Jacob's Oath (8 page)

As soon as he understood the delay could last another day at least, he set off into
the hills of the Odenwald, following a trail he remembered that wound around the high
ridge and rejoined the river road at the Snake Path almost opposite the Old Bridge.
The trail ran through thick woods until it opened onto the last part of the Philosopher’s
Way, which had been everyone’s most beloved picnic spot. Philosophers, poets, and
painters dedicated their art to the startlingly beautiful view through the trees and
across the winding river to the steeples, gables, and red roofs of Old Heidelberg,
over which ruled, from its perch on the hill, the ghostly towers of the destroyed
renaissance fortress of Prince Elector Otto Heinrich.

As he pushed through the overgrown trail, arms raised to protect himself from the
whip of branches, his step became heavier. A cloud descended upon him. He was nearing
the most beautiful city in Germany from its most beautiful approach, and all he would
see was a sea of rubble, like every other city through which he had passed. He didn’t
want to see the medieval towers, the ancient university buildings, even the old castle,
humiliated by the bombs, even if he hated everyone who lived in them.

His thoughts became grim. The trees were tall and dark and their branches spread and
their foliage pressed in and his childhood fears knocked at his heart. The ogres and
demons of the forest and the gnomes and elves of the fables inhabited the minds of
all who dwelt in the Odenwald. And even after all he had survived, the howls of the
wolves and the shrieks of the dwarves and the fiends of the tales of his childhood
still prickled his skin. He hurried forward, sniffing evil spirits in the wind, and
wondered with Rotkäppchen: Who is sleeping in my bed? Or did the warplanes huff and
puff and blow my house down?

He steeled himself as he broke out of the forest and climbed the final hill from whose
peak he would see Heidelberg, for the first time since that loud sharp knock on his
door, on October 22, 1940, a date he would never forget, when the Gestapo ordered
the family to report within two hours to the train station on Rohrbacher Street. Bring
a hundred Reichsmarks and one small bag each with your name, address, and date of
birth on a piece of paper inside.

Don’t worry. To a safe place.

The crowd of Christians grew as word spread. They watched in silence: schoolmates,
neighbors, their local shopkeepers. When Jacob’s eyes met those of Thomas Holtz, once
his bosom friend from kindergarten, Thomas blushed and looked down.

A light rain scattered the onlookers as the first train, with wooden planks nailed
over its windows, pulled away from platform 1A at 6:15 in the evening. From inside,
fingers poked through the slats, feeling for freedom, a woman’s long black hair billowed
through a crack as the wind picked up with the speed. It was the last time he saw
his father.

It was just after Yom Kippur and the Jews were taken into occupied France, to Gurs,
in the south, where most died of exposure that first freezing winter. The rest met
their end in Auschwitz. He and his brother, after watching the first train pull out
of the station, were trucked in the opposite direction, to Bergen-Belsen, to the Sternlager.
His dead British mother, who he could hardly remember, had saved his life by giving
him her nationality. With his last hug, with his last kiss, with his last words to
his father, who was strangely calm, as if he had accepted his fate, Jacob had promised:
“I will look after Maxie.”

And now he was returning, alone, wearing a stranger’s three shirts, and odd shoes.

Even when Maxie died, Jacob hadn’t cried. His grief was so overwhelmed by his fury
and frustration that he had frozen, seized up, and his friends had carried him to
the hut, laid him on the bed, and when he had started to rave and yell, they had held
him down, sat on him, anything to keep him away from the Rat.

He was twenty when he last saw his father, and now he was twenty-five. In those five
years in the hands of the torturers he had never cried.

Maybe it was because he had expected so little that the shock was so great. When he
emerged from the trees and looked down from the hill, steeling himself for the worst
across the river, only to find the sun glittering on red and black rooftops, lighting
rows of medieval homes in the narrow alleys, their white walls gleaming, almond and
chestnut trees blossoming white and yellow in the cobbled squares, and he heard the
four o’clock chimes of the Church of the Holy Spirit pealing across the Neckar from
the middle of Market Square, and he could even see, counting from the left, the gabled
roof of his own home, at Dreikönigstrasse 9, as if nothing had changed, as if a good
spirit from the woods had laid a protective hand over Heidelberg and kept the city
safe, Jacob couldn’t hold it in anymore.

