Authors: Jason Fields
“You better know soon or the Germans will tear us apart!”
“I understand that, sir,” Blaustein said.
Zimmerman took a deep, deep breath.
“So, what happened?”
Blaustein told him all that he knew, without gloss. Zimmerman might be a preening boot-licker, but he was also a sharp man, quick to see the ramifications of a problem.
“You have no one who can handle this?” Zimmerman asked.
It didn’t speak well of Blaustein’s command or the men in it, but he believed the circumstances made truth the best option.
“No, sir.”
A strange smile appeared on Zimmerman’s face.
“Lucky for us all that I’m not you, then,” Zimmerman said. “Kaminski!”
The clerk came into the room so quickly that it was hard to believe he hadn’t been there the whole time. He stood and waited respectfully to be addressed.
“Wasn’t your son some kind of policeman before the war, Kaminski?” Zimmerman asked.
The clerk shook his head, but not quite in denial.
“He worked with the
goyim
, yes.”
“But as a policeman?” Zimmerman prompted.
“He joined the Zendarmerie, sir.” Kaminski said. It was clear he didn’t approve.
The words triggered Blaustein’s memory. It had been a famous event in Miasto’s Jewish community when a young man had joined the national police force that was better known for brutality against Jews than for hiring them. Blaustein was surprised he hadn’t thought of Aaron Kaminski himself.
“But he’s here now, with us?” Zimmerman asked his secretary, meaning inside the Jewish enclosure.
“Aaron was seconded to the army when it was clear the Germans were going to invade. He was captured, along with his unit,” Kaminski said. “He was on his way to a prisoner-of-war camp nearby, but one of his ‘friends’ turned him in to the Germans as a Jew. So yes, he’s here.”
“Please bring him to my office, as soon as you can. We need him,” Zimmerman said.
“We don’t speak very often, sir,” Kaminski said stiffly. It was difficult for him to defy Zimmerman in the smallest matter — he had been with him as clerk and secretary since long before the war — but still he hesitated. “Could you possibly find someone else?”
Kaminski meant another man besides Aaron, but Zimmerman took him to mean that Kaminski himself didn’t want to run the errand.
“I think it would be fastest if you went. He wouldn’t deny his own father,” Zimmerman wheedled, “would he?”
Kaminski would have preferred the reunion to take place under less dangerous circumstances, and by his own choice, but he said nothing else. Instead, he turned and left the room to grab his coat.
I
t was not easy to wake up hung-over in the Miasto ghetto in early 1941.
Alcohol — that miraculous liquid that can dissolve the fabric of reality — was one of the first resources to disappear after the district had been walled off. Still, for the enterprising, there are always ways to leave the world’s troubles behind.
The return journey, though, tends to be on the painful side. Aaron Kaminski felt like yelping when his eyes squinted open. He stared into the all-too-bright murk of his small room, dreading a day that was unlikely to be better than the day before.
Aaron could feel a red-hot, electrified knitting needle slowly piercing his right eye. The only distraction from it was the unproductive nausea it brought along, almost like a side dish at the devil’s dinner table. A thin whiff of vomit rose from near his tender head.
“Ayyyhhh,” Aaron groaned.
He rolled onto his side, making sure to take the various scraps that made up his bedding with him. They were made up largely of the remnants of three military blankets he’d kept after being told he wasn’t good enough to be a German prisoner of war. He had little else to show for his decade outside of the Jewish community, except for the warm coat he’d been issued when called to duty, and a pair of tough army boots.
Aaron shifted again and a bottle fell off the bed and into the gloom, clanking but not breaking. Aaron suspected from the sound that its final resting place was under the bed.
Deserter
, he thought.
Aaron reached his hand out into the cold air, swept his fingers along the floor and finally felt the rectangular shape of a pack of cigarettes. If booze was rare in the ghetto — or at least hard to find — cigarettes were almost as precious as food. A family of four could have eaten for a week on the number of cigarettes that remained in the pack.
A little more fumbling and Aaron had a tube filled with tobacco clutched between his lips, waiting for the flame. More digging — he finally had to sit up — and he was able to find flimsy matches that required a number of frustrating strokes to catch fire. The light of the match hurt his eyes but, at last, Aaron was finally able to draw smoke deep into his lungs.
