by Andrew Gross
When he finally looked up she was looking at him.
He set up an exchange of pieces and she accepted. The moves came quickly. Four, five of them, taking off rooks, pawns, and a knight for a bishop. At some point, in the rapid exchanges, their fingers brushed against each other. This time instead of drawing them away, they stayed there.
Their eyes met again. “You know I can’t protect you forever, Leo.” There wasn’t insistence in her voice. More like sadness, and in her gaze as well.
“I know, madame.”
“Greta.”
He nodded. Swallowed.
“You can say it. Say it, Leo.”
He took a breath. The storm in his chest was raging now. It took everything inside him to summon the strength. The strength to say it. The sound barely fell off his tongue and onto his lips like a stone. “Greta.”
“See.” She smiled.
He did as well. He felt a tingling down his loins. What was happening…?
“Hedda!” she called out. For the maid. At the other end of the house.
Half a minute later she appeared at the door. “Frau Ackermann?”
“Would you go to the store please, in town? I believe my husband said he would like some ice cream tonight with his strudel.”
“I believe we have some, ma’am. I’ll just—”
“Fruit ice cream, Hedda. Any flavor. I’m sure you’ll pick the right one.”
The maid hesitated at the door and then said, “Yes, ma’am.”
The match was over. They didn’t make another move. They just waited, minutes it seemed, unending minutes, until they heard the sound of the back door closing.
“You are a virgin, aren’t you?” Frau Ackermann asked him.
Leo swallowed, wishing he could tell her differently, every cell in his body ajitter.
“Come on, you can tell me, Leo. Kurt is the only man I’ve ever been with. It’s all right.”
He knew this was the most dangerous thing he had ever done. To even answer such a question. If her husband happened to walk in, if she ever disclosed this, he would be dead barely a second after his pistol was out of its holster. “Yes.”
She got up. She came across the table and stood in front of him. The fullness of her breasts in front of his eyes, her breaths silent, but in and out. The curve of her hips. She put his hand there. Her eyes were liquid and pained. “I wish I could stop it all, Leo, but I can’t…”
“I know.”
She came over and straddled across him on the seat. The pressure between his legs was now impossible for him to conceal. Slowly, she unbuttoned her dress. One button, two … “Here, put your hand here…” she said, taking it in hers. Inside her dress. On her bra. “Like that. And here…”
She lifted slightly and took his other hand and put it inside her skirt, against her undergarment, where it was all soft and moist. He was locked on her eyes.
“You don’t want to die a virgin, do you, Leo?”
He swallowed, almost too nervous to even speak. “No.”
“You can kiss me.” She put her mouth close to his. She laughed. “You know, if he came in now he would kill us both. Are you prepared to die with me, Leo?”
He looked into her beautiful, deep eyes. “Yes.”
“Do you know why I am doing this…?”
He didn’t reply.
“Because you are good. And because I want to know what that feels like. Just once.”
She climbed onto him and looked down in his lap. His striped pants. In his dreams, he never imagined he could have an erection like that. He blushed and tried to cover it up.
“Don’t.” She took his hand away. “You don’t have to.” Her smile made it all seem okay. “Trust me, Leo…” She put his hands on her hips and gently began to rock. “You’ll leave today a much happier man than if you did with just an apple.”
THIRTY-FOUR
He was inside the camp.
Blum was placed on a construction team that was building additional barracks inside the main camp. He spotted prisoners everywhere. Thin, eyes sunken, wearing their loose-fitting zebra suits, many ravaged by what appeared to be sores and pestilence, scurrying around like mice, trying to stay one step ahead of their SS guards who constantly shouted at them and prodded them with heavy truncheons. Many looked so sickly and beaten down they wouldn’t even survive the day. Not a one made direct eye contact with any of outside crews. In the main staging yard, one prisoner had been hanged on a gallows, his neck crooked, left for everyone to see. A warning to the others, it was clear. As he hammered nails and sanded down the roof beams, Blum smelled the damning, sweet odor coming from the adjacent camp. A thin gray cloud hovered when they arrived and never left. They’re gassing them by the hundreds. Thousands … Strauss had said. And amid all the sickening brutality and hopeless misery these people were suffering, somewhere Blum heard the sound of an orchestra playing.
They all just did their work as ordered and stuck to themselves.
At noon, on a break, the work crew was fed a thin, tasteless gruel from a wooden bowl: a broth of cabbage and potato, accompanied by a piece of hardened bread. A couple of the prisoners who passed by seemed to eye the bowls covetously; clearly next to what they were being fed, this must be a delicacy! Blum would have happily left his half-finished bowl for one to take, but they’d been strictly warned by the officer in charge who had brought them inside to avoid even the slightest contact. The last thing Blum could risk was to be thrown off the work detail. He was here for a purpose, he reminded himself, and so, while it pained him, he simply did his work as best he could and kept to himself, trying not to make himself noticed. He wore his wool cap low over his eyes. The guards pretty much left them alone. He had to wait for just the right moment—at the end of the day, when the work crews were breaking up. It would cost him some time inside, but any earlier, and his disappearance might well be noticed. These Germans seemed to have a determination to count and recount, form a line and keep everyone in it. But even if there was a discrepancy, they would likely never know who was responsible for it, and once he switched uniforms, it would be impossible to find him in a camp of this size without tearing the whole place apart.
