Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  “That’s a flippin’ Jew for you, Bill.”

  McConnell rolled over and read the clock hanging on his bedroom wall. It was after three A.M., but he could not find sleep. He had gone to bed at midnight, dozed for an hour, then sat bolt upright in a fit of compulsion. One facet of the proposed mission had not been discussed — anti-nerve agent protection — and he did not intend to rely on any gear Duff Smith might supply. He dressed quietly and bicycled back to the university, let himself into his lab, and quietly removed two prototype anti-gas suits he had been secretly experimenting with for the last month. The ride home with the heavy gear strapped to the bike had nearly exhausted him, but the suits and tanks now lay packed in two suitcases at the foot of his bed.

  Yet something else had kept him twisting in the bedclothes long after that. Brigadier Smith had ordered him not to say any goodbyes, and he had tried to obey. But the sense of something important left undone, of words left unsaid, was too powerful to ignore. With a soft curse he climbed out of bed, lit a candle at the small desk in his room, and picked up his fountain pen.

  The letter to Susan came fairly easily. It was probably not much different than the millions of letters written by other husbands during the war. He apologized for sending her home during the Battle of Britain, and told her he had been faithful during the years since, which was true. There had been no children yet, and he regretted that, but in the end it would make it easier for her to build a new life, should the worst happen.

  The second letter took more time. When he thought of his mother, he felt a terrible guilt, a sense that he had no right to risk his own life no matter what the cause, no right to risk taking away her only surviving son. Yet it was his life, and in the end she would understand that. He lifted the pen and wrote:

  Dear Mother,

  If you have received this letter, I am no longer in this world. You have taken hard blows in your life, and do not deserve this one, but what I went to do, I had to do. Dad would say that I threw my life away in a useless attempt to revenge David’s death, but you know me better than that. I have learned that there is truly an infinite capacity for evil in the human heart, and because of my abilities I have an opportunity, and probably an obligation, to do what I can to stop it. There just comes a time when a man says, Enough.

  There are some practical matters to be attended to. Back during the Blitz, I wrote a will and mailed it to old Mr. Ward in town. As you know, the monthly payments he disburses to you and Susan come from my six industrial patents. It is a strange irony, but with the war expansion, the proceeds from those patents have grown to a substantial amount of money. In the will, I assigned three of those patents to Susan and three to you. It gives me great comfort to know that you will never have to worry about getting by again, or work so hard as you did during the Depression.

  In my letter to Susan, I wrote that she should remarry and try to make a new life with the children she deserves. I hope you will encourage her in that, but she is not the only one who needs encouragement. It may not be a son’s place to speak of these things to his mother, but I am. After Dad passed, I think you sealed away a part of yourself in the belief that David and I would never understand if you ever loved another man. That is a noble sentiment, but it is wrong. David and I, and yes, Dad too, wanted nothing so much in life as your happiness. You always said you were a tough old girl, but you are not so old, and no one should have to spend their life with only memories.

  Not one day of my life passed without you in my thoughts. I know the same was true for David. God bless you and keep you.

  Your son,

  Mark

  He sealed each letter in a separate envelope, then wrote a short covering letter asking the don he billeted with to forward the letters to Georgia if he had not heard from Mark in ninety days. He laid both envelopes on top of the letter, blew out the candle and went back to bed. This time sleep did not elude him. It came without warning and without dreams — a sleep so deep it was almost like death.

  At one-twenty a.m. Brigadier Duff Smith’s telephone rang for the last time that night.

  “Smith here,” he answered.

  “I gave it my best shot, Brigadier.”

  The Scotsman leaned back in his chair. “You earned your money, Corporal.”

  “It worked?” asked the voice.

  “I wrote the bloody script, didn’t I?”

  “Christ, sir, you did that all right. I felt so sorry for the poor bastard I could barely tell the story. It was the details that clinched it. And the plaster cast. Wow. It was like it really happened. It was easy.”

  “That story was not fiction, Corporal. It has really happened.”

  “Jeez, it really got to me, hurting the guy that bad.”

  “You don’t want the money, then?”

  “Hey, I want every fucking cent. I earned it. Five hundred simoleans.”

  Brigadier Smith chuckled cynically. “I foresee a stellar career for you in the American cinema, Corporal.”

  He hung up the telephone, consulted a calendar, scrawled a few notes on a pad, then made his last call of the night. It was answered by a male secretary, but after eight minutes the brigadier was rewarded with the unmistakable voice of Winston Churchill.

  “I hope this is bloody important, Duff,” the prime minister growled. “You pulled me away from the Marx Brothers.”

  “The doctor is in, Winston.”

  There was a pause. “How soon can you get here?”

  “By the end of the film, probably.”

  “Don’t let any Yanks see you, Duff. They’re creeping around London like phantoms at the bloody opera.”

  “Pour me a Glenfiddich, if you have it.”

  “Done.”

  15

  A woman was speaking Yiddish in the darkness. She spoke with the guttural inflections of Eastern Europe, but Rachel Jansen had no trouble understanding her. She would have understood even if she had not known Yiddish. Despair needs no translation.

