“It’s all the same to them if I don’t last,” he said. “They’ll find a way to make a liar out of me.”
It was as if she’d hit him with a hammer.
Corporal Dax came into the entryway, dangling his keys.
She took Kurt’s hand, squeezed and turned away, not looking back. There would be nothing of his eyes, being lost there in the dark, that would be any good to her until she saw them in the light again, somewhere beyond these terrible walls that seemed to keep her warm for the day she couldn’t turn her back on them without the man she never had been sure was real.
27
Geli saw by the light under Mattei’s office door that he was working late. She rapped lightly on the door.
There was a sound of movement inside.
She knocked again. “Major Mattei! May I see you a moment?”
More noise, the creaking of a chair.
She wrapped her hand around the knob. “I need to talk to you, Monsieur!”
Chair legs screeched and footsteps thudded toward the door and it flew open. Mattei left it that way as he stalked back to his chair behind his desk, sat in it noisily and began to busy himself with some papers spread out under the lamp.
Geli shut the door. She walked up to his desk and stood there quietly.
He kept on riffling through the papers. Taking another step, she felt the edge of the desk against her thighs, then something caught her eye. A blond young woman in the large, framed photograph, a radiant smile and sparkling eyes, the picture of a woman who knew she was pretty.
Mattei’s bark startled her. “Just what is it that you want?”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s been some weeks since you were kind enough to let me see Herr Langsdorff. You no longer bring him up for interrogation.”
“What about it?”
“Well, I - can you tell me if the doctor has looked in on him?”
His scowl took on incredulity. “Doctor Trouillet is aware of his condition.”
“What’s he doing about it?”
Mattei slapped his hand down on the pencil in it. “His best, within limits. There’s something wrong with all of them down there, but remember, this is no hospital. Colonel Laurent makes few if any exceptions for preferential treatment.”
“How near death does a person have to be?”
Mattei’s eyes came up cannily. “I don’t make the rules around here.”
“What do you do?”
Mattei glared at her, then looked aside airily, as if the spur hadn’t dug in.
She softened her voice to say, “Why don’t you let me be of help to you, Monsieur?”
“Help how?”
“I don’t want to be your enemy.”
“Then leave me alone.” He gave her a long look, then sat back with a sigh and said, “All right. I go down to visit him from time to time. We chat. He doesn’t ask for much. The sanitary situation still leaves something to be desired. You don’t get rid of two-hundred years’ worth of vermin overnight. Sometimes I take some fruit and cheese - Trioullet’s stopgap to getting a request for insulin turned down. I’ve made him know I’m doing all I can to get him off. Between that and the food, his spirits aren’t so bad.”
“Has he told you, yet, about Helsinki?”
His eyes came up and narrowed on her cautiously.
“Why?”
“He left it out that time you prompted him for witnesses.”
Mattei searched her face. “We never got to that. I found it later on in his report. I had to ask him why he hadn’t made much out of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“If he was so tormented by the thought that he had saved so few lives, why didn’t he invoke Helsinki?”
“Are you asking me, Monsieur?”
“No. I finally got it out of him. Then it was all I could do to talk him out of doing nothing about it.”
“I don’t -”
“It was his wife. He didn’t want her to be brought into it. Apparently, just days before he left Berlin he got through to her by telephone. Whatever other things he told her, Helsinki was the one he thought would stick. He’d kept her in the dark so long, the need for secrecy was over. I tried to make him understand he wasn’t sparing her by playing dead. Soon it would be too late. Then what good was his reputation to her if he got convicted when he’d never given her a chance to help?”
“Monsieur!” she blurted, “if he’s reluctant to involve her -”
Mattei was shaking his head. “No, no, that’s over. He wrote to her. I took his letter to the Americans for delivery. We’ll have our witness.”
She fought a swelling in her throat to say, “The other two, the Dutch partisans who were the first to hatch the plot -”
“Yes, them. More difficult to locate, but the search is out for them in Holland.”
