“Tell your guards to put down their rifles or we’ll shoot the prisoners,” Joseph said. He pulled a Beretta from a Windbreaker pocket.
“Do it,” Halloway said.
The guards set their rifles on the lane. Joseph searched them, found several handguns, and told the guards to lie facedown on the gravel.
“Why are you doing this?” Halloway asked. “What do you want?”
“Isn’t it obvious by now?” Ephraim said. “We’re here to discuss Nazi racial theories.”
The large front door to the mansion came open. One by one, the other members of Halloway’s group stepped out, their hands raised, their faces pinched with fear. Two elderly men holding Uzis followed them.
“Ah,” Ephraim said, “the rest of our audience has consented to join us.”
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” one of Halloway’s group shouted, “but—!”
“Mr. Miller,” Joseph said, “please shut your mouth.”
“You can’t keep something like this a secret! You can’t—”
Joseph struck him across the head with the Beretta.
Miller fell to the gravel. He moaned, clutching his bleeding scalp.
“Would anyone else like to say something?” Joseph asked.
The group stared, appalled at the blood streaming down Miller’s face.
“Very good,” Joseph said.
Other old men, aiming Uzis, appeared from each side of the house.
“Did you restrain the rest of the guards?” Ephraim asked.
“The perimeter’s been secured. We searched every room in the house.”
“In that case, it’s time to begin.” Ephraim stepped toward the truck.
“Whatever you plan to do, it’s wrong,” a Mexican-looking man said.
“Rosenberg, don’t presume to tell me what’s wrong. You and Halloway are perfect proof that the vices of the fathers are inherited by the sons.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The weapons you sold to Libya to be used against Israel.”
“You know about—?”
“The weapons are now in Israeli hands.”
Rosenberg gasped.
“It’s only fitting that, even if you didn’t intend to do so, you helped protect my race, the race your father tried so hard to destroy the race you pretend to belong to,” Ephraim said. He reached into the truck and threw shovels onto the gravel. “Pick them up. All of you.” He threw out more shovels. “We brought enough for everyone. We mustn’t take all day about this. Efficiency is something your fathers always recommended. Teamwork. Organization.”
“Shovels?” Halloway blanched. “What do you—?”
“Dig a hole, of course. A large deep hole.”
“You’re insane!”
“Were your fathers insane when they forced Jews to dig pits for the bodies of other Jews? Or is killing Jews a perfectly rational thing to do? Is it only insane when the executioners are executed? Pick up the shovels.”
Prodded by Uzis, the group stumbled forward.
“We’ll dig the pit behind the house, out of sight from the road down there,” Ephraim said. “I’m sure you’re all wondering what we intend to do with you when the hole is ready. Will we force you to watch the death of your fathers and then shoot you just as your fathers shot those they ordered to dig burial pits? We offer you the same temptation your fathers offered their victims. Cooperate with us, and we’ll let you go. Dig the pit—we’ll be understanding. How much do you love your fathers? Many Jews were faced with that question during the war. If your father’s going to die, is it a useless sacrifice to resist and die along with him? Or does it make more sense to cooperate with your persecutors and take the chance that you’ll be spared? An interesting dilemma. If you refuse to dig the pit, we’ll kill you. If you obey … ?”
Ephraim raised his hands, expressing a quandary. “Who knows? Experience what we did. It’ll be an education for you.”
21
Erika crouched behind a gazebo and surveyed the back of the mansion. The two old men who’d dragged the guard into a shed weren’t in view anymore, presumably having entered a rear door of the mansion. But on the far side of the house, two other old men dragged a guard behind what appeared to be a long garage. They came back into sight, holding Uzis, and ran toward the rear of the mansion.
She looked toward Saul crawling behind her, held up a palm to warn him, and pointed toward the rear of the house. She couldn’t see Drew and Arlene, assumed they were trying to circle the grounds, and hoped they would realize there were other strangers on the property.
