by Bari Wood
“But I—”
“Leave us alone, Captain.”
Abrams gave up and left them.
“It’s hard to discuss Belzec in the presence of a Jew,” said Speiser. A fog had come up and was drifting in through the open windows. The dampness settled on their skin, made them feel itchy, and the air took on a misty look that softened the red color of the drapes and carpet. Bianco wondered if Speiser was as uncomfortable as he was. He wiped his face, and handed Speiser his list of names, looking again as he did.
Levy, Dabrowa, Poland
Lippmann, Dabrowa, Poland
Luria, Dabrowa, Poland
“Do you remember those men?” Bianco asked.
Speiser glanced at the list, started to hand it back. “There were thousands in the camp. I don’t remember their names. . . .”
“These were special,” Bianco said softly. “They were all in Barracks 554.”
Speiser’s hand held the list in midair stretched toward Bianco. Sweat rolled down the side of his face and his pale skin got whiter. After a moment, he drew the list back and looked at the names again. “Are they alive?” he asked softly.
“They were when we opened the camp. Alive and well, alive and fed in a death camp—old men, children—with the gas and ovens going day and night . . . but they all survived . . .”
“Not all,” Speiser said mildly. “Three of them died in 1941.”
Bianco sat back. “You remember.”
“Of course,” Speiser said, then he laughed. “Don’t look so tense, Major. I remember, and I’m going to tell you all about how those men stayed alive.” Here Speiser’s smile changed; his eyes shone and Bianco had a sudden impulse to follow Abrams out the door. Speiser leaned forward so his face was close to Bianco’s. Bianco looked down at his hands, then folded them like a little girl at communion, and waited. Nothing happened and he looked up again. Speiser was still smiling. He deliberately reached out and put one of his hands over Bianco’s with a gentle touch such as he might give a woman.
“But I’m warning you, Major, you don’t want to hear it. Go after the Jew; get drunk together, find a woman, go home. Do anything but stay here and listen to me.”
“I want to hear,” Bianco said. He sounded stubborn and silly to himself, like a child. He looked up at Speiser, and Speiser patted his hand.
“Good,” Speiser said. “Very good, because I want so much to tell you. But I did warn you, didn’t I? So my conscience is clear.”
Bianco laughed at that before he could stop himself. Speiser laughed, too, then he stopped and drank down the rest of his tea. Bianco leaned forward and Speiser put the cup down.
“You’re very anxious, Major.”
“I’ve been waiting a long time,” Bianco said.
“The waiting’s over,” Speiser said quietly, then in the same soft voice he started to tell Bianco what had happened in Barracks 554. It was a long story, he told it well, and after a while, Bianco forgot to smoke, forgot to give Speiser cigarettes, forgot everything but what the other man was telling him. They laughed again later, crazy, joyless laughter that they couldn’t control, and Speiser grabbed Bianco’s arm, and Bianco tried to break free and he saw their wrestling shadows on the oak paneling, which made him laugh harder. Still later, Speiser spilled his tea, which they let run across the scarred table and drip on the red rug.
When Speiser stopped talking, Bianco stayed in a listening posture with his head to the side for a few minutes, then without a word he stood up, put the pack of cigarettes on the table, and went to the door.
“Aren’t you going to thank me?” Speiser asked from his chair.
Bianco opened the door and the MPs stationed on either side came to attention. Behind him Speiser called, “Don’t forget I warned you. Don’t forget they’ll live for years. . . .” Bianco slammed the door and took the stairs two at a time. But no matter how fast he ran away from that room, he thought he could hear Speiser’s voice coming from behind the heavy carved doors, “Alive somewhere . . . Palestine . . . America . . . somewhere . . .”
Abrams was in the lobby with the bottle, and right there, surrounded by inlays of green and rose marble, with the big-busted blond WAC frowning at them from behind the receptionist’s desk, he opened it and handed it to Bianco.
“What’d he say?” he asked Bianco. Bianco took a swallow, handed the bottle back, and walked out onto the street. Abrams followed.
“What’d he say?” he asked again. “Why did he feed them?”
