The Hunter From the Woods (28 page)

The German Army was reeling back from the Ardennes in the aftermath of Operation
Wacht Am Rhein
, Mallory said. Divisions would be refitting, restaffing and waiting for further orders. There would be some confusion to take advantage of. This mission involved
no parachute jump, just a truck trip in the company of British commandos and a
river to be crossed at night by rubber raft. On the other side would be some soldiers of
the Inner Ring, to get him into Berlin by staff car. He would have a solid identity, papers
made up by someone who made real papers, and a safe house to go to if things went
wrong. He would be contacted as when to end the mission, and leave the same way. What made him so valuable was that he knew his way around Berlin.

And around and around
, Michael thought, recalling a certain train trip he’d taken there on his last visit. “All measured out,” Michael said as they neared the house. “So simple, in theory. I understand the capture of the bridge at Arnhem was also a simple theory.” He expected no response on that one, and got none. “How am I supposed to meet Franziska Luxe?”

“I said the German Army was reeling back, and there’s confusion to be used in our favor. I said nothing about the end of parties and merrimaking in Berlin, did I?”

Michael nodded. They would carry on their parties in Berlin until their world was on the verge of destruction. Then, if the Russian tanks rolled into what was left of that city before the Americans or British got there, it would be a party in a vast blood-drenched boneyard. Even the remaining members of the Inner Ring would be crushed beneath the treads…if any still remained by then.

“Can I count on you?” Mallory asked as he stopped the car. It was a polite question, from one gentleman to another.

Michael took the briefcase, and got out.

A river to be crossed, he thought. And leave the same way.

But it occurred to him that no river could be crossed twice by the same man, because the river was never exactly the same, and neither would be the man.

Two

The Hunter Who Lives In The Woods 

Michael Gallatin walked out of the bathroom, stood over the bed and stared at her body.

The lights flickered. A power interruption, somewhere in the grid. The slow blinking of the eyes of a groggy leviathan. Did she move, in that brief loss of light? Did she stretch her long taut legs and open her own smouldering gray-hued eyes, and whisper up at him in her low voice rasped with passion,
Come to bed again, darling
.
Come crush me into
wine and drink all of me, every drop
.

She did not.

Michael wondered what would become of himself, at the end of his life. What was beyond this existence, for a creature such as he? Would he sleep among the angels, or would he just go on fighting the demons in a flame-lit room at the bottom of the stairs?

Dressed in his uniform as a German major of the 25th Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, 25th Panzer Grenadier Division, Michael had seen her across the dance floor at the Grand Frederik’s Regal Room. A foursome band in tuxedos was playing on stage, not the oompah-pah stuff of old Germany but the new Swing of the Jazz Age. Red balloons drifted along the vaulted ceiling, which was painted with the faces of ancient kings and emperors looking down through the pastel clouds of heaven to see what a mess they’d left behind.

It was his third night in Berlin, and this party was his reason for booking a room at the hotel. Every so often the golden-globed lights faltered, and with them the babble of conversation, the sometimes strident voices struggling to sound unconcerned, and the laughter too loud for the bad jokes of matings between American jackasses and Russian goats. But even in the dark the music kept playing, and even in the dark Michael watched her move amidst the men and other women like a torchflame amidst sad candles, and as he sipped from his glass of 1936 French Armagnac and the lights came up again he caught the glint of her eyes for the briefest of seconds passing across him and he felt the quick exhilarating celebration of being noted like a knight on his knees before a queen.

Not all the men in the room wore uniforms, but most did. Not all the women in the room were beautiful, but most were.

But none like her.

Not one.

He felt a man whose belly was about to burst his polished gold buttons coming toward him, possibly to ask some inane question about troop dispositions or what action he’d seen, or to voice some wine-odored opinion about the next thrust against the Russians, who in this first week of February were forty-some miles away from the city. Therefore Michael took another drink of his excellent brandy, squared his shoulders and gathered his courage and made his way across the dance floor to the woman in the long flowing crimson dress who was speaking to two other men, and when the men looked at him and the woman turned because she already knew he was coming he said into her face which was almost level with his own, “Pardon me,” in his best Westphalian accent, “but you are nearly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

She just stared into his eyes for perhaps three seconds. Three very long seconds.

Her red lips parted.

She said, with a hint of a smile that was not quite there, “
Nearly
?”

“Well,” he answered, and he gave her his own most disarming smile, “I haven’t seen all of you yet.”

He hadn’t known what he was going to say until it was time to speak, but as these words passed through the air she lifted her chin, almost as if to taste them. Her throat was offered to him, for a heartbeat. They stared at each other, as the two men behind Franziska Luxe seemed to Michael to diminish in size, to become cardboard cutouts, citizens of a world where passion grew pale for fear of failure. And so went the entire room and all its other inhabitants: sickly, small, and impoverished. If this Regal Room was its own jungle, the two greatest animals of the night had found each other.

And then Michael again said, “Pardon me,” to her, and to them, “Gentlemen,” and with a nod he moved away into the underbrush.

She did not follow. Nor did she track him very long with her gaze. Instead, she returned to her conversation, and a third man brought her a crystal glass of Picardon Blanc. In another moment a huge white buttercream-frosted birthday cake was wheeled out on a cart from the kitchen, and the jazz band—
Die Vier glatten Klagen
, printed across the bass drum in black letters—took up the universal ‘Happy Birthday Song’, and the room sang out loud as the figure of the hour, a big man wearing a white suit, a white shirt and a red tie stepped forward to try his lungs against thirty-seven candles, his face already flushed before he even began blowing.

