of those waiting to leave. Another one took off.
There were five of them, feverish with the excitement of big machines, and one with mud on his cheek blurted, “C-47.” He seemed very convinced of it.
Emil nodded at the fence. “And this one coming in?”
“I’ll bet it s a C-54,” said another boy.
“You can t tell,” said the first, wiping the mud away with the back of his hand. “You can’t see it.”
“I can see it as well as you,” came the bitter reply.
It was, in fact, a C-82-a rare bird, they all agreed. He asked how often they saw the planes up close, and the first boy proudly said, “Whenever we want.”
“Shut up” whispered another.
The first boy realized then what he had done. His confused silence endured as he wondered how to talk himself out of his slip, but he finally gave up. “Everyone does it.”
“Seen any C-4s?” Emil asked conversationally, as if he hadn’t understood the slip. “There were some around earlier.”
The rain had stopped, and the boys seemed to want to leave. They retreated a few steps, but one-the smallest, a dark-haired child with perfectly combed hair and immaculate lederhosen- asked if he had a cigarette.
Emil squatted and pulled out his pack. The others approached as he distributed them. When he offered them lights the first boy shook his head. “They’ll see us. Want to know how to see them up close?”
The littlest made some sound of discontent, but another gave an unimpressed sigh that shut him up. “ Baby
It was another fifty yards farther along the fence. In the darkness one of them tripped, but bounced upright again and ran to catch up. They had marked the spot with two sticks crossed on the ground. At first Emil didn’t see anything-it was a fence and two sticks, and on the other side the wet tarmac led toward the planes and, to the left, the Tempelhof building. But then the first boy, with a smile Emil could just make out, touched the fence, demonstrating that the chain links had been cut along a jagged vertical line, about three feet high. The boy bent and pushed through-there was the sound of his shirt tearing-and looked back, beaming. “Come on in!”
Emil came through next, painfully, holding the cane ahead of himself to open the way, and was followed by three boys. The last one, the baby, stood on the other side, watching, frowning. He had his cigarette behind his ear. He muttered something no one could hear.
The first boy crouched and rushed forward. Emil tried to follow his lead, bending and rushing forward, but his damaged body wouldn’t bend easily, and could not move that fast. “We should split up,” Emil told them. “That way if one of us is caught the others can get away.”
They liked the conspiracy in his voice, and were soon running far ahead and to the right, to where the planes were settling down. But Emil waited, then ran to the left. Behind him, he knew, the baby was standing on the other side of the fence, watching, muttering his worries.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Birgit’s scrawled directions were impeccable. They led him down the dark outside of the building s arc, where the planes on the other side were muted by brick. He was to skip the first door, which was locked, and make it to the second, which had been busted two months ago and never fixed. As promised, where its deadbolt should have been there was a perfect hole drilled in the door. He put two fingers through it and pushed.
A generator kept a dull sidelight burning that barely lit the concrete walls, and he had to pause at each turn to make sure the path was clear. Birgit had told him to look for stairs, and had marked where he could find them. The stairwell was completely black, and he had to feel his way. After the noise of outside, the silence made his footsteps elephantine.
First underground level. Then the second. Third. He pushed through the door.
The corridor was lit by a single fluorescent and, at the far end, light spilled from beneath an office door. He waited, sweating. His stomach made noises. He listened. Nothing.
He crept to the door and stopped again. Still, nothing. He turned the knob slowly, hearing the mechanism clicking, then stopped again. This door was not supposed to be unlocked. Birgit had told him he would have to break the lock. But he still heard nothing. He pushed it open.
It was a long office, more like a small warehouse, filled chin- high with brown boxes in all conditions. Ripped, cut, punctured by holes, water damaged. On half of them Emil spotted the small red imprint of flat wings on either side of a circled swastika. A few on the floor were open, revealing files, and more files covered the gunmetal desk in the center of the room, where a single lamp burned. The chair was empty, save a crumpled gray army blanket.
He heard a noise. A door closing.
He scrambled back into the darkness between the towers of boxes, his jacket scraping-loudly, it seemed-on cardboard as he squatted and waited.
A thin man came in and wiped his eyes, pushing round wire- framed glasses up his red nose.
Lieutenant Harry himself. Emils bubbling stomach threatened to explode.
Harry Mazur went to the desk and closed some files, dropping them into the squeaking desk drawers. He coughed into a thin hand, sniffed and belched. Emil noticed how gaunt the man was, how pale. The office was windowless, subterranean, and he imagined this historian hadn’t seen much sun these last months. He was practically wilting. Mazur took his coat and hat from a rack in the corner and turned off the desk lamp. The only light was from the hall. The historian muttered something-a deep, hoarse English Emil couldn’t understand-and left, closing and locking the door behind himself. The hall lights went off. Emil sweated and gritted his teeth against the pain in his stomach, but did not move.
Five minutes, maybe ten. He no longer had a watch to judge. He waited in the blackness, wishing he had sent Leonek here instead, Leonek with all his limbs and organs intact. But Leonek would have given up at the front gates; anyone else would have.
Once he was sure Mazur was gone for good, he felt his way to the desk and turned on the lamp.
He didn’t know where to begin; Birgit’s directions were only meant to get him here.
A dullard would pick up these boxes, one at a time, and go through each file, looking for the name Michalec, or Smerdyakov, or Graz. But the boxes were everywhere, stacked in little fascist towers that would take weeks, months to get through. About a third of the boxes, he noticed, had been moved to the front of the room, beside the desk. Maybe a hundred boxes, stacked tight. Each of these had been marked with a black X through its winged swastika, and a number beside it. The one closest to him was numbered 0087. He assumed these boxes had been through Mazur’s cataloguing process.
Emil went through the desk.
Beside loose files filled with economic forecasts written in German, there was a thick, hardbound notebook. Inside, grid paper was covered with columns of numbers and English writing. Emil didn’t understand a word. Mazur had written records on the front cover.
It was in here, he knew. There were columns of descriptions, each followed by a number, presumably to one of the boxes. The only way Janos Crowder could have found his evidence, Emil decided, would be to use these boxes, and this chart. He went quickly through the pages, dragging his finger down the lists, looking for anything familiar. But other than the occasional loose word he recognized nothing.
He found a few pages in English that were duplicated in German-a report by Lieutenant Harry Mazur on the history behind the files-but even that didn’t go into the contents of the boxes. The files had been taken, it said, from two places: a schoolhouse in Munich and a depot north of Berlin that had been set ablaze by retreating soldiers, then saved by the Red Army (many boxes, he saw, had water stains and running ink). Most of the Munich documents had begun in a warehouse in Oranienburg. When it was bombed, the boxes were moved, inexplicably, all the way to Munich. Even Harry Mazur had no explanation. It’s the madness of war, he offered in the report.
The rest of the drawers had only pencils, stale fried potatoes wrapped in paper and a full ashtray.
Emil took off his jacket and removed his tie. He would have to be a dullard.