“He doesn’t know why he did anything,” Bianco answered. “He’s crazy.”
He left Abrams and hurried up the street toward Dürer House. He had six minutes to make the convoy. Abrams stood uncertainly on the Tribunal steps, then, clutching the bottle, he ran after Bianco. He caught up at the corner, but Bianco didn’t stop. The city was fogging up from the heat, the stone felt warm under their feet.
“He’s not crazy.” Abrams was out of breath. “Sick, scared, but not crazy.” Bianco ignored him and kept going. Abrams got a pain in his side and had to stop for a second, then he ran on, but by the time he caught up again, they were at the convoy. The headlights of the thirty or so trucks coming through the fog blinded Abrams and he thought he’d lost Bianco; then he saw him handing his orders to the convoy leader. Abrams wasn’t usually persistent, and even though he was drunk, he felt shy about asking Bianco again. But when Bianco got his orders back from the captain and started down the line of trucks, Abrams grabbed the other man’s arm. Bianco pulled away and swung up on his seat next to the driver.
“I know he’s not irrational,” Abrams shouted, but just then the motors started up. The roar was deafening, and Bianco shook his head to show that he couldn’t hear over the noise.
Four months later, the day after his first Thanksgiving home, Bianco and his brother David decorated their variety store for Christmas. They packed away the cardboard turkeys and plastic souvenir whales; they wrapped silver demitasse spoons with “Craig Harbor, L.I.” enameled on them, and packed them in a box with sateen gold-fringed flags and pillows that also said Craig Harbor. They took orange and gold paper leaves out of the windows, and put paper holly in their place; they put long-sleeved blouses on the half-forms in the windows, and on the display racks inside the store they hung plaid mufflers, ruffled aprons, and ties that said Merry Christmas. They put ribbon and wrapping and cards in the bins and put away the hunting boots and work shoes. They brought out boxes of costume jewelry and arranged it—pins, rings, bracelets, and earrings—on green velvet.
Before the war, Bianco had enjoyed the decorating, and had done most of it himself. He’d liked the sense of order it gave him, and he’d found that he was even a little fussy. Now it annoyed him. The jewelry seemed too small for his hands to manage. His cuff caught in the gold-filled chains and pulled them off the velvet, and he gave up, left the jewelry arranging to his brother, and went down to the basement to get the toilet water and cologne they’d ordered for the season. He tried to carry too much and he dropped a seven-dollar bottle of Prince Matchabelli’s Duchess of York cologne. It smashed on the cement floor and, as the heavy sweet smell of the stuff filled the basement, he had an impulse to smash the rest of the bottles against the furnace.
He cleaned up the mess and they finished the windows and displays, then unwrapped the cellophane Christmas tree they’d been using for years. The transparent needles were limp and torn; the decorations brightened it up some, but it was still a dismal-looking thing. They hung scallops of tarnished tinsel across the ceiling, and he and David stood back to admire the effect.
Bianco thought the place had looked better before they decorated it and that his brother was acting like an old maid. He longed for his clean spare quarters at Camp Lee and the sense of doing things that mattered.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to his brother.
They locked
the front door and drove home.
A green Packard was parked in front of the garage, the living room lights were on, and when he opened the door, he heard Captain Abrams’s voice. He was telling June that German pastries were wonderful. Bianco closed the door quietly, and stood in the living room entrance to the side so Abrams couldn’t see him.
“Puff pastry filled with cream,” Abrams was saying, “covered with chocolate and nuts.”
“Bullshit,” Bianco cried. “There wasn’t an ounce of cream left in Germany.” Abrams laughed and they shook hands.
