Five Past Midnight

by James Thayer

  He drifted along the bank. The south end of the armory had been destroyed by a bomb, and only the north portion was in operation. But all of it was guarded. Cray glided through the water. A new scent caught him. Sewage. In the dim light he saw an effluent pipe that jutted from the bank, most of it underwater. He paddled up to the pipe, which was about five feet in diameter. Cray gripped the edges and held himself against the outflow. The human waste was warm, surging around him. He began to feel his chest and shoulders and arms again. He soaked in the warm fluid, his head above the pipe as he surveyed the armory's yard. The foul odor smelled like life to him.

  The troops strolled back and forth, rifles on their backs. One lit a piece of paper and dropped it into a barrel, then fanned it with his hands. Licks of flame appeared. Several guards held out their hands to the heat. When an officer barked at them, the guards resumed their rounds.

  The sewage pipe seemed to head underground in the direction of the armory, and alongside the toppled south end of the building. Bombs had mangled that end, and a wall had fallen into the lot to the south. The underground pipe appeared to lie below this cratered rubble.

  Cray studied the effluent. The stream carried the brown and unspeakable. Cray was comfortable hanging in front of the sewage pipe, and was tempted to stay awhile, leisurely coming up with another plan. But a splinter of wood drifted into him from the pipe, then more small pieces of wood, and then bits of floating plaster not yet fully soaked.

  Detritus was falling into the sewage not far up the line. The pipe was open to the air nearby. As if doing a pull-up, Cray lifted himself on the pipe to peer into the armory's yard. Two men in overalls hadjust entered the yard from a vehicle lot to the south. The lot had camouflage nets strung over it on poles. The men were negotiating a path through the bomb rubble, their heads visible to Cray one moment, then not the next as they climbed and descended hills of debris. They reached the armory's river-side yard. One of them carried a toolbox. They might have been mechanics, and perhaps their regular route between the vehicle lot and the armory had been obstructed when the south part of the armory was destroyed, so now they had to pick their way through the piles of bricks and beams and around craters. The mechanics had kicked debris into the open sewage pipe.

  Cray smiled thinly. He had found the breach. He lowered himself again to peer into the pipe. He might have seen a slight suggestion of indigo down the pipe — a reflection of the dying day's light — but he could not be sure. He breathed deeply, lifted his legs until his feet found the concrete lip, and crawled inside.

  Sewage filled the pipe except the top seven inches. Cray twisted his neck so that his mouth and nose remained above the surface. The air was putrid, but Cray knew it wasn't the scent but rather the methane and the absence of oxygen that would kill him if he was too long in the pipe. He scrambled along, his feet slipping on slime that coated the pipe walls under the surface. He held his breath as long as possible, then let it slowly out. When he at last had to inhale, the fumes seemed to lock in his lungs, and on his second breath neon spots began appearing before his eyes. He dug his feet into the walls and pushed off again and again. He used his hands as paddles, struggling up the sewage stream. His head scraped along the top of the pipe, loosening crusted filth that dripped into his eyes and ears.

  That distant purple spot seemed to draw no nearer. Blackness pressed in on Cray. He could see nothing except more neon colors, now dancing in front of him. He lost his bearings and drifted sideways, his shoulder bumping the pipe wall. He could not tell which direction was up. And then he could not detect the surface of the sewage His mind was going. He kicked and kicked against the slime-covered walls, vaguely hoping he was still going toward that patch of purple. Soft fingers of unconsciousness reached for him.

  Abruptly his head no longer had contact with the pipe. He rose in the waste. He had found the cleft in the pipe caused by the bomb blast. Cray gulped air.

  The mad colors in front of his eyes dimmed. His thoughts began arranging themselves. The opening in the pipe was twice the breadth of his shoulders. Cray was in a conical bomb crater, with a short horizon of dirt all around, as if he were standing at the bottom of a funnel He stood slowly so that the muck dripping off him would be soundless. He wiped his eyes and lips. He placed a foot on the dirt to test his weight. When several pebbles fell into the sewage, Cray froze to listen for the guards. He heard only good-natured chatter. With small and careful steps, he rose to the crest of the crater.

