“They didn’t exactly gush with information. I gather we’re not the only strangers who’ve asked about Avidan, and these people don’t take well to strangers, male or female, who aren’t here just to spend money as tourists.”
Saul thought about it. “Whoever came before us must have belonged to Misha.”
“Maybe. Let’s find out. I managed to get directions.”
Saul started the car and drove along the narrow street. “Tell me when to turn.”
“It’s outside town. The third farmhouse on the left.”
He increased speed.
The house was old, with white stucco walls, on a level section of the upper grassy slope. Though wider than the buildings in town, it did have a high peaked roof, its silhouette conforming with a mountain beyond it. Saul turned and drove up a rutted dirt lane, hearing cowbells from the pasture as he stopped outside the house. The sun made the valley even more brilliant. He didn’t pay attention to the scenery, his thoughts completely preoccupied with the list they’d discovered.
And the first name on the list.
They stepped from the car.
A woman with handsome, almost mannish features came out of the house. She was in her early thirties, with short sunbleached hair and ruddy cheeks. Muscular, she wore sturdy ankle-high shoes, woolen kneesocks, leather shorts, and a blue-checked shirt with its sleeves rolled up. Her shoes thunked on a wooden porch, then on stairs leading down to the car. When she stopped, her eyes flashed with suspicion.
Saul took for granted that Erika would do most of the talking, just as he would have if this had been a man. Erika used Italian. “We’re sorry to bother you, but we’re told that Ephraim Avidan used to live here.”
The woman spoke in English. “Your accent. American?”
Erika replied in kind. “No, I’m Israeli, but I lived in the United States for many years. In fact, I’m more comfortable with English than I am with my native language. Would you prefer … ?”
“To speak in English?” The woman shook her head and switched to Italian. “I could use the practice, but not when discussing Ephraim Avidan. He used to live here, but he’s gone.” She seemed sullen. “Are you with the others who came to ask about him?”
“Others?”
“Two men. Five days ago. They claimed to be old friends of Avidan. But they were thirty years younger. Like Avidan and yourself, they said they were Israeli. They claimed they owed Avidan money. Such conscientious debtors, don’t you think? They wanted to know where he’d gone.”
“And what did you tell them?”
“The same thing I tell you. I don’t know where. He left abruptly. In February. One evening he was here, the next morning he wasn’t. As far as I could tell, he took nothing with him. After several days, I notified our policeman in town. A search was organized, but we didn’t find a body.” She gestured toward the mountains. “We didn’t expect to. No one goes hiking in the woods at night during winter. Suicide was a possibility. He’d been moody. But without a body … Our policeman notified the authorities in Bern. The matter passed out of our hands. But we treated him fairly, the same as if he’d been one of us. And he treated me fairly. Before he disappeared, he paid his rent. I never had trouble with him.”
“Of course.”
The woman tightened her arms across her chest. “And what about yourselves? Are you also ‘old’ friends who owe him money?” She directed her question toward Saul.
“We didn’t know him at all.”
The woman smiled, apparently not having expected a candid response.
Saul nodded toward Erika. “My wife’s father was a friend of Ephraim Avidan, though.” He paused for effect. “And her father has also disappeared.”
The woman seemed caught between surprise and skepticism. “On the other hand, your explanation might merely be more inventive than that of old friends owing money to someone.”
“Why are you so suspicious?” Erika asked. “All we want is information.”
“Suspicious? If your husband had left you … If you had the responsibility of managing …” Her voice trailed off. She stared toward swollen-uddered cattle in the pasture. “I probably wouldn’t be suspicious if not for the priest.”
Saul’s pulse quickened. “Priest?”
“Not that he said he was a priest. He was rugged, handsome. A hiker, so he claimed. He arrived two weeks before the Israelis did. He had blue eyes and straw-colored hair. He chopped wood for his supper. He was muscular. His chest was strong. But what I noticed most were his hands.”
“What about them?”
“He took extreme care of them. I didn’t think it unusual when he wore gloves to chop wood. A precaution against slivers and blisters. But later, after he’d taken off the gloves and washed his hands, when I ate supper with him, I couldn’t help noticing how soft and smooth his hands were in comparison with his muscles. He was tanned, but on his left hand … here at the base of his middle finger … he had a white rim of skin where he’d recently taken off a ring. I still don’t understand why he’d have done that. Who knows? Perhaps he’d merely lost it. But his right hand … here … the thumb, the first and second fingers … those he was especially self-conscious about. He didn’t want food to touch those fingers, and later, when he helped me wash dishes, he kept a towel around his right hand, using his left to pick up the plates. Do you see the significance?”
