The Wolf's Hour (31 page)

The lieutenant waved them on and swung himself up into the truck bed to rest his legs. Michael and Mouse walked on across the road as the prisoners kept on chopping and pine trees cracked as they fell. Gunther glanced at Michael, his eyes large and frightened, and Michael saw the soldier in the wagon winnow his hand into the hay for whatever was disturbing his recumbent posture.

Mouse whispered urgently, “He’s found the-”

“Ah-ha!” the soldier cried out as his fingers found the object and he pulled it free. “Look what these dogs are hiding from us, Lieutenant Zeller!” He held it up, showing the half-full bottle of schnapps he’d discovered.

“Trust farmers to bury their secrets,” Zeller said. He stood up. The other soldiers looked on anxiously. “Are more bottles in there?”

“Wait, I’ll see.” The soldier began burrowing through the hay.

Michael had reached the wagon, leaving Mouse about six paces behind. He dropped the ax, reached deeply into the hay, and his hands closed on an object that he knew was there. He said, “Here’s something for your thirst,” as he drew out the submachine gun and clicked off the safety.

The soldier gaped at him, the young man’s eyes blue as a Nordic fjord.

Michael shot him without hesitation, the bullets stitching across the soldier’s chest and making the body dance like a marionette. As soon as the initial burst was released, Michael whirled around, took aim at the soldiers in the back of the truck, and opened fire. The axes ceased chopping; for an instant both the prisoners and German soldiers stood as motionless as painted statues.

And then pandemonium broke loose.

The three soldiers in the truck went down, their bodies punctured. Lieutenant Zeller threw himself to the floorboards, bullets whining all around him, and reached for his holstered pistol. A soldier standing near Gunther leveled his rifle to fire at Michael, and Gunther sank his ax between the man’s shoulder blades. The other two Resistance fighters lifted their axes to strike two more soldiers; Dietz’s ax all but took a man’s head off, but Friedrich was shot at point-blank range through the heart before he could deliver the blow.

“Get down!” Michael shouted at Mouse, who stood dazed in the line of fire. His bulging blue eyes stared at the dead German in the hay. Mouse didn’t move. Michael stepped forward and punched him in the stomach with the submachine gun’s butt, the only thing he could think to do, and Mouse doubled over and fell to his knees. A pistol bullet knocked a shard of wood out of the wagon beside Michael, its path grazing the horse’s flank and making the animal shriek and rear up. Michael knelt down and fired a long burst at the truck, popping its tires and shattering both rear and front windshields, but Zeller hugged the truck bed’s floorboards.

Gunther chopped down with his ax again, cleaving the arm of a soldier who’d been about to blast him with a Schmeisser. As the soldier fell, writhing in agony, Gunther picked up the weapon and sprayed bullets at two other soldiers who were running for cover in the trees. Both of them staggered and fell. A pistol bullet whined past Michael’s head, but Zeller was firing without aiming. Michael reached over the edge of the wagon, his hand searching in the hay. Another bullet knocked a storm of wood splinters into his face, one of them driving into the flesh less than an inch beside his left eye. But Michael had what he was after; he pulled it out, ducked down, and wrenched the pin loose on the potato-masher hand grenade. Zeller shouted to anyone who could still hear him: “Kill the man at the wagon! Kill the son of a-”

Michael threw the grenade. It hit the ground short of the truck, bounced, and rolled up underneath it. Then he flung himself over Mouse’s body and covered his own head with his arms.

The grenade exploded with a hollow whump! and the blast lifted the truck up off its flattened tires. Orange and purple flames roared, their violence hurling the truck to one side on a pillar of fire. It crashed over, the rending of metal followed by a second blast as the gasoline and oil ignited. A column of black smoke with a red center rose into the sky. Zeller didn’t fire again. A rain of burning cloth and scorched metal fell, and the wagon horse jerked its reins free from the branch Gunther had tied them to, then fled madly down the road.

Gunther and Dietz, who’d scooped up a dead man’s rifle, were kneeling amid the pine stumps, shooting at the four soldiers who’d escaped the first blaze of bullets. One of the men panicked, got up from the ground, and ran, and Dietz shot him in the head before he’d taken three strides. And then two prisoners rushed forward, into the midst of the remaining soldiers, and their axes began a merry work. Both men were shot before they could finish, but three more prisoners took their places. The axes rose and fell, the blades smeared with scarlet. A final shot rang out, fired into the air from a falling hand. There was a last shriek, and the axes stopped.

