by I V Olokita
“I told you to quit it!” I scolded him, as a father should. Yet he just laughed at my face, as if I were a perfect stranger.
“Well, this was long ago, when I was a kid. Now I am old enough to disregard your nonsense completely!”
“Nonsense?! Is risking choking on a cherry pit nonsense for you!?”
“Is killing innocent people nonsense for you!?” he mocked my way of speaking.
I laid back with a sigh, speechless. “I assume you will be staying in a nearby motel, right?” I promptly gave him this idea, realizing he might ask me to let him stay in my new place.
“Certainly!” Deus reassured me. “That’s exactly what I intend to do.”
We ran out of topics for conversation, so we just rose and left, after I had tipped the waitress generously.
“When shall we meet again?” he asked, just before we parted.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I guess the next time you’ll need me”
“Dear Heidi,” Deus wrote while lying with his face down on a bed in some hellhole motel, right after we went our separate ways.
“I have been going through some strange experiences ever since I stormed out of Professor Balaguer’s house, just a few hours ago. My life has been in the fast lane, maybe too fast even for a person as frantic as I am. I hardly get out of one trouble before I get into another, worse one, falling to new lows, yet I rise from the ashes, only to fall down again. For example, on the very day I left you I got arrested once again, and by the way, learned that my father moved from where we used to live and that some nasty people were after us for reasons still unknown to me. Dearest Heidi, I don’t know why I chose to run from you so hastily, surrendering you without a fight, but it’s no use regretting it anymore, unless…you give me a sign. So, will you? “
Putting down his pen, Deus gave a yawn. While trying to demonstrate to her she was still on his mind, it made no sense to him once he realized they would never meet again. However, he eventually succumbed to his passion, ending his letter with a drawing of a heart and the address of the motel, and promising to check every week for her letters.
Chapter 9
My guardian angels
When I regained my senses, I was in a dark room, attempting to stand up, in vain. A violent pain pierced my head and the tubes emerging from my chest and belly immobilized me. Realizing my helplessness, I rested my head on my pillow once again, looking around to recognize nothing familiar. Strangely enough, there were neither any medical devices, doctors nor nurses in sight. The horrifying idea that my enemies finally caught me crossed my mind, yet I dismissed it right away. I felt a soft touch of a woman’s hand on my forehead, and a gentle singing in German reached my ears, breaking through my locks:
“There is a Fatherland far away
Of a nation who will triumph someday.”
It kept ringing in my ears until I closed my eyes, succumbing to sleep once again.
“You’re safe here,” I heard from the old lady who faced me once I opened my eyes again, about an hour or more later. The light allowed me to detect on the opposite wall a proudly spread red and white flag with a swastika in the middle. How I missed it, and the good old days it stands for…
“Have we met already?” I enquired, instantly recalling her figure, though not her name.
“Ingrid,” she answered with a courteous smile. “We’ve met several times before, although it was my husband who did the talking for me.”
I returned her courteous smile, ignoring the serious pain in the nape it cost me.
“He’s awake!” the old lady exclaimed jubilantly, and it seemed that other figures emerged from the darkness to join the lit circle.
“We’re ODESSA,” she announced with a thrill as if trying to bring back to me some long-lost secret memory.
“Yes, I do remember you,” I mumbled quietly, letting a sigh of relief.
“You’ve gone a little sloppy, Herr Holland!” she said, bursting into a laugh, with her finger still waving in the air reproachfully. “But luckily enough, this time, as always, we emerged from the dark to stand by you!”
I forced myself to thank her, out of sheer courtesy, for their acts of mercy, only to let my eyes close again, sighing out of exhaustion and bewilderment at what was going on.
“Mein Herr!” she implored me persistently, “please, stay awake!” Yet her begging was all in vain: I could no longer keep my eyes open, and all my senses were overwhelmed by sleep.
A scorching sun penetrated the shutters, awaking me completely, the remaining morphine protecting me from a pounding headache fading away. “We found you lying down right in front of your house door.” I was surprised by a German-speaking male voice, which made me try to sit up again in my cozy bed. “You were breathless, with lips blue like those of the dead. We removed two bullets from your chest. When we drained the blood out of your lungs, we practically raised you from the dead!” he went on as if he himself had delivered me from death.
“All I remember,” I interrupted him with a hiss, “is that after I had bailed Deus out of the police, I took him to his motel and then I drove straight to my place, which nobody knows where it is.”
I hoped this meager information would suffice for him to leave me alone, since all my body was in pain, and it felt a little too early for such a chat.
“How about coffee?” the bearded man finally asked, while approaching me holding a steaming pot.
“No, thanks,” I declined his offer with my cracked lips.
“Do you have any idea who might have done it?” the old lady who just came in asked.
“I can guess quite easily,” I replied with embarrassment, “yet I have no idea why they would. If their purpose was to bring me to trial, they had no reason to end our encounter the way it ended!”
She laughed. “Do you know, Herr Holland?” she whispered while getting close enough for her cheek to warm up my face, “God works in mysterious ways and has His own ways to make us pay for what we did.”
