There was no sound now except the wind, high
up, pushing against the naked branches of the trees that stood
beside the sidewalk. A scrap of paper floated by on the street,
settling quietly to the stones every few yards, like an exhausted
ghost.
“Hagemann? You said, Hagemann? I—”
“Don’t lie to me, Herr Plessen.” With the
pressure of his arm, Faglin guided him around the corner. They were
safe now, quite away from everyone. “I’m not from the War Crimes
Tribunal, but I know what I know. So don’t take the trouble to make
up pretty stories. What does Hagemann want inside Mühlfeld Prison
that he sends you all this way?”
“Well, I don’t know. That is. . . He seems to
have friends. . .”
Faglin wasn’t even really listening. Nothing
that Plessen could tell him would be of the slightest interest, not
compared with the mere fact of his being in this place at this
moment. Actually, he was looking for a nice private place to get
rid of the body.
“. . . you know. I have my standards. I’m a
Doctor of Jurisprudence, you know. It’s a question of a client’s. .
.”
God, the man was such a fool—he probably even
believed some of it. About five meters in front of them, there was
the shell of a house. The walls of the surrounding buildings were
gouged by shrapnel holes, but this one seemed to have taken a
direct hit. There was a stairwell down to what had probably been
the servants’ entrance. It would do.
There was no one else on the street. Perhaps
people lived in some of these houses—people lived wherever they
could. Perhaps someone would chance to be glancing out his window,
but that wouldn’t matter. Sensible people did not report crimes to
the Russian authorities. If anyone saw, they would let the patrols
find the body tomorrow morning.
Plessen was still talking. “. . .It seems a
romantic interest. . .” He didn’t appear to notice when Faglin took
his right hand out of his pocket. He didn’t seem to hear the hard,
cruel snap as the blade shot out from Faglin’s gloved fist.
Faglin let his arm swing across, and the
blade caught Plessen just at the edge of his overcoat lapel. There
was a dull sound, like a cough, as it buried itself up to the
hilt.
People always acted so surprised when they
were stabbed. As Faglin took his hand away, Plessen stared down at
the knife that was sticking out of his chest like a coat peg and
the expression on his face changed, his eyes widening as if he just
couldn’t believe that it was there. The blade was buried deep into
his heart, so he was already dead—he simply didn’t know it yet. He
looked up at Faglin, who was still standing right beside him, and
he opened his mouth to say something, and that was when it
happened. He just died, from one instant to the next. His knees
started to fold under him, and even as Faglin was shoving him down
the basement stairway, even as his arm shot out as if under its own
power to grab for the iron railing, he was already a corpse.
At the bottom, perhaps three, perhaps four
meters below the level of the street, the body lay in a crumpled
pile. Faglin went down, pulled his knife loose, and wiped the blade
off on Plessen’s coat sleeve. He took the wallet from the breast
pocket. Let the police believe this was a simple robbery if they
liked—in any case, let them work a few days before they made an
identification. He took the briefcase as well. By the time he had
finished, Hirsch was already at the top of the stairs waiting for
him.
“You do nice work,” he said, smiling coldly.
“Now let’s get out of here. Christiansen will be waiting.”
8
It was the rule at Mühlfeld Prison that any
inmate receiving a visitor was confined in an isolation cell for
the twenty-four hours following. No one pretended there was any
reason for this, since no secrets or contraband could be passed
between people separated by heavy mesh screens, and certainly not
in the presence of two Russian guards, and it didn’t seem to make
any difference who the visitor was. Mother, lawyer, husband, NKVD
interrogator, agent of the International Red Cross—twenty minutes
of conversation in the reception room meant a day and a night in
solitary. It was the rule, that was all.
The cells were in the basement. They had
concrete walls and were very cold. There was one blanket. Esther
wrapped herself in it as many times as she could and lay down on
the plank bed. It was the first time she had ever been here because
it was the first time she had ever had a visitor.
