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Betts cleared his throat. “I am sorry, Lawson. Weiss, I should say. I’m really very sorry to give you this news.” A pause, as if he expected something from Matthew, some sort of response or emotion, but he had nothing to give. “Take the rest of the day off,” Betts said at last.
Matthew shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“Take it off,” he repeated firmly. “You need it. I’ll see you here at eight hundred hours, sharp, tomorrow.”
Outside the military headquarters housed in the Rathaus, or town hall, Matthew didn’t know what to do. People walked down the street; the sun was shining. Boizenburg had escaped the worst of the bombing, despite a shipbuilder’s right in the town, and the summery scene was disconcertingly pleasant: a child holding her mother’s hand, her steps light and skipping; two women gossiping. One of them laughed.
He took a few steps towards the center of the square, and then stopped. He did not know where to go. He felt as if he were both shrinking and expanding, the world coming in and out of focus, so he could see with extraordinary clarity in one moment, and then only a troubling blur the next.
A cold cattle car rattling east… He’d heard that they’d had to scrape the ice from the sides because they were so thirsty. And when it had stopped at the gates of Treblinka, with its fake timetables and its big clock, the grossest, most evil parody of a rail station…
An SS guard, smoking, indifferent. “Take off your things. We’ll hold your valuables for you.” Almost kind, in his reassurances, perhaps, knowing what was next. Had his mother known? His brothers? Franz and Arno would have been taken somewhere else with the other healthy young men and women, to work, often to death. But Mutti… and Gertie… dear, little Gertie with her black button eyes and her curly hair…
Matthew closed his eyes, fighting the images that came anyway. Gertie unbuttoning her dress, carefully folding it. She’d always been so neat with her things. Mutti, her hand on her daughter’s shoulder, a comforting weight.
His mother had not been an unintelligent woman. She must have known what was going to happen. Did she try to comfort Gertie? Or did she jolly her along, take part in the horrible pretense because it was better than having her only daughter, just twelve years old, facing such unimaginable fear?
Matthew squeezed his eyes shut tighter, hard enough to hurt, yet he could not block it out. Don’t worry, mausi. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Think of it, we will finally get nice and clean after all this time…
A sound escaped him, like an animal in its death throes. He started striding down the street, faster and faster, until he broke into a run. He did not know where he was going, only that he could never run fast enough.
At eight o’clock the next morning, Matthew reported for duty. Despite Betts’ doubts, he assured his commanding officer he was fit and ready for service, his voice as flat and unemotional as ever.
Half a dozen low-ranking Nazi officers had been rounded up the night before, and were waiting in their cells to be interrogated. Some of them had been involved in running the camp in Boizenburg, one of the small Neuengamme subcamps. Without a flicker of an eyelid or a tremor of emotion, Matthew assured Betts once more he was fine and perfectly capable of conducting interrogations as necessary.
And he was fine; his head felt remarkably clear as he read the brief and then came into the room where a prisoner waited, a short, red-faced man in a cheap suit, doing his best to look composed. Matthew had interrogated dozens of men like this—men who had been shoemakers or butchers before the war, and who had become puffed up by their own importance, their SS status, only to then tremble and stammer in fear when they were cornered, attempting denials, and then absurd justifications, and finally squealing for mercy. Mercy. The idea was an insult.
“Guten morgen.” He kept his tone civil, which gave the odious little man a flicker of hope. He had squinty eyes like a pig, and a wide, wet mouth.
“Guten morgen.”
Matthew leaned against a desk and folded his arms, keeping the man’s gaze as the silence spun out. The man licked his lips, his gaze darting nervously around the room.
“I don’t know anything,” he finally said. “I told them before, you’ve got the wrong man.”
Matthew’s expression did not change. “You are SS-Unterscharführer Heinrich Henck,” he stated, “director of camp labor for Boizenburg, a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp.”
“My name is Henck, but I did not have that position. I was never in the SS. I never even knew about the camp.” The man’s chin quivered.
“You were seen. You have been identified.”
“By one woman?” Clearly Henck was aware of the source of their information: a near-hysterical woman who had seen him on the street, a loaf of bread tucked under his arm. “She is clearly demented.”
“No.”
“She’s mistaken me, then.” He straightened. “How can I be SS? I’m an accountant.” Like Matthew’s own father. “Besides, I don’t have that tattoo they all have—”
“The blood type tattoo?” Usually on the underside of the left arm, near the armpit. A status symbol as well as a practical sign, in case they were wounded and needed a blood transfusion. “Not every SS has it,” Matthew returned coolly, “especially those who were drafted in at the end of the war.”
Henck deflated slightly, before he puffed up again. “It’s my word against hers, that of an unstable woman—”
“There are others.” They hadn’t found them yet, but they would. There were survivors, as well as other camp personnel, who would rat this little man out. Matthew was sure of it.
“Who are they, then?” Henck asked, thrusting his chest out, a moment of bravado.
Matthew smiled. “It doesn’t matter.”
Henck stared at him in wary confusion. “What is that supposed to mean? You are meant to be the law, now, aren’t you?”
