“They’re not bad—hold still.”
“You were a musician? What did you play?”
“Just hold still. Well save the confessions
for another day.”
The mask was very good. A little spirit gum,
a little grease pencil, and Esther looked wrinkled and ravaged.
When she closed her eyes, she looked dead.
“I’m going to give you a shot,” he told her.
“You’ll feel a trifle cold just at first, and then you’ll just
drift off—there’s no pain. When you come around, you’ll be in the
American Zone.”
Without a word, and as obediently as a child,
she lay down in the casket. Her eyes never left his face, as if the
sight of him was all that gave her the courage to be silent.
Christiansen inserted the needle in a vein on the inside of her
upper arm, where the sleeve of her dress would cover it. After a
few seconds, she closed her eyes. In less than a minute her hands
were white and cold. It gave him a peculiar feeling to look at
her.
“I’ve got a couple of packer’s straps here
somewhere,” he said to Sonya, as soon as he had screwed the lid on
the casket. “You’ll have to help me get her down to the van. I’ll
go first down the stairway, and you take the foot end. Let’s go. We
haven’t got a lot of time.”
It was twenty minutes after nine. Outside
there was a wind blowing, and the night air was stinging with ice.
Christiansen swung open the rear door of the van, and they pushed
the casket inside.
“I almost forgot. Give me your hand—no, the
left one.”
He took a gold ring out of his trouser pocket
and slipped it onto her finger. She looked a trifle surprised,
which was probably natural. There was no point in making a big
personal issue of the thing, however.
“We’re supposed to be married. It’s on your
passport, and they look for mistakes like that. And try to remember
this is your dead mother we’ve got back here. It would be nice if
you were clutching a suitably damp handkerchief as we rolled up to
the checkpoint.
The Russian Zone had its speed laws, of
course, but the curfew had cut the normally thin traffic down to
almost nothing. They made good time as they plunged along toward
the Dresdner Strasse.
“We’ll cross at the Gürtelbrücke,” he said,
shifting up with a grind that told him he was going to have to
watch himself. For some reason he was unusually tense tonight,
almost as if he hadn’t been doing things like this more or less
regularly for years. “There’ll be less of a lineup, and it crosses
straight into the American Zone.”
“Will she be able to breathe in that
box?”
“Sure. It doesn’t show, but the lid is a
little warped—enough to let in some air. Besides, right now she’s
hardly breathing at all anyway.”
“But can she stay alive like that?”
“No.” He turned and grinned at her, feeling
like a character in a Poe story. “That’s why there’s a bit of a
rush on. If we don’t bring her around inside of two hours we might
as well just leave her in that casket, because it’ll be all she
needs.”
Within six minutes they had made it to the
checkpoint. They joined a queue in which they were the eighth
vehicle. Christiansen turned off his ignition and his lights and
settled down to wait.
At twenty-seven minutes before ten, they were
the seventh in line. The Russians seemed to be making a very
thorough job of their searches tonight, which wasn’t particularly
encouraging.
“Do you want a cigarette?” he asked, holding
out the pack. There were only four left, hardly enough.
“No. thanks. They’re bad for the smile.”
She gave him a sample, with plenty of white,
even teeth. The lady was clearly counting her assets. Christiansen
struck a match, cupped his hands around it, and lit up, all the
time watching how the checkpoint guards were crawling over the lead
truck like ants.
“What’ll you do when we get out of here,
Sonya? Will you be all right?” One had to say something—they
couldn’t just wait in silence or they would be as jumpy as cats
when the time came to look like an old married couple. It was
nineteen minutes before ten.
“Don’t you worry about me,” she said, smiling
all over again. But this time not quite so much like the lady in
the Pepsodent ads. “Give me three weeks and I’ll have an American
boyfriend. In five months I’ll be a housewife in Topeka, Kansas. I
like the sound of it—’Top-EE-ka.’ Have you ever been to the
American Midwest?”
“Never. They tell me it gets cold out there,
though.”
“That shouldn’t bother a Norwegian.”
“You’re not a Norwegian.”
