The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds

by Ian Tregillis

  “Gretel!”

  She clambered out of her makeshift bomb shelter and dusted herself off. Klaus exhaled with relief.

  The room fell silent but for the crackle of flames, and screams that trailed off into sobs. Rudolf shuddered.

  Gretel kneeled next to him and took his hands. Shrapnel had reduced his face to so much meat. His breath came in explosive gasps.

  She leaned close. Like a lover, she caressed his ruined face, kissed his cheek, whispered in his ear. A single word passed her blood-smeared lips:

  “Incoming.”

  She stood. The hem of her dress draped across Rudolf’s face as she stepped over him. Then she sauntered out of the burning room, trailing the flying man’s blood.

  Rudolf stopped shuddering. He died on the spot. Just as Gretel had known he would.

  4 February 1939

  Barcelona, Spain

  The cashier wrinkled his nose. After a day and a half on the road, the smell of incinerated hotel still infused Marsh’s clothes. It even wafted out of his hair. He expected to find soot streaked on his face when he finally used a real washroom. And he couldn’t work up enough saliva to clear the smoked-pork taste from his mouth.

  Marsh let the cashier glimpse the bundle of cash under his hand. The distaste on the other man’s face turned into greed. He licked his lips. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded. Marsh slid his hand across the counter. With that, he traded every pound and peseta for a berth on the last British steamer out of Barcelona.

  Marsh shook his head. Nearly a grand for something that shouldn’t cost one pony. Thank you, Franco. It would have been easier to use the tickets intended for Krasnopolsky, but someone had been watching him; given the fool’s conduct, Marsh couldn’t risk adhering to the original travel plan.

  And now Krasnopolsky was dead, reduced to so much ash in the span of a few heartbeats, along with most of the information he carried. During his journey from Tarragona, Marsh had emptied the unburned scraps from the valise into an envelope along with the cash and Krasnopolsky’s passport. There wasn’t much left: the lower-left corners from a half dozen pages of a memo or report, written in German; half a photograph; and a jumble of acetate strips. The strips were all that remained of an eight-millimeter filmstrip. The film had been coiled on a reel, but when the valise ignited, a portion of the film had melted and disintegrated, rendering the rest a jumbled mess of confetti.

  Marsh had pored over it all a dozen times. The legible pages contained no mention of a Doctor von Westarp or children. The visible portion of the photograph showed an unremarkable farmhouse. And the scraps of film were unintelligible to his naked eyes.

  Marsh took the proffered voucher and retreated back through the crowd mobbing the ticket window. A breeze mingled fear, seaweed, rotting fish, and diesel fuel into a stomach-churning mélange. Every port in Catalonia must have been staggering under the influx of refugees as the Nationalists made their final push into the Pyrenees.

  He headed for his pier, scanning the crowd as he went. There wasn’t much time before his ship departed, but Marsh wanted to find something first. He watched a portly well-dressed man pushing a hand truck piled high with luggage. The man stopped on the boardwalk to pull a pair of eyeglasses from his pocket.

  Aha, thought Marsh. Those should do the trick.

  The man frowned at his ticket, then looked around in search of a placard. Marsh orchestrated his collision with the hand truck to make it appear as though he’d been too intent on his own ticket to notice it. Luggage clattered to the boardwalk.

  “Hijo de puta!”

  “Lo siento! Lo siento, señor.”

  Marsh swiped the eyeglasses while helping the man gather his things. “Lo siento muchísimo.” The man departed with a crack about burying Marsh’s heart in a hole so deep, the Virgin Mary couldn’t find it.

  A piercing shriek echoed throughout the port. The steam whistle on Marsh’s ship, making its penultimate boarding call. People scurried up the gangplank in ones, twos, and threes. Marsh needed to get going, but his curiosity couldn’t be contained any longer.

  A stack of cargo crates formed a passable shelter from the wind and crowds. Marsh hid behind the crates, crouched on a coil of rope. He pulled an acetate fragment from the envelope inside his shirt. What the fire hadn’t destroyed outright it had made very brittle, so he took great care when handling the crisp film. Using the eyeglasses as a makeshift magnifier, he strained to identify the images.

