“I knew it was coming to that,” said Michael, as he stared at the black briefcase that lay on the biscuit-colored leather next to him.
“We’re trying our best to get everyone out. We won’t be fully successful, but we need time. And we need you, Major, to give Franziska Luxe something to think about other than tracking down members of the Ring and sending them to be tortured to death at the hands of the Gestapo.” He paused for a few seconds, during which only Michael saw the pack following along, just loping easily through the sleet, almost grinning in the cold bracing air with lung-steam curling from their snouts. “Do you understand the mission?”
“Go into the chaos of Berlin, masquerade as a German—an officer, most likely, and a man with an interesting back-history—to seduce a rather nasty female Nazi? I’m flattered, but I believe there are other men who are better suited for this job.” And who most probably would die trying, he thought.
“Read her dossier, there in the briefcase,” Mallory instructed. “She’s thirty years old and quite beautiful. She’s a champion skiier, an expert marksman and driver of racing cars as well as being fluent in French, Italian and English. Her father was a daredevil pilot who ended his life last year testing the new German jet aircraft. Her mother at seventeen was a circus lion-tamer, has been an Olympic swimmer and a member of the most recent German expedition to Antarctica in 1938. Here, now…what’s this?” He put his foot to the brake and stopped the car. He leaned forward, peering through the windshield as the wipers scraped back and forth. “I presume that’s one of your companions standing on the road? Am I in some kind of violation I need to know about?”
“A precaution,” Michael said. “No one can take me beyond this point without my agreement. And theirs, also.”
“My God, that’s a big one,” said Mallory, still looking forward. “Um…may I ask…?”
“Animal,” came the response. “As far as I know, there is no one else…” Michael looked at the briefcase and put two fingers against it. “Like me,” he finished.
“One never knows what the Germans, if not stopped, might try to create in their laboratories.” Mallory winced a little, even before he’d finished saying it. “Oh, my. That didn’t sound right, forgive me.” He cleared his throat and put the stick into Reverse. “I’ll back up, shall I?”
It was very important that Michael do this, Mallory told him on the return drive. By diverting Fraulein Luxe’s attention and managing to stay at her side for one week in February, Michael might save the lives of twenty people…a dozen…five or six, but at least the Inner Ring would not be, so to speak, thrown to the wolves.
The German Army was reeling back from the Ardennes in the aftermath of Operation Wacht Am Rhein, Mallory said. Divisions would be refitting, restaffing and waiting for further orders. There would be some confusion to take advantage of. This mission involved no parachute jump, just a truck trip in the company of British commandos and a river to be crossed at night by rubber raft. On the other side would be some soldiers of the Inner Ring, to get him into Berlin by staff car. He would have a solid identity, papers made up by someone who made real papers, and a safe house to go to if things went wrong. He would be contacted as when to end the mission, and leave the same way. What made him so valuable was that he knew his way around Berlin.
And around and around, Michael thought, recalling a certain train trip he’d taken there on his last visit. “All measured out,” Michael said as they neared the house. “So simple, in theory. I understand the capture of the bridge at Arnhem was also a simple theory.” He expected no response on that one, and got none. “How am I supposed to meet Franziska Luxe?”
“I said the German Army was reeling back, and there’s confusion to be used in our favor. I said nothing about the end of parties and merrimaking in Berlin, did I?”
Michael nodded. They would carry on their parties in Berlin until their world was on the verge of destruction. Then, if the Russian tanks rolled into what was left of that city before the Americans or British got there, it would be a party in a vast blood-drenched boneyard. Even the remaining members of the Inner Ring would be crushed beneath the treads…if any still remained by then.
“Can I count on you?” Mallory asked as he stopped the car. It was a polite question, from one gentleman to another.
Michael took the briefcase, and got out.
A river to be crossed, he thought. And leave the same way.
But it occurred to him that no river could be crossed twice by the same man, because the river was never exactly the same, and neither would be the man.
Two
The Hunter Who Lives In The Woods
Michael Gallatin walked out of the bathroom, stood over the bed and stared at her body.
The lights flickered. A power interruption, somewhere in the grid. The slow blinking of the eyes of a groggy leviathan. Did she move, in that brief loss of light? Did she stretch her long taut legs and open her own smouldering gray-hued eyes, and whisper up at him in her low voice rasped with passion, Come to bed again, darling. Come crush me into wine and drink all of me, every drop.
She did not.
Michael wondered what would become of himself, at the end of his life. What was beyond this existence, for a creature such as he? Would he sleep among the angels, or would he just go on fighting the demons in a flame-lit room at the bottom of the stairs?
Dressed in his uniform as a German major of the 25th Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, 25th Panzer Grenadier Division, Michael had seen her across the dance floor at the Grand Frederik’s Regal Room. A foursome band in tuxedos was playing on stage, not the oompah-pah stuff of old Germany but the new Swing of the Jazz Age. Red balloons drifted along the vaulted ceiling, which was painted with the faces of ancient kings and emperors looking down through the pastel clouds of heaven to see what a mess they’d left behind.
It was his third night in Berlin, and this party was his reason for booking a room at the hotel. Every so often the golden-globed lights faltered, and with them the babble of conversation, the sometimes strident voices struggling to sound unconcerned, and the laughter too loud for the bad jokes of matings between American jackasses and Russian goats. But even in the dark the music kept playing, and even in the dark Michael watched her move amidst the men and other women like a torchflame amidst sad candles, and as he sipped from his glass of 1936 French Armagnac and the lights came up again he caught the glint of her eyes for the briefest of seconds passing across him and he felt the quick exhilarating celebration of being noted like a knight on his knees before a queen.
Not all the men in the room wore uniforms, but most did. Not all the women in the room were beautiful, but most were.
But none like her.
Not one.
He felt a man whose belly was about to burst his polished gold buttons coming toward him, possibly to ask some inane question about troop dispositions or what action he’d seen, or to voice some wine-odored opinion about the next thrust against the Russians, who in this first week of February were forty-some miles away from the city. Therefore Michael took another drink of his excellent brandy, squared his shoulders and gathered his courage and made his way across the dance floor to the woman in the long flowing crimson dress who was speaking to two other men, and when the men looked at him and the woman turned because she already knew he was coming he said into her face which was almost level with his own, “Pardon me,” in his best Westphalian accent, “but you are nearly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”