The Storyteller Read online

  I am in such a deep sleep, in fact, that even though I reach for the receiver and say hello, I drop it and it rolls underneath my bed.

  "Sorry," I say, after I retrieve it. "Hello?"

  "Sage Singer?"

  "Yes, that's me."

  "This is Leo Stein."

  I sit up in bed, suddenly awake. "I'm sorry."

  "You said that already . . . Did I . . . You sound like I woke you up."

  "Well. Yeah."

  "Then I'm the one who should be apologizing. I figured since it was eleven o'clock--"

  "I'm a baker," I interrupt. "I work at night and sleep during the day."

  "You can call me back at a more convenient time--"

  "Just tell me," I say. "What did you find out?"

  "Nothing," Leo Stein replies. "There are absolutely no records in the SS membership registry for Josef Weber."

  "Then there's been a mistake. Did you try spelling it differently?"

  "My historian is very thorough, Ms. Singer. I'm sorry, but I think you might have misunderstood what he was telling you."

  "I didn't." I push my hair out of my face. "You're the one who said the records aren't complete. Isn't it possible that you just haven't found the right one yet?"

  "It's possible, but without that, we really can't do anything else."

  "Will you keep looking?"

  I can hear the hesitation in his voice, the understanding that I am asking him to find an invisible needle in a haystack. "I don't know how to stop," Leo says. "We'll run checks in two Berlin records centers and our own databases. But the bottom line is if there's no valid information to run with--"

  "Give me till lunchtime," I beg.

  *

  In the end, it is the way I met Josef--at a grief group--that makes me wonder if Leo Stein is right, if Josef is lying. After all, he lived with Marta for fifty-two years. That's a damn long time to keep a secret.

  It is pouring when I reach his house, and I don't have an umbrella. I'm drenched after running to the covered porch, where Eva barks for nearly half a minute before Josef comes to the door. I am seeing double--not a blurriness of vision but a superimposition of this old man with a younger, stronger one dressed in the uniform of the soldiers I have seen on YouTube. "Your wife," I say. "Did she know you're a Nazi?"

  Josef opens the door wider. "Come in. This is not a conversation for the street."

  I follow him into his living room, where the chess game we were playing days earlier remains, unicorns and dragons frozen at my last move. "I never told her," Josef admits.

  "That's impossible. She would have wanted to know where you were during the war."

  "I said I was sent by my parents to study at university in England. Marta never questioned it. You would be surprised at the lengths you will go to to believe the best about someone if you truly love him," Josef says.

  That, of course, makes me think of Adam. "It must be hard, Josef," I say coolly. "To not get tangled up in your lies."

  My words land like blows; Josef shrinks back in his chair. "This is the reason I told you the truth."

  "But . . . you didn't, did you?"

  "What do you mean?"

  I can't very well tell him that the reason I know he's been lying is that a Nazi hunter from the Department of Justice checked out his false story. "It just doesn't add up. A wife who never stumbled over the truth, not in fifty-two years. A history of being a monster, without any proof. Of course the biggest inconsistency of all is why, after over sixty-five years of keeping a secret, you'd blow your own cover."

  "I told you. I want to die."

  "Why now?"

  "Because I have no one to live for," Josef says. "Marta was an angel. She saw good in me when I couldn't even look in a mirror. I so badly wanted to be the man she thought she had married, that I became him. If she knew what I had done--"

  "She would have killed you?"

  "No," Josef says. "She would have killed herself. I did not care about what happened to me, but I couldn't stand thinking of what it would be like for her, to know she had been touched by hands that would never truly be clean." He looks at me. "I know she is in Heaven now. I promised myself that I would be who she wanted me to be until she was gone. And now that this is the case, I have come to you." Josef folds his hands between his knees. "Dare I hope this means you are considering my request?"

  He speaks formally, as if he has asked me to dance with him at a mixer. As if this is a business proposition.

  But I string him along. "You understand how selfish you're being, right? You want me to risk getting arrested. Basically, I give up the rest of my life, just so you can leave yours."

  "This is not the case. No one is going to think twice if an old man turns up dead."

  "Murder isn't legal, in case you've forgotten in the past sixty-eight years."

  "Ah, but you see, this is why I have been waiting for someone like you. If you do it, it's not murder, it is mercy." He meets my gaze. "You see, before you help me die, Sage, I need one more favor from you. I ask you to forgive me first."

  "Forgive you?"

  "For the things I did back then."

  "I am not the one you should be asking forgiveness from."

  "No," he agrees. "But they are all dead."

  Slowly, the cogs turn, until the picture lines up clearly for me. Now I see why he turned to me for his grand confession. Josef does not know about my grandmother; however, I am the closest thing to a Jew he can find in this town. It is, I realize, like the victim's family in a death row case. Do they have the right to seek justice? My great-grandparents had died at the hands of Nazis. Did that make me, by proxy, the next best thing?

  I hear Leo's voice, an echo in my mind. I don't know how to stop. Is his work vengeance? Or justice? There is the finest line between the two, and when I try to focus on it, it becomes less and less clear.

  Repentance might bring peace to the killer, but what about the ones who've been killed? I may not consider myself a Jew, but do I still have responsibility to the relatives of mine who were religious, and who were murdered for it?

  Josef confided in me because he considers me a friend. Because he trusts me. But if Josef's claims are legitimate, the man I befriended--and trusted--is a shadow puppet, a figment of the imagination. A man who has deceived thousands of people.

  It makes me feel dirty, as if I should have been a stronger judge of character.

  In that moment I make myself a promise: I will find out if Josef Weber was an SS soldier. Yet if he does turn out to be a Nazi, I will not kill him the way he wants. Instead, I will betray him the way he betrayed others. I will pump him for information and feed it back to Leo Stein so Josef will die somewhere in a prison cell.

  But he doesn't have to know that.

  "I can't forgive you," I say evenly, "if I don't know what you did. Before I agree to anything, you're going to have to give me some actual proof of your past."

  The relief that floods Josef's features is palpable, almost painful. His eyes fill with tears. "The photograph--"

  "Means nothing. For all I know it's not even you. Or it came from eBay."

  "I understand." Josef looks up at me. "So the first thing you will need to know," he says, "is my real name."

  *

  If Josef thinks it is strange when I jump up moments later and ask to use his bathroom, he doesn't say so. Instead he directs me down the hall to a small powder room that has wallpaper blooming with cabbage roses and a little dish of decorative soaps still in their plastic wrap.

  I run the water in the sink, and then take my cell phone out of my pocket.

  Leo Stein answers on the first ring.

  "His name isn't Josef Weber," I say breathlessly.

  "Hello?"

  "It's me, Sage Singer."

  "Why are you whispering?"

  "Because I'm hiding in Josef's bathroom," I say.

  "I thought his name wasn't Josef . . ."

  "It's not. It's Reiner Hartmann. With two n's at