Mark of the Devil (17 page)

Matt gradually regained consciousness inside a moving ambulance. His head was splitting as a medical technician dabbed medicine on a knot on his forehead that felt like it was the size of a baseball. “Ouch!” The wound burned as if it had been smacked with a branding iron. Not only had he tripped on something, a really stupid thing to do, but he’d nearly killed himself in the process. He wanted to touch the injury, get an idea how large it really was, but found both arms and legs held down by straps.

Flexing arms and legs against the restraints, he complained to the technician, “Hey, man, what the hell?”

The technician looked at him and asked, “American?”

“Yeah, but why the straps?”

“For your safety only. You might have a concussion.”

Matt took a deep breath and tried to relax, until, for the first time, he saw a policeman sitting at the foot of the gurney on which he was lying. He nodded and tried to smile, but the policeman remained stone-faced, his right hand resting on the butt of a pistol holstered at his side. From that point on, things went from already bad to worse.

KRANKENHAUS MARIENHOF
was the sign over the double doors through which he was wheeled.
Krankenhaus?
His rattled brain searched through the relatively limited German vocabulary he possessed, but the only translation he could come up with was crazy house. It was, however, the sight of people bleeding, coughing, moaning, and hurting, as well as men and women in scrubs with stethoscopes draped around their necks, that made him realize he was being whisked through a hospital emergency room.

The fact that the policeman was still at his side didn’t help his frame of mind, nor did the doctor joining them add to his confidence level. The man looked old enough to be, at best, in his freshman year of pre-med. The doctor took the front end of the gurney and pushed through a door marked
“DER RÖNTGENSTRAHL
(X-ray).”

After a half-dozen X-rays, a large piece of antibiotic-smeared gauze placed on his forehead, a doctor’s warning to get some rest, and a cashier chewing him out for paying the bill in a combination of German marks and dollars, he was finally released. As he was to learn, however, the long night and now early morning were far from over.

Following release from the hospital, he took a trip under armed guard to the local police station. In a sparsely furnished, windowless room, lights pointed directly into his eyes while two unsympathetic detectives reeking of cigarettes got in his face. They grilled him for a good six hours. Why was he in Koblenz? How did he know Eduard Richter? What had he and Richter been doing that night? Who shot at the taxi? What did they look like? Could it have been the Red Army faction trying to kill the famous yet liberal Professor Richter? Or equally farfetched to Matt, was al-Qaeda trying to assassinate him, an American? Where had he been since the shooting? Did he know Richter was dead? Did he know about the killings at the
Deutsches Eck
monument? Same questions, over and over again. Same answers, all truthful except for the classified files at the Federal Archives and what happened some 30 feet beneath the statue of Kaiser Wilhelm and his horse.

After questioning, the authorities stripped Matt of his bloodstained jacket and trousers to determine whether, in addition to that of Eduard Richter or the taxi driver, the blood on his clothes matched that of any or all of three
Deutsches Eck
corpses resting in
das Leichenhaus,
the city morgue. Finally, they let him go with an angry
warning: “If you leave Koblenz without our authorization, we will send the whole fucking German army after you.” At least, that was Matt’s take on what he heard.

So much for going home.

Thursday, 25 October 2001

For two days Matt sat at the same table on his hotel room balcony overlooking the Rhine, his forehead sporting a white piece of gauze and two crossing strips of adhesive. His only contacts with the outside world had been a phone call to Hannah Richter to express his sorrow for her husband’s death and a call to Ashley. After several attempts, he had finally reached Ashley on the new cell phone she’d bought that, for some unexplained reason, seemed to work only half the time. She had blown him away with news she was now employed by Antiquity Finders, Inc. Assistant to the director, no less, who just happened to be Henry Shoemaker’s wife. “Are you crazy?” he had blurted. “My God, Ashley, they find out who you are, they’ll kill you.” To that she’d replied, “Thanks a hell of a lot, Matt. You really know how to make a girl feel appreciated.” Of course, he hadn’t told her about Richter’s death and his encounter on the
Deutsches Eck.
He only mentioned that things hadn’t gone as quickly as he’d planned.

