Five Past Midnight (29 page)

The trooper stabbed the bayonet several more times, all the way up to the rifle barrel. "I was told to stab, so I stab."

The house had been built on a slope, and the detectives stepped downhill along the walkway, passing basement windows and more of the SS troopers who had surrounded the house. The troopers kept their distance from the house, posting themselves behind trees and bushes. Along the back of the house was a rose garden. A dog run was also in back, where a Gestapo agent was poking his pistol into a clapboard doghouse. Several more troopers stood under a trellis that was ensnared by rose vines. The troopers wore gray fatigues and coal-scuttle helmets. They were almost invisible in the darkness. Two Gestapo agents were standing near a greenhouse, which was made to look Gothic with wrought-iron curls along the corners and ridgeline. Dietrich stared at the greenhouse a moment, thinking it odd for a reason he could not immediately determine. Then he realized that in Berlin he seldom saw so many undamaged panes of glass in one place. The detectives passed the coal and ash gates—both too narrow for a man to squeeze through, but nevertheless guarded by a trooper pointing a Schmeisser at the gates. More troopers watched the back door. Their lieutenant was standing behind them, the red point of his cigarette rising and falling in the night. Other troopers surrounded the garage. Dietrich's detectives stood apart from the troopers and Gestapo agents.

Dietrich and Hilfinger completed their circuit and paused at the front door. The armored car spotter asked from up on his machine, "Are you two waiting for me to make the hole bigger?"

A second armored car drove onto the lawn Instead of a 2-cm cannon, this car had a blunt nozzle that Dietrich had not seen before. Rudolf Koder was giving directions to the second car's driver, who peered out from a rectangular slot. The car pulled up closer to the house.

"Damn, I don't want to go into this house," Hilfinger said. "I thought being a cop meant I was exempt from this kind of Skorzeny stuff."

Pistols in hand, Dietrich and Hilfinger slowly stepped through the door, ducking under shattered boards that hung down. The bitter smell was of spent explosives. The armored car's shell had done its work on the hallway, also, which was tossed and shattered and filled with rubble like a Berlin street. They stepped around an overturned Chinese chest and a gilt-framed mirror that had been blown off the wall. Shards of mirror lay all along the hall. The chest was too small for a man, but Dietrich looked into it anyway pushing aside a door that was off-kilter. The chest was filled with China dishes, now mostly fragments. Rudolf Koder and six storm troopers followed them, Koder in the rear, a pistol in his hand. Dietrich led them into the good room, then into the kitchen. They pulled open cabinets. On the counter near the sink was a bottle of wine that was half full, ten sausages on a string, and hard rolls.

When a trooper came to the closed pantry door, rather than open it blindly he pulled back the bolt on the Schmeisser and loosed half a clip through the door, the weapon roaring and bucking, stitching the wood up one side and down the other.

Then he kicked in the door and bulled his way inside to find nothing but a few empty jars and bins.

"Learn that technique in Warsaw, did you?" Dietrich asked mildly. He led Hilfinger and the troopers up the stairs. The detectives peered into the bathroom. A trooper with a bayonet on a Mauser stepped by Dietrich, opened a towel cabinet, and jabbed the bayonet into the piles of neatly stacked towels. In the hallway, the Schmeisser- carrying trooper covered an armoire while Dietrich opened its door to reveal folded linen sheets and pillowcases. The bayonet was plunged into the linen. Rudolf Koder watched from the top of the stairs.

Troopers and several detectives now crowded the hallway. Dietrich entered the front bedroom, checking the two armoires, looking under the bed, turning back the mattress. The trooper followed him, sticking his bayonet into the armoire and through the mattresses. Hilfinger and other troopers searched the three back bedrooms while Dietrich climbed to the servants' quarters in the garret. They opened closets and dressers. Armoires were opened and their contents pierced through with bayonets.

The basement was next. Lightbulbs had been unavailable in Berlin for months, and they had apparently been purloined from this little- used basement for the sockets upstairs. Dietrich was passed a flashlight. He held it to one side, presenting a target away from his body as he descended the stairs, the pistol in his other hand. Koder followed. In the darkness only vague outlines were visible. Dietrich's eyes adjusted slowly. The basement was filled with boxes and bins, two bicycles>, a pedal sewing machine, a ringer washer, and a laundry hopper. Hilfinger and Koder had also obtained flashlights, and the thin, moving beams threw exaggerated shadows against the boxes and the walls.

