For a moment, we were all frozen in time and place, then the door to the stairwell swung open, and Moise appeared in the lobby. He stopped just inside the door and stood, reconnoitering. He reminded me of a lithe young cat-prepared to lunge forward but hanging back, waiting to see if it was necessary.
With his backup in position, the older man's shoulders relaxed, and he turned to me. 'What can I do for you, Detective Beaumont?' he asked.
'You can tell me exactly who you are and what you're doing here.'
'Would you like to see my identification?' he asked.
'Yes, but take it out very carefully.'
He slid his hand into the inside breast pocket of his coat and brought out a slim leather holder. He flipped it open and handed me an embossed plastic card. One side I couldn't read at all-it was written in Hebrew. The other side said only, Avram Steinman, Simon Wiesenthal Associates. There was no address-only telephone and fax numbers with a prefix that belonged to neither New York City nor L.A.
I looked at the I.D. card for a moment, then handed it back. 'What are you doing here?' I asked.
'I'm a hunter,' Avram Steinman said. His speaking voice carried only the slightest hint of an accent. 'I'm here investigating missing Nazi war criminals. How about you?'
'I'm with the Seattle Police Homicide Squad,' I said. 'I'm looking for a murderer.'
Avram Steinman's eyes never stopped scanning the room. He was every bit as on guard as I was, maybe even more so, but his anxiety didn't carry over into his speaking voice.
'Maybe we should talk then, Detective Beaumont,' he said, with a smile of wry amusement touching the corners of his mouth. 'It sounds to me as though you and I are both in the same business.'
22
Tim, Ralph Ames' favorite waiter on the staff at the Georgian Room, once told us about his most surrealistic shift in a lifelong career of waiting tables. It happened, he said, the first night of Operation Desert Storm. While bombs were tearing hell out of the swimming pool in the El Rashid Hotel over in far-off Baghdad, war protesters were swirling in a riotous mass up Seattle's Fifth Avenue right outside the gracious walls of the Four Seasons Olympic. War or no war, protesters or no protesters, the niceties of hospitable dining remained unaffected. Inside the Georgian Room, all that happened was that a piano player upped the volume.
I recalled Tim's comment vividly as I sat in the elegant, dimly lighted Hunt Club at the Sorrento while the Simon Wiesenthal manhunters happily devoured their specially prepared kosher meals and spoke, with a physician's clinical dispassion, of Hans Gebhardt and Sobibor. Plates of regularly prepared Hunt Club-quality food came and went from in front of Sue Danielson, Michael Morris, and me. Maybe Sue and Michael ate some of theirs. I barely touched mine. I have no idea now what the food was or whether or not I tasted it.
In my day-to-day work, I see plenty of common street-thug mentality-the kind of thinking that makes life cheap enough so smart-assed kids regularly blow each other away over something as negligible as a forty-dollar World Series bet.
Moise Rosenthal and Avram Steinman were ostensibly law-abiding citizens-at least when they were on U.S. soil. But I had heard allegations that Wiesenthal tactics occasionally resorted to kidnapping in faraway places like Buenos Aires. What that really meant was that Wiesenthal operatives could be presumed to be both smart and dangerous. When necessity dictated, they were capable of making nice, but they weren't above going for the jugular, either.
Both men exuded the intensity of hunters on the trail of someone or something. Their brand of single-minded focus was a trait I recognized all too well. I see it in myself every day-whenever I look in the mirror. In the course of my life, I've learned that the idiosyncracies that seem entirely understandable and familiar in me are often the very ones I find most disturbing when I encounter them in someone else.
Moise Rosenthal and Avram Steinman bothered me. I found them so troubling, in fact, that at first I had difficulty staying tuned in to the conversation.
'Part of the problem in prosecuting the Germans who participated in Sobibor,' Avram was saying, 'was that there were so few survivors, not only among the prisoners, but also among the German personnel who were in charge.
'From the very beginning, the German High Command ran the place with a skeleton crew. Large numbers of guards weren't necessary because the people who were sent to Sobibor weren't prisoners in the ordinary sense of the word. They arrived dazed and ill, weak and exhausted from a hellish boxcar trip. In the summer, some prisoners perished in transit from heat and thirst. In the winter, many died of numbing cold. After exiting the trains, they were herded from the railroad siding into Sobibor's gas chambers within hours of their arrival.'
'In other words, not that many guards were necessary,' Sue Danielson interjected.
Avram nodded. 'Right. The ranks of guard survivors were further reduced, not only by the number of those killed during the October uprising, but also by the ones who simply disappeared afterward. At the time, most of those were reported as either dead or missing in action. After all, the Germans didn't want it known in the ranks that they were having a desertion problem. Things were bad enough for them right then that it could have encouraged others to follow suit.'
'I understand that Hans Gebhardt was among those who either went underground after the war or who were thought long dead,' Sue said. 'I'm wondering about the others, the guards and officers who were tried, convicted, and given their obligatory slaps on the hand during the trials at Nuremburg. Was your organization instrumental in bringing any of them to trial?'
'Yes,' Avram said. 'We were involved in some of those cases. But what we're talking about here is another kind of trial altogether, other trials besides the ones at Nuremburg.'
'What do you mean?' I asked.
Avram ignored my interruption and continued. 'While the German High Command was totally focused on waging and losing a war, a few minor details slipped through the cracks. Sobibor was one of them. Those in charge knew approximately the number of prisoners who had been sent to the camp while it was in existence. According to the law of large numbers, they also knew about how much of what they called das neben-produkt — side-product- should have resulted from that many bodies. In the final accounting, gold from Sobibor turned up short.'
'I thought Germans always kept meticulous records,' I said.
'Supposedly, and up to a point, they did. From the time the gold was melted into bars and turned over for shipment, there's a complete paper trail, even now. The missing gold was stolen long before it entered that officially documented path.'
'Stolen by whom?' I asked.
'Hans Gebhardt, no doubt,' Avram answered.
'Certainly he wasn't acting alone,' I supplied. 'Who else would have helped him? Other guards perhaps? Some of the prisoners?'
'Maybe both,' Avram said. 'A young lieutenant named Lars Weber was in charge of Sobibor's accounting…'
'He was in on it?' Michael Morris interrupted. 'I remember his name from Kari's and my research. Lars Weber was tried in Nuremburg and imprisoned for a while-only for six months or so. According to one of his surviving relatives, he died shortly after being released.'
'He died as a result of one of those other trials I was telling you about,' Avram answered quietly. 'The unofficial ones. They were conducted by some of the earliest and most vicious gangs of what we now call neo- Nazis. They wanted to regroup and reorganize. They were broke and looking for money. By then someone must have realized that a large amount of gold from Sobibor was missing.'
'After he was released from prison, Lars Weber got a job doing reconstruction in Berlin. He disappeared one afternoon on his way home from work. A passing car slowed down, a door opened, and he was pulled inside. He returned home three weeks later. His five-year-old daughter found him outside the front door early one morning. He had been dumped off during the night. He had been severely burned over two thirds of his body. All his fingers and toes were missing. Gangrene set in. He died two weeks later.'
A burned body. Missing fingers and toes. This was clearly an identifiable M.O.-an inarguable connection.
