Five Past Midnight

by James Thayer

  "The same clean, quick knife work killed those three soldiers on the wall," General Eberhardt said.

  "Photographs, even good ones, are not a substitute for an examination," Wenck said. "But as far as I can tell, all the wounds—on the chateau soldiers and on the three agents—are virtually identical. So it is possible, perhaps probable, that the same person wielded the knife."

  General Eberhardt said darkly, "The American is now in Berlin."

  Müller flipped a thumb toward Eberhardt. "The general's so-called impenetrable wall around the city to keep this Jack Cray out was full of holes. The general has failed."

  Eberhardt straightened his backbone. "While the Führer is alive, I have not failed."

  "And so far, Detective," Müller glared, "you have failed, too."

  "Jack Cray is in Berlin." Otto Dietrich said the words slowly, tasting them. Then he asked, "Is there anything more you can tell me, Doctor?"

  "The assailant is right-handed," Wenck answered. "Why is that important to me?" The coroner replied, "Stay away from his right hand." Dietrich smiled. He nodded his thanks and turned to go. "Dietrich," Müller called after him. "You have underestimated." Dietrich passed through the aisle of bodies, walked through an anteroom, then out onto Huzel Street. Peter Hilfinger and the car were waiting for him.

  Dietrich opened the rear door and said, "Peter, at the intersection, turn right, then go back to the station. I'll meet you there."

  The detective bent low, slammed the door shut, then in a crouch stepped back into the coroner's office. Hilfinger drove the car away. Decades of police work had taught Dietrich to trust his hunches He stood inside the door, waiting.

  Not long A black Volkswagen sedan sped by his door, two men in the front seat, the passenger talking into a microphone, trailing Dietrich's car.

  Dietrich walked onto the sidewalk, his gaze following the Volkswagen as it turned right and disappeared behind a rubble mound. The Gestapo was following Dietrich Undoubtedly on Heinrich Müller's orders. Dietrich turned into the wind and began walking toward the station.

  12

  KATRIN SPUN AROUND, the rubble mounds a blur as she turned. She was lost, once again. She went up on her toes to try to look over a stack of concrete blocks, salvaged from a destroyed structure, but not yet carted away by salvagers. The pile was too high to peer over. She was less than three blocks from the Tiergarten's bird sanctuary, she was sure Yet she did not know where the park was, did not know which direction was north.

  Like most Berliners, she frequently became lost, sometimes only blocks from home, rubble piles obscuring the horizon, landmarks torn down, the location of the sun hidden by smoke and ash. She could not get her bearings. And because many buildings were crazily canted, the perpendicular was distorted, and Katrin found herself swaying in sympathy with the wounded structures. The war had taken away many things, none more surprising than the ability to tell which direction was straight up.

  She tried to push her hands into her coat pockets, but they were stuffed with cheese and bread rolls. She had been without adequate food so long that she had been unable to leave her home without filling her pockets. The American had laughed at her, not in an unkindly way. But she needed to be near food, even if she had to wear it, and its weight in her coat was comforting. At the very least, she knew where her next meal was coming from. From her pockets.

  She passed an elm tree lying on the street, its roots exposed, torn from the ground by a bomb blast. Two oxen pulling a Schutheiss Brewery dray crossed the intersection ahead of her. Perhaps she was near the brewery. Down the block a dozen French workers used block and tackle to pull reusable floor joists from a ruined building. Several loudly sang Maurice Chevalier's "I'm a Lover of Paris," probably to irk their two guards, who tried to ignore them by talking earnestly with each other. Painted on a nearby wall in a shaky scribble was ENJOY THE WA.R. THE PEACE WILL BE TERRIBLE.

  From around a pile of fractured telephone poles came a stream of refugees, carrying knapsacks and cloth bags, silently tramping along, twenty or so of them, and every one looking beaten down. Refugees always marched west — seemed to instinctively know the way — so Katrin took her bearings from them and started north toward the Tiergarten.

  After another block she again felt her bearings slipping away, so she climbed onto a pile of fractured masonry, careful to keep her skirt tucked around her legs, and stepped unsteadily up the rubble mountain for a view from the top.

