The German Suitcase (4 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mark Gunther’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “The old buzzard wants to use it to kick-off the print campaign?!” he exclaimed, referring to the suitcase.

In contrast to the luxe style of Tannen’s office, Gunther’s reflected the flowery Provence palette of the Agency’s Paris headquarters on Avenue Montaigne in the fashionable 8th Arrondissement. They had overlapped there when Gunther, who had been running it as part of his grooming process, handed the reins to Tannen prior to returning to the agency’s New York office.

“I thought Sol would go ballistic. You made him aware of the downside, the potential for backlash?”

“He’s counting on it,” Tannen replied with an amused cackle. “By the way, he eighty-sixed the locksmith. One of his techs is coming over tomorrow at ten. I thought you might want to be there.”

Gunther nodded half-heartedly. “Better put that on hold.”

“Why? Sol’s dying to find out what’s in it.”

“So am I. But that suitcase is hallowed memorabilia. The contents possibly even more so.”

“I’m aware of that but…”

“No buts. It shouldn’t be opened until we know if our Mr. Epstein is alive. If he is, we should get his permission, and invite him to be there.”

“Why? He discarded it. Finder’s keepers. No?”

“No. Granted the odds he’s still kicking aren’t much better than the Mets making the playoffs; but we should find out. Either way, it should be done by a professional, a Holocaust archivist.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Leave it to me,” Gunther said, stealing a glance at his monitor. The spread sheet on the screen was titled European Profit & Loss. He saw the steeply descending trend line and winced.

“Problem?” Tannen wondered.

“Europe’s not pulling its weight. Going to have to get my ass over there,” Gunther replied, wincing again, this time at the news crawl below which read:
PROMINENT IMAM CLAIMS JEWS HAVE INHERENTLY NEGATIVE CHARACTERISTICS
. “Sol’s right, you know. Anti-Semitism keeps rearing its ugly head.”

“The global financial crisis…”

“Yeah, bad times always set it off. All of a sudden, Goldman Sachs, long revered for their incredible performance and ethical standards, are the bad guys.”

“Envy. They made money when everyone else was losing their shirts.”

“So did the Rothschilds,” Gunther countered.

“I don’t get it. I mean religion’s just a crutch to cope with the cruelty of life. Why all the fuss over which one?”

“The Nazis didn’t give a damn about religion. For them, it was about race. Racial purity.” Gunther steepled his fingers in thought, making a decision. “How long we’ve been working together? Ten, twelve years?”

Tannen nodded, curiously.

“I’ve always been under the impression you were Jewish. I mean, it used to be Tannenbaum, right?”

“Uh-huh. I’m not a member of the tribe in good standing. My mother was a shiksa, my father loved shellfish, and we summered in Sag Harbor. Are
you
?”

“Am I what?”

“Jewish.”

“No, but Grace is, you know that,” Gunther said, referring to his wife. “Her family had a bookstore in Amsterdam. A rival turned them in for selling banned material. They lived like hunted animals.”

Tannen nodded grimly. “So…” he said, sensing he’d been set-up, “where you going with this?”

“Well, for want of a better word, you seem sort of detached from an extremely sensitive issue.”

Tannen looked stung. “If you’re suggesting I’m not as outraged by Nazi atrocities as you are, you’re wrong. Makes my skin crawl. So, I tuned-out—became detached if you prefer.” He cocked his head and smiled at a thought. “There was one advantage to being Jewish…”

“Lox and bagels?” Gunther teased, deciding to lighten the mood. “Circumcision without anesthesia?”

“My bar mitzvah,” Tannen replied, unable to keep from laughing. “Someone gave me a camera. Changed my life.”

“Right you had a studio there for a while.

“Along with an endless supply of hot women, fast cars, international travel, shoots for
Vogue, Harper’s, Vanity Fair
… It was one endless cocaine-driven bacchanal. But hey, I was young and foolish, then.”

