Yom Kippur Murder (13 page)

The police came very quickly. I was downstairs by then with Ian, and I opened the locked front door for them. They tried to be helpful, but I was in the embarrassing position of not being able to identify the man who had assaulted me, or even describe him very well. Nor could Ian.

“You gotta be careful here, ma’am,” one of the policemen said. “This is a dangerous building to be walking around in alone.”

I knew that. I explained what my business there was, and he shrugged. I sympathized with his frustration. All he could do was tell me; he couldn’t offer protection, and he couldn’t keep me from entering the building. They promised to drive by more often and alert the patrol car teams on the next tour, but Franciotti had promised that last week, and what good had it done?

Finally, after answering all the questions required for the complaint report, I walked over to Broadway to use a pay phone. I wished I had access to Nathan’s apartment, just for a place to sit down, use a bathroom, and look over my notes, but of course, he had given me the wrong keys or badly made keys and I had to improvise.

I started trembling as I walked, probably a delayed reaction. My mouth felt dirty, and I could still feel the pressure
of his fingers on my breast, as though each one had left an individual bruise.

To calm myself, I had a cup of coffee in our favorite coffee shop and pulled out my list of Nathan’s mourners. The next name was Strauss down on Seventy-second Street, and I had written a question mark for the first name. When I finished my coffee, I called Jack first and got him at his desk.

“Glad you called,” he said. “I talked to a guy at the precinct and asked about your missing address book. They don’t have it.”

“OK.” I suddenly felt a lot better. “That means whoever broke into the apartment took it. And I’ll bet it means his name’s in that book.”

“Assuming you’re right, how’re you going to reconstruct the entries in the book?”

“I can’t, but it means someone who knew Nathan killed him.”

“Possibly.”

I hate caution when I think I’m on a roll. “And it’s even possible it was someone who went to the funeral.”

“Also possible.”

“And I’ve got all their names and addresses, and I’m interviewing all of them.” I tried not to sound as smug as I felt.

“Terrific,” the love of my life said dryly. “Every time you knock on a door, it’s opened by a potential killer. You’d better check in with me before tomorrow night in case I need to look around for a replacement for dinner.”

“You’re overreacting,” I said, stifling a giggle. “I haven’t spoken to anyone under seventy so far, and the seventy-year-old looked like a kid compared to the others. I don’t think old men commit violent murders.”

“I just wish you wouldn’t play Sherlock Holmes. Can’t you be happy teaching poetry? Jesus, sometimes I think that sounds like the greatest life in the world.”

“It is, but I cared about Nathan Herskovitz. If Arnold Gold thinks Ramirez may not be the killer, someone’s got to
look into it, and I seem to have gotten the job by default.” My quarter dropped, and I started fishing around my purse for more change.

“OK, we’ve both gotta go. I’ll see you at six tomorrow.”

“Bye, Jack,” I said as the operator came on, rather proud of myself for keeping the attack a secret from him.

I pulled out the battered phone book, found B. Strauss on Seventy-second Street, and called the number. A woman answered. I introduced myself and got a sign of recognition.

“You’re the girl from the funeral,” she said.

“Yes, I was there.”

“So you were a friend of Nathan?”

“I was, and I’d like to ask you some questions. We’re not sure the police have arrested the right man.”

She agreed to see me, and I walked down Broadway to Seventy-second and then east toward Central Park. There are some fine old buildings there, including the Dakota, where I gather an apartment can cost a million dollars. Mrs. Strauss lived in one of the less affluent-looking buildings, but one with character nevertheless. I rode a shaky elevator up to her floor, and I heard the click of locks as I walked down the hall toward her apartment.

She was a modestly plump woman with a fresh, good-looking face and still-dark hair streaked with gray and wound up in a bun. We introduced ourselves, and she led me into a large living room with a grand piano that occupied a whole corner of the room.

“Do you play?” I asked when we had sat.

“It’s not so easy anymore,” she said, stretching out the fingers of both hands, then making fists and stretching them out again. “When you get to my age, a lot of things hurt, a lot of things don’t move the way they used to. I still play, but it’s not like it was.” But even as she said it, her face glowed
with a happiness that made me feel she had replaced her piano playing with something that gave her equal pleasure.

