The Wolf's Hour (6 page)

“Oh,” Shackleton said, and wiped his hands on his trouser legs.

“The ruins were still sturdy. I decided to try to put it back together again. It took me all of four years, and I still have a lot to do. In case you’re wondering, I’ve got a generator that runs on petrol out back.”

“I figured you didn’t have power lines way out here.”

“No. Not way out here. You’ll be sleeping in the tower room where the pastor died. It’s not a very large room, but the bed’s big enough for two.” The door opened and closed, and Michael glanced back at Humes-Talbot and the chauffeur. Michael stared for a few seconds, unblinking, as the old man took off his hat and topcoat. “You can sleep here,” Michael said, with a gesture toward the cot. “The kitchen’s through that door, if you want coffee or anything to eat,” he told all three of them. “I keep hours you might find odd. If you hear me up in the middle of the night… stay in your room,” he said, with a glance that made the back of Shackleton’s neck crawl.

“I’m going up to rest.” Michael started up the stairs. He paused and selected a book. “Oh… the bathroom and shower are behind the house. I hope you don’t mind cold water. Good night, gentlemen.” He ascended the steps, and in another moment they heard a door softly close.

“Damn weird,” Shackleton muttered, and he trudged into the kitchen for something to chew on.

4

Michael sat up in bed and lit an oil lamp. He hadn’t been sleeping, only waiting. He picked up his wristwatch from the small table beside his bed, though his sense of time told him it was after three. It was three-oh-seven.

He sniffed the air, and his eyes narrowed. A smell of tobacco smoke. Burley and latakia, a potent blend. He knew that aroma, and it called him.

He was still dressed, in his khakis and black sweater. He slipped on his loafers, picked up the lamp, and followed its yellow glow down the circular staircase.

A couple of fresh logs had been added to the hearth, and a polite fire burned. Michael saw a haze of pipe smoke drifting above the high-backed leather chair that faced the flames. The cot was empty.

“Let’s talk, Michael,” the man who called himself Mallory said.

“Yes sir.” He drew up a chair and sat down with the lamp on a table between them.

Mallory-not his real name, but one of many-laughed quietly, the pipe’s bit clenched between his teeth. Firelight glinted in his eyes, and now he didn’t appear nearly as old and unsteady as he’d been when he first entered the house. “ ‘Stay in your room,’ ” he said, and laughed again. His real voice, unmasked, had a gravelly edge. “That was good, Michael. You scared the balls off that poor Yank.”

“Does he have any?”

“Oh, he’s quite a capable officer. Don’t let the bluff and bluster fool you; Major Shackleton knows his job.” Mallory’s penetrating gaze slid toward the other man. “And you do, too.” Michael didn’t answer. Mallory smoked his pipe in silence for a moment, then said, “What happened to Margritta Phillipe in Egypt wasn’t your fault, Michael. She knew the risks, and she did her job bravely and well. You killed her assassin and exposed Harry Sandler as an agent for the Nazis. You also did your job bravely and well.”

“Not well enough.” This still made the sick sensation of grief gnaw at his insides. “If I’d been alert that night, I might have saved Margritta’s life.”

“It was her time,” Mallory said flatly, a statement from a professional in the arena of life and death. “And your time of brooding over Margritta should end now.”

“When I find Sandler.” Michael’s face was tight, and heat rose in his cheeks. “I knew he was a German agent as soon as Margritta showed me the wolf he said he’d sent her from Canada. To me it was perfectly clear it was a Balkan wolf, not Canadian. And the only way Sandler could’ve killed a Balkan wolf was to go on a hunting trip with his Nazi friends.” Harry Sandler, the big-game hunter from America who’d been written about in Life magazine, had vanished after Margritta’s murder, and left no tracks. “I should have made Margritta leave the house that night. Immediately. Instead I…” He clenched his hands on the chair’s armrests. “She trusted me,” he said, in a hushed voice.

“Michael,” Mallory said, “I want you to go to Paris.”

“Is it that vital that you be involved with this?”

