Boys Life

month, then eight hundred, then a thousand. It was down in the book that Dahninaderke lived in Zephyr, Alabama. Under a false name, I mean. Jeff and those scumbags helped him come up with a new identity, after he got in touch with ’em. But Jeff must’ve decided he wanted a payoff for his trouble. In the diary, he said he was gonna make a big score, get his stuff out of the apartment and move to Florida. He said he was drivin’ down to Zephyr from Fort Wayne on the thirteenth of March. And that was the last entry.” He shook his head. “My brother was fuckin’ crazy to get involved in this. Well, I was crazy for gettin’ involved in it, too.”
    “Involved in what?” Dad asked. “I don’t understand.”
    “Do you know the term ‘neo-Nazi’?” Mr. Steiner asked.
    “I know what a Nazi is, if that’s what you’re askin’?”
    “Neo-Nazi. A new Nazi. Lee and his brother were members of an American Nazi organization that operated in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. The symbol of that organization is the tattoo on Lee’s arm. Lee and Jeff were initiated at the same time, but Lee left the group after a year and went to California.”
    “Damn straight.” A match flared, and a Lucky burned. “I wanted to get as far away from those bastards as I could. They kill people who decide Hitler didn’t shit roses.”
    “But your brother stayed with ’em?”
    “Hell, yes. He even got to be some kind of storm-trooper leader or somethin’. Jesus, can you believe it? We were all-Americans on our high school football team!”
    “I still don’t know who this Gunther Dahninaderke fella is,” Dad said.
    Mr. Steiner laced his fingers together atop the table. “This is where I come in. Lee took the diary to be deciphered by the Department of Languages at Indiana University. A friend of mine there teaches German. When he got as far as deciphering Dahninaderke’s name from that code, he sent the diary directly to me at Northwestern in Chicago. I took over the project from there in September. Perhaps I should explain that I am the director of the languages department. I am also a professor of history. And last but not least, I am a hunter of Nazi war criminals.”
    “Say again?” Dad asked.
    “Nazi war criminals,” Mr. Steiner repeated. “I have helped track down three of them in the last seven years. Bittrich in Madrid, Savelshagen in Albany, New York, and Geist in Allentown, Pennsylvania. When I saw the name Dahninaderke, I knew I was getting closer to the fourth.”
    “A war criminal? What did he do?”
    “Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke was the directing physician at Esterwegen concentration camp in Holland. He and his wife Kara determined who was fit to work and who was ready to be gassed.” Mr. Steiner flashed a quick and chilling smile. “It was they, you see, who decided on a sunny morning that I was still fit to live but my wife was not.”
    “I’m sorry,” Dad said.
    “That’s all right. I knocked his front tooth out and spent a year at hard labor. But it made me hard, and it kept me alive.”
    “You… knocked his front tooth…”
    “Right out of his head. Oh, those two were quite a pair.” Mr. Steiner’s face crinkled with the memory of pain. “We called his wife the Birdlady, because she had a set of twelve birds made from clay mixed with the ash of human bones. And Dr. Dahninaderke, who was originally a veterinarian from Rotterdam, had a very intriguing habit.”
    Dad couldn’t speak. He forced it out with an effort. “What was it?”
    “As the prisoners passed him on their way to the gas chamber, he made up names for them.” Mr. Steiner’s eyes were hooded, lost in visions of a horrible past. “Comical names, they were. I’ll always remember what he called my Veronica, my beautiful Veronica with the long golden hair. He called her ‘Sunbeam.’ He said, ‘Crawl right in, Sunbeam! Crawl right in!’ And she was so sick she had to crawl through her own…” Tears welled up behind his glasses. He took them quickly off with the manner of a man who rigidly controlled his emotions. “Forgive me,” he said. “Sometimes I forget myself.”
    “You okay?” Lee Hannaford asked my father. “You look awful white.”
    “Let me… let me see that picture again.”
    Mr. Steiner slid it in front of him.
    Dad took a long breath. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh please, no.”
    Mr. Steiner had heard it in Dad’s voice: “You know him now.”
    “I do. I know where he lives. It’s not far