Styx & Stone (35 page)

He jumped, and his hand reached for the upper-left corner of his chest, just where the tattoo was branded into his skin, then he pulled it away quickly.

“What are you implying?” he asked. “That I am not a Jew? What am I if you deny me my identity?”

I stared coldly into his burning eyes. “You, Professor, are a
Schutzstaffel
. A former SS man.”

“Ridiculous,” he said, though not very convincingly.

“I couldn’t figure it out until this morning,” I said. “The tattoo on your wrist kept derailing me. But then I realized your mistake: you took Gualtieri Bruchner’s number. It suddenly became clear that you had never been an inmate, or Jewish, because you didn’t have a number of your own on your wrist.”

“No,” he turned away slowly, facing the wet, gray window.

“Then I decided my brilliant father deserved more credit than I had been giving him. He suspected the tattoo on your chest from the moment he saw it in the steam bath. He knew what was underneath.”

“You are as delusional as your father, Miss Stone.”

“SS men often had themselves tattooed with twin lightning bolts, isn’t that right?”

He said nothing.

“What is your real name?”

Bruchner rubbed his tired eyes with the heels of his palms, drawing a deep sigh. “My name is Gualtieri Bruchner.”

“Officially, yes. You have a passport, a driver’s license, and a library card. I may never find out your true name, but I’m sure Immigration and the State Department will be interested just the same.”

“But you have no proof!”

“Enough for an investigation, and the truth will come out. The government is particular about letting ex-Nazis into the country. With you and Caronte Bruchner claiming the same identity, they’ll want to know who’s who.”

“Since you believe I killed Ruggero Ercolano, and tried to kill your father, aren’t you afraid I will kill you too?”

“The thought crossed my mind,” I said.

Bruchner sat down—collapsed into a chair was more like it. He hung his head low, chin nearly touching his chest. His thin fingers drew imaginary circles absently on the table before him. We sat silently for several minutes, as I let him think about the power I held over him. One phone call to Immigration, or even the Italian Embassy, would set the wheels in motion, and in the end, the good professor would be deported or worse.

“You may think this tattoo was once two lightning bolts, but that’s not true,” he said finally. “Not all SS men were tattooed, and I . . . already had a tattoo there:
viel geliebt Katia
.”

Had he just admitted he was SS?

“My name was Gustav Emmel,” he said suddenly, his voice weak, eyes bone dry. “I was born in 1910 in Sillian, Austria, in the southern Tirol, just on the border with Italy. There were Italians in our town, and my mother was from Udine, in the Friuli on the Italian side. I learned Italian as a child, imperfectly, from my mother and her family. We traveled frequently to Friuli and even as far as Venice. My father, you see, was a builder. His father, and his father before, had been masons and bricklayers.” He paused to wipe his brow, which had boiled up a sheen of perspiration. “My mother’s family were early supporters of the
Camicie Nere
, the Blackshirts, in Italy. When I was in school, Mussolini was greatly admired, revered in our home. And then . . .” Bruchner shifted in his seat, let his head fall backward over his shoulders, and he stared at the ceiling for a moment.

“The
Anschluss
?” I prompted.

He nodded slowly and continued his narration. “Had I been born Italian, I would have joined the Fascists. In Austria, it was the
Heimwehr
, and I joined a few years before the
Anschluss
. When Austria became part of Germany, I saw a greater opportunity. The country was alive, burning with excitement for the future. I wanted to be part of that future, of a pan-Germanic revolution and renaissance in Europe. I believed in the words,
Deutschland über Alles
. So, at twenty-eight years of age, I joined the
Schutzstaffel
.”

Bruchner looked at me for the first time since he’d begun his statement, his expression humble, his shoulders drooping. I wondered if he wanted absolution from me, as if my forgiveness would erase the sins from his forehead.

“And the war?”

He looked away again, perhaps speechless before a Jew as he catalogued his past. “I was in Poland at the beginning, a radioman in a Panzer division. Then, because of my back, I was sent home for convalescence, where I stayed for several months. When my health improved, I was assigned to
Funkmesstechnik
—radar. But then the camps in the East were ready to become operational. For some reason, maybe because I had been in Poland, maybe because I had lost some hearing in my left ear, they decided I was not to be a radar technician, and they sent me east as a guard at Auschwitz.”

