The Hunter from the Woods

The

Room

at the

Bottom

of the

Stairs

One

Gone Too Deep

When Michael Gallatin could force himself to meet his own eyes in the mirror, he opened the flawless silver case that lay atop the blue porcelain sink. It was monogrammed, in simple capital letters, with an H and a J. He removed from the case the two pieces of the Solingen travel razor. The Germans made such beautiful instruments, especially those that could kill.

He put a fresh blade into its resting place and screwed the pieces of the razor together to make a whole. He turned on the cold water tap and ran the blade’s edge beneath it. Then, completely naked, he stared into his face as if looking for recognition there. He was no longer sure what he was seeing, in those green eyes that held secrets even from himself. To him they looked smoke-hazed, bloodshot, weary from the constant war.

But a gentleman must be well-groomed, and so with just a few seconds’ decision to employ no lather he began to shave the stubble from his right cheek. On the first stroke his hand betrayed him. He went too deep, felt first the nick and then the heat of blood rising from the cut on his cheekbone.

Michael watched the drop of blood roll down through the small hairs toward his jawline. Another followed, and then a third. They smelled of blood sausages in the Paris market, fresh after midnight. He was hungry, roused to appetite by his own juices. But he continued to shave, stroke after stroke—some smooth, some ragged—and when he was done with the massacre of his face he began to shave his throat and down across his chest, cleaving the field of black and gray hair, cutting himself here and there, no matter, no matter at all, for this little pain was nothing, and what would his Russian family think of him if he could not stand a little pain?

When he finished this task, he was going to have to decide what to do about the dead woman in the bed.

So he kept shaving, and he kept cutting.

Here and there, but this little pain was nothing.

He regarded the first nick he’d made, on his right cheek, and thought he fully understood his problem. He had certainly gone too deep.

So he stood in this bathroom, in room number 214 of the Hotel Grand Frederik, with its gold-colored walls and blue porcelain and its matching gold-and-blue tiles on the floor, and he dripped blood from seven cuts and mused on how his odor of wounded weakness would have had him torn to pieces in a certain area of Russian wilderness very distant from this dying city of Berlin. They would have consumed him, eaten his lungs and heart and all the meat that meant life for the strong, and they would have left his bones for the little scavengers who hid in the rotten logs, and all would be right with the world.

Michael Gallatin, born Mikhail Gallatinov in St. Petersburg thirty-four years ago, was no longer sure he was fit.

Nothing had changed about him, except for the slips of the razor. Except for the haze in his eyes. The tightness of his mouth. He was lean and healthy, his shoulders were broad and his waist narrow and he had enough muscle to get his work done. His thick hair was black, streaked with gray at the temples and cut short in the military style. Across his left cheek was a scar that began just under the eye and continued back into the hairline, the gift of a would-be assassin in North Africa in 1942. He bore other scars, nothing too ghastly, nothing that could not be explained to a woman between the damp sheets, with her head leaning against his shoulder and her fingers wandering the fields of his flesh, as the demands of a soldier.

He was going to have to go and look at her again. He steeled himself for it, but his metal had become tin. He wondered, as he put the bloodied razor away into the beautiful silver case she’d bought for him two days ago, if after he drank the last glass of champagne and put on his uniform of a German major he should set fire to the bed and send her to Valhalla in the proper fashion.

It had begun barely a month ago, when Michael had returned from an early-morning run through the cold January sleet of Wales and found a black Bentley Mark V in front of his proudly isolated house. At its wheel waited the older man Michael knew as Mallory, who said he would wait while Michael put on some clothes, and then they needed to take a drive and have a chat.

“The Inner Ring has been penetrated,” Mallory said as they drove along the tracks that passed as roads and sleet slashed across the windshield.

Michael knew, of course, about the Inner Ring. The group of Germans who were still doggedly fighting Hitler and the Nazis from within. They were scientists who did their best to delay or sabotage weapons projects. Secretaries and aides who made notes on overheard conversations or intercepted messages. More than one railway dispatcher who sent a munitions train onto a track laid with explosives. A priest or two who kept a radio tuned to the British secret service wavelength, and a codebook hidden where only Christ might find it. Prostitutes and pickpockets, old white-haired soldiers who carried scars from the first Great War, and ordinary citizens with extraordinary courage who had come over to the hope that Germany would surrender to the British or Americans, and that it would happen before the Russian wave smashed over the crumbling rock of the Fatherland.

“A woman has penetrated the Ring,” said Mallory. “She has seduced her way in. Her name is Franziska Luxe. She’s a photographer and a journalist for Signal.”

Signal magazine, as Michael also knew, was the glossy, lavishly-illustrated propaganda magazine of the German armed forces, enjoyed—if that was the right word—at the height of its popularity by over two million readers.

“The Ring is being taken apart,” Mallory went on. “Person by person. They are disappearing into the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Fraulein Luxe is a bit of a… I would call her a huntress. She’s gotten on the scent of the Ring through a stupid, love-stricken man, and she is working with a Gestapo official named Axel Rittenkrett to uncover and destroy—a kind way to put it—every member of the Ring and their families. Out of a hundred or so, there are maybe fifty left. We’ve been helping as many as we can, but some have complications and can’t get out. Some refuse to leave, they consider themselves martyrs for a cause. This is why you’re needed.”

“I knew it was coming to that,” said Michael, as he stared at the black briefcase that lay on the biscuit-colored leather next to him.

“We’re trying our best to get everyone out. We won’t be fully successful, but we need time. And we need you, Major, to give Franziska Luxe something to think about other than tracking down members of the Ring and sending them to be tortured to death at the hands of the Gestapo.” He paused for a few seconds, during which only Michael saw the pack following along, just loping easily through the sleet, almost grinning in the cold bracing air with lung-steam curling from their snouts. “Do you understand the mission?”

“Go into the chaos of Berlin, masquerade as a German—an officer, most likely, and a man with an interesting back-history—to seduce a rather nasty female Nazi? I’m flattered, but I believe there are other men who are better suited for this job.” And who most probably would die trying, he thought.

“Read her dossier, there in the briefcase,” Mallory instructed. “She’s thirty years old and quite beautiful. She’s a champion skiier, an expert marksman and driver of racing cars as well as being fluent in French, Italian and English. Her father was a daredevil pilot who ended his life last year testing the new German jet aircraft. Her mother at seventeen was a circus lion-tamer, has been an Olympic swimmer and a member of the most recent German expedition to Antarctica in 1938. Here, now…what’s this?” He put his foot to the brake and stopped the car. He leaned forward, peering through the windshield as the wipers scraped back and forth. “I presume that’s one of your companions standing on the road? Am I in some kind of violation I need to know about?”

“A precaution,” Michael said. “No one can take me beyond this point without my agreement. And theirs, also.”

“My God, that’s a big one,” said Mallory, still looking forward. “Um…may I ask…?”

“Animal,” came the response. “As far as I know, there is no one else…” Michael looked at the briefcase and put two fingers against it. “Like me,” he finished.

“One never knows what the Germans, if not stopped, might try to create in their laboratories.” Mallory winced a little, even before he’d finished saying it. “Oh, my. That didn’t sound right, forgive me.” He cleared his throat and put the stick into Reverse. “I’ll back up, shall I?”

It was very important that Michael do this, Mallory told him on the return drive. By diverting Fraulein Luxe’s attention and managing to stay at her side for one week in February, Michael might save the lives of twenty people…a dozen…five or six, but at least the Inner Ring would not be, so to speak, thrown to the wolves.

The German Army was reeling back from the Ardennes in the aftermath of Operation Wacht Am Rhein, Mallory said. Divisions would be refitting, restaffing and waiting for further orders. There would be some confusion to take advantage of. This mission involved no parachute jump, just a truck trip in the company of British commandos and a river to be crossed at night by rubber raft. On the other side would be some soldiers of the Inner Ring, to get him into Berlin by staff car. He would have a solid identity, papers made up by someone who made real papers, and a safe house to go to if things went wrong. He would be contacted as when to end the mission, and leave the same way. What made him so valuable was that he knew his way around Berlin.

And around and around, Michael thought, recalling a certain train trip he’d taken there on his last visit. “All measured out,” Michael said as they neared the house. “So simple, in theory. I understand the capture of the bridge at Arnhem was also a simple theory.” He expected no response on that one, and got none. “How am I supposed to meet Franziska Luxe?”

“I said the German Army was reeling back, and there’s confusion to be used in our favor. I said nothing about the end of parties and merrimaking in Berlin, did I?”

Michael nodded. They would carry on their parties in Berlin until their world was on the verge of destruction. Then, if the Russian tanks rolled into what was left of that city before the Americans or British got there, it would be a party in a vast blood-drenched boneyard. Even the remaining members of the Inner Ring would be crushed beneath the treads…if any still remained by then.

“Can I count on you?” Mallory asked as he stopped the car. It was a polite question, from one gentleman to another.

Michael took the briefcase, and got out.

A river to be crossed, he thought. And leave the same way.

But it occurred to him that no river could be crossed twice by the same man, because the river was never exactly the same, and neither would be the man.

Two

The Hunter Who Lives In The Woods

Michael Gallatin walked out of the bathroom, stood over the bed and stared at her body.

The lights flickered. A power interruption, somewhere in the grid. The slow blinking of the eyes of a groggy leviathan. Did she move, in that brief loss of light? Did she stretch her long taut legs and open her own smouldering gray-hued eyes, and whisper up at him in her low voice rasped with passion, Come to bed again, darling. Come crush me into wine and drink all of me, every drop.

She did not.

Michael wondered what would become of himself, at the end of his life. What was beyond this existence, for a creature such as he? Would he sleep among the angels, or would he just go on fighting the demons in a flame-lit room at the bottom of the stairs?

Dressed in his uniform as a German major of the 25th Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, 25th Panzer Grenadier Division, Michael had seen her across the dance floor at the Grand Frederik’s Regal Room. A foursome band in tuxedos was playing on stage, not the oompah-pah stuff of old Germany but the new Swing of the Jazz Age. Red balloons drifted along the vaulted ceiling, which was painted with the faces of ancient kings and emperors looking down through the pastel clouds of heaven to see what a mess they’d left behind.

It was his third night in Berlin, and this party was his reason for booking a room at the hotel. Every so often the golden-globed lights faltered, and with them the babble of conversation, the sometimes strident voices struggling to sound unconcerned, and the laughter too loud for the bad jokes of matings between American jackasses and Russian goats. But even in the dark the music kept playing, and even in the dark Michael watched her move amidst the men and other women like a torchflame amidst sad candles, and as he sipped from his glass of 1936 French Armagnac and the lights came up again he caught the glint of her eyes for the briefest of seconds passing across him and he felt the quick exhilarating celebration of being noted like a knight on his knees before a queen.

Not all the men in the room wore uniforms, but most did. Not all the women in the room were beautiful, but most were.

But none like her.

Not one.

He felt a man whose belly was about to burst his polished gold buttons coming toward him, possibly to ask some inane question about troop dispositions or what action he’d seen, or to voice some wine-odored opinion about the next thrust against the Russians, who in this first week of February were forty-some miles away from the city. Therefore Michael took another drink of his excellent brandy, squared his shoulders and gathered his courage and made his way across the dance floor to the woman in the long flowing crimson dress who was speaking to two other men, and when the men looked at him and the woman turned because she already knew he was coming he said into her face which was almost level with his own, “Pardon me,” in his best Westphalian accent, “but you are nearly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

She just stared into his eyes for perhaps three seconds. Three very long seconds.

Her red lips parted.

She said, with a hint of a smile that was not quite there, “Nearly?”

“Well,” he answered, and he gave her his own most disarming smile, “I haven’t seen all of you yet.”

He hadn’t known what he was going to say until it was time to speak, but as these words passed through the air she lifted her chin, almost as if to taste them. Her throat was offered to him, for a heartbeat. They stared at each other, as the two men behind Franziska Luxe seemed to Michael to diminish in size, to become cardboard cutouts, citizens of a world where passion grew pale for fear of failure. And so went the entire room and all its other inhabitants: sickly, small, and impoverished. If this Regal Room was its own jungle, the two greatest animals of the night had found each other.

And then Michael again said, “Pardon me,” to her, and to them, “Gentlemen,” and with a nod he moved away into the underbrush.

She did not follow. Nor did she track him very long with her gaze. Instead, she returned to her conversation, and a third man brought her a crystal glass of Picardon Blanc. In another moment a huge white buttercream-frosted birthday cake was wheeled out on a cart from the kitchen, and the jazz band—Die Vier glatten Klagen, printed across the bass drum in black letters—took up the universal ‘Happy Birthday Song’, and the room sang out loud as the figure of the hour, a big man wearing a white suit, a white shirt and a red tie stepped forward to try his lungs against thirty-seven candles, his face already flushed before he even began blowing.

Michael watched the festivities from the edge of the room, sipping slowly at his drink and avoiding the occasional glance from anyone else. His mind held the image of Franziska Luxe’s face: her strong jawline and classic Roman nose, her delicious-looking lips ripe for the kiss but perhaps with a twist of cruelty in them, her gray eyes almost luminous in this golden light, the arch of her black eyebrows and the mane of ebony hair that framed her face and fell about her bare shoulders and down her back. The grainy photograph of her had failed to fully prepare him. She was not the German Nordic ideal. She was not a pin-up fiction for the German troops to salivate over. She was a real woman of flesh, sinew, blood and bone. The heat that rose from her was, to him, an intoxicant far stronger than the vintage Armagnac. The aroma of her body beneath the floral Houbigant perfume—Quelque Fleur, he knew it was, from experience—was more wild and untamed forest than sculptured Paris garden.

Which suited him. After all, they’d given him the name of Horst Jaeger, the ‘hunter who lives in the woods’.

Her name was interesting as well. Franziska meant ‘free’.

But he thought that many men must have paid dearly to whisper it.

As the cake was being cut into pieces, a tub of ice cream was wheeled out. More bottles of wine and various liquors appeared. The Four Smooth Suits began to really—as the Americans would say—jump the blues, with the tenor saxophone wailing away and the drummer pounding a powerful beat. ‘Boogie-woogie’, he thought it was called. A slender young woman in a black dress, her hair red with coppery highlights and her face lovely if a little vapid, drifted out from the dancefloor and came directly toward Michael, offering him her cigarette to light. He’d picked up a packet of matches from the lobby for just such a moment—ten flimsy matches to the pack, the chemicals being in such shortage, yet the cigarette smokers were legion.

Michael struck a match and held it out, and as the red-haired woman grasped his hand to guide the flame, a breeze blew from the southeastern quadrant, the match went dark, and a hand took the cigarette from the woman’s lips.

“Go back to your husband, Bette,” said Franziska Luxe. She put the cigarette into Bette’s hand and closed the white fingers around it. “He’s about to be cornered by the most infamous homosexual in the room.”

Bette left, drifting along like someone who was already dead but didn’t know it.

“There,” Franziska said to Michael, with a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “I just saved you from a boring encounter with a nymphomaniac.”

Michael lifted his eyebrows. “Thank you?”

“I am Franziska Luxe,” she announced, and offered her hand not to be kissed or merely limply held in that most gratuitous of gestures, but to be gripped and shaken. He did. She gave his hand a crush before she let him go. “I’m a photographer and writer for Signal. You may have seen my work.”

“Possibly,” he replied. “I haven’t had much time for the reading of magazines.”

“You’re a major?” Of course she’d already seen the insignia of rank. “Reconnaissance?” That was clear, by the badge. His Iron Cross was also on full display. Now came what she really desired to know: “What’s your name?”

“Horst Jaeger, fraulein. At your service.” He gave her a little bow of the head.

Her smile, cautious as it was, seemed to deepen. “Why do you presume I’m not married? I could have chosen to leave my ring at home tonight.”

“No German husband,” Michael said, “would not be cleaved to the side of a woman like yourself.”

“Really? Why is that?”

He shrugged and took a sip, the last of his Armagnac. “To protect her from men like me.”

“I need no protection,” she said, and he could tell she meant it because it wasn’t softened with a further smile. There was a pause of a few seconds, during which Michael thought he might have lost her. He was expecting her to turn away, but when a man in the uniform of a Luftwaffe captain touched her shoulder and murmured to her and she did not respond Michael relaxed, just a bit. The Luftwaffe man glanced at Michael, gave him a look that said good luck, and moved away.

“I’m interested in you,” Franziska told him, as the band quietened into a slower, softer number. “Major Jaeger, have you ever been professionally photographed?”

He returned a quizzical expression.

“My intent,” she explained, drawing a little closer to him, “is a photographic piece on the faces of the noble warriors. Those who haven’t surrendered. In your heart,” she said. “I can tell, in this room, who has surrendered in the heart and who has not. No, I’m not saying that anyone here is a coward, or a doom-sayer, or treasonous. But there is a difference between the noble warrior who still believes in the German future, and the rabble, whether they wear uniforms with polished gold buttons or not.” And at this point she cast a sidelong glance at the fat-bellied officer, who staggered around behind a half-empty glass of some liquor that had for a while dulled the knife’s-edge prickling at the back of his neck.

Michael was impressed by her intensity. She was standing right in front of him now, filling up his vision. Completing it, in a way. She was almost six feet tall, and he’d already seen that her heels were not very high. Again he caught the wild forest under her perfume. In her eyes lay a controlled wildness, a calm before the storm. He thought her fierce beauty was breathtaking, almost other-worldly, and he had to remind himself that he was here in enemy territory on a very dangerous and important mission, and the smallest mistake—the smallest slip of accent or attitude—could end his life before the stroke of midnight.

“I’m not sure I’m so noble,” he answered, and for once in his life he had to look away from the searching eyes of a woman because he feared they saw too much.

“And an essence of humility too,” said Fransizka, who had almost breathed it as a sigh. Her voice had changed; there was a girl in there somewhere, who perhaps once had dreamed of meeting a knight on bended knee. “My God, where have you been?”

“Now who is this, Franziska?” came a man’s voice. “An uninvited guest, I think?”

Three

I Don’t Fear

It was the birthday boy, in company with the two men who’d been conversing with Fraulein Luxe when Michael had first approached. Both the men wore dark suits with swastika lapel pins, white shirts and dark ties. One man was husky, with a frizz of curly black hair and the sunken eyes of a common thug, while the other wore wire-framed spectacles and had thinning reddish-brown hair and the look of a worried accountant who has misplaced the key to his master’s deposit box.

The birthday boy, however, was a formidable presence. In his polar-white suit his shoulders looked to be five feet broad, and he was easily as tall as Michael, at about six-two. He had a little snow-cap of white hair atop the mountain peak of his head, his hair cropped right to the scalp, sandy and sparkly, on the sides and presumably also on the back. He had the round face and full cheeks of a cherub, a boyish grin on his wide mouth and pale blue eyes that did not quite complement the grin. What immediately struck Michael—along with the aromatic impressions that this man smoked cigars, had recently ridden a horse and had just finished a bowl of vanilla ice-cream—was that his face was as red as if he’d been weaned on tomato ketchup, and it had nothing to do with blowing out candles. It was a startling sight, really, like seeing a fireball sitting atop the body of a snowman. Michael wondered if the man wasn’t in need of a heart specialist close at hand. At the center of the red necktie was a swastika stickpin with a small diamond set into each of the four arms.

