Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  “My—”

  “In the Movement. I was there in the beginning, at the first summit. My Gruppe was the Blau-Weiss, have you heard of that? A little pack of Zionists at the Höhe Meissner? It rather taxes the imagination, these days.”

  “I’m sorry, no.” Was there a point to this? Had an evening with young people left Kleister feeling sentimental? But then Oskar recalled the circumstances under which he’d been recruited by the Abwehr. Jaap, too, had wanted to ascertain this. “I was in the dj.1.11,” he said.

  “Ah, indeed. Then I don’t need to tell you anything, do I? You’ve read George, you know these things often end. But I would ask you to tell me something, if I may. You can’t possibly be in the SOPADE.”

  It wasn’t a question, so Oskar didn’t trouble to deny it. He held his palms out: I’m just what I seem to be.

  The doctor wasn’t buying it. “But you are something, though, aren’t you? You’re in league with the underground. You make cryptic telephone calls. You carry a weapon.”

  Oskar reacted foolishly, slapping a hand to his jacket to make sure the gun was still there, that Kleister hadn’t deftly removed it. The doctor gave him a sympathetic smile, and Oskar understood the rest: like Clair and his scarf, only with Oskar it must be some habitual gesture, like slipping a hand into his pocket and letting it rest there—something like that. Almost anyone would make a better spy than Oskar was.

  It occurred to him—not a new thought, but now it caught fresh wind—that the doctor was putting himself at risk for all of them, including Oskar, and perhaps he owed him something for that. He let the hand slide down from his pocket and tried to think back through his various identities to the person who stood at the core of them, which might have been what Kleister was trying to discover with these questions about the Movement. That was possibly—for Oskar, for Jaap, for Kleister—the last time they’d been perfectly certain of where they stood, on account of who they were standing with.

  “I’m not with the SOPADE,” he said. “But I’m not with the Nazis, either. I’m not your enemy. I’m a German officer. My father was a German officer. I’m a patriot.”

  Kleister nodded. It was enough—probably more than he’d expected. “My father, too, was a German officer. I once considered myself a patriot. Now I don’t know what the word means. Nor what ‘German’ means, even. Schoenberg is in America. Brecht is in Denmark. Beckmann is in Amsterdam. George died in Switzerland. Are they Germans? And if so, if they left but remain German, what does it mean that I’m still here?”

  “Maybe,” said Oskar, “it means you’re braver than them. You’ve chosen to stay and fight.”

  “And you, my good officer. You too, you’ve chosen to stay and fight.”

  “I don’t think—this isn’t really what I’d call fighting.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” the doctor said. “If you stay, you won’t have to wait long. Your fight will come.”

  —

  The walk down from Kleister’s apartment to the empty wing of the spa seemed much longer than the walk up. Before, he’d had company and everyone had been tired and hungry but also wary; they weren’t sure about this doctor or what he had in mind for them, and they were still getting used to these empty, immaculate corridors and the shadows and the silences that filled them. They were easily spooked and expected to be surprised—and when it turned out to be so pleasant, delicious food and plenty to drink and Clair playing his flute, that was a surprise in itself.

  Oskar didn’t expect anything this time. He’d had enough for one night. He welcomed the shadows because he was tired of seeing clearly. The silence was a reprieve. All he really wanted was a few hours sleep—no more than that, because whatever his next move was, he needed to make it quickly. Maybe it would come to him in a dream. Or possibly it was so obvious that everyone but him had already seen it.

  Groggy with fatigue, he nearly tripped on the wide marble stairway leading down—he’d misjudged the height of the risers—so he took the remaining steps more slowly, one hand on the smooth spine of the banister. On the last step, he came to a halt.

  At first he didn’t understand why; he didn’t see what was wrong. But then he did—and he’d seen it all along, as he’d seen those men in the Opel. The trouble wasn’t his eyesight. Right in front of him in the hallway was a line of footprints. Here in this place where phantom janitors kept every surface clean enough to pass a white-glove inspection, a trail of muddy tracks ran from the main corridor into the depths of the empty wing. Maybe one of his companions had stepped outside—Anna, tired of watching an unconscious prisoner, or Clair sneaking out to relieve himself. These innocent explanations rang as hollow as such things generally did. Anyway, the tracks were so numerous they must’ve been made by at least two sets of feet. Oskar should have learned by now—perhaps he had, finally—that in his new line of work, the most outlandish and lethal theories had the greatest likelihood of being true.

