Jonathan Kellerman - Time Bomb

Another enlarged document: multisyllabic German words. A translating caption: PROCESSING PROCEDURES. The final solution.

Compulsively detailed lists of those bound for the refuse heap:

Jews. Gypsies. Subversives. Homosexuals.

I looked over at Milo. He was across the room, his back to me. Hands in pockets, hunched and bulky and predatory as a bear out on a night forage.

I kept walking, looking.

A display case of Zyldon B poison-gas canisters. Another containing a shredded striped uniform of coarse cloth.

Little children in cloth caps and braids, herded onto trains. Bewildered, tear-streaked. Tiny hands reaching out for mother love. Faces pressed against a train window.

Another group of children, in spotless school uniforms, marching beneath a swastika banner, giving a straight-armed salute.

Black gallows against a cloudy sky. Bodies dangling from them, their feet barely touching the ground. A caption explaining that the scaffolding had been specially constructed with short drops, so that death, from slow strangulation, was prolonged.

Guard towers.

More barbed wire- spooling miles of it.

Brick ovens.

Pallets of charred, caked matter.

Fat complacent cats licking at a pile of it.

Tiled laboratories that resembled autopsy rooms. Sinks full of glassware. Humanoid things on tables.

A paragraph describing the science of the Third Reich. Ice-water experiments. Eye-color experiments. Artificial-insemination experiments. Cross-species breeding experiments. Benzine injections to harden the arteries. “Surgery” without anesthesia to study the limits of pain tolerance. Twin studies. Dwarf studies. Authoritative-looking men in white coats, bearing scalpels like weapons.

Rows of graves outside a “sanitarium.”

Milo and I had come face to face. When I saw the moisture in his eyes, I realized mine were wet too.

My throat felt as if it had been stuffed with dirt. I wanted to say something but the thought of speaking hurt my chest.

I turned away from him and dried my eyes.

The gallery door opened. A woman came in and said, “Hi, Milo. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

Cheer in her voice. It jolted me like an ice-water bath.

She was in her mid to late forties, tall and slim, with a long neck and a smallish oval face. Her hair was short, gray, and feathered. She had on a silk print dress in mauves and blues, and mauve suede shoes. Her badge said J. BAUMGARTNER, SENIOR RESEARCHER.

Milo shook her hand. “Thanks for seeing me on short notice, Judy.”

“For you, anything, Milo. If I look a wreck, it’s from sitting at O’Hare for four hours waiting to take off. Place is a zoo.”

She looked perfectly put together.

Milo said, “This is Alex Delaware. Alex, Judy Baumgartner.”

She smiled. “Good to meet you, Alex.”

Mile said, “He’s never been here before.”

“Well then, a special welcome. Any impressions?”

“I’m glad I saw it.”

My voice was strained. She nodded.

We left the gallery and followed her down the hall to a small room furnished with four gray metal desks arranged in a square. Three of them were occupied by young people- two females and a male of college age- poring over manuscripts and notating. She greeted them and they said hi and went back to work. The walls were filled with bookcases of the same gray metal. A cardboard box sat atop the unoccupied desk.

Judy Baumgartner said, “There’s a meeting going on in my office, so this will have to do.”

She sat behind the desk with the box. Milo and I pulled up chairs.

She pointed to the box. “Ike’s stuff. I had my secretary go into the library card catalogue and pull everything he’d checked out. This is it.”

“Thanks,” said Milo.

“I’ve got to tell you,” she said, “I’m still pretty shaken. When I got the message in Chicago that you needed to see me, I thought it was going to be something about hate crimes or maybe even some progress on Kaltenblud. Then when I got back and Janie told me what you wanted…”

She shook her head. “He was such a nice kid, Milo. Friendly, dependable- really dependable. That’s why when he stopped showing up for work, I was really surprised. Tried to find the number he’d given me when he applied to volunteer, but it was gone. Must have gotten thrown out. Space is at a premium- stuff gets thrown out all the time. I’m sorry.”

Milo said, “He worked here?”

“Yes. Didn’t Janie tell you?”

“No. All I knew was he’d checked out books, done some research.”

“He did research for me, Milo. For over two months. Never missed a day- he was one of my steadiest ones. Really dedicated. His suddenly dropping out bothered me- it wasn’t like him. I asked the other volunteers if they knew what had happened to him but they didn’t. He hadn’t made friends- kept to himself. I tried to get a number for him but he wasn’t listed. Finally, after a couple of weeks of his not showing up, I put it down to impetuous youth. Figured I’d overrated his maturity. I never expected… never knew. How’d it happen, Milo?”

Milo told her about the shooting, told her it had taken place in a dope alley but left out the toxicology report.

She frowned. “He sure didn’t seem like a druggie to me. If any kid was lucid and straight, it was Ike. Unusually straight- almost too serious for his age. He had a really… crisp mind. Still, people can maintain, can’t they?”

“When did he start volunteering?”

“Late April. Walked in off the street and announced he wanted to help. Good-looking kid, fire in his eyes- passion. He reminded me of the way students used to be during the sixties. Not that I greeted him with open arms. I wanted to make sure he was stable, not just caught up in some impulsive thing. And frankly, I was taken by surprise. We don’t get much interest from non-Jewish kids, and with all the black-Jewish tension lately, the last thing I expected was a black kid wanting to do Holocaust research. But he was really sincere. On top of being smart. A very quick study, and that’s hard to find nowadays. The gifted ones all seem to stay on the career track, get rich quick. The ones like those three”- she pointed to the other desks- “are the exception.”

“Did they know Ike?”

“No. They just started. Fall interns. The summer group consisted of three students from Yeshiva University in New York, one each from Brown and NYU, and Ike. From Santa Monica College. All the others went back for fall semester. Ike didn’t hang out with them. Kind of a loner, really.”

“You said he was friendly.”

“Yes. That’s odd, isn’t it, now that you mention it. He was friendly- smiled a lot, courteous, but he definitely kept to himself. When Janie told me what had happened, I thought back, realized how little he’d told me about himself during the interview: He’d arrived a few months earlier from back east, was working and going to school. He told me he loved history, wanted to be a lawyer or a historian. He kept steering the conversation away from personal things and toward substance-history, politics, man’s inhumanity to man. I was so taken by his enthusiasm that I went along with it, didn’t ask very many personal questions. Do you think he was hiding something?”

“Who knows?” said Milo. “There’s no record at all of his application?”

“No, sorry. We dump tons. Anything to avoid the paper-glut.”

“Wish I had the luxury,” he said. “By now I dream in triplicate.”

She smiled. “Be thankful you don’t deal with the federal government. After years of haggling, the Justice Department’s finally started turning over names of old Nazis who’re still living here. They all lied on their visa applications and we’re processing to beat the band- meeting with federal prosecutors in the various cities, filling out mountains of forms, trying to persuade them to move faster on drawing up deportation papers. That’s what I was doing in Chicago: trying to sock it to a kindly old geezer who runs a bakery on the South Side- best pastry in town, free samples to all the local kiddies. Only problem is, forty-five years ago that geezer was responsible for gassing eighteen hundred kiddies.”