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

affected her commitment to the clandestine Zionist movement. She was advised of the arrival of two men and was asked to
help them, first during their time in Cairo, then to reach Europe. She had Lazarus and Klimrod stay in her former apartment, behind the American Embassy, and obtained passports for them-an Irish one for Lazarus and a French one for Klimrod-Hubrecht.
She booked ship passage for them, and on March 30 the two men reached Marseilles.
On April 8, Reb Klimrod was in Nuremberg, alone.

"Nakain," said Bunim Anielewitch. And he asked, in German: "Do you know what that means?"
"Revenge, in Hebrew," answered Reb.
They were walking in the suburbs of Nuremberg, between a double row of demolished houses, under a fine, icy rain. They were almost the same size-the advantage going to Klimrod by two or three inches. Anielewitch was twenty-eight years old, with large black eyes, deep, sad eyes, permanently veiled in a way that dimmed them.
"I don't like your companion," he said after a while. "First of all, he's too old. The oldest among us isn't yet thirty. But mostly because he has a professional look. He looks like an American gangster."
"He's extremely effective. More than I am. For the time being."
"I appreciate efficiency. There is nothing I hate more than these Talmudic discussions on the one hundred and twentyseven reasons to do or not do something, whether it be to open or to close a door. But for what we are about to undertake, what we have already begun to undertake, efficiency comes second in the qualities we require. I don't want any professional killers, Reb. I want, most of all He hesitated, and
then said almost timidly, ". . . purity. We are going to kill although hating to kill. Revenge is the weapon of the weak, they say, but what can we do? It is not so much to punish these men as it is to ensure that their crimes will not be forgotten. People are already forgetting. Some of them are on trial, right here and now. The newspapers are talking about it. But for how long? The whole world has to know that such an abomination cannot be forgotten in two or three years. And for that there is no other solution but to kill. Do you really want to be one of us?"
Reb nodded rather vaguely, his large hands shoved into the worn pockets of his jacket.
"I have been checking up on you. Our organization is widespread with agents all through Europe. And, what's more, I have friends, reliable friends, in Warsaw and in Moscow. Personal friends, I mean. They disapprove of us in Tel Aviv; the Haganah would like to control us, maybe even destroy us. The Talmud, time and time again; speechifying for hours instead of acting. As far as you're concerned, we have checked everything. One of our members was in Belzec; he remembers your mother and sisters, and he will answer for you."
"But not for Dov Lazarus."
"Not for Lazarus. However, we can use him. We are going to need money, a lot of money, and none of these sanctimonious rogues from Haganah, Mossad, Irgun, or Stern want to furnish us with any. We are on our own. We have a network that deals with the smuggling of gold and drugs. . . . I know: there is a contradiction between this purity we seek and the illicit traffic. But, here again, we don't have any choice. If need be-but I'm against it-Lazarus could work in that area of our organization. I have seen his file: in the States, he met a good number of those people they call 'the Mafia,' he collaborated with Jewish gangsters in New York, and he still has many contacts among them and their Sicilian friends. But let's talk about you. It's too late for you to participate in our next mission. At least in a primary role. But you speak French, and very well, I understand. As soon as this mission is over, its participants are supposed to withdraw to France. I would like you to take care of this withdrawal, to go to France and prepare refuges for them. Can you do it?"
"I'll need some money."
"You'll get it. But look at this."
Anielewitch had stopped him by putting a hand on his arm. Reb looked up and saw what he thought to be a factory, protected by policeman and a barbed-wire fence. But Anielewitch shook his head.
"No. It's an industrial bakery. Inside, they make two sorts of bread, delivered each morning, and luckily you can't make any mistake: the white bread goes to the American, English, and Polish soldiers. We won't touch that, of course. The loaves of black bread are reserved for the prisoners. These prisoners are in what used to be Stalag XIII. There are thirty-six thousand of them, all SS against whom the Allied Military Police have gathered proof. We hope to kill at least a third of them. With arsenic."

The mission took place during the night of April 13, 1946, and that night was marked by a violent storm, which explained its partial failure. In the weeks leading up to it, though, all precautions had been taken. Two men from the Nakam group, not mentioning the fact that they were Jewish, had been able to find work within the stalag, one as a chauffeur, the other as a warehouseman. Chemists in the organization had perfected an arsenic-based mixture that, when applied to the bottom of a loaf of bread, had the exact consistency and color as the flour with which German bakers dust their products. Other men had succeeded in finding work within the bakery itself, where they had dug, in secret, under the floor of the warehouse where the bread was kept before it was shipped, a hiding place for the poison and the tools. They brought the poison in by concealing it in hot-water bottles slipped under their clothing.
At the end of the afternoon of April 13, three men stayed behind in the hiding place, coming out only after nightfall, when the employees had all left. Wearing gloves and protecting their faces, they began to coat the loaves, in a strange stormy night. The wind became so violent it broke one of the windows of the warehouse. Alerted, policemen arrived. Not finding anyone there, they concluded it had been a robbery attempt, not unusual in these hungry times. Their routine investigation, the following day, forced Nakam to cut short the operation.
On the sixteenth, Nuremberg newspapers reported the discovery of the hiding place by the police, and the poisoning of five thousand SS prisoners.
Of these, four hundred died.