At the rear of the mansion, the two old men had been joined by two others. They hurried inside the building. Erika forced herself to wait, to watch for an opportunity.
She was glad she had. The four men came back outside, aimed their Uzis toward the grounds as if making sure that the perimeter had been secured, then separated, two men running along each side of the house to join the group in front.
Now! She sprinted toward the rear of the house, pressed herself against the back wall, and peered through a screen door toward shadows and silence. The instant Saul joined her, she opened the screen door and stepped inside.
She saw stairs on her right leading down to a basement. Ahead, three steps led up to a short corridor. While Saul checked the basement, she followed the corridor, smelling pot roast and freshly baked bread. The corridor opened into a large gleaming kitchen where two men, wearing servants’ uniforms, lay motionless on the floor, a tranquilizer dart protruding from each neck.
She felt a chill on her own neck. When Saul returned from the basement, she proceeded through a swinging door toward another corridor, this one wider and longer, with landscape paintings on the walls. Though the paintings were beautiful, with a mystical quality of light, they filled her with horror because of the monster, Halloway’s father, the assistant commandant of Maidanek, who’d probably created them.
On her right, she saw a dining room, on her left a large study where full ashtrays and empty liquor glasses showed that a large group had recently gathered here. But her attention was directed from the study toward the end of the corridor. The front door had been left open. Male voices—some angry, others pleading, a few disturbingly calm—drifted in from outside. One of the voices belonged to her father. Pulse pounding behind her ears, she eased along the corridor and hid against the wall next to the open door. Through a slight gap between the door and the jamb, she squinted toward the sunlit front steps where old men held middle-aged men at gunpoint.
Again she heard her father. The flood of excitement she felt at being close to him suddenly drained from her. Despair made her hollow. The conversation she heard was grotesque, as was the crunch of shovels being thrown onto gravel and the command to dig a pit behind the house. Restraining the reflex to be sick, she put a hand on Saul’s shoulder.
22
As Ephraim described the pit that the sons would dig for the fathers, Joseph vividly remembered the pits that he and his wife had been forced to dig at Treblinka. In the absence of ovens, the SS had burned corpses in those pits, promising a reprieve to the Jews who shoveled the earth as long as their strength held out. Cooperate and live. Refuse out of loyalty to your fellow Jews and die in the gas chamber you could have escaped, be burned in the pit you refused to dig.
That terrible choice had threatened his sanity—the choice to live by disposing of the remains of his fellow human beings. Guilt had so consumed him, rage had so festered within him that to vent his agony he’d been prepared to do anything. Now that the moment had come, he didn’t only remember Treblinka. He felt as if he were truly back there, the smoke of smoldering corpses swirling around him, the stench of charred flesh making him double over. But he had to force himself upright, had to keep working as the SS ordered more wood to be put on the corpses, more sacks of quicklime to be opened, more bodies to be carted from the gas chambers. Tears came to his eyes.
“Out!” he heard
the SS scream. “All of you! Hurry! Faster! Jump, goddamn you! Out of the truck!”
Truck? But there weren’t any trucks at Treblinka. The Nazis brought the prisoners in stock cars on trains. Why would a truck be at—?
He snapped from the nightmare of then to now, from Treblinka to Halloway’s estate, and saw Ephraim’s eyes bulging with hate.
“Out!” Ephraim shouted at the aged SS officers and whipped them with a rope, urging them faster from the truck. Chained together, the prisoners lost their balance as they did their best to descend in a hurry, falling on top of one another, chains rattling, frail bodies crunching on gravel. Jumbled together, they whimpered, squirming.
“No,” Joseph said.
But Ephraim’s shouts made his objection a whisper. Ephraim whipped the old men harder. “On your feet, vermin! Hurry! No time! Müller, you’re an expert in what happens next! After the pit’s been dug, we’ll place a plank across it and make you stand in the middle! So when we shoot you, we’ll know for sure you’ll fall into the pit! We wouldn’t want to waste time having to kick your body down if you fell on the rim! Efficiency, Müller! Wasn’t that the motto? Organization! We mustn’t waste time!”
