The Knife-Edge Path Read online

  The Knife-Edge Path

  Patrick T. Leahy

  Copyright © Patrick T. Leahy, 2019

  ISBN: 9789493056336 (ebook)

  ISBN: 9789493056329 (paperback)

  Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers

  [email protected]

  Front cover: Wartime Terminus, by Bert Hardy (Collection Picture Post), Copyright © Getty Images

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Praise

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part II

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Kind review Request

  Further WW2 Historical Fiction

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment to Time Life Books, WWII; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer; The Ambiguity of Good, by Saul Friedlander.

  For my children, Dan, Tom and Maureen.

  Praise

  "As an ardent, long-time admirer of Pat Leahy's meticulously crafted and at times almost painterly prose, I devoured his latest work in a couple of nights and am still reeling from the experience. In its mining of the human heart's darkest corners, THE KNIFE-EDGE PATH is just a tremendous read: the plotting tight as a harp-string and the characters drawn with such beautiful delicacy, the scope and sense of place genuinely stunning. This is a hugely impressive offering from a writer of significant talent, one that deserves the attention of the widest possible audience. If there's any justice in the world, he'll have a runaway bestseller on his hands." - Billy O'Callaghan, author of MY CONEY ISLAND BABY

  Part 1

  1

  Geli lifted the top off her King Tut humidor, took out the cigarette she’d saved for days. She wouldn’t light it up until she got out on the landing. Make this one last down to the end.

  The last of her Melachrino Number Twos, cork tipped, that she’d so loved to light up at parties when they would get her into conversations, and she could brag about their being Missie Vassilchikov’s brand. The day she’d brought a whole case home from Cairo Gunther chided her about the space they took up in the closet, and she remembered saying, ‘Darling, you like them as much as I do. By the time they run out, the war will be over.’

  She looked down the length of her dusky bare legs beneath her skirt to the muff mules on her feet. She would be 47 in another year, but men still stared at her, and she knew what they saw. There were still traces of the girl she used to be, and she remembered the shimmering firelight in Hagen, among felled Maypoles, while gongs banged and couples leaped across the flames, and they had crowned her Queen of the May. There’d been her prowess on a bicycle, the races she had shamed the boys into, and Manfred Priepke, their champion, had made the mistake of taking her on.

  She took the matches with her and, leaving the door unlocked behind her, stopped a moment in the corridor to light the cigarette, then hurried out onto the landing and sat there, not bothering to pull her skirt down over her knees. The stairway was empty, silent as a tomb.

  A plug of ash dropped from her cigarette and splashed across her ankle. She reached down to brush it off. All at once downstairs the gate clashed and a blast of cold air slipped in on a streak of pale light. There was a shuffling at the bottom of the stairway, shoes started upward and she sat still, smelling floral soap before she saw him lumbering upward in a heavy topcoat, tilting side to side. He was almost upon her when she looked up into a pair of pale blue, bulging orbs – jelly-like, as if you had to dive into his watery world to see what he saw just before you drowned.

  She scooted a little sideways to let him pass. She’d seen him once before but thought there must be better ones than that. He kept on clumping upward, saying nothing, then as his footfalls reached the landing, and he was behind her, she thought she heard him taking his first step onto the bottom of the next flight up.

  “You must be quite cold out here, Madame, dressed like that.”

  The cigarette between her fingers jerked. She wrenched herself around and saw him twisting toward her on the landing.

  “Oh, I’m never out here very long,” she said, “and you know – how the smell gets into your furniture, the walls -”

  Just then heat seared her fingers and her cigarette fell onto the next step down, showering sparks. Before she could pick it up he lurched down past her with surprising alacrity for a fat man, stomped on the butt and ground it viciously into the worn wood like he was stomping the last few twitches of life out of a centipede.

  “There!”

  “Oh, dear! That was my last.” She reached for the flattened stub.

  “No, Madame! Leave that for the janitor. You can’t put that filthy thing back on your lips.”

  She smiled wanly up at him. “Of course you’re right. I wasn’t going to. You do funny things when you’re down to your last smoke.” She reached for the butt again. “I’ll just drop this in the majolica jar.”

  He plunged his gloved hand under his blouse, pulled out a platinum cigarette case. She noticed then the lightning bolts of the Death’s Head Group of the SS on his collars. His voice sounded decent enough, but God, what would Gunther say?

  “Leave it, Madame. Allow me to offer you one of mine.” He held out the open case.

  “Oh, well, thank you, but I think I’d better get used to going without.”

  “No, no. I’ve got plenty more where these came from.”

  How much easier it might be if he weren’t such a toad, she thought. But it was now or never. The words were out before she knew what she was saying, like something so long in the oven it was burning.

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to join me for a drink?”

  He stared down at her. “Well, I - now?”

