The Tribe

by Bari Wood

  ¶¶¶ Slowly, slowly.

  **** Old wives’ tale.

  Chapter 5

  Bianco saw the word clay, stopped skimming, and read the headline.

  Still No Suspects in Laurel Beating Deaths.

  It was almost familiar and he thought he’d been rehearsing reading this for a long time.

  The bodies of Willa Garner, 40, and her sons, Thomas Jr., 17, and Eric, 14, were found in their home at 18 Sutter Lane early Sunday morning. A neighbor noticed the broken front door and called the Laurel police. The scene that confronted the officers . . .

  Bianco skipped, then read,

  . . . motiveless. Mrs. Garner’s jewelry, the family sterling, were intact. But the Garners were black and Chief Kramer suggested that the murders might be connected with the rash of cross-­burnings and swastika-­painting that plagued eastern Long Island last summer.

  Two weeks ago, a fight broke out in the Claremont High School cafeteria between black and white students. When it was over, one white boy was dead and seven black and white youths were injured. The older Garner boy was involved and Chief Kramer thought the incident might have triggered the killings and he plans to question local Klan members. He told the Journal that Mr. and Mrs. Myron Brodsky, the parents of the dead boy, had been traced to Palm Springs, where they have been staying with friends since Wednesday. “We had to get away,” Mr. Brodsky told the Journal. “Of course, we’re horrified by what’s happened to the Garners.” Dr. Thomas Garner was also out of town when the murders . . .

  Bianco skipped again.

  . . . was the mysterious presence of common clay . . .

  Lo, I have wrought in common clay, Kipling wrote someplace, Bianco couldn’t remember where. He kept reading.

  It was on the bodies, the floor, the walls. No one knows why it was there or where it came from. Chief Kramer refused to speculate.

  Bianco put aside the paper and forced himself to eat eggs, bacon, toast, but he couldn’t taste any of it. He helped June with the dishes, then drove to Main Street and opened the store. He was early, his nephew hadn’t come in yet, and he left the front door locked and went down to the basement. He’d stored his uniforms down there thirty-­six years ago, and the box was still where he’d put it. He lifted off sacks and other boxes that had been piled on top of it over the years and stripped off the tape he’d sealed it with. He lifted the cover and smelled the cedar shavings he’d scattered around the heavy OD wool jackets and trousers. He lifted the first two jackets out, then felt in the inside pocket of the third for the list of names he’d put there the last time he folded it. He wasn’t sure why he’d kept the list, just a feeling that he might need it some day. It was still there, and he pulled out the piece of paper with a feeling of half dread, half anticipation, unfolded it, and read the names again: Alldmann . . . Dworkin . . . Feldsher . . . Fineman . . . Gershon . . . Levy . . . Lippmann . . . Luria. . . .

  At noon he went to the telephone business office a few doors away and asked the woman behind the counter for the Laurel phone book. She gave it to him and he took it to a table across the room. The place was filled with phones for sale; round phones, phones covered with gilt, and phones that were transparent to show the works inside. He opened the book on the table next to a Mickey Mouse phone and, with the colored plastic face grinning madly at him, he found the names of eight of the men who had been in Barracks 554.

  Chief Kramer gave Bianco coffee and sat down at his desk across from him. Bianco had rehearsed what he was going to say on the drive from Craig Harbor to Laurel, but now, facing the tall thin man with mild blue eyes, he knew he’d sound crazy. He burned his tongue on the coffee and coughed. The chief leaned forward. “You okay?”

  “Sure, sure,” Bianco said, stalling for time. He’d believed what Speiser had told him, he still believed it, but he knew the man sitting across from him wouldn’t. Not because he was foolish or unimaginative, but because he wasn’t ready to hear such things. Bianco had been ready to hear anything from that scared Nazi in the red room in Nuremberg. They’d been surrounded by a bombed-out city and starving children, and he’d seen the camps; it was the right setting for Speiser’s story. But this was a neat office in Exurbia surrounded by overstuffed super­markets, swimming pools, neat lawns. No one would believe it here. He got the rest of the bitter coffee down and stood up.

  “I’m sorry. I think I was making connections that weren’t there.”

