The Wolf's Hour (57 page)

She offered the vodka bottle. “Welcome?” she asked, a gold pin stuck in one of her nostrils.

“Welcome!” Lazaris said as he snatched the bottle from her hand and swallowed the clear fire. He paused to make a respectful whistling noise, then went back to his guzzling. Michael pried the bottle out of his fingers and returned it to the woman, who licked the neck’s rim and took another slug.

“What’s your name?” Chesna asked, speaking German. The woman shook her head. “Your name?” Chesna tried her luck at Norwegian, though she knew very little of the language. She pressed a hand against her breastbone. “Chesna.” Pointed at Michael. “Michael.” Then at the happy Russian. “Lazaris.”

“Ah!” The woman nodded gleefully. She pointed between her massive thighs. “Kitty!” she said. “Welcome!”

“A man could get in a hell of a lot of trouble around here,” Lazaris observed sagely.

The cabin, if not exactly clean, was at least warm. Michael took off his parka and hung it on a wall hook while Chesna tried to communicate with the huge, rather tipsy Eskinordic. The best she could do was understand that the woman lived here, and that there were plenty of bottles of vodka.

The door opened, and the bells chimed. Hurks closed the door behind him. “Well!” he said as he peeled off his heavy coat. “I see you’ve met Kitty!”

Kitty grinned at him, drank the rest of the bottle, and flopped down on the sofa with a splintering crash.

“She’s a bit hard on the furniture,” Hurks admitted, “but she’s pleasant enough. Who’s in charge among you?”

“I am,” Chesna said.

“All right.” Hurks spoke to Kitty in a singsong dialect that sounded to Michael like a mixture of grunts and clicks. Kitty nodded, her grin gone, and stared at Chesna. “I’ve told her who you are,” Hurks said. “She’s been expecting you.”

“She has?” Chesna shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Kitty’s going to take you to Skarpa Island,” Hurks explained. He went to a cupboard and brought out a box of shortbread biscuits.

“What?” Chesna glanced at the woman, who was smiling with her eyes closed and the empty bottle clutched against her belly. “She’s… she’s a drunk!”

“So? We’re all drunks up here nowadays.” He took a beat-up coffeepot from a table, shook it to slosh the liquid around, and then set it atop the stove. “Kitty knows the water, and she knows Skarpa Island, too. Me, I don’t know a damned thing about boats. I can’t even swim. Which would be beside the point, I suppose, if you bumped a mine.”

“You’re saying that if we want to get to Skarpa, we have to put our lives in her hands?”

“That’s it,” Hurks said.

“Skarpa!” Kitty’s eyes opened. Her voice was a low, guttural growl. “Skarpa dirty bad! Patoo!” She spat on the floor. “Nazee boys! Patoo!” Another wad of spit hit the stained planks.

“Besides,” Hurks went on, “it’s Kitty’s boat. She used to be the best fisherman for a hundred miles around. She says she used to be able to hear the fish sing, and when she learned their songs and sang back, they swam into her nets by the ton.”

“I’m not interested in singing fish,” Chesna said coolly. “I’m interested in patrol boats, searchlights, and mines.”

“Oh, Kitty knows where those are, too.” He brought tin cups down from their hooks. “Kitty used to live on Skarpa Island, before the Nazis came. She and her husband and six sons.”

There was a clink as the empty vodka bottle was tossed aside. It landed in the corner, near three others. Kitty dug into the folds of the sofa, and her hand emerged gripping a fresh bottle. She pulled the cork out with her remaining teeth, tipped the bottle, and drank.

“What happened to her family?” Michael asked.

“The Nazis… shall we say… recruited them to help build that big son-of-a-bitch chemical plant. They also recruited every other able-bodied person from Kitty’s village. And Kitty herself, of course, since she’s strong as an ox. They also built an airfield and flew in slave labor. Anyway, the Nazis executed everyone who did the work. Kitty’s got two bullets in her. They hurt her sometimes when the weather turns really cold.” He touched the pot. “Coffee will have to be black, I’m afraid. We’re out of cream and sugar.” He began to pour coffee for them; it came out thick and sludgy. “Kitty lay with the corpses for three or four days. She’s not exactly sure how long it was. When she decided she wasn’t going to die, she got up and found a rowboat. I met her in forty-two, when my ship went down with a torpedo in the guts. I was a merchant marine seaman, and thank God I got to a raft.” He gave the first cup to Chesna, then offered her some shortbread.

