The clerk was waiting for her outside. They
put the metal box back into the vault, and the clerk handed her
back her key. That was all there was to it.
Outside, Inar and Jerry Hirsch were both
standing on the sidewalk, the sun on their faces. They looked as if
neither of them had spoken in several minutes.
“Is that it?” Jerry asked, not even trying
to conceal his eagerness. He held out his hand and, without
thinking, Esther gave him the papers. He opened the front cover and
began flipping through the pages so that they crackled in the
windless air. “I’m no technician, but it sure looks like the real
thing. Holy Moses—wait ’til the boys back in Tel Aviv get a load of
this!”
Inar’s face went tight for just an instant
and then he glanced at Esther and smiled, opening the door to the
rear seat for her. When they were both inside, Jerry came out of
his trance enough to walk around the front of the car and get
behind the wheel, tossing the papers on the seat beside him.
It wasn’t until he had started the car that
he noticed the revolver in Inar’s hand, the same one he always
carried. Esther had grown so used to the sight of it that she
hadn’t even noticed he had it with him. The butt was resting on the
top of the backrest and it was pointed directly at Jerry’s
head.
“Just drive,” Inar said quietly. His voice
sounded tired. He leaned back against his seat, cradling the pistol
on his lap. Perhaps as a precaution he reached across and took both
of Esther’s hands in his scarred left hand, holding them gently but
firmly. He didn’t look at her. “Stay where I can see you and don’t
even think about playing the hero. You of all people know what a
mess one of these things makes at close range. Let’s go.”
“Jesus Christ, I should have known.” Jerry
turned around to look at Inar, but he kept his hands up on the
steering wheel. “Okay, pal, where to?”
“I’ll let you know along the way. For now,
just drive.”
Jerry put the car into gear and headed
slowly out into the traffic.
What was going on? Esther was afraid even to
ask. She searched Inar’s face for an answer, but he had retreated
into a stony sullenness that revealed nothing. As he had so often
in the past, he wore a mask behind which only his eyes seemed
alive. She would have to wait and see, the same as Jerry. She would
have to find out why he had ceased to trust her.
They drove away from the center of the city.
Every so often Inar would issue a brief command and they would turn
off into another street. The people on the sidewalks paid them no
attention. This drama seemed to concern only themselves.
In ten minutes they were outside of Linz
entirely. In fifteen minutes they were in the countryside. Inar
directed them to a dirt road that led off into fields covered with
yellow stubble.
“Stop the car,” he said. When the engine was
still he let go of Esther’s hands and reached across the backrest
to the front seat to take the keys out of the ignition. “We get out
here, Jerry. Bring the goods with you.”
Outside it felt colder than it had in the
city. There was even a breath of wind, enough to make Esther bury
her hands in the pockets of her coat. She felt a strange
excitement. No fear—what did she have to be afraid of, except
perhaps that Inar no longer cared for her? Inar was not dangerous,
not to her. Inar was not Hagemann.
And yet the expression on Jerry Hirsch’s
face said something quite different. As he stood there at the edge
of the dusty little strip of road he was in the presence of his
enemy. And he knew all about enemies.
“Shall I give them to you now, or do you
want to wait until after you’ve killed me?” he asked, holding the
papers in their stiff black cover under his arm. “Who are we
waiting for out here? I can just imagine.”
There was a small stand of trees some sixty
or seventy meters away, where the ground seemed to slope down as if
to meet an irrigation canal or perhaps even a river. Inar held up
his arm and pointed toward it.
“Let’s go over there,” he said. “We’ll be
out of the wind.”
“Anything you say, pal. You’re the one with
the gun.”
The fields were hard, crusted mud, broken
into patches like the surface of an old oil painting. Jerry stayed
in front, and Esther and Inar walked behind. There was nothing to
suggest his wounded leg was bothering him.
Inar held his gun in one hand and Esther’s
hand in the other. He was no longer worried about her interference,
if that was what it had been; he simply held her hand the way any
man might have, to let her know that he hadn’t forgotten that she
belonged to him. It was the only way she could have known, because
he never looked at her.