A white suit in winter? Michael thought. It was obviously some attempt at a throwback to Viking furs or else simply to make a statement that this man was too large to be concerned either about proper fashion or God’s weather. The German word for that would be barbarisch.

Michael got his mouth in gear, careful with the Westphalian twang. “You’re absolutely correct, sir. I’m staying here and was passing by when I heard the music. I…um…don’t know anyone here, but I thought—”

“You’d walk in and help yourself to a drink or two, Major?” the man interrupted. He was still smiling, but the blue eyes in the ruddy face were dangerous. “At my birthday party? That takes some cheek, sir.”

“I didn’t know. No one stopped me at the door.”

“There’s a sign on the door that says ‘Private Party’. Did you not see that? What’s your name and your division?” Still the blaze of his smile had not cooled.

“His name is Horst Jaeger,” the woman spoke up, and Michael saw the man’s eyes go to her and fix there. “He’s a friend of mine, Axel.”

“A friend? Of how long? Five minutes?” Now his smile did hitch and sputter. The gaze swung back upon Michael Gallatin. “Your papers, please.”

Michael stood very still. His heart was hammering. He was, as the British would say, close to slipping in it. But by force of will he kept his expression blank. He cocked his head to one side.

“I’ll see your papers first, sir,” he said.

There was a silence. How long did it stretch? From here to London, it seemed.

“You wish to see my papers? My papers?” It was not a roar, as much as it was the sound of steam escaping an injured boiler.

“I know who I am,” Michael said calmly. “I have no idea who you might be.”

The man pushed Franziska aside and came up upon Michael like an Alp. The Four Smooth Suits were playing a midtempo jump, the dance floor was crowded, the drinks flowed and laughter rose up like the chatter of machine guns. The heat from the scarlet face almost seared Michael’s brows, and down in the man’s eyes burned small vicious cinders.

Michael stood his ground and made himself larger, swelling out his chest and shoulders. A whipstrike of bloodlust hit him. Oh, he was so close—

A hand plunged down into an inner pocket of a white jacket. It returned gripping a leather wallet covered with white horse hair, which Michael realized he’d mistaken as the scent of a saddle.

“I,” said the man’s mouth, “am Axel Rittenkrett, senior investigator with the—” The wallet opened to display the square brass badge with the German eagle stamped above the Nazi swastika and along the bottom the words Geheime Staatspolizei. “As you seem to disregard plain writing, Major, I will tell you that this is all the paper I need to put you in a car in the next moment and carry you with great glee to Gestapo headquarters.”

Michael felt sweat at his temples, but after all it was warm in this room, with all the heat of dancing roiling around. Rittenkrett also was sweating; it wouldn’t have surprised Michael if the man’s face leaked blood. He had to say something—right now—and it had to be impressive because his life depended on it.

“Herr Rittenkrett,” said Michael, staring calmly into the man’s furious eyes, “I have been with the 25th Panzer Grenadier Division since France in 1940. My companions and I were sent to the Russian Front in 1941. We fought at Minsk, Kiev, in the blizzards before Moscow, over the minefields of Kursk and through the inhuman butcheries at Smolensk. We fought our way out of the encirclement of Army Group Center, with heavy loss. We were sent to the Western Front after the invasion, undermanned in the hedgerows with mostly green replacements. Most recently—was it just in December?—we were holding the Bitche sector in the Ardennes. Herr Rittenkrett,” he said, “I appreciate the weight and power of your Gestapo badge, but I have seen men gutted, disemboweled, beheaded, cut in half, reduced to jibbering torsos that beg for death, crushed flat and unrecognizable as anything ever human under tank treads, blown into glistening shreds by artillery shells, burned alive by flamethrowers and—worse—not completely burned alive by flamethrowers, frozen solid into snowbanks, killed in ridiculous accidents by comrades too bone-weary to check their weapons, and drowned crossing rivers because they were too proud to tell their sergeants they never learned to swim. I have seen a young man turn eighty years old in a matter of minutes. I have seen the handsome pride of a loving mother lose his face like a mask being torn away, so much garbage for the summer flies.

“So, Herr Rittenkrett,” Michael said, thinking that some of these things—too many of these things—he had actually seen in his duty in North Africa, except it was British young men bearing the agonies, “I appreciate your position and I congratulate you on your birthday, but I am expecting to be ordered eastward again any day now, with the 25th Panzer Grenadiers for the glory of the Reich, and so until then I will walk through any door I please and take any drink I please because, Herr Rittenkrett, I walk and drink in the company of many hundreds of ghosts, and we have earned that very small privilege, even from the Gestapo.”

And though Herr Rittenkrett did not move an inch, Michael felt him draw back.

The music played and played. Above the dance floor the old dead regals peered down upon the lively celebration.

Rittenkrett slowly released the breath he’d been holding.

He said, “I have one question for you, Major. Answer it very carefully.”

“Go ahead, sir.”

Rittenkrett’s snow-capped head nodded. One hand slowly came up to grip Michael’s right shoulder. The blue eyes crinkled.

“Would you like ice cream with your cake?”

“Yes,” Michael replied, holding back his sigh of very huge relief, “I would.”

“Ross, go get it for him,” Rittenkrett said into the air, and the thuggish one moved to obey. “I suppose it’s unnecessary to surmise that you’ve given back to the enemy double or triple what you and your brave comrades have endured? No answer needed there, I can see for myself. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be alive, yes? Franziska! Why isn’t our new friend a colonel?”

“I was going to ask him the same question.” She wound her arm around Michael’s in a smooth, beautifully sinuous motion.

“There are already many talented and able colonels,” the wolf in the room answered. “I prefer to be nearer the action.”

“Ah!” Rittenkrett beamed. “Spoken like a man who ought to be a colonel. Your accent…is it…?”

“Westphalian,” Michael responded. “My hometown is Dortmund.”

“I’ve had some dealings involving the Hadamar hospital there. A shame your fair city has taken so much damage from the bombers. But that will be reckoned with, very soon. I presume you were here last night? During the air raid?”

“I was, yes.” It had been around eleven o’clock when the sirens had begun to shriek, and Michael had been in bed resting for the day to come. He’d gone down to the cellar with the other guests, maybe seventy or so people in the entire hotel. The lights had flickered and vibrations had pounded through the floor and the walls and a few of the women had begun to sob as they held their children but the night bombers had left smoking craters and fire-scorched ruins in another part of the city.

“Prepare for more,” Rittenkrett cautioned, his smile now gone. “But don’t fear, our courageous Luftwaffe is steadily rebuilding. I know of some tricks up their sleeves, yet to come.”

“I don’t fear,” Michael said. Tricks up their sleeves? He didn’t like the sound of that. “I have the utmost confidence in the Luftwaffe and in the ultimate destruction of all our enemies.” He decided to add, “If the Fuhrer says it will happen…so it shall.”

“Exactly.” Rittenkrett leaned in toward him and said, sotto voce, “But in the meantime, Major, make sure you get your ass to the cellar when you hear those sirens.” Then he winked and laughed and clapped Michael hard on the arm that Franziska wasn’t holding, and Michael allowed a smile and a nod.

The thug returned with a plate of cake and ice cream and both a fork and spoon engraved with the name of the hotel. As Michael accepted the gift and wondered where he was going to dump the sugary stomach-clogger, the man who looked like a distressed accountant whispered something into Rittenkrett’s ear and the big red-faced man grimaced. “Well, Sigmund reminds me I have business to tend to even on the night of my own party. Franziska, I’m sure you’ll be in your element as a gracious hostess in my absence. Oh…” That last word, Michael realized, was meant as a bridge between party-talk and more serious matters, for Axel Rittenkrett’s eyes sharpened again as he regarded the lady.

“Our continuing project requires your special enthusiasm,” Rittenkrett told her. “Your invaluable communication skills. We have some new clients on the list. Shall we talk in my office tomorrow morning? Around nine o’clock?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

“She warms my cockles,” Rittenkrett replied, speaking to Michael. “Major Jaeger, eat and drink to your heart’s delight and walk through any door that pleases you. It was an honor to meet you. Good luck and good… I’m sure you must hear this quite a lot…hunting. Heil Hitler.” He put up his right hand in the salute.

“Heil Hitler,” Michael replied, lifting his hand with the fork in it and on the fork a little bite of cake with buttercream icing.

The white, mountainous shape of the Gestapo investigator and his two assistants moved away through the throng. He had trouble getting out, as people converged upon Rittenkrett to clap him on his back, speak in one of his flaming ears and otherwise brown-nose him all the way out the door and beyond.

Four

The Battle Is Life

“Interesting man,” said Michael in the rippling wake of Rittenkrett’s departure. “May I ask…why the white suit in winter?”

“His persona.” There was a note in the woman’s voice that said she was quite relieved her Gestapo acquaintance had left the party. “He always wears a white suit, in every season. He likes to be called the ‘Ice Man’.”

“The ‘Ice Man’? Why is that?”

“You don’t want to know,” she said, and when Michael looked into her eyes he saw a boundary there that should not be crossed. “We’ve just met, but… I have to say…you take a great chance speaking that way to someone like him.”

“I’d probably take a greater chance putting this in my stomach before bedtime.” He set the cake and ice cream on the tray of a passing waiter.

“I mean it.” Franziska’s hand found his. “Axel has two faces. You can never know which one is looking at you.”

“Meat,” said Michael.

“What?”

“Oh, I’m thinking aloud. I would like some meat. I believe the restaurant’s still open across the lobby. Have you eaten dinner?”

“I should stay here.”

He looked at her steadily. He put himself in her eyes.

“No,” he said gently, “you should not.”

Even though supplies were running low, the chef was doing the best he could and the grilled lambchops in the Koniglicher Garten were excellent. Franziska grazed on a salad. In the brighter lamps of the restaurant, she was no less stunning a creature than Michael had first seen. Here again he had to be very careful, because she would ask a question—about his life in Dortmund, his education and so forth—and she would watch him intently and also, it appeared, listen intently until his reply was done. Never once did she ask if he was married. He wore no ring either, but still…he might have left it in his room. She touched only very briefly on his military service, which suited him fine because even though he’d fully memorized the exploits and travails of the 25th Panzer Grenadiers gleaned from prisoners of war captured in the Ardennes a month ago, he didn’t wish to wander too deeply into the details.

“Your accent is strange,” she suddenly said, as he was reaching for a glass of water.

He continued his motion, picked up the glass and took a good swallow.

“I’ve known…met…people from Westphalia before. Your accent…it’s different, somehow.”

“Accents are as different as people, I suppose,” he answered. Was his throat too tight when he said it?

“I suppose,” she agreed, and she shrugged her lithe shoulders.

“I have a question.” And thank God for it, he thought. She focused entirely on him, which was a trait both complimentary to a man and confounding to a secret agent. “As a Signal photographer and journalist, what project are you working on with the Gestapo?”

She didn’t even blink. The gray eyes—and there were hints of violet in them, he saw, or perhaps that was a trick of the small candleflame between them—were steady and absolutely cool. She turned her head as if to speak to someone else across the room, perhaps one of the partygoers who had stumbled in and to whom she’d already introduced her friend Major Horst Jaeger.

I may have gone my own bridge too far, Michael decided. But he waited.

“We are both soldiers,” Franziska said, her gaze swinging back upon him. “You have your battlefields and I have mine, because we both love Germany and the Reich. What more is there for us?”

“Life,” he said, and it stunned him because he didn’t know where it came from.

“The battle,” she said, “is life.”

He had eaten his way to the bones, and now he pushed his plate aside. Without looking at her, he could feel her like his own heartbeat. Her eyes were on him; they were taking him to pieces, even as he sat wondering what he should say next, what witticism, what paltry poetry meant to lure her upstairs to the bed in room 214, what gentlemanly endeavor in a world where the gentleman was nearly dead? And he himself…a hollow uniform, worn over a masquerade? He thought…he feared…she could see all the way into him, and what he thought of himself, everything he’d been through, all the fire and the blood, all the torment and tribulation, the very soul of what he pretended to be, all of it, everything, came down to the sudden crack of confidence, the feeling that for this woman, this creature, this job, he was not good enough.

Franziska spoke.

“I am not a whore,” she said.

“And I am not sorry for you,” she went on. “If you’re ordered to go east tomorrow morning, or the day after…that is your purpose. What I told you at the first is true. I’d like to photograph you for my article. Why? You are a very handsome man. You would look good on a magazine cover. And as I said… I know you have a strong and noble heart. How do I know that? Because even though you and I both are aware we desire to go to your room and make love tonight, you’re not rushing me there like an animal. I would go with you, regardless if you were all claws and spittle, because I do want the photograph. But because you are not an animal, I will go with you gladly and in great anticipation of learning what you think of all of me.”

It took him a moment to recover.

“I might turn into an animal the instant the door is locked,” he told her.

“I’m counting on that,” she said, and for the first time he realized she had the most adorable dimples in her cheeks.

She also, behind the locked door, revealed her adorable dimples of Venus, as her red dress and silken slip glided to the floor with soft whispers. Michael thought he could set teacups in those indentations at the small of her back, or pour pools of cold water into them and as he crouched above her on all fours lap them dry with a flicking tongue. The black air-raid shades were lowered over the windows, cutting any glimpse of seething fires that still glowed from the raid the night before; in this room was seething fire enough.

She said she wished to keep the small lamp atop the writing table on, with its royal-blue shade that cast the light of secret grottoes and stolen moments. They began by standing close together, at the center of the room, and admiring with fingertips and slow caresses the bodies offered one to another. Her fingers played over the muscles of his shoulders, down through the hair on his chest, along his hard stomach and downward still. She wore the expression of someone in a dream world that could not be shared, her lips slightly parted and teeth gleaming, her gaze upon him hungry yet not to be hurried through this banquet. He moved his hands over her like a sculptor, warming the smooth sleek stone before its transformation; she was harder than other women he’d known, her breasts small but the nipples yearning for his touch and taste. He slid his fingers along her sides, feeling the ribs there and all the constructions of sinew, bone and flesh that held the soul at its center. He let the knuckles of his right hand glide slowly down her stomach, down over her deep-dish navel, and she gave a quiet soft utterance as his fingers reached and lingered upon the black triangle of hair between long thighs that had begun almost imperceptibly to tremble.

Michael cupped the back of Franziska’s neck with his left hand, and as he drew her face to him to brand her lips with his own, she put a finger against his chin and the message was clear: You do not have my permission for that.

So he pulled his face away, and he picked her up in his arms and took her to the bed.

Five

Herr Rittenkrett Calls

He longed to enter her, to join himself with her in the only way he could, and she longed for it also because she pressed herself, moist with excitement, against him, yet he had no intention of rushing the moment. He began a soft consumption of her, an exploration of her beautiful body with his tongue and small nips of the teeth, and he began this study of erotic geography with her throat, which she offered to him like any passion-charged bitch in heat. He spared no effort and missed no port of call, and when his journey was almost done she shifted her hips and grasped his hair with both hands and called him back to revisit her aching harbor.

Then it was her turn to travel.

Michael Gallatin had known many excellent visitors, with many outstanding and often amazing talents, but Franziska Luxe very easily could be awarded the key to his city, if not his world. Her mouth was larger than he could have imagined, and her tongue more heated. Her forthright intention was to consume him to the root and hold him there until pleasure and pain began to merge together into a third sensation unknown to him until now. She was a relentless lover, a force that went nearly too far, backed off again, and again pushed the limit of his endurance. He felt as he had always wished every woman in his bed felt: that the world had stopped for a span of time, that nothing existed beyond the walls, or indeed beyond the moment, and that there was no one else on earth but these two figures, damp with sweat and breathing hard in the celebration of what seemed the act of gods and too exalted for mere human beings.

When at last he pushed himself inside her, she took him in deeply and wrapped her legs like bands of fire around his hips. They rocked together upon the wrecked sheets. She bit at his neck and made noises against his ear like the keening of wind through pines in the Russian woods. He saw colors behind his eyes that had no description, and were blinding even in his darkness. He shivered, as if struck by the passing blast of a train on a wilderness track. He almost forgot himself, and what began in his mind as a howl emerged from his throat in a moan of pure white ecstasy. Then he opened his eyes to drink in her beauty and found her glistening face looking up at him with wonder, as a solitary traveller through many black nights might look upon a guiding star.

She mounted him, while he lay on his back in what felt like the embrace of a swamp. It had always been his belief that one could tell how passionate in bed a woman was by the way she danced, by her innate sense of rhythm and her daring to experiment with the music she heard in her soul. It occurred to him that she could knock the hell out of the Four Smooth Suits.

As Franziska gave a sudden cry and shuddered, so too did Michael. His orgasm racked him, again the sensation of pain mixed with pleasure. It went on, wave after wave, until he was emptied. Franziska clung to him through her own series of small deaths and in her rebirth melded her cheek against his. With her damp ebony hair in his face Michael released a long sigh of utter and complete satisfaction.

They lay side-by-side with their heads on the same pillow, staring at each other, her fingers caught with his and her thighs held between his own.

“What can I say?” she asked softly.

“What would you like to say?”

“Something unladylike.”

“There’s no one listening but me, and I know you’re a lady.”

She moistened her lips. “You make me very, very, very, very…horny.”

Which was music to his ears.

The second time they made love was slower and softer. They were both tired, but both eager and willing to drive themselves and each other into the realm of dazed insensibility. Around three in the morning they showered together and were slick and soapy when the warm water abruptly turned icy cold, bringing a shriek and gale of laughter from Franziska and a good Germanic curse from the major.

“Oh, the time!” she said, as he towelled her off. Her face without makeup was no less beautiful, and to Michael even more so; she was scrubbed and naturally radiant, and her hair smelled of the hotel’s sandalwood shampoo. She went up on her tiptoes and gave a giggle that could only be described as girlish when he put the towel between her legs from behind and gave her a little buzz of friction. “You’d better be careful!” she warned.

“Or what?”

She turned around, pressed her breasts against his chest and with her arms around him looked him straight in the eyes. “You keep this up and I’ll have to stay with you all day. Just so you won’t get into trouble.”

“If you want me to keep it up, just ask.” He glanced southward. “Um…a growing boy does require breakfast.”

“I think,” she said, as she placed her fingertip on the end of his nose, “you should get some sleep. And I should go home too, sad to say.”

“Sad to say,” he repeated, and quickly he caught her finger in his mouth and almost sucked the meat from it. “So…don’t say it.”

She smiled at him, the perfect smile of freedom and happiness. But he saw the smile slowly fade away, until it was all gone. “I can’t stay. Really. I have some work to do this morning, I have to be clear-headed.”

“Am I now a noxious fog?”

“I’m serious, Horst. I would love to stay and have breakfast with you, and…do whatever you’d like, but…”

“Herr Rittenkrett calls.”

“Yes, he does. And I wish you would forget you ever met him or heard him speak to me. This is something you don’t need to be concerned about.”

“Which makes me more concerned than before. Is it dangerous?”

She pulled away from him and stepped back. Though completely naked, she was climbing into her armor. She began to get dressed and studiously avoided his stare.