  How about this, then: trained assassins had come here to murder him.

  The notion was too mad to think about, so Oskar chose not to. Instead, he slid the Walther out of his pocket and set off down the hall.

  TRYING TO COUNT BULLETS

  BAD KARLSHAFEN AND THE REINHARDSWALD: AFTER MIDNIGHT, 27 MAY

  Someone had turned off all the lights. That was the first thing Oskar noticed. The second was that someone—maybe a different someone—had opened all the doors. Moonlight spilled from each room into the dark passage. The effect was eerie and even beautiful, a river of darkness with small islands of silver light every dozen paces or so. If you stayed close to a wall and kept away from doorways you’d be nearly invisible, except, of course, in silhouette. Oskar tested this principle by crouching low and staring ahead as he moved down to the last suite on the right, where his companions ought to be.

  There was nothing, neither silhouettes nor sounds nor a flutter of moving air to suggest an open window or a doorway through which anyone might have escaped outside. He could see the tracks—clearly now two pairs of shoes—where they entered the nearest patch of light before fading into the shadows. He imagined those two men advancing like soldiers, a careful distance between them, each taking one side of the hall, opening doors as they went. And then what—a rapid glance inside, leading with the gun, sweeping the room with it? Would they bother to search every suite? Oskar guessed not: first a pass to check for signs of occupation, clearing the ground floor, moving to the next.

  It wasn’t much to stake your life on, but Oskar didn’t feel at liberty to indulge in calculation. He rose with the Walther, in both hands, pointing across the floor ahead while he moved forward swiftly, crisscrossing the hall in long diagonals to make himself a more challenging target.

  No bullets came ripping at him out of the black void at the end of the hall. He reached the last suite on the right and ducked inside, pressing himself to the wall, breathing hard and loud.

  The room was empty. Moonlight poured onto the bed where von Ewigholz had been lying; its linens were disarranged, the intravenous tube dripping free from its mount, bits of Clair’s luggage open and jumbled on the floor nearby. Drawing a breath and holding it, Oskar stepped toward the inner door to the bathroom. He’d taken four quiet strides when a noise came from behind him, and before he could turn to look a lithe shadow danced out of the shadows by the doorway and an awful burst of pain shot downward from the crown of his head. He understood that he’d been struck, not shot, but his muscles seemed to be spinning out of control, and he felt himself losing his balance as someone tried to tug the Walther out of his grip. He could have fired it, but his vision was too blurry to identify the target, and perhaps in some corner of his brain he detected something strangely familiar in all this, a recognizable pattern of screwing things up. He let go of the gun and bent over, fighting a wave of nausea.

  “You betrayed us!” Anna hissed.

  Oskar tried to tell her to be quiet, but his voice was slurred.

  “You be quiet!” she sai
d. “We trusted you, and you ratted us out.”

  Good Lord, was she actually shouting? When Oskar shook his head, it set loose a fresh wave of pain. He felt a hand moving along the back of his cranium, a touch that was almost gentle.

  “Give him a minute,” said Lena. “I think you might’ve cracked his skull. There’s a lot of blood.”

  Oskar managed to bring his eyes into focus and found Lena’s face in the vicinity of his own. Like a newly perceptive infant, he assembled the rest of her: the body leaning forward, one hand extended toward him, the other holding his gun. He took a couple of breaths before trying to speak again. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, more coherently this time. “There are two guys—”

  “We know about your little henchmen,” said Anna. “Is that who you called on the doctor’s phone? Oh yes, Clair told us about that—did you think he wouldn’t? And what have you done with him? Is he your hostage now? You bastard.”

  None of this was making much sense, and Oskar feared she was going to hit him again. “Please,” he whispered, “you’ve got to keep your voices down.”

