Desert Run (18 page)

Chapter Eighteen

I stared at Ian Mantz in shock. His father was Gunter Hoenig? One of the two German POWs who had never been caught? “That's impossible!”

He shrugged away my disbelief. “Improbable but not impossible. Dad never talked much about the old days in Germany and Mom never talked about their early lives together, either. It should have tipped me off that something was out of whack in ye olde Mantz household, but I told myself that they belonged to a generation which didn't talk much about themselves. But the day before I went to Vietnam, he told me I had a right to know the truth about who he was, so he sat me down and told me everything. He said that his real name was Gunter Hoenig, that after a few days on the run from Camp Papago, he, Ernst and his old friend Josef Braun finally found shelter in a cave somewhere in the Superstition Mountains. There was a lot of tension between him and Ernst. Josef, who I guess had the weakest character of the three, was content to follow orders, but after…well, I'll get to that in a minute. Anyway, after living rough for a couple of months, Dad was having second thoughts about Ernst and the whole situation. It all came to a head when Ernst wanted to raid a farm house they'd passed on the way up. Dad refused, said he wouldn't be a party to another murder.”

Somehow I managed to keep from jumping out of my chair.
“Another
murder?”

Ian sighed and leaned back against his chair. “The murder of Werner Dreschler, for a start, the German who was tortured to death at Camp Papago. Ernst set that up, but coward that he was, he let the other men take the fall. Literally, since they were all hanged.”

He paused again, as if gathering emotional strength for what he was about to say. “And the murder of the Bollingers. Ernst killed them, too, but this time, he did it all by himself. Dad told me that sometime Christmas night, Ernst found their farmhouse. Maybe Edward Bollinger caught him raiding the chicken coop or something and…and Ernst did what he did. By the time Ernst brought Dad and Josef up to the place to collect food and other survival supplies, the Bollingers were all dead, except for the woman. Dad was going to call for a doctor, but Ernst finished her off right in front of him.”

I had always suspected that Erik Ernst had murdered the Bollingers, but now that my suspicions were confirmed, I felt no triumph, only a great sadness.

Ian wasn't finished. “Dad wanted to leave Ernst right then, but Josef refused because he was afraid Ernst's contacts in the Gestapo would kill his family if he deserted their Kapitan. Since Dad was the older of the two I guess he felt responsible for Josef, so he went with them into the Superstitions. In a few days they found a cave—the place is riddled with them, you know. Everything was fine for a while. They pilfered food from various places and managed to catch small game. But then Ernst got the bright idea to raid another farm house, and to, uh…” Here he lowered his eyes. “…maybe rape one of the women. Dad not only refused, but he attacked Ernst. Unfortunately Ernst wasn't about to take that kind of insubordination, so he went after Dad with a butcher knife.”

Since Ernst was still alive and more or less well until someone bashed his brains in sixty years later, I figured Gunter wasn't much of a street fighter. Ian's next words proved me right.

“He managed to cut Dad up pretty badly. In fact, Dad probably would have died on the spot, but he had a notebook stashed in his shirt which deflected the worst of it.”

I could almost see the two men fighting: Gunter Hoenig for his life, Erik Ernst for the right to go on killing. Ernst was the stronger, and he had the bigger knife. But somehow Gunter survived. I looked up at the photograph of Ian sitting in a speedboat with another man: his father. “How did your dad get away?”

The smile came back to Ian's face, but this time there was no trace of sadness in it. “He was lucky. Very, very lucky. I guess Ernst believed he'd killed him, because he covered Dad with some brush and rocks and left. But Dad wasn't dead. He regained consciousness, managed to dig himself out from under, and took off. He told me he'd decided to go all the way back to Camp Papago, but he only made it as far as the farm Ernst wanted to raid.” His smile turned dreamy, like a child listening to a far-off fairy tale. “His knife wound wasn't deep, but it was bad enough, and it got infected. By the time my mother found him hiding in the hayloft, he was only half-conscious.” He went on to describe how his mother, sneaking out sulfa drugs left over from treating a sick cow, helped him recover.

