Jacob's Oath (29 page)

Jacob and Sarah stared at the door, shaking their heads in wonder. “You were right.
That man,” Jacob said, “is a force of nature.”

“I told you. A whirlwind,” Sarah said.

“Can he really do it?”

“He says yes. So far he’s done everything he said he would. And more. I believe him.
Absolutely.”

“Can it really be so simple? Just like that? Problem solved?”

Sarah poured a small glass of vodka and put it to her lips. “Aah.” She spat it out.
“Horrid.”

“You know,” Jacob said, “I really don’t know if I could have done it anyway. I know
what I wanted to do but I don’t know if I could have done it. Kill a man? Even the
Rat? It just isn’t me. Shoot him with a gun? Maybe. Stab him? Hit him with a club
or a rock?” He shivered at the thought. “I could never have done it. Inside, I think
I always knew it. The very idea gives me the creeps. How do people do things like
that? I just don’t know. It just isn’t me. I wish it was. But it isn’t.”

“I know,” Sarah said. “That’s why I love you. Anyway, let’s just wait.” She hugged
him. “We have so much to wait for.”

Jacob took a sip of vodka and waited for the burn to fade before swallowing. It burned
anyway. “Ugh. What time is it. Noon?”

Sarah smiled. “Bedtime.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Heidelberg,
June 8, 1945

Frau Trudi Seeler sat on a high wooden stool behind the bar that doubled as hotel
reception. She held a wineglass to the light, breathed on it, polished a bit more,
examined it again, and went on to the next. She brushed crumbs of almond cake from
her apron and put another slice to her mouth. On the wall behind her was a carved
wooden box in which room keys hung on numbered hooks. Two keys on each hook, round
one for the guest, square one for the maid. She was smiling to herself. For the first
time since 1939 all the round keys were out to paying guests. Not freeloading National
Socialists or occupation troops, or refugees, but actual, bona fide, paying guests.
She had let the last suite yesterday, even though she had given it for the price of
a double room. It was only for two days and she gave it cheap just so she could say
the hotel was full. At least the nice man had paid in advance.

Wolfgang had hung out the sign right away. A beaming fat man lying on a bed with the
word “Voll” painted across him. That would show the neighbors. What a feeling. Things
were really looking up at last. But nothing was perfect. Such a pity that Hans would
have to go in a few days. He wouldn’t say why or for how long, but she trusted him.
These were difficult times. He was such a fine young man, any mother would be proud.
If only he could find a nice young girl.

She looked through the arch to the dining room, where Fritz von Schuhmacher, who had
taken suite eight, was eating lunch. He had slept late. He looked up and she smiled
at him. “Ist gut?” she mouthed silently, stretching her lips like a clown. He smiled
in appreciation and rubbed his stomach. He toasted her with his glass of wine and
she raised her polished empty one to the elegant young man.

Nice woman, he thought. Pity about her son. The strudel was so light and flaky he
ordered a second slice with cream, and sighed as he tilted his glass to savor the
last drops of wine. Gewürztraminer. When he did the “Nazi officer” course they had
even had wine-tasting sessions. But not this one. Probably couldn’t get it in Palestine.
He’d have to remember it. He signed to put the lunch on his room bill and left a few
coins for a tip. Outside the hotel he turned left, walked a block, and as he passed
the café over the road, von Schuhmacher, aka Ari Levinsky, pulled out a handkerchief
to blow his nose.

Sitting at one of the wooden tables, Yonni Tal responded by dropping the menu to the
floor.

They were in business.

Ari finished his short walk and returned to the hotel to find reception empty. He
reached across the bar, took his key off the hook, and went to his room. The stairs
to the guest rooms were through a narrow swing door off the Stammtisch, the group
table that was closest to the bar. He counted the curving steps. Ten to the first
floor, where a polished brass sign showed an arrow to rooms one to five. Ten more
steps. Another brass sign pointed the way to rooms six and seven and the two suites.
“Next to my son,” the owner had said when she offered him the room. He’d said he could
only pay for a single or he’d have to look elsewhere, so she upgraded him. Must be
because I look like a Nazi poster boy, he thought.

