A Song of Shadows by John Connolly Page B

stronger, his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance, not even deigning to notice the men and women who surrounded him, the cameras and the lights, the protestors with their signs, as if all of this was a show being put on for another man, and the accusations leveled against him were somehow beneath his regard. The men disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by an attorney from the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, the arm of the Justice Department entrusted with investigating assorted human rights violations and, particularly, Nazi war criminals. The attorney was a pretty young woman, and Lenny was surprised by the passion with which she spoke. She didn’t have a Jewish name, or Demers didn’t sound like one. Not that this was a requirement for justice under the circumstances. Perhaps she was just an idealist, and God knew the world needed as many of those as it could find.
    Engel and Fuhrmann, she said, had been fighting the US government’s decision to rescind their citizenship, but that process had now been exhausted. The delivery of the arrest warrant for Fuhrmann from the Bavarian state public prosecutor’s office in Munich a week earlier meant that his extradition could now proceed immediately, and Engel’s deportation would follow shortly after for breaches of immigration law, regardless of whether or not charges were filed against him in his native land. Soon, she said, Engel and Fuhrmann would be banished from American soil forever.
    Deportation didn’t sound like much of a punishment to Lenny, whose family had lost an entire branch at Dachau. He hadn’t understood why they couldn’t be put on trial here in the United States until Bruno Perlman explained to him that the US Constitution precluded criminal prosecutions committed abroad before and during World War II, and the best that the United States could do was send war criminals back to countries that did have jurisdiction, in the hope that proceedings might be taken against them there. Not that Perlman was happy about the situation either. He would tell Lenny admiringly about the activities of the TTG, the Tilhas Tizig Gesheften , a secret group within the Jewish Brigade Group of the British Army who, after the German surrender, took it upon themselves to hunt down and assassinate Wehrmacht and SS officers believed to have committed atrocities against Jews; and of the Mossad killers who trapped the Latvian Nazi collaborator Herberts Cukurs, the ‘Butcher of Riga’, in a house in Montevideo in 1965, beating him with a hammer before shooting him twice in the head and leaving his body to rot in a trunk until the Uruguayan police found him, drawn by the smell. The gleam in Perlman’s eye as he spoke of such matters disturbed Lenny, but he supposed that the end met by such foul men was no more than they deserved. Lately, though, that light in Perlman’s eyes had grown brighter, and his talk of vengeance had taken a personal turn. Lenny worried for him. Perlman had few friends. Obsessives rarely did.
    ‘How do they even know it’s really them?’ said a voice. ‘Old men like that, they could be anyone.’
    A man was seated at the far end of the bar, close to the door. Lenny had not heard him enter. Neither had he heard a car pull into the lot. The visitor’s face was turned slightly away from the television, as though he could not bear to watch it. He wore a straw fedora with a red band. The hat was too large for his head, so that it sat just above his eyes. His suit jacket was brown, worn over a yellow polo shirt. The shirt was missing two buttons, exposing a network of thin white scars across the man’s chest, like a web spun by a spider upon his skin.
    ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in,’ said Lenny, ignoring the question. ‘What can I get you?’
    The man didn’t respond. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. Lenny looked past him to the parking lot outside. He could see no vehicle.
    ‘You got milk?’ the man