Michael’s heart lurched. Standing before him was the man called Boots, who had kicked and stomped Gaby’s uncle to death in the barn at Bazancourt.
“I’m to return a reply,” Boots said. His hair was cropped close to the skull, and his eyes were pale blue and heavy-lidded; the eyes of a man who saw everyone else in the world as frail constructions of flesh and bone. As Chesna tore open the envelope and read it Michael glanced at the SS aide’s thickly soled jackboots. They reflected the candles of the chandelier on their glossy surface, and Michael wondered if they were the same boots that had knocked Gervaise’s teeth from his head. He felt the man watching him, and he looked up into the dull blue eyes. Boots nodded curtly, no recognition in his gaze.
“Tell him I … we’d be delighted,” Chesna told him, and Boots strode away toward a group of officers at the center of the lobby.
The elevator came. “Six,” Chesna told the elderly operator. As they ascended she said to Michael, “We’ve just been invited to dine with Colonel Jerek Blok.”
6
CHESNA UNLOCKED THE WHITE door and turned the ornate brass knob. The smell of fresh roses and lavender rushed at Michael as he crossed the threshold.
The living room, a majesty of white furniture, had a twenty-foot ceiling and a fireplace with green marble tiles. French doors led out to a terrace, which overlooked the river and the forest beyond. Resting atop a white Steinway piano was a large crystal vase that held roses and sprigs of lavender. On the wall above the fireplace was a framed painting of a steely-eyed Adolf Hitler.
“Cozy,” Michael said.
Chesna locked the door. “Your bedroom is through there.” She nodded toward a corridor.
Michael went through it and looked around the spacious bedroom with its dark oak furniture and paintings of various Luftwaffe airplanes. His luggage was neatly arrayed in a closet. He returned to the living room. “I’m impressed,” he said, which was an understatement. He laid his topcoat down on the sofa and walked to one of the high windows. Rain was still falling, tapping on the glass, and mist covered the forest below. “Do you pay for this, or do your friends?”
“I do. And it’s not inexpensive.” She went to the onyx-topped bar, got a glass from a shelf, and opened a bottle of spring water. “I’m wealthy,” she added.
“All from acting?”
“I’ve starred in ten films since 1936. Haven’t you heard of me?”
“I’ve heard of Echo,” he said. “Not Chesna van Dorne.” He opened the French doors and inhaled the misty, pine-scented air. “How is it that an American became a German film star?”
“Talent. Plus I was in the right place at the right time.” She drank her spring water and put the glass aside. “ ‘Chesna’ comes from ‘Chesapeake.’ I was born on my father’s yacht, in Chesapeake Bay. My father was German, my mother was from Maryland. I’ve lived in both countries.”
“And why did you choose Maryland over Germany?” he asked pointedly.
“My allegiance, you mean?” She smiled faintly. “Well, I’m not a believer in that man over the fireplace. Neither was my father. He killed himself in 1934, when his business failed.”
Michael started to say I’m sorry, but there was no need. Chesna had simply made a statement. “Yet you make films for the Nazis?”
“I make films to make money. Also, how better to cultivate their good graces? Because of what I do and who I am, I can get into places that many others can’t. I overhear a lot of gossip, and sometimes I even see maps. You’d be amazed how a general can brag when his tongue’s loosened by champagne. I’m Germany’s Golden Girl. My face is even on some of the propaganda posters.” She lifted her brows. “You see?”
Michael nodded. There was much more to be learned about Chesna van Dorne; was she, like her screen characters, also a fabrication? In any case, she was a beautiful woman, and she held Michael’s life in her hands. “Where’s my friend?”
“Your valet, you mean? In the servants’ wing.” She motioned toward a white telephone. “You can reach him by dialing our room number plus ‘nine.’ We can order room service for you, too, if you’re hungry.”
“I am. I’d like a steak.” He saw her look sharply at him. “Rare,” he told her.
“I’d like you to know something,” Chesna said, after a pause. She walked to the windows and peered out at the river, her face painted with stormy light. “Even if the invasion is successful—and the odds are against it—the Allies will never reach Berlin before the Russians. Of course the Nazis are expecting an invasion, but they don’t know exactly when or where it will come. They’re planning on throwing the Allies back into the sea so they can turn all their strength to the Russian Front. But it won’t help them, and by that time the Russian Front will be the border of Germany. So this is my last assignment; when we’ve completed our mission, I’m getting out with you.”
