In the barracks at Waldenburg they had laughed like that. Esther could remember, almost as if it were happening that instant, how they had made her dance naked up and down the little corridor between the rows of beds, how they had beat time against the floor with their boot heels and how they had laughed. As she danced by, some of them would try to grab at her, or strike her on the buttocks with the flats of their hands. They wouldn’t allow her to stop, not even when she fell down weeping with exhaustion. When she couldn’t get up again, they had made her crawl on her hands and knees.
But the girls on stage, with their fixed grins, safe up there from their tormenters, was it any different for them? Did they think so? Their eyes, hunted and weary-looking, said not. It was no wonder Hagemann liked to come here.
“It’s pretty silly, isn’t it,” Itzhak said finally, having almost to shout over the laughter and the screaming trumpet.
But Esther couldn’t answer. She could only draw back her lips into what she hoped would be taken for a smile as she listened in her mind to the stamping of boot heels.
. . . . .
Hagemann’s car was a long gray Mercedes that had once, he was assured, belonged to a member of the Spanish royal family. He hardly cared which member, since he had bought it less to please his vanity than for the steel shields that turned the back seat into a bullet-proof cocoon. In case of attack, if he had time to throw himself to the floor, to get down below the window line, he would be safe enough. It seemed a reasonable precaution, even in General Franco’s Spain.
The drive from his villa to the club took less than twenty minutes, along a road that swept by Burriana’s harbor. The bay was too shallow for ships of any size, so all one saw there were the pleasure boats of wealthy tourists and fishing craft belonging to the local peasants. They made a picturesque sight, clustering around the sides of the long wooden piers like swarming bees.
Hagemann kept his own boat anchored closer to home, at a private wharf just beyond the fence surrounding his property. All he needed to do was to climb down a narrow metal stairway—so cunningly concealed by the undergrowth that one could look straight at it and never know it was there—walk across the narrow beach, and there it was. He kept the wharf guarded, of course. The sea was his avenue of escape.
But tonight he had no thought of escape. Two of his bodyguards were sitting in the front while he rode behind with Faraj. The others followed in a separate car. He was on his way to one of the more important moments in his invisible career.
“You see, my friend, we reach our goal not all at once but by a logical progression. We could not succeed in getting the girl out of her prison, but the Jews did that for us and now deliver her over into our power. What clearer proof could you demand that history is on our side?”
But Faraj was not in a temper to be consoled. Faraj was a nervous little man with none of the gambler’s confidence in his luck.
“They are preparing a trap for us,” he said. It was a sentence he had repeated at intervals throughout the evening.
“Of course they are. What of it? Wouldn’t you, in their place? Like us, they are fighting for their survival.”
“I wish you were a little less confident you will win, Colonel. Such self-assurance seems almost like tempting providence.”
“It is that. To be a German and alive after 1945 is to tempt providence. I have grown used to it.”
After that, and until the car began to make its slow, careful way through the narrow streets of the central town, they did not speak again. Hagemann was grateful. It was politic to bring Faraj this evening, but he would have preferred to be alone. He wanted to think, and to remember. He wanted to be alone with Esther.
It had been Becker who had first told him about “the Herr General’s new girlfriend—a skinny little thing, not your type at all. We picked her up on the way, in one of those glue factories in northern Poland. The General practically snatched her from before the doors of the crematorium. You should have seen her—messy little bitch! We’ve all had her, almost everyone in the camp, so she’s kneaded soft enough that she won’t be too demanding on our commander’s energies. By now you could push that little lady’s thighs apart with a feather. Hah, hah, hah!”
Yes, it had been a marvelous joke, in the best tradition of refined military humor. At the time, Hagemann had hardly even been listening.
Because, of course, he had been away—in Berlin, for conversations with the bright young things on Reichsführer Himmler’s personal staff who were concerned that “Project Loki” might not come to fruition quickly enough to turn back the American and British armies in France.
Well, they had been right to be concerned.
So he had not arrived at Waldenburg until nearly a month after the main force, under General von Goltz, had established themselves. The Berlin trip had been a great secret—he had not even employed a driver—so he alone had not been in on the great good fun of the little Jewish bitch who was keeping the General amused of an evening. At the time, it hadn’t seemed a very important omission.
The next morning he had gone to report. He and the General sat drinking captured Russian tea together, and the door to the bedroom was slightly ajar. There she was, sitting on the bed, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, staring out at him through huge, liquid brown eyes that seemed to see straight through him. Probably von Goltz had planned it that way—he took a curious pride in his little acquisitions, the way another man might in the bottles of wine that lined his cellar walls. The half-open door was a kind of boast.
Even then, while he and his commander drank tea together and discussed the politics of their mission in this peculiarly godforsaken place, Hagemann had known—yes, it was not too much to say he had known—that it was the shaping destiny of his life who stared at him with those frightened, hollow eyes.
So it was more than merely the answer to von Goltz’s riddle that drew him to the Café Pícaro this night. After all this time, he wanted to know what he would see in her eyes now.
