A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (15 page)

“At the tavern, you asked if the Americans were Jewish,” he said, his voice cold. “I don’t know if they were or not, but
I
am.”

For several seconds she just stared blankly at him; her mouth worked without any sound coming out. Finally she managed, “You’re
what?
” It was barely audible.

“I’m Jewish,” he repeated. His heart was pounding, but he forced himself to sound calm, soothing. “My name is Mordechai Rosenhoch. I was born here, in Munich, but when the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship in 1935, my family moved to England. When my brother enlisted in 1942 he used the name Thomas Quinn—Tommy. So when I enlisted in 1951, I used the name Simon Quinn. But my name is Mordechai Rosenhoch.” Truth.

She was looking off into space. “A Jew,” she murmured. “You’re a Jew.” Her eyes fastened on his and she stared at him, her face inscrutable. He reached out slowly and gently touched her shoulder, but she jerked away from him as if he might be contagious. She realized her robe was still hanging open; she pulled it tight across her front and turned her back to him.

He reached out again, but his hand hovered uncertainly over her back, then pulled itself away. He stood up and fastened his trousers, then took his jacket from over the radiator and opened the front door. He paused in the doorway, trying to think of something to say, but there was nothing. She had not responded at all to the sounds of him getting ready to leave. Wordlessly, he closed the door behind him and walked down the hall.

HE STORMED out the hotel lobby’s front door onto the pavement and stopped, letting the rain wash over him. It was coming down hard, harder than anything he had experienced living in the mild Mediterranean climate the past four years. In just a few moments it had completely soaked him again. He stared up into the night sky. Rainwater washed across his face, running into his eyes and blurring his vision, and down the back of his neck under his jacket. The smell of it filled his nostrils and ran into his mouth.

His jacket was open at the front and he could feel his shirt plastered against him, clinging heavily to his chest as he breathed. His trousers would feel the same way against his thighs when he walked. The only sound was the loud, omnipresent hiss of the rain striking pavement, tarmac, brick, and concrete. The rain filled every one of his senses; it was all he knew. The water felt cold against him, and he shivered. But it also felt good.

After a while he looked down again. The rain had washed away her scent, the taste of her in his mouth, and the feeling of her lips rubbing against his, the lingering sensation of her body pressing itself into his own. But much as he would like to believe otherwise, he knew that was not what he had wanted. What he was trying to wash away went much deeper than she did, and the rain could not get at it. Abruptly he turned and walked quickly away along the pavement. He did not care where he was going, so long as he was in motion.

“
My name is Mordechai Rosenhoch.
” Was that even true anymore? The name had felt strange on his lips; it had been two decades since he had last spoken it aloud. He had left Mordechai Rosenhoch twenty years ago, in the small, decaying tenement flat in Wapping that the family had ended up in after the war. During their first few years in England, they’d lived in a nice house in Ealing. But then the German A-bomb had turned most of London into a single smoking ruin, a massive open wound on the banks of the Thames, and had turned the surviving Londoners into an army of refugees. And the Rosenhoch family had found themselves squeezed into a Wapping flat, which at first they’d had to share with two other families.

Those had been hard years, following the war. As aliens and German nationals, they had lived under the perpetual cloud, in that the government could deport them at any time under the harsh citizenship laws Lord Mountbatten had enacted after he became Regent. Only the fact that his father had been one of the few who managed to remain regularly employed had stopped that from happening.

His parents had been implacably set against the idea of his enlistment. His mother had objected nine years earlier when Isaac had signed up, so he had expected her sobbing and her hysterics. Their father, though, had told Isaac in his quiet, dignified way that he understood the decision and would pray for his safe return. So when young Mordechai had declared his intention to follow in Isaac’s footsteps, he had at least expected his father to be supportive. But instead the old man had told him not to be a fool, that he would be throwing away his life for a hopeless, discredited cause.

