Death in Twilight (29 page)

He smiled ruefully, cut into the slice of pink flesh, brought it to his lips with trepidation and chewed with a slight queasiness that was generated by five thousand years of ancestors turning uncomfortably in their graves.

Eh
, he thought.
A little salty
.

As he swallowed he laughed a bit to himself, causing Lucja to give him a strange glance.

His laugh died down to a smile. His hostess continued to clean things, and in a short while his meal was finished.

“Delicious,” he said. “Like everything you’ve served me.”

Lucja blushed again.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I doubt it’s very hard to please a starving man.”

Aaron didn’t argue the point.

So, he sat and drank tea while she cleaned, and neither of them said a word for nearly an hour. Then both heard the truck springs creaking down the long lane that led to the house.

Tadeusz opened the door, stamped his boots and looked slightly surprised to see Aaron outside of the basement. He said nothing about it, though. Instead, he motioned that it was time to go.

Aaron nodded. He was ready. There was nothing for him to pack. As far as he knew, he had no possessions at all. He imagined the clothes now on his back must have belonged to the farmer at some point, or perhaps a son. He walked over to Lucja, and — to her pleased embarrassment — kissed her on the cheek and embraced her firmly.

“Thank you,” he said.

They were all the words he had.

Tadeusz held open the door and Aaron headed into the cold. He was climbing into the truck when Lucja ran out of the house.

“Wait. One second,” she shouted. She was carrying a winter coat with a scarf tucked into a pocket, as well as a haversack. She presented them to Aaron.

“We had to burn your clothes,” she said. “The moths have had this coat for a long time, but it’ll have to do.”

Aaron thanked her again, knowing he was completely undeserving of any of the couple’s kindnesses.

He shrugged into the coat. Inside the haversack were sandwiches and also Stefan Kaczynski’s papers.

Aaron closed the door of the truck. There was a final wave good-bye. The trusty rust bucket was reluctant to fall into gear but, with some softly spoken curses, it was subdued. Tadeusz said the drive would take about three hours.

Aaron fell back to sleep almost immediately.

Chapter 19

T
adeusz’s pickup carefully navigated through a warren of small, industrial buildings on the outskirts of Miasto. It was dark because it was night, but Aaron suspected there was so much soot in the air that it would have been the same with the sun high over the horizon. Even now, a few of the factories were up and running, smoke belching from rooftops, undoubtedly producing items the Nazis wanted.

Aaron thought of the workers inside and wondered how many of them were Jewish slaves like he’d been so recently. Were they eating any better than he had? Were the guards any less sadistic? Would all of them go back to their homes and their loved ones after the night’s work was over?

He hoped it would all be so, but believed in none of it.

“I can’t take you any farther,” Tadeusz said. “We’ve been lucky so far with checkpoints, but I can’t imagine that lasting much longer. You’ll have to find your own way into the city.”

“I understand. I agree that we’ve been very, very lucky so far,” Aaron said. “I’ve been much luckier than you, though. I don’t have words to thank you, and I don’t know what I can do … ”

“Kill one of those fucking Nazi bastards for me,” Tadeusz said with surprising vehemence. “If you’re really all that grateful, kill two! Kill a dozen!

“That’s what you can do for me.”

Aaron nodded solemnly.

“We’ll be more than even then,” Tadeusz said. His smile wasn’t very nice at all.

Aaron picked up his haversack. It was lighter than it had been only three hours before. One of the sandwiches had proved irresistible, despite the ham at its center.

As he left the car, Aaron felt a strength that he hadn’t for a very long time, caused by purpose as much as by rest and food.

He closed the door behind him and offered a quick wave that wasn’t returned. The pickup was already on its way out of Miasto, probably back to the farm. Aaron faced into the city and took his first steps toward home.

It was only then that Aaron realized he hadn’t had a cigarette in many days. He shrugged to himself and realized that torture and starvation were a sure way to kick the habit, though he wouldn’t recommend it as a course of treatment.

