Five Past Midnight

by James Thayer

  When she passed the home of Gauleiter Eckardt, the smell of pastry made her slow, made her glance up the brick walkway to the door. The gauleiter had an inexhaustible supply of food because he controlled the city's warehouses. The day after Adam's arrest, Eckardt had appeared on her doorstep offering her the benefits of his pantry and the protection of his household if she would help him overcome the loss of his wife and children, who had left for the safety of Switzerland. Katrin had politely declined, but such was the power of her hunger that she always slowed as she passed the gauleiter's walkway She would detect the scents of beef or venison, or chicken soup, which Berliners like to sip through straws, and once she had smelled a blackberry Strudel, she was sure of it. She wondered if now—all these months of hunger later—she would be able to resist his offer should it come again, whether her mouth would be able to form the words to turn him down. She shook off her revolting speculation.

  Thoughts of food were a familiar companion, and they calmed her. She walked steadily, the vapor of her breath trailing over her shoulders. On these cold spring nights Berlin was as silent as a country pasture. The citizens had fled or were dead or were inside their homes huddling before small fires, if they had somehow found wood. At least until the British bombers came at midnight, Berlin's residential neighborhoods sounded as the areas must have a thousand years ago, with the soft sough of wind and the occasional lupine cry of a dog. On these long walks she could will away the war.

  And she could will back Adam. She was still two blocks from her home, so she had time to re-create one of their dates. She smiled to herself as she picked his birthday dinner — his last birthday dinner ever — at Horcher's. They had sat near the window at the tiny restaurant at Lutherstrasse 2, and had begun the meal with sherry and caviar surrounded by shaved ice, followed by consomme Marcelle, then crabs in a dill sauce served over red nee, then venison in sour cream. Then a 1928 Lieserer Niederberg and peaches flambe, which was brought to the table by two waiters. The peaches and sugar were placed in a silver bowl and cooked over an alcohol lamp for five minutes. Then the skins were removed and the fruit cut in half and placed over shaved ice in another bowl to chill. Finally the peaches were layered on ice cream and topped with crushed nuts and apricot brandy.

  Katrin ruefully wiped the corner of her mouth. She had begun to salivate like a dog. And she was painfully aware that, as she had brought back that lovely and departed day she was focusing on the food rather than on Adam. Her home was now just half a block more along the street. It rose in front of her, a dark shadow on a black night, unleavened by a light or the hope of a warm greeting at the door. Instead of a sanctuary, her home had become a roof and a bed to her, offering no joy that was not a memory. She wondered what she would eat that night, could not think of a single item left in her pantry. Maybe there was a potato in the bin on the back porch. She would cut away the rotted black spots. She passed the laurel hedge that marked the edge of her lot.

  The sound of auto tires came from behind her. Katrin looked over her shoulder. A black sedan was moving slowly, was following her, and was running without headlight slits. The cab was dark and she could not make out faces. Then she saw a circular antenna on the car's roof. This was the Opel that Colonel Becker had warned her about. The agents inside the car must have been able to fix on her broadcast, and had been following her since she left the abandoned house. A window rolled down on the car's passenger side, and a hand holding a pistol emerged.

  Desperation and fear abruptly wrapped around her like a coat. She walked faster, approaching her brick walkway. She held the wireless in front of her, as if she could possibly hide it now. Anything she could do, any thoughts she might have, seemed useless and small. Then she broke into a run, slipping on the brick, but catching herself. She hurried up her walkway toward the front door, aware her attempt to escape was so hopeless it was comic.

  Maybe she had known she could never accomplish what the Hand wanted. Maybe she had known they would find her. Without Adam waiting for her in the living room with a fire roaring on the grate, it didn't seem to matter if she reached her door.

  The Opel accelerated to her walkway, then slowed. Two men in dark coats leaped out before it was fully stopped. The driver stayed in the car. Katrin braved a glance at them. Both wore belted coats and both carried pistols. One yelled at her to stop.

