A Death in Vienna (27 page)

“And when did you enter Austria?”

“I’ve told you that already.”

“Tell me again, please.”

“Earlier today.”

“What time?”

“I don’t remember the time.”

“Was it the morning? Was it the afternoon?”

“Afternoon.”

“Early afternoon? Late afternoon?”

“Early.”

“So it was still light?”

She hesitated; he pressed her. “Yes? It was still light?”

She nodded. From inside the van came the sound of cabinet doors being opened. She forced herself to look directly into the eyes of her questioner. His face, obscured by the harsh flashlight, began to take on the appearance of Erich Radek—not the pathetic version of Radek that lay unconscious in the back of the van, but the Radek who pulled a child named Irene Frankel from the ranks of the Birkenau death march in 1945 and led her into a Polish forest for one final moment of torment.

“Say the words, Jew! You were transferred to the east. You had plenty of food and proper medical care. The gas chambers and the crematoria are Bolshevik-Jewish lies.”

I can be as strong as you, Irene,
she thought. I can get through this. For you.

“Did you stop anywhere in Austria?”

“No.”

“You didn’t take the opportunity to visit Vienna?”

“I’ve been to Vienna,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

He spent a moment examining her face.

“You are Italian, yes?”

“You have my passport in your hand.”

“I’m not referring to your passport. I’m talking about your ethnicity. Your blood. Are you of Italian descent, or are you an immigrant, from, say, the Middle East or North Africa?”

“I’m Italian,” she assured him.

The second officer climbed out of the Volkswagen and shook his head. Her interrogator handed over the passport. “I’m sorry for the delay,” he said. “Have a pleasant journey.”

Chiara climbed behind the wheel of the Volkswagen, slipped the van into gear, and eased over the border. The tears came, tears of relief, tears of anger. At first she tried to stop them, but it was no use. The road blurred, the taillights turned to red streamers, and still they came.

“For you, Irene,” she said aloud. “I did it for you.”

T
HE
M
IKULOV TRAIN
station lies below the old town, where the hillside meets the plain. There is a single platform that endures a near-constant assault of wind pouring down out of the Carpathian Mountains, and a melancholy gravel car park that tends to pond over when it rains. Near the ticket office is a graffiti-scarred bus shelter, and it was there, pressed against the leeward side, where Gabriel waited, hands plunged into the pockets of his oilskin jacket.

He looked up as the van turned into the car park and crunched over the gravel. He waited until it came to a stop before stepping from the bus shelter into the rain. Chiara reached across and opened the door to him. When the overhead light came on, he could see her face was wet.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“No, I can do it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Just get in, Gabriel. I can’t stand being alone with him.”

He climbed in and closed the door. Chiara turned around and headed back to the highway. A moment later, they were racing north, into the Carpathians.

I
T TOOK A HALF HOUR
to reach Brno, another hour to get to Ostrava. Twice Gabriel opened the doors of the compartment to check on Radek. It was nearly eight o’clock when they reached the Polish border. No security checks this time, no line of traffic, just a hand poking from the brick bunker, waving them across the frontier.

Gabriel crawled to the back of the van and pulled Radek from the compartment. Then he opened a storage drawer and removed a syringe. This time it was filled with a mild dosing of stimulant, just enough to raise him gently back to the surface of consciousness. Gabriel inserted the needle into Radek’s arm, injected the drug, then removed the needle and swabbed the wound with alcohol. Radek’s eyes opened slowly. He surveyed his surroundings for a moment before settling on Gabriel’s face.

“Allon?” he murmured through the oxygen mask.

Gabriel nodded slowly.

“Where are you taking me?”

Gabriel said nothing.

“Am I going to die?” he asked, but before Gabriel could answer, he slipped below the surface once more.

T
HE BARRIER BETWEEN
consciousness and coma was like a stage curtain, through which he could pass at will. How many times he slipped through this curtain he did not know. Time, like his old life, was lost to him. His beautiful house in Vienna seemed another man’s house, in another man’s city. Something had happened when he’d shouted out his real name at the Israelis. Ludwig Vogel was a stranger to him now, an acquaintance whom he had not seen in many years. He was Radek again. Unfortunately, time had not been kind to him. The towering, beautiful man in black was now imprisoned in a weak, failing body.