Dietrich moved toward the furnace room. He stuck his flashlight and gun into the room at the same time, sweeping the light left into the coal bin.

"Nothing, not even coal," he whispered to himself.

He brought the beam of light down to the ash bin below the furnace's iron lip. The ash was gray and fine and a film of it lay on the furnace room floor. A trooper squeezed by Dietrich and thrust his bayonet twice down into the ash box, the weapon sinking each time until the front sight was below the ash.

Dietrich lowered himself to his knees to peer into the furnace's combustion chamber. He couldn't see up into the furnace, but nothing was on its floor. And he couldn't think of a way a man could get into it, anyway.

The bass cracking of a Schmeisser filled the basement. Dietrich turned to see the water heater leaking from eight holes. When he stepped away from the furnace, the same trooper used his weapon to perforate the furnace, up and down, then back and forth.

"Don't fire that again unless [ order you to," Dietrich said wearily. "I want to talk to this American first."

"I take my orders from Kriminalrat Koder, sir," the trooper replied.

"This is my goddamn investigation. I run it my way. I search a house my way."

Koder stared at him.

Dietrich detested the weakness in him that compelled him to explain further, "There might be evidence here we can collect. There's no sense destroying the house during this search."

"Evidence?" Koder appeared genuinely at a loss.

"And we don't know how involved this woman is."

"We have learned her name is Katrin von Tornitz," Koder said. "She is the wife of an executed traitor."

"But that doesn't mean she herself is a traitor. And so we shouldn't be in such a hurry to destroy her home. There's a less destructive way to search a house than to shoot up everything."

Koder smiled. Then he snapped a finger at the troopers.

Three of them turned their submachine guns on the cartons and bins. The roar pushed Dietrich back against a wall. Wood splinters leaped into the air. Masonry chips shot out from the walls. The boxes shattered inward, revealing old clothes and bric-a-brac from prior household moves. Bullets spun the bicycles and then threw them on the floor. The water heater and furnace were further perforated. A collection of bottles from the last century and three old vases blew apart. A glass-front bookcase ruptured. A duffel bag containing rags was shot through. The ringer washer was almost cut in half. A storage closet danced under the onslaught, and its door sagged open, revealing old clothes that were further punctured. Spent shells skittered across the floor. Gray gunsmoke gathered along the ceiling.

Then the troopers picked through the debris and pulled aside the bullet-riddled clothes and kicked in the boxes.

One of them said unnecessarily, "The American isn't here."

Dietrich's ears were ringing. He crossed the basement and climbed the stairs. Three Gestapo agents were in the kitchen, and four more in the good room, all of them rooting around, pulling items off shelves, flipping through a stack of letters and examining a pen-and-ink set.

Peter Hilfinger had been searching through back rooms, and he joined Dietrich at the door. He returned his pistol to his belt. "I feel like I've been run over by Blackshirts."

"It's clear to me now," Dietrich said in a low voice, "that although I was given control of the search for Jack Cray, and even though I've got Himmler's letter in my pocket, the Gestapo has also been given their orders, and when they and I conflict, I'm expected to give way."

Hilfinger followed Dietrich from the house and down the front steps. They walked between the two armored cars. The crews had climbed out of their vehicles and were sitting on the hoods and turrets. More equipment had arrived, filling the street, including a light tank, a bulldozer, and more troop trucks. More than three hundred soldiers and policemen now surrounded the house.

"So where is Jack Cray?" Hilfinger asked.

Dietrich turned abruptly so that he could again look at the von Tor- nitz house. "Peter, I saw him come out, and go back into that house." "So did I."

"He is still inside, goddamn it. But I don't know where."

Rudolf Koder emerged from the house, leading a line of agents and troopers. His black coat was shiny in the night, looking wet. His mouth was a grim line. He marched to the second armored car and yelled an order Dietrich couldn't hear over the sound of its engine.

