“Are you nervous now?”
“You mean, just because I’m in a nest of spies? Gallatinov, I’m so scared my shit comes out yellow. If the Nazis ever found this place, we’d all dance in piano-wire neckties!”
“They won’t. And we won’t.”
“Yes, maybe our wolf will protect us. Did you hear about that?”
Michael nodded.
“So,” Lazaris said, “you want to go to Norway. Some damned island off the southwest coast. Right? Goldilocks told me all about it.”
“That’s right.”
“And you need a copilot. Goldilocks says she’s got a transport plane. She won’t say what kind, which makes me think it’s not exactly one of the latest models.” He lifted a finger. “Which means, Comrade Gallatinov, that it’s not going to be a fast plane, and neither is it going to have a very high ceiling; I’ve told Goldilocks this, and I’ll tell you: if we run into fighter planes, we’ve had it. No transport plane can outrun a Messerschmitt.”
“I know that. I’m sure she does, too. Does all this mean you’ll do the job, or not?”
Lazaris blinked, as if amazed that the question should even be asked. “I belong in the sky,” he said. “Of course I’ll do it”
Michael had never doubted that the Russian would. He left Lazaris and went in search of Chesna. He found her alone in the rear parlor, studying maps of Germany and Norway. She showed him the route they were going to fly, and where the three fuel and supply stops were. They would travel only in darkness, she said, and the trip would take them four nights. She showed him where they were going to land in Norway. “It’s a strip of flatland between two mountains, actually,” she said. “Our agent with the boat is here.” With the point of her pencil, she touched the dot of a coastal village named Uskedahl. “There’s Skarpa.” She touched the small, rugged land mass-a circular brown scab, Michael thought-that lay about thirty miles down the coast from Uskedahl and eight or nine miles offshore. “This is where we’re likely to run into patrol boats.” She made a circle just to the east of Skarpa. “Mines, too, I’d guess.”
“Skarpa doesn’t look like the place for a summer vacation, does it?”
“Hardly. There’ll still be snow on the ground up there, and the nights will be cold. We’ll have to take winter clothing. Summer comes late in Norway.”
“I don’t mind cold weather.”
She looked up at him, and found herself staring into his green eyes. Wolf’s eyes, she thought. “There’s not very much that gets to you, is there?”
“No. I won’t let it.”
“Is it that simple? You turn yourself off and on, depending on the circumstances?”
Her face was close to his. Her aroma was a scent of heaven. Less than six inches, and their lips would meet. “I thought we were talking about Skarpa,” Michael said.
“We were. Now we’re talking about you.” She held his gaze for a few seconds longer, and then she looked away and began to fold the maps. “Do you have a home?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t mean a house. I mean a home.” She looked at him again, her tawny eyes dark with questions. “A place where you belong. A home of the heart.”
He thought about it. “I’m not sure.” His heart belonged in the forest of Russia, a long way from his stone manse in Wales. “I think there is-or used to be-but I can’t go back to it. Who ever can, really?” She didn’t answer. “What about you?”
Chesna made sure the maps were folded crease to crease, and then slid them into a brown leather map case. “I have no home,” she said. “I love Germany, but it’s the love for a sick friend, who will soon die.” She stared out a window, at the trees and golden light. “I remember America. Those cities… they can take your breath away. And all that space, like a vast cathedral. You know, someone from California visited me before the war. He said he’d seen all my pictures. He asked me if I might like to go to Hollywood.” She smiled faintly, lost in a memory. “My face, he said, would be seen all over the world. He said I ought to come home, and work in the country where I was born. Of course, that was before the world changed.”
“It hasn’t changed enough for them to stop making motion pictures in Hollywood.”
“I’ve changed,” she said. “I’ve killed human beings. Some of them deserved a bullet, others were simply in the path of them. I have… seen terrible things. And sometimes… I wish that more than anything, I could go back, and be innocent again. But once your home of the heart is burned to ashes, who can build it back for you?”
For that question he had no answer. The sunlight shone through the window into her hair, making it glint like spun gold. His fingers ached to lose themselves in it. He reached out, started to touch her hair, and then she sighed and snapped the map case shut, and Michael closed his hand and drew it back.
“I’m sorry,” Chesna said. She took the map case to a hollowed-out book and slipped it into a shelf. “I didn’t mean to ramble on like that.”
“It’s all right.” He was feeling a little fatigued again. No sense pushing himself when it wasn’t necessary. “I’m going back to my room.”
She nodded. “You should rest while you can.” She motioned to the parlor’s shelves of books. “A lot of reading material in here, if you like. Dr. Stronberg has a nice collection of nonfiction and mythology.”
So this was the doctor’s house, Michael thought. “No, thank you. If you’ll excuse me?” She said of course, and Michael left the parlor.
Chesna was about to turn away from the shelves when a book spine’s faded title caught her eye. It was wedged between a tome on the Norse gods and another on the history of the Black Forest region, and its title was Volkerkunde von Deutschland: Folktales of Germany.
She wasn’t going to take that book from its shelf, open it, and look at its page of contents. She had more important things to do, like getting the winter clothing together and making sure they’d have enough food. She wasn’t going to touch that book.
But she did. She took it down, opened it, and scanned the contents.
And there it was. Right there, along with chapters on bridge trolls, eight-foot-tall woodsmen, and cave- dwelling goblins.
Das Werewulf.
Chesna shut the book so hard Dr. Stronberg heard the pop in his study and jumped in his chair. Utterly ridiculous! Chesna thought as she returned the volume to its slot. She strode to the doorway. But before she got there, her strides began to slow. And she stopped, about three feet from the door.
The nagging, gnawing question that would not be banished returned to her again: how had the baron- Michael-found his way to their camp through the black woods?
Such a thing was impossible. Wasn’t it?
She walked back to the bookshelves. Her hand found the volume and lingered there. If she read that chapter, she thought, would it be admitting that she might possibly believe it could be true? No, of course not! she decided. It was harmless curiosity, and only that. There were no such things as werewolves, just as there were no bridge trolls or phantom woodsmen.
What would it hurt, to read about a myth?
She took the book down.
3
Michael roamed the dark.
His hunting was better than the night before. He came into a clearing and faced a trio of deer-a stag and a pair of does. They bolted immediately, but one of the does was lame and could not shake the wolf that was rapidly gaining on her. Michael saw she was in pain; the lame leg had been broken, and grown back at a crooked angle. With a burst of speed he hurtled after her and brought her down. The struggle was over in a matter of seconds, and thus was nature served.
He ate her heart, a delicious meal. There was no savagery in this; it was the way of life and death. The stag and the remaining doe stood on a hilltop for a moment, watching the wolf feast, and then they vanished into the
