The Barbed Crown (The Vatican Knights Book 13) Read online

  Ayana was laying on her bunk that was covered with a few hairs of straw, the platform smelling from ingrained urine from those who came before her, those who had become too weak to raise a hand for help that would never come. As she lay there staring at the bottom of the bunk above her, her mind was in a wondrous fog with thoughts of Frederic Becher. So much so that nothing else around her seemed to exist, these thoughts providing her with a wonderful moment of escape. She could see his face, strong and angular, and the flash of his smile from ruler-straight teeth. His eyes were a startling blue, like sapphires, that often displayed tiny bursts of pinprick lights along the edges, like stars.

  He was kind and different—a person who extended warmth rather than to mete out a sharp and bitter coldness, especially when comfort was most needed. Then she closed her eyes, his image burning behind the folds of her lids. And she smiled, wondering what life would be like if it wasn’t for the camps—if German and Jew could live without the mandate that divided them.

  “Ayana.” It was Ala, whispering. “Are you asleep?”

  Ayana opened her eyes. Ala was lying beside her. Even in the shadows she could see the hardness in the woman’s face, the intersecting wrinkles and seams that gave her a rough edge.

  “I’m awake,” she told her.

  “I’m Ala.”

  “I know who you are,” said Ayana, whispering.

  Somewhere down the row of bunks, someone stirred.

  After a moment when the quiet settled, Ala said: “We received your pouches and amended smocks. A job well done so far. But we’ll need more in the days to come if we’re to meet the schedule of the Sonderkammandos.”

  “It’s hard when there’s an SS guard patrolling the floor,” she answered. “I have to be careful and maintain my quota, so as not to draw suspicion.”

  “I know,” stated Ala. “But I’ve come to you on another matter.”

  “Such as?”

  Light from outside swept across Ala’s face and disappeared, for the moment highlighting features that were rough and aged far beyond her years.

  Then: “Word is, Ayana, that you’re infatuated with a German; an SS guard, to be precise.”

  She rocked her head on the bunk. “Not true,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “He comes to you every day. And every day you return to your station with a smile on your face.”

  “Do I?”

  Ala leaned closer, her face a dark shape until the search light once again swept across the barrack windows. “Listen to me, Ayana. Before all this happened I was engaged to—what I thought—was the most wonderful man in the world. I loved him very much. There was no one else besides him. He was a German and I, of course, a Jew. When the mandate came out that Germans and Jews could no longer date and were stripped of our citizenship, he then turned against me and called me the vilest things that I cannot, and will not, repeat to you. He said he loved his dog more than he loved me. And that’s perhaps the kindest thing he said to me. Overnight I was a Jew to him, a third-rate citizen who deserved no better than to be sent to the camps.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Your German boyfriend is only kind to you because he wants something. You’re nothing to him.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  Ala leaned into Ayana and whispered so softly, it was as if she was mouthing the words. “Listen closely. All the Germans in this camp are the same. All of them. I know it’s hard. And I know your family was sent to the ovens and you have no one else. But to lean to an SS guard who appears to show kindness is not the answer, Ayana. It’s dangerous. You need to stay away from him. Otherwise, you may jeopardize the mission should he grow suspicious.”

  “He’s not like that, Ala. He’s not like the other Germans in this camp. He said there were others like him—those who didn’t believe in what’s happening here.”

  Another sweep of the search lights, this time Ala was gritting her teeth in what Ayana believed to be anger.

  “You’re young,” Ala whispered. “So you’re supposed to be stupid. But take it from someone who’s been there. Do not trust this man. If he’s questioned about his attachment to you by the Blockführers, believe me when I say that he won’t hesitate to point you out as the offender to save his own skin. And I say this with experience since my fiancé, last I heard, was an SS guard at Treblinka.”

  Ayana closed her eyes. “I’m tired,” she lied.

  Though she could not see Ala, Ayana could tell that the woman eased away from her by the way the board shifted beneath her.

  Then from Ala, a husky whisper: “Do not compromise the mission.” And then she was gone, disappearing to her bunk.

  Ayana sighed inwardly, believing that Ala was wrong. Frederic Becher was a good man, a decent man who wasn’t like the others. But Ala had planted a notion of doubt, a slight germination of caution and awareness. Nevertheless, Ayana’s belief continued to outweigh the cautions insisted on by Ala, and continued to see Frederic Becher as a man of good quality.

  Ayana, with words of caution having been breathed into her subconscious by Ala, was now on the cusp of learning the meaning of prejudice, without recognizing the character underneath. Frederic Becher, by Ala’s statements, was to be reviled and mistrusted, even though he showed integrity.

  She closed her eyes and waited for sleep. But sleep never came. Not tonight. Instead, her thoughts tried to sort out her feelings for Frederic Becher.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Frederic Becher, for lack of a better term, had always been an insomniac. He was one of the rare few who could get by with little sleep, and be fully energized on the following day. So when the day evolved into night, when the card games were over and the stories told, the guards went to their respective bunks at ‘lights out.’

