The Storyteller Read online

So this is why my grandmother bakes four loaves every week, when she cannot finish even one herself. Not because she plans to eat it but because she wants to have the luxury of giving the rest away to those who are still hungry.

  When my cell phone begins to ring, I grimace—it’s probably Mary, giving me hell because Robena’s arrived to start the night’s baking instead of me. But as I pull it out of my pocket, I realize that the number’s unfamiliar.

  “This is Detective Vicks, calling for Sage Singer.”

  “Wow,” I say, recognizing the voice. “I wasn’t expecting you to call me back.”

  “I did a little digging,” he replies. “We still can’t help you. But if you want to take your complaint somewhere, I’d suggest the FBI.”

  The FBI. It seems like a massive step up from the local police department. The FBI is the organization that captured John Dillinger and the Rosenbergs. They found the fingerprint that incriminated the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr. Their cases are high-profile matters of immediate national security, not ones that have languished for decades. They will probably laugh me off the phone before I finish my explanation.

  I look up and see my grandmother at the kitchen counter now, wrapping one of the challah loaves in tinfoil.

  “What’s the number?” I ask.

  • • •

  It’s a miracle that I make it back to Westerbrook without driving off the road; that’s how tired I am. I let myself into the bakery with my set of keys and find Robena asleep, sitting on a giant sack of flour with her cheek pressed to the wooden countertop. On the bright side, though, there are loaves on the cooling racks, and the smell of something baking in the oven.

  “Robena,” I say, gently shaking her awake. “I’m back.”

  She sits up. “Sage! I just dozed off for a minute . . .”

  “It’s okay. Thanks for helping me out.” I slip into an apron and tie it around my waist. “How was Mary, on a scale of one to ten?”

  “About a twelve. She got pretty worked up because she’s expecting a lot of traffic tomorrow, thanks to the Jesus Loaf.”

  “Hallelujah,” I say flatly.

  I’d tried the number of the local FBI office while driving home, only to be told that the division I really needed to talk to was part of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. They gave me a different number, but apparently the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section keeps bankers’ hours. I got a voice recording telling me to call another number, if this was an emergency.

  It is hard to justify this as an emergency, given the length of time that Josef had kept his secret to himself.

  So instead, I have decided to finish up the baking, load the loaves into the glass cases, and be gone before Mary arrives to open the shop. I’ll call back from the privacy of my own home.

  Robena walks me through the timers that she’s set around the kitchen, some measuring bake times, some measuring dough that’s proofing, some measuring shaped loaves left to rest. When I feel like I’m up to speed, I walk her to the front door, thank her, and lock up behind her.

  Immediately my gaze falls on the Jesus Loaf.

  In retrospect I won’t be able to tell Mary why I did it.

  The bread is stale, hard as stone, with the variegations of seed and pigment that created the face already fading away. I take the peel I use to slide bread in and out of the wood-fired oven and toss the Jesus Loaf into the yawning maw of the kiln, onto the red-hot flames in its belly.

  Robena has made baguettes and rolls; there are a variety of other breads to be finished before dawn. But instead of mixing according to my usual schedule, I alter the day’s menu. Doing the calculations in my head, I measure out the sugar, the water, the yeast, the oil. The salt and the flour.

  I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet wheat. I imagine a shop with a bell over the window that rings when a customer enters; the sound of coins dropping like a scale of musical notes into the cash register, which might make a girl look up from the book in which her nose is buried. For the rest of the night, I bake only one recipe, so that by the time the sun simmers on the horizon, the shelves of Our Daily Bread are packed tightly with the knots and coils of my great-grandfather’s challah, so much that you could never imagine how hunger might feel.

  I kept dozing off in the market. I had not slept since I buried my father, not with any of the bells and whistles and fanfare he had joked of but in a small plot behind the cottage. My insomnia was not born of grief, however. It was out of necessity.

  I had no money for taxes. We had no savings, and our only income came from the market where we sold our daily loaves. In the past, my father baked while I trekked into the village square. But now, there was only me.

