Tonight then. There would be a Syrian
merchant ship waiting forty kilometers off shore. In the small
hours of the morning they would join her. Then everything would be
as it had been before the defeat. Everything.
There was a break in the trees, a small
clearing where one could stand by the sheer stone cliffs and look
out at the Mediterranean, as calm as any lake. Hagemann always
stopped here—he had no idea why, since the view always made him
feel uncomfortable. The sea was his avenue of escape—it had been in
1945 and would be again tonight—but somehow, looking down on it
from this height, it seemed shrouded in menace. He would stand
there, sometimes for several minutes at a time, feeling the dread
crawl through him like maggots.
“
Herr Oberst.”
He turned around and saw with some slight
sensation of relief that it was Gerstein, the captain of his
bodyguard.
“Yes, Rudi, what is it?”
“It is almost time to go
into town,
Herr Oberst
.”
Gerstein kept his face rigid and unsmiling.
He was a tall, wide-shouldered boy with hair the color of butter,
almost unchanged from the day in 1942 when, at the age of
seventeen, he had been assigned to the Fifth Brigade as a private.
He was a good soldier, brave and cruel, but somehow he had never
stopped being that boy of seventeen. Hagemann always felt more at
ease around Rudi.
“And are we quite prepared here, Rudi? You
know, even after we bring the thing off there will still be danger.
We shall have to wait here until just before the rendezvous, and
they are bound to try hitting back at us before then.”
“You mean the Jews,
Herr Oberst
?” Gerstein
allowed himself to smile, as if his commander had made a joke he
was bound to acknowledge. “We will be ready for them. We are always
ready for them.”
“Good. I am glad to hear you say so.”
Hagemann turned his eyes back toward the
sea. It was almost as if he couldn’t help himself. What was he
looking for? He hardly even knew.
And then he remembered the little sailboat
of yesterday afternoon.
“
Perhaps it is the
Norwegian,”
Faraj had said.
“Perhaps his intention is to climb these cliffs
and murder you in your sleep.”
Sleeping or
waking, what difference would it make to Christiansen?
And, of course, it would be impossible to
scale these cliffs without being detected. Nevertheless. . .
He glanced at his trusted subordinate, whom
he had trained, whom he had rescued from the insignificance and
boredom of a conquered Germany, and he watched the smile die on
those youthful lips. He meant to make it understood that there must
be no miscalculation, no concession to arrogance. And, yes,
Gerstein understood all that.
“Rudi, I think it would be well if we
doubled the patrols tonight, just as a precaution. And now perhaps
we can go down to the car?”
20
It was a three-story brick building that
looked as if it dated from the time of the Republic. Even for a
small town Civil Guard station it wasn’t much, and Franco had
inherited the old monarchy’s obsession with the grandeur of its
public edifices. The only windows that were barred were on the top
story, so that had to be where the holding cells were located.
“It isn’t very wide,” Faglin said, cocking
his head a little to one side, like a painter considering a
landscape. “There’s probably only one big cage up there, somewhere
to store the drunks of a Saturday night. What more would they need
in a little fishing town like this?”
“Nevertheless, we will have to know. “
Christiansen’s cold blue eyes played
nervously over the street, as if he were looking for someone. They,
of course, were looking for him. Probably every policeman in
Burriana had his name and description by then.
“You think maybe one of us should go in
there and ask them?”
“Don’t make jokes, Itzikel.”
“He’s right. That’s precisely what one of us
is going to have to do.”
The icy gaze settled on Faglin. No, there
was no chance that Christiansen was making a joke. Christiansen
looked as if he had never made a joke in his life.
“If Mordecai is in there, we’ll have to find
a way of communicating with him, and I’m the one they’re so eager
to lock up. I’ll just turn myself in.”
“You can’t do that! It’s crazy—it’s. .
.”
But Faglin made an impatient gesture with
his left hand and Dessauer fell silent.