“I’d like to talk to you about the way some things were.” I went through my little monologue about Nathan’s murder and some of the things I was interested in. “Were you a friend of his?” I asked at the end.

“My husband knew him from the early nineteen thirties. My husband was a little younger than Nathan. If he were alive today, he would be eighty-one. I’m a little younger than that. I got to know Nathan in the late thirties, and of course, in a way, we owe him our lives.”

“He helped you leave Europe.”

“Not just us, a lot of people. But us, too.”

“Did he give you a book?”

“Oh yes, a good one. Wait, I’ll show you.” She got up with agility, left the room, and returned with a book which she laid in my hands.

The leather cover was extremely worn, and I felt nervous holding it, as though it were someone’s newborn baby. Gingerly I opened it about halfway. Most of the page was taken up with an illuminated letter. “It’s very beautiful.”

“Would you believe he wouldn’t take it back?”

“I thought Nathan was a generous man,” I said.

“There were times when he could have used the money. The first years in New York weren’t the easiest.”

“Mrs. Strauss, did you know Nathan’s first wife in Europe?”

“So you know about Renata.” She said it with resignation, as though she had already decided that that would not be a topic of our conversation. “I knew her, yes.”

“Do you know the story of the person who was supposed to get her out and—”

“And didn’t but accepted payment for it. I know. I wish my husband were here; he would tell you.”

“You tell me,” I said softly.

Her face took on a troubled look. Where Zilman had delighted in denouncing Nathan in his version of the story,
Mrs. Strauss was unhappy that Professor Black had done what she was convinced he had done. I got the feeling that it hurt her to recount the dishonorable act of another person, a person who should have been beyond reproach. “He was not a common laborer,” she said at one point of Professor Black. “He was a member of the academic world. To us, that is sacred.”

But her story was essentially the same as Hillel Greenspan’s. Nathan had contracted with Black for the latter to escort the three Herskovitzes to safety, and Nathan had paid him with the Guadalaxara Haggadah.

“How do you know all this?” I asked when she had finished.

“Because Nathan Herskovitz was no fool. He had my husband as a witness to the agreement with Professor Black, and he gave the book to my husband, so that my husband would give it to Black when Renata was safe.”

“Then your husband was the person who was too ill to testify in 1975 when Nathan took action against Black in court.”

“So you know all that.”

“I was at the auction house this morning, Mrs. Strauss. I talked to the man who was head of the rare book division fifteen years ago.”

“Please,” she said with a smile, “call me Bettina.”

“What a lovely name. I’m Chris.”

“Thank you. In this country I’m often called Betty, but I much prefer my given name. There was a famous woman in the Romantic period named Bettina.”

“Bettina Brentano,” I said.

Her face lit up. “So you know a little something about literature.”

“A little something,” I repeated. “Yes.”

“That’s good. It makes me feel closer to you. Yes, yes, it was my husband. You see, we were scheduled to leave with Professor Black and Renata Herskovitz and her children. We were picked up by a hay wagon, and we hid under the hay. We thought the farmer would go to the Herskovitzes after he
picked us up, but instead, he went right to the border. We were being pulled by a horse and it was very slow, so it was hard to tell how far we’d gone. By the time we asked Black what was going on, it was too late to turn back. He made up some story about why he hadn’t picked up Renata, but I think he didn’t want the responsibility. At one point my husband attacked him physically. If you had known my husband, you would know how ridiculous that was. He was a beautiful person, but he hated violence; it repelled him. For him to grab that terrible man and shake him was a watershed in his life.”

“So the three of you made it to safety.”

“You put very simply what was really very long, very frightening, very complex, and very dangerous. Somewhere along the way some soldiers stopped the farmer and made him take a detour to get them somewhere they had to go. They actually got on the wagon on top of the hay, almost on top of where we were hiding. They were rowdy and drunk and disgusting, and we feared every moment that we would be found and shot—or worse. That’s the way it was then with refugees. But yes, we made it to safety, and no, Renata and her children didn’t. When I realized what had happened, I sat back and cried. I knew as surely as I see you now that I would never see her again.”

