Fiddle Game (14 page)

March 15, 1945

The Ardenne Forest

Mist rose silently from the forest floor and filled the ravines that ran through the dense black-green stands of fir and spruce. It could have been snow evaporating in the warmth of the coming dawn, or new fog, or just lingering smoke. Against the lightening sky, the silhouettes of the trees were fractured and bent at frequent intervals, and the mist smelled faintly of cordite and high explosive. There had been heavy fighting here, with armor and artillery, but it had all moved south now, as the invading armies closed in on Berlin, faster and faster, smelling its blood, thirsting for the kill shot.

It would all be over soon enough, but the man who threaded his way through the trees couldn’t wait. He had escaped from a death camp, with no money and no papers and a damning tattoo on his arm, and he knew he would be hunted. People were not allowed to escape, ever, and the fact of it had to be eradicated. He had to be eradicated. Better to give up the last bridge over the Rhine than to admit that a single, wretched Rom had escaped from the world’s most adept jailers, history’s most airtight prisons.

It was hard navigating in the dense woods, especially with no stars and the frequent stumbles over hazards of corpses and abandoned hardware, hidden by the indifferent snow. But it was a traditional skill among his people, an inherited instinct, and he was confident that he was still headed north, into the low country. There would be a lot of confusion there, and a careful man, a resourceful one, could make his way to a neutral country, or even a liberated one. Maybe even one where his skills and his people’s reputation were unknown.

He pushed on, ignoring his wet feet and chilled body, wanting to get as far as possible before the daylight forced him to hide and creep. The floor of the forest pitched up uniformly, coming to a roadbed, and he quickened his pace, driving himself up the embankment. His foot broke a fallen tree branch, making a sharp crack in the cold air, and he cursed silently and slowed a bit, straining to see into the mist.

“Halt!”

The word was the same in German and English, he knew, but the accent made it unmistakably a Hun. One of Little Adolph’s rear echelons, pretending the world wasn’t crumbling around him. The Rom stopped in his tracks and scanned the dim landscape intently. It was too dark to see colors yet, but the silhouette showed the unmistakable coattails of a winter greatcoat. This was good. It meant Wermacht, not SS or Gestapo. The fact that the figure was hunched over was also good. It meant that he had a rifle, not a Schmeisser machine gun. If the Rom ran, the man would have to aim, not merely spray. It also meant that he was probably rearguard, a reservist, too young or too old or just too unfit to be a regular combat soldier. And that was best of all. It meant that he could probably be bribed. And if he could be bribed, he could also be cheated.

“Don’t shoot,” he said in German. “I’m only a civilian.”

“Come out where I can see you. Now!”

“Ya, ya, I come. Only, don’t shoot.” He reached in his improvised backpack and took out the violin case, holding it aloft as he advanced, now making plenty of noise on the forest floor.

“What is that in your hand?”

“It is not a weapon, sir, I swear. Only my violin that I don’t want to damage. It is very old, you see.” He stopped again. “I will put it down, if you want me to. See, here I am, putting it down.”

“Bring it here.”

Bribable, yes, indeed. A man who takes himself very seriously, though. He would probably prefer to think that he had stolen something. Well, the Rom knew how to arrange that. Or rather, he didn’t know it yet, but it would come to him. It always did. He walked up the roadway embankment and stopped when the German told him to.

“Let me see it.”

“Of course, your honor.” He bent down on one knee, took off the work cap he had stolen at a farmhouse the day before, and placed it on the ground. Then he put the violin on top of it, enhancing the image of value without being too blatant about it, and opened it towards the soldier. Inside its case, the instrument gleamed dully in the dim light.

“This is a good fiddle?”

“The best, your excellency. It is 350 years old, made by a famous luthier named Amati.”

“You stole it.” Not a question. By this time of the war, anybody who had anything valuable must have stolen it. Unless, of course, he were a Nazi, in which case he had confiscated it from some subhuman scum. This was not stealing, merely restoring the natural order of things.

“It is mine. A family heirloom. I play it in the Berlin Symphony. Or I did, before they told us all to leave.”

Never tell a lie that doesn’t have at least a crumb of truth, he told himself for the thousandth time. Complete fabrications are hard to remember, and they will come back to trip you up. He truly had played in an orchestra for a while, but it wasn’t the Berlin, it was the forced ensemble of the Treblinka death camp. And the instrument really was a family heirloom. It had been used by his family in scams of one kind or another for more generations than they could easily count. It was not truly his yet, though. Not because he had not inherited it, nor even because his hand had not modified it, but because he had not yet used it to cheat anybody. With any kind of luck, that was about to change.

“The Symphony has gone? Why would they do such a thing?”

“I hesitate to tell a brave man like yourself, it’s so…”

“You had better tell me, and be quick about it, too.”

“Everyone is fleeing Berlin, sir. The end is near, and nobody wants to be captured by the Russians. But we did our duty, all the same, playing every Sunday, until some officers came and told us to leave. They told us to go north or west, to look for the Americans or the British.”

This was also essentially true, if only by coincidence. The Rom had surmised it from bits of rumors that came in with the trainloads of the doomed, adding a heavy dose of his own wishful thinking. He didn’t really have any facts, but his account made sense, and he told it haltingly, for the fullest possible effect on the soldier in front of him.

“I don’t believe you. I think you are a thief and a liar, and probably a Jew, to boot. I don’t even believe you are a musician. You look like a peasant.” He raised his rifle again, menacing, working himself up to do the unthinkable.

