And after that, strangely enough, everything
had been fine. She seemed to like it when he made love to her. It
seemed to make her happy, even through the tears with which she
still regularly wetted his shoulders. But what, finally, it meant
to her he couldn’t have said. He didn’t even know what, if
anything, it meant to him.
This is just kind of a vacation, he kept
saying to himself. I need it, and she needs it. But pretty soon it
will have to stop or it will begin to get in the way. She’s a poor
little thing and she likes me and she’s fun in the sack, but that’s
all there can ever be for either one of us.
All of which, as he perfectly well knew, had
nothing to do with anything. The fact was the little minx had
gotten under his skin with more than her fingernails.
“What is this?” she asked, closing the score
that lay unattended on his knees so she could read the cover.
“What is says: ‘Bartók, String
Quartets.’”
“Are they good?”
“Yes. He was a great genius. My composition
teacher introduced me to him when he first came to America in 1940,
a frail little man who hardly spoke. It was right after the German
invasion of Norway, so all I could think about was getting to
England and joining what was left of the army—I’m afraid I didn’t
pay him much attention. I didn’t care so much about genius in those
days.”
“Could you play them for me?”
“It takes four people to play them. You
probably wouldn’t like them anyway—they don’t sound a thing like
‘Little Brown Jug.’”
It was their private joke. They smiled, and
she leaned against his shoulder. And then suddenly she was very
serious again.
“When will I see you after Barcelona?” She
was looking down at his hand, still cradled in her lap, and as she
spoke she ran the tip of her little finger across the scar that
covered its back.
“I don’t know. I’d be around, but people are
going to be watching you. Try to remember—you’re supposed to be
married to Dessauer.”
“Will I have to sleep with him?”
“It isn’t part of the plan, no.” He smiled
again, but less easily. The subject made him faintly uncomfortable.
“Whether or not it’s part of Itzhak’s plan, I couldn’t say.”
“I will do what is necessary—no more. Perhaps
he won’t even want me. I am a tainted woman, but you are the
Righteous Gentile. He will not want to offend you. Would it offend
you?”
“It was not, he decided, a question he much
liked being asked. He wouldn’t answer it Perhaps he couldn’t.
“I think just maybe you carry this ‘tainted
woman’ nonsense a little far,” he said finally. “Lots of people
came out of the war with memories they’d just as soon bury. The war
turned everything upside down, so we all had to behave like devils
just to stay alive. You never did anyone any harm.”
“Didn’t I? Not even myself?”
She guided his hand up so that his fingers
rested just below the elbow of her right arm. Even through the
fairly heavy material of her blouse, he could feel the angry little
welt that marked where her tattoo had been. A doctor had removed it
in Vienna, but the scar remained. Well, they all had their
scars.
She had told him all about the camps, all
about von Goltz and Hagemann, much more than he cared to hear. He
knew all about her version.
“You were a prisoner, and your jailers were
the worst this world has to offer.” He could only shrug his
shoulders, as if to say,
What can I tell you that you don’t
already know?
“You might try to bear in mind that nobody was
giving you any choice.”
“Weren’t they? Haven’t I a choice now?”
. . . . .
Christiansen stood on the platform, watching
the train slide away, wondering why he felt so relieved. He was
fond of Esther—he wasn’t sure how much further than that he was
prepared to go, but he was reasonably certain that if he gave
himself half a chance he could work up a real sentimental
enthusiasm for her. Anyway, he was glad that for a few hours at
least he wouldn’t be seeing her.
“
Would it offend you?”
She didn’t even
have to put the question into words. It was always there. It
constituted the atmosphere of their relationship. He just didn’t
have an answer.
But for a while now he was at liberty to
think about something else.
Was that why men went off to war, to get away
from the ambiguities of their womenfolk? Was that what he was
doing? Just then it seemed to him the theory had a lot to recommend
it.
Once you got outside the train station,
Barcelona looked like a nice enough place. There weren’t any
bombed-out buildings—that was it. There was plenty of open ground,
but it wasn’t covered with rubble. Just trees and plastered walls
and sidewalks. Ordinary life. Of course, Spain had had nine years
to clean up the wreckage from its war; maybe the whole of Europe
would look this way before long. Anyway, the city was a pleasant
surprise.
