Doppelganger

  By Charles Schaeffer

My apartment, doubling as an office, overlooked Washington , D.C. 's Potomac River waterfront. I watched a pricey forty foot yacht up anchor and ease out of its moorings into mid-channel. Then came the sound I expected but didn't want to hear. The intercom. 

I shoved a half-empty scotch bottle in the desk and closed off the bedroom  and kitchen, hoping to fake a sober office look. I pressed the intercom reply. 

“Speak,” I said.  

“Sandra Levine,” the voice said. I buzzed her through the lobby door.  She'd called a week earlier with sketchy details. To say I was lukewarm libels the cliché. Frankly, I hoped she'd forgotten it all. I balked at sticking my nose into a case spelling “loser” in blinking red neon. 

A few minutes later a knock.  I opened the door to the outside corridor and she entered, offering a half smile. From the call, I knew Sandra Levine had touched base in vain with D.C. police about the case troubling her. The excuse for sending her on her way frankly made sense. After 50 years, police jurisdictional authority ranged from zero to none. 

She had turned to the cops when the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, dallied with the case years before, finally conceding they'd hit a stone wall. Because D.C. police Headquarters fingered me as some instant expert in international intrigue, she landed on my doorstep.   

My claim to Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes hung on the single fact that I'd nailed the kidnappers of a young, blond American woman. My debut case as David Martin, private investigator.  On a riverboat trip, a retirement goodie, courtesy of  Headquarters. I got lucky. Lucky, nailing my adversary, a lead-footed divorced klutz, who'd abducted his own daughter from the Danube excursion boat. 

Sandra Levine took a seat after a quick, puzzled glance at my contrived-looking office but confined a polite comment to, “interesting setup, Mr. Martin.”  An elderly woman, seventyish, she spoke softly,  yet with a voice edged in steel.  

“Make it Dave,” I said. 

“Okay, Dave, you said on the phone you needed a week to sleep on my proposition,” she began. Now that you're awake, what's the decision?”

“I hinted on the phone your case was kind of out of my league-- but one thing you said grabbed my attention and held on. The part about a murderer hiding out in the States and on the lam for his World War Two deeds.”

“ Senseless murders. Committed in the hellish years in Germany . Other Nazis have been tried and convicted for as much.”

Sandra Levine paused and looked me square in the eye. “Nobody will ever know all the details of those days.  But reliable eyewitnesses  passed the worst tales of horror from one survivor to another. At the approach of the Russians and hints of imminent liberation panic broke out. Records show that Jewish prisoners rebelled at Auschwitz-Birkenau, blowing up a gas chamber and killing three guards. Beatings and quick executions snuffed out that rebellion.”     

“The Allied judges went over all  this at Nuremberg .”  

Sandra Levine pressed on. “With the Russian Army mere miles from Auschwitz ,  camp commanders destroyed records, smuggled prisoners out by truck and train to hide their crimes. During the melee, a young guard,  maybe 16 years old, shot three prisoners for resisting. A drop in an ocean of blood. But listen to the macabre twist.  

“The guard  cracked in fear of Russian retaliation. He burned his own uniform and put on the clothes of a dead Jewish prisoner. After his quick change, he forced the camp's tattoo identity specialist to copy to his own body the tattoo of the corpse. The soldier found the dead man's papers in the files. Identify theft was complete. The soldier was now Daniel Feldman, Jewish prisoner.

“And you think  this quick-change artist is still around?”

“Yes,” she said, “He mingled with other survivors, was liberated, and started life under the stolen guise. And with the corpses scooped up and burned in a futile attempt to fool the Russians who would ever catch on to the identity switch?  He's become a doppelganger.”

“A what?”

“Like in folklore an evil twin who casts no shadow.”

The story struck me as tragic enough, but hardly verifiable.

“Eyewitnesses, one vital one, Daniel Feldman's brother,  Isaac, saw it all.  Maybe you've 

guessed  I'm their sister. Feldman was my maiden name. Isaac saw the three men shot, knew, of course, one was Daniel. He knew the guard's name,  Dieter Gross, a graduate of the Hitler Jugend--Hitler Youth, an eager warrior in the Nazi cause.”