  He could see nothing but bomb wreckage in all directions. He crawled over two beams that had fallen across each other, then up a hillock of bricks. He lay on the rubble pile like a lizard, sodden and stinking and once again getting cold.

  Laughter came from a patrol near the river. Piles of debris hid Cray from the German guards. He crawled toward the armory, moving one limb at a time, testing each handhold and each foot placement. He moved down a hill of bricks, then along a valley between more mounds. He slipped through a tangle of bent pipe and split wood. He moved without thought, his limbs silently finding their way through the twisted ruins, his mind on the guards.

  When he heard new voices, he paused to cup both ears with his hands, then rotated one cup downward, a hunter's trick that allowed him to better gauge the direction of the conversation. Sentries were both to his left and his right, to the street and the river sides of the building. Footfalls came from the rubble near the street, but they were even and unconcerned. Again Cray crawled forward.

  In lieu of the fallen wall, tarpaulins had been hung from beams. They warded off the weather and acted as blackout curtains. They billowed in the wind. Cray moved the last few yards to a tarp. He slowly lifted a corner.

  Sounds of machinery and men came from the far end of the building. Down a long aisle of wooden boxes, workers were pushing containers into two Wehrmacht trucks that had backed into loading bays. Cray's end of the building was dark. He slipped under the tarp and moved to a stack of boxes.

  Many of the containers had apparently been salvaged from the destroyed end of the building, because they lay about in disarray uncharacteristic of the Wehrmacht. But toward the center of the building the rows became more orderly. Some stacks were almost to the ceiling. Weapons were against the east wall. Crates were stamped with STIELHAND- GRANATE, FLAMMENWERFER, and MP/2. Stick grenades, flamethrowers, submachine guns, and many more crates filled with other weapons.

  Cray's clothing clung to him. He would turn to the weapons after he obtained a change of clothes. He left damp footprints as he moved to the closest container. The crate was painted in camouflage brown and gray, and was not latched. He opened it and pulled out green fabric. Cray held it up to his eyes. It was a field service tunic with the national emblem sewn on the breast. He found trousers and blouses, and windproof anoraks and boots and greatcoats, and caps with short cloth peaks. A dozen complete uniforms From the cleated boots and anoraks, Cray guessed these were mountain troop uniforms. He set aside a full uniform Then he lifted out a canvas bag. He dug inside to find shoulder patches showing rank. He brought out a patch with the two pips, for a captain. He stared at it a moment, then caught the sewage smell of himself. Cray whispered, "I deserve a promotion." He brought out two braided major's patches. "That's better." He added the patches to his cache.

  3

  SERGEANT ULRICH KAHR was passing the cement mixer when the air-raid siren began its low growl. He continued with his leisurely pace because the siren usually gave ten minutes warning, and in a few dozen meters he would enter the most bombproof structure in the Reich, maybe in the world.

  He had walked by the cement mixer countless times, and wondered why it had never been removed from the Chancellery garden. No new construction had occurred on the bunker in months, yet the mixer had remained. Painted in green three times on the round mixer was the name of its owner, Hochtief, the Berlin construction firm. The concrete guard tower was to his right.

  Ahead was the Old Chancellery a dark building made darker by low
clouds. The side of the Chancellery facing the street was intact, but the rear, which was Kahr's view, was severely damaged. Most of the windows on the ground floor were boarded, and the sky could be seen through windows on the upper floor. Zigzags of strafing pocks decorated the stone walls, courtesy of enemy planes that roamed Berlin skies virtually at will.

  The siren's wail played back and forth among the buildings, washing over Kahr again and again. Ahead was the cement blockhouse with its steel door and two SS guards. Kahr was wearing his gray-green army uniform, the new model that was made of cheap cloth To save fabric: the tunic had only two pockets instead of four. So he didn't need to walk Berlin's streets to know the war was lost.

  The SS guards eyed him as he approached, just as they did every day, looking at him as if he were some species of vermin. Kahr detested the haughty SS bastards, the lot of them. And he'd heard some stories about the SS.

  The sergeant slowed, not wanting to enter the bunker one moment earlier than he had to. He glanced at his wristwatch. A few more minutes.

