Five Past Midnight (31 page)

Cray grabbed a fistful of Katrin's dress and yanked her upright, still tugging her toward the rear of the room, between the medicine sideboard and the X-ray machine and into the back hall.

He released her. "Through the door."

In one hand was his pistol, and the knife had appeared in the other. The top half of the office's rear door was a frosted panel of glass. Cray shot twice through it, the sound sharp in the small hall. Then he shot two more times through the wood panel below. He threw the latch. He rushed out and she followed.

Slumping to one side was a Gestapo agent, two of Cray's bullets in him. Cray leaped down the steps and fired twice into a dark Mercedes sedan parked in the alley. The agent in the car had been trying to climb out, but now, new holes in him, he sank back, sightless eyes on the American. Cray used his knife as a grapnel to hook the agent under a rib and pull him aside.

He turned for Katrin, who was stepping to the car door, too slowly. He almost lifted her off the ground as he threw her into the cab. He ran around the front of the car toward the driver's side. The engine was still running. He slid into the seat behind the wheel, then stepped on the clutch and pulled the gearshift back, the pistol resting on the knob.

The sedan rolled away from the back door. Shots came from behind, one punching out the rear window and exiting through the roof. Cray yanked on the steering wheel, taking the car around a corner onto Hemplemann Street. More shots sounded behind them, but distant.

Katrin tried to breathe, but could not work her chest. Ninety seconds had passed since the doctor had held up the needle, prepared to stitch closed Cray's wound. She had not had time to be afraid. The car passed a shuttered bakery and a bank that had sandbags up to its second story.

Finally she said, ''You left your coat and shirt behind."

He looked down at his chest. "Well, that's one more damned thing I have to think about."

She stared at him. That dumb American grin returned to his face.

He said, "You do this enough, you begin to like it."

Cray swerved around potholes.

"You won't be satisfied getting just yourself killed, will you?" she asked dully.

Cray glanced at his arm. "Know where I can get a needle and some thread?"

"You'll get me killed, too."

"I can sew this up myself. I've done it before."

She persisted, "I can't get away from you, can I?"

"And it's cheaper than having a doctor do it."

A wall of rubble blocked an intersection, so Cray turned north. He slowed the car. The sedan's headlights were taped. Little could be seen out the front window, shadows and smudges, mostly darkness.

"You are insane," she said. "I only suspected it before, but now I know."

He finally looked at her, his smile fading. "I'm good at what I do. That's not being insane."

"You are good at what you do. But you are also insane."

The smile again. "I find it helps."

3

"You ARE on the list, Inspector," the SS guard said, pointing at a line on a clipboard. "This man is not."

"Wait here, Peter." Dietrich handed his Walther to Hilfinger, then spread his hands and feet for a search. The moon was hidden by high clouds. British bombers had not made their appearance that night yet. Any moment now.

Hilfinger stepped back to look again at the mammoth concrete block in the garden. "I think I'd rather stay out here, anyway."

One of the guards checked his watch, then nodded at Hilfinger. "You can step inside the blockhouse with us when the British bombers appear."

Dietrich followed an SS guard past a telephone hox and through the doors into the block. As he descended into the bunker, Dietrich felt his faith in his ability as a detective being shaken. He prided himself on his knowledge of Berlin. More than anything else, knowing the city's streets and alleys gave the detective an advantage over lawbreakers. And an advantage over fellow detectives, an edge Dietrich savored, truth be told. Other detectives knew Dietrich had better eyes and ears than they did. Friends and informants on those streets made sure that little in the city escaped Dietrich.

Yet here was an enormous structure—apparently the seat of the German government—that Dietrich had heard rumors about but had never been able to confirm. Right in the center of Berlin, a short walk from his own precinct station. It made Dietrich wonder what else he had missed.

The guard led him to the bottom of the stairs, where two more guards started to search Dietrich, but gently, showing more deference than they did to Wehrmacht generals. At this point in the war, men possessing all their limbs and wearing civilian suits were doubtless powerful.

The escorting trooper turned back, climbing the stairs. One of the guards at the metal door must have seen the wonder in Dietrich's eyes because as he patted down the small of the detective's back, the guard said, "It's called the Golden Cage. Or the Catacombs. Take your pick."

