The Old Boys (47 page)

One sunny day in the late summer of 1940, Heydrich came for
Lori when she was riding in the park. “He usually sent his men to do this, but on this day he came in person. He was in full uniform.”

One of his men led her horse back to the stable. Lori got into Heydrich’s parked car, a long Gestapo-black Daimler.

“There were lots of people about,” Lori said. “Men walking to work, women holding small children by the hand, Gestapo men who worked as lookouts and eavesdroppers for Heydrich.”

Heydrich was excited. In the backseat of the car, Heydrich peeled off one of Lori’s riding gloves and kissed her hand.

“He said, ‘Today we do something different. I want you to select a passerby. A man. A youngish healthy man, about your husband’s age. He must be tall. Anyone will do as long as he is tall.’ Heydrich loved to play games; you never knew what might be next, and he was capable of anything. I tried to pull my hand away, but he held on. I said, ‘No.’”

“ ‘As you wish, my dear,’ Heydrich said. ‘I already have under arrest a tall man who fits the type.’ He meant my husband. On days when he abducted me he always had Hubbard, and very often Paul, too, brought to Gestapo headquarters for questioning. This gave him hostages as well as the assurance that my husband would never burst in upon us. I didn’t know what he had in mind, apart from the fact that I knew it would be something barbaric, but I made the choice Heydrich knew I must make. I pointed to the first tall man who came along. He was a thin fellow, well dressed, a lawyer, perhaps. He wore a gold watch chain and a gold signet ring, but no wedding ring. He read a folded newspaper as he walked. Heydrich raised his hand; the gesture was enough to send anyone in Germany to his death. Two of Heydrich’s men, waiting on the sidewalk, seized the tall thin man and hustled him into the back of another black car. His watch fell out of his waistcoat pocket and swung on its chain, knocking against the metal of the car. Dozens of people watched this happen. They all looked away.”

Heydrich’s car took him and Lori to his hunting lodge.

“It was a lovely day, unusually bright and balmy for Berlin,”
Lori said. “Lunch was served in the garden and then Heydrich asked me to play the piano—he adored good music, but in the middle of the day he liked operetta tunes, pretty Lehár melodies; he loved ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz.’”

After she finished playing, Heydrich said, “Come, dear lady. We have some special music today.”

They descended into the cellar of the hunting lodge and walked along a corridor so long and low that Lori realized it must be a tunnel. One of Heydrich’s men went ahead and opened a series of doors for them while another followed behind and closed them. Lori found herself looking through a one-way mirror into a brightly lighted room next door. The tall thin man was strapped naked to a table. He was being tortured. His screams were very loud.

“I turned my back and put my hands over my ears—a foolish thing to do because it showed Heydrich his power over me. He said, ‘Does the outcry offend you? I’m very sorry.’

“Heydrich imagined that he had beautiful manners. He rapped on the glass and on the other side of the window one of the torturers injected something into the man’s tongue from a large hypodermic syringe.

“‘Novocain,’ Heydrich said. ‘He won’t disturb you much longer with his noise.’ The torturers went back to work.

“Heydrich watched through the glass as though he was showing me a delightful sight, fit for the eyes of innocent children. What he was telling me, obviously, was that the man writhing on the table could just as easily be my husband or my son. In a tender voice, he then said, ‘And now for my news. I have found a way for us to be happy together.’

“And then he gave me my instructions. That very evening, after my husband and my son came home from Gestapo headquarters, I must tell them that we must all three of us escape from Germany at the earliest possible moment. Two days from now, Hubbard, Paul and I would take a certain train to the French frontier. Our seats had already been reserved, the tickets had already been purchased. At the frontier I would be arrested by the Gestapo—or so
it would appear to Hubbard and Paul. I would be escorted back to Berlin. Hubbard and Paul would be sent on across the border into France. This was Heydrich’s gift to me. There they would be safe, but also quarantined. Neither would ever be permitted to reenter the Reich. Nor would I ever be permitted to leave.

“‘My men will make certain that the arrest looks authentic,’ Heydrich said. ‘Your husband will never suspect the truth of our little plan, and you and I will be together forever.’

“So it was pretty much as you may already have imagined it,” she said. “I made a deal with Reinhard Heydrich. A simple swap. Myself for my family. Not just Paul and Hubbard. My entire family. Everyone.”

Zarah said, “Even so, how could you do it?”

“It was already too late to do anything else,” Lori said. “I was like Germany. Nothing that I had ever been before this experience and nothing that I could ever be after it was over counted for anything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You must be the only person in the world who doesn’t. In twelve short years the Nazis lobotomized Goethe, Beethoven, Luther, Kant, Kepler and several hundred other Germans who were inventors of civilization from the mind of mankind. All that remained was the horror. The same transformation happened to me, and to others. So I made the choice I made.”

“I would have killed myself,” Zarah said.

“Me, too,” Lori said. “But first I had to kill Heydrich.”

The opportunity did not present itself until two years later, after Heydrich had taken her to Prague.

Lori said, “The contact was a child, a girl of nine or ten, who befriended me in a park in the Lesser City. I was allowed to walk and take the air for an hour or two every other day. Heydrich said he was worried about my safety, so I was always accompanied by one of the Gestapo women who passed as my maids but were really my keepers. The little girl wasn’t always in the park, but when she was, she and I played with dolls together on a bench—the usual tea parties and dress-up games. Her name was Liesl. She called me by my name, Hannelore. I enjoyed it; it diverted the mind. Everywhere you looked everything was in ashes, but little girls still played with dolls. Then the child began to pass messages to me. At first I didn’t understand. She did it as part of the I-say-then-you-say make-believe conversation between the dolls. Nothing was ever in writing. The dolls were called Liesl and Hannelore. At the second meeting the child began delivering messages: ‘Liesl says, Hannelore, we want to kill the evil man. Hannelore says, I will help you, Liesl.’