“Did he tell you the hometown of one of them was Lembeck?”
“Ah, yes. Interesting. Friends clear back to the first years of the war, then they all meet again as the unlikeliest of bedfellows.”
She stared his way, not seeing him, and the look he gave her slanted one eyebrow over a deep frown.
“Good news, isn’t it? Aren’t you glad?”
“Why, yes, of course.” Geli threw a smile out across the tears backing up in her throat.
“Well then, stop worrying. Things are looking up.”
Suddenly she felt flustered. She could only think to say, “Does he ever ask about me?”
Mattei was in the midst of smiling. He looked at her as if she’d spoiled his fun. “He asked me to be sure no harm comes to you.”
She looked down at the papers littered on his desk, smiling absently like she would smooth a clean sheet over a dirty bed. She brought her eyes up glistening. “Have you told him who I really am?”
“Oh, no. That would be cheating, wouldn’t it? Like I once let you get away with hating every prisoner Dax brought up by preaching justice from my pulpit.”
Something came loose and she laughed. “I’ve put you through the ringer, haven’t I?”
He ignored that, glaring at her levelly. “No matter. You can bow out, now.”
“I see. Why don’t you reassign me?”
“And have all that explaining to do? No, thank you.”
She opened her mouth to speak. Nothing came out. She looked down at the picture on his desk. “Your wife there, Monsieur?”
“Yes. We were in Vichy when that was taken.”
“She’s so pretty.”
“She’s grown rather shy of being photographed these days.”
Geli had only seen her once at the bottom of the stairway - pitifully fat, yet so pretty, catching them together coming down. Roland and the stenographer, and he’d been telling her about the indignities he’d endured at Vichy as Fifi kept on lumbering upward, carrying a basket, and he watched her with a stricken look as if she were a ghost that wouldn’t stay buried, all out of breath by the time she reached the top, heaving the words, ‘I’ve brought lunch, dear, it’s such a nice day out. Ah, this must be your new stenographer. I’ve brought enough for three, so you must join us, Mlle Miroux.’ And Fifi’s hand felt moist, her eyes brimming with the kindness of a woman who knew no better.
“She’s so awfully pretty,” Geli said with a smile put on like too much perfume.
“Yes, people always say that. Nothing’s changed.”
Geli eyed him cautiously. “She never -?”
“All that foolishness? It’s not the first time, you know. She lets me have my fun, waiting for the day I blow my top and ask her why she has to eat so much, as if that’s what the matter is, when really, she left me long ago, in Vichy, when she’d got enough of my self-loathing and decided to get fat instead of looking for another man. A test, until my ‘dears’ began to sound too dangerously like love, and I could almost hear her say stop sniveling. You’re alive, aren’t you? Take it like a man. So I did, and now I’ve only got myself to blame for, well - c’est la vie.”
“I�
��m sorry, Monsieur.”
“Don’t be. I’m not quite up to real life, most times. I’d rather lie in bed and take the wheel from that American captain of yours, but when we got to your door I wouldn’t let you off with just a breezy, gentlemanly farewell. You would invite me in. I’d find your flat quite small, but clean and tidy, smelling of cooking and your hair, when everything else was just a lamp left on somewhere, and it was easy to forgive myself for keeping Fifi in the dark.”
“I am sorry, Monsieur.”
He sat up, filling his chest with air. “So what now?”
“I won’t run, if you can put up with me a little longer.”
He sighed, eyes full of wan endurance, then took a breath and said peremptorily, “All right, stop badgering me, now. At this rate I won’t get home till after midnight.”
Geli turned away and started toward the door.
Mattei’s voice beat her to it. “Goodnight, Mlle Miroux. Forgive the stage name, force of habit. Until tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, Monsieur. Goodnight.” She turned the knob, pulled and went out.
