The German Suitcase Page 5

  “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.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Snow was falling as Professor Gerhard’s car pulled away from the morgue entrance at the rear of Munich University Hospital. The two-door Opel Olympia, first produced in 1935 in honor of the upcoming Olympic Games in Berlin, had more than 100,000 kilometers on it. After ten harsh winters, its heater was no match for the below freezing weather.

  Just moments ago, Dr. Jacob Epstein was in an operating room trying to save the bomb-shattered arm of a young woman. He had repaired the torn musculature and circulatory vessels, and was reassembling the broken pieces of her humerus, prior to literally screwing them back together, when Dr. Eva Rosenberg entered with the shocking news that their exemptions had been revoked and SS warrants issued for their arrest.

  Now, his head still filled with the medicinal odor of the O.R., the collar of his trench coat turned up against the cold, Jake slouched in the back seat of the professor’s car, staring numbly out the frosty window. “Bastards,” he grunted through clenched teeth. Despite his current distemper, he had an engaging smile, when he needed it, and dark, unruly hair that tumbled over his ears and forehead, softening his sharp features and eyes that sparkled with intelligence. “We should’ve known this was going to happen.”

  “We did know,” Eva said. Bundled in winter clothing, she was sitting next to the Professor with her knees up against the dash, and her physician’s bag nestled in her lap. “We just didn’t want to believe it. We just wouldn’t accept—”

  “Enough,” the Professor interrupted, squinting to see through the windshield where a single wiper was streaking across the frosty glass. “That’s neither here nor there, now. You’ll both have to go into hiding. You have no choice.”

  “Hiding?!” Jake erupted in frustration. “People are being blown to bits, torn to shreds, incinerated. We can help them. Why are we going into hiding?!”

  “To stay alive long enough to help them later,” the Professor answered gently. “I’m hoping you can spend a few nights at Max’s. After that, we’ll have to find a place where you’ll be safe.”

  “What about our things?” Jake asked.

  “Yes,” Eva chimed-in. “Everything I own is in my room. Can we stop along the way?”

  “I’d say it’s up to the SS, wouldn’t you?” the Professor replied.

  Jake Epstein had a one room flat in a building on Augustenstrasse that catered to students. The non-descript structure was situated just off the corner of Ziebland in easy walking distance of the University. “I’m going to drive past,” the Professor said as they approached. “If it’s safe we’ll come back around. Tell me what you see.”

  “I see trouble,” Eva said, as the car rolled through the intersection.

  “SS trouble,” Jake added. “Two staff cars blocking the street and a personnel carrier. Which means all I’ve got are the clothes on my back and my briefcase.” The latter doubled as a doctor’s bag and, along with medical instruments, contained a worn copy of All Quiet on the Western Front which Jake had read as a teenager and was, now, rereading. Published in Germany in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel was in Group 1 on the Führer’s list of banned books: All Copies To Be Destroyed. This accounted for the Mein Kampf dust jacket with which Jake had shrewdly camouflaged his copy.

  The professor detoured south in the direction of Eva’s apartment, a third floor walkup on Koenigstrasse
a few blocks from the Hauptbahnof, the main railway station. The working class neighborhood was across town from the Medical School; but rents were much lower than in the University District; and it was convenient whenever she wanted to take the train to Venice to visit her family. The street appeared to be clear of SS vehicles as they approached.

  “Go around back,” Eva said, removing her gloves. She tossed them atop the dash and fished her keys from her purse. “There’s less chance of running into a neighbor.”

  Moments later, the car turned into a narrow alley. An icy veneer sheathed the cobblestones. The Professor drove through an obstacle course of parked vehicles, overflowing trash receptacles, and debris from air raids that had been bulldozed into mountainous piles. The rear of Eva’s building was covered by black wrought iron staircases that zigzagged back and forth from landing to landing.

  “As quickly as you can, Eva,” the Professor said as the car lurched to a stop.

