When the sounds died away, his objective had been achieved. All was now quiet—permanently.

He turned off his lantern, but stood a while longer beside his car, taking an occasional draw on the cigarette held carefully between thumb and forefinger.

As the smoke drifted out of mouth and nose, again he fell to reflection. Momentarily he held in the smoldering acerbity of his bitter disappointment over the rabbi and mentally surveyed the dimensions of his defeat. The sharp sunken cheeks and chiseled jaw shone eerily in the pale moonlight, portraying an accurately fearsome image of the soul of stone that resided somewhere beneath the leather trench coat he wore. To say it dwelt near his heart would convey altogether an inaccurate psychic proximity, for that he possessed what is commonly referred to as a heart was doubtful at all. If he had ever had a conscience, that watch hound of the now-frigid soul had not given him nearly enough trouble during the time of his life when it should have barked the loudest. Alas, as such spiritual dogs are prone to do when not heeded, it had now become silent as a statue.

He had not laid his hands on either the rabbi or the network contact whose name he had heard in Warsaw.

Yet, he could not help his thoughts going back to that one empty house from earlier in the evening. Perhaps his instincts at the time had served him faithfully, and the clue he sought was in those silent rooms after all.

There must be some connection!

If so, he would find it. If the man called Kropf had contacted the escape network, he would leave a trail, no matter how hard he tried to disguise his moves. He would have to have talked to someone. No one—Jew, Pole, Russian, or German—just disappeared without a trace.

Whatever that trace was, Emil Korsch vowed to himself, he would find it!

He would dig into every file—past and present—to locate where this fellow Luddoff might have left a footprint. He had been so intent on the rabbi he had given but casual notice to local regions through which he must pass.

How could he have been so blind! The path to the rabbi’s door would necessarily lead through streets and neighborhoods just like this one.

The place to begin was back at that empty house!

He would put a man on it for the rest of the night, then he himself would return in the morning, with the dogs. He would find someone who knew something.

He would infiltrate the network! He would find the miscreant Kropf. He would break the network.

He would chase them all over Poland, all over Europe if necessary. He would get his hands on the rabbi’s holy box if it took him the rest of the war!

66 The Network

66

The Network