Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “If only the others had believed us!” cried Natalie.

  Saul shook his head. “Even Jack Cohen knows and believes only part of the story. What he knows for sure is that someone murdered Aaron Eshkol and his entire family, and that I was telling the truth when I said that the Oberst and U.S. authorities were involved in ways that I did not understand.”

  Natalie sat down. “My God, Saul, what happened to Warden’s other two children? The two girls Jack Cohen mentioned?”

  Saul closed the dossier and shook his head. “Jack couldn’t find anything,” he said. “No signs of mourning. No death notices in Philadelphia or Charleston. It’s possible that they were sent off to close relatives, but Jack could find no way to check that without making himself visible to everyone. If they are all serving Melanie Fuller, it seems possible that the old lady simply grew tired of having so many children around.”

  Natalie’s lips grew pale. “That bitch has to die,” she whispered. “Yes,” said Saul. “But I think that we have to stick with our plan. Especially now that we have located her.”

  “I guess so,” said Natalie, “but the thought of her not being stopped . . .”

  “They will be stopped,” said Saul, “all of them. But if we are to have a chance, we have to have a plan. It was my fault that Rob Gentry died. My fault that Aaron and his family died. I thought that there would be little danger if we could approach these people unobserved. But Gentry was right when he said that it would be like trying to catch poisonous snakes with one’s eyes closed.” He pulled another dossier closer and ran his fingers over the cover. “If we are to reenter the swamp, Natalie, we have to become the hunters, and not merely wait for these lethal monsters to strike.”

  “You didn’t see her,” whispered Natalie. “She’s . . . not human. And I had my chance, Saul. She was distracted. For a few seconds I had the loaded pistol in my hands . . . but I shot the wrong thing. Vincent hadn’t killed Rob, she had. I didn’t think fast enough.”

  Saul firmly gripped her upper arm. “Stop it. Now. Melanie Fuller is just one viper in the nest. If you had eliminated her at that second, the others would have remained free. Their numbers would even have remained the same if we assume that it was the Fuller woman who killed Charles Colben.”

  “But if I had . . .”

  “No more,” insisted Saul. He patted her hair and touched her cheek. “You’re very tired, my friend. Tomorrow, if you like, you can ride with me to Lohame HaGeta’ot.”

  “Yes,” said Natalie, “I would like that.” She bowed as Saul kissed her on the top of her head.

  Later, when Natalie had gone to bed, Saul opened the thin folder labeled HAROD, TONY and read for some time. Eventually he put that aside and went to the front door, unlocking it. The moon was out, bathing the hillside and distant dunes in silver. David Eshkol’s large home lay dark and quiet on the hilltop. The scent of oranges and the sea came from the west.

  After several minutes, Saul locked and bolted the door, checked the shutters, and went into his room. He opened the first file that Wiesenthal had sent him. Atop the stack of banal forms in Polish civil ser vice double-talk and terse Wehrmacht shorthand was clipped a photograph of a Jewish girl of eighteen or nineteen, small mouth, wan cheeks, dark hair hidden under a cotton scarf, and huge, dark eyes. Saul gazed at the photograph for several minutes, wondering what had been in the young woman’s mind as she stared into the official camera lens, wondering how and when she died, wondering who had mourned her and if any of the answers might be in the dossier; at least the bare facts of when she was arrested for the capital crime of being a Jew, when she was transported, and perhaps . . . just perhaps . . . when her file was closed as all the hopes, thoughts, loves, and potentials that had been her short life were scattered like a handful of ashes in a cold wind.

  Saul sighed and began reading.

  They rose early the next day and Saul fixed one of the huge breakfasts that he insisted was an Israeli tradition. The sun was barely over the hills in the east when they tossed a backpack in the rear of his venerable Landrover and drove north along the coastal highway. Forty minutes later they reached the port city of Haifa spread out at the base of Mount Carmel. “Your head crowns you like Carmel, and your flowing locks are like purple,” said Saul over the rush of wind.

  “Nice,” said Natalie. “Song of Solomon?”

  “Song of Songs,” said Saul.

