The midday sky was a solid slab of steel gray. If anything it seemed even colder and bleaker than before. Except for the soft keening of the wind, the silence was absolute. He got back into the Volga and started the engine. The sound of the engine kicking over seemed unnaturally loud. Then he realized that he was holding the wheel in what was almost a death grip. He forced himself to relax, and taking a deep breath, he let in the clutch. There was no need to ask directions. The main gate of the camp was clearly visible at the end of the street on the outskirts of the village.
He parked the car by the steel gate, the chilling words written in iron letters arching over the gateposts. Arbeit Macht Frei. Work makes freedom. The high barbed-wire fence still stretched out from the gate as far as he could see in either direction. Beyond the fence he could see the vast, snow-covered camp. The naked twisted limbs of a few long-dead trees stood in a line on the other side of the fence, like skeletons thrown up by the frozen earth. In the distance he could see a cluster of boxlike barracks, like a city of cargo crates. Beyond the barracks were the brick chimneys of the crematorium, gray in the bleak afternoon light. The camp lay empty and white under the snow, like bones long since picked clean and crumbling to dust. Just outside the gate was a small wooden guard’s hut. On the door of the hut was a small sign with a single word painted in black gothic letters. Auschwitz.
He heard the faint sounds of a violin playing a Gypsy melody coming from the hut. He walked over to the hut, the snow crunching under his feet with the sound of someone chewing crackers. The same instinct that had prompted him to come here in the first place was now screaming at him to leave. After a moment he knocked loudly on the door. Abruptly the music stopped. For a long time nothing happened and he was about to go back to the car when the door opened.
A small, wizened old man with a dark complexion peered uncertainly up at him. His dark eyes were almost lost in baggy wrinkles and his wispy gray mustache was stained yellow by tobacco. The old man wore a fraying guard’s cap, a moth-eaten Russian Army overcoat over baggy blue serge pants stuffed into high rubber boots, and a sweat-darkened Gypsy scarf around his neck. The skin on his neck was corded and wrinkled like an old turkey that had somehow survived Thanksgiving.
“Excuse me, please …” Caine began uncertainly in German.
“Of course.” The old man smiled tentatively, his few remaining teeth showing black and solitary, like charred tree stumps in a forest desolated by fire.
“Terrible weather,” Caine said, just for something to say. He didn’t want to be alone in this place.
“In winter the wind is cold,” the old man pronounced, shaking his head. Caine couldn’t decide whether he was being sarcastic or merely simple.
“You want to see the lager, hein?” the old man said, his German slurred by the syllables of Central Europe. Without waiting for a reply, he shut the door behind him and began walking through the gate. Caine caught up with him in a few strides. They passed under the iron arch and marched toward the barracks, white puffs of breath rising over their heads.
“Are you a Jew?” the old man asked.
“No, why?”
“Not so many people come here. A few Poles and Russians, but mostly Jews.”
“What about Germans?”
“Germans?” The old man hawked and spat, the spittle crackling as it hit the icy ground. Then he began to laugh in a strange high-pitched monotone. Somehow the sound of his laugh was eerie, like a human echo of the keening wind. Then he stopped and looked up at Caine.
“Deutschen, niemals” he said. Never. Then he gestured at the wide empty space around them.
“This is where the prisoners were lined up for roll call at dawn. Also for public executions and torture. Once I saw a man torn to pieces by the dogs almost on this very spot. They tied raw meat to his testicles. He was screaming while they ate him. They called it ‘special punishment.’”
“What had he done?”
The old man looked at Caine uncomprehendingly.
“He was a prisoner. That was his crime.”
Caine reached into his coat and took out a cigarette, then offered the pack to the old man, who took one cigarette and pocketed the pack. They lit up and stood for a moment, smoking.
“Everyone was lined up here for roll call, even the dead,” the old man continued. “They kept careful records of everyone’s number, the Germans. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the living from the dead. There were those who died and still walked around. We called them Musselmen. They never lasted long.” He shrugged. “Did you know that a man can die and still walk around?” the old man added. “They felt nothing. That’s what it is to be dead. To feel nothing.”
Caine followed the old man into one of the barracks. They stood in an empty space near the door. Along both walls ran a line of wooden shelves from floor to ceiling, a narrow corridor between them. They began to walk down the corridor. It was intensely cold. Yet even in the bitter chill there was a faint smell coming from the wood itself. It seemed to have traces of urine and carbolic acid and something else. Then as the old man stopped by one of the shelves colored with old dark stains, Caine recognized the scent that brought with it a sudden whiff of Indochina. It was the smell of death. The old man pointed at the shelf above his head.
“That was my bunk,” he said.
In spite of the cold Caine began to sweat. He wanted to get outside again, like that feeling of wanting to wake up while in the middle of a nightmare. Instead he quietly followed the old man to the far wall, then back again to the door.
