Do you have that photo?” I ask.

“No,” she admits. “He does.”

Of course.

I rub my forehead. “I’ve gotta ask... does he have a German shepherd?”

A dachshund,” she says.

“That would have been my second choice,” I murmur. “Look, how long have you known Josef Weber?”

“About a month. He started coming to a grief therapy group I’ve been going to since my mother died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say automatically, but I can tell it is a kindness she isn’t expecting. “So, it’s not as if you really have a thorough understanding of his character, or why he might say he did something he didn’t actually do...”

“God, what is with you people?” she explodes. “First the cops, then the FBI—shouldn’t you at least be giving me the benefit of the doubt? How do you know he’s not telling the truth?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense, Ms. Singer. Why would anyone who’s managed to hide for over half a century just suddenly drop the pretense?”

“I don’t know,” she says frankly. “Guilt? A fear of Judgment Day? Or maybe he’s just tired. Of living a lie, you know?”

When she says that, she hooks me. Because it’s so damn human. The biggest mistake people make when they think about Nazi war criminals is to assume they were always monsters; before, during, and after the war. They weren’t. They were once ordinary men, with fully operational consciences, who made bad choices and had to fabricate excuses to themselves for the rest of their lives when they returned to a mundane existence. “Do you happen to have his birth date?” I ask.

“I know he’s in his nineties...”

“Well,” I tell her, “we can try to check his name and see if we get a hit. The records we have aren’t complete, but we’ve got one of the best databases in the world, with over thirty years of archival research in it.”

“And then what?”

“Assuming we get confirmation or for some other reason think there might be a legitimate claim, I’d ask you to talk to my chief historian, Genevra Astanopoulos. She would be able to ask you a host of questions that would help us investigate further. But I have to warn you, Ms. Singer, even though my office has received thousands of calls from members of the public, none have panned out. In fact there was one call, prior to this office’s creation in 1979, that led the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago to prosecute the alleged criminal—who turned out to not only be innocent but a victim of the Nazis. Out of all the tips we’ve received since then from citizens, not a single one has actually become a prosecutable case.”

Sage Singer is quiet for a moment. “Then I’d say you’re due for one,” she says.

• • •

All things considered, Michel Thomas was one of the lucky ones. A Jewish concentration camp inmate, he escaped the Nazis and joined the French resistance and then a commando group before assisting the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. During the last week of World War II, he received a tip about a truck convoy near Munich, believed to be carrying some sort of important cargo. Arriving at a paper mill warehouse in Freimann, Germany, he discovered heaps of documents that the Nazis had planned to have pulped: the worldwide membership file cards of over ten million members of the Nazi Party.

These documents were used at the Nuremberg Trials, and afterward, to identify, locate, and prosecute war criminals. They’re the first stop for the historians who work with me at HRSP. That’s not to say that if we do not turn up a hit on a name that individual was not a Nazi—but it does make building a case a hell of a lot easier.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21