The Cincinnati Bicycle Killing

The Cincinnati Bicycle Killing is the novel's darkly comic and morally ambiguous climax to the pursuit of the former Kovno Ghetto commandant, S.S. Major Schmitz. An unnamed ex-New York Times reporter, having failed to secure legal justice for the Nazi war criminal, travels to Cincinnati intent on killing him, only to accidentally run him down with a bicycle in a bungled, almost farcical hit-and-run. The event transforms the reporter from a passive observer into an active agent of vengeance, yet the manner of the killing—an unintended, clumsy accident—undercuts any sense of heroic justice, leaving the perpetrator dead but the moral reckoning unresolved.

Background and the Failure of Legal Justice

The killing is the culmination of a long and frustrated legal pursuit. The rabbi had faxed the reporter her father's file, which contained letters to the United States Department of Justice and their bureaucratic replies, as well as two 1977 articles from The New York Times about a deportation hearing. In that hearing, three people testified that the man in question was the ghetto commandant, Schmitz, but his lawyer successfully shot down their testimony, portraying them as elderly and easily befuddled. The defendant testified that he was Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who had only done guard duty in the ghetto for three months before being shipped to fight on the Russian front, an identity he had presented to immigration authorities after the war. The judge found in his favor. Letters to and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center showed a functionary agreeing with Sarah's father that Preissen was almost certainly Schmitz, but short of convincing documentation, the identification could not be made to justify reopening the case, although their file was kept open. The Department of Justice offered less agreement, with the lawyer there somewhat defensive about his handling of the case.

The Reporter's Transformation and Preparation

The ex-Times man flies to Cincinnati with an open-ended return ticket, checking into a hotel called the Something Arms on a residential street in the hills above the downtown. The whole city smells like beer, with lots of red brick and white granite steps, the sun bronzing off the Ohio River below. He rents a car and cruises around to get the feel of the place, remembering from accounts of the Eichmann kidnapping that the major problem was identification. He reflects on how Eichmann worked under an assumed name, wore heavy black-rimmed glasses, and lived in a cubelike flat-roofed cinder-block house in the middle of an empty lot outside Buenos Aires, a house with small windows on all four sides that could not be sneaked up on. The reporter realizes he comes from the other culture—the culture of reporting the fact, getting the story, getting the spelling right. He describes it as like a ball and chain that drags on him, a heavy weight to pull. He reflects that all his life he has looked on, that civilization paid people like him for doing nothing, for living subsidized the way a farmer is paid for not planting crops. Now the time has come for him to pass over to the other side, to break through the inertia of his soul, something akin to transfiguration. Yet his excitement vanishes, and he is only mournful as he drives aimlessly around Cincinnati avoiding his destination, feeling like a fool and hapless, with absolutely no idea of how to proceed.

The Bicycle and the Accident

He drives past the S.S. man's address a couple of times, noting the house is the same as the others on the hill street, though slightly more modest. Deciding he can accomplish nothing from a car, he stops at a yard sale in a riverside neighborhood of porched cottages and clapboard houses. Among the peeling painted kitchen chairs, used books, and a couch with sprung springs, he sees a bike—a three-speed 28-inch wheel, only the third speed works and the rear tire is soft—and buys it for twenty dollars. He gets air for the tire and has himself a working surveillance bike. He parks in a shopping mall, takes the bike out of the car, takes off his jacket and tie, rolls up his sleeves and trousers, and becomes a graying, overweight, middle-aged man getting in his workout, puffing up the hills and cruising down, waving at the kids in the yards. He figures if he does this a few days at the same time every day, nobody will notice him anymore. He begins to think about buying a gun, something to fit in his pocket, perhaps going across the river to Kentucky, though the gun shops keep records. He considers a knife, some sort of hunting knife from a sporting goods store, or one of those underwater harpoons that divers use to spear fish, carried in a case, walking right up to the door. He is thinking imaginatively and not without pleasure, feeling better about himself, coasting down a hill in the right neighborhood, when he somehow loses his bearings. The bike wobbles, and he is able to right himself only by bouncing up on the sidewalk but at the same time going faster than he should. A man appears, coming down the path from his house and turning onto the sidewalk, unhearing, unseeing—a heavyset elderly man with a cane. The reporter later cannot remember if he shouted Look out or just shouted, unable to understand how someone, even someone that old, could be so unseeing, so unhearing. He remembers the catastrophic impact, the fedora flying up, the white hair rising as the body already falls, the black-rimmed glasses askew over the chin, the terrified milky eyes, and a good clear complexion for such an old man, jowly, florid, healthy. Simultaneously the back of the head hits the brick retaining wall of the man's own lawn with a thwack, a burlesque konk, the comic human body always looking for the opportunity of expression. There is an unwanted sudden intimacy as he falls on top of the man together with him on the sidewalk, smelling his onion breath, hearing the hiss from his throat, feeling the nap of his cashmere jacket, and finding the man's plaid muffler in his own mouth. His nausea rises—the nausea of shock but also disgust—and he uses the man's body to push himself upright, pressing the man's shoulders against the sidewalk, feeling the disgust of death before he knows that it is death. His bike is upturned, the front wheel spinning in the air, the handlebars lopsided, and the palms of his hands are scraped raw. He is outraged at this calamitous idiot, shouting at the dead form, shaking with umbrage, righting his bike and jerking at the unaligned handlebars. Around him the street is empty and quiet, and as if to punish the old fool for making such a mess of his transfigured intent, he mounts his bike and rides off wobblingly down the hill, the rear wheel scraping with every rotation against the bike frame.

Aftermath and the Unresolved Reckoning

The reporter makes it to the mall a few blocks away, throws the bike into a dumpster behind the A&P, and drives back to his hotel. He should have called for help, seen to the old man—but how could he explain himself, or what had brought him to this place? Sickened, pulse racing, he lies down, fearful of a heart attack, and instead dozes off. He wakes hours later disgusted with himself and determined to forget the whole thing. He checks out and goes to the airport to wait for a flight back to New York, where he picks up an evening paper and sits at the bar. He reads that a hit-and-run bike killer is at large; some kid saw the whole thing from his window, giving an imprecise description of a heavyset white man. The victim was an elderly refugee, age eighty-one, who had some years ago been accused of gaining entry to the United States by hiding his wartime role as a machine-gun platoon sergeant in charge of mass executions of Jews from the Kovno, Lithuania, ghetto, a charge that was later dismissed for lack of evidence. Neighbors say he was a good kind man who lived alone since the death of his wife, had something of an old world elegance about him, tipped his hat to women in the street, and came to his porch on Halloween with handfuls of candy for the trick-or-treaters. The irony is complete: the man the reporter sought to kill as a Nazi war criminal is remembered by his community as a gentle, kind old man.

The Final Irony of Closure

Much later, at a gathering, Pem takes the narrator by the arm and reveals that they found out the son of a bitch died two months ago—Schmid, Schmitz, whatever his name was, the Nazi who ran the ghetto. He died in his sleep, in a home in Yonkers. Pem laments that they had him good and nailed, too, and that he never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The revelation confirms that the bicycle killing was indeed the death of Schmitz, but it also underscores the futility of the act: the war criminal died in his sleep, never facing justice, and the reporter's accidental killing—which he himself never even reported—remains an anonymous hit-and-run in the public record. The event thus becomes a meditation on the nature of closure: the reporter's transfiguration into an active agent ends in a bungled accident, the legal system fails to convict, and even the successful killing provides no public reckoning. The man who sought to end a story with his own hands finds that the story ends not with a trial but with a silent death in Yonkers, and the world never takes a look at him for what he was.