“Do what he says, dammit! Faglin, pull over
somewhere.”
They had gone no more than half a dozen
blocks, but no one was following them—it seemed they had killed
every Guardsman with the misfortune to be on duty that afternoon.
Faglin found the driveway behind a store marked Ferretería in
flaking green paint. It didn’t seem to be very busy. Even before
the sound of their engine had died away, Mordecai was looking up at
the front seat, at Faglin, and making a vague beckoning gesture
with his right hand. In that tiny space he had everyone’s complete
attention.
“Thanks,” he murmured, casting his eyes
around to the three of them and smiling faintly. “I didn’t want to
die in Syria.”
He took a deep breath—at least his chest
heaved, but he seemed to take very little benefit from it. There
was a faint gurgling sound from his windpipe.
“Amos, I saw him.” An excited look came into
his eyes. He was looking at Faglin, but he put his hand on
Christiansen’s arm. “He’s scared good—of our friend here. Our
friend was right, all along. Do it his way now.”
“It’s okay, Mordecai.” Faglin reached over
the backrest and touched him on the face. “We’ll get you patched
up. We’ll—”
“No. No time. They’ve killed me, Amos”
His gaze appeared to wander for a moment,
and then he turned his head a few degrees and looked for
Christiansen.
“He’ll try for the girl now. No choice. He
told me. . . He’s mad, Inar. Crazy. You’ll know what to do. You’ll
know. . .”
It wasn’t until his hand slipped from
Christiansen’s arm that they knew for certain he was dead. For a
long time no one said anything, and then Christiansen reached
across with his right hand and closed Mordecai’s eyes. When he
spoke, his voice was thick but calm.
“Take care of the body,” he said. “Find
somewhere quiet and bury him. You’ll know what’s needed. Don’t let
the Guards. . .”
“Where will you go?” Dessauer asked. There
were tears in his eyes, but he couldn’t. help himself.
There was a pistol lying on the floor in
front of the back seat. Christiansen picked it up and hid it under
his coat. He didn’t look at anybody.
“I’ll be at the hotel, with Esther. Hagemann
can come for us there.”
21
As soon as the car was out of sight,
Christiansen started on his way back to the hotel. It wasn’t
far—nothing was far in this little town—but he had to be careful.
He had killed probably half the Civil Guard contingent for the
whole of Burriana, and they could hardly be expected to take a
thing like that in stride. They would be looking for him.
But he had to get back to the hotel and
Esther because now Hagemann would be looking for her. Right now
there was no one keeping watch on her except Hirsch, and Hirsch
might have all kinds of other things on his mind.
In an hour and a half, two at the
outside—how long did it take to get rid of a corpse?—Faglin and
Itzhak would be back, and then they would decide what to do next.
They would have to decide. There was no more Mordecai to call the
shots for them, just a corpse in the back of a borrowed car.
Christiansen decided he would just as soon
not think along those lines anymore. He would confine himself to
the problem at hand and save the regrets for later. Mordecai was
dead. For the time being they would all be better off simply to
leave it at that.
Hagemann would have to make his try for
Esther now. Mordecai had said so and it was the logical, even the
necessary move. Hagemann was running out of time, just like the
rest of them.
He would kill Hagemann now. He promised
himself that. He would kill the bastard twenty times over and it
still wouldn’t be enough. But he would try to make it enough. He
would square things the best way he could.
But first he had to get back to the hotel,
and avoid being arrested—if there was still anyone left alive to
arrest him.
Would that guy in the alley be one of the
ones who haunted him? If the poor son of a bitch hadn’t panicked. .
. Why hadn’t he fired? What had he seen that had made him want to
run? Christiansen didn’t know—he had hardly realized what was
happening until he found himself on his knees, his hands around the
Guardsman’s neck, staring into those wide-open, dead eyes. The poor
monkey was as limp as a rag doll. He didn’t even know how he had
killed him.
But for dumb luck, it would have been the
other way round. Christiansen figured he had probably used up that
day’s supply of dumb luck.
