Carrion Comfort (54 page)

S
aul Laski lay in his steel tomb and thought about life. He shivered in the chill from the air-conditioning, raised his knees toward his chest, and tried to remember details of a spring morning on his uncle’s farm. He thought about golden light touching the heavy limbs of willows and about a field of white daisies beyond the stone fortress of his uncle’s barn.

Saul hurt; his left shoulder and arm hurt constantly, his head throbbed, his fingers tingled with pain, and the inside of his right arm pulsed with the pain of all the injections they had given him. Saul welcomed the pain, encouraged it. The pain was the only dependable beacon he had in a thick fog of medication and disorientation.

Saul had become somewhat unhinged in time. He was sometimes aware of this but could do nothing about it. The details were there— at least up to the second of the explosion in the Senate Office Building— but he could not set them in sequence. One minute he would be lying on his narrow bunk in the chilly stainless steel cell— inset bunk, air conditioner grill, stainless steel bench and toilet, metal door that slid up into the wall— and the next minute he would try to burrow into cold straw, would feel the cold Polish night air coming through the cracked window, and would know that the Oberst and German guards could be coming for him soon.

Pain was a beacon. The few minutes of clarity in those first days after the explosion had been forged by pain. The intense pain after they set his broken collarbone; green surgical gowns in an antiseptic environment that might have been any surgery, any recovery room, but then the cold shock of white corridors and the steel cell, men in suits, colorful ID badges clipped to pockets and lapels, the pain of an injection followed by dreams and discontinuities.

The first interrogations had offered pain. The two men— one bald and short, another with a blond crew cut. The bald man had rapped Saul’s shoulder with a metal baton. Saul had screamed, wept with the sudden pain of it, but welcomed it— welcomed the clearing of fogs and vapors.

“Do you know my name?” asked the bald man. “No.”

“What did your nephew tell you?”

“Nothing.”

“Who else have you told about William Borden and the others?”

“No one.”

Later—or earlier, Saul was not sure— the pain gone, in the pleasant haze after injections:

“Do you know my name?”

“Charles C. Colben, special deputy assistant to the deputy director of the FBI.”

“Who told you that?”

“Aaron.”

“What else did Aaron tell you?”

Saul repeated the conversation as completely as he could recall it. “Who else knows about Willi Borden?”

“The sheriff. The girl.” Saul explained about Gentry and Natalie. “Tell me everything you know.”

Saul told him everything he knew.

The fog and dreams came and went. The steel room was frequently there when Saul opened his eyes. The cot was built into the walls. The toilet was too small and had no flush lever: it flushed automatically at irregular intervals. Meals, on steel trays, appeared when Saul slept. He ate the meals on the metal bench, left the tray. It was gone when he awoke from his next nap. Occasionally men in the white attendants’ uniforms came through the metal doorway to give him shots or to take him down white hallways to small rooms with mirrors on the wall he was facing. Colben or someone else in a gray suit would ask questions. If he refused to answer there were more shots, urgent dreams in which he desperately wanted to be friends with these people, and told them what ever they wished to hear. Several times he felt someone— Colben?—slide into his mind, the old memory of a similar rape rising from forty years before. These times were rare. The shots were frequent.

Saul slid backward and forward in time; calling to his sister Stefa on his Uncle Moshe’s farm, running to keep up with his father in the Lodz ghetto, shoveling lime onto bodies in the Pit, drinking lemonade and talking to Gentry and Natalie, playing with a ten-year-old Aaron and Isaac at David and Rebecca’s farm near Tel Aviv.

Now the drug-induced discontinuities were fading. Time stitched itself together. Saul lay curled on the bare mattress— there was no blanket, the air through the steel grill was too cold— and thought about himself and his lies. He had lied to himself for years. His search for the Oberst had been a lie— an excuse not to act. His life as a psychiatrist had been a lie, a way to remove his obsessions to a safe, academic distance. His ser vice as a medic in three of Israel’s wars had been a lie, a way to avoid direct action.

