Five Past Midnight (30 page)

Dietrich blinked. He was about to die — bubbling blood rushing from a slash in his neck, and he'd resemble the appalling body at Dr. Wenck's morgue — and all he could think of was that Jack Cray's German was fairly good. And that Cray was as quiet as snow. And that Cray simply must have been incinerated in the von Tornitz home.

"What did you want to say to me?" The voice of his killer again.

Dietrich's mind was blank with fear. He finally managed to gasp, "Nothing."

"Better think of something."

Was the American making fun of him? Dietrich stammered,
"I...
I wanted to ask if you were a show-off."

"I've been called that before." The flat voice was right at Dietrich's ear.

The detective could see a portion of Cray's shoulder, covered in dirt and ash.

Dietrich was still alive. He willed his mouth—dry as a kiln—to work. "How did you escape the fire?"

"In the furnace ash pit."

"The ash pit was stabbed with a bayonet, a couple of times."

"I was stabbed with a bayonet, a couple of times." Cray held his left arm over Dietrich's shoulder so the detective could see it. The uniform sleeve was matted with ash. Blood leaked from the arm onto the ground. ''Clean through my arm. It hurts, I don't mind saying. I've got another long cut, a graze, right along my backbone."

"How did you survive the heat?" Dietrich could feel his own pistol on his belt, pressing into his side. It seemed a long way away. The American was talkative, for Christ sake.

"I opened the coal gate. Cool air came in, sucked in by the flames. All the fire was above me. I dug down into the pit, and it was fairly comfortable. Except for being stabbed, of course."

Was the commando mocking him? It didn't seem professional. On the verge of death, Dietrich was indignant.

"I could hear you in the basement," Jack Cray said. "You sounded like a policeman. Not a soldier."

"I'm a detective. A homicide detective."

"Would killing you be legal, then ? Would it be a lawful wartime action?"

"No, surely not." The American was having a fine old time at Dietrich's expense. The detective asked, "Are all Americans as cocky as you?"

"You should meet our pilots."

"We Berliners meet them every day," Dietrich said.

"How'd you set me up last night in the Tiergarten?"

Dietrich hesitated, but when the knife scraped his neck as if it were shaving him, the German said, "We had the Chancellery issue orders as if the Führer were leaving Berlin. It is always a complicated process, with hundreds of people involved in preparation for Hitler's departure. We figured somewhere there'd be a leak and you'd find it. We were right."

"That was good," Cray said. "I like that."

"Thank you."

"Now what do I do with you?"

"You're going to let me live because you want someone to be able to tell how clever you were escaping the fire."

"I'm going to let you live because you argued against destroying her house." The pressure at Dietrich's neck lessened slightly. "Stay away from me. You'll get hurt if you get close again."

The knife was removed. Dietrich could sense the American receding into the night. He waited a few heartbeats to be sure. Then he pulled his Walther from his belt and turned around, the pistol leading the way.

He saw nothing, as he had known he would. Nothing but night and the dark shadows of a few trees and down the street a few licks of flame and purple sparkling embers, all that remained of the house.

Dietrich pushed the pistol back into his pants. His hands were shaking and he had trouble drawing a breath. He could still feel an echo of the appalling knife at his throat.

Finally, "Bastard American show-off."

2

C
AN WE TRUST the names from the milk box?" Katrin tapped on the door.

Cray replied,
"I
hurt too much to think about that."

"I thought you commandos don't feel pain."

"I'm about to weep from it." Cray held his left arm in his right hand. Blood had dried along the length of the coat sleeve, stiffening the fabric and turning it dark.

She gently touched the sleeve.

"Ouch." He jerked his arm away from her.

"Commandos say 'Ouch'?"

The brass sign to the right of the door read FREDERICK HOLENBEIN, MEDICAL CLINIC. Katrin knocked on the door again, then she saw the bell cord and pulled it. The sound of chimes came from deep within the office.

A bulb flicked on above them, from the second floor, spots of light visible through holes in the blackout curtain. After a moment the door opened, just a crack, an eye visible above the taut safety chain.

"Dr. Holenbein?" Katrin asked. "We were told you would help us."

The doctor hesitated, vast indecision apparent in one visible eye. Then the safety chain's catch scraped against its anchor. The door swung open. A flannel robe flapping behind him, the doctor led them through the reception area into his surgery, glancing nervously over his shoulder several times.

