Winter Sniper: A World War II Novel

Chapter 25

The noise in the cramped attic was like a thunderclap. Her ears rang. In the candlelight, she could see the round, neat hole in the front of his white T-shirt. Fleischmann looked down at the hole, then at her, wide-eyed. He put one hand over the wound and held up the other toward her, palm out as if to ward off bullets. This time she put two hands around the pistol grip, took careful aim, and shot him again.

Fleischmann stumbled backwards, reaching for the antique dressing screen to catch himself, but it was too flimsy and he only succeeded in knocking it down, sending up a storm of dust from the attic floor. He sank to his knees, his mouth moving noiselessly like a fish gasping for air on a riverbank. His eyes turned glassy. Then Fleischmann slumped forward and didn’t move, his face buried in the pit of one arm that was flung out as if to break his fall. He had the unnaturally limp look of those dead animals one sometimes saw by the side of the road.

Eva turned back to the radio and switched it off. The orange glow faded. She put away the pistol, then covered the table and chair with the quilt. Berlin would have to wait.

Now, what to do with Fleischmann?

From the bottom of the attic stairs she heard Petra call out in a frightened voice, asking if everything was all right.

Quickly, Eva made up her mind. She lifted the quilt and retrieved the pistol. Her hands shook but she forced herself to steady them. She wrapped the dead fingers of the colonel’s outstretched hand around the Walter, then screamed for all she was worth in her best stage voice. Petra flicked on the overhead light and stormed up the attic stairs.

When the girl saw the body she did not cry out, but only put a hand to her mouth and made a soft noise that sounded like oh. She had learned during the war in Poland to react quietly to death in case the killers were still nearby.

The single bulb overhead barely dissipated the shadows in the cluttered attic, but it was enough to light up the grisly scene. Fleischmann’s clean white T-shirt and underwear seemed to glow against the age-darkened floorboards.

“Is he dead?” Petra asked in German.

Eva nodded. “Ja. I think so. Yes.”

The girl made the sign of the cross and mumbled something that might have been a prayer. “What happened?”

“Can’t you see the gun in his hand? He shot himself.”

Petra glanced at Eva, a brief questioning look. Then she nodded. If you say so.

Actress though she was, Eva could not bring herself to shed a single tear or say so much as the poor man, even if it was for Petra’s benefit. Fleischmann was dead. “Good riddance,” the Americans liked to say.

Eva was fairly certain that if the second bullet had not done the job, she would have been happy to shoot him a third time. Now, the problem was what to do with the body. She doubted the American authorities would be as quick as Petra to accept that the colonel had committed suicide — by shooting himself twice, no less.

“Should I call the police?” Petra asked.

“No,” Eva said. “We cannot call the police or bring soldiers here again.”

“But Frau Von Stahl, surely we must tell someone what happened.”

“If this had happened in Warsaw in nineteen thirty-nine, would you have called the police?” Eva asked.

“This is America,” the girl said, as if that explained everything. “The rules here are different.”

“Not for us,” Eva said. “Colonel Fleischmann worked for the OSS. They are spies, Petra. He was using us, don’t you see? Our house has already been under guard. If we report that the colonel is dead in our attic, what do you think they will do to us then? They will arrest us or send us back to Germany.”

The girl looked up, fear plain in her eyes. Eva truly began to understand now that Petra had sent the note warning of the assassination attempt not to save Eisenhower but to protect her mistress and herself. If their involvement with the assassin became known, their lives as they knew them would be over. Better to go to the authorities and look like one was doing the right thing than keep quiet only to be discovered later. However, if Petra had been willing before to accept that her mistress was naive to the ways of the world and thus became entangled with assassins, standing here in the attic the mist had lifted from her eyes. Colonel Fleischmann had no more committed suicide than a pig might.

But Petra nodded in agreement. Having survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, she understood a thing or two about not involving the authorities.

“Why did he kill himself?” she finally asked.

“He knew too much,” Eva said. “That can be dangerous for anyone.”

Eva looked around the attic. They could not call the police, but at the same time they could not leave the body where it lay. If someone was to come looking for Fleischmann — and someone would — they would be at risk. Hiding him in the attic was a possibility, at least while it was bitterly cold. But Eva wanted him out of the house. Think, she told herself. How could the two of them get the body out of there?