By the time the Russians had finished their
search, it was eleven minutes to ten.
“Sixteen minutes. At that rate, by the time
we’re through our passenger will have been dead for ten
minutes.”
“But the others are all cars—perhaps they
won’t take as long with them. Could we pull out of line and try
again tomorrow?”
“No. They’ve already seen us. They’d be on us
before we got two blocks.”
“Could I have that cigarette now?”
“Sure.”
She held it uncertainly between two rather
bony fingers, taking short little drags now and again as if she
were trying to remember how it was done. She was a brick, was
Sonya. She wasn’t thinking about getting caught and spending the
rest of her life in Mühlfeld—she was thinking about those ten
minutes.
The next two cars were waved through—they
hardly even had to roll down their windows. There was hope yet.
The lead car was now an ordinary enough sedan
that looked brown under the harsh white light but could have been
any dark color. When the driver opened the trunk, the guards
started carrying suitcases over to the side of the checkpoint—there
seemed to be half a dozen of them. The driver produced a ring of
keys, and each suitcase in turn was carefully searched.
“They’ve got a live one.” Christiansen
murmured. “We could be here all night.”
After twenty-three minutes, one of the guards
climbed into the driver’s seat and wheeled the car back and out of
view. The driver was nowhere to be seen, but it didn’t take a
miracle of imagination to figure out what was probably happening to
him.
“Let’s hope they’re happy now.”
It was fourteen minutes before eleven when
the van was permitted to pull up under the klieg lights and
Christiansen handed his and Sonya’s passports, the export license,
and a death certificate made out in the name of Frieda Schratt to a
guard who stared up at him with evident suspicion through spectacle
lenses as thick as biscuits. The guard took these documents with
him when he vanished into the station house. There was nothing to
do but sit and wait. Christiansen rolled up his window. Esther
Rosensaft had now been in her trance for slightly more than an hour
and a half.
“Inar, do you see that man over there? The
one with the shoulder boards on his greatcoat?”
Christiansen didn’t make an issue of looking.
He just let his eyes drift by, the way a man does when he’s bored
from waiting in line.
“He’s a lieutenant, and he’s got campaign
ribbons from Leningrad and Brest-Litovsk. What about him?”
“I think he’s an old client of mine, from
before I went inside.”
“Good Jesus, that’s all we need. Has he
recognized you?”
“I don’t know.”
The lieutenant was obviously the officer in
charge—he had that jaded look of someone who knows that he must be
pleased. He was perhaps thirty-five and had the sort of wide,
Slavic face that made you think it must have been molded in wax and
then left in the hot sun just a few seconds too long. He wasn’t
looking at the van—at least, not at that precise moment—and he
didn’t give the impression be was thinking about women. Maybe it
would be all right.
Nine to eleven. Nothing. How long did it take
to read a few pages of forged official documents?
Six to eleven. The lieutenant had finally
noticed Sonya. He was peering at her in a furtive sort of way—if
Christiansen glanced up, he would drop his eyes—but he seemed to be
trying to place her.
“Was he a good customer?”
“How should I know? What kind of a question
is that, anyway? He came a couple of times. How the hell am I
supposed to remember? In that business we don’t keep an appointment
calendar.”
“Sorry. I was just wondering how likely he
would be to remember.”
“All my boys remember me.”
Finally, the guard came back. He handed
Christiansen the two passports and the export license. He kept the
death certificate.
“I shall have to look at the body.” he said,
in remarkably clear German. “A formality, you understand.”
And he smiled. It was Be Nice to Grieving
Norwegians Week.
Christiansen climbed down from the cab and
went around to the back. He unlocked the rear doors with his
ignition key.
“I hope you won’t find it necessary to remove
the casket from the van. My wife, you understand. . .”
“Yes, of course.”
The guard was carrying a flashlight. They got
inside the van, one at a time, and then Christiansen took a
screwdriver from his pocket and began unbolting the lid. It was two
minutes after eleven.