“Once you get inside, how will you let us
know where you are?”
“It’s not a problem. There are only two
barred windows, one on each side of the building. You take one and
Itzhak takes the other. If you see my left hand clutching one of
the bars, I’m in the same cell with Mordecai. Are your eyes good
enough to see my scar from that distance?”
He held out his hand for them to look at. It
was a huge scar, covering the width of all four fingers and
reaching back almost to the wrist
“Yes,” Dessauer said. For some reason the
sight of it awed him. “No trouble.”
“And if you’re not in the same cell?”
“Then I’ll throw down a shirt button or
something. If I can’t make contact, if I don’t think he’s being
held up there at all, I’ll just give a shout and the pair of you
can lose yourselves and live to try again another day.”
“Don’t you think we’d try to get you out
then?”
From the way Christiansen’s eyes narrowed,
Dessauer knew at once he had said something stupid. The silence of
those few seconds was almost unbearable. Then Christiansen smiled
faintly.
“You might, but Faglin’s been around longer.
No hard feelings.”
Faglin shrugged his thin shoulders. “No, no
hard feelings. I think it would be a good idea if we took another
look around before you go pay your courtesy call.”
The three of them were standing together in
the shadow of a shop awning diagonally across the intersection from
the Guard station’s front entrance. It was the lunch hour—sacred in
all Latin countries—so the shop was closed. The streets were nearly
deserted. Everything was quiet, which meant that any bored
policeman who happened to glance out the window because he had
nothing better to do would be sure to notice them. In
Christiansen’s case, this could present difficulties.
“I’ll wait for you here,” he said, lighting
another cigarette. It was his third in not quite twenty minutes.
“That might be best.”
The other two men stepped out into the
sunshine of the quiet, wind-still street. They didn’t look behind
them, but Dessauer could feel Christiansen’s eyes on the back of
his head. It wasn’t until they had passed around the front of the
Guard station and turned the corner onto the next street that he
lost that sense of being watched.
“What will we really do if they don’t put
him in the same cell with Mordecai?”
Faglin only glanced at him for a moment and
then went back to his study of the building directly behind the
Guard station.
“We’ll go through on the other side and hope
we find Mordecai there. What choice do we have?”
“And leave Christiansen behind?”
“Yes. There won’t be time to get him out as
well.”
“And he knows that?”
“Yes.”
“Shit.”
“Nobody ever said he didn’t have guts. Not
even Hirsch.”
There was a large dog with a heavy, matted
coat, brown with black patches, lying on a doorstep, stretched out
to make the most of the sun’s heat. He lifted his head to watch
them as they went by and then turned back to lay it between his
paws again. The sight of them seemed to depress him.
“What are you going to do about Hirsch?”
“Nothing.”
Faglin stopped and looked up at a
third-story window framed in shutters that had been painted a
bright blue. He smiled, as if at something funny.
“If I planned to do anything about Jerry I
would have done it before we left the hotel,” he went on. “Jerry’s
all right—he’s the practical type. He’ll stay in his room and sulk
for a while and then it’ll be business as usual.
“We’ll go in through there. Let’s hope
everyone is having lunch out, unlikely as that is.”
He hadn’t taken his eyes off the window with
the blue shutters.
They went around the next corner and found
the entrance to the apartment building. It really wasn’t anything
more than a tenement, with an outside stairway and only one door
per story. They had rented a car and had it parked just out of
sight, not half a block away, but they still had to get to it. The
stairway was completely exposed—it would be a problem if the police
came around fast enough to catch them before they made it down to
the street. That was the sort of thing they would have to worry
about when the time came. You couldn’t expect to have
everything.
Christiansen was still under the awning when
they got back. He still had a cigarette between his lips, and the
remains of four others were on the sidewalk in front of him, each
rubbed out with the toe of his shoe so that they looked like
squashed insects. He reached down and picked up a knapsack that had
been resting against the outside wall of the shop, handing it to
Faglin, Then he took the revolver from under his belt and gave it
to Dessauer.
