‘A Nazi?’ said Angel.
‘No, he was pre-Nazi: late nineteenth century, I think. He thought you could identify character types through their features, so he set about photographing all kinds of people, including criminals. I think he was mostly interested in murderers. He’d line up the portraits, and expose each one to a photographic plate for a fraction of the time usually required for a full exposure so that he had a kind of composite, an average, on a single frame – you know, faces superimposed over one another.’
‘Why?’ asked Angel.
‘He was trying to find a common feature in their appearance: the essence of their criminality – of their evil, if you like. He wanted to believe that he could isolate it, that men who had committed terrible crimes might show some evidence of it on their faces. That way, you’d be able to tell who was a criminal just by looking at him. All he ended up with, though, was a series of distortions, and a kind of generalized degradation. But the photographs are interesting. Unsettling. I’ve been trying to figure out all evening why, when I looked at Steiger, there was something familiar about him. I just now remembered what it was: his face reminds me of one of Galton’s composites, as if what was wrong with him inside had seeped through his pores and caused his skull to mutate.’
‘Your job would be a whole lot easier if you could tell the bad folk by the way they looked,’ said Angel. ‘Or you could just end up putting behind bars a whole lot of ugly people who’d never done anyone any harm, and leave a bunch of beautiful people with dead souls free to walk the streets.’
They stood to leave.
‘Galton had it all wrong,’ said Walsh. ‘The worst of them, the really foul ones, they hide their badness deep inside. They look just like average Joes and Janes, but underneath they’re rotten right down to the core, and we don’t find out about them until it’s too late.’
They left the restaurant and walked together to their vehicles.
‘You know, Walsh, you’re all right,’ said Angel. ‘For a cop.’
‘Likewise,’ said Walsh. ‘For whatever it is you are.’
Louis simply nodded. None of them shook hands.
‘Don’t forget what I said about burning down towns,’ said Walsh. ‘You keep that shit for south of the Mason-Dixon.’
He watched them head back to Portland. Tomorrow, he knew, they would return to Bangor to pick up Parker. He wished them luck. He wished them all luck.
Walsh drove home, the car silent, casting the miles behind him like discarded paper, shifting pieces of information in his mind, trying to make connections. When he got back to his house he removed his shoes on the doorstep, used the downstairs bathroom, undressed in the hall, and slipped between the sheets beside his sleeping wife. He felt her stir. Half-awake, she reached for him. He accepted her kiss, and returned it. He listened for that sigh, heard it with satisfaction, and watched her curl up like a cat. He turned over, thought that he would not sleep, but when he opened his eyes his wife was gone, and he heard the sound of the radio from below, and the clattering of breakfast dishes, and the voices of his children.
Enough, he thought. This is enough, and more.
44
Marcus Baulman attended the interrogation – they called it an ‘interview’, but Baulman knew better – at the Office of the United States Attorney, District of Maine, on Harlow Street in Bangor without a lawyer in attendance. The formal letter had arrived the day after Marie Demers’s visit to his house, informing him of possible irregularities relating to his admission to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The letter noted that he could bring legal counsel with him, should he choose to do so.
Baulman had thought hard about the approach he should take, and decided that an innocent man, an old German American who had lived a blameless life, would not arrive with a lawyer in tow. He dressed in his best suit, and took his funeral shoes from their box in his closet, dusting them lightly with a cloth before putting them on. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw, beneath the wrinkles and liver spots, and the white of his sparse beard and hair, the specter of the man he used to be.
Baulman was frightened, but no more than anyone who was forced unwillingly into contact with the institutions of law and justice. He was not about to panic. It was not in his nature. He wished that his wife were still with him, for he had never been ashamed to rely on her for comfort and reassurance. On another level, though, he was glad that she had predeceased him. Kathryn had, in her way, been a simple woman: she loved her husband, and trusted him. He looked after the bills, the bank accounts, the mortgage, the purchase of cars, the planning of vacations, and she was happy to let him do so. She, in turn, took care of him. It was an old-fashioned relationship, but what was bad about that? He had never cheated on her, and was certain that she had never cheated on him. They had enjoyed more than fifty years together before she passed away in her sleep, and the only shadow on their marriage was the absence of children. Perhaps that, too, might now be seen as a blessing, just like Kathryn’s absence from his life at this juncture. The loss of her had caused him so much pain, and he still lived with it every day, but at least it had spared her the hurt and confusion of all this. He would have denied everything, of course, and she would have believed him because she wanted to, and because her love for him was predicated on her faith in his honesty, but some doubt would surely have taken seed and prospered like a weed in a disused corner of her mind.
Marie Demers was waiting for him in the conference room with the historian, Toller, along with a third man whose purpose and affiliation they did not explain, merely referring to him as a ‘colleague’, an Agent Ross. Baulman took an instant dislike to Ross. He had the eyes of one who was never disappointed because his expectations of humanity were too low to allow for it. They thanked him for coming. Baulman asked if he was under arrest. They told him that he was not, that this was a civil matter. They emphasized that point. They simply wanted to talk, they said, but he knew that, just like in the movies, anything he said could be used in evidence against him. They didn’t warn him of this because they didn’t have to. He wondered how they could think him such an old fool. Then he remembered that what they believed they were seeing was not Marcus Baulman, a retired bus driver, but Reynard Kraus, a war criminal.
