Keitel shook his head, still flushed with fury. “You did nothing to prevent the greatest defeat of this war. And now you insist we focus our efforts on an obscure, insignificant village. This is a waste of time.”
Gretel said, “Williton is the key. Demolish it, leave nothing standing.”
Keitel stood again. “We're finished here.” He headed for the door, the others in tow.
Klaus exhaled. They weren't, it appeared, going to kill her outright. But the doctor might, when all was said and done.
“Wait!” von Westarp followed them.
“Her madness is too far advanced,” said Keitel. “She can't be trusted. You should put her down.”
While they argued, Gretel walked to the window. She pulled a few sprigs of the most well-preserved flowers from each bottle. She arranged the collection into a little bouquet of primrose and aster.
“Herr General Keitel,” she called. “Your wife enjoys dried wildflowers, no?”
Keitel turned in the doorway, looking alarmed and impatient. “What?”
Gretel said, “Your wife.” She held the flowers up. “When you go home this evening, give these to her. Tell her all will be well again.” She crossed the room to place the bundle in Keitel's hand. He towered over her. “Reassure her,” she said. “It wasn't her fault.”
He stared at her over the dried blossoms, as though taking the measure of her. Could he see the shadows behind her eyes as easily as Klaus?
“What do you know of Lisa?” he asked.
“All will be well again,” Gretel repeated. “She will recover.”
He opened his mouth as if to say something else, but stopped. Then, without warning, he turned and exited. He didn't speak. Nor did he discard the flowers. His colleagues followed him out the door. The doctor joined them, as did Pabst.
Klaus waited until he and Gretel were alone. “What was that all about?” he asked.
“His wife will miscarry this afternoon.” Gretel said it with the same bored disinterest she might have used to pronounce the day's soup not to her liking.
Klaus mulled this over. He was coming to understand that mad or not, Gretel did almost everything for a reason. He tried to see the world through her eyes, tried to think as she did. Cause and effect.
“That's why you've been picking flowers.” He didn't ask, because it wasn't a question. “You knew he'd balk. But you also knew about his wife, and you knew how to exploit that situation to convince him to heed your advice.”
Gretel clucked her tongue. “Such a devious brother I have.”
She blew loose petals and crumbled leaves from the table. Then she carried an armload of bottles from the windowsill to the table and began to rearrange the flowers.
“Why didn't you warn them?”
She concentrated on her wildflowers, saying nothing.
Klaus watched her try another arrangement, saying, “If I asked, would you tell me what you're doing?”
“I'm arranging flowers. Perhaps you aren't so clever as I'd thought.”
“You know what I meant. Tell me, Gretel.”
“And allow you to be swept along in my wake? Never.”
Klaus stomped out of the room. He slammed the door.
The machine shop was a cacophony of drilling, hammering, welding, and sawing. It smelled of hot steel and oil. In addition to countermanding Klaus's directives regarding the supplies, the doctor had also increased his order. Now he wanted thirty incubators of each type.
Klaus remembered the day that the doctor first unveiled the devices. He had been perhaps eight or nine when the doctor first locked him inside his incubator. He'd screamed himself hoarse when the claustrophobia consumed him, pounded his fists raw. There was no room to move inside; it had been built especially for him, and modified accordingly as he grew over the years.
In those days, von Westarp had kept them all in the same room. When Klaus had become too exhausted to scream and carry on any longer, he listened to Rudolf, Heike, Kammler, and the rest cry all night long. Except Gretel, of course. Of all the children, she and she alone never cried. Not once that he could remember.
Klaus remembered something he hadn't thought about in years. There had been many more test subjects back then. So many, in fact, that the field behind the house was—
—And then Klaus knew why the doctor had ordered the machinists to requisition so much extraneous materiel. The gas lines, the lime, the earthmoving equipment. None of this was for building incubators. It was for the mass disposal of bodies.
The doctor was planning for a massive influx of test subjects. Too many to bury one at a time, as he'd done in the old days.
nine hours of bombing had erased the road to Williton, rendered it indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. The churned and cratered earth still smoked in places. Here and there broken macadam peeked from the mud, but this only suggested a road, inasmuch as a shattered dish suggested a family dinner.
The undercarriage of the Rolls screeched as Marsh gunned the car over another hillock, causing debris to rake the belly of Stephenson's car. Then the suspension groaned when he forced the car to bounce across another cleft.
“What if she's cold?” said Liv, kneading a blanket in her fingers. It was pink, it had elephants and baby stains on it, and it smelled like Agnes. “I hope she's not out in the cold.”
“She could be safe. They could be in a shelter.”
In London, one heard tell of folks emerging from their shelters with nary a scratch, only to find their neighborhoods flattened. Sometimes they had to wait for the rescue men to clear away debris before the door could be wedged open.
The little information doled out by the BBC suggested this would be unlikely.
“I hope she's not hungry. What if she's hungry? We didn't bring her food. We should go back and get her food.”
Marsh drove on, wishing for Williton to emerge from the smoke, whole and pristine. It didn't. He stopped the car when he couldn't cajole it over the debris any longer. He killed the engine. They climbed out.
Rubble. They stood on the shore of a sea of rubble that stretched to the horizon. Here and there men in wide-brimmed metal helmets like sun bonnets scrambled over the mounds. Searching, or carrying stretchers. Sunset glinted on one man's helmet, highlighting the letter
TNT and baby. Two scents that should never mingle.
Liv mumbled, “She's cold. She's hungry and scared.”
“Where?” Marsh had never been to Williton, didn't know the village, didn't know where to find Liv's aunt.
They walked. Every block was a jumble of senseless images. Pulverized brick. A dented tea service. Shattered window glass. A Victorian fainting couch half-collapsed beneath a heap of charred timber. Jumbled masonry. A child's shoe. A bathtub. A cracked chimney, the bricks pulling apart in a snaggletoothed grimace. A family Bible. A dining room wall. A teacup.
What they didn't see were the telltale mounds of Anderson shelters.
That could have meant they'd sheltered in cellars. Cellars. Yes. Perhaps they were trapped inside. Underfoot, just feet away, waiting for somebody to free them. If he could find a cellar, find people alive and well and waiting to be dug out, then he'd know Agnes was safe somewhere, too.
