by Yehuda Avner
Polkes grinned. “They’re mine, see? They may be a bit big on you, little man. But the ice bath at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse might’ve shrunk them. You could be in luck.”
Eichmann stepped into the freezing pants and shivered. “What about the violin?”
“You can give up on that. It’s not going to be yours.”
“What do you want from me? I’ll cooperate. If I do what you want, you’ll give me the Stradivarius? I’m prepared to help. Talk to me, for God’s sake. I’m fucking freezing.”
“We’re going somewhere.”
“You won’t get me past the Gestapo out on the sidewalk.” Eichmann pushed his arms through the sodden sleeves of Polkes’s discarded jacket. “Give me the violin and we’ll forget all about this.”
Dan almost admired Eichmann’s avarice. It was stronger than self-preservation. For now.
When Dan took off his own clothes and put on Eichmann’s uniform, the Nazi’s face grew cunning. “So that’s your idea? You look about as much like an SS man as that nigger, Jesse Owens. No one’s going to swallow it. You’ll be questioned right away.”
“Unfortunately for you, no one asks questions of the SS.”
The door opened. Brückner came through. He glanced at Eichmann with disgust. He opened his attaché case and handed a sheaf of papers to Dan.
Eichmann wrestled against Polkes’s hold. “That document is a top state secret. You traitor, Brückner.”
“A man can’t betray that which doesn’t exist.” Brückner shut his case. “Nazism is a fake ideal, an unreal world. If anything is betrayed in these documents, it’s humanity. Germany, too. Which makes you guilty, not me.”
Dan slipped the papers inside his SS tunic and buttoned it up. “How do I look?”
“Like a mass murderer,” Brückner said. “The car’s outside.”
“This is madness,” Eichmann shouted. “Don’t do it. Listen, I won’t talk. Let’s forget this happened.”
“Shut him up,” Dan said.
Polkes brought his arm around Eichmann’s throat to cut off his blood. In a few seconds he’d be out.
“Wait, wait,” Eichmann said. “There’s something you need to know. Let me go and I’ll free her.”
“Free whom?” Dan tugged Eichmann’s leather gloves onto his hands.
“You don’t know?” Eichmann stood upright. He smiled. “You don’t, do you? Your wife is at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. When you went to collect your friend Polkes, she was probably in the basement with electrodes on her tits.” Dan’s breath grew shallow. Anna, in the Gestapo cells.
“She went to treat the wounds of your secret service man on her way to the airport. We picked her up this morning.” Eichmann was laughing with relief. “Herr and Frau Shmulik Shoham didn’t go so easily. They were killed resisting arrest.”
Dan glanced down the staircase to the Mossad office in the basement. The door was open. Devorah’s desk was unoccupied.
“So you’d better forget your little plan.” Eichmann wriggled out of Polkes’s grasp. “Get out of my uniform, you shitty Yid bastard, and hand over the violin if you ever want to see your wife alive again.”
Polkes watched for a sign, waiting to see what he should do.
Dan heard Anna’s voice, sensed her touch on the back of his neck. She was alive, he knew it. He would go to her, wherever she was. He would save her. He took off the SS cap and unfastened the top few buttons on the tunic. His fingers brushed the minutes of the Wannsee conference hidden against his chest. He paused, remembering Anna’s gaze as she forced a promise from him. If you must choose between me and a thousand other lives, let me go.
What if he rescued Anna now? She would learn what he had given up for her. He was working to save hundreds of thousands of Jews, perhaps even millions. What would she think of him if, instead, he gave in to Eichmann’s threats? Because of her. Let me go.
“Get out of my uniform.” Eichmann started to take off his jacket. “Give me the violin, and I will arrange for your wife to be freed.”
“This isn’t about my wife.” Dan spoke quietly.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Do you know what’s going to happen to your little Frau if you try anything stupid with me? This traitor Brückner just gave you the outline of the conference, but I know the details. Everything starts right away. If you play this wrong, the final solution starts with your wife. Tomorrow she goes east. On a train, in a cattle car, packed in with a load of other Yids from the Gestapo cellars.”
“East? To the ghettoes?”
“To Auschwitz, you sack of shit. To the death camp. She’ll be exterminated, just as the rest of you will soon be.” Eichmann dropped the wet jacket on the floor and shook his head, smiling. “I really thought this was all about her.”
