by Yehuda Avner
Eichmann blew out a weary breath. It was clear to Dan that the man wished to show the scope of his power, and the extent to which his office reached into the work of other parts of the Nazi system. “Besides the most important ministries, and the bodies responsible for Poland and the occupied east, there must be a representative from the Party’s highest office. Then there’s the Security Service, the Security Police, the Security Headquarters, and of course the Gestapo.”
“You’re going to be very busy.”
“Not as busy as I’m going to be if all goes well.”
“At the conference?”
Eichmann glanced at the empty glass. He seemed to regret his good spirits and the part the schnapps might have played in them. “I’ve already said more than is necessary for you to know.”
As he walked toward the zoo to take the S-Bahn back to the embassy, Dan thought over what he had heard. Visa applications were no longer enough. He was the ambassador of Israel. Israel’s role was to provide a haven for Jews, but it was also supposed to be a protector of Jews around the world. You sound like Shmulik, he told himself. Shmulik would have worked to find out more about this conference at the Wannsee villa. Then, if it was a threat to Jews, he would have taken action. But Shmulik was out of the picture. So I must do it.
Dan crossed the plaza in front of the Zoo Station and bent his head into the wind that gusted cold through the arches under the elevated tracks. Devorah didn’t believe her husband was dead. Dan hoped she was right. But even if she was wrong, the tough Mossad man was now alive in him.
Chapter 46
Berlin, January 1942
Snow collected in the ruins of the Countess von Bredow’s home. With Gottfried’s violin case under his arm, Brückner clambered through the spray of debris in the garden, gathering photos and books, piecing together the life he might have had as the son of a Prussian aristocrat and the famous violinist, her Jewish lover. He stood the case upright against a chunk of masonry. He had brought the violin home. It was all the family he had left. At the Wannsee villa, sluggish as he had been after the blow to his head, Brückner had wrenched the Stradivarius away from Maestro Furtwängler in the confusion that followed the shooting. He blew on his fingers. The cold pierced him.
Here he was, a Wehrmacht captain, Hitler’s adjutant, an aristocrat descended from the great Chancellor Bismarck, and the son of a Jew. But what kind of a man was he? It struck him that a man confronted the truth about himself only when he was torn apart like this house, his most private relics exposed, the walls that compartmentalized them smashed. If he were to walk the streets from his mother’s bombed-out home to his desk at the Chancellery, he would pass thousands of Berliners, each with a demeanor as inscrutable as the facade of a bourgeois dwelling. None would act on what they knew about the world around them. If their inner truth contradicted the aims of the Nazi regime, almost every one would defy his true self rather than go against the Gestapo. Their minds had become like homes they never entered, whose rooms were unlit. Because the alternative was a devastating explosion that would collapse the ceilings and rip out the pipes. Maybe it was the shock of recent weeks, of learning his parentage and seeing his mother and father executed, but Brückner had uncovered a compulsion to rebuild himself with an entirely different architecture. He felt his jaw, the bruise where Gottfried knocked him out with the pistol butt so that it would look as though the younger man had been fighting to save Hitler, instead of trying to protect the assassin. The bruise would heal and fade, but the love that it embodied would remain. The Countess’s son, Wili Gottfried’s son, would salvage the soul they had created. He would act in the name of the love they had shared, the love that had brought him into being.
He tossed aside the mementoes he had gathered in the ruins and picked up the violin case once more, then vaulted the wall into the embassy garden. The snow covered the black char of Shmulik’s secret bonfire. In the kitchen, a dark woman bent over a soup tureen, stirring and tasting, adding salt. He rapped on the window of the kitchen. The woman dropped her spoon and reeled away. He waved his hand and shook his head.
“Don’t be afraid.” He mouthed his words exaggeratedly so she would understand through the glass.
Bertha Polkes opened the door hesitantly. Her eyes were frightened and wet. The room smelled of boiled vegetables and broth.
