Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle

by Warsh, Sylvia Maultash

  She was still floating, but rising somehow, rising to some surface. What if Chana confronted Leo? Light shining in through a window. Rebecca could almost see something. The cloudy window in the back door of the van. Noisome bacteria, slimy mildew. What if Chana asked him the right questions? It might have amused him to tell her the truth, that he was in business with the Nazi. Profiting from the murderer. What unspeakable crimes had she seen him commit that wouldn’t allow her to accept this final degradation? That’s what had destroyed Chana, the memory of the dead. It was blood money. The red gauze heads of the three dolls.... When Steiner-Vogel had walked into her room last night, he pulled what was left of her into oblivion. Only the shell remained.

  The light diffused — were Rebecca’s eyes open? Her nose was certainly awake. The stench! Then she felt her body sway into a turn, someone else’s turn, out of her control. She rolled slightly and nudged something next to her. Then a bump in the road lifted her head up and dropped it back. Like a mound of flesh, she thought in her dream, helpless and inert. But a mound of flesh couldn’t open its eyes. And suddenly she was opening her eyes. She wished she’d kept them closed. In a light that seemed dimmer than the one she’d seen behind her eyelids, she found, not more than a foot away, the wry face of Feldberg, his eyes bulging, his hair matted. With the force of will, she turned the other way. Nesha, head on his chest, his breath shallow. The three of them stretched full length like sardines. With great effort, she moved one hand and touched Nesha’s chest. She gave a pathetic little push. He moaned without moving. She hoped Steiner hadn’t heard.

  The bumpy ride flattened into an elongated line, a rolling, rolling, a monotonous tremulo down endless road. No more street lights. Hadn’t there been street lights behind her lids? She was sure it had been brighter. Now there was a sudden humidity in the air. She twisted her head back trying to look out the front windshield: there he was, Steiner driving in shadow, lit only by the phosphorescent reflection from the dashboard. From the floor of the van, all she could see out the front was black sky. But the dampness, the vague presence of ... water. That was it. He was taking them to the lake. Somewhere east of the city along the waterfront. He could stop where the lake was deep at the shore, and push their bodies into the water.

  She had to start moving, she had to gain her strength back. And how would she do that, short of a miracle? She didn’t believe in miracles anymore. Not since David. God may have split the sea once and saved the Israelites, but He had since disappeared. She knew she was alone, could count only on herself. The Angel of Death would not pass over if she didn’t act. She lifted her head with effort. Hammers bounced at her temples. Who was she kidding? She didn’t have a chance. He had a gun. She strained her eyes to examine the area around him. The dashboard — no. The passenger seat — no.

  Then she spotted it: a bulge of black against the dark floor beside him. Almost under the dashboard. It wasn’t far. In her other life she could’ve just reached out and it would be hers. But her head felt like an overripe melon and her legs were rubber. She was moving in slow motion, wedged between two bodies. She couldn’t get to the gun before he would grab it.

  Without making a conscious decision, she turned slowly onto her side, then her front, trying to dislodge herself silently from the floor. She lifted herself up on her forearms. Her head ached as she pulled herself to her knees, then crouched on rubber legs. The movement sent a shot of fresh blood to her brain. All of a sudden, something flashed in her memory. The thing in her pocket. The something she couldn’t remember. She had deposited it there when the young cop had responded to her 911 call.

  She reached in with her hand and felt the familiar shape. It had waited there quietly for her, through everything. She closed her fingers around the scalpel, flicked off the protective cover. It was up to her. She had to be strong. Her heart thundered in her ears.

  She gripped the scalpel in her fist. The motion of the van made her sway. Adrenaline surged through her body as she rose behind him like a shadow. She wasn’t going to die without a fight.

  She steadied herself. With her left hand she reached out and firmly grabbed a fistful of Steiner’s hair, pulling back his head in the tightest grip she could summon. The scalpel in her right hand scraped at his throat.

  “Stop the van!” she screamed.