  Every woman in the block had gathered in a tight circle around a guttering candle hooded by a tin can. They sat on the floor with their knees under them, listening like mourners in a dark temple. The candlelight did little to smooth their stark, prematurely old faces, and it absolutely died in the hollows of their eyes. All but Frau Hagan wore the yellow triangle on their shifts.

  Rachel had never seen or imagined anything like this ritual. The women called it der Ring — the Circle. Each night they gathered in this way and spoke by turns, emptying their memories. Children were banished from the block during the Circle, and Rachel soon learned why. The stories told here would have plunged children’s minds into black depression and nightmares, scarring them forever. They were difficult enough for adults to endure. But every woman in the room already bore indelible scars. What could it hurt to hear others reveal their own? At least they could share their misery.

  But sharing misery was not the purpose of the Circle. Its purpose was to record. A woman called the Scribe wrote down in shorthand everything that was said, paying particular attention to names, dates, and places. Each night the Scribe’s annotated record was hidden in a space behind the wall where insulation would be, had insulation been provided for the barracks, which it had not. After hearing a single night’s entries into that record, Rachel had known she would never have the courage to read the full text. It was no less than a testament of the unwillingness — or perhaps worse, the inability — of God to protect his servants.

  With great effort she managed to block out the speaker’s voice. She admired the purpose of the Circle, but for the past four nights she had used this time to digest whatever she had learned during the day, and to try to apply that knowledge to her family’s survival. Unlike the other new widows, who walked through the camp in various states of lethargy, Rachel strained to catch every conversation, sifting each for some scrap of information that might help protect her children.

  Already she had experienced extremes of hope and despair. First she had
learned that if she and her family had been captured a few months earlier, her children would never have been picked out of the line at Auschwitz, but sent directly to its gas chambers. But with international pressure building against the rumors of Nazi death camps, the SS had decided to create special “family sections” inside certain camps. Red Cross inspectors would be allowed admittance at the front gate, then steered down prepared routes to areas where they would witness scenes of family life not so different from that outside the camp fence, albeit with fewer material comforts. They would leave confident that the grisly rumors were the exaggerations of frightened Jews.

  Frau Hagan told Rachel that when Reichsführer Himmler mentioned this program to Herr Doktor Brandt, Brandt had jumped at the chance. And the system had brought certain benefits. A few families were spared the agony of forced separation, which Frau Hagan claimed was worse than death for some, as she had seen such separations drive mothers to suicide. But the odd thing was, since the adoption of the family camp system, not one Red Cross inspector had ever been granted admittance to Totenhausen.

  It was not until yesterday that Rachel learned why, and the answer had left her in a permanent state of terror. It seemed that, until recently, Klaus Brandt’s talents were not sufficiently taxed by his poison gas experiments on behalf of Reichsführer Himmler. As a hobby he had taken up private researches into the etiology of spinal meningitis. Some said he had done this with an eye toward developing patentable medicines with which he could make a fortune after the war. In any case, Brandt’s research used up children at a staggering rate, as his normal method was to inject meningococcus bacteria into healthy spines, then chart the effectiveness or failure of various compounds against the infection. Brandt’s adoption of the family camp system insured a constant flow of children for his experiments.

  Frau Hagan claimed the meningitis research had slowed considerably in recent weeks, but Rachel was not comforted. The thought that Jan or Hannah could be plucked from the Appellplatz at any moment and taken to the “hospital” to have deadly bacteria injected into their bodies was simply too horrifying to shut out. The thought that any children were at risk of this — that some in fact were dying in agony in the hospital on this very night — kept her in a constant state of near panic. She now devoted every waking moment to discovering some way to have her children exempted from these experiments.

  A sudden sob from the Circle broke her train of thought. A listener had been moved to tears by the speaker’s words. Rachel found herself drawn into the narrative by morbid fascination. The speaker’s story was so much more harrowing than her own. It made her nervous to think what she would say when her turn came.

  “The trucks were in the square,” the woman said, determinedly focusing her eyes on the bare floorboards, as if her old village were standing there in miniature. “The SS beat everyone out of their homes. Those who were too slow about it, who stayed behind to pack some valuables or necessities, they died first. I had believed the worst rumors on the day before. I’d already packed a bag. There were rifle shots from every direction. They caused panic at first, but most of us hurried toward the trucks. We were like cattle. No one wanted to know what the shots meant. Mothers shouting to their children, children alone screaming. The men calling to each other, asking what they should do. What could they do? The SS had already shot the mayor and the police chief.

  “From the bed of the truck we saw the worst of it. The children . . . the poor babies. On Praga Street the Germans were killing the babies outright. Smashing their heads with rifle butts, swinging them by the heels against walls. I myself saw an SS grab an infant from Hannah Karpik and dash its head against the street cobbles. Hannah went mad, tearing out her hair and beating her fists against the SS. After a few seconds he took out his pistol and shot her in the stomach, then left her for dead.” The woman shrugged. “That was the Germans in Damosc.”

