Murder Without Pity Read Online Free PDF Page A

stevedore’s heft and blond hair shoved the ballroom’s main doors shut with a loud push to express his protest against the intruding fanatic.
    “Thank you, Serge.” Anna gripped the lectern’s sides. “Hatred has no home here or anywhere. On behalf of the Center, welcome to our fifty-first benefit. I’ll keep my remarks brief for your welfare as well as mine.”
    “We love you, my darling.” A white-haired matron from a nearby table blew her a kiss with both hands.
    “And I’m fond of all of you,” Anna replied, “which is why I won’t speak long.”
    Laughter erupted, and she had to motion for quiet several times before the audience finally stilled. She relaxed her hands on the lectern, more at ease, Stanislas thought.
    “Those of you new to our organization,” she continued, “may not know its humble origin. At our Center when you enter the Hall of Memories, you’ll see a portrait that faces you. It’s the largest one in that somber gallery. Madame Gertrude Steiner, Gerti, to those who had the honor to know and love her. A grandmotherly woman of forty-eight who had seen too much, one of her biographers wrote. Gerti survived the night train from Drancy to Auschwitz. And there, the daily starvations and beatings and rapes and murders of Auschwitz itself.”
    She hesitated. Her eyes fluttered shut. From where he sat Stanislas thought she appeared to sway, and for an awful moment he feared she might faint until he understood she was fighting back some painful memory of that woman.
    After a further moment composing herself, she continued. “When the Russians liberated that death camp and she felt strong enough to return to Paris, she had a simple idea: to handle the overflow of camp survivors who gathered daily at the Hotel Lutétia, that grand hotel on Boulevard Raspail turned into a reception point for those returnees. To clothe, feed, and in every other possible way, nurture them back to life. A single room near that hotel, a table, two chairs, a phone that rarely worked, some volunteers, and a board on which those volunteers tacked the names and any photos of camp survivors for any next of kin, the Center’s beginning, ladies and gentlemen.
    “Yet the Center grew, and I’ve heard from several former ministers under Charles de Gaulle that when that woman—that’s how they referred to her, ‘that woman,’—that when she wanted something, she was quite capable of terrorizing the most fearless bureaucrat into submission.”
    The ballroom exploded into whistles, shouts, and cheers, forcing her to pause. Jules’s face blushed so red from laughing he heaved forward into one of his coughing spasms. A teenager seated in the row across from him pounded the table with her palm in delight. The waiters dropped their trays against their legs and clapped as they whistled appreciation. Anna had to bat the air several times for quiet, seemingly unaware how much they adored her, Stanislas noticed. At the edges of the ballroom, a few last laughs went off, and she continued.
    “In Gerti’s last interview, she was asked what sustained her at Auschwitz and afterwards. ‘Was it God?’ the interviewer asked. Gerti brushed aside his question with her legendary brusqueness and refused to say. But she did quote an Old Testament prophet. ‘If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I am for myself only, then what am I?’”
    A lone cell phone went off somewhere in the audience. A flutter of movement blurred at the corner of Stanislas’s vision.
    “The world once looked only to its own selfish interests,” she continued, “and we had war. Gerti….”
    Now more cell phones rang like alarms going off. Something wasn’t right, Stanislas sensed. He stirred away from Anna and noticed a man in the right aisle just steps from the stage.
    “…that no matter what her tragedy, she would never tire helping….”
    The man pounded up the steps.
    “…to the end an unrepentant humanitarian….”
    The man