Chapter 8

Old City

Present Day

The book arrived at the end of the month. Helen had forgotten about it, and about the scrap of paper she had shoved into her pocket on the eve of the 4th, and she stood for a long time in her office, staring at the book before she remembered its significance. There was a note in it, from one of her operatives in Paris. We could not find him in France, because he never returned there. –G

The package had come from New York, and the note had been typed and reprinted by the publisher that had sent the book. She spent most of the following evening reading through it. It wasn't a thick tome but she devoured each word more than once before she could put it down. She would have to remember to ask for another copy in the original French.

She sent out e-mails. One to her French operative, one to the publishing company in New York, another to the author's agent, who it seemed, was also his daughter, yet another e-mail to Bijou in Paris. She didn't tell Bijou about the book. She wanted to let Nikola make that decision.

She went to his loft expecting him to be there tinkering as he had been of late. He wasn't there, nor was he in the wine cellar, and when she ran across Kate wheeling away at the punching bag in the rec room she said she hadn't seen him. Kate was the only member of her staff still up, or rather, she amended, up this early. It was five in the morning.

Where then was Nikola?

When she entered the library she experienced an extraordinary moment of déjà vu. Given how long she had been alive, déjà vu was expected, but this was more like time had stopped and reversed itself.

As she ventured into the massive room she realized not everything was the same as the last time. There was a table scattered with books but it was a different table, and the scatter of books less extensive. The gaps in the shelves were there but different shelves, slightly different subjects.

There was a chair in the middle of the room, set apart from all the tables but there was no silent, brooding vampire sitting in it staring at the ceiling. In fact the vampire was nowhere in sight. Helen felt her stomach churn, afraid he had already left on another goose chase.

She wondered if he had somehow found out what she had. If he had decided to head off to New York to confront yet another specter from his past. She had just reached the table of books when she heard his voice behind her.

"Good morning." He said, and there was a quiet, tired smile in his voice.

Helen turned, faster than she would have liked, trying to affect casual a second later.

Tesla gave her an amused look over the rim of a tea cup, taking a sip of something that steamed into his face.

"Tea? Surprising." She said, wincing a moment later at the unnecessary bite on the tail end of the comment. Perhaps she was more upset than she would have at first admitted.

Tesla read her like a book, showing mild concern and confusion before he sauntered through the door and into the library. He set the cup down on its saucer and placed the saucer on the first table as he advanced on Helen.

"I felt nostalgic." He said, shrugging a little. His spirit slightly dampened now.

Helen pressed her lips together and reached a hand out as he drew close to her, grasping his arm and squeezing slightly in apology.

His eyes jumped up to meet hers before he moved to close some of the open books on the table. She was watching his face and not his hands and jumped when she felt the book being tugged from her grasp.

"Dreams From Dachau, A Boy's Memoir. By Daniel Brouse." Nikola read, flipping the book open and thumbing through the pages before he turned it over to stare at the author's photo on the back. It took him a moment before he gasped softly. "My God."

"He changed his name. After Dachau he decided that there was nothing good about being a Jew. When he was freed he dropped Bronstien, calling himself after one of the other prisoners in the same barracks with him."

"He survived…" Nikola said, staring at the picture. The face had aged decades but the eyes were the same, and the similarities in appearance to Elise were impossible to ignore.

"Because of you, Nikola." Helen said carefully, perching on the edge of the table so that she could look up at the Serbian.

"No…" Nikola shook his head. "No…because of me he might have been killed."

"How did you escape the prison camp?" Helen asked.

"Lightning…" Nikola said, staring at Helen, wondering how she could possibly know. He'd said nothing to her about it. There had been no witnesses but for Kohrber and he was dead.

"An electromagnetic surge that wiped out power to the entire camp for an hour." Helen said nodding.

"Yes but in minutes I had been packed away into the back of a truck and driven from the camp Helen, there was no effort to made to save anyone." He insisted, shaking his head at the mere fancy of the idea.

Helen held up a finger and reached for the book cracking it open to a dog-eared page.

"Helen, I don't think I-"

"Nikola…sit."

A slight smirk came to the corner of his mouth before the vampire pulled at the back of the chair nearest where Helen was perched. He sat in it and looked up to her expectantly.

She began to read.

"If anyone left the camp it was death. I had only been there a month and I knew that. When we were separated into two lines the ones that didn't go to work never came back. The sick were taken to the infirmary and never came back. One day I was taken. I was led away from my barracks by the prisoners in charge of us and I knew I wouldn't come back. It would be death. Finally. I wanted it.

I walked with the guards out of the gates. The electric gates that so many men would run against to die. I wouldn't have to choose that way of death. I would die a noble death. I was sure of it. I expected to go to where the smoke rose every morning and afternoon but we turned away from there. We headed for other barracks.

