by John Altman
It had happened at the cinema. The flick had been Captain Blood, starring Errol Flynn. She’d been sitting two rows ahead of him, and as the lights had gone down, she had stretched: a simple stretch. Her hands had touched her hair, lifting it away for a fleeting moment from the back of her neck. And that had been the end of his life as a bachelor, in spirit if not immediately in practice.
For three months following that day, the thought of her neck—so pale and slim, so elegantly arched—had driven him mad. He had begun to haunt the theater, hoping to catch another glimpse of the beautiful girl with the slim pale neck. At that point, oddly enough, he had never even seen her face. But the neck had haunted his dreams; so vulnerable and exposed, so graceful and smooth. When she had finally come back to the theater—the picture that time had been My Man Godfrey—he had spent the entire film trying to get up the bollocks to approach her. And approach her he had, once the lights had come up. But he had not been able to put two words together; for she had been as gorgeous from the front as she was from the back.
Somehow, generous heart that she was, Mary had been charmed by his clumsy stammering. For some reason that he still couldn’t quite fathom, she had given him his chance. But she had still required convincing. Four proposals’ worth of convincing, to be precise, spread out over the course of two years. Finally, she had relented—as long as he obeyed her conditions.
Yet the one condition on which he’d fought was that he give up flying. He had held out on that one until the very day that Hugh had been born. Then a change had come, and his priorities had shifted. One moment he’d been pacing outside the delivery room, grappling with doubt about what he had gotten himself into. He was not a responsible man, after all. He could not look after an entire family. All of it had been a terrible mistake. He had thought this right up until the moment that his eyes had first fallen on Hugh’s face; then it was as if a switch had been thrown inside him. He had sworn to leave the RAF and devote himself entirely to his wife and child—and he had not regretted it for a moment.
Until, that was, Oldfield had given him this chance at revenge. Then he had changed his tune. So he couldn’t blame her for being angry. But she should have understood, he thought. For the sake of his parents, she should have understood.
He turned two pages, dropped the Mirror, and went back to the bedroom.
“Come on, Mary. Don’t be that way.”
“What way?” she said innocently.
“Well, bloody buggery hell,” he said.
This time, upon returning to the study, he left the paper untouched. He went to look out the window at the street. The latest rain was evaporating, giving the air a heavy, charged feeling. Lord Haw-Haw’s aristocratic affectations did little to lighten his mood. After a few seconds, he reached out and snapped off the wireless.
After another few seconds, he realized that Mary was standing in the doorway behind him. “Arthur,” she said.
“Mm.”
“He’s fussing.”
“Mm.”
“He doesn’t like it when we quarrel.”
He didn’t answer.
“You are a very stubborn man,” she said. “Do you know that?”
“You are a very stubborn woman,” he said.
She had come up behind him; now she began to knead his shoulders. “I do enjoy a good row,” she admitted.
“You’re as much of a harridan as your mother.”
“Fight fair, Arthur.”
Now she was turning him around, leaning up for a kiss.
“Go walk your son around the place,” she murmured. “See if you can get him back to sleep.”
“And if I can?”
“Let’s just see what we come up with,” she said, “to while away one of our last evenings together.”
MECKLENBURG
For the third time in as many minutes, Hermann Hetzler bent to inspect the ground at his feet.
As he prodded at the vegetation, his expression turned querulous. It was a false track—the man had backed up after moving forward, setting his feet in his own prints. The heel section of the track was nearly twice as deep as the toe. But the distinction was less noticeable than it had been the last few times the man had tried the trick. He was learning.
Hetzler stood again. The muscles in the small of his back contracted sharply, making the querulous expression on his face turn pinched. His back was not pleased with all this bending and standing. But the men still with him were losing enthusiasm, so he refrained from reaching around to rub at the muscles. He tried to project strength, confidence, unquestionable assurance.
The men gathered around to hear his verdict.
“He’s backtracked again,” Hetzler said.
He followed the tracks, searching for the place where the man had branched off. He found it in a shallow puddle beside a flat rock. The Britisher had used the water to cover his sidestep; it had devoured the print. Then taken a few steps across the rock, counting on the bright afternoon sun to dry the evidence. Then stepped off again—yes; there. Whatever he was using as a makeshift cane had left a string of dents in the earth, as clear as a trail of bread crumbs. Doubling around behind them, once again.
The circle of faces surrounding Hetzler looked anxious and discouraged. He tried to think of a way to phrase his conclusion without lowering their morale any further. They had spent all night following the man, who was seriously enough wounded that he was using the cane. By these men’s estimation, they should have had him by now. But the Engländer had kept his wits. He repeatedly fouled his trail, circling around, staying within a few miles of Wismar. The tactic, Hetzler thought, was designed to foster frustration. And it was working. These men knew only that they had been moving all night and kept coming back to the same place, that a third of their number had already given up. They did not understand that they were drawing steadily closer to their prey.
