Five Past Midnight (22 page)

"You are a deserter," the colonel exclaimed, leveling his Walther on the soldier. The war had put him behind a desk, and perhaps he saw this as his moment of glory, a chance to use the weapon he had carried on his hip for a decade. "A disgrace to the Fatherland and the Führer." The colonel held the pistol at full arm's length, and hesitated, maybe wondering whether to arrest the young soldier or to shoot him straightaway.

Cray saved him the trouble of making the decision. He quickly stepped to the colonel, and put his arm around the man's waist. The colonel stiffened.

Cray said, "Let's give the lad a break. What do you say?"

The SS officer's mouth moved silently. His head turned to Cray, but still he said nothing. His white face turned ashen, and his knees wavered. Cray held him tight, a friendly embrace, except for the knife deep inside the colonel's chest cavity. Blood bubbled at the SS officer's lips. The pistol lowered, then dropped to the floor. Cray held the colonel up, the blade hooked in his ribs. The officer's head nodded forward. Blood seeped from under his coat down his leg.

"Beat it, private," Cray ordered.

The soldier rushed away, stumbling over paint cans and chicken wire that littered the basement floor.

Cray yelled after him, "And find a helmet and a rifle, for God's sake. You look like just what you are."

The private hesitated, nodded at Cray, then climbed the stairs two at a time. Cray could hear the soldier's footfalls on the planking above his head. The American let the SS officer sink to the floor. The greatcoat wicked up blood.

Cray searched for the man's identification and found it in the inside breast pocket of his service tunic. He studied the gray linen card for a moment The documents identified the colonel as Kurt Schwenninger, an SS liaison officer to the Chancellery.

Jack Cray understood the benefit a commando operation might glean from confusion. Shake things up, see what happens, move when others are frozen, exploit any weaknesses Bedlam cracked open barriers. It waylaid the best-planned defenses. It threw up targets that had been well concealed. And, as here, it presented tools for the commando's trade. Even if his mission were a feint — as Cray increasingly suspected — undertaken to consume German manpower and materiel, he still needed the tools.

Cray had called in the bombing run so that he might study the government quarter, so that he might see the fire and rescue services in action, learn the guards' emergency routines, and obseive evacuation plans, searching for a flaw in the Chancellery's defenses But when the SS colonel found himself too far from a bomb shelter and had to seek refuge in the cellar of a ruined building, Cray had been offered more than an opportunity to study.

He emerged from the cellar ten minutes later wearing the colonel's uniform, with its black belt and shoulder strap. A rose of blood was around a gash in the greatcoat. The American still wore the bandage on his face. Cray stepped with purpose into the daylight, no longer shuffling like a refugee. He carried the colonel's briefcase.

Potsdamer Platz was obscured by smoke and dust, so thick that a fierce fire across the plaza could be seen only as a golden glow. The all clear mixed with the thin wail of fire truck sirens. Cray walked along Hermann Goring Strasse, stepping over newly fallen telephone poles. Water flowed from a broken main. A bomb had landed among four Mercedes limousines, and their wreckage was thrown about, a headlight here and a fender there. Other automobiles were on fire, sending black smoke into the sky. Bricks blown out of buildings covered the street. The neighborhood had been bombed so many times that most of this day's explosives had merely churned rubble. Berliners crawled from their basements and bomb shelters.

A truck had been overturned by a bomb blast. Citizens surrounded it and climbed into its cargo bay, frantically grabbing cases of tinned plums and peaches. In the gutter were two bodies, naked, their clothes blown off them. A grocery store had been hit, and a stream of fluids — honey, condensed milk, and marmalade — oozed out the front door.

Berliners rushed into the store to plunder it. A horse pulling a newspaper vendor's cart had been killed by flying debris. It had not fallen over, but had sunk to its haunches. Three women with carving knives whittled at the horse's shanks. More starving Berliners hurried to join them.

Cray quickly approached the city-block-long Reich Chancellery. Not until he was within fifty yards of the smoke-hidden structure could he see that it had been hit. The westernmost end of the building was a tangle of masonry and wood and tiles. Smoke drifted from the wreckage, but fire trucks were already parked near the building, and hoses were pouring water into the debris. That end of the building was being used as a hospital, and when Wehrmacht ambulances arrived on Vossstrasse in front of the Chancellery their crews rushed toward the building carrying litters to bring out the patients. Cray walked closer.