Her eyes settled on an old rug rolled up and set to one side. “Help me,” she said to Petra.

Together, they unrolled the rug with the edge next to the body. The Oriental rug was old and worn — too shabby for the parlor — but Eva prayed it wasn’t some valuable antique. The ultimate irony would be for the colonel’s blood to ruin one of the few items of value she owned.

Eva took the head, Petra took the feet. They shifted the body enough to get the carpet under him and began to roll it up. The weight was much easier to manage inside the rug and working together they soon had him wrapped up tight as a Cuban cigar. They slid the carpet down the attic steps and then down the hall and the stairs to the first floor. The head, being heavier, bumped on every step, a fact that almost made Eva regret that Fleischmann was dead. It would have served him right to suffer a bit of pain — he had certainly caused her enough.

Then they managed to drag their grisly baggage through the kitchen to the back door. Both of them were now panting with the effort, though Eva had to admit that she was impressed by Petra’s strength. She was very strong for such a skinny girl.

“Now what?” Petra wondered aloud as they stood by the back door.

Eva had never disposed of a body, but she surprised herself by seeming to know just what to do. She fought down the giddy sensation that she was acting in a detective film. “I will get the keys to the Cadillac,” she said.

Eva backed the vehicle as close to the back door as she could. Her driver, Mr. Dorsey, stopped by the house daily and also came over if she called his house, but it was too late at night to summon him. Besides, she did not want to involve anyone else at this point.Eva set the brake and then walked around to open the trunk.

In the kitchen, Petra eyed the distance to the car with apprehension. “It’s so far,” she said in a faint voice.

“You must help me,” Eva said. “I cannot carry him to the car alone.”

Resigned, Petra bent down to shift her end of the rug. With much struggling, they were able to get the bundled rug across the few feet of snowy yard and into the back of the car. Fortunately, the old Cadillac’s trunk was quite spacious.

“Get our coats,” Eva said. “We are going for a drive.”

Late on any January night, with the temperature in the teens and fresh snow covering the sidewalks and side streets, there would not have been much traffic. With the wartime gas restrictions on top of the weather and the late hour, almost nothing else moved. The Cadillac’s tires were not the best — she recalled that old Dorsey had warned her to get new ones — and she drove at a snail’s pace down the slippery streets. When they reached one of the rougher neighborhoods — another warning from Mr. Dorsey about this place — Eva backed the Cadillac into the darkest alley she could find.

Beside her, she heard Petra’s sharp intake of breath. “Where are we going?”

“Right here,” Eva said, stopping the car. Eva was a good driver, but her arms trembled with tension from wrestling the big car through the snowy city. But the drive had been worth it. The alley was dark as a tiger’s maw and deserted. Eva left the engine running. The two women got out and opened the trunk, and then with a final effort they tumbled the heavy bundle into the snow.

Alone in his suite, General Dwight Eisenhower studied a map of the French coastline. He was half-reclined on the sofa, feet on the coffee table where a cigarette in the ashtray curled a trail of smoke upward, a small glass of bourbon next to the ashtray. Mamie was asleep — or pretending to be asleep, at least — behind the closed bedroom door. After calling his wife “Kay” by mistake, Ike wasn’t all that sure he would be welcome in there tonight, so he had taken up residence on the couch. That slip of the tongue had been what his younger staffers would have called “a bonehead move.”

He pushed that thought from his mind. He was anxious to get back to England so that they could begin working out the details of the Allied invasion. Already, the names of French towns tumbled through his mind like stones rolling in the surf. Even Ike had to admit that planning a full-scale invasion was a daunting task as inclined to failure as success. They would have to coordinate air support with sea transport — always tricky — not to mention the whims of weather and tide. For they would need a very low tide to expose any beach defenses. That low tide would have to come early in the day, preferably at dawn, to give his troops the advantage of several hours of daylight in which to operate. And they would have to wait for spring weather, at least. That would give him time to plan. Besides, there was no point in mounting any operation on the wintry English Channel.

