The Keep Read online

  The Dardanelles. He had been through here before, but never during a war, and never at full speed in the dark. The starlit water was a gray expanse ahead of him, the coast a dark smudge to the left and right. He was in one of the narrowest sections of the strait where it funneled down to a mile across. Even at its widest it never exceeded four miles. He traveled by compass and by instinct, without running lights, in a limbo of darkness.

  No telling what he might run into in these waters. The radio said Greece had fallen; that might or might not be true. There could be Germans in the Dardanelles now, or British or Russians. He had to avoid them all. This journey had not been planned; he had no papers to explain his presence. And time was against him. He needed every knot the engines could manage.

  Once into the wider Sea of Marmara twenty miles ahead, he’d have maneuvering room and would run as far as his fuel would take him. When that got low, he would beach the boat and move overland to the Black Sea. It would cost him precious time, but there was no other way. Even if he had the fuel, he could not risk running the Bosporus. There the Russians would be thick as flies around a corpse.

  He pushed on the throttles to see if he could coax any more speed from the engines. He couldn’t.

  He wished he had wings.

  EIGHT

  BUCHAREST, ROMANIA

  Monday, 28 April

  0950 hours

  Magda held her mandolin with practiced ease, the pick oscillating rapidly in her right hand, the fingers of her left traveling up and down the neck, hopping from string to string, from fret to fret. Her eyes concentrated on a sheet of handwritten music: one of the prettiest Gypsy melodies she had yet committed to paper.

  She sat within a brightly painted wagon on the outskirts of Bucharest. The interior was cramped, the living space further reduced by shelves full of exotic herbs and spices on every wall, by brightly colored pillows stuffed into every corner, by lamps and strings of garlic hanging from the low ceiling. Her legs were crossed to support the mandolin, but even then her gray woolen skirt barely cleared her ankles. A bulky gray sweater that buttoned in the front covered a simple white blouse. A tattered scarf hid the brown of her hair. But the drabness of her clothing could not steal the glow from her eyes, or the color from her cheeks.

  Magda let herself drift into the music. It took her away for a while, away from a world that became increasingly hostile to her with each new day. They were out there: the ones who hated Jews. They had robbed her father of his position at the university, ordered the two of them out of their lifelong home, removed her king—not that King Carol had ever deserved her loyalty, but still, he had been the king—and replaced him with General Antonescu and the Iron Guard. But no one could take away her music.

  “Is that right?” she asked when the last note had echoed away, leaving the interior of the wagon quiet again.

  The old woman sitting on the far side of the tiny round oak table smiled, crinkling up the dark skin around her black Gypsy eyes. “Almost. But the middle goes like this.”

  The woman placed a well-shuffled deck of checker-backed cards on the table and picked up a wooden naiou. Looking like a wizened Pan as she placed the pipes to her lips, she began to blow. Magda played along until she heard her own notes go sour, then she changed the notations on her sheet.

  “That’s it, I guess,” she said, gathering her papers into a pile with a small sense of satisfaction. “Thank you so much, Josefa.”

  The old woman held out her hand. “Here. Let me see.”

  Magda handed her the sheet and watched as the old woman’s gaze darted back and forth across the page. Josefa was the phuri dai, the wise woman of this particular tribe of Gypsies. Papa had often spoken of how beautiful she had once been; but her skin was weathered now, her raven hair thickly streaked with silver, her body shrunken. Nothing wrong with her mind, though.

  “So this is my song.” Josefa did not read music.

  “Yes. Preserved forever.”

  The old woman handed it back. “But I won’t play it this way forever. This is the way I like to play it now. Next month I may decide to change something. I’ve already changed it many times over the years.”

  Magda nodded as she placed the sheet with the others in her folder. She had known Gypsy music to be largely improvised before she had started her collection. That was to be expected—Gypsy life was largely improvised, with no home other than a wagon, no written language, nothing at all to pin them down. Perhaps that was what drove her to try to capture some of their vitality and cage it on a music staff, to preserve it for the future.