“Yes. That vital.” He puffed smoke and removed the pipe from his mouth. “We’ll have one chance, and one chance only, for the invasion to be successful. The time frame, as of now, is the first week of June. That’s subject to change, according to the weather and the tides. We have to make sure ail potential disasters are dealt with, and I can tell you that watching these commanders hash things out leaves a lot of room for the damnedest mistakes you could imagine.” He grunted, and smiled thinly. “We have to do our part to give them a clean house when they move in. If the Gestapo’s watching Adam so closely, you can be certain he has information they don’t want getting out. We have to learn what it is. With your… uh… special talents, there’s a possibility you can get in and out under the nose of the Gestapo.”

Michael watched the fire. The man sitting in the chair next to him was one of three people in the world who knew he was a lycanthrope.

“There’s another facet to this you should consider,” Mallory said. “Four days ago we received a coded message from our agent Echo, in Berlin. She’s seen Harry Sandler.”

Michael looked into the other man’s face. “Sandler was in the company of a Nazi colonel named Jerek Blok, an SS officer, who used to be commandant of Falkenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. So Sandler’s moving in some high circles.”

“Is Sandler still in Berlin?”

“We haven’t had word from Echo to indicate otherwise. She’s keeping watch on him for us.”

Michael grunted softly. He had no idea who Echo was, but he remembered Sandler’s ruddy-cheeked face from a Life magazine photograph, grinning as he rested one booted foot on a dead lion on the Kenya grassland.

“We can get you dossiers on Sandler and Blok, of course,” Mallory ventured on. “We don’t know what their connection might be. Echo would contact you in Berlin. What you might decide to do from there is up to your own discretion.”

My discretion, Michael thought. That was a polite way of saying that if he chose to kill Harry Sandler, he would be on his own.

“Your first mission, however, is to find out what Adam knows.” Mallory let a trail of smoke trickle from his mouth. “That’s imperative. You can relay the information through your French contact.”

“What about Adam? Don’t you want him out of Paris?”

“If possible.”

Michael mulled that over. The man who, in this instance, called himself Mallory was as infamous for what he left unsaid as for what he spelled out.

“We want to tie up all the loose ends,” Mallory said after a moment’s silence. “I’m intrigued by the same thing you are, Michael: why is an artist involved in this? Von Frankewitz is a nobody, a hack who does sidewalk portraits in Berlin. How is he involved with secrets of state?” Mallory’s eyes found Michael. “Will you do the job?”

Nyet, he thought. But he felt a pressure in his veins like the power of a steam furnace building heat. In two years he had not gone one day without thinking of how his friend, the Countess Margritta, had died while he slumbered in the embrace of spent passions. Finding Harry Sandler might wipe the slate clean. Probably not, but there would be satisfaction in hunting the hunter. And the situation with Adam and the impending invasion was a vital issue on its own. How might Adam’s information affect D-Day, and the lives of the thousands of soldiers who would storm ashore on a fateful morning in June?

“Yes,” Michael said, tension in his throat.

“I knew I could count on you at the eleventh hour,” Mallory said with a faint smile. “The wolf’s hour, isn’t it?”

“I have one request to make. My parachute training’s rusty. I’d like to go over by submarine.”

Mallory considered it briefly, then shook his head. “I’m sorry. Too risky with German patrol boats and mines in the Channel. A small transport plane is the safest alternative. We’ll whisk you to a place where you can sharpen your skills, do a few practice jumps. Piece of cake, as the Yanks say.”

Michael’s palms were wet, and he closed his fists. Only two things frightened him: confinement and heights. He couldn’t stand the roar and sputter of airplanes, and with his feet off the earth he felt diminished and weak. But there was no choice; he would have to bear it and forge ahead, though the parachute training would be sheer torture. “All right.”

“Splendid.” Mallory’s tone of voice said he’d known all along Michael Gallatin would accept the task. “You’re doing well, aren’t you, Michael? Getting enough sleep? Eating balanced meals? Not too much meat, I hope.”

“Not too much.” The forest was stocked with a large herd of deer and stags, plus wild boar and hares.

“I worry about you sometimes. You need a wife.”

Michael laughed, in spite of Mallory’s well-intentioned seriousness.

“Well,” Mallory amended, “perhaps not.”

They talked for a while longer, about the war, of course, because that was their crossroads of interest, and as the fire gnawed quietly on oak logs and the wind keened before dawn, the lycanthrope in service to the king stood up and ascended the stairs to his bedroom. Mallory slept in his chair before the hearth, his face in repose again that of an elderly chauffeur.

