Promised Land Read online

Peter waited. Genscher broke the silence. “So you will give my name to the authorities. And when they arrest me, if they do, I will say I obeyed orders. I was an honest soldier for my country, which is the truth. And I will go home to my family. That is the worst that can happen to me.”

  “If that’s true, then I’m curious why you haven’t done that already,” Peter said. “Could this be why?”

  And fixing him with his eyes, Peter withdrew the next photo from the envelope, waiting for the Nazi’s reaction. He pulled out half a dozen more pictures and laid them on the bed, one next to the other, lined up like a firing squad.

  Genscher’s eyes widened, then he gasped. He seized one photo, then the next, and the next, looking at Peter with shock, and then back at the photos. They shook in his hands. He hurled them to the floor. He was trembling, and beneath the sheet his legs twitched.

  “You will be put to death,” Peter said. “Either by the courts or by the people.” He couldn’t blow his cover by saying aloud what he thought: Those who feed on Jews, choke on them.

  He gathered the evidence from the floor, and offered it to Genscher/Braun, who turned violently toward the wall, his whole body shaking. “It was so long ago,” he managed.

  “Oh, not so long. What, seven, eight years? Anyway, I doubt that matters in your case,” Peter said, sliding the photos one by one back into the envelope. “That is you here with the knife, isn’t it? And here, cutting the baby from the mother’s belly? She’s screaming, it appears. Who wouldn’t? It’s quite a series of photographs, don’t you think? Technically, very proficient. Well lit. And there are more, as you can see. The one with you laughing over the female corpse is particularly sharp and clear. With your boot on her naked breasts.” He tapped Genscher’s knee again with the knife. “These photos are your death warrant. But perhaps not yet. And maybe never, SS-Sturmbannführer Hans-Dieter Braun. But if you want to survive you must do what we want you to do.”

  PETER and ALIAS KARLA

  STUTTGART, GERMANY

  June 1950

  Günther Steinhoff was next on Peter’s list. A rising star in the Wiesbaden mayor’s office, with his eyes set all the way to the federal capital in Bonn; his wartime sadism on the Eastern Front, fully documented by Shiloah’s sources, exposed him to blackmail.

  It had taken five weeks of identification and pursuit, two weeks of meticulous planning, three days of pressure and coercion, and half an hour in a hotel room, but instead of the recruitment of an agent, it had led to the flash of a hunting knife, now rusting in the River Rhine.

  Afterward, Peter walked briskly to Wiesbaden’s Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, where he called Karla, alias Veronique, who was waiting by the phone in the hotel. He told her to leave town immediately and to meet him at 5:00 P.M. at the Ritterhof Hotel in Frankfurt, which she knew meant 6:00 P.M. at the Weinstube Adlerberg in Stuttgart.

  He sat at a window seat, staring out onto the rain and the glistening lawns of Schlossplatz, toying with his linsen and spätzle, his favorite local dish. He had little appetite; he was replaying the disaster in his mind, wondering where he had gone wrong.

  He should have realized that an SS intelligence officer could not be broken as easily as the others, and that he was a lot smarter. Where had he failed? It wasn’t his American English; that was flawless. His preparation and documentation were immaculate. He had even showed Steinhoff his CIA card, which was a perfect forgery, down to the embossed government seal and the tortuous signature of the director, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter.

  Maybe it really was true that the SS could smell a Jew. Either way, Steinhoff sentenced himself to death when he sneered that the CIA would never hire a Jew like Stinglwagner.

  “You are an Israeli, aren’t you?” Steinhoff had said. “You think I’d work for your stinking country?”

  It wasn’t the insult that made Peter wait for the right moment to glide behind Steinhoff’s back, seize his head, and slit his throat. It was his instructions from the Mossad chief. Nobody, under any circumstances, Shiloah had told him that first February evening in Tel Aviv, must know that Israel was building a spy network in Germany. Any hint could dilute German support for the Jewish state just as Konrad Adenauer, the German chancellor, was beginning to say that maybe the new Germany should take responsibility for Nazi crimes and compensate the Jews, some kind of financial reparations for lost lives and property. It could mean German blood money, hundreds of millions of dollars that Israel badly needed. For Israel, German guilt was an economic asset.

