Daniel Silva GABRIEL ALLON Novels 1-4 (168 page)

“There was a building here, was there not?”

“It was made up to look like an ordinary stationhouse, but in fact it was filled with valuables that had been taken from previous arrivals. That section over there they referred to as Station Square. Over there was Reception Square, or the Sorting Square.”

“Did you ever see the transports arrive?”

“I had nothing to do with that sort of business, but yes, I saw them arrive.”

“There were two different arrival procedures? One for Jews from western Europe, and another for Jews from the east?”

“Yes, that’s correct. Western European Jews were treated with great deception and fakery. There were no whips, no shouting. They were asked politely to disembark the train. Medical personnel in white uniforms were waiting in Reception Square to care for the infirm.”

“It was all a ruse, though. The old and the sick were taken off immediately and shot.”

He nodded.

“And the eastern Jews? How were they greeted at the platform?”

“They were met by Ukrainian whips.”

“And then?”

Radek raised the flashlight and followed the beam a short distance across the clearing.

“There was a barbed-wire enclosure here. Behind the wire were two buildings. One was the disrobing barracks. In the second building, work Jews cut the hair off the women. When they were finished, they went that way.” Radek used the flashlight to illuminate the path. “There was a passage here, rather like a cattle chute, a few feet wide, barbed wire and pine branches. It was called the tube.”

“But the SS had a special name for it, didn’t they?”

Radek nodded. “They called it the Road to Heaven.”

“And where did the Road to Heaven lead?”

Radek raised the beam of his light. “The upper camp,” he said. “The death camp.”

THEY WALKED FORWARD into a large clearing strewn with hundreds of boulders, each stone representing a Jewish community destroyed at Treblinka. The largest stone bore the name Warsaw. Gabriel looked beyond the stones, toward the sky in the east. It was beginning to grow faintly lighter.

“The Road to Heaven led directly into a brick building housing the gas chambers,” Radek said, breaking the silence. He seemed suddenly eager to talk. “Each chamber was four meters by four meters. Initially, there were only three, but they soon discovered that they needed more capacity to keep up with demand. Ten more were added. A diesel engine pumped car bon monoxide fumes into the chambers. Asphyxiation resulted in less than thirty minutes. After that, the bodies were removed.”

“What was done to them?”

“For several months, they were buried out there, in large pits. But very quickly, the pits overflowed, and the decomposition of the bodies contaminated the camp.”

“Which is when you arrived?”

“Not immediately. Treblinka was the fourth camp on our list. We cleaned the pits at Birkenau first, then Belzec and Sobibor. We didn’t get to Treblinka until March of 1943. When I arrived…” His voice trailed off. “Terrible.”

“What did you do?”

“We opened the pits, of course, and removed the bodies.”

“By hand?”

He shook his head. “We had a mechanical shovel. It made the work go much faster.”

“The claw, isn’t that what you called it?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And after the bodies were removed?”

“They were incinerated on large iron racks.”

“You had a special name for the racks, did you not?”

“Roasts,” Radek said. “We called them roasts.”

“And after the bodies were burned?”

“We crushed the bones and reburied them in the pits or carted them off to the Bug and dumped them in the river.”

“And when the old pits were all emptied?”

“After that, the bodies were taken straight from the gas chambers to the roasts. It worked that way until October of that year, when the camp was shut down and all traces of it were obliterated. It operated for a little more than a year.”

“And yet they still managed to murder eight hundred thousand.”

“Not eight hundred thousand.”

“How many then?”

“More than a million. That’s quite a thing, isn’t it? More than a million people, in a tiny place like this, in the middle of a Polish forest.”

GABRIEL TOOK BACK the flashlight and drew his Beretta. He prodded Radek forward. They walked along a footpath, through the field of stones. Zalman and Navot remained behind in the upper camp. Gabriel could hear the sound of Oded’s footsteps in the gravel behind him.

“Congratulations, Radek. Because of you, it’s only a symbolic cemetery.”