“But I would not say it. It was so diabolical, using a child as an agent provocateur, that I thought that Heydrich must surely be behind it. The child spoke German as if she had learned it from educated parents and she had a German nanny, a tall, athletic,
handsome woman with a Viennese accent. My Gestapo maid talked to the nanny while I played dolls with the little girl. This child was the only person I knew in Prague apart from Heydrich and my keepers. It was plain to see that the maid and the nanny enjoyed each other’s company even more than the child and I liked being with each other, but for quite different reasons.”

At first Lori pretended not to understand what the child was saying to her. She regarded the episode as some sort of demented test of what Heydrich called their love, especially since her maid always led her straight to the nanny and child, as if to an assignation. By now the maid and the nanny were holding hands, whispering, giggling. The child continued to deliver messages: “Liesl says, Please tell me you understand my messages; Hannelore says, I do understand and I want to help.”

“Gradually I began to regard what was happening as an opportunity for escape,” Lori said. “If I betrayed Heydrich and he found out about it, he would either kill me outright or, far more likely, send me to a camp to die. Both alternatives were acceptable. In either case I would be free of him, so I decided to play the game. One afternoon when Liesl and I were playing dolls and the maid and the nanny were walking back and forth in front of the bench arm in arm, heads close together as they whispered to each other, I made a move. I said, ‘Hannelore says, I will help you. But Liesl must tell me how.’ The child said, ‘Liesl says, Hannelore must say where he is going to be outdoors and at what time.’

“It was some time before I had the necessary information. Heydrich was close-mouthed about his public appearances, but I overheard a lot because he visited me almost every day and talked over the telephone to his aides. By eavesdropping I learned that he was going to be in a certain place at a certain time two days hence. The next day, I met the child and gave her the information. The child said, ‘Thank you. Liesl says, We will come for you at that same hour. Be ready
.
’

“On stroke of the hour at which Heydrich was assassinated by gunmen while riding in his car, the nanny turned up, alone, at my
apartment,” Lori said. “She said it was her day off. She was a big, strapping girl with a very sweet face. The maid was delighted to see her. They kissed—I was watching through a crack in the door—and immediately went into a bedroom together.”

Moments later the nanny emerged from the bedroom with a silenced pistol in her hand and shot the other maid through the forehead. She then opened a book in Heydrich’s study, found a key inside, and opened a trunk-size strongbox filled with jewels, gold coins, and reichsmarks. She loaded some of the jewels and gold coins into the pockets of her coat, the rest into two handbags. She handed one of these to Lori: “Carry this.” The Amphora Scroll was also in the trunk. Lori took it. Holding a forefinger to her lips for silence, the nanny opened the door into the outer hall. When the Gestapo man on duty in the hallway turned around with a smile, the nanny shot him dead also, caught his dead body as it fell, and dragged it inside the apartment.

“Not a word had been spoken,” Lori said. “But now, in a whisper, the nanny said, ‘Liesl says, Put on your coat and follow me.’”

The nanny led Lori to a streetcar stop. They got on the next streetcar. There were German soldiers in uniform on board. They stared at Lori and the nanny, but got off without making an approach. Two stops later, the nanny said, “I leave you here. Get off at the next stop. Follow a man wearing a green scarf. You will need this.”

Lori said,
“This
was the handbag she had told me to carry, weighed down with gold coins and paper reichsmarks.”

At the next stop Lori got off and followed the man as instructed into an apartment building. He left her alone in an empty flat.

“Like the nanny, he was silent,” Lori said. “Inside the apartment he said, ‘I will come for you in a few days. Don’t leave fingerprints. Don’t go near the windows. Don’t make noise. There is food in the kitchen.’ He left and locked me inside. It seemed quite possible that I had exchanged one prison for another, one madman for another. But a week later, after dark, the man in the green scarf let himself in with the key.”

He
took her to another empty apartment at the edge of the city. After that she was passed from empty safe house to empty safe house until she was close enough to the Hungarian frontier to walk across.

“And the rest you have found out for yourself,” Lori said. “Or so Zarah tells me. Hungary, Palestine, Norman Schwarz, my life in the mountains.”

“Not everything,” I said. “Why Kyrgyzstan?”

It was too dark to see Lori’s face, but when she answered her voice was as faint as Paul’s; I had to strain to hear her. Tarik gave her a sip of vodka and her voice came back, but even hoarser than before.

“Heydrich may have been dead,” she said. “But his men lived on. I had done something to be punished for no matter how long this took, and besides, I had the Amphora Scroll; I had stolen their gold. If I went back to Hubbard—and how could I?—they would hunt me down eventually and kill him and everybody else I loved. In the library at the country house in Hungary I found an old journal written by a dead member of the Bathory family. It described a trip he had made to Kyrgyzstan, described the people and the language. There were maps. He had gone in through Afghanistan. I memorized the list of Kyrgyz words in the diary, copied the maps, waited for the war to end.”

I said, “You realized that Kyrgyzstan was part of the Soviet Union and what that meant, especially to a German in 1945?”

“Of course, but that was its charm.” Lori said. “It was the most inaccessible place in the world for a Nazi, the last place even Heydrich’s men would or could go.”

Nevertheless Lori had never believed that she was safe. Not while Heydrich’s men lived, not while she had the Amphora Scroll and they knew she had it, because who else but Lori would have known enough about it to steal it?

“That was why she ran to Xinjiang when she heard that an elderly foreigner who claimed to be her son was looking for her,” Paul said. “She thought it must be one of Heydrich’s men. She had never imagined me as an old man.”

“But
you followed her.”

“With Tarik’s help, yes,” Paul said.