The Knife-Edge Path Page 8

  “With a little help from Herr Hitler,” the shorter man said, watching Geli.

  The other man stepped toward her. “Call me Ubbink, ma’am. This fellow here is my Svengali, better known as Henk de Vos. The three of us – that is, we two and Kurt – all trained together at Lembeck. That’s where we learned how to be bad boys in spite of graduating with honors.”

  The mask seemed to want to smile. But the eyes looking through it had other ideas.

  The shorter man clicked his heels together, taking a bow. “At your service, ma’am.”

  “Simone Miroux,” she said. “Please forgive my intrusion.”

  “Not at all. Not at all. I take it you’re a friend of Kurt’s?”

  “Newly made,” she said.

  “Ah.”

  Just then there was a rattling at the door, it flew open and in the doorway Langsdorff was bent over, picking up his grip.

  Frau Hintz stepped toward him with open arms. “There you are, dear! Surprise! Good friends here to see you, mein Führer!”

  Partly stooped over, Langsdorff scanned everybody with tired, blazing eyes. They fell on Geli. “Back so soon, Mlle Miroux?” The blistering rebuke in his voice stung her.

  “We’re all getting acquainted, dear,” Frau Hintz said brightly. “Here, let me take your coat.”

  He backed away. “No, I’ll keep it on a while longer.”

  “But we’ve got a fire going, dear. Get out of that thing. It’s damp.”

  Langsdorff broke over toward the two men, shook hands with them in turn.

  “You look all worn out, Kurt,” Ubbink said solemnly. He laid a hand on Langsdorff’s shoulder. “Long trip from -”

  Langsdorff turned aside. “How was yours?”

  “Ah, the usual holdups at the border. Of course they perked up right quick when we showed them our papers.” He turned to Geli. “People like us are in short supply in Germany. We’ve practically got a free pass coming across to look for work.”

  “People like -?”

  “We’re engineers, ma’am.” Ubbink took a slight bow.

  “How interesting,” Geli said, “I didn’t realize -”

  “Not too many people do,” Ubbink said in a tone that made her do a double-take on him.

  De Vos clapped Langsdorff on the shoulder, squeezed and gave it a shake. “Come on over here, Kurt. I think you could use a nice tall glass of Dunkelfelder.”

  “Where did that come from?” Langsdorff said.

  “We brought it with us,” De Vos exulted.

  “Hold on a moment, gentlemen.” Frau Hintz stepped around behind Langsdorff, grabbing the shoulders of his coat. “This wet old thing is coming off, no arguments.” She pulled on the padded shoulders.

  “Stop now, Hintzchen!” Langsdorff growled.

  But the coat came off in Frau Hintz’ thick hands. She marched with it toward the coat rack, saying, “Oh for goodness sakes, dear! Why don’t you say hello to Mlle Miroux. She’s come all the way from Lichterfelde to see you again.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Langsdorff said, then glanced at Geli as if startled by his own crabby voice. A sudden kindness in his eyes rose from a restless slumber. “Sorry, Mlle Miroux. I’ve been standing on a train most of the night. Any luck locating Marlene Spilde?”

  Geli sighed. “I finally had to give up on her. One of those things.”

  He levelled a smile on her, so unexpected it went through her like a warm wind. Thank God, she thought, he hadn’t made a big thing out of just how strange it was for her to be here.

  He loosened up a little, saying, “My French could use some brushing up, but I’m afraid I couldn’t afford you.”

  “Who said I’d charge you anything?” she said.

  In the middle of the room Frau Hintz brought her fists down on her hips. “Mlle Miroux teaches French, gentlemen. We Germans could take a few lessons from the French these days, n’est-ce pas?”

  Both Ubbink and De Vos snickered.

  Frau Hintz stepped up to Langsdorff. Her hands trembled a little as she fingered the buttons on the front of his shirt.

  “I’m going now, mein Führer, before the bombs get in my way.” She smiled up at him, making a kind of private affair out of it.

  He took her by the shoulders. “I wouldn’t go out into that -”

  “Now don’t start trying to baby me. I won’t be in for a couple of days. You’ll have to do your own dishes. D’you think you can handle that?”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Do I have to tell you all my secrets?”

