Authors: Annmarie Banks
The third man to approach the compartment started firing before he appeared in the doorway. Elsa glanced quickly at Sonnenby to see if he had been hit. No.
Sonnenby dived for the floor as the seat behind him exploded into splinters and fluff. The man in the corridor had a shotgun. Elsa did not wait for him to emerge among the chaff, but moved the barrel to shoot through the thin compartment wall into the corridor where she had deduced the shooter might be standing. She kept squeezing the trigger until she heard it clicking impotently.
“This is what happens with five!” she cried. “I need thirty! I need forty!
Verdammnt diese
five rounds! Five! Goddamned stupid five! Five is not good, it is
not good
!”
No one else tried to enter the compartment in the next few seconds. Elsa threw her pistol down and crawled over Sonnenby to where the first Turk’s handgun had fallen. Sonnenby helped her by scissoring his legs and kicking it toward her. She had it in her hand as they both sat in a jumble on the floor between the two seats in a now very crowded compartment. His large body was wedged in the foot well between the two seats and she sat between his knees, both of their legs stretched out straight in front of them, their feet resting on the bodies of the dead Turks. She could feel his sturdy chest behind her back and his warm breath in her hair. His arms steadied hers on either side. She heard more shouting in the corridor. More men were coming.
Sonnenby spoke low, translating. “They are calling the names of these two men, they are asking them if they have found me. They are asking if there are more people in this car, and if any of the passengers are armed.”
Elsa’s hands shook as she lifted the Turk’s pistol. “Oh no!” she cried, “Oh no! This one doesn’t have a hammer or a cylinder with ‘rounds’ in it!”
“That’s a Mauser, darling. It’s better.”
She pulled the trigger at the corridor, waving the barrel back and forth like spraying a hose. But nothing happened. The voices and thundering boots were louder now. An entire army was converging on their compartment. “It’s empty! It’s empty!
Gott im Himmel! Nichtig! Nichtig!
”
His voice was deep and even. “No it’s not. Well, yes it is. Calm down. Look at the top. The part over the stock. The handle. Look. Elsa. Look here. Elsa. Elsa. This clip is empty. Pull it out, put the other one in. Here it is. Here. It fits in the top.” He fumbled a bright arc of shining bullets from the dead Turk toward her and she took them. “Right in the top. There. Like that. Good.” Her hands were shaking but she ejected one stripper clip and positioned the other. She felt the clip slide in and lock itself inside the pistol. These bullets were much larger.
“This weapon will take your hand off if you don’t hold it right.” He touched her hands to position them correctly on the pistol and helped steady her elbow as another Turk entered their car and stopped just outside the compartment before theirs. The Turk shouted and Elsa waited for the translation but Sonnenby said, “Just shoot him,
Schatze
.”
She squeezed the trigger again and again sending the shots blindly through the thin veneer of the compartment walls. Powerful recoil accompanied each shot and it blew enormous holes in the train. Sonnenby had her elbow braced against his chest and steadied her with his arms. More men entered the car and more fell. She stopped counting, and didn’t hear the return fire, though the splinters and bits of the train’s interior paneling and upholstery filled the air around her. Turkish bullets exploded the seat beside her and she felt one whiz through her flying hair. She fired and fired until the clip was empty, then reloaded the clips with ammunition from the dead Turk’s body with Sonnenby’s hand guiding hers to set the clip properly.
The pistol was hot and her trigger finger continued to twitch until she had emptied this clip as well. Her ears rang with the reverberations of the powerful bangs and her shoulders ached from the repeated recoil. Sonnenby lowered her arm and gently removed the weapon from her fingers. There was no more shouting. No more gunfire. Wails and cries in the distance was all she could hear once the ringing in her ears stopped.
She took a deep breath. “I like the Mauser.”
“Me too,” he answered.
An hour later they stood next to the howitzer on the rise over the tracks and watched the local villagers loot the train. The blast from the shell had struck the track and another had put a hole through one of the tender cars. The combination of a loosened track and the force from the lateral strike had derailed four of the cars. Colorful forms darted to and fro, empty-handed going in, heavily laden coming out. Piles of looted goods, guarded by younger sons, appeared here and there, dotting the landscape. Their own baggage lay safe at their feet. Sonnenby examined the big gun much as she would examine a patient. He touched it here and there, poked and prodded it, tested the undercarriage and sighted along the barrel.