“What was I going to talk about?” Abrams said shyly. June said something about dinner and left them alone. He hadn’t been Abrams’s friend, they barely knew each other, but Bianco was enormously glad to see him. They examined each other, openly, kindly. Bianco realized that Abrams was dressed to go with a Packard, in the new look, with narrow shoulders and lapels and thin-legged trousers. He looked taller than Bianco remembered, much handsomer; and Bianco wished he had something better on than his old hunting jacket and plaid shirt, he wished he was in uniform. During dinner he admitted it to Abrams and Abrams said he’d only been back a week and hadn’t had a chance to miss being a captain yet. Over dessert, coffee, and whisky, he told Bianco that Pearce’s diverticulitis got so bad they sent him home. He also told him that the trials were more unpopular than ever and they were even having trouble finding judges. Finally, after they took the bottle of whisky into the living room to sit in front of the fire, and June had said good night and gone upstairs, Abrams told Bianco that Speiser had been tried in August, found guilty, and hanged at Spandau two weeks ago.
“That’s why I’m here in a way. I saw him the day they hanged him; he asked me if I would ever see you again and I said I might, and he said, ‘Tell the major not to forget that the men from 554 were still alive.’ ”
As soon as Abrams said that, Bianco felt a grim, perverse satisfaction. The store, the Christmas tree, the decorations were a lot of fussy shit; the peace and sense of belonging they were supposed to give was specious. Somehow, and for all time, Bianco thought, Speiser had had the last word.
PART ONE: ROGER HAWKINS
Chapter 1
Adam Levy stopped at the top of the subway stairs. It was dark, the street was empty, and Adam was a little scared. He’d been in Minnesota for four years, teaching philosophy at a small college on the edge of the northern wilderness, and he had to get used to Brooklyn and the neighborhood all over again.
His father still lived on the next block; his father’s shul, where Adam had been bar mitzvahed and married, was still on the corner of Nostrand, but most of the people he’d known were gone, and the ones who’d taken their place spoke Spanish, let their children rove the streets in gangs, and had turned the once neat street into a slummy-looking block with litter in the gutters and ranks of broken-down cars lining the curbs. Still, he told himself as he looked up the long empty block, they belonged here as much as he did.
He clutched his book and briefcase, came out of the shadow of the subway kiosk, and walked up the street.
It was hot for September, and dry. The leaves were falling early and a hot wind came up and blew grit in his face and mouth; paper sailed up out of the gutter and clung to his legs. He pulled it away and kept walking. If he looked up at the nice old graystones instead of down at the mess, the street was still pretty, he thought. He was next to the old Shapiro house when he noticed three boys—sixteen or seventeen—keeping pace with him across the street. They glanced quickly at him, then looked away. He walked faster, they did too; then he slowed down and so did they. He thought he heard one of them giggle, and his heart started racing. He stopped and pretended to study the front of one of the houses, and when he looked again, they had crossed the street and were standing across the sidewalk between him and the lights on Nostrand half a block away.
They came toward him, walking in step; they were grinning, and still clutching his briefcase and book, he turned to run back to the protection of the subway. But there were two more boys behind him, blocking his way. He froze and all five advanced on him and circled him like children playing Hi Ho the Merrio, with Adam as the cheese.
One boy broke the circle and came close to Adam. He had his hand out away from his body and Adam saw he had an open knife in it. He was a handsome boy, with black, wavy hair, blue eyes, and a silky mustache just starting to grow. But he was very thin, and Adam thought desperately, They’re hungry, that’s all, just hungry kids. They’d take his money, about thirty dollars, then they’d run away to buy food with it.
The blue-eyed boy half crouched like a knife fighter in a movie. “Turn ’em out, Jew,” he said.
Adam didn’t know what he meant, and he didn’t move.
“The pockets, Jew. Turn ’em out.”
Adam turned his pockets inside out. Change spilled and rolled, but the boys didn’t bother with it. His keys fell and his handkerchief fluttered to the sidewalk. One boy stepped closer to Adam and pulled his jacket open. He felt in the inside pocket, then snapped his knife open and, looking into Adam’s eyes, he slashed the jacket lining and outside pockets.
“The watch,” said blue-eyes.
Adam gave them the watch, and they passed it around. Then one said, “He’s got a ring.”
