"We haven't had much luck tracking them. The Ukrainians pretty well disappeared into post-World War Two Soviet territory and never resurfaced. The same goes for the Germans."
"Including Hans Gebhardt?"
"That's right," Kari answered. "Until those two men showed up at the apartment."
"Did they carry I.D.?"
"Yes."
"And did their papers identify the organization by name?"
"Oh, yes," Michael said. "One side of the I.D. card was in English; the other was printed in Hebrew."
"I never heard of the Wiesenthal people killing anyone," Sue objected pensively. "I thought they always worked inside the law and turned the people they captured over to the local court system."
"These people may or may not be who they say they are. It's always possible the I.D. they showed you was fake. If they're involved in all this, it certainly doesn't sound like they're operating inside the law this time," I said. "Regardless of justification, these people don't get to be judge and jury. If they killed Denise Whitney and Gunter Gebhardt, they'll have to answer for it in our courts. That's the law."
"The law!" Michael repeated, snorting in disgust. "What good does that do? Look at Nuremberg. All those guys got was a slap on the hand-like the guy who was sentenced to three whole years in prison. What kind of deal is that? After murdering that many people, here he is, walking around at seventy-five, as free as a bird. My mother's family is gone, and his isn't. Not only that, we're all supposed to buy into the idea that he's paid his debt to society. In full. What a load of crap!"
Michael Morris was absolutely right on that score-serving a total of three years for killing 250,000 people didn't seem to balance the scale. Not even close. Still, the alternative to courts of law is anarchy.
"Let me remind you one more time, Michael," I said. "That guard was actually at Sobibor. Denise Whitney and Gunter Gebhardt were not. Even if they've helped Hans Gebhardt avoid apprehension-even if they've shielded him for years-they may be guilty of harboring a criminal, but that's not a capital crime. They didn't deserve to die for doing it."
Michael made a face and nodded. "I know," he allowed grudgingly. "That's why we're here."
"Tell us what you can about the men who came to visit you last week," Sue said. "Didn't you say there were two of them?"
"Yes."
"Did they give you their names?"
Kari looked at Michael, and he answered. "Yes. One was Moise something. Rosenthal, maybe. The other one, the older one, was Avram Steinman. That struck my funny bone. Moses and Abraham working together."
"Can you give us a description of the two men?"
"They were both white. Medium build. Steinman was quite a bit older than we are, like about Kari's father's age. Your age. The other one was closer to us or maybe a little older. Thirty or so. The older one had a pronounced accent. The younger one spoke American English. He had brown hair, almost the color of mine."
"Were they in a car? On foot?"
"I don't know. I suppose they had a car, but I didn't see it."
"How did they find you?"
"Maybe they talked to some of the people we wrote to-one of the escapees."
"And why did they come to you?"
"They wanted us to help them," Michael answered. "After the letters we'd exchanged with some of the survivors, I'm sure they thought we would."
"What exactly did Hans Gebhardt do at Sobibor?" Sue Danielson asked.
This time it was Kari who answered. "They told us he was in charge of extraction. After the bodies came out of the gas chambers and before they were thrown into the fire, some of the prisoners-ones who were kept alive for a time solely to serve as part of the work crews-had to go through all the bodies and remove the gold teeth. That gold, along with gold from confiscated jewelry, was melted down into bars and shipped back to Germany. At the time of the Sobibor prison uprising, an entire truckload shipment of gold disappeared."
"The Wiesenthal people think your grandfather stole it?"
Kari nodded. "That's what they told us. They think he did it with help from one or more of the missing Ukrainian guards. They told us that over the years, and one by one, the guards have turned up dead, but no one had ever found any trace of my grandfather until just recently."
"Did they say what that trace was?"
"No."
"Where do they think the gold is now?" I asked, thinking at once of the solid-gold box wrench Bonnie Elgin had found lying in the street.
"They think it may have ended up in the Eastern bloc right after the war, but they believe most of it has been smuggled out in the course of the last few years," Kari answered. "On fishing boats."
"To your father?"
She shook her head. "By my father," she answered. "Through his joint-venture connections in and out of the former Soviet Union. They seemed to think my father knew where his father was all along. I think they were hoping Dad would tell them what he knew."
In view of the two unused airplane tickets to Rio, I thought I had a pretty good idea of where Kari's grandfather might be holed up. By now, the Wiesenthal operatives knew that, too.
"Michael and I were just doing research," Kari continued. "I think that's what called the investigators' attention to us. I think someone-maybe one of the survivors we interviewed-noticed my name and made the connection to my grandfather. And that's why those men came here, looking around and asking questions."
Kari's eyes once more filled with tears. "After they left, I called Granny to ask what she thought I should do. She told me just to stay out of it, to let well enough alone. I asked her advice, and then I ignored it. I guess I thought that if he helped them, it would make things better. And that's why this whole mess is my fault. I brought him to their attention.
"You see," she added, "I hated my father, but I never meant for him to die. And it's hurt my mother real bad. I can't stand what it's doing to her. It breaks my heart."
At that juncture, Kari Gebhardt finally fell apart completely. She put her arms on the table, rested her head on her arms, and sobbed brokenly for several minutes. I sat there and listened to her and waited for her to stop, but the whole time I was listening, I was thinking about Sobibor. I think Sue was, too.
It was late when we finally finished up with the interview. We had spent another full hour and a half going over and over everything they could remember about their Nazi-hunting visitors. It wasn't very illuminating. The first available appointment we could make for them to visit with the Identi-Kit artist was for the following Tuesday. The artist doesn't work weekends, and Monday would be entirely taken up by the funeral.
Kari and Michael left. Sue and I returned to the fifth floor, where she had some phone calls to make. I could have waited for her and hitched a ride home, but I wanted to walk. I thought the exercise might help clear my head and shake off some of the horror of what we had learned.
I thought about the men claiming to be Wiesenthal Nazi hunters as I made my way down a pedestrian-crowded Third Avenue. My natural inclination would have been to root for Nazi hunters-to cheer them on. But not if they had invaded my home territory and murdered people on my watch.
Back at Belltown Terrace, I grabbed a quick shower and changed into one of the two Brooks Brothers suits Ralph Ames had forced me to buy. Without my lawyer/fashion adviser's counsel, I'd look a whole lot more like Eddie Bauer than I would anything else. Once I was dressed, I placed a call to the Four Seasons Olympic. I wanted to be sure they'd have plenty of room to squeeze my grandmother and me into the Georgian Room for dinner.
Why did I want to take Beverly Piedmont to the Four Seasons? Maybe it was a way to distance myself from the horrors I'd been hearing about all afternoon. But also, I think, it had something to do with pride.