Chasing the Wind

by C. C. Humphreys

  Both her hands were tied to the bed by leather straps.

  He followed her gaze. “A precaution only, Fräulein…may I call you Roxy?” He went on without waiting for an answer. “Some people wake up frightened and thrash around. I had one subject, broke every knuckle hitting a wall.”

  “I won’t. Let me hold the glass.”

  She was pleased to have spoken in complete sentences.

  “Perhaps. If you are good.”

  “I will be.”

  “I hope. The Reichsmarschall will return in a few minutes. He is a very busy man. He will not wish to waste any time. So let us see if you are in a—how is it—a receiving state? Answer and I shall release a hand, let you sip yourself, ja?”

  “Absolutely ja.”

  “Very good.” He let her have another sip. “Answer the question again you answered before. This, uh, Jochen Zomack. You said you last saw him in Africa two months ago. Was this true?”

  “No.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “He fucked me senseless at eight o’clock this morning.”

  All six of Glück’s eyes shot wide. He looked like a deer in a forest that suddenly sees a wolf. It was the funniest thing she’d ever seen and she fell back onto the bed, laughing loud.

  The doctor grunted. “Where was this?” he snapped.

  “Once on a bed. Twice on a table. Last on a chair.”

  The eyes popped again and Roxy laughed even more. This guy was killing her! Then that thought suddenly sobered her up. Perhaps he was killing her. Didn’t he jab her? “I’m sorry,” she said primly. “But you did inquire.”

  “Sometimes subjects find things funny,” he said sourly. “I would ask you to try to resist this. Especially before the Reichsmarschall.”

  “Well, luckily for you I never liked clowns.” She jerked her head at her hand. “But I answered you. Do I get my deal?”

  He grunted then undid her right strap. She reached for the glass—but he held it away. “Sips only,” he said.

  She nodded, took the glass and sipped, resisted the urge to gulp. Her head started to swim, and she thought if she lay back again, she might throw up. “May I sit?” she asked.

  Glück nodded. “But we only undo this strap, not the other. I do not want you moving around, perhaps falling over. The hallucinations will continue to get stronger for a time. Your balance will be off for a while.”

  She sat up, swung her legs around to dangle off the bed, swayed. “No kidding,” she said.

  “Tell me this, Roxy.” Glück leaned forward at his desk. “Why were you hiding in the Reichsmarschall’s closet?”

  She wanted to stick to her story—infatuation. But she’d just called Göring a clown. Besides, there was nothing wrong with telling the truth. Everyone was going to know about it anyway, soon enough.

  “I was planning on stealing his painting,” she said.

  He did the eye thing again. She wanted to, but this time she didn’t laugh. Instead she looked away, to the eye chart. Read that bottom line, though the letters twisted like snakes and tried to throw her off. “Z,” she began, grinding her teeth, rubbing her right hand along the bed. “Z. B. J. Ü. M. T.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What’s that?” she cried out.

  “What? Where?”

  “That. Those!”

  He came, looked where she did. “On the chart?”

  “Ja. Yeah. Those two dots? They’re…eyes. Staring at me.”

  “Above the U?” He peered at it. “This is an umlaut.”

  “And this is a scalpel.” She put the blade to his throat with her right hand, gripping a scrawny wrist in her left, which she’d freed when he’d turned to the chart. “I will kill you with it if you move even a hair.”

  His six eyes bugged. But he obeyed her, because she would have and he knew it.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t until she finished the last knot that her fingers stopped working. One moment she was executing hitches and slips that would have had that old sailor, Pa Loewen, whooping approval; the next she was staring at ten pink oblongs that each had four spectre-pink oblongs behind them. She waved them, and it was like watching an anemone bed off Jamaica through her diving mask. “Whoa!” she giggled, and kept waving. “That’s great!”

  Glück said something, which she didn’t understand because of all the medical gauze she’d shoved in his mouth and taped over. But what had he said before? That the hallucinations would only get stronger? That couldn’t be good. She had to get out of this room, the cellar, the building, the whole damn country. Before Tweedledum and Tweedledee got back and asked her questions she’d have to answer.

