Death in Twilight (31 page)

Aaron must have sighed aloud. He hadn’t meant to.

“Exactly,” said the man who’d been telling the story. “It seems like anyone who can put a pen to paper is being arrested these days. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Who ever heard of a dangerous poet?”

His friend agreed and Aaron held his tongue.

“More tea?” the woman behind the counter asked. Aaron’s cup was empty.

“Please. And perhaps you could give these two gentleman a refill of whatever they’re having, too.”

“Actually, we’re having coffee,” said the man who had spoken first.

“Real coffee?” Aaron asked with a smile.

All three laughed and the proprietress poured.

“I’m Stefan,” Aaron said, remembering to introduce himself by the name on his papers.

“Andrej,” said the first man. “And this is Karol.”

“Pleased to meet you both.”

“No offense, but you look like you just got out of a hospital, my friend,” Andrej said.

“Not a hospital, exactly.”

“Well, you certainly don’t look healthy.”

“You may not believe it, but I looked worse just a few days ago,” Aaron said.

“Jesus,” Karol said. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Nazis.”

“Oh,” Karol said. He couldn’t think of anything else.

“If you really want to know, I just got out of a labor camp.”

“You look it,” Andrej said. “Shit, are they really that bad?”

“They’re not good,” Aaron said.

The men and the woman behind the counter asked for details. It seemed everyone in Miasto had heard rumors about the camps, but nobody in the café had met anyone who’d been inside. More people were disappearing every day. How many were being sent to places like Kronberg? Aaron could hear the anxiety in their questions.

Aaron told them what he’d experienced, leaving out only what mattered — that he was a Jew and had murdered a man to escape.

After he was done telling his story, it was they who bought him a drink — stronger than tea — adding on a pastry as well.

“Jesus,” Karol said again. His tone said he meant it.

Silence filled the café for a time.

“So, do you live in the neighborhood?” Andrej asked. “I don’t remember seeing you around here.”

“Would you recognize me, now, if you had?”

Aaron smiled to show he was kidding — sort of.

Andrej offered a strained grin.

“No, probably not.”

“Actually, I’m here because an old friend lives on the block. Yelena Gorska,” Aaron said, using the last name she’d never changed. “You don’t happen to know her, do you?”

The men shook their heads, but the proprietress asked, “Is she a small blond woman?”

“Smallish,” Aaron said.

“I know her. She had her breakfast here, most days.”

“You mean the tasty little dish who always takes a table at the back?” Andrej asked.

The proprietress gave him a nasty look, but nodded.

“I knocked on her door this morning,” Aaron said, “but she didn’t answer.”

“No. The last time I saw her was a little more than a week ago. She was carrying a small bag and looked like she was going somewhere, so I asked.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me! She took off when she knew I was locked up? How am I supposed to find her?” Aaron asked, sounding like a jilted lover. “What did she say?”

“I’m really sorry. All she said was something about Gradno being nice this time of year. I thought she was kidding.”

Gradno was an ugly little town of old smokestacks and grinding poverty.

But it was also the name on the door of a mountain cottage that Aaron and Yelena had shared during a blissful summer.

Every muscle in his body melted. He had no idea how, but she’d gotten away. Even if the Germans had asked everyone on the block where she’d gone and gotten the same answer as he had, they would have been none the wiser. It was a message — if it was a message — for him alone. He couldn’t help but smile.

“Yeah,” the proprietress said. “I thought it was funny, too. But then I saw the Gestapo in front of her building. We could hear things breaking all the way down the block. Everyone else is okay, so they must have been looking for her.”

“Jesus,” Karol said for the third time.

“But they didn’t find her,” Aaron said. “At least not here.”

“No, not here.”

“Well, that’s something at least.”

He changed the subject.

“Have you seen or heard anything from the Jewish District? I have a few friends there,” Aaron said, hoping that they wouldn’t find that odd.

“I do, too. Or at least I did,” Karol said. “People I did business with before the war. I haven’t heard from them in more than a year, now.”

He frowned.