They were almost to the trees before she saw
the little stream, hardly two meters wide, that seemed to form some
sort of natural barrier. The field on the other side was already
tractored into neat little furrows, ready for the spring
planting.
“We can stop here,” Inar said. He let go of
Esther’s hand and leaned against the thick trunk of a tree that
looked ageless. It hadn’t regained its leaves yet and its roots
were partially exposed on the side nearest the stream, which added
to the impression. For the first time, Inar showed that he was
tired.
Jerry Hirsch stood waiting, tense and
expectant. He seemed to be trying to decide who was absent, as if
he looked for them to show up at any moment. When his eyes fell on
Inar they were filled with resentment.
“I haven’t sold out, if that’s what you’re
thinking.” Inar pushed himself a little away from the tree trunk,
as if to draw notice to his independence. “We’re not out here to
meet anyone from the Syrian foreign office. This is strictly
between you and me.”
“Really, Christiansen? You amaze me. Then
why here? Any business you have with me could have been settled in
town over a couple of drinks.”
“Not any business. They don’t like fires in
hotel rooms. You’re going to burn that file.”
“The hell I am!”
Inar brought up the muzzle of his revolver
and pulled back the hammer with his thumb. It was pointed at a spot
just an inch or so below Jerry’s right eye.
“Jerry, use your head. Why do you suppose I
waited for you in Munich? I could have taken care of this three
days ago. You’re here as my witness, so your bosses in Tel Aviv can
sleep at night and I don’t have to spend the rest of my life
waiting for you or someone just like you to show up wanting to know
what I did with von Goltz’s recipe book. You’re here so that it can
all end today. Burn the file.”
He reached into his coat pocket and took out
his cigarette lighter, holding it up for Jerry to see and then
throwing it to him. It landed on the ground at his feet.
“Burn the file, Jerry. It isn’t going to
solve anything if I have to shoot you and then burn it myself. At
least if you do it you won’t imagine there’s been some sort of
conjuring trick played on you. Come on, burn it.”
“God damn it,
Christiansen, you’re out of your fucking mind!” Jerry was almost
beside himself. He held the papers in his good hand, shaking them
threateningly as if they were a weapon. “God damn it, don’t you
know we’ll have a war on our hands in just three goddamn
weeks?
Burn
it!?”
“Burn it. You can fight your war without
using nerve gas, Jerry. The Syrians won’t know any better—bluff
them. I’m not going to let you make it easy for yourself at the
price of committing a wholesale massacre. You’ll have to find some
other way.”
“It isn’t your decision to make,
Christiansen. Jesus Christ, it isn’t any of your damn
business!”
“It’s my business. If I turn my back on
this, and you use this junk to murder innocent people, there’s no
way I can avoid the responsibility. I will have handed this to
you.”
“You made a deal, Christiansen. And now
you’re welching on it. “
The two men stood staring at each other in
silence, Jerry’s accusation hanging in the air like a pall. Finally
Inar shrugged his shoulders, as if abandoning the attempt to make
himself understood.
“My ‘deal,’ as you call it, was with
Mordecai. Not with the Mossad, and not with you—with Mordecai. I
have the impression I’m keeping faith with that.” He lowered the
muzzle of his pistol and let the hammer back down. “We got
Hagemann, Jerry. He and his friends butchered half of Europe, but
we finally got them. That’s all finished. If you and your brand new
country want to grow up to be just like them, that’s up to you. I
don’t think that’s what Mordecai would have wanted, but he’s dead
so it’s up to you. Just don’t expect any help.”
“You really mean it.”
“Yes, I really mean it. I have enough blood
on my conscience.”
Jerry reached down and picked up the
cigarette lighter. Then, holding the file by one of its stiff
covers, he lit the last page at the corner. They stood there
watching while, one by one, the sheets began to burn. Finally Jerry
had to let it drop. It lay spine up on the ground until at last
even the covers had caught fire. In all, it took about five minutes
before the flames disappeared and there was nothing left except
smoke and ash.