“So how did Isaac know Dieter Gross's name?”

“Isaac had overheard conversations between Dieter Gross and the other guards.  During the talks his name came out. But there was one more remarkable thing--Dieter Gross's eyes, intense sky blue, almost made to order on the genetic assembly line. Blue eyes in a Jew don't happen often, but they do sometimes, a recessive trait, reasonable explanation for Dieter Gross if anyone ever questioned his stolen Jewish ancestry.”

“I'm guessing where this is going--you want me to trump what the feds or D.C. police couldn't do.” My ex-cop's skeptic look broke through.

“I know what you think. Is Dieter Gross alive?  Where in the USA is he?”

“Something like that.”

Sandra Levine's “people,” volunteer Nazi hunters, she assured me, had a fat dossier on Dieter Gross, or Daniel Feldman, the identity he'd stolen from a dead man years before. After liberators unearthed the ugly secrets of the camps,  postwar America and the Jewish community welcomed many survivors. Posing as Feldman, Gross shuffled in with the “huddled masses” of the Statue of Liberty fame. Not too long after entry he acquired citizenship.

This single public record  was enough to give pursuers the scent. For a while the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), assigned to chase down Nazis hiding in the States,  had Gross/Feldman in its sights, back in the 70's when the agency was new and full of piss and vinegar. Now, two concerns had turned them off from reopening the search. First,  he was--on paper--Daniel Feldman, a survivor, with a tattoo and whose picture ID showed the cleverly substituted face of Dieter Gross. No photos of the real Feldman existed to contradict the deception,  Sandra Levine confirmed.  Only her word and memory of her brother gave lie to the double life of Dieter Gross. 

About that time an attack of Nervous Nellism struck some OSI authorities.  The agency had successfully prosecuted about a hundred persons involved in war crimes, but the Dieter Gross case  dropped off the radar screen--and with good reason. The agency had stubbed its toe on the  “Ivan the Terrible” controversy.  Feds had fingered a Ukranian-American as the notorious former guard,  ‘Ivan,' at Treblinka. The case bounced from court to court and from here to Israel and back, before the possibility  of mistaken identity reared up. All of it ended with the suspect's deportation to the Ukraine .

Becoming an official Court ping pong ball was far down on my agenda. But face to face with Sandra Levine, her sincerity, plus the certainty she was chasing the right culprit hit me hard. The facts  impressed, too. She and her friends knew plenty about Dieter/Feldman's wanderings in America , that he once spent time in Washington .  He'd even married and worked in Baltimore , processing fish on the wharf. The spanner in the works, I figured, came down to one question: In the unlikely event we uncover one Dieter Gross, after wearing out shoe leather--then what?  

Her answer was simple, direct, maybe even rehearsed. “Have him  extradited to stand trial in Germany ,  If nothing else sticks, there's always a charge of false entry. That would at least be partial justice.”

She had me hooked.  “This could run to ten K. Odds against  success.”

“Money's no problem.”  

* * *

When she left I stared out the window, my head stuffed with grisly history. Did I expect Dieter Gross to materialize on the street below?  Unlikely that he was in Washington after he caught wind that the Feds and volunteer Nazi hunters once had him nearly cornered. Besides, surrounding burbs cover nearly six million people. The topper. National identity searches, including drivers' permit records, had turned up no Daniel Feldman fitting the description of Dieter Gross. No federal records anywhere, except citizenship, that he'd ever existed. Or ever paid taxes. All this told me something at least. Our quarry had always worked for cash, leaving no paper trail.  Or he'd been mooching off somebody else's labors. Or third possibility:  He was living outside the law, maybe a smart thief, who'd never been caught.

I checked my notes on Sandra Levine's background report. The trail in pursuit of Gross/Feldman ended in Baltimore , at the house where he once lived with his American wife. I figured it was as good a place as any to start.

