Read Five Past Midnight Online

Authors: James Thayer

Tags: #Fiction, #General

Five Past Midnight (4 page)

BOOK: Five Past Midnight
7.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Working his mouth silently and frowning, Bell had been staring at Jack Cray. Finally he spoke, clipping his words for emphasis "Captain Cray, we've been ordered to get you out of here."

The corners of the American's mouth lifted. "My friends call me Jack."

"You've told us nothing about yourself," Bell said angrily. "All we know about you is that you are a crazy escaper."

The last had been a particularly crazy attempt. When an electrician's truck was entering the yard through the main gate, the American took off, madly running past the guardhouse and over the moat bridge. Three Rottweilers tackled him seconds later. Then the guards reached him. A melee ensued, resulting in four guards being thrown into the moat, one with a broken jaw and another with a shattered kneecap. It took three blows to the American's skull with a rifle butt to bring him down. The American required 140 stitches in his legs and buttocks from the dogs' slashing fangs.

Bell demanded, "Why have we been told to spring you from this place?"

"Did the message say?" The burns on Cray's arm were covered with gauze.

SAO Hornsby said, "We thought you might have a clue." Cray shook his head.

Glowering, Major Bell shifted on his seat. "I suspect you
do
know, goddamn it, and..."

Hornsby interrupted, "There have been almost no gone-aways from POW camps in the past half year. It's just not worth it anymore, with the Allied armies getting closer every day. And now when there is an escape, the Gestapo takes over the facility."

"Things are hard enough here without letting the Gestapo have an excuse to run the castle," Bell said, still glaring at Cray. "Christ, our men are going to start dying if those bastards mete out a camp penalty, cutting the ration any further."

Reginald Burke poured more coffee. "Can I go with you, Yank?"

Hornsby ignored him. "Captain Cray, the Germans are no longer toying with escapees, giving out the twenty-one-day confinements. The Gestapo has issued an order that all escaping POWs are to be handed over to them. That means if you're captured you'll either be shot outright or sent to the Grandenz Military Prison, which might be worse."

"There must've been more to the message," Cray said.

Hornsby looked at him closely as if trying to divine his thoughts. "A Berlin address and a code word. Horseman. Does that mean anything to you?"

"Not a thing."

Bell asked: "Captain, why would they send you to Berlin, of all places? If you're so valuable, why aren't they getting you out of Germany, instead of further into it? And why do anything at all, with the war weeks from ending?"

Cray shrugged.

"And the message directs you to divert and distract on your way to Berlin," Hornsby said. "That's the term it uses. Divert and distract. Why, do you think?"

Cray rubbed his chin. "So the Germans will use up a lot of men and materiel searching for me, I suppose. Maybe my mission is just to be a feint."

Hornsby stared pensively at the American. Finally he said, "Well, we've got to get you out of this castle. I've got an idea, a good one. You willing to try it?"

Cray grinned widely. "Can I go today?"

 

 

4

 

KATRIN VON TORNITZ walked carefully along Lassler Street, stepping around a crater filled with murky water, then around an uprooted tree, torn from its planter by a high-explosive blast. It was ten in the evening, and the city was black, with no streetlights or neon. The few cars in the street had tape over their headlights. She carried a heavy suitcase, a prewar Rugieri from Milan. On Katrin's lapel was an ornate lily pin designed by the Berlin goldsmith Emil Lettine and given to her on her twentieth birthday. The case and the pin were among the last bits of the life she had once known

She ducked into a doorway to let a column of Home Guards march by some with Panzerfausten antitank rocket launchers over their shoulders, most carrying only shovels. They were old men, bedraggled and ridiculous. At the intersection to the north an apple-red post-office van also waited for the guardsmen to pass. Amid the chaos of Berlin was a berserk. Normalcy mail was delivered daily, newspapers were printed morning and evening although most had been reduced to single sheets, and telephone calls could still be made from Berlin to any part of Germany.

Like many Berlin automobiles and trucks, the van had no hood over its engine. Hoods and trunk lids had been sucked away by the vacuum that follows a bomb detonation. On a reader board on the side of the post-office van was the message THE
FÜHRER'S WHOLE
LIFE IS STRUGGLE, TOIL, AND CARE. WE MUST TAKE PART OF THE LOAD OFF HIS SHOULDERS TO THE BEST OF OUR ABILITIES. An elderly woman walked by, wearing a scarf around her hair and a briefcase with shoulder straps, a recent Berlin invention for shoppers who spent most of their days in lines.

