The Mechanic Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Alan Gold

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Yucca Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Jacket design by Slobodan Cedic at KPGS

  Jacket photo: PlusONE/Bigstock

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63158-085-7

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63158-092-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  PROLOGUE

  Cape Cod, October, 1998

  THE GRAVE LINE OF mourners approached the freshly cut pit, their faces drawn and haggard through grief and wind as they followed the coffin from the church.

  Newly cleft earth glistened; sods of clay wept thin brown tears while a gusty squall made the mourners unseasonably cold that October morning, with a chill that cut to their bones.

  The wind blew up stronger and stronger from the Atlantic, over the Sound, gathered grit as it dusted the sand dunes on its way inland, and then eddied up and over the fence which separated the cemetery from the beach.

  Gray elderly men in Homburgs, snug tailored overcoats, and black woolen scarves stood close beside dignified women wrapped in politically incorrect but protective fur coats. Whipped by the wind, the line of mourners came to a standstill and waited an interminable time as the priest made his appearance. They huddled into themselves, waiting for him to gather himself at the foot of the grave, open his prayer book against the strength of the coming gale, straighten out his cassock, and look up solemnly at the assembled company. This was his moment. His was the intercession between the soul and the deity, and though he’d never had a congregation as important as these before, they would wait upon him.

  And still they stood, looking like penguins on Antarctic ice as they turned their backs away from the direction of the sea and stared into the yawning maw of the grave.

  But it wasn’t just the elderly who were so badly distressed by the wind. The younger men and women, whose bodies were not as easily prey to the biting Atlantic gusts, were soon affected by the wind chill. The enveloping warmth of the chapel had quickly evaporated when they stepped out into the winter air, and the younger members of the congregation regretted not wearing heavy overcoats but instead having chosen dark gray suits or dresses and black armbands.

  The priest opened his mouth to read, but delayed a moment as his cassock fluttered like a noisy flag. He had been going to say something for each of the important people to remember as he walked slowly ahead of the bier proceeding to the grave. Instead, he decided to remain silent and portentous, to save his words until all were giving him their full attention. Now, as the coffin waited to be lowered into the ground, as he began his homily, because of the wind, he had to speak louder than normal so his words could be heard over the rising tempo of Nature.

  He was conscious of the importance of the gathering, of the honor to him of burying such a venerable and respected member of the congregation, a leading figure in American life for the better part of the century, and his voice took on an unusually sententious ring.

  A young woman, the granddaughter of the man in the coffin, exhausted from jetlag through her sudden departure from Europe, clutched the arm of her father to steady herself. She was on the verge of sobbing as the coffin settled into the bottom of the grave and the ropes and straps were pulled away. They made a hollow sound, as if there were nothing down below but an empty box. The granddaughter was utterly drained of the energy; she needed to resist the urge to cry. On the flight over, she’d thought she could cope with the formalities of the service, but she hadn’t seen her grandfather for over a year and the last time she’d kissed him, she knew she’d never see him again.

  The flight from Sarajevo had been long and hard. She’d thought about not rushing home to attend the funeral, because even though she loved the old man dearly, she felt guilty about leaving her colleagues to attend to the mass of details in the War Crimes Tribunal dealing with the butchers.

  But Chasca Broderick had loved her grandfather. Although he had been ninety-seven when she’d last seen him, blind and confined to a wheelchair, through all her growing up he had been the most entertaining, loving, and dearest of all her relatives. His position as a Supreme Court Justice under Kennedy had been the defining reason she’d gone to Harvard to study law; and his bent for matters of social justice had convinced her not to enter some Wall Street legal practice and become a wealthy corporate lawyer, but instead to become one of the underpaid and overworked legal counsel of the United Nations War Crimes Commission.

  Her father, now a retired stockbroker, hadn’t followed in Grandpa Theodore’s footsteps and become a lawyer. Instead, he’d taken the road to financial success, trading on Theodore’s potent Broderick name, becoming rich and powerful in the boardrooms of the nation. But Chasca hated money at the best of times, and resented her father’s lack of appreciation of her passion for environmental law, human rights, and anti-trust legislation. That was why, when she was adult enough to be independent of her parents, she spent less time with them, and as much as possible with old Theo. She loved her parents out of duty, but in her heart it was Grandpa Theo whom she loved with a passion. When she’d been younger, in her teens, she’d longed for school holidays so that she could go and stay with the old folk at their Cape Cod home. Her parents were concerned that she was missing out on camps and times with friends, but she reveled in the times she spent with the Theo and Detta, and came back each time a wiser and more learned person.

  Her fantasies were fulfilled each and every day of her holiday … He even let her put on his Supreme Court Justice’s robes and pretend that she was the Chief Justice of America, and he was an incoming president whom she would swear in, and then she’d advise the new president on how to run the country.

