The Children's War (181 page)

He turned back questioningly.

“Peter,” Olek said as if making a brave decision.

“What is it?”

Olek came close and extended his hand. Reflexively Peter grasped it, and Olek wrapped his other hand around their clasped hands. “I know you English are uncomfortable with many of our gestures, so I won’t do more than shake your hand.” As Olek said that, he tightened his grip as if trying to convey a warm embrace through just his fingers. “Be careful, Peter. It’s a dangerous job. I’d really miss you. You’ve been like a father to me. Please, be careful!”

Peter felt stunned by the intensity of Olek’s emotion and only managed to stammer, “I’ll do my best,” as an obviously embarrassed Olek ducked back into the room.

As Peter changed into the attachó’s uniform, he realized that he should have said much more, that he had not told Olek how much his friendship had meant to him, but there was no time to go back. He cursed his tiredness and finished dressing. He found his guide and together they set off toward the front. She took him down a well-trodden path, but as they continued farther and farther out, the path narrowed until there were only a few bootprints in the snow. Eventually even those turned off and he and his guide trod across a windswept clearing that bore no sign of having previously been crossed. Though the weather was wildly different, the lack of a trail brought up an eerie memory of when Marysia had first guided him back to the encampment. Then he had become convinced that she meant to kill him, and with that thought he glanced furtively at his guide.

Peter was startled when he realized the woman had stopped and was reaching for something, then he relaxed as he saw that she was putting on her snowshoes. Snowshoes! Of course! He had not been thinking. Snowshoes would have made a lot of sense, he thought, as he painstakingly lifted his legs time and again out of the snow to take the next arduous step. I’m an idiot, he thought, a tired idiot. I should have slept before leaving the cabin. I should have slept before leaving the camp. I’m an idiot.

Finally, after sunset, they reached their destination and he was handed off to the partisan leader. He had a brief discussion with him and was then handed over to his next guide—a short, skinny teenager with startlingly white skin and curly, jet-black hair. Under the cover of darkness, they left, diving into the woods toward enemy territory. It was arduous going through the snow, and his legs howled with pain as he and his guide clambered up an icy slope. Once they reached the top, he asked his guide to stop and the two of them rested on a log while Peter massaged his right knee, trying to snap the bones back into place.

The boy lit a cigarette. “You want one?”

Peter shook his head. It seemed pointless to say that they were near enemy troops and that the smoke from a cigarette could betray them.

“My father used to have problems walking,” the youth volunteered.

“Oh, why’s that?” Peter asked, feeling suddenly very old.

“It was his feet. He lost his toes. Fingers too.”

“Gestapo?”

“No, no. He was deported to Siberia from Wilno.”

“Why?”

The boy shrugged. “I guess they missed him in the first waves.”

Peter frowned as he tried to work out what that meant, but before he could ask, the boy continued,“He spent nearly five years in a labor camp out there.”

“That sounds rough. Is that where he got frostbite?”

“Not really. He said he was collapsing from hunger and exhaustion, so he decided to slice off some toes so he could get a few days’ rest in the camp hospital. When they released him, he said he couldn’t face the thought of going back into the mine, so he thought he’d head west and make for the Reich. He’d heard from some of the tradees—”

“The
what?

”

“The prisoners that the Nazis sold to the Soviets for slave labor, or usually ‘traded’ for raw materials,” the boy answered as if it were the most natural thing in the world to sell prisoners. “He’d heard there was a free area in the mountains, so he just leapt onto a passing train and took his chances. That’s when his fingers and the rest of his toes froze. He made it to the eastern reaches of these mountains, then hobbled across the border into our territory.”

“On his own?” Peter asked in amazement. A brisk wind stirred the barren branches, and the clouds cleared long enough for the half-moon to shine its light on them. A wolf howled in the distance.

“I think he had help. Somebody here found him, they fixed him up, and . . .” The boy shrugged.

“When was this?”

“About twenty-five years ago. He met my mother, they married, and so on.”

“How’s he doing now?”

“Oh, he’s been dead ten years now. One day he just walked off into the woods and shot himself.”

“Shot himself,” Peter repeated as he struggled to massage away his pain.

“Yeah, guess he had had enough.”

“Shot himself,” Peter whispered despondently.

“He was a coward,” the boy asserted as he ground out his cigarette on the rough wood of the log.

50

T
HE BOY LEFT HIM AT THE EDGE
of a road a safe distance from his destination, and Peter made his way on foot, alone and deliberately obvious. As he approached the camp, a sentry challenged him and asked the password.

“Haven’t a clue,” Peter answered. “I was due here yesterday but some idiot shot my motorcycle out from under me. Banged up my legs. Had to hobble here on foot. I’m tired, I’m cold, I’m hungry, and I want to see your commanding officer now!”