His plan, as far as he had one, was to head straight to Yelena’s apartment. Even if she wasn’t there, it was an area he knew well and where he could hope to gather information rather than the attention of the authorities.

He judged that he was less than five miles from where he needed to be. The only obstacle he foresaw was the Miasto River, which he needed to cross. The Germans would be watching the bridges, which provided a natural choke point, making it easy to monitor the whole town’s movements.

Aaron’s eyes were now perfectly adjusted to the dimness, but he could still see little. The factory windows were all blacked out and there were no streetlights. Everything was shadows and outlines. As he walked past the chain-link fences and barbed wire than protected the factories, he tried to use his ears as much as his eyes. There would be patrols, complete with dogs, to safeguard whatever it was that the factories were making and to prevent any of the workers from escaping.

One dark block, another.

A sound from up ahead. Drunken laughter.

He could hear the men getting closer. They certainly weren’t trying for subtlety.

Aaron was alongside a fence that protected nothing more than a vacant lot, and therefore wasn’t in great repair. He reached down to see if he could lift it from the bottom and felt some give. A little more, he thought, just a little more.

I’m thin enough, this should hardly be an issue
, he thought.
I should be able to squeeze through anywhere
.

But when the fence was barely six centimeters off the ground, he couldn’t lift it any further. There was no way to burrow under it. He’d have to rely on Stefan Kaczynski’s paperwork again to see him through. At least it was dark enough that the photo would be hard to make out, Aaron thought.

Rather than wait for the patrol to come to him, Aaron decided he would walk to them. Perhaps if he walked like a man who had every right to be on the streets, they wouldn’t even stop him.

Sure
.

Louder and louder — and drunker and drunker from what Aaron could tell — but now they were close enough for him to realize the jokes were in Polish, not German. That didn’t mean he was safe. After all, many Poles who traced their ancestry back to Germany had joined the Blue Police or even the SS itself. Still, Aaron felt himself relax the least little bit.

Finally, Aaron was able to see the men fairly clearly. They weren’t moving fast and what little light that had escaped from one of the factories was enough to present them in fair detail.

They were Poles. They looked like they had come off shift at one of the factories and were on their way to or from a bar. From their state, Aaron guessed it was from.

So, he picked up his pace further and walked past the men, on the opposite side of the empty street. He didn’t look at them, just kept moving, his eyes down. A turn around the corner, and they would be gone. Aaron felt eyes on his back.

Then he heard the words, “Too good to drink with us?”

He kept walking and hoped the man wouldn’t feel the need to follow up on his dig.

One breath. Two breaths. One step. Ten steps.

Nothing.

Aaron felt his muscles pop as the tension eased. The Poles were back in their world and he was alone again in his.

Within a quiet hour, he was in sight of the bridge he needed to cross. The neighborhoods that surrounded it were bathed in light from street lamps and a sliver of newly risen moon.

The illumination showed him that, as he’d feared, checkpoints had been set up at either end of the bridge, complete with sandbags and soldiers. Aaron wasn’t thrilled with any of his choices for getting past.

He could present his papers and brave it out, but Aaron was loath to put himself in the hands of German soldiers again, especially alone and at night. He would try it only as a last resort.

All he needed to do now was think of other resorts.

Swimming was out of the question. The river wasn’t wide, but it was cold and the current strong. His coat would instantly become waterlogged, dragging him toward the bottom. Even if he made it across, he’d have no way to warm himself again.

A boat? The problem there was that he’d have to find one to steal and then take it across the river unobserved. Besides, he knew little about boats and had trouble believing he’d be able to make the trip silently.

That left only one option that Aaron could think of, and he wasn’t fond of it.

Below the level of the street, a quay ran along both sides of the river. It met up with the foundation of the bridge, which was constructed of brick and ornamented stone. As a child, Aaron and a few of his friends would climb up and try to make it across the bridge by scaling its outer wall. They used only the handholds unintentionally created by the architect in designing its elaborate façade. It was possible — though not likely — that Aaron could get across using the same method now.

