“I lost track of the days we were out there—maybe three or four. Then one day before dark, we came to a farmhouse. I was desperate. We hadn’t eaten a thing, and we were caught in a blizzard. She begged me not to go to the farm, but I had to take a chance. I knew we couldn’t live through one more night if we didn’t have something to eat and get out of that storm.”
“Did the farmer take you in?”
Mason nodded. “Turned out, we had crossed into Czechoslovakia. It was a Czech farmer, his wife, and a daughter about the same age as Hana. We were able to communicate in broken German. They were taking an awful chance harboring an escaped U.S. soldier and a Jewish child. With both German fronts collapsing, the German security forces were resorting to more and more brutal methods to keep things together. Soldiers and civilians were being shot on the spot even if they were just suspected of desertion or treason. By the end of the second day, we were feeling better, and I knew we were putting the family in too much danger. They drew me a map of where to find a group of Czech partisans. . . .”
Mason paused at the memory of it. “But then the Gestapo came.”
“Oh, no . . .”
“I don’t know if one of the locals reported us, or if they were just making a security sweep ahead of the retreating German army. . . . It doesn’t matter.”
Mason rubbed his face and sighed. “They herded us out in a field and stood the two girls together. One of the goons stuck a machine pistol to the back of my head and forced me to kneel in front of them. Then they lined up the parents behind me with guns at their backs. The commander paced around, condemning everyone to death for partisan activities and treason against the Reich. We would be shot and the family hanged. I didn’t listen. My only thoughts were of regret and shame for failing Hana and destroying an innocent family. I prayed for forgiveness, while I readied myself to die.
“Then the commander shoved his Luger into my hand. He said, ‘I’m in a generous mood today. If you shoot one of these two girls the rest will go free. But you must shoot one. If you refuse, all will die, including you. If you try to shoot me, or yourself, all will die. Your fate and theirs are in your hands.’”
“What did he hope to gain by making you do that?”
“It was a common thing at all the concentration camps. I saw it all the time at Buchenwald. They’d make fellow prisoners execute one of their own or be killed themselves. It was a way to break them down. Lose all sense of humanity. It worked. Believe me. . . .”
He looked at Laura for a moment, hoping that she could possibly understand. But then he knew she could never understand completely. He looked down at his hands as if the memory of it had suddenly materialized. “I just stared at that Luger. All I could think about was the terrible things it could do to a little girl’s flesh and bone and it made me violently ill. I felt disgust, guilt, terror, rage. . . . The girl was crying. The parents were crying. Hana just stood there, staring at me. Passive. Ready.”
Mason summoned the courage to look in Laura’s eyes again. “You have to understand. I had no choice.”
Laura kissed the palm of his hand, but he withdrew it. He didn’t deserve the kindness, and it would weaken his will to continue.
“As I stared at that pistol, I was vaguely aware of the commander yelling orders for me to choose or I would die. Then everything went quiet for a moment, except for the girl and her parents sobbing. From behind my back, the commander ordered his man to shoot me. The gun barrel pressed into my skull. I heard him pull back the charger. Then—boom. A gun exploded just by my head. My whole body convulsed, expecting the impact of a bullet. Every nerve in my body fired, and I nearly blacked out. A second later, two other goons forced the farmer and his wife to their knees. The commander told me that if I didn’t decide by the count of five they would die.
“Hana and I locked eyes. She muttered in broken German that she wanted to join her mother. She would die to save the others. This brave little girl begged me to shoot her. She seemed at peace, and silently forgave me. God . . .”
Mason took a deep, shuddering breath and wiped a tear from his cheek.
“I aimed the pistol and prayed that my shaking hand wouldn’t make me miss and only maim her or cause her pain. With all my will, I steadied my hand and aimed through my tears. . . . I pulled the trigger.”
Laura gasped and backed away.
Mason kept his gaze on the wall. “I fired into the ground. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t shoot a child. The commander shouted orders, and then I was struck in the head by a rifle butt.”
“But why, after all that, did he save you?”
“The commander thought it was great fun to lead me on, when he never intended to shoot me. I was to be in a prisoner exchange with a group of Czech partisans. The partisans had captured some high-ranking German officer, and since I was an American intelligence agent the commander thought I would be a valuable bargaining chip. I was turned over to a Wehrmacht battalion coordinating the exchange, but it never came off.”
“Thank God for that.”
In his worst moments, Mason had believed the exact opposite. After a moment of silence, he said, “There’s one image from that day that will stick with me all my life. I came to just as the Gestapo goons started to drive me away, and the commander forced me to look back. In the field Hana lay dead with her blood staining the snow. The farmer and his wife were dead, too, shot through the head. And the farmer’s little girl stood frozen with shock, staring at nothing, all alone in the field. The commander leaned next to my ear and said, ‘You see what you did? You’ve killed them. And you’ve made an orphan of that little girl. I doubt that she will survive. You did all that.’”
For what seemed like a long time, Laura said nothing, did nothing. Finally she wrapped her arms around him and laid her head on his chest. Mason was aware of it, but felt nothing. In his mind, he was still back in the truck that took him away from the farm, looking upon the lone young girl in the blood-spattered snow with her parents and Hana lying dead at her feet.
