The One Man by Andrew Gross Page B

that face by the time you go. So I’ll inform your superior officer. I assume there’s someone there who can step in for you?”
    â€œMojowitsky,” Blum offered. “He’s in EU-4. He’s quite strong.”
    â€œGood, then…” The OSS captain nodded and then stood up.
    Blum stood up too.
    â€œIf you don’t mind,” the captain took off his glasses, “I’m curious about something…?”
    â€œWhat is that?”
    â€œI guess we’ve both thought out the risks of what you’re doing. I can only imagine, Colonel Donovan and I, we weren’t that good of salesmen…”
    â€œYou want to know why I would agree to go?”
    â€œYes. Keeping in mind, of course, I’d sign up myself in an instant if I was what they were looking for.”
    Blum gave him a thin smile. His eyes lifted to the metal shelves on the wall. Amid the files and thick binders, he saw a couple of leatherbound books in Hebrew. Strauss was the son of a cantor. “I see a Talmud. Do you happen to have a Mishnah up there as well?”
    The Mishnah Sanhedrin was the earliest written credos of Jewish law from the Torah, something a cantor’s son might have been read from in his very first lessons.
    â€œSomewhere.” The captain shrugged. “Perhaps.”
    â€œChapter four, verse five.” Blum stood up. “I don’t have any better way to explain it.”
    â€œChapter four, verse five … I’ll see if I can find one then. Anything else?”
    â€œNo, sir.” Strauss saluted him; Blum returned it. “Actually, there is one last thing…” Blum said, turning in the doorway. “I do have a fear of something.”
    â€œI hope it’s not small spaces,” the captain said. “Things are liable to get pretty tight in there once we drop you in.”
    â€œNo.” Blum shook his head and smiled. “Heights.”
    *   *   *
    After the lieutenant left, Strauss sat as his desk a long while. He felt buoyant. Catfish was back in the game! He picked up the phone to get word to Donovan—the Boss would be ecstatic too—but then he thought better of it and put the receiver back down. He stood up and checked the shelves for what Blum had mentioned. It was at the bottom of a stack. He didn’t even know why he had it. Certainly not because of any religious feeling on his part these days. He’d been to temple only on Yom Kippur for the past three years. To please his father, perhaps, who had given the holy books to Strauss before he left for duty and who was disappointed that his son, after law school and in the service, had pulled away from the faith.
    One day you’ll come back, he told him. You will.
    The Mishnah Sanhedrin .
    Strauss pulled the book out and sat back down, paging through the blue, leatherbound copy until he found it: chapter four, verse five.
    It was on the story of Adam. Some nameless scholar, Strauss had no idea whom, had written his commentary of the text, highlighted in red.
    Then, starting to read the passage Blum mentioned, he let himself smile.
    He knew exactly what came next; it was one of the first things ever drummed into him in religious school. He thought of Blum, the family he had left behind. All dead now. But whom he felt responsible for. It was a brave thing he was doing. But not so brave, when you’d lost everything. Everything but this one thing. All that he had left. And all that mattered.
    God’s speed, Strauss muttered to himself. To all of us.
    Then he read the next passage, though he already knew the words by heart:
    It was for this reason that man was first created as one person, to teach you that anyone who destroys a life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world; and any who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world.

 
    FIFTEEN
    APRIL
    In Block Thirty-Six, the barracks he shared two to a bed with 250 others,