"Nothing," he said. "Forget the whole thing."

We parked in the visitors' lot in back of the center and walked around to the front entrance. After passing through a metal detector, we signed in with a plainclothes guard in an open booth. He was young, sharp-featured, with cropped black hair, a strong chin, and hard eyes.

Milo showed ID and said, "We're here to see Judy Baumgartner."

"Wait, please," said the guard. Some kind of accent. He stepped back several feet and made a call.

"Israeli," said Milo. "Since the swastikas, they use ex-secret-service guys as security. Very stubborn. They can be a real pain in the ass to deal with, but they get the job done."

The guard returned to the counter. "She'll be a few minutes. You can wait up there." He pointed to a short, open flight of stairs. Above it was a landing backed with a black-and-white mural of wide-eyed faces. Frightened faces. It reminded me of the TV broadcast the day of the sniping.

Milo said, "How about we look at the exhibit?"

The guard shrugged. "Sure."

We took the open stairs clown to the basement level. Dark hallway, the sounds of typing and ringing phones. A few people traveled the corridor, purposeful, busy.

To the right of the stairs was a black door marked EXHIBIT in small steel letters.

"Temporary," he said, "until the museum's done."

He opened the door to a room about thirty feet square, paneled gallery-white, gray-carpeted, and very cool. Photo blowups lined the walls.

Milo began walking. I followed.

The first picture: storm troopers kicking and beating elderly Jews on the streets of Munich.

The second, stolid-looking citizens marching with placards: RAUS MIT.

EUCH DRECKIGE.

JUDEN!.

I stopped, caught my breath, went on.

A jackbooted, peak-capped soldier, not more than nineteen or twenty, using tin snips to cut the beard of a terrified grandfather as other soldiers look on in glee.

The shattered and defaced storefronts of post-Kristallnacht Berlin. Swastikas. Posters in crude gothic lettering.

Gutted buildings. Shattered faces.

A triptych midway down the first wall made me stop even as Milo kept walking. A winter scene. Forest of monumental conifers atop gently rolling snow dunes. In the foreground a row of naked men and women huddled in front of trench graves; some still held shovels. Dozens of emaciated physiques, caved-in chests, shriveled genitals. Victims obscenely bare amid the frosty beauty of the Bavarian countryside. Behind the prisoners, a dozen SS men armed with carbines.

Next photo: the troopers raise weapons to shoulder. An officer holds a baton. Most of the diggers keep their backs turned, but one woman has shifted to face the soldiers, screaming, open-mouthed. A dark-eyed, black-haired woman, her breasts shrunken, her pubic thatch a dark wound in white flesh.

Then: bodies, heaps of them, filling the trenches, merging with the snow. One soldier bayonets a corpse.

I forced myself to move on.

Close-ups of barbed wire-iron fangs. A sign in German. A shred of something clinging to the fangs.

Snarling dogs.

A blowup of a document. Columns of numbers, straight margins, beautifully printed, neat as an accountant's ledger. Opposite each column, hand-scripted words. Bergen-Belsen. Gotha. Buchenwald. Dachau. Dortmund. Auschwitz. Landsberg. Maidanek. Treblinka. Opposite each name, a number code. Body count. So many digits. A horrific arithmetic . . .

More snowy-white images: bleached bones. Piles of them. Femurs and tibias and finger bones white as piano keys. Pelvic cradles stripped raw. Yawning rib cages. Scraps and fragments rendered unidentifiable.

A mountain of bones sitting on a base of dust and grit.

An incomprehensible Everest of bones, landscaped with jawless skulls.

My stomach lurched.

Another enlarged document: multisyllabic German words. A translating caption: PROCESSING PROCEDURES. The final solution.

Compulsively detailed lists of those bound for the refuse heap: Jews. Gypsies. Subversives. Homosexuals.

I looked over at Milo. He was across the room, his back to me. Hands in pockets, hunched and bulky and preda-tory as a bear out on a night forage.

I kept walking, looking.

A display case of Zyldon B poison-gas canisters. An-other containing a shredded striped uniform of coarse cloth.

Little children in cloth caps and braids, herded onto trains. Bewildered, tear-streaked. Tiny hands reaching out for mother love. Faces pressed against a train window.

Another group of children, in spotless school uniforms, marching beneath a swastika banner, giving a straight-armed salute.

Black gallows against a cloudy sky. Bodies dangling from them, their feet barely touching the ground. A caption explaining that the scaffolding had been specially constructed with short drops, so that death, from slow strangulation, was prolonged.

Guard towers.

