Spandau Phoenix. Greg Iles
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“Hess” was one—“lefenant” and “bloody Russians” were others. Suddenly the Frenchman stood, flicked his cigarette butt into the darkness, and strode out of the white pool of light. The Englishman followed close on his heels.
Hans turned to go, then froze. One meter behind him stood the imposing silhouette of Captain Dieter Hauer. The fiery eye of a cigar blazed orange in the darkness.
“Hello, Hans,” said the deep, burnished voice.
Hans said nothing.
“Damned cold for this time of year, eh?”
“Why am I here?” Hans asked. “You broke our agreement.”
“No, I didn’t. This was bound to happen sooner or later, even with a twenty-thousand-man police force.”
Hans considered this. “I suppose you’re right,” he said at length. “It doesn’t matter. Just another assignment, right?”
Hauer nodded. “You’ve been doing a hell of a job, I hear. Youngest sergeant in Berlin.”
Hans flushed a little, shrugged.
“I lied, Hans,” Hauer said suddenly. “I did break our agreement. I requested you for this detail.”
Hans’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because it was busy work. Killing time. I thought we might get a chance to talk.”
Hans studied the slushy ground. “So talk.”
Hauer seemed to search for words. “There’s a lot that needs saying.”
“Or nothing.”
Hauer sighed deeply. “I’d really like to know why you came to Berlin. Three years now. You must have wanted some kind of reconciliation … or answers, or something.”
Hans stiffened. “So why are you asking the questions?”
Hauer looked hard into Hans’s eyes. “All right,” he said softly. “We’ll wait until you’re ready.”
Before Hans could reply, Hauer vanished into the darkness. Even the glow of his cigar had disappeared. Hans stood still for some moments; then, shaking his head angrily, he hurried into the shadows and resumed his patrol.
Time passed quickly now, the silence broken only by an occasional siren or the roar of a jet from the British military airport at Gatow. With the snow soaking into his uniform, Hans walked faster to take his mind off the cold. He hoped he would be lucky enough to get home before his wife, Ilse, left for work. Sometimes after a particularly rough night shift, she would cook him a breakfast of Weisswurst and buns, even if she was in a hurry.
He checked his watch. Almost 6:00 A.M. It would be dawn soon. He felt better as the end of his shift neared. What he really wanted was to get out of the weather for a while and have a smoke. A mountain of shattered concrete near the rear of the lot looked as though it might afford good shelter, so he made for it. The nearest soldier was Russian, but he stood at least thirty meters from the pile. Hans slipped through a narrow opening when the sentry wasn’t looking.
He found himself in a comfortable little nook that shielded him completely from the wind. He wiped off a slab of concrete, sat down, and warmed his face by breathing into his cupped gloves. Nestled in this dark burrow, he was invisible to the patrolling soldiers, yet he still commanded a surprisingly wide view of the prison grounds. The snow had finally stopped, and even the wind had fallen off a bit. In the predawn silence, the demolished prison looked like pictures of bombed-out Dresden he had seen as a schoolboy: motionless sentries standing tall against bleak destruction, watching over nothing.
Hans took out his cigarettes. He was trying to quit, but he still carried a pack whenever he went into a potentially stressful situation. Just the knowledge that he could light up sometimes calmed his nerves. But not tonight. Removing one glove with his teeth, he fumbled in his jacket for matches. He leaned as far away as he could from the opening to his little cave, scraped a match across the striking pad, then cupped it in his palm to conceal the light. He held it to his cigarette, drawing deeply. His shivering hand made the job difficult, but he soon steadied it and was rewarded with a jagged rush of smoke.
As the match flame neared his fingers, a glint of white flashed against the blackness of the chamber. When he flicked the match away, the glimmer vanished. Probably only a bit of snow, he thought. But boredom made him curious. Gauging the risk of discovery by the Russian, he lit a second match. There. Near the floor of his cubbyhole he could see the object clearly now—not glass but paper—a small wad stuck to a long narrow brick. He hunched over and held the match nearer.
In the close light he could see that rather than being stuck to the brick as he had first thought, the paper actually protruded from the brick itself. He grasped the folded wad and tugged it gently from its receptacle. The paper made a dry, scraping sound. Hans inserted his index finger into the brick. He couldn’t feel the bottom. The second match died. He lit another. Quickly spreading open the crinkled wad of onion-skin, he surveyed his find in the flickering light. It seemed to be a personal document of some sort, a will or a diary perhaps, hand-printed in heavy blocked letters. In the dying matchlight Hans read as rapidly as he could:
This is the testament of Prisoner #7. I am the last now, and I know that I shall never be granted the freedom that I—more than any of those released before me—deserve. Death is the only freedom I will know. I hear His black wings beating about me! While my child lives I cannot speak, but here I shall write. I only pray that I can be coherent. Between the drugs, the questions, the promises and the threats, I sometimes wonder if I am not already mad. I only hope that long after these events cease to have immediate consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and learn the obscene truth, not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but of England—of those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her existence for—
The crunch of boot heels on snow jolted Hans back to reality. Someone was coming! Jerking his head to the aperture in the bricks, he closed his hand on the searing match and peered out into an alien world.
Dawn had come. In its unforgiving light, Hans saw a Russian soldier less than ten meters from his hiding place, moving slowly forward with his AK-47 extended. The flare of the third match had drawn him. “Fool!” Hans cursed himself. He jammed the sheaf of paper into his boot, then he stepped boldly out of the niche and strode toward the advancing soldier.
“Halt!” cried the Russian, emphasizing the command with a jerk of his Kalashnikov.
“Versailles,” Hans countered in the steadiest voice he could muster.
His calm delivery of the password took the Russian aback. “What are you doing in there, Polizei?” asked the soldier in passable German.
“Smoke,” Hans replied, extending the pack. “Having a smoke out of the wind.” He waved his sector map in a wide arc as if to take in the wind itself.
“No wind,” the Russian stated flatly, never taking his eyes from Hans’s face.
It was true. Sometime during the last few minutes the wind had died. “Smoke, comrade,” Hans repeated. “Versailles! Smoke, tovarich!”
He continued to proffer the pack, but the soldier only cocked his head toward his red-patched collar and spoke quietly. Hans caught his breath when he spied the small transmitter clipped to the sentry’s belt. The Russians were in radio contact! In seconds the soldier’s zealous comrades would come running. Hans felt a hot wave of panic. A surprisingly strong aversion to letting the Russians discover the papers gripped him. He cursed himself for not leaving them in the little cave rather than stuffing them into his boot like a naive shoplifter. He had almost reached the point of blind flight when a shrill whistle pierced the air in staccato bursts.
Chaos erupted all over the compound. The long, anxious night of surveillance had strained everyone’s nerves to the breaking point, and the whistle blast, like a hair trigger, catapulted every man into the almost sexual release of physical