“And my friend. Mouse.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Him, too.”
As the lycanthrope and the film star discussed their future, a gunmetal-gray staff car with an SS pennant drove through the hotel’s courtyard a hundred and forty feet below. The car crossed the pontoon bridge and headed along the paved forest road that had brought Michael and Mouse to the Reichkronen. It entered Berlin and began to wind its way southeast toward the factories and dirty air of the Neukolln district. Black clouds were sliding in from the east, and thunder boomed like distant bomb blasts. The car reached a block of grimy row houses and the driver stopped in the street, heedless of other traffic. No horns blew; the SS pennant silenced all complaint.
A hulking man in an aide’s uniform, a gray peaked cap, and polished jackboots got out, and he went around to the other side and opened the door. The rear seat’s passenger, a rail-thin figure in uniform, a brimmed cap, and a long dark green overcoat, stepped out of the car, and he stalked into a particular row house with the larger man following at his heels. The gunmetal-gray car stayed exactly where it was. This wouldn’t take very long.
On the second floor a burly fist knocked at a door marked with a tarnished number “5.”
Inside the apartment there was the sound of coughing. “Yes? Who is it?”
The officer in the dark green overcoat nodded.
Boots lifted his right foot and kicked the door. It broke with a shriek of splitting wood, but the locks kept it from flying open. The door’s stubbornness made Boots’s face turn crimson with rage; he kicked it again, and a third time. “Stop it!” the man inside shouted. “Please, stop it!”
The fourth kick caved the door in. Theo von Frankewitz stood there in his blue silk robe, his eyes bulging with terror. He backed away, stumbled over a table, and fell to the floor. Boots entered the apartment, his metal-studded soles clacking. Frightened people had opened their doors and were peering out, and the officer in the overcoat shouted, “Back in your holes!” Their doors slammed, and locks clicked shut.
Frankewitz was on his hands and knees, scuttling across the floor. He jammed himself into a corner, his hands up in a gesture of supplication. “Please don’t hurt me!” he shrieked. “Please don’t!” His cigarette holder, the cigarette still smoldering, lay on the floor, and Boots crushed it underfoot as he approached the whimpering man.
Boots stopped, standing over him like a fleshy mountain.
Tears were crawling down Frankewitz’s cheeks. He was trying to press himself into the wall of his apartment. “What do you want?” he said, choking, coughing, and crying at the same time. He looked at the SS officer. “What do you want? I did the work for you!”
“So you did. And very well indeed.” The officer, his face narrow and pinched, walked into the room and glanced around distastefully. “This place smells. Don’t you ever open your windows?”
“They … they … they won’t open.” Frankewitz’s nose was running, and he snuffled and moaned at the same time.
“No matter.” The officer waved a thin-fingered hand impatiently. “I’ve come to do some housecleaning. The project
’s finished, and I won’t be needing your talents again.”
Frankewitz understood what that meant. His face grew distorted. “No … I’m begging you, for the love of God … I did the work for you … I did the—”
The officer nodded again, a signal to Boots. The huge man kicked Frankewitz in the chest, and there was a wet cracking noise as the breastbone broke. Frankewitz howled. “Stop that caterwauling!” the officer commanded. Boots picked up a throw pillow from the sea-green sofa, ripped it open, and pulled out a handful of cotton stuffing. He grasped Frankewitz’s hair and jammed the stuffing into the man’s gasping mouth. Frankewitz writhed, trying to claw at Boots’s eyes, but Boots easily dodged the fingers; he kicked Frankewitz in the ribs and staved him in like a brine-soaked barrel. The screaming was muffled, and now it didn’t bother Blok so much.
Boots kicked Frankewitz in the face, burst his nose open, and dislocated the jaw. The artist’s left eye swelled shut, and a purple bruise in the shape of a boot sole rose on his face. Frankewitz began, in desperation and madness, to try to claw his way through the wall. Boots stomped his spine, and Frankewitz contorted like a crushed caterpillar.
It was chilly in the damp little room. Blok, a man with a low tolerance for discomfort, walked over to the small fireplace grate, where a few meager flames danced amid the ashes. He stood close to the grate and tried to warm his hands; they were almost always cold. He had promised Boots he could have Frankewitz. Blok’s initial plan had been to dispatch the artist with a bullet, now that the project was done and Frankewitz wouldn’t be called on to do any retouching, but Boots had to be exercised like any large animal. It was like letting a trained Doberman go through its paces.
