The Hunter From the Woods (37 page)

Michael put his hands to his face.

“Is there any other way?” he asked, with a note of pleading.

“
You
don’t have to do it. Our mutual friend suggested it be offered first to you. If you refuse, you can go with me right now to the safe house. We’ll get you out as soon as possible.”

“But she’ll still be killed.”

“Yes. We have people with experience.”

“
How
—” His voice cracked. He tried once more: “How would it be done?”

The priest watched a Naval officer cross the lobby with a stylishly-dressed woman in a derby hat clinging to his arm. “A knock at the door of her studio, late at night. A silenced bullet to the head. Or someone following her to strangle her with a wire garotte wrapped around her neck. It would be quick.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Michael whispered, in agony. “I suppose one can also call murder a just retaliation for past sins?”

Kollmann’s face was impassive. “I didn’t always need the licorice for my breath, Major.”

The future had come. Michael knew it. And this future was more terrible than he ever might have conceived. The fighter pilots couldn’t kill a woman, because they left that hideous job to the slime on the ground. The shadow men. And him, the most shadowy of all.

“Can’t I get her out?” he tried. “Knock her over the head, use chloroform or something? Can’t I just get her out, and call it done?”

“Too risky. And in the scheme of things she’s more valuable to us dead than alive.”

It took Michael Gallatin awhile to get the words from brain to mouth and out.

“If…I were to do it…how would I?”

“You’re the killer,” said Kollmann.

Michael closed his eyes. But when he opened them again, he was still sitting in a black leather chair in the lobby of the Grand Frederik in the presence of this priest, and there was still a task to be done.

“Yes,” he agreed, “I
am
the killer. Yes, I am. So.” He lifted his gaze to the blue lenses. “I presume you have a chemist.”

“Yes.”

“I want a pill. Something that dissolves quickly. Something that is tasteless and odorless.” He had to stop for a little bit, because he was hurting so much. “Something that will put her to sleep, within…fifteen or twenty minutes. That’s what I want. That she just go to sleep.”

Kollmann thought about it, his fingers tapping the arm of his chair. “It’s a tall order.”

Michael leaned toward him with such ferocity that the tapping instantly stopped and the man shrank back.

“Yes, it is,” Michael said, his eyes enraged though his voice was eerily controlled, “but I’m the killer. And I’m telling you, as a killer, that if she feels pain, that if she throws up her guts or defecates herself, or anything
other
than going to sleep, then I’m coming after the messenger. And the messenger may think he’s so righteous and pure for his glorious love of what Germany once was, but it’s all murder to me because I’m the killer. If the messenger tries to hide in his house, I’ll tear it to pieces, and if he tries to hide in his church I’ll take that apart too. And maybe I’ll never leave this city alive, but after she’s dead and I’ve ripped you to shreds I will have no more need to live another day, because the killer’s work will be finished.”

It took a moment for Kollmann to relax. He must have really been close to God, because his next question was, “Shall I bring you two pills, then?”

Michael had already thought about that. As much as he might wish it, suicide was repugnant to him. The wolf in him wouldn’t allow it. No. Never.

“Only the one,” he said.

The priest stood up, and so did Michael.

Kollmann said, “We’ll come up with something. Still…there won’t be an opportunity to test its qualities. It’ll have to be guesswork.”

“Prayer might help,” Michael advised.

Kollmann offered his hand. Michael just looked at it, and thought how he could tear it off at the wrist. On his way across the lobby, Kollmann was stopped by the older man and woman. The woman began to softly weep, and then so did the man.

The priest spoke to them and touched their shoulders, but never did he remove his blue-tinted glasses.

Michael climbed up the stairs to his room, where pallid-faced and gasping he leaned over the toilet just in time to be violently, wrenchingly sick.

Eleven

The Tenth Woman

He went for a long walk through the streets, as evening turned the dim light of afternoon blue and snowflakes whirled around him. He walked on and on, as if seeking to be lost, but his sense of direction was unerring and he always knew exactly where his hotel was. He walked through bombed areas, where people still tried to salvage something of their lives from the ruins. He saw an overturned wagon with two dead horses still in their traces, the bloated carcasses whitened with snow. He saw a pack of desperate dogs gnawing in to get at the entrails, and he walked on.

In the silence of the evening streets, just a few people out and a few wagons, some riders on bicycles and a scattering of cars, Michael thought he could hear the sound of artillery firing in the east. The Russians might be slowed for a short while, but nothing would stop them from taking this city. He knew the strong, unyielding and often brutal nature of the Russian; after all, he was one of them.

At his hotel, the clerk gave him a message from Franziska. She had a dinner engagement she couldn’t get out of, and then she had to do some photographic work in her darkroom. But she would call at eleven o’clock.

The clerk read the last lines of the message: “Think of me when you have dinner. A thousand kisses. Weather forecast: more rain coming”. The clerk looked strangely at the major, as if he suspected this must be some kind of secret code.

Michael took the paper and had dinner in the restaurant followed by a good strong glass of brandy. He wound up paying for an entire bottle, which he took with a glass up to his room.

He was waiting, half-drunk, when the telephone rang at ten-fifty-six.

“I have to work a little later,” she told him. “Some more pictures to develop, and they must be done tonight.”

“By order of Herr Rittenkrett?” he asked.

She was silent for a few seconds. Then: “You don’t sound like yourself. Are you all right?”

“I’ve had dinner and I’ve been drinking. Just a little.” Had he slurred that word? Have to be careful here, not to let his accent slip. What the hell was wrong with him, letting his guard down like this?