  His face contorted with pain but his foot stayed pressed on the gas. The van kept rolling, a bit slower.

  “Stop!” she shrieked, pressing the scalpel harder. “This is a fresh, new blade. It’ll go through your throat like butter!”

  His icy eyes watched her through the pain. She could tell he was weighing his options. If he slammed on his brakes he could send her flying. He could also send the scalpel into his throat. He brought the van to a gentle stop. She glanced out the windshield: everything was dark. Water lapped against a shore somewhere.

  Now her problem was how to get the gun without losing her grip on him. If she reached down with her right hand, she’d have to take the scalpel away from his throat for a second. Instead, she let go of his hair to free up her left hand, then snaked it round the other side of his head. With a deft flick, she switched the scalpel into her left hand. So far so good. The gun was still not within her reach as long as she stood behind him holding the blade at his throat. She stretched her right arm out blindly, unwilling to take her eyes off him, but it was no good. She needed fifteen more inches of arm. She loosened her grip for a second — a heartbeat — to lean over and reach for the gun. That’s when he made his move.

  He kicked the Luger out of her reach. It slid along the grooves toward the back into the dark. A bolt of fear gave her the strength — she plunged the scalpel home into his neck. She felt it enter the flesh but she missed what she was aiming at. He took his foot off the brake and the van careened off the road. She was thrown onto the ground between the seats. The phosphorescent dashboard illuminated his face. His mouth opened in the effort as he reached for the scalpel lodged in his neck, not fatal as she had hoped, no artery severed. He made a gagging sound as he pulled the scalpel from his throat. He was bleeding but not enough to make a difference, not enough to stop him from turning on her with her own weapon.

  She was more dazed than hurt by her fall when she saw him bring the scalpel up at a murderous angle. He thrust it down toward her chest. With all her strength, she caught his forearm on its way down. God, he was strong! She couldn’t hold it. Still seated, he stabbed wildly into the air, cutting her hands, ripping her jacket. Her blood began to flow.

  His eyes blazing, he kept thrusting the scalpel at her. She couldn’t hold him off any longer. He was too strong. If only she could get the gun. She heard someone screaming and realized it was her. She was out of time, out of ideas.... Then suddenly — the noise! The noise swelled in her ears, its echo resonated in her body.

  Steiner had stopped slashing and looked up in shock. Still holding the scalpel, he brought his fingers to touch his left arm. They came away red with blood.

  She scrambled to the back where Nesha crouched, wild-eyed and dazed, pointing the gun at Steiner. “We’ve got him,” she said. “Let’s take him to the police.”

  Nesha shook his head. “No police.”

  Steiner held his fist, still gripping the scalpel, to his arm while perched on the side of the driver’s seat. “She’s right. I’m just an old man now. I was young and stupid during the war. I did what I was told. Everybody did. Should I be punished for that?”

  “Shut up!” said Nesha. “You’ve been alive thirty-eight years longer than my family....”

  “I’m sorry...,” Steiner began, “... it wasn’t personal ... we did our job....”

  Nesha breathed irregularly, pressed his other hand to his brow. He lifted himself from the crouch, trying to stand, but had to steady himself holding onto the side of the van.

  “You need to get to a hospital,” Rebecca said.

  Steiner used the moment of distraction. He dove into the back, pouncing on Nesha. He stabbed the sca
lpel at Nesha’s hand until the gun dropped once more. Steiner slashed at him with a fury.

  She crawled along the grooves feeling for the gun. It wasn’t so much pain as numbness that slowed her down. It was simply hard to move. She found the gun near Feldberg’s shoulder. She needed both hands to pick it up.

  Nesha was shielding his body from the ripping scalpel with his arms. The leather jacket protected him. But Steiner began to aim for his neck and head.

  Rebecca had never fired a gun before. Crooking her finger around the trigger, she pulled. Nothing. Maybe it was too old. Maybe Steiner had the only weapon between them. Try again. She pulled harder this time.

