Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (34 page)

A dip in the road evoked another groan from the suspension. The engine whined again as the drive wheels lost their grip on the macadam. Last time, I’d more or less destroyed the old man’s car. I’d gutted the undercarriage first by navigating a road of pulverized macadam, then by forcing the Rolls over heaps of rubble during our futile race to find and save our daughter.

To his credit, he’d taken it well. The old man wasn’t without empathy. Empathy for his surrogate son, Raybould Marsh. But a stranger had stolen his car tonight.

I blew through a crossroads. The headlamps flashed on a bare signpost. Most signs had been taken down or painted over in preparation for the invasion. If the Jerries came, they’d have to find their own bloody way around England.

The memory of Liv cried beside me.
What if she’s hungry? We didn’t bring her food.

Phantom splinters tore into my calloused fingers. Broken timbers, shards of glass, and pulverized masonry had torn my hands while I searched the rubble for our daughter. I hadn’t realized what I’d done to my hands until much later. The scars were still there, beneath the calluses.

It wouldn’t be like that this time, I tried to reassure myself. Last time, we’d hit the road after the BBC had reported the bombing. But the skies over Coventry had been clear when I left Will’s flat. Maybe they’d stay clear. Maybe I was overreacting.

But with Liv and Agnes out of London, they had passed beyond my sphere of protection. And Gretel was nothing if not patient. I knew as surely as I knew the sun would rise in the east, if Gretel still had designs on my family, she’d send the bombers to Coventry.

14 November 1940

Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials

Marsh said, “How long are we going to wait here?”

“Until it’s time,” said Gretel. Her hand went to the battery at her waist. A faint
click
told him she’d unplugged her wires again. But her gaze didn’t waver from the farmhouse. She’d been watching it over an hour.

Sod it all for a game of soldiers,
thought Marsh.

He stood. “Look. I’ll die of exposure if I sit out here much longer. I’m in a bloody uniform. Nobody will question me. And if they do, they won’t recognize me in the darkness. Once we’re in the farmhouse, you’ll warn me if things are looking to go pear-shaped.” He strode away.

Gretel whispered, “Raybould, wait.” He sighed. Turned. She said, “We have to get a battery first.”

“What?”

She pointed toward the battery storage shed. “We need a battery for Kammler.”

“We don’t have time for that. We’ll use yours.” Marsh reached for her battery harness, but Gretel flinched away, eyes wide and dark.

“No!” Her shout pierced the darkness.

They both froze. Marsh tensed, waiting for blinding kliegs to shred the darkness, waiting for the farm to explode with shouts of alarm. He started to tremble again. But no searchlights raked the forest; no guards boiled forth from the barracks. Marsh exhaled.

Gretel recovered her composure. She added, “This isn’t fresh. He’ll need a fully charged battery. And a spare.”

“Oh, this is just bloody wonderful,” said Marsh. “You might have taken care of this ahead of time, if you knew I’d be back tonight.”

An expression flitted across her face, too quickly to read in the dim light. Marsh cursed the inconstant moonlight. Her gaze settled on him, and it was harder than granite. Which matched her tone of voice.

“Of course I knew.”

He’d seen a protracted version of that expression once before. When she stood, frightened, before the Eidolon.

Von Westarp’s farm was infested with monsters, but all of the human variety. And Gretel was the queen bee. What did she fear now? What had changed since he’d been away?

“You lead,” he said.

She hiked through the underbrush. He followed a few steps behind, trying and failing to minimize the crunching and scraping of his footsteps. Soon they hopped over the fringe of tall grasses that lined the clearing. From there it was a straight shot to the battery storage shed. Gretel led him there without pausing and without veering.

The shed’s single entrance faced the center of the Reichsbehörde campus, like most of the facilities that bordered the training field. They had arrived in the rear. Marsh pressed himself against the cold bricks and inched toward the corner. But Gretel waved him back.

