Page 93 of The Little Liar
He plopped down on the unmade bed and looked out the apartment window toward the snowcapped mountains of northern Italy. The ceiling was low and its paint was peeling. A cobweb had formed. Udo crushed it in his palm.
He had been living here for the last three years, ever since everything he’d built in America had come crashing down. Udo had been called into Carter’s office. The senator informed him that someone from the old Jew’s agency in Vienna was circulating a photo of Udo at a Nazi rally in Chicago, alongside another photo of him during the war wearing an SS uniform. A reporter who recognized the face had already called the office.
“We denied everything, of course,” Carter said. “Told himpictures don’t prove anything. Mistaken identity. That kind of stuff.”
“Good,” Udo said.
“But,” Carter said, his voice lowering, “you can’t stay here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they’re close. I mean this could blow up the whole program.”
“You want me to leave Washington?”
Carter shook his head.
“Not Washington. The country.”
“What?When?”
“By morning.”
***
And so, for the second time in his life, Udo Graf went on the run. Carrying a single suitcase with all the valuables he could gather overnight, he took a sunrise flight to New York, and connected with a plane to Rome. He never collected the papers from his office. He never said goodbye to his wife. He became a ghost. When authorities came to Carter’s office, the senator said they had dismissed the man named George Mecklen a week earlier for personal reasons. All they knew of his past was that he was a Belgian immigrant, and that he’d done reputable work during his time on the staff. His current whereabouts were unknown.
It took four months of Udo hiding in a youth hostel outside Rome for his Italian connections to find him a new identity.The same underground that had harbored him after the war still had roots in this country, but not as powerful. Udo was eventually sold an Italian passport, but it required a great deal of the money he had scurried out of his safe. His “cover” was a job at a meatpacking plant near the Tyrolean Alps, a job where speaking Italian wasn’t necessary. He pushed a broom and kept track of deliveries. It was menial work, and it ate at Udo’s soul.
Every day he had to spend in exile was a day he felt he was giving away. In Washington, he’d been building to something. He had money. He had influence. He had Carter under his thumb for the dirty acts he had done for him, and he’d planned to cash in that chip when the moment was right.
Now all that was gone, destroyed by the old Jew from Vienna and the Brother, who were chasing him down like a rat into a sewer hole. Well. A rat can chase as well. And under the right circumstances, it can kill. Udo had been thinking of how to get rid of those two from the moment his plane left Washington.
He looked again at the circled date on his calendar.March 15.He had received a letter with a Greek newspaper article, telling of this ceremony for dead Jews in Salonika and those expected to attend. The names of the Nazi Hunter and the Brother were circled in red ink, alongside two handwritten words in German, no doubt from one of his fellow Nazis still in hiding.
The two words wereBeende es.
“Finish it.”
He went to the shelf and grabbed the brandy. Salonika?How fitting. The city had been the scene of his finest work, and this could be his crowning act. Killing the Nazi Hunter would make it safer for others in hiding. They could reemerge. Take their proud place in the sunlight.
Udo uncapped the bottle and took another swig. He would need a disguise. He would need a gun. He already had both.
Let Me Count the Ways
If words are a measure of how deeply humans value something, then you must cherish me greatly. Consider how many expressions you have for Truth.
“To tell you the truth,” people say. Or “Can I be honest with you?” Or “honestly” or “truthfully” or “no lie” or “the fact is” or “the sad truth” or “the undisputed truth” or “the truth of the matter is...”
These are just in English. There’s French,Je dis la verité(“I’m telling you the truth”) or Spanish,la verdad amarga(“the bitter truth”). The Germans saysag mir die wahrheit(“tell me the truth”), although during the war years, this phrase was an orphan. The Greek word for truth isAletheia, which literally means to “un-forget,” a recognition of the fact that I am often obscured.
For what it is worth, of my many verbal references, I am partial to “truth be told.” You can imagine a king declaring it. A mother demanding it. The Almighty decreeing it.
Truth be told.
Which brings us back to where our story began, in the city of Salonika, and Liberty Square, where four decades earlier,the Nazis humiliated nine thousand Jewish men on a Sabbath morning by herding them in the hot sun, making them do endless calisthenics, beating those who fell, killing those who resisted.
This time, in that same space, on the afternoon of March 15, a large crowd of citizens gathered to mark the shame of that era. Many carried red carnations to commemorate the dead. Others held white balloons with two Greek words written on them.