  When she was a young woman, expressing serious intent about studying civil liberties law, old Theo had even let her retry a couple of the famous cases which had come before him, to see whether her determination was the same as his. As she grew older, their verdicts agreed more and more frequently.

  And now he was dead. Her grandmother had died ten years earlier, and the old man had detested the succession of nurses who were installed by his children and grandchildren to look after him. And what Chasca really resented was that her parents and uncles and aunts had put the old man in some impersonal and antiseptic hospice for the last months of his life when his liver and heart were failing and diabetes was setting in, instead of allowing him to die in peace, sitting in his wheelchair, looking out over his beloved brooding Sound at the ever-challenging Atlantic Ocean. She imagined how he’d been treated by the nurses in the hospice, being called “darling” and “pop,” such an indignity for a man whose entire life had been a model of dignity. Barely able to speak, he must have been mort
ified at being unable to castigate them for their impertinence.

  But now, in his final moment, he was immersed in dignity. Surrounding the grave were two serving Supreme Court Justices, the Assistant Secretary of State representing the President of the United States, the president of Princeton University where Grandfather Broderick had served as Regent, and a double row of leaders in justice, education, and government.

  His death was noticed in the obituary columns of the New York Times, and the Washington Post and the American Jewish News had printed special feature articles about his work as an attorney in the Nuremberg Trials. She had read them all avidly, glorying in the way her grandfather’s life had been led; and now she was at his grave, imagining his frail and emaciated body, once so robust, lying cold and still, already ebbing into the past.

  The priest continued his address in his theatrically somnolent voice. When he’d finished, he invited the closest relatives to throw earth and flowers into the grave, as though their going first was some privilege of rank. Despite his accomplishments, her grandfather had hated rank and privilege all his life; and he would especially have hated it now. What did rank and privilege mean when everyone, regardless of rank and privilege, ended up in a coffin?

  Sods were thrown on to the coffin, and the funeral came to an end, and the important people went home, and Chasca and her parents and uncles and aunts and her brother and sister and cousins, retired to old Grandpa Theodore Broderick’s house, now cold and empty and smelling musty, to contemplate what was to be done with those assets which weren’t already controlled by the family trust … assets like his library, his papers, the furniture, and the future of the house.

  While they were discussing the dissection of the old man’s effects, especially whether to keep the house in the family as a holiday retreat or use the land for development for a summer apartment complex, Chasca inconspicuously slipped out and wandered about the house. It was cold now, cold because death had come to the places of her upbringing, places which she knew so fondly from her childhood, which were so much a part of her past.

  She touched the dark red mahogany wood of the staircase and remembered the look of horror on her grandma Detta’s face as she’d spent hour after hour sliding down the long, winding banisters; and she smiled as she remembered old Theo (he insisted on her calling him Theo because he said he wouldn’t live long enough for her to say the word “grandfather”) reassuring his wife that the little girl was perfectly safe in his hands; she examined the patterns in the hall runner on which she and Theo had played games of softball, much to Grandma Detta’s disapproval and concern for the gifts Theo had been given as part of the offices he had held; she picked up the silver salver that had served as a letter tray in the old days when a maid used to bring in the morning post over breakfast—at Detta’s insistence despite Theo’s disdain—and remembered clearly her childhood hopes that one day she’d be the recipient of important letters.

  Chasca smiled. All she had left were memories, reminiscences which made her feel warm and comfortable in the past, distanced from the present. But for the life of her, she couldn’t remember the old man’s face, nor any detail of what he looked like. But that, she knew, was the way in which Nature protected the mourner. And that, in itself, was a wonderful memorial to old Theo, to be remembered for his accomplishments, his good deeds.

  But despite all the diversions which memories of her youth caused, Chasca most wanted to revisit the library the old man had loved so dearly, and in which she had spent so many enjoyable hours, discussing with him the formulation of her career decision, until law and social justice became her inevitable choice.

  Chasca wasn’t his only grandchild, but in her heart—though he would never, ever admit it—she knew that she was his favorite. The others visited him out of duty, but he knew that her visits were eagerly sought, a reward for doing well at school. And in her days at college, she’d write to him regularly and send him messages of regard and respect from law professors who’d found out that her Broderick name came from the same family as the great and honorable Theodore Broderick, scourge of big business and organized unions and lobby groups, a man who had introduced judgments which, by most accounts, were decades ahead of their time. And she’d make irregular but welcome visits to the Cape Cod home, always dropping in on her way to and from somewhere. Her brothers and sisters and cousins never knew; but old Theo knew.

  And when it was decided that she’d study law, Theo had guided her gently yet inexorably into those legal frameworks which had been designed to protect the downtrodden, the poor, the minorities. And as he’d told her more and more about the inequities of life, he’d seared her being with a rage for justice.

