Five Past Midnight (35 page)

"I could see your finger fidget from here," the instructor said as he brought up the field glasses.

Downrange, a black circle on a pole rose from the butt and covered the new hole in the target.

The sergeant peered through the binoculars. "A wart. Second ring, six o'clock." A wart was a shot that was on the white but touching the black ring. "You've got a way to go, Hegel."

"Yes, sir."

"Let's rotate the pit, Sergeant." The rangemaster brought up the megaphone and called out, "Cease fire on the line."

He brought out a red flag and waved it above his head. When, six hundred yards away a red flag answered by crossing back and forth in front of the target, the rangemaster announced, "The range is closed."

"Hegel, you and Pohl are due in the target butt."

As the instructor turned to his other sniper students, Corporals Hegel and Pohl rose from their firing positions, slung their Mausers over their shoulders, and started for the target butt, a journey they had made once a day since their sniper training had begun two weeks ago.

Hegel was eighteen, and graveyard thin. His camouflage smock — brown and green and worn over his field uniform — hung on him as from a hanger. His face was long and his mouth was turned down at the corners, and so his friends in his unit thought Hegel carried the world's problems with him, but in truth Hegel was just built with a mournful face. He trotted along, the stock of the Mauser bouncing against his hip. At this stage in the struggle, when Russian guns were in earshot, full kits were worn even during training. Under Hegel's smock were three stick grenades, an entrenching tool, bullet dumps, and a canteen.

Hegel asked, "You think they'll finish with us in time?"

"In time for what?" Corporal Pohl followed in Hegel's footsteps toward the target butts. The path was at the edge of the range, wedged between the trees and the bomb craters.

"In time for the war."

Pohl laughed. "We'll probably finish our sniper training just as the Red Army gets to the camp. That way our unit won't have to be shipped anywhere. We can put our education to use right here."

Roland Pohl wore his field cap back on his head, showing tufts of blond hair. He had tried to join the Wehrmacht two years ago, but was rejected because he was too short. He had showed up at the recruiting office again six months ago, and discovered that, as the Red horde got closer to the Fatherland, he was still growing or the Wehrmacht was lowering its standards, probably the latter. He was little taller than his rifle. His good cheer at being accepted into the army had not quite worn off. He also wore camouflage.

Walking along, the mud sucking at his boots, Pohl said, "We're going to be ordered to do the impossible, you know that, don't you, Ewald?"

"What do you mean?"

"You and me and these rifles are going to be told to stop the entire Russian army. We'll be put out on the line to cover a Wehrmacht retreat, sure as anything."

"Well, if that's our duty then we'll do it." Hegel held his arm out for balance as the path narrowed and he had to negotiate around the crumbling side of a bomb crater.

"We'll be put out there, given a pocketful of cartridges, told to do as much damage as we can and slow the crazed Bolsheviks for as long as we can, and then we'll be forgotten while our army retreats."

The clouds above were broken, revealing patches of white spring sun. A crow wheeled overhead, its shadow climbing Pohl's back then speeding on.

Pohl went on, "We might as well be submanners, for all the chance we have of surviving the war."

"Didn't our Wehrmacht oath contain something about not complaining?" Hegel laughed. "We are going to do what we are told and if that's…"

Ewald Hegel would never be able to recall what happened to him at that instant, would have no memory of it whatsoever. One moment he was chatting with his friend Roland, walking along the path toward the target butts, and the next he was kneeling at the bottom of a bomb crater, gasping for breath, his head feeling as if a grenade had gone off in it, mud dripping off him and splashing into the brown pool of water at the base of the pit. The corporal coughed raggedly, then wiped mud out of his eyes.

Roland Pohl was next to him, on his back, the stock of his Mauser protruding above the surface of the water. Pohl groaned and rolled to his stomach, then brought his legs up to try to stand. He wobbled, then collapsed to the mud, sitting there a moment as if taking in the sun at a beach.

Finally Hegel asked, "What what happened?"

Pohl looked as if he had been rolled in mud. His cap floated nearby. After a moment he could offer an answer. "The edge of the crater must have collapsed."

"Then why does my head hurt so much?" Hegel pressed his temple. "My goddamn head was hit by something."

