“Probably?”
“Don’t get in an uproar.” He sat back.
“Where’d you see it?”
“Just before Motor, near Fox Studios. Probably my imagination- there doesn’t seem to be anyone back there now, but it’s too stacked up to be sure.”
“Maybe it wasn’t your imagination. I’ve had the same feeling a couple of times the last week.”
“That so?”
“I also put it down to imagination.”
“Probably was.”
“Probably?”
“Like I said, Alex, don’t get in an uproar. Even if there was someone, most likely it was the Department.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The car. Plymouth sedan. Flat gray, black-wall tires, radio antennae. Except for the narcs and all their confiscated hot rods, the Department hasn’t discovered special effects.”
“Why would the Department be following us?”
“Not us. Me. Maybe I stepped on someone’s toes. Got big feet.” He wiggled his brogans.
I said, “Frisk?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose. It’s Kenny’s type of game, but it could be anyone. My persona’s never that grata.”
“But what about the ones who followed me? Guilt by association?”
“Ones? How many were there?”
“Two, both times. First in a brown Toyota, then some kind of sedan. Male and female the second time, I think.”
“Sounds kind of imaginative for the Department. When and where’d it happen?”
“Both times were at night. Coming out of restaurants. The first time I was by myself, in Santa Monica. The second was this past Sunday night, with Linda. Melrose near LaBrea.”
“How long did they stay with you?”
“Not long.” I told him about driving into the gas station to avoid the brown Toyota.
He smiled. “Flashy move, Double-0-Seven. They show any signs of noticing you after you pulled into the station?”
“No. Just drove right by.”
“What about the second time?”
I shook my head. “I pulled off onto a side street and they were gone.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a tail,” he said. “And no similarities to the one I just saw. This was one guy- male Cauc, standard issue. And he didn’t just stay right on our tail. He hung back- the way they teach you in cop school. That’s what caught my eye- the spacing. Professionalism. A civilian would have missed it. I could have easily missed it. Even now, I’m not sure it wasn’t some guy just happening to be driving by. If the Department was bothering to run a two-man tail, chances are the second guy would have been in another car, doing an A-B. Your guys, on the other hand, were obvious as hell- you saw ’em, didn’t you? Which leads me to believe they weren’t tailing yon. So all in all, I’d vote for imagination, Alex.”
“Yours is real, mine’s baloney?”
“Just keeping a sane perspective,” he said. “Mine’s probably baloney too.”
He sat back, made a show of stretching his legs and yawning.
The crane was finally gone and we advanced. As I turned the corner, Milo checked out the cars that sped by.
“Nothing,” he said. “Forget the whole thing.”
We parked in the visitors’ lot in back of the center and walked around to the front entrance. After passing through a metal detector, we signed in with a plainclothes guard in an open booth. He was young, sharp-featured, with cropped black hair, a strong chin, and hard eyes.
Milo showed ID and said, “We’re here to see Judy Baumgartner.”
“Wait, please,” said the guard. Some kind of accent. He stepped back several feet and made a call.
“Israeli,” said Milo. “Since the swastikas, they use ex-secret-service guys as security. Very stubborn. They can be a real pain in the ass to deal with, but they get the job done.”
The guard returned to the counter. “She’ll be a few minutes. You can wait up there.” He pointed to a short, open flight of stairs. Above it was a landing backed with a black-and-white mural of wide-eyed faces. Frightened faces. It reminded me of the TV broadcast the day of the sniping.
Milo said, “How about we look at the exhibit?”
The guard shrugged. “Sure.”
We took the open stairs clown to the basement level. Dark hallway, the sounds of typing and ringing phones. A few people traveled the corridor, purposeful, busy.
To the right of the stairs was a black door marked EXHIBIT in small steel letters.
“Temporary,” he said, “until the museum’s done.”
He opened the door to a room about thirty feet square, paneled gallery-white, gray-carpeted, and very cool. Photo blowups lined the walls.
Milo began walking. I followed.
The first picture: storm troopers kicking and beating elderly Jews on the streets of Munich.
The second, stolid-looking citizens marching with placards:
RAUS MIT
EUCH DRECKIGE
JUDEN!
I stopped, caught my breath, went on.
A jackbooted, peak-capped soldier, not more than nineteen or twenty, using tin snips to cut the beard of a terrified grandfather as other soldiers look on in glee.
The shattered and defaced storefronts of post-Kristallnacht Berlin. Swastikas. Posters in crude gothic lettering.
Gutted buildings. Shattered faces.
A triptych midway down the first wall made me stop even as Milo kept walking. A winter scene. Forest of monumental conifers atop gently rolling snow dunes. In the foreground a row of naked men and women huddled in front of trench graves; some still held shovels. Dozens of emaciated physiques, caved-in chests, shriveled genitals. Victims obscenely bare amid the frosty beauty of the Bavarian countryside. Behind the prisoners, a dozen SS men armed with carbines.
Next photo: the troopers raise weapons to shoulder. An officer holds a baton. Most of the diggers keep their backs turned, but one woman has shifted to face the soldiers, screaming, open-mouthed. A dark-eyed, black-haired woman, her breasts shrunken, her pubic thatch a dark wound in white flesh.
Then: bodies, heaps of them, filling the trenches, merging with the snow. One soldier bayonets a corpse.
I forced myself to move on.
Close-ups of barbed wire- iron fangs. A sign in German. A shred of something clinging to the fangs.
Snarling dogs.
A blowup of a document. Columns of numbers, straight margins, beautifully printed, neat as an accountant’s ledger. Opposite each column, hand-scripted words. Bergen-Belsen. Gotha. Buchenwald. Dachau. Dortmund. Auschwitz. Landsberg. Maidanek. Treblinka. Opposite each name, a number code. Body count. So many digits. A horrific arithmetic…
More snowy-white images: bleached bones. Piles of them. Femurs and tibias and finger bones white as piano keys. Pelvic cradles stripped raw. Yawning rib cages. Scraps and fragments rendered unidentifiable.
A mountain of bones sitting on a base of dust and grit.
An incomprehensible Everest of bones, landscaped with jawless skulls.
My stomach lurched.
Another enlarged document: multisyllabic German words. A translating caption: PROCESSING PROCEDURES. The final solution.
Compulsively detailed lists of those bound for the refuse heap:
Jews. Gypsies. Subversives. Homosexuals.
I looked over at Milo. He was across the room, his back to me. Hands in pockets, hunched and bulky and predatory as a bear out on a night forage.
I kept walking, looking.
A display case of Zyldon B poison-gas canisters. Another containing a shredded striped uniform of coarse cloth.
Little children in cloth caps and braids, herded onto trains. Bewildered, tear-streaked. Tiny hands reaching out for mother love. Faces pressed against a train window.
Another group of children, in spotless school uniforms, marching beneath a swastika banner, giving a straight-armed salute.
Black gallows against a cloudy sky. Bodies dangling from them, their feet barely touching the ground. A caption explaining that the scaffolding had been specially constructed with short drops, so that death, from slow strangulation, was prolonged.
Guard towers.
More barbed wire- spooling miles of it.
Brick ovens.