Every ten or twenty minutes the eye slit in
her door would darken, which meant that someone was outside looking
in. Sometimes it was the guard on duty—she could hear the regular
click of his boot heels as he paced up and down the corridor—but
sometimes, probably, it was Filatov. For over a week now, he had
been watching her constantly. He never seemed to go off duty; she
could feel his eyes on her wherever she went. It was as if he hated
her, or was afraid she might find some means of running away, or
both. Perhaps he was simply waiting for another chance to shove her
into another empty room.
She had let him push her down onto the
blanket, had turned her face to the empty wall, and had tried, with
all the energy she could command from her giddy, half-paralyzed
mind, to force herself into being somewhere else. She couldn’t
fight him. She didn’t try. But she didn’t want to feel his clammy
hands on her face and shoulders, she didn’t want to hear the way he
grunted over her. She thought perhaps, if she willed it with enough
conviction, if just this once there was no part of her to say,
No, live!
then perhaps she might die. Could anyone just die
like that? Yes, she believed they could.
But she couldn’t. It must have been that
somewhere inside her, hiding where she couldn’t find it, a piece of
her had still been clinging shamefully to life.
“To live is a
moral duty”
her father had told her in Lodz, when a chunk of
mold-covered bread the size of one’s fist was something to fight
over, when every morning clean-up crews found more and more wasted
bodies in the streets. “
Every Jew knows that his only victory
can be to survive.”
So she had made it her business to survive,
and had learned there was no victory in it. There was only
remorse.
Afterwards Filatov had petted her and told
her about all the favors that would come to her now, all the gifts
and privileges. They always did that. She waited, looking away,
with all the apparent stupidity of an animal, trying not even to
exist as she kept her rage and self-loathing buried deep within
her. At last, when he had grown weary of her silence, he led her
back to her barracks.
And now she was lying in an isolation cell,
trying to keep warm, and Filatov was on the other side of the
locked door. It was almost a relief.
But she had had a visitor today, for the
first time in her four months at Mühlfeld. Why should anyone come
to visit her here? So she was now an object of interest to more
than just Filatov.
And then there had been that strange
encounter in the recreation yard this morning, that woman with her
hard, passionate face. That had been perhaps even a little more
unexpected.
It was all very disquieting, and at the
moment all Esther wanted was to be quiet. What only twenty-four
hours before had seemed the most monotonously predictable, the most
hopeless, the most solitary of existences was now crowded with
unfamiliar voices speaking of the mysterious future. She was glad
to be locked away. She was desperate for time to think.
The ceiling of her cell was nearly four
meters high, and in the center there was a single light bulb in a
metal cage. It flickered and made faint popping sounds, as if at
any second it might die away and leave her in darkness. She was not
frightened of the dark, but she hoped the light would stay on. It
was too cold to sleep and soon it would be time for the evening
meal. She was hungry, but she didn’t want them to have to leave the
door open so she could see to eat. She hoped Filatov hadn’t made
some sort of arrangement with the guard on duty.
They had told her after the two o’clock roll
call; “Someone has made an appointment to see you this afternoon.”
There were no details. She was told to go to the matron for a clean
dress, and to wait.
At a few minutes after three, a guard came to
the barracks to fetch her. He was someone she had never seen
before, so perhaps his duties were restricted to the reception
room—the Russians were great believers in specialization. He took
her to a tiny room, no larger than a broom closet, and directed her
to sit down on a wooden chair in front of a window that looked into
another room and was covered with a heavy wire screen.
“You will not touch the wire,” he told her,
in German—possibly he wished her to understand from the outset that
there were to be no private communications, that every word spoken
would be noted. “You will leave your hands in your lap. If you
attempt to touch the wire, the interview will be broken off at once
and you will be severely punished.”
And then they waited, she sitting in her
chair and he standing beside the only door, in unbroken
silence.