The first two rooms on the corridor were six and seven, then came his suite, which
was just a room and an alcove with the bed, and at the end of the corridor, facing
west and south, was the larger corner suite with Hans Seeler. Locked double doors
connected the two suites and both faced the road. At the end of the corridor was a
low niche with a decorative brass coal bucket and poker. When it was showtime, he’d
hide the poker, just in case. The bucket, too.

Otherwise, a piece of cake. Which reminded him. He bought two pieces of strudel for
Omri and Yonni.

“Too good to be true” was Yonni’s reaction as they leaned against the jeep, after
visiting the ruins of the old synagogue.

“The cake?” Ari said, licking the last cream from the paper bag.

“No. The plan.”

“Well, simple is good,” Ari said, looking over Omri’s shoulder.

“What are you looking at?”

Ari raised his eyebrow and inclined his head. Omri turned and stared at a girl sitting
on a pile of bricks in the corner. “Cute,” he said.

“Beautiful, you mean.” Ari smiled and greeted her. She looked away sharply.

“Anyway, again,” Ari continued. “Just wait up the road in the jeep. When my light
goes on and off again, it means I’m going downstairs to get his key. I’ll do that
when his light has been off for two hours. I’ll see that from the crack underneath
the connecting door. I’ll unlock his door, do the deed, close it quietly. When my
light goes on and off a second time, you pull up outside the hotel. Yonni, you have
the curfew pass?”

“No, I forgot it. Of course I do. What happens if he doesn’t go quietly?”

“He will. It isn’t a big room,” Ari said. “And I’ve already been inside. It’s the
smallest suite I’ve ever seen, apart from mine. The bed is to the left of the door,
less than a meter. All I carry is a flashlight and a knife. I open the door, light
him up, and cut his throat.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if I was inside too?” Omri said. “Just in case.”

Ari considered this.

Yonni nodded. “Many hands make light work.”

Ari said, “You stick a pillow on his head, keep him quiet, I’ll cut his throat?”

“Good.”

“So when the light goes on and off the first time, I go down, get the key and open
the front door to let you in.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll bring the pillow.”

“What do we know about him?” Yonni asked. “And it isn’t from Blue this time?”

“No,” Ari said. “From Red.”

*   *   *

It had taken Lieutenant Isak Brodsky of the Red Army a day to get the coded message
to the Avengers, and because the team was already near Mannheim, it took them an afternoon
to reach Heidelberg. The Rat had gone straight to the top of the list. They knew they
had to act fast. Hans Seeler was leaving within six days and nobody knew where he
was going. It was now or maybe never. They’d been worried about doing a job in the
town center. But as Seeler lived in a hotel, and by a stroke of pure luck Fritz von
Schuhmacher had been given the room next to his, SS-TV Unterscharführer Hans Seeler
was about to get his reckoning in record time.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Heidelberg,
June 8, 1945

An hour later, five hundred meters away in the lookout tower on the Scheffel Terrace
of Heidelberg Castle, the photographer moved Jacob a little to the left and pushed
Sarah toward him until they were perfectly framed in the window, with Sarah nestled
in Jacob’s arms, their left shoulders toward the camera. In the background, far below,
Heidelberg sparkled in all its sunlit glory. The destroyed arches of the Old Bridge
broke the waters of the glittering Neckar, which flowed around and beyond into the
open plain at the edge of the Odenwald forest, whose green canopy reached the river’s
banks. Soaring above the ocher roofs of the university and the Old City, the sharp
steeples of the Church of the Holy Spirit and the Jesuit Church pointed the way to
heaven.

They smiled at the camera and again and yet again as the photographer gestured to
them that now he wanted a profile shot. “Enough, Michael, enough,” Jacob said. “Who
do you think I am, an American officer?”

Michael laughed. He knew Jacob as a guide and translator in the castle but he had
never met his girlfriend.

“This one is free. For the lovely lady.” He adjusted the fill-in light to compensate
for the shade in the tower against the bright sunlight in the background and took
two more photos. “Tomorrow,” he said. “Come in the afternoon and choose.”

“How much each?” Jacob asked.

“Oh, for you, five Pall Mall.”

“Three.”

“Four and two butts.”

“Three and one butt. Camel.”

“Stop it, you two,” Sarah said with a smile.

