The Night of Shooting Stars

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The Night of Shooting Stars Page 23

by Ben Pastor


  This side of forty, white with rancour and the long hospital stay, Osterloh kept his grimace-like smile. “We continued to see each other for a while, but I knew it was over. She was not the same in bed, and if that isn’t a signal … She wasn’t the same when we spoke, either. She treated me more and more like a stranger. ‘He’s a soldier, isn’t he?’ I asked her. ‘I bet it’s your usual jackbooted buck who makes women’s heads spin. I thought you didn’t like soldiers.’ ‘I like this one.’ That’s what she said. But we weren’t thinking about a world war then. I said, ‘You realize soldiers are always away. It doesn’t seem the sort of relationship you’d like.’ ‘Well, I like him. I like him.’ And then I found out – from Herr Dortmueller the industrialist, who met you in Leipzig at that time – that it was our young Baron von Bora, whom everyone talked about because he was such a great horseman and such a promising officer. I choked with spite, I admit. But I kept my sangfroid enough not to make a scene, much less try to get in touch with my rival. And I was far-sighted enough to warn Benedikta that she’d tire of you, too. I was right, wasn’t I?”

  Provoked as he was, Bora found the accumulated bitterness in Osterloh a sight that disgusted him, as well as making him angry. Knowing Dikta, the chance that she might go back to an old lover was nil. As of the most recent reports, she’d chosen to live in Portugal, away from the war and from men who get hurt in war.

  “This conversation may be therapeutic for you,” he snapped back, “but it annoys me. Please come to the point, if you have one, otherwise I will bid you goodbye.”

  The last thing Osterloh wanted was to throw away a chance to speak his fill. His inflamed eyes trailed away from Bora’s figure and looked elsewhere. “The point is that I hoped she’d look me up once she got her annulment. To get even with you, if nothing else; believe me, I anticipated it. Foolish of me. She never called – and then the March bombs did this to me, so you can imagine … If she left you after you lost a hand, imagine what she’d think of me, in the state I’m in.”

  “I don’t want to imagine it, and I have nothing to tell you.”

  The accidental meeting had the unexpected power of stripping off whatever dressing time had placed on his grief over Dikta. Suddenly, Bora felt his loss once more exposed and bleeding like a fresh wound, nearly too painful to bear. He clung on to his pride to conceal it, even if it meant staying there instead of walking away.

  Insects flying across the grounds from hedges blooming elsewhere speckled the air. When a ladybird landed on the armrest of his wheelchair, Osterloh squashed it with his thumb.

  “With the war going as it is, Colonel …” He wiped his finger on the tartan blanket covering the stumps of his thighs. “I have no illusions; what about you? I admit I find myself fantasizing that a Russian private might sooner or later teach our girl a lesson in humility.” Vindictiveness was like a fluid that rose from Osterloh’s maimed body to his eyes, brimming from them, making them narrow. The red in them was such that he seemed about to weep blood. “I can see it – Dikta back in Berlin: she in one of her Paris gowns, and a Russian with grubby underpants …” He followed the movement of Bora’s hand to his holster, and made a sarcastic face. “Here,” he said, “Here,” pointing with his forefinger between his eyebrows, hard enough to dig his nail into the skin. “Oh, please. You don’t know the favour you’d do me.”

  Which, of all the reasons not to do it, was for Bora the sole, mean-spirited one that kept him from killing Willy Osterloh.

  When the same nurse’s assistant who’d served tea saw them confronting each other, she hurried over from the end of the garden path with an alarmed look on her young face. Osterloh told her everything was fine, and stayed her with a gesture. To Bora, whose telltale pallor he must have relished, he cooed provokingly, “I just wanted to know if it was you, the so-good-in-bed-and-in-the-saddle Martin-Heinz von Bora. Ta-ta for now.” The smile left his face as he nodded to the nurse’s assistant to come and fetch him. While she wheeled him towards the shade of a bird-filled tree, he continued to look back, craning his neck. And he was crying.

  4:15 P.M.