There was, however, a visit by two police investigators, who asked the same questions and got the same answers as before. He had to smile, thinking of the room service maids and restaurant waiters whose eyes spoke their wariness and who kept their distance. Finally the hotel’s concierge, for a “modest fee” plus cost, had replaced the blue blazer he’d surrendered to the police with one from a local haberdashery.

Matt watched a white, red-striped river cruiser, the name
MS Italia
on its bow, edge alongside one of the many piers dotting the western bank of the Rhine. Already, its passengers were lined up on the main deck, chomping at the bit to get ashore and enrich the pockets of local vendors. Taking another sip of coffee, he turned back to the day-old newspaper. His reading was slow, but the headlines and pictures on the front page were graphic enough for anyone to get the meaning.

The death of Eduard Richter and the taxi driver, Gunther Schmidt, along with photographs of the two men when they were much younger and a picture of the totally destroyed taxi, bullet holes included, covered the top half of page one of
Das Koblenz Rheinpfalz.
The bottom half was devoted to the Kaiser Wilhelm monument on the
Deutsches Eck
with three greenish-black body bags lying at the base of the monument. One victim was described to have four bullet holes in the chest and abdomen; the other two, badly mutilated, both assumed to have bled to death.

It had taken some looking, but on page four of the local news section was the admittance to St. Josef Hospital of a man during the early morning hours with badly burned eyes, supposedly from weed killer, and a broken arm sustained from a fall down a flight of stairs. There was, however, no mention of where the “accident” had occurred or how it had happened.

Matt checked his watch. Even though he’d been cleared to leave the country by the police, he’d promised Hannah he would be at the memorial service for Eddy.

Even before he pushed through the heavy, intricately carved double doors of the ninth-century Basilica of St. Kastor, Matt heard the organ music, its tones dirge-like, reminding him of Wagner’s Siegfried, of Siegfried’s death and funeral procession. He hesitated, not wanting to say goodbye to an old friend, especially since Eddy’s death had been caused by that friendship. But Matt knew he had no choice.

Pushing the door inward, he walked along the center aisle as softly as he could. The tile floor’s pattern of light brown and mahogany-colored diamonds led him forward through the sanctuary, its narrowness actually an optical illusion created by the high vaulted, richly decorated ceiling and the stark whiteness of walls and double line of supporting pillars. The sanctuary was more than half full of friends, colleagues, and family members. As he neared the last of the unoccupied pews, he thought he saw the back of Hannah’s head in the front row, and what appeared to be three distinct family groups with her. And he remembered. Eddy’s two sons and daughter, their wives, husband, and children.
Damn!
Their father dead, along with Sam Gravely, a man with the Smithsonian Institute, and a taxi driver. Two friends and two complete strangers, each trying to help, each sacrificing his life. And for what? For Matt Berkeley and a possible fool’s errand. All his fault. “God, forgive me,” he whispered, and lifted his face toward the vaulted ceiling.

Above the low murmur of organ music, two priests, several friends, and a man who was almost the perfect image of a younger Eduard Richter delivered eulogies and prayers, much of which Matt was unable to follow, and finally Holy Communion. After the service, Matt sat waiting for Hannah to come up the aisle with the other mourners, but she remained seated on the front row. Looking neither sideways nor back, her eyes seemed locked on the high altar and its polished bronze, near life-size figure of Christ on the cross. Her family spoke briefly with her, then followed the rest of the people, passing close to Matt. Caught up in the herding of their children, they ignored his presence.

Matt waited several minutes, then sidestepped his way out of the pew and walked toward the front of the church, his footsteps echoing off the marble tile, through the sanctuary, and around the rotunda above the choir. Without disturbing the woman, he sat down beside her, his eyes following hers toward the chancel and figure of Christ. Within moments, he felt her hand on his and heard a sigh and the words, “Thank you for coming. How is your head?”

Matt subconsciously raised his free hand and felt his forehead, the bandage removed, swelling almost gone, skin still a purple hue with six tight little stitches in the center. He turned slightly to Hannah, noticing for the first time the increasing grayness of her hair and the sunken quality of her eyes.