He had to get this business settled
today—tonight at the latest. He would probably be able to keep from
getting arrested or killed that long, but not any longer. Tomorrow
the whole area would be crawling with police. Four, maybe five more
hours of daylight, and then the covering darkness, and it had to be
finished. Either Hagemann died or he did. There wasn’t any third
choice.
. . . . .
Esther was taken to Jerry Hirsch’s room for
lunch, which was delivered on a covered tray by a waiter in a
starched white jacket. Since Jerry was an employee of the hotel, as
well as a foreigner who spoke English, could talk to the guests on
more or less equal terms, and was not required by his position to
touch money, he was treated with some deference by the rest of the
staff, and the meal was quite good. There was even wine, but it did
nothing to improve the atmosphere. Esther was to regard herself as
no more than a pampered prisoner—a role, it was implied, to which
she should long ago have grown accustomed. It might be protective
custody, but Jerry Hirsch was still her jailer.
They were on a first-name basis. He was one
of those men who always called women and children by their first
names. He wasn’t being friendly; it was merely habit. He wasn’t in
the least friendly.
“What will you do when all this is over,” he
asked, a faint, contemptuous smile on his lips, as if he already
knew the answer. “Are you expecting Christiansen to take you back
to Norway with him? Do you think you can get him to marry you? Do
you plan to turn into an Aryan?”
“He will never go back to Norway.”
“No?”
She didn’t smile at him. She discovered she
had the power to look him straight in the face without feeling
either ashamed or frightened. It was something new for her. She
didn’t care what Jerry Hirsch thought of her—it simply wasn’t
important.
“Then what is your plan?”
“I’ve given up having plans. I’ll do
whatever Inar wants. I’ll trust to that.”
“Maybe you should have stuck with Itzikel.
You could have been sure he’d marry you. That’s the way his mind
works.”
He set down his coffee cup and picked up the
pack of cigarettes that was lying on the table next to his plate.
There was something almost satirical in the way his fingers managed
the book of matches, cupping around the tip of the cigarette as he
lit it, almost as if he were parodying someone.
“Itzikel would take you to Israel—and it
will be Israel, very soon. You could be a Jew there.”
All at once Esther had an impulse to laugh.
She couldn’t help herself. She put her hands in front of her face
and laughed.
“Oh yes,” she said finally. She still had to
laugh a little, because it was all so funny. “I could be a Jew
there, but what else? Do you know when I found out I was a Jew?
When the Nazis told me. Suddenly it was the most important fact
about me: I was a Jew. You’re just like them, Jerry. You despise
me, and not because I’ve led a bad life but because I’m Jewish and
have led a bad life. I’m a little Jewish tramp, and you feel
insulted because Jewish women aren’t supposed to be like that. Is
that what would happen to me in Israel? Would I become so Jewish
that there wouldn’t be room for anything else? If it’s just the
same to you, I’ll stick with Inar. I don’t know whether he cares
for me or not, but at least it’s a woman he takes to bed with him
and not a cause.”
“Are you finished?”
Yes, he really did despise her—she could see
that in his eyes, and in the tight little lines around his mouth.
With another man it might have been merely an amused contempt, as
if she were some kind of incarnate dirty joke, but it went deeper
than that with Hirsch.
“Is it so bad if I just want to live like
other people?” she asked. She really wanted to know.
“Yes. For us, yes. I don’t
believe in God—to hell with God. But we’re the Chosen People
anyway. They chose us—the
goyim
, people like Hagemann and your
friend Inar. You’re a little fool if you think you can ever make
yourself into one of them. You’ll always be a Jew, whether you like
it or not.”
“So maybe it’s enough that Inar doesn’t care
that I’m a Jew. Maybe I can be a Jew and he can love me anyway. .
You think maybe that’s possible, Jerry? You think maybe they’re all
just like Hagemann, without any heart?”
She stood up, the tears brimming in her
eyes. She wouldn’t cry—she would force herself not to cry.
“I’ll go back to my room now,” she said, her
voice only a little choked. “Inar will be back soon.”
