Black Cross (17 page)

“But what
are
the rules? Where are they posted?”

“In the Germans’ heads!” Frau laughed harshly. “That’s why it’s so hard to stay within them! You’ve got one mark against you already, little Dutch girl.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re too pretty. You haven’t been starved yet, so you’ve still got your breasts.” The big Pole reached out and ran her hand over Rachel’s skull. Already a fine coat of black stubble had sprung up. Rachel instinctively jerked away. Frau Hagan laughed again. “Yes, someone might get very creative to get you into a bed. Schörner is drunk most of the time, but sometimes he perks up. His drinking is the best and worst thing about him. Sergeant Sturm is the one to watch out for. He’s a pig. I advise you to start looking as ugly as you can as soon as you can, although I’m sure they already noticed you during the medical inspection.”

Rachel shuddered at the memory.

“The SS may be animals, but remember one thing.” Frau Hagan glared at Benjamin Jansen. “You too, old man. It’s the unwritten law of every camp: The prisoner’s worst enemy is the prisoner!”

The Block Leader squinted at Rachel, as if trying to gauge whether any of her hard-earned wisdom had taken root. “You know, I survived Auschwitz for three years,” she said. “I have no tattoo number. You know what that means? I am less than zero. I helped build that stinking place. I was a
kapo
there, a good one. I saw a lot of Dutch, and they never lasted long. Especially the women. They couldn’t accept the change. They never bathed, never ate. I hope you’re different, Dutch girl. At Auschwitz the Dutch women became
musselmen
after only two weeks.”

“What is a
musselman
?”

“A bag of bones, princess. A bag of bones that doesn’t care if it eats anymore. A walking corpse.”

“But I have seen no one like that here!”

“I told you, this camp is different. They didn’t bring you here to work you to death. They brought you here to work
on
you.”

“But what can you mean?”

Frau Hagan glanced at the children. “You’ll find out soon enough.” The big Pole placed both hands on her wide hips. “Do you understand these things I’ve told you?”

Rachel nodded uncertainly.

“Rations in two hours. Guard your shoes, spoon, and cup with your life. Keep your children’s things yourself. Eat your bread as soon as you get it. Your stomach is the best safe against thieves.” She grabbed Ben Jansen by the collar. “Out you go!”

Rachel watched in amazement as the Block Leader hauled the old man to the barracks door and shoved him out into the snow. She darted to the doorway. As her father-in-law plodded toward the Jewish Men’s Block, she heard a rapid shuffling behind her. When she turned, she saw Frau Hagan passing out small sausages from the parcel Nurse Kaas had brought. The Pole met her starved gaze, but did not offer her a sausage.

Rachel turned away. She felt sure that a diamond would buy a few sausages for Jan and Hannah. But they were not starving yet. She would have to use the stones more wisely than that. With luck, they might last through the war. She wondered what the shoemaker would say if he knew that when he found her hiding in the shadows by the fence, she had not been sneaking out to the Appellplatz to search for the lost diamonds, but sneaking
back
. It had been a frightful risk to leave Jan and Hannah while she searched, but the three diamonds she had found — plus the two the shoemaker had given her — made five, and she had no regrets. Clearly, life inside the camp functioned on the same principle as life outside: economics.

She had told her father-in-law nothing about the diamonds, and she never would. He had proved last night that he was no judge of when to expend his treasure. He had been desperate, of course, but Rachel was sure that the diamonds could not have saved Marcus from the selection. Bribery was not a public business. She would need allies to survive, and she would choose them very carefully. Someone like the shoemaker, perhaps, or even Frau Hagan. The Block Leader would soon learn how far a Dutchwoman would go to survive.

As she walked across the floor toward her children, Rachel kept her genital muscles flexed. It was probably not necessary, but she had no experience in such things. She would walk that way until she knew the diamonds were as secure as if locked inside a vault. She might not yet know how best to spend them, but she would have them to spend when the time came.

14

Jonas Stern lay on a threadbare mattress and stared sullenly at the stained ceiling of his jail cell. It had been five days since he and Brigadier Duff Smith drove to Oxford to speak with the American doctor, and Stern had spent four of those in a cell. Where the hell was Smith? After McConnell refused the brigadier’s request, Smith had driven Stern back to London and dropped him at a rooming house run by “some good friends of mine.” Stern soon realized that Smith’s “good friends” were off-duty London policemen. But evading British police had become second nature to him in Palestine, and the London variety proved no more adept at surveillance than their Middle Eastern cousins.

