The Sleepwalkers (27 page)

“If we’re not back in ten minutes,” he ordered, “find us.”

He and Geiger climbed the enclosed stairwell to the top. The place was silent. Strangely peaceful. An icy breeze swirled through the air. They could smell the river, just as Kirkbride had planned. Willi didn’t know what to expect on the far side of the door marked
Three,
but what they found was crumbling plaster. Rotting walls. No renovation at all.
Two
was the same. The Institute for Racial Hygiene was still just a ground-floor operation.

Pushing the door open to
One,
his mood brightened at the sight of new floor tiling. Freshly painted walls. What pains it had taken to find this place! He was about to step in but Geiger yanked him back. “Willi . . . He pointed. Their shoes were filthy from the tunnel. There wasn’t any way to clean them. What choice did they have but to kick them off and explore the dark hallway in their stocking feet.

They moved swiftly. Silently. Flashlights to the ground. The freezing floor seeped into their soles. Willi kept one hand free,
ready to grab his pistol. But the hallway was blessedly empty. The first door they came to was clearly marked—
Operating Room
. As they slipped inside, their flashlights illuminated not one or two, but what had to have been a dozen operating tables. The whole place overflowed with medical equipment, cabinets of brand-new scalpels, drills, shiny sets of knives. In an astonished whisper Geiger stammered, “There’s not a hospital in Germany with a setup like this.”

The next door they came to was
Radiology.
Geiger had also never seen anything like it. X-ray after X-ray machine bizarrely arranged in sets, one facing the other. In between each, a weird wooden harness with long leather straps. It took some time before Willi realized these had to be for holding people.

“This can’t be,” Geiger rasped. “Simultaneous anterior and posterior radiation? But it’s too much. It would burn a person. Kill them probably, horribly.”

But then came the third door. The third room.

The sign simply read
Specimens.

Inside were dozens of cabinets laden with small, liquid-filled jars. A closer look revealed that these jars contained floating objects. An even closer look revealed that these objects were organs.

Human organs.

Meticulously categorized and numbered.

OVARIES—32:

Serb—12. Russian—14. Czechoslovak—16.

TESTICLES—16:

Greek—8. Romanian—4. Spanish—4.

BRAINS—89:

Mentally Deficient—42. Delusional—34. Schizophrenic—13.

Willi braced himself against a filing cabinet. It was worse than anything he’d seen in the war. Far worse. He couldn’t look
at it. Turning away, his whole face broke into a cold sweat. His stomach cramped. He had to concentrate not to throw up. To keep calm, he cast his eyes to the floor and tried regulating his breathing. He was doing okay until he caught sight of an open drawer . . . the files inside . . .

—The Effects of Radiation on Greek Reproductive Organs
—Unique Characteristics of Dwarf Testicles

Severe tingling gripped his limbs. A distinct sensation he was having a dream. That this could not be real. That he was sleepwalking and ought to go back to bed. But reality reflected in Geiger’s eyes.

They backed away, flying as if from a house of horrors.

Stumbling next door, they found themselves in some kind of clubroom for the doctors, wood paneled with large leather chairs, a gas stove, late-edition papers. They froze. Somebody was coming in through the outside door! Pressing themselves against the wall, they realized it was the guards.

“Why should I, when there are nice warm toilets in here?” one was saying.

They were in the lobby . . . outside the clubroom door. The toilets were across the hall.

“You know what those fat cats got yesterday? Fresh coffee. Let’s sneak a pot. They won’t notice. A few tablespoons.”

Willi clasped the pistol, his eyes glued to the floor. His sock had a hole, his big toe sticking all the way out. No coffee, he prayed. Don’t come in for coffee.

“You know what Huber got when they discovered he’d been helping himself to doctors’ goodies, eh? Ten lashes. Not for me. Toilets, then back to the doghouse, that’s what I say.”

One whistled gaily while the other closed the bathroom door.

“Tomorrow.” The whistling stopped. “Transport, ten a.m. Gonna be hell. The biggest batch yet.”

Transport? Willi wondered, wiping sweat from his face.

The other yelled back from behind the door. “If they weren’t so cheap, they’d get a few more men out here.” He farted loudly. “A dozen only—to handle ninety-five?”

