“We’re close to a wall,” he said softly.
Or maybe only his lips moved. Lena stared at him in concern, but after a moment she nodded.
“There should be a door,” he explained.
She tightened her lips, as if annoyed. Probably she’d already gotten that far. She gave his arm another pull and he was up now, they were walking, their feet following the path left by the flock of plovers. Around a corner, through a foliated archway—and there was the wall of glass, overlooking the grounds, as well as a tall man wearing a black uniform.
Lena raised the gun, but it was von Ewigholz. Pressed against him, partly supporting his weight, stood Clairborne.
“Thank God,” the boy said, his voice a stage whisper. “I wanted to leave, then Hagen said to wait. He said you’d get here.”
“We’re not alone,” said Oskar, who still felt he needed to explain things. While he was at it, he added, “There’s only one bullet left.”
Von Ewigholz looked him straight in the eye, one soldier to another. It felt to Oskar like a silent interrogation, and something he now realized had been going on for quite some time.
“Then we can’t afford to miss,” the SS man said, reaching out with the hand not draped around Clair. “Give me the weapon.”
Tightening her grip, Lena looked ready to spend the final bullet shutting him up. “You’re crazy,” she said.
“Give him the gun,” Oskar told her.
“You’re crazy, too.”
“Lena.” He felt an odd sort of clarity, bordering on omniscience, and suspected that it was a prelude to passing out. “You said you’d listen to me. And we can’t afford to miss. Give him the gun.”
Von Ewigholz came forward, pulling free of Clair. “Everyone stay where you are,” he said, taking the gun from Lena as though it were an afterthought. She gave it up like a wavering churchgoer letting go of her last shred of faith—and turning on Oskar a look that said as much. Von Ewigholz inspected the weapon, pulling back the firing pin to peer into the chamber. He didn’t bother to check the magazine—either he accepted Oskar’s math or he didn’t want to make any more noise. Then he stepped to the nearest tangle of leaves and stood with his back to it, the gun at chest level and aimed at nothing Oskar could see.
“Over here, comrade!” he called. “I’ve caught them for you!”
Had he counted on Lena to add a note of credibility to this? She started yelling curses and lunged across the empty space and might have reached him had the Gestapo man not been so close by. The man stuck his head through an opening in the leaves and seemed to be trying to figure out what he was seeing: the angry woman, the man he’d been sent to murder, a wild-haired boy who looked frightened to death and a tall Obersturmführer who…and that would have been as far as the survey went before the bullet entered his frontal lobe.
Had he lived a second longer, he might have seen Oskar fall, too, and it seemed at first as though von Ewigholz had managed to shoot both people with a single bullet. That confusion got sorted out quickly enough, and Clair and Lena—being the only two fit to do so—lifted Oskar through a blown-out section of the glass wall and lugged him across the lawn to where the black Opel stood waiting in the driveway. Von Ewigholz was in good enough shape to keep up with them. When they reached the car, he insisted that only he should drive, and only he would talk in the event that anyone stopped them. He’d also taken the dead man’s gun, his own now being empty. For once, no one was of a mind to quibble.
—
It was still dark and the car was jostling up a bad road when Oskar returned to consciousness. Lying with his head in Lena’s lap in the narrow back seat, he could see Clair up front, his young face limned dimly in blue from the lights on the dashboard. He tried to sit up, but nausea swooped down to meet him, and the best he could do was turn his head so as not to vomit on Lena’s clothing. He retched, though only a string of drool came of it. When the car hit a bump, it felt as though Oskar’s skull were attached directly to the undercarriage; the pain was beyond imagining, though it faded, and Oskar felt himself fading again, too. A fresh bump woke him up. On the second try, he was able to pull himself up into something like a sitting position, his head propped against the seatback.
“Where are we?” he said.
The car windows were rolled down, but all he could see outside were trees everywhere, looming in the penumbra of the headlamps, stretching twisted limbs over the road and vanishing beside the car with a whoosh and a brief echo of engine noise.
