The Storyteller Read online

  He looks up, surprised by my interest. “After we shape the face. Once the fluid enters the veins, the body firms up.” Adam slips a piece of cotton between the left eye and the eyelid, and then sets a small plastic cap on top, like a giant contact lens. “Why are you here, Sage? It’s not because you have a burning desire to be a mortician. What happened to you today?”

  “Do people ever tell you things you wish they wouldn’t?” I blurt out.

  “Most of the people I meet can’t talk anymore.” I watch Adam thread a suture string onto a curved needle. “But their relatives give me an earful. Usually they say what they should have said to their loved one before she died.” He slips the needle through the jaw below the gums and threads it through the upper jaw into a nostril. “I guess I’m the last stop, you know? The repository of regret.” Adam smiles. “Sounds like a Goth band, doesn’t it?”

  The needle passes through the septum into the other nostril, and back into the mouth. “What brought this on?” he asks.

  “I had a conversation with someone today that really rattled me. I’m not sure what I should do about it.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want you to do anything. Maybe he just needed you to listen.”

  But it isn’t that simple. The confessions Adam hears from the relatives of the deceased are should-haves and wish-I’ds, not I dids. Once you are given a grenade with the pin pulled out, you have to act. You have to pass it off to someone who knows how to disable it, or press it back into the hands of the person who’s relinquished it. Because if you don’t, you’re bound to explode.

  Adam gently ties the sutures so that the mouth cannot drop open but looks naturally set. I imagine Josef dying, his mouth being sewn shut, all his secrets trapped inside.

  • • •

  On the way to the police station, I call Robena Fenetto. She’s a seventy-six-year-old Italian woman who retired in Westerbrook. Although she doesn’t have the stamina to be a baker full-time anymore, I’ve called her once or twice to fill in for me when I was down for the count with the flu. I tell her which pre-ferments to use, where my spreadsheets are with the baker’s percentage that will yield enough output to keep Mary from firing me.

  I tell her to tell Mary I’ll be a little late.

  I haven’t been to the police station since my bike was stolen when I was a senior in high school. My mother took me in to file a report. I remember that at the same time, the father of one of the most popular girls in the school was being brought in, disheveled and reeking of alcohol at 4:00 p.m. He was the head of a local insurance company, and they were one of the few families in town who could afford an inground pool. It was the first time I remember learning that people are never who they seem to be.

  The dispatcher at the little glass window has a nose ring and a buzz cut, which is maybe why she doesn’t blink twice when I approach. “Can I help you?”

  How do you just come out and say I think my friend is a Nazi without sounding insane?

  “I was hoping to talk to a detective,” I say.

  “About?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  She blinks. “Try me.”

  “I have information about a crime that was committed.”

  She hesitates, as if she is weighing whether or not I’m telling the truth. Then she writes down my name. “Take a seat.”

  There’s a row of chairs, but instead of sitting, I stand and read the names of the deadbeat dads who fill the Wanted posters on a giant bulletin board. A flyer advertises a class for fire safety.

  “Ms. Singer?”

  I turn around to see a tall man with cropped gray hair and skin the color of one of Rocco’s mocha lattes. He’s wearing a gun holstered on his belt, and a badge around his neck. “I’m Detective Vicks,” he says, staring just a beat too long at my face. “Would you mind coming inside?”

  He punches in a key code and opens a door, leading me down a narrow hallway to a conference room. “Take a seat. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “I’m all set,” I tell him. Even though I know I’m not being interrogated, when he closes the door behind me, I feel trapped.

  Heat rushes up my neck, and I break out in a sweat. What if the detective thinks I’m lying? What if he starts asking me too many questions? Maybe I shouldn’t get involved. I don’t really know anything about Josef’s past, and even if he’s telling the truth, what could possibly be done after almost seventy years?

  And yet.

  When my grandma was being taken by the Nazis, how many other Germans had turned a blind eye, making the same kinds of excuses?

