Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

Greta closed her eyes, as if against a scene too dreadful to witness again.

“On young girls,” Eleanor continued. “About your age at the time.”

The eyes opened again. A terrible grief was fixed within them. “My mother was a doctor, a scientist. She had done research in this… area. Sterilization. Before the war. As a scientist, you see. The doctors knew of her work. Her mind. They valued it. They used her.” She drew herself up, growing bold in defense of her mother. “She had no choice. They would have killed her if she had refused to help them. They would have killed me too. My mother knew this. She did it so that we could survive. But they killed her anyway. Marched her with the others. Into a barn. And burned it.”

“How did you escape?”

At Eleanor’s question, Greta looked like a child returned to a nightmare. “The Russians were near. They were coming to the camp. It was chaos. The soldiers were running about, gathering people, marching them to the west. Away from the Russians. I hid in a locker. A metal locker. Until the Russians came. They took me to another camp outside Krakow. We lived in tents. That’s where Mr. Davies found me. Skin and bones. He had papers for me, papers to America. That is how I knew he was my father.” She lifted her head, as if to regain a birthright she had never really possessed. “Mr. Davies would not have come so far to save me. All the way to Krakow. For a little girl. A nobody. The daughter of someone who was no more than an… associate.”

“What exactly was your mother’s association with Mr. Davies?” Graves asked. “Beyond the personal, I mean.”

“They had similar interests,” Greta answered matter-of-factly. “In medicine. Science.”

“Were they also associated with Andre Grossman in some way?”

Greta did not seem in the least alarmed by the sudden mention of Grossman’s name. “Grossman knew my mother. That is all.”

“How did he know her?”

“They were in the camp together. Grossman also worked for the doctors there. I often saw him coming out of the building they worked in.”

“Block Ten,” Eleanor said.

Greta’s face stiffened. “Block Ten, yes,” she said. The name appeared to fill her mind with dreadful images. “In the morning Grossman would come there. To get names from the head doctor. Names of the girls he wanted. Then Grossman would go to the roll call and pull these girls from the lines. ‘Come with me,’ he would say to them. ‘You are going to be saved.’ Then he would take them to Block Ten. He was like that goat. The one that leads the others to the slaughterhouse. Saves itself in that way.”

Graves recalled himself as a boy, moving toward the darkened house, leading Kessler to his sister. “The Judas goat,” he said.

“That is what Grossman was,” Greta said. “I thought he was dead. Killed with my mother and the rest. I never expected to see him again. Then, he was here. Suddenly. At Riverwood. Standing at the door when I opened it. He could not believe it was me. That I, too, was alive. In America. Both of us. At Riverwood.”

Graves saw the door of the main house open, Greta’s eyes meet Grossman’s astonished gaze.

“He said nothing,” Greta continued. “Then-later-he came to me. Secret. At night. To my room. He asked, ‘How did you get here?’ In German. Always he spoke to me in German. So he would not be understood by them. He did not want anyone to know who he was, what he was. What he had done. To the girls. Leading them away. This was his terror. That someone would discover what he’d done in the camp.” Her eyes shifted to the window. “He said to me, ‘To be silent is the only way to survive.’” She continued to stare out the window, the dark grounds beyond them. “He was right.”

Graves could tell that Greta had reached the end of what she wanted to tell them. He urged her forward with a question.

“Was Grossman a thief?”

“No.”

“A blackmailer?”

She turned to him. “Why do you ask such a question?”

“Miss Davies believes that Grossman intended to steal something from Mr. Davies. An enameled box he kept in his office.”

Something appeared to give slightly in Greta’s determined self-control, the ever-weakening restraint that had kept her tongue in check down through the years. “Grossman was not a thief.” Her tone took on a quality of defense. “He would never have stolen anything from Riverwood.

“Then why was he interested in the box?”

Greta hesitated briefly. “Grossman was an artist. He had worked for a museum. Mrs. Davies believed he might be interested in the little box her husband kept in his office. The one you mentioned. A rare thing. That is what Mrs. Davies told him the box was. A work of art.”

“The Kaminsky box,” Graves said.

“Yes,” Greta said. She stopped abruptly, as if a red light had illuminated in her mind. Then she began again, speaking more cautiously now, measuring her words, like one making her way through a treacherous wood. “Grossman had seen the box before. The head doctor, the one in charge of Block Ten, had this portrait of himself. It hung in his office in Block Ten. The doctor had brought the painting from Berlin. To make himself important. Show how rich he was. In the portrait he is holding the box.” Her lips twisted into a bitter sneer. “He thought he was a god. This fat little man.”

“Karl Clauberg?” Graves asked.

At the mention of Clauberg’s name, Greta’s eyes caught fire. “He wanted always to be the big shot. Always boasting to my mother and the other doctors about what a great scientist he was. How one day his ‘secret formula’ would be used to sterilize millions of people at a time. Now it had to be injected, but soon it could be given in a way that no one would detect. This new way was already being tested, Clauberg claimed. When the test was over, he would be more famous than Copernicus or Galileo.”

“Did Grossman hear all this?”

“Everyone heard it,” Greta answered. “Everyone in Block Ten. Clauberg was always talking in this way.” She scoffed at his pretentions. “One day he noticed Grossman looking at the portrait he brought from Berlin. He pointed at the box. ‘That is a Kaminsky box,’ he said. ‘Very rare. Very valuable.’ Clauberg told Grossman that he had given the box away on behalf of the Fuhrer. It was very valuable, but he had given it away nonetheless. Out of his love for the Fatherland. To a great friend of German science. This is the way Clauberg talked. Always to make himself big.”

“Who did Clauberg say he gave the box to?” Eleanor asked.

“He never said a name,” Greta answered. “But after Mrs. Davies showed the box to Grossman, he believed it might be Mr. Davies who was the ‘friend of German science’ Clauberg spoke of.” The words that followed seemed to draw her into a world of ever-deepening pain. “And he was right. Grossman was right. He showed me papers to prove that it was Clauberg who’d given the box to Mr. Davies.” She looked like a woman who’d reached the edge of a precipice, had no choice now but to make the fatal leap. “That is when the question came to him. To Grossman. ‘Why? Why would Clauberg make such a gift to Mr. Davies?’ Grossman believed I knew, but he was wrong. I knew nothing. So he looked everywhere. For the answer. Always looking. I warned him to stop. That he would be discovered. But he would not stop. He looked in drawers. Everywhere. Always snooping. In Mr. Davies’ office. In the basement. That is where he found them. The records.”

“Records of what?” Eleanor asked.

“Of Faye,” Greta replied. “Everything about Faye. Charts. Measurements. From the time she was a little girl. Her whole life. That’s when Grossman thought he knew why Clauberg had given the box to Mr. Davies. Because Mr. Davies was testing Clauberg’s formula. Giving small doses. Over many years. Putting it in food so that it could be eaten ‘als Zucker.’ That’s what Grossman told me. In German. Eaten ‘like sugar.’”