The Kingdom of Shadows (40 page)

Von Behren called desperately after her. “Marte – don’t . . .”

An explosion, louder than all the ones preceding, rocked the shelter. Women screamed as the dirt floor heaved, bricks from the ceiling’s arch cracking and raining down with mortar dust upon the cringing shoulders. The impact knocked Marte to one side of the stairwell; from the open doorway above, a blinding light washed over her, then darkness, as though the sun itself had surged against her face. Behind her, Pavli caught her by the waist and kept her from falling.

Her ears rang with the shell’s echo; through it, she could still hear the coughing rattle of nearby rifles, the shriek of artillery cutting open the sky. “Come on –” Her own voice sounded distant beneath the barrage of noise. She regained her balance and reached back to grasp Pavli’s arm, pulling him with her to the street.

Figures ran between the buildings, several blocks down. The rolling smoke obscured them and prevented any from spotting her and Pavli as they pressed themselves against the wall by the shelter’s doorway.

Beside her, Pavli leaned forward, his anxious glance searching in all directions. He held her back with a protective hand across the front of the soldier’s coat,

Impatiently, she pushed his arm away. She began running; in the center of the street, it was easier to dodge past the mounds of rubble and overturned vehicles. Behind her, she heard Pavli’s footsteps and his panting breath as he tried to keep up.

They were far from the center of the city. That would be where the Red Army tanks and soldiers would be pressing toward; the fighting would be heaviest in the blocks surrounding that area.

Underneath the fiery sky, she headed in that direction, ducking from the shelter of one crumbling wall to the next, and in the open between the scarred faces of the blocks. The eyes of both the living and the dead watched as she passed by.

* * *

It ended in a place he could recognize. Pavli had been there with his uncle, long ago, so long that it seemed as if it had happened in another life. When his uncle had first taken him out of the
Bayerisches Viertel
, the closed-in neighborhood that had been home to the Lazarene community, and on the way to the little camera shop had shown him Berlin’s great wide avenues,
Wilhelmstraße
and
Unter den Linden
, and the massive buildings lining them. The centers of power, the Reich Chancellery, the
Leopoldpalast
and the others, that the old regime had handed over to the National Socialists, and that had been transformed even grander with stone eagles clutching swastikas in their talons, and flags snapping in the wind blowing across the land.

The flags were gone now, and the buildings were so battered and blackened by the storm passing over them, that he knew them only by their shapes, black, broken-windowed hulks outlined by the glow of fires in the distance.

He wondered where the angel was leading him. She had seemed to know where she was going, heading there with urgent purpose. Even when their progress had been halted by collapsed buildings or abandoned barricades, or they had circled blocks out of their way to avoid being seen by the few German military units or
Volkssturm
brigades milling chaotically about, Marte had kept on pressing toward the center of the dying city.

The bombardment had been interrupted, long enough for breaks to appear in the clouds overhead, stars and a pale wedge of moonlight silvering the rubble-strewn ground. Pavli caught up with Marte as she turned, gazing quickly across the streets pocked with craters. Her white-blond hair had come loose, lying tangled now across the collar of the heavy coat.

“There’s no one here.” Pavli took her arm, as though he might lead her away, back to safety. “There can’t be –”

“Not here.” She raised her hand toward the abandoned buildings, then pointed to the ground. “But below. That was what Joseph told me, that he’d never leave Berlin. He’d stay in the
Führerbunker
with the rest of them, until the end. Hurry –” She pulled away from him, heading down one of the dark gaps between the crumbling stone facades.

“Ah,
Fraulein
, you’re too late –” A drunken voice called out of the darkness. “You’ve come too late for the party!” The voice broke into coarse laughter.

Pavli looked across the small open space behind what had been the Chancellery building. A garden of some kind, for the private enjoyment of the ministers and their staff. Little of that remained, though; the grounds were strewn with twisted metal and wooden planks, some still smoldering from where a shell’s impact had ripped them from a flat-roofed structure, a square of thick, rough-surfaced concrete.

A soldier lay in the doorway, his back against the slanted edge of the wall. The dim light glinted off the bottle he waved toward Marte. “All gone, they’re all gone . . . nobody left but me.” His voice turned to sodden self-pity. “And I would’ve gone, too, if I could have.” One leg of his uniform was in tatters, his exposed shin raw and bloodied; Pavli knew that there would be no point in trying to help him stand upright. The soldier took another drink, tilting the bottle nearly vertical. He started to laugh again, the alcohol bubbling out the corners of his mouth. “I’ll just have to do for you, then, won’t I?” He gazed blearily at Marte standing before him.

“There’s no one down below?” She pointed to the steps leading into the darkness. “You’re lying –”

The soldier had slumped onto one arm, the bottle falling from his grip and clinking against the broken cement. “See for yourself,” he mumbled, eyelids drifting shut. His stubbled face grew slack, mouth falling open.

A pocket flashlight lay near the soldier’s outstretched hand; Pavli bent down and scooped it up. It emitted a weak, yellow beam, the batteries close to dead. He pointed it down the steps. “I don’t see anyone.” He turned to Marte. “Maybe he’s right –”

She pushed past him. “Joseph!” Her voice echoed against the walls as she descended.

