The Children's War (99 page)

Zosia gently pushed his hand aside and gave him a massage. “Are you hungry?” she asked as she soothed the pain in his muscles.

“Yeah. I wish I had eaten something. Idiotic planning on my part.”

“Ah, but you didn’t contend with my superb organizational abilities.” With that, she continued the massage with one hand while reaching with the other into her bag. After rooting around a bit, the hand reemerged holding a wrapped sandwich.

“You are a genius!” he declared, reaching for it.

She pulled it away. “Uh-uh-uh. Not until you say I’m a superb cook as well!”

He laughed. “Have I ever said otherwise?”

“Say it!”

“Ah, but it is so obvious. The chefs of the world sing your praises! You are a culinary genius beyond compare!” He lunged for the sandwich and managed to snatch it from her grasp.

She giggled quietly.

“Look at that,” he said between bites, pointing to a line on the screen.

“What about it?”

“Well, I don’t understand the formatting. Is it a number or more general?”

“Could be anything. Is that where the program accepts the password?”

“Yeah.”

“Should we run an iterative routine?”

Peter shut his eyes and did a quick mental calculation. He shook his head. “We don’t have time.”

They fell into silence. Zosia studied the screen along with Peter, but she saw nothing of interest. She turned her attention to him as he sat mesmerized by the lines of program displayed before him. He held the last of his sandwich in his hand, near his mouth, as if preparing to take a bite, but he did not move. After a long moment she asked, “What is it?”

“I think I know what he’s doing,” he said, almost as if speaking to himself.

“Really? Can I help? What should I do?”

He did not seem to hear her. She looked back at the screen, wondering what it was he saw there.

“I need my computer,” he said suddenly. “And the data that we gave the major this morning.”

She pulled his computer out of her capacious bag and helped him set it up, next to the major’s terminal.

“Now what?” she asked. A tingle of excitement crept through her, she felt so alive!

“Give me time,” he answered, shoving the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth. “Just give me some time.”

Zosia took up a position in the armchair and waited. Her relaxed attitude quite effectively hid that she was guarding the door—her ears keenly tuned to any approaching sound, her gun and cudgel resting at the ready in her hands, on her lap. She watched Peter as she waited. She noticed how he was thoroughly engrossed in his work, how his eyes scanned back and forth between the two screens with an intensity that excluded the rest of the world. She realized as she waited, guarding the door, that she was the only one who would notice an intrusion quickly enough to prevent disaster. And she acknowledged, for the first time, that she would be devastated if something happened to him.

The strangely mixed dark and blond of his hair, the graceful way he carried himself, his wicked sense of humor, his intelligence, strength, and gentleness— these reminded her of Adam. Yet, there was so much else, so much that was different. Like Adam, yet not like him. Maybe like a ghost of Adam returned from the dead, traumatized and changed by a vision of hell. The moods, the sudden frowns of pain, the distant looks followed by his brief, elusive smile as he noticed her looking at him, the trapped look in his eyes after one of his nightmares. She wondered what he had been like before the camp, before the
Kommandant,
before the torture and beatings and slavery. Was his smile less fleeting then?

As if from a dream Peter looked up at her. “I have a password,” he said quietly. He sounded exhausted. She leapt up and came to look. On a sheet of paper he had scribbled a number. “When you type this in at the prompt, the program decodes our data file and removes the copy protection.”

“Wonderful! How’s it work?”

“This number initiates the generation of pseudorandom numbers that are used as a one-time pad for encoding and decoding the relevant document. Put in the wrong password, and you get a different number so the decoding becomes meaningless.”

“Did you try the same number for the other files?”

“No, not yet. It’s worth a try but I don’t expect it will work.” He ran the program, entered the name of a different file and the same password. As expected the resultant output was useless.

“It didn’t work,” he said, stating the obvious.