“Are you going to kill me now? Have I not told you what you wanted to hear?”

Gabriel pushed him along the path. “You may take a certain pride in this place, but for us, it is sacred ground. Do you really think I would pollute it with your blood?”

“Then what is the point of this? Why did you bring me here?”

“You needed to see it one more time. You needed to visit the scene of the crime to refresh your memory and prepare for your upcoming testimony. That’s how you’re going to save your son the humiliation of having a man like you as a father. You’re going to come back to Israel and pay for your crimes.”

“It wasn’t
my
crime! I didn’t kill them! I just did what Müller ordered me to do. I cleaned up the mess!”

“You did your fair share of killing, Radek. Remember your little game with Max Klein in Birkenau? And what about the death march? You were there too, weren’t you, Radek?”

Radek slowed and turned his head. Gabriel gave him a push between the shoulder blades. They came to a large, rectangular depression where the cremation pit had been. It was filled now with pieces of black basalt.

“Kill me now, damn it! Don’t take me to Israel! Just do it now, and get it over with. Besides, that’s what you’re good at, isn’t it, Allon?”

“Not here,” Gabriel said. “Not in this place. You don’t deserve to even set foot here, let alone die here.”

Radek fell to his knees before the pit.

“And if I agree to come with you? What fate awaits me?”

“The truth awaits you, Radek. You’ll stand before the Israeli people and confess your crimes. Your role in
Aktion
1005. The murders of prisoners at Birkenau. The killings you carried out during the death march from Birkenau. Do you even remember the girls you murdered, Radek?”

Radek’s head twisted round. “How do you—”

Gabriel cut him off. “You won’t face trial for your crimes, but you’ll spend the rest of your life behind bars. While you’re in prison, you’ll work with a team of Holocaust scholars from Yad Vashem to compile a thorough history of
Aktion
1005. You’ll tell the deniers and the doubters exactly what you did to conceal the greatest case of mass murder in history. You’ll tell the truth for the first time in your life.”

“Whose truth, yours or mine?”

“There’s only one truth, Radek. Treblinka is the truth.”

“And what do I get in return?”

“More than you deserve,” Gabriel said. “We’ll say nothing about Metzler’s dubious parentage.”

“You’re willing to stomach an Austrian chancellor of the far right in order to get to me?”

“Something tells me Peter Metzler is going to become a great friend of Israel and the Jews. He’ll want to do nothing to anger us. After all, we’ll hold the keys to his destruction long after you’re dead.”

“How did you convince the Americans to betray me? Blackmail, I suppose—that’s the Jewish way. But there must have been more. Surely you vowed that you would never give me an opportunity to discuss my affiliation with Organization Gehlen or the CIA. I suppose your dedication to the truth goes only so far.”

“Give me your answer, Radek.”

“How can I trust you, a Jew, to live up to your end of the bargain?”

“Have you been reading
Der Stürmer
again? You’ll trust me because you have no other choice.”

“And what good will it do? Will it bring back even one person who died in this place?”

“No,” Gabriel conceded, “but the world will know the truth, and you’ll spend the last years of your life where you belong. Take the deal, Radek. Take it for your son. Think of it as one last escape.”

“It won’t stay secret forever. Someday, the truth of this affair will come out.”

“Eventually,” Gabriel said. “I suppose you can’t hide the truth forever.”

Radek’s head pivoted slowly around and he stared at Gabriel contemptuously. “If you were a real man, you’d do it yourself.” He managed a mocking smile. “As for the truth, no one cared while this place was in operation, and no one will care now.”

He turned and looked into the pit. Gabriel pocketed the Beretta and walked away. Oded, Zalman, and Navot stood motionless on the footpath behind him. Gabriel brushed past them without a word and headed down through the camp to the rail platform. Before turning into the trees, he paused briefly to look over his shoulder and saw Radek, clinging to the arm of Oded, rising slowly to his feet.

