by Matt Killeen
Stage fright. It’s stage fright. Control your breathing.
It’s what I’m about to do . . .
THIS IS THE SHOW. Canceled, runaway success, no crowd or an audience of thousands. PLAY YOUR PART.
Finally Lisbeth was helped over the side of the lifeboat, clambered onto the hull, and up onto the deck. She was dressed in borrowed sailor’s clothes with the necklace lying over a woolen sweater. She held it like it was a lifeline.
With her other hand she rubbed at her face nervously, removing a streak of makeup and revealing the scars on her cheek. Sarah reminded herself that her physical appearance meant nothing. It didn’t represent her state of mind or whether she was good or evil. In fact Sarah felt a pang of sympathy . . . then she understood that this was the desired effect.
Jansen’s crew had pushed the lifeboat away with poles and were retreating as ordered, but she could feel the eyes of the Schiffer and the bridge crew on them, not to mention the British sailors twenty meters away.
“Come here, Liebchen,” Lisbeth cried after a pause, holding her arms wide and stepping forward.
“Don’t come near me,” Sarah growled. She could feel a loss of control humming in her cheeks, making her want to whine and cajole and cry. She squeezed her teeth together until it stopped.
“What’s the matter, Ursula?”
“I know who you are, what you’ve really done. You’re the White Devil.”
“Who told you that? It was Klodt who—”
“The mask had your makeup inside. You killed all those people, hundreds that I saw and how many more before then? You’ve been in Africa for ten years? Fifteen?”
Lisbeth closed her eyes and screwed up her face.
Before, Sarah would have accepted this action immediately as something born of pain and suffering, something that she needed to repair, to fix, to drive away. Now it looked twisted and inauthentic, like a small child trying to manipulate an adult.
“Every medicine there has ever been has cost lives at some point,” Lisbeth managed.
“Medicine?”
“All medicine is poison. It’s a question of dose. Ursula,” Lisbeth said more urgently, stepping forward. Sarah fought the urge to retreat and stood her ground. The woman’s voice dropped, grew cloying, tearful. “We can pay them back, all of them. The English and the Americans. Then we can start on the Nazis, and then Stalin and his thugs, then the Japanese and that Ishii. You and me, we can scrub the earth clean. Ursula, please.”
Lisbeth reached out to her.
Sarah could step forward into her arms, receive her love. She could tell Jansen there had been a terrible error, and they could travel together—
“Imagine, everyone who ever hurt you, everyone who ever hurt someone you love, punished, stopped from hurting anyone again,” Lisbeth continued, a tremor in her voice. “We could rescue the Slavs, the blacks, the Jews if you want. You can decide. We’ll do it together.”
Sarah could . . . control her, maybe, or stop her worst excesses, convince her to give up on infecting England, then . . . figure out the best way to use the weapon. The appropriate victims—
The spell was broken.
“A kind of triage?” Sarah sneered.
“No, not triage . . . but if a limb is beginning to rot, you saw it off. You cut out the tumor before it grows. To save the patient—”
“As if you care about those people . . .”
“Of course I care. I’m a doctor, I care about everyone. I just have to make hard decisions, that’s all.”
“But you didn’t ask about your father.”
“Why . . . what happened to my stepfather?”
“Your father didn’t make it, but you never even thought of asking.”
“He wasn’t a good man . . .”
“No. Weak, craven, nasty, and evil . . . but you could forget all about him because . . . you have to remind yourself that you’re supposed to care,” Sarah said, the understanding seeping into her voice. “Give me the sample,” she demanded, holding out a hand.
Lisbeth changed in an instant, like she had torn off a mask. There was rage in her eyes, and it was cold.
“I don’t have it,” she answered, eyebrows raised, eyes wide.
“It’s around your neck,” Sarah said flatly.
“Oh, this.” Lisbeth touched her necklace. “This is empty, Liebchen. I poured the contents into the water barrel of that lifeboat.”
Sarah turned to look at the British sailors. Forty men, among them several of the refugees from Libreville. They were watching, confused but exhausted. No one was drinking. Yet. Or no one was drinking anymore.
“One of them could be infected. Maybe they all are. What are you going to do, Ursula?” Lisbeth crowed. “Are you going to let them live and see? Or are you going to cut the infection out? Are you going to be strong or hard? Which is which?”
The woman was daring her to do something about it. The tactic required Sarah to be overwhelmed, to be unable to take the next step. Lisbeth thought Sarah too compassionate, too human, to do what needed to be done.
Sarah had struggled with the idea that Lisbeth had seen something of herself in Ursula . . . That Lisbeth might have believed that Ursula could be corrupted, or had already been corrupted by her experiences, as Lisbeth had been.
She could have had Lisbeth shot immediately, but she hadn’t, and not just because she wanted to know the fate of the sample. Sarah had wanted to know if Lisbeth really had infected her with her own tainted soul. Had she fallen for Lisbeth’s artifice because she was also contaminated?
But . . . she thinks I’m too good to kill them all, thought Sarah.
The realization was like an absolution.
She felt unburdened. Weightless.
She had been judged by evil, and found wanting, by its own standards. Sarah was never part of Lisbeth’s plans, or at least she had shown herself incompatible with them.