Stern had passed most of that first day in various London pubs, where he ran into more than his share of American soldiers. With Allied troops massing for the invasion, GIs were thick on the ground. It wasn’t long before Stern began trying to take out his anger at McConnell on the nearest Americans to hand. He survived one brawl in Shoreditch without serious damage. Then he ran into a squad of marines outside the entrance to the Strand Palace Hotel bar. The liquored-up gyrenes did not take kindly to being called pacifistic dilettantes, especially by a suntanned civilian with a German accent. The military police found Stern lying flat on his back with two glowing shiners and the fragments of a chair scattered around him.

He had awakened in jail with ribs so bruised he could barely breathe, and a new American slang term added to his growing list.
Shitbird
. He railed at his jailers to call Brigadier Smith — and they claimed they had — but the Scotsman never showed up. Either the police were lying, Stern decided, or else he was precisely where the brigadier wanted him. Yesterday he had used Peter Owen’s handcuff key to unlock his manacles and attempt an escape, but the coppers had been ready. That escapade had caused his transfer to his current accommodations.

His body jerked at the harsh clang of metal against metal.

“Shove yer bucket through the bars and make it quick!” barked a jailer. “If you spill any, you’ll clean it up wiv your shirt!”

Stern rolled over and faced the stone wall. He couldn’t decide whom he hated more, Brigadier Smith or Doctor Mark McConnell.

At that moment McConnell was going over some notes in his laboratory in Oxford. When the telephone rang, he tried to ignore it, but the caller was persistent. McConnell glanced at his watch. Ten P.M. Perhaps it was Mrs. Craig, the woman of the house he billeted in, offering him a late supper. He picked up the phone.

“Yes?”

“Yeah, hey,” said a male voice with a Brooklyn accent. “Is this Dr. McConnell?”

“Yes.”

“I need to see you, Doc. I got a problem.”

“Excuse me, I think you have the wrong number. I’m a medical doctor, but I don’t see patients. I’m associated with the university.”

“Right,” said the caller. “You’re the one I want. I been patched up pretty good already. It’s something else. I really need to see you.”

McConnell wondered who in God’s name had recommended him to a man with mental problems. “I’m afraid I’m not a psychiatrist either. I can recommend a good man in London, though.”

The voice on the phone grew agitated. “You got it all wrong, Doc. It’s
you
I need to see. Not a sawbones or a head-shrinker.”

“Who is this?” McConnell asked, bewildered. “Do I know you?”

“Nah. But I knew your brother.”

“You knew David?” McConnell felt his heart thump. “What’s your name?”

“Captain Pascal Randazzo. Dave just called me Wop, though. I was his copilot on
Shady Lady
.”

McConnell’s heart rate was still rising. A member of David’s crew had
survived
? “Where are you, Captain?” he asked excitedly.

“Right here. Oxford.”

“My God. How did you get out of Germany? Do you have word of David?”

A long pause. “That’s what I need to talk to you about, Doc. Do you think we could meet tonight?”

“Hell yes, Captain. You can come to my lab, or I could buy you supper somewhere. Have you eaten yet?”

“Yeah. I’ll come to you, if you don’t mind. Sooner the better.”

“My lab’s sort of tucked away in the university. Do you think you can find it?”

“I’m from New York, Doc. Long as it’s streets and buildings, I can find it. It’s trees and woods that screw me up.”

McConnell couldn’t help but smile. What a strange pair Randazzo the Wop and David the Georgia redneck must have made. “Where are you now, Captain?”

“The Mitre Inn.”

He gave Randazzo detailed directions, then hung up. What the hell was going on? If there was word of David’s crew, why hadn’t the Air Force called him? Five days ago he had made the most difficult telephone call of his life, to tell his mother that her youngest son was presumed dead. Had that status changed? He paced the floor while he waited for Randazzo to arrive. What could the copilot’s survival mean? No chutes had been sighted by the other bomber crews on the raid, but that didn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any. In the last four years he had heard stories of miraculous survival that defied all explanation. Perhaps David had managed to crash-
land
his bomber, instead of just crashing. He was a fantastic pilot. He had the medals to prove it.

