The Hunter From the Woods (36 page)

That was enough for her to hear. She lay silently atop him, holding on.

And he stared at the ceiling for awhile and listened to the storm.

It was the sound, he knew, of the future lashing at the walls around them, trying to get in where the British secret agent and the Nazi huntress lay on the edge of slumber. But the future did not and would not slumber, and Michael knew that very soon it would rush in upon them no matter what he felt, or hoped, or wished for.

And what then?

Oh my God, he thought.

What then?

Ten

The Messenger

The future arrived at around three o’clock the following afternoon.

Berlin wore a crust of snow. Flurries drifted over the roofs and spires and made spitting noises in the places where bomb-burned buildings yet smoldered.

The future arrived as Michael, after returning from lunch with Franziska, was having a quick touch-up shave with the happiest razor in the world. On the silver case were the freshly-tooled letters H and J, as simple as possible. They’d had a long untroubled sleep, tangled together in the bed that she’d nicknamed
der Regen-Hersteller
, the Rain Maker, for reasons obvious to them both. He’d said he hoped she was careful today, whatever she was doing, and she’d confidently replied that she was always careful.

Not careful enough, he thought as he’d watched her walk away. And this time before she reached the end of the block she had glanced back at him and given him a wave and a smile that came closer to breaking his heart than any pain he’d ever known.

The future did not arrive with Russians smashing into the city. It did not arrive with Gestapo agents in black leather coats swarming out of cars and bounding up the stairs to room 214 with their Lugers drawn. It did not arrive with the falling of more bombs, or with train-killing Mustangs pumping rockets into buildings that were old when Beethoven’s Fate first knocked at the door.

It arrived with a telephone call to his room, and a softly-delivered message from a clerk that a priest by the name of Father Hubart Kollmann wished to speak to Major Jaeger in the lobby as soon as possible.

The major said he’d be down in a few minutes.

Now this was puzzling. There was no need for alarm…but still…if this was someone from his side, what was the reason for contact?

But, of course! He was being contacted to end the mission! It was all over. They must have gotten enough of the Inner Ring out that a week’s stay in this Devil’s playground was no longer required. He could get to the safe house and—

Cross the river and go home?

Walk out of this hotel in the company of a priest and never see Franziska again?

And leave her to what he knew was coming, in a month or two or three at the most? The Russians were set on vengeance for what the Germans had done to their countrymen beginning in ‘41. The murders, atrocities and rapes were going to be returned a hundredfold. Michael knew that, as the Russians steadily advanced into German territory, the sufferings of civilians and the sheer horror endured by those who couldn’t or wouldn’t escape were already beyond any demonic imagination.

He finished his shave, washed his face, buttoned up his uniform, put on his cap just so and left the room. It seemed a longer descent down the stairs than before.

The priest was sitting in a black leather chair in the far corner of a lobby that maintained, in spite of all realities, its opulent
faux
medieval charm. Flames crackled in the gray stone hearth, which was decorated with carvings of the faces of various knights and noblemen. Flags of many family crests were on display, all surrounding a huge Nazi banner. It was fitting, Michael thought as he crossed the gold-colored carpet, that the priest be waiting for him under a tapestry that depicted a medieval wolfhunt, with men on horseback plunging their spears into the doomed and bloody beast.

“Major Jaeger,” said the priest, as he stood up from his chair.

“Father Kollmann, is it?” He shook the man’s hand. A hard grip, very dry.

“It is.” Kollmann motioned to another chair, identical to his own, that faced him. “Please, sit.”

Michael did, like a good dog.

Kollmann sat down and, smiling faintly, seemed to be carefully examining the major. Michael had already taken the priest in: tall and slender, about forty-five, with light brown hair showing hints of gray here and there, a sharp nose, a long chin, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with blue-tinted lenses that made view of the eyes difficult. Slim-fingered hands with manicured nails, a bit vain for a priest. Black shoes polished to a military or holier-than-thou gloss. The smell of soap or aftershave that had a little too much topnote of Paris perfume, and the odor of a drink or two in the early afternoon. Also, the priest had a taste for licorice; there was probably some in his coat.

“We’re all hoping for an early spring,” said Kollmann.

“I can’t recall a colder winter,” Michael returned.

“But my dog certainly enjoyed it,” was the response to that.

“What kind of dog?” The response to the response.

“Just a mutt,” was the final piece.

Michael nodded. He removed his cap and stared up at the tapestry. There was some message in it, he thought. Maybe something he didn’t want to see.

“The situation is evolving well,” Kollmann said after a time. The movement of his head tracked a few people crossing the lobby. An older man and woman were seated on a sofa at a comfortable distance away, the woman’s face bowed. The man was talking quietly to her. Michael had already seen them; they looked like people who’d made a long trip under the burden of great sadness, possibly to visit in the Army hospital an armless or legless or completely appendage-free torso that used to be a good German boy. Michael wondered how many times that scene had been repeated, in how many countries, and when it would ever stop. “Evolving well,” Kollmann repeated.

“Glad to hear,” was Michael’s brusque comment.

The priest steepled his long fingers. He stared into space. Communing with God? Michael wondered. Hearing some voice from the divine infinite?

“There’s been an alteration,” said Kollmann.

Michael waited. He was tense.
Alteration.
A tailor’s term, the taking in or letting out of clothes by nimble needles.

“We want the woman removed,” came the next decree, as hard and dry as the handshake.

