Lying in wait

22

Tim, Ralph Ames' favorite waiter on the staff at the Georgian Room, once told us about his most surrealistic shift in a lifelong career of waiting tables. It happened, he said, the first night of Operation Desert Storm. While bombs were tearing hell out of the swimming pool in the El Rashid Hotel over in far-off Baghdad, war protesters were swirling in a riotous mass up Seattle's Fifth Avenue right outside the gracious walls of the Four Seasons Olympic. War or no war, protesters or no protesters, the niceties of hospitable dining remained unaffected. Inside the Georgian Room, all that happened was that a piano player upped the volume.

I recalled Tim's comment vividly as I sat in the elegant, dimly lighted Hunt Club at the Sorrento while the Simon Wiesenthal manhunters happily devoured their specially prepared kosher meals and spoke, with a physician's clinical dispassion, of Hans Gebhardt and Sobibor. Plates of regularly prepared Hunt Club-quality food came and went from in front of Sue Danielson, Michael Morris, and me. Maybe Sue and Michael ate some of theirs. I barely touched mine. I have no idea now what the food was or whether or not I tasted it.

In my day-to-day work, I see plenty of common street-thug mentality-the kind of thinking that makes life cheap enough so smart-assed kids regularly blow each other away over something as negligible as a forty-dollar World Series bet.

Moise Rosenthal and Avram Steinman were ostensibly law-abiding citizens-at least when they were on U.S. soil. But I had heard allegations that Wiesenthal tactics occasionally resorted to kidnapping in faraway places like Buenos Aires. What that really meant was that Wiesenthal operatives could be presumed to be both smart and dangerous. When necessity dictated, they were capable of making nice, but they weren't above going for the jugular, either.

Both men exuded the intensity of hunters on the trail of someone or something. Their brand of single-minded focus was a trait I recognized all too well. I see it in myself every day-whenever I look in the mirror. In the course of my life, I've learned that the idiosyncracies that seem entirely understandable and familiar in me are often the very ones I find most disturbing when I encounter them in someone else.

Moise Rosenthal and Avram Steinman bothered me. I found them so troubling, in fact, that at first I had difficulty staying tuned in to the conversation.

"Part of the problem in prosecuting the Germans who participated in Sobibor," Avram was saying, "was that there were so few survivors, not only among the prisoners, but also among the German personnel who were in charge.

"From the very beginning, the German High Command ran the place with a skeleton crew. Large numbers of guards weren't necessary because the people who were sent to Sobibor weren't prisoners in the ordinary sense of the word. They arrived dazed and ill, weak and exhausted from a hellish boxcar trip. In the summer, some prisoners perished in transit from heat and thirst. In the winter, many died of numbing cold. After exiting the trains, they were herded from the railroad siding into Sobibor's gas chambers within hours of their arrival."

"In other words, not that many guards were necessary," Sue Danielson interjected.

Avram nodded. "Right. The ranks of guard survivors were further reduced, not only by the number of those killed during the October uprising, but also by the ones who simply disappeared afterward. At the time, most of those were reported as either dead or missing in action. After all, the Germans didn't want it known in the ranks that they were having a desertion problem. Things were bad enough for them right then that it could have encouraged others to follow suit."

"I understand that Hans Gebhardt was among those who either went underground after the war or who were thought long dead," Sue said. "I'm wondering about the others, the guards and officers who were tried, convicted, and given their obligatory slaps on the hand during the trials at Nuremburg. Was your organization instrumental in bringing any of them to trial?"

"Yes," Avram said. "We were involved in some of those cases. But what we're talking about here is another kind of trial altogether, other trials besides the ones at Nuremburg."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

Avram ignored my interruption and continued. "While the German High Command was totally focused on waging and losing a war, a few minor details slipped through the cracks. Sobibor was one of them. Those in charge knew approximately the number of prisoners who had been sent to the camp while it was in existence. According to the law of large numbers, they also knew about how much of what they called das neben-produkt — side-product-should have resulted from that many bodies. In the final accounting, gold from Sobibor turned up short."

"I thought Germans always kept meticulous records," I said.

"Supposedly, and up to a point, they did. From the time the gold was melted into bars and turned over for shipment, there's a complete paper trail, even now. The missing gold was stolen long before it entered that officially documented path."

"Stolen by whom?" I asked.

"Hans Gebhardt, no doubt," Avram answered.

"Certainly he wasn't acting alone," I supplied. "Who else would have helped him? Other guards perhaps? Some of the prisoners?"

"Maybe both," Avram said. "A young lieutenant named Lars Weber was in charge of Sobibor's accounting…"

"He was in on it?" Michael Morris interrupted. "I remember his name from Kari's and my research. Lars Weber was tried in Nuremburg and imprisoned for a while-only for six months or so. According to one of his surviving relatives, he died shortly after being released."

"He died as a result of one of those other trials I was telling you about," Avram answered quietly. "The unofficial ones. They were conducted by some of the earliest and most vicious gangs of what we now call neo-Nazis. They wanted to regroup and reorganize. They were broke and looking for money. By then someone must have realized that a large amount of gold from Sobibor was missing."