“It’s getting better, but I’m so sorry for what happened, Hannah. If I hadn’t asked Eddy to help, if I hadn’t come over here, he’d still be alive.”

Hannah agreed. “Yes, for the moment, but the disease he had would have made life not worth living. It would not have been long. He would have asked me to help him end the misery, but could I? I don’t know. Did he live long after the shooting?”

Matt shook his head. “No. It was immediate.”

“So you see? It might be better this way. Better than the mind remaining sharp and knowing that nothing can help a body that is dying. But did you get what you came for?”

“Some of it. We were going back the next night to review the files of SS officers to see if we could identify the man who owned the hat I brought up from the U-boat.”

“Can you not find that anyway?”

“No. Eddy said files concerning concentration camp commandants and the more senior officers are still classified. From the death’s head insignia on the cap, that’s what he thought the officer had been. A concentration camp officer.”

Hannah took back her hand and sat quietly for a moment, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze directed at the crucifix as though she were in prayer. Finally, she asked, “When do you leave?”

“I’m driving back to Frankfurt later this afternoon and taking a flight to the States around noon tomorrow. The police called early this morning and said I could leave.”

“Then before you go, I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

“For the other night when I saw the photograph of the hat. It brought back such memories.” Hannah shook her head. “For too long I’ve tried to hide the past.”

“I’m sorry. If I’d known…”

“The initials inside the hat. You said J. K.?”

“Yes,” Matt answered.

“I think I might be able to help.”

Matt’s eyes narrowed in a question mark. “How?”

Hannah sighed, pushed up from the seat, and said, “Come walk with me. There is a little wine shop on the river nearby, and I will tell you a story.”

The shop was dark in comparison to the sun-dappled square on which it was located. Outside, great oaks and sycamore-like plane trees cast a canopy over the square. They allowed only splotches of sunlight to reach the sidewalk and open ground that separated Dagmar Wolff’s wine shop from the
Peter-Altmeier-Ufer,
a tree-lined embankment above the Mosel River. The shop’s windows were darkened to reduce nature’s glare. The effect on shelves of wines and a display of beautifully crafted, life-like Hummel figurines made the room resemble a tavern of ancient times. On separate tables stood, knelt, or lay miniature pewter soldiers waging mock battles: armies from the earliest days of Germany’s military prowess to the present.

“I was sorry to learn of Professor Richter’s death, my dear,” Frau Wolff said after placing the glasses of clear white wine in front of Hannah and Matt. “So sudden.” She patted Hannah on the arm.

“Thank you, Dagmar. It
was
sudden, but now he will feel no pain.”

Bending to kiss Hannah on the cheek, the portly, yet still attractive, Frau Wolff whispered, “I know, I know. A relative?” she asked, motioning to Matt.

“Nein.
A friend of Eduard’s from America. He is leaving this afternoon, and I have stories to tell before he goes.”

Frau Wolff nodded her understanding before turning back to Hannah. “Don’t stay away so long. You are always welcome to share a glass of wine with me.”

Hannah smiled and touched Frau Wolff’s hand as the woman turned away to give them privacy.

Hannah sat for a moment, her upper teeth gnawing against her lower lip as if the pain of remembrance was too much to bear. Finally, a sip of wine and she said, “It was October nineteen forty-three. Our family name was Kolbe. My twin brother, Aleksander, and I were eleven years old when they came for us.”

Hannah fumbled in her purse, pulled out a wrinkled black-and-white photograph, and handed it across the table. “This is a picture of my mother,
Marián, my brother Aleksander, and me. Taken the
summer before.”

Matt studied the picture. A handsome, light-haired woman in her late thirties or early forties. And two children, the boy slightly taller than the girl, both blond and as beautiful as any children he’d ever seen. “Your mother was a lovely woman, and you and Aleksander, like two peas in a pod. Absolutely stunning, both of you.” He handed the photograph back.

“Thank you. We lived in Lublin in the east of Poland. My father, we were to find out, was a member of the Polish, what you say…underground?”

“That’s close enough,” Matt responded.

