Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [84]
Cray lifted his shoulders. "I thought we were just going to talk to the colonel, not scare him to death. Just see what he could do for us. That's why we were meeting him in the Tiergarten."
"Hurt your feelings?" She laughed brightly so foreign and forgotten a sound that it startled her.
He smiled engagingly.
She walked on. "It scares me, but with you here Germany may win this war yet."
Cray kept pace with her. "I didn't tell you all of it last night."
"All of what?"
"About my wife, and what happened."
"Maybe because I didn't want to hear it." She picked up her pace. "Maybe if I walk faster."
"I've never told anybody else about it."
His voice was suddenly devoid of his American boldness, and there was a touch of pleading to it. She slowed.
Cray said softly, "I was the drunk."
She stopped. "What?"
"It was a one-car accident." Cray forced his gaze up from the sidewalk. He looked into her eyes. "I was driving."
"You were the drunk?"
Only by force of will could Cray keep his eyes on Katrin. His voice was broken. "We'd been at a restaurant, celebrating our second wedding anniversary. This was in the summer of 1941, almost four years ago. We held hands all night, even while we ate. I don't think my gaze left her once during the entire dinner. Our marriage was so ..."
He stopped and turned away, toward a bank of ruined apartment buildings across the street. Her hand came up, hesitated, then touched his arm.
His voice was rough. "I loved my wife."
"I know."
"That night, I never laughed so hard or talked so much. I'd never been funnier or more romantic. I had already swept Merri Ann off her feet, she liked to say, but I was trying to do it all over again. We were celebrating the good fortune of loving each other. And I never drank so much in my life. Christ, I drank too much."
"What happened?"
"I drove us toward home, still laughing, her sitting so close to me in the car that I could hardly shift the gears. I was going too fast, not paying enough attention. I missed a turn on the country road above the Columbia River. Our car skidded off the road, then rolled down a ravine. It turned over and over." Black grief was written on Cray's face. "I was pinned behind the steering wheel, both my legs broken. Our car wasn't found for eighteen hours. I stared at my dead wife for those eighteen hours."
"Were you prosecuted?"
Cray shook his head. "The sheriff had been a friend of my father's. He didn't inquire into it."
"So you ran away into the army?"
"After my legs healed."
"And you've been angry at yourself ever since."
"It has worked away at me ever since. Not an hour, not a goddamn minute of any day ..." Cray's mournful voice trailed off.
"And you've taken it out on my countrymen ever since."
"Something like that."
"Your plan is to have a German soldier end it for you, rather than do it yourself."
Cray said noncommittally, "I don't know if I had thought it through that far." He ran a hand along his temple. "But I sure didn't expect to last this long in the war." He tried a laugh, but it was feeble.
Katrin took him by the arm and continued walking. "Well, why don't you wait until you get back to Wenatchee to kill yourself. So I won't have to think about it."
He grinned crookedly. "You can be quite a comfort, Katrin."
She leaned into him as they walked. "Don't make me think about you, alive or dead. All right? Is that too much to ask?"
"I don't know. You might end up thinking about me a lot. When I put my mind to it, I'm quite likable "
"No, you aren't." But she squeezed his arm, and they made their way toward the Zoo Station. "Not in the least.".
13
HEINZ BURMASTER tramped along, close on the heels of the Home Guardsman in front of him. Burmaster's antitank weapon, a Panzerfaust, bounced on his shoulder with each step. He had found a woman's scarf — hand-knitted blue wool with a cross-eyed gray cat in the center — and had placed it on his shoulder as a pad, and now at least the Panzerfaust's metal stock was not banging against his collarbone. Burmaster