The Children's War (201 page)

“What’s that?”

“I’ll carry out this murder on one condition.”

“I thought you wanted to do it,” Marysia asked, confused.

“No. I don’t. I’ve only argued for its practicality, not for my desire. I want it made clear within our own organization that this is a professional execution done as a necessary part of our overall strategy.”

“Confession might be easier,” Zosia said behind her hand. “Why don’t you just accept that you have religious scruples and get it over with?”

Besides Peter, only Tadek heard the remark, and he sputtered into his hand to hide his laughter.

“Is that your condition?” Marysia asked.

“No. It’s just a statement of my moral position. My condition is that I be allowed to bring the youngest Vogel child back here as part of the same mission.”

“Kidnap?” more than one voice called out in surprise.

“It’s my child,” Peter asserted quietly, “and I want to raise her here as part of our family.”

“What do you mean by ‘your child’?” Hania asked. “Do you mean that you feel responsible for her, or that you feel you have the right to a child since yours was murdered by them?”

Wanda shook her head as if answering for Peter.

“He means he is the biological father and that he is the only person in the world who has a genuine interest in that child’s welfare,” Zosia answered defensively. “I’ve heard the mother speak about her, and she has no concern for the child at all; we know the attitude of her husband is even more indifferent. You can talk to Ryszard’s wife if you want confirmation of this. Magdalena is Peter’s daughter, and he is her only true parent.”

“He managed to leave that out of his original interrogation, didn’t he?” Wanda commented bitterly.

“It wasn’t relevant,” Hania asserted.

“Wasn’t it?”

Tadek leaned away from Peter to look at him with histrionic amazement. “You and Frau Vogel!” he giggled.

“Hilarious, isn’t it,” Peter agreed mordantly. He knew Tadek’s coarse sense of humor and braced himself accordingly.

“Where are your standards, boy? What’s next, sheep and cows? Or does that come before Nazi Party wives? Let’s see, after sheep, we have . . .” Tadek continued
to rib him, enumerating on his fingers a hierarchy of animals and objects that would be preferable to sleeping with a Nazi. As some of the other men joined in the teasing, Tadek came close to calling up memories of Peter’s other unwanted sexual liaison, but Zosia, behind Peter’s back, did a desperate slashing motion across her throat to shut him up just in time.

“Are German shepherds on the list?” Tadek asked as though genuinely perplexed.“Have you ever done anything with a German shepherd?”

Peter turned his attention to cleaning a bit of dirt out from under his thumbnail as he waited out the ritual humiliation that he had known would follow his revelation.

Wanda stood suddenly. Everyone looked at her in surprise. “
Kommandanten
and Nazi
Hausfrauen!
Is there anything you won’t do?” she exclaimed bitterly. “Two sons! My two boys lie cold in their graves and a lying, Kraut-fucking, atheist coward lives among us. It’s not right!”

There was a moment of leaden silence as Peter did a final swipe of his nail, then he slowly rose to his feet and, resting his hands on the table, leaned forward threateningly. “And who are you,” he asked coldly, looking at Wanda, but addressing a multitude of people, present and absent, “to imply my life is something to be traded for
anyone else?”

Wanda ignored his question. “You dare to lecture us the day you arrive, piously telling us how not to become what we hate; now we see,now we know what you meant!”

“You call me an atheist, but at least I don’t try and play God with other people’s lives. You have no right to judge me or my actions!” Peter spat in reply.

“You’re a collaborator! Fucking a Nazi Party wife and now we award you a Council seat. I refuse to be on a Council that awards you membership. It’s him or me!” Wanda declared.

There was an interminable silence, then Marysia calmly stated, “Wanda, ultimatums are unacceptable. If you wish to file an appeal of our decision, there are appropriate mechanisms, but ultimatums will not be accepted.”

“We should have shot him when we had the chance!” Wanda yelled angrily. “It’s him or me!”

“Wanda!” Marysia warned. “We do not accept ultimatums!”