“It was night. The pounding on the door, the shouting, and the Gestapo, they took my father away. We were made to pack clothes and what valuables we had. Rings, watches, anything made of gold, money, family photographs—we packed.” Hannah glanced quickly at the picture in her hand before going on. “They gave us only minutes before they took us away. They said we would need all those things when we arrived.”

“Did they say where you were going?”

“A place near Krakow; that’s all they said. Before daylight, my mother, my brother, and I were taken to the train station.”

“What about your father?”

“I never saw him again.”

Matt emptied his glass and raised it for Frau Wolff to refill. “I’m sorry.” He paused a moment before saying, “I guess I keep saying
I’m sorry
over and over again, don’t I?”

Hannah gave him a sad smile before continuing. “Though we didn’t know to where, we knew most of the Jews had been taken away long before, but when the train pulled into the station, there was boxcar after boxcar filled with Jews and a handful of Gypsies, I later learned. Men, women, children, crying and moaning. My God, they were putting us with the Jews. There had to be a mistake.”

“But there wasn’t, was there? Your father had fought with the resistance, and they didn’t care whether you were Jewish, Catholic, or what.”

“Ja,
no difference now. They had already taken most of the Polish
intelligentsia and the politicians and professional people, and we thought we were safe. We didn’t know until that night that our father was secretly fighting against the Nazis.”

“So what happened?”

“They pushed us into a car that had only one window on each side. The smell of vomit and shit and all the bodies crowded together, it was terrible! So many people, we could only stand. As long as she was able, my mother holding our one suitcase above her head; Aleksander and me clinging to her coat.

“The first frost had already fallen, and it was cold. The wind whipped through the two windows, one on each side, but they had to stay open, or we would all have suffocated. Sometime those that had been on the train the longest, mostly Russian Jews from Belarus, could stand no longer and would sink to the floor in all the filth.

“But that was nothing. Had we known what awaited us, we would have rejoiced in the filth and drunk in the odor like perfume. Two more days it took, stopping often for coal and water for the engine, but nothing for us. By the last day, I could have drunk my own urine. I wish I had. Perhaps its poison would have killed me before…”

Clouds hung low over the camp as the train huffed slowly through the eight-foot high gates of heavy wire with barbs strung across the top. Guard posts loomed high above the fence at regular intervals with wooden barrack like buildings in the distance. Pushed nearly flat against the side of the car, Hannah stood on her tiptoes to see through the open window, fingers wrapped over the gritty ledge for support.

Nearby, above the main gate to wherever they were about to enter, wrought iron words read,
ARBEIT MACHT FREI—Work Brings
Freedom. On a plaque at the side of the gate were the words AUSCHWITZ/BIRKENAU. She recognized the word Auschwitz, a small town outside Krakow she’d read about in her geography lessons, but the lesson had not mentioned a town encircled with wire fences and guard posts. A new odor drifted through the open window, a terrible stench worse than what hovered within the car itself. And fibers, like wisps of hair, floated on the air. She automatically held her hand to her mouth and nose.

As another train, its boxcars empty, rolled its way out through the gate, Hannah’s train rumbled to an agonizing stop. Almost immediately, the doors of the boxcars were thrown open, and soldiers with machine guns shouted, “Raus, raus!” “Out, out!”
“Schnell! Schnell!”
“Faster!. Faster!”

Her mother, brother, and she herself, being the last to board their car, were among the first off, roughly jerked by their arms to the concrete ramp that ran between two sets of rail tracks. Her mother’s suitcase was flung to the ramp and broken open. Hannah and her mother dropped immediately to their knees to scoop what little they were allowed back into the case, but the scramble of hundreds of feet and the immediate charge of barking, jaw-snapping German shepherds forced them to flinch away. The dogs’ handlers jerked back on the chain and leather leashes at the last moment. Even then, one of the dogs grabbed Marián’s coat sleeve and shook its head as though trying to rip away the arm. An officer’s boot swung suddenly from nowhere, kicking the dog in the head before sending the suitcase and the family’s valuables scattering across the ramp.

