Death in Twilight (8 page)

Both groups were lined up in front of the hospital. Open vehicles with machine guns mounted on their backs had joined the black sedans that Aaron had seen on his way into Breslaw.

A needle-sharp man wearing a black greatcoat was inspecting each of the sick and wounded. He had the air of a schoolmaster and a red, white and black armband. Every patient received individual attention and the schoolmaster called out notes to the giant who had confronted Aaron in the doorway of the hospital earlier. Clausewitz, Aaron remembered. In turn, the big man passed along the comments to his own aide-de-camp who followed behind them both with a notebook, carefully capturing every thought.

The ominous inspection was endured by the patients until one man, who had appeared catatonic, broke free and ran. It was as unexpected as a figure in a photograph taking life. It took an eternal fraction of a second for the rest of the world to catch up. And then it did all at once.

Aaron’s gaze tracked the fleeing man just a few steps before blood bloomed on the back of the patient’s whitish gown. It seemed to Aaron that he saw the wound even before he heard the pistol shot. He looked for the source of the bullet and saw the schoolmaster, steady hand on the grip of a Walther P38, smoke rising from its barrel.

The patients began to scream.

With a sigh and a signal to Clausewitz, the schoolmaster walked back to the line of German vehicles. Clausewitz nodded his head to one of the soldiers dressed in gray. The soldier, an officer, raised a black-gloved hand. A beat, and then he dropped it again.

The machine guns began to spit.

Chapter 6

B
ullets ripped apart men and women; the sick and the mad; the holy fools and the simple souls. It was a leaden rain that became a torrent.

An impossible amount of time passed but the barrage didn’t stop. Aaron began to believe it would never stop. The booming rattle of gunfire returned Aaron to the trenches outside Warsaw as the Germans advanced on the city. Then, it had presaged the earthquake of tanks that would crush Polish independence. Now, it spoke of immediate death, unadulterated by hope.

Aaron waited to be killed along with everyone else. He did nothing. He didn’t make a run at the guards. He didn’t scream. He didn’t even try to duck down out of the way. As a gendarme, he’d been trained to take action, to protect people, but as the machine guns spit he felt no urge to do so. He stood where he’d been told and witnessed the flowers of evil bloom.

He watched bodies fall, heads explode in blood, heard the cries, pleas and screams. He felt something other than human.

He turned to watch the killers at their work, curious when the barrels would shift to take his life, too. The machine gunners’ faces held no expression. They were concentrating on their work, focused on stamping out a clear threat to National Socialism.

The commander — the academic — had a small smile of satisfaction as he watched a job well done. The other Gestapo officer, Clausewitz, looked close to sexual climax. It must have been all he could do to stop himself from grabbing a burp gun out of one of the soldier’s hands and joining in the fun.

The final shot was fired. The work was done. Gray, cold death spattered with red blood, burst brains, children’s dolls and tortured faces was all around. The last echoes fled the confines of the killing ground.

And Aaron realized that he’d been spared.

The next sound came from the schoolmaster’s boots as he stepped in front of the living to give a eulogy for the corpses.

“We can no longer afford to carry the weak,” he said. “This is war and sacrifices must be made if the strong are to remain that way. To survive, we must all work to our capacity. We can no longer afford parasites.”

He nodded once and walked to a black car. Clausewitz opened the door for him and they drove away. The other vehicles fell in behind, leaving only a few soldiers to keep an eye on the survivors.

The orderlies and doctors among the living made their way over to the dead, fruitlessly hoping they would be able do some good. Aaron joined them, not looking to help, but for a single face. It wasn’t long before he found it.

Gersh, Jaruzelski — whatever his true name had been — was dead.

Aaron stepped back as hand-drawn and horse-drawn carts pulled onto Breslaw Street. There were wagons from the three Jewish mortuaries that ran an ever-growing business within the walls of the ghetto, as well as others manned by conscript labor.

The laborers had been drawn from every walk of Jewish life. Former yeshiva students mixed with men who had worked with bricks and brooms in the days before the ongoing apocalypse. The blunt point of a gun now united men who would only have come together at worship, if at all.

Aaron watched as the bodies were awkwardly lifted. Soon the impromptu morticians looked like butchers after a hard day’s slaughter. If those who had died had possessed dignity in life, it had gone with their souls. Gravity made fools of them as their limbs flopped about under the ungentle ministrations. Wet, squelching sounds came from the pile. Workers stepped on one body to reach for the next. Hands and whole arms came away at a tug, bullets having cut through tendon and bone. The remains were laid on wheeled beds of rough wood.

The dead wouldn’t mind a few splinters Aaron guessed, as he stood rooted to the horror. He knew he should move. The Germans had packed up their big machine guns, but the remaining soldiers looked ill at ease, even jumpy.

“Who will visit our unmarked graves when the last of us is gone?” a voice muttered.

Aaron turned to look, but couldn’t be sure who had spoken.

The words freed him from his trance. He turned and quickly retreated the way he’d come. German eyes followed him, watching for any sign of resistance or even emotion.

Once he was well out of view, he began to shake. Aaron’s numbed fingers clawed at his coat, seeking the cigarettes he knew were in some pocket. When he couldn’t immediately come up with them, he sought out his flask instead. That was easier to find because of its weight.

His fingers weren’t any more nimble with the cap than they’d been with his pockets. When he finally got the flask open, the cap spun away. He heard it fall but couldn’t see where it landed.

Fuck it. Just fuck it
.

He managed to get the flask to his lips. He poured the liquor down his throat so fast that he choked. Some of the liquid sprayed up into his nasal cavity, burning away the stench of cordite, urine and voided bowels.

