Then, there were only the creaks and pops of an injured building settling deeper on its foundations. The air raid sirens were still shrieking and the flak guns continued to fire upon the departing bombers. Shortly after that, they heard the sirens of the ambulances and fire trucks. The flak guns ceased, and the air raid warning abruptly stopped in mid-cry.
“Someday I’d like to take up sailing,” she said to him, as the manager and the shaken-looking patrons began to emerge from the cellar. “On the open sea. At least try it. How does that sound?”
“Wet,” he answered, which was also the description of the back of his neck. “But with you, an adventure I wouldn’t dare miss.”
“To our wet adventure,” she said as she lifted her glass for another toast. “Someday. Prost!”
The party—held in honor of Signal journalists by some very important backers and supporters of the magazine—was held in a private mansion on the Grabertstrasse. The place looked to Michael as if its architect had been a little too fond of gingerbread houses in his childhood, with its walls that resembled thick white frosting and upon the roofs, chimneys, and turrets that might have been sprinkled with cinnamon. On their way there, in the open-topped BMW through the wintry night, Franziska had given Michael a brief accounting of who would be in attendance: Baron von Caught the Clapp and his fourth wife the spindly sixteen-year-old Spidergirl, Ziggy the Playboy who zigged and zagged both ways, the Countess of No Worth, and so on, plus bodyguards and handholders for all these people and whoever else had decided to come in search of free champagne and little sausages in sesame-seed buns.
It was dreadful, but the champagne was good and flowed freely. The chamber music ensemble wasn’t so bad. The pile of logs in the huge fireplace was very warm, and the chandeliers sparkled in a merry way. Michael found himself and Franziska separated soon after they arrived, she whisked away by a spry white-haired man—the Clapp?—through a larger throng than he would have expected out on a bomb-run night. Suddenly Michael was surrounded by four girls, three of them very attractive indeed and the fourth unfortunately buck-toothed but who energetically kept wanting to feel his Iron Cross. They laughed and jostled together like brightly-painted freight cars while he tried to be charming and found that he didn’t have to try too very hard.
But the thing was…he realized that he was aware of wherever Franziska was among all these grinning and champagne-soused and somewhat sad people in the large ornately-appointed room. He just felt her out there. He would get a glimpse of her hair or her shoulder or her hip, before the crowd closed in, and then he would sense when she was moving, and in which direction. He laughed and talked to the ladies, but he was always aware that he was connected to Franziska by what seemed like an elastic band that could stretch to any distance and then draw them together again.
The ladies chattered on. Then through the crowd he saw her standing amid a group of several uniformed men of varying ages, her champagne flute in hand, the men motioning and posturing with the animation of excitement, she calmly sipping her bubbly at the center of what looked like a lot of playboys talking with their groins.
A thought came to him, unbidden.
That is my woman.
And as if she’d heard this as clearly as his voice, she looked at him directly across the room, through the puffery of playboys, and over the champagne flute that caught golden firelight from the blaze her right eye quickly winked.
My woman, Michael thought.
Then in the next instant he had to turn away, to stride past the girls with the giggles on their lips, to stride past the massive fireplace and the hanging tapestry that depicted a German knight on a white horse, and going past people he didn’t know and would never know he had to find a place to stand by himself, to think, because he knew exactly what the spikes at the bottom of this particular wolftrap were made of. This was wrong, terribly wrong, and here he paused to pluck a fresh flute of champagne from a waiter’s tray, and as he took a drink he thought it smelled of cigars and a leather saddle, and then the white-clad arm caught him hard by the shoulder and Michael turned into the mountainous bulk of the white-haired, red-faced man who also had hold of Franziska’s left arm as one would clutch a troublesome piece of luggage that sprang open at the most inopportune times.
Behind Axel Rittenkrett stood the thug and the accountant, both in their dark suits.
“Major Jaeger,” said Rittenkrett, with a slight bow of the mountaintop. “Franziska wishes to say goodnight, and may we call a cab for you before we leave?”
Michael read Franziska’s expression; it was more annoyance than pain, but the Gestapo man’s fingers were pressing into her flesh.
“Take your hand off her,” Michael said.
Rittenkrett’s pale blue eyes were dead. Icy, as it were.
“It’s all right, Horst,” said Franziska, her brow furrowed. “I just have to—”
“Take your hand,” Michael repeated into the dead eyes, “off her.” And across his body—back, chest, arms and legs—he felt the scurrying of dangerous ants.
“Or what, sir?” Rittenkrett’s face thrust at him like a scarlet bludgeon. “What will you dare to do, if I don’t take my hand off her?”
Michael wasted no time in answering.
He flung the remainder of his champagne across the flaming face and the snow-white suit jacket, and from the liquid that streamed down the cheeks and dripped off the chin he almost expected to hear a sizzle.
Nine
The Perfect Package
The group of people who witnessed this drama froze as if statues in a tableau, though across the room the violins and cello of the chamber music ensemble kept on playing. The accountant, Sigmund, looked worriedly around as if searching for a notepad to write down the details of this atrocity. The thug, Ross, strode toward Michael with a grim purpose, his hands in black leather gloves clenched into fists.
“Ross, be still!” snapped the Ice Man, whose face glistened. He had taken his hand from Franziska’s arm, and he reached with it for the red handkerchief in his jacket. Ross stopped. “Everyone be calm,” Rittenkrett said, to no one in particular. He wiped his face and gave a grunt of dismay at the champagne scrawled down the front of his suit.
Michael felt Franziska wanting him to look at her, to convey some message, but he would not. He stood loose-limbed and relaxed, ready for whatever happened next.
“This is a mess,” the Ice Man muttered. He aimed his eyes at Michael and scowled yet there was no true rage in the florid face, as Michael had expected to find. “Major, this tells me you’re either insane or you believe yourself to be in love. Which is it?”
“I don’t like to see a woman bullied by a man.”
“Bullied? Because I was guiding her to the door? Are you sure you know as much about women as you seem to think you do? By the way, are you married?”
“No,” came the reply. As far as he could tell, that brought no reaction whatsoever from Franziska.
“Ever been married? No children?”
Michael thought of a white palace, in what seemed another life. He was silent.
“We need to have a little talk, Major. About the importance of responsibilities. I suggest we go find a quiet room. Everyone!” Rittenkrett said to the onlookers, many of whom obviously knew his station in life and wore sickly expressions that said they regretted having been witnesses to the incident. “This has been an unfortunate misunderstanding, but everything’s fine. Believe me,” he added, for the unbelievers.