There are times when Brooklyn feels more like home than others. This was one of those times. I considered stopping at the office, but decided against it. I’d stop by later and drop off the new videotape and see if Devo had made anything of the answering machine tape and the original security video. Without tag numbers, it was a waste of time to put people on tracking down the Yukon. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of Yukons registered in New York State. Crank and the SUV had been worth a shot, but the sheriff was right, it was a dead end. Dead ends, unlike closing doors, are not very Zen. When one door closes, it’s said, another opens. When you hit a dead end, you make a U-turn. I needed to clear my head and think. I used to do my best thinking in Coney Island.
I strolled down the boardwalk toward the looming monster that was the Parachute Jump: its orange-painted girders rising like dinosaur bones two hundred and fifty feet off the grounds of Steeplechase Park. What a silly beast it was, after all, serving no purpose but to remind the world of its impotence. It might just as well have been a severed limb. Besides the salt air, the boardwalk smelled of Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, Italian sausages frying with sweet peppers and onions: the fat from the sausages hissing and spitting on the grill. It smelled of sun block too. The beaches were crowded, but not so crowded as when I was a kid. The beaches weren’t as much of a magnet for city kids as they once had been.
With Sarah fully grown and nearly all my old precinct brothers moved or dead, I didn’t find much cause to come back here as I used to. I still loved the wretched place. How could I not, but it had never been the same after Larry McDonald’s suicide. This is where I saw him alive that last time in ’89, the ambitious prick. He had been a murderer too, though I didn’t know it then. I guess it broke my heart a little to find that out about Larry. That day back in ’89, Larry and I stood on the boardwalk directly over where his victim had been found. Larry threatened me and my family. He said he was desperate. Maybe he was. Somehow his words and deeds had tainted the place a little. It was the divorce too. Divorce does more than split things apart. It taints things, all things, especially the good ones.
As I walked I thought back to my chat with Mira Mira and how she said the older guy with the eye patch was a cop. Maybe there was an angle in that, but intuition didn’t usually stand up under scrutiny. It had been my experience that people who insisted they knew things for sure didn’t necessarily know shit. I don’t care if every one of the tattoo artist’s relatives was a cop. Just because a man is a chef doesn’t mean his kid can cook.
I thought about how much money was involved in arranging for the audition ads, for paying the kid and fixing him up to look just like Patrick. I thought about what it had cost to fly around the country for the auditions and to have arranged for the roses and the dramatics at Jack’s grave. I estimated it had cost between ten and thirty grand, maybe a little bit more, to stage this little charade. A nice chunk of change, yes, but not big money. Any regular schmo, if he was motivated enough, could come up with that kind of scratch, so the money was another dead end. It all led back to the motivation. In the end, it was the only way I could figure to come at this. There was someone out there who wanted to hurt me and wanted to use my family to do it. For now, I had to go back to stumbling around in the dark, to interviewing everyone I could think of who might have a reason to want to hurt me.
It was no wonder that Devo’d had trouble tracking down Judas Wannsee. First off, the name was an obvious alias, a construct of the most hated Jew in history, Judas Iscariot, and of the Wannsee Conference at which the Nazis worked out the details for the Final Solution. Headquartered in the Catskill Mountains, his cult, the Yellow Stars, rejected the concept of assimilation and believed that the only way to avoid Jewish self-hatred was to announce your Jewishness to the world, to brand yourself a Jew, and to avoid the false comforts of fitting in. Most of the members did this by wearing the eponymous yellow star on their clothing to mark themselves as the Nazis had marked the Jews of Europe. Some went so far as to shave their heads and don the striped pajamas of those herded into concentration camps. In a few extreme cases, they had numbers tattooed on their forearms and ate a meager diet of stale black bread and potato soup.