“I’m sorry,” Erika said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“As an Israeli, you wouldn’t, I suppose. I myself am a Lutheran, but I know that for a Roman Catholic priest the thumb, first, and second fingers of his right hand are the most important parts of his body. They’re blessed. They’re what he uses to hold the wafer of bread that he consecrates and changes into what Catholics believe is the spiritual presence of Jesus Christ. If a priest’s right thumb and first two fingers were amputated, he couldn’t be a priest any longer, not totally. He couldn’t say mass. He couldn’t perform the ritual of consecrating the host and giving out Communion. And because those fingers have been blessed, he has to protect them not only from physical harm but also from indignities.”
Erika was puzzled. “But couldn’t he merely have been left-handed, and that’s why he seemed to favor his right?”
“After supper, he put his gloves back on and offered to go to the barn, to do a few more chores. I needed help, so I promised him breakfast and agreed.” She pointed toward the barn, a corner of which projected from behind the house. “He worked longer than I expected. When I went in to see if anything was wrong, I caught him by surprise. He shoved a small black book into his knapsack. Then I knew for certain.”
“I don’t follow you,” Erika said.
But Saul did. He remembered what his foster brother, Chris, an Irish-Catholic, had taught him about the Church. “The small black book was probably a breviary,” he explained. “The collection of prayers a priest has to read every day.” He faced the woman. “But you said you knew ‘for certain.’ Forgive me, it still seems like supposition.”
“No,” the woman said. “In the night, I went to his room in the barn and searched through his knapsack. The small black book was a breviary.”
“Searched through his … ?”
“You think I was bold? How could he rebuke me when he was as bold as I was, when he’d snuck from his room and gone up the hill to search Avidan’s room?” Her face flushed with indignation. “I’d left the cabin as Avidan had left it. There was always the chance Avidan would return, and since no one else had asked to rent it, I didn’t care to waste my time by moving his possessions. Where would I have put them anyhow? When I crept up the hill, I heard the priest in the cabin. I heard drawers being opened and shut. I saw the waver of a flashlight beam through cracks in the window shades.”
“What did you do about it?”
“What would you expect? A woman alone? An apparently innocent guest who turns out to be a prowler? I returned to the house and did nothing. In the morning, I pretended not to know h
e’d gone to Avidan’s cabin, and he—if he’d guessed I’d searched his knapsack—pretended not to have noticed. He ate the breakfast I prepared, asked if there were other chores he could do, and, when I declined, continued the hiking vacation he claimed to be on. For the next few nights, I kept a close watch on the cabin. So far as I know, the priest never came back.”
“And what would be the significance of the ring he took off?” Erika asked.
“It could have been the insignia of his order,” Saul said. “A few religious groups wear them.”
“I didn’t find a ring in his knapsack,” the woman said.
“Maybe he considered it so valuable he kept it in a pocket.”
“Perhaps. Then, two weeks later, the Israeli pair arrived. They asked if they could see Avidan’s cabin in case something in it might tell them where he’d gone—you understand, so they could repay the fabulous debt they said they owed him.”
“Did you let them?”
“Yes. I had the sense that, if I refused, they’d return in the night and search it anyhow. Or search the cabin right then, despite my objections. I didn’t want trouble. I hoped that, if I agreed, I’d see the end of it. Besides, what did I have to hide?”
“Or what did Avidan have to hide?” Saul said.
“Now you arrive, and you ask why I’m suspicious. Who was this Avidan? Why are you and those others interested in him?”
“I can’t speak for the priest,” Saul said. “He’s as puzzling to me as he is to you. But the two Israelis were probably intelligence operatives. Mossad. Avidan used to belong to their organization. When one of them—even one who’s retired from them—disappears, they want to know why, especially if his disappearance seems linked to the disappearance of yet another ex-Mossad operative. My wife’s father.”
The woman inhaled sharply. “Politics? I don’t want anything to do with politics.”
“We’re not sure it’s politics. It could be a personal matter from years ago. Honestly, we don’t know. For us, it’s definitely personal, though.”
“Are you Mossad?”
Erika hesitated. “I used to be.”
“Politics.”
