He almost lost it all, because the bones seemed to start to reshape in his face before he caught himself, and the blood roared within him and the scent of the wildness that was his deepest essence bloomed from his flesh.
“A statement?” He sprayed spittle. His face was contorted, and he leaned toward the priest with death in his eyes. “A statement of what? That we can kill women just as easily as they can?”
Kollmann said, “Calm down, Major,” as if speaking to a slightly-troublesome moron.
That was very nearly his last utterance upon the face of this earth.
Michael struggled to regulate his breathing. His joints were sore. All his bones had threatened, in the briefest of seconds, to rearrange themselves. Across the back of his neck, against the collar, he felt the scurryings of small coarse black and gray hairs rising and falling like strange tides. Only he knew what they were, and only he knew how much he wanted to kill the priest for even daring to speak this dirty idea into action.
Kollmann, his eyes hidden behind the blue lenses, reached into the pocket of his immaculate coat, and the fingers with their manicured nails returned with a small packet of black licorice sticks. He took one, slid it into a corner of his mouth, and offered the pack to Michael.
“No thank you,” Michael said. “I’m not a drunkard, so I don’t need that to hide the smell of my breath.”
Kollmann sat very still for a few seconds. His face was a blank. He returned the pack of licorice to his pocket.
“We are still where we are,” he told Michael. “The alteration does not come from me. I’m the messenger. But I am told to tell you that you should not blame our mutual friend for the disaster at Arnhem, and you should not blame him for this.”
“I’ll blame whoever I fucking choose to blame,” came the answer, spoken in almost a snarl.
“We need to make a statement,” the priest went on, his voice and demeanor maddeningly calm. “Not to the Germans, but to the Russians.” He lowered his voice, though there was no one close enough to hear. “They have spies here, watching. They want to see how we handle ourselves in matters like this, for future reference. We have to be as ruthless as they are, Major. Otherwise, they’ll walk all over us when they take the world stage. And believe me…when they seize Berlin, which they will…they will claim a large piece of Europe. So the woman needs to be removed, as a statement of what we will not tolerate.”
“One woman,” Michael said bitterly.
“No, she’s not the only one. Of course not. But she’s the one you’re being ordered to remove.”
“Why? Because I’ve gotten close to her?”
“Exactly,” said the priest.
Michael was sweating. It was oozing out of him. He could smell the sourness of himself. He put a trembling hand to his forehead.
“Are you going to be ill?” Kollmann inquired.
Michael lowered his hand. He smiled into the blue lenses, his face slick. “Do you believe in Hell?”
“Certainly I do.”
“You’re a damned liar,” said Michael, “because if you believed in Hell, you would be getting out of that chair and running for your life.”
The fingers steepled again.
“Oh, I see.” Did the mouth, with its licorice stick in one corner, twist into the briefest worm of a smile? “We have a complication.”
Michael stared at the floor, as that ridiculous hollow word clanged in his mind.
“I’ll remind you, Major,” said the priest, “that this woman has been instrumental in the brutal murders of many German patriots. Of many fine men, woman, and children. Because, you must realize, entire families have been destroyed in this. Just disappeared without a trace, but certainly we know they were taken first to Gestapo headquarters. And some of those people—those patriots who risked everything to save this country from its self-mutilation, its sheer drum-beating insanity—were my friends. Now, I suspect, bones and ashes in a garbage pit somewhere. Before we go any further with this, shall I supply for you a list of their names and a display of their photographs? I can show you some grand pictures of the children, all dressed in their nice clothes and smiling. You know, there’s nothing quite like a child’s smile.”
Michael kept his head lowered.
Kollmann nodded, still working on his candy. “They are the future, children are. Such potential, to make things brighter in this unhappy world. But, things do get complicated. Sometimes—very often it seems, in this day and age—the dark and the light get all mixed up together. And there are intelligent men who count on that happening. They are educated to make that happen. It is their most profound desire to do so. Now, I can sit here and say that possibly this woman fell under the spell and influence of such a man. That finding herself surrounded by fellow Germans who bore a grudge against the world and heeded the stirring call of a madman gave her a swell of what she took to be true and most worthy patriotism. Well, he said it: if you don’t follow me, you don’t love Germany. And he’s a fantastic speaker who can make some very convincing arguments. But…” And here he removed the stick and gazed at what had been whittled away. “One can call murder a process of cleansing, an eradication of the unfit, and the preparation for a Thousand-Year-Reich. It’s still murder, even in the language of the lawyer and the politician.” He let that hang for a few seconds. “She’s one of the people who must pay for that murder. Not just of other human beings, but of the country I knew. Because, Major Jaeger, my land has been burned away. I’m just trying my best to save a few seeds to throw on the scorched earth, in hopes anything can ever grow here again.”
“So,” said the priest, “you see, I do believe in Hell.” He brought out the packet and returned the remainder of the stick to its brothers. “I live there.”
Michael put his hands to his face.
“Is there any other way?” he asked, with a note of pleading.
“You don’t have to do it. Our mutual friend suggested it be offered first to you. If you refuse, you can go with me right now to the safe house. We’ll get you out as soon as possible.”
“But she’ll still be killed.”
