But in my head I could see again my daughter handling the snake with ease. Her calmness. As if she already knew it was there.
Why?
Why would my daughter place a poisonous snake in my bed? A spike of pain twisted through me at the thought. To make me ill? To make me sick from an adder bite, not lethal, but enough to keep me in bed. For a week. Maybe two. To force me to stay away from Scholz.
Was that possible? Was Alicja trying to save me? If so, she was going about it all wrong.
I ran through the rain. It felt fresh on my skin. It tasted clean on my tongue. It was what this camp needed, a good cleaning, but on the inside where the stains didn’t show. There was nobody about in the sheeting rain and I welcomed the solitude, as I swung down a side alley. It led to the western edge of the camp.
The roads were all straight as a poker, designed with military precision. This alley came to a halt at a blank two-metre-high concrete wall, fringed with barbed wire. Set into it was an oak door. It looked as if it had been looted from a castle, its carvings were so elaborate. To the side of it hung a heavy brass bell with a rope pull.
I lifted my hand to ring it, but my hand paused against my will. It floated in mid-air, its ugly stumps of fingernails hovering in front of my face.
Could I do it? In cold blood?
Now was the time to find out.
‘Hello, Niks.’
The big broad Latvian from the rough-end of camp threw wide his arms. He enveloped me in a bear hug that knocked the breath clean out of me. When he’d deposited me back on the ground, he propelled me through the downpour along a slippery path that dissected a huge vegetable garden to a sturdy shed. Nicks booted open its door and launched me inside as if I were a bedraggled kitten.
‘Welcome to my palace, Klara,’ he boomed. His laughter shook the wooden walls.
‘Thank you, Niks. This is very cosy.’
I looked around me. To be honest it looked a mess, garden equipment – spades, hoes, rakes, a muddy barrow – all jumbled together with lengths of wire and string and bits of God knows what. Odd newspapers and broken flowerpots sprawled in one corner, a rusty bicycle wheel and a box of nails in another. The light inside the shed had a fuzzy out-of-focus feel because the small window was curtained with cobwebs.
I’d have given my eye teeth for it.
The roof was sound, no leaks. And in the centre stood a beautiful handmade wooden chair with arms carved in the shape of turtles.
‘It really is a palace,’ I said, impressed.
The rattle of the rain on the corrugated iron roof meant I had to raise my voice.
‘I’ve brought you a gift, Niks.’
From the pocket of my sodden coat I drew an earthenware bottle with a cork stopper. His dark fiery eyes gleamed. A grin leaped across his heavy features, puckering the five tears tattooed on his cheek and I found myself wanting to ask him about those five men he’d killed. Whether they walked through his dreams at night.
‘Sit.’ He waved me to the chair.
I slipped out of my coat, hung it on the hook on the back of the door to drip beside his greasy oilskin and accepted his offer. I sat down, hands resting on the turtles with a view out the window of rows of earthy cabbages bigger than my head, splashes of vivid green spinach and feathery carrot tops. And in the middle of them all sat a long colourful row of peachy pumpkins, obscene in their glossy nakedness in the rain.
‘It’s nice here,’ I smiled.
‘I don’t suppose you came here to admire the view.’
He was rummaging among the flowerpots, rumbling like a giant in a doll’s house, and produced two glasses from under one. He gave them a quick wipe on his shirt front. He popped the cork on the bottle and filled both glasses to the brim. He stretched out his big paw with its soiled fingernails and handed me one.
‘Na Zdorovie,’ I said, raising my glass. I swallowed a slug of the murky liquid and felt the top of my head fly off. Hanna had outdone herself.
‘My friend Hanna is still waiting.’
‘For what?’
‘For you to turn up at her laundry one of these days.’
‘You mean it?’
‘Yes.’
The big man laughed again. Embarrassment made him run a hand over the black stubble on his head. ‘Good.’ He nodded to himself. Knocked back his drink. ‘Very good.’
He leaned his bull shoulder against the wall by the window. He needed to keep one eye on his drenched domain outside.
