Astronomy (8 page)
Authors: Richard Wadholm
“No pens, no pencils, nothing you can draw with.”
“I betrayed my brothers to spare you and your associates,” he said. “Yet you would make me work for my freedom like some indentured servant.”
Susan leaned forward to speak with him in a confidential tone.
“Arbeit Macht Frei.”
Malmagden looked away. That was dirty pool, wasn’t it?
He puffed on his cigarette till blue smoke fanned through the ceiling lights. “You should thank me for what I have done, both in Berlin, and . . .” he gestured at the ceiling, “elsewhere. You have no idea how close you all came to the Apocalypse.”
Shrieve sighed. He looked to Susan. “Is this the guy you were going to testify for at the war crimes tribunal?”
Susan wasn’t sure what her role was supposed to be here. Instinct told her to keep her mouth shut and stare at Malmagden like he was a piece of meat. That was easy to do. She thought of Hope and Crosby begging their commanding officer to save them.
Shrieve held up the pictures taken at Faulkenberg Reservoir. Susan nodded—
show him
. He set it on the table. Malmagden tried to claim it was faked. Susan turned it over to reveal the date and the signature of Conrad Hartmann.
Malmagden chuckled to himself. “That swine.”
“You worked together,” Shrieve said. “Hartmann once worked in your perimeter guard up at Faulkenberg Reservoir.”
Malmagden laughed. “Did he tell you that? He flatters himself.”
“Not anymore,” Susan said. “Conrad Hartmann is dead.”
This had a gratifying impact on Malmagden’s nerve. He looked as if he’d been hit by a penny thrown off the Empire State Building.
“ ‘Dead’? Please. That is too much dramatic. We are not children here. Hartmann is in this very prison somewhere. He is laughing at me right now, yes?”
“Somebody smothered him in mercury,” Shrieve said. “There’s some question whether he died before or after his intestines burst. Whatever, it must have been a horrible way to die.”
“And then one of your ghouls came by to check up on him.”
“ ‘Ghouls’?” Malmagden laughed.
“You know the one—Nietzsche, I think? He has the dark patch running between his eyebrows. Him.”
“You are an exceptionally imaginative young lady.”
“They were your personal guard in Berlin,” she said. “They still work for you? Or are they working for someone else now?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Because I always thought they were the reason your Zentralbund buddies left you alone. If your guard has gone to work for one of your rivals, hey . . .” She lifted her hands,
You figure it out.
Malmagden became quiet; that mercury business, that may have horrified him, but that was Hartmann’s problem. Malmagden’s ghouls were close to his heart.
“Please,” he said, “I cannot talk further. I have to go back now.”
Something had taken a wrong turn. She had miscalculated with her riff about his personal guard. Susan had worried she couldn’t scare a guy like Malmagden. She had succeeded entirely too well. In fact, he was checking his watch. He wanted to go back to his cell.
“You have no idea what you are dealing with here,” Malmagden said. He called to his two American protectors. But Dale Bogen had them wrapped up in a cutthroat game of Crazy Eights.
He pounded at the door.
“You know something about two hundred tons of lead and concrete shipped through a warehouse on Münterstrasse in the last few days?”
Malmagden laughed. “In the last few days? I’ve been in prison.”
“Is it a weapons program? You guys building yourself some sort of Gadget?”
“You risk my life in ways you do not understand. I will not talk to you further.” He banged at the door louder. Any second now, Enders and Hobbs would be down to collect him.
Susan saw the murderer of Hope and Crosby making his escape. And Shrieve was leaning back from the table in his casual manner.
“Let me suggest you get back here and sit down,” she said lightly. “I’m not done talking with you yet.”
“What would you do?” Malmagden addressed the door. He had no intention of turning around. “Beat me with the hose?”
Rubber hose was something she had a passing acquaintance with. “Takes a certain expertise to use a hose efficiently,” she said. “I’m in sort of a hurry tonight.”
Like magic, the Walther PP was in her hand.
The room got heartbeat quiet. Malmagden turned to face her. His eyes grew infinitesimally larger. Slowly, calmly, Charley Shrieve leaned forward in his chair.
“Come on, Red. Belay that shit.”
“You want to know what’s going on at Faulkenberg Reservoir? Just leave us alone a couple minutes. Let me take care of this.”
“What if you shoot off his kneecap and he doesn’t talk?”
“That’s the nice thing about knees,” she pointed out. “They come in pairs.”
“Malmagden was simultaneously trying to look amused and curl his knees away from her toward the wall.”