“Then I resign!” Wanda screamed. Before anyone could answer, she had left the room.

The remaining Council members turned toward Peter, but all he could see was Joanna’s trusting face. Trust, he thought. Open himself up, open those dark parts of his mind that they had created and he had so carefully shielded. Well, no one had said it would be easy. He breathed heavily trying to calm the pounding of his heart. He surveyed the faces staring at him. At one time he would have said they were laughing at him, but now he recognized other things: curiosity at what his reaction would be, sympathy, love . . . He settled back into his seat without saying anything. Zosia’s fingers reached for his and her thumb gently caressed the burn scars on the back of his hand.

“Pff! She’s finally lost it completely,” Tadek commented, interrupting the uncomfortable silence. “It was a long time coming. Now,” he continued in a businesslike tone, “we have a question before us. Does he get custody of his kid?”

Wanda’s spell was broken. There was a quick discussion of the merits, the risks of setting a precedent, the special circumstances in this case. Finally, it was agreed that as long as it did not jeopardize the mission or destabilize the quid pro quo, they had no objection to welcoming the babe into their midst.

“It won’t jeopardize the mission,” Peter said, “in fact, it will make it look all the more plausible. A daughter lost, a daughter gained. As for the quid pro quo, I believe it’s about time you start a tit for tat on the kidnaps. Maybe if they knew their precious babies were being raised in the Underground, they might hesitate to bomb or shoot at you. But in any case, I’ll make it clear that I’m doing it on my own initiative and plan to go into hiding in England or America or somewhere else. The kidnapping won’t reflect on you at all.”

“Agreed,” Marysia concluded. “As soon as we get clearance, we’ll send you out. Will you need help?”

“I’d like to go along,” Zosia volunteered. “And I request Stefi’s help for Irena if I go.”

“Fine,” Marysia agreed. “Just clear it with Stefi.”

Peter noticed he had not been consulted but decided not to comment.

71

“O
KAY,
ARE YOU GOING TO TELL ME
what this is about?” Peter asked Zosia as they settled into the room Ryszard had provided.

“What are you talking about?”

“Why did you volunteer to help and why are we here for two nights?”

“We won’t do Karl until tomorrow,” Zosia answered as she rolled onto the bed next to Irena and stretched luxuriously.

He continued unpacking. “So what’s up with tonight?”

“Business.” She rolled into a sitting position and, picking up Irena, opened her blouse and offered dinner. Irena latched on enthusiastically. “Seemed like a good time to do it.”

He was bent over the suitcase and could not see her face, but something in her voice gave him pause. He straightened and turned to look at her. Taking a wild guess, he said, “I know that’s not true. What are you planning?”

Zosia sighed, stroking Irena’s head distractedly. “Well, I didn’t want to get you involved, but it would be nice to have your help.”

“With what?”

Zosia explained about the men involved in his torture and Joanna’s murder.

“You want to finish the job tonight? Do you have enough information?”

“Yes, I’ve gathered all sorts of details about the last man—the interrogator— thanks to Ryszard. He had him followed for a while, on some pretext. There’s his dossier.” She pointed toward a file in her luggage.“His name is Berger.”

Peter picked up the file and opened it. The snotty voice of his tormentor played through his mind as he looked at the pathetic details. “Berger? That’s a nice, simple name.”

“It was changed in the thirties from something less acceptable,” Zosia explained.

“You want to kill him?”

“Yes! Don’t you? It’s necessary to send a message, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. I don’t really care, I just want to kill him,” he answered honestly. He felt that he should have gone through some crisis of conscience, examined the morality of revenge, or “preventative maintenance,” as Zosia termed it, but he felt no inclination to do so. “I would have liked to have helped you with the others. Why didn’t you at least tell me about them?”

Zosia repositioned Irena, mopped up some milk that had dribbled. “I thought you would call me a murderer.”

“I’m sorry about that. I was wrong, I’ve already said that.”

