Yasmina Ginsburg’s eyes twinkled with silent laughter as husband and wife shared a private smile. “What chutzpah!” he said, setting the tray with its load of homus and bread and olives on the table before them. “I was hopelessly smitten.”
While they ate, they talked of Leon’s son, Paul, and the time Leon had spent in Washington. Then Leon drew a pipe from the cavernous folds of his cardigan and packed it with tobacco, his expression growing thoughtful. He said, “I may be old and feebleminded, James, but I’m not so far gone as to believe you came all the way here to visit this alter kocker just to talk about old times.”
“You’re far from feebleminded, and you know it. I’m here because I need information.”
Leon cast him a long, steady look, and kept tamping his tobacco. “You’re a spy. That’s what you people do-you collect information. What kind of information could an old man like me possibly give you?”
“I need to know about the Nazi biological weapons program at Dachau.”
“Ah.” Leon lit a match and held the flame to his pipe with an unsteady hand. “That’s a pretty tall order, James. The Nazis were working with everything from anthrax to smallpox, and God only knows what else.”
“Did you ever hear of a disease that kills Jews, but is harmless to gentiles?”
Leon went very still. When his match burned down to the tips of his fingers, he dropped it in a nearby ashtray. But it was still a moment before he spoke. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
He leaned back in his chair, one hand cupping the bowl of his pipe. “It was in 1944. The fall, I think. A truck brought in a group of Jews from southern France. They were already very ill when they arrived-some sort of acute respiratory disease. No one knew what. They were put in a barracks where something like half the men were Polish intellectuals, the rest French Jews. Some of the Poles came down with a mild case of the sniffles. But almost every one of the Jews in that barracks died.”
He sucked silently on his pipe for a moment. Jax and Tobie waited. He said, “You know, a lot of people think the Nazis only sent Jews to the concentration camps. But the truth is, they rounded up anyone and everyone they thought might be a danger to the State. About a third of us at Dachau were Jews. The rest were a combination of Catholic priests, gypsies, Germans who opposed the Nazis, Communists…” Leon shrugged. “Hitler had a lot of different enemies.
“We were all made to wear overalls with color-coded triangles. The Jews, of course, wore yellow badges. The Communists and other political prisoners had to wear red. Common criminals wore green triangles. Jehovah’s Witnesses were given purple triangles. The Gypsies wore black, while homosexuals had to wear pink.” He gave a soft huff. “All these years, and I still remember.”
His wife reached out to lay her hand over his, and after a moment, he continued. “There was a doctor at the camp, a man by the name of Martin Kline. After he heard what happened in that barracks, he decided to do an experiment. He selected fifty Jews and fifty gentiles, and had them deliberately infected with the virus.”
“It was a virus?”
Leon flattened his lips, his bushy white brows drawing together in a thoughtful frown. “That’s what we thought it was. No one had heard of retroviruses in those days. But looking back on it now, it’s hard to say.”
Jax said, “Where did the disease originally come from?”
“Who can say? Those were terrible times, with vast populations in motion under wretched conditions. The miracle is that it never spread outside the camp.”
Tobie leaned forward. “So what happened?”
“Many of the gentiles came down with what I guess you might describe as a cold: sniffles, sore throat-that sort of thing. All but one survived. But half the Jews died. The doctors in the camp took to calling it die Klinge von Solomon.”
“The Blade or Sword of Solomon,” whispered October.
Leon nodded. He drew on his pipe, two streams of smoke leaking out the corners of his mouth. “Kline was ecstatic. He’d been hoping for a higher death rate, but still…fifty percent was promising. So he tried it on another group of a hundred prisoners, half Jewish, half not. That time, two of the gentiles died, and about twenty of the Jews. That’s when Kline realized it made a difference where the Jews were from.”
Tobie shook her head, not understanding. “Why?”
Leon smiled. “Ever hear of the Khazars?”
“No.”
“They were a semi-nomadic people who ruled a huge empire across the Russian steppes and the Caucasus, all the way to the Crimea. During the eighth and ninth centuries, they converted to Judaism. A lot of scholars think that many European Jews-particularly those from Russia and Poland-came from the dispersal of the Khazars, rather than from the original Diaspora.”
“Is that true?”
Leon shrugged. “Truth and politics make uncomfortable bedfellows. Just to suggest such a thing is enough to send certain people into fits. But there are two professors here at Tel Aviv University who refuse to be silenced-one a historian, the other a linguist.”
Pushing up from his chair, Leon shuffled off, to return a moment later with a small stack of well-thumbed books he set on the table before Tobie. “Recent genetic testing of mitochondrial DNA has been very suggestive. But who knows? Future testing may show something else.”
“What do you think?”
Leon shrugged. “I think there has to be some reason why I’m alive today to tell you about all this.”
“You were one of those exposed?”
He lowered himself stiffly back into his chair. “Yes.”
“This Dr. Kline,” said Jax. “What happened to him at the end of the war?”
“It’s hard to say. The last days were so chaotic. Everyone was starving. Not just the people in the camps, but the villagers and the soldiers, too. There was a terrible outbreak of typhus in all the camps, but because of the Allied blockade, we had no medicine to treat it. As the Russian army advanced, the Germans started moving inmates from the eastern camps, sending them to Dachau. New trains were arriving every day, but their boxcars were full of dead or dying prisoners.”
“From the typhus?”
“Mainly, yes. It was horrible-like something from the Apocalypse.” He tightened his grip on the bowl of his pipe, his gaze lost in the distance. “At that point, there was no one left to bury them. The bodies just piled up. I still remember the day the American infantry liberated the camp. They took one look at those piles of emaciated corpses, and rounded up every German guard in the camp-about five hundred of them-and shot them.”
“The Dachau Massacre,” said Jax.
Leon nodded. “Some of those guards were sadistic bulvons. But most of them were just kids. Scared kids, drafted into the army and doing what they were told. The ones the Americans should have shot-men like Martin Kline-are the ones who got away.”
Jax leaned forward. “You’ve no idea what happened to him?”
“I heard he fled east, to the Russians. But who knows?”
Jax met Tobie’s gaze, but said nothing.
Leon glanced from one to the other. “Why are you asking me about all this, James?”
“You know I can’t tell you that, Leon.”
Leon let out a long sigh that shook his narrow chest. “It’s still out there, isn’t it? That pathogen…whatever it is. It’s still out there, and someone has it. Someone who’s planning to use it.”
When Jax didn’t answer, Leon raised one shaky hand to rub his eyes, and his voice broke. “God help us all.”
57
The call from Andrei came through about ten minutes later. Excusing himself, Jax retreated to a small chamber on the far side of the courtyard.
The Russian came straight to the point. “Remember that boy you were interested in?”