Ring of Lies (36 page)

Dr. Rauch threw his hands in the air. Sweat glistened on his upper lip.

Justus Erlichmann was grinning at him. “Do not worry, Doctor. I would never shoot a physician.”

Petrified, Rauch slowly lowered his short arms until they were hanging by his sides.

“But I would shoot a veterinarian,” Justus added, pulling the trigger twice.

As the bullets entered his chest, Rauch's stunted body was thrown backward into the wall of jars. He reached out to grab hold of a shelf, but his hand hit a jar. The glass container tumbled to the floor and shattered, scattering ashes like flour on the black surface.

A nauseating, bitter odor filled the air.

Rauch's head hit the floor. Blood spread over his pink shirt as his little feet kicked at the pale ashes.

His piglike eyes were still gaping when his heart stopped beating.

Alex was stuck in a tub of tar. Muffled voices in the distance. It was done; he was dead.

The words seemed vaguely familiar.

They were calling his name.

The sound was coming from too far away.

Someone put a hand on his face, caressing him tenderly, speaking softly.

Who was this person? What was he saying?

The gummy tar gradually thinned out.

A cold floor. A black floor.

He opened his eyes.

“Justus?”

“Alex!” Justus cried. “I was afraid I was too late. But I'm here now, and Schlaff is dead. They are all dead. It's over.”

It was cold on the floor.

“You passed out,” Justus said. “Lack of oxygen.”

Alex struggled to sit up, leaning on his elbows, but he had no feeling in his arms. His body burned and throbbed with pain.

Stubble cast a shadow over Justus's pale cheeks. His blue eyes were sunken into dark circles.

“Where have you been hiding?” Alex asked.

“At home.”

“No way!”

“There is a secret room between the pantry and the guest bathroom. I built it a long time ago.”

“You were in the house?”

“Last night you slept in the pantry cupboard. I was two feet away, on the other side of the wall. You didn't know. You were blocking my exit. I bumped into a table and it made a noise. Perhaps subconsciously I wanted you to find me. You spoke on the phone. Then you got up and searched the house.”

“What were you doing there all this time?”

Justus smiled sadly. “Waiting.”

“The whole fucking time?”

“I realized that something had gone seriously wrong and I was in danger. So, yes, I abandoned the Ring in the hope that later I would be able to salvage what was left of it. I needed time to find out what had gone wrong. If I was killed, a whole life's work would have been lost.”

“What about the blood in the cemetery?”

“I was scared. I felt like I was being watched. When we were in the café together, I thought that perhaps you had brought people with you to kidnap me and bring me to Israel. I decided to go underground. I bought a large syringe at a pharmacy and filled a small soda bottle with my blood. I saw you enter the cemetery. I hid there until I was sure you had found it.”

“What made you come here?”

“I followed you.”

“The virus is on its way to Israel!” Alex suddenly remembered. “I have to get upstairs and make a call. If we're lucky, the Security Agency will catch Schlaff's couriers in time. They stole the inhalers from the Orchid Farm!”

“Yes, I heard that fool boasting about it before,” Justus chuckled.

“What's so funny?”

“The inhalers they have are of value only to asthma sufferers.”

“What!?”

“I went to the Orchid Farm the day before I met you in Berlin. As I said, I feared I was in danger, so I decided to switch the virus inhalers with ordinary Ventolin.”

“What did you do with the vaccine?”

“I replaced the three inhalers. The ones I left behind contain a strain of methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
, commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria. If the couriers used them as they were instructed to, there will be no need to look for them. Very soon they will present themselves at an emergency room with a high fever and an infection that is resistant to antibiotics.”

“Where's the virus now?” Alex asked.

“Hidden in a safe place.”

“How did they get into the Cube?”

“I have given that a lot of thought. The only answer I can find is that they took a picture of my iris when they brought me here. There are companies that will reproduce the image and print it on a contact lens. I must have given them the entry code under hypnosis.”

“I was sure they had killed you and stashed the body somewhere,” Alex said. “But this morning it struck me that the whole time you were gone, no one showed up at your house. No maid, no cook, no gardener.”