She shrugged. “I know what you said, but it still stuck with me. I’ve always valued your opinion and your sense of balance, and when you told me I was unbalanced . . .”

“You know I was just hurt and angry.”

“I know. The problem is, it is a very fine line that I draw—the one between my being a murderer and my being a courageous freedom fighter. From my position, it’s hard to know if I’ve misdrawn the line. In America, when I was able to get some untainted news of the world, and I would hear about some car bomb or assassination in some other part of the world, it always sounded like murder to me. I knew that whoever committed such crimes felt justified, but the perpetrators were labeled terrorists, and rightly so.”

“Those other places are different from here.
Here
the terrorists are in power; just because they have given themselves the trappings of government doesn’t make their murders any more acceptable. And you’ve never used random violence, not the way the Reich does, not the way some of those crazy organizations do. Your actions are as well directed as any responsible action can be. We
are
the side of right and justice, and if we weren’t so weak, we wouldn’t be driven to use such means! But inaction is even worse—it means we’ve handed everything over to them, and we’ve already seen what they do against powerless people. What we do is different, Zosiu. It really is and I should have never said what I did.”

“We?”

“Yes,” Peter sighed. “You know about the boy I had to knife, and all those soldiers I shot at and, no doubt, killed.”

“Self-defense. Battle action. Perfectly legit.”

“Then what about shooting an unconscious man in the head?”

Zosia’s head snapped up from looking at Irena. “You what?” He explained about the encounter in the alley and the fear that led him to “eliminate” a potential threat.

“What you did was right,” she assured him.

“I know.” He nodded. “More to the point, I didn’t care whether it was right or not; it was convenient and that was sufficient. I’ve finally had enough, Zosiu. They finally got what they wanted: they’ve destroyed who I was completely and left an automaton in his place. Problem is, I’m the wrong sort of robot. Miswired, I’d guess they’d say.”

Zosia smiled indulgently at him, shaking her head slowly. “We all feel like that the first time or so. You were the most gentle person I had ever met, and you still are. It’s one of my reasons for loving you. Don’t worry, you’re far too human to ever be cut loose from your conscience.”

Peter was unconvinced but did not say anything. It was not that he thought she was lying; it was simply that her words no longer carried such an overwhelming weight with him. Her revelations about what she had said to Joanna and the way she had let him carry the burden of guilt completely alone and unconsoled—it had hurt. At the time, he had been too overwhelmed by all that was occurring to understand exactly what her words had meant, but after having thought about it, he realized that this last straw, this minor cowardice on her part, had finally freed him. He still loved her, but he was at last free to love her not as the woman who had saved his life, not as the imposing political and military figure, not as the social and familial success story so in opposition to his own miserable failures, but as an equal. He was no longer in awe of her. He was free.

They walked together through the
Tierpark,
a loving couple intent on each other. Berger hardly took note of them as he walked his usual path home from the officers’ club meeting. He was weighing up his earlier refusal to accompany his friends to a bar. The problem was, they always went out to pick up women, and if he didn’t do likewise, he was left standing alone among strangers as each of his friends disappeared into the night. It had been months since he had left Neu Sandez, but he still felt nervous around strangers and was loath to walk off with a woman he did not know. Still, if he kept refusing his friends’ invitations, he might well be thought a homosexual and that could be devastating! Perhaps he should take the chance to go out, maybe it was time to put his worries behind him.

His path led him across a narrow wooden bridge romantically arching over a small fishpond. He continued along despite the couple who had stopped to kiss right in front of him, almost blocking his way. Oddly, as he brushed past them, they swung into step with him, one on each side. Fear seized him as he felt something cold and hard pressed snugly against his ribs.

“Just a robbery,” the woman intoned softly. “If you keep quiet and do as you’re told, you’ll be all right.”

