Lying in wait

18

Breaking up an interview at a crucial juncture like that is always a tough call, but Seattle's still a small enough town when it comes to discussing something that volatile. I opted for privacy over continuity.

I considered the privacy issue so important, in fact, that I was even willing to risk moving the interview to one of the interrogation rooms at the Public Safety Building, if need be. Interrogation rooms can be pretty scary places for someone who's never seen one before. Out of deference to Kari and Michael, Sue Danielson radioed ahead in search of a more suitable alternative.

We lucked out. The conference room next to the chief's office-the same one in which I'd spoken to June Miller hours earlier-was free for the remainder of the afternoon. We went there, but even in reasonably comfortable surroundings, it wasn't easy to restart the interview.

"Maybe we'd better go all the way back to the beginning," I suggested.

"Back to Sobibor?" Kari Gebhardt asked, blinking uncertainly.

"That would probably be best," I answered.

Kari took a deep, steadying breath. "There was an uprising at Sobibor in October of 1943. According to the records, my grandfather was still a guard there at the time. The mass escape from Sobibor was the only successful one out of all the Nazi camps. That day five hundred fifty prisoners scrambled through and over the barbed-wire fences and ran from the compound. Of the three hundred who actually made it to the woods outside the prison, only forty-seven were still alive by the end of the war. In the course of the uprising, approximately twenty-seven Ukrainian guards disappeared. Eight German guards also disappeared and were presumed dead."

"Hans Gebhardt was one of those?"

Kari nodded. "After I came back from Germany, I confronted my father about Sobibor, about my grandfather's role there, and about Hans Gebhardt's status as a deserter. Father denied every bit of it. Said it never happened. He claimed I was making the whole thing up. After that, I never had anything more to do with him." Her voice diminished to the merest of whispers. "Until three days ago, that is," she added.

"What happened three days ago?"

"That's when the people Michael told you about came to our apartment in Bellingham. They asked all kinds of questions about my father-where he worked, what he did. I felt like I had to warn him, and I did-even though Michael begged me not to."

I turned my attention full on Michael Morris. "Why?" I demanded.

"Because I didn't want that slime to get away."

"Kari's father?"

"No, her grandfather. I never thought Gunter would be in danger as well. That didn't occur to me. But I wanted them to catch the old man."

"They who?"

"Simon Wiesenthal's people. They were sure they were on the right track, and I didn't want them to lose him."

Michael's knowledge about the noted Wiesenthal Nazi hunters, his single-minded determination that Hans Gebhardt not escape capture, and the defiant way in which his eyes met mine suddenly switched on a lightbulb in my head.

"Michael," I asked, "are you Jewish?"

He nodded. "Half. My dad's Irish." His answer went a long way toward explaining his attitude.

"And you, Kari?"

"Lutheran," she answered, "so far."

"And how, exactly, did you two meet?"

"At school," Kari replied. "Toward the end of our freshman year, a Holocaust survivor came to the university to speak as a guest lecturer. Michael and I didn't know each other then, but we both went to hear the talk."

Michael nodded and took up the story. "I saw her at the lecture, and I knew what was said affected her. It affected all of us. After the lecture was over, a group of us went out for coffee. Somehow, Kari and I started talking. Long after everybody else had gone home, we were still there and still talking."

"What about?" Sue asked.

This time it was Michael's turn to draw a deep breath. "About the Holocaust. We talked all night. I told her about my family, and she told me about hers. My mother lost most of her aunts and uncles in concentration camps. She's still bitter about it, even now. And yet, here was Kari-the granddaughter of one of the very monsters my mother had warned me about-and she didn't seem like a monster at all. She was my age. Just listening to her talk, I knew she was every bit as horrified about what the Nazis had done as I was."

Once the dam was breached, Michael Morris couldn't seem to stop talking. "That's almost two going on three years ago now," he hurried on. "We've been together ever since. We've talked about getting married, but my mother's dead set against it. Like it was okay for her to marry my father, but it's not okay for me to do the same thing. Mother doesn't say so straight out, but she'd really like Kari and me to break up so I can marry some nice Jewish girl.

