The Lisbon Crossing (26 page)

“You’ve been a long time,”
Christien said, recognizing our footsteps before either of us spoke. “We have been worried.”

He and Gérard were at the kitchen table, seated across from Madame Moulichon. She gave Claude and me a suspicious look as we entered the room, then went back to staring into the cup of lemon tea that sat untouched in front of her.

“We had a couple of problems,” I said. “But it’s all right, we took care of it.”

Claude flopped into a chair, threw his cap on the table, and shook his head.
“Merde!”
was all he could say. Gérard poured us each a glass of wine while Christien explained that Raymond had gone to return the taxi to his uncle.

“And Eva?” I asked.

“She’s taken Abrielle to stay with a neighbor. It seemed a better place for her.”

I nodded and glanced over at the maid. “What does she have to say for herself?”

“She is too frightened to speak.”

“Can’t say that I blame her.”

I accepted a cigarette from Christien, leaned against the door frame, and sipped the wine, wishing it was whiskey. When I heard the front door open and close, I slipped out to intercept Eva before she could get to the back.

“Well?” I said.

She smiled, put her hands on my shoulders, and kissed me on the cheek. “It was sewn into the lining of her case.”

“And? Is it as good as advertised?”

“It’s incredible,” she said in an excited whisper. “It’s a report, Jack—a recent one—laying out Britain’s entire air defense system. Every radar installation along the English and Scottish coasts, and everything you’d want to know about them.”

I let loose a low whistle. “That’s big all right. Where is it?”

“I’ve hidden it.”

“Where?”

She hesitated. “There’s no point us both knowing, is there?”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

She smiled and averted her eyes, glancing around the room, though there was nothing to look at. “I just don’t see why we should both know where it is, that’s all.”

She tried to slip by, but I cut her off.

“I’d like to see it, Eva.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to have a look, that’s all.”

“I’ve told you what it is. Don’t you trust me?”

I was taken aback. “It’s got nothing to do with trust, Eva. I’d just like to see what I’ve been risking my life for.”

“It’s better that you don’t know where it is,” she said, trying to close the discussion while making another attempt to get around me. I grabbed her by the arm.

“I think I know why you don’t want to tell me.”

“Let go of me, Jack.”

“You think if we get caught, I’d tell them. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re afraid I’d fold.”

She yanked her arm free and gave me a dry look.

“I don’t know if you would or you wouldn’t. And neither do you. This way, we won’t have to put it to the test.”

I was trying hard not to say something that I would later regret when Claude appeared from the back room.

“Oh, pardon,”
he said, looking a little embarrassed that he’d stepped into our argument. “But the maid, she cries.”

S
he was bawling her eyes out, in fact. The poor woman had been able to contain her alarm for several hours by maintaining an absolute stony silence, but her fear had finally reached breaking point, and without warning, she’d exploded into a flood of tears. The boys thought that Eva, being a woman, would know what to do.

She sat down, took Madame Moulichon’s hand in hers, and said a few gentle words in French. The maid responded with what sounded to me like a series of whimpering sobs, but everyone else exchanged a meaningful look.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She thinks we’re going to kill her,” Eva said without flourish. Then she turned back to the maid, looked her in eye, and lied.

“I promise that no one is going to hurt you,” she said, in French. “You’ve had a shock, why don’t you lie down for a while? A rest will help you recover, then someone will take you home.” Worn down, Madame Moulichon acquiesced.

Christien told Claude to put her in his bedroom—and lock the door. No one said anything once she’d gone, but no one had to. We all understood that the poor woman had been right. We were going to have to kill her.

M
adame Moulichon was an innocent bystander, with no idea of the significance of what she was carrying, and she certainly didn’t deserve to be murdered in cold blood. But in war, innocence
and justice are not the criteria for who will live and who will die.

She had to die because letting her live would be too risky. That simple. It was possible, of course, that if we’d explained the significance of the document she was transporting, patriotism would’ve outweighed loyalty to her masters, and she would’ve told the Windsors that the papers had disappeared from the safe. Maybe she would’ve promised not to run to the gendarmes with a story about the men from Montmartre who’d abducted her, and maybe she would’ve even smiled at us, and said we were doing the right thing. But that was just too many maybes, and the stakes were just too high. So we had no choice but to get rid of her.

