Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Read online

  Anne Kane became Mrs. Henry Osborne in October of that year at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral just as the golden and red leaves were beginning to fall, a little over nine months after they had met. William feigned illness in order not to attend the wedding and remained firmly at school. The grandmothers did attend but were unable to hide their disapproval of Anne’s remarriage, particularly to someone who appeared to be so much younger than she. “It can only end in disaster,” said Grandmother Kane.

  The newlyweds sailed for Greece the following day and did not return to the Red House on the Hill until the second week of December, just in time to welcome William home for the Christmas holidays. William was shocked to find that the house had been redecorated, leaving almost no trace of his father. Over Christmas, William’s attitude to his stepfather showed no sign of softening despite the present, as Henry saw it—bribe, as William construed it—of a new bicycle. Henry Osborne accepted this rebuff with surly resignation. It saddened Anne that her splendid new husband made little effort to win over her son’s affection.

  William felt ill at ease in his invaded home and would often disappear for long periods during the day. Whenever Anne inquired where he was going, she received little or no response: it certainly was not to either grandmother, both of whom also were missing him. When the Christmas holidays came to an end, William was only too happy to return to school, and Henry was not sad to see him go.

  Anne, however, was uneasy about both the men in her life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Up, boy! Up, boy!”

  One of the soldiers was digging his rifle butt into Wladek’s ribs. He sat up with a start and looked at the grave of his sister and those of Leon and of the Baron, and he did not shed a single tear as he turned toward the soldier.

  “I will live, you will not kill me,” he said in Polish. “This is my home and you are on my land.”

  The soldier spat on Wladek and pushed him back to the lawn where the servants were waiting, all dressed in what looked like gray pajamas with numbers on their backs. Wladek was shocked at the sight of them, realizing what was about to happen to him. He was taken by the soldier to the north side of the castle and made to kneel on the ground. He felt a knife scrape across his head as his thick black hair fell onto the grass. With ten bloody strokes, like the shearing of a sheep, the job was completed. Head shaven, he was ordered to put on his new uniform, a gray rubaskew shirt and trousers. Wladek managed to keep the silver band well hidden and rejoined his servants at the front of the castle.

  While they all stood waiting on the grass—numbers, now, not names—Wladek became conscious of a noise in the distance which he had never heard before. His eyes turned toward the menacing sound. Through the great iron gates came a vehicle moving on four wheels but not drawn by horses or oxen. All the prisoners stared at the moving object in disbelief. When it had come to a halt, the soldiers dragged the reluctant prisoners toward it and made them climb aboard. Then the horseless wagon turned around, moved back down the path and through the iron gates. Nobody dared to speak. Wladek sat at the rear of the truck and stared at his castle until he could no longer see the Gothic turrets.

  The horseless wagon somehow drove itself toward the village of Slonim. Wladek would have worried about how the vehicle worked if he had not been even more worried about where it was taking them. He began to recognize the roads from his days at school, but his memory had been dulled by three years in the dungeons, and he could not recall where the road finally led. After only a few miles the truck came to a stop and they were all pushed out. It was the local railway station. Wladek had seen it only once before in his life, when he and Leon had gone there to welcome the Baron home from his trip to Warsaw. He remembered that the guard had saluted them when they first walked onto the platform. This time there was no one saluting and the prisoners were fed on goat’s milk, cabbage soup and black bread, Wladek again taking charge, dividing the portions carefully among the remaining thirteen others and himself. He sat on a wooden bench, assuming that they were waiting for a train. That night they slept on the ground below the stars, paradise compared with the dungeons. He thanked God that the winter was mild.

  Morning came and still they waited. Wladek led the servants in some exercises, but most collapsed after only a few minutes. He began to make a mental note of the names of those who had survived thus far. Twelve of the men and two of the women, spared from the original twenty-seven in the dungeons. They spent the rest of the day waiting for a train that never came. Once a train did arrive, from which more soldiers disembarked, speaking their hateful tongue, but it departed without Wladek’s pitiful army. They slept yet another night on the ground.

  Wladek lay awake below the stars considering how he might escape, but during the night one of his thirteen made a run for it across the railway track and was shot down by a guard even before he had reached the other side. Wladek gazed at the spot where his compatriot had fallen, frightened to go to his aid for fear he would meet the same fate. The guards left the body on the track in the morning as a warning to those who might consider a similar course of action.

  No one spoke of the incident that day although Wladek’s eyes rarely left the body of the dead man. It was the Baron’s butler, Ludwik—one of the witnesses to the Baron’s will—and Wladek’s heritage—dead.

  On the evening of the third day another train chugged into the station, a great steam locomotive hauling open freight cars and roofed passenger cars, the floors of the former strewn with straw and the word Cattle painted on the sides. Several open cars were already full of prisoners, but from where Wladek could not judge, so hideously did their appearance resemble his own. He and his small group were thrown together into one of the open cars to begin the journey. After a wait of several more hours the train started to move out of the station, in a direction that Wladek judged, from the setting sun, to be eastward.

  Every three open cars there was a guard sitting cross-legged on a roofed car. Throughout the interminable journey an occasional flurry of bullet shots from above demonstrated to Wladek the futility of any further thoughts of escape.

  When the train stopped at Minsk, they were given their first proper meal—black bread, water, nuts and millet—and then the journey continued. Sometimes they went for three days without seeing another station. Many of the reluctant travelers died of starvation and were thrown overboard from the moving train. And when the train did stop, they would often wait for two days to allow another train going west the use of the track. These trains that delayed their progress were inevitably full of soldiers and it became obvious to Wladek that the troop trains had priority over all other transport. Escape was always uppermost in Wladek’s mind, but two things prevented him from advancing that ambition. First, there was nothing but miles of wilderness on both sides of the track; and second, those who had survived the dungeons were now totally dependent on him. It was Wladek who organized their food and drink and tried to sustain their will to live. He was the youngest and the last one still to believe in life.

  At night it was now bitterly cold, often 30 degrees below zero, and they would lie up against one another in a line on the car floor so that each body would keep the next body warm. Wladek would recite The Aeneid to himself while he tried to snatch some sleep. It was impossible to turn over unless everyone agreed, so Wladek would lie at the end and each hour, as closely as he could judge by the changing of the guards, he would slap the side of the car, and they would all roll over and face the other way. One after the other, the bodies would turn like falling dominoes. One night a body, one of the women in his group, did not move—because it no longer could—and Wladek was informed. He, in turn, informed the guard, and four of them picked up the body and threw it over the side of the moving train. The guards then pumped bullets into it to be sure it was not someone hoping to escape.

  Two hundred miles beyond Minsk, they arrived in the town of Smolensk, where they received more warm cabbage soup and black bread. Wladek was