“You have a lot of questions, Jew-boy,” Schlaff chuckled. “By the way, the temperature has already reached eighteen degrees.”
“Aren’t you going to grant me my last wish? I want to know what happened.”
“Very clever, Jew-boy. Justus tried to play games with us—he stopped paying. Did you know he had been giving us money every month for a long time? One day he came home and found a dead pig in his living room with a Star of David branded on its chest. He got the message. I demanded ten times the normal amount, and he paid up like a good boy.”
“How did you find out he was working for Mossad?”
“You have to pay for what you did, Jew-boy. You killed the Mauser brothers. They were my bloodhounds! I would point to the garbage in the street and they would go fetch. We had to kill your people where we found them. Abducting a pro can be risky. But all the others were brought here alive.”
“You were going to tell me about Sepp.”
Schlaff licked his lips. He seemed to be considering his answer.
“Dear departed Sepp had Justus in his sights for quite a while without his ever knowing. One rainy day, Justus went to Grunewald. Sepp was watching. He saw Justus get into a car. Sepp snapped pictures of everyone, including the man in the backseat. I recognized him instantly. I had seen him on TV. It was Reuven Hetz, the head of Mossad. I realized that Justus could be of great service to us. Question time is over, Jew-boy. Twenty-one degrees!”
Luftwaffe bombers flew in formation on the screen behind Schlaff. Cut.
A Panzer factory. Cut.
Children beaming with pleasure. All blue-eyed blonds. Cut.
Hundreds of columns of Wehrmacht soldiers. Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
A moment of silence fell over the dungeon of horrors. Alex looked at the iron door of the crematorium where Jane was being burned to ashes and was filled with infinite sorrow.
“I see that you are enjoying the films,” Schlaff said. “Before you take your last breath, you might benefit from some wisdom from a great man. Listen to what the Führer says in Mein Kampf. It is from the chapter entitled ‘Race and People.’ ”
Schlaff goose-stepped across the cellar, his legs straight and his knees locked. Keeping up his maniacal march, he recited the words from memory in the tone of a professor lecturing his students.
“Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the fieldmouse with the fieldmouse, the housemouse with the housemouse, etc.”
Schlaff was in the midst of worship.
“Every crossing between two breeds that are not quite equal results in a product that holds an intermediate place between the levels of the two parents. For this reason, it must eventually succumb in any struggle against the higher species!” Spittle sprayed from his lips, and his shrill voice increasingly became an imitation of the Führer’s.
Rauch mouthed the text along with him, like a pious member of the flock.
“The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature!”
Schlaff turned abruptly to Alex. “Do you understand what the Führer is saying, Jew-boy?”
The gas chamber was getting stuffy.
“Twenty-four degrees!” Schlaff announced like a TV weatherman.
If only he had a hammer, he’d smash the fucking intercom, the glass wall, and Schlaff’s skull. “Do you know who thrust the knife into Uncle Alois’s heart in Damascus?”
Schlaff went rigid.
“Did Uncle Alois ever tell you how he burned down the Café Trezeguet?”
There was a satanic fire in Schlaff’s eyes.
“Roger Trezeguet’s son killed Uncle Alois. A Jew-boy. A JEW-BOY!”
Schlaff had apparently toyed with him enough. “Do . . . do you . . . ha . . . have . . . anything t . . . to say . . . before you d . . . die, Jew-boy?” He looked down at the remote in his hand. The red button had lit up. His finger was already on it.
It was over. There was no way to save himself.
Alex took a final look at the crematorium, where Jane’s remains were being burned.
Maybe they’d never had a real chance. Maybe she was right and he’d never really lived, never gotten a taste of the joy of life. It was time to say good-bye to the only person he had left: Daniella.
“You did a nice job down here, Schlaff. A gas chamber, a crematorium, refrigerators for the bodies, shelves for the jars, even a giant screen. But you forgot the most important thing, Oskar—a mirror. So you can look at yourself and see what you really are, not what you imagine in your sick fantasies.”
Schlaff snorted contemptuously.
Alex didn’t let up. “You hate Jews and you hate Muslims and you hate Justus Erlichmann and Gunter Erlichmann. You hate everyone, everyone who isn’t you—everyone who’s different from you.”
“Shut up, Jew-boy!”
“Did it ever occur to you that what you really hate is yourself?”
Schlaff gave him a patronizing look. “Congratulations, twenty-six degrees! Any last words, Jew-boy?”
He wasn’t going to give the scum the pleasure. He had no intention of begging.
“Shut up and press the button.”
WANNSEE, BERLIN | 04:26
Oskar Schlaff pressed the red button.
A loud sucking sound horrified Alex. A fucking vacuum pump!
In a minute, death would flow in, replacing the air being pumped out.
Schlaff had no compunctions.
Alex remembered Daniella as a baby. Taking her first steps. The first time she said “dada,” and later “I love you.” Planting a kiss on his cheek. His Daniella. He tried to force himself to find comfort in the memories.
Naomi quietly crept into his mind, along with their muted life together, devoid of excitement or joy.
