The distance was probably a shade over half a
mile. Christiansen made it in under four minutes and slowed down
only as he crossed the Odeonplatz and rounded the corner to his
hotel. The front door to the cinema was padlocked, but that meant
remarkably little since the whole back of the building was blown
out. He climbed over the rubble and up the rickety stairway that
led to the deserted office. No one had troubled to lock that
door.
The little room was hardly fifteen feet
square. There were pieces of the ceiling on the floor and very
little else. Except for a calendar on one wall—giving the date as
August 22, 1944—and an empty packing case by the little window,
everything had been taken away by scavengers. Christiansen picked
his careful way through the chunks of plaster and the shattered
two-by-fours and sat down on the packing case. The window was
broken in two of its four panes and caked with dust, but it
provided an excellent view of the whole length of the street
The hotel had its lights on. It looked quite
festive, or would have if the structures around it hadn’t been
uninhabited, ruined, lurching to this side and that as if time had
stopped for them the instant prior to collapse. Munich had been
gutted as badly as any city in Europe. It was a metropolis of
corpses where anything like celebration was not only in poor taste
but almost heartless. Christiansen decided he didn’t like his
hotel, that he was looking forward to moving on.
The packing case was not terribly
comfortable, and it was a cold night. Fortunately the Norwegian
army knew all about cold nights, and his greatcoat was proof
against freezing to death anytime soon. Still, he would have
preferred to be back in his own room, smoking a cigarette and
changing for dinner.
It was about a quarter to seven when he
noticed the man in the charcoal gray overcoat standing nervously in
the shadow of what had once been a furniture store. Christiansen
might never have seen him at all, it was so dark, except that the
fellow kept shifting his weight from one leg to the other with an
impatient movement that reminded one of a child who needed to go to
the bathroom. It was a cold night.
Christiansen sat at his window, waiting,
suddenly grown very calm, almost disappointed. It was only a man
after all, like himself. Perhaps this wasn’t even the one.
But then the man in the shadow seemed to make
up his mind about something and with a kind of shudder started
toward the hotel. Or perhaps he hadn’t made up his mind; perhaps it
had only been an impulse, one he didn’t know whether or not to
regret. He walked slowly, as if he hardly knew himself where he was
going, and then all at once, when he had come level with the
polished revolving glass doors of the hotel’s main entrance, a few
quick steps carried him through and out of sight.
If this is the one, Christiansen thought, if
this is the one he will only stop long enough to check behind the
porter’s desk to see if my key is in its box. He knows the hotel,
so he will know the room number. And he won’t wait around. As soon
as he is sure that I’ve not returned he’ll come back outside and
find himself a place from which to keep watch. If this is the one.
. .
And there he was. He stepped out into the
circle of light from the hotel’s entrance and stood there on the
sidewalk for a moment, looking as if he expected to see his worst
enemy. Maybe he did.
It was the first chance Christiansen had had
for anything like a good look at him, and he was surprised to see
that the man who had been tailing him hardly seemed old enough to
have heard of Kirstenstad. He wasn’t wearing a hat, his hair was
black and curly, like a poodle’s, and in need of cutting. It was a
thin face, handsome and dark but suggesting a certain lack of
decision. Long, rather delicate hands dangled from the sleeves of
his overcoat. In a few years, if he was lucky, he might grow into a
real fanatic, but nobody believes in much of anything at
twenty.
And he was looking straight up at
Christiansen’s little second-story window.
Christiansen remained sitting on his packing
case, as immobile as if he were part of the building. He was
intellectually convinced that there was no way anyone could see him
from across the street—he told himself that it was impossible, and
he nearly even believed it—but he was not foolish enough to move.
He would wait and see what happened next.
Nothing. The boy with the curly hair
continued to stare up at his window, and then he glanced back
inside the lobby of the hotel, and then down at the sleeve of his
overcoat. He was a long time deciding.
But in the end he walked across the street.