  After his check-up, Bruno Lattmann sat once more on the veranda, leafing through the periodicals Bora had brought him. He at once caught his friend’s surliness and took it as a sign of deep worry about the political implications of his inquiry. “Well,” he said, “I’m not going to let you leave while you’re in this temper.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Rubbish.” Lattmann rummaged in the pocket of his pyjama shirt. “I scribbled it while you were out smoking.” He took out a slip of paper, which he folded and refolded. “Remember the girl I mentioned the first time you were here – the one with the sick boyfriend, yes? Meet her, will you – what’s the harm in it?”

  “You’re a lousy matchmaker, Bruno.”

  “Why? She’s just a good girl who needs a shag.”

  “And I’m a good boy who needs a shag?”

  “Tell me it’s not true.”

  Bora had been furious since meeting Willy Osterloh, but Lattmann’s well-meant concern was suddenly irresistible. “It isn’t true that I’m a good boy,” he told him. “But I do need a shag.”

  “Hallelujah. In case you’re in the right mood, here’s her phone number.”

  Bora’s attitude changed the moment he unfolded the scrap Lattmann had handed him.

  “This is the telephone exchange for the Reserve Army. Does she work there?”

  “Remember the evacuation order for women and children; it’s mostly those living in the suburbs, like Eva, or those with a place of employment who stayed behind.”

  This changed matters – a little, at least. Bora stowed the number away. “I’ll see if I have time to give her a call.”

  “Wait. What day of the week is it?”

  “Thursday. Why?”

  “Because Emmy Pletsch comes to visit him on Thursdays. That’s how she and Eva met. I bet she’s still inside.”

  “Leave it be, Bruno. I’ll call her if I have time. You’re right about the other matter, though. I can’t let Salomon run loose, and I must clear matters privately with those he supposedly overheard. Whom should I go and see at the Reserve Army?”

  Lattmann’s face had the expression of one whose well-meant advice has succeeded beyond his expectations. “Might as well seek an unofficial interview with Stauffenberg himself, if he will receive you.” He pointed to the pocket where Bora had stored the phone number. “Ask Emmy Pletsch, she can arrange it.”

  As it happened, at that hour a handful of visitors, relatives and colleagues, were leaving for the day. “What a stroke of luck, it’s her!” Lattmann nodded in the direction of a fair-haired young woman looking onto the veranda, and before Bora could stop him he was already waving at her to get her attention. “She always stops to say hello.”

  Bora saw that it would be easier to stick to business with her than he’d anticipated. She wore a uniform, and he didn’t like uniformed women on principle. They were like the rest of his associates and subalterns, not at all objects of interest. He’d met young auxiliaries, pretty and more than eager – his secretary in Rome was only the last of a series – but those had been Dikta’s days, and he hadn’t even considered them.

  Aside from the field-grey, however, he couldn’t find much to dislike about Emmy Pletsch. Trim, fair-skinned, she was anything but ugly, and surely under thirty. His first, practical, thought was: I’m slim but, as Ida Rüdiger puts it, a tall and sturdy lad, and she’s rather small. When she approached to greet Lattmann, she became more interesting than she’d been from a distance. Her right eye, Bora noticed, was of a shade of blue slightly different from the left one: the peculiarity gave her an unusual, asymmetric appearance, of which she was perhaps conscious, because she quickly looked away. A little mark on the bridge of her nose suggested that she wore glasses to read. Her hands, square and short-fingered like a farm girl’s, contrasted with a pair of attractive, slender legs.

  “Lieutenant Colone
l – Major,” she addressed the officers. “How are you today, Major Lattmann?”

  “Ask something else, Staff Leader Pletsch,” Bruno sneered. “No tobacco, no drink, no wife. I’d climb the walls if I could. May I introduce you to my good colleague, Lieutenant Colonel Martin von Bora?”

  Her hesitation did not escape Bora. Hearing his name would hardly surprise her if she had merely heard Bruno or Eva mention it. Had she heard it spoken at Bendlerstrasse, like Salomon had? In any case, she rallied immediately.

  “Colonel von Bora.”

  “Staff Leader Pletsch.”

  “The colonel will be in Berlin for only a matter of days,” Lattmann explained.

  “Oh. I wish you a good stay, Colonel.”

  “Thank you.”

