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

"He was in charge."
"Describe him to me, please."
She did. He could very well have been one of the three men who came to Wagner's bookshop after his own visit.
"And the one you called 'the boss'? The very tall and good-looking one?"
"He came that night in a car with a flag on it. He said to Epke: 'Take this and that,' and he told Epke to pay our wages and let us go."
"Where is Epke now?"
She shrugged her shoulders, a mean look of irony showing in her eyes. He almost had to push her aside when he went back into the house. Again he raised his arms and slipped his tong fingers around the beam.
"You're no more than a kid," she remarked. "Why should I be afraid of you?"
He smiled. "You are afraid of me," he said softly. "Look at my face and my eyes and you will see that you are very afraid of me. And you are right to be afraid." His hand came down, holding the hook. "I will come back, Emma Donin. In a week or in two months. I will come back and I will examine the children. And if I find one whip mark, I will slit your throat and cut off your hands. First the hands and then the throat.
Did you speak with the old man with white hair whose name was Anton and who was run over by the army truck?" She looked at the hook, and maybe even more at the large
hand Reb held toward her, with terrified eyes. She nodded.
"Not often. He didn't speak much."
"I know," said Reb. "But maybe he said something to you or to one of the new servants about Johann Klimrod, my father. Try to remember, please."
The three little boys came in and sat down with the same furtive movement, their three faces looking from the hook to
the frightened face of the woman without showing any interest in what was taking place. The presence, the attitude, the silence, the large, serious blue eyes of the three little boys in this farmhouse in the middle of the forest were reminiscent of German folklore stories, full of ogres and fairies.
"Once," said Emma Donin, "he spoke of a sanatorium."
"Where they might have taken my father between July and September of 1941?"
"Yes."
Near Linz, she said. Anton had said another name, but she didn't remember it any more. From under his shirt, Reb pulled out the official map stolen from the British general. It took some time; he read, one by one, all the names on the map, including Mauthausen, within a forty-mile radius of Linz .
until the moment when she said yes, that was the name, Hartheim.
The castle of Hartheim.

7

Having left Reichenau, he spent the rest of the day and the following night in Payerbach, at the house of the old man with the barrow, whose invitation he had at first declined. And it was the only time in four years, since his departure for Lvov with his mother and sisters, that he slept in a real bed, ate at a table surrounded by a family. The old man's name was Doppler; three of his grandsons had been recruited into the German Army, two of them had already died, officially, and there was no word on the third one. Reb told Doppler about the children in Emma Donin's care and asked him to look after them.
He made a mistake when he returned to Vienna. Not in prowling around the Bohemian Chancellery, and even in going back into the house. But he asked too many questions concerning Epke.
In vain. The name didn't mean anything to anyone, as if Emma Donin had invented it.
In reality, the very fact that he had learned this name revealed the progress he had made. The same held true for the curiosity he showed concerning the exact circumstances of the death of Anton Hinterseer, "the old man with the white hair," who had been in the service of the Klimrods for over fifty years and had been killed by a military truck. If anything, Reb believed, he had simply been assassinated by Epke.
The tall, blond, and very handsome man in SS general's uniform described by Emma Donin was, of course, Erich Steyr.
And Steyr as well as Epke saw in Rob Kiimrod's inquiries the sign that he was closing in on the dreadful truth.

Hartheim castle is on the road that runs along the Danube when you go from Linz northwest to Passau in Germany. The
place is called Alkhoven. It is a small, quiet village, the kind you find by the hundreds in northern Austria. From Alkhoven to Linz is only a little over nine miles.
The castle is a large building, pierced by several blind windows, Renaissance-type, in the heavy and lugubrious German taste of Emperor Maximilian. A vast courtyard surrounded by rather nice colonnades does not succeed in diminishing the sinister impression of the whole place, which is dominated by four towers.

"It used to be a sanatorium," the red-haired man told Reb, reluctantly. "A kind of hospital, if you want. I went there twice, in 1942 and then the following year. They had a general short circuit and had me come."
He hastened to shake his head, already on the defensive. "But I didn't see anything unusual."
The red-haired electrician's shop was not far from the Trinity column in Linz. He had immediately recognized Reb Klimrod, the minute the adolescent's unending thin figure appeared on his doorstep. He remembered the boy the SS officers had dragged along with them, constantly, once on a leash, like a dog, in Mauthausen, to which he had gone several times in his capacity as electrician. Like all the men whose activity had dealt in small or great part with the camps, he knew that the search was on in full force, led by the section on War Crimes, and he was especially fearful of this Jewish committee recently organized in Linz. The Jews, now, were dangerous, terribly so. Twice already, in the streets of Linz, he had passed another former prisoner, Simon Wiesenthal, who actually lived close by. Sometimes, Wiesenthal's black, piercing eyes haunted his nightmares, although he considered himself to be completely innocent, unaffected: he was just an 'electrician, nothing more; for what could they blame him?
And yet, this boy who had just come in and was asking him questions about Hartheim was Jewish. The red-haired man clearly remembered the striped uniform on which the yellow J occupied the center of a reddish-yellow double triangle.
It was the red-haired man who gave Reb Klimrod the name of the photographer from Salzburg.
He had traveled from Vienna to Linz, hanging onto one of those open, almost completely demolished cars that the Austrian railroad had managed to put back on the tracks on certain lines. He arrived in Linz on June 30 and covered the distance to Alkhoven by foot and by military Jeep. The military willingly picked up civilian hitchhikers.
He never specifically told anyone whether he actually went inside Hartheim castle. Neither Tarras nor Settiniaz dared to ask him the question.
Reb Michael Klimrod was the first man-besides, of course, those who had worked there-to discover the true functions of Hartheim castle, which were only officially revealed in 1961, quite by chance, and on Simon Wiesenthal's initiative.
He arrived in Salzburg the evening of July 2 or the morning of July 3. More than two-thirds of the distance from Mauthausen he had done on foot, sleeping little, with the sole exception of his stop at Doppler's, in Payerbach, eating less yet, and, again with the exception of Doppler, without taking strength from any friendly presence. He was plunged in a desperate and dramatic solitude, driven by a unique obsession: to find out where and how his father had died.
The photographer from Salzburg was named Lothar.
"He is not here," said the woman with the gray hair cut very short. "He lives here but he doesn't work here. You can go to his laboratory."
She consented to give him the address-in a covered passage just behind the bell tower.
"Do you know where it is?"
"I'll find it," said Reb.
He left, trying to hide his limp. Crossing the square of the Old Market, he saw the ambulance for the second time.