Black Cross

away.

Every instinct told Anna to run, to turn around and pedal out of the camp as fast as she could. But where could she run to? Schorner might be watching her at this very moment. She knew she should enter the hospital, but her legs had stopped moving. Greta’s body told a long and terrible story. The bruises showed where the questions had started. A series of burns traversed the length of her left arm. More serious queries. Ragged wounds on her thighs revealed that Sturm and his dogs had taken a turn before the end.

“Why Greta?” Anna asked, her voice almost a child’s whimper.

She looked across the Appellplatz. She knew that if she saw Schorner or Sturm or Brandt then, she would scream, Why her, you stupid animals? I am the traitor! I am the spy! She was actually speaking aloud when someone opened the hospital door and snarled, “Get inside, you stupid cow!”

Ariel Weitz stood in the hospital doorway, his ratlike face white with fear. “Stop gaping at her! Get to work!”

When Anna did not obey, Weitz reached out and jerked her into the building. He pulled her down the right- hand corridor and into an empty examining room. “Get hold of yourself!” he said, shaking her by the shoulders. “You’re signing your death warrant if you can’t act normally. Mine too.”

“I don’t understand,” Anna wailed. “What happened?”

“What do you think? They tortured her all night, then shot her.”

“But why? She didn’t do anything.”

Weitz’s face twisted in savage anger. “What did you think would happen after you ran out of here last night? You left your post and that stupid Pole died! Schorner wanted blood. I thought Sturm was bad. My God, when Schorner loses control—”

“But why Greta?”

Weitz threw up his hands. “Why? Because Schorner was raving about security and treason and God knows what. He didn’t believe Miklos died naturally.”

“But why didn’t he come for me?”

“It would have been you!” Weitz ground his teeth. “Schorner was ready to send Sturm after you. I knew if they interrogated you all would be lost. I didn’t have any choice. I had to give them someone else.”

Anna stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“I told Schorner I saw little Greta slip into the morgue before you got there. I suggested that she might have done something to kill him.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did!” Weitz’s eyes danced with maniacal light. “I told him I’d seen her before in Dornow, too, talking to suspicious characters. Poles, probably. I told him a dozen lies — all to save you!”

“But Greta didn’t know anything! Why did they kill her?”

“You’re such a little fool! They thought she did know something. They tortured her until she was useless and then shot her as an example.”

Anna felt her legs go out from under her. Weitz managed to shove her backward so that she collapsed onto a doctor’s stool. “I can’t do it anymore,” she moaned. “Nothing is worth this.”

“I’m just glad Miklos died,” Weitz said. “He would have told them everything. I would have killed him myself if I’d had the chance. Tell me, what time are they attacking the camp?”

Anna raised her hands to her face. Tears of hysteria welled in her eyes and a scream gathered in her throat. Only hours ago she had glimpsed a chance at a life beyond this place, some light of sanity beyond madness. But it had been an illusion. By leaving last night she had doomed her friend to unspeakable torture—

“What time?” Weitz pressed.

Anna squeezed her shaking hands into fists. Only anger could bring her through now. She thought of the day Franz Perlman had been murdered by the SS in Berlin.

“Eight o’clock tonight,” she whispered.

Weitz nodded. “Good, good. I want to be ready. How many men?”

“No men.”

“What?”

“There won’t be any men.”

“No men? But how . . .? My God, they’re going to bomb us from the air?”

“No.”

“No? What, then?”

“Gas.”

“Gas? Poison gas? How can they do that?”

Anna looked up with bloodshot eyes. “It’s better that you don’t know.” She stood up. “I’ve got to get away from here.”

Weitz blocked the door. “You can’t go anywhere! You’ll ruin everything. Everything I did will have been for nothing.”

“I didn’t ask you to do anything!”

Weitz gave her a chilling smile. “I see. You wish it was you hanging up there on the Tree? You didn’t see what they did to little Greta.”

Anna shuddered. “Better me than an innocent girl.”

“Ha! None of us are innocent here. Even though we worked against them, we stood silent while it went on. We have participated. There are no clean souls in this building. Except the children. Don’t shed any tears for Fraulein Muller.”

“You sicken me!” Anna hissed. “Get away from me! Get away, you — you filthy Jew!”

Weitz clapped his hands together like a monkey. “Ha ha! You see? We’ve worked together six months, you and I. Plotting and scheming, we made this raid possible. But in the end you are a German and I am a filthy Jew!”

Anna held up her hands. “I didn’t mean that, Herr Weitz. I have nothing against Jews. I once loved a Jew.”

Weitz cackled still louder. “Of course you did! Every German has his pet Jew. The one that really doesn’t deserve the gas. But somehow we all end up there.”

“All but you,” she said cruelly.

“Oh, I’ll get there soon enough. But I’ll be taking a few Germans with me.”

Anna had no desire to know what he meant. “I can’t face Brandt today,” she said. “Or Schorner, or Sturm. Not any of them!”

“You’ll have to face Schorner eventually,” he said. “Go sit in the children’s ward for a while. That should stiffen your spine. Go sit with the little boy Brandt uses as a living culture medium. He’s deaf and mute now, from the meningitis. That should remind you of why we’re doing this. What was the life of Greta Muller worth compared to the children we have seen murdered here?”

“I can’t think that way,” Anna whispered.

“Then don’t think at all. Play your part for a few hours and go home. You can miss the final act.”

“What will you be doing?”

Weitz put his hand on the door handle. “Dying, probably. But before I do, I’m going to finish Klaus Brandt. Gas is too good for that slug. For years I’ve dreamed of how I would kill him if I had the chance.” Weitz held up a dirty-nailed forefinger. “You wouldn’t want to see it, I promise you.”

Hans-Joachim Kleber, deputy chief of police in Dornow village, was thinking that seventy years old was too old to be climbing down an icy iron ladder into a sewer tunnel. But he had little choice. Kleber had assumed his rank in the police department in late 1943, after the last Dornow men under sixty disappeared into the army. And since nothing illegal ever happened in Dornow — not since the SS had built the camp over the hill, anyway — he was placed in charge of maintaining the electric lights and the sewer tunnel. He didn’t complain much. The work paid enough to keep him in tobacco.

He groaned as his rubber boots plopped down into the cold muck at the bottom of the ladder. At least it