The Wolf's Hour (35 page)

“The first week of June,” Chesna answered. “We haven’t set the exact day yet, have we, Frederick?”

“No, not yet.”

“Happy for you, I might say. A tragedy for me.” Sandler watched a hunk of meat go into Blondi’s hooked beak. “Baron, do you do anything? Besides watch over the family estate, I mean?”

“I manage the vineyards. Also the gardens. We raise tulips.” That had all been part of his biography.

“Ah, tulips.” Sandler smiled, his gaze on the hawk. “Well, that must keep you very busy. Royalty is a wonderful occupation, isn’t it?”

“If you can stand the hours.”

Sandler stared at him; something glittered like a knife’s edge-anger? jealousy?-down in the dark brown, soulless eyes. He pushed the platter of meat a few inches toward Michael. “Here,” he said. “Why don’t you feed Blondi.”

“Harry,” Chesna told him, “I don’t think we need to-”

“All right.” Michael picked up a piece of meat. Sandler slowly moved his gloved hand forward, so Blondi’s beak was within Michael’s reach. Michael started to offer Blondi the bloody food.

“Careful,” Sandler said quietly. “She likes fingers. And then how would you pick your tulips?”

Michael paused. Blondi stared fixedly at the meat between his fingers. He could feel Chesna van Dorne tense beside him. Sandler was waiting, expecting the rich and idle tulip baron to back down. Michael had no choice but to continue the movement his hand had already begun. As his fingers neared Blondi’s beak, the hawk began to make a soft, menacing hissing noise.

“Uh-oh!” Sandler said. “She smells something about you she doesn’t like.”

It was the odor of the wolf, caught in his pores. Michael hesitated, with the meat about four inches from Blondi’s beak. The hissing noise was getting higher and harsher, like steam from a scalding kettle.

“I think you’re really upsetting her. Shhhh, girl.” Sandler pulled his hand and the hawk away from Michael, and blew gently on the back of Blondi’s neck. Gradually the hissing noise subsided. But Blondi’s gaze was still riveted on Michael, and he could sense the hawk wanted to leap from its leather perch and flail its talons at him. Like master, like hawk, he thought; there was no love lost at this table.

“Well,” Michael said, “it’s a shame to let good beef go to waste.” He put the meat into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Chesna gave a horrified gasp. Sandler just sat, stunned and disbelieving. Michael sipped casually at his wine and dabbed his lips with a white napkin. “One of my favorite dishes is steak tartare,” he explained. “This is almost the same thing, isn’t it?”

Sandler’s trance broke. “You’d better watch your groom-to-be,” he told Chesna. “He seems to enjoy the taste of blood.” Sandler stood up; for the moment, their game was over. “I have business to attend to, so I’ll say goodbye for now. Baron, I hope we’ll have a chance to talk later. Of course you’ll be attending the Brimstone Club?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

“If you can eat raw meat, you should love the Brimstone Club. I’ll look forward to our next meeting.” He started to shake Michael’s hand again, then looked at his own blood-smeared fingers. “You’ll pardon me if I don’t shake hands?”

“No pardon necessary.” His knuckles weren’t ready for another pressure contest, anyway. Sandler, the hawk latched to his gloved left hand, gave Chesna a brief bow and then strode away out of the lounge.

“Charming,” Michael said. “I’ve met nicer snakes.”

Chesna looked at him; she was indeed a good actress, because her face retained the dreamy expression of a happy lover while her eyes were chilly. “We’re being watched,” she said. “If you ever try to stick your tongue down my throat again, I’ll bite it off. Is that clear, darling?”

“Does that mean I’ll get another chance?”

“It means that our arrangement of betrothal is fiction, not to be confused with reality. It was the best way to explain your presence and get you into this hotel.”

Michael shrugged, rather enjoying needling this composed blond Nordic celebrity. “I’m just trying to play my part.”

“You leave the acting to me. Just go where I tell you to go, do what I tell you to do, and speak when you’re spoken to. Don’t volunteer any information, and for God’s sake don’t try to match egos with Harry Sandler.” She gave him a distasteful frown. “And what was that about the raw meat? Don’t you think that was going a bit too far?”

“Maybe so, but it got that bastard out of here, didn’t it?”

Chesna van Dorne sipped her wine but didn’t answer. She had to admit that he was right. Sandler had been upstaged, and the big-game hunter wasn’t one to take that lightly. Still… it had been amusing, in a bizarre way. She glanced at the man over the rim of her glass. Definitely not the tulip-plucking type, she decided. Without all the grime, the shaggy hair, and the beard, he was very handsome. But his eyes disturbed her in a way she couldn’t define. They looked… yes, she decided; they looked like the eyes of a dangerous animal, and reminded her of the pale green eyes of a timber wolf that had frightened her when she was twelve years old and visiting the Berlin Zoo. The wolf had stared at her with those cold clear eyes, and even though bars separated them, Chesna had shivered and clung hard to her father’s hand. She’d known what the wolf was thinking: I want to eat you.