  Nearing the northern sweep of Haifa Bay, signs announced Akko and translated it as both Acre and Saint John of Acre. Natalie looked west at the white, walled city gleaming in the rich morning light. It was going to be a warm day.

  A narrow road led off the Akko-Nahariyya Highway to a kibbutz where a sleepy security guard waved Saul through. They passed verdant fields and the kibbutz complex to stop at a large blocky building with a sign outside announcing in Hebrew and English: LOHAME HAGETA’OT, GHETTO FIGHTER’S HOUSE and giving the times it was open. A short man with three fingers missing on his right hand came out and chatted with Saul in Hebrew. Saul pressed some money into the man’s hand and he led the way in, smiling and repeatedly saying Shalom to Natalie.

  “Toda raba,” said Natalie as they entered the dim central room. “Boker tov.”

  “Shalom.” The little man smiled. “L’hitra’ot.”

  Natalie watched him leave and then wandered past glass cases with journals, manuscripts, and relics of the hopeless Warsaw ghetto re sistance. Blown-up photographs on the walls depicted life in the ghetto and the Nazi atrocities that had destroyed that life. “It’s different from Yad Vashem,” she said. “It doesn’t have the same sense of oppression. Maybe because the ceiling is higher.”

  Saul had pulled over a low bench and now sat cross-legged on it. He set a stack of dossiers on his left and a small, battery-powered stroboscope on his right. “Lohame HaGeta’ot is dedicated more to the idea of resistance than to the memory of the Holocaust,” he said.

  Natalie stood gazing at the photograph of a family disembarking from a cattle car, their possessions lying in a heap on the ground near them. She turned quickly. “Could you hypnotize me, Saul?”

  Saul adjusted his glasses. “I could. It would take much longer. Why?” Natalie shrugged. “I guess I’m curious to find out what it feels like. You seem to do it so . . . easily.”

  “Years of experience,” said Saul. “For years I used a form of autohypnosis to fight migraine headaches.”

  Natalie picked up a folder and looked at the photograph of the young woman inside it. “Can you really make all this part of your subconscious?”

  Saul rubbed his cheek. “There are levels of consciousness,” he said. “On some levels, I’m simply trying to recover memories that are already there by trying to . . . block out the blocks, I guess you’d say. In another sense, I’m trying to lose myself to some extent by empathizing with others who shared a common experience.”

  Natalie looked around. “And all this helps?”

  “It does. Especially in subliminally absorbing some of the biographical data.”

  “How much time do you have?” she asked.

  Saul glanced at his watch. “About two hours, but Shmuelik promised that he would turn tourists away until I was done.”

  Natalie tugged at her heavy shoulder bag. “I’ll take a walk and start collating and memorizing some of this Vienna stuff.”

  “Shalom,” said Saul. When he was alone he read the first three dossiers through carefully. Then he turned sideways and switched on the small strobe, setting the timer. A metronome ticked in beat with the pulsing light. Saul relaxed completely, emptied his mind of everything except the regular throb of light, and opened himself to another time and another place.

  On the walls around him, pale faces stared down through smoke and flames and years.

  Natalie stood outside the square building and watched the young kibbutzniks going about their business, a final truckload of workers heading out to the fields. Saul had told her that this kibbutz had been settled by survivo
rs of the Warsaw Ghetto and concentration camps set in Poland, but most of the workers Natalie saw were Sabra—native-born Israelis— as lean and tan as young Arabs.

  She walked slowly to the edge of the field and sat in the shade of a single eucalyptus tree as a tall sprinkler pulsed water toward the crops with a beat as hypnotic as Saul’s metronome. Natalie pulled a bottle of Maccabee beer from the bottom of her shoulder bag and used the can opener on her new Swiss Army knife to pop the lid. It was warm already but tasted very good, blending nicely with the unseasonable warmth of the day, the sound of sprinklers, and the smell of wet earth and growing plants.

