“She’s expecting me to take her shopping this
afternoon. You were the one who suggested it—you can be the one to
tell her it’s too dangerous.”
Mordecai shook his head.
“No, we must go ahead with it. I doubt if
Hagemann even knows she’s out of Mühlfeld yet and, besides, he
wouldn’t be stupid enough to do anything that might kill the golden
goose, if you will pardon the expression. If we begin treating her
like a prisoner, she will begin to think like one again—she is
accustomed to that role. We can’t risk that. We will need her
willing cooperation later.”
He looked out the window, watching the people
crossing back and forth on the sidewalks, and it was almost as if
he envied them. He seemed to have aged even in the past few
days.
“She likes you,” he said, turning back to
Christiansen with a smile that no longer had anything of pleasure
in it. “I think she has a bit of a . . .
Sie hat sich ganz in
Sie vernarrt
. How would you say that in English?”
“She has a crush on me.”
“A ‘crush’? What a way to put it. But why
not? She has spent several months locked away in a woman’s prison.
She is young, and you have been kind to her. How many men have been
kind to her in her life, eh? She probably thinks of you as her
savior, as Sir Galahad on his white horse. Why shouldn’t she have a
‘crush’ on you? It would not be the worst thing in the world if you
were to cultivate those feelings in her. They may be useful later
on.”
“Mordecai, you’re an even bigger son of a
bitch than I am.”
“Yes. I know.” He took a sip of his coffee
and set the cup back down noiselessly on its saucer. “I have chosen
to be a nation builder instead of a jeweler or an accountant, and
nations are built on the unwilling sacrifices of the innocent. It
is a cruel necessity.”
And so, at a few minutes before four that
afternoon. Christiansen changed into his army uniform and his
greatcoat and, with Mordecai’s big British service revolver in one
pocket, took the little lady out to see about refurbishing her
wardrobe. She made a comical sight; she was wearing Dessauer’s
raincoat over her black dress, and it reached within a few inches
of the ground.
Dessauer, like an idiot, was proving how
tough he was in nothing but an ancient tweed jacket. Dessauer was
being a surly little bastard, but it was possible to feel sorry for
him because he had a point. Children should fall in love with other
children. What Mordecai had said made Christiansen feel a little
ashamed of himself, although he didn’t quite know why. It wasn’t as
if he had done anything.
“You look nice in your uniform,” Esther said,
putting her hand on his sleeve. “I didn’t know you were a
soldier.”
“I haven’t been a soldier since the war’s
end. I should have thought you had had your fill of soldiers.”
What could have made him say a thing like
that? She let her hand slip from his arm, and the pleasure died out
in her eyes. Christiansen had decided he wouldn’t encourage her.
There was no place for anything like that in his life right now
and, for all the wisdom of Mordecai’s sly little suggestion, he
didn’t want to hurt this girl any more than was necessary for the
accomplishment of their business. She had had enough of that in the
past several years.
But perhaps there was some less brutal way of
putting an end to all these touching symptoms of young love.
They walked down the stairway together, the
three of them abreast. Dessauer, like a well-brought-up young man,
offered her his arm, and she took it. Perhaps that was the best
plan—just stay out of the way and let nature take its course.
“There’s a place not three blocks from here
that does a good business in secondhand clothes. I’m afraid that’s
the best we’ll do outside of the International Zone, and we can’t
risk taking you there. The Russians have powers of arrest
there.”
“I see. Secondhand will do quite well, so
long as they are warm.”
They exchanged a glance that seemed to settle
everything. There would be no more gushes of girlish admiration.
Things would stay on a business footing, and she could save herself
for someone who had the time.
. . . . .
The weather seemed to be warming up a
bit—perhaps they would even have a drop of rain by evening. The
clouds overhead were high and sparse but the color of tarnished
pewter.
People on the sidewalks, the women with their
net shopping bags and the men with their hands buried deep in their
overcoat pockets, didn’t give the impression they were in any hurry
to get back within doors. It was a pleasure to breathe the moist,
still air and to feel the sun’s soft heat. There was a certain
animal comfort to the way the light seemed to blunt the sharp edges
of naked tree limbs and the corners of buildings.