When his car pulled up in front of the entrance, Hagemann saw that Lutz was already standing in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest, waiting. The usual crowds of begging children were nowhere in sight—they were all deathly afraid of Lutz.
“She is already here, Herr Oberst,” he said, opening the car door for Hagemann. For a moment he stared at Faraj with what appeared to be astonished contempt and then, seemingly, dismissed him from his mind. “She is sitting at table fourteen, where you will have a good view.”
“You have done well, Ernst. And is her husband with her? What is he like?”
Lutz merely spat on the pavement—it was answer enough. He was a big man, with muscles that bulged visibly under his black dinner jacket. His hair was cropped so close that it was impossible to say precisely what color it might have been, and his massive head was seamed with leathery folds, like old wounds. The wound that had invalided him out of the SS in early 1944 did not show, but it kept him from ever raising his right arm above his shoulder. He was an old-line fighter, and he hated Jews worse than death.
“Of course—I quite understand. I suppose I shall see for myself. Have you arranged the distraction?”
“Ja, Herr Oberst.”
He glanced once more at Faraj and then gave Hagemann an inquiring look, as if to ask, Must I have this greasy little carpet peddler in my club as well?
“Come, Faraj.” Hagemann slid his arm over the Syrian’s narrow, chubby shoulders. “We’ll drink champagne and look at the girls. If you see one you particularly fancy, I’m sure Ernst can arrange something for you. Can’t you, Ernst?”
“Ja, Herr Oberst.”
The club was crowded. Hagemann went in behind his bodyguards, along the rear wall, and sat down at the table that was always kept for him. He had not yet seen Esther, and he was sure she had not seen him.
There was a great deal of noise—the band, and that idiot of a comedian shouting into his microphone, and everyone laughing and whistling and cal
ling to the girls. The girls, in their high-heeled shoes and their tiny swimsuit costumes that made them look all leg and bosom, the girls were dancing with frantic energy, as if caught up in some clumsy ecstasy of motion. It would be like this until the small hours of the morning.
Hagemann liked the club. The show was exactly the same, night after night, but he came as often as he could. He liked it because it was all vulgar nonsense. He let it wash over him like warm water. He liked it because it left room for nothing else. There were no dark thoughts at the Café Pícaro,
Lutz was very obliging, and none of the girls was averse to entertaining gentlemen, but Hagemann wasn’t interested in looking for that sort of pleasure here. Smiling chorus girls were not what he wanted, and Spain was full enough of dark Madonnas. He preferred women who understood the pain of life.
The woman he wanted tonight had no place at the Café Pícaro, and yet she was sitting, quite calmly, not ten meters away from him, watching the performance with an expression of uneasy pleasure frozen on her lips. Hagemann found it necessary to close his eyes for a moment, as if the light bothered them. He was not sure that he could bear the longing that was almost a surge of physical pain.
Of course she knew he was there. She gave no sign, but she knew. The time had been when he and Esther had understood each other very well, so it was impossible to hide against the wall of a crowded room and pretend not to be there. She would always know.
The Jew who was pretending to be her husband was slight, with curly hair, and much too young. He watched the show with a nervous intensity and now and then turned to Esther, spoke a few words, and gave his attention back to the stage, which, from the expression on his face, might have been the scene of his personal drama. Esther would never have married a man with eyes which had seen so little of life.
Hagemann did not regard himself as, at least in the theoretical sense, an anti-Semite. During the time of National Socialism, he had killed Jews on the orders of his superiors, but without conviction. They were harmless enough people, and the Zionist Conspiracy was a paranoid delusion—he knew that. Even the greatest of men can have their eccentricities, and Himmler had played upon that side of the Führer’s nature to create a foolish disaster. The whole policy had been a catastrophic waste. Only fools like Joachim believed anything else.
“Haven’t I told you often enough to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?” he would rave. “Isn’t it all there, how they plan to take over the world? Isn’t that just what they are doing this very moment? Look at Russia. Look at the Near East. Look at America!”
Nothing, of course, could convince Joachim that Truman and Stalin weren’t Jews and that any Zionist plot afoot in the world was merely a conspiracy of survival forced on them by the events of 1933 to 1945. Hagemann was a soldier, not a political philosopher, but even he could grasp as much as that.
For Joachim the theoretician and for Lutz the street brawler it was all so obvious, so straightforward. He envied them the clarity with which they saw the world.
But, for all that, he was committed now. When once one begins with the annihilation of a people, there can be no turning back. He, Egon Hagemann, through no particular wish of his own, found himself locked into a vendetta; the Jews and their allies would hound him to his death if he did not strike first. One could hardly blame them. There was no right or wrong in the matter. Those were simply the terms of engagement.
So the Jews must not have their nation. As one of their own had said, let them be blown about forever by the cruel winds of history. This Israel they longed for was not going to be his death, so let it be theirs.
All, perhaps, save one.
She was not precisely beautiful. Esther had never been beautiful—her particular charm had resided in nothing so superficial. As she sat near the stage, her face turned away so that all he could see was the line of her cheek and, occasionally, the bright glimmer of her left eye, she still made something inside his chest contract with a peculiar mingling of cruelty and tenderness. She was the child who had lived long enough to see everything, who understood him as no one else did in the wide world. Even when he had tormented her until she wept with fear, it had been like an act of mercy, a concession to his weakness, a contemptuous admission of what a nature such as his seemed to require.