The German shivered. The need for comfort overcame all other impulses. So did the sense that he wouldn’t be denied here—that she recognized him for who he truly was. His mother was gone, but he found his desire for motherly comfort was not. His eyes teared up. “I’m very hungry,” he said.
Bertha went to the tureen and spooned out a bowlful. He ate at the kitchen table.
Dan Lavi came from the hallway. “It’s good, isn’t it?”
“The soup? Wonderful.” Brückner smiled. His hair was lank from the snow and lay over his forehead.
Dan gestured at the violin case by Brückner’s feet. “Is that for me?”
Brückner put down his spoon. “It’s for Israel.”
Chapter 47
They went down to the firing range in the basement. Devorah stared at the uniformed Wehrmacht man and kicked shut the door to the closet where she kept her code books. She locked it, put on her coat, and headed up the stairs.
“She doesn’t need to worry, does she?” Dan said.
“She does. But not about me.” Brückner laid the violin case on the gun table. He took off his greatcoat and shook the snow from its shoulders. He took a long shuddering breath and smiled sadly. “I want to help you. With anything you need.”
“Is that why you came in the back door?” Dan smiled.
“I won’t be the only Wehrmacht officer to fear the Gestapo torture cells before this war is over. I don’t know if I’m even the first to risk being caught by them. I do know that what happened to my… my mother and father has changed me. It’s hard to explain. Maybe it’s like what you felt on the day Israel became a country. You found a home. You knew who you were.”
“I was happy that day. I expect you feel loss.”
“I do. But in a strange way, I am happy too. Like a ruined city liberated from occupation.”
“So what will you do for me? Gather information?”
“I’ll do more than that, if you ask me to. Whatever you need.”
“Will you kill Hitler?” Dan watched the German’s reaction. He wondered if it was what he wanted now—to send a man to kill the German leader.
“It can’t be done. That was a big risk in the first place, but now it’s simply not possible.”
Dan loaded a Luger. The pistol noise would cover their words if anyone was listening. The rooms of the embassy might be bugged by the Gestapo. Or by Shmulik and Devorah. “Why not?”
“The Führer’s gone to his headquarters in East Prussia. The Wolf’s Lair.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“He’s not. He intends to stay there until…until victory.”
“So he ran away?”
Brückner paused and frowned. “There is a reason I was convinced of him for so long, Herr Ambassador. His charisma, his devotion to our country seemed to justify all my pride in being a German, and perhaps also his luck. It has all deserted him.”
“Because of Russia?”
“Mostly. It was madness to invade the Soviet Union when we thought the Russians had two-to-one numerical superiority. Now our field intelligence units inform us that our army is actually outnumbered ten-to-one, but the Führer continues to insist we must press our advance. Things are bad out there for us.”
“You’re here to help because now you see that Germany will lose the war?” Dan lifted the pistol and took aim along the gallery. Shmulik had pinned a photo of a man in a military cap to the target.
“I told you, I want to work for Israel to honor my mother and father. I’m just explaining why things are going wrong for Hitler. The dreadful massacres on the Russian front, the killing of Soviet prisoners and of Jews, it
will all rebound on us Germans in the end.”
“So if we’re not going to kill Hitler, what have you to offer me?”
Brückner kneaded his hands. “There was a meeting recently. The Führer took Himmler and Heydrich into his office alone.”
“To talk about what?”
“Sometimes the Führer prefers to leave the dirty work to someone else. To keep his hands clean. But the rumor at the Chancellery is that it was to do with the Jews. Now Heydrich is convening a conference. About the Jewish question.”
Dan fired the Luger. A shred of photo paper flew off the target as his bullet struck. “Wannsee?”
“How did you know?” Brückner looked at him in shock.
“Eichmann is a little too boastful for his own good.”
“These SS leaders have never seen action in the field. At heart they’re queasy about the destruction they send other men to carry out.”
“Which is to be what, exactly?”