Yet he had become adept at playing Baulman, and was not about to falter now. He had been Baulman for longer than he had been Kraus. In that sense, the former was more real than the latter, and when he protested his innocence he spoke with conviction, for it was Marcus Baulman speaking.
They went over some of the same territory as before, and he gave them the same denials. Then they moved on to specific allegations, including claims that, as Reynard Kraus, he had trained at the SS-Junkerschule Bad Tölz; that he had spent time at the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office in Posen before moving to the RSHA; that he had served as a ‘medical attendant’ for one month at Auschwitz, following which he had been sent to Lubsko Experimentallkolonie, where he remained until the Allied advance forced the closure and liquidation of the camp. He was, they told him, not Marcus Baulman, who they now believed had been executed by the SS for desertion near the Dukla Pass on the Slovak-Polish border in September 1944, his death quietly concealed on orders from Berlin, where contingency plans were already being put in place to assemble new identities in the likely event of the collapse of the Reich.
Baulman asked, as before, where they had received such false information, and they spoke only of sources and documentary irregularities, and as he listened he smelled smoke without the heat of fire. It could yet bloom into flame, but if they had solid evidence then surely they would have confronted him with it. This was ein Angelausflug – a fishing trip. Baulman supposed that, in the past, some of their targets had confessed quickly, admitting their guilt. He was not about to join their number.
Then, just as he was allowing himself to relax a little, they sprang the next question on him.
<
br /> ‘Have you ever heard of a man named Bruno Perlman, Mr Baulman?’
Perlman, Perlman. He thought. Should he deny it outright? No, there was another way.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I have.’
He watched them all lean forward slightly, even the one called Ross, and he had to fight back a smile. It was as though he had caught their mouths with hooks. They were not the only anglers here.
‘I read that name in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘He was the man who was found drowned at Boreas.’
‘You have a good memory for names,’ said Toller.
Had he made a mistake? No. A little anger. Just enough.
‘I’m an old man,’ he replied, ‘but I’m not senile. I still read newspapers and watch the news, and Boreas is not so far from where I live. A lot has been happening there lately. Perhaps you should read the newspapers too.’
He sat back in his chair and let them see that he thought he had scored a point.
‘And Ruth Winter?’ said Demers. ‘You knew of her, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was murdered. Again, I saw it on the news. This was a terrible thing.’
‘Did you ever meet her?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Or I don’t think I ever did.’
‘So you’re sure that you never met her, or you think you never met her?’
‘I don’t know!’ He raised his hands in helplessness. ‘Could I have passed her on the street? Yes. Could I have raised my hat to her? Yes. Do I remember these things? No.’
‘And her mother, Isha Winter?’
‘Again, I may have passed her on at the street, but I could not put a face to that name.’
Demers made a note on her legal pad with a pencil. He watched her write, and wondered what he might have said that was important enough to set down in print when a device on the table before them was recording everything. Nothing, he decided. It was another move in the game.
‘Bruno Perlman,’ she said, ‘whom you say you did not know—’
‘I did not know him. I do not “say” this. It is true!’
Demers continued as though he had not interrupted her ‘—had four numbers tattooed on his arm. They were Auschwitz identification numbers, and corresponded to the names of four members of his family, the Nemiroffs. Does that name mean anything to you?’
‘No.’
‘They were transferred from Auschwitz to Lubsko at the end of 1944.’
‘I told you before, I knew nothing of this place until you came to me and began speaking of it.’
‘I thought that you kept up with the news,’ said Demers. ‘It’s been mentioned a lot lately. Thomas Engel served as a guard there. You know who Thomas Engel is, don’t you?’
‘I think I remember now. I have seen him on TV. They say he may be a war criminal.’
‘He is a war criminal, Mr Baulman. We have no doubt of that. Have you ever met Thomas Engel?’
‘No.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘Yes.’
‘He lived in Augusta. That’s not too far from you, is it?’
‘Lots of people live in Augusta,’ said Baulman. ‘I haven’t met most of them either.’
‘So you know of him?’
‘Yes, but only from what I have learned on TV.’
‘Which mentioned Lubsko.’
‘I suppose it must have.’
‘Just to bring you up to speed, then. Lubsko was a nasty piece of SS trickery, designed to make prisoners – wealthy prisoners – believe that an alternative to being worked or gassed to death might be available, and their families might be also be saved. Small, clean huts, with gardens in which vegetables could be grown. No mistreatment. No brutality. No gas chambers. But you had to be willing and able to pay for it. Those who were sent there were very carefully selected. They were prisoners who were strongly believed to have squirreled away significant wealth, maybe in the hope that, even if they didn’t survive the war, their children might, and they would be looked after. So these wealthy men and women would be brought from other concentration camps and shown an alternative way of seeing out the war – along with their families – if only they could afford it, the clear implication being that, if they chose not to reveal the whereabouts of their gold, or their paintings, or their gemstones, they, and their children, and anyone else related to them by blood, would be dead within days.