“I don’t think anyone’s heard from anybody for a while,” Andrej said. “I’ve wondered what’s going on in there, but I haven’t wanted to ask. Frankly, I haven’t wanted to think about it.

“I was never very fond of them — kept too much to themselves for me — but there’s no way to believe everything the Nazis say. It’s not like the typhus situation’s gotten any better since the Jews were locked away.”

Karol nodded.

“I’ve seen a lot of trucks heading to and from the ghetto, recently,” the proprietress added. “They’re empty when they go in, but they’re crammed with people on the way out.”

“Well, they’ve done that before, I guess,” Aaron said.

“This seemed like more trucks than usual,” she said. “But who can tell?”

“Well, I can’t tell about anything, anymore,” Aaron said, sighing again. “Thank you all for your kindness. I guess I’m off to Gradno.”

There was just one stop he had to make along the way.

Chapter 21

A
aron felt lightheaded from relief as he left the café.

He still had no idea what had happened to Yelena on the night he’d been taken, but at least she had left Miasto under her own power — if not necessarily by her own choice. He would follow her out of the city as soon as his other tasks were done, hoping to find her in a place where they’d been happy a lifetime ago.

Soon.

Back on the sidewalk, Aaron turned in the direction of the ghetto. It was the place he least wanted to go, but he felt compelled to complete his journey. The man he’d been tasked with finding, the murderer of the Jewish policeman Lev Berson, was still there. Aaron was sure of it. Perhaps he would even be able to prove it.

Getting in would likely be much easier than getting back out. And to be stranded in the Jewish district was the same as to fall off the icy bridge he’d climbed the night before. It was death.

Aaron didn’t want to die.

He’d seen death and torture. He’d seen children take their final breaths in the arms of their mothers, and children pulling at their mothers’ limp arms. He knew starvation from watching its slow progress in others and from feeling his body begin to eat itself for lack of other nourishment. He’d seen man’s inhumanity to man and the banality of evil. He understood that what was best in man was the merest glimmer held up against the infinite night of what was worst.

He’d proven that truth by becoming a murderer himself, killing Stefan Kaczynski — a man who had befriended him — in order to escape the Nazi camp. Aaron tried to rationalize it by telling himself a soldier did the same — killing men to avoid dying himself. It rang false. He’d regretted the few men he’d killed in September and October of 1939, though as he’d gotten to know the Germans, he’d come to regret it less. Kaczynski had seemed a decent man and, even if he’d been dying, he deserved to do it in peace as much as anyone.

The Nazis had stolen everything from Kaczynski and Aaron had stolen the rest.

Still, despite what he knew, despite what he’d done, Aaron wasn’t interested in atoning with his life.

As he drew closer to the outer boundaries of the ghetto, his hands shook and his teeth began to chatter. His muscles tensed. He felt nausea hit him, wave after wave. He knew he should turn away, should follow his wife. His papers could, possibly, get him on a train. If he needed money, he could steal it. He’d learned to be an excellent thief.

Instead, he kept walking, eyes front.

Aaron wasn’t returning the ghetto to solve the murder of a collaborator. Fuck him. Besides, it was far too late to save anyone from whatever German reprisals Berson’s death would have brought. Whatever the Germans would do in response to finding out the young officer had been killed had already been done. In that sense, there was no longer a promise for Aaron to keep.

The Judenrat’s threats were equally pointless. There was no longer any smuggling operation to shut down. Aaron didn’t know what had happened to his partners — Teitel, Dov, Boris — or the brave men who’d planned to use his smuggled guns on the Germans — but he assumed they were all dead. He’d miss Lech Teitel, a man whose good humor was unshakeable. Aaron felt sorry for Lech’s his wife, too, for whatever good that did.

There was nothing noble in Aaron’s motivations. He wanted to prevent Berson’s killer — his own betrayer — from offering up any new sacrifices to the Nazis, yes, but he wanted revenge more. Aaron felt the need for it pulse through him like a second heartbeat.

The little girl, Sparrow, might have told the Gestapo when and where to make the arrests, but Aaron had no interest in hurting her. She hadn’t acted on her own behalf. A hungry little girl would hardly have tracked him for days hoping that he would do something worth informing about.