‘How is Alicja?’ he asked.
‘Much better, thank you. She loves her ribbon.’
He grinned at me. ‘I heard about your snake.’
‘It wasn’t my snake.’
‘There’s only one kind of snake a man wants to put in a woman’s bed.’
‘No, Niks, it’s not like that. Not with him.’
‘It’s like that with all men, my friend.’
‘All the more reason for you to go visit the laundry,’ I smiled.
But this time he didn’t laugh. He folded his arms across his massive chest and thrust his jaw forward at me. For a moment I thought he might take a bite.
‘What do you want, Klara Janowska? Why have you come here in the pouring rain?’
We stared eye to eye for a long moment. His expression was fierce. I inhaled sharply, suddenly fearing I’d got him all wrong. The alcohol blurred the edges of my thoughts.
He leaned forward, his massive chest coming for me. ‘You want me to kill the bastard?’ he asked softly. ‘Is that why you’re here?’
‘No, Niks. Of course not.’
For a moment there was just the sound of our breathing and the rain hammering on the roof.
‘What then?’ he demanded.
I finished off my drink. Made the muscles in my neck relax before they snapped.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said before.’
He screwed up his black eyes. ‘What was that?’ He was wary now.
‘About killing rats in the camp. With rat powder.’
I heard him stop breathing. ‘What about it?’
‘What do you make rat poison out of?’
‘Flour. Honey.’ The grin came back. ‘And arsenic powder.’
‘Well, Niks.’ I held up my glass for a refill. ‘I think I have a rat under my bed.’
CHAPTER FORTY
I drew the curtain around my bed, shutting out the world. From my pocket I took out a small twist of old newspaper and just the soft touch of it on my palm made me edgy. With extreme care I untwisted it.
A white powder stared up at me, a teaspoon of it at most. It looked like flour. White. Virginal. Innocent. It was none of these things. It was lethal. As I bent over to study it, it started to rustle in its paper.
It scared the life out of me. I almost dropped it.
But it was my hand shaking.
Something in my brain was racing overtime and I struggled to slow it down. I sniffed the powder. No odour. No taste either, I’d been told.
White arsenic, it is called. The silent murderer’s weapon of choice. Emperor Nero used it to kill his brother centuries ago and seize the empire. I didn’t need an empire. Just a future for my daughter. Its full name is Arsenic Trioxide. As2O3 is its symbol. It has been a beneficial part of Chinese medicine for centuries and was a tool of the Borgias.
A ball of it the size of a pea will kill you.
It was hurting my eyes, just to look at it. I twisted the paper around it again, hiding it from my sight. But it was there. In my mind. I thrust the tiny packet under my mattress and my lungs drew in breath as if they were starved.
Could I do it? Kill in cold blood? Like a reptile.
Like a snake.
‘You’re jumpy, Klara.’ Davide stroked my cheek. ‘What’s the matter?’
His eyes shone dark with concern and I leaned my face against his, so that he could not inspect my own eyes so intently. This man knew instinctively how to see behind my hardened-steel shutters. I was not used to it. To bein
g so visible. It made me nervous. If Davide saw what lay behind. If he caught a glimpse of me. What then?
Would he still desire to hold my hand in his like this? Warm and tender. Or would he see it for the snake it is?
‘Lift your shirt,’ I said.
He laughed with surprise, which set him coughing. ‘You don’t waste time, do you?’
‘I have something for you. If you roll up your shirt.’
‘That sounds like an offer I’d be extremely foolish to refuse.’
He started to raise his shirt. We were alone standing in Hanna’s cubbyhole of an office in the laundry, sneaking a moment of privacy. Davide had come to find me in his lunch break from Administration and I had brought him here where the air was heavy with steam. I’d peeled his jacket off his shoulders. Our bodies so close, so drawn to each other, it took an effort of will to step back.
‘Look,’ I said and held up a small blue bottle.
He smiled at me, ignoring the bottle. ‘I’m looking.’
I dropped a light kiss on his lips. ‘I happened to be at the hospital this morning and this happened to fall into my pocket.’