“I want to eat something,” Michael said. The raw meat had sharpened his appetite. “Is there a restaurant here?”

“Yes, but we can order room service.” Chesna finished her wine. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.” He was staring at her, and she avoided his gaze. She summoned their waiter, signed the check, and then took Michael’s arm and led him out of the lounge like a thoroughbred dog on a leash. Once they were in the lobby and striding toward the row of gilt-doored elevators, Chesna turned on her magnificent smile like a klieg light.

As they neared the elevators, a man’s husky voice said, “Miss van Dorne?”

Chesna stopped and turned, her smile aglow, ready to charm another autograph seeker.

The man was huge: a living bunker, standing about six-feet-three and at least two hundred and sixty pounds, with thick shoulders and arms. He wore an SS aide’s uniform and a gray peaked cap, and his face was pale and emotionless. “I was told to give you this,” he said as he offered Chesna a small white envelope.

Chesna took it, her hand that of a child’s compared to the man’s. The envelope bore her name.

Michael’s heart lurched. Standing before him was the man called Boots, who had kicked and stomped Gaby’s uncle to death in the barn at Bazancourt.

“I’m to return a reply,” Boots said. His hair was cropped close to the skull, and his eyes were pale blue and heavy-lidded; the eyes of a man who saw everyone else in the world as frail constructions of flesh and bone. As Chesna tore open the envelope and read it Michael glanced at the SS aide’s thickly soled jackboots. They reflected the candles of the chandelier on their glossy surface, and Michael wondered if they were the same boots that had knocked Gervaise’s teeth from his head. He felt the man watching him, and he looked up into the dull blue eyes. Boots nodded curtly, no recognition in his gaze.

“Tell him I… we’d be delighted,” Chesna told him, and Boots strode away toward a group of officers at the center of the lobby.

The elevator came. “Six,” Chesna told the elderly operator. As they ascended she said to Michael, “We’ve just been invited to dine with Colonel Jerek Blok.”

6

Chesna unlocked the white door and turned the ornate brass knob. The smell of fresh roses and lavender rushed at Michael as he crossed the threshold.

The living room, a majesty of white furniture, had a twenty-foot ceiling and a fireplace with green marble tiles. French doors led out to a terrace, which overlooked the river and the forest beyond. Resting atop a white Steinway piano was a large crystal vase that held roses and sprigs of lavender. On the wall above the fireplace was a framed painting of a steely-eyed Adolf Hitler.

“Cozy,” Michael said.

Chesna locked the door. “Your bedroom is through there.” She nodded toward a corridor.

Michael went through it and looked around the spacious bedroom with its dark oak furniture and paintings of various Luftwaffe airplanes. His luggage was neatly arrayed in a closet. He returned to the living room. “I’m impressed,” he said, which was an understatement. He laid his topcoat down on the sofa and walked to one of the high windows. Rain was still falling, tapping on the glass, and mist covered the forest below. “Do you pay for this, or do your friends?”

“I do. And it’s not inexpensive.” She went to the onyx-topped bar, got a glass from a shelf, and opened a bottle of spring water. “I’m wealthy,” she added.

“All from acting?”

“I’ve starred in ten films since 1936. Haven’t you heard of me?”

“I’ve heard of Echo,” he said. “Not Chesna van Dorne.” He opened the French doors and inhaled the misty, pine-scented air. “How is it that an American became a German film star?”

“Talent. Plus I was in the right place at the right time.” She drank her spring water and put the glass aside. “ ‘Chesna’ comes from ‘Chesapeake.’ I was born on my father’s yacht, in Chesapeake Bay. My father was German, my mother was from Maryland. I’ve lived in both countries.”

“And why did you choose Maryland over Germany?” he asked pointedly.

“My allegiance, you mean?” She smiled faintly. “Well, I’m not a believer in that man over the fireplace. Neither was my father. He killed himself in 1934, when his business failed.”

Michael started to say I’m sorry, but there was no need. Chesna had simply made a statement. “Yet you make films for the Nazis?”

“I make films to make money. Also, how better to cultivate their good graces? Because of what I do and who I am, I can get into places that many others can’t. I overhear a lot of gossip, and sometimes I even see maps. You’d be amazed how a general can brag when his tongue’s loosened by champagne. I’m Germany’s Golden Girl. My face is even on some of the propaganda posters.” She lifted her brows. “You see?”

Michael nodded. There was much more to be learned about Chesna van Dorne; was she, like her screen characters, also a fabrication? In any case, she was a beautiful woman, and she held Michael’s life in her hands. “Where’s my friend?”

“Your valet, you mean? In the servants’ wing.” She motioned toward a white telephone. “You can reach him by dialing our room number plus ‘nine.’ We can order room service for you, too, if you’re hungry.”