  The thought of returning to the United States made her stomach constrict and her pulse race. Natalie had only the haziest of memories of those hours and days after the death of Rob Gentry. She recalled flames and darkness and flashing lights and sirens as if from a dream. She remembered cursing Saul and striking him for leaving Rob’s body behind in that cursed house, remembered Saul carrying her through the darkness, the pain in her leg making her shift in and out of consciousness like a swimmer rising and falling beneath the surface of a rough sea. She remembered— she thought she remembered— the older man named Jackson running beside them with the limp body of Marvin Gayle strung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Saul had later told her that Marvin was unconscious but alive when the two pairs of survivors parted company in that night of dark alleys and screaming sirens.

  She recalled lying on a park bench while Saul made a phone call from an open booth and then it was daylight— almost daylight, a cold, gray twilight— and she was lying in the back of a station wagon filled with strange men, Saul in the front seat with someone she later learned was Jack Cohen, Mossad station chief at Israel’s embassy in Washington.

  Natalie could not sort out the forty-eight hours that followed. A motel room. Shots of painkiller for her fractured ankle. A doctor setting it with a strange inflatable cast. Sobbing for Rob, calling his name in her sleep. Screaming as she remembered the sound the bullet made striking the roof of the honky monster Vincent’s mouth, the gray and red smear of brains on the wall. The old woman’s mad eyes burning into Natalie’s soul. “Good-bye, Nina. We shall meet again.”

  Saul said later that he had never worked harder in his life than during those first forty-eight hours of talking with Jack Cohen. The scarred, white-haired agent could never have accepted the whole truth yet had to be convinced of the essence of that truth through lies. In the end, the Israeli believed that Saul and Natalie and Aaron Eshkol and the missing cipher chief named Levi Cole had become enmeshed in something large and lethal, something involving high figures in Washington and an elusive ex-Nazi colonel. Cohen had received little support from his embassy or his superiors in Tel Aviv, but early on Sunday, January 4, the station wagon with Saul, Natalie, and two American-born Israeli agents passed over the Peace Bridge from Niagara Falls, New York, to Niagara Falls, Canada. Five days later they flew from Toronto to Tel Aviv with their new identities.

  The following two weeks held few referents for Natalie. Her ankle grew inexplicably worse her second day in Israel, fever flared, and she was only semi-aware of the short flight by private plane to Jerusalem where Saul called in favors from old medical acquaintances to find her a private room in the Hadassah-Hebrew Medical Center. Saul himself underwent surgery on his arm during that week. She was there five days and during the last three days she used crutches at dawn and dusk to visit the synagogue and to stare at the stained glass windows created by Marc Chagall. Natalie felt numbed, as if her entire body had been given a massive dose of Novacaine. Each night she closed her eyes and saw Rob Gentry staring back at her. His blue eyes were filled with that terrible second of temporary triumph before the blade appeared and slashed sideways . . .

  Natalie finished the beer and set the bottle back in her handbag, feeling vaguely guilty about drinking so early while others worked. She drew out the first stack of folders: clusters of photocopied pictures and written information about Vienna in the twenties and thirties, police reports translated by Wiesenthal’s assistants, a thin biography of Nina Drayton, typed by the late Francis Harrington and added to in Saul’s wild, hard-to-read script.

  Natalie sighed and began to work.

  They drove south in the early afternoon and stopped in Haifa for a late lunch before everything closed down for the sabbath. They picked up falafels at a stand on HaNevi’im Street and munched them as they walked down to the busy port. Several black market entrepreneurs hovered close, trying to sell toothpaste, blue jeans, and Rolexes, but Saul snapped something in Hebrew and they backed away. Natalie leaned on a railing and watched a large freighter moving out to sea.

  She said, “How long until we go back to America, Saul?”

  “I will be ready in three weeks. Perhaps sooner. When do you think you will be prepared?”

  “Never,” said Natalie.

  Saul nodded. “But when will you be willing to return?”

  “Any time,” said Natalie. “The sooner the better, actually.” She let out a breath. “Jesus, the thought of going back makes my legs go weak.”

  “Yes,” agreed Saul, “The feeling is mutual. Let us review our facts and assumptions to see if there is a weak point in our plan.”