* * *

Sandra and her cohorts had traced him to a row house near Little Italy, not far from the 

waterfront.  By chance, his former wife was still living in the same run-down house. My knock on the door brought a shuffling of feet on the other side.  The door opened on a wizened woman, gray, worn down by work, worry and life in general. I couldn't blame the woman's resentment. She had told her story to the government people. Years ago, in the 1970s. But she let me in, and answered questions.

There was one child from the union, a son, Marvin now grown, and living on the west coast,  working as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She had kept her married name, Mrs. Daniel Feldman, but this was all she had preserved from the marriage. Except a wedding picture, stored in a drawer. 

Bitterness had etched deep lines in her face. We sat on a couch as old and tattered as her memories of the past. All those years ago a Deiter Gross on the run had married her posing as Daniel Feldman,  a Jewish refugee from a concentration camp in wartime Poland . The marriage reached its tenth year, but it was not until near the end of this period that she began to suspect he wasn't who he said he was.  He'd shunned jobs or activities, which might create a record with the government. Over and over he'd explained that Nazis hiding in America had him targeted, and his best defense was to leave no trace.  

Never a happy marriage, it dropped a major notch in joy during the ninth year. A room her husband had locked and marked private had long puzzled her, until one day when he was at work on the waterfront docks, she found the key and entered the room.  The shock left scars, she confessed. Arrayed around the room was a collection of Nazi regalia, swastika flags, jackboots, a German pistol (she believed it was called a Luger).  

When she confronted him, he flew into a rage. Within days he was gone, and with him the memorabilia from the Third Reich, which, she later guessed, had been collected from souvenir shops specializing in the stuff.  “Even before that,” she told me, “I suspected he wasn't Jewish, despite the camp tattoo. He was an angry, deceitful man, who tried to hide behind my own Jewish heritage.” 

“You never heard from him?”

“Never.”

“ No idea where he might have gone?”

She shook her head. “I once heard he'd been seen in Washington . But that was years ago. 

By now he could be on the moon.”   

Sandra Levine must have been hanging the D.C. connection on that thin thread. Before I left, I asked Mrs.Feldman if  I could see the wedding picture taken in 1961. She consented. There he was, Daniel Feldman nee Dieter Gross, an angry-looking, Germanic young man in his early thirties staring out with striking, sky-blue eyes.  

* * *

Mrs. Daniel Feldman and her son, Marvin, were the last persons known to have had contact with her missing husband. After more than forty years, was he even still alive?  What would he look like? Old--that was sure. I hadn't a clue where to start looking.

A break, of sorts, happened just a week after my Baltimore trek. Using the number on the business card I'd left her,  Mrs. Daniel Feldman phoned my office.  Her son, Marvin, had called from LA. “What he's discovered ” she said, “was a possible sighting of his missing father. Something he noticed in a short article in the paper he works for.” 

As she explained it, the news account described a brawl in a German-run pub located in the south section of the city.  Not that a bar brawl was news, but this one caught reporter Marvin's eye, because it listed those arrested and booked for the disturbance, which drew both cops and medics. Named among those taken downtown and booked, photographed and fingerprinted was a Friedrich Hebbel. The bar was a sort of ethnic German hangout, known for neo-sympathizers. When a Jewish activist had stepped in for a drink, it set off taunts, ending in a fight, and prompting activists to wave new hate-law-statutes around. 

“Wait a sec,” I  interrupted Mrs. Daniel Feldman. “If Hebbel is really  Feldman-imposter, Dieter Gross, we  can assume the man we know as a vicious concentration camp guard is still alive. And that Dieter Gross  shed his Jewish cover and became Hebbel so he could cavort with pals from the old country.”

“Talk to Marvin,” she said. “I'll give you his number. He thinks the one named Heinrich Hebbel might be his father. Marvin was young in those days, but he sort of recalls what his father looked like, particularly the blue eyes. The police description of the man in the news article mentioned  blue eyes and his file photo looked like what an old Daniel might be. Sort of the way Clint Eastwood , you know, the actor, is older, but he still looks like Clint Eastwood.”

