Part 29 (1/2)

'Yes. That would be regrettable.' He pointed to the tray. 'You're not drinking your coffee.'

'No.'

'I don't blame you. She buys cheap garbage. She has a good heart, but no taste.'

Riese began fiddling with his cannula. The tube had slipped out from behind his left ear. Baulman asked permission to help. He tightened it in place, and saw that the area behind Riese's ears had been rubbed almost raw. His nostrils, too, were dry and irritated. G.o.d, thought, Baulman, I've been lucky.

'Hummel talked with me about you,' said Riese, as Baulman returned to his seat.

'Really? He was always discreet about you.'

'Huh. Good. He told me that you killed a man before the war.'

It had been so long since Baulman had thought of it. He had not spoken of his youth in many years, and there had been so many other killings after that. But it was the first that had set him on his path, he supposed. The first is always the hardest.

'That's right,' said Baulman.

'Who was he?'

'A criminal. A burglar. My father ran a clothing store. Sometimes he kept money in the house. He did not have a safe. He said that if he had one, people would start asking why he needed it, so better to do without.

'It was close to Christmas. He was busy, and there was more money than usual in the drawer in his office. He and my mother were at a party. I was alone in the house well, I had Britta for company. She was a little mongrel, but a good dog. She heard a noise in the kitchen, and went to investigate. Seconds later, I heard her yelp, and when I went to see what was happening there was a man holding her up by the collar. He had a scarf around his mouth, and a hat over his eyes. He put a knife to Britta's throat, and he killed her, right in front of me, and told me that I'd be next if I didn't show him where the money was.

'So I led him to my father's office. I remember crying because of what he'd done to Britta, but I was also so angry. It was a cold rage. I recall it clearly.

'The man began searching the desk, but my father kept his money in a concealed drawer. There was a lever under the desk, and you had to know where it was to open the drawer. I told the man that I could do it for him, and he stepped back. He was not frightened of me. I was only fifteen, and still small for my age.

'I found the lever with my left hand, and released the drawer. I knew that my father kept a little Mauser pistol there, a 6.35mm auto. He'd had it since the war. It was in my grasp before the man realized what I was doing. I held it up and pointed it at him. I can remember that my hands didn't even shake, and I thought that they should. He raised his own hands, and he started to laugh. He told me that I was brave, but I should hand over the gun before I hurt myself, that it was hard to kill a man, no matter what I might have thought or heard.'

Baulman swallowed. His mouth was dry. It was like telling a story about a stranger. This was not Baulman's history; this was Reynard Kraus's. Only the memory of Britta's death made it real to him.

'I said to him. ”Is it harder than killing a dog?” and I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him in the chest, and he fell back against the wall. There was a chair, and somehow he managed to sit down. He put his hand to the wound, and it came away red. He asked me to call a doctor, and I shot him again, and I kept shooting until the pistol was empty. Then I called my father at the party and told him what I had done.

'The police came. I explained everything. I didn't lie. There was talk about charging me with murder because I'd shot the man so many times, but it never came to anything. Eventually I joined the SS, and, because I was considered bright, and was good with numbers, I was recruited for the Economic-Administration Main Office, when the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was incorporated into it in 1942. That was how I eventually came to Lubsko.'

Riese nodded, as though somehow Baulman made a kind of sense to him now.

'I was at Mittelbau-Dora,' he said. 'First under Forschner, then Baer.'

Mittelbau-Dora, sometimes referred to simply as Nordhausen, was a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where prisoners worked on tunnel excavations for the production of V-1 and V-2 rockets. It was slave labor of the worst kind: twenty thousand died of exhaustion, disease, starvation, in accidents, or at the end of a noose. In 1947, the Americans tried nineteen former Nordhausen guards and kapos at Dachau, of whom fifteen were convicted and one executed. In an act of gross hypocrisy, the Americans also recruited Arthur Rudolph, one of the Nordhausen rocket scientists, under Operation Paperclip, and he went on to enjoy a distinguished career at NASA before being thrown out of the country in the 1980s.

Riese said no more, and Baulman did not pursue the matter. He wondered who Riese really was. He had worked as an engineer in the United States, so perhaps he had been a scientist. No matter. Like Baulman, he had lived under his false ident.i.ty for longer than his true one. He was more Ambros Riese than anyone else. Pressure had been placed upon them to provide funds for his escape. Hudal and Dragonovic together had asked, and Baulman and the others could not refuse, because the clerics were supplying the paperwork. Money was no good without papers.

'Do you regret anything that you did, Baulman?'

The question took Baulman by surprise. It was not that he had never considered it, merely that he had never heard it asked aloud.

'I cannot connect it to myself,' he replied. 'When I recall everything that occurred, it seems to be the work of another man.'

'It's so long ago now,' said Riese. 'It is to me like a bad dream.'

On the television, the news s.h.i.+fted to some G.o.dforsaken part of the Middle East, where bodies lay in the dust civilians, Baulman thought, although it was hard to tell in these conflicts.

'Why do they continue to pursue us?' asked Riese. 'Why all this effort for old men and women who can no longer hurt anyone, when all they have to do is turn on their televisions and see more worthwhile outlets for their self-righteousness? The world has no shortage of war criminals, no end of ma.s.s slaughter, yet still they focus their attentions on us.'

'They perceive no moral complexity in us,' said Baulman, 'no shades of right and wrong. They can show pictures of us to schoolchildren, and they can say, ”See? This is what evil looks like.” But show them men and women with machetes in Africa, show them Syrians fighting a dictators.h.i.+p and then flying the flag of Al-Qaeda, show them Israeli tanks and Hamas gunmen, and all they see is confusion. It is easier to torment us than to try to unravel the knots of outrageous human behavior that they witness every day. That is what I believe.'

Yet Baulman had never thought of himself as evil. He had done what he had to do. If he had not, others would have taken his place. He had tried to make sure that the children did not suffer. He put them to sleep the way his vets had put a succession of Weimaraners to sleep. He had not wanted the children to feel pain and fear at the last any more than he would have wanted his dogs to die in distress.

'What will you do about Hummel?' asked Riese.

'Our friend will take care of him. It will be a mercy.'

'He will be discreet?'

'Yes.'

'If Engel has named Hummel, they will investigate his death.'

'Let them. Old men die. It's what they do.'

'What we do,' Riese corrected.

'No, not us. Not yet.'

Riese reached out and placed his left hand on Baulman's leg.

'Do you know how Harry Houdini died?' he asked.

'What?' said Baulman.

'The escape artist, Houdini. Do you know how he died?'

'No.' Baulman was confused.

'He would boast that punches could never hurt him,' said Riese. 'A university student Whitehead, I believe was his name came to Houdini in his dressing room at a theater in Montreal and asked if this was true, that he could not be hurt by a fist. Houdini said that it was. This Whitehead asked permission to strike Houdini in the stomach, and when the great escapologist a.s.sented, Whitehead hit him hard repeatedly, just below the belt. The blows ruptured Houdini's appendix. You see, he had been reclining on a couch at the time due to a broken ankle, and so could not brace himself properly to receive the blows. He died of peritonitis as a result of the injuries he had received. What is the lesson of that story, Baulman?'

'That one should always be on one's guard?'

Riese's fingers dug painfully into Baulman's thigh.

'No,' said Riese. 'The lesson is that, in the end, n.o.body escapes.'

He picked up the clicker, and raised the volume on the television.

'Go now,' he told Baulman, 'and don't come here again.'