More barbed wire-spooling miles of it.

Brick ovens.

Pallets of charred, caked matter.

Fat complacent cats licking at a pile of it.

Tiled laboratories that resembled autopsy rooms. Sinks full of glassware. Humanoid things on tables.

A paragraph describing the science of the Third Reich. Ice-water experiments. Eye-color experiments. Artificial-insemination experiments. Cross-species breeding experiments. Benzine injections to harden the arteries. "Surgery" without anesthesia to study the limits of pain tolerance. Twin studies. Dwarf studies. Authoritative-looking men in white coats, bearing scalpels like weapons.

Rows of graves outside a "sanitarium."

Milo and I had come face to face. When I saw the moisture in his eyes, I realized mine were wet too.

My throat felt as if it had been stuffed with dirt. I wanted to say something but the thought of speaking hurt my chest.

I turned away from him and dried my eyes.

The gallery door opened. A woman came in and said, "Hi, Milo. Sorry to keep you waiting."

Cheer in her voice. It jolted me like an ice-water bath.

She was in her mid to late forties, tall and slim, with a long neck and a smallish oval face. Her hair was short, gray, and feathered. She had on a silk print dress in mauves and blues, and mauve suede shoes. Her badge said J. BAUMGARTNER, SENIOR RESEARCHER.

Milo shook her hand. "Thanks for seeing me on short notice, Judy."

"For you, anything, Milo. If I look a wreck, it's from sitting at O'Hare for four hours waiting to take off. Place is a zoo."

She looked perfectly put together.

Milo said, "This is Alex Delaware. Alex, Judy Baumgartner."

She smiled. "Good to meet you, Alex."

Mile said, "He's never been here before."

"Well then, a special welcome. Any impressions?"

"I'm glad I saw it."

My voice was strained. She nodded.

We left the gallery and followed her down the hall to a small room furnished with four gray metal desks arranged in a square. Three of them were occupied by young people-two females and a male of college age-poring over manuscripts and notating. She greeted them and they said hi and went back to work. The walls were filled with bookcases of the same gray metal. A cardboard box sat atop the unoccupied desk.

Judy Baumgartner said, "There's a meeting going on in my office, so this will have to do."

She sat behind the desk with the box. Milo and I pulled up chairs.

She pointed to the box. "Ike's stuff. I had my secretary go into the library card catalogue and pull everything he'd checked out. This is it."

"Thanks," said Milo.

"I've got to tell you," she said, "I'm still pretty shaken. When I got the message in Chicago that you needed to see me, I thought it was going to be something about hate crimes or maybe even some progress on Kaltenblud. Then when I got back and Janie told me what you wanted . . ."

She shook her head. "He was such a nice kid, Milo. Friendly, dependable-really dependable. That's why when he stopped showing up for work, I was really surprised. Tried to find the number he'd given me when he applied to volunteer, but it was gone. Must have gotten thrown out. Space is at a premium-stuff gets thrown out all the time. I'm sorry."

Milo said, "He worked here?"

"Yes. Didn't Janie tell you?"

"No. All I knew was he'd checked out books, done some research."

"He did research for me, Milo. For over two months. Never missed a day-he was one of my steadiest ones. Really dedicated. His suddenly dropping out bothered me-it wasn't like him. I asked the other volunteers if they knew what had happened to him but they didn't. He hadn't made friends-kept to himself. I tried to get a number for him but he wasn't listed. Finally, after a couple of weeks of his not showing up, I put it down to impetuous youth. Figured I'd overrated his maturity. I never expected . . . never knew. How'd it happen, Milo?"

Milo told her about the shooting, told her it had taken place in a dope alley but left out the toxicology report.

She frowned. "He sure didn't seem like a druggie to me. If any kid was lucid and straight, it was Ike. Unusually straight-almost too serious for his age. He had a really . . . crisp mind. Still, people can maintain, can't they?"

"When did he start volunteering?"

"Late April. Walked in off the street and announced he wanted to help. Good-looking kid, fire in his eyes-passion. He reminded me of the way students used to be during the sixties. Not that I greeted him with open arms. I wanted to make sure he was stable, not just caught up in some impulsive thing. And frankly, I was taken by surprise. We don't get much interest from non-Jewish kids, and with all the black-Jewish tension lately, the last thing I expected was a black kid wanting to do Holocaust research. But he was really sincere. On top of being smart. A very quick study, and that's hard to find nowadays. The gifted ones all seem to stay on the career track, get rich quick. The ones like those three"-she pointed to the other desks-"are the exception."

"Did they know Ike?"

