Proof Positive - Hardcover

Singerman, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312876866 ISBN 13: 9780312876869

Verlag: St Martin's Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

After the brutal murder of his new wife on their honeymoon, undercover operative Roland Troy seeks refuge in the backwoods of Vermont, until a request by his former partner, McKenzie Rockett, draws him and ex-model-turned-undercover cop Angela Becker into a perilous confrontation with a deadly international conspiracy spanning generations. 35,000 first printing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Philip Singerman lives in Longwood, Florida.

Philip Singerman lives in Longwood, Florida.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

 

I

THE PAST—NOVEMBER 1945

Solomon Kessler heard the sharp crack of a high-powered rifle and saw a bundled figure come off the ridgeline as though it were trying to fly. He knelt quickly behind a tree and watched the figure tumble partway down the slope toward the river before coming to rest against a fallen log. As the figure tumbled Kessler heard two more shots, less powerful than the first and fired in rapid succession, probably from a pistol, followed by what sounded like a far-off cry, though it could have been the wind. He waited for several minutes behind the tree, his eyes on the ridgeline, straining to see at a distance through the snow. Halfway between the ridgeline and the log he saw something—a scarf perhaps, or a hat—that had come off the tumbling figure and lay on the white slope, rising and falling forlornly in the wind. The echo of the shots was long gone; the wind was now the only sound he heard. As far as he could tell no one from up above was coming after the bundled figure.

According to the blazes slashed on the trunks of two trees angling southwest from where he knelt, it was time for Kessler to leave the trail he had been following along the river and begin climbing toward the old hunting lodge where he was to spend the night. His path would take him within yards of the tumbling figure that now lay in a motionless heap. He would have preferred to continue waiting and then follow a different route to the lodge, or better yet, circumvent the lodge altogether, but he had no choice. The light was fading, the snowfall was increasing, and since he could carry nothing that might indicate the direction of his journey, Kessler had no map. If he didn’t reach the lodge by nightfall he would surely freeze to death in the mountains. There was nothing for him to do but begin climbing directly toward the place from which the shots had come.

Kessler had been walking since he jumped from the back of a truck early that morning just north of Brenner Pass in the rugged mountains between Austria and Italy. The truck was loaded with crates of chickens, and as he moved south, following the river, the acrid odor of chicken droppings moved with him. The smell didn’t bother him. Neither did the snow that began falling shortly after he paused at noon to eat the sandwich and drink from the flask of tepid coffee the truck driver had given him. After what he had been through in the death camp, after what he had seen, the smell of chicken manure and some bad weather were as insignificant as the occasional feather that worked loose from his clothing and drifted to the ground with the snow.

The hunting lodge had been built more than a hundred years earlier in the dense, precipitous woods outside the town of Merano, along a route laid out for him by the underground transport network—the Bricha—that took its name from the Hebrew word meaning escape. He was to spend one night at the lodge. The following morning he would be escorted into Merano where another truck would take him to Genoa. There he would board a freighter bound first for Lisbon and then for Baltimore. In the United States he would begin a new life, assuming something didn’t happen to him before he reached the ship.

Solomon Kessler had been captured once, two years earlier on his seventeenth birthday, by an SS squad on patrol outside the small Hungarian town where he was born. The SS officers put him on a train to Auschwitz. In the five months since the Allied soldiers liberated the camp he had gained thirty pounds but he still looked gaunt, his haunted eyes smoldering from dark hollows in his face like a pair of flickering lanterns at the bottom of a well. Though he continued to suffer sporadic pains in his chest and fits of dizziness, the results of malnutrition and numerous beatings, Kessler had made the decision to flee through the underground rather than run the risk of being transported east to Russia. In the pocket of his coat was a 9 mm Luger taken from the body of a German soldier he found in the forest shortly after the liberation. Before beginning his climb, he reached into his pocket and touched the cold metal, wrapping his fingers around the stock and carefully releasing the safety. He was determined not to be captured again.

The bundled figure lay face up in the snow. Though the dark hair framing a pale, round face was quite short, he could tell at once by the smooth skin and the delicate hand that rested palm up on the fallen log that it was a woman. She had been shot in the back and was still conscious, but just barely, her life seeping darkly into the snow. Her large eyes were open. As they fixed on him with the crazed, desperate gaze of a wild animal caught in a trap he felt as though he were looking into a mirror.

“What happened,” he said, speaking to her in Yiddish. “Who did this?” She opened her mouth to answer but could manage only a hoarse, croaking sound, a weak groan. A small, pinkish bubble appeared between her lips. She groaned again, and died.

The face of death was nothing new to him. For more than a year he had been forced to pull gold from the teeth of dead bodies, reaching into the twisted, gaping mouths of the gassed with a pair of pliers specially designed for his job. The work had numbed him, leaving him bereft of almost any emotion, yet as he looked at the young woman in the snow, he shuddered. She had survived as he had only to end up like this, another dead Jew, soon to be a forgotten pile of bones as anonymous as the rest. For what? The few American dollars or British pounds she was carrying? A piece of jewelry she had somehow managed to bring with her? A passport that like his had been forged?

He reached down, closed the woman’s eyes, quickly mumbled the Kaddish—the prayer for the dead—and was about to move on when he saw something under her coat she seemed to be clutching with her other hand. He knelt in the snow, hesitated for a few seconds, then opened the coat. A book, spattered with the woman’s blood, lay across her frail chest. He leaned closer and saw that it was an album filled with photographs and that its leather cover was embossed with a circle surrounding two vertical lightning bolts—the seal of the SS. Again he hesitated for several seconds, glancing up at the ridge, listening for something other than the sound of the wind. Hearing nothing, he moved the woman’s tiny cold hand, lifted the album from her chest, and opened it.

The cruel, bloated face of SS Blockfuhrer Konrad Stuebbe, frozen in a half-smile, looked back at him. He knew that face well. Stuebbe had walked the platform next to the railroad siding at Birkenau, meeting incoming trains, deciding with a wave of his riding crop who would be sent to a labor detail and who would die at once in the gas chamber. The photograph had caught Stuebbe in mid-stride, the riding crop held aloft, a shaft of light glancing off a raised, polished boot. In the confusion during the liberation of the camp Stuebbe had managed to escape.

Solomon Kessler watched snowflakes fall on the photograph of Konrad Stuebbe and on the face of the woman whose name he did not know. She had not been shot for money or jewels or a forged document, but because of this album. Of that he was certain. That was why she had been running when the bullet struck her in the back. Someone had tried to take it from her and she had refused to give it up. But why hadn’t this person come down the slope to retrieve the album? Maybe the two pistol shots were the answer to that question. Maybe the woman had a friend, but if so, where was this friend? It was pointless, Kessler realized, to stand there wondering, for no matter what the answers, he was going to the lodge. He...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312876866
• ISBN 13: 9780312876869
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 348
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar