Death in Twilight (30 page)

If there was anyone alive for him to tell.

Aaron turned left up the quay, in the direction of Yelena’s apartment. As he walked, the river kept him company.

Chapter 20

T
he neighborhood that surrounded Yelena’s apartment was similar to many parts of the ghetto in outward appearance. Brick- and stone-fronted buildings of three and four stories, most with narrow doorways. It was a cozy, residential area with cafes nestled on every block. None were open and there was no sign of nightlife.

Perhaps because of that, Aaron had seen no German or Polish patrols for quite some time.

Aaron had never visited Yelena’s flat. She’d rented it after his capture and confinement to the ghetto, but he had no trouble finding it. Miasto was his city and he knew it like he knew how to breathe.

There were no lights in the building’s windows, but it was late enough that he hadn’t expected to see any. If Yelena were inside, she’d likely be asleep. Aaron hoped she might be dreaming of him.

He needed her to be alive. He needed a reason to live beyond simple revenge. Without her, all that would be left was hate for the people who had tortured him and self-loathing because of what he’d done to survive.

Everything else had burned away. His concern for his people — even his father — still suffering only miles away, meant nothing. Yelena was his only buffer against the blackness.

Aaron tried to shake all these thoughts away, as he had a thousand or million times before. He stared up at the building in front of him, suddenly hesitant.

What if Yelena wasn’t upstairs? If the apartment was empty? Would it mean that she’d reached safety? Or that she’d been tortured and was now dead?

He almost walked away then, giving in to cowardice. It was only the distance he’d already traveled that led him to take the final steps

Aaron entered the building’s entryway and was confronted by a single line of buttons, one with Yelena’s name on top of it. A deep breath. A pause. He reached out the quivering index finger on his right hand and pressed. There was a buzzing somewhere between the lobby and the flat upstairs. Aaron hoped the noise wasn’t enough to cause some insomniac tenant to get curious.

The buzz was followed by silence. After more than a minute, Aaron tried another, longer push. That, too, was followed only by silence.

Unless Yelena had gone deaf or the buzzing hadn’t made it up to her apartment, she wasn’t home.

Yelena and he had always known that Aaron might have to flee the ghetto someday. Both thought it would be a pretty sad end if he was shot or captured simply because Yelena was out at the store. She was supposed to have hidden keys in a window box on the ground floor. He hoped to God she’d done it.

In less than a minute he was back outside leaning precariously off the front step and into a window box that was filled with nothing but brittle stalks and hard dirt. The digging wasn’t easy and he was worried that the person who lived behind the box would see his shadow through their curtain and figure him for a burglar. How far could he push his luck in a single night?

At least this far.

The sleeves of both his coat and shirt were literally soiled but a small ring of keys dangled from his fingers. Aaron took a second to do a sloppy job of smoothing over the dirt in the box. He didn’t figure anyone would notice the mess he’d made, but it couldn’t hurt to make it look like he’d never been there.

The door to the building opened easily and with only a whisper once he found the right key. He didn’t dare turn the switch for the light over the stairs, so he felt his way to the bannister and then carefully up each step. The staircase was made out of wood and wasn’t new. There was a creak with each step that made Aaron wince.

It was a long, slow climb. When he reached Yelena’s landing it was so dark that he was forced to feel the letters on the doors to distinguish unit B from the others. He was deeply grateful that the letters weren’t simply painted on.

It took an eternity to find the proper key for each of the locks and turn them the right way. He got none of them right the first time.

He opened the door in stages, hoping to catch a glimpse inside the flat before giving himself away. He didn’t expect anyone to be inside, but caution was a habit that had saved his life more than once.

Once the door was open wide enough, he slipped in quietly. Enough light came in through the window at the end of the long, narrow hallway to give him a sense of direction. The hallway itself was filled with peeling paint and items in need of throwing out, including refuse, a bicycle and several bits of machinery. It was all roughly strewn about and Aaron had some trouble picking his path through.

A tiny kitchen was at the end of the hall and in the sink was nearly everything from the few cabinets, which hung open above. Many of the plates, bowls, glasses and teacups were shattered. Shards of ceramic and glass covered a floor made of tile.

He touched his boots to the ground as lightly as he could with each step, not wanting to hear crunching china. He hadn’t found the bedroom, yet, and there was still the possibility that someone was asleep in the flat.

The silence was broken when he missed a step, crushing a wineglass under his boot heel. It shattered loudly, and if his boots hadn’t been as thick as they were, he probably wouldn’t have been able to walk again for weeks.

Aaron heard the sound echo off the hard walls of the tight space, but nothing stirred. He told himself it was impossible for the noise to have been as loud as he’d heard it. It wasn’t a gunshot or a bomb blast, after all.

Finally, he was through the kitchen and into what appeared to be the living area, complete with a daybed. This room wasn’t large either, and every inch of the floor was taken up by what appeared to be the contents of a smashed dresser that leaned against the far wall. The bedclothes were torn and on the floor near the mattress. The mattress itself had been slit and was on the other side of the room from its cheap iron frame.

Surveying the damage as best he could, Aaron was sure of one thing: Yelena wasn’t here. He had no idea how long she’d been gone, or whether she’d been taken or had left voluntarily. Until he had sunlight to work by, he was unlikely to figure it out.

Aaron decided the best thing he could do was rest. Dawn was close and his trek across the city had been exhausting. He knew if he lay down for a while, things would become clearer.

He bent down and picked up what was left of the mattress and placed it on the frame again. Much of the stuffing was missing from it and the blanket he grabbed was in tatters, but after the week he’d spent in Kronberg, Aaron didn’t think he’d ever be tempted to complain about sleeping conditions again.

