“And then I would start screaming, and my grandmother would turn on the light and take me to her bed. It went on for years. I called him Mr. Leech. Because his skin…that black skin looked just like the engorged leeches we used to pick up in a nearby stream. Child psychiatrists looked at me and talked to me and called it ‘night terrors’ and gave me reasons not to believe in him, but…every night he came back. Every night I would sink under my pillows, hiding from him—but it was useless. I knew he was there, in the room…” Redfern grimaced. “We moved out some years later and my grandmother sold the armoire and I never saw it again. Never dreamed of it again.”

Eph had listened carefully. “You’ll have to excuse me, Captain…but what does this have to do with…?”

“I’m coming to that,” he said. “The only thing I remember between our descent and waking up here—is that he came back. In my dreams. I saw him again, this Mr. Leech…and he was smiling.”

Interlude II

INTERLUDE II

THE BURNING HOLE

HIS NIGHTMARES WERE ALWAYS THE SAME: ABRAHAM, OLD or young, naked and kneeling before the huge hole in the ground, the bodies burning below as a Nazi officer moved down the row of kneeling prisoners, shooting them in the back of the head.

The burning hole was behind the infirmary in the extermination camp known as Treblinka. Prisoners too sick or too old to work were taken through the white-painted barracks with a red cross painted on it, and into the hole they went. Young Abraham saw many die there, but he himself came close to it only once.

He tried to avoid notice, worked in silence, and kept to himself. Each morning he pricked his finger and smeared a drop of blood on each cheek in order to appear as healthy as possible at roll call.

He first saw the hole while repairing some shelving in the infirmary. At age sixteen, Abraham Setrakian was a yellow patch, a craftsman. He curried no favor; he was no one’s pet, merely a slave with a talent for woodwork that, in a death camp, was a talent for living. He had some value for the Nazi Hauptmann who used him without mercy, without regard, and without end. He raised barbed-wire fences, crafted a library set, repaired the railways. He carved elaborate pipes for the Ukrainian guard captain at Christmastime in ’42.

It was his hands that kept Abraham away from the hole. At dusk he could see its glow, and sometimes from his workshop the smell of flesh and petrol mixed with sawdust. As his fear took hold of his heart, so did the hole take residence there.