He sat on an upturned nail barrel near his boiler, then brought kindling from the wood rack and carefully placed it on the fire. It wasn't a boiler, really, just a ten-gallon hot-water heater, but it worked well enough. The heater was held over the fire by an angle-iron contraption Kahr had fashioned using the vise on his bench. A pipe ran from the top of the heater to an automobile radiator, which sat in a barrel of cold water. Vapor from the boiling mash traveled through the pipe to condense in the radiator. Kahr had learned how to make a still when be worked at the mustard gas plant near Cologne during the Great War. He and the crew maintained a still at one end of the plant, and were careful not to confuse the two products.
With the tip of his boot, Kahr pushed a few embers back into the fire. On the workbench were bottles and a bag of corks. Kahr drank much of his output, but he also traded it for food, something other than army food. Half a kilometer down the road, Widow Wenner would swap a bottle of apple spirits for a platter of doughnuts, which were at least edible, unlike the Wehrmacht variety, called "sinkers."
Kahr didn't know which gave him more comfort, the whiskey or tending the fire. It was a small fire, just enough to warm his corner of the shed and bring the mash to a boil. The fire demanded just enough attention to dull his misery. With his family gone—all his sons—he spent more time in the shed than in the house a hundred meters away. Every piece of furniture and every corner of the house brought back memories, so he preferred the goat shed. The place was lit by five oil lamps. It smelled of sour mash, old leather harnesses, and a hundred years of goats. The boiler gurgled in a satisfying way. Though he could not see the steam, Kahr could picture it drifting along the pipe toward the radiator. Slits of night could be seen through the walls, and Kahr sat there with his coat on.
The farm had been his father's, and his father's father before that. The tools along the wall—the pitchfork and shovels and harnesses and scythes—were older than Kahr. The farm no longer had any animals. They'd all been sold off or eaten, even the goats who once lived in this shed. Nothing to tend anymore on his farm, except the still. He lifted a handful of straw to toss onto the blaze. Kahr liked the spurt of fire that resulted.
His head came up. He knew the sounds of this place, and he'd just heard a noise that wasn't of the shed. He pivoted on the barrel to face the door. Its hinges were as old as the farm, and couldn't even be looked at without squeaking. Had it been the hinges? No, something else, a wood sound. Someone stepping on wood, or tripping on it. Maybe out at the stack of firewood. Kahr listened, wishing for once the fire and boiler didn't make so much noise. He looked at the bottle near the barrel he was sitting on, wondering if he'd drunk too much. Then the noise came again. Closer. Someone outside the goat shed who couldn't see in the dark, and was tripping over wood or stepping on shavings, something.
Kahr rose from the barrel and lifted the pitchfork from its wooden pegs. The fork had three prongs, each half-a-man long. The wooden handle was shiny from use, years of lifting hay from the rick and tossing it to ungrateful cows. He edged toward the door, bringing up the pitchfork and cocking his arms. Anybody coming through the door was going to wear a pitchfork.
"Sergeant Kahr?" A woman's voice. Somewhere out in the night. "Sergeant Kahr, may I speak with you?"
Kahr was silent. He didn't know any women except Widow Wen- ner, and the widow wouldn't be out walking around his farm in the mud at night. And the widow had a frog's voice, a bass crackle. The voice outside the goat shed was young. And cultured. Kahr could tell in just those few words.
"Come near the shed," he called in a gruff voice, trying to sound armed. "Where I can see you."
Katrin von Tornitz stepped into the circle of frail light coming from the shed. Her blue coat was tight around her waist, and her arms were out for balance on the slippery field. Her shoes were slight and cut low, and muddied, and her coat had shiny buttons and large lapels. Her dark hair was cut to her shoulders. This was a city girl, no question.
"Sergeant?" She smiled at him. "May I have a word with you?"
"Are you alone?" Kahr stepped through the door to look left and right. "What are you doing out here?"
"I've come from Berlin, and I rode a bicycle all the way. Can I come in out of the cold?"
"Into the goat shed?" Kahr lowered the pitchfork.
''Maybe it's warmer in there."
Kahr glanced over her shoulder. "You alone?"
"It's important, Sergeant Kahr. You'll profit by it."