There were soldiers in those barracks that wore dark black uniforms with skulls on them. They looked like demons and that was how I knew that we had all been banished to hell for our ill deeds. I knew then that it was truly my fault that Mama had died. This was my punishment. I welcomed it.

I was taken to a small room that had only a single light in it. There were no windows. There was a place to use the toilet and clothes on the floor. They were better than the rags I had been dressed in and I put them on, making them fit as Julius had showed me.

I saw that there was a dead man in the room too. He had been covered partially in a blanket and his eyes were open and staring. His hair had been burnt off too and there was nothing but-"

Helen stopped, her voice catching. Tesla had been so lost in the memories. He looked up to her surprised then held out a hand. "You don't have to-"

Helen shook her head, took his hand in her own and pressed it back toward the table, holding on to him as she turned her eyes back to the page.

"There was nothing but small white hairs on his head. I did not know why I was in the room with the dead man, but there were no soldiers there. There were no prisoner guards with whips or older men shoving me, telling me to look lively or I would die. I went to the wall where it was safest and crouched down so that I could sleep.

I do not know if it was a dream. Or if it was real. Late that night I heard the dead man speak. When I opened my eyes I saw that he had not moved from his death bed. But his lips moved in my dream, and his voice spoke. The words did not make sense at first; his voice was raw and rasping. Just the sort of sound that a dead man makes.

The dead man spoke many languages. He even spoke my own, and the language of the black coated demons. I thought it must be part of being dead, that when you die you are given the gift of knowing everything. I thought, that is why we get smarter as we get older. Preparing for the day that we die and can know everything there is to know.

He seemed to like my language the most. He spoke of a place of wonder. Tall buildings. Cars driving fast down wide open streets. Women with white teeth, men with fine hats and coats, walking freely down paved, white sidewalks. Not forced to wear stars. Not forced to walk only at certain hours, or hide in attics with their families, in constant fear.

There was no fear in this wonderful place. There were parks with green grass and giant trees that, in the winter time, were decorated with every bauble and ornament possible. Places to ice skate and throw a ball and play with marbles and skip a rope. Places to eat at every corner of the street. Smells and noises and voices and sights that ignited in me a passion so powerful I thought I might explode.

And then the dead man stopped speaking. Here is why I am not sure it was a dream. I remembered the silence. The world that had opened to me was suddenly dark again, slammed behind a locked door because the dead man had laid his head on his death bed and gone to sleep.

I wanted it too much to let it die. I wanted the dead man to speak, to bring back that beautiful world. Paint it brightly like a work on canvas so that I could feel the beginnings of hope once more."

Helen stopped briefly. Her eyes had begun to tear and she had to wipe them from her face so that she could see the words on the page. But she couldn't use the hand holding Tesla's. He had begun to squeeze it so hard she couldn't feel the tips of her fingers anymore. She used the sleeve of her jacket instead then righted the book and continued on.

"I was braver in that moment than I had ever been. I went to the death bed and I rattled it. I woke the dead man. Brought him back from his deep slumber. The dead man looked at me and I could tell that he knew I was there in the room. That he wasn't completely dead. How could he be if he saw me, and I was living.

He asked me if I liked the place he had described. Did I like this magical New York. I loved it. I nodded my head at the dead man and saw his teeth when he smiled.

"You'll go there some day." The dead man told me. Can dead men lie? I think, yes. They are dead, no longer bound by the rules of life. What is there to stop them? The dead man lied when he said what he said. But it wasn't like any other lie. The dead man believed the lie, if for just one second. And the dead man knew something about that lie that I didn't.

The men in the black coats came for me then. It was as though they had started to smell the stench of bourgeoning new hope and were dispatched to quash it once more. I was taken from the dead man and out into the yard. It was still night, but I knew we were headed for the place where the bodies were burned.

I couldn't go there. Not anymore. I had to get back to the dead man. I had to hear about New York. I had to know where this place was. I would go there.

The men in the black coats didn't think much of me. I could see that. And when they were distracted I stomped at their boots and broke free of their hold. I wanted to visit the dead man again."

There was more she wanted to read but it was a chapter away. Helen shifted from the table top and sat in one of the chairs, her hand still captured by Nikola's. With the other one she flipped through the pages.

In the silence Nikola spoke.

"He didn't recognize me, when they brought him into the cell." Nikola laughed softly. "I guess that makes sense. He thought I was a ghost."

She found what she was looking for and read again.

"I loved it when it rained because I could use the mud to draw on the barracks walls. I would draw funny things sometimes to entertain the other boys. But it had to be hidden, down low where the guards couldn't see it.

I would draw New York too. Making up things that didn't exist but that sounded as good and bright and hopeful as New York had sounded. Giant flowers that towered over the buildings. People and animals that had wings and could fly from building to building.

