David Morrell - League of Night and Fog

by League of Night

"How? Tell me a way to keep strangers from coming around here asking about Avidan."

  "If you help us, maybe we'll be able to find out what happened to him.

  Then the strangers will stop coming around." The woman studied them.

  "May we see Avidan's cabin?" Saul asked. The woman remained motionless.

  Saul held his breath. The woman nodded.

  The cabin was past the house and the barn, up the continuation of the sloping pasture. Behind it, dense forest rose to rocky bluffs. The

  Alpine air smelled pure and sweet, tinged with the fragrance of evergreens. The cabin was small, single-story, made from logs whose bark had long ago disintegrated. A rusty stovepipe projected from a roof mat needed re shingling Saul turned to survey the view: the lush lower part of the valley, a far-off small lake, the towers of the town, partly obscured by intervening fir trees, a kilometer to his right Why would

  Avidan choose such primitive, secluded lodgings? Saul wondered.

  "How long did Avidan live here?" he asked the woman. "He came last fall. In October."

  "He planned to spend all winter here?"

  "He said he was a writer. He needed solitude and privacy to finish a novel." A retired Mossad operative a novelist? Said thought. It was possible. Anything was possible. But probable? Once the winter storms started blowing... Solitude and privacy? Avidan had certainly gone to an extreme for those conditions. What had made him choose this place?

  They entered the cabin. It was divided into a bedroom and a kitchen. In the absence of a fireplace, a large black wood burning stove served for heating the cabin as well as preparing food. The rooms were spartan.

  Plain pine boards covered the walls. A slab of wood on trestles was the kitchen table, a bench beside it There were austere cupboards, a rocking chair, another bench along one wall. The bed was a top-and bottom bunk, its mattresses packed with straw. A cracked minor hung above a battered bureau, the drawers of which were lined with yellowed newspapers from

  1975. The drawers contained a few items of clothing. Books, mostly histories related to Israel, filled a shelf beside the bureau.

  Photographs of Israel's desert, along with images of crowded downtown

  Tel Aviv, were tacked here and there on the walls. In the kitchen, Erika found plastic cups and plates in a cupboard, along with cans of food.

  Dish detergent was in a compartment beneath the sink. A man could go crazy spending a winter up here, Saul thought He turned to the woman.

  "You said you didn't remove Avidan's possessions because you thought he might come back. It doesn't look like he had all that much to pack up."

  "And if he was working on a novel," Erika said, "he must have taken it with him. I don't see a typewriter. I can't find a manuscript." The woman stood silhouetted by sunlight at the open doorway. "From October to February, I almost never saw him. From my house, sometimes I couldn't see the cabin for the gusting snow. Sometimes I thought the snow would smother the cabin. But on clear days, as long as I saw smoke from the stovepipe, I didn't worry. And the first of every month, he waded down through the drifts to pay his rent" Saul remembered that the woman had said she'd been deserted by her husband. Avidan's monthly rent must have been sufficient comfort for her to ignore her tenant's eccentricities. "Something was wrong,"

  the woman said. "I knew that. And when he disappeared, in case the police reopened the investigation, I was determined not to touch anything."

  "But so far as you know, you don't think the priest and the two Israeli men learned anything from their search," Saul said. "We could sort through the pages of these books. We could sift through the packages of food. We could test for loose floorboards. My guess is we'd be wasting our time. Avidan was a professional."

  "The priest and the two Israeli men assumed they could take advantage of me, trick me, dominate me," me woman said angrily. "They never offered money."

  Saul's skin tingled. "But if we offered money... ?"

  "It's difficult to manage this farm alone."

  "Of course," Erika said. "We want to help you. Our resources are limited. We recently had to leave our home in Israel. But we're willing to make a contribution." The woman moved her head from side to side, calculating, and named an amount It was high, almost half of what Misha

  Pletz had given to Saul and Erika. But it was insignificant if the woman's information was as important as her rigid features suggested.