“You’ve been drinking,” she repeated back.

“Yes. Brandy. I’m looking at what is almost an empty bottle. I expect to empty it in the next…oh…ten minutes.”

Franziska gave a sudden gasp, as if she’d been slapped.

“Your orders came,” she said.

He closed his eyes, the better to see her standing before him. “Yes.”

“Oh…Horst. I’ll be right there.”

“No! Franziska…finish what you’re doing.”

“I’m leaving
now
. This can wait.”

“Listen to me!” he said, more sharply than he’d intended. “Just…stay there and do what you need to do. Keep your mind on your work.”

“Oh, of
course
!” Were there tears in that word?

“I mean it.” He wondered what Mallory and Kollmann would say to his telling her she should do the exact work he’d been sent to interfere with. Did it matter now? “Franziska,” he said in a quieter tone, “I don’t have to leave tonight. Nor tomorrow.”

“When do you have to go, then?” Yes, definitely a tear or two. Her voice had thickened with what could only be sorrow.

I have to go
after you’re dead
, he thought.

But he said, “We still have time enough. I promise.”

“There can’t be enough time.”

“Go back to your work,” he said firmly.

“I’ll be there as soon as I finish.” She hung up.

Michael returned the receiver to its cradle and then he picked up the bottle of brandy and swallowed some more courage. He would go down and buy another bottle, but he couldn’t get too drunk or he might lose himself. Whoever he was tonight.

When Michael heard the knock on his door at twelve-forty and opened it, Franziska rushed in and put her arms around him. She was wearing her fawn-colored overcoat and a sea-green beret. She kissed him on the cheek, on the forehead, on the lips and on the throat. She pressed herself into him. Then she put her head on his shoulder and said in his ear, “I know men who can help. They can have you reassigned to duty here. All I have to do is—”

He knew what she would have to do.

He took her chin in his hand and glared into her luminous eyes.

“No! You’re not doing that for
me
. Do you hear? Not for me.” He saw the pain in her face, and it nearly dropped him to his knees. He tried to pull a smile up from somewhere. “There’s no need for sadness. Didn’t you say to me that this is my
purpose
? And you know fully well you said that God would not allow a man like me to—”

“That was
before
,” she interrupted, and he saw the tears bloom. One overflowed and streaked down her right cheek.

“Before what? We went to bed together?”

“No.” A second tear followed the first. “Before I wanted you to stay with me. I know forever is a long time, so I won’t say forever. But we could start out by saying it
might
be forever. Couldn’t we? Please, please, please.” It was she who got down on her knees. She grasped his hand and kissed it, and she held it against a tear-wet cheek. “Please, I can take care of this. I can go see those men, it would be nothing, it would be so easy, I could—”

“Stand up! Come on!
Up
!” He pulled her to her feet. “Don’t beg,” he said. “Never beg. Not to any man.”

“I don’t want you to
die
!” she rasped. And there it was. The reality, in amid all the fictions, the parties and the merrymaking. She trembled, and her tears were trickling slowly down and so also trickled down a small thread of saliva from her lower lip.

Get out of here
, he almost said. He thought for a few seconds of shouting at her, of running her out because this was too much, it was impossible to bear this. But the fact was, he knew how short their hours were, and if she had to die—if she
had
to die—then he would be with her when it happened, and it would not be a cold stranger with a silenced pistol or a strangler in the alley at the end of the street. He would take the responsibility to put her over as gently as possible. And then, quite suddenly, he felt the burn in his own eyes and he lowered his head but she’d already seen.

She put a finger under his chin to angle his face toward her again.

Strongly and clearly she said, “I’m not going to let you be lost.”

“I have lied to you,” he heard himself answer. “My Westphalian accent is false. Studied. I was not born in Dortmund. I am…different, from anyone else. I was born in Russia, and I was a child there. What you’re hearing in my accent is—”

Her fingers went to his lips.

“Shhhhh,” she said. “I don’t care. Just answer me this: you’re not a traitor, are you?”

“No, I’m not a traitor.”

“Then what does it
matter
? Very well, so you were born in Russia. What were you, the family secret?” She didn’t wait for a response. “If you looked into the histories of most of the people at that
Signal
party, you’d find few of them without a chambermaid or a stable boy hidden in their family trees.”

The power of illusion, he thought. Or
delusion
. Right now she was creating the story in her mind of how he was the child of an ill-starred love between a German officer and a Russian maiden on the eve of the Great War, and how he’d probably been raised by the simple and gentle maiden, but then she’d sent him to be cared for by his father in Dortmund because she knew what better education and enlightenment he would receive. In fact, that sounded close to the movie they’d seen at the cinema a few nights ago.

What was the point of going down the road of truth? It was too fantastic to be believed. And if he showed her…what then?

He might kill her of fright, and then he could go home like a real hero.

He put his arms around her and held her tightly. They clung together like the only still-solid objects in a universe disintegrating to dust.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. Sorry, he realized, that she had not been born in England, that they had not met years before this one, that even together they stood on different sides of a chasm. Sorry that life was as cruel as it was, and that time could never be stopped or wound backward.

“It wasn’t a bad lie,” she answered, misunderstanding. “I forgive you.”

She kissed him on the lips. She traced her tongue along the outline of his mouth. She took her clothes off and pressed her breasts against his chest. She ground her second heart against his groin in slow circles while she stared pleadingly into his eyes but he could not be roused.

“Are you tired of me?” she asked.

Could a man ever be tired of the sun in winter? He said, “No, it’s not that.”