“Amateurs,” he decided. “They shot at the train like it was a gazelle or a deer.”
“It was enough,” she noted.
“Indeed,” he murmured. “Look at us, Elsa. We are now on foot four hundred kilometers or more from Istanbul, and the Turks are engaged in a civil war.”
“There is a station closer. We can pick up the train again there.”
“Maybe.” He took the fedora off his head and slapped it against his knee. When he moved to slide it over his hair it was decidedly out of shape. “But I am not sure I want to be on a Turkish train again.”
She shook her head in agreement. “What should we do?” His high boots were perfect for marching across this rough landscape, but her shoes were not. She lifted her skirts and looked at them. They were sturdy, but were not designed for cross country. And her baggage. Minimal now, but heavy enough to make twenty miles a day an achievement. And a civil war? She scanned the hills above them.
The other passengers milled about at the rear of the train. This band of Turks was not an organized group of soldiers, though most likely their leaders had once been Turkish soldiers. The men who had converged on their car had known how to use their weapons, they had a great variety of small arms. Elsa and Sonnenby had picked up more ammunition from their bodies. Sonnenby had indicated a Luger with his bloody hand and she picked it up and put it in his kit for him. The Mauser was in its wooden holster with its strap over her shoulder and extra stripper clips looted from the dead. She rested her hand on it every now and then. It felt good.
When the looting was over there would be twenty or thirty passengers waiting for rescue from Konya. After listening to Turkish discussions in the resulting milieu Sonnenby had decided to move them quickly away from the train.
The train had not been stopped to get Sonnenby, but to loot the food and supplies and baggage and fuel. Trains were being searched by mercenaries for anything of value. Sonnenby had a hefty price on his head, estimates between one and five thousand pounds, British sterling. The more people talked the larger the amount grew. It didn’t matter if the talk was true or not. If one man decided Sonnenby was worth a guinea that would be incentive enough to drag his body to town and demand something, even if he didn’t get it.
“In this situation, I am valuable even if I am only worth a donkey.” He scanned the horizon as she was doing.
“Just how much are those damned shares worth?”
He shook his head. “I can’t say. All I know is that I need to be dead to release them from the trust.”
She understood how little one man’s life could be worth to a government or a corporation. When they measured Sonnenby against an entire navy and against the idea of national security his life was worth very little. But when she looked at him she could not see trading any number of battleships for him, or millions of dollars of oil stock. He was hers now. The British were not going to take what was hers. They had taken her brothers. They would not take Sonnenby. She put her hand on the Mauser and tightened her jaw.
He saw her do that and said, “Elsa.”
She looked up at him.
“This changes things.”
“Of course. We will have to take that route,” she pointed to the west, “but stay off the road. We must keep the tracks in sight, as they are our best guide.” She lifted her skirt and then her ankle. “I want to loot some better boots from one of the dead Turks. And get some kind of army backpack for my baggage. We need water. I am thirsty.”
He frowned. “That is not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
He sat down. She would not. She paced back and forth behind the howitzer, her hand resting on the comforting grip of her Mauser. Below her the looters were loading their goods on donkeys and horses and mules and women. The other passengers were sitting in the shade of the upright cars, waiting.
“We cannot show our passports in Istanbul, Elsa. They will arrest us. Separate us.”
She stopped pacing. “Oh.” She had been concentrating on picking up the Orient Express there. She made a face. It was probably time to tell him about the power of attorney.
His face was serious. “I am saying we might not want to go back at all. That sheep herder job is looking better. I cannot let anything happen to you. You were almost killed on that train. But being a living shepherdess is better than being a dead therapist, though I hate to think of you living in the dirt. I like to imagine you in a blue beaded ball gown dancing Viennese waltzes or sitting in an opera box.”