"And even though her family died in the Holocaust, she doesn't approve of what we're doing-tracking down the various escaped survivors, writing to them or to their descendants or relatives, trying to learn exactly what happened to them during and after the war. Mother says Sobibor has become an obsession for both Kari and me. She says it's not a healthy foundation for a relationship."

It crossed my mind that Michael's mother might be right about that, but I didn't mention it to either Kari or Michael. In the meantime, Sue went back to the death-camp story. "What did happen to those death-camp escapees?" she asked.

Sue Danielson had been sucked into wondering about the desperate and virtually hopeless fates of those survivors in exactly the same way Michael and Kari had become caught up in their compelling stories. Part of it is the hope that a sliver of good could somehow emerge from such appalling evil. And once you heard about such terrible, inhuman suffering, it seemed unthinkable and disrespectful to turn away.

Michael shrugged. "Fewer than twenty of the escapees are still alive. A few of the German officers were tracked down and tried at Nuremberg. Some of them got as little as three years for their part in killing all those people. One of them, the commander at the time of the uprising, was sentenced to sixteen years. We read an interview with him after he was released from prison. His comment about the war was that ‘…it was a very bad time for the Germans.'"

Shaking his head in apparent disbelief, Michael repeated the phrase. "‘For the Germans'! I can't believe the man's hypocrisy! How could he even think such a thing, much less say it?"

With that, Michael lapsed into a brooding silence. I waited a moment before I pressed on. "Tell us what happened to the guards."

"We haven't had much luck tracking them. The Ukrainians pretty well disappeared into post-World War Two Soviet territory and never resurfaced. The same goes for the Germans."

"Including Hans Gebhardt?"

"That's right," Kari answered. "Until those two men showed up at the apartment."

"Did they carry I.D.?"

"Yes."

"And did their papers identify the organization by name?"

"Oh, yes," Michael said. "One side of the I.D. card was in English; the other was printed in Hebrew."

"I never heard of the Wiesenthal people killing anyone," Sue objected pensively. "I thought they always worked inside the law and turned the people they captured over to the local court system."

"These people may or may not be who they say they are. It's always possible the I.D. they showed you was fake. If they're involved in all this, it certainly doesn't sound like they're operating inside the law this time," I said. "Regardless of justification, these people don't get to be judge and jury. If they killed Denise Whitney and Gunter Gebhardt, they'll have to answer for it in our courts. That's the law."

"The law!" Michael repeated, snorting in disgust. "What good does that do? Look at Nuremberg. All those guys got was a slap on the hand-like the guy who was sentenced to three whole years in prison. What kind of deal is that? After murdering that many people, here he is, walking around at seventy-five, as free as a bird. My mother's family is gone, and his isn't. Not only that, we're all supposed to buy into the idea that he's paid his debt to society. In full. What a load of crap!"

Michael Morris was absolutely right on that score-serving a total of three years for killing 250,000 people didn't seem to balance the scale. Not even close. Still, the alternative to courts of law is anarchy.

"Let me remind you one more time, Michael," I said. "That guard was actually at Sobibor. Denise Whitney and Gunter Gebhardt were not. Even if they've helped Hans Gebhardt avoid apprehension-even if they've shielded him for years-they may be guilty of harboring a criminal, but that's not a capital crime. They didn't deserve to die for doing it."

Michael made a face and nodded. "I know," he allowed grudgingly. "That's why we're here."

"Tell us what you can about the men who came to visit you last week," Sue said. "Didn't you say there were two of them?"

"Yes."

"Did they give you their names?"

Kari looked at Michael, and he answered. "Yes. One was Moise something. Rosenthal, maybe. The other one, the older one, was Avram Steinman. That struck my funny bone. Moses and Abraham working together."

"Can you give us a description of the two men?"

"They were both white. Medium build. Steinman was quite a bit older than we are, like about Kari's father's age. Your age. The other one was closer to us or maybe a little older. Thirty or so. The older one had a pronounced accent. The younger one spoke American English. He had brown hair, almost the color of mine."

"Were they in a car? On foot?"

"I don't know. I suppose they had a car, but I didn't see it."

"How did they find you?"

"Maybe they talked to some of the people we wrote to-one of the escapees."

"And why did they come to you?"