  That’s why Shiloah had warned him always to make the pitch in the privacy of a hotel room, where quick action, if necessary, could be taken, unobserved. Preferably in the afternoon, after the maid had cleaned the room, so he would have a full day before the body was discovered. The DO NOT DISTURB sign could buy a few more hours.

  Shiloah had ordered: If a target realizes this is a false flag operation, if he works out you are an Israeli, kill him. He deserves it anyway.

  Those words were in Peter’s mind as he sprang with the knife: He deserves it anyway.

  He had felt a flash of doubt, instantly banished, and a surge of adrenaline that had all but lifted him from the ground. He was a soldier at that moment, bayonetting the gunners, not from a meter at the end of a rifle but gripping Steinhoff’s hair in his hand. An instant of godly power, a hint of regret overcome, and it was done. He had pushed away the gurgling head and stuffed a towel into the hole.

  So far, Peter reflected, watching the rain from inside the restaurant, I’ve caught one and killed one. Not a good average. Must do better. Four more on the list. At this rate he’d never see Tamara again, and the thought prompted a deep sigh.

  “What’s wrong?” The woman now called Karla, alias Veronique, hung her coat on the hook by the table and placed her hat on it. She swung onto the bench opposite him.

  “So what went wrong?” she asked, after ordering a beer. The nearest diners were two tables away but she still lowered her voice.

  When he told her, she said only, “Good. It’s better that way.”

  He knew what she meant. They’d been arguing for months, even though it didn’t affect their jobs. It was a moral question and it wasn’t clear who had the high ground. Karla thought there was no such thing as an ex-Nazi; once a Nazi always a Nazi, and that if they discovered a truly evil person, they should kill him, not offer to work with him.

  Her belief was shared by many in the Israeli government. But Shiloah, and presumably his boss, the prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, believed blackmailing high-level ex-Nazis, making a pact with the devil, made sense if it helped the country, which needed all the help it could get.

  It was a moral quandary that had not yet been resolved in Jerusalem, but Shiloah believed the country’s situation was too dire to delay. So, while the politicians dithered, the agents acted off the books.

  Which made it lonely. With all his being Peter became his cover, the German Willi Stinglwagner, medical products importer. He had to think in German, dream in German, be a German, nothing could break his cover. How true the warning had been during his brief training: When you’re an agent in the field, don’t worry about it affecting your home life because you won’t have one. He couldn’t contact the embassies, or local Israelis who could ask awkward questions, or go anywhere they frequented, or phone home, write, or communicate in any way with his brother or, more important, with Tamara. It had been months since he had met her, and he had fallen off the map. He couldn’t chance a call. Orders were strict. Right before the War of Independence the Arabs had caught an entire Jewish spy cell in Jaffa just because two of them had been overheard speaking Hebrew on tapped phones. Three were executed.

  All he could do was lie in his hotel bed, smoke, and dream of Tamara. Would she wait for him? Why should she? Just because he had asked her to in the note he’d given to his brother? What did Arie tell her about him? He tried not to imagine his brother courting her. Arie had money, he loved to party, while he, Peter, couldn�
�t even keep a dinner date. Or give a reasonable excuse for not turning up. His whole life was a lie. Everything was a conspiracy, everyone had an ulterior motive, he was always one false step from catastrophe.

  Or killing. True, for his country. But where was the line between exacting justice, and murder, and who set it? Shiloah once asked him if he wanted to avenge his parents, and he had said yes. What else could he have said? But when does that revenge end? How many can you kill? Isn’t the true revenge just existing when the Nazis wanted to wipe them out? Building their own country instead of again scattering across the globe? But if it is, someone must defend it.

  “Hello? Hello? Anybody home?” Karla was peering into his face. “What did I just say?”

  He gave a smile of embarrassment. “I have no idea, sorry. I was thinking…” He raised his glass and clinked against hers. “Prost.”

  “Cheers. Well, I just told you a very funny story and you missed it. Your loss.”