She had been out making a radio broadcast. When she returned, her home was surrounded by policemen and troopers and ablaze from front to rear. She had watched and watched from down the block, seeing her home turned to ash and smoke. Over the winter she had burned her furniture for heat, and now this fire was taking away all the rest, everything she owned, every memento of Adam. Her sorrow had rooted her to the sidewalk.

And only after a moment had she remembered that the American was in her house. She had stared at the twisting fire. There could nothing left of him. Perhaps Jack Cray's death should have seemed inconsequential to her — a foreigner thrown at her as her life was collapsing — but she had been surprised by her sadness that the American was surely dead, under the ashes of her home. She had never met anyone who had been on first sight more suggestive of wild trouble. His crazed grin, his animation, his unwavering focus. His stupid cheerfulness. Jack Cray would have led her to ruin, perhaps would have cost her her life. Yet for a while, watching the embers die, she had been sorrowful that he was gone.

Watching the fire, she had surprised herself with that emotion, the flutter of grief. She had thought herself no longer susceptible to such sentiment. Another soldier's life tossed into the war's grinder. What possible difference could it make to her?

But after a few more moments gazing at her burning home, her sensibilities had callused over again. Jack Cray had come and gone. Even though her home was gone, she was still alive. In Berlin, another day of
life was a victory.

Then when everyone else had retreated from the destroyed house, and when she had turned to wondering where she would spend the rest of the cold night, she saw Jack Cray rise from the ashes—a ghoul emerging from the center of the earth—and make his way toward the last remaining policeman, who was walking to his car.

She had been transfixed by the American's movement, utterly silent, yet almost as fast as a sprinter, and somehow eerily hard to follow with her gaze, merging with the shadows, darkness on darkness, and she then understood why the Hand had called on him. This was the skill, probably one of many skills, that his American fatuousness concealed. His exuberance and affability were doubtless feigned, a professional fak- ery designed to lull whomever he dealt with.

Watching Jack Cray move toward the policeman, she had been reminded once again that the American was nothing more than a proficient killer, a weapon of war loosed on Berlin, just like a B-17. But less philosophical and repentant. He was going to kill again, this time the policeman by the car.

But the crazy American said a few words into the policeman's ear and then let the man go. Just turned him loose. Jack Cray was continually complicating her assessment of him.

The doctor walked to the far side of his examining table before he turned to look more closely at them. When his eyes settled on Jack Cray, his face turned pale in blotches and his shoulders hunched. His face slackened and his lips parted, and a small sound escaped him, perhaps the beginnings of a plea for mercy. Then the doctor saw the blood, and realized that the American whose face littered Berlin had come to him for the same reason everyone else came to him. Slowly the doctor's face came together again, wrinkling around hostile eyes.

"He's been stabbed in the arm," Katrin said. "And along his back, though it's a slight wound there."

"Easy for you to say how slight it is." Cray's jaws were clamped with pain. "It's not your back that's hurting."

Katrin had seen firsthand the resources the Hand was committing to its mission, and knew that the American had been entrusted to her care, and so sensed that she had been invested with substantial authority, however undefined it was for her.

So she said bluntly, "We are in a hurry. Clean his wounds and do whatever else you need to do, and do it quickly."

The doctor scowled blackly at her, but he must have thought better of protesting or making an inquiry, for he reached for Cray's arm, but tentatively, across the wide distance between him and the American, afraid to get closer to the killer.

"Is this your knife hand?" Dr. Holenbein asked pointedly.

"Nah, fortunately," Cray replied.

Katrin stared at Cray.

"Can you take the coat off?" the doctor asked.

During the day, the doctor hid his baldness with several carefully placed strands. In his irritation and haste, he had forgotten to arrange his hair, and the long strands hung down one side of his head almost to his shoulder. His eyebrows were vast and black, covering a good portion of his forehead. His eyes were shallow and close together. His salt-and- pepper goatee looked carefully tended.

In a glass case against a wall was on otoscope, a blood-pressure gauge, and holders for thermometers and syringes and medicine droppers. The door to the stairs to his private quarters was in one wall. An eye chart was on another wall.

