"I need you to come down to the Sorrento with me to help identify the two men who visited you and Kari up in Bellingham."
"You've found them?"
"I think so, but I need your help to be sure."
"How soon do you need me?"
"As soon as possible. Don't go to the hotel. I'm here in my office in the Public Safety Building. Come here first," I told him. "There's a guard downstairs. You can't come up to the fifth floor, but he'll call to let me know you're here. We'll ride over to the hotel together."
"Don't you want me to go get Kari so she could be there, too?"
"No," I said, "let's leave Kari out of this for the time being. She might have more of a conflict than you do when it comes to all this."
"Oh," Michael Morris said after a moment's thought. "I see what you mean," he added. "I'll be there just as soon as I can."
Michael and I arrived early, even after swinging by Belltown Terrace so I could put on something a little more appropriate for the rarefied atmosphere of the Sorrento. We commandeered a table in the well-appointed lobby-a table that allowed us an unobstructed view of both the front entrance and the elevator. We drank coffee, watched, and waited until Sue arrived.
Once again, she looked surprisingly good. After I ordered another coffee, one for Sue, I told her so.
She grinned. "Every woman looks good in a little black dress," she said. "But I came prepared." The matching evening bag that dangled by a string over one shoulder had a peculiar bulge and weight to it. I was glad to see she was carrying.
"Good," I said while Michael Morris' eyes bulged. I don't think the idea of real guns and real bullets had ever crossed his mind until that very moment.
The plan was simple. Sue and I took our positions-Sue in the wing-backed chair nearest the door that entered the lobby from the stairwell, and I at a point across from both the elevator and the main entrance. Michael's job was twofold. First he was to use the telephone and call to see if either Moise or Avram would answer the phone. If so, Michael was to tell them that he had important information to share with them. Hopefully, using that ruse, he could charm one or the other of the two men into coming down to the lobby for a conference.
That done, Michael was to position himself so he could see as much of the lobby area as possible and give us a prearranged signal as soon as either man appeared in the lobby. From that point on, Michael was ordered to leave everything else to Sue and me.
When Michael went over to use the phone, my heart started beating faster in my chest. The prospect of some kind of physical confrontation always gets the adrenaline flowing. I'm sure Sue was affected the same way. That's a conditioned response with cops-a way of life.
We couldn't hear exactly what Michael was saying while he was on the phone. When he finished the call, he retreated to his assigned chair and slumped down in it while Sue and I kept watch on the lights over the elevator door. Moments after Michael regained the chair, the elevator began rising from the ground floor in answer to a summons. It stopped on Four, and the down arrow came back on.
When the elevator door slid open, only one man stood revealed in the opening-a man of about my age, weight, and height. Glancing warily from side to side, he stepped into the lobby. Michael Morris rubbed his chin-the affirmative signal we'd been looking for.
As the man moved forward, so did I. "Mr. Steinman," I said, cutting off his access to the entrance and holding out my I.D. "I'm Detective J. P. Beaumont with the Seattle Police Department."
He stopped and glanced toward the door that opened from the stairwell where Sue Danielson-fetching, in her "little black dress"-was watching for Moise to make a not-unexpected appearance.
There is a tense life-and-death moment in every police officer/citizen contact-even the simplest traffic stop-when everything hangs in the balance. It must be similar to the way a tightrope walker feels suspended above a gasping crowd, frozen in the blinding glare of a spotlight. One misstep, one slight miscalculation, and disaster follows.
For a moment, we were all frozen in time and place, then the door to the stairwell swung open, and Moise appeared in the lobby. He stopped just inside the door and stood, reconnoitering. He reminded me of a lithe young cat-prepared to lunge forward but hanging back, waiting to see if it was necessary.
With his backup in position, the older man's shoulders relaxed, and he turned to me. "What can I do for you, Detective Beaumont?" he asked.
"You can tell me exactly who you are and what you're doing here."
"Would you like to see my identification?" he asked.
"Yes, but take it out very carefully."
He slid his hand into the inside breast pocket of his coat and brought out a slim leather holder. He flipped it open and handed me an embossed plastic card. One side I couldn't read at all-it was written in Hebrew. The other side said only, Avram Steinman, Simon Wiesenthal Associates. There was no address-only telephone and fax numbers with a prefix that belonged to neither New York City nor L.A.
I looked at the I.D. card for a moment, then handed it back. "What are you doing here?" I asked.
"I'm a hunter," Avram Steinman said. His speaking voice carried only the slightest hint of an accent. "I'm here investigating missing Nazi war criminals. How about you?"
"I'm with the Seattle Police Homicide Squad," I said. "I'm looking for a murderer."
Avram Steinman's eyes never stopped scanning the room. He was every bit as on guard as I was, maybe even more so, but his anxiety didn't carry over into his speaking voice.
"Maybe we should talk then, Detective Beaumont," he said, with a smile of wry amusement touching the corners of his mouth. "It sounds to me as though you and I are both in the same business."
22
Tim, Ralph Ames' favorite waiter on the staff at the Georgian Room, once told us about his most surrealistic shift in a lifelong career of waiting tables. It happened, he said, the first night of Operation Desert Storm. While bombs were tearing hell out of the swimming pool in the El Rashid Hotel over in far-off Baghdad, war protesters were swirling in a riotous mass up Seattle's Fifth Avenue right outside the gracious walls of the Four Seasons Olympic. War or no war, protesters or no protesters, the niceties of hospitable dining remained unaffected. Inside the Georgian Room, all that happened was that a piano player upped the volume.
I recalled Tim's comment vividly as I sat in the elegant, dimly lighted Hunt Club at the Sorrento while the Simon Wiesenthal manhunters happily devoured their specially prepared kosher meals and spoke, with a physician's clinical dispassion, of Hans Gebhardt and Sobibor. Plates of regularly prepared Hunt Club-quality food came and went from in front of Sue Danielson, Michael Morris, and me. Maybe Sue and Michael ate some of theirs. I barely touched mine. I have no idea now what the food was or whether or not I tasted it.
In my day-to-day work, I see plenty of common street-thug mentality-the kind of thinking that makes life cheap enough so smart-assed kids regularly blow each other away over something as negligible as a forty-dollar World Series bet.
Moise Rosenthal and Avram Steinman were ostensibly law-abiding citizens-at least when they were on U.S. soil. But I had heard allegations that Wiesenthal tactics occasionally resorted to kidnapping in faraway places like Buenos Aires. What that really meant was that Wiesenthal operatives could be presumed to be both smart and dangerous. When necessity dictated, they were capable of making nice, but they weren't above going for the jugular, either.
Both men exuded the intensity of hunters on the trail of someone or something. Their brand of single-minded focus was a trait I recognized all too well. I see it in myself every day-whenever I look in the mirror. In the course of my life, I've learned that the idiosyncracies that seem entirely understandable and familiar in me are often the very ones I find most disturbing when I encounter them in someone else.