The Hunter From the Woods (27 page)

Michael learned that the nurse’s husband had been a Spitfire pilot who’d lost his life over Dunkirk. Her infant son had been killed in a German bomb raid in London in 1940. He didn’t ask her what the boy’s name had been. He didn’t think he had to.

Even the roughest road led somewhere, he thought.

On the morning of the fifth day, two officers in clean uniforms with polished buttons arrived at the base in a Douglas Dakota transport plane. Michael knew one of them as the man sometimes called ‘Mallory’, who wore a Colonel’s insignia. It was explained to him, as they sat under a striped awning facing the airstrip and drank Guinness Stout brought in a keg with the Dakota, that it was imperative he return to Cairo and, as Mallory put it, “get back on the horse”.

It was explained to him that he could fly back with them in the Dakota or, if his recent experience had somewhat sullied his desire for air travel, he might be driven in a truck back to HQ in Cairo. Of course, there was a very large difference in travel time between plane and truck, but it was his decision.

Not to put any pressure on him, of course.

Michael Gallatin sipped from his glass of Guinness and listened to the noise of an aircraft’s engine revving across the field. The sky was clear and untroubled by German fighters, yet who could say where the next Messerschmitt ace lurked? Michael had been dreading this moment, and his heart had begun beating harder. Perhaps, too, a fine sheen of sweat had risen at his temples.

He drew from his pocket a wristwatch.

He examined its face only briefly. It was the plain brown leather band that drew his attention. He thought of the old planes of the Great War, and how they were put together with wires, fabric, leather, and wood. How also they were taken up, as flimsy as they were, into the huge sky by small men with large dreams and the bravery of giants.

He ran his fingers across the brown leather. He listened to the engine revving, and heard it miss a beat.

They were still brave giants, in those cockpits.

Maybe it was time for him to grow a little larger, too.

He gave his answer.

“I’ll fly.”

The 

Room 

at the

Bottom

of the

Stairs

One

Gone Too Deep

When Michael Gallatin could force himself to meet his own eyes in the mirror, he opened the flawless silver case that lay atop the blue porcelain sink. It was monogrammed, in simple capital letters, with an H and a J. He removed from the case the two pieces of the Solingen travel razor. The Germans made such beautiful instruments, especially those that could kill.

He put a fresh blade into its resting place and screwed the pieces of the razor together to make a whole. He turned on the cold water tap and ran the blade’s edge beneath it. Then, completely naked, he stared into his face as if looking for recognition there. He was no longer sure what he was seeing, in those green eyes that held secrets even from himself. To him they looked smoke-hazed, bloodshot, weary from the constant war.

But a gentleman must be well-groomed, and so with just a few seconds’ decision to employ no lather he began to shave the stubble from his right cheek. On the first stroke his hand betrayed him. He went too deep, felt first the nick and then the heat of blood rising from the cut on his cheekbone.

Michael watched the drop of blood roll down through the small hairs toward his jawline. Another followed, and then a third. They smelled of blood sausages in the Paris market, fresh after midnight. He was hungry, roused to appetite by his own juices. But he continued to shave, stroke after stroke—some smooth, some ragged—and when he was done with the massacre of his face he began to shave his throat and down across his chest, cleaving the field of black and gray hair, cutting himself here and there, no matter, no matter at all, for this little pain was nothing, and what would his Russian family think of him if he could not stand a little pain?

When he finished this task, he was going to have to decide what to do about the dead woman in the bed.

So he kept shaving, and he kept cutting.

Here and there, but this little pain was nothing.

He regarded the first nick he’d made, on his right cheek, and thought he fully understood his problem. He had certainly gone too deep.

So he stood in this bathroom, in room number 214 of the Hotel Grand Frederik, with its gold-colored walls and blue porcelain and its matching gold-and-blue tiles on the floor, and he dripped blood from seven cuts and mused on how his odor of wounded weakness would have had him torn to pieces in a certain area of Russian wilderness very distant from this dying city of Berlin. They would have consumed him, eaten his lungs and heart and all the meat that meant life for the strong, and they would have left his bones for the little scavengers who hid in the rotten logs, and all would be right with the world.

Michael Gallatin, born Mikhail Gallatinov in St. Petersburg thirty-four years ago, was no longer sure he was fit.

Nothing had changed about him, except for the slips of the razor. Except for the haze in his eyes. The tightness of his mouth. He was lean and healthy, his shoulders were broad and his waist narrow and he had enough muscle to get his work done. His thick hair was black, streaked with gray at the temples and cut short in the military style. Across his left cheek was a scar that began just under the eye and continued back into the hairline, the gift of a would-be assassin in North Africa in 1942. He bore other scars, nothing too ghastly, nothing that could not be explained to a woman between the damp sheets, with her head leaning against his shoulder and her fingers wandering the fields of his flesh, as the demands of a soldier.

