The Hunter From the Woods

by Robert R. McCammon

  “It wasn’t a bad lie,” she answered, misunderstanding. “I forgive you.”

  She kissed him on the lips. She traced her tongue along the outline of his mouth. She took her clothes off and pressed her breasts against his chest. She ground her second heart against his groin in slow circles while she stared pleadingly into his eyes but he could not be roused.

  “Are you tired of me?” she asked.

  Could a man ever be tired of the sun in winter? He said, “No, it’s not that.”

  As Michael sat on the edge of the bed, Franziska knelt behind him and worked the tense muscles of his shoulders with her strong fingers.

  “I’ll do anything you like,” she told him. “I’m the tenth woman.”

  He frowned. “The tenth woman?”

  “Oh, yes. Don’t you know? Five women out of ten will slap a man’s face for an indecent suggestion. Two will turn on their heel. One will kick him in the balls, and one will think it over. I’m the tenth woman.”

  He smiled slightly, in spite of himself.

  “I’m the woman who refused to leave the Garden of Eden,” she said as she worked on him. “I bake pies from the forbidden fruit, and I serve them to whomever I choose.”

  “Sounds delicious,” he said.

  “Do you think I’m a bad person?” she asked. “I mean…do you think I’m…” She trailed off, and Michael could feel her shrug. Her hands stopped.

  He knew what she was really asking: How do you feel about me?

  He turned toward her, and it hit him anew how beautiful she was. She was to him like a masterpiece of a painting, a work of art that comes together in its perfection only once in the proverbial blue moon, and always in her face there was some shade or nuance of expression that changed it ever so slightly so that looking at her was like seeing not one woman but a multitude. And all of them, every one, were now staring at him with this question in the perfume-scented air between them.

  He was going to show her how he felt. No matter what tomorrow held. She wanted to know, and words were not enough. So he would lay her down upon the bed and show her, with all his strength and tenderness and desire, because she deserved to know and he owed her that much. Then he would make her promise on both her hearts that she would do nothing to interfere with his orders, and he would tell her that tomorrow night he intended to take her to dinner and to a place where music played until very late, and afterward he wanted her right where she belonged, here in bed with him tasting the forbidden fruit.

  And champagne, he would say. Of course they needed champagne to drink, on the last night of their world.

  She wrapped herself around him as he entered her, and in his ear she blissfully sighed the name of a stranger.

  Twelve

  The Light And The Dark

  A bad part of the morning was when Michael, returning from a walk, asked at the desk if anything had arrived for Major Horst Jaeger.

  “Yes, Major. This came while you were out.” The clerk brought from beneath the smooth oak counter a small box wrapped in brown paper. Michael noted at once that it was about the size of a jeweler’s box. The kind that might hold a—

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” said the clerk, “I’ve seen you several times in the company of the beautiful young woman. Um…would this be a ring for her, sir?”

  Michael knew what the man surmised. Lovers being parted, the noble soldier of the Reich going off to war. Was this an engagement gift, perhaps? A promise of many bright tomorrows?

  “I’ll need a magnum of chilled champagne in my room around midnight,” he said, with no emotion. “Two glasses. I’d like the best bottle in the house.”

  “Yes sir. I believe we have some Moet still in stock.”

  “That’ll do. Bill my account, of course.” He started to walk away, the box in his right hand.

  “My compliments and congratulations, sir,” said the clerk.

  In his room, Michael opened the box and unwrapped a small ball of waxed paper sealed with tape. The pill was white with a faint blue tinge, the same color and a little smaller than one of Franziska’s pearls. He returned it to the waxed paper and then to the box, which went up on the closet shelf behind the folded extra blanket.

  For most of the day he slept, or tried to. He curled himself against the gray light that fell through the windows. Snowflakes spun against the glass. The steam pipes beat a rhythm. Just after three she called to say she would be there in front at six-thirty. Their dinner reservation, more romantic than necessary, was for seven o’clock. She said she was happy, and she called him darling.

  When he hung up, he was planning the evening.

  Yes, I am the killer.

  He showered and shaved and dressed well in advance of her arrival. He used a German military-issue brush on his hair, and a German military-issue toothbrush on his teeth. He took the taped-up ball of waxed paper from its box and put it into his trouser pocket on the left side. He wasn’t sure yet how or when he was going to drop the pill in her glass, but he had the confidence of the professional.

  The killer, yes I am.

  Dark was falling, very quickly.

  He went downstairs to meet her, and pulling the collar of his feld-grau topcoat up he walked into the flurries and waited.

  The BMW came, its top raised and secured with grommets against the weather. When Michael climbed into the car, Franziska gave him a quick kiss at the corner of his mouth and she said she was famished, she’d been so busy during the day she hadn’t had time for lunch. More photographs to be developed and some documents delivered. She looked as if she might have cried at some point today also, because her makeup didn’t quite cover the dark hollows beneath her eyes.

  The roadster roared off, snow be damned.

  I am the killer. Yes.

