two watches side by side. “Six o’clock.” His other wrist had three watches.
This night had lasted forever.
A gray-haired man noticed him and jogged up. “Taxi? Taxi?” Emil wasn’t in the mood to debate prices. The car sat at the beginning of Unter den Linden. Past it, a few brightly lit clubs still tempted westerners with heat and electricity. Beneath the sound of the planes, the low bass of music, bands, voices. Emil climbed into the taxi. “Die Letze Katze” he said. The driver started the engine.
He took it out finally, and unfolded it. He wiped the sweat from the photograph with the corner of his shirt and gazed in the murky light at the two men passing a medal between them.
As Smerdyakov, Michalec had entered a crumbling Berlin and assassinated twenty-three German boys-by then that was all that was left of the Wehrmacht: old men and boys. He handed their bodies over to the Russian peasants, probably with a bag full of the dead soldiers’ watches and gold teeth.
The car trembled and shot pain through Emil’s side. He gasped.
It was clear, at last. The connection that had been nagging at him. The twenty-three soldiers Michalec had stacked up in a bombed-out living room in Berlin were what was left of the Hitlerjugend regiment he had taken into Poland and used to kill off a hundred Soviet boys.
He understood.
These children had seen their commander again, after months without him, in the midst of the bombs. He would have called them together for a meeting. He would have said, Lef s plan our own defense of the Reich. They had nothing else; it was their last hope. They were desperate children in an exploding city. He would have had them stand together at one side of the room, him at the other, as if it were a lecture. Their trust must have been immeasurable as they met in the living room with no ceiling, only jagged walls, the planes dropping everything onto their heads. They must have felt a surge of hope as he paced back and forth in front of them, holding his machine pistol like a mother would hold an infant. If they had any suspicions they would have beat them down, because knowing the truth would have been so much worse than those few minutes of delusion and devotion.
He wondered if Michalec had had to reload to finish them all off, or if he’d had two machine guns. Or a partner-the colonel: Herr Oberst? Or maybe he had simply been a careful, precise shot.
The taxi groaned up a dusty road, and Emil tried to orient himself. He saw piles of rotting mattresses and bedsprings and shattered wood. This was rubble Berlin, where not even three years of work had made a dent. Not a single building stood. Emil leaned forward, feeling it in his stomach. “Where are we?”
The driver glanced into the rearview, but said nothing. The car bumped over rocks.
“You” said Emil. He folded the photograph into the breast of his blazer. “Turn around. This isn’t what I asked for.”
But the driver was already parking.
They were surrounded on three sides by rubble, and inside this U stood three men. Two wore threadbare, cold-looking suits, while the third, who raised a hand to shield his face from the headlights, was elegantly dressed. A gray, long coat with white cuffs just visible at the sleeves. When he dropped his hand Emil recognized the Oberst. Hard, pale cheeks, wide lips. Very deutsch. He squinted.
The driver turned in his seat. “What are you waiting for?” he said. “ Get out.”
At each door a thug waited. He tried the weaker-looking one on the right, but he wasn’t weak at all. His big, sculpted hands wrapped completely around Emil’s forearm-a grip like a machine-and led Emil over to the colonel, who was tugging white gloves over his hands. Emil wondered if they were the same ones he wore while crushing Janos Crowder’s skull. Cleaned thoroughly, and bleached. Maybe they were what he always put on as a prelude to killing. Executioner’s gloves. From across the rubble came the whisper of Allied planes.
“You rose from the dead,” he said, and Emil remembered the voice-a little thinner than before, weaker. Comrade Emil Brod? “Really quite amazing. Impressed and, in no small way, disturbed.” Irma was right: He had old eyes. “I guess we don’t need to discuss anything. The photograph, please.” He opened a hand to accept it.
Emil only half-heard. He was measuring the distance to the piles of rubble, their height, and how much time it would take him to scramble over and sprint toward the silhouetted buildings in the distance. But it was cold-he had to take that into account. And he didn’t know if he could sprint at all. He was still, and always, an invalid.
“I don’t have the photograph.”
The colonel’s face was pink in the cool breeze. He sighed audibly, but it was more a sign of weariness than disappointment. He looked at the thug whose grip was cutting off blood in Emil’s tingling arm. The colonel said quietly, “Take care of it,” and walked away.
The two men went at it together, laying into him with hard, rock fists. Stomach, chest (they knew his weak points) and face. A steel-toed boot struck his shin, nearly breaking it, and he went down quickly to the damp earth. All the fight in him was concentrated into squirming. His hands fluttered about, swatting uselessly. Rocks cut into his back as they leaned over him and swung, and the numb pain shot through him like the sounds of their voices, saying things in German he had trouble understanding. Then a pair of hands on him-he flinched, but the hands only searched his pockets and removed the photograph.
He closed his eyes to darkness, and when he opened them the two men stood over him, looking at the picture, passing it back and forth. The colonel was shouting. Snatching the picture from them with white gloves.
Then blackness.
Then all three, still standing over him. One pointed a finger down at Emil, then all their hands were moving. Then blackness. A shot rang out.
Then more talking, and Herr Oberst was holding a gun. Emil didn’t know what kind. It was aimed at Emil’s face. He moaned, turning his head. He saw the shadow of the barrel’s corridor.
Then a shot, but the gun was aimed elsewhere. One of the other men fell. A flash of light, and the second fell.
The colonel was squatting over him and looking into his face, upside down. He felt the breath on his nose, but the colonel’s words were unclear. Now for yours or Off with you or This is all yours. Emil understood nothing because he was sliding again into that warm black river.
Pain. And white, cold sky.
The sun burned overhead. Closing his eyes did nothing to help the grind of his nerves. Sitting up was misery.
He checked himself for holes.
He lay near the front of the taxi. His red-and-purple belly was bruised and aching, but not torn. There was blood on his shirt and jacket, but he didn’t know if it was his. In his right hand was a pistol.
He dropped it.
PPK. Walther.
Around him, inside the U of rubble, were two lumps of clothes, filled with two dead men. A face was twisted toward him-one of the thugs. The other-he crawled and checked the face with the hole in its jaw-was the second thug. Flies crawled over their features.
After a while he could stand, but standing was hell, so he threw himself on the fender to help stay up. He shivered from cold and from everything else. He uneasily drew himself up to his full height, and saw the dead driver behind the wheel, head back, the passenger-side of his head blown out by an escaping bullet.
The noise of western planes was suddenly louder, drilling his ear. He tried to be quick about getting to the door and not looking too closely at the corpse as he dragged it out. The seat was covered with dry, sticky blood.
Why am I not dead?
When he sat down he closed his eyes and left his hands on the wheel.
Twice, he thought. I have died twice and twice been reborn.
He held down the nausea.
If this could happen here, if Michalec had found him with so little effort, then Lena was finished. He knew it then, was finally, utterly sure: She was dead. The pain rolled across his skull, pressing him down.
The car started quickly, but was difficult to turn around in the rubble. He worried about crushing the bodies as he backed up and drove forward many times. Once he was turned around completely, he had trouble staying on the path. He had the feeling, and it was overwhelming, that time was moving very quickly while he himself moved in slow motion. Dust shot up as he scraped the concrete blocks and shattered wood that bordered it, and he heard the
