Right now, however, Christiansen would settle
for some evidence that, as advertised, Esther Rosensaft had lived
through the war. If he could just establish that, then there might
be other ways of digging her out.
A car went by on the street, a prewar sedan,
dark blue or black under its winter dirtiness. It had a tendency to
grind between second and third gears. There was a man on the back
seat trying not to be seen as he watched Christiansen through the
rear window. His arm was extended along the top of the backrest and
he was pressed so deeply into the corner that his head must have
been touching the doorpost. That made the third time today.
It wasn’t a bad choice for a surveillance car
if you discounted the rattle, and a little oil probably would have
fixed that. But people had learned to live with their infirmities
since 1939—probably they didn’t even hear it anymore. So much the
worse for them.
Christiansen didn’t try to decide who was
trailing him around town. That was one of those questions which had
a way of answering themselves after a while, and a couple of
shadowy figures in an old roadster didn’t provide many clues. If
they were the police, which was possible, they didn’t present any
problem because Christiansen hadn’t broken any laws except the
statutes against murder, which hardly even counted these days, and
if they were friends of Colonel Hagemann, which was also possible,
that only meant he was getting close enough to make the Great Man
nervous. That Hagemann would eventually try to have him put out of
his misery was something he took so completely for granted that he
had almost ceased to worry about it. Almost.
He had spent the whole morning looking for a
“Rosensaft” on one of the hundreds of lists that were kept in no
particular order in tiles of everything from transportation
vouchers to military police reports. He hadn’t found one. Perhaps
General von Goltz hadn’t been quite so successful in ensuring her
safety as Becker had imagined.
He had tried every variation in spelling he
could think of: “Rosenzap” and “Rothensapf” and “Roterschatt” and
even “Saft, Rosa.” It wasn’t as if clerks with probably only a
crash-course knowledge of German didn’t make mistakes like that—but
everywhere he drew a blank. Perhaps, if the Nazis hadn’t destroyed
them, there might still be some record at Waldenburg, but that was
in the Russian Zone and they weren’t sharing any secrets. Finding
Esther Rosensaft was proving as difficult as finding her boyfriend
the Colonel. Perhaps he should just forget about this particular
hot tip and go back to tracking down Hagemann’s old
men-at-arms.
But there was still Linz and Vienna and
Stuttgart and—perish the thought—even Palestine before he ran out
of file folders to look through. He would be very scrupulous. The
nature of his task demanded it.
On the eighth of June, 1945, the day after he
had formed part of the honor guard for King Haakon’s return to his
capital, Christiansen had borrowed a car from a friend and had
driven north to Kirstenstad. He knew all about what had happened
there; intelligence on the incident had been very complete, and he
had even managed to interview a couple of the survivors after they
were smuggled over to England. He just wanted to have a look for
himself.
The only part of his parents’ house one could
see from a distance was a piece of broken chimney. Otherwise, there
was only the doorstep, upon which his father and mother had died,
and the outline of the exterior wall. Even the cellar was filled in
with rubble, and grass grew where his mother had had her sitting
room.
Everywhere else it was just the same. Nobody
lived in Kirstenstad now. Nobody could. Nobody ever would
again.
Christiansen had stopped his car at the ruins
of the post office—in a tiny hamlet like Kirstenstad, only a
crossroads in the middle of farmlands, the post office was a kind
of boundary, a line drawn in the dirt to say “here is where we
begin”—and walked the rest of the way, listening to his boot soles
crunch against the gravel roadbed. He kept thinking, “All of the
people who lived here are dead now. It’s all gone.” He hadn’t
really believed it could have happened, not until that moment, as
he looked at the weeds bowing gracefully in the wind where the
blacksmith’s house had been, where Madame Koht, the rector’s widow,
had taught him to read music and to play the wooden flute, where
the store had stood that had been successively a bakery, a
haberdasher’s, and a second-hand bookshop before standing idle for
the last two years prior to his departure for America. He hadn’t
really believed it, but he believed it now. As he stood on the
threshold of his home, where the snows of three winters had cleaned
away the traces of his parents’ blood, something seemed to freeze
shut inside him. He turned around and started walking back to the
car, faster and faster, until he was nearly running. It seemed as
if he couldn’t breathe until he got away.