“Keep it warm for me,” he said. In the
shade, his eyes looked as if he were already dead.
“Sure.”
He walked across the street and, without a
pause, as if it were the sort of thing he did every day, opened the
left side of the double doorway to the Guard station, letting it
swing closed behind him when he disappeared inside.
“Just like that,” Dessauer said under his
breath.
“That’s right, kid. Just like that.”
Faglin made a gesture to indicate that he
would take this side of the building and that Dessauer should go
around and watch at the other window.
The dog was still there. This time he didn’t
even trouble to look up as Dessauer took a station on the sidewalk
in front of him. Dessauer glanced at his watch. It was three
minutes after one.
He tried to imagine what was going on inside
the station. What would Christiansen do, just walk up to the front
desk and announce, “I understand you gentlemen have been looking
for me”? He might, come to think of it.
And what would the police do? At this hour,
all the senior officers were probably off home, enjoying a little
nap after lunch—Christiansen would be counting on that. The desk
sergeant wouldn’t dare risk trying to interrogate him; he would
leave that to his superiors, so they could take the credit. He
would content himself with a body search, which was why
Christiansen had given Dessauer his gun, and then he would toss him
in a cell and settle back to wait. The rough stuff would come
later, when they could all feel themselves on safer ground.
How long would all that take? Ten minutes?
Fifteen? Dessauer looked at his watch again and found that exactly
two minutes had passed.
He thought he could hear a telephone ringing
somewhere, but he couldn’t be sure. The sweat was collecting under
his armpits. His hands were cold, so he slipped them inside his
overcoat pockets. It was seven minutes past one.
No, he couldn’t blame Esther for liking
Christiansen better. Dessauer wasn’t at all sure he would have had
the nerve to walk into that place—in Spain they punished murderers
with the garrote. They strapped you down in a chair, put a loop of
rope around your neck, and twisted it with an iron bar until it
crushed your windpipe and you strangled.
At sixteen minutes after one, a hand
appeared in the cell window and the fingers closed around the
middle bar. It was a left hand, and the pale winter sunlight made
the scar on the back glisten like silver.
Dessauer had to force himself to keep from
running. This time he went around the back of the building. As soon
as he reached the other side he saw Faglin standing on the opposite
sidewalk, looking up at the barred third-story window like a man in
love. When he noticed Dessauer, he hoisted the knapsack to his
shoulder and came over.
“Well? Hand or button?”
“Hand. Lucky for Christiansen.”
“Lucky for us too. We’ll need him to help
cover our escape.”
The tenement had been built probably at
around the same time as the Civil Guard station, but the brick was
a slightly different color. The Republic had favored brick; brick
was more “proletarian”. The back of one building was flush up
against the back of the other; you couldn’t have fit a business
card in the space between them. Faglin and Dessauer trudged up the
stairway together to the landing on the third floor. There was no
bell, so Faglin knocked at the door. When there was no answer right
away, he knocked again.
Finally the door opened. The man inside was
perhaps thirty years old, with a stubble of beard and uncombed
black hair that had a tendency to fall forward into his eyes. He
was wearing an undershirt that showed off his heavy arms and.
shoulders, and there was a napkin in his right hand. He looked
annoyed.
“
Si?
”
Faglin only smiled at him, swung the
knapsack down from his shoulder, and pulled a revolver out from
beneath the flap. He rested the barrel against the man’s chest and
pushed. The man stepped back, the door opened wider, and everyone
was inside. Dessauer closed the door behind him.
The whole family was there—mama, grandma, a
boy of perhaps five with long, thin legs, a baby in a highchair.
They were sitting around a table covered with the remains of the
midday meal. Papa, the one in the undershirt, had retreated back to
his wife’s chair, where he stood with his hand resting on the
wooden backrest. They were all staring at Faglin’s gun—enchanted,
like mice before a cobra.