The Last Train to London Page 3

  Wisliceny said, “Your paper on ‘The Jewish Problem,’ Eichmann—it’s interesting, this idea that Jews can be provoked to leave Germany only if we dismantle their economic footing here in the Reich. But why force them to emigrate to Africa or South America rather than to other European nations? Why do we care where they go, so long as we’re rid of them?”

  Eichmann answered politely, “We’d not like to have their expertise in the hands of more developed countries that could benefit to our detriment, I shouldn’t think.”

  Wisliceny narrowed his little Prussian eyes. “You imagine we Germans can’t do better than foreigners aided by Jews we wish to be rid of?”

  “No. No,” Eichmann protested, setting a hand on Tier’s head. “That isn’t what I meant at all.”

  “And Palestine, which you include as a ‘backward’ country, is a British territory.”

  Eichmann, seeing this would only go more poorly, asked Wisliceny for his opinion on the matter, subjecting himself to an overlong bit of wind and bluster backed by an utter absence of knowledge. He listened as he forever did, storing away bits for future use and keeping to himself his own advantages. This was his job, to listen and nod while others talked, and he was very good at it. He routinely shucked his uniform for street clothes in order to infiltrate and more closely observe Berlin’s Zionist groups. He’d developed a cadre of informers. He gathered information from the Jewish press. Reported on Agudath Israel. Quietly kept denunciation files. Directed arrests. Helped with Gestapo interrogations. He’d even tried to learn Hebrew to better do his job, although that had gone to rot and now everyone in all of Berlin had heard of his folly—proposing to pay a rabbi three reichsmarks per hour to teach him when he might simply have arrested the Jew and kept him imprisoned for free tutoring.

  Vera was sure that blunder was the reason this know-nothing Prussian had been given the place as head of the Jewish Department that ought to have been Eichmann’s, leaving him only the sop of promotion to technical sergeant and the same old tasks now to be done with a leaner staff, thanks to the party purge. But Eichmann knew that wasn’t the reason he’d been denied the promotion. Who would have imagined that becoming a specialist in Zionist matters would make him too valuable as an expert to be “distracted” by administrative responsibilities? Better to be a pug dog of a Prussian with a theology degree, a hideous laugh, and expertise at precisely nothing if you wanted to climb the Nazi ranks.

  ONLY AFTER WISLICENY left for the day and Eichmann had tidied his desk did he allow Tier to move. “You are such a good boy,” he said, stroking the dog’s pointed ears, lingering on the velvety pink insides. “Shall we have some fun now? We’re deserving of a bit of fun after that charade, aren’t we?”

  Tier shook his ears, then cocked his pointy snout, as expectant as Vera just before sex. Vera. Today was their second wedding anniversary. She would be waiting at their little apartment on Onkel-Herse-Strasse with their son, whose birth Eichmann had had to report to the SS Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt just as he’d had to report his marriage, after first proving Vera was of impeccable Aryan stock. He ought to go straight home to Vera’s big eyes and lovely brows and round, sturdy face, her voluptuous body that was so much more inviting than the sharp-edged women now in fashion.

  But he walked the long way, with Tier at perfect heel. He crossed the river and wandered the Jewish ghetto, slowly up one street and down another, just to delight at how, despite Tier’s perfect behavior, children scattered at the sight of them.

  A Little Breakfast Chocolate

  Truus lowered the newspaper and looked across the narrow breakfast table. “Alice Salomon has been exiled from Germany,” she said, the words escaping with the shock of the news. “How can the Nazis do this? An internationally acclaimed pioneer in public health who is no threat to anyone? She’s old and she’s ill, and she isn’t even political.”

  Joop set his hagelslag on his plate, a sprinkle of chocolate falling from the bread to the plate while another sat unnoticed at the edge of his mouth. “She’s Jewish?”

