Five Past Midnight (13 page)

"Are you prepared to see her?" Scheller asked.

"Prepared?" Dietrich wiped away his breath from the window so he could continue to peer through it.

"Maria won't look the same, Otto. I've treated a few of my patients lucky enough to have been released from that place outside Dachau. I hardly recognized them. You should prepare yourself."

Dietrich nodded absently His new clothes—obtained at the haberdashery with Himmler's letter—were scratchy and stiff. His Walther was in his belt and his ID card in his pocket. Mounted on the wall were gas lamps that Maria had insisted remain because the flues were made of pink glass resembling flames. A winged draft chair, designed to keep drafts from the sitter, was next to a drawing table on which was a chess set and Dr. Scheller's black bag.

"Mister, do you have anything to eat?" The voice came from the doorway to the kitchen, a child's voice.

Dietrich turned to the boy, who was about five years old.

"A loaf of bread and strawberry preserves. Would you like some?"

The boy nodded shyly.

Dietrich opened a net bag he had placed on the floor near the door. He pulled out a knobby loaf of black bread, then tore a chunk from it. He twisted open a jar of preserves. The boy drew near. Dietrich poured jam onto the bread, spread it with his finger, then passed the bread to the boy, who gripped it with both hands and jammed it against his face to chew frantically.

"What's your name?" Dietrich asked.

The boy mumbled something around the wad in his mouth. He might have said "Rolf."

The boy's mother appeared at the kitchen door. She wore a green knitted scarf around her neck and a blue coat ragged at the seams. Dark patches were under her eyes. With wide blue eyes, she might have once been lovely, but deprivations and grief and weariness had worn it away. She was scarlet with embarrassment. She spun her son by his shoulders and gently pushed him toward the kitchen door.

When Dietrich said "Ma'am," and held out the bread and jam, she hesitated, then accepted them with a nervous smile. She led Rolf from the room.

The doctor asked, "Who are they, Otto?"

"I found them here when I arrived a while ago. She and her son have been living here a month. After their Dahlem home was destroyed in a bombing raid, she found my place, all the windows dark. So she broke open a glass pane in the back door and let herself and her son in."

"Squatters ? They have no right to take over your home. Why don't you call the police?"

Dietrich smiled. "I am the police."

"Where is her husband?" the doctor asked.

"He was a submarine officer, so he's most likely dead." Dietrich turned back to the window. A million Berliners were without homes. "She kept this house cleaner than it ever had been, and hadn't touched a thing she didn't require. So I told her she could stay."

"What's her name?"

"I haven't asked." The detective wiped mist from the window. His voice rose suddenly. "There's my wife."

Dietrich yanked open the front door and hurried down the four steps to the black Horch. The driver and front-seat passenger made no move to get out of the vehicle.

Dietrich pulled open the rear door. "Maria, I'm here, and..." Emotions chopped off his words.

She sagged out the door and he had to catch her. He was startled at how little she weighed. And instead of smooth muscles on her arms and shoulders, Dietrich found only bone. She was skeletal and spindly.

"Maria," he blurted. "It's me. It's Otto."

She was unconscious, her eyes closed, her body limp. She was wearing a coarse brown dress and no coat.

"Let's get her inside." Doctor Scheller had followed Dietrich.

Dietrich was unable to move. The doctor put his arms around Maria's still form and pulled her from the car. In the front seat two Gestapo agents chatted about dinner plans.

Dietrich was finally able to help. He and Scheller formed a fireman's grip to carry her up the stairs. Dietrich kicked open the door. The Horch pulled away from the curb. When Dietrich and Scheller lay her on the davenport, her head flopped to one side.

"I'll... I'll get her some water." Dietrich fled to the kitchen. He could not bear looking at her, her shrunken face, her convict's haircut, her dulled skin. He dipped a ladle into a bucket and poured water into a glass. After a moment he could return to the sitting room.

Scheller was using a tongue depressor to look at her throat, holding her head up with his other hand. A deflated blood-pressure cuff was around her thin arm. His black bag was open at his feet.

Dietrich held the glass. "I hardly recognize her, Kurt."

The doctor held her wrist and silently counted. He didn't look up.