And now she held von Goltz’s secret in her tiny hand, and his life, and such heart as the world had left him.
And in five or six minutes, as soon as there was an intermission and enough quiet for a few words between old friends. . .
Ernst managed these things very well. He had been a good lieutenant—no originality as a commander, but strong on the details—and he had found his natural place in life as the owner of a sleazy Spanish night spot. He was on excellent terms with the local police. There was nothing within these four walls that he could not manage, including the temporary removal of an unwelcome husband.
The music died away. The stage was empty. Hagemann glanced toward the door, saw Ernst standing there with a corporal in the Civil Guard beside him, and nodded. It was time for the real performance to begin.
Ernst went down to Esther’s table. He was perfect. He leaned down with the confidential air of a good waiter troubled about a problem with the bill, and whispered something into the Jew’s ear.
“I am very sorry, Senor, but there is a gentleman here from the police who wishes a few words—something about an irregularity in your passport.”
It wasn’t necessary to hear. Hagemann could read it all in Ernst’s face, and the way that boy’s head snapped around to the entrance, where Ernst’s tame constable was waiting with such a show of refined, professional patience. It was delicious.
Of course, the Jew’s reaction would tell everything.
And, yes, he did precisely what Hagemann had expected. He rose from his chair, touched Esther on the shoulder—that was important, the little sign that she was to stay behind and wait for him—and left with Ernst. In a moment the policeman had taken him outside, where a car was waiting. This was not a problem that could be settled there in the street; it was official and required the Jew’s presence at headquarters. They would be gone for at least an hour.
Hagemann could only shake his head. How stupid did they imagine him to be? They had, of course, expected that he would use some device to maneuver the husband out of everyone’s way, but did they have to fall in with it quite so readily? The fool didn’t have to be so very willing to leave his bride behind. They might as well have written him a note and sent it around to his table: “We are setting a trap for you, and there is the bait. Please respond.” It was all so painfully obvious.
But, of course, what did he care? He was willing to go along with them, up to a point.
Esther did not look around. She did not let her eyes follow her husband away. Her face was turned resolutely toward the stage. She gave the impression she was waiting for something to happen.
Hagemann’s bodyguards, thick-necked men chosen for loyalty and a certain cruel dexterity rather than intelligence, watched his face, waiting for a sign. Instead he turned to Faraj, putting his hand on the man’s arm, as if to hold him in place.
“Now, my friend, you will have perhaps a more entertaining performance to witness. It is a pity you won’t be able to listen. I expect my little Scheherazade will have a fascinating tale to tell this night.”
And he smiled, hating the waxy little Semite for whom all this was merely politics and war, for whom he had to make speeches that masked the longing that ached in his chest like a bruise.
Even when he sat down at Esther’s table, almost touching her left arm with the sleeve of his coat, she didn’t so much as glance at him.
“So. You were expecting me then?”
“Yes.”
“You saw me when I came in?”
“Yes.”
At last, as if with great effort, she managed to turn her head to look in his direction, although whether she saw him through her clouded eyes was another matt
er. She was coiled as tightly as a spring; she seemed about to fly at him with her nails, or perhaps merely to run away. Or perhaps, in some dark place in her mind, she took a kind of pleasure in this reunion. She had always been just that way with him, poised between fear and temptation, as if fear were as necessary to her as breath.
“You could have denounced me to your husband, Esther. He would, I’m sure, have been glad of this chance to play the protector, the avenging knight. Why did you miss the opportunity?”
“Because you would have killed him.”
“Would I have? Yes, perhaps I would.” He smiled and picked up the champagne glass that stood next to her tiny beaded evening bag. His mouth was dry—it was a sensation not unlike the fear that precedes a battle, the fear of the unknown. Why should that be? What was there he didn’t know about Esther, except how it was she always seemed to. . . But the champagne tasted like stale beer, and he felt no better for it. “Or perhaps you had another reason for your reluctance. This young man of yours, he doesn’t have the look of one who has ever been behind barbed wire. Perhaps he wouldn’t have understood?”
The man who played the piano came back and sat at his instrument, setting a large, heavy-looking glass of red wine down on the bench beside him as he began leafing through the pages of a score. A few of the patrons watched him expectantly, but he was not about to touch the keys before the end of intermission. There was all the time in the world.
“No, I thought perhaps you hadn’t told him about me.”
She dropped her tear-laden eyes and her hands drew together in her lap, where they were almost hidden from view below the table. She had always been a remarkable actress.
“Leave me alone, Colonel,” she said finally, her voice thick and slightly blurred. “I have a chance for a new life. I’m married, and I want to live like everyone else. Can’t you find it in you to leave me where I am?”
“No I can’t, Esther. I couldn’t possibly do that, not once I’ve seen you again. You couldn’t really expect it of me.”
The Linz Tattoo Page 27
