The Wolf's Hour Part 23

"No pardon necessary." His knuckles weren't ready for another pressure contest, anyway. Sandler, the hawk latched to his gloved left hand, gave Chesna a brief bow and then strode away out of the lounge.

"Charming," Michael said. "I've met nicer snakes."

Chesna looked at him; she was indeed a good actress, because her face retained the dreamy expression of a happy lover while her eyes were chilly. "We're being watched," she said. "If you ever try to stick your tongue down my throat again, I'll bite it off. Is that clear, darling?"

"Does that mean I'll get another chance?"

"It means that our arrangement of betrothal is fiction, not to be confused with reality. It was the best way to explain your presence and get you into this hotel."

Michael shrugged, rather enjoying needling this composed blond Nordic celebrity. "I'm just trying to play my part."

"You leave the acting to me. Just go where I tell you to go, do what I tell you to do, and speak when you're spoken to. Don't volunteer any information, and for G.o.d's sake don't try to match egos with Harry Sandler." She gave him a distasteful frown. "And what was that about the raw meat? Don't you think that was going a bit too far?"

"Maybe so, but it got that b.a.s.t.a.r.d out of here, didn't it?"

Chesna van Dorne sipped her wine but didn't answer. She had to admit that he was right. Sandler had been upstaged, and the big-game hunter wasn't one to take that lightly. Still... it had been amusing, in a bizarre way. She glanced at the man over the rim of her gla.s.s. Definitely not the tulip-plucking type, she decided. Without all the grime, the s.h.a.ggy hair, and the beard, he was very handsome. But his eyes disturbed her in a way she couldn't define. They looked... yes, she decided; they looked like the eyes of a dangerous animal, and reminded her of the pale green eyes of a timber wolf that had frightened her when she was twelve years old and visiting the Berlin Zoo. The wolf had stared at her with those cold clear eyes, and even though bars separated them, Chesna had s.h.i.+vered and clung hard to her father's hand. She'd known what the wolf was thinking: I want to eat you.

"I want to eat something," Michael said. The raw meat had sharpened his appet.i.te. "Is there a restaurant here?"

"Yes, but we can order room service." Chesna finished her wine. "We've got a lot to talk about." He was staring at her, and she avoided his gaze. She summoned their waiter, signed the check, and then took Michael's arm and led him out of the lounge like a thoroughbred dog on a leash. Once they were in the lobby and striding toward the row of gilt-doored elevators, Chesna turned on her magnificent smile like a klieg light.

As they neared the elevators, a man's husky voice said, "Miss van Dorne?"

Chesna stopped and turned, her smile aglow, ready to charm another autograph seeker.

The man was huge: a living bunker, standing about six-feet-three and at least two hundred and sixty pounds, with thick shoulders and arms. He wore an SS aide's uniform and a gray peaked cap, and his face was pale and emotionless. "I was told to give you this," he said as he offered Chesna a small white envelope.

Chesna took it, her hand that of a child's compared to the man's. The envelope bore her name.

Michael's heart lurched. Standing before him was the man called Boots, who had kicked and stomped Gaby's uncle to death in the barn at Bazancourt.

"I'm to return a reply," Boots said. His hair was cropped close to the skull, and his eyes were pale blue and heavy-lidded; the eyes of a man who saw everyone else in the world as frail constructions of flesh and bone. As Chesna tore open the envelope and read it Michael glanced at the SS aide's thickly soled jackboots. They reflected the candles of the chandelier on their glossy surface, and Michael wondered if they were the same boots that had knocked Gervaise's teeth from his head. He felt the man watching him, and he looked up into the dull blue eyes. Boots nodded curtly, no recognition in his gaze.

"Tell him I... we'd be delighted," Chesna told him, and Boots strode away toward a group of officers at the center of the lobby.

The elevator came. "Six," Chesna told the elderly operator. As they ascended she said to Michael, "We've just been invited to dine with Colonel Jerek Blok."

6.

Chesna unlocked the white door and turned the ornate bra.s.s k.n.o.b. The smell of fresh roses and lavender rushed at Michael as he crossed the threshold.

The living room, a majesty of white furniture, had a twenty-foot ceiling and a fireplace with green marble tiles. French doors led out to a terrace, which overlooked the river and the forest beyond. Resting atop a white Steinway piano was a large crystal vase that held roses and sprigs of lavender. On the wall above the fireplace was a framed painting of a steely-eyed Adolf Hitler.

"Cozy," Michael said.

