The Hunter From the Woods (40 page)

And fear. Much, much fear.

He was dragged onward, the men moving quickly around him.

The machines gave way to the medieval. Red embers glowed in a brazier full of pokers. And beside it stood that most ancient of torture devices: the rectangular wooden frame, ropes and rollers of the instrument known as ‘the rack’.

Upon seeing it, something in Michael Gallatin stirred and growled a word he took to be
resist
. But that was all, just a growl. He didn’t care to resist. He was no longer fit to wear either flesh or fur. It was over. He was ready to die.

But his captors didn’t know that.

“Ross,” said the Ice Man.

While Michael was held, Ross beat him. The black-gloved fists crunched his ribs, slammed into his shoulders, crashed into his jaw and nose and cheekbones. Michael’s legs gave way and he tumbled into darkness.

He was aware of lying on his back, his wrists and ankles being bound with ropes. He heard the cranking of the ratchet. The rollers rumbled and the ropes tightened, and the pressure began building at the sockets of arms and legs.

Warm liquid was flung into his face. He sputtered and spat. His swollen eyes opened into slits, and he smelled and tasted another man’s wine. In fact, wine from several men.

Michael moved the throbbing bloodmask of his face and was able to find Sigmund amid the shadows. The accountant held a bucket in one hand and was zipping up with the other. Ross also was zipping, and one man had his huge cock flapping up and down for the envy of the others.

Rittenkrett’s crimson moon emerged from the dark. The teeth in its crater gripped a freshly-lit cigarello. “How do you like
our
champagne, Major?”

Michael closed his eyes again. He’d seen by the filmy glare from an overhead bulb that the Ice Man had removed his white suit jacket and was now wearing a leather butcher’s apron.

“Your teeth are still there. Your lips haven’t been ripped off. Yet. You can still talk. Let’s hear the story.”

Michael smelled the smoke ring drift into his face.

The ratchet went
clack
…
clack
…
clack
. The pressure on his joints in-creased. It was not pain yet, but it would be there on the handle’s next turn.

“All right, let me try,” said Rittenkrett. Michael heard the white shoes grind grit on the floorstones. “It’s safe to say, I do believe, that you’re not who you say you are. Eh? Not a German officer. And not even a German? So, because you speak so well and you act with such authority, I’d say someone has gone to great trouble to train you and put you here. You know, I told you…hey, look at me when I’m talking to you!” The tip of the cigarello crisped hair on Michael’s chest.

Michael obeyed, not because he had to but because he wanted to move the torture session along. The sooner they got past the small stuff and Rittenkrett realized his guest would not talk, the faster they’d get to the hard treatment. And from that, it would eventually be the death that Michael desired. How many hours would it take?

No matter. He would never leave this room alive.

“Better,” the Ice Man said. “All right, then. So…well, let me backtrack a bit!” He blew a few smoke rings and admired their advance. “The most amazing thing happened to me today! Just this afternoon, Franziska arrives at my office looking very fetching, and she says, ‘Axel, do you know that thing you’ve always wished to do with me?’ And you can bet I do! So she says, ‘I have one request. That you call Denker in Administration and remind him to do what I’ve asked of him’. And what would that be? I inquire. But she says it’s her private business, and so—knowing I’m going to find out from Denker anyway, who is scared to death of me—I say, as you wish.”

“Therefore, we go to my little hideaway that every decent married man should have,” said the Ice Man, with the cigarello in one corner of his mouth, “and for as long as I am able I partake of this offered gift. Oh, you should have seen her on the edge of the bed as she was! Such a beautiful ass! Ah well.” The massive shoulders shrugged. “I’m going to miss her sense of humor.”

“But that’s not all the story!” Rittenkrett paced back and forth, smiling. He was careful never to leave his prisoner’s field of view. “Denker calls me in the evening with this question: do I know what the relationship is between Franziska Luxe and a certain Major Horst Jaeger?” He made a face and slapped himself on the forehead. “That goddamned man again! After I’ve told him to leave Franziska alone! And now comes the real gem: Denker tells me that this morning Franziska went to see Colonel von Piffin, the old fucking goat who has some pull in the dispatching of orders and so forth, and for an hour or so they left the building. Denker, you understand, is von Piffin’s aide. When they came back, von Piffin was using his walking-stick. It’s common knowledge that he has a little hideaway as well, for his chorus girls. Now listen, Major what’s-your-name, you’ll appreciate this!”

A smoke ring ascended toward the dirty lights.

“Denker,” said the Ice Man, “tells me that Franziska says she has always found him attractive—yes, him with his cocked eyes—and she wishes a favor. If Colonel von Piffin fails to put his signature upon a certain request for transfer in the next day or so, would Denker do it for him? To tell you the truth, he does it all the time. And if Denker the cock-eyed dreamboat will do this for her, Franziska will go to his fucking little hideaway with
him
. Only Denker’s too stupid to have a hideaway, so they go to a broom closet on the fourth floor. Then…get this, now…after
that
is when Franziska came to
me
. Talk about doing a dedicated job, Major!”

Michael started to let his eyelids slide down, but the Ice Man was leaning over him.

“The kicker to this tale of lust and woe is that Denker tells me what Franziska wants done can’t be done,” said Rittenkrett. “She wants her Major Horst Jaeger transferred from the 25th Panzer Grenadier Division before it moves to the East Front. She wants this great man of hers to be transferred to a division on the
Western
Front. Only Denker’s looked up the orders, and found that the 25th Panzer Grenadier Division was relocated to the East Front at the beginning of
last week
.”