A week later, when he knew what he had to do,
he wrote a letter to the King asking to be allowed to resign his
commission. There was no difficulty, since he was officially
invalided anyway, and he didn’t want to be anybody’s agent now
except his own. He was going to find General von Goltz.
“You’ll end up just like all the other
vigilantes,” a friend had told him. Nils Rynning was his brother
officer, his roommate for the two years prior to Normandy, and the
only person to whom he had confided his intentions. Nils had pale,
almost whitish hair and no taste for revenge. For him, the war was
over.
“They aren’t masters of Europe anymore,
remember? They’re on the run. I Just want to give them something to
run from.”
Captain Rynning, who still wore his army
greens and had spent every day since liberation taking advantage of
the patriotic fervor of Oslo’s female inhabitants, leaned across
the table toward him and frowned. He was a thin, wiry man, given to
sudden movements that those who didn’t know him might have ascribed
to nerves. They would have been mistaken. Captain Rynning had made
thirty-six crossings as a commando and had taken part in the
Finnmark operation. Captain Rynning didn’t have any nerves.
“Yes,” he said, tapping rapidly at the rim of
his glass with the nail of his middle finger, as if the sound it
made fascinated him. “We have driven the dog back into its hole,
where it will lick its wounds and whine. Perhaps, eventually, it
will even die there. But still it would be just as well not to
stretch one’s arms down into the darkness after it. Its jaws are
still filled with perfectly serviceable teeth.”
Of course. Everyone he knew offered the same
warning, as if it had never occurred to Christiansen that the men
who had razed Kirstenstad still knew how to defend themselves.
Which brought him back to the problem of the
muddy roadster.
. . . . .
Christiansen ground out his cigarette against
the shattered brick staircase and, without bothering to look
around, started back to his table in the record room. If these
people who were keeping such careful track of his movements were
Hagemann’s men, there was little enough he could do about it. Let
them roam about the streets waiting for him to come out again—it
would do them no harm to spend the rest of the afternoon growing
restless and apprehensive. He would know how to deal with them when
the moment came.
Upon his return he discovered that the tables
were less crowded. The lawyers were gone and those few souls left,
the dogged and determined remnant, were turning the pages of the
files with a melancholy fatalism, as if they had lost all real
expectation of finding whatever names they were looking for.
And they were probably right. By a quarter
after four, Christiansen had satisfied himself that Esther
Rosensaft had never registered with the United Nations office in
Munich. There was nothing left to do except to return to his
hotel.
The U.N. building had a back entrance, but
there seemed no good reason why his shadows should have it pointed
out to them that they had been detected. They would merely find
themselves another car or, if they had the resources, put a
different team on him. He went down the stairs into the bleak
winter sun and started back the way he had come.
Sure enough, within four blocks the roadster
had pulled up behind him and driven past. Christiansen could hear
the rattle of the gearbox as it shot ahead. He was careful not to
look after it.
What did they want? To kill him probably, but
then what were they waiting for? And why suddenly now?
Had Becker been one too many for them? It
seemed unlikely—he was a small fish. Had they picked up on him
already in Nuremberg? In Havana?
There was a string quartet playing in the
lounge that evening; it was a regular Wednesday feature at the
hotel, something straight out of Edwardian times. The notice on the
bulletin board had mentioned Debussy—obviously the management was
making a concerted effort to let bygones be bygones—and
Christiansen had busted his tail on that piece for his first group
recital at Juilliard. So he had rather thought that after dinner he
would carry his coffee with him and join the eight or ten other
people who usually put in an appearance at these sorts of affairs,
to have a listen and see if the fourth movement was really the
bitch he remembered. He could use the distraction.
But first he had to make it back in one
more-or-less contiguous piece.
