Death in Twilight (11 page)

Bend, do not break.

Aaron kept his head down, perhaps even dropped it a little lower than before, doing his best to mumble out the words.

The German bellowed with laughter.

“Excellent!” the man said. He gave Aaron a friendly, though forceful, slap in the face and said, “You’ve been a good sport. I tell you what, why don’t you run, and if you make it home, good for you. If you don’t, well, I’ve already told you what will happen.”

Aaron began to walk swiftly, but he refused run, which made the German laugh.

“So proud! Well, use your time the way you want. It won’t make much difference, really. I’m sure I’ll see you soon.”

A turn at the corner, another turn. The laughter faded and Aaron’s sense of purpose returned. He broke into a trot when he was sure there was no patrol to see him.

Two more blocks; two more turns; another block; the light fading all the time; his sense of danger growing with the darkness.

Aaron reached a street that looked no different from the others he’d passed. A few shop fronts, mostly closed up — either for the night or forever, who could say? — apartment buildings of three to six floors, composed of brick and stone, indistinguishable in the dimness but for the street numbers. The building he was looking for had a number that he knew well. Over the last few weeks he had been a constant visitor.

An engine growled not far away. Aaron couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from, but it sounded like it was getting closer. He began to run, each footfall sounding like thunder in his ears.

The door he needed was just in front of him, perhaps twenty meters away. He closed the distance at a pace that he couldn’t have kept up for a second longer, reaching the doorway, entering and gasping, coughing, choking all at once. Lights from a car filtered though the glass in the top half of the door above Aaron. He lay on the floor unmoving.

The car passed.

Aaron’s heart restarted.

He slowly rose to his feet and stepped down the building’s unlit corridor, feeling for a door that led to darkened stairs and the basement.

He turned, closed the door behind him, and walked down toward a glow. After a few steps, he heard the bolt of a rifle snick.

“It’s me,” he said. “Put the gun away.”

In lieu of an answer, the gun’s barrel was pointed in a different direction.

Teitel was waiting there for him with three other men and lanterns. Behind the men was a ragged hole that had been ripped into the Aryan world.

Or more precisely, a short tunnel dug through brick and dirt that led into a small space below a warehouse that had been closed to prevent smuggling. Now, unbeknownst to the authorities, the warehouse was back in business, under new management.

“Things look good?” Aaron asked Teitel, who was smiling.

“You can see for yourself,” he said proudly. “Everything’s clear, thanks to the help from your friends on the other side.”

“Friends might be a little strong. They didn’t do it out of good will. They’re hoping for a little return on their investment,” Aaron said, lighting a cigarette, breathing the smoke deeply. “Do we have enough to pay for the shipment?”

Teitel pointed to two steamer trunks and a small satchel that sat in the dirt of the unfinished space. The lack of dust on them betrayed their recent arrival.

Aaron walked over, reached down and undid one of the clasps on a trunk, and then another, releasing the lid and allowing some of the lantern light to penetrate the box. The contents glittered in reply.

It was a strange collection of wealth. A kind of wealth only available to the poor. It was everything that could be stripped from a person while leaving the owner alive. Silk from a mother’s wedding dress, a candelabrum that had passed generations in the same family, a necklace that had adorned the throat of a woman on a forgotten evening at the opera. A trunkful of such things.

“And the other trunk?” Aaron asked.

“Furs,” one of the other men replied, “and the special package.”

“And cash in the satchel?”

“What there is. And a little gold, mostly in coins, but a tooth filling or two, also,” said the same man, whom Aaron knew only as Boris.

“Let’s hope it’s not a biblical trade,” laughed a squat man with an unintended beard. His name was Dov.

When nobody else laughed he added, “You know, from the Torah. An eye for an eye? A tooth for a tooth?”

Thin smiles all around.

Aaron looked directly at Teitel.

“And the special items?”

“At the bottom of the second trunk. When are we expecting your friends?” Teitel asked Aaron.

“They don’t have the same curfew. They may want to wait a while longer, until it’s been dark for a while and people have settled in for the night.”

“Well, it’s okay, I brought cards,” Teitel said. “And this.”

He pulled out a bottle of slivovitz that had been hit hard already. Probably the one he’d shared earlier with Aaron.

The group gathered around one of the trunks, using it as a table, and Teitel dealt cards as the bottle passed from hand to hand, mouth to mouth. The air in the little space grew stale as they played and drank, its only escape through the hole in the wall.

A sound of something scraping on brick or rock caught Aaron’s attention and his gaze snapped toward the wall. Another scrape was followed immediately by a metallic click that Aaron knew was the sound of a gun safety snapping off. That sound came from his side of the hole, so Aaron kept his eyes locked in front of him, poised to leap forward or fall to the floor depending on what he saw or heard next.

Dust settled down into the lanterns’ light. A boot, a leg and then a second boot followed it quickly. Next came a voice.

“May I come in?” the woman in the boots asked.

The voice filled Aaron with relief and a joy that he kept entirely from his face and his voice.

“Please do,” Aaron said evenly.

The woman who was revealed when she ducked under the ledge belonged on a propaganda poster drawn to Goebbels’ personal specifications. Her eyes were Arctic blue, but more sympathetic than that. Her cheekbones were high, but not so high as to give her a Slavic look. Her lips pouted just a bit, sensuous. Her brow was high and clear, her hair edged toward the platinum side of golden, drawn back in a businesslike fashion.

Goebbels’ only quibble? Perhaps she was a little short of his ideals, standing 5-feet 3-inches tall. It was a fault that most men forgave her easily.

“Good to see you, Yelena,” Teitel said, walking over and kissing both of her cheeks.