“Gérard will do what is necessary tonight,” Christien finally said, breaking the silence.

I needed a real drink, so I headed to the front room to see what I could find at the bar. As I passed through the door into the club, I was feeling on edge, preoccupied with Madame Moulichon, and I never saw what hit me. Whatever it was, it came down like a hammer—a dull, heavy blow at the back of my head, accompanied by a loud
thwack
and a simultaneous explosion of pain.

Then the lights went out.

I came to
in a sitting position, hands bound together and tied to the back of a hard wooden chair. My head felt like it had been hit by a runaway train. I opened my eyes, got a blast of light and pain, tried to break through both. The first thing that came into slow focus was Popov, sitting across the room, at the bar, smoking a cigarette. He looked nervous. Like he was waiting for something to happen.

The room had been pretty well turned upside down. Furniture upended, banquettes ripped open, pictures pulled off the walls and smashed onto the floor. I was momentarily blank, then it all came back in a rush—the maid…the abduction…the duke’s papers. They must not have found them, I thought. If they had, I probably wouldn’t be waking up at all.

“Jack…?”

Easing my head around while trying to keep my battered brain from bumping up against my skull, I found Eva seated on my left, just a couple of feet away. Like me, she was secured to a chair, hands tied behind her back. So were Gérard, Christien, and Claude. The five of us formed a small circle, about ten feet across, in an area in front of the stage that had been cleared of tables and chairs.

“…Are you all right, Jack?”

Her voice was distant, muffled, the words lagging behind her lips, like she was disconnected from her body. Concussion, I thought. Like the time I did a swan dive off a stagecoach and landed headfirst on a boulder. I wasn’t myself for a couple of days then, but I didn’t have the luxury of that kind of time now. I tried to refocus and must’ve given Eva a pretty odd look, because she frowned and looked at me sideways, as though she was trying to figure out if I was still in there.

“Jack…?”

“Yeah…” I groaned. “I…I’m okay.” Not really, though, because just saying the words sent a knifelike pain shooting down the back of my neck, across my shoulders, and along the length of my spine. It helped bring me back to reality, but I must’ve cried out because Popov swiveled his head around and gave me a sour look.

“Mr. Jack Teller,” he hissed. “So you are awoken.”

Slipping off the bar stool, he crossed the room and planted himself a couple of feet in front of me. He stood there watching me for a moment, blowing smoke into the air without saying anything. Just seeing him again made my stomach churn.

“It’s better if you have stayed in Hollywood,” he finally said, poking his cigarette at my chest. “Better for all of us.”

“How about I apologize and we can all be friends again?” Popov, unappreciative of my humor, tossed his cigarette aside, pulled a 9mm Glock out of his jacket pocket, and pointed it at my head.

“You think you are really quite clever, but in fact you are the opposite.” He took a step closer, pressed the barrel up against my forehead, which got my full attention. “You have fucked up everything when you take her off this boat.”

“That’s right, Jack…” Eva chose an opportune moment to jump in. “Roman would’ve been the toast of Berlin if you hadn’t interfered. Isn’t that right, Roman?”

It took him a moment to take his eyes off me, but when he finally looked over at Eva, he lowered the handgun.

“I thought that you were smarter,” he said.

“I’m smarter now,” she said. “You see, Jack, Roman has British intelligence fooled, as well. They think he’s on their side, just as I did. He was sending me off to London to become an agent for them when you showed up and ruined it all.”

“You don’t know anything,” Popov moaned, but Eva kept talking.

“Had I arrived in England,” she continued, “I would’ve been given training and a new identity, then put in the field—back in Germany, or even here, in France. Roman would’ve been my control agent, so I would’ve been feeding everything through him, thinking he was forwarding it on to London. But, of course, he wouldn’t have been doing that at all. He would’ve been passing it straight to his friends in Berlin, who would replace it with whatever misinformation they wanted London to have. So you see why Roman is so upset with you, Jack. You ruined quite a good plan by taking me off that boat.”