The Jew had placed him on the foldout bed. His hands and ankles were bound by thick silver packing tape, and he was belted into place like a mental patient. His wrists served as the portal between his two worlds. He had only to twist them at a certain angle, so that the tape dug painfully into his skin, and he would pass through the curtain from a dreamscape to the realm of the real. Dreams? Is it proper to call such visions dreams? No, they were too accurate, too telling. They were memories, over which he had no control, only the power to interrupt them for a few moments by hurting himself with the Jew’s packing tape.

His face was near the window, and the glass was unobstructed. He was able, when he was awake, to see the endless black countryside and the dreary, darkened villages. He was also able to read the road signs. He did not need the signs to know where he was. Once, in another lifetime, he had ruled the night in this land. He remembered this road: Dachnow, Zukow, Narol…. He knew the name of the next village, even before it slid past his window:
Belzec…

He closed his eyes. Why now, after so many years? After the war, no one had been terribly interested in a mere SD officer who had served in the Ukraine—no one but the Russians, of course—and by the time his name surfaced in connection with the Final Solution, General Gehlen had arranged for his escape and disappearance. His old life was safely behind him. He had been forgiven by God and his Church and even by his enemies, who had greedily availed themselves of his services when they too felt threatened by Jewish-Bolshevism. The governments soon lost interest in prosecuting the so-called war criminals, and the amateurs like Wiesenthal focused on the big fish like Eichmann and Mengele, unwittingly helping smaller fish like himself find sanctuary in sheltered waters. There had been one serious scare. In the midseventies, an American journalist, a Jew, of course, had come to Vienna and asked too many questions. On the road leading south from Salzburg he had plunged into a ravine, and the threat was eliminated. He had acted without hesitation then. Perhaps he should have hurled Max Klein into a ravine at the first sign of trouble. He’d noticed him that day at the Café Central, as well as the days that followed. His instincts had told him Klein was trouble. He’d hesitated. Then Klein had taken his story to the Jew Lavon, and it was too late.

He passed through the curtain again. He was in Berlin, sitting in the office of Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo. Müller is scraping a bit of lunch from his teeth and waving a letter he’d just received from Luther in the Foreign Office. It is 1942.

“It seems that rumors of our activities in the east have started to reach the ears of our enemies. We’ve also got a problem with one of the sites in the Warthegau region. Complaints about contamination of some kind.”

“If I may ask the obvious question, Herr Gruppenführer, what difference does it make if rumors reach the West? Who would believe that such a thing was truly possible?”

“Rumors are one thing, Erich. Evidence is quite another.”

“Who’s going to discover evidence? Some half-witted Polish serf? A slant-eyed Ukrainian ditchdigger?”

“Maybe the Ivans.”

“The Russians? How would they ever find—”

Müller held up a bricklayer’s hand. Discussion over. And then he understood. The Führer’s Russian adventure was not going according to plan. Victory in the east was no longer assured.

Müller leaned forward at the waist. “I’m sending you to hell, Erich. I’m going to stick that Nordic face of yours so deep in the shit you’ll never see daylight again.”

“How can I ever thank you, Herr Gruppenführer?”

“Clean up the mess. All of it. Everywhere. It’s your job to make sure it remains only a rumor. And when the operation is done, I want you to be the only man standing.”

He awakened. Müller’s face withdrew into the Polish night. Strange, isn’t it? His real contribution to the Final Solution was not killing but concealment and security, and yet he was in trouble now, sixty years on, because of a foolish game he’d played one drunken Sunday at Auschwitz.
Aktion
1005? Yes, it had been his show, but no Jewish survivor would ever testify to his presence at the edge of a killing pit, because there
were
no survivors. He’d run a tight operation. Eichmann and Himmler would have been advised to do the same. They’d been fools to allow so many to survive.

A memory rose, January 1945, a chain of ragged Jews straggling along a road very much like this one. The road from Birkenau. Thousands of Jews, each with a story to tell, each a witness. He’d argued for liquidation of the entire camp population before evacuation. No, he’d been told. Slave labor was urgently needed inside the Reich. Labor? Most of the Jews he’d seen leaving Birkenau could barely walk, let alone wield a pickax or a shovel. They weren’t fit for labor, only slaughter, and he’d killed quite a few himself. Why in God’s name did they order him to clean out the pits and then allow thousands of witnesses to walk out of a place like Birkenau?

