Depraved Indifference (42 page)

“In April the Nazis came in. The war lasted ten days. Yugoslavia was broken up and Croatia became a German puppet, run by Pavelic and the
ustashi
. The pogroms started very soon. Of course, with so many Serbs to kill, it was hard for the
ustashi
to make room for the Jews, but they tried. These were, you understand, old-fashioned pogroms, with priests. The Jews were being beaten and killed because they weren't goyim.

“But this was too sluggish for the Final Solution. So in March 1942 an
einsatzkommando
was detailed from
Einsatzgruppe C
and sent to Zagreb to inspire the multitudes by a special action, as they called it. Now, there was in Zagreb at that time a large kosher slaughterhouse, because of the big Jewish community there. In 1942, of course, it had been shut down for some time. There was no meat for anyone by then, much less for Jews.

“This particular
sonderaktion
began with a riot, which started in the evening of Good Friday, an Eastern European specialty, as I'm sure you know. The torches came out and soon virtually the whole of the Jewish quarter was engulfed. By dawn there were perhaps ten thousand homeless people on the street, and slowly they began to gravitate for shelter to the old slaughterhouse, which anyone could see was a good choice: it was large, strongly built, dry, and it had, of course, adequate water and sewage.

“Therefore, when the
einsatzkommando
and its Croat allies set out on its task, the remnants of the Jewish community of Zagreb were conveniently at hand in, of all places, a kosher slaughterhouse. Naturally, the humor of this did not escape the SS. The Jews were herded into the pens formerly used for the animals, the children and the good-looking women were separated out, and the remainder were divided by sex and stripped. Then the machinery, the hoists and sluices and so forth, was started up, and the Jews were, literally, slaughtered. They were knocked on the head, a hook was driven through their heels, they were jerked upside down by the moving hoist, and their throats were slashed.

“The children were killed in different ways according to the whim of the murderers and the availability of equipment. Some were beheaded like chickens. They had skinning equipment, of course, so some were skinned, alive, dead, who knows? Some were flung into the boiling vats used to remove feathers from fowl. The little corpses were hung neatly on hooks, twenty-three hundred and fifty-two of them, aged four months through twelve years.

“Of course, in the main room there was a great deal more fun, because the SS and the
ustashi
were pretending to observe the rituals involved in kosher butchering: the draining of the blood, the salt rubbed into the flesh, and so on. There was a catwalk in the koshering room so that the supervising rabbi and his assistants could have a good view that the rituals were being followed. Now this catwalk was occupied by the leader of the
einsatzkommando
. He had there with him, bound and watching in the most extreme horror, the religious leaders of the Jewish community, with whom he would mockingly consult from time to time about fine points of slaughtering ritual. Every victim was marked with a red-hot electric brand that said ‘kosher meat.' We can imagine what was going on in their minds. This commander, I don't need to tell you, was SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Josef Karl Dreb.

“As you would expect, this event made his reputation. He was promoted and given the post of liaison officer between the SS and the Croatian police authorities. Did I tell you he was a native of Zagreb? Yes, indeed, a local boy, the son of an Austro-Hungarian imperial official and a Croat mother. In 1918, of course, they had to go back to Austria in disgrace.

“Not to psychologize, Mr. Karp, but you couldn't ask for a better breeding ground for a Nazi. The ruined authoritarian father, impotent, enraged; the mother, a fanatic Catholic, tyrannized by the man, both of them anti-Semites and Slav haters. Of course, the mother
is
a Slav, but that just spices the pot, you see. And of course, in their intimate moments together, Momma teaches her first-born son perfect idiomatic Serbo-Croat, even with the Zagreb dialect. Of course, it is only German in public: the father insists.

“Well, Karl does well in school, mechanical engineering, joins the Nazis in 1934, and after Anschluss is admitted into the SS, very squeaky that is, because the Momma is not perfectly Aryan. However, he gets in, has a good record, a brave fighter and imaginative murderer, not like Eichmann, afraid to get dirty hands, not a paper pusher at all, a head breaker instead. Ideal for
sonderaktionen
. We see him in 1943, at the height of his powers, a very important young Sturmbannfuehrer now, working closely with the Croat allies to crush the partisans and the Serbs and other under-people.

