“Not much,” I said, handing him back his envelope. “I saw that Peled was married to a Mina Lerer, so I tried to find her.”
“Any success?”
“No. She's gone to Munich.” I looked him in the eye. “Any idea if her departure is connected to Peled?”
Benny said nothing. He took a special interest in his sandwich. Maybe he doesn't know, I thought, trying to find a brighter side.
“I don't know,” he finally said, with his mouth full. “But remember, Peled was trained like me and you. That stays even after we leave the shoo shoo business.” He used the old slang for clandestine activity. It had been a long time since I'd heard that.
“So, if Peled wanted to keep things undetected, and if her departure is connected to him, you'll have to find out independently,” he concluded. “I've got to go.”
I looked at his plate in amazement; he had devoured a New York-style hot pastrami sandwich in ten minutes. “But I'll ask someone in the office to do a search – just as a favor. I'll call you if we find anything.”
His promise sounded useless, a token gesture. I said nothing.
I went upstairs to my room. The telephone was ringing as I entered. It was Ralph.
“Well, at least the neighbor wasn't lying. Ariel, the high school chemistry teacher, is Ariel Peled; she's DeLouise's daughter with Mina Lerer. She'd asked the principal very suddenly for a few days off to take care of an ‘urgent family matter.’ Said she'd be back in three or four days, but it's been much longer than that already and they haven't heard from her. They're worried. Ariel isn't married and has no children. She leads a quiet life and doesn't have many friends at the school.”
“Do you know when she asked for the leave?”
“The principal said he thought it was on September 23, but I spoke to him at his home so he couldn't verify the exact date.”
“Ralph, I need to find these women. Get a border-exit run on Ariel as soon as you can. I just want to make sure she hasn't disappeared like her mother.”
More than a week away from school during the school year. That was unusual. Events were unfolding so quickly that I felt as if I were playing catch-up. “I'll call you as soon as I can,” said Ralph, picking up on the urgency in my tone.
Twenty-five minutes later he rang.
“You were right; she's gone too. Left on September 24. Guess where she was headed?”
“Munich,” I stated flatly.
“That's right,” he said approvingly, and gave me the flight details.
A few moments later a fax message from Lan was slipped under my door. It read: “The number you gave me is a pay phone located in the Grand Excelsior Hotel in Munich, Germany.”
Three road signs leading to Munich: the pay phone and Mina and Ariel's sudden departures. Clearly Munich was my next stop. And I had to get there in a hurry.
T he next day I boarded Lufthansa flight 693 to Munich Airport's Terminal C. The New York office had made the travel arrangements and I'd contacted our embassy legal people. My man, Ron Lovejoy, would be on duty when I got there.
When I arrived, it was almost 7:00 P.M. and raining lightly. A BMW waited for me at the Hertz counter with a note, as Lovejoy's office had promised. I drove to the Omni Hotel on Ludwigstrasse.
I checked in and then headed over to the Grand Excelsior Hotel, where the trail to Mina Bernstein went cold. She'd accepted collect charges from a pay phone located in the Grand Excelsior's lobby.
The hotel was one of those pre-World War II landmarks with plenty of Old World charm and prices far above my budget. I still remember the startled look one of the bean counters in Washington, D.C., had given me when I'd tried to explain why my bill from a Tokyo hotel ran four hundred dollars a night. “Frankly, the place looked like a youth hostel,” I'd said with feigned exasperation, “but with the yen so strong against the dollar that's what you pay there.” He had not been amused.
The first questions I had to answer were whether it had been DeLouise who'd called Mina in Israel and whether he had been a guest at the Grand Excelsior.
I went to the desk and asked for Raymond DeLouise. They had no such guest. The response was too pat, I thought. But then, he wouldn't have used that name. How about Mina Bernstein? No. I left the desk disappointed. Then I turned around and made yet another try.
“I'm sorry, is there a Dov Peled?” I asked.
