In the Land of Armadillos (2 page)

“Theater sets,” he said. “In Vienna. Opera sets, once, for a friend in Warsaw. Murals for Szyk's dining room. Szyk was my dealer.”

“Sounds like fun. You must know a lot of interesting people.”

For an instant, the look the artist returned was unmistakably ironic. Then he shifted his gaze to the trail of smoke dissipating into the air. Max realized his mistake. Of course. They were probably dead now.

The interview was depressing him. He clapped the book closed with more force than he had intended, making Tobias Rey jump. The noise was like a gunshot in the quiet room.

“Come on, Rey, cheer up,” Max said in an affable voice. “You're going to be fine here. I want you to paint some murals for my son's room. He's arriving in a few weeks. You'll have to hurry.”

*  *  *

The next morning, his new employee presented himself at ten
A.M.
, two hours late. Any other day, Max might have shot him. But he was already behind on his other duties, so today he let it go.

Last night he'd been having a wonderful time in Reinhart's castle, a medieval hunting lodge belonging to some departed Polish earl. Reinhart himself was at his table, along with some of the brightest lights of local Party society. Chief Engineer Falkner, who rolled his eyes and complained about how long his damned drainage operation was taking; Rohlfe, Gestapo chief of the district, who said little, but drank heavily and was surprisingly jolly; Hackendahl, Rohlfe's protégé. Cold and efficient, he had studied law before taking to the streets as a Brownshirt. Gruber, who beamed at Max from across the table, his face shiny and red, while his eyes followed Honi as she flitted from table to table, wearing a gold gown that was tight across the breasts.

Reinhart had a marvelous chef. There was game from his forest, venison, boar, grouse, duck, rabbit, all prepared from good German recipes. With dinner, one could have French brandy, Scottish whisky, Polish vodka, Czech slivovitz, and with dessert, a fruity German Riesling. Max had just discovered, over an apple strudel that melted on the tongue, that he shared with Rohlfe a lively common interest—they were both in the process of training a new cook—when Gruber called him aside.

“Sorry, Haas,” he began apologetically. “Something's come up. We caught a group of Jews in the forest outside of town, and I need you to take over.”

“Why me?” Max protested unhappily. “I don't do that anymore. Ask some of the other officers. Or the men. They love shooting Jews.”

“Ah, that's just the problem,” confided Gruber morosely. He glanced around the room at the men in their dress uniforms, the ribbons, medals, and braid on their chests refracting the light of the chandeliers like the flashbulbs of many miniature cameras. “Just between you and me, they love it a little
too
much. I know that what we are doing here is for the benefit of mankind, but when I think of what it is doing to their souls . . . Something happened today during a perfectly routine operation . . . some of our men behaved abominably. Babies . . . bayonets . . .” He took off his glasses, rubbed his red eyes with fat fingers. Max noted that his hands were shaking. “What are we doing to them, Max? How we can send them back to Germany, to their mothers, their wives, their children, after the things we've made them do?”

Max glanced around uneasily, worried that someone was listening in on their conversation. He had never heard Gruber talk this way. Was it a test? A trap? Or was he cracking?

With a quick motion, his superior gulped down what was left in his glass. An involuntary shudder, followed by a forced smile. “That's why I'm asking you. With you, there's no circus, no hysterics, no fuss, one-two-three and it's over. I don't know how you do it. You have a way with them.”

Seems that I am General of the Jews again.
A muscle at the base of his skull was throbbing. He flexed his neck right, then left, until he felt a click. “How many?”

“A small job. Twenty-three. They must have been hiding out somewhere.”

After so many of these lousy operations, what was one more? “Send a driver to my villa. First thing in the morning. I want this over with before breakfast.”

Gruber squeezed his arm, bent close enough so that Max could smell the brandy on his breath. “I won't make a habit of this, Haas. You're a good man.”

*  *  *

Max led his new employee up a narrow passage of stairs to the top floor. At this hour of the morning, beams of sunlight streamed in through the windows, heating the space with a voluptuous warmth.

The walls were newly plastered, as chaste as the feathers in an angel's wing. There was a bare bed, a desk, a chest of drawers, a pair of tailor's dummies left by a previous owner. As if he had been placed there for the purpose of contrast, Tobias Rey slouched over by the pristine white wall, the very picture of doom and gloom.