  He looked down at her solemnly. “When you get back I’d better hear you’ve gone to the doctor.”

  “Look who’s talking. You going around on the verge of a diabetic fit.”

  “I’ve got an excuse, Hintzchen. You don’t.”

  “Oh, I see. Men get all the excuses.”

  Ubbink spoke up, “Perhaps we’d better meet you at St. Anne’s later on, Kurt. Say in the morning. Pastor Mochalsky has been kind enough to put us up tonight.”

  Geli slid one foot toward Ubbink. “Don’t go on my account, gentlemen. I won’t be staying.”

  “Why not, dear?” Frau Hintz said. “Hot water’s on the stove.” She minced a scowl at Langsdorff. “You remember how to make tea, don’t you?”

  “It’s coming back to me,” Langsdorff said.

  Frau Hintz grunted. “Keep up the good work, mein Führer.”

  “Better stop calling him that,” De Vos said with a grin. “It might go to his head.”

  “Why shouldn’t it, with that lovely uniform he’s got on?” De Vos put in.

  Frau Hintz clumped toward the coat rack, lifted her heavy coat off the hook and shrugged into it.

  Langsdorff called after her as she was making for the door, “I want a full report from Doctor Roenne when I get back!”

  Frau Hintz ignored him marching toward the door and going out, then from the corridor twiddled fingers through the narrowing gap of the doorway. “Goodnight, all!”

  As soon as the door shut Geli said, “What’s the matter with Frau Hintz?”

  “Bad heart,” Langsdorff said.

  “You’d never know it by the way she hops around here like a heifer,” De Vos said.

  Ubbink looked at him. In a guarded tone he said, “Got a minute, Kurt, before we leave?”

  There was something suddenly in the air.

  They didn’t want her here and Geli knew it, thinking it was time to go. Then it was him, Ubbink’s obvious dislike of her that held her back.

  She gestured toward the door that stood slightly ajar at the far end of the kitchen. “Kurt, would you mind if I ducked into your… ?”

  He hurried to say, “Ah yes, of course. You’ll find the light switch just around the corner to your left as you go in.”

  “Thank you.”

  She walked across the room and, dogged by a gaping silence, stepped into the cramped little water closet. Inside, she didn’t touch the light. She swung the door to just within a crack of being shut. The dark she stood in now would be to them a closed door.

  Voices mingled out there in low tones, heatedly, in grating whispers.

  One she recognized as Ubbink’s hissed, “Who is she?”

  “I hardly know her.” That was Kurt, as if his voice was being lowered on his own radio.

  “Can you afford to know her?”

  “I’m not worried.”

  There was a silence. Glass clinked on glass, a faint sound of gurgling, in her mind she saw wine being poured.

  The voice she knew to be De Vos’s said, “We’d better finish this at the church tonight, Kurt, or let’s say in the morning. The only thing… ”

  The rest of it got drowned out by the sound of a chair that screeched like a sagging bedspring.

  It felt like they had all turned to look her way, thinking she’d been in here too long; no flushing sound, no water running. The darkness in the slit she’d left ajar would make them wonder why the light was out. She cou
ldn’t risk turning it on, now. She’d better flush the toilet, run some water in the bowl.

  “…Mochalsky said that Van der Hooft was dead. He didn’t know if Karski’s message would get through in time before… ”

  She reached for the toilet chain, but didn’t pull. Sometimes, in the rasping low tones they were using, she could not tell one voice from another.

  “… the problem is, the Finns are still too nervous about Russia, they think they can’t do without German protection. They’ll need convincing.”

  “… contact in Helsinki is a Jew himself. Can’t you go sooner?”

  She pulled the chain. The gush of water went down loud enough for them to hear it in the pipes. No time to wash her hands. She pulled open the door and stepped out jauntily.

  De Vos was getting into his coat.

  Ubbink, she remembered, had never taken his off. She had something, now. The whispering, Helsinki, those few snatches that could mean anything, but Stumpff would pounce on that. Start something she couldn’t stop. She’d swallowed something that she wanted to spit out.