This part made no sense. “Why didn't they contact the authorities? Or at least a doctor, for God's sake!”

“
They
? For a couple of weeks, there was no
they
, just my mother helping him back there in the barn. She was, what, only sixteen, seventeen? Nothing more than a kid who'd heard about the Camp Papago escape and imagined it to be as romantic and adventurous as a dime store novel, so she made him a bed up there, brought him food and water, and took care of him all by herself. By the time her parents discovered what was going on, it was too late to contact the authorities.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

He gave me a sharp look. “Ms. Jones, you have to understand the way it was then, during wartime. My grandparents were simple people, but they knew the U.S. authorities had rounded up Japanese-Americans and put them into camps. They also knew there'd been talk about doing the same thing to the Germans. Did I forget to tell you that my grandparents were Germans?” Duly noting my reaction, he continued. “They immigrated to the U.S. from a small villiage outside Frankfurt shortly before the war and weren't citizens yet. My grandfather still wanted to alert the authorities, but my grandmother was terrified that when it was discovered that an escaped German POW had been living on their ranch for the past two weeks, they'd wind up in camps like the Japanese. Grandmother, helped along by my mother's tears, won the argument and so Gunter stayed.”

“For the duration of the war?”

He shrugged. “It wasn't that long. Gunter left Ernst and Josef at the end of March, and Hitler committed suicide in April. The Germans surrendered a few days later.”

I thought for a moment. In those days before holographic drivers licenses and data base background checks, assuming a new identity would have been relatively easy. Especially in the confusion after the war. “So Gunter Hoenig became Gerhardt Mantz.”

“Correct. And that August, Eva Schmidt, my mother, became Mrs. Gerhardt Mantz. He remained on the farm, working with my mother's parents until they died, and then sold it and bought another one over here, where there's a decent-sized German community.”

I pointed to the degrees on Mantz's wall. “I take it he did well in his new life.”

Mantz nodded. “Very well. After a few years, he sold the new farm to a developer and started a construction company. It paid my way through college and dentistry school.” He smiled. “And everyone lived happily ever after.”

“Except for the Bollingers.”

“My father never harmed those people!”

Knowing that Mantz had a vested interest in guarding his father's reputation, I allowed skepticism to show on my face. “And you believe that because…?”

He rose to the bait. “I believe it because of what he did when he saw Ernst at Gemuetlichkeit. My God, he tried to kill the man with his bare hands! He would have, too, if I hadn't come along and stopped it. I told you that my father was an honorable man. The Bollinger murders weighed heavily on him through the years.”

Not heavily enough. I remembered Chess Bollinger, lying in a filthy nursing home bed, crying,
“Not me, not me, not me,”
like a litany, like a prayer. I remembered Chess' ruined life, his wife's and daughter's ruined lives—all because a weak, troubled boy had carried around a burden that should never have been his in the first place.

“You say your father was an honorable man. Then why, if he knew Ernst killed the Bollingers, did he stand by and let Chess,
a kid
, stand trial for their murders?”

Ian shook his head. “He didn't know anything about it. Like I told you, his stab wound was infected by the time Mom found him. His condition was pretty iffy for a couple of months, and Mom's family kept him away from any kind of bad news. By the time he was well enough to read the Sunday newspapers my grandfather always picked up on the way back from church, the trial was over and done with. Chess Bollinger had been found innocent. But before that, in April, Edward R. Murrow broadcast from Buchenwald about the horrors he'd seen there, and the paranoia among German-Americans increased to near-panic levels. Then in November, the Nuremberg trials began and the whole world learned what had happened at places like Auschwitz and Buchenwald.”

Granted, German-Americans—and especially Gunter Hoenig AKA Gerhardt Mantz—were probably frightened, but the way I saw it, fear was no excuse for keeping his mouth shut about murder. I told Ian so.

His answer took me aback. “As soon as Dad found out about the Bollinger trial, he did notify the authorities.”

“What do you mean? You just told me…Listen, I read up on everything that was written about the case. There was no mention anywhere that someone fingered Ernst for the murders.”

