“Don’t be foolish, American.”
“I think you’re all bluff. You didn’t bring me here to waltz, you brought me here because you want something. Now why don’t you just get to it and stop waving that piece around.”
“Don’t make light of the .
“Hey, why the hell am I here?” Keegan demanded. He moved forward until the muzzle of the pistol was touching his forehead. “There, you can’t miss. Now, either you pull that trigger or tell me what the hell you want. I told you I don’t know anything about Vierhaus. And how do you know about my relationship with Jenny. . . and what the hell business is it of yours anyway?”
The bearded man stared at him for several seconds. He reached out and lowered the arm of the man with the gun.
“My name is Avrum Wolffson,” he said finally. “Jenny is my half-sister.”
“Your sister!” Keegan said with shock. He stared at Wolffson for several seconds, then said, “Well, she ought to get after you for playing with guns.”
“Do you make a joke of everything?”
“Why not? Life’s a joke. And the older you get the funnier it gets. Look, I came over here to get my fiancée and take her back to Paris. I get here, her apartment is a mess. She’s gone. I get a face full of chloroform, I wake up in a warehouse someplace with hot lights and guns in my face and you guys giving me the third degree, now you tell me you’re her brother? What the hell is going on?”
“I had to make sure you were not connected with Vierhaus.”
“Why? Because of Jenny? Is this some kind of bizarre family tradition, to try and scare the hell out of her suitors? I’m in love with your sister. I’ve asked her to marry me. I mean, why would I do such a thing?”
“I don’t know, but you and I were the only ones who knew where she lived. Somebody got to her place and she’s gone. And I didn’t tell anybody, so that leaves you.”
Keegan was getting angrier but he controlled himself.
“I didn’t tell a soul,” he said.
The big question now was, why was anybody after Jenny? Why?
“Why do they want her?” Keegan asked.
“You really do not know, eh?”
“If I knew would I ask you?”
“Perhaps. If you were trying to convince us you are not involved.”
“You’re very paranoid.”
“Yes, it keeps us alive.”
Wolffson lit another cigarette. He held the tip of it up and blew a stream of smoke across the end of the cigarette, watching it glow, giving himself more time to make his decision.
“Come on, Wolffson, why would the Gestapo be dogging me?”
“The light is on her. She is the target.”
“What do you mean, the target?”
“I mean the Gestapo is onto her. She has been betrayed and we think your friend Vierhaus is the one who is after her.”
“Betrayed? By who? And for what?”
“Some miserable Judenopferer turned her up.”
“A what?”
“A Judenopferer is a Jew who hunts other Jews. The word literally means ‘Jew sacrificer.’ They spend hours going over court records, looking for the most remote Jewish connection, they listen to rumors, infiltrate families
“You still haven’t told me why.”
“To get to me.”
Keegan sighed. “Okay, I’ll play. Why do they want you?”
“Have you ever heard of an organization called the Black Lily?”
“No . . . Wait a minute. I did hear that expression once. At the American embassy.”
“The night you refused to help Reinhardt?”
Keegan did not answer for a long time. He felt his pockets for his cigarettes and matches and lit a cigarette and then slowly started to nod.
“That’s right,” he said. “The night I turned my back on Reinhardt.” He rubbed his eyes. “Look, Wolffson, I know a lot of things now I didn’t know then. But I don’t know what the Black Lily is. And can we do without the hot lights? I’m getting a headache.”
Wolffson turned around and made a motion with his hand. The heavy light went out and a small table lamp was turned on in its place. A third man was sitting at a table nearby. The room appeared to be a one-room flat. It was small and contained a bed and dresser, a table and two chairs, a stuffed easy chair and a floor lamp. Black cloth was taped over the windows. In a corner there was a small table that held a hot plate with a coffee pot simmering on it.
The man at the table was unarmed and his nose was flattened and bruised. He was clean shaven, had a conventional haircut and wore wire-rimmed glasses. The shorter man with the gun had a bandage taped to his jaw, which was badly bruised and swollen. He was burly, his muscular arms straining rolled-up sleeves, and had fierce, angry eyes, the demeanor of a man holding himself in check but about to explode. A thick black beard added to his ominous presence. The tall man’s left eye had begun to swell. He, too, was in excellent physical condition but his look was intense rather than mad and his beard was more scholarly than menacing. He was calm and totally in command.
None of them could have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six years old.
Well, thought Keegan, looking at the bandages and bruises, I got in a few licks anyway.
“One gun?” he said. “You have one lousy gun?”
“We are on the run, have been for months. But it is now more intense. You know what it means in German, Freiheit?”
Keegan thought for a moment. He wasn’t familiar with it. He shook his head.
“It would be in English something like ... freedom. We don’t blow things up. We don’t kill people. We distribute pamphlets and try to help people who are in trouble with the government. Jews, Germans, gypsies, no matter. If they become targets and we know about it, we try to get them out of the country.”
“In America, back in the slave days, we called it the Underground Railroad.”
“Ja, to help Negroes escape to Philadelphia.”
Keegan chuckled. “Right,” he said. “So what got them so hot on you all of a sudden?”
“We also keep the German people informed of what is really going on here, so they can never say they did not know what was happening. They can never lie about it, they will have to say, ‘Yes, we knew and we turned away our eyes.’ That is what The Berlin Conscience is for. Anyway, a man died a few days ago. A Jew named Herman Adler. He was a Judenopferer. He was also Joachim Weber’s uncle.” He nodded toward the young man at the table.
“Your uncle turned other Jews in to the SS?”
Joachim nodded and looked down at the table. “He betrayed me and Avrum,” he said, and nodded toward the young man with the gun, the silent one. “And Werner Gebhart there.”
“My God.”
“Adler was one of the best they had,” said Wolffson. “He was responsible for the arrest of dozens of people. Jews, Gentiles, Gypsies. We tried to reason with Herman, offered to get him out of the country. But he was arrogant about it. There was some yelling, some anger, and then he had a heart attack. Just like that he was dead. We felt sorry for Herman. He was scared. He was doing the only thing he could do to stay alive.”
“He betrayed too many of us,” Joachim, the nephew, said bitterly. “Our grief over him was brief.”
“Then the thought occurred to me that perhaps we could make an example of him, a lesson to other hunters,” said Wolffson. “So we wrote a story about what he—and the other Judenopferers are doing. I realize now it was a stupid thing to do. It merely goaded the wolf. The Gestapo has become obsessed with destroying the Black Lily ever since.”