The Other Side of Love (67 page)

Wyatt said, and in a swift motion reached under his topcoat for his pistol. His arm steady, he aimed at Groener.

“A gun? You’re kidnapping him?”

“Getting him back for Kathe.”

Groener turned to her.

“Steal my Erich and you’ll never be safe in your own country.”

Sweat was trickling down his face.

“This I swear, Kathe. As long as I live, you’ll never be safe anywhere in the Reich.”

“Too bad you Nazis lost the fucking war, Groener,”

Wyatt said.

“Now, where’s his room?”

Tears shone in the keen little eyes.

“Kathe, I love the boy, he loves me.”

Wyatt’s finger tensed on the trigger.

“Move!”

Groener picked up the oil-lamp.

He led the way up the broad shadow-haunted staircase, Wyatt following a step behind, Kathe trailing. Again she was having difficulty catching her breath. Her legs refused to function properly, and she needed to clutch the banister. Her mind, too, was performing oddly. She worried about ludicrous details, like whether she would have time enough to put on Erich’s dressinggown and slippers.

They went down the bedroom corridor. Groener opened a door.

An insignificant drift under the down quilt. A soundlessly sleeping child.

At long last, her son …

“OK, Kathe,”

Wyatt said.

“Get him.”

She passed between the men. She coulfr smell the odour of their sweat, hear the rasp of their breathing Memories of them both jumbled inside her head. Wyatt’s sombre voice in the London hotel room telling her to decide whether she would return to Germany or marry him … The streak of blood on Groener’s brown leather couch … Groener’s fatuously proud smile above her bed in the tower room at Villa Haug. Groener’s thick careful hand on the knife as Erich howled on a swastika-pillowed altar. Wyatt’s tense pallor last night when he’d stunned her by saying he would find out whether Erich were alive.

She bent over the bed, lifting her son.

He stirred sleepily, and she pressed her cheek against his soft hair, hugging his limp warm weight. In this instant, after nearly six years of privation and danger, of terrible doubts, of crippling grief, it seemed to her that there was, after all, a God.

Suddenly everything went black.

Groener had extinguished the lamp. She poised by the bed, clutchmg Erich. The fine hairs rose on the back of her neck as the

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floorboards reverberated with an invisible gasping struggle. Her hands spread across Erich’s back, and she hugged him protectively to her body. He whimpered, pushing sleepily at her face.

There was the flat, almost hollow sound of a fist connecting with well-muscled flesh.

“Rathe, get the hell out of here!”

Wyatt panted.

“Put me down.”

Erich was more awake now. Tut me down!”

“Hans!”

Groener bawled.

“Hans, she has Erich!”

Small moist fingers were tugging at her hair, pushing at the small bones of her nose, poking at her eyes. It didn’t seem possible that she could hold Erich and run. Yet her feet were sure in the darkness. The child struggled in her arms, wild and slippery as a landed fish. The sounds faded as she trotted down the staircase. She heard only Erich’s cries and the blood drumming against her ears. Balanced to take another step, she found she had reached the landing. Erich’s struggles had loosened the quilt. The feather-puffed fabric caught her foot. She tripped. Clutching the flailing boy closer, she thumped on to the drugget. She struggled to her feet with what seemed nightmare slowness.

Above, in the bedroom corridor, a door opened and the wedge of light cast dim tea-coloured shadows. By this marginal illumination, Kathe sped down half a dozen more steps. She clattered across the front hall’s marble floor. Erich was screaming now.

“It’s all right, Erich, it’s all right,”

she panted.

A sudden beam of brightness blinded her. Unable to see who held the torch, she guessed it must be Hans, whoever he was, probably the muscular servant in the green jacket.

“Halt!”

The man’s footsteps pounded towards her. Tut down that boy!”

“Hansi …

“

Erich wailed.

A sharp noise exploded above them. The woman screamed. Hans swerved away. His torch casting a mobile brilliant circle on the staircase, he took the steps two at a time.