“Weren’t we all,” Gunther said, with a lascivious cackle and a glance to his watch. “Just enough time before my two o’clock to tell you a story. I had a social-psych prof once who got the class into this. Being a cocky Greenwich WASP, I got into it with this Jewish girl from Flatbush. Let’s check some boxes, I challenged. Religion: I’d check Protestant, and you’d check Jewish. Ethnic Background: I’d check German, and you’d check Dutch. ‘No,’ she said, forcefully. ‘No, I’d check Jewish.’” Gunther splayed his hands, implying it couldn’t be clearer. “Get it, now?”

A thin smile tugged at the corners of Tannen’s mouth. “Was she cute?”

“Very,” Gunther replied with a mischievous twinkle. “We’ve been married for twenty-two years.”

“Mazel tov,” Tannen said with a chuckle. “Nice lady, Grace. The Hopper show at the Whitney a couple of years ago…that was hers wasn’t it?”

Gunther nodded his eyes glowing with pride. “She’s working on a Kandinsky retrospective at the Guggenheim now.” He cocked his head in thought. “Come to think of it, Grace volunteers at the Wiesenthal Center in her spare time. She might have an angle on this archivist thing.”

“I’m sure she would,” Tannen said, his expression darkening at a recollection. “You know, when I was a kid, my Uncle Nat had a series of books on World War II. I start flipping pages, and before I know it, I’m staring at a mountain of emaciated corpses being bulldozed into a mass grave. It was sickening. Paralyzing. My uncle, well, he was a kindly man who watched Meet the Press when Lawrence Spivak was the moderator, and subscribed to the
Kiplinger Letter
when it was a typewritten flyer. Pretty well-informed for a guy with a floor covering store in Brooklyn; but strictly old school. Kept his feelings to himself.”

“So what happened?”

“He closed the book, looked at me with this sad smile, and said, ‘One day, when you’re older we’ll talk about this.’ But he died and we never had that conversation.”

“You and I are having it now,” Gunther said, softly.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A grime-blackened rescue worker in winter coveralls lumbered into the Emergency Room at the University of Munich Hospital carrying the limp body of a child. He made his way between the stretchers in the waiting area and past the queues of walking wounded slumped against the walls into the makeshift treatment center.

It had once been the Assembly Hall; but after the heavy bombings in April and July of last year, it had been taken over by the hospital to accommodate the ever-increasing number of casualties. The central core served as a processing area. The perimeter was lined with rows of curtained enclosures in which harried doctors and nurses, wearing sweaters and scarves beneath their gowns, treated the most critically injured victims. The air had an icy crispness and a medicinal scent that mixed with the odor of those who were still clinging to life, and of those who had lost their grip on it.

Dr. Eva Rosenberg had spent the last hour, trying to save the life of a young man whose broken body lay on a blood-drenched gurney. “We’ve lost him,” she said with a defeated sigh to the nurse who’d been assisting her.

Despite the exhausting chaos, Eva still carried herself with the confidence of someone who had always been as smart as the boys in her class, and even smarter when it came to medical school. Her lynx-like eyes had the blue-green intensity of her Galician forebears who had also passed on their raven-black hair. Clasped at the nape of her neck, it swept across the back of her white smock which concealed her willowy figure.

During centuries of tumultuous history, Galicia had been controlled by warring Polish Kings, Austro-Hungarian potentates, vengeful Polish tyrants, and was, now, being overrun by brutal Russian troops. When the disorder that followed World War One gave rise to pogroms, Eva’s father, an artisan who worked in gold, moved the family to Venice, in Northern Italy, where a more tolerant and wealthy clientele awaited.

Crushed by her failure to save the young man’s life, Dr. Rosenberg gathered herself, then slipped between the curtains into the aisle. The rescue worker with the child was coming toward her. “Here! Over here!” she called out, fetching a gurney. The bone-weary doctor placed two fingers on the little girl’s neck as two nurses joined her and rolled the gurney into one of the enclosures. “Her pulse is weak, her blood volume’s low; and she’s severely dehydrated.”

