Sarah’s eyes met Jacob’s. She nodded in encouragement. Jacob opened one hand. “What? Bartering? Or something else?”
“Something else,” Isak said. “The Rat.”
“You’re a man of few words,” Jacob said.
“Ha! Tell that to my wife,” Isak bellowed and smacked the table, which shook. “She would be very surprised to hear that.” His laugh was short. “But work? Yes. Few words. Don’t talk. Do. My brother. I will take care of the Rat for you.”
Jacob’s eyes went wide. He felt himself go cold. Sarah took his hand. “Isak can do it,” she said.
“Not me,” Isak interrupted. “Don’t get me wrong. I will get it done. Not me. But I know people. They will do it.”
Jacob sat in shock. Really? He was looking down, he couldn’t meet their eyes. Suddenly there was light. All the way home he had been telling himself how impossible it was becoming, how he could never get close enough, how torn he was between killing Hans and losing Sarah, losing his future. In the camp, awaiting his moment, there was no either/or. There was no context, no background, no choices. Simple revenge. He was going to do it, one way or another, he knew he would, but the price he would have to pay was increasing every day. But now … now … is this really possible … has this man saved Sarah again, saved me? Saved us? Who is he, this angel from heaven?
“How? How can you do this? Who would do it?”
“If I told you I’d have to kill you.” Isak threw his head back and roared. “Really,” he said, settling his chair on all four legs again. “I’d have to kill you.”
He stood and pulled on his jacket and buckled his belt. “Jacob, seriously. Sarah has told me his name, the name of his hotel, and especially, who he is and what he did. That’s all I need to know.”
“There’s something else you need to know,” Jacob said. He could hardly believe what he was hearing. Would his oath really be kept, and he’d be safe at the same time? Had his luck finally turned? He looked at Sarah with utter love in his eyes, and a tear formed in the edge of hers. She squeezed his hand. His mind was working feverishly as he tried to get his head around what he was hearing, before the Soviet officer left.
“There’s something else. If you really do it, everyone heard me threaten him. I’d need an alibi. I’d need to know when it happens so I can be somewhere else, in a beer garden. In the police station getting some papers, that would be perfect. Right? Otherwise I’d be picked up immediately. I need an alibi, so I’d need to know when, is that possible?”
Isak sat down again. “I don’t know. I have to see if that is possible.”
“It has to be,” Jacob said, and Sarah agreed. “Yes, he’s right, everyone heard him say he’d kill him.”
“Look, I’ll be honest,” Isak said. “I don’t know if that’s possible. Let me tell you what I can.” He paused, took a breath, and let it out without saying anything. He was measuring what was safe to say. He spoke slowly, deliberately. “Look. I am an officer in Soviet Intelligence. I am a translator. But maybe a little more than that. Never mind. Liaison with the American and British armies. Intelligence. That sort of thing. I know things. I am Jewish too. I know things about the Jews. There is a group of Jews, I won’t say anything more about them, but let’s put it this way. Jacob, you are not the only Jew who wants revenge. And Hans Seeler is not the only Nazi out there who needs to be destroyed. Let’s just say that there is a way to put his name in the hands of the right people. It will be done. I can guarantee it. But those people must be protected. Zero risk. Zero.” He poured himself a glass and drained it. “Now I must go. Jacob, it is over for you. It will happen. But I should tell you now. They will not want to widen the circle, not even by one. They are complete professionals. I don’t know what you will do about an alibi.”
Jacob nodded with pursed lips. The main thing was revenge for Maxie. That was all he cared about. What a stroke of luck. Then he remembered. “There’s one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“He will leave Heidelberg in nine days.”
“Who, the Rat? Nine days?”
“Yes.”
“From what I know, that is enough time. More than enough.”
“Why, are they already here?”
“Jacob, oh, Jacob, you are too smart for your own good. I may have to kill you anyway.” Isak stood again and poured himself another vodka and drained it and pushed the flask toward Jacob. “The rest is yours. Sarah, I came to give you your photos, and look what you’ve got me into. Come here.”
Sarah stood and hugged Isak. She put her head against his chest. She trembled. “I have no words.”
She felt his words rumble through his body. “Just remember. You will come to Balakovo for dinner. Both of you. I have told you before, Sarah. My mother is the best cook east of the Elbe. And my wife is the best hostess. She will love you, like I do. Anyway,” he said, letting Sarah go, “I will see you again. In a few days I will be back in Heidelberg. Sarah knows how to contact me. Dosvidanya tovarishchi.” Farewell, comrades. He swept his cap from his head, threw out his arm with a flourish, bowed from the waist like a hussar in the court of the tsar, and the door closed after him.
Jacob and Sarah stared at the door, shaking their heads in wonder. “You were right. That man,” Jacob said, “is a force of nature.”
“I told you. A whirlwind,” Sarah said.
“Can he really do it?”
“He says yes. So far he’s done everything he said he would. And more. I believe him. Absolutely.”
“Can it really be so simple? Just like that? Problem solved?”
Sarah poured a small glass of vodka and put it to her lips. “Aah.” She spat it out. “Horrid.”
“You know,” Jacob said, “I really don’t know if I could have done it anyway. I know what I wanted to do but I don’t know if I could have done it. Kill a man? Even the Rat? It just isn’t me. Shoot him with a gun? Maybe. Stab him? Hit him with a club or a rock?” He shivered at the thought. “I could never have done it. Inside, I think I always knew it. The very idea gives me the creeps. How do people do things like that? I just don’t know. It just isn’t me. I wish it was. But it isn’t.”
“I know,” Sarah said. “That’s why I love you. Anyway, let’s just wait.” She hugged him. “We have so much to wait for.”
Jacob took a sip of vodka and waited for the burn to fade before swallowing. It burned anyway. “Ugh. What time is it. Noon?”
Sarah smiled. “Bedtime.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Heidelberg,
June 8, 1945
Frau Trudi Seeler sat on a high wooden stool behind the bar that doubled as hotel reception. She held a wineglass to the light, breathed on it, polished a bit more, examined it again, and went on to the next. She brushed crumbs of almond cake from her apron and put another slice to her mouth. On the wall behind her was a carved wooden box in which room keys hung on numbered hooks. Two keys on each hook, round one for the guest, square one for the maid. She was smiling to herself. For the first time since 1939 all the round keys were out to paying guests. Not freeloading National Socialists or occupation troops, or refugees, but actual, bona fide, paying guests. She had let the last suite yesterday, even though she had given it for the price of a double room. It was only for two days and she gave it cheap just so she could say the hotel was full. At least the nice man had paid in advance.
Wolfgang had hung out the sign right away. A beaming fat man lying on a bed with the word “Voll” painted across him. That would show the neighbors. What a feeling. Things were really looking up at last. But nothing was perfect. Such a pity that Hans would have to go in a few days. He wouldn’t say why or for how long, but she trusted him. These were difficult times. He was such a fine young man, any mother would be proud. If only he could find a nice young girl.
She looked through the arch to the dining room, where Fritz von Schuhmacher, who had taken suite eight, was eating lunch. He had slept late. He looked up and she smiled at him. “Ist gu
t?” she mouthed silently, stretching her lips like a clown. He smiled in appreciation and rubbed his stomach. He toasted her with his glass of wine and she raised her polished empty one to the elegant young man.
Nice woman, he thought. Pity about her son. The strudel was so light and flaky he ordered a second slice with cream, and sighed as he tilted his glass to savor the last drops of wine. Gewürztraminer. When he did the “Nazi officer” course they had even had wine-tasting sessions. But not this one. Probably couldn’t get it in Palestine. He’d have to remember it. He signed to put the lunch on his room bill and left a few coins for a tip. Outside the hotel he turned left, walked a block, and as he passed the café over the road, von Schuhmacher, aka Ari Levinsky, pulled out a handkerchief to blow his nose.
