Authors: Jason Fields
“Well, I didn’t come here for the tea,” Aaron said.
“That’s good,” Shemtov said.
“Tell me what you saw when you found Berson.”
Shemtov paused, brought together the scene in his mind and slowly began to speak.
“A body lying in the street,” Shemtov said. “Leopold Street. He was sprawled on his back. His face was easy to see and not so damaged that you couldn’t identify him immediately, if you knew him.
“Blood and brains had splattered out and to the right of his body. His hat was lying off to his right side, a meter or so away. The blood was frozen when we got there, so I suppose it had been a little while since he was killed. Since all the pieces of the skull and all that blood were right there, I’d guess he was killed in the street.”
It all matched with what little Aaron remembered.”
“And I’m the expert?” Aaron said lightly. “You sound as if you’ve dealt with this sort of thing before. Were you in the police before the war and no one told me?”
“No, but I read a little English,” Shemtov said. “Dashiell Hammett.”
“Who’s that?” Aaron asked.
“An American. He writes about private detectives.”
“Too bad he’s not here to take the case.”
“Yes.”
Shemtov took another sip of the terrible tea.
“Did you find any witnesses?” Aaron asked.
“How much do
you
want to help our little police force?”
Aaron nodded his understanding.
“The few people Finkelstein could catch up with were studiously ignorant,” Shemtov said.
“I had to ask. Berson worked nights?”
“My understanding is that he preferred it.”
“Do you know if he was walking around alone?”
“Well, he shouldn’t have been, but since his partner was out with a bad leg, maybe he was,” Shemtov said.
“Wait, Martin Gersh wasn’t with Berson on patrol?”
“No. I heard from someone else that he got hurt early in the evening, so Berson went back out alone.”
“Do you know where Gersh is now?”
“I think he’s in Breslaw Hospital. At least that’s what I heard,” Shemtov said.
“Okay. Well, I guess I know where I’m going next. Thanks,” Aaron said.
“Sure.”
“So, otherwise, how well did you know Berson?”
“We never worked the same shift, and I’d never met him before the Germans came,” Shemtov said.
“But do you know anything about him?”
“He seemed nice enough the two or three times I spoke with him,” Finkelstein said.
“Really?
That’s
what you’ve got for me? ‘He seemed
nice
?’”
“Well … ”
“You can do better than that,” Aaron said in his best coaxing, just-between-us voice. “Was he a good cop?”
“Sure. Or at least I never heard anything.”
“Really? Nothing?”
“Well, one always hears things,” Shemtov said grudgingly.
Aaron waited.
“All I’ve heard was that he and his partner … ”
“Gersh?”
“Yes, Gersh. All I heard was that they did a little more business than usual with the black market. Maybe that they didn’t treat the citizens with much respect,” Shemtov said cautiously.
“That’s it?” Aaron asked. “Nothing more specific?”
Shemtov shook his head.
“What can you tell me about him personally?”
“That I truly know nothing about. I mean, I know he wasn’t from Miasto originally, that he didn’t have any family here. I think he was religious, but that’s it.”
Aaron was sure Shemtov knew more, but judging by the tone of the man’s voice, he wouldn’t get it out of him without inflicting pain.
“Anything you can tell me about Gersh, Leon?”.
“Again, we didn’t work the same shifts, but I will tell you that he’s not someone who’s easy to like. Actually, if I think about it for a minute, it might be impossible to like him.”
“How so?”
“Well, to start with, he knows he’s better than everyone else,” Shemtov said. “Some people think it, but he knows it.”
“Okay.”
“Also, his eyes look like he borrowed them from a corpse. Nothing there at all.”
“Well then, he has plenty in common with his friend Berson,” Aaron said. “So, where is Berson now? Nobody’s mentioned a coroner.”
“We thought it best to get him out of sight as quickly as possible,” Shemtov said. “We took him to cellar a block from where he was killed.”
“Where exactly?
“It’s 331 Varlamow. He’s in a basement under some rubble if you want to see him.”
“It could be helpful, though I’m hardly a doctor,” Aaron said. “Anything else you want to tell me? No, scratch that. Anything else I need to know?”
