Depraved Indifference (41 page)

“Being shot,” observed Devra Blok as she helped him to his feet and into a blue terrycloth robe, “is not like anything else. It knocks the stuffings out, isn't it so?”

“Yo,” Karp answered shakily, concentrating on keeping his feet. He leaned heavily against her and was conscious of her strength and the heat of her body under the thin shirt. “You sound like you've been shot yourself.”

She shook her head. “Not me. But I have taken care of casualties. So, let us go get you feed.”

“Fed,” said Karp. “Bacon and eggs? Or is this a kosher kidnap? How about bagels and lox?”

A faint smile. “What you like.”

She brought him into a sunny breakfast nook that smelled of toast and coffee and frying onions. Karp felt the saliva flow; he hadn't eaten any serious food since before he had been shot. He sat gingerly down at a round white table, and Devra sat next to him. Across the counter in the kitchen a lean man in a dark T-shirt stirred something at the range.

Devra poured coffee, and in a few moments the man came in from the kitchen holding a frying pan full of scrambled eggs made with minced lox and onions and a plate of toasted rye. The man nodded to Karp and sat down. Devra said, “Natan likes to cook breakfast, don't you, Natan?” Natan grinned shyly and dug into the meal. Karp did the same, wondering what Natan did when he wasn't cooking breakfast. The man was well built in a wiry way. He had a thick head of dirty blond curls and a wide mouth loaded with big white teeth. He had the air of a college student, but Karp figured he was four or five years into his twenties.

A door slammed somewhere in the back of the house. A few seconds later, Yaacov the weightlifter strode into the room, rubbing his hands. He had traded his track suit for a puffy red down parka, jeans, and hiking boots. He said “good morning” all around, unzipped his parka, and sat at the table.

Karp remarked lightly, “Yaacov, hang onto that parka. If the commando business ever goes bad, you can get a job with Michelin.”

“Pardon?” Yaacov asked politely.

“You know, Michelin, the tire company. Their little man?” Karp mimicked the great girth of
l'homme Michelin
and got blank looks. It must be the language barrier, he thought.

After breakfast they adjourned to the living room. This was furnished in an anonymous suburban style, vaguely early American. Floor-length drapes in a pale green silky material covered one wall. There were pictures on the walls and hook rugs on the floors, but no knickknacks or personal photographs to be seen. Karp wondered who lived here, or if anybody did. He presumed it was what the spy stories called a safe house. He spotted a phone sitting on a corner table and thought about what they would do if he just walked up to it and tried to call.

Yaacov turned on a TV and sat on a couch to watch it. Soaps. He seemed interested. Devra sat in a ladder-back rocker and took out her knitting. Natan disappeared somewhere. There was a grandfather clock that ticked loudly. After half an hour of this, Karp felt his mind softening. He wanted to know what these people wanted from him. He wanted to know what Leventhal was up to. And most of all, he wanted to know what he had meant about Karavitch not being Karavitch, but somebody else instead, who had killed the real Karavitch.

The hours dragged by. They had lunch—tuna fish sandwiches and Pepsi—and then returned to their original places. Karp studied his captors. The three of them seemed curiously flat in their personalities. No little jokes. No byplay. Very solemn. Of course, he reflected, maybe this is what kidnappers learn in kidnapping school: don't flash anything at the victim, be cool. Maybe he could get a rise out of them.

“This is fun,” he said, “I always wanted to sit around for days on end and watch daytime TV. The problem is, I didn't bring my ironing.” He stood up, walked over to the phone, and picked up the receiver. It was dead. Then he noticed that someone had removed the wire connecting it to the wall jack.

“Damn, I really could have gone for a pizza,” he remarked. Devra looked up from her knitting. “We can get. Do you like it?”

“No, Devra. It was sort of a joke. Kind of an incongruity that in many people would produce the sensation of humor, perhaps leading to a laugh.” She looked at him blankly.

Karp walked over to the floor-length drapes, pulled them back, and looked out through the huge picture window they concealed. A cleared gravel driveway and hedge-lined road, a snowy lawn, a row of black trees. A figure, a large man, was hurrying up the road. Leventhal? Before he could decide, Yaacov was by his side, closing the drapes.

“Please. You shouldn't do.”