“On your feet,” he shouted, his voice rising above what had become a wail of human misery from the thousand or more piling out of the train cars, onto the ramp, each trying to avoid the blows of gun butts and wooden batons. The air was thick with the barking of dogs, the shouting of orders, and the cries of families being separated.

Officers pointed to one side of the ramp. “Men, over there. Women and children, other side. Quickly.”

“My husband, please, don’t separate us,” a woman nearby cried.

“Together soon,” was the reply from the officer who had kicked the suitcase.

Even before the last of the prisoners jumped from the boxcars, the engine jerked into reverse. It slowly backed away from the ramp and out through the yawning gate that was immediately swung shut by soldiers, locking in the new arrivals from the rest of humanity, or what was left of it.

It was then that Hannah saw the long, low-slung brick buildings. Five of them, she quickly counted. Each had smoke stacks belching rivers of black smoke into the morning sky, and suddenly she knew the source of the gut-wrenching stench and rain of fibers. But what were they? Automatically, she sneezed, the mucous filled with the mysterious fibers. Had she and her mother and brother been thrown into hell…and was this only the beginning?

As men and women with children were separated into two distinct lines, soldiers ranged in between the two groups, their voices and faces in the direction of the women. “Zwillinge, Zwillinge!” they shouted. “Twins, twins!” One of them stopped and looked at Aleksander and Hannah. Pushing their faces together, he asked Marián, “They are twins?”

“Is that good?”

“Ja, very good.”

Marian nodded quickly, “They are twins, yes, yes.”

“They come with me.”

“No, we go together. They will be afraid without me.”

The soldier looked at her for a moment, then said, “Come.”

More gunshots aimed toward the sky, and suddenly there was silence. Only the odor, the fibers, and intermittently one voice, a man’s voice, filled the air as soldiers moved into position between the two lines of people, weapons at the ready. “Links!” or “Rechts!” were the words Hannah heard, but to Hannah they made no sense.

They broke from the rest of the masses and walked forward between the lines of men and women, many weeping, others clutching children to their skirts. Hannah, with one hand tight in her mother’s hand, the other in Aleksander’s, saw an officer, standing alone on a small podium, directing the detainees to one side or the other with a hand and finger. Prisoners, one from each column, their arms stretched high in the air, were marched forward. In each case, the officer, his lips puckered, whistled a melody from Wagner, or was it Strauss, while scrutinizing their bodies, a look of total detachment, almost boredom, on his face. Interrupting the melody, he pointed to the left, followed immediately by the word, “Links!” or, more often, he pointed to the right and directed, “Rechts!” Hannah realized the words meant left or right. Dropping their arms, men and women turned in the direction they were ordered and were quickly ushered off the ramp. And then the whistling continued until Hannah, her mother, and brother were stopped just short of the podium. For a moment, the officer stared down at them, his gaze settling on Hannah.

At first she stared back, her mouth open in amazement at how impressive he looked. The man’s uniform, trousers and jacket, were neatly pressed; the boots were polished to a mirror shine; the hat was placed squarely on his head. A truly handsome man, she thought. He reminded Hannah of the American Clark Gable. Though she’d understood little, she’d seen the movie star in a German-dubbed version of Gone with the Wind with her mother and father before the Germans had gone to war with America. The officer’s mustache, the disarming smile that seemed to remain on his face, the dark hair showing from beneath his hat—she thought he was a gorgeous man.

But it was the skull and crossbones on his cap, just beneath the German eagle and swastika emblem, as well as on the right collar of his jacket, that frightened her. Her whole body began to tremble as she lowered her head beneath his gaze, her eyes closed in fear.

The man knelt to one knee, waved the soldier away, and motioned for Marián and her children to come closer. “Come, come” he urged, the smile on his face growing wider. “Twins, and so beautiful. Not Jewish?”

“Oh, no, Sir,” Marián assured him. “We are Polish. Catholic.”

The officer reached out and ran a finger along Hannah’s face, examining her, fingering the blondness of her hair. All the while, his eyes roved the length of her body. Turning to Aleksander and placing a hand beneath the boy’s chin, he gently lifted Aleksander’s head. “Open your mouth.” Aleksander did. The man nodded. “Very good. Your mother should be proud.”