  She thought vaguely that perhaps she could make it into her house. She climbed the eight steps to the porch, passing ivy planters on both sides. The home had been in Adam's family for eighty years, but she and Adam had planned after the war on finding a house with more light and fewer rooms. The enormous black oak door had a wrought-iron grate over a center portal. She uselessly fumbled for her keys. Maybe if she could get inside, look at their wedding portrait once more.

  The Gestapo agents scrambled up the front steps and onto the porch behind her. Perhaps only because it was habit, the taller agent clubbed her with the butt of his handgun. Katrin sagged against the door, then slid to the mat.

  The second agent caught her suitcase as it fell. He was a plug of a man, with his weight in his chest. He slipped his pistol into his belt and opened the suitcase. The plug grinned. "A pack radio."

  The first agent said, "We've been looking for you a long while. You've kept a lot of us busy." He bent to dig roughly into her pockets.

  He pulled out her one-time pad. "Looks like we've found ourselves a professional." He continued his search of her, patting her down, but found no weapons.

  "They all talk down IN the cellar, professional or not." The plug laughed. "They talk and talk and talk."

  The agents lifted Katrin by her elbows. She found she could focus her eyes. Pain from behind her ear poured down her neck and into the rest of her body. Her legs were rubbery, but the agents held her up. They carried her down the stairs and along the walkway toward the car. They chatted about something, but she could not think beyond the agony of her head. They approached the Opel, with its sweeping fenders and long hood shaped like a coffin. Darkness hid the driver.

  The taller agent opened the back passenger door. Gestapo cars have the cab lights disconnected to hide comings and goings. The tall agent bent to enter the car first.

  The plug waited behind Katrin. He said tonelessly "You can tell us about your radio broadcasts on the way to Prinze Albrecht Strasse. It'll save us time once we get there."

  She thought she heard the tall agent cough from inside the cab. The plug put a hand on her head and pushed her down toward the door. He shoved her onto the back seat.

  Everything inside the car was entirely wrong. Instead of the tall Gestapo agent, a blond, chop-jawed man sat in the middle of the leather seat, a knife in his hand. Blood dripped from the knife onto his trousers. The body of the tall Gestapo agent was pushed against the far door, crumpled and slack, blood gushing from a wound in his throat. In the front seat, the Gestapo driver was bent over his steering wheel, his hands loose at his sides. Katrin could hear blood from the driver's neck splashing onto the floor. The radio direction finder was on the seat next to the driver, its gauges glowing amber.

  The blond man held a finger to his lips. He was smiling narrowly behind his hand. He wore a Wehrmacht major's uniform. For all his concern, he might have been sitting in a pew in church.

  The plug had heard nothing When he bent to enter the cab, the blond reached across Katrin, gripped the agent by a coat lapel and jerked him into the car.

  The agent did not even have time to register surprise. The blond brought the agent's head down over the knife, and the blade worked swiftly. The momentum of the plug's body carried him across Katrin. The agent shook violently and then relaxed in death, his last sound a liquid sigh. His body came to rest on the first agent. In one smooth motion, the agents had entered one door alive and ended up against the other door dead. The agents seemed a pile of leather. Less than ten seconds had elapsed since the first agent had entered the car.

  The blond man wore stubble across his chin. His face w
as full of harsh angles. The knife disappeared somewhere.

  With a broad accent, the blond man asked, "Do you have anything to eat?"

  9

  KATRIN SAT on the only piece of furniture left in her bedroom, a Gothic armchair of carved and gilded wood with velvet upholstery. The one-time pad was on one knee and her pages of dots and dashes on the other. The room was meagerly lit by an oil lamp resting on a windowsill at her shoulder. On a bitterly cold night three months ago, with no electricity or coal, Katrin had ripped apart her bed and used the frame for firewood. Then onto the fire grate went the dresser and her antique desk on which she once wrote letters to Adam, and even the chair with the scroll legs and ball feet made by the Huguenot Daniel Marot two centuries before. She had huddled near the fireplace and watched the flames blacken and eat away the old wood, so happy to be warm she hadn't given the heirloom furniture another thought.

