Clair was beaming, and as Hagen steadied the chair, he climbed up and delivered the next verse with greater conviction:
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
It was a strange song anyway, but in the present context, it seemed to Oskar downright surreal. Was there more of it? The two men in lederhosen were conferring earnestly, glaring in disapproval. The elderly couple looked slightly confused. Herr Bugatti, a helpful sort, had laid his newspaper on the table, folded so as to display a photograph, blown up and grainy but still faithful enough to the young subject that you could pick out notable characteristics: the hair, the nose, a faintly insolent smile…
And yes, there was more:
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
And now he was finished. Oskar and Lena and Hagen rose to their feet, clapping loudly and laughing as Clair took a long stage bow and stepped down, beaming and perspiring, from the chair—which wobbled dangerously, causing him to yelp in alarm, until Hagen reached up and, with a strong hand under each armpit, lowered him easily to the ground. Clair looked back at him in such a way that Oskar finally understood what had been happening all along, right in plain sight; the two of them hadn’t even bothered much to hide it. But that was the piece he’d been missing, and now everything made sense. Why Hagen had refused to leave them, starting back in Bremen and ever since. Why he’d shot a Gestapo man in the forehead. Why he’d allied himself with Socialists and outlaws. In the end, it was pretty simple—if anything could be simple at a time like this.
The two men in lederhosen were coming over. They’d struck Oskar before as slightly ridiculous: office workers, he’d guessed, gotten up in völkisch style for an outing to the countryside, the real Germany, away from the crowds and dirt and decadence of city life. Yet here, what do they find on this mountain where everything ought to be clean and decent and racially pure? They find “cosmopolitans” singing in English and speaking in Russian and behaving like degenerates. They didn’t look ridiculous anymore. Red-faced, their fists clenched, they came down the terrace with a slow, angry swagger. They looked like proper Nazis now. One of them snatched the newspaper from Herr Bugatti and shook it open, waving it in front of himself like a battle flag.
They halted a stride away, within punching distance. They looked at the newspaper and then at Clair, at Clair’s companions, then at the newspaper again. For a few seconds, Oskar wondered if they were so dumbfounded or so stupid that they were in fact unable to speak.
That was when the one holding the paper said, “What’s this, then?”
And his companion, slightly taller and more sunburned, said, “Who are you people? What do you think you’re doing?”
“Nun lassen Sie mich denken,” Clair said blithely, his forehead beaded with sweat. Well, let me think. His German was pretty good when he wanted it to be. “I seem to remember we were singing.”
The tall man tightened his mouth and drew a fist back like an archer slotting a fat arrow. Hagen made a very small movement—shifting his weight, loosening his arms—barely enough to notice, yet it caught Oskar’s attention, and the other man must have seen it as well; he lowered his fist but looked even angrier than before.
“We know who you are,” the first man said, brandishing the newspaper. “The game is up.” He turned his head. “Landlord! Get out here! Bring your shotgun!”
Lena bent to pick up her hiking bag, which held the pistol she’d taken from Hagen, who’d taken it from a dead Gestapo agent. Oskar shook his head energetically, but she paid no attention.
“The game is up,” Clair repeated, shaking his head. “So people actually say that.”
The matron with the war novel was on her feet now, keen to see what was in the paper. Then she looked up at Clair, biting her lip, her eyes excited and a little wild. The men in lederhosen closed ranks; they seemed to be sizing up von Ewigholz, calculating the odds. Behind them, the Bugattis were gathering their belongings, evidently preparing a timely exit.
There were too many things to follow but Oskar chose to concentrate on Lena, her hand now dipping into the bag, and he edged toward her. On the opposite side of the table, she glared at him—thinking what? That he wanted to grab the gun himself? The last thing she’d imagine was that he wanted them to surrender without a fight. There was no way to explain, no chance to even try.
Just Plain Müller emerged from the Gasthaus’s front door, which gave him an elevated vantage from which to consider the situation on the terrace. He paused there, leaning on the stock of a long, bolt-action hunting rifle.