He hesitated, then said, "Sure, come in."
The sergeant led Katrin into the shed. "It's not much, but it's better than where I serve my army time." He turned over another barrel, then dragged it toward the fire. He brushed clinging straw and dirt from the barrel. "Have a seat. Do you want something to drink?" He waved toward the bottles. "A lady like you might not appreciate what I stir up here, but they'll do the job for you." He sat across from her, lifted his bottle, and swallowed gratefully.
She shook her head at the offer, then said, "Sergeant, I don't want you to be frightened."
His chin came up. "I'm not frightened."
"Well, you are going to be in a minute, as I was the first time I saw him. As everyone is, when they see him."
"Who? Who are you talking about?"
"And it isn't as if I had a choice to be with him."
"Who?" Kahr glanced at the door. Nothing outside but darkness.
"The war has forced him on me. I wouldn't tolerate him otherwise."
"Who?"
"If it weren't for this terrible struggle, I'd find his presence intolerable. My association with this man should not be held against me."
"Who?"
From the shed door came a new voice. "Will you just make the introductions, for God's sake?"
Katrin added, "I just don't want you to be afraid, Sergeant."
Sergeant Kahr had seen the posters in Berlin, and now he saw the man standing at the door. Terror lifted him from the barrel as if by the nape of his neck, and his face bunched with fear. He backpedaled, bumping into the boiler. At first he could do nothing but stare at Jack Cray, but then he scooped up the pitchfork and held it up, the points at the level of Cray's neck.
The sergeant glanced reprovingly at Katrin. "You said you were alone."
"No, I didn't," she replied. "But when I'm with this American, I wish I were."
Cray said to the sergeant, "This lady is nicer than she acts."
"What are you going to do?" Kahr's voice was windy with fright.
"What do you have in those bottles?" Cray nodded toward the workbench where the glass dully reflected the lamplight.
"Some of it is schnapps. Some of it is vodka. And some of it, I don't know what to call."
"May I have a drink?"
The pitchfork was lowered slightly. "That all you want?"
"I want to talk."
Kahr peered at the American. "What kind of talk? The kind you did at the chateau?"
"About family." Cray pushed the tines aside and stepped to the workbench. "And what it's like to lose a son."
Katrin said, "We know your son is gone."
The sergeant snorted. "Not just one. All three of them. All dead within a year."
"What's this?" Cray held up a jar of clear fluid.
"Made of apples. Apple peels and cores, actually."
Cray sipped from the bottle, then sharply drew in air through his teeth. "Could use another ten or fifteen minutes of aging."
Kahr glanced at the pitchfork in his hands. He had heard tales of German commandos, how they trained and how rugged they were. And the legendary Otto Skorzeny had visited the Führer in the bunker, and everyone down there had talked about Skorzeny and his men, how they had rescued Mussolini. This American was much like Skorzeny, must be, with his operation against the Vassy Chateau. And he looked as tough as Skorzeny. Kahr decided a pitchfork was useless against the American, would have all the effect of spitting from a flatcar. He hung the fork back on its pegs.
Cray wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Where I'm from, we call this applejack."
"I tried to make it taste like schnapps." Kahr returned to his upturned barrel. "Sometimes I add spices to the mix, when I can find them."
The woman was staring with disapproval at the American. Finally she said, "We didn't come all the way out here for you to drink liquor."
Cray took another swallow. "There's a taste of lead in it."
"From the automobile radiator. I flushed it out as well as I could, but the lead flavor is still there."
With the bottle still in one hand, Cray dragged a sawhorse to the circle of warmth around the boiler. "Drink enough of this, the lead will make you blind." He passed the bottle to Kahr.
"I'm not going to live long enough to worry about it." The sergeant took the bottle and brought it to his mouth. "No survivors where I'm posted. We're all going to fall, right to the last man. That's what my Schutzstaffel friends tell me, not that they're really my friends." He added happily, "The Russians are going to kill every one of them when the Red Army gets to Berlin. I only hope they run out of bullets before they get to us regular army folks."
"I ever tell you my father once made a barrel of this stuff?" Cray leaned back, bringing his feet to the fire to warm them. "Tasted about like yours."
