Pursuit (20 page)

He shifted slightly on the hard duckboards of the boat and came awake, momentarily relieved it had only been a dream, and that the security of his normal fantasy had not been breached. But some of the fury was still in him. And then he became aware that he was still hearing a chain rattle, softly but insistently. He raised his head slightly, peering over the shadow of the gunwale. Someone was trying to pry the ring loose that held the chain coupling the boats; someone was trying to steal the boats! My God, hadn't he enough trouble in his life? He couldn't even have a decent dream without someone interrupting! Now that someone was trying to get him into more trouble by stealing the boats in his charge!

Deiter came to his feet silently, balancing his large frame with practiced ease against the dipping of the boat. He silently unshipped an oar and raised it over his head, determined to give this one a lesson! He started to step to the dock, but the movement threw his boat against the others, making them all bump the dock, and the man turned, startled. In the little light there was, Deiter saw the glint of steel in the man's hand, and any compunction he might have felt for merely challenging the thief disappeared. With a lunge he brought the oar down as hard as he could.

The man did his best to avoid the blow, but the heavy oar caught him on his shoulder and threw him from the dock. The tool in his hand went flying, disappearing with a slight splash in the lake. There was an almost audible snap as his leg crashed against the edge of one of the boats, and then he was in the water, floundering.

In an instant the anger Deiter Kessler had been feeling changed to compassion. What had he done? The man had been trying to steal the boats, it was true, but was that any reason to try to kill him? Was the crime of theft now to be punished by death? Had he become an animal? The water at the dock was shallow, little more than the draft the boats required; he stepped down into the water and raised the man in his arms.

“Are you all right?”

“My leg—” There was tight pain in the voice.

“Let's get some light.”

Deiter carried the thin figure in his arms easily, bringing him to the shack, squelching along the dock in his sodden boots. He put the man down as gently as he could, and went inside. He brought out a kerosene lantern and lit it, studying the man on the dock with curiosity. Grossman's eyes were shut, his breathing ragged. He opened his eyes and then shut them tightly against the glare of the lantern.

“My leg—it's broken …”

It was evident he was telling the truth; the leg poked out at an odd angle, not disguised by the soaking trouser leg. Deiter tried to think what to do. He had no ability to set the leg himself, and he knew from his wartime training that the man should not be moved unless there were trained people to do it. But there was no hospital in Allenbach; there was not even a doctor, or even a nurse as far as he knew. The closest help was in Konstanz, three or four miles away, and he had no transportation. There was a barrow nearby he could borrow, but he could scarcely haul the man three or four miles in a barrow; he could be dead from shock long before they arrived. And the lone constable on duty in town only had a bicycle—

But the constable did have a telephone!

Grossman was shivering violently, although the evening was warm. Deiter took off his jacket and wrapped it about the injured man, wincing as the other winced, sorry he did not have any schnapps to ward off the shock that was coming. “Don't move,” he said. “I'll go for help,” and he started off at a gallop.

The small sidewalk cafe on Saarland Strasse gave a view down Konstanz Strasse as well as down Kreutlingen Strasse to the fence that constituted the German-Swiss border, as well as to the two guard positions that allowed passage on the two roads between the countries to be monitored. At that hour of the night there was little traffic, and the occasional truck that came along was thoroughly searched and the driver's papers well studied. Brodsky had come to the cafe after watching the railroad cars along the tracks on Schiller Strasse undergo a search at the gate he knew would be sufficient to prevent any passage by that route. If Grossman seriously considered crossing into Switzerland from the town of Konstanz, he was obviously wasting his time.

As if in answer to the thought, there was a soft voice behind him.

“Forget it. It's impossible—”

Max turned in surprise; it was the waiter who had served him his coffee, his only concession to his growing hunger and to the responsibility he felt for the funds he
carried.

“Were you talking to me?”

The waiter chose to answer in another fashion. He was an old man with a stoop and with sad eyes set in a seamed face; his worn shoes had been sliced with a razor blade to give his corns room. His black uniform was shiny with age, but his paper dicky was spotless.

