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Back The One from the Other
Chapters (50)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. ONE
  7. TWO
  8. THREE
  9. FOUR
  10. FIVE
  11. SIX
  12. SEVEN
  13. EIGHT
  14. NINE
  15. TEN
  16. ELEVEN
  17. TWELVE
  18. THIRTEEN
  19. FOURTEEN
  20. FIFTEEN
  21. SIXTEEN
  22. SEVENTEEN
  23. EIGHTEEN
  24. NINETEEN
  25. TWENTY
  26. TWENTY-ONE
  27. TWENTY-TWO
  28. TWENTY-THREE
  29. TWENTY-FOUR
  30. TWENTY-FIVE
  31. TWENTY-SIX
  32. TWENTY-SEVEN
  33. TWENTY-EIGHT
  34. TWENTY-NINE
  35. THIRTY
  36. THIRTY-ONE
  37. THIRTY-TWO
  38. THIRTY-THREE
  39. THIRTY-FOUR
  40. THIRTY-FIVE
  41. THIRTY-SIX
  42. THIRTY-SEVEN
  43. THIRTY-EIGHT
  44. THIRTY-NINE
  45. FORTY
  46. FORTY-ONE
  47. FORTY-TWO
  48. EPILOGUE
  49. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  50. Teaser chapter

I looked again at her case notes. Mistakenly booked into the hospital as a single woman, and wrongly described as mentally retarded, it had been assumed that no one would really miss her. There was no mention of me. Only that she had been transferred to the General Hospital, where she had “succumbed” to the disease. “Succumbed.” They made it sound like she had just gotten tired and gone to sleep, instead of having died. As if they didn’t know the one from the other any more than they knew that I had been this poor woman’s husband. Otherwise they would surely have recorded my name in their damned file.

I closed my eyes. Not fleas or bed lice at all. But mosquito bites. And the insect that had bitten me during one visit to the Max Planck? A single escaped mosquito, perhaps? Perhaps that explained the so-called pneumonia I had caught following my beating at the hands of Jacobs’s friends in the ODESSA. Perhaps it had not been pneumonia at all. Perhaps it had been a mild dose of malaria. Henkell wouldn’t have been able to tell the one from the other. There was no reason at all for him to have suspected that my own fever had an “entomological vector,” as they called it, any more than there was reason for him to have known that Kirsten Handlöser was my wife. Not under those circumstances. Which was probably just as well. They might have given me Sporovax.

This put a very different complexion on things. Involving the police looked much too unpredictable now. I needed to know that these men would be properly punished for their crimes. And to know that for sure I would have to punish them myself. Suddenly it had become much easier to understand those Jewish avenger squads. The Nakam. What kind of punishment was a few years in prison for men who had committed such disgusting crimes? Men like Dr. Franz Six from the Jewish Department at the SD. The man who, back in September 1937, had sent me to Palestine. Or Israel, as we now had to call it. I had no idea what had happened to Paul Begelmann, the Jew whose money Six coveted. But I remembered seeing Six again, in Smolensk, where he had commanded a Special Action Group that had massacred seventeen thousand people. And for this he had received a sentence of just twenty years. If the new federal government of Germany had its way, he would be out on parole before he’d served even a quarter of that sentence. Five years for murdering seventeen thousand Jews. No wonder the Israelis felt obliged to murder these men.