  Truus looked out the third-floor window, over the flowerpots on the sill to the Nassaukade and the canal, the bridge, the Raampoort. Dr. Salomon was Christian. Devotedly so, probably from a family like Truus’s, affluent Christians who appreciated God’s gifts to them, who’d shared those gifts by taking in Belgian children during the Great War. But telling Joop the Germans had exiled a Christian would only alarm him, and Truus didn’t want to give him any reason to inquire about her plans for the day. She had hoped to go into Germany to meet with Recha Freier about what more might be done to help Berlin’s Jewish children, now barred from public schools, but her message had elicited no response. She’d already arranged to borrow Mrs. Kramarsky’s sedan, though. She could at least make another run over the border to the Weber farm.

  “Some Jewish ancestry, apparently,” she said, which had the advantage of being true, but still her gaze slid to the flowered wallpaper and the curtains that needed cleaning in this room they’d breakfasted in ever since they married. She doubted that Alice Salomon’s ancestry explained her being stripped of her homeland.

  “Geertruida,” Joop began, and Truus braced herself. Her name had always seemed so solid and unremarkable before she’d met Joop—Geertruida or Truus, either one—but in his voice it sounded rather lovely, really. Still, he rarely called her by her full name.

  That which makes a marriage work is to be guarded carefully, her mother had told her the morning of her wedding, and who was Truus to defy her mother’s advice by letting on that this little tic of Joop’s—using her full name when he meant to persuade her to step off a chosen course—put her on alert?

  She took her napkin and reached across to wipe the chocolate sprinkle from Joop’s mouth. There now: restored to the properly unsprinkled chief cashier and principal at De Javasche Bank he’d been when they’d first become engaged.

  “I’ll make you a broodje kroket for breakfast tomorrow,” she said before Joop could launch into questioning how she meant to spend her day. The deep-fried meat ragout croquette on a soft bun was his favorite; just the mention of it could lift his mood, and distract him.

  Chalk on Her Shoes

  Stephan watched at the door as Žofie wiped away half of a mathematics proof that covered an entire chalkboard.

  Her professor, alarmed, said, “Kurt—”

  The younger man with them just slid his hands casually into the pockets of his white linen suit pants and nodded at Žofie. Stephan felt a little like the doctor in Amok, the Zweig character who becomes so obsessed with a woman who won’t have sex with him that he stalks her. But Stephan wasn’t stalking Žofie. She had suggested he pick her up at the university, never mind that it was summer and no one was in class.

  Žofie dropped the eraser and, oblivious to the chalk on her shoe, began refilling the board with symbols. Stephan pulled a journal from his satchel and noted: Drops eraser on her shoe and doesn’t even notice.

  Only after Žofie-Helene had finished her equation did she catch a glimpse of him. She smiled—like the woman in Amok smiling across the ballroom in her yellow gown.

  “Does that make sense?” Žofie said to the older man. Then to the younger one, “I’ll explain it tomorrow if it doesn’t, Professor Gödel.”

  Žofie handed the chalk to Gödel and joined Stephan, oblivious now to the two men, the older one saying, “Extraordinary. And she’s how old?” and the other, Gödel, answering, “Just fifteen.”

  The Liar’s Paradox

  Stephan ducked from the rain into the Neuman’s Chocolates building at No. 2 Schulhof, with Žofie in tow. He led her down a steep wooden stairway into the basement cavern, their wet shoes leaving prints unseen in the cool-stone darkness as the chatter of the chocolatiers upstairs faded.

  “Mmmmmm . . . chocolate,” she said, not the least bit afraid.

  How had he ever imagined anyone as smart as Žofie might fear anything, that he might have that excuse to take her hand the way
Dieter did every time they rehearsed his new play? The chalk had washed from Žofie’s shoe in the run over through the rain, but still Stephan couldn’t shake all those symbols she’d written on the chalkboard, mathematics for which he didn’t have even the alphabet.

  He pulled a chain to a ceiling light. Crate-stacked pallets leapt into shadow cubes and angles on the cavern’s uneven stone walls. Just being here made words tumble in his mind, although he rarely wrote here anymore now that he had a typewriter at home. He opened a crate with the crowbar from the hook on the bottom stair post and untied one of the jute sacks inside: cocoa beans smelling so familiar that he was often left wanting anything but chocolate, the way a boy whose father wrote books might grow weary of reading, impossible as that seemed to him.

