The Ambassador

by Yehuda Avner

  “That’s correct, Mister President.”

  “They never taught me anything worth a damn there. How did you get so smart?”

  “I have learned the necessity of survival from watching some of my friends fail in that task.”

  FDR pulled on his cigarette thoughtfully. “What exactly would you expect of us? To destroy the rail connections to these camps?”

  “Rail tracks can be replaced easily. Moreover, I doubt that a bomber can hit a track that measures five feet across from half a mile up. No, we have the locations of the camps. We can identify the purposes of the buildings inside the camps. We are able to pinpoint these buildings with an accuracy that’s within the capability of your bombers to hit.”

  “This is on the basis of your consultations with Israeli Air Force people?”

  Dan smiled. “No. With the Luftwaffe.”

  FDR took the cigarette holder from his mouth and cocked his head.

  “The pilot who brought me and Eichmann to the Middle East is a Luftwaffe officer committed to the fight against Hitler.”

  “So let’s say we can hit these locations within the camps. What exactly are the targets?”

  “The main targets, from our point of view, must be the gas chambers and the crematoria where the Nazis plan to incinerate the bodies of their victims.”

  Churchill rasped a disdainful cough. “Those bloody Huns.”

  “The extermination plan is to gas the Jews and then to incinerate their bodies. Those are the facilities your bombers must attack, because they are relatively complicated industrial facilities which can’t be replaced as easily as rail tracks. Once they are destroyed, it’s likely that you will have won the war before the Germans are able to rebuild them and put them back into operation.”

  “How many locations?”

  “Six camps in Poland.”

  “It’s a major operation to launch raids there. It’s not a short hop. What do you think, Winston?” FDR said.

  “We have bombers with sufficient range. I expect that if these camps are under construction or only recently completed, as I gather from Mister Lavi’s report, there will be little air defense to threaten our planes. The introduction of Israel to the war, with the consequent securing of Suez, victory in North Africa, and a swifter invasion of Europe, is well-worth the immediate effort on the parts of our air forces. I am enthusiastically in favor, Franklin.” Churchill watched Roosevelt like a man who has bet all he has, and now senses the roulette wheel begin to slow.

  Dan felt the cushions of the sofa tip forward. Ben-Gurion was almost toppling to the floor in anticipation. FDR laid his cigarette holder in the ashtray at his side and addressed the two Israelis.

  “War is a contagion, gentlemen,” he said. “If Israel enters into this one, perhaps you will find yourself more afflicted than you think.”

  “We have already built up a resistance to the ill effects of war,” Ben-Gurion replied.

  “I wonder if there is such a thing.” FDR touched his forehead softly. He pulled his shoulders back. “Well, when you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him.”

  Churchill clapped his hands and his eyes glittered with joy. Cigar between his teeth, he reached out a hand to Ben-Gurion. “Bravo, Franklin, dear chap.”

  Ben-Gurion hadn’t grasped FDR’s figure of speech. He looked confused.

  “The rattlesnake is Nazism,” Churchill said. “We shall crush the blighters.”

  “The rattlesnake is the wickedness of these death camps,” FDR corrected. “Let us hope that America’s destiny is to crush it, before it destroys all that is left of goodness in our world.”

  Ben-Gurion gripped Dan’s knee, his hand shaking, his emotions seeming to funnel through him into his ambassador. But the Old Man was a dealmaker, a man who had prevailed at contentious Zionist conferences and in whispered dialogues, always squeezing everything he could from his interlocutor. He cleared his throat. “One more thing,” he said.

  FDR murmured, a questioning sound.

  Ben-Gurion smiled. “I also want a dozen Flying Fortress bombers.”

  Chapter 62

  Exhausted, Schulze draped himself over a wicker chair, a cold beer in his hand. Having concluded that his blue Luftwaffe uniform might cause too much of a stir on the veranda of Shepheard’s Hotel, the center of British Cairo’s social life, he wore the untidy olive green shirt and pants of the Israeli army. Among the other patrons—the starchy Sandhurst graduates and the Eton boys of Churchill’s staff— he looked like a flight mechanic on a brief break. He was in the midst of a protracted yawn when Dan threaded through the tables and sat down beside him.