Esther looked convincingly dead—she might
even be dead by now. The guard threw his flashlight beam across her
face, but he seemed to have no taste for such things and quickly
shut it off.
“Yes. that’s fine,” he said, his voice just a
trifle shaky—maybe he didn’t like being closed up in a black metal
box with a corpse. “You may put the lid back on now.”
He hopped down and left Christiansen alone.
Christiansen gave each screw about two turns, just enough to make
it look right, and came out himself. It was six minutes after
eleven.
The lieutenant was standing outside, waiting
for him.
“How long have you been married,
Mein
Herr
?” he asked. His German was almost unintelligible. He
looked angry.
A couple of months.” Christiansen answered,
trying to sound as if he were standing on his matrimonial dignity.
He wondered how he should play it—would he be expected to know all
about his wife’s shady past? It was a nice question. “Why?”
“Nothing,
Mein Herr
. My condolences to
your wife. I wish you all the best.”
And then he grinned, the tasteless bastard.
Yes, of course he remembered. What did he want, to compare
notes?
Christiansen took the death certificate the
guard was holding out to him and walked back to the cab in grim
silence. He and Sonya waited, hardly able to breathe, until the
barrier was raised and they were waved through. It was eight
minutes after eleven.
She’s just a little thing, he kept thinking.
What if I got the dosage wrong?
He raced down the empty street and went
around the first corner he could find, pulling the van to a halt
with screeching tires.
“I don’t want to know how it comes out,”
Sonya murmured, her hand already on the door latch. Her eyes were
full of dread. She looked older. “I’m sorry, Inar. I can’t. . .
Goodbye.”
She was gone before he had a chance to
answer. The street was dark, and in a few seconds all there was to
hear was the tick-tick-tick of her high-heeled shoes against the
sidewalk.
But Christiansen wasn’t thinking about Sonya.
His hands were shaking as he unlocked the rear doors of the van and
climbed inside. There was no time left, no time at all.
The hell with screwdrivers—he slid his
fingers in under the casket lid, where there was a gap of perhaps
half an inch, and pulled. With a scream, as the screws tore loose,
it came away. Her hands folded together at her waist, Esther lay
there, just as she had for the last two hours, just as she might
for eternity if he hadn’t been fast enough. Christiansen took a
small, flat leather case from its resting place between her
shoulder blades, took out a syringe that was already loaded, and
started to look for a vein. There was a nice big one just above the
knee—hell, she’d never feel it. He drove the needle home.
Nothing—she was dead. He pressed his ear
against her chest, but he couldn’t hear anything. He wasn’t sure. .
.
He stared at the withered mask, hating it. He
hated the whole stinking operation—he hated himself for consenting
to do something like this. She wasn’t even twenty, and now she was
dead.
He began to peel the mask away. He couldn’t
stand it, couldn’t stand seeing her look like that. He began
pulling away the rubber in great pieces; the spirit gum that had
been holding it in place stretched and snapped like taffy. He
wanted to see her face.
And then he heard what might have been a soft
moan—something must have hurt her. And if she could feel pain, she
was alive. He put his face close to her lips to see if he could
feel her breath.
Yes, there was something. Christiansen
experienced a choking sensation in his throat. He peeled away the
last of the mask, and waited.
After a moment, one of her hands moved. The
tip of her tongue came out to moisten her lower lip. God damn it,
she was alive.
An eye fluttered halfway open, and she moaned
again. With the ends of his fingers he brushed a strand of hair
away from her face. It was a long time before she was conscious
enough to look up into his face and return the pressure of his hand
as it held hers.
“Welcome back to earth, kid.”
11
Vienna, Austria: March 6, 1948
Mordecai Leivick stared out of his hotel room
window at the dark pavement three stories below. There was nothing
to see; not even the street lamps were lit. No one passed by on the
sidewalk. There was no traffic. Life had come to a dead hush, and
the moonlight caught nothing but the last flurries of snow, giving
them an ashen luminescence as they drifted in damp clumps toward
the ground.
“Itzikel, make some coffee like a good boy.
They can’t be much longer now, and they’ll be cold.”