by Rex Baron
She pushed back her coat sleeve to look at her watch, as if to fix the event in time and space. It was nearly two in the morning. Michael would be waiting as Uncle Jacob suggested.
When she arrived home, she opened the door and kicked the letter that had been slipped under it, sending it skidding across the polished floor. She switched on the lights and called Michael's name before she stooped down to retrieve the envelope. She read its contents, then crumbled it in her hand, as the tears of sorrow poured down her face. The last paragraph had told her that she too was in danger. There was no question of continuing the arrangement with Helen, when even the woman's own husband was not safe from her dangerous whims.
“It is over,” she said aloud. “I’ve lost everything. The judgment has come at last.”
Chapter Ten
Munich
It would be dawn in about two hours, Lexi thought, as she stood on the platform waiting for the last scheduled train heading toward the Swiss border. A small suitcase stood at her side, filled with things she had gathered in hysterical haste and wadded together between the leather sides of the valise. She had randomly snatched clothes from the wardrobe and a tangle of silky things from the bureau drawer, only half considering what use they might be when she got where she intended to go. She was certain to find a single, unmatched shoe, or half of a suit, she thought, pondering the ridiculous contents of the bag.
She had been in such a hurry, as if the soldiers were already on their way for her. The rush had been overridden with anxiety and she had come away without her papers or any identification. She breathed a visible sigh into the cold night air and decided that if they were looking for her, it would be better to have no papers at all. She would tell whoever asked her that they had been stolen. Yet, how would she get across the border without a passport?
She rubbed her hands together to warm them against the dampness and thought about her brother. She wondered where he was and if he was safe and warm. She knew that they would be searching for him in the same way they surely searched for her, and she prayed under her breath that he could make it to the safety of the border.
A man passed by, too close to her, tipping his hat courteously, but fixing his eyes on her in a predatory way. She looked away and shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat and shivered, as the chill of his intentions worked their way through her thin coat like a cold wind. She boarded the train and put a length of several cars between herself and her early morning admirer. How could men be interested in such things in the last desperate hours of the night or the first half-formed hours of morning? He was probably returning to his wife from a business trip, she thought, home to his children, yet his mind was still able to turn to the thought of a liaison at this ungodly hour. She shook her head in disgust and settled into a vacant compartment.
When the sun climbed several hours higher over the horizon, Lexi awoke from a deep sleep. The empty compartment was now filled to overflowing with weary-looking people. Shabby travel-beaten bags blocked the aisle and choked the overhead racks behind the seats. Young people, outside the compartment in the corridor, turned their suitcases on end and used them as makeshift seats, while children dutifully took turns sharing a single seat in shifts.
The smell of sausage and goose fat poisoned the air of the suffocating compartment. Lexi pulled the woolen scarf from around her throat and leaned back in her seat to savor the benefits of a thin stream of fresh air siphoning in through a sliver of open window.
They did not speak, these strangers thrown together for the long hours of travel, not wanting to involve themselves in each other’s lives, not wanting to be seen talking to someone who might damage their chances of getting across the border without incident. They nodded and smiled as the long hours passed, trying to keep up the most rudimentary levels of politeness, offering a sausage without words, or grinning approval at a kind person who offered to hold a heavily sleeping child for the blessed relief of an hour. But these perfunctory acquaintances were made without benefit of introduction. No names were asked or given, no friendship implied. No one could risk association with anyone who might prove dangerous, anyone who might ruin their chances this close to freedom.
As the train entered the station, Lexi waited until the last of her nameless companions had dragged their dilapidated bags from the overhead racks and merged into the congestion of the corridor, before she pulled her own valise from under the seat and poked her arms into her wrinkled coat.
Outside the window, the silent travelers queued up in long lines, waiting to have their papers inspected by two uniformed officials inside the station house.
Lexi dismounted from the train and found herself in line behind a young mother holding a baby on her shoulder. The tiny baby, its eyes twinkling brightly, unaware of the sorrow of leaving home, gave her a beaming toothless grin and clapped its hands over its eyes as if to initiate a game of peek-a-boo with her. Lexi felt foolish but could not bring herself to ignore the trusting sweetness of the child. She imitated its gesture, covering her eyes, then uncovering them again, to the delight of the chortling baby.
The line moved slowly and Lexi regretted having responded to the tireless infant, who repeatedly covered and uncovered its face, unceasingly excited by his mastery of the game and the attentions of the pretty woman who accepted to play. The young mother never once turned to recognize the source of her child's delight, but stared intently at the two officers stamping papers only a few feet from her, hours away in time.
As Lexi came within earshot of the officials’ table, she overheard the interview of a youngster, a dozen or so people ahead of her in the line.
“Where are your papers?” One of the soldiers asked sternly. “What you have presented is inadequate.”
The boy stepped backward a half step and stammered out his answer.
