He tried to imagine Adolf Hitler killing himself if faced by some disaster. Not likely rang again in his mind. The first Fuhrer would surely have grabbed some soldier’s Mauser and kept firing at his foes till he finally fell. Suicide was the coward’s way out.
Heinrich Anielewicz-like Drucker’s own Heinrich, named for the Heinrich Jager they’d both admired-was holding his pet beffel. The little animal from Home swiveled one eye turret toward Drucker. It opened its mouth. “Beep!” Pancer said, almost as if it were a squeeze toy. The corners of Drucker’s mouth couldn’t help twitching up a few millimeters. That really was one of the most preposterously friendly sounds he’d ever heard.
Heinrich Anielewicz scratched the beffel between the eye turrets and under the chin. Pancer liked that, and said, “Beep!” again. The boy spoke to it in Polish. Drucker had no idea what he said; he’d never known more than a handful of words in the language, and he’d long since forgotten those. Then Heinrich Anielewicz switched to Yiddish and spoke to him: “If it hadn’t been for Pancer, you know, we might never have been found.”
“Yes, I do know that. I was with your father when he heard him,” Drucker answered. “I didn’t know what the noise was. But he did.”
“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “It was luck, nothing else. But sometimes, when you haven’t got anything else, you’ll take luck.”
“You don’t just take it. If you get it, you grab it with both hands,” Drucker said, the soldier in him speaking. Had Bertha and Miriam Anielewicz not been there, he might have put it more earthily.
“Listen,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “I’ve talked to that male named Gorppet, the one who had Pancer. He knows I’m a Big Ugly”-he used the language of the Race to say that-“the Lizards want to keep happy. I’ve asked him to give you whatever help he can. He’s an intelligence officer, too, so whatever they hear, he can get his hands on it. I hope that does you some good.”
“Thanks.” Drucker nodded. “That’s-damned good of you, all things considered.”
“All things considered.” Anielewicz savored the phrase. “There’s a lot to consider, all right, Herr Oberst. There’s the Reich you fought for. But then there’s your wife and your children. And you got Jager loose from the SS, you tell me, and if you hadn’t done that, Lodz would have gone up in 1944 instead of this spring. Bertha and I would be dead, and the first round of fighting might have gone on and ended up wrecking the whole world. So I didn’t spend a lot of sleepless nights worrying about this one.”
“Thanks,” Drucker said again. That didn’t seem to be enough. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it. Bertha Anielewicz hugged him, which took him by surprise. No woman had done that since… since the last time he’d seen Kathe, before the fighting started up. Too long. God, too long. Roughly, he said, “I’m going into the camp now.”
“Good luck,” they chorused behind him.
He’d seen too many refugee camps by now for this one to hold any surprises. Tents. People in shabby clothes. More shabby clothes hanging out as laundry. The smell of latrines and unwashed bodies. The dull, apathetic look of men and women who didn’t think things would or could ever get better again.
In the middle of the camp, as in the middle of all these camps, stood a tent with a Red Cross flag flying above it. The men and women-they’d be mostly women-in it would be clean. They’d have clean clothes, fresh clothes, clothes they could change. They’d mislike anyone entering their realm who didn’t give them their full due.
As he ducked through the tent flap, he heard rhythmic tapping. Someone in there had a typewriter. It wasn’t a computer, but it was still a sure-fire sign of superiority in the middle of a refugee camp. Several women-sure enough, all of them scrubbed till they gleamed-looked up from whatever important things they were doing to give him the once-over. By their expressions, he didn’t pass muster. They probably took him for one of the people they were there to help.
“Yes?” one of them said. “What is it?” By her tone, it couldn’t possibly have been as urgent as the forms she was filling out. Yes, she must have taken him for an inmate here.
“I am here to look for my family. My wife. My sons. My daughter. Drucker. Katherina-Kathe. Heinrich. Adolf. Claudia.” Drucker stayed polite and businesslike.
“Oh. One of those.” The woman nodded. Now she knew in which pigeonhole he belonged. She pulled out a form from a box on the table behind her and said, “Fill this out. Fill it out very carefully. We will search. If we find them in our records, you will be notified.”
“When will you search? When will I be notified?” Drucker asked. “Why don’t you search now? I’m here now.” By all the signs, she needed reminding of that.
A slow flush darkened her cheeks. It wasn’t embarrassment; it was anger. “We have many important duties to perform here, sir,” she said in a voice like winter on the Russian front. “When we have the opportunity, we shall search the records for you.” That might be twenty years from now. It might, on the other hand, be never. “Please fill out the form.” The form was important. The family it represented? That might matter, but more likely it wouldn’t.
Drucker had seen that attitude before. He had a weapon to combat it. He took from his wallet a telegram and passed the woman the yellow sheet. “Here. I suggest you read this.”
For a moment, he thought she’d try to crumple it instead. He would have prevented that-by force, if necessary. But she did read. And her eyes, the dull blue and white of cheap china, grew bigger and bigger as she read.
“But this is from Flensburg,” she said, and all the other Red Cross women exclaimed when she mentioned the new capital. Even the typist stopped typing. In an awed whisper, the woman went on, “This is from the Fuhrer, from the Fuhrer himself. We are to help this man, he says.”
They all crowded around to examine, and to exclaim over, the special telegraph form with the eagle with the swastika in its claws. After that, Johannes Drucker found things going much more smoothly. Instead of being a client and hence an obvious inferior, he was a man known to the Fuhrer-the Fuhrer himself, Drucker thought sourly-and hence an obvious superior.
“Helga!” the blue-eyed woman barked. “Check the records at once for the Herr Oberstleutnant. Drucker. Kathe. Heinrich. Adolf. Claudia. At once!” Drucker’s eyebrows rose. She’d been listening. She just hadn’t wanted to do anything about it. To him, that made things worse, not better-lazy, sour bitch.
Helga said, “Jawohl!” and went for the file boxes at the run-so fast that a lock of her blond hair escaped the pins with which she imprisoned it. She grabbed the right one without even looking and riffled through the forms in it. Then, on the off chance something had gone wrong, she went through the boxes to either side. Having done that, she looked up at Drucker and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we have here no record of them.” Since he was known to the Fuhrer, she actually sounded sorry, not bored as she might well have otherwise.
It wasn’t as if Drucker hadn’t heard it before, too many times. Lately, though, he’d added a new string to his bow. “See if you have anyone who was living on Pfordtenstrasse in Greifswald.” Maybe a neighbor would know something. Maybe.
“Helga!” the woman holding the telegram thundered again. While Helga went to a different set of file boxes, Drucker got the precious sheet of yellow paper back. He’d need it to overawe people somewhere else.
Sorting through those boxes took longer. After fifteen minutes or so, Helga looked up. “I have an Andreas Bauriedl, at 27 Pfordtenstrasse.”