"How long has this bunker been here?" Dietrich asked, spreading his arms.

"State secret." The guard grinned as he searched Dietrich's coat. "That and everything else about the place. You may go in."

Dietrich stepped through a door that must have weighed more than a Panzer, must have been ten centimeters thick, solid steel. An SS orderly was on the other side of the door, checking his wristwatch as the detective entered.

The orderly said, "One moment, if you will, Inspector."

Dietrich stared down the hallway, recognizing people he had seen only in newsreels and on posters and in newspapers. Dr. Goebbels was speaking with General Keitel. When Goebbels turned toward the hallway's rear door, Dietrich noticed that the man walked with a limp. One of his feet was turned in. The detective wondered if Goebbels had been to the front, and been wounded in the leg. He looked at the little man, with the slicked-back hair and choppy chin and terrier's eyes. No, never to the front. The minister of propaganda—the most visible man in the Reich now that the Führer had largely disappeared from public view— had a club foot, was born with it, and Dietrich had never heard of it. Again Dietrich was disturbed. What else had he missed?

Also in the hallway were Minister Ribbentrop and a tall, hatchet- faced man Dietrich knew to be Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Main Security Office, who had replaced the assassinated Heydrich. And he recognized Friedrich Hatzfeldt, who had replaced Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach as head of Krupp industries when Krupp had been arrested by an American patrol a year ago. Hatzfeldt was bent in conversation with Theodor Steinort, director of the Mariupol electro-steel works in Breslau. All appeared to be waiting. The hallway also contained a dozen senior SS officers and Wehrmacht generals Dietrich did not recognize, and a number of lower-ranking personnel Dietrich took for valets and orderlies. A high-pitched whine seemed to come from all directions. The air was dank.

After two primly dressed women carrying secretarial pads emerged from a door on Dietrich's right, the orderly at Dietrich's elbow pointed at the same door and said, "Go in, please."

Kaltenbrunner's eyebrows rose, and others in the hall turned to examine Dietrich, a man in plain clothes who apparently had precedence over all the rank in the hall. Dietrich walked into a small study, filled by a table covered with maps. Dietrich was alone with Adolf Hitler.

The Führer was wearing reading glasses, which Dietrich had never seen in posters or photographs. The detective knew Hitler was fifty-five, but he looked two decades older, shrunken, the skin on his face mottled. Hair hung down across his forehead, and it appeared greasy, needing to be washed. The mustache was uneven, bitten and dull, with speckles of gray. Hitler's left hand rested on a map, and it trembled with enough force to make the map rattle.

The Führer looked up. "Detective Inspector Dietrich." Not a question.

"Yes, sir."

"Would you like some refreshment?" Hitler removed the spectacles and put them into his uniform pocket.

"Yes, sir."

"Come with me."

Hitler led the detective into a back chamber, a sitting room. The Führer motioned to a blue-and-white horsehair sofa set against a wall under a portrait of Frederick the Great that was framed by two ventilation grates. Below a grate was an oxygen bottle on wheels, its mask resting on the controls at the top of the bottle. A small marble bust of Frederick rested on a burnished wooden stand near the door. Dietrich lowered himself onto the sofa while Hitler reached for a silver teapot. He poured tea into a tiny engraved silver cup, then passed it to Dietrich.

Dietrich sipped it. "What is this?"

Hitler smiled. Never had Dietrich seen a photograph of Hitler smiling. The man had bad teeth, yellow with some green, and small.

"It is just as well you did notjoin the Party, Inspector. Asking what refreshment is being served is not the proper protocol, and indicates a dangerous independence."

Was Hitler making ajoke? Humor was a characteristic Dietrich had never before associated with the Reich's leader. And it was ghastly.

Hitler returned the teapot to the stand, grabbed his left hand in his right to hold it close to his body then with a slight groan sat in a leather chair behind a cluttered desk. Near a lamp with a green glass shade was Schopenhauer's
The World as Will and Representation.
Hitler's eyes found Dietrich.