  The war had turned Berlin inside out. Bits and pieces of lives that should have been concealed and comfortable behind walls and doors were rudely exposed to the gazes of passersby. Katrin stepped over a leather photograph album, open to the sky its photos of marriages and christenings scattered about. Lodged between blue and black clinker bricks were a pair of men's long underwear, the legs missing from a blast. Also on the rubble pile were the upper half of a ceramic beer mug with a hinged pewter top, a pair of yellowed dentures, the head of a girl's China doll, a stack of letters held together by yarn, a brass weight and chain from a pendulum clock, a rouge brush, a shattered photograph frame, an empty bottle of India ink, a box of Christmas tree ornaments, the blue glass balls fractured to the size of snowflakes and scattered across the debris, dully reflecting the day's gray light. Small tokens from broken lives. Berlin was awash in these mementos and trifles, abandoned and ignored in a city without roofs. She climbed over them without a glance.

  At the top of the rubble pile she could see over a neighboring row of rubble, just enough to find the flak tower near the bird sanctuary. She had her directions again. She carefully descended the wreckage, her shoes slipping on the damp bricks and concrete pieces. A swallow flitted by once, then again, perhaps looking for a recognizable place to land. A piece of torn camouflage netting caught her ankle, and she stumbled just as she reached the sidewalk. She caught herself on a telephone pole and started north.

  She passed heap after heap of debris and one gutted building after another. She could ignore only so much. Her city—the destination of youthful dreams, the sacred place of her marriage to Adam—lay about her, trampled and burned, no more resembling a city than a rock quarry. The symphony of the city had been stilled. With a finger she dabbed at the corner of her eye, but there was no tear. She pressed the corner of her eye. Still no tear. She had shed the last of them, she supposed. And she was not alone. Berlin was beyond tears. Now only fear remained. Fear of Bolshevik soldiers, so close their campfires reddened the eastern clouds at night. Fear of the American and British bombers, which returned with numbing punctuality. Days and nights of fear.

  Berliners wore their fear like a uniform. As she walked toward the park, passing many pedestrians doing their anxious errands in the predictable pause between bombing runs, Katrin realized Berliners had grown to look alike. Drawn, bony, wan faces. Stricken expressions. Bent, furtive walk, like mice scurrying from one safe spot to the next. And as if by agreement, Berliners had surrendered their right to color. They wore gray or black, the clothes of mourning.

  Ahead on the street were three wooden barricades. An errant bomb from the run on the Alkett tank plant m Ruhleben had blasted a hole in the street precisely the street's width. People waited in line to cross unsteady planks that had been rigged along the edge of the crater, which was filled with murky water from a burst main. Katrin stepped behind a Red Cross colonel in black boots, a slate-gray greatcoat, and a peaked hat. Even the Red Cross looked like the Wehrmacht. She waited her turn to use the planks. Buildings near the crater had been raked back by the blast. A dead horse was bobbing in the crater. A man in a chef's hat was in the water, pushing the horse carcass to the crater's edge, where a cart waited. A restaurant would be serving it by nightfall.

  Katrin held her hands out like a wire walker as she negotiated the plank. The Red Cross colonel turned to offer his hand, and she used him for support the last few steps. She nodded her thanks, then waded through a knot of refugees waiting to use the plank, heading in the other direction. She glanced
at her watch. She had twenty-five minutes.

  A child's cry brought her up, a piercing wail. Huddled near an overturned Auto-Union truck was a boy, maybe four years old, wearing three gunnysacks for a shirt and a pair of rolled-up man's pants held around his waist by a rope. His face was screwed up with the realization that he was lost, that his parents had moved on without him. In his hand was a crudely carved toy truck. Porous shoes had allowed water to wick up his pants almost to his knees. Dirt or ashes smudged his face. The boy dragged a sleeve across his eyes, streaking the dirt.

  What was one more lost child? One more orphan? Berlin was full of lost children. They go somewhere, eventually, she figured, though she didn't know where. Wars had their price, and children paid their full measure.

  Katrin took three more steps before, with a huge sigh at her weakness, she turned back toward the boy. He stepped back at her approach, covering his eyes with his hands to make her disappear.

  She towered over him. "Where are your parents?" A little too gruff. Lord, she didn't want this little boy's problems.

  He peeked up at her through his fingers, but said nothing.

  "Are you German? Can you understand me?"

  Tears had reached his chin. He nodded.

  "Is your Muti alive? Your father?"

  "Muti. But she's not here." The boy's words ended in a thin wail.

  A siren sounded from the next block, the mechanical wail weaving in and around the boy's cry. Katrin no longer even turned her head toward sirens. She asked, "How long have you been lost?"

  His chin trembled. "Ten hundred hours and minutes." He tentatively moved toward her, two half steps, and with that little movement, gave himself over to the kind lady who had asked after his mother. He was now hers.

  Katrin understood this rule of engagement She rubbed her hand alongside an eye, trying to think Then it came to her She looked at her watch Twenty minutes She had to hurry "What's your name?"

  "Artur"

  She reached for his hand and gently patted it "Come with me, Artur"

  She led him through the street, passed a restaurant where a sign in the window announced it was Eintopftag, One-dish Day, when it was required to serve only a tasteless stew. On the walk in front of the restaurant was a bundle of the Volkischer Beobachter, the party's official newspaper, now down to one-page editions, and largely ignored except to kindle fires

  Another stray bomb had fallen that morning further down the block, felling two buildings, setting them on fire, and blowing much of their contents out onto the street. Katrin and the boy picked their way along, stepping around a blackened trumpet, half an accordion, dozens of loose ivory piano keys, and a French horn twisted even more than French horns are in their natural state. The bomb had hit a musical instrument shop. The boy paused to put several piano keys in his pocket. The fire had been extinguished, and a crew was rolling up hoses. The street was slick with water.

  A TeNo squad worked hurriedly in the rubble. TeNo was short for Technische Nothüfe, the Technical Emergency Corps, also called the Rescue Squad. Cable from an electric winch on a Phanomen truck's front bumper was pulling aside a beam. One rescuer moved his finger in a circle, and the winchman engaged the drum. The cable became taut, and the beam groaned as it was dragged from the ruin. A scream came from the rubble. The winchman threw the winch's clutch With pry bars and axes, the Rescue Squad dug into the timbers. Artur tugged Katrin's hand to slow her so he could watch. The squad yelled encouragement to the trapped individual below. Two workers heaved on a wrecking bar, and two more reached deep into the wreckage. After a moment they gently pulled out the victim, who smiled weakly despite the blood on a leg. A gray-haired man in a tie Perhaps from the music shop. A litter was passed into the rubble.

  The boy said, "That's blood."

  "Yes."

  "I seen it before."

  She pulled him along, around a piano leg, then over a saxophone that had been pressed as flat as a coin, the mother-of-pearl keys sprinkled about. Artur stopped for some of these, too.

  Katrin again brought up her wristwatch. "No wonder you lost your mother, Artur. You stop to pick up everything."

  A few moments later they were on the Kurfürstendamm near the blackened skeleton of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. The zoo flak tower— the dark, indestructible obelisk that Allied fighters pockmarked daily— loomed just to the north. At this intersection were public notice boards, dozens of them, installed for government announcements — Jack Cray's face stared out from each panel — but lately plastered with private messages. A few boards displayed items for trade, but most were papered with layer upon layer of missing-person messages, hastily handwritten judging from the scrawls, often on crumpled scraps, most from refugees fleeing west, telling of a time and place to meet, hoping to hook up with the missing.

  This was the place in Berlin where the lost might be found. A hundred and more people clutched their coats, went up onto their toes, and called out, hoping against hope that the war would for once relent and allow their loved ones to appear at this spot. Occasionally a crushing embrace was seen, but most often people drifted away, one after another, hoarse and heartbroken.

  Even Berliners who had misplaced one another while shopping knew to meet at these notice boards. And Artur's mother had figured out that her son might end up here. She leaped from the crowd and grabbed her son, her face broadly creased by a smile. Artur whooped and clung to his mother's neck, the piano keys and saxophone buttons rattling in his pockets, his wood truck in one hand. She scolded him softy, but he laughed. Artur's two brothers—perhaps seven and nine years old— waited nearby. The woman was dressed in a filthy Wehrmacht coat that hung to her ankles. Her hair was matted, and a deep cut on her chin did not seem to be healing. But she hugged and hugged her boy. Katrin looked at her watch. She still had ten minutes.