“Silly me,” I said.

Popov dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand, and shoved the gun back into his pocket. “You are both fools,” he mumbled as he made his way back to the bar.

The door to the back rooms opened and Engel stepped into the room, escorting Madame Moulichon.

“Nichts,”
he said, which I took to mean that, though he’d found the maid, he hadn’t located the missing papers after tossing the rest of the building. Popov nodded, suggested that he put the lady in the car and bring the other one back with him. I couldn’t think who he meant by the other one, but it wasn’t long to find out.

R
aymond was alive, but just barely. Beaten senseless, he couldn’t stand up on his own, let alone walk, and his face and torso were so covered in blood that he looked like he’d been turned inside out. Engel dragged him across the room and let him fall, facedown, onto
the floor in the center of the circle. He lay there, limbs flailing back and forth like a crushed insect—maybe a last-ditch, pitiful attempt to escape, or maybe just indiscriminate muscle spasms, the result of random electronic impulses firing along his shattered nervous system.

“This is a tragedy,” Popov said, shaking his head as he looked down on the poor soul, a snarl of distaste fixed onto his lips. “And it has not been necessary. He told us, in the end, what we wanted to know. Here we are to prove it.”

“Du vergeuden Zeit,”
Engel snarled. “You’re wasting time.” Popov gave him a look and continued.

“We have brought him here so that you will see what will happen if you try to—”

“He is a hero…” Christien said quietly, his voice filled with emotion. Popov sighed, put on a vexed expression.

“You are fortunate to be blind in this instance,” he said. “Because if you can see your friend, you would know—”

“I know that he is a hero!” Christien shot back defiantly. He leaned forward in his chair and called out.

“ÉCOUTE, RAYMOND?! TU ES UN HÉROS! UN HÉROS DE LA FRANCE!”

Claude and Gérard quickly joined in, calling out a chorus of praise to their struggling comrade:

“RAYMOND! TU ES UN HÉROS!…UN HÉROS DE LA FRANCE!”

The battered drummer slowly turned his head up toward the sound and—I can’t be sure about this, but I thought I saw a flicker of a smile form across his bloodied face at the very last moment, just before Engel stepped forward and fired a single bullet into the back of his head. Someone gasped, then there was stunned silence. Even Popov looked shocked.

I watched Engel. There was no sign of emotion on his face, no suggestion that firing a bullet into a man’s brain had any effect on him whatsoever. It was an execution, carried out with cold, military indifference, and it seemed to give him neither pleasure nor pain, and
certainly no pause. I wondered if being able to kill like that was something he was born with, or if it was repetition that had inured him to the act.

He studied Raymond’s corpse for a brief moment, then swung around, raised the pistol again, and fired a shot into Christien’s forehead. The chair fell backward onto the floor, and just like that, Christien was dead, too.

“Another fallen hero of France,”
Popov moaned. “I hope there will be no need for more.”

Unlike Engel, who betrayed no emotion, the violence was making the Slav visibly edgy. He stepped around Raymond’s mangled body to continue his interrogation.

“A document has been stolen,” he announced, walking the circumference of the chairs as he spoke. “This must be returned. If one of you chooses to speak now, he—or she—will save all of you. This will be the only opportunity to speak without consequences.”

Popov didn’t expect any takers, so he didn’t wait for any volunteers. He stopped behind Eva’s chair, crouched down, and whispered in her ear.

“What can I offer you? The lives of your friends? I can give you that.”

He got nothing but stony silence.

“I’m sorry, then,” he said, sounding almost genuine. “Truly, I am sorry, Eva. I wish it could be—”

“Get on with it,” she said sharply.

Popov sighed and moved away. He seemed to have genuine regret for what was to come, but he knew Eva, so he knew that she couldn’t be frightened or threatened into submission. She was too strong to be manipulated, but there are very few people who can stand up to the kind of torture that Raymond had been subjected to.

