All For One (205 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryLabels: Ubermadness_IV
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Submitted by Jack McCallum (View user info) at 2006-12-01 15:04:21 EST
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After months of searching for the woman, I was sure I had finally found her.
Thanks to the internet, I had her name, address, and phone number. I gave her a call one Sunday morning and told her who I was. I told her about the file I had found among my father's things, and explained that I had a few questions about it. When she realized who I was she said she would answer my questions, but not over the phone.
We agreed to meet. I arranged a cross-country flight, and two days later I was sitting in Have Beans, an old coffee shop in Albany. In a bag at my feet was a copy of the old police department file my dad had opened on the woman, back when I was a kid.
I watched her cross the street, walking in the careful and delicate way of some older women, moving with the grace of another time. She was wearing a wool cap and a plain cloth coat. It was impossible to believe this woman was a murderer.
She entered the shop and looked from table to table until she saw me and nodded. She came to the table and sat down, certain I was the man she was meeting. People always said I looked like my father. I guess that's how she knew me.
I stood and asked, "Ingrid Lucht?"
She nodded again.
"You are Bill's little boy. A man now."
For a moment I wondered who she was talking about, and then I realized she was referring to my dad. He was Will to his friends and family, Detective William Weil of the Denver PD to everyone else. I'd never heard anyone call him Bill.
I sat down. A waitress came over and I got a coffee. Ingrid ordered a tea.
She took off her cap and a heavy braid fell down, a white rope. Her skin was pale and creased. Her eyes were a dark and stunning blue, like a winter sky at twilight.
"I think you have mistaken me for another."
She didn't have much of an accent after all these years, but she phrased things in a slightly awkward way. She was seventy-seven years old, and she had been away from Germany for over half a century.
She sipped her tea and I didn't really see any point is wasting time. I took the old file out of my bag and put it on the table.
"I want to ask you about this."
She looked at the file, looked at me, and raised her eyebrows.
"It's a file my father started putting together when I was a kid. There was a killing in Denver in the late seventies, a shop-owner had his... he was cut up. The case was never solved. My dad was a good cop. He closed all his cases but this one. He died last year. Cancer"
Her eyes widened, just a little. She looked out the window and watched a young couple walk by, both bundled in heavy coats. They were holding hands.
"I did not know about Bill. I am sorry."
"I went through his papers. I'm a free-lancer for the Post, and I'd planned on doing a book on my dad after he retired a few years back. I ran out of time, and ended up with a lot of questions. Most of them were answered in copies of his old case files. All but this one."
I opened the file and took out some glossy black and white photos. Crime scene photos. The once-white borders of some of the older photographs were now brown and cracked with age. The pictures had been taken across a span of years, from the early fifties to the late seventies. Some of them had identifying stamps from police departments other than Denver.
Ingrid turned her head, just a little, and looked down at the photos I had spread across the table.
I didn't see any disgust or repulsion or horror in those eyes, the dark blue now appearing almost black.
"My dad worked on the last of what he believed might a series of linked murders. The case he had was cold, but after years of digging, in a time when little of this information was in databases and had to be located in warehouses holding old files, he found similar cases and began to believe he had a serial killer on his hands."
I saw her eyes moving, as she looked at faces long-dead, sprawled and mutilated bodies, pools of blood like black ink.
"All of the victims were men," I said.
She looked up at me. I looked at her eyes and thought of blue-black winter ice, thick and as hard as steel. The corners of her mouth curled in the slightest of smiles.
"All of the victims had been cut the same way. There were seven victims in six different cities. The first killing took place in New York City, in December of nineteen fifty-one. The last was in Denver in the spring of seventy-eight."
Ingrid's lips parted and her smile grew wider, brighter. Her eyes were still as dark and cold as a winter night.
"And you suspect me of such heinous acts, Junior Detective Edward Weil?"
She gave her head a little shake as if the very notion were the most ridiculous thing imaginable. She raised her teacup and sipped the steaming liquid, watching me with those dark eyes.
"I also found this in the file."
