“That they were going to kill the Krauts.”

Rachel sat very still.

“Why should killing Nazis bother him?” Hawkins asked.

“Listen, if it were up to me, I’d’ve peeled their skin off slowly, slowly. They’d’ve died over and over again if I had my way. Burnt up,” he laughed, “boiled, broiled, sliced, ground up . . .” He searched for horrors. “I’d’ve sandpapered them to death!” He laughed again, clapped his hands, then he subsided and patted Roger’s knee. “But we’re not supposed to feel like that. Until they sent Jacob to Belzec, he was religious . . . which is, according to some, that you don’t kill. There’re Jews who say we were that close to the Messiah because we suffered so much and that when we killed for Zion we lost Him. I’m not one of them, mind you. Kill the bastards is what I say. Keep what we’ve won, no matter what it costs, I say, because I know what it means not to have a place to hide and I know everybody’ll kill everybody if they have half a reason. Forgive me, but the blacks’d kill the Jews if they could, wouldn’t they?”

Hawkins didn’t answer.

“Of course they would.” He patted Hawkins’s knee again as if to reassure him. “Jacob could have been the exception but they ruined him.”

“Who ruined him?” Hawkins asked. “Luria? the Nazis?”

“All of them,” Relkin said sadly.

Hawkins said, “So Levy failed the test and they killed the Nazis?”

“Yes.”

“But the guards had machine guns and the Jews were unarmed.”

“Yes.”

“How did they kill them then, Mr. Relkin?”

“I don’t know.”

Hawkins leaned closer to Relkin. “What do you mean you don’t know? You were there, you had to know.”

“But I didn’t. I only saw what was left,” Relkin said. He seemed to be enjoying himself and he leaned toward Hawkins too.

“What was left?” Hawkins asked.

“Blood and clay,” Relkin said softly, “just like in Brooklyn and Laurel.”

Hawkins sat back slowly.

“Tell me, Mr. Relkin.”

Relkin said, “They bought wood from the kapos. Kapos were Jew guards. They did it to stay alive, but I heard later, to my delight, that the Nazis killed them in the end, too.

“The men used the wood to make a long, wide box and they stood it on end in the back corner of the barracks. I thought they were hiding guns in it, or grenades, but when they killed the guards I didn’t hear shots or explosions.

“You didn’t see what they were doing?”

“No, they put Danny and me into a trunk and put something heavy on top. Maybe someone sat on it . . .”

“How did they know when the guards were coming?”

“They set it up.”

“How?” Rachel asked.

“Dworkin strangled one of the kapos.”