you finish with the cops.”
“Cops I don’t like,” she said. “I seen enough kinds of cops to know they’re all the same.” Then she squinted up at me. “You’re no cop. Cops don’t say ‘cop.’”
“No, I’m not. I’m a private detective.”
“What’s it to me?”
“I’ve been hired by a woman whose father was burned to death on this street.”
“Abraham Winston,” she said. “All the papers. I can read English.”
“Weinstein,” I said. “Abraham Weinstein.”
She looked down at the gnarled fingers wrapped around the door. “Well, I figured that,” she said. “Please. Abraham? My kids changed their name, too. Now it’s Godfrey. Fitting in, huh?”
“I saw him before he died.”
“Ach, the pain,” she said, “I can imagine.”
“His daughter saw it, too.”
She kicked my shoe with a tiny black-clad foot. “So come in,” she said.
The apartment was tiny and dim, crowded with dark, heavy furniture. There were carpets everywhere, and a smell of cooking in the air. Mrs. Gottfried was thinner than a lost hope. She gestured me toward the chunky sofa.
“So sit,” she said. “Hungry?”
“No,” I said.
“Me, too,” she said. “I cook for the smell. Smell is the sense closest to memory, do you know that? That was Freud, hah? I cook to remember. When it’s finished cooking, I give it to them.” She pointed at the window, in the general direction of the homeless. “I been hungry, I know what it’s like.”
“Have the cops asked you questions?”
“No.” She sat beside me, slowly and experimentally, as though she wasn’t sure her body was up to it. “They tried. I looked out through the little hole I had somebody put in the door, I saw the uniforms. I hate uniforms, so I went away and let them knock.”
“That was why you wouldn’t talk to them? Because of the uniforms?”
She looked at me as though I were the youngest and most innocent human being on earth. Then she stretched out her right arm and showed me the number tattooed on it. There was something formal about the gesture, like a lady at the Viennese Opera demonstrating the quality of her full-length silk gloves.
“371332,” she said without looking at it. “It’s a big number. They all wore uniforms. How neat their uniforms were, and how dirty we were. That was part of what was so terrible. When I got brought to New York, when it was all over, I couldn’t take the bus. The man in the uniform scared me. I couldn’t even walk, because how could I ask a cop for directions if I got lost? The uniform, huh? So I stayed home. A car backfiring in the street made me cry. I was crying a lot then.” She peered up at me, proving that her eyes were dry.
“Who brought you to New York?”
“My children. A boy and a girl, the boy older. When we saw how it was at the beginning, my husband and me, may God rest his soul, we packed them up and got them out. We sent them to my sister in New York. But we still didn’t believe all of it, so we stayed. There was the business.” She smoothed back her graying hair. Her knuckles were swollen, knobby, and arthritic; they looked like the joints at the end of a drumstick. She could have removed her rings only with wire clippers. “The business,” she said. “My husband was in fur. We sold to the top monsters. We protected their wives and their fancy women against the cold. ‘People will always need fur,’ he said to me. We wrapped ourselves in fur against the Holocaust. Are you sure you’re not hungry?”
I’d never been less hungry in my life. I shook my head.
“We should have known better,” she said. “Fur burns.” She closed her eyes. “Scheiss,” she added. She wasn’t Polish. She was German.
“And your husband?”
“He burned, too,” she said dispassionately. She opened her eyes and looked at nothing. For her it was an old story.
“Where are your children now?”
“East. New York. I told you already. The big hepple.” She waved the arm with the tattoo to indicate the walls, lined with photographs of heavy men with beards wearing dark suits. Assembled around them were impossibly large families, huge broods of smiling adults and children, now lost, scattered, annihilated, incinerated. “We had to sneak the pictures in their bags after the children slept,” she said. “Old pictures don’t mean anything except to old people.”
“So you sent them out with the children.”
“If I hadn’t,” she said, “I wouldn’t have any past. Any happy past, I mean. Nothing left but the fires and the curses. What’s my life, huh? These pictures.”
“And the soup,” I said.
She gave the idea of the soup a one-handed gesture that could have sent it all the way to Latvia. “I do it for the smell,” she said again. “It makes the pictures move.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s the only reason you make the soup.”
She tossed a bright, dry, sparrowlike glance at me. “So it’s more than that,” she said. “That’s a federal case? They’re hungry, right? Like I said, I been hungry.”
“How did your children let you escape from them?” I asked.
“Oh, well,” she said, placing her hands in her lap. Her fingers folded over each other like the leaves of a prized manuscript, yellow and faded and hard to read. I thought of Hermione’s palm. “I embarrassed them. I couldn’t go nowhere. Anywhere, I mean. I couldn’t sleep. I was cold all the time. I lost weight in Treblinka, you know? Thirty pounds, no less. I never got it back.”
She held up a parchment arm. “Look at me, skin and bones. The New York winters drove spikes through my skin. I felt-what’s the word? — impaled, like I was nailed to my bed by icicles. So I woke up in the mornings, on the nights I went to sleep I mean, and I made problems. When I slept, my dreams were all people dead or dying, so I stopped dreaming. Skinny, no English, crying in the middle of parties, scared by loud noises. My grandchildren laughed at me. I embarrassed everybody. It wasn’t their fault.” She blinked, heavy as a tortoise. “It’s a terrible thing to stop dreaming.”
“So you came to California,” I said for lack of anything else.
“I was brought here,” she said. “My children talked about it and brought me out here. I had friends here then. They’re all gone now. I got here, it was clean, there were orange trees, you could smell the ocean. Not like now. And it was warm.”
“They write you?”
“Oh, sure. Letters every month. They come some, too. My son is very successful now, very busy. When they come, they stay in a hotel.”
“No room here,” I suggested.
“You,” she said, smiling, and I caught a glimpse of the girl she must have been. “More flies with sugar than with vinegar.” Unexpectedly, she laughed, a low, rhythmic chortle that summoned up the sound of a tropical lizard on the wall. “You look like my grandson, Eli. That’s why you got in the door. You don’t need all the sugar.”
“You’re not a fly,” I said.
“No,” she said, tapping me on the knee. “But you’re not Eli, either. And you didn’t come here to pass time making spiel with some old lady. You want to know did I see something.”
Without realizing what I was doing, I crossed my fingers. “Did you?”
“Yes,” she said. She reached down and uncrossed my fingers, laughing again, and then sat back triumphantly and glowed at me.
“Will you tell me about it?”
“What, I’ll tell you my whole life story and I wouldn’t tell you that? This man, he burns people. I testified,” she said proudly. “I testified at Nuremburg. I did that, and I wouldn’t testify for you?”
“What did you see?” I asked.
“First was hearing. I was sitting here, right where I am now. I still don’t sleep so good. First thing, I heard somebody laugh.” She rubbed one forearm as though she’d broken out in goose bumps. “I never heard a laugh like that, and I’ve heard every noise a human being can make. This laugh wasn’t nothing-anything-human. Then the