Boots broke Frankewitz’s left arm with a kick to the shoulder. Frankewitz had ceased his struggling, which disappointed Boots. The artist lay limply as Boots continued to stomp him.
It would be over soon, Blok thought. Then they could get back to the Reichkronen and out of this miserable—
Wait.
Blok had been staring at a small red eye of flame, there in the grate, as a piece of paper curled and burned. Frankewitz had just recently torn something up and cast it into the grate, and not all of it had been consumed. In fact, Blok could see a bit of what had been drawn on the paper: it looked like a man’s face, with a sweep of dark hair hanging down over the forehead. A single bulging, cartoonish eye remained; the other had been burned away.
It was a familiar drawing. Too familiar.
Blok’s heart started to pound. He reached down into the ashes and pulled out the fragment of paper. Yes. A face. His face. The lower part of it had been burned, but the sharp bridge of the nose was familiar, too. Blok’s throat was dry. He rummaged in the ashes, found another unburned bit of paper. This one had what appeared to be a representation of iron armor on it, fastened with rivets.
“Stop it,” Blok whispered.
Another kick was delivered. Frankewitz made no noise.
“Stop it!” Blok shouted, standing upright. Boots restrained the next kick, which would have shattered Frankewitz’s skull, and stepped back from the body.
Blok knelt beside Frankewitz, grasped the man’s hair, and lifted his head off the floor. The artist’s face had become a work of surrealism, rendered in shades of blue and crimson. Bloody cotton hung from the split lips and red streams ran from the smashed nostrils, but Blok could hear the faint rumbling of Frankewitz’s lungs. The man was hanging on to life. “What’s this?” Blok held the fragments of paper before Frankewitz’s face. “Answer me! What’s this?” He realized Frankewitz couldn’t answer, so he put the paper on the floor—avoiding the blood—and started pulling the cotton out of the man’s mouth. It was a messy labor, and Blok scowled with disgust. “Hold his head up and get his eyes open!” he told Boots.
The aide gripped Frankewitz’s hair and tried to force the eyelids open. One eye had been destroyed, jammed deeply into the socket. The other eye was bloodshot, and protruded as if in mockery of the cartoon eye on the piece of paper Blok held. “Look at this!” Blok demanded. “Can you hear me?”
Frankewitz moaned softly, a wet gurgling in his lungs.
“This is a copy of the work you did for me, isn’t it?” Blok held the paper in front of the man’s face. “Why did you draw this?” It wasn’t likely that Frankewitz had drawn it for his own amusement, and that brought another question to Blok’s thin lips: “Who saw it?”
Frankewitz coughed, drooling blood. His good eye moved in the socket and found the fragment of char-edged paper.
“You drew the picture,” Blok went on, speaking as if to a retarded child. “Why did you draw the picture, Theo? What were you going to do with it?”
Frankewitz just stared, but he was still breathing.
They weren’t going to get anywhere this way. “Damn it to hell!” Blok said as he stood up and crossed the room to the telephone. He picked up the receiver, carefully wiped the mouthpiece with his sleeve, and dialed a four-digit number. “This is Colonel Jerek Blok,” he told the operator. “Get me medical. Hurry!” He examined the paper again as he waited. There was no doubt; Frankewitz had repeated the drawing from memory, then tried to burn it. That fact made alarms go off in Blok’s brain. Who else had seen this drawing? Blok had to know, and the only way to find out was to keep Frankewitz alive. “I need an ambulance!” he told the Gestapo medical officer who came to the phone. He gave the man the address. “Get over here as fast as you can!” he said, almost shouting, and hung up. Then Blok returned to Frankewitz, to make sure the man was still breathing. If the information died with this pansy-balled street artist, Blok’s own throat would be kissed by a noose. “Don’t die!” he told Frankewitz. “Do you hear me, you bastard? Don’t die!”
Boots said, “Sir? If I’d known you didn’t want me to kill him, I wouldn’t have kicked him so hard.”
“Never mind! Just go outside and wait for the ambulance!” After Boots had clumped out, Blok turned his attention to the canvases over by the easel and began to go through them, tossing them aside in his fearful search for any more such drawings as on the scraps of paper clenched in his hand. He found none, but that didn’t ease him. He damned his decision not to execute Frankewitz long before now, but there had always been the possibility that more work was needed and one artist in on the project was enough. On the floor, Frankewitz had a fit of coughing, and spewed blood. “Shut up!” Blok snapped. “You’re not going to die! We have ways to keep you alive! Then we’ll kill you later, so shut up!”
