Five Past Midnight (40 page)

They passed a row of three cars, all on fire, beacons in the gray smoke. The buildings near the cars had just been destroyed and were now nothing but tumbles of wood and wire. Cray could see their remains only when the wind pushed a hole in the smoke.

"I'm hungry," he announced. Much of his face was hidden behind a bandage, and he was walking with an exaggerated limp. "You'd think if the Hand is putting us to all this trouble, it'd send us something to eat."

Katrin's hands were on his arm. Her face was well bidden by a scarf. She asked abruptly, "Have you ever read Kant?"

He shook his head. "Did you say you smelled bread?"

"Or Leibniz or Hegel?"

"Not enough pictures in those books."

She slowed their pace. "What do you read?"

Gray shrugged.

"Do you read?" she demanded. "Anything at all?"

"Popular Mechanics."

She hesitated. "What's that?"

"A magazine about how to make crystal radios usingjunk found in the kitchen drawer," he said. "I must have made a dozen of them when I was a kid."

"I'll try again." Her tone was of vast patience. "Clearly you don't know our literature or philosophy. But do you know anything about us Germans?"

"I aim and fire at them. What's to know?"

After
a
moment she said, "Is it just that your German is rough, or is it possible
I'm
speaking with
a
moron?"

"Now I'm smelling the bread, too. It's making me salivate like a dog."

A few Berliners crept out of cellars onto the sidewalks to squint against the gauze of smoke, craning their necks, trying to determine what was left of their neighborhood. Then more and more people emerged, some brushing off their coat sleeves, others pulling wadded paper plugs from their ears, others coughing at the dust in their throats. Some swatted at the smoke, to no effect. No one paid attention to the wounded Wehrmacht major, even when they could glimpse him through the smoke. Berlin was brimming with injured servicemen. Wooden stumps, eye patches, empty sleeves, halting limps, purple burn scars, crutches — the city was choking with them.

Katrin and Cray waded through someone's library, the books tossed along the sidewalk, some shedding pages in the wind. Then they stepped around a row of shattered pigeon cages, the birds inside and dead. Then around a tangle of brassieres and two headless mannequins.

"Adam and I had wonderful conversations," she said finally.

He looked at her. "Is that what this is about? Trying to have a conversation with me to replace the ones you once had with your husband?"

"It was a laughable idea, come to think of it." She dabbed a glistening eye. "An absurd notion on my part, trying to get some conversation from you."

They passed an elderly man pushing a perambulator filled with bread loaves

"What's so absurd about it?" Cray's gaze followed the bread, then turned back to Katrin. "I can have a meaningful discussion, probably just as well as Adam could."

"Try it."

They stepped over a wad of singed blankets, then from the sidewalk out into the street to avoid the heat of a burning building, which creaked and groaned from the fire's assault.

Cray pulled at the earlobe that wasn't covered with the bandage. He had repaired the damage to his eyebrows. He was again a brunet.

"Go ahead," she prodded. "Make some intelligent conversation."

"Well, I can't talk about Hegel or Kant, if that's what you're waiting for."

"Something easier, then. How about your childhood?" Cray thought for a moment. "I knew I was going to be an engineer when I was very young. Maybe ten or eleven years old."

They passed a rolling pin, then stepped over wooden coat hangers. She nodded, encouraging him. "What made you think so?"

"Future engineers do one of two things. They play with radios or they play with chemistry sets. And they become either mechanical or chemical engineers."

"So what did you
do?"
Her voice was warming, and she walked a bit closer to him.

"Radios. I built them and I took them apart and I put them together again, when I was a kid. Endlessly."

"You had a childhood? Somehow I didn't think so."

"There wasn't a wire or a tube in a radio I didn't know. I rigged an antenna on our house, but it wasn't high enough, so I put one up on the barn. I could hear stations as far away as San Francisco."

"I thought you maybe sprang from the ground, fully formed, carrying a knife and a grenade and a pistol." His look was of crushed dignity.

"I'm teasing." Her voice was light and warm. "Go on. I like this."

"For years our house near Wenatchee had radio parts scattered throughout it. I made a transmitter, and bought a microphone at an auction of used police equipment. There was a while when San Francisco might've been able to hear me."

