In War Times (25 page)

“Hell, for that matter, British or American. We’ve had a fair number of people sticking their noses into this.”

“I don’t trust him.”

The next two days, as he busied himself with integrating the
querverbindungsatz
into the phone system, Sam kept a close eye on Perler. He noticed that Perler seemed to be keeping a close eye on him.

“You have good schooling,” Perler remarked, as he stripped some wires with a jerking motion.

“Thanks,” said Sam.

“I am surprised at how quickly you got the telephones working.”

Sam laughed. “Smarter than I look, eh?”

“I don’t like Hitler.”

“Neither do I.”

“He is destroying what is left of our country.”

“We’re doing our best to prevent that.”

“You’re destroying it as well.”

“Germany is still fighting. We don’t have much choice.”

“Yes,” said Perler, finishing his connection and moving on to the next. After that he asked no more questions.

It was a week later, early in the morning.

The punch press was hard at work, stamping out aluminum mess trays using a die made by Al Hauk of Company C—without telling the officers—from rolls of heavy sheet aluminum they’d traded with the 611th in return for their share of trays. Munchengladbach was becoming a regular stop for U.S. military traversing the British sector. There were no public restaurants, no carryouts, gas was hard to get, repairs impossible, and they had many overnighters for meals and quarters. Word had spread about the punch press so Al and gang were making more die sets and planned to set up three other presses on a twenty-four-hour schedule to fill the demand.

Sam passed through the din and climbed the stairs to his new second-floor haven. Unlocking the door, he let himself in to their spacious lab—about twenty by twenty-five feet, but still in setup stage—and saw Perler, sitting on an office chair at a table. For once, he was smoking a precious cigarette instead of saving it for trade or currying favors. His forehead shone with sweat in the unheated room.

Sam put his hand on his pistol. “What are you doing here?”

“Look,” said Perler, and nodded to an object that lay on the table in front of him. “Just—look.”

“I can see it from here,” said Sam. “Where did you get it?”

Although it looked as subtly foreign as all of the other electronic and mechanical parts in Germany, it was clearly a Hadntz Device.

Perler stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and put the butt in his metal cigarette case, snapped the case shut, and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “It was given to me.”

“By whom?”

“A German woman. We are part of an organization that has been trying to assassinate Hitler. All of our attempts have failed. I give this to you as an act of good faith. To show you we are serious.”

“Why?” asked Sam.

“Sit down,” said Perler. “Have a cigarette.” He got out his case again.

Sam pulled out a chair at the other end of the table. “I have my own. Here. I’ll smoke if you smoke.” He tossed one to Perler. Perler put it in his case. Sam tossed him another. He lit it and continued.

“In 1944, Rommel was forced to commit suicide for participating in one of our plots. We are presently trying to get some sarin gas to put down Hitler’s ventilation shaft in Berlin.”

“I thought that Hitler was in Bavaria.”

Perler shook his head. “He is in Berlin, in his bunker. Speer, his minister of armaments, who is an architect, informed us of the presence of this ventilation shaft.”

“Why?”

“Speer believes that Hitler is committing treason against the German people, as do I. Hitler’s latest command is that the Gauleiters—men who have local control throughout the country, all of them quite loyal to Hitler—are to destroy anything that will be of use to the conquerors. Factories, dairies, anything and everything. You arrived in Muchengladbach before this order could be implemented, so the power plant was still available for your use. Germany has lost the war; it is just a matter of time before the surrender. But if it takes too long, all of Germany will be destroyed. Transportation, communication, manufacturing, waste-disposal plants—everything. We will starve. Hitler would like to kill us all, and he is taking steps to carry out his plan. He says that any Germans left are weak, non-Aryan, not fit to live.”

“Shove that over here,” said Sam. Perler slid it over to Sam, and he picked up the device.

It was encased in a network of circuits, tubes, and steel. Larger than the one they had made. Within the case, Sam could see that the substance had the same translucent qualities. When Wink and Sam had made theirs, they had made no such case. There was a dial on the case.

