Jacob's Oath (13 page)

Sarah was catching her breath and wiping her cheeks. She blew her nose on a hand towel
that was already wet. Rabbi Bohmer dipped another towel in a bowl of water and handed
it to her. He sat back in his chair, folded his hands, and waited, watching her with
an encouraging smile. She wiped her brow, face, and hands and lay back with a sigh.

After a minute’s pause she said, “So I can leave in a few days.”

“Yes, that’s what the nurse said. How do you feel about that?”

“I wonder what the doctor wants to talk to me about. The nurse said it was important.”

The rabbi nodded. “It can’t be anything bad. The nurse said you can leave in a few
days.”

“I’ll go to Heidelberg as soon as I can. Will that be difficult, do you think?”

“I don’t know, to be honest. There are about thirty Jews here in Frankfurt that we
know of, they all survived one way or another—married to Christians, by hiding like
you, a few were hidden by nuns through the whole war, an extraordinary story. Do you
know how many Jews there were in Heidelberg before the war?”

“About a thousand, I think. A few more.”

“The U.S. Sixth Army is based there now, they took over the Wehrmacht barracks. If
any Jews have come back they’ll have gone there for help. Or at least the chaplain
there may know about them.” He wondered how many Jews there were, like Sarah, who
had survived the Nazi evil. How correct Roosevelt had been when he called on the nation
to come together to defeat the Hitler scourge. Look at this young woman, so attractive,
so tired, so defeated, and yet her eyes, her dark eyes, they’re burning. With what?
Fever? The pain of her outburst? No. She’s burning with hopeless love. For a man she
knows is dead and for a baby that never lived. Poor thing.

He heard himself say, “I can check, if you like. About Jews. In Heidelberg.”

*   *   *

Sarah climbed back into bed after wandering the corridor, looking into small rooms
with eight cots each, greeting nurses in white frocks and caps, and doctors with white
coats over their military uniforms. A general visiting the wounded had caused a commotion
by telling a soldier with no visible wounds yet kept weeping, to stop faking it and
get back to his unit. The soldier had not responded but one nurse, no doubt a civilian
seconded to the army, for who else would have dared, muttered so that everyone could
hear, “How dumb can you be?” Even Sarah heard her from outside the room.

She hated the sharp, bitter smell of chloroform and antiseptic and cleaning liquid.
Tomorrow I’ll leave, she thought. But first, the doctor. What could he want to tell
her? She would be seeing him in three hours, not during his regular rounds but by
appointment, in his office.

In bed she dozed, a small smile on her lips. She was thinking of her home, the animals,
Willi the family goat, the farmyard smells, their friends, the games they had played.
And then she had gone to Berlin to study and work, which had saved her life. She became
sad and wondered, yet again, why she seemed to accept so calmly the deaths of her
parents, let alone her aunts and uncles and cousins. She knew they would not come
back, couldn’t, had known it for years, since they had been taken by the Nazis, and
that in a strange way had helped her. She had accepted it long ago. It was the not
knowing that must be so painful.

It seemed like only minutes had gone by when she made out a distant voice and a tapping
on her shoulder. “Wake up, honey,” the nurse was saying, “time to see the doctor.”

But later, when Sarah had returned to her bed, it seemed that the wall clock had stopped,
that the minutes would never pass. When Rabbi Bohmer dropped by on his rounds, it
seemed as if she had aged by ten years, yet the clock showed she had been back in
bed for barely an hour. The rabbi was smiling and held out an apple. He was thinking
that maybe the next part of her life would be good, as her dream had portended. But
Sarah looked different. She was pale. She didn’t greet him. She stared past him, her
face set.

“What is it? Did you see the doctor?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer,
went on, “I heard from Heidelberg.”

Her eyes flickered in his direction.

Normally the rabbi would have picked up on her change of mood. Everyone said how perceptive
he was, especially for such a young man, how he always knew exactly how to talk to
everyone. But now he was too excited.

“Chaplain Monahan with the Sixth sent me a message. From Heidelberg.” He waited for
her response but Sarah stared past him.