Sitting at one of the wooden tables, Yonni Tal responded by dropping the menu to the floor.
They were in business.
Ari finished his short walk and returned to the hotel to find reception empty. He reached across the bar, took his key off the hook, and went to his room. The stairs to the guest rooms were through a narrow swing door off the Stammtisch, the group table that was closest to the bar. He counted the curving steps. Ten to the first floor, where a polished brass sign showed an arrow to rooms one to five. Ten more steps. Another brass sign pointed the way to rooms six and seven and the two suites. “Next to my son,” the owner had said when she offered him the room. He’d said he could only pay for a single or he’d have to look elsewhere, so she upgraded him. Must be because I look like a Nazi poster boy, he thought.
The first two rooms on the corridor were six and seven, then came his suite, which was just a room and an alcove with the bed, and at the end of the corridor, facing west and south, was the larger corner suite with Hans Seeler. Locked double doors connected the two suites and both faced the road. At the end of the corridor was a low niche with a decorative brass coal bucket and poker. When it was showtime, he’d hide the poker, just in case. The bucket, too.
Otherwise, a piece of cake. Which reminded him. He bought two pieces of strudel for Omri and Yonni.
“Too good to be true” was Yonni’s reaction as they leaned against the jeep, after visiting the ruins of the old synagogue.
“The cake?” Ari said, licking the last cream from the paper bag.
“No. The plan.”
“Well, simple is good,” Ari said, looking over Omri’s shoulder.
“What are you looking at?”
Ari raised his eyebrow and inclined his head. Omri turned and stared at a girl sitting on a pile of bricks in the corner. “Cute,” he said.
“Beautiful, you mean.” Ari smiled and greeted her. She looked away sharply.
“Anyway, again,” Ari continued. “Just wait up the road in the jeep. When my light goes on and off again, it means I’m going downstairs to get his key. I’ll do that when his light has been off for two hours. I’ll see that from the crack underneath the connecting door. I’ll unlock his door, do the deed, close it quietly. When my light goes on and off a second time, you pull up outside the hotel. Yonni, you have the curfew pass?”
“No, I forgot it. Of course I do. What happens if he doesn’t go quietly?”
“He will. It isn’t a big room,” Ari said. “And I’ve already been inside. It’s the smallest suite I’ve ever seen, apart from mine. The bed is to the left of the door, less than a meter. All I carry is a flashlight and a knife. I open the door, light him up, and cut his throat.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if I was inside too?” Omri said. “Just in case.”
Ari considered this.
Yonni nodded. “Many hands make light work.”
Ari said, “You stick a pillow on his head, keep him quiet, I’ll cut his throat?”
“Good.”
“So when the light goes on and off the first time, I go down, get the key and open the front door to let you in.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’ll bring the pillow.”
“What do we know about him?” Yonni asked. “And it isn’t from Blue this time?”
“No,” Ari said. “From Red.”
* * *
It had taken Lieutenant Isak Brodsky of the Red Army a day to get the coded message to the Avengers, and because the team was already near Mannheim, it took them an afternoon to reach Heidelberg. The Rat had gone straight to the top of the list. They knew they had to act fast. Hans Seeler was leaving within six days and nobody knew where he was going. It was now or maybe never. They’d been worried about doing a job in the town center. But as Seeler lived in a hotel, and by a stroke of pure luck Fritz von Schuhmacher had been given the room next to his, SS-TV Unterscharführer Hans Seeler was about to get his reckoning in record time.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Heidelberg,
June 8, 1945
An hour later, five hundred meters away in the lookout tower on the Scheffel Terrace of Heidelberg Castle, the photographer moved Jacob a little to the left and pushed Sarah toward him until they were perfectly framed in the window, with Sarah nestled in Jacob’s arms, their left shoulders toward the camera. In the background, far below, Heidelberg sparkled in all its sunlit glory. The destroyed arches of the Old Bridge broke the waters of the glittering Neckar, which flowed around and beyond into the open plain at the edge of the Odenwald forest, whose green canopy reached the river’s banks. Soaring above the ocher roofs of the university and the Old City, the sharp steeples of the Church of the Holy Spirit and the Jesuit Church pointed the way to heaven.