  “So,” Detective Vicks says. “What’s this about?”

  I take a deep breath. “A man I know may be a Nazi.”

  The detective purses his lips. “A neo-Nazi?”

  “No, the kind from World War Two.”

  “How old is this guy?” Vicks asks.

  “I don’t know, exactly. In his nineties. The right age, anyway, for the math to make sense.”

  “And what is it that led you to believe he’s a Nazi?”

  “He showed me a photograph of himself in uniform.”

  “Do you know that it was authentic?”

  “You think I’m making this up,” I say, so surprised that I meet the detective’s gaze head-on. “Why would I do that?”

  “Why would a thousand crazy people call in to a tip line that runs on the news about a missing kid?” Vicks says, shrugging. “Far be it from me to figure out the human psyche.”

  Stung, I feel my scar burn. “I’m telling you the truth.” I am just leaving out, conveniently, the fact that this same man asked me to kill him. And that I chose to let him believe I was entertaining the possibility.

  Vicks tilts his head, and I can see that he’s already making a judgment—not about Josef but about me. Clearly I’m trying my damnedest to hide my face; he must be wondering if there’s more I’m concealing. “Is there anything in this man’s behavior that would indicate he was actually involved in Nazi activities?”

  “He doesn’t wear a swastika on his forehead, if that’s what you’re asking,” I say. “But he has a German accent. In fact he used to teach the language at the high school.”

  “Hang on—are you talking about Josef Weber?” Vicks says. “He goes to my church. Sings in the choir. He led the Fourth of July parade last year, as the Citizen of the Year. I’ve never even seen the guy swat a mosquito.”

  “Maybe he likes bugs more than he liked Jews,” I say flatly.

  Vicks leans back in his chair. “Ms. Singer, did Mr. Weber say something that upset you personally?”

  “Yes,” I say. “He told me he was a Nazi!”

  “I mean an argument. A misunderstanding. Maybe even an offhand comment about your . . . appearance. Something that might have warranted . . . such an accusation.”

  “We’re friends. That’s why he confided in me in the first place.”

  “That may be, Ms. Singer. But we’re not in the habit of arresting someone for alleged crimes without having a valid reason to believe he might be a person of interest. Yes, the guy speaks with a German accent, and he’s old. But I’ve never even experienced a whiff of racial or religious prejudice from him.”

  “Isn’t that the point? I thought serial killers were supposed to be totally charming in public; that’s why nobody guesses they’re serial killers. You’re just going to assume I’m crazy? You’re not even going to investigate what he did?”

  “What did he do?”

  I look down at the table. “I don’t know, exactly. That’s why I’m here. I thought you could help me find out.”

  Vicks looks at me for a long moment. “Why don’t you write down your contact information, Ms. Singer,” he suggests, passing me a piece of paper and a pen. “I’ll look into things, and we’ll be in touch.”

  Without a word I scribble down my information. Why would anyone believe me, Sage Singer, a damaged ghost who only comes out at night? Especially when Josef has spent the past twent
y-two years gilding his reputation as a beloved Westerbrook community member and humanitarian?

  I hand the paper back to Detective Vicks. “I know you’re not going to contact me,” I say coolly. “I know you’re going to toss that piece of paper into the trash as soon as I walk out the door. But it’s not like I walked in here saying I found a UFO in my backyard. The Holocaust happened. Nazis existed. And they didn’t all just evaporate into thin air when the war ended.”

  “Which was nearly seventy years ago,” Detective Vicks points out.

  “I thought there was no statute of limitations on murder,” I say, and I walk out of the conference room.

  • • •

  My nana only serves tea in a glass. For as long as I can remember, she has said this is the only way to drink it properly, the way her parents used to serve it when she was a young girl. It strikes me, as I sit at her kitchen table, watching her bustle around the kitchen with her cane to set the kettle and arrange rugelach on a plate, that although she talks openly and easily about being a child and about her life with my grandfather, there is a caesura in the time line of her life, a break of years, a derailment. “This is some surprise,” Nana says. “A nice one, but still a surprise.”

