QB VII (5 page)

“I should like to know if any of the Kapos were Jewish?” Bannister asked.

“Only a few from every hundred.”

“But most of the labor was Jewish?”

“Seventy-five percent Jews. Twenty percent Poles and other Slavs and the rest criminals or political prisoners.”

“And you were first taken to Barrack III.”

“Yes. I learned that in this barrack the Germans kept the raw material for medical experiments ... and then I was taken to Barrack V.”

“And forced to undress and shower?”

“Yes, then I was shaved by an orderly and made to sit naked in the anteroom.” Janos fished for a cigarette and his story slowed and his voice varied now with the pain of memory. “They came in, the doctor with an SS colonel Voss, Adolph Voss.”

“How do you know it was Voss?” Highsmith asked.

“He told me, and he told me that as a Jew my testicles would do no good because he was going to sterilize all the Jews so I would be serving the cause of science.”

“In what language did he speak to you?”

“German.”

“Are you fluent in German?”

“In a concentration camp, you learn enough German.”

“And you claim,” Highsmith continued, “that the doctor with him was Kelno.”

“Yes.”

“How did you know that?”

“In Barrack III it is known and said Dr. Kelno was the head of prisoner medicine and often performed surgery for Voss in Barrack V. I heard of no other doctor’s name.”

“Dr. Tesslar. Did you ever hear of him?”

“At the end of my recovery a new doctor came to Barrack III. It may have been Tesslar. The name sounds familiar, but I never met him.”

“Then what happened?”

“I became panicked. Three or four orderlies held me down and another gave me an injection in the spine. Soon my lower body became dead. I was strapped to a trolley and taken into the operation room.”

“Who was there?”

“The SS colonel Dr. Voss and the Polish doctor and one or two assistants. Voss said he was going to time the operation and wanted the eggs removed quickly. I begged in Polish for Kelno to leave one testicle. He only shrugged and when I screamed he slapped me and then ... he took them out.”

“So,” Bannister said, “you had ample time to see this man without a surgical mask.”

“He wore no mask. He did not even wash his hands. For a month after, I almost died from infection.”

“To be absolutely clear,” Bannister said, “you were a normal healthy man when you were taken to Barrack V.”

“Weak from the concentration camp life but normal sexually.”

“You had no prior treatment of X-ray or anything else that could have damaged your testicles?”

“No. They only wanted to see how fast it could be done.”

“And would you describe your treatment on the operating table as less than gentle.”

“They were brutal to me.”

“Did you ever see the Polish doctor after the operation? ”

“No.”

“But you are absolutely certain you can identify the man who operated on you.”

“I was conscious the entire time. I will never forget the face.”

“I have no further questions,” Bannister said.

“No questions,” Highsmith said.

“Is the inspection line-up ready?” Magistrate Griffin asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, Mr. Janos. You understand what a police identification parade is?”

“Yes, it has been explained.”

“There will be a dozen men behind a glassed-in room, dressed in simulated prison clothing. They are unable to see into the room where we shall be observing. One of the men is Dr. Kelno.”

“I understand.”

They filed from the conference room, down a rickety stairs. Each man was still full of Janos’s tale of horror. Highsmith and Smiddy, who had fought so bitterly for Adam Kelno, felt an unavoidable twinge of apprehension. Had Adam Kelno lied to them? The door of Barrack V had been opened for the first time giving a glimpse of its horrible secrets.

Nathan Goldmark’s chest nearly burst. The moment was at hand for vengeance for the death of his family, for justification to his government. The orgasm of victory. From here, there could be no further delays. The fascist would be brought to heel.

Thomas Bannister took all of this with the apparent dispassionate calm that stamped his personality and career as a human refrigerator.

To the man who had suffered the most, it mattered the least. Eli Janos would still be a eunuch when it was over and it did not matter one way or the other.

They were seated and the room darkened. Before them was a glass-paneled room with a height marker on the rear wall. The men in prison uniform were marched in. They blinked from the sudden shower of light. A police officer directed them to face the dark room beyond the glass.

Adam Kelno stood second from the right in a mixture of tall and short and fat and thin people. Eli Janos leaned forward and squinted. Immediate identification eluded him so he started at the left side of the line-up.