  “At your convenience.”

  He looked down at her some more. “Do you belong here, Madame?”

  She laughed a little, pointed back across the corridor toward the door marked 211. “That’s my flat right there. My husband is away at the front.”

  He stood there in the shadow, motionless. At last he pulled his thick coat sleeve back from the face of his watch. “I almost forgot, I’ve got a cat to feed. My housekeeper has the night off.”

  “Ah, so you like cats, sir.”

  He shrugged, showing the thin leer of a smile. “Not if you ask my housekeeper.”

  “Oh! Allergic to them, maybe? But how nice of you to put up with one.”

  He shrugged again, and lifted one foot up onto the next step.

  She said, “Well, I’ll be up a while longer if you change your mind.”

  “I normally retire by ten,” he said moodily.

  “I see. Well, perhaps some other time.” She stretched her open hand up to him.

  He started to pull off his right glove, then thought better of it as he re
ached down for her hand. His flaccid squeeze made her look up into his eyes like they were staring from a fish bowl. She traced his mump jowls down to the lightning bolts on his collar, remembering Gunther’s admonition once to steer well clear of anybody belonging to the SS The bane of our existence, he’d once said.

  “Geli Straub,” she said, wagging his hand.

  He let go and stood back. “Willy Stumpff.”

  “Captain,” she said. “My husband taught me how to tell the ranks.”

  His drowsy, lurid smile caressed her with some inscrutable inquiry, and she wondered whether in his mind she was some demimonde who’d sunk quite low enough to let the leash off her husband. He wouldn’t be far off, she thought.

  “Good night, then, Madame,” he said.

  “Good night, sir.”

  As he lumbered upward toward the next level, the smashed butt on the step caught Geli’s eye. She reached for it, like being dirty now it was no longer hers. She closed her hand around it and got up.

  Back in the warmth of her flat she shut the door behind her and with a sudden shiver thought, my God, what have I done? Probably he won’t come, she thought. But if he does…

  One bottle of Frascati left in the pantry, a block of Munster from which she’d have to cut away the mold. Barely half a loaf of black bread and three sausages to her name. Yesterday down at Thaleiser’s she had bought just one short string of bratwurst. Otto the butcher had handed her the little package over the counter as much as to say what happened to the pounds you used to buy, Frau Straub?

  She’d lived alone too long. Old newspapers strewn across the piano, dusty paper flowers in the vase beside her monument to Gunther - his portrait in full military regalia, taken in Taranto on their wedding day. She tidied up all around that, then in her bedroom shut the closet door on a heap of soiled clothes. She thought of getting into something more revealing. No, it was enough to leave her stockings off. Her hair looked tousled in the mirror. Let that be. Gunther used to say she looked prettier without makeup. Why did men say that? That one bottle of Frascati would hardly be enough to make him feel good, and leave some for the numbing of her own nerves. The chances were he’d never come. He didn’t look like the kind of a man who’d had experience with women, unless the housekeeper, well, you didn’t have to think too long and hard to guess what kind of ‘house’ she kept.

  She sat on the sofa to wait, glancing at the door from time to time. She waited and waited and then picked up her tattered volume of Rilke’s Das Buch der Bilder. The words began to sway and blur as she grew sleepy, and the next thing she knew her head jerked up and the clock came into focus, hands showing 10:16. She got up and was about to switch off the lamp when she heard knuckles hitting so lightly on a door she thought it must be coming from across the hallway. The rapping came again, harder.

  “Just a moment!” she called out. She hurried toward the door and was about to pull the bolt back when she realized that she was still in her bare feet. The fist on the other side hit again.

  “Coming!”

  Bare feet might be the best thing she could greet him in, she thought, and feeling breathless she swept the door open.

  He stood there now in gabardine slacks, a white shirt open at the collar, arms pumping at his sides like a schoolboy arriving for a term’s evaluation. A rivulet of sweat crept down past his ear. His thinning grizzled hair was slicked back with pomade, cheeks freshly shaved and rosily aglow. Gone were his overcoat and the peaked cap. Oddly, though, he’d kept his gloves on.

  She stepped aside, pulling the door back. “I’d almost given up on you, Herr Stumpff.”

  “Well, it’s quite late, I know,” he said, glancing at her feet. “I hope I didn’t get you out of bed.”

  “No, no. Please come in.”

  He stepped gingerly across the threshold as if it was a muddy puddle in the street.

  Geli said, “May I take your gloves?”

  He drew his hands back quickly like a mother who didn’t want any strangers touching her baby. “Ah, no thank you. Not at the moment. You see, I have poor circulation.” He smiled, then glanced aside at the painting hanging there beside him on the wall. “Ah! The Pastoral Symphony.”

  “Why, you’re a connoisseur of art!” she said gaily.