McConnell jumped the first time he heard the sound:
thump-thump-bump
. It was irregular in tempo but continued to grow louder. He decided it must be a janitor pushing something heavy up the three flights of stairs. Probably a mop and a bucket of water. Then he heard a knock on his lab door.

“Doc?” said a muffled voice. “Hey, Doc!”

He hurried over and opened the door. Before him stood a short young man with dark eyes, curly black hair and a thick five-o’clock shadow. He leaned heavily on crutches, and his left leg was encased from ankle to hip in heavy plaster. The air force uniform was soaked with sweat.

“Captain Randazzo?”

“The Wop in person.”

“I had no idea you were wounded. I’m sorry.”

“No problem, Doc.”

Randazzo
thump-bumped
his way across the floor and collapsed into a chair beside the very window Mark had dropped the telegram from just a week before. “Still ain’t used to these fuckin’ things,” he said.

“What happened to your leg?”

“Broke it in two places.”

“In the crash?”

“Bad parachute landing. Never had much practice.”

Mark could hardly contain his excitement. “You mean you got out of the plane? Did David get out?”

“Sure did.”

“But the air force said no chutes were sighted!”

Randazzo snorted. “I ain’t surprised. We’re flying in coffin corner to start with. And we were so goddamn low by the time we jumped that the squadron had already left us behind.” The Italian thumped his plaster cast with the tip of a crutch. “That’s how I got this fuckin’ thing. We jumped too late. Still, it’s better than dying, I guess.”

McConnell studied the olive-skinned face and bleary eyes. Randazzo had been drinking. Probably for several days. “Maybe you should just tell me what happened, Captain.”

The young officer looked out of the window at the dark skyline of Oxford. Only black spires broke the indigo screen of sky and stars. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I came for.”

McConnell waited.

“The raid went okay. Made the Initial Point with only two losses in the squadron. We dropped all ten bombs within a thousand feet of the Mean Dropping Point. We creamed ’em. Won’t be no fighters rolling out of Regensburg for a while.”

“The problem came after?” McConnell prompted.

“Fuckin ’ay right. After we left the Rally Point. The return leg. A
real
problem.”

“What happened?”

“About five flak shells, that’s what. They happened to blow about ten holes in
Shady Lady
. The Germans had us conned before we ever passed over. Add in about twenty ME-109s attacking wingtip to wingtip.”

Randazzo licked his lips and stared out of the window. “Looks like some kind of castle out there, huh? Like an Errol Flynn movie or something.”

McConnell waited, but the captain said nothing further. “What do you remember about David, Captain, after the flak hit the plane?”

“Those fuckin’ bastards!”
Randazzo screamed suddenly.
“Goddamn murderers!”

McConnell rocked back on his feet. Spittle flew from Randazzo’s mouth as he tried to get to his feet using one crutch. Mark hurried over and gently pushed him back down onto the chair. “Take it easy, Captain. You said you were hit by flak. What happened then?”

“Flak,” Randazzo said in a remote voice. “Yeah. After five or six hits,
Shady Lady
was buckin’ like a Jersey hooker. Guys were screamin’ in back. Joey, our ball turret gunner, was dead already. I told Dave it was time to bail out, but he wanted to try to nurse her back to England. We were somewhere near Lille. That’s in France. After the Messerschmitts made their pass, I knew the
Lady
wasn’t ever gonna see England again. The engines were on fire and she was dropping like a brick off the Empire State Building.”

McConnell felt his mouth going dry. He actually heard the scrape as Randazzo drew a hand across his heavy black cheek stubble.

“I screamed at Dave to hit the silk, but he says we gotta wait ’til the crew gets out. I tell him I think the crew’s dead. He tells me go check. Pilots sit way up high in a Fortress, you know. So I go back. Radio man, waist gunners — dead. I hump down the chute. Bombardier and navigator cut to shreds. Nobody on the interphone. It was time to bug out.
Shady Lady
was shaking herself to pieces. Dave held her steady while I jumped. He jumped a few seconds later.”