And then, in the other room, a door opened—at
least, she heard the sound when it closed again—and a man in a
green suit sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the
screen.
It was difficult to see him through the wire,
which was thick and so closely woven that even Esther’s fingers
could hardly have gone through the mesh, but he seemed a dapper
little figure, pink and fleshy with thinning hair. He had a way of
folding his hands together over his chest that somehow emphasized
their softness, suggesting that he look an almost feminine pride in
them. He smiled at her, his eyes glittering sympathetically.
“Fräulein Rosensaft?” he asked, allowing the
tips of his fingers to press together. “Fräulein Esther Rosensaft,
born in Königsberg in 1928? Your father was Julius Rosensaft, a
civil engineer in that city?”
She was so astonished that for an instant she
thought he must be talking about someone else. But, yes, that was
her name—she had almost forgotten it. Finally she could bring
herself to nod.
“Good. It would have been a pity to come all
this way and find myself talking to the wrong young lady.” The
smile broadened slightly, as if to emphasize that he was making a
small joke. He opened the briefcase he had been holding on his lap
and took out a file folder crammed with papers that rustled noisily
as he sorted through them.
“You seem to have gotten yourself into a
certain amount of trouble, my dear. Still, no one is blaming you.”
He was careful not to glance up from the long, official-looking
document he held clutched in his right hand. “I’m sure life hasn’t
been easy for you since the war, and your family is sparing no
expense to procure your release.”
“My—?”
It became impossible to finish the question.
Her face grew hot, and for an instant she forgot herself enough to
begin bringing her hands up to her mouth. And then she remembered
the guard standing behind her and pushed them back down against her
thighs. Those few seconds, staring through the wire barrier at this
blandly smiling man, were an agony.
“Yes, my dear. But allow me to introduce
myself. My name is Gustav Plessen. I am an attorney in Heilbronn
retained by your aunt, a Mrs. Erica Adler, living at present in
Trenton, New Jersey, in the United States. She is your father’s
sister and is very anxious to do what she can for you. We have
filed a petition for clemency with the military governor. We have
every hope.”
“Is my aunt here? Is she—”
Esther shook her head, she could hardly see
through her tears.
“No.” Plessen, the attorney from Heilbronn,
seemed to regard the question as a trifle foolish. He cocked his
head a little to one side, the way one does when in conversation
with an engaging child. “Your aunt has young children and was thus
unable to come. She only heard you were alive a few months ago,
apparently from one of the Jewish agencies. I’m sure you can
appreciate her surprise when she subsequently learned that you were
incarcerated.”
He smiled again. He had established his
client’s perfect right to remain with her family in Trenton, New
Jersey. He was obviously a man for whom the world organized itself
into conveniently intelligible moral categories. It seemed clear
that there were to be no more troublesome questions. Esther could
feel her bowels shriveling with mortification.
“But we’ll have you out soon enough, my dear.
The authorities are sympathetic. These things take time and money,
but I think another few weeks should see you free of this
place.”
As the guard led her away, Esther Rosensaft,
niece of an American lady named Adler, kept wondering why she
couldn’t seem to feel anything except dread. She was happy, of
course—that she was happy she knew as an objective fact, the way
she knew her age and the color of the linoleum in her barracks—but
she couldn’t seem to make that translate into something besides a
cold, sickened sensation all through her neck and chest. It was as
if she had received a warning and couldn’t make out when or about
what. There had simply been too much for one day—that was it. Her
nerves had been stretched too tight, and now they were having their
revenge. In a few hours she would be all right again.
She wondered what America could be like, and
what part of it was Trenton, New Jersey. Right after the war, in
the refugee camps, everyone had been dying to go to America. To
have relatives willing to sponsor you was to belong to a kind of
aristocracy. It meant that you were going to return, almost from
one day to the next, to normal life, the way it had been before
1933.
Esther could hardly remember what “normal
life” had been like. In 1933 she had been five years old. The world
had been mad for as long as she could remember.