Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [136]
"I don't smell any of that."
"Take a big breath, and tell me the scents you detect."
Cray breathed deeply, pondered for a moment, then announced, "Cordite and gelignite and HE residue."
She looked at him. "Have you ever had a romantic thought in your
life?"
Katrin had been contacting the Hand twice a day since Cray had appeared. The Hand had given her no information during her last three broadcasts. The American had speculated that either the Hand was learning nothing to pass on, perhaps because of the purge Colonel Becker had referred to, or perhaps the Hand was saying nothing because Cray's mission was only a cover for some other operation, and so the Hand had other, more pressing concerns. Still, she would continue to make her broadcasts, hoping for something useful.
They passed a row of three cars, all on fire, beacons in the gray smoke. The buildings near the cars had just been destroyed and were now nothing but tumbles of wood and wire. Cray could see their remains only when the wind pushed a hole in the smoke.
"I'm hungry," he announced. Much of his face was hidden behind a bandage, and he was walking with an exaggerated limp. "You'd think if the Hand is putting us to all this trouble, it'd send us something to eat."
Katrin's hands were on his arm. Her face was well bidden by a scarf. She asked abruptly, "Have you ever read Kant?"
He shook his head. "Did you say you smelled bread?"
"Or Leibniz or Hegel?"
"Not enough pictures in those books."
She slowed their pace. "What do you read?"
Gray shrugged.
"Do you read?" she demanded. "Anything at all?"
"Popular Mechanics."
She hesitated. "What's that?"
"A magazine about how to make crystal radios usingjunk found in the kitchen drawer," he said. "I must have made a dozen of them when I was a kid."
"I'll try again." Her tone was of vast patience. "Clearly you don't know our literature or philosophy. But do you know anything about us Germans?"
"I aim and fire at them. What's to know?"
After a moment she said, "Is it just that your German is rough, or is it possible I'm speaking with a moron?"
"Now I'm smelling the bread, too. It's making me salivate like a dog."
A few Berliners crept out of cellars onto the sidewalks to squint against the gauze of smoke, craning their necks, trying to determine what was left of their neighborhood. Then more and more people emerged, some brushing off their coat sleeves, others pulling wadded paper plugs from their ears, others coughing at the dust in their throats. Some swatted at the smoke, to no effect. No one paid attention to the wounded Wehrmacht major, even when they could glimpse him through the smoke. Berlin was brimming with injured servicemen. Wooden stumps, eye patches, empty sleeves, halting limps, purple burn scars, crutches — the city was choking with them.
Katrin and Cray waded through someone's library, the books tossed along the sidewalk, some shedding pages in the wind. Then they stepped around a row of shattered pigeon cages, the birds inside and dead. Then around a tangle of brassieres and two headless mannequins.
"Adam and I had wonderful conversations," she said finally.
He looked at her. "Is that what this is about? Trying to have a conversation with me to replace the ones you once had with your husband?"
"It was a laughable idea, come to think of it." She dabbed a glistening eye. "An absurd notion on my part, trying to get some conversation from you."
They passed an elderly man pushing a perambulator filled with bread loaves
"What's so absurd about it?" Cray's gaze followed the bread, then turned back to Katrin. "I can have a meaningful discussion, probably just as well as Adam could."
"Try it."
They stepped over a wad of singed blankets, then from the sidewalk out into the street to avoid the heat of a burning building, which creaked and groaned from the fire's assault.
Cray pulled at the earlobe that wasn't covered with the bandage. He had repaired the damage to his eyebrows. He was again a brunet.
"Go ahead," she prodded. "Make some