  “How did it go?” He ruffled his blond hair.

  “They will bomb Auschwitz in three days,” Dan whispered.

  Schulze gripped Dan’s shoulder and shook him. “You did it. Thank God. Germany will thank you.”

  “The day after that, they will bomb the other camps.”

  “All of them. Dan, by Christ.” Schulze touched his knuckles to his bleary, tired eyes. It all burst from him now, the tension of their escape from Berlin and of all the months in which he had watched his Luftwaffe comrades shot from the skies in aid of a hopeless war, a criminal war. He wept, his hands over his face.

  The British officers at nearby tables looked away. Their ladies made small talk to cover the embarrassment.

  Schulze wiped his face on the rolled-up sleeve of his Israeli shirt. “I’m so tired. I’m a bit of an emotional mess. I need to go to my room and sleep for a week. God bless you, Dan, for what you’ve accomplished.”

  Dan was not crying yet. He stared out at the elaborate Victorian facades of the Azbakeya district. The ponies and traps and the dust must have changed little since the hotel was built a century before. A military jeep pulled up, and it brought with it all the horror and bloodletting that characterized the present. Anna, Anna was so distant, so much in jeopardy. And it was his fault. He should never have taken her to Berlin, into the clutches of those maniacs. He should have stayed in Jerusalem, or Boston. Cut off from the fate of his people in Europe. But, no, she would never have allowed that.

  “I must go back,” he said.

  “To find Anna?”

  “I’ve done what I came here to do for the Jewish people. Now I must do something for love.”

  Schulze sipped his beer. “Then so must I.”

  Dan stared. “You can’t come with me. You took your plane out of Reich airspace. You won’t be able to explain that away.”

  “How else will you get there in time?”

  “My dear Ansgar, no, I won’t let you do this.”

  “Here we are, in Egypt, so I will quote to you from the Book of Exodus. ‘Let us take a three-day journey into the wilderness that we may offer sacrifices to the Lord, our God.’ If I’m to be the sacrifice, I’m ready for it. In gratitude for what you’ve done on behalf of my country. I believe you’ve saved us from eternal shame. Or at the least, you’ve diminished the horror, let’s put it that way.”

  The German was right. Without Schulze to fly him, Dan wouldn’t get back to Germany before the bombs fell on the death camps. By then, Anna might already have been transferred to Auschwitz. He had persuaded the British and Americans to launch the raids that might kill her.

  Schulze put down his beer and reached out his hand. “So you accept?”

  Dan shook the pilot’s hand. “We can get back to Israel tonight. Tomorrow we’ll fly your Messerschmitt to Berlin. Then, the next day, I’ll go to Poland. The timing will be tight, but you’re right that I can do it. If you help.”

  “Why not fly straight to Poland?”

  “I need to see someone in Berlin first.”

  Schulze stretched his back. He reached into his pocket for a tube of Benzedrine. “So much for sleep. It’s a good job I didn’t throw away my Luftwaffe uniform.”

  Chapter 63

  Berlin

  Brückner saw Kritzinger coming down the long Chancell
ery corridor. The State Secretary seemed determined not to notice him, burying his attention in a file of papers. Brückner understood. He had made this upright civil servant an accomplice in something— and he hadn’t even fully explained what. The poor man no doubt presumed he wouldn’t find out until either Hitler was assassinated or the Gestapo interrogators strung him up by his thumbs and told him all about the plot. Brückner was at least grateful that the man had enough decency to have gone along with his plan, even if he had done so in a cowardly fashion, just as he implemented the laws of the Third Reich with a twinge of misgiving.

  Kritzinger was almost beside him when he looked up. He halted and spoke in a low voice. In the grandiose corridor it was like a whisper echoing through a cathedral. “It is probable that the Führer merely wishes your presence to assist him as his adjutant. But, nonetheless, I beg of you to be prepared for the worst.”

  “The Führer—what?” Brückner glanced each way. The massive space was empty except for the SS guards at the end, two hundred paces away.

