The One Man (25 page)

No …
He opened the door and looked out again. This time no one was around.
Go.
He stepped outside and quickly shut the door. He took a look toward the work detail; no one was focused on him, only inventorying the tools and forming the line. He hugged the wall and went around the far side of the latrine, away from them, facing the wire.

He stared at the vast commotion in the yard, prisoners lining up in formations in front of their blocks.
It was suicide.
Thousands of sickly looking prisoners forming lines, raising their hands at the call.
You will never come back.
Guards shouting in their faces like vicious dogs. Like some stomach-turning nightmare out of a Bosch painting of hell. Suicide.
Do not fail us, Roosevelt had said.

Now.

“Was machst du denn?”
A voice barked sharply behind him.
What are you doing?

Every cell in Blum froze.

He turned. A burly SS corporal was staring directly at him. A heavy rope twisted with several thick knots hung menacingly at his side. “Which block are you from?” the corporal asked.

“
Zwansig,
sir.” Blum cleared his throat, averting his eyes. The report was that the Ukrainian
kapo
who oversaw Block Twenty was as human as there was in this place, meaning he wouldn't crack you in the head with his truncheon merely for the sport of it. There would have to be a reason. Blum's heart began to pound with dread. He was sure the guard would hear it inside his chest.

“Then get the fuck on back, yid! Unless you'd rather I give you a nudge…” The German raised his knotted rope. Contempt and a total disregard for humanity oozed from him like an icy, terrifying vapor.

“No, Rottenführer.” Blum nodded, contrite. “I mean yes, now. Thank you.”

“Get your dirty ass out of here!”

“Yes, sir.”

He quickly ran toward the rows of barracks, praying as he did he wouldn't feel the lash from the knotted rope strike him from behind. He knew just how arbitrary the line between life and death was here. The wrong guard, at the wrong time, one who just killed for the thrill of it or simply just to relieve the boredom, the way others might bet on the flip of a coin … And your time was up! Prisoners kept flooding into the large, staging area, guards shouting at them, beating them like angry dogs.

“Line up! Roll call. Now! On the double!”

Blum blended into the throng, melding safely into the vast numbers.

He wove through the crowd until he found a group lining up in front of a barrack.

“Dwadziescia?”
he asked someone in line in Polish.
Twenty?

The prisoner never looked at him, just nodded.
“Ja. Dwadziescia.”

Across the way, Blum spotted the work detail he had been on forming a line and being marched toward the front gate and out of the camp. He watched them filing out, not knowing if, like any of them, he would ever see the outside again.

“Line up! Everyone line up!” the guards yelled.

He muttered a few words of the prayer he had recited earlier:
Ayl molay rachamin, shochayn bam'romin.

This time it was for himself.

For he was truly in the middle of the nightmare now.

 

PART THREE

 

THIRTY-FIVE

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Colonel Bill Donovan went down the White House steps and to the black Cadillac waiting for him in the driveway.

Another black sedan pulled up just as he was about to step in. It had a blue flag with a star on the front grille signifying the vehicle of a one-star general. A junior officer in dress khakis jumped out and opened the door for his senior officer who was in the back.

“General,” Donovan said, recognizing who it was before climbing into his own car.

The Army officer climbed out and offered his hand. “Bill.”

General Leslie Groves was the military's chief overseer of the top-secret weapon program that had every top brain in the country not assigned to code breaking working for it, known as the Manhattan Project. Donovan didn't understand a word of the “science,” but what
was
clear was, with the attention it received from FDR and his war secretary, and the rumors of its vast budget and top-secret locations, that if it was successful, whatever they were conjuring up would give the Allies the decisive edge they needed to end the war.

“Got a moment, as long as we bumped into each other…?” Groves asked.

“Of course, General,” replied Donovan.

“Can we walk?” Groves said, leading the OSS chief away from the parked sedans and their drivers and onto the South Grounds.

“I suppose this isn't about the game Dutch Leonard pitched last night, is it, Leslie?” the head of the OSS asked.

Groves smiled and shook his head. “No. It's not.”

An engineer by training, Leslie Groves was a brilliant thinker with a driving personality. The concepts he was faced with understanding and evaluating, deciding between alternatives and also funding, required a Nobel Prize winner's grasp of science and a chief economist's understanding of finance. He was large, broad shouldered, and tall, with a square, solid jaw.

“That physicist we spoke of a few weeks back … Mendl…? I'm told you're mounting an effort to locate him,” the general started in.

“I believe we
have
located him,” Bill Donovan replied. “In fact, we have someone on it now.”

“And at what stage of the operation are you, if that's something you can share with me?”

Donovan looked the general in the eyes and saw how vital the man he sought was. Still, this was a top-secret operation that was under way with only a few on the inside. “What I can share is that he's there now. On site. In two days your man will either be in a transport plane on his way to D.C. or you'll have to do without him for good, I'm afraid.”

Groves nodded soberly. He pulled Donovan farther away from the cars. “We're in a race, Bill. A race to hell, some might say, but Oppy assures me this Mendl guy can save us six months.You realize what six months can mean—in the race for the supreme weapon. And in lives.”

“All I can say, General, is that I promise we're giving it our best.”

“Then that's all I can ask.” Groves checked his watch. “I'd better go. The president expects us military types to be on time. Senators and cabinet members can wander in as they please.”

“Yes, that's always the case.” The OSS chief and the Manhattan Project overseer started to head back. “Before you go, Leslie, I assume you have other research along these lines going on, simultaneously?”

“Along these lines…?”

Donovan stopped. “In this man Mendl's field.”

“Gaseous diffusion.” Groves stopped too. “It's a process. Separates uranium-238 from its lighter cousin, 235.”

Donovan shrugged. “I was never very good at chemistry, Leslie.”