  The shot cracked in the air, the report filling the van. Her heart roared in her ears. Steiner stopped. Just like that. Bent over, gripping the scalpel, his mouth strangely open. He raised the scalpel again tentatively, unconvinced of his mortality. But a worm of blood trickled from his mouth. His breathing became laboured. His eyes stared but saw nothing. He fell backwards over Feldberg’s body, the two merging in shadow.

  She couldn’t move, the weight of the gun pulling her hands down. Was he really dead? She waited for the undefined mass to move. She stepped toward it, holding the gun at the ready.

  “He’s dead,” Nesha said, crouched on his knees to one side. “I felt the weight lift off my chest when he died.”

  She took one last look into the dark, but discerned no movement. She breathed deeply, both relieved and appalled. She had taken a life, she, who had dedicated herself to preserving it. How had the world turned so far upside down that she had found herself in the role of killer? No, not killer. Executioner. But that implied some kind of moral right. And moral right to kill belonged only to God. At least, the God she had once relied on. The God that had failed her.

  “Are you all right?” she asked Nesha.

  She knelt down and took his bleeding hands in hers. One side of his hair was caked with dried blood. She realized she was shivering.

  Pulling him to his feet, she led him toward the rear of the van where she opened the gate. A cool spring wind rushed through her hair. They jumped down onto the grass where the van had landed. They were both trembling.

  I didn’t die, she thought. It’s spring and I’m still alive. Beyond a field to their right, an ink-black basin stretched toward the lowering sky. The lake. She had just lived through a parting of the waters. Hallelujah.

  She probed the wound on his head. “You took quite a blow,” she said, moving aside his hair. “There’s a lot of blood, but no real damage. You were lucky.” She couldn’t stop shivering.

  He put his hand up to the wound. “I have a hard head.” His sad soft eyes took in her face. “I’m so sorry you had to go through this. I should’ve done things differently... too many people got hurt... good people...” He closed his eyes, swayed as if he might fall over. “There is no justice ... God always waits too long ...we suffer and die and He comes too late....”

  She took him gently in her arms. He was a rag doll, limp and tractable. “At least, you feel He still comes.” She stroked his back beneath the leather jacket.

  They stood for a long time, the water-fragrant breeze wafting off the lake, cooling their skin. They listened to it head inland like a vast breath and rouse the shadowy leaves of nearby trees. Finally she felt his arms tighten around her. He would be all right now. He began to shake, and she held onto him until his body was still.

  She gazed at the black sky over his shoulder, the black shadow of water. She didn’t tell him that she envied his belief, or that she no longer thought about forgiving God because He had stopped being part of her universe. There was a hole in her heart where God used to live and when she peered into it, all she saw was her own reflection looking back. She had not only lost David; she had lost the sense of her place in the world. God had failed David, but she had failed David, too. How was she ever going to believe in herself again? Somehow she would have to start with herself, then, in time, she might be able to consider God again, some wary day when the hurt finally flattened into the kind of dull ache one only noticed in the silence of the night. But for now, she was alive, that was all she knew. The Angel of Death had passed over. Her heart was still beating and it was April and the sun would come up tomorrow. Was there anything sweeter than spring?

  author’s note

  Raffaello Sanzio — Raphael — painted the Portrait of a Young Man in oil on a wood panel, 28 by 22 inches, around 1512. The clear-eyed face of the nobleman looks down on the viewer from the elongated neck. Fine dark eyebrows, the long curly hair beneath the rich cap are pretty enough to be feminine. Prince Adam Czartoryski, the Polish aristocrat who bought the painting in 1807 in Venice, regarded it as Raphael’s self-portrait.

  The Czartoryski family, possessing both wealth and taste, acquired a large collection of antiquities, porcelain, graphics, and paintings, the stars of which were the Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with the Ermine, and Rembrandt’s Landscape with the Good Samaritan. The collection opened to the public in 1876 in Krakow’s old City Arsenal.

