The Hunter From the Woods (32 page)

His heart had given a lurch. He leaned toward her and said as calmly as his voice would allow, “I think we’d better get off this—”
Road
, he was about to say, for obvious reasons, but already the first Mustang was straightening out and coming in for the kill.

Sparkles of fire erupted from the leading edges of both wings.

He imagined the fighter jocks had been train-hunting today, and maybe one had already used its rockets to knock a locomotive off the rails. In any case, the little silver roadster with two Nazis in it was just too good a target for a trigger-happy Yank to pass up.

In the next instant the Browning machine gun bullets began to march in rows across the other side of the
Reichsautobahn
, on a collision course with the BMW. Michael nearly reached out to grab the wheel, but Franziska hit the brake. The car skidded in the smoke of burning rubber. The section of roadway it would have passed over if she’d kept up the speed was torn into pieces of flying concrete that thunked into the hood, smashed the windshield in front of Michael’s face and passed over their heads almost as deadly as the slugs.

The carefree girl was gone. She whipped the wheel around and downshifted as she punched the accelerator again and the BMW fishtailed and spun in a circle that left a perfect O of black rubber. The second Mustang flashed over their heads.

“Hang on!” Franziska shouted.

He surely wasn’t going to get out and walk. The 328 seemed to pause for a few precious seconds even though the accelerator was pressed to the floorboards, and then it gave what was nearly a forward leap that rocked Michael’s head back and cracked his teeth together. When he got his neck working again and looked over his shoulder he saw the two angels of death turning for another pass.

Franziska didn’t look. She just drove, now jinking the BMW to left and right, refusing to give the planes an easy target. Berlin, and its flak towers, was more than ten kilometers distant. Michael thought he should be pleased at this development of Allied fighters seeking kills on the edge of Berlin in broad daylight, but somehow he was not so pleased.

Another burst of bullets tore across the concrete and median in front of them, and then Michael heard a
whoosh
and felt something scorching hot pass seemingly right behind his neck. Over on the right, trees blew out of the ground, a geyser of dirt exploded and small things on fire began to run wildly across the hillside. Michael could imagine the radio chatter:
Direct hit today on a rabbit burrow, flight leader
.

Franziska was nearly standing on the accelerator.

The two planes roared over them, marking them with their shadows, and again made a circle.

It had already gone through Michael’s mind that she should get off the roadway and make for the woods, but he understood why she didn’t. In this case, speed was life. The car’s silver gleam would not be hidden by leafless limbs. The only chance they had, if indeed it was a chance at all, was to outrun both bullets and rockets. One advantage owned by Franziska: the fighter pilots were used to attacking trains, tanks and trucks, which moved considerably slower and more predictably than the small quick 328.

To emphasize that point, Franziska suddenly swerved the wheel to the right and they crossed the median onto the other pair of lanes. Two rows of Browning bullets rushed after them but were late to catch their target, and so pocked the concrete and threw up plumes of dirt in the median. The first Mustang zoomed over their heads, but the second had eased back on the throttle and Michael knew the pilot was lining up a shot. Franziska knew it too; she hit the brake, violently downshifted and fought the wheel to veer again over the median to the other side. Heat waves shimmered past the car, there were two bright flashes and a black-edged crater suddenly marred Hitler’s highway. Chunks of concrete crashed down, but the BMW was already racing out of the next curve.

Michael lost sight of the planes. An onrush of panic seized him. He twisted around, and there directly behind them the Mustangs were coming down side-by-side, like vultures, almost floating toward them. Taking their time, he thought. Waiting for Franziska to commit to a move. Where was the Luftwaffe, for Christ’s sake? Closer still came the Mustangs, and lower.

It was just a matter of seconds now before the machine guns started firing and the last rocket ignited. The Mustangs were nearly wingtip-to-wingtip. Michael had the feeling they were going to let go at the same time with everything they had, and it was probably going to happen when the BMW started up the slight incline that was just ahead.

He sensed her trying to decide what to do. Over the noise of the wind they heard the low roar of the Mustangs right at their backs. She decided, and he saw her grasp the gear knob to shift down. She was going to stomp the brake and make the Mustangs overshoot.

Michael had had enough of playing with death. He made his own decision. He reached out and pulled the cap off Franziska’s head, letting the ebony hair boil out and stretch behind her like a banner. She looked at him from the green-tinted goggles as if she thought he’d gone stark raving mad.

The flesh on the back of Michael’s neck crawled. Time seemed to hang, even at one-hundred-fifty kilometers per hour.

The two Mustangs passed overhead, still side-by-side. Picking up speed, they waggled their wings. Then they turned to the right, and Michael watched them as they flashed away, silver-bright and shining, toward the west.

“It’s all right!” he shouted, the wind in his face through the broken glass. “They’ve gone!”

“They’ve
gone
? How do you
know
?” Her voice was admirably controlled, but he could see that her eyes were wet. “And what was that with my
cap
?”

“I decided that no fighter pilot worth his wings,” he said, “would kill a woman in a sports roadster. But they had to
see
you were a woman.” He thought the waggling of the wings was the same unspoken message that the Luftwaffe captain had given him at the party last night:
good luck
.

So there
were
gentlemen left in the world, after all.

Their good luck, today.

At the top of the incline, Franziska downshifted, braked and cut their speed. In the distance ahead of them was the smoke-haze of the destruction in Berlin. Franziska eased the BMW to a stop in the road, and they sat there while the engine burbled and the hot metal tick…tick…ticked.