Michael stood up, retrieving the submachine gun he’d thrown aside. It was still warm, like a comforting oven. Gunther and Dietz got up from their shelter and quickly began to inspect the bodies. Gunshots flared as they dispatched the wounded. Michael reached down and pulled at Mouse’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Mouse sat up, his eyes watering and still stunned. “You hit me,” he gasped. “Why’d you hit me?”

“Better a tap than a bullet. Can you stand?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can,” Michael said, and hauled him to his feet. Mouse still held his ax, his knuckles bleached white around the handle. “We’d better get out of here before any more Germans come along,” Michael told him; he looked around, expecting to see the prisoners disappearing into the woods, but most of them simply sat on the ground, as if awaiting the next truckload of Nazis. Michael crossed the road, with Mouse a few paces behind, and he approached a thin, dark-bearded man who’d been among the chopping party. “What’s wrong?” Michael asked. “You’re free now. You can go, if you like.”

The man, his face stretched like brown leather over the jutting bones, smiled faintly. “Free,” he whispered in a thick Ukrainian accent. “Free. No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“There are the woods. Why don’t you go?”

“Go?” Another man, even thinner than the first, stood up. He had a long-jawed face, and was shaven almost bald. His accent was of northern Russia. “Go where?”

“I don’t know. Just… away from here.”

“Why?” the dark-bearded man inquired. He lifted his thick brows. “The Nazis are everywhere. This is their country. Where are we to go that the Nazis wouldn’t hunt us down again?”

Michael couldn’t fathom this; it was utterly against his nature that anyone whose chains had been broken wouldn’t try to keep them from being forged again. These men had been prisoners for a very long time, he realized. They had forgotten the meaning of freedom. “Don’t you think there’s any chance you might be able to-”

“No,” the bald prisoner interrupted, his eyes black and remote. “No chance at all.”

As Michael talked to the men, Mouse leaned against a pine tree nearby. He felt sick, and he thought he might faint from the smell of blood. He wasn’t a fighter. God help me get home, he prayed. Just help me get ho-

One of the dead Germans suddenly sat up, about eight feet from where Mouse stood. The man had been shot through the side, his face ashen. Mouse saw who it was: Mannerheim. And he also saw Mannerheim reach for a pistol lying beside him, pick it up, and point it at Green Eyes’ back.

Mouse started to scream, but his voice croaked, unable to summon enough power. Mannerheim’s finger was on the trigger. His gun hand wavered; he steadied it with his other hand, which was covered with crimson.

Mannerheim was a German. Green Eyes was… whoever he was. Germany was Mouse’s country. I DESERTED MY UNIT. Runt. And went home to the Devil.

All these things whirled through Mouse’s mind in an instant. Mannerheim’s finger began to squeeze the trigger. Green Eyes was still talking. Why wouldn’t he turn? Why wouldn’t he…

Time had run out.

Mouse heard himself shout-the cry of an animal-and he strode forward and smashed the ax blade down into Mannerheim’s brown-haired skull.

The gun hand jerked, and the pistol went off.

Michael heard the whine of a wasp past his head. Up in the trees, a branch cracked and fell to earth. He turned, and saw Mouse holding the handle of his ax, the blade buried in Mannerheim’s head. The man’s body slumped forward, and Mouse released the ax as if he’d been scalded. Then Mouse fell to his knees in the dirt; he stayed there, his mouth half open and a little thread of saliva hanging over his chin, until Michael helped him to his feet.

“My God,” Mouse whispered. He blinked, his eyes bloodshot. “I killed a man.” Tears welled up and ran down his cheeks.

“You can still get away,” Michael told the dark-bearded prisoner as Mouse’s weight leaned against him.

“I don’t feel like running today,” was the answer. The man gazed up at the pewter sky. “Maybe tomorrow. You go on. We’ll tell them…” He paused; it came to him. “We’ll tell them the Allies have landed,” he said, and smiled dreamily.

Michael, Mouse, Gunther, and Dietz left the prisoners behind. They continued along the road, keeping to the woods, and found the hay wagon about a half mile ahead. The horse was calmly chomping grass in a dewy field.

They got away as quickly as they could, black smoke like banners of destruction now hazing the western horizon as well as the eastern. Mouse sat staring into space, his mouth working but making no sounds, and Michael looked ahead, trying to shake the image of the young soldier’s face just before he had slaughtered him. The bottle of schnapps, unbroken in the gunfire, had been sipped from by all and deposited under the hay. In these times liquor was a priceless commodity.