  That was all. As she walked away, Bora had the impression of someone who no longer endures strain with patience, but with resignation. Even the touch of rebellion against one’s lot that patience often implies had gone from her. Something about her shoulders and the way she held her head indicated a proud, quiet surrender. As for the rest – such details were unlikely to escape him even in pensive moments – she was shapely and petite (Bora still measured women according to Dikta’s athletic build), not unlike Mrs Murphy in Rome.

  I scribbled a crazy note to Mrs Murphy, which said that I hoped to marry her one day, although she has a husband and a twenty-year-old stepson. I believed it when I wrote it, and I needed to assign myself a task to accomplish, to give me a reason to carry on. I still think about her, but more hopelessly than when we last saw each other.

  “Well?” Lattmann stared at Bora, who said nothing.

  “Well?” he repeated.

  “She wears a uniform.”

  “Not in bed, she wouldn’t.”

  “Leave it, Bruno. You’ve done your good deed for the day.” It would take more than a pretty girl to take his mind off the mountain of trouble facing him. Trying to sort out his priorities would require every ounce of concentration Bora could muster. He glanced at the watch on his right wrist. “Nebe’s man will be here to fetch me any time now. I have to go.”

  Silent and immaculate, meanwhile, white-stockinged nurse’s assistants were making the rounds of the veranda with their inescapable mint tea.

  “The care of German heroes has passed from Valkyries to nurses serving dishwater,” Lattmann grumbled at the sight. “Before they come here with my portion of slop, know that I’d have kept my mouth shut if you hadn’t asked. You made me tell you what you’re up against, Martin, so you, too, owe me the truth.”

  Bora slowly let the air out of his lungs. Maimed and injured men sat around, waiting for permanent disability, or death, or health regained and a return to duty at the front. Willy Osterloh was not in his corner. I really would have done him a favour by shooting him, Bora told himself. But I’m not that merciful.

  “The truth?” He patted Lattmann on the back, an unusual show of sociability for him. “This assignment is the last drop, Bruno. Being shrewd, covering up my tracks – I’m no cleverer than those after me. You were right about Russia and Italy: I’d gone too far, and knew that I had. This is the ‘something else’ I’m reconciled to.”

  “Please, don’t tell me it’s as bad as all this.”

  “Let’s just say that it’s a matter of time. Like my late uncle, I can’t blame anyone else for the bed I’ve made.”

  Lattmann swallowed. “Give me a cigarette. Blast, man, give me a cigarette. I’m dying to taste tobacco in my mouth, even if I don’t smoke it.” He snatched the cigarette Bora reluctantly handed him and sucked on it furiously. “It can’t be this bad,” he groaned. “What will your family say?”

  “My family will accept things, as I expect them to do.” Bora was so ashamed of saying this much, of revealing this much about himself, that he blushed under his tan and had to look down.

  The awkward moment threatened to turn grim. Lattmann chewed on the tip of the unlit cigarette. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but eleven years ago, when my father had his own radio programme in Berlin, the gossip was that the SA or Heldorff had a hand in the matter of Hanussen’s end. Heldorff became top dog in the Berlin police two years later. Father kept the story under his hat, especially as the Reichstag went up in smoke the day after the murder. Dangerous as the rumour was, about the death of a Jew who collected important debtors, it did not stack up to a national crisis … whether or not he could see into the future, like his Aryan replacement Niemeyer.”

  “If it’s true, it took some gall on Nebe’s part to saddle me with the task to expose his counterpart in the police.”

  “Can you think of a cleverer move? Come closer.”

  Forcing a smile, Lattmann pulled out three flat packets from his pyjama top and pushed them into Bora’s breast pocket. “In memory of the old days, when back in Kharkov fear made us throw up or grow horny. For future use.”

  Bora did not want to contradict him. He silently buttoned the pocket over the army condoms.

  4:50 P.M.

  As he followed the path to the gate, halfway across the park and ahead of him he glimpsed Emmy Pletsch in conversation with Sister Velhagen near a tall, flowering hedge. The nurse was shaking her head at whatever Emmy asked her; no drama followed, only a weariness of stance and that controlled despondency perceivable even from afar. Ever so briefly, war seemed to Bora nothing but an unforgivable abuse committed by egotistical, unthinking males. We are wounded, we die, and compel grieving women to stand about us, whispering.