5

Dawn came gray and stormy as yesterday’s dusk. At six o’clock orchestral music roused Major Shackleton and Captain Humes-Talbot, whose backbones popped and moaned as they pried themselves out of the narrow and wholly uncomfortable dead pastor’s bed. They had slept clothed, to ward off the chill that sneaked in around the stained-glass window, and they went downstairs marked with unmilitary wrinkles.

Sleet slashed at the windows, and Shackleton thought he might scream. “Good morning,” Michael Gallatin said, sitting in the black leather chair before a newly built fire, a mug of hot Twinings Earl Grey tea in his hand. He wore a dark blue flannel robe and no shoes. “There’s coffee and tea in the kitchen. Also some scrambled eggs and local sausage, if you want any breakfast.”

“If that sausage is as strong as the local whiskey, I think I’ll pass,” Shackleton said, with a frown of distaste.

“No, it’s very mild. Help yourselves.”

“Where’s Mallory?” Humes-Talbot asked, looking around.

“Oh, he had his breakfast and went out to change the oil in the car. I let him use the garage.”

“What’s that racket?” Shackleton thought the music sounded like armies of demons clashing in hell. He walked to the Victrola and saw the record spinning around.

“Stravinsky, isn’t it?” Humes-Talbot inquired.

“Yes. The Rite of Spring. It’s my favorite composition. This is the part, Major Shackleton, where the village elders stand in a circle and watch a young girl dance herself to death in a pagan ritual of sacrifice.” Michael closed his eyes for a few seconds, seeing the dark purple and crimson of the leaping, frenzied notes. He opened them again, and stared at the major. “Sacrifice seems to be a particularly popular topic these days.”

“I wouldn’t know.” Gallatin’s eyes made Shackleton nervous; they were steady and piercing, and they held a power that made the major feel as boneless as a washrag. “I’m a Benny Goodman fan.”

“Oh yes, I know his work.” Michael listened to the thunderous, pounding music for another moment; in it was the image of a world at war, fighting against its own barbarity and the barbarity clearly winning. Then he stood up, lifted the needle without scratching the 78 rpm disk and let the Victrola wind down. “I accept the mission, gentlemen,” he said. “I’ll find out what you want to know.”

“You will? I mean…” Humes-Talbot stumbled over his words. “I thought you’d made up your mind already.”

“I had. I changed it.”

“Oh, I see.” He didn’t really, but he wasn’t going to question the man’s motives any further. “Well, that’s good to hear, sir. Very good. We’ll put you in a week of training, of course. Give you a few practice parachute jumps and some linguistic work, though I doubt you’ll need it. And we’ll put together all the information you’ll need as soon as we get back to London.”

“Yes, you do that.” The thought of the flight over the Channel into France made the skin crawl at the back of his neck, but that would have to be dealt with at the proper time. He drew a deep breath, glad now that his decision was final. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going for my morning run.”

“I knew you were a runner!” Shackleton said. “I am, too. How far do you go?”

“Five miles, more or less.”

“I’ve gone seven miles before. Loaded down with field gear. Listen, if you’ve got an extra warm-up suit and a sweater, I’ll go with you. I wouldn’t mind gettin’ the blood movin’ again.” Especially after trying to sleep in that torture rack, he thought.

“I don’t wear a warm-up suit,” Michael told him, and removed his robe. He was naked underneath. He folded the robe over the chairback. “It’s almost springtime. And thank you, Major, but I always run alone.” He walked past Shackleton and Humes-Talbot, who were both too shocked to move or speak, and went out the door and into the cold, sleety morning light.

Shackleton caught the door before it closed. He watched, incredulous, as the naked man began to run with long, purposeful strides down the driveway, then across the grassy field toward the woods. “Hey!” he shouted. “What about the wolves?” Michael Gallatin didn’t look back, and in another moment he vanished into the line of trees.

“He’s an odd chap, don’t you think?” Humes-Talbot asked, peering over the other man’s shoulder.

“Odd or not,” Shackleton said, “I believe Major Gallatin can get the job done.” Sleet dashed him in the face, and he shivered in spite of his uniform and shut the door against the wind.