They went on, and every turn of the wheels took them closer to Berlin.

2

Michael had seen Paris in sunshine; he saw Berlin in gray gloom.

It was a huge, sprawling city. It smelled musty and earthy, like a cellar long sealed from light. It looked ancient as well, its stocky buildings the same shade of gray. Michael thought of tombstones in a damp graveyard where deadly mushrooms thrived.

They crossed the Havel River in the Spandau district, and on the other side were immediately forced off the road by a column of Kubelwagens and troop trucks heading west. A chill wind blew off the Havel, making faded Nazi flags snap from their lampposts. The pavement was cracked with tank treads. Across the cityscape spouts of dark smoke rose from chimneys, and the wind curled them into question marks. The stone walls of rowhouses were adorned with battered posters and proclamations, such as REMEMBER THE HEROES OF STALINGRAD, ONWARD TO MOSCOW, GERMANY VICTORIOUS TODAY, GERMANY VICTORIOUS TOMORROW. Epitaphs on gravestones, Michael thought; Berlin was a cemetery, full of ghosts. Of course there were people on the streets, and in cars, and flower shops, and cinemas, and tailorshops, but there was no vitality. Berlin was not a city of smiles, and Michael noticed that people kept glancing over their shoulders, fearful of what was approaching from the east.

Gunther took them through the elegant streets of the Charlottenburg district, where dwellings styled like gingerbread castles housed equally fanciful dukes and barons, toward the war-worn inner city. Row houses crowded together, grim-looking structures with blackout curtains: these were streets where dukes and barons held no power. Michael noticed something strange: there were only elderly people and children about, no young men except for the soldiers who swept past in trucks and on motorcycles, and those men had young faces but old eyes. Berlin was in mourning, because its youth was dead.

“We have to take my friend home,” Michael said to Gunther. “I promised him.”

“I was ordered to take you to a safe house. That’s where I’m going.”

“Please.” Mouse spoke up; his voice quavered. “Please… my house isn’t far from here. It’s in the Tempelhof district, near the airport. I’ll show you the way.”

“I’m sorry,” Gunther said. “My orders were-”

Michael clamped a hand around the back of his neck. Gunther had been a good companion, but Michael didn’t care to argue. “I’m changing your orders. We can go to the safe house after we get my friend home. Either do it or give me the reins.”

“You don’t know what a risk you’re taking!” Dietz snapped. “And us, too! We just lost a friend because of you!”

“Then get off and walk,” Michael told him. “Go on. Get off.”

Dietz hesitated. He, too, was a stranger in Berlin. Gunther quietly said, “Shit,” and popped the reins. “All right. Where in Tempelhof?”

Mouse eagerly gave him the address, and Michael released Gunther’s neck.

Not too much farther, they began to see bombed buildings. The heavy B-17 and B-24 American bombers had delivered their freight, and rubble choked the streets. Some of the buildings were unrecognizable, heaps of stones and timbers. Others had split open and collapsed from the force of the bombs. A haze of smoke lay close to the street. Here the gloom was even thicker, and in the twilight the red centers of smoldering heaps of rubble glowed like Hades.

They passed an area where civilians, their clothes and faces grimy, were searching through a building’s wreckage. Tongues of flame licked along fallen timbers, and an elderly woman sobbed as an old man tried to comfort her. Bodies under sheets were laid out, with precise German geometry, along the fissured sidewalk. “Killers!” the elderly woman shouted, and whether she was looking at the sky or toward Hitler’s chancellery at the heart of Berlin, Michael couldn’t tell. “God curse you, you killers!” she shrieked, and then she sobbed again with her hands over her face, unable to bear the sight of ruin.

Ahead of the wagon stretched a landscape of destruction. On both sides of the street, buildings had exploded, burned, and collapsed. Smoke hung in layers, too heavy for even the wind to tatter. Factory chimneys jutted up, but the factory had been crushed like a caterpillar under a steel-soled boot. The rubble was so high that it clogged the street, forcing Gunther to find another route south into the Tempelhof. Off to the west, a large fire raged, spitting up whirling red flames. Bombs must have fallen last night, Michael thought. Mouse was sitting slumped over, his eyes glassy. Michael started to touch the little man’s shoulder, but then he drew his hand back. Nothing could be said.