Until you noticed the crowds of Civil Guards
standing around, with their crisp black uniforms and their
lacquered hats. They all carried little pistols in their patent
leather holsters, and they were everywhere. It seemed the current
regime wasn’t taking any chances.
Like almost everyone else in the civilized
world, Christiansen had developed an allergy to snappy tunics and
gold braid—he didn’t like the fancy-dress ball through which
soldiers tried to intimidate the rest of the human race. He didn’t
like government policemen.
And all these guys standing around with their
hands on their belts were friends of Colonel Egon Hagemann.
Old-line Nazis were very popular in Franco’s Spain—it was a point
to remember.
It was cold. There was still a little of
winter left, even in Spain, and Christiansen dug the
rabbit-fur-lined gloves out of his overcoat pocket as he crossed
the plaza in front of a massive Gothic cathedral, its central doors
open and gaping like the mouth of a dead monster. A few elderly
women were coming down the steps.
Away from the plaza, the buildings crowded
together and the streets were not as clean. Carpets and bed sheets
hung from the iron balconies on the upper stories. There was hardly
any noise—like all northern Europeans, Christiansen somehow
expected Latins to conduct affairs at the top of their lungs—and
everyone moved quickly and furtively. It was almost like walking
through a city under military occupation.
On the other side of the Ramblas was a
district known as the “Barrio Chino”—one could only guess why,
since there weren’t any Chinese anywhere in sight. There also
weren’t any women leaning suggestively against the lampposts and no
one approached him with photographs of his kid sister, but
Christiansen didn’t have to have it explained to him that he was in
what passed locally for the red light district. It was one of those
places where you seemed to see only other men on the sidewalks, and
everyone was very careful to pretend everyone else was invisible.
Even at this hour of the morning, the bars were open. One of them
was called the “Hotel Goya.” That was what the sign in the window
said. It was Jerry Hirsch’s idea of a joke.
It was a small, dark room. Just inside the
shelter of the doorway, a huge green parrot eyed Christiansen
suspiciously through the bars of its cage, twisting its head around
as if to whisper over its shoulder. There were no confidences here,
it implied, nowhere in out of the storm.
Hirsh was sitting at a table in the rear,
nursing a cup of coffee that looked as if it hadn’t been touched in
a couple of weeks. The women in their tight satin dresses who were
taking up space around the bar looked up hopefully as Christiansen
pushed aside the beaded curtain that formed a kind of second
entrance, but their enthusiasm died almost at once as they saw
Hirsch raise his hand in recognition—another damned inglés who
wasn’t interested in girls, it seemed.
“Did Itzikel and the girl get away all
right?” Hirsch asked almost before Christiansen had had a chance to
sit down. Hirsch had a way of referring to “the girl” as if she
were an item you took off the grocery store shelf. Hirsch didn’t
waste a lot of time cultivating his charm.
“They’re fine.”
“Good—then that’s taken care of.”
It was impossible to tell what he might have
meant, so Christiansen decided not to try. But he would be just as
happy when this business was over, and with it the need to stay on
civil terms with Hirsch.
“Do you think it would be possible to get
some breakfast in a place like this? I haven’t eaten yet”
“Yes. They cater to every appetite here.”
Hirsch turned and caught the bartender’s eye. “I’ll join you, if
you don’t mind. I think my prestige with the management could use
the lift.”
Five minutes later a fat, breathless little
woman with the sleeves of her white blouse rolled up high on her
arms had brought them two plates of food so hot the steam rose up
and hit them in the face. In Spain, one gathered, they didn’t kid
around—there was rice, beans in heavy brown sauce, lumps of meat
the size of a child’s fist. There was coffee sweetened with a local
brandy and a wooden bowl filled with dried apricots.
“Maybe we should have just asked for
cornflakes,” Hirsch murmured, grinning with a parody of horror as
the good lady, who was presumably the bartender’s wife, retired
back into her kitchen.
“Tell me about Hagemann.” Christiansen spoke
quietly. Anyone watching would have supposed his attention was
entirely absorbed by the food in front of him. “What have you found
out? Have you seen him?”
“I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him nearly every
night for the past week.”