"After he was released from prison, Lars Weber got a job doing reconstruction in Berlin. He disappeared one afternoon on his way home from work. A passing car slowed down, a door opened, and he was pulled inside. He returned home three weeks later. His five-year-old daughter found him outside the front door early one morning. He had been dumped off during the night. He had been severely burned over two thirds of his body. All his fingers and toes were missing. Gangrene set in. He died two weeks later."

A burned body. Missing fingers and toes. This was clearly an identifiable M.O.-an inarguable connection.

Sue's eyes met mine across the table, but neither of us gave anything away. Unfortunately, Michael Morris wasn't a cop. He didn't know better.

"Fingers and toes!" he exclaimed. "That's the same thing that happened…" Too late, I silenced him with a reproving glare. He subsided meekly back into his chair.

"You're saying Lars Weber was in on it then?" Sue asked.

Avram shrugged, "Maybe. Maybe not. The daughter-Erika-did very well in school. She grew up, became a member of the Communist party, and went to work for a branch of Stasi-the feared East German secret police. She dropped out of sight shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We've been looking for her for the past several months."

"Why?"

"One of our affiliated organizations maintains a data base on the status of known Nazi war criminals-those who have already served their prison terms as well as those who have never been apprehended. When two of the missing Ukrainian guards from Sobibor turned up dead-murdered, or rather executed-under similar circumstances hundreds of miles apart, we started looking into it."

"Those guards were murdered?" Michael asked. "We checked on them. Kari and I were told they all died of natural causes."

"As far as we can tell," Avram answered, "six of the guards are dead. Some of them did die of natural causes. Two of them did not. Neither did the sons of two of the others. You must understand that the term ‘natural causes' becomes very flexible in some jurisdictions when inquiries are being made by someone from outside that jurisdiction."

"You said ‘similar circumstances,'" I prompted. "Can you be more specific?"

"Burned," he answered. "Almost beyond recognition, but not quite. In each case, the fingers and toes were removed but left with the body. As a warning, perhaps."

"To whom?"

"To whoever had the gold. We believe Erika Weber Schmidt was serving notice to all concerned that she was coming looking for the gold her father had once been accused of stealing."

"Whether or not he did it," Sue said. Avram nodded. "Do you think she was acting alone or in concert with someone else?"

"That we haven't been able to determine. Our assessment is that Erika Weber Schmidt is more than capable of doing it. She's a trained killer. More to the point, she's an unemployed trained killer, or at least she was."

"What does that mean?"

"We now have reason to believe she has gone to work for one of the newer and more radical neo-Nazi splinter groups."

"What you're giving us is a lot of ancient history," I interjected. "I'd like to know what brought you here to Washington last week when you showed up at Kari and Michael's apartment up in Bellingham."

Avram looked questioningly at Moise, who nodded. "A few days ago, while checking Erika Schmidt's back trail, we stumbled over the names of Michael Morris and Kari Gebhardt. One of the survivors mentioned having been interviewed by someone named Gebhardt. Since Hans Gebhardt was one of the missing German soldiers from Sobibor, it struck us as more than just a coincidence. We came here as soon as it was possible to make suitable arrangements. I should imagine Erika located Gunter in much the same way."

"Mr. Gebhardt's murder is our fault then, isn't it?" Michael murmured, his face ashen. "Kari's father died because our research called her attention to him."

"Don't blame yourselves," Moise Rosenthal said, speaking for the first time since Avram had begun his narrative. "Gunter Gebhardt died because the neo-Nazis are trying to build an entrance ramp to the information superhighway. It's illegal for them to sell books denying the reality of the Holocaust, and the existence of the death camps. Instead, they're setting up a complicated computer network they plan to use to spread their propaganda. To do that, they need money."

"We've been convinced for some time that Erika wasn't acting entirely on her own. For one thing, most former Eastern bloc workers don't have enough money to do the kind of traveling she does. They just don't have the wherewithal to pay for tickets. There's also the matter of navigating a complicated bureaucratic maze in order to secure the proper exit papers and visas.

"I personally am convinced that Erika Schmidt is working for one of these neo-Nazi entities, although we're not yet sure which one. They're providing seed money and helping her cut through red tape. In exchange, once the missing gold is found, they'll be reimbursed for their up-front expenses, then they'll split the profits with Erika."

Michael Morris fidgeted in his chair. "What am I going to tell Kari?" he said. "Here's her father, an innocent man and…"

"I wouldn't be so sure about the innocent part," Moise cautioned. "For years Gunter Gebhardt has been involved in a joint venture with someone in Vladivostok. I believe he went into it solely in order to establish a cover that would allow him to smuggle his father's gold out from behind the iron curtain."

Moise Rosenthal sat back in his chair. He looked at Sue and me and smiled as if to say it was our turn. Now that he had told us what they knew, I believe he expected us to return the favor. Unfortunately, I wasn't in any mood for show-and-tell. Impeccable manners to the contrary, I still had a feeling Moise and Avram were playing us for fools. They had only told us as much as it suited them to tell. One important oversight was the fact that so far they hadn't mentioned a word about the toy soldiers they had bought from Else Gebhardt.

I stood up. "Excuse me for a moment, would you?"