  “I was in the area,” I lie. “How couldn’t I stop by?”

  My grandmother sets the plate on the table. She is tiny—five feet, maybe—although I used to think of her as tall. She always wore the most beautiful set of pearls, which my grandfather had given her as a wedding gift, and in the old photo of the ceremony that sat on her mantel, she looked like a movie star with her dark hair in victory rolls and slim figure hugged by a confection of lace and satin.

  She and my grandfather used to run an antiquarian bookstore, a tiny hole-in-the-wall that had narrow aisles jammed with hundreds of old tomes. My mother, who would always buy her books new, hated the vintage hardcovers with their cracked spines and threadbare cloth covers. True, you couldn’t go in there and find the latest bestseller, but when you held one of those volumes in your hands, you were leafing through another person’s life. Someone else had once loved that story, too. Someone else had carried that book in a backpack, devoured it over breakfast, mopped up that coffee stain at a Paris café, cried herself to sleep after that last chapter. The scent of their store was distinctive: a slight damp mildew, a pinch of dust. To me, it was the smell of history.

  My grandfather had been an editor at a small academic press before buying the bookstore; my grandmother had allegedly wanted to be a writer, although in my childhood I never saw her write anything longer than a letter. But she loved stories, that much was true. She would sit me on the glass counter beside the cash register and take the A. A. Milne and the J. M. Barrie books from their locked case and show me the illustrations. When I was older, she would let me wrap customers’ purchases in the brown butcher paper she kept on a giant roll, and she taught me to tie it with string, just like she did.

  Eventually my grandparents sold the bookstore to a developer who was bulldozing a host of mom-and-pop stores to make way for a Target. Whatever money they made was enough for my nana to live on, even all these years after Poppa was gone.

  “You were not really in the area,” she says now. “You look just like your father used to look when he lied to me.”

  I laugh. “How’s that?”

  “Like you’ve swallowed a lemon. Once, when your father was maybe five, he stole my nail polish remover. When I asked him about it, he lied. Eventually I found it in his sock drawer and told him so. He became hysterical. Turned out he read the label and thought it would make me—someone Polish—disappear. He hid it before it could do its job.” Nana smiles. “I loved that boy,” she sighs. “No mother should outlive a child.”

  “It’s no party to outlive your parents, either,” I reply.

  For a moment, there is a shadow veiling her features. Then she leans down and hugs me. “See, now you are not lying. I know you are here because you’re lonely, Sage. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Maybe now, we will have each other.”

  They are the same words, I realize, that Josef said to me.

  “You should cut your hair,” my nana announces. “No one can see you properly.”

  A small snort escapes me. I think I’d rather run naked through the street than cut my hair, and leave my face exposed. “That’s the point,” I say.

  She tilts her head. “I wonder what magic could make you see yourself the way the rest of us do,” she muses. “Maybe then you’d stop living like a monster who comes out only after dark.”

  “I’m a baker. I have to work at night.”

  “Do you? Or did you pick the profession because of the hours?” Nana asks.

  “I didn’t come here to be grilled about my career choice . . .”

  “Of course not.” She reaches over and pats my face, the bad side. She lets her thumb linger on the ridged flesh, to let me know that it doesn’t bother her—and that it shouldn’t bother me. “And your sisters?”

  “I haven’t talked to them lately,” I mutter.

  That is an understatement. I actively avoid their calls.

  “You know they love you, Sage,” my grandmother says, and I shrug. There is nothing she could possibly say that can convince me Pepper and Saffron don’t hold me responsible for the fact that our mother isn’t alive.

  A timer goes off on the oven, and my grandmother pulls out a braid of challah. She may have given up formal religion, but she still adheres to the culture of Judaism. There is no ailment her matzo ball soup cannot fix; there is no Friday she doesn’t have fresh bread. Daisy, the home health aide Nana refers to as her “girl,” is the one who mixes the dough in the KitchenAid and sets it to rise before Nana braids it. It took two years for Nana to trust Daisy enough to give her the family recipe, the same one I use at Our Daily Bread.

