Plessen was nowhere in sight. It was all very disheartening.
Faglin slipped his hand inside his pocket, and the fingers automatically closed around his knife. He had only to squeeze the sides and the blade would spring straight from the hilt, like a snake sticking out its tongue, just hold it against a man’s heart and squeeze; the point would go through anything, even leather. It was a remarkable weapon. He had taken ft off a dead Syrian in 1943. He wondered if he would ever have a chance to use it.
He saw Hirsch first, and then, about three quarters of a block in the lead, pushing along as fast as discretion and his stumpy little legs would allow, Plessen. It was only necessary to wait.
And then, as luck would have it, a pair of Russian soldiers turned up, out on their evening patrol. They were coming straight down the Tabor Strasse, their machine guns, hanging from shoulder straps like a couple of ladies’ handbags, swinging in a little arc with every step, from right to left and back again. Faglin lifted one foot up to the seat of the crumbling bench and began to make a great display of retying his shoelace.
Plessen would reach the corner first. The question was, what would he do when he saw the two soldiers? Hirsch was only ten or twelve meters behind him, and he would have to assume that Hirsch was armed and hostile. After all, he knew Hirsch well enough to have made trouble for him with the Neapolitan police, so he knew what kind of man he had to deal with.
Hirsch was not the timid type. A couple of Russian peasants in infantryman uniforms weren’t going to stop him if he felt like killing Plessen. He would simply kill them first, one shot apiece, before they ever had a chance to raise their weapons . Plessen wouldn’t have any illusions about that.
And. besides, one word in that quarter and he was on a prison train for the Arctic Circle. Hirsch didn’t have anything to hide, but Plessen did.
Hence there was no chance that he would want to do anything but avoid the Russians. After all, he didn’t know for certain that Hirsch wasn’t just going to scold him for being a bad sport about the Italian business. So he would sheer off, trying to avoid them both.
But which way? Across the street? No. there was too much traffic—he wouldn’t much fancy waiting at the intersection for a break, not with Hirsch at his back. So he would go up Tabor Strasse. He would turn the corner, walk straight past the two Russian soldiers, and keep going.
And that was where Faglin would intercept him. He took his foot down from the bench and began making his leisurely way up the sidewalk.
He passed the two Russians; they never so much as glanced at him. They were too busy talking about the cheapest places to buy cigarettes. He heard the sound of their boot heels dying away behind him.
He stayed back from the curb. He wanted Plessen to walk by him on the left side. His right hand went into his overcoat pocket. He didn’t look behind him.
One, two, one, two, quick march. Not running, not seeming to hurry very much, but eager to be on his way—Plessen’s footsteps clicked against the pavement with the regularity of a metronome. Faglin allowed himself to slow down to a stroll. The Russians, by now, were probably twenty-five or thirty meters behind them.
As Plessen tried to move around him on the sidewalk, Faglin reached out and took him by the right arm, just as if they had been friends all their lives.
“I hope you are not carrying a gun.” he said in English—Nazis always found the sound of English so reassuring, and he didn’t want Plessen to bolt on him. He tightened his grip. “But you wouldn’t have been stupid enough to carry a gun into a Russian prison, now would you. After all, they let you come back out.”
“What is it you. . .”
Plessen’s eyes bulged out of his thick, cunning face. He was frightened, but he had the composure not to raise his voice —that was something.
“A word with you, Herr Doktor—nothing more. We’d like to know what brings you back to historic Vienna.”
They kept pace together at a slow walk, arm in arm for all the world could have seen. In another quarter of a minute they would reach the next corner. It seemed an immense distance.
“Are you one of the Jews? Are you with—? I never—”
“Yes, Herr Plessen I am one of the Jews.” Faglin allowed his left hand to run slowly up and across the back of Plessen’s overcoat, until his arm was resting in the friendliest manner possible on the other man’s shoulders. The fingers of his other hand curled around the hilt of his knife. “But all of that was a long time ago, and all of us are here on other business. Tell me, what do you hear these days from Colonel Hagemann?”
There was no sound now except the wind, high up, pushing against the naked branches of the trees that stood beside the sidewalk. A scrap of paper floated by on the street, settling quietly to the stones every few yards, like an exhausted ghost.
“Hagemann? You said, Hagemann? I—”
“Don’t lie to me, Herr Plessen.” With the pressure of his arm, Faglin guided him around the corner. They were safe now, quite away from everyone. “I’m not from the War Crimes Tribunal, but I know what I know. So don’t take the trouble to make up pretty stories. What does Hagemann want inside Mühlfeld Prison that he sends you all this way?”
“Well, I don’t know. That is. . . He seems to have friends. . .”
Faglin wasn’t even really listening. Nothing that Plessen could tell him would be of the slightest interest, not compared with the mere fact of his being in this place at this moment. Actually, he was looking for a nice private place to get rid of the body.
“. . . you know. I have my standards. I’m a Doctor of Jurisprudence, you know. It’s a question of a client’s. . .”