Justus gave him an approving smile. Then his face turned serious. “I realized that they were only going after the Ring, not Mossad. I could not deal with them by myself. You showed me that
you were the right man for the job, so I decided to disappear and let you handle it.”

“Did you bribe Reuven?”

Justus's expression became grim. “Like me, Reuven sensed that something was wrong, but I did not have any answers for him yet. I thought that perhaps my personal issues with Schlaff were distracting me. Reuven told me that he was obligated to report his suspicions to the prime minister. I could see the wheels turning in his head. He was hungry, so I gave him something to chew on.

“Israeli politicians do not contend with the real problems. Their sole concern is their own survival. A second Holocaust is just a matter of time. I thought that if Reuven were prime minister, he would be able to prevent it.”

Justus the idealist had tried to buy himself an Israeli prime minister. A lot of influence for a little money.

Alex said, “It doesn't bother you that Reuven has no principles and no scruples?”

“A person with principles and scruples will not win an election in Israel these days,” the German said.

“Why was Schlaff blackmailing you?”

Justus lowered his eyes and shook his head.

“I'm sorry,” Alex said, “but I have to know.”

“My father was an SS officer, Alois Brunner's deputy at Drancy. When he learned that Germany was planning to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, he defected. Roger Trezeguet, Gerard's father, hid him and brought him to the Resistance.

“Our fortune . . .” Justus paused and pursed his lips, ordering his thoughts.

“Before my father began saving Jewish lives, he did a terrible thing. He took . . . he stole precious gems from a Jewish family. Everyone could see that those who were deported to the East never returned. The family offered him everything they had to save them, and told him where to find the family jewels. They were concealed in the leg of a table that had been confiscated by the Nazis. My father found it in a camp near Drancy where they stored the property they looted from the Jews. In a moment of weakness, he took the jewels for himself. Then, to hide his crime, he arranged for the family to be sent to Auschwitz.”

Justus's lower lip was quivering. His expression was somber. “My father confessed to me years ago. He was deeply ashamed. It was a despicable, inhuman act. Two days after the Dresdener family was loaded on the transport, he decided to redeem himself, to defect from the army of the Reich and save as many Jews as he could.”

“Who killed him in Davos?”

“Oskar, most likely. I taught him about RC helicopters.”

“Who's Rachel Dresdener?”

“You could only know about her if you had read my will,” Justus said with a sad smile. “I see that you found a way into my vault at Berghoff Bank.” He gave Alex an admiring look before going on. “Almost the entire Dresdener family died in the camp. Only the youngest daughter, Rachel, survived. She is an old woman now, all alone in the world. She lives in Israel, in Kiryat Motzkin. I have been sending her money for many years. She does not know where it comes from.

“After the war, my father sold the jewelry and invested the money in art and real estate. And so the source of my family fortune is a crime, an atrocity.”

“What does all that have to do with Oskar Schlaff?”

“After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Oskar discovered that he was the nephew of Alois Brunner. He went to see him in Damascus. Brunner had never lost his hatred for my father. I assume he mentioned his name to Oskar, and Oskar saw the opportunity to extort money from us. We patronized his restaurant for more than twenty years, almost from the day it opened. We came even when no one else did. Oskar was a young man back then, still trying to make his way in life. There were rumors about him. It was said that he worked for the Stasi, that he was an informant. My father helped him, gave him money. That did not stop him from blackmailing us.

“We paid and we kept silent, but we did not know the identity of the blackmailer. We did not know that it was Schlaff, or that he was Brunner's nephew. When I found out, I prepared a letter bomb, but it was his girlfriend who opened it, not him. He knew that it came from me. The rest I heard tonight, together with you.”

“Why didn't you just tell the truth? You could have compen
sated Rachel Dresdener for the jewels and put an end to it all,” Alex said.

“My father made me swear to keep his secret as long as he lived.” Justus lowered his voice. “Did Gerard die in Syria?”

