A Song of Shadows (29 page)

‘What about the message that Oran Wilde left?’

‘From what I read, he didn’t
leave
a message. The message was sent later. And what did it say: “I hated my family and burned our house down, but I’m misunderstood” or some shit like that? What the fuck kind of kid kills his family, then takes the time to sit down a day or two later and write a message to his buddy that basically says nothing at all, that doesn’t even ask for help?’

‘That wasn’t really the first message,’ said Walsh, ‘but I take the point. Yeah, the texts we’ve picked up are odd. Again, could be the accomplice. Suppose I accept the idea of complications and variables. The messages, the dead homeless guy, they’re just muddying the waters. But I have no reason to buy your central thesis about a link between Oran Wilde and Boreas.’

‘True,’ said Louis. ‘I was just thinking aloud.’

‘And Earl Steiger couldn’t have killed the Wildes, the Tedescos, Perlman,
and
Ruth Winter. That’s just not possible.’

‘No, it’s not. You’re back to an accomplice, but maybe just not the kind you thought.’

Walsh wanted to go home, in part because his wife would be in bed by the time he got back, and he liked slipping under the sheets when she was already there, to feel her move as she woke to his presence, to return her goodnight kiss, and hear her sigh contentedly as she returned to sleep, happy that her husband had come back to her safe and sound. Such small pleasures made life worth living. But he was also looking forward to the journey, because he did a lot of his best thinking when he was driving alone, and Louis had given him much to think about.

Walsh called for the check. When it eventually arrived, it remained in the center of the table, untouched and unwanted.

‘Hey, man,’ Angel said to Walsh, ‘why don’t you pick that up and see what it is?’

Walsh reluctantly reached for his wallet.

‘I figured you’d stiff me.’

‘And after all we’ve done for you,’ said Angel.

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Walsh placed his credit card over the check, and the waitress whisked both away.

‘One final question,’ said Walsh. ‘How does a man who looks like Steiger manage to stay under the radar for so long?’

‘If you look strange or different, you get pretty good at hiding yourself,’ said Louis. ‘You could choose to remain in sight, if you’re brave enough, but that wouldn’t work for a killer like Steiger. He needed the shadows. And he had help.’

‘This Cambion.’

‘Cambion knows how to hide.’

Walsh’s credit card was returned. He added a good tip. He wasn’t cheap.

‘Either of you ever hear of a man named Francis Galton?’ he asked, as he reached for his coat.

Both Louis and Angel took their time answering. With Louis in particular, it was a matter of flicking through the Rolodex in his head just to make sure that, at some point in the past, he hadn’t killed someone named Francis Galton.

‘Not that I can recall,’ he said at last. Angel concurred.

‘He was a founder of the science of eugenics – you know, improving the human race through selective reproduction, that kind of thing.’

‘A Nazi?’ said Angel.

‘No, he was pre-Nazi: late nineteenth century, I think. He thought you could identify character types through their features, so he set about photographing all kinds of people, including criminals. I think he was mostly interested in murderers. He’d line up the portraits, and expose each one to a photographic plate for a fraction of the time usually required for a full exposure so that he had a kind of composite, an average, on a single frame – you know, faces superimposed over one another.’

‘Why?’ asked Angel.

‘He was trying to find a common feature in their appearance: the essence of their criminality – of their evil, if you like. He wanted to believe that he could isolate it, that men who had committed terrible crimes might show some evidence of it on their faces. That way, you’d be able to tell who was a criminal just by looking at him. All he ended up with, though, was a series of distortions, and a kind of generalized degradation. But the photographs are interesting. Unsettling. I’ve been trying to figure out all evening why, when I looked at Steiger, there was something familiar about him. I just now remembered what it was: his face reminds me of one of Galton’s composites, as if what was wrong with him inside had seeped through his pores and caused his skull to mutate.’

‘Your job would be a whole lot easier if you could tell the bad folk by the way they looked,’ said Angel. ‘Or you could just end up putting behind bars a whole lot of ugly people who’d never done anyone any harm, and leave a bunch of beautiful people with dead souls free to walk the streets.’

