The dawn was a shock after the close apartment—cold air, dark blue sky, shattered red cloud in streaks that curved to the horizon. He took a moment to get his bearings, smelled cigarette smoke nearby, then knelt behind a plaster wall at the foot of a chimney. Somebody was up here with him, possibly a German policeman. He held the 9 mm in his right hand, pressed the fingertips of his left hand against the tar surface of the roof. He could feel somebody pacing: one, two, three, four, five. Pause. Then back again. Everything de Milja knew suggested a police guard on the roof—the raid, the document control at the front door. Germans were thorough, this was the sort of thing they did. He wanted to see for himself, but resisted the temptation to rise up and look around—the roof was cluttered; sheets hung on clotheslines, chimneys, ventilation pipe outlets, two tarpaper-roofed housings that covered the entries to staircases.
A few feet away, across a low parapet and above a narrow alley, was a fire escape on the sixth floor of the building next door. From there, he had several choices: climb in an apartment window, descend to the alley, or go up to the roof, which abutted two neighboring buildings, one of them a factory with heavy truck traffic in and out. All he had to do was jump the space above the alley.
Down in the street, a tramcar arrived, ringing its bell, grinding to a stop, then starting up again. He heard the clop of hoofbeats—perhaps the wagon that delivered coal—and the high/low siren of German police wagons as they sped through the city streets. The air smelled of coal smoke and onions frying in fat, and he could see the morning star, still sharp, but fading in the gathering daylight. He heard the rasp of a window forced up, he heard a woman laugh—shrill, abandoned, it was so funny she didn’t care how she sounded.
Turning his head, he saw a woman appear at an open window in an adjacent building. Her apartment was one story above the roof, so he found himself looking up at her. She wore an old print dress with the sleeves rolled up, an apron, and a kerchief with the knot tied in the middle of her forehead. Her face was determined—here it was just after dawn and she was cleaning her house. She poked a dustmop out the window and gave it a good bang against the sill, then another, just so it remembered who was boss.
When she saw de Milja, she stared as though he were an animal in a zoo. Of course, he thought. What she sees is a man with an automatic pistol in his hand, kneeling behind the base of a chimney. Hiding behind the base of a chimney. Hmm. Probably a criminal. But he’s not alone on the roof. From where she stood—she gave the mop a desultory rap just to keep up appearances—she could see another man. This man was pacing, and smoking a cigarette. Perhaps, if God wills, de Milja thought, he’s wearing a uniform, or if he’s in civilian clothes maybe he has on one of those stupid little hats with alpine brushes the Germans liked.
De Milja watched the woman, she stared back shamelessly, then looked away, probably at the pacing man. Then back at him. He sensed a motion behind her, and she was briefly distracted. She almost, he felt, turned away from the window and went back to cleaning the apartment—somebody in the room had told her to do that. Yes, de Milja thought, that was it. She turned her head and said something, something dismissive and sharp, then returned to watching the men on the roof below her. She had broad shoulders and big red hands— nobody told her what to do. De Milja now faced her directly and spread his arms, palms up in the universal interrogatory gesture: what’s going on?
She didn’t react. She wasn’t going to help a thief—her expression was suspicious and hostile. But then, a moment later, she changed her mind. She held out a hand, fingers stiff: stop. De Milja put his hand back on the surface of the roof, three, four, five. Pause. The woman held her signal. Then, just as a new sequence of footsteps began, she beckoned abruptly, excitedly: yes, it’s all right now, he can’t see you. Three, four, five. Pause. No, stop, he’s facing your way. Three, four, five. Pause. Yes, it’s . . .
De Milja leaped up and ran for his life.
He almost got away with it.
But if he could feel the policeman pacing on the roof, the man could feel it when he ran. “Halt!”
As de Milja reached the parapet he could see the woman’s face with perfect clarity: her mouth rounded into an O, her hand came up and pressed the side of her face. She was horrified at what was about to happen. The first shot snapped the air next to his ear just as his foot hit the parapet. It was a long way across. Seven floors down, broken glass in the alley glittered up at him. And the parapet was capped with curved, slippery, ceramic tile. It was a bad jump, one foot slipped as he took off. He flailed at the empty air, and he almost cleared the railing, but then his left heel caught and that spilled him forward, his head hitting the iron floor of the fire escape as something pinged in the stairway above him and somebody shouted.
He had not felt the bullet, but he was on his knees, vision swimming, a rock in his chest that blocked his air. He went away. Came back. Looked down at a windowsill, worn and weathered gray. A big drop of blood fell on it, then another. His heart raced, he clawed at the iron fretwork, somehow stood up. The world spun around him; whistles, shouts—a brick exploded and he turned away from it. Saw the ladder to the floor below, made himself half slide, half tumble to the iron platform.
His escape—from everything, forever—was six stories down into the alley and he knew it, he just had to get one leg over the railing and then the other and then the terrors of Szucha Avenue no longer existed. Hide under the ground, they will never touch you. He was going to do it—then he didn’t. Instead, the window on the fire escape exploded into somebody’s kitchen—glass, blood, and de Milja all showing up for breakfast.
A family around a table; a still life, a spoon frozen in air between bowl and mouth, a woman at a stove, a man in suspenders. Then he was in a parlor; a canary tweeted, in a mirror above a buffet a man with bright blood spattered on his face. He fumbled at the family’s locks, somehow worked the right bolt the right way, the door opened, then closed behind him.
He froze. Then the door on the other side of the landing flew open and a man beckoned fiercely from the darkness of his hall. “This way,” he said, voice thick with excitement. De Milja couldn’t see— objects doubled, then faded into ghosts of themselves—then a bald man with a heavy face and small, restless eyes emerged from the fog. He wore an undershirt, and held his pants up with his hand.
When de Milja didn’t move, the man grabbed him—he had the strength of the mad, he may have been mad for all de Milja knew— and shoved him down a long, dark hallway. Once again de Milja started to fade out, he felt the wall sliding past on his right shoulder as the man half-carried him along. There was a sense of still air, the odor of closed rooms. A hallway made unlikely angles, sharp turns into blank walls, a wood panel swung wide, and he found himself in a box that smelled of freshly sawn planks. Then it was dark, with a heavy silence, and as he blacked out he realized that he had been entombed.
There was more. It went on from there, but he was less and less a part of it. Merely something of value. It was not so bad to be something of value, he discovered. He was fed into a Saving Machine—a mechanism that knew better than to expect anything of fugitives, the damaged and the hunted. It simply saved them. So all de Milja ever retained of the next few days were images, remnants, as he was moved here and there, an object in someone else’s operation, hidden and re-hidden, the treasure of an anxious miser.