“I have been looking forward to this meeting,” he went on.
“I can imagine. What is this place?”
“This?” Hagemann looked around appraisingly at the brick cell. “This is the Burriana town jail. You were arrested by the Spanish authorities—didn’t you know? You are being held on a passport violation; they expect very shortly to be able to prove that your documents are forgeries, since certainly the British would never have issued travel papers to someone of your reputation. In the meantime you can expect to be treated decently.”
“And what happens when the authorities have completed their inquiries?”
“You will be deported—to Syria.”
Hagemann had a way of reaching behind his jacket lapel to smooth down his necktie that was expressive of extreme uneasiness. To Syria, to the very door of one’s enemies. And yet it was possible to wonder whose victory this was.
“We will be leaving rather quickly. Early tomorrow morning, I should think.”
“Is there some particular hurry?”
Leivick forced himself to smile, and the effort had an unpleasant effect on him. It compelled him to realize that it was still possible, in the ordinary way of human beings, to hate this man.
“Inar Christiansen is in town.” He said it quite matter-of-factly, but anyone with eyes could see that Colonel Hagemann was not pleased. His right hand slid inside his jacket and the fabric of his necktie pulled smooth and straight. “But, of course, I’m forgetting you must know that.”
“As it happens, I did not. I’ve never met the formidable Mr. Christiansen.” Leivick found it easier to smile now, pleased with his facility at lying. “But I can understand now why you’re suddenly so unwilling to linger here. I imagine you really would feel safer in Damascus.”
Hagemann glanced away suddenly, wiping his hand on the knee of his trouser leg. He had a hunted look. It was possible to know exactly how he must have felt.
“He has always been the wild card, hasn’t he, Leivick,” he said, in a tone that suggested he wished to be understood—that claimed that, after all, the two of them shared at least a common appreciation of each other’s aims. “If he killed me, would it simplify matters for you? At the moment, yes, probably—but if you were not here in this cell? Perhaps not? You and I have political objectives which give a certain clarity to our actions, but what of Mr. Christiansen? Can I be sure you haven’t brought him over to your side?”
“I doubt if you can be sure of anything.”
For just an instant the phantom of a smile played across Hagemann’s lips. Leivick took his point.
“You are on the verge of reminding me who is the prisoner here?” he asked. He raised his free hand a little and then let it fall dejectedly back into his lap. “No doubt you are right, but I was not attempting to bargain with you—only to point out the obvious fact that no matter what becomes of me, and even if you and your Syrian masters win your war, this will not help you against Christiansen. I think that, in the end, he will kill you.”
He set the tea mug down on the cell floor, and when he straightened up again and glanced at Hagemann he could see easily enough that the man was struggling with the urge to confess something. It was not to be, however.
“It shocks you that I am afraid of him,” Hagemann announced finally—in place, it would seem, of saying something else.
“No. It is only reasonable to be afraid of him. Only a fool would be anything else.”
“Just so.”
Out of force of habit, Leivick checked his shirt pocket for the pack of cigarettes he had bought less than an hour ago, but of course they were not there. Someone must have stolen them. Someone always stole one’s cigarettes in a prison.
“Are you looking for these?” Hagemann asked, taking the pack from his right jacket pocket. He even had the box of matches.
Leivick took them and lit one. The smoke made his headache worse, but he felt more tranquil.
“Were you in the war, Herr Leivick? I mean, of course, the 1914-18 war.”
“Yes. I was a corporal of artillery in the Austrian army.”
“Did you see much of the fighting?”
“No. One doesn’t in artillery.”
“I was in the infantry.”
He said this as if it were meant to explain something, turning his head to see what impression it made. Yes, of course. The Western Front in its full savagery.
“I was in Treblinka. These things cannot be made to constitute an excuse.”
“You are a Czech, are you not, Herr Leivick?”
“I was a Czech, yes.”
The irony did not escape Hagemann’s notice. He raised his eyebrows and made a short gesture with his left hand, as if to concede the point.
“Very well then, you were a Czech. It amounts to the same thing. For you the great war’s end meant national liberation—freedom from Austria. For us it meant nothing except defeat.”
“So you followed Hitler?”
“Yes. Hitler wanted to recast the world, and we both know it needed recasting. He wanted a real revolution, not just in politics but in the way people thought and acted and lived. You don’t do that unless you are prepared to be ruthless.”
“So you were ruthless? I have heard this argument before, Colonel.”
“And you will hear it again, provided you Jews ever manage to achieve your utopia in the desert.”
“Which you are determined to prevent.”
“Yes, which I am determined to prevent. You see, this war will not end. The logic of the conflict perpetuates itself forever. It will go on and on, however any of us may feel, until we are all dead.”
“Which is, it would seem, something Christiansen understands as well as vou.”
“Yes.” Hagemann smiled, nodding his head, almost as if this were the conclusion he had hoped they would reach. “Yes, for him too there is no turning back. The old war was over when it was over, but not this one. This one, never. I knew it that morning in June, 1942. I rather suspect I had known it all along, but Kirstenstad forced it upon me.”
“Then you know why he means to kill you?”
