Black Cross (42 page)

“If he makes it up the hill alive, he probably will. Do you think he
should
do it?”

“Someone must do something,” Anna said. “I don’t know if it’s right to kill the prisoners. But he is right about one thing.”

“What?”

“Everybody in that camp is doomed no matter what we do. They’ll never survive the war.”

“Do you think what he said is true? Do you think I’m a coward for not helping him?”

Anna looked into her coffee. “People are different. What he calls courage you call stupidity. What you call courage he calls weakness. Some men are not made for war, I think. And that must be a good thing.” She looked up at him. “Why
did
they select you for this mission? It doesn’t seem to make sense.”

“They said they picked me because I’m not British and because I’m an expert on poison gases. I guess the idea was that together Stern and I would make one perfect soldier. A killer with the brain of a scientist. What about you? You’re a civilian nurse?”

“Yes. They said there was a shortage in the medical corps, but I think Brandt just prefers civilians.”

“I’m a civilian myself.”

She nodded. “A chemist, yes?”

He laughed. “By avocation only. I’m actually a medical doctor.”

Anna’s face underwent a subtle yet profound change. She seemed to be looking at McConnell through different eyes. “You are a physician?”

“Yes. Before the war, anyway.”

“You had a practice?”

“Briefly.”

She sat in silence, reflecting on this new information. Finally she said, “Is that the reason you are so hesitant to kill?”

McConnell hedged. “Part of it, I suppose.”

“It’s part of the reason I do what I do, too.”

“How do you mean?”

Anna glanced at the kitchen window. “It’s dangerous for you to be up here. Schörner might order a house-to-house search.”

“You want me to go down to the basement?”

She stood up and refilled their mugs, then took the half-empty vodka bottle from a sideboard. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “I guess we’re both waiting for the same thing.”

“What is that, exactly?”

“The alarms at Totenhausen. If Stern carries out the attack, we will hear sirens, even in the basement.”

McConnell went down the steps first and lit the gas lamp. They sat on the sofa he’d slept on the night before, half-hidden behind the boxes and old farm-machinery parts.

“Can I ask you something?” he said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. But I’m curious.”

She looked at the floor and smiled sadly. “Why do I work against the Nazis? Yes?”

“Yes. You have to admit, not many Germans have.”

“Oh, I’ll admit that. The few who had the courage to fight were hunted down early on. The rest fall into two categories: those who love the new order, and those who simply take the path of least resistance. The latter is a highly developed feature of the German political character.”

“But not of yours.”

Anna poured a stiff shot of the vodka into her coffee. “It could have been.” She drank. “But it didn’t turn out that way. The funny thing is what changed me. I thought about it a moment ago, when you talked about yourself and Stern. About the two of you making one complete soldier.”

“What do you mean?”

“What made me different than other Germans. It was a man, of course.”

“A man like myself and
Stern
? I can hardly imagine a man like that.”

She laughed. “This man was more like you than Stern. He was a doctor, in fact.”

“A physician?”

“Yes. But he was also a Jew.”

Anna said this with a certain defiance, and it was the last thing he expected. He didn’t know what to say. But he did want to hear the story. “This was in Dornow?”

“No, Berlin. I was raised in Bad Sülze, not far from here. My parents were rural people. Well-enough off, but very provincial. My sister and I had grander ideas. At seventeen I went off to Berlin to become a sophisticated city girl. When I completed my nurses’ training, I went to work for a general practitioner in Charlottenburg. Franz Perlman. That was 1936. The Nuremberg Laws had been passed by then, but I was a foolish girl. I had no idea how ominous it all was. The restrictions on Jews were being enforced in different fields at different speeds, and many doctors were still practicing. Franz really seemed too busy to notice. He worked from morning till night, and on everyone — Jews, Christians, whomever.”

Anna sipped from her coffee and stared into the soft light of the gas lamp. “There were three of us: Franz, the receptionist, and me. You can imagine how it happened. It’s not so uncommon a situation, is it? A doctor and a nurse? I was twenty at the time. I’d fallen in love with him by the third week. It wasn’t so hard to do. He was a kind and dedicated man. He tried to discourage me at first. He was a widower, and older. Forty-four. I didn’t care how old he was. I never thought about him being a Jew, either. After about a year he stopped discouraging me. Poor man. I was shameless. I wanted to marry him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t even let us be seen together outside the office. Only twice in all that time did he sneak into my flat, and he never allowed me in his.

