The League of Night and Fog (48 page)

“I’m getting out of here!”

“But it isn’t safe to leave!”

“It isn’t safe to stay!”

“What’s supposed to happen at three o’clock?”

“Why was that time specified in the telegram?”

“What if our fathers
will
be returned?”

“What if we’ll be
attacked
?”

The appointed time passed. Halloway heard another vehicle enter the lane. He rushed outside, hoping he was wrong about the Night and Fog, praying this was Icicle and Seth.

But instead of a car, he saw a truck. With wooden slats along its sides, a tarpaulin covering the top. It looked like …

Halloway shivered.

… a cattle truck.

God have mercy, he thought, filled with a sickening premonition. The threat was all the more horrifying because it was vague. But of this he was certain—the end had begun.

“W
hat’s happening down there?” Saul asked. Crouched beside Erika, Drew, and Arlene, he watched from the bluff as the truck approached the cars parked in front of the mansion. The man in the blue exercise suit gestured frantically to his guards, who raised their rifles toward the truck.

Drew’s voice was strained. “We need to get closer.”

“Now. While the guards are distracted,” Erika said.

Beyond the bushes in which they hid, a waist-high barbed wire fence separated them from the lawn of the estate. Erika hurried toward it. There were no glass insulators on the posts; the wires weren’t electrified. She didn’t see any closed-circuit cameras. There might be hidden sound and pressure detectors, but need made her take the risk. She climbed a post, tumbled to the lawn, and crawled.

To her right, a hundred yards away, she saw the man in the blue exercise suit shouting more orders to his guards, who aimed toward the cattle truck. It reached the top of the lane, approaching the cars.

Impelled by a horrible foreboding, Erika crawled faster. She turned toward Saul, who was squirming through the grass in her direction. Drew and Arlene were farther to her left, spreading out so there’d be less chance of anyone seeing them.

With the sun on her back, she hurried toward a garden plot filled with tall orange snapdragons that would give her more concealment on the way to the mansion.

Abruptly she stopped. Two guards at the back of the mansion had scrambled toward the commotion in front. They joined their counterparts and aimed at the cattle truck, which had turned so that its hatch was pointed toward the group in front of the mansion.

She took advantage of the guards’ preoccupation and hurried closer to the mansion. But on her left she saw a sentry. She crouched behind a shrub. The sentry, rifle at the ready, approached a shed, only to lurch back as if struck. He plucked at something on the side of his neck and suddenly collapsed. Baffled, Erika watched two elderly men emerge from behind the shed. One of them held a gun whose distinctive shape she recognized—it was used to shoot tranquilizer darts. Despite their advanced age, the men worked with surprising speed, dragging the sentry into the shed. One shut the door while the other grabbed
the sentry’s rifle. They hurried toward the back of the mansion and disappeared.

Erika’s bewilderment increased when she looked to her right, toward the front of the mansion, and saw an elderly man get out of the passenger door of the truck. The man walked toward the truck’s back hatch and joined another old man, who’d gotten out on the driver’s side and, unseen by Erika, had walked to the back. They braced themselves in front of the guards’ rifles. With a mixture of fear and dismay, Erika crawled faster. Her heart pounded. Her premonition worsened. The elderly man who’d just appeared from the blind side of the truck was her father.

R
age had made him incapable of fear. Joseph Bernstein stopped at point-blank range from the rifles and turned toward Halloway. “Is this any way to welcome visitors?”

“Who
are
you?”

“I think you already know,” Ephraim Avidan said. Standing next to Joseph, he lifted his hand toward the tarpaulin that covered the truck’s back hatch. “Tell your guards to lower their guns.” Ephraim yanked the tarpaulin to the side of the truck. The back hatch slammed down.

A bearded elderly man sat in the truck, aiming a machine gun. “Since munitions are your business, you’re no doubt aware I’ve pulled back the cocking bolt on this weapon,” he said. “You also know the devastation rapid-feed thirty-caliber bullets can accomplish. Even if someone shot me right now, my nervous reflex would pull the trigger. I’m aiming directly at your chest. Please do what my associate requested and order your guards to lower their rifles.”

“If you need further incentive, look deeper into the truck,” Joseph said.

Lips parted with apprehension, Halloway squinted toward the interior.