  During the Second World War, Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland, confiscated the Czartoryski “Big Three” paintings to hang in his baronial apartments in Krakow’s Wawel Castle. The paintings had already been earmarked by other high-ranking Nazis: Herman Goering had whisked them away to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, while Hitler’s art deputy coveted them for the FÜhrer’s personal collection in Linz, Austria. In 1942, however, the paintings were shipped out of Berlin by train to escape the bombing. They were returned to Dr. Frank in Krakow with the understanding that they would go to Linz after Germany won the war. In January 1945, with the war lost and the Russians closing in, Dr. Frank ordered an assistant to drive a truck loaded with art to his villa at Neuhaus, just south of Munich, two days ahead of Frank himself.

  In June 1945, while examining the art cache that had been taken from Dr. Frank’s house, the allies opened one of the cases to find a dozen paintings including da Vinci’s Lady with the Ermine and Rembrandt’s Landscape. There was no sign of the Raphael. In 1955 the Czartoryski family tried to trace the missing painting but with no success. There is conjecture that the painting may be lying unidentified in some attic or cellar.

  Perhaps because Hitler was a failed painter, works of art acquired a rare importance in the Third Reich. The confiscation of art became a priority of war and was carried out by numerous branches of government. Official looters had at their disposal the necessary staff for the job, as well as clearance to commandeer the trucks, trains, and fuel required to transport warehouses of art out of their country of origin and back to Germany. With one country after another falling to the Wehrmacht, the Nazis had access to an ever-expanding supply of booty. Not only government agencies profited. German officials and SS officers regularly travelled as diplomats to Switzerland where dealers bought paintings and artifacts stolen from private homes all over occupied Europe. The Nazi plunder of European art during the Third Reich stands unprecedented in history. Fifty-five years after the war, many important works of art are still missing.

  Europe around 1740

  chapter one

  Rebecca

  August 1979

  She was there, but she wasn’t there. Rebecca wavered before the cloth-covered headstone. She felt numb, an absence of sensation that, as a physician, she knew was a bad sign. Knew objectively, but could do nothing about. Let yourself go, baby, David would have said. But David was dead.

  The rabbi began: “A thousand years, in the sight of our eternal and merciful Father, are but a day; the years of our life but a passing hour. He grants us life and life He has taken away; praised be His name.”

  The birds cheeped in the maple and chestnut trees that grew at the edges of the vast cemetery. A gentle wind fluttered the leaves while Rebecca stood resolutely on the narrow walkway between the graves, her father on one side, her mother on the other. She seemed to be hovering in a narrow corridor, her peripheral vision gone, eclip
sing the familiar faces of friends, relatives, colleagues that floated around her as if behind glass, like spectators to her grief. She had struggled to put off this day, this unveiling of the monument, which could have been scheduled months ago. Up to a year after was traditional, but the High Holidays were next month and then it would be too late.

  Her mother-in-law had not pressed her. Sarah had not been in a hurry, herself, to finalize the death of her only child. Earlier in the summer they had set off with misgivings for the little shop on Bathurst Street to choose the monument. That experience had been surreal — the tiny old man in shirt sleeves and yarmulke, leading her and her mother-in-law out the back to show them samples. How many different shapes and colours were there to signify death? How was one to choose? How did the little proprietor manage stones that weighed literally tons? His son was larger, greeted them with perfunctory politeness in the yard while hosing down a finished piece of granite.

  Poor Sarah had already been down that road when her husband died five years earlier. Rebecca let her take the lead in the arrangements, though she knew Sarah’s pain matched her own. They rarely spoke of their mutual loss, indeed Rebecca realized that she steered clear of Sarah whenever possible, simply to evade the subject. She felt particularly helpless in light of Sarah’s past, a life filled with loss — most of her family had been killed in the Holocaust. Only her sister had survived. What did one say to someone who had lost everything once, and then lost everything again?

  The rabbi continued: “David Adler has been taken from our midst. We are pained by the hole in our lives. Yet love is strong as death; the bonds created by love last forever. We have the blessing of memory, through which the lives of our departed continue to be with us.”