“Yes. Of course. He is a Norwegian, isn’t he? Who could blame him? Would I act any differently in his place? He has a right to kill me—provided he can.”
“And so do we.”
“Who? You mean the Jews? Yes, of course. We have all behaved just as we ought, all along.”
Leivick had finished his cigarette. He ground it out under his heel, feeling not the least bit tranquil. The tea had grown quite cold, but he picked the mug up from the floor and moistened the inside of his mouth with it. Hagemann was mad, of course.
“You have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, and now you prepare for the murder of countless thousands more, and you claim we have all behaved as we ought? You astonish me, Colonel. Even coming from an SS man, that is simple insanity. “
“On the contrary, Herr Leivick, it is the only antidote for insanity. Do you know what they taught us in the SS? ‘Believe, Obey, Fight!’ We are soldiers in the Waffen-SS, not bureaucrats or policemen or politicians—soldiers. That is the logic of the military life: ‘Believe, Obey, Fight!’ We have nothing else to keep us sane. To doubt is to perish—to die inwardly and, finally, to die in earnest. Do you know what my orders were concerning Kirstenstad? ‘You will destroy the village with the utmost ferocity.’ Those were General von Goltz’s very words: ‘with the utmost ferocity.’ It was to be a reprisal. Such operations were being carried out everywhere in Europe to avenge the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, and everywhere the orders were the same: ‘with the utmost ferocity.’ I was a soldier—I did my duty. The great trick is to do one’s duty and not go mad.”
Leivick wanted to hide his face in his hands. His head was pounding again and he was filled with despair. No, Hagemann had not gone mad—except in the sense that the whole world had gone mad in this maddest of times. Everything Hagemann said made perfect sense. He was not a r
aving lunatic. And that was what Leivick’s despair consisted of, the consciousness that he understood everything, that, like Hagemann, he had always understood.
“You do evil, knowing it to be evil, and you do not go mad. Tell me, Colonel, what is your secret? I am not joking—I would like to know.”
“You know already, Herr Leivick, Tell me, when you were a corporal of artillery, and you sent your explosive shells whistling off into the enemy trenches, didn’t you do evil and know it? Have you ever seen what artillery shells do to men? I was in the trenches in France. I can tell you. I’ve seen men, still alive, with their guts torn out, or wandering around half mad from the pounding of the guns. To be a soldier is the condition of life in our time. You may wish to draw distinctions, to say that the things I did in Norway and in the East were somehow different, but I do not. Horror is horror, suffering is suffering, death is death. If we wish to live—and perhaps, I grant, under such circumstances it is better not to live—but if life is what we want, then we submit to evil. We surrender to it. We embrace it. I embraced it, and not without cost to myself, but I lived. We are none of us any different, not you nor myself nor Christiansen. For all of us it is the same. Triumph or perish, and the cost of that triumph is wickedness.”
He had become quite excited, whether from some private despair or out of a cruel delight in his own words it was impossible to say. When he stopped speaking he stared straight ahead for several seconds, as if waiting to return to himself.
“Good.” Leivick smiled and lit himself another cigarette. “You might try explaining all of this to Christiansen, provided there is time before the catgut chokes off your windpipe.”
“Do you hope to frighten me, Herr Leivick?”
“No. Only to remind you that there is still something of which to be frightened.”
“Oh, I knew that already.”
“You really have gone mad, Colonel.”
“No, I have merely discovered freedom.”
He turned to Leivick as if he expected to be understood, as if that was why he had come—to be understood. He had not been disappointed.
Yes, of course. Leivick knew all about freedom. It was part of war, that freedom. One’s government released one from moral responsibility. Mercy became nothing except a species of intellectual weakness. It happened even in the death camps, to the prisoners themselves, whose very powerlessness became a liberation of sorts. One will do anything to survive, just as in the SS one could do anything and survive. They all went mad. And none of them would ever recover. Nothing would ever be the same for them again.
“You will only be free until Christiansen kills you.”
“Yes, I know. But the fates of individuals don’t matter so very much, do they. That was something else we both learned in the war.”
He seemed to derive some sort of satisfaction from the idea, almost like the comfort of a religious faith—people didn’t matter. But that, of course, was his freedom.
“And am I to be allowed to know what my fate will be?”
“You will die—in Syria. After you have told me where I can find the late General von Goltz’s legacy.
“You seem surprised. Did you imagine, Herr Leivick, that I was really so naive? Didn’t you think I would realize that if you were willing to bait your trap with Fraulein Rosensaft you must already have learned from her everything she could tell you? And who would know if not you?”
Leivick was glad to be sitting down. He felt weak and shaky and full of anguish, and he had no idea whether it was still the drug or merely the consciousness of his own failure. His eyes burned and were damp with sweat. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped them dry, but it hardly seemed to make any difference. Hagemann, who, it seemed, had deliberately chosen to be a mad brute and hardly a man at all, was still watching him with something like resentment.
“So you never wanted her at all then?”
“Yes, I wanted her. And I will have her, within a matter of hours. But it will be you and not she who is put to the question in Damascus. That will be better.”
