Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [167]
He entered a second office and said, "Let's go, Inspector."
Otto Dietrich was holding his pistol on Rudolf Koder and the S S guard who had helped Koder drag Cray up to the garden. Koder and the guard were sitting on the edges of chairs, bent slightly forward because Koder was wearing his own handcuffs behind his back, and the guard was wearing Dietrich's. The room was filled with file cabinets spilled onto their sides. Smoke from the garden seeped in through the shattered wall. Rudolf Koder glared malignantly at Dietrich.
"So you got back into the bunker?" Dietrich asked.
"In and out like grain through a goose."
Dietrich shifted his glance to the American. "And?"
Cray looked at him with mock incredulity. "Slick as a whistle."
"What does that mean?"
"The trouble with you Germans," Cray said, "other than that you are a warrior race, is that you don't have enough slang."
Rudolf Koder's voice was tight with hatred and fury. "You are a traitor, Dietrich. A traitor to the Fatherland."
Russian shells landed on the plaza outside, and cobblestones rained against the Foreign Ministry's wall.
Cray lifted a finger toward Koder. "This fellow know you, Inspector?"
Dietrich nodded. "His name is Rudolf Koder, a Gestapo agent. He is my case officer. He had my wife arrested and sent to a camp, where she came down with typhoid fever and died."
Koder bellowed, "A traitor to the Führer and to your homeland." He jerked against the handcuffs, his face the color of blood.
"And he tortured me in a prison cell, day after day, until I was released to chase after you." Dietrich breathed heavily, and then ran a hand down his face, fighting the memory. "He almost killed me, reduced me to nothing, nothing human. I'd like to shoot the bastard." The detective spoke slowly, convincing himself of the correct and lawful course. "But I've spent too much of my life hunting down murderers to kill somebody in cold blood. It would haunt me the rest of my life."
"It's not going to bother me at all." Out came Jack Cray's pistol. He pulled the trigger, and Rudolf Koder bucked back in the chair, then spilled sideways. Blood pumped from the hole in his chest and leaked from the exit hole in his back. Twisted sideways, his hands still behind him, Koder stared in surprise, stared without seeing.
"What about the other one?" Cray asked. "The SS trooper?"
"I don't know him," Dietrich said. "Never seen him before."
Cray wagged his pistol at the trooper. "Lucky for you, eh?"
The American used a key to unlock the trooper's handcuffs from one hand. The trooper's eyes darted between Cray's hands, searching for the fabled knife. Cray attached one cuff to an exposed pipe, the trooper still sitting in the chair.
The American picked up his pack, then led Otto Dietrich through the wing's maze of ruin.
As they reached Sergeant Kahr in the lobby, the all clear sounded, and Cray looked at his wristwatch. "There'll be another air raid in thirty minutes. We'd better be there."
He didn't say where, and Dietrich and Kahr had to satisfy themselves by following him. They turned south to Leipziger Strasse, then onto the plaza, then past the Hotel Esplanade, heading for the Tiergarten.
Detective Dietrich could not help himself. "Look around. Your bombers did this."
They were walking through a sea of rubble, along a narrow path cleared to allow pedestrians to pass. On both sides of them fire-blackened building facades stood like tombstones. Wreckage filled the eye to the horizon without the relief of a single undamaged structure or bit of color or a standing tree. Gray and brown debris and nothing more.
Cray said, "Well, you did your part to stop it, back there, letting me go."
Dietrich stepped around a pile of books that had been tossed onto the street by a bomb's concussion. "Agent Koder was right. I'm