Theater of spies, p.41
Theater of Spies, page 41
You stake out the goat to draw el puma, she thought. And information gets our goat, we pantherish spies.
Instead she concentrated on rolling up the carpet in front of the door, giving it a dose of the mop and wiping the wet floor with a scrap of soap, blessing her mima’s thoroughness in teaching her the hands-on details of the domestic arts the while. She’d learned the risks of housekeeping—such as slippery floors—and what not to do as well; right now she was making a deliberate mistake, one few men would spot.
You don’t always have to fool someone, she thought, as hard brisk heel clicks sounded in the corridor outside and she suppressed a murderous snarl that would be badly out of character for a hungry, depressed foreign worker. Just confusing them will do, short-term. And then you kill them before they get their balance back.
The door opened. Luz gave a start—which was in character—and then grounded her mop and bent her head, giving a convincing impression of fear. The man who stepped with the same confident stamp was burly, the type who’d be heavy in middle age if he didn’t work hard at it but was just a knot of muscle now. Not much taller than her five-foot-six but thick through the chest and shoulders and arms, in a dark-gray sack suit and matching waistcoat and low dark shoes, with a narrow tie and modern turned-over collar.
The secret police eat well. ¡Qué sorpresa! I’m shocked, shocked!
One foot slipped a little and he automatically adjusted his stance in a way that immediately suggested athletics to Luz’s eye—gymnastics or boxing, at a guess. His face was square and clean-shaven, and he appeared to be around thirty, brown hair cropped close at the sides and only a little longer on top, blue eyes darting around the room and making her thankful she’d been thorough about hiding the body.
“Who are you, woman?” he barked, in accented but fluent French, standing with his hands in his pockets. “What are you doing here?”
“I am Marie Lecomte, sir,” she said meekly, giving the name of one of Unfortunately Pregnant’s group who was getting a holiday, and rattled off her identification number. “I am a cleaner, sir.”
“I can see that, you stupid slut,” he snapped. “Where is Hélène Carpentier? She called from this office less than ten minutes ago.”
“I know nothing of any Mme. Carpentier, sir,” she said, calculating distances and chances with cold detachment behind the surface that was playing a part.
Don’t get into a punching match with this one, chica; a solid right would rip your jaw off and I doubt he’s enough of an idiot to be chivalrously inhibited about hitting women—that type generally don’t join the secret police. He’s thick-boned, too, with lots of muscle over it. You’ll have to get to the vulnerable parts to take him.
The human body, especially a strong one, could stand an amazing amount of general battering and keep right on functioning; it was an exquisitely designed and very robust machine. There were a number of points, though . . .
“I only clean the rooms I am assigned, sir,” she quavered; it was still possible he’d just go somewhere else in a futile search for the woman lying dead behind the desk. “I have been here for more than half an hour, all alone, sir.”
“That is impossible—” he began.
The man started, visibly remembered something, and barked:
“Look at me!”
When she did he actually looked at her for the first time, a trained observer’s feature-by-feature examination rather than the swift dismissive glance he’d used the first time, the non-attention that the socially invisible got. It was belated, but still very dangerous.
He’s not just trying to contact his snitch, he’s looking for someone and that’s what he was hoping she could tell him. Looking for a specific woman . . . working from a picture or a description . . . ¡Huy! He’s looking for me, somehow!
Luz kept herself from tensing . . . but the man’s eyes flared wider, and his right hand whipped out of his pocket in a motion that would end under the front of his jacket on the left.
“Stand back! Hands up!” he barked as he started to step back and halted as his foot began to slip again.
Luz dropped the mop and stepped forward instead, planting her feet carefully. In the same moment she slapped her left palm under his right elbow, shoving hard with the direction of his motion toward his shoulder-holster, upward and forward in a motion like a shot put with a hard, fast twist of her body and hips behind it. It was smooth enough that the motion felt almost cooperative, as if they were dancing.
