She glanced down at the brandy bottle, a
little surprised to discover it actually existed, and then she
smiled.
“Am I interrupting something?”
It was Hagemann. He had opened the door and
stepped inside so quietly that she hadn’t imagined he was there,
but she managed to smother the sudden rush of fear and turned
around to meet him tolerably composed.
She hated him—“hate” was hardly even
adequate—but she managed to smile after a fashion.
“I’m glad to find you in better spirits,
Esther. Are you prepared to live now, and listen to reason?”
The smile on his own lips seemed to mock at
her, as if he understood everything that was in her mind, had
always understood and would never be taken in. He was a superior
being, a member of the race of masters. What could she hope to
achieve against him? He took a few tentative steps toward her and
raised his hand, as if offering to take hers, and then he stopped
and the smile died.
She was standing beside the bed, just at the
edge of the white carpet beneath it, and suddenly she knelt down
and smashed the brandy bottle against the tile floor. The bottom
broke cleanly away, leaving the upper half a series of vicious,
jagged points. As she got up she took a lunge toward Hagemann and
the broken bottle raked across the palm of his open hand.
He looked down at it with surprise, as if he
hardly knew what to make of the blood that was suddenly pouring out
over his fingers. It didn’t last long, but for that moment he
didn’t seem to have the will to defend himself. Esther got ready to
lunge at him again—this time she would cut his throat.
But she was just too late. As she swung her
arm around toward him, his own came up to block it and the shock of
pain that reached all the way to her shoulder caused her to let go
of the bottle. But not before one edge of it touched lightly
against Hagemann’s cheek, leaving behind a thick trail of blood. It
was the best she could do.
The bottle struck the floor and smashed, and
at almost the same instant Esther felt a blow to the side of the
head that sent her reeling. A second had her down on her hands and
knees, and when she tried to get up Hagemann kicked her in the
ribs, using the whole top of his shoe so that the toe caught her in
the left breast.
She couldn’t breathe anymore. All she could
hold in her mind was the hope that he wouldn’t kick her again, that
she would have those few seconds to find a breath of air before he
killed her. And of course he would kill her—at Waldenburg once she
had seen him hack a man to death with a shovel merely for daring to
look him directly in the face.
But instead he was kneeling beside her, his
hands on her shoulders, lifting her up. He had wrapped a
handkerchief around his cut hand, but otherwise he hardly seemed to
notice. The wound on his face was bleeding so freely that it had
soaked the front of his shirt and his clean white jacket.
“What’s happened to you, Esther? Do you hear
me? What’s taken possession of you—have you gone mad?”
She was all right now. All she felt was
pain.
“I wanted to kill you,” she said. Merely to
speak the words, and to see the expression on Hagemann’s face, gave
her an intense, almost sensual pleasure.
Yes, this was worth dying for.
Hagemann pushed her away and rose to his
feet. He hardly seemed to know what to do.
And then, quite suddenly, his confidence
returned. He looked down at her with his old smile.
“So I was right—more right than I could have
guessed. This time it won’t be anything like Waldenburg, will it,
my dear. No. Perhaps that’ s just as well.”
He took the handkerchief from around his
hand and used it to make some attempt at wiping the blood off his
face.
“At Waldenburg you were a reasonable
creature and afraid of me, and you survived that place—you survived
longer than any of my other women. But you should have learned in
the camps what happens to those who hang on to the illusion of
being human. They are trampled into the mud.”
“Do you think I care if you kill me?” she
shouted. “Do you think I care?”
She struggled to rise from her knees. She
didn’t want to meet death like that. Just for once, not like
that.
“No, perhaps you don’t. But you will when
the moment comes. When I’ve decided to kill you, I’ll make it my
business to make you care.”
He began to take off his belt. He was
excited—she could see that clearly enough. He had plans.
No, he hadn’t changed at all.