  “It will do for now,” Magda replied. “Maybe next year I’ll see what you’ve added.”

  “Won’t the book be published by then?”

  Magda felt a pang. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not?”

  Magda busied herself with putting her mandolin away, not wishing to answer but unable to dodge the question gracefully. She did not look up as she spoke.

  “I have to find a new publisher.”

  “What happened to the old one?”

  Magda kept her eyes down. She was embarrassed. It had been one of the most painful moments in her life, learning that her publisher was reneging on their agreement. She still stung from it.

  “He changed his mind. Said this was not the right time for a compendium of Romanian Gypsy music.”

  “Especially by a Jewess,” Josefa added.

  Magda looked up sharply, then down again. How true.

  “Perhaps.” She felt a lump form in her throat. She didn’t want to talk about this. “How’s business?”

  “Terrible.” Josefa shrugged as she set the naiou aside and picked up her tarot deck again. She was dressed in the mismatched, cast-off clothes common to Gypsies: flowered blouse, striped skirt, calico kerchief. A dizzying array of colors and patterns. Her fingers, as if acting of their own volition, began shuffling the deck. “I only see a few of the old regulars for readings these days. No new trade since they made me take the sign down.”

  Magda had noted that this morning as she had approached the wagon. The sign over the rear door that had read “Doamna Josefa: Fortunes Told” was gone, as was the palmar diagram in the left window and the cabalistic symbol in the right. She had heard that all Gypsy tribes had been ordered by the Iron Guard to stay right where they were and to “deal no fraud” to the citizens.

  “So, Gypsies are out of favor, too?”

  “We Rom are always out of favor, no matter the time or place. We are used to it. But you Jews…” She clucked and shook her head. “We hear things…terrible things from Poland.”

  “We hear them, too,” Magda said, suppressing a shudder. “But we are also used to being out of favor.”

  At least some of us are. Not her. She would never get used to it.

  “Going to get worse, I fear,” Josefa said.

  “The Rom may fare no better.”

  Magda realized she was being hostile but couldn’t help it. The world had become a frightening place and her only defense of late had been denial. The things she had heard couldn’t be true, not about the Jews, or about what was happening to Gypsies in the rural regions—tales of round-ups by the Iron Guard, forced sterilizations, then slave labor. It had to be wild rumor, scare stories. And yet, with all the terrible things that had indeed been happening…

  “I do not worry,” Josefa said. “Cut a Gypsy into ten pieces and you have not killed him; you have only made ten Gypsies.”

  Magda was quite certain that under similar circumstances you would be left only with a dead Jew. Again she tried to change the subject.

  “Is that a tarot deck?” She knew perfectly well it was.

  Josefa nodded. “You wish a fortune?”

  “No. I really don’t believe in any of that.”

  “To tell the truth, many times I do not believe in it either. Mostly the cards say nothing because there is really nothing to say. So we improvise, just as we do in music. And what harm is there in i
t? I don’t do the hokkane baro; I just tell the gadjé girls that they are going to find a wonderful man soon, and the gadjé men that their business ventures will soon be bearing fruit. No harm.”

  “And no fortune.”

  Josefa lifted her narrow shoulders. “Sometimes the tarot reveals. Want to try?”

  “No. Thank you, but no.” She didn’t want to know what the future held. She had a feeling it could only be bad.

  “Please. A gift from me.”

  Magda hesitated. She didn’t want to offend Josefa. And after all, hadn’t the old woman just told her that the deck usually told nothing? Maybe she would make up a nice fantasy for her.

  “Oh, all right.”

  Josefa extended the pack of cards across the table.

  “Cut.”

  Magda separated the top half and lifted it off. Josefa slipped this under the remainder of the deck and began to deal, talking as her hands worked.

  “How is your father?”

  “Not well, I’m afraid. He can hardly stand now.”

