Dark Tunnel by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

blood fell from his stained beard onto his shabby black vest. Ruth helped him down the hall to the bathroom to tend his wound. Franz cursed once between his teeth and the room filled with low sounds of excitement and indignation.
    “This is terrible, terrible,” Frau Wanger said to me in English. “What will you tell Americans of our country when you return home?”
    “I’ll tell them about you and Ruth and Franz,” I said. (I’m telling them now.) “What happened to the old gentleman, do you know?”
    “Dr. Wiener is a Jew,” she said.
    In a few minutes Ruth came back into the room holding Dr. Wiener’s arm. His head was bandaged and his face was washed as pale as the bandage. He shook in his chair and could not hold his cup of tea. Ruth held it for him.
    There was only one thing to talk about but nobody would talk about it in front of the injured Jew. The party broke up and the guests went home. Several of the women apologized to me for Germany when they said good-bye. The men held their tongues but there was a look of firm humility on their faces, more impressive than pride or anger. Only Franz sat on in a corner by himself, composed and self-contained.
    Dr. Wiener went on trembling in his chair, trembling with rage and humiliation, trembling with terror. SS men had attacked him at the head of the street, he said, and flung him down in the gutter. They had kicked him like a dead dog in the gutter, him! a respected physician before they took away his practice, a scientist and a family man and a veteran of the last war. He spluttered with rage.
    He went on trembling with terror. He must not venture forth on the streets of this accursed city, this doomed Sodom, in the light of God’s day. He must move in darkness, skulk in back streets, live underground like a rat in a tunnel, because he was the unchosen of the chosen of Moloch. He wept with humiliation and trembled with terror. He was afraid to go home.
    “I will take you home, Dr. Wiener,” Ruth said and put her hand on his arm.
    “I’ll come, too, if I may,” I said.
    “I’m afraid I can’t,” Franz said from his corner, smiling as if at a personal joke. “I think those SS men are looking for me.”
    “Stay with me as long as you wish,” Frau Wanger said. “Both of you.”
    “Vielen Dank,” Franz said. “Until dark.” He stayed in his corner, relaxed but ready like a boxer between rounds.
    Dr. Wiener said, “You are very good. But I must go home to my wife. She must not be left alone.” As night fell in the German cities, Jews were safer in the streets and less safe in their houses.
    He got up and walked slowly to the door on knees that were bent with age and weakness. Frau Wanger said Auf Wiedersehen with anxiety in her voice, and Ruth and I went down the long stairs with Dr. Wiener between us, each of us holding an arm.
    He walked slowly and heavily but bore most of his own weight. We went out into the street and along the deserted sidewalk. The brown stone buildings looked ancient and obtuse. The lighted windows seemed to hum with a mad, inner fire consuming a doomed city.
    I said to Ruth, “Why are they after Franz?”
    “He’s a worker for the Austrian Sozialdemokraten. He came to Germany to fight Anschluss. He should not have come.”
    “You must not stay,” I said. “Will you marry me and come to America?”
    She spoke across Dr. Wiener, who was moving like a sleepwalker, lost in the old melancholy dreams of the Jew. “I love you. When all this is over, I will go with you if you want me to. Now there is work to do in Germany. It will take years. It may take all my life.”
    “You’re going to stay, then?”
    Before she could answer, four men in black uniform came out of an arched doorway at the head of the block and approached us walking in step, their polished belts shining dully in the lamplight. Their black metallic bodies were like the products of a foundry and lent no humanity to the street. We stood still and watched them