  As Becher lay there staring at the ceiling with his fingers interlaced across his abdomen, his thoughts centered on Ayana. In his eyes he had never seen anyone so perfect, a person who could do no wrong no matter what. She was polite and beautiful and perfect in every way, with eyes so dazzling and pure, they were perhaps the windows of her inner self, which was strong and courageous, all the measures he wished he had.

  In his life as a Jungvolk and then as a member of Hitler’s Youth Organization, he had been groomed to hate a Jew and was led to believe that they were a subspecies to the Aryan race; therefore, prejudice had been born without reason, as far as he was concerned. Ayana had taught him that much.

  It’s not a crime to be a Jew, he thought. And yet he had treated them as a lesser class, nevertheless, killing two in the process. And because his conscience had not completely absorbed the teachings of hatred, he sensed a measure of guilt rather than pride and bloodlust.

  And then deep in his mind, a hollow ringing of a single word: Ayana.

  Frederic Becher smiled at the thought of her name.

  Ayana.

  He was German. She was a Jew. And the only division between them was the divide of prejudice, a strong and sometimes unyielding wall to breach.

  Ayana.

  Becher smiled, could see her face clearly in his mind’s eye.

  And he dreamed of her, while awake, of what life would be like if things were different. He saw them in Paris, the two hand-in-hand while walking the streets in a world without war. She was beautiful, as always, wearing a dress, one without stripes or bands, perhaps a color with a dusting of soft green or blue, his favorites, while her long hair hung down and shined against the sunlight. This thought was a perfect moment in an imperfect time, however. Something that was idealistic rather than realistic.

  Slowly, Becher’s smile slipped away.

  …Ayana…

  He was a German.

  She was a Jew.

  And never the twain shall meet. At least not in this lifetime.

  He turned over on his cot, wide awake. And still he thought of Ayana.

  All the way until a dismal gray light began to surface
along the edges of a distant horizon.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Over the past few days the ovens have been burning at full capacity. Inside the crematorium, Ephraim was working the trays alongside Dror in silence. The room was hot and always above 100 degrees. In those moments of quiet outside of the sound of crackling flames, Ephraim thought of times not too long ago when he and Dror, along with their fathers, operated competitive bakeries with plans to merge and expand, with Ephraim and Dror managing a third and potentially fourth store in Germany. Life at that time had been filled with plans for a prosperous future—so much so that there had been gatherings between the two families over food and drink to talk of a future of creating a business conglomerate, and to have their names spread throughout the European communities as a measure of their achievement, with everything they talked about having a high level of probability to it.

  Then one night their hopes had been shattered as Hitler’s SA paramilitary forces took to the streets of Nazi Germany as part of a pogrom against Jews, and smashed all the windows to Jewish shops, buildings and synagogues during the Kristalnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Over the two-day period their shops had been laid to waste with broken glass littering the streets. And as fragile as the glass was, so was their dream, which was equally smashed as well.

  Over the months they had been stripped of their citizenship and had become a people without a country. Soon, thereafter, they had been transported out of Germany to the ghettos of Warsaw, where they spoke of a different dream: that of escape. But after spending a year inside the ghetto under deplorable conditions behind the walls, they were eventually transported to Auschwitz where the levels of Hell just seemed to get worse.

  In a time when dreams of expanding a business seemed within arm’s reach, twenty-three people belonging to two different nuclear families had become one. But on this day as Ephraim stared at gloved hands that once made the best bakery goods in Germany alongside Dror, he understood that he was the last of his kind with Dror the last of his, with the other twenty-one members of their family ending ‘up-the-chimney’ over time.

  Ephraim sighed as he stared at his gloved hands. With these hands, he thought, flexing his fingers, I made the best goods in town. Now they heave and pitch bodies into the flames all day long.

  “Help here,” Dror said with his hands underneath the armpits of a corpse. Then he inclined his chin as a gesture to Ephraim regarding the body. “Grab the ankles.”

  Ephraim dropped his hands in defeat, and did as Dror asked. He grabbed the body by the ankles, and in unison they lifted it off the brick floor and onto the tray. After sliding the tray into the flames, Dror closed the door and locked the handle in place.

  Dror did not look at Ephraim when he spoke, instead he looked hypnotically at the devouring flames that were always hungry but never satiated, through the small vents in the oven’s door. “We can’t do it,” he said rather dismally.

  Ephraim looked at him with a neutral appearance. “This was your plan,” he said.

  Dror nodded. “The network is too small. We don’t know who to trust. And we need more product than the time allows. It was always a long shot, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Dror feigned a smile as an orange light danced across his face. “And as a good friend, Ephraim, you still followed me.”

  “That’s because I believe in the one thing you’ve said all along… Just one. And I still believe in it today.”

  Dror turned to him. “And what’s that?”

  “That there’s a solution for everything.”

  Dror nodded, then turned back to the flames. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

  “There are now people in the network who believe the same, Dror. The odds are moot at this point. The wheels are in motion. People believe or want to believe. So there’s no going back.”

  “I’m not saying that we quit, Ephraim. I’m saying that the odds of pulling this off is substantially low, an impossibility.”

