The Knife-Edge Path Read online

  That woman crept around the edges of his life. Circling, like one of those Greek birds, and he thought back to happier days. Simpler days. Were there any? A strand of Trude’s fur clung to the far edge of the table. He leaned over to blow it off, but then let his breath out slowly. He swung his hand around, grabbed the bottle and poured, watching the amber splash. He took a small sip, comme il faut. The French, he thought. Now she was French. Strange how he had given her life back to her. If I were a woman, he thought, I wouldn’t want to ride alone with Obermeyer, either.

  16

  Kurt was gone when she woke up in the hotel. She had to catch a later train back to Berlin alone. He hadn’t left a note, and that worried her. She hoped he’d read the one she’d left in plain sight on the chair where he had draped his tunic: her exact address in Lichterfelde, adding ‘In case anything goes wrong…’

  There were delays along the line and it was nightfall by the time the train pulled into Berlin, and through the window she could see the thin blue lights at the tunnel exits, the zinc sculptures standing their massive ground as they were left behind, and they wound past the sidings and the freight yards toward a shift onto the track that soon would straighten through the city toward the great domed hub of Anhalter Bahnhof and the walkways winding round the fountain in Potsdamer Platz, no longer spouting water.

  The platform swarmed with people waiting for a train – any train, as long as it was going westward. She caught a tram to her Lichterfelde stop and hurried up the stairs. She didn’t see the man bounding downward until he clipped her with his bag and kept on going. Dressed in mufti, now, whereas she’d seen him once in uniform, his long unbuttoned overcoat flying like limp wings behind him. The corridor was messy – scraps of paper, a rumpled tunic, empty bottles. Doors on both sides stood ajar and everything was quiet. Eerily quiet, as if everybody had gone except her. Stumpff’s letterbox, she’d noticed in the vestibule, was empty. The Russians could be here within a week. Why should he stay behind? Why bother with her anymore, if everybody else was getting out?

  Her flat smelled of damp wallpaper. She turned on the steam heater, lit one lamp. There was a flash against the curtains and she went over, parted them and looked down. Rain flittered in the headlight beams from a long black staff car. Behind it, the young man she’d passed on the stairway was cramming bags into the open trunk. Another car splashed past. She let the curtain fall. There was no use trying to sleep, she knew, and paced the floor from room to room, smoking up her cigarettes. She wouldn’t go upstairs to see if Stumpff was gone. She couldn’t face him now. Those bulging eyes of his would get her in their sights and she would crack, she knew. She was afraid that Kurt would come and Stumpff would catch them here, together. She’d been too full of love for him last night, too quick to pour it out into the note she’d left: ‘If anything goes wrong. Second floor, number 211.’ The only other thing to do was run, or watch the walls close in. Whenever they made up their minds it was time to come for her, Kurt would never know and she would disappear. One thing they didn’t have and couldn’t do without before they killed her: all she now knew about Kurt that they didn’t. Gunther had once said, ‘Under torture, everybody talks.’

  The room was heating up. She flopped onto the sofa in her damp coat. Things here and there across the room gleamed in the faint light. The glass that Gunther kept looking through. God couldn’t make him see her. He should be happy where he was. She shut her eyes, feeling a sting under her lids. All that foul air on the train, the acrid smoke and brick dust from the bombing and the fires. The steam heater knocked and banged.