“I know, I know. But Dad was an enemy combatant living in enemy territory under a false name. Technically, that made him a spy, and the penalty for spying was death by hanging. Still, Dad did everything he could to bring out the truth without endangering himself and my mother's family. Remember, they were afraid they'd go to prison for harboring a fugitive. So Dad wrote several anonymous letters to the sheriff
and
the judge in the case naming the real killer. But no one followed up.”

Of course not. Unsigned letters telling the authorities they'd been dumb enough to accuse the wrong man—or boy, in this case—would have been summarily dismissed. I made a mental note to call Harry Caulfield. He'd been a mere deputy at the time and new to the job, but perhaps rumors of Hoenig's letters had reached him. Then I remembered the unsigned letter I'd found among Fay's notes. It bore an August 2002 post mark—the month after
Escape Across the Desert
hit the shelves. Yet according to Jimmy's research, Gunter Hoenig had already been dead three years.

I narrowed my eyes at Ian. “They say the apple never falls far from the tree. After your father died, did you continue your father's letter-writing campaign?”

He wouldn't meet my eyes. “Don't be silly.” But he flicked his eyes to the photograph of himself and his father out on Lake Pleasant in their speedboat. Liars always give themselves away.

“You father liked boating, right?”

He looked puzzled. “Sure. The whole family does. We have a Chris Craft and a twenty-six-foot Columbia, not that a sailboat's much good on Lake Pleasant.”

“Did your father ever go boating in Connecticut? Say, around the time Erik Ernst lost his legs in that boating accident?”

“Don't be ridiculous.” He rose from his desk and started walking toward the cabinet that housed the daggers, but stopped when he saw my hand slide into my carry-all. With a cold smile, he veered away from the cabinet and opened the office door instead.

“Time for you to leave, Miss Jones.”

***

Since I was already on the west side, I decided to drop by the jail and visit Rada Tesema. He deserved to be filled in on my progress, or lack thereof. But when two corrections officers—one black, one white—led him into the visiting room, my planned conversation went south. He limped, but that was the least of his injuries. One eye was swollen shut, and his upper lip was split, probably because his broken front tooth had exited through it.

“What happened to this man?” I demanded of the guards.

The black guard eased Tesema gently into the chair. “Aryan brothers got him in the lunchroom. Told him to go back to where he came from, that America already has more niggers than it needs.”

“Has the doctor seen him?”

“Yeah,” the white guard said. “Nothing's broken, except for the tooth. He should be all right in a couple of days, as long as they don't get to him again. We're going to do what we can to make sure that doesn't happen.” He gave Tesema a comforting pat on the shoulder, then he and the other guard exited the room, leaving me to speak privately with my client.

“Oh, Rada, I'm so sorry.”

His smile looked like it hurt. “I am sorry too, Miss Jones, that I am such a poor fighter. But is okay. The people from synagogue, they are here yesterday. One nice woman, she has son who is dentist. Says he will fix tooth for nothing when I get out. Put on crown. Put one on back tooth, too. They also taking up collection to fly family over. But is a lot of money.”

No kidding. The wife and all those children. “That sounds good. I'm sure you'll be out of here in no time.” I tried to sound upbeat, but I could hardly convince myself, let alone Rada.

He gave up trying to smile. “Miss Jones, will I see family again?”

“Of course you will. I've almost solved the case.” If liars go to Hell, I'd better get myself fitted for a fire-retardant suit.

***

It was six o'clock and almost dark when I arrived back at Desert Investigations to discover that Jimmy was still running background checks. When I told him to go home, he said that he wanted to have everything finished before he left Desert Investigations for Southwest MicroSystems. Which was just days away, I realized. God, what was I going to do?

“No dinner with Esther tonight?”

He shook his head. “She's picking out furniture.”

Funny. So was I. “Why aren't you helping?”

I couldn't tell if the twist his mouth made was meant to be a grin or a grimace. “Esther has very specific tastes.” After a moment's silence, he added, “But she says I can decorate the den any way I want to as long as it's that new color in all the magazines. Persian Pink.”