Shemtov smiled with sardonic sympathy.
“Other than who did it, I can’t think of anything.”
Aaron stood, then leaned over to massage his legs for a minute. He thanked Shemtov for the little help he’d been able to give.
Before leaving the building, Aaron turned and knocked on Blaustein’s door. He got no answer and felt no urge to linger.
The cold was no surprise when he had walked through the miasma of the crowd, past the guards and back onto the heather gray streets, but it temporarily blinded him to his surroundings. He shook himself, raised the collar of his coat and started toward the hospital.
A
aron Kaminski walked toward Breslaw Hospital under the gray light of noon. If anyone knew Berson’s business, it would be his partner. People became intimate during long nights on patrol. Aaron knew it from his own experience. He remembered many nights spent bored to death, waiting for something to happen and hoping that it never would. Talk helped to fill the time and to deal with the nerves.
Aaron figured that Martin Gersh might not have witnessed the killing of his partner, but there was a good chance he would know what was behind it.
The only concern Aaron had was the severity of Gersh’s injury. He assumed it was bad, only desperation drove people to seek help from the abattoirs the ghetto’s hospitals had become.
Aaron was forced to make his way more slowly than he would have liked. His route led him straight through the ghetto’s mostly lively district. Everywhere, despite the cold, clumps of men gathered to sell the literal clothes off their backs to each other. It was a race to the depths of poverty.
One pale man in a suit made up mostly of unidentifiable stains held up a small dressing gown made of fine satin, fit only for a child of fewer than two years. It was the kind of thing found in second-hand stores, sold or donated by parents whose children had grown.
“Our youngest died last week of typhus. She no longer needs it,” the man told the prospective buyers, some of whom had a cynical look. It was impossible to know if the story was true or was meant to drive up the price through pity. It occurred to Aaron that the man may have stolen the dress and never had a child at all. No one in the ragged crowd was willing to part with even a groczy for the gown, so the seller moved on in search of a more biddable congregation.
Aaron pushed his way past the beggars’ impromptu auctions, kept his chin tucked into the collar of his coat, his black hat tilted forward against the wind.
Other, less pitiful, wares were also for sale on Gdansk Street, which had once been a promenade of shops and cafés where people went to display their wealth. Signs of that recent past poked through the shabbiness of Nazi occupation. Little flecks of gilt remained in the names carved above storefronts. Flickers of light occasionally escaped the clouds, causing the gold to glitter gaily. Those flecks were stubborn. No one had yet been able to peel them and sell them for a bowl of soup or a thin piece of cheese.
A very few men and women who could be glimpsed inside café windows, something warm or warming to drink in their hands and, occasionally, laughter could be seen if not heard. The ghetto was not yet entirely a world of have-nots, though the divide had never been so sharp. Just a few doors down from a certain Café Bourdain was a bakery that had been turned into a soup kitchen. The line was long, the people pinched, their eyes either empty or filled with avarice for the steam they could see rising from the huge pots inside.
Many of the men and women, some with children clutched tightly by the hand, would be sickened by what they ate. Common ingredients included the dregs and spoiled leftovers of better meals enjoyed by others.
Those afflicted would quickly give back whatever nutrients they’d been able to take in. The truly unlucky would end up in a doctor’s care, or worse, in a hospital like Breslaw.
Aaron had been lucky, so far, and stayed healthy. But he’d seen inside, either visiting people he knew or selling supplies. It was a desperate situation.
Since the entry points to the Jewish quarter had been cauterized from the body of Miasto and its inherently superior inhabitants, medical care had deteriorated to a nearly medieval level, though even leeches were inaccessible to the doctors. There was no flowing water to fetch them from.
Medical centers were set up in former storefronts, and doctors’ surgeries were converted to small hospitals by the Judenrat for the common good. There was no lack of doctors or nurses; though nearly everything else, from medicine to bandages, was in short supply.