  He waited at a discreet distance until the two women parted from each other, and then caught up with the auxiliary.

  “Staff Leader Pletsch, one moment, please: is there a chance I could meet with Colonel von Stauffenberg later today?”

  She turned around. Her eyes were moist, and when she saw him directly behind her she became a little defiant. “The colonel is not available today, Lieutenant Colonel.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  “Sorry, unlikely.”

  Damn the bureaucracy. This was why he despised headquarters. Bora remained patient, because she evidently needed a moment to pull herself together, and he meant to reach his aim through her. “Will he be available at all during the week?”

  “No. It is impossible.”

  The blossoming hedge along the path let out a balmy aroma; bees and golden flies swarmed above it. The fragrance in the air and her inflexible words oddly became one in Bora’s mind, as if nature were trying to mitigate the refusal. The fact that she did not give or ask for details, but only said no, made him wonder: auxiliaries of her rank were more than just secretaries or assistants; the firmness of her denial suggested complete unavailability on Stauffenberg’s part. She must have orders to that effect. Bora, who seldom took rejection well, physically loomed over her.

  “Well, I have every intention of meeting him, with or without an appointment. Inform him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  5:00 P.M.

  Grimm’s replacement had not yet arrived. Bora paced back and forth in front of the gate. Looking out, he could saw the site where the fugitives were caught and presumably burned alive behind a screen of leafy trees. Dove-coloured smoke rose to a certain height and then spread horizontally, as if an invisible ceiling blocked its further ascent. In Russia, in Ukraine, Bora would not have given a second’s thought to such marks of horror. One met them daily, perpetrated by both sides. There, one told oneself, This is the Eastern front; since time immemorial, we have butchered one another along these frontiers. But here! Past the line of trees and the smouldering barn were gentle heights, and the shore of the Blankensee, and beyond was one of the old artillery ranges, south of Greater Berlin. The city limits lay only eighteen miles north of here. Pointless to wonder whether the fugitives were in fact Russian, or responsible for this or that crime (including the timely murder of Ergard Dietz). Bora was tired of steeling himself against bestiality.

  And he was still angry. Osterloh’s venom, followed by Bruno’s well-in
tentioned meddling, renewed his bitterness (but it tasted like guilt more than bitterness) over losing Dikta. Angry with her as he was, he was angrier with himself for feeling so bereft. I miss her now and always will, he admitted. As much as I try to convince others and myself that I make do, and have come to terms with the annulment, the thought of being for ever separated from her is intolerable.

  From the grounds of the sanatorium behind him drifted a scented, reassuring warmth. Yet during the cold season the same lofty trees had to rage and bellow in the wind.

  Bora stood facing the gate, waiting, averting his eyes from the smoke and breathing slowly to compose himself, so he didn’t notice the nurse until she was right beside him.

  In her seersucker smock, Sister Velhagen had that appearance between a nun and a mess-hall cook that made some German nurses so sterile and unattractive.

  “Do you have someone to pick you up, Lieutenant Colonel? And are you travelling to Berlin?”

  When Bora answered yes, she asked if he would consent to share the car with three people. “They are an SS lieutenant who has a broken leg and hobbles on crutches, a Chilean radiologist bound for the Landhausstrasse Red Cross hospital in Wilmersdorf, and Staff Leader Pletsch of the Reserve Army. I wouldn’t impose, but they have no other means of rapidly reaching the city.”

  It was an imposition. Bora wavered a moment and then replied in the affirmative, but not because Emmy Pletsch was among the passengers. The mixed company would justify his foray to Beelitz in the eyes of any Kripo man.

  Sister Velhagen resorted to one of those quick, unamused smiles, without a show of teeth. “That is excellent. They’ve all agreed that it will be fine if you leave them at the Red Cross hospital – they can make their way from there.”

  At this point, an exchange of favours was only fair: “Sister,” Bora asked (without really knowing why he did so; the idea had crept unwanted into his mind), “how is Osterloh, the engineer?”

 

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