He sat on the bed and watched her. God, she was some piece of fabulous woman! he thought. The memory of her vagina clamped to his penis as if he had pressed into a jar of warm honey sent a shiver up his spine. I could take you to lunch, he almost said. But in the next instant he thought, Don’t beg. Never beg. Not to any woman.

Suddenly she looked up at him and, half-dressed, she let out a laugh. “You’ve got the face of a wounded puppy! Get some sleep, you’ll feel better in a few hours.”

“I doubt it, but thank you anyway.”

“Of course you’ll feel better. Or I hope you will. Because I’m going to cut my meeting short, tell Herr Rittenkrett what he wants to hear, and then I can take the rest of the day to show you something I think you’ll really like. Will you do my buttons?”

It dawned on Michael what she was saying. He buttoned her up and placed his hands on both globes of her bottom, tight in the saucy red dress. “I’ve already seen something I really like.”

“Men,” she said, and she tensed her buttocks under his fingers. “Oh, look at you now! A wolf where a puppy just was!”

“Yes,” he agreed. “That’s me.” He let her go and frowned up at her. “Won’t our Gestapo friend take offense at your…shall I say…unprofessional attitude today?”

“It’s a meeting to make plans, that’s all. Now I’ve said enough about that, and you’ve asked enough questions.” A hint of frost was creeping into her voice. “Honestly,” she said, as if scolding a schoolboy. She finished dressing in silence, putting on her mink coat, her long red leather gloves and getting her handbag, and Michael let her alone.

When Franziska was ready to go, Michael unlocked the door for her. Before he could turn the cut-glass knob, she placed her hand on his.

“I am never unprofessional,” she said. “Not when I’m working. Or…when I’m involved in a project. We won’t talk about this anymore.” It was a statement not to be challenged. Her face softened, and with it her voice. “If you’ll be downstairs in front of the hotel at ten-thirty, I’ll come for you.”

“In public?” he asked.

A naughty little laugh wanted so much to spring from her mouth. A muscle in her jaw moved to clench it shut, but her eyes were sparkling. “You,” she said, “are part gentleman and all beast.” The way she said it, that put him far ahead of other men she knew. She pushed him playfully on the chest, and then she opened the door for herself, went out into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

One of the hardest things he’d ever done was not open the door and watch her walk away, heading for the staircase since the elevator wasn’t working due to the lack of lubricating fluids for the motor. He lay on the bed for awhile, but it smelled too much like her. He got up and in the bathroom splashed cold water in his face. The bathroom, too, was heady with her fragrance. She was even still in his own freshly-washed skin and hair. He would have to cut his nose off if he wanted to be rid of her.

A rather nasty female Nazi, he remembered saying to Mallory.

Well, she was.

He’d done his damnedest, but he hadn’t stopped her from going to see Rittenkrett. Maybe he was responsible for the meeting being cut short, as she put it, but that didn’t mean some member of the Inner Ring might not be picked up tonight. Her invaluable communication skills, Rittenkrett had said. New clients on the list. Did that mean she was inserting herself into having affairs with suspected members of the Ring to get information? So she might not be a whore for a single German officer, but she was indeed a whore for the entire Third Reich?

Oh my God, he suddenly thought with a startle.

Michael, old chap. Jealous just a little bit, are we?

He decided to take another shower, and the colder the better.

Six

Why Scout Cars Aren’t Silver

It was Michael’s intention to be a few minutes late striding out onto the Kleiststrasse, in front of the hotel, yet he found himself leaving the Grand Frederik a few minutes early.

He wore his perfect counterfeit uniform, his cap and boots, a feld-grau overcoat and black leather gloves. It was a chilly morning, though the sky was blue and the sun bright. A breeze moved past him, ruffling his coat and bringing to him the smell of the state of affairs in Berlin, and most likely the pungent aroma of its future. Smoke stained the eastern horizon, reddish in hue. He could smell scorched bricks, burned lumber and the odors of the dust of centuries spun up from the ancient cellars when the bomb-blasted buildings crashed down. True, Berlin was a massive city and there were scores of large buildings remaining, but it was now a town of targets. From his position he could see at the Berlin Zoo one of the three huge gray concrete flak towers that stood like the stalks of poisonous mushrooms in defense of Berlin. They were medieval in design, like Barbarossian castles, suitable to shelter ten thousand civilians and topped with a Hell’s garden of flak cannons. Still, the larger the flak towers and cannons, the bigger the bombers and more deadly the rain. It was just a matter of time.

And his thoughts on that subject came to an end when a sleek silver Bayerische Motoren Werke 328 sports roadster slid out of the trickle of elderly black cars and cloak-wrapped citizens on bicycles and stopped with a polite growl in front of him.

It was a convertible, the top was down, and Franziska Luxe sat behind the wheel with a gray woolen cap pulled jauntily over her hair and green-tinted pilot’s goggles on her face, though the glass windshield was up both for driver and passenger.

“Ah!” Michael said, in appreciation of her machine and of her promptness. He smiled at her smile. “In the style of the Silver Arrows?”

“Exactly. Get in, I’ll take you for a ride.”

How could he not accept such an offer?

It was a tight squeeze. A car with a Grand Prix pedigree was not necessarily built for a man his size. Even for that, he felt it was the type of car one might need to be strapped into, because he saw on the speedometer the top marking of one-hundred-and-fifty kilometers per hour. Then Franziska put the white-knobbed gearshift into First, tapped the accelerator and they were off along the Kleiststrasse like a silver swan amid the waddling, somber geese.

He was glad she had the good sense to be wearing a fawn-colored overcoat and brown driving gloves. She kept increasing the speed, shifting through the gears with an expert hand. Michael remembered driver of racing cars from his briefing about her.

Franziska whipped to the right on Motzstrasse, crossing over the tram tracks and ignoring the shout of a traffic warden to slow down. A whistle was blown, which caused Franziska to shrug her shoulders and grin into the wind. Her foot descended on the accelerator again, Michael held his breath as they passed through a flurry of bicyclists, and they sped along toward the southwest.

“Your car?” he asked. “Or a friend’s?”

“Mine, all mine,” she answered, as she cut around a fat-assed sedan that flew a Nazi flag from an aerial on its roof and looked terrifyingly important. But it was left behind when she made a quick right onto the broad boulevard of the Hohenzollerndamm. “I was part of the Grand Prix Mercedes-Benz team in ’39,” she explained. “This was as close as I could get to a Silver Arrow for the road.”

Michael nodded. The story was that in 1934, prior to a Grand Prix race at the Nurburgring, a competing Mercedes tested one kilogram over the limit on the weight scales, so the racing manager and driver at that time removed all the white paint from the car to lose the offending kilo. The next day, the shining silver car won the race, and a legend was born. Between 1934 and 1939, all the great German racing cars of Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union were bare silver, and all were referred to as ‘Silver Arrows’.

Franziska and Michael arrowed along through the city, at one intersection causing a horse drawing a coal wagon to rear up in angry defiance of the 20th century.

“My studio’s over there,” she said, pointing to a concentration of gable-roofed buildings to the right. Not a minute afterward, she turned off the avenue and began a twisty-curvy tour that took them across cobblestoned streets not suited for speed, and as Michael had already seen the haze of smoke and dust in the air he knew she was trying to avoid the bombed-out sections.

It was an impossible task, because there had been so many bombs. Thousands of them, most likely. Rubble and twisted metal were so common in some places here that the unmarked buildings looked strange. Some of the destruction resembled what might have been Axel Rittenkrett’s birthday cake baked to gargantuan size, set on fire and allowed to melt into the street like black tar stubbled with fist-sized nuggets of cemented sugar. Buildings leaned against each other like drunken buddies, their faces full of cracks. Seas of broken glass glittered before the roadster’s tires, but in this area of Berlin Franziska was always twisting and turning the wheel, getting out of danger an instant before it got to her, avoiding the shattered bricks of buildings cleaved down the center so all the burned-up entrails showed, avoiding the dusty rag people with wheelbarrows who searched through the cratered wreckage, and avoiding the roaming packs of dogs that used to be household pets and now had no masters but Fate.

She didn’t speak while they were driving through or around these sections, and neither did Michael. He wanted to ask her how she was getting the fuel and oil to operate this buggy, since for every car he saw there were a half-dozen wagons and a dozen more bicycles, but he decided it was not a prudent question.

The clusters of buildings thinned to outskirts. Suddenly they came upon a checkpoint with a lowered gate and four soldiers with machine guns. Michael’s gut clenched, even as he returned the salute the soldiers gave him. Franziska showed one of the men a small booklet with a yellow cover stamped by the Nazi swastika. He opened it briefly to look at something—a special permission to come and go, Michael assumed—and then the booklet was returned to her, the gate opened and the 328 shot through onto what Michael realized was the Fuhrer’s pride, the Reichsautobahn.

It was four lanes of white concrete separated by a grassy median about five meters wide. It stretched on across the rolling winter-brown landscape like a ski trail, which Michael thought touched two of Franziska’s interests, both involving speed. As far as he could see, and he could see very far, today the Reichsautobahn belonged to her and her alone.

She had the BMW in fourth gear, her mouth was grinning below the goggles and the elegant Roman nose, the engine roared and the speedometer’s red needle was climbing rapidly toward that one-hundred-and-fifty mark.

“Do you like to go fast?” she shouted to him against the wind.

“I do,” he answered. “When do we start?”

She gave him a quick elbow in the ribs. He grasped his cap to keep it from flying away.

They went into curves that Michael was certain they could never take at this speed, yet they were kept on the concrete by Franziska’s undeniable skill with the clutch, gearshift and quick taps of the brake. They hurtled onward. The smells of engine oil, grease and hot metal washed back through the cockpit. The engine noise was nothing short of apocalyptic. Michael had been in speeding aircraft before, yes, but never in a road rocket. The winter trees on either side blurred together. Now the BMW came out of a curve onto a straightaway, and as the engine screamed impossibly louder Michael looked at the speedometer and figured that at this rate they’d be in Amsterdam by early afternoon.

There was an idea, he thought. Just drive all the way to the American or British lines, turn her over to the first officer he saw, and there would be no more rivers to cross. She would be spared from the oncoming and unstoppable horde, in spite of herself.

He wondered if she kept a pistol in the glovebox, and if it would be loaded. But he felt that even at gunpoint she might fly this machine off into the woods, and it was a ridiculous thought anyway because there would be many checkpoints ahead just for the reason that Hitler wanted no capitulation with the Allies on the western front.

“You’re very quiet!” she shouted after a few more minutes of racing along the perfectly-smooth roadway.

“I’m enjoying the ride!” he shouted back, which was absolutely true. He expected she’d be turning back before long. He intended to ask her where he might take her to lunch, and after that he would say he wanted to see her studio and maybe this afternoon, if she was willing, to get the photographs done. After that, if she was willing…

His reverie on matters of the bedroom was interrupted by a quick glint of metal.

Up in the sky, at about the two o’clock position.

He looked for it again. They were going down into a small decline. The hills and trees obscured his vision on the right. Then they curved to the left and started upward once more, and at the top of the rise the pair of aircraft, one following off to the side of the other, shrieked about fifty feet above their heads with a noise that enfeebled the 328’s husky voice.

The car briefly slewed from side to side until Franziska got full control again. She glanced back over her shoulder, and Michael’s head also swivelled.

They both knew their aircraft. The two planes were P51 Mustangs, bright silver as the BMW, and marked with American stars. Michael saw that the aircraft in the rear position, the wingman he thought that would be, carried four air-to-ground rockets. As Franziska returned her attention to the roadway and her fingers tightened on the wheel, Michael saw the two planes began to turn to the right.

His heart had given a lurch. He leaned toward her and said as calmly as his voice would allow, “I think we’d better get off this—” Road, he was about to say, for obvious reasons, but already the first Mustang was straightening out and coming in for the kill.

Sparkles of fire erupted from the leading edges of both wings.

He imagined the fighter jocks had been train-hunting today, and maybe one had already used its rockets to knock a locomotive off the rails. In any case, the little silver roadster with two Nazis in it was just too good a target for a trigger-happy Yank to pass up.

In the next instant the Browning machine gun bullets began to march in rows across the other side of the Reichsautobahn, on a collision course with the BMW. Michael nearly reached out to grab the wheel, but Franziska hit the brake. The car skidded in the smoke of burning rubber. The section of roadway it would have passed over if she’d kept up the speed was torn into pieces of flying concrete that thunked into the hood, smashed the windshield in front of Michael’s face and passed over their heads almost as deadly as the slugs.

The carefree girl was gone. She whipped the wheel around and downshifted as she punched the accelerator again and the BMW fishtailed and spun in a circle that left a perfect O of black rubber. The second Mustang flashed over their heads.

“Hang on!” Franziska shouted.

He surely wasn’t going to get out and walk. The 328 seemed to pause for a few precious seconds even though the accelerator was pressed to the floorboards, and then it gave what was nearly a forward leap that rocked Michael’s head back and cracked his teeth together. When he got his neck working again and looked over his shoulder he saw the two angels of death turning for another pass.

Franziska didn’t look. She just drove, now jinking the BMW to left and right, refusing to give the planes an easy target. Berlin, and its flak towers, was more than ten kilometers distant. Michael thought he should be pleased at this development of Allied fighters seeking kills on the edge of Berlin in broad daylight, but somehow he was not so pleased.

Another burst of bullets tore across the concrete and median in front of them, and then Michael heard a whoosh and felt something scorching hot pass seemingly right behind his neck. Over on the right, trees blew out of the ground, a geyser of dirt exploded and small things on fire began to run wildly across the hillside. Michael could imagine the radio chatter: Direct hit today on a rabbit burrow, flight leader.

Franziska was nearly standing on the accelerator.

The two planes roared over them, marking them with their shadows, and again made a circle.

It had already gone through Michael’s mind that she should get off the roadway and make for the woods, but he understood why she didn’t. In this case, speed was life. The car’s silver gleam would not be hidden by leafless limbs. The only chance they had, if indeed it was a chance at all, was to outrun both bullets and rockets. One advantage owned by Franziska: the fighter pilots were used to attacking trains, tanks and trucks, which moved considerably slower and more predictably than the small quick 328.

To emphasize that point, Franziska suddenly swerved the wheel to the right and they crossed the median onto the other pair of lanes. Two rows of Browning bullets rushed after them but were late to catch their target, and so pocked the concrete and threw up plumes of dirt in the median. The first Mustang zoomed over their heads, but the second had eased back on the throttle and Michael knew the pilot was lining up a shot. Franziska knew it too; she hit the brake, violently downshifted and fought the wheel to veer again over the median to the other side. Heat waves shimmered past the car, there were two bright flashes and a black-edged crater suddenly marred Hitler’s highway. Chunks of concrete crashed down, but the BMW was already racing out of the next curve.

Michael lost sight of the planes. An onrush of panic seized him. He twisted around, and there directly behind them the Mustangs were coming down side-by-side, like vultures, almost floating toward them. Taking their time, he thought. Waiting for Franziska to commit to a move. Where was the Luftwaffe, for Christ’s sake? Closer still came the Mustangs, and lower.

It was just a matter of seconds now before the machine guns started firing and the last rocket ignited. The Mustangs were nearly wingtip-to-wingtip. Michael had the feeling they were going to let go at the same time with everything they had, and it was probably going to happen when the BMW started up the slight incline that was just ahead.

He sensed her trying to decide what to do. Over the noise of the wind they heard the low roar of the Mustangs right at their backs. She decided, and he saw her grasp the gear knob to shift down. She was going to stomp the brake and make the Mustangs overshoot.

Michael had had enough of playing with death. He made his own decision. He reached out and pulled the cap off Franziska’s head, letting the ebony hair boil out and stretch behind her like a banner. She looked at him from the green-tinted goggles as if she thought he’d gone stark raving mad.

The flesh on the back of Michael’s neck crawled. Time seemed to hang, even at one-hundred-fifty kilometers per hour.

The two Mustangs passed overhead, still side-by-side. Picking up speed, they waggled their wings. Then they turned to the right, and Michael watched them as they flashed away, silver-bright and shining, toward the west.

“It’s all right!” he shouted, the wind in his face through the broken glass. “They’ve gone!”

“They’ve gone? How do you know?” Her voice was admirably controlled, but he could see that her eyes were wet. “And what was that with my cap?”

“I decided that no fighter pilot worth his wings,” he said, “would kill a woman in a sports roadster. But they had to see you were a woman.” He thought the waggling of the wings was the same unspoken message that the Luftwaffe captain had given him at the party last night: good luck.

So there were gentlemen left in the world, after all.

Their good luck, today.

At the top of the incline, Franziska downshifted, braked and cut their speed. In the distance ahead of them was the smoke-haze of the destruction in Berlin. Franziska eased the BMW to a stop in the road, and they sat there while the engine burbled and the hot metal tick…tick…ticked.

She drew a long breath, both her hands still tight on the wheel. Michael reached into his coat for the white handkerchief he always carried. “Let’s do this,” he said, and he pushed the goggles up on her forehead. The tears in her eyes were of course from terror, but she was certainly a strong-hearted woman. He dabbed the tears away, as gently as he could. If he wasn’t supposed to be such a man, he might have shed a few himself. Even so, his hand wasn’t exactly the steadiest it had ever been.

“Now you know,” he told her, “why scout cars aren’t silver.”

She stared at him blankly for a few seconds. Then all the fire and excitement rushed back into her eyes and she began to laugh as if this had been the grandest adventure of a lifetime. Her laugh was so open and natural that Michael was struck by the strange humor it carried, and he too began to laugh. What could be more funny, he mused in his hilarity, than to be sitting in a fast roadster on the edge of Berlin with a beautiful Nazi Gestapo ‘talent’ and the smell of rocket explosive in one’s clothes? He suspected that at this minute he’d become a little unhinged.

Franziska’s laugh ceased.

She leaned toward him, took his cap off and put her hand around the back of his neck.

Her lips just barely grazed his own, but her mouth was ready to be crushed.

She stayed at that intimate distance. Michael didn’t try to breech the gap; he didn’t yet have her permission, and he respected that.

When she kissed him, it was soft. It was the blue sky of May, the warmth of a sun-lit morning. It was distant music playing in a park. It was boats on a lake, young men in their best courting suits and young women with their parasols. It was a kiss that belonged to another world.

He kissed her back, just as softly. Their lips met and held, and some trick of friction or cold air made them tingle together, and when Franziska pulled her head back and looked at him she said, “Oh,” very quietly, as if he’d made a statement that required an answer yet she didn’t know how to give one.

“We’d better get off this road,” Michael told her, which was what he’d intended to say before the air attack. When she still hesitated he had a bad instant in which he couldn’t decide whether he’d spoken in German, Russian or English. Then she nodded, answered “Ja, haben Sie Recht,” and she started them off once more toward the city.

Seven

I Loved A Man Who Died

The damage to the BMW wasn’t so bad. Besides the broken windshield, various dents to the bodywork, a single bullet hole in the spare tire mounted on the trunk and the groove across the passenger side where a ricocheting slug had passed, it was perfectly able to race another day.

The damage to the bed in Franziska’s studio apartment on Wittelsbacherstrasse was more substantial. Sometime during the afternoon’s storm that swept through, the bed capsized on one side like a freighter struck by a U-Boat torpedo and its occupants, still wrapped up in each other, tumbled off to the floor where they finished what they’d started.

