Five Past Midnight (9 page)

Dietrich craned his neck left and right, taking in Berlin's wilderness of devastation. Some of the mountains of waste were new, others had weeds growing from them. The debris consisted of concrete, mortar, brick, glass, plumbing, limestone, sandstone, and shattered furniture. Above many mounds were solitary chimneys, still standing.

They passed a line of decrepit nags pulling carts. Dietrich saw almost no automobiles or trucks. He still had to squint against the bright light. The sky was dust-laden, and the sun was an outsized fiery red orb like a biblical omen. The Mercedes came to a rubble peak blocking the street.

The driver put the car into reverse. He turned to look through the back window. He had a long face with a flared nose. His dimples were at odds with the SS tabs on his collar. "Can't go anywhere directly these days. I know some detours, but they change every day."

The Mercedes veered around a crater, then tried another street. The car bumped over abandoned fire hoses. They passed sandbagged storefronts and the Mitte Cinema, still in operation. The epic
Kolberg
was playing. The marquee also advertised that a Fritz the Cat cartoon opened the show. Dietrich rolled down a window. The air smelled of sewage, cordite, and escaping gas. When he coughed against the dust, he cranked the window up.

A line of fallen telephone poles blocked the road. The driver again backed up, then turned onto another street, but here high-tension cables lying across the pavement were marked with a warning sign. Again he put the car into reverse, this time going two entire blocks backward before finding a clear roadway, but one that had not been swept. It was a river of glittering glass, sparkling gaily from curb to curb and crackling under the Mercedes's tires. At the next intersection they passed a field kitchen with a long line of haggard women and blank-faced children waiting with tin bowls in their hands.

The Mercedes turned onto Berliner Strasse, then came to the Tier- garten. The two massive flak towers at the zoo had so often been strafed that their concrete walls were scabrous. Piles of concrete chips lined the bases of the towers.

Dietrich's mouth turned down at his first view of the Tiergarten's lawns. They were a moonscape of room-sized craters. Many of the chestnut and lilac trees had been blasted down. Others had been cut down for firewood. The park reminded Dietrich of no-man's-land at the Somme, where he had spent much of the Great War. Once the Tiergarten's ponds had been blue gems but now were filled with rubble pushed there by bulldozers clearing nearby streets. Because the trees were gone, the park's statues were plainly visible. Without their usual camouflage of leaves and branches, they seemed naked and embarrassed. Goethe stared moodily at the victory garden that had been planted at his base. The statue of Frederick William II was newly headless. The Victory Column was undamaged but was surrounded by ramshackle squatters' huts. Columns of refugees flowed westward across the park.

The Brandenburg Gate came into view. Its twelve Doric columns and the Quadriga — the female charioteer with her four bronze stallions — were pocked and cracked. The gate's copper roofing had been removed early in the war.

The driver said, "Remember the fog crows that always spent the winter and spring in Berlin? They're gone. Bombs chased them away. Nobody knows where they went."

Dietrich was more interested in the two policemen they passed. "When did Berlin police start wearing steel helmets and carrying carbines?"

"Two, three months ago. We'll make them fighters yet."

They drove along the once-elegant Kurfürstendamm, where the cafe society had reigned. The street was bombed out and boarded up, the restaurants' striped awnings lying along the gutters. The Kudamrn was filled with filthy rainwater. At the top of the avenue they came to the Kaiser Wilhelm Church where the tower clock had been frozen at seven- thirty since the day in November 1943 when Allied bombers destroyed a thousand acres of the city.

"The city will never be rebuilt," Dietrich said.

"That is defeatist talk," the driver said lightly. "I'm charged with arresting you and taking you to Gestapo headquarters." He laughed. "And I would arrest you, too, if you weren't already on your way there."

A wave of Dietrich's fear returned. "What for?"

The driver shrugged. "I'm a chauffeur. General Müller doesn't often consult me regarding his appointments."

"An SS trooper with a sense of humor," Dietrich said. "They must be lowering their standards."

The driver laughed again. "I'll say."

The detective was inordinately grateful for the small talk, a flicker of normalcy even if it was from an SS storm trooper. Dietrich said, "The city has changed so much since I last saw it, it's unrecognizable."