PART FOUR

The Prisoner of Abu Kabir

39

JAFFA, ISRAEL

T
HERE WAS CONSIDERABLE debate over where to put him. Lev thought him a security risk and wanted him kept permanently under Office care. Shamron, as usual, took the opposite position, if for no other reason than he did not want his beloved service in the business of running jails. The prime minister, only half-jokingly, suggested that Radek be force-marched into the Negev to be picked over by the scorpions and the vultures. It was Gabriel, eventually, who carried the day. The worst punishment for a man like Radek, Gabriel argued, was to be treated like a common criminal. They searched for a suitable place to lock him away and settled on a police detention facility, originally built by the British during the Mandate, in a seedy quarter of Jaffa still known by its Arab name, Abu Kabir.

A period of seventy-two hours passed before Radek’s capture was made public. The prime minister’s communiqué was terse and deliberately misleading. Great care was taken to avoid needlessly embarrassing the Austrians. Radek, the prime minister said, was discovered living under a false identity in an unspecified country. After a period of negotiation, he had consented to come to Israel voluntarily. Under the terms of the agreement, he would not face trial, since, under Israeli law, the only possible sentence was death. Instead he would remain under permanent administrative detention and would effectively “plead guilty” to his crimes against humanity by working with a team of historians at Yad Vashem and Hebrew University to produce a definitive history of
Aktion
1005.

There was little fanfare and none of the excitement that accompanied news of Eichmann’s kidnapping. Indeed, word of Radek’s capture was overshadowed within hours by a suicide bomber who murdered twenty-five people in a Jerusalem market. Lev derived a certain crude satisfaction from the development, for it seemed to prove his point that the State had more important things to worry about than chasing down old Nazis. He began referring to the affair as “Shamron’s folly,” though he quickly found himself out of step with the rank and file of his own service. Within King Saul Boulevard, Radek’s capture seemed to rekindle old fires. Lev adjusted his stance to meet the prevailing mood, but it was too late. Everyone knew that Radek’s apprehension had been engineered by the
Memuneh
and Gabriel, and that Lev had tried to block it at every turn. Lev’s standing among the foot soldiers fell to dangerously low levels.

The half-hearted attempt to keep secret Radek’s Austrian identity was undone by the videotape of his arrival at Abu Kabir. The Vienna press quickly and correctly identified the prisoner as Ludwig Vogel, an Austrian businessman of some note. Did he truly agree to leave Vienna voluntarily? Or was he in fact kidnapped from his fortresslike home in the First District? In the days that followed, the newspapers were filled with speculative accounts of Vogel’s mystifying career and political connections. The press investigations strayed perilously close to Peter Metzler. Renate Hoffmann of the Coalition for a Better Austria called for an official inquiry into the affair and suggested that Radek may have been linked to the bombing of Wartime Claims and Inquiries and the mysterious death of an elderly Jew named Max Klein. Her demands fell largely on deaf ears. The bombing was the work of Islamic terrorists, the government said. And as for the unfortunate death of Max Klein, it was a suicide. Further investigation, said the minister of justice, was pointless.

The next chapter in the Radek affair would take place not in Vienna but in Paris, where a mossy former KGB man popped up on French television to suggest Radek was Moscow’s man in Vienna. A former Stasi spymaster who’d become something of a literary sensation in the new Germany laid claim to Radek as well. Shamron first suspected the claims were part of a coordinated campaign of disinformation designed to inoculate the CIA from the Radek virus—which is exactly how he would have played it had he been in their shoes. Then he learned that inside the Agency, the suggestions that Radek may have been plying his trade on both sides of the street had caused something of a panic. Files were being hauled out of the deep freeze; a team of elderly Soviet hands was being hastily assembled. Shamron secretly reveled in the anxiety of his colleagues from Langley. Were it to turn out that Radek was a double agent, Shamron said, it would be profoundly just. Adrian Carter requested permission to put Radek under the lights when the Israeli historians were finished with him. Shamron promised to give the matter thorough consideration.