They lay on a pile of pillows beneath the window, as the afternoon light began to fade. Franziska had her head on his shoulder, and she suddenly woke up from her sweet slumber and stretched so hard Michael heard her joints pop.

“If you give me one more orgasm,” she said into his ear, “you’re going to have to take up permanent residence in my pussy.”

“What more could a man ask for but a warm, snug place to call home?” he asked.

She began to lick in slow circles around his nipples, her tongue flicking this way and that.

“You’re tempting fate,” he warned. Though one very important part of his body had come to the end of its usefulness for awhile, he still could flip her over and dive in headfirst, and before his own tongue and lips were through he would make her scream all the framed photographs off the walls.

She put her chin on his chest and stared up at him. “Are you married?”

An instant after she’d posed the question, she pressed her hand to her mouth. The gray eyes widened. “Oh my God! Oh Christ, I didn’t mean to ask that! Forget it, all right?”

“All right,” Michael answered. Better, perhaps, to make her think he was married?

“That’s a stupid question,” she went on after a short pause. She snuggled up in the crook of his right arm. “It’s unsophisticated.”

“It’s not unsophisticated to be curious.”

“Yes it is.” She didn’t speak again for a while, and he didn’t either. He could feel her heart beating under his hand. They’d gone to lunch at a small cafe after the incident on the Reichsautobahn, and then Franziska had brought him here to take the photographs. After about half-an-hour of posing before a Nazi flag tacked to the wall, Michael had had enough of being told what to move and what not to move, especially when Franziska took off her clothes and informed him from behind the chrome-bodied Leica Standard that she just needed a few more shots.

“When the war’s over,” Franziska said quietly, “it will all have been worth it.”

Michael said nothing.

“You know what I’m saying. When the trash and the undesirables are removed from society. When Germany takes its rightful place. You know.”

“Yes,” Michael had to say, because she was waiting for his reply.

“I’ve seen some of the sketches for the buildings. Berlin is going to be the most beautiful city in the world. The parks will be majestic. The Reichsautobahn will connect every city in Europe, the trains will be back as they were, but even faster, and the ocean liners will even be bringing the American tourists over. And everyone will be flying in their own personal autogyros. You wait and see.”

“I’m just concerned with the next few months.”

“Oh, I understand that!” She rolled over so she could see his face in the shadowy light. “You don’t have to grasp the big picture right now, but you’re going to be part of it. All good Germans will be part of it. Those who fought and died, they’ll be part of it too. The war memorials are going to be the envy of the world. Showing them all how we stood against the Bolsheviks. How we were the wall they couldn’t break through. How we won the battle the British and Americans didn’t have the courage to fight.” She nodded, to emphasize her own certainty. “If the Fuhrer says it’s so, it will be so.”

“Yes,” Michael agreed. He had to stare at the ceiling. He’d already noticed many cracks up there. This building on the outside was untouched by the bombing, yet here was the damage from distant explosions, creeping along walls and ceilings from cellar to attic, weakening the structure by millimeters of brick dust and plaster, a slow destruction, a death counted in sheared-off nailheads and popped rivets, until the sick center could not hold.

“Horst, you’re going to live to see all this.” Franziska put a hand on his chest, over his British and Russian heart. “God will not let a man like you be lost to the future. I know this like I know my own soul.”

Michael made some kind of noise of assent, he wasn’t sure what.

She stretched out upon him, her arms going around his body and her ear pressed down as if to count the heartbeats of such a noble beast. “You’ve seen so much death, I know,” she said. “I can feel that in you. I think you’ve known very much pain. But you hide it from the world. You see, we’re alike in this way. My parents were too busy for me, too busy adventuring. I was raised by a succession of nannies and thrown out of a succession of schools. I loved a man who died. In a racing accident, right in front of me. We were going to be married, but…you know, such things happen. I was a girl.” An element in her voice was quickly effervescent, and then gone. “I think…maybe all of me never came back from that. I’m sorry,” she said suddenly, “I wasn’t meaning to talk so much about myself.”

Michael’s right hand had moved to poise over the black waves of her hair. He let his hand drift upon her head. He stroked his fingers gently through her hair and down along the back of her neck. “I like to listen,” he invited.

She didn’t speak for a length of time. The light faded more and more, to less and less.

When Franziska did speak, it was in a quiet voice that was tight with emotion. “Sometimes I feel…as if no one knows me, or can ever know me. I feel as if…no one hears music as I do, or sees color, or appreciates…just living, every day. I feel… I’m in a world of shadows, and where are the real people? Am I the sleepwalker, or are they? Because if I learned anything from watching Kurt die, it was that one must be prepared to die, at any moment. But that doesn’t mean being afraid, or locking yourself into a room and sealing off the world. Oh, no…it’s the opposite. It means going out with courage into what you fear the most, and looking it right in the face. And if you live, you laugh, because you have won the fight for another day. That is how you prepare for death. By embracing life, not hiding from it. Oh, listen to me!” She glanced quickly up at him and then returned her head to the position it had been in. Michael knew she was enjoying having her head and neck rubbed. “Lecturing about life and death to a soldier!”

“I understand what you mean,” Michael said.

“I knew you would. And I knew, the moment you approached me at Herr Rittenkrett’s party, that you were different. I looked at you and took you in, and I thought… Franziska, you must be with this man. You must not only go to bed with him, but you must be with him. Why? Because I’m a selfish slut dressed up in silks and furs, and I want my pleasure. But also…because to you I want to give pleasure, and I haven’t felt that way…since I was a girl,” she finished.

Michael said, “I’m honored,” and he meant it.

Her hand slid down between his thighs.

“Now,” she said, “I’m going to get up and go fetch from a drawer a paper pistol target and a floorstand to mount it on. I’m going to set the target up within an interesting distance. Then I’m going to give you the cocksucking of your life, and even though you think you might be tired, I’m going to use your gun to hit a bull’s-eye. Do you understand that?”

An expert marksman, Mallory had said.

Michael would have to judge for himself.

“Yes,” he told her, and heard in his own voice the nearly giddy excitement of…a boy? “I very much understand.”

There would be no shooting of blanks in this contest.

Sometime when the evening had closed in and they had showered together, she remarked on how fast his beard seemed to grow, and what kind of razor did he use? He said he owned a French Thiers-Izzard, and she gave him an expression of horror and said the beauty of his face should only be trusted to German steel.

He wound up shaving with her razor, and afterward he watched as she sat on the edge of the tub and shaved her magnificent legs.

“Do you like my bush?” she asked, with a dimpled half-smile he found devastating. “It’s getting a little full, I think.”

He just had to look down at the floor tiles and shake his head at her earthiness, and when Franziska laughed at this unbelievable and until now unknown moment of shyness in the life of Michael Gallatin he thought he would pick this woman up in his arms and press her so close that Eve would return the rib.

“Dinner?” he asked her, when he’d recovered himself. “Someplace with music?”

A frown surfaced. “Oh… I have an appointment tonight. Something I can’t put off. As a matter of fact, I was supposed to call Herr Rittenkrett by now. He’ll be waiting to hear from me.” Without the need for a towel, she walked in her glorious lithesome nakedness to the telephone in the other room.

Michael hated to play his next card, but it was time to show the East Front Jack Of Hearts. He sighed as she picked up the receiver. “I’m sorry we can’t spend all our time together. The time left, I mean.”

She put the receiver to her ear and started dialing.

“If I get my orders tomorrow,” he continued, “I might not have a chance to see you again.” Careful, he thought. She mustn’t smell the lie.

“Franziska Luxe for Herr Rittenkrett,” she said to whomever answered on the other side.

“Well,” he said, “do you have a suggestion for where I should eat?”

She gave him a look over her shoulder that of itself was worthy of more target practice.

“Hello, Axel,” she said into the mouthpiece. “I wanted you to know…” She paused, still staring fixedly at Michael. “I’m not feeling very well tonight,” she went on. “We’ll need to postpone our plans. What? My condition? My throat is a little sore. Yes, I think I’ll feel better tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow. I’ll swallow something for it. Yes, I do know.” She paused, listening to the Gestapo’s ‘Ice Man’. “That’s right, Major Jaeger is here. I’ve been taking his pictures this afternoon. Yes, I’m aware it’s evening, thank you.” She gave a quick nod as if standing in Rittenkrett’s presence. “I’m also aware of that,” she replied. Then, after a silence, “I’ll give him your regards, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Franziska returned the receiver to its cradle.

Her eyes had gone a little chilly. “He knows I’m lying, of course. It wouldn’t do to lie a second time, about your not being here.” She examined her fingernails for a moment, and then when she lifted her gaze to his again her eyes had warmed. “I am free for dinner, after all. And I do know a place with music.”

“And dancing?” he prodded.

“I’ll dance you into the ground,” she promised.

“We’ll see about that.” He hoped he wouldn’t be dancing on a grave; either his own, or hers. The Ice Man might look coldly upon this interference in the Gestapo’s plans, even if from a major who ought to be a colonel. Michael decided from here on out he should take care to pay attention to anyone coming up behind him.

But, for the moment, there was life to be lived.

Eight

This Particular Wolftrap

Over the next few days—as the air raid sirens shrieked at night, bombs fell on Berlin, troop trains passed through carrying more meat to feed the Russians and yet the parties went on at a pace meant to satisfy all human appetites and destroy all remaining inhibitions—the major with wary green eyes and the female photojournalist with an interesting reputation were seen in several restaurants, the cinema, and a few nightclubs that still had glass in the windows and not boards.

Michael thought that for a person who felt she was known by no one, Franziska had an army of acquaintances. At lunch or dinner their table was bound to be approached by at least two or three people. Of course Franziska would introduce him and—most of these visitors being civilians—Michael would listen politely to their comments about the war being won soon, and Berlin getting back to normal and the world paying its heavy debt to Germany. Even Franziska, who could herself go on at length about the future of the Thousand-Year-Reich, was bored within one minute of the proclamations of some of these overstuffed blowhards. Michael didn’t fail to notice that several of the married men, their mummified wives in tow, gazed upon Franziska with the eyes of those who have for a short space of time seen what lay beneath the gown and the manners, and their nervous movements from side-to-side showed they hoped someday to repeat that viewing. She dashed their hopes and broke their hearts with a quick sidelong smile and a turning away of the face that said Your day is done.

Of more concern to Michael were the officers who occasionally ambled up, their pathetic attempts at charm not quite up to the hard reality of a missing limb, and above the fixed smiles the glazed expressions of actors no longer sure they remember their lines. They steered clear of actual war talk, movements of troops and tanks and so forth, which suited Michael fine, but what made him dodge a bit were the questions of did he know Colonel der von Glockenspiel or Major Hamminibus or some such name thrown at him like a fat piece of oily pork. He always said the name was familiar but, no, he had never met the man. He knew the name of his own supposed divisional commander, Burmeister, so he couldn’t be tripped up for that mistake.

The officers always said it was a pleasure, good luck in his forthcoming struggle, may God protect Germany, and Heil Hitler.

Then, when the major and the photojournalist sitting at their table had seen that sharp hunger in the eyes of the other, the rising of the heated flame that no liquid outburst could extinguish for very long, either he or she reached for a knee and in his case winnowed his hand beneath her skirt and moved along a silken thigh, or in her case placed a firm hand of ownership upon what she wished to command, and one of them—or both at the same time, as had happened—would ask the question: “Are you ready?”

They were always ready.

He didn’t know exactly what she was doing. If she was gathering information for the Gestapo by seduction, or by following and photographing the comings and goings of suspected Inner Ring members, or some of both. He didn’t think she was doing only mundane investigation, she was far too talented for that alone. He understood how within a few minutes of being with her, a man would cast aside all caution and self-preservation and start to jabber about things to make himself sound important, until a slip of the jabber made her hone in on some remark and work it like she worked in the sheets on a man’s most valued companion. If, as Michael understood, the majority of the Inner Ring’s members were office clerks, military aides, pencil pushers and scientists who might be brilliant but sometimes forgot what shoe went on which foot, Franziska’s work was nearly accomplished just by walking into the room.

One evening at midweek, before going to a late-night Signal party that she’d invited him to, they went to dinner in one of the very few fine restaurants still open, and they sat before a picture window overlooking a lamplit park. They’d just gotten their food when the air raid sirens went off, and instantly the few other patrons started for the cellar.

“No,” Franziska said when he started to stand up. She was radiant tonight, absolutely gorgeous in a dark blue dress with a strand of pearls around her neck. She took his hand. “We’ll be all right.” Then she’d continued eating her dinner and drinking her wine, and though the manager came and implored them to leave their table and come down with everyone else she shook her head with a wry smile, and at last they were alone in the restaurant.

The flak guns began firing, the sounds like pillows being whacked with cricket bats. Michael heard the distant thunder of the bombs. Through the window he could see the blue-white flashes, like whips of lightning, and then the faraway red flames curling up. She was staring at him across the table. He had lost his appetite, but he lifted his glass and said, “Prost!”

“Prost!” she answered with pleasure, and they drank.

A bomb fell closer. Michael felt its power in the floor. Multicolored lanterns at the ceiling shivered.

Her fingers entwined with his. She said softly, “I am safe with you. And you are safe with me. As long as we’re together…nothing can hurt us.”

“I’m glad you believe that.”

She shook her head. “More than believe. I know.”

But he wondered: do the bombs know?

One fell very close, an explosion perhaps a street or two beyond the park. The wineglasses and gold-edged plates jumped on the table. Tree limbs came flying at the window and made a noise like clattering claws.

She just smiled.

Michael looked at her. Really looked, as if he’d never seen her before.

At the birthday party, he’d said something to the Ice Man that wasn’t exactly true: I don’t fear. The truth was, he wasn’t afraid. He was cautious, and he was prepared, and so he was not afraid.

But he feared this woman sitting, smiling, before him. The woman whose fingers were entwined with his.

He’d had choices presented to him, after the mission that involved the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the matter of Iron Fist. Chesna van Dorne had asked him to go to Hollywood with her. In his mind he’d weighed that invitation against disappearing into the wilds of Canada, of finding a hunter’s stone cabin three hundred miles from people, and living as a solitary man there until, possibly, the end of his days.

His decision had been neither of those. He’d decided to stay where he was, at the house in Wales. To press on pressing on, as the British would say.

But now he knew, he had made a mistake.

He should have left Wales. He should have gone where they couldn’t find him. Where an inquiry for Michael Gallatin drew only a blank stare. He had made a mistake, and now he was in Berlin, with bloodthirsty Russians on the outskirts and bombs falling down, and he was holding the hand of Franziska Luxe.

Whatever he was, he was not fully. Not one nor the other. He could not live in the crowded city of Hollywood, nor could he live three hundred miles from the nearest human being. But whatever he was, and whatever he at last became, he realized that he needed the human embrace just as every heart did. And more than that…his downfall…was that he needed to be the human embrace to some other heart.

She was a Nazi, with a Nazi’s view of the world. What they had between them was the sex. The deep and hungry kisses, the bites, the cries of passion, the friction of flesh, the movement of hips and the pounding one into the other until the electric release and then the wet mouths searching for each other again. They had the sex, and with that they were very good.

But when the next bomb fell, again too close, and Franziska’s hand tightened just a little on his own but her composed expression never changed, Michael feared this woman because she was the river that, once crossed, would never let him go home again.

Moving in slow inches, he began to turn his chair and his body. She would say she needed no protection, and so he didn’t ask. He positioned himself so he was directly across from her, his back offered to the picture window and to the God of War from whom all jagged shards flew.

Franziska continued the conversation they’d been having before the sirens, about the prospects for German Grand Prix racing to be reinstated after the war, and her intention to be part of a team. She knew her cars inside and out and could explain the varying characterics of engines, braking systems, tires and so on year-by-year. Michael was more comfortable listening rather than talking very much, to avoid a blunder, though she did try to encourage him to talk about his childhood and his family. If she only knew the truth, he thought as he fed her the fiction that had been prepared for him before he’d left England. There were never any questions about his being married, or about his experiences in the war. She never failed, however, to at least once a day ask if he’d gotten his orders yet.

Not ninety seconds later, the bomb that Michael was dreading ended its long fall among buildings on the far side of the park. At the same instant as they heard the hollow whump of the blastwave, there was a loud noise like a pistol shot. Michael flinched. The floor trembled and creaked. Brick dust drifted in the air. Throughout the restaurant the lanterns swung back and forth. Michael turned in his chair and saw first the crack that had cut diagonally across the window. Secondly, he saw that the park’s lamps had been blown out, and thirdly he saw that a building was burning bright orange with a white center where the bomb had struck.

Another bomb exploded further to the east, and one or two or several more after that, moving eastward still, the noises merging together to make a continuous whirling roar.

Then, there were only the creaks and pops of an injured building settling deeper on its foundations. The air raid sirens were still shrieking and the flak guns continued to fire upon the departing bombers. Shortly after that, they heard the sirens of the ambulances and fire trucks. The flak guns ceased, and the air raid warning abruptly stopped in mid-cry.

“Someday I’d like to take up sailing,” she said to him, as the manager and the shaken-looking patrons began to emerge from the cellar. “On the open sea. At least try it. How does that sound?”

“Wet,” he answered, which was also the description of the back of his neck. “But with you, an adventure I wouldn’t dare miss.”

“To our wet adventure,” she said as she lifted her glass for another toast. “Someday. Prost!”

The party—held in honor of Signal journalists by some very important backers and supporters of the magazine—was held in a private mansion on the Grabertstrasse. The place looked to Michael as if its architect had been a little too fond of gingerbread houses in his childhood, with its walls that resembled thick white frosting and upon the roofs, chimneys, and turrets that might have been sprinkled with cinnamon. On their way there, in the open-topped BMW through the wintry night, Franziska had given Michael a brief accounting of who would be in attendance: Baron von Caught the Clapp and his fourth wife the spindly sixteen-year-old Spidergirl, Ziggy the Playboy who zigged and zagged both ways, the Countess of No Worth, and so on, plus bodyguards and handholders for all these people and whoever else had decided to come in search of free champagne and little sausages in sesame-seed buns.

It was dreadful, but the champagne was good and flowed freely. The chamber music ensemble wasn’t so bad. The pile of logs in the huge fireplace was very warm, and the chandeliers sparkled in a merry way. Michael found himself and Franziska separated soon after they arrived, she whisked away by a spry white-haired man—the Clapp?—through a larger throng than he would have expected out on a bomb-run night. Suddenly Michael was surrounded by four girls, three of them very attractive indeed and the fourth unfortunately buck-toothed but who energetically kept wanting to feel his Iron Cross. They laughed and jostled together like brightly-painted freight cars while he tried to be charming and found that he didn’t have to try too very hard.

But the thing was…he realized that he was aware of wherever Franziska was among all these grinning and champagne-soused and somewhat sad people in the large ornately-appointed room. He just felt her out there. He would get a glimpse of her hair or her shoulder or her hip, before the crowd closed in, and then he would sense when she was moving, and in which direction. He laughed and talked to the ladies, but he was always aware that he was connected to Franziska by what seemed like an elastic band that could stretch to any distance and then draw them together again.