Wyatt, shoving his service pistol back into the holster, was barrelling downwards. The two men collided. The torch clattered downwards on to the marble, breaking. Now the woman’s screams issued in a high-pitched monotone like an all-clear siren. Hans’s steps resounded upwards.

“Is Groener dead?”

Kathe asked.

“No such luck. We were fighting for the gun, and it went off. I grabbed it and conked him over the head. Here, let me take him.”

He reached for the struggling child.

“You open the door.”

Kathe fumbled with the bolt in the darkness. The chain clattered. Then they were outside, racing along the gravel path between moonlit shrubbery and trees. Into her mind popped a memory of the last time they had run side by side, that soft summer dawn in

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Hyde Park. Probably she had been pregnant then. They curved towards the gate.

“Achtung!”

shouted a voice behind him.

A shot rang.

Then another shot.

Wyatt staggered. Crouched over Erich, he called:

“Run like hell!”

But she waited until he and Erich were through the gate. Bullets whined around them. Hans must have been in the SS. A crack shot. Why can’t he hit us at this range1? It didn’t occur to her until later that he was firing through trees at swift-moving shadows.

Wyatt flung open the back door of the car, diving inside with the boy.

He tossed her the keys.

“Stop at the first MP you see. Go. Go “

Erich was crying more softly now, and she could hear Wyatt’s wheezing gasps as she frantically tried to find the ignition in the darkness.

Her foot pressed down to the floorboards. As the gears ground and car jolted forward, Wyatt gave a grunt. She felt Erich’s light body hit the back of her seat. The motor-pool Buick’s headlights bored between the ancient trees of the Stadtwald. She didn’t slow.

Erich sobbed tonelessly.

Wyatt was silent.

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7

The Krankenhaus Frankfurt, built at the turn of the century in the neoclassical style, had a grandiose gallery intended to serve as a visitors”

waiting-room, but after the hospital had been requisitioned by the Military Government the rare visitor was shunted down to a windowless basement room.

Erich lay weeping on the old-fashioned horsehair sofa while Kathe sprawled in the shabby armchair watching him. She had just finished the struggle to change the uncooperative child from pyjamas soaked with Wyatt’s blood to the government-issue man’s khaki undershirt that a kind-voiced bespectacled nurse had given her. Sensing Kathe’s gaze, Erich gave a bellicose kick. The army blanket slithered on to the linoleum. Turning his back to her, sobbing wearily, he sucked on the Hershey bar that the nurse had unwrapped for him.

Kathe leaned forward, once again attempting to reassure him.

“You’ll be safe here,”

she said.

He averted his face, his body convulsing with an effort to halt his sobs. He hadn’t spoken a word since they’d left Groener’s house. But why should a bright child, almost six, already uprooted from one home and one set of parents, put any trust in a stranger who had snatched him from his bed, then rushed him into the bullet-streaked moonlight? What sort of reassurances could go over after that wild drive? With a sigh, he finished the last square and clutched the T-shirt to his mouth. After a few minutes, his fingers fell away. He had cried himself to sleep.

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Kathe tiptoed to wipe the ooze of chocolate cautiously from his chin and replace the blanket.

“Sleep tight,”

she whispered, kissing his forehead.

“Sleep tight, my baby.”

Returning to her chair, she wore an expression of dread. She had no watch, there was no clock. How long had it been since the medics had rushed Wyatt away on the trolley? Plasma had already been dripping into his arm, an oxygen-mask had covered his nose and garishly white lips. A swift-moving scene of terror. Maybe he’s already dead, she thought. At a tap on the heavy door, she gave a little gasp and jumped to her feet. She was aware of an icy chill as though the warm little underground room had suddenly frozen. This must be the doctor. Come to tell her - what?

But it was Aubrey who opened the door.

II

Too distracted to question either what he was doing in Frankfurt or how he had found her in a military hospital, she flung herself at him, weeping into his rough uniform as desperately as Erich had wept earlier.