  "Done," Saul said. "Provided you don't merely show us an out-of-date address book or..."

  "A diary," the woman said. "The dates are from October of last year until he disappeared. It's about this cabin. It's about him. There are photographs. They made me sick." Saul's chest contracted. Erika stepped forward. "How did you get them?"

  "I found where they were hidden."

  "Yes. but how?"

  "After the priest searched this cabin, I wondered what he was looking for. When I felt he was really gone, I came up here and searched as well. I tested the floor. The walls. The ceiling. I even budged the stove and pried up the firebricks beneath it."

  "And?"

  "I found nothing.

  But the priest wasn't thorough," the woman said. "He didn't identify with Avidan's routine. He didn't put himself in Avidan's mind. There's another building.

  Saul knew. "The outhouse."

  "I found the diary and the photographs attached beneath the platform of the hole above the pit. Each day when he came and went along the path he dug through the snow, he must have taken them with him, possibly even concealed them beneath his clothes."

  "And they're worth the sum you asked?"

  "The worth is your concern. The sum you know." Erika reached into a pocket. "The money's Austrian."

  "It could be Japanese for all I care. This is Switzerland. Every currency is welcome here." The woman counted the bills. "Where's what we paid for?"

  "Come down to the house."

  They sat at a table in a rustic kitchen. As the woman made coffee, Saul opened the plastic-wrapped packet she'd given them. He winced when he saw the photographs. Erika's hands shook sorting through them.

  Nazi concentration camps. SS soldiers aiming submachine guns at refugees being shoved from trucks and railway cattle cars. Gaunt-faced prisoners staring with haunted eyes through barbed-wire fences. Endless trenches, quicklime- covered corpses, bulldozers poised to fill in dirt.

  Gas chambers, naked people--mostly children, old men and women--so squeezed together they'd died standing up. Open doors of massive ovens.

  Unimaginable quantities of ashes and bones. Saul studied them all, every obscene one, and when he'd finished, he'd learned what he already knew--mat the human ability to invent new methods of brutality was boundless.

  He stacked the photographs and turned them face down on the table. "The examined life isn't worth living," he said, his voice trailing off. He stared at the diary. "God knows what else is in..."

  "The night I looked through that packet, no matter how many logs I put on the fire, I was still cold," the woman said. "I paced until dawn. I knew about such atrocities, but to see them, to read about them..."

  "Read about... ?" Erika looked at the diary, reached for it, hesitated, and drew her bands back as if from vomit

  "Yes, the diary,"

  the woman said. "Avidan, his parents, his sister, and two brothers lived in Munich. In 1942, when the Holocaust was set into motion, the SS arrested them and trucked them to the concentration camp at Dachau. It was only twenty kilometers away from their home. A work camp, not a death camp, though the way he describes it, there wasn't much difference. With the other prisoners, he and his family were used as slave labor at an ammunition factory. They received a minimum of food.

  They were given little time to rest or sleep. Sanitary facilities were inadequate. Toilets were nothing more than open trenches. Drinking water was contaminated.

  Their barracks leaked. There were rats. For two years, Avidan and his family slaved for Hitler's war. And one by one, they died. Avid
an's mother went first--she collapsed in the factory and died from exhaustion. When Avidan's father couldn't get off the barracks' floor one morning, the SS dragged him outside and shot him in front of the other prisoners. His corpse was left in the assembly area for three days before prisoners were ordered to put the body on a cart and push it to a burial pit outside the camp. Next, Avidan's ten-year-old sister coughed herself to death. His older brother didn't move fast enough to suit a guard and had his head split open with a club. His remaining brother went insane and gashed his wrists with a splinter of wood.

  Avidan himself became determined to survive. In small unnoticeable ways, be rested while he worked, conserving his strength. He devoured spiders, flies, worms, anything he could find in camp. And he succeeded.