  “Look, we’re stymied, anything you can tell us . . .”

  Bianco shook his head. “It’s something from the war, and I was there, and I think I let my imagination run away with me. . . .”

  “You’re the second person who talked about the war.”

  Bianco sat down again. “Who was the first?”

  The chief told him, then he said, “This story must be a beaut because the inspector looked as strung out as you do. Maybe you’ll talk to him.”

  They got to Craig Harbor by seven that night and drove through town toward the Sound. They passed Bianco Bros. Notions and Variety. It was closed, but Rachel knew from the front of the place that inside she’d find old-­fashioned wooden counters and bins full of razor blades, tennis shoes, flannel nightgowns, kitty litter, plastic souvenirs.

  They were halfway up Bianco’s driveway when the front door opened and he came out to greet them. He shook Hawkins’s hand, glanced at his ID, then looked at Rachel.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Jacob Levy’s daughter-­in-­law,” Hawkins answered.

  Levy. The sweet-­faced man who’d started all the crying; the one Speiser called the little bastard. He’d be a grandfather by now, like Bianco.

  “Can we come in?” Hawkins asked.

  “Of course, of course,” he said and hustled them inside.

  He was impatient, but he made himself light the fire and give them brandy. Hawkins told him about Brooklyn, Laurel, and Relkin. Then Hawkins said, “And that’s all we’ve got. No facts, no evidence, just an asshole story almost forty years old.”

  He sounded bitter and angry and Bianco knew he wasn’t going to believe the story either. Then Bianco looked at Rachel. She could have been Italian, he thought, and she was pretty, but too thin. She was nervous, too. Her feet dug into the beige carpet and she’d already finished the brandy. Her eyes were dark, but not soft; they were hard and bright, with clear whites, like his daughter’s.

  “I know who,” Hawkins was saying. “Known that for two years.”

  “But not how,” Bianco said.

  “No,” Hawkins answered.

  “I know,” Bianco said softly, looking at Rachel.

  She leaned forward and Bianco realized that he’d never said this aloud before, and wasn’t sure how to do it. He had to get it out somehow, and he took a sip of brandy to get ready, but it went down wrong. He choked and gasped, tears ran down his face. He wiped them away and, still half choking, he said, “They built a monster shaped like a man.”

  Hawkins looked like someone had slapped him. He was holding the thin glass too tight and Bianco was afraid it would break in his hand. Rachel didn’t even look surprised.

  “And what did they build it out of?” Hawkins snarled.

  “Clay.”

  The glass did break. Bianco ran to get alcohol and a tweezer in case there was any glass stuck in Hawkins’s hand. Rachel and Bianco mopped up the blood and spilt brandy, and she put alcohol on the cuts, which weren’t deep.

  “I don’t know what I expected to hear,” Hawkins whispered to her when Bianco went out to the kitchen for another glass and paper towels to dry the carpet. “Shit . . . not that. Not a clay man . . . anything but that . . .”

  “I know, I understand. . . .” she said a little wildly, “But there’ve been others. There was one in Spain.” Hawkins stared at her. “And in Vilna, I think, and Krakow and Prague.” Bianco stood in the
entrance to the room holding a roll of paper towels. Rachel went on. “The Prague golem was the most famous . . .”

  “The what?” Bianco asked.

  “Golem . . . the man of clay is a golem. The golem of Prague killed the Gentiles who killed the Jews. Like God in Egypt.” She stopped, then she said helplessly, “But they were legends.”

  “This wasn’t a legend,” Bianco said.

  “Then you saw it?” Rachel asked.

  “No. Someone told me about it.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “The commandant of Belzec, Johann Speiser.”

  “And where’s the commandant now?” Hawkins asked.

  “Hanged for war crimes, thirty-­six years ago.”

  “So how . . .”

  “He told me in Nuremberg, before he died.”

  Bianco poured more brandy for them and sat across from Rachel so he could talk to her, convince her, because she was the one who would believe him. He remembered Speiser warning him that he didn’t want to hear this story; Speiser was right and Bianco knew he should warn this young woman, too. But he wasn’t going to and he felt guilty and elated at the same time, a little like a relay runner he thought—glad his stretch is done, and sorry for the one who starts running. She looked frail and he wondered how she’d manage. But that wasn’t his problem.

