"Paul-Loup Sulitzer - The Green King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sulitzer Paul Loup)

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Author: Paul-Loup Sulitzer
Title: The Green King
Original copyright year: 1983
Genre: Fiction
Version: 1.0
Date of e-text: Nov 2000
Source:
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From the cover:

In 1950 he appeared in New York, a tall, gaunt twenty-two year-old with a false passport and not a penny in his pocket. Within six daays he began his first company. Within six months he'd established fifty-eight more. Within ten years Reb Michael Klimrod would be a billionaire, an enigmatic genius dealing in real estate, gold mines, hotels, oil, and tankers in a bid to possess more money and power than anyone else in the world.

The Green King

Yet only a small, select group of men would know his real name, recognize his face. And not even they knew what he planned for the Nazis who had betrayed his youth ... for the woman he loved ... and for the entire unsuspecting earth.



The Green King
By Paul-Loup Sulitzer

Some say he's mad; others that lesser hate him
Do call it valiant fury; but, for certain,
He cannot buckle his distemper'd cause
Within the belt of rule.

Shakespeare, Macbeth, V,2

PROLOGUE

I hadn't been in Munich one hour when Captain Tarras informed me that advance units of the Seventh Army had just discovered another camp, in north Austria, near Linz; the place was called "Mauthausen" Tarras insisted that I leave right away; he had secured three seats in a military plane. He would join us in two or three days. I had many good reasons to obey Georges Tarras: he was a captain and I was only a first lieutenant; he had been, until the summer of 1942, my international law professor at Harvard; and, finally, it was he who, having accidentally run into me in Paris two weeks earlier, had recruited me to serve under him on the War Crimes Commission. If that was not enough, I liked him, although I had some difficulty in recognizing, beneath the olive-drab uniform, the sarcastic and brilliant professor who used to hold forth within the ivied walls of Harvard Yard.
Three of us left. I was accompanied by Mike Rinaldi, a sergeant, and by Roy Blackstock, a photographer. I had little in common with either of them. Rinaldi was from Little Italy in New York City, Blackstock was from Virginia. Although totally different physically-one, small, stocky, with a thin black waxed mustache; the other, six feet four inches of soft and still-expanding bulk-they seemed to share an impressive and cynical nonchalance I took as proof of maturity, of experience I had not yet acquired.
It was May 5, 1945. I knew little of the war then ending in Europe, except for the news of the taking of Berlin by the Russians, three days earlier, and the imminence of a total and official surrender of the Third Reich. The war was ending and I hadn't killed anyone and hadn't seen any fighting. Four months from my twenty-second birthday, I was like an adolescent entering a theater for the first time just as the curtain is coming down. Having returned to Europe for the first time in six years,
I had seen my French grandmother again, in Paris. The fact that I had become an American, giving up my father's nationality for my mother's, had affected her ever so slightly; actually, she had barely reacted to the news, being too preoccupied with describing to me what had become of Paris and her Provence under German occupation.
Once in Linz, Rinaldi managed to get us aboard a truck going to Vienna, where the Red Army had been since April 13. At about 2:00 P.M., we crossed the Danube at Enns. There, Rinaldi intercepted a Jeep and convinced the driver, an Italian-American like himself, to take us farther. We went first to the Mauthausen train station, and there we coerced the driver, with constraints bordering on pure and simple blackmail, to cover the last three and a half miles separating us from the camp.
There, for the first time, did my footsteps cross those of Reb Michael Klimrod.

Among the many clear memories I've kept of that day, there is, first, that lightness of the Austrian air, sunny and mild, balmy, with the perfume of a spring that seems eternal.
Only then came the stench.
It hit my nostrils when we were still two or three hundred yards from the camp. A large convoy of covered trucks forced us to stop, and our improvised chauffeur took this opportunity to proclaim with furious determination that he would go no farther. We had to get out and proceed on foot. The stench became more perceptible; it hung in the air in successive and unmoving masses. "Crematoriums," said Blackstock, with his Southern drawl. And the placid tone, the very accent, seemed to rid the word of its horror. We passed through the wide-open doors. Tanks had come, then gone, leaving fresh tracks on the ground. In their place, trucks kept arriving in a continuous flow, discharging supplies, medicine and bandages, bolstering the medical units already on the spot. But this flow, once inside the doors, lost itself instantly in the huge mute sea of living corpses, almost still, strangely, like a tide suddenly frozen. The arrival of the tanks, five or six hours before, had probably caused this sea to shudder, to become animated, but now, the excitement had dropped, the joy of freedom had dimmed, and
the faces were rigid masks. It was as if they had entered a second stage, now that the end of the nightmare was accepted as reality. In the hallucinatory glances cast toward me, Rinaldi, and Blackstock, who used his well-fed mass to make a path, I could see a strange apathy, and a sort of resignation, but also hatred, an angry reproach: "Why didn't you come sooner?"
"And they stink," said Blackstock, "how they stink; it's unbelievable." With determination and without any gentleness, the giant pushed through the scarecrows in striped rags.
The American officer in charge of the camp wore gold maple leaves on his collar. He was short, stiff, had red hair, and was named Strachan. He told me that if there was anything at this moment that preoccupied him less than war crimes, he would like to know what it was. Right now he was trying to bring some order to this unspeakable mess. He had undertaken to separate the former prisoners into three categories: beyond help, critical, out of danger. Those beyond help were numerous. "Two or three thousand of them are going to die on me within the next few days, but at least they'll die free, and that's something." He stared at me with his brown, almost yellow, eyes.
"What did you say your name was?"
"David Settiniaz."
"Jewish?"