Draw the Dark (17 page)

Perhaps the fire had been the final straw. After all that had happened, maybe it was just too much for the Jews of Winter to bear.

What would it be like to watch your community dissolve around you? Hell, that’s what. Mr. Witek would already be cut off from the community because of his father. His friends would drop away one by one. Pavel wouldn’t want to swing with him anymore. The other kids in school wouldn’t talk to him, or they’d elbow one another as he walked by. Going to school must’ve been torture, the whispers swirling in his wake.

I knew all about that kind of life. I lived it. Only I hadn’t left, not yet anyway. Planning on it, though. College never looked so good.

But here was what I didn’t get: why had Mr. Witek come back?

I shook myself back to attention.

Then I remembered.

I clicked on the link, and a scan of an old newspaper page appeared on my screen. The article, on page eight, was from the
Milwaukee Post-Dispatch
and was dated 5 November 1945. The story had been buried and took up one column along the lower right of the page. Above the headline—Fire Destroys Town Synagogue, Kills 15—was a black-and-white photograph of the synagogue as it had looked before being destroyed.

I took one look and thought:
Of course, it had to be.

The White Lady was a synagogue.

She was right. That had flown right past me.

I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure I thought the murder and Catherine Bleverton’s death were related, just that it seemed kind of bad karma for all that stuff to happen so close together.

I guess I was thinking like Uncle Hank. For a cop, there are no coincidences.

That gave me a very complicated feeling.

I got ready for bed and then stretched out on top of my sheets. My entire body craved sleep; my brain felt sore, but I couldn’t calm down. I had the sense that I had disparate bits and pieces of an important story and that I was very close to things falling into place. You know how trees and garbage get all jammed up in strainers sometimes? That’s how my brain felt: like a logjam with white water roaring all around, only now things were moving, the strainer breaking up, and logs starting to float free and pick up speed.

After about a half hour of this—enough to hear the front door close and Dr. Rainier’s truck rumble off and Uncle Hank’s slow step up the stairs to his room—I flicked on a bedside lamp, padded to where I’d tossed my jeans, fished out my list, and then settled back against some pillows.

I’d inked in more information alongside some of the items—the White Lady as an old synagogue, for example—but there were now other things I knew, avenues to explore, and I felt as if I needed to order all this into some coherent narrative, if just for myself.

Flipping to a blank piece of paper, I wrote:

Mordecai Mendel Witek was a Polish artist who moved to Winter sometime after 1935. His wife’s name was Chana; they had two children, Marta and David. Witek worked in Eisenmann’s foundry as a ceramics artist, and during that time, he became involved with the labor unions. The unions must have had a lot of Jewish members because there was a large enough Jewish population to support a synagogue, Beth Tikva, which was nicknamed the White Lady, and the Jewish community let the unions use the synagogue for their meetings.

In June 1945, Eisenmann lent the dormitories on his foundry’s grounds to the military to house German prisoners of war. This wouldn’t be so hard because of all the Germans in town. The PWs were brought into Winter to work the fields and supply manpower for the foundry.

Something dinged in my head. Something important there, but I was missing it. I chased after the thought a couple seconds, staring at that last paragraph a moment, but nothing surfaced.

I continued:
There must’ve been problems with the unions before this because the PWs had been in the U.S. since 1942. Maybe Eisenmann had asked for them before, and maybe he had to wait his turn, but Eisenmann’s a rich guy. He can get what he wants. Also, there are clearly enough workers in the foundry to support a union— so maybe the idea of getting the Germans to work here was to break the unions, not because Eisenmann really needed the help. This would be a way of rubbing the Jewish union members’ noses in it, by threatening to give their jobs to Nazis if the union called a strike.

Oh, I liked that. Eisenmann was ruthless enough to do that. I knew this was precisely the way other manufacturers had broken unions before: calling in scabs to work the jobs the union vacated. I knew from history class that there had been some well-known strikes in Wisconsin during the Great Depression.