Chesna locked the door. "Your bedroom is through there." She nodded toward a corridor.

Michael went through it and looked around the s.p.a.cious bedroom with its dark oak furniture and paintings of various Luftwaffe airplanes. His luggage was neatly arrayed in a closet. He returned to the living room. "I'm impressed," he said, which was an understatement. He laid his topcoat down on the sofa and walked to one of the high windows. Rain was still falling, tapping on the gla.s.s, and mist covered the forest below. "Do you pay for this, or do your friends?"

"I do. And it's not inexpensive." She went to the onyx-topped bar, got a gla.s.s from a shelf, and opened a bottle of spring water. "I'm wealthy," she added.

"All from acting?"

"I've starred in ten films since 1936. Haven't you heard of me?"

"I've heard of Echo," he said. "Not Chesna van Dorne." He opened the French doors and inhaled the misty, pine-scented air. "How is it that an American became a German film star?"

"Talent. Plus I was in the right place at the right time." She drank her spring water and put the gla.s.s aside. " 'Chesna' comes from 'Chesapeake.' I was born on my father's yacht, in Chesapeake Bay. My father was German, my mother was from Maryland. I've lived in both countries."

"And why did you choose Maryland over Germany?" he asked pointedly.

"My allegiance, you mean?" She smiled faintly. "Well, I'm not a believer in that man over the fireplace. Neither was my father. He killed himself in 1934, when his business failed."

Michael started to say I'm sorry, but there was no need. Chesna had simply made a statement. "Yet you make films for the n.a.z.is?"

"I make films to make money. Also, how better to cultivate their good graces? Because of what I do and who I am, I can get into places that many others can't. I overhear a lot of gossip, and sometimes I even see maps. You'd be amazed how a general can brag when his tongue's loosened by champagne. I'm Germany's Golden Girl. My face is even on some of the propaganda posters." She lifted her brows. "You see?"

Michael nodded. There was much more to be learned about Chesna van Dorne; was she, like her screen characters, also a fabrication? In any case, she was a beautiful woman, and she held Michael's life in her hands. "Where's my friend?"

"Your valet, you mean? In the servants' wing." She motioned toward a white telephone. "You can reach him by dialing our room number plus 'nine.' We can order room service for you, too, if you're hungry."

"I am. I'd like a steak." He saw her look sharply at him. "Rare," he told her.

"I'd like you to know something," Chesna said, after a pause. She walked to the windows and peered out at the river, her face painted with stormy light. "Even if the invasion is successful-and the odds are against it-the Allies will never reach Berlin before the Russians. Of course the n.a.z.is are expecting an invasion, but they don't know exactly when or where it will come. They're planning on throwing the Allies back into the sea so they can turn all their strength to the Russian Front. But it won't help them, and by that time the Russian Front will be the border of Germany. So this is my last a.s.signment; when we've completed our mission, I'm getting out with you."

"And my friend. Mouse."

"Yes," she agreed. "Him, too."

As the lycanthrope and the film star discussed their future, a gunmetal-gray staff car with an SS pennant drove through the hotel's courtyard a hundred and forty feet below. The car crossed the pontoon bridge and headed along the paved forest road that had brought Michael and Mouse to the Reichkronen. It entered Berlin and began to wind its way southeast toward the factories and dirty air of the Neukolln district. Black clouds were sliding in from the east, and thunder boomed like distant bomb blasts. The car reached a block of grimy row houses and the driver stopped in the street, heedless of other traffic. No horns blew; the SS pennant silenced all complaint.

A hulking man in an aide's uniform, a gray peaked cap, and polished jackboots got out, and he went around to the other side and opened the door. The rear seat's pa.s.senger, a rail-thin figure in uniform, a brimmed cap, and a long dark green overcoat, stepped out of the car, and he stalked into a particular row house with the larger man following at his heels. The gunmetal-gray car stayed exactly where it was. This wouldn't take very long.

On the second floor a burly fist knocked at a door marked with a tarnished number "5."

Inside the apartment there was the sound of coughing. "Yes? Who is it?"

The officer in the dark green overcoat nodded.

Boots lifted his right foot and kicked the door. It broke with a shriek of splitting wood, but the locks kept it from flying open. The door's stubbornness made Boots's face turn crimson with rage; he kicked it again, and a third time. "Stop it!" the man inside shouted. "Please, stop it!"

