“Or we could be dead,” Herman repeated. “We could be dead anyway. At least this way
Muscles tightened in the backs of Joachim’s legs. He wanted to stand. But he did not know what kind of death waited outside. It would be a death, probably a sooner death than awaited him at Dachau. A sooner death.
Herman dropped his warm hand onto the crown of Joachim’s head. “I’m leaving. Are you coming with me?”
Joachim shook his head. He needed time. He hated his cowardly survival instinct.
“Kurt didn’t escape to Switzerland,” Herman said abruptly. He withdrew his hand, the spot he’d warmed now colder than the rest of Joachim’s head. “Kurt died.”
Joachim’s stomach convulsed. His voice almost broke when he spoke, but he brought it under control. “I don’t know any Kurt and I don’t care what he did.”
He gazed into Herman’s eyes, surprised that they were such a vivid blue. They reminded him of a mountain lake he swam across as a child. Joachim dropped his eyes first.
“Be careful then, Joachim Rosen.”
Herman forced the door out, grunting as his arms shook with the strain. Slowly, the wire stretched. Joachim admired his strength. He could never force the door like that.
“Good-bye.” Herman dropped out of the train into the snow.
For the first time since they took him, Joachim wept. He did not cry with the loud, wet wails of his childhood. He sat and wept the dry, silent sobs of a new grief.
The prisoner next to him reached over and put a cold hand on his arm. Joachim slowly brought himself under control.
The train jerked to a stop and knocked him to the floor. He pulled himself back onto the bench. Whispers ran the length of the car. Why were they stopping?
Were they in Dachau already? Herman had escaped at the last instant. Joachim tried to imagine him rowing across Lake Constance to a land filled with chocolate, but instead pictured him bleeding in the snow.
The familiar aroma of cigarette smoke wafted in. Behind him several prisoners inhaled the smell greedily, but Joachim shrank back. That odor meant soldiers.
The car door jerked open, and Joachim threw up an arm to shield his eyes from the scalding light. Dark profiles of three soldiers with guns loomed in the doorway, a prisoner sagged between two others. They heaved a body in and slammed the door.
Joachim alone crossed to the inert figure, giving up his precious seat on the bench. He knelt and rolled him over. Dim light from the window illuminated a battered face. Herman.
Joachim shook him, thinking of Kurt’s beautiful face broken by the Gestapo. Herman’s head lolled on his shoulders. He looked dead.
Joachim put a finger under Herman’s nostrils to check for breath just as the car jolted back into motion. Off balance, he fell across Herman’s body. Herman’s heart beat against Joachim’s chest. Joachim smiled. He lay there a moment, remembering other men and other nights.
He pulled himself to a sitting position and peeled off his own jacket, shivering. He wiped blood from Herman’s face with its tattered sleeve, tracing the angle of his cheekbone. Herman moaned.
Joachim’s shaking fingers unbuttoned Herman’s jacket. He lifted Herman with one hand and pulled his jacket off, wincing at the darkening bruises on his ribs.
Another prisoner put a skeletal hand on Joachim’s naked arm. “Careful,” he said. “You don’t want to be pink at Dachau.”
Joachim squeezed his hand.
The prisoner pulled back. Joachim finished switching jackets with Herman. Now his own jacket bore a pink triangle, Herman’s a yellow one.
The prisoner turned away.
Joachim cradled Herman’s head in his lap until the train stopped hours later. The doors opened onto darkness.
“
The guards marched through the weary prisoners, separating them into two long lines. They sent Joachim to one line, Herman to another. Joachim looked at the pink triangle on the man next to him. Herman was safe.
But then Joachim noticed the other triangles in his line: red, black, and purple, but no yellow. Herman stood in a line of all Jews.
Joachim read the station name off a sign. Not Dachau at all. Not a work camp.
The sign read Oswiecim. He closed his eyes. The German name for Oswiecim was Auschwitz. A death camp. He smelled sweetish smoke from the crematorium.
Joachim opened his eyes and searched for Herman. Herman’s blue eyes met his. Herman nodded. He knew, too.
Joachim’s line moved toward a convoy of trucks, Herman’s into the darkness. Joachim realized that the yellow triangles were never coming back. He pulled his jacket closer around his thin frame, one hand lingering on the pink triangle. Strains of Wagner drifted through the cold air surrounding both of them.
REBECCA CANTRELL writes the critically acclaimed Hannah Vogel mystery series set in 1930s Berlin, including
Children’s Day by Kelli Stanley
Shorty was complaining about the grift around Midget Village when Miranda saw the clown. Sad eyes. No smile. The Gayway wasn’t always gay, even for a clown and the little blonde girl with him, waiting in line for cotton candy.
Too many kids, too many clowns. Monday, April 3, Children’s Day, and Miranda wondered why the fuck she’d come back to the fair on her one day off. Maybe because she had nowhere else to go.
“You take it up with the bulls?” she asked Shorty.
The little man shook his head, the red light of the cigarette dancing at the end of his mouth.
“You know how it is. Don’t take us serious. Come in for a belly laugh and drift over to Sally Rand’s or Artists and Models for a tweak of some tit. Christ Almighty, I can’t blame ’em for that, but we need protection, not a goddamn babysitter.”
Miranda nodded, looking over his head. The clown was crouched at the side of the refreshment booth, talking to the kid, pink sweat dripping on his dirty white collar. Puffs of spun candy hid her face. A stout woman in a green plaid coat smiled at them through her peanuts.
Miranda dropped her Chesterfield and rubbed it out in the dirt next to a wadded-up napkin from Threlkeld’s Scones. “I’ll do what I can. I don’t have much pull with the cops-”
“You got pull where it counts, sister. You got in the papers, you got your shamus license, you caught your boss’s killer. That’s enough for Leland Cutler, and it’s enough for Shorty Glick.”
She bent down to shake the midget’s hand. “I’ll do what I can. Be seeing you, Shorty.”
He nodded, put the ten-gallon hat back on, hoisted up the chaps and kid’s gun belt with dignity, and waddled into the compound. Singer’s Midgets, carted around from sawdust heap to sawdust heap, stared at, laughed at, gee
