Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  Alone at last, McConnell reread the telegram in a daze. Regret to inform . . . killed in action . . . McConnell’s actions always reflected the highest honor . . . my personal condolences . . . condolences. . . . Mark put his left hand behind him and found the edge of a desk. He couldn’t breathe. He stumbled to the nearest window and tried to open it, but the latch was stuck. He raised his right foot and kicked furiously at the ironwork.

  In his anger at McConnell’s refusal, Smith was pushing the Bentley beyond the limit of sanity, much less legality. The fact that he was doing it in the dark with only one arm would have terrified Jonas Stern at any other time. But just now his fury burned as hot as the brigadier’s.

  “Just find another damned chemist!” he shouted above the roar of the Bentley’s engine.

  “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” Smith snapped back. “I can’t use enlisted personnel, American or British. Besides, McConnell’s the best man for the job. Under the age of sixty, anyway.”

  Stern slammed his hand against the door. “Then what the hell are we going to do? You can’t let one idealistic fool stop us.”

  Brigadier Smith glanced over at the young Zionist. “I haven’t given up on the good doctor yet.”

  “No? You’re mad, then. He’ll never do it. You might as well ask Albert Schweitzer to start carrying a bazooka.”

  “I think he will,” Smith insisted. “I think he almost agreed today. That telegram nearly pushed him over the edge.”

  Stern laughed harshly. “You’re crazy.”

  “Mark my words,” Brigadier Smith said, his eyes focused on the dark road. “He’ll come around. Tragedy has a way of changing people’s minds.”

  Stern turned suddenly to the Scotsman and stared. “Brigadier, you didn’t set up that scene, did you? I mean . . . his brother was really killed?”

  Smith glanced at Stern, a look of genuine shock on his face. “Christ, how devious do you think I am? I’d better hire more Jews while I can get them. You’re born conspirators.”

  Stern searched the brigadier’s face for a sign of deceit, but the Scotsman gave away nothing. Stern saw no point in questioning him further. But as he withdrew into his own thoughts, he could not help but wonder. How far would Brigadier Smith go to get what he wanted? The answer to that question would be of great importance after the war, in Palestine.

  If he lived that long, of course.

  McConnell was kicking at the ironwork of the window when the first doubt struck him. Why had he taken Brigadier Smith at his word? If the SOE chief had faked David’s death, would he admit it when confronted?

  “That bastard is cold enough to do it,” he said aloud.

  Mark knew how improbable the idea was, but a fierce hope overrode every rational objection his mind could conjure. With shaking hands he called the university operator and asked to be connected to the 8th Air Force base at Deenethorpe. He drummed his feet on the floor at the operator’s infuriatingly polite: I’m trying to connect you — then at last he was through.

  “I’d like to speak to someone about casualties, please.”

  “One moment, sir,” said a young male voice.

  McConnell heard several clicks, then a male voice with a Southern drawl came on the line. “Colonel Harrigill here.”

  Harrigill. McConnell remembered the name from the telegram. Doesn’t mean anything, he thought. Brigadier Smith could easily get the right names. “Colonel,” he said, surprised by the quaver in his voice, “this is Dr. Mark McConnell. I’m calling from Oxford University. Was there a raid over Regensburg last night?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give out information like that over the phone, Doctor.”

  Part of McConnell’s brain placed Harrigill’s accent — the Mississippi Delta — while another made his face flush. The timbre of Colonel Harrigill’s voice held more than official courtesy. The undertone sounded almost like sympathy.

  “What information can you give me, Colonel?”

  “Well . . . have you received a telegram today, Doctor?”

  McConnell shut his eyes. “Yes.”

  “I can confirm that your brother’s aircraft was lost in the line of duty over France. Visual reports from other aircrew led us to classify the entire crew as Killed In Action.”

  Mark found himself unable to say anything further.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, son? I was about to send a telegram to your family Stateside.”

  “Don’t! I mean not yet, at least. There’s only our mother, and she’s seen enough — just — I’ll tell her, Colonel.”