  Which was when? What had Glück said? She’d been asleep for about fifteen. Had Göring said he’d return in thirty? And she’d been awake now for a couple? Roxy looked at the clock. Hitler looked back and said, “Games.” She gave a little scream. All she wanted to do was lie on the bed, talk to that rat and watch the anemones sway in Montego Bay.

  Somehow, she’d lain down when she thought it. She sat up again. Clutching her scalpel in one hand, she bent to check Glück’s knots with the other. “All secure, Cap’n,” she muttered, then lurched to the door.

  In the corridor, bare-bulb light shimmered on steel cage and cabinet. The only way out that she knew was the elevator. Besides, her legs weren’t working too good. She didn’t think she could handle stairs even if she found them.

  The elevator came to the call of her finger. Pulling the door open was harder work. Somehow she must have managed it but when it closed softly behind her the box she found herself in was so tight, so close, so crammed she thought she might be in her coffin. She moaned, bit her lip to stop moan turning to scream. Buttons were before her and she stretched her tendrils to the one above the bottom. She missed, raised to stab again…and stopped. She’d aimed for the entrance hall. Guards would be in it. Appear there and they’d grab her. She had to go higher. She lifted her hand again…and remembered something else.

  Göring had stolen Grandpa Loewen’s derringer.

  Roxy hit the penthouse button.

  She heard young men’s voices in the hall as the elevator cruised past. They didn’t sound concerned. They were probably used to late-night trips from the cellar to the penthouse. The memory came, of Göring’s pink toes, and she shuddered.

  The elevator glided into position and the bell went bing. She leaned all her weight on the door and it finally opened a crack. She listened. Had Göring and his group come back up there? But she heard only the party beyond the room, nothing in the room itself. Taking a deep breath, she stepped into the dark.

  It took her a while to get her bearings, even though it was bright enough in there—those columns of light were still rising from the searchlights outside. In the gardens, the laughter had only gotten more raucous, the oompah band more strenuously jolly. Her heart thumped in rhythm as she staggered into the bedroom. “Ferency?” she called. But the cupboard was bare. The Hungarian had sneezed and bolted. Only the polar-bear skin answered her. “Wilkommen,” it said, lifting its head.

  She ignored it. Her purse was still open on the bed, its contents spilled. She dropped the scalpel, shovelled them all in, then weaved to the desk, pulled open a drawer. There, in the centre of a jumble of letter openers and penknives, lay the derringer. It felt good in her hand.

  A bang! She cried out, wondered if she’d pulled the trigger, felt desolate at the thought. But no smoke rose from the barrel. Another bang came, then another, then a series, the noise coming loud from the office beyond.

  “Move!” she said to herself, turning away sharply, and crashing straight into the edge of the painting, still covered on its trestle. The cover slipped. Crying out, she bent to rub her knee and stared as the painting came alive, became a movie. She’d seen one the year before in Cairo, called Becky Sharp. It was made in Technicolor, which almost none were, the colour garish. The Fall of Icarus was twice as lurid. The son’s legs scissored in the wa
ter, though he didn’t sink below the surface. The plowman plowed, the fisherman caught a cod, wind billowed the boat’s red sail. The father, Daedalus, his face a mask of anguish, turned to her and pleaded, “Help him! Help him!”

  She fled the room; looked out the office windows and saw trails of light soar up into the sky. She staggered across. The fireworks display had begun. To cries of wonder and joy from the gardens, rockets screamed and rose, starbursts lit the sky, rainbows cascaded. It was beautiful enough anyway. On this drug, it was breathtaking. She stood transfixed.

  The bing wasn’t nearly as loud as the fireworks, but it startled her even more. It was the elevator. The sound of it descending, the turning of its gears, was monstrous.

  She turned and watched the arrow dial descend. Floor 3, 2, 1, ground. It stopped. She held her breath but jumped when it started again. Down. Down to the cellar.

  The monster twins, Göring and Munroe, were back to question her. They would find Glück. They would sound the alarm. They would hunt her down.