  They were at the door with Kurt as she called out, “A pleasure meeting you, gentlemen!”

  De Vos stood where he was.

  Ubbink strolled back a few steps, toward Geli, saying, “D’où êtes-vous en France?”

  She shrugged, answering with a smile, “Je suis juste une fille simple, née aux agriculteurs en Provence.”

  “And now?”

  “Most of my business has dried up because of the war, but I scrape along.”

  “I’m sure you do. Forgive our curiosity. How did you meet Kurt?”

  “Accident. I came to the wrong door, looking for a client.”

  “Interesting. It might just as well have been the right door, now that you’ve come back.”

  With a sweet smile Geli said, “C’est la vie.”

  The contours of a smile etched Ubbink’s mouth like the illusion of good will from a well-fed crocodile.

  From the open doorway De Vos said, “Come on Ubbink, before those bombs catch us with our pants down! Remember, we’re hoofing it.”

  “Goodnight, Mlle Miroux,” Ubbink said acidly.

  He doesn’t like me, this one, Geli thought. She could feel it like a knife being twisted in her gut.

  “Goodnight!” she said pleasantly.

  From the corridor both men turned to wave, Ubbink calling out, “See you in the morning at St. Anne’s, Kurt! Tell Frau Hintz to hurry up and get well now, won’t you?” He swung the door shut.

  Langsdorff came back into the room and, sighing heavily, sat on the sofa.

  Geli walked over and sat down beside him. “Sorry, Kurt, I feel I’ve chased them away. Bad timing. I should have turned right around and gone home.”

  “No. They couldn’t stay long anyway.”

  “Ubbink doesn’t like me.”

  “He’s never had much use for women.”

  “Even so, I’m sorry I barged in on you the way I have.”

  “You don’t need to say that anymore.”

  He didn’t say I’m glad you’re here, she thought, and got the feeling that maybe it was not just kindness, but curiosity that kept him from turning her away: give his friends the chance to look her over. Later on they’d tell him what they thought. Be careful of that woman, Kurt. She could be poison.

  She said, “Do you think Frau Hintz is going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know. She’s let it go too long.”

  “What?”

  “Angina, so the doctors say. She’s a tough old bird, but -” He shook his head, swallowing, and looked out across the silence in the room. “She seems to be quite fond of you.”

  “Think so? So she told you I’d been here.”

  He nodded, something in his eyes forgiving Frau Hintz for her impudence. “She thought your coming all the way from Lichterfelde was quite some feat.”

  “And you?” She cocked her head at him saucily.

  He shrugged. “She’s always looking out for me.”

  Geli lowered her eyes. “She quite adores you,” she said.

  “Well, I’m lucky to have her,” he stated.

  “Brags on you, too. She told me all about how you once – well, the way she put it – saved her bacon.”

  “Ah, that. Anybody would have done the same.”

  “Not the way she tells it.”

  “I might have handled that situation somewhat differently if I hadn’t borne a grudge against the officer in question. They gave me a talking-to, then let me off with a warning. I didn’t tell them what I’d held against Lieutenant Baab. They would have frowned on the complaint. When it was his turn, he came out of our superior’s office grinning.”

  “What did you hold against him?” Geli said.

  “He used to work at a place where the so-called insane and feeble-minded were committed. Baab liked to brag about what happened to them, which he took part in proudly, so one day I asked him if he’d ever heard of a Bertha Ebeling.”

  Staring at him, Geli saw Anneliese stumbling into the hands of a policeman, shrieking for help. “Bertha was -?”

  “My sister-in-law. Baab asked what she was to me, but I said I’d just heard a rumor. He took pleasure in telling me that none of them lived long enough to prove they weren’t mad. Pneumonia saved them the trouble. Then up the chimney, making room for more. I might have killed him that day, but then what would have happened to Frau Hintz?”

  She reached for his hand and he looked at her, not pulling away, just leaving his hand under hers and she almost squeezed to stop up his weakness through which she could pick him clean. The dead and dried-up longing she had left somewhere in Cairo, that old clipping telling of Halfaya Pass in Reggie’s blood, burned in her heart. Langsdorff was staring at her.