Found him with the force of a blow. Despite Hitler's appearance of age and infirmity, the eyes were blue, a milky blue, penetrating, yet at the same time warm and guileless. So powerful was the gaze that it was a presence entirely apart from the decrepit, ailing man sitting across from Dietrich. The detective felt pushed back into the chair by the eyes, and laid bare.

"You never joined the Party, Inspector." Hitler's right leg trembled so violently that his boot danced on the rug. "You would have done better at the Berlin police had you been one of us, had been one of the Old Fighters."

"Yes, sir." Was that all Dietrich could say? Didn't Hitler's comment deserve some caustic retort, an observation that the Old Fighters had caused Berlin to be plowed up and turned over? The words would not come. Something to do with Hitler's eyes.

"You noticed my leg." Hitler patted it with his good hand. "It shakes a little."

"Yes, sir."

"It's not from the bomb at my field headquarters, like everybody thinks. My doctor says I have a touch of the grippe."

Dietrich had never heard of a bomb at a headquarters.

"But I don't suppose I need to apologize for my health to a Berlin policeman."

"No, sir." Dietrich's face warmed with anger. At himself. Hitler was deliberately charming the detective, and it was working. Two decades resisting the National Socialists, and now to be enchanted in sixty seconds by their leader. Dietrich fought it, and stared at the Iron Cross on Hitler's coat rather than into the eyes.

"You have been assigned to search for the American killer." Hitler spoke with his Lower Bavaria accent.

"Yes, sir."

"You missed him earlier this evening."

"I didn't miss him. That was the Gestapo. Apparently they are running an operation entirely apart from my own. And, if I may say, they are interfering with mine."

"It's apple-peel tea, by the way," Hitler said. "You should never drink real tea or coffee. They'll kill you."

"I'll keep that in mind," Dietrich cleared his throat. "I wasn't informed that the American had been spotted again walking with the woman, and had been seen entering that physician's office. The information went to the Gestapo, instead of to me."

"Well, they can be a bit aggressive."

Dietrich again brought his gaze up to Hitler's face. Was this more humor? Dietrich quickly surveyed the small room. It was spartan. Little more than the desk and sofa and dresser and bed. A photograph of Hitler's mother was on the desk, and two telephones.

"You expected something more grand," Hitler said, lifting a hand to indicate the room.

"I heard a rumor you believed in the occult, sir." Had Dietrich ever said anything more foolish? "I expected Tarot cards and an astrology chart." He smiled weakly.

"I allow rumors to spread if they are useful. If my enemies think the phases of the moon affect my decisions, all the better."

"May I ask why I was summoned here, sir?"

"Goring sees things as an officer. But I see them as an enlisted man." Hitler brought up a finger, indicating the silver service. "I forgot my tea. Would you mind?"

Dietrich rose quickly, poured tea into a cup, and handed it to the leader.

"It's a little difficult for me to move about, with the grippe and all." Hitler sipped the drink, holding the silver cup under his nose for a long moment. "As I say, I see things as an enlisted man."

"Sir?"

"Goring and many of the others want me to flee Berlin. I could never do that."

"Because enlisted men expect their leader to remain in the center of things?" Dietrich was determined to add more to the conversation than a series of "Yes, sir"s.

"And there's another reason." Hitler again sipped the tea. "I have nowhere to go."

Dietrich said nothing.

"Our enemies believe we have a fortress in the Bavarian Alps, an enormous fortified redoubt where we will defend ourselves once Berlin falls. Where crack Waffen-SS troops are waiting. Where I will flee once the enemy appears at the city's gates." Hitler paused. "There is no such place."

An orderly appeared at the door with a fistful of messages on paper of three different colors. "My Führer. Dispatches."

Hitler waved him away.

Dietrich was immensely flattered. And angry once again.

"Do you believe in fate, Inspector?"

"I've not given it much thought, sir."

"One day during the Great War when I was eating dinner with other soldiers in a trench, I heard a voice in my ear. It said, 'Go over there, quickly.' It was so insistent — much like an officer barking an order — that I obeyed automatically, moving twenty yards down the trench. And just then a deafening report came from behind me. A shell had burst over my comrades, sitting there eating from their tins. All of them were killed. Fate spoke to me that day. Fate spared me."