He forced open his eyes and stared out the window. They were driving along the banks of a river, near the Ukrainian border. He knew this river, a river of ashes, a river of bone. He wondered how many hundreds of thousands were down there, silt on the bed of the River Bug.

A shuttered village: Uhrusk. He thought of Peter. He had warned this would happen. “If I ever become a serious threat to win the chancellery,” Peter had said, “someone will try to expose us.” He had known Peter was right, but he had also believed he could deal with any threat. He had been mistaken, and now his son faced an unimaginable electoral humiliation, all because of him. It was as if the Jews had led Peter to the edge of a killing pit and pointed a gun at his head. He wondered whether he possessed the power to prevent them from pulling the trigger, whether he could broker one more deal, engineer one final escape.

And this Jew who stares at me now with those unforgiving green eyes? What does he expect me to do? Apologize? Break down and weep and spew sentimentalities? What this Jew does not understand is that I feel no guilt for what was done. I was compelled by the hand of God and the teachings of my Church. Did the priests not tell us the Jews were the murderers of God? Did the Holy Father and his cardinals not remain silent when they knew full well what we were doing in the east? Does this Jew expect me now to suddenly recant and say it was all a terrible mistake? And why does he look at me like that? They were familiar, those eyes. He’d seen them somewhere before. Maybe it was just the drugs they’d given him. He couldn’t be certain of anything. He wasn’t sure he was even alive. Perhaps he was already dead. Perhaps it was his soul making this journey up the River Bug. Perhaps he was in hell.

Another hamlet: Wola Uhruska. He knew the next village.
Sobibor…

He closed his eyes, the velvet of the curtain enveloped him. It is the spring of 1942, he is driving out of Kiev on the Zhitomir road with the commander of an Einsatzgruppen unit at his side. They are on their way to inspect a ravine that’s become something of a security problem, a place the Ukrainians call Babi Yar. By the time they arrive, the sun is kissing the horizon and it is nearly dusk. Still, there is just enough light to see the strange phenomenon taking place at the bottom of the ravine. The earth seems to be in the grips of an epileptic fit. The soil is convulsing, gas is shooting into the air, along with geysers of putrid liquid. The stench! Jesus, the stench. He can smell it now.

“When did it start?”

“Not long after winter ended. The ground thawed, then the bodies thawed. They decomposed very rapidly.”

“How many are down there?”

“Thirty-three thousand Jews, a few Gypsies and Soviet prisoners for good mea sure.”

“Put a cordon around the entire ravine. We’ll get to this one as soon as we can, but at the moment other sites have priority.”

“What other sites?”

“Places you’ve never heard of: Birkenau, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Our work is done here. At the others, they’re expecting imminent new arrivals.”

“What are you going to do with this place?”

“We’ll open the pits and burn the bodies, then we’ll crush the bones and scatter the fragments in the forests and the rivers.”

“Burn thirty thousand corpses? We tried it during the killing operations. We used flamethrowers, for God’s sake. Mass open-air cremations do not work.”

“That’s because you never constructed a proper pyre. At Chelmno, I proved it can be done. Trust me, Kurt, one day this place called Babi Yar will be only a rumor, just like the Jews who used to live here.”

He twisted his wrists. This time, the pain was not enough to wake him. The curtain refused to part. He remained locked in a prison of memories, wading across a river of ashes.

T
HEY PLUNGED ON
through the night. Time was a memory. The tape had cut off his circulation. He could no longer feel his hands and feet. He was feverishly hot one minute, and shivering with cold the next. He had the impression of stopping once. He had smelled gasoline. Were they filling the tank? Or was it just the memory of fuel-soaked railroad ties?

The effects of the drug finally wore off. He was awake now, alert and cognizant and quite certain he was not dead. Something in the determined posture of the Jew told him they were nearing the end of their journey. They passed through Siedlce, then, at Sokolow Podlaski, they turned onto a smaller country road. Dybow came next, then Kosow Lacki.

They turned off the main road, onto a dirt track. The van shuddered:
thump-thump…thump-thump
. The old rail line, he thought—it was still here, of course. They followed the track into a stand of dense fir and birch trees and came to a stop a moment later in a small, paved carpark.

A second car entered the clearing with its headlights doused. Three men climbed out and approached the van. He recognized them. They were the ones who had taken him from Vienna. The Jew stood over him and carefully cut away the packing tape and loosened the leather straps. “Come,” he said pleasantly. “Let’s take a walk.”