Across the street was a building that had been a bakery. Most of the top-floor roof had been blown away. On the bakery door was a placard reading ‘ACHTUNG MINEN'. An unexploded bomb was inside.

The old men's footfalls faded. Katrin glanced nervously along the street. Most of the tenements on the road had been destroyed. At the end of the block, a bathtub was perched in the air, attached to a pipe above a mountain of shattered masonry.

Katrin saw no one, so she briskly crossed the street. She had developed the
Berliner Bhck
(the Berliner look), the habit of glancing over her shoulder for the Gestapo. She wore a gabardine coat with the collars pulled up against the wind. On her feet were "Goebbels shoes," flats with pressed-cardboard soles. They were sodden with rainwater. Most of Katrin's high heels had been broken on Berlin's perilous sidewalks and streets. Hats had not been rationed, and so had come into their own. Hers was green felt, peaked in two ridges, approximating a hat she had seen on Vivien Leigh in an English movie before the war.

Again Katrin surveyed the dark street. Still no one. She pushed against the bakery's shattered door. Her coat brushed against the bomb warning, and she stepped inside. Glass shards snapped under her shoes.

The darkness was thick; black shadows on shadows. She held her hand up to ward off hanging wires and timbers. Her fingers found an oven built into a wall, and she barked her shin on an overturned chair.

She vaguely saw another warning poster tacked to a wall at the back of the bakery. The bomb lay under the pile of wreckage. A ragged hole had been punched through the ceiling above the mound of debris. She stepped around support pillars that gleamed like oilskins, damp from the rain dripping from the floor above. She felt along a wall of the room until she came to a stairway. She was met with the scent of corroding flesh. The Rescue Squad had missed a body somewhere under the rubble.

She climbed the stairs, splintering clumps of plaster with her shoes. The second floor was open to the sky. Rain had dampened beams and the floor. She stepped on a broken mirror, cracking it further. Moving slowly, she crossed the room to the window, which had only slivers of glass sticking up from the frame. No one was on the street below.

Katrin found a barrel chair and placed her suitcase on it. She flipped the clasps. Inside was her radio, a pack wireless once used by a Wehr- macht infantry squad for unit messages. A powerful amplifier and frequency multiplier had been installed. She pulled a small compass from her pocket. It had been a toy, issued to a member of the Deutsche Jungvolk, the branch of the Hitler Youth for len- to fourteen-year-olds, but it worked well enough.

Before Allied bombing had begun in earnest, she would have known which direction was northwest, but most of Berlin's landmarks had been toppled, and it was dark. She squinted at the compass's tiny needle, then squared herself to the northwest, toward another smashed window.

Unrolling one of the wire antennas, she picked her way across the room to the window's fractured casing. She retrieved a thumbtack from her coat pocket. The end of the antenna had a tiny loop. Bending close to the casing, she pressed the tack through the wire circle and into the wood. She did the same with the second wire antenna.

The rwu wires made a broadside array antenna, boosting the transmitter's radiation along the plane of the wires toward London. In directions lateral to the plane the broadcast waves largely canceled themselves out. Each half-wave wire was a precise length, and they ran to the window exactly three feet apart, all to put the radiation waves in phase.

She brought up her wristwatch. Still five minutes to go. She righted a captain's chair, brushed dampness from the seat, and lowered herself into it. She turned her head to gather in the wrecked and black room. Through the gaping holes in the ceiling, she could see the red night sky, colored by the fires set by American bombs that day. She wanted to grin at fate's irony but she lacked the energy.

Katrin von Tornitz had not visited Berlin until her twenty-third birthday, seven years ago. In 1902 her grandmother, Countess Voss- Hillebrand, had been one of the Ladies of the Palace. When the kaiser changed the title Lady of the Palace to Lady-in-Waiting, and appointed new Ladies of the Palace ranking above them, the countess stormed out of the court and left Berlin for the family estate in the Mecklenburg area. She raged anew when she learned from a family friend, Ludwig Count Oppersdorff, the court marshal, that the kaiser enjoyed making jokes at the countess's expense, vulgarly approximating her bosom. The countess swore her family would never return to the city, and her iron will had prevailed for decades. Not once in her fifty-five years had the countess's daughter—Katrin's mother—visited Berlin. Only when her grandmother died—of an accumulation of bile, the family suspected— could Katrin venture to the great city.