Guards at the Chancellery door nearest the ruined part of the building were diligently checking the rescue crew's identification papers. Ninety percent of the structure still stood, and Chancellery personnel— senior service and Party officers, secretaries and cooks—who had been out of the building at the start of the raid now returned, holding their hands over their faces against the dust.

As Cray approached the door, he saw that despite the smoke and sirens and firemen and confusion, the SS guards were closely examining the faces and identification cards of those who entered the building.

Cray turned away from the guards, brought his knife up to his forehead, and slashed the skin above his eyebrows, left to right, leaving a trench, dragging the blade against bone. Blood instantly poured down his face. He pulled the bandage off his cheek, pretended to dab at the cascade of blood. The shirt collar and tie were quickly soaked. The knife disappeared, and he turned back to the Chancellery.

He waited behind a Wehrmacht general, and pulled out the colonel's identification card. Pulling his mouth back in pain, he held up the card and stepped forward when the general was allowed into the building.

The guard looked at the blood covering the American's face, then asked, "A splinter?"

Cray nodded, wincing, fingers to his face as if to stem the blood, but which only smeared it. Blood dripped down his hand to his sleeve. More blood dripped from his eyelashes, and ran down on both sides of his nose. It collected around his mouth and streamed down his chin.

The guard looked at the identification card. A second guard patted Cray down, keeping his fingers away from the blood. He opened the briefcase and flipped through the documents. He snapped the case shut.

The first guard then said, "Dr. Niedhardt is inside, Colonel. He'll fix you up."

Cray nodded and stepped through the door into the Reich Chancellery. He entered a hallway with a green marble floor, then turned left, in the direction of the new ruin. Smoke filled the room.

A woman stepped out of the haze, stared with wide eyes at Cray, then took him gently by the elbow. She said, "The doctors are this way, Colonel."

Cray let himself be led into a conference room with a thirty-foot- high marble ceiling. The room was dominated by a table around which were two dozen Empire chairs. The seat back of each chair was decorated with an eagle and a swastika. A green doth covered the table, with gold tassels hanging at the ends of the cloth. In front of each chair was a blue leather folder and a writing pad with a minister's name embossed in gold. Landscapes in gilded frames were on the walls, and a red and blue Kermanshah carpet covered the floor. This was the Chancellery's cabinet room. Hitler had never convened a meeting here. Cray's blood dripped onto the carpet.

The woman led him into an anteroom, where a surgery had been set up to treat Chancellery personnel. An examining table, three beds, a medicine cabinet, and an X-ray machine filled the room. Two of the beds were occupied by guards who had remained at their stations during the raid rather than seek shelter. One moaned and turned his head back and forth. A physician tended to a third guard, probing a wound on his arm.

The woman lowered Cray into a chair by a window and patted him on the arm. "He'll be with you as soon as he can." She continued to stand near him, waiting to catch the doctor's eye.

Prompted by the sudden good fortune of an SS uniform and documents allowing him entry into the Chancellery, Cray's makeshift plan had been to see as much of the building as he could, open a few doors and walk into a few rooms, and if he found the target, take advantage of the opportunity. At the very least, he would discover the layout of the seat of German government. At best, he would accomplish his mission.

The American wiped blood from his eyes, wondering when this good-hearted woman would leave him so he could continue his reconnaissance. He turned in his seat to peer out the window.

Behind the Chancellery was a garden. The smoke was lifting, and Cray saw that it must have been an elegant park at one time, with pergolas and fountains and symmetrical planters and walkways. But the fountains were dry, and air-raid ditches had been dug in irregular patterns. A tower was occupied by an SS guard.

Cray again brushed blood from his eyes. At the west end of the garden was a massive concrete block with a steel door in it. The block stood by itself, not connected to the Old or New Chancelleries, and its door surely led belowground to a bunker. Two SS guards stood at the door. And to one side of the block Field Marshal Keitel and General Jodl were bent in conversation, smoking cigarettes.

