Now the pistol wasn’t pointing at anything.
It was simply lying in the palm of his hand, an exhibit. He set it
down on a small table beside his chair.
“Perhaps you’d like to tell me what I’ve done
that I’ve got a Palestinian Jew following me around with a gun in
his pocket.”
“Perhaps you’d like to explain to us your
sudden interest in Displaced Persons.”
“I asked first.”
It was hot in the room. Leivick began
unbuttoning his overcoat. Finally he found himself a small, rather
ornate chair that had been hiding out of sight behind a dresser,
moved it to the center of the room, and sat down. The two men were
facing each other directly, across perhaps seven feet of rather
fanciful Persian carpet.
“You were in Havana ten days ago,” he said,
as if stating a neutral fact. “You murdered a former SS sergeant
named Gerhart Becker, living in that city under the alias of
‘Bauer.’”
Astonishingly, there was no reaction.
Christiansen never so much as blinked—they might as well have been
discussing the railway schedule. It seemed that nothing about this
man, absolutely nothing, was going to be easy.
“Three months before that, in Sao Paulo, one
Dieter Kurtz, also formerly of the SS, was found in a closet by his
Brazilian girlfriend, hanging from one of the hooks. He had been
strangled with a length of very heavy catgut, the E-string from a
double bass to be precise.”
He glanced at the cello which Christiansen
was still holding delicately by the neck, but once again, the man
might as well not have been listening.
“I happened to be in Sao Paulo just then,”
Leivick went on. He had decided not to be impressed with this
display of unnatural calm. After all, as Christiansen must have
realized perfectly well, the Mossad was not exactly a police
organization. “I was negotiating with Kurtz over a piece of
information. He was badly frightened and, as it turned out, he had
reason to be. If you had waited just one or two more days, Mr.
Christiansen, you would have saved me a great deal of trouble.”
“What makes you so positive any of this is my
business?”
“That was a double bass you were playing ten
nights ago in Havana, wasn’t it, Mr. Christiansen? I was sitting
rather far from the stage, but I don’t think I could have been
mistaken.”
The cold blue eyes narrowed slightly—the man
was actually amused. Of course he had killed Gerhart Becker and
Dieter Kurtz—and, could it be, one or two others about which even
the Mossad remained ignorant?—and clearly he didn’t give a damn who
knew it. All at once Leivick felt a certain helplessness.
“It would seem that we’ve been following the
same trail now for some time.” Leivick shrugged his shoulders, as
much out of resignation as anything else. There was no point in
threatening such a man. “We watched from a window across the street
while you climbed down onto Becker’s roof. We watched you leave an
hour and a half later. As a matter of fact, it was Becker who
alerted us to you, when he delivered that note to your hotel.”
“Had you been trying to make a deal with him
too? I’m surprised you didn’t call the police the minute you were
aware of his danger.”
The very blandness of the remark carried a
certain contemptuous irony—what business had anyone to hold
commerce with vermin like Gerhart Becker? Christiansen rose
suddenly from his chair, strode across the room to where his cello
case was lying on the floor like an empty coffin, and, with
touching delicacy, slid the instrument inside, like a father
lowering his favorite child into the grave.
“We had made a decision by then that you were
the more promising lead. Did you know that for over a year now
Colonel Egon Hagemann has been having his former associates from
the Fifth Brigade assassinated? Under the circumstances, it was a
natural enough mistake. We thought you might lead us back to
him.”
That, at least, elicited a reaction. As he
stood up from buckling the case lid closed, the muscles in
Christiansen’s jaw were working as rhythmically as a heartbeat. The
unreachable man had at last been reached.
Yes, this one too knew what it was to hate
with soul-killing intensity. He was human after all, and a
casualty.
“Is all of this about Hagemann? Is that it?”
Christiansen leaned back against the dresser, his arms folded
across his chest, making him look even more massive. “Because if
you have some private arrangement with Hagemann, you can just
forget it. As soon as I find him, he’s a dead man.”
