The rest of the photos had slipped from her grasp, scattering across the floor. She watched helplessly as the consulate official bent down and picked one photo up, then held it out to her.
“You know it’s true, don’t you?”
She tried to turn her face away from the photo, the face of the little boy, but couldn’t.
The consulate official’s voice whispered at her ear. “You must think with your blood, Marte. Then you’ll know this is your child.”
Her sudden tears blurred the photograph. The child’s somber, unsmiling face turned to nothing but muddled shades of black and white, then vanished as she broke away her gaze. A sob rose in her throat as she turned her own face against the chair, as though she could hide in its depths, falling into the darkness that would welcome and forgive her.
THIRTEEN
The shades had been drawn, sealing out the merciless bright sunshine of the morning. A little piece of night remained inside the room that Ernst von Behren used as his study. He sat deep in brooding thought behind the desk. One of the few books he’d managed to bring with him from Berlin lay on the desktop, a black silk ribbon marking his place halfway though the yellowed pages. The book was a favorite, he’d read it many times through since he’d been a boy. But there’d be no reading of old tales set in thorny black-letter, this day. Perhaps for many days to come.
“It is true -” Marte sat curled up in the chair on the other side of the desk, her legs tucked up beneath her, a wet handkerchief squeezed into a ball in one hand. Her face was still puffy and reddened from her crying, though the tears had stopped hours ago. “I know it is.”
She had said those same words over and over, and each time von Behren had felt a knifeblade touch his heart, the edge dulled to ache rather than cut. He slowly rubbed a fingertip on the only other thing on his desk, a photograph of a child lifted up in a another woman’s arms. The corner of the photo had been crumpled where Marte had clutched it tight; he watched his own hand trying to smooth out the frayed creases.
There was nothing he could do about the things of which she told him. His brooding was a pit that opened wider beneath him. Working on a screenplay with Wise or anyone else, he could slash a red pencil through the bad parts, or crumple into his fist a page that was beyond redemption and hurl it toward an overflowing wastebasket. The SS were considerably more difficult to dispose of.
Von Behren roused himself from his brooding. The man from the German consulate, who’d come to Marte with the photos of the child, had displayed a fine sense of timing. David Wise wasn’t here in Los Angeles at the moment; he wasn’t even in California, but had just left on a two-week business tour of the movie theaters under the control of the Wise Studios – a separate corporation was about to be set up, to avoid getting hit with the same antitrust pressure that Roosevelt’s Attorney General had brought against MGM and Warner Brothers. He would have been the only one who could keep Marte here; he would have been able to wrap his arms around her and hold her, let her cry against his chest, tell her that he and his money and all his powerful friends would do something, he’d go up against the iron weight of the Reich, against Goebbels and the SS, he’d find a way to get the little boy out and bring him here…
It wouldn’t have even mattered if Herr Wise had lied to her about those things, about what he could or couldn’t do. He would at least have found a way of keeping Marte here. Told her that it would be better if she stayed here, in this safe country, while he pulled strings, all his great net of connections and influence, to find the little boy, Marte’s child, and trade whatever else Goebbels and the SS might want for him.
Which was the problem, of course; von Behren’s heart slowed and grew heavy inside him. He knew there wasn’t anything else that the Reichsminister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment wanted. He had done his job all too well, when he had set out to have Goebbels fall in love with his protegee. Only one love greater, the interlocking of obsessions between the Reichsminister and the Fuhrer, that could have made Goebbels send Marte away. And now things had changed; Goebbels had paid his penance, the Fuhrer ’s gaze had turned elsewhere – and now the Reichsminister would have her back again.
As Marte wept quietly, curled up in the chair on the other side of the desk, von Behren reached out and turned a few pages of the old book before him. He stopped at the woodcut print of the cloaked and hooded figure, stalking with a crossbow through a night-dark forest. The figure leaned forward, the hidden face intent upon its prey. Der Rote Jager. The story and the image had sealed itself into von Behren’s dreaming years ago, when he’d been a child and his grandmother had first read it to him as he’d sat in the safety of her lap. The red hunter, the hunter of men. The one from whom there was no escape, no matter where you fled. As the nobleman who’d broken the ancient laws ran through the entangling branches, seeking the shelter of daybreak, only to find an endless night and a red-cloaked figure barring the path before him, the same faceless image that had strode unstoppable behind him…
Perhaps it was unavoidable, and always had been. Von Behren closed the book and let out a pent-up sigh. “We had better pack, then. You will only need to take a few things. I’m sure the gracious folk of the consulate will take care of all the rest.”
Marte raised her head. “You would come with me?”
He nodded. “Yes, of course.” He picked up the old book; that was one thing he would take with him, back to that land from which he had brought it. A rueful smile came to his face. “How could I not?”
After she had hurried away, back to her little house to throw a few things into a suitcase, he went on sitting at the desk, mulling over answerless questions.
He supposed he loved her as well. But he hadn’t realized it, until after he had given her to the eyes of other men.
The forest snared him in its branches, as he closed his own eyes and ran toward the waiting figure.
The house felt empty. Except for the man standing in the middle of the living room, the exact center of the little house with the other empty rooms echoing around. A man with necktie loosened and pulled askew, and a two-day stubble on a face trembling with anger.
“Well?” David Wise turned, his fists tightened. “Any word?” His voice was a demanding bark.
The head of security for the Wise Studios had left the house’s front door open behind him. With somebody in the state that his boss had worked himself into, Wilson knew it was best to keep his own options clear.
“It’s pretty sure they went through Mexico, and probably on to Buenos Aires.” He glanced at a piece of paper he took from his shirt pocket, though he’d already memorized what was on it. “Apparently von Behren tried to cash a check in Tijuana. At a hotel – the clerk remembers a group of about six people speaking German, and one of them was a woman. He didn’t see her face; they hustled her in and out before he got a good look at her.”