Five Past Midnight (39 page)

The east end of the row house had been hit by a bomb, and was fractured and exposed to the street. Fire was bubbling up through the windows, and quickly eating its way toward the neighboring house. A wall collapsed inside the house, sending a cloud of black dust and sparks out shattered bay windows onto the street. Flames crawled beneath the overhang. Smoke curled skyward. At the corner was a telephone pole with a poster showing Jack Cray's face.

"The rest of the homes and stores along the street weren't hit," Ka- trin said. "Just those two."

"Maybe these stray bombs were jammed in the plane's bomb bay, and were kicked loose by one of the crewmen."

Her voice was dark with resentment. "I'd hate to have one of your planes return to England with unused bombs."

A Borgward 4X4 rolled down the street to stop near a pumper. Painted on the olive door was TECHNISCHE NOTHILFE. The canvas flap was pushed aside and six men in off-white herringbone uniforms spilled out of the truck's cargo bay. Several carried axes and mauls. Another opened a tool chest mounted behind the driver's door and brought out bolt cutters with handles the length of his legs. One of these men conferred with a fireman, who pointed at the house, then moved his hands in measured gestures, perhaps indicating the movement of the fire.

"Who are those men in the white uniforms?" Cray asked as he led Katrin across shattered glass.

"They call themselves the TeNo. Everybody else calls them the Rescue Squad."

The TeNo workers wore black berets and black belts that cinched in the white tunic. The white pants were loose and made of rough drill material, and stained from earlier rescues. Black cuff titles identifying the unit were on the left sleeves.

TeNo men entered the home next to the burning unit. The fireman at the hydrant cursed, then spun the nozzle off the spigot. Bombs had disrupted the mains, so there was no water to be had. He dragged the hose back to the pumper to attach it to the outlet. The truck's tank carried four thousand liters of water. It would not last long. The fireman checked the pressure gauges, then pushed back the hose-bed tarp to reach for more hose.

When Cray stopped to watch, and resisted Katrin's trying to pull him along by the arm, she said, "Honest to God, you are a child. Stopping to gaze at a fire."

He replied, "I rarely see one I didn't start."

The muffled roar of a collapsing ceiling came from the burning building, then the squeal of timbers wrenched down by the weight of debris. Two TeNo men ran out of the neighboring building, chased by a swirling smoke cloud. They yelled at their supervisor—the only TeNo worker wearing a black greatcoat—and one of them pointed with agitation back toward the building. Fire in the neighboring building was drawing near. When a fireman turned the handle on the nozzle, a stream of water from the pumper arced into the building, to little effect.

Katrin flinched when the cry of a man came from the neighboring building, a ragged wail, choked off by pain. She breathed, "My God, someone's still in there."

A TeNo worker climbed into the truck, then emerged a few seconds later carrying a three-meter pry bar, so heavy that he could not jump to the ground with it, but had to lay it on the bed, climb down, then retrieve it. Other TeNo men pulled gas masks from a wooden compartment under the toolbox. They removed their berets to secure the masks to their faces. Glancing anxiously at the next building, where fire was gaining despite the stream of water, the Rescue Squad reentered the building.

Another cry came from within, a strangled shriek. Jack Cray edged closer to the building, as far the first pumper truck.

"What are you doing?" Katrin asked, still at his elbow.

"Someone's in that building, and the fire is moving into it."

"That's why the Rescue Squad is here." She gripped his arm more tightly.

"Someone's going to be parboiled." Cray moved nearer to the buildings, stepping over a fire hose.

"This is none of our business, Jack." She was startled she had used his first name.

But he drew closer to the fire, to stand next to the TeNo leader. A double row of silver buttons was on the leader's greatcoat. He wore a black beret. He glanced at Cray, then stepped toward the door of the house where the man was trapped inside. He was met by a Rescue Squad member holding the pry bar as he emerged from the house. The man pulled off his gas mask.

Katrin hung back when Cray walked toward them, as if he were suddenly part of the Rescue Squad.

The TeNo man was saying, "When I jam the pry bar into the fallen wall and jack it up, it just sags around it. The stuff is too soft. Every time I pry, more weight goes onto the man's arm."

The troop leader asked, "Would a pulley and chain work?"

