Death in Twilight (22 page)

Okay.

On the other hand, Aaron had been beaten, drowned and would soon be dead. The tall man had been rude.

“No.”

Aaron’s voice was gravel and he spoke from somewhere beyond the cell.

The other man reached out a hand to shove Aaron, expecting no resistance from the shade in front of him. Aaron grabbed that arm and used it as a lever to spin the man around, kicked the man’s knees out from under him and then kicked him in the back of the head, planting him facedown on the stone floor. There was just enough room because the sudden violence had sent everyone else pressing back against the iron bars of the cell door.

The extra weight caused the metal to groan audibly, but no guards came to take a look. As long as no one escaped, it seemed like the Germans didn’t very much care what went on in the cells.

The young boy Aaron had noticed squeezed through the crowd. He looked down at the man below him and spat, but said nothing. Then he turned and wormed away, deeper into the press of bodies.

It was feeding time at the zoo. One by one, the men were allowed to come up to the front of the cell and receive a cup of broth from the same metal mug. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and men trying very hard to steal a second helping by taking their comrades’ place.

As Aaron made his way to the front, he found himself looking for the boy. He wasn’t visible until Aaron ducked his head down below chest height. All the men seemed to be treating him like an obstacle to be gotten around. The boy was getting no closer to the broth, nor would he without help.

Aaron swam through the crowd until he reached the boy, bent down and somehow lifted him. With the boy hugged to his chest Aaron waded toward the broth.

And men moved. The crowd parted.

Broth for both of them, and then Aaron put the boy back down, and resumed his own place along the wall. The boy had no words of thanks, but stayed at Aaron’s side.

Aaron shook his head and closed his eyes, leaned back in the spot he’d earned and made the world go away.

For less than a minute.

He heard his name called from outside the cell. At first he didn’t move.

He heard his name again.

He knew the guard would offer him nothing that he wanted.

The third time they guard asked it was by turning a hard jet of water into the cell. Spraying up, spraying down, spraying from one side to the other. The water was deadly cold and the men tried their hardest to get away from it. Aaron felt ever-increasing pressure on his chest. The boy had slipped out of sight, trying to take refuge below the crowd.

It was hard to speak and harder to be heard above the general roar, but those nearest Aaron must have figured out what he was saying because suddenly they did everything they could to let him through. It wasn’t long until Aaron was vomited up and stood at the front of the cell, admitting whom he was.

The door opened. Aaron was taken. The trip was a whirl of gray stone and institutional paint but, in the end, he found himself in the room with the metal chair, the bright lights, the pliers and the hand-cranked generator.

Here, too, was Hermann Clausewitz, infinitely patient.

Aaron was again put roughly in the metal chair, his arms tied ruthlessly behind him. He slumped as much as he could, enjoying the weight of his body resting comfortably on his ass, as God had intended.

“Better?” Clausewitz asked, seeing Aaron’s posture.

Aaron said nothing. If he began to talk, where would he stop?

“They fed you?”

No reply.

“You know when I said I’d see you again, that first time we met at the hospital?” Clausewitz asked. “How did I know such a thing?

“I have to admit, I didn’t. It was simply an effort to intimidate you. It worked, didn’t it?”

Aaron kept his face blank.

“I know it did,” Clausewitz said. “It always does, especially with you people. Even if you did serve in the Zendarmerie and the army.”

So, Aaron was more than a name, a man in a basement. He was a file now, with “facts” and details.

“I’m sure you led the retreat. You Jews are always the first to run, if you can be made to fight at all.”

Was Clausewitz going to insult him to death, Aaron wondered? It would make a nice change from physical injury.

“You know what? I’m just going to stop talking,” Clausewitz said.

Aaron couldn’t help himself.

“That would be nice.”

Clausewitz actually laughed.

“Well, you’re not going to like what I do instead any better.”

“I suppose not,” Aaron said.

He didn’t know why, but he was talking, and now it was all just a matter of time.

There were electrical shocks, punches and kicks, there was diesel fuel to drink and even breathe. There were fingernails slowly extracted.

Aaron worked hard to be somewhere else, but this time there was nowhere to go.

And this time he talked.

Some of what he said was even true.

Chapter 15

“Y
ou’ve just had an enormous stroke of luck,” a voice in Polish said to Aaron. He was lying on the floor of another crowded cell, bleeding from cuts above his eye, lashes to his back and a gash in his thigh uncomfortably near his scrotum — not that it would have been comfortable anywhere else. The other prisoners had given him some room in order to let him die in peace.

“How so?” It was a faint croak, but it still surprised the men in his cell that Aaron could make any sound other than moans.

“You’ve just been shot trying to escape,” the Polish speaker said cheerfully.

Aaron summoned enough energy to point an incurious eye at the man. It was the eye that could still open at all.

“So, get the fuck up! Don’t just lie there like a dead man,” the Pole, who was wearing the uniform of the Blue Police, said.

Aaron said nothing, nor did he move.

The man and his partner opened the door to the cell. They were large men with no inclination toward mercy in their faces. They reached down and grabbed Aaron under the arms, turning him into a grotesque marionette, unable to either resist or cooperate.

The rest of the men who shared Aaron’s cell cowered, clambering on top of each other in their effort to get as far back from the open door as possible. Standing in each other’s shit and dying slowly of starvation, dysentery and a lack of oxygen was better than the only other alternatives they knew of, being beaten or shot. There was no one to defend Aaron, no matter how helpless he appeared, and soon there would be no one to remember him.