“Do take your time,” Magistrate Griffin said.

All that broke the silence was the deep wheezing of Nathan Goldmark and it was all he could do to restrain himself from jumping up and pointing at Kelno.

Janos’s eyes stopped for a long search of each of them, probing for recognition of that terrible day in Barrack V.

Down the line. One, then the other. He came to Adam Kelno and hunched forward. The officer inside ordered everyone to turn left profile, then right profile. Then they were marched out and the light turned on.

“Well?” Magistrate Griffin asked.

Eli Janos drew a deep breath and shook his head. “I do not recognize any of them.”

“Have the officer bring in Dr. Kelno,” Robert Highsmith said in a sudden, unexpected flare.

“It’s not required,” the magistrate said.

“This bloody business has been going on for two years. A blameless man has been in prison. I want to make completely certain of this.”

Adam Kelno was marched in and made to stand before Eli Janos and they stared at each other.

“Dr. Kelno,” Highsmith said, “would you speak to this man in German or Polish.”

“I want my freedom,” Adam said in German. “It’s in your hands,” he concluded in Polish.

“Does the voice mean anything?” Highsmith said.

“He is not the man who castrated me,” Eli Janos said.

Adam Kelno sighed deeply and bowed his head as the officer led him out

“Are you willing to swear a statement?” Highsmith asked.

“Of course,” Janos answered.

There was a formal letter that His Majesty’s government regretted any inconvenience to Adam Kelno for his two year detention in Brixton Prison.

As the prison gate closed behind him, the patient and loving Angela rushed to his arms. Behind her, in the alleyway that lead to the entrance, his cousin Zenon Myslenski with Count Anatol Czerny, Highsmith, and Smiddy. There was someone else. A little boy who wavered cautiously under the prodding of “Uncle” Zenon. Then he toddled forward and said ...“Daddy.”

Adam lifted the child. “My son,” he cried, “my son.” And soon they passed down the long high brick wall into a rare day of sunlight in London.

The conspiracy had been beaten, but Adam Kelno was filled with an even greater fear without the protection of prison walls. He was on the outside now and the enemy was relentless and dangerous. He took his wife and son and fled. He fled to the remotest corner of the world.

7

“A
DAM!
A
DAM!”
A
NGELA SHRIEKED
.

He tore over the veranda and flung the screen door open at the same instant Abun, the houseboy, arrived. Angela had flung herself over Stephan to shield the child from the cobra coiled near the bed, tongue flicking, head bobbing in a death dance.

Abun motioned Adam Kelno into stillness, slowly unsheathed his parang. His bare feet slipped noiselessly over the rat mat.

Hisssss! A flashing arc of steel. The snake was decapitated. Its head bounced off and the body crumpled after a short violent tremor.

“Don’t touch! Don’t touch! Still full poison!”

Angela allowed herself the luxury of screaming, then sobbed hysterically. Young Stephan clung to his mother and cried as Adam sat on the edge of the bed and tried to calm them. Adam looked away from his son guiltily. The boy’s legs were still full of welts from leeches.

Yes, Sarawak in the northern corner of Borneo was about as far away as a man could run and deep as a man could hide.

A few days after his release from Brixton Prison and in a state of overwhelming fear the Kelno family booked secret passage for Singapore and from there a rotting tramp steamer took them over the South China Sea to the end of the earth ... Sarawak.

Fort Bobang, a classic pesthole, stood on a delta formed by the Batang Lampur River. The outpost held a hundred thatched huts on hardwood stilts that nestled on the river’s edge. A bit inland, the town consisted of two muddy streets of Chinese-owned shops, warehouses for the rubber and sago exports, and a dock large enough to accommodate the ferry that shuttled to the capital at Kuching and the long boats that traveled the endless rivers.

The British compound was a smattering of peeled, faded white-washed buildings scalded by the sun and beaten by the rain. In the compound was an area commissioner, a police station, a few banished civil servants, a clinic, and a one room schoolhouse.

A few months prior to the incident with the cobra, Adam Kelno had been interviewed by Dr. MacAlister, the Chief Medical Officer of Sarawak. Kelno’s credentials were in order. He was a qualified physician and surgeon and men who desired to come to this place were not asked too many questions about their past.