The nurses knew what to do. They’d been doing it day and night for as long as they could remember. One affixed an oxygen mask over the child’s face then slipped an IV needle into her arm. The other began cutting off her clothing that had stiffened with dried blood. “Piece of shrapnel here, doctor,” she said, pointing to a shard of blackened metal protruding from the child’s thigh.

“Might have punctured her femoral artery,” Eva said, examining the festering wound. “If it did and we remove it…”

“Like a finger in a dike,” the nurse said.

“Precisely. She could bleed to death before an O.R. becomes available.” Eva traced the path of the artery with her stethoscope. “Evenly paced flow above and below the wound,” she announced which meant it hadn’t been pierced. “Let’s get it out of there.” She was grasping the shard with a pair of forceps when the curtain swept aside, revealing Professor Gerhard in a lodencoat and a hat that partially obscured his face.

“See you for a minute, Doctor?” Gerhard knew it would be unwise to make the reason public, and said it in as casual a tone as he could manage.

“Sure. As soon as I get—this nasty piece of shrapnel—out of here.”

“I have an emergency that can’t wait, Doctor,” Gerhard said with more intensity, circling the gurney.

“So do I, professor. She could die if—”

The professor was next to her, now, and through clenched teeth, hissed, “So could you. The SS just paid me a visit. Your exemption’s been revoked.”

Eva stiffened, but maintained her concentration, and removed the piece of metal from the child’s thigh. The fleshy crater filled with fluid but there was no spurting of arterial blood. “Dress the wound,” she said smartly to the nurses. “And keep her warm. She’s in shock.”

“I’m sorry, Eva,” Gerhard said, guiding her aside. “Max called to warn me but it was too late.”

“No wonder he hasn’t been here. Jake and I really missed him in Ortho last night,” Eva said, referring to Captain Kleist’s talent for orthopedic surgery; to the exceptional skills for setting broken bones, for screwing complex fractures back together, for reducing dislocated joints that all three of them shared, and that the Professor had cited to Major Steig to no avail. “Max,” she said, her voice taut with concern. “Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” the professor replied not wanting to take the time to explain. “You can’t stay here. The SS have arrest warrants for you and Jacob.”

The color drained from Eva’s face.

“They’re searching the building as we speak,” the Professor went on. “You know where Jake is working?”

Eva shrugged, seeming as traumatized as the child she’d been treating. “He’s here somewhere. Trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

“Find him. Come out the morgue entrance. They won’t be looking there. I’ll be waiting in my car. Now. There’s not a minute to spare.”

CHAPTER NINE

Stacey was disappointed the suitcase couldn’t be opened, and was determined to find the Jacob Epstein who, during the Holocaust, had painted his name on the, now, vintage Steinbach. She emerged from the subway on Broadway and 79th—as she did every day on the way home—and made a beeline for the Apthorp.

John O’Hara, one of several long-serving doormen, was on duty. From the standup desk in the lobby, he tracked visitors, workmen and deliveries on a computer that displayed the data on monitors above the banks of mailboxes and in the Resident Manager’s office. He knew every resident in the building’s 163 units by name, along with their friends and family, as well as old-timers from the neighborhood whom he allowed to sit and read in The Apthorp’s 12,000 square foot garden—which was where he and Stacey were talking amidst the calming gurgle of its fountains.

“Naw, no Epsteins in the building,” John said, his Jersey Boys pompadour undone by a breeze. He tapped a cigarette from a pack and lit it. “But I’m pretty sure there was one when I first started. Jake Epstein. He was a doctor. A pretty famous one, too.”

Stacey’s eyes widened with intrigue. “What do you mean famous?”

John shrugged, smoke streaming from his nose and mouth. “You know. You hear things, stuff in the papers, on TV…Dr. Epstein honored for this, made chairman of that. Had a lovely wife. She was a doctor too. Must be twenty years since they moved out.”