  “In Lodz, too,” echoed a woman from the outer edge of the Circle. “The same, but worse. While we stood in lines in the square, the SS backed a flat truck up to the hospital wall. We could not understand what they were doing. Someone opened a third floor window. Then small packages began flying out of the window. When the second package landed in the bed of the truck, we realized what it was. They were throwing the newborn babies down from the nursery. Three floors. They laughed while they did it.”

  “Like barbarians from the Dark Ages,” said the first woman. “Our rabbi was crying out to God to deliver us, while a young man cursed God in a voice twice as loud. On that night I felt the boy was right. How could God watch that slaughter and not be moved to act?”

  “It’s always the same,” said another woman, a voice much older and cracked with phlegm. “Why write them down? The same story told a hundred times. A thousand times. No one cares.”

  “That is why we must write them all,” Frau Hagan said forcefully. “To show what the Hun is really doing. Good men sometimes do bad things in war. But with the SS it is the rule. It is policy. Our stories, piled on other stories, each one documented, can prove this madness. Only then will it be impossible for them to deny it later.”

  “Later,” scoffed a disembodied voice. “What is later? Who will be left to dig up our papers? Our stories. Who will be left to listen? Soon the Germans will own the world.”

  “Cover your stupid mouth,” said Frau Hagan. “There is always a reckoning. The Red Army is coming to set us free. Stalin will crush Hitler into the ice of Russia, drown his tanks in the Pripet Marshes. We must be ready when the soldiers arrive. We must point out the butchers to them.”

  “Stalin won’t come. Hitler almost took Moscow in ’forty-one. Anyway, Stalin hates Jews as much as Hitler. It doesn’t matter. The streets of Moscow will soon have German names.”

  “Liar!” Frau Hagan snapped. “Empty-headed fool! Ask the Dutch girl. She came from Amsterdam. She had a radio. Ask her about Stalin. Ask her about the Red Army.”

  All eyes turned to Rachel. “Tell them,” urged Frau Hagan.

  “It’s true,” Rachel confirmed. “The Russians began a winter offensive in December. Only days before I was captured, I heard that they had advanced into Poland.”

  “As I told you!” Frau Hagan said triumphantly.

  “I heard also on the BBC that they were driving the Germans back across the Ukraine.”

  Nearly fifty faces turned to Rachel and fired questions at her in a jumble of languages. What was happening in Estonia? In Warsaw? Italy? What about the Americans? The English?

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much,” she apologized. “There are rumors of an invasion this year.”

  “They say that every year,” said a disparaging voice. “They will not come. They don’t care about us.”

  A long shriek suddenly pierced the night. The women in the Circle fell silent. Rachel had heard screaming earlier, like several women shouting for help, but it had come from farther away, from the direction of the SS barracks, and she had been unable to make Frau Hagan take notice of it. But when the second shriek sounded — this one obviously from close by — Frau Hagan’s face told Rachel she sensed real danger.

  “I may have to speak to Frau Komorowski,” the Block Leader said.

  “Don’t risk it,” said a woman. “Let them solve their own problems.”

  Frau Hagan ruminated. “I’ll wait a few minutes. Finish the story, Brana.”

  “Should I hide the papers?” asked the Scribe. “What if the screams make them search?”

  “Finish the story.”

  The woman called Brana resumed her narrative, telling of the open trucks driving through the winter blast to meet a prison train at an empty stretch of track. Of families loaded into unheated cattle cars, as Rachel’s had been, without food, water, or toilets. Rachel found herself unwillingly reliving her own nightmare journey from Westerbork when something raised the hairs on her upper arms.

  “Quiet!” she warned in a sharp voice.

  Frau Hagan glared at her. “What is it, Dutch
girl?”

  “There is someone outside. Hide your papers.”

  Frau Hagan looked skeptical. “Heinke is listening at the door. She has heard nothing.”

  “Hide the papers, I tell you!”

  Frau Hagan snatched the papers from the Scribe and stuffed them under her shift. Her eyes went to the woman called Heinke at the door. “Anything?”

  The guard shook her head. Frau Hagan curled her upper lip at Rachel.

  “SS!” Heinke hissed suddenly. “Into the bunks!”

  The hooded candle was instantly extinguished. A wild scramble ensued as the women found their allotted places in the tiered bunks. Rachel realized then that they had practiced this maneuver a thousand times. The only sounds she heard were the grunts and curses of the new women as they stubbed toes and barked shins in their inexperienced haste. She admired the old-timers. Walking quickly without sound was a skill she had mastered long ago, in Amsterdam, and not an easy one.

  Holding her breath in her own bunk, she waited for the slamming door and pounding boots of an SS search team. Instead she heard a furtive knock. Then the door cracked open and a shadow slipped through.

  “Hagan?” whispered the shadow.

  “Irina? Is that you?”

  “Da.”

  “Everyone stay in your bunks,” ordered Frau Hagan.

  Rachel heard the muted thud of the heavy Pole’s feet hitting the floor. Frau Hagan crossed the room in total darkness and held a whispered conversation with the kapo of the Christian Women’s Block. In less than a minute the door opened and closed again.

  “Another child has gone missing,” Frau Hagan announced to the room. “A gypsy child.”

  There was a heavy silence.

  “A boy child?” asked a quiet voice.