  “That’s fine with the Army Air Corps, Doctor. I’ll try to slow down Western Union a little bit. And again, let me express my sorrow. Captain McConnell was a fine officer. A credit to his squadron, his country, and to the South.”

  Mark felt a strange chill at this archaic expression of respect from a fellow Southerner. Yet somehow it touched him. It seemed to fit David. “Thank you, Colonel.”

  “Good night, Doctor. God bless.”

  McConnell hung up the phone. Colonel Harrigill had dashed his last hope. David was gone. And to think Brigadier Smith had believed his death would finally wipe away Mark’s hatred for war.

  This time the grief washed over him without warning. His brother was dead. His father was dead. In his entire family, he was the last male McConnell left alive. For the first time since returning to England he felt an almost irresistible urge to go home. Back to Georgia. To his mother. His wife. The thought of his mother brought a wave of heat to his scalp. How was he going to tell her? What could he possibly say?

  When he kicked the window latch this time, the ironbound panes crashed open and a cutting wind stung his face. Slowly, his throat began to relax. He could breathe. He gazed out over a snowy scene that appeared much as it had four hundred years before. Oxford University. His island of tranquility in a world gone mad. What a pathetic joke. He felt the telegram slip from his hand, watched it brush the window casement and then flutter down to the cobblestones three stories below.

  The first sound that escaped his throat was a great racking wail that burst from the depths of his soul. Several windows opened across the quad, revealing white faces alive with curiosity. Somewhere a gramophone was playing Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Seeing You.” By the time the second verse wafted across the quad, the tears were freezing on McConnell’s cheeks.

  He was alone.

  10

  “Your tape machine stopped,” said Rabbi Leibovitz.

  “What?”

  The old man pointed a long finger at the Sony micro-cassette recorder lying on the end table beside his chair. I blinked twice, unable to break the vision of my grandfather at that Oxford window, or my thoughts of my great uncle, whom I had never known.

  “You need another tape,” Leibovitz said. “And I need another brandy. Pass the bottle, please.”

  I did. The rabbi glanced up at me while carefully pouring the amber liquid into the glass. “So, Doctor, what do you think?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Does that sound like your grandfather to you? Does it ring true?”

  I pondered the question while I changed cassettes in the Sony. “I guess it does,” I said finally. “I can’t see him compromising his principles simply for revenge.”

  “Are you so sure, Mark?”

  I studied the rabbi’s wizened face. “I guess I’ll have to wait until you tell me, won’t I? It’s some story, all right. But the detail. . . How could you know all this?”

  Leibovitz smiled fleetingly. “Some very long afternoons with Mac in my office. Letters from other persons involved. Once I learned about this story, it . . . possessed me for a while.”

  “What about the girl?” I asked, reaching down to the floor. “The woman in this photograph? Who is she in the story? Is she the woman who sent that coded message to Brigadier Smith? What the hell was that about, anyway?”

  Rabbi Leibovitz took a sip of his brandy. “Be patient
. I’m getting to the girl. You want everything wrapped up in an hour, like a nice television movie.” The old man cocked his head and listened to the relentless cheeeep of the crickets in the humid darkness outside the house. “It’s time to shift focus for a little while. All this wasn’t happening in a vacuum, you know. Other people were pursuing their own ends, quite oblivious to Brigadier Smith in London. Some very evil people. Monsters, I would say, if you don’t object to the word.”

  I watched the old rabbi’s eyes flick restlessly around my grandfather’s study. It seemed to me that we had come to a part of the story he did not like. “Where are we shifting our focus to?” I asked, trying to prompt him.

  “What?” he asked, his eyes fixing on mine.

  “Where,” I said again. “I guess you mean Germany, right?”

  Leibovitz sat up straighter in the chair. “I do, yes,” he said in a hoarse but resolute voice. “Nazi Germany.”