‘Most paid up, Mr Baulman. They died anyway, of course, once they’d been bled of whatever they had managed to hide. Lubsko operated on a regular cycle, so every month a new set of families would be transferred once the camp had been scrubbed of their predecessors. To further strengthen the illusion of possible salvation, a pair of Judas goats was kept there: a German couple masquerading as liberal intelligentsia, victims of political rather than religious persecution, as it was deemed too difficult to have Aryans pretend to be Jews for fear their imposture would be discovered.
‘Only one person survived the camp: a young woman named Isha Górski. The Russians were advancing, and the guards were ordered to get rid of all remaining prisoners and torch the camp. Isha survived by hiding among corpses. Later, when she came to this country, she married a Jew named Isaac Winter and—’
‘Isha Winter,’ said Baulman softly, as though he had just made the connection.
‘Mother of Ruth Winter. You’re telling me that you did not know her history?’
‘No, I was aware of none of this. How could I be? I was a not friend of hers. I do not think I ever met the woman.’
‘Were you avoiding her?’
‘No! Why would I avoid her?’
‘For fear that she might recognize you.’
‘But how could she? I told you: we did not know each other.’
‘You live – what, maybe ten miles from Pirna? Surely you must have visited the town.’
Baulman didn’t even have to pretend to sound weary. ‘I rarely go into Pirna. It is a small town. Things are expensive there. When I shop, I shop at the big supermarket outside Boreas, or maybe go to Bangor.’
‘And you don’t socialize?’
‘Miss,’ said Baulman, ‘I am over ninety years old. My wife is dead. My friends are dead. Whom do you suggest I socialize with?’
He thought that he caught the man named Ross smiling. Demers did not smile.
‘I still do not understand what all of this has to do with me,’ Baulman continued. ‘I think someone has been telling lies.’
‘Reynard Kraus, the man whom you deny that you are, was sent to Lubsko as a general assistant with “special duties” at the start of 1944. Those duties included murdering children by lethal injection. We have confirmation of that in a note from Josef Mengele to the RSHA inquiring after Kraus’s progress, and confirming that Kraus had attended the killing by injection of groups of children at Auschwitz, following which he had been permitted to perform the procedure himself, under Mengele’s expert gaze. Apparently Mengele was concerned that his pupil might embarrass him, but the RSHA’s response was entirely positive: Kraus had given no cause for complaint at Lubsko, and his conduct reflected well on his tutor.
‘You see, Mr Baulman, the difficulty with Lubsko was that, in order for the illusion of possible salvation to be maintained, very particular types of guards had to be used to staff the camp. They couldn’t be your usual brutes. They had to possess a degree of refinement, of sensitivity. But that presented problems when it came to disposing of the prisoner intakes because refined, sensitive individuals tend to be bad at executing terrified naked men, women, and children. That was where Engel came in. We think that he and a couple of other men were kept off camp, and were only brought in when the killing needed to be done. But children – or the few that had survived the other camps – were dealt with separately: a quiet injection was deemed less damaging to morale, even that of a killer like Engel. That became Reynard Kraus’s job.’
‘I am not Reynard Kraus. I have told you t
his before.’
‘We’ve struggled to find pictures of Kraus,’ said Demers, as though she had not heard him. She flipped through some papers before her, and came up with a single photocopied page.
‘Is this your driver’s license, Mr Baulman?’
He peered at the document.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s from your most recent renewal, right?’
He looked at the date.
‘Yes.’ The state required people over sixty-five to renew their license every four years. He had been pleased not to be deprived of it.
‘Thank you.’
She put the document back in the pile before her, like a magician hiding a card.
‘And this?’
He accepted a photocopied picture from her. It was the photograph taken of him when he first immigrated to the United States in 1952.
‘Again, this is me.’
He’d had some work done after the war, just enough to blur his appearance in case anyone might remember Reynard Kraus: a thinning of the nose, a tightening of the eyes, a reduction in the size of his earlobes, which were conspicuously large, a family trait.
‘And this one?’
He recognized his party membership photo immediately, even though it was blurred and damaged. He peered at it. He took off his glasses, wiped them on his tie, and examined it again.
‘It is a very bad photo,’ he said.
‘It was part of a batch that someone tried to burn,’ said Demers. ‘Thankfully, the fire was put out before it could do too much damage.’
‘I cannot tell who this is,’ he said, ‘but I do not think that it is me.’
‘You don’t think that it’s you,’ asked Demers, ‘or you know it isn’t?’
Baulman was conscious of walking on treacherous ground. He was tempted to deny entirely that this was his photo, but it still bore some resemblance, he supposed, to the man who had come to the United States in 1952. Already he was thinking forward to any possible attempts to deport or extradite him, just in case it came to that. A good lawyer might be able to use that photo in his favor.