“No,” Joseph said again.
But again, amid Ephraim’s shouts, no one heard him.
The sons were pale with shock.
“Aren’t you going to try to stop us?” Ephraim asked. “Halloway? Rosenberg? Try to stop us! No? Are you beginning to understand how fear can rob you of your will? The SS used to say that the Jews deserved to die because they didn’t resist being marched to the gas chamber! Well, now it’s your turn! Resist! Show us how superior you are!” He whipped their fathers again. “On your feet! Damn you, hurry!”
Joseph watched Ephraim’s hate-contorted face and felt sickened. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He’d expected to feel satisfaction, not disgust. Relief, not nausea.
Ephraim whipped the old men faster. “Soon you’ll learn how it feels to see your sons dig your graves, to watch your sons being forced to watch you getting shot! You’ll feel afraid, humiliated, debased!” Ephraim glared toward the sons. “And soon you’ll learn how it feels to see your father killed, to stand helplessly back after you participated in his execution by digging his grave! Soon you’ll learn how it feels to wonder if the obscene bargain you made will be honored, if you’ll be killed or spared!”
The old men were being herded toward the back of the house, their sons prodded with Uzis, forced to carry shovels for the pit.
“Try to escape!” Ephraim shouted. “That’s what we were tempted to do! We knew we’d be shot, and yet we kept hoping that something, anything, would stop the efficiency, stop the—!”
Joseph opened his mouth to shout again, “No!” But the word froze in his throat.
Because someone else, a woman, shouted it first.
23
Joseph swung toward the open front door of the mansion. The others spun with their Uzis. Ephraim drew his Beretta.
With dizzying astonishment, Joseph watched the woman step out of the mansion.
No! he thought. This can’t be happening! I’m imagining it!
But he knew he wasn’t. As the gravel beneath him seemed to tilt, he recognized beyond a doubt.
The woman was Erika.
Her face was flushed with anger. “No! You can’t! This is wrong! It’s worse than wrong! If you do to them what they did to you, to us, to our people, you make yourselves them! You destroy yourselves! This has to stop!”
“Erika …” Joseph murmured.
“You know this woman?” Ephraim asked.
“My daughter.”
“What?”
A man and a woman rushed from the right side of the house, grappled with two members of Ephraim’s team, and grabbed their Uzis. Almost at once, a man lunged through the mansion’s open door, held a member of Ephraim’s team in a stranglehold, and took his weapon.
Joseph felt a further disorienting sense of unreality.
The man at the open door was Erika’s husband.
“Saul?” he asked, bewildered. “But how did—?”
“It’s finished!” Erika shouted. “There’ll be no execution! We’re leaving these old men with their sons! We’re getting out of here!”
But Ephraim continued to aim his pistol at her. “No, you’re going to leave! I’ve waited too long for this! I’ve suffered too much! Before I die, before they die, they’ll be punished!”
“And it’ll happen!” Erika rushed down the steps. “In the courts! Let the law take care of this!”
Ephraim scowled with contempt. “The law? Where was the law in Nazi Germany? I know what the law will do! Waste time! It’ll give them rights their victims never dreamed of! The trials will take forever! And in the end, instead of being executed, they’ll die peacefully at home.”
“If you won’t respond morally … !”
“Did the SS?”
“Then think about this! Kill them, and you’ll be hunted for the rest of your life! You’ll be caught and die in prison!”
“You’re proving my point! The law would punish me more than them! And as for my life, it ended more than forty years ago!”
“Then you’re a fool!”
Ephraim stiffened so abruptly Joseph feared he’d pull the trigger on his pistol.
“Yes, a fool!” Erika said. “By a miracle, you survived! But instead of giving thanks to God, instead of savoring life, you savored death! God granted you a gift, and you threw it away!”
Ephraim aimed toward Halloway’s father.
“No!” Joseph yelled.