Saul lay in the gray hinterland between drug-induced nirvana and painful reality and saw the truth of his years of lies. He had lied to himself about his rationale for telling the Charleston sheriff and the Preston girl about Nina and Willi. He had secretly hoped that
they
would act— removing the burden of responsibility for revenge from
him.
Saul had asked Aaron to look for Francis Harrington
not
because he was too busy, but because he secretly wanted Aaron and the Mossad to do what had to be done. He knew now that part of his motive for telling Rebecca about the Oberst twenty years ago had been the secret and self-denied hope that she would tell David, that David would handle things in his strong, capable American-Israeli way—

Saul shivered, raised his knees to his chest, and stared at the lies that were his life.

Except for rare minutes such as when he had resolved in the Chelmno camp to kill rather than be taken into the night, his entire life had been a paean to inaction and compromise. Those in power seemed to sense this. He understood now that his assignment to the Pit detail in Chelmno and the rail yards at Sobibor had been more than chance or good luck; the bastards with power over him had sensed that Saul Laski was a born
kapo
, a collaborator, someone safe to
use.
There would be no violence from this one, no revolt, no sacrifice of his life for the others— not even to save his own dignity. Even his escape from Sobibor and from the Oberst’s hunting preserve before that, largely had been due to accident, allowing events to sweep him along and away.

Saul rolled out of bed and stood swaying in the center of the small, steel cell. He was wearing gray coveralls. They had taken his glasses and the metal surfaces only a few feet away seemed blurred and faintly insubstantial. His left arm had been in a sling, but now it hung loose. He moved it tentatively and the pain shot up through shoulder and neck— a searing, cauterizing, brain-clearing pain. He moved it again. Again.

Saul staggered to the steel bench and sat down heavily.

Gentry, Natalie, Aaron and his family— all were in danger. From whom? Saul lowered his head to his knees as dizziness washed over him. Why had he been so stupid as to assume that Willi and the old ladies were the only ones with such a terrible power? How many others shared the Oberst’s abilities and addiction? Saul laughed raggedly. He had enlisted Gentry, Natalie, and Aaron without even considering a serious plan of dealing even with just the Oberst. He had vaguely imagined some entrapment— the Oberst unaware, Saul’s friends safe in their anonymity. And then what? The sound of the Mossad’s little .22 caliber Berettas?

Saul leaned back against the cold metal wall, set his cheek against the steel. How many people had he sacrificed because of his cowardice and inaction? Stefa. Josef. His parents. Now, almost certainly, the sheriff and Natalie. Francis Harrington. Saul let out a low moan as he remembered the guttural
Auf Wiedersehen
in Trask’s office and the following explosion. For a second before that, the Oberst had somehow given him a glimpse through Francis’s eyes and Saul had sensed the terrified presence of the boy’s consciousness, prisoner in his own body, waiting for the inevitable sacrifice. Saul had sent the boy to California. His friends, Selby White and Dennis Leland. Two more victims on the altar of Saul Laski’s timidity.

Saul did not know why they were allowing the drugs to wear off this time. Perhaps they were finished with him; the next visit could be to take him out for execution. He did not care. Rage coursed through his bruised body like an electric current. He would
act
before the inevitable, long-delayed bullet slammed into his skull. He would hurt
someone
in retaliation. At that second, Saul Laski would gladly have given his life to warn Aaron or the other two but he would have given
all
of their lives to strike back at the Oberst, at any of the arrogant bastards who ran the world and sneered at the pain of human beings they used as pawns.

The door slammed up. Three large men in white coveralls entered. Saul stood up, staggered toward them, swung a heavy fist at the first one’s face.

“Hey,” laughed the big man as he easily caught Saul’s arm and pinned it behind him, “this old Jew wants to play games.”

Saul struggled, but the big man held him as if he were a child. Saul tried not to weep as the second man rolled up his sleeve.

“You’re going bye-bye,” said the third man as he stabbed the needle of the syringe into Saul’s thin, bruised arm. “Enjoy your trip, old man.”

They waited thirty seconds, released him, and turned to go. Saul staggered after them, fists clenched. He was unconscious before the door slammed down.