“We’re in the Reinhardswald,” von Ewigholz said, sounding almost cheerful. The dim blue light suited the icy character of his skin, the hardness of his features. Compared to Oskar, he looked healthy, and he drove with the sort of intuitive carelessness one uses on familiar roads.
Oskar tried to think of something reasonable to say—to reassert his presence, or maybe to reestablish his mental competence—but all he could think of was “I’ve been to the Reinhardswald before.” It sounded stupid right away.
“Yes!” von Ewigholz exclaimed. “The fairy-tale forest. Die Brüder Grimm. And it’s now protected territory.” He repeated this for Clair in English, adding, “Like one of your national parks. Only here, you know, it’s not so much the wildness that’s being protected, or the views, or what you call the natural resources. This place hasn’t actually been wild for a very, very long time. It was a private hunting ground for centuries, guarded by wardens, groomed by foresters. Look at the trees, how huge they are. It’s because the smaller trees were cut to make room, and the unhealthy branches carefully pruned out. No, what’s protected here is the magic. The old legends. The great myths of Germany.”
They drove on for a while in silence, the road twisting relentlessly, always crawling up onto higher and higher ground. Oskar could halfway remember a map—a map made for tourists, he thought, meant to look older than it was—showing stylized trees and mountains and rivers coursing like melted sapphire. And there was a castle—
“We used to come hiking here,” von Ewigholz said, speaking German again, his voice quieter. “In the Weiss Ritter. Wonderful days.”
“Weiss Ritter!” Clair repeated, making a great thing of the r’s. “The White Knights. How old were you?”
Von Ewigholz gave him a look, a curious one from Oskar’s back-seat perspective.
“I was the youngest of the group,” he said. “Eleven, at the start. But we came back each year. Then one year there was some trouble. After that, I—”
There was some trouble. Oskar remembered the Weiss Ritter: a right-wing bund that got itself banned from Movement gatherings on account of its members’ proclivity toward getting into fights. There were boys who’d been badly injured—Jewish boys, or boys who looked like they might be Jewish, or Socialists, or “friend-lovers” (he’d never heard that Movement term elsewhere), or any number of other things a White Knight could not abide. It seemed to Oskar there were pieces here that fit and some that didn’t, the largest of these being that a former Weiss Ritter, now an SS officer, had lately shot a Gestapo agent in the forehead.
The car was braking now. They’d pulled up onto level ground and entered a clearing in which, between the headlamps and the moon, Oskar could see what looked like an old-fashioned woodman’s hut. There was a space to park out front, rolled flat, covered in fine gravel, that showed signs of other vehicles having come and gone. Von Ewigholz switched the lights off, set the hand brake and turned in the driver’s seat so he could see everyone.
“This is the last place to stop,” he said. “It’s a public camp house. Hikers can use it, hunters, anyone. People leave things behind sometimes. Books and so forth. I was thinking that perhaps someone left a few pieces of clothing that might be useful for disguise. And also perhaps a hiking map.”
This was smart, Oskar thought. Smart but peculiar, somehow counterintuitive, von Ewigholz thinking about disguise. Something that Oskar didn’t really understand. It was like an experiment in science class where the results tu
rned out…not wrong, exactly, but different from what you’d expected. You’d poured these ingredients into a container and stirred them together and they turned an unusual color that you couldn’t find on the chart. But maybe it was the wrong chart, or you didn’t follow the instructions properly, or one of the ingredients had been labeled incorrectly…
“Should we go in?” Clair said.
“No,” said von Ewigholz. “Just one of us would be faster.”
“I’ll go,” said Lena, reaching for the door handle.
“Wait!” Oskar’s voice was loud in the car’s close interior. “Somebody might already be in there. Which of us looks…least alarming?”
The four of them appraised one another. Lena had blood on her clothes. Von Ewigholz likewise. Oskar—well, he was probably the worst off. So it was down to Clair: disheveled but presentable.
“But what if they try to talk to me?” he said.
“Grab whatever you can and leave,” Lena told him. “If you’re confused, just say entschuldigen.”
“Entschuldigen!” Clair mimicked, making a great show of the u, and draped his scarf dramatically around his neck.