MacAlister accompanied the Kelnos to Fort Bobang. Two male nurse assistants, a Malayan and a Chinese, greeted the new doctor without particular enthusiasm and showed him through the shoddy clinic.

“Not exactly the West End of London,” MacAlister understated.

“I’ve worked in worse places,” Adam answered tersely.

Adam’s trained eye photographed the meager inventory for drugs and equipment. “What happened to the last man?”

“Suicide. We get quite a few of them out here, you know.”

“Well, don’t have any thoughts like that about me. I’ve had the opportunity. I’m not the type.”

After the inspection, Adam curtly ordered a thorough scrubbing and cleaning of the building, then retreated to his quarters on the opposite side of the compound.

Angela was disappointed but did not complain. “A little touching up here and there and everything will he just lovely,” she said, convincing herself least of all.

The view from the screened-in veranda was to the river and the docks below them back up to the hills that rose behind the town. It was all in low palm and an incredibly deep luscious green. As their drinks arrived, the sounds and smells of dusk invaded and a blessed blade of coolness cut through the wet suffocating heat of the day. As Adam stared out, the first drops of rain sprinkled down in prelude of the daily torrent to follow. The usual power failure of the compound s generator flicked the lights off and on, off and on. And then the rain came for fair, gushing and hopping off the ground as it hit with trip hammer impact.

“Cheers,” said MacAlister. His time-wizened eyes studied the new man. Old Mac had seen them come and go, so many of them. The drunks and the dregs, and those filled with the false hope of bettering mankind. He had long forgotten his own missionary zeal, which was squashed by his mediocrity, the crown’s bureaucracy and finally wrung out by the hot wet jungle and those savages down the river.

“The two boys you have with you are quite good. They’ll help you learn your way about. Now that Sarawak has become a crown colony, we’re going to have a bit more to spend on medicine. Spruce things up, here and there.”

Adam stared at his own hands and flexed them and wondered. It had been so long since they had held the surgeon’s tools. “I’ll let you know what I’ll need and what changes I plan to make,” he said abruptly.

Rather a cheeky sort, MacAlister thought. Well, he’ll get all that beaten out of him. He had watched them withdraw and grow cruel and cynical by the month, once they realized the unthinkable situation.

“A bit of advice from an old Borneo hand. Don’t try to change things here. The people down the river will thwart you on every turn. They’re only just a generation or two removed from being head-hunters and cannibals. Life is hard enough here, so take it easy on yourself. Enjoy our meager comforts. After all, you’ve brought a woman and child to this place.”

“Thank you,” Adam said, not really thanking the man at all.

Stinking Sarawak. Hidden from humanity in a corner of Borneo. It was peopled by a conglomerate of Malayans who were the Moslems and there were Kayans and the tribes of Land Dayaks and the Ibans, who were the Sea Dayaks, and, of course, the omnipresent Chinese, the shopkeepers of the Orient.

Its modern history came about a bit over a century ago when trade over the China Sea between the British colony of Singapore and the Sultanate of Brunei on Borneo increased to such an extent that it became a prime target of pirates.

The Sultan of Brunei was not only raided by the pirates but constantly plagued by uprisings within his own kingdom. Law and order arrived in the person of James Brooke, a swashbuckling English soldier of fortune. Brooke stamped out the rebellions and sent the pirates packing. As a reward, the grateful Sultan ceded to him the province of Sarawak and James Brooke became the first of the fabled “white rajahs.”

Brooke ruled his domain as a benevolent autocrat. It was a steamy little state, with but a few miles of dirt roads. Its highways were the rivers which poured down from the hilly thick forests into the deltas of the South China Sea. It was a land blanketed in tropical foliage, inundated by two hundred inches of rain a year, and co-inhabited by crocodiles, rats, snakes, bats, and wild pigs. Its natives were beleaguered and decimated by leprosy, elephantiasis, worms, cholera, smallpox, dropsy.

Oppression was their lot. With pitiful little farm land, their meager crops were under constant attack by pirates and neighbors or taken by taxation.