“I had a date.”
“You sly dog. She got any friends?”
“I’ll ask.” He paused. “Doing anything today, want to go on a field trip?”
“Field trip? We back in middle school?”
“Dachau,” Harry said. “The concentration camp.”
“Why you want to go there?”
He picked Cordell up at the Pension Jedermann on Bayerstrasse at 11:30. Cordell in a powder-blue leisure suit with beige stitching and a beige polyester shirt with musical notes scattered all over the front. “Man, you’re a dresser, aren’t you?” he said when Cordell got in the car.
“I’m fly, Harry. Got my fly on.”
“You sure do.”
“You know what fly mean, Harry?” Cordell said, grinning.
“Let me guess. Fashion-conscious. Am I in the ballpark?”
“OK, you in the right direction,” Cordell said. “I can hook you up with some cloth, style you.”
“Guys selling scrap don’t dress like that.”
“You be the first. They be looking at you with envy and shit.”
Harry wondered what Michalski, the buyer at the steel mill, would say if he showed up in a powder-blue leisure suit. It wouldn’t be pretty.
Harry drove through Altstadt, and once he had cleared the ancient spires he saw a Zeppelin hovering high above. “Look up there.” He pointed to the top edge of the windshield. “See it?”
“Yeah. More Nazis, Harry? Think it’s following us?”
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.”
They got on the highway and drove northwest out of the city, Cordell looking through the windows, checking to see if the Zeppelin was still up there. “Don’t see nothing, Harry. We cool.” Cordell took a red Nazi armband out of his pocket. “Souvenir from the other night. Check it out.”
“Hitler said the red symbolized the social idea of the movement. White was the nationalistic idea, and the swastika represented the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, that was a victory of the idea of creative work, which always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.”
“Huh? What was the Führer smoking he wrote that? Must’ve been some good shit.”
“All of them were smoking it.” Harry paused. “They listened to the lunatic, believed him. Hitler thought Jewish men purposely seduced German girls to pollute the Aryan race.”
“What would he’d a thought about brothers doin’ the fräuleins?”
A few minutes later they were cruising along the northern perimeter of Dachau concentration camp. “When I was here there were thirty-four barracks. There’s only one left.”
“When was that?”
“Got here in November 1941, escaped in April 1942.” He pulled the BMW over on the side of the road, looking past Cordell at the entrance gate. “There’s the guardhouse, and that brick building with the chimney is the crematorium.”
“Hold on, Harry, rewind.”
“It was the beginning of November. The Nazis came to our house, ten armed men, banging on the door, seven in the morning. I got out of bed, looked out the window and saw them in front of the house. An SS sergeant told us to get dressed and come downstairs, bring what we could carry but no food.
“We started walking through Altstadt, joined now by other families, friends and neighbors forced out of their homes. Fifty of us, I counted. People were stumbling along, weighted down by layers of clothing, carrying suitcases and duffel bags. We walked through town and then we were outside of the city. I was thirteen, no idea what was happening. None of us did. They marched us sixteen kilometers to Dachau. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the walls and towers of the camp.”
“What’s that mean: Arbeit Macht Frei,” Cordell said, trying to pronounce it, pointing to the words on the gate.
“Work makes you free. That was the irony,” Harry said. “The harder you worked the weaker you got. Only way to be free was to die.”
“What you do, they put you in here?”
Harry turned his head, held Cordell in his gaze. “I was a Jew.”
“You got a tat?”
“They didn’t do that here. They put your number on your uniform.” He paused. “Morning roll call was four a.m. in the summer and five thirty in the winter. After going to the bathroom we were given a cup of black coffee, then marched to the assembly area for roll call. After roll call the work commander, a prisoner, called out names for work details. If your name was called you were given a slice of bread and maybe a little piece of sausage. We worked, usually in the Plantage, farmland near the camp until eleven thirty. Marched back to the barracks for dinner, a small serving of cabbage or carrots and a small piece of potato. At twelve thirty we marched back to work until six, then back to camp for roll call, and back to the barracks for supper: watery soup, sometimes a bit of cheese.