“Does this do anything?”

“There are glimmerings of…something. Several others of our group are trying to make a copy of this one. The woman told us that it was necessary to have a network of them to enable their use. But this one doesn’t do anything. Still, when I saw the combination of tubes that you confiscated, I realized that you might be making one. That you might be one of us. That you might even have more of them, enough to facilitate its functioning. I gained entry to this laboratory, and my suspicions were confirmed.”

“What was the woman’s name?”

“She wouldn’t say.”

“What did she look like?”

“She had blond hair, blue eyes, a delicate face.”

“Where was she from?”

“She had a Berlin accent.”

“When was she here?”

“In December.” Perler nodded toward the device. “After our close call last week, I realized that I should not keep this to myself. Mine was given me as you see it. Being an engineer, I have thought about how to make one, but without seeing the plans, I am only guessing. I believe, however, that you will benefit by incorporating a
querverbindungsatz
into the process, as well as other parts that you might not recognize, as they are German technology. I can help you. We are on the same side. I just need to see your plans.”

“I want you to leave, for now,” Sam said.

“But—”

“You are going to give me your key, we are going to leave, I will lock the door, and you will meet me back here in an hour.”

He went to fetch Wink.

“Okay,” said Wink, as the three of them, back in the office, drank Cokes. He had Perler’s device in front of him. “For one thing, we can’t get sarin gas. I’ve heard of it. The Japanese have used it. Unless there’s some in Germany that we can liberate, there’s nowhere else to get it.”

“Maybe you could make some,” suggested Perler. “Or get some anthrax. Anthrax would work. We have a network set up to put poisons into the bunker through the shaft. But we have to move quickly. Every day, Hitler destroys more of our infrastructure.”

“How the hell do we know that you’d use it on Hitler and not us?”

“You would just have to trust me,” said Perler.

They kept Perler’s device, and put Kocab on immediately to make their lab secure, even against explosives. “Or magicians,” said Sam.

“I’m not sure about explosives,” Kocab said. “But we could weld some of that sheet aluminum around the inside. I can fix the door pretty well too.”

They re-crated their equipment; nailed and chained and locked the crate shut. Then they let Kocab and Earl T. get to work. Wink remained to keep an eye on things; Sam was to spell him in two hours.

When Sam left the factory, Perler was sitting on a flight of concrete steps across the street, the only remains of a bombed building. His arms were linked around his knees. He rose when he saw them and hurried across the street.

“Can you get the sarin for me?” he asked anxiously.

“I doubt it very much,” said Sam. He continued down the street.

Perler followed. “I need the device back.”

They walked in silence for a moment, then Perler said, “I was foolish.”

Sam said, “Maybe not. If, as you say, we’re all on the same side, you’ve lost nothing. If we’re not, you may have lost a great deal.”

“Why would I even have shown it to you, then?”

“To get information from us.”

“I have a daughter. She is fifteen. I am doing this for her. I don’t want her and her children to grow up in a destroyed country, a country with no hope, like the Germany I grew up in, a country that can be easily swayed by someone else like Hitler.”

They were passing a block of empty shops now. “She used to work in that drugstore. Now it is empty. Maybe it will always be empty.”

“I’m not a magician. Winklemeyer and I have no connections with anyone who may be able to help you with your plans.”

Perler said, “I suppose I can console myself with the thought that it didn’t work, anyway.”

“What did your contact tell you it would do?”

“Open new worlds,” Perler said. “As if one really could.” He stopped and looked around at the darkening ruins. “We could certainly use one. I was just holding on to straws.”

“It’s almost curfew. We’ll see you tomorrow morning,” said Sam. “You said we could get some telephone equipment in Köln.”

“Yes,” said Perler.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” said Sam, and turned down Neusser Strasse.