  I found myself living around the clock. At night, I would roll up my sleeves and shape mounds of dough into boules; I would mix more while those rose; I would take the last loaves out of the brick oven as the sun spilled, like an accident, over the horizon in the morning. Then I would fill my basket and hike to the market, where I found myself struggling to stay awake while I hawked my wares.

  I did not know how long I could continue this. But I wasn’t going to let Baruch Beiler take away the only thing I had left—my father’s home and his business.

  However, fewer customers were coming into town. It was too dangerous. My father’s body had been one of three found this week around the outskirts of the village, including a toddler who had wandered into the woods and had never returned. All had been disfigured and devoured the same way, as if by a ravenous animal. Frightened, the townspeople were opting to live off their own gardens and canned goods. Yesterday I had seen only a dozen customers; today there had been only six. Even some of the merchants had chosen to stay safe behind their locked doors. The market was a gray, ghostly space, the wind whistling over the cobblestones like a warning.

  I opened my eyes to find Damian shaking me awake. “Dreaming of me, darling?” he asked. He reached past me, brushing my face, and ripped the neck from a baguette. He popped the bread into his mouth. “Mmm. You are nearly the baker your father was.” For just a moment, compassion transformed his features. “I’m sorry about your loss, Ania.”

  Other customers had told me the same. “Thank you,” I murmured.

  “I, on the other hand, am not,” Baruch Beiler announced, coming to stand behind the captain. “Since it greatly diminishes my chances of ever receiving his tax revenue.”

  “It is not the end of the week yet,” I said, panicking.

  Where would I go if he turned me out into the streets? I had seen women who sold themselves, who haunted the alleys of the village like shadows and who were dead in the eyes. I could accept Damian’s offer of marriage, but that was just a different kind of deal with the Devil. Then again, if I were homeless, how long would it be before the beast that was preying upon the people of our village found me?

  From the corner of my eye I saw someone approaching. It was the new man in town, leading his brother on the leather leash. He walked past me without even glancing at the bread, and stood in front of the empty wooden plank where the butcher usually set up his wares. When he turned to me, I felt as if a fire had been kindled beneath my ribs. “Where is the butcher?” he asked.

  “He isn’t selling today,” I murmured.

  I realized he was younger than I’d first thought, perhaps just a few years older than me. His eyes were the most impossible color I had ever seen—gold, but gleaming, as if they were lit from within. His skin was flushed, with bright spots of color on his cheeks. His brown hair fell unevenly over his brow.

  He was wearing only that white shirt, the one that had been beneath the coat he traded the last time he’d been in the village square. I wondered what he had been willing to barter with today.

  He didn’t say anything, just narrowed his eyes as he stared at me.

  “The merchants are running scared,” Baruch Beiler said. “Just like everyone else in this godforsaken town.”

  “Not all of us have
iron gates to keep the animals out,” answered Damian.

  “Or in,” I murmured beneath my breath, but Beiler heard me.

  “Ten zloty,” he hissed. “By Friday.”

  Damian reached into his military jacket and pulled out a leather pouch. He counted the silver coins into his palm and flung them at Beiler. “Consider the debt paid,” he said.

  Beiler knelt, collecting the money. Then he stood and shrugged. “Until next month.” He stalked toward his mansion, locking the gates behind himself before vanishing into the massive stone house.

  From their position in front of the empty meat stall, I could see the man and his brother watching us.

  “Well?” Damian looked at me. “Didn’t your father teach you any manners?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to show your appreciation,” he said. “Your debt to Beiler’s paid. But now you owe one to me.”

  Swallowing, I came up on my tiptoes, and kissed his cheek.

  He grabbed my hand and pressed it against his crotch. When I tried to push away from him, he ground his mouth against mine. “You know I could take what I want anytime,” he said softly, his hands bracketing my head and squeezing my temples so hard that I could not think, could barely listen. “I am only offering you a choice out of the goodness of my heart.”