"Nothing solid overhead to hang it on, and you've still got the problem of the crumbling plaster around his arm." The TeNo man looked over his shoulder into the building. Timbers creaked and groaned. "He doesn't have long, Lieutenant. I can already feel the fire when I'm in there, right through the wall."

The lieutenant ordered, "Get the saw."

"Will you do the sawing this time, sir?" the pry bar man asked. "I've had it with the saw."

Another TeNo worker passed the saw to the lieutenant. It was a carpenter's tool, with crosscut teeth.

The lieutenant slipped a gas mask over his face. His words were muffled. "Get the litter ready. Hans, you come in with me, and you yell if the ceiling is about to give way, and don't be shy about it."

The lieutenant may have been surprised when the Wehrmacht officer followed him toward the building, but he said nothing. Cray left Katrin on the street and climbed four stairs to the door, and then stepped from the cool day into a hot house. The east wall—papered with maroon flowers—was bubbling and peeling from the fire in the adjacent home. This was a living room, but the furniture had been tossed when the room buckled from the bomb that hit next door. And the back wall had collapsed, as had some of the ceiling. Timbers and plumbing hung down, and electric wires. Plaster was everywhere.

A man was on his back next to the collapsed wall. A timber lay across his arm, pinning him. On the floor below the arm and beam was crumbled plaster. His eyes were wide and glassy. His mouth opened and closed. His other hand was gripping the corner of a throw rug. He was wearing a blue knit sweater, and it rose and fell quickly as he breathed.

"See what I mean?" The TeNo man jabbed the big pry bar under the beam, then heaved on it. The bar's blade only dented the weakened floorboards under the man's arm, and didn't raise the offending beam.

"You can't just push the beam back?" Cray asked. He held his gloved hand to his face, trying to keep the heated vapors out. He breathed quickly, as if that might make the air cooler. He had not bothered with a gas mask.

"Too much weight behind it," the Rescue Squad man replied.

The lieutenant stared at Cray's bandaged face. "Who are you?"

Cray lifted his collar to look at the tabs. "I'm a major. Go turn off one of the fire hoses and bring it in here. Turn it off at the pump, not the nozzle."

The lieutenant knelt next to the man on the floor. He brought up the saw. "I've got to take the arm off. He's not going to last. None of us is going to last if we don't get out of here."

The man groaned. The sound of falling timber came from the floor above. The room shivered. Glass shattered somewhere in the next room. Cray reached for the lieutenant's hand, halting the saw just as it was to bite into the trapped man's arm.

"Go turn off the fire hose and bring it in here." The lieutenant hesitated.

"I'm an engineer." Cray had to raise his voice over the sounds of the burning and collapsing structure. "Berlin Polytechnic. Now go get the fire hose."

The TeNo lieutenant released the saw to Cray, then sprinted from the room to the street. Cray tossed the saw aside. He knelt next to the man. "We'll have you out of here in a minute."

The wounded man breathed raggedly. He nodded. Yells came from outside, the lieutenant cursing the firemen who were reluctant to follow his orders and relinquish the hose. Cray looked toward the door but smoke hid it, and obscured even the nearby walls.

Cray coughed against the smoke and said to the wounded man, "Is it hot in here or what?"

The man managed, "Yeah, it's hot. And my arm hurts." After a moment he added, "I'd ask you to get out of here and save yourself, but I'm not that brave."

Licks of fire came through the wall near the ceiling behind them, then gushed into the room, spreading along the fractured ceiling. Flames churned above them like an angry sky.

The lieutenant rushed back into the room, dragging the hose behind him. Water dripped from the brass nozzle. "Drop the hose to the floor," Cray ordered.

The lieutenant did as he was told, and Cray stepped on the hose, pressing the water out of it and flattening it. The lieutenant copied him, stomping on the hose. Water dribbled from the nozzle. Then Cray knelt to close the nozzle.

"Help me press the hose into the crack," Cray said. "Hurry now. You"—he pointed at the TeNo man in the gas mask near the door— "when I give the signal, tell the firemen to turn the water back on, full pressure."

Cray jammed the hose into the narrow space under the beam. He wedged it in, much like filling a gap with a bead of caulk, kicking the hose into place.

Then the lieutenant understood. He carried a portion of the hose over the trapped man, to his other side, and began inserting it into the crack that held the man's arm.