Hirsch smiled, lifting a heavy forkful of
meat to his mouth. He seemed to be enjoying some private irony,
with Christiansen as the principal victim. They weren’t really
enemies—it was almost as if they understood each other too
well.
“There’s a club he favors, a kind of cabaret.
You know the kind of place—the emcee tells dirty jokes you might
have heard from your mother, and the girls up on stage never quite
manage to take their clothes off. The band is terrible. Anyway.
Hagemann likes it. He goes there every couple of nights and stays
until around midnight. The place is run by a fellow named “Ernesto”
Lutz—born ‘Ernst,’ Tübingen, 1901; also old-school SS, in case you
hadn’t guessed. The management keeps a table for the exclusive use
of our friend and his entourage. Did I mention that? Hagemann never
goes anywhere without three or four bodyguards—they wrap him up
like a baby with the croup.
“The local authorities act as if he’s
incognito royalty or something, so we’ve had to exercise a little
discretion. The one place we do have under control is our hotel,
the Casa General Moscardo. Faglin and I have both got jobs there.
We created a few vacancies.” He smiled again. He was just full of
good cheer. “We’ll nab our friend there, when he comes to relive
old times with Mrs. Dessauer.”
“You really are an unpleasant son of a bitch,
Hirsch.”
“I know it.”
“What about the house?”
“Oh, that.” Hirsch pushed away his half-empty
plate with a look of unconquerable distaste. No one, he seemed to
imply, could eat that much food. “I think you can just forget about
the house. He’s got the sea on three sides—the compound is on an
outcropping of rock, with seventy-foot cliffs, straight up and
down. You can’t even get near it from that direction. For the rest
he’s got a chain-link fence, and of course it’s all patrolled. He’s
got a regular platoon of bodyguards, and they live on the grounds
in a barrack of their own. The regular servants are all Spanish
nationals and go home at night, but the boss treats them pretty
well and the police have got the hell scared out of the whole town,
so we haven’t been able to get near any of them. What goes on up
there is a closed book to us. Forget the house. We’re going to have
to put the touch on him in town.”
One of the whores was standing by the
doorway, trying to feed pieces of bread to the parrot. It was a big
bird with a beak that could do a lot of damage to a lady’s fingers,
so she was a little nervy as she held out the bread through die
cage bars. She had a high-pitched giggle and she kept glancing back
at her friends for moral support. Apparently it was a slow morning
in the Barrio Chino.
When Christiansen decided he had had enough
breakfast, he took out a cigarette and lit it with the
nickel-plated lighter Esther had bought for him during their
one-day stopover in Lyon. He felt uncomfortable, as if he had been
awake too long.
“Why don’t I just kill him for you?” he asked
suddenly. He smiled, but he wasn’t kidding. “You people have your
side of the code, so Hagemann can’t put his hands on his secret
weapon—you’re safe. All you need to make it all come out right is
for me to walk up behind him at that special table of his and put a
pill in his car.”
“You d never get away with it. His boys would
cut you down before you had your hand out of your pocket. And even
if you succeeded, how would you ever get out of there alive?”
“That would be my problem.”
“No it isn’t—it’s ours.” Hirsch glanced
nervously toward the doorway as if the parrot worried him. “Nobody
is safe until friend von Goltz’s recipe hook is in the custody of
the Mossad. The only way we can guarantee that Hagemann won’t get
it is if we have it ourselves, and that won’t happen unless we take
Hagemann alive so we can squeeze him.”
“He won’t get it if he’s dead”
The cigarette had burned down almost to
Christiansen’s fingers, so he crushed it out against the side of
his plate. Hirsch watched him. and finally sighed and shook his
head.
“That would settle everything for you,
wouldn’t it, brother.” He laced his hands together over his stomach
and leaned back in his chair, frowning like a judge. “That’s the
difference between us—some Nazi kills a few dozen of your friends
and relations and you go all huffy about it. All of a sudden it’s a
blood feud, just like the Hatfields and the McCoys. All you can
think about is how good it’s going to feel when you make the son of
a bitch start bleeding through his ears. Shit. Hagemann butchered
thousands of my people, but when you’re a Jew you learn to take a
broader view of these matters.