They stood to leave.

‘Galton had it all wrong,’ said Walsh. ‘The worst of them, the really foul ones, they hide their badness deep inside. They look just like average Joes and Janes, but underneath they’re rotten right down to the core, and we don’t find out about them until it’s too late.’

They left the restaurant and walked together to their vehicles.

‘You know, Walsh, you’re all right,’ said Angel. ‘For a cop.’

‘Likewise,’ said Walsh. ‘For whatever it is you are.’

Louis simply nodded. None of them shook hands.

‘Don’t forget what I said about burning down towns,’ said Walsh. ‘You keep that shit for south of the Mason-Dixon.’

He watched them head back to Portland. Tomorrow, he knew, they would return to Bangor to pick up Parker. He wished them luck. He wished them all luck.

Walsh drove home, the car silent, casting the miles behind him like discarded paper, shifting pieces of information in his mind, trying to make connections. When he got back to his house he removed his shoes on the doorstep, used the downstairs bathroom, undressed in the hall, and slipped between the sheets beside his sleeping wife. He felt her stir. Half-awake, she reached for him. He accepted her kiss, and returned it. He listened for that sigh, heard it with satisfaction, and watched her curl up like a cat. He turned over, thought that he would not sleep, but when he opened his eyes his wife was gone, and he heard the sound of the radio from below, and the clattering of breakfast dishes, and the voices of his children.

Enough, he thought. This is enough, and more.

44

M
arcus Baulman attended the interrogation – they called it an ‘interview’, but Baulman knew better – at the Office of the United States Attorney, District of Maine, on Harlow Street in Bangor without a lawyer in attendance. The formal letter had arrived the day after Marie Demers’s visit to his house, informing him of possible irregularities relating to his admission to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The letter noted that he could bring legal counsel with him, should he choose to do so.

Baulman had thought hard about the approach he should take, and decided that an innocent man, an old German American who had lived a blameless life, would not arrive with a lawyer in tow. He dressed in his best suit, and took his funeral shoes from their box in his closet, dusting them lightly with a cloth before putting them on. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw, beneath the wrinkles and liver spots, and the white of his sparse beard and hair, the specter of the man he used to be.

Baulman was frightened, but no more than anyone who was forced unwillingly into contact with the institutions of law and justice. He was not about to panic. It was not in his nature. He wished that his wife were still with him, for he had never been ashamed to rely on her for comfort and reassurance. On another level, though, he was glad that she had predeceased him. Kathryn had, in her way, been a simple woman: she loved her husband, and trusted him. He looked after the bills, the bank accounts, the mortgage, the purchase of cars, the planning of vacations, and she was happy to let him do so. She, in turn, took care of him. It was an old-fashioned relationship, but what was bad about that? He had never cheated on her, and was certain that she had never cheated on him. They had enjoyed more than fifty years together before she passed away in her sleep, and the only shadow on their marriage was the absence of children. Perhaps that, too, might now be seen as a blessing, just like Kathryn’s absence from his life at this juncture. The loss of her had caused him so much pain, and he still lived with it every day, but at least it had spared her the hurt and confusion of all this. He would have denied everything, of course, and she would have believed him because she wanted to, and because her love for him was predicated on her faith in his honesty, but some doubt would surely have taken seed and prospered like a weed in a disused corner of her mind.

Marie Demers was waiting for him in the conference room with the historian, Toller, along with a third man whose purpose and affiliation they did not explain, merely referring to him as a ‘colleague’, an Agent Ross. Baulman took an instant dislike to Ross. He had the eyes of one who was never disappointed because his expectations of humanity were too low to allow for it. They thanked him for coming. Baulman asked if he was under arrest. They told him that he was not, that this was a civil matter. They emphasized that point. They simply wanted to talk, they said, but he knew that, just like in the movies, anything he said could be used in evidence against him. They didn’t warn him of this because they didn’t have to. He wondered how they could think him such an old fool. Then he remembered that what they believed they were seeing was not Marcus Baulman, a retired bus driver, but Reynard Kraus, a war criminal.