He dreamed of walking, being led. There was the sound of jet engines and the smell of stale cigar smoke. He walked again, strong hands on his upper arms. Lights were very bright. When he closed his eyes he could hear the click-click-click of metal wheels on rails as the train carried them all to Chelmno.

Saul came to in the comfortable seat of some sort of conveyance. He could hear a steady, rhythmic
thwop
, but it took him several minutes to place it as the sound of a he li cop ter. His eyes were closed. A pillow was under his head, but his face touched glass or Plexiglas. He could feel that he was dressed and wearing glasses once again. Men were speaking softly and occasionally there came the rasp of radio communications. Saul kept his eyes closed, gathered his thoughts, and hoped that his captors would not notice that the drugs were wearing off.

“We know you’re awake,” said a man from very close by. The voice was strangely familiar.

Saul opened his eyes, moved his neck painfully, adjusted his glasses. It was night. He and three other men rode in the passenger seats of a well-appointed he li cop ter. A pilot and copilot sat bathed in red light from the instruments. Saul could see nothing out the window to his right. In the seat to his left, Special Agent Richard Haines sat with his briefcase on his lap, reading papers by the light of a tiny overhead spot. Saul cleared his throat and licked dry lips, but before he could speak Haines said, “We’ll be landing in a minute. Get ready.” The FBI man had the remnant of a bruise under his chin.

Saul thought of pertinent questions, discarded them. He looked down and realized for the first time that his left wrist was handcuffed to Haines’s right wrist. “What time is it?” he asked, his voice little better than a croak.

“About ten.”

Saul glanced back at the darkness and assumed it was night. “What day?”

“Saturday,” grunted Haines with a slight smile. “Date?”

The FBI man hesitated, shrugged slightly. “The twenty-seventh, December.”

Saul closed his eyes at a sudden dizziness. He had lost a week. It seemed much longer. His left arm and shoulder ached abominably. He looked down and realized that he was dressed in a dark suit and tie, white shirt. Not his own. He removed his glasses. The prescription was correct, but the frame was new. He looked carefully at the five men. He recognized only Haines. “You work for Colben,” Saul said. When the agent did not respond, Saul said, “You went down to Charleston to make sure the local police didn’t find out what really happened. You took Nina Drayton’s scrapbook from the morgue.”

“Tighten your seat belt,” said Haines. “We’re going to land.”

It was one of the most beautiful sights Saul had ever seen. At first he thought it was a commercial ocean liner, ablaze with lights, white against the night, leaving a phosphorescent wake in black-green waters, but as the helicopter descended toward the illuminated orange cross on the aft deck, Saul realized that it was a privately owned ship, a yacht, sleek and white and as long as an American football field. Crewmen with hand-held, glowing batons waved them down and the helicopter touched the deck gently in the glare of spotlights. The four of them were out and moving away from the helicopter before the rotors began to slow.

Several crewmen in white joined them. When they could stand upright, Haines unlocked the handcuffs and dropped them in his coat pocket. Saul rubbed at his wrist just below where the blue numbers were tattooed.

“This way.” The pro cession went up stairways, forward along wide walkways. Saul’s legs were unsteady even though there was no motion to the ship. Twice Haines reached out to steady him. Saul breathed in warm, moist, tropical air— rich with the distant scent of vegetation— and stared through open doors at the sleek opulence of the cabins, staterooms, and bars they passed. Everything was tweaked and carpeted, interior-designed and plated with brass or gold. The ship was a floating five-star hotel. They passed near the bridge and Saul caught a glimpse of uniformed men on watch, the green glow of electronic equipment. An elevator took them to a private stateroom with a balcony— perhaps flying bridge was the proper term here. A man in an expensive white jacket sat there with a tall drink. Saul stared beyond him at an island perhaps a mile away across dark waters. Palm trees and a riot of tropical vegetation were festooned with hundreds of Japanese lanterns, walkways were outlined by white lights, a long beach lay illuminated by a score of torches, while rising above everything else, ablaze in the beams of vertical searchlights that reminded Saul of films of Nuremburg rallies in the thirties, a wooden-walled and red-tiled castle seemed to float above a cliff of white stone.

“Do you know me?” asked the man in the canvas chair.