Michael Gallatin walked out of the bathroom, stood over the bed and stared at her body.
The lights flickered. A power interruption, somewhere in the grid. The slow blinking of the eyes of a groggy leviathan. Did she move, in that brief loss of light? Did she stretch her long taut legs and open her own smouldering gray-hued eyes, and whisper up at him in her low voice rasped with passion, Come to bed again, darling. Come crush me into wine and drink all of me, every drop.
She did not.
Michael wondered what would become of himself, at the end of his life. What was beyond this existence, for a creature such as he? Would he sleep among the angels, or would he just go on fighting the demons in a flame-lit room at the bottom of the stairs?
Dressed in his uniform as a German major of the 25th Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, 25th Panzer Grenadier Division, Michael had seen her across the dance floor at the Grand Frederik’s Regal Room. A foursome band in tuxedos was playing on stage, not the oompah-pah stuff of old Germany but the new Swing of the Jazz Age. Red balloons drifted along the vaulted ceiling, which was painted with the faces of ancient kings and emperors looking down through the pastel clouds of heaven to see what a mess they’d left behind.
It was his third night in Berlin, and this party was his reason for booking a room at the hotel. Every so often the golden-globed lights faltered, and with them the babble of conversation, the sometimes strident voices struggling to sound unconcerned, and the laughter too loud for the bad jokes of matings between American jackasses and Russian goats. But even in the dark the music kept playing, and even in the dark Michael watched her move amidst the men and other women like a torchflame amidst sad candles, and as he sipped from his glass of 1936 French Armagnac and the lights came up again he caught the glint of her eyes for the briefest of seconds passing across him and he felt the quick exhilarating celebration of being noted like a knight on his knees before a queen.
Not all the men in the room wore uniforms, but most did. Not all the women in the room were beautiful, but most were.
But none like her.
Not one.
He felt a man whose belly was about to burst his polished gold buttons coming toward him, possibly to ask some inane question about troop dispositions or what action he’d seen, or to voice some wine-odored opinion about the next thrust against the Russians, who in this first week of February were forty-some miles away from the city. Therefore Michael took another drink of his excellent brandy, squared his shoulders and gathered his courage and made his way across the dance floor to the woman in the long flowing crimson dress who was speaking to two other men, and when the men looked at him and the woman turned because she already knew he was coming he said into her face which was almost level with his own, “Pardon me,” in his best Westphalian accent, “but you are nearly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
She just stared into his eyes for perhaps three seconds. Three very long seconds.
Her red lips parted.
She said, with a hint of a smile that was not quite there, “Nearly?”
“Well,” he answered, and he gave her his own most disarming smile, “I haven’t seen all of you yet.”
He hadn’t known what he was going to say until it was time to speak, but as these words passed through the air she lifted her chin, almost as if to taste them. Her throat was offered to him, for a heartbeat. They stared at each other, as the two men behind Franziska Luxe seemed to Michael to diminish in size, to become cardboard cutouts, citizens of a world where passion grew pale for fear of failure. And so went the entire room and all its other inhabitants: sickly, small, and impoverished. If this Regal Room was its own jungle, the two greatest animals of the night had found each other.
And then Michael again said, “Pardon me,” to her, and to them, “Gentlemen,” and with a nod he moved away into the underbrush.
She did not follow. Nor did she track him very long with her gaze. Instead, she returned to her conversation, and a third man brought her a crystal glass of Picardon Blanc. In another moment a huge white buttercream-frosted birthday cake was wheeled out on a cart from the kitchen, and the jazz band—Die Vier glatten Klagen, printed across the bass drum in black letters—took up the universal ‘Happy Birthday Song’, and the room sang out loud as the figure of the hour, a big man wearing a white suit, a white shirt and a red tie stepped forward to try his lungs against thirty-seven candles, his face already flushed before he even began blowing.