The reception clerk hesitated, and then said, “Minute!” and disappeared into the back office. She returned a minute later with another man, obviously senior staff.
“I am looking for Mr. Dov Peled. Can you give me his room number?” I repeated. The clerk's action told me I was getting close.
“I'm sorry,” said the man, with somewhat fraudulent solemnity. “We were notified this morning that Mr. Peled has died.”
“Died?” I repeated after him in disbelief. “What happened?”
“We don't know,” said the man. “The police just told us that he is in the city morgue. That's all we know.”
“Are Mina Bernstein or Ariel Peled registered? We were all to meet here,” I asked, adding feigned shock to the real thing.
He looked at the woman next to him. She shook her head. “No, I'm sorry sir, we have no such guests,” the man replied.
I thanked them, turned around without another word, and went to my car.
I had my answer. Yes, he had been a guest at the hotel under his old Israeli name, but had he been the one to use the pay phone at the hotel to call Mina in Israel? And if so, why use the pay phone?
I juggled the various plausible answers around in my mind. Whoever had called didn't want the call to be traced to him or her or else was already afraid that any telephone associated with him or her was being monitored.
If it was DeLouise/Peled who had called, who or what was he afraid of? No answers. Not yet, anyway. But given his probable horizontal position in the city morgue, his concerns had been justified.
A visit to the morgue confirmed that Popescu/Peled/DeLouise wasn't going anywhere. I had to find Mina and Ariel; they were my only viable leads to DeLouise's money. Where were they? Munich could be just their point of entry to Europe. They could have taken another flight to Timbuktu in the sub-Saharan desert or driven to Finland. And come to think of it, why was I using the plural form: they? Why should I assume that Mina and Ariel had met in Europe?
I didn't know where to start, although I had a hunch they weren't far away. I decided to stay in Munich for a serious looksee. I suspected that Mina and Ariel must have been here and had left their mark. Did they have anything to do with DeLouise's death? Or were they potential victims?
Lovejoy left me no information about whether he had contacted the German police. It was too late to call him, so I decided to go to the local precinct and find out what I could. If DeLouise died of natural causes then the police would not be involved. But I had to find out what they knew. I asked the man at the desk if I might speak to the officer in command. My basic workable German, even if not fluent, could help. A few moments later, I was shown to a small office.
“Good afternoon,” I said as I entered, in the friendliest tone I could muster and politely showing my ID. “My name is Dan Gordon, and, as you can see, I'm with the U.S. Department of Justice. I have an interest in Mr. Dov Peled, who I understand is in the Munich city morgue. Is there a police investigation into the cause of his death? Could I help you out with anything?”
The officer looked at me with ice-cold eyes, as if I had just vomited on his best suit, and said in excellent English, “I am sorry, sir, this is a German criminal investigation. If your government has a relevant and parallel criminal investigation, I am sure it can find out more through INTERPOL when I send my report to my superiors.” The sarcasm virtually seeped through his pores.
Hell, I thought, he was right. You wouldn't get a different answer from an American police detective investigating a homicide in Cleveland or Miami. But national sovereignty or not, I had to know Raymond DeLouise's movements and activities after he had left the United States. Besides, the officer confirmed that there was a criminal investigation. I left the police station and returned to the Grand Excelsior.
A mild-looking, middle-aged man dressed in a ridiculous uniform, too much pomp and circumstance, stood behind the cashier's counter. I told him that I'd come to settle Dov Peled's hotel bill. I sensed he was not about to object.
“By all means, sir, by all means,” he said quickly, and rattled the keyboard to get the printout.
The printer started spewing out a surprising number of pages. The clerk stapled them and handed me the lot.
“Twenty-one thousand, six hundred thirty-two marks and seventy pfennig, please,” he announced coolly.
I put the packet in my briefcase and said casually, “Thank you, I'll forward it to the family's attorney for his review,” and walked away without waiting to see his astonished look.