“You, too, Lech,” she said, putting down the messenger’s bag she carried.

The other men nodded their hellos but said nothing. They continued to stare.

“Where’s everyone else?” Teitel asked.

“They’re being careful, taking different routes. Something has the Germans stirred up,” Yelena said. “But I doubt it’ll be too much longer. It’s fine, though. Gives me time to work out some details with Aaron.”

She turned to face him.

“And I have a message to pass on, as well.”

She picked up her bag again.

“We can use one of the rooms upstairs,” Aaron responded levelly, though his pulse picked up a beat or two. “I’ve got a few things stored there. The rest of you can stay down here in case Yelena’s crew shows up with the supplies.”

Teitel nodded. The right corner of his mouth twitched slightly. Aaron chose to ignore it and led Yelena out of the basement, leaving behind the smell of rotting cement.

The building they stood in was less crowded than most and, perhaps because of the darkness of the halls, everyone had retreated behind their doors for the night.

Aaron felt ahead for the door he wanted. A hand snaked its way into his other palm. He gripped it tightly, its slight warmth enough to thaw out the part of him that remained frozen between Yelena’s visits.

He found the metal door and opened it smoothly and quickly with a key from his pocket. He had to drop Yelena’s hand for a few moments while he did it. Once they were inside, he replaced that fingers’ touch with his arms, his lips, his body. She pressed back against him and their combined weight shut the door more loudly than they would have liked, startling them and forcing them apart for a moment.

Yelena recovered first.

“Damn. My nerves didn’t need that.”

“Don’t worry too much, everyone here is used to our banging by now. It’s hard to take down a wall quietly, even if it’s in a basement,” Aaron said, and now he smiled. He was pretty sure the last time he’d done so was more than a month before, when he’d last seen his wife.

“I hope you’re right. Every time we do this, I’m scared from the minute the planning starts until … Actually, I’m not sure when I’m not scared anymore.”

There were several cots in the room, she picked one and sat. Aaron sat down next to her. They could both feel the wooden rails give a little, despite her small size and Aaron’s ever-shrinking weight. He held her. She held him.

“If I’m not worried about the Gestapo showing up at my door, then I’m worried about you in here,” Yelena said. Aaron could feel her shaking her head, negating everything she’d seen and felt over the last year and a half.

“How are things outside the ghetto?” Aaron asked, trying for a lighter tone, though he didn’t feel light.

“It all looks the same, but everything feels different. It’s all so empty, the shelves in the stores, the streets themselves.”

She shook her head again.

“But, speaking of the world outside, I brought you some things I think you probably need.”

She reached her hand into her bag.

“I’m sure I need them. I can’t think of a single thing I don’t need,” Aaron said with a bitter laugh. “Neither can anyone else I know.”

Yelena pulled out a thick sweater, two warm shirts and even a few pairs of underwear.

“You would have made a terrific Jewish mother,” Aaron said. “Bringing underwear to the ghetto.”

He pitched his voice to a gravely falsetto. “‘At least when the Germans shot him, he was wearing clean underwear!’”

She picked up the tone.

“‘If he wasn’t, I’d have died of embarrassment.’”

They laughed softly together. It was a comedy routine they had shared since they’d met in a bar years before, when Aaron had begun his training in the Zendarmerie, far from Miasto.

Yelena Gorska had been bored but well educated. Aaron had been handsome and exotic — at least by the standards of the small town where they found each other. There were a thousand things they shared in common and more that divided them. All of it was entirely beside the point. Within hours, it was obvious to both of them that they were in love.

Yelena got an apartment with Aaron’s pay and he visited as often as he could during training. They called each other man and wife though no ceremony was ever held, socialized little and told only their closest friends. By then Aaron was estranged from his family. Yelena’s parents had both died young.

His training complete, the couple took a small house in the town where Aaron was assigned as a gendarme. A few years later it was there that the war found them.

Aaron became a soldier and told Yelena to go to Miasto, which seemed far enough from the front to offer some protection. She moved into a neighborhood he knew well, though he’d never lived there. When Aaron had been dumped into the city’s ghetto, he was able to contact her through a mix of bribes and telephone calls.

It was a strange business, but even as the walls had gone up, some lines had been left uncut. Everyone assumed that either they wouldn’t last, or they were monitored. Aaron had worked the phones carefully, using only the homespun code that had developed over the months of German occupation to ask his questions.

Aaron didn’t understand where Yelena’s courage came from. It was Yelena who had suggested that they work together to get supplies into the ghetto. It was she who bought favors from the Blue Police — Polish constables who had been coopted by the Nazis. Many of the Blue Police liked the Germans as much as the Jews did, and they were more than happy to be corrupted by the beautiful woman who cried so pitifully about her husband.

Such long and lonely nights she must have
, they thought.

And, at least until the tightening noose utterly strangled the Jews, the operation was highly profitable. Yelena learned that she had quite the head for business, making it grow and bringing in ever more supplies.

The smuggling would have been impossible if the Germans themselves were less corrupt. Even now, there was money to be pillaged from the Jews, so Nazis at all levels pitched in where they could, sometimes by looking the other way, sometimes by selling military stores. Greed, it seemed, made a better motivator than hatred.

Yelena was hardly the only one in business on the Polish side, of course. Men like Jaruzelski/Gersh had their own angles, and the competition was, at times, violent.

But the fact was that Yelena thrived, and because of it, Aaron and others survived.

This evening, so far, that meant clean underwear, and later there would be potatoes, bread, liquor, cigarettes, maybe even some meat. Oil for cooking, a little fuel for heating, perhaps.