  “Such a shame. Not often you can find a gadjé who knows how to rokker. Yoska’s bear did not help his rheumatism?”

  Magda shook her head. “No. And it’s not just rheumatism he has. It’s much worse.”

  Papa had tried anything and everything to halt the progressive twisting and gnarling of his limbs, going even so far as to allow Josefa’s grandson’s trained bear to walk on his back, a venerable Gypsy therapy that had proven as useless as all the latest “miracles” of modem medicine.

  “A good man,” Josefa said, clucking. “It’s wrong that a man who knows so much about this land must…be kept…from seeing it…anymore…” She frowned as her voice trailed off.

  “What’s the matter?” Magda asked. Josefa’s troubled expression as she looked down at the cards spread out on the table made Magda uneasy. “Are you all right?”

  “Hmmm? Oh, yes. I’m fine. It’s just these cards…”

  “Something wrong?”

  Magda refused to believe that cards could tell the future any more than could the entrails of a dead bird, yet a pocket of tense anticipation formed under her sternum.

  “It’s the way they divide. I’ve never seen anything like it. The neutral cards are scattered, but the cards that can be read as good are all on the right here”—she moved her hand over the area in question—“and the bad or evil cards are all over on the left. Odd.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. Let me ask Yoska.” She called her grandson’s name over her shoulder, then turned back to Magda. “Yoska is very good with the tarot. He’s watched me since he was a boy.”

  A darkly handsome young man in his mid twenties with a porcelain smile and a muscular build stepped in from the front room of the wagon and nodded to Magda, his black eyes lingering on her. Magda looked away, feeling naked despite her heavy clothing. He was younger than she, but that had never intimidated him. He had made his desires known on a number of occasions in the past. She had rebuffed him.

  He looked down at the table to where his grandmother was pointing. Deep furrows formed slowly in his smooth brow as he studied the cards. He was quiet a long time, then appeared to come to a decision.

  “Shuffle, cut, and deal again,” he said.

  Josefa nodded agreement and the routine was repeated, this time with no small talk. Despite her skepticism, Magda found herself leaning forward and watching the cards as they were placed on the table one by one. She knew nothing of tarot and would have to rely solely on the interpretation of her hostess and her grandson. When she looked up at their faces, she knew something was not right.

  “What do you think, Yoska?” the old woman said in a low voice.

  “I don’t know…such a concentration of good and evil…and such a clear division between them.”

  Magda swallowed. Her mouth was dry. “You mean it came out the same? Twice in a row?”

  “Yes,” Josefa said. “Except that the sides are different. The good is now on the left and the evil is on the right.” She looked up. “That would indicate a choice. A grave choice.”

  Anger suddenly drove out Magda’s growing unease. They were playing some sort of a game with her. She refused to be anyone’s fool.

  “I think I’d better go.” She grabbed her folder and mandolin case and rose to her feet. “I’m not some naive gadjé girl you can have fun with.”

  “No! Please, once more!” The old Gypsy woman reached for her hand.

  “Sorry, but I really must be going.”

  She hurried for the rear door of the wagon, realizing she wasn’t being fair to Josefa, but leaving all the same. Those grotesque cards with their strange figures, and the awed, puzzled expression on the faces of the two Gypsies filled her with a desperate urge to be out of the wagon. She wanted to be back in Bucharest, back to sharp, clear lines and firm pavements.

  NINE

  THE KEEP

  Monday, 28 April

  1910 hours

  The snakes had arrived.

  SS men, especially officers, reminded Woermann of snakes. SS-Sturmbannführer Erich Kaempffer was no exception.

  Woermann would always remember an evening a few years before the war when a local Hohere SS und Polizeiführer—the high-sounding name for a local chief of state police—held a reception in the Rathenow district. Captain Woermann, as a decorated officer in the German Army and a prominent local citizen, had been invited. He hadn’t wanted to go, but Helga so seldom had a chance to attend a fancy official reception, and she glowed so when she dressed up that he hadn’t had the heart to refuse.