  In 1944, in September, he was part of a work force trucked from the camp to pick up liquor and food from town for an SS party that night The truck blew a tire. In the confusion, prisoners fled. The SS soldiers recovered quickly and shot three of the four escaping prisoners. The fourth was Avidan. The thrill of freedom was so overwhelminghe pushed himself to limits he didn't know he had. He stole food from storage bins. He slept in haystacks. He kept moving. Dachau is a hundred kilometers from Switzerland. In his diary, he doesn't say how he passed the Bodensee, but he arrived at neutral territory, and still kept going, still not sure he'd reach sanctuary, till he finally came to rest here.

  My former husband and I bought this farm in 1978.1 have no idea who owned it during the war. But whoever lived here found Avidan cowering in the barn one night They understood his circumstances, took pity, and let him stay in the cabin. They supplied him with food. He remained from October of 'forty-four till the end of the war the following May, when he went to Palestine." The woman stopped. The room became eerily silent Saul had listened so raptly that it took a moment before a reference to the end of her words tugged at his memory. "He reached the cabin in October of 'forty-four?"

  Heat rushed into Saul's stomach. "But didn't you say he came back last year... ?"

  "In October," the woman said. "Given what he wrote in his diary, about his ordeal in the war, I doubt the parallel of the months was coincidental. The past was on his mind. Something must have driven him to return. His diary's so vivid it's as if he did more than recall his terrors--he relived them." 'To be that obsessed..." Erika shuddered.

  "As obsessed as your father was," Saul said. In the presence of their hostess, he didn't mention the photographs in the basement of the Vienna apartment building. "But you said mat in 1945 Avidan left here in May, at the end of the war," Erika said. "This year, though, he left in

  February. The pattern isn't exact"

  "Unless he intended to leave in May," the woman said, "and something forced him to leave early, just as something had forced him to come back here. He left without warning. He took almost nothing with him. His decision must have been abrupt"

  "Or someone abruptly made the decision for him,"

  Erika said, "just as I suspect someone did for my father."

  "Abducted him?" the woman asked. "It's possible." Erika exhaled. "We still don't know enough." Through open windows, Saul heard the drone of a car coming along the road. The drone became louder. All at once it stopped. His shoulder blades contracted. He left the kitchen and, careful to stand to the side of the big front window, peered out past the porch. A black Renault stood in the open gate of the rutted lane that led from the road toward the house. He saw the silhouettes of three men inside. Erika came into the living room. "What's the matter?"

  The woman followed her. Saul turned to the woman. "Do you recognize that car?" The woman stepped toward the window. "Don't show yourself,"

  Saul warned. The woman obeyed, moving to the side of the window as Saul had. "I've never seen it before." The three men got out of the car.

  They were tall and wellbuilt, in their mid-thirties. Each wore thick-soled casual shoes, dark slacks, and a zipped-up windbreaker. The jackets were slightly too large. In June? Saul thought. On a warm day like this? Why zipped-up windbreakers? As the men walked up the lane, each pulled down the zipper on his jacket. Saul felt Erika close behind him. "They could have driven all the way up to the house," she said.

  "But instead they blocked the gate. Until they move their car, we can't drive out" The men walked abreast of each other. Though their expressions were blank, their eyes kept shifting, scanning the

  Volkswagen, the house, the pasture on either side, the woods and mountains beyond. Each had his left hand raised toward his belt They were halfway up the lane now, close enough for Saul to notice the bright red ring each wore on (he middle finger of his raised left hand.

  He spun toward the woman. "Have you got a gun in the house?" The woman stepped back, repelled by the force of his question. But her voice was steady. "Of course. This is Switzerland." She didn't need to explain.

  Switzerland, though a neutral country, believed in military preparedness. Every male from me age of twenty to fifty was obligated to undergo military training. Every family had to keep a weapon in the house. "Get it Quickly," Saul said. "Make sure it's loaded. We have to leave here now."

  "But why would... ?"