“What happened to you, Rey, stay up too late dancing?”

The circles under his artist's eyes had grown darker, if it was possible, the stubble on his long face, longer. Max offered him a cigarette from a gold case, then took one himself. Smoke waltzed in lazy spirals with the dust motes in the bare room.

“So, what are you going to paint for me?”

Tobias Rey spoke slowly and deliberately. “I'm sorry for your trouble, Sturmbannführer. Someone should have told you. I don't paint anymore.”

Max considered this for a moment, then pulled out his pistol and jammed it into the hollow under the artist's cheekbone. With a satisfying click, he relaxed the safety catch. The bereaved eyes stammered shut.

Sturmbannführer Maximillian Haas was not an introspective man. He believed in neither God nor an afterlife. He was a man of medium height and build, with plain looks, of moderate intelligence. As a schoolboy, he'd never excelled at anything, his grades were nothing to brag about. Before he joined the Nazi Party, he'd been a machinist.

But as he stood there, his finger curled around the trigger of a gun pressed to another man's head, Max came to a startling conclusion: Tobias Rey wasn't being disrespectful. Tobias Rey wanted to die.

The arm holding the gun fell to his side. “What's the matter with you, Rey?” he asked, curious. “Why don't you want to paint anymore?”

The shadowy eyes opened, recognized that the risk of imminent death had passed. Max could tell that he didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. Wearily, he replied, “With death circling all around us, the practice of making these chicken scratches seems ridiculous to me. I feel like I am mocking the dead.”

Max thought. “It's not ridiculous to want to live. Toby—may I call you Toby?—you know what your problem is? You think too much. For now, all you have to do is work. Okay?”

When he sucked on the cigarette, Max could see a cut shaped like a crescent moon where he had socked his gun into the starved cheek. “What do you want me to paint?”

Since yesterday, the box with Peter's possessions had moved upstairs. Max paged through
In the Land of Armadillos
until he found the picture he liked. “This one,” he said, pointing to the parade of red armadillos trundling up and down blue hills.

Leaving the cigarette dangling from his lips, the artist took up a pencil and squinted at the wall behind the bed. In his black pants and black shirt, he was pitiably scrawny, reminding Max of a broken umbrella, ribs inverted by the wind.

With a pencil in his hand, Toby's entire affect changed. His back straightened, realigned. His shoulders relaxed and, with that small adjustment to his posture, broadened. He seemed to grow several inches taller all at once. Simultaneously, the muscles in his face tautened to a kind of concentration Max usually associated with animals of prey. Inhabiting his element the way a lion inhabits the savannah, Toby radiated power and confidence.

He lunged forward and began to draw. With a single undulating line, he brought forth a series of rolling, round-topped mountains. Max watched, entranced, as he feinted back, frowned, then darted forth to add palm trees and tufts of grass. With an intense flurry of strokes, Toby outlined a chubby armadillo. Before Max's astonished eyes, the picture in the book came to life.

“My God,” he said. The words burst out involuntarily.

Now Toby seemed to remember that Max was in the room. He glanced at his drawing, gave him a wry smile. “Well, boss, what do you think?”

Max was confused. In the white room, watching the thin, pale man in dark clothes summon forth images from the air, he felt an elation not unlike the awe he had experienced when he was a child in church.

He shook his head to clear it of the dreaminess that had settled over him. An office full of work awaited his attention. “You look like you're going to faint,” he grunted. “I'll send up some breakfast.”

*  *  *

In the following days, Max was preoccupied with a whole Pandora's box full of problems. Jews were pouring in from everywhere. There was a transport from Vienna, one from Kraków, another one from Skorodnica, all needing evaluation, labor assignments, housing. A crew of Jewish stonecutters complained that they were being mistreated by their employer and refused to go back to his shop. They wanted assurances that the abuses would stop. Furthermore, the Jewish Council was screwing around, unwilling to come up with a list of people who were too old, too sick, or too worn out for employment, having finally figured out what it meant when a large group of Jews was assembled for a walk in the woods. Up until now, the Judenrat had done everything they were asked. The time was right for his first visit.