  “Let him talk, Anna,” said Lena. “Oskar—can you hear me? Do you understand?”

  “Everyone can hear you. That’s the—”

  “Oskar, just listen. Clair came down and told us you were using the telephone. We—well, we got angry and went to look for you. But then we heard noises, people walking around—were there only two of them? So we hid and waited. Then we came back here, but Clair and Hagen were gone. Oskar, what have you done?”

  “Shh!” He went on in a furious whisper: “I haven’t— Look, we can talk about this somewhere else. It isn’t safe here.”

  “Fine,” said Anna, waving the ancient revolver at him. “Just get up! If you’re going to vomit, then vomit. We’ll all go up to the doctor’s place and have a nice talk there. Give us any trouble and we’ll shoot you. If we bump into your friends, do tell them that.”

  Oskar’s mind had cleared to the extent that he was able to recognize this much: his only hope of keeping Anna quiet was to do exactly as she said. And so he raised an arm in surrender, and Lena pulled him to his feet. He wobbled for a moment but then was okay. He nodded.

  Anna, momentarily satisfied, stuffed the old pistol into her belt. Oskar almost advised her to take it out again—she might need it—but as she wasn’t shouting and he was likely the one who’d get shot, he kept his mouth shut. The three of them stepped together into the dark hallway.

  Which wasn’t empty any longer. Of course it wasn’t. The man who stood waiting just outside, away from the moonlight, barely even a silhouette, was short but bulky, his apparent width exaggerated by a black leather coat that hung open so you could see something gleaming silver at his belt—some kind of badge, Oskar thought. It was strange that he had time for such a thought at this moment, but everything seemed to be happening more slowly than usual. The man’s arm, for example, seemed to float upward like something rising through the water—and only the tip of his gun, the silencer screwed to the end of it, broke out of the shadow to glint softly, for just that instant, in the moonlight. Oskar thought he could see straight down the barrel, but the illusion was spoiled by Anna fumbling at his side, trying to free the pistol from her belt, only, of course, much too late.

  The man fired at Anna as soon as he’d swung his arm up. The silencer dulled the explosion to a sort of harsh metallic cough. Then, while she continued to grapple for the old pistol, he took more careful aim and fired again—a smoker could have lit a cigar in between, so slowly did it play out for Oskar. There was enough time and barely enough light to see the man’s eyes shift from Anna to Lena—the former wasting her final strength on a gun that wouldn’t come out of her belt, the latter seeming to remember that she was already holding a gun herself. The man’s arm moved sideways, time snapped back to its normal tempo and three things happened so nearly simultaneously that the exact sequence remains open to debate.

  Anna managed to discharge the pistol, shooting herself to death through the lower abdomen, but she would have died in the next few seconds anyway, and the gun made the loudest noise ever likely heard in these rarefied hallways.

  The Gestapo man went goggle-eyed, his eyes losing so much focus that he tried but failed to properly aim his weapon—a result either of the gun blast or the third thing that happened at more or less the same instant.

  Which was Oskar slicing upward with the knife he’d gotten from the boatman Tiller, lodging the short blade in the man’s windpipe. He yanked it out and slashed from right to left, severing a jugular vein and cutting halfway through the larynx.

  The man was dead before he fell, and Oskar and Lena were left standing amid the gore and general moral calamity. His head seemed to swell with each throb of his pulse, as though it were being pumped up to some multiple of its normal size. He took Lena’s hand and held it, more for his own sake than for hers.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now we’ve got to go.”

  She didn’t move, which he could understand but not allow. He pulled her around, away from the bodies, and they set off up the hall toward the distant conservatory. They’d covered about half the distance when they heard footsteps behind them, out of the black void.

  “Clair!” called Lena. “Hagen! It’s us, we’re—”

  “No,” breathed Oskar, yanking her off the spot, “listen to me this time.”

  The first bullet whipped by very close to where they’d just been standing. The fact that they could hear it probably meant the silencer was slowing the muzzle velocity. The shooter must have deduced this as well, because the next shots were louder.

  “All right,” whispered Lena. “I will.”