  “Take a cyanide capsule. In case.”

  Brückner tasted the civil servant’s stale breath, as though the last air were being squeezed from the very bottom of his lungs. Kritzinger saw his confusion. His eyes opened wide.

  “You don’t know? The order didn’t come to you? Then it must be true.” Kritzinger backed away.

  Brückner shuddered. “What order, Herr State Secretary?”

  “The Führer wants you at the Wolf’s Lair. The personnel memo came across my desk an hour ago. From Günsche.”

  Günsche, Hitler’s SS adjutant. Brückner swallowed hard. If the order hadn’t reached him directly, it meant Günsche didn’t want to give him a chance to flee before others found out about it. Perhaps it was simply a mistake. He went over his incomplete memory of what had happened at the Wannsee concert. Had he said anything to his mother as she died? To his father? It wouldn’t take much to give him away. He had been with Hitler long enough that the Führer might call him to East Prussia to give him a chance to explain himself.

  Or to see him die.

  “You are to depart immediately on a plane from the Führer’s squadron,” Kritzinger said. “Please remember what I said.”

  Brückner made himself focus. He laid his hand on Kritzinger’s arm. “Don’t worry yourself. I know what to do. I thank you for the courage you showed in assisting me. It will not be forgotten.”

  “It is my hope that everything will be forgotten.” Kritzinger hustled away, his heels echoing like gunshots.

  Brückner rushed to his office. He had no choice but to go to Hitler. To the Wolf’s Lair. He picked up the small overnight bag he always kept under his desk and set it before him. The gloomy forest around Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters seemed to close in around him. He opened a drawer of his desk and took out a small tin of cyanide capsules. He put it in the pocket of his bag. In which grim bunker would they kill him? They would torture him first. The Führer would rave about his betrayal.

  But Brückner would act before he was arrested. He would shoot the leader of the nation. It came clear to him with astonishing clarity. The solution to a puzzle that had always been there.

  He carried the bag to his door, threw his greatcoat over his shoulders and headed for the garage. As he descended the stairs, he caught the sound of steps behind him. He halted and waited. Nothing. You can’t go all the way to the Wolf’s Lair in this condition, he told himself. Calm down, or you’ll be too nervous to raise your pistol and kill the swine once you get there.

  He entered the dark garage. An SS Rottenführer came out of the dispatcher’s cubicle and bellowed a Heil Hitler.

  “I need a car and driver for Tempelhof airfield,” Brückner said.

  The Rottenführer snapped his heels and beckoned to one of the SS men lounging by his cubicle. The driver was a private with a finger in his nose and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He pulled himself out of his chair and jogged to a BMW. He opened the back door, but Brückner climbed into the front seat. The private shrugged, threw the cigarette away, and ran round to the driver’s side. He started the engine. The car rolled forward toward the gate onto Wilhelmstrasse.

  A voice behind them called out. “Halt, wait.”

  Brückner stared ahead. They had come for him already. He smiled grimly, because rather than fear, he felt offense that the Führer might have thought he would refuse to present himself at the Wolf’s Lair. That he would try to save himself.

  The Rottenführer rushed to the side of the car, puffing. He leaned in through the front passenger-side window beside Brückner.

  “Hang on, will you?”

  “What is it? I have a plane to catch,” Brückner snapped.

  “The Obersturmbannführer’s order. He wishes to accompany you.” The Rottenführer stepped back and gave the Nazi salute.

  An SS lieutenant-colonel reached for the rear door of the car. He kept his head down. Brückner saw only the four pips on his collar and the silver shoulder braid. He understood. This man would kill him with a bullet to the back of the head on the way to the airfield. The officer climbed in and sat behind him. They probably weren’t even going to Tempelhof. How long would it be before he knew where they were taking him? He slipped his fingers into the pocket of the case by his legs and brought the cyanide capsules out. He kept the tin hidden in his palm.

  “Go,” the officer said.

  The BMW roared into the gray afternoon light. They turned south and went through the government district toward Kreuzberg. Brückner listened for a word from the SS officer behind him. He eased open the tin as they crossed the bridge over the Landwehr Canal.

