The garage was small and empty except for the car. Gebhart nodded toward a door that led into the house.
“Go through there,” he said. “Viel Gluck. I will not see you again.”
He held out his hand and they shook..
“Thanks, Werner. Viel Gluck to you too.”
He entered the house and went up a short flight of stairs and through the sparsely furnished kitchen to the living room. Wolffson was alone there sitting on a large packing crate. There was no furniture except for a single floor lamp with a fringed shade. An ashtray filled with butts sat beside him.
“Welcome, Herr Keegan. Pick a box and sit down.”
“Moving in or out?”
“In, actually. We travel light, Ire. Sometimes we have to leave everything behind. So, we have to kill some time. We will be here awhile.”
“Mind telling me what’s going on?”
“We have an excellent contact at SS headquarters. Early this morning, Vierhaus ordered your arrest. Specifically you are charged with espionage.”
“Ludicrous.”
“But true. And if they catch you, you are a dead man either way.”
“The whole thing is insane. It doesn’t even make good sense.”
“That is right, it is insane. But it makes sense to them.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“We will leave at dark, drive to Munich. We know back roads where there is little traffic. It takes longer but we will be there before dawn. There will be three of us. You, me, and Joachim.”
“Do I have any say in the matter?”
“What is your choice, ire? Go to the American embassy? No way to get our once you are in, you could spend eternity there. If you remain in Berlin they will most certainly catch you and after your skirmish with the Gestapo they will most certainly kill you. Or go with us. We will have you out of Germany in forty- eight hours.”
“Why Munich?”
“We have a strong organization in Munich and we need to spend the day there. Much safer to travel at night and it will take us two nights to get to the Swiss border.”
so we’re going into Switzerland, then?”
“Yes. We have good friends there and we know the safe places to cross. If everything goes well, you will be a free man by day after tomorrow.”
Keegan lit a cigarette and thought about the alternatives. Of course, Wolffson was right. Nothing could be gained by staying in Berlin.
“I keep thinking once I’m out of Germany I lose any hope of helping Jenny,” he said finally.
“If she can be helped, I promise you we will do everything in our power to get her out,” Wolffson said.
“How about escape?”
“Virtually impossible. We have tried three breakouts. All failed. Twelve people died.”
Wolffson ground out a cigarette and Went to the window, peering through the drapes and checking the street.
What a way to live, thought Keegan. Constantly on the run, never trusting anyone, knowing if you are caught some blond moron will cut off your head in the basement of Landsberg prison.
Finally Wolffson turned back to Keegan.
“What will you do when you get back to America?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Keegan answered. “This has all happened so fast. I suppose try to wake people up to what’s really happening. Maybe try to raise money for you. Try to do something to help.”
“And what will you tell them they do not know already? People hear what they want to hear, Ire. And right now they do not want their conscience challenged. Much easier to ignore it.”
“I have influential friends, Avrum. I may be able to do something.”
“Politicians?” Wolffson shook his heal. “They will not help you. They lean with the people and the people do not want to hear about our troubles. They have their own problems. Believe me, I know.”
Wolffson stretched out on the floor with his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Several minutes passed in silence.
“There is only one way to impress anyone with the horror that already exists here,” Wolffson said finally.
“What’s that?” Keegan asked.
“See it yourself,” Wolffson said. “Nobody can deny what you have seen with your own eyes.”
Then he closed his eyes.
“We talk later. I need some sleep, it is a long drive.”
Keegan sat against the wall with his knees pulled up and his chin resting on his arms. Here and there, streaks of light sneaked through the heavy drapes. In a minute or too Wolffson’s breathing grew deeper, more rhythmic, and he was asleep. Keegan watched as the shadows in the room grew longer. Finally he too dozed off.
They were a hundred yards away, hidden in the thick trees and heavy brush of the woods that hid the treacherous stockade from the main road. An area one hundred yards wide had been cleared of all foliage around the entire perimeter of the camp. Signs warned that this barren stretch was mined. A single-lane road led through the trees to the gate and beyond it, railroad tracks glistened in the morning sunlight, the tracks worn shiny from use.
The lenses of the binoculars swept slowly across the terrain, picking up first the gate, then the wire and finally the camp itself. It was a forlorn and desolate place, bleak, disheartening, oppressive; a place of long, drab wooden barracks painted gray, a place barren of foliage except for a failed attempt at a garden between two of the barracks, a sorrowful row of twisted, dead plants that hung from stakes or lay on the hard, brown earth. The earth itself was baked rock hard by the sun, earth so poor layers of it were churned to dust and swirled away by the slightest wisp of wind. The buildings were coated with the dead earth.
Then there was the wire.
Four rows of barbed wire three feet apart, humming with deadly electricity, followed by a ditch and a twelve-foot link fence, which was also electrified. Dogs snarled at the end of short leashes. Powerful searchlights were mounted on tall poles scattered about the sprawling enclosure. Gun towers loomed ominously at the corners of the compound.
As Keegan scanned the enclosure with the binoculars, he stopped suddenly. An old man in striped prison clothes dangled on his back across the inner wire; his arms, stiff in death, were outstretched. One foot barely touched the ground. His flesh was gray and had begun to rot. His white hair fluttered in the breeze.
Flies swarmed hungrily around the corpse. Fifty feet away, an elderly woman with a handkerchief pressed over her nose and mouth numbly watched the flies at work.
“Good God,” Keegan breathed.
“His name was Rosenberg. A banker from Linz. He was fifty-eight years old. That is his wife looking at him. His only crime was that he was a Jew. They took his money, his property, destroyed his family and then put them in the camp. They broke that gentle old man and he finally jumped on wire and ended it all. So they leave him there until he literally rots away. A warning to others.”
Keegan lowered the glasses and took several deep breaths.
“You wanted to see Dachau and I wanted you to see it, Keegan,” Wolffson whispered. “Now you can believe, now you can convince others that this is not just a foul rumor.”
“Oh, it’s foul all right,” Keegan groaned. “Foul beyond comprehension.”