Dark Victory (Stella Bled Book Four) Read online

  Dark Victory

  Stella Bled Book Four

  A.W. Hartoin

  Dark Victory

  by A.W. Hartoin

  Copyright 2021 A.W. Hartoin

  Smashwords Edition

  * * *

  “This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Created with Vellum

  Also by A.W. Hartoin

  Historical Thriller

  The Paris Package (Stella Bled Book One)

  Strangers in Venice (Stella Bled Book Two)

  One Child in Berlin (Stella Bled Book Three)

  Dark Victory (Stella Bled Book Four)

  * * *

  Young Adult fantasy

  Flare-up (Away From Whipplethorn Short)

  A Fairy's Guide To Disaster (Away From Whipplethorn Book One)

  Fierce Creatures (Away From Whipplethorn Book Two)

  A Monster’s Paradise (Away From Whipplethorn Book Three)

  A Wicked Chill (Away From Whipplethorn Book Four)

  To the Eternal (Away From Whipplethorn Book Five)

  * * *

  Mercy Watts Mysteries

  Novels

  A Good Man Gone (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book One)

  Diver Down (A Mercy Watts Mystery Book Two)

  Double Black Diamond (Mercy Watts Mysteries BookThree)

  Drop Dead Red (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Four)

  In the Worst Way (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Five)

  The Wife of Riley (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Six)

  My Bad Grandad (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Seven)

  Brain Trust (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Eight)

  Down and Dirty (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Nine)

  Small Time Crime (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Ten)

  Bottle Blonde (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Eleven)

  * * *

  Short stories

  Coke with a Twist

  Touch and Go

  Nowhere Fast

  Dry Spell

  A Sin and a Shame

  * * *

  Paranormal

  It Started with a Whisper (Sons of Witches)

  For those who sacrificed so that we might be saved.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  Prologue

  There wasn’t a thought in his head, not a single one. Abel Herschmann walked across roll call square with his previously active mind curiously quiet. He saw the new prisoners entering Dachau in his peripheral vision but didn’t bother to give them a good look. He hadn’t any curiosity left.

  Several dozen men sat with their bony bottoms on the gravel, hammering nails into boards and then pulling them out again. Abel threaded his way between them, not meeting their eyes or hearing the weeping. Some guard had come up with the idea, genius in its insidious evil, as a punishment. At first, Abel had thought this simple hammering was benign and it was, compared to having your hands bound behind you and being hung by them from a pole. But the senseless activities were a special kind of torment that affected the mind terribly and Abel had seen more than one man come apart at the seams after spending a few thirteen-hour days hammering or digging a hole only to fill it back in.

  Jakob had told him hopelessness was the enemy and that’s where those punishments excelled. The old man was the wisest person Abel had ever met as well as the bravest. He kept his wits about him, despite illness and injury, to give Abel a name to help him survive in Dachau.

  “Adam,” whispered a man as he passed.

  Abel gave the slightest of nods to acknowledge the voice of a bookkeeper from the Jewish barracks, but he didn’t hesitate or answer. The guards were watching and it would do neither of them any favors. He’d learned a lot in his eighteen-month internment, but the most important was not to think. It was a rare time when Jakob had been wrong. His sweet and naturally hopeful nature leaned toward happy distracting thoughts. He’d advised dwelling on pleasant memories of childhood or friends or holidays, but those thoughts only tormented Abel. They were so far away that he was no longer quite sure they had happened. He’d discovered during a particularly long punishment of moving sand from one pile to the next and back again that not thinking was the key.

  So a man given to thinking in vivid imagery and full complex sentences in multiple languages learned to turn it off and found the specter of insanity that had been barking at his door disappeared entirely. Now the guards ignored him and it was considerably easier to pretend to be a communist bricklayer named Adam Stolowicki when he didn’t think about Oxford, his beloved books, his friends, or, most importantly, Stella. That beautiful young woman had to go, pushed into a corner of his mind, where her smile and charming naïveté didn’t twist his soul with longing. That was the kind of thing that showed on a man’s face and made him a target. Abel was blank and obedient. He’d become a master bricklayer and memorized a mountain of useless facts on communism, making him both convincing and useful.

  Abel would do what he had to for survival’s sake. It was only a matter of time. He’d given his name, his real name, to Michael Haas a second before his friend’s release and Michael would save him. It would happen. He was so sure he’d even stopped thinking about that. Wondering if today was the day was pointless and inefficient. Let the others waste their time. He’d told them his secret to survival and counseled them on their pain as Jakob had done for him, but some couldn’t or wouldn’t follow his advice and there was nothing he could do about that. Some would whisper and plead as the bookkeeper was just then. They could not be led away from it. Abel heard a boot connect with flesh and a howl burst out in protest, bringing more guards and more pain. Some survived with hope like Jakob and Michael, a path much harder in Abel’s opinion. The guards didn’t like hope. Blank was better.

