We have not had rain for three weeks and the parks look like dead lands, but I am leaving for Kiev next week to stay with your auntie. What can we do, after all? It’s in God’s hands.
At the end, Ted Austin had included a note about the Lithuanian Police Battalions:
Ms. Warshawski, maybe you already know this, but “police battalions” was the sanitized name given to Lithuanian units that supported the Germans in their extermination campaign against the Lithuanian Jews. They were at least as cruel and ruthless as the German Einsatzkommandos and made it possible for the Nazis to murder the Lithuanian Jews quite rapidly.
I printed out the e-mails and read and reread them. The language made my skin crawl, the whining over how ungrateful everyone was to the writer, how ungrateful the boy Chaim had been to his protector. The story sounded appalling, however you looked at it: Salanter’s mother was murdered, and then he went to live with a member of one of the commando units that had been involved in killing the Jews of Vilna.
I tried to put my emotional reaction aside, tried to figure out the chain that had linked together Wuchnik and Shatka.
My guess was that Helen Kendrick had asked her lawyer to find an investigator to dig up dirt on Salanter, as a way of undermining the Durango campaign. Wuchnik was someone Eloise Napier had worked with before from time to time, and he must have been happy every time an affluent client like Crawford, Mead called for help. He pulled out all the stops, approached the granddaughter, tried to get her to break into Chaim’s computer.
And then Wuchnik had been inspired to place an ad—where? In some publication, or meeting place for Lithuanian immigrants—looking for information about Chaim Salanter’s war experiences. It had been a good strategy. Lithuania is a small country, after all, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine some Lithuanian immigrant might have known him all those years ago.
Shatka had seen the ad and remembered family stories about Salanter, “the Jew.” She’d gotten in touch with Wuchnik. Perhaps she’d used Xavier as a middleman: that would explain why Wuchnik had gone to Ruhetal in the first place.
If Shatka’s great-uncle had taken in the boy Chaim Salanter, then the uncle had done a good deed in a dangerous time and place. What I couldn’t figure out is why Salanter should be trying to hide that history. Was he ashamed of having sought refuge with a member of the ruthless Police Battalions?
Salanter might feel that he’d been a collaborator, even though he’d been too vulnerable to have other choices in such a poisonous situation. But when Lawlor accused him of collaborating with the Nazis in those rants on GEN, perhaps it brought such painful memories back that Salanter couldn’t bear for his daughter or granddaughter to know anything about them. His face was so scary, Nia Durango said, the night she and Arielle asked him about his mother. We were scareder of him than anyone.
I gave up on it. It was past ten by now, and I hadn’t even made a start on the Ruhetal patient database I’d opened twelve hours ago. I was too tired to look at it now, and anyway, I was hungry. I’d pick up a pizza at Aubigné’s on Damen and see how abysmally the Cubs were doing against the Giants.
When I got home and saw the Mercedes sedan parked in front of the building, I pulled up behind it. Pennies from heaven, or something like that. I wanted to talk to Chaim Salanter, and here he was. Of course, I would have liked some time to think through how or what to ask him, but this was a gift. I got out of my car and walked over to the driver’s door.
Gabe Eycks opened the window just far enough that I could see his head. “Mr. Salanter needs to talk to you.”
In the dark, with the Mercedes’s tinted windows, I could see that the car was full, but not who was in it. “Hey, Gabe, you’re right, this is the Twenty-four/seven Detective Agency. Our licensed ops never need to sleep, so you can barge in any hour of the day or night and find them bright, chipper, and ready to detect. All major credit cards accepted.”
Just because I wanted to talk to Salanter didn’t mean I needed to be enthusiastic about yet another imperious summons.
Gabe frowned at me. “We’re all tired, but we wouldn’t have come if it weren’t essential to talk to you. Since you betrayed Mr. Salanter’s trust, it would be better if you dropped your facetious tone.”
A surge of anger rode through me. I turned and marched up the walk to my front door, fed up with the way the Salanters and their team began all our conversations. I heard the thunk of the heavy sedan door closing, and footsteps behind me on the walk, but I didn’t turn, just found my keys in the bottom of my bag and undid the lock.