“What did the Nazis do with the bodies?” Chesna took the coffee and a biscuit.

Hurks asked Kitty, again using that grunt-click language. Kitty replied in a quiet, drunken voice. “They left them for the wolves,” Hurks said. He offered the box to Michael. “Biscuit?”

Along with the muscular coffee and the shortbread, Hurks produced a packet of dried, leathery mutton that Michael found tasty, but Chesna and Lazaris had difficulty swallowing. “We’ll have a good pot of stew tonight,” Hurks promised. “Squid, onions, and potatoes. Very tasty, with a lot of salt and pepper.”

“I won’t eat a squid!” Lazaris said as he shrugged off his parka and sat down at a table, his coffee cup before him. He shuddered. “Damn things look like a cock after a night in a Moscow whorehouse!” He reached for his cup. “No, I’ll just eat the onions and pota-”

There was a movement, very fast, behind him. He saw the glint of a blade, and Kitty’s huge bulk falling over him like an avalanche.

“Don’t move!” Hurks shouted-and then the blade was thrust down, before either Michael or Chesna could get to the Russian’s aid.

The knife, its wickedly hooked blade used for skinning seals, slammed into the scarred tabletop, between Lazari’s outstretched second and third fingers. It missed the flesh, but Lazaris jerked his hand to his chest and squalled like a cat with a burning tail.

His scream was followed by another: a scream of hoarse, drunken laughter. Kitty wrenched the knife out of the table-top and did a merry dance around the room like a massive and deadly whirligig.

“She’s mad!” Lazaris hollered, checking his fingers. “Absolutely mad!”

“I’m sorry,” Hurks apologized after Kitty had sheathed her knife and fallen onto the sofa again. “When she drinks… she has this little game she likes to play. But she always misses. Most of the time, that is.” He held up his left hand; part of the third finger was severed up to the knuckle.

“Well, for God’s sake get that knife away from her!” Lazaris shouted, but Kitty was already folded up around it, swigging down more vodka.

Michael and Chesna stuffed their hands into the pockets of their jumpsuits. “It’s important we get to Skarpa as soon as possible,” Michael said. “When can we go?”

Hurks posed the question to Kitty. She thought about it for a moment, her brow knitted. She got up and waddled outside. When she returned, her feet covered with mud, she grinned and answered.

“Tomorrow night,” Hurks translated. “She says there’ll be a blow tonight, and fog follows wind.”

“By tomorrow night I might be down to the stumps!” Lazaris buried his hands in his pockets until Kitty returned to the sofa, then he dared to withdraw them and to finish his meal. “You know,” he ventured after Kitty had begun to snore, “there’s something we all ought to be thinking about. If we get on that island, do whatever it is you heroic types are supposed to do, and get off with all our body parts, then what? In case you haven’t noticed, our Junkers has lived up to its name. I couldn’t put that engine back on, even with a crane. And anyway, it’s burned to a crisp. So how do we get out of here?”

The question was not one that Michael hadn’t already considered. He looked at Chesna, and saw she had no answer for it either.

“That’s what I thought,” Lazaris muttered.

But Michael couldn’t let that problem contaminate his mind right now. Skarpa had to be reached and Dr. Hildebrand dealt with first, then they’d find a way out. He hoped. Norway would not be a pleasant place to spend the summer with the Nazis hunting them down. Hurks got the vodka bottle away from Kitty and passed it around. Michael allowed himself one fiery sip, and then he stretched out on the floor-his hands wedged in his pockets-and was asleep in just over a minute.

5

Kitty’s boat slid through the mist, its engine growling softly. The water hissed as it parted before the figurehead, a wooden gargoyle with a trident, and a shielded lantern illuminated the interior of the wheelhouse in dim green.