Dan took a pace toward him. “It’s not about her at all. It’s about an entire people. Anna knows that. Which is why you’re coming with us now, whatever happens to my wife.”
Polkes shook his head. “Dan, you can’t.”
Dan slipped Eichmann’s holster over his shoulder and cinched the belt. He took the Luger out. “It’s not about saving one person, Arvid. No matter how much she means to me.”
“You’re crazy.” Eichmann’s assurance seeped away. “What are you going to do?”
“The last time you went to Palestine, in 1936, the British deported you.” Dan held the Luger by the barrel and rested the grip against Eichmann’s jaw. “Fortunately for you, there’s a new regime there. Israel will have a much more eager welcome for you.”
“You’re kidnapping me? Me, the Obersturmbannführer?”
Dan swung the pistol sharply against Eichmann’s face. It struck in front of his ear, where the jaw met the skull. The Nazi slumped, unconscious, into Polkes’s arms.
“That’ll keep him under for a while,” Dan said. “Let’s go.”
Bertha was beside the steps with the Gestapo watchers when Dan came out. She looked up at the doorway. Polkes carried the unconscious Nazi roughly, as a Gestapo agent would be expected to handle a Jew. Brückner slammed the door behind them.
Bertha dropped the tray of empty soup cups. The Gestapo men, who were now enjoying contraband American cigarettes she had brought them, wheeled toward the door.
“My husband,” she bawled. “Arvid. Where are you taking my husband?”
She rushed to the foot of the steps. Dan pushed her away, but she grabbed at Eichmann’s limp body. “Arvid, no. Don’t take my Arvid.”
Dan backhanded Bertha on her nose. He barked at the Gestapo men. “Do your job, for God’s sake. Hold this bitch until she calms down.”
The two guards needed no more urging than the command in his voice and the Death’s Head on his cap. They hauled Bertha away from the steps. One of them gave her a sharp jab in the solar plexus and she doubled over, gasping and breathless.
Arvid Polkes squeezed his eyes shut. He thrust Eichmann’s body into the back of the Mercedes staff car at the curb. Brückner went to the driver’s seat.
Dan called to the two Gestapo men. “Stick her in the car too. Her husband may talk faster if he sees her hanging upside down in the cells.”
The two men leered. Dan waited for them to shove Bertha into the backseat, then closed the door and climbed into the front.
Brückner took the car fast, to the south, toward the airfield. Dan stared ahead as they crossed the Spree and skirted the government district.
“Polkes can take Eichmann to Palestine on his own,” Brückner said. “You can tell him who to contact. But you should stay here. I’ll help you get Anna out before she’s sent east.”
“Polkes won’t be able to convince Ben-Gurion. I’m close to the prime minister. He’ll listen to me. God knows, if someone told me the Nazis intended to exterminate every last Jew in Europe, I’d find it hard enough to believe. I have to be there to drive this home. I mustn’t deviate from the plan.”
Dan wondered if he could have been so decisive, so ruthless, had he not been wearing an SS uniform.
> Chapter 58
Schulze laughed harder than any man about to risk his life had a right to. He grabbed for the lapels of Dan’s SS uniform and shook him. The Luftwaffe pilot was as filled with good humor as he had been when Dan first met him at the Countess’s soiree. He helped Polkes and Bertha pull Eichmann out of the car and cram him behind the backseat of his Messerschmitt Bf 108 personnel transport.
Dan shook Brückner’s hand in farewell and the young adjutant pulled his Mercedes across the outer field at Tempelhof, heading back to the Chancellery. He took the copilot’s seat in the Messerschmitt. Schulze started the V8 engine and got the propeller moving.
“Here, hold this.” Schulze shoved a folded map into Dan’s lap and pulled his radio mask over his face.
“Tempelhof tower, this is Parrot three. Requesting confirmation, takeoff south lane.” He gave a thumbs up and grinned.
Through the flickering blades of the propeller, Dan watched the runway stretch before them as the small, long-range transport plane came around. Schulze let out the throttle and they rumbled along the tarmac, picking up speed. Then the wheels left the ground and there was only the humming of the engine and the quiet sobbing of Bertha Polkes against her husband’s chest. Inside his tunic, Dan carried the minutes of the Wannsee meeting. They felt cold on his belly. Then he realized it was the chill of the unheated aircraft as they passed into the winter cloud above Berlin.
