The Hunter From the Woods

by Robert R. McCammon

  “I was going to ask him the same question.” She wound her arm around Michael’s in a smooth, beautifully sinuous motion.

  “There are already many talented and able colonels,” the wolf in the room answered. “I prefer to be nearer the action.”

  “Ah!” Rittenkrett beamed. “Spoken like a man who ought to be a colonel. Your accent…is it…?”

  “Westphalian,” Michael responded. “My hometown is Dortmund.”

  “I’ve had some dealings involving the Hadamar hospital there. A shame your fair city has taken so much damage from the bombers. But that will be reckoned with, very soon. I presume you were here last night? During the air raid?”

  “I was, yes.” It had been around eleven o’clock when the sirens had begun to shriek, and Michael had been in bed resting for the day to come. He’d gone down to the cellar with the other guests, maybe seventy or so people in the entire hotel. The lights had flickered and vibrations had pounded through the floor and the walls and a few of the women had begun to sob as they held their children but the night bombers had left smoking craters and fire-scorched ruins in another part of the city.

  “Prepare for more,” Rittenkrett cautioned, his smile now gone. “But don’t fear, our courageous Luftwaffe is steadily rebuilding. I know of some tricks up their sleeves, yet to come.”

  “I don’t fear,” Michael said. Tricks up their sleeves? He didn’t like the sound of that. “I have the utmost confidence in the Luftwaffe and in the ultimate destruction of all our enemies.” He decided to add, “If the Fuhrer says it will happen…so it shall.”

  “Exactly.” Rittenkrett leaned in toward him and said, sotto voce, “But in the meantime, Major, make sure you get your ass to the cellar when you hear those sirens.” Then he winked and laughed and clapped Michael hard on the arm that Franziska wasn’t holding, and Michael allowed a smile and a nod.

  The thug returned with a plate of cake and ice cream and both a fork and spoon engraved with the name of the hotel. As Michael accepted the gift and wondered where he was going to dump the sugary stomach-clogger, the man who looked like a distressed accountant whispered something into Rittenkrett’s ear and the big red-faced man grimaced. “Well, Sigmund reminds me I have business to tend to even on the night of my own party. Franziska, I’m sure you’ll be in your element as a gracious hostess in my absence. Oh…” That last word, Michael realized, was meant as a bridge between party-talk and more serious matters, for Axel Rittenkrett’s eyes sharpened again as he regarded the lady.

  “Our continuing project requires your special enthusiasm,” Rittenkrett told her. “Your invaluable communication skills. We have some new clients on the list. Shall we talk in my office tomorrow morning? Around nine o’clock?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “She warms my cockles,” Rittenkrett replied, speaking to Michael. “Major Jaeger, eat and drink to your heart’s delight and walk through any door that pleases you. It was an honor to meet you. Good luck and good… I’m sure you must hear this quite a lot…hunting. Heil Hitler.” He put up his right hand in the salute.

  “Heil Hitler,” Michael replied, lifting his hand with the fork in it and on the fork a little bite of cake with buttercream icing.

  The white, mountainous shape of the Gestapo investigator and his two assistants moved away through the throng. He had trouble getting out, as people converged upon Rittenkrett to clap him on his back, speak in one of his flaming ears and otherwise brown-nose him all the way out the door and beyond.

  Four

  The Battle Is Life

  “Interesting man,” said Michael in the rippling wake of Rittenkrett’s departure. “May I ask…why the white suit in winter?”

  “His persona.” There was a note in the woman’s voice that said she was quite relieved her Gestapo acquaintance had left the party. “He always wears a white suit, in every season. He likes to be called the ‘Ice Man’.”

  “The ‘Ice Man’? Why is that?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she said, and when Michael looked into her eyes he saw a boundary there that should not be crossed. “We’ve just met, but… I have to say…you take a great chance speaking that way to someone like him.”

  “I’d probably take a greater chance putting this in my stomach before bedtime.” He set the cake and ice cream on the tray of a passing waiter.

  “I mean it.” Franziska’s hand found his. “Axel has two faces. You can never know which one is looking at you.”

  “Meat,” said Michael.

  “What?”

  “Oh, I’m thinking aloud. I would like some meat. I believe the restaurant’s still open across the lobby. Have you eaten dinner?”

  “I should stay here.”

  He looked at her steadily. He put himself in her eyes.

  “No,” he said gently, “you should not.”

  Even though supplies were running low, the chef was doing the best he could and the grilled lambchops in the Koniglicher Garten were excellent. Franziska grazed on a salad. In the brighter lamps of the restaurant, she was no less stunning a creature than Michael had first seen. Here again he had to be very careful, because she would ask a question—about his life in Dortmund, his education and so forth—and she would watch him intently and also, it appeared, listen intently until his reply was done. Never once did she ask if he was married. He wore no ring either, but still…he might have left it in his room. She touched only very briefly on his military service, which suited him fine because even though he’d fully memorized the exploits and travails of the 25th Panzer Grenadiers gleaned from prisoners of war captured in the Ardennes a month ago, he didn’t wish to wander too deeply into the details.

  “Your accent is strange,” she suddenly said, as he was reaching for a glass of water.