She laughed.

"It amused my mom and dad, having all those tubes and condensers and dials and switches all around." He paused. "Until one bad day. A very bad day."

"Yes?"

"I made a radio detonator."

She stiffened. "Aw, damn it, don't go ruining this little talk."

"And discovered—purely by accident, I told my dad—that match heads inside a length of pipe could be detonated at a distance, and would indeed destroy a tool shed."

"Weapons. Is that all you ever think about?"

"Shovels, hoes, planting pots, rakes, shingles, bits of windowpanes, the works, all blown into the air. Some landed on our lawn, some I don't think ever came down."

Katrin sighed heavily.

"Well." He brushed his hands together. "I do enjoy a nice chat, after all."

"Now you are just teasing me."

They worked their way around a tangle of roof rafters and collar beams that had fallen from a building.

She asked abruptly, "Have you ever examined your life?"

"Why would I do that?"

She waited, silently coaxing more from him.

Finally he said, "A person shouldn't look too closely at himself."

"Why not?"

He said nothing.

"You are a better person than you think, Jack," she said with emphasis.

That stopped him. He looked perplexed, but only for a moment. He smiled at her, an American grin, full of teeth. "I've always said so."

She added, "But that doesn't mean you aren't a moron."

Her hand was on his arm as they walked, and now Cray put a hand over hers. He said in a diminished tone. "I can get you out of here when this is over, Katrin. Out of Germany."

Her eyes shone with emotions he could not read.

He said gravely, "Even if the Gestapo doesn't find you, the Red Army will be here soon. The horrors have just begun for Berlin."

Her mouth moved, trying to find the right words.

"I can get you out," he repeated.

"You won't be able to get yourself out, much less me." She smiled to take the edge off of her words.

"I guess I've been too subtle around you."

"Subtle?" She laughed, a bright chirrup. "You? You're as subtle as a belch in church."

"You try to get me to talk, so you can examine me, figure me out." His mouth was still turned up. "But you still don't know me."

His face was abruptly as cold as a carving. His urbanity seemed suddenly stripped away.

Alarmed, she dropped her hand from his arm. "Why do you say that?"

"If you knew me," he said, "you'd know that once my mission is accomplished, I'm going to be like a horse turned back to the stable. I'll be coming hard, and those who try to stop me will fare poorly."

"I don't… I don't think I know what you mean." His gloss of civilization abruptly returned. His eyes became gentle again, and an arm — as thick as a hawser — went across her back as they walked around a scattering of bricks. "I can get us out, both of us."

She shook her head. "I'm not leaving Germany. I know a few places I can hide."

"We can talk about it later."

"There's no need to. I'm not leaving."

"Later."

Lifted by a breath of air, a curtain of smoke rose in front of them, revealing yet another building with a collapsed façade. Cinder blocks and glass and shingles had fallen into the street, and a commercial baking oven was halfway out a shattered window, balanced on the window apron, the baking racks having spilled onto the street. The bomb had yanked off the building's fixtures, and deposited them here and there a doorknob, a mail drop, two brass light fixtures, strips of wood siding, lengths of vent pipe, and pieces of window casing. A cash register lay near the oven, on its side with its drawer sprung open and a few Reichsmarks fluttering about, but they were ignored by the knots of people hurrying toward the bakery. There was nothing to buy in Berlin.

Cray pointed. "That's where the smell is coming from. Looks like lunch."

Cray led her toward the fractured bakery. Berliners were following their noses toward the wrecked building, pushing their way through the smoke. The scent of freshly baked bread drew them as if hands were tugging their lapels. More and more Berliners crawled out of cellars, turned their noses into the wind, then began brushing their way through the smoke and slapping aside leafy ash, desperately searching for the source of the intoxicating scent. Cray glimpsed them through twisting ropes of smoke, an eerie, gathering assemblage, pushing through drifting ash and trailing swirling wisps of smoke.

"It'll be first come, first served in that bakery," Cray said.

