Döring, his eyes shut, breathed deeply and swallowed a portion of his fury. “Sometimes,” he whispered, and opened his eyes. “I go different ways.”
“Well, they’re expecting you to go that way tonight. They’re waiting there, both of them, with sticks of some kind, caps pulled down over their eyes, collars turned up; exactly as you said last night, Springer planning to spring from an alley! I went through the building and found a way out on this side.”
Döring pulled in another deep breath and clapped a hand gratefully to Reichmeider’s dusty shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”
Smiling, Reichmeider said, “I’m sure you could lick both of them with one hand tied behind your back—the other fellow’s a skinny little nothing—but the wisest thing, of course, is simply to go home another way. I’ll go with you if you’d like. Unless, that is, you’d rather get rid of this Springer once and for all.”
Questioningly, Döring looked at him.
“It’s a golden opportunity, really,” Reichmeider pointed out, “and he’ll only come at you another night if you don’t. It’s quite simple; you walk down there, they attack”—he glanced down at Döring’s coat and smiled skew-eyed at him—“and you let them have it. I’ll be a few steps behind, to serve as your witness, and in the unlikely event that they give you any real trouble”—he leaned close and pulled his lapel out to show a holstered gun-butt—“I’ll take care of them and you’ll be my witness. Either way you’ll be rid of him, and the most you’ll have to pay is getting hit with a stick once or twice.”
Döring stared at Reichmeider. He put his hand to his coat, pressed the hardness within. “My God,” he said wonderingly, “to actually use this thing!”
Reichmeider unwrapped the handkerchief from his hand and blew at a bloody scrape on the back of it. “It’ll give that wife of yours something to think about,” he remarked.
“My God,” Döring exulted, “I hadn’t even thought of that! She’ll faint at my feet! ‘Oh say, Klara, do you remember Wilhelm Springer, Erich’s clarinet teacher? He jumped me in the street tonight—I can’t imagine why—and I killed him.’” He clutched his cheeks delightedly and whistled. “My God, it’ll kill her too!”
“Come on, let’s do it!” Reichmeider urged. “Before they lose their nerve and run away!”
They hurried down Kirchengasse’s dark decline. Bright headlights swept up and raced past them.
“Who says there’s no justice, eh?”
“‘Fat prick’? Oh, you shitty little faggot, I’m going to get you right through the heart!”
They crossed deserted Lindenstrasse; walked slowly now and quietly, close against shuttered storefronts. And came to four stories of stonework building, dark and broken-topped against moonlit sky, footed at front and side with rough-built passages of lumber and painted doors. Reichmeider drew Döring into the side passage’s blackness. “You stay here,” he whispered; “I’ll go through and make sure he didn’t have ten others joining them.”
“Yes, you’d better!” Döring got out the gun.
“I know the way now and I have a penlight; I won’t be long. Stay right here.”
“Don’t let them see you!”
Away already, Reichmeider whispered, “Don’t worry.” The passage appeared, plank-roofed and door-walled in bobbing dim light. Reichmeider’s tall thin silhouette strode into it, and turned to the inner wall and was gone, leaving blackness.
Alert and excited—and needing to pee—Döring held the wonderfully weighty Mauser, so many years carried and now to be used! He brought it closer to the passage’s opening and inspected it in faint light from Lindenstrasse; caressed a hand along its smooth barrel, carefully pushed its safety catch down into the ready position.
He moved back against the wall where Reichmeider had put him. What a friend! What a real man! He would take him to dinner tomorrow night, at the Kaiserhof. And buy him something too, something gold. Cuff links maybe.
He stood in the now-growing-visible passage with the gun big in his hand; thought about shooting its death-bullets into Wilhelm Springer.
And—after police business—going home and telling Klara. Die, bitch.
There would even be stories in the papers! Retired Transport Commission Administrator Slays Attackers. A picture of him too. Television interviews?
He really had to pee. The beer. He pushed the safety catch back up and returned the gun to its neatly receiving holster. He turned to the wall, unzipped his fly, drew himself out; spread his feet wide and let go. What relief!
“Are you there, Döring?” Reichmeider called softly from above.
“Yes!” he answered, looking up at planks. “What are you doing up there?”
“It’s easier to get across on this level. There’s all kinds of crap down below. I’ll be with you in a minute. Stay there. The light’s gone out and I won’t be able to find you if you move around.”
“Did you see them?”
No answer. He peed on, looking at a crack between pale doors. Would Reichmeider be able to get down all right without the light? And had he seen Springer and the other, or was he still on the way? Hurry, Reichmeider!
A pattering above; he looked up again. Gravel or something falling on the planks. They burst in at him with thunder behind them; and wondering, hurting, he died quickly.