  And then they were running at full gallop, making gracelessly for the doors ahead. Glass shattered in front of them while the gunshots continued from behind; then everything fell quiet. The remaining Gestapo man must’ve decided to empty his clip, then reload and finish the job more methodically. They reached the doorway and stepped into the sunroom, which the night had transfigured into a weird moonlit jungle.

  Oskar took a few steps in, trying to orient himself. He’d been here only once before, with the sun blazing then, and the world hadn’t been spinning so noticeably. He recalled the room as being split into a series of alcoves by greenery, huge pots grouped in clusters. All he could see now were masses of black foliage. Step away from the wall, and your only point of reference was the elaborate armature supporting the glass roof three stories above. Beyond that, only the stars. The moon, though bright, was low in the sky and blocked off by the main building.

  “Oskar.” Lena’s voice was barely a whisper. “What are we going to do?”

  He didn’t know but wasn’t about to tell her that. He’d make this work, somehow. Lure the assassin into the maze and—

  Already they’d wasted too much time. Hearing footsteps out in the corridor, crunching on glass, he touched Lena’s arm and made a motion with his head. Even he wasn’t sure what he was signaling—move now, something like that—but she seemed to understand. The two of them crept along the nearest wall of plants until an opening appeared, and they stepped through it into a long, roughly oval-shaped clearing with a pool in the center and wicker chairs at either end. The pool seemed to glow—and while the ambient light was silver and the plants were black, the water looked green, a pale and poisonous green. The Luxury Spa on Mars.

  Lena took over now, leading him around the pool and into a kind of tunnel beneath tall cycads. Oskar recognized them by their family resemblance to plants he’d seen in a hothouse at the Tiergarten—like ancient fat-bellied ferns, their huge fronds curling out like a thousand grasping fingers. The footsteps sounded again, no longer behind them but seemingly from everywhere, echoing off tile and glass. She tugged at his sleeve and they were moving again, out of the tunnel and into another alcove, circling another pool.

  There’s a wall up ahead somewhere, Oskar thought. A wall, maybe a door. They’d make it to the door
if his legs didn’t collapse, and the evening air would revive him.

  Then gunshots, like the footsteps, issued from all directions at once. Bullets ripped through the foliage around them with a sound like a wet rug being whipped with a carpet beater. More glass shattered, and Lena screamed.

  Of course she’d scream, as anyone would; not many people are trained to keep quiet while being shot at. This was, however, what the gunman was hoping for. The next bullets were closer, and Lena did the next instinctive thing, something only a few people are trained not to do: she turned and pointed the Walther where the shooting seemed to be coming from and fired back, twice. The muzzle flashes briefly lit their hiding spot like matches being struck.

  Oskar grabbed her hand and pulled it downward. She must have been holding the gun too tight, because it went off again—another explosion, another flash.

  “Run,” he whispered.

  They were racing heedlessly now, batting leaves out of their faces, tearing through cover into other open spaces and then back into cover. Oskar taxed his memory, trying to count bullets. Three shots just now, how many before? How many times had von Ewigholz fired the weapon, back at Aunt Tilde’s house? Twice, he thought. So, five shots in all. A Walther PPK clip holds six bullets. You can store a seventh in the chamber, but you wouldn’t unless you planned to use it immediately. Would von Ewigholz have expected to use his weapon that day and slipped in an extra bullet before stepping ashore at Bremerhaven? Oskar didn’t imagine so.

  Therefore there was just one bullet left.

  He knelt, panting, with Lena close by. They’d paused to rest in what looked for all the world like a bamboo grove, hundreds of canes a bit thicker than his thumb bearing thousands of narrow leaves. The shadows the plants cast by moonlight were like sand where a flock of plovers had been running about, then waves had washed over, then the plovers had gone running again—innumerable repetitions of the same basic pattern at every level of sharpness. Oskar guessed he had lost more blood than he’d hoped because his perceptions kept blurring, his thoughts losing focus, and now it was Lena whispering, Come on, we’ve got to keep going. Oskar just looked up at the sky; he was mildly surprised to see that it was divided into strips, forming an elaborate pattern that seemed to spell out a coded message.