“Better for who?”
“Better for her, and better for me.”
. . . . .
It was not until he had been alone for several minutes that Leivick could bring himself to take the handkerchief out of his pocket once more, to wipe his face, and to consider calmly—in the sense of a rational progression of ideas, of propositions expressible in words, not simply images of horror—where his miscalculation had led him. Emotion and appetite, they were the province of a creature like Hagemann. Any animal could feel, but it was the special gift of men to think. And now, in his extremity, Leivick wanted most particularly to be a man.
He was in possession of a terrible secret, a secret that could lead to the destruction of many lives, of a nation, a people’s last hope. And now, through his own stupidity and blindness, he had been delivered into the hands of one certain to turn that secret to the most appalling ends. If he could have died, simply by willing it—if he could just. . .
They had taken his watch, and of course his necktie and belt, all of the more obvious methods of suicide. But sometimes living and dying were nothing more than questions of fortitude. A man could run his head against a wall, crushing it like an eggshell, if he had but the will.
Except that Hagemann had thought of that, and had ordered him chained to the plank bed. It was unlikely, under the circumstances, that he would end by doing more than knocking himself into a stupor and thus making matters that much easier for Hagemann and his allies.
So, after all, there was nothing to do except, once more, to wait upon events. The next few moves were up to Hagemann—and, perhaps, Hirsch and Faglin, Perhaps they might furnish the means of defeating the interrogators in Damascus.
There was strength in hope—and in the knowledge that it was not the Angel of Death they were fighting, only a weak and frightened man who might, in another life, have been just another in the faceless innocence of the human race but whom instead history had made its victim. Villainy in itself was nothing. It had no strength of its own; it needed the support of a uniform and a gun and a mandate of its own devising. That was how it had murdered its six million Jews.
Hagemann was mortal, though, and could be killed. Perhaps finally Inar Christiansen really would kill him, but perhaps it would be better for Inar Christiansen to learn that Egon Hagemann wasn’t worthy of such intensity of hatred.
Still, please God let him kill him. Let him do it before Egon Hagemann has his chance to murder another six million.
19
The distance between the hotel and the spot where Dessauer hid while he watched Mordecai being taken was only a little more than a quarter of a mile, yet it took him nearly half an hour to cover it. He had never been more frightened in his life—every shadow seemed to conceal an enemy with a gun; at every intersection he expected to be run down by a speeding car that would come out of nowhere. Until that morning they had all been embarked upon what he had somehow taken to be an adventure, one of those slightly unreal conflicts between good and evil that men talk about after dinner, when the women have left the room.
Now, suddenly, this was actual life.
Mordecai was unconscious when they put him into the back of the car. Two men carried him, and his head hung at a strange angle. He might even have been dead except that then they wouldn’t have bothered to make off with his corpse. Before they got in the car themselves, the men looked around, searching the neighborhood, scowling as if surprised and annoyed to have found Mordecai alone. Then they drove off. They weren’t in any hurry. They had a lifetime and nothing to be afraid of.
I have to find a telephone, Dessauer thought. I’ve got to warn them—and then I’ve got to get back.
A grocery store in the next block had a telephone. Dessauer dialed the hotel and gave the desk clerk his room number. Esther was the one who answered. When he was finished he managed to fumble a fivepeseta note out of his billfold—he didn’t seem to have
any change—and handed it to the grocer, who stared at him with undisguised astonishment before hurriedly stuffing the money into the pocket of his apron.
He made his way through back yards and over fences. Every so often he would stop and listen. He was full of fear. There was nothing except himself, and a nameless menace, and the next few hundred meters.
When he reached the hotel he didn’t go near the front entrance. If they weren’t afraid to pull Mordecai off a city street in full daylight, they wouldn’t worry about doing the same for him in the lobby of a hotel. He slipped in through the employees’ entrance and made his way up by the back stairs. No one tried to stop him.
It was Faglin who opened the door. They were all there, even Christiansen, who was supposed to be in hiding from the police. He could have done without seeing Christiansen, who looked at him through the same cold blue eyes, as if nothing had changed. Maybe he didn’t know about last night. Maybe he didn’t care. Esther, of course, seemed unwilling to look at him at all. Her hand kept reaching up to touch Christiansen on the arm, as if to steady herself.
“Was it Hagemann’s boys or the Spanish police?” Hirsch asked. He seemed impatient, even angry, as he stood by the dresser drinking coffee out of a tin cup. He was the only man there still in his shirt sleeves.
“I don’t know—Spanish, I guess. They called him ‘Señor.’”
“That doesn’t make them the police,” Faglin noted calmly. As usual, he was sitting in a corner, as inconspicuous as a piece of furniture. “Our friend might prefer to use local talent for a job like this—it might create fewer problems for him with the authorities.”
“And the logical extension of that reasoning is that he would use the local police to cart off Mordecai. He’s got that kind of drag. Didn’t he get them to decoy Itzhak out of his friend’s club last night?”
It was Christiansen—huge, impassive as granite. He glanced at Faglin and the two men exchanged a nod.
The Linz Tattoo Page 31