Kitty’s hands-broad and coarse-were delicate on the wheel. Michael stood beside her, watching through the dripping windshield. Kitty had been drunk for most of the day, but as soon as the sun had begun to set she put aside the vodka and washed her face in icy water. It was past two o’clock on the morning of the nineteenth, and Kitty had pulled the forty-foot, weather-beaten relic out of its harbor slip about three hours before. Now, here in the wheelhouse, she was silent and brooding, with no trace of the grinning, drunken woman who’d greeted them in Uskedahl. She was all deadly business.

She had been right about the blow on the night of the seventeenth. A fierce wind had rushed down from the mountains and screamed over Uskedahl until dawn, but the houses were built for such caprices and there was no damage except to the nerves. She was correct, as well, about the fog that had crept over Uskedahl and the bay, blanketing everything in white silence. How she could steer in this soup he didn’t know, but every so often she cocked her head and seemed to be listening; surely not for the singing of fishes, but for the sound of the water itself, telling her something it was not in his power to understand. She made minor corrections of the wheel from time to time, as gently as nudging an infant.

Kitty suddenly reached out and grabbed Michael’s parka, pulling him closer and pointing. He couldn’t see anything but fog, though he nodded. She grunted with satisfaction, let him go, and steered in that direction.

There had been a strange incident at the dock. As they’d been loading their gear onto the boat, Michael had found himself face-to-face with Kitty sniffing at his chest. She had sniffed his face and hair, then had drawn back and stared at him with those blue Nordic eyes. She smells the wolf in me, Michael thought. Kitty had spoken to Hurks, who had translated for her: “She wants to know what land you come from.”

“I was born in Russia,” Michael had said.

She spoke through Hurks, pointing at Lazaris: “He stinks like a Russian. You have a perfume like Norway.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Michael answered.

And then Kitty got very close to him, staring intensely into his eyes. Michael stood his ground. She spoke again, this time almost in a whisper. “Kitty says you’re different,” Hurks translated. “She thinks you’re a man of destiny. That’s a high praise.”

“Tell her thank you.”

Hurks did. Kitty nodded, and moved away toward the wheelhouse.

A man of destiny, Michael thought as he stood beside her and she steered deeper into the fog. He hoped his destiny-and that of Chesna and Lazaris as well-wasn’t a grave on Skarpa Island. Hurks had stayed in Uskedahl, a stranger to travel by water since the U-boat torpedoing of his freighter. Lazaris was no lion of the sea either, but fortunately the water was glassy and the boat’s progress smooth, so Lazaris had only heaved twice over the side. Perhaps it was nerves, or perhaps it was the reek of fish that clung to the boat like a miasma.

Chesna entered the wheelhouse, the hood of her parka up over her head and her hands in black woolen gloves. Kitty kept staring straight ahead, guiding the boat toward a point the others couldn’t see. Chesna offered Michael a drink from the thermos of strong black coffee they’d brought, and he accepted it. “How’s Lazaris?” Michael asked.

“Conscious,” she answered. Lazaris was down in the cramped little cabin, which Michael had noted was even smaller than the kennel at Falkenhausen. She peered out at the fog. “Where are we?”

“Hell if I know. Kitty seems to, though, and I guess that’s what matters.” He returned the thermos to Chesna. Kitty turned the wheel a few degrees to starboard, and then she reached down to the greasy throttles and cut the engines. “Go,” Kitty told him, and pointed forward. Obviously she wanted Michael to watch for something. He took a flashlight from a corroded metal locker and left the wheelhouse with Chesna following.

On the bow Michael stood over the figurehead and probed with the light. Tendrils of fog wafted through the beam. The boat drifted, and waves lapped at the boards. There came the noise of boots on the deck. “Hey!” Lazaris called, his voice as tight as new wire. “What happened to the engines? Are we sinking?”