Another shrug. "I'm not going to worry until you can get to the eastern front by the underground."

"Berlin will cease to exist, I think. Farmers will plant wheat and barley here."

Dietrich continued to stare out the Mercedes's window at the disfigured city. Those features that gave Berlin its unique personality had been ravaged. While Munich embraced art, Hanover its spas, Nuremberg its fourteenth-century gables and frescoes, and Hamburg its lovely lagoons, Berlin once had the splendor of its architecture. But since Schinkel, no Berlin architect had seen his work survive his era. And so it would be again. Berlin had become a second Carthage.

The car traveled under a camouflage net strung from building to building, then stopped in front of Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Al- brecht Strasse. The structure had once been an industrial arts school, but now the business in the building's dungeon was so ferocious that Berlin mothers warned their children not to walk by the building because of the sounds coming up through the sidewalk grates.

After an SS guard opened the Mercedes's door, a Gestapo agent showed the detective into the building. The agent was in street clothes but Dietrich had long been able to identify them from their walk. He had often wondered if the Gestapo had a class that taught the peculiar gait. The hallway led straight to the back of the building, and was lined with doors, all closed. At the end of the hall was a plainclothes guard carrying a machine pistol.

Dietrich was led to the third floor, to Muller's office. Dietrich was astonished when the door was opened to reveal all of the chiefs of the Reich's criminal and political police organizations sitting around Muller's conference table, silently waiting for him.

"Please sit down, Chief Inspector Dietrich," Heinrich Himmler said.

Dietrich had never before met the man. He was smaller than his photographs portrayed. And more kindly in appearance. Dietrich had never seen a photo of Himmler without his cap, which was on the table next to a leather folder and a vial of pills. The SS chief had sparse sandy hair. His undersized chin, delicate mustache, and watery eyes behind rimless spectacles gave him the look of a clerk. His hips were wider than his shoulders, his double chin extended from his lower lip to his chest with only the slightest interruption for his chin, and he had gained a potbelly over the years sitting behind his desk. Himmler excelled at desk work.

Dietrich's immediate superior, Erwin Golz, said with feeling, "Good to see you, Otto."

Golz was the senior Berlin criminal police officer. His background was as a homicide investigator, and he still wore the clothes of a civil servant: striped pants and a jacket. Golz had not allowed the hardships in Berlin to cause him to miss meals. His small features were almost lost in the moon of his face. The bulk of his stomach kept him a good distance from the table. Strangers often mistook him for a jovial incompetent, a mistake. Golz had tried in vain during the first weeks of Dietrich's incarceration to free him. But the Berlin police's long arms did not reach into Gestapo prisons.

Displaced from his chair at the head of the conference table by Himmler, Gestapo Müller sat stonily to the
ReichsFührer's
left. Müller was as barbarous as he was anonymous to most citizens of the Reich. He had been too long inside Gestapo headquarters, and his skin had faded to a leprous white and was marred by pockmarks near his ears. His nose was flat as if it were pressed against a window, and his mirthless brown eyes were set deep in his skull. His dark hair was combed straight back and kept in place with gleaming pomade. He wore plain clothes; a white shirt and emerald tie under a herringbone jacket. Müller stared at Dietrich with undisguised hatred.

Gestapo Müller was Dietrich's great nemesis, the ever-present threat and the constant danger. Ten years before, in 1935, Dietrich had arrested Müller for the murder of Müller's mistress, a teenager from the Bavarian mountains who arrived in Berlin on a train with twenty marks, a beguiling innocence, and an angelic face. Müller made her his, set her up in a flatjust off the Kurfürstendamm, and purchased or stole for her everything the country girl desired. Dietrich had never determined what had driven Müller to his murderous fury, but the girl's body had been punctured with a knife eight times. Based on the report of a neighbor in the building who had seen Müller leave the premises with a bloodstained overcoat, Dietrich arrested Müller, who spent two months in the Lerhterstrasse Prison awaiting trial before the Nazi Parry could effect his freedom. Despite Dietrich's pressing the issue, Mullei was never re- arrested or tried. And Müller had been after Dietrich for ten years, trying to waylay him, trying to catch him in a mistake, trying to find him in an exposed and vulnerable position. Finally the Stauffenberg plot had been enough. Müller himself had signed the warrant that had taken Dietrich to the same cell where Müller had spent those two months.

