“Ah…”
“You mayn’t like me, but your nipple does.”
“Did you really mean it about Christmas, bastard?”
“I swear I did, love, and any other time we can manage. Maybe you could even move to London; have you ever thought of doing that? There are always posts for nurses, aren’t there? That was Mary’s experience.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. Not just pick up and move. Alan? Could you…really stay a fortnight?”
“I could get away with more than that, if I had the bug in; I’d have to wait till he’s out of the tent and talking to people…But I’m not going to let you do it, Meg; I meant it.”
“I already know—”
“No. I won’t risk spoiling our relationship.”
“Oh bosh. I already know you’re a bastard, so what difference will it make? I want to help the government, not you.”
“Well… I suppose I shouldn’t stand in the way of getting my job done.”
“I thought you’d come round. What must I do? I can’t wire things.”
“There’s no need to. You simply bring a package into his room. The size of a sweet box. It is a sweet box actually, nicely done up in flowered paper. All you do is unwrap it, put it close to his bed—on a shelf or night table or such, the closer to his head the better—and you open it.”
“That’s all? Just open it?”
“It goes on automatically.”
“I thought those things were tiny.”
“The telephone ones. Not this kind.”
“It won’t make a spark, will it? The oxygen, you know.”
“Oh no, it can’t possibly. Just a microphone and a transmitter under a layer of sweets. You mustn’t open it until you have it in the right place; it doesn’t do to jiggle it around too much once it’s broadcasting.”
“Do you have it ready? I’ll put it in tomorrow. Today, I should say.”
“Good girl.”
“Fancy old Harrington a tax cheat! What a stir it’ll make if he’s brought up on charges!”
“You mustn’t breathe a word of this to anyone until we have evidence.”
“Oh no, I’d never; I know that. We must assume he’s innocent. It’s quite exciting! Do you know what I’m going to do after I open the box, Alan?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“I’m going to whisper something into it, something I’d like you to do to me tomorrow night. In exchange for my helping. You will be able to hear, won’t you?”
“The moment you open it. I’ll be listening with bated breath. Whatever can you be thinking of, you wicked Meg? Oh yes… ooh, that feels very nice indeed, love.”
Liebermann went to Bordeaux and Orléans, and his friend Gabriel Piwowar went to Fagersta and Göteborg. None of the four sixty-five-year-old civil servants who had died in those cities was any more imaginable as a Nazi victim than the four who had already been checked out.
Another batch of clippings and tear-offs came in, twenty-six this time, six of them possibles. There were now seventeen, of which eight—including the three of October 16th—had been eliminated. Liebermann was certain Barry had been wrong, but reminding himself of the gravity of the situation if, he decided to check out five more, the ones most easily checked. Two in Denmark he delegated to one of his contributors there, a bill collector named Goldschmidt, and one in Trittau, near Hamburg, to Klaus. Two in England he checked out himself, combining business with pleasure—a visit with his daugher Dena and her family, in Reading.
The five were the same as the other eight. Different, but the same. Klaus reported that the Widow Schreiber had propositioned him.
A few more clippings came in, with a note from Beynon: Afraid I can’t justify this to London any longer. Has anything come of it?
Liebermann called him; he was out.
But he returned the call an hour later.
“No, Sydney,” Liebermann said, “it was only wild geese. Thirteen I checked, out of seventeen that could have been. Not one was a man the Nazis would plan to kill. But it’s good I checked, and I’m only sorry that I put you to so much trouble.”
“Not a bit of it. The boy hasn’t turned up yet?”
“No. I had a letter from his father. He’s been down there twice, in Brazil, and twice to Washington; he doesn’t want to give up.”
“Pity. Let me know if he finds anything.”
“I will. And thank you again, Sydney.”
None of the final few clippings was a possible. Which was just as well. Liebermann turned his attention to a letter-writing campaign aimed at getting the West German government to renew attempts to extradite Walter Rauff—responsible for the gassing of ninety-seven thousand women and children and living then (and now) under his own name in Punta Arenas, Chile.
In January of 1975 Liebermann went to the United States for what was to have been a two-month speaking tour, a counterclockwise circuit of the eastern half of the country starting and ending in New York City. His lecture bureau had booked seventy-odd engagements for him, some at colleges and universities and the majority in temples and at luncheon meetings of Jewish groups. Before being sent on the tour he was escorted to Philadelphia and put on a television program (along with a health-food expert, an actor, and a woman who had written an erotic novel; but invaluable and hard-to-arrange publicity, Mr. Goldwasser of the bureau assured him).
On Thursday evening, January 14th, Liebermann spoke at Congregation Knesses Israel in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A woman who had brought a paperback copy of his book for him to autograph said as he wrote in it that she was from Lenox, not Pittsfield.
“Lenox?” he asked. “That’s near here?”
“Seven miles,” she said, smiling. “I’d have come if it were seventy.”
He smiled and thanked her.
November 16th: Curry, Jack; Lenox, Massachusetts. He hadn’t brought the list with him but it was there in his head.
That night, in the guest room of the congregation’s president, he lay awake, listening to snowflakes patting at the windowpanes. Curry. Something with taxes, an assessor or auditor. Killed in a hunting accident, someone’s wild shot. Aimed shot?
He had checked. Thirteen out of seventeen. Including the three on October 16th. But only seven miles? The bus ride to Worcester wouldn’t take more than two hours, and he didn’t have to be there till dinnertime. Even after dinnertime in a pinch…
Early the next morning he borrowed his hostess’s car, a big Oldsmobile, and drove to Lenox. Five inches of snow had fallen and more was coming down, but the roads were only thinly covered. Bulldozers pushed snow aside; other machines threw snow away in rushing arches. Incredible; back home everything would have been stopped dead.
In Lenox he found that no one had admitted shooting Jack Curry. And no, off the record, Police Chief DeGregorio wasn’t sure it had been an accident. The hit had been suspiciously clean; smack through the back of the red hunting cap. That seemed more like good aim than bad luck. But Curry had been dead five or six hours when he had been found, and the area had then been walked over by at least a dozen people; so what could the police have been expected to find? Not even the shell had turned up. They had nosed around for someone with a grudge against Curry, but hadn’t found anyone. He had been a fair and even-handed assessor, a respected and well-liked townsman. Had he belonged to any international group or organization? The Rotary; beyond that, Liebermann would have to ask Mrs. Curry. But DeGregorio didn’t think she’d want to talk much; he heard she was still pretty broken up about it.
At midmorning Liebermann sat in a small untidy kitchen, sipping weak tea from a chipped mug and feeling miserable because Mrs. Curry was going to cry any minute. Like Emil Döring’s widow, she was in her early forties, but that was the only resemblance: Mrs. Curry was lank and homely, with boyishly chopped brown hair; sharp-shouldered and flat-chested in a faded floral housedress. And grieving. “No one would have wanted to kill him,” she insisted, massaging below her flooding eyes with reddened crack-nailed fingertips. “He was…the finest man on God’s green earth. Strong, and good, and patient, forgiving; he was a…rock, and now—Oh God! I—I’m—” And she cried; took a crumpled paper napkin and pressed it to one streaming eye and the other, laid her forehead on her hand, her sharp elbow on the tabletop; sobbed and shook.