28
The lunch hour came around. Major Mattei went down to the cafeteria as usual. Geli was having a beignet with coffee in the day room when she heard a commotion in the hallway. The door was open.
Wearing new chevrons on his sleeves Sergeant Dax, wide-eyed and out of breath, poked his head in. “Where’s Mattei?”
“Why, he’s -”
Somebody else ran past behind Dax.
“Never mind, I’ll find him!” Dax took off at a fast trot toward the end of the hall and the iron door that opened onto a stairway downward.
Geli hurried into the hallway calling after him, “He went down to the cafeteria!”
Dax raised one hand just as he stepped off onto the stairs.
Across the way a woman she knew only by sight stepped out of her office. She looked this way and that, then at Geli, shrugging her shoulders.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
The woman took a few more steps into the hallway. “It’s not the first time. Every so often one of the chiens down there goes berserk. You know, can’t stand the vermin or the food.” She hugged herself against the chill. “I suppose I would, too, but I’ve never murdered anybody for the fun of it. I say they’re getting what they asked for. One time we had to borrow a strait jacket from the police station. They had it from before the war. I’m Giselle, by the way.”
“Simone Miroux.”
“Hello there, Simone.” Taking a step back onto the threshold, Giselle looked behind her into the office as if somebody else was there.
“A little excitement doesn’t hurt every once in a while. Eh, Simone?”
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough what it’s all about.”
“You think so? For our tender ears?” She raised her eyebrows naughtily. “Who’d care, though, if you shouted from the rooftops? You know how they say the worms crawl in and the worms crawl out. Well, this is a head start for those bastards down there. Their days of drinking up our wine and dragging off our women are over.” She twiddled fingers. “Au revoir, Simone.”
Stepping back behind her door, she swung it shut.
Geli stood there. She turned back into the day room, leaving the door open. The remains of her beignet sat on the plate, her coffee with its milk-slick getting cold. Major Mattei could have rushed past ahead of Dax. He’d left his office, that was all she knew, without inviting her to join him in the cafeteria. That was all right. She would have begged off, anyway. She didn’t feel like going back into the interrogation room, just yet, to wait for him alone. She picked up her beignet, pushed the whole thing into her mouth as she leaned over the plate so it would catch the powdered sugar. She was about to take a sip of coffee when there was a tramping in the hallway and a rush of breathless voices in low tones. She kept her back to the doorway, holding her coffee.
The floor behind her creaked, more voices hissed and she turned to see Mattei so close she felt his breath and suddenly she thought he’d been about to touch her. His face was livid, a strange and helpless frenzy pinning his eyes back as they fell from her onto the cup she was holding.
In the doorway Sergeant Dax stood back hesitantly.
She set the cup down and said, “Anything wrong, sir?”
He took her arm and led her back into the corner near the sink. “Mlle Miroux -” His hand came off her shoulder, trembling.
She pulled out a chair, partly to escape him and leaned on it, saying, “Yes? What is it, Monsieur?”
In the doorway Sergeant Dax said, “I’ll go now if you don’t need me, sir.”
“Not yet, Dax. Wait a moment.”
Dax slackened his stance uneasily. “Of course, sir.”
Mattei swung his face toward Geli like a window suddenly blown open, and it was banging in his eyes, and wouldn’t stop. His voice came in like a hot wind she’d felt once bearing the musky scents of the Nile, and the desert swept in, and Reggie stood there in the guttering candlelight, not there at all.
“Something has happened,” Mattei said.
In the doorway Dax shifted his feet, glancing behind him as if he didn’t want to be there.
A wave swept up out of Geli’s stomach. “What is it?” she said.
“Mlle Miroux, the fact is - please, sit down.”
“No. I don’t want to sit down.”
Mattei backed away, looking suddenly alone. He took a breath. “There’s been an accident. I’m afraid we’ve lost a prisoner.”
Fear caught in Geli’s throat.
Mattei stood there, waiting.
“Why are you telling me?” she cried.