If Karen Rosen had sought refuge from any other group, cult, or religion, Judas Wannsee and I might never have crossed paths. Karen was one of the three girls from my high school who had allegedly perished in a Catskill Mountain hotel fire in the summer of 1965, so you can imagine my response when her lunatic older brother Arthur came to me in 1981 claiming not only that the fire was no accident, but intimating that one of the dead girls wasn’t dead at all. As it happened, he was right on both counts. Not only had his sister survived the fire, she started it. Exhausted from guilt and years of hiding, she found her way back to the Catskills and joined the Yellow Stars. Why she joined them is hard to say. Maybe she thought she could fashion her own murderous self-loathing into something that could be exorcised by slapping on the yellow Juden star. Maybe it was proximity to the scene of the original crime. By the time I found Karen Rosen at the Yellow Star compound and got to discuss it with her, liver cancer had since rendered her more dead than alive. When we spoke, she wanted from me something not in my heart to deliver: forgiveness.
Years later, I read an interview with Wannsee in a magazine. Although he gave no specifics, he discussed the issue of giving refuge and how the sins of those he had harbored over the years had come to weigh heavily upon him. Yeah, tell me about it. Shortly after the interview appeared, buzz over the group faded. Then the Yellow Stars went the way of their buzz. It was a stretch, I know, but I wondered even then if he blamed me for pulling the first stone from the foundation upon which his little semi-secular temple had rested. Back then, it hadn’t interested me enough to bother tracking him down. It did now.
Given his fanatical rantings against assimilation, there was a kind of perverse symmetry in his latest incarnation. Judas Wannsee had gone from the ultimate outsider and gadfly to faceless bureaucrat, from messianic to mundane, from bright yellow stars to grays and inspection stickers. The Department of Motor Vehicles office on Route 112 in Medford on Long Island was the perfect physical manifestation of the anonymous new life Wannsee had chosen for himself. It was tucked neatly into the corner of one of the gazillion strip malls and shopping centers that scarred the island. Long Island had been transformed from a place of endless trees and beaches to a land of ugly, mind-numbing repetition. Deli. Chinese take-out. Dojo. Pizzeria. Card store. Phone store. Deli. Chinese take- out. Dojo. Card store. Phone store. Deli. Chinese take-out…
As I stood on the information line and listened to the beige woman at the desk endlessly repeat How can I help you? I had to snicker. There were several layers of irony in Judas Wannsee’s transformation.
“Yes,” I said, “I’d like to speak to your supervisor, please.”
“What’s this in reference to?”
“Just tell him it’s about Bungalow number eight. He’ll understand.”
She hesitated and shook her head. Apparently, this situation had not been covered in Information Desk 101, so she handled it as she would if I’d come in to surrender some old license plates. She hit a button that generated a white numbered chit-A 322-and handed it to me.
“Take a seat. Next! ”
I did as she asked, taking a seat on a long pew. The pews faced numbered stations where bored-looking clerks did what clerks do. The pews also faced big electronic boards that posted chit numbers and stations in red lights:
F121 12
D453 10
A320 08
And whenever new numbers were posted, a bell would ring. The place seemed to have been designed by a bingo-playing priest heavily influenced by Pavlov. A322 12 flashed up on the screen quickly enough. The woman at window 12 directed me to walk over to a door. When I reached it, she buzzed me in.
“Down the hall,” she yelled to me as I closed the door behind me.
The man I had known as Judas Wannsee sat behind a metal desk, shuffling and scribbling on papers. The walls were white and blank except for the mandatory notices about sexual harassment, emergency procedures, and handwashing when leaving the rest rooms. They were devoid of pictures, posters, of anything that might have given a visitor insight into the man who occupied the office. He was twenty years older and it showed. He had thinned, as had his hair. He was stooped somewhat and gravity had taken its toll on his face, but the eyes still burned bright.
“Mr. Prager,” he said without looking up. “Bungalow number eight, indeed.”
I knew he would remember. Bungalow 8 was where Karen Rosen had spent her last days, where we spoke that final time.
