Five Past Midnight (21 page)

Even his German was getting better, she thought. And he seemed forgetful of himself.

"I've heard old people say that they wish they had known how happy they were when they were younger, because they would have made a point of enjoying it more." He chuckled, a hollow sound. "Well, I knew how happy I was."

"What happened to your wife?"

"Apple cider is made from apples, and you can get as drunk from apple cider as from anything." His mouth silently worked a moment. Finally he said, "Merri Ann was killed by a drunk driver." He might have been talking to the fire. "So I know something of what you are going through. Some mornings I wake up and wonder whether its worth getting out of bed."

"What happened to the drunk?" Katrin asked.

"I don't know." His face reformed into hardness. "Not yet I don't."

After a moment, she asked, "Do you know why the Hand has chosen you?"

"The Vassy Chateau and a few other reasons, I imagine. And that I speak German."

"More than that."

He finally looked away from the fire and at her.

"The Hand knows about your wife," she explained. "It knows of your sorrow. You don't have much to live for, or so the Hand believes. And so you will go places and do things that a person who wants to survive will not."

He shrugged.

"The Hand is sending you on a suicide mission," she insisted.

"I don't go through a door unless I know I can get back out." The American lifted the message and reread it.

Katrin thought he was deliberately making light of the message. She said quietly, "And I'm telling you, you are being sent to your death."

10

A DEAD DOG in a wheelbarrow was Cray's ruse, and it was working. Stooped and limping, he walked southwest from the park and onto Hermann Goring Strasse. The Reich Chancellery garages and guard quarters were on his left. SS guards stood at the doors to the barracks. Others manned machine guns behind sandbags. Rolls of razor wire had been spread along the curb to keep passersby from nearing the barracks. Two antiaircraft guns—Flakvierling 38s with quadruple barrels—were at the corners of the barracks. Their regular-army crews stayed near their weapons, away from the SS guards.

Cray walked among a slow stream of refugees, pushing his wheelbarrow. They were a sullen, dispirited lot, shuffling ahead, slowed by despair and grief and hunger. Many glanced covetously at the dead dog, knowing its owner would eat well that night. One man wore rags wrapped around his legs like puttees. A woman with an empty sleeve pinned to her coat led a ten-year-old girl with a bandage over her eyes. Some refugees wore pieces of cast-off uniforms, some little more than rags, more than likely picked off bodies, including a Soviet flyer's thigh-length fur-lined boots and a Danish army officer's black greatcoat. Many carried their possessions in blankets over their shoulders, some wore rucksacks, and others carried dilapidated suitcases. Two dead chickens hung from a pole over one man's shoulders, and another used a birch switch to herd a goat. Crutches and canes were common on this street. Cray's was not the only wheelbarrow. Others pulled small hay carts loaded with possessions, and one family nudged along a railroad porter's cart.

Walking among the refugees, but with brisk steps in an effort to appear to be on business, were many servicemen in Wehrmacht gray and Luftwaffe blue and even a few Kriegsmarine sailors in navy-blue pea jackets. Were any of the soldiers or sailors to mill about, they would be pounced upon by roving SS squads demanding identification and orders. Cray guessed that many of these servicemen were from destroyed units and were seeking—with various degrees of diligence—to hook up with new companies.

Berliners had become expert at judging shell trajectory from the sound, and when a Red Army shell sailed overhead, sounding like a dog's growl, few looked up. They knew the shell was destined elsewhere, and an instant later it detonated three blocks away, a muffled and dull sound indicating it had found rubble rather than a standing structure.

Up ahead, a horn bleated, and the refugees were shunted toward the curb as six Wehrmacht Phanomen and Auto-Union trucks carrying troops rolled down the street, the last one pulling a 15-cm infantry- support gun. They were followed by three enormous Famo half-tracks whose steel treads ground stray bricks and plaster to powder. When the convoy had passed, the refugees refilled the street.

Cray was wearing two wool jackets, one over the other, a grease- stained felt hat, and pants so short they showed his ankles. His eyebrows and hair were blackened with fireplace soot, and a bandage was over his left cheek and ear. He shuffled along, bent and slow, indistinguishable from hundreds of others on the street.