Then came Jane, the love of his life; the greatest regret of his life. She was a few feet away, but it was the closest they’d ever come. His heart filled with remorse over the lost women in his life.
A dull pain throbbed behind his eyes. The pressure in his head was mounting. The oxygen was running out.
“You are about to die, Jew-boy!”
The pressure increased. His head was pounding: bo-boom, bo-boom. He felt woozy.
He remembered the machine gunner in Leipzig. The pool of blood around his head was getting smaller, being soaked back up. The man rose from the dead, sat up, leaned on his arm, and stood. And then, as if wiping away a bad dream, he passed his gloved hand over his face, picked up the machine gun, and fired a heavy barrage at the Wehrmacht troops.
“It is time,” Schlaff shrieked, bursting the bubble of his thoughts and pointing the remote at the gas chamber. There was a click, and then another, and the glass in front of him turned white.
Something splattered on it.
Red.
Something banged against the glass.
A head.
Schlaff’s.
A large red hole had opened in the German’s cheek. Blood was pouring out. His face was pressed against the glass door. He collapsed onto the floor, the blood smearing down the glass.
Someone was there.
The pressure behind his eyes was blinding.
A shape.
A gun.
WANNSEE, BERLIN | 04:39
Dr. Rauch threw his hands in the air. Sweat glistened on his upper lip.
Justus Erlichmann was grinning at him. “Do not worry, Doctor. I would never shoot a physician.”
Petrified, Rauch slowly lowered his short arms until they were hanging by his sides.
“But I would shoot a veterinarian,” Justus added, pulling the trigger twice.
As the bullets entered his chest, Rauch’s stunted body was thrown backward into the wall of jars. He reached out to grab hold of a shelf, but his hand hit a jar. The glass container tumbled to the floor and shattered, scattering ashes like flour on the black surface
.
A nauseating, bitter odor filled the air.
Rauch’s head hit the floor. Blood spread over his pink shirt as his little feet kicked at the pale ashes.
His piglike eyes were still gaping when his heart stopped beating.
WANNSEE, BERLIN | 04:42
Alex was stuck in a tub of tar. Muffled voices in the distance. It was done; he was dead.
The words seemed vaguely familiar.
They were calling his name.
The sound was coming from too far away.
Someone put a hand on his face, caressing him tenderly, speaking softly.
Who was this person? What was he saying?
The gummy tar gradually thinned out.
A cold floor. A black floor.
He opened his eyes.
“Justus?”
“Alex!” Justus cried. “I was afraid I was too late. But I’m here now, and Schlaff is dead. They are all dead. It’s over.”
It was cold on the floor.
“You passed out,” Justus said. “Lack of oxygen.”
Alex struggled to sit up, leaning on his elbows, but he had no feeling in his arms. His body burned and throbbed with pain.
Stubble cast a shadow over Justus’s pale cheeks. His blue eyes were sunken into dark circles.
“Where have you been hiding?” Alex asked.
“At home.”
“No way!”
“There is a secret room between the pantry and the guest bathroom. I built it a long time ago.”
“You were in the house?”
“Last night you slept in the pantry cupboard. I was two feet away, on the other side of the wall. You didn’t know. You were blocking my exit. I bumped into a table and it made a noise. Perhaps subconsciously I wanted you to find me. You spoke on the phone. Then you got up and searched the house.”
“What were you doing there all this time?”
Justus smiled sadly. “Waiting.”
“The whole fucking time?”
“I realized that something had gone seriously wrong and I was in danger. So, yes, I abandoned the Ring in the hope that later I would be able to salvage what was left of it. I needed time to find out what had gone wrong. If I was killed, a whole life’s work would have been lost.”
“What about the blood in the cemetery?”
“I was scared. I felt like I was being watched. When we were in the café together, I thought that perhaps you had brought people with you to kidnap me and bring me to Israel. I decided to go underground. I bought a large syringe at a pharmacy and filled a small soda bottle with my blood. I saw you enter the cemetery. I hid there until I was sure you had found it.”
“What made you come here?”
“I followed you.”
“The virus is on its way to Israel!” Alex suddenly remembered. “I have to get upstairs and make a call. If we’re lucky, the Security Agency will catch Schlaff’s couriers in time. They stole the inhalers from the Orchid Farm!”
“Yes, I heard that fool boasting about it before,” Justus chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“The inhalers they have are of value only to asthma sufferers.”
“What!?”
“I went to the Orchid Farm the day before I met you in Berlin. As I said, I feared I was in danger, so I decided to switch the virus inhalers with ordinary Ventolin.”
“What did you do with the vaccine?”
“I replaced the three inhalers. The ones I left behind contain a strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria. If the couriers used them as they were instructed to, there will be no need to look for them. Very soon they will present themselves at an emergency room with a high fever and an infection that is resistant to antibiotics.”
“Where’s the virus now?” Alex asked.
“Hidden in a safe place.”
“How did they get into the Cube?”
“I have given that a lot of thought. The only answer I can find is that they took a picture of my iris when they brought me here. There are companies that will reproduce the image and print it on a contact lens. I must have given them the entry code under hypnosis.”
