The Lisbon Crossing (22 page)

W
e had dinner in our cabin—tender steak, creamy potatoes, and fresh asparagus, with a bottle of vintage Bordeaux. Afterward, the conductor knocked on the door to collect our passports—so we wouldn’t have to be disturbed when we crossed into France—then the porter arrived to turn down the bed. We had to vacate, so we walked toward the back of the train and stood between carriages rather than risk waiting outside our door, where we might run into Engel. I was jumpy and Eva, sensing it, slipped her arm into mine and squeezed. Surprising what a difference it made.

“Ever been to Paris?” she asked as I lit a smoke.

“First time,” I said. “Is it as beautiful as they say?”

“Yes, it is,” she answered wistfully. “Though I can’t imagine how it will look swathed in swastikas.” She sighed and glanced sideways at me.

“I love Germany, Jack, with all my heart.” Eva didn’t owe me any explanations, but she seemed to want to say it, so I listened. “I try to think of it as a loved one who’s been infected with a terrible disease—a parasite that worked its way into the brain, causing a kind of insanity. Because it’s been left so late, the treatment will be harsh, and perhaps, in the end, it will even kill the patient. But without it, all hope would be lost. Does that make any sense to you?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could get a word out, she leaned over and, lips parted, ambushed me with a warm, passionate, lingering kiss. It caught me off guard, but only for a moment. I took her by the shoulders, and pulled her toward me. She gave way, but without ceding the initiative. Eva was never a passive participant—not in life, and certainly not in kissing.

“Give me five minutes,” she said, slipping out of my arms and quickly disappearing through the carriage door. I reached for another Lucky and smiled. I’d known, of course, that this would be our night. We’d both known. But knowing didn’t make the prospect any less thrilling.

T
he cabin lights were dimmed when I entered and Eva was nowhere in sight. The newly made bed was untouched.

“Looking for me?”

I glanced up and found her smiling down from the upper bunk, a playful glint in her eyes. “I hope you don’t mind that I took the top bed,” she teased. I noticed that the ladder had been pulled up.

“Wanna throw me a rope?”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that. You’ll have to find your own way.” And she disappeared under the sheets.

“Okay,” I laughed. “If that’s the way you want it…” I quickly stripped down, stepped onto the lower bunk, and heaved myself up and over, landing squarely on top of her.

“That’s rather forward of you, Mr. Teller…”

I hovered for a moment, holding myself over her with locked arms, savoring the look of breathless anticipation on her face, her lips parted and ready.

“You think so, huh?”

“Yes, I do…”

“Well, then…I wonder what you’ll think of this…?”

I lowered myself onto her, kissing her deeply as I ran my hand along the curve of her spine until I touched the small of her back. I flattened my palm and toyed with the elastic band around her panties, tugging at them with my fingertips.

“I might have to scream,” she whispered.

“Please do.” I smiled.

I pulled the lingerie down across her hips, then along the long curve of her leg, until they disappeared into the bed. She wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me into a frenzied kiss, each of us exploring the other with impatient hands. I lifted her T-shirt and lowered my lips onto her breasts, kissing the soft, pink flesh of her nipples. She tensed up with anticipation as I moved down, letting my tongue glide across her satin skin. She groaned and gave way as I kissed and fondled her, gently at first, then deeper, sensing her expanding pleasure and wanting to bring it to a shuddering climax.

I looked up, along the length of her torso, and could see that her head was thrown back and to one side, eyes tightly shut. She gripped the pillow in her fist and moaned softly, her body swaying back and forth with the movement of the train as it sped headlong into the night.

She reached down, pulled me back into her arms, and the world melted away, leaving just the raging fever of our lust.

Eva stirred
and opened her eyes as the train rolled to a gentle stop. We shared a look through the darkness and listened as French customs officials boarded the carriage, stamping up and down the corridor, interrogating the conductor about each of the cabins’ occupants, occasionally knocking on a door and asking for papers. Engel would be awake, too, I thought. I’d give it an hour after we got under way, just to be sure he’d gone back to sleep. I looked for my watch, but my wrist was bare. Eva showed me hers: 3:40. There would be time, but none to waste.

We didn’t speak until the inspectors had disembarked, the train had let off a burst of hot air, and we’d rolled out of the station. As we headed into occupied France, Eva snuggled up to me.

“Lili told me you were quite a ladies’ man in Hollywood.”

I laughed. “Lili’s been known to exaggerate from time to time.”

“She said that all you had to do was look at a girl, and she’d fall at your feet. That no woman could resist you.”

“She managed to resist pretty well.”

Eva lifted her head, looked at me cockeyed, and let loose a wholehearted laugh. “You’re joking, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m joking…”

She laughed again. “No, you’re not. You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“About Lili…”

“What about her?”

“She isn’t interested in men, Jack. In fact, I think she finds them rather repulsive. At least as far as sex goes.”