Because, you see, the car had dropped back
and there was a man on foot behind him now. Either they entertained
some suspicions that he had tumbled to them and had decided on that
account on a change in tactics, or they were moving in for the
kill. It didn’t matter—Christiansen had made up his mind it was
time to force the issue with these jokers, so if they weren’t ready
to go to extremes now they would be soon enough. One can’t allow
oneself to be followed all over Europe by such people. Eventually
they would start to get in the way.
By the time he reached the Marienplatz the
sun had already disappeared behind the half-ruined Rathaus, and
with it had gone the tourists and the hucksters and even the
police. The pushcarts had vanished and the wooden doors of the
stalls were locked tight. There was nothing left but the emptiness
and the ruins and the shadowed darkness. As he walked across that
vast, hollow plaza, listening to the echoes of his footfalls
against the paving stones, Christiansen was painfully aware how
easy it would have been for someone with a rifle, or even a
decently accurate pistol, to. . .
Or perhaps they were waiting. Doubtless they
knew he was on his way back to the hotel—they could anticipate his
route. Perhaps they would catch him in some narrow sidewalk, step
out from behind the corner of a building, and then, when they were
close enough to make quite sure. . .
But this wasn’t the first time he had had to
face the prospect of a man with a gun waiting to kill him. That was
what the war had been all about. And that had been the daily
possibility ever since he had set himself the task of squaring
things for Kirstenstad.
Still, nothing prevented him from admitting
to himself that he didn’t like it. The war had taught him the
stupidity of imagining that you weren’t afraid.
The Marienplatz was no more dangerous than
any other hundred or so meters between here and the hotel. He kept
going, resisting the temptation to slow down, listening all the
time for any sound that kept pace with his own footsteps.
When he reached the other side, he ducked
into a shadow and waited.
There was nothing. He had imagined the whole
business—the car with the bad gears, the man behind him, the whole
sorry spectacle. He was getting paranoid; it happened to people
with bad consciences. He felt in his shirt pocket for his pack of
cigarettes.
He already had the book of matches in his
hand when he saw a gray shape, a man in a dark overcoat, come onto
the plaza, hesitate for an instant, and then go to the left and
disappear around the side of the Rathaus. Apparently Christiansen
wasn’t the only one with a bad conscience.
So. That much he hadn’t imagined—he was being
followed. Nice people with no malice in their hearts didn’t find it
necessary to be so furtive. The son of a bitch was taking the long
way around because he couldn’t work up the nerve to expose himself.
He liked shadows, this boy did. He liked narrow streets and the
shelter of crowds. He wasn’t going to walk straight across the
Marienplatz, not all by himself, not on your life.
Christiansen lit his cigarette and glanced
around him, wondering what he was supposed to do. The enemy had no
face—he could be anyone. He probably had a gun, and Christiansen
wasn’t carrying anything except the coiled length of catgut that
went with him everywhere. The odds were decidedly uneven.
It was necessary to find out what this one
looked like. He would have to be forced into showing himself.
There was a half destroyed row of shop
buildings across the street from Christiansen’s hotel. A few had
survived the war without enough damage to force them into closing
down, but most were just shells, walls of dead brick that broke off
in a ragged line in the middle of the window frames, waiting to be
bulldozed. One of them had been a cinema and still contained the
ruin of a second story where doubtless the manager had had his
office. There was a small window facing out onto the street where
perhaps he had stood and watched the patrons queuing up to buy
tickets. Christiansen would wait there to see who came to wait for
him.
Which meant he had to get there first. He
threw his cigarette down on the paving stones—they were a nasty
habit he had picked up during the war, and he kept intending to
give them up—and broke into a run. He had a head start. He wouldn’t
try to be devious—he would leave that to the man behind him. That
was the great disadvantage to shadowing people; you always had to
take the long way around and you couldn’t afford to crowd.
Christiansen didn’t have those problems. He intended to be there
waiting when the other guy started to panic that he had dropped out
on him.