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The dogs were still having fun and Rochester resisted my call to get him to leave. Twice. The third time I walked up to him and grabbed a hank of fur from the back of his neck. “March, mister,” I said. He looked up at me with those soulful big brown eyes, like I was destroying all chance of him having happiness in this world.
I relented, as I almost always do. “Fine. You can have five more minutes of play.”
I released my grip on him, and he immediately went down on his front paws in the play posture. Rascal yipped, and then they took off.
“Puppy whipped,” Rick said. Then he held up his hand. “And before you say anything, I know, I’m just as bad as you are.”
Five minutes turned into ten, as Rick and I sat and talked about nothing in particular. When Rochester was momentarily tired out, he and I left.
When I got home, Lili wanted to know about Rick. “He seems to be okay, but he’s got to take some pills for stress.”
“He’s got to ask Tamsen to marry him,” Lili said. “She’ll take care of him.”
It was funny – I’d thought Rick and Tamsen were a good match, because he had a caretaker personality, and as a young widow with a son, she needed someone to take care of her. But she was a strong, independent woman, accustomed to being a mother, and I realized that they could take care of each other.
Lili and I were each other’s best friend, backup and sounding board, and I knew first-hand that the stress relief Dr. Chen had prescribed for Rick was very therapeutic.
Sadly, Lili was still catching up on all the work she’d missed while she was in Florida, so there was no kissing or cuddling for us. Instead she went up to the office to grade papers online, and I stayed downstairs with Rochester.
Lili was pragmatic about my hacking. She understood that I had a compulsion to sneak into places online where I shouldn’t be, that I was trying my best to control behavior that might get me sent back to prison. So I did my best not to do things in front of her that might upset her or provoke an argument.
With her safely upstairs, though, I could I turn on the laptop that contained my hacking tools. As I did, I thought about the conclusions I’d come to. How could I verify that Karl Kurtz, who entered Feldafing camp, was the same man as Kalman Feinberg, who left it? There was no exit record for Kurtz, or entry record for Feinberg, but that was just the starting point for a hypothesis.
I went back to the results of the database program I had set up to search for Kurtz and Feinberg. I’d stopped paying attention to it when I discovered the reference to Kurtz at Feldafing, but now I check the full results, which had been saved in a text file on the laptop’s hard drive.
There were no more records of the Karl Kurtz who had been born in 1922 in Berlin after his entry into the Feldafing camp. I did find a couple of places that had mentioned someone by his name as one of the guards at Auschwitz, but I dismissed those, because the Kurtz I was looking for was Jewish, and I’d already established that the name Kurtz could be used by Jews and non-Jews alike—as long as they had a short ancestor.
The Kalman Feinberg who had been born in Berlin that same year had a much fuller life story. He had been recorded as entering Auschwitz, though his name was not among those on any list of prisoners freed.
I looked at Rochester. “What do you think, boy?” I asked. “Did Feinberg slip through the cracks? Maybe his record is here, but his name was misspelled.”
Rochester woofed and shook his head.
“No? Then you think he died in the concentration camp?”
He woofed again, louder, and this time he went down on his front paws in the play posture. I got up and fetched him a treat from the box in the kitchen, and he sat beside me crunching noisily.
I looked back at the screen and the name Auschwitz jumped out at me. I couldn’t hear or say that name without a bit of a shudder, and a thank you to the Lord who had thus far kept me from suffering that kind of horror.
Auschwitz. Auschwitz.
I went back to the records on Kurtz and looked at the statements by survivors that said he had been a guard there. Suppose that was true, and that after the war was over Kurtz had appropriated Feinberg’s identity. They were the same age, after all, both from Berlin. How hard would it have been during that chaotic time after the camps were liberated to step up and pretend to be someone else?
Someone whose whole family was dead. Who was left to know of the deception? He had known Feinberg as a boy, knew that Feinberg’s whole family had been killed.
The answer came to me in flash that felt almost like the onset of a headache.
Myer Hafetz knew. He had known both Feinbergs in Berlin and seen both die at Auschwitz. Then he had the bad luck to be sent to Trenton, New Jersey, where a man was pretending to be his old friend.
A man who had been a guard at the very camp where his friend had died.
What would Hafetz do if he discovered Kurtz masquerading as Feinberg? Write up the testimony for Yad Vashem? Then use that paper to confront Kurtz?
Kurtz had already started a new life by then. I checked the records and discovered that he had married by then, a woman named Hina Levine, and begun working in the furniture store owned by his father-in-law.
I knew that eventually Hina’s father would die, that Kalman would inherit the company and rename it Feinberg’s Fine Furniture, that he would become president of Shomrei Torah.
But back then, he was a young man with a terrible past that anyone would want to forget, and a bright future ahead of him. If Hafetz told the community who he really was, he might be arrested for his role in the camp. Tried, sentenced, deported. Divorced.
Everything lost. If only there was some way to keep Hafetz quiet.
Kurtz had found that way. But what if before he died, Hafetz had confided in Rabbi Sapinsky? That was very believable – who else would Hafetz be able to confide in?
With Hafetz dead, the rabbi might have spoken with Kurtz himself—which triggered his death. Because of the tensions between immigrants and natives, it was logical to me that the rabbi would have tried to solve the problem within his community, rather than involve the police.
But that didn’t explain why someone had killed Joel Goldberg, or Daniel Epstein. Kalman Feinberg – or Karl Kurtz – was long dead, and beyond any earthly punishment.
Unless I was wrong about something. I went back to the mysterious online individual who billed himself NotwhoIthinkIam, and had used Saul Benesch’s email address. What was Benesch’s connection to this whole business?
He had been a boy in Trenton at the time of the two deaths, and I found it hard to believe he was guilty of them. Could he have discovered somehow that his father was not the man he believed, but Karl Kurtz instead?
That would explain the online moniker. But why commit murder over it?
“I am so glad to be caught up,” Lili said, from the top of the stairs, and I quickly shut down the laptop.
“Congratulations,” I called up to her.
“Are you going to come up here and celebrate with me, or are you going to stay down there?”
The answer to that was clear.
