Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (35 page)

Shadows and moonlight bleached all but the slightest suggestion of color from the doctor’s inner sanctum. Marsh crept through a chiaroscuro warren. Past the bookshelves, past the gramophone, through eddies of chalk dust swirled up by his footsteps. He approached the doctor’s desk. Toward the empty-eyed leer of a child’s skull. Toward the glimmer of polished steel rivets.

A wet
click
rattled on the floorboards behind him. “K-k-k-buh-bbbb!” Kammler squealed and clapped.

Marsh wheeled, crouched, froze. His thudding heart smashed against his breastbone, chiseling for escape. Long seconds passed while he watched the door to the doctor’s bedroom. Gretel snatched something from the floor and pushed it back into Kammler’s mouth. If she saw the dirty look he shot her, she showed no sign.

His breath came out in a long, ragged exhalation. His hands shook. He leaned against the desk until his jackhammer heart didn’t threaten to pulverize his ribs to so much gravel.

He traced the wires from the skull-cum-paperweight. The doctor used them as a bookmark, Marsh recalled. His fingers traced cool copper to the soft leather of a blotter, past the sharp facets of a glass inkwell, across the slick oiliness of polished wood. He brushed a fountain pen, sent it rolling across the desk to clatter on the floor. He searched the entire desktop by touch, feeling for the roughness of paper, the contours of embossed leather, the filigreed brass of corner clips. But the wires ended on a bare desk. No journal.

Tipping the skull back with one hand, he slid his fingers under the dead child’s teeth. When he’d been here before, the skull had rested on a pile of journals. But not tonight.

Drawers rasped open when he rifled the desk. With dark-adapted eyes he glimpsed stationery; rubber stamps; paper clips; calipers; a magnifying glass; multiple file folders; an empty saltcellar; a cracked sugar bowl inscribed with gradations and imperial volume measurements; a medal inlaid with opals and diamonds. No journals.

God, where were they? Marsh reconsidered the jumble on the bookshelves. The true hopelessness of his self-appointed task washed over him. He didn’t have time to search the entire room. The moon was already lower in the west than he liked. They had to finish this.

The journals would have been such a boon … But it would take an hour to search the shelves in the dark.

Click.
The ceiling fixture erupted with electric light, banishing the shadows. Marsh winced from the flare of pain in his eyes.

Marsh hissed, “Kill that bloody light!”

Behind him, von Westarp said, “I’ll do no such thing.”

*

I flashed the headlamps a few times, too, for good measure. It worked. ARP wardens swarmed to me like picnic ants to an open jam pot.

The first was a pudgy fellow who came trotting up the street, huffing and wheezing, a hand holding the forage cap to his head. He looked to be in his late sixties. “Oy!” he managed, before doubling over to catch his breath. “You can’t … do … that…”

He trailed off, still a dozen yards from where I leaned against the Mulliner. Brilliant. Poor bastard was likely to kick before I could get directions out of him.

I reached inside, flicked the lights a couple more times. Gave the horn another blast, too.

The second warden came running around the corner at a good clip. “You! Kill those bloody lights now!”

Much better. Young fellow, this one. It surprised me to see somebody so young and healthy working for the local Air Raid Precautions. Ought to have joined up. But as he approached, swaggering with righteous indignation, moonlight shone on the gray hair at his temples, and I realized he had to be in his mid-forties. Not so young. But younger than me. Young enough to remind me what it had been like to sprint without my knee giving out, to raise my voice without the inevitable agony from the wreckage of my throat.

Came right up to me, this one. “What the hell is wrong with you? Might was well be signaling the Luftwaffe, what?”

“Stoke Aldermoor,” I said. “How do I get there?”

That brought him up short. “What?”

Behind us, the pudgy warden had caught enough breath to stagger over. “What?”

I grabbed the younger warden by the collar of his oversized coat. The wool scratched at my knuckles like tiny ineffectual hands scrabbling for release. “Stoke Aldermoor! I need directions!”

Guess the moonlight gave him a glimpse of my face, because he blanched. But he shoved me back, hard enough to knock me against the old man’s car. Strong chap. “You broke the blackout regs for this? Are you barmy?”

I pulled Liv’s address from my pocket, waved it in his face. “Can you tell me or not? It’s life and death, man!”

“I don’t care if the Prime Minister sent you, mate. You’re breaking the regs. That could mean life or death for everybody in the city.”