After less than a minute, he scampered back with a half-folded bit of paper flapping from one hand and an anorak from the other, breathless and giggling as he leapt into the car.
“God, there was a fat man snoring in there. And somebody else—I didn’t want to look. Let’s get out of here.”
As befit a getaway driver, von Ewigholz already had the Opel in gear. He switched the lights on, and the car lurched back onto the forest road.
Lena took the crumpled paper and flattened it on her lap. “Does anyone have a match?” she asked.
A Wandervogel should always have matches, but Oskar did not. Von Ewigholz fished out a zinc lighter with the emblem of the SS Cavalry Regiment and handed it to Clair. The boy struck it merrily, his face glowing in the blue-and-orange flame that revealed this paper as a map, a finely detailed one showing topography and watersheds, with a few points of human interest added as though in afterthought. It was entitled “Sababurg und Reinhardswald mit umliegendem Gebiet.”
Lena read the title aloud for the benefit of the front seat. “The ‘surrounding territory’ looks pretty empty,” she said, running two fingers over it as though checking for land mines. “I don’t know where we are on here. Was the spa called Bad—” Abruptly she squeezed her eyes shut. “Oh, Anna.”
That name seemed to break the spell of electric, incredulous, half-frantic energy that had been running through them since their escape. Oskar hadn’t especially noticed it until now, when the charge dropped and in its absence he found only dread and the smell of still-damp blood and a dark road away from the horror behind them to whatever doom lay ahead. His head started to hurt again.
Lena might have started crying. He felt an impulse to take her hand, to comfort her—but then the thought of Anna woke other things in him too.
“What was she doing back there?” He was looking at Clair. “You said you thought she was up to something. What did you mean?”
“I don’t know.” Looking bewildered, the boy snapped the lighter shut, extinguishing the flame. In the darkness, Oskar could hear him take a breath, letting the air out through his teeth as though the blank noise, the failure of speech, fairly represented his thoughts. But then he said, “I guess it was just an odd feeling. Just—how she was acting when I came down to get my flute.”
“It’s not fair to talk like this,” Lena told them. “Either of you.”
Oskar was ready to reply—and then they’d be arguing, and perhaps that would be healthy, airing out their suddenly dark and conflicted feelings—but von Ewigholz eased off the accelerator and glanced at Clair.
“It wasn’t just a feeling,” he said. “And you weren’t wrong.”
He let the car roll to a stop. His expression was all but impossible to read by the faint dashboard lights. He seemed to be frowning. He looked, perhaps, like someone who’d just been reminded of a trivial but vexing oversight—a book left on the table outside, a call he’d meant to return.
“She was making a plan,” he said, in his ordinary flat timbre. “I don’t know who she was making it with. Someone on the staff there, probably. Another member of the cell. Or of another cell, who knows how they work. I wasn’t quite awake; the doctor had given me something. But I wasn’t quite asleep either, and she didn’t know that. I could hear them talking in the hall—”
“I knew it,” Clair interrupted. “I knew somebody was there.”
“You were right.” Von Ewigholz’s eyes remained expressionless, but in his voice there was a kind of insistence, as though he were not just speaking but declaring. “And from what I could hear, the plan seemed to be about you.”
Clair stared back for a moment, confused, then gave a short, nervous laugh. “About me?”
“About you—and this opportunity. We can’t waste this opportunity, she said. There was more, but that’s all I could hear.”
Oskar’s head was throbbing, and it felt like a manifestation of his anger. He clenched his hand into a fist but couldn’t see anything to punch.
“But what did she mean?” Clair said. “What opportunity?”
Von Ewigholz shook his head. “That’s all I heard. I’m sorry.”
Oskar had never once heard an SS man say he was sorry and couldn’t imagine that such a thing was possible. Sorry for what? Lying there half-conscious recovering from a bullet wound, because some amateur guerrilla had screwed up a simple drop-off and gotten him shot? This thought made Oskar angrier still, and it was unsettling to realize that the anger was on behalf of von Ewigholz.
Then Lena said, “Oh, no.”
