“Remember to call me Jan,” Andrei said.
Styka nodded and sniffed and blew his nose vociferously. “When that woman found me and told me that you needed me I was never so happy since before the war.”
“I’m lucky that you were still living in Lublin.”
Styka grumbled about fate. “For a time I thought of trying to reach the Free Polish Forces, but one thing led to another. I got a girl in trouble and we had to get married. Not a bad girl. So we have three children and responsibilities. I work at the granary. Nothing like the old days in the army, but I get by. Who complains? Many times I tried to reach you, but I never knew how. I came to Warsaw twice, but there was that damned ghetto wall ...”
“I understand.”
Styka blew his nose again.
“Were you able to make the arrangements?” Andrei asked.
“There is a man named Grabski who is the foreman in charge of the bricklayers at Majdanek. I did exactly as instructed. I told him you are on orders from the Home Army to get inside Majdanek so you can make a report to the government in exile in London.”
“His answer?”
“Ten thousand zlotys.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“He is aware he will not live for twenty-four hours if he betrays you.”
“Good man, Styka.”
“Captain ... Jan ... must you go inside Majdanek? The stories ... everyone really knows what is happening there.”
“Not everyone, Styka.”
“What good will it really do?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps ... perhaps ... there is a shred of conscience left in the human race. Perhaps if they know the story there will be a massive cry of indignation.”
“Do you really believe that, Jan?”
“I have to believe it.”
Styka shook his head slowly. “I am only a simple soldier. I cannot think things out too well. Until I was transferred into the Seventh Ulanys I was like every other Pole in my feeling about Jews. I hated you when I first came in. But ... my captain might have been a Jew, but he wasn’t a Jew. What I mean is, he was a Pole and the greatest soldier in the Ulanys. Hell, sir. The men of our company had a dozen fights defending your name. You never knew about it, but by God, we taught them respect for Captain Androfski.”
Andrei smiled.
“Since the war I have seen the way the Germans have behaved and I think, Holy Mother, we have behaved like this for hundreds of years. Why?”
“How can you tell an insane man to reason or a blind man to see?”
“But we are neither blind nor insane. The men of your company would not allow your name dishonored. Why do we let the Germans do this?”
“I have sat many hours with this, Styka. All I ever wanted was to be a free man in my own country. I’ve lost faith, Styka. I used to love this country and believe that someday we’d win our battle for equality. But now I think I hate it very much.”
“And do you really think that the world outside Poland will care any more than we do?”
The question frightened Andrei.
“Please don’t go inside Majdanek.”
“I’m still a soldier in a very small way, Styka.”
It was an answer that Styka understood.
Grabski’s shanty was beyond the bridge over the River Bystrzyca near the rail center. Grabski sat in a sweat-saturated undershirt, cursing the excessive heat which clamped an uneasy stillness before sundown. He was a square brick of a man with a moon-round face and sunken Polish features. Flies swarmed around the bowl of lentils in which he mopped thick black bread. Half of it dripped down his chin. He washed it down with beer and produced a deep-seated belch.
“Well?” Andrei demanded.
Grabski looked at the pair of them. He grunted a sort of “yes” answer. “My cousin works at the Labor Bureau. He can make you work papers. It will take a few days. I will get you inside the guard camp as a member of my crew. I don’t know if I can get you into the inner camp. Maybe yes, maybe no, but you can observe everything from the roof of a barrack we are building.”
Grabski slurped his way to the bottom of the soup bowl. “Can’t understand why the hell anyone wants to go inside that son-of-a-bitch place.”
“Orders from the Home Army.”
“Why? Nothing there but Jews.”
Andrei shrugged. “We get strange orders.”
“Well—what about the money?”
Andrei peeled off five one-thousand-zloty notes. Grabski had never seen so much money. His broad flat fingers, petrified into massive sausages by years of bricklaying, snatched the bills clumsily. “This ain’t enough.”
“You’ll get the rest when I’m safely out of Majdanek.”
“I ain’t taking no goddamned chances for no Jew business.”
Andrei and Styka were silent Grabski looked from one to the other, snarling, bullying. He quickly realized that the men before him were as large and tough as the Death’s-Head Corps. He knew, too, Styka would kill him. Grabski grunted, cursed, and shoved the money into his pants pocket. “Be here in the morning at six. We’ll get started on the work pass.”
A sudden northeast breeze blew the sack curtains into the room, bringing in a terrible stench, nauseating the men. Grabski shoved away from the table and slammed the window shut. “Every time the wind blows we get that smell from Majdanek.”
Andrei and Styka stood behind Grabski. Styka pointed to the skyline a few kilometers away where grayish smoke fizzled from a tall chimney.
“That’s it,” Styka said, “Majdanek.”
“Only way the Jews leave that camp is through the chimney,” Grabski said. Amused at discovering himself a humorist, he broke into a fit of laughter.
Chapter Eight
HORST VON EPP WAITED with an infinite, knowing patience for Christopher de Monti to unravel after he had made his visit to the ghetto. Horst played it like a puppet master, confident that Chris was sinking closer to that point where he would be abandoned by the ever-shrinking voices of morality within him. As the weeks and months went, Horst saw his calculations coming to pass.
Chris drank hard these days, and women he had once resisted with bored ease were now constant bedmates. He became a perpetual guest at the perpetual parties he once shunned. As the heaviness inside him compounded, that point of no return would soon be reached. A week, a month, two, it did not matter to Horst, for Chris’s downfall had become inevitable in his calculation. One day he would come to Horst and babble a plea for the life of the unknown Jewess inside the ghetto, and the piper would be paid.
Dr. Franz Koenig’s parties were uninhibited affairs that generals recalled with affection during the long cold winter nights on the Russian front. Koenig kept an international flavor, spicing the invitations to include the diplomatic corps, the press, and the stars of the moment, as well as the top Nazis. Nothing was spared by Koenig in the pursuit of gluttony and revelry. In addition to Warsaw’s courtesans, Koenig continually imported new, young, slim, high-cheekboned blondes from Berlin, playing the role of a degenerated industrialist with great finesse.
Dr. Koenig premiered the newly remodeled ballroom as the first large midsummer event of 1942. It had been redecorated in unabashed elegance. Amid tinkling glasses, bowing, kissing of hands, rumors ran rampant and deals and bribes and barter were made. Much of the talk was about the new depth of the German armed penetrations. El Alamein in North Africa stood before Rommel’s magnificent Afrika Korps, and on the Russian front the Don River had been reached. The Japanese guests had an air of cocksure confidence. The Americans had not recovered from the devastation of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese General Staff was positive America had no stomach to make the sacrifice necessary to displace them from the Pacific islands. It was a night for Axis gaiety. America had come into the war with too little, too late. The glitter of Dr. Franz Koenig’s new ballroom made the participants so heady, there was even talk of a German breakthrough to India, which had been the long-forbidden dream of a dozen empires in a dozen ages.