The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds

by Ian Tregillis

  Marsh rolled down the window. The man in the road approached the driver-side door and saluted. “Heil Hitler.”

  It took a moment for Marsh’s brain, running on a cocktail of fear and adrenaline, to process the rank insignia on his coat: SS-Obersturmführer. A lieutenant. Marsh outranked him. He returned the salute, relaxing.

  The lieutenant said, “Guten Morgen, Herr Hauptsturmführer.” A cloud of his breath hovered between them in the still air. Black blemishes marred the man’s face and nose. Frostbite.

  “Be quick. I’m in a hurry,” said Marsh.

  “Apologies, sir. But the standartenführer”—the frostbitten lieutenant indicated his companion—“requires your vehicle.”

  Standartenführer. Colonel.

  Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Marsh fought to keep his voice steady. “I’ve been ordered to return to Berlin at once.”

  “Berlin? Excellent! So has the standartenführer.”

  “But—I must—”

  The lieutenant called to his senior officer. Their senior officer. “Sir, the hauptsturmführer has been ordered to Berlin as well.” He jogged around to the car’s passenger side and opened the rear door.

  Marsh was trapped. It was too late to don the wires and attempt to talk his way out of this. There was nothing he could do except wait for the officer to climb inside, and then drive the man to Berlin.

  Or, actually, no. He didn’t have to drive.

  Marsh stepped out of the car and saluted the approaching officer. “Heil Hitler!” He played the moment for everything he was worth. “Guten Morgen, Herr Standartenführer.”

  The colonel returned his salute with a halfhearted wave. “Devil take these backstabbing Communists,” he muttered. “Straight to hell. Every one of them.” His breath smelled of a stomach made sour by too much strong coffee and not enough food.

  “Trust it to them to find their spine just now,” said Marsh. The col o -nel ignored him.

  Marsh turned to the lieutenant once the colonel had settled inside. “Take us to Berlin, Obersturmführer.”

  “Jawohl.”

  By the time the lieutenant had settled into the driver’s seat and Marsh had settled into the front passenger seat, the convoy was on the move again. Loud snoring emanated from the backseat soon after the lieutenant had the car in gear.

  They followed the convoy through the outskirts of the city. The streets were clear of all but military traffic and those vehicles, like his own, on Reich business. It was impossible to tell how much of this was by virtue of people opting to stay home, and how much by virtue of the fact that many of the civilians had frozen to death.

  The flow of traffic slowed to little better than a brisk walk in several places; burst water mains transformed entire intersections, even major traffic circles, into skating rinks. They passed a house gutted by fire. A fire probably set by the residents themselves in a bid to stay alive. A truck from the local fire brigade blocked part of the road. The hoses had ruptured. The resulting geyser had coated the road and the truck itself in the instants before the water froze. One side of the truck was coated in inches of ice. So were the bodies of the fire brigade men, frozen in midscream.

  My God, thought Marsh. What kind of blood prices bought this? What is this costing us back home?

  They picked up the Elbe outside Hamburg, and followed the valley southeast toward Berlin. The river had become a glacier. It was frozen solid, from the surface all the way down to the riverbed. And the water had expanded as it froze, rising above its banks and ripping down bridges. The only way to cross the river was on the few temporary bridges the engineering detachments had erected.

  Marsh closed his eyes. “Wake me when we enter Berlin,” he told the lieutenant.

  Liv’s light touch, a fingertip on his lips.

  “What?”

  Quiet laughter, warmth in the dark. “You were talking in your sleep again, love.”

  “I’m sorry, Liv.”

  Her breath tickles his earlobe. “Don’t be. I’ve missed it more than you know.” She laces her fingers through his.

  “I’m glad I came back. I’m sorry it took so long.”

  “So are we.”

  Agnes fills the hollow between their bodies, nestled in the blankets. Marsh presses his lips to the fine, thin hair of her scalp.

  Her skin is icy cold. She smells like baby and rot.

  Marsh jerked awake.

