lawyer. All fine. The difficult thing was the story.
He’d rehearsed it like an actor, trying to get the accent right, a little softer, slower. “Yes, legal business in Tuttlingen, a client’s will named his half-brother executor and to gain power of attorney we needed the half- brother’s signature. He couldn’t come to me!” This had been designed as a joke, to lessen the tension of the confrontation with a smile. “Terrible, the bombing, the devastation, just terrible.”
It should work.
He looked at himself in the mirror, searching for one Herr Doktor Peters. The dark double-breasted suit certainly would help, as would the tie and the Homburg and the briefcase. Still, a haggard, desperate man looked back at him, cheeks sunken, hardly a lawyer who’d lived fat and smooth these past seven hard years. His eyes seemed lusterless, his skin pale. Perhaps he ought to give himself color and health with Margareta’s makeup when he tried the border.
And when would that be?
“Repp,” she said behind him, scared.
“Yes?” He looked around.
“They’re here.” She pointed to the window. He peered out. A small open vehicle moved slowly down the street, four wary infantrymen in it.
“Damn!” he said. “We thought they’d pass this place.”
For a third time, the Americans had arrived.
23
There was no time to mourn. But Leets insisted on something. He wanted to carve the name into the trunk of a tree, or engrave it on a stone.
“So that he won’t be anonymous. So that he’ll have his name, his identity. Repp couldn’t take that from him.” For Leets believed that Repp had done the killing — not literally, of course, but at least on the metaphorical level. It was a Repp operation: at long distance, in the dark.
An American doctor less prone to melodrama had another explanation: “Just before liberation, a few trapped SS men broke into the warehouses and put on prison jerseys. They tried to mingle with the inmates. But it didn’t work. Because of the faces. That thin, gaunt KZ face. They didn’t have it; they were recognized right away, and beaten to death. And your friend — well, he’d been among us. All that American meat and potatoes. He’d filled out. They saw him in the prison compound and took him for an SS man. Who do you blame? Just one of those terrible things.”
So Leets felt his own emotions sealed up inside himself. He could not let them escape. He stared at the corpse. The head had been smashed in, the teeth broken off. Bright blood lay in the dust of the Appellplatz where he was found.
“Go with him to the pit or something, if it makes you feel better,” Tony said coldly. “Take his hand. Touch him. He’s only dead, after all, and you’ve seen the dead before.”
Leets knelt by the body, feeling a little ridiculous now. In fact he did take the hand, which felt cold and hard.
He could feel Susan accusing him once again in the dark.
He turned back to the dead Jew.
What did you expect from us? What do you people want, anyway? We had a war to win, we had to worry about the big picture. I had no idea this would happen. I had no idea. I didn’t know. I didn’t kn—
Leets felt the piece of paper in the cold hand. He pried the fingers roughly apart. Something in Hebrew had been written in pencil on a scrap. He stuffed it into his pocket.
After a while, two conscripted Germans came by for the body. Leets would have liked to have hated them, but they were elderly civilians — a banker and a baker — and the weight of the body was nearly beyond them. They were apologetic with the stretcher — it was too heavy, they were too weak, it wasn’t their fault. Leets listened to their complaints impatiently, and then gestured them to get going. After much melancholy effort they got Shmuel over to the burial ground, a pit that had been bulldozed out, and there set him down. They would not look into the wide, shallow hole. The stench of decomposition, though somewhat controlled by great quantities of quicklime, still overpowered, an inescapable fact. Delicately the two old men coughed and averted their eyes from the hundreds of huddled forms resting under a veil of white on the pit’s floor. Leets felt like kicking their asses.
“Go on, beat it, get the fuck outta here!” he yelled, and they ran off, terrified.
Awkwardly he got Shmuel up off the stretcher. Once he had him in his arms, he was astonished at how light he was after the groans of the pallbearers. He climbed into the pit and a cloud of lime dust swirled up over his boots, whitening them. The chemical stung his nose and eyes and he noticed most of the men around had masks on.
“Hey, Captain, you’ll want out of there. We’re shoveling ’em under now.” It was another officer, calling from the far side. An engine gunned into life. The bright blade of a bulldozer lurched into view over the pit’s edge, pushing before it a liquid tide of loose earth.
Leets laid Shmuel down. Any place in here was fine. He put him down in a long row of nearly fleshless forms.
Leets climbed out and brushed himself off and waved all clear. The dozer began to muscle the earth in and Leets watched for a second as it rolled over them.
“And that’s it? That’s all?”
He turned. Susan was standing there.
“Susan, I — it just—” and he ran out of words.
She looked at him blankly. Behind him the dozer lurched and tracked and flattened the soft earth.
“It just happened,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
She continued to stare.
“There was nothing any of us could do. I feel responsible. He’d come so far.”
In the sunlight, he could see how colorless her face had become. She looked badly in need of sleep. Her work with the dying, with the victims, must have been gruesome and dreadful; it must be eating her, for she looked ill. A fine sheen of bright sweat stood out on her upper lip.
“Everything you touch,” she said, “turns to death, doesn’t it?”
Leets had no answer. He watched her walk away.
There was the note, of course.
He had not forgotten it; but it took awhile to find a man among the prisoners who could read it.
Leets had a headache and Tony was impatient, and the translator, a bright young Polish Communist, played them for two packs of Luckies before delivering.
“That’s not much,” said Leets, handing over the cigarettes, feeling cheated.
“You asked, I answered,” the man said.
“It’s not much to die for.”
“He didn’t die for it. He got caught in a bad accident. Accidents are a feature of war, don’t you see?” Tony said. “It must be some sort of code name.”
Leets tried to clear his head. They were in the office where the interrogations had taken place. He still saw the rail yard full of corpses, Shmuel smashed to nothingness in the dust, the huddled forms laid out under the chemical snow, Susan in her nurse’s uniform glaring at him, eyes vivid with accusation.
He looked again at the word. It had to have some significance, some double meaning. It wasn’t arbitrary.
“Don’t they have an SS division called ‘Nibelungen’?”
“The Thirty-seventh,” confirmed Tony. “A mechanized infantry outfit. Third-rate, conscriptees, the lame, the halt, somewhere out in Prussia against the Russians. But that’s not it. This has been a