Since the walkway was a trifle narrow,
Christiansen fell behind a few paces and left Dessauer and Esther
to go on together. Dessauer was being very gentlemanly and correct
and, aside from the odd polite murmur, they didn’t seem to have a
lot to say to each other. Christiansen contented himself with
keeping a nervous watch on the faces of the other pedestrians. He
couldn’t rid himself of a nagging suspicion that he was being
watched. His hand slipped into the pocket of his overcoat and
closed around the butt of Mordecai’s pistol. It was only a feeling.
. .
The proprietress of the secondhand clothing
store opened the door for them even before Christiansen had a
chance to touch the knob. She was a huge, withered woman with black
eyes that looked as if someone had pressed them into her face like
raisins into dough—the network of lines over her nose and
cheekbones seemed to suggest something of the sort. She stood by
the door, ducking her head and making little sighing sounds, all
directed at Christiansen whom, from the fact of his uniform, she
must have selected as the one with the money.
“We need things for the young lady,” he said,
taking Esther by the arm and pulling her forward into everyone’s
line of sight. “A couple of dresses and a suit—yes, a suit, one
with long sleeves. A good warm winter coat as well, and underwear.
Can you oblige us with all that? Do you have any shoes that might
fit?”
They both looked down at Esther’s feet, which
were still shod in a pair of prison clogs that were too big for her
because she had had to borrow them from Sonya. The old woman
scratched the soft, wrinkled folds of her thick neck and
frowned.
“A small foot,” she said, seeming, by the way
she said it, to turn the matter into a philosophical issue. “She
won’t be easy. In Vienna, all the women have big feet—in Vienna, we
are all great ones for dancing.”
“I haven’t danced in a long time.”
Esther’s serious little face revealed
nothing—she might even have accepted the proprietress’s stupid
attempt at a joke as literal truth. In the silence created by her
innocence, she looked up to Christiansen as if she wanted him to
interpret for her.
Well, what was so surprising? She was a
child, really. Almost a newborn. She had spent most of her young
life under one or another kind of arrest, and prisons weren’t the
place where one learned how to understand a joke. Or how to dance
either.
“See if you can come up with something,” he
said harshly, wondering why he was so angry with an old woman who
obviously hadn’t meant any harm. “We aren’t looking for dancing
shoes.”
With hardly more than an uncomprehending
shrug, she put her hand on Esther’s shoulder and guided her through
a curtained doorway into a back room which, apparently, she
regarded as a purely feminine sanctuary. Christiansen and Dessauer
were left alone together among the dusty counters and the racks of
men’s suits and overcoats.
Christiansen took out a cigarette and lit it.
The smoke felt dry in his lungs and he couldn’t taste it at all,
but at least it gave him the appearance of an occupation. He had an
excuse for not noticing the rather pointed rudeness with which
Dessauer was staring at a wall shelf full of men’s and women’s
hats—bowlers, huge Edwardian productions with purple feathers,
cloth caps, silk opera hats of both the collapsing and the
non-collapsing variety, all promiscuously jumbled up together. But
young Itzhak wasn’t interested in these little fragments of social
history, he seemed to be peering through to something on the wall’s
other side. That, at least, was probably the impression he wished
to convey.
Dessauer didn’t like him. Christiansen knew
all the reasons: he wasn’t Jewish; he had broken the lad’s nose for
him; he seemed to hold some prior claim to the attention of Esther
Rosensaft. There was nothing new about any of this. This was simply
the first moment, as Christiansen suddenly realized, when that
hostility had caused him any twinge of discomfort.
It had been a long time since he had allowed
himself to think in such terms—since that day in June, 1945, when
he had stood amidst the ruins of Kirstenstad, looking down at the
spot where his parents had died, he had imagined himself as having
a human relationship with only two people on earth: Ulrich von
Goltz and Egon Hagemann. There had been only the hatred of those
two men, with nothing left over for anyone else. Having given
himself up to the task of settling his blood debt, he really
couldn’t bring himself to care what anyone else thought of him.
