The woman turned her head. She must have heard something, the sound of footsteps, but it was too late. A gloved hand locked on her arm, just above the elbow, and pushed her forward. A few more paces and they reached the mouth of a narrow alley; a sharp tug and they disappeared inside. Christiansen had never had a chance to see her face, but this wasn’t anybody she was looking forward to meeting.
He didn’t wait for the screaming to start. In his pocket was a coil of catgut—he never went anywhere without it. The ends were knotted into handles. He look it out, holding it in his left hand as he ran.
The first thing he heard was the soft, muffled sound that fists make when they strike the body—not the face, the body, where they don’t leave any marks. Then, as he stepped inside, he could see them—or at least the man as he huddled over his victim—and the sounds changed. It was the face now, and the curses were well within Christiansen’s working knowledge. “You little whore. You bitch, so you thought you could hold out, did you? You worthless, ugly old tramp. . .”
It was just as well. The stupid bastard was too busy with his righteous wrath to notice anyone coming up behind him. The shadows of the surrounding buildings closed over all three of them as Christiansen moved in, the coil held in both hands now, with a big double loop, like a halo he was about to try on. grasped delicately with the tips of his fingers.
He wasn’t more than five or six feet behind the man when suddenly both the beating and the curses stopped. A hand went into the overcoat pocket, but Christiansen didn’t wait to see what it would bring out. He stepped forward, dropped the loop over the man’s head, and pulled.
He pulled hard—he wasn’t fooling around with this one. A sharp backward yank and the noose went tight, cutting off a sound that might have been anything, perhaps just a grunt of surprise. A knife clattered against the stones.
He pulled again, even harder, and the man jerked backward, just as if his legs had been pushed out from underneath him. With the ends of the coil held in both hands, Christiansen started dragging the man along the pavement, back into the darkness.
“I suppose, like everything else it loses some of its terror with repetition,” Mordecai had said, but that was eyewash. Killing was killing, and it never got any easier.
It takes very little time for a man to die like that. For a few seconds, as the noose pulls him, he kicks and tries to scream, and his bands claw at his neck so that they draw blood, but only for a few seconds. Unconsciousness comes quickly—in a quarter of a minute he’s as good as dead. The hands go limp and the fighting stops, he’s just a weight at the end of a string. And then, if you don’t let go, in another minute or so he really is dead. Christiansen put his foot on the back of the man’s neck, keeping the catgut taut, until he was sure.
It had a way of embedding itself in the flesh, so it wasn’t very pleasant to unwind. As he slipped the coil back into his pocket, he glanced up and saw the woman, realizing with a shock that he had forgotten all about her.
She hadn’t moved. She was still crouched against a wall, staring out over her knees—frightened, of course, but alert and wary. That she had just seen a man garroted was not what was uppermost in her mind. She wanted to know what Christiansen would do next.
The first impression was confirmed—she was about thirty. It was a face that ran a little too heavily to bone to be quite pretty, but she wasn’t bad. The eyes that peered up at him from under the heavy brows were intelligent if perhaps a trifle small. Her heavy frame and reddish-brown hair, cut short—after all, she had been in prison—made her look like a farm girl fallen from grace.
“Would he have killed you?” Christiansen asked, in English. It was a sudden inspiration. It established his credentials as a neutral.
She didn’t answer; at first he thought probably she hadn’t understood. And then she glanced down at the knife that was still lying on the cobbled pavement next to her left foot. Of course she had understood. It wasn’t her fault if strange men asked stupid questions.
“Here, we can’t have you freezing to death.”
He took off his overcoat—hell, he wouldn’t die of exposure—and placed it carefully over her so that she was covered almost up to the mouth. She didn’t seem impressed by the kindness.
“What’s it to you?” she asked.
. . . . .
The room was too large to be heated efficiently by the tiny coal-burning fireplace, and dinner consisted of bread, boiled ham, a little cheese, and coffee liberally adulterated with chicory. Because she liked being paid in American money, the landlady wasn’t asking any awkward questions. In fact, Christiansen had the distinct impression that she and Sonya had done business before. Sonya seemed to know her way around.
“Eight months I was in that stinking place,” she said, to no one in particular as she lay on her side in front of the fireplace. She had taken a bath as the absolute first thing; she had said she wanted to rid herself of the smell of disinfectant. And now, she said, she wanted to get roasted, like a joint of meat. “And all because I gave a Russian major a bad time when he wanted to cheat me on the price. These people give you eight months for spitting on the sidewalk. I started studying English in 1942, just in case things went the wrong way, and then I get caught in the stinking Russian sector.”
One injustice seemed to rankle as much as the other. She turned over, so that her back was to Christiansen, who was sitting in a massive chair that could have been the throne of the Hapsburgs. She wasn’t the modest type; she wasn’t wearing anything except a huge white towel tucked in under her arms, and it was plain how pink the fire had made her bony shoulders and the backs of her legs. She wanted to be warm and comfortable, and to let her dinner digest. And she wanted to complain about the Russians.
“Christ, what pigs. I was lucky not to catch the clap in there.” She sat up, wrapping her arms around her legs so that her head rested on her knees. She had hardly even looked at Christiansen.