When Sam returned to spell Wink, their helpers were at work downstairs on their machines. They sat on the floor and leaned against the wall of their lab. Wink wolfed down a sandwich that Leonid had made for him, and swigged a beer. A single light threw faint light on the heavy, grease-stained planks of the floor.

“So,” said Wink around his mouthful of black bread and mystery sausage, “what do you think of Perler?”

Sam’s dark, bitter beer was cold, satisfying despite the chill of the night air. “I suppose he must be right. There’s a network of these things. Somebody’s passing them out like candy. If he’s on the level, we should tell someone.”

Wink wiped his mouth on the napkin Leonid had wrapped the sandwich in, folded it carefully, and put it in his jacket pocket. “Like Sunny? Who’s in charge here, anyway? My friend, we are living on the dangerous but fruitful edge of chaos, where no one is in control and anything could happen. We could bust into General Simpson’s headquarters with a wild tale of vengeance weapons, but if we showed him one of these things, he’d laugh. Anybody would.”

“I mean, we need to tell someone where Hitler is. If that’s where he is.”

Wink nodded. “Sure. And of course they’ll believe us. I heard yesterday from a German that Hitler was ten miles away, on the verge of liberating them from our terrible yoke. You think that Perler is the one and only conduit to truth?”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to have that device made. Maybe they know more than us.”

Wink snorted. “That’s
definitely
possible. Wonder what Elegante did with ours?”

“She’s on our side,” said Sam.

“Maybe. Who’s on anyone’s side? I’m trying to figure it out.” Wink got to his feet, put his hands on his hips, leaned backward. “I’m off to bed. Wake me up in four hours.”

“Will do.”

Wink headed toward the end of the factory, where someone’s office held a couch.

Sam was left alone for a while. He fell into deep thought, imagining more than two melodies at once—three, possibly, or four, which merged from time to time, then diverged, strings spinning into space to loop back, perhaps, at some point, and converge. Startled out of his reverie by footsteps, he rose silently and drew his pistol.

Earl T. emerged from the stairway at first, followed by Kocab. They were panting, and carried a sheet of machined steel.

“Put that away and get the hell over here,” said Earl T. “This thing is heavy.”

I
N THE BACK OF
their apartment building, as with many German homes, was a courtyard with a summerhouse. Earlier in the morning than Wink rose unless death or something like it threatened, Sam sat at a desk overlooking the courtyard and closed up the papers he had been studying once again. Access to the German telephone system and warehouses full of detailed, advanced electronics was going to make this attempt a bit easier than their try in England. But he was still unsure how to proceed.

Lighting a cigarette, Sam watched sunlight glaze the roofs below and fill shattered buildings with deep shadows.

It was early April 1945. On March 7th, the Ramagen bridge across the Rhine had been taken miles south of Muchengladbach, but Germany had not yet surrendered, although many German soldiers and commanders had individually surrendered. The Werewolves, the fighting Hitler Youth, who had necessitated the complete destruction of several towns which were willing to surrender, had succumbed to whatever might cause twelve-year-old boys to stop fighting—perhaps seeing death firsthand. Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Montgomery had together descended into the Merker salt mines to survey the discovery of hundreds of priceless paintings, tons of gold, and barrels of gold-filled teeth that the Nazis—Goering, in particular—had stored away for the time when they would resurface. Hitler had ordered troops and materiel east to defend Berlin against the Russians. When Sam pulled
volkspark
night patrol, he always took a potshot at “Bed-check Charlie,” the Allies’ name for the plane the Germans still sent out at twilight, in a futile gesture, to check Allied positions.

Seventy thousand refugees were on the move. Germans who had fled east to escape the Americans and British realized that the Russians were a far greater threat and were filtering back west. The neighborhood was filling up with German civilians reclaiming their homes or squatting in unoccupied buildings, surviving on potatoes, fruit, and the remnants of last year’s home canning. Children played in the street, melting away before an MP jeep rounded the bend. The women sat on their stoops and talked with one another in the evening before curfew.