“I saw a man beaten to death by a guard for stealing potato peelings, stuffing them in his pockets ’cause he was starving. I remember bodies that looked like skeletons stacked on top of each other outside the crematorium.
“Waking to the sounds of rifle shots, firing squads shooting prisoners who had broken the rules. I remember naked prisoners sprayed with a hose in January and left to die.”
“Why we here? This some kind of cathartic experience, got to purge this from your soul?”
“I’m getting my bearings.”
“Your bearings? What’s that mean?”
Harry told him about the mass execution, the mass grave, digging his way out and going to the farmhouse and being helped by the woman.
“Harry, you got some dark secrets. But I got to ask, you really think you gonna find this grave in the woods after all this time?”
“I don’t know.” Harry checked the side mirror, shifted into first gear and got back on the road, thinking about that day almost thirty years ago. “We went right out of the gate and got on the two-lane road heading to Munich, just like we’re doing now. I could see SS guards, eight men in two kubelwagens driving close behind the truck. I remember looking through the slit in the tarp, seeing forest, walls of trees on both sides of the road. Prisoners packed together, the heat from the bodies. The Nazis called it sardinpackung, packed like sardines. I remember seeing a concrete marker: Dachau 4 km, on the other side of the road. And then the truck slowing and turning into the woods, the back end bucking, going through the trees, and then panic because all at once we knew we weren’t being transferred to a sub-camp.”
“What’d you think?”
“I knew.”
They rode in silence for a few minutes, Harry clocking four kilometers on the odometer. They passed stands of trees, and a couple factories, and houses built in the green hills to the east. Everything looked different. The road was wider and there were billboards now, advertising beer and lodging, the 1972 Olympics coming to Munich. He drove a little farther—it was just by feel now, pulled over next to a wooded area, glanced at Cordell.
“This the place, Harry?”
“We’ll see.” It was just over four kilometers from Dachau. But Harry admitted to himself they could’ve been off by a hundred yards or half a mile. He got out of the car and went to the trunk, opened it and took out the shovel, leaned the handle against the fender, closed the lid. Cordell was standing next to the BMW, watching him, lighting a thin brown Davidoff.
“Ready?” Harry said.
They went in the woods, Harry picturing what it looked like that day thirty years ago, seeing the scene in his memory, seeing himself moving uphill through the trees behind the truck and the kubelwagens, running for a few minutes until the truck stopped. He remembered the clearing, thinking at the time how odd it was. The trees just ended, and he was looking out at flat hectares of farmland.
They walked due west from the highway for fifteen minutes, Cordell next to him, saying, “Anything look familiar?”
“Trees,” Harry said.
“Trees, huh? That suppose to be funny? I’m gettin’ eaten alive. These Kraut skeeters like dar
k meat.”
Harry said, “Why don’t you go back sit in the car, I’ll look around a little longer.”
“What am I going to do in the car?”
“Listen to the radio. You like yodeling?” Harry said it straight.
“Huh?”
“Find yourself a nice yodeling station.” He grinned. “Do me a favor, will you? Get the car and drive back toward Dachau a kilometer or so. I’ll walk through the woods and meet you.” He handed Cordell the keys.
Cordell liked the idea. Get away from the skeeters. He was no Boy Scout, didn’t like communing with nature. He wanted to help Harry but this idea was fucking crazy. He got in the car, adjusted the seat, looked in the rearview mirror, looked through the windshield, saw a car coming toward him on the other side of the road, let it pass and made a U-turn, on the highway now, moving. Watched the odometer and when the number rolled over he slowed down and made another U-turn, pulled off the road and waited, left the motor running, turned on the radio, something classical, turned the dial, heard yodeling, no shit. Man, it was funny. He tried it, no fucking way. Dude singing:
Yodel-oh-ee-dee-yodel-oh-ee-dee,
Diddly-odel-oh-ee-dee,
Yodel-oh-ee-dee-ay-dee…
Cordell thought he could bring yodeling back to the D, give it some attitude, see what the brothers thought. He took the sterling silver cigarette case out of his shirt pocket, opened it, took out a Davidoff, tapped it on top of the case, lit up, wished it was a joint, but liked the look of it, skinny bad-ass cigarette.