“You’re not scaring him. Krzyzstof here, he’s got things after him that aren’t even human.”
Malmagden was watching the gun. He was holding his droll expression even as he reached back to work the doorknob.
“Listen to the young gentleman,” Malmagden urged in a voice that did not sound droll or amused in the least. “If you truly understand the principalities I dealt with, then you know what would happen if they learned of my betrayal.”
“There you go, Red. He can’t name names. But that doesn’t mean he won’t help us out, does it Krzysztof?”
Malmagden became still. He studied Shrieve in a calculating way. They were speaking in fine print, she realized. She had fulfilled her role in this little charade: They were doing some kind of deal.
“We don’t want you to get in trouble.” Charley smiled reasonably at everyone. Things were going to be all right; he would see to it personally. “Red here, she doesn’t want you to get in trouble. She’s just a little pent-up. It’s been a long war. But we’re all friends. Aren’t we, Red?”
All she could think was the stink of the sewers, those two
Volksstürm
kids asking her hopefully if she could get them cowboys’ licenses after the war.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re family.”
* * *
Shrieve had to break at one point to find a stenographer cleared for Watermark Eyes Only transcription. The torrent of names and details was more than Bogen could keep up with.
That left her and Malmagden to stare at each other. Malmagden, she thought, looked almost apologetic. No matter; she knew him better than that. To Malmagden’s mind, he had done nothing but save the world—from a plague of his own creation, but saved the world nonetheless.
Susan was feeling maybe a little rueful herself. A few minutes ago, she’d been ready to question Malmagden, one kneecap at a time.
But in the banked embers of deferred action, she had begun to doubt. She wondered if she had embarrassed herself. Pointing guns at unarmed prisoners. Swearing, making death threats. One simply didn’t do that sort of thing in Boston. No doubt it was frowned upon in Berlin as well.
She made some excuse about going to the ladies’ room and fled out the door. She found Shrieve leaning over the railing, staring into the courtyard below.
“That’s one chatty Kraut,” he said as she came up behind him.
“He was like that when I met him in Berlin. Mr. Personality.”
Shrieve was a thumb-chewer. She noticed it now. He worried at a cuticle on the edge of his thumbnail with a vacant-eyed obsession.
“You know we’re riding up with him to see this Faulkenberg Reservoir. I’ve got somebody downstairs getting us clearance from Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s office to go through the Russian sector. You going to be all right with that?”
She nodded. “I’m all right with it.” She was looking forward to Malmagden’s escape attempt. She had half a mind to shoot him in the back if the opportunity presented itself.
“I know what you did was hard in there,” Shrieve said. “But we’re close. I can feel it.”
“Christ,” she said. “You know we’re practically working for him.”
“That’s not how I see it.”
“He’s given us nothing he couldn’t bear to give up.”
“He’s given us the store. He’s given us the history of
Das Unternehmen
.”
“He gave us a list of his personal enemies.”
“Before Malmagden,
Das Unternehmen
was just a rumor. Now we know it’s real.”
“
What
’
s
real? What has he told us? He told us this Jürgen Kriene was a bad sort and needed to be stopped. He hasn’t even told us exactly what they were doing up on Faulkenberg Reservoir.”
This was what Shrieve had been chewing his thumbnail over. She could see the doubt in the back of his eyes.
A young private from the steno pool brushed past her looking for Major Malmagden.
Susan pointed thataway, toward the cell door. The girl smiled and nodded, and then looked toward Shrieve to confirm Susan’s directions.
Susan sighed. She would have given anything to be that little steno-pool warrior—young and snotty and dumb, out to see Europe, trade in a bedroom in her parents’ house for an apartment full of girlfriends. Maybe meet some dark European,
ooooh.
She felt a migraine winding up at the base of her skull.
“You think all this stuff about the reservoir project is a ghost story?” Shrieve looked at her. This was not a rhetorical question.
“No,” she said. “I think something’s waiting up there for us. Maybe something important. That would fit with how Malmagden operates—he’s a minelayer. He’ll take us up there to see something spectacular. But he’s planning to come back alone.”
“He’s one man. He’s going to be in handcuffs the whole time. You can hold the Thompson.”
“Well,” she said. “This is serious.”
“I’ve got to get back,” he said. “Bogen will be trading baseball cards with him if I leave them together too long.”
“One thing before you head back.” Susan caught his elbow as he turned away. “That old good cop-bad cop routine, that wasn’t going to work on crafty Major Malmagden, was it? Not unless you had some way to really sell it—some crazy witch with a grudge and a gun in her purse?”