  "Now!" Eyes widening, the woman rushed to a closet, removing a

  Swiss-made Sturmgewehr, or storm rifle. Saul knew it well. The length of a carbine, it was chambered for NATO's 7.62-mm caliber bullets. It had a fold-down tripod beneath the barrel and a rubber-coated stock that helped to lessen the force of the recoil. The woman groped for two magazines on the shelf above her. Erika took them, checking to make sure they were full to their twenty-round capacity. She inserted one into the rifle, switched off the safety, set the weapon for semiautomatic firing, and pulled back the arming bolt to chamber a round. She shoved the remaining magazine under her belt. The woman blinked in dismay.

  "Those men surely wouldn't..."

  "We don't have time to talk about it! Get out of here!" Saul lunged for the diary and the photographs on the kitchen table and crammed them into their cardboard packet. With the rifle in one hand, Erika yanked open the rear door to the kitchen. Saul grabbed the woman's arm, tugging her with him, and charged out after Erika. They raced across a small grassy area, through the barn, and up the slope toward Avidan's cabin. Saul heard a shout behind him. Legs pounding, he pressed the cardboard packet against his chest and risked stumbling to glance backward. Two of the men darted around the left side of the barn while the other man appeared at the right, pointing upward. The third man yelled in French,

  "lei!" Each pulled a pistol from beneath his windbreaker. "Erika!" Saul shouted. She looked back, saw the three men aiming, and spun. In a fluid motion, she dropped to one knee, propped an elbow on her upraised other knee, and sighted along the rifle. Before the three men could fire, she pulled the trigger, then shot again. And again. The range was fifty meters. She was a skilled sharpshooter, but with no time to steady her muscles, the barrel wavered. She grazed one man's shoulder, the other bullets slamming against the barn. The injured man grabbed his arm and darted back behind the barn. His companions ducked out of sight inside it. If she hadn't killed them, at least she'd distracted them, and she rose, sprinting after Saul and the woman, who'd already reached the top of the slope. A bullet tore splinters off a log on Avidan's cabin as she took cover behind the building. Saul and the woman waited for her, breathing deeply. Erika took a chance and showed herself to shoot twice more down the slope at the men scrambling after them. The men sprawled flat

  "You know these woods," Saul told the woman. 'Take us into the mountains."

  "But where will we... ?"

  "Hurry. Mover

  The woman squeezed through a line of bushes and came to a narrow path that veered up a wooded slope, her muscular bare legs taking long forceful strides toward the summit Saul and Erika followed, struggling to adjust to the unaccustomed altitude. At the top, the path changed direction, angling to the left, then descending between two chest-high boulders. Dense trees shut out the sun. Saul sensed
their pine resin fragrance, their fallen needles soft beneath the impact of his shoes, but what occupied his attention was the crack of branches behind him, ethe muffled echo of angry voices. The woman led them down the path to a shallow stream. Saul splashed across it, ignoring the cold wetness of his pants clinging to his legs, and forced himself into the shadowy continuation of the forest. He heard Erika's feet plunge through the stream behind him. The woman led them up another slope, but this slope was steeper, the trail almost indiscernible. Saul zigzagged past dead falls thickets, and clumps of boulders. Finally at the top, his lungs on fire, he pivoted to stare past Erika down toward the hollow. The men weren't in sight, but he could hear footsteps splashing through the stream. The woman had brought them to a grassy plateau. A hundred meters away, another stretch of dense forest angled up, it seemed forever. They raced ahead. High grass tugged at Saul's shoes. His back itched as he imagined the three men suddenly appearing at the top of the slope behind him, but no bullet punched through his spine. He threw himself to the ground behind bushes at the opposite edge of the clearing. Erika dropped beside him, aiming the rifle. The woman rushed farther, stopped when she realized her protectors weren't racing to follow, then sank to her knees behind a tree. In contrast with her obvious terror, Saul felt almost joyous. We made it! he thought. We crossed before they saw us! They didn't catch us in the open! Now it's our turn! Beside him, Erika calmed her breathing, pulled down the tripod attached to the rifle's barrel, steadied her aim, and became rock-still.