After a moment Dietrich said in a low voice, "She has always been the lively one, you know, the funny one in our marriage. If I was too dour—and I was dour a lot, looking at murdered people for a living—she would stick me in the ribs."

Scheller lifted one of her eyelids, then the other.

"And she has always been stronger than me. When I was pressured to join the Party, and when I refused an order to investigate a political crime, I would come home afraid, and she would pour courage into me."

Scheller unbuttoned the first three buttons at the back of Maria's dress so he could examine her skin.

Dietrich's voice was dark with sorrow. "And when our only child, Bernd, was killed at Stalingrad, she helped me through the agony." A moment passed. "I can't lose her, Kurt. I can't."

Scheller placed his hand against Maria's forehead, then he said, "She's got typhoid fever, Otto."

Dietrich blinked. "Typhoid fever? How can you tell?"

"This rose-colored rash on her skin. I've seen this before."

"Is she going to be all right?"

Scheller hesitated. "Otto, I don't think she's going to make it. She's too far gone. She's bleeding internally."

Dietrich's heart was a hammer in his chest. "Too far gone? She... she... There must be something you can do."

Scheller slowly shook his head.

"Some medicine?" the detective demanded. "What medicine is used to treat typhoid fever?"

"Ampicillin. But there isn't any in the entire city."

Dietrich stabbed his hand into his jacket pocket and brought out Himmler's letter. He held it up for the doctor. His words were frantic. "We can get some ampicillin with this letter. This letter'll get us anything, anything we want."

Doctor Scheller reached for his friend's shoulder. "Otto, there's none in Berlin. There's none in Germany. And it's too late for the medicine anyway."

Dietrich felt as if a cable were tightening around his chest.

"Let's take her upstairs, Otto. She'll be comfortable in bed."

The detective's voice was a rough whisper. "How long does she have?"

"A day. Maybe several days. No longer than that."

They carried Maria up the narrow stairs, passed the hunting prints on the stair walls, then by a tiny carved wooden truck that must have belonged to Rolf, then by a plant stand, and into the bedroom, Dietrich seeing none of it because of the tears in his eyes.

2

TWILIGHT
LINGERED in Leipzig. The sky was washed in reds and purples. Dust and ash from the day's bombing runs had not yet settled. They never settled, persistent Allied airmen saw to that. The particles softened the city by obscuring the distance, letting citizens occasionally forget that the skyline of their ancient city—the spires and towers—was now a series of rounded mounds. Leipzig's great publishing houses were in ruins, their university — opened a half a millennium ago — cratered.

All a flying execution squad needs is a standing wall, and Leipzig still offered a selection. When the Kübelwagen pulled to the side of the brick road, and when the troopers inside began spilling out of the enclosed cargo bay, only one man seemed to notice. He was apparently a refugee, who glanced over his shoulder at the troopers. He then shuffled on, walking into the wind, arms across his chest, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind, his feet crunching the rubble. A scarf was around his head, covering his hair and ears. He turned into an alley between two destroyed warehouses. The alley was filled with debris, but he found sufficient space to pause out of sight.

A railroad track lay down the center of the street. The building opposite the alley had been a depot, with six loading bays looking out onto the street. Because a high-explosive blast had torn the roof off the building, sky was visible through the bays. Three smokestacks were behind the depot, the northernmost stack missing its top third. Just north of the depot was a power substation that bombs had reduced to a blackened knot of wire and steel. The refugee peered back at the Kübelwagen.

SS troopers dragged two men from the truck. They wore Wehr- macht uniforms stripped of badges and stripes and even buttons. They had no boots or hats. Their faces were twisted in terror.

An SS sergeant pushed one of the prisoners toward the wall, and said in a bored voice, "Let's go, let's go, let's go."

When one prisoner tripped over a fallen beam, two troopers righted him and shoved him toward the wall. That prisoner turned to the troopers and held up his hands, as if he had anything more to surrender. The second man was pushed against the wall. He too turned, but his legs gave out, and he slid to the ground. His mouth opened and closed like a fish.

"Let's go, let's go." Now the sergeant was addressing his troops.