  Kahr instinctively ducked when the AA gun atop the Chancellery opened fire, filling the garden with hollow pounding. He glanced skyward to see a stream of tracer shells arcing across the sky. The gun battery was hidden by the roof. “Didn't the sirens always give ten minutes?” Kahr began to run toward the bunker entrance. The wand of tracers slashed across the sky, the gunner frantically cranking, trying to catch up to his target.

  Then the daylight flickered. An airplane soared across the garden, east to west along the length of it, there and gone almost before Kahr saw it. But he did see it, an enemy plane, American, a small plane, flying so low Kahr could see the white stars on its tail, however fleeting Un doubtedly a reconnaissance plane, sent over the Reich's capital, right over the Chancellery, with stunning impudence. Kahr had seen these recon planes before many times. Enemy bomber command surely had a detailed map of Berlin, updated frequently, so the bombers wouldn't waste their payloads on buildings that were already destroyed, as if the British and Americans had to worry about a shortage of explosives, goddamn them.

  The last of the tracers sped away across the sky, then blinked out in the distance, their own small admission of their folly Wisps of smoke rose from the Chancellery's roof, from the AA barrels Kahr heard the battery officer on the roof berate his men for slowness and poor aim. An SS guard was in a concrete tower to Kahr's right. The young guard looked unperturbed by the American flyover, and was examining with minute care a brown glove he held in his hand, and smiling.

  Kahr's right boot had a hole in the sole, and dampness had worked its way to his sock. He knew his foot wouldn't dry all day, and he didn't dare remove his boot to air out the sock because the last time he did so no less a personage than Dr. Goebbels upbraided him for being out of uniform. Kahr had wondered later how the minister of propaganda had time to be concerned about a sergeant's bootless foot.

  At the blockhouse door Kahr lifted his stiff gray linen identification card from a pocket. On the card was Kahr's photograph, a gold seal, a yellow diagonal bar, and the signature of the Führer's chief adjutant. Kahr had lost such a card three months ago, and had reported the loss immediately, and all Reich Security Service offices, the Wehrmacht Berlin regiment, the Gestapo, the Berlin police, and the Liebstandarte- SS Adolf Hitler were notified of the loss. But Kahr was not reprimanded because the authorities did not want to deter reports of lost passes. His lieutenant had ordered him to be more careful.

  The sergeant had no idea how he had lost his pass. He didn't care about it anymore, anyway. Much had happened to Kahr since then, none of it good. He did not have the energy to care about such things as a piece of stiff linen, or these rude guards, or the destroyed garden behind him, none of it. The war's toll on Kahr had been so great that he could not find refuge even in bitterness. Ulrich Kahr was spent. Little was left of him.

  The SS guard studied Kahr's face, comparing it with the photograph on the pass. Sergeant Kahr's mouth was crooked, lower on one side, giving him a carping look, even though he seldom carped. His eyes were dark and faded, with only a suggestion of life left in them.

  The two guards were all polish and creases, brittle in their importance, guarding this hole in the ground. Every day this same guard glared at the ID photograph and then Kahr with renewed suspicion, and each time the guard handed back the pass slowly, as if he might change his mind at any moment. Finally the guard nodded, a grudging, almost imperceptible movement. When the other guard opened the heavy steel door, Sergeant Kahr entered the blockhouse. The door clanked shut behind him with the deep finality of the last sound on earth.

  Kahr descended the stairs to one landing, then another, circling counterclockwise. The fetid smell reached for him, dank and sour. The bunker was surrounded by groundwater, and with every heavy rain the sewers backed up, filling the toilets with waste that would spill out into the halls. Added to the sewage smell were the odors of coal-tar disinfectant and damp wool uniforms. Kahr was sure these foul aromas chased away the good air, depriving his brain of oxygen, and so every shift he became dumber and dumber.

  Then he heard the whine, his whine. Sergeant Kahr may have been the only person assigned to the bunker whom the ventilator system's incessant drone did not bother. Most compared the sound to a dentist's drill. Constant, always on, reaching every room in the bunker, inescapable. But Sergeant Kahr was one of the bunker's ventilation technicians. His duty was to maintain the equipment that sucked in new air and blew out old air. He took pride in his task and appreciated the whine because it constantly reminded bunker denizens of his importance. Kahr might be the lowest-ranking person in the entire complex, but the whine was suffered by everyone irrespective of rank, which gave him some satisfaction.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a foyer, lit so brightly by overhead bulbs that Kahr had to squint up into the faces of the two SS guards posted there. Schutzstaffel guards were all tall. One examined his pass, then checked the duty roster on his clipboard, marking off Kahr's name. The other guard searched Kahr, running his hands up the sergeant's uniform to his armpits, then along his lower back, then down and up his trousers, rudely probing his crotch. This guard carried a Schmeisser submachine gun across his stomach on a sling.