Brückner shrugged. “In the summer, it was still thought that we could ship most of the Jews to Siberia, and the rest could go to your Israel. But then our advance broke down in Russia. So Siberia is out, and frankly I don’t think even Israel would take the number of Jews we’re talking about. You just wouldn’t have the means for it. So Heydrich is working on another solution.”
Shmulik’s Zyklon B document, the letter from the Nazi chief in Poland to the SS in Berlin. “The final solution.”
“The Führer ordered Heydrich to exterminate all the Jews. Physically. To kill them all.”
Dan fired the pistol, but this time it was not to create a cover for their words. The shot expressed the shriek of anguish and rage that echoed within him. Again a bullet struck the photo. “Wannsee will be where they make the plans?”
“The conference will be attended by some of the most ruthless men in Germany. Heydrich, Gestapo Chief Müller, that scheming bastard Martin Luther from the foreign ministry.”
“Could you get into the conference?”
“Not a chance. It’s very high-level.”
“Who’s going from the Chancellery?”
“Kritzinger, the state secretary.”
The man who had hovered at the fringes of the Countess’s soirees. Pale and old-fashioned, an upright Prussian civil servant. Dan wondered whether Kritzinger’s devotion to duty would override the humanity that connected him to Hannah von Bredow and her anti-Nazi circle. He fired. The Luger filled the gallery again with its short bellow. “Can you get information from Kritzinger?”
“I think he’d be against anything that Heydrich has in mind. He’s not that kind of man. But I don’t think he’d trust me with details. He’d be afraid it would get back to the Führer.”
“You can try.”
“I will. But you’d better try to gather the information elsewhere, too. Just in case.”
Dan paced down the length of the firing range. The face Shmulik had pinned to the target belonged to Adolf Eichmann. Dan’s bullet had pierced the Death’s Head on the SS man’s hat. He poked his finger into the hole and smiled.
“I know just the man.”
Chapter 48
Devorah made her way to the apartment in Friedrichshain without being followed, as far as she could tell. She slipped through the courtyard of a tenement and under an arch in the rear of the block, then knocked at the low door of the coal hole. It swung open and she climbed in.
A single oil lamp lit the cellar. The flickering orange light lit the face of the old communist who bolted the hatch behind her. Devorah crossed the room and knelt beside the bed. She took the cold hand of the man who lay under the thin blanket.
Shmulik squeezed her fingers.
She kissed his forehead. He was feverish. She pulled a package from her handbag. “Sausages, and cheese,” she said. She pushed them at him.
He moaned a little as he smiled. “Later. I’m not hungry now.”
His skin was pale, his eyes ringed with black. A fetid smell surrounded him. The wounds were rotting. She would have to get him out of here for treatment.
“You’re sick, my love.” She stroked his sweaty hair. “You’re not getting better.”
“Kasia’s taking good care of me.”
The old communist nudged Devorah’s shoulder. “He needs a doctor. It’s a month since I cut the shrapnel out of his leg, but the wounds haven’t healed.”
The smell. Devorah asked, “Gangrene?”
“It needs cutting away, so the wounds can heal up.”
Shmulik grabbed at his wife’s elbow. “We’ll talk about my stinking leg in a minute. First I want to know what’s been happening.”
“Dan brought a Wehrmacht officer into the basement. That Brückner asshole.”
“Did he?” Shmulik gave a dreamy smile.
“You don’t think that’s a stupid risk? I thought you’d be angry.”
He worked his tongue for some spit so he could speak. “ Stupid or not, I think the Herr Ambassador has finally decided to take a risk.”
“Do you want me to do something about it?”
“Not yet. I want you to bring Anna to me. Without Dan’s knowledge.”
“It won’t be easy. Dan has been trying to get her to leave the country since the Germans declared war on America. She refuses to go, but she did agree to inform him whenever she leaves the embassy.”
“You’ll think of something. Tell her to come with a very sharp knife. It’s time I got out of here.”