Christiansen knew, with an instinct he couldn’t have explained,
that in another two minutes this guy would be coming up those
shaky, dust-covered stairs and through the door. And Christiansen
had nothing in his pocket except a coil of fiddle string.
Could he have seen him through the window?
Perhaps, if he knew what he was looking for. But how could the kid
have known, when Christiansen himself hadn’t known until perhaps
half an hour ago? It wasn’t as if this ruined movie house were
somewhere he haunted like a shadow.
Christiansen could hear him now. The office
door was open about an inch, and he was down below, in what had
once been the lobby, climbing over fallen pieces of timber. He
wasn’t exactly being quiet about it, so perhaps he didn’t know that
Christiansen was upstairs. Or perhaps he realized the futility of
trying to make one’s way through such a place in silence. Or
perhaps he just didn’t care whether Christiansen heard him or
not.
There was no time to waste—he was on the
stairway. Christiansen rose from the packing case and stepped
lightly across to the doorway. It was almost completely dark now.
He waited by the door, hardly daring to breathe.
All at once he stopped hearing the sound of
footsteps on the stairs. For perhaps as long as fifteen seconds
there was perfect quiet and then, finally, a slow, cautious creak
of dry wood as the man outside resumed his climb. Only now he was
being very careful.
The door swung open. He didn’t come in, not
right away. And then a half step—one foot over the sill, and a huge
revolver in his right hand swept over the room like a
searchlight.
There wasn’t time to think. The two men were
hardly more than half a yard apart, and in a fraction of a second
he would see Christiansen and fire the revolver. He had only to
turn his head.
Christiansen made a grab. His fingers snapped
shut over the cylinder just as the revolver stopped in its arc. It
was pointed straight at his belly. He didn’t know—if the thing was
already cocked, he was dead.
They stood there like that for what seemed
most of the night, looking directly into each other’s eyes. There
was surprise; there was fear. Neither of them moved.
And then Christiansen felt the revolver
twisting in his grasp. The fellow was trying to pull the trigger,
but it wouldn’t fire because the cylinder couldn’t turn. The gamble
had paid off.
With a short, deft movement, Christiansen
brought up the heel of his left hand and snapped it into the man’s
face. There was a sound like a lock clicking shut as the nose
broke, and then there was a great deal of blood. It streamed out of
the nostrils and the man clapped his free hand across his mouth and
nose as though he wanted to keep himself from screaming.
Still keeping his hold on the revolver,
Christiansen threw his weight against him, sending him sprawling
into the door. In an instant he was down; Christiansen kicked him
once in the pit of the stomach, and all resistance was at an end.
The man had even let go of his gun.
Christiansen put it in the pocket of his
greatcoat and began searching for papers and additional weapons.
There was no hurry now—whoever he was, he had other things to think
about than fighting back. He lay there on the floor, groaning
quietly, as helpless as a baby. Christiansen found a wallet and a
passport.
The wallet was full of British pound notes,
and the passport, which was registered to the British mandate in
Palestine, was filled out in the name of one Itzhak Dessauer,
resident at 276B Hagesher Street, Tel Aviv.
Terrific. It would be worth something to know
what he had done to bring that crowd down on his back.
But there were consolations. Unless things
had changed a great deal since the last time he had checked, at
least he didn’t have to worry that anyone with a name like “Itzhak
Dessauer” was working for Hagemann.
4
When Itzhak came back that night, the first
thing Mordecai Leivick did was send for a doctor—a Jewish doctor,
who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut—and the second thing he
did was to inquire, in the politest possible way, how little
Itzikel, who was such a tough guy that it was all his mother could
do to keep him from running off to join the Stern Gang, how a
formidable fellow like that had managed to lose his gun and get his
nose broken for him on a simple shadowing job. He was a regular
miracle was this boy, a real demon.
After the doctor, that good man, had finally
left, Mrs. Dessauer’s little son sat on a wooden chair in the
center of their rented room, slumped slightly forward and resting
the points of his elbows on his thighs, looking like a battle
casualty with his two black eyes and the dried blood around the
nostrils of his puffy, bandaged nose. But his distress was more
likely mental than physical. He had made a first-class fool out of
himself and, for once, he had the good sense to know it.