“I grew angry at him after a while. About his refusal to marry me, even secretly. I was a fool. One day he pulled the scales from my eyes. He told me about all his friends who had been forced out of business, or who had simply disappeared. I didn’t believe him at first. I lived in . . .
in einem Traum
. In a dream. Jewish professors had already been badgered out of the medical schools. Franz had received threatening letters. He showed me some. Only then did I understand. It was for my physical safety that he’d kept up the illusion that we had no relationship. He wanted to marry me more than anything.”

McConnell detected a hitch in Anna’s voice, but she got control of it again.

“The practice was almost as busy as ever. A few patients stopped coming, but not many. A caring doctor is not so easy to find. Too many worship the scalpel, yes? Or themselves.”

McConnell smiled. “I’ve known a few of those.”

“Franz was different. He felt a deep obligation to his patients. That’s why he wouldn’t stop. Finally the Nazis left him no room to squirm. They forbade Jewish doctors practicing at all. The line was drawn. Our receptionist refused to come to work. But not me. Every day for five weeks I did the work of two. And Franz was doing the work of ten. Visiting the old, delivering babies — he was one of the last. The funny thing is, many Aryans continued to see him. And he continued to treat them!” She drew a deep breath. “I apologize for dragging this out. It’s just . . . I haven’t told anyone about this since it happened. I couldn’t, you understand? Not my parents. Not even my sister. Especially not my sister.”

“I understand, Fräulein Kaas.”

“Do you? Do you know what finally happened?”

“They dragged him off to a concentration camp.”

“No. One fine morning a well-scrubbed SS boy — I mean it, he was younger than I — he walked into the waiting room and demanded to see the doctor. He had four friends with him, all dressed in black with their Death’s Head badges. Franz came into the waiting room wearing his white coat and stethoscope. The SS man informed him that the clinic was closed. Franz said no one had the right to stop him from treating the sick, no matter what uniform they wore. Franz told the boy to go home, then turned around to go back to work.”

A chill ran along McConnell’s neck and arms. “They didn’t kill him—”

“The boy pulled out a Walther and shot Franz in the back. The bullet shattered his spine.” Anna wiped tears from her cheeks. “He died within a minute on his own waiting-room floor.”

McConnell found nothing to say.

She raised her eyes. “You know what the worst of it was? There were German Christians in that waiting room when it happened. People Franz had treated for fifteen years. And not one of them — not
one
— uttered a sound of protest. Not even to the
boy
who had murdered their doctor before their very eyes!”

“Anna—”

“And Stern wonders why I hate the Nazis?” She balled her fists. “I tell you, if I weren’t such a coward I would kill Brandt myself!”

An odd thought struck McConnell then. “How in God’s name did you end up working in a concentration camp after that?”

She drank another slug of the vodka-laced coffee. “This really takes the prize. After I came back from the city, depressed and nearly destitute, my older sister took pity on me. And of course, she was in an excellent position to ‘help’ me. Her way of escaping the boredom of country life had been to marry the Gauleiter of Mecklenburg. Can you believe it? My sister Sabine is a rabid Nazi! She got me the job at Totenhausen, and I was in no position to turn it down. Honestly, the first time I toured Brandt’s hospital, it seemed almost like a civilian institution. What a fool I was!”

It was insane, thought McConnell, but typical of what the war had done to people around the world. “You mentioned courage before,” he said. “Your Franz Perlman had the kind of courage I admire. He had principles. Character. Conviction.”

“Yes,” Anna said to her coffee. “And now he is dead. In this world we have made, that’s where principles get you.”

“Maybe. But I’ll take that over capitulation anytime.”

“What about you, Doctor?” she said. “I gave you my confession. Give me yours. What keeps you from going up that hill and helping Stern?”

McConnell slid off the sofa and sat on the floor with his back against the leg rest. “It’s simple, really. It was my father. He was a doctor too. He’s dead now. He fought in World War One. Against the Germans, of course.”

