Magda closed her eyes. Faintly, she heard the cheeping of the baby birds outside the window. Their peeps were fainter than this morning and seemed to have taken on a desperate quality. But before she could wonder about what might be wrong, she was asleep.
He looked at Magda's face in the dark. Peaceful and innocent. The face of a sleeping child. He tightened his arms around her, afraid she might slip away.
He should have kept his distance; he had known that all along. But he had been drawn to her. He had let her stir the ashes of feelings he had thought long dead and gone, and she had found live coals beneath. And then this morning, in the heat of his anger at finding her snooping through his closet, the coals had burst into flame.
It was almost like fate. Like kismet. He had seen and experienced far too much to believe that anything was truly ordained to be. There were, however, certain ... inevitabilities. The difference was subtle, yet most important.
Still, it was wrong to let her care when he didn't even know if he would be walking away from here. Perhaps that was why he had been driven to be with her. If he died here, at least the taste of her would be fresh upon him. He couldn't afford to care now. Caring could distract him, further reducing his chances of surviving the coming battle. And yet if he did manage to survive, would Magda want anything to do with him when she knew the truth about him?
He drew the cover over her bare shoulder. He did not want to lose her. If there were any way to keep her after all this was over, he would do everything he could to find it.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Keep
Friday, 1 May
2137 hours
Captain Woermann sat before his easel. It had been his intention to force himself to blot out that shadow of the hanging corpse. But now, with his palette in his left hand and a tube of pigment in his right, he found himself unwilling to change it. Let the shadow remain. It didn't matter. He would leave the painting behind anyway. He wanted no reminders of this place when he departed. If he departed.
Outside, the keep lights were on full force, the men on guard in pairs, armed to the teeth and ready to shoot at the slightest provocation. Woermann's own weapon lay on his bedroll, holstered and forgotten.
He had developed his own theory about the keep, not one he took seriously, but one that fit most of the facts and explained most of the mysteries. The keep was alive. That would explain why no one had even seen what killed the men, and why no one could track it down, and why no one had been able to find its hiding place despite all the walls they had torn down. It was the keep itself doing the killing.
One fact was left dangling by this explanation, however. A major fact. The keep had not been malevolent when they had entered, at least not in a way one could sense. True, birds seemed to avoid nesting here, but Woermann had felt nothing wrong until that first night when the cellar wall had been broached. The keep had changed then. It had become bloodthirsty.
No one had fully explored the subcellar. There really didn't seem to be any reason to. Men had been on guard in the cellar while a comrade had been murdered above them, and they had seen nothing coming or going through the break in the floor. Maybe they should explore the subcellar. Perhaps the keep's heart lay buried in those caverns. That's where they should search. No ... that could take forever. Those caverns could extend for miles, and frankly, no one really wanted to search them. It was always night down there. And night had become a dread enemy. Only the corpses were willing to stay.
The corpses ... with their dirty boots and smudged shrouds. They still bothered Woermann at the oddest times. Like now. And all day long, ever since he had overseen the placement of the last two dead soldiers, those dirty boots had trudged unbidden into his thoughts, scattering them, smearing them with mud.
Those dirty, muddy boots. They made him uncomfortable in a way he could not pin down.
He continued to sit and stare at the painting.
Kaempffer sat cross-legged on his cot, a Schmeisser across his knees. A shiver rippled over him. He tried to still it but didn't have strength. He had never realized how exhausting constant fear could be.
He had to get out of here!
Blow up the keep tomorrow—that's what he should do! Set the charges and reduce it to gravel after lunch. That way he could spend Saturday night in Ploiesti in a bunk with a real mattress and not worry about every sound, every vagrant current of air. No more would he have to sit and shake and sweat and wonder what might be making its way down the hall to his door.
But tomorrow was too soon. It wouldn't look good on his record. He wasn't due in Ploiesti until Monday and would be expected to use up all the available time until then to solve the problem here. Blowing up the keep was the last resort, to be considered only when all else failed. The High Command had ordered that this pass be watched and had designated the keep as the chosen watchpoint. Destruction had to be the last resort.
He heard the measured treads of a pair of einsatzkommandos pass his locked door. The hallway out there was doubly guarded. He had made sure of that. Not that there was the slightest chance a stream of lead from a Schmeisser could actually stop whatever was behind the killings here—he simply hoped the guards would be taken first, thereby sparing him another night. And those guards had better stay awake and on duty, no matter how tired they were! He had driven the men hard today to dismantle the rear section of the keep, concentrating their efforts on the area around his quarters. They had opened every wall within fifty feet of where he now huddled, and had found nothing. There were no secret passages leading to his room, no hiding places anywhere.
He shivered again.
The cold and the darkness came as they had before, but Cuza was feeling too weak and sick tonight to turn his chair around and face Molasar. He was out of codeine and the pain in his joints was a steady agony.
"How do you enter and leave this room?" he asked for want of anything better to say. He had been facing the hinged slab that opened into the base of the watchtower, assuming Molasar would arrive through there. But Molasar had somehow appeared behind him.
"I have my own means of moving about which does not require doors or secret passages. A method quite beyond your comprehension."
"Along with many other things," Cuza said, unable to keep the despair from his voice.
It had been a bad day. Beyond the unremitting pain was the sick realization that this morning's glimmer of hope for a reprieve for his people had been a chimera, a useless pipe dream. He had planned to bargain with Molasar, to strike a deal. But for what? The end of the major? Magda had been right this morning: Stopping Kaempffer would only delay the inevitable; his death might even make the situation worse. There would most certainly be vicious reprisals on Romanian Jews if an SS officer sent to set up a death camp were brutally murdered. And the SS would merely send another officer to Ploiesti, maybe next week, maybe next month. What did it matter? The Germans had plenty of time. They were winning every battle, overrunning one country after another. There did not seem to be any way of stopping them. And when they finally held the seats of power in all the countries they wanted, they could pursue their insane leader's goals of racial purity at their leisure.
In the long run there was nothing a crippled history professor could do that would make the least bit of difference.
And worsening it all was the insistent knowledge that Molasar feared the cross ...feared the cross!