“I thought it was a woman’s prison,” he said, aware that he sounded like a chump. What did he care? The point was to keep her talking.
She let her head roll a little to one side and then, quite suddenly, gave him a knowing smile, as if they shared some secret.
“The guards never let that stop them.” A short, bitter laugh escaped her lips. “Christ, they must cut each other’s throats to be posted to that stinking place. For them it’s just the biggest cat house in Vienna.”
Christiansen still had half a cup of coffee balanced carefully on his thigh, he picked it up and allowed himself a sip. It was something to do, since she seemed to be waiting for some response. He just wanted her to go on. He wanted to hear about the inside of Mühlfeld Prison.
“I guess it must have been a pretty bleak time for you,” he said quietly, as if stating the obvious. The coffee was extremely bitter and, of course, there was no sugar. He must have made a peculiar face because the woman smiled.
“Is that how you usually pick up girls?” she asked. “Hanging around prisons waiting for the garbage to be thrown out?”
“Not as a rule, no.”
The smile kept tugging at the corners of her mouth as she studied his face with an almost embarrassing frankness. It was impossible to tell whether she liked what she saw there or not, and probably it made very little difference, even to her. Christiansen decided he really wasn’t interested in a professional opinion.
“Do you want to sleep with me?” It was just a question, on the order of “Would you like a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want? Or did you just kill Otto for the fun of it?”
“Was that his name?”
“Yes, but don’t feel sorry—he was no loss. He wanted me to come back to work for him. He would have carved me up good, except for you.”
Her eyes narrowed with what was probably supposed to be smoldering seductiveness—she seemed to imagine he was about sixteen. It was almost funny. When she saw it wasn’t working, she stopped.
; “A pity,” she said. It was almost possible to believe her. “You know, you really are a nice looking man. I don’t get one like you every day. So tell me, what is it you do want?”
The silence was awkward, almost dangerous. It was the last question Christiansen felt inclined to answer, partly because this was not anyone he could trust and partly because be hardly knew himself.
“Perhaps I’m just a good Samaritan.”
“Yes, sure. And I’m the Virgin Mary.” She laughed—it was a delicious joke, apparently. And then suddenly the joke was over and her face tightened.
“I’ve seen men killed before, you know.” With a quick movement of her hand she brushed a strand of hair back from her face. The gesture carried a certain brutal authority. “We’ve had the war and the Russians, and I haven’t lived with my eyes closed. You’re no tourist. That was a very professional job you did on Otto—he never even made a sound.”
Then, with a kind of pleasant sigh, she stretched out full length on the rag rug in front of the fire. She covered her eyes with the back of her right hand, and her stomach rose and fell slowly with every breath. Christiansen was a very dangerous man, she had apparently decided, someone who murdered as if he had been born to it, but what was that to her?
The towel around her slipped open a little—perhaps she had intended it to—uncovering her right side, all the way up to the rib cage There was a scar, about four inches long, running down Her belly just inside the soft mound made by her hip bone. It was still fresh, angry and red at the edges. After a moment she pulled the towel back into place.
“You don’t like it, do you.” she said, slipping her fingers in under the fringed edge. “I don’t like it either—a scar like that is bad for business. Christ, what a mess they made of me in that place.”
“Where? The prison?”
“No, the hospital. I had to wait two hours for the ambulance, damn them. I thought my guts would pop open.”
“There isn’t a hospital in the prison?” Christiansen tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. The chair creaked beneath him as he moved.
“No, just an infirmary. They have a big, smelly Russian nurse there who couldn’t cut a splinter out of your finger. I think she’s queer for the girls, you know? You don’t go near the place unless you’re really sick, and then they have to send you to the hospital.”
Christiansen smiled at her, perhaps a little uncertainly. He didn’t want her to say anything more. He didn’t want to look at her. All he wanted to see was the image in his mind, an ambulance pulling out through the prison gates.
7
It was a few minutes to ten when Christiansen crossed the Salztorbrücke back into the International Zone. Sonya was probably asleep. He had given her enough money to keep herself for at least a week and she had told him everything she knew, content not to ask why he was interested. She would stay there in the room. Where else would she go? she had asked. He had a key. He had a feeling she would be useful later on.
Apparently the shift had changed, because the guard on the Russian side of the bridge wasn’t the same one who had warned him about the whores in the Augarten. This time it was a kid of perhaps seventeen, who went over every page of Christiansen’s passport as if he imagined it to be forged and was looking for a mistake. He seemed to resent his failure when he handed the passport back and waved Christiansen across.
Christiansen decided he would walk back to the hotel.
They had agreed before leaving Munich that it was best to find rooms in the American sector. They had made their bookings in advance, with Hirsch, Faglin and Dessauer in a hotel in the next block. There was no point in looking like a convention.
He anticipated no problems with either Hirsch or Faglin—they were both basically technicians, willing to take Mordecai’s word for it that he was someone they could work with. But Dessauer, whom the others treated like the baby of the family, couldn’t seem to forgive him for having broken his nose. Finally, as if it was the most devastating insult he could think of, he had called Christiansen a goy, a word Christiansen had had to think about for perhaps a quarter of a minute before he could even remember what it meant. Everyone learns a little Yiddish in New York, but that had been a long time ago. The outburst had been followed by an embarrassed silence.
