“According to Hirsch, the girls don’t come on
until after nine, so Hagemann never bothers to come until then. He
says it’s a pretty tame show. I wonder why your friend is such a
fan.”
Itzhak filled her champagne glass again,
studying her face as if he really expected her to know. Perhaps he
was only having his revenge, for which she couldn’t blame him.
“Don’t make it any harder for me,
Itzhak—please?” She smiled and reached across to place her hand on
his arm. They couldn’t know who at that moment might be watching
them. Itzhak covered her hand with his own. He was smiling too.
Yes, he was having his revenge.
“I don’t know what you’re worried about. This
is a public place and the war’s over. He can’t touch you. I
wouldn’t let him touch you.”
Esther could only laugh. She realized she
must have gotten a little drunk, but that was just as well. She
felt as if her heart had frozen shut, but the laugh still sounded
pleasantly girlish. No one turned to stare at her.
“If he decides he wants to touch me, he will
simply kill you, Itzhak. ‘The war is over. I wouldn’t let him touch
you.’ How would you stop him, would you tell me? Do you really
imagine this is just anyone?”
Suddenly she was sick with dread. She wanted
to get up and run, and knowing that she couldn’t, that she might be
running straight into Hagemann’s arms, only increased her rising
sense of panic.
Oh God, where was Inar? If she could know
only that he was somewhere around, she would feel safe again. But
perhaps she had forfeited her small claim to his protection. Yes,
of course she had. She had given up even her right to love him,
except that she wouldn’t help herself.
Poor Itzhak, he was all at sea. He looked so
uncomfortable, almost ashamed. They weren’t having a very pleasant
honeymoon.
Another flourish of the drums and three girls
tumbled on stage, almost as if they had been pushed. The trumpet
blared out one of those throbbing tunes that everyone knows but
that don’t seem to have any name, and the girls swayed back and
forth in a parody of dance, swinging their hands and behinds like
mechanical toys. Their costumes were bright yellow, edged with
ruffles, and no less modest than the sort of thing one saw every
day on any beach in Europe, but the whole performance still managed
an impressive lewdness. After a few moments the comedian returned
and stood at one corner of the stage shouting jokes as the girls
continued to dance. Now everyone laughed.
In the barracks at Waldenburg they had
laughed like that. Esther could remember, almost as if it were
happening that instant, how they had made her dance naked up and
down the little corridor between the rows of beds, how they had
beat time against the floor with their boot heels and how they had
laughed. As she danced by, some of them would try to grab at her,
or strike her on the buttocks with the flats of their hands. They
wouldn’t allow her to stop, not even when she fell down weeping
with exhaustion. When she couldn’t get up again, they had made her
crawl on her hands and knees.
But the girls on stage, with their fixed
grins, safe up there from their tormenters, was it any different
for them? Did they think so? Their eyes, hunted and weary-looking,
said not. It was no wonder Hagemann liked to come here.
“It’s pretty silly, isn’t it,” Itzhak said
finally, having almost to shout over the laughter and the screaming
trumpet.
But Esther couldn’t answer. She could only
draw back her lips into what she hoped would be taken for a smile
as she listened in her mind to the stamping of boot heels.
. . . . .
Hagemann’s car was a long gray Mercedes that
had once, he was assured, belonged to a member of the Spanish royal
family. He hardly cared which member, since he had bought it less
to please his vanity than for the steel shields that turned the
back seat into a bullet-proof cocoon. In case of attack, if he had
time to throw himself to the floor, to get down below the window
line, he would be safe enough. It seemed a reasonable precaution,
even in General Franco’s Spain.
The drive from his villa to the club took
less than twenty minutes, along a road that swept by Burriana’s
harbor. The bay was too shallow for ships of any size, so all one
saw there were the pleasure boats of wealthy tourists and fishing
craft belonging to the local peasants. They made a picturesque
sight, clustering around the sides of the long wooden piers like
swarming bees.