Shrieve didn’t answer right off. But that cheek muscle Susan had found so adorable, that was working like a shock absorber on a bad road.
“Dammit, Charley—”
“I hear you, I hear you.” Quietly, as if he were saying it to himself. “What do you want me to say?”
“Don’t ever use me like that again. You hear me? Not even to save the world.”
He looked away. The harsh prison light hooded his eyes, cast his gaunt features in a distant penumbra.
“Funny thing about being a quiet man,” he said finally. His voice was gasoline on an open wound. “You find people make presumptions about you. They presume that you are nice. They presume that you are polite. They presume you are fair-minded to a fault.”
Susan thought back to their first meeting, in the warehouse off of Münterstrasse. All right, she had assumed a few things.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but all of the nice, polite, fair-minded men we both know are gone. Most of the people they cared about are gone. I’m not going to disappear like everyone else I know, and neither is anyone I care about. That means I don’t apologize for business. No matter how much I regret it.”
He turned to look full in her eyes.
“You’d better get ready. We’re leaving for the Franconian Wald in an hour.”
She should have been able to read his expression. She had the disconcerting feeling that anyone else could have.
Chapter Seven
H
ERE WAS AN IMAGE THAT WOULD STAY
with Susan—Bogen, pouting that Charley wouldn’t bring him along to Faulkenberg Reservoir.
“What’s the matter, you take her but you won’t take me?”
It hurt him especially that he was being replaced by a woman. Susan hadn’t the heart to get angry.
Charley explained how Malmagden’s interrogation notes had to get back to Berendstrasse. Too much to transmit by radio, they needed an armed courier.
Bogen started to go “She’s got a gun. Why can’t—”
But something in Charley’s expression made him duck his eyes.
The three of them watched Bogen slink down the back to the interviewing room. Even Malmagden felt awkward. “An engaging young man,” he offered.
“Shut up,” Charley said.
It didn’t help that none of them had slept much since yesterday. Susan had gotten a few hours but she had been as keyed up as she always was before a mission. Faulkenberg Reservoir was in the Franconian Forest, just this side of Czechoslovakia. People had disappeared there for centuries. Three more would carry no particular novelty. Susan was realistic about this. The rockets in her dreams had rained down accordingly.
Malmagden seemed nervous as well. Under all that Völkich patter, he could hardly keep still. All the way down Highway 174 from Berlin to Zwickau, Malmagden’s knees prodded Susan through the back of her seat.
She was afraid he might freeze up as they crossed the Soviet checkpoint at the Elbe River. He was a German officer, after all. He would not be popular even if they had never heard of his business with the dead people. They had given him papers in the name of George Kroft, of Auckland, New Zealand. Try and find a Soviet border guard knows anything about New Zealand. The idea was that Malmagden should keep his mouth shut, without being, you know, silent. Malmagden had his mind on things far beyond the Soviet checkpoint. Such genuine disinterest is hard to fake. The guard spent more time looking over Marshall Zhukov’s travel permit than Malmagden’s fake identification papers.
Susan was relieved as they pulled back onto the highway. But it played on her mind—what was more scary than being hauled off to the nearest transit camp and disappeared?
At Mühlreit the highway turned southeast into the Franconian Wald. The forest rose up around them. Little towns appeared through sudden gaps in the trees, only to vanish as quickly.
Ancient trees formed a ceiling against the sunlight. Any other time, Susan would have lost herself in the dreamy light passing through the layers of branches. Today, she gripped the Thompson submachine gun tighter across her lap. She peered into the shadows beneath the trees for Werewolf cadres or Russian patrols.
Charley Shrieve curled his fingers around the steering wheel. He smiled when he saw her looking. “Cramps,” he explained. Susan was relieved to see she was not the only one who was nervous.
Malmagden relaxed for the first time. He was effusive. He leaned his shoulder out the window. He closed his eyes and breathed the mountain air.
“Ahh, that’s good!” he cried. “Smell that! That is the air off the German Alps. This is the first air I’ve smelt in six months that has no tinge of death to it!”
The smell of death could follow Malmagden to hell, if Susan had her way. She opened her mouth to say something maybe a little ungenerous. Charley gave her a look,
Mass murderers have feelings too
. Charley the diplomat. No, it wasn’t as simple as that. Charley could be as nasty as Susan. He just picked his fights more carefully.
The forest pulled back to reveal a small dairy farm at one end of a meadow. A man stood up in the bed of his wagon. He shaded his eyes to watch them pass. His stare was neither friendly nor afraid, but it was steady.