Yet he had become adept at playing Baulman, and was not about to falter now. He had been Baulman for longer than he had been Kraus. In that sense, the former was more real than the latter, and when he protested his innocence he spoke with conviction, for it was Marcus Baulman speaking.

They went over some of the same territory as before, and he gave them the same denials. Then they moved on to specific allegations, including claims that, as Reynard Kraus, he had trained at the
SS-Junkerschule
Bad Tölz; that he had spent time at the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office in Posen before moving to the RSHA; that he had served as a ‘medical attendant’ for one month at Auschwitz, following which he had been sent to Lubsko
Experimentallkolonie
, where he remained until the Allied advance forced the closure and liquidation of the camp. He was, they told him, not Marcus Baulman, who they now believed had been executed by the SS for desertion near the Dukla Pass on the Slovak-Polish border in September 1944, his death quietly concealed on orders from Berlin, where contingency plans were already being put in place to assemble new identities in the likely event of the collapse of the Reich.

Baulman asked, as before, where they had received such false information, and they spoke only of sources and documentary irregularities, and as he listened he smelled smoke without the heat of fire. It could yet bloom into flame, but if they had solid evidence then surely they would have confronted him with it. This was
ein Angelausflug
– a fishing trip. Baulman supposed that, in the past, some of their targets had confessed quickly, admitting their guilt. He was not about to join their number.

Then, just as he was allowing himself to relax a little, they sprang the next question on him.

‘Have you ever heard of a man named Bruno Perlman, Mr Baulman?’

Perlman, Perlman. He thought. Should he deny it outright? No, there was another way.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I have.’

He watched them all lean forward slightly, even the one called Ross, and he had to fight back a smile. It was as though he had caught their mouths with hooks. They were not the only anglers here.

‘I read that name in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘He was the man who was found drowned at Boreas.’

‘You have a good memory for names,’ said Toller.

Had he made a mistake? No. A little anger. Just enough.

‘I’m an old man,’ he replied, ‘but I’m not senile. I still read newspapers and watch the news, and Boreas is not so far from where I live. A lot has been happening there lately. Perhaps you should read the newspapers too.’

He sat back in his chair and let them see that he thought he had scored a point.

‘And Ruth Winter?’ said Demers. ‘You knew of her, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was murdered. Again, I saw it on the news. This was a terrible thing.’

‘Did you ever meet her?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Or I don’t think I ever did.’

‘So you’re sure that you never met her, or you think you never met her?’

‘I don’t know!’ He raised his hands in helplessness. ‘Could I have passed her on the street? Yes. Could I have raised my hat to her? Yes. Do I remember these things? No.’

‘And her mother, Isha Winter?’

‘Again, I may have passed her on at the street, but I could not put a face to that name.’

Demers made a note on her legal pad with a pencil. He watched her write, and wondered what he might have said that was important enough to set down in print when a device on the table before them was recording everything. Nothing, he decided. It was another move in the game.

‘Bruno Perlman,’ she said, ‘whom you say you did not know—’

‘I did not know him. I do not “say” this. It is true!’

Demers continued as though he had not interrupted her ‘—had four numbers tattooed on his arm. They were Auschwitz identification numbers, and corresponded to the names of four members of his family, the Nemiroffs. Does that name mean anything to you?’

‘No.’

‘They were transferred from Auschwitz to Lubsko at the end of 1944.’

‘I told you before, I knew nothing of this place until you came to me and began speaking of it.’

‘I thought that you kept up with the news,’ said Demers. ‘It’s been mentioned a lot lately. Thomas Engel served as a guard there. You know who Thomas Engel is, don’t you?’

‘I think I remember now. I have seen him on TV. They say he may be a war criminal.’

‘He is a war criminal, Mr Baulman. We have no doubt of that. Have you ever met Thomas Engel?’