  He shrugged. “I was an art dealer before the war.” He stepped back from the painting, wincing faintly as his bulging eyes roamed over the fat picnicking nudes, the nonchalance with which a fully clad man with a mandolin sat serenading the heavy naked lumps of flesh under an oak tree.

  “I just adore Giorgione, don’t you?” she said. “Can’t you just see the dust in those old trees?”

  Stumpff looked again, this time fingering his chin skeptically. “Actually, I’m rather partial to the nudes of Adolph Ziegler and Julius Engelhard. Our rustic settings are so much more wholesome. Give me Sepp Hilz any day when it comes to unclothed women.”

  “Yes. My husband used to say that Hilz was one of the finest pornographic painters in Germany today.”

  The tepid smile on Stumpff’s lips froze. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Madame.”

  “Well, Gunther thought it was especially true of Engelhard and Breker – how their art inspires our fighting men to do their part for the birth rate when they’re home on leave. You know, with the war on, we need all the extra babies we can get.”

  Stumpff arched one eyebrow, staring at her. “I wouldn’t repeat that outside present company.”

  Geli threw her head back, laughing. “If you promise not to tell on me.”

  Stumpff moved uneasily, as if he wanted to edge past her. “Who is your husband, Madame, if I may ask?”

  “That’s him right over there.” Geli stood aside, pointing at the portrait on the piano.

  Stumpff clasped his hands behind his back and strutted over, taking in the martial beauty of General Gunther Straub’s deadly serious pose. He leaned forward, taking a closer look.

  “Quite a handsome man, and a General.” Stumpff lightly touched the edge of the frame, like a child’s fingers on the General’s epaulettes.

  “Are you surprised?” Geli said.

  “Surprised? Oh, perhaps.” Stumpff shrugged. “I don’t run into General’s wives that often.”

  “Don’t be nervous. He’s in Russia with Guderian. I’ve had one letter from him, sent from Smolensk in June of ’41. Since then, not a word.”

  “But that’s -”

  “Yes, almost three years ago. You fear the worst, but then as long as nobody comes to your door with bad news, you’ve got a reason to go on hoping. However, when your stipends suddenly run out, that’s another story.”

  He stared at her incredulously. “Your stipends? But if he’s still alive, I see no reason why -”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I marched right down to OKA to inquire. Showed them my papers, but they insisted on seeing our marriage license. I had to come back home to see if I could find it. I looked high and low but it was gone. If Gunther took the original with him, he didn’t leave me with a copy. The only thing I had to prove I was his wife was that letter from Smolensk. This smart-aleck little Deutsches Frauenwerk seemed to think it was too old to be of value. There was no way of authenticating such a letter. She said come back with your marriage certificate, we might begin to get somewhere. I wanted to smack her smug little face. Not all that little, really.”

  Stumpff was shaking his head woefully. “Since then the certificate hasn’t turned up?”

  “No,” Geli said, thinking it better to keep her frantic searches through drawers and shoeboxes to herself.

  Stumpff shook his head some more. “This all seems quite irregular to me, Madame. They shouldn’t have treated you so shabbily. My only thought is, security restrictions may be keeping your husband’s whereabouts under wraps. Things haven’t been going all that well for us in Russia.”

  “Yes, but Gunther’s letter got through to me from Smolensk. Then we hear that Guderian, at Moscow’s doorstep, turns toward the Ukraine.
What could Gunther give away that Goebbels hadn’t broadcast to the nation?”

  Stumpff rolled his eyes and hooked a finger on his lower lip. “Quite so, quite so. At least you haven’t received any official notification of his death. That’s something.”

  “Is it?”

  “Mmm. But on this matter of your stipends. There must be some way to get to the bottom of that.” A lazy, helpless smile moved sluggishly across Stumpff’s lips, he sighed and Geli could see that she was wearing him down.

  “Enough of my troubles, Herr Stumpff! What about a drink?”

  He brightened. “Why, yes. That would be lovely.”

  “I’ve got a nice bottle of Frascati on ice.”

  “Oh, splendid. I rarely drink anything stronger than wine.”

  Geli trotted back into the kitchen, feeling like she ought to tell him they were getting into her last bottle. It lay in a pool of melted water in the icebox. She wiped it down, wondering again whether she should tell him that, after this, there wouldn’t be any more. The cork held fast as she tugged, and she twisted on the screw, beginning to get mad. Why was it that the corks in these white wines were always so hard to get out?

  She came back with the tray and saw his hand was moving around behind Gunther’s picture to the smaller one.

  He pulled it out, tucked in his chin and gazed down at her in baggy shorts crossing a plank that spanned a small gorge under the Sphinx near Cairo, hands spread like a tightrope walker, her more sure-footed Egyptian guide behind her. “This is you!” Stumpff turned with the picture in his hand.