He rushed ahead of Katrin, through the opacity, careful to preserve some of his limp. He pushed by an elderly woman walking with a cane, and joined four others who climbed into the bakery through the shattered window, squeezing by the oven, scrambling over fallen timbers, crushing glass shards under their feet, and then ducking under sagging beams. Cray scaled a loose pile consisting of baking trays, an overturned mixer, and flat wood spatulas. Against the back wall were the cooling trays, rapidly being emptied by frenzied Berliners, twenty people and more every moment, some in uniform—two Red Cross nurses and auxiliary postal drivers and a bus conductor—and others in rumpled civilian clothes. They yanked loaves from the trays, jamming them into their coats and under their arms, balancing them in their hands, piling themselves high with bread. Light fixtures dangled from the ceiling, and water poured from the wall where the sink had been ripped away.

Cray muscled his way through the throng, almost too late. He was able to find one loaf, which he pulled from the rack amid a cluster of grasping hands. He tucked the bread into his belly like a fullback, and shoved his way back through the crowd.

Despairing shouts and groans came from Berliners who had arrived in the bakery too late. A few scuffles at the edge of the crowd, and more yells. The scavengers quickly fled the smashed bakery to disappear into the smoke, lest they be forced to account for their good fortune.

Cray slipped by the oven again on his way out. Katrin was waiting near a fire hydrant, her hands in her pockets, looking at once embarrassed at the looting and grateful that Cray had found the bread.

The old woman with the cane stepped around an empty flour barrel into Cray's path. "You should share that loaf of bread, young man." Her hair was gray and tightly curled like a schnauzer's. She wore a gabardine coat and a wool shawl. She held out her hand, the cane in the other. "Give me some of that bread, in the name of the Fatherland."

"No, thanks." He could say the short phrase entirely without an accent. He sidestepped her toward Katrin.

The old woman might have had bound-up hips, requiring the use of a cane, but there was nothing wrong with her shoulders and arms. She brought her cane around in a tight arc and cracked it against Jack Cray's temple just below his Wehrmacht cap.

Cray yelped and brought up his hands to his head, dropping the bread. The old lady swung again, and this time her cane found Cray's cheekbone. Cray blindly spun to the source of his torment, but the woman shoved the cane between his legs, and he toppled to the cobblestones.

The old woman used her cane like a broom to scoot the bread away from Cray. Then she braced herself on the cane to reach for the bread. She grunted politely, her hips creaking.

As she hobbled away, the loaf under her arm, she said over her shoulder, "You should be ashamed, trying to take bread from an old woman, and my husband a veteran of the Great War."

Several bystanders laughed, but they moved on, and the smoke hid them quickly.

Cray sat on the sidewalk, amid the rubble, his legs inelegantly out in front of him and his hands to his throbbing cheek. His teeth showed with his grimace of pain.

When Katrin knelt to him, Cray said in a hiss of suffering, "Don't say anything, please."

Her smile was puckish. "I wasn't going to say anything."

Cray rose to his knees, a hand still at his cheek,

"Just a question." She helped him to his feet.

"Don't ask."

"Do you suppose Hitler's guards are as tough as that old woman?"

He adjusted his bandage, that small motion seeming to chase away his pain. A red welt on his cheek resembled a smear of lipstick. The half of his smile not hidden by the dressing was sheepish. "No. Surely not."

14

DIETRICH AND EBERHARDT stood in front of the barber's chair, which was brought into the room once a day for these few minutes. The barber was an SS noncom who handled the straight-edge with infinite care, starting below the left ear. White foam covered the Führer's face, except for the narrow mustache. The barber expertly drew the blade down Hitler's cheek.

Dietrich had never made a mental connection between the Führer and anything tonsorial. He had sort of assumed the Führer was born with a mustache. But here Hitler was, getting a shave, under the smiling and careful attention of an SS barber. Hitler's teeth were an appalling green, in contrast with the white shaving foam, and his eyes the yellow of old snow. A bib was across his chest, and Dietrich thought it peculiar that the bib was camouflage brown and green. Under the bib, Hitler was wearing a black satin morning robe over white pajamas with blue piping. On his feet were black patent leather slippers. Hitler's left arm trembled under the bib.