“We may have a deserter, I say to Denker. Now we have to do some digging and make some calls, because people have left their offices for the day. It’s night now, the phone lines in and out of Berlin are cut by Inner Ring swine all the time, and every colonel worth a shit is in his little hideaway. Records are incomplete, fucked up by incompetents, lost and damaged. But at last—about an hour ago—we get the information we need. And you know what we find, don’t you? Speak up!”

Michael remained silent.

“You don’t exist,” hissed the Ice Man. “You never did.”

He let that hang, and blew a misshapen circle that curled in upon itself.

Then he opened a red box in his right hand and withdrew from it an ice pick with a pearl-white handle.

Clack…clack…clack
went the ratchet. Michael winced and bit his lower lip as pain rippled through his joints.

“She was trying to have you sent to the Western Front.” The Ice Man inspected his instrument of choice. A small spark of light jumped from the tip. “Hoping to save you from the Russians, I suppose? Picture it. Poor Franziska, fighting for the life of her noble knight with the only weapon she had.”

I’m so tired
, she’d said. She must have scrubbed herself raw to get rid of the odors of those men. Either that, or he was really and truly in love, because all he’d been able to smell was her.

And now, tortured in his own private hell, Michael thought her champagne toast made sense.

To freedom?

To good decisions?

To the sun that sets in the west.

What kind of toast is that?
he remembered asking.

And the reply:
One I hope you remember when you need to
.

He realized what she was trying to tell him.

She seemed to speak to him again, her voice calm and quiet from the realm of the dead:
They can’t be stopped from the East. Not by all our wishes and dreams. Not by all we pretend to be but are not. They can’t be stopped, and when this city dies I will die here too, because I have chosen my field of battle. But you…in the West…can make the good decision to live. You can put aside your rifle when there’s no need for any more death. You can find honor in being one of the Germans who survives a war that is senseless to continue, and give yourself to the British or the Americans. It may be a little while until you find freedom…but you will.

You see? I said everything would be all right, didn’t I?

“And then you killed her,” Rittenkrett said. His hand reared back, and drove the ice pick into the exposed underside of Michael’s left arm.

This little pain was nothing.

“Are you British?” The ice pick slid into his right arm. Rittenkrett gave it a twist.

“Are you American?” The ice pick went into his left thigh.

“Are you
Russian
?” There was a pause, and then Rittenkrett drove the ice pick into Michael Gallatin’s right testicle.

“Oh,” said Rittenkrett in the aftermath of the teeth-gritted scream, “I think
that
hit something!”

His audience, frocked in darkness, laughed.

Rittenkrett nodded to whoever was handling the ratchet.

Clack…clack
. Two turns. Agony upon agony. A mist of sweat and a new flow of blood from Michael’s nostrils. The next turn of the ratchet would tear his shoulders and legs from their sockets.

“I’ll ask again,” the Ice Man announced. “Are you British?”

The ice pick pierced Michael’s side, and more blood spooled down.

“Are you American?”

The ice pick went into his right cheek. Rittenkrett let it sit there vibrating for a few seconds before he took it out.

“Are you Russian?” Rittenkrett’s hand poised in the air. The stub of the cigarello in his mouth glowed as red as his face.

The ice pick entered the loose flesh between Michael’s penis and scrotum.

“Oh, I missed!” said the Ice Man, and he pulled the pick out and jammed it into the left testicle.

His audience applauded at that one. It did go on at length.

Rittenkrett paused in his performance to take a drink of water and flame a fresh Indianer. “What’s the reason for not speaking, sir?” he asked as he returned to the sweating, blood-pocked figure on the rack. “I’m just asking you your nationality, that’s all. Who do you work for, that kind of thing.” He took his position and lifted the pick. “Let’s start again, shall we? Are you British?”

The pick swung down and entered Michael’s left leg just above the knee.

“Are you American?”

Into the upper chest, where it turned on the collarbone.

“Are you Russian?” Rittenkrett lifted the ice pick high. “You know, sir, whoever you are, it’s futile. You’ve lost. Not just you, but your entire effort. Because I hear it on great authority that the scientists are only a few days away from having the Black Sun, and when that is complete no force on earth can stand against the Reich.”

Light gleamed from the bloody tip.

A drop of blood fell, and hit Michael on the forehead.

It was in his mind.

The Black Sun.

Only a few days away.

Something that had wanted to go to sleep, that had yearned for the peace of sleep, now stretched its muscles and opened a fierce green eye.

The Black Sun.

What in the name of God could that be?

In spite of himself, in spite of all the little pains that had merged together to make one pain huge and terrible, he knew his duty just as Franziska had known hers. In the flash of an instant it brought him back from the edge. It cleared his head.

He knew who he was, what he was. And
why
he was.

Michael looked up at the Ice Man and spoke.

In a hoarse, nearly inhuman rasp. And in English.

“I wish…you hadn’t said that.”

“He said something!” Amazed, Rittenkrett looked around at the others. “I think it was English! Uthmann, come over here! Don’t you speak English?”

“I’m about to kill you,” said Michael Gallatin, prisoner of the Gestapo and wrenched out upon the rack.

“
What
?” Rittenkrett leaned down toward him, the cigarello gripped between his teeth on the left side.

What the Ice Man could not possibly know is that there was more than one perfect package in this world.

Fourteen

The Soul Cage

“Kill you,” the major repeated. Except now it was mostly a snarl, because the change was upon him.

One benefit of practice is, indeed, perfection. It comes only after many hundreds of attempts. And through Michael Gallatin’s lifetime, it came from his practice of controlling and guiding the transformation sometimes three or four times a day, in all weather, in all positions both solemnly immobile in the cathedral of the forest and running at full speed as if to beat Satan’s own locomotive on the underworld tracks.