“It will be interesting to see how your
newfound dignity holds up, Esther. And this, of course, will only
be the merest taste of what’s to come. Before we’re finished you’ll
give me everything, my dear. You’ll tell me all your little
secrets. You’ll beg me—just as you used to—to do whatever I like
with you.”
As she staggered to her feet he reached out
and took the front of her dress in his hand, pulling it away and
yanking her back down to the floor. She hit her elbow against the
tiles, and as she reached up to cover her naked breast she felt
Hagemann’s belt cut her across the face.
Yes, let him kill her. There wouldn’t be
anything to hold him back now. She wanted him to kill her. She
would force him to it.
“He’ll kill you,” she whispered. She could
hardly even do that—it felt as if the buckle had torn her mouth.
“He’ll kill you, no matter what you do to me. How will you feel
then?”
Yes, this was the moment. He wouldn’t be
able to help himself—she could read it in his face. He raised his
hand. . .
She felt the tremor before she heard
anything. It was something that passed through the room like a
shudder. And then she looked up at Hagemann and realized it wasn’t
what she had expected. Hagemann wasn’t even looking at her. He had
forgotten her completely as he stared into empty space. The belt
dropped from his hand.
He said something, but it was lost in the
sound of the explosion.
25
Christiansen walked around to the front of
the villa, carrying a pistol. He had left his rifle behind—this was
going to be a night for close work. Anyone who looked out a window
could have seen him, but it was too late now for that to make any
difference.
He never saw Faglin throw his incendiary.
The explosion was terrific, and thick black-red columns of fire
licked out of the broken windows. One man got out through the front
door. He was screaming and the whole back of his body was on fire.
He only managed six or seven steps before he collapsed and lay
quite still on the ground, still burning. No one else came out. No
one else was ever coming out.
The kitchen fire started only a few seconds
later. Christiansen couldn’t see it, but he heard the blast. Now it
was time to do something.
The front door gave way with a kick, and he
found himself in a large entrance hall with a tiled floor. There
was a stairway, made of massive dark wood and carpeted with a
Persian runner, a couple of doors at either end of the hall, and
two arched entryways to what were obviously reception rooms, side
by side against the rear of the building. What impressed him in
that first instant was the stillness. No one was anywhere to be
seen, and there wasn’t a sound.
He stepped into one of the reception rooms
and snicked on a light switch. It was a beautiful room—the floor
was dark, polished hardwood covered with a Persian carpet that
could have been worth any amount of money. The furniture was old,
heavy and well cared for. There was no one there, nor in the other
reception room, with which it connected. It was almost as if no one
was coming to their party. The only sound was the muted roar of
flames and the crackling of burning timber. In just a few minutes
this place would be an inferno.
There was a door leading off the second
reception room. It was open just a few inches, and Christiansen
pushed against it with the palm of his hand. Inside, standing
behind a desk as if he were looking for something, was a man in
what was obviously an old SS uniform but with the identifying
badges removed. He had thin hair, almost white and carefully combed
back from his forehead, and he wore a pair of rimless spectacles.
The desk drawer was open. When he saw Christiansen he reached
inside. Christiansen shot him through the eye and the man pitched
over backward, hitting his head against the wall behind him and
leaving a wide smear of blood. He was quite still when Christiansen
came over to look at him. There was a Luger lying in the desk
drawer, but that didn’t make any difference. Christiansen would
have killed him anyway.
There was the noise of shooting from the
entrance hall—Faglin’s Sten gun from the sound of it. Christiansen
ran back and found a fat Arab in a pair of red and white striped
silk pajamas lying at the foot of the stairway, his chest cut open
by a burst of machine gun fire. It was the man Christiansen had
seen sitting beside Hagemann at the Café Pícaro the night before.
It seemed like a thousand years ago.
Faglin was there too. His face was streaked
with smoke and he looked excited, the way men always do in
battle.
“Do you know who that was?” he asked,
gesturing with the muzzle of his gun toward the dead Arab. He
didn’t wait for an answer. “That was Mustafa Faraj, the head of the
Syrian Foreign Office’s Department of Jewish Affairs. These people
meant business.”
