The first thing he heard was the soft,
muffled sound that fists make when they strike the body—not the
face, the body, where they don’t leave any marks. Then, as he
stepped inside, he could see them—or at least the man as he huddled
over his victim—and the sounds changed. It was the face now, and
the curses were well within Christiansen’s working knowledge. “You
little whore. You bitch, so you thought you could hold out, did
you? You worthless, ugly old tramp. . .”
It was just as well. The stupid bastard was
too busy with his righteous wrath to notice anyone coming up behind
him. The shadows of the surrounding buildings closed over all three
of them as Christiansen moved in, the coil held in both hands now,
with a big double loop, like a halo he was about to try on. grasped
delicately with the tips of his fingers.
He wasn’t more than five or six feet behind
the man when suddenly both the beating and the curses stopped. A
hand went into the overcoat pocket, but Christiansen didn’t wait to
see what it would bring out. He stepped forward, dropped the loop
over the man’s head, and pulled.
He pulled hard—he wasn’t fooling around with
this one. A sharp backward yank and the noose went tight, cutting
off a sound that might have been anything, perhaps just a grunt of
surprise. A knife clattered against the stones.
He pulled again, even harder, and the man
jerked backward, just as if his legs had been pushed out from
underneath him. With the ends of the coil held in both hands,
Christiansen started dragging the man along the pavement, back into
the darkness.
“
I suppose, like everything else it loses
some of its terror with repetition,”
Mordecai had said, but
that was eyewash. Killing was killing, and it never got any
easier.
It takes very little time for a man to die
like that. For a few seconds, as the noose pulls him, he kicks and
tries to scream, and his bands claw at his neck so that they draw
blood, but only for a few seconds. Unconsciousness comes quickly—in
a quarter of a minute he’s as good as dead. The hands go limp and
the fighting stops, he’s just a weight at the end of a string. And
then, if you don’t let go, in another minute or so he really is
dead. Christiansen put his foot on the back of the man’s neck,
keeping the catgut taut, until he was sure.
It had a way of embedding itself in the
flesh, so it wasn’t very pleasant to unwind. As he slipped the coil
back into his pocket, he glanced up and saw the woman, realizing
with a shock that he had forgotten all about her.
She hadn’t moved. She was still crouched
against a wall, staring out over her knees—frightened, of course,
but alert and wary. That she had just seen a man garroted was not
what was uppermost in her mind. She wanted to know what
Christiansen would do next.
The first impression was confirmed—she was
about thirty. It was a face that ran a little too heavily to bone
to be quite pretty, but she wasn’t bad. The eyes that peered up at
him from under the heavy brows were intelligent if perhaps a trifle
small. Her heavy frame and reddish-brown hair, cut short—after all,
she had been in prison—made her look like a farm girl fallen from
grace.
“Would he have killed you?” Christiansen
asked, in English. It was a sudden inspiration. It established his
credentials as a neutral.
She didn’t answer; at first he thought
probably she hadn’t understood. And then she glanced down at the
knife that was still lying on the cobbled pavement next to her left
foot. Of course she had understood. It wasn’t her fault if strange
men asked stupid questions.
“Here, we can’t have you freezing to
death.”
He took off his overcoat—hell, he wouldn’t
die of exposure—and placed it carefully over her so that she was
covered almost up to the mouth. She didn’t seem impressed by the
kindness.
“What’s it to you?” she asked.
. . . . .
The room was too large to be heated
efficiently by the tiny coal-burning fireplace, and dinner
consisted of bread, boiled ham, a little cheese, and coffee
liberally adulterated with chicory. Because she liked being paid in
American money, the landlady wasn’t asking any awkward questions.
In fact, Christiansen had the distinct impression that she and
Sonya had done business before. Sonya seemed to know her way
around.
“Eight months I was in that stinking place,”
she said, to no one in particular as she lay on her side in front
of the fireplace. She had taken a bath as the absolute first thing;
she had said she wanted to rid herself of the smell of
disinfectant. And now, she said, she wanted to get roasted, like a
joint of meat. “And all because I gave a Russian major a bad time
when he wanted to cheat me on the price. These people give you
eight months for spitting on the sidewalk. I started studying
English in 1942, just in case things went the wrong way, and then I
get caught in the stinking Russian sector.”