Hagemann kept his own boat anchored closer to
home, at a private wharf just beyond the fence surrounding his
property. All he needed to do was to climb down a narrow metal
stairway—so cunningly concealed by the undergrowth that one could
look straight at it and never know it was there—walk across the
narrow beach, and there it was. He kept the wharf guarded, of
course. The sea was his avenue of escape.
But tonight he had no thought of escape. Two
of his bodyguards were sitting in the front while he rode behind
with Faraj. The others followed in a separate car. He was on his
way to one of the more important moments in his invisible
career.
“You see, my friend, we reach our goal not
all at once but by a logical progression. We could not succeed in
getting the girl out of her prison, but the Jews did that for us
and now deliver her over into our power. What clearer proof could
you demand that history is on our side?”
But Faraj was not in a temper to be consoled.
Faraj was a nervous little man with none of the gambler’s
confidence in his luck.
“They are preparing a trap for us,” he said.
It was a sentence he had repeated at intervals throughout the
evening.
“Of course they are. What of it? Wouldn’t
you, in their place? Like us, they are fighting for their
survival.”
“I wish you were a little less confident you
will win, Colonel. Such self-assurance seems almost like tempting
providence.”
“It is that. To be a German and alive after
1945 is to tempt providence. I have grown used to it.”
After that, and until the car began to make
its slow, careful way through the narrow streets of the central
town, they did not speak again. Hagemann was grateful. It was
politic to bring Faraj this evening, but he would have preferred to
be alone. He wanted to think, and to remember. He wanted to be
alone with Esther.
It had been Becker who had first told him
about “the
Herr General’s
new girlfriend—a skinny little
thing, not your type at all. We picked her up on the way, in one of
those glue factories in northern Poland. The General practically
snatched her from before the doors of the crematorium. You should
have seen her—messy little bitch! We’ve all had her, almost
everyone in the camp, so she’s kneaded soft enough that she won’t
be too demanding on our commander’s energies. By now you could push
that little lady’s thighs apart with a feather. Hah, hah, hah!”
Yes, it had been a marvelous joke, in the
best tradition of refined military humor. At the time, Hagemann had
hardly even been listening.
Because, of course, he had been away—in
Berlin, for conversations with the bright young things on
Reichsführer
Himmler’s personal staff who were concerned
that “Project Loki” might not come to fruition quickly enough to
turn back the American and British armies in France.
Well, they had been right to be
concerned.
So he had not arrived at Waldenburg until
nearly a month after the main force, under General von Goltz, had
established themselves. The Berlin trip had been a great secret—he
had not even employed a driver—so he alone had not been in on the
great good fun of the little Jewish bitch who was keeping the
General amused of an evening. At the time, it hadn’t seemed a very
important omission.
The next morning he had gone to report. He
and the General sat drinking captured Russian tea together, and the
door to the bedroom was slightly ajar. There she was, sitting on
the bed, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, staring out at him
through huge, liquid brown eyes that seemed to see straight through
him. Probably von Goltz had planned it that way—he took a curious
pride in his little acquisitions, the way another man might in the
bottles of wine that lined his cellar walls. The half-open door was
a kind of boast.
Even then, while he and his commander drank
tea together and discussed the politics of their mission in this
peculiarly godforsaken place, Hagemann had known—yes, it was not
too much to say he had known—that it was the shaping destiny of his
life who stared at him with those frightened, hollow eyes.
So it was more than merely the answer to von
Goltz’s riddle that drew him to the Café Pícaro this night. After
all this time, he wanted to know what he would see in her eyes
now.
When his car pulled up in front of the
entrance, Hagemann saw that Lutz was already standing in the
doorway, his arms crossed over his chest, waiting. The usual crowds
of begging children were nowhere in sight—they were all deathly
afraid of Lutz.
“She is already here,
Herr Oberst
,” he
said, opening the car door for Hagemann. For a moment he stared at
Faraj with what appeared to be astonished contempt and then,
seemingly, dismissed him from his mind. “She is sitting at table
fourteen, where you will have a good view.”
