Greg Iles - Black Cross

“The patient?” Anna said.

Brandt’s face suddenly came alive, like a still picture shocked into motion. “The patient expired, Nurse Kaas. Cardiac arrest, I’m afraid. The shock was too much for her.”

He took a step toward her. “It was you who clamped the femoral artery?”

Anna nodded hesitantly.

“You know that is not within your professional competency.” Brandt gave her a mechanical smile. “Still, it was a good job. Initiative is to be encouraged. You might have saved her.”

If you hadn’t killed her! Anna screamed silently. But she said nothing. She simply watched him turn and walk across the Appellplatz toward his quarters.

She went back into the hospital. Greta was cleaning the surgery. The blood-soaked blanket now covered the gypsy woman’s face. On the tray beside her corpse lay the syringe and a half-empty vial.

Anna picked it up and read the label: PHENOL.

Brandt had injected carbolic acid directly into the woman’s heart muscle, causing an agonizing death that had probably lasted one or two minutes. It was his favorite method of “elimination,” as he called it.

“He murdered her,” Anna said in a monotone.

Greta looked up and stared as if Anna were mad.

“We’re nurses, Greta. Aren’t we?”

Greta Müller looked away. She seemed caught between anger and compassion. Finally she said, “Politics. I don’t understand it. I’m just a country girl. The Führer says the Jews and the gypsies are an infection. You have to kill an infection to save the host. The host body is the nation. I understand that principle. Many of our greatest physicians have endorsed it. Even Sauerbruch.”

Anna shook her head hopelessly.

“But I don’t understand one thing,” Greta said.

“What?”

The little nurse pulled back the blanket and pointed at the mutilated throat. “This one. She would have died anyway.”

“What are you saying, Greta?”

The nurse shrugged and pulled the blanket back over the corpse’s face. “Sometimes in life it is necessary to do difficult things. But it is not necessary to like it.”

Rachel sat rigidly in a back corner of the Jewish Women’s Block, hugging Jan and Hannah to her chest. Frau Hagan stood across the block, watching the Appellplatz through the crack in the door. Every block veteran believed a reprisal was imminent.

Rachel knew nothing about reprisals. She had not been in camp long enough to experience one. Some women had been hissing that the SS should kill every gypsy in the camp, since it was a gypsy who had gone after Brandt. What madness. Madness when fear could pit good people against a woman whose only crime was trying to exact justice from her son’s murderer. If Brandt had violated Jan, Rachel knew, she would have done the same, and probably suffered the same fate.

She prayed that the gypsy woman was dead. To be torn to pieces by dogs! She shuddered. She could not keep waiting for Schörner to ask why she was not eating the food he was sending her. She had hoped by her fasting to convince him that fear for her children’s safety was driving her toward starvation, and that by offering protection he could bring her willingly and in good health to his bed.

But she could wait no longer. Brandt might decide in the next five minutes that he wanted Jan to replace the gypsy boy in his quarters. He could order a selection and take both of her children to the meningitis ward. No, she would simply have to go to Schörner’s office today and try to baldly bargain with him. He could have what he wanted. Frau Hagan could call it collaboration — she had no children to protect. To Rachel, only one thing mattered. On the day the Allied armies finally arrived — Russians, Americans, she didn’t care who — they would find Rachel Jansen at the gate of Totenhausen with her two children in her arms.

Alive.

23

As it happened, Rachel did not have to steel herself to walk into Major Schörner’s office and ask to speak to him. Fifteen minutes after the gypsy woman died, Schörner sent Weitz to the block with orders to bring Rachel to him.

Her first response was panic. Had Schörner grown tired of waiting and decided to punish her?

“The Pole will take care of your brats,” Weitz muttered as he pulled Rachel across the Appellplatz. “I think that bitch is in love with you.”

At Schörner’s office, they walked right past the clerk and into the major’s presence. Schörner sat behind his desk, his face clean-shaven today, his tunic buttoned to the throat. He dismissed Weitz and opened his mouth to speak, but Rachel started first.

“A moment please, Sturmbannführer! May I ask you a question?”

Schörner looked discomfited by her directness. “Go ahead, then.”

“It is a difficult question, Herr Sturmbannführer.”

“I’m not squeamish.”

Rachel concentrated on speaking perfect German. “Are you a man of your word, Sturmbannführer? A man of honor?”

Rather than explode with indignation as Rachel had feared, Schörner leaned back in his chair and regarded her with interest. He chose to answer her question with a question of his own.

“Do you know what honor is, Frau Jansen? I will tell you. When our armies marched into Athens, a German officer ordered a Greek soldier to strike the Greek flag from the Acropolis. The Greek took down the flag, wrapped himself in it and stepped off the parapet. He plunged to his death. That is honor.”

Schörner sniffed and looked toward his office window. “Do you think Sturm and his men know anything of honor?”

Always Sergeant Sturm, Rachel thought. Why do they hate each other so much? Why does a major trouble himself about a sergeant?

“If the Russians overran this camp tomorrow,” Schörner said, “Sturm would kiss the ass of the first private through the gate and offer to sell him a watch.”

“And you, Sturmbannführer?”

Schörner steepled his fingers and gazed into Rachel’s eyes. “Only the day of action can answer that question. But I can tell you this. My word is my life.”

“I am glad to know that, Sturmbannführer. Because I have a favor to ask of you.”

Schörner’s eyelids lowered a little. “A favor?”

“You have asked something of me. I wonder if I might ask something from you?”

“I see. What is it?”

Rachel felt her words slipping away. She had rehearsed them all the way across the Appellplatz, but to stand here like a beggar and offer to trade herself . . . it was too difficult.

“Speak!” Schörner demanded, coming to his feet. “What is the matter with you? Weitz tells me you refuse to eat any of your food. I go to great trouble to send that to you! The other prisoners endure the same hardships as you, yet they have no trouble eating. In fact they gobble their food like swine.”

Rachel felt the floodgates burst. “It is my children, Sturmbannführer! My son! I’m worried that—” Her throat closed involuntarily. If Schörner perceived Jan as an obstacle to sexual congress with her, might not he simply order the boy taken to the E-Block and—

“Out with it, woman!” Schörner shouted.

Rachel could think of nothing but the truth. “Sometimes . . . sometimes children disappear here, Sturmbannführer.”

This statement took Schörner completely aback. He stood motionless for a few seconds. Then he walked to the door and made sure it was completely closed. “You’re speaking of Herr Doktor Brandt, of course,” he said in a low voice.

Rachel nodded quickly.

Schörner sighed. “The commandant has . . . a problem, it is true,” he said softly. “A weakness. As a man and a German officer, I despise him. However, I tolerate him. Not because he is my superior, but for one very simple reason. He is competent. In fact, he is probably a genius. Can you understand? Brandt is not like Mengele and the other quacks they call doctors at Auschwitz. Brandt was educated at Heidelberg, and then at Kiel as a medical doctor. He was a senior chemist with Farben for a while, after which he moved into pure research. He worked with Gebhardt Schräder himself.” Schörner rubbed his chin, as if mulling over how much to reveal. “Research is what he is doing here. Farben provides him with equipment and materials. And what he is working on, Frau Jansen, well . . . never mind. I have forgotten myself in the presence of a beautiful woman.” He looked Rachel from head to toe. “You have some sort of accommodation in mind, I take it.”