A dozen, Willi thought. Could that be all the guards they had?

“As long as we’re the ones with the machine guns.”

Ninety-five? Who were these people?

“Except half those screwballs from the asylum don’t even know what a machine gun is.”

The toilet flushed.

The guards went back to their “doghouse” without coffee.

Willi and Geiger were so desperate to escape they nearly forgot their shoes in the stairwell. Downstairs they drove the others ahead of them back into the tunnel. Hurrying through the dark, hot underground Willi shivered with horror. Each step another spasm of realization tore through him. That transit order Gunther had shown him weeks ago . . . for “Special Handling.” Now he understood. Gustave’s sleepwalkers were only just the icing on this cake. The foreign blood. But Sachsenhausen was being filled with German mental patients, kidnapped from local asylums. That’s what “Special Handling” meant—slated for experimentation. For sterilization by radiation. For removal of testicles, ovaries, brains. Had there ever been such a scheme in human history?

Back outside he couldn’t get enough oxygen. He kept coughing, gasping, wheezing for air. The others wanted to know what they’d seen, but neither he nor Geiger could speak. Were there words to describe what these doctors, these scientists, were doing up there?

Who were the lunatics in this asylum?

Lutz held up his two-fingered hand. “Listen!”

There was music on the frigid breeze, drunken singing.

A couple of hundred yards away, Willi knew, were a group of
cottages once used for staff housing. The SS must have fixed one up for their own. Down a gravel path, sure enough, they came upon five little bungalows in a semicircle. One had lights blazing from every window. A phonograph record was blasting inside.

Crouching in the high grass, through binoculars they could see men in there. Some were in the living room guzzling schnapps. Upstairs, one was dancing by himself, knocking things over. Another sat in the kitchen weeping tragically, as if the record were too sad to bear. Guard duty at Sachsenhausen certainly took its toll, Willi saw.

Then abruptly the record ended, and a moment of total silence followed. Which is when he heard it. Not from that house, but the one next door.

A distinct moaning.

It was dark, not a glimmer of light. Silent except for the strange whimpers. They seemed to be emanating from the basement. At first Willi thought it might be an injured animal, but as they crept nearer, there was little doubt. The sounds were from a human larynx. And not just one. The basement window was open, but solidly barred with iron mesh. Inside was pitch-black. They didn’t dare shine a light through. Fritz motioned skyward, suggesting they wait for one of the periodic cloud breaks, so they backed off and sat there in the dark.

How many times had they waited like this? Willi wondered. For clouds to break. For troops to move. For an attack to commence. Fritz stuck a cigarette between his lips without lighting it. How familiar that taut, patient expression in his eyes. How extraordinary that they should find themselves once more in such an ominous pause between acts. Barely daring to breathe.

Then the cloud curtain drew apart. From high above, a billion distant galaxies cast a platinum sheen on the world.

Fritz and Willi peered through the wire mesh.

Silhouettes took shape in the basement below. Two of them. Upright.

Women. Very young. Very large breasted.

Completely naked.

Willi’s throat burned when he realized they were bolted to the wall, their arms high above their heads, their bodies hanging limply. Their eyes rolled and they were moaning in tandem. In harmony almost. Across from them stood a bed, its rumpled sheets filthy with bloodstains. Shackles hung from its posts like in a medieval torture chamber. He yanked away, fending off another wave of nausea, trying to comprehend this.

The guards needed distraction. Sure. Their duties were odious. They’d plucked a few girls out for fun. Soldiers had done this since time immemorial. But keeping them chained to a wall, half-dead . . . why? Was their pleasure heightened by this . . . by suffering? To what degree of barbaric insanity had these men descended? In terms of sheer sadism, sheer calculated cruelty, nothing he’d seen in the Great War could compare to what was on this island.

The others took turns looking. Electric bolts of outrage shot between them. Willi had to restrain them from breaking in to free the poor creatures. It would jeopardize the mission. This had to be done right or the madness would only metastasize. God knew how many others were being tortured out here.