  In silence with his quiet empty mind, Abel Herschmann approached the guard standing next to the Jourhaus door. He’d eyed Abel critically, looking for something to target or suspect.

  Finding nothing, he asked in a guttural kind of German accent most often spoken in factories or fields, “What do you want?”

  “I was ordered to come to the Jourhaus,” said Abel without any interest at all.

  “What for?”

  “I was not informed of the reason.”

  “Do you deserve a reason?” asked the guard slyly.

  There was a time when Abel’s heartrate would’ve skyrocketed. He’d have flushed and broken out in a sweat, but now he merely stared straight ah
ead and said, “I follow orders. I do not question them.”

  Mollified, the guard stepped aside. “Weiß is waiting for you in his office. Don’t make him wait.” He said it like Abel had some kind of control over his situation and might just decide that angering the assistant to the camp commandant was a swell idea. Both notions were ludicrous, but neither one made the slightest impression on Abel.

  “Yes,” he said. “May I open the door?”

  The guard shoved his shoulder. “Unless you want to walk through it.”

  “I will open the door.”

  “Do that.”

  A nearby prisoner sweeping the gravel tensed up and backed away. Abel saw the move. Once he would’ve been dismayed, but, for him, this wasn’t a tense exchange. He had no interest in the outcome because he couldn’t do anything about it.

  “Do I have permission?” Abel asked simply.

  The guard was puzzled but said, “You do.”

  Abel opened the door and walked inside the Jourhaus, feeling the warmth of a heated building for the first time since the time he was there with Michael. Jakob had somehow arranged to have their designation changed from Jews to communists and it had been a terrifying experience. There was no terror now. He explained himself three more times before standing at Weiß’s door and giving it a single knock.

  “Come,” barked the SS officer and Abel walked into an office with a large window overlooking the men hammering and the beating that was still taking place. The SS Weiß sat behind a cherrywood desk that was at least a hundred years old. Its neoclassical elegance was completely out of place in the white-walled office replete with metal filing cabinets and photos of Der Führer, the high command, and Nuremberg rallies covering the walls.

  Weiß sat on a rolling office chair and signed a series of papers, stacking them in a basket next to a bronze-colored SS desk eagle. It looked like an oversized paperweight and if Abel had been thinking he’d have wondered what on Earth it was for and why anybody would put such a hideous symbol on such a beautiful desk, but he wasn’t thinking and he merely stood waiting in silence.

  The SS signed three more papers, tossed them in the basket, and finally looked up saying, “Who is she?”

  Abel’s blank mind had nothing. He hadn’t seen a woman for five months, not since Michael stumbled into the arms of one just outside the gate and he didn’t know who she was.

  “Sir?”

  “There’s a woman here asking for you,” said Weiß as he leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers.

  “I don’t know who that is,” he said with complete honesty. He thought he felt a flicker of interest inside himself, but it was quickly gone.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “She knows who you are.” The SS shuffled around the desk and found a folder. “Adam Stolowicki.”

  Abel remained silent. There was no right answer.

  “You don’t know any women?”

  The answer to that would seem obvious. Of course, he did. All men knew women at least in some capacity, but in Dachau the simplest answers could be death. Three months ago, a new arrival had been asked during a work detail what color the sky was. The prisoner had said without hesitation that the sky was blue. The guard had beaten him into unconsciousness because the sky was currently grey as it was an overcast morning. The man was lying and he died for it. Abel had been working near him and he’d seen it coming. They all had. That guard roused them that morning and they knew him well enough to know he was spoiling for a fight, but they hadn’t said anything to the new prisoners. Abel bitterly regretted it, but in the end, it made his silence more profound.

  “Not since I’ve been here.”

  Weiß watched him with dark eyes. He was a brutal man, but not the kind that beat men to death over the color of the sky. He would, however, have no difficulty sending Abel to the medical block for what would be called treatment.

  “I guess not,” the SS said finally. “This would be a member of your family?”

  “I have no family, except an aunt in Prague.” He left out Adam’s sister Helena in Vienna, a risk he took without thought. Adam had died for a moment of decency on that hellish night in Vienna when they’d been arrested. Abel would not repay the man by turning the SS’s eyes on his sister.