“Inar and all the rest of them are very
probably dead by now, don’t you know that?”
“Don’t say it! Don’t you ever say it!”
“Have everything just your own way,
Missy.”
He smiled again, this time an uncomfortable,
unhappy smile. No, he wouldn’t be glad if they all died. He didn’t
wish for that.
Jerry Hirsch’s room was on the first floor,
so he took her up the stairway to the third-floor landing and then
brought her to her door.
“I’d better wait with you,” he said. It was
part of the routine.
“No. I’ll be fine by myself. All I need do
is pick up the telephone.”
That was even true. Jerry’s room was next to
the switchboard—if he left his door open he could hear the ringing,
and there were little red lights to indicate the room. She would be
safe enough, and she really did want to be alone for a while.
“Okay. Fine.”
It was the room she had shared with Inar
last night. One of his shirts was hanging in the closet, and his
shaving things were still resting on the shelf above the sink. No
one had been in yet to make the bed, and when she sat down on it
she passed her hand in under the sheets, as if to see if she could
still feel the heat of his body. There was nothing, of course. All
at once she felt terribly lonely.
It had been easier when she had had no one.
Her loneliness then had been something of an abstraction, a window
between her and the world. It was one thing to miss the parents who
had died at Chelmno five years ago, but it was quite another, she
was discovering, to miss a man who might come back in ten minutes
or never. The luxury of that uncertainty made her heart seem to
twist inside her.
Inar was strong and hard—the muscles in his
arms were directly under the skin and were just as smooth and
unyielding as steel. But he was a man and any man could be killed
by any other man. Inar knew it, she knew it, even Hagemann knew it.
It was the great lesson that the war had taught each of them, the
reasonableness of fear. But if Inar was ever afraid he never let it
show. That was his armor—his massive indifference to death. That
was why they were all just a little afraid of him, even Hagemann.
Even Jerry Hirsch.
And she was more afraid than any of them
because she loved him. Inar made her feel as if the war had never
happened—with him everything was innocent, as if it were for the
first time.
If he died, she had no idea how she would
support it.
But she would not cry. She had had all done
with tears a long time ago. Even if she could love, she had not yet
learned how to grieve.
The room was cold. Someone had left the
window slightly open, and the damp cold had gotten inside. She rose
from the bed and closed the window, still feeling half numb after
her conversation with Jerry Hirsch. He was so brutally sure of
himself that she—
The bed was unmade. No one had been in to
attend to the room. So who had left the window open?
All at once fear rushed at her like
darkness. She couldn’t think at all, and then she could only think
of escape.
Then she remembered the telephone. All she
had to do was to pick up the telephone.
It stood on the night table beside the bed,
two steps away. She almost stumbled as she crossed over to it. She
picked up the receiver and pressed it against her ear, listening
for the familiar crackling buzz, but there was nothing. The line
seemed to be dead.
No. It wasn’t that. Someone had anchored
down the cradle prongs with heavy black tape so they couldn’t
spring up when she lifted the receiver.
She mustn’t panic. She kept telling herself
that she mustn’t panic. She had to do something. She could try
pulling the tape up, but there was too much of it to manage easily
and her hands were shaking. She might even drop something and make
a noise. She had to try to get out of the room as quietly as
possible.
She put the receiver back on its cradle,
trying to remember the plan of the room. Had the bathroom door been
open when she came in? Yes, it had—no one could be hiding in there.
Perhaps they were out in the corridor. Perhaps she had been wrong
about the bathroom. There was nothing except to try to run away.
Even if they caught her in the hallway, perhaps if she screamed
loud enough someone would hear.
“No, Esther, it wouldn’t do you any good to
scream.”
She spun around so fast that if she hadn’t
caught herself on the edge of the night table she probably would
have fallen down. A man had stepped out of the closet. He had been
waiting there the whole time. He was wearing a pair of blue
worker’s coveralls, and there was a pistol in his right hand. He
was tall and slender and smiled at her. He was Hagemann.