Child of the Journey (33 page)

"The retard reached the place where the picture was projected. A graph regarding troop movements, if I remember correctly. He kept erasing and washing, but naturally nothing came off. I was the first to stop laughing. That's how it is with Herr Hitler and myself. He's going to keep thinking he has all the answers, and I'm going to keep trying to erase the board."

He realized he was actually talking aloud, as though Solomon were among the clouds.
Fitting
, he thought. Solomon with his head in the clouds, and me with my mind on theoretical physics, the only subject other than Imperial German history that I enjoyed at the
Gymnasium
. Well, those times are over now. School's out. For the whole country, it's out.

Thinking about school, about training, he experienced a pang of anxiety as he realized the dogs were no longer muffed against him. Then, relieved, he saw that they were sitting in a circle half a dozen meters away, perfectly equidistant from him and each other, each in its respective place. A zodiac, with Aquarius at twelve o'clock. He smiled at Taurus seated at five o'clock, her head regally lifted, ears back. He could sense her joy in the pride he felt for the dog team, but for the moment she was too ensconced in her role to acknowledge him as friend. In the affenpinscher's absence, he had become, for her, the center of the pack, the hub of the wheel of the zodiac.

That was the way they had been trained: the affenpinscher presided; the other dogs obeyed and guarded that central position.

Unlike with most guard dogs, trained to follow their handler's lead and to move against an enemy in a typical flanking pattern, he had built his corps to respond to one another, and to attack outward from the hub. That would best assure that headquarters remain inviolate, especially, as he hoped, if his main base were behind enemy lines.

In Madagascar, it occurred to him, he would always be behind enemy lines. All he need do was assume that the Malagasy were the enemy.

The whole damn island was in France's back pocket, wasn't it? What a prize the island would make if--when--war broke out in Europe, a median in the midst of Indian Ocean shipping lanes! Not that he would give Herr Hitler anything other than a bullet in his heart, but were he, Erich, to control Madagascar, what a hole card he would have.

He looked at the dogs, sitting like guards before a castle keep, barely blinking, seemingly so patient but, he knew, waiting with high anxiety for an order to begin whatever game he required.

He mentally reached out to Taurus and felt the effort it took her merely to maintain an uplifted head. Her pain made his eyes water. How could he subject her to the rigors of the rain forest? She and the others were mentally ready--but was she physically capable? Were any of them?

"
Come
," he silently commanded Taurus. She glanced around at the other dogs as though confused at being singled out to break the formation, and at last left her post. "
Come all
," he ordered, and the rest followed, beginning with Cancer and continuing around the clock.

Taurus lifted her head once more. How she loved leading, Erich thought, feeling her happiness.

At the edge of the cobbled, crescent-shaped driveway the men had set up a dog pull. That Erich had not yet scheduled the event was due less to the dogs' condition than to indecision about how it should occur. Most of the trainers wanted a competition, dog against dog to see which could pull the most weight, while Erich found that motivation misdirected--more appropriate to humans than to animals. Teamwork was difficult enough to perfect among the dogs. Like prima ballerinas forced to become chorines, they held onto their individuality. His focus was on the finer details of unit cooperation. Still, the trainers had a point. If all of the dogs literally pulled together, how, they asked, might they assess the teams' weakest and strongest links?

The blocks of concrete sat on the sled like a pyramid awaiting ruin beneath wind and rain. It was time to move the thousand-kilo mountain.

Erich called to Aquarius. He could never feel the other dogs in the team as strongly as he could Taurus. Largest and most powerful of the Zodiac team, Aquarius was slow to respond, eyeing Taurus as if for confirmation or approval. That Taurus was clearly the leader among the shepherds despite her age and infirmities brought a slight smile to Erich's lips, though he tried his best to block the emotion lest Aquarius feel slighted and under or over-perform as a result.