I let it sink in a minute. “You mean she—”

Eva nodded. “I thought you knew.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said, shaking my head. I hadn’t felt so guileless since—well, ever. How could that one get by me? Lili had often referred to all the foul men she’d had to bed on her way to the top—tossing off comments like “Thank God I’ll never have to look another penis in the eye and say, ‘Please, Mr. Producer, I was born to play this part!’”—but I’d never suspected that her aversion extended to the entire gender. I’d just assumed that she’d been discreet about her indiscretions. Apparently, she’d been very discreet.

“We were lovers,” Eva said, surprising me again. I gave her a look, saw that she was serious.

“You and Lili?” was all I could come up with.

“Does it bother you?”

I thought about it a second. “No, it doesn’t seem to.”

“It only happened once,” she continued. “It was the last time we saw each other, just before she went off to America…”

“The night of the concert.”

“That’s right. Did she tell you about it?”

“Only that you played like an angel, then you both got drunk on champagne.”

Eva smiled. “I don’t know about playing like an angel, but we certainly got drunk on champagne. It was one of those nights, you know, when everything is just right. Lili sparkled, the way only Lili can. She was going off to Hollywood to become a big star, and I was going to travel the world, playing music. The future seemed so filled with promise.

“It was lovely to see her. We’d been so close as children and suddenly there we were, together again, as if we’d never been apart. There were no barriers between us, no masks, no pressure, no need to pretend. We could just be ourselves. You don’t often find people like that in life, do you?

“Anyway, we laughed about the past, and talked late into the night, and, well, one thing led to another…It wasn’t until afterward that Lili confessed her undying love. I put it down to her overdeveloped sense of drama—she’d always been like that—but I also thought it was just as well that she was going away. We exchanged a couple of letters in the first year, but life moved on, as it always does. When Lili became a movie star, I assumed that she’d forgotten about me, or at least consigned me to the past. I heard nothing for years, then she showed up in Lisbon, with you.”

Eva and I lay there side by side for a few moments, listening to the steady cadence of the train rolling over the track. I thought about Lili, and how empty she must have felt to have to reach back into her past in search of a fleeting moment of happiness. But maybe she’d been searching for something more. Eva was right, we don’t find many people in life who allow us to let our masks down and be nobody but ourselves. After all those years in Hollywood, playing the role of the legendary film star, being the recipient of all that adulation, maybe Lili had lost the person whose heart went out to Eva on that perfect night in Berlin. Maybe finding Eva had been Lili’s only hope of finding herself.

“H
ow much time will you need?” When Eva finally broke the silence, it was in a very different voice. Detached. I didn’t answer right away and she didn’t rush me.

“Five minutes should be enough.”

“Okay. Once you’ve done it, roll him up in his sheets and the blanket, tie him up with something, and wait for me. We’ll push him
out the window together. We’ll look for a deserted spot…” Eva paused, looked over at me. “Are you all right?”

“Sure,” I said.

She turned onto her side and watched me through the darkness. I sensed that she wanted to say something more, but I let her come to it in her own time.

“When I was in Amsterdam,” she began tentatively, “I received instructions from Berlin. They wanted me to make a list. A list of any German I could find who’d left the country since 1933. It turned out that there were quite a few. Many were teaching at the universities, but there were others, as well, doing all sorts of jobs…There was one young couple who lived on my street. From Stuttgart. They had a little boy, nine years old. Very cute, very precocious. His name was Lukas. I didn’t know the parents well, but I often spoke with Lukas as I walked past his house on my way home from the conservatory. He was a quiet child, perhaps a little bit lonely. He told me that his family had come the previous year, and that he missed his friends in Germany. I put them on my list.

“Then, one morning, a few days after Holland surrendered, the Gestapo came and took them away—the entire family. The father had been a journalist, and I assumed that he’d written something that the Reich found objectionable. He might be held, I thought, but surely the mother and child would be allowed home after a day or so. When, two days later, none of them had returned, I made inquiries. It took several days, but I was eventually able to find the Gestapo officer who had signed the arrest order. Do you know who it was?”

“Engel?”

“Yes.
Der Engel der Schwärzung.
I made arrangements to see him, concocting a story that I was interested in the family because I had been using the father as an informer on other Germans. I told Engel that he’d been quite useful to me and I would like him and his family to be released. It was clear that Engel wasn’t at all interested in helping me—I was Abwehr, you see, and he was Gestapo. But I
pressed him and he finally searched his records. When he found the information, he looked up at me and he smiled. He smiled for quite a long time, then he told me that the family had already been released—into the hands of God.”

Eva paused to control her emotions.

“I was shocked and angry, and I didn’t try to hide it. I don’t think I could have hidden it. But Engel didn’t understand. It didn’t occur to him that I could be upset because an innocent family had been coldly murdered. He interpreted my anger as a reaction to his bureaucratic victory. The Gestapo had bested Abwehr by killing one of their assets. That was why he had been smiling.