"Get it good and tight," Cray said unnecessarily. "Ready?"

The lieutenant nodded.

Cray called over his shoulder, "Open the pumper nozzle."

Using his hands as a megaphone, the Rescue Squad man relayed the order. A side wall in the neighboring room fell, sending a blast of hot air through a door. Burning debris from the ceiling began falling on them.

"Have I said it's hot in here?" Cray asked.

"You did, yes." The wounded man almost smiled.

Then the hose filled with water, expanding and rising, and lifting the beam all along its length. With a grinding groan the weight of the fallen wall shifted, and the cavity opened, freeing the arm.

Cray grabbed the wounded man's legs and the lieutenant brought up the man's shoulders. They carried him out of the room, his maimed arm trailing across the floor. Clumps of burning ceiling fell behind them.

They put him on a litter, a Rescue Squad man at each end. He was carried toward an ambulance that had arrived while Cray was in the room. Katrin was still standing near a pumper.

Cray breathed the cool air, wiping his forehead with a hand.

The lieutenant removed his gas mask. He fixed his eyes on Cray, then said, "Sir, the makeup on your eyebrows is coming off, dripping down your face, from the heat in the building."

Cray dabbed at a brow and looked at his hand. A black smudge.

The lieutenant's words were barely audible above the fire's sibilance. "That was nice work with the hose in there, Captain Cray."

He stared at the lieutenant.

"I'd have never thought of it."

"Like I said, I'm an engineer." Cray's pistol was in a belt holster under the greatcoat.

"The radio in my truck is broken," the lieutenant said, "and it's going to take me at least ten minutes, maybe fifteen, to find a telephone to report your location."

The American nodded, then turned for Katrin and quickly led her away from the burning buildings. The sounds of buckling wood and falling lathes and plaster followed them along the street.

13

THE
BOMBERS had returned half an hour after their first run, an unusual double punch for one morning. Katrin and Cray had not been near a shelter, so they had climbed into the basement of a ruined building and huddled in a corner under a table, mouths open and fingers in their ears. When the all clear sounded, they emerged to find that smoke and drifting ash had swallowed Berlin. Their ad hoc shelter had been at the edge of the target area, and the new fires and craters and shattered buildings were to the south, the direction they needed to travel.

They picked their way along, no one else on the street yet. For a few minutes after each terror raid, Berlin stood in mute shock, like a man just slapped, incapable of comprehension, yet full of helpless outrage. Then Berliners slowly emerged from their hiding to begin again their inventory. The Allies destroyed, Berliners made an accounting, an endless cycle.

Smoke was as thick as cotton, and Cray could make out nothing beyond the reach of his arm. Katrin coughed into her hand. He led her around a cluster of tortoiseshell spectacle frames, blown from an eye doctor's office by a bomb blast, then past a dozen white linen napkins tied together with a red ribbon, so newly deposited on the street that the rain had not yet dampened them. They passed shattered seltzer bottles, a pencil sharpener ripped from a desk, a silver teapot and a brass coronet, scattered across the street. They carefully stepped through new fields of brick and plaster, and around timbers, some still on fire. Above them the sky was a sulfurous yellow, the sun hidden in the haze.

"Do you smell perfume?" Katrin asked.

"Lilac, smells like."

"Some woman's perfume bottle was vaporized by a blast, probably, and now the smell wafts down the street." She sniffed. "I can also smell fresh bread and mothballs, and there's a whiff of ammonia, maybe someone's kitchen floor cleaner. It's always like this after a bombing. The air smells of better days."

"I don't smell any of that."

"Take a big breath, and tell me the scents you detect."

Cray breathed deeply, pondered for a moment, then announced, "Cordite and gelignite and HE residue."

She looked at him. "Have you ever had a romantic thought in your

life?"

Katrin had been contacting the Hand twice a day since Cray had appeared. The Hand had given her no information during her last three broadcasts. The American had speculated that either the Hand was learning nothing to pass on, perhaps because of the purge Colonel Becker had referred to, or perhaps the Hand was saying nothing because Cray's mission was only a cover for some other operation, and so the Hand had other, more pressing concerns. Still, she would continue to make her broadcasts, hoping for something useful.