Isaac Goldberg’s vanishing was announced. Nurses, attendants, cooks, janitors, the entire staff, felt rudderless as the news—and the rumors—spread. Even though the evening shift, including Ben Blake and Dick O’Brien, had gone home, word had spread about the man in the basement with the gun. With no one knowing anything about Goldberg’s disappearance, it was only logical to assume that the two events were connected. And conversations throughout the day produced scenarios even more exotic than the reality of what had occurred. The more anti-Semitic staff members thought that Dr. Goldberg was a Communist, and that the arrested man was a CIA assassin. Others thought that the intruder was a jealous husband of an as-yet-unidentified nurse with whom Goldberg was carrying on an affair. Still others suggested that the shooter was a vengeful Nazi who came to finish what the concentration camps had not been able to accomplish. Only a very few subscribed to the theory that Dr. Isaac Goldberg was not whom he seemed to be.
