The Bourne Sanction

“Sooner or later,” Bourne said, “you’re going to have to tell me who hired you.”

Petra said nothing, but her hands trembled on the wheel, an aftermath of their harrowing chase.

“Where are we going?” Bourne said. He wanted to keep her engaged in conversation. He felt that she needed to co

“Home,” she said. “A place I never wanted to go back to.”

“Why is that?”

“I was born in Munich because my mother traveled there to give birth to me, but I’m from Dachau.” She meant the town, of course, after which the adjacent Nazi concentration camp had been named. “No parent wants Dachau to appear on their child’s birth certificate, so when their time comes the women check into a Munich hospital.” Hardly surprising: Almost two hundred thousand people were exterminated during the camp’s life, the longest of the war, since it was the first built, becoming the prototype for all the other KZ camps.

The town itself, situated along the Amper River, lay some twelve miles northwest of Munich. It was unexpectedly bucolic, with its narrow cobbled streets, old-fashioned street lamps, and quiet tree-lined lanes.

When Bourne observed that most of the people they passed looked contented enough, Petra laughed unpleasantly. “They go around in a permanent fog, hating that their little town has such a murderous burden to carry.”

She drove through the center of Dachau, then turned north until they reached what once had been the village of Etzenhausen. There, on a desolate hill known at the Leitenberg, was a graveyard, lonely and utterly deserted. They got out of the car, walked past the stone stela with the sculpted Star of David. The stone was scarred, furry with blue lichen; the overhanging firs and hemlocks blocked out the sky even on such a bright midwinter afternoon.

As they walked slowly among the gravestones, she said, “This is the KZ-Friedhof, the concentration camp cemetery. Through most of Dachau’s life, the corpses of the Jews were piled up and burned in ovens, but toward the end when the camp ran out of coal, the Nazis had to do something with the corpses, so they brought them up here.” She spread her arms wide. “This is all the memorial the Jewish victims got.”

Bourne had been in many cemeteries before, and had found them peculiarly peaceful. Not KZ-Friedhof, where a sensation of constant movement, ceaseless murmuring made his skin crawl. The place was alive, howling in its restless silence. He paused, squatted down, and ran his fingertips over the words engraved on a headstone. They were so eroded it was impossible to read them.

“Did you ever think that the man you shot today might have been a Jew?” he said.

She turned on him sharply. “I told you I needed the money. I did it out of necessity.”

Bourne looked around them. “That’s what the Nazis said when they buried their last victims here.”

A flash of anger momentarily burned away the sadness in her eyes. “I hate you.”

“Not nearly as much as you hate yourself.” He rose, handed her back her gun. “Here, why don’t you shoot yourself and end it all?”

She took the gun, aimed it at him. “Why don’t I just shoot you?”

“Killing me will only make matters worse for you. Besides…” Bourne opened up one palm to show her the bullets he’d taken out of her weapon.

With a disgusted sound, Petra holstered her gun. Her face and hands looked greenish in what light filtered through the evergreens.

“You can make amends for what you did today,” Bourne said. “Tell me who hired you.”

Petra eyed him skeptically. “I won’t give you the money, if that’s what you’re angling for.”

“I have no interest in your money,” Bourne said. “But I think the man you shot was going to tell me something I needed to know. I suspect that’s why you were hired to kill him.”

Some of the skepticism leached out of her face. “Really?”

Bourne nodded.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” she said. “You understand that.”

“You walked up to him, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.”

Petra looked away, at nothing in particular. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“Then you’re no better than anyone else in Dachau.”

Tears spilled over, she covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shook. The sounds she made were like those Bourne had heard on Leitenberg.

At length, Petra’s crying jag was spent. Wiping her reddened eyes with the backs of her hands, she said, “I wanted to be a poet, you know? I always equated being a poet with being a revolutionary. I, a German, wanted to change the world or, at least, do something to change the way the world saw us, to do something to scoop that core of guilt out of us.”

“You should have become an exorcist.”

It was a joke, but such was her mood that she found nothing fu

“Impractical might be a better word.”

She cocked her head. “You’re a cynic, aren’t you?” When he didn’t answer, she went on. “I don’t think it’s naive to believe that words-that what you write-can change things.”

“Why aren’t you writing then,” he said, “instead of shooting people for money? That’s no way to earn a living.”

She was silent for so long, he wondered whether she’d heard him.

At last, she said, “Fuck it, I was hired by a man named Spangler Wald-he’s just past being a boy, really, no more than twenty-one or two. I’d seen him around the pubs; we had coffee together once or twice. He said he was attending the university, majoring in entropic economics, whatever that is.”

“I don’t think anyone can major in entropic economics,” Bourne said.

“Figures.” Petra was still sniffling. “I have to get my bullshit meter recalibrated.” She shrugged. “I never was good with people; I’m better off communing with the dead.”

Bourne said, “You can’t take on the grief and rage of so many people without being buried alive.”

She looked off at the rows of crumbling headstones. “What else can I do? They’re forgotten now. Here’s where the truth lies. If you omit the truth, isn’t that worse than a lie?”

When he didn’t answer, she gave a quick twitch of her shoulders and turned around. “Now that you’ve been here, I want to show you what the tourists see.”

She led him back to her car, drove down the deserted hill to the official Dachau memorial.

There was a pall over what was left of the camp buildings, as if the noxious emissions of the coal-fired incinerators still rose and fell on the thermals, like carrion birds still searching for the dead. An ironwork sculpture, a harrowing interpretation of skeletal prisoners made to resemble the barbed wire that had imprisoned them, greeted them as they drove in. Inside what had once been the main administrative building was a mock-up of the cells, display cases of shoes and other inexpressibly sad items, all that was left of the inmates.

“These signs,” Petra said. “Do you see any mention of how many Jews were tortured and lost their lives there? ‘One hundred and ninety-three thousand people lost their lives here,’ the signs say. There’s no expiation in this. We’re still hiding from ourselves; we’re still a land of Jew-haters, no matter how often we try to stifle the impulse with righteous anger, as if we have a right to be the aggrieved ones.”

Bourne might have told her that nothing in life is as simple as that, except he deemed it better to let her fury burn itself out. Clearly, she couldn’t vent these views to anyone else.

She took him on a tour of the ovens, which seemed sinister even so many years after their use. They seemed alive, appeared to shimmer, to be part of an alternate universe overflowing with unspeakable horror. At length, they passed out of the crematorium and arrived at a long room, the walls of which were covered with letters, some written by prisoners, others by families desperate for news of their loved ones, as well as other notes, drawings, and more formal letters of inquiry. All were in German; none had been translated into other languages.