Black Cross. Greg Iles
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the world of light, then could not the shoemaker as well?
He let his mind reel back through time, to his life before Hitler. The pungent stench of the block gave way to the warm colors and smells of his home. Bread cooking in the oven, good matzo, his wife working over the kitchen stove. And in the back of the apartment, his shop. There, shaping leather at the last, his son, only fourteen yet nearly as tall as his father. So quickly becoming a man. He heard his wife calling, “Avram? Avram! Come! There are men in the street! Brown Shirts!”
The shoemaker hugged himself and shivered in his bunk. That Nazi rally had marked the beginning of the end for him, the end of the time when he would be known by his given name. Soon after his wife and son fled Germany, Hilter’s thugs began rounding up Jewish combat veterans along with all the rest, just as his son had predicted. Avram was arrested with a truckload of other Jews from Rostock and taken to a distant camp. There he had become prisoner 6065, a number of prestige now in the hellish universe of the camps, where a low number indicated either survival skills or luck—both treasured commodities.
When all his comrades died, he was transferred north to help build another prison in the land of numbers—Totenhausen Camp, not fifty kilometers from Rostock, his home city. There—here—he had carved out a small place for himself, existing in darkness, moving through life in single steps, with each step hoping to avoid the god of the camps, which was Death. So far he had been lucky, if survival was luck. Some believed the dead were the lucky ones. Sometimes he believed that too. But tonight, in some nameless slice of time between seeing the tears staining Weitz’s ratlike face and giving the two diamonds to Rachel Jansen, the shoemaker had become Avram Stern again. And that terrified him.
Because once again he had something to lose.
One hour after the shoemaker found sleep, Anna Kaas was standing beneath a tree in a dark clearing five miles northeast of Totenhausen. A giant of a black-bearded Pole stood beside her, ravenously chewing the salted ham she had stolen from the camp stores. Kneeling on the ground at her feet was the gaunt young man with wild hair and violinist’s fingers. He bent over an opened suitcase and began tapping out coded number groups on a Morse key. The numbers had been encoded to conceal the words on the sheet of paper in Anna’s hand. While the young Pole tapped and his older brother wolfed down the ham, Anna reread her message.
Himmler personally observed Special Action tonight.
Field test of Soman Four to be held at Raubhammer Proving Ground in fourteen days. The Führer will be present.
She took a match from her purse and set fire to the paper. It burned quickly. With her eyes she followed the dark antenna wire from the suitcase to the tree branch high above them.
She wondered exactly where the dots and dashes were going.
Six hundred miles away, in Bletchley Park, England, young Clapham received the message, transcribed and decoded it. Then he lifted the telephone and placed a call to SOE Headquarters in Baker Street.
Brigadier Duff Smith was awakened from sound sleep on an office cot to take the call. When he heard the word SCARLETT, followed by the contents of the message, he thanked Clapham, hung up, reached into a nearby tumbler and splashed water on his face. Then he calmly walked to the next office up the hall and said: “Barry, where’s Winston tonight?”
Rachel Jansen spent her first morning as a widow trying desperately not to fall asleep. She had not rested for many hours, but until she was certain that her children were relatively safe, she would not sleep. She sat stiffly on the floor, her back pressed against the narrow bunk she had been assigned, one of three stacked like bookshelves against the front wall of the Jewish Women’s Block. Her father-in-law stood unsteadily beside her. Her two children—Jan, three, and Hannah, two—sat on either side of her, their heads pillowed upon her shrinking breasts.
With stinging eyes Rachel looked warily around the barracks. For the last hour, women of every size and condition had been staring at her. She could not understand it. During her short time here, she had taken great care to offend no one. The women she had mentally christened the “new widows”—those who had arrived with her and also lost their husbands last night—were not staring. They seemed to be suffering various degrees of shock. But the others were. The only characteristic the staring women shared was their hair. Most of them had several inches of it.
It’s the old-timers, she thought uneasily. The camp veterans are staring at us. Rachel pressed her thighs tightly together and thought of the two diamonds the shoemaker had given her. It was a bit of an indignity to hide them in so intimate a place, but she had seen female veterans of the camp hiding coins, rolled photographs, and other small treasures there in the showers, and she had quickly followed their example. It proved a wise decision. Since then she had witnessed two surprise searches.
Why do they stare so? she thought anxiously.
“My son,” Benjamin Jansen whimpered for the hundredth time. “My home and my business weren’t enough? They had to take my only son?”
“Quiet,” Rachel whispered, pointing to the snoring children. “Sleep is their only refuge.”
The old man shook his head hopelessly. “There is no refuge from this place. Except through the back gate.”
Rachel’s young face hardened. “Stop whining. If it hadn’t been for that shoemaker knocking you down, you’d already be out the back gate.”
The old man closed his eyes.
Though exhausted, Rachel stared defiantly back at the toughest looking of the women—a thickset Slav with ash colored hair—and blocked out the old man’s fatalism. It was not easy. The thought of the “back gate” was enough to paralyze anyone. Already she had learned that the irregular tattoo of muffled bangs echoing in the trees behind the camp—which she had thought were gunshots—were actually explosions of gas through the swollen skins of decomposing bodies, buried in shallow pits behind the camp. Her husband’s resting place …
“Hey!” barked a gravelly voice. “Don’t you know why everyone is staring at you?”
Rachel lashed out blindly with her right hand and blinked her eyelids. She had fallen asleep just long enough for the big Slav to cross to her bunk. “Leave us alone!” she snarled.
The coarse-featured woman towering above her did not back away. She squatted down and jabbed a stubby finger at Benjamin Jansen. She wore leather-soled shoes, Rachel noticed, the only pair in the barracks.
“They’re staring because of him,” the woman said in a thick Polish accent. “This is the Jewish Women’s Block. He can’t stay here. The SS tolerate a certain amount of movement between the women’s and the children’s blocks. Helps to keep mischief down. But no men are allowed in the women’s block. The old goat can listen to what I have to say, then he has to go.”
Rachel looked at her father-in-law to make sure he understood.
“You’ve never been in a camp before, have you?” the woman asked. “None of you.”
“We passed through Auschwitz,” Rachel answered, “but only for an hour. I’m afraid this is all quite new to us.”
“It shows.”
“How, exactly?”
The woman wrinkled her wide, flat-boned face in scorn. “A hundred ways. But that doesn’t matter. Now that your rich husband has gone through the back gate, maybe you’re not too good to socialize with us, eh? Or maybe you want to be transferred to the Prominents’ Block?”
“No, no. We want no special treatment.”
“Good. Because there is no Prominents’ Block here. That’s Buchenwald. In Totenhausen everyone is equal.”
The woman seemed to take great satisfaction from this statement. Rachel extended