She raised an eyebrow. “No,” she told him firmly. “I refuse to be another dead child for my poor papa and mama.” She stood next to him. “And if I do not return to Doctor Engel I will not be Elsa Schluss anymore.” She didn’t know how to say this in English any better than that.
“You would be Elsa Sinclair, Lady Sonnenby.”
“But I would not. You cannot marry me. And as an Anatolian shepherd you would no longer be Sinclair nor Sonnenby. You would not even be Henry. After a time you would begin to regret that decision, you would begin to hate yourself as a sheep herder. You would see yourself as a coward. I know you.
Gott im Himmel,
I know you. We go west. Follow the tracks. We walk into the British Embassy in Istanbul. We show them our passports. We are Elsa Schluss and Henry Sinclair, Lord Sonnenby. We can solve this problem as sane, professional people.”
He bent his head until his chin touched his chest. The brim of the fedora wavered.
She continued quickly before he could despair, “I have papers that can secure a medical hearing for you. Doctor Engel will provide you with an affidavit that will be taken very seriously. Even in London. After that it is up to the lawyers. It is in your government’s best interests to have you declared sane. You can then sell them the stock and be done with it. I believe the merger is more important than a treason charge. Perhaps they will investigate what happened to you in Cairo. I suspect you may use those shares as a gambling chip and get that charge dismissed.”
The brim lifted and she could see his eyes. Wary.
“Henry,” she continued gently, “we do not change who we are by geography. We are only ever who we believe we are. We have to live with ourselves first, before we can live with others.”
She touched his shoulder. “You will have to trust me on this one. Come with me to Vienna to see Doctor Engel, and then return to London. I will wait for you.”
They did not walk all the way back to Vienna. Or even to Konya. An engine pulling two cars and the tenders arrived the next morning and loaded the survivors and what belongings they had been able to keep away from the looters.
Workmen with picks and shovels and welding gear stepped down from the cars as the passengers lined up to board. Soldiers with machine guns passed them as they stood in the queue. Elsa and Sonnenby climbed aboard with the others. No one asked for a passport, no one asked their names. They sat side by side on a bench with their satchels on their knees. They did not speak. At the Konya station they boarded another train for Istanbul.
Elsa removed the bandages from his swollen and bruised hands. The right knuckles and the one cracked metacarpal were not healed, but the bandages bothered him. He spent the time on the train massaging the knuckles and rubbing the thumb muscle in his palm. He would shake out his hands, then splay the fingers and curl them and uncurl them, testing them. She watched him silently. He would look at her now and then, and his eyes held the kind of uncertainty that comes from trusting someone else to make important decisions for you.
At the Istanbul station they stepped down from the puffing train onto the crowded platform. Elsa stepped confidently to the station window and asked, “Which way to the British Embassy?”
Sonnenby followed her. She kept a brisk businesslike pace, clicking her heels on the pavement and holding her head high. She pushed into the office of British Foreign
Affairs in Istanbul and marched up to the front desk with their passports and the power of attorney in her hands. She knew how she must look. She saw it in the mirror of the clerk’s face. His eyes opened wide and his face lost its bureaucratic boredom. His mouth fell open and he blinked.
On the edges of her vision she could see the uniformed security men moving in to stand behind them. Her Mauser and its holster and stock and stripper clips were hanging prominently from the thick leather shoulder strap and bounced against her hip. She did not need to look at Sonnenby. She could feel him directly behind her, breathing hard but regularly. By now she knew exactly his state of mind by the rhythm of his breath. She had disarmed him on the train and his Luger was now safely in her briefcase. He would stand behind her, he would not speak. He would keep his hands to himself. It had been agreed.
They both looked like they had been through a recent battle and a forced march over rough country. Not a single hair on her head was in place. The blonde lengths hung down in tangled mess to her waist, wads of it were striped black with dried Turkish blood. Her black skirt was splashed with mud and blood and horsehair. Her blouse was torn in places where the Mauser and flying shrapnel and bits of train had savaged her, revealing glimpses of a round white breast and half-healed scrapes and cuts when she moved her shoulders. The blouse was no longer a crisp professional white, but was spattered with every kind of filth and every variety of human body fluid. She relished that idea that she and Sonnenby must smell like a stable in the summer.
Elsa raised her chin as she presented the passports and said, emphasizing her German accent, thick and heavy, “I am Elsa Schluss and this is Henry Sinclair, Lord Sonnenby. I believe you have been looking for us.”
Vienna, March 1922
Elsa took off her hat and hung it on the peg. She followed with her jacket and set her umbrella in the stand. She picked up her briefcase and made her way to the stairs, her heels clicking on the marble floors. Magda came out, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Fraulein, there is mail for you today.”
Elsa tipped her head, “Thank you, Magda. I will read it with my coffee upstairs.”
Upstairs she glanced in the round mirror over the trestle table on the mezzanine. For the past ten months she had worked on achieving this triumph. She was renting a fine house in a good neighborhood. She had a position at the University in the College of Psychology. She had patients in her parlor four afternoons a week, referrals from Doctor Engel. It was good. Very good.
Magda had asked Doctor Engle if she could keep house for her. Elsa welcomed the older woman’s help. She could not have focused so completely on writing her papers without the housekeeper’s support. She tilted her head to make sure every hair was still in place. One tendril touched her cheek and she licked her finger to put it back over her ear. Good.
Her mail was stacked neatly in the table and tied with string. She set her house keys down in the glass bowl and picked up the many letters. There was also a shallow box, half a meter square tied with string. A longer oblong box was most likely filled with congratulatory flowers. She picked them all up and took them into her room and set them on her desk. She arranged them to make room for the tray, careful not to disturb the two opened silver pocket watches that told her the time in London and in Paris.
Magda arrived with the tray of coffee and little
keks
. She set it down on the desk and began to pour, but Elsa said, “Thank you, no, Magda, I will pour after I have looked at the letters, but I think I will need a vase and water for this.” She touched the oblong box and Magda smiled.
The housekeeper closed the door with a polite click behind her. Elsa opened the letter from the College of Physicians. It was a letter of congratulations on her dissertation and an invitation to a meeting next month. She had made her presentation to a packed house on a theme, “The Common Errors Perpetrated by Males when Underestimating the Abilities of Females in the Masculine Setting of War.” She enjoyed the absolute silence in the auditorium when she punctuated her research and analysis with anecdotes from her experiences in the field hospitals during the war and her adventures in Syria afterwards, but no mention of a specific patient. She especially enjoyed the collective gasp of fifteen hundred people when she recounted her attack by a Bedouin raider in the desert southeast of Baghdad, and the attack of Turkish rebels on the train near Konya. She suspected that many of them would not believe she had killed a man with her bare hands, but she was ready to demonstrate her technique. She glanced up at the wall over her desk at the Mauser, proudly displayed the way other women might hang a needlework sampler or a portrait.
The next letter was from a colleague, also congratulating her on her triumphant presentation and careful research. One was an invitation to the opera next week.
Madame Butterfly
. She set that one aside to answer immediately. She loved Puccini.
The others were not as important-looking, and most were from people she knew. She took the opportunity to pause and pour her coffee. She sipped with one hand and sorted the balance of the letters with the other. When it was time to pour the second cup, she set the saucer on the package while she adjusted the lid of the coffee pot and looked inside to see how much more there was. Plenty. At least enough for two more cups, though it was cooling.
She would have to drink quickly if she were to avoid the unpleasant bottom-of-the-cup feel of coffee that had gone cold. She poured and drank, then poured again, setting the saucer aside. She had left a ring on the package that blurred her name written on the wrapping paper. She wiped it with her thumb and looked for the return address. Nothing.
She opened the drawer of her desk and got out her little silver scissors and snipped the coarse burlap cord and freed the paper. Inside was a flimsy cardboard box which twisted with the weight of something substantial inside. It didn’t rattle. It was the wrong shape for flowers.
She took the last drink of her cooling coffee as she lifted the top.
“
Fraulein
!” Magda’s voice carried up the stairs, followed by her heavy footsteps moving quickly up as well. She knocked hard at the door and called breathlessly to her again. “
Fraulein
! What was that crash? Let me in!”