I went back to my narrative:

The Germans arrive. Witek is a union official, and he’s pissed and so are the other union members. But there’s nothing they can do about it.

I stopped again. Here, my narrative started to break down. The Germans arrived in June or July; the murder happened in October. So what happened in between?

According to the newspapers, somewhere in that time period—or maybe before—Witek either had an affair or became obsessed with Charles Eisenmann’s fiancée, Catherine Bleverton.

So what if Eisenmann decided to meet Witek and have it out with him, tell him to stay away from his fiancée or else? Witek went bonkers, attacked Eisenmann; Brotz was maybe someone Eisenmann brought along as a witness. Only Brotz gets killed; Eisenmann gets cut up; Witek panics and runs away....

Leaving his wife and kids? That may have made sense, but it didn’t feel right. But it
did
make sense because . . .

“Oh boy.” I actually hit my head with my hand. “You are so stupid.”

Katarina at Sunset.
The painting of Catherine in Mr. Witek’s room: the one of the woman in the red silk kimono.

And now that I was really thinking about it, that weird jumbled dream bubbled up in my brain—the one about a garden room and brook and Papa painting....

I could fire up my computer again—but I didn’t really need to. I didn’t need to look up the various spellings of a particular name or figure out if one was the Russian or Eastern European variation. I knew it was. There were David’s charged, horrified memories, after all. So I knew that this is what I would find: Katarina and Catherine Bleverton—Mr. Eisenmann’s fiancée—were one and the same.

On the other hand, women posed for artists all the time. Except Catherine Bleverton was rich, an heiress. She’d have a position in society. I doubted she wanted just
anyone
to see her nude because she’d surely have been recognized. And where would Mordecai Witek and Catherine Bleverton have met, and how? He was an immigrant Jew, probably poor, and married. He had kids. It wasn’t like they’d go to church and meet up with the Blevertons in the pews.

Milwaukee? Maybe. That’s where she lived and where Witek was when he first came to Wisconsin. I remembered the numbers above and below the Star of David signature Witek favored: 3 and 9. The numbers on the kimono painting were 4 and 5. Dates. They probably referenced a
year
. Maybe Witek actually met and painted Catherine Bleverton in 1939, way before she knew Eisenmann. So she and Witek had known each other for nine years? Maybe ten?

Wow.

Well, why not? I didn’t know what the rules of the Lakeside Arts Festival were, but I suspected an artist could enter anything he wanted, old or new. Entering
that
painting of a wellknown woman would’ve been seen as either incredibly daring or sensationally scandalous. It certainly made people sit up and take notice—and it solidified Witek’s reputation.

So was that when they started their affair? In 1939?

Even as I thought this, I realized there was another scenario. Catherine Bleverton might have commissioned the portrait herself. Witek might not have initiated a thing. Maybe she saw something he’d done and sought him out. Catherine could’ve said she wanted something scandalous for whatever reason. Then, years later, when Witek’s star is rising, she commissions another portrait, just as sensual. I wondered where the kimono portrait had been done. By 1940, Witek was living in Winter. So either they’d kept in touch or she contacted him in 1945 to paint her again. But by then, she’d have been engaged to Charles Eisenmann and . . .

Holy crap.

So an affair was discovered and a man was killed accidentally, and Witek went on the run—but then why the wolves? Why the swastikas?

It was so frustrating. The clues were there but jumbled up in David’s mind. For example, those wolves . . . no, no, men—
Germans
—who turned into wolves.

Then I remembered what Pavel had said: Wolfsangels.

Turned out that
Wolfsangel
—or “wolf’s hook”—is an old German symbol that has two meanings. The upright version’s called a
thunderbolt
; the horizontal variant means . . .
werewolf
. Men who turn into wolves.

And, the Wolfsangel was used as a symbol for the 8th Panzer Division, World War II.