  One minute he was there, and the next, he wasn’t. I fell, the cobblestones cold against my legs, as the man with the golden eyes yanked Damian away from me and wrestled him to the ground. “She already chose,” he gritted out, punctuating his words with blows to the captain’s face.

  As I scrambled away from their fight, the boy in the leather mask stared at me.

  I think we both realized at the same time that his leash was dangling, free.

  The boy threw back his head and started to run, his footsteps echoing like gunshots as he raced across the deserted village square.

  His brother paused, distracted. It was enough of a hesitation for Damian to land a solid punch. The man’s head snapped back, but he staggered to his feet and chased after the boy.

  “You can run,” Damian said, wiping the blood from his mouth. “But you can’t hide.”

  LEO

  The woman on the phone is breathless. “I’ve been trying to find you for years,” she says.

  This is my first red flag. We’re not that hard to find. You ring up the Justice Department, and mention why you’re calling, you’ll be routed to the office of Human Rights and Special Prosecutions. But we take every call, and we take them seriously. So I ask the woman her name.

  “Miranda Coontz,” she says. “Except that’s my married name. My maiden name was Schultz.”

  “So, Ms. Coontz,” I say, “I can hardly hear you.”

  “I have to whisper,” she says. “He’s listening. He always manages to come into the room when I start trying to tell people who he really is . . .”

  As she goes on and on, I wait to hear the word Nazi or even World War II. We’re the division that prosecutes cases against people who have committed human rights violations—genocides, torture, war crimes. We’re the real Nazi hunters, nowhere near as glamorous as we’re made out to be in film and television. I’m not Daniel Craig or Vin Diesel or Eric Bana, just plain old Leo Stein. I don’t pack a pistol; my weapon of choice is a historian named Genevra, who speaks seven languages and never fails to point out when I need a haircut or when my tie doesn’t match my shirt. I work in a job that gets harder and harder to do every day, as the generation that perpetrated the crimes of the Holocaust dies out.

  For fifteen minutes I listen to Miranda Coontz explain how someone in her own household is stalking her, and how at first she thought the FBI had sent him as a drone to kill her. This is red flag number two. First of all, the FBI doesn’t go around killing people. Second, if they did want to kill her, she’d already be dead. “You know, Ms. Coontz,” I say, when she breaks to take a breath, “I’m not sure that you’ve got the right department . . .”

  “If you bear with me,” she promises, “it will all make sense.”

  Not for the first time, I wonder how a guy like me—thirty-seven, top of his class at Harvard Law—turned down a sure partnership and a dizzying salary at a Boston law firm for a government pay grade and a career as the deputy chief of HRSP. In a parallel universe I would be trying white-collar criminals, instead of building a case around a former SS guard who died just before we were able to extradite him. Or, for that matter, talking to Ms. Coontz.

  Then again, it didn’t take me long in the world of corporate law to realize that truth is an afterthought in court. In fact, truth is an afterthought in most trials. But there were six million people who were lied to, during World War II, and somebody owes them the truth.

  “. . . and you’ve heard of Josef Mengele?”

  At that, my ears perk up. Of course I’ve heard of Mengele, the infamous Angel of Death at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the chief medical officer who experimented on humans and who met incoming prisoners and directed them either to the right, to work, or to the left, the gas chambers. Although historically we know that Mengele could not have met every transport, almost every Auschwitz survivor with whom I’ve spoken insists it was Mengele who met his or her transport —no matter what hour of the day the arrival took place. It’s an example of how much has been written about Auschwitz, how survivors sometimes conflate those accounts with their own personal experiences. I have no doubt in my mind they truly believe it was Mengele they saw when they first arrived at Auschwitz, but no matter how much of a monster the guy was, he had to sleep sometime. Which means that other monsters met some of them instead.

  “People believe Mengele escaped to South America,” Ms. Coontz says.

  I stifle a sigh. Actually, I know that he lived, and died, in Brazil.

  “He’s alive,” she whispers. “He’s been reincarnated, in the form of my cat. And I can’t turn my back on him, or go to sleep, because I think he’s going to kill me.”

  “Good God,” I mutter.