  She decoded the last line and stared at the page. The message made little sense to her, and it was not meant to. It was addressed to the Horseman. She fumbled with the sulfur match, her hands so cold she had difficulty grasping it. She scratched the match head, then put the flame to the pages she had torn off the one-time pad. After they had curled and turned dark, she blew out the flame and used the bottom of an ink bottle to crush the embers.

  Katrin's head snapped up at the scent of meat. She had not had any kind of meat in six weeks, maybe longer, she could not remember. The heady smell was almost foreign to her. Tendrils of the odor seemed to lift her from the chair and pull her from the room. She carried the message with her as she descended the stairs. Her head throbbed with each step, and her ears were still buzzing from the Gestapo agent's blow.

  The American was in the kitchen. She held out the message. "It's for you."

  He looked up from the frying pan. He must have been more interested in the meal, because he put the message on the counter without looking at it. He salted the meat. She shuddered at the sight of the American, and found herself taking a step back. But the scent of the meat — it looked like flank steak, sizzling and browning, the juice gathering at the bottom of the pan — held her in the kitchen.

  "I don't bite," he said, shuffling the meat in the pan.

  She glanced at the flyer on the counter. It had been delivered to every door in the neighborhood by a Pimpf—a member of the Jungvolk—that afternoon. This man's face was on the flyer.

  "I had no idea.. . ." Her voice faded.

  "You had no idea the Horseman would be the man on the posters all over the city, the Vassy Chateau soldier?"

  She shook her head.

  He smiled. "I had no idea I was the Horseman either, until a few days ago. Somebody gave me the name. I'd like that job. Sitting in a room, dreaming up code names."

  He took another pinch of salt from a bowl and sprinkled it over the pan. He concentrated on the steak and seemed to exclude all else in the room. Also on the stove were potatoes and carrots in boiling water. On the counter and table was a vast treasure of food. The kitchen seemed to be bursting with jars ofjam, cheeses, potatoes, three dressed-out chickens, dozens of sausages, tins of butter, loaves of bread, and bottles of wine. And pastries. French eclairs, an apple tart, Bismarcks, and a blackberry Strudel.

  She moved toward the pastry. She knew she should show some restraint. Her finger dipped into the icing on an eclair. She brought it to her mouth. She tested it with her tongue, then like a child licked it off her finger. The sweetness of that small taste made her giddy, overwhelmed the pain in her head. Her finger went back for more.

  "Don't spoil your dinner," the American said lightly. His German was gnarled by an accent but fast and understandable.

  Katrin picked up a cloth bag from the counter and held it to her nose. She closed her eyes. "Coffee. Real coffee." She glanced at him. "Is the gauleiter still alive?"

  He looked up, wearing a startled expression, perhaps for her benefit. "Of course he's still alive."

  "Then how did you get all this food?"

  In the Opel, after the American had told her he was the Horseman, and with blood still pouring all around, he had asked where the nearest food was. In a daze, she had pointed at the gauleiter's home. He had told her to go into her house, and that he would be along in a few minutes, all the while speaking with a bank clerk's dispassion. He had returned while she was upstairs decoding the message.

  The American said, "The gauleiter was upstairs, drunkenly bawling out some beer hall song. And a lady was up there too, giggling and singing. I went in the unlocked back door into the kitchen. They didn't hear a thing, and so much food was in his larder he won't miss the little I took. I made three trips, my arms full of food each time."

  "Where did you put the car, the car with the bodies?"

  "I left it in a park a kilometer from here. From there I walked to the gauleiter's,"

  She nodded at the stove. "And the wood?"

  He grinned again. "It's coal, not wood."

  "I've been out of coal for months."

  "Do you know anything about your furnace?" he asked.

  "Only that it doesn't have any coal, like I said."

  "This is a large house, and you have a huge furnace. A coal bin with a feed into the furnace usually has a few pieces of stray coal that the feed screw couldn't collect. And I found a few more chunks that had fallen into the ash bin below the furnace."

