Greg Iles - Black Cross

Leibovitz smiled. “I don’t know. The two of them raised Hannah under the same roof for some years. They never married, though. From what I gathered, Stern’s work kept him traveling around the world for longer and longer periods. He was a born fighter. He spent his whole life in one branch or another of Israeli intelligence. Eventually Rachel married another man. Hannah is a grown woman now. Well into middle age. Jan is a lawyer, like his father was. In Tel Aviv.”

I shook my head. “And Avram?”

“Avram died twenty years ago. He was eighty-six.”

I felt a disturbing dislocation of time. In my mind, Avram Stern was a man of fifty-five, Hannah Jansen a child of two. “How do you know all this?” I asked. “My grandfather kept up with everyone?”

“A little. Not so often, but enough to know the big things. Every two or three years he got a letter from Stern. Postmarked from the ends of the earth, usually.”

I sat quietly, trying to take it all in. The man who raised me — the grandfather I thought I had known all my life — was really someone entirely different. Leibovitz was right. I felt different for hearing the story. How many gray heads had I passed in the street or spoken to in the emergency room, never imagining they had once hunched over the controls of a shattered bomber in the darkness over Germany or lain in an icy ditch while SS troops combed a forest for them.

“The rest of the story is not so happy,” Leibovitz said. “Fewer than half of the women and children who got away on the truck survived the war. I’ve spent several years trying to track them down. Life in the forests of occupied Poland was hard. Some ran into the wrong kind of resistance groups. Others died of sickness, even hunger. That’s the way it was. The most dramatic escape from a death camp in World War Two was from Sobibor. Three hundred escaped through the fence, yet only a handful survived the mines and the machine guns of the SS.”

“Christ.” I could see now why my grandfather felt confused about what he had done. “Was it worth it, Rabbi? How much of what my grandfather guessed was true? How much of what Brigadier Smith told them was the truth?”

Leibovitz straightened in the chair. “As costly as that mission was, I believe it was worth every life lost. Heinrich Himmler had been trying to persuade Hitler to utilize nerve gas to stave off the invasion. But after the raid on Totenhausen, he had little choice but to buy Brigadier Smith’s bluff. The evidence was before his eyes. The Allies possessed nerve gas and they had used it. They had used it to destroy Himmler’s pet project one day before his demonstration for the Führer. That left him two choices. Tell Hitler about the devastating raid and accept the shame of being proved wrong — not to mention admitting that Allied saboteurs had penetrated a top-secret SS facility — or—”

“Cover it up.”

“Yes.”

“How did he do it?”

“He simply exaggerated the effects of the bombs delivered by the Mosquito flight. Who would argue with him? What had been the village of Dornow was hardly more than a crater in the snow. The power station was obliterated. The day after your grandfather left Totenhausen, Himmler ordered the camp demolished and the debris plowed under the ground.”

“Jesus.”

“I went there, Mark. Four years ago. I was on a trip with some other rabbis, to see the concentration camps. I took a side trip to Dornow. I went down to the spot between the hills and the river.”

“And?”

“There was nothing there. Just a rough, uneven field with the river flowing past it. I said kaddish and drove away.”

Leibovitz touched a finger to his chin. “Some justice did come out of it. Anna’s diary was used as evidence in the infamous Nazi medical trials. One of Brandt’s assistant physicians had been away from Totenhausen at the time of the attack. He was hanged, largely on the evidence of the diary.”

“What about the record kept by the Jewish women? Did Rachel take that out?”

Leibovitz smiled sadly. “How symmetrical it would be to think she did. But when that last night of horror came, no one thought of it. They thought only of survival.”

“Perhaps if Frau Hagan had still been alive. . . ”

“Perhaps. But in any case, they were not the only prisoners who kept records. After the war, similar journals were found buried in jars, cans, under barrack floorboards. Some of them . . .”

For the first time I saw moisture in the rabbi’s eyes. He leaned his head back and blinked, then fell silent. I picked up the Victoria Cross from the floor. “I think I’m beginning to understand,” I said. “What happened at Totenhausen had nothing to do with glory.”

“Not in any conventional sense. Winston Churchill thought so, though. He awarded Mac the medal in a private meeting near the end of the war.” The old man squeezed his hands together, then reached out and took a sip of brandy. “I’ve sometimes wondered whether or not that VC is real. As I told you, the only other American ever to receive it was the Unknown Soldier. Technically, it’s not supposed to be awarded to civilians. The highest British medal that can be is the George Cross, and Jonas Stern received that for the Totenhausen mission. I believe the VC is real, though. I believe Churchill liked your grandfather, Mark. I think he deeply respected him, and his ideals. I think Churchill saw in Mac the best part of America. And Mac had given a great deal to England. He’d been working for them since 1940, remember, long before Pearl Harbor.”

Leibovitz set down his glass. “Mac respected Churchill as well. Churchill asked him as a favor to preserve the secret of BLACK CROSS, and as you know too well, Mac did so until his dying day. He once told me Churchill’s note meant far more to him than the VC.”

The rabbi got up from the chair and walked over to my grandfather’s bookshelves. “We had a bit of a shock in 1991,” he said, moving slowly along the row of books. “Mac and I were in my home, watching CNN. The Desert Storm deadline was near to expiring. We saw a clip of American soldiers being briefed on how to inject themselves with atropine in response to poison gas attacks. The announcer specifically mentioned Sarin as the most feared weapon in the Iraqi arsenal.”

“My God.”

Leibovitz turned from the shelves. “It’s true. To this day, Sarin and Soman remain the deadliest poison gases in the world.”

The rabbi’s revelations were shocking, but the truth was that my mind was no longer on weapons and military medals. I picked up the old wooden box and took out the black-and-white photograph, the one showing the blond woman’s face against dark wood. She really was beautiful.

“This woman is Anna Kaas, isn’t she?”

Leibovitz nodded. “That was the real secret of your grandfather’s life, Mark.”

“What happened to her?”

“She lived in Britain until the end of the war. I don’t know whether she and Mac lived together there or not. But when the war ended, he came back to America alone.”

“She stayed behind?”

“Yes.”

“And he never told my grandmother about her?”

“Never. Two years after the war, Anna Kaas emigrated to New York. She graduated from the Cornell Medical School in 1952.”

“Wow. Did my grandfather ever see her after that?”

The rabbi seemed hesitant to answer. “Two or three times,” he said finally. “Over all those years. Medical meetings in New York, Boston. What does it matter now? He shared something with Anna that no one but Jonas Stern could understand, and probably not even him. Stern was made of different stuff, I think.”

I stood up, tired from lack of sleep, yet alive with a strange energy. “It’s difficult to take in,” I said. “I don’t really know what to say, or do. I guess there’s nothing I can do.”