“Moved out? As into another residence, or as into the family plot?”

“No, no,” John replied with an amused chuckle. “Wherever he went, it wasn’t in a body bag.”

“You remember if he had an accent or anything?”

John flicked his ashes into a planter. “Yeah, New York-Jewish. You know, instead of Upper West Side, he’d say Upper Vest Side. With a V.”

“Thanks,” Stacey said, brightly, slipping him a ten. “Thanks a lot.” Bound by the doorman’s code of delayed gratification or disappointment, as the case may be, John pocketed the bill without looking at it.

Doctor. Doctor Jacob Epstein. This was a vital piece of information. Stacey had what she needed to narrow the search, and hurried across the street to her building. Its beige bricks and tacky aluminum windows were in marked contrast to her apartment that had a charming ambience. Indeed, furnished with an eclectic assemblage of found objects, it was the quintessential expression of her acquisitive personality.

She came through the door to find her boyfriend in the living room seated at her trestle table desk, the discarded one he had helped carry home and restore. Looking disheveled and sleep deprived, Adam Stevens was typing furiously on her computer while listening to the shimmering harmonies of a Phillip Glass Violin Concerto on his iPod. He had a pleasant face with sincere eyes and the two-day growth favored by male models and young leading men like Clive Owen, whom Stacey thought he resembled, which was why—when she wanted to get his attention or reinforce a point—she called him by the actor’s name.

“Hey, surprise, surprise, didn’t expect to find you here,” Stacey said, dropping her shoulder bag to the floor and kicking off her pumps. “What’s going on?”

“My computer crashed,” Adam replied without looking up from his work, though he did stop typing just long enough to remove his ear buds. “I think the hard drive got fried. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, but that’s why God made cell phones, Clive. I mean, like, suppose I was getting it on with this
NYT
reporter and Columbia alum who just happened to be a guest lecturer in my Ethics In Journalism Class?” she teased, recalling the very circumstances which, several years earlier, had jump-started their relationship.

“You could’ve been getting it on with Clive himself, and I wouldn’t’ve noticed,” Adam said, fingers flying over the keyboard. “I’m sorry. I’m on deadline. I panicked.”

“Which translates to what?” Stacey wondered rhetorically. “If you don’t get that story filed, you’ll join the long list of
NYT
casualties?”

“That’s not funny,” Adam said, his eyes riveted to the text-filled monitor. “They announced a hundred more layoffs, yesterday. Twenty-five in the newsroom.”

“Unbelievable,” Stacey exclaimed. “They can blow six hundred million on a new building but they can’t pay the reporters who work in it.”

“Yeah, along with the
Boston Globe
, the
L.A. Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
,” Adam said, still typing away. “Hang in there. I won’t be much longer.”

“No problem, I just need to Google somebody when you’re done.”

“That’s why God made Blackberries,” Adam said, a little too matter-of-factly.

“Gee, Clive, how come I didn’t think of that?”

“You want hard copy,” Adam deduced.

“You’re a rocket scientist, you know?” Stacey said with good-natured sarcasm; then in a conciliatory tone, added, “Yeah, I might want to print it out. Depends on what I find.” She mussed his hair, affectionately, as she headed into the kitchen which had a pass-through countertop and was open to the living area. “Get you a beer or anything?” she called out.

“A beer would be great.”

“Everybody keeps talking about the sorry state of the newspaper business,” Stacey went on, pulling a couple of Coronas from the refrigerator. “Pretty soon there won’t be any newspapers.” She headed back into the living room with the beers, closing the door with a backward swipe of her foot.

“Story signed, sealed, and—” Adam mouse-clicked on Send before adding, “—filed! That’ll teach those oil companies to contaminate groundwater in Queens!” Then, with the euphoria that always seems to accompany the completion of writing anything, he looked over his shoulder at Stacey and prompted, “Okay! So who are we Googling?!”