Next day, I got hold of Marvin on the phone.  He was ninety percent sure the police photo 

was his father using the alias Hebbel. During the fight, a few brawlers, including Hebbel and the activist sustained injuries. No pictures ran with the article but it listed addresses of everyone involved, which gave me an idea. Track Hebbel to his lair. Marvin Feldman was eager to show off his reporting skills and when he got back to me three days later he had interesting news.

Friedrich Hebbel's landlady  didn't know all about him, but she knew enough. He'd worked at odd jobs, paying the rent, and using a computer at the library, since he didn't  own one.  He'd also belonged to some kind of German organization, because she sometimes heard him talking in German on the phone and he went out to meetings every Wednesday night. Hebbel had been living in her rental flat about a year. About that same time, as she tossed out newspapers, she spotted a personal ad circled in black, an invitation for German-speaking people to meet and keep old traditions and customs alive.  

Hebbel's landlady hadn't seen the news article about the brawl, but shortly afterward, her elusive boarder had pulled up stakes, paid his rent, and flown the coop. Just my luck. Our quarry in the cross hairs. Now he'd ducked out. But Marvin wasn't finished. The landlady had overheard Hebbel making plane reservations. His destination? Washington , D.C. Bingo.  Now, there was a chance Dieter/Feldman was living here as Freidrich Hebbel. Maybe Daniel Feldman. Or some other concocted persona. 

* * *

 I was dealing with the circumstantial.  The blue eyes and son Marvin's instincts that Hebbel was his father were shaky clues. I needed solid proof--at least fingerprints. I recalled Sandra Levine telling me that Dieter/Feldman, Nazi in flight from capture in America , years ago took the citizenship oath. Probably figured back then that was the one record on file worth the effort. Daniel Feldman, concentration camp survivor. Certified American citizen.  My next thought. What if the LA arrest print files happened to match the ones at Immigration?  

On a call to D.C. Headquarters, the Chief wondered what I was up to these days. “Thanks to your tip to Sandra Levine,” I said, “ I'm up to my eyeballs in intercontinental intrigue. And I need a favor.”  He agreed to check out the possibility of a match between the prints at Immigration and ones with the L.A. police. “I'd like a color fax of the police mug shot, if you don't mind.” Turned out the prints matched. At last there he was. Age had dimmed but not erased the bony, angular, Teutonic face with eyes as blue as an Aryan's blood. So now it added up. Feldman, 

Dieter Gross and Friedrich Hebbel shared the same body. I imagined the bar scene, Dieter Gross's only slip-up. Like rebelling Jewish prisoners, he'd  been in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

One thought troubled me. Unmasking the figure in question still left loose threads. Was Citizen Feldman without reasonable doubt Deiter Gross, former Nazi concentration guard, as Sandra Levine had sworn? With no more than her say-so, I could wind up with a slander subpoena. When I phoned and brought her up to date on my progress, she cried, “ Eureka ! “ She wasn't happy, though, when I insisted on proof that the Dieter/Feldman under scrutiny was the wartime I.D. thief, no matter how dead certain she was. “I need  time to work this out,” I said.

* * *

Washington became one big ocean with one small multi-personality fish, Dieter Gross attached to alter egos, Freidrich Hebbel and Daniel Feldman. The plane from LA had landed with our person of interest about two weeks before. A little help from the Chief at Headquarters opened up airline passenger lists to me. No snap, pouring over hundreds of the names of passengers flying from LAX to Dulles in mid July.  Into the fourth hour of the search, a name leaped out --Freidrich Hebbel. July 17, landing at 5:25 in the evening.

From airport to a hotel or rooming house, you need transport. You take a cab or limo. I liked the way I was thinking now. Luck and circumstance helped, too. Old-fashioned rules limited airport cabs to one company and a few enterprising shuttle drivers. Business practice also required records, maybe not the names of customers, but a notation of the destinations from the airport. 

Taking a cab instead of a shuttle struck me as the best bet for a man on the lam.  Nobody in the cab company management rolled over to my appeal to interview drivers on duty about the time of the flight's arrival. Okay, it was a stretch, suggesting that their stonewalling might let a terrorist off the hook. After all but singing  “ America the Beautiful”, I won a point. Copies of the mug shot from the LA cops would be passed out to the cabbies on airport duty the evening of the flight, with a note to phone me, day or night. I underscored the blue eyes, the standout clue.

After two days nothing happened. Dieter/Feldman was as slippery as an eel in an oil spill.  I figured he'd escaped my grasp for good. Late that afternoon I was driving to my office from a visit to a strung out divorce client. My cell phone rang and I pulled into an empty space on southwest Seventh Street . On the other end an airport cab driver with a middle-eastern accent made sure I was Dave Martin.  He'd seen the mug shot with my note, and, yes, he'd picked up a passenger fitting the description.

“No doubts? I said

“No mistake. Not with those eyes. An old man. Because he might be a terrorist made me want to find you. Terrorists drove me from my own country.”

I felt a twinge of guilt about the terrorist bit, but took comfort that Dieter Gross, if only in a walk-on part, served the premier terrorist government of his time. I thanked the driver and wrote down the address where he'd dropped off the passenger.

I had one more chip to cash at D.C. Police Headquarters. The Chief, weary resignation marking his face, rolled his eyes. “During the war, Nazis kept records, exacting records of everything from A to Z,  art to Zyklon B, the poison gas,” I told him. “I'm within an ace of this guy I'm trailing. You wouldn't want me to make a mistake. All I need is a match of prints of a fake Daniel Feldman from Immigration with those of Dieter Gross, Auschwitz guard and Hitler Youth honor graduate.”

* * *

A week later confirmation of guard Gross's prints arrived from German authorities, proving  obsessive Nazi record keeping was no fluke. Dieter Gross and alter ego Daniel Feldman--tossing in Freidrich Hebbel to boot--posed as three and the same. Next on the check list. Track down the former Nazi  and bring him to justice envisioned by idealist Sandra Levine. I found the address on Porter Street slipped to me by the airport cabbie, and parked a hundred feet or so on the opposite side about eight in the morning. I sat in the car for half an hour, my mind stuck in neutral. I winced at  the thought of spending the day staked out, when a man exited a basement level door of a tan brick attached house. I crossed my fingers this was was my prey. The gray hair fit.

The figure turned east toward Connecticut Avenue . I jumped from my Honda and  followed at a safe distance. He walked towards the Cleveland Park Metro, a Red Line stop. Now the hunt turned tricky, keeping him in view on the packed Metro train. He slipped a pre-bought fare card in the entrance gate,  reminding me I didn't have one. I couldn't stop for the formality of a ticket and let my quarry disappear in the crowd.  Gambling, I flashed my PI license at the station guard, who seemed easily impressed and let me pass.

I squeezed in the same train car as Dieter/Feldman, who, at the opposite end, was unaware of the tail. The trick now. Note his exit. We were headed downtown and I figured he'd bail out at Metro Center , hub for changing trains to other destinations.

He did exactly that, wiggling like a salmon into a river of rush hour commuters on the platform. A crown of thick gray hair and his six feet two or so offered visible help, as he wove through work-bound humanity. For a heart-stopping instant he vanished in the crowd. I felt the sweat on my palms. Then the gray head again. He'd bent to tie his shoe, then stood,  sticking up out of the crowd, and headed for the platform of the Blue Line train, just arriving.  I pushed though separate doors in the same car.  We could be headed anywhere on the miles of Blue Line track, but the trip turned out to be short, the Smithsonian station.