Alone on the hill, he sobbed with relief: his home still stood; he had come home;
so others may return too. And he wept for all he had lost: his youth, his family,
everything but his life. And for what he had endured. He howled across the river,
and felt better for it.

Finally, trembling, with an unfamiliar relief sweeping through him, he wiped his face,
and as he set off down the Snake Path toward the Old Bridge, pushing aside the overgrown
bramble, he believed everything would be all right again, after all.

It was a beautiful feeling.

It didn’t last long.

The beauty and the serenity of the ancient town had lulled him. It was picture-perfect
down there, but that’s all it was, an image, like a postcard mailed the day before
an earthquake. He had been duped by the flowers and the birds and the view.

His back straightened as he walked and it all came back. Why was he here? To find
family? He wished, but no chance. Friends? No. Property? No.

No.

His oath to Maxie as he died in his arms.

SEVEN

Twisted around with his arm over the passenger seat, Yonni Tal reversed the darkened
jeep into a stand of pine trees. He came to a halt at the edge of a shaft of moonlight,
walked to the back, pulled out two long wooden planks, and wedged them beneath the
two front wheels, to give them a firmer grip. Heavy rain that afternoon had turned
the grass into mud. He didn’t want any surprises; they needed a clean getaway. He
leaned the heavy spade against the spare wheel, to grab it quickly just in case they
did get stuck.

Ari Levinsky unzipped a kit bag and pulled out two gray German army combat jackets,
which he and Omri Shur put on. They adjusted their steel helmets, more for disguise
than protection. They didn’t want to be seen at all but if they were, they didn’t
want to be recognized later. In one pocket Ari put his jackknife, and in another,
two thin steel cords with knotted rubber ends. Just in case, he slipped a seven-inch
commando knife into the top of his boot. His stomach turned. He hated the rancid smell
from his bag of raw meat and bones.

Omri detached his Colt .45 from the shoulder holster, which he didn’t need, and checked
all seven rounds in the magazine. He’d need only one, and hopefully not even that.
He’d bought the gun from an American G.I. and liked it for his private work. He snapped
the magazine inside the butt, double-checked the thumb safety, and pushed it in his
belt. Ari looked around, pointed with his chin at the row of small houses at the end
of a country lane. “One, two, three,” he said. “The third house on the left. With
the two lights.”

“You don’t say,” Omri said. They’d cruised by six times in two days.

“Ready?” Ari said.

Omri nodded. “If you are.”

Omri, as he always did before a kill, slid his hand under the German jacket and tapped
his British army shoulder flash with two fingertips, kissed them, and again tapped
the golden Star of David on blue and white stripes.

“Yallah,” he said. “Let’s go.”

*   *   *

Omri Shur was a legend in Palestine, at least among the fighters of the Haganah. Born
on Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’akov in the Jordan Valley, at twenty years old he had been a
strategist and instructor for the Jews’ endgame, code-named Maoz Haifa. It would be
another Masada, the final fight of the Jews in the Holy Land. In 1942, with German
Panzer divisions storming across North Africa, led by their greatest general, Erwin
Rommel, the Jews in Palestine understood that if his Blitzkrieg crushed the British
in Egypt, they would be next, and if the reports from Europe about the Jews were correct,
there would be no mercy. They would all be slaughtered. But here it would be a different
story. Here, the Jews would fight to the last, and the last redoubt of the last Jews
would be in the hundreds of linked caves and thick forests of Mount Carmel—Maoz Haifa,
the Haifa Stronghold. On these slopes, Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal. Omri
Shur didn’t expect to defeat the Nazis, but he would make sure he would be among the
last of the last.

He was trained to kill Nazis at any price.

As for Ari Levinsky, he was born in Hamburg and left for Palestine in 1933 when his
prescient parents took Adolf Hitler at his word. He was thirteen years old, newly
bar mitzvahed, and thanks to generations of intermarriages with prototypes of Hitler’s
racial fantasies, grew into a powerfully built young man with blond hair and blue
eyes.

