Eva

by Ib Melchior

  “Open the door!” he bellowed. He strained to pull the motorbike and its gory burden into the cabin. The sweat dripped into his eyes, blurring them. He blinked it away, keeping his gaze locked on the furious beasts.

  With a sudden mighty heave he hauled the motorbike halfway through the door opening. It caught on the jamb, making it impossible to close the door. With the courage of desperation the dogs lunged for him. He flailed the burning torch at them, close enough to singe the hair on their muzzles. They howled with fear and rage. He felt the bike jar and move under his hand, slowly being drawn into the cabin. Eva.

  With a final roar of defiance he hurled the torch at the frenzied beasts. He leaped over the bike in the doorway into the cabin, and yanked the machine all the way in—as Eva slammed the door on the charging pack of dogs.

  The shelf above the door looked sadly naked with only one or two torn red paper hearts remaining where thumbtacks had fastened the decorative border to the wood, but on the shelf itself stood two steins. Gray, without the elaborate lids that adorn most steins, they bore an inscription instead of fancy ornamentation: Gruss aus dent ZILLERTAL Hamburg—St. Pauli—souvenirs from the famous Hamburg beer hall. Willi and Eva used them to transfer the gasoline from the wrecked motorcycle to the tank of the motorboat. As if by tacit agreement they averted their eyes from the mangled corpse trapped in the twisted bike. Nor did they speak of it.

  The boat motor caught and roared into a steady purr on Willi’s first try to start it. Within minutes they were well away from the little pier, cruising down the river.

  Fires burning on shore on either side cast red ribbons of rippling light across the wavelets in a spectacular display of watery fireworks.

  Willi was at the wheel. Eva sat close beside him. She turned to him.

  “Willi,” she said, “do you have a cigarette? I forgot. I left mine with the rucksack.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  She sighed. She ached for a smoke.

  Willi turned to her. “We will not get to Wannsee for a couple of hours,” he said kindly. “Get some sleep.”

  “I will,” she said. “Soon.” She shifted in her seat. She felt a compelling need to be close to someone.

  Willi peered into the darkness. Ahead lay the Wannsee Forest.

  And the safe house in Potsdam.

  SS Obersturmbannführer Oskar Strelitz cursed himself. He had let the Führer down. He had allowed himself to lose his charges—Frau Eva and her escorts.

  When he had been trapped by the fiery cave-in in the sewer and been prevented from following Bormann and the others, he had had to run all the way back to the Tiergarten entry hole to get out. At gun point he had commandeered a dispatch rider’s motorcycle and raced through the zoo, emerging on Bismarck-strasse, and he had tried to follow on the streets above the course of the old sewer all the way to the exit point in Wilhelmstadt that he had been told about.

  He had been well into Wilhelmstadt when he had been caught in a Russian artillery barrage coming from the direction of Grunewald. A shell had landed a few meters in front of him. The explosion had knocked him from his bike and spun him against the curb. He had been dazed, but recovered quickly. The bike was wrecked. He had continued on foot and had come upon an SS flying court-martial in the process of hanging a Hitler youth from a lamppost. He had just begun to skirt the gang of SS thugs when he had seen Lüttjohann, Eva, and Bormann emerge from the manhole. He had lain in wait, trying to decide how best to rescue his charges from the SS hangmen, if need be, when a second Russian artillery barrage had hit.

  He had seen Bormann shoot the Rottenführer and take off into the ruins. And he had seen Lüttjohann and Eva flee in the direction of Havel Lake.

  As soon as possible he had followed them.

  But verflucht nochmal—dammit all—he had lost them again.

  He ran across Heerstrasse. Before him lay a suburban community on the shore of the lake.

  Suddenly, ahead, he heard the furious barking of a pack of dogs. He ran to investigate.

  At a small boathouse a pack of wild-looking dogs were howling, barking, and scratching on the door.

  He took out his gun and fired into the air to frighten off the beasts.

  They turned on him.

  He had to kill two of them—one a big, black brute—before the rest turned tail and ran.

  The door to the boathouse was locked. He kicked it in.