Corporal Pohl pulled his weapon out of the mud. "The sergeant isn't going to like this, Ewald. Look at my Mauser. He's going to see the water and mud, and court-martial us. I'll bet the scope is ruined."

Hegel pushed his hands through the mud, first in front of him, then to both sides. "Where's my rifle?"

"Under the water, probably."

"And my grenades? Where are they?"

They searched for several minutes, feeling their way through the mud. Then they climbed out of the crater, shivering, their uniforms dripping steadily, to search the edge of the range.

After a moment of looking through the brush and around the trees, Hegel said darkly, "My rifle is gone. And my sticks."

"It can't be." Pohl brushed mud from his sleeves.

"Someone stole my rifle. Knocked me in the head and took my rifle and grenades."

"We'd better go tell the sergeant." Pohl carried his muddy Mauser by the stock.

"The sergeant is going to kill me," Hegel said in a rough voice.

They walked back the way they had come.

"He's going to kill me," Hegel repeated.

"Well," Pohl replied, "it'll save the Russians the chore."

8

"
E
VERY
TIME you show up here, you've got more holes in you." The countess chuckled, staring down at her knitting. The needles clicked together rhythmically. "You're like a big pincushion."

Cray was sitting on a hooked rug, leaning hack on his elbows. Ka- trin was bent over his punctured foot. A bowl of reddened water and a bottle of iodine were at his right hand. She held the foot up for better light, and probed a wound with a cotton swab dipped in the antiseptic. Cray's pant leg was rolled up. His right foot had six wounds. He looked at Katrin, not his foot. Her ebony hair framed her face. Her features were delicate without being weak. Her mouth was pursed as she concentrated. In the dim light her eyes were wine-dark. Her brows approached each other a trifle.

She said, "I'm surprised you can even walk."

He bit his lip as she dug the cotton into another perforation in his foot.

She looked up. "Where did you learn to walk like you do?"

"One day when I was a baby I got tired of crawling."

She slapped the bottom of his foot. "That's not what I mean, and you know it. I saw you sneak up on that man, the one who told you he was a detective. You didn't seem connected with the ground. You were as quiet as growing grass. And moving fast."

"I learned it in Wenatchee." Cray's mouth pulled back with pain. "You're killing me with that swab. It feels like you've got barbed wire wrapped around it."

"I'll be gentle," she said. "They walk differently in Wenatchee?"

"My mother and father and I lived in the Columbia River valley, north of town. For those years between planting our first apple trees and harvesting our first apples, we were poor." He hesitated, his eyes distant, settled now on a scarf hanging on the back of the door. "I don't know how my parents made it through those years. No money, little food, never anything store-bought." He looked back at her. "Have you ever been poor, Katrin?"

"One winter we didn't go to the south of France because our villa near Cannes had been damaged in a storm. Is that poor?"

"How you must have suffered." Cray stared at her. "One Christmas I received an orange and a pair of work gloves, my mother weeping that it couldn't be more. That's poor." He bunched an edge of the rug in his hand, fighting down a bolt of pain. After a moment he added, "Because we didn't have any other food, I learned to hunt. We ate venison, pheasant, even bobcats, anything I could shoot. But I was still a kid. Eleven, twelve years old. So I'd also play games."

The countess looked up from her knitting. "I remember that winter. You and the family went to Danzig instead, isn't that right? Visited Baron Esten at his estate?"

"Games out in the wilderness?" Katrin asked.

"I taught myself to sneak up on animals. I'd move through the brush, testing the ground with each step, rolling my feet, crouched, utterly silent. I'd often get close enough to a deer to tap it on its flank." Cray laughed lightly. "You've never seen anything as startled as a deer that's been snuck up on. They don't like it. It offends their sense of how things should work in the woods. They'd bolt away and I swear I could see them blushing." He laughed again, then his mouth pulled down when she punched the cotton into another hole in his foot.

"The baron, he was a dandy." The countess leaned forward to unroll more yarn in the basket at her feet. "I had a fancy for him, I don't mind telling you."

"Once I snuck up on a badger." Cray held out his right arm to roll back a sleeve. "It didn't take to the surprise too kindly. This nice little scar on my forearm was the result. I'm lucky I got away with my fingers."