The ladies chattered on. Then through the crowd he saw her standing amid a group of several uniformed men of varying ages, her champagne flute in hand, the men motioning and posturing with the animation of excitement, she calmly sipping her bubbly at the center of what looked like a lot of playboys talking with their groins.

A thought came to him, unbidden.

That is my woman.

And as if she’d heard this as clearly as his voice, she looked at him directly across the room, through the puffery of playboys, and over the champagne flute that caught golden firelight from the blaze her right eye quickly winked.

My woman, Michael thought.

Then in the next instant he had to turn away, to stride past the girls with the giggles on their lips, to stride past the massive fireplace and the hanging tapestry that depicted a German knight on a white horse, and going past people he didn’t know and would never know he had to find a place to stand by himself, to think, because he knew exactly what the spikes at the bottom of this particular wolftrap were made of. This was wrong, terribly wrong, and here he paused to pluck a fresh flute of champagne from a waiter’s tray, and as he took a drink he thought it smelled of cigars and a leather saddle, and then the white-clad arm caught him hard by the shoulder and Michael turned into the mountainous bulk of the white-haired, red-faced man who also had hold of Franziska’s left arm as one would clutch a troublesome piece of luggage that sprang open at the most inopportune times.

Behind Axel Rittenkrett stood the thug and the accountant, both in their dark suits.

“Major Jaeger,” said Rittenkrett, with a slight bow of the mountaintop. “Franziska wishes to say goodnight, and may we call a cab for you before we leave?”

Michael read Franziska’s expression; it was more annoyance than pain, but the Gestapo man’s fingers were pressing into her flesh.

“Take your hand off her,” Michael said.

Rittenkrett’s pale blue eyes were dead. Icy, as it were.

“It’s all right, Horst,” said Franziska, her brow furrowed. “I just have to—”

“Take your hand,” Michael repeated into the dead eyes, “off her.” And across his body—back, chest, arms and legs—he felt the scurrying of dangerous ants.

“Or what, sir?” Rittenkrett’s face thrust at him like a scarlet bludgeon. “What will you dare to do, if I don’t take my hand off her?”

Michael wasted no time in answering.

He flung the remainder of his champagne across the flaming face and the snow-white suit jacket, and from the liquid that streamed down the cheeks and dripped off the chin he almost expected to hear a sizzle.

Nine

The Perfect Package

The group of people who witnessed this drama froze as if statues in a tableau, though across the room the violins and cello of the chamber music ensemble kept on playing. The accountant, Sigmund, looked worriedly around as if searching for a notepad to write down the details of this atrocity. The thug, Ross, strode toward Michael with a grim purpose, his hands in black leather gloves clenched into fists.

“Ross, be still!” snapped the Ice Man, whose face glistened. He had taken his hand from Franziska’s arm, and he reached with it for the red handkerchief in his jacket. Ross stopped. “Everyone be calm,” Rittenkrett said, to no one in particular. He wiped his face and gave a grunt of dismay at the champagne scrawled down the front of his suit.

Michael felt Franziska wanting him to look at her, to convey some message, but he would not. He stood loose-limbed and relaxed, ready for whatever happened next.

“This is a mess,” the Ice Man muttered. He aimed his eyes at Michael and scowled yet there was no true rage in the florid face, as Michael had expected to find. “Major, this tells me you’re either insane or you believe yourself to be in love. Which is it?”

“I don’t like to see a woman bullied by a man.”

“Bullied? Because I was guiding her to the door? Are you sure you know as much about women as you seem to think you do? By the way, are you married?”

“No,” came the reply. As far as he could tell, that brought no reaction whatsoever from Franziska.

“Ever been married? No children?”

Michael thought of a white palace, in what seemed another life. He was silent.

“We need to have a little talk, Major. About the importance of responsibilities. I suggest we go find a quiet room. Everyone!” Rittenkrett said to the onlookers, many of whom obviously knew his station in life and wore sickly expressions that said they regretted having been witnesses to the incident. “This has been an unfortunate misunderstanding, but everything’s fine. Believe me,” he added, for the unbelievers.

Michael, Franziska, Rittenkrett and the two underlings went through a door and along a hallway. Rittenkrett guided them into a room with a checkerboard-patterned floor and some overstuffed chairs arranged around another huge fireplace, this one cold. A chandelier hung from the high ceiling and the walls were adorned with a few light fixtures done up to resemble torches that might be carried by a village mob, but with electric bulbs. Rittenkrett closed the door behind them. In here there was no noise of the party, just the quiet ticking of a grandfather clock in a corner.

Ross stood at the door. Sigmund wandered around, perhaps making mental numbers of how much everything in the room was worth. Rittenkrett folded his handkerchief into smaller and smaller squares.

“I presume,” he said after a few more ticks of the clock, “that you’re fucking her brains out? You must be, because she’s gotten stupid here just lately. She was supposed to meet me at headquarters this evening, at exactly six-thirty, yet where was she? With you, I’m guessing. This afternoon, she missed another important meeting. You know why? Because she called my secretary and said she had to go shopping.”

“I regret not being available this evening,” Franziska spoke up, her voice firm and clear. There wasn’t a hint of regret in it. “I had my notes delivered to you.”

“Oh yes, your notes. Your journalistic impressions. Of course. Those.” Rittenkrett reached into a pocket and brought out a pack of Krenter Indianer cigarellos, with the stylized drawing of an American Indian chief on the front. He lit a gold-colored bullet-style lighter, got the cigarello going and blew a couple of hearty smoke rings. “Major, do you have any inkling of what Fraulein Luxe is doing for the Gestapo? Or should I say, for the war effort against traitors unfortunately too close to home?”

“No.”

“Good, because it’s not your concern. You have your own war to fight. I presume you do. When are your orders coming through?”

“Any day now, I’m sure.” This was a hazardous area; he didn’t want the Ice Man checking up on his supposed division. “I’m ready to go tonight, if need be.”

“Are you?” Rittenkrett squinted at him through another smoke ring that floated toward Michael like a ghostly noose and broke apart only at the last second. He let the question linger, as he paced back and forth across the polished floor. His shoes were also white, and they made clacking noises. “Look, Major Jaeger!” Rittenkrett abruptly stopped, and with the cigarello clenched between his teeth he threw up his hands. “The problem seems to be that Franziska is neglecting some of her duties to be with you. Now, I don’t care if you’re fucking her. I myself have fucked her. She has a whole closet full of letters and medals and little pitiful gifts sent to her by men who have fucked her, from all branches of the services, and I think there are even some Boy Scout badges in there somewhere. I mean, this is what she does. She’s famous for it, sir. Surely you know why by now. Either that, or you’re dead down there.”

Michael was by no means dead down there, but he did feel a little ill.

“She is the perfect package,” Rittenkrett went on, behind his smoke rings. “And her photographic talents aren’t so bad either. Working with Signal, she has an open doorway to anywhere she wishes to go. Which makes her also valuable to me.” His gaze turned upon Franziska. “But I really don’t like it when you send me notes as if I’m not worthy of your time or presence. You have winnowed yourself into a position of responsibility, and I expect you not to falter in your duties. You realize, the perks you enjoy aren’t free.”

“I never assumed they were,” she said, with her own touch of ice.

Rittenkrett silently smoked at the center of the room. His expression told Michael he wasn’t sure he liked her tone. But then he shrugged the massive shoulders. “Let’s put this behind us and focus on our work. All right? The reason I’ve come here tonight is to tell you that something strange is happening with our list of clients. They are…shall we say…vacating the premises. Therefore we need to work faster. And, by the way, were you going to forget your appointment?” He checked his wristwatch. “In a little less than an hour, I believe?”

“There’s not much there,” Franziska said, and Michael just pretended to wear a puzzled look that he kept short of too much curiosity.

“But there’s something there,” the Ice Man reminded her, with a jab of his Indianer in the air. “You yourself said so, and I hold you to delivering it.” He gave the major a damp smile. “Business, you see, goes on both day and night. Oh, don’t look so glum, sir! I’ll tell you what.” He approached Michael, the white shoes clacking, but stopped short of crowding him. “We’ll give you a ride. Not far from your hotel is an excellent whorehouse with many beautiful young girls. Some of them are gypsies, if you like the dark look. Very talented, in their way. So if you were hoping for a warm hole tonight, you won’t be disappointed.”

Michael stared at the floor, somewhere between himself and the white shoes. “I’ll just accept a ride to the hotel, if that’s what you’re offering.”

“Yes, indeed it is. And Franziska, you should be on your way.”

She left without another word.

They rode back in a long black Mercedes that displayed small Nazi pennants on aerials mounted above the headlamps. Sigmund drove, Michael had the shotgun seat, and Ross and Rittenkrett occupied the spacious rear seat. Michael’s head felt foggy. He rolled his window down and put his face into the cold. A few snowflakes whirled before the lamps. Either that, or ashes.

Rittenkrett wished him good night in front of the hotel. “You do understand,” he added before Michael left the car, “the value of the work that Franziska is doing?”

“I’m sure it must be valuable.”

“Oh, yes. And one more thing, Major Jaeger: please don’t try to see her again. It really would interfere. All right?” He continued without waiting for a response, and this time his voice carried a sharp edge. “You’ve crashed my birthday party, made a spectacle of me before some very important people, and taken Franziska’s mind off her responsibilities. Now I’ll tell you that if I find out you’re seeing her again I’m going to forget what an excellent soldier for the Reich you’ve been and escort you through a door you certainly will not want to enter. In there is no cake and ice cream, I can promise you. But I’m sure we won’t see each other again, so once more I say good luck to you in your future battles, and Heil Hitler.”

Michael returned the salute with small enthusiasm. He got out of the car.

The Mercedes pulled away.

He went to his room, took a cold shower and stretched out on the bed. The sheets were fresh, but still her aroma seemed to be everywhere. It permeated and perfumed the air in here. No wonder, he thought; it was in his clothes. And it lingered on his own flesh too, no matter how hard he scrubbed.

But, in truth, he didn’t want to scrub too very hard.

He might have gotten to sleep around midnight. But on the first ring of the telephone he was immediately awake. “Hello?”

There was a silence. Michael waited through it.

In a voice that tried to be cheerful but had a sad center, she said, “I’m missing you.”

He didn’t hesitate. “Franziska, come to me.”

She hung up, and he lay waiting for her in the fragrant dark.

She arrived within fifteen minutes. His heart beat harder when he set his eyes on her. When he kissed her, he found her face was still cold from the wind. He wondered if she’d gotten the BMW up to racing speed through the empty streets. Under her coat she was wearing the dark blue dress and the strand of pearls around her throat. Within another minute she was as naked as he was, the expensive coat and dress falling to the floor the same as if they’d been old rags, her shoes kicked away, her sheer stockings tossed one way and another, her underwear crumpled in elegant folds. She started to remove the pearls, but he caught her fingers and said, “Leave those on for now.”

Her raven-black hair was touselled and roughened by the night. Her gray eyes were sparkling and eager, but Michael could see they burned with a lower flame. He could smell the too-sweet cologne of the man she’d slept with, could smell his hair pomade and his bitter sweat. He could smell the cigarette the man had smoked in the aftermath. A much inferior brand to the cream of the British crop, he thought.

“I’ve been with someone,” she told him, which was perhaps the biggest waste of breath in the history of the world.

“I know, but you’re with me now.”

“Please,” she said, her mouth up close to his, “will you hold me?”

He guided her the few steps to the bed, and lying down together he enfolded her, and she pressed her head against his strong shoulder and gave a soft quiet sound worlds away from the brassy trumpets of the Third Reich.

She went to sleep in that position. He closed his eyes against the blue-shaded lamplight and dozed, opened them, closed them again, felt the full length of her body shift against his, deliciously warm in the sheets, her thighs moving, her lips grazing his cheek, and still she slept.

She trusts me, he thought. She trusts a fiction, to keep her safe through the night.

My God, what am I going to do?

If he ever really went back to sleep he wasn’t sure, because the steam pipes began to knock and the radiator hissed. He heard the rumble and rush of wind beyond the glass. Maybe it was bringing heavy snow. The Ice Man’s element, he thought. To Hell with that bastard.

Suddenly he felt her above him, and when he opened his eyes she was staring at him with her chin supported on her forearm, as if trying to memorize every line, every pore, every newborn beard hair.

“I’ve realized what I can hear in your accent,” Franziska said. Her hair had tumbled forward, covering half her face. “You speak English.”

“Speak English?” He needed a few seconds to think about that. If he did decide to start speaking the King’s, she would instantly hear that he spoke it far too effortlessly. “No, I don’t.”

She frowned. It was a mystery she was trying to solve. Then her frown went away. Up close to his ear she whispered in lightly-accented English, “I’ve been waiting for you, for a very long time. I didn’t think you were ever going to find me. But I’ll wait for you still, however long it takes.”

With the greatest force of will he’d ever commanded, Michael just gave her a bemused expression and shook his head.

Franziska returned to her German: “I just said I bought you a present today. It’s in my handbag, over there.” It had been placed on a chair. She licked across his chest with her talented tongue. “Why don’t you go see what it is?”

When Michael removed the white-wrapped present with its green bow from the purse, he remembered Rittenkrett saying that this afternoon she called my secretary and said she had to go shopping. Here, then, was what she’d gone shopping for. A gift for him. He felt he should be pleased, but why did something the size of a pine knot seem to be caught in his throat?

“Open it, open it!” she urged, sitting up with her legs crossed under her.

He did. It was a flawless silver case, and upon opening that he found a shiny new Solingen travel razor, the kind that screws two parts together to make a whole.

“It’s very handsome,” Michael said. “That was kind of you.”

“I was going to have your initials put on it, but I wasn’t sure what type of lettering you’d like. There are too many choices these days. Can we go tomorrow and get it done? I’m free until two.”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“I’ll take you to lunch. All right?”

He nodded. He realized that she was asking for more time with him because the howling wind and cold outside spoke volumes of merciless death on the Eastern Front. Which, of course, now Berlin bordered.

“I’d like you to use your razor now,” said Franziska.

He touched his chin. It was a bit prickly.

“Not on you,” she told him, as she stretched her legs out before her. She wiggled her toes back and forth. “You missed the jar of shaving soap and the scissors in my handbag. Get them.” She smiled impishly, her dimples going deep. “I’ll wait.”

He got them. “And just what would you like me to shave?” he asked, though his cock already knew.

“I want a heart, right here.” She put a finger into her untamed black bush. “Are you up for that?”

Which might have been the second biggest waste of breath in the history of the world.

Michael prepared a warm towel and warmer water in a white bowl. He got the razor rinsed and ready. He got the soap foamy. His cock strained upward, which might be a problem. When Michael sat down on the bed between her open thighs to begin this heroic endeavor by shaping the heart with the scissors, Franziska gave a throaty little laugh that almost finished him off.

“We’re just using the soap cream right now,” she reminded him. “Go ahead, my life is in your hands.”

He did a good job. An excellent job. A slow, careful job. If a razor could speak, it would babble happily for the rest of its days.

Then it was done, and she gazed down upon the result and then looked at him with what he thought might be stars in her eyes.

“Now,” she said, “I can say that both my hearts belong to Horst Jaeger.”

He put the razor and the scissors and the soap and the bowl aside, and he grasped a handful of her hair to rock her head back and even as his mouth pressed forward hers opened to accept him and her tongue was formed of flame.

For the next hour, as the wind shrilled and the pipes thrummed, he devastated her. He took her to the edge and brought her back so many times she became a trembling, moaning, half-sobbing pulse of nerves vibrating with need and shining with sweat. He plunged into her full-length, at full power, and then he pulled out and balanced above her, the very tip of him making slow circles in the foldings of her new heart. Again and again he moved upon her, into her and within her. She cried out, and she mashed her lips against his shoulder to muffle her cries because any louder and the police would arrive to investigate the killing. Then, when she was crazed and her eyes were wild and her hair was a beautiful tangled jungle, Michael said he wanted to show her what pleasure he could give her with a strand of pearls.

At last, at length, as she lay upon him with her back against his chest and he clutched her breasts and stroked her fire like a machine, a cry came out from between her gritted teeth that became a scream from an open mouth. She tensed so hard Michael thought he could feel every muscle in her body move beneath the flesh like bundles of piano wire. It went on and on, and then the flash seared through his own body and as he slid out of her he felt the flood of her liquid explosion. In the next instant he knew what it was like to be a long-distance shooter, lying in a rain of his own making. She gave a groan that was nearly a different language altogether, and she turned over atop him and pushed him back in with one hand and clamped herself around him like a hot, soaking-wet vise.

They stayed that way, breathing hard together.

She shivered a few times, on her long strengthless falling back to earth.

She tried to lift her head. Tried to speak. He needed a towel and a new pair, because these were done for the night.

“Oh my God,” she finally was able to gasp. And again: “Oh my God.”

When he slid out of her again—and this time he wasn’t going back in for a while, no matter how much he might desire it—Franziska tried in vain to hold him, but she too was as weak as yesterday’s pudding.

With an effort her head came up and she looked at him through glazed eyes.

“I think you’ve broken me,” she breathed. “I’m in pieces.”

He brushed her hair aside and kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry, I’ll put you back together again.”

That was enough for her to hear. She lay silently atop him, holding on.

And he stared at the ceiling for awhile and listened to the storm.

It was the sound, he knew, of the future lashing at the walls around them, trying to get in where the British secret agent and the Nazi huntress lay on the edge of slumber. But the future did not and would not slumber, and Michael knew that very soon it would rush in upon them no matter what he felt, or hoped, or wished for.

And what then?

Oh my God, he thought.

What then?

Ten

The Messenger

The future arrived at around three o’clock the following afternoon.

Berlin wore a crust of snow. Flurries drifted over the roofs and spires and made spitting noises in the places where bomb-burned buildings yet smoldered.

The future arrived as Michael, after returning from lunch with Franziska, was having a quick touch-up shave with the happiest razor in the world. On the silver case were the freshly-tooled letters H and J, as simple as possible. They’d had a long untroubled sleep, tangled together in the bed that she’d nicknamed der Regen-Hersteller, the Rain Maker, for reasons obvious to them both. He’d said he hoped she was careful today, whatever she was doing, and she’d confidently replied that she was always careful.

Not careful enough, he thought as he’d watched her walk away. And this time before she reached the end of the block she had glanced back at him and given him a wave and a smile that came closer to breaking his heart than any pain he’d ever known.

The future did not arrive with Russians smashing into the city. It did not arrive with Gestapo agents in black leather coats swarming out of cars and bounding up the stairs to room 214 with their Lugers drawn. It did not arrive with the falling of more bombs, or with train-killing Mustangs pumping rockets into buildings that were old when Beethoven’s Fate first knocked at the door.

It arrived with a telephone call to his room, and a softly-delivered message from a clerk that a priest by the name of Father Hubart Kollmann wished to speak to Major Jaeger in the lobby as soon as possible.

The major said he’d be down in a few minutes.

Now this was puzzling. There was no need for alarm…but still…if this was someone from his side, what was the reason for contact?

But, of course! He was being contacted to end the mission! It was all over. They must have gotten enough of the Inner Ring out that a week’s stay in this Devil’s playground was no longer required. He could get to the safe house and—

Cross the river and go home?