Popov nodded to Engel, and as the German moved toward Eva, my heart sank into the pit of my stomach. Engel took hold of the back rung of her chair and dragged it into the center of the circle. I could see that she was frightened—who wouldn’t be?—but she clenched her jaw and stared the Angel of Darkness square in the face. A trace of a smile appeared on his scarred lips, and I understood that, unlike the others, he didn’t see Eva as a faceless victim. With her, it would be personal.

He put on a pair of black gloves, then removed a short leather truncheon from his pocket—the same instrument, no doubt, that had made a cripple out of Raymond, and bruised the base of my skull. I wanted to explode out of my chair, take the bastard by the throat, and choke the life out of him…

Stay cool, I told myself…It’s over if you don’t stay cool…

“So I guess it’s true what they say about Nazis,” I said as loudly and clearly as I could muster, waiting for his eyes to pivot around on me before I continued.

“Everyone knows that they’re pigs, of course,” I said, my voice sounding surprisingly breezy. “But I didn’t believe until now that they’re cowards, too.”

“Jack…” Eva moaned, but I kept my eyes locked on Engel.

His expression of utter incredulity would’ve been funny if I didn’t know that behind it he was pondering the best way to take me apart, piece by bloody piece. He didn’t budge, didn’t blink, I don’t think he even breathed. He just stood there, studying me, like a sadistic schoolboy might study a fly before relieving it of its wings.

“It’s obvious from the way you smell that you’re
ein Schwein,
”
I said, closing the deal. “And now we all see that you’re
ein Feigling
, because you’re obviously too frightened to untie me and fight like a man.”

He struck first at my solar plexus, driving the truncheon deep into my abdomen, just below the rib cage. A visceral blow like that doesn’t just “knock the air out you,” like most people think. It initiates an acute and sudden trauma to a cluster of nerves that lies behind the stomach, resulting in a muscle spasm that makes it physically impossible to draw a breath.

I doubled over, gasping for air, and was on the verge of blacking out when I was treated to a crushing blow to my kidneys, sending white-hot pain rushing into every corner of my torso. Stuck between a desperate search for oxygen and the paralyzing agony of a bruised organ, my brain seized up and I must’ve gone into some sort of psycho-traumatic shock.

My head went a little funny.

The next thing I knew I was lying on the floor, still tied to the chair, staring at a pair of leather boots. But when I looked up, it wasn’t Walter Engel—
der Engel der Schwärzung
—who was standing over me. It was Mickey Rooney. I don’t mean to say that my rattled mind got momentarily confused because Engel looked a bit like the young star. I mean that, as far as I was concerned, I was in the midst of a knock-down, drag-out fight to the death with little Mickey Rooney.

Unusual role for him, I thought. He even has a knife in his hand. I panicked because I couldn’t remember what the hell my next move was supposed to be. Was I supposed to win, or was my character supposed to die in this scene? I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. Shit, we’d probably have to do another take and I’d have to listen to the director moan all through lunch. He might even fire me. The actors can screw up till the cows come home, but the stunt guys don’t get a second shot.

The knife looks particularly real, I thought, even at close range. Rooney held it like a pro, too. Not like most actors, who look like
they’re getting ready to butter a roll. I braced for the kill, but was surprised when, instead of plunging the retractable blade into my chest, the actor brought the knife around the back of the chair and cut my bindings free. That’s odd, I thought.

Then Rooney fed me a line:

“Maybe you can show me now how you fight like a man.” He smiled wickedly, and the German accent wasn’t bad, either. Maybe he’s playing a bad guy, after all, I thought.

“Get up, Jack! For God’s sake, get up and fight!”

Eva’s voice snapped me back to reality, along with the sight of Engel’s boot heading for my teeth. I did a quick roll out of the chair, got a rush of air as his foot swept by, and ended up facedown on the floor, staring Louis Armstrong in the face.

The big black-and-white photograph had been dropped onto the floor and stomped on by the same boot that had just tried to stomp on my head. And there, lying on top of Satchmo’s wild-eyed, horn-blowing face, was just what the doctor ordered—a long piece of thick, razorlike glass that came to a beautifully sharp, flesh-piercing point.