“Did they brief you about what you were going to do?”

The gray man before me thought for a long moment before answering. “We understood what was to happen, but there was no option to protest. It’s not like here. You don’t understand that. One did as they said, or one faced death.”

“How did you feel about it? Did the idea of murdering hundreds of thousands, millions, bother you?”

“Of course it did,” he muttered. “I had no choice. I did not wish to be there. It was hell, I can tell you that, for us too.”

“You’re pushing the limits of my sympathy,” I said. “Three of my cousins were gassed at Auschwitz.”

“I am truly sorry, Miss Stone,” he said, almost pleading. “I pitied those poor Jews, dying as they did, stripped of their clothes, possessions, and dignity. Even in death, the affront was bestial: piles of bodies, roaring crematoria, body parts used for . . . It was infernal, Miss Stone. My descriptions cannot convey the horror of walls of naked corpses, stacked with less care than if they had been firewood.”

Bruchner’s eyes, burning like coals, stared out the window, his breathing becoming shorter as his voice gained strength from the disgust. His mouth twisted in revulsion at his memory.

“Near the end,” he continued, “as the Russians approached from the east, time became short. We stoked the ovens with the fury of Vulcan, burning flesh
ad nauseam
, literally. But the worst nightmare of all was when we had the work gangs dig up the mass graves that had been filled before the crematoria were in place. Those bodies had to be destroyed. No evidence could remain.”

He paused, head still, no movement besides the rise and fall of his strained breathing.

“But you carried out your orders,” I said. “It never became so inhuman that you said ‘Enough, these are men.’ You’re here today to bear witness to the horror, theirs and yours, but they’re gone, dead, exterminated like vermin.”

“Yes,” he said, looking at me, eyes sparkling now.

“Did you ever drop the gas in the chambers?”

He shook his head. “No, other men were assigned that duty. Always the same technicians.”

“What exactly was your job at the camp?”

He shrugged. “In the beginning I was with the work gangs in the mines nearby, but a relapse of my back problems ended that. From July 1944 until the Russians liberated the camp in late January ’45, I held a machine gun and drove the Jews from the train to the showers. I . . . ,” he wiped an eye, “I even closed the doors and . . . bolted them shut. Oh, the screams and the wailing . . .”

I couldn’t speak. My hostility had somehow vanished, supplanted by the horrible fascination of listening to an eyewitness to history. One, who, like Aeneas and Orpheus and Dante, had descended into the netherworld and come back out again. Indeed, Gualtieri Caronte Bruchner, too, had made the trip to hell and back. The professor—Emmel—continued:

“The showerheads were fakes,” he said, voice hoarse and tormented. “Once, one fell out of the wall. It was a length of pipe, sealed on one end, leading nowhere. The fraud was complete, right down to the counterfeit drain in the floor and the hooks for towels they would never need. In the ceiling, at the center of the chamber, was the trap. The technician would drop a cylinder of Zyklon-B—a pesticide—through the slot, then close the opening. The crystals reacted with the air, producing a fog of deadly gas. Then the screaming began, and lasted for as long as ten, twelve minutes, until the hardiest had succumbed to the poison. We waited thirty minutes more before opening the doors to be sure they were dead. They died like cockroaches; Zyklon-B.”

I swallowed back a dry mouth. “Then what?”

“We brought in the gangs to clear the bodies, to check for gold in the teeth, and then carry them to the crematoria. The bodies were still warm, their expressions still human. Men, women, and children in heaps, naked like the damned souls of hell. The incinerators’ smokestacks vomited black clouds, and the smoke billowed so thickly and smelled so bitter you could taste it on your tongue. It tasted like agony and perdition.”

As Emmel finished his sentence, he did the strangest thing: he reached into his breast pocket, retrieved a handkerchief, and wiped his flat tongue with it. Then he spat into it. Relief softened his rigid features after he’d expelled the taste.