“Step closer. We want you to see every detail,” Ephraim said.

Halloway took two nervous steps forward and paled when he saw what was in there.

Drugged, ashen, hollow-cheeked, the fathers were chained together, eleven of them slumped on the floor of the truck. An elderly man guarded the prisoners, pressing an Uzi against the forehead of Halloway’s father.

“Dear God.” Halloway clutched his stomach, as if he might vomit.

“Tell your guards to put down their rifles or we’ll shoot the prisoners,” Joseph said. He pulled a Beretta from a Windbreaker pocket.

“Do it,” Halloway said.

The guards set their rifles on the lane. Joseph searched them, found several handguns, and told the guards to lie facedown on the gravel.

“Why are you doing this?”
Halloway asked.
“What do you want?”

“Isn’t it obvious by now?” Ephraim said. “We’re here to discuss Nazi racial theories.”

The large front door to the mansion came open. One by one, the other members of Halloway’s group stepped out, their hands raised, their faces pinched with fear. Two elderly men holding Uzis followed them.

“Ah,” Ephraim said, “the rest of our audience has consented to join us.”

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” one of Halloway’s group shouted, “but—!”

“Mr. Miller,” Joseph said, “please shut your mouth.”

“You can’t keep something like this a secret! You can’t—”

Joseph struck him across the head with the Beretta.

Miller fell to the gravel. He moaned, clutching his bleeding scalp.

“Would anyone else like to say something?” Joseph asked.

The group stared, appalled at the blood streaming down Miller’s face.

“Very good,” Joseph said.

Other old men, aiming Uzis, appeared from each side of the house.

“Did you restrain the rest of the guards?” Ephraim asked.

“The perimeter’s been secured. We searched every room in the house.”

“In that case, it’s time to begin.” Ephraim stepped toward the truck.

“Whatever you plan to do, it’s wrong,” a Mexican-looking man said.

“Rosenberg, don’t presume to tell
me
what’s wrong. You and Halloway are perfect proof that the vices of the fathers are inherited by the sons.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The weapons you sold to Libya to be used against Israel.”

“You
know
about—?”

“The weapons are now in Israeli hands.”

Rosenberg gasped.

“It’s only fitting that, even if you didn’t intend to do so, you helped protect my race, the race your father tried so hard to destroy the race you pretend to belong to,” Ephraim said. He reached into the truck and threw shovels onto the gravel. “Pick them up. All of you.” He threw out more shovels. “We brought enough for everyone. We mustn’t take all day about this. Efficiency is something your fathers always recommended. Teamwork. Organization.”

“Shovels?” Halloway blanched. “What do you—?”

“Dig a hole, of course. A large deep hole.”

“You’re insane!”

“Were your fathers insane when they forced Jews to dig pits for the bodies of other Jews? Or is killing Jews a perfectly rational thing to do? Is it only insane when the executioners are executed?
Pick up the shovels.”

Prodded by Uzis, the group stumbled forward.

“We’ll dig the pit behind the house, out of sight from the road down there,” Ephraim said. “I’m sure you’re all wondering what
we intend to do with
you
when the hole is ready. Will we force you to watch the death of your fathers and then shoot you just as your fathers shot those they ordered to dig burial pits? We offer you the same temptation your fathers offered their victims. Cooperate with us, and we’ll let you go. Dig the pit—we’ll be understanding. How much do you love your fathers? Many Jews were faced with that question during the war. If your father’s going to die, is it a useless sacrifice to resist and die along with him? Or does it make more sense to cooperate with your persecutors and take the chance that you’ll be spared? An interesting dilemma. If you refuse to dig the pit, we’ll kill you. If you obey … ?”

Ephraim raised his hands, expressing a quandary. “Who knows? Experience what we did. It’ll be an education for you.”

E
rika crouched behind a gazebo and surveyed the back of the mansion. The two old men who’d dragged the guard into a shed weren’t in view anymore, presumably having entered a rear door of the mansion. But on the far side of the house, two other old men dragged a guard behind what appeared to be a long garage. They came back into sight, holding Uzis, and ran toward the rear of the mansion.

