Another Green World (22 page)

The kid on the ground seemed to have caught his breath. An expression almost like a smile appeared on his face. When he spoke—his voice notably clearer than before—it was to pronounce a startling colloquialism Ingo had never encountered, even in Brecht, though he recognized the body parts involved.

That seemed to do it. The blond's brittle composure cracked. He raised the crop high like a
Magier
charging his wand for some shattering invocation, and the magic took immediate effect: the texture of time thickened and events took on the slowed-down, rather balletic quality of something happening underwater.

The firelit scene spread itself out, as a movie screen does when you walk down toward the front of the theater, the projected images becoming larger and more distinct. Several heads turned—something had interrupted the bloody ritual, violated the sacred circle. Lastly the face of the boy-god, more beautiful than ever in close-up, swiveled toward the camera, its otherworldly pallor blanching everything around it. But the deathly blue eyes never quite came into focus. The riding crop—a fine piece done in willow and braided leather—leapt out of his hand and floated through the air in a perfect arc that ended at the heart of the circle. From offscreen came a maelstrom of voices—languages running together, the voices of no particular age, it might as well have been the forest itself crying out or the spirits that drift in the twilight.

Suddenly another face, looming close, swelled to fill the screen. The Gruppenführer's mouth opened, and somewhere behind it, shadowed and out of focus, one of those powerful hands clenched into a fist.

Ingo slugged the guy so hard he was afraid he might have broken a knuckle or two. The man, a puzzled look on his face, did not look hurt so much as taken by surprise. His thoughts ran slowly, like time itself, whereas for Ingo everything was clicking along at ordinary speed. He hit the burly fellow again, this time lower, down in the gut. It felt even better than before.

“Try it like this,” said the scrawny kid, who in the confusion—half dead or not—had managed to wrench himself free and climb to his feet. While his captors stood dumbly, as if waiting for their leader to rally them, he squared off before him and delivered a kick straight to the groin that crumpled him like a paper bag. From the heavy fallen body came a long, plaintive moan. The rest of the pack stood frozen in a jumble of alarm, disbelief and open fear. The older man was nowhere to be seen.

“As for you, bottom boy,” the kid said, turning on the blond god, his voice a polyglot sneer, “you better keep out of my way, or my pal here will
really
get sore next time. Come on”— this to Ingo—” let's get out of here.”

He limped for a step or two, then threw a hand around Ingo's shoulder, pulling himself upright. For all his bravado, the boy was hurt so badly he could barely walk on his own. Yet he managed to set a brisk pace for the two of them, tugging Ingo along even while half dangling off him. They hobbled along for some distance without speaking, the boy dripping blood over Ingo's new shirt, until neither of them could go any farther without a rest.

Dark now, the moon nowhere in sight. The boy's face was indistinct, but Ingo could hear his labored breathing and smell the animal scent that rose off his body and clothes.

“You're American,” Ingo said finally, in English.

At first the boy did not respond. Then Ingo felt a hand taking hold of his upper arm, and the boy's face pulled in close. A pair of half-demented eyes screwed into his own, the oddly shaped nose pointing from one feature to the next like a specialized instrument being used to examine him.

Suddenly the kid laughed. “Another fucking Yank!” he loudly exclaimed, as if to an audience out there in the darkness—hamming it up for the peanut gallery. “An honest-to-God Yankee Schwuler. Wouldn't you know it?” He settled back with an honest sigh. “Well, pal, I owe you. I'll remember this one for a long time, you can believe that. I thought for a minute there the fucking Huns were going to kill me.”

Ingo wanted to downplay the incident, but in truth that's how it had looked to him as well. “You know, I haven't the faintest idea where we are.” He spoke in German—having done so all day, it seemed natural to continue.

The boy understood well enough. “Not to worry, pal. I'll get you right where you need to go. I've got kind of an instinct.” He braced himself on Ingo's shoulder and heaved himself back to his feet. “Let's get going. I could use some grub. Even that scheisslich vegetable stuff.”

Ingo was loath to move. The events of the day—an almost insupportable load of new experience—weighed more heavily on him than this insubstantial kid with the nasal voice whom he somehow, despite an intimation that he ought not to, found himself growing to like. “Those things the guy back there was saying,” he began hesitantly. “That you stole something from him. Is it true? What was all that about?”

He felt he had earned the right to some explanation. But the kid didn't seem inclined to provide one.

