The One Man (21 page)

“
A sheynem dank
.” Blum grinned and replied.
Thank you very much.

“Yes,
a sheynem dank.
” The captain smiled. “Certainly haven't heard those words in a while.”

The two men shook hands.

There was a knock on the door. “Ah, almost forgot…” Strauss said. “One last thing.” A short, squat Brit in a civil defense uniform carrying a small metal kit came in.

“Captain.” Then he looked at Blum.
“Leftenant…”

The man put down his kit and took out an electric shearer.

“Say goodbye to your hair for a while,” Strauss said.

Blum sat as the man put a sheet around his shoulders. Blum asked,“You were a barber before the war?”

“Not quite, sir,” the Brit said, turning on the shearer.

He shaved Blum's head. The dark hair fell at Blum's feet. Afterward, Blum looked at himself in the mirror. The sunken eyes and protruding cheeks seemed even more pronounced. He looked indeed like what he would be in a day: a prisoner. His heart swelled with the depth of the responsibility they were placing on him. A Pole. Someone with no standing. Who had escaped from the world of darkness only three years before.

Strauss shrugged. “That leaves one last thing…”

He nodded, and the Brit went back into his kit and came out with a tattoo needle. He plugged it in and dipped it in a bluish ink. “I did
this
before the war, sir,” he said to Blum. Strauss passed the man a six-digit number. The instrument began to vibrate.

“Sir,” the man said to Blum, “would you mind giving me your left arm?”

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

WARSAW

Colonel Martin Franke sat at his desk at German intelligence headquarters in Warsaw on Szucha Street. His aide, Lieutenant Verstoeder, put his morning
kaffee
on his desk. Not the watered-down gruel the Poles drank with sugar and cream to hide the taste. German coffee. Hearty. Black. Brought in from Dallmayr's in Munich. He paged through the overnight cables that had come in over the intelligence wires. Some had been intercepted from coded transmissions; others from directly over the radio. From the BBC. Those that piqued his interest Franke kept in what he called the “A” box by his desk. The others just went in the “B” box to be filed. True intelligence wasn't just a round of drinks at the bar in Estoril or wagering at the casino. That was Rule One. It demanded thoroughness. And follow-through. Follow-through, but instinct too. A good nose.

A good nose was worth all the drinks in Lisbon.

Still, Rule Two. Everything was filed.

The past four months since Vittel had only made Franke's desire to reclaim his prior standing even stronger. The war was not going well. Any fool could see that. The Red Army was advancing; it was almost in Poland now. There was fighting as close as Lvov. Even the Poles were starting to rise up and make a nuisance of themselves. And everyone knew the Allied invasion was imminent; Normandy or Calais? It was only a matter of where.

In Warsaw, the ghetto had been burned and razed. The last Jews, other than those who had taken refuge in the Aryan sector, were either dead or shipped out to places they would not return from. His current job was to root out those still in hiding or with forged papers. And round up suspected Polish collaborators, toss them into the basement of Pawiak Prison, and basically let some Gestapo strongarm pummel their faces raw until they talked. Or didn't, in the rare case. Either way have them shipped out to the Katlan Forest, lined up against a tree and shot.

The woods there were so thick with blood, the joke was going around, this spring, the grass was growing in red.

Still, Franke knew, it was all basically police work. Stuff for the
Ordnungspolizei,
perhaps. Not intelligence.

He had received merely a letter from SS Brigadeführer Schellenberg, his new overseer from Berlin, congratulating him for his “helpful role” in rooting out those phony passport holders in Vittel.

Helpful role?
Two hundred forty Jews he had given them.

While the war was being lost by fools, he was being left behind.

Over his
kaffee,
Franke leafed through the day's stack of cables and intelligence messages. Mostly phrases meaningful only to whoever they were intended for: “Lila's shoes have arrived. Pick them up any time.” “Oskar wants you to know, the cello lesson is set for next week at the same time.” “Jani can't wait to see you again. But this time, she asks you bring the red hat instead of the blue.” Everything meant something, of course. Part of Franke's job now was to pick out any that might have a particular connection to the partisan network, whose members were starting to make pests of themselves on the front and in Warsaw, and then track them down.