  Twenty frames of a brick wall. The second fragment showed an empty field. The third showed two men in Schutzstaffel uniforms kneeling over an empty container and smiling. The fourth fragment showed a machine gun nest and the long view down a firing range.

  The fifth showed an antiaircraft gun hovering above the same range. Marsh shook his head. Too many hours on the road and not enough sleep. But when he looked again, it truly did look like the eighty-eight was floating in midair. No evidence of an explosion, either, though it was hard to tell from a few frames of heat-damaged film.

  What on God’s green Earth were you mixed up with, Krasnopolsky?

  The fragments crackled against each other when he dropped them back in the envelope. Once the envelope was secured inside his shirt once more, he stood as though he’d merely ducked behind the crates to tie his shoes.

  A gypsy woman stared at him from across the boardwalk with wide plum-dark eyes. She’d been beaten. The skin around one of her eyes looked like the rind of an aubergine; the corner of her mouth quirked up where her split lip had scabbed over.

  Marsh frowned. He sized up her companion, a man with the same olive skin as the woman. Brother? Husband? A tall fellow, but not problematically so. Enjoy beating up women, do you? Marsh cracked his knuckles as he started for the pair.

  Another breeze rolled off the harbor. It tugged up the kerchief tied over her hair and fluttered the braids hanging past her shoulders.

  And jostled the wires connected to her head.

  Marsh stopped. He looked again.

  Wires. In her head.

  The wind died, and the kerchief covered her hair again.

  She winked at him.

  Her companion said something. She turned away. Marsh made to follow them before they disappeared in the throng.

  The whistle on his steamer blew two short, impatient bursts. Final call. He looked over his shoulder. The last few stragglers dashed up the gangplank under the watchful scowl of the porter.

  When he turned back, the woman was gone.

  “Gretel, please.” Klaus tugged at his sister’s hand. “We have to go.”

  Exasperation crept into his voice, though he tried to suppress it. In addition to Rudolf, two technicians had died when the errant mortar shell hit the house. A doctor had also died in the fire during the confused scramble to evacuate. One of the Twins nearly perished, too, before Reinhardt strode through the fire and released her from the restraints on the operating table. Standartenführer Pabst made the decision then and there to terminate training operations in Spain. There was no point in risking further Reichsbehörde assets to another “accident.” They had their field results; it was time to go home.

  “Sorry, brother.” Gretel turned and smiled. The swollen skin around her eye stretched tight. “I’ll be good.”

  Pabst had belted her with a savage backhand across the jaw when he learned of Rudolf’s death. It was her duty, her purpose, to warn them of such dangers, he’d screamed. And, like the incantations of a mad al-chemist, her laughter had transmuted his rage to violence, his open hand to a fist.

  Reinhardt wasn’t punished for burning down the house.

  “What were you staring at?”

  “Daydreams. Posies and gravestones.”

  Klaus sighed. “Our pier is this way,” he said, pulling her through the crowd.

  two

  22 February 1939

  Westminster, London, England

  Brittle scraps of acetate fluttered across Stephenson’s desk as he paged through Marsh
’s report. The charred edges of the document fragments littered the wide expanse of cherrywood with black flakes and smears of carbon. Ashes skittered along the desk and drifted to the carpet at Marsh’s feet every time Stephenson exhaled. They smelled of woodsmoke and scorched leather.

  Marsh rocked on the balls of his feet. Stephenson had been at it for a good half hour.

  Somewhere down on the street the rat-a-tat syncopation of a two-stroke engine drifted out of the white noise of a London morning. A motorbike, probably a Villiers, zipping along Victoria Street, Marsh gauged. Stephenson’s window didn’t afford a grand view, mostly just the buildings across Broadway, but from here on the fifth floor of SIS headquarters, it was possible to glimpse the late-winter sun on the trees of St. James’ Park several streets over.

  “Hmmm.”