“They come almost every day, lately,” the waiter said. “Before the war they came as tourists, for the lake, for the rest, to cross into Switzerland for the scenery. Now they come like you. They sit and have a coffee, or a
Kuchen
, or sometimes a schnapps to build up their courage or to hide their disappointment, I suppose. But mostly they just sit here awhile, staring up the street to the fence; and then they mostly go away and forget it. Like you should go away and forget it. Pardon me if I speak out of turn, but crossing into Switzerland is not easy.”

“You say, mostly they go away,” Max said, interested. “Do some of them try to cross?”

“Not many, but some.” The old man flicked his towel at a fly who merely circled and returned. The old man sighed; the fly seemed to represent the inevitability of his failures. “They try to swim around the end of the fence out in the lake, mostly. Sometimes they drown. Sometimes they get shot. There was one just tonight …”

“There was one tonight?” Max sat more erect. “What happened?”

The old man shrugged. “That one was shot …”

“They killed him?”

The old man looked surprised at this vehemence at a normal event.

“I don't know if they killed him,” he said slowly, wanting to be as accurate as possible with this huge and menacing man now on his feet and towering over him. “There were shots down by the lake; they must have seen him in the floodlights. I'm pretty sure they hit him, because they came and took him away in an ambulance. I mean, they brought him back to the Konstanz side,” he added, as if to prove that even the ploy of getting shot would not guarantee entrance into the forbidden land.

“Where did they take him?”

“To the Municipal Hospital, I suppose.”

“And where is that?”

The old man shuffled to the doorway and pointed.

“On Leiner Strasse. Up Robert Wagner Strasse three blocks, then left. Of course they might have taken him to the Sisters across the river, but—”

He was speaking to empty space. He sighed and picked up the small coin Max had left for the coffee, tucking it into his change purse and laboriously putting the purse into his pocket. They came and they came, and all they got for their trip was getting shot, or going to jail, or just going back where they came from, disappointed.

The dead man was a stranger, but he was as familiar to Max Brodsky as if they had known each other all their lives. The thin body, the army clothes too large, the sucken cheeks, the hair growing back in patches, the tattoo on the arm that signified a period in Auschwitz-Birkenau on his way here to death beside the Bodensee. Max sighed in pity for the poor soul, and shook his head at the morgue attendant. The morgue attendant pulled the sheet back over the dead face and led Max back to the main corridor of the hospital.

Well, at least it hadn't been Ben Grossman. It seemed a cruel thought, a denigration of that man who lay in the morgue and the value of his existence, but that was the way of life. He paused to allow a wheeled litter to pass. It was carrying a pale-faced man whose leg had just been set in plaster of Paris; the leg jutted from a wrinkled trouser leg, still damp, that had been neatly cut with surgical scissors just above the knee. The man's slate-blue eyes flickered open a moment, and then stared in total amazement.

“Max! What are you doing here?”

“I've come to take you back to Felsdorf,” Brodsky said softly, and walked along beside the litter as the attendant wheeled it toward the emergency entrance, quite as if they had met by appointment. He frowned as he walked.
Had
they met by appointment? His frown changed to a smile. Coincidence? He didn't think so.

What had Wolf said about God?

Chapter 10

It was early November when the cast finally came off and Benjamin Grossman could take his first tentative steps without the use of crutches. His leg had not healed perfectly; the medical staff at the hospital in Konstanz had done their best, but the long delay in reaching them, plus the several handlings he had suffered before getting to the hospital, had splintered the bone and made the doctors' task more difficult. Benjamin Grossman would have a slight limp for the rest of his life, to add to the disfigurement of what he had once been proud to consider one of the handsome faces of the Third Reich.