Like this one perhaps …
Franke reread one from last night that had caught his attention.

It was the kind of message that to most might well go unnoticed. It came in just before the BBC's
Evening with the Philharmonic
. It mentioned a truffle hunter on his way to Poland. It read, “They are growing very well this season amid the birchwood trees.”

Birchwood trees?

“What are truffles?” his aide, Verstoeder, asked, as he went to collate the A and B piles.

“They are like mushrooms. Only far more expensive,” Franke said. “They grow in the roots of trees. But in Italy,” he remarked curiously, “not in Poland. That's what strikes me of interest here. And in the fall. They use pigs to find them.”

“Pigs?”

Franke nodded. “Pigs and dogs.” The kind of message that to most might go unnoticed.

“So who is this truffle hunter?” Verstoeder asked. “And why is he coming to Poland?”

“In springtime…” Franke clarified.

“Yes, in the spring.”

“A good question.” Franke sipped the last of his coffee. “And another would be, who is the pig?”

The thought of truffles made Franke's stomach growl yearningly, for it had been a long time since anything had found its way into it other than potatoes, cabbage, and sausage. But it was a game of scents, the colonel knew, and this one he could smell as clearly as if he held one of the little buggers in his hand.

“Keep or file?” the lieutenant inquired, deciding in which box to put the cable.

“Keep, I think. At least, for now.” There would be more to come, he suspected, about this truffle hunter.

He had a nose for things like this. And this one made it itch.

Franke placed the cable in the box marked A.

 

TWENTY-NINE

In the belly of the de Havilland Mosquito, flying fifteen thousand feet over Poland, Blum pushed back his nerves.

He looked at his forearm. It still smarted from the number etched into it in blue ink. A22327. Rudolf Vrba's number. So if needed, it matched up against a number that was real. It hardly mattered anyway, Blum knew. If he was caught, he would be interrogated and shot straightaway as a spy. All the numbers in the world wouldn't save him.

Or any diamond.

The plane rattled up and down. Occasionally antiaircraft flak could be heard in the sky. The Allies planned a bombing raid over Dresden to divert enemy aircraft and artillery, but still it was terrifying, knowing what lay ahead, the plane lurching up and down. He held onto the jump strap to settle himself.

He thought about the conversation he had had earlier with President Roosevelt. How much was riding on this; the faith they had in him. His blood still surged with pride. That a Pole, a Jew from the Krakow ghetto, should be speaking across an ocean with the most powerful man in the world. If only his father and mother could have known. They would never believe it. And Leisa. She would have rolled her eyes and told him, “Don't get such a swelled head. In a minute you could be shot down. Or land on the back of a Nazi troop truck. And then what of your conversation?”

Blum smiled, reminding himself why he was there, trying to settle his nerves. The plane lurched, hitting turbulence. It shook so hard for a second Blum felt like the screws holding the fuselage together were about to come apart. He looked at his watch. Only another few minutes.
Then …

Then the jump. His stomach shifted uneasily, thinking of it.

“Get ready!” the copilot called back from the cockpit. “We're dropping to six thousand feet.”

Blum gave the thumbs-up sign, but inside his nerves were in a riot. If there was any light in this godforsaken place, he knew his face would appear like a white sheet.

“We're jumping at twelve hundred feet! Six minutes.”

“I'm set,” Blum said, though there wasn't a cell in his body that didn't stiffen at the thought. He went through the contingency plan. What if the resistance wasn't there to meet him on the ground? He'd have to make his way to the village of Rajsko, eight kilometers to the east. To the safe house. He went over the password again:
ciasto wisniowe.
Cherry pie.

He had maps. A compass. Money. A Colt 1911 holstered to his belt. The chute had been checked and rechecked.
Five seconds,
he reminded himself. His count before pulling the cord. He tried to block out of his mind, what if he botched it and fell? What then?
Do not fail us, Lieutenant.