Erika ran to her father. “Tell him! Convince him! If you love me, make him stop!” She grabbed his shoulders. “Do it! For me! I’m begging you! Tell him these monsters aren’t worth destroying your lives! You’ve got a grandson you’ve seldom seen! You could watch him grow up! You could learn about innocence and maybe even regain your own! You could be young again!” Tears streamed down her face. “For God’s sake, do it! If you love me!”
Joseph felt a tightness in his chest that took his breath away. It was overpowering, frighteningly different from the pressure that had brought him here. Produced by love, not hate.
“Ephraim …” It was difficult to speak. “She’s right.” He sounded raspy, in pain, though the feeling was quite the opposite. “Let’s get out of here.”
Ephraim squinted down the barrel of his pistol toward Halloway’s father. “It would be so easy to squeeze the trigger. It would be so satisfying.”
“You didn’t see yourself when you whipped them. You reminded me of the commandant of the workforce at Treblinka.”
“Don’t compare me with—!”
“You aren’t relieving my nightmares. You’re bringing my nightmares back. I’m ashamed that my daughter saw us doing this. Ephraim, please, I know now what I want. To forget.”
“And let them go?”
“What difference will it make? Killing them won’t bring our loved ones back. It won’t stop hate. But if you kill them, you’ll be a part of hate.”
Like Erika, Ephraim had tears running down his face. “But what’s to become of me?”
Joseph took his gun away and held him. “With luck … both of us … we’ll learn to live.”
24
There were five of them now in the rented car. Drew and Arlene in front. Saul, Erika, and Joseph in back. As they drove from Halloway’s estate, followed by the truck in which Ephraim brought away the rest of the team, Saul said, “Halloway won’t dare call the police. He and the others have too much to hide.”
Joseph nodded solemnly and turned to Erika. “How did you find me?”
“I’ll need the flight back to Europe to explain.”
“I’m afraid I won’t be going back with you.”
She paled. “But I assumed …”
“I wish I could.” Joseph held her. “But there’s much to be done. The operation has to be dismantled. Our escape procedures have to be cancelled. Beside
s”—Joseph glanced sadly toward Ephraim in the cab of the truck behind them—“my friends and I have a lot to talk about. To adjust to. It won’t be easy. For Ephraim. For any of us.”
“Then you have to promise you’ll come to visit us, to see your grandson,” Erika said.
“Of course.”
“When?” she asked quickly.
“Two weeks.”
“Thank God we got to you in time,” Drew said.
“I wonder.” Joseph brooded. “Ephraim was right about one thing. They’ll die peacefully before they’re punished.”
“No. We’ll contact Misha,” Erika said. “We’ll tell him what you found out. He’ll force extradition. They will be punished.”
“I want to believe that. But on the other hand …” Joseph smiled at something outside the car.
“What do you mean ‘on the other hand’? Why are you smiling?”
“No reason.”
He’d just seen a car go past. A big car. Heading toward Halloway’s estate. It was filled with Arabs. Libyans, he was sure. Angry Libyans. About to demand an explanation from Halloway and Rosenberg about the hijacked munitions shipment.
Yes, Joseph thought and hugged Erika again, justice feels satisfying.
25
They caught a night flight back to Rome. Saul slept most of the way, but an hour before landing, he felt a hand grip his shoulder. Waking, he saw that Drew had just passed him and was motioning for him to follow. Careful not to wake Erika, noticing that Arlene was still asleep as well, Saul unbuckled his seat belt and joined Drew where he waited out of sight in a narrow corridor between two rows of restrooms.
“Before we land,” Drew said, “I want to talk with you.”
“I figured we could do that in Rome.”
“We won’t have time. Arlene and I need to report to the Fraternity. We fulfilled our bargain with them. We learned why the cardinal disappeared and who was trying to sabotage the order. We’re anxious to arrange for our freedom.”
“Are you sure they’ll stick by their agreement?”
The League of Night and Fog Page 37