“My uncle, too. He died at the Marne.”

“My father was gassed at St. Mihiel. Badly burned by mustard. He never really recovered.”

Anna touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure Freud would have a lot to say about my career choice,” McConnell said lightly. “I don’t really give a damn. I saw very young what war did to people, and I didn’t like it. I still don’t. When this one started, I tried to use my talents to prevent suffering, not inflict it. As you can see, the British weren’t satisfied with that.”

She leaned forward and looked down into his eyes. “You remind me a lot of Franz, Doctor. I think you are a good and kind man. But I don’t think you really understand what is happening in Germany.”

Anna got up and walked over to a shelf lined with what appeared to be old account books. “I would like you to look at something.”

She removed several books, then reached into the space behind and pulled out a small leather-bound volume, its cover worn to a dull shine. “This is my diary,” she said. “I began it the day after Franz was killed. In some ways it has been my only friend. The first part contains nothing of consequence — merely personal things. But somewhere around page thirty, I began to record my experiences at Totenhausen. I recorded every experiment I witnessed myself, as well as things I overheard Dr. Brandt confide to other doctors, either in person or on the telephone. Some passages are things he said directly to me after visiting other Reich medical facilities. Concentration camps, euthanasia centers, various clinics.” She carried the book part of the way to the stairs, then turned and tossed it to McConnell.

“You’re a doctor,” she said. “Read the
Curriculum Vitae
of one of your fellow physicians.”

When she had gone, McConnell opened the diary and began to read.

Rachel Jansen sat motionless in the wing chair in the anteroom of Major Schörner’s quarters. Schörner sat on the sofa opposite her, sipping from a glass of brandy.

“Why didn’t he kill me in the reprisal?” Rachel asked in a monotone.

Schörner held his glass up to a lamp and watched the light play through the amber liquid. “Sturm is just the slightest bit afraid of me,” he said. “And well he should be. I’d like to cut his throat with his own dagger. When I look at those bruises on your beautiful face . . . my blood burns. And I can tell by the way you sit and breathe that you are hurt in the side. Did that bastard Grot kick you?”

“This is madness,” Rachel said softly, the act of speech sending stabbing pains along her damaged ribs. “What if I am discovered here? Now? Tonight?”

A reckless smile played at the corners of Schörner’s handsome mouth. “That is the last thing that would happen tonight,
Liebling
. Brandt wants no conflict, nothing that might disturb his arrangements with Reichsführer Himmler. To Brandt, Sturm and I are merely a sideshow. Besides that” — his voice softened — “I had to see you. I had to know that the pig had not hurt you badly.”

Schörner leaned forward on the sofa. “Did he? If you are unable tonight . . . I will understand.”

Rachel shivered in the chair.

“You are cold?” Schörner asked, his voice full of concern. “Here,
Liebling
, come and sit beside me.”

Rachel hesitated, then rose and walked to the couch like a woman going to the guillotine.

32

Jonas Stern stood in the shadow of a wooden barracks building and listened. At first he heard only the wind, blowing down the Recknitz River. Anna Kaas was right. It was stronger here than in the treetops on the hills.

It took time to separate the snoring from the wind. But that was the sound, he realized: snoring. He moved silently along the row of barracks buildings.

A combination of stealth and boldness had brought him this far. Just before reaching Totenhausen’s back fence, he had crossed over three long, shallow pits dug under the trees. He remembered the smell of burnt flesh from North Africa, and recognized the pits for what they were.

It was the trees that gave him his plan. Tall evergreens grew right up to the electrical fence on three sides of the camp. Since he was outside the fence, he simply slung his Schmeisser over his shoulder, climbed a fir tree, shinnied out along a branch and dropped to the snow beside the barn that concealed the gas factory.

Before his nerves had time to stop him, he straightened his back and marched toward the gate that separated the factory from the camp proper. There was one sentry there, an SS private wearing the earth-brown uniform of a concentration camp guard. Stern made ready to get out his papers, but his gray-green SD uniform and Iron Cross were apparently all the identification he needed. He rapped out a “Heil Hitler!” as he passed the respectful guard.