“Removed,” Michael echoed. “You mean…taken somewhere?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I do not.” Michael’s heart felt squeezed by a hand made of a thousand thorns. He couldn’t breathe. The blood pulsed in his face. “No, I do not,” he said again.

“The decision has been made to remove her. We want to make a statement.”

And here was where he almost lost everything he’d built into himself over the hardship and experience of his years: his self-control, his knowledge that one must sometimes accept an occasional whip from a stupid man in order to move toward freedom, the pushing down and down and down of his own desires of the heart, the grimness of the morning before dawn when the wolves call and no human is there in bed to make you want to stay. To make you
need
to stay.

He almost lost it all, because the bones seemed to start to reshape in his face before he caught himself, and the blood roared within him and the scent of the wildness that was his deepest essence bloomed from his flesh.

“A
statement
?” He sprayed spittle. His face was contorted, and he leaned toward the priest with death in his eyes. “A statement of
what
? That we can kill women just as easily as
they
can?”

Kollmann said, “Calm down, Major,” as if speaking to a slightly-troublesome moron.

That was very nearly his last utterance upon the face of this earth.

Michael struggled to regulate his breathing. His joints were sore. All his bones had threatened, in the briefest of seconds, to rearrange themselves. Across the back of his neck, against the collar, he felt the scurryings of small coarse black and gray hairs rising and falling like strange tides. Only he knew what they were, and only he knew how much he wanted to kill the priest for even daring to speak this dirty idea into action.

Kollmann, his eyes hidden behind the blue lenses, reached into the pocket of his immaculate coat, and the fingers with their manicured nails returned with a small packet of black licorice sticks. He took one, slid it into a corner of his mouth, and offered the pack to Michael.

“No thank you,” Michael said. “I’m not a drunkard, so I don’t need that to hide the smell of my breath.”

Kollmann sat very still for a few seconds. His face was a blank. He returned the pack of licorice to his pocket.

“We are still where we are,” he told Michael. “The alteration does not come from me. I’m the messenger. But I am told to tell you that you should not blame our mutual friend for the disaster at Arnhem, and you should not blame him for this.”

“I’ll blame whoever I fucking choose to blame,” came the answer, spoken in almost a snarl.

“We need to make a statement,” the priest went on, his voice and demeanor maddeningly calm. “Not to the Germans, but to the Russians.” He lowered his voice, though there was no one close enough to hear. “They have spies here, watching. They want to see how we handle ourselves in matters like this, for future reference. We have to be as ruthless as they are, Major. Otherwise, they’ll walk all over us when they take the world stage. And believe me…when they seize Berlin, which they will…they will claim a large piece of Europe. So the woman needs to be removed, as a statement of what we will not tolerate.”

“One woman,” Michael said bitterly.

“No, she’s not the only one. Of course not. But she’s the one you’re being ordered to remove.”

“Why? Because I’ve gotten close to her?”

“Exactly,” said the priest.

Michael was sweating. It was oozing out of him. He could smell the sourness of himself. He put a trembling hand to his forehead.

“Are you going to be ill?” Kollmann inquired.

Michael lowered his hand. He smiled into the blue lenses, his face slick. “Do you believe in Hell?”

“Certainly I do.”

“You’re a damned liar,” said Michael, “because if you believed in Hell, you would be getting out of that chair and running for your life.”

The fingers steepled again.

“Oh, I see.” Did the mouth, with its licorice stick in one corner, twist into the briefest worm of a smile? “We have a complication.”

Michael stared at the floor, as that ridiculous hollow word clanged in his mind.

“I’ll remind you, Major,” said the priest, “that this woman has been instrumental in the brutal murders of many German patriots. Of many fine men, woman,
and
children. Because, you must realize, entire families have been destroyed in this. Just disappeared without a trace, but certainly we know they were taken first to Gestapo headquarters. And some of those people—those patriots who risked
everything
to save this country from its self-mutilation, its sheer drum-beating
insanity
—were my friends. Now, I suspect, bones and ashes in a garbage pit somewhere. Before we go any further with this, shall I supply for you a list of their names and a display of their photographs? I can show you some grand pictures of the children, all dressed in their nice clothes and smiling. You know, there’s nothing quite like a child’s smile.”

Michael kept his head lowered.

Kollmann nodded, still working on his candy. “They
are
the future, children are. Such potential, to make things brighter in this unhappy world. But, things do get complicated. Sometimes—very often it seems, in this day and age—the dark and the light get all mixed up together. And there are intelligent men who count on that happening. They are educated to make that happen. It is their most profound desire to do so. Now, I can sit here and say that possibly this woman fell under the spell and influence of such a man. That finding herself surrounded by fellow Germans who bore a grudge against the world and heeded the stirring call of a madman gave her a swell of what she took to be true and most worthy patriotism. Well,
he
said it: if you don’t follow me, you don’t love Germany. And he’s a fantastic speaker who can make some very convincing arguments. But…” And here he removed the stick and gazed at what had been whittled away. “One can call murder a process of cleansing, an eradication of the unfit, and the preparation for a Thousand-Year-Reich. It’s still murder, even in the language of the lawyer and the politician.” He let that hang for a few seconds. “She’s one of the people who must pay for that murder. Not just of other human beings, but of the country I knew. Because, Major Jaeger, my land has been burned away. I’m just trying my best to save a few seeds to throw on the scorched earth, in hopes anything can ever grow here again.”

“So,” said the priest, “you see, I do believe in Hell.” He brought out the packet and returned the remainder of the stick to its brothers. “I live there.”