Magda fingered the slim gold band on her right ring finger. It had been her mother's. How different things would have been if she hadn't died.
Once in a while Magda thought of Mihail. He had married someone else ... they had three children now. Magda had only Papa.
Everything changed with Mother's death. Magda couldn't explain how it happened, but Papa grew to be the center of her life. Although she had been surrounded by men in those days, she took no notice of them. Their attentions and advances had lain like beads of water on a glass figurine, unappreciated, unabsorbed, leaving not so much as a hazy ring when they evaporated.
She spent the intervening years suspended between a desire to be somehow extraordinary, and a longing for all the very ordinary things that most other women took for granted. And now it was too late. There was really nothing ahead for her—she saw that more clearly every day.
And yet it could have been so different! So much better! If only Mother hadn't died. If only Papa hadn't fallen sick. If only she hadn't been born a Jew. She could never admit the last to Papa. He'd be furious—and crushed—to know she felt that way. But it was true. If they were not Jews, they would not be on this train; Papa would still be at the university and the future would not be a yawning chasm full of darkness and dread with no exit.
The plains gradually turned hilly and the tracks began to slope upward. The sun was sitting atop the Alps as the train climbed the final slope to Campina. As they passed the towers of the smaller Steaua refinery, Magda began to help her father into his sweater. When that was on, she tightened the kerchief over her hair and went to get his wheelchair from an alcove at the rear of the car. The younger of the two Iron Guards followed her back. She had felt his eyes on her all during the trip, probing the folds of her clothes, trying to find the true outline of her body. And the farther the train had moved from Bucharest, the bolder his stares had become.
As Magda bent over the chair to straighten the cushion on the seat, she felt his hands grip her buttocks through the heavy fabric of her skirt. The fingers of his right hand began to try to worm their way between her legs. Her stomach turning with nausea, she straightened up and wheeled toward him, restraining her own hands from clawing at his face.
"I thought you'd like that," he said, and moved closer, sliding his arms around her. "You're not bad-looking for a Jew, and I could tell you were looking for a real man."
Magda looked at him. He was anything but "a real man." He was at most twenty, probably eighteen, his upper lip covered with a fuzzy attempt at a mustache that looked more like dirt than hair. He pressed himself against her, pushing her back toward the door.
"The next car is baggage. Let's go."
Magda kept her face utterly impassive. "No."
He gave her a shove. "Move!"
As she tried to decide what to do, her mind worked furiously against the fear and revulsion that filled her at his touch. She had to say something, but she didn't want to challenge him or make him feel he had to prove himself.
"Can't you find a girl that wants you?" she said, keeping her eyes directly on his.
He blinked. "Of course I can."
"Then why do you feel you must steal from one who doesn't?"
"You'll thank me when it's over," he said, leering.
"Must you?"
He withstood her gaze for a moment, then dropped his eyes. Magda did not know what would come next. She readied herself to put on an unforgettable exhibition of screaming and kicking if he continued to try to force her into the next car.
The train lurched and screeched as the engineer applied the brakes. They were coming into Campina junction.
"There's no time now," he said, stooping to peer out the window as the station ramp slid by. "Too bad."
Saved. Magda said nothing. She wanted to slump with relief but did not.
The young Iron Guardsman straightened and pointed out the window. "I think you would have found me a gentle lover compared to them."
Magda bent and looked through the glass. She saw four men in black military uniforms standing on the station platform and felt weak. She had heard enough about the German SS to recognize its members when she saw them.
TWELVE
Karaburun, Turkey
Tuesday, 29 April
1802 hours
The red-haired man stood on the seawall feeling the dying light of the sun warm against his side as it stretched the shadow of the piling beside him far out over the water. The Black Sea. A silly name. It was blue, and it looked like an ocean. All around him, two-story brick-and-stucco houses crowded up to the water's edge, their red tile roofs almost matching the deepening color of the sun.
It had been easy to find a boat. The fishing around here was good more often than not, but the fishermen remained poor no matter how good the catch. They spent their lives struggling to break even.