Grabbing the blunt end with both hands, I rolled back the way I came and buried the shard into the first thing I came across, which happened to be Engel’s thigh muscle. He hit the floor screaming, spitting out German curses. He instinctively reached for the wound, but just drove the glass farther into the muscle before it broke off, leaving a large piece embedded in his leg.

A shot of adrenaline brought me to my feet. Grabbing the nearest thing available, I lifted my discarded chair high over my head and brought it down toward Engel’s head. He saw it coming and was able to get his Luger halfway out of its holster before I caught him across the neck and shoulders.

He fell backward and the gun went spinning across the floor. I got there first, took the pistol in both hands, and spun around, ready to empty it into Engel—

“STOP!”

I pivoted, saw that Popov had the Glock buried in Eva’s ear.

“PUT IT DOWN!” he said. “PUT DOWN THE GUN!”

“KILL THEM! JACK!” Eva cried out. “KILL THEM BOTH!”

“I PROMISE YOU THAT I WILL SHOOT A BULLET INTO HER HEAD!” Popov screamed, his voice charged with emotion.

My mind raced. I might get one of them, maybe I’d even kill them both, if I got lucky, but not before Popov pulled the trigger. I had no doubt that he would. He’d pull the trigger as I shot Engel, then it would be a race to see if Popov or I survived. It wouldn’t matter, though, not to me, because she’d be gone, and there would be no changing that.

Popov took a step back and planted himself, ready to absorb the gun’s kick.

“DECIDE!” he yelled. “NOW!”

I tossed the gun onto the floor.

“Jack…” Eva moaned. “Oh, Jack…They’re going to kill me anyway…They’re going to kill us all…”

Popov exhaled and lowered his gun. He mumbled something to himself which I didn’t understand, then looked up at me and nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Now we must see if she feels the same about you.” He gave the nod to the Angel, who struggled to his feet, scooped up the Luger, and took aim at my head. I looked to Eva and she looked to me.

“Well, Eva?” Popov said. “Do you love him as much as he loves you?”

I tried to smile at her, to let her know that it was okay, I didn’t mind, but I doubt it looked like a smile. Tears spilled onto her cheeks and ran down her face.

“Just say it,” Popov persisted. “Say that you love him.”

She inhaled sharply and seemed to stop breathing.

“Do you love him, Eva?”

“Yes…” she whispered, barely audible. “Yes, I love him!”

“Then you cannot let him die for the sake of a few papers. Do for him what he did for you. You must save the man you love.”

She turned her eyes toward me. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, too, and that whatever they did with us, it didn’t matter, because we’d had each other, and I was happy with that, I didn’t need more.

But I didn’t get a chance to say anything. A shot rang out and I fell to the floor.

I
cried out in pain and grabbed my leg. The bullet had ripped a hole through my right thigh, in the same spot I’d stabbed Engel with the shard of glass. Payback, I guess—but it was just his appetizer.

He picked up the chair that I’d attacked him with and brought it crashing down across a table, smashing it to pieces. Then he selected a long fragment of wood, with a sharp, splintered end, and limped forward, toward me. He stood there for a moment, expressionless, before he carefully placed the pointed end of the wood an inch over the bullet hole he’d just put in my leg. He moved suddenly, driving it hard into the wound with all his might, then twisting it back and forth sharply. My entire being screamed out in unspeakable agony.

“SCHWEIN!”
Eva shrieked from across the room.
“HE’S RIGHT! YOU ARE A PIG AND A COWARD!”
Engel pulled back, threw the wood aside, and turned toward her tearstained face. He smiled.

“I know that I will break you,” he said matter-of-factly. “Of this I can be sure. Because you are weak. Your emotions make you so. It has been already shown.”

Eva breathed in deeply and cast him a steely glare.

“You are the devil on earth,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion. “And there is nothing—nothing in this world—that can make me help you again!”

There was a moment of stunned silence, then we became aware of a voice. It cut through the night, like a knife through my heart—
outside, on the street, distant at first, but approaching quickly, the high-pitched voice of a little girl singing a carefree song to herself as she made her way home from a visit with the neighbor…