Five Past Midnight (23 page)

Dietrich heard voices from the doorwav behind Wenck. Because paper would quickly become bloodied, a chalkboard was against a wall for the physician to mark down observations. A reflector light hung over the table, and another was on a stand at one end, adjustable by two universal joints. On a wall to Wenck's right were three enlarged photographs of bodies, showing the portion of each body from the breastbone to the nose. The bodies looked remarkably similar. Each wore a Wehrmacht tunic, and each neck was creased with a wide and ghastly wound, and each set of eyes was open and staring, giving each corpse an appearance of modest surprise. Blood was pooled under each dead soldier, obscuring what might have been a Persian rug below the bodies.

Gestapo Müller entered the examining room from the rear door, followed by General Eberhardt. Müller's mouth was pressed into a thin line, and his lip curled contemptuously when he saw Otto Dietrich. Apparently having lost an argument, Eberhardt was flushed from neck to hairline, and his jaw was set at a mulish angle.

Müller's raincoat was buttoned to his throat. His eyes shone with anger. He chopped his head at Wenck and demanded, "Tell him what you just told us."

The coroner pursed his mouth a moment before he began, Dietrich guessed to annoy the Gestapo chief, who seemed to quiver with impatience, rocking on his heels and clenching and releasing his fists, his gaze cutting between the body on the table and the three photographs on the wall.

Wenck stepped toward the wall. "These are photographs of three of the soldiers killed at the Vassy Chateau. You can see that all have severe wounds to their throats, which caused their deaths. These photographs were taken by a military police lieutenant right after the deaths, and are of an inferior quality to photographs I would normally insist upon from my investigators."

"Can we cut this short," Müller said. It was not a question.

Wenck said, "Skin on the neck is in a state of tension because of clastic fibers that align on a particular axis—"

"Shorter," Müller ordered.

Wenck inhaled sharply. "I have examined all three—"

"This is one of my agents lying here." Müller stabbed the table with a finger. "He and two others were knifed last night in the Niko- lassee district."

Doctor Wenck said, "There is a certain artistry to the wound that killed this man and the other two last night."

"An artistry?" Dietrich repeated.

"An economy is perhaps a better word." Wenck bent over the table to lift a flap of the corpse's skin, exposing the neck wound. "This sharp force wound was a straight penetration. The assailant used a knife approximately twenty centimeters long. And although it is difficult to tell if the knife had one or two edges, I believe the one used here was a double-edged blade."

"A commando knife," Müller added.

Dietrich stepped closer to the table. The dead man was washed white by the lamp. A small cloth was over his groin. The harsh light seemed to be making him less significant, nothing but a specimen.

Wenck continued, "By economy I mean that the wound was inflicted by someone who knew how to do it. This injury displays no evidence that the knife's action had twisting or rocking components, which are common in knife wounds. And the blade penetrated the neck here." The coroner pointed at one end of the wound. "And it moved across the neck, only once, and not any further than was needed to accomplish the assailant's task."

"Which was to kill him," Müller said.

"Which was to cut both carotid arteries in the neck and the internal jugular vein." Wenck moved his finger into the wound. "This controlled cut resulted in almost instant death."

"The same clean, quick knife work killed those three soldiers on the wall," General Eberhardt said.

"Photographs, even good ones, are not a substitute for an examination," Wenck said. "But as far as I can tell, all the wounds—on the chateau soldiers and on the three agents—are virtually identical. So it is possible, perhaps probable, that the same person wielded the knife."

General Eberhardt said darkly, "The American is now in Berlin."

Müller flipped a thumb toward Eberhardt. "The general's so-called impenetrable wall around the city to keep this Jack Cray out was full of holes. The general has failed."

Eberhardt straightened his backbone. "While the Führer is alive, I have not failed."

"And so far, Detective," Müller glared, "you have failed, too."

"Jack Cray is in Berlin." Otto Dietrich said the words slowly, tasting them. Then he asked, "Is there anything more you can tell me, Doctor?"