The world was below him. Between the clouds, he caught glimpses of the Prussian plain. Down there, on the surface of the earth, the lives of millions of Jews depended upon him and on how he played his hand. Anna waited there, too. He had to get Eichmann and the Wannsee notes to Ben-Gurion. Then he had to persuade the Old Man to take a step which he hoped would change the course of the war. Certainly it was the only hope for the millions listed in Eichmann’s Wannsee protocols.
Schulze banked to the southwest. “Next stop Bucharest, for a refuel.”
“We can get that far in this plane?”
“The Typhoon has a range of one thousand kilometers. That’s why I picked her. I have an old flying school pal in Romania who’s going to make sure we get tanked up, no questions asked. Then it’s straight on to our final destination.”
Eichmann groaned and raised his head. He looked about the cockpit, seeming unsurprised to be stuffed into the small space behind the two rear seats. He scrabbled to make himself more comfortable, wriggling against the bonds Polkes had tied on his wrists. Recognizing the Luftwaffe pilot from the soiree at the Countess’s mansion, he shouted, “Oberleutnant Schulze, you will be executed for this. I insist you free me now and return to Tempelhof field.”
With a broad smile, Schulze called back over the din of the engine. “Obersturmbannführer Eichmann, thanks to Nazis like you, Germany is doomed. So it makes no difference to me if I live or die. On the other hand, I am quite determined that you shall not live.”
“You’re a traitor.”
“Filthy pig.” Bertha Polkes hammered her fist into Eichmann’s jaw. She sniffled and shook her hand. The blow had hurt her knuckles. “That was from Anna,” she said. Arvid touched her face gently. She leaned over the seat and spat at the bound Nazi.
No, Dan thought. I’m the one who will strike the blows for Anna. He opened up the map. With a red pencil, Schulze had plotted their route across the Carpathians to Bucharest. He unfolded the next section, which covered the Black Sea and Turkey, then went all the way down into the Levant. The red line ended with a point over a country that wasn’t even marked on the Luftwaffe chart. They were going to Israel. Carrying with them the SS plan for the extermination of the Jews. Taking Eichmann to Jerusalem.
Chapter 59
Jerusalem
The pages of the Wannsee minutes turned slowly. Ben-Gurion shut his eyes. He seemed to be imagining these unconscionable deliberations, as if they unfolded before him. He read on, shaking his head when he reached page six. The table of statistics, the Jewish populations that were to be eradicated. He looked up at Dan. The ambassador to Berlin had removed the SS tunic and cap, but still wore Eichmann’s riding breeches and jackboots. “How will I find him?” Ben-Gurion said.
“Unashamed.” Dan thought of other words he could use to describe Eichmann. But he left it at that.
“When people do terrible things, they usually try to tell you they were just a cog in a machine.”
“Eichmann got his orders from above. He would never have conceived of the killing of millions of people. But once they ordered him to do it, he was no cog. He made this machine. Proudly.”
Ben-Gurion shrugged and beckoned. “Bring him in.”
Dan opened the door. Polkes shoved Eichmann into the prime minister’s office. The Obersturmbannführer drew himself up straight, defiant and yet aquiver. For a moment, Dan thought of the times he had stood before Eichmann’s desk. He wondered if his own conflicting emotions had showed so clearly on his face and in his trembling muscles. Eichmann was surely calculating how long it would be before he died. He must know his life was forfeit. But Dan had another role in mind for him before that end came. He watched Ben-Gurion examine the exaggerated insolence on the Nazi’s face. The Old Man had yet to pass judgment on Dan’s plan. He wanted to assess Eichmann, to see if he would be a convincing witness when they took him before…. You’re getting ahead of yourself, Dan thought. Let Ben-Gurion judge him now. Then move to the next step.
“How many Jews are already dead, Eichmann?” Ben-Gurion gestured with the minutes of the Wannsee conference.
