March 14, 4.43 p.m.
Lucy looked all around her. She was in a brick room with a barred window. She looked up at the ceiling. Four shower heads.
She knew enough about history to know that this was no shower. She looked out of the Plexiglass and saw the metal tubes leading to the bin. She had smelled the strange smell from inside the van. Almond.
Outside, in his antechamber, a man was sitting on a chair staring into the window. It was him. Someone she had known. Someone she had made a mistake about. An evil man. He was concentrating. He clenched his fists hard in their leather gloves.
He walked through to the next room. He didn’t appear to want to look at her. He returned with a metal can and walked over to the plastic bucket. Lucy watched him, terror in her eyes. She placed both hands on the Plexiglass and hit hard.
He would not look at her. He took the new can and opened it. Poured the whole tube of Zyklon B pellets into the plastic bucket. Then he turned and stared at Lucy. All he had to do was open the channel.
She tried to recall events, but her mind wasn’t functioning. He must have drugged her. She couldn’t remember things in the right order. Lots of the last few hours were blank. She could remember further back. She was his girlfriend, the love of his life, his black-and-white happy ending, his meaning, his everything. Not someone else’s.
He walked across to the cell and stared inside.
‘You’re going to die,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Once upon a time, you made me sane. Just the warm curl of your skin and the smell of your neck – that’s all it took, and the hatred was a world away. You gave me redemption, Lucy, then you took it away.’
She stared up at him, the tape around her mouth preventing her from speaking, preventing her from pleading.
‘You were more than my lover. You never understood that you were my antidote. You were my hope and you left me.’
He pressed his face against the Plexiglass. ‘I have so much hate and anger inside me now, Lucy, that I can’t get rid of it. I have killed because of you. Then I realized why you hated me. Because you want a Jew for your bed.’ He reached out his hand. ‘I still want you, but I hate myself for it. You excite and repulse me. I found someone who looked like you,’ he said, through the Plexiglass, ‘but she wasn’t enough. She didn’t feel like you, Lucy. She didn’t have what you have. Her name is Abby. She was bigger than you, Lucy. I had to starve her just so I could feel her ribs like I could always feel yours.’
Lucy stared out, shocked and silent. She was going to die. She knew it with horrible certainty.