  Marsh looked back to his mentor. Stephenson opened a side drawer and produced a jeweler’s loupe, a holdover from his days as a photo recon analyst during the Great War. He examined a random sampling of film scraps with quiet concentration. One by one he held them up toward the window in his single hand, squinting through the magnifying lens. Marsh scooted aside so as not to block what little natural light the window provided.

  Marsh sighed. He pressed the backs of his fingers to his neck and cracked his knuckles against his jaw. Stephenson cleared his throat; Marsh dropped his hands.

  Years of polishing had imbued the wood-paneled walls with a satiny finish that reflected the soft glow of lamplight. The walls matched the bookcases, and Stephenson’s desk. Above the wainscoting hung maps; photographs of a young, two-armed Stephenson in flying leathers; and a few of his wife, Corrie’s, watercolors.

  Stephenson had married a Yank from Tennessee. She tended to paint landscapes and nature studies from memory, evoking the rolling hills of her home. Marsh’s mentor derived a strange amusement from decorating his office with images of plants foreign to a country of gardeners.

  “Well,” said Stephenson at last, still squinting at the film scraps, “I’m quite impressed. When you cock something up, you do it good and proper.”

  “Sir?”

  “I sent you to Spain to run a simple errand.”

  “Sir—”

  “Somebody just swans in and torches your contact and where are you, hmmm? Off getting pissed in the pub.”

  “Sir, it’s not as if some pikey came traipsing along with a bucket of kerosene—”

  “Hmm. This is interesting.” Stephenson held up one of the scraps. “What do you make of this one?”

  Marsh took the film in one hand and the loupe in the other. The fragment contained less than a dozen frames, several of which had been darkened by heat damage. A sequence of eight or nine frames—a fraction of a second—showed a woman standing in front of a brick wall, and then just the brick wall, with no transition from one frame to the next. She was nude except for the belt at her waist connected to her head by what appeared to be wires.

  “Looks like they stopped the camera.” He handed the items back to Stephenson. “Or perhaps this was spliced together from various sources.” He pointed at the film scrap. “Those things in her head. That’s what I saw in Barcelona. Different woman, though.” He shrugged. “It’s not the only oddity in the film, sir.”

  Stephenson waved him toward a chair upholstered in button-tufted chintz. As Marsh took the load off his feet, the old man opened another desk drawer and pulled out a bottle and two glasses.

  “Brandy?”

  “Please.” Marsh sank farther into the chair.

  “I imagine you could use it.”

  A knock sounded at the door while Stephenson poured. He called, “Yes, Marjorie.”

  His secretary peeked inside. “Sir, Commander Pryce from the Admiralty wants—Oh! You’re back.”

  Marsh nodded at her. “Hi, Margie.” She seemed pleased to see him. But she was a married woman, and that caused a pang of loneliness.

  “What ever it is, he’ll have to wait,” said Stephenson.

  “Sir, he said—”

  “Not now. I’ll call him back.”

  She nodded and withdrew.

  As the head of circulating section T (short for “technological surprise”), Stephenson was responsible for gathering intelligence pertaining to military technologies under development within Nazi Germany. Although the section itself was only a few years old, it descended from the historical roots of the organization prior to the Great War, when foreign espionage was the purview of the Admiralty, focused primarily on gauging the strength of the Imperial German Navy. Politically savvy Stephenson therefore maintained close ties with the Admiralty, not least because C, the head of SIS, was a career naval officer.

  Marsh accepted one of the glasses. Stephenson held his up: “To safe travels, and safe returns.” Clink. This ritual had become their custom. Insofar as Stephenson had been a father to Marsh, tradecraft was the family business.

  “This one turned out to be more complicated than we realized,” said Stephenson, settling back into his own chair. Marsh grimaced. It was the nearest thing to an apology he’d ever heard out of the old man. And that made him uneasy.

  Stephenson gestured at the desk with his glass. “So. What should we do with this mess?”

  “It might be possible to copy the remaining frames and to splice together a rough approximation of the original film. That’s what I’d do.”

  Stephenson nodded. “I’ll put out a few feelers. We’ll need somebody good, somebody who can keep his mouth shut. It may take a while. And the photograph?”

  “Could be anywhere. Probably useless, at least until we know more.”