She looked toward Saul crawling behind her, held up a palm to warn him, and pointed toward the rear of the house. She couldn’t see Drew and Arlene, assumed they were trying to circle the grounds, and hoped they would realize there were other strangers on the property.

At the rear of the mansion, the two old men had been joined by two others. They hurried inside the building. Erika forced herself to wait, to watch for an opportunity.

She was glad she had. The four men came back outside, aimed their Uzis toward the grounds as if making sure that the perimeter had been secured, then separated, two men running along each side of the house to join the group in front.

Now! She sprinted toward the rear of the house, pressed herself against the back wall, and peered through a screen door toward shadows and silence. The instant Saul joined her, she opened the screen door and stepped inside.

She saw stairs on her right leading down to a basement. Ahead, three steps led up to a short corridor. While Saul checked the basement, she followed the corridor, smelling pot roast and freshly baked bread. The corridor opened into a large gleaming kitchen where two men, wearing servants’ uniforms, lay motionless on the floor, a tranquilizer dart protruding from each neck.

She felt a chill on her own neck. When Saul returned from the basement, she proceeded through a swinging door toward another corridor, this one wider and longer, with landscape paintings on the walls. Though the paintings were beautiful, with a mystical quality of light, they filled her with horror because of the monster, Halloway’s father, the assistant commandant of Maidanek, who’d probably created them.

On her right, she saw a dining room, on her left a large study where full ashtrays and empty liquor glasses showed that a large group had recently gathered here. But her attention was directed from the study toward the end of the corridor. The front door had been left open. Male voices—some angry, others pleading, a few disturbingly calm—drifted in from outside.
One of the voices belonged to her father
. Pulse pounding behind her ears, she eased along the corridor and hid against the wall next to the open door. Through a slight gap between the door and the jamb, she squinted toward the sunlit front steps where old men held middle-aged men at gunpoint.

Again she heard her father
. The flood of excitement she felt at being close to him suddenly drained from her. Despair made her hollow. The conversation she heard was grotesque, as was the crunch of shovels being thrown onto gravel and the command to dig a pit behind the house. Restraining the reflex to be sick, she put a hand on Saul’s shoulder.

A
s Ephraim described the pit that the sons would dig for the fathers, Joseph vividly remembered the pits that he and his wife had been forced to dig at Treblinka. In the absence of ovens, the SS had burned corpses in those pits, promising a reprieve to the Jews who shoveled the earth as long as their strength held out. Cooperate and live. Refuse out of loyalty to your fellow Jews and die in the gas chamber you could have escaped, be burned in the pit you refused to dig.

That terrible choice had threatened his sanity—the choice to live by disposing of the remains of his fellow human beings. Guilt had so consumed him, rage had so festered within him that to vent his agony he’d been prepared to do
anything
. Now that the moment had come, he didn’t only remember Treblinka. He felt as if he were truly back there, the smoke of smoldering corpses swirling around him, the stench of charred flesh making him double over. But he had to force himself upright, had to keep working as the SS ordered more wood to be put on the corpses, more sacks of quicklime to be opened, more bodies to be carted from the gas chambers. Tears came to his eyes.

“Out!” he heard the SS scream. “All of you! Hurry! Faster! Jump, goddamn you! Out of the truck!”

Truck? But there
weren’t
any trucks at Treblinka. The Nazis brought the prisoners in stock cars on trains. Why would a truck be at—?

He snapped from the nightmare of then to now, from Treblinka to Halloway’s estate, and saw Ephraim’s eyes bulging with hate.

“Out!” Ephraim shouted at the aged SS officers and whipped them with a rope, urging them faster from the truck. Chained together, the prisoners lost their balance as they did their best to descend in a hurry, falling on top of one another, chains rattling, frail bodies crunching on gravel. Jumbled together, they whimpered, squirming.

“No,” Joseph said.

But Ephraim’s shouts made his objection a whisper. Ephraim whipped the old men harder. “On your feet, vermin! Hurry! No time! Müller, you’re an expert in what happens next! After the pit’s been dug, we’ll place a plank across it and make you stand in the middle! So when we shoot you, we’ll know for sure you’ll fall into the pit! We wouldn’t want to waste time having to kick your body down if you fell on the rim! Efficiency, Müller! Wasn’t that the motto? Organization! We mustn’t waste time!”