Greg Iles - Black Cross

“Yes, Sturmbannführer.”

“That would be fair, of course. But I must be honest. The simple fact is that I cannot protect your son. As commandant, Brandt has absolute authority over everyone here, including me.”

“But you are second only to him! And I have heard some people say that — well, that Brandt is afraid of you.”

Schörner laughed. “I can assure you that rumor is false.”

“Sturmbannführer, I think that a small gesture from you at the right moment might save my son, even my daughter.”

Schörner made a sound indicating great weariness. “Frau Jansen, I can only give you advice. Keep the boy out of the Appellplatz except during roll call. Make him look sick. Rub his skin with something to give him a rash. Give him lice. It won’t kill him, and it might save him. Make his skin look yellow, jaundiced.”

“But what about medical inspections? I’ve heard that they periodically remove the sick and . . .” She faltered.

“Eliminate them,” Schörner finished. “Sometimes they do, yes. SS doctors are bloodthirsty, even when working on their own brothers-in-arms. They would rather hack off a leg than try to save it for you.” Schörner’s right hand went to his eyepatch. “You would come to me tonight?”

“Sturmbannführer, please. Promise me you will try. For that . . . for that I could come.”

As Schörner’s eyes bore into hers, Rachel felt wretched and ridiculous. What was she offering? To have her body, the major had only to lock the door and bend her over his desk. She could not afford to scream, much less fight him. Yet that did not seem to be how he wanted things to happen.

“Perhaps,” Schörner said carefully, “I could help about the medical inspections. I could send word to you just beforehand. You could clean your boy up a bit, so that he wouldn’t be eliminated for sickness.”

Rachel put her hand over her mouth. “But then Dr. Brandt would see him up close and clean. He might decide he wants him for the medical experiments. Or for — you know what.”

Schörner threw up his hands. “There is only so much I can do! That is the system. I didn’t devise it. I am merely trapped inside it, as you are.”

Rachel let this remarkable statement pass unchallenged. But in a way, Schörner was right. He could only do so much to thwart the desires of his superior officer. It was a miracle he had offered even this much. Of course, he didn’t have to live up to his word. And he would probably grow tired of her after a few nights. Then what would she do?

“Frau Jansen!”

“I’m sorry, Sturmbannführer?”

“Come to your senses, please. We are agreed? You will come to my quarters tonight?”

Rachel felt the coldness of a crypt seeping out from her heart. “Tonight,” she said.

Naturally it was Weitz who escorted Rachel to Schörner’s quarters. The camp was dark, blacked-out to conceal it from Allied bombers. Once she was inside, the physical act happened quickly. The major had obviously been waiting at the door. She did not fully undress. She merely became bodiless for a few minutes, a mind that absorbed the inanimate environment around her. Cherry furniture, of which Schörner had a few nice pieces, scrounged from God knows where. A phonograph, an old gramophone that clicked steadily, insisting that the end of the record had been reached. A framed picture on the wall, the obligatory stern-faced father and mother, with Schörner in front in civilian clothes and a tall, smiling young man beside him in a Wehrmacht captain’s uniform. His older brother, of course. Also a little blond girl, smiling at the level of Schörner’s belt. There were other photos stuffed between a bureau mirror and its frame. A group of gray-uniformed men standing in deep snow, and beyond the snow a white haze of sky split by bare black trees. A pile of burning scrap metal behind the men materialized into a tank that would never move under its own power again. The men’s faces were grim, but every man was touching a comrade in some way, as if to reassure himself he was not alone on the great white plain.

Rachel had assumed that when Schörner finished she would be told to go back to the women’s block. Or at least allowed to go. But after she pulled on her underpants and rose from the couch, Schörner asked if she would stay a bit. She hesitated, wondering what he could want. Had he not satisfied himself? He looked quite at ease.

Schörner led her into his front room and bade her sit down in a wing chair. He poured some brandy, which Rachel left standing on the low table before her. Then Schörner simply looked at her. To Rachel the room seemed filled by a brittle silence. She did not feel particularly uncomfortable, or particularly comfortable either. She simply noticed that the major’s quarters, unlike the Jewish women’s block, did not stink of sweat and disinfectant and worse things. It smelled of leather and gun oil and faintly of cigars. While he sat there watching her, she wondered if she was a different person for what she had allowed him to do. She didn’t feel different. At least not any different from when she had walked in the door fifteen minutes earlier. But perhaps she was not thinking clearly, like a person who has had a limb torn off by a shell.

While Rachel sat thinking these things, Major Schörner began to talk. It struck her as quite odd, the things he said. He began by talking about the city of Cologne, how he missed it. And then about his older brother. He talked about hunting trips they had taken together as boys. He required no response from Rachel, only that she listen. She was glad he had not done all this talking before. Somehow she knew it would have been more difficult to block him out. To erase him as a person. After some time talking like this, he fell silent again. He studied Rachel with a wistful intensity so great that she suddenly realized she knew what he was thinking. This strange certainty gave her the courage to ask a question.

“Who is it that I remind you of, Sturmbannführer?”

Schörner answered effusively, as if during all his silence he had been waiting for her to ask this very thing. “A young Fräulein from my hometown. Cologne, as I told you. Her name was Erika. Erika Möser. We were sweethearts from a very young age, but no one knew it. She was the daughter of a rival banking family. You’ve read Shakespeare, I’m sure. It was the Montagues and the Capulets all over again. The coming of Hitler made things even worse for us. Unlike my father, Herr Möser openly condemned the Führer and anyone who supported him. He was an arrogant man — too powerful to eliminate — but Goebbels forced him out of the country in 1939. Erika stayed behind to wait for me.” Schörner swallowed and looked at the floor. “It was a mistake. She was killed in the British thousand-bomber raid of 1942.”

Rachel listened in amazement. It was all so unbelievable. One imagined SS officers to be monsters, sterile machines that obeyed orders to rape and massacre — not human beings who quaintly compared their childhood romances to Romeo and Juliet . Yet Schörner had killed many times, she was sure of it. At Totenhausen alone he had presided over the executions of hundreds, perhaps thousands of prisoners. And tonight he had pressured her into submitting to his will.

“You went to university?” Schörner asked suddenly.

“Yes. At Vrije. For two years only, though. I married before graduating.”

“But that is excellent! Now perhaps I can converse for a while in words not prescribed in the manual of orders. I told you I was at Oxford, didn’t I?”

Rachel could hardly believe he remembered, he had been so drunk. “Yes, Sturmbannführer. You said you were a paying student. Not a Rhodes scholar.”

Schörner laughed. “That’s right. My father wanted me to be the German Asquith. Strange, isn’t it?”