Time Bomb (40 page)

I turned away from him and dried my eyes.

The gallery door opened. A woman came in and said, “Hi, Milo. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

Cheer in her voice. It jolted me like an ice-water bath.

She was in her mid to late forties, tall and slim, with a long neck and a smallish oval face. Her hair was short, gray, and feathered. She had on a silk print dress in mauves and blues, and mauve suede shoes. Her badge said J. B
AUMGARTNER, SENIOR RESEARCHER
.

Milo shook her hand. “Thanks for seeing me on short notice, Judy.”

“For you, anything, Milo. If I look a wreck, it’s from sitting at O’Hare for four hours waiting to take off. Place is a zoo.”

She looked perfectly put together.

Milo said, “This is Alex Delaware. Alex, Judy Baumgartner.”

She smiled. “Good to meet you, Alex.”

Mile said, “He’s never been here before.”

“Well then, a special welcome. Any impressions?”

“I’m glad I saw it.”

My voice was strained. She nodded.

We left the gallery and followed her down the hall to a small room furnished with four gray metal desks arranged in a square. Three of them were occupied by young people—two females and a male of college age—poring over manuscripts and notating. She greeted them and they said hi and went back to work. The walls were filled with bookcases of the same gray metal. A cardboard box sat atop the unoccupied desk.

Judy Baumgartner said, “There’s a meeting going on in my office, so this will have to do.”

She sat behind the desk with the box. Milo and I pulled up chairs.

She pointed to the box. “Ike’s stuff. I had my secretary go into the library card catalogue and pull everything he’d checked out. This is it.”

“Thanks,” said Milo.

“I’ve got to tell you,” she said, “I’m still pretty shaken. When I got the message in Chicago that you needed to see me, I thought it was going to be something about hate crimes or maybe even some progress on Kaltenblud. Then when I got back and Janie told me what you wanted . . .”

She shook her head. “He was such a nice kid, Milo. Friendly, dependable—
really
dependable. That’s why when he stopped showing up for work, I was really surprised. Tried to find the number he’d given me when he applied to volunteer, but it was gone. Must have gotten thrown out. Space is at a premium—stuff gets thrown out all the time. I’m sorry.”

Milo said, “He worked here?”

“Yes. Didn’t Janie tell you?”

“No. All I knew was he’d checked out books, done some research.”

“He did research for me, Milo. For over two months. Never missed a day—he was one of my steadiest ones. Really dedicated. His suddenly dropping out bothered me—it wasn’t like him. I asked the other volunteers if they knew what had happened to him but they didn’t. He hadn’t made friends—kept to himself. I tried to get a number for him but he wasn’t listed. Finally, after a couple of weeks of his not showing up, I put it down to impetuous youth. Figured I’d overrated his maturity. I never expected . . . never knew. How’d it happen, Milo?”

Milo told her about the shooting, told her it had taken place in a dope alley but left out the toxicology report.

She frowned. “He sure didn’t seem like a druggie to me. If any kid was lucid and straight, it was Ike. Unusually straight—almost too serious for his age. He had a really . . . crisp mind. Still, people can maintain, can’t they?”

“When did he start volunteering?”

“Late April. Walked in off the street and announced he wanted to help. Good-looking kid, fire in his eyes—passion. He reminded me of the way students used to be during the sixties. Not that I greeted him with open arms. I wanted to make sure he was stable, not just caught up in some impulsive thing. And frankly, I was taken by surprise. We don’t get much interest from non-Jewish kids, and with all the black-Jewish tension lately, the last thing I expected was a black kid wanting to do Holocaust research. But he was really sincere. On top of being smart. A very quick study, and that’s hard to find nowadays. The gifted ones all seem to stay on the career track, get rich quick. The ones like those three”—she pointed to the other desks—“are the exception.”

“Did they know Ike?”

“No. They just started. Fall interns. The summer group consisted of three students from Yeshiva University in New York, one each from Brown and NYU, and Ike. From Santa Monica College. All the others went back for fall semester. Ike didn’t hang out with them. Kind of a loner, really.”

“You said he was friendly.”

