The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (42 page)

The working class took a dim view of funk holes. As well they should have.

Will, being not of the working class, knew of several such places. Places where those with enough money—more money than conscience, certainly—could wait out the war in comfort. The residents typically pooled their rationing books together, enabling the proprietor or proprietress to prepare more suitable meals. And in return for a not-inconsiderable fee, the residents spent their war time years painting, punting, playing bridge, or listening to the wireless with a glass of sherry on hand while complaining about how Mr. Churchill had done everything so very wrong.

The driver sped off—grumbling about the well-to-do, his son in the Royal Navy, and his daughter in the Women’s Land Army—as soon as Will had his suitcases out. From Will’s vantage point there before the main house, he could see a tennis court, a fishpond, a whitewashed pergola, and a horse stable. A breeze carried the perfume of bluebells and hollyhocks blooming down in the garden.

It was, Will decided, a perfectly fine place to die.

22 May 1941

Bielefeld, Germany

T
he weather turned on them yet again. But it was different this time: a relentless, eyeball-cracking cold, equal parts ice and malice. And although this seemed impossible, or perhaps too disturbing to
contemplate, Klaus felt as if the deepest freeze, the very worst of it, was following them. Dogging them. It seemed drawn to their uniforms, their regalia.

Klaus had never before in his life seen Reinhardt shiver. Now they all did it, constantly.

At night, when the temperature plunged and every snowflake became a crystalline fléchette, patterns emerged within the interplay of moonlight and shadow. Wind sculpted the snowdrifts into unknowable shapes. Phantom scents lingered like half-remembered dreams on a wind that murmured in a language too alien to discern.

But most disturbing of all were the rumors. Klaus had heard in each of the last two towns they’d visited that the local children had begun to act strangely. They babbled endlessly, and they babbled in unison, as though chanting to some unseen presence that lived inside the weather.

Klaus had heard reports from Channel weather spotters the previous year, during the run-up to the invasion of Britain. Those men had reported strange shapes, sounds, even scents in the fog. More than a few of those men had gone mad. Gretel had told him so. He believed her; her voice had carried an undertone of wry amusement, as though it were an inside joke to which he wasn’t privy.

She’d also told him about the British warlocks, and the beings they commanded. This was their work.

Turnout for the Götterelektrongruppe’s demonstrations had declined steadily as they performed their pointless road show in Heidelberg, in Frankfurt, and in the shadow of Cologne Cathedral. It was too cold for people to venture outside their homes, no matter the promised entertainments.

Their tour was forced to linger in Bielefeld—the birthplace of poor, martyred Horst Wessel—for an extra day when thigh-deep snowdrifts closed the road to Hannover. The mighty Götterelektrongruppe could have pushed through, had its members been so inclined. But after more than a month on the road, they couldn’t stand each other’s company long enough to discuss the issue. And besides which, they had only so many batteries.

Klaus took his dinner, alone, at an inn down the road from where he and the others stayed. A late-spring sunset washed incongruously against frost-etched windowpanes, bleaching the room in diffuse white light. The décor was a thoroughly unconvincing re-creation of a beer hall. The stag heads, enameled tankards, and filigreed woodwork around the doorways would have been more natural farther south, in Bavaria. A true hall (Klaus had seen several; populous Munich had yielded many volunteers) required dark walnut paneling, stout ceiling beams, and casks of beer stacked behind the bar for fueling the
gemütlichkeit.
This place had none of these things.

It was the kind of place that didn’t know itself, didn’t know what it was meant to be. Klaus liked it. Though it was chilly, he felt more at ease here than anywhere else they’d visited.

The fireplace was empty and dark. Klaus inquired about a fire. He was told the flue had frozen shut soon after being closed to keep out vicious downdrafts.

He ate in a bubble of silence. All the other patrons stepped widely around Klaus’s table. The wires unnerved people, but he was too weary of the issue to hide them any longer. People were polite when forced to interact with him, but jittery, too.