Mattei sucked in another breath. “The prisoner has been identified as 1171.”
She stared at him, looking for the lie to fall apart. The number wasn’t him. Her hand flew to her mouth. “You mean escaped. A prisoner has escaped!”
“No, Mlle Miroux.”
She lunged at him, raising her fists.
Dax took three quick steps toward her. “I am the one who found him, Ma’am. I ran for Dr. Trouillet, but it was too late. There was no sign of foul play. Nothing to be done except -” Dax turned aside, catching his breath.
Geli’s fists locked in the air. She screamed insanely. “You couldn’t let the Nazi live! You all hated him down there! I want to see him!”
“You can’t go down there,” Mattei said.
Dax stepped closer to her, said in a quiet, tender voice, “He’d left a letter on his bed, ma’am.” Dax began to dig into his pocket.
Mattei cut in sharply. “You took it?”
“Yes, sir. I thought you would want to give it to the Colonel.”
Mattei stared at him blankly as Dax slid a glance toward Geli.
“Quite right, Dax.”
Dax came out of his pants’ pocket with a tightly folded brownish paper.
Mattei took it from him, wrapped his hand around it tenderly as he would clutch a struggling moth. He turned to Geli. “He left this note behind. I think you’d better read it before we have to give it up.”
“No!” Geli shrieked. “Take it away!” She doubled over, sobbing.
Mattei took a short sidestep toward Dax, keeping one splayed hand low between himself and Geli. “You’ll forget this, Dax. Understood?”
Dax stood stoutly taller. “I have already, sir. I’ll leave you now, so there will be no doubt.”
“Don’t go too far away.”
“I’ll be just outside, sir.”
“Yes.”
Dax went out.
The latch caught soundlessly behind him.
Mattei held out the paper.
Geli snatched it from his fingers and flung it to the floor. “No!”
Mattei bent over slowly, picked up the paper and faced her squarely. “If you don’t want to read it, I will.”
“I don’t care!” she cried.
He reached for her arm, she flinched
away with a toss of her shoulder. His face tightened with anger as he began to peel open the paper.
“One day his wife may see this. She’ll never know he couldn’t leave you out. Take it. If you gave a damn about him, do him the courtesy of being the first to read this, as he intended.” He grabbed her wrist and and pressed the paper into her palm.
She looked down at the crinkled paper as if it were his ashes, some sound from his last gasp of life, and blood trailed from Kurt’s tracks back down into his cell; blood turned against her like a knife that laid her heart bare, and it was false, flown onto the side of his passage to despair. Now it was hers. Hers for now, until Elfriede’s tears would fall upon it, too. She brought it closer to her face. It was too close, words smeared in tears as if the echo of his voice was dying out.
With this letter I, Kurt Langsdorff, hereby testify to the reasons for my actions, namely, the ending of my life which will be evident to whomever shall become the bearer of this testament.
I cannot say that the authorities here, assigned to hold and to interrogate me, have not believed me, or have not been sympathetic to my desire to appear before the International Tribunal as a material witness against war criminals. That we Germans being kept here have been strictly segregated from the other inmates leaves little doubt that we are the criminals, and I must honestly admit that I was not prepared for this. To those who know me, and to those responsible for my imprisonment, I can only say that, after all that has happened to me, only emptiness echoes behind these walls in which telling God the truth will never clear me of the cowardice of being able only to plunder the past I can no longer live. There was once a knife-edge path that stood between me and the call to a death I cheated when I watched thousands of innocent people go to their deaths without me.
God’s silence is such a terribly long wait. I can only tap and talk as if He will be there on the other side of the wall when, one day, we might escape together.
In her mind now Geli saw him holding the pen that he had somehow got them to lend him. And what it took for him to buy that much more time, hastening the ink across the paper so as not to drag out life before death stopped calling, and hope peeped in to say he had forgotten something.
The Knife-Edge Path Page 21