Holding hands, they walked down the steep cobbled alley shaded by overhanging trees
to the Corn Market, where they found the perfect table, beneath the white blossoms
of a spreading almond tree and next to three large pots of flowering geraniums. They
ordered two teas and shared a slice of cheesecake. As their forks met on the plate
their eyes met too and they smiled, content.

They had woken late and for a change had not made love. Jacob had kissed Sarah’s puffed
eyes and sighed, and she kissed his lips and turned around. He hugged her as she held
his hands on her stomach. Like the quiet river below the white water, it was enough
to hold each other and to drift in silence.

The frenzy had passed. The uncertainty, the tumult of it all. Leaving in its wake
the eternal question: Why me? Of all the men in Hut 28, Square 9, Block 2, why was
it he lying in a warm bed with a beautiful woman who loved him? The devil had destroyed
them all, apart from one. One weak and undeserving man. Why was he spared? It was
a question Jacob dwelled on everywhere, waiting in the bus station, working in the
castle, drinking at the table by the Schwartzer Bock.

Surely he was not left alive just to kill a man? There must be a greater purpose to
his life than murder.

Finally, he had found an answer. To love Sarah.

Sarah turned and kissed Jacob and hugged him to her. He didn’t need to say a word.
She knew. She had also fought and suffered and in the end survived. She had lost everything,
her family, her lover, her baby, but never her will to live. In the coldest, most
freezing moments, when her bones ached, without water to drink or food to eat or a
blanket to cover herself, she had stamped all night in the woods, in circles, hugging
herself, fighting off the siren call of sleep, to make sure she would still be there
in the morning. It rained and hailed on her. When she had run out of friends she had
lived like this in the Berlin woods for two months. Hiding by day, foraging for food
by night. Why? She never really knew. Less to live, more to deny them the pleasure
of killing her. She just wouldn’t allow it.

And now here they were, the two of them, holding on to each other as if holding on
to life. A reprieve at the gallows. She swore she would never let go again. She would
never lose Jacob. She would never lose her love again.

A long sigh shook her body. If only. If only she could have a baby.

Jacob sipped the last of the tea and reached across Sarah to the flower pot. He picked
a geranium and wove the red blossom in Sarah’s hair. She smiled and tilted her head
to model her hair design. “What else can we do that’s nice?” she asked, as Jacob paid
the bill. He thanked the waiter and said with his mischevious smile, “I know. Let’s
go for a swim.”

“Swim? Where?”

“In the river, of course.”

*   *   *

Sarah looked around, hugging herself. “I can’t,” she said.

“Stop it. Of course you can,” Jacob said, “look at me.” With a quick glance around
he pulled off his underpants, hung them on a broken branch, and splashed naked into
the water. The sun glistened on his buttocks as he jumped up and down.

They had walked upriver until they came across a clearing in the reeds that grew into
the river, where a fallen tree trunk that lay in the water had made a quiet lagoon
for them to lie in. Thick trees concealed them from the road, which was deserted apart
from the occasional military truck trundling by. Beyond their little tranquil spot
the Neckar flowed fast and strong.

“Come on, it’s beautiful,” Jacob called out, splashing his face and sinking to his
knees. Sarah had kept on her bra and panties. She looked around again with an air
of desperation. She pulled her bra around to the front to unclip it, leaned forward
and shrugged herself loose, and placed the bra on Jacob’s pants. She took a step into
the water until Jacob, whose eyes were devouring her, said, “Not yet. All the way.
There’s nobody here anyway.”

Sarah shook her head and rolled her eyes as if to say, boys will be boys, and not
giving herself time to think, in one swift motion pulled her panties down and stepped
out of them, tossing them onto the pile of clothes. She laughed as the water chilled
her to the crotch. “You see,” Jacob called as he waded to her and held her. They kissed
on the lips and were warmed by the sun. They sank into the river until it reached
their necks and Sarah felt Jacob’s urgency against her. “No, no, not here,” she said,
and swam away to hang on to the tree trunk. “You’re insatiable,” she said.

“You’re irresistible.”

“You’re a sex maniac.”

“Thank you.”

He waded to her again and they stood near the bank where the water reached their knees.
They embraced and kissed, watching their naked reflection breaking and reforming as
one body in the windblown water. Jacob brushed Sarah’s wet hair from her mouth as
she began to kneel when: