Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [78]
Dietrich opened the rear door and said, "Peter, at the intersection, turn right, then go back to the station. I'll meet you there."
The detective bent low, slammed the door shut, then in a crouch stepped back into the coroner's office. Hilfinger drove the car away. Decades of police work had taught Dietrich to trust his hunches He stood inside the door, waiting.
Not long A black Volkswagen sedan sped by his door, two men in the front seat, the passenger talking into a microphone, trailing Dietrich's car.
Dietrich walked onto the sidewalk, his gaze following the Volkswagen as it turned right and disappeared behind a rubble mound. The Gestapo was following Dietrich Undoubtedly on Heinrich Müller's orders. Dietrich turned into the wind and began walking toward the station.
12
KATRIN SPUN AROUND, the rubble mounds a blur as she turned. She was lost, once again. She went up on her toes to try to look over a stack of concrete blocks, salvaged from a destroyed structure, but not yet carted away by salvagers. The pile was too high to peer over. She was less than three blocks from the Tiergarten's bird sanctuary, she was sure Yet she did not know where the park was, did not know which direction was north.
Like most Berliners, she frequently became lost, sometimes only blocks from home, rubble piles obscuring the horizon, landmarks torn down, the location of the sun hidden by smoke and ash. She could not get her bearings. And because many buildings were crazily canted, the perpendicular was distorted, and Katrin found herself swaying in sympathy with the wounded structures. The war had taken away many things, none more surprising than the ability to tell which direction was straight up.
She tried to push her hands into her coat pockets, but they were stuffed with cheese and bread rolls. She had been without adequate food so long that she had been unable to leave her home without filling her pockets. The American had laughed at her, not in an unkindly way. But she needed to be near food, even if she had to wear it, and its weight in her coat was comforting. At the very least, she knew where her next meal was coming from. From her pockets.
She passed an elm tree lying on the street, its roots exposed, torn from the ground by a bomb blast. Two oxen pulling a Schutheiss Brewery dray crossed the intersection ahead of her. Perhaps she was near the brewery. Down the block a dozen French workers used block and tackle to pull reusable floor joists from a ruined building. Several loudly sang Maurice Chevalier's "I'm a Lover of Paris," probably to irk their two guards, who tried to ignore them by talking earnestly with each other. Painted on a nearby wall in a shaky scribble was ENJOY THE WA.R. THE PEACE WILL BE TERRIBLE.
From around a pile of fractured telephone poles came a stream of refugees, carrying knapsacks and cloth bags, silently tramping along, twenty or so of them, and every one looking beaten down. Refugees always marched west — seemed to instinctively know the way — so Katrin took her bearings from them and started north toward the Tiergarten.
After another block she again felt her bearings slipping away, so she climbed onto a pile of fractured masonry, careful to keep her skirt tucked around her legs, and stepped unsteadily up the rubble mountain for a view from the top.
The war had turned Berlin inside out. Bits and pieces of lives that should have been concealed and comfortable behind walls and doors were rudely exposed to the gazes of passersby. Katrin stepped over a leather photograph album, open to the sky its photos of marriages and christenings scattered about. Lodged between blue and black clinker bricks were a pair of men's long underwear, the legs missing from a blast. Also on the rubble pile were the upper half of a ceramic beer mug with a hinged pewter top, a pair of yellowed dentures, the head of a girl's China doll, a stack of letters held together by yarn, a brass