“Nonsense,” I retorted since she seemed to suggest I betrayed my race. “You, I, and every one of us is the God he chooses to be. As long as the right blood runs through your veins, only you and nobody else is the master of your fate, certainly not some metaphysical hallucination invented by the delirious Jewish minds!”
She walked away, nearly getting out of my sight, and silence prevailed once again in the room.
“Anyway, the fact remains that somebody tried to kill you, Herr Holland,” hairy-face told me once again, “and you cannot argue with facts!”
I slowly nodded in approval.
“Good!” the old lady was appeased, coming back to the middle of the room. “Now, if you kindly tell us everything you know about your enemies, we will greatly appreciate it.”
Thus, that very day I have told them everything that happened to me since Deus left home until the very moment I woke up in their place.
“Rest assured, Herr Holland, we’ll get them!” the old lady promised, signaling this way for her subordinates to start searching for them high and low.
“Who are you?!” Gabriel startled, once the hood covering his head was removed, since the first thing he saw was the banner of the Third Reich on the wall.
“I am Mateus Esperança,” I explained quietly. He moved a little, but enough to make the chains binding his hands to the chair rattle menacingly.
“Lights on, please!” I ordered, and the room’s features grew clearer. He looked different from what I have remembered in that old footage, yet his eyes still burned with the same lust for triumph.
“Are you a Nazi?” the old man finally asked, blinking his eyes in an attempt to avoid the blinding light.
“Yes, I am!” I confirmed with a smile. “I’m a Nazi. And who may you be, sir?” I asked him back as if it was a kind of outwitting game.
“I am…,” h
e stuttered, “I’m Gabriel.”
“Just a Gabriel?” the bearded fellow interrupted him. “Just any Gabriel cannot enter the house of the highest-ranking Nazi fugitive alive, just like that!” he went on shouting, and finally slapped the old man.
“Well, I’m not just any Gabriel,” the professor explained, returning his look to me. “I’m the Head of History Department your son, Deus, left prematurely, and I came to the address he had left me in an attempt to talk him back to school,” the old man went on, frowning a little.
“And I say you are Gabriel Balaguer!” the old lady, who just came in, shouted at him.
“I never claimed I wasn’t,” he disarmed her, smiling.
“So why did you shoot me and run?!” I expressed my surprise. Were all my assumptions so far untrue?
“I have never met you,” Gabriel stated with an amazed expression. “The more so, it’s been years since I possessed a gun.”
The old lady, seemingly running out of patience, came so close to him as if she was about to give him a hug. “Either way, today is the last day of your life, old man!” she whispered straight in his ear. “So why don’t you just make your confession first?”
Sitting up in his chair, Gabriel smiled: “I’ve been tracking you for years, Herr Klaus Holland!” he finally announced, “until I finally found you, struggling to survive, wounded, hunted down like a beast. Therefore, lady and Nazi gentlemen, I’ll be happy to die now, knowing your end is near!”
“I don’t believe a single word of what he said!” Ingrid whispered to me while the bearded fellow hooded the professor’s head once again.
“Where did you catch him?” I contributed my own surprising question.
“At your old place,” hairy-face told me, sitting down next to me.
“Oh no!” I betrayed my panic.
“Oh-no is an ill omen,” Ingrid informed me. “So why should you make it?” she went on, short tempered, standing up.
“The police arrested Deus in my house, when he tried to pay me a visit, quite recently, right when he came back from America. When I came to bail him out, he told me the man who filed the complaint was the new owner of my old place. Deus said he was the very same man who had stolen his wallet on board a plane three years earlier!” I concluded, looking heavenwards.
“It means,” the bearded fellow interrupted me, “we’ve picked up the wrong man in the wrong place!”
“You dummer als brot!” Ingrid hissed at him through her teeth, slapping him violently. “You, Herr Holland, no offense, have grown a little slow in body and mind at your age, to fall for such a trap!”
Now it struck me, without her telling me anything, that contrary to my custom so far, I too have been a little off guard for the last couple of days. Only now I recalled that ever since I picked up Deus from the police station, I took no precautions against surveillance.
“Wake up!” Ingrid shouted, to defy my sleep, snapping her fingers in front of my drowsing eyes. “Come on, who can it be!? Who else might have an unsettled score with you, except the guy chained to this chair for hours?!”
“Huh-huh,” Gabriel burst into loud giggling that breached through the sack hooding his head. The bearded fellow paced towards him quickly to silence it.
“Assholes!” the scholar cried before the bearded fellow could reach him. “What was his name?” he enquired.
“Whose name?!” the bearded guy expressed his own surprise.
“I wasn’t talking to you, you stupid ass!” Gabriel yelled at him while the latter unhooded his head to give him another slap.
“I think it was Janusz,” I recalled, just in time to prevent hairy-face from knocking any piece of useful information out of the professor’s brain.
“Doesn’t that name ring any bells to you?!” the professor inquired, looking into my eyes as if possessing some information which slipped my mind.
“I have met a Janusz once,” I recalled. “He was a Jewish prisoner in my camp, but I can’t remember his last name,” and I remarked right away, “However, he had died years before I even got to this country.”
