The Shadow Man (30 page)

Frieda Kroner nodded her head in agreement, then snarled and whispered in a low, angry grunt: ‘We must find him. We must find him today or tomorrow or this week or next, but we must find him. Otherwise, he will find us. We must fight back.’

‘Even against a shadow,’ the rabbi added.

Simon Winter nodded. He thought to himself: This man is something different. He felt his imagination start to grind away, mechanical, factoring.

‘What was it you said, Mrs Kroner? Last time? He is one of you?’

‘That is correct. He must be a survivor as well.’

‘Then that is where I will start. And you two also. He will be out there, in a synagogue, at the Holocaust Memorial, at a condo association meeting, as he was with Mr Stein. There must be names, lists of names. Of organizations and congregations. That is where we will start.’

‘Yes, yes, I see,’ the rabbi said. ‘I can contact other rabbis.’

‘Good. Eliminate anyone under the age of sixty….’

‘He will be older than that. Why not make it sixty-five? Or sixty-eight?’

‘Yes. But we are all old, and we all know some people wear their years differently. Some look younger, some older. I think to perform two - maybe three - killings, the Shadow Man will have the strength and appearance of a younger man. Let’s keep that in mind.’

The rabbi nodded. ‘Like the man on trial in Israel. He was in the papers again today.’ Simon Winter’s mind’s eye quickly formed a picture of a man accused of being a former death camp guard. He had been on the television nightly and in the daily papers. He was a hulking man, thick through the middle, with wide shoulders and arms like wooden pilings. He was balding, and had a roughness about him that was unsettling. Flanked by a pair of armed policemen, the man always wore a prisoner’s jumpsuit, but not the attitude or appearance of a prisoner.

‘You have seen this man, this Ivan the Terrible?’ Rabbi Rubinstein asked, and Winter nodded in reply. ‘You can see, can you not, Detective, that this is a man who was never broken? Never crushed? Never beaten down and starved? With us, it is not exactly the same, is it?’ ‘I don’t follow.’

‘It is not that we survivors are less … I am not sure how to put it, but let me suggest this, Detective: a true survivor

wears a mark just as surely as I wear this tattoo.’

He held up his forearm and pulled back the dark shirtsleeve he was wearing.

‘See how it has faded with time? But it is still there, is it not? And we are no different inside. There is a mark there. As the years pass, it becomes less. But it is still there and will never totally disappear. You can see it in the slope of the shoulders, or maybe behind the eyes. This I believe is true for all of us.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘This man, Der Schattenmann, he will say one thing. But he will not have the truth within him. And, if we look hard enough, we will be able to see that.’

‘This is correct,’ Frieda Kroner added decisively. There was a momentary pause, and then she continued, with a secretary’s efficiency. ‘I know all of Irving’s memberships. The bridge club and the discussion groups … I can get those lists.’

‘Excellent. And addresses. And descriptions, if you can get them. Remember detail. Any little thing could tell us what we need to know.’

‘What do you mean, detail?’ she asked.

‘He was a Berliner once. Would he speak with an accent, like you do, Mrs Kroner? That is just a possibility. He may not.’

‘Yes. Yes. This makes sense. I can see that, but in the meantime, how do we protect ourselves?’

‘Change your routine. If you have been going to the supermarket at three p.m. every Wednesday afternoon for the past ten years, then change. Go at eight a.m. Start taking different routes. If you want to go to the boardwalk for a stroll, fine, just turn and head two blocks in the wrong direction before doubling back. If you are going out, call your destination first. Let them know you are traveling. If

you always ride the bus, take a cab. Find someone to accompany you. Move in groups. Travel erratically. Zigzag. Stop in front of plate-glass windows and spend a few seconds watching the people behind you. Turn suddenly and examine the street you’ve just walked down. Be alert.’ ‘This is wise,’ said the rabbi.

‘He may try to come at you as something familiar, a delivery-man or a postman. Trust no one. Even if you have been going to the same deli and eating the same corned-beef at lunch for the last ten years, now you must change. And.no longer trust the counterman, even if he’s the same face you’ve seen every day since you moved to the Beach. Think: nothing is safe. Everything could hide a shadow.’

