“Yes, it is.” General Dornberger tapped Gunther Grillparzer’s letter once more. “I ask you again, Hans-what about this? What do I say when the pointy-nosed SS men come around here and start asking me the questions I’m asking you now?”
That was a fair question-more than a fair question, if Dornberger wanted to be able to protect him. Drucker thought fast, as he had in the hallway outside Grillparzer’s flat in Weimar. “Sir,” he said, “it’s pretty plain somebody in the SS doesn’t like me, isn’t it? The way they went after my wife…”
“Yes,” Dornberger said, nodding. Drucker didn’t tell him-Drucker wouldn’t tell anybody, not to his dying day-that Kathe truly did have a Jewish grandmother. Whoever’d found that out had been right, even if Drucker and Dornberger between them had managed to quash the investigation. The commandant went on, “You are suggesting this is another hoax?”
“Yes, sir,” Drucker answered. “One way to put all sorts of details in a letter is to just make them up. The SS knows my service record; it knows the names of the men I served with. This letter makes it sound like Grillparzer was as much a murderer as I was. Do you think anybody who really did something like that would give you or the blackshirts the whole story?”
“A point-a distinct point,” General Dornberger said.
Drucker nodded, doing his best to look as well as sound convincing. He was convinced Gunther Grillparzer wouldn’t be in that Weimar flat any more if he or the Gestapo came knocking. The ex-gunner would probably have shed his alias and his girlfriend, too, though Friedli had been worth hanging on to. Nothing, though, was worth the risk of kicking your life away at the end of a piano-wire noose after some highly ingenious men spent a long time making you wish you were dead.
Dornberger paused to light a cigar. He aimed it at Drucker as if it were a pistol. “You realize that, if your enemy in the SS wants you badly enough, he will simply come and take you away regardless of anything I can do.”
“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Drucker said. He knew he sounded worried-he was worried. But anyone with a powerful enemy in the SS had every right to be worried. More than a generation of German history proved as much.
“All right, then.” General Dornberger picked up Grillparzer’s letter, folded it in thirds, as it had been in the envelope, and then slowly and methodically tore it to pieces. “I think we will be able to carry on on that basis. You understand that Neufeld has also seen this?”
“I would have expected that, yes, sir,” Drucker said, nodding. “But, sir, Major Neufeld wouldn’t tell his granny her own name if she happened to ask him for it.”
Dornberger chuckled, coughed, and chuckled some more. “I won’t say you’re wrong. I will say that’s one of the reasons he’s so useful to me. If your unfriend has sent copies of this letter to people besides me-which it makes sense that he would do-we shall try to deal with them as you’ve suggested.” He took another puff on the cigar, then set it in an ashtray. Exhaling smoke, he went on, “You are dismissed, Lieutenant Colonel.”
Drucker sprang to his feet and saluted. “Heil Himmler!” he said, as he had when he came in. For once, the words were not automatic. He wondered what he was doing hailing the man who, along with heading the Reich, also headed the outfit that had tried to execute Kathe, the outfit that had done its best to get him drummed out of the Wehrmacht, the outfit that would no doubt take another shot at him now, thanks to Gunther Grillparzer.
But that couldn’t be helped. As long as he lived in the Greater German Reich, he had to conform to its outward usages. He made a smart about-turn and strode out of General Dornberger’s office. In the antechamber, Major Neufeld’s face revealed nothing but dyspepsia. Drucker nodded to him and walked out.
He was just leaving the administrative center when a black Mercedes pulled to a halt in front of it. A couple of Gestapo men got out of it and hurried into the building. They took no special notice of him, but he would have bet Reichsmarks against pfennigs they hadn’t come to Peenemunde on any other business.
To hell with you, Grillparzer, you son of a bitch, Drucker thought. If you drag me down, I’ll take you with me. He knew the alias under which the ex-panzer gunner had been living in Weimar. If the Gestapo couldn’t track the bastard with that much to go on, the boys in the black shirts weren’t worth much.
As Drucker walked away from the administration building, he wondered if the loudspeakers would blare out his name again. The SS had wanted his scalp ever since he managed to get Kathe out of their clutches. If Dornberger couldn’t convince them to leave him alone…
What would he do then? Take out his pistol and go down fighting? Take it out and kill himself, so he wouldn’t suffer whatever the blackshirts wanted to inflict on him? If he did either of those things, how would he avenge himself on Gunther Grillparzer? And what would happen to his family afterwards? But if he didn’t do it, would that save his wife and children? And what horrid indignities would be waiting for him?
The loudspeakers kept quiet. Drucker stayed where he could keep an eye on that black Mercedes. After about forty-five minutes, the Gestapo men came out of the administrative center and got back into the car. By the way they slammed the doors, they weren’t happy with the world. The Mercedes leaped away with a screech of tires, almost flattening a couple of enlisted men who’d presumed to try to cross the road. The soldiers sprang out of the way in the nick of time.
Drucker watched it go with the same savage joy he’d known when he stuck a pistol in Grillparzer’s face. Before then, he hadn’t felt that particular delight since taking out a Lizard panzer during the fighting. Somebody’d tried to ruin him, tried and failed. That was how things were supposed to work, but things didn’t work that way often enough.
Whistling, Drucker went into the officers’ club, ordered a shot of schnapps, and knocked it back with great relish. The fellow behind the bar, a young blond corporal straight out of a recruiting poster, grinned at him. “Something good must have happened to you, sir,” he said.
“Oh, you might say so. You just might say so,” Drucker agreed. “Let me have another one, why don’t you? There’s nothing in the world to match the feeling you get when somebody shoots at you and misses, you know that?”
“If you say so, sir,” the bartender answered. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen combat myself, though.” Polite puzzlement was on his face: what sort of combat would Drucker have seen lately?
But Drucker knew-and combat it was, even without a literal shot being fired. “Don’t be sorry, son,” he said. “Count yourself lucky. I wish I could say the same thing.”
“Germans!” Monique Dutourd snarled as she walked up to her brother in the Jardin Puget, a few blocks south of Marseille’s Old Harbor. Not far away, sweaty kids booted a football toward one side’s goal.
“Don’t start talking yet,” Pierre warned. He looked around to make sure no one else in the park was taking any notice of him, then pulled from his pocket a gadget plainly not of Earthly manufacture. Only after waving it at her and examining the lights that glowed and flickered at one end did he nod. “All right. The Boches have not planted any ears on you.”
“Germans,” Monique said again; even the usual scornful French nickname for them didn’t let her get rid of enough anger to be satisfying. Only by calling them exactly what they were could she vent even part of the loathing she’d come to feel for the occupiers.
To her intense annoyance, her older brother chuckled. “You just went about your business as long as they didn’t bother you too much. It’s only after they start annoying you personally that you discover you’ve hated them all along, eh?”