While he hammered in the joints, Blum kept his eyes peeled, staring at every face in a striped suit that passed by. He’d rehearsed what he would say, once he spotted Mendl. The shock and incredulity the man would undoubtedly feel. I’ve come for you, Professor. But no one Blum saw fit his looks or was even close to his age. At fifty-seven, from Blum’s view, Mendl would be an old man in here. We don’t even know for certain if he’s even still alive, Strauss had admitted. That would be the ultimate joke, Blum thought, helping to steady the roof beams as they hammered the flat roof in place: to come all this way, to have risked his life and possibly never make it back out, and all for a corpse. A dead man. A person who could never have helped them. And looking at the shaven, rail-thin mice scurrying by who seemed more like walking ghosts than men, Blum suspected with concern that that might well be the case.
The sun had moved to the west in the sky. Blum judged it was going on five p.m. They’d only be working for a few minutes more. He had to find the right time to make his move.
In the next few minutes the camp came alive with activity. Where there were hundreds of prisoners before, suddenly the number doubled, tripled. Now it seemed there were thousands of them, returning to the camp through the front gate, hunched over and exhausted, trudging more than walking upright, guards every ten paces or so. A few wore striped uniforms as well, yet they seemed more like guards in that they carried truncheons of their own, some with green or blue triangles on their chests, prodding the pack along with shouts and insults like cattle moving into a pen. The returning prisoners were all lined up in the main yard. Carts, being wheeled and pulled along, were filled with twisted corpses, their skinny limbs and open mouths protruding grotesquely. The ones who didn’t make it back that day.
The yard filled. Kapos and guards started coun
ting each block. The constant drone of “eins, zwei, drei…” heard everywhere. Even the cart of dead bodies was counted; prisoners tossed out the dead like blocks of firewood. “Ten, eleven, twelve…”
Blum’s stomach turned.
The foreman called out for Blum’s work team to call it quits on the hour. Ten more minutes. “Take your tools and line up,” he alerted them. After, they’d all be loaded back in the truck.
This was it. He had to make his move. He had to summon the courage to do what every instinct for survival inside him cried out was suicide. Yet he knew it was now or never. This was either the bravest thing he’d ever done in his life or surely the stupidest, he reckoned. The most calamitous.
“Tak, tak.” He raised his hand to get the foreman’s attention.
“What is it?” The foreman came over.
“Toilet, sir.” Blum signaled. There was a latrine by one of the blocks that the work crew was allowed to use.
“Go ahead,” the foreman said, pointing to his watch. “But hurry.”
“I will, sir. Thanks.”
The man went back around to the other side of the half-built barrack and Blum set down his hammer. A while back, he had removed his jacket in the afternoon heat, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it in the bottom of one of the supply bins.
He made his way over to the latrine. No guards were near. Everyone was distracted by the counting and assembling of the prisoner work teams returning to the yard. Blum stepped inside. He stood for a second at first, his heart beating with more insistence and drumming louder than he had ever felt from what he was about to do. Cross a line he might never again be able to come back from. Amid the putrefying stench of the open hole, he reminded himself why he was there. Why he was doing this for a person he didn’t even know and for a country he might not even make it back to. This is your aliyah, he reminded himself. Your commitment.
Your penance.
His penance for being the one who had made it out.
You cannot go back now, Nathan.
He ripped off his shirt, pulling the arms inside out, and reversed it to the faded blue and gray burlap stripe on the other side. Then he flung it back over his head and buttoned it to the neck, to hide what was underneath. He kicked off the wooden clogs he’d had on all day that were similar to what they wore in the camp and reversed out his loose-fitting trousers.
He was in a prisoner’s suit now. From an inside pocket he took out the cap that was like a thousand he had seen that day and placed it on his head.
Less than sixty hours left to do what he had to do.
Sucking in a breath, his last moment of anything resembling freedom, Blum cracked the outhouse door and peered outside.
Across the yard, the foreman was rounding up his work crew. Two guards passed close by. His heart clenching, Blum pressed the door closed again. He caught his breath. If the wrong person saw him coming out of there, the game was over from the start. He’d be shot on the spot. He composed himself again, wiping off a bead of sweat making its way down his temple, instructing his heart to quiet and his nerves to calm. Inside him, a voice of doubt whispered he could just reverse back into his work outfit and rejoin his crew. He could hide with Josef and meet the plane in two more nights and say he was unable to find Mendl. Who would be the wiser…?
No … He opened the door and looked out again. This time no one was around. Go. He stepped outside and quickly shut the door. He took a look toward the work detail; no one was focused on him, only inventorying the tools and forming the line. He hugged the wall and went around the far side of the latrine, away from them, facing the wire.
He stared at the vast commotion in the yard, prisoners lining up in formations in front of their blocks. It was suicide. Thousands of sickly looking prisoners forming lines, raising their hands at the call. You will never come back. Guards shouting in their faces like vicious dogs. Like some stomach-turning nightmare out of a Bosch painting of hell. Suicide. Do not fail us, Roosevelt had said.