"The assailant is right-handed," Wenck answered. "Why is that important to me
?
" The coroner replied, "Stay away from his right hand." Dietrich smiled. He nodded his thanks and turned to go. "Dietrich," Müller called after him. "You have underestimated." Dietrich passed through the aisle of bodies, walked through an anteroom, then out onto Huzel Street. Peter Hilfinger and the car were waiting for him.

Dietrich opened the rear door and said, "Peter, at the intersection, turn right, then go back to the station. I'll meet you there."

The detective bent low, slammed the door shut, then in a crouch stepped back into the coroner's office. Hilfinger drove the car away. Decades of police work had taught Dietrich to trust his hunches He stood inside the door, waiting.

Not long A black Volkswagen sedan sped by his door, two men in the front seat, the passenger talking into a microphone, trailing Dietrich's car.

Dietrich walked onto the sidewalk, his gaze following the Volkswagen as it turned right and disappeared behind a rubble mound. The Gestapo was following Dietrich Undoubtedly on Heinrich Müller's orders. Dietrich turned into the wind and began walking toward the station.

12

KATRIN SPUN AROUND, the rubble mounds a blur as she turned. She was lost, once again. She went up on her toes to try to look over a stack of concrete blocks, salvaged from a destroyed structure, but not yet carted away by salvagers. The pile was too high to peer over. She was less than three blocks from the Tiergarten's bird sanctuary, she was sure Yet she did not know where the park was, did not know which direction was north.

Like most Berliners, she frequently became lost, sometimes only blocks from home, rubble piles obscuring the horizon, landmarks torn down, the location of the sun hidden by smoke and ash. She could not get her bearings. And because many buildings were crazily canted, the perpendicular was distorted, and Katrin found herself swaying in sympathy with the wounded structures. The war had taken away many things, none more surprising than the ability to tell which direction was straight up.

She tried to push her hands into her coat pockets, but they were stuffed with cheese and bread rolls. She had been without adequate food so long that she had been unable to leave her home without filling her pockets. The American had laughed at her, not in an unkindly way. But she needed to be near food, even if she had to wear it, and its weight in her coat was comforting. At the very least, she knew where her next meal was coming from. From her pockets.

She passed an elm tree lying on the street, its roots exposed, torn from the ground by a bomb blast. Two oxen pulling a Schutheiss Brewery dray crossed the intersection ahead of her. Perhaps she was near the brewery. Down the block a dozen French workers used block and tackle to pull reusable floor joists from a ruined building. Several loudly sang Maurice Chevalier's "I'm a Lover of Paris," probably to irk their two guards, who tried to ignore them by talking earnestly with each other. Painted on a nearby wall in a shaky scribble was
ENJOY
THE
WA.R.
THE
PEACE WILL BE TERRIBLE.

From around a pile of fractured telephone poles came a stream of refugees, carrying knapsacks and cloth bags, silently tramping along, twenty or so of them, and every one looking beaten down. Refugees always marched west — seemed to instinctively know the way — so Katrin took her bearings from them and started north toward the Tiergarten.

After another block she again felt her bearings slipping away, so she climbed onto a pile of fractured masonry, careful to keep her skirt tucked around her legs, and stepped unsteadily up the rubble mountain for a view from the top.

The war had turned Berlin inside out. Bits and pieces of lives that should have been concealed and comfortable behind walls and doors were rudely exposed to the gazes of passersby. Katrin stepped over a leather photograph album, open to the sky its photos of marriages and christenings scattered about. Lodged between blue and black clinker bricks were a pair of men's long underwear, the legs missing from a blast. Also on the rubble pile were the upper half of a ceramic beer mug with a hinged pewter top, a pair of yellowed dentures, the head of a girl's China doll, a stack of letters held together by yarn, a brass weight and chain from a pendulum clock, a rouge brush, a shattered photograph frame, an empty bottle of India ink, a box of Christmas tree ornaments, the blue glass balls fractured to the size of snowflakes and scattered across the debris, dully reflecting the day's gray light. Small tokens from broken lives. Berlin was awash in these mementos and trifles, abandoned and ignored in a city without roofs. She climbed over them without a glance.