“The ultimate weapon,” Jerry said at last.
“The little country’s atomic bomb, and I burned it. I can’t believe
this.”
“There’s just one more thing.”
Inar tossed his pistol into the air and then
caught it again so that he was holding it by the barrel. Then he
took two steps forward and offered it to Jerry Hirsch, who took it
probably without thinking.
“Now or later, you’ll want to settle up for
this. It might as well be now.”
“No, Inar, please. . .” She took his arm and
buried her face in it. There had been enough now. She would never
forgive him for this. “Please. Inar—please think of me a
little.”
But he only stood his ground, hardly even
breathing. He really was prepared to die.
And Jerry Hirsch was just as ready to kill
him. He raised the pistol, taking careful aim at Inar’s heart. The
process seemed to take forever.
“You have this coming,” he said. “If ever
anybody earned it, you sure as hell. . . Aw, shit!”
And then, suddenly, he pulled back his arm
and threw. The pistol hit Inar square in the chest and bounced off.
He hardly seemed to notice it.
“You goddamn
sentimental
goyish
bastard. You’ve ruined everything.”
Inar reached over and picked up the pistol,
putting it out of sight under his coat.
“What will you tell your bosses back home?”
he asked.
“I don’t know.” There was real anguish in
Jerry’s face. “I guess it’ll have to be that we both agreed to
this, and I decided not to take the chance of soiling the Jewish
national honor with possession of a genocidal weapon. Anything
would be better than confessing I was dumb enough to let myself get
jumped like a goddamn school kid. Isn’t that a choice phrase,
‘Jewish national honor’? Tel Aviv is filled with bleeding hearts,
so maybe they’ll even buy it.”
“It was the right thing to do.”
“Like hell it was.” He swallowed hard and
made a disgusted gesture with his right hand. “This won’t be a nice
war, Christiansen. A lot of raw things will get themselves done;
and just once, just once, I’d have liked to see the atrocities
happen to somebody else besides the Jews. Of course you wouldn’t be
able to understand that, would you.”
“Maybe not.”
“You weren’t in the camps, “ Esther found
herself saying. No one could have been more surprised than she, but
the words seemed to come of themselves. “I was, and so I have a
right to care what is done in my name. I think Herr Leivick would
have agreed. It is a blasphemy to invoke the dead to justify such
things. Jews of all people should know the value of clean
hands.”
As they walked back to the car, Inar put his
arm over her shoulder and drew her to him. He smiled in that way
she had seen only a few times, the way that meant he was really
happy.
“You didn’t tell me,” she said, trying to
sound angry. “You didn’t trust me.”
“I didn’t want you to have to decide between
one loyalty and another. It didn’t have anything to do with
trust—you might have thought I was doing the wrong thing.”
“I don’t think you did the wrong thing.”
“But now you won’t ever have to question
your part in it. Nobody gave you a choice, so you’re off the hook.
It’s better this way.”
They continued on in silence. Esther was
almost too happy to. talk. It really was over now. The past was
dead. She felt as if she had just turned sixteen, as if Inar were
the first man to come into her life. Perhaps in a way he really
was. At any rate, she felt free. That was love, to feel free.
And then something occurred to her. She had
seen the little announcement in the Munich newspapers, so she
didn’t know why it suddenly came as such a surprise.
“Inar,” she said, “did you know that today
is Purim?”
“Now how would I have known that?”
About the Author
NICHOLAS GUILD was born in 1944 in Belmont,
California. He received a B.A. degree in English from Occidental
College in Los Angeles and an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a
Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley.
Since then he has divided his time between teaching and writing. He
is the author of critical articles on 17
th
Century
poetry and 20
th
Century fiction, along with twelve
novels, several of which have been international best sellers and
which have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese,
Russian, Greek and Czech.
Presently he lives in Frederick, MD
Visit his website:
http://www.nicholasguild.com/