Eagles at War (48 page)

Lyra hated each interrogation, each threat to her liberty. The military police worked in pairs, strutting as if they were winning the war by intimidating civilians. She slept where she could, in bomb shelters or on the streetcars that were always filled with foreign workers.

She could not even recognize where she was most of the time; Berlin was a nightmare, more a lunar landscape than a city. Mile after mile of gutted buildings stood groaning in the wind, outer walls weaving wearily, interiors collapsed and burned out, a chalky haze hanging like broken souls in the ghostly squares that had once been rooms. Grimy survivors huddled in the wreckage, tunneling into basements, content with a hole in the ground and a plank for a roof as long as the bombers were not overhead. Besides the throngs of desperate foreign workers, the pitifully few men about were elderly or war wounded. The fatigue and pain were egalitarian—the men were all unshaven and dirty, the women wrapped in layers of filthy clothing, often all they owned. Most clutched bags or bundles. With glazed and listless eyes they sat before open fires fueled by the inexhaustible debris of the broken buildings. The lucky ones cooked in fire-blackened pots hanging from makeshift tripods. There was little charity—Lyra lived by bargaining away her ration coupons for short rations from the boiling pots. Infrequently, usually immediately after a raid, a sense of solidarity prevailed, and she might be welcomed to share a bowl of soup.

As her strength declined, her hatred grew until she felt it could sustain her without any food or any shelter. It was an illusion. When the blustering militiaman checked her papers closely, then arrested her, she felt an almost perverse gratitude, a desire to put an end to her suffering. By sheer chance, he had turned her over to the police guarding this strangely compatible group, people she might have been arrested with anyway.

She had not been with them long when the old hatred surged back like a tonic, this time for her new companions. She despised them for awaiting their fate like cows. It was a sickness in Germany. People who had been privileged, who should have known better, had tolerated the regime as long as they were unmolested. Now that the Russians were on the Oder River they were protesting the loss of their lands. It was sickening to listen to, and worse to realize that she was nominally "one of their class" and accepted as such.

They were all desperately frightened and fatigued, but invigorated by her anger Lyra moved among them, talking to the few that she knew, checking to see if anyone had enough spirit to fight, to rebel.

Her first success was with a former acquaintance, Countess Ilsa von Heeren—her husband had been ambassador to Bulgaria until 1942. An ardent monarchist, one of the few who were openly contemptuous of the Nazis, the Ambassador had been recalled after some outspoken remarks at an Embassy party. After the Gestapo had interrogated him, von Ribbentrop had intervened on his behalf. He had retained the title of Ambassador and with the Countess was allowed to live a fairly comfortable life in Berlin—but under close surveillance. Even though he'd had no role in the Stauffenberg bomb plot, the Gestapo had used it as an excuse to swoop down and arrest him and the Countess.

Lyra had met the woman at several social gatherings before the war. Countess von Heeren was typical of the German nobility, tall and slender, with an unfailingly icy politeness. Now her figure was stooped, and hunger had etched the flesh away from her bones. When Lyra spoke to her, she seemed totally enervated.

"You know that when we get to Dachau, it's the end."

"I'm afraid so. After all this journeying, too. We've been on the rails all the way from the Brenner Pass to the Baltic, and back again." In her weariness, Countess von Heeren spoke as if the endless ordeal on the trains had been one of those little unavoidable disappointments, like rain on a picnic.

"Where is the Ambassador?"

"Executed. At least I think so. I'm not certain. Nothing is certain anymore."

"Yes, it is! Death at Dachau is absolutely certain. We've got to fight and get out of this shipment. This war can't last forever. If we can survive even a few months, we can make it."

"Not here. There are too many guns trained on us. No wonder they can't keep the Russians out, half of the German troops are guarding their own people! And we certainly won't be able to do anything if we wait until we reach Dachau. But on the train, perhaps. How were you guarded in the past?"

"Two guards per carriage, one at each end."