It worked better than he had expected, and he was courteously led to the subcommander’s tent.

“Where’s the commander?” Peter demanded.

“Sleeping, sir.”

“Well, get him up!”

“It’s four in the morning, sir!”

“I’m well aware of that!” Peter snapped. “I spent half the night trudging here. Your roads are inadequately patrolled, no one was sent out to find me, and I haven’t slept, so I don’t expect your commander will want to sleep either!”

His Berlin charm continued to work like magic, and the commander was roused and greeted him sleepily only fifteen minutes later. Peter upbraided him for sloppy security and for not sending out a search team for him.

“But you should have been seen, we checked that road earlier,” the commander argued, his breath still heavy with alcohol.

“Obviously you didn’t do a very good job. Here!” Peter slammed down the documents he was carrying. “You need these.”

The commander sighed, scratched his head, and groaning, opened the packet. “Get Schweig,” he told one of his men, then explained to Peter, “This is his department.”

Peter and the man called Schweig seated themselves at a side table in the tent and consulted over the contents of the packet while the commander drank coffee and feigned activity at his desk. The sky lightened, the sun rose behind heavy clouds, and slowly the camp came to life.

Being an attachó rather than a courier had made it easier for Peter to bully his way into the camp, but it did leave him with the obvious problem of how he could discreetly leave. It would serve no purpose to stay past the time when the altered plans would be used—and that was scheduled for noon—nor would his cover last much beyond that time; nevertheless, they expected he would stay some days, and he was not sure how to get around that problem. He was just deciding to delay thinking about the logistics of leaving in order to solve the more immediate one of his hunger when he heard a familiar voice talking to the
commander. While continuing his dialogue with Schweig, he listened to the urbane speaker to try to place him.

“What about it?” Schweig asked, indicating a point on a map where Peter’s finger rested.

“Huh?”

“What about it?”

Peter fell silent again. That voice! Where in the world? “Do you think you could find some coffee for us?” Peter asked Schweig suddenly.

“Sure,” Schweig answered agreeably, and left.

Peter remained hunched over the maps, his back to the speaker. The voice sent shudders through him. He listened to the words and realized they were talking about some prisoners.

“We’ve waited long enough! They must be interrogated,” the voice demanded.

“We’ve already questioned them,” the commander insisted wearily.

“You’ve got nothing out of them,” the voice sneered. “Now it’s my turn.”

The commander sighed and Peter imagined he was scratching his head again. “Look, I know they sent you out here just for this sort of thing, but I don’t really want that in my camp. I’m not all that comfortable—”

“Your level of comfort is not the point,” the other interrupted in his well-bred and highly educated voice.

A chill of terror ran down Peter’s spine. Shocks and burns and beatings. Drug-induced illness, hallucinations, mind games. Humiliation, indoctrination, the rantings of lunatics in power. Brutality and inhumanity too vicious to describe or even remember. And over it all, this little lord of terror lecturing him, convincing him that somehow it was all no more than he deserved.
How dare he!

Peter leapt to his feet. “If you have prisoners here, they are the province of the RSHA, and I have first access to them and the right to determine their fate.”

The speaker turned to face him and Peter confronted his erstwhile torturer. The tall, handsome young man was a little older than when he had overseen Peter’s reeducation but was otherwise unchanged. “And who might you be?” the man asked with suave self-assurance.

The commander introduced Peter, explaining his presence, then introduced the officer to Peter as a Herr Lederman. As the two greeted each other, the commander slurped his coffee worriedly, unsure of what to do next.

Lederman spoke first. “I’ve come from Breslau explicitly to oversee the gathering of information . . .”

Peter was not listening. He stared into the face of his torturer. Though Peter had not seen him often, the man’s features were seared into his brain. An unreal fear gripped him, and he felt himself detaching from the scene, rising above it as if floating out of harm’s reach. He could not hear the words being said, could hardly see the faces of the others. Blackness hovered at the edges of his perception, his vision narrowing to a tunnel that was focused on that one face, that
mouth, those words. His mouth was dry, and he nervously licked his lips, trying to feel the reality of his own body, the lack of chains or walls or even pain. He glanced down at his uniform and took comfort in the quality, the cleanliness, the imposing insignia. His hand strayed mindlessly to his gun, and as he felt the reassuring coldness of the metal, he regained his composure.

“. . . haven’t come all this way . . . ,” Lederman continued lecturing.

“Enough!” Peter snarled with an anger that surprised the others and implied irrefutable authority. “You can have your chance after I’m through with them.”

“I don’t have time for—”

“Don’t worry,” Peter said calmly, “I won’t take long. Then you can have your flies so you can pluck off their wings, if that’s what you need to do to preserve your manhood. Such as it is.”

The commander snickered. Lederman sputtered, but then the commander interceded, “It’s my camp here and you’ll obey my orders. Obviously, our comrade from Berlin has priority.”