  “Again,” said Ephraim, “were you not the one who said that the word ‘impossible’ didn’t mean that something can’t be done—that it only measures the difficulty of the situation.”

  “I know what I said, Ephraim. But at the end of the day they’re only words. And empty ones at that.” He turned away from the flames and from the oven. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

  Ephraim remained as stoic as usual, straight and neutral in appearance. And then: “Yes.”

  Dror nodded with this confirmation.

  But then Ephraim added: “But we have to try,” he told him. “What we do here is not living. We’ve become machines tossing our own upon the flames like it was something normal. It’s not. And I can’t do this anymore.”

  “I hear you,” said Dror.

  “Death is something that I have come to believe over time to be a new beginning to something else. So this is not the end, Dror. If we cannot pull this off, then I want to see my family. I want to be where the Light shines all the time. I don’t want to be in a place where the sky and the ground is always gray with the ashes of Jews. I’m tired of the stench of burning flesh, a stink I could never get used to. And I’m tired of not knowing when they’re going to come for me.”

  “Understood.” Dror walked over to Ephraim and placed a gloved hand on the man’s shoulder. “It’s always better to have little hope than no hope at all.” Then he nodded to Ephraim with encouragement. “We’ll see this all the way through, my friend. And I pray that some of us will escape.”

  “Then no matter what happens,” returned Ephraim, “it’ll be worth it.”

  There was another false smile provided by Dror as he patted Ephraim’s shoulder.

  What they didn’t see, however, was Moshe Chapiro standing at the other end of the room wearing a wicked grin. In his hand was a truncheon, which he slapped against his palm again and again.

  …Thwack…

  …Thwack…

  …Thwack…

  * * *

  “Speaking in hushed tones, I see,” said Chapiro, approaching.

  …Thwack…

  …Thwack…

  …Thwack…

  “As I’m sure you’ve already heard,” said Chapiro, “I’m now a kapo.”

  I can tell, thought Dror. You’ve put on some weight since the last time I saw you. Most likely from feeding your face from the kapo’s banquet table.

  Chapiro leaned into Dror and Ephraim. “You both know what’s coming your way,” he told them. “And you, Dror,” the kapo poked the Sonderkommando in the chest with the tip of his baton, “will not wait around for the inevitable. I know you’re up to something.” Then he turned to Ephraim. “And you,” he said. “I know you’re in league with him as well.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Dror told him. “For instance: Do you have any idea of a kapo’s fate?”

  “I know I live a life much better than you two,” he told him. “At least I’ll live.”

  “Sure you will,” said Ephraim. “For three months, anyway. Then off to the fields with you like every other kapo.”

  “Nothing but rumor,” said Chapiro, waving his free hand as if to push the report aside.

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.” Chapiro began to circle the two with a smug air about him, his one-sided grin a testament to this. “And as a kapo,” he continued, “it’s my duty to watch everything that goes on around here. And be assured,” he added, pointing his truncheon accusingly at both men, “I’ll be watching the two of you like a hawk.”

  Dror sensed an immediate threat, and was sure that Ephraim felt the same.

  “What happened to you?” Dror asked him. “You’re a Jew, like us.”

  “I’m a Jew who wants to live.”

  “At the cost of your own people?”

  Chapiro bit down enough to cause the muscles in the back of his jaw to work.

  “I guess desperation can turn any man into an animal,” Dror finally added, which set Chapiro off
into a rage.

  Raising his club high, Chapiro brought it down against Dror’s forearm, hard, which Dror had raised in defense after intuiting the oncoming blow. Then came a second and third blow, sending Dror to the brick floor.

  As Chapiro raised his club for a fourth time, he held himself back while fighting for calm. Then he pointed the truncheon at Dror. “Step out of line one more time, Dror, so help me I’ll beat you down to paste. Do you understand me?”

  Dror rubbed his injured forearm and nodded.

  “Good,” said Chapiro. “You need to know your place.” Then the kapo straightened his shoulders, lifted his chin, and said, “As I said before: I’ll be watching you two closely. So my word of advice to you both is to pray to God.”

  When Chapiro left the area, though he didn’t go far, Ephraim aided Dror to his feet.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Dror, who was shaking his arm.

  “Pins and needles,” he said. “But I’ll be fine. For a little man he’s surprisingly strong.”

  “And he’s a problem, too. One that needs to be handled.”

  Dror nodded in agreement. They could take out Chapiro and offer him to the flames, his corpse nothing but dust in the end. But a missing kapo would also invite a search team of SS guards and their dogs. And such an investigation would surely discover the stockpiles of gunpowder.

  Dror closed his eyes. The situation was becoming more difficult by the moment. And then he prayed to God, asking Him why He was fighting against them.

  The answer was the crackling of the fire in the background.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Throughout the day and most of the next, the sublevels had been cleared of the urns, raising questions between the Sonderkommandos working the crematories, and, of course, inferring the reasons behind doing so, which cultivated concerns. The ovens had been going day and night. The Processing Center appeared to have shut down. Barracks that had been emptied were not being filled to occupancy. And trucks loaded with Jews were going out, only to return an hour later with their bays completely empty.