He took the up escalator, with me  hanging back just enough. When he reached Independence Avenue , he turned west to l4th street, then south.  Age had been kind to him. He stepped along briskly in the heat. Near the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, he crossed the street and entered a large, gray building with a curved facade, modern architecture, the type Hitler would have denounced. Not far behind, I took deep breaths of Washington 's notorious July humidity and almost drowned. My gaze wandered over various no parking and do-not-enter signs and fixed on a larger emblem. I knew where we were now. I'd been past the building dozens of times, but had never gone in-- “The Holocaust Museum.”

 Inside, I dropped my keys, cell phone  and change in a dish, walked through the electronic monitor, and passed a security guard with a sidearm.  A tall man in a red jacket reached to pin a name on my lapel, an actual name of a Holocaust victim, but I waved the symbolic gesture off, apologizing that I was there on business. He pointed out  the museum personnel office. On the way I took in the deliberate architectural touches, prison camp motif,  red brick walls supporting cold, bridge-like girders rising to the ceiling.

I identified myself to an employe, a short, plump, bald man who eyed me warily, but  answered a couple of questions. No Dieter Gross or Friedrich Hebbel worked there.  But, yes, a Daniel Feldman, a security guard, came on not long ago. The museum felt a special kinship with Feldman and had a good reason to help him,  a concentration camp survivor, still bearing the infamous tattoo. “We pay him minimum wage off the books, with no Social Security connection,” the employe said. “His choice.  A harmless enough concession.”

Now Dieter Gross was back to the Feldman persona. “I'd like to talk to him,” I said.

“He'll be on duty on the fourth floor, where the exhibits start.” 

On the elevator up a recorded voice, probably a soldier's, spoke of the horror of entering a death camp for the first time. I stepped off on the fourth floor and began a slow walk through a forbidding  dim corridor, lined with 1930's Nazi posters, pictures of starving inmates at 1945 Buchenwald and a plaque charting the rise of Hitler in the 1920s.

I guess the irony struck me of more than half a century of Dieter Gross's subterfuge ending in the Holocaust Museum . But it didn't help with how I was going to deal with him. I considered: game's up. Turn yourself in. Authorities might go easier on you. Maybe no deportation. This,  I couldn't promise, but it sounded good.

Suddenly, I was aware of  striking blue eyes staring at me from beneath a guard's cap encasing a mat of gray hair. Of course, the downstairs employe, not knowing who he really was, but sensing I was trouble, had tipped him off. I'd scarcely time to call myself a sucker when Dieter Gross's bony fist flashed forward and connected with my cheekbone. Not bad for an old man, I thought, as I pulled myself up just in time to watch him disappear down an exit stairwell.  

My chase slowed on the second floor, near an old wood rail car, one like those that hauled Jews to the camps. Danger ahead. Dieter Gross packed a guard's pistol. Was a man on the run for decades desperate enough to use it?  Visitors were scattered here and there on the exhibit floor, and I wasn't about to trigger one more death by a Nazi's pistol.

Maybe he didn't realize I was within sight. But I watched him scrambling frantically to hide in the rail car. This time age let him down, because he misjudged the strenuous challenge and slipped, hitting his head hard on an outhrust metal fitting. He bled from the temple.  I noted the tattoo as I took his pulse. Dieter Gross was as dead as Daniel Feldman.

***

At Headquarters, the Chief  confirmed that Gross had rented the Porter Street room via computer from a LA library. With help from the coroner and using my statement and the damning prints, the Chief satisfied himself that Dieter Gross was Dieter Gross, illegal immigrant, residing under false pretenses. In greater Washington , spin capital of the world, persons unknown deftly confined the news to a couple of paragraphs reporting the accidental death of an elderly museum guard, Daniel Feldman.  

A followup from Marvin Feldman, who'd phoned his mother with developments, reported a couple of facts emerging from police records on the neobundists at the German bar. Over the years since his Baltimore days, Dieter Gross had spent time in Washington ,  Brazil , Texas and other locales. History now.

In my office, Sandra Levine listened raptly to the graphic details of how the chase, spanning decades,  ended. “Is  it possible-- in a place dedicated to memorializing the Holocaust?” she asked with disbelief.

I shrugged.  “It's where he started.”