  All at once she awoke with a start. The room felt hot; she had been sweating. She listened to the smacking of the rain down in the street, the rush of water in the gutter drains. She got up and went to the window, parted the curtain and looked down into the street – deserted except for one small car on the other side, shining mirror-like in the long slick of the rain under the streetlamp, dripping from its fenders. She was about to let the curtain go when something made her look again. She hadn’t heard the car start up, but it was wobbling faintly now. Puffs of exhaust spurted out from under the rear bumper. A black shape behind the front window moved. She couldn’t make out any features, only a shape hunched over the wheel. She stepped back quickly, letting the curtain go, hurried over toward the lamp to snap it off when suddenly the phone rang. She looked up at the clock on the mantle: 12:22. She let the bell ring four more times before it stopped. Cold gripped her heart. At any moment now the streetlights would go out, darkness would cloak the city, preparing for another British raid. That wraith behind the wheel could be from the Gestapo. She snicked off the lamp, went back over to the window, stood behind the curtains while she plucked back a view through the slit. The window on the driver’s side was rolled down halfway. A face peered upward over the spattered glass. Henk de Vos! Was he alone? She couldn’t see anybody in the back seat. If he’d brought Kurt along, why were they just sitting down there? Suddenly three sharp knocks hammered on the door and she stood stock still, barely breathing. Her heart thumped like a jungle drum. The knock gave it away. Too vicious to be Kurt. She heard a creaking near the door, pictured a gloved fist poised to hit again. No voice roared through the door. Just creaking, like somebody out there pacing. Then it seemed to move away, becoming footfalls, now dull thuds on the stairway, moving upward. Silence for a moment, then the muted slamming of a door. Her eyes fled toward the clock, its heedless, blithe tick-tock like sound given to the trick that now might not be time enough to get out before he came back.

  She ran back to the bedroom closet getting out of her wet wool coat, dumped it onto the pile of soiled clothes and tore her trench coat off the hanger. She grabbed her handbag off the bed and hurried back out into the vestibule where she had left her shoes. There in the dark the doorknob faintly gleamed. Her heart caught in her throat. In the strip of light under the door she saw the scrap of paper lying there. She stooped for it, stayed on her haunches while she held it near the light and read: Urgent I see you. Be thinking of Helsinki. S.

  She stood up letting the paper flitter to the rug, slipped into her shoes and flew out pulling on the door until the bolt clunked and she broke into a trot and took the stairs on tiptoe, swung open the inner door and then the iron gate and stepped out into the rain. The streetlamp still gleamed on the wet street and across the hood of the small car. She kept her eyes off the windows as she pulled up her collar and turned down the winding route toward nowhere. She would say St. Anne’s if they came after her, thinking Ubbink could be hidden in the back seat, if not Kurt, they were so seldom apart. Still not looking at the car she crossed to their side, veering toward the same direction it was pointed. She walked briskly at first, waiting for their headlights to come on and light her up, but as she moved deeper into the murk and closer to the corner where she’d have to turn, she slowed to keep from sinking into the dark where they might lose her. Behind her suddenly headlights flashed on and found the scut of her coat before she made the dark again rounding the corner. She heard the rumble of a motor just as the streetlights went out, like a power failure in one neighborhood after another, and for a moment she was in pitch black. Then light from behind, moving up on her, spread onto the shapes ahead and all at once the car pulled along the curb beside her, tires splashing gutter water as brakes squealed and it stopped.

  She stopped. There was no use running. Nobody got out. The car sat there idling in the rain, drops drumming on its hood. She felt a hand on her shoulder, clamping down, and as she twisted toward it the wet face, inches from hers, belonged to Ubbink. He must have got out way back there and followed her on foot. He gave her a shove toward the car. She lurched and stumbled as he pulled back on door, saying harshly, “Get in.”

  Nobody else but De Vos was in the car. She did as she was told and sat there, soaking wet, as the car began to move and Ubbink, with the wet pelt smell of a river rat beside her, rammed the door shut. Presently she said, “What do you want? Where�
��s Kurt?”

  “Shut up,” Ubbink snarled. “We’ll let you know.”

  She felt too afraid to speak, now, as if a word was all they’d need to tie a gag around her face. The streets, as De Vos careered around one corner after another, gunning the motor on straightaways, were deserted, and she kept expecting some air raid warden to step out of the dark and hold them up. So far the sirens were silent, but searchlights swept the low rain-soaked ceiling. Finally she flung her face at Ubbink and cried, “Where are you taking me?”

  “You’ll see,” Ubbink said.

