Ernesto took a breather and went on. “So I figure okay…so Grandpa came after the war. He made a mistake. When I knew him, he was old and a little senile, so his absentmindedness is completely within context. So, I point out this little discrepancy to my dad, expecting a logical explanation. Instead, Dad freezes up, then accuses me of trying to stir up trouble…which was totally ridiculous. Usually, if Dad doesn’t want to talk about it, he just kind of gets this condescending smile and says something like ‘another time, Che.’ Dad calls me Che when he’s trying to prove a point. But this time he gets mad. He gets red in the face. He stomps off. I’m shocked. This means, you know, I hit a nerve.”

Silence.

Decker said, “So what happened?”

“Nothing. I never brought it up, and certainly Dad never brought it up again.”

“So now you’re curious and you have no logical explanation and no one to talk to.”

“Exactly! I technically dropped it, but it’s been plaguing me. It’s on my mind all the time. Because I get to thinking that if Grandpa did come over in ’47, that must have meant that he was in Europe at the time of the war. And being a Jew during the war, he must have suffered somehow. Because I have a couple of friends whose grandparents were European and Jewish, and they have war stories. But I never remember hearing any war stories. Nothing about the…the Holocaust…the death camps. No survival tales, either.”

“I understand.”

“And furthermore, my grandfather’s family was intact—his parents and a sister—which would make sense if they all had come to South America in 1937. The camps weren’t in full operation until later on. But it wouldn’t make any sense for all of them to be alive if Grandpa came over in 1947. You get my drift?”

“Your grandfather was an imposter.”

“That was my conclusion. My dad told me that I got the dates mixed up. But I don’t think so.”

“Do you have your grandfather’s birth certificate?”

“No, and that’s a problem. Just some old papers. I did some further probing…a little of this and that. Called up some resources. I did find a Yitzchak Golding who was sent to Treblinka, a camp in Poland, in 1940. He never came back. His brothers and sisters were also sent to the death camps. So were his parents. None of them came back. No aunts, uncles, cousins…all of them gone. Dead. The family is as extinct as dinosaurs. I’m carrying the name for a bunch of Jewish ghosts. They’re haunting me, Lieutenant Decker. Day in and day out, they’re haunting me. Their faces and their corpses.” Golding looked up, his stormy eyes wild and wet. “I had to get rid of them. So I did what I had to do.”