I took out another photo and set it before her. There was a stamp in one corner. Department of the Army. There was also a date stamp. 17 July, 1945. The black and white photo showed five young women standing against a drab wall of crumbling bricks. There were three brunettes and two blondes. The women were thin and frightened, wearing worn, dirty clothing. On the border of the photo were two words written in faded ink.
Liberated Berliners.
Ingrid set down her cup and looked at the photo.
I tried to imagine her at twenty, or thirty, or even fifty. She would have been stunning. Slender and blonde, with eyes that could almost sear your skin.
"My father had notes on you," I said. "You came to America in 1949. You lived in the vicinity of each city and town where these seven murders took place. You were living in Denver in the spring of seventy-eight when my father was working on the murder of a man named Kurakin."
She reached across the table and touched my cheek with one thin finger. She touched an old scar under my right eye. It was shaped like the Nike swoosh.
"You were nine years old, then," Ingrid said, sitting back in her chair. "Perhaps ten. In your cheek here you had four stitches. You fell playing in the woods and just missed by an inch a branch piercing your eye."
I opened my mouth, but couldn't think of anything to say.
"I saw you once, long ago," she said. "Your mother was away for the day. I knew this. I stopped by. You were in the yard, playing with plastic soldiers. Your father was angry. He asked how I found his home, what I was doing there. I told him I had the experience of many years searching for and finding men. I knew that he was handling the investigation and decided to see him. We sat on your front step and you played and bravely displayed your stitches and I told your father everything. And then I left."
Part of me thought this was bullshit. Part of me searched my memory for that day, drawing a blank.
"Your mother was with friends from her church. Delivering baked goods to the elderly."
That much was true. For years my mom was part of a social group at the local church. She would bake pies and cookies and bread every other Saturday and spend Sundays delivering the stuff to a retirement home. Mom wasn't the most devout Catholic since dad would probably only have entered a church at gunpoint, but she liked the company. She liked doing good.
"Your parents, both of them were good people," Ingrid said. She looked out the window again. "Your father... good men are rare, even now."
I didn't know what to say to that. I felt like we were getting off track, and I was annoyed that I wasn't guiding this interview in the way I had anticipated.
"Are you a good man, Edward?"
I looked into those eyes, the shifting blue depths.
According to the women who were the other half of all my failed relationships, I was... what? Difficult? A bastard at times?
"Sure," I said.
Ingrid gave me that little smile again, as if she knew everything about me.
"Did you come here today seeking a newspaper story you could sell? Materials for a book, perhaps?"
I shrugged. "My dad could have retired with a prefect record if he had been able to close this last case."
She raised one slender hand to the side of her neck, her fingers stroking her heavy white braid.
"In honor of your father and the memory of the kind of man he was, and the kind of man I hope you are... I will tell you the truth."
She reached out and her fingertips grazed the crime scene photos.
"Two of these, they are out of order," she said. She shifted two of the glossy pictures. "The butcher in Allentown was killed before the office manager in Philadelphia. This was in nineteen sixty-three. They were killed only a day apart, but Alexander Sinoyev was found in his office before Gora Prikhodko was discovered in his shop."
When she pronounced the Russian names her accent hardened, the R's rolled and harsh.
She looked at the photos, her fingers settling on the picture of Prikhodko. He was lying on his back, wearing a white shirt and dark pants and a butcher's apron that had been pushed up to cover his face. His shirt was ripped open and his pants and under shorts were pulled down around his knees. There were black gaping wounds in his throat and groin.
"It is so easy," she said quietly. She looked up at me. "It is so easy to get a man to follow you anywhere. To make him drop his trousers. To make him close his eyes. You can look them in the eye and smile and know they do not remember faces, only breasts and buttocks and legs and—"
She reached for her cup and sipped some tea.
I looked at her a long time. She stared back at me in silence.
"You killed seven men."
She shook her head. "Not seven. Thirteen. It began in Europe. Not all of them emigrated to America after the war.
"Jesus."
Ingrid closed her eyes and recited names. "Voronokhin. Poliakoff. Artyukhin. Aksyonov. Lagin. Veller. Korchmar. Sinoyev. Prikhodko. Kotelnikov. Klyuchevsky. Bunimovich. And Kurakin."
The murder of Georgy Kurakin was the only case my father had never closed.
