The One Man by Andrew Gross Read Free Book Online

Please,” the prisoner begged, with what looked like a dire warning in his eyes.
    Alfred could see the rage and anger stiffen in the German officer’s eyes and neck, knowing that if he resisted even seconds longer he would be dropped right here on the tracks, the way the old rabbi and his wife had been shot back in Vittel. He had to stay alive, if only for Marte and Lucy’s sake. He had to see them again.
    Reluctantly, he let go.
    â€œNow get over there.” The German pushed him toward the line of younger men assembling. “Your German will come in handy.” He blew his whistle and moved on to someone else.
    Alfred watched as the prisoner took his leather case and flung it onto the mountain of bags and belongings that was growing by the minute. In horror, he saw the clasp become undone, and pages and pages of his work—equations, formulas, research for papers he had written for Academic Scientifica and the Zeitschrift für Physik, the toil of twenty years—slowly slide out of the case and scatter like debris over the mounting pile of bags, rucksacks, children’s toys and dolls, until they disappeared—every page, like bodies hurled indifferently into a mass grave and then covered over by the next.
    If only they knew what that was …
    He was handed a uniform and told to march to a processing building and change his clothes. Over the ubiquitous wailing on the platform and the desperate last goodbyes and shouts of “I love you!” and “Stay strong,” Alfred thought he heard his name. He spun around, his heart springing up with hope. “Marte!”
    But it was likely only another person shouting for someone else. He searched the crowd for one last look at his girls, but they were gone. Then he was pushed along in the throng. Twenty-eight years … he said to himself. In all that time, they rarely spent a day apart. She had typed every one of his papers and listened to hundreds of his talks in advance, correcting his syntax and cadence. She made him cakes and meat pies, and every Thursday he came home with flowers from the market on King Stanisław Street on his walk back from the university. A panic rose up in him that he would never see her again. Neither of them. That they would all die in this place. He prayed they would be all right. Up ahead, he saw the line he was in being separated into two new ones. He sensed that in one he would live and in the other he would die. But it was too late for fear now, or for prayers.
    Looking back and watching his papers scatter like dead leaves on that pile of bags and people’s belongings, the small part of him that was still even capable of fear or hope felt nothing.
    It had already died.

 
    SEVEN
    LATE APRIL, THREE MONTHS LATER
LISBON
    A black Opel pulled up to the curb at the Lisbon airport, and Peter Strauss climbed into the backseat, ducking out of the rain.
    He was not wearing his officer’s cap, nor, beneath his raincoat, his army captain’s uniform. Only a sport jacket with flannel trousers, rumpled from the two-hour flight in from London. With his valise and leather briefcase, he might have been any businessman arriving who was trying to profit from the war, selling steel or food or buying Portuguese tungsten, as Lisbon was one of the last open and thriving centers of commerce in Europe during the war.
    â€œCaptain Strauss,” the Swiss-born driver who worked with the War Refugee Committee greeted him, taking his bags. “I know you’ve had a long trip. Would you like to stop off at the hotel and freshen up?”
    â€œThanks,” Strauss replied. He’d caught a diplomatic night flight to London, then spent two days absorbed with secret phone calls and cables in order to set up the meeting he was here to be part of. “But I’d just as soon get going if it’s all the same.”
    â€œVery good.” The driver put Strauss’s bag in the front and climbed