“I am. I’d like a steak.” He saw her look sharply at him. “Rare,” he told her.

“I’d like you to know something,” Chesna said, after a pause. She walked to the windows and peered out at the river, her face painted with stormy light. “Even if the invasion is successful-and the odds are against it-the Allies will never reach Berlin before the Russians. Of course the Nazis are expecting an invasion, but they don’t know exactly when or where it will come. They’re planning on throwing the Allies back into the sea so they can turn all their strength to the Russian Front. But it won’t help them, and by that time the Russian Front will be the border of Germany. So this is my last assignment; when we’ve completed our mission, I’m getting out with you.”

“And my friend. Mouse.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Him, too.”

As the lycanthrope and the film star discussed their future, a gunmetal-gray staff car with an SS pennant drove through the hotel’s courtyard a hundred and forty feet below. The car crossed the pontoon bridge and headed along the paved forest road that had brought Michael and Mouse to the Reichkronen. It entered Berlin and began to wind its way southeast toward the factories and dirty air of the Neukolln district. Black clouds were sliding in from the east, and thunder boomed like distant bomb blasts. The car reached a block of grimy row houses and the driver stopped in the street, heedless of other traffic. No horns blew; the SS pennant silenced all complaint.

A hulking man in an aide’s uniform, a gray peaked cap, and polished jackboots got out, and he went around to the other side and opened the door. The rear seat’s passenger, a rail-thin figure in uniform, a brimmed cap, and a long dark green overcoat, stepped out of the car, and he stalked into a particular row house with the larger man following at his heels. The gunmetal-gray car stayed exactly where it was. This wouldn’t take very long.

On the second floor a burly fist knocked at a door marked with a tarnished number “5.”

Inside the apartment there was the sound of coughing. “Yes? Who is it?”

The officer in the dark green overcoat nodded.

Boots lifted his right foot and kicked the door. It broke with a shriek of splitting wood, but the locks kept it from flying open. The door’s stubbornness made Boots’s face turn crimson with rage; he kicked it again, and a third time. “Stop it!” the man inside shouted. “Please, stop it!”

The fourth kick caved the door in. Theo von Frankewitz stood there in his blue silk robe, his eyes bulging with terror. He backed away, stumbled over a table, and fell to the floor. Boots entered the apartment, his metal-studded soles clacking. Frightened people had opened their doors and were peering out, and the officer in the overcoat shouted, “Back in your holes!” Their doors slammed, and locks clicked shut.

Frankewitz was on his hands and knees, scuttling across the floor. He jammed himself into a corner, his hands up in a gesture of supplication. “Please don’t hurt me!” he shrieked. “Please don’t!” His cigarette holder, the cigarette still smoldering, lay on the floor, and Boots crushed it underfoot as he approached the whimpering man.

Boots stopped, standing over him like a fleshy mountain.

Tears were crawling down Frankewitz’s cheeks. He was trying to press himself into the wall of his apartment. “What do you want?” he said, choking, coughing, and crying at the same time. He looked at the SS officer. “What do you want? I did the work for you!”

“So you did. And very well indeed.” The officer, his face narrow and pinched, walked into the room and glanced around distastefully. “This place smells. Don’t you ever open your windows?”

“They… they… they won’t open.” Frankewitz’s nose was running, and he snuffled and moaned at the same time.

“No matter.” The officer waved a thin-fingered hand impatiently. “I’ve come to do some housecleaning. The project’s finished, and I won’t be needing your talents again.”

Frankewitz understood what that meant. His face grew distorted. “No… I’m begging you, for the love of God… I did the work for you… I did the-”

The officer nodded again, a signal to Boots. The huge man kicked Frankewitz in the chest, and there was a wet cracking noise as the breastbone broke. Frankewitz howled. “Stop that caterwauling!” the officer commanded. Boots picked up a throw pillow from the sea-green sofa, ripped it open, and pulled out a handful of cotton stuffing. He grasped Frankewitz’s hair and jammed the stuffing into the man’s gasping mouth. Frankewitz writhed, trying to claw at Boots’s eyes, but Boots easily dodged the fingers; he kicked Frankewitz in the ribs and staved him in like a brine-soaked barrel. The screaming was muffled, and now it didn’t bother Blok so much.

Boots kicked Frankewitz in the face, burst his nose open, and dislocated the jaw. The artist’s left eye swelled shut, and a purple bruise in the shape of a boot sole rose on his face. Frankewitz began, in desperation and madness, to try to claw his way through the wall. Boots stomped his spine, and Frankewitz contorted like a crushed caterpillar.

