Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [23]
"I told you I have an ear for the lie."
"Yes, ma'am."
"That submarine isn't the worst thing you've done to my country, is it?"
Cray didn't stop his mechanical motion. "No, ma'am."
After another moment watching him, she asked, "I don't suppose I want to know the worst, do I?"
"No, ma'am."
She said, "You may be an enemy commando, but you aren't a bad man, are you?"
Cray stopped the ax. "Pardon, ma'am."
She put the shotgun down, leaning it against the wall, then brushing her hands together as if to fully rid herself of it. "You could have flicked me aside like a bug, shotgun or no. Isn't that so?"
Cray replied, "The thought never crossed my mind. Frau Engelman."
"But someone like you, it would have been an easy thing, less work than chopping wood. And you didn't, so you are a kind man, despite what your army orders you to do." She smiled again. "Will you help me put the firewood inside before you go?"
Cray filled his arms with wood, then carried the load into the house.
"To the kitchen stove," she instructed. "The wood will last longer if I only heat the kitchen."
Cray stacked the wood in the cradle near the stove. Then he made five more trips.
When the hopper was full, she said firmly, "It will be my duty as a German patriot to report that you were here."
"Can you wait three hours?"
"One hour."
"Ninety minutes?"
"All right. Ninety minutes."
Cray opened the grate to place several logs into the stove. He gathered a handful of chips from the hopper and shoved them under the logs. When Frau Engelman handed him several newspaper pages, Cray crumpled them and pushed them into the stove. He lifted a match from a ceramic cup and scraped it against the stove top. It flared, and he placed it under the newspaper, which quickly caught fire.
Frau Engelman held her hands out to the stove. "That's better."
"I'm off, then," Cray said.
She wrapped the rest of the Strudel in a sheet of newspaper and passed it to the American. "I've got more canned apples and sawdust, and can make another. You'd best hurry. Five of your ninety minutes are already gone."
Cray tucked the pastry under his coat. "Maybe I'll come back and visit you, Frau Engelman. After the war."
"If you survive, which you probably won't, you being a commando."
"I'll survive."
Cray was at the door when the old lady added, "It's going to be hard around here for a long time after the war, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Bring coffee when you return. I won't have any, most likely."
Cray smiled again at Frau Engelman, then left her house.
He heard her call after him. "And cream. I take mine with cream."
9
THE REICH SECURITY SERVICE (RSD) office had been moved three times in as many weeks, the victim of fires caused by the Allied terror flyers: from a building on Wilhemstrasse near the Reich Press Office, to one east of the Brandenburg Gate on Unter den Linden, to the current one on Potsdamer Strasse near OKW's Cipher Branch. The structure had once been an apartment, but the RSD had evicted the tenants. The only heat was a fire on the grate. SS Lieutenant General Eugen Eberhardt sat at his desk with his uniform coat over his shoulders.
Although Heinrich Himmler often acted otherwise, the RSD was a separate Reich agency, subordinate only to the Führer himself. Gestapo leader Heinrich Müller, known as Gestapo Müller, had offered the RSD space in the Gestapo's office on Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Eberhardt might have accepted the kindness had he been able to tolerate being in the same building as Gestapo Müller, whom the RSD chief viewed with equal amounts of revulsion and fear. So Eberhardt made do with the makeshift office. His red mahogany desk had been moved just ahead of the Unter den Linden fire, and one leg was singed. An electric cord hung from the ceiling to a desk lamp. Six file cabinets lined a wall. Two telephones were in front of him, one with an outside line and the other with a direct connection to the RSD's small office in the New Reich Chancellery basement. On the wall behind him was a portrait of the Führer.