“I asked him why they had been killed. Do you know what he said? They were ‘enemies of the Reich.’ A nine-year-old boy. The truth, of course, was that he had no idea why. But they had been on the list, so they had been taken out, told to kneel, and one after the other, they were shot in the back of the head. Engel said that he couldn’t remember it, and I don’t think he did, even though he had signed the paperwork. Perhaps he had even carried out the executions himself. Even if he didn’t, he might as well have.”

Eva’s voice had never faltered through the story, and her eyes had never flinched. But now her emotions overcame her. She rolled onto her back and put both hands to her face. I pulled her closer and kissed her cheeks, tasting the tears that were coming now, in silent streams. She let me hold her for a moment, then she drew a long, shaky breath, and looked me in the eye.

“I can’t remember the last time I cried, Jack,” she said. “I honestly don’t remember.”

I
tucked my wash bag under my arm and slipped into the empty corridor, sharing a last look with Eva before she pressed the door closed behind me. My heart rate increased with each step as I walked the thirty paces, knelt down in front of Engel’s door, and removed the knife and hairpin from the pouch. The lock took me
longer than I’d expected, thanks to the cold sweat that ran to the tip of my fingers, but after pausing to take a deep breath and starting over, I felt the pins drop into place.

As I turned the door handle, ready to step inside, something very odd happened. A wave of tranquility washed over me, engulfing me like a warm bath, soothing my jangled nerves. I didn’t do anything to make it happen, it just did. My heart stopped pounding, the knot in my stomach evaporated, and my whole body relaxed into a peculiar sort of stillness—I felt alert and focused and entirely unencumbered. Perhaps “clear” is the best way to describe it. I would experience that same feeling many times in the future—in particular when I was about to face combat—but as I stood there on that train to Paris, preparing to kill someone for the first time, it was an entirely new sensation.

I carefully pushed the door open, slipped inside, and stood there, motionless, engulfed in darkness. I listened. For anything. Any sound at all. A movement, a stirring, a breath. But there was none. Nothing but the relentless beat of the train sluicing along the rails.

One…two…and a half paces across the cabin floor delivered me to the window, as I’d practiced. I reached out to find the wall with my left hand, steadied myself, and flipped around so I wouldn’t have my back to the victim. I found the protruding wooden window frame, moved my hand up and around it to the shade’s drawstring, and pulled gently, letting in only enough moonlight to give the room shape.

I could just make out the contour of a man lying in the bed. He seemed to be sleeping on his side, facing the wall, with the blanket pulled up around his head. There was no movement, no sign that I’d disturbed him, so I stood there for a moment, planning my attack. Slow and easy, I thought. No quick moves. Get close, but not so close that he’ll sense something. Don’t hesitate, and don’t slice. The first cut has to be deep, into the jugular, severing it, if possible. Then be ready to hold him down, to cover his head with a pillow in case he cries out. If I do it right, he won’t last long, I thought.

Tightening my grip on the knife, I stepped forward and stood over the bed where
der Engel
would meet his end. I held the blade over the spot I thought his head would be, and reached down to draw the blanket back. Some corner of my mind noted with interest how steady my hand was…

Then I was hit with a horrible, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something wasn’t right. The blanket was the wrong shape. There couldn’t possibly be anyone under there. I yanked the covers back and found nothing…Nothing but an empty bed. A sudden rush of adrenaline shot through my heart and one thought took over my whole being:

Get the hell out of here!

I hastily rearranged the bed into something approximating the way I found it, stepped away, and grabbed the door handle.
Christ, the window shade!
I couldn’t leave it like that!

Crossing the cabin, I quickly lowered the shade, plunging myself into darkness again, then moved back toward the door. Halfway across the room, the train swung into a sharp left bend, sending me stumbling to the right. My hand went up to block the fall, and as I hit the wall I felt the hard steel of the knife’s blade slice across the flat of my palm, unleashing a shooting pain up the length of my arm to my shoulder. I cried out and dropped the knife. Clasping my hands together, I could feel the warm blood pouring from the wound.

The door opened…

Engel entered with his back to me. In black silk pajamas with matching robe, he held a newspaper in one hand, a roll of toilet paper in the other. The Angel of Darkness had been taking a crap when he was supposed to be having his throat cut.

I planted my feet and stepped into a wide left hook, catching him squarely across the temple as he instinctively turned toward me. Falling backward, he bounced off the side of the bed and slid onto the floor. The cabin door kept banging open and shut, taking the room in and out of darkness, creating a strange, jerky quality to our movements.

I caught a glimpse of him on his knees, reaching for something under his pillow. Stepping up, I swung my leg around and kicked him hard in the ribs, propelling him back against the far wall. He groaned, shook it off, then lifted his right arm, bringing his Luger to bear on me…

The door fell shut again and the room went dark. There was a
LIGHTNING FLASH
and a bullet exploded into the mirror beside my head, showering the room with tiny fragments of razor-sharp glass. Then all hell broke loose. The door burst open and Eva started firing across the cabin. She got two shots off before Engel took slow aim and pulled the trigger.

She cried out and fell backward into the corridor.