The fourth kick caved the door in. Theo von Frankewitz stood there in his blue silk robe, his eyes bulging with terror. He backed away, stumbled over a table, and fell to the floor. Boots entered the apartment, his metal-studded soles clacking. Frightened people had opened their doors and were peering out, and the officer in the overcoat shouted, "Back in your holes!" Their doors slammed, and locks clicked shut.

Frankewitz was on his hands and knees, scuttling across the floor. He jammed himself into a corner, his hands up in a gesture of supplication. "Please don't hurt me!" he shrieked. "Please don't!" His cigarette holder, the cigarette still smoldering, lay on the floor, and Boots crushed it underfoot as he approached the whimpering man.

Boots stopped, standing over him like a fleshy mountain.

Tears were crawling down Frankewitz's cheeks. He was trying to press himself into the wall of his apartment. "What do you want?" he said, choking, coughing, and crying at the same time. He looked at the SS officer. "What do you want? I did the work for you!"

"So you did. And very well indeed." The officer, his face narrow and pinched, walked into the room and glanced around distastefully. "This place smells. Don't you ever open your windows?"

"They... they... they won't open." Frankewitz's nose was running, and he snuffled and moaned at the same time.

"No matter." The officer waved a thin-fingered hand impatiently. "I've come to do some housecleaning. The project's finished, and I won't be needing your talents again."

Frankewitz understood what that meant. His face grew distorted. "No... I'm begging you, for the love of G.o.d... I did the work for you... I did the-"

The officer nodded again, a signal to Boots. The huge man kicked Frankewitz in the chest, and there was a wet cracking noise as the breastbone broke. Frankewitz howled. "Stop that caterwauling!" the officer commanded. Boots picked up a throw pillow from the sea-green sofa, ripped it open, and pulled out a handful of cotton stuffing. He grasped Frankewitz's hair and jammed the stuffing into the man's gasping mouth. Frankewitz writhed, trying to claw at Boots's eyes, but Boots easily dodged the fingers; he kicked Frankewitz in the ribs and staved him in like a brine-soaked barrel. The screaming was m.u.f.fled, and now it didn't bother Blok so much.

Boots kicked Frankewitz in the face, burst his nose open, and dislocated the jaw. The artist's left eye swelled shut, and a purple bruise in the shape of a boot sole rose on his face. Frankewitz began, in desperation and madness, to try to claw his way through the wall. Boots stomped his spine, and Frankewitz contorted like a crushed caterpillar.

It was chilly in the damp little room. Blok, a man with a low tolerance for discomfort, walked over to the small fireplace grate, where a few meager flames danced amid the ashes. He stood close to the grate and tried to warm his hands; they were almost always cold. He had promised Boots he could have Frankewitz. Blok's initial plan had been to dispatch the artist with a bullet, now that the project was done and Frankewitz wouldn't be called on to do any retouching, but Boots had to be exercised like any large animal. It was like letting a trained Doberman go through its paces.

Boots broke Frankewitz's left arm with a kick to the shoulder. Frankewitz had ceased his struggling, which disappointed Boots. The artist lay limply as Boots continued to stomp him.

It would be over soon, Blok thought. Then they could get back to the Reichkronen and out of this miserable- Wait.

Blok had been staring at a small red eye of flame, there in the grate, as a piece of paper curled and burned. Frankewitz had just recently torn something up and cast it into the grate, and not all of it had been consumed. In fact, Blok could see a bit of what had been drawn on the paper: it looked like a man's face, with a sweep of dark hair hanging down over the forehead. A single bulging, cartoonish eye remained; the other had been burned away.

It was a familiar drawing. Too familiar.

Blok's heart started to pound. He reached down into the ashes and pulled out the fragment of paper. Yes. A face. His face. The lower part of it had been burned, but the sharp bridge of the nose was familiar, too. Blok's throat was dry. He rummaged in the ashes, found another unburned bit of paper. This one had what appeared to be a representation of iron armor on it, fastened with rivets.

"Stop it," Blok whispered.

Another kick was delivered. Frankewitz made no noise.

"Stop it!" Blok shouted, standing upright. Boots restrained the next kick, which would have shattered Frankewitz's skull, and stepped back from the body.

Blok knelt beside Frankewitz, grasped the man's hair, and lifted his head off the floor. The artist's face had become a work of surrealism, rendered in shades of blue and crimson. b.l.o.o.d.y cotton hung from the split lips and red streams ran from the smashed nostrils, but Blok could hear the faint rumbling of Frankewitz's lungs. The man was hanging on to life. "What's this?" Blok held the fragments of paper before Frankewitz's face. "Answer me! What's this?" He realized Frankewitz couldn't answer, so he put the paper on the floor-avoiding the blood-and started pulling the cotton out of the man's mouth. It was a messy labor, and Blok scowled with disgust. "Hold his head up and get his eyes open!" he told Boots.