Elsa had not locked the door and Magda did not wait to be invited. The old lady pushed in and knelt at her feet, “
Ach
, look at this fine china. Oh dear, and the pot too.
Fraulein
? What is that? What are you holding?”
Elsa did not try to calm herself. She did not check to see if the falling coffee pot had stained her skirt or splashed her stockings or ruined her shoes. She dropped the filthy and tattered blue damask gown to the floor where it landed in beaded folds on top of the shattered china. She lifted the old lady to her feet.
She cried, “Who delivered that package!”
Magda’s mouth opened. Her eyes were wide and she tried to stutter an answer. “A m-m-man, a man.”
“The postman?” Elsa let her go and went to the window. The rain promised an overnight deluge. The streetlights reflected on the sidewalks and the gutters. Traffic was heavy with commuters returning to their houses and their own cups of coffee and little cookies and warm fires.
“No, not the postman.” Magda stood at her shoulder and looked out the window too. “A tall man. A stranger. In a fedora and a raincoat.”
Elsa saw many tall men in fedoras and raincoats on the sidewalk below. Most had umbrellas over their heads and were bent against the weather as they made their way home. He could have rung her in the telephone. Her number was in the public directory. He could have knocked at her door. He obviously had her address. But no. He was afraid. He did not want to hear her voice on the telephone tell him to go away, or see rejection in her eyes on a doorstep.
He had been gone for ten months with no word to her. She nodded to herself. It was likely he had been in custody for a while. His presence implied that he was now free. She could barely wait to hear the story of how he had done it.
She looked to the left and the right down below in the streets. If he were watching the house, he would not be among the men hurrying. He would be standing. If he didn’t have an umbrella he would be standing under an awning.
He would not have an umbrella. She knew him that well. He would be standing where he could watch her window without his view blocked by the canopy of an umbrella. He would stand in the weather. He would challenge himself not to feel the wet, the cold or the stiffening breeze. And he would stand where she would be able to see him as soon as she came home from the clinic and read her mail. He would be watching her right now.
Magda was picking up the china shards behind her. Elsa heard her gasp.
“
Fraulein
! Look!”
Elsa turned around to see Magda kneeling on the carpet, a plain gold ring between her finger and her thumb.
“
Fraulein
, this was inside the dress.”
Elsa took it from her. It was heavy and shone in the lights as she turned it to and fro. Inside the band there was a thin inscription in German, Siegfried’s dying words: “
Brunhilde bietet mir Gruss”
, “Brunhilde welcomes me”. The ring meant that he had been declared sane by a physician. She rubbed the corner of her eye and stepped to the window. He had his rights back. Now he wanted to know if he had her as well.
Elsa scanned the sidewalk across the street. Stately houses rose three stories up from one corner of her street to the other; on the corner was a bistro and a newsstand, now closed against the dark and the weather. The only awning within a sightline to her window was on that corner. She turned to the housekeeper.
“Magda, I need you to set the table for a guest tonight. Go now. Leave the broken china. I broke it, I will clean it up.”
“It is sauerbraten tonight,
Fraulein
.”
“Excellent. He will want that. Make sure there are plenty of potatoes, he will want potatoes. He is hungry.
Gott im Himmel
, he is famished. He will want supper.”
“Who,
fraulein
?”
“Go, Magda. Make sure there is dessert afterwards. Can you make a flan? He will want flan.”
“
Ja
. It is a simple custard with syrup. What else?”
Elsa looked out the window. The glowing electric globes that lit the streets were muted by the rain and cast their light in stingy circles, but she could see a still form under the leaking awning across the street on the corner. She saw in profile a tall man in a fedora. She saw a dark raincoat, broad shoulders, an aquiline nose and a strong jaw. She saw the glint of his eyes in the lamplight as he lifted his face to her second-floor window. The rain was growing heavier.
Elsa stepped closer to the window and held her left hand to the glass. She slowly lowered the ring over her finger. The lights behind her would make the gesture clear to anyone watching. Especially to one person carefully watching.
Magda cleared her throat to remind Elsa that she had not answered her question.
“Champagne,” Elsa told her. “I will want champagne.”