He closed his eyes as his back hit the mattress, pulling the blanket’s remnants over himself. Not quite as comfortable as the warm basement at Tadeusz and Lucja’s farmhouse, he thought, but not bad at all.

He expected to fall asleep quickly, but didn’t. Instead, he found himself thinking about his time with Yelena before the war. Their little house. Her cooking. Their lovemaking. Somehow, every day of that life had been sun-filled. Everything after the German invasion had turned gray.

Aaron tried to imagine a life after the war, but couldn’t. He wasn’t even sure what after would mean. Could the Germans lose? They had most of Western Europe, too. He knew Poland’s government was in exile in Britain, but never heard anything more about them.

Britain itself was still fighting, but it was so far away. The diplomats’ pretty words about friendship with Poland had turned into the purest bullshit. It had been no secret the Germans were coming, but the British and French sent none of their promised aid.

And the Americans, of course, dithered and dawdled, crying out against evil but doing little to fight it.

No, Aaron was afraid the war would end only because the Nazis had won, when the world’s other nations agreed either to surrender or let the Germans keep whatever they could grab.

What then for Poland? Aaron knew that it wasn’t just Jews that the Nazis hated. They didn’t think much of the Poles, either. Unless they had German blood in their veins, Poles counted as Slavs. Not as low on the scale of sub humans as Jews, but no prizewinners, either. Would the Poles be turned into slaves when the supply of Jews dried up? Would they slowly be starved the way the Jews were being starved now? Jews headed the shit list, but they didn’t make up entirety of it.

Aaron again wished for a cigarette, but he wasn’t likely to find anything except splinters and glass in the dark. He let that thought go as he let go of all the others. He reached for clarity, briefly finding oblivion instead.

Yelena’s window faced east, so the sun wasted no time in filling the room. Aaron felt its caress and his eyes twitched open. He’d woken in so many different places recently, he was completely baffled by which one it was today.

What brought him back to the flat in Miasto was a faint smell of Yelena in the mattress. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed it before. Her scent was one of many things he’d always loved about her.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes, surveying the damage to the room. Books had been pulled down from the single shelf and their spines had been slit. The dresser must have been disassembled in an effort to find any hidden compartments. It didn’t look like any had been found.

A small bathroom was attached to the living space. A medicine cabinet had been pulled from the wall. Behind it was a rectangular hole, large enough to store a pistol and perhaps some ammunition but little else. The toilet bowl itself had been cracked. With few options immediately available, Aaron used it anyway.

Back to the kitchen and a quick sorting of the debris. Aaron found nothing of interest. The Germans — he assumed it was the Germans — had even thought to check the pipes, with the one leading from the drain sitting out on the floor. Whatever water had dripped out in the process had long since dried, but that wasn’t nearly enough to give Aaron an idea of when the search had been conducted.

Nothing that he’d seen gave him any idea of where to go next in his search for Yelena. The fact that the apartment had been ransacked might mean that she was in German custody, or even dead at their hands, but that wasn’t the only plausible explanation.

The Germans could have searched the apartment because they were looking for Yelena but hadn’t been able to find her.

Or maybe none of this had anything to do with the Germans. Yelena had been in business with some pretty rough people, some of whom Aaron had never trusted, like the gunrunner Andrusz.

With Aaron’s capture, Andrusz hadn’t gotten his hands on the gold Torah vestments. Would he be looking to Yelena to make up the difference?

Aaron decided that if there had been a clue to find, whoever tore the apartment apart had taken it with them.

Aaron took one last look around the flat. He’d hoped to find a keepsake of some kind but was disappointed there as well. Other than torn clothing, anything personal — photographs, jewelry — was gone or had never been in the apartment at all. Aaron turned his back on the wreckage and fought his way down the hallway to the front door.

Once on the street, Aaron was uncertain of what to do next. There was a cafe a few doors down. He wondered if Yelena had ever been there. Would someone know her, or have an idea of where she’d gone? He wouldn’t mind something warm to drink, either, but he hadn’t found any money in the flat and wasn’t sure how he would pay for it.

He did have something to eat, though. He huddled in a doorway and opened his haversack. Inside was Lucja’s final sandwich. Ham again. God’s little joke.

He lifted out the sandwich and a ten-zloty note came with it. If he ever saw Lucja again, he would bring her diamonds, Aaron promised silently.

He took a minute to eat the sandwich. He had no idea how far the ten zlotys would have to carry him and wasn’t going to waste it on a breakfast he didn’t need. He did, however, buy himself something called tea when he sat down at the counter of the café. He would have been hard pressed to say what kind of tea it was.

At this early hour, the only others in the place were a pair of bald old men talking about better times and current events.

Aaron listened with half an ear as he considered how he wanted to frame his questions to the proprietress.

He caught the words, “in the paper the other day. Do you remember Radislaw, the poet?” one of the men asked.

“I think so. He was pretty good, right?” asked the other.

“He was terrible, but my daughter really liked his stuff. But she was always dreamy. She loves romance and horses and such,” the first man said. “Radislaw used to write about them all the time.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I know who you’re talking about. I think you’re being a little to hard on him.”

Aaron, now caught up in the conversation, remembered he’d disliked Radislaw’s work intensely.

“Well, doesn’t really matter if you like him anymore. He’s dead.”

“Dead how? Writer’s cramp?”

The first man glared.

“Not so funny, actually. It was the Germans. There was some kind of writers meeting. The Germans came in and took them all.”