Although Dietrich did not have the slightest idea what was occurring, it was clear to him that his release from Lehrterstrasse Prison represented a victory of the criminal police over the political police, over Gestapo Müller.

RSD General Eugen Eberhardt was also at the table. Dietrich had worked with Eberhardt before and knew him to be highly competent.

Müller's office contained a Regency desk, a Louis Seize long-case clock, and the conference table. Because the windows had been boarded, several lamps with radiant orange and red leaded glass had been placed around the room, adding to the illumination provided by the electrified crystal chandelier hanging over the table.

"I have flooded the Reich with copies of this photograph," General Eberhardt said.

Dietrich was finally able to remove his eyes from the lofty gathering. He followed Eberhardt's gaze to the white wall, where the image of a man's head was projected.

"His name is Jack Cray," Eberhardt continued. "He is an American."

Himmler said, "He may be the most dangerous man in Europe."

"There is no question that this American was the guerrilla who entered the Vassy Chateau," Eberhardt said slowly, letting his words take full effect.

All German police and military personnel knew of the Vassy Chateau disaster. On a moonless night last August, the 4th Company, 3rd Lancers of the Wehrmacht's 15th Light Division was bivouacked in a vineyard's chateau near St. L6. Sleeping soldiers were scattered about the main room, some on davenports, some on a Turkish rug. An enemy commando crawled into the chateau, put his hand over the first sleeping soldier's mouth and slit his throat. It was believed the commando was in the room less than ten minutes. He knifed eight Germans, every other one he came to. He dispensed death and granted life alternately. Soldiers woke up sandwiched between two dead comrades. The Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS began fearing the night. They went to watch and watch, where fully half the soldiers served as sentries each night. OKW had not expected irregular warfare behind its line. The German army was forced to divert enormous resources to protect itself.

Eberhardt leaned slightly toward the projected photo and said, "One of the sentries patrolling the chateau that night is now posted to the Lechfeld airport. He reports that the American snuck up behind him and spun him around."

Dietrich now realized that he had been released from prison for his investigative skills. He was determined to prove himself to avoid a return to his cell. He asked quickly, "Why would he bother to do that? Wouldn't the American have been smarter to blindside the sentry?"

Eberhardt replied, "The American gave the sentry two seconds to look at his face before he smashed him with the pommel of his knife, knocking him out. The sentry believes the American deliberately let him see him."

"And the American let the sentry live?" Dietrich asked, "Why?"

"I don't know, Inspector."

Director Golz speculated, "Perhaps he wanted his description to become known, as a terror tactic."

Himmler nodded. "That is an American trait, you know. I have studied our enemies. Soldiers reflect their homeland's national peculiarities. British soldiers are courteous even when killing you. French servicemen refuse to fight on empty stomachs. Wanting to become famous for his exploit is certainly American."

"Thank you, Herr Reichsführer." It was far too dangerous for Eber- hardt to allow the slightest inflection of sarcasm to touch his words. "This same American single-handedly sunk a Kriegsmarine submarine at the base at Lorient." The general described the sabotage at Lorient. Then he added, "This man belongs to an American army unit called the Rangers, and he .. ."

The room went dark as electricity in the building
was
interrupted, for perhaps the tenth time that day. The slide projector blinked off and Jack Cray disappeared from the screen. When Eberhardt reached for the table to get his bearings, he brushed the slide projector.

"Our generator will come on momentarily," Müller said, a disembodied voice in the murk.

Himmler snapped open the pill vial. "I've got to take these for my breathing. It's the dust and ash."

The lights flickered back on. The projector came to life, throwing Jack Cray's face onto the screen in stark blacks and whites. Because Eberhardt had nudged the projector nearer to the screen, the American was closer, as if he had moved up on them in the dark, a perilous presence in the room. His countenance seemed even more fierce. Himmler was heard to gasp, a slight sound he covered by clearing his throat.