During her first evening there, at the Hotel Esplanade, Captain Adam von Tornitz had approached her as she was standing near a terrace fountain. Cosseted away in the Voss-Hillebrand estate most of her life, Katrin was defenseless against the gallant Wehrmacht officer. That evening he had whispered into her ear that she was
das Ewig-weibliche,
the eternal feminine, a phrase from Goethe. They were married ten days later.

Their love was a gift from God, she knew then. Their years together played themselves out joyfully, even though they were together only a few days here and there when the captain received a leave. What they lost in those days apart they made up for in intensity when they were together. She was convinced then—and still fervently believed— that their love was a unique creation, unattainable by other humans. With Adam she had found her fulfillment.

Adam von Tornitz was arrested on July 28,1944, tried before Judge Freisler in the People's Court for complicity in Colonel Stauffenberg's plot, then taken to Plotzensee Prison, where he was hung by piano wire from a meat hook. Rumors circulated in Berlin that a motion picture camera had been in the death chamber, and that Hitler watched the movies at night. She never learned what, if anything, her husband had done to assist Stauffenberg.

Her grief had made her a traitor to the Fatherland. At Adam's funeral, one of his friends, Colonel Wilhelm Becker, expressed his sympathy, then added cryptically, "Katrin, if you would like to do something in memory ofAdam more substantial than tossing flowers onto his casket, let me know." Becker was with the Wehrmacht Administration Office in Berlin.

She had been doing her part for the Reich for three years, working as a radio operator for OKW (the High Command of the Wehrmacht), assigned to G Tower, the thirteen-story antiaircraft complex built on the grounds of the Berlin Zoo. She had known nothing of the messages she sent or received. They were always in code, and she knew radios, not codes. She had spent her days over a Morse sender.

She had been fired at OKW the day Adam was arrested. Had she not been so disconsolate after Adam's death, she might have feared for herself because the Gestapo often arrested the accused's family members. But she was numb to everything but grief. And then rage began to kindle.

So she had visited Colonel Becker at his home in Dahlem. Three days later she received the pack wireless and a one-time pad, a booklet with codes printed in red for enciphering and black for deciphering, and made of cellulose nitrate, which burns quickly and leaves no latent images. Each page of the book contained a new, random key character, to be used only once for each plain text character. A one-time code is unbreakable because it never repeats.

She was also given a route that took her from the Tiergarten to Kreuzberg south of the city center then back to the Friedrichstrasse Station, during which she checked three drops. She was to transmit whatever message she found, but there had never been any, until today. She had found in her southerly drop a message that the sender asked be transmitted immediately. Katrin did not know that a milkman had made the drop. She had transmitted his message that afternoon.

Colonel Becker had also told Katrin of the Gestapo's new radio direction finder, a circular antenna mounted on a black Opel. She was not to broadcast twice from the same location, and she was never to send for more than thirty seconds. Buildings with ACHTUNG.' MINEN! on them were free from squatters and looters. She knew the risk of treading inside buildings where high explosive duds had fallen, but she no longer feared anything.

Berlin was a city of widows, and they had grown to look alike, with vacant eyes, compressed lips, and the timid expressions of those eternally fearful of more dreadful news. Katrin had fought this sameness. She wore lipstick and a light stroke of eyeliner, though not much because heavy use of makeup was unpatriotic. Her face was slightly over- featured, with vast Prussian blue eyes. Adam had said they were the color of the Havel River. Her eyes had once been able to switch from glacial to gay in an instant. They had an inexhaustible supply of expressions. Now they were only mournful. The slightest of webs had begun around her eyes, giving her a delicate majesty. Her nose was sharp. Her smile had been luminous, as if lit from within. She could not remember the last time she smiled. Adam had reveled in her black hair, and had called her "my little raven." The ebony hair, blue eyes, frost-white skin, and her full rose lips were jarring in their kaleidoscopic colors. Adam had trouble finding his voice that day they had first met each other on the Esplanade terrace, he had later admitted.

BOOK: Five Past Midnight
7.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Enemy Way by Aimée & David Thurlo
Wonderful Lonesome by Olivia Newport
Fighting Fair by Anne Calhoun
December Boys by Joe Clifford