There were a couple of facts that discouraged Aaron:

First, when he’d played there as a boy, it had been midsummer and the water was warm. Since the bridge wasn’t particularly high, the price for falling was mainly embarrassment. That and a bath his mother would have made him take in the evening anyway.

Second, he’d never made it across. He’d seen it done by others, but he’d always had trouble finding his next handhold. He’d had the courage but not the coordination he needed. After he’d endured enough laughter, he’d gone on to other things.

Aaron stood for a while, hoping a workable fourth option would come into his mind. It didn’t.

He’d have to try the circus act, he decided. Without a net.

Shit
.

In order to approach the bridge, he first had to get farther away, walking far enough from the guard posts to climb down to the quay without being seen. He walked briskly and in the shadows, pausing in doorways to make sure the next little patch of road was safe.

It took ten minutes to walk three hundred yards, but Aaron was able to find a spot where there were no lampposts to give him away as he climbed down the embankment. There he removed his boots, tied their laces together and strung them around his neck. The quay was stone and he wanted to make no sound as he neared the bridge.

The walk back was faster, even though each step was precisely calculated before Aaron took it. The light was uniformly dim on the quay and there was no sign of anyone else. Aaron assumed it was now long past curfew on the Aryan side of Miasto, though he had no watch to confirm it.

The bridge loomed ahead, a single span no more than one hundred meters long, built where the river was narrowest.

How hard could it be?
Aaron asked himself.

Every sense in his body and his powers of reason had a single answer to that:
Very
.

No matter how revived he felt now that he’d eaten and slept, four days was barely a start on his recovery. When he’d tried to cross the bridge like a circus performer as a teen, he’d been something of an athlete, always strong, if not particularly agile.

Aaron shook his head. He decided to be done with doubt because he had to be. He’d made it to the bridge without drawing attention, now it was time to climb. He’d heard of a little lizard once that walked up walls and even on ceilings. A gecko?

Be a gecko
, he told himself, and reached up with a hand, finding a space in between the bricks. He was then able to lodge his foot a little less than a meter off the ground. He pulled with the hand and pushed with the foot and found himself a little closer to his goal. As he reached around for the next foothold, he realized his decision to remove his boots was helping him to get and keep a grip. He’d always had long toes, showing off for friends by picking things up and throwing them with his feet.

He made better progress than he’d expected and, when he next reached up, he felt the stone carving of an ancient king’s crest. The sculpted relief was deep enough to give Aaron a chance to rest and see where he was.

He’d climbed level with the bottom of the roadway, making it time to start the trip out over open water. He could hear it running below him and it wasn’t enticing. Aaron paused for a long minute. He didn’t want to let go of the — what was it? — dove he was holding and take the next step into space. He felt the cold of the water enveloping him, even though it was still far below.

Fuck it
, he thought, and stepped sideways on faith.

His long, cold toes found a chink in the bridge’s armor that allowed him to take another step. He worked slowly, feeling his way. What had been a mere hundred-meter span when seen from the ground was clearly more than a kilometer long from where Aaron stood.

But perhaps because he was more careful as an adult than he’d been as a child, or because he had so little bulk to carry, he came close to death only once as he inched his way across.

When he had only ten meters left to go, a solid handhold metamorphosed into a chunk of ice looking to break free from the wall. His toes became his savior, keeping their grip just long enough for Aaron to fall forward and find a new gap to jam a hand into.

On the far side, Aaron climbed down as quietly as he’d crossed, jumping the final half-meter and absorbing the force with his knees. There was no sign that anyone had noticed his act of lunacy. He heard nothing from the guards.

For a fleeting moment, Aaron wished his school friends had been able to see his feat. As far as he knew, no one had ever made the trip in the dark — certainly not in the dark in the winter. Aaron could now claim bragging rights for all time.