Frieda Kroner narrowed her eyes in appreciation.

‘This will keep us alive?’ she asked.

‘It might. There are no guarantees. A gun is no guarantee. Or a pit bull.’

‘Or the police,’ she said bitterly.

‘That is correct. The police solve crimes that have happened. Rarely do they manage to prevent something from taking place.’

The rabbi interrupted suddenly. ‘We could go away. Just leave town perhaps?’

‘Forever?’

‘No. This is my home now.’

‘Then I think it wiser to defend it.’

‘Yes. If we had thought that way fifty years ago, sixty years ago perhaps … No, let us not think of those things. Let us think about staying alive now. Today. Tonight. Tomorrow.’

Winter hesitated before continuing, watching the rabbi’s face as it drifted momentarily back in time, seeing the

remembrance of evil mark each line and furrow around his eyes, across his forehead, at the corners of his mouth.

‘There is one other thing,’ Winter added slowly. He saw the rabbi’s eyes swing slowly back across the landscape of decades and arrive at the present, recovering an unsettled nervousness.

‘What is this one other thing, Mr Winter?’

Winter replied quietly. ‘Let’s all assume that he knows who you are. And where you live. Let’s assume right now that he is confident because he doesn’t believe anyone is searching for him. Let’s assume he could be planning his next attack right now.’

Frieda Kroner gasped. The rabbi stepped back abruptly. ‘Do you think it so, Mr Winter?’ he asked with a stroke of panic painted on his words.

‘I do not know, but I believe you must consider the worst.’

‘But how?’ Frieda Kroner demanded.

‘Perhaps Mr Silver told him.’

‘No. This I do not believe. No matter what the pain.

No.’

Winter nodded. ‘Perhaps you’re right. But there is one other thing that I just remembered.’

‘What is that?’

The memory made him feel helpless, impotent and stupid. He wondered for an instant whether Irving Silver might be standing in front of him had he recalled this simple fact a few days earlier. He abruptly pictured himself, standing next to the young black detective amidst the heat and raised voices of the crime scene technicians as they processed Sophie Millstein’s apartment. He saw in his mind’s eye his own finger pointing toward the telephone stand, and he recalled his words to the young detective.

‘Sophie’s address book was missing the night of her

murder.’

‘What?’

‘Her telephone address book. It wasn’t in its customary location. It was gone.’

‘You think Der Schattenmann …’

‘If he saw it, he might have grabbed it. And you both were in it, because I saw her open it to get your telephone numbers.’

‘But we do not know—’ the rabbi began, then stopped abruptly. He rocked back and forth on his heels, a faint grin just starting in the corners of his lips. ‘This is like a chess game, is it not. Detective?’

‘In a way, yes.’

‘He has made moves. He has controlled the board. It is as if we have been unable to see his pieces go from square to square. But now, perhaps, it is our turn. There are three of us and we have some tricks left, do we not?’

‘I think we do,’ Winter said.

‘I am not scared,’ the rabbi said suddenly to Frieda Kroner. ‘No matter what happens, I cannot be scared. I do not think that Irving was either, when he came for him. And I do not think you will be anymore. Have we not seen the worst that this earth can manufacture? Is there some greater terror than Auschwitz?’

Oddly, then, Frieda Kroner smiled as well. ‘We lived through that….’

‘We can face up to this.’

Simon Winter saw the old man reach out, seize the old woman’s hand and give it a small, reassuring shake. He thought he should say something, but could not think of words. After a moment Frieda Kroner turned to him. She did not speak, but he knew that they were all beginning to get ready for whatever the next move was.

Esther Weiss leaned back in her desk chair inside her small

office at the Holocaust Center. She did not seem surprised to see him.

‘You have more questions, Mr Winter?’

‘Yes’ he replied.

‘This is to be expected. When one cracks the lid on Pandora’s box, many questions slide out. What is it you need to know?’

‘Is there a registry or a list of Holocaust survivors, you know, a directory of sorts, that you have here?’

The young woman raised her eyebrows momentarily, then shook her head. ‘A list of survivors?’

‘Correct.’

‘Like the membership of a club or a social group?’

He paused, but then said, ‘Yes, though I realize that sounds odd.’

