Petr decided he would have to wait until morning. He tried to reassure himself that this was not unreasonable. Karen was far from helpless. She could take care of herself. She’d proven that again and again. She’d survived starvation, she’d escaped Leningrad, and she’d even escaped from him. But when night finally came and he lay down beside the warm stove, he couldn’t sleep. All he could think about was that moment he’d first met Karen. He remembered the NKVD man and his Tokarev pistol. He’d had it pointed at Karen. If Petr hadn’t arrived, and Duck hadn’t attacked, Karen would be dead. She’d needed him then and, he worried, she might need him now.
CHAPTER 23
THE CELLIST
Almost a week later, Karen didn’t sleep, either. She didn’t want to. If this was going to be her last night alive, she wanted to experience it. She was locked in a storage closet, in the dark, so there wasn’t much around her to experience. She was cramped and uncomfortable.
But so long as she lived, she still had her memories. Memories of her father, of New York, of Leningrad during the previous summer, of Inna, and, most of all, of Bobby. Those were the memories she wanted to cherish above all. But something strange kept happening. Whenever she tried to envision Bobby, she saw the face of the boy soldier instead. Her mind kept drifting to him, and even to his dog. She wondered if he hated her. She’d have hated her if she were him. She’d betrayed him. And she wondered if he really had managed to kill a deer.
The storage closet had no windows. But it was getting brighter. The shapes of the empty shelves were turning gray. She wondered what time it was. It must be well after dawn; the sun would have to be high and bright if its light was managing to penetrate this dark place. Karen wondered how much longer she had left alive. She’d been told she would be executed at noon. That couldn’t be very far off.
Karen knew there was no point in resisting. These men weren’t with the NKVD. They were Germans. They were the enemy. If she told the truth, they would execute her. If she lied, they would execute her. There was no story, no matter how preposterous, imaginative, or believable, that could save her life. All she could hope for was to minimize the torture and die with her dignity intact. That, at least, she had achieved.
They had beaten her, of course. That went without saying. The Germans never would have believed her story if she hadn’t made them beat her. As a result, her fat lip and black eye throbbed, and her ribs ached. But there was a big difference between being beaten and being tortured. She’d discovered that difference in the company of the NKVD man. He hadn’t beaten her; he hadn’t even left scratches or bruises on her body. But what he had done to her, even just for a moment, was ten times worse than what the Germans had done.
Karen had denied being a Russian partisan. So the Germans started beating her. After receiving a few licks, Karen let her Russian falter, revealing a foreign accent. This aroused their interest. They started paying attention to what she had to say. Karen had confessed that she was American and asked to be taken to the embassy. That was a ridiculous request, of course, because America had declared war on Germany. So, after a few more punches in the stomach, she asked to be taken to a prisoner-of-war camp and held until the end of hostilities. The Germans didn’t take that demand seriously, either. Only soldiers were granted the right to be captured as prisoners of war, and Karen wasn’t a soldier. If she was, she’d be wearing a uniform. So, when they started punching her in the face, Karen “confessed” that she was a spy.
The Germans had suspected this all along, and Karen played into those suspicions. She told them she had been sent there to determine German troop strength and location. The Americans didn’t trust their Russian allies, she explained, and they considered all Soviet military reports propaganda. So they’d sent a number of American spies into Russia to see with their own eyes.
That sounded believable to the Germans, for they didn’t trust Communists, either. But they wanted to know where her equipment was—her radio and her codebook. Karen claimed to have lost both while trying to cross a river. But she offered to write down what little she remembered of the cipher she and the other spies were using.
This was a major intelligence coup for the Germans. With even bits and pieces of the code, cryptanalysts in Berlin could crack it and use it to entrap other American spies. They could also eavesdrop on American transmissions and intercept military orders and dispatches.
The cipher Karen wrote down was nonsense, of course. She made it up on the spot—a simple system of substituting numbers for letters. By the time her notes were sent to Berlin, the Germans would know she’d invented it. But by then it would be too late. Karen would be dead. That was what happened to spies: they were shot. But the Germans didn’t want to waste bullets on a firing squad. They’d decided to hang her instead.
Karen was proud of her deception. She hadn’t saved her own life, but she might have saved Petr’s. The Germans never suspected she was traveling in the company of a Russian soldier, and she’d been able to avoid divulging the existence of the abandoned hunting shack. She was pleased with herself, she told herself, and she should be at peace—ready to die. And yet she couldn’t help what she really felt. What she experienced inside that storage closet was terror.
Suddenly Karen heard a dog howling. It confused her for a moment. Then a new fear kicked in. She knew the Germans were looking for Duck. She’d overheard them, and they’d even asked her about the dog during her interrogation. The howling dog had to be Duck; the Germans had found him. And if they’d found Duck, that meant they’d probably found Petr.
Karen knew she should be overcome with despair. If Petr were captured, that meant her carefully constructed story had failed to protect him. To make matters worse, the Germans would soon discover from him that everything she’d told them was a lie. She’d be interrogated again, and this time she wouldn’t just be beaten, she’d be tortured. That made her all the more terrified now, but she wasn’t sad. Illogically, unreasonably, she actually felt happy. Because for some reason even she couldn’t quite understand, she couldn’t wait to see Petr again.
CHAPTER 24
THE GOATHERD
Unteroffizier Oster suspected it was a trap. The safest thing to do would be to put a bullet in the dog’s head. But Leutnant Schaefer wanted the creature alive, so the Unteroffizier had to obey.
A report had come in that someone had tied the Alsatian wolf dog to a tree near the village, causing the hound great despair. By the time they found it, the dumb beast’s attempts to break free had only succeeded in tangling it more. The canine didn’t stop howling when the German soldiers neared, but it did gaze at them with its big brown eyes and a mournful expression that begged them to set it free.
Oster had his men keep their distance. Unfortunately for the hound, Oster first had to make sure there wasn’t a partisan sniper waiting in ambush. So he ordered Krause to go forward alone and see whether the dog was injured.
Oster was using Krause as bait. Fortunately, Krause didn’t realize that. If he had, he might have figured out some way to refuse the order and shirk the dangerous duty. Instead, he moved carefully toward the dog, holding his hand out in greeting. The big dog stopped howling, pawed at the ground, wagged his tail, and even licked the palm of Krause’s hand.
Oster was impressed. Maybe he’d finally found something Krause was good at.