  “I’m the weak point,” Natalie said softly. “No,” said Saul. He squinted out at the water. “All right, we assume that Aaron’s information was accurate and that there were— at a minimum— five of them in the central cabal: Barent, Trask, Colben, Kepler, and the evangelist named Sutter. I watched Trask die at the Oberst’s hands. We will assume that Mr. Colben perished as a result of Melanie Fuller’s actions. That leaves three in that group.”

  “Four if you count Harod,” said Natalie. “Yes,” said Saul, “we know that he appeared to be acting in concert with Colben’s people. That is four of them. Perhaps Agent Haines, but I suspect that he is an instrument rather than initiator. Question: Why did the Oberst kill Trask?”

  “Revenge?” said Natalie. “Perhaps, but I got the impression that there was a power play under way. Let us assume for the time that the entire charade in Philadelphia was aimed toward finding the Oberst rather than the Fuller woman. Barent allowed me to live only because I was to be another weapon aimed at the Oberst. But why did the Oberst allow me to live . . . and introduce you and Rob into the equation?”

  “To confuse the issue? A diversion?”

  “Possibly,” said Saul, “but let us return to a former assumption and say that he was indirectly using us as instruments. There is no doubt that Jensen Luhar was William Borden’s assistant in Hollywood. Jack Cohen has confirmed Harrington’s notes on that. Luhar identified himself to you on the plane. There was no need for that unless the Oberst wanted both of us to know that he is manipulating us. And the Oberst went to great lengths to convince Barent’s and Colben’s surrogates that I had died in the explosion and fire in Philadelphia. Why?”

  “He has further use for you,” said Natalie. “Exactly. But why did he not use each of us directly?”

  “Perhaps it was too difficult for him,” said Natalie. “Proximity seems to be important for these mind vampires. Maybe he was never in Philadelphia at all.”

  “Only his conditioned proxies,” agreed Saul. “Luhar, poor Francis, and his white assistant, Tom Reynolds. It was Reynolds who attacked you outside the Fuller home on Christmas Eve.”

  Natalie gasped. She had not heard this assumption before. “Why do you say that?”

  Saul took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirttail. “What reason did the assault have except to set you and Rob back on the right track? The Oberst wanted both of you on the scene in Philadelphia when the final showdown with Colben’s people occurred.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Natalie. She shook her head. “Where does Melanie Fuller come in?”

  “Let us continue with the assumption that Miss Fuller is in collaboration with neither the Oberst nor his enemies,” said Saul. “Did you get the impression th
at she was aware of either group?”

  “No,” said Natalie. “She mentioned only Nina . . . Nina Drayton, I assumed.”

  “Yes. ‘Good-bye, Nina. We shall meet again.’ Yet, if we are to follow Rob’s logic . . . and I see no reason not to . . . it was Melanie Fuller who shot and killed Nina Drayton in Charleston. Why would Fuller think you were the agent of a dead woman, Natalie?”

  “Because she’s as crazy as a goddamned bedbug,” said Natalie. “You should have seen her, Saul. Her eyes were . . . sick.”

  “We hope this is the case,” said Saul. “Even though Melanie Fuller may be the most deadly viper of all, her insanity might yet serve us. And what of our Mr. Harod?”

  “I wish he was dead,” said Natalie, remembering his clammy, insistent presence in her mind.

  Saul nodded and put his glasses on. “But Harod’s control was interrupted— much as the Oberst’s was with me four decades ago. As a result, each of us has some memory of the experience and an impression of the other’s . . . what, thoughts?”

  “Not quite,” said Natalie. “Feelings. Persona.”

  “Yes,” said Saul, “but what ever the transfer consists of, you came away with a clear sense that Tony Harod had an aversion to using his Ability with males?”

  “I was sure of it,” said Natalie. “His feeling toward women was so sick, but I sensed that it was only women he . . . assaulted. It was like I was his mother and he had to have intercourse with me to prove something . . .”

  “Conve niently Freudian,” said Saul, “but we will take a leap and accept your feeling that Harod has the ability to influence only women. If this is true, then this particular nest of monsters has at least two weak points— a powerful female who is not part of the group and who is as crazy as a goddamned bedbug and a male figure who may or may not be part of their group but who is unable or unwilling to use his Ability on men.”