It wasn't that the ghetto was walled off, or fenced in with barbed wire. Still, it bore all the signs of involuntary incarceration. The trees were dead, the crumbling buildings displayed leprous facades, the paving stones were cracked and missing. The gutters were swollen with an oily black runoff fed by melting snow. A fading, outdated movie poster peeled from a kiosk, advertising
Gone with the Wind;
a flyer demanding that Jews turn in all furs was tacked over it. Here and there Max could see a house destroyed at the beginning of the war and never repaired. Color had fled the Jewish quarter; the houses were gray, the snow was gray, the shingles were gray, merchandise in shopwindows, faces, too.

On the sidewalk, Yids scattered at his approach, scurrying across the street to the other side. Children stopped playing as he strode by, observing with wide eyes the shiny death's-head badge on his officer's cap, the billowing skirts of his overcoat, his gleaming leather boots.

The offices of the Judenrat looked like offices anywhere else. A desk, a telephone, a receptionist, rows of ledgers, a potted plant, the clatter of women typing in another room. There was a flutter of activity at his arrival. The members of the Jewish Council emerged from their offices, looking prosperous and harried. When enough of them had gathered around, peppering him with explanations and concerns, he handed his coat to the receptionist, pulled out his pistol, and shot them.

From Max Haas's diary, November 1, 1942

. . . fifteen men, well dressed, cultured, with beautiful manners. I didn't enjoy shooting them, but it was the quickest way to get their cooperation. The list of names I requested will be in my hands by morning.

This is wartime. There are the victorious and the vanquished, and unfortunately for them, they belong to the side of the vanquished. I didn't write the rules, that's just how it goes. From now on, I expect the Jewish Council will be more compliant.

From his letter to Gerda Haas, November 1, 1942

The most exciting news! You're never going to guess who I found to paint murals in Peter's room. Tobias Rey, what do you think of that! He's painting some scenes from
In the Land of Armadillos.
Please don't tell Peter. I want it to be a surprise.

How are my little soldier's riding lessons coming along? Tell him that Lilo is a little lame from a fall she took during a hunt, so she is getting a good rest in the barn right now, but when he gets here, we'll go riding all the time.

My dearest darling sweetheart, how I miss you! Today I am thinking in particular of your little bunny nose, and your little bunny chin, and the softness of your hair when I put my fingers through it. How I long to be alone with you in our little den! All this romantic talk doesn't sound much like your old Max, does it? The closer the day of your arrival comes, the faster my heart beats for you.

*  *  *

The tall clock in the stairway chimed ten times as Max climbed up the steps. At the threshold of the nursery, he pushed open the door. He caught his breath, speechless with delight.

Using the word
red
to describe the armadillos would have been laughably inadequate. The color was scarlet, or carmine, or madder lake, boiling crazily into a neon sunset orange, overflowing into an ecstasy of bronze, cinnabar, rust, before finally bleeding back into crimson. A wide swash of blue was brushed exuberantly around the outline of each armadillo, a pure, burning hue he had seen only once before, in a painting of the Virgin.

Max was just returning home from the cinema, a gala premiere for a new German film. A young, handsome scientist was developing a top-secret weapon that would win the war for Germany. Disaster struck when a foolish secretary let the secret slip to her new boyfriend, who, surprise surprise, turned out to be spying for the enemy. Order was restored in the end—the handsome scientist shot the traitorous spy and married his virtuous blond fiancée—and the foolish secretary learned a tough but valuable lesson. Max loved movies, especially movies like this one, thrillers that delivered a timely political message.

Toby was standing in the middle of the room, his thin arms crossed over his chest, lost in contemplation. There was something glamorous about him, Max thought, a certain inborn elegance, as if he belonged to a lost branch of a forgotten monarchy. He had already begun sketching out the next mural, which showed the armadillo Aramis and his lady love, Bianca, at the café they opened together in Paris. Men in homburg hats soared through the air, while fantastic animals of every shape and color populated the little round marble-topped tables. Bianca, the blue cockatoo, was in her white apron, Aramis, his vest and bow tie. Max barely stopped himself from clapping his hands with childish joy.