“I said I used to be. Look, please, we’ve told you a lot more than we should have. How can we make you trust us?”
“How? Tell me a way to keep strangers from coming around here asking about Avidan.”
“If you help us, maybe we’ll be able to find out what happened to him. Then the strangers will stop coming around.”
The woman studied them.
“May we see Avidan’s cabin?” Saul asked.
The woman remained motionless. Saul held his breath.
The woman nodded.
3
The cabin was past the house and the barn, up the continuation of the sloping pasture. Behind it, dense forest rose to rocky bluffs. The Alpine air smelled pure and sweet, tinged with the fragrance of evergreens.
The cabin was small, single-story, made from logs whose bark had long ago disintegrated. A rusty stovepipe projected from a roof that needed reshingling. Saul turned to survey the view: the lush lower part of the valley, a far-off small lake, the towers of the town, partly obscured by intervening fir trees, a kilometer to his right.
Why would Avidan choose such primitive, secluded lodgings? Saul wondered.
“How long did Avidan live here?” he asked the woman.
“He came last fall. In October.”
“He planned to spend all winter here?”
“He said he was a writer. He needed solitude and privacy to finish a novel.”
A retired Mossad operative a novelist? Saul thought. It was possible. Anything was possible. But probable? Once the winter storms started blowing … Solitude and privacy? Avidan had certainly gone to an extreme for those conditions. What had made him choose this place?
They entered the cabin. It was divided into a bedroom and a kitchen. In the absence of a fireplace, a large black wood-burning stove served for heating the cabin as well as preparing food. The rooms were spartan. Plain pine boards covered the walls. A slab of wood on trestles was the kitchen table, a bench beside it. There were austere cupboards, a rocking chair, another bench along one wall. The bed was a top-and-bottom bunk, its mattresses packed with straw. A cracked mirror hung above a battered bureau, the drawers of which were lined with yellowed newspapers from 1975. The drawers contained a few items of clothing. Books, mostly histories related to Israel, filled a shelf beside the bureau. Photographs of Israel’s desert, along with images of crowded downtown Tel Aviv, were tacked here and there on the walls. In the kitchen, Erika found plastic cups and plates in a cupboard, along with cans of food. Dish detergent was in a compartment beneath the sink.
A man could go crazy spending a winter up here, Saul thought.
He turned to the woman. “You said you didn’t remove Avidan’s possessions because you thought he might come back. It doesn’t look like he had all that much to pack up.”
“And if he was working on a novel,” Erika said, “he must have taken it with him. I don’t see a typewriter. I can’t find a manuscript.”
The woman stood silhouetted by sunlight at the open doorway. “From October to February, I almost never saw him. From my house, sometimes I couldn’t see the cabin for the gusting snow. Sometimes I thought the snow would smother the cabin. But on clear days, as long as I saw smoke from the stovepipe, I didn’t worry. And the first of every month, he waded down through drifts to pay his rent.”
Saul remembered that the woman had said she’d been deserted by her husband. Avidan’s monthly rent must have been sufficient comfort for her to ignore her tenant’s eccentricities.
“Something was wrong,” the woman said. “I knew that. And when he disappeared, in case the police reopened the investigation, I was determined not to touch anything.”
“But so far as you know, you don’t think the priest and the two Israeli men learned anything from their search,” Saul said. “We could sort through the pages of these books. We could sift through the packages of food. We could test for loose floorboards. My guess is we’d be wasting our time. Avidan was a professional.”
“The priest and the two Israeli men assumed they could take advantage of me, trick me, dominate me,” the woman said angrily. “They never offered money.”
Saul’s skin tingled. “But if we offered money … ?”
“It’s difficult to manage this farm alone.”
“Of course,” Erika said. “We want to help you. Our resources are limited. We recently had to leave our home in Israel. But we’re willing to make a contribution.”
The woman moved her head from side to side, calculating, and named an amount. It was high, almost half of what Misha Pletz had given to Saul and Erika. But it was insignificant if the woman’s information was as important as her rigid features suggested.
“Done,” Saul said. “Provided you don’t merely show us an out-of-date address book or …”
“A diary,” the woman said. “The dates are from October of last year until he disappeared. It’s about this cabin. It’s about him. There are photographs. They made me sick.”
Saul’s chest contracted.
Erika stepped forward. “How did you get them?”
“I found where they were hidden.”
“Yes, but how?”
