“I don’t know.”
“You can,” Michael said, and hauled him to his feet. Mouse still held his ax, his knuckles bleached white around the handle. “We’d better get out of here before any more Germans come along,” Michael told him; he looked around, expecting to see the prisoners disappearing into the woods, but most of them simply sat on the ground, as if awaiting the next truckload of Nazis. Michael crossed the road, with Mouse a few paces behind, and he approached a thin, dark-bearded man who’d been among the chopping party. “What’s wrong?” Michael asked. “You’re free now. You can go, if you like.”
The man, his face stretched like brown leather over the jutting bones, smiled faintly. “Free,” he whispered in a thick Ukrainian accent. “Free. No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“There are the woods. Why don’t you go?”
“Go?” Another man, even thinner than the first, stood up. He had a long-jawed face, and was shaven almost bald. His accent was of northern Russia. “Go where?”
“I don’t know. Just… away from here.”
“Why?” the dark-bearded man inquired. He lifted his thick brows. “The Nazis are everywhere. This is their country. Where are we to go that the Nazis wouldn’t hunt us down again?”
Michael couldn’t fathom this; it was utterly against his nature that anyone whose chains had been broken wouldn’t try to keep them from being forged again. These men had been prisoners for a very long time, he realized. They had forgotten the meaning of freedom. “Don’t you think there’s any chance you might be able to-”
“No,” the bald prisoner interrupted, his eyes black and remote. “No chance at all.”
As Michael talked to the men, Mouse leaned against a pine tree nearby. He felt sick, and he thought he might faint from the smell of blood. He wasn’t a fighter. God help me get home, he prayed. Just help me get ho-
One of the dead Germans suddenly sat up, about eight feet from where Mouse stood. The man had been shot through the side, his face ashen. Mouse saw who it was: Mannerheim. And he also saw Mannerheim reach for a pistol lying beside him, pick it up, and point it at Green Eyes’ back.
Mouse started to scream, but his voice croaked, unable to summon enough power. Mannerheim’s finger was on the trigger. His gun hand wavered; he steadied it with his other hand, which was covered with crimson.
Mannerheim was a German. Green Eyes was… whoever he was. Germany was Mouse’s country. I DESERTED MY UNIT. Runt. And went home to the Devil.
All these things whirled through Mouse’s mind in an instant. Mannerheim’s finger began to squeeze the trigger. Green Eyes was still talking. Why wouldn’t he turn? Why wouldn’t he…
Time had run out.
Mouse heard himself shout-the cry of an animal-and he strode forward and smashed the ax blade down into Mannerheim’s brown-haired skull.
The gun hand jerked, and the pistol went off.
Michael heard the whine of a wasp past his head. Up in the trees, a branch cracked and fell to earth. He turned, and saw Mouse holding the handle of his ax, the blade buried in Mannerheim’s head. The man’s body slumped forward, and Mouse released the ax as if he’d been scalded. Then Mouse fell to his knees in the dirt; he stayed there, his mouth half open and a little thread of saliva hanging over his chin, until Michael helped him to his feet.
“My God,” Mouse whispered. He blinked, his eyes bloodshot. “I killed a man.” Tears welled up and ran down his cheeks.
“You can still get away,” Michael told the dark-bearded prisoner as Mouse’s weight leaned against him.
“I don’t feel like running today,” was the answer. The man gazed up at the pewter sky. “Maybe tomorrow. You go on. We’ll tell them…” He paused; it came to him. “We’ll tell them the Allies have landed,” he said, and smiled dreamily.
Michael, Mouse, Gunther, and Dietz left the prisoners behind. They continued along the road, keeping to the woods, and found the hay wagon about a half mile ahead. The horse was calmly chomping grass in a dewy field.
They got away as quickly as they could, black smoke like banners of destruction now hazing the western horizon as well as the eastern. Mouse sat staring into space, his mouth working but making no sounds, and Michael looked ahead, trying to shake the image of the young soldier’s face just before he had slaughtered him. The bottle of schnapps, unbroken in the gunfire, had been sipped from by all and deposited under the hay. In these times liquor was a priceless commodity.
They went on, and every turn of the wheels took them closer to Berlin.
2
Michael had seen Paris in sunshine; he saw Berlin in gray gloom.
It was a huge, sprawling city. It smelled musty and earthy, like a cellar long sealed from light. It looked ancient as well, its stocky buildings the same shade of gray. Michael thought of tombstones in a damp graveyard where deadly mushrooms thrived.
They crossed the Havel River in the Spandau district, and on the other side were immediately forced off the road by a column of Kubelwagens and troop trucks heading west. A chill wind blew off the Havel, making faded Nazi flags snap from their lampposts. The pavement was cracked with tank treads. Across the cityscape spouts of dark smoke rose from chimneys, and the wind curled them into question marks. The stone walls of rowhouses were adorned with battered posters and proclamations, such as REMEMBER THE HEROES OF STALINGRAD, ONWARD TO MOSCOW, GERMANY VICTORIOUS TODAY, GERMANY VICTORIOUS TOMORROW. Epitaphs on gravestones, Michael thought; Berlin was a cemetery, full of ghosts. Of course there were people on the streets, and in cars, and flower shops, and cinemas, and tailorshops, but there was no vitality. Berlin was not a city of smiles, and Michael noticed that people kept glancing over their shoulders, fearful of what was approaching from the east.
Gunther took them through the elegant streets of the Charlottenburg district, where dwellings styled like gingerbread castles housed equally fanciful dukes and barons, toward the war-worn inner city. Row houses crowded together, grim-looking structures with blackout curtains: these were streets where dukes and barons held no power. Michael noticed something strange: there were only elderly people and children about, no young men except for the soldiers who swept past in trucks and on motorcycles, and those men had young faces but old eyes. Berlin was in mourning, because its youth was dead.
“We have to take my friend home,” Michael said to Gunther. “I promised him.”
“I was ordered to take you to a safe house. That’s where I’m going.”
“Please.” Mouse spoke up; his voice quavered. “Please… my house isn’t far from here. It’s in the Tempelhof district, near the airport. I’ll show you the way.”
“I’m sorry,” Gunther said. “My orders were-”
Michael clamped a hand around the back of his neck. Gunther had been a good companion, but Michael didn’t care to argue. “I’m changing your orders. We can go to the safe house after we get my friend home. Either do it or give me the reins.”
“You don’t know what a risk you’re taking!” Dietz snapped. “And us, too! We just lost a friend because of you!”
“Then get off and walk,” Michael told him. “Go on. Get off.”
Dietz hesitated. He, too, was a stranger in Berlin. Gunther quietly said, “Shit,” and popped the reins. “All right. Where in Tempelhof?”
Mouse eagerly gave him the address, and Michael released Gunther’s neck.
Not too much farther, they began to see bombed buildings. The heavy B-17 and B-24 American bombers had delivered their freight, and rubble choked the streets. Some of the buildings were unrecognizable, heaps of stones and timbers. Others had split open and collapsed from the force of the bombs. A haze of smoke lay close to the street. Here the gloom was even thicker, and in the twilight the red centers of smoldering heaps of rubble glowed like Hades.
They passed an area where civilians, their clothes and faces grimy, were searching through a building’s wreckage. Tongues of flame licked along fallen timbers, and an elderly woman sobbed as an old man tried to comfort her. Bodies under sheets were laid out, with precise German geometry, along the fissured sidewalk.