He tried to snatch the paper from my hand. I ducked under his arm, sidestepped, pulled his arm through the rest of the arc to overbalance him. He toppled facedown in the street. I knelt on him, locked his other arm behind his back, clamped my free hand on the back of his head.

“Stoke Aldermoor,” I growled. “Now.”

Something scuffled off to my left. I turned just in time to turn the kick into a glancing blow. Fat coward. Rage boiled up from deep within me. Unfocused anger had been my companion for so long that it had long ago become part of the background noise of my daily life.

I remembered the first man to speak to me after Liv and I arrived at the ruins of Williton. He spoke with compassion and reason, told me there was nothing I could do. He dared to suggest I stop digging in the rubble with my bare, bloody hands. Dared to suggest I abandon the search for my infant daughter. So I shattered his jaw with a brick. There were times during the long, dark years after the war when I wondered what became of him. Usually late at night, when I lay in bed alone, Liv having taken a lover just to avoid sleeping under the same roof as our son. Most natural thing in the world, questioning the path of your life at times like that. But there had been just as many times, in earlier days, when I remembered how good it felt, how right, to give the grief a violent outlet.

I released the armlock on the younger warden and leapt on his colleague. Fat man went down fast. It felt a bit like kicking a puppy, but I didn’t care. All I needed was one miserable question answered, but these tossers wouldn’t help me. I needed to find Liv, but their obstinacy was killing her. I couldn’t lose Agnes again. I wouldn’t.

The younger warden tried to pull me off him. He got an arm under my shoulder, jammed his thumb and forefinger against my windpipe. His other hand clamped down on the back of my neck, as I’d done to him.

“What’s so bloody important about Stoke Aldermoor?”

I broke free. “I’m trying to save my family!”

“From what, for chrisssakes? There isn’t—”

But the rest of his protest was lost in the banshee wail of air-raid sirens. Doors opened all around us as people ran for shelter in their nightclothes. I pointed at the sky. Over the earthshaking chatter of ack-acks, I screamed, “From
that
!”

*

Von Westarp stood in the doorway that opened on the main staircase. He wore a tattered silk dressing gown. Its colors had faded long ago; when he moved, the wispy sleeves and hem waved like cobwebs. He might have been a sepulchral visitation, a revenant spirit. No shortage of those at the farm. In one hand, the doctor held a white porcelain plate stacked high with pieces of blackened toast; his other held one of the missing journals. He’d been reading it.

Bloody fucking hell.

He must have gone down to the kitchen for a midnight snack while they were dealing with Kammler. He’d come up the front stairs while Gretel and Kammler held the servants’ stair. Speaking of whom—

Gretel and Kammler were not in evidence. Had she foreseen the doctor’s interruption and slipped out to give Marsh surprise reinforcements? Or had she sold him out again? She was overdue for a short, intense conversation.

Von Westarp said, “I knew you were a problem the moment my daughter brought you home.”

“You’re not the first man to say so.”

Keep him talking. Keep him busy. Take him before he raises the alarm.

Marsh gauged the distance separating them. He sidled around the desk.

Von Westarp dropped the plate of toast and pulled a short-barreled pistol from the sagging pocket of his gown. He had it trained on Marsh before the toast and porcelain fragments came to rest underfoot. When he strode forward, his hairless legs poked through the opening of his gown. His sash was coming undone. He was pale and skinny.

“Stop,” said the doctor.

The Luger in his hand predated the Great War. Marsh wondered if the half-naked madman knew how to use it. Probably. What sort of lunatic carried a gun in his dressing gown?

Marsh said, “I doubt you fully understand what’s—”

The doctor cut him off. “This isn’t a conversation. I’m no fool.” And he raised the Luger at Marsh’s face.

He was too close to miss. The barrel looked a foot wide. Marsh tensed, rose to the balls of his feet, prepared to dive as the doctor’s finger tightened on the trigger. Tendons stood out in bas-relief beneath the doctor’s papery skin.

A door scraped open. Von Westarp’s gaze flicked from Marsh’s face to something behind him.

Marsh clenched the bundle of wires on the desk behind him. He swung the skull at von Westarp’s outstretched hand. It connected with a solid
crack
at the same moment von Westarp fired.

A dead child’s teeth clattered to the floor like hailstones. Somebody gasped.

Marsh leapt on the doctor. He wrenched the Luger from his grip and broke a couple of his fingers in the process. A punch snapped the doctor’s head back hard enough to daze and subdue him, but not before von Westarp screamed to raise the dead: “Help! Children, help me!”

