Flowers From Berlin

THIRTY- FOUR

Laura was noticing the little things.

Her husband had been home for two days and had again become the moody, uncommunicative Stephen that she did not like. He had hardly spoken to her. The least he could have done was tell her about his trip. To her, New York was an exciting, bustling exotic city. She wished he would at least excite her with stories of what he had seen, people he had met.

But nothing. No talk. And heaven knew, he hadn't much been interested in touching her, either. What was she to think? She was a woman of twenty-five with the physical desires of a woman of twenty-five. Why couldn't they make love when he came home? Why wasn't he interested?

Little things, she repeated. She sat in the living room of their home and stared out the window, through the rain, across the lawn to St. Paul's. Her husband had disappeared into the church two hours ago, citing the need to work on Sunday's sermon. Little things, like ignoring her as if she wasn't there.

She caught herself thinking the unthinkable: maybe, long-range, this marriage wasn't destined to work. If Stephen was going to neglect her, well, she could see her reflection in the mirror. She was an attractive woman. She took care of her body and groomed herself well. If this man couldn't love her and appreciate her, maybe another man would.

She dismissed the idea, but with effort.

Then there were the big things. There were the tales told by Peter Whiteside, suggestions and accusations that grew upon Laura like a series of cancers. Combined with Stephen's behavior, Peter's insinuations nurtured suspicion within her. She sought to acquit him. But when she compared his time of return by train two days earlier from New York, she found that no New York train had stopped at Liberty Circle at that hour. There had only been the train that connected with Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.

“Wrong cities, wrong timetable, Stephen,”she thought.

Wrong husband, wrong wife? She wondered.

There were too many questions. Too much unexplained behavior. Laura rose from the window and went to the closet. She pulled on her raincoat. It had been raining hard that day, a cold wet downpour which did nothing to elevate her mood and much to trigger a residual dissatisfaction and homesickness. A wife could be expected to tolerate only so much. It was time to discuss things. Now.

Laura took an umbrella from the rack in the foyer and she crossed the street to the church. Outside the red front door she shook out her umbrella and slipped out of her coat as she entered.

The minister's chambers were in the rear, past the pews and the altar. When Laura looked for him there, he was gone. The light was off and his small desk looked untouched. She stared at it for several seconds trying to grasp the meaning.

"Stephen?" she called out. "Stephen?"

There was only the sound of empty rooms in return. It occurred to Laura that Stephen may have left the church through the rear exit, and, as variations of deceit swirled and unraveled before her, she contemplated why. She passed quietly to the doorway adjacent to his chambers. It was locked from the inside.

Facts, Peter Whiteside: Stephen came into this building two hours ago. I have been staring at the front door from across the street. Either I have failed Basic Surveillance or he has not left. He is in this building.

Where? What was he doing?

There remained only the balcony, which was empty, and the front stairway to the belfry and steeple. When she looked at the latter, she found the doorway ajar. She ascended the narrow staircase that wound up to the spire.

As she climbed she listened. She heard her own footsteps on the stairs and the creaks of the aged wood. She came to a first landing, where there was a small window. She stopped, listened, and looked out.

She was higher than the nearest trees. She looked down at the rectory house where she lived and watched the rain sweep over it. She lifted her gaze and could see the road stretching into Liberty Circle. She could see part of the town.

It was a fine view, probably even finer and more dramatic on a clear day or at the next level. Why, she wondered, had Stephen never called her attention to it?

The staircase led to another landing just below the bells. She could smell the mustiness of the seldom-used stairs and could hear the rain driving against the wooden walls. It almost distracted her from the entire point of the search. Where was Steven?

She took the final turn in the staircase and arrived in the bell-tower landing. It was a narrow, square chamber about eight by eight, ringed by panels and several storage closets. The door of one closet was slightly open and she stepped toward it. But as she made her first movement, she saw that several of the panels on the opposite wall had been hastily replaced. She stepped toward them instead.

"Stephen?" she said aloud.

Behind her a closet door exploded open. Laura screamed. She wasn't fast enough to turn to confront the figure that lunged toward her.

It was a man, she was sure, and he hooked one arm around her with his hand covering her mouth. The other hand came up to her throat with a knife and she felt the side of the blade pressed hard-it was hurting her!-to the flesh by the jugular.

He was rough. He forced her all the way forward to the small window in the tower. Her face was pressed roughly to the cold glass.

There he held her and hurt her, until she recognized the hand, the wrists, and the feel of the strong body.

Slowly his hand moved away. Slowly he relaxed the knife.

"Stephen!"

He allowed her to turn slowly to face him. His gray eyes were blazing with a furious cruelty that she had never seen in the man with whom she had shared part of her life.

"You fool!" he said. "What are you doing here?"

"I was looking for you!"

"Why? Why do you have to prowl? Why can't you leave me alone?"

Laura could feel the tears welling up in her eyes. And she was fully aware that he had not for an instant relaxed the grip on the knife.

"You're my husband!" she cried. "I wanted to see you! I wanted to talk to you!"

"You should have stayed home and waited for me!"