  He continued his motion, picked up the glass and took a good swallow.

  “I’ve known…met…people from Westphalia before. Your accent…it’s different, somehow.”

  “Accents are as different as people, I suppose,” he answered. Was his throat too tight when he said it?

  “I suppose,” she agreed, and she shrugged her lithe shoulders.

  “I have a question.” And thank God for it, he thought. She focused entirely on him, which was a trait both complimentary to a man and confounding to a secret agent. “As a Signal photographer and journalist, what project are you working on with the Gestapo?”

  She didn’t even blink. The gray eyes—and there were hints of violet in them, he saw, or perhaps that was a trick of the small candleflame between them—were steady and absolutely cool. She turned her head as if to speak to someone else across the room, perhaps one of the partygoers who had stumbled in and to whom she’d already introduced her friend Major Horst Jaeger.

  I may have gone my own bridge too far, Michael decided. But he waited.

  “We are both soldiers,” Franziska said, her gaze swinging back upon him. “You have your battlefields and I have mine, because we both love Germany and the Reich. What more is there for us?”

  “Life,” he said, and it stunned him because he didn’t know where it came from.

  “The battle,” she said, “is life.”

  He had eaten his way to the bones, and now he pushed his plate aside. Without looking at her, he could feel her like his own heartbeat. Her eyes were on him; they were taking him to pieces, even as he sat wondering what he should say next, what witticism, what paltry poetry meant to lure her upstairs to the bed in room 214, what gentlemanly endeavor in a world where the gentleman was nearly dead? And he himself…a hollow uniform, worn over a masquerade? He thought…he feared…she could see all the way into him, and what he thought of himself, everything he’d been through, all the fire and the blood, all the torment and tribulation, the very soul of what he pretended to be, all of it, everything, came down to the sudden crack of confidence, the feeling that for this woman, this creature, this job, he was not good enough.

  Franziska spoke.

 
“I am not a whore,” she said.

  “And I am not sorry for you,” she went on. “If you’re ordered to go east tomorrow morning, or the day after…that is your purpose. What I told you at the first is true. I’d like to photograph you for my article. Why? You are a very handsome man. You would look good on a magazine cover. And as I said… I know you have a strong and noble heart. How do I know that? Because even though you and I both are aware we desire to go to your room and make love tonight, you’re not rushing me there like an animal. I would go with you, regardless if you were all claws and spittle, because I do want the photograph. But because you are not an animal, I will go with you gladly and in great anticipation of learning what you think of all of me.”

  It took him a moment to recover.

  “I might turn into an animal the instant the door is locked,” he told her.

  “I’m counting on that,” she said, and for the first time he realized she had the most adorable dimples in her cheeks.

  She also, behind the locked door, revealed her adorable dimples of Venus, as her red dress and silken slip glided to the floor with soft whispers. Michael thought he could set teacups in those indentations at the small of her back, or pour pools of cold water into them and as he crouched above her on all fours lap them dry with a flicking tongue. The black air-raid shades were lowered over the windows, cutting any glimpse of seething fires that still glowed from the raid the night before; in this room was seething fire enough.

  She said she wished to keep the small lamp atop the writing table on, with its royal-blue shade that cast the light of secret grottoes and stolen moments. They began by standing close together, at the center of the room, and admiring with fingertips and slow caresses the bodies offered one to another. Her fingers played over the muscles of his shoulders, down through the hair on his chest, along his hard stomach and downward still. She wore the expression of someone in a dream world that could not be shared, her lips slightly parted and teeth gleaming, her gaze upon him hungry yet not to be hurried through this banquet. He moved his hands over her like a sculptor, warming the smooth sleek stone before its transformation; she was harder than other women he’d known, her breasts small but the nipples yearning for his touch and taste. He slid his fingers along her sides, feeling the ribs there and all the constructions of sinew, bone and flesh that held the soul at its center. He let the knuckles of his right hand glide slowly down her stomach, down over her deep-dish navel, and she gave a quiet soft utterance as his fingers reached and lingered upon the black triangle of hair between long thighs that had begun almost imperceptibly to tremble.

  Michael cupped the back of Franziska’s neck with his left hand, and as he drew her face to him to brand her lips with his own, she put a finger against his chin and the message was clear: You do not have my permission for that.

  So he pulled his face away, and he picked her up in his arms and took her to the bed.

  Five

  Herr Rittenkrett Calls

  He longed to enter her, to join himself with her in the only way he could, and she longed for it also because she pressed herself, moist with excitement, against him, yet he had no intention of rushing the moment. He began a soft consumption of her, an exploration of her beautiful body with his tongue and small nips of the teeth, and he began this study of erotic geography with her throat, which she offered to him like any passion-charged bitch in heat. He spared no effort and missed no port of call, and when his journey was almost done she shifted her hips and grasped his hair with both hands and called him back to revisit her aching harbor.

  Then it was her turn to travel.