“I was sure they had killed you and stashed the body somewhere,” Alex said. “But this morning it struck me that the whole time you were gone, no one showed up at your house. No maid, no cook, no gardener.”
Justus gave him an approving smile. Then his face turned serious. “I realized that they were only going after the Ring, not Mossad. I could not deal with them by myself. You showed me that you were the right man for the job, so I decided to disappear and let you handle it.”
“Did you bribe Reuven?”
Justus’s expression became grim. “Like me, Reuven sensed that something was wrong, but I did not have any answers for him yet. I thought that perhaps my personal issues with Schlaff were distracting me. Reuven told me that he was obligated to report his suspicions to the prime minister. I could see the wheels turning in his head. He was hungry, so I gave him something to chew on.
“Israeli politicians do not contend with the real problems. Their sole concern is their own survival. A second Holocaust is just a matter of time. I thought that if Reuven were prime minister, he would be able to prevent it.”
Justus the idealist had tried to buy himself an Israeli prime minister. A lot of influence for a little money.
Alex said, “It doesn’t bother you that Reuven has no principles and no scruples?”
“A person with principles and scruples will not win an election in Israel these days,” the German said.
“Why was Schlaff blackmailing you?”
Justus lowered his eyes and shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said, “but I have to know.”
WANNSEE, BERLIN | 04:57
“My father was an SS officer, Alois Brunner’s deputy at Drancy. When he learned that Germany was planning to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, he defected. Roger Trezeguet, Gerard’s father, hid him and brought him to the Resistance.
“Our fortune . . .” Justus paused and pursed his lips, ordering his thoughts.
“Before my father began saving Jewish lives, he did a terrible thing. He took . . . he stole precious gems from a Jewish family. Everyone could see that those who were deported to the East never returned. The family offered him everything they had to save them, and told him where to find the family jewels. They were concealed in the leg of a table that had been confiscated by the Nazis. My father found it in a camp near Drancy where they stored the property they looted from the Jews. In a moment of weakness, he took the jewels for himself. Then, to hide his crime, he arranged for the family to be sent to Auschwitz.”
Justus’s lower lip was quivering. His expression was somber. “My father confessed to me years ago. He was deeply ashamed. It was a despicable, inhuman act. Two days after the Dresdener family was loaded on the transport, he decided to redeem himself, to defect from the army of the Reich and save as many Jews as he could.”
“Who killed him in Davos?”
“Oskar, most likely. I taught him about RC helicopters.”
“Who’s Rachel Dresdener?”
“You could only know about her if you had read my will,” Justus said with a sad smile. “I see that you found a way into my vault at Berghoff Bank.” He gave Alex an admiring look before going on. “Almost the entire Dresdener family died in the camp. Only the youngest daughter, Rachel, survived. She is an old woman now, all alone in the world. She lives in Israel, in Kiryat Motzkin. I have been sending her money for many years. She does not know where it comes from.
“After the war, my father sold the jewelry and invested the money in art and real estate. And so the source of my family fortune is a crime, an atrocity.”
“What does all that have to do with Oskar Schlaff?”
“After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Oskar discovered that he was the nephew of Alois Brunner. He went to see him in Damascus. Brunner ha
d never lost his hatred for my father. I assume he mentioned his name to Oskar, and Oskar saw the opportunity to extort money from us. We patronized his restaurant for more than twenty years, almost from the day it opened. We came even when no one else did. Oskar was a young man back then, still trying to make his way in life. There were rumors about him. It was said that he worked for the Stasi, that he was an informant. My father helped him, gave him money. That did not stop him from blackmailing us.
“We paid and we kept silent, but we did not know the identity of the blackmailer. We did not know that it was Schlaff, or that he was Brunner’s nephew. When I found out, I prepared a letter bomb, but it was his girlfriend who opened it, not him. He knew that it came from me. The rest I heard tonight, together with you.”
“Why didn’t you just tell the truth? You could have compensated Rachel Dresdener for the jewels and put an end to it all,” Alex said.
“My father made me swear to keep his secret as long as he lived.” Justus lowered his voice. “Did Gerard die in Syria?”
“Gerard is fighting for his life, but they’ve managed to stabilize him. The chopper must have landed in Israel by now. He killed Brunner last night in Damascus. He thought he was dying, so he told me most of the story. There was only one moment when he broke down and cried.”
“When?”
“When he spoke of you. He loves you. He was sure you were dead. It was hard to hear.”
Justus’s eyes glistened. He wiped away a tear.
“The bond between us . . .” Justus took a deep breath before going on. “We are more than brothers. When I did not answer the phone, he rushed to Berlin. I know all about the body in the trunk and the grave in the forest.”
A shadow passed over Justus’s face.
“I am so sorry about the Ring. It was my father’s legacy to me. He created it with his own two hands, but I could not . . . so many people have died . . .”
Justus gazed at the wall of jars. His eyes were moist, but his voice was steady. “It is all gone. I am glad that my father is not here to see it.”
He attempted a smile. Suddenly he looked different, and not merely because he was not as meticulously groomed as usual.
Ring of Lies Page 32