It was not a pleasant thing to think about, and his weeks of convalescence gave him ample time to think. True, it was better than being in the group assembled at Nuremberg for the Allied trials scheduled to begin quite shortly, but the truth was that far more of those sought by the authorities had escaped than had been caught. Oh, the Russians had hung quite a few of the SS they had captured, but the Americans would hold their show trials, hang some and free most, and that would be that. Hitler had been a fool to commit suicide; six months after Nuremberg, he could probably walk down the Unterderlinden and American soldiers would give him chewing gum and chocolate bars. It was the way they were.

Ben Grossman would sit at the window of his room, staring out into the compound, and think about Switzerland. He had been so close, and then his damnable luck had deserted him once again! Would he not have been better off with the Strasbourg Group and their ODESSA plan? Here he was, crippled, scarred and with a big Jew nose, sitting in a miserable refugee camp six months after the war had ended, and almost a year after he had planned on getting his money and being on his way. And not a pfennig in his pocket. Brodsky, the cheapskate, had asked for the return of his twenty American dollars and he had no choice but to give it back. It wasn't fair! He was no more guilty of war crimes than Bormann, or Eichmann, or Hirt, or Mittendorf, or the Mauer brothers, or Mengele, or—but he could go on all day. They had all escaped and were undoubtedly living the good life somewhere. And where was he?

When his thoughts became this bitter, he would reprove himself. The original plan had
not
been a bad one. And he wasn't dead yet—which was more than could be said for Himmler or even Hitler, or would shortly be able to be said for some of the defendants in Nuremberg. He would get to Switzerland yet, by God! Maybe from Italy …

That was not a bad idea. The Italians were nowhere near as hardnosed as the Swiss, and they didn't care how many refugees made it into Switzerland. The guards on their side of the border were bound to be less rigorous than the German guards; it was the nature of the people. The border was also longer and less populated. It was, obviously, the answer.

Now that he was ready to travel, he was anxious to get going. The first Mossad group, originally scheduled to be led by Max Brodsky, had left some time before under the leadership of Morris Wolf, Brodsky electing to stay with his friend until he could travel. Grossman suspected that Brodsky had stayed mainly to proselytize him on the matter of Palestine, but if so he was wasting his time. If he, Ben Grossman, never saw Switzerland, he would see Palestine a week after
that!

According to Brodsky, the Mossad
bricha
—escape—route lay through Innsbruck and the Brenner Pass on the Austrian-Italian border. From there safe-houses led to Verona, then across to Milano and down through Pavia and Tortona to Genoa. A ship called the
Naomi
was being prepared near there at a small port named Nervi, to take a total of two hundred refugees. Brodsky had memorized the safe-house addresses in case the list was lost, or taken from him in any circumstance, and he was as anxious to leave as Grossman, awaiting only the word from the Mossad.

It came in a way he had not contemplated.

The Mossad man appeared at Felsdorf and called a meeting, stood before those in attendance, and gave them the bad news.

“There is no more room on the
Naomi
,” he said. “As soon as it is ready, it will sail for Palestine. However, we are dickering for a ship near Riccione on the east coast of Italy, on the Adriatic. We think we can come to arrangements with the present owner in one or two weeks. Until our financial arrangements are complete, we suggest you people remain here. We will inform you when it is time to travel and where to go …”

“Not me,” Brodsky said positively as soon as he got back to their quarters. “If worse comes to worse, when we get to Genoa, if the
Naomi
is gone we can cross over to Riccione and wait for that boat.”

“You can,” Grossman said. “Not me. I'll go with you as far as Italy, as far as Milano, but after that I go north. Anyway,” he added, “I thought you said the man said the ship was full?”

“Full, schmul!” Brodsky said shortly. The news had put him in a bad mood. “What's one more person they can't squeeze him on?” He frowned at Grossman. “You really going to try for Switzerland again? You still crazy?”

“I'm going to Switzerland. And this time,” Grossman said ungraciously, “please don't follow me.”

“Don't worry,” Brodsky said, irked by this lack of gratitude. “This time I'm going to Nervi as fast as I can get there. You want to come along, fine. You want to stay here, fine.”