God, the man was such a fool—he probably even believed some of it. About five meters in front of them, there was the shell of a house. The walls of the surrounding buildings were gouged by shrapnel holes, but this one seemed to have taken a direct hit. There was a stairwell down to what had probably been the servants’ entrance. It would do.
There was no one else on the street. Perhaps people lived in some of these houses—people lived wherever they could. Perhaps someone would chance to be glancing out his window, but that wouldn’t matter. Sensible people did not report crimes to the Russian authorities. If anyone saw, they would let the patrols find the body tomorrow morning.
Plessen was still talking. “. . .It seems a romantic interest. . .” He didn’t appear to notice when Faglin took his right hand out of his pocket. He didn’t seem to hear the hard, cruel snap as the blade shot out from Faglin’s gloved fist.
Faglin let his arm swing across, and the blade caught Plessen just at the edge of his overcoat lapel. There was a dull sound, like a cough, as it buried itself up to the hilt.
People always acted so surprised when they were stabbed. As Faglin took his hand away, Plessen stared down at the knife that was sticking out of his chest like a coat peg and the expression on his face changed, his eyes widening as if he just couldn’t believe that it was there. The blade was buried deep into his heart, so he was already dead—he simply didn’t know it yet. He looked up at Faglin, who was still standing right beside him, and he opened his mouth to say something, and that was when it happened. He just died, from one instant to the next. His knees started to fold under him, and even as Faglin was shoving him down the basement stairway, even as his arm shot out as if under its own power to grab for the iron railing, he was already a corpse.
At the bottom, perhaps three, perhaps four meters below the level of the street, the body lay in a crumpled pile. Faglin went down, pulled his knife loose, and wiped the blade off on Plessen’s coat sleeve. He took the wallet from the breast pocket. Let the police believe this was a simple robbery if they liked—in any case, let them work a few days before they made an identification. He took the briefcase as well. By the time he had finished, Hirsch was already at the top of the stairs waiting for him.
“You do nice work,” he said, smiling coldly. “Now let’s get out of here. Christiansen will be waiting
.”
8
It was the rule at Mühlfeld Prison that any inmate receiving a visitor was confined in an isolation cell for the twenty-four hours following. No one pretended there was any reason for this, since no secrets or contraband could be passed between people separated by heavy mesh screens, and certainly not in the presence of two Russian guards, and it didn’t seem to make any difference who the visitor was. Mother, lawyer, husband, NKVD interrogator, agent of the International Red Cross—twenty minutes of conversation in the reception room meant a day and a night in solitary. It was the rule, that was all.
The cells were in the basement. They had concrete walls and were very cold. There was one blanket. Esther wrapped herself in it as many times as she could and lay down on the plank bed. It was the first time she had ever been here because it was the first time she had ever had a visitor.
Every ten or twenty minutes the eye slit in her door would darken, which meant that someone was outside looking in. Sometimes it was the guard on duty—she could hear the regular click of his boot heels as he paced up and down the corridor—but sometimes, probably, it was Filatov. For over a week now, he had been watching her constantly. He never seemed to go off duty; she could feel his eyes on her wherever she went. It was as if he hated her, or was afraid she might find some means of running away, or both. Perhaps he was simply waiting for another chance to shove her into another empty room.
She had let him push her down onto the blanket, had turned her face to the empty wall, and had tried, with all the energy she could command from her giddy, half-paralyzed mind, to force herself into being somewhere else. She couldn’t fight him. She didn’t try. But she didn’t want to feel his clammy hands on her face and shoulders, she didn’t want to hear the way he grunted over her. She thought perhaps, if she willed it with enough conviction, if just this once there was no part of her to say, No, live! then perhaps she might die. Could anyone just die like that? Yes, she believed they could.
But she couldn’t. It must have been that somewhere inside her, hiding where she couldn’t find it, a piece of her had still been clinging shamefully to life. “To live is a moral duty” her father had told her in Lodz, when a chunk of mold-covered bread the size of one’s fist was something to fight over, when every morning clean-up crews found more and more wasted bodies in the streets. “Every Jew knows that his only victory can be to survive.” So she had made it her business to survive, and had learned there was no victory in it. There was only remorse.
Afterwards Filatov had petted her and told her about all the favors that would come to her now, all the gifts and privileges. They always did that. She waited, looking away, with all the apparent stupidity of an animal, trying not even to exist as she kept her rage and self-loathing buried deep within her. At last, when he had grown weary of her silence, he led her back to her barracks.
And now she was lying in an isolation cell, trying to keep warm, and Filatov was on the other side of the locked door. It was almost a relief.
But she had had a visitor today, for the first time in her four months at Mühlfeld. Why should anyone come to visit her here? So she was now an object of interest to more than just Filatov.
And then there had been that strange encounter in the recreation yard this morning, that woman with her hard, passionate face. That had been perhaps even a little more unexpected.
It was all very disquieting, and at the moment all Esther wanted was to be quiet. What only twenty-four hours before had seemed the most monotonously predictable, the most hopeless, the most solitary of existences was now crowded with unfamiliar voices speaking of the mysterious future. She was glad to be locked away. She was desperate for time to think.