“The so-called Final Solution was to be executed by the
Schutzstaffel
. With the debacle at Stalingrad in January 1943, the tide had turned, and the Jewish Question acquired more urgency, sometimes even at the expense of the war effort. As the Red Army pushed back our troops, we in the camps became more aware of the danger we faced. The crimes we had witnessed,” he paused to consider his words. Then he amended his statement: “The crimes we had committed would demand justice and punishment. We tried to destroy the evidence, even as we hurried to gas and burn thousands per day. It was a factory; we were specialists in extermination and disposal. We exhumed the old mass graves and stuffed the decayed corpses into the ovens.”

Again he spat into his handkerchief. I could see his eyes watering, but I wasn’t sure if he was crying or choking on the memory of human smoke.

“Did you know Gualtieri Bruchner?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, I never met him.”

“Then how did you come to take his name?”

“As the Russians approached in January 1945, I planned my escape. I stole a tattooing pen and ink from the registration office and hid them in my bunk. Later, when the Kommandant quit the camp and we received orders to destroy all evidence of our actions, we burned paper documents. I thought my best chance for escape was a new identity, non-German. Since I spoke Italian, I looked through the records of the Italians. Gualtieri Bruchner was the first northern Italian I found with a birth date close to mine. It was the night of January 25, two days before the Red Army reached the camp. I scratched Bruchner’s number into my arm and memorized his birth date. Then I destroyed his records. The next night, I moved to the other side.” He drew a deep breath, but didn’t seem to exhale. “I pulled the uniform off a prisoner who had dropped that afternoon on a work detail. His body was piled with the others, waiting for cremation. Then I crossed the camp to the women’s barracks, because I feared the male prisoners would recognize me. I passed two sentries on the way, but they let me pass because they knew me. Finally, I found an isolated spot where I stripped out of my uniform, buried it under the corner of one of the women’s barracks, and dressed in the prisoner’s filthy clothes. The lice began to bite immediately, as I was fresh and alive.” Emmel scratched his side, then his leg. A vestigial memory.

“I slipped inside the barracks,” he continued, “and begged the women not to turn me in to the guards. I told them the Russians were near, that the camp would be free by morning, and they hid me. The confusion was great at that time, and the only organized security was in the towers; no guards entered the barracks that night, nor the next morning. By noon, the Russians had arrived, and most of my old comrades were dead.”

“How did you get out?” I asked.

Emmel shrugged his shoulders, a bewildered fatigue on his face. “I wandered out the front gate with some other prisoners. Hungarian Jews, among the last to arrive. They were strong, like me, but we couldn’t communicate; I pretended not to know German. Four of us walked for three days, until a Russian patrol picked us up. They sent us south to a refugee camp. By May, when they shipped me to a displaced-persons camp in the British zone, no one would have doubted I was a deportee. I had lost twenty kilos, and I had tuberculosis, worms, and lice. The British sent me to Milan and helped me get new papers. There was never any question that I was not Gualtieri Bruchner.”

“And you started a new life,” I said.

He nodded and bowed his head, eyes dry again.

“But this story is not over,” I added, doing my best to put aside the inexplicable pity I felt for him. “Why don’t you tell me what happened the Friday night after your lunch with my father?”

Emmel looked up, perplexed, as if I had hit him in the ear with a spitball. “Tell you what?”

“You’ve come this far,” I said. “Why not clear your conscience of the rest?”

“Are you referring to your father again?”

I nodded.

“I told you that I did not harm him,” he said forcefully. “The last time I saw him, he had his hands around my throat in the Faculty Club dining room. I did not go to his apartment that night, and I did not hit him on the head. I did not leave this room that night. In fact, I did not even use the telephone!”

“Were you alone?”

“Of course I was alone,” he said, rising to his feet to pace the room. “I cannot prove I was here, if that is your next question, Miss Stone. But I was here and I never left. Why do you insist it was I who did this thing? Your father surely had other enemies. Or perhaps it was a robbery like so many that you have here in America. And Ruggero Ercolano, there is no shortage of spurned women or jealous husbands who might have wanted to kill him. Even Bernard Sanger. He was envious of Ercolano’s successes with Ruth Chalmers. And Luigi Lucchesi was his main rival for Hildy Jaspers’s affections.”