“Besides, it leaves us with that much more
for our big bang.”
Faglin once more adjusted the straps of his
shoulder pack, wishing as he did it that Hirsch wouldn’t talk that
way. He started to say something but saw that Hirsch was grinning
at him.
“Come on, Amos, Relax,” he said. “Time for
lunch.”
The Russian Zone was not very accommodating
to the casual tourist—there were hardly any restaurants at all, and
the few food stalls were almost empty of goods and jammed with
customers trying to barter furniture and old clothes for a few
ounces of coffee or half a dozen shrunken little apples. Everyone
seemed to have plenty of money, it just didn’t seem to be worth
very much.
But Faglin’s parents had come from Vilna, so
he had grown up speaking good enough Russian to convince any
Austrian that he was probably a plainclothesman in the NKVD. Added
to that, he had British money. The combination proved irresistible
to a grocer on the Blumauergasse who, after a few minutes of
hectoring, disappeared into his back room and returned with a paper
bag containing several large hard rolls, lemonade in an old wine
bottle, and a sausage that must have weighed close to four pounds,
and all for the ridiculously low figure of two pounds ten—enough to
buy dinner for four in almost any restaurant in London. The grocer
was frightened of Faglin, so he only robbed him a little.
“Can we steal an ambulance?” Hirsch asked,
using his American jackknife to carve off a large piece of the
sausage as they walked along.
“Yes, that will be easy. We know
approximately when the call will be coming in, so we can wait
outside near the loading dock. Perhaps, if the ambulances have
radios, all we’ll need to do is listen. If not, we’ll know when the
stretcher bearers come running. In either case, we stop
them—quietly—and take their places. Surely there will be someplace
in the ambulance to hide the bodies; we want the police to find the
correct number of corpses, so we’ll have to take them along.”
“Then it’s a good thing the weather is
cold.”
“You have a twisted sense of humor,
Jerry.
“If you think so, then let’s sit down here
and eat.
“You worry too much about corpses, my friend.
They have too much reality for you.”
They sat with their legs over the edge of the
canal embankment, the bottle of lemonade between them as Hirsch
hacked away at bread and sausage with the rough efficiency of a
stonecutter. It was almost ten in the morning, and the milky
sunlight hardly seemed to warm them at all. Now and again they saw
Russian soldiers patrolling in twos along the Handels-Kai or over
the bridges, but this deep inside the Zone no one was
interested.
“Then let’s go to the prison first,” Faglin
said abruptly, as if announcing the results of some inner dialogue.
“We can leave the hospital until later. The less we show ourselves
around there the better.”
“But first finish eating, Amos. You look like
a scarecrow. Didn’t your mama ever tell you to eat?”
“She hardly ever told me anything else.”
. . . . .
Mühlfeld Prison was as forbidding as
Christiansen had led them to expect. The back gate was massive,
even taller than the surrounding stone wall, and behind it there
was a chain and behind that a parked troop carrier. No one was
coming in or out without the Russians’ approval
But at least now they knew where to bring the
ambulance.
“They will send a guard with her,” Hirsch
said. They were walking by on the opposite side of the street,
hunched inside their overcoats like men who were in a hurry to be
someplace warm. The soldiers, of course, paid no attention. “It
will be a problem if they send more than one.”
Faglin laughed out loud. A gray squirrel,
startled by the sound, glared at them from the safety of a tree as
they passed.
“And why should they do that, do you
suppose?” The laughter subsided into a cough as he shook his head
at the absurdity of the idea. “A girl doubled up with stomach
pains, who doesn’t weigh fifty kilos to start with—what do they
need, an army?”
“You know how they are about security. Every
prisoner is a counterrevolutionary, and every counterrevolutionary
is either Trotsky or the Czar. It’s a matter of prestige, I
suppose. We have to make plans for a second guard.”
“All right. One will go in the back with the
girl, right? I’ll take care of him. If there’s another, we’ll say
it’s too crowded and have him sit up front with you. Have a pistol
taped under the dashboard. Just give me a chance to take care of
mine first. I don’t want him jumping out of his skin at the sound
of gunfire.”