He turned off the car, rolled down the window and waited. Heard the clock ticking. Felt the wind shake the BMW when a car passed by. Sat there twenty minutes, then thirty, saw something out of the corner of his eye, looked like Harry coming out of the woods. He watched him all the way, watched him open the door, get in with the shovel. Man looked stressed. “What’s up, Harry? Want to keep going?”
Shook his head. “This is crazy,” Harry said.
Cordell was right there with him on that. “What you want to do?”
“Go back to Munich.”
Cordell checked the mirror, put it in gear, got on the road. He was hungry, thinking about some food, and then some poon, in that order. He’d gone maybe a klick when he saw Harry look at him.
“Pull over, will you?” Harry said.
He did, noticed they were back where they started, saw tire tracks in the gravel.
“This is it. I’m going to give it one more shot.” Harry said, like he apologizing.
“Whatever you want to do.”
Harry got out with the shovel and Cordell watched him walk to the woods, disappear in the trees. Wished him luck even if it was some grisly shit he doing. Cordell thinking how they met, and now how they were friends. Sure, part of it was circumstances. Two strangers from the D, meeting in a strange motherfucking land. But was more than that. Cordell liked the dude.
Cordell drove south this time, went exactly a kilometer, pulled over and waited. Same drill as before. Put the seat back as far as it would go, got comfortable. He was thinking about his situation: out of the army, almost out of money, had to go back to Detroit get his stash. Thirty thousand dollars hid at his momma’s house. Only problem, he wasn’t in the service no more. Go home, they make him do his time? But first they got to find him.
He saw something in the mirror, car coming. It slowed down and pulled up behind him.
Harry drove the curved tip of the shovel into the soft ground, levered the handle back and brought out a shovel full of dirt. Dug down a foot or so, didn’t find anything, and moved along the edge of the clearing covered with grass, leaves and pine needles. Was he in the right place? There was no way to be sure. The scenery looked different than he remembered it. The trees, mostly pines, were taller, and far in the distance was a factory, a series of low-slung buildings and an asphalt parking lot filled with cars, spread out on what might’ve once been farmland. It was the open angle, the view beyond the forest that seemed vaguely familiar. One hundred yards from where he was standing was a steel chain-link fence marking the perimeter of the property.
He tried to picture the pit, tried to calculate where it was in relation to the tree line. Harry moved along the edge of the clearing, went ten feet out and sunk the shovel in the soil again. Dug a hole a foot and a half deep. Nothing. Now he went out farther from the tree line, drove the shovelhead into the ground, dug down and hit something. It felt like a root. He cleared the earth around it, and wedged the tip of the shovel under it and it came up, a stick caked with dirt. He bent down and picked it up. But it wasn’t a stick. He wiped it on the grass to clean it and now recognized it as a human bone, a piece of a leg, one end brittle, decayed.
Harry dug around the hole, clearing more dirt, making it bigger and deeper, found a stained, tattered piece of cloth, part of a striped Dachau uniform—the number 027 still legible. But now he felt guilty for disturbing the grave of his parents and so many others. Filled in the hole and scattered leaves and pine needles over it.
He moved back toward the tree line, heard the hum of a motor, looked up, saw the Zeppelin coming in just over the treetops, casting a shadow, man with a gun in the open window of the gondola. He dropped the shovel and ran.
Rausch told the pilot to go in as low as he could. He saw Harry Levin at the edge of the trees, a clearing behind him, holding a shovel, and fired a burst from the silenced machine gun, rounds chewing up bark, blowing off branches, Levin running and disappearing in the forest.