Most of the schnapps went down, though. Lava spread from his throat to his stomach and out to his extremities. It was welcome. He put the flask to his lips again and breathed in the fire. Another minute and the artificial calm had spread to his fingers, letting him pull the tattered cigarette pack from his coat. The cigarette trembled at his lips, but he was able to light it with the third match.

A deep breath of nicotine and then another. As the chemicals pushed their way through his system, Aaron’s mind put what he’d seen into a box he’d never open outside of his nightmares.

His eyes itched and when he put a hand up to rub them, it came away wet with freezing tears. He wiped them off on his coat and tried to turn his mind back to the case. It offered him the opportunity to consider just a single murder instead of a massacre.

Jaruzelski hadn’t added much to what he already knew, and Aaron wondered if he could trust even that much. If Jaruzelski had witnessed Berson’s death, he had little incentive to talk about it. Even less if he’d been the one to kill Berson.

That speculation, though, led to a dead end and Aaron decided to push it aside. Instead, he would play along and take Jaruzelski at this word; that Berson had been a smuggler for God, trying to steal as much as he could for his congregation. And that was all.

It wasn’t much and it didn’t bring Aaron closer to the answers he needed in any obvious way. He was, however, more aware than ever of the price of failure.

Aaron walked back the way he’d come, but now the streets were abandoned. The gunshots’ echoes told the ghetto that the Germans were out for blood.

When Miasto had first been taken, the Germans had carried out a massive purge, using machine guns and house fires to kill not only Jews, but prominent Poles as well.

Days of killing had taken place in a Jewish cemetery, with death only stopping to reload. More than ten thousand people had died before the rest had been ushered into their new “homes.” Then came the edicts governing Jewish life: the curfews, the armbands, the rationing, the Judenrat and the Jewish Police.

Many people who heard the shots outside of Breslaw Hospital were survivors of other mass slaughters. Many had planned ahead for the day when the killing would begin again, when the next roundup would come. In minutes they became invisible, having gathered their children and aging parents into the safest places they could imagine. Some hid under floorboards, others up in attics, still others crouched down in sewers or lay on top of shingled roofs.

Aaron felt himself floating ghostlike through a realm of shades. Everywhere were closed shop fronts and bolted doors. In front of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee soup kitchen there was no line. A normal day meant a queue that stretched for blocks beginning the minute the ghetto’s curfew was lifted and lasting until it fell again.

Despite the cold and fear that Aaron felt, he wandered aimlessly at first. He found his direction only when he discovered that he was out of cigarettes. He walked two more blocks and then took a sharp turn down an alley so narrow it could only be seen by someone standing directly in front of it.

The wind funneled into Aaron’s face. His shoulders brushed the bricks on both sides of the alley and he was forced to advance like a fencer. Light was fast disappearing. A frigid stink grew and formed a wall of its own for Aaron to push through. Ahead was a low window partially covered by random junk.

Aaron tapped on the junk, his rhythm confident. A voice called out, a code word was exchanged, and the odds and ends revealed themselves as a door of sorts. It was pulled aside, allowing Aaron to climb down into a dim, cluttered room.

“We weren’t expecting you until later,” said a gruff voice from the shadows, speaking in Yiddish.

“I wasn’t expecting to see what I just saw, either, Lech,” Aaron said. “A cigarette, please.”

A flame sparked in the darkness and an ember glowed. Lech Teitel, a rough man in a workman’s clothes, handed the cigarette’s unlit end to Aaron, who took it gratefully.

“What happened?” the Teitel asked, motioning Aaron to a chair that sat mostly empty.

“I was at the hospital,” Aaron began and, inhaling tobacco smoke with nearly every breath, he told his business partner everything he’d just seen, including Jaruzelski’s death.

Teitel knew the name through Aaron and had met the man more than once. It was Aaron’s contacts in the wider Polish community that helped bring the supplies into the ghetto. Teitel organized the manpower and distribution once they were inside. Before the war, Teitel had been a grocer. He saw no reason why a wall should force him to change professions, especially as demand had never been greater.

“We saw it coming,” Teitel said a few minutes after Aaron had finished. “It won’t be the last massacre, that’s for sure. What were you doing at Breslaw, anyway? You weren’t looking for Jaruzelski, were you? And what was he even doing there?”

“He said he’d been injured in some deal that had nothing to do with us. And I wasn’t there looking for him. Except it turned out that I was.”

“Very cryptic.”

“I was looking for a man named Martin Gersh, supposedly a Jewish policeman,” Aaron said. “Turns out that Gersh and Jaruzelski were the same man.”

“Hmmm … ” Teitel paused. “Well, I can see how that could be useful. Being both a smuggler and the man who is supposed to catch him.”

“I thought the same thing,” Aaron said. “But it must have cost him quite a bit. A lot of people would need paying off. I can’t imagine he was regularly showing up for his shifts. He must have been fairly busy on the other side of the wall.”

“Yes, if it was me, I’d only work the shifts when I had a shipment coming in.” Teitel nodded to himself. “Interesting that he was willing to do deals with us but never offered us the protection he had for himself.”

“Maybe he knew we had our own arrangements.”

“Maybe,” Teitel said. It was clear he wasn’t convinced.

Aaron wasn’t sure it mattered much anymore.

“Okay, next question,” Teitel said. “What were you doing looking for a Jewish policeman named Gersh?”

“Slivovitz?” Aaron asked, instead of answering.

There were crates and boxes behind Teitel, who reached around and pulled out a bottle of the sharp liquor. He opened it and poured the contents down his own throat for one second, two seconds, three seconds …

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself,” Teitel said through a burning throat, after handing the bottle over. “So, why were you there?”

“One of the Jewish Police was killed sometime between midnight of last night and dawn. Head bashed in. No witnesses, of course.”