“Yes. That’s odd, isn’t it, now that you mention it. He
was
friendly—smiled a lot, courteous, but he definitely kept to himself. When Janie told me what had happened, I thought back, realized how little he’d told me about himself during the interview: He’d arrived a few months ear-lier from back east, was working and going to school. He told me he loved history, wanted to be a lawyer or a historian. He kept steering the conversation away from per-sonal things and toward substance-history, politics, man’s inhumanity to man. I was so taken by his enthusiasm that I went along with it, didn’t ask very many personal questions. Do you think he was hiding something?”

“Who knows?” said Milo. “There’s no record at all of his application?”

“No, sorry. We dump tons. Anything to avoid the paper-glut.”

“Wish I had the luxury,” he said. “By now I dream in triplicate.”

She smiled. “Be thankful you don’t deal with the fed-eral government. After years of haggling, the Justice Department’s finally started turning over names of old Nazis who’re still living here. They all lied on their visa applications and we’re processing to beat the band—meeting with federal prosecutors in the various cities, filling out
mountains
of forms, trying to persuade them to move faster on drawing up deportation papers. That’s what I was doing in Chicago: trying to sock it to a kindly old geezer who runs a bakery on the South Side—best pastry in town, free samples to all the local kiddies. Only problem is, forty-five years ago that geezer was responsible for gassing eighteen hundred kiddies.”

Milo’s face got hard. “Gonna nail him?”

“Gonna try. Actually, this particular case looks good. Of course there’ll be the usual outcry from his family and friends: We’ve got the wrong guy; this one’s a saint, wouldn’t hurt a fly; we’re only persecuting him because of his noble anticommunist background—Moscow’s behind all of it, you see. As if the Russians would give us the time of day. Not to mention a whole bunch of mewling from the nonconfrontational wimps who think human nature’s basically pure and bygones should be bygones. And, of course, straight-out anti-Semitic garbage from the revisionist morons—the it-never-happened-in-the-first-place-but-if-it-did-they-deserved-it crowd. Your basic neo-Bundists.”

“Neo-who?”

“Bundists.” She smiled. “Sorry for being esoteric, I was referring to the German-American Bund. It was a big movement in this country, before World War II. Passed itself off as a German-American pride society, but that was just a cover for American Nazism. Bundists were big in the isolationist movement, agitated against U.S. involvement in the war, used the America First cover to press for mandatory sterilization of all refugees—that kind of thing. But they weren’t just a tiny fringe group. They held rallies at Madison Square Garden for thousands of people, complete with swastika banners, Brown Shirt marches, ‘The Horst Wessel Song.’ Ran paramilitary training camps—two dozen of them, with bunkhouses for ‘storm troopers.’ Their goal was to set up a German-speaking colony—a Sudetenland—in New York State. First step toward an Aryan America. Their leaders were paid agents of the Third Reich. They published newspapers, had a press ser-vice, a book publishing company called Flanders Hall. Got support from Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford—the Bundesführer, a man called Fritz Kuhn, was a Ford Motors chemist—and plenty of politicians too. They interfaced with Father Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith, lots of other loonies. But after Pearl Harbor, their leaders were rounded up for espionage and sedition and sent to prison. It put a damper on the movement but didn’t kill it. Extremism’s like that. A recurrent cancer—you need to be always looking out for it, cutting it away. Nowadays it’s skinheads, revisionists . . . the Holocaust never happened. They thrive on economic hardship—tried to exploit the farmers problems a few years back. The latest thing is Odinism. Some sort of ancient Norse religion. They reject Christianity because it evolved out of Judaism. Then there’s this other group that claims to be the real Hebrews. We Jews are subhuman, the spawn of Eve and the snake. Farrakhan says the same kind of thing—white separatists showed up at one of his rallies and donated money.”

“Nutso,” said Milo.

“But dangerous. We’re working overtime keeping an eye on them all.”

“Was Novato involved in investigating any of them?”

“No. We keep the volunteers away from that kind of thing—too dangerous. I’m up to two death threats a week. He did library work: reshelving, working on the index catalogue. I’d call down with a list of references and ask him to get them for me. Sometimes I’d send him to outside libraries—UCLA or Hebrew Union College. Or over to the Federal Building to pick up some documents. He had a motorcycle, which made him perfect for that. Mostly what he did was read—on his own time. Sat in the library until closing time, then took stuff home with him.”

