The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (26 page)

“My God,” said Marsh. Will knew he was thinking of his daughter.

They were nearing Will’s flat, skimming along the south edge of the green expanse of Hyde Park along Kensington Road, when the light traffic slowed to a halt. Marsh idled Stephenson’s Rolls into a queue of several other cars.

“Damned Jerries,” said Will. Bomb craters, the rubble of collapsed buildings, and unexploded ordnance were common traffic hazards of late.

They inched forward a bit at a time. Will expected to see a troop of sappers from the Royal Engineers setting up, as was often the case with bomb damage. Instead, a policeman directed the queue around a traffic smashup.

An omnibus on a side street had blasted through the intersection with Kensington and smashed into the Victorian guard house at Alexandra Gate. It had clipped two cars, nearly flipping one, and pinning another to the guard house. The omnibus had ripped a deep furrow through the flowerbeds. Three of the four pillars on the guard house portico had come down, littering the grounds with chunks of granite. Will glimpsed two more policemen carrying a stretcher covered with a sheet away from the site of the pinned car just as Marsh cleared the congestion and sped up again.

Blood prices.

Will wondered who had arranged this one. He clawed at his necktie. He yanked his collar open, too. A shirt button
plinked
into his lap.

“Not far from your doorstep,” said Marsh. “Perhaps it’s for the best that you haven’t driven the Snipe down from Bestwood.”

Will concentrated on breathing, the ebb and flow of air through his lungs. He wasn’t drowning just yet. Not yet.

“You know, Pip . . . I rather think I will take you up on that pint.”

Marsh looked at him sidewise. “Honestly?”

“Please.”

Will didn’t say anything else until Marsh found a pub with
PLENTY OF BEER, BOTTLE
&
DRAUGHT
chalked on the door. Marsh had to point it out twice. Will didn’t hear him the first time, because he was too distracted by the crash of surf and an advancing tide.

1 September 1940

Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials

O
n Sundays, Klaus took breakfast with Doctor von Westarp.

His parlor on the third floor of the farmhouse overlooked the grounds of the REGP. The treetops of the distant forest shimmered green, yellow, and red in an early autumn breeze. Over the susurration of leaves, one could hear the stutter of a machine gun, the
whoosh
and crackle of fire, the
whumpf
of muffled land mine detonations, Buhler barking orders off in the distance. Gravel pattered against the windowpanes. It came from the immense sand pit that had been constructed on the west side of the complex.

It was quieter inside. The doctor demanded strict silence during meals. Extraneous noise caused indigestion, he insisted. Silence during the meal, followed by a symphony and one cup (precisely eight ounces) of coffee. That was the doctor’s recipe for a vigorous constitution. But now Mahler’s Sixth had ended, and the gramophone hissed while the needle skipped around the center of the disc. Klaus used a toast point to mop up the last of his breakfast. Today it had been quail eggs, salty Dutch bacon, lemon curd, and bitter coffee mixed with real cream.

The doctor commanded such esteem in the eyes of the Reich’s leadership that he enjoyed the first pick of many spoils of war. And Klaus, having single-handedly rescued Gretel from enemy territory (therefore making possible the chain of successes that had inflated the doctor’s prestige over the summer) enjoyed von Westarp’s favor.

Skrreep.
Von Westarp raised the gramophone needle, put the arm on its cradle, and gently lifted the disc with his fingertips. He tilted it this way and that, peering at it through his thick eyeglasses, inspecting it for dust and scratches with the same concentration he applied to subjects in his laboratory.

“I have a new task for you,” he said.

At last.
A frisson of excitement ricocheted through Klaus, banishing the usual lethargy brought on by a fulfilling meal. He sat up. “I’m ready.”

Emboldened by his success in May, Klaus had been agitating for another mission to England. Gretel’s report regarding her experiences in enemy custody—though hard to believe at first—pointed the way to the conquest of Great Britain. Kill the sorcerers, and the island would fall. Klaus could do that easily.