The timing gave the truth away. Aaron had first felt his shadow’s presence on the afternoon when he took the case — an unlikely coincidence. He’d first seen her clearly when he was following a lead. He could only assume it was she who had been behind him — just out of sight — as he went about his business for the next forty-eight hours. It was certainly the little girl who’d signaled the Nazis when all was ready.

But the man who showed up at the denouement had been Hermann Clausewitz of Section IV — the same man addressed in the conspiratorial note Aaron had found on Berson’s body. The man who had killed Berson was the same one who had destroyed the ghetto’s chance to resist the Nazis, killed Aaron’s friends, and exposed Aaron himself to torture and the camps.

Aaron put his thoughts away as he neared one of several checkpoints into the ghetto. He could see German soldiers, the Polish Blue Police, and officers of the Jewish Police working together to monitor the traffic flowing in and out. At the moment, their attention was focused on an oxcart, the barrels of German weapons rifling through the straw that filled it. The guards would be done with their inspection soon. Aaron felt exposed on the street this close to the gate. He wasn’t in the mood for questions.

On his right, though, was his destination. The building had once been an enormous city library. It took up most of a block. What had been its grand front entrance opened onto the Aryan part of the city. The back door faced the ghetto. Before the war, it had been possible to walk through the library from one avenue to the other. While the building had been shut tight long before, it still was.

Aaron needed to reach a short staircase that ended at a door below street level. He took one last glance at the checkpoint. Some kind of argument had broken out, giving Aaron a gift. He didn’t jerk into motion, thinking that would be more likely to catch someone’s eye. Instead, he looked serious and moved as if he had a job to do but wasn’t looking forward to it. Which wasn’t far off the mark, he realized.

Down the staircase and out of sight. He moved with urgency, now, checking the door. It was sealed with a heavy padlock and even the keyhole had been filled in, making it impossible to pick. Aaron didn’t have anything to cut the lock with, but he wasn’t the first person looking to get past the door. What looked solid had, in fact, been jimmied. A quick yank and the lock was open, the thick chain swinging free.

Aaron opened the door just enough to get through, then turned back and grabbed the chain. Pulling its ends together in one hand, he replaced the lock with the other. From the outside, it would look as if the seal on the building still held.

It was time to move. Aaron felt his way through a cinder-block hallway that led to the building’s boiler and other maintenance facilities. The dark spaces he was passing through were often narrow and awkward, rarely used for large-scale smuggling. Instead, the route was primarily used by people who were willing to emerge from the ghetto right in front of a checkpoint. That is to say, it wasn’t used often.

There were no lights to help Aaron find his way, making him grateful for his one previous visit. He had an idea of what he was stumbling over as he ran his hands along the wall to keep oriented. He also knew where to look for the staircase that led upstairs to the library proper.

He swore constantly, if softly, as he made progress. He barked his shins every few steps. Detritus such as broken tables and chairs had been abandoned every few feet and always in his path.

“Fuck!” he shouted into the black. He’d both winded himself on the edge of something and found his turn at the same time. Underneath so much stone and cement, there was little fear of being heard.

Aaron took a minute to get his breath back and then climbed twenty steps to an open door. His eyes hurt as they adjusted to the light that filled the hall above him.

It was a grandiose space built by someone trying to impress. The ceiling was nearly as high as a cathedral’s, with windows that ran up and up. Even on the cloudiest days, there was no need for artificial light to read even the smallest print.

Marble covered nearly every surface, and was itself marbled with other stones in different colors in beautiful patterns. Partisans had added new decorations, most of which condemned the Nazis, though swastikas were represented, too.

The bookshelves were made from thick oak and stood tall where they hadn’t been felled, smashed, or broken up for firewood. The books had been stolen, hidden away or ruined. There were signs of water damage everywhere, but what struck Aaron like a blow was seeing a rough circle in the middle of the main hall, filled with scorch marks and rubble.

Books had been burned, and it hadn’t been done to keep someone warm. What Aaron saw were the remnants of a bonfire intended to destroy what little was good about humanity: hard-won knowledge and the ability to transmit it through generations.