When Cray struggled with the coat, the doctor assisted, still maintaining a distance. Cray grimaced as the sleeve was slipped along his arm and the coat lifted off his shoulders. Next came the uniform blouse, stained dark brown on one sleeve and along the hollow of his back. The wound lay open to the light, the entrance hole on top of his upper arm, the exit hole below. Clotted bits of blood hung from the lower wound. A pistol was in Cray's belt. Katrin wondered where the knife was. Cray had prisoner's ribs, clearly defined, the skin sunk deeply between them. Blond hair on his chest was in tight curls.

"Sit on the end of the surgical table." Holenbein glanced around at the blackout curtains, all in place, then flicked on an examining light. He placed a mirror on his head and leaned over the wound. After a moment he said, "I must open the wound to abrade it properly. Do you know if you have reactions to anesthesia?"

"No anesthesia," Cray said.

"I'm already impressed," Katrin said. "You needn't do anything more."

Cray smiled at her.

Dr. Holenbein said, "I cannot clean and mend this wound while you are conscious. It needs to be properly opened—the wound enlarged—to satisfactorily rid it of dirt. Otherwise it will pus out, and quickly."

"I can't afford to lose the remaining motion in my arm. Clean the hole as best you can without opening it any further, without tearing the muscle any more."

"Mr. Cray, I am better with a knife than even you, believe it or not," Holenbein said magisterially. Like all Berliners, he knew Cray's name. "So kindly do not tell me how to practice medicine. You need a general anesthesia, and a full probing and abrading of your wound."

Cray said, "Doctor, I'm leaving your office in three minutes. Do you have a bottle washer?"

"Pardon?"

"Do I have the wrong phrase in German?" Cray asked Katrin. "A long wire with bristles all around at the end, used to clean the inside of a bottle."

"A bottle washer?" Then the doctor's eyes grew small with understanding and amusement. "You cannot be as badly wounded as I had supposed, making such a jest."

"Get a bottle washer," Cray ordered

"I have them here." Holenbein lifted a wire bristle brush from a drawer under an autoclave "For test tubes and beakers.

"What do you have to kill germs on a wound?" Cray asked. "Alcohol is all I have due to the shortages."

"Dip the brush into the alcohol."

Dr Holenbein opened a jar of rubbing alcohol. "I'm going to enjoy this little spectacle. I only hope your friend here," he nodded toward Katrin, "will help me lift you from the floor, where you will fall senseless from the pain." He dipped the brush into the fluid, and brought it up again, the bristles dripping. He held it out.

"Americans don't use anesthesia." Cray glanced at Katrin, his eyes alight. "We view it as a European indulgence."

Cray took the brush by the handle, and held it up his wounded arm. He stared at the raw wound a moment, his jaw tight, the humor gone from him. Then he rammed the brush into the wound, through the wound, so that bloody bristles popped out under his arm.

Katrin thought she could see his fist shake, could see his jaw tremble. Cray plumbed the wound, just as if he were cleaning a rifle barrel. In and out went the brush, carrying clotted and tresh blood and bits of tissue and damp ash. Katrin studied him, looking for signs of pain or distress. His mouth pulled back, but only a little Nothing more.

The American passed back the bottle brush. His words were serrated by pain. "Sew it up."

Katrin said flatly, "You are an exhibitionist." Cray suddenly sagged to one side but caught himself on the operating table. He pushed himself back to his feet. He blinked rapidly, his teeth sunk into his lower lip. He held out his arm again. "Sew it up." Dr Holenbem clucked his tongue. He lifted a needle and a vein of silk thread. "I'm impressed, even if she's not." He pulled the silk through the needle's eye. "You won't need anesthesia for the stitching either, I would imagine."

The room suddenly filled with glass and bits of plaster and splinters of wood, thrown about as if in a high wind. Jack Cray tackled Katrin and drove her to the floor before the sounds of the shots registered on her. A machine gun, two machine guns, outside the surgery's window. Cray was on top of her, then he was crawling toward the surgery's back door, dragging her across the floor like a flour sack. Beakers shattered. A wheelchair against a wall skipped about. Pockmarks raced across the wall opposite the window, then back again. Fractured cabinet doors flew open. Dr. Holenbein fell to the floor, his trunk almost severed by bullets, blood spilling from him.