  “Smells good,” I say, desperate to change the course of the conversation.

  My grandmother drops the first challah down on the counter and goes back, in turn, for each of the other three. “You know what I think?” she says. “I think that even when I do not remember my own name anymore I will still know how to make this challah. My father, he made sure of it. He used to quiz me—when I walked into our apartment after school, when I was studying with a friend, when we were strolling together into the city center. Minka, he’d say, how much sugar? How many eggs? He’d ask what temperature the water should be at, but that was a trick question.”

  “Warm to dissolve the yeast, boiling to mix the wet ingredients, cold to balance it out.”

  My grandma looks over her shoulder and nods. “My father, he would have been very happy to know his challah is in good hands.”

  This, I realize, is my opportunity. I wait until Nana has brought one of the braids to the table on a cutting board. As she slices it with a bread knife, steam rises like a passing soul. “Why didn’t you and Poppa start a bakery, instead of a bookstore?”

  She laughs. “Your poppa couldn’t boil water, much less a bagel. To bake bread, you have to have a gift. Like my father did. Like you do.”

  “You hardly ever talk about your parents,” I say.

  Her hand trembles the slightest bit where she holds the knife, so slightly that had I not been watching so carefully, I might never have noticed. “What’s there to say?” She shrugs. “My mother, she kept house, and my father was a baker in Łód. You know this.”

  “What happened to them, Nana?”

  “They died a long time ago,” she says dismissively. She hands me a piece of bread, no butter, because if you’ve made a truly great challah you don’t need any. “Ah, look at this. It could have risen more. My father used to say that a good loaf, you can eat tomorrow. But a bad loaf, you should eat now.”

  I grasp her hand. The skin is like tissue, the bones pronounced. “What happened to them?” I repeat.

  She forces a laugh. “What is with these questions, Sage! All of a sudden you’re writing a book?”

  In response, I tur
n her arm over and gently push up the sleeve of her blouse so that the blurry edge of her blue tattoo is exposed. “I’m not the only one in the family with a scar, Nana,” I murmur.

  She pulls away from me and yanks down the cotton. “I do not wish to talk about it.”

  “Nana,” I say. “I’m not a little girl anymore—”

  “No,” she says abruptly.

  I want to tell her about Josef. I want to ask her about the SS soldiers she knew. But I also know that I won’t.

  Not because my grandma doesn’t want to discuss it, but because I am ashamed that this man I’ve befriended—cooked for, sat with, laughed with—might have once been someone who terrified her.

  “When I got here, to America, this is when my life began,” my grandmother says. “Everything before . . . well, that happened to a different person.”

  If my grandmother could reinvent herself, why not Josef Weber?

  “How do you do it?” I ask softly, and I’m no longer asking just about her and Josef but about myself as well. “How do you get up every morning and not remember?”

  “I never said I do not remember,” my grandmother corrects. “I said I prefer to forget.” Suddenly, she smiles, cutting the ribbon between this conversation and whatever comes next. “Now. My beautiful granddaughter did not come all this way to talk about ancient history, did she? Tell me about the bakery.”

  I let the beautiful comment slide. “I baked a loaf of bread that had Jesus’s face in it,” I announce; it’s the first thing to come to mind.

  “Really.” My grandmother laughs. “Says who?”

  “People who believe that God might show up in an artisan boule, I guess.”

  She purses her lips. “There was a time when I could see God in a single crumb.”

  I realize she is extending an olive branch, a sliver of her past. I sit very still, waiting to see if she’ll go on.

  “You know, that was what we missed most. Not our beds, not our homes, not even our mothers. We would talk about food. Roast potatoes and briskets, pierogi, babka. What I would have given my life for back then was some of my father’s challah, fresh from the oven.”