Gunther found Mouse’s street and in another moment stopped the wagon at the address Mouse had given him.

The row house had been made of red stones. There was no fire; the ashes were cool, and they spun in the wind past Mouse’s face as he got out of the wagon and stood on what remained of the front steps.

“This isn’t it!” Mouse said to Gunther. His face was slick with cold sweat. “This is the wrong address!”

Gunther didn’t answer.

Mouse stared at what used to be his home. Two walls had collapsed and most of the floors. The central staircase, badly scorched, ran up into the building like a warped spine. A sign near the jagged, burnt hole where the front door had been warned DANGER! ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN! It was stamped with the seal of the Nazi party’s inspector of housing. Mouse had a terrible desire to laugh. My God! he thought. I’ve come all this way, and they won’t let me into my own house! He saw the broken shards of a blue vase in the wreckage, and he remembered that they’d once held roses. Tears burned his eyes. “Louisa!” he shouted, and the sound of that awful cry made Michael’s soul shrivel. “Louisa! Answer me!”

A window opened in a fire-scorched building across the street, and an old man peered out. “Hey!” he called. “Who’re you looking for?”

“Louisa Mausenfeld! Do you know where she and the children are?”

“They took all the bodies away,” the old man said with a shrug. Mouse had never seen him before; a young couple used to live in that apartment. “It was a terrible fire. See how it burned these bricks?” He patted one for emphasis.

“Louisa… the two little girls…” Mouse wavered; the world, a brutal hell, was spinning around him.

“The husband died, too, in France,” the old man continued. “That’s what I heard, at least. Are you a relative?”

Mouse didn’t answer, but he did speak: a cry of anguish that echoed between the remaining walls. And then, before Michael could leap out of the wagon and stop him, Mouse started running up the spindly staircase, the burned risers cracking under his weight. At once Michael was going after him, into a realm of ashes and darkness, and he heard the old man shout, “You can’t go in there!” before the window slid shut.

Mouse kept climbing the steps. His left foot smashed through a flimsy stair; he pulled it loose and kept going, gripping the blackened railing and pulling himself along. “Stop!” Michael called, but Mouse didn’t. The staircase shook, a section of the railing suddenly breaking and tumbling down into a pit of debris. Mouse balanced on the edge for an instant, then grasped the railing on the other side and continued up. He reached a floor, about fifty feet above the ground, and stumbled over a pile of burned timbers, the weakened floorboards shrieking under him. “Louisa!” Mouse shouted. “It’s me! I’ve come home, Louisa!” He went on into a warren of rooms that had been sliced open by the destruction, revealing the possessions of a dead family: a soot-coated oven; shattered crockery, and an occasional dish or cup that had miraculously survived the concussions; what had once been a pine-plank table, now burned down to its legs; the frame of a chair, springs rusting like coiled guts; the remnants of wallpaper on the walls as yellow as patches of leprosy, and against them the lighter squares where pictures used to hang. Mouse went through the small rooms, calling for Louisa, Carla, and Lucilla. Michael couldn’t stop him, and there was no use in trying. He simply followed Mouse from room to room, close enough to grab him if the little man fell through the floor. Mouse entered what had been the parlor; there were holes in the floorboards where burning debris from above had settled and gone through. The couch where Louisa and the girls liked to sit was a burned tangle of springs. And the piano, their wedding gift from Louisa’s grandparents, was a horror of keys and wires. But there was the fireplace of white bricks that had warmed Mouse and his family on so many frigid nights. And there was a bookcase, though few books remained. Even his favorite rocking chair had survived, though badly scorched. It was still there, just as he’d left it. And then Mouse looked at the wall, next to the fireplace, and Michael heard him gasp.

Mouse didn’t move for a moment; then, slowly, he crossed the creaking floor and went to the framed Cross of Iron: his son’s medal.

The frame’s glass was cracked. Other than that, the Cross of Iron was unmarred. Mouse lifted the frame off the wall, his touch reverent, and read the inscription of his son’s name and date of death. His body shook; his eyes glinted with madness. Two bright spots of crimson rose in his pale cheeks above the dirty beard.

Mouse hurled the framed Cross of Iron against the wall, and fragments of glass exploded across the room. The medal made a tinkling sound as it fell to the floor. At once he rushed forward, scooped the medal off the floor, and turned-his face swollen with rage-to throw it through a broken window.

Michael’s hand clamped on Mouse’s fist, and sealed it tight. “No,” he said firmly. “Don’t throw it away.”

