Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [80]
She towered over him. "Where are your parents?" A little too gruff. Lord, she didn't want this little boy's problems.
He peeked up at her through his fingers, but said nothing.
"Are you German? Can you understand me?"
Tears had reached his chin. He nodded.
"Is your Muti alive? Your father?"
"Muti. But she's not here." The boy's words ended in a thin wail.
A siren sounded from the next block, the mechanical wail weaving in and around the boy's cry. Katrin no longer even turned her head toward sirens. She asked, "How long have you been lost?"
His chin trembled. "Ten hundred hours and minutes." He tentatively moved toward her, two half steps, and with that little movement, gave himself over to the kind lady who had asked after his mother. He was now hers.
Katrin understood this rule of engagement She rubbed her hand alongside an eye, trying to think Then it came to her She looked at her watch Twenty minutes She had to hurry "What's your name?"
"Artur"
She reached for his hand and gently patted it "Come with me, Artur"
She led him through the street, passed a restaurant where a sign in the window announced it was Eintopftag, One-dish Day, when it was required to serve only a tasteless stew. On the walk in front of the restaurant was a bundle of the Volkischer Beobachter, the party's official newspaper, now down to one-page editions, and largely ignored except to kindle fires
Another stray bomb had fallen that morning further down the block, felling two buildings, setting them on fire, and blowing much of their contents out onto the street. Katrin and the boy picked their way along, stepping around a blackened trumpet, half an accordion, dozens of loose ivory piano keys, and a French horn twisted even more than French horns are in their natural state. The bomb had hit a musical instrument shop. The boy paused to put several piano keys in his pocket. The fire had been extinguished, and a crew was rolling up hoses. The street was slick with water.
A TeNo squad worked hurriedly in the rubble. TeNo was short for Technische Nothüfe, the Technical Emergency Corps, also called the Rescue Squad. Cable from an electric winch on a Phanomen truck's front bumper was pulling aside a beam. One rescuer moved his finger in a circle, and the winchman engaged the drum. The cable became taut, and the beam groaned as it was dragged from the ruin. A scream came from the rubble. The winchman threw the winch's clutch With pry bars and axes, the Rescue Squad dug into the timbers. Artur tugged Katrin's hand to slow her so he could watch. The squad yelled encouragement to the trapped individual below. Two workers heaved on a wrecking bar, and two more reached deep into the wreckage. After a moment they gently pulled out the victim, who smiled weakly despite the blood on a leg. A gray-haired man in a tie Perhaps from the music shop. A litter was passed into the rubble.
The boy said, "That's blood."
"Yes."
"I seen it before."
She pulled him along, around a piano leg, then over a saxophone that had been pressed as flat as a coin, the mother-of-pearl keys sprinkled about. Artur stopped for some of these, too.
Katrin again brought up her wristwatch. "No wonder you lost your mother, Artur. You stop to pick up everything."
A few moments later they were on the Kurfürstendamm near the blackened skeleton of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. The zoo flak tower— the dark, indestructible obelisk that Allied fighters pockmarked daily— loomed just to the north. At this intersection were public notice boards, dozens of them, installed for government announcements — Jack Cray's face stared out from each panel — but lately plastered with private messages. A few boards displayed items for trade, but most were papered with layer upon layer of missing-person messages, hastily handwritten judging from the scrawls, often on crumpled scraps, most from refugees fleeing west, telling of a time and place