“And if I knew I'd have this job I might have paid a bit more attention myself,” Groves chuckled back. “But to your question, yes, Bill, we do have other avenues being looked into. At Berkeley … and at the University of Minnesota. We're making progress. But like I said, it's a race. The Germans might have things going on as well.” They resumed their walk back toward the cars. “Why…?”

“I just wouldn't want to raise any expectations…” the OSS man stopped and looked at the general again, “on the prospects of this mission. Like I said, there's a man in the field, and his senior officer, Strauss—I think you met him once—he believes he's a good one and that there's a fighting chance of success. But to be frank, we never assigned much hope to seeing either of them sailing up the Potomac. If you know what I mean.”

“Yes, Bill.” The head of the Manhattan Project nodded soberly. “I understand perfectly what you mean.”

“A shame too, if you ask me…” Donovan opened the door to his car. “He seemed like a game young man when I met him.”

 

THIRTY-SIX

The block Blum had wormed his way into held around three hundred prisoners, two or three to a bunk.

After the outside head count he wandered inside next to weary prisoners returning from their days, emitting audible sighs and groans of exhaustion, tossing their emaciated bodies on the thin straw mattresses and nursing their blisters and sores. Blum figured there had to be some time until they could reconcile the head count with those who were newly dead.

The reek of body odor and human excrement made him hold his breath. There was every noise imaginable. Groaning, coughing, scratching, farting; others simply rambling to themselves in a kind of incoherent daze. Back in England, they'd inoculated him as best they could against the kinds of diseases that were rampant in here. Typhus. Dysentery. But the stench alone almost made him retch. And the thought of lice. He finally located a bunk with only a single person on it.

“This free?” he asked the man lying there.

“Zugangi?”
The prisoner looked at Blum with bloodshot eyes. Blum thought his accent sounded Lithuanian or Estonian.

“Sorry?”

“Novy
…?
”
the man above him clarified.
Are you new?

“Yes,” Blum answered. “Today.”

“New arrivals in the back.” The man in the bunk pointed to the rear. “Near the shit hole.”

Holding his breath against the smell, Blum kept on going. He saw another bunk with only one in it.

“Up there.” Someone pointed from underneath a bunk, directing him.

Near the very back, two prisoners were stretched out on the top bunk. One was a giant, picking at the sores on his feet, which were open and oozing pus. The other was gaunt with a pinched-in face like a ferret, with flitting, suspicious eyes. Neither moved as much as an inch to let him up.

“We've been saving it just for you,” said a man in a lower bunk who had on a flat tweed cap and appeared to be a kind of leader within the block. “The previous occupant died of fever just the other day.”

“My good luck, then,” Blum replied.

“There's a bowl.” The man in the cap pointed to one hanging from the bedpost. It was made of filthy and corroded tin, and who knew whose disease-inflicted hands had recently been on it. “If I were you I'd attach it to yourself. No bowl, no food. That's the way it goes here.”

“I will. Thanks.” Blum pulled on the slats of the wooden bunk and hoisted himself up.

“Over there.” The large man grunted inhospitably, indicating the spot closest to the open latrine. Which was basically no more than a separated-off area with a shit hole and a stool.

“Where are you from?” someone called up to him.

“Gizycko. Near Lake Sniardwy,” Blum said.

“Masuria, huh? Pretty. How did you manage to hold out so long?”

“I've been hiding on a farm.” He was told to stay as vague as possible about his new identity, as someone might be from there or know someone who could expose him. “Damn postal deliverer gave us away.”

“Postman? You can't even trust the mail these days. So what can you tell us? From the outside.”

“Not so much.” Blum didn't want to attract attention or to make himself so well known.
Still …
“Only that the war in the East is going badly. The Russians are now in Ukraine.”

“Ukraine!”
someone exclaimed joyfully.

“And in England the Allies are set to invade.”

“Invade?
Where?
” Another sat up.

“The French coast. Calais. Normandy. No one knows, of course. But soon, the BBC says. They say it's the biggest army the world's ever seen.”

“Not soon enough for us,” someone sighed from the next bed. “Let's face it, the Germans will kill every one of us before they'll let anyone see what is going on here. And if they don't, the Russians surely will. Trust me, I've seen what a pogrom looks like there.”

“We're told the trains are all full of Hungarians now,” another spoke up. “We hear them, thousands arriving every day and night. But, poof, they don't even bring them into the camp anymore. They just go up in smoke.”

“I wouldn't know about that.” Blum shrugged. Even though he knew well what Strauss had said, and from Vrba and Wetzler, that it was true. “Listen, maybe one of you can help
me
. I am trying to locate someone. I'm told my uncle is here. His name is Mendl. Alfred. He was a professor. In Lvov. Anyone know of him?”

“
Mendl…?
Don't think so,” the man in the tweed cap said. “But no one knows names in here, just faces.”

“I knew a Petr Mendl,” another spoke up. “But he was from Prague. A fishmonger, not exactly a professor. Anyway, he went up the chimney a long time ago.”

“Up the chimney?” Blum said.

He could hear a few chuckles.

“That stench outside, you didn't think that was from the chocolate factory, did you?”

More laughter.

“Or the kitchens…” someone said. “But you'll soon see, it surely tastes that way.”

“I have a photograph.” Blum removed a small, dog-eared picture of Mendl from his waistband. “Pass it around. Maybe one of you will recognize him.”

The photo traveled from bunk to bunk. One or two shook their heads, then passed it on. Another just shrugged blankly.

“Looks familiar. But not lately, anyway,” one said, handing it to the next.

“Sorry.” That one passed the photo to the bunk above him. “There's not many from Lvov here. I try not to look at faces anyway.”

“There are thousands and thousands here.” The man in the tweed cap shook his head solmenly. “And sadly the cast changes daily.”