Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [138]
She shook her head. "I'm not leaving Germany. I know a few places I can hide."
"We can talk about it later."
"There's no need to. I'm not leaving."
"Later."
Lifted by a breath of air, a curtain of smoke rose in front of them, revealing yet another building with a collapsed façade. Cinder blocks and glass and shingles had fallen into the street, and a commercial baking oven was halfway out a shattered window, balanced on the window apron, the baking racks having spilled onto the street. The bomb had yanked off the building's fixtures, and deposited them here and there a doorknob, a mail drop, two brass light fixtures, strips of wood siding, lengths of vent pipe, and pieces of window casing. A cash register lay near the oven, on its side with its drawer sprung open and a few Reichsmarks fluttering about, but they were ignored by the knots of people hurrying toward the bakery. There was nothing to buy in Berlin.
Cray pointed. "That's where the smell is coming from. Looks like lunch."
Cray led her toward the fractured bakery. Berliners were following their noses toward the wrecked building, pushing their way through the smoke. The scent of freshly baked bread drew them as if hands were tugging their lapels. More and more Berliners crawled out of cellars, turned their noses into the wind, then began brushing their way through the smoke and slapping aside leafy ash, desperately searching for the source of the intoxicating scent. Cray glimpsed them through twisting ropes of smoke, an eerie, gathering assemblage, pushing through drifting ash and trailing swirling wisps of smoke.
"It'll be first come, first served in that bakery," Cray said.
He rushed ahead of Katrin, through the opacity, careful to preserve some of his limp. He pushed by an elderly woman walking with a cane, and joined four others who climbed into the bakery through the shattered window, squeezing by the oven, scrambling over fallen timbers, crushing glass shards under their feet, and then ducking under sagging beams. Cray scaled a loose pile consisting of baking trays, an overturned mixer, and flat wood spatulas. Against the back wall were the cooling trays, rapidly being emptied by frenzied Berliners, twenty people and more every moment, some in uniform—two Red Cross nurses and auxiliary postal drivers and a bus conductor—and others in rumpled civilian clothes. They yanked loaves from the trays, jamming them into their coats and under their arms, balancing them in their hands, piling themselves high with bread. Light fixtures dangled from the ceiling, and water poured from the wall where the sink had been ripped away.
Cray muscled his way through the throng, almost too late. He was able to find one loaf, which he pulled from the rack amid a cluster of grasping hands. He tucked the bread into his belly like a fullback, and shoved his way back through the crowd.
Despairing shouts and groans came from Berliners who had arrived in the bakery too late. A few scuffles at the edge of the crowd, and more yells. The scavengers quickly fled the smashed bakery to disappear into the smoke, lest they be forced to account for their good fortune.
Cray slipped by the oven again on his way out. Katrin was waiting near a fire hydrant, her hands in her pockets, looking at once embarrassed at the looting and grateful that Cray had found the bread.
The old woman with the cane stepped around an empty flour barrel into Cray's path. "You should share that loaf of bread, young man." Her hair was gray and tightly curled like a schnauzer's. She wore a gabardine coat and a wool shawl. She held out her hand, the cane in the other. "Give me some of that bread, in the name of the Fatherland."
"No, thanks." He could say the short phrase entirely without an accent. He sidestepped her toward Katrin.
The old woman might have had bound-up hips, requiring the use of a cane, but there was nothing wrong with her shoulders and arms. She brought her cane