“You have done well, Ernst. And is her
husband with her? What is he like?”
Lutz merely spat on the pavement—it was
answer enough. He was a big man, with muscles that bulged visibly
under his black dinner jacket. His hair was cropped so close that
it was impossible to say precisely what color it might have been,
and his massive head was seamed with leathery folds, like old
wounds. The wound that had invalided him out of the SS in early
1944 did not show, but it kept him from ever raising his right arm
above his shoulder. He was an old-line fighter, and he hated Jews
worse than death.
“Of course—I quite understand. I suppose I
shall see for myself. Have you arranged the distraction?”
“
Ja, Herr Oberst.”
He glanced once more at Faraj and then gave
Hagemann an inquiring look, as if to ask,
Must I have this
greasy little carpet peddler in my club as well?
“Come, Faraj.” Hagemann slid his arm over the
Syrian’s narrow, chubby shoulders. “We’ll drink champagne and look
at the girls. If you see one you particularly fancy, I’m sure Ernst
can arrange something for you. Can’t you, Ernst?”
“
Ja, Herr Oberst.”
The club was crowded. Hagemann went in behind
his bodyguards, along the rear wall, and sat down at the table that
was always kept for him. He had not yet seen Esther, and he was
sure she had not seen him.
There was a great deal of noise—the band, and
that idiot of a comedian shouting into his microphone, and everyone
laughing and whistling and calling to the girls. The girls, in
their high-heeled shoes and their tiny swimsuit costumes that made
them look all leg and bosom, the girls were dancing with frantic
energy, as if caught up in some clumsy ecstasy of motion. It would
be like this until the small hours of the morning.
Hagemann liked the club. The show was exactly
the same, night after night, but he came as often as he could. He
liked it because it was all vulgar nonsense. He let it wash over
him like warm water. He liked it because it left room for nothing
else. There were no dark thoughts at the Café Pícaro,
Lutz was very obliging, and none of the girls
was averse to entertaining gentlemen, but Hagemann wasn’t
interested in looking for that sort of pleasure here. Smiling
chorus girls were not what he wanted, and Spain was full enough of
dark Madonnas. He preferred women who understood the pain of
life.
The woman he wanted tonight had no place at
the Café Pícaro, and yet she was sitting, quite calmly, not ten
meters away from him, watching the performance with an expression
of uneasy pleasure frozen on her lips. Hagemann found it necessary
to close his eyes for a moment, as if the light bothered them. He
was not sure that he could bear the longing that was almost a surge
of physical pain.
Of course she knew he was there. She gave no
sign, but she knew. The time had been when he and Esther had
understood each other very well, so it was impossible to hide
against the wall of a crowded room and pretend not to be there. She
would always know.
The Jew who was pretending to be her husband
was slight, with curly hair, and much too young. He watched the
show with a nervous intensity and now and then turned to Esther,
spoke a few words, and gave his attention back to the stage, which,
from the expression on his face, might have been the scene of his
personal drama. Esther would never have married a man with eyes
which had seen so little of life.
Hagemann did not regard himself as, at least
in the theoretical sense, an anti-Semite. During the time of
National Socialism, he had killed Jews on the orders of his
superiors, but without conviction. They were harmless enough
people, and the Zionist Conspiracy was a paranoid delusion—he knew
that. Even the greatest of men can have their eccentricities, and
Himmler had played upon that side of the Führer’s nature to create
a foolish disaster. The whole policy had been a catastrophic waste.
Only fools like Joachim believed anything else.
“Haven’t I told you often enough to read the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
?” he would rave. “Isn’t it
all there, how they plan to take over the world? Isn’t that just
what they are doing this very moment? Look at Russia. Look at the
Near East. Look at America!”
Nothing, of course, could convince Joachim
that Truman and Stalin weren’t Jews and that any Zionist plot afoot
in the world was merely a conspiracy of survival forced on them by
the events of 1933 to 1945. Hagemann was a soldier, not a political
philosopher, but even he could grasp as much as that.