There apparently was no time for the protocol of a firing squad. Without any further commands, four troopers formed a haphazard line, raised their rifles, and fired several shots each. The standing prisoner was blown back into the wall, then bounced back to hit the cobblestone street facedown, a red stain spreading below him. The sitting prisoner slumped sideways, blood gushing from his chest, his face frozen in his last unimaginable passion. The shots echoed among the ruins, racing up and down the street several times.

The sergeant pulled a placard from the truck's cab. He leaned it against the wall behind the dead men. It read in black paint written by a hasty hand,
DESERTERS FROM THE
FÜHRER'S
ARMY.
The
paint
had not
fully dried, and beads ran down the placard onto the cobblestones.

"Let's go, let's go, let's go." The sergeant waved his arms at his men, hurrying them back into the truck. A day's work was never done.

One trooper made it only as far as the running board before the truck accelerated away, and he clung to the door, laughing about something, his rifle across his back. His helmet reflected red sparks of the long sunset.

The witness to the executions stepped out of the alley. Jack Cray continued down the road, the third time he had walked this circuit. His gait was a perfect imitation of a refugee's, a dispirited, halting walk that broadcast hunger and despair. Cray had found the neighborhood by walking in the direction from which came loaded military cargo trucks. He had found an armory on the bank on the Parthe River.

Cray had only been able to get within a block of the building. Ein- heit and Borgward trucks in camouflage paint with black crosses on their doors passed a checkpoint where Wehrmacht soldiers looked at the identification cards of all drivers. Part of the armory had been destroyed in a bombing raid, but the portion that remained was still being used as a storehouse. The armory was surrounded by concertina wire, and soldiers patrolled the exterior of the building. Many important buildings in the Reich were now being patrolled by Werksschutzpolizei, the Factory Protection Police, who at this point in the struggle were the old and infirm or were pubescent boys. But this Leipzig armory still commanded regular troops, and a good number of them, and they were well armed. Cray had found no way to penetrate the wire and the patrols. He hobbled along the street.

When a troop truck passed, its wheels throwing mud, he felt the eyes of the driver on him. Cray reached down to the cobblestones for a discarded tin can, running his fingers inside the container, searching for anything edible. He licked his fingers. The truck's driver did not look a second time at Cray.

Cray passed an antiaircraft battery, four soldiers manning a Flakvierling 38. Next to the flak crew was a twisted skeleton of the last AA battery that had tried to defend the armory against Allied dive- bombers. The Reich thought the armory still worth protecting. Down a side street ten refugees stood with their hands out toward a bonfire. When one of them threw a broken wood siding onto the fire, a pillar of sparks rose skyward.

Three blocks from the armory Cray turned toward the Parthe River. He passed a coal yard, ash capping each mound of coal, resembling a miniature Alps. The yard was guarded from looters by two Protection Police who gave Cray no notice. He passed a row of five gutted trucks, reduced to blackened hulks in a bomb raid. Then came a machine shop, a bindery, and a glassworks, all intact and operating, slits of light coming from under their doors. Workers' shadows were visible on blackout paper on the windows. The sweet scent of brewery malt turned Cray's nose. Their city was devastated, yet Leipzigers could still run a brewery. He grinned quickly at the thought of a beer, his teeth flashing like a half- hidden knife.

On the riverbank were the remnants of a warehouse, hit long ago. Brick pickers and iron scavengers had been through it, leaving only a concrete foundation, burned and fractured timbers, and scattered brick and glass shards. Glass crunched under Cray's feet as he moved across the warehouse floor toward the water. He stepped around a pile of broken barrel staves. Ash partly covered a stack of rotting gunnysacks. The American walked carefully in the grainy purple light, leaving the warehouse by wooden steps that went down to the river. He crossed gravel, then passed through damp grass as he neared the water. He stabbed his shoes into the mud for traction as the riverbank steepened.

The veil of darkness was beginning to obscure buildings across the river. Most of the structures had been damaged, and brick walls bad spilled into the river, forming rough piers of rubble. Smoke rose from a few stacks across the river, and wind whipped the haze away. Power lines crossing the river were still up. Blackout curtains hid the window light from occupied buildings, and as night fell, the black city's gloom became palpable.