“Quiet,” Michael said. Lazaris came forward, guiding himself along the rusted railing. Michael slowly swung the flashlight beam from right to left and back again. “What are you looking for?” Lazaris whispered. “Land?” Michael shook his head, because he really had no idea. And then the flashlight hit a faint, ill-defined object off on the starboard side. It looked like the rotten piling of a dock, with gray fungus growing all over it. Kitty had seen it, too, and she guided the bow toward it.

In another moment they all could see it, perhaps more clearly than they’d wished.

A single piling had been sunk into the muck. Bound to that piling by rotting ropes was a skeleton, immersed up to its sunken chest. A bit of scalp and gray hair remained on the skull. Twined around the skeleton’s neck was a noose of heavy wire, and attached to the wire was a metal sign with faded German words: ATTENTION! ENTRY FORBIDDEN!

In the light, small red crabs scuttled in the skeleton’s eye sockets and peered out between the broken teeth.

Kitty corrected the wheel. The boat drifted past the grisly signpost and left it in darkness. She started the engine again, throttling it to a low mutter. Not twenty yards from the piling and skeleton, the flashlight beam picked out a floating gray ball, covered with kelp and ugly spikes.

“That’s a mine!” Lazaris yelped. “A mine!” he shouted at the wheelhouse, and pointed. “Boom boom!”

Kitty knew where it was. She veered to port, and the mine rolled in the boat’s wake. Michael’s stomach knotted. Chesna leaned forward, gripping the port-side railing, and Lazaris watched for more mines on the starboard side. “One over here!” Chesna called. It bobbed and lazily turned, encrusted with barnacles. The boat slid past it. Michael spotted the next one, almost dead ahead. Lazaris scrambled back to the wheelhouse, and returned with another flashlight. Kitty kept the boat at a slow, constant glide, weaving among the mines that now appeared on all sides. Lazaris thought his beard would turn white as he watched a mine, its spines covered with kelp, drift over the crest of a swell almost in their path. “Turn, damn it! Turn!” he hollered, motioning to port. The boat obeyed, but Lazaris heard the mine scrape across the hull like fingernails on a blackboard. He cringed, waiting for the blast, but the mine disappeared in their wake and they went on.

The last of the mines floated away on the starboard side, and then the water was free of them. Kitty rapped on the windshield, and when she had their attention, she put a finger to her lips and then drew it across her throat in a slashing gesture. The meaning was clear.

In a few minutes a searchlight appeared through the fog, sweeping around and around atop its tower on Skarpa Island. The island itself was still invisible, but soon Michael could hear a slow, steady thumping noise like a huge heartbeat. The noise of heavy machinery at work in the chemical plant. He switched off his flashlight, and so did Lazaris. They were getting close to shore. Kitty turned the boat, staying just outside the searchlight’s range. She suddenly cut the engine, and the boat whispered through the swells. Michael and Chesna heard another, more powerful engine growling somewhere in the fog. A patrol boat, circling the island. The noise grew distant and faded, and Kitty throttled up with a careful hand.

The searchlight skimmed past them, dangerously close. Michael saw the glint of smaller lights through the murk: what looked like bulbs on outside catwalks and ladders, and the dark shape of a huge chimney that rose into the mist. The heartbeat thump was much louder now, and Michael could make out the hazy forms of buildings. Kitty was guiding them along Skarpa’s rugged coastline. Soon they left the lights and the sound of machinery behind, and Kitty veered the boat into a small, crescent-shaped harbor.

She knew this harbor, and took them straight to the crumbling remains of a seawall. She killed the engine, letting the boat drift across silvery water at the base of the wall. Michael switched his light on and made out a barnacle-crusted dock just ahead. The rotting prow of a long-sunken boat jutted up from the water like a strange snout, and hundreds of red crabs clung to it.

Kitty emerged from the wheelhouse. She called out something that sounded like “Copahay ting! Timesho!” She motioned to the dock, and Michael jumped from the boat onto a platform of creaking, sodden timbers. Chesna flung him a rope, which he used to tie the boat to a piling. A second rope, thrown from Kitty, completed the task. They had arrived.

Stone steps led up from the dock and seawall. Beyond them, Michael saw by the flashlight beam, was a cluster of dark, dilapidated houses. Kitty’s village, now occupied only by ghosts.