One injustice seemed to rankle as much as the
other. She turned over, so that her back was to Christiansen, who
was sitting in a massive chair that could have been the throne of
the Hapsburgs. She wasn’t the modest type; she wasn’t wearing
anything except a huge white towel tucked in under her arms, and it
was plain how pink the fire had made her bony shoulders and the
backs of her legs. She wanted to be warm and comfortable, and to
let her dinner digest. And she wanted to complain about the
Russians.
“Christ, what pigs. I was lucky not to catch
the clap in there.” She sat up, wrapping her arms around her legs
so that her head rested on her knees. She had hardly even looked at
Christiansen.
“I thought it was a woman’s prison,” he said,
aware that he sounded like a chump. What did he care? The point was
to keep her talking.
She let her head roll a little to one side
and then, quite suddenly, gave him a knowing smile, as if they
shared some secret.
“The guards never let that stop them.” A
short, bitter laugh escaped her lips. “Christ, they must cut each
other’s throats to be posted to that stinking place. For them it’s
just the biggest cat house in Vienna.”
Christiansen still had half a cup of coffee
balanced carefully on his thigh, he picked it up and allowed
himself a sip. It was something to do, since she seemed to be
waiting for some response. He just wanted her to go on. He wanted
to hear about the inside of Mühlfeld Prison.
“I guess it must have been a pretty bleak
time for you,” he said quietly, as if stating the obvious. The
coffee was extremely bitter and, of course, there was no sugar. He
must have made a peculiar face because the woman smiled.
“Is that how you usually pick up girls?” she
asked. “Hanging around prisons waiting for the garbage to be thrown
out?”
“Not as a rule, no.”
The smile kept tugging at the corners of her
mouth as she studied his face with an almost embarrassing
frankness. It was impossible to tell whether she liked what she saw
there or not, and probably it made very little difference, even to
her. Christiansen decided he really wasn’t interested in a
professional opinion.
“Do you want to sleep with me?” It was just a
question, on the order of “Would you like a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want? Or did you just kill
Otto for the fun of it?”
“Was that his name?”
“Yes, but don’t feel sorry—he was no loss. He
wanted me to come back to work for him. He would have carved me up
good, except for you.”
Her eyes narrowed with what was probably
supposed to be smoldering seductiveness—she seemed to imagine he
was about sixteen. It was almost funny. When she saw it wasn’t
working, she stopped.
“A pity,” she said. It was almost possible to
believe her. “You know, you really are a nice looking man. I don’t
get one like you every day. So tell me, what is it you do
want?”
The silence was awkward, almost dangerous. It
was the last question Christiansen felt inclined to answer, partly
because this was not anyone he could trust and partly because be
hardly knew himself.
“Perhaps I’m just a good Samaritan.”
“Yes, sure. And I’m the Virgin Mary.” She
laughed—it was a delicious joke, apparently. And then suddenly the
joke was over and her face tightened.
“I’ve seen men killed before, you know.” With
a quick movement of her hand she brushed a strand of hair back from
her face. The gesture carried a certain brutal authority. “We’ve
had the war and the Russians, and I haven’t lived with my eyes
closed. You’re no tourist. That was a very professional job you did
on Otto—he never even made a sound.”
Then, with a kind of pleasant sigh, she
stretched out full length on the rag rug in front of the fire. She
covered her eyes with the back of her right hand, and her stomach
rose and fell slowly with every breath. Christiansen was a very
dangerous man, she had apparently decided, someone who murdered as
if he had been born to it, but what was that to her?
The towel around her slipped open a
little—perhaps she had intended it to—uncovering her right side,
all the way up to the rib cage There was a scar, about four inches
long, running down Her belly just inside the soft mound made by her
hip bone. It was still fresh, angry and red at the edges. After a
moment she pulled the towel back into place.
“You don’t like it, do you.” she said,
slipping her fingers in under the fringed edge. “I don’t like it
either—a scar like that is bad for business. Christ, what a mess
they made of me in that place.”
“Where? The prison?”
“No, the hospital. I had to wait two hours
for the ambulance, damn them. I thought my guts would pop
open.”
“There isn’t a hospital in the prison?”
Christiansen tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. The
chair creaked beneath him as he moved.
“No, just an infirmary. They have a big,
smelly Russian nurse there who couldn’t cut a splinter out of your
finger. I think she’s queer for the girls, you know? You don’t go
near the place unless you’re really sick, and then they have to
send you to the hospital.”
Christiansen smiled at her, perhaps a little
uncertainly. He didn’t want her to say anything more. He didn’t
want to look at her. All he wanted to see was the image in his
mind, an ambulance pulling out through the prison gates.
7
It was a few minutes to ten when Christiansen
crossed the Salztorbrücke back into the International Zone. Sonya
was probably asleep. He had given her enough money to keep herself
for at least a week and she had told him everything she knew,
content not to ask why he was interested. She would stay there in
the room.
Where else would she go?
she had asked. He had a
key. He had a feeling she would be useful later on.
Apparently the shift had changed, because the
guard on the Russian side of the bridge wasn’t the same one who had
warned him about the whores in the Augarten. This time it was a kid
of perhaps seventeen, who went over every page of Christiansen’s
passport as if he imagined it to be forged and was looking for a
mistake. He seemed to resent his failure when he handed the
passport back and waved Christiansen across.
Christiansen decided he would walk back to
the hotel.
They had agreed before leaving Munich that it
was best to find rooms in the American sector. They had made their
bookings in advance, with Hirsch, Faglin and Dessauer in a hotel in
the next block. There was no point in looking like a
convention.
He anticipated no problems with either Hirsch
or Faglin—they were both basically technicians, willing to take
Mordecai’s word for it that he was someone they could work with.
But Dessauer, whom the others treated like the baby of the family,
couldn’t seem to forgive him for having broken his nose. Finally,
as if it was the most devastating insult he could think of, he had
called Christiansen a
goy
, a word Christiansen had had to
think about for perhaps a quarter of a minute before he could even
remember what it meant. Everyone learns a little Yiddish in New
York, but that had been a long time ago. The outburst had been
followed by an embarrassed silence.
There were lights everywhere in the
International Zone. Christiansen remembered Emperor Franz Josef’ s
remark about putting a tent over Vienna to make the biggest brothel
in the world, and then be remembered Sonya and decided to put the
subject out of his mind.
When he got back to the room he found that
everyone had arrived. Hirsch had brought sandwiches and bottles of
beer with him from the train station, and they were all having a
late-night picnic. Christiansen accepted a bottle of the beer and
told them about Mühlfeld Prison.
“It’s a real bank vault,” he said sullenly,
holding the bottle by the neck “We’ll never crack her out of there.
We might as well try knocking over the Kremlin.”
“It’s still just a prison.” Jerry Hirsch sat
staring at his sandwich, as if he rather expected it to bite him.
“We have people who practically specialize in stuff like that,” he
went on. “Acre Fortress wasn’t exactly a cracker box, you know. We
could bring in a few demolition experts. We could be in and out
before they knew we were there.
Christiansen shook his head, frowning.
“It won’t do—I read about Acre. We don’t have
an adjoining bath house here so that all we would have to do is
punch through a wall. We don’t have a ready-made army waiting for
us on the inside. This is Austria, not Palestine. We don’t have a
friendly local population ready to hide us until the Russians get
tired of searching for us.”
“He’s right, Jerry.” Mordecai smiled glumly
from where he stood by the huge rosewood wardrobe that separated
the room’s two beds. “And there is the political side of things to
he considered. The Haganah gets a fair share of its arms from
Czechoslovakia, so we don’t want to antagonize the Russians. It
would be better from several points of view if this operation could
look like some quite ordinary criminal matter—the local underworld
retrieving one of its own.”