The last time he had spoken at Heidelberg—in 1970, that was—the auditorium had been a splendid old cathedral of blackened oak, crowded even beyond its thousand-seat capacity. This time it was a new sand-colored oyster shell for five hundred, very modern and well designed, with the last two rows empty. The speaking was much easier, of course, like talking in someone’s large living room. Real eye-to-eye contact with all these bright young kids. But still…
Well. It was going along nicely, as it had every night so far. German audiences, young ones, were always the best; really caring, attending, concerned about the past. They made him be his best, finding genuine feeling again where American and English audiences, less involved, allowed him to lapse into mechanical delivery of memorized lines. Speaking German made a difference too, of course—the freedom to use natural words rather than cope with “was” and “were” (and “dejected” and “ejected” are you getting the clippings for me, Sydney?).
He snapped himself back into it. “In the beginning I only wanted vengeance,” he told an intently watching young woman in the second row. “Vengeance for the deaths of my parents and sisters, vengeance for my own years in the concentration camps”—he spoke to the farther rows—“vengeance for all the deaths, for everyone’s years. Why had I been spared if not to exact vengeance?” He waited. “Vienna certainly didn’t need another composer.” The usual small uplift of relieved laughter came; he smiled with it and chose a brown-haired young man on the far right (he looked a little like Barry Koehler). “But the trouble with vengeance,” he told him, trying not to think about Barry, “is that, one, you can’t get it, not really”—he looked away from the Barry-like young man, to the whole audience—“and two, even if you could, would it be of much use?” He shook his head. “No. So now I want something better than vengeance, and something almost as hard to get.” He told it to the young woman in the second row: “I want remembrance.” He told it to all of them: “Remembrance. It’s hard to get because life goes on; every year we have new horrors—a Vietnam, terrorist activities in the Middle East and Ireland, assassinations”—(ninety-four sixty-five-year-old men?)—“and every year,” he drove himself on, “the horror of horrors, the Holocaust, becomes farther away, a little less horrible. But philosophers have warned us: if we forget the past, we are doomed to repeat it. And that is why it’s important to capture an Eichmann and a Mengele; so that they can—” He heard what he had said, was lost. “A Stangl, I mean,” he fumbled. “Excuse me, I was indulging in some wishful thinking there.”
They laughed a little, but it was no good, it had broken the build; he tried to restore it: “And that’s why it’s important to cap
ture an Eichmann and a Stangl,” he said. “So that they can be made to stand trial—not necessarily to convict them, no—but so that witnesses can be brought forward, to remind the world, and especially to remind you, who weren’t even born yet when these things happened, that men no different on the outside from you and me can commit under certain circumstances the most barbarous and inhuman atrocities. So that you”—he pointed—“and you—and you—and you—will take care to see that those circumstances shall never again be permitted to arise.”
The End. He bent his head; applause flooded at him and he withdrew a step from the lectern, keeping title to it with a hand touching a rounded corner. He waited, breathing hard, then stepped forward, grasped the lectern again with both hands, and faced the applause into spattering near-silence. “Thank you,” he said. “If you have questions now, I’ll do my best to answer them.” He looked around, chose and pointed.
Traunsteiner, leaning forward over a tightly held steering wheel, fired his car full-speed at the back of a gray-haired man walking on the road’s shoulder. Swelling close in the headlight’s explosive radiance, the man turned, raised a folded magazine above his eyes, back-stepped. The car’s fender bowled him up and away. Fighting a smile, Traunsteiner swerved the car back full onto pavement, barely missing a white-on-blue intersection warning. Braking, and braking more, he swung the car screechingly left into a wider road posted Esbjerg—14 Km.
“Mainly by contributions,” Liebermann said, “from Jews and other concerned people all over the world. And also by my income from writing and from engagements such as this.” He pointed to a hand in the back row. A young woman stood up, pink-faced and plump; she began asking what he saw was going to be the Frieda Maloney question.
“I can see,” the young woman said, “that it’s important to get the key people put on trial, the ones who held high positions. But aren’t you still motivated by vengeance in a case like Frieda Maloney, a rank-and-file guard who gets dragged back here after being an American citizen for so many years? Whatever she did during the war, hasn’t she made up for it by what she’s done since? She was a very useful citizen there. Teaching and so on.” The young woman sat down.
He nodded and stayed silent for a moment, smoothing his mustache down thoughtfully—as if he had never been asked the question before. Then he said, “I gather from your question that you’re aware that a woman who has been a nursery-school teacher, and a finder of homes for homeless babies, and a good housewife, kind to stray dogs, can also have been—the self-same woman!—a ‘rank-and-file’ concentration-camp guard, guilty, perhaps—her trial, when it finally takes place, will tell us—of mass murder. I ask you now: would you be aware of this somewhat surprising possibility if Frieda Altschul Maloney hadn’t been found and extradited? I don’t think so, and I don’t think it’s an unimportant possibility for you to be aware of. Neither does your government.”
He looked around—at hands springing up, including the hand of the Barry-like young man. He looked away from him (not now, Barry, I’m busy) and pointed at a shrewd-looking blond young man at dead center. (“There are ninety-four of them,” Barry’s telephone voice insisted, “and they’re all sixty-five-year-old civil servants. How do you like them apples?”)