“Shh, shh,”

he said, stroking her hair.

“Kathe, it’s all right.”

Kathe pulled away, wiping her knuckles across her eyes, taking his handkerchief.

“So Wyatt got you off,”

he said after she had blown her nose.

“Oh my God, we never told you. Yes, he did a masterful job.”

Aubrey took a step towards the couch.

“And this is Erich? But”

“Groener took him from the Dettens.”

Telling what had transpired the previous two days, Kathe repeated herself or left out chunks of time, yet Aubrey nodded as if her story were fully coherent.

“I blame myself,”

she finished.

“I knew what Groejfrr was. How could I have let Wyatt go there?”

*

“Kathe, this is Wyatt’s son.”

“He has no idea.”

“Not even now?”

She shook her head, and began to cry again.

“Don’t, Kathe, don’t.”

Holding the slender shuddering body that he loved, he wondered at the paradoxes of human nature. How could Kathe, surely by any definition of courage a heroine, be abjectly terrified of Wyatt’s disbelief? And how could Wyatt, susceptible to every doubt about Kathe, put his life on the line to regain her child, ostensibly by a man guilty of crimes against humanity? And what about Aubrey Kingsmith? Why, when he desired only joy for Kathe, was he snared in this murky web of rivalry that Wyatt had succeeded where he himself had failed?

“If you’d seen him when they took him away …” She wiped her eyes.

“His tan looked like make-up, there was blood everywhere and his breath rattled.”

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‘He’s strong, Kathe.”

Aubrey didn’t add that Wyatt would need superhuman resilience to overcome the negative prognosis he’d heard at the desk.

Without a tap the door burst open. A narrow-shouldered officer with sleep grains in the corners of his eyes introduced himself as Lieutenant Rockwell. Although Rockwell’s high-pitched tenor voice was loud and penetrating, Erich didn’t stir.

Tm here to investigate what happened to Captain Kingsmith”

“How is he?”

Kathe interrupted.

“Still on the table, and in damn grim shape, or so they tell me. Fraulein, there’s a lot of questions before we get to the shooting of an American officer in the back.”

Rockwell’s precision indicated a certainty that she had aimed the gun.

“First off, both sergeants I talked to said you had no papers. That’s a criminal offence. And why do you call yourself Kingsmith? And what about the kid? Is he yours? How’s he involved in this mess? Straight answers, understand? No tricks.”

On hearing Wyatt’s condition, Kathe had sunk into the chair. With a light touch on her hair, Aubrey introduced himself.

“It’s an involved story, Lieutenant, and I for one can’t blame you if you’re dubious. But this lady’s name is Kingsmith. You see, we’re all three cousins.”

After several minutes, Aubrey had convinced Rockwell that it might, just might be plausible that Wyatt had been shot while rescuing Kathe’s son from the home of a high-ranking SS officer who had falsified his Fragebogen.

“If that’s true, it’ll be a case for a Military Government prosecutor,”

Rockwell said, turning to Kathe. Til need you to take me to the house and identify this SS criminal.”

She began to shiver. Her nervous system was tethered to Krankenhaus Frankfurt. Physically as well as mentally she was incapable of leaving either Erich or Wyatt.

“My cousin’s had enough for one night,”

Aubrey said firmly. Til go with you.”

“We had two jeeploads of men following us to the Stadtwald,”

Aubrey reported two hours later.

“No need to tell you the house was deserted. Still, it gave me a chance to fetch those things for Erich.”

On the small table lay a tangle of boy’s clothing, a board game, a battered toy truck with scratches where the swastikas would have been.

“We left a sentry, and I led the parade to Hochst. Groener’s watchman had decamped from the warehouse. But the crates of American food, the medical supplies and cigarette-cartons proved to Rockwell that, whatever else, he was in the lair of an enterprising black-marketeer. He stationed four guards around the place. On the way back,

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he relaxed, thanking me profusely on behalf of G5 I gave him full credit.”