"If all of us cannot overcome two guards, we deserve to die. The trip won't be nonstop—there are sure to be air raids. We could kill the guards and make a break for it at the first stop afterward. Who else can we count on?"

Countess von Heeren appeared stricken at the thought of violence.

"How would we kill them? We don't have even a spoon to fight with."

"There's sure to be fifty or sixty of us in the car, perhaps more. We'll kill them with our bare hands if we have to. But let me try another way first."

After hours of waiting they'd been walked to the station to be loaded into a wreck of a third-class car. The windows had long since been blown out, replaced by rough wire netting and pieces of asphalted cardboard that deflected some of the wind. A dim lamp burned at the center and at each end of the car. More than ninety people were jammed inside. Lyra had been able to recruit six of them, three men and three women, who had agreed to escape or die trying. She'd volunteered to get a weapon from one of the guards.

The train moved out slowly in a fitful series of stop-and-gos, grumbling along the bomb-battered railway. It was shunted aside for every passing troop train and stopped repeatedly to avoid the Allied
Jabos,
the fighter bombers. After six hours they were just past Berlin's outskirts.

Lyra edged toward the rear of the carriage. With her fingertips she washed her face with saliva, trying somehow to smooth away the grime, wondering how cats managed the process. She pulled off her scarf and patted her hair into place. Positioning herself near the guard, she waited to catch his eye. He was one of the new
Volksturm
recruits, a stupid
Oldenburger
by the sound of his cackling voice, at least sixty, his once rugged shoulders bent and his pockmarked face a canvas of years of want and deprivation. He sat on an upended trunk, eating greedily, taunting the prisoners, clearly enjoying life. Whatever he had been—a street sweeper, a farm laborer—now he was an armed official of the state, guarding people to whom he would have doffed his cap in civilian life.

The guard placed his rifle to the side and slid his pistol around so that he could sit more comfortably on the battered trunk near the end of the aisle. Holding a dark brown Army loaf in the crook of his arm, he sawed a thick slice off with a serrated butcher's knife. Balancing the bread on his knee, he pulled out a fat sausage—it was obviously real meat and not one of the synthetic vegetable rolls—and cut off a chunk. Smiling, he alternated bites, bread and sausage, bread and sausage, chewing slowly. He swallowed noisily, smacking his lips. Taking a canteen from the clip on his belt, he shook and sniffed it to let them know it was not just water, then drank deeply.

The prisoners had not been fed for two days and, as genteel as they might once have been, those nearby followed his motions like so many Oliver Twists, each person salivating, stomach growling, jaws moving involuntarily.

When the guard looked around, munching, Lyra sent him a broad smile. His glance passed her by, then switched swiftly back. Years of repression stifling him, he put his head down and cut another piece of sausage. As he cut he raised his eyes again to her, then looked away quickly.

Take your time, she thought. Don't frighten him. She forced herself to relax, knowing that she must not fail. This was their only chance. She hoped he wasn't too old or too frightened to be interested.

The air within the car was foul with the odors of ninety dirty bodies, but she forced herself to breathe deeply, summoning her strength and resolve. She edged directly in front of him. He looked at her, flushed, then cut a slice of sausage and passed it under her nose before biting into it.

Lyra ran her tongue over her lips. He glanced around nervously, then lowered his hands so that they were pressed to his stomach. Oblivious to the crowd of people watching, he made a circle of his finger and thumb, and thrust a grime-blackened finger into it in the age-old symbol. She nodded and he stood up, busily putting the sausage and bread into his pack and fastening the canteen to his belt. Wiping the knife on his trousers before thrusting it into a loose scabbard at his side, he shoved his way to the very end of the carriage where a crude storage closet had been fashioned out of boards salvaged from burned-out buildings. As he moved the crowd separated, allowing first him, then her, to pass. From those who were unaware of Lyra's plan there came a disapproving mumble—she was obviously going to do what "wasn't done," and for a slice of sausage!