Well, we’re in the shit now,
thought Marsh.

He said, “Gretel! Get Kammler ready! We’re going to have company in about ten seconds.”

Then he shot von Westarp. The bullet split the doctor’s glasses at the bridge of his nose. A jet of blood and brain matter geysered from the neat round hole between his eyebrows. Warm blood spatter stippled Marsh’s face for the second time in as many days, but this time no Eidolon swirled about him to demand greater carnage.

“Somebody should have done that long ago, you twisted bastard.”

That made two gunshots in the doctor’s study. Shouts echoed up the rear stairwell. The rest of Von Westarp’s children were awake and agitated.

Bloody fuck.

He kicked the dead man for good measure, for frustration’s sake, for time spent rotting in Berlin, for time lost watching Agnes grow …

… and glimpsed the rest of von Westarp’s journals crammed on a shelf between a pair of specimen jars.

He yanked the flour sack from behind his belt. Unfurling it, he said over his shoulder, “Don’t kill Reinhardt until the house is burning. Let him do our work for us.”

Marsh shoved the doctor’s snack-time reading into the bag. Then he ran to the shelf, swept the other volumes into the sack, and spun it closed.

Two doors. Two exits. Two entrances.

He slammed the door that opened on the front stairwell. Marsh hooked a mahogany armchair with his foot, wedged it under the knob. It wouldn’t keep everybody out, not in this nightmare factory, but it would keep the mundane soldiers out for a minute or two. Long enough. If he and Gretel were still barricaded in the doctor’s study when the soldiers broke in, it would mean their bid to destroy the Reichsbehörde had failed.

Next, he turned for the rear stairwell, where Gretel’s perfectly timed entrance had distracted the doctor. Von Westarp’s desk looked to be half an acre of solid oak. Pain rippled through Marsh’s knees and shoulders as he strained to force it across the room to barricade the door.

Couldn’t get it there in one go. He wedged himself under the edge of the desk, strained, forced the damn thing past where Gretel knelt on the floor, slammed it against the servants’ door.

Right. Now we can make a good run at this.

“Doctor!” The servants’ stair reverberated with footsteps and panic, the scuffling sounds of a brainwashed family scrambling to be the first to leap to the aid of its insane paterfamilias.

Marsh said, “Gretel, get ready.”

Then he looked down.

Kammler lay slumped against the wall. All color had drained from his face. He stared up at Marsh, wide-eyed and afraid. He was crying. Gretel’s braids hung in disarray. She had tied her ribbons around Kammler’s left thigh. Her hands were the color of stewed beets, as was the long smear of blood from Kammler’s gunshot wound.

“God damn it!”

“Temper,” said Gretel. Her face was unreadable.

“Can he work?”

Kammler was the key to everything. What was Gretel’s escape plan?

The door to the servants’ stair rattled. The edges turned black. Marsh scooted away from the heat. Tongues of flame licked into the study while Reinhardt assaulted the door with fists and Willenskräfte.

Reinhardt called, “Doctor! Let me in!”

Klaus yelled, “You idiot, you’ll kill him! Give me that battery!”

Marsh knelt over Kammler. Gretel’s tourniquet hadn’t staunched the bleeding. She was too small, and the ribbons too slippery, to pull tight enough. Marsh’s belt, or even a stick to twist into the knot, might have done the trick. But they hadn’t time. Heat poured off the door in waves thick enough to crisp Marsh’s hair.

The chair barring the other door screeched backwards half an inch, tracing bright gouges in the dark varnish of the floorboards. Another good shove would snap it apart.

Marsh took Kammler’s face in his hands. “Look at me, son. Remember me?”

The fear and confusion on Kammler’s face softened under Marsh’s attention. He shrunk away from Gretel’s touch. He smelled like sour milk and peppermint, shit and warm iron.

“M-m-m—”

Marsh gave a little smile of encouragement.

“That’s right. I need your help.” He pulled one of Kammler’s arms over his shoulder. Gretel did the same. Marsh lifted the telekinetic to his feet. Christ, but he was heavy. Klaus passed through the barricade like a ghost wreathed in smoke and anger. He disregarded the growing flames. Marsh fired at him with the Luger, but the shot passed harmlessly through him to crack the chalkboard. But then Marsh started to lose his grip on Kammler, and he had to keep the large man on his feet.