  Eva was out the door before he finished and didn’t stop to close it. She ran up the icy steps to the third floor landing, crept to the door, and wiped the frost from the small wire-glass window with a cuff. The corridor beyond appeared clear. The staircase was the building’s emergency egress and the doors on the landings weren’t locked. She slipped inside, then let herself into her room, and pulled a canvas rucksack from beneath the bed.

  Minutes later, the bag was filled with clothing, toiletries, and a few treasured books. A framed snapshot of she and Max—arms around each other’s waists, their faces alive with the enchanted glow that belongs to young lovers—stood on a table between the windows. She had just slipped it into the bag when the crunch of tires on snow got her attention. Two SS staff cars were approaching. One stopped in front of her building. Several SS men got out and trudged toward the entrance. The other vehicle circled a tenement that had collapsed during one of the bombings, and headed for the alley.

  Eva slung the rucksack over her shoulder, took one last look around the room, scooped a bracelet from atop the dresser, and dashed into the corridor. Men’s voices and the pounding of jackboots and clattering of military gear came from below, propelling her toward the exit. Once outside, she clambered down the icy staircases until she reached the alley and ran to the car. Without breaking stride, she threw the rucksack through the open door and jumped in after it. “They’re here, Professor! They’re here!”

  Gerhard jammed the car into gear and floored the accelerator. The Opel rumbled off, skidding on the snow-slick cobblestones, and turned into the cross street just as the second SS car entered the opposite end of the alley. A short time later, they were heading east on Luitpoldstrasse toward the Prinzregentenbrucke, one of three bridges that arched with Neo-Romanesque grace across the Isar River. The latter—which flowed south through Munich to Upper Bavaria and the lake country north of Innsbruck at the foot of the Alps—was completely frozen over, its steep banks encrusted with crystalline splashes of ice that rose to the adjacent roadways.

  The Professor’s car came off the bridge into the ellipse that circles the Friedensengel, a grand monument to Germany’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Atop its towering Corinthian column, a gilded statue of an angel with flared wings, soared high above the trees.

  “The Angel of Peace,” Jake said with bitter sarcasm. “Who do they think they’re kidding?!”

  “She’s still standing,” the Professor countered. “The way things are going for Hitler these days, she may yet prevail.”

  “If we ever live to see it,” Eva said, curled up in her seat against the cold.

  “I always thought cynicism was an affliction that came with age,” the Professor said, attempting to lighten the mood. “How come I’m the optimist and you two are the gloom-and-doomers?”

  “Because we are Jews,” Eva retorted.

  “We are the ones with targets on our backs,” Jake chimed-in. “Bright, yellow, six-pointed ones.”

  “And I’m the one keeping you out of the crosshairs,” the Professor said, “Jew or not, if I’m not careful, I’m next. Steig will stop at nothing,” Gerhard went on, taking Moulstrasse that ran north to Bogenhausen, the city’s most aristocratic residential district.

  This was an area of stately mansions and imposing townhouses where royal barons mixed with the barons of industry and finance; where upper-class families—many untouched by the catastrophic collapse of the German economy, though not by the air raids that had destroyed a number of their grand dwellings—lived amid the very trappings of privilege against which Adolph Hitler railed. Indeed, the mentally and economically depressed working class—having little connection to the cradle of culture that had produced the likes of Beethoven and Mozart; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; Goethe, Brecht, and Mann; Durer, Holbein and Cranach—found the Führer’s fanaticism and policies of racial superiority compelling.

  The Kleists lived on Possartplatz, a stately Square that enclosed an oasis of mature trees. Their bare branches, sheathed with ice, sent sparkling canopies arching above the streets. The art-filled townhouse had a quiet, neo-classic grandness befitting its owner’s social standing and business prominence. It was one of several that still had Christmas decorations in the windows and on the door. Despite the constant threat of airstrikes the Kleists had decided against consigning their priceless collection to underground bunkers, preferring to live with it and, if need be, die with it. Indeed, despite Hitler’s ban on modern art, many top-ranking Nazis, Hermann Goering among them, collected it with a passion, using the Führer’s decree as an excuse to confiscate it from wealthy Jewish businessmen, bankers and art dealers, and keeping it for themselves.