The aide gripped Frankewitz's hair and tried to force the eyelids open. One eye had been destroyed, jammed deeply into the socket. The other eye was bloodshot, and protruded as if in mockery of the cartoon eye on the piece of paper Blok held. "Look at this!" Blok demanded. "Can you hear me?"

Frankewitz moaned softly, a wet gurgling in his lungs.

"This is a copy of the work you did for me, isn't it?" Blok held the paper in front of the man's face. "Why did you draw this?" It wasn't likely that Frankewitz had drawn it for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, and that brought another question to Blok's thin lips: "Who saw it?"

Frankewitz coughed, drooling blood. His good eye moved in the socket and found the fragment of char-edged paper.

"You drew the picture," Blok went on, speaking as if to a r.e.t.a.r.ded child. "Why did you draw the picture, Theo? What were you going to do with it?"

Frankewitz just stared, but he was still breathing.

They weren't going to get anywhere this way. "d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l!" Blok said as he stood up and crossed the room to the telephone. He picked up the receiver, carefully wiped the mouthpiece with his sleeve, and dialed a four-digit number. "This is Colonel Jerek Blok," he told the operator. "Get me medical. Hurry!" He examined the paper again as he waited. There was no doubt; Frankewitz had repeated the drawing from memory, then tried to burn it. That fact made alarms go off in Blok's brain. Who else had seen this drawing? Blok had to know, and the only way to find out was to keep Frankewitz alive. "I need an ambulance!" he told the Gestapo medical officer who came to the phone. He gave the man the address. "Get over here as fast as you can!" he said, almost shouting, and hung up. Then Blok returned to Frankewitz, to make sure the man was still breathing. If the information died with this pansy-balled street artist, Blok's own throat would be kissed by a noose. "Don't die!" he told Frankewitz. "Do you hear me, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d? Don't die!"

Boots said, "Sir? If I'd known you didn't want me to kill him, I wouldn't have kicked him so hard."

"Never mind! Just go outside and wait for the ambulance!" After Boots had clumped out, Blok turned his attention to the canvases over by the easel and began to go through them, tossing them aside in his fearful search for any more such drawings as on the sc.r.a.ps of paper clenched in his hand. He found none, but that didn't ease him. He d.a.m.ned his decision not to execute Frankewitz long before now, but there had always been the possibility that more work was needed and one artist in on the project was enough. On the floor, Frankewitz had a fit of coughing, and spewed blood. "Shut up!" Blok snapped. "You're not going to die! We have ways to keep you alive! Then we'll kill you later, so shut up!"

Frankewitz complied with the colonel's command and slipped into unconsciousness.

The Gestapo's surgeons would put him back together, Blok mused. They would lace his bones with wires, sew together the gashes, and screw his joints into the sockets. Then he would look more like Frankenstein than Frankewitz, but drugs would grease his tongue and make him speak: why he'd drawn this picture, and who had seen it. They had come too far with Iron Fist to let it be ruined by this battered meat on the floor.

Blok sat down on the sea-green sofa, its arms protected with lace coverlets, and in a few minutes he heard the klaxon horn of the ambulance approaching. Blok reasoned that the G.o.ds of Valhalla were smiling on him, because Frankewitz was still breathing.

7.

"A toast!" Harry Sandler lifted his winegla.s.s. "To Stalin's coffin!"

"Stalin's coffin!" someone else echoed, and the toast was drunk. Michael Gallatin, sitting at the long dining table across from Sandler, drank without hesitation.

It was eight o'clock, and Michael was in the suite of SS Colonel Jerek Blok, amid Chesna van Dorne, twenty n.a.z.i officers, German dignitaries, and their female companions. He wore a black tuxedo, a white s.h.i.+rt, and a white bow tie, and to his right Chesna wore a low-cut, long black dress with pearls covering the creamy swell of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The officers were in their crisp dress uniforms, and even Sandler had put away his tweeds in favor of a formal gray suit. He had also left his bird in his room, a fact which seemed to relieve many of the other guests as well as Michael.

