“Just so.”
Out of force of habit, Leivick checked his
shirt pocket for the pack of cigarettes he had bought less than an
hour ago, but of course they were not there. Someone must have
stolen them. Someone always stole one’s cigarettes in a prison.
“Are you looking for these?” Hagemann asked,
taking the pack from his right jacket pocket. He even had the box
of matches.
Leivick took them and lit one. The smoke
made his headache worse, but he felt more tranquil.
“Were you in the war, Herr Leivick? I mean,
of course, the 1914-18 war.”
“Yes. I was a corporal of artillery in the
Austrian army.”
“Did you see much of the fighting?”
“No. One doesn’t in artillery.”
“I was in the infantry.”
He said this as if it were meant to explain
something, turning his head to see what impression it made. Yes, of
course. The Western Front in its full savagery.
“I was in Treblinka. These things cannot be
made to constitute an excuse.”
“You are a Czech, are you not, Herr
Leivick?”
“I
was
a Czech, yes.”
The irony did not escape Hagemann’s notice.
He raised his eyebrows and made a short gesture with his left hand,
as if to concede the point.
“Very well then,
you
were
a Czech.
It amounts to the same thing. For you the great war’s end meant
national liberation—freedom from Austria. For us it meant nothing
except defeat.”
“So you followed Hitler?”
“Yes. Hitler wanted to recast the world, and
we both know it needed recasting. He wanted a real revolution, not
just in politics but in the way people thought and acted and lived.
You don’t do that unless you are prepared to be ruthless.”
“So you were ruthless? I have heard this
argument before, Colonel.”
“And you will hear it again, provided you
Jews ever manage to achieve your utopia in the desert.”
“Which you are determined to prevent.”
“Yes, which I am determined to prevent. You
see, this war will not end. The logic of the conflict perpetuates
itself forever. It will go on and on, however any of us may feel,
until we are all dead.”
“Which is, it would seem, something
Christiansen understands as well as vou.”
“Yes.” Hagemann smiled, nodding his head,
almost as if this were the conclusion he had hoped they would
reach. “Yes, for him too there is no turning back. The old war was
over when it was over, but not this one. This one, never. I knew it
that morning in June, 1942. I rather suspect I had known it all
along, but Kirstenstad forced it upon me.”
“Then you know why he means to kill
you?”
“Yes. Of course. He is a Norwegian, isn’t
he? Who could blame him? Would I act any differently in his place?
He has a right to kill me—provided he can.”
“And so do we.”
“Who? You mean the Jews? Yes, of course. We
have all behaved just as we ought, all along.”
Leivick had finished his cigarette. He
ground it out under his heel, feeling not the least bit tranquil.
The tea had grown quite cold, but he picked the mug up from the
floor and moistened the inside of his mouth with it. Hagemann was
mad, of course.
“You have been responsible for the deaths of
thousands of innocent people, and now you prepare for the murder of
countless thousands more, and you claim we have all behaved as we
ought? You astonish me, Colonel. Even coming from an SS man, that
is simple insanity. “
“On the contrary, Herr Leivick, it is the
only antidote for insanity. Do you know what they taught us in the
SS? ‘Believe, Obey, Fight!’ We are soldiers in the Waffen-SS, not
bureaucrats or policemen or politicians—soldiers. That is the logic
of the military life: ‘Believe, Obey, Fight!’ We have nothing else
to keep us sane. To doubt is to perish—to die inwardly and,
finally, to die in earnest. Do you know what my orders were
concerning Kirstenstad? ‘You will destroy the village with the
utmost ferocity.’ Those were General von Goltz’s very words: ‘with
the utmost ferocity.’ It was to be a reprisal. Such operations were
being carried out everywhere in Europe to avenge the assassination
of Reinhard Heydrich, and everywhere the orders were the same:
‘with the utmost ferocity.’ I was a soldier—I did my duty. The
great trick is to do one’s duty and not go mad.”
Leivick wanted to hide his face in his
hands. His head was pounding again and he was filled with despair.