“You'll like these friends of mine,” he said. “They're Krauts, but they're okay.”

Friends, thought Ingo: that problematic word again. With a feeling of resignation—he was lost in darkness, steering by unfamiliar stars—he allowed the strange boy to direct him onward. After a while the boy stopped abruptly and said, “Hey, you saved my butt back there, and I don't even know your name.”

“Ich bin Ingo.”

“Is that so? Well, ich bin Isaac. Glad to meet you, pal. Really and truly I am.”

He slapped a hand into Ingo's. It felt big for the size of him, the grip strong, the skin damp and hot. Something odd moved through Ingo at the moment of contact, a raw kind of energy. He dropped the hand but the feeling, the energy, stayed with him for a while. In a way it never left him.

He could not have known at the time, but it came to him later, with the startling clarity of a dream, that maybe what he had felt in that instant was nothing less than the pure stab of his long-awaited destiny.

END OF OCTOBER 1944

T
hank you, Lord, for Timo. Really, I mean it. I'll make this up to you. Trust me. Martina couldn't remember how or when or at whose suggestion the ex–D.C. cabdriver had signed on for the long haul. Maybe somebody managed to find Serbia on a map. Maybe it was just another fuck-up. In any case, by the time SS
Paloma Roja
, a round-bottomed steamer of Portuguese registry, had cleared Gibraltar and Martina was able once again to keep down solid food, she had come to depend on Timo for everything from weather updates and policing the cargo hold to apprising her of morale and gossip among her shipmates.

The problem with the Varian Fry Brigade, she felt—now that it was too late to change anything—was that it had grown into a multiheaded beast. Head no. 1 belonged to Aristotle, the veteran guerrilla chosen to command the volunteers upon their landing in Yugoslavia—which should happen, so she'd heard, in a matter of hours. Head no. 2 bore the raptorlike features of Rabbi Harvey Grabsteen of Agudas Israel Worldwide, whose Hollywood donors were footing the bill, his overseas contacts handling the logistics. If Grabsteen wanted to tag along on this little voyage, who was going to tell him no? The same nobody that was going to tell him to shut up, go back to his stateroom and stop getting on people's nerves. Which was to say: Not me, thanks.

And Head no. 3—like it or lump it, boys—demurely adorned the shoulders of Miss Martina Panich, duly appointed Girl Wonder of the U.S. War Refugee Board and hence,
ex officio
, the brigade's sole link with any recognized governmental entity, if not, indeed, with reality as it is commonly understood. Never mind that for the record Martina had taken a leave of absence from her duties in Washington. Or that the Secretary, if pressed,
would deny all knowledge of her activities. The fact remained that Martina's presence aboard
Paloma Roja—
even as a chronically seasick bystander—constituted the only practical response of the Roosevelt administration to the annihilation of the Jews of Europe.

Martina knew it. Aristotle knew it. Even Grabsteen, who knew everything, just ask him, knew it.

She was not at all certain what this singular historic position required of her. Not much, she hoped. With any luck, the boys could handle the tricky part: get in, find Isaac, grab the paper and scoot. Under such happy circumstances her role would entail what was known in
Realpolitik
circles as “maintaining a constructive presence.” Things might, of course, take a less happy turn. Martina might find herself obliged to deal with Nazi assassins the way she dealt on a workaday basis with shit-heeled Dixiecrats—a bloody business best not dwelt upon. In either case: the thing to bear in mind was, she damned well did
not
intend to be nudged aside while the boys made all the decisions.

Hence, Timo. Her closest ally. Her strong-arm man, father confessor, messenger and spy. And perhaps, now that she was feeling better, her something else as well. We'll have to think about that. There are those yellow teeth to consider.

Timo—the man, not the prospective lover nor the multifaceted wish-fulfiller—smiled at her from across the cabin, where he sat on the bunk assigned to a spunky gal named Sara Weiss, the only other dame on board. Martina suspected she'd made the cut so there would be two of them—
Let's give Marty somebody to talk to—
though what she had to say to a twenty-year-old typist was beyond her. Nice nails, sugar. As things fell out, Sara spent no more time than necessary in the stuffy little cabin, which suited everyone.

Martina sat cross-legged on her own bunk shoveling down a late breakfast of Spam and reconstituted eggs that tasted heavenly. “What did the message say?” she asked, prompting Timo to resume the daily briefing, an ordeal she equally dreaded and could not wait for.