  “What is it, Kurt?”

  He slipped his hand out from under hers. “Why did you tell Ubbink you came from Alsace Lorraine?”

  She kept her eyes on him.

  Needles pierced her face.

  “Did I?”

  “You told Frau Hintz that you were born in Italy.”

  “That’s true. We came down to Alsace when I was very young, not three years old. My father bought a farm, ran goats and sheep. I’m a French citizen, Italian blood.” She felt anger rising as she spoke. “Should I write it all out for Ubbink?”

  He blanched a little.

  A little anger wouldn’t hurt right now, she thought. “Good thing I won’t be seeing him again, to tell him what I think.”

  His face changed, ears pinned back on a sour expression as if he were chagrinned. “There’s something else I want to ask you.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Since you’re French, why haven’t I scared you off?”

  “D’you think you’ve missed your chance?”

  “Most people go out of their way to avoid me. What keeps you in Berlin?”

  “I’ve thought of getting out, except - oh, I don’t know. It’s too late. Funny how it is to feel safer in the land of the enemy.”

  “How safe do you feel telling me?”

  “So far you haven’t given me any reason not to,” she said.

  Watching her he made a halting sound like disused laughter trying to start on a dead battery. Suddenly his face darkened. He looked around at the wine bottle on the table. “I think I need a drink of that.”

  “I’ll get it,” she said, and scooted forward, but didn’t get up. “What’s the matter, Kurt? Worried about Frau Hintz?”

  “I’m annoyed at her for trying to prove that she’s too tough to die.”

  “Well, aren’t we all afraid of finding out what we don’t want to know?”

  “I wish I didn’t have to go away right now.”

  “Oh? You’re going -?”

  “Finland. Routine inspections, but I’m afraid she won’t be here when I get back. I mean alive.”

  “Don’t say that. We’ll pray for her. I’ll pray with you.”

  “Yes.”
>
  Just then a faint shuddering in the walls accompanied the distant sound of an explosion. Cups clanked in their saucers in the breakfront. The shriek of falling bombs cut through the rising note of a siren nearer by.

  Geli looked up at the swaying chandelier that cast a shadowy spoked wheel on the ceiling. “Kurt, I’d better go.”

  “Out into that?”

  “Oh, but -”

  “They shut the trams down when the bombing starts.”

  She looked down at her fingers in her lap. “Just when I feel I’m getting to know you.”

  “You might not like it if you got to know me,” he said.

  She steadied a gaze on him. “Are you asking me, or telling me?”

  He blinked as if he hadn’t been listening. “You must know by now that I’m married.”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  He looked at her incredulously. “Well -”

  “Can’t a woman be your friend? Or is that just one more of our many shortcomings?”

  “No. I -”

  “Don’t bother tearing yourself down. I’m not scared of you, and won’t be if you should suddenly sprout the well-known Nazi fangs. Otherwise I wouldn’t have so freely told you I was French, n’est-ce pas?”

  For a moment he looked at a loss, then said at last, “It’s not safe out there. You might not make it all the way to Lichterfelde. You can have the bed that Frau Hintz sleeps in, when she stays over. It’s not much, but -”

  “Well, that’s -” She almost said I hope you know I didn’t plan it this way, and a kind of shiver scaled her heart. The grandfather clock against the wall struck nine, and something in her moved, as if Reggie was giving her another chance. He spoke softly in the bed beside her, his boyish voice in the dark not long for this world. ‘We’ve got a big show coming up, love. The Jerries will get it good and proper. Day after tomorrow, the worst place they can be, they’ll find out quick enough. Halfaya Pass. We’re taking them by surprise. It’ll be a rout. You’ll hear about it, love, before I get back.’

  “I don’t know, Kurt. I’m sure I’d be in the way. I’d better go.”

  He shrugged. “You can leave as early as you like in the morning. Me, I’m going up to St. Anne’s. Pastor Mochalsky has been kind enough to put up Ubbink and De Vos in the rectory. I’ll say goodbye to them, then I’ve got that plane to catch. I’ll try not to wake you in the morning.”