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

At 8:10 A.M., a tall man, rather corpulent but still cutting a pleasing figure, came out of a private house on Zeppelinstrasse, in Munich, near the Isar. He raised the fox collar of his coat, adjusted his smart suede gloves, and opened the door of his garage. The Mercedes, his pride, was there, sparkling clean. He sat down behind the wheel and reveled in hearing the engine purr softly. He put the car in gear.
"Don't move, please."
The voice was so soft and so courteous that he felt no fright. Then, turning, he recognized the eyes, and a blazing terror overtook him.
"It can't be!"
"I'm afraid so," answered Reb. "I know that your children are going to come out and that you have to take them to school. There will be no change in the program. There better not be. I would be forced to kill your children, also, and I would rather not. Now, drive normally, please."
"Michael . .
"Drive, please."
The Mercedes backed out of the garage and pulled up slowly in front of the house. The two children walked out, bundled up in red and blue wool scarves. They showed some surprise at seeing a stranger next to their father, but Reb smiled and said to them: "Your father and I are old friends. He took care of me almost like a father for twenty months. Come, get in; we are going to drop you at school."
The children smiled at him and asked questions. He told them his name was Michael, or, rather, that their father called him that because he did not like his other name. And what was this name? Oh, he said, something very foreign and strange, and they could ask their father what it was.
They arrived at the school, and Reb said to the driver of the Mercedes: "You should kiss your children. They are charming."
The children went into the school, and the car pulled away.
"Michael, my God . .
"We are going to Dachau," said Reb. "Please. Mauthausen is too far and we would have to cross the border. Dachau will do."
"Michael . .
"My name is Reb," said Reb, smiling. "Slow down a little, please. I wouldn't want us to have an accident. And I would like you to be quiet. To hear you speak . . . only increases that great anger I feel. Do you understand?"
They drove in silence. The camp appeared, still intact after twenty-three months.
"We are not going inside. It's not necessary. Just follow the wall until you can see the crematoriums."
Two minutes went by.
"There. Stop now, please. And get out of the car."
Reb also got out. He was holding a can in his left hand and a weapon in his right.
The former Obersturmbannfiihrer asked in a hollow voice:
"Would you really have killed my children?"
"I think so," said Reb. "But I'm not sure. I am very angry but I don't know whether I would have gone as far as to kill them."
He handed him the can.
"Open it and drink, please."
The former Obersturmbannfiihrer unscrewed the cap and immediately recognized the smell. He said in a strangled voice:
"It's gasoline."
"Yes," said Reb. "I remember a young Frenchman you forced to drink, three years and four days ago, at about the same time. For him, it was sludge. Probably because you did not have enough gasoline. He was ten years old. He was born on July 23 in Bordeaux. I remember him very well. It took him ten hours to die. I think you will drink this gasoline because you will hope until the very end that I will not kill you. And
it's true that you have a chance. Not a big one, but you have one. But, before you drink . .
From the pocket of his jacket, he took a small object wrapped in paper.
"A present," he said.
The man removed the paper. He found a lipstick.
"I would very much like you to put some on your face, on your lips especially .
Time went by.
"There. The cheeks, also, please ... Very good. Now you can drink the gasoline. . . . The can is yours, in case you did not recognize it. And this letter will be found in your pocket. It was written by a young Lithuanian named Zaccharius. You'll tell me he's dead. But is that reason enough? He describes in it what you did to the children, of which I was one. . . . Drink a little more, please . .
He shot from very close, under the right cheekbone. Then he placed the weapon in the still-warm hand of former Obersturmbannfdhrer Wilhelm Hochreiner and, with the dead man's own fingers, pulled the trigger once again, this time shooting into a bush.
He waited until he was far away before throwing up. In fact, Dov Lazarus had to stop his car two more times so that he could throw up again.

"Watch it," whispered Dov.
The woman had just reappeared, this time with two men.
"Don't you recognize one of them, kid?"
Reb nodded. The smaller of the two men was German, and three weeks earlier, right after Hochreiner's execution near the crematoriums of Dachau, he and Dov had seen him driving one of the trucks that delivered Stars and Stripes between Salzburg and Munich. The Military Police never searched those trucks, other than to take a few copies with a smile, so that during almost every trip Nazi fugitives traveled, hidden behind stacks of newspapers. As for the woman, with short gray hair and a cold expression, she was the one who, on July 3, 1945, in Salzburg, had told Reb he could find the photographer named Lothar at his laboratory near the bell tower and had in this way sent him into the trap laid by Epke.
The woman had been the first step in the hunt undertaken by Reb Klimrod. (The search for Hochreiner had been easy, because the former Obersturmbannfdhrer had simply, at the beginning of 1946, returned to running his textile mill.) Reb had found her less than a hundred hours after he returned to Austria from Munich, and on this day, March 23, 1947, he and Lazarus, together or separately, had been on her trail for forty-three days.
"There are other guys in the chalet, kid. At least three men."
"Four," said Reb.
It was about 10:00 P.M. and it was going to be a cold night. Below the small wood where they were lying in wait, they could see the lights of Althaussee. It was in the heart of the Dead Mountains, and the lakes there are deep and dark, set between high, often almost vertical cliffs. Sixty thousand civilians loaded with loot from all of Europe had sought refuge there during the last months of the war.
"Four men and another woman," said Reb. He had started with the hypothesis that, working with Epke, she might have been at the house near the Bohemian Chancellery. He was right: Gerda Huber, as described by Reb, had been identified by two shopkeepers in the neighborhood. They had also revealed her name and her origin. She came from Graz, Erich Steyr's hometown. The rest had been easy. The woman worked for the Austrian Red Cross, helping displaced people. As such, she had access to all sorts of passes.
"Something's up."
A third man came out of the chalet, and Dov as well as Reb recognized him.