  “Pull into that side street,” the SS officer ordered.

  “Aren’t we going to the airport?” the driver said.

  “Do as you’re told.”

  The driver glided the big car to the curb beside the cemetery of the Jerusalem Church. The street was empty of worshippers or visitors to the cemetery. So it was to happen here, Brückner thought, looking down the quiet road. Even if someone came along, who would question two SS men engaged in the execution of an army officer? No one would do anything for him.

  “Kindly offer the private one of the candies from your tin,” the SS officer said from the backseat.

  Brückner closed his hand over the tin of cyanide capsules in confusion.

  The driver glanced back at the officer in the rear of the car. “Candies?”

  The SS officer pounded his fist into the driver’s face. The man grunted in surprise and pain.

  Brückner dropped the capsules. Dan Lavi slipped between the two front seats and slammed his weight into the struggling driver. “Give him one of those, Brückner,” he yelled.

  The last time Brückner saw Dan he had been wearing an Obersturmbannführer’s uniform. But it still gave him a moment’s start to see his friend in Eichmann’s field-gray SS tunic.

  Dan pressed down on the driver’s nose. He shoved the gloved fingers of his hand between the man’s teeth and wrenched his mouth open. “Give him a capsule. Quickly.”

  The driver snarled and bit down on Dan’s finger. Dan pulled hard and jerked his hand from side to side until the driver’s jaw dislocated. “Damn it, the cyanide. Hurry.”

  Brückner picked up the tin from the floor of the car with shaking hands and pulled out a capsule. He shoved it into the man’s mouth. The driver struggled, pushing the capsule away with his tongue. Dan jammed his mouth shut.

  Within thirty seconds, the driver went limp. He was dead. Dan jumped from the car. He scanned the street. Finding it still empty, he tugged the driver’s body out onto the sidewalk and lifted him over the wall into the cemetery.

  Brückner got out of the car and followed Dan over the wall. He watched the Israeli pull the dead man through the gravestones to a big tomb guarded by a bronze angel. Dan hid the SS driver behind the angel and ran back to the car.

  He dragged Brückner behind the wheel. “You must drive.” His voice quav
ered. He had killed a man. Brückner felt the weight of death in Dan’s words.

  He raced the BMW onto Belle Alliance and headed south. “Slower. We can’t afford a crash.”

  Brückner nodded. Or perhaps he only shivered a little more. “Dan, where are we going?”

  With Dan’s answer, the shock of the driver’s killing was erased. But death remained, lurking in every syllable. “To Auschwitz.”

  Chapter 64

  Draxler dozed on the sofa as darkness fell. His children raced through the apartment. His wife had a vegetable soup on the stove. It was a bad time for the Reich when even the Gestapo couldn’t get meat, he thought. He wondered what their life would have been like if he had stayed in Palestine. Well, he couldn’t have stayed in Palestine, could he? It wasn’t there anymore. It was the land of the Jews now. The rest of the German Templers had been expelled from their Jerusalem enclave, deported. They ought to have seen that coming when they flew the Swastika flag. Maybe he had sensed the looming cataclysm and thus brought his family to Berlin. He laughed at himself. If he had been able to foresee that little tragedy, how had he managed to miss the global conflagration at whose center he now found himself? It was all crap. Everything they said, the leaders. When you were inside the machine, you saw how filthy it all was. The men at the top looked after themselves. Everyone else ate shit, while they feasted on steak. He sniffed the aroma of vegetables in the air. Time he did the same. He’d put a scare into one of the butchers on Schönhauser Allee tomorrow and bring home a side of beef.

  His six-year-old daughter kissed him, her face chubby and soft. Draxler smiled and proffered his cheek for another. Traudl touched her lips to his stubble and said, “Mmmmwa.” Then she rubbed her face and made a comical frown. “Papa, you need to shave.”

  “I’m sorry, my little love. But Papa has been working very hard.”

  She put her hands on her hips and grinned. “I can see that.”

  She cartwheeled through the door and walked on her hands across the landing to play with her friend in the next apartment. “Shut the door behind you,” he shouted.