tattoo number. You know what that means? I am less than zero. I helped build that stinking place. I was a kapo there, a good one. I saw a lot of Dutch, and they never lasted long. Especially the women. They couldn’t accept the change. They never bathed, never ate. I hope you’re different, Dutch girl. At Auschwitz the Dutch women became musselmen after only two weeks.”
“What is a musselman?”
“A bag of bones, princess. A bag of bones that doesn’t care if it eats anymore. A walking corpse.”
“But I have seen no one like that here!”
“I told you, this camp is different. They didn’t bring you here to work you to death. They brought you here to work on you.”
“But what can you mean?”
Frau Hagan glanced at the children. “You’ll find out soon enough.” The big Pole placed both hands on her wide hips. “Do you understand these things I’ve told you?”
Rachel nodded uncertainly.
“Rations in two hours. Guard your shoes, spoon, and cup with your life. Keep your children’s things yourself. Eat your bread as soon as you get it. Your stomach is the best safe against thieves.” She grabbed Ben Jansen by the collar. “Out you go!”
Rachel watched in amazement as the Block Leader hauled the old man to the barracks door and shoved him out into the snow. She darted to the doorway. As her father-in-law plodded toward the Jewish Men’s Block, she heard a rapid shuffling behind her. When she turned, she saw Frau Hagan passing out small sausages from the parcel Nurse Kaas had brought. The Pole met her starved gaze, but did not offer her a sausage.
Rachel turned away. She felt sure that a diamond would buy a few sausages for Jan and Hannah. But they were not starving yet. She would have to use the stones more wisely than that. With luck, they might last through the war. She wondered what the shoemaker would say if he knew that when he found her hiding in the shadows by the fence, she had not been sneaking out to the Appellplatz to search for the lost diamonds, but sneaking back. It had been a frightful risk to leave Jan and Hannah while she searched, but the three diamonds she had found—plus the two the shoemaker had given her—made five, and she had no regrets. Clearly, life inside the camp functioned on the same principle as life outside: economics.
She had told her father-in-law nothing about the diamonds, and she never would. He had proved last night that he was no judge of when to expend his treasure. He had been desperate, of course, but Rachel was sure that the diamonds could not have saved Marcus from the selection. Bribery was not a public business. She would need allies to survive, and she would choose them very carefully. Someone like the shoemaker, perhaps, or even Frau Hagan. The Block Leader would soon learn how far a Dutchwoman would go to survive.
As she walked across the floor toward her children, Rachel kept her genital muscles flexed. It was probably not necessary, but she had no experience in such things. She would walk that way until she knew the diamonds were as secure as if locked inside a vault. She might not yet know how best to spend them, but she would have them to spend when the time came.
Jonas Stern lay on a threadbare mattress and stared sullenly at the stained ceiling of his jail cell. It had been five days since he and Brigadier Duff Smith drove to Oxford to speak with the American doctor, and Stern had spent four of those in a cell. Where the hell was Smith? After McConnell refused the brigadier’s request, Smith had driven Stern back to London and dropped him at a rooming house run by “some good friends of mine.” Stern soon realized that Smith’s “good friends” were off-duty London policemen. But evading British police had become second nature to him in Palestine, and the London variety proved no more adept at surveillance than their Middle Eastern cousins.
Stern had passed most of that first day in various London pubs, where he ran into more than his share of American soldiers. With Allied troops massing for the invasion, GIs were thick on the ground. It wasn’t long before Stern began trying to take out his anger at McConnell on the nearest Americans to hand. He survived one brawl in Shoreditch without serious damage. Then he ran into a squad of marines outside the entrance to the Strand Palace Hotel bar. The liquored-up gyrenes did not take kindly to being called pacifistic dilettantes, especially by a suntanned civilian with a German accent. The military police found Stern lying flat on his back with two glowing shiners and the fragments of a chair scattered around him.
He had awakened in jail with ribs so bruised he could barely breathe, and a new American slang term added to his growing list. Shitbird. He railed at his jailers to call Brigadier Smith—and they claimed they had—but the Scotsman never showed up. Either the police were lying, Stern decided, or else he was precisely where the brigadier wanted him. Yesterday he had used Peter Owen’s handcuff key to unlock his manacles and attempt an escape, but the coppers had been ready. That escapade had caused his transfer to his current accommodations.
His body jerked at the harsh clang of metal against metal.
“Shove yer bucket through the bars and make it quick!” barked a jailer. “If you spill any, you’ll clean it up wiv your shirt!”
Stern rolled over and faced the stone wall. He couldn’t decide whom he hated more, Brigadier Smith or Doctor Mark McConnell.
At that moment McConnell was going over some notes in his laboratory in Oxford. When the telephone rang he tried to ignore it, but the caller was persistent. McConnell glanced at his watch. Ten P.M. Perhaps it was Mrs. Craig, the woman of the house he billeted in, offering him a late supper. He picked up the phone.
“Yes?”
“Yeah, hey,” said a male voice with a Brooklyn accent. “Is this Dr. McConnell?”
“Yes.”
“I need to see you, Doc. I got a problem.”
“Excuse me, I think you have the wrong number. I’m a medical doctor, but I don’t see patients. I’m associated with the university.”
“Right,” said the caller. “You’re the one I want. I been patched up pretty good already. It’s something else. I really need to see you.”
McConnell wondered who in God’s name had recommended him to a man with mental problems. “I’m afraid I’m not a psychiatrist either. I can recommend a good man in London, though.”
The voice on the phone grew agitated. “You got it all wrong, Doc. It’s you I need to see. Not a sawbones or a head-shrinker.”
“Who is this?” McConnell asked, bewildered. “Do I know you?”
“Nah. But I knew your brother.”
“You knew David?” McConnell felt his heart thump. “What’s your name?”
“Captain Pascal Randazzo. Dave just called me Wop, though. I was his copilot on Shady Lady.”
McConnell’s heart rate was still rising. A member of David’s crew had survived? “Where are you, Captain?” he asked excitedly.
“Right here. Oxford.”
“My God. How did you get out of Germany? Do you have word of David?”
