Death in Twilight (20 page)

However Boris might have been inclined — to fire or to drop his gun — he didn’t have time choose. His head exploded, too. A bullet had struck it from very close range.

SS men had manifested in the cellar through the hole in the wall. The sound Aaron had heard had never been Yelena.

As the German who had first spoken made his way down the stairs, Aaron realized he and Teitel both had their hands raised over their heads without having been told to put them there.

There was no question of fighting. Aaron had no impulse to do so. Fatalism and perhaps relief overwhelmed him. There was no more fear of being caught because he had been. It was over. The tension in his back ebbed.

Aaron felt no surprise at all when he recognized the Nazi who came down the stairs. The man wore the same black leather coat at the massacre in front of Breslaw Hospital. The same silver death’s head was pinned to its lapel.

The man had no trouble recognizing Aaron, either.

“I told you I’d see you again,” he said.

Aaron could only nod. No smart remarks came to mind. He was terrified of this man who stood a full head above him and had the shoulders to back up his height. Even when Aaron had eaten better and more regularly, he would hardly have been two-thirds of the man’s width.

“Hermann Clausewitz, Section IV,” the German said, now speaking Polish. He stuck out his hand as if to shake Aaron’s, and when Aaron instinctively moved to reciprocate the gesture, Clausewitz twitched at the speed of lightning and smacked him with his open hand. It felt and sounded like thunder, and Aaron fell to the ground.

He had only a second to realize the man who had hit him was the man addressed in the note he’d found on Berson’s body.

Someone brought Aaron roughly back to his feet. Clausewitz struck him again, and this time his hand was closed.

Aaron’s eyes opened again as his feet bumped up the stairs, his shins catching painfully more than once. He tried to see around him, but all he could do was peer down between his own legs. From that view, he caught a glance of Teitel being carried up behind him. The blood that was dripping from Teitel’s body showed that Aaron’s friend hadn’t benefited from any kind of favoritism.

Aaron tried to move a little and that was how he discovered that his hands were cuffed behind him. He tried to get his feet under him, if for nothing else than dignity’s sake, but kept tripping. He had no choice to but allow himself to be muscled through the main hall and out onto the darkened street. There were three black Gestapo cars waiting with their lights on and engines running.

Clausewitz was illuminated by one of the beams and Aaron caught a glimpse the man talking to someone who barely came up to his waist. When Aaron saw the tiny figure was haphazardly wrapped in brown cloth, he knew immediately who it was.

Clausewitz handed the girl something and even patted her on the head, though his palm could have swallowed it entirely. She took what she was given and ran off as fast as Aaron had ever seen her go.

“I was right to call you Sparrow,” he muttered beneath his breath. “Look at how you sing.”

Aaron was thrown into the back of one of the cars and Teitel was loaded into another. Clausewitz climbed into the front passenger seat of the vehicle in the lead and the small convoy rolled forward.

Aaron’s head was swimming. Gestapo men bracketed him on either side, his hands were pinned behind him and reality was beginning to break through the shock.

He began to fear for what would happen to him, the torture he could expect and then death.

And he thought of Yelena, the broken rendezvous and where she might be. He guessed she was in a position much like his or dead already, summarily executed. But the stupidest part of his mind wouldn’t let go of the hope that she had been warned somehow and had fled.

A checkpoint was coming up. Aaron first saw it through a blur. As they drew close, he realized the blur was snow. It had just begun to fall. A brief stop at the guard hut, some conversation between Clausewitz and the men on duty, a little curiosity on the faces of the Jewish policemen on guard and it was done.

The barrier lifted, the cars picked up speed and, for the first time in months, Aaron left the Miasto ghetto.

Chapter 14

T
he first thing that Aaron noticed on arriving at the prison/ headquarters of the Gestapo was the friendly smile on the face of the officer at the desk who welcomed him. He seemed genuinely pleased that Aaron had been able to spare the time to become a prisoner of the Reich.

It was clear that the man had a sense of humor, as well.

“The name on the reservation?” he asked.

“Goering, Hermann,” Aaron replied, hoping his own humor would be appreciated.

“Ahh! Reichsmarschall! I can’t say we’ve been expecting you, but a pleasure, nonetheless.”

“Cut the shit, Himmelfarb,” Clausewitz, the Gestapo officer who had captured Aaron, said. “Just get the fucking paperwork filled out and get him in a cell. We can all have our fun, later.”

“Ja vol,” Himmelfarb replied, the smile still on his face, though not quite as bright.

Aaron handed over his papers and the ritual began. All the various boxes had to be ticked. Even if Aaron were going to disappear, the event would need to be properly recorded.

Seeing the process was well in hand, Clausewitz shrugged his massive shoulders, rubbed the top of his bald head for a second and announced he was leaving.

“But don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be back to speak with you much sooner than you’d like.”

He didn’t laugh like a villain in the movies as he walked off. Aaron had half expected it, but supposed the gesture would have been gratuitous.

Shortly thereafter, the proper forms were filled out, Aaron’s identity papers were filed away somewhere — forever more out of his reach — and there was nothing to keep Aaron from becoming one more wretch trapped in the stone hell around him.