“If I were a peasant, I would be wearing the feldgrau now, just like you. I was deferred to play in the great symphony, which is now, alas, scattered to the winds. As for being a Jew, do you want me to drop my trousers and show you the proof?”

“What do you take me for, a pervert?”

“Perhaps you would prefer that I play something, then, to prove that I am a musician.”

“Now you think you can bluff me. Play, peasant. And it had better sound good. Don’t think for a moment that I don’t know real music, just because I’m only a foot soldier. Make a fool of me, and you will not live to gloat about it.”

We’ll see about that, thought the Rom. He put a bit of rosin on his bow, took the instrument from the case, and began to play, a popularized version of Tales From the Vienna Woods. It was complicated enough to sound like a serious work, but simple enough for the Rom to play it well, even exceptionally. He had no formal training, but he was good, a natural talent with a perfect ear and instinctive phrasing. He let the instrument run the gamut, from sweet to coarse, subtle to insistent, but always returning to mellow, heart-rending richness. And it was, indeed, a fine instrument.

As he played, he watched the soldier relax, then slump, until he looked as if he were about to cry. The Rom wished the soldier would interrupt him, since he couldn’t remember how the piece was supposed to end, but the man gestured him to play on. He improvised an ending, based on the dominant theme of the opening stanzas, and before he could be challenged on it, he slipped into a lively Strauss waltz. At least, he thought it was Strauss. It seemed to suffice, whatever it was.

The German sat down on a fallen tree trunk, his rifle upright between his knees and a faraway look in his eyes. Putty.

“I heard the Symphony once,” he said. “Before the war. We went to Berlin, my parents and I, to see the city and to take my father to a famous hospital there. He had been in the Great War, you see, had his lungs burned out. They were going to try some new treatment, we were told. I think they lied, just to get him off the pension rolls. My mother and I left him at the hospital and never saw him alive again.”

“I thought only we Germans had the poison gas in the last war.”

“That’s what they tell you, isn’t it? But you know what? The wind doesn’t give a pfennig who released the terrible stuff. Unlike my poor father, it doesn’t always go where it’s told.”

“A great tragedy for you.” He touched the strings lightly again, slipping into a slow, high version of Lilli Marlene. He spoke while he played, watching the soldier with great care. “They don’t care about the little people, do they? About the ones who just follow orders?”

“Ya, ya,” he said, now rocking back and forth slightly. “This is so true.”

“They left the orchestra to fend for itself and now they leave you to be captured by Russians. They hate us, you know.” He didn’t say if he meant the Russians or the high German leaders.

“That’s what you say. I think this is a safe enough place. I think I will be here when the war is over. Then I will just put on some woodsman’s clothes and melt into the landscape. Maybe I will have a violin to keep me company, hey?” His eyes lost their faraway look and began to turn menacing again.

“Or the Russians will.”

“They will not come here. My lieutenant told me so.”

“And where is he now? Eating hot soup in some prisoner camp, fifty kilometers west of here, out of harm’s way? I passed an advance Russian patrol the day before yesterday. Wild, crazy men with submachine guns, looking for anything to shoot or burn. I hid from them, but there will be more. And they will come this way, soon enough.”

“You lie.”

“Kill me and take my violin, and you can only find out the hard way.” He shifted to playing Deutschland Über Alles, slowly and transposed into a minor key, as if it were a dirge.

“Where were they, exactly?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“So I don’t shoot you?”

“Much good it would do you.”

“Then what do you propose, herr musician-peasant?”

“You wish to survive the war?” Suddenly the plan that he had been looking for became crystal clear, laid out before him like a multicolor battle map. All his best schemes came to him that way, quite unbidden and unforeseen.

“Ya, I wish to survive the war. Who does not?”

“Then follow me. I will take you past the patrols, to a safe place. Along the way, we will look for a dead American with a uniform that will fit me, and I will coach you in a most wonderful charade that we are going to play.”

“Why do we need to play at anything?”

“Because when we run into another Russian patrol, then I am an American GI, and you are my prisoner. They won’t like it, but they won’t interfere with us.”

“I hope you know what you are doing.”

That made two of them. The Rom repacked the violin, crossed over the road, and continued to walk north, the rising sun on his right now illuminating the forest floor, displaying the litter of battle. There was a tense moment or two when he thought he could feel the German aiming his rifle at the center of his back, but finally he heard the man shoulder his gear and trudge after him. The man made more noise than a Tiger tank, which was what the Rom had really hidden from two days earlier. Then, after dark, he had garroted the watch stander on the turret and stolen the man’s field rations. He could have killed the private who now followed him, too, any of several times in the last few minutes, but he had faith in his own ruse, and he needed the man for a shill. And he was tired of both the killing and the hiding. Killing is not the Gypsy way. He was ready for a more honorable and interesting game, one more suited to his talents. He was ready to perpetrate the biggest fraud of his career.

Six days later, a gaunt and disheveled U.S. Army corporal wearing the insignia of the 101st Airborne walked into an advance camp of a combined U.S.-British task force in Belgium. The man had lost his weapon, but he carried a Mauser rifle and a violin case. He had also apparently lost his memory and was suffering from what was then called “battle fatigue.” He was sent to England for treatment and evaluation, and then home to an early discharge, a modest pension, and a family who didn’t seem to know him. His dog tags said his name was Gerald Cox.