“Dear lady!” Gabriel addressed the Old Lady, with evident despair, “I implore thee to end my life right now, before I’m infected with his stupidity!” he went on insulting me: “if I have to spend just another minute with such a nitwit, I will take my own life, if I can!”
She bent down to me, her face growing sterner at once. “Klaus, are you absolutely sure this Jew is dead and gone?!”
Trying to recall that day in the Camp, my mind was overwhelmed with a succession of memories as vivid as if it all happened just yesterday. “Positive,” I finally spoke up. “I remember hearing the sound of a distant shot and of the thud of his corpse hitting the bottom of the mass grave, and also…,” I went on, but was suddenly startled. “Perhaps…it didn’t all happen exactly this way. As a matter of fact…” I confessed quietly, “I do not know for sure whether he is dead or alive at all!”
Covering her head with both hands, Ingrid started pacing back and forth, occasionally waving her hands as if talking to herself. She started cursing me, at first quietly and then shouting at the top of her voice: “You moron! You screwed up everything! You betrayed us to them! What can we do now, with our hideout uncovered, thanks to you!?”
Her words, naturally, offended me a little, yet right then they didn’t do much good for either her or me: a few seconds later the hideout’s door was broken and we came under heavy crossfire.
Hailing from a long line of fugitives from the law, Hairy-face had no intention to surrender without a gunfight that will go down in history. Instantly drawing two pistols with delicately engraved ivory grips, he opened fire towards the door. The first to go down was a man in black with a rifle, but then others followed, storming over their fellow’s dead body by the bullet-pierced lintels of the breached door, while others were breaking the little room’s windows. The room grew so dense with gunpowder smoke I could see nothing. Hairy-face kept firing, bringing down another three attackers, until a single shot pierced a small hole in his forehead, bringing him down silently. All the while, Ingrid kept sitting still, until all her few gunmen went down one by one and the firing stopped. The stench of dense gunpowder smoke filling the room burnt my nostrils and made me numb. Only then did I noticed she rose, approaching the dead bearded man who lay near the chair where Gabriel was still chained. I watched her crossing the room, while the attackers, too, followed her through their sights. Bending over him, she caressed his head affectionately, and then kissed his cheek, repeatedly murmuring, “Oh, Christian! Christian!”
A hand landed heavily on her shoulder. “Ingrid!” a man in black and a ski mask revealing his eyes and mouth only, said menacingly. “Ingrid Von Bertele!” he repeated, this time shouting, to make sure she heard him but was met with disregard. “You come with us!” he went on, cuffing her hands behind her back, but it was too late. Ingrid, like all professional spies, clenched her teeth tightly, until a foamy poison started filling her mouth, running down her throat all the way to her stomach. She fell down, giving one last convulsion before dying.
“Dammit!” the assault team’s commander muttered as if forgetting this is what all top Nazis did when captured. However, right afterwards he went to unhood the professor chained in the middle of the room.
“Brigadier-General Balaguer?” the commander greeted the old man with broken English, once seeing his face. “Lieutenant-Colonel Nusiant?” Gabriel returned his greeting with a smile. “Would you be kind enough to unchain me?” he asked, while the latter was already searching for the cuffs keys.
“What about him?” Gabriel asked, pointing at me, who still lay in the corner, waiting for them to decide my fate as well.
“We’ll bring him back, to trial,” the commander decided, lowering his head as if he made this decision most reluctantly.
“I was under the impressio
n you would prefer to kill him right away, as you promised me back then,” the Professor reminded him, with not an ounce of compassion.
“I have given it a lot of thought,” the commander, now standing above me, explained. “Ever since you first met me, decades ago, as an ex-death-camp prisoner with nothing but a camp’s uniform, you, better than anyone else on earth, knew that my greatest source of joy would be killing this murderer, who wiped out my entire family!”
“So,” Gabriel insisted, “why don’t you do it now?”
The commander looked up at me again, letting me notice through his ski mask the smile spreading all over his face, while his eyes still struggled to keep on the secret kept for all those decades. His figure, slightly taller than mine, popped a small belly through his black uniform. “I’m too old for bloody vengeance,” Janusz finally uttered with a sigh, while rolling the ski mask off his head, facing the professor. His gray hair flowed down his shining skull. “Anyway,” Janusz went on, “that human scum lying in front of you would have probably liked me to end his life right away, but I’m not the one to grant him this satisfaction!”
I waited for Janusz to turn his uncovered face to me, to remind me of the look of that sub-human who escaped its death when I ordered it to die like all other sub-humans in the camp. Yet he faced me, closing in on the professor until he was within an arm’s length from him.
Even when they met for the first time, Janusz knew it would all end exactly as it did. For too many years, he has been wandering all over the world, playing his own victim. From the moment he chose to conceal the Nazi murderer he really was under the clothes and identity of the last Jew he killed back then in Holzen, he has been playing his role with unparalleled skill. As I have learned during the several following days, it all started that very day in Holzen. A few minutes after he had put on the prisoner’s clothes and assumed his identity, and several hours after he had watched us taking off to leave him behind, Jan met Gabriel, US Army’s chief Nazi hunter, making a lifelong friend of him. They have become an inseparable team with one target – me.
