The upper story, where, to all appearances,
Becker was sleeping quietly, was curtained and dark. But
Christiansen was putting little faith in appearances, so he found
himself a convenient shadow to hide in and settled down to
wait.
The rain had left the air feeling slightly
clammy, and Christiansen kept his hands in the pockets of the blue
overcoat he wore over his dinner jacket. He wished he could have
had another cigarette, but of course that was impossible under the
circumstances. He was watching the windows across the street.
A man walked by on the sidewalk in front of
where Christiansen was standing. It wasn’t Becker, who had reddish
hair and a round, rather Slavic face, but one of the natives, out,
from the looks of him, for a little catting around. Under the wide
brim of a light-colored felt hat, Christiansen could see a
pencil-thin moustache, a narrow jaw, and two rather
frightened-looking eyes. Perhaps he was aware that someone was
there in the shadow of the archway that marked the entrance to a
darkened restaurant, because his pace seemed to quicken slightly as
he passed.
Christiansen was tired. He had been awake for
something like twenty hours, and it seemed like a good deal longer
than that since anything had passed his lips but cold coffee and
cigarette smoke. And on top of everything else his hand felt as if
it were stuffed with broken glass. It always throbbed after a night
of playing, even the thump-thump-thump of a bass fiddle, but
tonight it was worse. The surgeon had told him he would always have
trouble with it. Anyway, there wasn’t any point in complaining—he
should probably count himself lucky it was still attached to his
wrist.
It was about ten minutes before four when he
noticed that the inside edge of one of the curtains behind the
middle window upstairs was no longer hanging quite straight.
Someone had pulled it a little to one side in order to see out onto
the street.
So, Herr Bauer—the former Herr Becker, the
former Sergeant Becker, Ninth Occupation Division, Fifth Brigade,
Waffen-SS, Norway—Herr Bauer was at home, and just as restless as
everyone else. It would appear he wasn’t looking forward to the
morning very much.
Or perhaps he was. From his point of view the
strategy made a certain amount of sense. If he knew he was being
hunted, why shouldn’t he take the opportunity of choosing the time
and place for an encounter he probably realized was inevitable?
Didn’t he have a life here, something worth defending? If he was
sufficiently sure of himself—and this, after all, was his warren,
not Christiansen’s—why should he run?
And when were the SS ever unsure of
themselves?
And, of course, Becker was perfectly aware
that he was being hunted. Christiansen had been no more than a
little surprised that morning when he had returned from breakfast
and the man at the desk had handed him a small buff-colored
envelope in exchange for his room key.
“This was left for you a few minutes ago,
Señor Barrows,” he had murmured, smiling his polite, inoffensive
Latin smile. “The gentleman said he did not wish to disturb your
meal.”
Becker wasn’t even bothering to be coy—the
address of his shop was printed right on the flap. It was the sort
of envelope that might accompany a box of gift cigars, and even in
Cuba it paid to advertise.
And why should it be so surprising that
Becker would know he was being hunted? These men were all
condemned, convicted
in absentia
for crimes against humanity
and sentenced to death by a Norwegian court. But more than that,
the old boys’ network the SS maintained was probably humming with
word that somebody was killing off the alumni of Colonel Hagemann’s
command. People tend to get nervous and efficient after three of
their own have been found hanged in lengths of catgut. Probably by
now they knew all about Inar Christiansen, even down to the name on
his forged American passport.
The slight hitch in the curtain disappeared.
Christiansen waited for perhaps a quarter of a minute and then
stepped quickly across the street to the hotel that stood pressed
up against the tobacco shop like the next book on the shelf. He
wanted to look at Becker’s garden.
It was astonishing how no one ever questioned
the presence of a strange man in a hotel lobby at four in the
morning—provided, of course, that he appeared to know what he was
about and didn’t loiter. The night porter merely glanced up from
his newspaper, perhaps wondering for an instant which of the
resident ladies would still be receiving callers at such an hour.
He had lost interest by the time Christiansen disappeared up the
stairway.
