The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,66
to the curves of breast and hip, was better than her usual work clothes. It had taken Rhion awhile to get used to seeing a woman’s calves and ankles so casually displayed, though Dr. Weineke’s SS uniform had effectively killed whatever erotic interest he’d felt in the principle.
“They let families in, if the commandant’s not being a putz that day,” Sara went on. “Sometimes women wait for eight, ten hours outside to see their husbands, and then he decides there’s no visiting till next week. They come from all over Germany, you know—it’s a work camp, mostly for political prisoners. A lot of the town mayors and priests and union leaders from Poland are there, as well as Germans who said something Hitler or the local party leaders didn’t like—or were something they didn’t like, like Jews or gypsies or Poles. The women bring food and clothing...” Her red-painted mouth twisted. “The commandants budget for it in the rations. They count on the men being fed at least half by their families, whether they are or not.”
“Have you gone before?”
She shook her head. “Even in different clothes with my hair dyed and those fake glasses I got, I didn’t want to risk anyone recognizing me. God knows enough of the guards could.” She smoked awhile in silence, dark gaze fixed on some middle distance beyond the window, lost in her own thoughts.
“It’s funny,” she said softly, her face half turned aside and the cold glare of the floodlights from below picking out the fragile wrinkles and the lines of dissipation around the mouth and eyes. “When I heard they’d picked up Papa—when I’d heard the SS had him in ‘special custody’—I thought, Hell, I know how to find him... or at least how to make money and get information while I looked. I had God knows how many boyfriends in New York. I worked as an artist’s model while I was in school—not that Aunt Tayta ever knew where I was always going in the evenings—and the first year I was in New York, in thirty-four, I worked as a waitress to make money to start at NYU. I used to go out to dinner with one guy, have him bring me home at eight because I said I had to study, have another guy pick me up to go to the movies, have him bring me home in time to go out with guy number three for the midnight set at the Cotton Club. So I thought doing what I do now wouldn’t be so very different. Christ, was I naïve.”
Her lips flinched suddenly, and she looked down, crushing out her cigarette on the windowsill with fingers that shook.
“You must love him a lot,” Rhion said quietly. She nodded, not looking, not willing to give him even the words of a reply. The pride in her, the anger at men, and the hatred of having to depend on one, however crazy, for help, was like a wall of thorns. He drew up his knees, wrapped his sweatshirt-clad arms around them. The half-healed knife cut still hurt like hell. “How did you get into Germany?”
“Through Basle.” The request for information, for the story, steadied her as he’d hoped it would. “I used to go out with a guy named Blackie Wein—he ran protection for Lepke Buchalter down in the garment district. A mobster,” she added, seeing Rhion’s puzzled expression. “He was tied up with Murder, Incorporated—the Ice Pick League, they were called—but Blackie was all right. He was a Yankees fan like me. When I heard Papa had been picked up—that he was in ‘designated internment’—I didn’t know what else to do. I went to Lepke. He put the word out and got me identity papers for two hundred dollars from the daughter of a newspaper editor from Dresden who’d just got out with his family by the skin of his teeth. There was a guy named Fish who did me up a couple more sets to use in emergencies, plus some for Papa—Fish made his living passing bad checks—and another one of Lepke’s boys taught me how to pick locks. That was the biggest help when I got to searching this place.” She shrugged. “So here I am.”
She straightened up, and walked to the chair again, to pick up the little screw of paper with the two waxy, lumpy pills that lay upon its padded arm. For a long moment she stood looking down at them. Then her eyes