And choke. And splutter. And hack.
These were not good cigarettes.
The paper was stiff enough to be cardboard and the filling was execrable, likely 80-percent sawdust, Aaron thought with disgust. He took another deep drag. The smoke tasted of roofing tar and burning rubber.
But whatever the taste or quality, Aaron was grateful for his cigarettes. He’d worked hard enough for them. Sometimes he wondered if his addiction alone had led him to become a smuggler. There was no other way he could have afforded them. Or anything else for that matter.
Thanks to his skills and contacts — many of them developed in his time as a police officer — he’d brought more than a ton of illicit merchandise through the main gate at King Bolesłas I Chrobry (the Brave) Street. More had come over, under and through the weak points of the “wall” that surrounded the Jewish ghetto.
Aaron and the boys, girls, men and women who worked for and with him, knew the wall intimately. Well enough to know it wasn’t a single wall at all, but a makeshift structure of boarded up buildings, concrete barricades topped with barbed wire, closed-off streets and the occasional machine gun nest. The holes in its boundaries were what allowed the ghetto to survive. Without links to illegal food and other supplies, the ghetto’s privations would become even worse.
So, really, I’m doing a public service
, he told himself when he needed to.
Aaron ran a hand through greasy hair that mixed dirty blond with sprays of gray. He kept it at a bristle length that would have done an angry drill sergeant proud in order to keep the ghetto’s billion lice at bay.
There was a water tap in his small room. Aaron carefully placed his cigarette on the chipped rim of the grimy sink, turned a knob, and hoped for water. The pipes groaned, clanked and finally emitted a thin stream of brown liquid. He took a drink, brought a wet hand to his face, rubbed, and tried telling himself that getting out of bed would be worth it.
The water was cold, then just cool. Morning seemed to finally become a possibility.
A sharp rap on the door brought him to full wakefulness and sent him diving for a large knife that was tangled in his bedding. The knocking continued, became more insistent. Aaron expected the door to crash open at any second, the Gestapo to pour in after.
Instead he heard a small voice.
“Open the door, Aaron.”
Aaron quietly crept toward the door and peered out through a narrow crack in the wood.
It was his father, and he was alone.
Shit
, Aaron thought.
The elder Kaminski raised his hand to knock again. He was unlikely to go away. Aaron knew his father to be persistent, if nothing else.
Accepting the inevitable, Aaron removed the latch, another latch, a chain and a small bolt. Even then, it was hard to move the doorknob more than a few degrees without hurting his hand. If the only guest you’re expecting is the secret police, there isn’t must point in being hospitable, Aaron figured.
He stayed in the door’s shadow in case he’d missed any armed men who’d accompanied his father. The possibility didn’t seem out of the question. It wouldn’t even have been much of a surprise.
For a few seconds, Aaron’s father stared into the darkness. His son read some conflict in his body language, and saw the fear coupled with it. But it wasn’t enough fear to keep the old man outside.
Yitzhak Kaminski’s eyes needed time to adjust to the dark, even after standing in the dim hallway for several minutes. Slowly he was able make out the outline of his son’s face. When Aaron finally stepped forward into the twilight provided by the open doorway, his father couldn’t help but step back.
In front of Yitzhak was a large man with a deeply scarred face, relatively clean-shaven in a city hidden behind beards. The man’s expression was hard and wary, and not like anything he’d seen on his son’s face before. Ten years apart and his only child was nearly unrecognizable.
What Aaron saw was a small man who seemed to have gotten a little smaller. The light of humor he was used to seeing in the corner of his father’s eye was extinguished. Despite the fact that it had been his choice to leave his family behind, Aaron suddenly hoped it wasn’t his actions that had put it out.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” Aaron said, with a weak smile.
“Truthfully, I wasn’t expecting to come.”
Both men stood silently for a minute. Finally it was the good manners that Yitzhak had taught his son that won.
“Would you like to come in?”
“Thank you,” Yitzhak said a little stiffly.
“Have a seat, if you’d like,” Aaron said, pointing to the bed. There was no other surface available.
“I’m fine standing,” Yitzhak said.