  The glare of sunlight on snow stabbed at his eyes; he squeezed them shut and then opened them slowly. They were still moving, though they no longer followed a convoy. They were driving through a large city.

  “Hauptsturmführer?” The lieutenant took his eyes off the road for a moment. “We’ve entered Berlin.”

  Marsh’s gut impression was of a venerable lady, a grande dame, never beautiful but handsome in a stern way, now ruined by illness and racked with tumors. If a city could contract cancer, this place was terminal. In some places the wounds were relatively small, embodied in the swastikas and Prussian eagles adorning everything. And in other places the Reich’s philosophical malignancy had engendered severe art deco monstrosities like the Olympic Stadium. There were reminders of a healthier, more aesthetic time, and hints of old Europe, such as on the Potsdamer Platz, but even that was scarred with ea gles and broken crosses.

  The weather had changed while Marsh was napping. The ice caked to the edges of the windshield had begun to melt. And the roads were slushy. Compared with the rest of the countryside Marsh had witnessed, the capital of the Third Reich was balmy. Perhaps as warm as ten degrees Celsius. He could breathe without his nose freezing shut.

  It meant the warlocks had completed their corridor to Berlin. Now the question was, where were the Soviets?

  The lieutenant woke the napping colonel as they entered the central administrative district of the Reich. They passed the air ministry, which was a hulking square gray building with square black windows. Profoundly utilitarian.

  The colonel’s errand took him to the Reich Chancellery building, which occupied an entire city block on the Voss Strasse. It connected to the Foreign Office building, which stood around the corner on Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse, across from the Propaganda Ministry. The nerve center of the Third Reich had been shaped from countless tons of granite and yellow marble to create a monster of neoclassical and art deco construction topped with massive bronze eagles and bas-relief scenes of Aryan greatness. It was all designed with an eye toward creating awe-inspiring ruins in some distant century, like those the vaunted Romans had left behind. Albert Speer’s theory of ruin value at work.

  Marsh began to sweat again. If the colonel gave the order to accompany him inside, his options would be severely limited. But the colonel stepped out of the car as soon as the driver brought it to a stop. He bounded up the stairs between the massive square pillars and disappeared into the Chancellery without another word for Marsh or their driver. He hadn’t even closed the door.

  Marsh released the breath he’d been holding. He moved to the backseat and told the lieutenant, who had apparently been left in his command, to drive to Schutzstaffel Headquarters. Then he took the opportunity while the driver was distracted to finish his disguise, pulling the wires from his collar and fastening them to the strips of adhesive under his hair.

  The drive to the SS Haus was brief. The street directly in front of the headquarters building was clogged with trucks and other vehicles. The lieutenant parked next door, at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, formerly a school of industrial arts and crafts and now the headquarters of the Gestapo. Marsh imagined he could hear the special prisoners screaming themselves hoarse, confessing to anything and everything, in the basement cells.

  Standing there in the nerve center of the police state, surrounded by thousands of the Third Reich’s most dedicated servants, Marsh resigned himself to his fate.

  I’m so sorry, Liv. I was a bloody fool. I should have gone back to you sooner. Why did I stay apart from you for so long?

  What I
do now, I do with a light heart, because I know you understand. You understand that I’ve loved you so fiercely that at times I’ve been unable to think rationally. You understand that everything I’ve done has been for you, and Agnes. Marsh touched the breast pocket of his uniform, felt the reassuring bump of the cyanide capsule hidden there. Stephenson will look after you.

  In recent years, the trajectory of Marsh’s life had orbited scenes of mass panic, of crowds bubbling with that barely contained animal instinct to flee, to lash out, to find cathartic release in the disorder of uninhibited emotion. He’d listened to its murmurings in Spanish, in French, in English. He’d walked amongst it in Spain, at the port of Barcelona; then again in France, where he heard it in the catch of people’s voices and watched it in the way they moved too quickly; he’d smelled the sweat and fear again during the Blitz, in the shelters, and had seen the worry lines creasing every face in London. He had immersed himself in the panic, perhaps even indulged in it, at Paddington when he and Liv evacuated Agnes.

