“Nope.” He met her gaze, and saw his own growing horror reflected in the stark, drawn features of her face.
She said, “We need to find out exactly what was on that U-boat. But how?”
He turned his back on the darkened sea. “I’ve been thinking. I know someone who might be able to help us. A guy by the name of Leon Ginsburg.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s the father of Paul Ginsburg.”
“As in, Paul W. Ginsburg, former secretary of defense? How can he help us?”
“For one thing, he’s a doctor. And he was a prisoner at Dachau for three years.”
“Where does he live now?”
“Jaffa.”
“Jaffa? As in, Jaffa, Israel?”
“That’s right.”
“So, how do you know him?” she asked, as Jax flagged down a passing taxi.
“It’s a long story.”
56
Jaffa, Israel: Thursday 29 October 11:54 P.M. local time
Leon Ginsburg lived in an ancient stone house on a narrow, crooked street that dated back to the days when Jaffa was a prosperous Palestinian port surrounded by the vast orange groves that had made the city famous. The orange groves were mostly gone now, the few that were left disappearing fast beneath the runways of Ben-Gurion Airport and the creeping urbanization that had made Jaffa a virtual suburb of Tel Aviv.
It was nearly midnight by the time their taxi pulled up next to the house’s worn, shallow steps. A wrought-iron lamp set high on a coursed stone wall cast a pool of warm, golden light over a heavy, weathered door set into a corbelled arch. As Jax raised his fist to knock, the door swung inward to reveal a small, wizened man half lost in a bulky brown cardigan sweater, with thin white hair and wire-framed glasses he wore pushed down on the end of his bulbous nose.
“James! I wondered when you were going to get here.” His liver-spotted, bony hand closed on Jax’s sleeve, dragging him inside. “Come in, come in. You too, Miss Guinness.”
“James?” whispered Tobie, following Jax up the steps.
“That’s right. James.” Leon Ginsburg closed the old door behind them and gave a soft laugh. “It’s his real name. James Aiden Xavier Alexander.”
“There are only two people in the world who call me James,” said Jax, slinging an affectionate arm around the old man’s shoulders. “My mother, and Leon.”
The old man huffed another laugh and ushered them down a narrow corridor. “I was Jax’s grandfather for two years, you know. Did he tell you?”
The corridor erupted suddenly into a leafy courtyard surrounded by open arcades that loomed three stories above them. “No,” said Tobie. “He didn’t tell me.”
“My son Paul was Sophie’s third husband.” He frowned. “Or was it the fourth?”
“The third,” said Jax.
“I don’t know how you keep them straight.”
“I remember the earlier ones better.”
With a soft chuckle, Leon spread his arms wide, indicating a grouping of chairs nestled in amongst potted palms and ferns. “Please. Sit. You’ve been traveling for hours. You must be hungry. I’ve asked my wife to fix us something.” The sound of soft footsteps brought his head around. “Ah. Here she is.”
A woman bearing a heavy tray emerged from an open doorway beneath the far arcade. Leon rushed to help her, murmuring something to her in Arabic as he took the heavy tray from her. She stood a good half a head taller than he, and was perhaps twenty years younger, with a plump face and green eyes and the discreet headscarf of a devout Muslim.
“Good evening,” she said in lightly accented English. “Welcome to our home.”
“My wife, Yasmina,” said Leon, his face breaking into a broad grin as he introduced them. “She is a professor of biology at Al-Quds University. Sixteen years ago this December, I heard a loud pounding on my door just after sunrise. When I peeked outside, there was this beautiful woman standing on my steps. She shook her fist under my nose and said, ‘My grandfather built this house. I was born in this house. By what right do you live here?’”
Yasmina Ginsburg’s eyes twinkled with silent laughter as husband and wife shared a private smile. “What chutzpah!” he said, setting the tray with its load of homus and bread and olives on the table before them. “I was hopelessly smitten.”
While they ate, they talked of Leon’s son, Paul, and the time Leon had spent in Washington. Then Leon drew a pipe from the cavernous folds of his cardigan and packed it with tobacco, his expression growing thoughtful. He said, “I may be old and feebleminded, James, but I’m not so far gone as to believe you came all the way here to visit this alter kocker just to talk about old times.”
“You’re far from feebleminded, and you know it. I’m here because I need information.”
Leon cast him a long, steady look, and kept tamping his tobacco. “You’re a spy. That’s what you people do-you collect information. What kind of information could an old man like me possibly give you?”
“I need to know about the Nazi biological weapons program at Dachau.”
“Ah.” Leon lit a match and held the flame to his pipe with an unsteady hand. “That’s a pretty tall order, James. The Nazis were working with everything from anthrax to smallpox, and God only knows what else.”
“Did you ever hear of a disease that kills Jews, but is harmless to gentiles?”
Leon went very still. When his match burned down to the tips of his fingers, he dropped it in a nearby ashtray. But it was still a moment before he spoke. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
He leaned back in his chair, one hand cupping the bowl of his pipe. “It was in 1944. The fall, I think. A truck brought in a group of Jews from southern France. They were already very ill when they arrived-some sort of acute respiratory disease. No one knew what. They were put in a barracks where something like half the men were Polish intellectuals, the rest French Jews. Some of the Poles came down with a mild case of the sniffles. But almost every one of the Jews in that barracks died.”
He sucked silently on his pipe for a moment. Jax and Tobie waited. He said, “You know, a lot of people think the Nazis only sent Jews to the concentration camps. But the truth is, they rounded up anyone and everyone they thought might be a danger to the State. About a third of us at Dachau were Jews. The rest were a combination of Catholic priests, gypsies, Germans who opposed the Nazis, Communists…” Leon shrugged. “Hitler had a lot of different enemies.
“We were all made to wear overalls with color-coded triangles. The Jews, of course, wore yellow badges. The Communists and other political prisoners had to wear red. Common criminals wore green triangles. Jehovah’s Witnesses were given purple triangles. The Gypsies wore black, while homosexuals had to wear pink.” He gave a soft huff. “All these years, and I still remember.”
His wife reached out to lay her hand over his, and after a moment, he continued. “There was a doctor at the camp, a man by the name of Martin Kline. After he heard what happened in that barracks, he decided to do an experiment. He selected fifty Jews and fifty gentiles, and had them deliberately infected with the virus.”
“It was a virus?”
Leon flattened his lips, his bushy white brows drawing together in a thoughtful frown. “That’s what we thought it was. No one had heard of retroviruses in those days. But looking back on it now, it’s hard to say.”
Jax said, “Where did the disease originally come from?”
“Who can say? Those were terrible times, with vast populations in motion under wretched conditions. The miracle is that it never spread outside the camp.”
Tobie leaned forward. “So what happened?”
“Many of the gentiles came down with what I guess you might describe as a cold: sniffles, sore throat-that sort of thing. All but one survived. But half the Jews died. The doctors in the camp took to calling it die Klinge von