There were lights everywhere in the International Zone. Christiansen remembered Emperor Franz Josef’ s remark about putting a tent over Vienna to make the biggest brothel in the world, and then be remembered Sonya and decided to put the subject out of his mind.
When he got back to the room he found that everyone had arrived. Hirsch had brought sandwiches and bottles of beer with him from the train station, and they were all having a late-night picnic. Christiansen accepted a bottle of the beer and told them about Mühlfeld Prison.
“It’s a real bank vault,” he said sullenly, holding the bottle by the neck “We’ll never crack her out of there. We might as well try knocking over the Kremlin.”
“It’s still just a prison.” Jerry Hirsch sat staring at his sandwich, as if he rather expected it to bite him. “We have people who practically specialize in stuff like that,” he went on. “Acre Fortress wasn’t exactly a cracker box, you know. We could bring in a few demolition experts. We could be in and out before they knew we were there.
Christiansen shook his head, frowning.
“It won’t do—I read about Acre. We don’t have an adjoining bath house here so that all we would have to do is punch through a wall. We don’t have a ready-made army waiting for us on the inside. This is Austria, not Palestine. We don’t have a friendly local population ready to hide us until the Russians get tired of searching for us.”
“He’s right, Jerry.” Mordecai smiled glumly from where he stood by the huge rosewood wardrobe that separated the room’s two beds. “And there is the political side of things to he considered. The Haganah gets a fair share of its arms from Czechoslovakia, so we don’t want to antagonize the Russians. It would be better from several points of view if this operation could look like some quite ordinary criminal matter—the local underworld retrieving one of its own.”
“No one will believe that. This woman isn’t important. Who would go to the trouble?”
It was Fagiin who had spoken. He was lying full length on one of the beds, staring at the ceiling through exhausted-looking eyes. He seemed already to have made up his mind that they were doomed to failure, but he had been like that even before they had left Munich. Mordecai claimed he was merely homesick.
“It is important, however, that we give them no reason to believe anything else. Inar, my young friend, have you any ideas? Perhaps more important, have you any cigarettes?”
It had become a ritual by now. Christiansen took the pack from his shirt pocket, shook out two cigarettes, one for himself and one for Mordecai.
“There are no medical facilities inside the walls,” he said, feeling a curious sense of relief. He turned his hand so that the smoke crept across the ball of his thumb before snaking upward into the air. “If she were to become suddenly ill—if she had an attack of appendicitis, for instance—they would have to send her in an ambulance to one of the civilian hospitals. She’d be within reach then.”
The stillness was almost palpable, as if they suddenly had found themselves in the presence of a miracle and were afraid to mention it for fear it might vanish. Dessauer, who was sitting on the second bed, close enough to Mordecai that he could have touched him, looked as if he would have liked to say something but didn’t know what.
“We could slip her something,” he whispered finally, his throat working nervously. “They must have visiting hours. We could pretend we were relatives or something. . .
There was an odd clicking sound in the room, which Christiansen at last determined was coming from the other bed. Faglin was laughing.
“Such a sheltered life you’ve led, Itzekel. Don’t you know what Russian prisons are like?” Slowly, with an appearance of great effort, he turned hi
s head the few degrees that allowed him to look in that direction. “If they have a visiting room, they make the prisoner sit in a steel mesh cage with a guard right behind the chair. There will be one window into the room where the visitor sits, and the visitor will have a guard too. Sometimes there’s glass in the window and you talk through a microphone, but even if there’s only more steel mesh you’re not allowed to touch. You have to keep your hands in plain view, all the time—it’s the rule. Nobody slips anyone anything.”
Dessauer was silenced. They were all silenced. It seemed to be the moment of defeat.
And then Mordecai smiled his sad. ironic smile.
“We don’t have an army inside,” he said finally. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it as if he wondered why it kept burning. “This isn’t Acre—Inar is right about that. But people go into prisons as well as out. Perhaps we could smuggle in just one little soldier.”
. . . . .
The plan was straightforward enough, Faglin and Hirsch would take responsibility for getting the girl out of Mühlfeld Prison and, while they served as a distraction for the police, Christiansen would smuggle her back to the American Zone. The three of them would rendezvous the day of the escape, but until then they would keep clear of each other—It was safer that way. Mordecai and Itzhak, thank God, would stay behind and out of harm’s way.
The only thing was that while Christiansen, the lucky devil, had a passport that allowed him to pass the Russian checkpoints without challenge, Faglin and Hirsch had to smuggle themselves in.
They would use the sewers, since the plans were available at any of the city’s libraries and not even the Russians could guard every manhole cover in the Brigittenau. The water, which smelled bad but not as bad as they had expected, was up to their calves and lumpy with ice. Even with rubber boots on, Faglin could hardly feel his feet at all.
Faglin had been born on a kibbutz just south of Caesarea. The sea was only half an hour’s walk away, and it was never cold. Faglin, who hadn’t been home in eleven months, and then only for a brief visit, hated the winters in Europe.
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