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 Fuhrer 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.
More of the clouds parted, letting through enough moonlight to show the two charred bodies. They lay on their backs, one barely recognizable as a woman, the golden hair gone, blackened bone visible through the scalp. Pavli could even see where a bullet had cracked open the skull close to the burnt scrap of ear cartilage. The other corpse, though its skin had turned dark as a piece of bacon that had fallen from the skillet into the fire, was still recognizable as the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, the Gauleiter and defender of Berlin. Goebbels’ mouth was drawn open in a silent grimace, his eyesockets scorched hollow. Scraps of his dress uniform’s collar and sleeves were still in place above the sunken chest.
Marte dropped to her knees. “Joseph -” She shouted the living’s name into the face of the dead. She placed both hands against the protruding knobs of the corpse’s shoulders, looking for a reply that could never come. “ Joseph! ”
The burnt smell thickened in Pavli’s nostrils, suffocating him. He felt Marte grab his hand, saw a hysterical angel tugging him down beside her.
“You -” Both her hands gripped his forearm, her fingers clawing in desperation. “You can bring him back! You have to – so he can tell me where my son is!”
He shook his head. “No… I can’t. It’s impossible.” He stepped back, trying to pull Marte away from the blackened object before her. “Don’t you see? He’s dead, there’s nothing left to bring back -”
“Try! You must try!” Her hands stayed locked upon his arm. “I was dead… I was… and then… you did that…” She glanced down at Goebbels’ sightless visage. “Even for a moment… a few seconds, anything… that’s all it would take…”
“All right -” His will left him, sapped away by the angel’s tear-wet face and her pleading words. How could he refuse her, when her mere image had kept him alive for so long at the asylum? He sank down beside her. “I’ll try.”
He had no knife with him; Ritter’s SS dagger had been left behind on the floor of the shelter. But none was needed. With his thumbnail, he broke a line through the charred undersides of the corpse’s wrists, then along the ribs of the exposed torso. Flakes of black ash clung to his hand; he shook them away before going any further.
Again, he heard his brother’s voice whispering at his ear, the pale thing upon the makeshift crucifix imparting the secrets of the Lazarene faith. A sacrament to be administered to the dying, not to the dead. To take the skin of death away…
But here there was no skin, no life inside the husk of ash and cinder. This was sacrilege; he knew that even as he obeyed the angel’s command and set his palms beneath the withered form’s shoulderblades. He drew his hands apart, away from the spine, feeling a crumbling, mortal substance peel away and gather against his fingertips.
His brother had given him his inheritance, given him the power to take away death, bestow life. He closed his eyes and let the sacrament move inside his arms, down to his own unscarred wrists. Without Christ’s stigmata, the emblems of sacrifice that had brought the ancient craft into the light; darkness welled up inside his head, pushing away all thought, even the memory of his own name…
The weight against his hands shifted. He heard something tearing, like fire-blackened paper.
“Joseph…”
Her whisper brought Pavli’s eyes open. He looked down at what he held, saw the corpse’s chest swell, a white angle of breastbone protruding through the charred flesh, vertebrae cracking as the spine arched into a bow.
Marte reached past him, trying to touch the corpse’s face. A spark moved inside the blind sockets; the lipless mouth opened wider, the black tongue thrusting against the splintered teeth. A hissing sound came from deep inside the throat. Pavli watched as its left hand rose, brushing against his own chest, the fingers like a withered tree branch as they tightened into claws, struggling to touch the hand of the woman above.
The hissing changed, the remains of lips and tongue pressing against each other, to form a single word.
Her name…
She screamed and pushed Pavli away from the corpse; she screamed the dead man’s name as he fell back, twisting onto his side.
“Joseph!” She gathered the corpse into her arms, her face close to its sharp-edged mask. “Tell me… tell me where he is… my baby…”
On his hands and knees, Pavli saw the last ember die in the hollows of its skull. The hissing noise stopped, the clawing hand frozen an inch from touching her.
The last of its death; he knew that. He got to his feet and stood behind Marte, reaching down to pull her away from the lifeless form. “Don’t… it’s no use…”
She knew it as well. The corpse slid from her hands. It lay with the one hand still raised, the fingers curved toward the palm, the thing it had desired now beyond its grasp.
With his arm around her shoulders to hold her upright, Pavli turned and looked behind himself. In the distance, he heard the sound of artillery fire. In a few seconds, the ground beneath them would tremble and split open beneath the force of the bombardment. And after that, a matter of hours, the Russian soldiers would stream across the ruins of their enemy’s capital.
“Come.” He guided her out of the rubble-strewn garden, toward the narrow passage that opened onto the broken streets. “I think I remember the way.” He wondered if they would be able to reach the shelter before the last tide of the war surged over them.
It didn’t matter. The angel wept against his neck as he led her through the dark.
