“What did Malachi do with all these people? Why, he sold them cars. If customers had any money at all, he would invent credit schedules tailored to their needs and show them how painless it was to become a car owner. He made the brilliant decision to make Mustangs his loss leaders. Ford had stopped producing them in 1970, so Malachi recruited a network of dealers to supply him with second-hand Mustangs. This woke up the entire distribution system. The head office in Dearborn started to take notice of him. He astutely persuaded Carroll Shelby to come to Miami for a weekend, which brought on even more visitors. (Shelby’s 1-2-3 win at Le Mans in 1966 had led to the creation of Ford’s ‘Shelby Mustangs.’ ) It was about this time that Malachi bought the adjacent parking lot and created Malachi’s Ford Plaza. Given the guaranteed crowds of potential customers, he was able to sell concessions there at downtown rates. Two years after his first broadcast, he was making enough money to pay off his bank loans and buy himself a house at 3810 Alhambra in the elegant green gloom of Coral Gables — as well as his own customized Mustang.
“His business sponsors were proud of him. One way they expressed their affection and approval was to introduce him to the nicest, prettiest, and richest Jewish princesses. To their consternation, Malachi was never interested. He had affairs with women who were original, demanding, and usually married or closely involved with another man. These affairs were not necessarily brief, but they seemed almost planned not to be lasting; they left his friends bemused and the women often embittered. It was the one dark zone in Malachi’s Miami life. But he never revealed its source, and few guessed it.
“Malachi didn’t give a damn about his success — it was simply a necessary step on the way to satisfying his undeclared, obsessive passion. A passion that he’d kindled and rekindled ever since he’d found himself alone on the streets of Antwerp in December 1942, knowing that his father and mother would never return. He dreamed endlessly of revenging their deaths on what was left of their murderers. And he had imagined a way of doing it.
“Malachi felt nothing but scorn for the legal means of retribution. A former Nazi official was revealed to have served in the administration of a death camp; he was arrested, brought to trial, sentenced to life imprisonment; and soon afterward, given his or her advanced age, transferred to a prison hospital to die a more or less natural death. That was no punishment. He wanted these criminals to suffer as he had suffered after they killed his parents. Of course they had no parents; but many had children, and grandchildren, whom they especially loved to dote on publicly. Killing these children and grandchildren, perhaps torturing them first, might sufficiently devastate the surviving murderers in their last years.
“For a long time Malachi imagined carrying out this project literally. He assembled the family trees of every known or suspected Nazi killer, he located their residences, followed their travels at home and abroad. He researched methods of abduction and concealment, of inflicting pain and death, of recording pain and death, of inconspicuously crossing borders, of disposing of dead bodies. . . .
“As he told me this, Malachi started letting his words tumble out almost uncontrollably; then he paused a long moment as if deliberately returning to a quieter state. In time, he said, he understood that merely initiating his plans required a vast organization of detectives, informers, lawyers, and professional criminals that he could never fund, no matter how much money he made; that it was a scheme that not even the Mossad could have pulled off, although probably one that they themselves had considered. Furthermore Malachi saw that his obsession had begun to contaminate the rest of his life: his loathing of Nazi crimes was slowly spreading so as to include all of Germany, and Germans past and present, and their heirs in every Western country. He knew this was another form of madness, and he had no desire to become a madman. I can’t vouch for his exact words, but what he said on the subject, halfway across the Indian Ocean on our flight to Europe, went something like this:
“‘So I came to realize that actually killing the children and/or grandchildren was out of the question. So what, I asked myself, could be the next best step for creating a stink, a stink that served the dictates of my single-minded end? What that necessary end required was a step that would associate a notional killing of offspring with the name of the original bastard so that an indelible stink would be glued to him, such that any subsequent step that might cleanse him of it would be out of the question. In which case what was the next step I should take? Then I remembered what Kafka said about expressing love. A bouquet of roses can’t do it. There is only coitus and literature that can achieve this end. Well, if Kafka said so, then choosing literature was my obvious next step (since for “coitus,” read “killing,” which was not an option). Better than direct denunciation: even if newspapers can still engineer a stink in the right circumstances, nothing can approximate the truly colossal stink that expert writing is capable of, something on the level of Musil or Proust, writing that cuddles up to the so-called truth but never pretends to be it, and it was not out of the question that even real names be kept, it was only a lying fiction (that pleonasm!) that made the end, the obliteration of its target as deadly as actually killing it, that is, him or her: all that would be needed as a next step was a hint to e.g., Der Spiegel — a prominent member of the media was best equipped to propagate and inflate fictitious shame into