The roof, of course, was deserted.
The hotel had only three stories, but Havana
was a city of low buildings so it was possible to stand there on
the parapet and look out over the whole broad tangle of streets,
smeared here and there with colored light, all the way to the
harbor. Above, the stars twinkled as brightly as if it had never
rained, mocking in their indifference. If all this ceased in the
next instant, they seemed to affirm, who would care? It was a
strangely comforting idea.
Christiansen stared down into the tobacco
shop’s back yard, which was partially illuminated by a light over
the hotel’s rear entrance. Still, he wouldn’t have cared to walk
around in it, since its owner had done a thorough job of
booby-trapping almost the whole area.
Old paint cans were stacked up precariously
at intervals along the gravel pathway that led to the rear
entrance. There were boards and tangles of wire. In that
semidarkness, no one could have crossed the twenty or so yards of
open ground without stumbling over something. And making an unholy
racket in the process.
That was undoubtedly the plan. Should he
knock at the front door, Christiansen would be invited inside and
promptly shot; should he try to sneak in the rear, he would trip
the alarm and meet the same fate. In either case. Becker would tell
the police he had surprised an intruder, a few pesos would change
hands, and that would be that.
As he peered down into the shrouded garden,
Christiansen couldn’t help but marvel at the Teutonic
tidymindedness of the scheme. The SS were such careful, planning
bastards. They had murdered people in their millions and laid waste
to most of Europe, and all with the precision of an army of file
clerks. Everything was always thought through in advance—one
arrived at a plan and then followed it to the letter.
Anyone who approached either of the tobacco
shop’s two doors was as good as dead.
Becker had learned his villainy at a good
school. He was down there now, prowling around the rooms of his
little house, wound up like a mechanical toy, but he suffered from
the same weakness as all the rest of them; he simply couldn’t deal
with the unexpected. The Germanic soul had no powers of
improvisation.
So the attack would come from the one place
Becker hadn’t troubled to fortify. His own roof.
There had been a couple of straight-backed
wooden chairs leaning against the wall in the hotel’s third-floor
hallway. Christiansen decided he would also see if he couldn’t
steal fifty or sixty feet of clothesline—if there was a utility
closet around anywhere, he should be able to find something.
There wasn’t any clothesline, so he had to
break into an empty room and make off with the drapery cord, which
was only about two thirds the length he would have liked, but he
thought he might be able to get by with it.
Like all the establishments around it,
Becker’s had a flat roof— Latin architects always seemed to ignore
the fact that it rains sometimes, even in Havana—and it was about a
fifteen-foot drop down from the hotel parapet. The great thing was
to get down there without making any detectable noise, since Becker
was playing this game for his life and that was enough to make any
man preternaturally alert.
Christiansen set the two chairs together on
the parapet ledge, seat down, balancing them so that it wouldn’t
take more than a breath to make either one fall over. Then he took
out his pocketknife and cut off about fifteen feet of drapery cord,
tied one end to a leg of each chair, and let the loop drop down
over the side of the building. From Becker’s roof he would only
have to give a little tug and they would topple into his arms, one
after the other. It was getting himself down that was going to
present the problem.
There was a curved drainpipe near that edge
of the roof. He could tie the rest of his drapery cord to that and
then lower himself over the side—except that he wasn’t at all
confident the cord would hold his weight unless he used a double
length, and that would leave him hanging against the outside wall
of the hotel with about a seven-foot fall to the edge of Becker’s
roof. Christiansen weighed close to two hundred and twenty pounds;
dropping from that height, he would make enough of a bang to wake
up all the sweating former SS men who had ever lived.
He took off his overcoat and tied the sleeves
together through the circle of drapery cord around the hotel
drainpipe, wondering the whole time if the thing wouldn’t simply
pull to pieces the instant it had to bear the full load—he didn’t
even know if it would reach far enough. He threw it over the edge
and watched it as it fluttered to rest against the wall, and he
still didn’t know. The bottom was lost in darkness.