  “This aunt has money?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, who is this woman who has come here for you?” the SS asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He flipped through the file. “I remember you. Michael Haas was your friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  “No.”

  Prisoners were allowed mail intermittently and Abel had received a letter from Adam Stolowicki’s aunt, a caustic woman who said she was glad that his parents weren’t alive to see him in jail. Jail, as if Adam had been picked up for purse snatching or something equally minor. Dachau was hardly jail. Jail would be a holiday. He hadn’t answered her, since he wasn’t her nephew and because her last line was quite pointed. “Serves you right.”

  “Have you heard from anyone?”

  “My aunt,” said Abel.

  “What did she say?”

  “That I was a Dummkopf and also ugly.”

  The SS’s mouth twitched. “Maybe she changed her mind about you.”

  “I doubt it. She also said she was ashamed of me.”

  He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Is she small? Tiny?”

  Abel was able to accurately describe Adam’s aunt since Jakob had seen her, a large woman with a beaky nose and bad teeth.

  “That’s not her. What is your organization?”

  “The Communist party of Poland.”

  The SS frowned. “A dirty, conniving Pole.”

  Abel was originally categorized correctly as a Jew when he arrived since it was assumed that everyone on the train was. It turned out Adam Stolowicki wasn’t Jewish. Usually, once a person was labeled, they were stuck, but Jakob had managed to take Jew off Adam’s list of so-called crimes. Unfortunately, the stain of what remained was still enough to hold him. Being a Polish communist was the reason Abel hadn’t been released when many of the others arrested on the Kristallnacht were. Michael had, fortunately, been turned into an Austrian communist and had, according to the Nazis, good Aryan blood.

  “Why do we keep you?” muttered Weiß.

  Abel knew he wasn’t referring to release. The SS was asking why he was still alive. Many of the Poles were beaten or starved to death. But they were not silent, their minds filled with justifiable rage that they couldn’t contain.

  While Weiß pondered Adam’s continued breathing, a gunshot went off in the square. Neither man reacted. It wasn’t unusual. But then another fired and another and another. Weiß looked up, his dark brows knitted. “What is it?”

  Abel looked out the window and saw several guards firing into the air and cheering. “A celebration.”

  The frown grew deeper. Celebrations weren’t common unless it was about a prisoner’s death and even that was usually met with indifference.

  “What about?”

  “I can’t tell,” said Abel.

  More gunshots went off and Weiß jolted to his feet. “Stay here.” He marched out, leaving Abel to stare out the window at dozens of congregating guards. Curiosity didn’t come. He simply watched the joy of his tormentors and waited until the SS came back to decide his fate.

  After fifteen long minutes, Weiß came back wreathed in smiles with a beer in hand and a touch of foam on his upper lip. “You are curious about the commotion?”

  Abel wasn’t, but he said yes.

  “A great day for the Fatherland. All these months of quiet restraint are over.” He took a big gulp of beer and raised the mug to the men in the square who raised theirs to him.

  Abel wouldn’t have described the Nazis as restrained, but it pleased them to think they were. They often bragge
d about not killing a prisoner as if it were some kind of virtue.

  “You are not asking questions?” the SS asked, still smiling.

  “Did a country surrender to the Fatherland?”

  Weiß pointed at him. “Good guess, but no, not yet. We have attacked and overwhelmed Norway and Denmark.”

  “In one day?”

  “Today. This morning. What do you think of that?”

  Abel had to answer and he did so honestly. “I’m not surprised.”

  “No?” asked Weiß.

  “I heard what happened to Poland,” Abel said.

  The SS nodded and drained his beer. “This is your lucky day.” He pounded his knuckles on the desk.

  Abel very much doubted his idea of luck was the same as Weiß, but he nodded.

  “It’s not much, but I will accept it. My wife still longs for a boat.” He pulled out a sheaf of forms, signed several, and then stamped them. “Get your things from the barracks and report to the intake area for your papers.”

  Abel stood in front of the desk, his blank mind frozen and unable to comprehend what was happening.

  “You’re straining my good will, Stolowicki.”

  “I…”

  “You are released to that woman whoever she is. You should thank the Führer that today is a day of triumph.”

  Abel nodded, took the papers and walked woodenly out of the door as Weiß yelled for another beer. The square was awash in guards, celebrating both Germany’s triumph, which they took for granted, and the possibility that they would be heading for the front. He walked through the men and passed unmolested, which was a first. Other prisoners who hadn’t learned that curiosity killed the cat were coming to see what was going on. Abel was the only one going in the other direction and he found his barrack empty, except for the two men who had died the night before and hadn’t yet been removed.