“Friends. They know nothing about the situation in camp.”
“You’re Brigadier Smith’s only contact?”
“Who is Brigadier Smith?”
McConnell couldn’t keep from grinning. “What’s wrong with her? I like her just fine. Our own Mata Hari.”
“Shut up, damn you!”
McConnell stood up. “Kiss my ass, Stern. You know that idiom yet? Add it to your collection.”
Stern gave both of them withering stares, nodding like a man who has just discovered he is surrounded by enemies. Then he turned, walked through the foyer and out the front door.
Anna looked at McConnell with wild eyes, then jumped up, ran to the door, and shouted for Stern. He apparently did not stop, for she came back into the kitchen wearing the blank gaze of a witness to a terrible accident.
“He is walking toward the hills,” she said. “He will kill us all.”
“I don’t know,” said McConnell, standing up from the table. “He’s got that SD uniform. He speaks perfect German. He might make it.”
Anna looked around her kitchen as if it had suddenly become an alien environment. “They should have told me,” she said, her soft voice full of resentment. “It is too much to ask.” She focused on McConnell, her face now illuminated by sunlight. “Would he really do it?” she asked. “Would he really kill all those prisoners? All those children?”
McConnell realized then that Stern’s revelation had shocked the nurse as deeply as it had him. He felt an urge to touch her, to try and comfort her, but he didn’t want her to misinterpret his action. “I’m afraid he’s perfectly capable of doing that,” he said. “If he really wants to, you could only stop him by killing him. Unless you’re ready to do that, I don’t think you’d better go in to work today.”
“But I must!” Anna looked at him with new fear in her eyes. “If I don’t, Major Schorner will send a patrol here.”
“Can you call in sick?”
“I have no telephone.”
“How do you get to work?”
“Bicycle.”
“Well . . . you’d better ride damn slowly.”
29
Only twenty-four hours had passed since Major Schorner humiliated Sergeant Sturm in the alley, but in those hours Gunther Sturm had boiled with a rage unlike any he had ever known. It consumed him. Ultimately, he would kill Schorner. But the discovery of the British parachutes had caused enough of an uproar to draw the attention of Colonel Beck at Peenemunde. Sturm knew he would be crazy to try to get rid of Schorner under the nose of that devil.
He’d flirted with the idea of challenging Schorner to a duel. SS law entitled a man to demand satisfaction in a dispute where honor was involved. But in practice, actual duels were discouraged. Besides, even with one eye missing, Schorner was an expert fencer and a crack shot. No, the only revenge he could get immediately would be through Schorner’s Jewish whore.
The man he had chosen to carry out his vendetta was a certain Corporal Ludwig Grot. Not only was Grot the most violent man in his unit, but he also owed the sergeant major nearly four hundred marks in gambling debts. Sturm had put the matter to him over a bottle of excellent schnapps, a treat he had been saving for a special occasion. Grot had been more than happy for the chance to erase his debts with a single favor. And so simple! One beating. A couple of well-placed blows. Where was the difficulty? If a Jew insulted the honor of the Reich as he passed, it was his duty to teach her a lesson. If she died, so what? One less Jew fouling the good German air.
Sturm had made sure Grot had a clear field for his attack. Schorner was meeting with Colonel Beck at Peenemunde about the parachutes, and Brandt had driven down to Berlin again to meet with Reichsfuhrer Himmler. As Sturm walked his favorite shepherd — an enormous male called Rudi — down to the vantage point he had chosen from which to observe the ambush, he saw Grot lounging in front of the SS enlisted barracks. He gave the corporal a smug grin and reflected on how good a choice he had made.
During their time in Einsatzkommando 8, clearing Jews from Latvia, Ludwig Grot had frequently complained of boredom. He also lamented the great waste of ammunition expended in the disposal of Jews. One day he discovered a way to simultaneously assuage his two pet peeves. He ordered several Jewish prisoners to stand in a line, each man pressing his chest to the back of the man in front of him. He then took bets on how many Jews he could kill with a single bullet. In eastern Poland he had won thirty marks by killing three fully grown males with a single shot from his Luger. Near Poznan he had killed five women this way, but the last in line had taken several hours to die, so she didn’t really count.
Sturm affectionately scratched Rudi’s coat behind the powerful neck. He almost wished Schorner could be around to see the show.
Rachel was crossing the Appellplatz with Hannah and Jan when a guttural German voice brought her up short.
“What was that you said, Jew?”
She stopped and looked up into the perpetually angry face of Corporal Ludwig Grot.
“What did you call me,
Rachel noticed that the corporal was speaking very loudly, as if for the benefit of an audience. She clenched Jan and Hannah’s hands. “I said nothing, Herr Rottenfuhrer. But if I offended, I apologize.”
“You did offend, you stinking slut.”
Rachel crumpled to the ground under the force of the first blow. She wasn’t sure what had happened. It felt like she had walked blindly into an iron lamppost. When Grot kicked her in the stomach she nearly blacked out, but she forced one string of words from her throat. “Run! Children, run to Frau Hagan!”
Jan caught little Hannah’s hand and began pulling her toward the inmate blocks.
Grot dragged Rachel to her feet and slapped her twice — very hard and very quickly — like a man for whom violence is an old habit. The right side of her face stung as if it had been scalded. The left side felt numb. An image of a silver Death’s Head ring hung before her eyes. For an instant she thought of Wolfgang Schorner, then in the next remembered he was eighty kilometers away in Peenemunde. There would be no rescue today. She closed her eyes and prayed that Frau Hagan would look after her children.
Grot balled his right fist and punched the side of her head, dropping her onto the snow, then kicked her savagely in the ribs with his hobnailed boot. Rachel heard something crack as her left side collapsed inward. Grot’s boot stopped in its path toward her head as a woman’s voice shouted at him in a foreign language.
He looked up.
Frau Hagan was striding across the yard with all the confidence she had displayed digging peat at Auschwitz or hauling bricks at Buna. When she was ten meters from the corporal she began berating him in German, waving her hands and shouting that Major Schorner had unexpectedly returned to the camp and wanted Grot in his office immediately.
Confronted by this disconcerting spectacle, Grot stood up straight. The
While Corporal Grot looked to Sturm for guidance, Frau Hagan covered the last few meters to him. Rachel gasped when she saw the gardening spade appear from beneath her gray shift.
Grot whirled just in time to see the flash of metal as Frau Hagan buried the spade up to the hilt in his neck. She jerked the spade back out, allowing a fountain of blood to spurt from Grot’s carotid artery. Both hands flew to his throat.
The SS man, his eyes bulging in dumb incomprehension, fell to the ground in a spreading puddle of