She felt her courage rallying. "And wait for what?" she demanded. "Wait until you bloody well felt like coming home and talking to me? What are you doing up here?"

"Nothing that you would understand."

"No? And that?" She stared angrily at the knife, then back at her silent husband. And next there was a horrible moment as she looked into Stephen Fowler's eyes and no longer saw her husband. She saw something cold, mean, and evil that had always before been beneath the surface. But now, when she saw it, the look explained everything.

She saw the man before her for what he was. As his eyes riveted upon her, there was only sheer, paralyzing terror, knowing that the hands that had been intimate hundreds of times with her had manufactured bombs and strangled a strange woman. She knew that Peter Whiteside had been right in everything he had last said about him. And she knew that somehow she had come very close to her husband's secret. Something about this place…

Then she realized. Bill Cochrane had told her. Radio transmissions. A spy. The steeple was the highest point for miles around. That's what had attracted the F.B.I. agent and that was its significance to her husband.

It all came together to her in the space of three seconds, along with the fact that Stephen was intent on killing her. Now! She could tell from his eyes. She could tell by the way his fingers played nervously on the hilt of the knife.

She could think of only one way to save her life.

As his eyes remained locked with hers, she pressed her hand between his thighs. Gently, as she suppressed a shudder, she rubbed him.

The savagery in his face softened with the surprise. Good, she thought, she had done the unexpected.

"Don't you understand?" she asked with a conciliatory voice. "I don't know what you're doing and I don't care. I just want my husband to make love to me. I've missed you.

Can't you comprehend that?"

She did her best to smile receptively. All the while she feared that he would stab her with one sudden upward thrust of the knife.

"I love you, Stephen," she said. "I'd never do anything to betray you. Don't you know that?"

The words were barely out of her mouth when she realized it was the first lie she had told him in more than two years of marriage.

"Let's undress," she said. "Now. Right here. Please, Stephen?" She unbuttoned her blouse as she spoke.

"I'm going to teach you who the master is," he said. "I'm going to punish you for following me."

"Stephen…?"

He raised the knife, then threw it onto the floor, where, point-first, it stuck. Then he looked at his wife, drew back his hand, and slapped her hard across the face, just as he had once struck Charlotte.

Laura's face was on fire where he had hit her. She raised both her hands to where she had been struck and looked at her husband with wide horrified eyes. He grinned. He struck her again. She bolted to flee him, but he held her by the wrist.

"You'll finish undressing," he told her, biting off the words. "You'll do exactly what I tell you, Laura. Nothing less! You belong to me, Laura. You said so yourself. Now, don't you forget it."

She undressed as he watched her in silence. As her undergarments came off, Stephen seemed to be devouring her with his eyes, assessing her as a rapist might a naked schoolgirl. She was completely nude. She covered a small area on the floor with her clothing.

When she turned and looked at Stephen again she realized that there had always been within him a need to brutalize a woman. He had never done it to her before, but obviously he had been doing it somewhere else. She wondered what connection it had with the dead woman behind the church.

Then as he pulled his own clothes off, he made her kneel. He held her by the hair and forced her to take him into her mouth. She had never done that to him before, much less been forced to. As an act of love, had he ever asked, she would have. Today, with a deceitful man whom she knew to be a spy and a killer, it filled her with revulsion.

But then he made her lie back, and he was on top of her. She managed to keep her face away from his as he pushed inside her. He could not see her tears. He was rough and fast, like she imagined a man might he in a whorehouse. And when she felt him finish, she was relieved. Horrible as it was, at least it was over.

He moved off her, breathing heavily. He lay near her and she sensed him to be more of a stranger than any man she had ever made love with. She was afraid to speak. She looked at the knife, which still stuck in the floor nearby. She realized that he could still kill her. She would have to see this terrifying hour through to the end.

"I like you as a sexual animal," she lied, wondering all the time how she was managing to maintain her facade.

"Get dressed and get out of here," he said. Apparently, she realized, he had decided to keep her alive. She stood and reached for her clothing. Stephen grabbed her by the wrist.

"And Laura," he snapped, holding her so tight that it hurt, "you never come up here again. I have things to do that a woman couldn't begin to understand. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Stephen," she said.

"Now, go."

She did.

Laura returned to their bedroom in the rectory. She looked in the mirror at her ashen, tear-streaked face, felt something welling inside her, and threw up.

She went downstairs. She found a bottle of Scotch, took a drink, and after several minutes it seemed to calm her. She would have to maintain the act until the right opportunity came along, she told herself. No, she could barely tolerate thinking about or looking at this man again, much less have him violate her. But she did know where she could find friends. She only needed the right moment.

Stephen forced his new, brutal form of sex upon her again that night and the next. Then, mercifully, he announced on Wednesday morning that he was traveling again. He departed on the noon train to Trenton and Philadelphia.

Within another hour, she too was gone. She traveled first by bus, using some dollars she had put aside in her kitchen. In Newark she walked from the bus depot to the train station and found a southbound express for Washington. There, at Union Station, she deciphered a confusing city map and started her way to the British Consulate, praying that Peter Whiteside would still be there.