“I... I never got the proper papers. My father was supposed to get them for the whole family. He went to Koln to confirm our family's racial purity and never came back.”
He shuffled from one foot to the other nervously. The soldier handed the bundle of papers back to him and he smiled in relief. He started to pass on toward the gate for the outgoing trains to Switzerland, but was called back by the other official.
“Where do you think you are going?” he shouted, causing the boy to freeze in his tracks. “No one has given you permission to move on. You have no valid papers. There is no telling who you might be.”
“I swear to you,” the youth pleaded as the panic rose in his voice. “I'm going to my mother in Zurich. Isn't there some way you can check on that end, to see that my mother is there waiting for me? She has my birth certificate. Please let me go to her,” he asked earnestly.
The soldier waved his hand, and once again, the boy started toward the door, mistaking the gesture of dismissal for a pardon.
“Stop him,” the official shouted to the posted soldiers at the gate. Within seconds, they were on him. He struggled with them, more out of terror than intended resistance.
“Please let me go to her,” he screamed as they dragged him back to the station house for interrogation.
Lexi heard someone whisper form behind her in the line.
“He'll be sent to a work camp. They have dozens of them in the waiting room, ready to be shipped off already.”
Lexi found it impossible to swallow. Her mouth had gone dry and she felt a lump of anxiety in her throat. This too would be her fate, she told herself. She would never get across without papers. She would be suspect and they would detain her. A cold chill ran through her body. They would interrogate her and perhaps even torture her until she revealed who and what she was.
“Would you mind holding my place in the queue?” she asked the man behind her. “I've got to visit the ladies. I won't be a moment.”
The man nodded and smiled without interest.
Lexi lifted her bag and casually walked to the ladies’ room. She waited inside for long moments, shivering behind the closed door of a stall
, wracking her brain for some solution, some inspiration, but nothing came to her mind. Finally, she felt that she must move. Exiting the washroom through a side door, she found her way into one of the old luncheon rooms, now filled with displaced families and crying children like those who had shared her compartment during the night.
Unlike the first class dining room at the other end of the platform, with its private chefs and purple velvet upholstered seats, there was no longer any food to be had in this place. This was the platform designated for moving the poor and undesirables without them being visible to the normal passengers. Armed guards stood watch to make certain that none of these lesser beings found their way into that unsuspecting world of legitimacy just fifty yards away.
Lexi longed to walk that length of platform to be with her own kind, dressed in beautiful furs, complacently eating breakfast behind the pages of the morning Völkischer Beobachter.
She caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror behind what was once the lunch counter. She was a strange outcast in the room packed with hundreds of the poor and those uprooted from their lives. Her expensive coat of cobalt blue was a swash of exotic color in an otherwise depleted palette of grays and browns. If only she could get past the guards to the other dining room, she might be able to slip away, out of the station without interference. There would be no guard checking papers at the first class station. She smoothed the sides of her hair back into a felt beret the same color as the coat and straightened the seams on her stockings.
With a little lip rouge added and a diamond clip she had hidden in the zipped lining of her handbag, she was able to transform her rumpled traveling clothes into a presentable ensemble. She found herself under the watchful scrutiny of an ashen-faced boy, and she wondered, once again, about Michael.
Outside on the platform, the line had hardly moved since she had left it. She surveyed the platform, looking in both directions, getting her bearings straight, half afraid of starting in the wrong direction toward the frightening interrogation of the uniformed officials.
The first class dining room lay just ahead, with nothing obstructing her but a single soldier holding a rifle across his chest. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that he had spotted her. His body stiffened as he noticed the single traveler out of the ranks of those awaiting the security check. It was too late for her to escape back into the anonymous comfort of the lunchroom. He had seen her.
She picked up her suitcase and started walking toward him, then turned on her heels and started back the other way. She stopped and looked both ways, then headed directly for the soldier, never taking her eyes from the pale green paint of the station platform underfoot. She muttered to herself and ran headlong into him, jarring his solid stance with the collision. She looked up into his face with an expression of wild bewilderment.
“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm afraid I'm a bit confused.”
The soldier glared down at her unmoved.
“I came out on the platform to go to the ladies because the one in the restaurant had a hideously boring, long line, and I seem to have got turned around somehow.”
“Are you waiting for security check?” the young man asked with routine courtesy, indicating the queue of gray-faced, weary travelers.
“Do I look like I’m waiting for a security check?” Lexi answered emphatically, drawing herself up with a sigh of insulted indignation. “I was in the middle of a lovely bowl of oatmeal, and now I'm afraid it'll be cold before I find my way back to the restaurant.”
“Where do you want to go?” the soldier asked, noticing her diamond pin and softening his tone.
“I believe it's there.” Lexi pointed over his shoulder toward the first class restaurant. The soldier smiled and clicked his heels gallantly, then bowed slightly. As his face rose to her, the smile slowly dissolved. He glowered down at the suitcase in her hand.