  Oddly, her own father and mother, who wanted her to go into the family business of stock and share broking, didn’t object, rationalizing that a grounding in law could qualify her for a job in broking just as well as training in finance and commerce. It was only in her third year of Harvard, when she specialized in international law and human rights, that her parents understood the enormity of the conspiracy that Chasca and old Theo had dreamed up in her holidays in the Sound; but by then she was too old to influence, and the damage was done.

  Chasca sat in old Theo’s chair at his desk, and determined that, despite any potential family claims, these were the items of furniture she’d be taking for her Greenwich Village apartment when eventually she returned from the hell-hole of Bosnia. She rifled through his drawers, not feeling in the least bit guilty about breaching any privacy. There was nothing in the old man’s life about which he, or she, might feel remotely ashamed. She knew every moment of his existence and was aware of every friend and associate; they’d discussed his life in intricate detail. So all she was interested in were those minutiae which might have escaped his attention in the sweeping dialogues of law and human rights which they regularly conducted, especially when she became a counsel at the Department of Justice.

  She was suddenly sad. Old notes, letters dated 1978, even a dry-cleaning ticket from eight years ago, bank and check statements which were ridiculously outmoded in an era of electronic banking and e-commerce.

  She opened a second drawer and found similar detritus of his life.

  She opened the bottom drawer. She took out a sheaf of papers. They were old, very old. She read the cover. It was written in German. She’d studied German in Harvard as one of her majors. She undid the old red ribbon. As it came away, it left a faded mark of lightness where the rest of the paper had browned through age.

  Chasca scanned the first page. Then the second. It seemed to be some sort of memoir, but when she glanced through it, it took on all the cadences of a last will and testament. It was written by somebody called Joachim Gutman. She searched in her memory, but for the life of her, couldn’t ever recall her grandfather mentioning his name.

  Surprised, she continued reading, suddenly feeling somewhat guilty, as though she were intruding into somebody’s personal life and times.

  Three hours later, Chasca asked her parents and uncles and aunts to join her in the library. She showed them the testament of the unknown Jew and asked them if they had ever heard of a German who was hanged as a war criminal in 1947, a man called Wilhelm Deutch. Nobody had heard of him. Neither her parents nor their brothers or sisters had ever heard the old man mention him, despite his constant reiteration of his most famous trials and judgments.

  ‘Well, it appears that Grandpa Theo defended this German war criminal guy called Wilhelm Deutch, when he was acting as a defender in the Nuremberg Trials just after the Second World War; apparently this man Deutch was some sort of a mechanic in the concentration camps. He wasn’t a monster like Hitler or Himmler or Göring, or anything. He was just an ordinary guy, a mechanic, but the Allied authorities wanted to show the world the guilt of the majority of Germans who had fallen in with the Nazis and just co-operated, saying they were only following orders. But according to the memoirs of this Jewish gentleman, Joachim Gutman, all this guy Deu
tch seems to have done was twiddle the knobs on the gas ovens. From what I can tell, this was one of the last of the Nuremberg trials. And from what Gutman says in this memoir, Deutch should never have been sent to trial at all.’

  She could see her mother looking at her quizzically, wondering why she was so concerned with some ancient obscure trial of Theo’s when they’d just buried the old man.

  ‘Bear with me a moment. This is very important. It seems that justice wasn’t done for this mechanic, this Wilhelm Deutch. You see, when I finished reading this memoir of the concentration camps written by Mr. Gutman, I checked into Theo’s records, and it appears that despite the defense, there were no witnesses who would come forward to speak on behalf of the mechanic. I’ve read the remarks of the trial judge, and they were pretty damning.

  ‘Fact is, if the judge had seen this testimony from this Jewish gentleman, Deutch not only wouldn’t have hanged as a war criminal, but would have been feted as a hero.’

  ‘So?’ said her father.

  Chasca looked at her father in surprise. ‘Dad, a huge injustice appears to have been done. A man was hanged by the Allies who shouldn’t have been. According to Gutman, Mr. Deutch was anything but a mass murderer. In fact, he wasn’t even rotten and evil. He tried to save Gutman’s life.’

  Still, her parents and the rest of the family looked at her in silence.

  The gulf between them grew into a chasm. Her father smiled and said gently, ‘Chasca, darling, this all happened fifty years ago. Ancient history. We’ve just buried your grandfather. You’re naturally upset. Why don’t we just come out of this room, with all its memories, and we’ll drive back to Boston and stay at a lovely hotel, and we can have a crab dinner and relax.’

  She was astonished by their lack of sensitivity to the injustice she’d just uncovered. But she knew them too well to think of arguing. So she looked at them, nodded slowly, and said softly, ‘Okay.’

  Having flown halfway around the world, and landed in Boston and then driven straight to her grandfather’s funeral, she was exhausted and didn’t have the energy to fight. And Chasca knew from long experience that her parents would continue their exercise in conditioning until she gave in; and currently all she wanted to do was to sleep. So she folded the old document into two, quickly wrapped the red ribbon back over it, and put it into her pocket.