I popped the cork and tipped out on to my palm a small pool of nut-brown oil. Its aroma was sharp and clean and strong.
‘Come here,’ I smiled and moved closer.
‘What is it?’ He looked mildly alarmed.
‘Eucalyptus embrocation. Good for lungs.’
He raised his shirt higher. It was the first time I’d seen any part of Davide naked and I felt such a stirring in my body that for a moment my resolve weakened.
Could I really hold back the truth from this man?
I had an overwhelming desire to lay my cheek against his flesh and let the words flow out that were choking me. Please, I wanted to say, please listen. Please hold my head above the rising waves.
Instead I put down the blue bottle, smiled at him in a way to make him laugh and rubbed my hands together with exaggerated glee. His chest was pale and narrow, but sinewy like a long-distance athlete’s. I could see the elongated bands of muscle and sense the energy locked within them. I wanted to touch. To rub. To squeeze. To find out what Davide was constructed of.
I placed my oiled hands on his bare chest. We both felt the impact though it was a gentle touch. A jolt shot through us. He exhaled with a rush of air that brushed the side of my neck. Intimate. Erotic. An invitation. Though no words were uttered.
My hands started to massage his chest. Slowly at first, small circles with my fingertips below his collarbones. Then with the palm of my hand. Bigger. Wider. Long strokes down over his ribcage till his whole chest glistened and heat surged between our skin. I let my thumb trail along the strong ridge of each rib and I could sense the grit buried deep in there, the grit and the courage.
His gaze was on my face. Never leaving it. I bent my head forward, kissed the hollow at the base of his throat and spun him around to work on his back.
‘Feel good?’ I asked.
There was a long pause. ‘Very good.’ His voice was languid.
‘Is it easing your lungs?’
‘They feel brand new. Fresh off the shelf.’
I laughed. How easily Davide could do that. Reach in and pull up my laughter from wherever it was hiding. I thought I had lost it in Warsaw. My hands skimmed across his shoulder blades and over a series of ragged scars on one side of his spine. I didn’t ask. He’d tell me about them when he was ready. His muscles were unknotting, his skin relaxing. As I wove patterns in the oil, something was unknotting and relaxing in me too. I didn’t know what. I didn’t want to know what.
‘Klara, what were you doing at the hospital? I thought you stayed away from that place.’
My hands did not stall. Not for one second.
‘I needed to go there.’
‘Oh, is your throat—?’
‘No, no, it’s fine. I wanted more ointment to soothe Alicja’s back.’
‘I thought it was better.’
‘Not quite.’
There. It was said. The moment fraying at its edges.
‘So I decided,’ I added, ‘that it was time we did something about those lungs of yours.’
‘They just handed out spare ointment?’
I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the suspicion in his voice.
‘Not exactly,’ I admitted.
I pressed the heel of my hand hard into a tight muscle under one shoulder blade.
‘Did it jump off the shelf into your hands?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Klara!’
‘I wanted to help. To make your lungs stop hurting.’
Slowly he turned. My hands moving from his back to his front once more. I could feel his heart thudding. He drew me into his arms, my blouse nestled tight against his oiled chest, his lips in my hair.
‘Thank you, Klara.’
It was the tenderness that undid me. The loving, naked tenderness. It stripped the last layer of my defences. I buried my face in the eucalyptus-scented skin of his shoulder and the words that had been choking me came flowing out.
‘In Warsaw there was an SS-Waffen officer. His name was . . .’ I forced myself to let the words sour my lips, ‘Axel Fleischer.’
Davide’s hand cradled the back of my head. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘I do.’
Standing there in the dour little room, with steam clinging like dew to our hair and noise from the laundry rattling the flimsy door, I let the words spill out of me. I told him fast and straight. About my capture one summer night on the streets of Warsaw. The cold-blooded shooting of my friend Tomasz Chlebek. The interrogation in the basement of Gestapo headquarters in Szucha Avenue where no one could hear my screams. The beatings. The torture. The loss of my daughter.