  11

  Every prisoner in Totenhausen Camp had been standing on the hard-packed snow in roll-call formation for forty minutes in a freezing Arctic wind. Wearing only wooden shoes and gray-striped burlap prison clothes, they stood in a line seven deep and forty persons long. Nearly three hundred souls, all told — withered old men, mothers and fathers in their prime, strong-limbed youths, small children. One colicky infant screamed ceaselessly in the wretched ranks.

  This Appell had been a surprise. The two scheduled roll calls — seven in the morning and seven at night — had already taken place. The camp veterans knew no good could come of the change in routine. In camp, all change was change for the worse. After only five minutes standing in the Appellplatz, they had caught the faint sound of the Polish prisoners whispering the feared word seleckja — selection. Somehow the Poles were always the first to know.

  The newest prisoners in the line were Jews. Yesterday they had been clubbed out of an unheated rail car that carried them here from the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where they had been pulled from lines leaving trains newly arrived from the far corners of Western Europe — France and Holland mostly. They were the last of the lucky who had avoided the early deportations.

  Their luck had run out.

  One of the Jews standing in the first rank was no newcomer. He had been in Totenhausen so long that the SS called him not by his number or name, but by his occupation — Schuhmacher. Shoemaker. A lean and wiry man of fifty-five, with a hawklike nose and gray mustache, the shoemaker did not shiver like the other prisoners, nor did he try to whisper to those on either side of him. He simply stood motionless, burning as few calories as he could, and watched.

  He watched SS Sergeant Major Gunther Sturm strut before the ragged assembly, his face clean-shaven for once, his lank blond hair combed across his bullet-shaped head. The shoemaker saw that the screeching of the infant annoyed the sergeant to no end. He had studied Gunther Sturm for two years, and could easily imagine the thoughts churning behind the slate eyes: How did that brat’s whore of a mother slip it through the selection net? Under her skirts, no doubt. The Auschwitz SS stay drunk and the prisoner Kommandos are lazy. How the hell do those laggards expect to win a war when they can’t outsmart one crafty Jewess? Sturm’s growing frustration was of great interest to the shoemaker. On any other night the sergeant would have walked over and strangled the infant on the spot. But tonight he did not. This fact told the shoemaker something.

  Tonight was special.

  He studied the impressive display of force assembled to insure that tonight’s activities — whatever they might be — proceeded in an orderly fashion. Eighty storm troopers of the SS Totenkopfverbände — Death’s Head Battalions — stood stiffly at attention in their earth-brown uniforms, rifles at the ready in case some witless newcomer should make a dash for the wire. They were backed up by Sturm’s beloved German shepherds — canines carefully bred with wolves to enhance their killing instinct — and also by the two machine gun towers at the forward corners of the camp.

  A slamming door heralded the arrival of Sturm’s immediate superior, Major Wolfgang Schörner. The senior security officer of Totenhausen marched smartly across the snow and stopped two meters from the shoemaker. Unlike the Death’s Head guards, he wore the field gray uniform of the Waffen SS. He also wore a black patch over his left eye socket — a souvenir from his participation in the bloody retreat from Kursk, the turning point of the war in Russia — and a Knight’s Cross at his throat.

  Though only thirty years old, Schörner understood instinctively the dynamics of intimidation. Prisoners were forbidden to move during Appell, but the entire mass of bodies had drawn back slightly at his approach. With his good eye Major Schörner inspected the front line from end to end, looking for something or someone the prisoners could only guess at. Few had the courage to return his probing stare.

  One who did was the shoemaker.

  Another was a young woman of about twenty-five, a Dutch Jewess by the name of Jansen. Unlike the shoemaker, she had her entire family with her: husband, two small children, her father-in-law. The shoemaker had seen them arrive on yesterday’s train. The woman’s head had been shaved, but her large brown eyes flickered with a quick intelligence that had long since faded from the eyes of most of the other camp women. The shoemaker admired her bravery in returning Schörner’s gaze, but he knew that it was hollow. She had no idea what lay in store for her family.