Schweig returned with the coffee even as Lederman harrumphed angrily and left.

“Who the hell is he?” Peter asked.

“Oh, somebody who’s supposed to be an expert in breaking people.”

“Hardly seems like something that takes expertise,” Schweig commented. “We’ve got whole countries full of broken people.”

The commander shrugged. “I heard he’s supposed to be really very good at it, is able to spot fake information a mile off.”

“I heard,” Schweig interjected, “that he really screwed up with one of his subjects and still hasn’t lived it down.”

“Oh, how so?”

“Don’t know. Just heard that it led to some sort of international embarrassment. God knows how. Must be just talk.”

“Must be.” Peter smiled, then returned the conversation to the business at hand. “I want to see to those prisoners now. Where are they?”

“Now?”

“Before he does something stupid,” Peter explained.

“What about the orders? We’re supposed to move soon,” Schweig asked.

Peter brushed off his concerns. “Oh, you can handle it. They’re selfexplanatory.” Indeed they were; he had only managed to explain their contents by reading a paragraph ahead as he had spoken to Schweig. “Where are the prisoners?”

The commander told one of the guards to take Peter to their prisoners. He found them, nine in all, sitting outside, huddled together against the cold. Their hands were bound behind them and a single guard kept watch. Peter scanned them but did not recognize anyone. He glanced around at their location and the proximity of other soldiers and decided there was nothing he could do for them at the moment. He thanked the soldier who had led him to the prisoners and made his way back to the commander’s tent alone.

At the entrance to the tent, he stopped and debated what he should do next. He had taken an insane and unnecessary risk speaking directly to Lederman, and there was no way he could justify a further confrontation, yet the opportunity his presence in the camp afforded was unparalleled. Peter’s mind worked frantically as he plotted one scenario after another trying to work out how he could carry out his mission, free the prisoners, and take some sort of revenge on his erstwhile torturer. Killing him was the most practical but least satisfactory option. Better yet would be to take him prisoner, hold him in the mountains and . . . There was a problem there. He would never be permitted to do what seemed most appropriate. So, keep his prisoner a secret, perhaps with a bit of help from one or two of Zosia’s friends. Then what? Four months of torture was the obvious and rather unappealing answer.

Peter was not a torturer. As seductive as the idea of revenge was, there was no way he could do to someone else what had been done to him. It would be too humiliating. He was left with the option of killing the man. Given the circumstances, it would have to be a hasty execution with only the briefest of explanations possible: a swift murder as a ghostly reflection of the fury and hatred that motivated him. Would that suffice?

He sighed. He would have to jeopardize his mission and significantly lower the chances of freeing the nine prisoners in order to carry out an act of vengeance. If he failed, it would cost him and nine other people their lives, and it would ruin the very mission he had come here to fulfill. Even if he succeeded, he risked court-martial if anyone found out. He swore quietly and thought some more, but he could see no way around it: it was the opportunity of a lifetime and he would have to let it slip through his fingers.

He stood there in the dark and the cold, silently seething. Such a petty, banal man. A banal man in a banal uniform with a banal job and a banal name! The sort of man other officers made fun of. A nobody. For some reason Peter did not quite understand, he felt incredibly foolish. His torturer was nothing more than a tedious, insignificant officer, a nonentity who earned the scorn of his comrades. That his life had been in the hands of that nobody! Worse than that, his soul was still ravaged by what he had experienced at that man’s hands. He felt humiliated, as if his god, which he had prayed to and offered sacrifices to for generations, had suddenly been shown to be nothing more than a bit of scrap metal dropped off a passing train.

The attachó had a pack of cigarettes, and on an impulse Peter lit one for himself. He looked at the gold lighter he had found in the coat pocket and read the inscription:
To Robert, with love always, Sybille.
Deeper in the pocket Peter found a small building block—the sort of thing a child gives a father as a present. At first it is carried as an indulgence, then a fond memory, and at last as a talisman. He pulled out the attachó’s bulging wallet and opened it. A number of photographs were stuffed into it, and Peter leafed through them. He found one of Sybille, a pretty woman, or rather, widow. Children, too; at least five. The photos
were of various ages—apparently Robert did not discard old photos even as the child grew. There was Hedwig at three and again at eight and again with her siblings when she was eleven. From the date, he guessed she had just turned thirteen recently. Just looking at her picture, Peter felt sure she would miss her father and would not understand why he had had to die.

He finished the cigarette and turned his thoughts to what he should do next. As he stood there, debating with himself, still trying to find a way to get his hands on his erstwhile torturer, he overheard the commander talking to Schweig, and intrigued, he listened.

“. . . fucking sitting ducks, if you ask me,” the commander was saying.

“I do wonder, sometimes, what they have on their minds in Berlin,” Schweig agreed cautiously.