“Two minutes!”
The copilot scrambled back into the fuselage. “Let's get over to the hatch.”

Blum's stomach tightened.

He checked his pack and made his way over, clipped himself to the jump line. He tightened his helmet strap.

“We'll be back for you in seventy-two hours,” the airman said. “Aught one thirty hours. There's a cleared field just off the main road. Three kilometers east of the drop site.”

Blum nodded. He'd gone over and over it. He had it in the map of his mind. But it wouldn't matter; the partisans would take him there.

“Remember, we'll stay on the ground for only two minutes. That's all. Then we hightail it out of there, as fast as we can. You'd best be there.”

“I understand.”

“And whatever it is you're bloody well doing down there”—he gave Blum a slap on the shoulder—“All good luck!”

“Thanks.”

“Hang on tight now…” The airman pulled open the outside hatch. Cold air rushed in.

“Look, down there!” The airman pointed into the darkness.

Straight ahead of them was an array of lights on the ground in the shape of an X. “That's your mark. The wind is good. We're under twelve hundred feet. Shouldn't be too hard. Done this before, I assume?”

Blum shook his head. “Only in training. Off blocks.”

“Off blocks?” The airman rolled his eyes. “Well, it's just the same.” He gave Blum's helmet strap a tug. “Just take a deep breath and go on my mark. You'll be down before you know it.” The plane lurched like a horse trying to throw him off. Blum had to hold onto the rail to keep from falling out.

Count of five,
Blum reminded himself.
Then pull.
His chest was hammering inside him.

“Set, now. We're almost there.” Cold wind battered him in the face.

“Remember…” The airman put his hand on Blum's back. “Seventy-two hours.” He looked back to get his bearings, holding onto Blum's strap. “Now, go!”

Blum's heart leaped into the sky, but his feet, frozen in place, remained locked to the plane. He saw the lit-up X approaching below them. They were almost directly over it.

“Go, I said! Now!
Hit it!
” the airman shouted.

He took Blum by the shoulder straps and basically hurled him out into the night. Blum closed his eyes and let out a yell. It was freezing, pitch-dark; he felt himself falling faster than he imagined he would.
“One, two…”
He heard the roar of the plane pulling away, banking upward. Wind smacked him in the face, jostling him around.
“Three … Four!”

Five!

He held his breath and yanked the cord. To his relief, it was like the elevator he was riding in jolted to an abrupt stop. For a second it felt like he had slipped through his chute and was plummeting on his own. Fear shot through him.

Then he opened his eyes.

He was okay. Floating. Everything completely dark. His heart settled back to a normal pace. He had overshot his mark by a ways. He wasn't going to be landing near the X, but still not too far away.

A bolt of worry jolted him: What if the resistance had given him up? What if there weren't friends but a truckload of German troops waiting for him on the ground? He saw the darkened tops of trees, coming up fast. This would be it then.

Hold on …

He floated to the ground, faster than he'd anticipated, hitting the field with an exhalation of air and nerves, and rolled. His pack almost knocked the breath out of him.

There wasn't a light anywhere around.

The first thing he did was take out his Colt. The brush there was thick, and it was perfectly silent, dark. He gathered his chute together. He'd expected people to be rushing up to him but so far there was no sign of anyone, not even voices. He spotted a wood to the left—the south, according to the compass on his wrist. He balled up the chute and headed over to the cover. He got down and dug a hole in the brush. Fortunately the rains had been generous and the spring soil was moist. He stuffed the chute in it and covered it up, spreading a blanket of leaves and brush around it.

His heart was pounding.

For the first time, it dawned on him that he was back in Poland.

It was silent. Blum had no idea who was waiting for him. Resistance, or German soldiers? He peered out from the woods. No one. This wasn't what he was expecting. Just what had he gotten himself into? he asked himself. What if no one comes? He'd be alone here. In occupied territory. He'd—