  From the moment the Opel left the alley behind Eva’s flat, the Professor’s eyes had been darting to the rearview mirror which was, now, blurred with condensation. “Jake. That car behind us,” he said as they neared Possartplatz. “Can you tell if it’s SS?”

  Jake twisted around to the tiny window behind him. He wiped it with a glove and squinted to see through the streaked glass. “Looks like a black Mercedes…”

  “That’s what worries me,” the Professor said, his suspicion all but confirmed.

  “…but it isn’t flying SS flags,” Jake added.

  The Professor winced. “Sometimes they take them off when they don’t want to be spotted.”

  “Either that or Himmler sicced the Gestapo onto us,” Eva said, referring to the Reichführer’s iron-fisted control not only of the SS but also the state police. The Geheimes Staatspolizei, his plainclothes sociopaths who drove unmarked cars and operated without the constraints of a military code of ethics, were as inhumanely ruthless as their SS counterparts, only more so.

  “We can’t go anywhere near Max’s place until we’re certain it’s neither of them,” the Professor said. Instead of turning into Possartplatz, he continued along Holbstrasse for several blocks, then made a left into Muhlbaur, angling across the eastern-most section of Bogenhausen that had been turned to rubble by Allied warplanes. The snow had intensified making it even more difficult to see the car they feared was tailing them. If it was the SS or Gestapo, the snow might also make it more difficult for them to maintain contact with their prey; but when Jake peered out the window again, the black Mercedes was still behind them.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Bart Tannen didn’t go nuts as Stacey had predicted when she briefed him on her Google search, but he took immediate action. From the data she had downloaded, he knew that Dr. Jacob Epstein lived in a townhouse on East 78th Street off Fifth Avenue. He and his wife, Hannah, occupied the upper duplex while the lower three floors housed The Epstein Family Foundation. When his contact information turned out to be unlisted, Tannen called the Foundation and explained he was trying to reach Dr. Epstein about an extremely important personal matter.

  “Well…” the receptionist mused. “The doctor’s son is the Foundation’s Director. He handles all family matters. Perhaps if you explained it to him…”

  “Be glad to,” Tannen said, prompting her
to put him on hold and transfer the call.

  “This is Dan Epstein,” a polished voice said after a brief interval.

  After identifying himself and his position at Gunther Global, Tannen explained that in the course of working on an assignment, the agency had come into possession of a discarded suitcase. It appeared to be Holocaust memorabilia. There were reasons to believe it had belonged to his father.

  “You have my attention,” Epstein, said, intrigued. “What’s this about?”

  “I’ll be more than happy to explain; but it’d be a waste of time, if it isn’t your father’s suitcase. We just need him to take a look at it and say yea or nay.”

  “I couldn’t get my father involved without meeting with you, first. I might even be able to make the determination myself.”

  “Fine,” Tannen prompted smartly, seizing on the offer. “Where and when?”

  Mid-morning the following day, Tannen and Stacey got out of a taxi in front of an imposing townhouse. A bronze plaque proclaimed: The Epstein Family Foundation. The limestone mansion—one of a dozen or so that lined East 78th Street between Fifth and Madison just off Central Park—would have sold for forty million at the height of the market. They checked in at the security desk in the reception hall where an exuberant spray of fresh flowers stood framed by tall windows that overlooked a garden. On one wall Dr. Jacob Epstein’s many awards, honorary degrees, and memberships in professional societies were displayed; on another were brass plaques with photo-engraved diagrams of the many patents for prosthetic devices he had been awarded.

  The Director’s office had a quiet grandness due to its generous 19th Century proportions and fine period antiques. The historical illusion was broken only by the computer screens and Bloomberg terminals on the desk and the man who made the Foundation’s investment decisions based on the data they provided. Dan Epstein always greeted his guests in shirtsleeves—the de facto, if misleading, symbol of Wall Street transparency—and looked resplendent in suspenders, striped shirt with solid collar and cuffs, and boldly patterned tie.