Oskar looked up quickly, afraid that some terrible new thing had arisen. But Lena still had her eyes closed.
She was shaking her head. “Oh, Anna,” she said. Her tone had changed.
“What do you mean?” von Ewigholz asked—and his voice was different too, sharper, more like an interrogation.
“I mean…” She opened her eyes, which shone large and clear in the dim blue light. “I mean about Clair—Anna’s big plan. Her stupid plan, all the way back on the Eulenspiegel. What to do with him.”
It was obvious that she had more to say, so everyone stayed quiet and let her get to it.
“It was to do with a manifesto. I don’t know who wrote it, but it’s a statement of SPD principles, ‘A Message to All Germans.’ It was published in Neuer Vorwärts—we read it in America. Anna’s cell, though, wanted something bigger. They had the idea that they could pressure the big papers, the European papers, maybe even German ones, into printing it. Only no one knew how—and then somebody thought, What if we had a hostage? Of course it was crazy, but they never sat down to think how crazy it was, because there were no hostages in sight. And how would you even get one? And what Socialist would do that? But then, you know, suddenly we had Clair.”
“You never had Clair,” von Ewigholz said, with disconcerting force. “Do you think I would’ve let you—”
“You weren’t in much of a position to stop us,” Lena interrupted, bridling. “To stop her. I mean, I don’t think she would’ve—”
“A fanatic is capable of anything,” he said. “I would have stopped her. Or he would have.”
He meant Oskar, signaling as much with a slight inclination of his head. Oskar was as surprised as anyone.
Clair snapped the lighter open again. “Well, this is exciting,” he said drolly. “I’ve never been a hostage before.”
Lena’s eyes were down on the map again, but if she saw anything of interest there, she kept it to herself. Von Ewigholz put the car back in gear, and they resumed their bumpy progress along the forest road, which seemed to have gotten even rougher beyond the camping hut.
Oskar was brooding—a serious activity that required his complete awareness. He registered an occasional change of landscape or elevation without focus, like the music you don’t really notice in a
movie because you’re concentrating on the characters and their improbable but arresting plight.
After a while he said, to no one in particular, “I think she saved our lives.”
He was thinking of Anna struggling idiotically with the old revolver. Only not idiotically, he thought. She’d drawn the Gestapo man’s attention away from Oskar, whom he’d been ready to kill. And in so doing, she’d given Oskar time to make good use of Tiller’s knife. She hadn’t thrown away those final seconds of her life—she’d given them to her comrades. She’d let Oskar be the hero, to rescue Lena and rejoin the others. Had she understood what she was doing? Or was it some noble instinct, activated in extremis?
One thinks of dying heroically—von Ewigholz had said that. Oskar had never given dying much thought at all—and now it seemed a miracle that he was alive, an unfathomable gift.
“Do you have a plan?” he asked von Ewigholz.
“This is my plan,” he answered, gesturing around them—meaning, presumably, the old forest.
It seemed to Oskar as good a plan as any. He laid his head on the seatback and fell promptly asleep.
THE HIGH POINT OF THE SEASON
BERLIN, FASANENSTRASSE: 27 MAY
The Baroness von F—— read the morning papers that day with unusual avidity. In the afternoon, she summoned the young friend of an old diplomat to buy more. By three o’clock, she was taking little sips of her fourth cigarette from the meerschaum holder—the house girl having hidden herself away on the top floor instead of serving tea. The Baroness didn’t seem to notice.
It was one of her “at home” days, those twice-every-week, rain-or-shine occasions when she opened the grand and gloomy flat to all comers. Attendance, after dropping over the winter, had picked up again as the famous Berliner Luft grew warm and redolent of lilacs, while the quickening pace of events in the Sudetenland—the “May crisis,” the papers were calling it—gave everyone something fresh and horrid to talk about. The Baroness’s old redoubt in the Fasanenstrasse was one of the few places in town where one could talk of such things openly, among like-minded people, while swallowing cocktails and enjoying, or enduring, whatever music was on offer. There were so many unemployed musicians these days, and many of them, poor dears, would play for pfennigs and a swipe at the hors d’oeuvres.
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