The Storyteller (24 page)

“It’s silly, but I pictured you with brown eyes. Not blue,” he says.

My mouth drops open.

“I like the blue, though,” Leo adds. “It suits you.”

“That’s all you have to say?” I reply. “Really?”

He shrugs. “If you were thinking I’d run away screaming because you have a few silver cyborg lines on your face, I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“Cyborg?”

“Look, I don’t know you very well, but you seem a
little
fixated on physical appearance. That’s far less interesting to me than the fact that you brought Josef Weber to my attention.”

At the mention of Josef’s name, I shake my head to clear it. “I talked to him yesterday. He’s done so many horrible things.”

Leo reaches into a battered briefcase and takes out a file. “I know,” he says. “That’s why I thought it was time for us to meet each other.”

“But you said I would have to talk to one of your historians.”

A flush works its way up his neck. “I was in the neighborhood,” he says.

“You were in New Hampshire for something else?”

“Philly,” he replies. “Close enough.”

Philly is eight hours away by car. I step back, holding the door. “Well, then,” I reply. “You must be hungry.”

 • • • 

Leo Stein cannot stop eating the brioche. The first batch has come out of the oven, impossibly light. I serve it warm, with jam and tea. “Mmm,” he rhapsodizes, his eyes closing in delight. “I’ve never tasted anything like this.”

“They don’t have bakeries in Washington?”

“I wouldn’t know. My sustenance consists of really bad coffee and sandwiches that come out of a vending machine.”

I have spent the past two hours telling Leo everything Josef told me. In between, I have shaped the brioche into a traditional tête, brushed it with an egg wash, and baked it. It’s easier for me to talk when my hands are busy. With each word that passes my lips, I feel less heavy. It is as if I am giving him sentences made of stones, and the more I relay, the more of the burden he is carrying. He takes notes and writes on his legal pad. He scrutinizes the clipping I slipped into my pocket before I left Josef, the one of him eating his mother’s cake that ran in the local paper in Wewelsburg.

And he doesn’t even do a double take when he looks at me.

“Are you going to talk to him directly?” I ask.

Leo looks up at me. “Not yet. You’ve developed a good rapport. He trusts you.”

“He trusts me to forgive him,” I say. “Not to turn him in.”

“Forgiveness is spiritual. Punishment is legal,” Leo says. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”

“So you’d forgive him?”

“I didn’t say that. It’s not my place, or yours, if you ask me. Forgiveness is the imitation of God.”

“So’s punishment,” I point out.

He raises his brows and smiles. “The difference is that God never hates.”

“I’m surprised you can believe in God, after meeting so many evil people.”

“How could I not,” Leo asks, “after meeting so many survivors?” He wipes his mouth with his napkin. “So you saw his tattoo,” he clarifies.

“I saw a mark that could have been a tattoo.”

“Where?” Leo holds up his arm. “Show me.”

I touch his left biceps muscle, below the armpit. I can feel the heat of his skin through the cotton of his shirt. “Here. It looked like a cigarette burn.”

“That’s consistent with Waffen-SS
Blutgruppe
tattoos,” Leo says. “And with the file we’ve got so far. As is his claim that he was with the 1.SS Infantry Brigade in 1941, and that he worked at Auschwitz Two after 1943.” He opens the folder on the table between us. I see a grainy photograph of a young man in a Nazi uniform with skulls on the lapels of his coat. It could be Josef, I suppose, but I can’t tell.
HARTMANN
,
REINER
, I read, peeking as he slips the photograph from its paper clip. There is an address in spiky handwriting I cannot read, and the letters AB, which must be his blood type. Leo closes the folder quickly—classified information, I suppose—and sets the photo beside the newspaper clipping. “The question is: Are these the same guy?”

In the first, Josef is a young boy; in the second, he’s a man. The
quality of both photos is shoddy at best. “I can’t tell. But does it really matter? I mean, if all the other stuff he’s said fits?”

