The Kingdom of Shadows (43 page)

He wanted to wrap her in his arms and take her away from the glutted, shabby room and the cruelly smiling woman. He’d already stepped toward Marte when the woman raised herself from the sofa, pulling a thin silk wrap closer about herself.

“Oh, very well – you want to see your little boy, than you shall.” The woman’s voice twisted with contempt. “I brought him a long way, I carried him here; I’m not about to lose track of such a valuable little item. Come along – I’ll show him to you.”

They followed her down another corridor, to the back of the flat. The woman’s hand, with its nails painted bright red, gestured over her shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll be able to work out some suitable arrangement. Of course, I can’t let you have the boy, to keep all to yourself. I’m not a fool. You must come and visit him, and take care of him – I’m tired enough of that, God knows.” The woman rattled on, as though talking to herself. “It’ll be in a much nicer place, though; with your money, we’ll see to that . . .”

Behind the last door, a small room, the only light that which spilled in from the hallway; it revealed a small figure lying on a rumpled bed. Marte rushed past the woman and knelt down, her fingertips reaching for the sleeping child’s face.

“A mother’s love.” The woman leaned against the side of the doorway, her sneer directed at Pavli. “How charming. You would never know from the way she acts – but then she is an actress, isn’t she? – how she abandoned her child all these years.”

Marte suddenly cried out. “No –” The word was muffled by her hand against her mouth as she stepped back from the bed. The blanket that had been pulled to the boy’s chin slid to the bare planks of the floor. Her eyes widened as she gazed down at the small body.

He shoved past the woman. Before he reached Marte’s side, he saw the pillow and the bare mattress dark with dried blood. The child’s face, the cheeks and neck whiter than paper; the blood, thickened with phlegm, dried to reddish dust.

“You see?” The woman reached between Pavli and Marte, and stroked the child’s cold brow. “I took good care of him. Fed him and bathed him and carried him – oh, it was such a long way – and did everything for him. As if he were my very own. So he
is
my own. Of course he is.” The woman’s voice softened, as if she had become a child herself, her fingers ruffling a doll’s white-gold hair. “They lied about him, about my baby, right from the beginning. This is my little boy, he always was, you stole him from me, the way you stole everything. It was the other one, the ugly little one, that I left behind in the snow –” She shook her head, face clouding with confusion. “But this one is your little boy, too. I don’t understand how that can be. But look – he has those eyes that he got from you, from being a
Mischling
. See?” The woman pulled back the child’s eyelids with her thumb and forefinger; the pupils had begun to cloud over, but the colors of blue and golden-brown were still visible beneath the milky-grey film. “You see?”

Pavli looked away from the child’s corpse, turning toward the woman. Her prattling voice went on, each syllable a soft tapping against his brow.

“So now you must give back everything you stole from me. Everything. So my child and your child and I can live in a large fine house, where it isn’t cold and there’s plenty to eat, and everyone will see me there and they’ll know it’s mine, it always was mine –”

He could see the woman’s eyes now; he had leaned forward, drawn to look, as if mesmerized by the spiraling words. He saw there, not the blind gaze of death, but something sharper and brighter, glittering like the points of needles. The woman’s madness pierced the world, showing another, where the dead were merely sleeping, ready to wake and reach for only her with their small hands.

“I took such good care of him.” The woman smiled tenderly at the face crusted with blood. “He was running a fever, and he had a nasty cough, but I knew those would pass and he would get better, and he did. You feel fine now, don’t you, sweetheart? Wake up, there’s someone come to see you –”

“No . . .” Marte touched the woman’s arm. “Let him sleep.”

Pavli wondered if she had gone mad as well; her voice was calm and untroubled.

“Let him sleep . . .” Crooning, the words falling as a song. Marte’s hand drew away. “You took care of him, you brought him here to me . . . I owe you so much.”

The room became still and small, the space between the two women vanished, their faces close together, as though Marte had stepped forward to bestow a kiss. Pavli couldn’t breathe, there was no air in the room, not even enough to shout a single word as Marte’s hand drew something bright from the pocket of the soldier’s coat.

“So much . . .” A whisper.

The other woman’s mouth parted, a smile tracing its corners, her eyes closing to savor her triumph.

A red flower blossomed on the woman’s lips.

She fell backwards, eyes still closed, her body crumpling away from the shining object that Marte had raised between them. Pavli could see it now, he could even read the words inscribed on the metal.

Meine Ehre heißt Treue
.

The knife was a memory that could never be erased. He had gone back to the empty shelter to look for it, days after the fighting had stopped, and been unable to find it on the wet, dirty floor. He had thought then that some Russian soldier had taken it for a souvenir, a trophy of their victory. Now he saw that it had been Marte who had found and kept the thin weapon.