She looked down at the box. “I glanced through it. Seems to be mostly Holocaust history. The origins and structure of the Nazi party and neo-Nazi groups. At least that’s what he checked out. We’ve got a very comprehensive civil rights collection, and we put together an entire section on black slavery. But he didn’t check out any of that. I was surprised. Which just reminds me how easy it is to stereotype—you’ve got to fight it constantly. Still, it’s the first time I can remember a black kid focusing exclusively on the Holocaust. There was something about him, Milo. A naïveté—an optimistic sincerity—that was really touching. You just knew that in a couple of years he was going to get disillusioned and lose some of that. Maybe even all of it. But in the meantime it was nice to see. Why would anyone want to kill him?” She stopped. “Pretty dumb question coming from me.”

“It’s always a good question,” Milo said. “It’s the answers that stink. Did he ever mention any family or friends?”

“No. The only time he got even remotely personal was toward the end of his . . . Must have been early September. He came into my office to deliver some books, and after he put them down he kept hanging around. I didn’t even notice at first—I was up to my elbows in something. Finally I realized he was still there and glanced up. He looked nervous. Upset about something. I asked him what was on his mind. He started talking about some pictures he’d come across while cataloguing—dead babies out of the crematoria, Mengele’s experiments. He was really affected. Sometimes it just hits you, out of the clear blue—even after you’ve seen thousands of other pictures, one will set you off. I encouraged him to talk, get it all out. Let him go on about why, if there was a God, He could let those things happen. Why did terrible things happen to good people? Why couldn’t people be kind to one another? Why were people always betraying one another—
brutalizing
one another?

“When he was through I told him those were questions humanity had been asking itself since the beginning of time. That I had no answers, but the fact that he was asking them showed he was one cut above the crowd—had some depth to him. The wisdom to question. That the key to making the world a better place was to constantly question, never accept the brutality. Then he said something strange. He said Jewish people question all the time. Jewish people are deep. He said it almost with a longing in his voice—a reverence. I said thanks for the compliment, but we Jews don’t have a monopoly on either suffering or insight. That we’d swallowed more than our share of persecution, and that kind of thing did tend to lead to introspection, but that when you got down to it, Jews were like everyone else—good and bad, some deep, some shallow. He listened and got this strange smile on his face, kind of sad, kind of dreamy. As if he were thinking about something else. Then he turned to me and asked me if I’d like him better if he were Jewish.

“That really threw me. I said I liked him just fine the way he was. But he wouldn’t let go of it, wanted to know how I’d feel if he were Jewish. I told him we could always use another bright penny in the tribe—was he thinking of converting? And he just gave me another strange smile and said I should be flexible in my criteria. Then he left. We never talked about it again.”

“What did he mean, ‘criteria’?”

“The only thing I can think of was that he was con-sidering a Reform or Conservative conversion. I’m Orthodox—he knew that—and the Orthodox have more stringent criteria, so maybe he was asking for my approval, asking me to be flexible in my criteria for conversion. It was a strange conversation, Milo. I made a mental note to follow up on it, try to get to know him better. But with the workload it just never happened. Right after that, he stopped showing up. For a while I wondered if I’d said the wrong thing, failed him in some way.”

She stopped, laced her hands. Opened a desk drawer, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and blew out smoke.

“So much for quitting. My first all week. Talking about this isn’t good for my willpower. Since I got your message I’ve been wondering if there was something he was asking from me that I didn’t give. Some way I could have—”

“Come on, Judy,” said Milo. “Dead-end thinking.”

She held the cigarette at arm’s length. “Yes, I know.”

Milo took it and ground it out in an ashtray.

She said, “Been talking to my husband?”

“It’s my job,” he said. “Protect and serve. Got a few more questions for you. Hate groups. Anything new on the local scene?”

“Not particularly, just the usual fringies. Maybe a slight upswing in incidents that seems to be related to the situation in Israel—a lot of the printed material we’ve been seeing lately has been emphasizing anti-Zionist rhetoric: Jews are oppressors. Stand up for Palestinian rights. A new hook for them since the U.N. passed the Zionism-is-racism thing. Basically a way for them to sanitize their message. And some of the funding for the worst anti-Semitic literature is coming from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Syria, so I’m sure that’s got something to do with it.”