He hooked Aquarius into the traces and mentally issued the command. Taurus and the other dogs looked on as Aquarius strained. The dog lurched, straining, sliding back against its own efforts, claws scraping on the tarspayed cobbles. On the second try, the mountain of concrete broke loose and began to move. The shepherd kept low, seeming to dig its claws into the tar as the mountain slid forward.

"
Go!
Erich commanded. "
All the way across the drive. You can
!"

The sled slid more easily as Aquarius' powerful shoulders hunched into the trial.

"
Yes
!" Erich cheered.

Aquarius reached the far side of the drive and entered the grass, digging up divots, belly almost touching the ground. Behind him, the sled touched the lawn.

"
Enough
," Erich said. He patted the dog while the others looked on jealously, wanting his affection.

"Now you," he said aloud to Taurus, though even before he spoke she was moving in an excited circle. He pointed to the traces. She ambled over, the hitch in her hips almost imperceptible. "Good girl," he said. Her tail wagged in answer, and her happiness and determination beat against his mind like a frothy surf.

He unhitched Aquarius, still catching his breath, his chest heaving. Taurus waited patiently, almost seeming to distance herself from the insult of any form of leash, while Erich hooked her up. Aquarius shook himself and trotted back to take his post in the circle.

Erich knelt and held Taurus' head in his hands. Touching her that way gave him an odd sense of déjà vu:
lifting Miriam's chin and kissing her at the wedding
. The wedding was simple: Konnie, the trainers, a few Nazi functionaries as a matter of form. Hitler had been unable to attend but sent his good wishes. No family members or friends. She had none left who were not Jewish, and they in Switzerland; as far as he was concerned, he had none--period.

Now that Sol was gone.

Had I known about his perversion, he would have been dead to me long before the goddamn jar arrived.

He gave Taurus a final pat, and stepped back. A breeze had come up, and for a moment the scent of roses and freshly mown lawns from the surrounding gardens assailed him. It felt good to be alive. He put the horror of the jar behind him.

"
I love you
," he told his dog.

As if sublimating her happiness into determination, rather than wag her tail she leaned into the task of pulling the pyramid back across the drive. Unlike Aquarius' surges to jump-start the weight, she strained forward without moving, her shoulders level with her hips, the forelegs taking the bulk of the load. It was, Erich knew, poor form, especially given the size of what she was expected to carry, but she seemed loathe to engage in tricks which, while effective, would render her less than regal.

Her entire body took on the look of a freeze-frame: jowl set, eyes bulging, shoulder muscles bunched beneath the skin. He could feel the dysplasia raging as he opened his mind to her misery, hoping the combined psyches would will her onward.

Pain sliced from one of his hips to the other with such force that it sent him staggering. His mind reeled with agony. It shot up his spine and clutched the base of his skull. Breath issued loudly through his lips. He tried to cry out her name but only gasped as the pain triggered a series of lightening seizures, shaking his body like minor aftershocks of an earthquake.

In the split-seconds between its beginning and its end, there came an intense awareness of greenery around him. He was no longer at the estate that once had belonged to Miriam Rathenau and now was the property of the Nazi Party, as she herself was--officially. He was amid thigh-high grass beneath a white moon crimped into an otherwise ink-black sky like a notary punch. The night was hot, oppressive; oppressive, too, was the dark tangle that, surrounding him, seemed to press toward him as if to listen to another of his dialogues carried on in solitude. At the top of a gentle slope above him, a dozen dressed stones and totem sticks, all the height of a man, stood beneath the moon which backlit half a dozen dogs which walked upright, like men.

As instantly as it had come, the image vanished. Once again Taurus was before him, pulling with all her might but unable to move the mountain. Aquarius joined her, followed by Pisces, Virgo, Sagittarius with her clipped tail, Libra. Then all of them. Before Erich could object, they clamped their mouths upon the traces and, tugging backward as Taurus continued to pull, brought the pyramid scraping along the drive.