The troopers and agents backed away from the house, giving the armored car a clear field of fire.

Dietrich rushed up to Koder. "What in hell are you doing?"

"The American is in that house." Koder did not bother looking at Dietrich. He walked away, hands casually in his coat pockets. "He won't let me find him, so he leaves me no alternative."

The sudden blare was of a bellows, a loud windy howl. The night lit up, painting Dietrich and Hilfinger and all the others in orange light. A stream of fire gushed from the second armored car's nozzle. The flood of liquid flame surged across the lawn and coursed up the steps and into the house. The fire stream roared and popped, and it splashed against the house as the gunner swung the nozzle left and right. The force of the flood blew in the front room windows, which instantly filled with flame. The blazing spray climbed to the second story and poured into the windows. Fuel dropped in puddles onto the lawn under the fiery stream, and ignited, leaving a trail of fire to the house. The flamethrower was then directed at the base of the house, covering the porch and even the azaleas with flame. Dietrich shielded his eyes from the furious light. The armored car filled the hole where the door had been with fire.

Within seconds, nothing of the front facade could be seen. Fire rose three stories and beyond, swirling in the air above the house, and sending sparks even higher. Black smoke churned up from the fire, but was quickly lost in the night. Everything—the dormers and parapets, the flues and chimneys, the cornices and shutters, the roof cresting and door casings—was lost behind the boiling curtain.

Fire enveloped the house, which became a torch, nothing visible but flames. Golden washes of flame peaked fifty meters above the roof. In his robe the gauleiter had joined the Gestapo agents, giving a series of orders they ignored. The von Tornitz house was still surrounded by Black- shirts and Gestapo agents and policemen, but they had to withdraw, away from the heat, into the street and adjoining yards. They watched the conflagration. Where was the American?

Dietrich and Hilfinger retreated to the far curb. Even here the heat was on their faces. Behind them was an elm grove that partly hid a vast and dark house that had once belonged to a Berlin banking family.

Staring at the backlit figure of Rudolf Koder, Dietrich muttered, "If I had anything left of myself, any courage at all..."

Hilfinger leaned toward him to hear, but Dietrich let his words trail off, even left the thought uncompleted.

For half an hour they watched. The blazing house fell in on itself, and continued to angrily burn, the red core getting smaller and smaller. Clouds of smoke lifted skyward. The fire sighed and hissed.

The troopers returned to their trucks. The armored cars and the tanks and fire trucks and motorcycles receded, all loudly, all with the neighbors watching from dark windows. Even the gauleiter went home.

Koder crossed the street. "Where's the American?"

"Dead in the ashes."

"No person—not even this crazed American commando—can sit calmly in a fire and burn to death. He should have cried out. He should have made a run for safety."

In the tone of one addressing a child, Dietrich said, "He was in the house, and the house burned down."

Koder's eyes dug into Dietrich, who would not look down, not like all the times in the prison. Finally the Gestapo agent turned toward his car and walked away.

"Are we done for the night?" Peter Hilfinger asked.

"Maybe more than just for the night." Dietrich stared at the remains of the house, much of it still glowing and steaming. He chewed on nothing for a moment. "Goddamn it, Peter. If I know anything, it's that I trust my eyes."

Hilfinger nodded. "I trust your eyes, too."

"Jack Cray is in that house."

"There is no house anymore. Only fire."

"Then Jack Cray is in that fire."

"Bright and early tomorrow, then." Hilfinger turned toward a car where other plainclothes policemen waited for a ride back to the station. "They'll find his body in the ashes after they cool."

Dietrich nodded. He walked toward his car, along the wooded lane, the fire still spitting and crackling behind him. With the fire dying down and Dietrich walking away from it, the night had become bitterly cold and fully dark.

Otto Dietrich would go to his grave wondering how he heard utterly nothing and saw utterly nothing. He was alone on the sidewalk, surely. But he wasn't.

An arm came out of the night and wrapped itself around Dietrich's neck, pulling him back against a man's chest, a big and solid man.

The detective gasped and might have cried out, but he felt cold metal press into his neck, right into the soft spot next to his Adam's apple.

The accent was strong. "What did you want to talk about?"