"To Churchill's tombstone!" the gray-haired major sitting a few seats down from Chesna proposed, and all-including Michael-drank merrily. Michael scanned the table, examining the faces of the dinner guests. Their host and his lead-footed aide were absent, but a young captain had seated everyone and gotten the party going. After another few rounds of toasts, in honor of drowned U-boat men, the valiant dead of Stalingrad, and the fried corpses of Hamburg, white-jacketed waiters began to roll in the dinner on silver carts. The main event was roast boar with an apple in its mouth, which Michael noted with some pleasure was set in front of Harry Sandler. The hunter had evidently shot the beast in the forest's hunting preserve just yesterday, and as he cut slabs of greasy meat and slid them onto platters it was clear Sandler knew how to handle a carving knife as well as a rifle.

Michael ate sparingly, the meat too full of fat for him, and listened to the conversations on all sides. Such optimism that the Russians would be thrown back and the English would come crawling to Hitler's feet with a peace treaty was worthy of a gypsy and a crystal ball. The voices and laughter were loud, the wine kept flowing and the waiters kept bringing food, and unreality was so thick in the air Harry Sandler might have carved it. This was the food these n.a.z.is were used to eating, and their bellies looked full.

Michael and Chesna had talked most of the afternoon. She knew nothing about Iron Fist. Neither did she know anything of Dr. Gustav Hildebrand's activities, or what went on at Hildebrand's Norway island. Of course she knew that Hildebrand advocated gas warfare-that was a common fact-but Hitler evidently remembered his own sniff of mustard gas in the Great War and didn't care to open that particular Pandora's box. Or, at least, not just yet. Did the n.a.z.is have a stockpile of gas bombs and sh.e.l.ls? Michael had inquired. Chesna wasn't sure of the exact tonnage, but she felt sure that somewhere the Reich had at least fifty thousand tons of weapons, kept ready in case Hitler changed his mind. Michael pointed out the fact that gas sh.e.l.ls could be used to disrupt the invasion, but Chesna disagreed. It would take thousands of sh.e.l.ls and bombs to stop the invasion, she said. Also, gas of the kind Dr. Hildebrand's father had helped develop-distilled mustard during the Great War, Tabun and Sarin in the late 1930's-might easily blow back on the defenders in the tricky coastal winds. So, Chesna told him, a gas attack on the Allies might backfire on the German troops instead. That had to be a possibility the high command had already considered, and she didn't think one Rommel-who was in charge of the Atlantic Wall's defenses-would allow. Anyway, she said, the Allies had control of the air now, and would certainly shoot down any German bombers that approached the invasion beaches.

Which left them where they'd begun, pondering the meaning of a phrase and a caricature of Adolf Hitler.

"You're not eating. What's wrong? Isn't it raw enough for you?"

Michael looked up from his deliberations and stared across the table into Sandler's face. It had grown more ruddy from all the toasts, and now Sandler wore a slack-lipped smile. "It's all right," Michael said, and forced the greasy meat into his mouth. He envied Mouse, eating a bowl of beef soup and a liverwurst sandwich in the servants' wing. "Where's your good-luck charm?"

"Blondi? Oh, not so far. My suite's next door. You know, I don't think she likes you very much."

"What a shame."

Sandler was about to reply-a gimcrack witticism, no doubt-but his attention was distracted by the red-haired young woman who sat next to him. They began to talk, and Michael heard Sandler say something about Kenya. Well, it took a bore to kill a boar.

At that moment the dining-room door opened, and Jerek Blok stalked in with Boots following behind. Instantly a chorus of cheers and applause rose up and one of the dinner guests proposed a toast to Blok. The SS colonel plucked a winegla.s.s from a pa.s.sing tray, smiled, and drank to his own long life. Then Michael watched as Blok, a tall, thin man with a sallow face, wearing a dress uniform studded with medals, made the rounds of the table, stopping to shake hands and slap backs. Boots followed him, a fleshy shadow.

Blok came to Chesna's chair. "Ah, my dear girl!" he said, and bent down to kiss her cheek. "How are you? You look lovely! Your new film is almost out, yes?" Chesna said it was imminent. "And it'll be a tremendous smash and give us all a boost, won't it? Of course it will." His gray-eyed gaze-the eyes of a lizard, Michael thought-found Baron von Fange. "Ah, and here's the lucky man!" He approached Michael, held out his hand, and Michael rose to shake it. Boots stood behind Blok, staring at the baron. "Von Fange, isn't it?" Blok asked. His handshake was loose and damp. He had a long, narrow nose and a pointed chin. His close-cropped brown hair swirled with gray at temples and forehead. "I met a Von Fange in Dortmund last year. Was that a member of your family?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. My father and uncles travel all over Germany."