  They were waiting for him to say something, but he took his time because he didn’t want to leave anything out. He looked at the fire; the ship’s clock chimed from the hall, the radio in the kitchen played Schumann, and after a few minutes he recalled the feeling of the red room in Nuremberg, and when he looked up at Rachel and started talking, he could almost see Speiser’s pale sick face against the red walls.

  “They’d killed a kapo,” Speiser said, “and we couldn’t let it go unpunished. Yet we couldn’t make an example of them because kapos were Jews, too, and we were killing Jews as fast as we could. You see the problem.”

  Bianco didn’t answer. Speiser took another cigarette.

  “We walked a fine line in those camps, no one will ever understand. Our solution was to punish such crimes quietly, at night. Ten or twelve German guards would march to the barracks of the criminals, shoot them fast— we used automatic weapons—then quick, quick with the bodies into the woods and underground. That was the plan for 554, too. Quick death by shooting. Infinitely better than the gas, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Infinitely,” Bianco answered.

  “Unfortunately, it wasn’t always as clean as it sounded.”

  Did it sound clean, Bianco wondered. To whom?

  “Two of my men were pederasts and if there were young boys among the condemned . . .” Bianco laughed and Speiser looked sharply at him. “You think I’m silly to be offended by pederasty when we . . . did what we did to all of them?”

  “I think you’re insane,” Bianco said.

  “You don’t understand . . . to some of us the Jews were corrupt people who would defile us. To some, myself included, they were a political tool to unite a country that had existed for centuries as separate states. They might have been instrumental in uniting all Europe. . . .”

  Bianco couldn’t listen to any more of that, and he turned away.

  Speiser went on, “In any case, we were there to destroy them, not torture, rape, or steal from them. If there’s a blot on my people . . .”

  Bianco interrupted, “Ten or twelve of your guards, including two queers, are sent to ‘execute’ thirty-­some Jews, they get to the barracks . . .”

  Speiser sighed and went on with his story. “Lieutenant Klinger would tell the head of the barracks why they were there—a reading of the charges, so to speak—then . . . then . . .” Speiser blotted sweat from his upper lip. “They would shoot them,” Speiser said, “except the boys . . .”

  Speiser stopped and wiped his face again.

  Bianco waited. “But this time . . .” he prompted after a while.

  “This time . . . I knew it was to happen and I was in my office waiting. The gunfire started when I expected and I heard screams. All normal. Then I noticed that the screams didn’t stop and the gunfire did. At first I thought it was wounded Jews and my men would finish them off in a second. But the screaming went on and I knew something was wrong. I didn’t move at first. I don’t know why. Maybe just malaise that comes after hours at a desk, or maybe I had a premonition. Anyway, I sat there, staring at Himmler’s picture on the wall . . . a visage to make anyone torpid.” He grinned companionably.

  Bianco said, “What finally made you move?”

  “I heard men running. It sounded like a whole squad racing past my door and no one came in to tell me what was going on. So I went out into the hall and I asked the others what had happened. They said the Jews had built something. Built something! I thought of a wall, or a secret room to hide in, and I remember thinking how right we were to be doing away with these people who were stupid enough to think that a wall would save them. I crossed the compound armed with a pistol and with four of my men at my heels like hungry dogs. Oh, I was sure of myself. Then, halfway across the compound, striding through the dust of the camp in the moonlight, with the pines moving in the night wind around us, the branches rubbing against each other, making that breathing sound, and the breeze carrying the smell to us, I heard something pound. I swear the ground shook. At that instant a scream came from Barracks 554 and I was suddenly cold with terror. I have never had such a feeling. I trembled and the men with me did, too. We all wanted to bolt.”

  Bianco looked at his hands.

  “I swear to you,” Speiser kept talking, “if any of us had been alone, we’d have run. But there were five of us, watching each other, so together we crossed the compound and went inside the barracks.

