bribe. He was killing us when Hansi handed him the ring and whatever money we had and heard him promise that great lie. No, we were all dead, even though he promised us life.’

Sophie Millstein paused. She was breathing hard on the tape, her face flushed with rage.

‘But you lived, Sophie,’ Esther Weiss interjected softly. Sophie Millstein’s eyes narrowed and her voice rasped in reply:

‘I lived? You think anyone who went through that lived? Ach, you don’t know anything! We all died, right inside! Maybe the body went on. Maybe we could still breathe. Maybe we still woke up every morning and saw the light of day, but we were dead inside! Dead!’

‘Sophie, that’s not true,’ the young woman argued gently. ‘You lived. Others lived. There was a reason for that. It was important that you lived.’

Sophie Millstein started to reply, then stopped. Her eyes filled once again with tears. ‘I’m sorry, Hansi,’ she said slowly. ‘I’m sorry Mama and Papa. I’m sorry to everyone who died.’

She took a deep breath and nodded.

‘Esther, I have loved living, that’s true. Maybe it wasn’t a perfect life, maybe I shouldn’t have done some things I did, or said some things I said, but I have and there’s no going back, is there?’

‘No, there isn’t.’

Sophie Millstein started to say something, then stopped. She seemed to think hard, then she whispered, ‘And to think … he was one of us.’ She shook her head. ‘I need to take a break,’ she said.

‘Sophie, this is important. What about the man who turned you in? We need to know about him.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. Perhaps tomorrow. Or next week. But I need to think of happier things, Esther, because sometimes these memories just make my heart want to stop.’

There was a momentary pause, then the young woman’s voice replied: ‘That’s fine, Sophie. We have plenty of time. All the time you need.’

Then there was another blue slate, with a date and document number, before the screen went blank again.

Esther Weiss turned off the television and shook her head. ‘I was wrong,’ she said. ‘She didn’t have time. Damn.’ She sighed and eyed Simon Winter. ‘So, there was just that. Her brother paid the catcher - maybe a former schoolmate, teacher, who knows? It wasn’t like the majority of good Germans were hiding Jews - a bribe. But it didn’t work. They got denounced anyway. Denounced and shipped off to die. Does that help you?’

‘Perhaps.’ He was thinking hard, trying to measure what he’d heard. He summoned Sophie Millstein’s words spoken in his apartment on the day of her death: ‘I only saw him that once, and for such a little time …’ Would you ever

forget that face? he demanded of himself suddenly. Would you recognize that face, no matter how few seconds you saw it that day fifty years ago, no matter how the years had aged it? Would you ever forget?

He answered that question instantly: no.

Then he turned the equation around in his head. Would the owner of that face ever forget what he’d done?

No.

The young woman hesitated. Winter saw a frown pass her eyes before she added: ‘You know what’s odd? That was what she wanted to talk about the night she was killed.’

‘What?’

‘She left a phone message on the Holocaust Center’s tape recorder. It was after hours and no one was here. She just said she was going to come in and she wanted to talk about her arrest.’

‘What exactly did she say?’

‘Just that. It was very brief.’

‘Did you tell—’

‘I called the police. They didn’t seem very interested.’

Winter nodded. ‘They believe she was killed by a narcotics addict, or someone similar. Someone who’s done a bunch of robberies near Sophie’s apartment,’ he explained.

‘That’s what they told me,’ she said. ‘But you seem troubled Mr Winter. You don’t believe them?’

He paused. He was struck by the German words that had rolled from Sophie Millstein’s tongue. I never realized, he thought. All those years, watching her coming and going, living right across from her in the Sunshine Arms, and I never knew. Some detective you were, he reproached himself.

‘Of course I believe them,’ Winter said slowly.

‘So, why are you here, Mr Winter?’ the young woman asked.

He thought how stupid he was. All those years as a policeman, day in and day out, living daily with all of death’s caresses, in every manner of murder. And Death had walked right into the Sunshine Arms and been right there when he’d reached for his pistol to take his own life, and for some evil reason had taken the wrong person. Not him, but his neighbor.

‘I’m here,’ he said with a hard-edged tone, ‘because someone murdered a person close to me.’

He glanced quickly toward the window, as if the bright sunlight streaming through could help remove the dampness of his heart. He guarded his words carefully, doling them out with a cold precision: ‘On the night she died, when she called here … did she use the phrase Der Schattenmann?’

Weiss shook her head. ‘No. I don’t believe so. The Shadow Man? No, I would have remembered that.’

Simon Winter gritted his teeth. ‘Does it mean anything to you?’

‘I don’t recall it. But…’

‘He might have been the catcher.’

‘That would be reasonable. They all went under pseudonyms and nicknames. And she describes her brother’s hand…’

‘Did any survive the war?’

‘Maybe one or two. One, a woman, was tried by the Russians, did some time and now lives quietly in Germany.’

‘The others?’

‘They disappeared into the camps. Or into the rubble. Who knows?’

That’s right, Simon Winter thought. That’s the question.

Walter Robinson followed the G-75 bus as it accelerated across the Julia Tuttle causeway, leaving the beach as it headed toward the core of Miami. It was midday; he saw a belch of smoky exhaust absorbed by the spongelike heat as the bus churned up the three-lane highway.