He would go on, as Hana had inspired him to do in the forest. He would go on. Someday he would find the Gestapo commander. And maybe someday he might find the farm girl and ask her forgiveness. He could no longer ask for Hana’s.
And now there is Angela. . . .
FORTY-ONE
He wept. The tears blurred his vision. The surgical instruments seemed to undulate in the watery distortion. Now he understood the power and meaning of supreme sacrifice. Ascension required the greatest of ordeals. Only by plunging into the abyss could one then soar to heaven.
Behind him, the girl, gagged and bound to the table, burbled with sobs only to then choke and gasp for air. Each utterance made him shudder. He had already violated one of the ceremonial canons . . . the gag. Though he was in a secure basement, there was still a risk the screams could be heard.
That was the logical reason. But he also knew he could not bear to hear her screams, her pleading for mercy. Not from an angelic child. The required task was abhorrent enough without having to bear the angel’s screams.
Oh, God, and thy flock of fallen angels, why must I do this?
The wail started deep in his gut and rose with a burning fury until it exploded out in a howl. He yanked up the sleeve of his surgical gown and thrust the tender part of his upper arm over the flame of the gas lantern. As his skin began to scorch, then blacken, the ecstatic pain calmed him.
He pulled his arm away just as the flesh began to crackle. The searing pain swept away his desperate thoughts, the guilt, the shame and repugnance. He lowered his head and prayed.
The discovery of this angelic child had been the culmination of a long and difficult path. At Ravensbrück, the surviving victims of the experiments had emerged from the medical block like souls risen from the dead, testaments of his heinous deeds. They limped through the camp, and they disgusted and terrified him. Yet, at the same t
ime, they inflamed his urges, inflamed his groin, his desires, and he had managed with extreme care to murder two of them.
During several months after the war, recovering from illness and seeing to daily survival had superseded all else. With time, he’d returned to practicing medicine, but the memories, the urges never left him. Then an event occurred in an unexpected way. A doctor at a clinic in the Bogenhausen district, whom he had encountered at random, looked strikingly like an SS doctor at Ravensbrück, and, in what was surely a divine manifestation, the doctor walked with a pronounced limp. To embody both surgeon and victim overwhelmed him with desire. Without a second thought, he had killed the doctor instantly, mutilated his corpse, and buried him in a field.
To his surprise, he had felt more remorse than joy, yet at the instant of killing he had sensed a cleansing of sins, a lifting of his spirit toward heaven. It was then that he realized that to expiate sin required profound suffering. It would require surrogates. These surrogates would endure the same experiments he had performed in the camps. Each surrogate would be offered up to God in a glorious ceremony.
He had found his path to absolution. And a perfect angel had been brought to him.
He lifted his head from prayer and took deep breaths. His hands no longer shook. He was ready now.
He turned to look at the child on the metal table. She was naked, but he felt nothing sexual at the sight. She elicited in him adoration, exaltation. Even her name . . . Angela.
He took the lantern in one hand and, with the other, rolled the tray of instruments up to the table. He poised his scalpel in his gloved hand and scanned her body. He started at her foot and moved his gaze upward. Her single foot and legs trembled and struggled against the straps. Her stomach and lungs heaved. Her breasts, not yet blossomed to womanhood, retained the vision of innocence.
That was where he would begin.
He lowered the scalpel toward a point just below the clavicle. Then, against all resistance to temptation, despite the warnings of the voices, he looked. He looked at her face, into her eyes. Her terror had transformed her angelic vision. Her blue eyes, flooded with tears, locked onto his. They dug deep into his psyche, ripping away the illusion.
Before him was a living child, just a child, with tears and snot and crooked teeth. The flush in his groin and abdomen dissipated. The transfiguration from human to saintly angel vanished.
He fell to his knees and clasped his hands, his face level with the child’s body. He could smell her humanness, the odors of sweat and urine and defecation.
He bowed his head and prayed for strength and mercy.
• • •
Corporal Manganella stopped the jeep in front of Asamkirche on Sendlinger Strasse. Mason had expected to see at least two of his investigators and a team of MPs, but they were nowhere in sight. Becker waited by the church’s entrance with four other German police.
“Where are our guys?” Mason asked Manganella. “They were supposed to rendezvous with us here.”
“Don’t know, sir. I did hear a call over the radio recalling a number of the guys back to headquarters. Could be they’re checking on a hot tip. We’ve been flooded with calls since the morning papers came out with Ramek’s picture.”
It had just turned ten on Sunday morning—at least ten hours since Angela’s abduction. Mason had called for his teams, along with Becker and his men, to stop by every church in the city to canvass the congregations with the sketches of Ramek and Angela. Mason had already visited three, and Wolski was to hit another three. There were too many churches to cover quickly without splitting up.
Mason climbed out of the jeep and joined Becker.
“Mass has just finished,” Becker said. “My men are talking to the congregation now.”