The door that opened to Aaron’s right had always led to the cells, as far as Aaron knew. The complex hadn’t been built by the Germans, but rather taken over by them. It had been a place of fear long before they came. Common criminals, thieves and murderers had been kept here by the Poles, as had political prisoners, including some of note over the past century. Aaron felt their collective fear radiating off the walls. He could smell it wafting down a stone-lined corridor with few lights. He could hear it coming from cells downstairs.

A young, blond, blue-eyed example of perfection followed behind him. The man’s face was sweet, one that invited trust, but the gun he held at the ready showed no remorse for its role in the prison’s brutality.

As the two walked forward, the door closed softly behind them. The final muffled snick of the catch was definitive. It wouldn’t open again, even if Aaron asked nicely.

Doors on either side of the passage looked heavy, but the third one they passed on the right did little to block out the sounds of the woman being tortured inside. She was chanting a prayer in Yiddish in between screams. The same few words were offered up to God over and over again, even as Aaron heard the sound of flesh slapping against flesh. From the rhythm of her broken voice, he was sure she was being raped. His heart shrank in his chest. He lowered his head and must have slowed until a shove reminded him of the expected pace.

A little further, Aaron saw a broken old man with a mop, working vigorously. There was a scrap of black cloth on his head in a vaguely circular shape and a white band with a blue Star of David on his sleeve. The man leaned heavily on the mop as he dragged it back and forth, staring blankly. Aaron turned his head just enough to look the man in the face and realized he’d been mistaken. The man wasn’t very old at all. His mouth was puckered and misshapen because he had no teeth. His gaze was blank because one eye was swollen nearly shut. Where the other should have been, there was nothing.

Aaron doubted the poor soul was there to clean, but rather as an abject lesson for new arrivals.

Aaron turned to see how this sight affected the beautiful young man who was his Virgil through the Inferno. The guard’s face gave away nothing at all. He might as well have been a clockwork figure.

Aaron shivered — as well he might. His coat, sweaters and shoes had been taken from him before his registration at the prison. He’s seen no record being made that would link him to his clothes. It seemed unlikely he would ever wear them again. The floor of the corridor, and now the steps down below the ground, were colder than ice, though his breath didn’t fog.

The lighting on the stairs came from a single round fixture. It illuminated hardly anything at all. Aaron’s numb feet soon missed a step and he was heading toward the ground when a hand shot out and pulled him back. Aaron again turned to look at his escort, but found no new sign of fellow feeling. It seemed that Aaron’s breaking his neck wasn’t part of the plan at the moment.

The staircase ended at another stone corridor that felt so solid, it could only have been underground. Two guards flanked the entrance, a third man, who stank of boredom, sat at desk. Aaron’s escort gave his prisoner’s name and status and was given a cell number in return.

The cells lined both sides of the hall, and each one was filled to the point where every man was pressed against his neighbors. Prisoners didn’t have to stand, the pressure of each other’s bodies kept them upright. Aaron saw an arm sticking out beyond the bars of one cell. The skin had a bluish tinge. It wasn’t moving.

There seemed no way Aaron could be squeezed inside any of the cells, but the young German didn’t try. Instead, eventually, they came to a cell with no one in it at all and no furniture of any kind. Aaron was invited in and landed on his face.

The bars closed behind him.

The smell of piss and shit and vomit enwrapped him. The cold nuzzled his cheeks, his chest, his legs, his feet. Aaron lay down and curled his body into as small a space as was possible, hoping to use his own body’s warmth for comfort. He built a wall between himself and the mumbling and shrieking of the men in the other cells.

He sensed Death waiting patiently outside.

They came for Aaron after an indefinite, gray time. It wasn’t that he’d slept, exactly, but for a time his conscious mind had left his body. His gauziness was aided by the blows his head had already taken. Reality, dreams and visions were sometimes hard to tell apart as he waited for his torturers.

He was sure that torture would be the next step. There would be questions about his partners, his operations, his intentions, and Aaron would volunteer none of the answers.

But how long could he hold out? Forever? For Yelena’s sake, he hoped so, but Aaron was in no mood to kid himself. If even half of what he’d heard about the creativity of Nazi interrogators was true, he figured it would be a matter of a few days if he were lucky, hours if he wasn’t.

The blond guard was elsewhere when the cage opened. Instead, two SS privates screamed at him to get on his feet.

“Raus, Juden!”

He wasn’t a man with a name in this place. He was a Jew and nothing else.

When Aaron climbed too slowly to his feet, one of the soldiers stepped forward and grabbed him under the arm. Aaron was jerked up and incidentally slammed heavily into the wall. The breath went out of him, but he didn’t dare fall.

As this was happening, the other man in gray kept his machine gun pointed into the cell. If Aaron had planned to feign weakness and tackle the guard, he wouldn’t have made it a single step.

Finally allowed to stand on his own, Aaron began the march back up the corridor, past the other cells and toward the stairs. The body of the man who had died was still pressed against the bars. The odor coming from the cages was hardly to be believed. Aaron thought he would have gotten used to the stench after however may hours he’d lain in it, but passing this close to its source, he retched. His stomach was empty. A thin stream of clear fluid came up.

“Stop that!” one of the guards shouted. “I’m not cleaning up after a fucking Jew.”

Aaron thought of the man with one eye and the mop, shuddered and worked hard to keep his stomach in place.