The man was thin, with a gaunt, sallow aspect that could not be entirely explained by wartime food rationing. His skin was pale to the point of fluorescence in the slattern light of late afternoon. Dark circles stood out under his eyes. She watched the farmer in his wagon till he disappeared behind a copse.
Malmagden chuckled. “These simple country folk. So suspicious. It must be the same in America, yes?”
Susan said she supposed so. She turned her gaze up the hillside behind his house. A line of sickly cows were wandering back to the broken-down barn.
She could make out ribs beneath their loose and shifting hides, and something else—bloodstains. Some large animal had been at them.
They turned onto a smaller highway. A half-hearted grade that tended to slope toward the canyon floor below. No telling how long since this road had been cleared. Rockslides poured down boulders the size of skulls. They banged against the Plymouth’s fenders and bounced over the hood.
Now and then, Susan caught a glimpse of something in the trees below them. It seemed to glint in the sun. Susan took it for the Faulkenberg Reservoir spillway. Then the trees opened up and the spillway showed itself to be a trail of mud. She lost sight of it as they continued up to the valley rim, though Susan continued to see evidence of some sort of passing.
Periodically, they would find a barefaced cliff, where an avalanche or over-saturation had peeled away a layer of earth and vegetation. More rarely, she would find herself looking up a path as wide as a road, cleared straight up the side of the mountain. The trees in these vertical clearings would be snapped over a couple of feet up from the ground. The stumps would be tilted into the unyielding soil as if from a great weight.
This worried her. She had seen similar trails in her Watermark seminars about Dunwich, Massachusetts. There were trails like this all through the hills around Dunwich. No one had taken pictures of the thing that had left them, but oral tradition surrounding it had impressed her greatly.
Malmagden seemed to grow quieter with each passing trail. She watched his eyes follow each one off into the distance. Clearly, he knew more than he was telling.
They were at the ridge crest. The air grew pungent with wood smoke. It congealed in the dusk before their headlights. Charley turned the car left, into the mountains that surrounded the reservoir. And stopped.
Faulkenberg Reservoir was gone.
Charley said, “Damn.” Malmagden sat back, quiet and morose. The three of them stared into an empty bowl of rock. Millions of cubic meters of water were gone—flashed to steam? Susan could hardly imagine it. More than the reservoir was gone. An entire deciduous forest, from the edge of the shoreline to the top of the crest line had been turned to cinders and loose rock.
Below them, the road wound down through smoke that flattened out along a thermocline, patchy and soot-gray. Susan made out a huge fire toward the valley center, just past the shore-side turnout, where nothing but water should be. It was like the heart of a rose quartz. The entire cloud flickered and pulsed to its every shift. But this was not the source of the smoke cover. The smoke that filled the Faulkenberg Wald breathed out from beneath the bare rock walls of the canyon. It curled up from the road. The evidence all around her spoke of immensity. Whatever the Germans had fooled with up here had scoured Faulkenberg Wald from the bottom of the reservoir to the cliffs over her head.
Rock cascaded to their left. Susan had her Thompson nailed to the spot and would have blown out the windshield but for Charley’s restraining hand.
“It’s a rockslide,” he whispered. She looked off her target just long enough to see what he was saying. The bare limestone was cooling from whatever had happened. Rock was raining down all along the flanks of Faulkenberg Tal.
“What do you know about this?” Charley was addressing Malmagden over his shoulder, though his eyes were on the blasted valley before them.
Horror or calculation had Malmagden silent. Susan shot a hand over the seat. Her fingers latched onto Malmagden’s collar. She repeated Charley’s question.
“Get me to the valley floor,” he croaked. “I will give you an informed opinion.” Susan cinched up her grip. “Night is coming,” Malmagden squeaked. “We have to get off the road.” He seemed very sincere about this.
The blacktop had been heated to taffy. Susan could see where it had run down the embankment like loose mud. Between the mounting smoke and precarious road, going was slow; it took ten minutes to roll down the last half mile to the shore. On the way down, they passed over a rail crossing; the tracks stretched away in their bed all along the surrounding cliffs.
A little further on, Susan could see some sort of encampment waiting down in the reservoir. Hard to tell through the smoke cover that layered the valley, but the fire was unmistakable. It rose twenty feet, surrounded by a tiara of wobbling shadow.
Trucks were backed up to it. Susan cupped her hand to her forehead and made out the silhouettes of soldiers heaving long branches onto the flames.
