“You must give me a week,” he says.
Erich nods, takes the medicine for Vivi, and motions to leave.
“I should tell you that my wife said a stranger came in several days ago when I was collecting supplies,” says Elias suddenly. “She only just told me because she didn’t think it was important. The stranger asked her if there were any new faces in town. She said only his, and he thought that amusing.”
“Can I speak to her?”
“She isn’t here,” he says, looking briefly to the side of him. He is lying.
“Was he Russian?”
“He spoke German well, but she said there was an accent.”
“What did he look like?”
“Tall. Dark hair. She had not seen him before. He looked like a farmer, a laborer, and he wore a silver bracelet. She told him that he shouldn’t wear it. Criminals will cut off his hand before they ask him to hand it over.”
Erich says nothing. He waits for more because he can tell there is still something to come, and Elias is reluctant to speak, perhaps because he is afraid of Erich. Elias has heard things from others about the work he used to do.
“He also asked about a child. He said he had lost a small child with light-colored hair. He also asked if there are places for orphans. When he left, my wife said there was a little boy waiting for him outside.”
Erich feels the blood pumping hard through his body and coldness at the back of his neck, the same feeling he had when he returned to his home in the country for the last time. He is convinced more than ever now that the vehicles he saw earlier were coming for him.
“He sounds harmless,” says Elias, unconvincingly, his voice brittle and his expression blank and insincere. “I think his questions were harmless. I don’t think there was anything in it, but I thought I should mention it to you.”
“What else was he doing here?”
“He asked if we had any painkillers. She told him we did not. And then he left.”
Erich looks to the doorway behind him. He knows what he must do.
“I need something else from you.”
Elias looks over Erich’s shoulder to the street, wishes him gone.
He has turned, thinks Erich. He has become weak, afraid to fight, like so many others now.
“What is it?” Elias asks.
“A liquid opiate. Something stronger than before.”
1943–1944
Erich had located most of the remaining Jews hiding across Austria in the first few months of his commission. His work since had been to interrogate prisoners at camps, gleaning information about the location of other undesirables, and those who resisted the government. Though the travel was tiring, the position itself had become soft. He still held a small hope that he would be sent to war, to command one of the tanks his father had helped design. But he was convinced that his father had somehow thwarted his plans. That he had kept him away from the front lines.
“You are not a soldier, Erich,” said his father more recently, when Erich had put forward the suggestion. “You are merely an enforcer, who must do whatever he is told to do. You no longer have control over your own thoughts. But I can tell you it is not what I wanted for you.”
Monique made continual reminders to him to search for her father. Reminders of her continued quest to find him. Erich had not told her the truth. There were some things she didn’t need to know.
Upon various inquiries, Erich eventually received a list of detainees from a prison outside Vienna. It was a better prison than most, and he was taken directly to the holding cell. The place smelled of disinfectant, but it didn’t mask the smell of defecation. Some of the prisoners had taken to shitting on the floor in protest. They had been punished, their faces pummeled, their noses rubbed in their own excrement. As yet, Erich had not personally enacted such punishments at the larger camps he frequented. And at the end of a day of interrogations, his uniform never looked worn, the labor of the tasks assigned to someone else. But this visit was different. He was not here to interrogate, but merely to observe in a prison not manned by Hitler’s men.
The man he had come to see had been ill for some time, Erich was advised, as he was led to a cell that held a single prisoner. The air was warm, which only heightened the stench of bodily fluids along with the staleness of flesh and clothes that had not seen air and sun for many months. Many prisoners had been there for a long time, and Erich had to wonder why they weren’t just sent to the labor camps. This was something he would investigate further once more pressing tasks were done.
The man was lying on his side, eyes closed. Shriveled and gray, he looked around eighty, though he was much younger, and had somehow lasted ten years in such circumstances. He should have died by now, thought Erich, but the political prisoners here were treated better than most. He’d had connections. Monique at one time said that one of the fascists who had put him in prison had once been her father’s friend.
The prisoner was sallow and shrunken. He no longer resembled a human. Erich scanned the bleak gray walls of the cell, the inhabitant’s only vista, and the concrete floor, stained and streaked with matter. When he looked up, the man had one eye open, watching him. Erich paused a moment. He could have said something then. The words were there in his head, the words that might fill the wretch with a moment of peace, if his mind was not yet addled. But Erich walked away instead. If nothing else, he had satisfied his own curiosity.
Monique must never know. Erich needed his wife to do her duties, to not be distracted, and to remain a silent and loyal wife at least, even though it was a marriage of convenience only, as a favor to Georg. He and Monique were nothing alike, and their separations were probably the only thing they agreed upon. The air in their apartment was oppressive. He was glad to leave as often as he did, was pleased when he was called to Berlin for urgent talks.
The next months were spent busily interrogating people who had not been fully supportive of recent measures—of the treatment of Jews, of changed conditions—people who were not happy with the closure of certain venues and the abolishment of certain newspapers, and people who had their own ideas, which were no longer allowed. It was his job to counsel (code for threaten), to ensure compliance from those who were outspoken. And then there were the occasional resistance members who were caught in the mountain ranges between Italy and Austria. Who had taken to theft and minor sabotage but had not been, who Erich thought would never be, clever enough to commit the kind of deed that would overthrow the powers of Germany. As inconsequential as he thought they were, they were still annoying enough to waste his valuable time. They would need to be eliminated.
In the summer he and Monique had taken the train to Dresden and had access to a car to take them to the river house. He had not liked the idea of spending any extra time with her, but he was pleased to be seeing Georg again. Rosalind had been there, mousy as always, looking around her and watching Monique. He had seen the jealousy years earlier, as had Georg. He had been amused by it, Georg less so, more guarded on the subject. But the incident by the river houses had left an effect on Erich that would change the course of his life forever. It was something that would hang low, a gray cloud just above him; even at the crucial moment of interrogation, the memory of that night would attempt to scatter his otherwise arranged thoughts.