  They ate at a restaurant that overlooked the river Spree. It was all candles and dark red drapes. A strolling violinist made the circle between their table and the only two other occupied tables, until Michael tipped him and said they wished to be excluded from the route. Michael had to move his chair a little, because from where he was sitting the view out the terrace windows to the east showed him the occasional dim flare of an artillery shell against low-lying clouds.

  Franziska played hands with him atop the table and rubbed his ankle with her foot beneath it. She ate her first courses of rose hip soup and potato salad like there was no tomorrow. When his meal, the grilled venison, came he moved it around the plate for show but found he had no stomach for the eating.

  Still, he had to pick himself up for her. He had to chat and listen and nod, and to give her a smile when she needed or expected one. And she had chosen this night to reveal to him the full power of her gifts, for not only was she streamlined and sleek as a racing machine in her black dress trimmed with silver spangles, and not only were the waves of black hair pinned back with a silver clasp in the shape of a half-moon, and not only did her wine-red lips shine and her gray eyes gleam in the low light, but her force of life was focused on him as if he were the only other human being in the world. Whenever he spoke about the most inane thing—the weather, the service at the hotel, what he’d seen on his walk today—seemed to her rapt attention to be the most heart-felt confession of a god.

  This was how she worked, Michael thought. This was how the family man or the office worker or the lowly aide tripped over his tongue in his eagerness to be heard and appreciated, to be thought so important by a beautiful creature. This was how the secrets became known: not by being pried out, but by being urged out word after word with silent approval. Then the Gestapo came and took the crowing, pitiful roosters to Hell, to be boiled down into oil for the potato salad.

  Yes.

  I am the killer.

  “You look so worried,” she said, as she rested her hand atop his. “You don’t need to be.”

  “It’s not worry. I’m just preparing myself, in my mind.”

  “I know,” she said, “that you want to do your duty. I know you’re a
warrior. What would you be, if you weren’t? An office boy? And not some general’s staff monkey, either. You are what you are, and I thank God for that. But you’re also only a man, Horst. The same flesh and blood and…worries…of any man. It is the woman who shoulders the burden her man can’t carry. This woman wants to, very badly. So if you need to talk about the war, or anything else that troubles you…please… I’m right here.”

  Michael took a drink from his cup of erstaz coffee. Her man, she’d said. He picked up his fork and drew furrows in the white tablecloth.

  This was her power.

  Because everything in him wanted to say, yes I am the killer, but I want to be your man. And I want to start clean and tell you my story. I want to tell you how I was born, both times, and how I have lived. I want to tell you about my first bitch and my missing son. About the world as I know it, and the world as I wish it to be. I want to tell you how the old tales of the lycanthrope are wrong, and how they are right. And I want to be able to tell all this to you, and afterward look into your eyes and see not fear but love.

  But he didn’t say any of this, because there was no time and the pill was in his pocket, and if he was indeed her man he would not ask her to shoulder any burdens he couldn’t carry alone.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  Michael nodded. Sometime in the next few minutes one of the other couples in the room, an elderly pair, stood up and danced gracefully beside their table to the violinist’s tune, and Michael watched Franziska’s face as she smiled at the charming old man who at the end of the dance kissed his wife’s hand and held her chair out for her as any gentleman should.

  They went to a music hall where the attendance was again skimpy, but the dark brew was good and a trio of guitar player, pianist and drummer held the stage. The lights kept flickering, not for effect but because of hits somewhere on the power grid. Michael asked Franziska to dance to a slow, jazzy number during which he held her as tightly against himself as he could without hurting her. Suddenly they found themselves alone on the floor because the music had stopped and the place was closing down.

  “Just a moment,” he told her, and under the uncertain lights they danced a bit longer to their own secret music.

  Then it was time to go back to the hotel, back to room 214, because there was nowhere else to go.

  The magnum of Moet champagne sat in its ice bucket by the bed. Two champagne flutes had been placed nearby. A light blue envelope bearing the golden seal of the Grand Frederik called for Michael’s attention, and when he opened it the note read in tidy German penmanship: Dear Major Jaeger, in recognition of your service to the Reich and to your happy occasion, which our day clerk Oskar has informed me of, please accept this bottle with the best compliments of the house, and please think of the Grand Frederik should you require accomodations for any future celebration. A good life to you. In Debt To Your Honor, Adrian Bayerbergen, Manager.

  “What’s that?” Franziska put her arms around him from behind.

  He folded the note. “The bill,” he said, as he put it into a coat pocket. “Unfortunately, in this world nothing is free.”

  “Oh, don’t be so sure about that.” She kissed and nuzzled the back of his neck. “I’m pretty free.”

  “You are free,” he agreed, “and you are pretty.” He turned around to face her, and he took hold of her chin and stared deeply into her eyes. His heart was its own BMW 328. “What can I do for such a free and pretty woman as you?”

  “Well,” she breathed, with her lips just barely grazing his, “first I would like to put into my mouth a big, succulent, wet and delicious—”

  She held up before him the champagne flute she was holding. “Drink?” she finished.

  “I should spank you first.”

  “Would you please?” she asked, her eyes going wide.