He had been furious that his father could so repudiate the sacrifice Isaac had made for all their sakes; he had not understood that the older man spoke out of pain, grief, and a desperate desire not to lose his only remaining son. If his family wanted to reject what his brother had loved enough to die for, then he would reject his family. Mordechai Rosenhoch had stolen away out his bedroom window and down the fire escape in the middle of the night, and the following morning Simon Quinn had presented himself at the recruitment office.

But if not Mordechai Rosenhoch, then what
was
his name? He wandered aimlessly through the Munich streets, turning at random corners, neither noting nor caring which streets he was turning into.

To the Army he had been Simon Quinn for five years, and that was the name he had used more often than any other in the four years since he left MI6. But in the intervening decade, he had not encountered it once. For those years, when he had lived in Paris, the Crimea, and Berlin, MI6 had made him into Johann Kreuz. And
now, according to the passport and SS ID he carried in his pocket, they had made him into Matthias Kaufholz. Those were just pieces of paper, of course—but then again, what legitimized the name Simon Quinn, except for a handful of pieces of paper? His enlistment papers, the gazette for the Military Medal he had won in Siberia, his British passport in his cabin aboard the cruiser in Greece. Lying in the drawer on top of that British passport was his Sicilian passport, listing his name as Simon Morlino. Truth and deception.

He emerged from a narrow street onto a broad, open boulevard, and he realized he had come to Glory Way. The storm and the late hour had driven away any lingering tourists, and the statues scattered along the length of the avenue formed eerie, motionless silhouettes emerging out of the rain as far as he could see, cast into curious relief by the bright white streetlights spaced every few hundred meters.

A cluster of statues loomed immediately before him, and he walked up to them and stared at them. They were the ones past which he and Ellie had driven earlier: four men in pseudo-military uniforms stood before a wood and barbed wire barricade, their mustachioed and bespectacled leader holding aloft a red, white and black military ensign that now hung, limp and heavy with water, molded to its staff. He stared at the face of the young man holding aloft the ensign and realized that he recognized him: he was staring at Heinrich Himmler. He peered at the young but still chillingly familiar features, then moved on.

Of course, the name that had haunted him the most was Mordechai Rosenhoch. For the decade he had spent in fascist France and Nazi Germany, he had lived in fear of being discovered, of getting into a situation like he had tonight. He remembered the week in Siberia, separated from his company and trapped behind the German lines; the thought of capture then had been the greatest terror he had ever known in his life.

There had been other times since, of course. Stationed in Paris, posing as a German secondary-school instructor, his heart pounding every time he crossed the border into Germany that the frontier police would stop him for a random anti-terrorist check, would see him, would
know
just from looking at him. Once he had been moved on to his assignments in Germany, his cover had become more official—a Kriegsmarine intelligence analyst in the Crimea and a Gestapo investigator in Berlin—and he had therefore become more immune from the idle and arbitrary attention of the German security services to which the rest of the Reich’s citizens were subject. But there were times when he was trapped, as at Denlinger’s the night before, and then survival and escape crowded everything else out of his mind. He must maintain his secret—he must not be found out. Truth and deception.

Glory Way ended and opened onto the Odeonplatz, where the hundred Bavarian policemen had confronted Hitler’s disorganized mob almost fifty years before. It was dominated on one side by the Feldherrn Halle, the Hall of Fallen Heroes. At the time of the Putsch the Feldherrn Halle had been dedicated to the soldiers of the Bavarian Army who had died fighting for Germany in the first war; in the 1950s, though, the Führer had demolished it and replaced it with a larger, more grandiose edifice, a monument now also to Bavarians who had died in the second war, and, of course, to the sixteen Nazis and three state policemen who had died in 1923.

From his position at the edge of the square’s broad, open space, with the view obscured by the rain, he could make out the famous statues at its center only as obscure, hazy shapes. He walked forward, and they began to resolve themselves: the Führer, Ludendorff, Göring, and Himmler, faced by six policemen with rifles raised.