She looked at her watch, suggested that he rest a few minutes, and sat down to try various permutations of the password on a test file. Peter sat for a moment, listened as Zosia swore quietly every time the screen filled with gibberish. Then he began pacing the room again. One matched set. They had one matched set. A file name, written as a number, and a password—also a number. He mentally toyed with the pair, trying to match letters to the numbers to see if he could invent appropriate words. None of his naive attempts worked. He continued roaming the room. One matched set. How could one generalize anything from
that? He returned to the desk and started unlocking the drawers and rummaging through them.

“What are you doing?” Zosia asked as he shuffled through papers.

“Looking for a list. If there’s no mnemonic, then there must be a list.”

“Fair enough. But the major might not keep it here.”

“Well, if he doesn’t, then we’re screwed. Any luck?”

“You would have heard.” Zosia turned her attention back to the screen and tried to ignore Peter poking around underfoot as he struggled to open the lock that held the bottom drawer shut. Suddenly he managed to pull it open with a loud clang. She winced and glanced at the door. Was the guard near enough to hear that? They both froze, waiting, but there was no sound outside.

Peter sighed miserably. Other than for a broken pencil, the drawer was empty.

“Maybe he didn’t use it because the lock was broken,” Zosia suggested humorously.

“Probably. Well, we can always charge him for fixing his desk.” Peter rose to his feet, paced the room some more, and stopped in front of the bookshelf. “Zosia, remind me. What did the major talk about at dinner?”

“Himself,” Zosia answered sarcastically. She stopped her futile attempts at the keyboard and, pursing her lips, added, somewhat more helpfully, “Dogs, horses, politics, music . . .”

“Not music,” Peter corrected, “musical instruments.”

“Ah, yes, the domineering father who pushed him into the military and cut short his brilliant career in . . . What are you doing?” Zosia asked as Peter suddenly moved forward and scaled the bookshelf. He stood with his head above the top shelf and peered downward.

“Looking for dust. Or rather, the lack of it.” He climbed back down and pulled out two books.

“What’s up?”

He turned to her, holding a book in each hand. His smile was so triumphant, she grinned in response, not even knowing why she was so happy.

“What do you have?” she asked.

“An acoustics book and math tables,” he said with a laugh. “Our poor major couldn’t bear not leaving his signature on his masterpiece.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The solutions to the equations in this book”—he shook the acoustics book—“are tabulated in a book like this.” He waved the math tables. “Get it? Something the major is keenly interested in, translated into a nice series of random-looking, but well-matched numbers.”

“His list of passwords,” Zosia sighed. She eyed the large tome Peter was holdingand said, “I don’t want to sound discouraging, but even if you are right, will we have time to work through all the possibilities in that book? How many pages are there?”

“Twelve hundred,” Peter answered as he flipped to the back of the book.

“Even with a computer, that’s a lot of trial and error. We have a shitload of files to check out, and we really don’t have much time left.”

“I’ll do it faster than trial and error,” he assured her, as he sat down in the armchair. “The sorts of equations you use for dealing with musical instruments will narrow down which tables to look at—and when I find a pair that matches our password and its file, then we’ll have the list. I guarantee it.”

Zosia bit her lip, worried by his confidence, but within fifteen minutes, he proudly presented her with a page of the book. “Try it,” he said. “Match the fourth, fifth, and sixth digit of the file name to this column, and the password is here, backwards, in this column.”

Zosia grimaced, selected one of the file names off the computer, matched the name to the appropriate password, entered both into the decoding program, and waited.

Results spilled out on the screen. Fertility data for sheep in Denmark before and after treatment.

Zosia stared at the screen, utterly stunned. “You did it!” she whispered. “You did it!”

“Is there a file zero zero zero?”

“No, unfortunately the numbers don’t seem to be sequential. Files older than ours have higher numbers. And lots of numbers are missing.”

“Damn. That means we’ve got to examine each one by hand until we find the most useful information.”

“I’m afraid so. I’ll start by looking at size and date, and maybe we can pick out the most relevant stuff that way. Why don’t you guard the door,” she said, pushing her gun and cudgel in his direction.