Ike hoped to create a hammer blow that would get his troops established on shore. But the slightest mistake would blunt the force of that hammer. Worse yet, if the Germans had warning of the attack, disaster might await them on the beaches of Normandy. Ike was a straightforward soldier who didn’t think much of spies and spying — he left that up to the likes of “Wild Bill” Donovan and the OSS. While he didn’t approve of their methods, even the general had to admit that misinformation had its uses. It would be almost impossible to keep the Germans from discovering that plans were being made for an invasion.

What if they were led to believe the Allied hammer blow was falling elsewhere? The obvious point of attack would be Pas de Calais, the stretch of German-occupied coastline closest to British ports. Ike took a thick, red pencil and sketched a wide arrow from the British coast to Pas de Calais. He jotted a few numbers in the margins, then smiled at his handiwork. Maybe the OSS could see that this was slipped into Hitler’s mailbag. That would make sure that the German defenses were thickest at that point while the Allied invasion force landed elsewhere. Maybe it wasn’t so hard being a spy, after all.

Ike gathered his papers and walked over to his desk in the second bedroom that he had taken over as an office. He dumped them in a heap, then retreated to the couch, tucked a pillow under his head, and then the general went to sleep.

Eva felt that her situation in Washington had spiraled out of control. One of her best contacts had been discovered by the OSS and hanged himself with his shoelaces to avoid giving her up. She had killed a man, shot him through the heart and dumped his body in a deserted alley. And she had fallen in love — just a little, she reminded herself — with Captain Ty Walker. That might not have been so bad if Ty had not been the enemy, and if she did not feel as if she were being unfaithful to her own dead husband, her beloved Kurt, killed in the invasion of Poland. She feared that Ty loved her back, which made the fact that she was using him even harder.

What kind of woman had she become?

None of this was what she had bargained for when she left Germany in 1939. Yet here she was. There was no going back. She was like the German army with its back to the Volga and thus no hope of retreat. The only way out was forward.

Which was why, less than twenty-four hours after she had shot and killed Carl Fleischmann in her attic, she was back in front of the radio. On the way to the radio table she passed the spot where Fleischmann had lain last night. Eva had scrubbed out the bloodstains herself, leaving the unfinished floorboards brighter where the wood had been scoured.

Last night, the glow from the radio dials had seemed warm, but now it struck her as a soulless light. Nonetheless, she put on her headphones and sat listening, hoping for some contact with one of the U-boats cruising the Atlantic coast of America.

Finally, after midnight, she made contact. The coded message spilled through the headphones and she hurried to copy it down. Then she deciphered the words using the light from her stub of candle.

Use your contact to gain entry to the Ironworker’s retreat. Gather any intelligence regarding invasion plans and then bring original assignment to conclusion. Finish Ironworker at all costs.

Eva frowned down at the message she had translated. That was Berlin for you, always talking in riddles. But she had little doubt this time about the meaning. They wanted her to kill General Eisenhower.

Eva used the candle flame to ignite the scrap of paper and burn it in an ashtray. The Walther pistol, carefully cleaned and reloaded, was back in its usual spot beside the radio. Eva did not put it back in its drawer but instead slipped it into a pocket of the housecoat she had worn into the cold attic. Then she covered the radio table with the quilt and started downstairs.

She found Petra in the kitchen.

“Are you all right, Frau Von Stahl?” the girl asked. “You look pale.”

You would be too, she thought, if you were now ordered to be an assassin. Eva forced a smile. “Nothing that summer can’t cure, Petra. I am tired of this cold.”

“Winter is a cruel time,” Petra said, then pursed her lips as if stopping herself from saying more. They had not discussed what they had done the night before. So long as it was not mentioned, it would be as if it never happened. Eva was convinced that Petra had gone along with disposing of the body out of simple shock and fear. Eva’s hands were shoved into her pockets, the gun gripped in her right hand. Could she count on Petra to keep quiet after what had happened with the warning note? Then again, she knew Petra had acted to protect them both in that case. She didn’t have much choice but to rely on the girl.

With an effort, Eva took her hand off the gun. “A trip might do us good,” she announced. “Pack our bags, Petra. Bring lots of warm clothes. We are taking the train to visit Captain Walker at White Sulphur Springs.”