  Against one wall of the reception hall had stood a glass terrarium in which a three-foot snake coiled and uncoiled incessantly. It was the host’s favorite pet. He kept it hungry. On three separate occasions during the evening he invited all the guests to watch as he threw a toad to the snake. A passing glance during the first feeding had sufficed for Woermann—he saw the toad halfway along its slow, headfirst journey down the snake’s gullet, still alive, its legs kicking frantically in a vain attempt to free itself.

  The sight had served to make a dull evening grim. When he and Helga had passed the tank on their way out, Woermann saw that the snake was still hungry, still winding around the inside of the cage, looking for a fourth toad despite the three swellings along its length.

  He thought of that snake as he watched Kaempffer wind around the front room of Woermann’s quarters, from the door, around the easel, around the desk, to the window, then back again. Except for his brown shirt, Kaempffer was clad entirely in black—black jacket, black breeches, black tie, black leather belt, black holster, and black jackboots. The silver death’s-head insignia, the SS paired thunderbolts, and his officer’s pins were the only bright spots on his uniform…glittering scales on a poisonous, blond-headed serpent.

  He noticed that Kaempffer had aged somewhat since their chance meeting in Berlin two years ago.

  But not as much as I, Woermann thought grimly.

  The SS major, although two years older than Woermann, was slimmer and therefore looked younger. Kaempffer’s blond hair was full and straight and still unmarred by gray. A picture of Aryan perfection.

  “I noticed you only brought one squad with you,” Woermann said. “The message said two. Personally, I’d have thought you’d bring a regiment.”

  “No, Klaus,” Kaempffer said in a condescending tone as he wound about the room. “A single squad would be more than enough to handle this so-called problem of yours. My einsatzkommandos are rather proficient in taking care of this sort of thing. I brought two squads because this is merely a stop along my way.”

  “Where’s the other squad? Picking daisies?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.” Kaempffer’s smile was not a nice thing to see.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Woermann asked.

  Kaempffer removed his cap and coat, threw them on Woermann’s desk, then went to the window overlooking the village.
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  “In a minute, you shall see.”

  Reluctantly, Woermann joined the SS man at the window. Kaempffer had arrived only twenty minutes ago and already was usurping command. With his extermination squad in tow, he had driven across the causeway without a second’s hesitation. Woermann had found himself wishing the supports had weakened during the past week. No such luck. The major’s jeep and the truck behind it had made it safely across. After debarking and telling Sergeant Oster—Woermann’s Sergeant Oster—to see that the einsatzkommandos were well quartered immediately, he had paraded into Woermann’s suite with his right arm flailing a “Heil Hitler” and the attitude of a messiah.

  “Seems you’ve come quite a way since the Great War,” Woermann said as they watched the quiet, darkened village together. “The SS seems to suit you.”

  “I prefer the SS to the regular army, if that’s what you’re implying. Far more efficient.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “I’ll show you how efficiency solves problems, Klaus. And solving problems eventually wins wars.” He pointed out the window. “Look.”

  Woermann saw nothing at first, then noticed some movement at the edge of the village. A group of people. As they approached the causeway, the group lengthened into a parade: ten village locals stumbling before the proddings of the second squad of einsatzkommandos.

  Woermann felt a wave of shock and dismay, even though he should have expected something like this.

  “Are you insane? Those are Romanian citizens! We’re in an ally state!”

  “German soldiers have been killed by one or more Romanian citizens. And it’s highly unlikely General Antonescu will raise much of a fuss with the Reich over the deaths of a few country bumpkins.”

  “Killing them will accomplish nothing!”

  “Oh, I’ve no intention of killing them right away. But they’ll make excellent hostages. Word has been spread through the village that if one more German soldier dies, all those ten locals will be shot immediately. And ten more will be shot every time another German is killed. This will continue until either the murders stop or we run out of villagers.”