Michael watched the festivities from the edge of the room, sipping slowly at his drink and avoiding the occasional glance from anyone else. His mind held the image of Franziska Luxe’s face: her strong jawline and classic Roman nose, her delicious-looking lips ripe for the kiss but perhaps with a twist of cruelty in them, her gray eyes almost luminous in this golden light, the arch of her black eyebrows and the mane of ebony hair that framed her face and fell about her bare shoulders and down her back. The grainy photograph of her had failed to fully prepare him. She was not the German Nordic ideal. She was not a pin-up fiction for the German troops to salivate over. She was a real woman of flesh, sinew, blood and bone. The heat that rose from her was, to him, an intoxicant far stronger than the vintage Armagnac. The aroma of her body beneath the floral Houbigant perfume—Quelque Fleur, he knew it was, from experience—was more wild and untamed forest than sculptured Paris garden.
Which suited him. After all, they’d given him the name of Horst Jaeger, the ‘hunter who lives in the woods’.
Her name was interesting as well. Franziska meant ‘free’.
But he thought that many men must have paid dearly to whisper it.
As the cake was being cut into pieces, a tub of ice cream was wheeled out. More bottles of wine and various liquors appeared. The Four Smooth Suits began to really—as the Americans would say—jump the blues, with the tenor saxophone wailing away and the drummer pounding a powerful beat. ‘Boogie-woogie’, he thought it was called. A slender young woman in a black dress, her hair red with coppery highlights and her face lovely if a little vapid, drifted out from the dancefloor and came directly toward Michael, offering him her cigarette to light. He’d picked up a packet of matches from the lobby for just such a moment—ten flimsy matches to the pack, the chemicals being in such shortage, yet the cigarette smokers were legion.
Michael struck a match and held it out, and as the red-haired woman grasped his hand to guide the flame, a breeze blew from the southeastern quadrant, the match went dark, and a hand took the cigarette from the woman’s lips.
“Go back to your husband, Bette,” said Franziska Luxe. She put the cigarette into Bette’s hand and closed the white fingers around it. “He’s about to be cornered by the most infamous homosexual in the room.”
Bette left, drifting along like someone who was already dead but didn’t know it.
“There,” Franziska said to Michael, with a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “I just saved you from a boring encounter with a nymphomaniac.”
Michael lifted his eyebrows. “Thank you?”
“I am Franziska Luxe,” she announced, and offered her hand not to be kissed or merely limply held in that most gratuitous of gestures, but to be gripped and shaken. He did. She gave his hand a crush before she let him go. “I’m a photographer and writer for Signal. You may have seen my work.”
“Possibly,” he replied. “I haven’t had much time for the reading of magazines.”
“You’re a major?” Of course she’d already seen the insignia of rank. “Reconnaissance?” That was clear, by the badge. His Iron Cross was also on full display. Now came what she really desired to know: “What’s your name?”
“Horst Jaeger, fraulein. At your service.” He gave her a little bow of the head.
Her smile, cautious as it was, seemed to deepen. “Why do you presume I’m not married? I could have chosen to leave my ring at home tonight.”
“No German husband,” Michael said, “would not be cleaved to the side of
a woman like yourself.”
“Really? Why is that?”
He shrugged and took a sip, the last of his Armagnac. “To protect her from men like me.”
“I need no protection,” she said, and he could tell she meant it because it wasn’t softened with a further smile. There was a pause of a few seconds, during which Michael thought he might have lost her. He was expecting her to turn away, but when a man in the uniform of a Luftwaffe captain touched her shoulder and murmured to her and she did not respond Michael relaxed, just a bit. The Luftwaffe man glanced at Michael, gave him a look that said good luck, and moved away.
“I’m interested in you,” Franziska told him, as the band quietened into a slower, softer number. “Major Jaeger, have you ever been professionally photographed?”
He returned a quizzical expression.
“My intent,” she explained, drawing a little closer to him, “is a photographic piece on the faces of the noble warriors. Those who haven’t surrendered. In your heart,” she said. “I can tell, in this room, who has surrendered in the heart and who has not. No, I’m not saying that anyone here is a coward, or a doom-sayer, or treasonous. But there is a difference between the noble warrior who still believes in the German future, and the rabble, whether they wear uniforms with polished gold buttons or not.” And at this point she cast a sidelong glance at the fat-bellied officer, who staggered around behind a half-empty glass of some liquor that had for a while dulled the knife’s-edge prickling at the back of his neck.
