A Death in Vienna
security checks this time, no line of traffic, just a hand poking from the brick bunker, waving them across the frontier.
Gabriel crawled to the back of the van and pulled Radek from the compartment. Then he opened a storage drawer and removed a syringe. This time it was filled with a mild dosing of stimulant, just enough to raise him gently back to the surface of consciousness. Gabriel inserted the needle into Radek’s arm, injected the drug, then removed the needle and swabbed the wound with alcohol. Radek’s eyes opened slowly. He surveyed his surroundings for a moment before settling on Gabriel’s face.
“Allon?” he murmured through the oxygen mask.
Gabriel nodded slowly.
“Where are you taking me?”
Gabriel said nothing.
“Am I going to die?” he asked, but before Gabriel could answer, he slipped below the surface once more.
37
EASTERN POLAND
THE BARRIER BETWEENconsciousness and coma was like a stage curtain, through which he could pass at will. How many times he slipped through this curtain he did not know. Time, like his old life, was lost to him. His beautiful house in Vienna seemed another man’s house, in another man’s city. Something had happened when he’d shouted out his real name at the Israelis. Ludwig Vogel was a stranger to him now, an acquaintance whom he had not seen in many years. He was Radek again. Unfortunately, time had not been kind to him. The towering, beautiful man in black was now imprisoned in a weak, failing body.
The Jew had placed him on the foldout bed. His hands and ankles were bound by thick silver packing tape, and he was belted into place like a mental patient. His wrists served as the portal between his two worlds. He had only to twist them at a certain angle, so that the tape dug painfully into his skin, and he would pass through the curtain from a dreamscape to the realm of the real. Dreams? Is it proper to call such visions dreams? No, they were too accurate, too telling. They were memories, over which he had no control, only the power to interrupt them for a few moments by hurting himself with the Jew’s packing tape.
His face was near the window, and the glass was unobstructed. He was able, when he was awake, to see the endless black countryside and the dreary, darkened villages. He was also able to read the road signs. He did not need the signs to know where he was. Once, in another lifetime, he had ruled the night in this land. He remembered this road: Dachnow, Zukow, Narol. . . . He knew the name of the next village, even before it slid past his window:Belzec . . .
He closed his eyes. Why now, after so many years? After the war, no one had been terribly interested in a mere SD officer who had served in the Ukraine—no one but the Russians, of course—and by the time his name surfaced in connection with the Final Solution, General Gehlen had arranged for his escape and disappearance. His old life was safely behind him. He had been forgiven by God and his Church and even by his enemies, who had greedily availed themselves of his services when they too felt threatened by Jewish-Bolshevism. The governments soon lost interest in prosecuting the so-called war criminals, and the amateurs like Wiesenthal focused on the big fish like Eichmann and Mengele, unwittingly helping smaller fish like himself find sanctuary in sheltered waters. There had been one serious scare. In the mid-seventies, an American journalist, a Jew, of course, had come to Vienna and asked too many questions. On the road leading south from Salzburg he had plunged into a ravine, and the threat was eliminated. He had acted without hesitation then. Perhaps he should have hurled Max Klein into a ravine at the first sign of trouble. He’d noticed him that day at the Café Central, as well as the days that followed. His instincts had told him Klein was trouble. He’d hesitated. Then Klein had taken his story to the Jew Lavon, and it was too late.
He passed through the curtain again. He was in Berlin, sitting in the office of Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo. Müller is scraping a bit of lunch from his teeth and waving a letter he’d just received from Luther in the Foreign Office. It is 1942.
“It seems that rumors of our activities in the east have started to reach the ears of our enemies. We’ve also got a problem with one of the sites in the Warthegau region. Complaints about contamination of some kind.”
“If I may ask the obvious question, Herr
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