The airship spun around, hovering and then gliding back the way they had come, Rausch scanning the ground, looking for any sign of movement. The gun felt good in his hands like it was part of him. He saw Levin appear from behind a tree, emptied the magazine, ejected it, popped in a fresh one, racked it and kept firing, pieces of bark and branches flying. They hovered and waited. He looked down, the floor of the gondola littered with shell casings.
They glided south fifty meters, Rausch and a spotter next to him with binoculars, looking for any sign of movement. He did not see anything. The Zeppelin drifted east and then north, circling back around to where they had started.
He directed the pilot to go west and south this time, making another circle, gliding over treetops. Nothing moved. And now Rausch believed he had shot Harry Levin and Levin was somewhere down there wounded, or more likely, dead. The only way to be sure of course was to land the airship and search the area. They flew back to the clearing. The airship went down close to the ground. Rausch jumped out with the machine gun and went into the woods.
Harry had been lucky, that’s all there was to it. There were trees to take cover behind, trees to hide him as high-velocity rounds tore up everything around him. It had all happened so fast he hardly had enough time to react. The Zeppelin circled around a couple of times, Harry burrowing half under a fallen tree trunk. It continued on, going north, and disappeared. He got up and hid behind a giant oak tree, gripping the Colt in his right hand.
He looked in the direction the Zeppelin had gone and thought he saw something, and then did, someone coming toward him, moving through the trees, a dark shape carrying a machine gun on a strap around his neck, holding it with two hands across his chest. Harry went down on his knees. The man, dressed in casual attire, like he was going out to dinner and a movie, passed right by, and Harry recognized Rausch.
When the bodyguard disappeared from view Harry took off, went back toward the clearing, taking cover just inside the tree line. He saw the Zeppelin hovering about ten feet off the ground over the grave site.
Twenty minutes later the bodyguard returned, got back on the airship, and Harry watched it rise up over the trees, heading for Munich. This time he was reasonably sure it wasn’t coming back.
Harry came out of the woods, sweating and filthy, clothes covered with dirt. He stood on the side of the highway, looking down the empty road in both directions. Cordell was gone, of course he was. Probably saw the Zeppelin and took off. Harry didn’t blame him. This wasn’
t his fight, but there was another possibility. He’d been kidnapped. The Zeppelin had radioed their position, and Hess dispatched a gang of Blackshirts. That seemed more likely.
He checked his watch. 4:30. He was supposed to be at Martz’ house in an hour for the phone call with Joyce. He wasn’t going to make it. Looked at his options, realized he didn’t have any. Walked on the side of the road, ducking back in the trees when he heard a car. Made it to Dachau in thirty-two minutes, looking around, nervous, studying everyone he passed. He stopped at the Hofgarten, needed time to think, compose himself, and he was dying of thirst. He stood at the dark bar, ordered a beer, and drank it fast, men lined up on both sides of him, holding the handles of their mugs, talking and drinking.
He had to go to the police station, tell them what happened. They were going to think he was crazy. He recited the lines in his head. “I was in the forest looking for a mass grave of Jews killed by Ernst Hess and his SS guards on April 2, 1942. His bodyguard came in a Zeppelin to kill me with a machine gun. Oh, and my friend and rental car disappeared.” He told them that, they’d put him in a padded cell. And yet, it was all true.
Harry walked in the police station that was as quaint and Bavarian as the town, and talked to a cop sitting behind a heavy desk. He had dark hair, a dark mustache, and wore a blue uniform with matching tie and epaulets, the word Polizei over the left pocket in white letters. Harry spoke German, told him he’d been with his friend, Cordell Sims, in a rented BMW. He stopped to take a leak in the woods, and when he came out the car and Mr. Sims were gone. Harry took out his wallet and showed him his driver’s license.
As it turned out, Herr Sims—who had no identification—was in a jail cell. The police thought he had stolen the vehicle and were holding him until an investigation could be completed. Another bizarre turn of events. The BMW was in the police-station parking lot. Harry told him to check the rental agreement in the glove box and that should clear things up.
It did, but an hour passed before Cordell was released. He didn’t say anything till they got in the car and were pulling out of the station parking lot.
Voices of the Dead Page 13