“Yes. We have people with experience.”
“How—” His voice cracked. He tried once more: “How would it be done?”
The priest watched a Naval officer cross the lobby with a stylishly-dressed woman in a derby hat clinging to his arm. “A knock at the door of her studio, late at night. A silenced bullet to the head. Or someone following her to strangle her with a wire garotte wrapped around her neck. It would be quick.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Michael whispered, in agony. “I suppose one can also call murder a just retaliation for past sins?”
Kollmann’s face was impassive. “I didn’t always need the licorice for my breath, Major.”
The future had come. Michael knew it. And this future was more terrible than he ever might have conceived. The fighter pilots couldn’t kill a woman, because they left that hideous job to the slime on the ground. The shadow men. And him, the most shadowy of all.
“Can’t I get her out?” he tried. “Knock her over the head, use chloroform or something? Can’t I just get her out, and call it done?”
“Too risky. And in the scheme of things she’s more valuable to us dead than alive.”
It took Michael Gallatin awhile to get the words from brain to mouth and out.
“If… I were to do it…how would I?”
“You’re the killer,” said Kollmann.
Michael closed his eyes. But when he opened them again, he was still sitting in a black leather chair in the lobby of the Grand Frederik in the presence of this priest, and there was still a task to be done.
“Yes,” he agreed, “I am the killer. Yes, I am. So.” He lifted his gaze to the blue lenses. “I presume you have a chemist.”
“Yes.”
“I want a pill. Something that dissolves quickly. Something that is tasteless and odorless.” He had to stop for a little bit, because he was hurting so much. “So
mething that will put her to sleep, within…fifteen or twenty minutes. That’s what I want. That she just go to sleep.”
Kollmann thought about it, his fingers tapping the arm of his chair. “It’s a tall order.”
Michael leaned toward him with such ferocity that the tapping instantly stopped and the man shrank back.
“Yes, it is,” Michael said, his eyes enraged though his voice was eerily controlled, “but I’m the killer. And I’m telling you, as a killer, that if she feels pain, that if she throws up her guts or defecates herself, or anything other than going to sleep, then I’m coming after the messenger. And the messenger may think he’s so righteous and pure for his glorious love of what Germany once was, but it’s all murder to me because I’m the killer. If the messenger tries to hide in his house, I’ll tear it to pieces, and if he tries to hide in his church I’ll take that apart too. And maybe I’ll never leave this city alive, but after she’s dead and I’ve ripped you to shreds I will have no more need to live another day, because the killer’s work will be finished.”
It took a moment for Kollmann to relax. He must have really been close to God, because his next question was, “Shall I bring you two pills, then?”
Michael had already thought about that. As much as he might wish it, suicide was repugnant to him. The wolf in him wouldn’t allow it. No. Never.
“Only the one,” he said.
The priest stood up, and so did Michael.
Kollmann said, “We’ll come up with something. Still…there won’t be an opportunity to test its qualities. It’ll have to be guesswork.”
“Prayer might help,” Michael advised.
Kollmann offered his hand. Michael just looked at it, and thought how he could tear it off at the wrist. On his way across the lobby, Kollmann was stopped by the older man and woman. The woman began to softly weep, and then so did the man.
The priest spoke to them and touched their shoulders, but never did he remove his blue-tinted glasses.
Michael climbed up the stairs to his room, where pallid-faced and gasping he leaned over the toilet just in time to be violently, wrenchingly sick.
Eleven
The Tenth Woman
He went for a long walk through the streets, as evening turned the dim light of afternoon blue and snowflakes whirled around him. He walked on and on, as if seeking to be lost, but his sense of direction was unerring and he always knew exactly where his hotel was. He walked through bombed areas, where people still tried to salvage something of their lives from the ruins. He saw an overturned wagon with two dead horses still in their traces, the bloated carcasses whitened with snow. He saw a pack of desperate dogs gnawing in to get at the entrails, and he walked on.
In the silence of the evening streets, just a few people out and a few wagons, some riders on bicycles and a scattering of cars, Michael thought he could hear the sound of artillery firing in the east. The Russians might be slowed for a short while, but nothing would stop them from taking this city. He knew the strong, unyielding and often brutal nature of the Russian; after all, he was one of them.
At his hotel, the clerk gave him a message from Franziska. She had a dinner engagement she couldn’t get out of, and then she had to do some photographic work in her darkroom. But she would call at eleven o’clock.
The clerk read the last lines of the message: “Think of me when you have dinner. A thousand kisses. Weather forecast: more rain coming”. The clerk looked strangely at the major, as if he suspected this must be some kind of secret code.
Michael took the paper and had dinner in the restaurant followed by a good strong glass of brandy. He wound up paying for an entire bottle, which he took with a glass up to his room.
He was waiting, half-drunk, when the telephone rang at ten-fifty-six.
“I have to work a little later,” she told him. “Some more pictures to develop, and they must be done tonight.”
“By order of Herr Rittenkrett?” he asked.
She was silent for a few seconds. Then: “You don’t sound like yourself. Are you all right?”
“I’ve had dinner and I’ve been drinking. Just a little.” Had he slurred that word? Have to be careful here, not to let his accent slip. What the hell was wrong with him, letting his guard down like this?