“How will you do it?”
“How do I always do it?”
That seemed answer enough. Hirsch nodded
soberly and they continued along their walk. It amused Faglin to
think that even twenty years ago they might have been a pair of
rabbis out to take the air and dispute a passage of Torah. Now they
were soldiers, plotting a raid on a Russian prison. It constituted
progress of a sort.
They took the long route, going several
blocks out of their way in order to approach the prison from a
different direction, so they could have a look at the front
entrance.
“Well drive around this way to the Heine
Strasse,” Faglin said, looking out at the broad, almost empty
boulevard. Petrol was difficult to find in the Russian sector.
“It’s quicker to the hospital, so it’ll be what they expect. After
you’ve turned the corner onto Tabor Strasse, I’ll kill my guard. I
forgot to ask—will you have any trouble shooting with your left
hand?”
“I am left-handed.”
“Oh, that’s right. I had forgotten.”
“Will you look at that?”
They were at the corner, some thirty meters
from the checkpoint at the prison’s main gate. A rather pudgy man
in a green suit, carrying his overcoat across his arm, was having
his briefcase searched as he came out. He looked nervous, although
obviously there was nothing for the guards to find, he kept running
the flat of his hand across his thin, rather oily-looking hair,
glancing around as if he would have liked to take flight but didn’t
quite have the courage. It was impossible to tell whether he had
seen them or not.
“You recognize the face, of course,” Hirsch
said, putting his hand on Faglin’s arm and gently pulling him
around so that their backs were toward the checkpoint.
“Of course. It’s Plessen.”
It was a terrible thing to have happen, worse
even than putting the Russians on the alert. The Russians, after
all, were not very active antagonists, but Plessen was the enemy
incarnate. Faglin struggled to regain his composure, cursing
himself for being surprised. After all, what could be more natural
than for Hagemann to have tracked Esther Rosensaft to the gates of
Mühlfeld Prison and then send his tame lawyer sniffing around?
“Perhaps he didn’t recognize us.”
“Don’t be daft.” Hirsch tightened his grip as
they walked slowly back to the shadow of the building. “He’s not a
fool. Besides, I had a little run-in with him in Naples once—he
tried to denounce me to the police. We can’t take the chance. We
have to kill him.”
Yes, they would have to kill him.
They split up at the next corner, where they
were well out of sight of the prison, and Faglin set off down the
street at a dead run. Plessen was heading back toward the Augarten,
where he might have a car parked, so they had to intercept him
before then. Hirsch would go back to the Heine Strasse and follow
him from the opposite side of the street, making himself suitably
conspicuous—the idea was to herd him straight into Faglin’s waiting
arms. But first Faglin had to be there, so he had to hurry.
One thing, at least they didn’t have to worry
about. Plessen, no matter how scared he was, wouldn’t go rushing
back to Mühlfeld to throw himself on the protection of the
Russians. His had not been a blameless life. One word would be
enough to ensure that Plessen disappeared into a Soviet labor camp
forever, and he knew it.
As soon as he reached Tabor Strasse, Faglin
started north. His way was parallel to the Augarten, and if he
looked to his left he could see the bare back of one of the old
palace buildings. By the time he crossed the Heine Strasse his
breathing was nearly normal again. Plessen was nowhere in
sight.
Plessen wouldn’t get away—Hirsch was right
behind him, and Hirsch had a pistol. If he met anyone, or tried to
enter a car or board a bus, Hirsch would shoot him dead. It would
be noisy and dangerous, but that wouldn’t do Plessen any good.
Hirsch was an excellent shot.
Still, the Russians weren’t going to be
lulled to sleep by having people murdered on the streets of their
sector. It wouldn’t make anything any easier.
Faglin glanced around nervously, resting his
head on the back of a bench where, possibly right up to the final
bombardment of the city, people had sat waiting for the bus to
come. The green wooden slats on one side had been torn to
splinters, probably by a piece of shrapnel, and the absence of legs
on that side made the whole structure tilt like a gangplank.
Plessen was nowhere in sight. It was all very
disheartening.