  Thus, the scene outside Schutzstaffel headquarters held a surreal familiarity. The building itself, formerly the Prince Albert Hotel before Himmler commandeered it, was a four-story edifice that occupied most of the block. Here and there, hints of the building’s old life could be seen in the reversed shadow of the old hotel sign on the weather-darkened granite, and in the clock atop the undulating cornices that overlooked the street. Marsh had seen the hotel only in photographs.

  But the tension in people’s voices as they barked out orders, the herky-jerky motions of their arms and legs as they hurried in and out of the building, the electric tingle of nervous energy: Marsh knew it well. Only the details differed. A constant stream of men flowed between the headquarters building and the line of trucks parked in front. Each man exited the building with an armload or hand truck of boxes, which he relinquished to other men loading the trucks. Everybody moved at a clip just below a dead run, just on the orderly side of chaos.

  They’re moving the files, Marsh realized. In case the Soviets take the city. Jerry doesn’t want his operational records falling to the Communists any more than we do.

  He watched the men hurrying into the building and rushing back out again with more crates. It all proceeded under the supervision of two officers who, with their steaming breath, suggested twin dragons looming overhead while medieval villagers scrambled to amass tribute.

  Each load of boxes went to a different truck. Some, he imagined, were slated for destruction. But the most valuable information would be saved. Moved to bunkers, perhaps, or shipped out of the city ahead of the Soviets.

  Somewhere in that mess resided the files that Marsh had come to destroy. The records of the Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials, and the Institut Menschlichen Vorsprung before that, and perhaps even of the orphanage before that. These were some of the Reich’s most precious secrets and its vision for the future. They’d be moved to the most secure location possible, preserved until the bitter end, defended against all comers. Especially saboteurs like Marsh.

  But the scene gave him an idea.

  Strictly speaking, his mission wasn’t to destroy the files. His mission was to ensure they didn’t fall into Soviet hands. The ideal solution would have been for Milkweed to seize them, but that had never received serious consideration, since Britain lacked an occupying force with which to capture Berlin.

  But as he watched the boxes loaded onto the trucks, Marsh realized they didn’t need an army to seize the files. All he had to do was determine where the files were going, which truck they occupied, and steal the truck.

  He breathed deeply and disregarded the chill as he opened his coat, rolled down the collar, and strode toward the hubbub. He counted over a dozen trucks, their cargo beds in various states of loading. Some were nearly full. He had to move quickly before the records he sought were moved out.

  He joined the stream of men entering and leaving the SS Haus, quickening his pace to match the sense of urgency that surrounded him. The subordinate officers occupied with carrying and loading the boxes paid him no heed, except for the handful who noticed his rank and paused for salutes. These he returned with the same desultory air he’d received from the colonel. Stay focused on your task, his body language said.

  They didn’t question him; this was the last place anybody would expect to find a British spy.

  Marsh made it as far as the entrance when one of the supervising captains lifted an arm to block his passage. Marsh stopped short, nearly bumping the clipboard in the other man’s outstretched hand.

  “You’re late,” he said. Condensation from his breath glistened in his eyebrows and eyelashes. He held the clipboard out to Marsh again. Marsh took the board and flipped through the pages.

  It contained a nine-page list, each page filled with pairs of columns of numbers. One column referred to the crates, while the other referred to the trucks. It was the list that determined which boxes went into which trucks. But it didn’t specify the contents of the crates.

  “You were supposed to be here half an hour ago,” said the second officer. Whiteness caked one corner of his mouth, and his runny nose had coated his upper lip.

  Marsh ignored them. He also shifted his stance slightly, turning his head and neck toward the men without taking his eyes off the list. He made a show of inspecting the loading manifest, slowly perusing the pages while he waited for the men to notices his wires.

  His accusers fell quiet; Marsh let the silence stretch into awkwardness. The buzz of activity swirled around them.