Walk out of this hotel in the company of a priest and never see Franziska again?

And leave her to what he knew was coming, in a month or two or three at the most? The Russians were set on vengeance for what the Germans had done to their countrymen beginning in ‘41. The murders, atrocities and rapes were going to be returned a hundredfold. Michael knew that, as the Russians steadily advanced into German territory, the sufferings of civilians and the sheer horror endured by those who couldn’t or wouldn’t escape were already beyond any demonic imagination.

He finished his shave, washed his face, buttoned up his uniform, put on his cap just so and left the room. It seemed a longer descent down the stairs than before.

The priest was sitting in a black leather chair in the far corner of a lobby that maintained, in spite of all realities, its opulent faux medieval charm. Flames crackled in the gray stone hearth, which was decorated with carvings of the faces of various knights and noblemen. Flags of many family crests were on display, all surrounding a huge Nazi banner. It was fitting, Michael thought as he crossed the gold-colored carpet, that the priest be waiting for him under a tapestry that depicted a medieval wolfhunt, with men on horseback plunging their spears into the doomed and bloody beast.

“Major Jaeger,” said the priest, as he stood up from his chair.

“Father Kollmann, is it?” He shook the man’s hand. A hard grip, very dry.

“It is.” Kollmann motioned to another chair, identical to his own, that faced him. “Please, sit.”

Michael did, like a good dog.

Kollmann sat down and, smiling faintly, seemed to be carefully examining the major. Michael had already taken the priest in: tall and slender, about forty-five, with light brown hair showing hints of gray here and there, a sharp nose, a long chin, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with blue-tinted lenses that made view of the eyes difficult. Slim-fingered hands with manicured nails, a bit vain for a priest. Black shoes polished to a military or holier-than-thou gloss. The smell of soap or aftershave that had a little too much topnote of Paris perfume, and the odor of a drink or two in the early afternoon. Also, the priest had a taste for licorice; there was probably some in his coat.

“We’re all hoping for an early spring,” said Kollmann.

“I can’t recall a colder winter,” Michael returned.

“But my dog certainly enjoyed it,” was the response to that.

“What kind of dog?” The response to the response.

“Just a mutt,” was the final piece.

Michael nodded. He removed his cap and stared up at the tapestry. There was some message in it, he thought. Maybe something he didn’t want to see.

“The situation is evolving well,” Kollmann said after a time. The movement of his head tracked a few people crossing the lobby. An older man and woman were seated on a sofa at a comfortable distance away, the woman’s face bowed. The man was talking quietly to her. Michael had already seen them; they looked like people who’d made a long trip under the burden of great sadness, possibly to visit in the Army hospital an armless or legless or completely appendage-free torso that used to be a good German boy. Michael wondered how many times that scene had been repeated, in how many countries, and when it would ever stop. “Evolving well,” Kollmann repeated.

“Glad to hear,” was Michael’s brusque comment.

The priest steepled his long fingers. He stared into space. Communing with God? Michael wondered. Hearing some voice from the divine infinite?

“There’s been an alteration,” said Kollmann.

Michael waited. He was tense. Alteration. A tailor’s term, the taking in or letting out of clothes by nimble needles.

“We want the woman removed,” came the next decree, as hard and dry as the handshake.

“Removed,” Michael echoed. “You mean…taken somewhere?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I do not.” Michael’s heart felt squeezed by a hand made of a thousand thorns. He couldn’t breathe. The blood pulsed in his face. “No, I do not,” he said again.

“The decision has been made to remove her. We want to make a statement.”

And here was where he almost lost everything he’d built into himself over the hardship and experience of his years: his self-control, his knowledge that one must sometimes accept an occasional whip from a stupid man in order to move toward freedom, the pushing down and down and down of his own desires of the heart, the grimness of the morning before dawn when the wolves call and no human is there in bed to make you want to stay. To make you need to stay.

He almost lost it all, because the bones seemed to start to reshape in his face before he caught himself, and the blood roared within him and the scent of the wildness that was his deepest essence bloomed from his flesh.

“A statement?” He sprayed spittle. His face was contorted, and he leaned toward the priest with death in his eyes. “A statement of what? That we can kill women just as easily as they can?”

Kollmann said, “Calm down, Major,” as if speaking to a slightly-troublesome moron.

That was very nearly his last utterance upon the face of this earth.

Michael struggled to regulate his breathing. His joints were sore. All his bones had threatened, in the briefest of seconds, to rearrange themselves. Across the back of his neck, against the collar, he felt the scurryings of small coarse black and gray hairs rising and falling like strange tides. Only he knew what they were, and only he knew how much he wanted to kill the priest for even daring to speak this dirty idea into action.

Kollmann, his eyes hidden behind the blue lenses, reached into the pocket of his immaculate coat, and the fingers with their manicured nails returned with a small packet of black licorice sticks. He took one, slid it into a corner of his mouth, and offered the pack to Michael.

“No thank you,” Michael said. “I’m not a drunkard, so I don’t need that to hide the smell of my breath.”

Kollmann sat very still for a few seconds. His face was a blank. He returned the pack of licorice to his pocket.

“We are still where we are,” he told Michael. “The alteration does not come from me. I’m the messenger. But I am told to tell you that you should not blame our mutual friend for the disaster at Arnhem, and you should not blame him for this.”

“I’ll blame whoever I fucking choose to blame,” came the answer, spoken in almost a snarl.

“We need to make a statement,” the priest went on, his voice and demeanor maddeningly calm. “Not to the Germans, but to the Russians.” He lowered his voice, though there was no one close enough to hear. “They have spies here, watching. They want to see how we handle ourselves in matters like this, for future reference. We have to be as ruthless as they are, Major. Otherwise, they’ll walk all over us when they take the world stage. And believe me…when they seize Berlin, which they will…they will claim a large piece of Europe. So the woman needs to be removed, as a statement of what we will not tolerate.”

“One woman,” Michael said bitterly.

“No, she’s not the only one. Of course not. But she’s the one you’re being ordered to remove.”

“Why? Because I’ve gotten close to her?”

“Exactly,” said the priest.

Michael was sweating. It was oozing out of him. He could smell the sourness of himself. He put a trembling hand to his forehead.

“Are you going to be ill?” Kollmann inquired.

Michael lowered his hand. He smiled into the blue lenses, his face slick. “Do you believe in Hell?”

“Certainly I do.”

“You’re a damned liar,” said Michael, “because if you believed in Hell, you would be getting out of that chair and running for your life.”

The fingers steepled again.

“Oh, I see.” Did the mouth, with its licorice stick in one corner, twist into the briefest worm of a smile? “We have a complication.”

Michael stared at the floor, as that ridiculous hollow word clanged in his mind.

“I’ll remind you, Major,” said the priest, “that this woman has been instrumental in the brutal murders of many German patriots. Of many fine men, woman, and children. Because, you must realize, entire families have been destroyed in this. Just disappeared without a trace, but certainly we know they were taken first to Gestapo headquarters. And some of those people—those patriots who risked everything to save this country from its self-mutilation, its sheer drum-beating insanity—were my friends. Now, I suspect, bones and ashes in a garbage pit somewhere. Before we go any further with this, shall I supply for you a list of their names and a display of their photographs? I can show you some grand pictures of the children, all dressed in their nice clothes and smiling. You know, there’s nothing quite like a child’s smile.”

Michael kept his head lowered.

Kollmann nodded, still working on his candy. “They are the future, children are. Such potential, to make things brighter in this unhappy world. But, things do get complicated. Sometimes—very often it seems, in this day and age—the dark and the light get all mixed up together. And there are intelligent men who count on that happening. They are educated to make that happen. It is their most profound desire to do so. Now, I can sit here and say that possibly this woman fell under the spell and influence of such a man. That finding herself surrounded by fellow Germans who bore a grudge against the world and heeded the stirring call of a madman gave her a swell of what she took to be true and most worthy patriotism. Well, he said it: if you don’t follow me, you don’t love Germany. And he’s a fantastic speaker who can make some very convincing arguments. But…” And here he removed the stick and gazed at what had been whittled away. “One can call murder a process of cleansing, an eradication of the unfit, and the preparation for a Thousand-Year-Reich. It’s still murder, even in the language of the lawyer and the politician.” He let that hang for a few seconds. “She’s one of the people who must pay for that murder. Not just of other human beings, but of the country I knew. Because, Major Jaeger, my land has been burned away. I’m just trying my best to save a few seeds to throw on the scorched earth, in hopes anything can ever grow here again.”

“So,” said the priest, “you see, I do believe in Hell.” He brought out the packet and returned the remainder of the stick to its brothers. “I live there.”

Michael put his hands to his face.

“Is there any other way?” he asked, with a note of pleading.

“You don’t have to do it. Our mutual friend suggested it be offered first to you. If you refuse, you can go with me right now to the safe house. We’ll get you out as soon as possible.”

“But she’ll still be killed.”

“Yes. We have people with experience.”

“How—” His voice cracked. He tried once more: “How would it be done?”

The priest watched a Naval officer cross the lobby with a stylishly-dressed woman in a derby hat clinging to his arm. “A knock at the door of her studio, late at night. A silenced bullet to the head. Or someone following her to strangle her with a wire garotte wrapped around her neck. It would be quick.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Michael whispered, in agony. “I suppose one can also call murder a just retaliation for past sins?”

Kollmann’s face was impassive. “I didn’t always need the licorice for my breath, Major.”

The future had come. Michael knew it. And this future was more terrible than he ever might have conceived. The fighter pilots couldn’t kill a woman, because they left that hideous job to the slime on the ground. The shadow men. And him, the most shadowy of all.

“Can’t I get her out?” he tried. “Knock her over the head, use chloroform or something? Can’t I just get her out, and call it done?”

“Too risky. And in the scheme of things she’s more valuable to us dead than alive.”

It took Michael Gallatin awhile to get the words from brain to mouth and out.

“If… I were to do it…how would I?”

“You’re the killer,” said Kollmann.

Michael closed his eyes. But when he opened them again, he was still sitting in a black leather chair in the lobby of the Grand Frederik in the presence of this priest, and there was still a task to be done.

“Yes,” he agreed, “I am the killer. Yes, I am. So.” He lifted his gaze to the blue lenses. “I presume you have a chemist.”

“Yes.”

“I want a pill. Something that dissolves quickly. Something that is tasteless and odorless.” He had to stop for a little bit, because he was hurting so much. “Something that will put her to sleep, within…fifteen or twenty minutes. That’s what I want. That she just go to sleep.”

Kollmann thought about it, his fingers tapping the arm of his chair. “It’s a tall order.”

Michael leaned toward him with such ferocity that the tapping instantly stopped and the man shrank back.

“Yes, it is,” Michael said, his eyes enraged though his voice was eerily controlled, “but I’m the killer. And I’m telling you, as a killer, that if she feels pain, that if she throws up her guts or defecates herself, or anything other than going to sleep, then I’m coming after the messenger. And the messenger may think he’s so righteous and pure for his glorious love of what Germany once was, but it’s all murder to me because I’m the killer. If the messenger tries to hide in his house, I’ll tear it to pieces, and if he tries to hide in his church I’ll take that apart too. And maybe I’ll never leave this city alive, but after she’s dead and I’ve ripped you to shreds I will have no more need to live another day, because the killer’s work will be finished.”

It took a moment for Kollmann to relax. He must have really been close to God, because his next question was, “Shall I bring you two pills, then?”

Michael had already thought about that. As much as he might wish it, suicide was repugnant to him. The wolf in him wouldn’t allow it. No. Never.

“Only the one,” he said.

The priest stood up, and so did Michael.

Kollmann said, “We’ll come up with something. Still…there won’t be an opportunity to test its qualities. It’ll have to be guesswork.”

“Prayer might help,” Michael advised.

Kollmann offered his hand. Michael just looked at it, and thought how he could tear it off at the wrist. On his way across the lobby, Kollmann was stopped by the older man and woman. The woman began to softly weep, and then so did the man.

The priest spoke to them and touched their shoulders, but never did he remove his blue-tinted glasses.

Michael climbed up the stairs to his room, where pallid-faced and gasping he leaned over the toilet just in time to be violently, wrenchingly sick.

Eleven

The Tenth Woman

He went for a long walk through the streets, as evening turned the dim light of afternoon blue and snowflakes whirled around him. He walked on and on, as if seeking to be lost, but his sense of direction was unerring and he always knew exactly where his hotel was. He walked through bombed areas, where people still tried to salvage something of their lives from the ruins. He saw an overturned wagon with two dead horses still in their traces, the bloated carcasses whitened with snow. He saw a pack of desperate dogs gnawing in to get at the entrails, and he walked on.

In the silence of the evening streets, just a few people out and a few wagons, some riders on bicycles and a scattering of cars, Michael thought he could hear the sound of artillery firing in the east. The Russians might be slowed for a short while, but nothing would stop them from taking this city. He knew the strong, unyielding and often brutal nature of the Russian; after all, he was one of them.

At his hotel, the clerk gave him a message from Franziska. She had a dinner engagement she couldn’t get out of, and then she had to do some photographic work in her darkroom. But she would call at eleven o’clock.

The clerk read the last lines of the message: “Think of me when you have dinner. A thousand kisses. Weather forecast: more rain coming”. The clerk looked strangely at the major, as if he suspected this must be some kind of secret code.

Michael took the paper and had dinner in the restaurant followed by a good strong glass of brandy. He wound up paying for an entire bottle, which he took with a glass up to his room.

He was waiting, half-drunk, when the telephone rang at ten-fifty-six.

“I have to work a little later,” she told him. “Some more pictures to develop, and they must be done tonight.”

“By order of Herr Rittenkrett?” he asked.

She was silent for a few seconds. Then: “You don’t sound like yourself. Are you all right?”

“I’ve had dinner and I’ve been drinking. Just a little.” Had he slurred that word? Have to be careful here, not to let his accent slip. What the hell was wrong with him, letting his guard down like this?

“You’ve been drinking,” she repeated back.

“Yes. Brandy. I’m looking at what is almost an empty bottle. I expect to empty it in the next…oh…ten minutes.”

Franziska gave a sudden gasp, as if she’d been slapped.

“Your orders came,” she said.

He closed his eyes, the better to see her standing before him. “Yes.”

“Oh… Horst. I’ll be right there.”

“No! Franziska…finish what you’re doing.”

“I’m leaving now. This can wait.”

“Listen to me!” he said, more sharply than he’d intended. “Just…stay there and do what you need to do. Keep your mind on your work.”

“Oh, of course!” Were there tears in that word?

“I mean it.” He wondered what Mallory and Kollmann would say to his telling her she should do the exact work he’d been sent to interfere with. Did it matter now? “Franziska,” he said in a quieter tone, “I don’t have to leave tonight. Nor tomorrow.”

“When do you have to go, then?” Yes, definitely a tear or two. Her voice had thickened with what could only be sorrow.

I have to go after you’re dead, he thought.

But he said, “We still have time enough. I promise.”

“There can’t be enough time.”

“Go back to your work,” he said firmly.

“I’ll be there as soon as I finish.” She hung up.

Michael returned the receiver to its cradle and then he picked up the bottle of brandy and swallowed some more courage. He would go down and buy another bottle, but he couldn’t get too drunk or he might lose himself. Whoever he was tonight.

When Michael heard the knock on his door at twelve-forty and opened it, Franziska rushed in and put her arms around him. She was wearing her fawn-colored overcoat and a sea-green beret. She kissed him on the cheek, on the forehead, on the lips and on the throat. She pressed herself into him. Then she put her head on his shoulder and said in his ear, “I know men who can help. They can have you reassigned to duty here. All I have to do is—”

He knew what she would have to do.

He took her chin in his hand and glared into her luminous eyes.

“No! You’re not doing that for me. Do you hear? Not for me.” He saw the pain in her face, and it nearly dropped him to his knees. He tried to pull a smile up from somewhere. “There’s no need for sadness. Didn’t you say to me that this is my purpose? And you know fully well you said that God would not allow a man like me to—”

“That was before,” she interrupted, and he saw the tears bloom. One overflowed and streaked down her right cheek.

“Before what? We went to bed together?”

“No.” A second tear followed the first. “Before I wanted you to stay with me. I know forever is a long time, so I won’t say forever. But we could start out by saying it might be forever. Couldn’t we? Please, please, please.” It was she who got down on her knees. She grasped his hand and kissed it, and she held it against a tear-wet cheek. “Please, I can take care of this. I can go see those men, it would be nothing, it would be so easy, I could—”

“Stand up! Come on! Up!” He pulled her to her feet. “Don’t beg,” he said. “Never beg. Not to any man.”

“I don’t want you to die!” she rasped. And there it was. The reality, in amid all the fictions, the parties and the merrymaking. She trembled, and her tears were trickling slowly down and so also trickled down a small thread of saliva from her lower lip.

Get out of here, he almost said. He thought for a few seconds of shouting at her, of running her out because this was too much, it was impossible to bear this. But the fact was, he knew how short their hours were, and if she had to die—if she had to die—then he would be with her when it happened, and it would not be a cold stranger with a silenced pistol or a strangler in the alley at the end of the street. He would take the responsibility to put her over as gently as possible. And then, quite suddenly, he felt the burn in his own eyes and he lowered his head but she’d already seen.

She put a finger under his chin to angle his face toward her again.

Strongly and clearly she said, “I’m not going to let you be lost.”

“I have lied to you,” he heard himself answer. “My Westphalian accent is false. Studied. I was not born in Dortmund. I am…different, from anyone else. I was born in Russia, and I was a child there. What you’re hearing in my accent is—”

Her fingers went to his lips.

“Shhhhh,” she said. “I don’t care. Just answer me this: you’re not a traitor, are you?”

“No, I’m not a traitor.”

“Then what does it matter? Very well, so you were born in Russia. What were you, the family secret?” She didn’t wait for a response. “If you looked into the histories of most of the people at that Signal party, you’d find few of them without a chambermaid or a stable boy hidden in their family trees.”

The power of illusion, he thought. Or delusion. Right now she was creating the story in her mind of how he was the child of an ill-starred love between a German officer and a Russian maiden on the eve of the Great War, and how he’d probably been raised by the simple and gentle maiden, but then she’d sent him to be cared for by his father in Dortmund because she knew what better education and enlightenment he would receive. In fact, that sounded close to the movie they’d seen at the cinema a few nights ago.

What was the point of going down the road of truth? It was too fantastic to be believed. And if he showed her…what then?

He might kill her of fright, and then he could go home like a real hero.

He put his arms around her and held her tightly. They clung together like the only still-solid objects in a universe disintegrating to dust.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. Sorry, he realized, that she had not been born in England, that they had not met years before this one, that even together they stood on different sides of a chasm. Sorry that life was as cruel as it was, and that time could never be stopped or wound backward.

“It wasn’t a bad lie,” she answered, misunderstanding. “I forgive you.”

She kissed him on the lips. She traced her tongue along the outline of his mouth. She took her clothes off and pressed her breasts against his chest. She ground her second heart against his groin in slow circles while she stared pleadingly into his eyes but he could not be roused.

“Are you tired of me?” she asked.

Could a man ever be tired of the sun in winter? He said, “No, it’s not that.”