That morning I couldn't remember New York anymore. I had tried to draw more pictures, of what the dead man had told me, but every picture looked like the barrack. I couldn't see the women and men with smiling faces. All I could see were the faces of the sick around me.

The dream was gone. The dead man was on the other side of the fence. It was then that I knew I had to die.

Death would bring me to the dead man. Perhaps New York, this wondrous land, would be on the other side of death as well.

The rain fell, drenching me. I walked to the fence. The men around me stopped their work to watch. None of them knew my name, or what barrack I was from. I was just another in a long line of those that gave up on living. That preferred death to life. But this wasn't leaving behind life. This was moving on to something greater. I knew that New York, and all the knowledge and freedom and joy that it possessed would be waiting for me once I touched that fence.

The fence would free me. Had I the capacity to understand irony at that age I would have seen it and laughed. I finally had the answer.

I flung myself at the fence and for a brief moment I felt something. Pain, excruciating and deep that cut through the numbness. I heard the crackle of the electricity, and the roar of thunder and lightning, and smelled my own flesh as it was charred.

Then there was nothing. Oh but it wasn't death that caused the nothing.

No. I was still alive. I could still feel the pain. I could still smell the burns. I could still feel the cooling rain. Something else had happened.

I reached out a hand and put my fingers against the barbed metal. Nothing. The fence was dead.

Had I raised an alarm in that moment there might have been an escape. When I finally returned to the barrack I was too ashamed to admit that I had not taken that opportunity, and said nothing. I hid the burns from the other men.

Later I heard someone say that lightning had struck somewhere in the camp. One of the men said that it had struck the flag pole in the SS barracks. He said the swastika had burned."

Nikola was silent when Helen put the book down. He had let go of her hand finally and sat sideways in his chair, staring at the floor. She could see him working for control, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed hard.

"He uh…" Nikola began finally, looking to Helen briefly before he asked, "He was liberated?"

Helen nodded and Nikola sucked in a shaky breath, reaching into a breast pocket and fishing out a handkerchief that he handed to her.

She took it but didn't wipe her eyes, watching her friend. Ready to answer the questions she knew he had.

"What happened..where did he go?"

"He wanted to go to New York. He begged and begged one the soldiers that liberated them to take him to America. One of the men finally took pity on him and wrote on his papers that Daniel was American, and should be returned there. He was thirteen. His father had been a shoe maker and Daniel had already begun to learn the trade. He offered his services to a cobbler in Queens and in his spare time he would save money to buy canvasses and paints."

"He became an artist?" Nikola asked, struggling for brightness, pleased for a brief moment before the dam broke. He moved to his feet, trying to escape notice, desperate not be seen but Helen wouldn't let him. She rose as well and moved with him, pulling at his arm, guiding him into her embrace, pulling him hard against her where he sobbed.

"You saved them." She said, her tears falling as well. But her voice was strong, as proud as she had ever been of the Serbian and determined to force him into accepting the truth. "Nikola Tesla…" She said again, not letting him loose. "You saved both of those children. You gave them hope, you helped them find purpose. They were and are successful, healthy adults. And they would not have been had it not been for you."

She felt his hands bunching into fists but he wasn't pulling away. He shuddered against her, his body shaking each time he choked, as if Helen had finally found her way into the secret place where Nikola hid his pain, and had begun ripping out the hidden cancers that plagued him for so long. It was painful, but the goal was healing.

They stood that way for a while, and Helen could think of no other place that she wanted to be. When Nikola finally pulled away she let him, keeping her hand on his arm until she could see his face. Until she was certain there was no shame there. She smiled when she saw it and pulled him near her so that she could kiss his cheek, using the handkerchief he had given her to wipe at the mascara she had left on his forehead.

Nikola smiled too, hesitantly at first, then brilliantly. He swept towards her suddenly and grabbed her around the waist swinging her around in a burst of joyful abandon, whooping happily.

"They're alive, Helen! Both of them! My God!" He shouted and Helen smiled brilliantly with him. He hugged her tightly before he put her down.

"Thank you…ThankYou!" Nikola said, reaching for the book and scanning the back again. "He's in New York. And he's alive."

Helen nodded, caught up in his joy, elated to be a part of something so singularly miraculous.

"Bijou…" Helen said and Nikola nodded, eyes lost in the distance again.

"Yes…Yes she needs to know. It won't be easy. For either of them. But they need to know." Nikola nodded and took a deep breath.

"Helen…" He started, blue eyes determined. "Will you-"

"Of course, Nikola. I wouldn't miss it for the world."

Thank you to The Watch Stander for your kind words. They helped me get back on the bull so to speak.

Historical note- I wish I had found the character before the final few chapters. The 'big man' named Stefan is loosely based on Stefan Starzynski, President of Warsaw, who was imprisioned in the Dachau camp and was reported murdered in 1943.