They smiled at the camera and again and yet again as the photographer gestured to them that now he wanted a profile shot. “Enough, Michael, enough,” Jacob said. “Who do you think I am, an American officer?”
Michael laughed. He knew Jacob as a guide and translator in the castle but he had never met his girlfriend.
“This one is free. For the lovely lady.” He adjusted the fill-in light to compensate for the shade in the tower against the bright sunlight in the background and took two more photos. “Tomorrow,” he said. “Come in the afternoon and choose.”
“How much each?” Jacob asked.
“Oh, for you, five Pall Mall.”
“Three.”
“Four and two butts.”
“Three and one butt. Camel.”
“Stop it, you two,” Sarah said with a smile.
Holding hands, they walked down the steep cobbled alley shaded by overhanging trees to the Corn Market, where they found the perfect table, beneath the white blossoms of a spreading almond tree and next to three large pots of flowering geraniums. They ordered two teas and shared a slice of cheesecake. As their forks met on the plate their eyes met too and they smiled, content.
They had woken late and for a change had not made love. Jacob had kissed Sarah’s puffed eyes and sighed, and she kissed his lips and turned around. He hugged her as she held his hands on her stomach. Like the quiet river below the white water, it was enough to hold each other and to drift in silence.
The frenzy had passed. The uncertainty, the tumult of it all. Leaving in its wake the eternal question: Why me? Of all the men in Hut 28, Square 9, Block 2, why was it he lying in a warm bed with a beautiful woman who loved him? The devil had destroyed them all, apart from one. One weak and undeserving man. Why was he spared? It was a question Jacob dwelled on everywhere, waiting in the bus station, working in the castle, drinking at the table by the Schwartzer Bock.
Surely he was not left alive just to kill a man? There must be a greater purpose to his life than murder.
Finally, he had found an answer. To love Sarah.
Sarah turned and kissed Jacob and hugged him to her. He didn’t need to say a word. She knew. She had also fought and suffered and in the end survived. She had lost everything, her family, her lover, her baby, but never her will to live. In the coldest, most freezing moments, when her bones ached, without water to drink or food to eat or a blanket to cover herself, she had stamped all night in the woods, in circles, hugging hers
elf, fighting off the siren call of sleep, to make sure she would still be there in the morning. It rained and hailed on her. When she had run out of friends she had lived like this in the Berlin woods for two months. Hiding by day, foraging for food by night. Why? She never really knew. Less to live, more to deny them the pleasure of killing her. She just wouldn’t allow it.
And now here they were, the two of them, holding on to each other as if holding on to life. A reprieve at the gallows. She swore she would never let go again. She would never lose Jacob. She would never lose her love again.
A long sigh shook her body. If only. If only she could have a baby.
Jacob sipped the last of the tea and reached across Sarah to the flower pot. He picked a geranium and wove the red blossom in Sarah’s hair. She smiled and tilted her head to model her hair design. “What else can we do that’s nice?” she asked, as Jacob paid the bill. He thanked the waiter and said with his mischevious smile, “I know. Let’s go for a swim.”
“Swim? Where?”
“In the river, of course.”
* * *
Sarah looked around, hugging herself. “I can’t,” she said.
“Stop it. Of course you can,” Jacob said, “look at me.” With a quick glance around he pulled off his underpants, hung them on a broken branch, and splashed naked into the water. The sun glistened on his buttocks as he jumped up and down.
They had walked upriver until they came across a clearing in the reeds that grew into the river, where a fallen tree trunk that lay in the water had made a quiet lagoon for them to lie in. Thick trees concealed them from the road, which was deserted apart from the occasional military truck trundling by. Beyond their little tranquil spot the Neckar flowed fast and strong.
Jacob's Oath: A Novel Page 22