“The pastor did not see the person but he has heard.” He waited, pleased with himself,
but when he was still met by silence, he continued: “There is a Jew in Heidelberg.
One.”

Now he had Sarah’s attention. “Who?” she asked in a tiny voice. “What name? A man
or a woman?”

“He didn’t know the name, just that a Jew had come for help and then left.”

Sarah asked, “A man or a woman?”

“A man.”

ELEVEN

“I really don’t like it,” Yonni said as he guided the jeep slowly around a bomb crater
in Hesselstrasse. “In fact, I hate it.”

“Too bad,” said Ari. “Because we’re doing it. That’s why we came.”

“It isn’t right,” Yonni said again.

“Yes, Yonni,” Omri said from the backseat, watching the slight woman holding the little
boy’s hand. “I think we got the message.”

The woman turned left at the pile of twisted tram tracks on the corner, while they
drove straight by until they took the next left, and left again. Now they approached
her from the front as she disappeared into the open stairwell of the apartment block.

“We’ll do it tomorrow,” Ari said. “After she drops him off, after whatever she does
next. As she turns into her building, I’ll come out of it.”

Each morning for three days they had watched the woman leave her home, walk around
the corner to Hesselstrasse, and drop her son at school. Each morning she next ran
an errand before returning home. The first day, she had waited in line with her ration
card at the grocery store and walked home with her little bag of food. The next day,
she came out with a bucket and, after depositing her son, had collected water from
the pump and taken it to another building nearby. They knew from Blue at Intelligence:
She took the water to her father, who couldn’t leave home. He had lost his legs in
the First World War and, with all the trouble, there was nobody to carry him and his
wheelchair downstairs.

And that morning she had gone to the police station; they didn’t know why.

There didn’t appear to be a man in her life. She lived alone with her hyperactive
son, a cute blond kid about six years old. That’s what was upsetting Yonni. The boy
couldn’t pass a pile of bomb debris without jumping on top and at every corner he
played traffic cop, waving his arms and pointing, although it was two minutes between
vehicles.

“Who’ll look after him, that’s what I want to know,” Yonni kept saying.

“Who gives a monkey’s?” Omri said. He enjoyed the English slang he was picking up
in the Jewish Brigade.

“I do,” Yonni said.

“Oh, for God’s sake, drop it, Yonni,” Ari said. “Do you think you’re the only one
with a conscience? Just remember, she isn’t a woman, she’s a witch.” A better phrase
came. “She isn’t a mother, she’s a murderer.”

They drove to the woods where they would spend the night. Sometimes they would show
their papers and travel passes and sleep in an army base, but rarely in the town of
a kill. Leave no pattern, no coincidences, no trail.

Not that anyone cared if a few SS war criminals were murdered. There were thousands
of them, tens of thousands who would never face justice.

As their secret unit grew, as their reach spread, their goals became clearer and more
specific. They weren’t killing the Nazis for justice, or even morality. No. It was
a matter of honor. That’s why it wasn’t good enough to report the Nazis to the Allied
war criminal sections.

First, they wouldn’t do anything anyway, they were too busy with the leaders.

And second, and most important, Jewish honor demanded Jewish vengeance.

For who else would punish the bastards, the sadists? Not the leaders, but the cogs
in the machine. Those men who laughed at the naked women and beat them with their
guns and made them run on all fours and bark like dogs? Those who pushed them into
vast pits while they were still alive and covered them with tons of earth so that
witnesses said that for days the earth writhed and moved and groaned.

We can’t punish them all, the Avengers said, but we can punish some so that their
descendants will know forevermore that no evil deed will go unpunished.

“But what about the boy?” Yonni said yet again. “He’ll be an orphan.”

“Better to be an orphan than dead. They killed one and a half million of our kids.
And now, for God’s sake, enough,” Ari said. “Don’t go on about it again. That’s an
order. If you do, I’ll report it to the boss and you’re out of the unit. And if you
breathe a word of this outside the unit, you’re next.”

“A bit of advice,” Omri added. “Don’t think about what you’re doing. Think about what
she did.”

On the dot of eight a.m. the boy skipped and bounded out of the building followed
by his mother, who was carrying a tray. Two American jeeps drove by, and then came
a British one, a little more slowly. “She’s been baking,” Omri said.