  Her mind raced in the silence as De Vos drove on, taking corners as if he knew some route by which they could avoid being stopped. The next thing she knew they were pulling up to the narthex of St. Anne’s, and the stately cypresses that rose above the pathways into a pale misty moonlight.

  “This is where we get out,” Ubbink said.

  “Is Kurt here?” she said.

  He didn’t answer, but got out and held the door for her until she was out, too, rain pelting her head. De Vos drove the car around to the side where he doused the lights and shut the motor off. There was the slap of the door shutting.

  Ubbink took her roughly by the arm and hustled her around to a side door. He gave her a shove and they followed her in. A draft swept in on the candles lit for the Virgin Mary, and shadows from the dancing flames pulled at her motionless serenity.

  Pastor Mochalsky’s voice fell fervently out across the mostly empty pews. “Behold, I have told you before. Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in a desert; go not forth, he is in the secret chambers; believe it or not. For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be… ”

  Ubbink pushed her past the edges of the pews, unheeded by Mochalsky, then through a passageway to another door at the back. Outside the rain had stopped, except for an occasional drop. They shoved her along to the edge of a flight of stone steps and she stumbled once before they came down to a street and turned along a row of brick tenements, then crossed where the road began to slope from the edge of a ruined building toward a dip under a bridge, and she could barely make out the piers sunken in ink-black. She heard only their own footsteps, the breeze whistling past heaps of spired fragments of what had once been sturdy structures. They stopped her near the abutment under the bridge while Ubbink fumbled out a cigarette. He struck a match, it flared and he touched the flame to the tip, then held it up close to her face. The breeze blew out the flame. He looked back up the hill toward the faint glow in the colored windows of St. Anne’s.

  De Vos came down from the direction of the grass.

  Ubbink hurried to say, shoving his face up close to Geli’s, “Where did you think you were going?”

  “I saw you from my window. I thought Kurt might be with you.”

  Ubbink shook his head. “Hoping he’d walk right into a beehive full of German officers?”

  “No! They’ve cleared out – all but a few.”

  “Why did you leave him your address?”

  “In case I wanted him to know.”

  “But didn’t want to be there when he walked into your trap.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong. What do you want of me?”

  De Vos stepped forward, speaking quietly. “Kurt asked us to come and get you.”

  Her heart soared.

  Ubbink reached between two buttons of his coat and came out with revolver fitted with a silencer.

  Geli sprang back, buckling in one knee as a dead branch rolled under her heel. Terror gripped her like a blindfold.

  De Vos said, “Put that away, Ubbink. You know what we agreed.”

  Just then Geli heard the smack of footsteps. Something moved into the blackness near the abutment, then stepped away into the faint light from the other side of the bridge. She saw the cold lurid smear of a face under a slouch hat, a ghostly luminescence as it moved toward them, arms swinging in long sleeves. The slick of small thin lips quivered with the uncertainty of a grin. A lump drove up into her throat. Suddenly nearby an air-raid siren wound up its ear-splitting high note.

  Ubbink raised his gun, spoke in a loud commanding voice, “What do you want? Speak up! Who are you?”

  The figure turned abruptly and began to hurry away into the fog.

  Ubbink took aim, but suddenly there was nothing to aim at.

  The air-raid siren cranked up, howling.

  “I know that man!” Geli cried.

  But the siren drowned out her voice, and the figure disappeared like all the other traces of light gone out across the city as the earth shook with the landing of the first bombs.

  17

  Between the crumps and the far-off flashes she could hear the thrum of the B-17’s overhead. They were dragging her away, back up the hill into the shelter of a tree. One of them turned her around to face the trunk and held her by the shoulders from behind, then let go.

  “What are you going to do?” she cried.

  “Shut up.” Ubbink came around her on the bed of wet decaying leaves until the gun was pointed at her belly.

  She threw up her hands in front of her face. “I’m not Simone Miroux!”

  “We didn’t think you were,” Ubbink said.

  She thought now that maybe Obermeyer had spared her to be killed by them. She pointed out into the mist where he’d been swallowed up.

