A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (16 page)

Periodically vehicles would pass, going in either direction. There were not many of them, but there were enough that he did not take any special notice when the van came around a corner a hundred meters up the road and headed in his direction. He did not notice it until it turned into the car park of the Hotel Udet and pulled up in front of the main entrance.

The van’s back doors flew open and disgorged six Waffen-SS storm troopers armed with automatic rifles, their coalscuttle helmets wrapped in plastic covers to protect them from the rain, followed by a black-uniformed SS officer carrying a pistol. The officer banged on the hotel’s front door and shouted something; he could not hear what, as the sound did not carry across the street through the rain’s hiss.

When no one had opened the door after a few moments, the officer nodded to one of the storm troopers, who stepped forward and smashed at the lock with the butt of his rifle. It took only five strokes for the lock to shatter and the door to swing open. The officer headed inside, followed by four of the storm troopers; the other two remained behind and took up guard stations at the entrance.

He watched Garner’s window, sickeningly certain of what was about to happen but unable to think of anything he could do to affect it. There was no way he could warn Garner; the storm troopers at the front entrance would see him if he tried throwing stones at his windowpane, and at any rate, the other troopers would be at the room door before Garner could climb out the window.

It actually took a good two or three minutes, much longer than he would have expected; he supposed that whatever intelligence had led the SS to Garner had not given them his room number, and they still had to find it once they had gotten inside the hotel. If they knocked at Garner’s door, Garner ignored them; all that was visible to him through the window was the door suddenly swinging freely open on its hinge as its lock was smashed from the other side.

Two of the storm troopers came first, training their rifles on something he couldn’t see. Then came the officer, who strode past his field of vision, followed by the last two storm troopers, who appeared to start immediately searching the room’s closet and chest of drawers. The officer reappeared a moment later, dragging Garner after him. He threw Garner to his knees and said something to him. Garner responded, seemingly calm, and the officer snapped back an angry response.

This time Garner did not respond. The officer spoke again, still to no response. Suddenly he struck Garner across the temple with the butt of his pistol, and Garner went sprawling. The two storm troopers calmly continued their methodical search. The officer bent over and hauled Garner back up to his knees, then spoke once more. Now Garner responded, but his words were few and probably glib.

The officer said something; no response. He shook his head and raised his pistol, setting it against Garner’s temple where he had just struck him. He spoke again, very briefly; Garner simply turned and stared up into his eyes. The officer pulled the trigger.

There was a flash, though even the sound of the gunshot could not penetrate through the window and carry across the street over the white noise of the rain. Blood spattered across the windowpane. The officer stared down at Garner’s body, then turned and spoke to the storm troopers guarding the doorway. One of them stepped forward and saluted, bent elbow snapping at a crisp military angle, fingers perfectly straight as they touched the brim of his helmet, then turned and headed out the room.

He did not wait around to see what would happen next. Since the officer had pulled the trigger he had been slowly backing further into the alley at whose mouth he stood. As soon as he was sure he was deep enough that there was no possibility of the storm troopers at the hotel entrance seeing him, he turned and ran for his life away from the Hotel Udet.

ELLIE LAY curled up on the bed, her face buried in the pillow, but she did not cry. She refused to cry. A Jew. He was a Jew. She almost could not believe it. He did not look or act like a member of a lesser race. He certainly had not felt different from a real human being when he pressed his body against hers—surely she would have been able to tell that she was about to give herself to a subhuman.

She knew she was somewhat unusual amongst Germans of her age in that she had actually seen a real Jew before. She had been very young at the time, three or four, still living in Volgaburg where her father was stationed, northwest of Moskau. She had been walking through the town square with her mother one cold autumn morning when a trio of Waffen-SS storm troopers had shepherded a half dozen hunched, broken-looking men through the square in the direction of the work camp outside of town. Their clothing, coarse fabric with faded black and white vertical stripes, had hung limply from their gaunt, malnourished frames. Their heads had been shaved, their skin sallow and loose. Some of them might have been in their twenties, or even their late teens, but their shriveled faces, sunken eyes, and hollow cheeks made them all look like old men.

They had shuffled despondently across the square and Ellie had stared at them curiously, even when her mother had herded her back and told her to keep her distance. The most chilling thing about them was their complete lack of reaction, their seeming inability to summon the energy to
care
about anything—the onlookers in the square, the biting cold through their thin fatigues, even when one of the SS storm troopers had suddenly slammed the butt of his rifle into one of the prisoners’ backs and laughed with his fellows to see the prisoner lurch and fall flat on his face. The prisoner had merely gotten back to his feet and rejoined the line. The troopers had not even bothered to bind their charges’ wrists. The young Ellie had watched them, wide-eyed, and known that these could not be
real
people.

A year or two later Ellie’s parents had dispatched her to the West, when her mother found her a place at a school in Heidelberg run by the
Bund Deutscher Madel
, the League of German Girls, and she had never again seen a Jew. Until tonight.

She tried in vain to reconcile Quinn—tall, athletic, intelligent, confident, quietly superior without being con-descending—with the godforsaken wretches she had seen that day so long ago in Volgaburg, no flicker of activity behind their glassy, lifeless eyes. How could he come from the same racial stock as they?

She lay on the bed for a long time, unmoving. After a while, feeling cold, she rose and examined her clothes, which she had hung over the radiator when she showered. Judging them dry enough, she changed out of the robe and back into her original clothing. She sat back on the bed and tucked her legs up underneath her.

