Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [57]
Most other seats were filled. Soft moans came from some passengers, the blowing rasp of tortured breathing from others. After a few minutes the locomotive's whistle blew. The sound of couplings under sudden stress rolled from front to rear. The train lurched forward, leaving most of the injured to wait for yet another train.
Cray trusted his German only enough to hide it in a rough whisper. He asked the soldier next to him, who had a bandage around his head covering his eyes, "Wo gehen wir?" The soldier answered, "Berlin."
The American nodded to himself and said just above a whisper, "Berlin."
5
OTTO DIETRICH slumped on the three-legged stool next to the bed. His wife's hand was in his. She lay there, her breathing shallow and occasional. Her face was rose-red and splotchy, the same rash that covered most of her body. She had moaned much of the morning, but now she was quiet, and Dietrich knew the end was near. Her lovely face was sunken and her sandy gray hair was spilled about the pillow.
She was bone thin, and Dietrich had been told by Dr. Scheller that it was her time in detention and not the disease that had wasted her away. Her eyes were dark hollows. The skin of her face was so thin he could see capillaries. She had always had an inexhaustible supply of expressions, and now the stillness of her face was alien to Dietrich. She seemed a stranger.
Kurt Scheuer had given her a few days, and he had been generous. Now her time was up. Dietrich sat in their old house, the back two rooms boarded up from a bomb blast fourteen months ago, squeezing her hand, wondering how he would continue after today. Long ago he had determined that only two things were certain in his life: the love between Maria and him, and his investigating skills. Two things he could always count on, the two constants that would get him through a hard day, a hard week Now one of those constants was leaving him
Christ, he loved his wife. He blinked and blinked. A photograph framed in silver was on their bedside table, and he turned to it rather than look at her. She was her old self in the photo. A flash of teeth, merrily angled eyes, mischief right there for all to see. Dietrich glanced behind him, to the dresser, to a photo of them on their wedding day, as handsome a pair as had ever been joined together at the Charlottenburg Lutheran Church. Next to the photo was his service pistol and a manila envelope containing the photograph of the escaped POW.
Feeling he was being unkind — looking at her in the old photographs rather than as she was now before him, drawn and skeletal — he turned back to the bed. Her chest rose and fell, just a suggestion of movement. He wiped a bit of spittle from the corner of her mouth, then caressed her forehead. Her fever had ended only because her body no longer had the strength to generate heat. Her eyes were closed as they had been since the Gestapo had delivered her.
The telephone rang for the tenth or eleventh time since he had brought her home from the hospital. He ignored it again.
Time and time again when he was in the Lehrterstrasse Prison, Dietrich would reconstruct their wedding day. Each time he remembered more detail, until after several months in his cell he could play it out before his closed eyes like a cinema, even though it had been twenty-five years ago. All the bouquets, the champagne, his father-in- law's lederhosen, the cream and strawberries, every faux pearl on Maria's dress. Their wedding, all the way through, over and over.
As he stared at his wife, Dietrich was about to begin again with his memory, with his arrival at the church with his brother who was best man. But Maria shuddered and gasped. Her body straightened as if pulled from both ends. She inhaled loudly and let it out, her nose flaring. Then her head moved on the pillow and her eyes opened. She looked at her husband a few seconds,