  The room beyond was empty. Another door on the lake side stood open.

  He played the light from his flashlight around the room. A piece of shiny metal glinted in the beam. He picked it up.

  It was the I.D. disc of one Obersturmführer Lüttjohann, Willibald.

  He ran to the open door facing the lake. Down a few wooden steps was a small pier, and on it—incongruously—stood two beer steins.

  He leaped down the stairs, two steps at a time. He picked up one of the steins. He smelled it. Gasoline. Hardly the remains of a drinking party.

  He looked out over the night-dark lake.

  He had found his charges. And he knew where they were headed.

  He, too, had heard the Führer’s instructions.

  Dawn was valiantly trying to penetrate the oppressive mixture of mist and smoke that hung in an acrid haze over the lake as the little motorboat neared shore.

  It had still been dark half an hour before when they passed Schwanenwerder peninsula, protruding into the river from south Grunewald. All the luxury villas on shore were lit up brightly and they had plainly heard the loud talk, raucous laughter, and drunken bellows of the Russian troops, punctuated by an occasional shot. Willi—who had stayed in midstream on the broad river—had ducked into the protective darkness of the Kladow suburb on the west bank. They were therefore approaching the east shore of Wannsee above Pfaueninsel rather than coming in from the north.

  The trees of Wannsee Forest loomed tall on the horizon. Willi headed toward a stretch of wooded lakeside rather than the open beach. Wannsee and Potsdam were supposed to be in German hands. He prayed his information was still correct.

  Soon a small pier, a modest motor yacht sunk beside it, presented itself out of the mist. Willi headed for it.

  There was only a narrow strip of beach between the water and the woods. A couple of small sailboats had been hauled up on land and lay on their sides, their masts at oddly disturbing angles.

  Willi throttled down. They were only a few meters from the pier.

  Suddenly a man stood up from behind the boats. He leveled a rifle at Willi. On his arm he wore the red brassard of the Volk-sturm. Three more men joined him. Three more rifles were aimed at Willi.

  And the boat hit the pier with a soft bump, as Willi killed the motor.

  A sudden alarming thought struck him.

  He was without any identification.

  9

  THE SHRILL BELL on the field telephone rang insistently. Woody put down his coffee mug and picked up the receiver.

  “World War Two, Agent Ward,” he said cheerfully.

  “How the hell can you be so damned chipper,” Major Hall growled on the phone. “It’s barely dawn.”

  “You bet.” CIC Agent Woodrow Wilson Ward grinned at the receiver. “The dawn of a new day, and a new month. Mark my word, Mort. Major. Sir. The month of May will go down in history as the month the Nazi pricks finally got their ass kicked in. Or is that too much of an anatomically mixed metaphor?”

  “Simmer down,” Hall said sourly. “It’s too damned early for that kind of crap.”

  “What’s up?”

  “You still interested in that five-point case?”

  Woody sat up. “You bet! What’ve you got?”

  “Don’t know. Just got a call. Woke me up, dammit.” He snorted in disgust. “Could be something. Could be nothing.”

  “Everything is something,” Woody philosophized. “Give me the poop.”

  “MP unit in Weiden is holding an SS officer.”

  “Big deal.”

 
“They seem to think he’s more than just another SS mandatory.”

  “Why?”

  “You get the details, dammit!” Hall exploded. He was never at his best early in the morning. “Get your ass down there and find out! Five-point case or not.”

  “Sure thing, Mort, sweetheart.” Woody grinned. “Did they give you any clues?”

  “They think the guy may be a left-over guard officer from that Flossenburg thing,” Hall said. “Or he may have something to do with that much-touted Alpine Fort. Or Fortress. Or whatever. Never could figure out what the hell the difference is between a fort and a fortress.”

  “That’s easy, Mort,” Woody quipped. “A fortress has breastworks.”

  Hall groaned. “Your contact in Weiden is a Lieutenant Arin. Dirk Arin. MPs. And Woody,” he said sarcastically, “don’t try to crack the case with wisecracks.”

  He hung up.