“Of course, he had an opposite number on the Croat side, with whom he liaisoned, didn't he? And how marvelously he got on with this other young man! They were the same age, they shared the same ideals, they had similar backgrounds. Also, strange to say, they even resembled each other, both tall, sturdy, blue eyes, long skull, straight blond hair, and the rest. Now, Mr. Karp, you are a clever man. What do you suppose the name of this other fellow was?”

Karp had to clear his throat. “Djordje Karavitch,” he answered hoarsely.

Leventhal seemed delighted with the reply. “Yes! Yes, Djordje Karavitch, a Croat patriot, reviving an ancient nation in the glow of the New Order. Well, they were thick as thieves for the next year or so, until things started to go badly for the Germans. The Russians were coming, the partisans were getting stronger. Dreb was detailed to a Waffen-SS division, the Prinz Eugen, where he was one of those responsible for reprisals against villages that were supposed to have helped the partisans. Dreb was able to get his good friend Karavitch the command of a company of
ustashi
attached to the German unit. Thus they were together when in the winter of 1945, their small column was ambushed by a reinforced battalion of partisans. From this attack only three men escaped alive. One was Dreb, one was Karavitch, and the other was, can you guess? No? It was Macek, whom I think you know, and who was then little more than a boy. They were scraping the barrel in 1945.

“So they escape and have many merry adventures, and at last in 1946 they find themselves in the city of Trieste. Karavitch and Macek are making contact with an organization that arranges the transportation of Croat fascists—I'm sorry, now it is Catholic nationalist anticommunists—to the United States.

“But Dreb? No, he is in much deeper trouble. He has to hide while his good friends bring him food. Because, you see, Dreb has made in the war a serious error. Oh, not the atrocities. People who were worse even than Dreb were at that moment being recruited by your government, Mr. Karp, to spy against the Russians. But in 1944 the American air force was conducting heavy raids from Foggia airbase against the industries of Central Europe. Many of these aircraft were forced down in Yugoslavia, and of course the partisans wished to help the crews escape as much as the Germans wished to capture them.

“To this game, Dreb brought his peculiar imagination. When he was able to capture an American crew he would send the healthy crew members to the stalags, to keep Luftwaffe intelligence off his back, but the wounded ones, these he would use as bait to catch partisans. His favorite trick was to stick a bunch of them in a barn or house and then have the partisans tipped off. The place would be heavily booby-trapped with the delayed-action devices he loved to use. He liked to observe the ‘rescue' at long distance through his field glasses. Smiles, relief, cheers, then boom! Interesting, don't you think?”

“Fascinating. So if that was known, nobody would have him, not even our intelligence guys. What happened then?”

“Ah, yes, the denouement. On August 14, 1946, a corpse was found in a cheap lodging house in Trieste. The throat had been cut. This was not an unusual occurrence at the time, of course, but what attracted attention to this particular corpse was that it had an SS identification number tattooed in the armpit. On checking, it was found to be the number of Josef Karl Dreb, SS-Sturmbannfuehrer. Imagine that! Shortly thereafter, Djordje Karavitch and Pavle Macek entered the employment of the U.S. Army's Counter-intelligence Corps, and a year later, that of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“And you think this was really Dreb?”

“We know it.”

“What's your proof?”

“We have informants.”

“Yeah? Who?”

Leventhal smiled. “They are reliable. It is the man.”

“If you say so. But there's something funny about this operation, boss. I mean, you're not making a public fuss, not going through DOJ in Washington. Shit, they got a whole unit there does nothing but kick old Nazis out of the country. We got an election year here, you think maybe Begin could shake out a war criminal or two for the Jewish vote? Are you joking? President Ford goes, ‘Hey, Betty, guy says he saw you chalking swastikas in Bucharest in '43. Sorry, kid, write when you get to Jerusalem.'

“Especially, you got a mutt who aced a bunch of our wounded guys in the war, hey, piece of cake. So why the hanky-panky, Leventhal? Maybe this isn't an official operation, huh? Where you from, Leventhal? I don't mean Tel Aviv, I mean before. Maybe Yugoslavia? Maybe Zagreb? You got a special interest in this one, a personal interest? Maybe your boy isn't heading for a glass cage in Jerusalem. Maybe someplace a lot closer, like a car trunk in LaGuardia, how about that?”