No sleek, swift, smuggler's launch this time, but a lumbering, salt-encrusted sardine fisher. Not at all what he needed, but the best he could get.
The smuggler's boat had taken him in near Silivri, west of Constantinople—no, they were calling it Istanbul now, weren't they? He remembered the current regime changing it nearly a decade ago. He'd have to get used to the new name, but old habits were hard to break. He had beached the boat, jumped ashore with his long, flat case under his arm, then pushed the launch back into the Sea of Marmara where it would drift with the corpse of its owner until found by a fisherman or by some ship of whatever government was claiming that particular body of water at that particular time.
From there it had been a twenty-mile trip over the gently undulating moorland of European Turkey. A horse had proved as easy to buy on the south coast as a boat had been to rent here on the north. With governments falling left and right and no one sure whether today's money would be tomorrow's wastepaper, the sight and feel of gold could be counted on to open many doors.
And so now he stood on the rim of the Black Sea, tapping his feet, drumming his fingers on the flat case, waiting for his battered vessel to finish fueling. He resisted the urge to rush over and give the owner a few swift kicks to hurry him up. That would be fruitless. He knew he couldn't rush these people; they lived at their own speed, one much slower than his.
It would be 250 miles due north of here to the Danube Delta, and almost 200 more west from there overland to the Dinu Pass. If not for this idiot war, he could have hired an airplane and been there long before now.
What had happened? Had there been a battle in the pass? The short-wave had said nothing of fighting in Romania. No matter. Something had gone wrong. And he had thought everything permanently settled.
His lips twisted. Permanently? He of all people should have known how rare indeed it was for anything to be permanent.
Still, there remained a chance that events had not progressed beyond the point of no return.
THIRTEEN
The Keep
Tuesday, 29 April
1752 hours
"Can't you see he's exhausted?" Magda shouted, her fear gone now, replaced by her anger and her fierce protective instinct.
"I don't care if he's about to breathe his last gasp," the SS officer said, the one called Major Kaempffer. "I want him to tell me everything he knows about the keep."
The ride from Campina to the keep had been a nightmare. They had been unceremoniously trundled into the back of a lorry and watched over by a surly pair of enlisted men while another pair drove. Papa had recognized them as einsatzkommandos and had quickly explained to Magda what their areas of expertise were. Even without the explanation she would have found them repulsive; they treated her and Papa like so much baggage. They spoke no Romanian, using instead a language of shoves and prods with rifle barrels. But Magda soon sensed something else below their casual brutality—a preoccupation. They seemed to be glad to be out of the Dinu Pass for a while, and reluctant to return.
The trip was especially hard on her father, who found it nearly impossible to sit on the bench that ran along each side of the lorry's payload area. The vehicle tipped and lurched and bounced violently as it raced along a road never intended for its passage. Every jolt was agony for Papa, with Magda watching helplessly as he winced and gritted his teeth as pain shot through him. Finally, when the lorry had to stop at a bridge to wait for a goat cart to move aside, Magda helped him off the bench and back into his wheelchair. She moved quickly, unable to see what was going on outside the vehicle, but knowing that as long as the driver kept banging impatiently on the horn, she could risk moving Papa. After that, it was a matter of holding on to the wheelchair to keep it from rolling out the back while struggling to keep herself from sliding off the bench once the lorry started moving again. Their escort sneered at her plight and made not the slightest effort to help. She was as exhausted as her father by the time they reached the keep.
The keep ... it had changed. It looked as well kept as ever in the dusk when they rolled across the causeway, but as soon as they passed through the gate, she felt it—an aura of menace, a change in the very air that weighed on the spirit and touched off chills along the neck and shoulders.
Papa noticed it, too, for she saw him lift his head and look around, as if trying to classify the sensation.
The Germans seemed to be in a hurry, and there seemed to be two kinds of soldiers, some in gray, some in SS black. Two of the ones in gray opened up the rear of the lorry as soon as it stopped and began motioning them out, saying, "Schnell! Schnell!"