The ceiling of her cell was nearly four meters high, and in the center there was a single light bulb in a metal cage. It flickered and made faint popping sounds, as if at any second it might die away and leave her in darkness. She was not frightened of the dark, but she hoped the light would stay on. It was too cold to sleep and soon it would be time for the evening meal. She was hungry, but she didn’t want them to have to leave the door open so she could see to eat. She hoped Filatov hadn’t made some sort of arrangement with the guard on duty.
They had told her after the two o’clock roll call; “Someone has made an appointment to see you this afternoon.” There were no details. She was told to go to the matron for a clean dress, and to wait.
At a few minutes after three, a guard came to the barracks to fetch her. He was someone she had never seen before, so perhaps his duties were restricted to the reception room—the Russians were great believers in specialization. He took her to a tiny room, no larger than a broom closet, and directed her to sit down on a wooden chair in front of a window that looked into another room and was covered with a heavy wire screen.
“You will not touch the wire,” he told her, in German—possibly he wished her to understand from the outset that there were to be no private communications, that every word spoken would be noted. “You will leave your hands in your lap. If you attempt to touch the wire, the interview will be broken off at once and you will be severely punished.”
And then they waited, she sitting in her chair and he standing beside the only door, in unbroken silence.
And then, in the other room, a door opened—at least, she heard the sound when it closed again—and a man in a green suit sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the screen.
It was difficult to see him through the wire, which was thick and so closely woven that even Esther’s fingers could hardly have gone through the mesh, but he seemed a dapper little figure, pink and fleshy with thinning hair. He had a way of folding his hands together over his chest that somehow emphasized their softness, suggesting that he look an almost feminine pride in them. He smiled at her, his eyes glittering sympathetically.
“Fräulein Rosensaft?” he asked, allowing the tips of his fingers to press together. “Fräulein Esther Rosensaft, born in Königsberg in 1928? Your father was Julius Rosensaft, a civil engineer in that city?”
She was so astonished that for an instant she thought he must be talking about someone else. But, yes, that was her name—she had almost forgotten it. Finally she could bring herself to nod.
“Good. It would have been a pity to come all this way and find myself talking to the wrong young lady.” The smile broadened slightly, as if to emphasize that he was making a small joke. He opened the briefcase he had been holding on his lap and took out a file folder crammed with papers that rustled noisily as he sorted through them.
“You seem to have gotten yourself into a certain amount of trouble, my dear. Still, no one is blaming you.” He was careful not to glance up from the long, official-looking document he held clutched in his right hand. “I’m sure life hasn’t been easy for you since the war, and your family is sparing no expense to procure your release.”
“My—?”
It became impossible to finish the question. Her face grew hot, and for an instant she forgot herself enough to begin bringing her hands up to her mouth. And then she remembered the guard standing behind her and pushed them back down against her thighs. Those few seconds, staring through the wire barrier at this blandly smiling man, were an agony.
“Yes, my dear. But allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gustav Plessen. I am an attorney in Heilbronn retained by your aunt, a Mrs. Erica Adler, living at present in Trenton, New Jersey, in the United States. She is your father’s sister and is very anxious to do what she can for you. We have filed a petition for clemency with the military governor. We have every hope.”
“Is my aunt here? Is she—”
Esther shook her head, she could hardly see through her tears.
“No.” Plessen, the attorney from Heilbronn, seemed to regard the question as a trifle foolish. He cocked his head a little to one side, the way one does when in conversation with an engaging child. “Your aunt has young children and was thus unable to come. She only heard you were alive a few months a
go, apparently from one of the Jewish agencies. I’m sure you can appreciate her surprise when she subsequently learned that you were incarcerated.”
He smiled again. He had established his client’s perfect right to remain with her family in Trenton, New Jersey. He was obviously a man for whom the world organized itself into conveniently intelligible moral categories. It seemed clear that there were to be no more troublesome questions. Esther could feel her bowels shriveling with mortification.
“But we’ll have you out soon enough, my dear. The authorities are sympathetic. These things take time and money, but I think another few weeks should see you free of this place.”
As the guard led her away, Esther Rosensaft, niece of an American lady named Adler, kept wondering why she couldn’t seem to feel anything except dread. She was happy, of course—that she was happy she knew as an objective fact, the way she knew her age and the color of the linoleum in her barracks—but she couldn’t seem to make that translate into something besides a cold, sickened sensation all through her neck and chest. It was as if she had received a warning and couldn’t make out when or about what. There had simply been too much for one day—that was it. Her nerves had been stretched too tight, and now they were having their revenge. In a few hours she would be all right again.
She wondered what America could be like, and what part of it was Trenton, New Jersey. Right after the war, in the refugee camps, everyone had been dying to go to America. To have relatives willing to sponsor you was to belong to a kind of aristocracy. It meant that you were going to return, almost from one day to the next, to normal life, the way it had been before 1933.
Esther could hardly remember what “normal life” had been like. In 1933 she had been five years old. The world had been mad for as long as she could remember.
There had been three places everyone hoped to go—America, England, or Palestine. Hardly anyone had any hope of going anywhere, but the general consensus, unless you were a Zionist, was that America was best.
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