“You’ve been drinking,” she repeated back.
“Yes. Brandy. I’m looking at what is almost an empty bottle. I expect to empty it in the next…oh…ten minutes.”
Franziska gave a sudden gasp, as if she’d been slapped.
“Your orders came,” she said.
He closed his eyes, the better to see her standing before him. “Yes.”
“Oh… Horst. I’ll be right there.”
“No! Franziska…finish what you’re doing.”
“I’m leaving now. This can wait.”
“Listen to me!” he said, more sharply than he’d intended. “Just…stay there and do what you need to do. Keep your mind on your work.”
“Oh, of course!” Were there tears in that word?
“I mean it.” He wondered what Mallory and Kollmann would say to his telling her she should do the exact work he’d been sent to interfere with. Did it matter now? “Franziska,” he said in a quieter tone, “I don’t have to leave tonight. Nor tomorrow.”
“When do you have to go, then?” Yes, definitely a tear or two. Her voice had thickened with what could only be sorrow.
I have to go after you’re dead, he thought.
But he said, “We still have time enough. I promise.”
“There can’t be enough time.”
“Go back to your work,” he said firmly.
“I’ll be there as soon as I finish.” She hung up.
Michael returned the receiver to its cradle and then he picked up the bottle of brandy and swallowed some more courage. He would go down and buy another bottle, but he couldn’t get too drunk or he might lose himself. Whoever he was tonight.
When Michael heard the knock on his door at twelve-forty and opened it, Franziska rushed in and put her arms around him. She was wearing her fawn-colored overcoat and a sea-green beret. She kissed him on the cheek, on the forehead, on the lips and on the throat. She pressed herself into him. Then she put her head on his shoulder and said in his ear, “I know men who can help. They can have you reassigned to duty here. All I have to do is—”
He knew what she would have to do.
He took her chin in his hand and glared into her luminous eyes.
“No! You’re not doing that for me. Do you hear? Not for me.” He saw the pain in her face, and it nearly dropped him to his knees. He tried to pull a smile up from somewhere. “There’s no need for sadness. Didn’t you say to me that this is my purpose? And you know fully well you said that God would not allow a man like me to—”
“That was before,” she interrupted, and he saw the tears bloom. One overflowed and streaked down her right cheek.
“Before what? We went to bed together?”
“No.” A second tear followed the first. “Before I wanted you to stay with me. I know forever is a long time, so I won’t say forever. But we could start out by saying it might be forever. Couldn’t we? Please, please, please.” It was she who got down on her knees. She grasped his hand and kissed it, and she held it against a tear-wet cheek. “Please, I can take care of this. I can go see those men, it would be nothing, it would be so easy, I could—”
“Stand up! Come on! Up!” He pulled her to her feet. “Don’t beg,” he said. “Never beg. Not to any man.”
“I don’t want you to die!” she rasped. And there it was. The reality, in amid all the fictions, the parties and the merrymaking. She trembled, and her tears were trickling slowly down and so also trickled down a small thread of saliva from her lower lip.
Get out of here, he almost said. He thought for a few seconds of shouting at her, of running her out because this was too much, it was impossible to bear this. But the fact was, he knew how short their hours were, and if she
had to die—if she had to die—then he would be with her when it happened, and it would not be a cold stranger with a silenced pistol or a strangler in the alley at the end of the street. He would take the responsibility to put her over as gently as possible. And then, quite suddenly, he felt the burn in his own eyes and he lowered his head but she’d already seen.
She put a finger under his chin to angle his face toward her again.
Strongly and clearly she said, “I’m not going to let you be lost.”
“I have lied to you,” he heard himself answer. “My Westphalian accent is false. Studied. I was not born in Dortmund. I am…different, from anyone else. I was born in Russia, and I was a child there. What you’re hearing in my accent is—”
Her fingers went to his lips.
“Shhhhh,” she said. “I don’t care. Just answer me this: you’re not a traitor, are you?”
“No, I’m not a traitor.”
“Then what does it matter? Very well, so you were born in Russia. What were you, the family secret?” She didn’t wait for a response. “If you looked into the histories of most of the people at that Signal party, you’d find few of them without a chambermaid or a stable boy hidden in their family trees.”
The power of illusion, he thought. Or delusion. Right now she was creating the story in her mind of how he was the child of an ill-starred love between a German officer and a Russian maiden on the eve of the Great War, and how he’d probably been raised by the simple and gentle maiden, but then she’d sent him to be cared for by his father in Dortmund because she knew what better education and enlightenment he would receive. In fact, that sounded close to the movie they’d seen at the cinema a few nights ago.
What was the point of going down the road of truth? It was too fantastic to be believed. And if he showed her…what then?
He might kill her of fright, and then he could go home like a real hero.
He put his arms around her and held her tightly. They clung together like the only still-solid objects in a universe disintegrating to dust.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. Sorry, he realized, that she had not been born in England, that they had not met years before this one, that even together they stood on different sides of a chasm. Sorry that life was as cruel as it was, and that time could never be stopped or wound backward.
The Hunter From the Woods Page 26