Her arms were quite strong, strong enough to haul her own weight up a rope at speed for several stories. His were much stronger . . . but it was extremely difficult to halt a motion once you were already committed to it. The reflex when you felt someone pushing was to snatch the limb away from the contact, and a man’s center of gravity would be much higher than hers. She’d long ago learned how to use that.
The German instinctively stepped away as the motion levered at his balance and pushed his upper body backward. The smooth leather soles of his shoes skidded on the soap-slick boards, and he twisted for a single brief moment on the edge of toppling. Luz’s reflexes told her not to try to use her knee, not on this uncertain footing she’d manufactured and not against someone who’d probably had that move played on him before. Men often kicked or used their knees on that target, but rarely their hands. So . . .
Instead she shot her right hand downward toward his crotch, with the heel of the palm hammering into the man’s pubic bone in a solid jolt that ran back up into her shoulders. Then her fingers gripped with savage strength and twisted. The thick wool of his trousers and underdrawers resisted her, but she clenched her hand into a fist and ripped it backward hard with a crouch and twist.
The secret policeman’s eyes bulged and he jackknifed forward with a thin shriek, trying to clutch at his groin. Luz snapped her arms wide in a parody of an embrace and then swung them inward, fast and hard, keeping her wrists loose until the instant her cupped palms landed over both the man’s ears with a simultaneous double smack sound, hollow but loud. That stung her hands and wrists and jarred her elbows . . . but ruptured both his eardrums and smashed dense slugs of compressed air into the delicate, nerve-rich structures of the middle and inner ears. The pain was even greater than his savaged groin and paralyzed him for an instant, long enough for her to drive paired thumbs into his eyes just to either side of the nose, scooping outward. His feet scrabbled, but his sense of balance had been destroyed as well as his hearing and eyesight. He crashed down on his back, arms and legs jerking like a beetle.
Luz stepped closer, raised a knee high, and drove the heel of her right foot down into his throat above the Adam’s apple with clinical precision. The sensation was familiar, rather like stamping on a bunch of celery stalks wrapped in a piece of veal, and she repeated the blow three times as hard as she could. The man’s breathy attempt to scream ended in a gurgle as blood and shattered, collapsed tissue filled his throat. His back arched and he tried to scrabble at his neck for a few moments; then he slumped and went limp.
Luz wiped her thumbs on the man’s jacket and then stayed bent over for a moment, wheezing, with her hands on her knees and spots swimming before her eyes. The explosion of total effort was grossly draining, as much a matter of mind as body.
“You should . . . have had . . . your gun . . . in your hand . . . when you came through the door,” she panted. “You died of . . . arrogance, cabrón.”
Then she flogged herself into motion, going to one knee by the door before opening it a crack and checking in either direction. The corridor remained silent and empty, with that desolate early-morning feel and only an occasional distant clunk or murmur from the cleaners. Apparently there hadn’t been enough noise to attract attention, but then it was surprising what people could ignore or misinterpret. And often extremely useful.
Luz drew the office door softly closed, locked it, and dragged the secret policeman’s body behind the desk. She swiftly went through the dead man’s pockets, laid the spoil on the blotter, and then tied him in a fetal position with strips torn from his jacket and the rest of it wrapped around his face and neck to absorb the leakage before she shoved him into the leg-well with the equally dead informer. Then she sorted the documentary prizes.
Oh, that’s so German, she thought, methodically examining his wallet.
He actually had a card identifying him as a Preußische Geheimpolizei agent!
Though to be fair, the FBS carry theirs far too often too. I think it makes them feel chic and powerful. This would be more useful if the Germans were Progressive enough to have women as secret police agents, but I don’t think anyone would believe I’m him.
