for years-they may be guilty of harboring a criminal, but that's not a capital crime. They didn't deserve to die for doing it.'
Michael made a face and nodded. 'I know,' he allowed grudgingly. 'That's why we're here.'
'Tell us what you can about the men who came to visit you last week,' Sue said. 'Didn't you say there were two of them?'
'Yes.'
'Did they give you their names?'
Kari looked at Michael, and he answered. 'Yes. One was Moise something. Rosenthal, maybe. The other one, the older one, was Avram Steinman. That struck my funny bone. Moses and Abraham working together.'
'Can you give us a description of the two men?'
'They were both white. Medium build. Steinman was quite a bit older than we are, like about Kari's father's age. Your age. The other one was closer to us or maybe a little older. Thirty or so. The older one had a pronounced accent. The younger one spoke American English. He had brown hair, almost the color of mine.'
'Were they in a car? On foot?'
'I don't know. I suppose they had a car, but I didn't see it.'
'How did they find you?'
'Maybe they talked to some of the people we wrote to-one of the escapees.'
'And why did they come to you?'
'They wanted us to help them,' Michael answered. 'After the letters we'd exchanged with some of the survivors, I'm sure they thought we would.'
'What exactly did Hans Gebhardt do at Sobibor?' Sue Danielson asked.
This time it was Kari who answered. 'They told us he was in charge of extraction. After the bodies came out of the gas chambers and before they were thrown into the fire, some of the prisoners-ones who were kept alive for a time solely to serve as part of the work crews-had to go through all the bodies and remove the gold teeth. That gold, along with gold from confiscated jewelry, was melted down into bars and shipped back to Germany. At the time of the Sobibor prison uprising, an entire truckload shipment of gold disappeared.'
'The Wiesenthal people think your grandfather stole it?'
Kari nodded. 'That's what they told us. They think he did it with help from one or more of the missing Ukrainian guards. They told us that over the years, and one by one, the guards have turned up dead, but no one had ever found any trace of my grandfather until just recently.'
'Did they say what that trace was?'
'No.'
'Where do they think the gold is now?' I asked, thinking at once of the solid-gold box wrench Bonnie Elgin had found lying in the street.
'They think it may have ended up in the Eastern bloc right after the war, but they believe most of it has been smuggled out in the course of the last few years,' Kari answered. 'On fishing boats.'
'To your father?'
She shook her head. 'By my father,' she answered. 'Through his joint-venture connections in and out of the former Soviet Union. They seemed to think my father knew where his father was all along. I think they were hoping Dad would tell them what he knew.'
In view of the two unused airplane tickets to Rio, I thought I had a pretty good idea of where Kari's grandfather might be holed up. By now, the Wiesenthal operatives knew that, too.
'Michael and I were just doing research,' Kari continued. 'I think that's what called the investigators' attention to us. I think someone-maybe one of the survivors we interviewed-noticed my name and made the connection to my grandfather. And that's why those men came here, looking around and asking questions.'
Kari's eyes once more filled with tears. 'After they left, I called Granny to ask what she thought I should do. She told me just to stay out of it, to let well enough alone. I asked her advice, and then I ignored it. I guess I thought that if he helped them, it would make things better. And that's why this whole mess is my fault. I brought him to their attention.
'You see,' she added, 'I hated my father, but I never meant for him to die. And it's hurt my mother real bad. I can't stand what it's doing to her. It breaks my heart.'
At that juncture, Kari Gebhardt finally fell apart completely. She put her arms on the table, rested her head on her arms, and sobbed brokenly for several minutes. I sat there and listened to her and waited for her to stop, but the whole time I was listening, I was thinking about Sobibor. I think Sue was, too.
It was late when we finally finished up with the interview. We had spent another full hour and a half going over and over everything they could remember about their Nazi-hunting visitors. It wasn't very illuminating. The first available appointment we could make for them to visit with the Identi-Kit artist was for the following Tuesday. The artist doesn't work weekends, and Monday would be entirely taken up by the funeral.
Kari and Michael left. Sue and I returned to the fifth floor, where she had some phone calls to make. I could have waited for her and hitched a ride home, but I wanted to walk. I thought the exercise might help clear my head and shake off some of the horror of what we had learned.
I thought about the men claiming to be Wiesenthal Nazi hunters as I made my way down a pedestrian- crowded Third Avenue. My natural inclination would have been to root for Nazi hunters-to cheer them on. But not if they had invaded my home territory and murdered people on my watch.
Back at Belltown Terrace, I grabbed a quick shower and changed into one of the two Brooks Brothers suits Ralph Ames had forced me to buy. Without my lawyer/fashion adviser's counsel, I'd look a whole lot more like Eddie Bauer than I would anything else. Once I was dressed, I placed a call to the Four Seasons Olympic. I wanted to be sure they'd have plenty of room to squeeze my grandmother and me into the Georgian Room for dinner.
Why did I want to take Beverly Piedmont to the Four Seasons? Maybe it was a way to distance myself from the horrors I'd been hearing about all afternoon. But also, I think, it had something to do with pride.
I had been to the Georgian Room on several occasions with Ralph Ames, and I wanted to take Beverly Piedmont someplace nice. Maybe it was showing off, and maybe it was nothing more than a misguided desire on my part to pamper her, to make my grandmother feel as though there was still someone in her life who cared about her, someone she could lean on if she ever needed to do some leaning.
Once I had her in the car headed back downtown, I began to have misgivings. Since I didn't have any viable alternatives in mind, I stuck to the original plan with the exception of parking in the garage off Fifth and Seneca instead of driving up to the posh front entrance and using the valet parking.
The trouble started as soon as we walked up the stairs from the lobby to the entrance of the Georgian Room. We stopped beside the maitre d's station behind a laughing, somewhat noisy group of well-oiled diners. There were several men in tuxes and women in long, sequined gowns, and from what conversation we overheard, they were evidently on their way to the opera.
Beverly Piedmont looked down at her plain but neat coat and dress. 'I shouldn't be here,' she whispered self-consciously. 'I'm not dressed well enough.'
'You're fine,' I said reassuringly, urging her forward.
The unfailingly polite maitre d' took her modest wool coat and showed us to a linen-covered table, where he graciously helped my grandmother into her chair. While she examined the elegant room, I stole a glance at the menu. These were definitely not King's Table prices. If she caught a glimpse of the toll, she'd balk, and we'd be out of there in a flash.
Before she even had a chance to look at the menu, I shifted hers out of reach, closed mine, and waved away the sommelier.
I knew from being there with Ralph that the Georgian Room always has available an elegant fixed-price dinner, from soup to nuts, literally. The set five-course dinner offered the advantage of taking all the options out of ordering. The food was bound to be good, and it would keep my grandmother from reading the menu too closely. It would also keep me from trying to explain what any of the listed food actually was. Despite the name Beaumont, French and I are not exactly on speaking terms.
My menu sleight-of-hand may have been a slick maneuver, but Beverly Piedmont has a few jumps on me in terms of years and experience. She didn't fall for any of it.
'This place is very expensive, isn't it?' she observed, watchfully examining the room while she picked at her squash-soup appetizer.