“Her last meal,” Ari said.

Her errand that day was back at the police station.

“Twice in two days. Nobody does that,” Ari said. “If you ask me, she’s planning something.
To do with papers. Getting travel papers, or a new ID card. What else would she be
doing there two days in a row? I bet she’s leaving. We’re just in time.”

“And leave her father?” Yonni said.

“Sure. He’ll want his daughter to be safe. After what she did,” Omri said.

“She probably got it from him,” Ari said. “Let’s steal his wheelchair.”

They drove to her apartment building, where Ari got out, went into the stairwell,
and waited. He nodded at other tenants as they came and went. They glanced at him
and quickly looked away. He wore a hat low over his eyes and a shabby suit, and over
that a long leather coat. He looked like a Hollywood Gestapo agent. It would confuse
her just long enough to take her. In his right pocket he held his seven-inch blade,
his favorite: short enough to hide, long enough to kill.

At ten thirty-seven Yonni pushed the clutch and slipped into first gear. He had kept
the engine running for an hour, to make sure when the time came there was no problem
starting. Two hundred meters ahead, fifty meters from the building, the woman had
appeared around the corner and was walking home. Driving slowly, Yonni depressed the
clutch and moved into second gear. It would take her forty-five seconds. A slow-moving
jeep was not unusual. Everyone was careful to avoid craters and debris. She held the
empty tray in her hand. The metal glinted in the light. Its hard, thin edges looked
lethal. Yonni glanced at Omri, who nodded. He had seen that too. He held his pistol
by the open window, ready to lean out and shoot, in case she surprised Ari with the
sharp-edged metal—not that anything ever surprised him.

As she turned into the drab garden, with its broken wall and dusty bomb debris piled
on a flattened hedge, Ari emerged from the stairwell toward her and tipped his hat.

“Frau Adler?” he asked with a smile, in his native German. Nice touch that, she’d
taken a Jewish name. “Here,” he said, taking the tray from her hand, “please allow
me to help you with that.” She looked surprised. “We’ve been looking for you from
the Bund.” The federation. Another nice touch, this time his. Bund meant nothing at
all these days, but it was generic enough to hint at the good old days when every
Nazi social outfit was Bund this and Bund that.

Two women in kerchiefs and coats were chatting in the next-door garden. They looked
at the man in the leather coat. Is he police? Ari nodded to them. “Guten Morgen.”
May as well be polite. They fell silent and watched.

With his other hand he took Frau Adler’s elbow and turned her around and guided her
back to the street, talking all the way. “You see, some of us are getting together,
there are some changes afoot, with some travel included…” Keep talking. Distract her.
“So of course, we thought of you, you know, because…”

At the street, with his arm at her elbow, he felt her begin to stiffen, she was about
to resist. “Wait a moment,” she said, “who…”

At that instant the British army jeep jerked to a halt beside her, the tailgate flew
open, and Ari grabbed her around the shoulders, heaved and pushed, and fell on top
of her on the backseat while Omri leaped out from the front, gave their legs a powerful
shove, slammed the door, jumped back in, and Yonni accelerated smoothly away.

Her scream was muffled by a rag in her mouth and a hood on her head.

The two women in kerchiefs and coats in the garden next door covered their mouths
in horror until the jeep had disappeared from view. They looked at each other and
quickly parted. Their silent advice to each other: Mind your own business.

In silence the Avengers drove to their woods, past a convoy of three-quarter-ton trucks
with the insignia of the U.S. 11th Armored Division, past groups of tattered refugees
pushing carts and carrying cases.

The woman struggled in desperation, kicking and hitting out with her elbows, but Ari
had switched places with Omri, who pushed her head down out of sight and whose one-handed
grip clamped her thin wrists like a vise.

Yonni followed a road that became a trail as it entered the woods; narrowed into a
beaten, grass-covered track; and ended in a clearing on the bank of the Wertach River.
The grass was flattened where they had slept the night.

In better days it must have been a beautiful secluded picnic spot, perfect for young
lovers.

Today it was a good place for a killing.