  Žofie-Helene said, “You are going to offer me a bite.”

  “Of the beans? You can’t eat them, Žofie. Well, maybe if you were starving.”

  She looked so disappointed that he bit back the words with which he’d meant to impress her, about how tempering chocolate is like coordinating a ballet, melting and cooling and stirring so that all the crystals align to leave the tongue in ecstasy. Ecstasy. He didn’t suppose he could use the word with Žofie anyway, unless he put it into a play.

  He ran upstairs to grab a handful of truffles, and returned to find Žofie gone.

  “Žofie?”

  Her voice echoed up from underneath the stairs, “You should keep the beans down here. Temperature is more constant in deeper caves, not because of the geothermal gradient at these depths but because of the insulating effect of the rock.”

  He glanced at his nice clothes—meant to impress her—but grabbed the flashlight from the peg and ducked underneath the stairs and down the rungs to the lower cavern. Still no Žofie. He crawled into the low, gritty tunnel on the cavern’s far side, the flashlight beam illuminating the bottoms of Žofie’s shoes, her bent-kneed legs, her derriere under her skirt. She stood at the tunnel’s end, her dress hiking with the motion so that for the briefest moment before she pulled the fabric down, he could see the pale skin of the backs of her knees and thighs.

  She leaned down into the tunnel again, her face now in the circle of light. “It’s a new term, geothermal gradient,” she said. “It’s okay if you don’t know it. Most people don’t.”

  “The upper chamber is drier, which is better for the cocoa,” he said as he reached her. “Also easier to get things in and out of.”

  The passageway here was naturally formed, unlike the cement one under the Ringstrasse by the Burgtheater. It appeared to end at a pile of stones several yards away, but didn’t. It was the way of this underworld, the labyrinth of ancient passageways and chambers underrunning Vienna: there was usually a way forward if you searched long enough. The low humidity in this part of the underground was the reason his great-grandfather had bought the Neuman’s Chocolates building. He’d come to Vienna with nothing when he was sixteen, Stephan’s age now, to live in the attic of a walk-up in the slums of Leopoldstadt. He started the chocolate business at twenty-three and bought this building to expand it while he still lived in that attic, before he built the Ringstrasse palais where Stephan’s family now lived.

  Stephan said, “I could have waited while you explained that equation to those professors.”

  “The proof? Professor Gödel doesn’t need it explained. He established the incompleteness theorems that transformed the fields of logic and mathematics when he was barely older than we are, Stephan—without even using numbers or symbolic formalisms. You would love his proofs. He used Russell’s paradox and the liar’s paradox to show that in any formal system adequate for number theory, there is a formula that is unprovable, and its negation is too.”

  Stephan extracted his journal from his satchel and wrote: The Liar’s Paradox.

  “This very sentence is false,” she said. “The sentence has to be true or false, right? But if it’s true, then, as it says itself, it’s false. But if it’s false, then it’s true. So it has to be both true and false. Russell’s paradox is even more interesting: is the set of all sets that aren’t members of themselves a member of itself or not? See?”

  Stephan turned off the flashlight to mask how very little he did see. Maybe Papa had a mathematics volume that would explain whatever Žofie was saying; maybe that would help.

  “I can’t even see where you are now!” Žofie said.

  He knew where she was, though. He knew from her voice that her face was perhaps an arm’s length from him, that if he just leaned forward he might put his lips to hers.

  “Stephan, are you still there?” she asked with just a hint of the fear he too sometimes felt in this dark underworld, where one might become lost and never be heard from again.

  She said, “I can still smell the chocolate, even here.”

  He fingered the truffles in his pocket and took one out. “Open your mouth and put your tongue out, and you can taste it,” he suggested.

  “You cannot.”

  “You can.”

  He heard the licking of her lips, smelled the freshness of her breath. He put one hand to her arm, to have his bearings, or maybe to kiss her.

  She giggled, a little dove sound that wasn’t like her at all.

  “Keep your mouth open,” he said gently, and he fumbled his hand slowly forward until he could feel the warmth of her breath on his fingers, and he set the truffle on her tongue.