He forced them onward, sticking to the planned route. The trees disappeared and the landscape opened into great plains of weeds. Willi knew this part of the island had once been the agricultural zone. Almost all the food the inmates at Oranienburg consumed they’d cultivated themselves. He’d seen photos of the wheat fields and melon patches, the huge vegetable gardens. Sheep and cattle had grazed in these meadows. There’d been barns for horses and modern milking facilities. Where were they now? And where were the rest of the prisoners they had out here? An appalling thought occurred to him—not, God forbid, in those graves we saw earlier.

And that stench? He sure as hell hadn’t imagined it. Whatever its source, it had to be in the direction they were heading. But every step brought them nearer to the end of the island. In
another mile or so they’d be back at the footbridge to the Island of the Dead. The cloud cover at least seemed to have broken apart. The bright half moon now lit their way. Through the tangles of dead vines and high grasses they came upon the ruins of a chicken coop. A burned-out barn. The foundations of a greenhouse, sheets of broken glass still strewn around. Then like a blast from the depths of hell itself—it hit them. Worse than dead flesh. The most disgusting smell ever to reach their nostrils.

All of them staggered, coughing, gagging, clutching at their throats as if stricken with mustard gas. Willi felt he might actually pass out if not for a cross breeze off the channel. Every foot forward, the stench grew more revolting, until finally there was no doubt about its source. A series of long wooden sheds before them, now clearly visible in the moonlight.

For a second Willi had to mentally sort through all the old photos he’d examined until he realized what this place had been . . . the pig farm. Oranienburg had been famous for its cured hams and pork. They’d had a whole city of pigs out here. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Now, the ramshackle buildings were completely encircled with double rows of barbed wire. A sign above a locked gate read
Quarantine!
The odor was so bad that Lutz began puking.

Collapsing weakly onto the ground, gasping to take in air from the channel side, they waited while Richter cut the wire. When he was done, they summoned the last of their energy and crept inside. Through the cracked windows bright moonlight clearly illuminated the pig hut. Three tiers of plain plank bunks stretched its full length. Crammed into every square inch of these were human beings. There had to be a hundred of them, men to the left, women to the right, stacked against each other like cords of wood, all dressed in the same asylum smocks the Mermaid had been found in. Every head shaved. The longer Willi looked, the clearer it became they had all been . . . experimented on. Some had huge scars across their torsos, or hideous festering burns. Others had bizarre rashes in perfect geometric
patches, as if they’d been intentionally infected. At the foot of each bunk was a clipboard. Geiger confirmed these were medical charts.

Most seemed asleep, or dead already. A few huddled around a wood-burning stove in the center aisle. Among them Willi noticed three skeletal women, one hanging on a pair of makeshift crutches, the others heaped on a lower bunk. All had Mermaid legs, like Gina Mancuso. Reversed! With a jolt of horror he recognized one. The great dark eyes filled with such pride and superiority before she was hypnotized on Gustave’s yacht were now completely blank. The Greek countess, Melina von Auerlicht. A few bunks farther . . . two tiny ladies examining their breasts—the Hungarian dwarfs. But why were they on the men’s side? In a flash he recalled those jars with the little floating things and the file marked
Unique Characteristics of Dwarf Testicles,
and clutching himself with grim comprehension, he let out a groan.

Three days later he was on a train to Paris.

He’d managed to sleep most of the way, but when his eyes opened, the memories rushed back. At some moments the last few days he’d been sure it was a hallucination, all the torments of that little island a bizarre dream from which he was about to awaken. Then he’d picture those jars of floating organs again, the half-dead girls chained to the wall, the reeking barracks crammed with prisoners—and he knew it was all too real.

The whole mission had gone like clockwork. They’d motored back across the Havel. Returned the boats. Richter had stayed. Geiger and Lutz boarded trains for home. But none of them would ever be the same. How could they, after what they’d witnessed? Those SS doctors were a hundred times more insane than the maddest schizophrenics. And yet . . . they were highly regarded specialists, top men in their fields. Someone was spending
a fortune bankrolling their operation. After so many years with the police, all the horrors he’d seen of war . . . Willi didn’t think he could be shocked anymore by the depths to which human beings could sink. But he was. He truly was.