Aaron wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or just realistic about how filthy his bed looked.
“A drink?”
Yitzhak shook his head.
“Aaron, the reason I’m here isn’t social.
“I’m shocked!” Aaron said.
Yitzhak ignored that.
“Mr. Zimmerman sent me to get you.”
“You still work for Zimmerman?” Aaron asked, not sure if he should be surprised. Yitzhak had worked for Mordechai Zimmerman all of Aaron’s life. Still, he hadn’t known that his father had followed the old man to his new job.
“Why would Zimmerman want me?” Aaron asked.
“Apparently, he remembers why you left Miasto,” Yitzhak said sourly. “Now he needs a gendarme.”
The older man’s tone let Aaron know that nothing had been forgiven. Aaron’s decision to join the world of the gentiles was still beyond the pale.
“He’s got a whole police force of his own,” Aaron pointed out. “Why in the world would he need me?”
“Because they’re incompetent,” Yitzhak answered. “Or at least that’s what Mr. Zimmerman seems to think.”
“And this has just become a problem now?”
“Someone murdered one of them. Now they need a real detective to find out who did it.”
Aaron took that last part as a complement, intended or not. “What makes you think I’d want to be a part of this mess?” Aaron said. “If we’re talking about an officer in the Jewish Police, there’s a whole ghetto that would want him dead. I’m not exactly broken up by the news, myself.”
Still, he paused.
Saying the words brought back a vague, vodka drenched, memory of stumbling into a corpse just before dawn. Aaron’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. Better to see how things played out, he thought.
Aaron began to fumble around, looking for the bottle that contained what was left of last night’s booze.
“You’ve handled murder investigations before, yes?” Yitzhak asked.
Aaron stopped fumbling for a moment and raised an eyebrow at his father.
“What would you know about the kind of cases I handled?”
“You made the papers, sometimes. The Jewish detective solves a case!” Yitzhak said. “They always seemed so surprised.”
“Well, flattery aside, I still don’t see why I’d want to get involved.”
“Mr. Zimmerman and Captain Blaustein — the police chief — seem convinced that the Germans would hurt people to find who killed the policeman.”
“Sounds like standard procedure,” Aaron said.
“Mr. Zimmerman thinks it would be better if we solved the case ourselves,” Yitzhak said, then shrugged.
Aaron thought for a minute. Having the Germans rampaging through the ghetto would mean a lot of people would die, maybe even him. On the three occasions the Germans had flooded into the district in the last year, thousands had been rounded up and put on gray trucks. Many hundreds more had been shot out of hand. Sex or age had made no difference.
And now, in particular, was not a good time to have the Germans on high alert, as far as Aaron was concerned. There was important business he needed to finish over the next few days.
Success! Aaron found the bottle he’d been looking for. He walked over to a shelf above the sink that held a few dusty glasses and plates. He briskly wiped out two of the glasses and handed one to his father.
“Isn’t it a little early?” Yitzhak asked.
“Is it ever early here? Even when the sun’s up, it feels like midnight.”
His father nodded and held up his glass. Aaron filled it generously, watching the clear trickle pour nearly like syrup in the cold. He was more sparing with himself, afraid of what his stomach might have to say.
After a large gulp, Yitzhak Kaminski felt a burning he hadn’t for a long time. He savored it. Whatever the liquor was — and he wouldn’t venture a guess — it reminded him of rough slivovitz, a Slavic favorite, or perhaps potato vodka, a Polish staple, or both or neither. It was terrible. Wonderfully terrible.
Aaron hoped the hair of the dog would help his stubborn headache.
After a few minutes, it did.
“Do you know the name of the officer who was killed this morning?” Aaron prodded.
“His name was Lev Berson,” the elder Kaminski said. “He was young I think, but I can’t remember his face, or even be sure I’ve seen him.”
“I don’t think I knew him,” Aaron said.
“Why would you have known him?”
“I know a lot of people. Let’s leave it at that.”
The two men drank some more. Yitzhak contemplated the man his son had become. Aaron tried to decide what he would do.
Keeping away from the whole mess seemed the better bet. He dealt with the Jewish Police every day and felt little sympathy for them. They universally took his payoffs, but that hardly recommended them.