"They wanted us to help them," Michael answered. "After the letters we'd exchanged with some of the survivors, I'm sure they thought we would."

"What exactly did Hans Gebhardt do at Sobibor?" Sue Danielson asked.

This time it was Kari who answered. "They told us he was in charge of extraction. After the bodies came out of the gas chambers and before they were thrown into the fire, some of the prisoners-ones who were kept alive for a time solely to serve as part of the work crews-had to go through all the bodies and remove the gold teeth. That gold, along with gold from confiscated jewelry, was melted down into bars and shipped back to Germany. At the time of the Sobibor prison uprising, an entire truckload shipment of gold disappeared."

"The Wiesenthal people think your grandfather stole it?"

Kari nodded. "That's what they told us. They think he did it with help from one or more of the missing Ukrainian guards. They told us that over the years, and one by one, the guards have turned up dead, but no one had ever found any trace of my grandfather until just recently."

"Did they say what that trace was?"

"No."

"Where do they think the gold is now?" I asked, thinking at once of the solid-gold box wrench Bonnie Elgin had found lying in the street.

"They think it may have ended up in the Eastern bloc right after the war, but they believe most of it has been smuggled out in the course of the last few years," Kari answered. "On fishing boats."

"To your father?"

She shook her head. "By my father," she answered. "Through his joint-venture connections in and out of the former Soviet Union. They seemed to think my father knew where his father was all along. I think they were hoping Dad would tell them what he knew."

In view of the two unused airplane tickets to Rio, I thought I had a pretty good idea of where Kari's grandfather might be holed up. By now, the Wiesenthal operatives knew that, too.

"Michael and I were just doing research," Kari continued. "I think that's what called the investigators' attention to us. I think someone-maybe one of the survivors we interviewed-noticed my name and made the connection to my grandfather. And that's why those men came here, looking around and asking questions."

Kari's eyes once more filled with tears. "After they left, I called Granny to ask what she thought I should do. She told me just to stay out of it, to let well enough alone. I asked her advice, and then I ignored it. I guess I thought that if he helped them, it would make things better. And that's why this whole mess is my fault. I brought him to their attention.

"You see," she added, "I hated my father, but I never meant for him to die. And it's hurt my mother real bad. I can't stand what it's doing to her. It breaks my heart."

At that juncture, Kari Gebhardt finally fell apart completely. She put her arms on the table, rested her head on her arms, and sobbed brokenly for several minutes. I sat there and listened to her and waited for her to stop, but the whole time I was listening, I was thinking about Sobibor. I think Sue was, too.

It was late when we finally finished up with the interview. We had spent another full hour and a half going over and over everything they could remember about their Nazi-hunting visitors. It wasn't very illuminating. The first available appointment we could make for them to visit with the Identi-Kit artist was for the following Tuesday. The artist doesn't work weekends, and Monday would be entirely taken up by the funeral.

Kari and Michael left. Sue and I returned to the fifth floor, where she had some phone calls to make. I could have waited for her and hitched a ride home, but I wanted to walk. I thought the exercise might help clear my head and shake off some of the horror of what we had learned.

I thought about the men claiming to be Wiesenthal Nazi hunters as I made my way down a pedestrian-crowded Third Avenue. My natural inclination would have been to root for Nazi hunters-to cheer them on. But not if they had invaded my home territory and murdered people on my watch.

Back at Belltown Terrace, I grabbed a quick shower and changed into one of the two Brooks Brothers suits Ralph Ames had forced me to buy. Without my lawyer/fashion adviser's counsel, I'd look a whole lot more like Eddie Bauer than I would anything else. Once I was dressed, I placed a call to the Four Seasons Olympic. I wanted to be sure they'd have plenty of room to squeeze my grandmother and me into the Georgian Room for dinner.

Why did I want to take Beverly Piedmont to the Four Seasons? Maybe it was a way to distance myself from the horrors I'd been hearing about all afternoon. But also, I think, it had something to do with pride.

I had been to the Georgian Room on several occasions with Ralph Ames, and I wanted to take Beverly Piedmont someplace nice. Maybe it was showing off, and maybe it was nothing more than a misguided desire on my part to pamper her, to make my grandmother feel as though there was still someone in her life who cared about her, someone she could lean on if she ever needed to do some leaning.