No, Hagemann had not gone mad—except in the sense that the whole
world had gone mad in this maddest of times. Everything Hagemann
said made perfect sense. He was not a raving lunatic. And that was
what Leivick’s despair consisted of, the consciousness that he
understood everything, that, like Hagemann, he had always
understood.
“You do evil, knowing it to be evil, and you
do not go mad. Tell me, Colonel, what is your secret? I am not
joking—I would like to know.”
“You know already, Herr Leivick, Tell me,
when you were a corporal of artillery, and you sent your explosive
shells whistling off into the enemy trenches, didn’t you do evil
and know it? Have you ever seen what artillery shells do to men? I
was in the trenches in France. I can tell you. I’ve seen men, still
alive, with their guts torn out, or wandering around half mad from
the pounding of the guns. To be a soldier is the condition of life
in our time. You may wish to draw distinctions, to say that the
things I did in Norway and in the East were somehow different, but
I do not. Horror is horror, suffering is suffering, death is death.
If we wish to live—and perhaps, I grant, under such circumstances
it is better not to live—but if life is what we want, then we
submit to evil. We surrender to it. We embrace it. I embraced it,
and not without cost to myself, but I lived. We are none of us any
different, not you nor myself nor Christiansen. For all of us it is
the same. Triumph or perish, and the cost of that triumph is
wickedness.”
He had become quite excited, whether from
some private despair or out of a cruel delight in his own words it
was impossible to say. When he stopped speaking he stared straight
ahead for several seconds, as if waiting to return to himself.
“Good.” Leivick smiled and lit himself
another cigarette. “You might try explaining all of this to
Christiansen, provided there is time before the catgut chokes off
your windpipe.”
“Do you hope to frighten me, Herr
Leivick?”
“No. Only to remind you that there is still
something of which to be frightened.”
“Oh, I knew that already.”
“You really have gone mad, Colonel.”
“No, I have merely discovered freedom.”
He turned to Leivick as if he expected to be
understood, as if that was why he had come—to be understood. He had
not been disappointed.
Yes, of course. Leivick
knew all about freedom. It was part of war, that freedom. One’s
government released one from moral responsibility. Mercy became
nothing except a species of intellectual weakness. It happened even
in the death camps, to the prisoners themselves, whose very
powerlessness became a liberation of sorts. One will do anything to
survive, just as in the SS one
could
do anything and survive. They
all went mad. And none of them would ever recover. Nothing would
ever be the same for them again.
“You will only be free until Christiansen
kills you.”
“Yes, I know. But the fates of individuals
don’t matter so very much, do they. That was something else we both
learned in the war.”
He seemed to derive some sort of
satisfaction from the idea, almost like the comfort of a religious
faith—people didn’t matter. But that, of course, was his
freedom.
“And am I to be allowed to know what my fate
will be?”
“You will die—in Syria. After you have told
me where I can find the late General von Goltz’s legacy.
“You seem surprised. Did you imagine, Herr
Leivick, that I was really so naive? Didn’t you think I would
realize that if you were willing to bait your trap with Fraulein
Rosensaft you must already have learned from her everything she
could tell you? And who would know if not you?”
Leivick was glad to be sitting down. He felt
weak and shaky and full of anguish, and he had no idea whether it
was still the drug or merely the consciousness of his own failure.
His eyes burned and were damp with sweat. He took a handkerchief
from his pocket and wiped them dry, but it hardly seemed to make
any difference. Hagemann, who, it seemed, had deliberately chosen
to be a mad brute and hardly a man at all, was still watching him
with something like resentment.
“So you never wanted her at all then?”
“Yes, I wanted her. And I will have her,
within a matter of hours. But it will be you and not she who is put
to the question in Damascus. That will be better.”
“Better for who?”
“Better for her, and better for me.”
. . . . .
It was not until he had been alone for
several minutes that Leivick could bring himself to take the
handkerchief out of his pocket once more, to wipe his face, and to
consider calmly—in the sense of a rational progression of ideas, of
propositions expressible in words, not simply images of
horror—where his miscalculation had led him. Emotion and appetite,
they were the province of a creature like Hagemann. Any animal
could feel, but it was the special gift of men to think. And now,
in his extremity, Leivick wanted most particularly to be a man.