Before the war, Breslaw Hospital for Mental Defects and Diseases — where Aaron was headed — had functioned as an asylum for all of Miasto. Polish sufferers of retardation and schizophrenia resided cheek by jowl with Jews with similar diagnoses. The Poles interned had not been separated out when the Germans came because they were no more welcome in the New Order than Jews were. Similar patients who had been housed at other facilities were consolidated into Breslaw, if they hadn’t simply been shot.
Now, a wretched place that had always been crowded was reduced to a mass of stinks and screams. With no soothing medications, little food and no hope of ever being rid of lice or dysentery, it was hard to know who had less hope, the inmates or their watchers.
Added to Breslaw’s burdens was the need to care for the physically ill. There had always been a small emergency clinic for residents of the area. Now many people had nowhere else to go and Breslaw refused to turn anyone away.
As Aaron turned the corner past what had once been another bakery and onto Breslaw Street, named for the hospital, he was stopped dead by the sight of at least half a dozen gleaming black vehicles. Cars such as these would hardly have caused comment just a year before, but today there was menace behind their headlights; the growl of their engines keyed fear in those who heard them rev. The sound meant death. The machines carried the Gestapo.
The Gestapo was Aaron’s worst fear. It was everyone’s worst fear.
Officially named Section IV of the German occupying authorities, the Gestapo was given the responsibility of quelling dissent within the Reich and conquered territories. Jews were, of course, a threat by the very definition of Hitler’s regime.
There was nothing else to be but brave. Aaron continued walking toward the hospital, trying to look invisible in plain sight. Just another dark coat with a white armband and blue star. Nothing to catch the eye, nothing to remark on.
Only the drivers were left in the cars, the back seats were empty, the men who had ridden in them were nowhere to be seen.
Just keep walking, Aaron told himself, keep walking.
The granite entrance to the hospital was close, perhaps one hundred meters. Aaron could see the elaborate façade, carved into stone, the many windows, all of them barred.
Forward, forward. Don’t look at the cars. Don’t not look at the cars. Forward.
The wind picked at his collar, trying to reveal his face. Aaron wanted to give these men nothing to remember, so he pulled it closer again.
Aaron was almost surprised when he wasn’t stopped, when he walked past the gleaming Mercedes-Benz without hearing a hard voice call him over. Perhaps the men were more interested in the warmth of the cabins than in a Jewish man walking by himself in the one part of his city that a Jewish man could walk freely.
The hospital’s massive door didn’t move easily and Aaron felt eyes on his back as he struggled. A few seconds more, a heave and he was inside. A few seconds after that, he wished he weren’t.
The Gestapo men in their black leather coats were inside the hospital’s arched front hall, along with perhaps a dozen soldiers whose Schmeiser MP40 submachine guns seemed pointed everywhere at once. They looked nervous. A meaty giant, in a leather coat that would have required several cows to make, was talking to a frightened man — a doctor from his once-white coat and tangled stethoscope — who seemed to be denying everything, whatever everything was.
“I’m sorry doctor,” the giant said in a voice that sounded as if it had never been touched by regret and was as deep as the man was tall. He spoke in German. “A decision has been made. These are hard times. There are great shortages and we all do our part. Every man must give his all to ensure victory.”
“But how does this get you any closer to your victory?” the doctor asked in his own stilted, schoolboy German. He was as angry as he was afraid.
“Arbeit macht frei, doctor. Arbeit macht frei,” the Gestapo man said. “Please have everyone ready to be moved to the work camp within one hour.”
“But many can’t walk Herr Clausewitz!”
“I’d like to judge that for myself, if you don’t mind, doctor. Just bring out those you consider ambulatory and we will visit with each of the rest to make an assessment.”
The hospital’s gray-faced guardian pitched his head down in despair.
“You know doctor, your skills would be of great use in the work camp, too,” the devil in the black coat said.
The doctor was broken. He turned to an attendant at his side, who Aaron hadn’t noticed before, and said what he had to in order to begin the evacuation.
“Thank you, doctor. I’ll leave a few men here to help you. You’ll forgive me if I disappear for a little while to ensure the transports are on their way.”
The German doffed his hat sardonically and headed for the door, which Aaron was unintentionally blocking.
“Excuse me,” Aaron muttered, his eyes cast down.