‘And who was responsible? Who do you think, Davide?’
‘Oskar Scholz.’
‘Let’s give him his full title. SS-Waffen Sturmbannführer Oskar Scholz. He stole my child.’
I told him how I had grovelled to him. Begged. Pleaded. Never knowing whether Alicja was dead or alive.
No tears from me now, no sobs, but Davide had murmured sounds. Of despair. Of comfort. He held me so tight I thought I would snap.
‘There is more,’ I whispered, lips pressed into his shoulder.
I told him about Oberführer Axel Fleischer. I mentioned nothing of his debauched tastes in bed, just that I had orders from Scholz to spy on him. And always Alicja’s name hung between us, unspoken.
‘Why did they let you live, Klara? Why didn’t they silence you?’
I lifted my head and ran both my hands down his cheeks, under his jaw, along his taut neck.
‘I was too quick for them, Davide. I escaped. But now he wants revenge.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I waited. I am not good at waiting. I waited for the sun. I needed it to come and burn away the rain that was pinning everyone inside their huts.
I needed people to be busy in the streets of Graufeld Camp, doing their living outdoors, tempted by the sunshine into letting it all happen in the open. Their whittling and their knitting. Their jawing and their laughing. Their lying and their fighting. Their strumming and their card playing.
Their card playing.
That’s what I was waiting for.
Five days I had to wait. Long nervy days. Yes, I did my teaching. Yes, I kept up my reading to my four kids. Yes, I spent precious time with Davide. But always I was conscious of the twist of paper under my mattress. As if it might catch fire.
At night I lay on top of it. Eyes wide open, picturing the plain white powder. And what it could do.
To my surprise it was Izak I chose to help me. Not Rafal. Izak – with his burnt face and the bubble of fear he carried round with him – was easy to overlook. Downcast eyes and small apologetic frame. No threat to anybody. That’s what people assumed.
But people can be wrong.
He came to me on what turned out to be the final day o
f rain. He clambered up beside me on the top bunk – I avoided sitting on the white powder when I could – and tucked in close. Alicja was safe with Rafal at school.
‘Look at me, Izak.’
He didn’t look. Gently I lifted his chin. His lip was split, a swollen bruise, as moist as an over-ripe plum, pulled his cheekbone out of shape. I drew him closer and kissed the top of his dark bushy hair to hide my dark bushy anger. In the beginning Izak had been bullied in the classroom but Alicja and Rafal had put a stop to it between them.
‘Who did it, Izak?’
He took a long time to reply. ‘Bolek’s father.’
‘Wait here.’
I ran through the rain all the way to Hut N and strode in. The family huts were always noisy, crowded with chatter and scolding, laughter and young voices. Arguments were frequent, but so was singing. I spotted the Vrubel family and headed over.
‘Vrubel, you hit Izak,’ I said in a raised voice.
A hush fell in the immediate area, heads turned, sensing entertainment. The Vrubel family consisted of the two parents, a grandfather and seven children. They took up a lot of space. Igorek Vrubel was playing cards with his two eldest sons but at my accusation he rose to his feet, cheeks florid, eyes brimming with discontent, bristling for a fight. He stood a head taller than I did.
‘What’s it to you?’ he demanded. ‘The kid deserved it.’
His gaze flicked behind me and I glanced round. Izak was rooted to the spot right at my heels.
‘Do you know what it feels like to be hit, Vrubel?’
His children were always hiding bruises.
Without warning I slapped his sneering face. His head shot back from the impact and his fist bunched. He was about to hammer me but just in time he became aware of the onlookers. Even he knew you don’t hit a woman in public.
‘Stay away from Izak,’ I said. ‘Stay away from all my kids.’
‘You bitch!’
He punched the air where I had been standing, but I had already seized Izak’s hand and was on my way out. In the street I slowed my pace to my young companion’s despite the downpour.
‘You didn’t ask why he hit me,’ Izak muttered.
‘I don’t need to know. It was wrong. That’s enough for me.’
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