  Finally, Artur freed himself to point over his shoulder at Katrin. Artur's mother smiled tentatively. Artur wiggled out of her arms to join his brothers. His mother's mouth moved, trying to find the right words. Then she stepped to Katrin and gripped both of her hands in hers and whispered a thank you.

  Katrin pulled two cheese rolls out of her pocket, and passed them to the woman, who may not have seen that much food in weeks. She grabbed them, then remembered to smile another thanks. Katrin dug further, and pulled out three Kaiser rolls. The woman also took these, and turned to join her sons. She herded them away. West, of course. An instant later they had disappeared in the crowd.

  Katrin fairly ran past the ruined church toward Budapcster Strasse. She reined herself in. To run in Berlin was to invite being stopped by the Gestapo. Wilhelm Becker had told her weeks ago that he was punctual. That in an emergency she could always find him walking along the park side of Tiergartenstrasse at four in the afternoon. He had given her precise instructions how to meet him, but only in a dire predicament. She hurried along the Landwehr Canal, then crossed a bridge to approach army headquarters.

  And it was here she spotted Colonel Becker, emerging from the OKW building's double doors. But instead of turning north toward the park, for the stroll he promised he took every afternoon at four, he turned south, toward her. The distance between them closed rapidly. Other army officers moved in and out of the building.

  She was startled by Becker's appearance. His shoulders were hunched protectively. His eyes were shadowed and remote, and, it seemed to Katrin, fearful, darting left and right. She had met him at several army social gatherings before Adam had been arrested, and the colonel had been animated, with an inexhaustible supply of expressions and gestures. But now his face was clouded, and his mouth was pulled back anxiously. Becker had the look of one expecting a blow.

  Katrin stepped up to him. "Colonel Becker?"

  He started, his head snapping back. And he gasped, more a hiss, when he recognized her. "What are you doing here?"

  "I need to talk to you."

  He shook his head so violently he dislodged his peaked hat, and it rested on one ear. "That's impos
sible. You've .. . you've put me in grave danger approaching me. I can't possibly..."

  She fiercely gripped his elbow and turned him around. "Walk with me to the park."

  When he balked, she pulled him along like she had done with Artur. The colonel ducked his head to hide his face under the cap's brim.

  She said, "You didn't respond to my message."

  His arm trembled under the pressure of her hand. He seemed so afraid he could not control his legs, and she guided him north, toward the Tiergarten. Fear was making him breathe like a runner.

  "What has happened to you?" she demanded.

  Becker coughed weakly, an excuse to hide his face behind his hand as a group of Wehrmacht officers passed. Two Mercedes limousines were at the curb in front of the headquarters buildings, and Becker tilted his cap to further hide himself. When he walked by the headquarters' doors, he quickened his pace, suddenly pulling Katrin along. Strung from telephone poles, overhead camouflage netting threw Crosshatch patterns of shadows on the sidewalk.

  He was silent, glancing over his shoulder every few steps. He licked his lips. Again he ducked his head as army officers passed. Katrin led him across Tiergartenstrasse and into the park. They walked toward the East- West Axis. The park resembled the dreadful, grainy newsreels she had seen of the Great War's trench lands; craters, uprooted trees, stones strewn about, lawns hidden under debris, nothing untouched by high explosives.

  She conducted him toward a bench that had been blown backward. He stood mutely while she righted it, then swept dampness from the seat with her hand before sitting down. After a moment Becker joined her on the bench.

  "You ignored the message I left in the milk box," she said. "You recruited me, and now you've cut me off?"

  "You have no idea what has been happening." Becker refused to look at her, staring at a bank of lilac bushes. Like a tortoise, he kept his head tucked back in his collar. He nervously dabbed at nothing at the corner of his mouth. "My superior, General Etzdorf, has been arrested, and so have two others in my office. And many others in my branch. A purge. The general and I..."