The Wolf's Hour

by Robert R. McCammon

  Michael got out, came around the car, and opened the door for Gaby. He said, “Be here,” and Mouse nodded and drove away. Then Michael offered Gaby his arm, and they strolled past a German soldier on horseback just like any French couple out for a night at the Opera. Except Michael wore a Luger in a holster that Camille had supplied, the pistol lying just under his left armpit, and Gaby had a very small, very sharp knife in her shiny black clutch purse. Arm in arm, they crossed the Avenue de 1’Opera to the Opera House itself. In the huge vestibule, where gilded lamps cast a golden glow on statues of Handel, Lully, Gluck, and Rameau, Michael saw several Nazi officers with their lady friends among the crowd. He guided Gaby through the throng, up ten steps of green Swedish marble, to a second vestibule where the tickets were sold.

  They bought their tickets, two seats on the aisle near the back of the house, and continued through the building. Michael had never seen such an assembly of statues, multi-hued marble columns, gilt-edged mirrors, and chandeliers in his life; the grand staircase, a gracefully massive thing with marble balustrades, swept them up to the auditorium. Everywhere he looked there were more staircases, corridors, statues, and chandeliers. He hoped Gaby knew her way here, because in this place of art run riot even his wolf’s sense of direction was stunned. At last they entered the auditorium, another marvel of space and proportion which was rapidly filling, and they were shown to their seats by an elderly attendant.

  The odors of conflicting perfumes stung Michael’s nose. He noted it was chilly in the huge auditorium; due to fuel rationing, the building’s boilers had been turned off. Gaby glanced casually around, noting where perhaps a dozen German officers sat with their female companions. Her gaze went up to the third of the four tiers of loges, stacked atop each other and connected by gilded balconies and fluted columns like the layers of a massive and rather gaudy cake. She found Adam’s loge. It was empty.

  Michael had already seen it. “Patience,” he said quietly. If Adam had found the note, he’d be here. If not… then not. He took Gaby’s hand and squeezed it. “You look beautiful,” he told her.

  She shrugged, uneasy with compliments. “I don’t dress this way very often.”

  “Neither do I.” He wore a crisp white shirt along with his gray suit, a muted gray-and-scarlet-striped necktie, and a pearl stickpin that Camille had given him “for luck.” He glanced up at the third tier; Adam still hadn’t arrived, and the orchestra was tuning. A hundred things could have gone wrong, he thought. The Gestapo could have searched his coat when he got to work. The note could have fallen out. Adam simply could have hung the coat up and not even looked in the pocket. No, no, he told himself. Just wait, and watch.

  The houselights dimmed. The heavy red curtains parted, and Puccini’s tale of Fiona Tosca began.

  As the desperate Tosca murdered her brutal tormentor with a knife at the end of Act II, Michael was aware of the pressure of Gaby’s grip on his hand. He glanced again at the third tier. No Adam. Damn it! he thought. Well, Adam knew that he was being watched. Maybe he chose, for whatever reason, not to appear tonight. Act III began, a prison scene. The minutes ticked past. Gaby cast a quick look at Adam’s loge—and Michael felt her fingers crunch his hand.

  He knew. Adam was there.

  “A man’s standing in the loge,” she whispered, her face close to his. He smelled the delicious apple-wine scent of her hair. “I can’t tell what he looks like.”

  Michael gave it another moment. Then he glanced up and saw the sitting figure. The footlights, dimmed to a moody cast as Tosca visited her imprisoned lover Cavaradossi, glinted on the lenses of eyeglasses. “I’m going upstairs,” Michael whispered. “Wait here.”

  “No. I’m coming with you.”

  “Shhhhh!” the man behind them hissed.

  “Wait here,” Michael repeated. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. If anything happens, I want you to get out.” Before Gaby could protest again, he leaned forward and kissed her lips. An electricity passed between them, a tingling of the nerves that connected them for a few seconds like raw wires. Then Michael stood up, walked purposefully up the aisle, and left the auditorium. Gaby stared at the stage, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, all her attention fixed on the deadly drama that was yet to be played out.

  Michael ascended a series of wide staircases. An attendant, a young man in a white jacket, black trousers, and white gloves, stood on duty on the third tier. “May I help you, please?” he asked as Michael approached.