As Michael sat on the edge of the bed, Franziska knelt behind him and worked the tense muscles of his shoulders with her strong fingers.

“I’ll do anything you like,” she told him. “I’m the tenth woman.”

He frowned. “The tenth woman?”

“Oh, yes. Don’t you know? Five women out of ten will slap a man’s face for an indecent suggestion. Two will turn on their heel. One will kick him in the balls, and one will think it over. I’m the tenth woman.”

He smiled slightly, in spite of himself.

“I’m the woman who refused to leave the Garden of Eden,” she said as she worked on him. “I bake pies from the forbidden fruit, and I serve them to whomever I choose.”

“Sounds delicious,” he said.

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” she asked. “I mean…do you think I’m…” She trailed off, and Michael could feel her shrug. Her hands stopped.

He knew what she was really asking: How do you feel about me?

He turned toward her, and it hit him anew how beautiful she was. She was to him like a masterpiece of a painting, a work of art that comes together in its perfection only once in the proverbial blue moon, and always in her face there was some shade or nuance of expression that changed it ever so slightly so that looking at her was like seeing not one woman but a multitude. And all of them, every one, were now staring at him with this question in the perfume-scented air between them.

He was going to show her how he felt. No matter what tomorrow held. She wanted to know, and words were not enough. So he would lay her down upon the bed and show her, with all his strength and tenderness and desire, because she deserved to know and he owed her that much. Then he would make her promise on both her hearts that she would do nothing to interfere with his orders, and he would tell her that tomorrow night he intended to take her to dinner and to a place where music played until very late, and afterward he wanted her right where she belonged, here in bed with him tasting the forbidden fruit.

And champagne, he would say. Of course they needed champagne to drink, on the last night of their world.

She wrapped herself around him as he entered her, and in his ear she blissfully sighed the name of a stranger.

Twelve

The Light And The Dark

A bad part of the morning was when Michael, returning from a walk, asked at the desk if anything had arrived for Major Horst Jaeger.

“Yes, Major. This came while you were out.” The clerk brought from beneath the smooth oak counter a small box wrapped in brown paper. Michael noted at once that it was about the size of a jeweler’s box. The kind that might hold a—

“If you don’t mind my asking,” said the clerk, “I’ve seen you several times in the company of the beautiful young woman. Um…would this be a ring for her, sir?”

Michael knew what the man surmised. Lovers being parted, the noble soldier of the Reich going off to war. Was this an engagement gift, perhaps? A promise of many bright tomorrows?

“I’ll need a magnum of chilled champagne in my room around midnight,” he said, with no emotion. “Two glasses. I’d like the best bottle in the house.”

“Yes sir. I believe we have some Moet still in stock.”

“That’ll do. Bill my account, of course.” He started to walk away, the box in his right hand.

“My compliments and congratulations, sir,” said the clerk.

In his room, Michael opened the box and unwrapped a small ball of waxed paper sealed with tape. The pill was white with a faint blue tinge, the same color and a little smaller than one of Franziska’s pearls. He returned it to the waxed paper and then to the box, which went up on the closet shelf behind the folded extra blanket.

For most of the day he slept, or tried to. He curled himself against the gray light that fell through the windows. Snowflakes spun against the glass. The steam pipes beat a rhythm. Just after three she called to say she would be there in front at six-thirty. Their dinner reservation, more romantic than necessary, was for seven o’clock. She said she was happy, and she called him darling.

When he hung up, he was planning the evening.

Yes, I am the killer.

He showered and shaved and dressed well in advance of her arrival. He used a German military-issue brush on his hair, and a German military-issue toothbrush on his teeth. He took the taped-up ball of waxed paper from its box and put it into his trouser pocket on the left side. He wasn’t sure yet how or when he was going to drop the pill in her glass, but he had the confidence of the professional.

The killer, yes I am.

Dark was falling, very quickly.

He went downstairs to meet her, and pulling the collar of his feld-grau topcoat up he walked into the flurries and waited.

The BMW came, its top raised and secured with grommets against the weather. When Michael climbed into the car, Franziska gave him a quick kiss at the corner of his mouth and she said she was famished, she’d been so busy during the day she hadn’t had time for lunch. More photographs to be developed and some documents delivered. She looked as if she might have cried at some point today also, because her makeup didn’t quite cover the dark hollows beneath her eyes.

The roadster roared off, snow be damned.

I am the killer. Yes.

They ate at a restaurant that overlooked the river Spree. It was all candles and dark red drapes. A strolling violinist made the circle between their table and the only two other occupied tables, until Michael tipped him and said they wished to be excluded from the route. Michael had to move his chair a little, because from where he was sitting the view out the terrace windows to the east showed him the occasional dim flare of an artillery shell against low-lying clouds.

Franziska played hands with him atop the table and rubbed his ankle with her foot beneath it. She ate her first courses of rose hip soup and potato salad like there was no tomorrow. When his meal, the grilled venison, came he moved it around the plate for show but found he had no stomach for the eating.

Still, he had to pick himself up for her. He had to chat and listen and nod, and to give her a smile when she needed or expected one. And she had chosen this night to reveal to him the full power of her gifts, for not only was she streamlined and sleek as a racing machine in her black dress trimmed with silver spangles, and not only were the waves of black hair pinned back with a silver clasp in the shape of a half-moon, and not only did her wine-red lips shine and her gray eyes gleam in the low light, but her force of life was focused on him as if he were the only other human being in the world. Whenever he spoke about the most inane thing—the weather, the service at the hotel, what he’d seen on his walk today—seemed to her rapt attention to be the most heart-felt confession of a god.

This was how she worked, Michael thought. This was how the family man or the office worker or the lowly aide tripped over his tongue in his eagerness to be heard and appreciated, to be thought so important by a beautiful creature. This was how the secrets became known: not by being pried out, but by being urged out word after word with silent approval. Then the Gestapo came and took the crowing, pitiful roosters to Hell, to be boiled down into oil for the potato salad.

Yes.

I am the killer.

“You look so worried,” she said, as she rested her hand atop his. “You don’t need to be.”

“It’s not worry. I’m just preparing myself, in my mind.”

“I know,” she said, “that you want to do your duty. I know you’re a warrior. What would you be, if you weren’t? An office boy? And not some general’s staff monkey, either. You are what you are, and I thank God for that. But you’re also only a man, Horst. The same flesh and blood and…worries…of any man. It is the woman who shoulders the burden her man can’t carry. This woman wants to, very badly. So if you need to talk about the war, or anything else that troubles you…please… I’m right here.”

Michael took a drink from his cup of erstaz coffee. Her man, she’d said. He picked up his fork and drew furrows in the white tablecloth.

This was her power.

Because everything in him wanted to say, yes I am the killer, but I want to be your man. And I want to start clean and tell you my story. I want to tell you how I was born, both times, and how I have lived. I want to tell you about my first bitch and my missing son. About the world as I know it, and the world as I wish it to be. I want to tell you how the old tales of the lycanthrope are wrong, and how they are right. And I want to be able to tell all this to you, and afterward look into your eyes and see not fear but love.

But he didn’t say any of this, because there was no time and the pill was in his pocket, and if he was indeed her man he would not ask her to shoulder any burdens he couldn’t carry alone.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “You’ll see.”

Michael nodded. Sometime in the next few minutes one of the other couples in the room, an elderly pair, stood up and danced gracefully beside their table to the violinist’s tune, and Michael watched Franziska’s face as she smiled at the charming old man who at the end of the dance kissed his wife’s hand and held her chair out for her as any gentleman should.

They went to a music hall where the attendance was again skimpy, but the dark brew was good and a trio of guitar player, pianist and drummer held the stage. The lights kept flickering, not for effect but because of hits somewhere on the power grid. Michael asked Franziska to dance to a slow, jazzy number during which he held her as tightly against himself as he could without hurting her. Suddenly they found themselves alone on the floor because the music had stopped and the place was closing down.

“Just a moment,” he told her, and under the uncertain lights they danced a bit longer to their own secret music.

Then it was time to go back to the hotel, back to room 214, because there was nowhere else to go.

The magnum of Moet champagne sat in its ice bucket by the bed. Two champagne flutes had been placed nearby. A light blue envelope bearing the golden seal of the Grand Frederik called for Michael’s attention, and when he opened it the note read in tidy German penmanship: Dear Major Jaeger, in recognition of your service to the Reich and to your happy occasion, which our day clerk Oskar has informed me of, please accept this bottle with the best compliments of the house, and please think of the Grand Frederik should you require accomodations for any future celebration. A good life to you. In Debt To Your Honor, Adrian Bayerbergen, Manager.

“What’s that?” Franziska put her arms around him from behind.

He folded the note. “The bill,” he said, as he put it into a coat pocket. “Unfortunately, in this world nothing is free.”

“Oh, don’t be so sure about that.” She kissed and nuzzled the back of his neck. “I’m pretty free.”

“You are free,” he agreed, “and you are pretty.” He turned around to face her, and he took hold of her chin and stared deeply into her eyes. His heart was its own BMW 328. “What can I do for such a free and pretty woman as you?”

“Well,” she breathed, with her lips just barely grazing his, “first I would like to put into my mouth a big, succulent, wet and delicious—”

She held up before him the champagne flute she was holding. “Drink?” she finished.

“I should spank you first.”

“Would you please?” she asked, her eyes going wide.

He opened the champagne, which foamed extravagantly, and then he poured a flute for her and himself. She tapped his glass with her own. “To freedom?” she asked. “No, no! Wait! To…good decisions? No, wait!” She frowned. “Ah!” she said. “To the sun that sets in the west.”

“What kind of toast is that?” he asked as she drank.

“One I hope you remember when you need to.” she answered. “Drink up.”

He did, trying to figure out what she was saying. Maybe it was the beer talking? “Excuse me while I go to the bathroom.”

“May I give assistance?”

“You may stay right here and have another drink.” He went into the bathroom and leaned over the sink, because his heart was hammering and sweat was rising on his face. He might be a killer, but he wasn’t a monster. He couldn’t do this. No, tomorrow he would go to the safe house and tell them he was done, he was out, and to send a killer with the fingers of an angel and the mind of a blank slate to remove Franziska Luxe from this world.

He took the ball of waxed paper from his pocket and held it over the toilet.

But he asked himself: if it fell in the water and was swirled away into the depths of Berlin, would this be the act of a hero or the shame of a coward?

The light and the dark, all mixed up together. The words of a priest.

“Darling?” Franziska called. “Shall I phone for a plumber?”

“Hush!” he told her, trying to keep his voice light.

When he’d pulled the chain, the toilet had flushed and the waxed paper was gone, he walked out of the bathroom and found her naked on the bed but for a strip of sheet clutched between her legs. She was drinking her champagne and reading the afternoon’s edition of the Deutsche Allemagne Zeitung as casually as if she were waiting for the next tram to come along.

“Oh!” she said at his appearance. “Are you the new serving-man here?”

“Does the uniform give me away, madam?”

“It does. Please be kind enough to take it off and serve me.”

She watched as he undressed, making rather interesting noises and a few earthy comments here and there. Then, nude, Michael took her flute and poured some more champagne and as she leaned forward and gave his right buttock a fairly stinging slap he dropped into the sparkling liquid the small pill that had been held in his palm. He faced her with the glass down at his side, giving time for the dissolvement.

“You have a very strange look on your face,” she observed.

“Possibly there are strange thoughts in my mind.”

“I’m a journalist!” she said brightly, and sat up on her knees. “Tell me everything!”

He drank down the rest of his champagne, set her full glass on the table and his empty one next to it. His voice was husky when he spoke; not with passion, as she might think, but with the first pangs of true grief. “I’ve always been better at showing than telling.”

If anything, he had to command his own performance. Franziska was talented, true, and she was eager and hot-blooded and adventurous, but Michael Gallatin was fighting his own battle even as he stormed her walls.

He gave her as good as he could, as long as he could. He stretched her out and pressed her inward. His tongue shattered her dam, and her mouth brought forth droplets of rain in February. He lay back on the pillow, seeing colors and catching his breath.

Before he could move or speak or do anything, she stood up from the bed, picked up her flute and drank the champagne. She took three long swallows.

It was too late to move. To speak. To do anything.

He noticed then the bruises on her smooth bottom and the backs of her thighs.

“What are those?” he asked.

“Those what?”

“Bruises. Right there.”

“Bruises? Where?”

“There. Right there, on your—”

She slid into bed, tight up against him, and kissed him. Her mouth might have given him a taste of her champagne too, he thought. But it no longer mattered.

He pushed her back. “The bruises. From what?”

“I fell down today. I slipped on some snow. Fell smack on my bottom.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true!” she said, right in his face. “I promise!”

“I don’t believe you. Not even a promise.”

She tapped his lower lip with her forefinger. “Is this our first quarrel?”

“No, it’s not a quarrel.”

“That’s too bad.” She sat astride him, her legs curled around his hips. “Because, you know, they say the best thing about a quarrel is the making-up.”

The bruises were not going to be explained. Michael let it go; the ticking of the clock had begun.

They lay together, cuddling. Warmth upon warmth. They kissed lightly and deeply. One mouth was never without the other for very long.

She lay without moving for awhile.

Michael said, “Are you all right?”

“Sleepy,” she answered. “It just came on me.”

“It’s late,” he told her.

“I did have a long day.” She turned toward him and, looking into his eyes, she softly stroked his cheek. “You need a shave.” Her voice was a little listless.

He caught her hand and kissed the fingers. Every one.

“Will you hold me while I sleep?” she asked, nestling against him.

“I will hold you forever,” he said, and he put his arm around her.

“I’m so…tired. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so tired. Or so happy,” she amended. “I think you’ve worn me out.”

“Just lie still. Rest.”

She gave him a crooked smile, her eyes hazed. “I used to be young,” she said.

He waited.

When he looked at her again, her eyes had closed.

“Oh!” she said suddenly, with a jerk of her body. Her eyes opened. They were bloodshot, and Michael thought with a shrill of alarm that he was going to have to kill a messenger after all.

But she smiled in his direction, and she felt for his hand until he found hers, and she asked in a voice that was going away, “Am I still…only nearly…the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?”

He might, in some other situation, have had a response to this. A quick-witted comeback, a double-entendre, a poetic witticism worthy of Cyrano. Now, though, at this crucial and terrible instant he was struck dumb as a stone.

“It’s all right,” she whispered. Her eyes closed again, and with her last dwindling strength she squeezed his hand. “Tell me when I wake up.”

She breathed in and out, and in and out. He heard her breathing become shallow. As if in slow-motion, her head came back and her neck stretched, a cord standing out against the flesh, and for an instant Michael thought she was having one of her small deaths, and that when she regarded him again it would be with sated eyes, a dimpled smile and the sparkle of sweat on her cheeks.

But she was gone.

He felt her leave. Because suddenly the room felt so dark, and suddenly he felt so alone.

He got up after a few minutes, because she wasn’t coming back. He went into the bathroom, where he sat down on the cold tiles in a cold corner and wept.

She was right, he decided when he was all cried-out. Maybe he did need a fresh shave. She never knew my real name, he thought. That was what caused the first cut. Then, dripping blood from seven slips of the Solingen, which was not such a safety razor after all, he stood over her body and finished the last glass of champagne. He sat beside her for a time, just looking at her. She did appear to be only sleeping. But when he touched her hand he felt her already becoming common clay. That thought caused the tears to burn again. His nose ran like a spigot. Still, he held her hand until he was sure her ghost was no longer there, and he could no longer hear the music of her laughter.

One last thing. To get her properly in bed, with the sheet tucked around her and the fan of her black hair spread out on the pillow. Her face in repose did seem to have the hint of a secret smile. Something, perhaps, she knew that he did not?

Good dreams, he wished her.

He was tired, too. Worn out and weary. Sick with himself. He wished he could go to sleep and dream with her. It was going to be mind over matter tonight to get dressed and make his way to the safe—

He heard the footsteps at his door. The creak of a board.

They didn’t bother with knocking.

A heavy boot crashed the door in. Men in black leather coats came boiling like ebony wasps into the room and from their midst strode the big man with the red face and the white suit.

He brushed past the major even as two men caught Michael’s shoulders and slammed him against the wall. A painting of a golden-haired fraulein in a sunlit garden jumped off its hook and fell to the floor.

Rittenkrett walked to the edge of the bed and peered down at Franziska. He squinted, spoke her name, and then reached out to rouse her before he realized she could not be roused. “Hey! Sigmund!” he snapped. The accountant came over, lifted the sheet and tried to find a pulse. He leaned forward to feel for breath. He jammed a hand against her breast, seeking the missing heartbeat.

Sigmund shook his head. Rittenkrett turned toward the major with his face as red as a crimson lamp.

“You,” said Rittenkrett behind a thick forefinger, “have done a dirty. Haven’t you? Eh? Ask him, Ross.”

As the two men held Michael, Ross stepped forward and hit him in the stomach with a black-gloved fist. The second blow was harder, and the third made Michael’s legs buckle. Before he could find his balance, a hand gripped his hair and a knee burst his nose open.

“Careful with the blood!” Rittenkrett warned, retreating a step. “Christ, get him a towel! Stand up, Major Jaeger! But that’s not your real name, is it? How did you murder Franziska?”

A throat cleared. Rittenkrett turned around to see Sigmund holding up the two champagne flutes. “We’ll find out,” Rittenkrett promised Michael. “Next question: why did you murder Franziska?”

Michael didn’t answer. There was no point. Eight men in the room. At least four with drawn pistols. His nose was streaming blood, his eyes were swelling shut and his head pounded. Maybe down his sides or upon his back there were small stirrings of animal hair, but not much.

He could never commit suicide, but he was so weary and so sick at heart that he wished for death tonight. He welcomed it. He was no one’s hero. He was the shadowy slime that could kill a masterpiece of a woman who loved him, a perfect package, and no matter what her sins were he had failed to move heaven and earth to find a way to save her life.

He deserved to die. To die brutally, and in great pain.

Which had already begun.

“We’re going to march you out of here,” Rittenkrett said. “No clothes are necessary where you’re going, but we’ll take your uniform anyway to go over everything with our fine-toothed buzzsaws.” He came up close to the bleeding face, though not too close to risk the suit. “I hope you enjoyed her. Got your dick’s worth. Because now, sir, whoever you are, you’re coming to the Gestapo’s playhouse. And there we will give you a fucking of another kind. Sigmund!”

The accountant hit Michael across the side of the head with a leather-wrapped blackjack. He was fast and efficient, no energy wasted.

They dragged the naked, bleeding major out. Behind them the pair of men charged with tearing the place apart for evidence peeked under the sheet. One grinned at the other and with his fist made a pumping gesture at his crotch.

Thirteen

The Room

Through the wind and gusts of snow the two black sedans drove. Through the dark and empty streets of Berlin. They drove also through the nightmares of those Inner Ring members who yet remained in this city, manning the code books and doing whatever small sabotage they could conceive for the glory of old dead Germany.

When these black sedans came for you, the intelligent thing to do was to pick up the pistol in the upstairs desk, shoot your children in the head and then your wife and then yourself. That was called escape.

And it was the only way.

But for Michael Gallatin—sitting naked, groggy and bleeding on the back seat of the lead sedan between Sigmund and Ross—it was no way at all.