Leivick, who had remained seated, threw
himself back into his chair until it creaked distressedly. He was
hungry past imagining, he felt as if the walls of his stomach would
begin caving in on him at any moment.
“Mr. Christiansen,” he said at last, glancing
up at that enormous and angry man with an expression of great
self-pity. “Mr. Christiansen, finding the Colonel is not the
problem. If you would be so kind as to inquire if the kitchen would
still be willing to send up something in the way of dinner, I will
tell you precisely where you can find him. Nothing would give me
greater pleasure.”
. . . . .
A quarter of an hour later a waiter arrived,
pushing a wing table covered with an immaculate white cloth. When
he had left there was a place setting for one, complete with a
crystal water glass and a small arrangement of flowers. The meal
consisted of melon, cold roast lamb, fennel hearts, sautéed
potatoes, apricot mousse, and coffee. Leivick hadn’t seen anything
quite like it in nearly ten years.
“I trust you weren’t kidding about Hagemann,”
Christiansen said as he sat down in his chair to watch Leivick
eat.
“No, I wasn’t kidding.”
“Then?”
Having killed the first big urge, Leivick
felt able to pause for a moment and pour himself a cup of
coffee.
“He’s in Syria just now.” He looked up,
smiling kindly at Christiansen, for whom at that particular moment
he harbored only the warmest feelings. “He stays at the Hotel
President Kuwatly in Damascus, in a suite on the top floor. In
another week he will travel to Spain, where he owns a house, but in
either case you would merely be throwing your life away if you
attempted to kill him. He’s very well guarded by his own people and
in both countries he enjoys the protection of the
government—informally, but none the less impenetrably. As you see,
however, locating him hasn’t been our difficulty.
It was encouraging, if perhaps a trifle
uncomfortable, to know that at least be had managed to secure
Christiansen’s undivided attention. In his vast, almost morbid
stillness, the man had a way of concentrating himself, of seeming
to focus his will like sunlight through a lens, so that one had the
sense that every corner of one’s mind was being opened to that
merciless white glare.
But Leivick wasn’t really bothered. Within
limits, he was prepared to be candid—he would have to be, or they
could end by having to fight Christiansen as well as the Nazis and
the Syrians. He was not the sort of man anyone wanted for an
enemy.
“What we need to do is to lure him out,”
Leivick went on slowly, filtering a teaspoon of sugar into his
coffee. “I have one or two pointed questions I should like to put
to the Colonel, and if he could be gotten away from his bodyguard
for a while he might be persuaded to answer them. After that, you
could kill him with my blessing. My government—when, in a few
months, we have a government, and when the Arabs give us a moment
in which to catch our breath—my government would probably give you
a medal for killing Hagemann. He is more our enemy now than ever,
and he has had a long and gaudy career as an anti-Semite.”
“You can keep your medal, but maybe you’d
better tell me why it’s so important to keep Hagemann alive long
enough to answer questions. What questions?”
Christiansen closed and opened his eyes with
almost deathlike slowness. His enormous hands were folded together
in his lap—he seemed indifferent to everything. It suddenly
occurred to Leivick that this was a man who understood he was
acting out his part in a tragedy.
“Mr. Christiansen, fair is fair.” Leivick
smiled wearily. The rest seemed to him inevitable, words rehearsed
many times already. He wondered why Christiansen didn’t see even
then that the thing was settled. “I have answered your first
question—you know now why we’ve taken such an interest in you. Now
you answer mine. What have you been looking for in the case
histories of our surviving remnant? What do you expect to find
among the DPs?”
The silence was almost a third presence in
the room. Life, hope, even the small, still hum of one’s own mind
seemed to have stopped for good and all. And then, for no apparent
reason, Christiansen turned his staring gaze to the wall behind
Leivick’s head. His voice was empty, almost toneless.
“The bait for your lure,” he said, and
Leivick knew they were within striking distance of a bargain.
“Mr. Christiansen, perhaps the time has come
for me to tell you a story.”
5
“You seem a clever young man; you must have
picked up all sorts of information about the Fifth Brigade while
you were hunting down its old membership. Did you know they were
garrisoned in Poland for a time?”