Mason could easily see into the ornate Baroque church, as an Allied bomb had sheared off the front of the building, leaving most of its interior exposed. He removed a map from his breast pocket and unfolded it on a worktable set aside for repair of the church. On the map the city had been broken down into grids with small areas shaded in different colors. He indicated points within the grids. “I’ve been to these three churches. Nothing definitive. Wolski is covering these three in Schwabing.”
“My teams are now spreading out to churches outside the city center,” Becker told him. “I have men distributing sketches and canvassing the markets, train stations, and tram stops. We performed a full search of the entire grid surrounding Ramek’s house and the western warehouse district. Other forces have covered areas here and here. But that still leaves around seventy percent of the city, not including many suburbs. About one hundred and forty square kilometers.”
“And sixty percent of that is either ruins or just plain rubble,” Mason said.
They fell silent, awed by the enormity of the area left to search.
A German policeman came up to them. “Herr Oberinspektor, we have someone who may have seen Ramek and the girl.”
Mason and Becker followed the policeman into the church. An elderly woman dressed in her threadbare Sunday best waited for them inside the narthex. Mason found it disturbing that she happened to be standing underneath a gold-colored sculpture of a skeleton that appeared to be menacing a robed child.
Becker introduced them in a soft baritone voice. “Frau Siegel, could you tell us what you saw?”
“I couldn’t see their faces,” the woman said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mason said. “What did you see?”
“Around two A.M. I noticed a tall man in a long dark coat carrying a crippled child. I said to myself, what is a man doing carrying that poor child in the streets at two A.M.? I didn’t think anything else about it until that policeman showed me the sketches. Then I realized it must be the killer.”
“Could you describe the girl for us?” Mason asked.
“It was dark, you understand. I didn’t see her face, but I am sure that she was missing her left leg. The poor girl, I—”
“Where was this, ma’am?”
Frau Seigel looked startled by Mason’s sudden interruption. “On Holzstrasse, where I live, of course. You know, when you get to be my age—”
“Yes, ma’am. Can you tell which direction they were heading?”
“South, toward the canal.”
Mason hesitated with the next question, but he had to know. “From what you could tell, did the girl look okay?”
“She was alive, if that’s what you’re asking,” Frau Seigel said, a little annoyed at Mason’s impatience. “I know, because I heard her crying.”
They thanked Frau Seigel and returned to the map outside the church. Mason drew out a rectangular area south of their location. “To start with, we’ll spread out a search from here, west to Lindwurmstrasse and east to the river, just down to Kapuzinerstrasse.”
“That could take days,” Becker said.
A jeep pulled up behind them, and they turned to see Wolski drive up and climb out. He met them at the table.
“Anything?” Mason asked.
Wolski shook his head. “Everyone wanted to help so much that they were making things up. But listen to this, I went by the Frauenkirche and Saint Michael’s, but our teams were gone. Mass had already let out, so I don’t know if any of them canvassed the churchgoers or not.”
Manganella called over to them. “I heard something over the radio, sirs. Colonel Walton recalled all our detachment’s investigators except you guys back to headquarters for some big operation.”
“He did what?” Mason said. “He knows that’s going to screw us.” He turned to say something to Becker, but Becker beat him to it.
“Go,” Becker said. “I will organize the search.”
Mason tapped Wolski on the arm and rushed for the jeep. “You’re coming with me to make sure I don’t murder a superior officer.”
• • •
Mason and Wol
ski entered the squad room just as every CID investigator and MP staff sergeant poured down the stairs from the third floor. They talked excitedly or barked orders to subordinates. Colonel Walton led Timmers and Pike to a table and started giving instructions as he pointed to areas on a blueprint spread out on the table surface.
Mason and Wolski rushed up to Colonel Walton. “Colonel, what’s going on?”
“They’ve got us going out on this raid,” Timmers said, indicating the blueprint of the immense refugee camp for displaced persons a few miles outside of Munich.
“What raid?”
“The raid on this DP camp,” Colonel Walton said. “All available personnel are ordered to go.”
Colonel Walton walked toward his office, and Mason followed close behind.
“You’re taking my investigators?”
“Last time I checked they weren’t your investigators.”
“Colonel, I need all my guys to go out on a search for Ramek and the girl. We just found a witness who saw them last night near Sendlinger Tor.”
“This is a battalion-wide raid. We need everyone we’ve got. That perp you brought in, Wertz, gave up the gang’s hideout. The gang is heavily armed, so we’re going in with even heavier ones. You’re lucky I’m not shanghaiing you and Wolski.”
“Colonel,” Mason almost shouted, “we’ve got to move on this abduction.”
“You’re hoping by some miracle that you’ll find one crippled girl in an ocean of rubble. The entire battalion wouldn’t make a difference.” Colonel Walton slipped on his overcoat and pointed his finger at Mason. “And don’t you raise your voice to your commanding officer. This is still the United States Army. You will respect the rank.”
Wolski stepped in between Mason and Colonel Walton. “Sir, we know that from the time Ramek abducts his victim to the actual killing is between twelve and twenty-four hours. There’s still the possibility we could track them down before he kills her.”
“Then tell your partner here to stop hounding me and hit the pavement.”
Ruins of War Page 30