“Why did you leave the restaurant with a coffer unless you did not intend to return? “ he asked accusingly.
Lexi panicked. She felt the blood rush from her head and a clammy numbness crept across her scalp under the beret. Her mind raced for something to say.
She looked at him and laughed.
“I don't know about you, sunshine,” she said, “ but I don't travel all night and into the next day without changing a few under-things, if you know what I mean. I'm sure your mother would agree with me and recommend the same for you.”
The young soldier's face reddened at the discussion of such intimacies, and he stepped aside, out of her way. Lexi winked and smiled, waving him an impudent little wave over her shoulder as she strode the length of the platform, like a socialite swinging her bag merrily.
She wanted to break into a run, seeing her freedom just ahead, but knew that she would be shot without a moment’s hesitation. Instead, she galvanized her nerves and stopped to window shop and adjust her hair in the reflection, knowing that the resolute soldier had not taken his eyes from her since she left his side. Once again, she smiled and called back a thank you for his help. Breaking the rules, he waved in return.
She disappeared inside the safety of the dining room and ordered a cup of tea. The place was overheated and too brightly lit, but it was comforting, nonetheless, to see faces without the pallor of fear and sorrow.
When she felt steadier, she lifted her bag and exited unquestioned into the street. She walked for a few moments, a block or two around the walled-in station to a stairway that led to an elevated cable car platform. At the top of the stairs, she rested and looked down behind the wall of the station at the train already steaming, which could have taken her to Switzerland or France, anywhere out of Germany. She clutched the railing as the tears came to her eyes. The train was only a matter of a hundred feet away, but it might have been miles. It would be impossible to cross the border without papers, and if Michael's warning proved correct, to use her own would surely prove fatal.
“You're not going to jump, I hope,” a voice came from behind her.
She spun around to see a young man not much older than her brother, with dark, intense eyes and shaggy black hair that fell over his ears.
“What do you want?” Lexi asked.
“I'd say that was a question to ask yourself. After all, you are the one who is crying,” he said with a kind smile. “You have the tragic look of the heroine who has just said goodbye to someone. In my business I know it well.”
Lexi shielded her emotions and turned an inscrutable face towards him.
“And in what business is that... informant to the police?” she asked with an icy edge.
Her interlocutor pantomimed falling against the rail, as if struck by an unseen blow. He laughed heartily.
“Commedia d’ell Arte is my business, a profession hardly approved of by the police, I can assure you.”
“What do you want with me? Why can't you leave me in peace?” she asked, once again staring down at the train.
The steam poured from around the wheel casings as the last of the passengers raced along the platform to find a place in the already overflowing second-class compartments.
Lexi continued her silent observation, hoping that by ignoring him, the young man would go away.
“As I said... I hope you're not going to jump,” he persisted.
Lexi drew herself up into a weary semblance of indignation.
“Look, all I want is to get out of here, to be left alone, and if it makes you go away, I will guarantee that I have no intention of committing suicide.”
The stranger assessed her in silence, then, turned on his heels and started off. Halfway across the elevated bridge he stopped.
“If getting out of here is all you really want, that's easy enough,” he called back to her.
Lexi could not risk responding to the bait dangled by this stranger and kept her face turned away from his eager offer. The youngster saw her inability to respond as a small but unmistakable act of desperation. Once again, he approached and stood next to her. She started to s
hout but he cut her off with his calm, even voice.
“My name is Raphael,” he said, “like the Archangel... and I bring you help of a sort.”
Lexi breathed into her hands to warm them, as a distraction from his alluring words.
“If you need to get out of here, as you say, across the border into vaguer and friendlier territory, then I have a solution for you.”
Lexi could trust no one. The informants of the police were everywhere. The greengrocer, the librarian, or even small children with big ears and wild imaginations were applauded for finding enemies of the State, even within their own families.
“If you are in trouble...”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said, cutting into his promise of hope with sharp words. “I hardly think that I look like someone in trouble, and if I were, it would certainly be no concern of yours.”
Raphael fumbled in his jacket pocket and produced a scrap of paper upon which he wrote a street address and number. He handed the paper to Lexi.
“These are unlucky and dangerous times for some of us,” he said, undaunted by her haughty appearance. “A time when the huntsman becomes the hunted, and the seeker becomes that which is lost.”
Lexi stared down at the scrap in her hand, bewildered.
“If you need to get out, come to that address, no questions asked. As I said, these are dangerous times and too much knowledge can prove fatal, even to me.”
By the time Lexi had disengaged her stare from the paper, he had already disappeared. There had been such warmth in his presence that now she felt lonely and chilled through by his absence. He had given her nothing but a bit of paper and a casual smile, but along with it came the possibility of salvation, a clarion call of hope, delivered on the face of a messenger worthy of his heavenly namesake.
Chapter Eleven
Lindau, Swiss-German border