Michael watched the festivities from the edge of the room, sipping slowly at his drink and avoiding the occasional glance from anyone else. His mind held the image of Franziska Luxe’s face: her strong jawline and classic Roman nose, her delicious-looking lips ripe for the kiss but perhaps with a twist of cruelty in them, her gray eyes almost luminous in this golden light, the arch of her black eyebrows and the mane of ebony hair that framed her face and fell about her bare shoulders and down her back. The grainy photograph of her had failed to fully prepare him. She was not the German Nordic ideal. She was not a pin-up fiction for the German troops to salivate over. She was a real woman of flesh, sinew, blood and bone. The heat that rose from her was, to him, an intoxicant far stronger than the vintage Armagnac. The aroma of her body beneath the floral Houbigant perfume—
Quelque Fleur
, he knew it was, from experience—was more wild and untamed forest than sculptured Paris garden.

Which suited him. After all, they’d given him the name of Horst Jaeger, the ‘hunter who lives in the woods’.

Her name was interesting as well. Franziska meant ‘free’.

But he thought that many men must have paid dearly to whisper it.

As the cake was being cut into pieces, a tub of ice cream was wheeled out. More bottles of wine and various liquors appeared. The Four Smooth Suits began to really—as the Americans would say—jump the blues, with the tenor saxophone wailing away and the drummer pounding a powerful beat. ‘Boogie-woogie’, he thought it was called. A slender young woman in a black dress, her hair red with coppery highlights and her face lovely if a little vapid, drifted out from the dancefloor and came directly toward Michael, offering him her cigarette to light. He’d picked up a packet of matches from the lobby for just such a moment—ten flimsy matches to the pack, the chemicals being in such shortage, yet the cigarette smokers were legion.

Michael struck a match and held it out, and as the red-haired woman grasped his hand to guide the flame, a breeze blew from the southeastern quadrant, the match went dark, and a hand took the cigarette from the woman’s lips.

“Go back to your husband, Bette,” said Franziska Luxe. She put the cigarette into Bette’s hand and closed the white fingers around it. “He’s about to be cornered by the most infamous homosexual in the room.”

Bette left, drifting along like someone who was already dead but didn’t know it.

“There,” Franziska said to Michael, with a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “I just saved you from a boring encounter with a nymphomaniac.”

Michael lifted his eyebrows. “Thank you?”

“I am Franziska Luxe,” she announced, and offered her hand not to be kissed or merely limply held in that most gratuitous of gestures, but to be gripped and shaken. He did. She gave his hand a crush before she let him go. “I’m a photographer and writer for
Signal.
You may have seen my work.”

“Possibly,” he replied. “I haven’t had much time for the reading of magazines.”

“You’re a major?” Of course she’d already seen the insignia of rank. “Reconnaissance?” That was clear, by the badge. His Iron Cross was also on full display. Now came what she really desired to know: “What’s your name?”

“Horst Jaeger, fraulein. At your service.” He gave her a little bow of the head.

Her smile, cautious as it was, seemed to deepen. “Why do you presume I’m not married? I could have chosen to leave my ring at home tonight.”

“No German husband,” Michael said, “would not be cleaved to the side of a woman like yourself.”

“Really? Why is that?”

He shrugged and took a sip, the last of his Armagnac. “To protect her from men like me.”

“I need no protection,” she said, and he could tell she meant it because it wasn’t softened with a further smile. There was a pause of a few seconds, during which Michael thought he might have lost her. He was expecting her to turn away, but when a man in the uniform of a Luftwaffe captain touched her shoulder and murmured to her and she did not respond Michael relaxed, just a bit. The Luftwaffe man glanced at Michael, gave him a look that said
good luck
, and moved away.

“I’m interested in you,” Franziska told him, as the band quietened into a slower, softer number. “Major Jaeger, have you ever been professionally photographed?”

He returned a quizzical expression.

“My intent,” she explained, drawing a little closer to him, “is a photographic piece on the faces of the noble warriors. Those who haven’t surrendered. In your
heart
,” she said. “I can tell, in this room, who has surrendered in the heart and who has not. No, I’m not saying that anyone here is a coward, or a doom-sayer, or treasonous. But there is a difference between the noble warrior who still believes in the German future, and the rabble, whether they wear uniforms with polished gold buttons or not.” And at this point she cast a sidelong glance at the fat-bellied officer, who staggered around behind a half-empty glass of some liquor that had for a while dulled the knife’s-edge prickling at the back of his neck.

Michael was impressed by her intensity. She was standing right in front of him now, filling up his vision. Completing it, in a way. She was almost six feet tall, and he’d already seen that her heels were not very high. Again he caught the wild forest under her perfume. In her eyes lay a controlled wildness, a calm before the storm. He thought her fierce beauty was breathtaking, almost other-worldly, and he had to remind himself that he was here in enemy territory on a very dangerous and important mission, and the smallest mistake—the smallest slip of accent or attitude—could end his life before the stroke of midnight.

“I’m not sure I’m so noble,” he answered, and for once in his life he had to look away from the searching eyes of a woman because he feared they saw too much.

“And an essence of humility too,” said Fransizka, who had almost breathed it as a sigh. Her voice had changed; there was a girl in there somewhere, who perhaps once had dreamed of meeting a knight on bended knee. “My God, where have you
been
?”

“Now who is
this
, Franziska?” came a man’s voice. “An uninvited guest, I think?”

Three

I Don’t Fear