  She looked around, at a room lit by rockets. It made no sense. Five floors up? There had to be stairs. Wait! Yes! Göring’s officer had gone a different way to bring the doctor.

  She ran up to the doors that stood on either side of the hearth and the Reichsmarschall’s monstrous portrait, his eyes following her. Both doors were still locked.

  The elevator binged and began to rise again. They were coming for her. She’d be trapped; they’d take her back to the cellar, where she’d truthfully answer any question they asked her because she’d have no choice. She’d betray Jocco; she’d betray herself. And then? They weren’t just going to let her go. People disappeared all the time in Berlin, that tailor had said to her. His wife was one of them. They’d throw her in a camp. Or they’d kill her. And maybe not quickly.

  She looked again at the gun in her hand, as the elevator dial rose to ground level and kept coming. A single bullet. But sometimes a single bullet is all a gal needs, she thought. And thinking that, she raised the gun—and shot in the lock in front of her.

  The dial was at 3 when she walked through gun smoke into the office beyond. She’d been right, there were stairs—one set down the interior of the building, another outside the rear windows. Those were the ones she chose, seeing as men appeared to be rushing up the others now. The door to the fire escape was locked, but a window beside it was open, held by a bolt above. The gap was less than a foot wide. So was she. As the shouts sounded on the landing below, as the elevator binged its arrival, Roxy slipped through the gap and out onto the metal platform.

  She didn’t stop as lights came on above her. Kicking off her stilettoes—Farewell, my lovelies! she thought—she began a fast stumble down.

  It was hard work. For a fixed staircase, the thing swayed a lot, like a building in an earthquake. Or maybe a battle, the stench of one as she descended through sulphur-and-cordite clouds, as firework bombs still exploded above her and flares split the night sky. Her gait was half lurch, half tumble. She caught herself on cold rails to stop a trip, used them to push off and continue the trajectory. It was dangerous but speedy, and it was not till her feet hit cold pavement that she heard the smashing of glass and the first boot thump onto the metal platform five flights above.

  A treed darkness was ahead of her—the back of the building, leading some place unknown. It was tempting to dive into it, to play hide-and-seek among the spectral silver birch. But she didn’t fancy her chances against the goons making all that noise on the stairs. So instead of plunging forward, she tottered to the right. As she cleared the edge of the ministry, the brightness of the fairground beyond near blinded her. Raising a hand, taking a deep breath, she dived into the light.

  No one paid her much nevermind, gazing to the heavens as they were, sighing out on oohs and aahs. As she thrust herself into the crowd, she knew that her gait was a stagger. A guard glanced at her as she weaved forward. She kept going, passed him heading…where? She had a feeling that the main gate was up ahead. But fifty paces away she saw him—one of Göring’s SS guards sprinting in, conferring with two of his fellows there, all three turning to look sharply along the avenue. Roxy stepped between two fairground booths. Like everyone else there, the proprietors were gazing upward, and she slipped by, unnoticed.

  She could see the high wall of the ministry dead ahead. It was too high for her to climb unaided, and she suspected by the time she got something up against it, guards would have been dispatched along its length. She didn’t know what to do, so she turned back into the main fairground. Two soldiers came toward her, sharp gazes sweeping about. Swivelling, she grabbed a stout man in lederhosen and spun him around to the oompah beat. He laughed, reaching for her, but she slipped his grasp as the soldiers passed by.

  What was she going to do? What the hell was she going to do? She could hear Glück’s words, almost as if he was whispering them in her ear. The effects were only going to get stronger. She didn’t see how that was possible. Already the noise of band and rockets and crowd had blended into one steady roar. Already faces around her were distorting, noses elongating, mouths spreading in cavernous red smiles. Her gait was full-on lurch now, only the drunkenness of so many blending her in. Men were seeking, grey-and-black steadiness amid the mayhem. She had a surge of desire to just run up to them and end it; felt a jab of longing for the doctor’s bloodstained couch. She’d answer their questions and they’d give her water to sip—her mouth was still a scorched desert.