  “That man came here to kill me! He would have killed you, too. His name is Obermeyer. A man I know was trying to be sure it was me, consorting with two men he suspects as being who you are – Dutch partisans meeting with Kurt to further his aims and theirs.”

  “I had a shot,” Ubbink snarled. “You scared him off.”

  “Listen! This Obermeyer drives for a German officer living in my flat. Now that he’s seen me with you, if you let me go I’ll be dead within hours. So will the truth you’d better know before you -” She looked down at the gun and up at Ubbink again, filling her eyes with something he could do about her fear.

  “Don’t worry,” Ubbink said, “we’re not going to let you go.” He dragged on his cigarette and lowered it, scribbling the dark across his face.

  De Vos stepped between them. He lowered his hand onto Ubbink’s gun arm. “Let her talk, Ubbink.”

  Ubbink gave him a sharp, shrewd look. “Get wise, Henk. Kurt will never know the difference.”

  Still buttressing himself between them, De Vos turned to Geli. “This German officer – is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” Geli said. She suddenly felt like crying.

  “When did you last see him in your tenement?”

  “Not for several days. Most of the tenants have already fled. Tonight there was a note from him under my door. That makes me think he hasn’t gone.”

  “Who are you?” De Vos said.

  Geli stood up straighter, shaking inside. “My name is Geli Straub. My husband is Gunther Straub, a Wehrmacht officer now fighting in Russia – the last I knew. Whether he was killed or - I never found out why, but his stipends stopped coming. I had no money, so I seduced a lonely officer in my tenement: SS Obersturmbannführer Stumpff. The bait I offered didn’t interest him. He had other ideas. In return for his gifts of food and cigarettes he wanted me to find out whether Kurt was loyal to him and the Reich’s aims. I was to work on Kurt as if I’d known him years before the war, and was still as much an enemy of the Nazis as he’d been, then.”

  “What made Stumpff think you could do this for him?” Ubbink put in.

  “I’d had experience in Cairo.”

  “Ah! Made to order. I should have known.”

  Geli ignored that. “I didn’t want to do it. I’d had enough. But it was either that or starve.”

  Ubbink shook a smug sneer up and down. “You were good,” he said, “because Kurt made it easy for you. I knew it from the moment I set eyes on you.”

  Geli felt his hatred feeling for her. She went on as if she hadn’t. “I grew fond of him. I hadn�
��t intended this to happen but it did, and I became afraid that, one day, he’d tell me things I didn’t want to know. Snicker all you want, but I began to care for him. Everything changed. One night I thought he was beginning to have feelings for me, too. From then on -”

  “From then on you could work your voodoo on him until you’d earned your keep. You begged him to let you go with him to a funeral.”

  “No. I wanted to go because Frau Hintz -”

  “Frau Hintz was nothing to you but a way to him.”

  She wanted to hit him, but held onto her nerve. “That night in Bornichen he drank too much and told me things I didn’t want to hear. Terrible things about the death camps. I tried to stop him, but it was no use.”

  “This note under your door,” De Vos said. “What did it say?”

  “He signed it S, for Stumpff. It said he wanted me to think about Helsinki. I knew he meant to flush me out.”

  “There you are, Henk!” Ubbink crowed.

  “No!” Geli cried. “I’m not sure, but I think he’d somehow found out that I’d gone to Bornichen with Kurt.”

  Ubbink tucked in his chin to snigger. “More like he’d sent you, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No, I went on my own.”

  “Where you could tie up all the loose ends on Helsinki.”

  “I knew he’d gone, but I never asked him why, and he never told me.”

  “Tell us why we shouldn’t think you’ve given Stumpff enough to send for the Gestapo.”

  “First, he wants nothing to do with the Gestapo. Second, if he’d got all he wanted out of me, he wouldn’t need me anymore and I’d be dead.”

  Ubbink dropped his cigarette and clamped his hand down hard on Geli’s arm. “After all you’ve done to Kurt, why shouldn’t we save your Nazi friend the trouble?”