Mila 18 - Leon Uris [167]
Chris drank hard these days, and women he had once resisted with bored ease were now constant bedmates. He became a perpetual guest at the perpetual parties he once shunned. As the heaviness inside him compounded, that point of no return would soon be reached. A week, a month, two, it did not matter to Horst, for Chris’s downfall had become inevitable in his calculation. One day he would come to Horst and babble a plea for the life of the unknown Jewess inside the ghetto, and the piper would be paid.
Dr. Franz Koenig’s parties were uninhibited affairs that generals recalled with affection during the long cold winter nights on the Russian front. Koenig kept an international flavor, spicing the invitations to include the diplomatic corps, the press, and the stars of the moment, as well as the top Nazis. Nothing was spared by Koenig in the pursuit of gluttony and revelry. In addition to Warsaw’s courtesans, Koenig continually imported new, young, slim, high-cheekboned blondes from Berlin, playing the role of a degenerated industrialist with great finesse.
Dr. Koenig premiered the newly remodeled ballroom as the first large midsummer event of 1942. It had been redecorated in unabashed elegance. Amid tinkling glasses, bowing, kissing of hands, rumors ran rampant and deals and bribes and barter were made. Much of the talk was about the new depth of the German armed penetrations. El Alamein in North Africa stood before Rommel’s magnificent Afrika Korps, and on the Russian front the Don River had been reached. The Japanese guests had an air of cocksure confidence. The Americans had not recovered from the devastation of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese General Staff was positive America had no stomach to make the sacrifice necessary to displace them from the Pacific islands. It was a night for Axis gaiety. America had come into the war with too little, too late. The glitter of Dr. Franz Koenig’s new ballroom made the participants so heady, there was even talk of a German breakthrough to India, which had been the long-forbidden dream of a dozen empires in a dozen ages.
Toward one o’clock the more strait-laced had made their departures and the party broke into splinter groups drifting to one of the many lush parlors adjoining the ballroom.
In another hour the guests would include only Dr. Koenig’s intimate circle of ten or twenty and the new imports from Berlin. The serious business of an orgy would begin.
Chris’s cup had run over. He was in that state of inebriated calm when all of the tensions within him seemed gone for the moment. In the library he rested his head on the shoulder of a young German model. She was delighted to have found an Italian and he said that it was some time since he had had a German girl, so it should be fun. The room was quite dark, lit only by candelabra and some light filtering in from the main ballroom.
His German girl was approached by Koenig’s aide and spoke so rapidly that Chris could barely decipher it through the alcoholic haze. Apparently she was essential to an act and could not be dispensed with. She eased away with apologies and promises. Chris yawned and shut his eyes for a moment.
He opened them, smacked his lips, and looked around for a servant. A figure of a small woman framed the doorway. Chris tried to think. He had seen the girl from a distance several times during the evening. He was positive he knew her from somewhere, and it seemed as though she were watching him.
She walked into the library, moving to the uninhabited corner by the candelabra. Chris walked up behind her. “Do I know you?” he asked.
She turned and faced him, holding her chin up to the candlelight. “Once you did.”
He squinted, trying to make her out in a sliver of light.
“Gabriela!”
She nodded. He turned chalky.
“What the hell are you doing here! What do you want?”
“An old friend wants