“Well?” Friedburg demanded.
Hetzler did not look at Friedburg. Instead he looked off into the trees, grandly calculating. “We’re close,” he said.
“That’s what you said an hour ago.”
“It was true then. And it’s more true now.”
“How close?” Ludwig Sturm asked.
“Close.”
The men began to mutter among themselves. Hetzler waited, giving them time. The muttering, of course, worked in favor of their quarry. But better for the men to mutter in front of Hetzler than behind his back.
Finally, Friedburg voiced what many of them were thinking: “We should leave it to the Gestapo.”
Hetzler shook his head. “Town business,” he said firmly, “is town business.”
“So you say. But you also say we’re close. And it doesn’t seem to me as if we’re close.”
“This is what he wants,” Hetzler answered. “He’s counting on this. Why else would he keep circling back?”
More low muttering. Hetzler looked from one face to another, trying to gauge the loyalties. Nearly half of the group, he thought, were on Friedburg’s wavelength. The other half understood better. They looked dispirited, but still willing.
“My feet hurt,” Friedburg said.
“As do mine,” Hetzler said. “But not half as much as his must.”
“How do you know these are his tracks at all? For all I know, you’re leading us on a wild-goose chase.”
Hetzler didn’t justify that with an answer.
For five minutes more, the men talked. Again Hetzler waited. Let them get the grousing out of their systems, he thought. Let the ones who were going to turn back do it now, so that the rest of them could continue without interference.
At last, a man named Horst took the lead. “Hermann,” he said. “I’ve had enough. Leave it to the Gestapo.”
Hetzler didn’t argue.
“Horst is right,” another said. “For all we know, the man’s gone.”
Hetzler waved a hand. “Go, then.”
The group separated like quicksilver flowing down a pane of
glass. When the naysayers had gone, Hetzler saw that only five remained: himself, Sturm, the farmboy Messel, the blacksmith Grünewald, and—astoundingly—Friedburg.
Friedburg looked defensive.
“Go with them,” Hetzler said impatiently, “if that’s what you want.”
“But you say we’re close.”
“We are.”
“So I’ll stay.”
Hetzler controlled himself. The man liked complaining more than anything else. If he went back to town, he could no longer complain. So he would stay—in all likelihood, dragging the rest of them down with him, to the best of his ability.
He put Friedburg from his mind and turned back to the tracks on the ground.
“We can move faster with five,” he said. “It won’t be long now. If you can’t keep up, you’ll be left behind.”
None of the men answered. After a few seconds, Hetzler chose a direction. He struck off without looking back.
10
Hauptmann and Bandemer were almost useless, Frick thought.
The road was ending in a thick snarl of underbrush. Hauptmann eased the Mercedes to a stop, then made a sound of aggravation. Useless, Frick thought again.
“We can’t make it through that,” Hauptmann said. “Should we clear the road? …”
Confusion and frustration seeped through his every pore, reeking. Frick shook his head. “Wait here,” he said.
He left the car, stepping out into the wild and breathing deep.
There were so many answers, to be told by the air and the trees and the grass. He became immediately aware of a ballet that had been going on for several hours already, a few hundred yards to the east. He strode off in that direction, leaving the men and the dogs in the car behind him.
Here—a spoor that crossed back on itself. The grass was bent, pressed in countless directions, stippled with regular indentations. He closed his eyes and opened the rest of himself. The man had been leading them on a merry chase, he thought. The man was a worthy opponent. And these others who were chasing him were mongrels, as ineffectual as the men waiting for him back in the Mercedes.
He held very still, letting himself feel the truth. What came was not precisely truth, but a humming instinct. Over the next ridge, he thought. That was where he had to go.
He went, his eyes barely open, moving very slowly.
Another pretzel of tracks, scents, and clues. When they had passed this place—many minutes after they had been at the first site—the Engländer had still been in control. Playing a game, Frick thought; wearing down his pursuers. And his strategy had been effective. Now the men on his trail were half their previous number.
But his footsteps were deeper, more labored; the indentations were so pronounced that groundwater was visible near the bottoms. Fatigue was taking its toll. And was there blood, coming from the man’s wound? There was. He couldn’t see it and he couldn’t smell it; but he could sense it. Dark blood; granular blood. The blood was … there.
He found it.
And where had they gone then?
Back over their own trail again. Behind them, and farther to the east.
Instead of following farther, he went back to the car.
“Bandemer,” he said to the man in the backseat. “Let me have the dogs.”
The door opened; the leashes were handed out. Frick led the three dogs back to the second site. He could feel Hauptmann and Bandemer following hesitantly behind him, baffled. Frick relocated the Engländer’s trail, then knelt beside it. The dogs clustered around, rooting in the grass.
He watched. They were still better than him, he thought. They were made for this.