It took Zosia ages to work her way through the files, and still she found nothing-of significance. He tried to relieve her from the tedious work, but his were failing him, and they quickly gave up on that idea. So instead he sat guarding the door, listening to the sound of the sentry’s footsteps—more a thud than a click from this one—as they came and went back and forth, again and again.

Zosia continued her scanning and copied several relevant files. He glanced at the clock; they did not have much more time. To have come this far and leave essentially empty-handed! He sighed.

“Don’t sigh, boychick, I’ve found what we need.”

“You have?”

“Yes, I’ve been quietly copying it for the last five minutes.”

“Oh, thank God!”

“Or whomever,” she teased, reminding him of his own favorite reply to her constant use of that phrase.

A short while later she stood up and groaned. She pressed the lid of his computer shut and shut down the major’s terminal. “Done,” she announced, her voice hoarse with fatigue. “I suppose if the major is really observant, he’ll note that somebody was using his computer, but somehow, he doesn’t strike me as the
observant type. Anyway, they’ll work it out soon enough when the adjutant turns up missing.”

They reorganized the desk, checked that the furniture and the books and everything else was exactly as they had found it, then slipped out of the office and back upstairs. Entering their room quietly, they greeted Tadek silently as he emerged from the shadows, nodding to him to let him know that all had gone well. He sat down on the sofa and let out a loud sigh of relief.

29

Z
OSIA WAS UTTERLY
exhausted from the long hours she had spent inspecting the files and the constant fear of discovery; without saying anything at all, she used the toilet, then returned to the room to slip out of all her evening clothes. Both Tadek and Peter found themselves turning away uneasily so that each would not see the other looking at her. She seemed oblivious to both of them; after a lifetime of enforced closeness in the encampment, it had not even occurred to her to seek privacy.

Tadek gave Peter an unreadable look, removed his clothes—he also had not changed out of the uniform he had worn the previous evening—and slid into the luxurious double bed next to Zosia. Though Zosia’s soft breathing told them both she was already asleep, Tadek rolled next to her and wrapped his arm around her to keep her warm and safe.

Peter grimaced. Leave it to the major to have rooms furnished, somewhat unusually, with double beds. And of course, since Tadek and Zosia were playing the role of husband and wife, what would be more natural than the two of them snuggling together in the same bed? Without bothering to undress—what was the point, he’d be wearing the same thing in an hour—Peter lay across his cot and stared at the ceiling. They had placed his cot near the door, out of sight of the bed, but he could still hear the two of them breathing deeply. He was tired, but sleep eluded him. Finally, he got up and went and sat on the sofa. From there, he could watch Tadek and Zosia sleeping and could torment himself with his jealousy more effectively.

After about an hour or so, he got up from the couch and went to splash some water on his face and shave; then he went over to the bed to wake them both up. He knew they would want to be dressed and ready to leave as soon as possible after breakfast, but somehow, as he watched the covers rise and fall with their breathing, he found himself unable to disturb them. As he stood there watching, Tadek opened his eyes and looked accusingly up at him.

“What are you doing?”

“I was just coming to wake you up,
mein Herr.
Breakfast will be here soon.”

“Oh, all right.” Tadek nudged Zosia. “Time to get up, darling.”

She rolled over and mumbled something incoherent. Finally her eyes fluttered open and she looked at Tadek. “What is it?” she asked sleepily.

“Time to get up,
gnädige Frau,”
Peter said flatly, and walked away to get her robe. He dropped it on the bed wordlessly and went to stand with his back to them by the window. He felt embarrassed by his churlishness and wondered at the intensity of his feelings. He remembered the first night he had spent with Zosia—how she had fallen asleep on his shoulder, and he remembered Tadek’s bitter words of reproof. Now he felt like saying something similar, but recognized immediately not only that his words would have no effect, but that they would be unfair as well. Zosia was Zosia, raised in a strange mixture of secrecy and intensely close community, she had no qualms about such things and would never understand either his or Tadek’s jealousy. He would at least not make Tadek’s mistake of possessiveness. If he loved her, it was his problem to deal with her openness and lack of inhibition, not hers.