They walked across the parade ground in silence, the only sound the crunch of snow crust breaking under their boots. The old man led him to a long, rectangular brick building. The sign over the door read, BATH HOUSE. Inside, a long line of hooks along both walls led to a set of large tiled rooms. Above each of the doorways was the single word: SHOWER ROOM. The floors sloped towards a drain in the center of the room. On the ceiling directly above the drain was a shower head from which had sprayed Cyklon B instead of water. The walls were in shadows. The only light came from the dim gray corridor.
“When the doors were shut, the screaming always began,” the old man said, his voice echoing faintly. “The Jews always sang their death prayer.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I was a Sonderkommando here. That’s how I stayed alive,” the old man said simply, flicking his cigarette ash. “While they screamed, we had to search through the clothes, looking for valuables. There were always a few babies hidden by their mothers in the clothes pile. We used to throw the babies in with the next batch. Then we always waited five minutes after the last screams, while the gas was sucked out. When we opened the door, we would find the bodies tangled in a pyramid, sometimes up to the ceiling. They were always covered with blood, as they clawed each other to escape. Also vomit and excrement. That was the hardest job, untangling the bodies. Often we had to break the dead fingers and feet in order to do it.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Caine said, his voice echoing in the gray darkness.
They walked out past the rusting hooks, their footsteps almost muffled and indistinct. Outside the bleak afternoon sky had darkened. The faint clouds of their breath dissolved into the barren air. The old man shuffled his feet awkwardly in the snow that had begun to take on the gray color of the light, as though they were standing in an endless field of ashes.
“Do you want to see the crematorium?” the old man asked with a vaguely disappointed air.
“No.”
They stood in the frozen emptiness, like ghosts lost beyond time, the wind ruffling the gray wisps of the old man’s mustache. They were like two dying archeologists who had excavated an ancient tomb only to find it empty.
“Tell me about Mengele,” Caine said finally.
“Ach, that one. Come, I’ll show you.” The old man beckoned him with a Mediterranean hand gesture that means “go away” to an American and “come here” to a Southern European.
&nb
sp; They hiked side by side in silence to a large wooden building, traces of whitewash still visible on the walls. Inside, the old man led him to a large empty room. The only things left in the room were a few decaying pipe fixtures, where a sink had once stood.
“This was Mengele’s. Laboratorium. He would operate here on his experimentieren. Very scientific, Hauptstürmführer Mengele.” The old man nodded. “Here he would amputate healthy limbs, turn young boys into women, with breasts and everything, even women into men. In this corner”—the old man pointed—“he kept a large glass jar. It was filled with human eyeballs preserved in formaldehyde. They were all blue, the eyes.”
Then he stopped, because Caine was smiling. It was a strange, bestial smile, like the death rictus of a wolf. Now at last he understood why he had come, Caine thought. It was going to be so easy to kill Mengele. The old man shuffled uneasily and the moment died. Caine looked around at the room, finding it difficult to imagine the horrors that had happened here. It was just a bleak, ordinary room.
“If you saw Mengele today, would you still recognize him?” he asked.
“He must be an old man by now.” The old man shrugged. “Yes, I would recognize him.”
“Suppose he had altered his appearance?”
“I would recognize his smile. It was almost like yours just now,” the old man added uneasily.
“Anything else? Any other mannerisms? Something he couldn’t change?”
The old man took off his cap and scratched his head, as though digging for something. At last he put his cap back on and glanced at Caine. “There is one thing. He used to crack his knuckles before he would operate. Very slowly and carefully. He was proud of his hands,” the old man said, jamming his own hands into his overcoat pockets.
Caine followed the old man across the camp to the hut. The frigid wind had strengthened, blowing granules of snow across the lengthening afternoon shadows. When they reached the hut, the man invited him inside. Caine sat patiently on an old army cot while the old man brewed them some herbata tea over a little kerosene stove. The wind shrieked through the cracks as they sat quietly drinking their tea. The old man tried the radio, but there was nothing on except for a Polish announcer gloating over the latest inflated production figures.
“It doesn’t get good till after six P.M. Then sometimes you can get Radio Warsawy,” he apologized.
Then the old man slapped his forehead. He had just been reminded of something and he began rummaging among his things in an old trunk. He pulled out a half-empty bottle of cheap Polish vodka, opened it, and handed it to Caine.
“What’s this?”
“For the Silvesterabend. A Happy New Year,” the old man explained shyly.
It was New Year’s Eve, Caine thought. He had completely forgotten. For a moment he felt a pang of loss. He would have liked to share it with C.J., both of them naked in front of the flickering fireplace and toasting each other with snifters of Courvoisier, instead of here in this desolate place. Happy New Year, he thought grimly, wondering, as everyone does, what the new year would bring. Then he shrugged. For him it was easy. He would either be rich—or dead.
“Prosit,” he toasted, sniffing the cheap vodka and drinking. It smelled like diesel fuel and tasted worse.
“Prosit,” the old man’s voice bleakly echoing Caine. The old man lifted the bottle to his lips and took a long drink, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed. When he looked back at Caine, his red-rimmed eyes were wet, whether from the icy wind or the vodka, Caine couldn’t tell. The wooden cabin creaked in the wind, like a sailboat. The sound made their isolation even more complete. They could have been alone in the middle of the ocean.
