When he hung up, he was planning the evening.
Yes, I am the killer.
He showered and shaved and dressed well in advance of her arrival. He used a German military-issue brush on his hair, and a German military-issue toothbrush on his teeth. He took the taped-up ball of waxed paper from its box and put it into his trouser pocket on the left side. He wasn’t sure yet how or when he was going to drop the pill in her glass, but he had the confidence of the professional.
The killer, yes I am.
Dark was falling, very quickly.
He went downstairs to meet her, and pulling the collar of his feld-grau topcoat up he walked into the flurries and waited.
The BMW came, its top raised and secured with grommets against the weather. When Michael climbed into the car, Franziska gave him a quick kiss at the corner of his mouth and she said she was famished, she’d been so busy during the day she hadn’t had time for lunch. More photographs to be developed and some documents delivered. She looked as if she might have cried at some point today also, because her makeup didn’t quite cover the dark hollows beneath her eyes.
The roadster roared off, snow be damned.
I am the killer. Yes.
They ate at a restaurant that overlooked the river Spree. It was all candles and dark red drapes. A strolling violinist made the circle between their table and the only two other occupied tables, until Michael tipped him and said they wished to be excluded from the route. Michael had to move his chair a little, because from where he was sitting the view out the terrace windows to the east showed him the occasional dim flare of an artillery shell against low-lying clouds.
Franziska played hands with him atop the table and rubbed his ankle with her foot beneath it. She ate her first courses of rose hip soup and potato salad like there was no tomorrow. When his meal, the grilled venison, came he moved it around the plate for show but found he had no stomach for the eating.
Still, he had to pick himself up for her. He had to chat and listen and nod, and to give her a smile when she needed or expected one. And she had chosen this night to reveal to him the full power of her gifts, for not only was she streamlined and sleek as a racing machine in her black dress trimmed with silver spangles, and not only were the waves of black hair pinned back with a silver clasp in the shape of a half-moon, and not only did her wine-red lips shine and her gray eyes gleam in the low light, but her force of life was focused on him as if he were the only other human being in the world. Whenever he spoke about the most inane thing—the weather, the service at the hotel, what he’d seen on his walk today—seemed to her rapt attention to be the most heart-felt confession of a god.
This was how she worked, Michael thought. This was how the family man or the office worker or the lowly aide tripped over his tongue in his eagerness to be heard and appreciated, to be thought so important by a beautiful creature. This was how the secrets became known: not by being pried out, but by being urged out word after word with silent approval. Then the Gestapo came and took the crowing, pitiful roosters to Hell, to be boiled down into oil for the potato salad.
Yes.
I am the killer.
“You look so worried,” she said, as she rested her hand atop his. “You don’t need to be.”
“It’s not worry. I’m just preparing myself, in my mind.”
“I know,” she said, “that you want to do your duty. I know you’re a warrior. What would you be, if you weren’t? An office boy? And not some general’s staff monkey, either. You are what you are, and I thank God for that. But you’re also only a man, Horst. The same flesh and blood and…worries…of any man. It is the woman who shoulders the burden her man can’t carry. This woman wants to, very badly. So if you need to talk about the war, or anything else that troubles you…please… I’m right here.”
Michael took a drink from his cup of erstaz coffee. Her man, she’d said. He picked up his fork and drew furrows in the white tablecloth.
This was her power.
Because everything in him wanted to say, yes I am the killer, but I want to be your man. And I want to start clean and tell you my story. I want to tell you how I was born, both times, and how I have lived. I want to tell you about my first bitch and my missing son. About the world as I know it, and the world as I wish it to be. I want to tell you how the old tales of the lycanthrope are wrong, and how they are right. And I want to be able to tell all this to you, and afterward look into your eyes and see not fear but love.
But he didn’t say any of this, because there was no time and the pill was in his pocket, and if he was indeed her man he would not ask her to shoulder any burdens he couldn’t carry alone.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “You’ll see.”
Michael nodded. Sometime in the next few minutes one of the other couples in the room, an elderly pair, stood up and danced gracefully beside their table to the violinist’s tune, and Michael watched Franziska’s face as she smiled at the charming old man who at the end of the dance kissed his wife’s hand and held her chair out for her as any gentleman should.
They went to a music hall where the attendance was again skimpy, but the dark brew was good and a trio of guitar player, pianist and drummer held the stage. The lights kept flickering, not for effect but because of hits somewhere on the power grid. Michael asked Franziska to dance to a slow, jazzy number during which he held her as tightly against himself as he could without hurting her. Suddenly they found themselves alone on the floor because the music had stopped and the place was closing down.
“Just a moment,” he told her, and under the uncertain lights they danced a bit longer to their own secret music.
Then it was time to go back to the hotel, back to room 214, because there was nowhere else to go.
The magnum of Moet champagne sat in its ice bucket by the bed. Two champagne flutes had been placed nearby. A light blue envelope bearing the golden seal of the Grand Frederik called for Michael’s attention, and when he opened it the note read in tidy German penmanship: Dear Major Jaeger, in recognition of your service to the Reich and to your happy occasion, which our day clerk Oskar has informed me of, please accept this bottle with the best compliments of the house, and please think of the Grand Frederik should you require accomodations for any future celebration. A good life to you. In Debt To Your Honor, Adrian Bayerbergen, Manager.
“What’s that?” Franziska put her arms around him from behind.
He folded the note. “The bill,” he said, as he put it into a coat pocket. “Unfortunately, in this world nothing is free.”
“Oh, don’t be so sure about that.” She kissed and nuzzled the back of his neck. “I’m pretty free.”
“You are free,” he agreed, “and you are pretty.” He turned around to face her, and he took hold of her chin and stared deeply into her eyes. His heart was its own BMW 328. “What can I do for such a free and pretty woman as you?”
“Well,” she breathed, with her lips just barely grazing his, “first I would like to put into my mouth a big, succulent, wet and delicious—”
She held up before him the champagne flute she was holding. “Drink?” she finished.
“I should spank you first.”
“Would you please?” she asked, her eyes going wide.
He opened the champagne, which foamed extravagantly, and then he poured a flute for her and himself. She tapped his glass with her own. “To freedom?” she asked. “No, no! Wait! To…good decisions? No, wait!” She frowned. “Ah!” she said. “To the sun that sets in the west.”
“What kind of toast is that?” he asked as she drank.