The German’s chin quivered. To be addressed without his title, and by a Jew. The double shock rattled him. To see the conference minutes already on the desk of the Israeli prime minister, within a day of his dictating them to his secretaries. His Führer was right. The Jews truly did possess mysterious powers.
“Answer me.”
“One point two million—” Eichmann cut himself off, as if he felt unable to complete his statement without bestowing an honorific on the man who ordered him to speak. He wouldn’t say Herr Prime Minister. But without appending a title to his comments, his very words seemed weak, floating and directionless, like dust in the light.
He had aged immensely during the flight over Central Europe. His hair looked thinner, almost as though he had started down the road to baldness overnight. He squinted over baggy sacks of loose skin that hung in crescents below his eyes. His mouth contorted, drawn to the side by the muscular effort of suppressing the nervous tremors of his fear. He tried to be defiant, but his voice quivered. “You may execute me, you Jews,” he said. “I will leap laughing into the grave. The feeling that I have been responsible for the death of so many enemies of the Reich will be a source of extraordinary satisfaction to me.”
Ben-Gurion rubbed his bald scalp. The Old Man was accustomed to engaging with angry men—Zionists from other streams of the movement, underlings who rejected the deferential behavior of the European bureaucrats who used to persecute them. Dan saw it as a measure of his chief’s strength of character that he simply brushed off Eichmann’s vitriol and continued with his calculations.
The Old Man nodded his head, a decision made. He twitched his hand at Polkes, who yanked Eichmann out of the room.
“Anna?” Ben-Gurion said.
“In the hands of the Gestapo. She was arrested when she went to treat Shmulik’s wounds.”
Ben-Gurion lowered his head and murmured a regretful syllable.
“Shmulik and Devorah are, I believe, dead,” Dan said. “ Eichmann assures me Anna will be sent to the new death camp at Auschwitz.”
“Yet you still came.”
“We have to stop it—this project being planned by the Nazis.”
Ben-Gurion went to the window. He looked out over the quiet Rehavia street. A heavy rain watered the newly planted maples on the sidewalks. “It never drizzles here in Jerusalem. It’s all or nothing. Bright desert sunshine, or a downpour.” He touched the cold glass. “Shmulik gave you a hard time because you were dealing with
the Nazis? Even though you were following my orders?”
“Maybe he was right all along.”
The Old Man turned. “You’re a Jew, Dan. That means you have inherited five thousand years of second-guessing and lamenting the mistakes of our people. But you’re also an Israeli. So let’s talk about the future.”
It was true. The world seemed about to end. Not only for the millions of Jews on Eichmann’s list, or the six million in the territories currently under Nazi control. It teetered on the brink of a disaster that would stain humanity for generations. “There’s only one way to stop it,” Dan said.
“Your plan.”
“We have the conference minutes. We have Eichmann. We know where the camps are. We can convince the Allies to bomb them, to destroy the Nazi infrastructure of extermination before it can do its job. They will do it now, because we can offer them military assistance in North Africa. The British army there is on the run. Israeli troops can make the difference.”
Ben-Gurion rocked back and forth on his heels. He had taken momentous decisions before. But Dan sensed that the deeply philosophical prime minister was considering implications far beyond the question at hand.
“You accomplished a great feat of Jewish defiance in kidnapping this Nazi,” Ben-Gurion said.
“Thank you, Prime Minister.”
Ben-Gurion smiled gently. He looked out the window again as if he were staring into the future. Then his voice was firm again. “They’re holding a conference now in Cairo.”
“The Allied military commanders?”
“Better. Roosevelt and Churchill.”
Dan breathed deeply. “Then we must take Eichmann to them.”
“The Nazi is not all we take,” Ben-Gurion said. “The fate of Europe’s Jews travels with us.”
Chapter 60
Cairo
Dan awaited Boustead by the tall glass doors facing onto the veranda of Shepheard’s Hotel. The Englishman entered the bar wearing the uniform of a major in military intelligence. As Dan took his hand, he sensed considerable tension. It didn’t surprise him. Adding to the pressure of the summit meeting between Boustead’s prime minister and the American president was the fact that the British army had been swept steadily back into Egypt. The Germans were only a day’s drive from Alexandria, in the Nile delta, ready to cut off Cairo and push toward the Suez Canal. He let go of the major’s sweating palm and called a waiter. “Drink?”