He looked at her and was stunned by her appearance. She was beautiful! Blond hair, fair skin, a true Aryan. Such women did not commit crimes! He was so taken by the woman that he barely noticed the silent, dark-haired man who strode along his other side, pressing the gun into his ribs.

“You can take my wallet,” he offered worriedly. “It’s right here.” He started to reach for his breast pocket, but the woman intercepted his hand.

She clasped his hand warmly to her breast as if confiding to a friend.“No, no, you must come with us. Nobody carries all his money in his wallet. We are not fools.” She gazed lovingly at her two companions as a patrolman passed them.

Berger was led to the edge of the zoo. The threesome stopped in front of a nondescript door cut into the surrounding wall, and Berger’s abductors glanced casually around. Satisfied that they were unobserved, the man reached behind himself to turn the knob and together they slipped into the darkened room. The pair led him knowingly down a pitch-black corridor, then through another door. They shut the door behind them, and suddenly fluorescent lights blazed overhead.

Berger blinked against the brash lights, then took in his surroundings. It was a windowless storage room: shelves laden with packaged supplies, bales of hay or something stacked untidily against a far wall. In the small open area in front of them, against the outer wall, sat a single chair. He was escorted to the chair and pushed down into it. Before he realized what was going on, his wrists were locked behind his back and to the crosspiece of the chair. He looked in panic at the woman; she smiled sweetly in return. Finally he turned his eyes to the man who stood patiently in front of him. It took only a moment to get past the different hair color, then his mind went blank with fear.

The man opened a knife in front of his face. “I have to send a message to your comrades,” his erstwhile prisoner explained, “and I’m afraid you’re going to carry that message for me.”

Berger collected himself. Ignoring the man, he turned to the woman. “Beautiful lady, whatever this man has told you, it’s untrue! Don’t listen to him! Help me, please. He’s a madman, please, listen to me. Go get help.”

The woman’s smile gently faded from her face; otherwise she did not reply.

“You and I, sweet, noble Aryan lady, we’re alike,” he continued to plead,“we’re superior to this scum. Please don’t abandon me. You must help me. Whatever he’s said to convince you to do this, it’s untrue. He’s an
Untermensch,
don’t listen to him! He’s a criminal—look at his arm, he’s been condemned by a court! Please believe me,
don’t listen to him!”

“Shut up!” the man grated, slamming the knife down and into his captive’s leg. Berger screamed, his head snapping down to look at the knife embedded in his flesh. He watched in horror as blood seeped into his trousers, looked up in shock as the man removed the blade and wiped it clean.

“Now that I have your attention,” the man continued, “perhaps I could get
you to look at the woman you’ve been imploring. Doesn’t she remind you of someone? Hmm?”

Following the suggestion, Berger turned his attention back to the woman. There was a resemblance to someone. Someone in his dreams? He stared a moment longer, then began to quake with fear. The child! Oh, God, the child! Fighting against the pain in his leg, struggling to overcome his fear, he pleaded, “Don’t. Please don’t! I had to do it, I was following orders. It wasn’t me. It was the others. I’m innocent. Don’t! Please!”

He was so intent on the woman’s impassive face that he barely noticed how the man moved in toward him. “I was just following orders,” he repeated lamely.

“There are some orders which must not be obeyed,” the woman reminded him softly as he felt the man’s hands close in on his throat.

They left the body in a state similar to the others and walked away in silence. Zosia seemed relieved, a load removed from her shoulders; she had done what she could to avenge her daughter, and now it was time to move on. Peter accurately perceived her mood and wondered at it. A lifetime of being hunted, a lifetime of killing—it was no wonder she could settle a score and put the past behind her; if she had done anything other than that in her life, she would have been paralyzed by grief or fear.

As for himself, he felt no such release. The murder of the interrogator provided nothing more than another body to add to the count. He mentally listed his victims: self-defense, battle, fear of betrayal, and now, revenge. Each killing less defensible than the previous; yet, he could not claim that he really cared. They had achieved their original intent: he was now, at last, less than human.