“Well,” Leo answers, “that depends. In 1981 the Supreme Court concluded that anyone who was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp took part in supporting the activities that occurred there—including murder, if we’re talking about Auschwitz Two. The court’s analysis was reminiscent of a trial in Germany years earlier in which a suspect said that if German authorities prosecuted him, they should prosecute everyone at the camp, because the camp operated as a chain of functions and everyone in that chain had to perform his function, or the whole apparatus of annihilation would have ground to a halt. So everyone from the guards to the bean counters at Auschwitz is culpable for what happened there, simply because they were aware of what was going on inside its fences, and performed their duties. Think about it like this—let’s say you and your boyfriend decide to kill me in my office. The deal is that your boyfriend is going to chase me around the room with a knife while you stand outside holding the door closed so I can’t escape. Both of you are going down for Murder One. It’s just a division of labor about how you each participated.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I blurt out. It turns out that it is easier to say aloud than I would have expected, and instead of feeling as if my heart has been ripped out of my chest, it seems as if I am made of helium. “I mean, I did, but things aren’t . . .” I shrug. “Anyway. He won’t be killing you in your office anytime soon.”

Leo blushes. “Guess that means I’ll be able to sleep well tonight.”

I clear my throat. “So all we have to do is prove that Josef worked at Auschwitz,” I say. “If he’s confessed to that, isn’t it enough?”

“That depends on how trustworthy his confession is.”

“Why would any court think he’d lie about that?”

“Why does anyone lie?” Leo says. “He’s old. He’s got mental issues. He’s a masochist. Who knows? For all we know, he wasn’t even there. He could have read a book and regurgitated that history to you; that doesn’t mean it’s his own.”

“Even though you have a file with his name on it?”

“He’s already given you one false name,” Leo points out. “This could be another.”

“So how do we make sure he’s really Reiner?”

“There are two ways,” Leo says. “Either he has to keep talking to you and eventually spill information that’s inside this file—up-close SS information that isn’t the kind of stuff you can glean from watching the History Channel 24/7. Or we need an eyewitness who remembers him from the camp.” He touches the newspaper clipping and the Nazi Party registration photo. “Someone who
could
say that these two men are one and the same.”

I look at the loaf of brioche, no longer steaming but fragrant and warm. The jam, staining the maple table. My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle:
What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together?

Bread, of course.

I think of this, and even though I am not religious, I pray that she will forgive me.

“I think I know someone who can help,” I say.

“Say what you want,” Damian argued. “I am only trying to keep you safe.”

I had opened the door, expecting Aleks, only to find the captain of the guard instead. I had told him I was busy, and this was true. This week, business had grown stronger. We could not produce enough baguettes to feed demand. The loaves, like my rolls, were sweeter than anything my father had ever baked. Aleks joked with me, and said he had a secret ingredient, but he would not tell me what it was. Then it would only be an ingredient, he said.

Now, I listened to Damian as he lectured me in my kitchen. “An
upiór?” I said. “Those are folktales.”

“There’s a reason tales get told. What else makes sense? The livestock was one thing, Ania. But this . . . this beast is going after humans.”

I had heard of them, of course. Of the undead who rose from their coffins, unsatisfied, and gorged themselves on the blood of others. An
upiór
would eat its own flesh, if it had to.

Old Sal, who sold baskets in the village square, was superstitious. She never walked near a black cat; she threw salt over her shoulder; she wore her clothes inside out the night of the full moon. She was the one who buzzed about this
upiór
that was terrorizing our village, whispering every time we set up shop beside each other at market.
You can spot them in a crowd,
she had said.
They live among us, with their ruddy cheeks and their red lips. And after their death, they complete their transformation. If that’s already happened, it’s too late. The only way to kill an
upiór
is to cut off its head, or cleave open its heart. And the only way to protect yourself from one is to swallow its blood.

I had dismissed Old Sal’s stories, and now, I would dismiss Damian’s. I folded my arms. “What is it you want me to do, then?”