  “No, thank you. I’m meeting a friend.” Michael walked past him, found the rosewood door of loge number six, and rapped quietly on it. He waited. A latch was slid back. The door opened on brass hinges.

  And there was the man called Adam, his eyes wide with terror behind his glasses. “I was followed,” he said, his voice reedy and trembling. “They’re all over the place.”

  Michael entered the loge and closed the door behind him. He slid the latch shut. “We don’t have much time. What’s your message?”

  “Wait. Just wait.” He held up a pale, long-fingered hand. “How do I know… you’re not one of them? How do I know you’re not trying to trick me?”

  “I could recite the names of people you know back in London, if that would help. I don’t think it will. You’ll have to trust me. If you don’t, we might as well forget this and I’ll swim home across the Channel.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that… I don’t trust anyone. Not anyone.”

  “You’ll have to start right now,” Michael said.

  Adam sank down in a red-cushioned chair. He leaned forward and ran a shaking hand across his face. He looked emaciated, about to pass out. Onstage, Cavaradossi was being escorted from his cell to face a firing squad. “Oh, God,” Adam whispered. He blinked, his glasses reflecting the dank gray light. He looked up at Michael and drew a deep breath. “Theo von Frankewitz,” Adam began. “Do you know who that is?”

  “A sidewalk artist in Berlin.”

  “Yes. He’s… a friend of mine. Back in February… he was called to do a special job. By an SS colonel named Jerek Blok, who used to be the commandant of—”

  “Falkenhausen concentration camp, from May to December of 1943,” Michael interrupted. “I’ve read Blok’s dossier.” As little as there was of it. Mallory had gotten him the dossier on Blok; it had told him only that Jerek Blok was forty-seven years old, born into a military and aristocratic German family, and that he was a Nazi party fanatic. There had been no photograph. But now Michael felt like a raw nerve: Blok had been seen in Berlin with Harry Sandler. What was their connection, and how did the big-game hunter figure in this? “Go on.”

  “Theo… was taken to an airstrip, blindfolded and flown west. He thinks that was the direction, because of how the sun felt on his face. Perhaps an artist would remember such things. Anyway, Blok was with him, and there were other SS men, too. When they landed, Theo could smell the sea. He was taken to a warehouse. They kept Theo there for over two weeks, while he painted.”

  “Painted?” Michael stood toward the rear of the loge, positioning himself so he couldn’t be seen from the auditorium. “Painted what?”

  “Bullet holes.” Adam’s hands were white-knuckled on the armrests. “For more than two weeks he painted bullet holes on sections of metal. The sections were obviously part of a larger structure; they still had rivets in them. And someone had already painted the metal olive green.” He looked quickly at Michael, then back to the stage. The orchestra was playing a funeral march as Cavaradossi refused a blindfold. “They had pieces of glass for Theo to paint, too. They wanted bullet holes in precise patterns, and what would look like cracks in the glass. Blok wasn’t satisfied when Theo finished, and he made Theo do the glass all over again. Then they flew Theo back to Berlin, paid him a fee, and that was it.”

  “All right. So your friend painted some metal and glass. What’s it mean?”

  “I don’t know, but it worries me.” He ran the back of his hand across his mouth. “The Germans know the i
nvasion’s coming soon. Why are they spending time painting bullet holes on green metal? And there’s this, too: another man came to visit the warehouse, and Blok showed him the work Theo was doing. Blok called this man Dr. Hildebrand. Do you know that name?”

  Michael shook his head. Onstage, the soldiers of the firing squad were loading their muskets.

  “Hildebrand’s father created the chemical gases used by the Germans in the Great War,” Adam said. “Like father, like son: Hildebrand owns a chemical manufacturing company, and he’s the Reich’s most vocal proponent of chemical and germ warfare. If Hildebrand’s working on something… it could be used against the invasion.”

  “I see.” Michael’s stomach had knotted. If chemical gas shells were dropped on the Allies during the invasion, thousands of soldiers would die. And adding to that tragedy was the stark fact that, once repulsed, the invasion of Europe might be delayed for years—time for Hitler to fortify the Atlantic Wall and create a new generation of weapons. “But I don’t understand where Frankewitz fits in.”