Lena must have noticed him in that same moment. Oskar watched helplessly as a series of inevitable actions began to unfold. He’d felt it coming but had not guessed the correct sequence. He hadn’t foreseen that in trying to extract the pistol from the bag, Lena would manage to entangle it with the discarded clothing, so that for several awkward seconds she was brandishing the entire bag as a weapon. Still, the outcome was more or less foreordained, the main question being who would get shot before old Müller took her down.
“No! Stop!” Oskar was shouting, and everyone but Lena turned to look at him. Hagen seemed to read the warning in his eyes and followed them to Lena and down her arm to the bag. And then for the longest time, nothing happened. It was one of those moments.
Oskar had experienced a moment like this on a bridge in Washington, another in a hallway in a haunted spa. Though the details were different, these moments had a common texture, a sort of viscosity through which events slid very slowly around you, and if you tried in just the right way, you could nudge them as they went by. The effort involved was so subtle it barely registered as an intention.
Oskar blinked and Hagen was turning away from him, launching himself toward Lena with gymnastic precision—no movement wasted, no gap into which she might have squeezed a reaction. His arm fell onto her wrist above the gun, forcing it downward against her body; he reached in with the opposite hand to grab the bag and in that instant of physical shock wrenched it cleanly away. His arm straightened and the bag went flying over the low stone wall, past the face of the cliff, then down and down, spinning like a slain bird.
“The evidence!” shouted the fiction lover. “They’re getting rid of the evidence!”
The sunburned man went over to the cliff’s edge and looked down gravely, then shrugged. What evidence, what does it matter, nothing we can do now—the bag had vanished. Old Müller hurried down from the stoop but couldn’t seem to decide whom to point his rifle at. He arrived just in time to watch the Bugatti spin out of the courtyard and sputter off southward.
Now a fresh distraction arose: a steady percussive beat coming from down in the valley that Oskar in his excited state took for distant gunshots. But the sounds grew louder and more distinct, approaching from the roadway just past the nearest bend—hollow, rhythmic, unhurried. They were hoofbeats.
The two horses—Haflingers, long-maned and burly, bred for the mountains—sauntered over the rise looking unfazed by the rigors of the terrain. Not so their riders, a pair of weary policemen whose sage-green uniforms appeared to have been slept in. The nearest one, spotting the small crowd in front of the Gasthaus, raised a hand in greeting; they came on at a saunter, rifles still in their scabbards. Only when they reached the gatepost did certain aspects of the scene before them—old Müller standing with a gun in his hands, guests clustered near the cliff’s edge as though they’d been interrupted in mid-brawl—rouse them to alertness. The lead policeman reached for his weapon, and that signaled an end to the stalemate on the terrace.
“Look!” shouted the sunburned man. “Look here, it’s the outlaws, the ones in the newspapers!”
“That one there,” said the novel reader, pointing at Clair, “that
’s the American boy who was kidnapped. Allegedly kidnapped. And those three are his so-called kidnappers. But look at them—they’re all four as thick as thieves.”
“Ich war…ich wurde nie entführt,” Clair protested, losing some indignation in his struggle with the verb.
“You’ve got to arrest them,” said the shorter lederhosen man. “Don’t worry—my friend and I will help you keep them in check until reinforcements arrive.”
“Arrest us for what?” demanded Lena, stinging from the loss of the gun. “You heard him yourself: he was never kidnapped.”
Hagen looked at Oskar as though seeking some wordless form of guidance. Oskar gave him a slight nod, unsure himself of what he was trying to convey: Let it play out, maybe something like that.
The nearest police officer—a loping man with a mournful demeanor and two stripes on his sleeve—approached with his rifle at the ready while his partner tethered the horses to the gatepost. He looked them over carefully, pausing at last before Clair, studying the boy’s features one at a time, perhaps ticking them off against a list he’d committed to memory.
“You are the senator’s son?” he asked in passable classroom English.
Clair nodded. “And these are my friends. They haven’t done anything wrong. None of us has.”
