that. The worst corpse in the world hadn’t a chance when Geiske and Helst lit up.
The battle between the Gestapo and the Czech resistance had been a savage one, and they’d both played a role in its major actions. In 1942, Geiske had taken part in the pursuit of the assassins Gabcik and Kubis-parachuted in by British MI6-who had murdered Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Gestapo intelligence service, by rolling a hand grenade under his car. Heydrich had survived the initial wounds-fragments of leather upholstery and uniform buried in his spleen-then died of gangrene. Geiske had helped to organize payment of the $600,000 bounty to the Czech who had betrayed the assassination ring, while Helst had assisted in the interrogation of the young man whose confession had ultimately led to its capture-the boy’s collapse under questioning having been facilitated by the presentation of his mother’s severed head. The Gestapo had staged a strong reprisal for Heydrich’s murder, arresting ten thousand people, executing the entire population of Lidice, then leveling the town with explosives.
From their Borgward, parked discreetly just off Jiraskuv Square, Helst and Geiske had observed with interest the unfolding of events on the night of March 24.
A man had loitered briefly on the bridge just before the 9: 00 p.m. curfew, then melted away quickly into a side street.
A second man had walked into the square at 9:15, looked about, then retreated much as the first one did. “Better and better,” Geiske remarked. Patiently, they waited for the fallback meeting. Entirely unprofessional to have it at the same location, but the two sergeants had seen stranger things in their time. Perhaps a poorly contrived black market exchange, perhaps a situation where extreme necessity had outdistanced caution. Either way, a plus for them.
Geiske grunted with satisfaction when the first one showed up again at 10:10.
This time he walked onto the bridge with great determination, ignoring the fact that he was alone and there were no crowds to protect him, carrying it off as best he could. Then the Tatra appeared, moving slowly into the square. Geiske and Helst sat forward expectantly-the chemistry of the situation had altered with the addition of the car. “Ah,” Helst said, “he gets in.” But he did not. The Tatra slowed to a crawl as it reached the man on the bridge, someone in the back seat rolled a window down an inch or two. The man on the bridge glanced at the Tatra and there was a muffled report inside the car and he collapsed, falling forward. He made no move to shield himself as he fell; the marksman had been perfect.
The Tatra accelerated, then turned right at the end of the bridge. Helst snatched the radio handset from beneath the dashboard and reached another unit almost immediately. “For you, my friend,” he said in a low voice, “a Tatra headed south on Dvorakovo.”
“I’ll go see to the other one,” Geiske said, hauling himself out of the car. He trotted toward one of the side streets and, sure enough, here came the second one, right on schedule. Geiske didn’t want him in the square. The Wehrmacht clods in their armored car at the other end of the bridge would likely shoot him, and he didn’t want him shot-not just yet. “Run!” he called out. “There’s been a shooting.”
But the second man was as much of a fool as the first, for he went charging off into the square without hesitation. Geiske shrugged and let him go, stepping back into a shadowed doorway and waiting to see what would happen. But the Wehrmacht boys held their fire, simply squawked at him over their loudspeaker and tried to pin him down with a searchlight. Lately, he had noticed, they were all teenage recruits, green as grass and barely trained. He breathed a sigh of relief as the man came back out of the square in a hurry. Perhaps not such a fool after all.
Geiske counted slowly to sixty, then sauntered on after him. He had little hope of being able to follow the man for very long-not alone, not in a city where the streets veered and twisted in a devil’s maze-but his professional instincts were challenged and he decided to give it his best effort. Helst would understand, you had to take chances now and then, and he was extremely curious about this one, about where he might be headed. He could have arrested him on the spot, but these bastards worked on a certain principle:
But Geiske was lucky. The man ahead of him appeared to be in some sort of daze. He just went slogging along for a time, street after street, taking no elusive action at all. There was one bad moment, when he climbed down a ladder onto a disused spur of railroad track that headed out into the factory district, but Geiske counted again and climbed down after him, then followed at a distance, picking his way along the track among the weed- choked ties. The man in front of him never stopped dead, never turned around, seemed to believe he was alone in the world. Geiske gave himself a bit of credit for that-he could walk like a cat when he had to. But it was the man himself who made the pursuit possible. When Geiske halted for a moment to listen, the sound of his footsteps never faltered. Geiske the sergeant was delighted by such stupidity, though Geiske the hunter, he admitted to himself, was perhaps a little disappointed.
As he entered the factory district at the eastern edge of the city, the smoke and fog seemed especially thick and, at the point where the man ahead of him suddenly left the tracks, the smell of burning was particularly bad. They were really catching it tonight, Geiske thought, up north on the Oder where the Russians were working their massed artillery. The entire eastern border was likely on fire, judging from what drifted south. Worse yet, he was below a loading dock that served some sort of warehouse and the stench of rancid oil in the burnt air very nearly made him gag. He patted a row of cigars in his breast pocket, but of course that was out of the question. The sound of footsteps had disappeared,
He stood at the base of the loading dock for a time and listened carefully to the silence. Now he missed his partner. He was going to have to go groping around in there alone and he didn’t look forward to it. He took a moment to steady his nerve-he’d done this sort of thing many times before. If you kept your wits about you, nothing much could go wrong. He unholstered a Walther automatic and worked the slide, made sure of the pen flashlight in the pocket of his coat, then vaulted up onto the dock.
Getting in quietly turned out to be easy: a sliding door had been left partly open. And, once inside, he realized that finding the man wasn’t going to be a problem either. The first floor of the warehouse was empty-apparently the place was no longer in use-and a faint glow at the far end indicated a candle burning behind a windowed partition in what must have once been the shipping office. But, candle or not, a sea of darkness lay between him and his quarry and he would have to cross it blind-a flashlight in this black hellhole would shine out like a beacon.
He decided to have done with the whole nasty business and walked forward across the warped floorboards at a normal pace. The man in the office might come out at any moment, he too might have a flashlight and a weapon, and Geiske could move quickly as well as silently.
There was no warning. One moment he was walking, the next he was in space, falling head first, arms flailing. At the basement level, his head struck a charred beam-end that before the fire had been part of the flooring. The blow reversed his rotation so that when he hit the concrete subbasement he landed full on his back. He never screamed, though it took a long second to fall thirty feet, but when he hit the concrete the force of landing blew the breath from his lungs and made a sound like the roar of an animal in an empty cavern. He understood what had happened, understood that a fire had caused the warehouse to be abandoned, had burned through the first floor and the basement, and he called himself several kinds of fool just before he died.
“And did you think, perhaps, that just because I let you play between my legs that I was not a patriot?”
Magda did not look at him, her eyes never left the mirror as she prepared to go to war. She had arrayed, on the dressing table, every weapon in her armory: paints, powders, creams, brushes, pencils, tweezers, miniature bottles of scent, and a frightful device that curled her eyelashes upward. Hands darting here and there, she worked like an artist in a frenzy of creation. “That I might refuse you this? That I even
He had stood outside Magda’s flat in the early hours of the morning. Her husband, she had once told him, was a postman. When he saw a postman-a strutting little man with a cavalry mustache, something of the old Austro-Hungarian bureaucrat about him-march off to work, he’d taken the chance and knocked on her door. Explained to her what needed to be done, telling her as little as possible about himself, but insisting on the danger
