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

The first time, it had been on the other side of the Salzach, when he emerged from the Linz road. He had noticed the vehicle parked at the entrance to the Staats Bridge, facing him. There were two men in the front seat, motionless, with that blank look of subordinates waiting for the order that will make them move again. The ambulance was painted khaki, with a red cross on a white background. There was nothing unusual about it, at first glance.
And now it was in the heart of old Salzburg, parked once
again, with no one in it. But the license number was the same, and it had the same scratch on the front right fender.
Reb crossed the square, with a blank look on his face, but suddenly appearing rather awkward and limping more than before.
He was about two hundred and fifty yards from the bell tower.

He reached it twenty-five minutes later.
The passageway was dark and narrow; without even reaching, Reb could have touched the arch. He walked about thirty feet, going by dark shops, before he saw the painted sign, black on a white background, rather clumsy: K.-H. LOTHER-ART PHOTOGRAPHER. As he pushed the glass door, he set off the high-pitched tinkling of a small bell. He entered a low room, the walls and ceilings of which were uncovered stone. On either side of him were large wooden counters, but they were empty, as were the recessed shelves.
A voice, coming from a back room, said: "I am here."
All the way in the back, a cloth curtain covered the frame of a door. Reb drew it aside and walked into the next room. He found himself face to face with four men, one of whom immediately pressed a gun barrel against his left temple.
"Don't move and don't scream."
He recognized two of the men: the very ones who had been in the front seat of the military ambulance. He identified the third one from the description Emma Donin gave him at Reichenau: Epke. He had never seen the fourth one. They asked him where he had been and why it had taken him so long to arrive from the Old Market square, which, even if one was on foot and limping, was only two or three minutes away.
Reb Klimrod's face, as well as his whole manner, had changed incredibly. He seemed younger than his age, more fragile and exhausted than was possible. His eyes widened frantically.
"I was hungry and I got lost," he answered, with the whining voice of a child overcome by events. And terrified.

David Settiniaz received the phone call in place of Tarras, who had gone out, as he said, "to scour the country." The call
must, of course, be from some military authority, because public telephones had not yet been fully restored in Austria. The man on the phone emitted an incomprehensible gibberish which was supposedly English.
Settiniaz identified the accent and said: "You can speak French, sir." He explained who he was and in what way he was capable of replacing Captain Tarras in almost all respects. Then he was quiet, listening with growing stupefaction to what the French occupying troops' officer was telling him, from Salzburg. In fact, he hardly took the time to think, but, in a move that was to have not a small effect on his life, told the first big lie of his career.
"Don't believe it," he said. "The boy is older and much more experienced than he looks. You can trust him completely. He works for the OSS, and he is one of their best agents. Do exactly as he tells you, please."
Only after hanging up did he ask himself the truly important questions, about what had led him to commit this foolish act, about what he was going to tell Tarras in order to justify the great lie, and about this extraordinary, and dangerous, situation in which young Klimrod had put himself.

The fourth man was, quite simply, Karl-Heinz Lothar. He was a heavyset, red-faced man, quite tall, with, as often happens, very small, almost feminine hands. In spite of the coolness produced by the stone ceiling, he was sweating profusely, and he was frightened.
Two Austrian photographers worked at Hartheim castle between the fall of 1940 and the end of March 1945. One of them is still alive, and lives today in Linz; Wiesenthal refers to him as Bruno Bruckner.
The other one was Karl-Heinz Lothar. For him, everything started in mid-October 1940. He was forty-seven years old. He was summoned by the Gauleitung of Linz, questioned as to his capacity to perform "certain special photographic tasks" and remain totally discreet concerning them. He was offered three hundred and forty marks a month. He accepted and was taken by car to Hartheim castle, which already had been baptized a "sanatorium."
The director of the establishment was, at. the time, Captain
Christian Wirth, who eventually, as a reward for the excellence of his work at Hartheim, was made general director of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka camps in Poland. Franz Stangl succeeded him as director of Hartheim, later also at Treblinka. The medical direction of the sanatorium was in the hands of Dr. Rudolf Lehauer of Linz, with the assistance of Dr. Georg Renno. (Lehauer killed himself in April 1945; Renno was arrested in 1963.)
Wirth explained to Lothar the sort of work they expected of him: he was to take the best possible shots of the sick people on whom the Hartheim doctors were performing experiments, at the rate of thirty or forty per day. These experiments consisted of determining the most effective way to kill people and of perfecting, in this field, truly efficient techniques, while establishing a scientifically exact graph of the degree of suffering a human body can withstand before succumbing.
Lothar was asked to photograph and film the subjects' brains, which had been carefully exposed by cutting away the skull, to focus on the eventual modifications visible at the moment of death.
That was the first mission of Hartheim, but not the most important one. The castle was in reality a school and a training center, reserved for "students" who, when their training was completed, could be assigned to the several extermination camps envisaged by Himmler during the Wannsee conference in January of 1941, but in fact planned before that date. Moreover, Hartheim was not the only establishment of this kind. There were three others.
Lothar was handicapped in his work by the fact that he often had to operate through a spy hole during experiments with gas; and he was rather inconvenienced at first by the vile odor of the crematoriums. All in all, he must have photographed at least two-thirds of the thirty thousand people killed at Hartheim.
One thing only really bothered him, perhaps: that the overwhelming majority of the thirty thousand subjects were Christians. They were Germans, Austrians, and Czechs who had been sent to Hartheim either because they were part of the program, established at the demand of Hitler and supervised by Martin Bormann, to exterminate the physically or mentally handicapped and the incurably ill, or because they were simply
old people entering the category of useless mouths. Not a Jew among them; to die at Hartheim, Grafenegg, Hadamar, or Sonnenstein was an honor reserved only for Aryans.
"But of course, your father," said Epke to Reb Klimrod. "Your father really died at Hartheim. Is that what you wanted to know so badly?"
"I don't believe you," said Reb in a hollow and hesitant voice. "He is alive."
Epke smiled. Maybe Epke was not his real name: he was extremely blond, his eyebrows were almost white and blended into his very light skin, and he spoke German with the particular intonation of people from the Baltic states. He shook his head, with an expression of regret, like a professor who is not given the expected answer from a good student.
"He is alive," repeated Reb, more determined. "You are lying."
He looked exactly like a crazy adolescent. Even his size seemed to have decreased. He was half-collapsed against the wall, the barrel of the Luger still pressed against his temple. His eyes darted from one man to another, stopping a little longer on Lothar, who was sweating more than ever. Behind Lothar was a small window, obstructed by two bars, with a dusty windowpane; not so dusty, however, that you could not see through it.
"Let's finish with this," said Epke.
"In the letter my father left for me . .
Reb stopped suddenly, as if he realized he had said too much. Epke's pale gaze had quickly returned to him.
"What letter?"
"My father is alive, I know it."
"What letter?"
Through the half-moon opening of the window people could be seen walking by in the street, from their shoes to their knees, even though the noise of the traffic was inaudible. The man wearing paratroopers' boots had already walked by once; he reappeared, and, just by the position of his feet, it was clear that he was facing, if not the window, at least the house where Reb and the four men were.
Reb lowered his head, defeated.
"I left it in Vienna."
"Where in Vienna?"
"I won't tell you." In the tone of a stubborn kid.
Epke was looking at him, uncertain. Finally, he shook his head and said, without turning around: "Lothar, can you find the pictures of his father?"
The fat man mopped his forehead and his whole face with his girlish little hands. "If I have the dates, yes."