Frankewitz complied with the colonel’s command and slipped into unconsciousness.
The Gestapo’s surgeons would put him back together, Blok mused. They would lace his bones with wires, sew together the gashes, and screw his joints into the sockets. Then he would look more like Frankenstein than Frankewitz, but drugs would grease his tongue and make him speak: why he’d drawn this picture, and who had seen it. They had come too far with Iron Fist to let it be ruined by this battered meat on the floor.
Blok sat down on the sea-green sofa, its arms protected with lace coverlets, and in a few minutes he heard the klaxon horn of the ambulance approaching. Blok reasoned that the gods of Valhalla were smiling on him, because Frankewitz was still breathing.
7
“A TOAST!” HARRY SANDLER lifted his wineglass. “To Stalin’s coffin!”
“Stalin’s coffin!” someone else echoed, and the toast was drunk. Michael Gallatin, sitting at the long dining table across from Sandler, drank without hesitation.
It was eight o’clock, and Michael was in the suite of SS Colonel Jerek Blok, amid Chesna van Dorne, twenty Nazi officers, German dignitaries, and their female companions. He wore a black tuxedo, a white shirt, and a white bow tie, and to his right Chesna wore a low-cut, long black dress with pearls covering the creamy swell of her breasts. The officers were in their crisp dress uniforms, and even Sandler had put away his tweeds in favor of a formal gray suit. He had also left his bird in his room, a fact which seemed to r
elieve many of the other guests as well as Michael.
“To Churchill’s tombstone!” the gray-haired major sitting a few seats down from Chesna proposed, and all—including Michael—drank merrily. Michael scanned the table, examining the faces of the dinner guests. Their host and his lead-footed aide were absent, but a young captain had seated everyone and gotten the party going. After another few rounds of toasts, in honor of drowned U-boat men, the valiant dead of Stalingrad, and the fried corpses of Hamburg, white-jacketed waiters began to roll in the dinner on silver carts. The main event was roast boar with an apple in its mouth, which Michael noted with some pleasure was set in front of Harry Sandler. The hunter had evidently shot the beast in the forest’s hunting preserve just yesterday, and as he cut slabs of greasy meat and slid them onto platters it was clear Sandler knew how to handle a carving knife as well as a rifle.
Michael ate sparingly, the meat too full of fat for him, and listened to the conversations on all sides. Such optimism that the Russians would be thrown back and the English would come crawling to Hitler’s feet with a peace treaty was worthy of a gypsy and a crystal ball. The voices and laughter were loud, the wine kept flowing and the waiters kept bringing food, and unreality was so thick in the air Harry Sandler might have carved it. This was the food these Nazis were used to eating, and their bellies looked full.
Michael and Chesna had talked most of the afternoon. She knew nothing about Iron Fist. Neither did she know anything of Dr. Gustav Hiidebrand’s activities, or what went on at Hildebrand’s Norway island. Of course she knew that Hildebrand advocated gas warfare—that was a common fact—but Hitler evidently remembered his own sniff of mustard gas in the Great War and didn’t care to open that particular Pandora’s box. Or, at least, not just yet. Did the Nazis have a stockpile of gas bombs and shells? Michael had inquired. Chesna wasn’t sure of the exact tonnage, but she felt sure that somewhere the Reich had at least fifty thousand tons of weapons, kept ready in case Hitler changed his mind. Michael pointed out the fact that gas shells could be used to disrupt the invasion, but Chesna disagreed. It would take thousands of shells and bombs to stop the invasion, she said. Also, gas of the kind Dr. Hildebrand’s father had helped develop—distilled mustard during the Great War, Tabun and Sarin in the late 1930s—might easily blow back on the defenders in the tricky coastal winds. So, Chesna told him, a gas attack on the Allies might backfire on the German troops instead. That had to be a possibility the high command had already considered, and she didn’t think one Rommel—who was in charge of the Atlantic Wall’s defenses—would allow. Anyway, she said, the Allies had control of the air now, and would certainly shoot down any German bombers that approached the invasion beaches.
The Monster Novels: Stinger, the Wolf's Hour, and Mine Page 87