“How about justice?” shouted Leventhal, his face darkening. He rose to his feet and glared down at Karp. “Justice is what's at stake here, not somebody's bureaucratic skirts getting dirty. He's protected, as you well know. And you know why, too. Because the CIA people who hired him knew very well who he was, and that he had murdered American airmen in cold blood. So do you think we will be allowed to just take him away, thank you very much, so he can tell all that to the world?”

“Right,” Karp said wearily. “You got justice mixed up with revenge, Leventhal. Not the same thing at all.”

It had grown dark in the room. Light was no longer coming in through the drapes, and no one had turned on any lights. There was a scuffling noise in the hallway and a shadowy form entered the living room. Karp saw that it was Natan, his face blackened, dressed in baggy coveralls and a wool watchcap. He wore a belt from which hung various items of equipment and a large knife. Slung on his shoulder was an Uzi submachine gun. He conversed briefly with Leventhal and left.

Leventhal turned to Karp. “We are about to begin our operation. You must return to the bedroom, where Devra will look after you. If we are unsuccessful, she will help you get to safety. But under no circumstances are you to attempt to leave here by yourself. Is that clear?”

Karp started to object, then shrugged and went back to the bedroom. The curtains had been drawn over the glass door and the blinds on the window were closed. The only real light came from a tiny nightlamp plugged into the baseboard. By its glow Karp could make out Devra sitting in the armchair, her knitting in her lap. Karp lay on the bed. Outside, it grew darker. The woman stopped knitting. They were silent, waiting.

The noises started, a string of pops far off, shouts, once a shrill cry like that of a tropical bird. Karp wiped the sweat off his palms and concentrated on breathing.

Something exploded outside the room and a red glare shone through the glass of the sliding doors. Then the doors exploded inward, and a man leaped into the room amid a shower of glass and curtain rags.

He really does look just like a snake, was Karp's first thought. The man was small and lithe and dressed in army fatigues. The face was so narrow and the yellow-brown eyes were so close together as to be almost a deformity. The mouth was a nearly lipless
V
, the nose two pits in a flat bump, and Sergio Ruiz had skin trouble too; his pale ochre face was covered with shiny bumps and excavations, adding to the reptilian effect.

On leaping into the room, he had crouched, sighting down the barrel of his Armalite automatic rifle into the four corners of the room in approved infantry-school fashion. He was angry and upset. He couldn't understand why he was having all these problems with shooting one man, nor did he understand why his people were being shot down in the dark outside by hidden strangers. He wanted to do the job as quickly as possible and get out of this crazy place.

Ruiz saw the woman first, sitting wide-eyed in her armchair. A woman was no danger, another piece of the furniture; he would deal with her later. Turning a quarter turn, he spotted Karp sitting up in his bed. Even in the dim light the target was unmistakable. He raised his rifle, sighted on Karp's chest, and touched the trigger. Karp had at that instant begun to roll off the bed in the direction of the nightlight. His hand reached out to swat it from its wall socket.

As soon as Ruiz's eyes were no longer on her, Devra Blok reached into her knitting bag and drew out one of the little alloy .22-caliber automatic pistols the Mossad issues to its agents when they are in foreign parts and need to kill people. In one long-practiced motion she yanked the slide back to chamber a round, pointed, and fired twice into the back of Sergio Ruiz's head. The assassin's hand tightened reflexively on the trigger as the slugs tore into his brain and the Armalite erupted.

Karp landed on his bad knee and grunted in pain. He was down in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, trying to make himself small and reaching for the nightlight with a shaking hand. Above him, Ruiz's assault rifle roared and bits of plaster, wood, and pillow feathers fell down on him. He waited for the pain of the bullets and worried fleetingly about wetting his pants. Then the firing stopped and he felt the bed jerk with the impact of a weight falling upon it.

He stuck his head up cautiously. Ruiz was facedown on the bed, his head in the center of a spreading red stain. One of his legs was twitching rhythmically. He was still breathing, a hoarse rasp, but Karp could see, and smell, that he had lost control of his bowels and bladder. Karp saw Devra Blok bend over Ruiz, as if to examine him. He saw the little dark gun in her hand and saw what she was about to do. He said, “Hey …”