"No. They just started. Fall interns. The summer group consisted of three students from Yeshiva University in New York, one each from Brown and NYU, and Ike. From Santa Monica College. All the others went back for fall semester. Ike didn't hang out with them. Kind of a loner, really."

"You said he was friendly."

"Yes. That's odd, isn't it, now that you mention it. He was friendly-smiled a lot, courteous, but he definitely kept to himself. When Janie told me what had happened, I thought back, realized how little he'd told me about himself during the interview: He'd arrived a few months ear-lier from back east, was working and going to school. He told me he loved history, wanted to be a lawyer or a historian. He kept steering the conversation away from per-sonal things and toward substance-history, politics, man's inhumanity to man. I was so taken by his enthusiasm that I went along with it, didn't ask very many personal questions. Do you think he was hiding something?"

"Who knows?" said Milo. "There's no record at all of his application?"

"No, sorry. We dump tons. Anything to avoid the paper-glut."

"Wish I had the luxury," he said. "By now I dream in triplicate."

She smiled. "Be thankful you don't deal with the fed-eral government. After years of haggling, the Justice Department's finally started turning over names of old Nazis who're still living here. They all lied on their visa applications and we're processing to beat the band-meeting with federal prosecutors in the various cities, filling out mountains of forms, trying to persuade them to move faster on drawing up deportation papers. That's what I was doing in Chicago: trying to sock it to a kindly old geezer who runs a bakery on the South Side-best pastry in town, free samples to all the local kiddies. Only problem is, forty-five years ago that geezer was responsible for gassing eighteen hundred kiddies."

Milo's face got hard. "Gonna nail him?"

"Gonna try. Actually, this particular case looks good. Of course there'll be the usual outcry from his family and friends: We've got the wrong guy; this one's a saint, wouldn't hurt a fly; we're only persecuting him because of his noble anticommunist background-Moscow's behind all of it, you see. As if the Russians would give us the time of day. Not to mention a whole bunch of mewling from the nonconfrontational wimps who think human nature's basically pure and bygones should be bygones. And, of course, straight-out anti-Semitic garbage from the revisionist morons-the it-never-happened-in-the-first-place-but-if-it-did-they-deserved-it crowd. Your basic neo-Bundists."

"Neo-who?"

"Bundists." She smiled. "Sorry for being esoteric, I was referring to the German-American Bund. It was a big movement in this country, before World War II. Passed itself off as a German-American pride society, but that was just a cover for American Nazism. Bundists were big in the isolationist movement, agitated against U.S. involvement in the war, used the America First cover to press for mandatory sterilization of all refugees-that kind of thing. But they weren't just a tiny fringe group. They held rallies at Madison Square Garden for thousands of people, complete with swastika banners, Brown Shirt marches, 'The Horst Wessel Song.' Ran paramilitary training camps-two dozen of them, with bunkhouses for 'storm troopers.' Their goal was to set up a German-speaking colony-a Sudetenland-in New York State. First step toward an Aryan America. Their leaders were paid agents of the Third Reich. They published newspapers, had a press ser-vice, a book publishing company called Flanders Hall. Got support from Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford-the Bundesfuhrer, a man called Fritz Kuhn, was a Ford Motors chemist-and plenty of politicians too. They interfaced with Father Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith, lots of other loonies. But after Pearl Harbor, their leaders were rounded up for espionage and sedition and sent to prison. It put a damper on the movement but didn't kill it. Extremism's like that. A recurrent cancer-you need to be always looking out for it, cutting it away. Nowadays it's skinheads, revisionists . . . the Holocaust never happened. They thrive on economic hardship-tried to exploit the farmers problems a few years back. The latest thing is Odinism. Some sort of ancient Norse religion. They reject Christianity because it evolved out of Judaism. Then there's this other group that claims to be the real Hebrews. We Jews are subhuman, the spawn of Eve and the snake. Farrakhan says the same kind of thing-white separatists showed up at one of his rallies and donated money."

"Nutso," said Milo.

"But dangerous. We're working overtime keeping an eye on them all."

"Was Novato involved in investigating any of them?"

"No. We keep the volunteers away from that kind of thing-too dangerous. I'm up to two death threats a week. He did library work: reshelving, working on the index catalogue. I'd call down with a list of references and ask him to get them for me. Sometimes I'd send him to outside libraries-UCLA or Hebrew Union College. Or over to the Federal Building to pick up some documents. He had a motorcycle, which made him perfect for that. Mostly what he did was read-on his own time. Sat in the library until closing time, then took stuff home with him."