He turned his wrist to look at his watch. Only he among the crowd knew that an American air strike was due in twelve minutes.

The dead dog stared up at the American with unseeing eyes. Its back was bent unnaturally, probably the result of falling bomb debris. Cray pushed the wheelbarrow nearer a row of five-story apartment buildings, once the elegant homes of Reich officials, now vacant, many with facades pushed in, others sagging out onto the street. Rubble rose in front of the ruined buildings like foothills. Pipes and support posts jutted uselessly into the sky. Mounds of rubble seemed like rolling fields. A toilet hung in the air on a pipe, the new Berlin weather vane.

American and English bombers had not settled for changing Berlin's landscape. They had also changed the language. Berliners now called a sunny day a bombers' day. A cloudless night was now known as a smoking night because of the smoke screens from oil-burning canisters placed all over the city. The Elbe River was now Bombers' Alley because the Allies flew along the river toward the city.

Air-raid sirens began their plaintive wail. The sirens were on posts and atop buildings, and the sound eerily came from all directions. Cray was nearing Potsdamer Platz, still within sight of the Chancellery, now behind him. The sirens usually gave Berliners ten minutes. Many refugees looked around wildly, searching for bomb shelters. Cray pushed the wheelbarrow to the curb, passing a poster on a telephone pole that read OUR WALLS MAY BREAK, BUT NEVER OUR HEARTS, then climbed the steps of an abandoned building. The door frame was empty, the door sucked off the building by a bomb sometime before.

Cray walked into the apartment, toward the stairs to the cellar. Perhaps because he had abruptly begun walking like he might know where he was going, Cray was followed by a dozen refugees and a serviceman looking for shelter from the coming attack. He led them down the stairs, ducking under a wall that had collapsed over the steps. He pushed away dangling boards.

The floor had collapsed into the back of the basement. Cray passed a boiler, empty crates, and an overturned cement washtub. Light leaked into the cellar from fractures above. A woman behind him held an infant in her arms, and she followed Cray as if she knew him. The baby sucked on a checkered rag that looked as if it had been torn from a shirt. Cray found the civilians looking at him. He sat on the floor against the concrete wall, and the woman with the baby followed him, and then the others also lowered themselves to the floor. A Wehrmacht private sat at the other end of the room. He had a nose with a knot in it, and eyebrows and hair the color of straw. He tore a piece of paper from a notebook, chewed it for a moment, then stuck wads of the damp paper into his ears. He was missing his cap and was not carrying a weapon.

A low sound came from the north, a persistent and growing rumble. Dust fell from the ceiling. The baby grinned at Cray.

The American rose to his feet and crossed the floor to the wash basin. He tried to drag it across the floor, but it slid only a few inches. The Wehrmacht private obligingly rose to help Cray. They pushed the sink to the wall, then rolled it over and leaned it against the wall, forming a solid shelter. The bombers grew closer, and antiaircraft guns began their stuttering clap. Cray motioned to the woman, and she smiled hesitatingly at him, then scooted under the upside-down basin, her baby waving his rag at Cray. The soldier returned to his corner.

Cray couldn't see the sky, but he knew what it contained. It would be laden with bombers, perfect formations. Smaller planes—American fighter escorts and spotter planes—flitted about, daring the Luftwaffe to send planes skyward. The bombers had taken off from England, but the fighters had joined the formation from captured German airfields, and unlike earlier in the war, fighters could now escort the bombers during their entire mission. The sound of the massed planes seemed to be pressing the basement dwellers into the ground.

High above, the planes' bellies opened. Sticks of explosives fell away from the B-17s, so high the bombs would seem tiny and insignificant to anyone watching from the ground. At first they fell horizontally, resembling ladder rungs. Then the bombs squared away to their purpose and dropped nose-down.

Cray could hear the woman's teeth grind together. She shivered, waiting for her country's due from the sky. Cray reached under the basin for her hand. She gripped his hand fiercely.

