He heard the footsteps at his door. The creak of a board.
They didn’t bother with knocking.
A heavy boot crashed the door in. Men in black leather coats came boiling like ebony wasps into the room and from their midst strode the big man with the red face and the white suit.
He brushed past the major even as two men caught Michael’s shoulders and slammed him against the wall. A painting of a golden-haired fraulein in a sunlit garden jumped off its hook and fell to the floor.
Rittenkrett walked to the edge of the bed and peered down at Franziska. He squinted, spoke her name, and then reached out to rouse her before he realized she could not be roused. “Hey! Sigmund!” he snapped. The accountant came over, lifted the sheet and tried to find a pulse. He leaned forward to feel for breath. He jammed a hand against her breast, seeking the missing heartbeat.
Sigmund shook his head. Rittenkrett turned toward the major with his face as red as a crimson lamp.
“You,” said Rittenkrett behind a thick forefinger, “have done a dirty. Haven’t you? Eh? Ask him, Ross.”
As the two men held Michael, Ross stepped forward and hit him in the stomach with a black-gloved fist. The second blow was harder, and the third made Michael’s legs buckle. Before he could find his balance, a hand gripped his hair and a knee burst his nose open.
“Careful with the blood!” Rittenkrett warned, retreating a step. “Christ, get him a towel! Stand up, Major Jaeger! But that’s not your real name, is it? How did you murder Franziska?”
A throat cleared. Rittenkrett turned around to see Sigmund holding up the two champagne flutes. “We’ll find out,” Rittenkrett promised Michael. “Next question: why did you murder Franziska?”
Michael didn’t answer. There was no point. Eight men in the room. At least four with drawn pistols. His nose was streaming blood, his eyes were swelling shut and his head pounded. Maybe down his sides or upon his back there were small stirrings of animal hair, but not much.
He could never commit suicide, but he was so weary and so sick at heart that he wished for death tonight. He welcomed it. He was no one’s hero. He was the shadowy slime that could kill a masterpiece of a woman who loved him, a perfect package, and no matter what her sins were he had failed to move heaven and earth to find a way to save her life.
He deserved to die. To die brutally, and in great pain.
Which had already begun.
“We’re going to march you out of here,” Rittenkrett said. “No clothes are necessary where you’re going, but we’ll take your uniform anyway to go over everything with our fine-toothed buzzsaws.” He came up close to the bleeding face, though not too close to risk the suit. “I hope you enjoyed her. Got your dick’s worth. Because now, sir, whoever you are, you’re coming to the Gestapo’s playhouse. And there we will give you a fucking of another kind. Sigmund!”
The accountant hit Michael across the side of the head with a leather-wrapped blackjack. He was fast and efficient, no energy wasted.
They dragged the naked, bleeding major out. Behind them the pair of men charged with tearing the place apart for evidence peeked under the sheet. One grinned at the other and with his fist made a pumping gesture at his crotch.
Thirteen
The Room
Through the wind and gusts of snow the two black sedans drove. Through the dark and empty streets of Berlin. They drove also through the nightmares of those Inner Ring members who yet remained in this city, manning the code books and doing whatever small sabotage they could conceive for the glory of old dead Germany.
When these black sedans came for you, the intelligent thing to do was to pick up the pistol in the upstairs desk, shoot your children in the head and then your wife and then yourself. That was called escape.
And it was the only way.
But for Michael Gallatin—sitting naked, groggy and bleeding on the back seat of the lead sedan between Sigmund and Ross—it was no way at all.
His strength was gone. He was all used up. He just no longer wished to live.
Was it suicide if he allowed someone else to kill him? If he simply lay unresisting as they pulled him apart? On that matter, the wolf in him was silent.
Through the streets they went, through the wind and snow. At length the two cars turned onto Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Their yellow cat’s-eye headlamps approached a block-long gothic slab of bricks, with five floors showing. Beneath the street, who knew how many? Lights showed through some of the windowblinds. This place never slept.
The cars went through a black gate, past the electric lamps that stood on either side of a porte cochere, and slid to a halt before a secondary entrance toward the rear of the building. Michael was dragged out, with Ross’s Luger in his ribs. He knew that if he struggled, he would not be shot in the ribs but instead either clubbed again over the head, hit in the face or in the worst case shot in an area that would cause pain but no immediate death, like the back of the hand or the knee. He didn’t care to struggle; it was too much of an effort.
Sigmund pressed a recessed button on the wall beside a door. In a few seconds the door was unbolted from within. The entourage, six men strong, went through with Michael a pale hobbler at their center. Inside there was a desk and a soldier and a file cabinet and a telephone and another door. Michael was half-pushed, half-carried through this door and into a green-painted corridor with frosted glass light globes spaced along the ceiling. Various doors lined this hallway, and at the far end was a tall, wide window through which another light gleamed.
At about the hallway’s centerpoint they came to an oak-railed staircase and started down. When Michael’s feet wanted to balk, he was picked up by two of the men and rushed downward. The staircase descended past several landings and more doors. It angled to the left, straightened out again and then angled to the right. Bare bulbs lit the stained risers. Michael smelled the old odors of human sweat and fear, and some of them not so old.
“Move!” a voice said from behind him. Sigmund’s blackjack gave him a knock across the base of the skull, which filled Michael’s head with flaming pinwheels. They came to the bottom of the stairs. Michael heard the jingle of keys, a merry sound like little bells. A lock was turned.
When the door opened, he was pushed and hauled through. In his haze he made out a stone-walled chamber with light bulbs hanging on cords from the timbered ceiling. Shadows ate some of the room. There were chairs sitting about. There was a machine of some kind on rollers, with coiled-up cables that ended in what might have been large alligator clips. Another machine was attached to what appeared to be a portable water tank on one end and on the other a gray instrument that resembled a baker’s pastry bag. He doubted it was used to frost any birthday cakes. He heard the door close behind him. A bolt was thrown with a metallic finality that would have made most men start to either babble or weep. In here there were no windows. The air smelled of vinegar and the sharp bitterness of chemical disinfectant.
And fear. Much, much fear.
He was dragged onward, the men moving quickly around him.
The machines gave way to the medieval. Red embers glowed in a brazier full of pokers. And beside it stood that most ancient of torture devices: the rectangular wooden frame, ropes and rollers of the instrument known as ‘the rack’.
Upon seeing it, something in Michael Gallatin stirred and growled a word he took to be resist. But that was all, just a growl. He didn’t care to resist. He was no longer fit to wear either flesh or fur. It was over. He was ready to die.