He went to the bathroom, took his twelve-o’clock pills, hung his other suit in the closet, and exchanged his jacket for his sweater and his shoes for his slippers. With his glasses in his hand he went back into the living room, picked up his briefcase, and went around and between desks toward the French doors to the dining room.
Esther said from the kitchen doorway, “I’ll stick around and keep an eye on the dripping. Do you want me to get that man in Mannheim?”
“Later,” Liebermann said, and went into the dining room—his office now.
The desk was heaped with magazines and stacks of opened letters. He put the briefcase down, switched the lamp on, put on his glasses; moved a stack of letters from several large envelopes beneath. He found the gray Reuters envelope, hand-addressed, bulkily full. So many?
Sitting, he cleared everything else out of the way, pushed piles of mail to the sides and back of the desk. Hannah’s picture turned; magazines slapped the floor.
He unwound the envelope’s string fastener and tore the taped flap open. Tilting the envelope to green blotter, he shook out, pulled out, a mass of newspaper clippings and teletype tear-offs. Twenty, thirty, more, some of them photocopies, most quick-scissored patches of newsprint. Mann getötet in Autounfall; Priest Slain by Robbers; Eldsvåda dödar man, 64. Blue and yellow labels with dates and the names of newspapers were pasted to some of the clippings. A good forty items altogether.
He looked into the envelope and found two more small clippings and a sheet of white paper that had been folded around the whole bundle.
Keep me posted, it said in small neat handwriting at its center. S.B. Dated 30 Oct.
He put it aside along with the envelope, and spreading the clippings and tear-offs with both hands, opened them out to greater visibility, a layered patchwork of French, German, English—and Swedish, Dutch, others, indecipherable except for a word here and there. Död was surely tot and dead. “Esther!” he called.
“Yes?”
“The dictionaries for translating, Swedish and Dutch. And Danish and Norwegian.” He picked up a German clipping: an explosion in a chemical plant in Solingen had killed a night watchman, August Mohr, sixty-five. No. He put it aside.
And took it back. Mightn’t a civil servant, a low-level one, have a second job at night? Unlikely for a sixty-five-year-old, but possible. The explosion had happened at one in the morning on the day before the story appeared, making it October 20th.
The overhead light went on, and Esther, crossing the room, said, “They must be in here.” She went to the dining table against the wall and read the sides of the cartons on it. “We don’t have a Danish one,” she said. “Max uses the Norwegian.”
Liebermann got a pad from the drawer. “You’d better give me the French too.”
“First let me find.”
He reached for his pen standing up among the mail. Glancing again at the clipping, he wrote on the large yellow pad—after a scribble at the top to get the pen going: 20; Mohr, August Solingen, and put a question mark after it.
“Dictionaries,” Esther announced, and opened the flaps of a carton. “Norwegian, Swedish, French?”
“And Dutch, please.” He put the clipping to the left, where he would keep the possibles. He looked for the one in English about the priest, found it, skimmed it, and—“Ei”—put it to the right.
Esther came, unsteadily carrying four thick blue-bound volumes. He pulled mail in from the side of the desk to make room for them. “Everything was organized,” she complained, setting them down.
“I’ll reorganize. Thanks.”
She tucked hair in under the side of her wig. “You should have kept Max here if you wanted translations.”
“I didn’t think.”
“Should I try to find him?”
He shook his head, picked up another clipping in English: Dispute Ends in Fatal Knifing.
Esther, looking troubledly at the spread of clippings, said, “So many men murdered?”
“Not all,” he said, putting the clipping to his right. “Some are accidents.”
“How will you know which ones the Nazis killed?”
“I won’t,” he said. “I’ll have to go look.” He picked up a German clipping.
“Look?”
“And see if I can find a reason.”
She scowled at him. “Because a boy calls up and disappears?”
“Good-by, Esther dear.”
She went from the desk. “I would be writing articles and making some money.”
“Write them, I’ll sign them.”
“Do you want something to eat?”
He shook his head.
A few of the items reported the same deaths as others; a few of the dead men were outside the age-range. Many were tradesmen, farmers, retired industrial workers, vagrants; many had been killed by neighbors, relations, bands of young hoodlums. He searched the bilingual dictionaries with his magnifying glass; a makelaar in onroerende goederen was a real-estate broker, a tulltjänsteman a customs officer. He put the can’t-bes to his right, the possibles to his left. Most of the words in the Danish clippings were in the Norwegian-German dictionary.
Late in the afternoon he put the final clipping with the can’t-bes.
There were eleven possibles.
He tore the list of them from the pad and started a fresh list, setting them down neatly according to the dates of death.
Three had died on October 16th: Chambon, Hilaire, in Bordeaux; Döring, Emil, in Gladbeck, a town in the Essen area; and Persson, Lars, in Fagersta, Sweden.
The phone rang; he let Esther take it.
Two on the 18th: Guthrie, Malcolm, in Tucson—
“Yakov? It’s Mannheim again.”
He picked up the phone. “Liebermann speaking.”
“Hello, Herr Liebermann,” a man’s voice said. “How was your trip? And did you find the reason for the ninety-four killings?”
He sat still, looking at the pen in his hand. He had heard the voice before but couldn’t place it. “Who is this, please?” he asked.
“My name is Klaus von Palmen. I heard you speak at Heidelberg. Maybe you remember me. I asked you if the problem was really hypothetical.”
Of course. The shrewd-looking blond young man. “Yes, I remember you.”
“Did any of your audiences do better than we did?”
“I didn’t ask the question again.”
“And it wasn’t hypothetical, was it.”
He wanted to say it was, or to hang up—but a stronger impulse took hold of him: to talk openly with someone who was willing to believe, even this antagonistic young Aryan. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “The person who told me about it…has disappeared. Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong.”
“I suspected as much. Would it interest you to know that in Pforzheim, on October twenty-fourth, a man fell from a bridge and drowned? He was sixty-five years old, and about to retire from the postal service.”
“Müller, Adolf,” Liebermann said, looking at his list of possibles. “I know already, and about ten others besides: in Solingen, Gladbeck, Birmingham, Tucson, Bordeaux, Fagersta…”
“Oh.”
Liebermann smiled at the pen and said, “I have a source at Reuters.”
“That’s very good! And have you taken steps to find out whether it’s statistically normal for eleven civil servants, age sixty-five, to die violently in—what is it, a three-week period?”