  “Just let it sit in your mouth,” he whispered. “Just leave it there, make it last, taste every moment of it.”

  He wanted to take her hand, but how could you take the hand of someone who had so quickly become your best friend without risking the friendship? He stuck his hands in his pockets, where they brushed against the other truffles. He fingered them, then took one out and put it to his own tongue, not wanting the chocolate itself but wanting the shared experience—the darkness around them and the trickle of water up ahead, rain falling through a grate and flowing lower, headed to the canal and the river and the sea as the slow melt of chocolate warmed their tongues.

  “It’s both true and not true that I can taste it,” she said. “The chocolate paradox!”

  He leaned forward, thinking he might risk it, he might kiss her, and if she balked he could pretend he’d just bumped into her in the dark. But a critter of some sort (almost certainly a rat) scampered by, and he clicked on the flashlight, a reflex.

  “Don’t tell anyone I brought you here,” he said. “If I’m found out again, I’ll be confined to my room for the rest of my life, on account of the thugs and the collapsing. Isn’t it great, though? Some of these tunnels are just storm drains, which you have to avoid in heavy rain, and some are sewers, which I always avoid. But there are whole rooms down here. Crypts full of old bones. Columns that could be, I don’t know, from the Romans, even. It’s an underground network that’s been used by everyone from spies and murderers to neighbors and nuns. It’s my secret place. I don’t even bring friends here.”

  “We aren’t friends?” Žofie-Helene said.

  “We aren’t . . . what?”

  “You don’t show it to your friends, but you’re showing me, so logically I’m not your friend.”

  Stephan laughed warmly. “I never met anyone who could be so technically brilliant and so abysmally wrong. Anyway, I didn’t show you, you found it yourself.”

  “So we are friends, then, because you didn’t show me?”

  “Of course we’re friends, you idiot.”

  The friendship paradox. She was both his friend and not.

  “Do these tunnels go to the Burgtheater?” she asked. “We could surprise Grandpapa. Or, I know! Can we get to Mama’s office? It’s near St. Rupert’s, and our apartment too. Do the tunnels go that far?”

  Stephan tended to travel the same paths down here so he wouldn’t get lost, but he did know the way to St. Rupert’s and her apartment. He’d found a few different ways in the weeks since school was out, actually, not that he was like the doctor in
Amok, not that he was stalking her. He could take her the long way, past the crypts under St. Stephen’s Cathedral and through the three levels, impossibly deep, that were once a convent. He could take her under the Judenplatz, the remains of an underground Talmud school from centuries ago. He might even take her through the old stables. Would she be horrified by the old horse skulls? But, knowing Žofie, she’d be fascinated. Well, he might save the stables for himself, anyway, for now at least.

  “All right,” he said. “This way, then.”

  “The game is afoot!” she said.

  “I meant to tell you I finished The Sign of the Four,” he said. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

  “But I haven’t finished Kaleidoscope.”

  “You don’t have to give it back. You can keep it. Forever, I mean.” Registering reluctance in her hesitation, he said, “I have another copy,” although he didn’t; he just rather liked the idea of knowing one half of his two-volume set would be in Žofie’s hands, or even just on her shelf as she read in bed at night. “I had a copy already when Aunt Lisl gave me one for my birthday,” he lied. “I’d like you to have it.”

  “I don’t have an extra Sign of the Four.”

  He laughed. “I’ll give it back, I promise.”

  He skirted the rubble pile, beyond which was a man-made metal stairway circling up into the passageway’s ceiling, at the top of which was an octagonal manhole cover of eight metal triangles whose tips met in the center, which you could push up from down here or pull open from the street. He led her on past the stairway for a few minutes, then clambered down some metal rungs to a wide, arched passage made of smoothly stacked blocks. A river ran alongside a railed walk here, illuminated by a caged work light fastened to the ceiling, which threw their oversize shadows onto the wall.

  “This part is from when they rerouted the river into the underground, to expand the city,” he said as he clicked off the flashlight. “It helped prevent the cholera too.”