Chapter 49
Eichmann’s Kurfürstenstrasse offices were like a college dorm the night before finals when Dan entered. It was after 8 p.m., but the corridors were busy with preoccupied young men, moving fast, scanning documents as they went. Every room Dan passed emitted the scent of cigarettes and coffee, and at every desk a glistening head of hair framed an expression of concentration so deep it seemed painful.
Identical young officers surrounded Eichmann’s desk, as though he could give them the answers to all the questions on the exam. They turned with blankly superior faces when Dan knocked at the door. Eichmann gave an irritated frown and ushered his men out.
“What do you want? I’m very busy. I can’t process any of your papers this week.” Eichmann sifted through a file of statistics on the desk.
“I know. How are preparations for your Wannsee conference progressing?”
“I already asked you, what do you want? Don’t make me repeat myself, Lavi.” Eichmann looked up, ready to lash out. But Dan’s face was so placid before his anger that it made him pause.
“The conference is on January twentieth, the day after tomorrow? At the very villa where Gottfried gave his last concert.” Dan came to the side of Eichmann’s desk. He had only ever stood before it, like a naughty schoolboy called to the principal. Eichmann drew back in his chair warily, as though a potentially vicious dog approached him.
“My God, don’t bring up that concert.”
“Uncomfortable events for all of us,” Dan said. “But perhaps we can turn them to our advantage.”
Eichmann blew out his cheeks and dropped his pen, impatient.
“After Wili Gottfried met his end, you and the other members of the Führer’s entourage were concerned for his well-being alone.” Even as he spoke, Dan remembered the shots those men had fired into the bodies of the Countess and poor Gottfried. “Someone, on the other hand, remained mindful of an object of great value that was otherwise overlooked.”
“Get to the point.”
“I have that object at my embassy.”
“What object?”
“Wili Gottfried’s Stradivarius.”
Eichmann perked up. “That must be worth—”
“Several million reichsmarks. The maker’s label says it was made in 1719.”
“My God, Stradivarius’s Golden Period.”
“I assume that you, as a connoisseur of the violin, would like to buy it. Either for your personal disposal or as a gift for the Obergruppenführer Heydrich. He’s a devoted musician. I’m
sure he’d be extremely grateful.”
Eichmann was so stunned by the possibility of owning a Stradivarius worth millions that it was a few moments before the conspiratorial expression came over his face. “What do you want for it?”
Dan could have phrased his answer as a request. But it was time this Nazi got used to receiving orders from him. “Bring me Arvid Polkes.”
Chapter 50
Dan’s plans hinged on the Stradivarius. He was on his way upstairs to bed when he decided he couldn’t let it out of his sight. He returned to his office and took the violin case from under his desk. He was slipping it beneath his bed as Anna came in from the dressing room.
“Wili’s violin?” She pulled the last pins from her hair. “How did you get hold of that?”
“Brückner brought it.” Dan was on his knees. He dropped the bedspread over the violin and stood. “I need to keep an eye on it.”
“You’re planning something.” She brought her arms up around his neck. “What are you up to, Herr Ambassador?”
“Nothing.” His lie was so transparent, he laughed. “Nothing you need to know about.”
“Bertha said you took Brückner down to the basement earlier today.”
“Shooting practice.”
She started to ask him a question, but she changed her mind. “I can’t get through to Boston. The phone lines are cut off.”
After Pearl Harbor, it had taken Hitler four days to make his declaration of war against the United States. Ribbentrop called the US chargé d’affaires to the Foreign Ministry and read him a pack of self-justificatory lies. Then he sent the embassy staff into confinement in a spa town. Other American citizens either got out of Germany or were swiftly interned.
“Do you think they’ll come for me?” Anna laid her head against Dan’s chest.
“Not as long as they need this embassy working.”
“That’s all the protection I’ve got?”
“Welcome to my world.” He lifted her chin. “Darling, in all seriousness, it might be best if you left after all. I’d hate to say goodbye, but I’ve already asked you to risk too much by being here in Berlin. It’s time for you to get to safety.”
