Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [101]
Hilfinger nodded. "I trust your eyes, too."
"Jack Cray is in that house."
"There is no house anymore. Only fire."
"Then Jack Cray is in that fire."
"Bright and early tomorrow, then." Hilfinger turned toward a car where other plainclothes policemen waited for a ride back to the station. "They'll find his body in the ashes after they cool."
Dietrich nodded. He walked toward his car, along the wooded lane, the fire still spitting and crackling behind him. With the fire dying down and Dietrich walking away from it, the night had become bitterly cold and fully dark.
Otto Dietrich would go to his grave wondering how he heard utterly nothing and saw utterly nothing. He was alone on the sidewalk, surely. But he wasn't.
An arm came out of the night and wrapped itself around Dietrich's neck, pulling him back against a man's chest, a big and solid man.
The detective gasped and might have cried out, but he felt cold metal press into his neck, right into the soft spot next to his Adam's apple.
The accent was strong. "What did you want to talk about?"
Dietrich blinked. He was about to die — bubbling blood rushing from a slash in his neck, and he'd resemble the appalling body at Dr. Wenck's morgue — and all he could think of was that Jack Cray's German was fairly good. And that Cray was as quiet as snow. And that Cray simply must have been incinerated in the von Tornitz home.
"What did you want to say to me?" The voice of his killer again.
Dietrich's mind was blank with fear. He finally managed to gasp, "Nothing."
"Better think of something."
Was the American making fun of him? Dietrich stammered, "I... I wanted to ask if you were a show-off."
"I've been called that before." The flat voice was right at Dietrich's ear.
The detective could see a portion of Cray's shoulder, covered in dirt and ash.
Dietrich was still alive. He willed his mouth—dry as a kiln—to work. "How did you escape the fire?"
"In the furnace ash pit."
"The ash pit was stabbed with a bayonet, a couple of times."
"I was stabbed with a bayonet, a couple of times." Cray held his left arm over Dietrich's shoulder so the detective could see it. The uniform sleeve was matted with ash. Blood leaked from the arm onto the ground. ''Clean through my arm. It hurts, I don't mind saying. I've got another long cut, a graze, right along my backbone."
"How did you survive the heat?" Dietrich could feel his own pistol on his belt, pressing into his side. It seemed a long way away. The American was talkative, for Christ sake.
"I opened the coal gate. Cool air came in, sucked in by the flames. All the fire was above me. I dug down into the pit, and it was fairly comfortable. Except for being stabbed, of course."
Was the commando mocking him? It didn't seem professional. On the verge of death, Dietrich was indignant.
"I could hear you in the basement," Jack Cray said. "You sounded like a policeman. Not a soldier."
"I'm a detective. A homicide detective."
"Would killing you be legal, then ? Would it be a lawful wartime action?"
"No, surely not." The American was having a fine old time at Dietrich's expense. The detective asked, "Are all Americans as cocky as you?"
"You should meet our pilots."
"We Berliners meet them every day," Dietrich said.
"How'd you set me up last night in the Tiergarten?"
Dietrich hesitated, but when the knife scraped his neck as if it were shaving him, the German said, "We had the Chancellery issue orders as if the Führer were leaving Berlin. It is always a complicated process, with hundreds of people involved in preparation for Hitler's departure. We figured somewhere there'd be a leak and you'd find it. We were right."
"That was good," Cray said. "I like that."
"Thank you."
"Now what do I do with you?"
"You're going to let me live because you want someone to be able to tell how clever you were escaping the fire."
"I'm going to let you live because you argued against destroying her house." The pressure at Dietrich's neck lessened