The Night, The Day (15 page)

chapter 23

A
shok Reddy sat across from
Martin in the hospital cafeteria. The two had been there for a while, and Martin, practically wordless, had barely touched his lunch.

“Is something wrong, Marty?” Reddy asked.

“Why would you think that?”

“You are awfully quiet. And frankly, I have never seen you so disinterested in food.”

“I just have a lot on my mind.”

“Woman problems?”

“Perhaps.”

“Same girl?”

Martin lifted his eyes and looked at his friend.

Reddy looked at his watch. “If my memory is correct, Marty, you requested this luncheon.”

Martin nodded.

“I even recall you saying you had something you needed to discuss.”

Another nod.

“Well, in case you were wondering, I
do
have a department to run, patients to see, a stock broker to call, just a few minor chores for the afternoon.”

“I’m sorry, Ashok.”

“Save your contrition for church, my friend. Or synagogue, or wherever it is you go these days. Just tell me what is on your mind.”

“That’s just it. I’m not quite sure.”

“Aha, so it’s one of those vague premonition-type things. You have a sense that something is not quite right, but you just cannot pin it down.”

“Exactly!”

“That isn’t so unusual, it happens to me all the time.”

“Me too, with patients. But not in my private life.”

“You forget, Marty, you have not had a
private
life for quite some time.”

Martin shrugged. “True.”

Reddy seemed to be contemplating. “Do you have a clue?”

“I know it’s something about her. At least I think it is. Don’t get me wrong, she really grabs me, but when I was looking around her place last night, something just didn’t feel right.”

“You were at her place? That seems rather fast.”

Martin smirked. “She cooked me dinner.”

“I can just imagine.”

“Ashok…”

“Yes. Sorry, Marty. Sometimes I just like to live vicariously.”

“You don’t need to. You have a perfect life.”

“Nothing’s perfect, my friend, but I will take it.”

The two men smiled at each other.

“Getting back to you,” Reddy continued. “Maybe you are just frightened about getting close to someone new. It is quite normal to feel that way in your circumstances.”

“I’ve thought about that. It’s true, I am scared, but I think I’m dealing with it.
This
is something else.”

“Well, Marty, everyone has secrets. I am sure she has a few. In time you will learn what you need to know.”

“You’re probably right. But I just had a sense that there was something else.” Martin thought for a moment. “I had a disturbing dream while I was there.”

“How did you manage to dream during dinner?”

Martin’s eyes told his friend to cut the sarcasm.

“Okay,” Reddy said. “Do you recall the details?”

“That’s just it. I can’t remember anything about the dream.”

“Then how do you know it was disturbing?”

“Because I woke up feeling troubled, even agitated.”

Reddy’s beeper sounded. He removed it from his waist, looked at it and said, “Shit! I am late for a meeting with the administration. I forgot all about it.” He looked at Martin apologetically.

“It’s fine. Go!”

“I’m really sorry, Marty. It is about budget nonsense, but I have to be there.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll catch each other later.”

They stood up, took their trays, and started toward the conveyer belt.

“You know, Marty, there are two things we could try.”

Martin looked at him curiously. “What’re you thinking?”

“Well, the first, and simplest, is for you to bring her by for dinner. Savitri’s quite eager to meet her, and I will have her sized up in no time.”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll spare her the scrutiny for now.”

“Who said anything about scrutiny? She would just be meeting friends.”

“Yeah, sure. What’s your other idea?”

“Hypnosis.”

Martin stopped in his tracks and stared at Reddy. “Are you serious?”

“Sure. Why not? If I can get you in a good trance, there is no telling what we will uncover. I won’t even charge you.”

Martin looked like he was actually considering the idea.

“Why don’t you think on it,” Reddy said.

“I’ll do just that.”

chapter 24

D
an Gifford’s mind was in
overdrive. He gulped his coffee, not realizing how hot it was until it was too late. It would be days before he would be able to taste his food again. “Are you sure?” he asked Bobby Marcus.

“I have this friend at the bureau, owes me a few favors,” Marcus explained. “That’s what he says.”

The information on Richard Schwartz was puzzling, but it definitely fit; Israeli agents in cahoots with one of the FBI’s foremost experts on Nazi war criminals. Only, what were they doing outside Martin Rosen’s office?