Miami has a linear quality to it. The city stretches north and south along the coastline, clinging to Biscayne Bay with an urban tenacity, taking not only the image that it wants to show the world, but also a sort of internal bearing from the glistening, azure waters. In recent years it has begun to flex to the west toward the soggy expanse of the Everglades, growing housing developments and shopping malls like so many boils on an infected man’s back. But these are the inevitable eruptions of shifting population trends. In attitude and essence, Miami remains a coastal city, oriented toward the ever-changing fields of blue-green ocean.

Walter Robinson, however, hated the water.

It was not that he didn’t enjoy looking out over the ocean, a view he frequently sought out, especially when considering a case in hand. He had long since discovered that the sea’s rhythms had a subtle, encouraging sense and that the monotonal sounds of the waves against the shore

helped to filter out extraneous details and focus his thoughts, and so he appreciated the great expanses of ocean and bay as tools which aided him. His hatred, however, was a more political one.

He thought the water was something that belonged to the wealthy. There are dozens of docks and marinas and boat ramps in Miami and none abut areas where blacks live in any numbers. He had become aware of this at a young age, when he would walk from the poverty of what is known as the Black Grove, through increasing affluence, down to the water, where he could watch the well-heeled and influential mount sailboats, speedboats, or large cabin cruisers and idle past the shore, heading out through the bay. In his solitude, watching, he was aware that his color made him different from virtually everyone heading toward the water. He had complained of this once to his mother, the elementary school teacher, and her response had been to insist that he learn to swim, if he was going to frequent the watery areas of Dade County. It was only as an adult that he’d realized that many of his schoolmates had never bothered to acquire this skill, so ingrown was the prejudice that the water belonged to others, not them.

So Walter Robinson had forced himself to become a powerful swimmer - fast, strong, and confident even when the ocean currents pulled and tugged with dangerous desires.

As he drove across the causeway, speeding to keep pace with the hurrying bus, he glanced at the bay, which shimmered on either side of him. He was always unsettled by the trip between the beach and Liberty City; the bay seemed to mock the blight that rose up a half mile inland from the shoreline. Six blocks, perhaps nine, and any memory of the water dissipated in a rigid, unforgiving dusty heat. He kept close to the G-75 bus as it downshifted

on an exit ramp, sending another cloud of dirty gray smoke into the air, and descended into the inner city.

The G-75, he knew, in unspoken truth, existed for a single purpose. It made the loop between a half-dozen stops in Liberty City and a similar number on Miami Beach so that the cleaning women, dishwashers, lawn men, and the occasional private nurse who lived in the city could get up early and ride through the heat to their difficult and low-paying jobs, without complaint or hope, and then make the return trip at night, swaying with noise and speed as the bus hurtled across the causeway.

He kept a street map on the seat beside him, and as the bus maneuvered down Twenty-second Avenue, he noted the location of every pawnshop and check-cashing store. There was a depressing frequency to these businesses, at least one per block.

The pawnshops, in particular, interested him.

Which one? he wondered to himself. Which one would open for you in the middle of the night? Which one did you slip right into, trying to shake off the last droplets of panic? Which one gave you the quick and easy, no questions deal?

This was just an educated guess on his part. He knew that a sophisticated burglar would have a regular fencing operation that he would frequent. Some fringe person who could be trusted. A fence, as well, would be able to handle more expensive pieces of jewelry, and give a higher return.

But a professional fence would also have more sense than to deal with some strung-out crack-bedeviled low-life, Robinson thought. So, he guessed, his quarry didn’t have a regular bank where he could take his stolen goods and make what in Liberty City passed for a regular deposit. He drove along, speaking to himself:

‘No, my man. You were all strung out, weren’t you? And

you’d want to get rid of almost all this stuff real fast, so a pawnshop would be right. One that you knew keeps two sets of books. One that would simply fork over some tens and twenties and not ask any questions. Enough to keep you from getting rich, but not enough to keep you from getting high, right, my man?’

There were seven such shops along the G-75 route.

Walter Robinson parked and smiled to himself.

‘You wouldn’t want to walk far, would you? You’d just want to get rid of the stuff nice and quick and get some cash and forget about that big step you just took. You know what step I’m talking about, my man? The one where you went from punk and burglar to the big time. The step that’s gonna put you on Death Row in Raiford Prison wondering what it is about life that’s so sweet because it’s gonna be taken away from you.’

Robinson stepped out of the car and felt a blast of heat rise from the sidewalk, enveloping him. He locked the unmarked car and hummed a snatch of a song to himself.

He breathed in deeply and thought: No, my man, you don’t know how close I am, but I’m close. Real close. And gonna be closer still, before you know I’m right there beside you.

He paused and let his eyes sweep into a low-slung housing development across the street from where he stood. Three small children were playing with a garish pink-colored plastic scooter bike on a dusty brown spot between cement walkways. Behind them were two two-story-high rectangular apartment buildings. Graffiti marred the fading white paint on the walls. Most of the doors and windows were open to the oppressive humidity; if there were air conditioners, they either didn’t work or were too expensive to operate. Occasionally a loud voice, raised in some sudden anger, flung an expletive or two through