“It’s said that you can catch an
upiór
if you can distract it,” he explained. “Once it sees a knot, it has to untie it. If there’s a pile of seeds, it has to count them.” Damian reached above my head, took a bag of barley grain, and dumped it on the counter.

“And why would the
upiór
happen to wander into my bakery?”

“It’s possible,” Damian said, “that he’s already here.”

It took me a moment to understand. And then, I was furious. “So because he’s an outsider, he’s the easy target? Because he didn’t go to school with you like all your soldier friends, or because he has a different way of pronouncing words? He’s not a monster, Damian. He’s just different.”

“Do you really know that?” he challenged, backing me up against the wall of the brick oven. “His arrival coincided with the killings.”

“He’s here all night, and at home with his brother all day. When would he even have time to do the things you claim?”

“Are you with him, while he’s working, watching him? Or are you asleep?”

I opened my mouth. The truth was, I had been spending more and more time in the kitchen with Aleks. I told him about my father, and about Baruch Beiler. He told me about how he’d wanted to be an architect, designing buildings so tall that you became dizzy standing on the top floors. Occasionally I fell asleep curled at the table, but when I did I always awakened to find that Aleks had carried me to my bed.

Sometimes I thought that I liked staying up late with him because I knew he’d do that.

I started to sweep the barley up with my hands, but Damian caught my wrist. “If you are so sure, then why not leave it and see what happens?”

I thought of Aleks, running with his brother from town to town. I thought of his hands at my throat, sewing me whole again. I met Damian’s eyes. “All right,” I said.

 • • • 

That night, I did not meet Aleks in the kitchen. I was not even there when he let himself inside. Instead, when he knocked softly on my bedroom door, I told him I was feeling ill and wanted to rest.

But I didn’t. I imagined him distracted by the barley, sorting it into piles. I imagined blood on his hands and pooling in his mouth.

When I couldn’t sleep, I lit a candle and crept down the hall to the kitchen.

I felt the heat through the wooden door, radiant from the oven. If I stood on my toes, I could peer through a chink in the wood. I would not have a panoramic view of the kitchen, but maybe I could see Aleks working as he usually did, allaying my worst fears.

I had a perfect view of the butcher-block table, with the bag of barley still spilled on its side.

But the pile of grains had been organized, seed by seed, into military formation.

The door swung open so suddenly I fell inside, landing on all fours. The candle I was carrying rolled out of its holder and skittered across the stone floor. As I reached for it, Aleks’s boot stepped down, extinguishing the flame. “Spying on me?”

I scrambled to my feet and shook my head. My gaze was drawn to the barley, in neat rows.

“I’m a little behind in my baking,” Aleks said. “I had a mess to clean up when I arrived.”

I realized that he was bleeding. A bandage was wrapped around his forearm. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing.”

He looked like the man I had laughed with yesterday, when he did his impression of the town drunk. He looked like the man who had lifted me into his arms when I saw a mouse skitter across the floor and refused to walk in the kitchen until I was sure it had been caught.

He was so close, now, that I could smell peppermint on his breath; I could see the flecks of green in the molten gold of his eyes. I swallowed. “Are you what I think you are?”

Aleks did not blink. “Would it matter?”

When he kissed me, I felt like I was being consumed. I was rising, expanding from the inside, frustrated that there was skin between us, that I could not get closer. I clawed at the small of his back, my fingers slipping beneath his shirt. He held my head in the cradle of his hands, and gently, so gently that I did not even feel it, he bit my lip.

There was blood in my mouth and on his. It tasted like metal, like pain. I pulled away from him, drinking the taste of myself for the first time.

In retrospect I could only think that he was as shaken by the moment as I was. Or surely he would have heard the approach of Damian, who flung open the door with his soldiers, their bayonets trained on us.

LEO

The reason that we go to meet the people who bring us plausible tips about potential Nazis is so that we can make sure they aren’t nuts. You can usually get a good reading in a few moments about whether your informant is balanced and sane, or whether she is acting on a grudge, is paranoid, or is just plain crazy.