When he slid out of her again—and this time he wasn’t going back in for a while, no matter how much he might desire it—Franziska tried in vain to hold him, but she too was as weak as yesterday’s pudding.
With an effort her head came up and she looked at him through glazed eyes.
“I think you’ve broken me,” she breathed. “I’m in pieces.”
He brushed her hair aside and kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry, I’ll put you back together again.”
That was enough for her to hear. She lay silently atop him, holding on.
And he stared at the ceiling for awhile and listened to the storm.
It was the sound, he knew, of the future lashing at the walls around them, trying to get in where the British secret agent and the Nazi huntress lay on the edge of slumber. But the future did not and would not slumber, and Michael knew that very soon it would rush in upon them no matter what he felt, or hoped, or wished for.
And what then?
Oh my God, he thought.
What then?
Ten
The Messenger
The future arrived at around three o’clock the following afternoon.
Berlin wore a crust of snow. Flurries drifted over the roofs and spires and made spitting noises in the places where bomb-burned buildings yet smoldered.
The future arrived as Michael, after returning from lunch with Franziska, was having a quick touch-up shave with the happiest razor in the world. On the silver case were the freshly-tooled letters H and J, as simple as possible. They’d had a long untroubled sleep, tangled together in the bed that she’d nicknamed der Regen-Hersteller, the Rain Maker, for reasons obvious to them both. He’d said he hoped she was careful today, whatever she was doing, and she’d confidently replied that she was always careful.
Not careful enough, he thought as he’d watched her walk away. And this time before she reached the end of the block she had glanced back at him and given him a wave and a smile that came closer to breaking his heart than any pain he’d ever known.
The future did not arrive with Russians smashing into the city. It did not arrive with Gestapo agents in black leather coats swarming out of cars and bounding up the stairs to room 214 with their Lugers drawn. It did not arrive with the falling of more bombs, or with train-killing Mustangs pumping rockets into buildings that were old when Beethoven’s Fate first knocked at the door.
It arrived with a telephone call to his room, and a softly-delivered message from a clerk that a priest by the name of Father Hubart Kollmann wished to speak to Major Jaeger in the lobby as soon as possible.
The major said he’d be down in a few minutes.
Now this was puzzling. There was no need for alarm…but still…if this was someone from his side, what was the reason for contact?
But, of course! He was being contacted to end the mission! It was all over. They must have gotten enough of the Inner Ring out that a week’s stay in this Devil’s playground was no longer required. He could get to the safe house and—
Cross the river and go home?
Walk out of this hotel in the company of a priest and never see Franziska again?
And leave her to what he knew was coming, in a month or two or three at the most? The Russians were set on vengeance for what the Germans had done to their countrymen beginning in ‘41. The murders, atrocities and rapes were going to be returned a hundredfold. Michael knew that, as the Russians steadily advanced into German territory, the sufferings of civilians and the sheer horror endured by those who couldn’t or wouldn’t escape were already beyond any demonic imagination.
He finished his shave, washed his face, buttoned up his uniform, put on his cap just so and left the room. It seemed a longer descent down the stairs than before.
The priest was sitting in a black leather chair in the far corner of a lobby that maintained, in spite of all realities, its opulent faux medieval charm. Flames crackled in the gray stone hearth, which was decorated with carvings of the faces of various knights and noblemen. Flags of many family crests were on display, all surrounding a huge Nazi banner. It was fitting, Michael thought as he crossed the gold-colored carpet, that the priest be waiting for him under a tapestry that depicted a medieval wolfhunt, with men on horseback plunging their spears into the doomed and bloody beast.
“Major Jaeger,” said the priest, as he stood up from his chair.
“Father Kollmann, is it?” He shook the man’s hand. A hard grip, very dry.
“It is.” Kollmann motioned to another chair, identical to his own, that faced him. “Please, sit.”
Michael did, like a good dog.
Kollmann sat down and, smiling faintly, seemed to be carefully examining the major. Michael had already taken the priest in: tall and slender, about forty-five, with light brown hair showing hints of gray here and there, a sharp nose, a long chin, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with blue-tinted lenses that made view of the eyes difficult. Slim-fingered hands with manicured nails, a bit vain for a priest. Black shoes polished to a military or holier-than-thou gloss. The smell of soap or aftershave that had a little too much topnote of Paris perfume, and the odor of a drink or two in the early afternoon. Also, the priest had a taste for licorice; there was probably some in his coat.
“We’re all hoping for an early spring,” said Kollmann.
“I can’t recall a colder winter,” Michael returned.
“But my dog certainly enjoyed it,” was the response to that.
“What kind of dog?” The response to the response.
“Just a mutt,” was the final piece.
Michael nodded. He removed his cap and stared up at the tapestry. There was some message in it, he thought. Maybe something he didn’t want to see.
“The situation is evolving well,” Kollmann said after a time. The movement of his head tracked a few people crossing the lobby. An older man and woman were seated on a sofa at a comfortable distance away, the woman’s face bowed. The man was talking quietly to her. Michael had already seen them; they looked like people who’d made a long trip under the burden of great sadness, possibly to visit in the Army hospital an armless or legless or completely appendage-free torso that used to be a good German boy. Michael wondered how many times that scene had been repeated, in how many countries, and when it would ever stop. “Evolving well,” Kollmann repeated.
“Glad to hear,” was Michael’s brusque comment.
The priest steepled his long fingers. He stared into space. Communing with God? Michael wondered. Hearing some voice from the divine infinite?
“There’s been an alteration,” said Kollmann.
Michael waited. He was tense. Alteration. A tailor’s term, the taking in or letting out of clothes by nimble needles.
“We want the woman removed,” came the next decree, as hard and dry as the handshake.
“Removed,” Michael echoed. “You mean…taken somewhere?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I do not.” Michael’s heart felt squeezed by a hand made of a thousand thorns. He couldn’t breathe. The blood pulsed in his face. “No, I do not,” he said again.
“The decision has been made to remove her. We want to make a statement.”
And here was where he almost lost everything he’d built into himself over the hardship and experience of his years: his self-control, his knowledge that one must sometimes accept an occasional whip from a stupid man in order to move toward freedom, the pushing down and down and down of his own desires of the heart, the grimness of the morning before dawn when the wolves call and no human is there in bed to make you want to stay. To make you need to stay.