Chesna, Michael, and Lazaris checked their submachine guns and strapped them on. Their supplies-rations of fresh water, dried beef, chocolate bars, ammo clips, and four grenades apiece-were in backpacks. Michael, in his previous examination of their supplies, had also noted something else wrapped up in a little packet of waxed paper: a cyanide capsule, similar to the one he’d popped into his mouth on the roof of the Paris Opéra. He hadn’t needed it then, and he would die by a bullet rather than use one here on Skarpa.

Their equipment ready, they followed Kitty up the ancient steps into the dead village. She probed ahead with the flashlight she’d taken from Lazaris, the beam revealing a rutted main road and houses covered with wet mold as white as ash. Many of the roofs had collapsed, the windows without glass. Still, the village was not entirely dead. Michael could smell them, and he knew they were close by.

“Welcome,” Kitty said, and motioned them into one of the sturdier-looking houses. Whether this one had been her home, Michael didn’t know, but it had become a home again. As they crossed the threshold, Kitty’s light speared through the mist and caught two skinny wolves, one yellow and one gray. The gray one leaped for an open window and was gone in an instant, but the yellow wolf wheeled on the intruders and showed its teeth.

Michael heard the bolt of a submachine gun going back. He grabbed Lazaris’s arm before the Russian could fire, and said, “No.”

The wolf backed toward the window, its head held high and fire in its eyes. Then it abruptly turned, lunged up into the window frame and out of the house.

Lazaris released the breath he’d been holding. “Did you see those things? They’ll tear us to pieces! Why the hell didn’t you let me shoot?”

“Because,” Michael said calmly, “a. burst of bullets would bring the Nazis here about as fast as you could reload. The wolves won’t hurt you.”

“Nazee boys nasty,” Kitty said as she shone the flashlight around. “Wold not much so. Nazee boys make dead, wold yum dead.” She shrugged her massive shoulders. “Such done.”

This house, wolf droppings on the floor and all, would be their headquarters. Most likely, Michael reasoned, the German soldiers who guarded Hildebrand’s chemical plant were as fearful of the wolves as Lazaris was, and wouldn’t come here. Michael let the others start unpacking their gear, and then he said, “I’m going out to do some scouting. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“I’m going with you.” Chesna started to shrug her backpack on again.

“No. I can move faster alone. You wait here.”

“I didn’t come with you to-”

“Argue,” Michael finished for her, “and that’s not why we’re here. I want to get in closer to the plant and take a look around. Better one scout than two or three. Right?”

Chesna hesitated, but his voice was firm and he was staring holes through her. “All right,” she agreed. “But for God’s sake, stay low!”

“I plan on it.”

Outside, Michael strode briskly along the road and away from the village. Woods and sharp-edged boulders began about seventy yards east of the last house and ascended toward Skarpa’s heights. He knelt down, waiting to make sure Chesna hadn’t followed him, and after a couple of minutes he unstrapped his gun, took off his backpack and his parka. He began to undress, his skin rippling in the chill. Naked, he found a secure niche to wedge his backpack, clothes, and Schmeisser into, and then he sat on his haunches and began the change.

As a wolf, he realized the scent of the food in his pack would draw Skarpa’s wolves like a dinner bell. One way to fix that. He urinated all over the rocks around his cache, and if that smell wouldn’t keep the wolves back, they were welcome to his dried beef. Then he stretched, getting blood into his muscles, and he began to lope nimbly over the rocks above Wolftown.

After he crested the ridge, it was a half-mile jaunt through dense forest before he smelled the reek of men. The thumping noise was louder; he was going in the right direction. Other aromas crowded into his senses: the bitter smell of exhaust from the plant’s chimney, the smell of wet steam, hares, and other small animals quivering in the woods at his passage, and… the musky perfume of a young female.

He heard the soft cracking of a twig off to his left, and when he glanced that way, he caught just the quickest glimpse of yellow. She was keeping pace with him, probably made a little nervous with curiosity and his own male aroma. He wondered if she’d witnessed his change. If so, she’d have interesting tales to tell her pack.