Night Angels(6)

Fengshan turned around. In the red-carpeted hallway, next to a guard, the small figure of Grace appeared, faltering. Her eyes were wide, alert, and her face was bloodless, lips swollen, a smear of redness on her chin. There was a peculiar expression on her face—something akin to happiness, it seemed. He rushed to her and put his arms around her to support her entire body, which was almost weightless.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Let’s go home.” He wiped off the blood on her chin and murmured in English. Out of courtesy, he gave Eichmann a nonchalant nod, even though he was burning with fury. How could it be legal to arrest a woman for sitting on a public bench? And what kind of regime would torment a defenseless woman who weighed less than one hundred pounds? The Germans—the Nazis—couldn’t be trusted.

Outside, he passed the Brownshirts and the policemen in black uniforms and settled Grace in the car. He rubbed her back, comforting her. If they had had privacy, he would have let go of the Chinese custom and kissed her.

“Let’s go home, Grace.” He asked Rudolf to start the engine. The sooner they left here, the better.

“Wait, my dear.” Grace’s voice was a whisper, but she looked rather poised, not devastated, fearful, or tearful, as he had thought.

“What’s the matter?”

“Lola Schnitzel, my dear. She’s still in the dungeon. Could you please ask for her release as well?”

Grace had a habit of addressing him in her American way. But he, a conservative Chinese man adhering to Confucian teaching, didn’t consider it appropriate to address his wife in endearments. “Who’s Lola Schnitzel?”

“The tutor you recommended.”

He remembered all the tutors he had urged his wife to hire. Lola Schnitzel—or was it Schnitzler?—was a student. “Did you interview her?”

She nodded. “I just met her today. We were sitting on a bench outside a park when the policemen came for us.”

So that was how it happened. The tutor, he recalled, was an Austrian. Rescuing his wife from the Nazis was his duty, but asking for the release of an Austrian was crossing the professional line he had set for himself.

“Please, my dear. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

He glanced back at the policemen, the squad cars, and motorcycles. “Grace, I think we should just leave.”

She gripped his hand with surprising strength. “She’s a lovely girl, very young and brave. We were brought here together and placed in a dungeon in the basement. I can’t just leave her alone. Please get her out. Please do me a favor.”

He sighed. His wife. He would do it for her. He pushed open the car’s door, entered the hotel, and went to the counter in the lobby. One of the guards approached him, but Eichmann gestured him away.

“Herr Consul General, it is my pleasure to see you again. How may I help you?” The man straightened his cap with the skull and crossbones. The skin around his mouth sprang to form a smile, but his gray eyes flashed coldness.

“Herr Eichmann, pardon me, I heard my wife’s tutor—Fr?ulein Schnitzel—was also detained. May I request your kindness in granting her release?”

He prayed that the tutor was not a supporter of Schuschnigg or a Communist, like the Austrian at the Soviet legation whose passport he’d been asked to provide. If she were, then his effort in rescuing her would be not only in vain but also messy.

“By any chance, does Herr Consul General mean Lola Schnitzler?”

Fengshan gave an affirmative nod. It was Schnitzler after all. “She’s my wife’s tutor.”

“Herr Consul General, perhaps it is not known to you that she’s a Jewess.” A note of warning had crept into Eichmann’s voice.

A Jewess. Not as serious as a supporter of Schuschnigg or a Communist, but still a point of concern. For about a year, he had read about the absurd rhetoric of racial purification in Nazi propaganda; since the Anschluss, however, instances of harassment and discrimination against the Viennese Jews had been unfortunately legitimized. Fengshan had deep misgivings about the race theory. In the course of China’s two-thousand-year history, the Chinese had conquered other races and had also been conquered by other races, and who could say which was superior? And Confucianism and Taoism, of course, always gave sage instructions of tolerance and coexistence. If there was one thing definitive about the argument of race, it was that it derived from the imbalance of power; in the world of Ruo Rou Qiang Shi—the strong devoured the meat of the weak—the weak were doomed to be vulnerable.

The ambassador hadn’t explicitly mentioned to stay out of the Jewish business, only that of the dissidents and the Communists, and Grace was waiting in the car. He didn’t have the heart to disappoint her after the ordeal she had gone through. “Is she? I didn’t know. I hope it’s not too much trouble.”

The look in Eichmann’s eyes grew intense—the man was calculating. It seemed to be of great interest to him that a foreign diplomat would care to meddle in his country’s domestic affairs, or maybe he was assessing the pros and cons of granting a diplomat’s request, and it was even possible that he was considering reporting him to his Japanese counterpart with whom the Nazi had rubbed shoulders. Then Eichmann shrugged with aloofness and callousness—it was only a Jewess, and the city was full of them. “No trouble at all, Herr Consul General.”