  The guard captain worked at a small desk to one side of the door. He glanced up at Kahr, but quickly returned to his rosters and bulletins. Four telephones and several loose-leaf binders covered his desk. The guard captain wore a livid purple burn scar on his right cheek and right side of his neck.

  "All right, Sergeant," the guard with the clipboard said. "You can go in."

  "Bleib übrig," Kahr said pointedly. Survive. Lately, Berliners had been using the phrase instead of "good-bye." Kahr knew it irritated the SS guards, who viewed the new saying as defeatist. So he said it again.

  "Bleib übrig."

  "I'll survive, old man." The clipboard guard laughed meanly. "From the looks of you, you may not."

  Kahr could only nod agreement. The war had beaten up Ulrich Kahr, had ravaged his face and his body, and he knew it. Perhaps he shouldn't feel sorry for himself. He hadn't seen frontline duty, after all, not in this war, anyway because he was fifty-five years old, born the same year as the Führer. But the war had etched deep lines into Kahr's face, running from his nose to the corners of his mouth, fanning out from his eyes in expanding webs. The skin below his eyes was a ghastly mottled green, looking as if it had been bruised. He walked now in a stoop like an old man. And he was hesitant, the boldness gone from him. Everything, from climbing a flight of stairs to rising from a chair to spreading ersatz butter on black bread, seemed an insurmountable physical challenge. Last week the Führer's physician, Dr. Morrel, a kindly man, had offered to examine Kahr. The sergeant had politely said no. Kahr's decline was not due to a physical ailment but to news from the fronts, and in the last half year he had taken Germany's sufferings upon his shoulders.

  Kahr had been a widower for fifteen years, and had raised his sons on his own. La
st summer his oldest boy, Eswald, a Wehrmacht infantryman, had been killed by the American naval bombardment on the Normandy coast. Then just this past Christmas, Kahr had learned his second son, Theodor, an armored scout-car driver, had been killed during the Ardennes campaign when his vehicle rolled over a mine.

  Now all that was left of Ulrich Kahr's family was his youngest son, Max, who was on the eastern front. Every time Kahr saw the regimental chaplain, Kahr held his breath, hoping the chaplain wasn't bringing bad news, as he had already done twice. Kahr took little solace in knowing he was not alone in having lost two sons. German families had been gutted by this war, their boys torn from them. A pall of grief lay over the land.

  And there was no one to turn to. Every man in his regiment had lost someone. To talk of one's own loss was to rekindle someone else's heartache. So he suffered alone and in silence. Ulrich Kahr knew he could never again be whole, but he had one tender hope. The chance he might see his son Max again, home and alive, was a fragile prospect, too perilous to nudge by dwelling on it, but it was all that was left for Kahr.

  He stepped into a long central corridor used as a lounge. A Persian carpet brought from the Chancellery covered some of the floor, its edges folded under to fit the space. The furniture was an odd mix: a utilitarian bench resembling a pew, three ribbonback Louis Quinze chairs, several camp stools, and a long oak table against a wall under two enormous Schinkel landscapes. Dome lights cast the concrete walls in pale yellow.

  Ventilation grates were along the walls near the ceiling at three-meter intervals. Emergency telephones were mounted on each of the hallway's walls. The first door to his right was to a cloakroom.

  Just then General Keitel emerged from the second door, from the conference room. In those two paces into the hall Keitel transformed his face. In the conference room he had been a worried supplicant, earnest but unassuming, offering nothing to offend. But as he stepped into the hall, Keitel's chin firmed, his head lifted haughtily, and his gaze became imperious. Even his dueling scar remolded itself, from an insignificant welt to a magnificent testament to Prussian honor. He must have been meeting with the Führer, the only person on earth who could drain the Wehrmacht chief of staff s face of its arrogance.