He followed her, trying to shine the light past her so she wouldn’t trip and fall. The bunker’s narrow corridors were littered with papers and other rubble; with each step, he seemed to kick away another empty bottle. The smell of spilled alcohol in the trapped air choked his breath in his throat.

“He was here . . .” Marte stopped and looked across the open doorways surrounding her. “I can still feel him . . .” She stepped closer to one. The flashlight beam revealed a table covered with maps, a few spilling onto the trash-strewn floor. She stepped back into the corridor and closed her eyes, raising a hand before himself.

Pavli felt his chest tightening, his lungs straining for whatever oxygen was left in the fetid air. The walls and ceiling pressed tighter around him than the shelter had. The human smells, and the shouting voices, the screams and hysterical laughter, now reduced to whispers embedded in the earth.

“There –” Marte pointed down the corridor. A spiralling set of stairs curved beyond the door to which she ran.

They were still underground when they stepped into the next level; Pavli could sense the weight of stone and concrete above his head. He followed Marte through a doorway on the left.

At first, he thought the flashlight, slowly growing weaker, had picked out a set of dolls on the beds against the room’s walls. Large ones, but still smaller than adult figures would have been. Six of them, the golden hair of the girls spilling across the pillows.

He tried to keep Marte from touching any of them, but she pushed away his arm. She leaned down, her fingertips brushing the cheek of the oldest girl’s corpse. The younger girls and the boys looked peaceful, but Pavli could see the dark bruises on the one’s shoulders and throat, showing the struggle she must have put up.

“Joseph did this.” Tenderly, she stroked the girl’s hair, a deeper, more sunlike golden than her own. The hair of all the dead children were the same blond shade; that was what had told Pavli that Marte’s child wasn’t among them. “He and Magda . . . they didn’t want to leave them behind . . .”

The sight of the small corpses made Pavli dizzy. He had seen so many worse things, in the war-torn streets of Berlin and on Ritter’s surgery table at the asylum, but the peaceful faces in this tomblike chamber, looking as if they were merely asleep, wrapped ice around his heart. Present time ebbed away; Marte was no longer there with him, and he could watch in silence as a woman in a dark blue dress, with hair as golden as that of the children, bent forward to wake each child in turn. The woman of the room’s past placed capsules in their mouths, one after another, telling them to be good and to bite down and swallow their medicine, that soon they would be getting ready to go on a long airplane ride, to go far away, to someplace much sunnier and prettier. Only the eldest girl woke before her mother reached her; she started sobbing in fear as she watched her brothers and sisters fall back into a sleep from which they would never waken. She had sobbed and cried out, her mother had slapped her, forced her mouth open and pressed in the capsule with her thumb, then pressed a hand over her face to make her swallow . . .

“Joseph!”

His head swam with the images of another’s memory, the deaths of the golden-haired children, as he heard Marte scream the single name. He opened his eyes and saw her standing in the center of the room, looking wildly about herself, as though she expected an answer to the shout still echoing in the bunker. She burst into tears as he placed his arm around her shoulders.

“He was here –” She struck a weak fist against Pavli’s chest. “He knows, he’s the only one who can tell me –”

Marte was still weeping as he led up into the cold night air, still thick with smoke but breathable. She slipped from his grasp and knelt beside the drunken soldier.

“Where is he?” She pulled the man toward her by the front of his uniform. His head lolled back, eyelids fluttering open. “Where is
Reichsminister
Goebbels? Where did he go –”

The soldier laughed. “He went nowhere,
Fraulein
. The bastard’s still here.” He reached for Pavli’s hand. “Help me up. I’ll show you.”

Leaning his weight on Pavli, the soldier hobbled with his wounded leg dragging behind. “This way.” He nodded toward the corner of the rough concrete structure.

They had come around the other side when they had entered the remains of the Chancellery garden; if they had gone by this side, they would have stumbled across the two corpses to which the soldier brought them.

“There – you see?” The soldier’s rank breath was right against Pavli’s face. “He wanted to go the same way – they both did, him and his stuck-up wife – the same way the
Führer
did. We burned that bastard yesterday, broke up what was left with a shovel handle, and then we scattered the ashes all around, so the Ivans wouldn’t be able to get their hands on any piece of him. So of course your precious
Reichsminister
Goebbels would have to have the same thing, wouldn’t he?” The soldier’s voice sharpened with scorn. “Burn ’em up, soon as he and his wife had killed themselves, those were his orders. But we’d already used most of the cans of petrol on his boss – it takes a lot of fuel to get to ashes. And there wasn’t time to stand around watching these two burn. Just doused ’em and threw the match, and then everybody was gone. Everybody but me.” The soldier’s weight sagged against Pavli; he had to catch himself to keep from falling. “I had to smell ’em all this time, ’til the flames died out.” He spat on the ground. “Made me sick, it did –” His head wobbled, and Pavli let him slip unconscious onto the ground.