As Time Goes By (41 page)

The tenth day was just like the ninth. He was begin
ning to give up hope.

He had lived with the artful double cross all his life.
Each time he had been on the losing end. He had only
half trusted Major Miles in the first place, the way he
had always only half trusted the world. Hell, if he were
the English, he wouldn't send a plane, either, not after
what had happened. Laszlo, Renault, Kubiš , and Josef
Gabčík
were all dead. Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund might still be alive somewhere, but they were foreigners, little
people, expendable.

Late that night he knocked on Ilsa's door. He had
nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to.

To his surprise, the door opened. "What do you
want?" she asked bitterly.

He couldn't see her face, only one red eye and a
strand of hair that fell across it to cover her tears. "To explain," he said.

"Nothing you can tell me, no explanation you can
give me, will I either believe or accept," she said
coldly.

"That's where you're wrong. Someday, I hope
you'll let me try." He had to keep talking, to keep her
listening. "Besides, why were you in that car? That was
never part of the plan. What did you expect me to do
when I saw you? Let Victor kill you? I was prepared to
do a lot of things, Ilsa, but seeing you die wasn't one
of them."

Slowly, she opened the door a little wider. Rick
wasn't sure if her gesture was an invitation to enter or an invitation to speak. He kept talking.

"For a long time, I thought we'd go through with it,"
he began. "I told Victor I'd help him, and I meant it.
Part of me
wanted
to go through with it. For you, if nobody else."

Ilsa remained silent.

"When you told me about how the Underground was
begging London to call it off, that got me thinking
about something Louie had been saying, that he had
never trusted the British all along, that they had duped
Victor into taking on this mission: not because they
wanted to kill Heydrich, but because they want to pro
voke the Germans and get the Czechs fighting again. In
fact, they pretty much admitted it to me themselves." "Why would they do that?" she said. "Politics," replied Rick "Good old-fashioned power
politics. That's what this whole thing is about That's
what it has always been about. We may think we're
kings and queens in our own little worlds, but to them we're just pawns in the game, ready for sacrifice with
out a second thought." He thought about the absent
rescue plane. He'd just about given up hope but de
cided not to let on.

The door opened all the way, and Rick could see Ilsa
nodding. "Reprisals," she said. "That's what Heydrich said to me the last night." Her voice caught. "That if
anything happened to him, their vengeance would be
terrible."

"I'm afraid he wasn't kidding," said Rick. He real
ized he was standing in the hallway, which was no
place for the conversation they needed to have. "Do
you mind if I come in? There's a lot of things you
ought to know."

She let him in and closed the door. Seated on a chair, he told her what had happened to Jan and Josef and the
others in the church. He fumbled for a cigarette, then
remembered he had smoked his last one. It had been a
gift from Renault, just before everything. The hell with
cigarettes. There were enough nails in his coffin as it
was.

"It looks like Louie was right, that it was all a setup,
from the start," he said. "The British care only about themselves, about whether they're going to come out
of this war in one piece and with Hitler defeated by
any means necessary. And why shouldn't they?
They're only human." He let out his breath. "Just like
the rest of us."

"But what about the cause?" asked Ilsa, her eyes
softening. "The cause we all believed in?"

"They're
the only cause they believe in," he told her.
"Just like we're the only cause I'm interested in."

"Victor died for what he believed in," said Ilsa, her
voice ardent once more.

"He was willing for you to die, too. I wasn't. I guess
that's the difference between him and me."

"I was ready if I had to."

Impulsively Rick swept Ilsa into his arms. "I
couldn't let you. For a long time I thought I wanted to die, because of something I did years ago. Then I met
you. You gave me back my life, Ilsa. I thought I'd lost
it, but I got it back, thanks to you. My life came with a
price, though: yours."

Now, at last, he could put the ghost of Lois Meredith
to rest, once and for all.

"I can't live without you, Ilsa. I thought I could. God
knows I tried. But I couldn't. Not after Paris. Not after
Casablanca. Not now. Not ever."

"Oh, Richard," she murmured as he held her tight
"Do you know how much I love you?"

They clutched each other as if they were the last two
people on earth. "I thought you hated me," he whis
pered.

"No," she breathed. "The time for hating is over."

"You're right," he said as he roughly drew her
mouth to his.

That night they got word from Karel that a small
plane would land in a farmer's hops field six kilometers
outside Lidice at eight o'clock the next morning and
that he and Ilsa were to be there and to be ready. The
plane would land for exactly five minutes: if they were
late, it would leave without them.

They awoke to the sounds of men yelling. Rick was
instantly alert and on his feet.

"Get up, Ilsa," he said. "We've got to hurry."

Ten truckloads of German security police were pour
ing into the village, firing at anything that moved.

Karel
Gabčík
burst into the room. "This way," he
said.

"Take Miss Lund to the plane." Rick turned to Ilsa
and thrust his Colt .45 into her hand. "This may come in handy. I'm staying." He reached for a rifle.

"No, you're not," replied Karel. "It's our fight, not
yours."

Rick started to object, but young
Gabčík
already was
hustling them out the door and into a waiting car. The
minute Ilsa and Rick climbed in, it sped off.

"Tell the world," Rick could hear Karel shouting.
"Tell the world what is happening here. Don't let them
forget."

His words disappeared in a burst of machine-gun
fire.

The battle of Lidice was over almost before it had begun. Taken by surprise, the villagers had no choice
but to surrender. One boy, aged twelve, ran away. He
was shot trying to escape. An old peasant woman,
seeing the soldiers, tried to flee. A German marksman
dropped her in her tracks.

The Germans ordered every male over the age of six
teen to gather in the barn of a farmer named Horak,
who was also the mayor. Then they were taken out in
groups of ten and shot. Anyone still moving after the
initial volley received a pistol shot to the head as a
coup de grâce, but there was no grace or mercy in it,
only malice. One hundred and seventy-two men of Lid
ice died this way, Karel
Gabčík
among them.

Seven of the women were taken back to Prague and
shot in the courtyard of the castle, in the shadow of
Dalibor Tower. Four of the women, who were pregnant,
were taken to hospitals in Prague; when their babies
were bom, the infants were murdered on the spot. The
new mothers, along with the rest of the village's 195
females, were shipped to the Ravensbr
ü
ck camp in Germany, northwest of Berlin.

The children of Lidice were taken to Gneisenau,
where they were examined by doctors, given new
names, and placed with German families so that they might be brought up properly as Aryans.

When all the people were disposed of, the Germans
burned the village to the ground and blew up the rubble
with dynamite. They then brought in heavy earth-
moving equipment and erased all traces of Lidice's
existence.

The car carrying Rick and Ilsa sped toward the ren
dezvous. It was not alone.

A single German unit,