Ingrid looked at me and gave me her little smile. "Kurakin was the last, in Denver. He was the most difficult to find, and I believe that he suspected someone was hunting him by that time... Perhaps he knew his comrades were falling one by one."
"Why?"
Ingrid looked beyond me, her eyes darkening again. "I have, for you, more names. Ermentraude Fromme. Klara Schröder. Liese Stoph. Kinge Saltzman. Ingrid Lucht."
I gave her a questioning look.
She reached forward and grabbed the photo of the five young women standing against the wall. Her eyes flashed a darkening blue, like sapphires under a sliver of moonlit.
"This was us! Five average German girls. We never knew each other until we reported what had happened to us to the American soldiers, in Berlin after the war ended. The Americans were all men. They shuffled their feet and avoided looking us in the eye. They gave us rations and blankets and an address we could report to for lodging and medical care but not one of them asked us how we felt. How we were managing. It was as if they were ashamed of us for what had been done. For what had been done to us. We were treated like lepers."
She opened her purse and too out a pewter cigarette case.
"Ingrid, you can't smoke inside."
"Scheisse," she said.
I gathered the pictures and closed the file and stood up. "I'll go outside with you. I could use one too."
I asked the waitress to hold our table and we went out on the sidewalk. I lit up a Camel.
"Your father smoked Camels," Ingrid said. She lit a slender brown cigarette.
"Yeah," I said. "And they killed him.
"Perhaps you need a less subtle hint, hmm?"
She grinned and the daylight filled her blue eyes and I began to understand what she meant when she said it was easy to get a man to follow you anywhere. Ingrid was strikingly lovely at seventy-seven. She must have been almost unbearably beautiful when she was young.
We inhaled smoke and exhaled great swirling clouds into the cool December air.
"What happened to you and those other girls?"
She turned away, and glanced at me over her shoulder, and for a moment her eyes were haunted and filled with despair. She shook her head and the little half-smile returned. Her eyes were cold and clear.
"I gave you names," she said. "Now let me give to you some numbers. Two million. One hundred and thirty thousand. Ten thousand."
I shook my head, dropping my cigarette butt into an ashtray outside the coffee shop.
"In the last days of the war, the civilians of Berlin were in a living hell." She gave me a wistful smile. "Of course, we brought it upon ourselves, no? We elected a man we thought would save Germany, a man who turned into a monster. Even I thought Hitler was a good man, then. I was very young."
She finished her own cigarette and I held the door for her as we went back inside. After we sat down she spoke in a softer voice.
"People were starving, cold, frightened. The city was a ruin. When we heard that the Americans might be coming, many of us, those of us who were sane, realized the nightmare was almost over. Instead, the Russians came, and we found out the nightmare had only just begun."
I silently signaled our waitress for another coffee and another tea.
"It is estimated that the Russian army raped as many as two million women just after the war. This number is of course based on the surge in abortions performed on women who had previously been in the path of the Red Army as it swept eastward. One hundred and thirty thousand women were raped in Berlin alone. Ten thousand committed suicide. Ten thousand."
I didn't know what to say. I whispered "Christ," and she held up a hand for silence.
The waitress brought our coffee and tea, and when she was gone Ingrid continued talking in a soft voice.
"Mothers and daughters were raped. Pregnant women were raped. Children were raped. Women much older then I am now were raped. It was hell on Earth. I was sixteen years old."
She sipped her tea.
"Some women tried to bargain with groups of soldiers, promising themselves to the strongest if he would keep the others away. I once read that Stalin laughed off reports of these rumored atrocities as 'soldiers having a little fun,' and for the longest time what happened to us was just a rumor. Now it is accepted as fact. Now is too late."
Ingrid closed her eyes.
"Thirteen Russians. Kurakin was the biggest, the strongest, the one in charge. They raped me, one after another, on five different occasions. I had nowhere to go. My family was killed when a bomb dropped by the British or the Americans, who knows, blew our apartment house to rubble. I would try to hide from the men in the ruins of my neighborhood, but always they found me. There were times when I wanted to die, when they left me lying on the ground wearing nothing but tatters of clothing, weeping and bleeding from my..."