Now.
“Was machst du denn?” A voice barked sharply behind him. What are you doing?
Every cell in Blum froze.
He turned. A burly SS corporal was staring directly at him. A heavy rope twisted with several thick knots hung menacingly at his side. “Which block are you from?” the corporal asked.
“Zwansig, sir.” Blum cleared his throat, averting his eyes. The report was that the Ukrainian kapo who oversaw Block Twenty was as human as there was in this place, meaning he wouldn’t crack you in the head with his truncheon merely for the sport of it. There would have to be a reason. Blum’s heart began to pound with dread. He was sure the guard would hear it inside his chest.
“Then get the fuck on back, yid! Unless you’d rather I give you a nudge…” The German raised his knotted rope. Contempt and a total disregard for humanity oozed from him like an icy, terrifying vapor.
“No, Rottenführer.” Blum nodded, contrite. “I mean yes, now. Thank you.”
“Get your dirty ass out of here!”
“Yes, sir.”
He quickly ran toward the rows of barracks, praying as he did he wouldn’t feel the lash from the knotted rope strike him from behind. He knew just how arbitrary the line between life and death was here. The wrong guard, at the wrong time, one who just killed for the thrill of it or simply just to relieve the boredom, the way others might bet on the flip of a coin … And your time was up! Prisoners kept flooding into the large, staging area, guards shouting at them, beating them like angry dogs.
“Line up! Roll call. Now! On the double!”
Blum blended into the throng, melding safely into the vast numbers.
He wove through the crowd until he found a group lining up in front of a barrack.
“Dwadziescia?” he asked someone in line in Polish. Twenty?
The prisoner never looked at him, just nodded. “Ja. Dwadziescia.”
Across the way, Blum spotted the work detail he had been on forming a line and being marched toward the front gate and out of the camp. He watched them filing out, not knowing if, like any of them, he would ever see the outside again.
“Line up! Everyone line up!” the guards yelled.
He muttered a few words of the prayer he had recited earlier: Ayl molay rachamin, shochayn bam’romin.
This time it was for himself.
For he was truly in the middle of the nightmare now.
PART THREE
THIRTY-FIVE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Colonel Bill Donovan went down the White House steps and to the black Cadillac waiting for him in the driveway.
Another black sedan pulled up just as he was about to step in. It had a blue flag with a star on the front grille signifying the vehicle of a one-star general. A junior officer in dress khakis jumped out and opened the door for his senior officer who was in the back.
“General,” Donovan said, recognizing who it was before climbing into his own car.
The Army officer climbed out and offered his hand. “Bill.”
General Leslie Groves was the military’s chief overseer of the top-secret weapon program that had every top brain in the country not assigned to code breaking working for it, known as the Manhattan Project. Donovan didn’t understand a word of the “science,” but what was clear was, with the attention it received from FDR and his war secretary, and the rumors of its vast budget and top-secret locations, that if it was successful, whatever they were conjuring up would give the Allies the decisive edge they needed to end the war.
“Got a moment, as long as we bumped into each other…?” Groves asked.
“Of course, General,” replied Donovan.
“Can we walk?” Groves said, leading the OSS chief away from the parked sedans and their drivers and onto the South Grounds.
“I suppose this isn’t about the game Dutch Leonard pitched last night, is it, Leslie?” the head of the OSS asked.
Groves smiled and shook his head. “No. It’s not.”
&nb
sp; An engineer by training, Leslie Groves was a brilliant thinker with a driving personality. The concepts he was faced with understanding and evaluating, deciding between alternatives and also funding, required a Nobel Prize winner’s grasp of science and a chief economist’s understanding of finance. He was large, broad shouldered, and tall, with a square, solid jaw.
“That physicist we spoke of a few weeks back … Mendl…? I’m told you’re mounting an effort to locate him,” the general started in.
“I believe we have located him,” Bill Donovan replied. “In fact, we have someone on it now.”
“And at what stage of the operation are you, if that’s something you can share with me?”
Donovan looked the general in the eyes and saw how vital the man he sought was. Still, this was a top-secret operation that was under way with only a few on the inside. “What I can share is that he’s there now. On site. In two days your man will either be in a transport plane on his way to D.C. or you’ll have to do without him for good, I’m afraid.”
Groves nodded soberly. He pulled Donovan farther away from the cars. “We’re in a race, Bill. A race to hell, some might say, but Oppy assures me this Mendl guy can save us six months.You realize what six months can mean—in the race for the supreme weapon. And in lives.”
“All I can say, General, is that I promise we’re giving it our best.”
“Then that’s all I can ask.” Groves checked his watch. “I’d better go. The president expects us military types to be on time. Senators and cabinet members can wander in as they please.”
“Yes, that’s always the case.” The OSS chief and the Manhattan Project overseer started to head back. “Before you go, Leslie, I assume you have other research along these lines going on, simultaneously?”
“Along these lines…?”
Donovan stopped. “In this man Mendl’s field.”
