Greg Iles - Black Cross

Six hundred miles away, in Bletchley Park, England, young Clapham received the message, transcribed and decoded it. Then he lifted the telephone and placed a call to SOE Headquarters in Baker Street.

Brigadier Duff Smith was awakened from sound sleep on an office cot to take the call. When he heard the word SCARLETT, followed by the contents of the message, he thanked Clapham, hung up, reached into a nearby tumbler and splashed water on his face. Then he calmly walked to the next office up the hall and said: “Barry, where’s Winston tonight?”

13

Rachel Jansen spent her first morning as a widow trying desperately not to fall asleep. She had not rested for many hours, but until she was certain that her children were relatively safe, she would not sleep. She sat stiffly on the floor, her back pressed against the narrow bunk she had been assigned, one of three stacked like bookshelves against the front wall of the Jewish Women’s Block. Her father-in-law stood unsteadily beside her. Her two children — Jan, three, and Hannah, two — sat on either side of her, their heads pillowed upon her shrinking breasts.

With stinging eyes Rachel looked warily around the barracks. For the last hour, women of every size and condition had been staring at her. She could not understand it. During her short time here, she had taken great care to offend no one. The women she had mentally christened the “new widows” — those who had arrived with her and also lost their husbands last night — were not staring. They seemed to be suffering various degrees of shock. But the others were. The only characteristic the staring women shared was their hair. Most of them had several inches of it.

It’s the old-timers, she thought uneasily. The camp veterans are staring at us. Rachel pressed her thighs tightly together and thought of the two diamonds the shoemaker had given her. It was a bit of an indignity to hide them in so intimate a place, but she had seen female veterans of the camp hiding coins, rolled photographs, and other small treasures there in the showers, and she had quickly followed their example. It proved a wise decision. Since then she had witnessed two surprise searches.

Why do they stare so? she thought anxiously.

“My son,” Benjamin Jansen whimpered for the hundredth time. “My home and my business weren’t enough? They had to take my only son?”

“Quiet,” Rachel whispered, pointing to the snoring children. “Sleep is their only refuge.”

The old man shook his head hopelessly. “There is no refuge from this place. Except through the back gate.”

Rachel’s young face hardened. “Stop whining. If it hadn’t been for that shoemaker knocking you down, you’d already be out the back gate.”

The old man closed his eyes.

Though exhausted, Rachel stared defiantly back at the toughest looking of the women — a thickset Slav with ash-colored hair — and blocked out the old man’s fatalism. It was not easy. The thought of the “back gate” was enough to paralyze anyone. Already she had learned that the irregular tattoo of muffled bangs echoing in the trees behind the camp — which she had thought were gunshots — were actually explosions of gas through the swollen skins of decomposing bodies, buried in shallow pits behind the camp. Her husband’s resting place. . .

“Hey!” barked a gravelly voice. “Don’t you know why everyone is staring at you?”

Rachel lashed out blindly with her right hand and blinked her eyelids. She had fallen asleep just long enough for the big Slav to cross to her bunk. “Leave us alone!” she snarled.

The coarse-featured woman towering above her did not back away. She squatted down and jabbed a stubby finger at Benjamin Jansen. She wore leather-soled shoes, Rachel noticed, the only pair in the barracks.

“They’re staring because of him ,” the woman said in a thick Polish accent. “This is the Jewish Women’s Block. He can’t stay here. The SS tolerate a certain amount of movement between the women’s and the children’s blocks. Helps to keep mischief down. But no men are allowed in the women’s block. The old goat can listen to what I have to say, then he has to go.”

Rachel looked at her father-in-law to make sure he understood.

“You’ve never been in a camp before, have you?” the woman asked. “None of you.”

“We passed through Auschwitz,” Rachel answered, “but only for an hour. I’m afraid this is all quite new to us.”

“It shows.”

“How, exactly?”

The woman wrinkled her wide, flat-boned face in scorn. “A hundred ways. But that doesn’t matter. Now that your rich husband has gone through the back gate, maybe you’re not too good to socialize with us, eh? Or maybe you want to be transferred to the Prominents’ Block?”

“No, no. We want no special treatment.”

“Good. Because there is no Prominents’ Block here. That’s Buchenwald. In Totenhausen everyone is equal.”

The woman seemed to take great satisfaction from this statement. Rachel extended her hand. “I am Rachel Jansen. I am honored to meet you.”

Rachel’s formal manners brought a sneer to the woman’s face. “I’m Frau Hagan,” she announced. “I am Block Leader. I am also a Pole and a Communist.” Frau Hagan said this as if it were a challenge to the devil. “I am kapo of Jewish women prisoners. Because I understand Yiddish, of course. Not everyone in this camp is Jewish, you know. There are Christian Poles, Russians, Latvians, Estonians, Gypsies, Ukrainians . . . even Germans. More Communists, too. A whole world behind an electric fence.”

Frau Hagan frowned again at Benjamin Jansen. “I came over to tell you the facts of life — camp life — before your ignorance gets you and others killed.”

Rachel nodded quickly. “We appreciate your kindness.”

Frau Hagan snorted. “The first thing I tell you is this: whatever you were outside, forget it. The sooner the better. The higher up the ladder you were, the harder it will be for you to get used to the camp. What were you? What did your husband do?”

“He was a lawyer. A very good one.”

Frau Hagan turned up her heavy hands in mock despair. “You see? That’s terrible. Another spoiled princess.”

“My father was a carpenter,” Rachel added quickly.

“That’s a little better. I was a washerwoman on the outside. A maid to a German businessman’s family. Yet here I am Block Leader.”

“That’s very impressive,” Rachel said carefully.

Frau Hagan stared at Rachel, trying to see if she was being made fun of. She decided she wasn’t. “Now, the badges. Your children are wearing the plain yellow star. Jood . That means Jew in Dutch, eh? Some language. Well, a Jew is a Jew, no matter what the letters. Yellow triangles mark them all. But there are other colors, you’ll see. People here have been brought from many camps, but in general the badges are based on the Auschwitz system. Knowing the badge colors can mean life or death for you here.”

Rachel looked down at the cloth badge sewn onto the left breast of her tunic. It was made of two triangles, one superimposed upon the other to form the Star of David. The top triangle, which was red and pointed up, bore a large “N” on its center. Beneath this was a bright yellow triangle pointing down.

“The red triangle,” Frau Hagan explained, “means Political Prisoner. It’s nothing to do with anything you’ve done, it’s just a convenient tag for the Germans. They think they have to label everything in sight or it doesn’t exist. The big capital letter marks your country of origin. Same with all foreigners. Yours is ‘N’ for Netherlands, see? Mine is ‘P’.”

“I see.”