  “I stopped at the door and yelled as loud as I could, ‘This is Commandant Speiser. Everyone at attention!’ Nothing at first, not a sound. Then a moan came from the floor next to the door, and the s­mell hit us. Slime, like a cave under a river. Reinhart got the spot going and in the light I saw a little man whose clothes were splashed with blood, and then I saw what was left of my men. Oh God . . .” Speiser put his head in his hands and sobbed aloud. Bianco felt nothing. He refilled the other man’s cup with cold tea and sugar and nudged Speiser’s shoulder with the cup. Speiser drank some, then went on.

  “They were dead or dying. Some had broken necks and died whole. Some of the heads were torn off and some lingered there on the floor but without some of their parts . . .” Speiser stopped. Bianco’s gorge rose up his esophagus, into his throat. He tasted bile and took a deep breath to keep from puking on the floor.

  Speiser leaned close and whispered at Bianco, “You can’t imagine, in the light, in the shadows, what it was like. The look, the sound, the smell of that barracks. Then . . . oh God . . . in the middle of the room, in the spotlight poor Reinhart was holding, I saw what the Jews had built.” He grabbed Bianco’s arm. Bianco tried to shrug him off but he held on. Bianco tried to pull free, but Speiser wouldn’t let go. They tussled back and forth while Speiser raved. “At that moment I saw the future. I saw the Russians in Berlin, I saw my poor son looking in garbage cans for sawdust to eat, I saw my country in ruins . . .” They swayed back and forth on their chairs, Bianco trying to free his arm, Speiser holding on. Bianco saw their shadows on the wall, their reflection on the window. They looked ridiculous and he laughed. Speiser did, too. Suddenly they couldn’t stop laughing. They rocked and swayed, laughing, they held their sides.

  “What was it?” Bianco croaked. “Ha . . . ha . . . what was it?”

  “A monster of clay.” Tears of laughter streamed down Speiser’s face. “Enormous, smooth, silent, featureless . . . the perfect monster. The hands were mitts without fingers, the feet toeless, miniature barges of clay. The crotch was smooth, the arms were logs that bent without joints, and the face . . . the face had nothing, no eyes, mouth, nos
e. No ears, nothing. But it saw us . . . Oh God, it saw us without eyes, it heard us without ears. It turned and looked at me . . . Heee . . .” The tea spilled and spread across the table, and they laughed at that. “Then it moved, and the floor and walls shook. Its head scraped the ceiling and left a trail of slime. Its feet hit the wood floor . . . boom . . . boom . . . oh ho.” Speiser stopped laughing and after a minute, Bianco did too.

  “The little Jew raised his hand,” Speiser said, “and it stopped. Behind me my men cried and groaned and I sobbed with them. The little Jew came right up to me and looked up into my face. He had very clear, dark eyes and black hair that shone in Reinhart’s spot. He was a good-­looking man, delicate, pale, and there were tears in his eyes. Don’t ask me . . . I don’t know why the little bastard was crying. ‘We need food,’ he told me. ‘You’ll have it,’ I sobbed. ‘There are old men in here,’ he said, ‘who get cold at night.’ ‘I’ll get blankets,’ I said. Then the little man took my chin in his hand and brought his face very close to mine. His skin was pasty from protein starvation and his breath smelled terrible. I tried to turn my head away, but he wouldn’t let my chin go. Then he whispered to me, blowing that foul breath in my face. ‘I don’t think Joseph will die with us.’ I knew that ‘Joseph’ was the monster and the Jew smiled at me as if the name was a joke we could share. ‘If you go back to your bunker and bomb us, blast us to dust, I think Joseph will come out of the rubble, step over our bodies, and kill you all. I think he will leave the camp, go out in the world, so to speak. He could go ten thousand miles and twenty years before anyone stopped him. He could kill ten thousand, a hundred thousand . . .’

  “I nodded and nodded. ‘No bombs,’ I gibbered. ‘No tanks, I swear . . . oh God . . . I’ll bring food and coal, anything you say . . . I swear.’

  “ ‘And no more killing,’ said the little Jew.

  “ ‘I swear you’ll live,’ I said.

  “ ‘And all the others in this camp,’ said the Jew, and everyone in the barracks waited for my answer. Even the dying soldiers on the floor stopped moaning. I grabbed the little Jew’s arm. ‘Come outside,’ I pleaded.