She worked on his foot, apparently lost in the procedure.

The countess said, "And one day I counted the candles in the chandelier in their dining room. Over four hundred."

"Now you tell me something in return," Cray said.

Katrin looked up. "Pardon."

"I told you my family was poor." He smiled gently, but his eyes were straight and untamed. "I don't talk about things like that easily. Now it's your turn."

Her eyes flitted around the apartment, searching for a thought. "I broke a boy's leg once."

The countess lowered her needles. "You did what?" Her eyes glowed with the prospect of a bit of history of her best friend's daughter.

"Do you remember Freddie von Vietinghoff, Auntie?"

"The count's boy. A rascal, as I recall."

"One day—I must have been fourteen—he put a ladder to my dressing room window to try to watch me change clothes. I spotted him, and shoved the ladder away. He broke his leg when he landed below my window."

Her hand at her mouth, the countess exclaimed, "My Lord, is that how Freddie broke his leg? We all thought he fell from a horse."

"I was mortified," Katrin added. "I thought I'd go to jail. Freddie might have been a sneak but he was also a gallant. I made him swear he'd never tell anyone, and he never did." She looked swiftly at the countess, then back at Cray, "And I've never told anybody about that little episode."

"Not even Adam?" Cray prompted.

Her smile faded. "Except Adam. Now you. I don't know if you deserve to know it." She wrapped his foot in a band of cotton then tapped his toes. "That's as good as I can do mending you."

Cray stood to try his foot. "Feels like new."

The countess looked over her needles at him. "Your foot must hurt terribly."

The American lifted his shoulders. "I'll be able to move about as well as in the old days in the brush in the Columbia valley."

Katrin's eyebrow lifted. "You'll just sneak up on him like a deer?"

Cray smiled that mad smile. "And slap him on the flank."

9

SERGEANT ULRICH KAHR dropped a handful of potato peelings into the meat grinder bolted to the workbench, then turned the grinder's long handle. He grunted as he worked, cranking the handle around and around. Pulpy, mashed potato skins oozed out the spout and dropped into a wooden bucket. The bag of peelings was on the bench. He wound the handle and added more peelings to the feeder cup.

Kahr was searched each time he entered the garden and the Chancellery and the bunker, but only given a glance when he left them, just to make sure he wasn't walking out with the candelabras.

The staff took slops from the Chancellery kitchen. They dug through the wastebins and retrieved whatever was edible, took it home, if they still had a home, and fed their children with cast-off scraps. Same with the wastebins in the bunker. Halves of pears and apples, steak bones with meat left on them, coffee grounds that had only been used once, jars with fruit preserves still stuck to the sides that could still be scraped out with a spoon. Took them home in cloth bags. The guards would glance in the bags, see rubbish, maybe stick their hand in to make sure one of Adolf's paperweights wasn't hidden below, and wave them on. One time a guard said Kahr must be hungry as a goat, him taking home potato peels.

It wasn't hunger that prompted Kahr to bring home the potato skins and orange rinds and bread crusts. It was thirst. The sergeant could make alcohol out of almost anything. His still was in the goat shed behind his farmhouse, just east of the Havel, near the Hamburg road. The duty roster allowed him three days at home after seven days living in the Chancellery barracks and serving the bunker's generators and ventilating systems. Getting to his farm was harder with each passing week, with most bridges underwater and buildings lying across the streets, but Kahr always found a way twice rowing across the Havel.

Kahr scooped the potato-peel pulp into a wooden bowl, where he ground away at it with a stone shaped like a pestle, crushing out the liquid. Then he poured pulp and fluid into a bucket along the shed's back wall. He had nine buckets of various sizes, most used at one time for chicken feed or to carry scraps to the pigs. He had spotted two of the buckets among ruined houses on his walks from the city. Now they all contained fermenting mash. Three with potato peels, three with apple parts, and two with citrus rinds. Kahr had no idea how the Chancellery found oranges and lemons with the Allies now occupying the citrus orchards in Italy. The last bucket held assorted berries and jams he had scavenged, and whatever else he could find to throw in, including half a pomegranate. He called this the surprise bucket, because he never knew quite what the result would taste like.