  “I don’t either. Once the Gestapo found my radio and destroyed it, I was cut off from all information. But this is something that must be followed up. If not…” He let the sentence hang, because Michael fully understood. “Theo overheard Blok and Hildebrand talking. They mentioned a phrase twice: Eisen Faust.”

  “Iron Fist,” Michael translated.

  A fist of flesh knocked at the loge’s door. Adam jumped in his chair. Onstage, the firing squad lifted their rifles, and the orchestra played a dirge as Cavaradossi prepared to die.

  “Monsieur?” It was the voice of the white-jacketed attendant. “A message for you.”

  Michael heard the tension in the young man’s voice; the attendant was not alone. Michael knew what the message would be: an invitation from the Gestapo for a lesson in screaming. “Stand up,” Michael told Adam.

  Adam did—and at that instant the rosewood door was broken open by a man’s husky shoulder as the muskets fired onstage. Cavaradossi sagged to the stage. The noise of the gunfire had masked the sound of the door splintering. Two men, both in the dark leather overcoats of the Gestapo, were shouldering their way into the loge. The man in front had a Mauser pistol in his hand, and he was the one Michael went for first.

  Michael picked up the red-cushioned chair and smashed it across the man’s head. The chair burst to pieces, and the man’s face bleached white as blood spewed from his broken nose. He staggered, the gun coming up, and his finger twitched on the trigger. The bullet whined over Michael’s shoulder, the noise obscured by the soprano wailing of Ninon Vallin’s Tosca as she fell at Cavaradossi’s corpse. Michael reached out, grasped the man’s wrist and the front of his overcoat, twisted sharply, and lifted the man over his shoulder. He took a lunging step toward the gilded balcony and threw the gunman into space.

  The man shrieked, louder than Tosca had ever dreamed, as he fell fifty-two feet to the auditorium floor. For a second their voices blended in eerie harmony; then there were other screams, and the screaming spread like a contagion across the audience. The orchestra stopped in a shatter of broken notes. Onstage, valiant Ninon Vallin was desperately trying to continue her role, so close to the dramatic finale.

  But Michael was determined it was not going to be his own swan song. The second man reached into his coat; before the gun could come out, Michael slammed his fist into the man’s face and followed it with a blow to the throat. Strangling around a crushed windpipe, the man fell backward and crashed against the wall. But the loge’s splintered doorway filled with a new figure: a third man in a pin-striped suit, a Luger in his right hand. Behind him was a soldier with a rifle. Michael shouted to Adam, “Grab on to my back!” and Adam did, putting his arms under Michael’s shoulders and locking his fingers together. Adam was light, a hundred and thirty pounds if that; Michael saw the third man’s eyes widen as he realized what was about to happen, and the Luger rose for a shot.

  Michael leaped to his right and bounded over the balcony with Adam clinging to his back.

  8

  He had no intention of following the first Gestapo agent’s descent to the auditorium’s floor; his fingers gripped the fluted finials of the gilded column that rose beside Adam’s loge, and the muscles of his shoulders strained as he pulled himself and Adam up toward the topmost tier. A new chorus of screams and shrieks swept across the audience. Even Ninon Vallin cried out, whether in fear for a human life or rage at being upstaged, Michael couldn’t tell. He hoisted them up, grabbing whatever handholds he could find. His heart pounded and the blood roared through his veins, but his brain was cool; whatever the future held, it was to be decided very quickly.

  And so it was. He heard the vicious crack! of a gunshot—a Luger being fired at an upward angle. He felt Adam’s body shudder and stiffen. The man’s arms, already tightly clamped around him, in an instant became as rigid as iron bars. Warm wetness trickled through the back of Michael’s hair and down his neck, drenching his suit jacket; he realized the bullet had just blown away a large portion of Adam’s skull, and the muscles of the corpse had frozen in the sudden paralysis of severed nerves. He clambered up the column, a dead man locked on his back and blood trickling over the finials. He pulled himself over the balcony of the uppermost loge as a second bullet flayed away a shower of gold paint four inches from his right elbow.

  “Up the stairs!” he heard the Gestapo agent shout. “Hurry!”

