Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [121]
"The baron, he was a dandy." The countess leaned forward to unroll more yarn in the basket at her feet. "I had a fancy for him, I don't mind telling you."
"Once I snuck up on a badger." Cray held out his right arm to roll back a sleeve. "It didn't take to the surprise too kindly. This nice little scar on my forearm was the result. I'm lucky I got away with my fingers."
She worked on his foot, apparently lost in the procedure.
The countess said, "And one day I counted the candles in the chandelier in their dining room. Over four hundred."
"Now you tell me something in return," Cray said.
Katrin looked up. "Pardon."
"I told you my family was poor." He smiled gently, but his eyes were straight and untamed. "I don't talk about things like that easily. Now it's your turn."
Her eyes flitted around the apartment, searching for a thought. "I broke a boy's leg once."
The countess lowered her needles. "You did what?" Her eyes glowed with the prospect of a bit of history of her best friend's daughter.
"Do you remember Freddie von Vietinghoff, Auntie?"
"The count's boy. A rascal, as I recall."
"One day—I must have been fourteen—he put a ladder to my dressing room window to try to watch me change clothes. I spotted him, and shoved the ladder away. He broke his leg when he landed below my window."
Her hand at her mouth, the countess exclaimed, "My Lord, is that how Freddie broke his leg? We all thought he fell from a horse."
"I was mortified," Katrin added. "I thought I'd go to jail. Freddie might have been a sneak but he was also a gallant. I made him swear he'd never tell anyone, and he never did." She looked swiftly at the countess, then back at Cray, "And I've never told anybody about that little episode."
"Not even Adam?" Cray prompted.
Her smile faded. "Except Adam. Now you. I don't know if you deserve to know it." She wrapped his foot in a band of cotton then tapped his toes. "That's as good as I can do mending you."
Cray stood to try his foot. "Feels like new."
The countess looked over her needles at him. "Your foot must hurt terribly."
The American lifted his shoulders. "I'll be able to move about as well as in the old days in the brush in the Columbia valley."
Katrin's eyebrow lifted. "You'll just sneak up on him like a deer?"
Cray smiled that mad smile. "And slap him on the flank."
9
SERGEANT ULRICH KAHR dropped a handful of potato peelings into the meat grinder bolted to the workbench, then turned the grinder's long handle. He grunted as he worked, cranking the handle around and around. Pulpy, mashed potato skins oozed out the spout and dropped into a wooden bucket. The bag of peelings was on the bench. He wound the handle and added more peelings to the feeder cup.
Kahr was searched each time he entered the garden and the Chancellery and the bunker, but only given a glance when he left them, just to make sure he wasn't walking out with the candelabras.
The staff took slops from the Chancellery kitchen. They dug through the wastebins and retrieved whatever was edible, took it home, if they still had a home, and fed their children with cast-off scraps. Same with the wastebins in the bunker. Halves of pears and apples, steak bones with meat left on them, coffee grounds that had only been used once, jars with fruit preserves still stuck to the sides that could still be scraped out with a spoon. Took them home in cloth bags. The guards would glance in the bags, see rubbish, maybe stick their hand in to make sure one of Adolf's paperweights wasn't hidden below, and wave them on. One time a guard said Kahr must be hungry as a goat, him taking home potato peels.
It wasn't hunger that prompted Kahr to bring home the potato skins and orange rinds and bread crusts. It was thirst. The sergeant could make alcohol out of almost anything. His still was in the goat shed behind his farmhouse, just east of the Havel, near the Hamburg road. The duty roster allowed him three days at home after seven days living