“Unfortunately, the rabbi would not show me the text.” He flicked invisible lint off the lapel of his olive gabardine. “So I had to wait till late at night, then had a chat with the radio operator. This”— withdrawing a slip of flimsy paper from a pocket—” cost one bottle of bourbon. We are running out.”

“Yeah, well, we've made it across, though.” Martina squinted at the paper by the dim light oozing through the porthole.

“We have not yet made it so far as the dock. This is the beginning of our problems. I hope you brought plenty of money.”

Martina shrugged. She had some money, Department money, of assorted denominations. There wasn't much, and she wasn't at liberty to talk about it. Skimming through a gabble of international radio signals, she reached the content of last night's signal from Grabsteen to Agudas headquarters in Palestine. Halfway through it, her jaw was bouncing off the wafer-thin mattress. “He told them
what
? My God, I can't believe this. I'll kill him. I swear it, Timo, I will murder that man.”

Timo grinned. The malicious twinkle, the problem teeth. “Let me do it.”

Martina tossed the paper at no particular target. “Why doesn't he cable Himmler and tell him where to meet us? That's the only thing he left out.”

The cable in question, its text on onionskin drifting to the cabin floor, took the form of a press release (dateline: Somewhere in the Mediterranean) announcing that as of today, heroic Jewish freedom fighters were poised to strike a blow
into the very belly of the Nazi beast. No longer
, crowed the dispatch,
will the Jewish nation depend upon empty assurances from the Western powers. Henceforth we shall take up arms in our own behalf. Let the Fascist killers tremble in their lairs!

“I assume,” Martina said dourly, “that if this message is intercepted—
when
it's intercepted—the Germans will be able to figure out where it came from.”

Timo retrieved the paper and ran a finger down the chain of alphanumeric designators. “It's probably all right,” he said. “There's not really much here to go on.”

“Still, that man is an idiot.”

“Indeed.” Timo shrugged. “On the other hand, it makes no difference.”

“How do you mean?”

“This dispatch? Nothing but empty bluster. The Germans will laugh. They understand, at this stage, they have nothing to fear from a tiny, ridiculous band of Jews.”

“Thanks, Timo,” Martina said, feeling the eggs deconstituting in her stomach. “That's really a comfort.”

She stood on deck, wearing rumpled fatigues and clutching the rail just aft of the boat davits, when the first line hit the wharf at 2:45 that afternoon. Grabsteen had managed to insert himself into the rank of ship's officers lining the bridge wing two decks above. Aristotle was up in the bow in conference with his three Moes.

Before them lay the ancient, drab and battered city of Sibinik, a lesser
port of entry into the Yugoslavian province of Dalmatia, cleared of German forces only weeks ago. Behind them lay the Adriatic Sea and most of the food Martina had consumed for the past week and a half. While the
Paloma'
s winches hauled wearily at hemp lines as thick as her leg, Martina scanned the deck and eventually located Ingo, slouched against the railing between his two best buddies of late: Stu the dentist, whose inclusion was based solely on his medical credentials, and the prelaw kid from Charlottesville, Eddie, whom Ingo seemed to have taken under his wing. Martina, performing an old and dependable trick, held her eyes on Ingo until he looked back at her, at which point she gave him a sly, knowing wink. He affected not to see her.

The vessel shuddered beneath them as it was winched against the current to the wharf. Martina gazed past the waterfront to the surrounding hillsides, where the city lay swabbed in orange with smoky afternoon sun. Buildings clumped up around the old seaport, whose wharves and piers welcomed everything from oceangoing rigs like the
Paloma
through rusted-out coastal steamers to humble fishing boats propelled by oar and Gypsy-rigged sailcloth, manned by crews consisting of a father and one or two of his shirtless, umber-skinned sons. Sibinik must have seen street fighting not long ago, for the appalling consequences of modern warfare were everywhere on display. There were buildings with walls and roofs blown in, burned-out vehicles no one had bothered to drag off the streets, the charred carcasses of locust trees jutting from a hillside north and east of the harbor. The pavement was cratered from shelling. Rubble lay everywhere, some of it gathered into neat little hillocks, scampered over by half-clothed, feral-looking children. There were few other people in sight. Tito's partisans were setting up a new government, yet the streets still had the look of a no-man's-land.