Her hands dropped into her lap.
"From both ends," she said.
I looked away, my face turning red at what I was hearing.
Ingrid slammed a fist down on the table, rattling cups and saucers.
"Look at me!"
I turned back to her, and it was then that all of my doubts fell away. I knew those dark eyes in that white face were the last thing the dead Russians had seen before they died.
"I bled from my ears and nose and mouth as well. I never stopped resisting them and they never lacked the energy to beat me. They pissed on me and forced so much vodka down my throat I thought I would drown. I wanted to drown. Instead, I struggled, and they beat me and raped me and left me lying in pools of their semen. It hung in my hair in clots. When I could finally stand up it ran down my thighs like molasses. I swallowed it."
My stomach did a slow roll, and I wondered how anyone could ever get past something like that.
"With every one of them I killed, first in Germany, and then in Paris and Barcelona and Istanbul and Southampton and Montreal and across the United States, with every throat I cut and every no longer hard and triumphant penis and fear-shriveled pair of testicles I cut off I tasted them less and less."
I expected tears from her, but her eyes were dry and bright. My own eyes were burning.
"They would stand over me and talk when they were done. Smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka and laughing. Acting as if I were not even there. That is when I learned their names. Names I never forgot."
She leaned over the table, close to me. "One for All, they would say, again and again. One for All, and then all of them would rape me. And years later, when I was ready, my own cry became All for One. All of them would pay for their sins against me."
Ingrid sat back in her chair and laughed. "I did learn one lesson from the way they used me. I learned that most men are just a prick waiting to bury itself and spurt. So I never had to work. I used what I had been born with to get money from men, or information. Information that helped me track down the rapists and kill them one by one."
In a matter-of-fact tone she said, "Did you know that the only orgasm I ever had was after I killed the first one?"
I looked down at my hands, folded on the table.
"I was covered in blood and standing over a half-naked body and I shuddered and fell to my knees. Afterward, I realized what had happened and I was not proud, but I was not ashamed, either. Perhaps my awareness is what prevented it from ever happening again."
I looked up when she asked, "How many orgasms have you had? How many have you given the women you have been with? I have never been with a man, other than those I killed. This is one of many joys that was denied me forever."
She put on her wool hat, tucking that long white braid out of sight.
"When I was a little girl, I thought life would be wonderful... forever. But those men ruined me. So I killed them."
She took a few dollars from one coat pocket and left them on the table.
"I was never charged with any crimes, never suspected of any wrongdoing, but I got away with nothing. A husband, children, friends... I have had none of those."
She reached across the table and touched my hand.
"Your father never closed the case because he let me walk away after I told him what I told you. There was no big dramatic moment like in the movies when the music swells and everything is set right again. I just walked away, and left him sitting on the step while you played nearby."
Ingrid stood up and straightened her cloth coat.
"Show me there are still good men in the world," she said. "Now that your father is gone. He was the only one who ever heard what I had to tell."
After a moment of silence she whispered, "Not so many women were as lucky as your mother. Goodbye, Edward."
She turned and walked out the door and across the street.
I never saw Ingrid Lucht again.
I sat in the coffee shop for a while after Ingrid left. I was certain I had the basis for one hell of a book. If I handled the material right, I could have a best-seller on my hands. If I could push something like this on Oprah I'd be a goddamned millionaire.
Then I thought of my mom, and of how Ingrid had said my mom was lucky.
I took my dad's file out of my bag and opened it again. When I found the picture of the five young women, I got a pen and wrote their names on the back of the picture. Ermentraude Fromme. Klara Schröder. Liese Stoph. Kinge Saltzman. Ingrid Lucht.
I left the coffee shop and walked a few blocks, smoking a cigarette. I saw an alley and went into it.
In a recessed doorway I used my Zippo to burn my dad's file. I burned everything but the old black and white photo of the five young women. That I would keep. As the rest of the file burned I felt the muscles in my legs twitch. Part of me wanted to stomp out the flames, save the file, and profit from Ingrid's story.
When the file was just ashes and a few unrecognizable fragments of old glossy photo paper, I went back out to the street. Within a few minutes I hailed a cab, and was on my way to the airport.
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