There was just room inside the closet for the two of them to stand. He pressed himself on her, greasy lips slobbering on her face, his carrion breath foul. He pawed at her breasts through her clothing, then reached down to grope beneath her skirt. She pretended to respond, placing her right hand around his waist and pulling him to her, nuzzling her face in his neck to avoid his mouth as she slipped her left hand to his groin. Moaning, he began undoing his belt. As he did the scabbard holding his knife became free.

Lyra, her heart pounding, reached inside his baggy trousers and began manipulating his penis. There was a quick response. As his breath came faster, she squeezed against him and with her right hand slipped the knife from its scabbard. He squirmed to kiss her again, full on the mouth. She cringed, revulsion at the filth against her face and thrusting in her hand raising bile in her throat.

This is Germany I'm killing. This is all Germans, all Nazis, this evil. The thought gave her strength. Still manipulating him swiftly with her left hand, she slowly brought the knife down. His back moving convulsively, he pressed against her, oblivious to the jolting train or her shift of position. Summoning all of her courage, she brought her hand up in a single swift motion, driving the long blade up under his rib cage directly into his heart, thrusting with all her strength just as he ejaculated. His eyes rolled back and he sagged against her, spurting blood against her chest, semen on her hand.

Quivering with disgust, she let him fall back. Then, deliberately, she washed her left hand in the blood streaming from his wound before wiping it on his shabby uniform.

He was slumped against the wall like a half-empty sack of wheat, his trunk folded forward. Lyra removed his belt and put it around her. Attached to it was the scabbard, the canteen, and an automatic pistol. She searched his pockets, stuffing the bread and sausage inside her blouse, taking the few marks he had kept in a draw-string bag. She discarded his passbook—she didn't want to know his name or think of him as an ordinary human being. He was Germany, and she had killed him. That was enough.

When she emerged, Lyra put her finger to her lips and began to move through the crowd to the other end of the car, the pistol in her right hand, the knife, dripping blood, in the left. It felt as if she had stopped breathing, as if every drop of blood in her body was pounding in her head. Wide-eyed, the others followed her, their mouths dropping open, the babble of their conversation falling with her passage, then rising as she went on. I must look like Lady Macbeth, she thought. She moved effortlessly, everyone now aware of what had happened, quickly stepping aside as she approached, then closing ranks again behind her.

The other guard, a younger man with a deformed leg in a brace, was dozing with his back against the wall, his rifle held between his knees.

Lyra watched him for a moment, feeling a trace of pity for this last scraping from the bottom of Germany's manpower barrel. He was probably a poor farmer pulled from some little village to do a job for which he wasn't fit. She shook off the feeling and shifted the still dripping knife into her right hand. Countess von Heeren stood directly between her and the guard. Lyra nudged her with the pistol and she stepped aside.

It was easier to do the second time. Lyra moved forward, stabbing through the guard's throat with such force that the blade stuck in the wooden wall behind him. He jerked upward, pulling the knife from the wall. She twisted it, dragging him face forward to the floor. There was a single agonized groan of pain as, voiding, he collapsed into a heap, gurgling, legs drumming, a gush of blood spewing from his neck.

The wail of protest from the group surprised her.

An officious middle-aged man, his clothes slack on his once sleek body, yelled, "Look here, young woman, you are going to get us killed!"

Lyra shrugged him off, and as she stripped the guard of his keys and weapons, spoke to her six allies.

"Open the locks now—we may have to jump from a moving train. But if we stop, let's leap out with our guns, ready to shoot. Everybody else will jump out and run. Be sure to scatter—don't bunch up."

The officious man protested, "Don't tell me what to do. I'm not going to cause any trouble."

Lyra looked at him, unable to believe his bovine protest. "Do what you wish. But some of us are going to try to live through this war."

Only twenty minutes had passed when they heard the shrill scream of brakes being applied as the train shuddered to a halt. Before it had stopped the doors were open and the prisoners were streaming out into a driving snowstorm. Lyra stood in the center of the car, alternately urging and shoving as the people leapt out.