  Ten minutes later Woody was tooling toward Weiden in his jeep. His cheerful mood had vanished as he had thought over what Hall had told him.

  An SS officer. Possibly one of the officers who had been in command of the Flossenburg March of Death. Unconsciously he gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles showed white. If the bastard was one of those inhuman fiends, he’d give up five points to bring him to justice!

  It had been less than a week ago. He had tried to forget it. He knew he never would.

  Flossenburg was a Konzentrationslager—a concentration camp—ten miles northwest of Weiden. When the Nazis realized that it was in danger of being overrun by elements of the 11th Armored Division, the commandant of the camp had been ordered to march those inmates who could still walk to safer ground near the Czechoslovakian border. Fifteen thousand of them had started out on what was to be truly a march of death. More than half of them fell dead on the way. Most of the rest perished soon after.

  For three days and three nights, without food, without water, without rest, they had been driven on by the brutishly ruthless SS guards and their officers, clad only in their thin, ragged, striped uniforms of the camp—walking, fleshless bags of bones. Those who were too weak and fell by the wayside were either shot or bayoneted to death by the guards. So emaciated were they that they hardly bled when gutted. The road shoulders for miles were littered with their corpses. Involuntarily he shuddered. He had seen them. And he had seen—and smelled—the hellish camp from which they came.

  It was the smell of death. The stink of the starving, the suffering, the dying, and the dead. A cloyingly putrescent smell that burned itself into his nostrils and his mind to stay forever. He had seen the barracks holding hundreds of living skeletons ridden with disease and dysentery, lying in rows of wooden bunks four tiers high—the dying and the dead together, for no one had the strength to remove the cadavers, their body wastes seeping and dripping from bunk to bunk to collect on the floor in a fecal, slimy mass. And the stench.

  Those had been the ones too weak to walk. Theirs had been a death in filth and stink rather than in the fresh air of the death march route. Theirs had been a death even worse.

  He had seen the crematorium ovens, the torture instruments, the gas chambers. He had looked upon the shriveled bodies stacked along the barracks like cordwood, and he had gazed into the sunken, imploring eyes of the still living.

  And he would never forget.

  It had all been brought back to him when only the day before Stars and Stripes had headlined: Real Horror of Nazi Camps “UNPRINTABLE.” He hoped some day someone would print it. But he had not read the report.

  Then there had been the soul-shattering mass burial near the village of Neunberg, where the SS guards had indulged in a final orgy of butchery. The villagers, who had tacitly condoned the SS atrocities and ignored the pleas for help by the few survivors, had been forced by the American unit that occupied the burg to dig the graves and bury the hundreds of concentration camp victims slaughtered within the village boundaries, with the entire village—every man, woman, and child—in attendance at the ceremony.

  The shaken US army officer in charge had given the assembled villagers a grim, unforgettable message. “Only God Himself,” he had said, “has the terrible might and the infinite wisdom to visit upon you, your cohorts, and your leaders the dreadful punishment you deserve. May the memory of this day and of these dead rest heavily upon your conscience and the conscience of every German so long as you each shall live!”

  Was the SS prisoner he was about to interrogate one of those leaders?

  Some of the white sheets of surrender, which had saved the little town of Weiden from destruction when it was seized on April 22, still fluttered pitifully from windows and gables, as Woody drove into town.

  He found Lieutenant Arin—a lantern-jawed young man with a shock of light brown hair and eyes that seemed used to laughing and found it difficult to accept their current, grim duty—in his office in a small inn, taken over by his Military Police unit.

  “Couple of GIs hunting for eggs found him hiding in a barn,” Lieutenant Arin told him. “They brought him to us, slightly the worse for wear. Pretty bedraggled.”

  “What have you gotten out of him?” Woody asked. “So far?”

  Arin shrugged. “Not a hell of a lot,” he said. “In fact—nothing. Name, rank, and serial number, that sort of crap. The local Bürgermeister—the man had just recently been put in office when his Nazi predecessor was arrested by you guys—thinks the man may have had a hand in that death march that broke up a few miles from here.”