Gifford entertained the possibility that they could be after someone in a neighboring building or in one of the other apartments in Rosen’s building. Maybe a resident, guest, or even one of the professional tenants. The possibilities were plentiful.

Either way, Gifford realized that Schwartz was right; it really wasn’t his problem. He already had enough on his plate with the upcoming drug trial. Yet, having to keep all this from Rosen irked him. What if Rosen was somehow unwittingly involved, whether through another patient or in some other way?

Gifford was knee-deep in this thing. He couldn’t continue his therapy, business-as-usual, while keeping this a secret; he couldn’t divulge the secret either, until he knew it was safe to do so; and he couldn’t imagine quitting therapy, one of the few things in his life that was working. “You seem to have a lot of people owing you,” he said to Marcus.

They were sitting at their usual corner table in Starbucks. They spoke quietly beneath the noise of the crowd, assuring their privacy. “Don’t fret, Danny boy. You’ll join the club soon enough.”

“I’m already there. You’ve done a lot for me, Bobby. I don’t forget things like this.”

Marcus ignored the comment. He was uncomfortable with accolades from friends. “So, what do you want me to do next?”

Gifford weighed the question. It wouldn’t cause any harm to dig a little deeper, especially with Marcus doing the digging. Gifford trusted his instincts about Marcus, as he did about most things. Marcus was good, always covered his tracks well. It was highly unlikely the FBI would get wind of anything. “Do you think you could find out exactly what Schwartz is working on?”

“That’s a tall order, boss.”

“I know.”

The two friends looked at each other.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

chapter 25

G
alit Stein sat nervously, wondering
if the place she had chosen for her meeting with Richard Schwartz would make a difference. She wanted a frank discussion with her FBI compatriot, something that was generally impossible between people in their respective positions. Notwithstanding what they had in common, she and Schwartz worked for different governments with different agendas. They shared only what they needed to, and would easily turn on the other if circumstances necessitated. Her intention now was to try to get past that, to engage him, Jew-to-Jew.

She, Arik, and Kovi had spent the morning at the Israeli consulate, meeting with a member of the Israeli delegation to the UN, who was really the local Mossad commander, to update the mission’s status. She wondered if the commander had noticed some tension among the three agents, particularly between her and Arik. The commander had already known about the incident with Gifford from his own sources, leaving her to guess that the FBI and the consulate were somehow in contact. She was hoping that the meeting with Schwartz might short-circuit that line of communication.

The sanctuary of Congregation Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue and 65
th
Street in New York City was open every day for tourists and those seeking a place to meditate. It was the world’s largest synagogue, erected in 1929 on the former site of the John Jacob Astor mansion. The Gothic sanctuary was massive, softly lit, and quiet. Galit was neither a religious nor particularly observant Jew, but she chose the synagogue because it was a place where Jews gathered in worship, a place with an ark containing sacred Torah scrolls, and perhaps in some intangible way, a place where God dwelt. It was a place she figured neither she nor Schwartz would be likely to lie, and a place where they might feel somewhat akin to each other. And it was far enough from the consulate, from the FBI’s New York headquarters, and from Long Island’s North Shore, for them to be on equal footing.

She sat at the end of a wooden pew toward the back of the sanctuary and looked at her watch. Schwartz was already twelve minutes late. She knew he would keep the appointment, because he had said he would. He must simply be caught in traffic or held up for some other reason, she told herself.

She looked at her surroundings and tried to remember the last time she’d been in a synagogue. It was probably when she was 15 or 16, before she had entered the army, she decided. The kibbutz was not a religious place, but it had a small synagogue for High Holidays and special occasions, such as bat mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. It was a funny thing, she thought, even the most secular Israelis celebrated the High Holidays, and the same was generally true of American Jews as well. She wondered if Martin Rosen cared about such things.

Her eyes scanned the sanctuary. There were only a few other visitors, all far enough away to permit complete privacy for her rendezvous with Schwartz. Sunshine crept in through the stained glass windows, casting multicolored rays of light across the room, and shadows of mysterious shapes on a far wall. She wondered if God was actually in this place, and thought back to the stories of the concentration camps that she had heard growing up. They had been as integral to her rearing as butter to bread. And they had shaped the essence of her being as nothing else. They had caused her to wonder if God could actually have been in those camps. Or anywhere.