“It sounds to me as though Professor Black counted on that.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“But if Professor Black didn’t fulfill his part of the bargain, how did he end up with the book?”

“As we climbed on the hay wagon, Black took the little bags we were carrying and pushed them in a corner. Sometime during the night, the book disappeared from my husband’s bag.”

“You mean he stole it.”

“You could say that. We felt that he did.”

“If Nathan had pursued his lawsuit, he would have had a very strong case.”

“Without my husband, it was one man’s word against the
other. My husband had had a heart attack earlier that year. He died in 1976, fourteen years ago.”

“Why didn’t you testify?” I asked. “You knew the story.”

“I didn’t testify because I’m an honest person, and Nathan respected it. He couldn’t ask me to perjure myself, even to recover that book. I wasn’t there when the agreement was made. I actually never saw my husband put the Haggadah in his travel case, although he showed it to me when he came home. I never saw Black take it from the case. What would a lawyer have said? ‘Your husband came home with a book that he later gave to Professor Black.’ What could I say to that? Only that there are people I trust and believe and people I don’t.”

“Bettina, something has been bothering me since I realized that the pictures in Nathan’s living room were of his first family.” Her eyes went up at that, but I continued. “He couldn’t have kept personal possessions through the war. How could he have had all those pictures?”

Bettina Strauss smiled. “We took them for him. When my husband collected the forged papers, he offered to carry whatever Nathan wanted. It was understood that Nathan would follow us by a day or two, but he would travel light and alone. My husband said he scooped up the pictures in the living room, put them in a little sack, and said, ‘Please take these.’ Between us we distributed them in our bags, in my coat pockets, even in the lining. It was the least we could do. We owed him our lives.”

“And then you gave them back to him when he showed up in New York.”

“He asked for them.”

“Did Hannah know about Renata?” I asked.

You would have thought I had asked her something unanswerable. She looked uncomfortable, uneasy. “Of course she knew,” she said finally. “When the war was over, Nathan was a man of forty. Hannah was younger, but she would have assumed he had had a family. Why do you ask?”

“Why did my question make you so uncomfortable?”

“I cannot explain to you how terrible those times were. People did things then that they would never have done in
normal times. That my husband could become violent, that I could rob a dead body …” She shivered, then became silent, and I regretted my question.

“Please don’t tell me things you don’t want to talk about,” I said.

“I want you to understand. Nathan had a wife that he loved. She died. He met Hannah. He loved Hannah, don’t think he didn’t. She was a fine and beautiful girl, very beautiful. Of course he told her. Half the people who survived were left widowed. Nathan didn’t talk about it, and I know he didn’t tell his children. Was that right or wrong?” she asked rhetorically. “Then was then and now is now. Today if you have a problem, you call a psychologist, and he spells out exactly what to do. Nowadays families tell their children everything. You don’t tell them, you ruin their lives. Parents are afraid, so they do what the psychologist says. In the forties and fifties, it was different.”

“Did Nathan and Hannah have a happy marriage?”

“Very. I knew them.” She said it with great certainty.

“I know she committed suicide,” I said.

“How do you know all these things?”

“Nina told me. I don’t think she ever forgave her father for the way he treated Hannah.”

“Ah.” Bettina slapped her palms on her thighs. “Nina doesn’t know anything. I told Nathan he should sit down with that girl, he should talk to her. She was so impressionable when Hannah died.”

“Bettina, Nathan’s living room is filled with pictures of Renata and the first children. There isn’t a single picture of Hannah, Mitchell, or Nina.”

“My God.” She seemed genuinely surprised. “I haven’t been in that place in I don’t know how long. The building was in such chaos, you took your life in your hands if you went in.”

“I know,” I said, still sore from my recent adventure. “But why do you think Nathan abandoned Hannah in his thoughts?”

She shook her head slowly. “He got old. He remembered the best times, the sweetest times. What else can I say?”