Cray recognized both generals from photographs. Wilhelm Keitel was known as Lakaitel
(lakai
means "lackey") and carried out Hitler's orders without question. Alfried Jodl attended Hitler's twice-daily strategy sessions and turned the Führer's strategy into tactical operations. Cray knew that neither Keitel or Jodl ever allowed himself to be far from Hitler. And when Keitel and Jodl threw aside their cigarette butts and reentered the blockhouse, Cray knew that Hitler was no longer ruling the Reich from the Chancellery but instead was in a fortified bunker below the Chancellery's garden.

When the helpful woman walked to the physician to alert him that a badly wounded SS colonel needed his attention, Cray rose quickly and left the room, then crossed the conference room, still carrying the briefcase. The Chancellery was filling quickly as personnel returned from bomb shelters. Many stared at the mask of blood on Cray's face, but the wounded were as common as stray bricks in Berlin, and no one paused to ask after him. Cray walked out the same door he had entered the Chancellery.

He walked toward Hermann Goring Strasse and grinned to himself, the drying blood around his mouth cracking. He had located the Führer. In a bunker below the Chancellery garden. Adolf Hitler had gone to ground.

11

OTTO DIETRICH walked through a canyon of flesh. Corpses were on both sides of him, stacked like firewood as high as his head, presenting walls of white feet bottoms, bodies filling every space except the narrow walkway to the examining room. The path zigzagged left and right because some corpses were longer than others. In one corner were piles of severed arms and legs, and in another corner were heads, resembling a stack of cannon shot.

Some of the bodies were clothed, others had had their garments blown off, others burned off. Most in the room had died during bombing raids. Many injuries were visible, but other people seemed alive, lying there, eyes open, not a wound anywhere. Bomb blasts near them had created instant vacuums in their body organs, hemorrhaging brains and spinal cords, and they had collapsed, dead before they were prone, their insides turned to mush.

Dietrich had spent a career examining bodies, but he locked his gaze straight ahead as he made his way to the wide door, wide enough for a gurney. The stench of decay seemed to have removed useful oxygen in the room, and Dietrich panted as he walked. Behind him two workers brought in another corpse, and searched for a spot in the crowded room they might be able to wedge it in. The detective's shoes crackled through dried blood.

As he passed through the door, the scent shifted from rot to formaldehyde. A stainless-steel examining table filled most of the room, white and green institutional tile under it. The table was ringed by a blood gutter, and three buckets of fluid were at one end. Bone cutters, scissors, hemostats, scalpels, forceps, and an oscillating bone saw were arrayed on an implement tray.

A naked corpse lay on the table. Dietrich was embarrassed for it. Blue-white flesh in folds, mouth hanging open, filmy eyes staring dumbly at the ceiling, stripped of its humanness. The only color to the dead man was at his throat, which was open ear to ear, a gaping black and red maw of a wound, with sinews hanging about.

"I knew you couldn't keep away, Otto." Emil Wenck smiled at the detective. Wenck was Berlin's chief medical examiner. He wore rubber gloves and a dappled apron. The doctor's eyes were kindly and bagged, and a horseshoe of white hair was around a bald head. The base of his nose was almost as wide as his mouth. His forehead was half the length of his face. His ears stood out at right angles.

"You could have been a baby doctor, and you chose this instead," Dietrich said. "Shows what you know."

Inspector Dietrich had worked with Wenck for years. In addition to being the city's chief coroner, Wenck held a chair in anatomy at the University of Berlin. He raised one finger to his chest and moved his eyes in an exaggerated way toward the rear door. A warning.

Dietrich dipped his chin. "The bodies have piled up, Emil. You are behind in your work."

"The morgue is full. The cemeteries are full. So when Berliners find a body—and there are many to be found—they often bring it here, thinking the coroner must know what to do with corpses."

"And what do you do with them?"

"Usually they are brought in one door and taken out another, a parade of the dead. These bodies are being taken to a new open pit grave at a farm near Zehlendorf, not too far from here. But our truck has run out of fuel, and there's none to be had, so the cadavers are backing up, just like the plumbing."