Michael was impressed by her intensity. She was standing right in front of him now, filling up his vision. Completing it, in a way. She was almost six feet tall, and he’d already seen that her heels were not very high. Again he caught the wild forest under her perfume. In her eyes lay a controlled wildness, a calm before the storm. He thought her fierce beauty was breathtaking, almost other-worldly, and he had to remind himself that he was here in enemy territory on a very dangerous and important mission, and the smallest mistake—the smallest slip of accent or attitude—could end his life before the stroke of midnight.
“I’m not sure I’m so noble,” he answered, and for once in his life he had to look away from the searching eyes of a woman because he feared they saw too much.
“And an essence of humility too,” said Fransizka, who had almost breathed it as a sigh. Her voice had changed; there was a girl in there somewhere, who perhaps once had dreamed of meeting a knight on bended knee. “My God, where have you been?”
“Now who is this, Franziska?” came a man’s voice. “An uninvited guest, I think?”
Three
I Don’t Fear
It was the birthday boy, in company with the two men who’d been conversing with Fraulein Luxe when Michael had first approached. Both the men wore dark suits with swastika lapel pins, white shirts and dark ties. One man was husky, with a frizz of curly black hair and the sunken eyes of a common thug, while the other wore wire-framed spectacles and had thinning reddish-brown hair and the look of a worried accountant who has misplaced the key to his master’s deposit box.
The birthday boy, however, was a formidable presence. In his polar-white suit his shoulders looked to be five feet broad, and he was easily as tall as Michael, at about six-two. He had a little snow-cap of white hair atop the mountain peak of his head, his hair cropped right to the scalp, sandy and sparkly, on the sides and presumably also on the back. He had the round face and full cheeks of a cherub, a boyish grin on his wide mouth and pale blue eyes that did not quite complement the grin. What immediately struck Michael—along with the aromatic impressions that this man smoked cigars, had recently ridden a horse and had just finished a bowl of vanilla ice-cream—was that his face was as red as if he’d been weaned on tomato ketchup, and it had nothing to do with blowing out candles. It was a startling sight, really, like seeing a fireball sitting atop the body of a snowman. Michael wondered if the man wasn’t in need of a heart specialist close at hand. At the center of the red necktie was a swastika stickpin with a small diamond set into each of the four arms.
A white suit in winter? Michael thought. It was obviously some attempt at a throwback to Viking furs or else simply to make a statement that this man was too large to be concerned either about proper fashion or God’s weather. The German word for that would be barbarisch.
Michael got his mouth in gear, careful with the Westphalian twang. “You’re absolutely correct, sir. I’m staying here and was passing by when I heard the music. I…um…don’t know anyone here, but I thought—”
“You’d walk in and help yourself to a drink or two, Major?” the man interrupted. He was still smiling, but the blue eyes in the ruddy face were dangerous. “At my birthday party? That takes some cheek, sir.”
“I didn’t know. No one stopped me at the door.”
“There’s a sign on the door that says ‘Private Party’. Did you not see that? What’s your name and your division?” Still the blaze of his smile had not cooled.
“His name is Horst Jaeger,” the woman spoke up, and Michael saw the man’s eyes go to her and fix there. “He’s a friend of mine, Axel.”
“A friend? Of how long? Five minutes?” Now his smile did hitch and sputter. The gaze swung back upon Michael Gallatin. “Your papers, please.”
Michael stood very still. His heart was hammering. He was, as the British would say, close to slipping in it. But by force of will he kept his expression blank. He cocked his head to one side.
“I’ll see your papers first, sir,” he said.
There was a silence. How long did it stretch? From here to London, it seemed.
“You wish to see my papers? My papers?” It was not a roar, as much as it was the sound of steam escaping an injured boiler.
“I know who I am,” Michael said calmly. “I have no idea who you might be.”