“Where is Hagemann?”
“What?”
You could smell the fire by then, the thick
smell of burning varnish. And the air was hot and hard to breathe.
They had perhaps two or three minutes before everything within
those walls would be as dead as the house itself, but still Faglin
didn’t seem to know what he was talking about.
“Dammit—have you been upstairs?”
“No.” Faglin looked down once more at the
corpse of the fat little Arab, and then he seemed to return to
himself. “There hasn’t been time.”
Christiansen stepped over the body and
started up the stairs, three at a time. And Faglin was right behind
him.
“Esther!” he heard himself shouting.
“Esther, are you there?”
The second floor was a long corridor with
doors on both sides. Some of them were open, as if people had left
in a hurry. Christiansen kicked in the first one he came to, but
the room was empty—there was just time to notice that it smelled
strongly of violet water. The window was open. Outside there were
two shots from a rifle, the reports just far enough apart to
indicate that they had been very carefully placed. There was the
crack of a pistol firing out in the corridor, overwhelmed at once
by another burst of machine gun fire.
Christiansen went to the next bedroom, and
the next. In one he found another man in his pajamas who looked as
if he had shot himself in the heart, God alone knew why. His pistol
was on the floor beside him. But he didn’t find Esther, and he
didn’t find Hagemann. When he came back out to the landing, Faglin
was waiting for him.
“Let’s get out of here while we still have
the chance.
Everyone’s dead anyway. Come on.”
“He’s got Esther! He’s here and I’ll find
him. He’s—”
“He’s not here. Nobody’s here but the dead.”
Faglin was beginning to look a little wild. “Come on,
Christiansen—let’s go!”
They could already feel the fire on the
second story, and as they went down the staircase it was like
descending into a furnace. Some of the walls were already in
flames, and almost every second there was the sound of breaking
glass. The smoke was so thick they had to cover their faces to
breathe. There was nowhere to go but outside.
They came onto the lawn just in time to see
the great chain-link gate slide open and a car shoot by on the
driveway. Faglin raised his Sten gun and fired after it, but he
wasn’t really trying.
A few seconds later there was the hollow
sound of something Christiansen hadn’t heard since the war. He
could see the explosion almost at once. He found himself wondering
where the hell Hirsch had ever found a grenade launcher.
“Do you think that could have been Hagemann
in the car?” Faglin asked. Christiansen shook his head.
“No. Hagemann isn’t stupid. He would know
we’d have something as obvious as the front gate covered.”
But, of course, he didn’t know for sure.
Could Esther have been in that car? Could that be her, right this
instant, burning to death because she couldn’t get the doors open
fast enough? If it were so, he would kill Hirsch. He would. . .
“
He suckered us good,
pal.”
That was what Hirsch had said,
only that afternoon. Hagemann, that bastard, what was
he—?
Suddenly it was all made clear for him. It
was as if he could see into the man’s mind, as if they had had the
same thought together. Down there on the road into town, probably
not fifty yards from the front gates, a car full of Hagemann’s men
was burning like a tar ball, sending smoke and dark red flames into
the night sky. It wasn’t a way anyone would want to die.
Hagemann had sent them, or at least allowed
them to go, to take what he must have known was a foolhardy risk.
Neither Hagemann nor anything that Hagemann cared about was in that
car, but they had served his purposes just the same. It was
Mordecai in the slammer, all over again.
“
He suckered us good,
pal.”
Yes, he had. But maybe not this
time.
“They were a decoy.” Christiansen put his
hand around the barrel of Faglin’s Sten gun—if he was right, he was
going to need more to bargain with than just a pistol. “Those guys
in the car, they were sent out to die so Hagemann could have a
running start.”
Faglin was looking at him as if he had grown
another head.
“Give me the grease gun. Everyone else is
dead—you won’t need it. Let go, dammit!”