But at least he could console himself with
the thought that he wasn’t encumbered with an impossible number of
alternatives. He could climb down on his coat—and trust that the
Portuguese tailor who had made it for him hadn’t economized on the
stitching—or he could take the stairs back to the lobby and forget
the whole thing. There simply wasn’t a third choice.
And so it was that with a thousand misgivings
Inar Christiansen found himself clinging in the black of night to
the back of a dress overcoat, working his way down handful by
handful as he felt for something solid under his feet and listened
with expectant dread for the sound of tearing fabric. As he changed
his hold from one hand to the other, he could feel himself swinging
against the hotel wall. There was nothing down there, it seemed,
except air. His left hand was aching until he could hardly feel his
fingers—possibly he wouldn’t even know he had lost his grip until
he started to fall. And still the edge of Becker’s roof seemed no
closer.
He changed hands one last time—they were both
so slippery with sweat that it hardly seemed to make any
difference—and felt again for something solid under him. Nothing.
It was all up with him. In another second he would come down with a
crash, and then where was he supposed to go? Becker would be able
to kill him at his leisure.
He tried once more—nothing. And then once
more, stretching down so far that the shoulder joint in his right
arm felt as if it might be ready to pull loose.
And then, there it was. The point of his shoe
scraped against what felt like a flat surface. Possibly he might
have caught on nothing more than a protruding piece of brickwork,
but right at that moment it hardly mattered. The hem of his coat
was greasy with sweat and slipping between his fingers. He was
going down, whether he liked it or not.
And then, as if by some miracle, he found
himself clinging to the hotel wall, his feet pressing against
something that felt solid enough to convince anybody it was the
cinderblock edge of Gerhart Becker’s roof.
It was several seconds before Christiansen
could bring himself to breathe, let alone try to move. He was
afflicted with a terrible fear that he was about to topple over
backward, that there was really nothing there beneath him but
perhaps an inch or two of shelf, but finally, after what felt like
an eternity, he nerved himself up to let his eyes follow the line
of the brick wall down to where he could see that it joined the
flat, granite-colored plane of the next building. So far, so
good.
Moving his feet slowly and carefully, and
staying flush against the hotel wall, he made his way to the rear,
where he could see the whole of Becker’s little garden and could
put his hand on the loop of drapery cord that ran up to his two
chairs. One after the other, be pulled them down and set them to
rest on the roof beside him. Near the seam where the two buildings
joined at right angles there was a downspout running from the hotel
gutters. It was round and made of cast iron and seemed well
anchored. It would do for the descent.
Finally, he leaned his shoulder against the
wall and began to collect himself. His little plan, such as it was,
was ready to be put into execution. Everything was assembled. It
would have been nice to have had some idea where Becker was hiding
himself, but one couldn’t ask for the moon. It was time to start.
That was the problem.
It was four-thirty in the morning. In three
quarters of an hour, sooner perhaps, certainly well before first
light, the rubbish carts would start on their rounds and everywhere
the city would begin stirring into sullen life. There was simply no
space left for the luxury of weariness—or fear, or scruples, or
whatever it was—but Christiansen could hardly bring himself to keep
his eyes open. His head touched the cool bricks of the hotel, and
he found himself wondering why he wasn’t home in bed.
Except that there was no longer anywhere on
earth he could rightfully call home, something that Becker and his
friends had seen to on that second Sunday in June, 1942. Something
they had seen to with amazing thoroughness.
No one wears his past comfortably.
Christiansen realized he was probably no worse than anyone
else—after all, his parents had sent him away. He hadn’t asked them
to; it had all seemed so natural at the time. He hadn’t even wanted
it, not at first. But at that age one learns new ways fast,
forgetting the old. The two of them had stood together on the dock
at Oslo and waved goodbye. He hadn’t been any more than a kid, so
how could he have known what it cost them, what was in their
hearts? He was their pride, and he had watched them growing smaller
and smaller as the ship pulled away and left them behind. And now
he couldn’t ever go back.