The officers always said it was a pleasure, good luck in his forthcoming struggle, may God protect Germany, and Heil Hitler.
Then, when the major and the photojournalist sitting at their table had seen that sharp hunger in the eyes of the other, the rising of the heated flame that no liquid outburst could extinguish for very long, either he or she reached for a knee and in his case winnowed his hand beneath her skirt and moved along a silken thigh, or in her case placed a firm hand of ownership upon what she wished to command, and one of them—or both at the same time, as had happened—would ask the question: “Are you ready?”
They were always ready.
He didn’t know exactly what she was doing. If she was gathering information for the Gestapo by seduction, or by following and photographing the comings and goings of suspected Inner Ring members, or some of both. He didn’t think she was doing only mundane investigation, she was far too talented for that alone. He understood how within a few minutes of being with her, a man would cast aside all caution and self-preservation and start to jabber about things to make himself sound important, until a slip of the jabber made her hone in on some remark and work it like she worked in the sheets on a man’s most valued companion. If, as Michael understood, the majority of the Inner Ring’s members were office clerks, military aides, pencil pushers and scientists who might be brilliant but sometimes forgot what shoe went on which foot, Franziska’s work was nearly accomplished just by walking into the room.
One evening at midweek, before going to a late-night Signal party that she’d invited him to, they went to dinner in one of the very few fine restaurants still open, and they sat before a picture window overlooking a lamplit park. They’d just gotten their food when the air raid sirens went off, and instantly the few other patrons started for the cellar.
“No,” Franziska said when he started to stand up. She was radiant tonight, absolutely gorgeous in a dark blue dress with a strand of pearls around her neck. She took his hand. “We’ll be all right.” Then she’d continued eating her dinner and drinking her wine, and though the manager came and implored them to leave their table and come down with everyone else she shook her head with a wry smile, and at last they were alone in the restaurant.
The flak guns began firing, the sounds like pillows being whacked with cricket bats. Michael heard the distant thunder of the bombs. Through the window he could see the blue-white flashes, like whips of lightning, and then the faraway red flames curling up. She was staring at him across the table. He had lost his appetite, but he lifted his glass and said, “Prost!”
“Prost!” she answered with pleasure, and they drank.
A bomb fell closer. Michael felt its power in the floor. Multicolored lanterns at the ceiling shivered.
Her fingers entwined with his. She said softly, “I am safe with you. And you are safe with me. As long as we’re together…nothing can hurt us.”
“I’m glad you believe that.”
She shook her head. “More than believe. I know.”
But he wondered: do the bombs know?
One fell very close, an explosion perhaps a street or two beyond the park. The wineglasses and gold-edged plates jumped on the table. Tree limbs came flying at the window and made a noise like clattering claws.
She just smiled.
Michael looked at her. Really looked, as if he’d never seen her before.
At the birthday party, he’d said something to the Ice Man that wasn’t exactly true: I don’t fear. The truth was, he wasn’t afraid. He was cautious, and he was prepared, and so he was not afraid.
But he feared this woman sitting, smiling, before him. The woman whose fingers were entwined with his.
He’d had choices presented to him, after the mission that involved the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the matter of Iron Fist. Chesna van Dorne had asked him to go to Hollywood with her. In his mind he’d weighed that invitation against disappearing into the wilds of Canada, of finding a hunter’s stone cabin three hundred miles from people, and living as a solitary man there until, possibly, the end of his days.
His decision had been neither of those. He’d decided to stay where he was, at the house in Wales. To press on pressing on, as the British would say.
But now he knew, he had made a mistake.
He should have left Wales. He should have gone where they couldn’t find him. Where an inquiry for Michael Gallatin drew only a blank stare. He had made a mistake, and now he was in Berlin, with bloodthirsty Russians on the outskirts and bombs falling down, and he was holding the hand of Franziska Luxe.
Whatever he was, he was not fully. Not one nor the other. He could not live in the crowded city of Hollywood, nor could he live three hundred miles from the nearest human being. But whatever he was, and whatever he at last became, he realized that he needed the human embrace just as every heart did. And more than that…his downfall…was that he needed to be the human embrace to some other heart.
She was a Nazi, with a Nazi’s view of the world. What they had between them was the sex. The deep and hungry kisses, the bites, the cries of passion, the friction of flesh, the movement of hips and the pounding one into the other until the electric release and then the wet mouths searching for each other again. They had the sex, and with that they were very good.
But when the next bomb fell, again too close, and Franziska’s hand tightened just a little on his own but her composed expression never changed, Michael feared this woman because she was the river that, once crossed, would never let him go home again.
Moving in slow inches, he began to turn his chair and his body. She would say she needed no protection, and so he didn’t ask. He positioned himself so he was directly across from her, his back offered to the picture window and to the God of War from whom all jagged shards flew.
Franziska continued the conversation they’d been having before the sirens, about the prospects for German Grand Prix racing to be reinstated after the war, and her intention to be part of a team. She knew her cars inside and out and could explain the varying characterics of engines, braking systems, tires and so on year-by-year. Michael was more comfortable listening rather than talking very much, to avoid a blunder, though she did try to encourage him to talk about his childhood and his family. If she only knew the truth, he thought as he fed her the fiction that had been prepared for him before he’d left England. There were never any questions about his being married, or about his experiences in the war. She never failed, however, to at least once a day ask if he’d gotten his orders yet.
Not ninety seconds later, the bomb that Michael was dreading ended its long fall among buildings on the far side of the park. At the same instant as they heard the hollow whump of the blastwave, there was a loud noise like a pistol shot. Michael flinched. The floor trembled and creaked. Brick dust drifted in the air. Throughout the restaurant the lanterns swung back and forth. Michael turned in his chair and saw first the crack that had cut diagonally across the window. Secondly, he saw that the park’s lamps had been blown out, and thirdly he saw that a building was burning bright orange with a white center where the bomb had struck.
Another bomb exploded further to the east, and one or two or several more after that, moving eastward still, the noises merging together to make a continuous whirling roar.