He, too, had been part of the underground Jewish army’s determination to go down fighting.
They had formed a secret unit of Jews in Palestine known as the German Platoon: fluent
German-speakers who could pass as Wehrmacht soldiers if the Nazis occupied Tel Aviv.
They learned to impersonate the enemy: to swagger like them, sing Nazi marching songs,
give correct greetings according to rank, until they could get close enough to murder
senior SS officers.

In late 1944, two years after General Montgomery’s Eighth Army, the British “Desert
Rats,” had turned the tide on Rommel, and the Nazi threat to Palestine had evaporated,
the British army formed the Jewish Brigade. Five thousand Jews who would fight for
the British against the Germans in Europe.

The Haganah sent Omri Shur and Ari Levinsky, and hundreds more, to join the Brigade
and gain experience for the next war they all saw coming: against the Arabs in Palestine.
They didn’t get a chance to do much fighting, though. British commanders didn’t trust
the Palestinian Jews, and the war ended too soon.

But for a rogue handful of the Jewish Brigade, their own private war was just beginning.
A war of revenge.

*   *   *

Omri and Ari trod in the shadows of trees until the track from the meadow merged with
the lane. It was the very last street of Holzkirchen, a small market town in Bavaria,
about thirty kilometers from Munich: Hitler country. At ten o’clock at night, most
of the worthy burghers were fast asleep. All the houses in the street were dark, except
for the third on the left. Upstairs, their man in British Intelligence had told them,
at 10:00 p.m. Frau Inge Langenscheidt would be preparing to put out the light. Downstairs,
her husband would shuffle around till the small hours of the morning, reading, writing,
pacing.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Uwe Langenscheidt, of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division, special
liaison with the Croatian Ustasha, murderer, torturer, rapist, had trouble sleeping.

“The fuck he does,” Ari had said when they were given their target, his history, his
address, his habits, his wife’s habits, and the names and breeds of the neighborhood
dogs. “He’s a big guy, rough, be careful,” the briefer, known to them only as Blue,
had told them. Blue was a Jew in British Intelligence, part of a tiny underground
within the Allied armed forces that gave the files of identified yet unpunished SS
officers to the secret band that called themselves the Avengers. It enabled small
units of killers to operate in the British, American, and Russian zones of occupied
Germany.

Omri and Ari emerged from the blue-tinged trees into pale moonlight. Now that they
were in the open anyway, they no longer crept but walked boldly in the middle of the
street as if they had grown up there.

Two men and their shadows, with guns.

At the gate to the house, Ari clicked with his tongue, and clicked again, until Topf,
the Langenscheidts’ big mutt, appeared by the garden shed, alert and suspicious. They
heard his low growl. Ari clicked again a few times, burrowed in his pocket, and threw
a slice of raw meat toward the animal. “Kelev tov,” Ari murmured in Hebrew, good dog.
As Topf leaped onto the meat and gulped it down, his tail wagging furiously, wanting
more, the two killers quietly unlatched the gate and walked toward the front door,
avoiding the two orange pools of light from the windows.

Upstairs, the light went out. After five minutes, without a sound, Ari released the
clasp on his jackknife, slid it between the lock and the door, and maneuvered and
levered until with a pop the bolt slid back into its cylinder. He pushed the door.
It still didn’t open. He slid the blade of the knife down to the floor and then upward
till he found a second lock. Again, the clasp, pressure, a sudden giving, and the
bolt moved backward.

It was just a simple country door.

Omri, pistol in hand, breathed out again. Topf pinned them with his eyes and whined
for more. Ari placed a bone in his slobbering mouth.

Omri eased the door open to find himself in a small hallway with a neat row of walking
shoes and boots lined up beneath the coatrack. There was a set of stag horns above
a mirror. He saw his reflection: coat, helmet, slit eyes, a gun. A shaft of light
beneath the door to the left, the only light in the house, showed the way to Langenscheidt.
Ari picked up a boot and quietly placed it against the wide-open front door, to keep
it from slamming.

He looked into Omri’s eyes and nodded: ready?

Omri’s right hand held his Colt .45 at shoulder height, the safety still on. He didn’t
want to shoot. He nodded back.