Another civilian scrambled down the stairs, tripping over a crate as he stared up at the sky as if he could see through the tumbledown building. Then an SS officer followed him down the stairs. The collar tabs on his gray-green greatcoat collar identified him as an
SS-Standarten-
führer,
the equivalent of a colonel. The SS version of the national emblem was on the coat's upper left arm, and a silver cord adorned each shoulder. Under the coat were a brown shirt and a black tie. A silver death's head was on the gray peaked cap. He carried a briefcase. His mouth was a stiff, pedagogic line. He had spent the war indoors, and his face was as white as a skull. The man was an SS bureaucrat, an author of orders and a keeper of files and an attendant at meetings. He glanced at the Wehrmacht private, who ducked his head. Then the colonel sat next to Cray.

The first bombs tore into the neighborhoods. Debris flew skyward and had started its descent before the sounds reached Cray. And it was less a noise than a pulse. Then fireballs rose, mushrooms of bubbling flame, out of sight of the troglodytes in the cellar. The basement's walls trembled, then bucked. Cray's ears popped with the sudden changes in air pressure. The sound was as if thunderclaps were going off between his eyes. A shroud of dust drifted down from the flooring planks. The bombs roared, one indistinguishable from another. The room shimmied. The baby wailed. A bicycle that had been leaning against a wall fell over. Empty canning jars fell from a shelf and shattered on the floor. The SS officer coughed, then brought a handkerchief to his mouth. Added to the bombs' deep retorts were the eerie sibilance of fire-driven wind and the shrieks and moans of structures giving way.

Cray's thoughts—those that could form between the pounding of the explosives—settled on Katrin, and their conversation last night. She had thought his comments about Merri Ann to be manipulative, offered to show that Cray and Katrin were kin in suffering, offered to open her up and get her to help. But Cray's memory of his wife, and of her death, had come forth unbidden, as it did every hour of every day, and would until he left this earth, he grimly supposed. This time, though, someone other than a combat-hardened Ranger had been near him when a wave of sorrow washed over him, and Katrin's grief had caused his own to escape his mouth before he could control it.

Only part of it had escaped him, a fragment of the story. He was surprised by his unexpected moment of confiding in Katrin, but he had reined himself in and had not told her all of it. The horror of that day, and of the subsequent weeks and months when Cray had almost left this life, had remained locked within him, available only to torment him and to push him. Katrin had been right. The Hand knew of his wife's death, and of Cray's wild grief and guilt, and was using it. The Hand knew that Jack Cray gave most of his energy to accomplishing his assignments, and little to getting back to safety. Cray would seldom be diverted from his goal by the frivolous complications of escape plans. He had lied to Katrin when he said he didn't go through a door unless he knew he could get back out. If he got out, fine. If not, well, he deserved to find the door closed.

He had never allowed this knowledge of himself to fully form. It had been partly hidden by his vast pool of self-loathing. But Katrin had put it bluntly, had thrown it up in front of him. Cray sat in the trembling cellar, realizing fully for the first time—just as the Hand had perhaps long known—that Cray didn't care if he returned from his missions. If Cray didn't have the courage to resolve his overwhelming guilt, perhaps the Germans would do it for him. And the dreadful days would end, and the long, long nights. Despairing and angry, Cray squeezed the bridge of his nose, his mouth pulled back in a snarl. Jesus, if he could just have that night back. Just that one night. The woman under the basin yelped, and Cray lessened his grip on her hand.

Time in the cellar had an odd elasticity. With the crushing noise and the heated rushes of air and the basement's jarring, Cray could not determine whether the raid—and his dreadful memories—lasted five minutes or an hour, but finally the last bomb detonated, and the weight of the sound was lifted from the cellar's occupants.

Cray kept his hat between him and the SS officer, and rose to push aside the concrete basin. The baby had cried himself to sleep. His mother squeezed Cray's arm in thanks. Others opened their mouths to crack their jaws, trying to clear their ears. They dusted their shoulders.

"You." The SS officer stabbed his hand toward the Wehrmacht private. "Your ID and orders, quickly."

The private, no more than seventeen years old, whitened and stammered, and it was instantly apparent he was a deserter. The civilians in the cellar hurried up the stairs, anxious to get away from the SS colonel and his young prey. Except Cray.

The colonel reached inside his greatcoat for his service pistol. The young soldier backed into the wall, his hands out. His mouth formed a word, an entreaty, but no sound came. A civilian looked back, hesitated, but hurried toward the stairs.