  The loge Michael found himself in was unoccupied. He spent a few seconds trying to unlock Adam’s fingers from where they were clenched together at his chest; he broke two of them like dry twigs, but the others resisted him. There was no time to fight a dead man’s grip. Michael staggered through the door into the crimson-carpeted hallway outside and faced a warren of lamplit corridors and staircases. “This way!” he heard a man shout, from somewhere to his left. Michael turned to the right and staggered down a corridor lined with paintings of medieval hunting scenes. The corpse hung to his back, its shoe tips dragging furrows in the carpet. Behind them, Michael realized, was also a trail of blood. He stopped to thrash against the body; but all he did was burn up priceless energy, and the corpse remained latched to him like a lifeless Siamese twin.

  A shot rang out. Just over Michael’s shoulder, a lamp held by a statue of Diana exploded. He saw two soldiers coming after him, both armed with rifles. He tried to reach his Luger but couldn’t get to it because of the corpse’s grip. He turned and ran into another corridor, this one curving to the left. The voices of his pursuers shouted directions to each other, their Germanic snarls like the baying of hounds. Now the corpse’s one hundred and thirty pounds seemed an eternal weight. He forced himself on, the corpse leaving smears of blood in the halls of beauty.

  An ascending staircase was ahead of him, cherubs with lyres mounted on its balustrades. Michael started toward it—and smelled the bitter scent of a stranger’s sweat. A German soldier with a pistol stepped from a shadowed archway on his left. “Your hands,” the soldier said. “Up.” He motioned with the gun.

  In the second that the barrel was uptilted, Michael kicked him in the right kneecap and heard the bones break. The pistol fired, its bullet thunking into the ceiling. The German, his face twisted with pain, staggered against the wall but didn’t let go of the gun; he began to take aim, and Michael leaped at him as Adam dragged on his shoulders. He caught the German’s wrist. Again the gun fired, but the bullet passed Michael’s cheek and smashed something on the other side of the corridor. The German gouged at Michael’s eyes with hooked fingers and screamed, “I’ve got him! Help me! I’ve got him!”

  Even with a broken knee, the soldier was strong. They fought in the hallway, grappling for the gun. The soldier struck Michael in the jaw with a blow that stunned him and made him see double for a few seconds, but he held on to the gun hand. Michael delivered a punch that hit the German in the mouth and knocked two teeth down his throat, strangling his screams for help. The German brought a knee up into Michael’s s
tomach, driving the breath out of him, and the corpse’s weight pulled Michael off balance. He fell backward, hitting the wall with a force that cracked Adam’s ruined skull against the marble. The soldier, balancing desperately on one leg, raised his Luger to shoot Michael at point-blank range.

  Behind the German Michael saw a whirl of dark blue, like a tornado unfurling. A knife glittered with chandelier light. Its blade plunged down into the back of the soldier’s neck. The man choked and staggered, dropping his pistol to clutch his throat. Gaby wrenched at the knife, but it had gone in too deeply. She let it go, and the soldier made a terrible moaning noise and crashed face down.

  Gaby blinked, stunned at the sight before her: Michael, his hair bloody and gore spattered over one side of his face, and clutched to his back an openmouthed corpse that had a pulpy mess where the right temple had been. Her stomach churned. She picked up the gun, her knife hand smeared with scarlet, as Michael found his balance again.

  “Geissen!” a man shouted from down the corridor. “Where the hell are you?”

  Gaby helped Michael try to unlock the corpse’s fingers, but they could hear the noise of more soldiers approaching. The only route available to them was the ascending staircase. They started up it, Michael’s legs beginning to cramp under Adam’s weight. The staircase curved and took them to a latched door. As Gaby threw back the latch and pulled the door open, the night wind of Paris rushed into their faces. They had reached the roof of the Opera House.

  The tips of Adam’s polished black shoes scraped the tarred stones as Michael followed Gaby across the Opera’s huge roof. Gaby looked back and saw figures emerging from the doorway they’d come through. She knew there had to be other ways down, but how long would it take the Germans to cover all the exits? She hurried on, but had to wait for Michael; his strength was ebbing, his back beginning to bow. “Go on!” he snapped. “Don’t wait for me!”