“Why do you stay here?” Caine asked.
The old man shrugged.
“My whole family is here. Everyone I ever knew.”
“Are you a Jew? Is that it?”
“No, I’m a Gypsy. The last Gypsy.”
“I thought that Gypsies wandered.”
“They do,” the old man cackled, exposing the stumps of his teeth. “I’m a Gypsy who doesn’t wander. Where is there to go?”
The old man dug in his pocket and brought out the cigarettes. He took out two, handed one to Caine, and they both lit up. Caine took out his wallet, peeled off a hundred-dollar bill, and handed it to the old man, who stuffed it in his pocket without expression.
“I stay here to remind people that once there were Gypsies,” the old man said.
Caine stood up to leave. The old man walked him to the door. Then the old man shrugged.
“I knew about the Jews, but not about the Gypsies,” Caine said.
“Everyone knows about the Jews.” The old man smiled sadly. “But who remembers the Gypsies?”
CHAPTER 7
In Berlin the pattern changed. It wasn’t so much a change in content as in perspective, Came reflected; like one of those ink-blot optical illusions that looks like a duck’s head until it’s turned sideways and then appears to be a rabbit.
Caine flew in on the afternoon LOT flight to East Berlin. As the Viscount entered the landing pattern for Schönefeld Airport, he could see the vast flat expanse of the Marx Engels Platz below, like a giant concrete lake that drained the river of concrete that was the Unter den Linden. Dominating the skyline was the Brobdingnagian statue of a Russian soldier in Treptower Park, looking as if with his next giant stride he would be stubbing his toe on the wedding-cake facade of the reconstructed Reichstag. The outsize statue looked big enough to scoop up the Statue of Liberty like a football and run with it. Beyond the statue the monotonous vista of Stalinist gingerbread apartment buildings stretched all the way to the Spreewald. On the western side of the wall he could see the Funkturm Tower in the Messengelände, standing like a modernistic beacon for the glories of capitalism. The Viscount landed in a small series of bounces, like a stone skipped across a lake. After going through Customs, he caught a taxi to the Potsdamer Platz.
As the taxi turned down Friedrichstrasse, Caine took in the furtive air of pedestrians scurrying in the cold wind, like faceless human ants dwarfed by the immense monuments. Hulking over the eastern approach to Potsdamer Platz were the ruins of the Führerbunker, where the dying Third Reich had tried to play the last scene of the war as though it were the final reel of The Phantom of the Opera. The taxi slowed as it bumped over the tram tracks on Zimmerstrasse and neared the cinder block wall that bisected the city. The apartment blocks near the wall were bricked up and a cleared area twice the length of a football field and filled with tank traps and land mines and barbed wire ran parallel to the wall. At intervals along the barbed wire, skull-and-crossbone signs announced Achtung, Meinen, just in case the locals didn’t get the idea that wall climbing wasn’t an encouraged sport for the Spartakia.
The taxi stopped at Checkpoint Charlie, and as soon as Caine paid him, the driver took off with a roar, as though to forestall any objections to having carried an American tourist foolish enough to abandon the glories of democratic socialism. A young Vopo, a Kalatchnikov slung over his shoulder, impassively watched Caine enter the low concrete Passkontrolle. A Grepo, resplendent in a blue uniform that made him look like a U.S. Air Force general, mechanically held out his hand for Caine’s passport. If it had been a contest of uniforms, the Germans would have won the war, Caine reflected as he handed over the passport.
“What is your name?”
“William Foster.”
The official glanced suspiciously up at him. Or perhaps he just looked at everyone that way, Caine thought. He stared at a large wall poster behind the official. On it a sprinter crouched at the starting line, his social realism muscles bulging, as he prepared to run for, “Sport and Health in the G.D.R.,” according to the title.
“And your destination?”
“The Berlin Hilton.”
The official raised his eyebrows barely perceptibly. Caine was obviously a hopeless capitalist. He stamped the passport as if it were an execution order, then gave Caine one las
t suspicious glance just to let Caine know that he couldn’t be fooled.
“Go through that door to the Customs.”
“Ja, danke,” Caine said, retrieving his passport.
At the customs tables a Western tour group crowded uncertainly like a nervous herd. Midwestern husbands in checked coats glanced cautionary daggers at their wives, who surveyed the guards with satisfied eyes under lacquered gray hair, as though to silently remind them that they were (whisper it) crossing the Iron Curtain. Near the front of the group a longhaired hippie wearing a brown leather jacket bearing a Canadian flag and on the back a painted fist with the inscription, “Che lives!” paced impatiently, as though he expected to be met by a brass band. A wan blonde in jeans sitting on a suitcase anxiously watched him pace.
Caine waited patiently for his turn. For a moment his eyes met the glance of one of the Vopos and then they both looked away. Maybe neither of them wanted to be there. The busy customs officer barely glanced at the Hasselblad and after he wrinkled all the clothes in Caine’s suitcase to conform with the approved border-crossing disorder, Caine was able to walk past the gate and go through the whole procedure again for the American MP’s.
Hour of the Assassins Page 11