At the top of the rubble pile she could see over a neighboring row of rubble, just enough to find the flak tower near the bird sanctuary. She had her directions again. She carefully descended the wreckage, her shoes slipping on the damp bricks and concrete pieces. A swallow flitted by once, then again, perhaps looking for a recognizable place to land. A piece of torn camouflage netting caught her ankle, and she stumbled just as she reached the sidewalk. She caught herself on a telephone pole and started north.

She passed heap after heap of debris and one gutted building after another. She could ignore only so much. Her city—the destination of youthful dreams, the sacred place of her marriage to Adam—lay about her, trampled and burned, no more resembling a city than a rock quarry. The symphony of the city had been stilled. With a finger she dabbed at the corner of her eye, but there was no tear. She pressed the corner of her eye. Still no tear. She had shed the last of them, she supposed. And she was not alone. Berlin was beyond tears. Now only fear remained. Fear of Bolshevik soldiers, so close their campfires reddened the eastern clouds at night. Fear of the American and British bombers, which returned with numbing punctuality. Days and nights of fear.

Berliners wore their fear like a uniform. As she walked toward the park, passing many pedestrians doing their anxious errands in the predictable pause between bombing runs, Katrin realized Berliners had grown to look alike. Drawn, bony, wan faces. Stricken expressions. Bent, furtive walk, like mice scurrying from one safe spot to the next. And as if by agreement, Berliners had surrendered their right to color. They wore gray or black, the clothes of mourning.

Ahead on the street were three wooden barricades. An errant bomb from the run on the Alkett tank plant m Ruhleben had blasted a hole in the street precisely the street's width. People waited in line to cross unsteady planks that had been rigged along the edge of the crater, which was filled with murky water from a burst main. Katrin stepped behind a Red Cross colonel in black boots, a slate-gray greatcoat, and a peaked hat. Even the Red Cross looked like the Wehrmacht. She waited her turn to use the planks. Buildings near the crater had been raked back by the blast. A dead horse was bobbing in the crater. A man in a chef's hat was in the water, pushing the horse carcass to the crater's edge, where a cart waited. A restaurant would be serving it by nightfall.

Katrin held her hands out like a wire walker as she negotiated the plank. The Red Cross colonel turned to offer his hand, and she used him for support the last few steps. She nodded her thanks, then waded through a knot of refugees waiting to use the plank, heading in the other direction. She glanced at her watch. She had twenty-five minutes.

A child's cry brought her up, a piercing wail. Huddled near an overturned Auto-Union truck was a boy, maybe four years old, wearing three gunnysacks for a shirt and a pair of rolled-up man's pants held around his waist by a rope. His face was screwed up with the realization that he was lost, that his parents had moved on without him. In his hand was a crudely carved toy truck. Porous shoes had allowed water to wick up his pants almost to his knees. Dirt or ashes smudged his face. The boy dragged a sleeve across his eyes, streaking the dirt.

What was one more lost child? One more orphan? Berlin was full of lost children. They go somewhere, eventually, she figured, though she didn't know where. Wars had their price, and children paid their full measure.

Katrin took three more steps before, with a huge sigh at her weakness, she turned back toward the boy. He stepped back at her approach, covering his eyes with his hands to make her disappear.

She towered over him. "Where are your parents?" A little too gruff. Lord, she didn't want this little boy's problems.

He peeked up at her through his fingers, but said nothing.

"Are you German? Can you understand me?"

Tears had reached his chin. He nodded.

"Is your
Muti
alive? Your father?"

"Muti.
But she's not here." The boy's words ended in a thin wail.

A siren sounded from the next block, the mechanical wail weaving in and around the boy's cry. Katrin no longer even turned her head toward sirens. She asked, "How long have you been lost?"

His chin trembled. "Ten hundred hours and minutes." He tentatively moved toward her, two half steps, and with that little movement, gave himself over to the kind lady who had asked after his mother. He was now hers.

Katrin understood this rule of engagement She rubbed her hand alongside an eye, trying to think Then it came to her She looked at her watch Twenty minutes She had to hurry "What's your name?"

"Artur"

She reached for his hand and gently patted it "Come with me, Artur"