But now, all at once, he would have been
easier in his mind if this boy could have been made to like him. He
didn’t want any more enemies. Nobody was giving Itzhak Dessauer any
trouble over possession of Esther Rosensaft s fair young body, so
the rotten little bastard didn’t have to be such a hard case all
the time.
Outside on the sidewalk, on the other side of
the street, a man in a dark tan raincoat hurried by. His hat brim
was pulled down, and he was walking with his head cocked to one
side, as if the shop windows interested him, so it was impossible
to see his face. He was gone in a minute. Christiansen turned away
from the big plate-glass window with a feeling of desolation that
was beginning to seem almost comfortably familiar.
“When we’re finished here, I think it would
be just as well if you took the girl through the back way,” he
said, not quite looking in Dessauer’s direction. “I’ll give you
about thirty seconds’ head start, and then I’ll shadow you back to
the hotel. We seem to have attracted some attention.”
“I’ve got a gun—I can manage.”
Dessauer s voice was tight, as if he were
coiled up like a spring inside. Yes, Christiansen could just
imagine how he’d manage.
“Nevertheless, we do it my way.”
For the first time that day, the two men’s
eyes met. And no, nobody was going to vote Christiansen Most
Popular Man in Vienna.
“How do you like it?”
They both turned toward the curtained
doorway. Esther was standing there, smiling, radiant, her arms held
out to the sides. She wore a gray wool suit of a type that had
probably been fashionable four or five years earlier, with sharp,
padded shoulders and a skirt jagged with narrow pleats. She spun
around for them, rising up on her toes, making the hem of her skirt
flare out; she was obviously intensely pleased with herself. The
old woman, who was immediately behind her, her hand resting on the
frame of the doorway, smiled in approval. They all smiled. They
couldn’t have helped themselves.
“Isn’t it pretty? Don’t you think it’s
pretty?”
The questions were both directed at
Christiansen, who felt something tugging at the inside of his
throat and who wished he were somewhere else just at that moment.
He didn’t want to be reached by this girl—he didn’t want to be
reached by anyone; that sort of thing just wasn’t on the
program—but she was reaching him whether he wanted her to or not.
When she looked like that, when she was happy and it seemed to
light her up from the inside, he just didn’t have any way of
defending himself.
“Yes. It’s very pretty—it makes you look very
nice.”
That, apparently, was all she needed to
hear—or, what was just as likely, she saw more in his face than the
bare confirmation of the words—because she danced across the ten or
twelve feet of floor separating them and caught his hand. It was a
perfectly spontaneous gesture, as automatic as a drowning man’s
catching at the floating wreckage, but suddenly he found she had
him. She tugged at his arm as if she wanted to pull him down so she
could see herself reflected in his eyes.
And then something changed. All at once, from
one instant to the next, she seemed to have lost interest in him.
She wasn’t even looking at him; she was looking at something
else.
“What is it? What—?”
He never had a chance to finish. She cut him
off with a wild scream, the sound of an animal, and threw herself
into his arms. He felt the jolt of her tiny body against his own,
and then the sound of broken glass coming from behind, from the
store window, and then something like a small explosion. Of course
he knew almost at once what had happened.
His right hand went into the pocket of his
overcoat, and with his left he swept the girl away from him. She
was trying to shield him with her body, but in that fraction of a
second all he felt was a certain annoyance; she was just something
in the way. It wasn’t until he tried to move her aside that he
noticed the first sharp little twinge of pain in his left shoulder.
The gun was in his hand and he was bringing it around to aim when
he heard the second shot. He assumed it would kill him.
But it didn’t. In fact, it had come from
inside the store. As he turned around, the first thing he saw was
Itzhak Dessauer standing in the middle of the room, his huge
British service revolver held in both hands, firing round after
round through the shattered window. No one was outside, but, then,
no one would be.