“Gerard is fighting for his life, but they've managed to stabilize him. The chopper must have landed in Israel by now. He killed Brunner last night in Damascus. He thought he was dying, so he told me most of the story. There was only one moment when he broke down and cried.”

“When?”

“When he spoke of you. He loves you. He was sure you were dead. It was hard to hear.”

Justus's eyes glistened. He wiped away a tear.

“The bond between us . . .” Justus took a deep breath before going on. “We are more than brothers. When I did not answer the phone, he rushed to Berlin. I know all about the body in the trunk and the grave in the forest.”

A shadow passed over Justus's face.

“I am so sorry about the Ring. It was my father's legacy to me. He created it with his own two hands, but I could not . . . so many people have died . . .”

Justus gazed at the wall of jars. His eyes were moist, but his voice was steady. “It is all gone. I am glad that my father is not here to see it.”

He attempted a smile. Suddenly he looked different, and not merely because he was not as meticulously groomed as usual.

The aura of German malevolence had faded.

Justus was now German in the same way that Jane was British. Even his German accent no longer grated on Alex's ear; the German language was no longer a badge of dishonor. Alex had heard
the phrase “the other Germany” more times than he could count. For the first time, he understood what it meant.

His body still ached from the abuse it had suffered, and he was totally drained. But strangely, his heart felt lighter. The heavy lid that had held his life in check had been lifted.

“Help me up,” Alex said.

Justus bent over and held out his arms. Alex clutched them. Clenching his teeth, he pulled himself up and immediately folded over in pain. Justus grasped him securely to keep him from falling. Alex straightened up as best he could and looked Justus in the eye. “You saved my life,” he said. “I'll never forget it.”

He threw his arms around the German. Justus returned the embrace, careful not to hurt him.

“I also came to find out who informed on the Nibelungs,” Justus said, his voice cracking. “It appears that it was me.” He shook his head sadly.

Then he went into the toilet.

Doubled up in
pain, Alex stumbled to the door of the crematorium and felt the heat. He looked through the thick glass window. Flames; a skeleton; the remains of a human body. The love of his life.

His chest rose and fell heavily. In despair, he wept silently, thinking of the days to come, of the love that wasn't to be, of the chance for happiness disappearing in a column of smoke.

From the direction of the toilet, he heard glass shatter. “
Scheisse
. . .” Justus spat from behind the closed door.

Alex took a deep breath. In a shaking voice, he asked, “Is everything all right?”

“Yes . . . I broke the mirror,” Justus answered.

The black floor was covered with a layer of pale ashes. On the screen, the Führer was shrieking behind a dais and swastikas were waving in the wind. Sepp Mauser lay dead, not far from the body of Dr. Rauch. Oskar Schlaff was sprawled next to the gas chamber, his eyes wide open.

Alex had been through several circles of hell tonight. He had looked death in the eye and made peace with it, but he was desperate to get out of this dungeon of horrors.

What was taking Justus so long?

Alex stood in front of the bathroom door. “Are you coming?”

Silence.

“Justus?”

No answer.

He banged his fist on the door.

Silence.

Alex leaned on the handle. The door was locked.

He looked down at the space between the door and the floor.

A dark pool of blood was spreading toward his feet.

In the Al-Malki district on the western outskirts of Damascus, about a mile and a half from his home, in the basement morgue of Shami Hospital, in the cadaver refrigerator, on a cold stainless-steel slab, lay the naked body of Alois Brunner.

The temperature gauge read four degrees Celsius. He had been there for a long time.

He refuses to die.

DAMASCUS, 1985

Alois Brunner, an infamous Nazi war criminal, was born on April 8, 1912. After serving as Adolf Eichmann's second-in-command, he became commandant of the Drancy internment camp near Paris. He is considered personally responsible for the deaths of 125,000 Jews.

After the war, Brunner fled, finding a safe haven in 1954 in Damascus, where he collaborated with the Mukhabarat. He resided alternately in the Hotel Dedeman and in an apartment at 7 Hadad Street in the Abu Rumaneh district.

There is no record of his death, no grave, and no tombstone.