Faglin slipped his hand inside his pocket,
and the fingers automatically closed around his knife. He had only
to squeeze the sides and the blade would spring straight from the
hilt, like a snake sticking out its tongue, just hold it against a
man’s heart and squeeze; the point would go through anything, even
leather. It was a remarkable weapon. He had taken ft off a dead
Syrian in 1943. He wondered if he would ever have a chance to use
it.
He saw Hirsch first, and then, about three
quarters of a block in the lead, pushing along as fast as
discretion and his stumpy little legs would allow, Plessen. It was
only necessary to wait.
And then, as luck would have it, a pair of
Russian soldiers turned up, out on their evening patrol. They were
coming straight down the Tabor Strasse, their machine guns, hanging
from shoulder straps like a couple of ladies’ handbags, swinging in
a little arc with every step, from right to left and back again.
Faglin lifted one foot up to the seat of the crumbling bench and
began to make a great display of retying his shoelace.
Plessen would reach the corner first. The
question was, what would he do when he saw the two soldiers? Hirsch
was only ten or twelve meters behind him, and he would have to
assume that Hirsch was armed and hostile. After all, he knew Hirsch
well enough to have made trouble for him with the Neapolitan
police, so he knew what kind of man he had to deal with.
Hirsch was not the timid type. A couple of
Russian peasants in infantryman uniforms weren’t going to stop him
if he felt like killing Plessen. He would simply kill them first,
one shot apiece, before they ever had a chance to raise their
weapons . Plessen wouldn’t have any illusions about that.
And. besides, one word in that quarter and he
was on a prison train for the Arctic Circle. Hirsch didn’t have
anything to hide, but Plessen did.
Hence there was no chance that he would want
to do anything but avoid the Russians. After all, he didn’t know
for certain that Hirsch wasn’t just going to scold him for being a
bad sport about the Italian business. So he would sheer off, trying
to avoid them both.
But which way? Across the street? No. there
was too much traffic—he wouldn’t much fancy waiting at the
intersection for a break, not with Hirsch at his back. So he would
go up Tabor Strasse. He would turn the corner, walk straight past
the two Russian soldiers, and keep going.
And that was where Faglin would intercept
him. He took his foot down from the bench and began making his
leisurely way up the sidewalk.
He passed the two Russians; they never so
much as glanced at him. They were too busy talking about the
cheapest places to buy cigarettes. He heard the sound of their boot
heels dying away behind him.
He stayed back from the curb. He wanted
Plessen to walk by him on the left side. His right hand went into
his overcoat pocket. He didn’t look behind him.
One, two, one, two, quick march. Not running,
not seeming to hurry very much, but eager to be on his
way—Plessen’s footsteps clicked against the pavement with the
regularity of a metronome. Faglin allowed himself to slow down to a
stroll. The Russians, by now, were probably twenty-five or thirty
meters behind them.
As Plessen tried to move around him on the
sidewalk, Faglin reached out and took him by the right arm, just as
if they had been friends all their lives.
“I hope you are not carrying a gun.” he said
in English—Nazis always found the sound of English so reassuring,
and he didn’t want Plessen to bolt on him. He tightened his grip.
“But you wouldn’t have been stupid enough to carry a gun into a
Russian prison, now would you. After all, they let you come back
out.”
“What is it you. . .”
Plessen’s eyes bulged out of his thick,
cunning face. He was frightened, but he had the composure not to
raise his voice —that was something.
“A word with you, Herr Doktor—nothing more.
We’d like to know what brings you back to historic Vienna.”
They kept pace together at a slow walk, arm
in arm for all the world could have seen. In another quarter of a
minute they would reach the next corner. It seemed an immense
distance.
“Are you one of the Jews? Are you with—? I
never—”
“Yes, Herr Plessen I am one of the Jews.”
Faglin allowed his left hand to run slowly up and across the back
of Plessen’s overcoat, until his arm was resting in the friendliest
manner possible on the other man’s shoulders. The fingers of his
other hand curled around the hilt of his knife. “But all of that
was a long time ago, and all of us are here on other business. Tell
me, what do you hear these days from Colonel Hagemann?”