“Yes.” Christiansen nodded solemnly. “During
the second half of 1943, after their year of combat duty in Russia.
It was the nadir of von Goltz’s career, that eastern period, a
disciplinary bloodletting after. . . after Norway, and before the
establishment of the concentration camp at Waldenburg. They lost
about seventy percent of their numbers, without being permitted
replacements. I don’t suppose they enjoyed themselves.”
Leivick found himself studying the hard,
impassive face, pondering the significance of what he had just
witnessed there. Norway—yes, of course. He wondered why that had
never occurred to him before.
“Precisely. After Norway.” He smiled faintly
and shrugged his shoulders, doing his best not to imply that he was
presuming to understand anything. “One gathers that the
thoroughness and zeal with which they carried out their assignments
in that country were a bit much even for the SS. After all, Norway
is ‘Aryan.’ In Russia, on the other hand, they could behave any way
they liked.
“And, of course, that was even more the case
in Poland. In Poland they didn’t even have to worry about the Red
Army, only the odd rag-bag band of partisans.”
He paused for a moment to give Christiansen a
chance to say something, but that proved a fruitless
occupation.
“Colonel Hagemann and I have never met,” he
went on finally. “I hope and pray he’s never heard of me, and
during that part of the war I never troubled much with names. What
did I care about the identity of the Regional Deputy Commander, SS?
He was a German—that was the point. And the Germans were as
impersonal as demons. Nevertheless, that was where we had our first
contacts, in Poland.
“He was a famous man in that sector. I had
not the honor of being one of his victims, but I don’t feel
slighted. The Fifth Brigade did its very best in the time given
them. It has nothing to do with my current interest in him, but he
has much innocent blood on his hands.
“It was an accident of timing, really. The
day we broke out of Treblinka, I had been there ten months. General
von Goltz and his men were only recently posted to the region, so
perhaps, if we do them justice, they had never even heard of the
place. Even so, our paths crossed soon enough.
“We made our escape in August, 1943. Six
hundred men, more or less, out of the thousand or so still alive by
that time. We knew we were slated to be killed within a matter of
days; we were absolutely the last in line. The trains had stopped
coming—there were other, newer camps by then, where the process of
extermination was more efficient and, besides, Treblinka was not
equipped to make use of slave labor for the armaments industry. We
were burning the last of the bodies. We had ten thousand corpses to
go, and in the arithmetic of that place ten thousand corpses meant
a little less than two weeks. After that the Ukrainians would
massacre us, to be massacred in their turn by the Germans. So we
had to get out. It was a clear choice; escape or die.
“We had stolen a case of hand grenades, and
someone had managed to buy half a dozen rifles from
somewhere—probably from the Ukrainians, who were running a black
market in food and could be counted on to do anything for the right
price. I was one of those who broke into the storage hut where the
petrol was kept. The plan was to burn the whole camp down, kill as
many of the Germans as possible, and then scatter before
reinforcements arrived.
“I will never forget the moment I heard the
first series of explosions. I expected to die in the next few
seconds, but I have never known such joy. And then, all at once,
the southern watchtowers shot up in flames, and I was part of a mob
running for the antitank barriers. We didn’t think—we ran. To stand
still was to die, so we ran, not looking to the right or left, not
caring that the bullets were as thick as hornets and that men were
dropping all around us, merely running. Our very souls were in our
legs.
“The antitank barriers were simply low
concrete pylons with tangles of barbed wire strung between them.
Our masters hadn’t seriously considered the possibility of a mass
escape attempt; once in a while some poor devil, driven most of the
way out of his mind by despair, would make a rush for the fence,
but usually the Ukrainians with their machine guns would cut him
down before he had covered thirty meters. The defenses were deemed
adequate.
“But not on that day. The watchtowers were
burning, there were snipers in the windows of the barracks and the
kitchen, and hand grenades seemed to be going off everywhere. The
Ukrainians had other things to think about. I don’t suppose they
managed to kill more than one in seven of us before we reached the
outer barrier.