  He enjoyed Karla. She was funny, clever, sharp. Her real name was Diana, and her namesake in ancient Rome, she loved to point out, was the goddess of the hunt, the moon, and childbirth. A British journalist with a German father and a French mother, she was trilingual. During the war the British had interned her father for a year on the Isle of Man, afraid that “enemy aliens,” even Jews, could be German spies, but he was freed in 1943 in time to join the British Army Intelligence Corps.

  She had survived the London Blitz with her mother, who worked as a translator for the BBC, while supporting General de Gaulle’s Free French movement. It was her mother who got her started in journalism, and it was her father’s contacts and experiences that gave her something to write about. But it was Peter who’d recruited her.

  Her work as a freelance journalist was a perfect cover for her long periods on the European mainland. And her classic beauty: high cheekbones, full lips with a ready smile, green eyes that gleamed, and long, soft auburn hair that bounced as she walked, made heads turn. But it was her focus that had won Peter’s attention, when he first sat opposite her at a lunch in Paris. Her brow had puckered in absorption as she hung on to his every word, her look of admiration and appreciation was flattering, pleasing, charming. It had made him feel the most important man in the world. And there was no way that she meant it: Peter had thought, I’m just not that interesting. It’s an act, a brilliant act. We need someone like her. Beautiful, calculating, and above all, able to suppress a yawn.

  From that meeting, and several more, had been born a fruitful cooperation in the service of the State of Israel, for with very little training, Diana Greenberg had become a genius at entrapment. She could lead a man to the gallows and make him think the noose around his neck was the latest fashion in neckties.

  One tipsy evening in Amsterdam, Peter had told Diana about Tamara and he came to regret it. Over a bottle of wine she had told him about her special friend, a schoolteacher, with a sweet little house in the Home Counties with a white wooden gate and a blue front door. He thought she was a journalist, a sensitive writer of human-interest stories. That’s the person he fell in love with, who he wanted to marry. He was sweet, but he didn’t dare tell his parents she was Jewish. “Can you imagine if they knew what I do for you?” she said to Peter with a high-pitched laugh. “Anyway, I’m thinking of moving to Israel.”

  And, as for Peter, he felt stupid when Diana had asked him how long he had known this wonderful girl he missed so much. First he had hesitated, recognizing the absurdity, then answered, the last word rising as if in a question: Two hours? Diana’s eyes, always large, had widened further as she’d absorbed the import of what he’d said. She brought her hand to her mouth to suppress a giggle, but couldn’t help herself and it came out as a hoot, and then she had burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” she tried to say, but it emerged as a yelp, and she repeated, “you’ve known her for two hours?” and he began laughing too. He couldn’t stop, nor could she. They had fairly rocked with laughter, gasping and helpless in the quiet family restaurant, gripping their sides, while couples with children tut-tutted their disapproval.

  How stupid can you be? Two hours! He didn’t even know her family name. Or how old she was—did she say nineteen? Did she still know he even existed?

  He knew only one thing for sure: For him, two hours were enough.

  TAMARA and ARIE

  HERZLIYA, ISRAEL

  March 1950

  After Peter had left, Tamara hadn’t known what to think. She certainly felt different: Could she be pregnant? She shivered at the thought and, with no word from Peter, she felt abandoned. He said he couldn’t contact her. Why not? Of course he could, if he wanted to. Arie had said so.

  Nobody must ever know what she had done, especially her parents, who would never understand her moment of weakness, that beautiful moment of passion. In Israel, everything had changed, values were upside down. The strong became weak, respect was an empty word, European Jews ruled. This land had promised so much and given so little: They still lived in a tent with no real work.

  And now here was Arie, bearing presents and promises. Could she tell him about Peter? No, never. Arie was kind and generous and sweet. Could she love Arie, after making love with his brother? Or was Arie’s wealth turning her head, a ticket out of the misery of the camp?

  Whatever was happening, it was happening fast, though not as fast as with Peter, thank God. She had resisted Arie once, and since then he hadn’t tried again. They snuggled together on the bed, to keep warm as much as anything else, and that was all. Sometimes they dozed, but mostly they talked. And she already knew that for all his humor and strength, Arie was in pain. If she needed somebody to speak to, Arie needed it more.

  It was a joke that had made Arie talk about the bluish, vein-like numbers, 126497, tattooed on his forearm, and then Tamara wished he hadn’t.