His strength was gone. He was all used up. He just no longer wished to live.

Was it suicide if he allowed someone else to kill him? If he simply lay unresisting as they pulled him apart? On that matter, the wolf in him was silent.

Through the streets they went, through the wind and snow. At length the two cars turned onto Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Their yellow cat’s-eye headlamps approached a block-long gothic slab of bricks, with five floors showing. Beneath the street, who knew how many? Lights showed through some of the windowblinds. This place never slept.

The cars went through a black gate, past the electric lamps that stood on either side of a porte cochere, and slid to a halt before a secondary entrance toward the rear of the building. Michael was dragged out, with Ross’s Luger in his ribs. He knew that if he struggled, he would not be shot in the ribs but instead either clubbed again over the head, hit in the face or in the worst case shot in an area that would cause pain but no immediate death, like the back of the hand or the knee. He didn’t care to struggle; it was too much of an effort.

Sigmund pressed a recessed button on the wall beside a door. In a few seconds the door was unbolted from within. The entourage, six men strong, went through with Michael a pale hobbler at their center. Inside there was a desk and a soldier and a file cabinet and a telephone and another door. Michael was half-pushed, half-carried through this door and into a green-painted corridor with frosted glass light globes spaced along the ceiling. Various doors lined this hallway, and at the far end was a tall, wide window through which another light gleamed.

At about the hallway’s centerpoint they came to an oak-railed staircase and started down. When Michael’s feet wanted to balk, he was picked up by two of the men and rushed downward. The staircase descended past several landings and more doors. It angled to the left, straightened out again and then angled to the right. Bare bulbs lit the stained risers. Michael smelled the old odors of human sweat and fear, and some of them not so old.

“Move!” a voice said from behind him. Sigmund’s blackjack gave him a knock across the base of the skull, which filled Michael’s head with flaming pinwheels. They came to the bottom of the stairs. Michael heard the jingle of keys, a merry sound like little bells. A lock was turned.

When the door opened, he was pushed and hauled through. In his haze he made out a stone-walled chamber with light bulbs hanging on cords from the timbered ceiling. Shadows ate some of the room. There were chairs sitting about. There was a machine of some kind on rollers, with coiled-up cables that ended in what might have been large alligator clips. Another machine was attached to what appeared to be a portable water tank on one end and on the other a gray instrument that resembled a baker’s pastry bag. He doubted it was used to frost any birthday cakes. He heard the door close behind him. A bolt was thrown with a metallic finality that would have made most men start to either babble or weep. In here there were no windows. The air smelled of vinegar and the sharp bitterness of chemical disinfectant.

And fear. Much, much fear.

He was dragged onward, the men moving quickly around him.

The machines gave way to the medieval. Red embers glowed in a brazier full of pokers. And beside it stood that most ancient of torture devices: the rectangular wooden frame, ropes and rollers of the instrument known as ‘the rack’.

Upon seeing it, something in Michael Gallatin stirred and growled a word he took to be resist. But that was all, just a growl. He didn’t care to resist. He was no longer fit to wear either flesh or fur. It was over. He was ready to die.

But his captors didn’t know that.

“Ross,” said the Ice Man.

While Michael was held, Ross beat him. The black-gloved fists crunched his ribs, slammed into his shoulders, crashed into his jaw and nose and cheekbones. Michael’s legs gave way and he tumbled into darkness.

He was aware of lying on his back, his wrists and ankles being bound with ropes. He heard the cranking of the ratchet. The rollers rumbled and the ropes tightened, and the pressure began building at the sockets of arms and legs.

Warm liquid was flung into his face. He sputtered and spat. His swollen eyes opened into slits, and he smelled and tasted another man’s wine. In fact, wine from several men.

Michael moved the throbbing bloodmask of his face and was able to find Sigmund amid the shadows. The accountant held a bucket in one hand and was zipping up with the other. Ross also was zipping, and one man had his huge cock flapping up and down for the envy of the others.

Rittenkrett’s crimson moon emerged from the dark. The teeth in its crater gripped a freshly-lit cigarello. “How do you like our champagne, Major?”

Michael closed his eyes again. He’d seen by the filmy glare from an overhead bulb that the Ice Man had removed his white suit jacket and was now wearing a leather butcher’s apron.

“Your teeth are still there. Your lips haven’t been ripped off. Yet. You can still talk. Let’s hear the story.”

Michael smelled the smoke ring drift into his face.

The ratchet went clack…clack…clack. The pressure on his joints in-creased. It was not pain yet, but it would be there on the handle’s next turn.

“All right, let me try,” said Rittenkrett. Michael heard the white shoes grind grit on the floorstones. “It’s safe to say, I do believe, that you’re not who you say you are. Eh? Not a German officer. And not even a German? So, because you speak so well and you act with such authority, I’d say someone has gone to great trouble to train you and put you here. You know, I told you…hey, look at me when I’m talking to you!” The tip of the cigarello crisped hair on Michael’s chest.

Michael obeyed, not because he had to but because he wanted to move the torture session along. The sooner they got past the small stuff and Rittenkrett realized his guest would not talk, the faster they’d get to the hard treatment. And from that, it would eventually be the death that Michael desired. How many hours would it take?

No matter. He would never leave this room alive.

“Better,” the Ice Man said. “All right, then. So…well, let me backtrack a bit!” He blew a few smoke rings and admired their advance. “The most amazing thing happened to me today! Just this afternoon, Franziska arrives at my office looking very fetching, and she says, ‘Axel, do you know that thing you’ve always wished to do with me?’ And you can bet I do! So she says, ‘I have one request. That you call Denker in Administration and remind him to do what I’ve asked of him’. And what would that be? I inquire. But she says it’s her private business, and so—knowing I’m going to find out from Denker anyway, who is scared to death of me—I say, as you wish.”

“Therefore, we go to my little hideaway that every decent married man should have,” said the Ice Man, with the cigarello in one corner of his mouth, “and for as long as I am able I partake of this offered gift. Oh, you should have seen her on the edge of the bed as she was! Such a beautiful ass! Ah well.” The massive shoulders shrugged. “I’m going to miss her sense of humor.”

“But that’s not all the story!” Rittenkrett paced back and forth, smiling. He was careful never to leave his prisoner’s field of view. “Denker calls me in the evening with this question: do I know what the relationship is between Franziska Luxe and a certain Major Horst Jaeger?” He made a face and slapped himself on the forehead. “That goddamned man again! After I’ve told him to leave Franziska alone! And now comes the real gem: Denker tells me that this morning Franziska went to see Colonel von Piffin, the old fucking goat who has some pull in the dispatching of orders and so forth, and for an hour or so they left the building. Denker, you understand, is von Piffin’s aide. When they came back, von Piffin was using his walking-stick. It’s common knowledge that he has a little hideaway as well, for his chorus girls. Now listen, Major what’s-your-name, you’ll appreciate this!”

A smoke ring ascended toward the dirty lights.

“Denker,” said the Ice Man, “tells me that Franziska says she has always found him attractive—yes, him with his cocked eyes—and she wishes a favor. If Colonel von Piffin fails to put his signature upon a certain request for transfer in the next day or so, would Denker do it for him? To tell you the truth, he does it all the time. And if Denker the cock-eyed dreamboat will do this for her, Franziska will go to his fucking little hideaway with him. Only Denker’s too stupid to have a hideaway, so they go to a broom closet on the fourth floor. Then…get this, now…after that is when Franziska came to me. Talk about doing a dedicated job, Major!”

Michael started to let his eyelids slide down, but the Ice Man was leaning over him.

“The kicker to this tale of lust and woe is that Denker tells me what Franziska wants done can’t be done,” said Rittenkrett. “She wants her Major Horst Jaeger transferred from the 25th Panzer Grenadier Division before it moves to the East Front. She wants this great man of hers to be transferred to a division on the Western Front. Only Denker’s looked up the orders, and found that the 25th Panzer Grenadier Division was relocated to the East Front at the beginning of last week.”

“We may have a deserter, I say to Denker. Now we have to do some digging and make some calls, because people have left their offices for the day. It’s night now, the phone lines in and out of Berlin are cut by Inner Ring swine all the time, and every colonel worth a shit is in his little hideaway. Records are incomplete, fucked up by incompetents, lost and damaged. But at last—about an hour ago—we get the information we need. And you know what we find, don’t you? Speak up!”

Michael remained silent.

“You don’t exist,” hissed the Ice Man. “You never did.”

He let that hang, and blew a misshapen circle that curled in upon itself.

Then he opened a red box in his right hand and withdrew from it an ice pick with a pearl-white handle.

Clack…clack…clack went the ratchet. Michael winced and bit his lower lip as pain rippled through his joints.

“She was trying to have you sent to the Western Front.” The Ice Man inspected his instrument of choice. A small spark of light jumped from the tip. “Hoping to save you from the Russians, I suppose? Picture it. Poor Franziska, fighting for the life of her noble knight with the only weapon she had.”

I’m so tired, she’d said. She must have scrubbed herself raw to get rid of the odors of those men. Either that, or he was really and truly in love, because all he’d been able to smell was her.

And now, tortured in his own private hell, Michael thought her champagne toast made sense.

To freedom?

To good decisions?

To the sun that sets in the west.

What kind of toast is that? he remembered asking.

And the reply: One I hope you remember when you need to.

He realized what she was trying to tell him.

She seemed to speak to him again, her voice calm and quiet from the realm of the dead: They can’t be stopped from the East. Not by all our wishes and dreams. Not by all we pretend to be but are not. They can’t be stopped, and when this city dies I will die here too, because I have chosen my field of battle. But you…in the West…can make the good decision to live. You can put aside your rifle when there’s no need for any more death. You can find honor in being one of the Germans who survives a war that is senseless to continue, and give yourself to the British or the Americans. It may be a little while until you find freedom…but you will.

You see? I said everything would be all right, didn’t I?

“And then you killed her,” Rittenkrett said. His hand reared back, and drove the ice pick into the exposed underside of Michael’s left arm.

This little pain was nothing.

“Are you British?” The ice pick slid into his right arm. Rittenkrett gave it a twist.

“Are you American?” The ice pick went into his left thigh.

“Are you Russian?” There was a pause, and then Rittenkrett drove the ice pick into Michael Gallatin’s right testicle.

“Oh,” said Rittenkrett in the aftermath of the teeth-gritted scream, “I think that hit something!”

His audience, frocked in darkness, laughed.

Rittenkrett nodded to whoever was handling the ratchet.

Clack…clack. Two turns. Agony upon agony. A mist of sweat and a new flow of blood from Michael’s nostrils. The next turn of the ratchet would tear his shoulders and legs from their sockets.

“I’ll ask again,” the Ice Man announced. “Are you British?”

The ice pick pierced Michael’s side, and more blood spooled down.

“Are you American?”

The ice pick went into his right cheek. Rittenkrett let it sit there vibrating for a few seconds before he took it out.

“Are you Russian?” Rittenkrett’s hand poised in the air. The stub of the cigarello in his mouth glowed as red as his face.

The ice pick entered the loose flesh between Michael’s penis and scrotum.

“Oh, I missed!” said the Ice Man, and he pulled the pick out and jammed it into the left testicle.

His audience applauded at that one. It did go on at length.

Rittenkrett paused in his performance to take a drink of water and flame a fresh Indianer. “What’s the reason for not speaking, sir?” he asked as he returned to the sweating, blood-pocked figure on the rack. “I’m just asking you your nationality, that’s all. Who do you work for, that kind of thing.” He took his position and lifted the pick. “Let’s start again, shall we? Are you British?”

The pick swung down and entered Michael’s left leg just above the knee.

“Are you American?”

Into the upper chest, where it turned on the collarbone.

“Are you Russian?” Rittenkrett lifted the ice pick high. “You know, sir, whoever you are, it’s futile. You’ve lost. Not just you, but your entire effort. Because I hear it on great authority that the scientists are only a few days away from having the Black Sun, and when that is complete no force on earth can stand against the Reich.”

Light gleamed from the bloody tip.

A drop of blood fell, and hit Michael on the forehead.

It was in his mind.

The Black Sun.

Only a few days away.

Something that had wanted to go to sleep, that had yearned for the peace of sleep, now stretched its muscles and opened a fierce green eye.

The Black Sun.

What in the name of God could that be?

In spite of himself, in spite of all the little pains that had merged together to make one pain huge and terrible, he knew his duty just as Franziska had known hers. In the flash of an instant it brought him back from the edge. It cleared his head.

He knew who he was, what he was. And why he was.

Michael looked up at the Ice Man and spoke.

In a hoarse, nearly inhuman rasp. And in English.

“I wish…you hadn’t said that.”

“He said something!” Amazed, Rittenkrett looked around at the others. “I think it was English! Uthmann, come over here! Don’t you speak English?”

“I’m about to kill you,” said Michael Gallatin, prisoner of the Gestapo and wrenched out upon the rack.

“What?” Rittenkrett leaned down toward him, the cigarello gripped between his teeth on the left side.

What the Ice Man could not possibly know is that there was more than one perfect package in this world.

Fourteen

The Soul Cage

“Kill you,” the major repeated. Except now it was mostly a snarl, because the change was upon him.

One benefit of practice is, indeed, perfection. It comes only after many hundreds of attempts. And through Michael Gallatin’s lifetime, it came from his practice of controlling and guiding the transformation sometimes three or four times a day, in all weather, in all positions both solemnly immobile in the cathedral of the forest and running at full speed as if to beat Satan’s own locomotive on the underworld tracks.

He was by now very good and very fast at opening his soul cage and letting Hell loose.

Several things happened at once, in rapid succession. There were the crackings of bones and joints and the wet slidings and rearrangings of sinews that might have been taken for the work of the rack, but it was not. Bands of black and gray hairs rippled across the pick-pocked flesh. The face seemed to dissolve, to be replaced by a second, darker face that had been hidden beneath the mask of the first. It, too, was battered and bloody as the first one had been; the man’s wounds were also the beast’s. Fingers warped and toes warped into claws. Fangs exploded from bleeding gums. Ears burst forth fur as they lengthened like strange flowers. The ribcage shivered and changed shape. The torso altered, the spine shifted, the neck thickened, the shoulders grew muscles like pulsing gray ropes and then the black hair scurried over them and across the chest and groin where the pierced testicles tightened. The pain was exquisite. The pain was a religious experience, because through it Michael Gallatin was reborn.

All this happened in a matter of seconds. It happened so fast the black wolf streaked with gray was there on the rack before Axel Rittenkrett could cry out around his cigarello or step back from the blood-dripping muzzle that now snapped up at his face. The fangs caught cheek, nose and forehead. Then the wolf’s head thrashed side-to-side in a blur, the muscles standing out in its neck, and very suddenly Axel Rittenkrett really did have, as Franziska had said, two faces.

Both of them were red. One was streaming blood around torn and twitching facial muscles. That side had no eye, because the eye was crushed between the wolf’s jaws like a hard-boiled egg and swallowed. It had a gaping hole where the nose had been, because nose went very well with eyeball. In fact, much of the whole side of the face had gone down the gullet. A smoke ring red with gore burst from the mouth. The teeth clacked, like the sound of a rack’s ratchet or white shoes on a checkerboard floor. And Rittenkrett’s shoes were, alas, no longer the color of virgin snow.

Michael Gallatin tore the Ice Man’s throat open with his next snap and thrash, and perhaps it was due to the wolf’s rage or his strength or his purpose returning, but the Ice Man’s mangled head was ripped off and went rolling across the stones like a large red rubber ball. It rolled past the shoes of Sigmund, who like the others in the room were for the moment truly ice men: frozen in absolute, apocalyptic horror.

As the merely human stood stunned, the monster of miracle’s hind legs slipped out of the loosened bindings. One rope on the right foreleg had to be gnawed off, the matter of a few heartbeats, but the left foreleg came free easily enough. In his fever dream, Michael smelled that every man in the room had just peed in their pants. A couple of them needed their diapers. The wolf leaped to the floor, and the slitted green eyes searched for the next throat to savage.

Could five men scream as one? They could.

There was a rush toward the door. An entanglement of Gestapo men. A crashing together, stumbling and falling of the Master Race, reduced to Marx Brothers comedians.

He paused to kill one man who’d fallen. It was fast and clean, and it tasted good. Then he was moving again, his shoulders hunched. It was unfortunate, Michael thought as he loped across the stones, that a bolted door couldn’t be opened when so many hands were slipping and sliding all over the place.

“Help us! God help us!” one of them shouted, banging at the wood. Was that Sigmund, whose account had suddenly become due?

The wolf lunged forward, seized Sigmund’s ankle and dragged him away, and that debt was paid in bloody full in about three seconds.

Someone had either gone mad or found courage, because a Luger began firing into the dark. A bullet whined off the floor to Michael’s left. “Get it open! Open it!” a man shrieked; now that was the sound of madness, for sure. A second Luger fired, the bullet hissing through the air over Michael’s spine. Then suddenly there came the noise of the bolt being drawn, light from the staircase streamed in as the door was opened, and a trio of rabbits in pee-stained trousers were fighting to get past each other.

Michael slouched forward as beasts do. He could slow time down to his own desires, so the merely human were moving as if through sludge. He let them all get started up the stairs. His muzzle was throbbing with pain. Something was not totally right with his lower jaw. The agony of two stabbed balls still writhed in his belly.

Oh, he thought as he listened to them scrambling up those stairs and wheezing in fear, you are mine.

Then the purely animal took him. He growled deep in his throat and flung himself through the door and up after the three men, rivulets of saliva crawling from his mouth.

Ross was going up first. He had a Luger. When he turned and saw the monster coming, he got off a wild shot that was unfortunately not wild enough to miss the head of the man just behind and below him, who also had a Luger. Ross’s hair was standing on end, as if electrified, and his face was the color of wet paper. As the man in the middle fell, the one closest to Michael screamed like a woman and tried to kick like a little girl, but he died like a pile of dirty laundry when Michael bit into the leg and threw him almost disdainfully down the stairs where his chin hit the railing, his neck broke, and he slithered down in his stinky pants.

And now there was just the common thug.

Ross started shooting over his shoulder, without looking. The bullets whacked risers and walls but no wolf. Then Ross got to the top of the stairs and turned to the right, and with a keening shriek he fled along the corridor in the direction of the large window. He ran out of one of his shoes. Michael, a green-eyed and ravening juggernaut, went after him. A bullet suddenly hit the wall and another cracked through the window’s glass; someone, likely the guard at the door, was firing a pistol. Michael could imagine the man’s dumbfounded wonder: how in the name of Gabbling Goebbels had a big dog gotten in here?

The big dog now wanted out, and he saw the way.

He managed a burst of speed, and he leapt.

An instant before Michael hit Ross, the thug must’ve felt the death fangs at the back of his neck and somehow he mustered the courage to face them. He turned and fired, possibly his last shot. Michael felt the bullet go into his left hip and do serious damage, and then he was on top of Ross and Ross was being propelled backward along the hallway the last few feet to the window. They crashed through the glass and into a snowscape, with Ross taking the brunt of the injuries. The air whooshed out of the man’s lungs, but in the next instant Ross didn’t need that air anyway since claws and fangs removed the lungs in a small frenzy of maddened revenge.