Give or take a couple Gestapo corpses, thought Oskar. And traveling under false identities. Lying to the authorities. Stealing a government motorcar. Enough to hang the lot of them—though Clair would probably be spared on public relations grounds. Or maybe not: the phrase killed while trying to escape had slipped into common parlance. It never rang true, and Oskar supposed it wasn’t meant to; you were meant to understand that they could do what they liked with you.
Did this policeman know about all that, the string of crimes trailing behind them? If so, he wasn’t letting on; his manner was correct and dispassionate, the soul of German civic order. He acknowledged Clair’s statement with a nod, then addressed himself to everyone present, glancing at Müller over his shoulder in order to include him as well.
“It is required that you all remain here for the time being. You four are hereby taken into police custody, pursuant to an ongoing investigation. You are not under arrest, but it is a crime to attempt to flee. You others are needed as witnesses. I will be interviewing you shortly. In the meantime, my colleague will ride to the park headquarters to use the telephone there. Now, landlord—Herr…”
“Müller. Just plain Müller.”
“Herr Müller, you will please provide a room where the detainees may be temporarily concentrated.”
As he was being led away, into the Gasthaus and up the creaking stairway to a chamber on the top floor, Oskar wondered if this was really where the whole strange journey would end, on the slopes of the Höhe Meissner. It would be fitting, actually—so many journeys had ended here before.
But no: You’ll be leaving, the woman had said. There’s a way out, but only one.
It was hard to believe that this was what she had in mind.
—
The landing field in Kassel lay adjacent to a cow pasture, and Toby guessed it had been used for that purpose until a short while ago, as its grass was not much shorter and its surface not much smoother than some pastures Toby had seen. The little four-seater bumped along for a while with trees and cows and fenceposts scooting by, until the pilot executed a smart left turn and taxied over to a fanciful Hessian contribution to a new architectural genre: Municipal Airport. The terminal had been built with an eye toward the main local tourist draw, a scenic drive called the Märchenstrasse, or Fairy-Tale Road, linking various destinations made famous by the likes of the Brothers Grimm. Though tiny, it sported a wide pitched roof and mullioned windows, and Toby wouldn’t have been surprised to find seven small baggage handlers ready to greet him. But then, not much about the New Germany would have surprised Toby at this point.
He was welcomed, in fact, by SS-Standartenführer Kohlwasser, waiting antsily beside a gray staff car with a tall chauffeur or adjutant or whatever the fuck, who appeared to have been washed in starch and then ironed in an industrial laundry press. Kohlwasser offered Toby a cheerless smile as he deplaned. The adjutant hastened to open a rear door.
“What’s happening, Helmut?” Toby said, approaching warily. “Am I late? Is Clairborne, ah…” He’d intended to say safe. But he guessed he could speak a little more freely, now that he was truly off the reservation. “Have you caught him yet?”
The man just gave him a tight-lipped stare and motioned him into the car. So, thought Toby, we’re not going to speak while the pesky dwarfs might be listening.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Kohlwasser said at last, as the adjutant put the car in gear and they jerked forward, wheels spinning in the dirt. “And I don’t know where the boy is. I’ve spoken to the local police commander, but he seems to be having problems with his telephone. We’re going there now. These country policemen are thick-headed brutes, but we’ll have him thinking straight soon enough. Either that or we’ll find someone more reliable. It’s a pattern we’ve seen all too often, I’m afraid: the old guard clinging to their outmoded habits. What’s that you have in your briefcase?”
Toby smiled. Though he couldn’t bring himself to like Kohlwasser, he enjoyed his deviousness and agility, his little tricks for catching you wrong-footed. He might have done well in an American courtroom. The problem being, if the tricks don’t work, you can wind up on the wrong foot yourself.
“Don’t tell me you’ve lost him,” Toby said. “Please don’t tell me I’ve flown down here for nothing.”