A certificate folded in the wallet stated that Vizefeldwebel—sergeant first class, roughly—Arno Batz, born April 10, 1886, in Neurode, was discharged honorably from the 11th Silesian Grenadier Regiment in December 1914, after recovering from wounds and on detection of a heart murmur, with the award of the Iron Cross Second Class; that accounted for why someone his age and built like a bull wasn’t in uniform. You could stop exercising in a gymnasium when the warning signs hit you, but not in the field when you were trying to drag a wounded comrade to shelter or sprint over broken ground raked by Hotchkiss fire with twenty-five pounds of Lewis gun in your arms. Six years of Realschule made him a natural for the Geheimpolizei. And all German police forces favored veterans as recruits—American ones did too these days, for that matter.
She regretfully left his Luger in its shoulder holster.
Too easy to detect. I’m not going to take a real risk for the imaginary comfort of having a gun on me.
Much of the rest was the junk of daily life: small change, keys, tramway tokens, a cigarette case with Love From Your Darling Erika engraved in one corner in curlicue script with wings and hearts around it, pictures including one of him standing grinning between six other soldiers, muddy and grubby, and another of him in a 1914 Pickelhaube and the uniform he’d marched off with that lost hot August, with an older woman who was probably his mother trying to look stoic beside him.
The documents, however . . .
Luz hissed to herself as she unfolded a bulletin. Her description and Ciara’s, and quite accurate physical descriptions—including the small white scar beneath her right ear that was the fruit of a sniper’s duel in the Sierra Madre Occidental—were included, and an instruction: Extremely dangerous, shoot on sight. And a signature. Captain Horst von Dückler.
“Well, that’s flattering! Oh, Horst, mi güey, I see you have been busy,” she murmured to herself.
He was the only man in Germany who could have given that detailed a description and was probably going mad trying to get people to take Luz seriously as a threat. The only comforting factor was that the descriptions listed Ciara as titian-blond, and herself as having shoulder-length hair of a striking raven color; neither was true anymore, but it was just the sort of thing people would look for first. It wouldn’t make much difference to someone—maybe a confidence man, or a spy, a policeman—who was really used to looking at faces and not just a few markers, and who took the time, but it would help.
But that just shot our escape plan through the head. With copies of these up in every train station and post office, traveling is going to be insanely risky. Maybe Staaken is the best idea after all . . . and it’s an idea that’s absolutamente pésimo, the only reason it could work is that nobody would expect it.
And the inside pocket of his jacket held various authorizations directed at the Siemens management, including an extremely general one for commandeering labor and supplies for government purposes.
“Now, that may be useful,” she murmured, as plans stirred in her mind. “But I have to buy us some time.”
First she used the mop, carefully going over the floor to eliminate any spots of blood from the brief savage assault that had killed the Geheimpolizei man and removing the excess soap and water before she unrolled the carpet. Then she went back to the elevator. As you would expect from someone who took a nip of schnapps for pain control at six in the morning, the supervisor was dozing a bit.
“Excuse,” Luz said humbly.
With luck, the German would have trouble remembering her own name when she ended up answering Geheimpolizei questions, much less the details of personal interactions she profoundly wished would just go away so she could get more sleep, but it never hurt to be careful and consistent.
“Ja?” came a mumbled response.
“Die Haushaltswagen, bitte?”
A Haushaltswagen was a housekeeping cart, a bag or basket on wheels; she knew the factory used them, because she’d seen one at the forced laborers’ vile breakfast during the sanitary inspection.
“Da drüben, da drüben,” she said vaguely, which meant over there, while waving in the other direction.
Luz bobbed a half curtsey and went past her at a scurrying pace. Over there turned out to be a storage room, gratifyingly large and lined with deep shelves but, when she flicked on the light, looking rather bare with wartime shortages. But it did have several housekeeping carts, all about chest-high on her, with side panels of rather worn canvas. She poured the water in her bucket down the drain, refilled it, hung it on a hook on the side of the cart, slid her mop into the helpful loops, and pushed the empty cart back to the office.
“This . . . should . . . just . . . about . . . fit,” she grunted, hauling the secret policeman’s body—he weighed at least a hundred and seventy pounds, or seventy-eight kilos to be local—up and tipping it into the cart.
