Over the years, whenever there was a story about a miscarriage of justice or debate about the death penalty, the Froelich case would be cited. Newspaper articles would appear alongside old school photographs of the boy and the victim. Eternally paired in grainy reproductions, their smiles more and more remote in time — his slicked-back hair from a bygone era, her Peter Pan collar. Older and older, and younger and younger.
As time went by, the case acquired the air of legend. Articles never failed to include certain “haunting details” such as the wildflowers and the cross of bulrushes found over her body. Her underpants over her face. And “the mysterious air force man,” the passing motorist who supposedly had waved from a blue Ford Galaxy, then failed to come forward. Journalists speculated that he might have been the real killer. In the late seventies, a weekly news magazine ran an article that featured an interview with a retired police officer who had been a constable on the case. Lonergan revealed for the first time that the boy’s father, “a German Jew named Henry Froelich,” had claimed to have seen a war criminal driving that same car in downtown London.
In the eighties a commission of inquiry was set up by the federal government to investigate the presence of war criminals in Canada. Parts of the report were never published, available only via the Access to Information Act, for it turned out that there were possibly thousands of war criminals in Canada — among them, concentration camp guards and an entire SS unit from Eastern Europe, members of which had claimed “conscription” and a healthy hatred of Communists among their credentials in their quest for Canadian citizenship.
Eventually a few cases were brought to trial, and although public opinion was divided on whether these law-abiding senior citizens should be prosecuted after all these years — whether it was justice or “Jewish vendetta,” whether it was democracy at work or playing into the hands of “Soviet propaganda”—Henry Froelich’s story began to look less far-fetched. Journalists, authors and documentary filmmakers theorized about the fate of Henry Froelich, whose body had never been found. Had he stumbled on — to use a term that had become common currency — a “covert operation”? Was he a victim of RCMP dirty tricks? Was the CIA involved?
Sporadic attempts were made to find Richard Froelich and interview him. But he had changed his name, and his whereabouts remained a mystery.
WILD KINGDOM
Everything that is now in space had its origins here, not in America or Russia.
ONE MORNING, Madeleine saw their pictures in the paper. Under the headline “Supreme Court Turns Down Bid for Appeal.” She was seventeen at the time. But Ricky was still fifteen, and Claire of course was nine.
She glimpsed the pictures when her father turned the page at the breakfast table, then they disappeared when he folded the paper. He took it to work with him. She knew he hadn’t wanted to leave it lying around. She got up from the table.
“You leaving already, ma p’tite?”
“Yeah, I want to get to school early. I’m meeting Jocelyn.” Unnecessary lie, but harmless. Her first class that morning was a spare.
“Qu’est-ce que tu as, Madeleine?”
“Nothing’s the matter.”
“You’re flushed, come till I feel your forehead.”
“I’m fine.”
She left, forgetting her lunch. She needed to go outside, where it was cool and normal. She didn’t need to read the article, the headline said it all. She didn’t want to read the fine print, to see again the words child witnesses. When her Man In Society teacher, Mr. Eagan, asked the class how many of them were familiar with the Richard Froelich case, Madeleine and two other students — one from Pakistan and one from Uganda — were the only ones who didn’t raise their hands. She drew cartoons in the back of her scribbler while the class discussed the possible miscarriage of justice.
After supper she asked her father, “Dad, do you think it really was an air force man Ricky saw in the car?” They were in the family room, watching the new colour TV. A nature show. He didn’t seem surprised by the question.
“If it was, you have to ask yourself why he didn’t come forward.”
“Why do you think?”
“Well, assuming Ricky wasn’t mistaken, I’d have to say that this air force type, whoever he was, must’ve been up to something fairly confidential.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged, eyes on the screen. “Government business?”
She stared at the lurid greens and shifting blues of the television.
“Do you think there really was a war criminal?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, getting up to adjust the colour.
“So you think Mr. Froelich was telling the truth?”
“Knowing Henry Froelich,” said Jack, “there’s no doubt in my mind.”
She started to ask another question, but they heard Mimi coming in through the garage door and Jack warned her with a look. They stopped talking and concentrated on the screen: an unspoiled tropical paradise — white sand, azure sea.
In the kitchen, Mimi began rattling around. Emptying the dishwasher, putting away groceries.
“He was in a camp,” said Madeleine quietly. On the screen, a sea turtle glided under water. “I saw his tattoo once.”
“Did you?” His profile was impassive.
“He must’ve been at Auschwitz.” She had studied the Holocaust in History. She never used the term “holocaust” at home, however, because her father objected to it: the Second World War was about a whole lot more than that. She watched the turtle sleeping on the ocean floor and heard her father say, “At first.” She looked at him, perplexed, but his gaze was on the TV and he kept it there as he spoke. “He was at a different place later.”
“Another camp?”
“This was no ordinary concentration camp.”
She waited. You mean there’s such a thing as an “ordinary” concentration camp, doc?
“Dora,” he said.
“Who?”
On the TV, hundreds of baby turtles flailed across the beach toward the sea. Birds dropped down, leisurely, picking them off one by one as the narrator, in measured manly tones, asserted that “only a handful” would make it.
“Dora. Where the rockets were built.”
“What rockets?”
“Ever hear of guided missiles? Ever hear of Apollo?”
She heard the note of grim sarcasm, the one usually reserved for politicians, the school system and — before he left home — Mike. She wondered if her father was about to get angry again, the way he had at the moon landing last summer. His anger never frightened her, however. It gave her a pang in the pit of her stomach. Something was wrong. Someone should fix it for him.
In the kitchen, Mimi turned on the Cuisinart. It sounded like a jet engine.
Jack said, “Dora is where it all started.” Eyes fixed on the South Pacific. “Henry Froelich was there.”
She pictured Mr. Froelich in his white shirt, skinny tie and thick glasses, bearded and conspicuous in a row of clean-shaven scientists and engineers hunched over their computers at Mission Control, Texas.
“It was a concentration camp,” said Jack.
In Houston? Madeleine was beginning to feel as though she were a little stoned. A mother sea turtle began the near-futile task of digging a hole in the sand with her flippers. “Where was Dora?”
“It was in a mountain cave.” His voice changed again. It took on the dreamy quality she recognized from childhood, his once-upon-a-time tone. “During the war,” a long time ago, “in what would later become East Germany,” in a country that no longer exists, “Hitler’s secret weapon,” there was a treasure, “built by slave labour” they toiled out of sight of sun or moon….