“After the priest searched this cabin, I wondered what he was looking for. When I felt he was really gone, I came up here and searched as well. I tested the floor. The walls. The ceiling. I even budged the stove and pried up the firebricks beneath it.”
“And?”
“I found nothing. But the priest wasn’t thorough,” the woman said. “He didn’t identify with Avidan’s routine. He didn’t put himself in Avidan’s mind. There’s another building.”
Saul knew. “The outhouse.”
“I found the diary and the photographs attached beneath the platform of the hole above the pit. Each day when he came and went along the path he dug through
the snow, he must have taken them with him, possibly even concealed them beneath his clothes.”
“And they’re worth the sum you asked?”
“The worth is your concern. The sum you know.”
Erika reached into a pocket. “The money’s Austrian.”
“It could be Japanese for all I care. This is Switzerland. Every currency is welcome here.” The woman counted the bills.
“Where’s what we paid for?”
“Come down to the house.”
4
They sat at a table in a rustic kitchen. As the woman made coffee, Saul opened the plastic-wrapped packet she’d given them. He winced when he saw the photographs. Erika’s hands shook sorting through them.
Nazi concentration camps. SS soldiers aiming submachine guns at refugees being shoved from trucks and railway cattle cars. Gaunt-faced prisoners staring with haunted eyes through barbed-wire fences. Endless trenches, quicklime-covered corpses, bulldozers poised to fill in dirt. Gas chambers, naked people—mostly children, old men and women—so squeezed together they’d died standing up. Open doors of massive ovens. Unimaginable quantities of ashes and bones.
Saul studied them all, every obscene one, and when he’d finished, he’d learned what he already knew—that the human ability to invent new methods of brutality was boundless.
He stacked the photographs and turned them facedown on the table. “The examined life isn’t worth living,” he said, his voice trailing off. He stared at the diary. “God knows what else is in …”
“The night I looked through that packet, no matter how many logs I put on the fire, I was still cold,” the woman said. “I paced until dawn. I knew about such atrocities, but to see them, to read about them …”
“Read about … ?” Erika looked at the diary, reached for it, hesitated, and drew her hands back as if from vomit.
“Yes, the diary,” the woman said. “Avidan, his parents, his sister, and two brothers lived in Munich. In 1942, when the Holocaust was set into motion, the SS arrested them and trucked them to the concentration camp at Dachau. It was only twenty kilometers away from their home. A work camp, not a death camp, though the way he describes it, there wasn’t much difference. With the other prisoners, he and his family were used as slave labor at an ammunition factory. They received a minimum of food. They were given little time to rest or sleep. Sanitary facilities were inadequate. Toilets were nothing more than open trenches. Drinking water was contaminated. Their barracks leaked. There were rats. For two years, Avidan and his family slaved for Hitler’s war. And one by one, they died. Avidan’s mother went first—she collapsed in the factory and died from exhaustion. When Avidan’s father couldn’t get off the barracks’ floor one morning, the SS dragged him outside and shot him in front of the other prisoners. His corpse was left in the assembly area for three days before prisoners were ordered to put the body on a cart and push it to a burial pit outside the camp. Next, Avidan’s ten-year-old sister coughed herself to death. His older brother didn’t move fast enough to suit a guard and had his head split open with a club. His remaining brother went insane and gashed his wrists with a splinter of wood. Avidan himself became determined to survive. In small unnoticeable ways, he rested while he worked, conserving his strength. He devoured spiders, flies, worms, anything he could find in camp. And he succeeded. In 1944, in September, he was part of a workforce trucked from the camp to pick up liquor and food from town for an SS party that night. The truck blew a tire. In the confusion, prisoners fled. The SS soldiers recovered quickly and shot three of the four escaping prisoners. The fourth was Avidan. The thrill of freedom was so overwhelming he pushed himself to limits he didn’t know he had. He stole food from storage bins. He slept in haystacks. He kept moving. Dachau is a hundred kilometers from Switzerland. In his diary, he doesn’t say how he passed the Bodensee, but he arrived at neutral territory and still he kept going, not sure he’d reached sanctuary, till he finally came to rest here. My former husband and I bought this farm in 1978. I have no idea who owned it during the war. But whoever lived here found Avidan cowering in the barn one night. They understood his circumstance, took pity, and let him stay in the cabin. They supplied him with food. He remained from October of forty-four till the end of the war the following May, when he went to Palestine.”