Accompanied by a French Jew by the name of Mayziel, a sometime member of Nakam, Reb Klimrod had succeeded in finding a large apartment in Lyon. For ten days he harbored four of the men who had engineered the Nuremberg affair. They were still mourning their failure, having poisoned only two thousand loaves instead of fourteen thousand.
Anielewitch himself came to Lyon one week later and met with Mayziel and Klimrod. He asked the latter to accompany him as guide and interpreter on a trip that would take them to Belgium and Germany. Mayziel saw them leave on April 26, at dawn, in an automobile they had bought for the organization. Almost five months were to pass before he saw the tall young man again. Klimrod had left behind in the apartment in Lyon his only worldly goods at the time: two books, Montaigne's Essays, in French, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass, in English.
Reb Klimrod reappeared in Lyon in mid-September, with Dov Lazarus.
But, before that, there was the Paris episode.

Two hours earlier, the telephone had rung. A stranger had asked to speak to David Settiniaz. The servant told him that he was not in Paris, or in France. Luck had it that Suzanne Settiniaz was in the room. She took the phone, explaining that she was David's grandmother. "Are you a friend of my grandson?"
"Not really," answered Reb Klimrod in his slow, serious voice. "We met last year in Austria, and he did me a great favor. I would have liked to see him again."
In 1946, Suzanne Settiniaz was sixty-five. She had been a widow for more than ten years, and had no other child than David's father and no other grandchild than David. Although the fortune left to her by her husband kept her more than comfortable, she suffered from loneliness. She loved David, to the point where she had decided, although she didn't speak a word of English, to spend the preceding spring in Boston. She had returned to Paris on September 9, after having spent her
summer, as usual, in her house in Aix-en-Provence. She suggested to the man on the phone that he come visit her, "since you are a friend of David's." Reb accepted.
He looked around him, and his eyes stopped on a small painting hung between two sections of a bookcase of carved mahogany, above a meridienne. The canvas had been painted in oil and tempera, probably in the early nineteen-twenties; it showed mostly undefinable objects, except for two sienna-colored fish on a flat blue background.
"Paul Klee," he said. "We had an almost identical one."
"We?"
"My father and I. We lived in Vienna."
He smiled, and suddenly his entire appearance changed. Up to this moment, his features were not impassive, but he had the expression of someone absorbed in contemplation, an impression accentuated by his light eyes, his huge, deep pupils. But he smiled, and everything changed.
He said: "You have a magnificent apartment. My father would certainly have spoken of a jewelcase worthy of the pearl it contains. He liked to pay that sort of compliment, probably to justify his Viennese nationality."
His accent was slight, and he could have passed for a Frenchman from the East. Like her own grandson and Georges Tarras before her, Suzanne Settiniaz felt disconcerted. She, too, was affected by the disparity between the physical appearance of her visitor, whom she assumed to be about twenty-one, when he was not yet eighteen, the rusticity, the actual poverty of his clothes, and the feeling of immensity that came from the eyes, the voice, and the whole person of Reb Klimrod.
She asked him questions about her grandson, asked him how they had met. He answered that David and he had met "near Linz, in Austria," soon after the arrival of the victorious Allied troops, and that, at a time when he, Reb Michael Klimrod, was in "a difficult situation" (these were the words he used), David had helped him. And they had become friends.
At no time did he speak of camps, or death. In answer to the only question she asked him, hesitantly, for fear of being indiscreet, about his family, he said he no longer had one, his father having been "killed" during the war. So Suzanne Settiniaz imagined a rather normal situation. She assumed that the fa
ther of her visitor had, as had most Austrians, fought in the armies of the Third Reich, that he must have died in combat; and she thought that even Reb himself must have taken part in the hostilities in a German uniform, since she was mistaken about his age. When, later on, David revealed to her the actual circumstances of his meeting with Klimrod, she was doubly horrified: by the facts themselves and, maybe even more, by her own mistaken judgment. She cried over it.
He changed subjects easily and began talking about the six or seven trips he had made to France, the last one in April of 1938. He said he had learned to speak French from a governess who came from the area around VendЇme, and had perfected it during a summer in Paris, and other vacations, in Deauville, Biarritz, and on the Riviera. Yes, he knew Aix-en-Provence; he mentioned the Granet museum, "where there is a Rembrandt and two Cranachs." His knowledge of art dazed Mrs. Settiniaz, who knew the name of Klee only because her husband had bought one of his paintings.
She told Klimrod that David had been demobilized and that he had just resumed his law studies at Harvard. She gave him the address in Boston where David would be at this time of the year unless he was still at the family summer home.
"Shall I make a note of the addresses and phone numbers?"
He shook his head, smiling.
"That will not be necessary. I have rather good memory."