He was going to have to go and look at her again. He steeled himself for it, but his metal had become tin. He wondered, as he put the bloodied razor away into the beautiful silver case she’d bought for him two days ago, if after he drank the last glass of champagne and put on his uniform of a German major he should set fire to the bed and send her to Valhalla in the proper fashion.

It had begun barely a month ago, when Michael had returned from an early-morning run through the cold January sleet of Wales and found a black Bentley Mark V in front of his proudly isolated house. At its wheel waited the older man Michael knew as Mallory, who said he would wait while Michael put on some clothes, and then they needed to take a drive and have a chat.

“The Inner Ring has been penetrated,” Mallory said as they drove along the tracks that passed as roads and sleet slashed across the windshield.

Michael knew, of course, about the Inner Ring. The group of Germans who were still doggedly fighting Hitler and the Nazis from within. They were scientists who did their best to delay or sabotage weapons projects. Secretaries and aides who made notes on overheard conversations or intercepted messages. More than one railway dispatcher who sent a munitions train onto a track laid with explosives. A priest or two who kept a radio tuned to the British secret service wavelength, and a codebook hidden where only Christ might find it. Prostitutes and pickpockets, old white-haired soldiers who carried scars from the first Great War, and ordinary citizens with extraordinary courage who had come over to the hope that Germany would surrender to the British or Americans, and that it would happen before the Russian wave smashed over the crumbling rock of the Fatherland.

“A woman has penetrated the Ring,” said Mallory. “She has seduced her way in. Her name is Franziska Luxe. She’s a photographer and a journalist for
Signal
.”

Signal
magazine, as Michael also knew, was the glossy, lavishly-illustrated propaganda magazine of the German armed forces, enjoyed—if that was the right word—at the height of its popularity by over two million readers.

“The Ring is being taken apart,” Mallory went on. “Person by person. They are disappearing into the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Fraulein Luxe is a bit of a…I would call her a
huntress
. She’s gotten on the scent of the Ring through a stupid, love-stricken man, and she is working with a Gestapo official named Axel Rittenkrett to uncover and destroy—a kind way to put it—every member of the Ring and their families. Out of a hundred or so, there are maybe fifty left. We’ve been helping as many as we can, but some have complications and can’t get out. Some refuse to leave, they consider themselves martyrs for a cause. This is why you’re needed.”

“I knew it was coming to that,” said Michael, as he stared at the black briefcase that lay on the biscuit-colored leather next to him.

“We’re trying our best to get everyone out. We won’t be fully successful, but we need time. And we need
you
, Major, to give Franziska Luxe something to think about other than tracking down members of the Ring and sending them to be tortured to death at the hands of the Gestapo.” He paused for a few seconds, during which only Michael saw the pack following along, just loping easily through the sleet, almost grinning in the cold bracing air with lung-steam curling from their snouts. “Do you understand the mission?”

“Go into the chaos of Berlin, masquerade as a German—an officer, most likely, and a man with an interesting back-history—to seduce a rather nasty female Nazi? I’m flattered, but I believe there are other men who are better suited for this job.”
And who most probably would die trying
, he thought.

“Read her dossier, there in the briefcase,” Mallory instructed. “She’s thirty years old and quite beautiful. She’s a champion skiier, an expert marksman and driver of racing cars as well as being fluent in French, Italian and English. Her father was a daredevil pilot who ended his life last year testing the new German jet aircraft. Her mother at seventeen was a circus lion-tamer, has been an Olympic swimmer and a member of the most recent German expedition to Antarctica in 1938. Here, now…what’s
this
?” He put his foot to the brake and stopped the car. He leaned forward, peering through the windshield as the wipers scraped back and forth. “I presume that’s one of your companions standing on the road? Am I in some kind of violation I need to know about?”

“A precaution,” Michael said. “No one can take me beyond this point without my agreement. And theirs, also.”

“My God, that’s a big one,” said Mallory, still looking forward. “Um…may I ask…?”

“Animal,” came the response. “As far as I know, there is no one else…” Michael looked at the briefcase and put two fingers against it. “Like me,” he finished.

“One never knows what the Germans, if not stopped, might try to create in their laboratories.” Mallory winced a little, even before he’d finished saying it. “Oh, my. That didn’t sound right, forgive me.” He cleared his throat and put the stick into Reverse. “I’ll back up, shall I?”

It was very important that Michael do this, Mallory told him on the return drive. By diverting Fraulein Luxe’s attention and managing to stay at her side for one week in February, Michael might save the lives of twenty people…a dozen…five or six, but at least the Inner Ring would not be, so to speak, thrown to the wolves.