As Zosia and Tadek dressed, he packed the bags in silence, carefully placing his computer and their equipment in Tadek’s briefcase and locking it. The late winter dawn finally approached. The sky turned a soft gray, the birds began to sing, and then slowly, the edge of pink marched upward from the east and lit the room with a rosy glow. Zosia and Tadek finished dressing and sat on the sofa, talking in a desultory manner. Peter, of course, did not join in; he was more nervous than the other two, and he paced uneasily from one window to the other as if looking for something or someone to arrive. He watched as the clouds gathered on the horizon, obliterating the feeble sunrise with their threat of yet more rain. The thought kept running through his mind: just a few more hours, just a few more hours. There was breakfast, a short meeting between Tadek and the major, the drive to Neu Sandez, and then he could be rid of his uniform and manacle and . . . He had almost added his numbers to the mental list, but those, he reflected sadly, would remain.

A soft knock announced the arrival of their breakfast. As with the previous mornings, it would consist of two hearty trays of food: sausages, ham, cheese, and liver paste; fresh rolls and butter and jams, fruit and yogurt—more than many families would eat in a day. There would be a pitcher of juice with two glasses and a pot of steaming coffee, cream, sugar, and two cups with saucers.

The first morning the breakfast had arrived, Tadek and Zosia looked momentarily perplexed by the service. There was clearly enough food for three, so why only two of everything? Peter had smiled to himself as he reached under the trolley and, with a flourish, produced the small tin of food from the second shelf: stale bread and some hard cheese, moldy around the edges. He had made a point of emptying the tin—to leave the food might raise difficult questions—before he joined the other two in indulging in the bounteous breakfast.

He opened the door, expecting the same sullen orderly who had brought the food on the previous mornings. Instead, he was greeted by three officers: one was
the major, the other two he did not recognize, but they were wearing police uniforms—one a captain, the other a lieutenant. Peter stepped back as the major pointed in his direction and said, “That’s him.”

“What’s going on here?” Tadek demanded.

The lieutenant grabbed Peter and pulled his arms behind him, fixing them there with handcuffs even as the major explained, “There’s been a theft. I’m afraid your boy here is under arrest.” He sounded somewhat apologetic.

“A theft? What’s missing?” Zosia asked, and wondered at the same time why a captain and a lieutenant were investigating. It seemed like overkill.

“Some silverware,
gnädige Frau,”
the major answered before his companion could shush him. The captain mumbled something to the major and then he added, “I’m afraid I can’t give more details without compromising the investigation. I’m afraid your boy is the prime suspect.”

“Nonsense!” Zosia snapped.“He hasn’t stolen anything!”

“We can’t be sure of that until we have finished our investigations,
gnädige Frau,”
the captain assured her, leering in such a manner that Zosia instinctively glanced down at her blouse to make sure that all the buttons were fastened. “We have to take him in for questioning.”

“You can’t do that!” Tadek blurted. In answer to the questioning looks, he added,“He’s our driver, we need him to get home today. We must leave immediately—I have work that must be done.”

“We’ll provide you with another driver.”

“Then he won’t be able to get home,” Tadek insisted.

“If he is found innocent, we’ll transport him to your address. If not . . .” The captain shrugged. “If not, I suppose the authorities will provide you with a replacement.”

Zosia eyed Peter. He hadn’t in any way resisted having his hands bound, and now, keeping his head lowered, he glanced from one speaker to the other as if casually watching a play in which he himself was not involved. There was something in his expression, but what was it? She remembered his manic pacing and the way he had kept checking the windows and wondered if he had expected this. Had they been set up? Had he managed to contact someone in Berlin after all? She bit her thumbnail nervously and turned her focus back to the argument as Tadek was saying, “. . . there was no time for that, he’s been with us!”