Yet they lacked reason. Once they had caught the man’s scent, they tried to follow it literally, just as the man’s pursuers had done. But Frick tugged at the leashes, to let them know that something else was required. A leap of imagination; a glimpse into the quarry’s mind. He chose the direction that felt most right, and followed it.
Suddenly, one of the dogs—the small, vicious one—was pulling strongly to the left.
Frick let him pull. Soon the others had caught the same trail. Then Frick caught it himself. When they came upon the tracks, they were still fresh. A drop of blood the size of a large beetle was clinging to a blade of grass. He bent and touched it. Still wet. They were not far behind, now.
They would need to leave the car, and follow on foot.
Hauptmann and Bandemer were trotting up behind him. He handed the leashes back to Bandemer. “This way,” he said. “We must abandon the car.”
“Herr Kriminal Inspektor—how can you be sure?”
He considered trying to explain his instincts, decided it would be a waste of breath. “I trust the dogs,” he said instead. “Do you not?”
“Well …”
“If you’d rather wait for us here, Herr Hauptmann …”
“Of course not. I will come along.”
Frick kept the contempt he felt off his face. The man was weak, conflicted; a fool. He did not trust himself.
But the Engländer was better. A worthy opponent, he thought again.
They headed off, half-running to keep up with the straining dogs.
GOTHMUND
Eva watched the old man’s back as he painted.
His body was wider through the hips than through the shoulders. The material of his shirt constricted with each fluid movement of the brush across the canvas, showing that peculiar pear-shaped body in sharp relief. It was a curious phenomenon, she thought. After almost forty-eight hours spent in the little house with nothing to look at, it seemed all the more curious still.
Then she pressed her hands against each other, and tried to find something else to distract her.
Her eyes moved from the pallet to the fireplace to the table and then back to the old man at the easel. The painting on which he worked was not bad at all: the bay through the window as it must once have looked, with old-fashioned boats moored against a pastel dock and seven jeweled church spires rising in the foreground. Similar paintings adorned the cottage walls, mostly variations on the same theme: Germany as it had once been, the Germany of tradition.
She stood, stifling a yawn. Only one more day, she thought. Then she would be out of here—on her way back to England.
Except that Hobbs had not yet arrived.
And so she did not know the precise location of the extraction site.
An airplane, the letter had said, would meet them north of Gothmund. But was it an airplane or a seaplane? And how many possible landing sites were in the vicinity? She could ask the fisherman. Perhaps he would have her answers. But if she showed her helplessness, she would be putting her fate into his hands—even more securely into his hands than she already had. And if he sensed that things had gone terribly wrong—Hobbs had never arrived; the operation was in jeopardy, if not in ruins—he might even turn on her. It seemed that from the old man’s perspective it would be far easier to turn her in to the Gestapo than to risk staying involved with a shattered operation.
But he was doing this for a reason, she thought. The British had not chosen him at random. She would need to trust the judgment of MI6, and trust that the fisherman would not betray her even after she revealed her need for help. She had no other choice.
She went to stand behind him.
“You don’t need to watch over my shoulder,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I have a question.”
He said nothing to encourage her to continue. The brush in his hand moved to the paints, dipped, swirled, and moved back to the canvas.
“The man who was meant to meet me here,” Eva said. “If he doesn’t arrive, then I don’t know where they’re supposed to fetch me.”
“They?”
“The airplane.”
“Ah,” he said. “The airplane.”
“Yes.”
“Has this been arranged in advance?” Brandt asked. “It hardly seems like it.”
“My friend was meant to meet me
here,” Eva said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice.
“I’ve gathered that.”
“But if he doesn’t—and if you can’t help me—then I won’t be able to leave.”
The brush paused in mid-stroke.
“And I don’t think you’d enjoy that,” she said. “Would you?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I would.”
“So I need your help.”
Brandt looked at his canvas for a moment more. Then he sighed, added a final corkscrew of red, and set his paints on the plankboard floor.
As they left the house, Eva saw the neighbor Katie Ilgner sitting with her book in front of the harbor. Something about the way the girl was bent over the pages, her brow deeply furrowed, struck her as familiar. But Katie didn’t look up as they strolled casually past her, arm in arm, and Eva soon found her mind turning elsewhere.
Brandt led her along the length of the bay, then came to an abrupt stop. He turned to a rough-hewn path that led up a small wooded hill. “Such a beautiful day,” he said cynically. “Do you feel up to walking a little farther?”
Eva bowed. “After you.”
They began to negotiate the primitive path. For about ten minutes, they walked without speaking, gaining altitude; Eva could hear the man’s breath coming harder. Finally, they reached a clearing perhaps eighty feet wide and four times as long. On three sides, the field was surrounded by trees. On the fourth, the land sloped down to a small stagnant lake the color of limes.
“If it’s to be an airplane,” Brandt said, “it will be here.”
Eva looked around dubiously. “It seems awfully small,” she said.
“It is the location I supplied to Noyce. Unless something else has been arranged …”
“Can a plane really land here?”