The relief was total.
It made the next act an easy one.
“You think I’ll let them go, you think I’m too nice.” Sarah hissed the last word and smiled.
Lisbeth shook off the last vestiges of her disguise. “Let me make this easy for you.” She pulled her necklace from her neck. She began to unscrew the top. “I’ve got a little bit left, enough for me, and you.”
Sarah took her other arm from behind her back. In her hand was Lady Sakura’s derringer.
“That’s tiny!” Lisbeth laughed.
Sarah took a step forward, aimed, and squeezed the trigger as Clementine had taught her.
The low-velocity bullet moved so sluggishly Sarah could see it travel through the air.
Lisbeth watched it, too, right up until it struck her face.
In that moment Sarah saw Lisbeth horrified and realized that nothing about Lisbeth up until that point had been real. It had all been an act, to provoke a desired response.
As Lisbeth slumped to the deck at Sarah’s feet, there was a cry from the lifeboat, where several of the British sailors had stood in shock, and a gasp behind her from the bridge. Sarah pushed the necklace clear of Lisbeth’s chapped hand with a foot. Seeing it was still sealed, she picked it up and cast the stone as far as she could into the ocean.
Sarah had been cold, but not from the wind or the spray. From her core to her skin, she had felt a chill that didn’t hurt or discomfort her. An unemotional resolve. But standing over Lisbeth’s corpse, it was fading fast, like the last sand running through an egg timer, leaving behind an empty glass. At the bottom, she filled with doubt, guilt, and nausea.
She didn’t need a rain of fire, the lake of ice, or the mouth of Satan that Dante described. She had no need of a cursed valley of dead babies, a dark abyss, or the waiting room of shame that her mother talked about.
Hell was in the here and now. A place of lamentation of her own ma
king.
She thought of der Werwolf, and the end of her vow, realizing now what it meant.
Kill all those it is within my power to kill.
And, finding myself in hell, deliver you to the devil myself.
EPILOGUE
December 16, 1940
THE U-113 CRAWLED into the harbor at Kiel on a bitterly, painfully cold morning. Only the very robust, or the very in love, were waiting to greet the returning crew on the frost-rimed quayside. A few dockworkers and sailors of the Kriegsmarine stopped to see the apocalyptic damage suffered by the iron coffin wheezing into port, but it was no weather for spectating. It was shaping up to be a winter for hunkering down and getting on with things.
The four-week voyage had been an exercise in sustained fear and miserable tension, as the U-boat had limped home, the long way around the British Isles, barely capable of submerging if attacked and probably incapable of surfacing again if it had. Yet the journey continued unmolested, unseen, and unremarked upon by the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force.
After a brief heated argument, they towed Virulent’s lifeboat and new water barrel behind them for two weeks. The Oberleutnant wouldn’t countenance killing the survivors on the off-chance that they were infected, and Sarah was gratified to discover that she could not bring herself to order it. It was hugely dangerous, the extra time cutting them loose in the event of an attack would probably have been fatal, but the bizarre convoy was left alone long enough to ensure that no one aboard became ill, just more and more irritated. When they cut the boat loose, there was a profound sense of relief and no little satisfaction that they had not erred on the side of caution.
After Lisbeth’s death the crew would not look Sarah in the eyes and avoided her where they could. Now Sarah stood on the torn bow deck under the conning tower, as had become her habit. A murderer returning to the scene of the crime. She was wrapped in multiple clothing layers and a leather smock coat that trailed on the floor behind her. Nobody had volunteered to give her warmer clothing as they sailed north, so in the end she just took some. She was surefooted now and unconcerned by the pitch and roll of the boat in the winter waters. Somewhere in what felt like the incineration and extinguishing of her soul, she hadn’t lost her seasickness so much as no longer cared about it. This, she presumed, was what they meant by getting your sea legs.
She had watched the smooth, curved thirteen-story tower of the Laboe Naval Memorial grow on the horizon until it towered over the estuary, silhouetted by the rising sun. It was impossible to miss. It marked home and safety for many. But it also demanded attention, a remembrance.
So Sarah had made herself remember.
Her mother. Schäfer. Stern. The other guards of Schäfer’s estate. Foch. The Bateke boy who ran. Lieutenant La Roux and his men. Hasse. Bofinger. Jansen’s six men. The crew of Virulent and half the passengers from the Ittenbach, save the forty survivors.
Lisbeth Fischer.
She made that 170 people. Give or take two or three.
Ngobila. Though she had not caused his death, this man, like the infected villages, and millions of others round the world, had suffered and died in European imperial hands. Sarah felt sullied and implicated by it. She felt remembrance was the least she could do.
How many had she saved? Thousands. At the very least. But was that the way that the mathematics of death worked? How many need she save to strike off the casualties? How many saved lives needed to justify the murders?
She’d saved millions of Slavs, too . . . but that figure seemed ridiculous. Fantastical. How would they kill millions? Who would do that? And why?