She marveled at this. The heat beneath the smoke cover was stifling. Not hot enough for some. The trucks were heavy with wood. Whoever these people were—Russians?—they must have scavenged every dead tree in the Franconian Forest.
They were still coming in. As Charley left the blacktop and started down the steep grade into the dry reservoir. A truck loomed out of the smoke just ahead of them. A stake bed, overloaded with tree trunks, branches, saplings complete with roots. The whole mass swayed unsteadily as the driver picked his way around the potholes and small boulders.
The truck pitched right. Its load slewed in the opposite direction. Charley slammed on the brakes. Ash from the lakebed blew up in a fine cloud that coated the windshield like paint as he then gunned past the truck. They ducked into their shirts, coughing, to avoid being asphyxiated. Shrieve fumbled at the wipers and the headlights. Susan peered through twin arcs of clean glass at bales of concertina wire across the road.
The Soviet camp spread just beyond. She shaded her eyes against the giant fire at its center. She could just make out a handful of trucks, a collection of light field artillery, tents, and some tower-thing away to the back of the camp, inexplicable from here.
Above it all drifted—Susan frowned with surprise—music. The Andrews Sisters were singing “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” Their pristine harmonies eeked, thin and cracked, out of some ancient public-address system. She shrugged at Charley. Charley shrugged at her. Those Russians.
The incongruity of the American Tin Pan Alley floating over a Soviet military outpost caught her up short. Her eyes were on the little speaker blaring down at them from the top of the gatepost. She never saw the Russian sentry slip through a gap in the concertina wire.
He was a nervous kid with a prewar Masin-Nagant rifle. Susan didn’t realize how young he was till he stepped out of the glare of the bonfire.
Christ, she said to herself, because he was younger than the German kids she’d left in Berlin. War in the twentieth century had turned to cradle robbing to satisfy its needs. Susan was not casting stones, no indeed. She had her own little den of Cub Scout spies back on Berendtstrasse in Kiel, didn’t she.
“Reach for the sky,” the kid demanded.
Carefully, Charley Shrieve pulled Marshal Zhukov’s travel permit out of his coat pocket. The kid examined Marshal Zhukov’s signature and then flipped it over as if looking for the fine print. He tossed it to the ground.
“Reach for the sky,” he repeated. Communist or not, he was obviously a connoisseur of American culture.
Susan thought for a moment. Did she want to give up her weapon inside the Soviet Sector? She started to raise the Thompson. Charley turned a meaningful glance over his shoulder.
The truck they had passed at the bottom of the grade had turned around. It was now pulling in behind them, blocking their only exit. Susan put the gun down.
Soldiers gathered around the car. None of them would have been college age in America.
A Tokarev pistol was pressed to Susan’s nose. The Thompson was taken from her lap. One of the kids removed a pack of cigarettes from Malmagden’s shirt pocket. He had one in his mouth before his friend pointed to the writing on the pack, which, unfortunately, was in German.
She heard one of the sentries refer to them as “Werewolves.” Susan realized they were not referring to the shapeshifting creatures of lore, but the Nazi partisan group.
It occurred to her that maybe she was about to be shot.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “Wait a minute.”
The door jerked open. She was pulled out and thrown to the ground, next to Charley and Malmagden. Shrieve was searched with perfunctory disinterest.
Malmagden was kicked in the ribs so that he jackknifed over, gasping for breath. Two of the sentries went through his pockets for weapons and more cigarettes. Finding neither, they kicked him in the ribs a couple more times.
A fight broke out over who would search Susan. It engulfed the squad of sentries, and then the soldiers who came to break it up.
Selfishness appeared to be the issue—why did Viktor Illysovich always get to search the women? The possibility that Susan might have a backup hidden under her pant cuff never occurred to any of them. She wondered,
What exactly did they hope to find?
She found herself standing over the swarm of fists and knees with her Walther PP in her hand, tapping her foot expectantly. She looked at Charley, What do you want to do?
Shrieve put out his hands, going, I don’t know. Eventually, he pointed out one of the kids at random.
“Hey.” She stuck the automatic in his ear. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
Viktor Illysovich looked dismayed. His comrades looked utterly heartbroken. They glared at the Walther as if it violated the accepted rules of gang rape.
Somebody near the back picked up his rifle. Shrieve grabbed his Colt out of some careless kid’s hand and sighted right down on the miscreant. The rifle fell to the ground, hardly louder than the stares from every soldier at the reservoir.
Great, she said to herself. We’ve got the drop on about a hundred-twenty Soviet troops. Somehow, she knew, this got them back to the American lines. But she was hazy on the details.