But the high command had disregarded his suggestion. Gretel’s advice had guided the Luftwaffe through the systematic elimination of Britain’s air defenses. The island nation faced a deficit of fighting men, armaments, and morale. The OKW felt that Britain’s final defenses would collapse under a sustained bombing campaign.

It was slow and inefficient. Klaus could fix the problem in a matter of days.

Von Westarp exhaled forcefully in short little bursts, clearing the gramophone disc of dust. The motes danced in the sunlight slanting through the tall windows. Between exhalations he added, almost as an afterthought, “You must do this, or my reputation will suffer.”

“I would die to prevent that,” said Klaus. He was pleased with how genuine it sounded. Perhaps it was true.

“You will oversee the construction of new incubators.”

Incubators.
The excitement disintegrated. Cold panic filled the void it left behind, as though Klaus had been stabbed with an icicle. The buzz of the Götterelektron filled his head. Klaus wanted to dematerialize, to become ephemeral so that he couldn’t be imprisoned.

He had tried it once, years ago. His battery had lasted just long enough to whip the doctor into a frenzied rage. Two days later, Klaus
had emerged from his box feeble with dehydration and sobbing for clemency.

A moment passed while the rest of the doctor’s statement sank in. Klaus released the Götterelektron, ashamed of his weakness. He hoped the doctor hadn’t noticed the way the dust had eddied through the space occupied by Klaus’s body.

Klaus drained the last drops of coffee from his cup to wash away the taste of copper. He set it back on its saucer with the characteristic
clink
of fine Dresden porcelain.

“I don’t understand.” Also genuine. Also true.

Von Westarp turned his attention to Klaus, eyes narrowed in irritation. “The continuation of my work requires new incubators. You will see they are constructed promptly. You do remember your incubator, don’t you?”

The doctor called it that because it incubated the Willenskräfte, willpower. Klaus called it a coffin box.

“Yes.”

“Tell the shop to build several of each type,” said the doctor. “You have firsthand experience, so you will instruct them on the proper methods.” He slid the music disc into its sleeve. “And note their progress closely.”

Klaus’s incubator had been filled with hydraulic plates for squeezing the occupant. Reinhardt’s incubator had been fitted with compressors, pumps, and coils of liquid refrigerant. Heike’s incubator had been made of window glass, and ringed with lamps, mirrors, and lenses. Kammler’s had been the largest, lined with knives and needles, with a single lever out of reach of the restraints.

Von Westarp shuffled across the room in the threadbare dressing gown he’d taken to calling his “uniform.” He poured a new cup from the porcelain carafe on the table and scooped six heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee. He took the coffee to the bay window overlooking the empire he’d built.

“They envy my success. They covet my standing with the Führer.
You must watch them, lest my enemies sabotage me. You’re the only one I trust.”

It was common for the doctor to change subjects like this. Such was the mark of a great mind, seeing connections that others found opaque. Common wisdom at the REGP.

But seeing him there at the window . . . Klaus wondered if many great men shuffled around in their dressing gowns and obsessed over their bowel movements.

He was silent for too long as he considered this.

“Does this please you?” snapped von Westarp. “The plotting of my enemies?”

“No, Herr Doctor!” The words came automatically. “They won’t dare act against you. I’ll see to it.”

“Good. See the work is completed quickly.”

“It will be.” Klaus stood. He saluted. “Thank you for breakfast, Herr Doctor.”

“Fetch your sister before you speak to the machinists,” said von Westarp, still gazing outside. Klaus recognized the black Mercedes coming up the long crushed-gravel drive. It belonged to General Field Marshal Keitel, the Führer’s chief of staff on the OKW.

“At once.”

Von Westarp slurped at his coffee, waving him away with an impatient flutter of his free hand.