"Yeah?" Kahr sipped from the bottle again, then passed it back to the American. "I'll bet he didn't have the problems that I do finding yeast for the mash."
Katrin cut in, "What is this talk?"
Cray took another pull from the bottle. "He'd use Red Delicious apples from our farm, in the state of Washington. Place called Wenatchee, right on the Columbia River. The best apples in the world, some of them almost the size of my head, their color as glorious as a sunset."
"I used to grow those big red ones myself, between the wars. Right out there." Kahr waved at a wall. "Sixty-four trees in perfect rows. A lovely sight. But when I was called up into the army in 1943—an old gent like me, so I knew the Wehrmacht was getting desperate — I didn't have the time to work the orchards. Prop up the apples. Do the culling."
"My dad even had an apple press." Cray smiled at the recollection. "And I'd help him by turning the crank…"
She interrupted again. "Two men, sitting around a fire, drinking, having a fine time, like in some beer hall. That's not why we came out here."
Sergeant Kahr stared morosely at her.
So did Cray. He said to the sergeant, "She's been a lot of fun, you can tell." He passed the spirits back to Kahr.
"To business," Katrin insisted. Her hair reflected the fire like obsidian.
Cray rubbed the side of his nose with a finger. "You've lost three sons, Sergeant." Colonel Becker had reported Kahr's missing sons to Cray.
Kahr nodded. "No one to leave the farm to now. I can't think about it much.
I...
I don't have..." His voice was just audible above the crackling of the fire. "So I sit out here in the goat shed."
Cray smiled broadly. "I'll give you one of them back."
The sergeant's brow furled.
"One of your sons," Cray said.
"That's a poor joke, friend."
The American pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. From it he withdrew a photograph. He held it up to the sergeant and said grandly, "Wehrmacht Corporal Max Kahr sits in a Russian POW camp six hundred kilometers from here."
Ulrich Kahr stared at the photo, his knuckles white on the bottle. "That can't be him."
"Look closely." Cray smiled again. "This photograph was taken within the past week."
For a long moment the sergeant looked blankly at the photograph, unable to take in all that it conveyed. Then his voice was the ghost of a whisper. "I was told my boy was dead." Kahr blinked repeatedly but he could not stop the tears. Finally he had to dab at his eyes.
Katrin said, "We can get him released from the POW camp, Sergeant Kahr."
"And returned to you," Cray added. "In a matter of days."
Kahr was breathing quickly, the joy flooding him. Forgetful of himself, he swayed, first right, then left. Cray put a hand on the sergeant's knee, lest he might topple.
The sergeant intoned, "You have no idea ... no idea what my boys mean to me. . . . My last boy ... "
"Well, there is one small catch," Cray said, almost apologetically.
And it brought Sergeant Kahr up as if he had been snagged by one of Otto Skorzeny's grappling hooks. "A catch? What? What is it you want?"
Cray held out his hands, palms up, a gesture of complete equanimity. "It's nothing."
"Nothing?" Kahr repeated.
Cray smiled again, reaching for the bottle. "A small thing, really."
10
HALF AN HOUR later they left Sergeant Kahr to his distilling and walked around his farmhouse, then out the driveway, with pasture on both sides. The moon's shadow was dappled by the boughs of elms that lined the driveway. The boundary of Kahr's small property was marked by a stone wall. Cray and Katrin approached their bicycles, which were leaning against the wall near Kahr's mailbox at the mam road.
Cray pointed. "What direction is that?"
"West,"
"How can you tell?"
"See the orange clouds that way?" She pointed, too, but at a ninety-degree angle off Cray's direction. "Berlin burning, a reflection of the fires. Orange clouds are our unfailing compass."
Cray glanced east. "Do you hear something?"
She followed his gaze. "The wind."
"Are there train tracks near here?"
"I don't know."
He looked at her, an impish cast to his eyes. "Thanks for the date tonight. I had a good time."
"Date? What date?"
"You and me, sitting in front of the fire, having a couple drinks."
She was brought up. "That wasn't a date. And you weren't really drinking. You tasted his liquor, and after that was pretending to drink. I noticed that after a while."
He kept on walking, nearing the bicycles. "Then why did I have the most fun in two years, if that wasn't a date?"