His wedding ring. On the verge of tears, Adam tried to pull it off his finger, but it stuck. Blue-eyes waved the knife and Adam said hoarsely, “I’ll get it off.” He managed to raise enough saliva to wet his finger and pull the ring free. They passed that around too. Then blue-eyes opened the briefcase. He found Adam’s bottle of Allerest and pitched it away down the street. Then he turned the case over and the books and papers spilled around them on the sidewalk and into the gutter. The boy bent the top of the case back until the hinges broke and it flopped loose, then he threw it down and picked up the book. It was called Objectivity: New Essays on Epistemology. Adam had been going to assign it for a seminar he was leading. Blue-eyes showed it to the other boys, but they didn’t react, and he slashed the spine, and tore off the book’s covers.
“That it?” he said to Adam.
For some reason, their brutality made Adam calmer; he looked into the boy’s eyes, which seemed to glow with hatred.
“Thirty lousy dollars and a two-bit watch. Is that all, Jew?”
“I’m afraid it is,” Adam said quietly. He kept looking at the boy, and that must have annoyed him, because he raised his hand and hit Adam in the face, using the knife handle to make the punch harder. The sound was sickening, and Adam was afraid he would throw up. He knew from the blinding pain and dead-space feel of his face that the jaw was broken. He wanted to yell at them to stop—that his best friend was Roger Hawkins, Inspector Roger Hawkins who ran this town. And if anything happened to him, Hawkins himself would come after them and make sure they’d pay. But he couldn’t talk, and he knew they wouldn’t care anyway. They hated him, and wanted to kill him—he’d never know why—and his only chance was to run. He opened his hurt mouth as wide as he could and gave a fierce, piercing shriek. It startled blue-eyes so much he jumped back, and Adam smashed past him and ran for Nostrand.
His jacket flapped out behind him, the hot wind blew his hair flat, and he thought for a few steps he might make it. The lights weren’t far, he was a good runner; but his jaw throbbed with every move and the pain radiated into his ear and eye. It blurred his vision and the lights on Nostrand looked hazy and further away than ever. He was slowing down, they were catching up. He was in shock, and even though he knew that one of them had jumped on his back and stabbed him as he fell, he didn’t feel the knife cut, or any pain. It was like a punch, nothing worse. He sank forward, face down, and felt more blows; on his back, shoulders, buttocks. He knew one of them stabbed him in the neck. He also knew that he was dying. He had a sudden vision of his father and wife, in the kitchen a block away, making a kugel to celebrate coming home.
He could see their hands and the Pyrex casserole they used. He could see the light golden noodles, and raisins and nuts. He could see the old linoleum on the kitchen floor that he and Hawkins had laid years ago, and the curtains. But he couldn’t see anyone’s face. He kept his eyes open, trying. The blood was pouring, the weight was off his back, and he heard the boys running. He knew he should pray, but he couldn’t remember any prayers; he tried to keep his eyes open, but they closed involuntarily; and just before he lost consciousness for good, he dreamed that he and his wife, Rachel, were back in Minnesota, in the million-acre wilderness park that stretched across Canada to the edge of the Arctic, to Siberia for all he knew. They’d gone there in the summer, two New York Jews, used to taxis and subways and noise; used to doormen, porters, janitors, handymen. And they’d carried a canoe for three miles through the pine woods. They laughed and complained, they were sore and sweaty, and just when they thought they’d never come to the end, the pines thinned and they stood on the bank of an empty lake that was smooth, dark, and silent, like ink in a well. They set the canoe into the shallow water, dipped their paddles in the still surface, and glided away from the shore. Adam felt free and at ease; Rachel lifted her paddle smoothly out of the water, looked at him over her shoulder, and smiled.
In spite of the windows open to the river, the guests at the mayor’s birthday party sweated in the tuxes and long gowns. Roger Hawkins’s stiff shirtfront had gone limp; his collar was damp and he longed to unhook it. But he kept smiling and circulating. He stopped at group after group, listening, talking, laughing at the other men’s jokes. He had a fine deep laugh, husky and rich. He was well liked and hadn’t stood alone yet that evening.
He was black, medium dark, and he had high, wide cheekbones and a long Masai nose with flaring nostrils. He was tall like the Masai, but heavier-boned, massive. Between his size and the aristocratic cut of his features, people would turn to look at him.