Aaron was dragged in front of the German who was in charge of the floor. There was an exchange of words — perhaps an envelope? — and soon the journey continued up a flight and then down another corridor of the prison. This hallway, too, was lined with closed doors. Here, though, the sounds of horror were mixed with those of administration, including clattering typewriters and endlessly ringing telephones. The walls were lined with the grime of a million hands over a thousand years. The smells ranged from vomit to disinfectant and back again. The light that came down from the fixtures was itself a shadow.

The little troop pulled up in front of no door in particular and the policeman who had spoken opened it. Instead of a torture chamber, an office desk and chair were revealed. The telephone that sat on the desk was silent. On the visitor’s side of the desk, was something that could only be called a chair by convention. It looked more uncomfortable than a church pew.

“Put him there,” the man waiting in the room said, pointing to the guest “chair.”

Aaron’s ass met metal with surprising speed. He grunted and was still.

“Go,” the man said, speaking to the two guards. “If he attacks me, I’ll call you.”

The two officers glanced down at Aaron who appeared catatonic and, laughing, left the room. Even the sound of the door slamming behind them elicited no response from the prisoner.

“Aaron. Aaron!”

Nothing.

The man whose office it was pulled a small first aid kit from a drawer in his desk and locked the door. Before bandaging any of Aaron’s wounds, he brought smelling salts under the helpless man’s nose. Aaron jerked back in the seat and his one eye opened. The other man spoke softly and quickly.

“I’ve got good news and bad news. Your mouth looks really painful so I won’t ask which you’d like to hear first.

“The good news is you’re not going to be executed tonight.”

“Okay,” Aaron managed, not sounding like he cared very much.

“The bad news is that you’re going to a camp.”

Aaron stared, unblinking, but with a dawning recognition and more than a little surprise.

“Don’t look at me like that!” the main said fiercely, but without raising his voice. “You’re only getting this chance because I had you shot trying to escape. At great personal risk, I must add.”

Aaron worked his jaw and felt it loosen a little beneath the bruising.

“Your man said the same thing, Novak. What the fuck do you mean?”

Aaron’s voice was akin to a rusty saw cutting through particularly dry wood. If Novak, once Aaron’s partner in the Zendarmerie, hadn’t been trying to patch him up, he wouldn’t have been close enough to pick out the meaning in the mumbles.

“You really are a lucky bastard,” Novak said, attending to the gash in Aaron’s thigh. “They must not have wanted you dead, yet. They didn’t quite nick the artery.”

Aaron grunted interrogatively and insistently.

“I had a man who was scheduled for the labor camps shot and he’s in the record books as you. So, now you are going to the labor camps in his place.”

Novak smiled benevolently at Aaron, and then shouted as the wounded man used his bare foot to smash down on his shoe.

“You killed someone for me?”

This time his voice was clear enough to be easily understood.

Novak was hopping and grabbing at his foot.

“What did you want me to do? What was your idea other than being beaten to death or shot? I’m your friend!”

Could that last part be true? Was Novak still a friend?

The two men had met shortly after Aaron had joined the Zendarmerie. Novak was one of the few officers who had shown Aaron any kindness. Or at least no derision. The Pole was from cosmopolitan Warsaw. He saw no reason to object to Jews, and he enjoyed a good fight. Novak had helped to beat off the men who Aaron couldn’t take care of himself.

When Aaron was posted to the town where he would eventually meet Yelena, Novak had gone with him. They had been fixtures at each other’s dinner tables, and liked to think that they were the scourges of the town’s criminals.

Aaron had been swept up into the Army after the bombs began to fall, while Novak had disappeared, leaving Aaron with no idea what had happened to him.

But here Novak was, in the heart of Nazi Miasto, saving him one more time.

Aaron began to weep. It was all far, far too much: his pain, the ruined plan, Yelena gone. And now a man sentenced to death for no other reason than to let him live? Covered with wounds both psychic and physical, he wasn’t sure how much farther he wanted to go.

There was no way to communicate all this to Novak, and little chance that a man who was able to commit murder so lightly would understand. Aaron didn’t try.

After a minute or so, Novak was back on two feet. Seeing Aaron’s tears and hearing his sobs, he pulled a flask from his jacket. He tipped it back, drinking deeply, and then put it to Aaron’s lips. Despite their soreness, Aaron was able to seal them around his salvation. He drank.

“You know, there’s nothing really so serious about your wounds,” Novak said, with false cheer and a smile intended to win his friend back.

Aaron said nothing.

Novak became serious again.

“It doesn’t matter how you feel now. You’re going to live — at least for a while longer. From what I’ve heard about the camps, there’s no guarantee of longevity, but still … Life is life. Isn’t that what you people say is important?”

“You say that after what you just did?”

“I didn’t say all life is equal,” Novak replied. “If the war has taught us one thing, it’s that. I killed a man who was going to die anyway so that my friend could live. We all have to make choices. What’s changed is that every little choice we make today is between life and death.”

“We aren’t supposed to make those choices for others.”

“But we do,” Novak said. “If you keep a crust of bread for yourself in the ghetto, some child dies somewhere. But I know you eat, otherwise it would have been you who died. You chose yourself. You’re lucky today, because I chose you, too.”

“It isn’t supposed to work like that.” Aaron’s tears were back.

“No, it’s not,” Novak agreed.

Finished with the bandages, the Pole returned to his side of the desk and picked up his phone. It only took a few seconds for the person on the other end to answer.

“What time does the train leave for the camp, today?” Novak asked. “Good. Then send someone to my office in five minutes to pick up Rosen.”

He listened for a second.

“Good,” he said again, and hung up, turning to Aaron. “You may live to thank me, yet.”