  Stephenson nodded. “And what of the documents?”

  Marsh shrugged. “Difficult to say. One gets the impression that they’re excerpts from medical reports.”

  “Your man did mention a doctor, I note,” said Stephenson, sifting through Marsh’s report again. “Von Westarp? Medical doctor, presumably.” He put the loupe back in his desk and produced a packet of cigarettes. An American brand, Lucky Strike.

  Over the skritch of Stephenson’s match, Marsh added, “He also said something about children. Got rather worked up about it. Peculiar.”

  Around the cigarette dangling from his lips, Stephenson asked, “And what, I wonder, does one thing have to do with the other?”

  “My thoughts exactly, sir.”

  The two men watched in quiet contemplation as shadows slowly inched along the street. The tip of Stephenson’s cigarette flared marigold orange in the growing darkness.

  He stamped it out in a marble ashtray and turned on another lamp. “Right, then. First things first. I’m opening a new file. Until we resolve this issue, or it resolves itself, refer to this matter under the rubric ‘Milkweed.’” At this last he nodded at the wall over Marsh’s head.

  Marsh craned his neck. Another of Corrie’s watercolors hung over the chair. “Understood.”

  “And as for Milkweed, there are a few people who ought to be apprised of this. If I can call them together on short notice, are you free this evening, Marsh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Excellent. I’ll ring you.”

  Stephenson’s car, a gleaming cream-colored Rolls Royce Mulliner, rolled up at half seven. A gray cloud roiled out when Marsh entered. The interior smelled of leather and Lucky Strikes. Stephenson rapped the roof once Marsh was settled, signaling his driver to proceed.

  From Marsh’s home in Walworth they drove west. The Rolls thumped as they crossed onto the steel spans of Lambeth Bridge. Stephenson’s driver swung the car north on Millbank when they passed beneath a granite obelisk and its pineapple finial at the far side of the Thames.

  Soon Victoria Tower loomed out of the night, a square stone giant wrapped in fog and lamplight. They passed the Perpendicular Gothic filigrees of Westminster Palace: Tudor details on a classic body, as somebody once said. Marsh noted the gradations where the crumbling Yorkshire limestone was being replaced with honey-colored clipsham.

  Th
ey skirted Parliament Square, passed the Cenotaph, and continued north onto Whitehall.

  “Sir, where are we going?”

  Stephenson turned. “Do you know what I miss the most about the old days?”

  “Your arm?”

  “Ha. Cheeky lad,” said the older man. “No. Back then, we didn’t have so many damnable meetings. Now it’s all we ever do.” His eyes twinkled. “This one’s a bit above your regular pay grade, I’m afraid. I trust you won’t mind, just this once.”

  Oh, hell. That meant sitting in a room full of tossers who would discount Marsh the moment he opened his mouth. He’d had quite enough of that at university.

  The car passed through the narrow arch of a long, low screen into the courtyard of a pseudo-Palladian three-story brick building. The Admiralty.

  Marsh followed Stephenson through a side door into a neoclassical rabbit warren. Their footsteps echoed through marble colonnades, twisting stairwells, and narrow corridors. At length the older man stopped before a single door of simple walnut. He knocked.

  A pale man—any one of countless bureaucrats in this lightless den, Marsh thought—ushered them into a dark room. Marsh smelled brandy and the mustiness of old paper when he stepped inside. A pair of brass lamps with jade-green lampshades stood on twin davenports flanking the room. The lamps cast their illumination in tight circles near the center of the room, leaving the periphery in deep shadows.

  Fabric rustled in one corner of the room, as of somebody shifting in a chair. Elsewhere somebody suffered a coughing fit. Deep shadows, but not empty.

  “About time, Stephenson.” A man with a great aquiline nose glanced at his pocket watch. Marsh recognized the Earl Stanhope, First Lord of the Admiralty.

  Marsh leaned toward Stephenson. “Sir,” he whispered, “may I ask what I’m doing here?”

  “I’d like you to tell these gentlemen”—his gesture encompassed the room, shadows and all—“about your experience in Spain.”