He was in possession of a terrible secret, a
secret that could lead to the destruction of many lives, of a
nation, a people’s last hope. And now, through his own stupidity
and blindness, he had been delivered into the hands of one certain
to turn that secret to the most appalling ends. If he could have
died, simply by willing it—if he could just. . .
They had taken his watch, and of course his
necktie and belt, all of the more obvious methods of suicide. But
sometimes living and dying were nothing more than questions of
fortitude. A man could run his head against a wall, crushing it
like an eggshell, if he had but the will.
Except that Hagemann had thought of that,
and had ordered him chained to the plank bed. It was unlikely,
under the circumstances, that he would end by doing more than
knocking himself into a stupor and thus making matters that much
easier for Hagemann and his allies.
So, after all, there was nothing to do
except, once more, to wait upon events. The next few moves were up
to Hagemann—and, perhaps, Hirsch and Faglin, Perhaps they might
furnish the means of defeating the interrogators in Damascus.
There was strength in hope—and in the
knowledge that it was not the Angel of Death they were fighting,
only a weak and frightened man who might, in another life, have
been just another in the faceless innocence of the human race but
whom instead history had made its victim. Villainy in itself was
nothing. It had no strength of its own; it needed the support of a
uniform and a gun and a mandate of its own devising. That was how
it had murdered its six million Jews.
Hagemann was mortal, though, and could be
killed. Perhaps finally Inar Christiansen really would kill him,
but perhaps it would be better for Inar Christiansen to learn that
Egon Hagemann wasn’t worthy of such intensity of hatred.
Still, please God let him kill him. Let him
do it before Egon Hagemann has his chance to murder another six
million.
19
The distance between the hotel and the spot
where Dessauer hid while he watched Mordecai being taken was only a
little more than a quarter of a mile, yet it took him nearly half
an hour to cover it. He had never been more frightened in his
life—every shadow seemed to conceal an enemy with a gun; at every
intersection he expected to be run down by a speeding car that
would come out of nowhere. Until that morning they had all been
embarked upon what he had somehow taken to be an adventure, one of
those slightly unreal conflicts between good and evil that men talk
about after dinner, when the women have left the room.
Now, suddenly, this was actual life.
Mordecai was unconscious when they put him
into the back of the car. Two men carried him, and his head hung at
a strange angle. He might even have been dead except that then they
wouldn’t have bothered to make off with his corpse. Before they got
in the car themselves, the men looked around, searching the
neighborhood, scowling as if surprised and annoyed to have found
Mordecai alone. Then they drove off. They weren’t in any hurry.
They had a lifetime and nothing to be afraid of.
I have to find a
telephone
, Dessauer thought.
I’ve got to warn them—and then I’ve got to get
back.
A grocery store in the next block had a
telephone. Dessauer dialed the hotel and gave the desk clerk his
room number. Esther was the one who answered. When he was finished
he managed to fumble a fivepeseta note out of his billfold—he
didn’t seem to have any change—and handed it to the grocer, who
stared at him with undisguised astonishment before hurriedly
stuffing the money into the pocket of his apron.
He made his way through back yards and over
fences. Every so often he would stop and listen. He was full of
fear. There was nothing except himself, and a nameless menace, and
the next few hundred meters.
When he reached the hotel he didn’t go near
the front entrance. If they weren’t afraid to pull Mordecai off a
city street in full daylight, they wouldn’t worry about doing the
same for him in the lobby of a hotel. He slipped in through the
employees’ entrance and made his way up by the back stairs. No one
tried to stop him.
It was Faglin who opened the door. They were
all there, even Christiansen, who was supposed to be in hiding from
the police. He could have done without seeing Christiansen, who
looked at him through the same cold blue eyes, as if nothing had
changed. Maybe he didn’t know about last night. Maybe he didn’t
care. Esther, of course, seemed unwilling to look at him at all.
Her hand kept reaching up to touch Christiansen on the arm, as if
to steady herself.