‘That would be anathema, Mr Winter.’

‘I’m sorry … I don’t see—’

She interrupted him swiftly. ‘Mr Winter, these people became Holocaust victims because they were put on lists. Registers. Directories. Allotments. There are all sorts of innocent words that take on horrific meanings when you connect them to the roundups and transports. No, Mr Winter. There are no more lists, thank God.’

‘But here, at the Holocaust Center, and the other memorials…’

‘We guard the names of the people who have spoken with us, who continue to speak with us, very carefully. Privacy is an important issue for these people, Mr Winter. It is hard to understand how these people can be both unique and special and terribly ordinary, all at the same time. Many have lived simple, unexceptional lives, save for those years swept up in the camps. Consequently, these memories - even though they share them - have a privacy to them that we protect. They do the same at the center in

Washington, and the one in Los Angeles. Yale University keeps their collection of videotaped recollections under lock and key. They have more than two thousand.’

‘How many Holocaust survivors are there here on the Beach?’

‘On the Beach? This is hard to say. A few years back it was estimated that there were fifteen thousand survivors living in South Florida. From Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale all the way down to South Beach. But they are growing old. The number dwindles monthly. That is why their recollections are so crucial.’

She eyed him with some apprehension.

‘We have no list, Mr Winter. These people come to us.’

He thought hard for a moment, then tried a different tack. ‘Suppose I were to backtrack. Try Immigration and Naturalization. Would they have records, you know, from the Forties or early Fifties…’ His query dwindled as Esther Weiss shook her head.

‘I doubt it. Certainly they have records of people entering the U.S. and how it was managed. But an overall compilation? For Holocaust survivors? No. And there were so many different routes here, not just to the U.S., but within the nation after they arrived. From the Lower East Side to Skokie, Illinois, or Detroit or Los Angeles and finally to Miami Beach. These are not official travels, Mr Winter. They are recorded only in the memories of the people who made the trek.’

‘But surely there must—’

‘Surely what? In Israel they have been attempting to simply document the names of the people killed in the Holocaust. The number is at three million, slightly less than half. No, Mr Winter, lists don’t exist. Only disarray and memories of nightmare.’

She paused, examining the consternation in his face.

‘There is a question, but you won’t ask it. You know something, but you won’t say it. You want me to help you, but you won’t say why.’

Simon Winter shifted about in his seat He was dismayed. He berated himself inwardly for thinking the Holocaust would be like some great Department of Motor Vehicles, with names, addresses, telephone numbers, and current photographs. He looked over at Esther Weiss, who was staring at him with anticipation. It was not within his ordinary approach to matters to relinquish information. He stayed quiet for an instant, until the young woman shuffled some papers on the desk in front of her.

‘When I came in before …’ he started slowly.

‘After Sophie Millstein’s death,’ she continued for him. He nodded.

‘… You recall I was interested in a man Sophie knew only as Der Schattenmann.’

‘Of course. The catcher. You were speaking with the other Berliners. I remember.’

‘I am afraid that this man, the Shadow Man, is living here on Miami Beach.’

Esther Weiss opened her mouth as if to say something, then stopped. She seemed to take a deep breath before continuing. ‘Here?’

The question seemed as suddenly pale as her skin.

‘I believe so.’

Hesitancy slipped into the young woman’s words. ‘But that would be …’ She shook her head. ‘… incredible. Horrible. I can’t believe …’

‘I think he has killed, Miss Weiss. I think he is stalking survivors. I think he stalked Sophie. And another man, a Herman Stein …’

‘I knew Mr Stein.’

‘And possibly another. Irving Silver.’

She shook her head.

‘No. Irving Silver was in here. Two weeks ago. Talking to the camera, recording his memories.’

She reached toward the phone, as if to put something in her hands.

‘He is missing.’

‘Have you spoken with the police?’

‘I haven’t. Others have.’

‘What do they say?’

He shrugged. ‘Unless there is evidence of a crime …’

‘But the Shadow Man? Here? Someone should …’

‘What, Miss Weiss? Someone should investigate? Certainly. The police? The Justice Department? The damn Supreme Court?’

‘Yes, yes. They have special investigations at the Justice Department. They have found Nazis …’