“We?” Stacey echoed, handing him the beer. “Who are you, my administrative assistant?”

“Among other things,” Adam said with a salacious smile. She was standing right next to him, now, and he slipped his hand under her skirt, moving it slowly upward between her thighs.

Stacey emitted a little squeal as his fingertip found its mark, and twisted away from him. “Oh no. No way, Jose. Well, not until you Google Doctor Jacob Epstein for me.”

Adam laughed and typed it in the search window.

“The word Doctor is key,” Stacey warned as Adam clicked on Go. “Truth is, I actually did Google him on my Blackberry; but I didn’t know he was a doc; and ended up with a coupl’a hundred thousand useless hits.”

“Jacob Epstein the doctor,” Adam announced as the screen came alive. Per standard Google format, the heading read: Results 1-10 of about 10,700 for Dr. Jacob Epstein. (0.35 seconds) “Let’s see…He’s an orthopedic surgeon…Inventor of prosthetic devices…Holder of dozens of patents. Not to mention Chairman Emeritus, Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Has a Family Foundation dedicated to supporting Jewish charitable causes. Headquarters in NYC.”

“Yessss! That’s him. Has to be!” Stacey exclaimed, doing a little pirouette that positioned her over Adam’s shoulder. “Born Vienna, 1920,” she went on, reading from the screen. “University of Munich Medical School…surgical residency nineteen forty-four…Married to Dr. Hannah Epstein, nee Friedman.” Her head tilted at a thought. “Is there an obit?”

Adam took a long sip of beer, then scrolled down the screen, and shook his head no. “Nope, no DOD.”

“Which means he’s still among the living. Yes!” Stacey exclaimed with delight. She held up her bottle of Corona to Adam’s. “Way to go!”

“What’s this all about anyway?” he wondered as they clinked in triumph.

“Campaign I’m working on,” Stacey replied. “And he’s the key to it.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “An eighty-what year-old retired orthopedic surgeon? What’s he going to be pitching? Peg-legs for Somali pirates?”

“No, pull-levers for one armed bandits,” Stacey retorted with an evasive cackle followed by a long swallow of beer. “Anything there about the Holocaust?”

Adam scrolled down the screen. “Yeah. Yeah, says he was at Auschwitz.”

“Awesome!” Stacey said, envisioning the possibilities. “Bart is really going to go nuts when I tell him. This is fantastic!”

Adam looked baffled. “How could you say that?”

“I’m sworn to secrecy,” Stacey said, mysteriously. “Agency-client privilege.” She gestured to the computer, and added, commandingly, “Don’t just sit there, Clive. Print that stuff out.”

Adam recoiled, looking offended. “Pardon me?”

“That’s what administrative assistants do, isn’t it,” she said in a sexy voice, undoing the buttons of her blouse; then, sensing his distance, she switched to a more sincere tone, and asked, “You’re really worried about getting laid-off, aren’t you, Adam?”

Adam nodded, glumly. “You know what reporters have in common with Cochran frogs and Indian pythons?”

“They’re all cold blooded?”

“Thanks,” Adam said, trying not to laugh. “They’re all on the endangered species list.”

“This isn’t exactly the Golden Age of print journalism, is it?” Stacey said sadly; then brightening at a thought, she added, “But if Dr. Epstein works out, I’ve got an idea for a fantastic story that just might have your byline on it.”

Adam looked up at her with an expression that ran the gamut from surprise, through hope, to curiosity.

Stacey nodded, reassuringly, then took his head in her hands, and kissed him. As their lips were parting, at that moment when the moist surfaces adhere for one last instant before releasing, she slipped a hand inside her open blouse and undid her bra, then gently hugged his face to her breasts.

“Got a little nervous energy you want to work off?” Adam mumbled, his voice lost in the soft folds of fabric and flesh.

“A lot,” Stacey said in a breathy whisper.

“You’re bad,” Adam said as they slid down onto the rug in a passionate grapple.

“You have no idea,” Stacey purred.