Questioningly, Döring looked at him.
“It’s a golden opportunity, really,” Reichmeider pointed out, “and he’ll only come at you another night if you don’t. It’s quite simple; you walk down there, they attack”—he glanced down at Döring’s coat and smiled skew-eyed at him—“and you let them have it. I’ll be a few steps behind, to serve as your witness, and in the unlikely event that they give you any real trouble”—he leaned close and pulled his lapel out to show a holstered gun-butt—“I’ll take care of them and you’ll be my witness. Either way you’ll be rid of him, and the most you’ll have to pay is getting hit with a stick once or twice.”
Döring stared at Reichmeider. He put his hand to his coat, pressed the hardness within. “My God,” he said wonderingly, “to actually use this thing!”
Reichmeider unwrapped the handkerchief from his hand and blew at a bloody scrape on the back of it. “It’ll give that wife of yours something to think about,” he remarked.
“My God,” Döring exulted, “I hadn’t even thought of that! She’ll faint at my feet! ‘Oh say, Klara, do you remember Wilhelm Springer, Erich’s clarinet teacher? He jumped me in the street tonight—I can’t imagine why—and I killed him.’” He clutched his cheeks delightedly and whistled. “My God, it’ll kill her too!”
“Come on, let’s do it!” Reichmeider urged. “Before they lose their nerve and run away!”
They hurried down Kirchengasse’s dark decline. Bright headlights swept up and raced past them.
“Who says there’s no justice, eh?”
“‘Fat prick’? Oh, you shitty little faggot, I’m going to get you right through the heart!”
They crossed deserted Lindenstrasse; walked slowly now and quietly, close against shuttered storefronts. And came to four stories of stonework building, dark and broken-topped against moonlit sky, footed at front and side with rough-built passages of lumber and painted doors. Reichmeider drew Döring into the side passage’s blackness. “You stay here,” he whispered; “I’ll go through and make sure he didn’t have ten others joining them.”
“Yes, you’d better!” Döring got out the gun.
“I know the way now and I have a penlight; I won’t be long. Stay right here.”
“Don’t let them see you!”
Away already, Reichmeider whispered, “Don’t worry.” The passage appeared, plank-roofed and door-walled in bobbing dim light. Reichmeider’s tall thin silhouette strode into it, and turned to the inner wall and was gone, leaving blackness.
Alert and excited—and needing to pee—Döring held the wonderfully weighty Mauser, so many years carried and now to be used! He brought it closer to the passage’s opening and inspected it in faint light from Lindenstrasse; caressed a hand along its smooth barrel, carefully pushed its safety catch down into the ready position.
He moved back against the wall where Reichmeider had put him. What a friend! What a real man! He would take him to dinner tomorrow night, at the Kaiserhof. And buy him something too, something gold. Cuff links maybe.
He stood in the now-growing-visible passage with the gun big in his hand; thought about shooting its death-bullets into Wilhelm Springer.
And—after police business—going home and telling Klara. Die, bitch.
There would even be stories in the papers! Retired Transport Commission Administrator Slays Attackers. A picture of him too. Television interviews?
He really had to pee. The beer. He pushed the safety catch back up and returned the gun to its neatly receiving holster. He turned to the wall, unzipped his fly, drew himself out; spread his feet wide and let go. What relief!
“Are you there, Döring?” Reichmeider called softly from above.
“Yes!” he answered, looking up at planks. “What are you doing up there?”
“It’s easier to get across on this level. There’s all kinds of crap down below. I’ll be with you in a minute. Stay there. The light’s gone out and I won’t be able to find you if you move around.”
“Did you see them?”
No answer. He peed on, looking at a crack between pale doors. Would Reichmeider be able to get down all right without the light? And had he seen Springer and the other, or was he still on the way? Hurry, Reichmeider!
A pattering above; he looked up again. Gravel or something falling on the planks. They burst in at him with thunder behind them; and wondering, hurting, he died quickly.
The last time he had spoken at Heidelberg—in 1970, that was—the auditorium had been a splendid old cathedral of blackened oak, crowded even beyond its thousand-seat capacity. This time it was a new sand-colored oyster shell for five hundred, very modern and well designed, with the last two rows empty. The speaking was much easier, of course, like talking in someone’s large living room. Real eye-to-eye contact with all these bright young kids. But still…
Well. It was going along nicely, as it had every night so far. German audiences, young ones, were always the best; really caring, attending, concerned about the past. They made him be his best, finding genuine feeling again where American and English audiences, less involved, allowed him to lapse into mechanical delivery of memorized lines. Speaking German made a difference too, of course—the freedom to use natural words rather than cope with “was” and “were” (and “dejected” and “ejected” are you getting the clippings for me, Sydney?).
He snapped himself back into it. “In the beginning I only wanted vengeance,” he told an intently watching young woman in the second row. “Vengeance for the deaths of my parents and sisters, vengeance for my own years in the concentration camps”—he spoke to the farther rows—“vengeance for all the deaths, for everyone’s years. Why had I been spared if not to exact vengeance?” He waited. “Vienna certainly didn’t need another composer.” The usual small uplift of relieved laughter came; he smiled with it and chose a brown-haired young man on the far right (he looked a little like Barry Koehler). “But the trouble with vengeance,” he told him, trying not to think about Barry, “is that, one, you can’t get it, not really”—he looked away from the Barry-like young man, to the whole audience—“and two, even if you could, would it be of much use?” He shook his head. “No. So now I want something better than vengeance, and something almost as hard to get.” He told it to the young woman in the second row: “I want remembrance.” He told it to all of them: “Remembrance. It’s hard to get because life goes on; every year we have new horrors—a Vietnam, terrorist activities in the Middle East and Ireland, assassinations”—(ninety-four sixty-five-year-old men?)—“and every year,” he drove himself on, “the horror of horrors, the Holocaust, becomes farther away, a little less horrible. But philosophers have warned us: if we forget the past, we are doomed to repeat it. And that is why it’s important to capture an Eichmann and a Mengele; so that they can—” He heard what he had said, was lost. “A Stangl, I mean,” he fumbled. “Excuse me, I was indulging in some wishful thinking there.”
They laughed a little, but it was no good, it had broken the build; he tried to restore it: “And that’s why it’s important to capture an Eichmann and a Stangl,” he said. “So that they can be made to stand trial—not necessarily to convict them, no—but so that witnesses can be brought forward, to remind the world, and especially to remind you, who weren’t even born yet when these things happened, that men no different on the outside from you and me can commit under certain circumstances the most barbarous and inhuman atrocities. So that you”—he pointed—“and you—and you—and you—will take care to see that those circumstances shall never again be permitted to arise.”