  The shoemaker did. He didn’t need to hear the whispers of the Poles. During the afternoon he had seen SS men taking great pains to avoid the area of the gas storage tanks behind their barracks. Obviously some new and potent poison had been pumped into the tanks from the laboratory. Yes, tonight there would be a selection. And selections were the exclusive province of the Herr Doktor.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the young Dutchwoman whispered in Yiddish. “I am Rachel Jansen. How long must we stand here in the cold?”

  “Don’t talk,” said the shoemaker, keeping his face forward. “And keep your children quiet, for their sakes.”

  “No talking!” Sergeant Sturm shouted. At the sound of his voice the German shepherds burst out barking.

  The shoemaker looked up at the sound of another slamming door. SS Lieutenant-General Herr Doktor Klaus Brandt, Commandant of Totenhausen Camp, stood before the rear door of his quarters wearing his elegant pale gray dress uniform. The tunic was immaculate. With a slow, purposeful tread he walked toward the Appellplatz and his assembled prisoners. It always intrigued the shoemaker to watch this man. Not only was Klaus Brandt exactly his own age — fifty-five — but to his knowledge was the only concentration camp commandant who was also a medical doctor. This had been tried once before, at a different camp, but the chosen physician had made a muddle of the administration. Not Brandt, though. The balding, slightly podgy Prussian was an obsessive perfectionist. Some believed he was a genius.

  The shoemaker knew he was insane.

  The commandant’s SS uniform also signaled that tonight was a special occasion. Klaus Brandt considered himself a doctor first and a soldier second, and on most days wore his white lab coat over a business suit. He also insisted that he be addressed by his subordinates as Herr Doktor rather than Herr Kommandant. Of course he might be wearing the uniform simply to keep out the cold. The shoemaker could not remember a wind like this for many weeks. Earlier he had seen SS men building fires beneath their vehicles to keep the motor oil from freezing in the crankcases.

  When Brandt came within ten paces of the line, Sergeant Sturm snapped to attention and yelled: “All prisoners present, Herr Doktor!”

  Brandt acknowledged this report with a curt nod. He examined his watch, then leaned over and spoke quietly to Major Schörner. Schörner checked his own watch, then looked toward the main camp gate forty meters away. One of the gate guards shook his head in reply. Schörner looked questioningly at Brandt.

  “Let us begin, Sturmbannführer,” Brandt said.

  Major Schörner signaled Sergeant Sturm with a flick of his head. Sturm marched toward
the far end of the line and began pulling men from the ranks. The shoemaker saw immediately that this selection was different from all others he had seen. The criteria for selections were usually self-evident — sometimes certain adult men were selected (those of a certain approximate weight, for example) other times women having their menstrual cycle. Never had the shoemaker seen more than ten adults selected at one time, and for a simple reason: Brandt’s testing chamber had not been designed to handle more.

  Also, the usual procedure was for Brandt to walk along just behind the sergeant, approving the selections or, in rare cases, granting an on-the-spot dispensation. The Lord of Life and Death at Totenhausen savored his divine authority. But tonight Sturm was snatching men from the ranks with hardly a glance. Already thirteen stood under guard apart from the main group. With a chill of foreboding the shoemaker realized that all thirteen were Jews. Had his turn finally arrived?

  His hands trembled. None of the Jews looked over fifty, but who knew? He saw the Jansen woman lean out of the line to try and see what was happening. An SS private stepped forward and shoved her back. Five storm troopers converged as Sergeant Sturm waded into the ranks to collar a reluctant prisoner. A hysterical wail echoed up the line, forcing the dog handlers to restrain the German shepherds.

  The shoemaker began to pray. Nothing else would do any good. He had made his mistake years before, when he refused to flee from Germany with his wife and son. At least they were safe now, he thought — he hoped — safe in the Promised Land. Palestine. He was certainly luckier than the Jansen family on his right. Tonight the old grandfather would lose his son, the young wife her husband, and the children their father. He saw panic in the woman’s eyes as she sought some means of protecting her husband. There was nothing. This was Nazi Germany, and Sergeant Sturm was getting closer.

  “You!” Sturm snapped, pointing his finger. “Out of the line!”