  He opened the champagne, which foamed extravagantly, and then he poured a flute for her and himself. She tapped his glass with her own. “To freedom?” she asked. “No, no! Wait! To…good decisions? No, wait!” She frowned. “Ah!” she said. “To the sun that sets in the west.”

  “What kind of toast is that?” he asked as she drank.

  “One I hope you remember when you need to.” she answered. “Drink up.”

  He did, trying to figure out what she was saying. Maybe it was the beer talking? “Excuse me while I go to the bathroom.”

  “May I give assistance?”

  “You may stay right here and have another drink.” He went into the bathroom and leaned over the sink, because his heart was hammering and sweat was rising on his face. He might be a killer, but he wasn’t a monster. He couldn’t do this. No, tomorrow he would go to the safe house and tell them he was done, he was out, and to send a killer with the fingers of an angel and the mind of a blank slate to remove Franziska Luxe from this world.

  He took the ball of waxed paper from his pocket and held it over the toilet.

  But he asked himself: if it fell in the water and was swirled away into the depths of Berlin, would this be the act of a hero or the shame of a coward?

  The light and the dark, all mixed up together. The words of a priest.

  “Darling?” Franziska called. “Shall I phone for a plumber?”

  “Hush!” he told her, trying to keep his voice light.

  When he’d pulled the chain, the toilet had flushed and the waxed paper was gone, he walked out of the bathroom and found her naked on the bed but for a strip of sheet clutched between her legs. She was drinking her champagne and reading the afternoon’s edition of the Deutsche Allemagne Zeitung as casually as if she were waiting for the next tram to come along.

  “Oh!” she said at his appearance. “Are you the new serving-man here?”

  “Does the uniform give me away, madam?”

  “It does. Please be kind enough to take it off and serve me.”

  She watched as he undressed, making rather interesting noises and a few earthy comments here and there. Then, nude, Michael took her flute and poured some more champagne and as she leaned forward and gave his right buttock a fairly stinging slap he dropped into the sparkling liquid the small pill that had been held in his palm. He faced her with the glass down at his side, giving time for the dissolvement.

  “You have a very strange look on your face,” she observed.

  “Possibly there are strange thoughts in my mind.”

  “I’m a journalist!” she said brightly, and sat up on her knees. “Tell me everything!”

  He drank down the rest of his champagne, set her full glass on the table and his empty one next to it. His voice was husky when he spoke; not with passion, as she might think, but with the first pangs of true grief. “I’ve always been better at showing than telling.”

  If anything, he had to command his own performance. Franziska was talented, true, and she was eager and hot-blooded and adventurous, but Michael Gallatin was fighting his own battle even as he stormed her walls.

  He gave her as good as he could, as long as he could. He stretched her out and pressed her inward. His tongue shattered her dam, and her mouth brought forth droplets of rain in February. He lay back on the pillow, seeing colors and catching his breath.

  Before he could move or speak or do anything, she stood up from the bed, picked up her flute and drank the champagne. She took three long swallows.

  It was too late to move. To speak. To do anything.

  He noticed then the bruises on her smooth bottom and the backs of her thighs.

  “What are those?” he asked.

  “Those what?”

  “Bruises. Right there.”

  “Bruises? Where?”

  “There. Right there, on your—”

  She slid into bed, tight up against him, and kissed him. Her mouth might have given him a taste of her champagne too, he thought. But it no longer mattered.

  He pushed her back. “The bruises. From what?”

  “I fell down today. I slipped on some
snow. Fell smack on my bottom.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true!” she said, right in his face. “I promise!”

  “I don’t believe you. Not even a promise.”

  She tapped his lower lip with her forefinger. “Is this our first quarrel?”

  “No, it’s not a quarrel.”

  “That’s too bad.” She sat astride him, her legs curled around his hips. “Because, you know, they say the best thing about a quarrel is the making-up.”

  The bruises were not going to be explained. Michael let it go; the ticking of the clock had begun.

  They lay together, cuddling. Warmth upon warmth. They kissed lightly and deeply. One mouth was never without the other for very long.

  She lay without moving for awhile.

  Michael said, “Are you all right?”

  “Sleepy,” she answered. “It just came on me.”

  “It’s late,” he told her.

  “I did have a long day.” She turned toward him and, looking into his eyes, she softly stroked his cheek. “You need a shave.” Her voice was a little listless.

  He caught her hand and kissed the fingers. Every one.

  “Will you hold me while I sleep?” she asked, nestling against him.

  “I will hold you forever,” he said, and he put his arm around her.

  “I’m so…tired. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so tired. Or so happy,” she amended. “I think you’ve worn me out.”

  “Just lie still. Rest.”

  She gave him a crooked smile, her eyes hazed. “I used to be young,” she said.

  He waited.

  When he looked at her again, her eyes had closed.

  “Oh!” she said suddenly, with a jerk of her body. Her eyes opened. They were bloodshot, and Michael thought with a shrill of alarm that he was going to have to kill a messenger after all.

  But she smiled in his direction, and she felt for his hand until he found hers, and she asked in a voice that was going away, “Am I still…only nearly…the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?”