A familiar voice broke her meditation. “Hello, Galit,” Schwartz said quietly as he took a seat next to her. “Strange place to request a meeting.” He looked around.

Agent Richard Schwartz was one of the FBI’s leading specialists on Nazi war criminals. He was a seasoned agent, nearing retirement, tired, cynical, and aware that he had caught this detail because of his German-Jewish background, while most of the Bureau’s higher-ups couldn’t give a shit. Throughout the Nazi-hunting community, however, he was legendary.

Schwartz’ career launched in the ’70s on one of the most difficult Nazi war criminal cases in history, involving a Romanian-born U.S. citizen named Valerian Trifa living in Grass Lake, Michigan. Trifa had been an active member of the infamous Romanian “Iron Guard,” and had participated in pogroms against thousands of Jews in Bucharest. What had made the case tricky was that Trifa was an archbishop and leader of the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of America. After years of dogged investigating, and resisting intense political pressure from his own and other governmental agencies, Schwartz saw to it that Trifa was convicted of entering the U.S. under false pretenses. The fascist archbishop was denaturalized, deported, and ended up in Portugal – the only country that would admit him – where he eventually died a free man.

Schwartz’ second big case concerned a carpenter who had lived in Mineola, Long Island, named Boleslavs Maikovskis. Maikovskis, a native of Latvia, had also entered the U.S. during the ’50s, by way of Austria. On his immigration papers, he had described himself as a staunch anticommunist, and claimed to have worked as a bookkeeper during the war. His Long Island neighbors saw him as a friendly, docile sort who attended church every morning. Schwartz’ evidence, based on a request for extradition from the Soviet Union, told a different story: Maikovskis had been chief of the second precinct of the Rezekne District for the Nazi-created police force in Latvia. In 1941, he had personally ordered the mass arrest of every man, woman and child in the village of Audrini, totaling about 300 people, most of whom were Jews. He also ordered that every house be burnt to the ground, after which thirty of the villagers were publicly executed in the middle of the town, while the rest were taken out to the nearby woods and slaughtered.

Maikovskis was eventually sentenced to death in absentia in a Soviet Latvian court for his crimes. As a result of Schwartz’ efforts, he was denaturalized and deported from the U.S. in 1987, and fled to West Germany to avoid Soviet justice. The German government, after years of prodding by Schwartz and the Israelis, eventually indicted him, and was set to try him in 1994, when he became ill. The trial was suspended, and Maikovskis died two years later of a heart attack. Another free man.

But of all Schwartz’ cases, the most harrowing was the one against John Demjanjuk, the Cleveland, Ohio, autoworker accused of having been “Ivan the Terrible,” a notorious Treblinka concentration camp guard who personally supervised the extermination of thousands of Jews. Schwartz had worked closely with the Israelis, who sought extradition of Demjanjuk to Israel for trial. Demjanjuk was eventually convicted of lying on his U.S. immigration papers, denaturalized, and extradited for what was to be the second-largest Nazi criminal trial in history, next to Eichmann’s. There was testimony from five eyewitnesses, and a resulting verdict of guilty, which was eventually overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court on grounds of reasonable doubt. The higher court’s decision had emanated from the release of previously secret KGB files identifying a supposedly different Ukrainian, one Ivan Marchenko, as Ivan the Terrible.

Though there was other evidence supporting a claim that Demjanjuk, while not Ivan the Terrible, may actually have been a guard at another concentration camp, the Israeli court chose not to convict him on that charge either, because he had not been given ample opportunity to defend himself from it. In the end, Demjanjuk reapplied for his U.S. citizenship, and was still awaiting a decision from the U.S. District Court on that matter, while the entire Nazi-hunting community had been left lost and demoralized.

“If you’re not comfortable, we can go somewhere else,” Galit whispered.

“No.” Schwartz was defensive. “This will do just fine.”

“I thought it was a good idea. Neutral turf, so to speak, and it also reminds us why we do what we do.”

“I suppose you could look at it that way.”

There was a brief silence between them.

“When was the last time you were in a synagogue, Richard?”