A new question was coming at him. “But Frieda Maloney hasn’t even been indicted yet,” the blond young man was saying. “Is our government really so interested in pursuing Nazi criminals? Is any government in the world today, even the Israeli? Hasn’t there been a decline of interest, and isn’t that one of the reasons why you haven’t been able to reopen your Information Center?”
So who tells you to pick the shrewd-looking ones? “First of all,” he said, “the Center is temporarily in smaller quarters, but it’s still open. People are working; letters come in, advisories go out. As I said before, we’re funded by private individuals and in no way dependent on any government. Secondly, though it’s true that both German and Austrian prosecutors are no longer as…responsive as they once were, and Israel has other more pressing problems, the cause of justice hasn’t yet been deserted. I have it on good authority that Frieda Maloney will be indicted sometime in January or February, and brought to trial soon after. The witnesses have been found, a difficult and time-consuming job in which the Center played a part.” He looked at raised hands again, bright young faces—and suddenly realized exactly what he was looking at. A gold mine, for God’s sake! Right in front of him!
Here in this luminous oyster shell were nearly five hundred of the smartest young people in Germany, the cream of their generation, and he was trying to figure the thing out alone, one old fool with one tired brain. Dear God!
Ask them? Crazy!
He must have pointed at someone; the neo-Nazism question had been asked. “Two factors are necessary for a resurgence of Nazism,” he recited quickly, “a worsening of social conditions till they approximate those of the early thirties and the emergence of a Hitler-like leader. Should both these factors come into being, neo-Nazi groups around the world would of course become a focus of danger, but at the present time, no, I’m not particularly alarmed.” Hands sprang up, but he raised his hand against them. “Just a minute, please,” he said. “I’d like to interrupt the questions for a moment—and ask one instead of answering.”
The hands fell away. The bright young faces looked at him expectantly.
Crazy! But how could he not try to make use of such brain-power?
He gripped the lectern with both hands, took a breath, thought. “I want,” he said to the oyster shell full of such excellent pearls, “to borrow your brains to solve a problem. A hypothetical problem that a young friend presented to me. I’m very anxious to solve it, so much so that I’m willing to cheat a little and get help.” Small laugh. “And who could help me better than students of this great university and their friends?”
He let go of the lectern and stood straight, looked at them casually—a man offering a hypothetical problem, not a real one.
“I’ve told you about the Comrades Organization in South America,” he said, “and about Dr. Mengele. Here’s the problem my friend presented. The Organization and Dr. Mengele decide that they want to kill a large number of men in different countries of Europe and North America. Ninety-four men, to be exact, and they’re all sixty-five years old and civil servants. The killings are to take place over a two-and-a-half-year period, and there’s a political motivation for them, a Nazi motivation. What is it? Can you find an answer for me? Who are these men? Why are their deaths desirable to the Comrades Organization and Dr. Mengele?”
The audience of young people sat uncertainly. A hum of whispering grew among them. A cough broke out; another cough echoed it.
He took the lectern—casually. “I’m not joking with you,” he said. “This problem was put to me. As an exercise in logic. Can you help me?”
They leaned to one another, and the hum of whispering intensified, became the buzz of ideas being hazarded.
“Ninety-four men,” he said slowly, guidingly. “Sixty-five years old. Civil servants. In various countries. Two and a half years.”
A hand came up, and another.
Hoping, he took the first; a few rows back, left of center. “Yes?”
A young man in a blue sweater stood up. “The men hold positions of responsibility,” he said in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. “Their deaths will directly or indirectly bring about the worsening of social conditions you just referred to, creating a more suitable climate for a rebirth of Nazism.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Could the killing of highly placed men go on for months, let alone two and a half years, without attracting attention and causing investigation? No, the men must be low-echelon civil servants. And at sixty-five they’ll more than likely be retiring anyway, so removing them from their jobs can’t possibly be the object of killing them.”
“Why kill them at all?” a voice called from the right rear. “They’ll soon die naturally
!”
He nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “They’ll soon die naturally. So why kill them at all? That’s what I’m asking you.” He pointed at the second hand that had come up, at the rear center; other hands were up now.
A tall young man stood and said, “They’re Nazi sympathizers without families, who’ve left their life savings to Nazi groups. It’s murder for money. There’s some reason why they need funds now rather than five or ten years from now.”
“That’s possible,” he said, “though it seems unlikely. As I mentioned before, the Comrades Organization has enormous wealth that it smuggled from Europe before the war’s end.” He pulled his pen free of his breast pocket and clicked its top. “Still, it’s a possibility.” He turned over one of his note cards on the lectern, and on the back of it wrote: Money? He raised the pen and pointed with it to the right.
A young woman with glasses and long brown hair stood up. “It seems much more likely to me,” she said, “that the men are anti-Nazi rather than pro-Nazi, and obviously there’s a connection of some kind between them. Could they be members of an international Jewish group that threatens the Comrades Organization in some way?”