Mouse stared at him incredulously; he blinked slowly, his brain gears slipping on the grease of despair. He made a moaning sound, like the wind through the ruins of his home. And then Mouse lifted his other hand, balled it into a fist, and struck Michael as hard as he could across the jaw. Michael’s head snapped back, but he didn’t release Mouse, nor did he try to defend himself. Mouse hit him again, and a third time. Michael just stared at him, green eyes aflame and a drop of blood oozing from a cut on his lower lip. Mouse pulled his fist back to strike him a fourth time, and the little man saw Michael’s jaw tense, preparing for the blow. All the strength suddenly drained out of Mouse’s shoulder; his muscles went limp, and his hand opened. He slapped the face of Green Eyes, a weak slap. And then his arm fell to his side, his eyes stinging with tears, and his knees sagged. He started to fall, but Michael held him up.

“I want to die,” Mouse whispered. “I want to die, I want to die, oh God please let me…”

“Stand up,” Michael told him. “Come on, stand up.”

Mouse’s legs had no bones. He wanted to fall to this floor and lie there until Thor’s hammer destroyed the earth. He smelled gunsmoke on the other man’s clothes, and that bitter aroma brought back every horrifying second of the battle in the pine forest. Mouse wrenched away from Michael, and staggered back. “You stay away from me!” he shouted. “Damn you to hell, stay away!”

Michael said nothing. The storm was coming, and it would have to whirl its course.

“You’re a killer!” Mouse shrieked. “A beast! I saw your face, there in the woods. I saw it, as you killed those men! Germans! My people! You shot that boy to pieces, and you never even flinched!”

“There wasn’t time for flinching,” Michael said.

“You enjoyed it!” Mouse raged on. “You liked the killing, didn’t you?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Oh God… Jesus… you’ve made me into a killer, too.” Mouse’s face contorted. He felt as if he were being wrenched apart by inner tides. “That young man… I murdered him. I killed him. Killed a German. Oh my God.” He looked around the decimated room, and he thought he could hear the screams of his wife and two daughters as the bombs blew them to heaven. Where had he been, he wondered, when the Allied bombers had dropped death onto his loved ones? He didn’t even have a picture of them; all his papers, his wallet, and photographs had been taken from him in Paris. This was the cruelty that drove him to his knees. He scrabbled onto a pile of burned rubble and began to search desperately for a picture of Louisa and the children.

Michael wiped the blood from his lower lip with the back of his hand. Mouse flung bits of wreckage to either side, but he kept the Iron Cross in his fist. “What are you going to do?” Michael asked.

“You did this. You. The Allies. Their bombers. Their hatred of Germany. Hitler was right. The world fears and hates Germany. I thought he was mad, but he was right.” Mouse dug deeper into the debris; there were no pictures, only ashes. He scrambled to burned books and searched for the photographs that used to be on the shelves. “I’ll turn you in. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll turn you in, and then I’ll go to church and beg forgiveness. My God… I murdered a German. I murdered a German, with my own hands.” He sobbed and tears ran down his face. “Where are the pictures? Where are the pictures?”

Michael knelt down a few feet away from him. “You can’t stay here.”

“This is my home!” Mouse shouted, with a force that made the empty window frames shake. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken into his head. “This is where I live,” he said, but this time it was a whisper from his raw throat.

“No one lives here.” Michael stood up. “Gunther’s waiting. It’s time to go.”

“Go? Go where?” He was echoing the Russian prisoner who’d seen no purpose in flight. “You’re a British spy, and I’m a citizen of Germany. My God… why I let you talk me into this; my soul’s burning. Oh Christ, forgive me!”

“Hitler brought down the bombs that killed your family,” Michael said. “You think no one grieved over the dead when Nazi planes bombed London? You think your wife and children were the only bodies ever taken out of a blasted building? If you do, you’re a fool.” He spoke calmly and quietly, but his green gaze pierced Mouse. “Warsaw, Narvik, Rotterdam, Sedan, Dunkirk, Crete, Leningrad, Stalingrad: Hitler strewed corpses as far north, south, east, and west as he could reach. Hundreds of thousands to grieve over, and you cry in the wreckage of a single room.” He shook his head, feeling a mixture of pity and disgust. “Your country is dying. Hitler’s killing it, but before he finishes the job he’s going to destroy as many as he can. Your son, wife, and daughters: what are they to Hitler? Did they matter? I don’t think so.”