His meal was as slapdash as the décor. Gristle marbled the corned beef so thickly that Klaus was hard-put to carve out each mouthful. Brine squeezed out of the too-pink meat each time he sawed his knife through it. The water sloshed over the lip of his plate and made a ring around his glass of lukewarm cider.

But the beets weren’t so terrible, and the venison sausage was edible if slightly gamey. Best of all was the black bread, which was warm enough to melt butter. It must have been made in-house; carrying it just across the street would have leeched away the heat, rendering the bread as cold and hard as a hearthstone in an abandoned house.

“Where are your companions?”

Klaus looked up. A short ruddy man stood across the table. He stood with elbows resting on the back of an empty chair, forearms extended over the table and fingers interlaced. He fixed a wide grin on Klaus.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your companions,” said the stranger in a reedy voice. “Especially the thin fellow.” He wiggled his fingers, raising his arms as he did so to mimic a blazing fire. “Whoooosh! I’d be inclined to stick close to him, on a chilly evening like this.”

“You wouldn’t, if you knew him.”

The stranger looked surprised. “Oh. That’s a shame.” He gestured at the empty chair. “May I?”

Klaus’s fork
tinked
against his dish when he set it on the table. “Do I know you?”

“Nein.
But I know you.” The other man untied the oyster blue muffler about his neck, unbuttoned his coat, and hung them on the hooks on the wall behind him. Under the coat he wore work boots, denim coveralls, and a flannel shirt over a thick white turtleneck sweater. “I saw you in Augsburg several weeks ago. And your impressive friends.”

It was possible. That had been over a month ago, when the weather had still carried the potential for spring. They had drawn large crowds, large enough that Klaus wouldn’t have remembered individual faces, even if they hadn’t been on the road for so damnably long.

The man sat. “Ernst Witt,” he said, hand extended.

Klaus took it. “Klaus.”

“A rare honor, Obersturmführer Klaus.”

Klaus cocked his head in surprise. This man was dressed as a civilian laborer, yet he’d identified the insignia on Klaus’s collar. Few civilians knew the Waffen-SS well enough to correctly address an officer by his rank.

“How—?”

“I work for IG Farben. We do a lot of business with the Wehrmacht. . . . It’s my job to know the military.” Witt’s lips peeled back to reveal a gap-toothed smile.

That’s one explanation,
thought Klaus.
But there are others.

“So you saw us in Augsburg, and followed us here?”

Witt laughed. “No. Like you, my work sends me on the road. I saw flyers advertising a visit from the elite Götterelektrongruppe when I
arrived yesterday. I hoped I’d get to see you and your companions in action again. Perhaps even meet you. One doesn’t often meet such greatness.”

Klaus nodded at the fawning man. “And why are you on the road?”

“What we sell to the Wehrmacht, we also fix for the Wehrmacht. That is to say,
I
fix. And with weather like this, many things need fixing.”

No, you’re following us,
Klaus decided. “Is that so.”

“Oh, yes. You’d be surprised how brittle certain alloys can become, under the right conditions.”

“Really.”
Are you keeping an eye on us for the Sicherheitshauptamt?
If morale and discipline had declined at the Reichsbehörde after Doctor von Westarp’s death, the SD Hauptamt, the SS Security Department, would want to know.

“Most people don’t realize that a well-cast metal is actually composed of tiny crystals,” said Witt, warming to his subject. He spoke of atoms and dislocations and still other things Klaus neither knew about nor cared for. His eyes never lingered on Klaus’s face, flicking instead to Klaus’s collar and scalp whenever Klaus turned his head.

Witt trailed off. “I’ve bored you. I apologize.”

“I lack your passion for science,” said Klaus.

“But German science made you the man you are today,” said Witt.

“I’m a soldier,” said Klaus, because it sounded true and needed no elaboration.