“Huh? Why shouldn't I? You're afraid I'll make signals? Help, I'm a prisoner in a matzoh-ball factory?”

Yaacov looked uncomfortable. He exchanged a quick look with Devra. “No,” he said, “these men who shot you. They are outside.”

“What? Oh, for crying out loud! What is this shit, guys? Why the hell don't you just call the goddamn cops?”

“I'm afraid we can't do that yet, Mr. Karp,” said Leventhal.

Karp spun around. Leventhal was standing in the doorway of the living room, taking off his gloves. He was wearing a double-breasted tan car-coat, to which he gave a decidedly military air. His face was reddened, either with cold or exertion.

“Why not? When are you going to tell me what's going on?”

Leventhal smiled. “Now, if you like.” He spoke to the two others in clipped phrases in guttural Hebrew, orders. They vanished. Leventhal removed his coat and threw it on the couch, then sat and gestured Karp cordially into an armchair opposite him.

“Now,” he said when Karp had seated himself, “we can have our talk. You are being well treated?”

“Sure. First class. Best kidnapping I ever had. Look, Leventhal, when are you going to let me get out of here? And what was all that about those guys that shot me hanging around outside? And what was all the stuff about Karavitch being somebody else?”

Leventhal, still smiling, held up his hands in mock defense. “Please, one question at a time. First, let me deal with your personal danger. It is true we have observed a van on the local roads that appears to be the one that carried the would-be assassins. There is also a Cadillac sedan that travels with it. These two vehicles are now parked about a quarter of a mile from the main entrance to this property, and Natan is observing them. They have automatic weapons and shotguns. We think it is possible they will attempt to assault this house, perhaps this evening. It will be quite dark by six.”

“How many guys do they have?”

“Natan says ten.”

“Ten! For chrissakes, Leventhal, how you going to hold off ten guys with machine guns? You got three people and a girl.”

Leventhal smiled and shrugged. “They're Cuban gangsters, Mr. Karp, and we're Israeli soldiers. You remember the Bay of Pigs? You remember Entebbe? I think we will do all right. Besides, we don't intend to hold them off. We will attack.”

“Now I know you're crazy,” Karp snapped. Leventhal's beaming confidence was beginning to get on his nerves. “OK, before you get killed, just tell me, why not bring in the cops? Just let me make a couple of calls, I guarantee you, you won't have to be involved.”

“Well, I'm afraid we are involved, and the presence of the police at this time would complicate matters in a way that would be inconvenient to our mission.”

“What are you talking, inconvenient? Stop these riddles, Leventhal. Tell me who you are, what you're doing here, and most of all, what the fuck you want with me.”

Leventhal gave him a long look. His smile faded and was replaced by an expression that was both sad and angry. “All right, fine. You want information, I give you information. I notice there's no ‘Thank you, Ben, you saved my life, you're risking your lives to keep on saving it.'”

“You could just call the cops; nobody's asking you—”

“The cops? Don't you know anything yet? What cops? The New York police? The FBI? Don't you know when you've been set up? How do you think those gentlemen out there in those cars found us so fast? Believe me, Mr. Karp, you want me to bring cops, I'll give you a gun first, you could blow your own brains out.”

Karp looked at the floor and said nothing. He felt an odd shame about how plausible this was to him, that he could so easily credit the corruption of his country's and his city's police forces. After a moment Leventhal went on.

“Now, you are correct in thinking that I have a proposition for you. Simply, it is this. I am determined to capture and bring to justice in Israel an infamous war criminal whom you have in custody. I wish your help and cooperation in doing this.”

“You mean Karavitch?”

“The man you know as Karavitch, the man you are holding now on a kidnap and murder charge, is not Djordje Karavitch. He is Josef Karl Dreb. Hauptsturmfuehrer Dreb of the Prinz Eugen Division of the Waffen-SS and before that a junior officer in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Eichmann's organization. Dreb was among the most promising officers in Amt IV B4, the organization responsible for the final solution to the Jewish problem. Accordingly, he was given a sensitive and important mission, which was mobilizing the forces of the Croatian puppet state and helping them round up all the forty thousand Jews in that country and dispose of them. Now, you understand that this was no easy task—”

“Wait a minute, Leventhal. How do you know Karavitch is what's-his-name, Dreb? He looks like Karavitch, he talks like Karavitch, also the Croatians accept him as Karavitch, and he entered the country as Karavitch. On top of that, if there was a Nazi who wanted to cover his tracks, why would he use Karavitch as a cover? Apparently Karavitch wasn't any sweetheart in the war either. It's like Jesse James trying to pass as Billy the Kid.”