Schwartz looked her in the eye. She could tell he felt uneasy with the question, partly because, through the years they had known each other, she had never before called him by his first name. He remained quiet for a few seconds, thinking, and then said, “My son’s bar mitzvah.”

“You never told me you had a son.”

“You never asked.”

“You’re right, I guess there is much about our lives that we don’t discuss.”

“If we even have lives.”

She digested the comment. “Where is your son now?”

“Law school. Yale. No thanks to me, however. His mother divorced me when he was 3. I don’t know if it was me she couldn’t stand or the job. Either way, I didn’t see much of him as he grew up. Paid what I had to, but was too busy with other things. You know how it is.”

She nodded.

“So,” Schwartz continued, “you asked for this meeting. What’s it about?”

“I understand you are upset with us.”

“It was a pretty stupid thing, your boys getting caught outside that psychologist’s office with their pants down like that. Caused a lot of unnecessary complications.”

“You knew what we were doing. You authorized it.”

“I didn’t authorize getting caught.”

“It was nothing we did. Who could have known that someone like Gifford would be going in and out of the building regularly? He’s ex-naval intelligence, trained to see things that normal people don’t. You can only hide from an eye like that if you are prepared for it.”

“And what do you think Jacques Benoît is, blind?” Schwartz whispered angrily. “Let me tell you, he’s every bit as observant as Gifford, and every bit as smart as we are. If Gifford saw them, then Benoît did too.”

“What does that matter? Benoît knows we are onto him. What difference does it make if he sees us following him?”

“All the difference in the world. Right now, we have very little on him. At best, there are only three or four eyewitnesses, a circumstantial trail, and a few old, worn photos. You know how that sort of stuff turned out in the Demjanjuk thing. We need more. I was hoping that if he felt safe for a little while, maybe he would do something stupid or lead us someplace.”

Her eyes asked for an explanation.

“Look Galit, it’s a reach, I know, but we’re both aware that these guys sometimes consort with their cronies, keep one another abreast of happenings, dangers. They even help one another out financially. It’s hard to believe that a man of Benoît’s resources hasn’t been approached. We only started watching him closely a few months ago, so we’re not sure who he’s been in touch with over the years. If we could catch him on camera with some other guy who looks familiar to us, we could start to build a stronger case, maybe get someone to turn against him, or maybe even find a bigger fish to fry.”

This wasn’t the first time Galit had heard this strategy, though she knew that things never quite worked out this way. Rumors of a “brotherhood” of Nazi fugitives had been rampant in the Nazi-hunting world for the past five decades but never proven. And even if such an organization had existed, the fact was that most of its members would be dead at this point. “I doubt that Benoît will be meeting with anyone,” she said.

Schwartz didn’t disagree; on the contrary, he wore his frustration. “So, what do you propose?”

“I say we stay on Rosen. I know it is a long shot, but he is the best thing we have.”

“I hear you’re getting very close to him, perhaps too close.”

“Why don’t you let me worry about that.”

“And what do you think you can possibly get from him? Even if he learns something, it’s unlikely he’ll give it up, and even if he does, it wouldn’t be admissible in any court.”

“I know.”

“So why are we wasting our time with him? Aside from your own personal amusement.”

She ignored the gibe. “It is possible that he could give us something that doesn’t require testimony.”

“Like what?”

“Look, Richard, we both know that Benoît is different from the others. He is bolder, more egotistical. Instead of laying low in some blue-collar neighborhood with a menial job, he has put himself in the public eye. Of course, he has avoided photographers, but aside from that, he acts like a man with no fear. He
is
calculating and cunning, and his choice of Rosen is not an accident. I don’t know why, but I do know that he is dying to tell someone. Martin Rosen is going to learn things, and just maybe one of those things will prove useful to us.”

“It’s a lot of resources to spend on a hunch.”

“It is all we have.”

Schwartz looked at her, then shifted his eyes around the sanctuary. “Tell me, Galit, what keeps you going?”

“The same thing that keeps you going.”

His eyes landed on the Ark. “You really think we make a difference?”

“Sometimes.”

“You know, we’re becoming obsolete.”

“After this, we
will
be obsolete.”

He turned back to her, a sympathetic expression on his face. “This is it for you, isn’t it?”

“For us all, my friend.”

He considered her response. “Then let’s go out with a bang.”

“Yes, let’s.”