But she did know, after a moment’s thought. She had seen it happening, heard how it had happened before and knew how it would all happen again. People would do that. The Nazis for land and racial purity. The Belgians for money. The British and French for not much more than that, wrapped up as a patronizing racist paternalism—imagined fathers to a whole continent, but with all the secrets and horrors of Professor Schäfer behind closed doors.
She had watched the port grow in front of her, seen the warships, the busy cranes, the new U-boats, and their bombproof pens. There was a war happening, here and now. This country she was returning to was not just the master of Europe. It was hungry for more and would stop at nothing to make that happen. Nothing.
Sarah took this knowledge and hugged it close, warmed it, and would feed it, in the hope that it would guide her in the months to come.
It was with these thoughts that Sarah saw the Captain standing on the quayside, in the cold, with the lovers.
What was this man now? Safety? A mentor? Her family? Was he any of these things anymore?
As the ship tied off, the crew, the remains of the crew, were lining up for dismissal. Sarah decided to take her leave immediately, but as she reached the gangplank, something made her turn to the bridge, where Jansen stood with the ginger Wachoffizier. She straightened up and saluted.
“Get off my boat,” Jansen growled.
Sarah turned back to the land, unsurprised, but a voice behind her made her stop.
“Thank you for not damning us all,” Esser said.
“Thank you for your help. You’ve saved . . . lives, many lives,” she managed.
“You know,” he said, shrugging, “some people believe that hell is just somewhere you have your sins burned away, so you can finally be with God. That there is only shame in this life.”
Esser stood a distance from the others, and they couldn’t be overheard. She leaned in. “The Jews believe that, Oberbootsmann.” She sighed dismissively.
He offered a hand. “Lev Herschel Esser. Pleased to meet you,” he said quietly.
She took his hand and shook it. “I’m an agent of the Abwehr. Why are you telling me this?”
“Take care, Sarah,” he whispered. “And mind you don’t talk in your sleep anymore.”
She had trouble crossing the gangplank and climbing the quayside steps.
The Captain looked healthy. There was color in his cheeks and a clarity to his eyes—not the knife-edge focus of the Pervitin, but something approaching his previously centered, single-minded self.
He also looked pleased to see her, but that could have been one of his many masks.
“I had a very interesting chat with Admiral Canaris,” he said. “He wanted to know why I was on my way back from the Bay of Guinea on a U-boat I’d requisitioned, and yet coming to see him in his offices on the Tirpitzufer at the same time.”
“Things got complicated, but rest assured the admiral will be happy with the results.” Sarah shrugged. “Depending on what he was actually asking us to do, of course.”
“Of course. A long story for a long car ride probably.”
“Probably. Britain is still in the war?” she asked.
“And will remain so. The Reich is returning my barges unused until further notice. I will still be charging.”
“Of course you will.”
“And bombs have fallen on Berlin. Another promise broken to the German people.” He smiled. “Those are stacking up now.”
“So where’s your racist friend? Back in Paris, or back in the Dreckloch he hates so much?”
The Captain missed a beat. “Claude got sick. He . . . It was quick. Turns out I had a lot of leftover morphine . . .” He smiled, evidently without feeling it. “So he didn’t suffer.”
The hairs on Sarah’s neck prickled, and she had to catch her breath. If Claude had contracted the disease, she must have been very, very close to death. She remembered Claude pouring the bleach over her head. In all probability that had saved her life, at the expense of his own.
“I’m sorry, I know he was your friend.”
“Yes, I need to choose those more carefully . . . He was a good man, once. But he let the world make him hard.”
A chill filled her chest, like a gust of the win
ter wind had entered her. Had Clementine been infected after all? Had she escaped only to spread the disease inadvertently? She pictured Clementine, dying alone, far from home.
Sarah wobbled, struggling between sympathy and panic, as if on a loose roof ridge tile, high above the pavement below. She quashed the emotions. Clementine had survived everything else life had thrown at her, even if others had paid the price. Sarah would not have bet against her now.
Sarah found herself with eyes closed and screwing up her face. She had to break this new habit, borrowed from a monster.
“Do we get hard, or do we get strong, that’s the question . . .” She looked back at the submarine. “What do we do now, Captain Floyd?”
“I thought you’d like to go back to Berlin.”
“No, I mean, how do we fight the Nazis when the cost of doing it is so high?” she said softly. “When I’ve done such, terrible, terrible things and that’s a success. That’s the job.”
He looked at her with an expression that might have been sympathy but could easily have been the confusion of not understanding, a lack of empathy.
“I mean, you’ve done terrible things—” she continued.
“Thank you,” he said flatly.
“How do you live with yourself? How do you forgive yourself?”
“I think I’ve demonstrated recently that dealing with those things remains a work in progress. But you fight for what’s right, no matter how it’s done. Then you commit, you own it. Own your deeds.”
Commit to the move.
“And what do we do? Are you yourself again?”
“I’m six weeks clean.”
“You cannot ever do that again. This”—she waved a hand in between them—“it doesn’t work without you, the real you . . . Whoever that really is,” she added with a chuckle. Then she looked right up at him, the last of the little girl. “I have to be able to rely on you. Promise me it’s over, forever.”
“I promise.”
A promise. From a liar, who sometimes told the truth. Which of these was it? Did she trust him?
Not at all.