A larger flower, red and wet, leapt through the slashed front of the woman’s wrap as Marte jerked her arm, the dagger moving without resistance toward the center of the white breasts.

The glistening vine of the flower twisted snake-like around Marte’s wrist, the coat’s sleeve darkening with the growing stain.

For a moment longer, the woman hung upon the knifepoint. Flesh gave way and she sank, first against the side of the bed, then sprawling at Pavli’s feet. The dagger dropped from Marte’s hand and clattered across the floor.

Two dead things in the room now. For a second, Pavli’s vision filled with an image of scrubbed white tiles, his nostrils catching the scent of preserving chemicals in a metal basin. The knife wasn’t the ornate SS ceremonial dagger, but a gleaming scalpel raised in Ritter’s gloved hand . . .

The vision faded, and he saw Marte standing before him, her hand reaching down to stroke her dead child’s brow. At the same time, Pavli heard the sound of a door opening, and laughing voices, in the distance at the building’s street entrance. Another woman, perhaps the same one they had passed before on the stairs, with another customer; likely an American soldier. That would be trouble, whether the man were drunk or sober.

He looked down and saw that the pool of blood from the dead woman had reached the edges of his boots. He stepped backward, grabbing Marte’s arm and pulling her away from the bed. “We must leave here.” He bent down and scooped up the dagger, wiping its blade quickly on the bedcovers before slipping it inside his shirt, where he had carried it before. “Quickly – before anyone finds us.”

Marte’s gaze snapped round at him, like another, even sharper knife. She drew in her breath, controlling her flare of anger, and something more, that he had not seen in her eyes before. “Very well.” She had turned her back on the dead, the child and the woman, as if they no longer existed. “You know the way better than I do.”

Going down, they had already passed the landing when they bumped into the laughing woman and her customer, a new one, a broad-shouldered American sergeant black as coffee. The pair hardly even noticed Pavli and Marte, her hair covered again by the kerchief, as they drew back against the railing to let the couple by.

On the street, Pavli looked up at the building’s broken windows. The faint glow of a candle moved behind the ragged cloth that had been nailed over one empty frame; again he heard the sound of laughter.

The room with the dead woman and child was far at the rear of the building; it might be hours, or even days, before the corpses were found. He and Marte would be well away by then. And what did two more dead matter in this city? Nothing; nothing at all . . .

He took the angel’s arm and walked with her, guided her, between the mounds of rubble and the shell craters, carefully and slowly, so that anyone who might have been watching them would not have the least suspicion –

And at that moment, he was happy.

At that moment, his life began. Everything before then had been but a dream, that he could hardly remember now. From which most people, he knew, never woke. They never lived at all.

But I’m the lucky one
, thought Pavli. He had woken, been born, to hunger and cold and a drizzling rain that sluiced tarry black ash through the broken streets, filled the bomb craters with shimmering dark mirrors, like fragments of a starless night turned upside-down. His hair hung in wet traces along his neck.

“Don’t worry,” murmured Pavli. He sheltered the angel’s cold hand in both his own. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Will you?” She turned her gaze toward him. “Yes . . .” She nodded slowly. “You will . . .”

His heart swelled beyond the walls of his chest, beyond the walls of the cold, black world through which they made their way. He had been born, and born for this.

She stopped and looked around them, her gaze searching the unlit buildings, the sharp-toothed broken windows glinting as they caught an angle of moonlight.

“You must help me.”

“Yes . . .” Pavli tried to draw her away from the spot, before anyone might see them. “Of course . . .”

“The studio . . . you must take me there . . .”

“I can’t.” He shook his head. “It’s all in ruins. I saw it –”

“I don’t care!” She snatched her hand away from his grasp. “And the director – you must bring him there, too!”

“Von Behren? But what can he –”

“It must be finished! Everything must be!” Her rain-damp face was painted bright by the sliver of moon above. “You don’t understand . . . but it must!”

“All right . . .” He tried to soothe her, stroking a trembling shoulder with his hand. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

Marte collapsed against him, as though the burst of anger had consumed the last of her strength. He held her and kept her from falling, her face pressed against the side of his neck; he felt the brush of her lashes as she closed her eyes.

“Come on, then.” He pulled her with him, bearing her fragile weight with each step across the rubble. “It’s not far . . .”

* * *

The broken metal of the roof creaked as the night wind pried at it. Von Behren glanced up at the noise, then drew his jacket tighter about himself. “We shouldn’t be here,” he said. “There is a military curfew in this area – and patrols.”