Kohlwasser held him in a chilly glare for a few seconds, then seemed to decide he was wasting his animosity. “We’ll find him. We have a good idea where the criminals were headed. It’s a wild area, with only a few places to go and limited trails to get there. We’re setting up checkpoints, and soon enough they’ll walk into one. Unless…it’s possible they’re trying to meet up with an underground cell in the mountains somewhere. But that’s unlikely. You can’t have an underground without local support, and this is a law-abiding region.”
“The heartland,” said Toby.
Kohlwasser gave him a thoughtful look, as though checking for signs of irony. Finding none, he said, “Just so. And the wellspring of our support. We won a majority here even in ’32. So don’t worry: we’ll have young Mr. Townsend in our hands before long. The question then becomes…” He paused, maybe to be sure he had Toby’s full attention. “What shall we do with him?”
What indeed. Toby was glad he didn’t have to think about that right now. He could stash it in a mental locker marked “When the Time Comes,” along with the leather case, with “Erwin Kaspar,” with a whole stack of private obsessions and unsettled scores, all of which he would get around to eventually, some later and others probably very soon.
Kohlwasser didn’t press the point. He settled back in his seat and they rode in silence through woods and fields, along roads that wound and climbed and threatened to drop them into marshy swales. It was beautiful country—as beautiful and frightening as the old fairy tales. Toby wasn’t frightened but felt an unusual sense of foreboding, and he was unreasonably glad when the staff car pulled into Kaufungen, a medium-sized burg upon which the present century had not made a deep impression.
The police station was easily located—near the Rathaus, across the street from a beer garden overhung with hop vines, their big drooping leaves a voluptuous contrast to the prevailing asceticism. The adjutant didn’t bother to park, just brought the car to a halt smack in the main roadway, an impertinence that would have been more glaring had there been any traffic. Kohlwasser was out before the hand brake had been set. Toby followed in no particular hurry, the inside of a Nazi police station not ranking high on his list of sights to take in on this fact-finding tour. By the time he ambled through the door, Kohlwasser was already in a heated discussion with an older man whom Toby took to be the desk sergeant, and whom he judged to be gett
ing the better of this contest, if only by virtue of his grave, phlegmatic calm in the face of the SS man’s badgering.
Toby’s command of Deutsch sufficed to let him skim a few points off the top: that the American boy had been located, that the chief had left the building, and that no, Standartenführer, we did not think it necessary to apprise you of these developments. There was a mention of standard police procedure and of disciplinary measures and of Lager, which might be a beer or a camp. The upshot was finally the unfolding of a map: Naturpark Meissner-Kaufunger Wald, rendered in the fine topographic detail required by artillery officers, probably also useful to mountaineers and search parties. The sergeant conjured a pencil from behind one ear to make a few careful marks: X for the destination, a little box to signify the police station, a bold meandering line for the suggested route between them.
“There must be a shorter way,” said Kohlwasser, making it sound like a direct order, as though by force of will he could overcome mere geography.
Well, perhaps he could. The sergeant looked at him thoughtfully. “You can go straight up the mountain,” he said, running the pencil lightly over the map, leaving a ghostly trail behind. “But that’s meant for hikers. And for horses. Is this something you would like me to arrange?”
Toby couldn’t tell if the old man was enjoying a private joke, the country bumpkin gulling the city slicker. If so, he was playing it damn close to his chest.
“I think we can manage well enough,” said Kohlwasser, snatching the map and roughly folding it up.
They drove on with an altered seating arrangement: Kohlwasser up front with the driver, clutching the map and barking directions, Toby alone in the back seat hugging the leather case in his lap like a pet he’d grown grudgingly fond of. They left town at speed but were obliged before long to slow down as each turn took them onto roads that became—as any fool could have predicted—successively narrower, steeper and less fastidiously maintained. Kohlwasser pointed and cursed; the adjutant fought manfully with the wheel and the pedals and the gearbox. Toby felt a curious sort of intellectual detachment; he imagined a curve plotted on graph paper, asymptotically approaching the axis labeled I for impassible. He figured the old sergeant must be chuckling by now.
Cave Dwellers Page 34