“But he was seen out of your presence at least once! Remember, he was discovered wandering around lost,” the major pointed out.

Tadek hesitated before continuing, “Well, yes, but that was a very short time.”

“And there are so many other people in this building! How do you know none of them did it, knowing that our boy would automatically be blamed?” Zosia added.

“They are all officers in the
Wehrmacht
or guests of the major,
gnädige Frau.
Surely you are not suggesting that they would indulge in such behavior?” the captain asked.

“All things are possible. We are, after all, only superhuman,” Zosia retorted slyly.

“With all due respect,
gnädige Frau,
we really have only one suspect, and it is your servant. I know it will be a hardship to do without him, but I’m sure he will be replaced eventually. You don’t want to make the job of the police difficult now, do you?” the captain said snidely.

With a sudden shock, Zosia guessed it might well be a setup, but not the one she had initially suspected. The captain was eyeing Peter not as a suspect nor as a comrade who needed to be freed and debriefed, but as an acquisition.
They wanted him!
He had to be worth a small fortune in bribes and deals. The Móller’s well-trained and trusted servant would simply disappear into the criminal justice system only to reemerge the property of some other wealthy and connected individual. With a palpable horror, Zosia realized that it may have been her zealous comments to Frau Rattenhuber that had initiated their current situation.

Her thoughts followed several tracks simultaneously. If Peter was their agent, letting them take him would mean the death of everyone she loved and the destruction of all they had fought for, and he could not be allowed to leave the room alive. Similarly, if there had been a theft, he would be trapped in a prison, vulnerable to interrogation and might possibly betray them all, and again, the risk was too great to accept. But if the entire charade was nothing more than a hastily constructed abduction, then there was hope, for what the policemen were doing was illegal, and a sufficiently obstinate Frau Móller could well fend them off. Zosia weighed the evidence and her intuition and made her decision.

She turned to Tadek. “Darling, you really do have a lot to do. Why don’t you
get away
now. Take the car; I’ll stay here and make sure that things are sorted out. We’ll take the train later, I’m sure that won’t be too inconvenient.”

Tadek stared at her helplessly. He looked at Peter, at the briefcase, at Zosia again. Carefully he said, “Are you sure that’s wise?”

“Yes,” Zosia replied with delicate precision, her tone conveying that it was not only her choice, it was an order.

Reluctantly he agreed to her plan. “All right.” He turned to the major. “I’m afraid, Major, we should finish our business and I’ll have to leave.”

“But of course.”

Tadek turned to the captain, said without preamble, “We are not without our own connections, Captain. I’m sure the boy is innocent, and I’m sure it’d be in your best interests to ascertain that
immediately.”
He turned away before the captain could reply and approached Peter to say, “Don’t worry, lad, I’m sure these men will soon realize their mistake. I’ll see you soon.” He turned to Zosia and paused. She could see the tears glistening in the corners of his eyes as he struggled to control his fear for her. His mouth moved but no words emerged.

“I’ll see you back at home,” she assured him, but her words were empty.

“Auf Wiedersehen,”
Tadek said, his voice quavering on that simple phrase. He kissed Zosia and, then casually picking up his briefcase, left the room with the major.

As the door shut behind them, Zosia, knowing that everything incriminating had left the room with Tadek, said, “Now, gentlemen, I know it is somewhat unconventional for me to suggest this, but perhaps we should look for some evidence of guilt or innocence? I propose that you search my servant and see if you can find this missing silverware. If not, then I think we have proof that you have the wrong man.”

The two men looked at each other, somewhat taken aback by her boldness. Eventually the captain nodded, and the lieutenant went over to Peter and frisked him carefully. After that they searched the baggage. When they still found nothing, they painstakingly searched the entire room, suggesting to Zosia that she retreat to the dining room for breakfast and return later since the search would be tedious. She, however, declined the invitation.