  She snatched a beer stein from a table, drank hard, dropped it and kept going. Stop and she’d freeze. Move and she had a small, small chance. As small, perhaps, as the derringer in her pocket. She always kept a second bullet about her; had one tucked in the top of her right stocking. She thought of stopping, trying to load it. Instead she sped up.

  Because she’d noticed something…someone. Following her. A man’s eyes were on her; she could hear his feet treading the ground. When she moved quicker, so did the footsteps. When she slowed, so did they. Which meant he wasn’t a guard. Perhaps it was the gentleman in lederhosen, who was seeking another spin. Perhaps it was the devil. She’d been expecting him.

  She reached the corner of the ministry main building again. A glance to its entrance showed her Göring, shouting, gesticulating wildly, guards running off in every direction at each spittle-flecked wave. Munroe was beside him, and as she looked, he began to turn in her direction.

  She slipped around the corner, broke into a lurching sprint, rounded the next corner and threw her back against the wall. Those footsteps were still behind her.

  A man came, fast. She stuck out a leg. He fell, and she was above him in a moment, derringer pointed at his head. “I’ll blow your head off, you—”

  “Roxy?”

  It was the moment she knew that she’d tipped over the edge. The drug now had her in its full grasp. The hallucinations were complete. Because the man who lay at her barrel’s end was Jochen Zomack. Or a version of him. The one who no longer had a beard and now, instead of a flying suit, wore a waiter’s black-and-white uniform.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  Jocco was up in a moment. Gently, he pushed the gun aside. “Roxy! What has happened? Why are you—”

  She’d talked to hallucinations earlier that night. Polar bears and paintings. At least this was someone she knew, even if he wasn’t real. “Drug. Something to make me talk. Escaped. After me.”

  She thought she did pretty good, considering that her tongue was a piece of leather and her brain was closing down. Her legs too. They jellied and she started to fall. He caught her, which was kind.

  “Come,” he said. “We get out. This way.”

  “Can’t walk. Need to lie down.”

  “Not yet.”

  He bent, lifted her, put her across his shoulders.

  Her head spun; she retched, but nothing came. “How’d you find me?”

  He began to move fast along the wall. “I was looking for you. I was desperate after Ferency told me—�
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  “Ferency made it out?”

  “Yes. He waits outside with a car.” Jocco paused, peered around the ministry’s end. “I was going to try to get into the building. Then I heard them say you’d escaped. I was standing right next to you when you danced with the burgomaster.”

  “You should watch that guy. He has some fancy moves.” He started again. “Listen! They have guards everywhere.”

  “I know. But there is a way in for servants. We try.”

  The world was even crazier upside down. Jocco took her to a side entrance, where there were piles of wooden crates, dirty glasses, plates, steins in boxes. He leaned her against a wall and she slipped down it, as servants bustled in and out. She put her head back, closed her eyes—then opened them fast. Worse things went on behind her eyelids. Way worse.

  He was shaking her. “Roxy?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I am going to hide you in a box. It will be dark for a while but—”

  “No!” She gripped his arm. “No box! No coffin!”

  “Just a little while. I will get you out the gate. It is our one chance.”

  “Not much of a chance.” She released him. “ ‘Not much of a chance’ Loewen.”

  She watched him through half-slit eyes. There was a trolley, and he loaded tall boxes of glasses onto it. One, she saw, was empty. He put that down, then came to her, bent, lifted. “Be calm, love. Make no noise,” he said, kissed her head and placed her into the box.

  She curled up tight. Kept her moans to herself, even when he pulled her Red Riding Hood cloak over her and began to cover that with beer mugs. Another crate banged on top of hers, another on that. Then, through the gap he’d ripped in the side of the box, enough for her to breathe, to see a little, she watched the world go past—legs, uniformed and costumed; bushes strung with firefly lights. The cart tinkled as it halted. Men questioned Jocco. She saw the trouser crease on a black-clad thigh. Hands shook the trolley. Then they were off again. She heard him whisper, “Close. Close.”

  Babel faded. A car went past, another. A horn sounded. They halted. Crates came off, glasses. Her tomb was opened. Hands reached, lifted.