The man pushed Franziska aside and came up upon Michael like an Alp. The Four Smooth Suits were playing a midtempo jump, the dance floor was crowded, the drinks flowed and laughter rose up like the chatter of machine guns. The heat from the scarlet face almost seared Michael’s brows, and down in the man’s eyes burned small vicious cinders.
Michael stood his ground and made himself larger, swelling out his chest and shoulders. A whipstrike of bloodlust hit him. Oh, he was so close—
A hand plunged down into an inner pocket of a white jacket. It returned gripping a leather wallet covered with white horse hair, which Michael realized he’d mistaken as the scent of a saddle.
“I,” said the man’s mouth, “am Axel Rittenkrett, senior investigator with the—” The wallet opened to display the square brass badge with the German eagle stamped above the Nazi swastika and along the bottom the words Geheime Staatspolizei. “As you seem to disregard plain writing, Major, I will tell you that this is all the paper I need to put you in a car in the next moment and carry you with great glee to Gestapo headquarters.”
Michael felt sweat at his temples, but after all it was warm in this room, with all the heat of dancing roiling around. Rittenkrett also was sweating; it wouldn’t have surprised Michael if the man’s face leaked blood. He had to say something—right now—and it had to be impressive because his life depended on it.
“Herr Rittenkrett,” said Michael, staring calmly into the man’s furious eyes, “I have been with the 25th Panzer Grenadier Division since France in 1940. My companions and I were sent to the Russian Front in 1941. We fought at Minsk, Kiev, in the blizzards before Moscow, over the minefields of Kursk and through the inhuman butcheries at Smolensk. We fought our way out of the encirclement of Army Group Center, with heavy loss. We were sent to the Western Front after the invasion, undermanned in the hedgerows with mostly green replacements. Most recently—was it just in December?—we were holding the Bitche sector in the Ardennes. Herr Rittenkrett,” he said, “I appreciate the weight and power of your Gestapo badge, but I have seen men gutted, disemboweled, beheaded, cut in half, reduced to jibbering torsos that beg for death, crushed flat and un
recognizable as anything ever human under tank treads, blown into glistening shreds by artillery shells, burned alive by flamethrowers and—worse—not completely burned alive by flamethrowers, frozen solid into snowbanks, killed in ridiculous accidents by comrades too bone-weary to check their weapons, and drowned crossing rivers because they were too proud to tell their sergeants they never learned to swim. I have seen a young man turn eighty years old in a matter of minutes. I have seen the handsome pride of a loving mother lose his face like a mask being torn away, so much garbage for the summer flies.
“So, Herr Rittenkrett,” Michael said, thinking that some of these things—too many of these things—he had actually seen in his duty in North Africa, except it was British young men bearing the agonies, “I appreciate your position and I congratulate you on your birthday, but I am expecting to be ordered eastward again any day now, with the 25th Panzer Grenadiers for the glory of the Reich, and so until then I will walk through any door I please and take any drink I please because, Herr Rittenkrett, I walk and drink in the company of many hundreds of ghosts, and we have earned that very small privilege, even from the Gestapo.”
And though Herr Rittenkrett did not move an inch, Michael felt him draw back.
The music played and played. Above the dance floor the old dead regals peered down upon the lively celebration.
Rittenkrett slowly released the breath he’d been holding.
He said, “I have one question for you, Major. Answer it very carefully.”
“Go ahead, sir.”
Rittenkrett’s snow-capped head nodded. One hand slowly came up to grip Michael’s right shoulder. The blue eyes crinkled.
“Would you like ice cream with your cake?”
“Yes,” Michael replied, holding back his sigh of very huge relief, “I would.”
“Ross, go get it for him,” Rittenkrett said into the air, and the thuggish one moved to obey. “I suppose it’s unnecessary to surmise that you’ve given back to the enemy double or triple what you and your brave comrades have endured? No answer needed there, I can see for myself. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be alive, yes? Franziska! Why isn’t our new friend a colonel?”
The Hunter From the Woods Page 20