Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [102]
The knife was removed. Dietrich could sense the American receding into the night. He waited a few heartbeats to be sure. Then he pulled his Walther from his belt and turned around, the pistol leading the way.
He saw nothing, as he had known he would. Nothing but night and the dark shadows of a few trees and down the street a few licks of flame and purple sparkling embers, all that remained of the house.
Dietrich pushed the pistol back into his pants. His hands were shaking and he had trouble drawing a breath. He could still feel an echo of the appalling knife at his throat.
Finally, "Bastard American show-off."
2
C AN WE TRUST the names from the milk box?" Katrin tapped on the door.
Cray replied, "I hurt too much to think about that."
"I thought you commandos don't feel pain."
"I'm about to weep from it." Cray held his left arm in his right hand. Blood had dried along the length of the coat sleeve, stiffening the fabric and turning it dark.
She gently touched the sleeve.
"Ouch." He jerked his arm away from her.
"Commandos say 'Ouch'?"
The brass sign to the right of the door read FREDERICK HOLENBEIN, MEDICAL CLINIC. Katrin knocked on the door again, then she saw the bell cord and pulled it. The sound of chimes came from deep within the office.
A bulb flicked on above them, from the second floor, spots of light visible through holes in the blackout curtain. After a moment the door opened, just a crack, an eye visible above the taut safety chain.
"Dr. Holenbein?" Katrin asked. "We were told you would help us."
The doctor hesitated, vast indecision apparent in one visible eye. Then the safety chain's catch scraped against its anchor. The door swung open. A flannel robe flapping behind him, the doctor led them through the reception area into his surgery, glancing nervously over his shoulder several times.
She had been out making a radio broadcast. When she returned, her home was surrounded by policemen and troopers and ablaze from front to rear. She had watched and watched from down the block, seeing her home turned to ash and smoke. Over the winter she had burned her furniture for heat, and now this fire was taking away all the rest, everything she owned, every memento of Adam. Her sorrow had rooted her to the sidewalk.
And only after a moment had she remembered that the American was in her house. She had stared at the twisting fire. There could nothing left of him. Perhaps Jack Cray's death should have seemed inconsequential to her — a foreigner thrown at her as her life was collapsing — but she had been surprised by her sadness that the American was surely dead, under the ashes of her home. She had never met anyone who had been on first sight more suggestive of wild trouble. His crazed grin, his animation, his unwavering focus. His stupid cheerfulness. Jack Cray would have led her to ruin, perhaps would have cost her her life. Yet for a while, watching the embers die, she had been sorrowful that he was gone.
Watching the fire, she had surprised herself with that emotion, the flutter of grief. She had thought herself no longer susceptible to such sentiment. Another soldier's life tossed into the war's grinder. What possible difference could it make to her?
But after a few more moments gazing at her burning home, her sensibilities had callused over again. Jack Cray had come and gone. Even though her home was gone, she was still alive. In Berlin, another day of life was a victory.
Then when everyone else had retreated from the destroyed house, and when she had turned to wondering where she would spend the rest of the cold night, she saw Jack Cray rise from the ashes—a ghoul emerging from the center of the earth—and make his way toward the last remaining policeman, who was walking to his car.
She had been transfixed by the American's movement, utterly silent, yet almost as fast as a sprinter, and somehow eerily hard to follow with her gaze, merging with the shadows, darkness on darkness, and she then understood why the Hand had called