Moise nodded graciously. I made my way to the nearest pay phone and punched in the directory-assistance number for eastern Washington.

"What city, please?" the operator asked.

"Yakima," I answered. "I'm looking for someone named Hurtado. First name Sergio."

Within moments I was speaking to Lorenzo Hurtado himself. I didn't beat around the bush. "Tell me something, Lorenzo," I said. "Was Gunter Gebhardt fishing or smuggling?"

"I am not a smuggler," Lorenzo answered. "I am an honest man. So is my cousin. We worked hard for Senor Gebhardt. We caught the fish. We cleaned them. We unloaded them onto the ships."

"What ships?"

"The Russian ships. American ships can't go into Russian ports."

"When you unloaded the fish, did you take anything on board?"

"Only food and supplies. Just enough to get back home. Senor Gebhardt would ship some spare parts and tools over ahead of time, so if anything broke while we were out, we'd have replacements. He said things they made in Russia weren't any good. He only wanted American."

"He didn't load on anything else?"

"Nothing else."

If Lorenzo was telling the truth, that pretty much blew the smuggling theory. Frustrated, I returned to the restaurant where the plates and dishes had given way to brandy snifters and cups and saucers.

"Look," I said impatiently. "Let's not play games. I know where you two were this afternoon. I know what you did. When did you figure out that those soldiers in Gunter Gebhardt's basement were made out of gold? Was it before or after you lied your way into Else Gebhardt's house to buy them?"

For a moment, there was dead silence around the table, then Moise said, "Those soldiers aren't gold, Detective Beaumont. You can check them yourself. They're made out of some other metal. Lead, maybe."

The soldiers weren't gold? There went my latest pet theory, shot straight to hell!

"Where is the damn gold then?" I demanded. "If Gunter didn't use it to make the soldiers, what the hell did he do with it?"

A tweak of amusement turned up the corners of Avram Steinman's mouth, wrinkling the corners of his eyes and twisting his face into a wry grin. "That, Detective Beaumont," he replied, "is what we were hoping you could tell us."

There was some stiff small talk after that. Moise and Avram were looking for information that neither Sue nor I was prepared to share.

I skipped the brandy. While drinking my second cup of coffee, I caught Michael Morris checking his watch three different times. Obviously, he had an important previous engagement. Our visit with Moise Rosenthal and Avram Steinman was making him late.

I passed on the waiter's offer of a third cup. I made one abortive attempt to pick up the tab, but Moise waved that aside, telling me it was handled on a direct-billing basis. Thank you, Simon Wiesenthal. Sue, Michael, and I made our joint exit a few minutes later. Because it was cold outside, we stood just inside the entrance while a pair of attendants brought around the cars.

"Do you think those two guys are really on the level?" Sue asked.

"Up to a point," I answered, "but I wouldn't trust them any farther than I can throw them."

"What about old man Gebhardt? Is he alive or dead?"

"Good question," I replied. "It's a crap-shoot either way. If I were you, I wouldn't bet any money one way or the other."

My 928 is always popular when it comes to the young men who work valet-parking concessions. Naturally, the Guard-red Porsche appeared in the hotel driveway long before Sue Danielson's battle-weary Ford Escort. It's possible the parking personnel at the Sorrento might have frowned on handling such lowbrow transportation, but Sue's considerable display of well-turned calf and thigh kept the car jockeys from making snide comments about her car. They did, however, feel free to comment on her looks.

Sue was fully capable of handling herself. She simply ignored their admiring but verging-on-rude leers. Rather than challenge them on it, she merely got in the car and drove away, stiffing the car jockeys out of their expected tip. When Michael Morris and I drove away, one attendant was busy griping to the other about how come she did that. I could have told him, but there are some things in life guys need to be smart enough to figure out for themselves.

Once Michael and I started down Madison, I caught him stealing yet another surreptitious glance at his watch.

"What have you got," I asked, "a hot date?"

He shook his head. "I'm worried about Kari," he said.

"What about her?"

"My mother didn't invite Kari to dinner tonight. She said that under the circumstances, with Mr. Gebhardt dead, she was sure Kari wouldn't want to accept a dinner invitation. The truth is, Mom doesn't like Kari at all. That was just an excuse not to have her over. But I told Kari I'd come over to her place right after dinner. Now I'm worried about showing up so late."

"Ten-thirty isn't all that late," I reassured him. "As soon as I get you back to your car, you can be at Kari's house in a matter of minutes. There's hardly any traffic this time of night."

Michael's car, a bright blue Geo Storm, was parked on Cherry just east of Third. He was in such a hurry to get where he was going that he leaped out of the Porsche while it was still rolling. He took off without so much as a wave or a thank-you. It's a wonder he didn't break his leg.

Such is love, I thought, watching him scramble into the car, start it, and peel out of the parking place. Love, youth, and raging hormones.

As the pair of bright red taillights sped up Third Avenue, I hoped he'd pay attention to his driving.

It would be too bad if some hard-nosed traffic cop pulled the poor kid over and gave him a ticket, I thought, not because Michael was screwed up on booze or drugs, but because he was an inattentive, lovesick swain.