  “What do you think?”

  Again Arin shrugged. “Possible. Although he doesn’t strike me as the concentration camp guard type. Who the hell can tell?”

  “Okay,” Woody said. “Trot him out.”

  “One thing,” Arin added. “The guy speaks English. Pretty good at that.”

  Woody raised an eyebrow. “Did he say how come?”

  Arin shook his head. “I think he kind of regretted having let on. Said a lot of Germans with a higher education speak English.”

  “True enough,” Woody agreed. He filed the bit of information away in his mind. “Okay. Let’s put him through the wringer.” He glanced at the MP lieutenant. “How’d you like to be the good guxy?”

  “Good guy?”

  “Yeah. The good-guy/bad-guy interrogation routine. I’ll be the heavy.”

  Arin grinned. “Sure,” he said. “But I don’t speak the Kraut language.”

  “No need to. The guy will understand you if you speak English. You said so, yourself. And I’m counting on it.” He bit his lip in concentration. “Now here’s what I want you to do. . . .”

  The SS officer stood up when Woody and Lieutenant Arin entered the room in which he was being held, but he did not quite come to attention.

  Woody quickly sized him up. Around forty. Good build. Clad in an SS officer’s uniform with all insignia removed. Dirty and surely bedraggled but apparently well groomed underneath, if such a thing was possible. Apprehensive without being scared stiff. Well, that could be changed, he thought grimly.

  Woody glowered at the German. He had borrowed a pair of major’s leaves and put them on his uniform. No need to seem too badly outranked.

  “I am Major Isidor Cohen,” he said, addressing the prisoner in German, his voice harsh with contempt and animosity. He saw the tiny, expected flicker of alarm dart through the Nazi’s eyes. Good! “I am here to ask you a few questions. And—more important—to get them answered. Is that clear?”

  The German officer drew himself up. “I am Obersturmbannführer Leopold Krauss,” he said. “My service number is . . .”

  Woody interrupted him sharply. “I don’t give a shit whether you are a Lieutenant Colonel or not, nor what your damned service number is, you Kraut bastard,” he snarled. “I want to know your unit, its mission, and what the hell you were doing holed up in the hay!” He took a menacing step toward the startled German. “I’ve already got a damned good idea and I’d like to . . .”

  Lieutenant Arin put o
ut a restraining hand. “Major,” he said, concerned, “please . . .” He spoke in English.

  “Shut up, Lieutenant!” Woody snapped. “I’ll handle this.” He glared at the SS officer. “Well?”

  “Obersturmbannführer Leop . . .”

  Woody suddenly grabbed the front of the German’s jacket and pushed him up against the wall.

  “Listen you Kraut shithead,” he shouted, reverting to German. “You don’t give me that name, rank, and serial number crap! You answer my questions or I’ll ram your name, rank, and serial number up your ass!”

  Lieutenant Arin, obviously disturbed by Woody’s rage, stepped up to him. “Major,” he said firmly, “I must insist. The Geneva Convention . . .”

  Woody whirled on him. He spoke English in the taut, low voice of fury, just loud enough for the German to overhear. “Insist! You listen to me, Lieutenant. I have a damned good idea what this bastard is. One of the officers from that death march from Flossenburg. Thousands of people died. You hear? Died horribly. At the hands of such as he. He is one of those responsible. I say, to hell with your Geneva Convention!”

  “I know that, Sir,” Arin said urgently. “We are pretty convinced he is one of the Flossenburg camp officers. What else would he be doing here? We are about to send an exchange shipment of PWs to the Russians. Some of the prisoners who died on that death march were Russian PWs, and the Russkies really want to get their hands on those responsible.” He nodded toward the German who stood rigidly listening, his pinched face growing ashen. “I am including him,” Arin finished.

  “The hell you are,” Woody shouted. “I want him. I’ll take him. I know just how to handle a bastard like that—or my name isn’t Isidor Cohen!”

  “He is my prisoner, Major,” Arin said coolly. “As long as he is in my charge he will be treated according to the Geneva Convention. And I have decided he goes to the Russians.”