“And quite a soldier at that. You must be, to have been among the first recruits for such an elite project,” said Witt. His inflection might have breathed a subtle implication into the words, or perhaps not.

Klaus chose to let a heavy silence suffocate any implied questions. Witt didn’t offer up anything else to fill the growing pause in the conversation.

“Things were different in the early days,” Klaus said, and left it at that.

“Yes, I suppose they were. You’ll have raised an entire army soon! An army of men like you.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’m sure you’ve inspired many eager recruits.” Again, it might have been a question, and it might not.

“It varies from town to town. And with the weather.”

Witt nodded. “I imagine so. You’ve been traveling for many weeks, it seems. Will you be returning home soon?”

“Soon enough.” Klaus drained the last of his cider, which had gone cold. “And speaking of travel, I may be in for a long day tomorrow.” Witt again looked surprised. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll turn in early.” Klaus rose, shook Witt’s hand again, and donned his wool overcoat.

As he buttoned it, he said, “A question, Herr Witt?”

“Of course, my friend.”

“You said you entered Bielefeld yesterday. Yet the roads have been closed for the past two days.”

“I did? Well, then, I’m sure I meant Monday.”

“That explains it.”

“Yes. With weather like this, who can keep track of the days?”

“Safe travels,” said Klaus.

“Heil Hitler,” said Witt with a wave and another flash of his gap-toothed smile.

The cobbled walkway along the street had been reduced to an iced footpath trampled into thigh-deep snow. Wind sliced through the buttonholes of Klaus’s coat and the seams of his shirt. It raked his skin, stippled him with gooseflesh. He hadn’t gone twenty meters before his chest muscles ached with the effort it took not to shiver. A gust eddied around the side of the inn. Klaus slipped, landing painfully on the ice.

“To hell with this.” He stood, shook himself off, and embraced his Willenskräfte. The copper taste of the Götterelektron erased the last remnants of his drink, which was regrettable because he had enjoyed the hints of cinnamon in the cider. Armored in willpower, Klaus became a wraith untouched by the demon wind.

The change in his surroundings, in his personal microclimate, was immediate. The twin bulbs of a glass streetlamp shattered. Window shutters wrenched free of their hinges and exploded into matchsticks on
the frozen street. The boles of the gingko trees along the boulevard cracked open.

The weather had been ferociously cold, but now it was nothing short of furious. By expressing his supreme volition, Klaus had enraged the elements.

He stood at the center of a maelstrom that tried in vain to assail him. Nor could the ice underfoot make him slip if such contradicted his Willenskräfte. He ran through snowdrifts and crashing icicles, impervious to one and all.

He ran because his invulnerability would last only so long as he could hold his breath. When he did rematerialize, just long enough to exhale and gulp down air, the arctic fury zeroed in on him. It savaged his throat, reached into his chest and attempted to freeze his lungs. He raced past the trucks parked outside, ghosted through the front windows of his inn, and released the Götterelektron before an ashen-faced desk clerk.

Klaus ascended the narrow stairs to his room on the second floor. Static and the high-pitched warble of a radio came through the wall; their LSSAH radio operator had the adjacent room. This arrangement suited Klaus. Anything was better than sharing a wall with Reinhardt.

When Klaus turned on the light over the washbasin, he discovered that his mouth and chin were caked with frozen blood. Inhaling the smoke from a British phosphorus grenade back in December had done minor but permanent damage to his sinuses. It left him susceptible to nosebleeds. Drawing a single breath from the blizzard outside had been more than enough to provoke one.

The blood had begun to thaw, but he was too numb to feel it trickling down his neck. The image in the mirror was that of a ravenous beast, an insatiable carnivore. Not a man.

He fell asleep in a chair, still in his uniform, holding a damp towel to his face.

He woke some time later to a commotion outside his window. Familiar voices, shouting, down on the street below. Klaus’s hip twinged as he stumbled to the window; sleeping upright in a chair, with his battery harness still attached, had made for hours of awkward posture.