  She had laughed when he told her his name had been Aren Berg before he changed it to Arie ben Nesher, which meant Lion, son of the Eagle.

  “How noble,” she had said, “how powerful. King of the jungle, master of the skies. The New Israeli.”

  “If you think that’s funny,” he had replied, “what about my friend Dov, remember him, the taxi driver?”

  “What about him?”

  “Paul Kokotek was his name in Poland. Here he’s Dov ben Arie, Bear, son of Lion. And then there’s Sammy Schnitzler, you don’t know him. Here he’s Natanel—Gift of God. Everyone reinvents himself here; it’s wishful thinking. It’s like a snake shedding damaged skin. No more diaspora Jew, here, they’re reborn as fighters, at least in name.”

  It was cold that evening as they had huddled beneath the blanket by the little electric heater, its one bar glowing red in the dark, like a warning.

  “You’re strong,” Tamara had said, thinking of nothing but the hardness of his body. But she had felt his body tense and he went silent. What is it? she thought.

  “You don’t know how right you are,” he had finally replied. She had said, “What do you mean?”

  In the same way he had to eat, had to sleep, had to breathe, sooner or later he had to tell someone something; it was too much to bear alone. Outside, he was a hevreman, one of the guys, while inside, he was drying up.

  Indeed, he had been strong: a fighter. In Auschwitz, where Jews fought Jews and if you won you lived to fight again, like a gladiator. In Rome, if you lost, you were fed to the beasts. In Auschwitz, you were fed to the ovens, and you rose to heaven in a column of smoke.

  * * *

  It had been nearly six years since the SS had abandoned Auschwitz a gasp ahead of the Soviet troops. But for Arie, liberation did not mean he was safe. There would be a different danger, it would be payback time. Already, he had seen packs of inmates kick and beat SS guards to death while their Russian liberators cheered.

  Tamara had sensed the tension in Arie’s body as he forced himself to break his vow of silence. His voice was low, she strained to hear. “I mean … you’re right. I was … strong, a fighter. They ma
de some of us fight.” He spoke haltingly, as if hearing each word for the first time, describing a nightmare, something he barely believed, a horror divorced from the safety of this moment by the heater with the girl he was beginning to love. “The Kommandant, the guards, they arranged boxing matches, you got extra food, you didn’t have to work so hard, they kept us alive so we could fight to the death, or near death.” Now it was Tamara, hanging on every word, whose body went tense. “I kept winning, so I kept fighting, and I stayed alive. For months, that went on. I don’t know how I was such a fighter, I was always bigger and stronger than everyone else at school, but it wasn’t about winning. It was about surviving; I suppose I wanted to stay alive more than anyone else did. It was like a dogfight, all the guards yelling, drunk, betting. We were an entertainment for the Nazis.”

  Tamara could hardly breathe as she listened. Her breath came in sharp intakes, she felt the hair rise on her neck, barely comprehending that the body next to hers, the hand that gripped hers too tightly, the feet that lay over hers, this kind man could have done such things.

  “They didn’t let us stop until there was blood. A lot of it. I don’t know how many I beat. I as good as killed them, they were bleeding on the ground and were taken to the ovens, or they were shot. But it was them or me. That’s the truth.” He stopped suddenly. He breathed in as deeply as he could and heaved the deepest sigh she had ever heard.

  “Yes, I was strong. So I got more food. And the other Jews didn’t like it. They hated me. But I lived. And now here I am.” He paused. “Here we are.” He sighed again, and felt relief, but not for long. Now he felt shame. And fear, as Tamara lay silently beside him. He had exposed himself. For what? It could only harm him; he shouldn’t have said a word. Just because she said he was strong?

  He pushed her hand away.

  She felt tears in her eyes, and noticed herself edging away from his tense body. He was breathing fast, almost panting. Was he feeling it now, was it still so real? She couldn’t imagine such a memory, such a reality, such a life. And he said he had only been a fighter for a few months. What else had he done to survive for years? He had said that her worst nightmares were better than what he woke up to each morning. Now, beneath the cozy blanket, he had uncovered his soul: how he must suffer.