She was an opponent, albeit secretly, of the National Socialist state. As the daughter of a Wehrmacht brigadier and an exemplary member of the BDM, the girls’ counterpart to the Hitler Youth, she had as an adolescent been selected for the trips abroad open only to the BDM elite. She had been exposed firsthand to life in Italy and Spain, fascist countries where the government had never managed to achieve the invasive dominance over every aspect of everyday life and thought that the regime in Germany had. She wanted political dissidence to be legalized in Germany, she wanted Germans to have a voice in their government, she wanted nuclear disarmament, and she wanted the Slavic population in the East to receive their own autonomous government, rather than serving as the slave labor that fed the Reich’s industrial base. But Jews? She had never considered that what her parents, her teachers, and her government had told her all her life of Jews, that they were a parasitic people who sucked on the vibrancy of European civilization while contributing nothing of their own, might not be true. It had simply never been an issue. A few isolated Jewish communities
clung to life in some of the countries on the fringe of fascist Europe, like Spain, Sweden, or Finland, where they had managed to maintain a degree of independence by not openly flouting it in the Führer’s face; but within the Reich and the directly occupied states, the Reich had purified the last Jew decades ago.

Yet she knew she could not simply dismiss Quinn that way. He was not the lecherous, deformed, grasping monster of her school history and racial biology textbooks, preying on her virginal—hmph, the look on her mother’s face if she ever learnt the truth about
that
little myth—Nordic virtue. She had been attracted to Quinn longer than she would have liked to admit; the beer tonight had simply diminished her inhibitions against acting upon that attraction. And more than that, she
liked
him—admired him, even. There was something noble to him: as much as she knew he would deny it if confronted, he was not the moral cynic he pretended to be. He fought for an ideal, though she was not sure what that ideal was. At first she had thought it was England; now that she knew his origin, she suspected it was simply the end of National Socialism. Just like her.

HE BOUNDED up the stairs and along the hallway, room key already in hand. He tried too hurriedly to force it into the lock and fumbled with it slightly, but after a moment he was able to slide it home and felt the lock click when he turned the key. He opened the door and went inside.

Ellie was sitting on the bed. She was already dressed. Good. He wondered idly if she had gotten dressed to leave before he returned, then he dismissed the thought; there were more important things to attend to now.

She looked up at him, her eyes wide, startled.

“Come on,” he said. “We have to leave. Now.” He bent down and picked up her pumps from beside the radiator, tossed them to her. They were still wet.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

He hesitated, then decided to tell her. “The Gestapo. They’ve found Garner. He’s dead. They could be coming after us next.”

She stared at him for a long moment without any visible reaction, then simply nodded and obediently slipped on her pumps. Once she had her coat on, he let her exit the room first, then followed her and closed the door behind them. He left the room key on the reception desk as they left the building.

It was all running through his mind, over and over.

The storm troopers emerging from the back of the van
.

Garner on his knees, refusing to let go of his dignity

He let her into the passenger side of the car, then went round to the driver’s side.

The officer setting the muzzle of his pistol against Garner’s temple, pausing, and then pulling the trigger; then calmly turning around and issuing orders to one of his storm troopers
.

They took the long way around the city center, so as to avoid passing the Hotel Udet. His soaked clothing clung to his body, chilling him, and at a red light he peeled off his jacket and tossed it on the back seat.

The storm trooper stepping forward and acknowledging the order with a salute
.

They drove in silence; he wondered what Ellie was thinking, whether she was still thinking about earlier tonight. He would have expected her to demand he tell her more, tell her what he had been doing with Garner and how he had escaped the Gestapo.

The officer had been so businesslike, as had the storm trooper to whom he spoke, saluting crisply, elbow bent at a perfect angle like he was on the parade ground, his eyes not even flicking down at the body at his feet
.

The rain was coming down as fiercely as ever, making it hard for him to see the road, and he had to go slowly. Once they got on the autobahn they were the only car heading northeast, and he was able to speed up a little, though not too much. Heading in the opposite direction, though, southwest from Nuremberg and Berlin, was a different story. Traffic, even at this late hour, was heavy, the road busy with mourners in their Volkswagen Cabriolets and KdF-Wagens bound for the Führer’s funeral in Linz, the day after tomorrow.

At last Ellie stirred. “Did they see you?” she asked. “The Gestapo?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What about Garner? Did you speak with him at all?”

“No.”

“I wonder how they found him.”

“Me too.”

“He’s definitely dead? He’s not in custody?” You saw his body? Or did you arrive after they had taken him?

“He’s definitely dead. I saw the whole thing from across the street.”

The officer had been so businesslike, as had the storm trooper to whom he spoke, saluting crisply, elbow bent at a perfect angle, his eyes not even flickering down at the body at his feet

He frowned. That couldn’t be right. Could it?

—
the storm trooper saluting crisply, elbow bent at a perfect angle, eyes not even flickering
—

—
elbow bent
—

He slammed on the brake and pulled over to the side of the road, throwing Ellie forward in her seat with a cry of surprise. If he had been driving one of the basic Volkswagens the Reich made so affordable to its working class citizens, like the cars passing them by in the opposite direction—the KdF-Wagen, or Strength-through-Joy car, or its slightly modified sibling, the Cabriolet—he would probably have left his transmission lying in the middle of the road behind them, but he was driving an SS Focke-Wulf. The mechanism gave a grating whine of protest and the stick fought back as he shifted gears, then all was well.

Ellie dusted herself off. Her eyes flashed angrily. “What the hell—”

Her exclamation died when she saw he was pointing his pistol at her.

“Are you working for the British?” he demanded.

She stared at him blankly, then managed, “What?”

He repeated himself more slowly. “Are you working for the British?”

She frowned. “What are you talking about?
You’re
working for the British.”

Her obvious confusion was already enough to satisfy him, but he still needed a denial. “And you’re not working for them behind my back?”

“What? No. No, of course not. What the hell is going on?”

“Then how did they bloody well find Richard Garner?”

She blinked. “
What?
”