Remo looked into the rear-view mirror. He saw Zhava's eyes. Empty eyes. Empty of tears, empty of hurt, empty of ghosts. They were the eyes of a professional. No expectations, no dreams, no hopes. They were his own eyes.
"You needn't worry about the bombs," Remo said, trying to reassure her. "They're secure."
"What do you Americans know?" Zhava suddenly flared. "You have a war every twenty years, you fight it on someone else's soil, and then you sit in your easy chairs, and talk about how terrible it was. But war is our way of life. Not just existence. Life. Survival. We are outnumbered three to one, the battles are fought here, on our land, and it is our brothers who are dying. I would kill everyone if it would just end."
Zhava's barely controlled voice rattled into silence. Her eyes drooped and her face grew relaxed. Her speech had been passionate but without any real passion. Passion had been squeezed from her by reality.
Chiun turned to her. "You are upset. Lie back and sleep now."
She did so without complaint. Chiun lay his thin, yellow hands across her brow, "Sleep now. Remember, no paradise in the east, nor in the west. Seek the way you have come. It is within you."
Remo drove along the flat countryside, imagining all the unseen death around him. He drove through high peaks of the North Negev. He drove by moonlike craters in the rocks. He drove past signs saying Hamekesh-Hagodol-The Big Crater. He passed the huge chasm that shone pink, purple, and yellow in the moonlight. Remo's foot pushed down on the accelerator.
"You drive like you jump," said Chiun. "Badly."
"She asleep?" asked Remo.
"I have spent the last ten minutes keeping her awake?"
Remo drove on for a while, thinking about Zhava's last statement. "I would kill everyone if it would just end." He decided not to let her out of his sight. He turned back to Chiun.
"Quite a woman," he said, motioning to Zhava's sleeping form.
"A wise young lady," said Chiun. "I too would be upset if I had killed someone with a gun."
CHAPTER NINE
It was not easy. It was never easy, and it took a long time. But the man knew that soon it would be over and like everything else, all good things were worth waiting for. And working for, and planning for, and suffering for, and killing for.
The thin man of medium height stepped out of the bathroom, naked, after carefully wiping off the toilet and washing his hands. As he walked toward the closet, he dried his hands and his thick wrists. The man stopped before his full-length mirror.
Not bad, he thought. His whole body looked younger than his years. The face lift had done wonders, raising his cheekbones and smoothing out the cruel lines around his brown eyes and thin mouth. Yes, and exercise had kept his body trim, his legs and arms strong, and his carriage and posture correct. As was befitting the man who used to be Major Horst Vessel of the Nazi S.S.
The man who used to be Horst Vessel dressed, thinking about all the good old times in the Fatherland. Germany had key, high-ranking positions for the clever, the educated, the subtle. His present position with the Israeli government proved that. Experience and expertise were always admired, even in the ranks of the heathen. Of course, they had no idea of who he really was and what he used to be.
The man who had been the youngest Nazi officer in a position of power during World War II checked his fully attired appearance.
The next to last thing he did before leaving the room was to drape the Chai on a chain around his neck. The last thing he did was spit on the Hebrew symbol of life.
The thin man with the thick wrists drove his jeep just south of Tel Aviv to a small town named Rehovat. There he found a large, flat, gray building and pulled into the parking lot. He got out of his jeep and went inside.
The man strode down the tiled cellar hallway in disgust. Sweat poured across his proud, straight body. He remembered marching down halls of marble and silk, cool in the German autumn of 1943. He was going to meet, for the first time, the savior of Germany. He was making his first of many visits to the greatest man, the most brilliant tactician, the finest leader the world had ever seen.
It was for that leader that he now slid his Israeli military boots across the unwaxed tile. His neatly groomed head passed just inches below the dull acoustical tile. The drab cinder blocks that were the walls only made the man who had been Horst Vessel long all the more for the glorious paintings, the lush carpets, and the ornate balustrading that he had gloried in during his youth. They had befitted only the greatest.
The man who had been Horst Vessel thought that the environment always befitted the race. No wonder the Jews lived in the desert. He stopped thinking about the past as he moved by sets of closed wooden doors. He smiled as he heard young voices coming through the cracks in the wall and underneath the doors. Scum. Laugh while you may.
The man who had been Horst Vessel thought about the future. Of a world in black decay. Of nations of chaos. Of the ground under his feet replaced with twisted radioactive waste, and he wanted to laugh in happiness.
He found the room he had been looking for all the way down on the right. The man who had been Horst Vessel opened the door and entered. He stood in a long room filled with lab tables upon which were shelves of chemistry equipment. Each table had a sink on each end and these shelves, which stretched across the table's middle.
At the table farthest from where he stood was another man with his head in one of those sinks.
The man who used to be Fritz Barber was throwing up his guts. All that could be seen of him at the moment was his dirty, flecked lab jacket and his two hands dotted with age gripping the sides of the sink.
The man who had been Horst Vessel clicked his heels loudly in the empty room. The man who had been Fritz Barber continued puking. Lining the tables were surgical instruments: a sharp scalpel, a few rubber gloves, and a metal probe. Beside these operating materials were trays in which seemed to be remnants of a fetal pig.
"I cannot stand it," said the man who used to be Fritz Barber, as he pulled himself out of the sink and sat heavily on the floor. He was a fat, balding man, whose front was spotted with yesterday's dinner. A few, small, liquid green specks littered his chin.
"Are we being listened to?" asked the man who had been Horst Vessel in Hebrew.
"No, no, of course not," said the fat man on the floor whose teacher identification tag read "Dr. Moishe Gavan."
"Then speak German!" the thin man spat harshly, "and rise when a superior officer enters the room!"
"Yes, oh, yes," wheezed the fat man, rising awkwardly to his feet and turning green. He was short and had white hair, not at all like the Fritz Barber of thirty years ago. But now he was Dr. Moishe Gavan, a biology teacher at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Now he taught Jews how to take apart fetal pigs and which disease would cause you to smother in your own waste products and how to tell girls from boys. Times had changed.
"Heil Hitler," the fat man said softly, saluting.
"Heil Hitler," was the crisp reply. "What is all this?"
"Dissections," the fat man smiled weakly, "I am not cut out for this kind of work. I was a physicist in the Fatherland. What do I know of earthworms and crayfish, and frogs and…" He began to grow green again.
"You will do as you are told," the thin man said, coming forward, "I have no time for your minor complaints. Do you have it?"
The fat man straightened as best he could and nodded. He still just barely reached the thin man's shoulders. "Yes, of course. That is why I am here. I was supposed to clean up my students' work, but…" The fat man became purple.