Klaus took his leave of the doctor and went downstairs. He passed the debriefing rooms on his way outside. From one of the rooms came a rhythmic panting and the squeak of wooden table legs across a tile floor as Pabst “interrogated” one of the Twins. Her sister had been deployed to the Baltic states. Everything she learned about the Soviet occupation there would go straight to her double, unimpeded by the threat of Allied and Soviet listening posts intercepting the transmission.

The autumnal smell of wet leaves wafted across the training grounds. It would rain to night. The grounds also smelled of diesel fuel and hot sand, from where Reinhardt trained for his mission to North Africa.

Britain’s piddling deployments in Egypt and Sudan would fall
quickly now that the Italians were on the move; their reinforcements had perished on the beaches of France, after all. But an Italian North Africa would put the Mediterranean in Mussolini’s control. Reinhardt’s talents—perfectly suited to the desert—would go a long way toward ensuring that didn’t happen. He would also spearhead the inevitable advances into the oil fields of the Middle East.

News of the assignment had eased the foul mood that had enveloped Reinhardt since Klaus’s elevation to von Westarp’s favorite. For months, random objects had developed a tendency to erupt into flames in Klaus’s presence.

Reinhardt’s new boast was that he had learned how to reverse his ability, to pull heat
out
of something. It meant he could vitrify a swath of sand and cool it into a crude but passable roadbed in moments. Klaus watched. First, the air above the sandpit shimmered. Then the sand turned dark as the individual grains lost their cohesion and relaxed into slag. Dust and debris skittered along the ground past Reinhardt’s boots, pulled along by the updraft. The furnace heat felt like sunburn on Klaus’s face. The liquefied sand fractured and buckled as Reinhardt willed it cool. It made a hideous noise like the shattering of a million dinner plates.

The entire process took seconds. A Sonderkraftfahrzeug half track plowed forward, crossing from the solid earth of the training ground onto the simulated desert. The makeshift roadbed held. Without the benefit of Reinhardt’s alchemy, the heavy armored vehicle would have sunk to its front axle.

But the result was akin to driving over a road paved with shards of glass. The front tires shredded explosively.

“Piss on Christ’s wounds!” yelled Reinhardt.

“Perhaps you can regain the doctor’s favor with comedy!” Klaus called.

“Piss on you, too,” said Reinhardt. The air around him started to shimmer again.

Klaus left. He passed the new pump house as he headed for the tree line at the far edge of the training ground.

The ground rumbled beneath his boots. He staggered. Slack-jawed
Kammler shambled across a minefield, deflecting each detonation back into the earth with the force mirror of his willpower. His long leash snaked along the ground to where Buhler chanted at him through a megaphone.

Klaus found his sister strolling through the carpet of leaves under the oak and ash trees at the edge of the farm. She walked slowly, studying the ground before taking each step. Little blossoms of blue and white dusted her wild black hair with flower petals.

She went through phases. Back in Spain, it had been the modernist poets. This summer, she’d taken to collecting posies. But the weather was changing; Gretel would have to find a new hobby soon.

“Gretel.” She didn’t look up. As usual.

Klaus joined her. Leaves and twigs crackled underfoot.

“Keitel is here. You shouldn’t keep him waiting.”

“We have a few minutes.” She stopped and cocked her head, staring at nothing in particular. “He has diarrhea.”

“The doctor will have something to say about that,” said Klaus. He offered his hand to guide her around a thornbush. Gretel took it, shifting the flowers she’d collected from one hand to the other.

“Come. We’ll find a vase for those,” he said.

She gazed across the field to where Reinhardt raged.

“Poor junk man,” she said.

Klaus led her around the far side of the farm, toward where Keitel and von Westarp would be waiting. The route took them past the gunnery range that had become Heike’s personal training ground. The guns here fired nonlethal wax bullets designed specially at the REGP, back in the days when it had been the IMV, the Human Advancement Institute. They wouldn’t kill, but the pain was enough to make one wish they did. Klaus remembered his sessions on this range vividly, and he had the scars on his chest to ensure he’d never forget the lessons learned here.