She drew a long breath, both her hands still tight on the wheel. Michael reached into his coat for the white handkerchief he always carried. “Let’s do this,” he said, and he pushed the goggles up on her forehead. The tears in her eyes were of course from terror, but she was certainly a strong-hearted woman. He dabbed the tears away, as gently as he could. If he wasn’t supposed to be such a man, he might have shed a few himself. Even so, his hand wasn’t exactly the steadiest it had ever been.

“Now you know,” he told her, “why scout cars aren’t silver.”

She stared at him blankly for a few seconds. Then all the fire and excitement rushed back into her eyes and she began to laugh as if this had been the grandest adventure of a lifetime. Her laugh was so open and natural that Michael was struck by the strange humor it carried, and he too began to laugh. What could be more funny, he mused in his hilarity, than to be sitting in a fast roadster on the edge of Berlin with a beautiful Nazi Gestapo ‘talent’ and the smell of rocket explosive in one’s clothes? He suspected that at this minute he’d become a little unhinged.

Franziska’s laugh ceased.

She leaned toward him, took his cap off and put her hand around the back of his neck.

Her lips just barely grazed his own, but her mouth was ready to be crushed.

She stayed at that intimate distance. Michael didn’t try to breech the gap; he didn’t yet have her permission, and he respected that.

When she kissed him, it was soft. It was the blue sky of May, the warmth of a sun-lit morning. It was distant music playing in a park. It was boats on a lake, young men in their best courting suits and young women with their parasols. It was a kiss that belonged to another world.

He kissed her back, just as softly. Their lips met and held, and some trick of friction or cold air made them tingle together, and when Franziska pulled her head back and looked at him she said, “
Oh
,” very quietly, as if he’d made a statement that required an answer yet she didn’t know how to give one.

“We’d better get off this road,” Michael told her, which was what he’d intended to say before the air attack. When she still hesitated he had a bad instant in which he couldn’t decide whether he’d spoken in German, Russian or English. Then she nodded, answered “
Ja, haben Sie Recht
,” and she started them off once more toward the city.

Seven

I Loved A Man Who Died

The damage to the BMW wasn’t so bad. Besides the broken windshield, various dents to the bodywork, a single bullet hole in the spare tire mounted on the trunk and the groove across the passenger side where a ricocheting slug had passed, it was perfectly able to race another day.

The damage to the bed in Franziska’s studio apartment on Wittelsbacherstrasse was more substantial. Sometime during the afternoon’s storm that swept through, the bed capsized on one side like a freighter struck by a U-Boat torpedo and its occupants, still wrapped up in each other, tumbled off to the floor where they finished what they’d started.

They lay on a pile of pillows beneath the window, as the afternoon light began to fade. Franziska had her head on his shoulder, and she suddenly woke up from her sweet slumber and stretched so hard Michael heard her joints pop.

“If you give me one more orgasm,” she said into his ear, “you’re going to have to take up permanent residence in my pussy.”

“What more could a man ask for but a warm, snug place to call home?” he asked.

She began to lick in slow circles around his nipples, her tongue flicking this way and that.

“You’re tempting fate,” he warned. Though one very important part of his body had come to the end of its usefulness for awhile, he still could flip her over and dive in headfirst, and before his own tongue and lips were through he would make her scream all the framed photographs off the walls.

She put her chin on his chest and stared up at him. “Are you married?”

An instant after she’d posed the question, she pressed her hand to her mouth. The gray eyes widened. “Oh my God! Oh Christ, I didn’t mean to ask that! Forget it, all right?”

“All right,” Michael answered. Better, perhaps, to make her think he
was
married?

“That’s a stupid question,” she went on after a short pause. She snuggled up in the crook of his right arm. “It’s unsophisticated.”

“It’s not unsophisticated to be curious.”

“Yes it is.” She didn’t speak again for a while, and he didn’t either. He could feel her heart beating under his hand. They’d gone to lunch at a small cafe after the incident on the
Reichsautobahn
, and then Franziska had brought him here to take the photographs. After about half-an-hour of posing before a Nazi flag tacked to the wall, Michael had had enough of being told what to move and what not to move, especially when Franziska took off her clothes and informed him from behind the chrome-bodied Leica Standard that she just needed a few more shots.

“When the war’s over,” Franziska said quietly, “it will all have been worth it.”

Michael said nothing.

“You know what I’m saying. When the trash and the undesirables are removed from society. When Germany takes its rightful place. You know.”

“Yes,” Michael had to say, because she was waiting for his reply.

“I’ve seen some of the sketches for the buildings. Berlin is going to be the most beautiful city in the world. The parks will be majestic. The
Reichsautobahn
will connect every city in Europe, the trains will be back as they were, but even faster, and the ocean liners will even be bringing the American tourists over. And everyone will be flying in their own personal autogyros. You wait and see.”

“I’m just concerned with the next few months.”

“Oh, I understand that!” She rolled over so she could see his face in the shadowy light. “You don’t have to grasp the big picture right now, but you’re going to be part of it. All good Germans will be part of it. Those who fought and died, they’ll be part of it too. The war memorials are going to be the envy of the world. Showing them all how we stood against the Bolsheviks. How we were the wall they couldn’t break through. How we won the battle the British and Americans didn’t have the courage to fight.” She nodded, to emphasize her own certainty. “If the Fuhrer says it’s so, it will be so.”

“Yes,” Michael agreed. He had to stare at the ceiling. He’d already noticed many cracks up there. This building on the outside was untouched by the bombing, yet here was the damage from distant explosions, creeping along walls and ceilings from cellar to attic, weakening the structure by millimeters of brick dust and plaster, a slow destruction, a death counted in sheared-off nailheads and popped rivets, until the sick center could not hold.