The informer’s much lighter corpse followed; a sniff made clear that she had to scrub under the desk as well. That was only to be expected, but . . .
Me cago en esta soplona, me cago en la policía secreta prusiana, y me cago muchas veces en toda esta ciudad fría y fea de Berlin, she thought sourly. I shit upon this snitch, I shit upon the Prussian Secret Police, and I shit many times upon the whole cold and ugly city of Berlin.
A spy had to be versatile; sometimes you had to be a chambermaid. Then she pushed the cart back to the storage room, considered thoughtfully for a few seconds, and rearranged the shelves so that there was a suitable space at the left rear, dumped the bodies out and shoved them in with a layer of curtains beneath in case they leaked, dumped half a bottle of some disinfectant that smelled strongly of coal-tar and something that was like, but was probably not, wintergreen on them. She poured the rest of it into her bucket, and then stacked the oldest—and hence least likely to be disturbed—supplies around them. She followed up by washing herself, and inspected the ragged dress Marie Lecomte had donated for anything that couldn’t be explained by her work . . . though that had provided dirt and stains enough.
The factory also had plenty of wall-mounted clocks. Luz was mildly shocked to see that she’d only been gone twenty minutes. Better still, Ciara and her new assistant-friend Simone were back. Luz glanced at her and got a short nod, albeit with an anxious, preoccupied expression. Simone was fairly dancing with poorly suppressed excitement, and Luz flicked her eyes that way. Ciara nodded, and began to whisper urgently in her ear to calm her down. Joyous excitement was rather conspicuous for people in their position.
Unfortunately Pregnant raised an eyebrow as they went back to work. Luz murmured softly:
“Carpentier won’t be a problem anymore, and neither will her secret police contact.”
Unfortunately Pregnant smiled unpleasantly, and then her eyes went wide as she went beyond the pleasures of revenge to possible consequences. Luz continued:
“The . . . remains won’t be found for a while, hopefully for a day or so. Yes, I know that will implicate you, but I have a plan for that. I’ll give you the details later.”
That amounted to saying trust me, and when someone said that it was usually a very strong hint that you shouldn’t, but Unfortunately Pregnant seemed to be ready to wait, even if she wasn’t very satisfied. Luz let the matter rest; what she had planned was half-formed. Still . . .
We have the information. Now all we have to do is get the information out . . .
Which they could do quickly, if they didn’t mind giving themselves away.
. . . and hopefully get ourselves out of the enemy capital with legions of intelligence agents and secret policemen and the regular police after us, our descriptions and probably our pictures being posted everywhere . . .
Which was going to be much more tricky. The original idea had been simply to travel to Hamburg under yet another identity, and then make contact at a Chamber safe house there and be smuggled across the Danish border. That was a really bad plan now.
TWENTY-ONE
Siemensstadt (Northwest Berlin metropolitan area)
Königreich Preußen (Kingdom of Prussia)
Großdeutsches Kaiserreich (Empire of Greater Germany)
DECEMBER 4TH, 1916(B)
Shit,” Horst von Dückler said with conviction as the factory doctor pulled back the sheet.
The Siemens plant was big enough and paternalistic enough to hold its own well-equipped clinic, now doubling as a morgue; it was brightly lit, electrics gleaming off polished enamel and wood and the glass of cabinets, and smelled of medicine and disinfectant . . . and now slightly but detectably of dead meat if you knew the odor well.
The doctor was a woman, oddly enough, a dry middle-aged stick with a strange part-Swiss accent, but she seemed competent and she was keeping doggedly at the work despite the late hour. The room was big but fairly crowded, with Röhm and his stormtroopers present, Gustav Diehl from the Geheimpolizei, Kurschat of the regular police, and a nervous-looking rabbity fellow with an East Prussian accent named Bladis, who was in charge of security for the Siemens plant and effectively head of the Siemensstadt police as well. Before the war he’d been a glorified night watchman mainly concerned with petty pilfering, and he was obviously out of his depth here.