Once I had her in the car headed back downtown, I began to have misgivings. Since I didn't have any viable alternatives in mind, I stuck to the original plan with the exception of parking in the garage off Fifth and Seneca instead of driving up to the posh front entrance and using the valet parking.

The trouble started as soon as we walked up the stairs from the lobby to the entrance of the Georgian Room. We stopped beside the maitre d's station behind a laughing, somewhat noisy group of well-oiled diners. There were several men in tuxes and women in long, sequined gowns, and from what conversation we overheard, they were evidently on their way to the opera.

Beverly Piedmont looked down at her plain but neat coat and dress. "I shouldn't be here," she whispered self-consciously. "I'm not dressed well enough."

"You're fine," I said reassuringly, urging her forward.

The unfailingly polite maitre d' took her modest wool coat and showed us to a linen-covered table, where he graciously helped my grandmother into her chair. While she examined the elegant room, I stole a glance at the menu. These were definitely not King's Table prices. If she caught a glimpse of the toll, she'd balk, and we'd be out of there in a flash.

Before she even had a chance to look at the menu, I shifted hers out of reach, closed mine, and waved away the sommelier.

I knew from being there with Ralph that the Georgian Room always has available an elegant fixed-price dinner, from soup to nuts, literally. The set five-course dinner offered the advantage of taking all the options out of ordering. The food was bound to be good, and it would keep my grandmother from reading the menu too closely. It would also keep me from trying to explain what any of the listed food actually was. Despite the name Beaumont, French and I are not exactly on speaking terms.

My menu sleight-of-hand may have been a slick maneuver, but Beverly Piedmont has a few jumps on me in terms of years and experience. She didn't fall for any of it.

"This place is very expensive, isn't it?" she observed, watchfully examining the room while she picked at her squash-soup appetizer.

"It's all relative," I said.

"I'm not a blind date, Jonas," she chided gently. "You don't have to impress me."

Touche. She had me dead to rights. Neither of us said a word while the busboy whisked the appetizer dishes out of the way of a waiter poised to deposit our entrees.

"Your grandfather was not a mean man; he just had no idea how to bend," Beverly Piedmont said. "In retrospect, I can see that what he did to your mother was heartless. It was only days after your father died in that motorcycle accident that Jonas and I found out our daughter was pregnant. He wanted her to give you up, and she refused. They had a terrible fight. I have to say your mother gave as good as she got. After that, there was no turning back for either one of them. And not for me, either.

"Through the years, it broke my heart to know that my only grandson was growing up right here in Seattle, almost under my nose, and yet I couldn't have anything to do with him. With you. I suppose I could have ignored your grandfather's wishes-done something underhanded and gone behind his back-but that's not the kind of person I am.

"I'm an old woman now, Jonas," she continued. "I never got to hold you when you were a baby or to save your first tooth in my jewelry box or to watch you unwrap your very first Christmas presents. Or any Christmas presents at all, for that matter. Now that I'm alone, I want to make up for lost time. I promise not to be a pest, but I do want to spend time with you, to get to know about who you are and how you think.

"And there are things I want to tell you, about what your mother was like when she was a little girl. About the places we lived when she was growing up and the things we did. Does that make any sense?"

I nodded. That's all I could manage.

"The food is very nice here," she went on, "but you don't have to take me to fancy restaurants. We could go someplace like Zesto's or Dick's Drive-In, or we could just sit at the house and talk. Mandy would like that. I swear that dog is lonely, too."

Beverly Piedmont put down her fork and then fumbled in her purse until she located a white lace-edged handkerchief, which she used to dab at her eyes.

It's a funny thing about Adam's apples. On special occasions, mine swells until it is approximately the size of a basketball. When that happens, I find it very difficult to talk. Impossible even. Rather than embarrass us both, I reached into my pocket and dragged out my notebook.

On the first blank page, one just beyond my hastily scribbled notes about Hans Gebhardt and Sobibor, I wrote myself a note. I put it in a spot where I was sure to stumble across it first thing the following morning.

"CALL KELLY," I wrote, printing my daughter's name in large capital letters. "INVITE TO T-DAY DINNER."

Who says you can't learn from someone else's mistakes?