Warren laughed nervously, pushed his son. “Take the wheel. Madame here wants to leave.”
They were under way in a few minutes, chugging down the bay toward the open sea. “We didn’t stay long,” Paul muttered as he and Gerd watched the last lights of the shoreline slipping past.
“Long enough. We’ll have to watch them day and night now,” he added, indicating the cabin where the two Warrens were talking softly to each other.
“How long’s this trip going to take?”
“Two days,” Amy said, joining them. “It’s over six hundred miles. I don’t think they’ll give us any trouble, but it might be a good idea to throw the tommy guns overboard rather than have to carry them around.”
“Good idea,” Gerd said. “Let’s do it now.” He disappeared into the crew quarters, took a quick look at Kuznetsky, and returned with the three guns. The men in the wheelhouse had stopped talking, were watching with open mouths as he and Paul sent them arcing over the side.
“I’ll take first watch,” Paul said. “I’ll wake someone if I feel like collapsing.”
The others laid out blankets on either side of the foredeck, and Paul sat down with his back against the bow railing, his service revolver in his lap. Amy heard him and Gerd talking about someone called Burdenski, fell asleep wondering when they’d first met each other.
Twelve
Paul rearranged his legs to make himself more comfortable, tried to remember which of the stars was which. The sky must be very different this far south, he thought, because he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Warren stood in the wheel-house a few yards away, both hands on the wheel, a pipe in his mouth. His son had bedded down somewhere in the stern.
He looked at Amy’s upturned, sleeping face, watched her hand brush something from her cheek, felt a lump form in his throat.
He forced his gaze back to the sky, made out the veil of the Milky Way draped across the heavens. What the hell had happened by the train? Gerd still hadn’t told him the full story. The image of Smith shooting the injured man in the back of the head kept flashing into his mind, and the feeling of revulsion that had accompanied it. Why? he wondered. Why was it worse to kill people in cold blood than to kill like an animal? The man had known nothing; it had been almost merciful. Because we are animals, he answered himself, and we fear machines.
He found himself staring at Amy again, remembering kissing those gray eyes, feeling those legs that now shifted under the blanket shifting then against his own… Damnit, that had been someone else, not this woman with a gun and a voice that could turn you to stone. But sleeping, she seemed…
He’d read the paper while Gerd had been looking for Warren back in Mon Louis. Russians outside Warsaw, Americans all over Normandy. It wouldn’t be long now. He might yet outlive the war. And then what? The farm? It would be like Russia again, a life dictated by the seasons. He never wanted to see snow again; he still had the snow dream, as Gerd did, and probably thousands of others: the beautiful white blanket, white velvet sewn with silver sequins, so lovely… suddenly thawing into mud and flesh, as if a face had been pulled away to reveal the pulsing muscles and pumping blood…
Stop it, he told himself, you’re not asleep now. He wouldn’t go back to the farm, the country. A city then, full of new buildings, living people, endless activity.
“Life in the country is just like life in the city — a hundred years earlier.” He could still hear Uncle Berndt say it, the droll inflection, the malicious twinkle in his eye. Well, his uncle had died in his beloved Bremen, had stubbornly sat in his fourth-floor office, probably with cigar in hand, as everyone else crouched in the shelters and the RAF opened their bomb-bay doors.
He wouldn’t mind losing the last hundred years. What had been happening in 1844? They’d been building railways, exploring Africa, looking at steel mills as if they were magic creations. People had been optimistic then, one way or another. Hadn’t Marx written the Communist Manifesto that year? Now there was optimism for you. And Germany hadn’t even existed then, not as a unified state. Perhaps it would be that way after the war: a hundred small states within a civilization, just getting on with existence, making watches and toys like the Swiss.
It was one in the morning, time for something to eat. He raised himself gingerly to his feet and walked back to the cabin.
The first thing Kuznetsky noticed was the movement of the floor, the easy rocking motion of a buoy on water. Either he was being rowed across the Hesperus or they’d made it to the Gulf. The latter, he guessed, wincing as the muscle movement of a smile shot up the side of his face. He carefully felt for the wound, found his head swathed in bandages.
Someone came in, a man to judge from the footfall. He closed his eyes and played unconscious as the visitor rummaged around at the far end of the cabin, then observed the man’s back through slitted eyes. It was the younger German, Paul. He closed his eyes again as the man walked back past him.
Alone again, he tried to remember what had happened. The train, the rush of feet in the darkness, the blow on the side of the head. How long ago had it been? At least twenty-four hours if they were now at sea, which they were — he could smell the salt.
So what was the German doing here? She must have brought them — no one else knew. But why? It couldn’t be betrayal or he wouldn’t still be alive. And if it wasn’t betrayal, then what had she told them? Christ, his head hurt. She’d have to do the thinking for a bit longer yet. He drifted back into sleep, the throbbing in his skull keeping time with the throbbing of the engines.
When Amy woke it was light, the first flash of the sun glinting on the eastern horizon. The boat was chugging through an empty sea, deep blue and calm, beneath an empty sky that seemed to lighten as she watched. She stood up and stretched, forgetting for a moment the wound in her side. The sharp pain pulled her up short, but the scab tissue stayed closed.
Gerd was huddled in the wheelhouse with Warren, who appeared to be explaining the controls. She joined them. Warren seemed almost asleep on his feet, but at least daylight gave his face a basic friendliness that she hadn’t suspected the night before. Perhaps she’d overreacted by pulling a gun on him, perhaps he really had only wanted to move the camper. He looked at her now with something approaching awe. He finished with Gerd and went to lie down in the stern next to his snoring son.
Gerd didn’t look much livelier. She made herself some coffee and asked him to go through what Warren had shown him. There was nothing to it.
“Go to sleep,” she said, “I’ll be fine.”
“Smith’s better,” he told her, “he’s sleeping now.”
“Good,” she said automatically, and watched him slump wearily down onto the foredeck beside the sleeping Paul. She supposed she was glad, but she’d never really doubted that he’d pull through. His sort always did.
She knew what they had to do with Paul and Gerd. It was obvious — they’d leave them in Cuba. There was no reason for them to go back to Europe, and after what she’d made up about their being Berlin’s sacrificial lambs, surely they wouldn’t feel duty-bound to carry on fighting the Führer’s war. It was simple. No need for Kuznetsky to kill them. No need for her to worry. Paul would soon be gone again, pushed safely back into the past.
She gripped the wheel, checked the compass heading, pushed her hair back from her eyes. Another thirty-six hours. She didn’t want to think about anything else, just to get it over, come through to the other side. There must be other things she could occupy her mind with… But there weren’t — everything in her life seemed to return to the same place, the same feelings, the same knot of experiences she couldn’t untie…