He stopped before the four Nazi leaders. Ludendorff stood a few steps in front of the others, his right arm half-raised in a gesture of supplication towards the policemen. The scene was a fabrication, of course: the Bavarian police had deliberately avoided putting themselves in a position where they might have to fire upon Ludendorff, venerated hero of the first war, and Himmler had been a minor Party functionary at the time, not a member of its ruling echelon up here alongside the Führer and Göring—he would have been with the rank and file. Truth and deception.

The rain bouncing off the copper statues gave them an eerie, translucent white halo. He peered at the Führer, unflinching and upright in the face of the raised rifles, nobly staring down the Bavarian police in the unshakeable knowledge that only he could achieve Germany’s true and rightful destiny.

“You took my name away,” he said, and turned and walked away, wanting only to be in motion once more.

He took one of the smaller side streets leading off the square, turned one way at the first intersection to which he came, then the opposite way at the next. After a block or two he once again no longer had any idea where he was. Ellie’s face floated before his eyes, the unreadable expression she had had when he had told her his secret, how she had jerked away from him when he touched her.

In his mind, her face changed. The skin shriveled and tightened, lost its softness and femininity; the color drained from her cheeks and lips. Her mouth puckered, a telltale sign that it no longer contained any teeth. Her hair fell away and her eyes sunk back into her head, darkening and losing their spark, their
life
, and before him once again he saw one of those gaunt, broken faces in the pictures at the Purification Museum, so emaciated he could no longer guess age or even gender—it could have been his own grandmother or uncle or cousin for all he knew.

And he wept, though he could not distinguish his tears from the rain pouring down his face. He had been East, to where the Reich had deported Europe’s Jewish population to a network of Purification centers where they had been gassed and fed into furnaces—he was probably the only free Jew who had been there in thirty years. He had found an empty land there, just the occasional scattered German colony or Slavic slave labor camp. But of the death camps, and of the millions and millions of Jews who had met their ends there, nothing remained. And what had he done for them? What simple act of vengeance, or even of memorial?

Nothing. Jews who had emigrated abroad when the Nazis came to power had tried to drum up international concern about the relatives they had left behind, but over the years they had grown older and passed on. The younger generation growing up in England and America, concerned with the Cold War and the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation, simply did not want to hear about a problem they could do nothing to solve. It amounted merely to another reminder of a painful, horrific, destructive war that their parents and older siblings had lost. They wanted to put the war, and their families’ pasts, behind them, and build their new lives in Birmingham, Liverpool, or New York.

But Quinn, though—Quinn had been East. His mother’s family, his father’s family—grandparents he had no memory of ever meeting, uncles and aunts, cousins; all had died—
been murdered
—in that land. But he had ignored that inconvenient fact, had dutifully filed reports with London on fleet movements in the Black Sea and the number of missile silos with nuclear warheads in the Kiev region, all the while trying to forget that he was Jewish, shoving his Jewishness aside as something shameful, something that—when he allowed himself to think of it at all—he only wished he could wave away into nonexistence.

HE TURNED a corner out an alleyway and found himself in a larger street. He recognized it immediately: a dozen meters up on the other side of the road stood the Hotel Udet. He hesitated, about to turn in the other direction, but instead he headed toward the hotel. He took up a position directly across the street, standing concealed in the shadows at the mouth of another alleyway, shielded from the rain by the protective lee of a building.

He counted across and found Garner’s window once more. The light was on and the blinds were up, allowing him to see into the room. He began to think the room was empty or Garner was asleep, but then he saw his quarry in his horn-rimmed glasses move across his field of vision, from one side of the room to the other. A few moments later he crossed back again.

Quinn stood there for a long time, watching, and also wondering, in the back of his mind, what was in that envelope Garner had given him. He reached inside his jacket and fingered its creased outside. It felt slightly damp at the edges but had stayed mostly dry. He did not see Garner again after that first time, though the light stayed on and he assumed the man must still be awake.