Adolf Eichmann.
“The Sturmbannfuhrer told me that he would like to conduct an experiment,” Klein said. “He orders me to play Brahms’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano in G Major. I take my violin from its case and begin to play. An inmate walks past. The Sturmbannfuhrer asks him to please name the piece I am playing. The inmate says he does not know. The Sturmbannfuhrer draws his sidearm and shoots the inmate through the head. He finds another inmate and poses the same question. What piece is this fine violinist playing? And on it goes for the next hour. Those who can answer the question correctly are spared. Those who can’t, he shoots through the head. By the time he’s finished, fifteen bodies are lying at my feet. When his thirst for Jewish blood is quenched, the man in black smiles and walks away. I lay down with the dead and said mourner’s Kaddish for them.”
KLEIN LAPSED INTO a long silence. A car hissed past in the street. Klein lifted his head and began to speak again. He was not quite ready to make the connection between the atrocity at Auschwitz and the bombing of Wartime Claims and Inquiries, though by now Gabriel had a clear sense of where the story was headed. He continued chronologically, one china plate at a time, as Lavon would have said. Survival at Auschwitz. Liberation. His return to Vienna…
The community had numbered 185,000 before the war, he said. Sixty-five thousand had perished in the Holocaust. Seventeen hundred broken souls stumbled back into Vienna in 1945, only to be greeted by open hostility and a new wave of anti-Semitism. Those who’d emigrated at the point of a German gun were discouraged from returning. Demands for financial restitution were met by silence or were sneeringly referred to Berlin. Klein, returning to his home in the Second District, found an Austrian family living in the flat. When he asked them to leave, they refused. It took a decade to finally pry them loose. As for his father’s textile business, it was gone for good, and no restitution ever made. Friends encouraged him to go to Israel or America. Klein refused. He vowed to stay on in Vienna, a living, breathing, walking memorial to those who had been driven out or murdered in the death camps. He left his violin behind at Auschwitz and never played again. He earned his living as a clerk in a dry-goods store, and later as an insurance salesman. In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, the government agreed to pay surviving Austrian Jews approximately six thousand dollars each. Klein showed Gabriel the check. It had never been cashed.
“I didn’t want their money,” he said. “Six thousand dollars? For what? My mother and father? My two sisters? My home? My possessions?”
He tossed the check onto the table. Gabriel sneaked a glance at his wristwatch and saw it was two-thirty in the morning. Klein was closing in, circling his target. Gabriel resisted the impulse to give him a nudge, fearing that the old man, in his precarious state, might stumble and never regain his footing.
“Two months ago, I stop for coffee at the Cafe Central. I’m given a lovely table next to a pillar. I order a Pharisaer.” He paused and raised his eyebrows. “Do you know a Pharisaer, Mr. Argov? Coffee with whipped cream, served with a small glass of rum.” He apologized for the liquor. “It was the late afternoon, you see, and cold.”
A man enters the cafe, tall, well-dressed, a few years older than Klein. An Austrian of the old school, if you know what I mean, Mr. Argov. There’s an arrogance in his walk that causes Klein to lower his newspaper. The waiter rushes across the floor to greet him. The waiter is wringing his hands, hopping from foot to foot like a schoolboy who needs to piss.Good evening, Herr Vogel. I was beginning to think we wouldn’t see you today. Your usual table? Let me guess: an Einspanner? And how about a sweet? I’m told the Sachertorte is lovely today, Herr Vogel…
And then the old man speaks a few words, and Max Klein feels his spine turn to ice. It is the same voice that ordered him to play Brahms at Auschwitz, the same voice that calmly asked Klein’s fellow inmates to identify the piece or face the consequences. And here was the murderer, prosperous and healthy, ordering an Einspanner and a Sachertorte at the Central.
“I felt as though I was going to be sick,” Klein said. “I threw money on the table and stumbled into the street. I looked once through the window and saw the monster named Herr Vogel reading his newspaper. It was as if the encounter never happened at all.”
Gabriel resisted the impulse to ask how, after so long, Klein could be so certain that the man from Cafe Central was the same man who’d been at Auschwitz sixty years earlier. Whether Klein was right or not was not as important as what happened next.
“What did you do about it, Herr Klein?”
“I became quite the regular customer at the Cafe Central. Soon, I too was greeted by name. Soon, I too had a regular table, right next to the honorable Herr Vogel. We began to wish each other good afternoon. Sometimes, while we read our newspapers, we would chat about politics or world events. Despite his age, his mind was very sharp. He told me he was a businessman, an investor of some sort.”
“And when you’d learned as much as you could by having coffee next to him, you went to see Eli Lavon at Wartime Claims and Inquiries?”
Klein nodded slowly. “He listened to my story and promised to look into it. In the meantime, he asked me to stop going to the Central for coffee. I was reluctant. I was afraid he was going to slip away again. But I did as your friend asked.”
“And then?”
“A few weeks went by. Finally I received a call. It was one of the girls from the office, the American one named Sarah. She informed me that Eli Lavon had some news to report to me. She asked me to come to the office the next morning at ten o’clock. I told her I would be there, and I hung up the telephone.”
“When was that?”
“The same day of the bombing.”
“Have you told any of this to the police?”
Klein shook his head. “As you might expect, Mr. Argov, I’m not fond of Austrian men in uniform. I am also well aware of my country’s rather shoddy record when it comes to the prosecution of war criminals. I kept silent. I went to the Vienna General Hospital and watched the Israeli officials coming and going. When the ambassador came, I tried to approach him but I was pushed away by his security men. So I waited until the right person came along. You seemed like him. Are you the right person, Mr. Argov?”
THE APARTMENT HOUSE across the street was nearly identical to the one where Max Klein lived. On the second floor a man stood in the darkened window with a camera pressed to his eye. He focused the telephoto lens on the figure striding through the passageway of Klein’s building and turning into the street. He snapped a series of photographs, then lowered the camera and sat down in front of the tape recorder. In the darkness it took him a moment to find the PLAY button.
“So I waited until the right person came along. You seemed like him. Are you the right person, Mr. Argov?”
“Yes, Herr Klein. I’m the right person. Don’t worry, I’m going to help you.”
“None of this would have happened if it weren’t for me. Those girls are dead because of me. Eli Lavon is in that hospital because of me.”
“That’s not true. You did nothing wrong. But given what’s taken place, I’m concerned about your safety.”
“So am I.”
“Has anyone been following you?”
“Not that I can tell, but I’m not sure I would know it if they were.”
“Have you received any threatening telephone calls?”
“No.”
“Has anyone at all tried to contact you since the bombing?”
“Just one person, a woman named Renate Hoffmann.”
STOP. REWIND. PLAY.
“Just one person, a woman named Renate Hoffmann.”
“Do you know her?”
“No, I’ve never heard of her.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“No, she left a message on my machine.”
“What did she want?”
“To talk.”