  Michael Gallatin had known many excellent visitors, with many outstanding and often amazing talents, but Franziska Luxe very easily could be awarded the key to his city, if not his world. Her mouth was larger than he could have imagined, and her tongue more heated. Her forthright intention was to consume him to the root and hold him there until pleasure and pain began to merge together into a third sensation unknown to him until now. She was a relentless lover, a force that went nearly too far, backed off again, and again pushed the limit of his endurance. He felt as he had always wished every woman in his bed felt: that the world had stopped for a span of time, that nothing existed beyond the walls, or indeed beyond the moment, and that there was no one else on earth but these two figures, damp with sweat and breathing hard in the celebration of what seemed the act of gods and too exalted for mere human beings.

  When at last he pushed himself inside her, she took him in deeply and wrapped her legs like bands of fire around his hips. They rocked together upon the wrecked sheets. She bit at his neck and made noises against his ear like the keening of wind through pines in the Russian woods. He saw colors behind his eyes that had no description, and were blinding even in his darkness. He shivered, as if struck by the passing blast of a train on a wilderness track. He almost forgot himself, and what began in his mind as a howl emerged from his throat in a moan of pure white ecstasy. Then he opened his eyes to drink in her beauty and found her glistening face looking up at him with wonder, as a solitary traveller through many black nights might look upon a guiding star.

  She mounted him, while he lay on his back in what felt like the embrace of a swamp. It had always been his belief that one could tell how passionate in bed a woman was by the way she danced, by her innate sense of rhythm and her daring to experiment with the music she heard in her soul. It occurred to him that she could knock the hell out of the Four Smooth Suits.

  As Franziska gave a sudden cry and shuddered, so too did Michael. His orgasm racked him, again the sensation of pain mixed with pleasure. It went on, wave after wave, until he was emptied. Franziska clung to him through her own series of small deaths and in her rebirth melded her cheek against his. With her damp ebony hair in his face Michael released a long sigh of utter and complete satisfaction.

  They lay side-by-side with their heads on the same pillow, staring at each other, her fingers caught with his and her thighs held between his own.

  “What can I say?” she asked softly.

  “What would you like to say?”

  “Something unladylike.”

  “There’s no one listening but me, and I know you’re a lady.”

  She moistened her lips. “You make me very, very, very, very…horny.”

  Which was music to his ears.

  The second time they made love was slower and softer. They were both tired, but both eager and willing to drive themselves and each other into the realm of dazed insensibility. Around three in the morning they showered together and were slick and soapy when the warm water abruptly turned icy cold, bringing a shriek and gale of laughter from Franziska and a good Germanic curse from the major.

  “Oh, the time!” she said, as he towelled her off. Her face without makeup was no less beautiful, and to Michael even more so; she was scrubbed and naturally radiant, and her hair smelled of the hotel’s sandalwood shampoo. She went up on her tiptoes and gave a giggle that could only be described as girlish when he put the towel between her legs from behind and gave her a little buzz of friction. “You’d better be careful!” she warned.

  “Or what?”

  She turned around, pressed her breasts against his chest and with her arms around him looked him straight in the eyes. “You keep this up and I’ll have to stay with you all day. Just so you won’t get into trouble.”

  “If you want me to keep it up, just ask.” He glanced southward. “Um…a growing boy does require breakfast.”

  “I think,” she said, as she placed her fingertip on the end of his nose, “you should get some sleep. And I should go home too, sad to say.”

  “Sad to say,” he repeated, and quickly he caught her finger in his mouth and almost sucked the meat from it. “So…don’t say it.”

  She smiled at him, the perfect smile of freedom and happiness. But he saw the smile slowly fade away, until it was all gone. “I can’t stay. Really. I have some work to do this morning, I have t
o be clear-headed.”

  “Am I now a noxious fog?”

  “I’m serious, Horst. I would love to stay and have breakfast with you, and…do whatever you’d like, but…”

  “Herr Rittenkrett calls.”

  “Yes, he does. And I wish you would forget you ever met him or heard him speak to me. This is something you don’t need to be concerned about.”

  “Which makes me more concerned than before. Is it dangerous?”

  She pulled away from him and stepped back. Though completely naked, she was climbing into her armor. She began to get dressed and studiously avoided his stare.

  He sat on the bed and watched her. God, she was some piece of fabulous woman! he thought. The memory of her vagina clamped to his penis as if he had pressed into a jar of warm honey sent a shiver up his spine. I could take you to lunch, he almost said. But in the next instant he thought, Don’t beg. Never beg. Not to any woman.

  Suddenly she looked up at him and, half-dressed, she let out a laugh. “You’ve got the face of a wounded puppy! Get some sleep, you’ll feel better in a few hours.”

  “I doubt it, but thank you anyway.”

  “Of course you’ll feel better. Or I hope you will. Because I’m going to cut my meeting short, tell Herr Rittenkrett what he wants to hear, and then I can take the rest of the day to show you something I think you’ll really like. Will you do my buttons?”

  It dawned on Michael what she was saying. He buttoned her up and placed his hands on both globes of her bottom, tight in the saucy red dress. “I’ve already seen something I really like.”

  “Men,” she said, and she tensed her buttocks under his fingers. “Oh, look at you now! A wolf where a puppy just was!”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “That’s me.” He let her go and frowned up at her. “Won’t our Gestapo friend take offense at your…shall I say…unprofessional attitude today?”