The satisfaction that flooded Erich washed the pain away, his and Taurus'. For the first time in months, he felt free of anxiety and dread, utterly at peace, without concerns or plans for what the dogs' teamwork would mean in the greater picture called Madagascar. This is the satisfaction, he decided, I would have known after lovemaking with Miriam, had not the Party turned her away from me. He assessed the loss without remorse or self-pity, no more emotionally involving than the clouds that were clouds.

A
sound invaded Erich's consciousness, unmistakable and too-familiar, coming from the direction of the west gate.

Few sounds in the universe approximate that of a round being chambered. There is about it a certainty of its own importance, like the hiss of a highly venomous snake. Someone or something
else
holds the power of life and death, and the myth of immortality is briefly, however briefly, dispelled.

Erich's attention leapt toward the sound. What he saw commanded his full attention: Heinrich Wilhelm Krayller, who had dreamed of being a circus clown but whom fate and Hitler had conspired to make a clown in the Nazi circus, stood with his Karbiner 90 beneath the chin of Sachsenhausen's Deputy Commandant, finger on the trigger, face rigid with wrath.

Hempel's head was tilted back from the pressure of the muzzle. Though he clearly was attempting to maintain his military bearing, his eyes registered fear.

On the other side of the men, two other soldiers also faced off: Krayller's affenpinscher stood before and below the larger wolfhound, neither dog moving, both tight with fury, tails set like sticks.

"I'm going to kill you, you son of a bitch," Krayller said, his finger tightening on the trigger. Krayller, who would not harm so much as a fly unless the defense of his country or its women or children necessitated it, had murder in his eyes and held the power of God in his hands.

For a moment.

As suddenly, the power shifted. He dropped the carbine to the ground and clutched his throat, staggering backwards into the affenpinscher whose neck was being jostled between the wolfhound's jaws.

The terrier kicked ineffectually as it lay on its side, fighting with no more sound than a wind wafting through the linden trees that lined the Grünewald's streets. Then its rump flopped twice upon the driveway and the little dog lay paralyzed, chest rising and falling, eyes staring...and the shepherds charged.

Everything happened almost without sound, like a silent movie where only the tick, tick, tick of the turning metal wheel indicated that there was a mechanical helper that balanced the magic of film. Perhaps, Erich thought, the dogs sensed that there was no need for sound, that nothing but death would deter one like Sturmbannführer Otto Hempel who bent effortlessly and lifted up the corporal's weapon. Without looking at Erich he said, "If your dogs so much as rub against me I'll kill your friend here." He moved the carbine toward the terrier. "I'll kill them both."

My friend
? Erich reacted with surprise. Was that what he and the trainers had become. No. He would not countenance that, not after what had become of the only real
friend
he had ever known.

Solomon
Freund.

He called off the dogs.

They halted but refused to sit, as he commanded. Instead they moved nervously along an imaginary boundary drawn across the drive, anxious to finish what they had begun.
  

Corporal Krayller picked himself up, blood seeping through his fingers which still rested against his neck. He looked up at Hempel with terror and, Erich realized incredulously, a certain measure of awe.

"You sick bastard," Erich said to the Deputy Commandant.

"That I am, Herr Oberst," Hempel replied, casually checking the button of his sleeve. "Not only emotionally but actually. Points of fact, I might add, of which I am intensely proud."

Erich bent over Krayller and, despite the soldier's attempt to keep his hand over his throat, examined the wound.

"Not deep," Erich concluded. "He didn't cut the jugular."

"I am a surgeon in that regard," Hempel said. "Keep that in mind, Herr Oberst."

Relegating his anger to the back of his mind, Erich lifted Krayller by the arm, the corporal cradling the affenpinscher. Krayller pointed toward Hempel, trying to tell Erich something, but the wound or perhaps his fear had momentarily taken away his ability to speak. Erich patted him on the shoulder and sent him trundling toward the first aid locker in the garage, the shepherds parting before him and the terrier, the guard of the hub of their team, with the respect one might accord royalty.