“No, it is not. Karavitch was a typical Croat fascist. He backed the wrong side in the war, maybe he shot the odd Jew, the odd Serb, but what's a massacre or two or three against a good anticommunist Catholic background? No, Mr. Karp, Karavitch is small beer compared to Dreb. A Karavitch could get into the Croatian nationalist escape routes, could enter the United States, a poor refugee, everybody very sympathetic, you understand? Start a new life, bygones are bygones, no?

“But not Dreb. Mr. Karp, do you know what an
einsatzgruppe
was?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. They were SS murder squads that followed the army and killed people the Nazis didn't like.”

Leventhal raised his eyebrows. “Very good. Very interesting that you should have such knowledge. You have a special interest in the Holocaust perhaps?”

“No. But I was born Jewish in New York in 1943. Eat your soup, children are starving in Europe—that generation. My mother was a big-time Zionist, regional Hadassah officer for years, and for two hours every Sunday for six years I had Jewish history and culture pounded into my head, along with a load of Zionist propaganda. Mostly by Israelis, as a matter of fact. They had a lot of cachet in Brooklyn at that time. For years we had this book on our coffee table. Other people had, I don't know, horses of the world, flowers, Picasso; we had Auschwitz snaps—piles of human hair, the guys, the skeletons in striped pajamas, the room with a hundred thousand eyeglasses on the floor.

“Which is how come I know what
einsatzgruppen
are. I also know the names of all the concentration camps, their years of operation, and approximately how many people died in each one. Also their commandants, and the particular or unusual atrocities associated with particular camps: the human skin lampshades at Bergen-Belsen, the rock quarry at Majdenek, the medical experiments at Ravensbrucke. I remember there was one guy who liked to kill little children one by one with a hammer, in front of their parents—”

“Scharfuehrer Schmidt.”

“Right, Sergeant Schmidt. They caught him and gave him eight years in the slammer. Apparently slept like a baby every night. Funny how that kind of stuff sticks in your head. Anyway, I'm just telling you this so you don't think that raising my Jewish guilt or conscience with a bunch of Holocaust stories will make me help you move Karavitch illegally out of the jurisdiction of the County of New York. Sorry.”

Leventhal looked at Karp for several long minutes without saying anything. He was no longer smiling. Instead his large, liquid eyes glowed in their dark pouches with sadness, disappointment, a hint of contempt. It was high-intensity Jewish guilt-generating radiation, and Karp knew it well from countless cringing moments of his childhood. Despite himself he began to feel generalized shame and discomfort.

“It's not going to work, Leventhal,” said Karp, feigning more confidence than he felt at that moment. “Get my grandmother in here, maybe you got a shot, but otherwise I can't help you.”

“Yes, I see that,” said the other man. “And I'm sorry too. For you. It must be sad to be so cut off from your own people. Funny, we don't learn. United we stand.” He clenched his fist. “Divided we fall.” He wiggled his fingers.

“I'm an American, Leventhal. We invented that.”

“Yes, and they thought they were Germans and French and Poles, but in the end, all that counted was, they were Jews.”

“True, but it turns out the Nazis aren't on the ballot this year. Not in New York anyway. If they ever come to power again, I'm going to go with the Remington autoloader twelve-gauge, modified with the drum magazine. I ought to be able to take out most of a
sturmbann
before they get me.”

Leventhal looked sad again and cluck-clucked like an old lady. “What a shame we should be having a conversation like this, two Jews. A shame and a disgrace. Forgive me, Mr. Karp, if I must bore you with one more little tale from that time. You can add it to your coffee table collection, heh?

“In Zagreb in 1941, there were many Jews, refugees from Austria and Germany. The Yugoslavs were generous with visas at that time; perhaps they wanted Croatia salted with people who had some reason to be grateful to the Belgrade regime. And we were, we were.