  The scent of the meat was powerful, was making her act strangely and inappropriately. She was talking with a cutthroat, a merciless killer, chatting away and making small gestures, all as an excuse to monitor the progress of the steaks in their pan.

  She had heard a few things about America and Americans, mostly on the radio. They were naive and full of energy, children really. They were easily swayed and easily distracted. Churchill had duped the entire country. American women shaved their armpits and New York City lay in ruin after Luftwaffe bombings. That was all she knew about them. She had never before met one.

  Now an American was making a meal in her kitchen. If Americans all looked like him, the war was certainly lost. His smile was there and gone, there and gone. A killer, yet he had a veneer of urbanity and good cheer. In fact, she thought, he looked rather German. At least, he looked like the exaggerated caricatures of German soldiers on the propaganda posters Goebbels had placed all over the country. Big-framed and blond and agate-eyed. Except this one looked like he'd been run over by a truck once or twice.

  "Are you German?" she asked abruptly.

  "I'm an American. I thought you knew that."

  "What I mean is, is your heritage German? You look German. Were your grandparents from Germany, maybe?"

  He pulled at an earlobe. "I had an uncle who was German. He came to America to work in a baby carriage factory."

  "Yes?"

  Cray said, "He was fired after two weeks."

  "Why?"

  "Because every time he tried to build a baby carriage, it turned out to be a machine gun."

  It took her a moment. Then she said, "You are a child."

  "Looks like the steaks are done." He slid them onto two plates, then fished out the carrots and potatoes. He broke the potatoes open and spread butter on them. He tore off large chunks of bread. He buttered hers, but with his he scraped the meat pan, letting the grease soak into the bread. When Katrin pointed at the pan, he did the same with her bread, cleaning the pan with it. He handed her a plate. So much time had passed since her last full meal, she was startled with the plate's weight. He gave her a knife and fork.

  She followed him into the adjacent room, where a fire was on the grate. The coal was of a poor quality, and it gave off more smoke than heat. Even so, it warmed the entire room. He had placed a bucket containing a few more pieces of coal to one side. He lifted two pillows from a sofa and tossed them in front of the fireplace. He lowered himself to the pillow, his feet out to the flames. She followed him down to a pillow.

  The fire was the only light in the room, which Germans call the good room. Thi
s good room still looked as it had since the turn of the century, everything in its place in a rigid geometry. In the middle of the room was a carpet, and centered on that carpet was a table, in the middle of the table was a crocheted mat, and in the center of the mat was a flower vase. Around the table were six chairs with plaited cane seats and red plush backs. Dark curtains hung over the windows. In one corner was a wicker flower stand for a miniature rubber tree. A small portrait of the German patron saint, St Boniface, occupied one wall and a copy of Brehm's Animal Life was on a pedestal table under a lamp with a silk shade. Katrin could not imagine anyone ever laughing in the room Except her and Adam. They had laughed here a lot, rolling and groping crazily in front of the fireplace on these very pillows. Then Adam had been taken away.

  "Aren't you going to read the message?" she asked.

  "Until I eat this steak, I don't care what's in that message." He cut off a large portion of meat and shoved it into his mouth.

  She bit into the grease-soaked bread, then said around the wad in her mouth, "I've never tasted anything better than this."

  They ate in silence, the only sound the rush and pop of the fire. She could not take her eyes off him. He ate with a singular dedication, his hand moving mechanically between plate and mouth. She thought she was repelled by him, but no emotions and few thoughts could compete with the flavors of the meal. She ate quickly, as if the American might decide to take away her food. She had also heard they were volatile.

  He cleaned his plate with the bread, and only when the last of it was gone did he go to the kitchen for the message. When he returned, he was also carrying an open bottle of wine and two glasses. He sat next to the fire and used its light to read. Then he read it again. He brought his head up slowly and stared at the Brehm print, not appearing to be seeing it. Then he returned his gaze to the message.