“I saw the footprints in the dust on the
stairs,” he said morosely. He drew himself up straight and then
subsided again into a dejected slouch, as if he was beginning to
realize the futility of striking attitudes. “I had my gun out, but
he jumped me.”
“And how did he contrive to do that?”
Leivick, who was leaning against the door
with his arms folded across his chest, smiled kindly. His eldest
boy, had he lived through Treblinka, would have been just about
Itzhak’s age, and he liked the little
pisher
, but there was
no room in this for sentiment.
The expression in the boy’s blackened eyes
was genuinely pathetic.
“He just reached out and grabbed the gun,” he
said finally. “I didn’t come through the door right away. I’m
sorry, Mordecai.”
“And what were you doing going after the man
with a gun in the first place—you want to tell me that? If you knew
he was up there, why didn’t you just tiptoe back down the stairs
and leave him in peace, eh? You had orders maybe to shoot him? We
don’t have enough troubles with the local authorities, is that
it?”
“I thought maybe I could pull him in and we
could squeeze him a little. I thought I could . . .”
“You
thought
?” Leivick scratched his
heavy forearm through the shirt sleeve, wondering if miracles would
ever cease. “You were supposed to follow the man and report,
Itzhak, not to think. Leave the thinking to me—the Mossad doesn’t
pay a squirt like you to think.”
“The Mossad doesn’t pay me at all.”
“My very words.”
For a moment neither of them spoke. They
didn’t need to—Itzhak knew the rules now. He would keep his
creative outbursts in check.
It was almost possible to feel sorry for him.
After all, his heart was in the right place.
“I still think he’s one of Hagemann’s thugs,”
he said, shrugging his shoulders as he stared down at his hands
with sullen concentration. “God knows, he looks the part.”
Leivick ran a hand over his scalp, which was
perfectly bald, and sighed. He had already missed dinner by about
two hours, something that couldn’t help but add to his impatience,
and now it seemed that he had a congenital idiot to deal with. He
wished the other fellows would hurry up and come back; the strain
of listening to such rubbish was beginning to get him down.
“Itzikel, please allow me to remind you of
something. The SS don’t like Jewish people, not even nice boys like
you. If that had been one of Hagemann’s men you would not be
sitting here feeling your nose throb. You would be dead, probably
with embellishments. Okay? We made a mistake—the man isn’t a Nazi
assassin. He s something else, so live with it”
Dessauer looked less than convinced, but
Mordecai Lelvick had almost ceased to care. These young Sabras,
they seemed to live in a dream world where every Gentile who wasn’t
an Arab had to be Martin Bormann.
As soon as he heard footsteps in the hallway
outside, Leivick reached into the top drawer of the room’s battered
old dresser and pulled out a duplicate of the British army revolver
which earlier that evening Itzhak Dessauer had so ignominiously
lost. He was reasonably certain who it was, but there were such
things as necessary precautions.
“Mordecai, it’s us,” was followed by two
sharp raps on the door. The pistol went back inside the dresser
drawer, and Leivick walked over and threw the catch on the door
lock.
The two men who came inside were both in
their middle thirties and carried with them that indefinable
suggestion of having seen it all. They were old campaigners: Jerry
Hirsch, who had grown up in America and emigrated to Palestine with
his parents in 1929, had joined the Haganah in 1934, at the age of
twenty, and served with the Palmach in Syria during the war. Since
the truce with the British authorities had lapsed he had been
spending most of his time in Italy, getting survivors of the Final
Solution past the blockade—that was where he had met Mordecai, in
June of 1945. He was a short, compact man and tended to sway at the
shoulders when he walked, like an American. He looked like no one
in particular and had participated in the
Exodus
affair. The
current reward for his capture was fifteen hundred pounds, which
made him the sixth most wanted man on the British Army Authority
lists.