  “I know,” Ms. Coontz agrees. “I thought I was getting a sweet little tabby from the shelter, and one morning I wake up to find scratch marks bleeding on my chest—”

  “With all due respect, Ms. Coontz, it’s a little bit of a stretch to think that Josef Mengele is now a cat.”

  “Those scratch marks,” she says gravely, “were in the shape of a swastika. ”

  I close my eyes. “Maybe you just need a different pet,” I suggest.

  “I had a goldfish. I had to flush it down the toilet.”

  I am almost afraid to ask. “Why?”

  She hesitates. “Let’s just say I have proof that Hitler was reincarnated, too.”

  I manage to get her off the phone by telling her that I’ll have a historian look into her case—and it’s true, I will pass this off to Genevra the next time she does something to piss me off and I want to get back at her. But no sooner do I have Miranda Coontz off my line than my secretary buzzes me again. “Is your moon out of alignment or something?” she asks. “Because I’ve got another one for you on line two. Her local FBI office referred her here.”

  I look at the piles of documents on my desk—reports that Genevra has turned in. Getting a suspect to trial is a slow and laborious expedition and in my case, often a fruitless one. The last case we were able to bring to prosecution was in 2008, and the defendant died at the end of the trial. We do the opposite of what police do; instead of looking at a crime and seeing “whodunit,” we start with a name, and pore through databases to see if there’s a match—a person who’s alive with that name—and then to figure out what he did during the war.

  We have no shortage of names.

  I pick up the receiver again. “This is Leo Stein,” I say.

  “Um,” a woman replies. “I’m not sure I have the right place . . .”

  “I’ll let you know, if you tell me what you’re calling about.”

  “Someone I know may have been an SS officer.”

>   In our office, we have a category for these calls: My Neighbor’s a Nazi. Typically, it’s the neighbor from hell who kicks your dog when he crosses the property line, and calls the town when the leaves of your oak tree fall in his yard. He’s got a European accent and wears a long leather coat and has a German shepherd.

  “And your name is?”

  “Sage Singer,” the woman says. “I live in New Hampshire, and so does he.”

  This makes me sit up a little straighter. New Hampshire’s a great place to hide, if you’re a Nazi. No one ever thinks to look in New Hampshire.

  “What’s this individual’s name?” I ask.

  “Josef Weber.”

  “And you think he was an SS officer because . . . ?”

  “He told me so,” the woman says.

  I lean back in my chair. “He told you that he was a Nazi?” In the decade I’ve been doing this, that’s a new one for me. My job has involved peeling away the disguises from criminals, who think that after nearly seventy years, they should literally get away with murder. I’ve never had a defendant confess until I’ve managed to back him so far into a corner with evidence that he has no choice but to tell the truth.

  “We’re . . . acquaintances,” Sage Singer replies. “He wants me to help him die.”

  “Like Jack Kevorkian? Is he terminally ill?”

  “No. He’s the opposite—very healthy, for a man his age. He thinks that there’s some sort of justice in asking me to be a part of it—because my family was Jewish.”

  “Are you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  No, it doesn’t. I’m Jewish, but half the staff in our department isn’t.

  “Did he mention which camp he was in?”

  “He used a German word . . . Toten . . . Otensomething?”

  “Totenkopfverbände?” I suggest.

  “Yes!”

  Translated, it means the Death’s Head Unit. It’s not an individual location but rather the division of the SS that ran the concentration camps for the Third Reich.

  In 1981 my office won a seminal case, Fedorenko v. United States. The Supreme Court decided—wisely, in my humble opinion—that anyone who was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp necessarily took part in perpetration of Nazi crimes of persecution there. The camps operated as chains of functions, and for it to work, everyone in the chain had to perform his function. If one person didn’t, the apparatus of extermination would grind to a halt. So really, no matter what this particular guy did or didn’t do—whether he actually pulled a trigger or loaded the Zyklon B gas into one of the chambers—even confirming his role as a member of the SS-TV in a concentration camp would be enough to build a case against him.