It was chilly in the damp little room. Blok, a man with a low tolerance for discomfort, walked over to the small fireplace grate, where a few meager flames danced amid the ashes. He stood close to the grate and tried to warm his hands; they were almost always cold. He had promised Boots he could have Frankewitz. Blok’s initial plan had been to dispatch the artist with a bullet, now that the project was done and Frankewitz wouldn’t be called on to do any retouching, but Boots had to be exercised like any large animal. It was like letting a trained Doberman go through its paces.

Boots broke Frankewitz’s left arm with a kick to the shoulder. Frankewitz had ceased his struggling, which disappointed Boots. The artist lay limply as Boots continued to stomp him.

It would be over soon, Blok thought. Then they could get back to the Reichkronen and out of this miserable-

Wait.

Blok had been staring at a small red eye of flame, there in the grate, as a piece of paper curled and burned. Frankewitz had just recently torn something up and cast it into the grate, and not all of it had been consumed. In fact, Blok could see a bit of what had been drawn on the paper: it looked like a man’s face, with a sweep of dark hair hanging down over the forehead. A single bulging, cartoonish eye remained; the other had been burned away.

It was a familiar drawing. Too familiar.

Blok’s heart started to pound. He reached down into the ashes and pulled out the fragment of paper. Yes. A face. His face. The lower part of it had been burned, but the sharp bridge of the nose was familiar, too. Blok’s throat was dry. He rummaged in the ashes, found another unburned bit of paper. This one had what appeared to be a representation of iron armor on it, fastened with rivets.

“Stop it,” Blok whispered.

Another kick was delivered. Frankewitz made no noise.

“Stop it!” Blok shouted, standing upright. Boots restrained the next kick, which would have shattered Frankewitz’s skull, and stepped back from the body.

Blok knelt beside Frankewitz, grasped the man’s hair, and lifted his head off the floor. The artist’s face had become a work of surrealism, rendered in shades of blue and crimson. Bloody cotton hung from the split lips and red streams ran from the smashed nostrils, but Blok could hear the faint rumbling of Frankewitz’s lungs. The man was hanging on to life. “What’s this?” Blok held the fragments of paper before Frankewitz’s face. “Answer me! What’s this?” He realized Frankewitz couldn’t answer, so he put the paper on the floor-avoiding the blood-and started pulling the cotton out of the man’s mouth. It was a messy labor, and Blok scowled with disgust. “Hold his head up and get his eyes open!” he told Boots.

The aide gripped Frankewitz’s hair and tried to force the eyelids open. One eye had been destroyed, jammed deeply into the socket. The other eye was bloodshot, and protruded as if in mockery of the cartoon eye on the piece of paper Blok held. “Look at this!” Blok demanded. “Can you hear me?”

Frankewitz moaned softly, a wet gurgling in his lungs.

“This is a copy of the work you did for me, isn’t it?” Blok held the paper in front of the man’s face. “Why did you draw this?” It wasn’t likely that Frankewitz had drawn it for his own amusement, and that brought another question to Blok’s thin lips: “Who saw it?”

Frankewitz coughed, drooling blood. His good eye moved in the socket and found the fragment of char-edged paper.

“You drew the picture,” Blok went on, speaking as if to a retarded child. “Why did you draw the picture, Theo? What were you going to do with it?”

Frankewitz just stared, but he was still breathing.

They weren’t going to get anywhere this way. “Damn it to hell!” Blok said as he stood up and crossed the room to the telephone. He picked up the receiver, carefully wiped the mouthpiece with his sleeve, and dialed a four-digit number. “This is Colonel Jerek Blok,” he told the operator. “Get me medical. Hurry!” He examined the paper again as he waited. There was no doubt; Frankewitz had repeated the drawing from memory, then tried to burn it. That fact made alarms go off in Blok’s brain. Who else had seen this drawing? Blok had to know, and the only way to find out was to keep Frankewitz alive. “I need an ambulance!” he told the Gestapo medical officer who came to the phone. He gave the man the address. “Get over here as fast as you can!” he said, almost shouting, and hung up. Then Blok returned to Frankewitz, to make sure the man was still breathing. If the information died with this pansy-balled street artist, Blok’s own throat would be kissed by a noose. “Don’t die!” he told Frankewitz. “Do you hear me, you bastard? Don’t die!”

Boots said, “Sir? If I’d known you didn’t want me to kill him, I wouldn’t have kicked him so hard.”

“Never mind! Just go outside and wait for the ambulance!” After Boots had clumped out, Blok turned his attention to the canvases over by the easel and began to go through them, tossing them aside in his fearful search for any more such drawings as on the scraps of paper clenched in his hand. He found none, but that didn’t ease him. He damned his decision not to execute Frankewitz long before now, but there had always been the possibility that more work was needed and one artist in on the project was enough. On the floor, Frankewitz had a fit of coughing, and spewed blood. “Shut up!” Blok snapped. “You’re not going to die! We have ways to keep you alive! Then we’ll kill you later, so shut up!”