  When he finally looked up, Marsh saw the supervisors looking at his battery harness, and then at each other. As he’d hoped, the battery spoke for him. The wire snaking up his collar and into his hair made his point more effectively than any words could have. These men knew the significance of the battery, knew that it commanded respect. Marsh hoped they didn’t look so closely as to notice the sweat trickling down his forehead, along his scalp, and down his collar.

  Marsh cleared his throat. “I’m not here to relieve you,” he said, emphasizing relieve. True, as far as it goes, he thought. Now for the lie, and the gamble. He made an educated guess: “I’m here to escort all Reichsbehörde records to the Führer’s bunker.” He held up the clipboard, pointing at it. “Where are they?”

  It worked.

  The men looked at each other. “We only have what you see there, the crate numbers,” said one man. He nodded his head toward the former hotel building. “We don’t load the crates. You’ll have to ask inside.” He paused before he added, tentatively and uncertainly, “Sir.”

  Marsh shoved the clipboard back at the first man, nudging him in the chest. “Carry on,” he said. He turned his back on them and went inside.

  The Prince Albert Hotel had been built long before the Nazis’ rise to power. The original design of the lobby reflected that different time, but it had been subverted into the architectural bastard child of Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler. Marsh imagined thick rugs covering the marble and parquet floor in the wings of the lobby, oak and leather furniture arranged cozily around low tables and the large hearth opposite what must have been the concierge desk at one time. A nicer space than the Hotel Alexandria in Tarragona. But now it was all gone, stripped down to bare marble polished to shining beneath the vaulted ceiling and the unblinking stares of bas-relief plaster ea gles. There was no furniture, nothing to suggest comfort or welcoming, and certainly nothing to encourage loitering. The concierge station had been ripped out and replaced with a utilitarian desk, behind which sat an SS-Unterschar -führer, a sergeant. Men streamed around him as they passed through the lobby, the rubber tires of their hand trucks squeaking on the marble.

  Marsh stood inside Schutzstaffel headquarters feeling like Daniel in the lions’ den. Yet nobody stopped him; nobody paid him any attention at all. It was as though the battery harness had rendered him invisible, like the blond woman in the Tarragona filmstrip. He wondered, fleetingly, where she was,
and if she had participated in the decimation of Milkweed’s strike teams back in December.

  Wherever she was, the Reich had a fearsome assassin at its call. Perhaps, if his ploy worked and he obtained the Reichsbehörde’s operational records, he could learn more about her. Although she wasn’t his main interest.

  Marsh followed a line of men returning from the trucks outside to a bank of elevators at the edge of the lobby. He and nine others stuffed themselves into an elevator. It was paneled with rosewood and lined with a brass rail at waist height, little remainders of the building’s previous life. The men spoke little as it descended to the basement, instead taking the opportunity to catch their breaths where the air wasn’t so cold. Some of the men had an unpleasant rasp in their chests, probably from working in chilly weather that had lifted only within the past day. They saluted Marsh as appropriate, and more than a few eyes widened in alarm when they glimpsed his wires.

  The elevator dinged, the doors opened, and they poured into the basement. In times past, it had housed the laundry and other services. Now it served as an archive for SS records, a clearing house for all information Reichsführer Himmler wanted to keep at hand.

  That the operational records of the Reichsbehörde qualified as such was beyond question. The only issue was whether they had already been moved to a safe location, and whether Marsh would find them before his ruse fell apart.

  Shelves had been installed in the former laundry, and the corridors were dense with filing cabinets nearly identical to those back at Milkweed Headquarters. Stacks of crates, empty but otherwise like the ones Marsh had seen loaded on the trucks outside, occupied every spare inch of floor space. The shelves held boxes of files, which the men systematically loaded into the numbered crates for loading onto hand trucks.

  The total amount of paperwork stored in the bowels of the former hotel was staggering. It seemed Jerry couldn’t do anything without first completing a form in triplicate. And then again when the task was finished.

  Marsh examined a random shelf. Some boxes were indexed with keywords and numbers, while others had dates printed neatly on their spines. But there was nothing to explain their contents.