“Wait here,” she whispered. Then she disappeared around the corner into the semicircle of light cast by the lamp above the shed door.

A breeze caught Marsh’s breath, pulling it into long silvery streamers that drifted past the edge of the shed and into the moonlight. He backed away, one carefully measured footstep at a time, lest his breath give him away. The breeze snaked tendrils through the buttonholes of Pabst’s coat. He tried not to shiver. And wondered how long Gretel would make him wait this time.

Around the corner, footsteps approached from the direction of the farmhouse. Marsh tensed, and listened.

“Good evening. How was your dinner?”

“I got your note,” said Klaus. “It’s cold outside. So why am I here?”

“I need you to do something for me,” she said.

Klaus might have sighed—Marsh couldn’t hear him well enough to know—but the man didn’t miss a beat. “Why am I stealing a battery for you? You’re already wearing one.”

“Not one battery. Two. And it’s a surprise.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Do you remember what I told you in England?”

“You said I need to trust you. That what you’re doing is vital.”

“Yes.”

“And this is part of that.”

“Yes.”

Nothing happened for several moments. The silence was Klaus’s way of mulling things over. Did he really believe he’d stand up to her? Klaus wasn’t capable of resisting his sister. As aggrieved as he felt at times, he was, in the end, devoted to Gretel. He always would be.

“If I do this, will you tell me what it’s for?”

“No. But you’ll find out soon enough.”

“Will I get in trouble?”

“No more than I will.”

A few footsteps, then Klaus fell silent again. This silence lasted a bit longer than the previous one. Gretel broke it a minute or so later.

“Thank you, Klaus.”

“I’m going to bed.” His footsteps receded into the night.

Gretel rejoined Marsh behind the shed. She carried a battery in each hand. Patchy clouds scudded across the dark sky, blocking the moon. Marsh couldn’t read the gauges.

They waited before setting off again, this time toward the farmhouse. The door to the servants’ entrance creaked, then thudded, when Klaus entered. Gretel led Marsh to the main entrance.

Shifting moonlight coaxed a pale glow from the stained glass window on the landing. The swastika banners inside the window cast soft ruby light upon the gilded balustrades. It waxed in brightness as another cloud bank cleared the moon. Marsh looked away, to better preserve his night vision. They headed for the kitchen. He turned to tell her to look for sweets, but she went straight to the walk-in larder without his prompting.

Marsh searched the rest of the kitchen while Gretel rummaged in the larder. The faint aroma of baked trout wafted from the ovens. A sliced lemon lay atop a saucer on one of the butcher-block tables in the center of the kitchen. It reminded him of Will.

I’ve been away so long. Is he still alive? Has he visited Liv? What must they think of me? What of Milkweed? What does the old man think? Can I ever make this right with any of them? Will Agnes know me, if I ever see her again?

He packed the worry and wistfulness aside before they crippled him. He checked the cabinets and the iceboxes, but didn’t find anything that was likely to garner Kammler’s cooperation. Not unless the poor fellow enjoyed calf liver, which appeared to be on the menu for the doctor’s dinner tomorrow.

But he did find a nearly empty sack of flour. Marsh dumped the flour into the rubbish bin, rolled up the cloth sack, and tucked it into his belt.

Gretel emerged from the larder with a paper bag in one hand. She held something lustrous and white in her lips. She plucked the stick from her mouth, offered it to him.

“Peppermint?” she whispered. He declined.

Back to the entryway. Marsh took care to step at the edges of the stairs, where they were less likely to creak. Although it felt like six days had passed since he’d returned to the farm, and even though each tick of the clock meant another opportunity for things to turn sour, he suppressed his impatience and the temptation to take them two at a time. That would have put more stress on the boards and, thus, might have been louder. He crouched in the shadows beneath the rosette window.

Gretel followed. Straight up the middle. Sounded like a bloody rhino.

Marsh turned for the flight that led to the top floor, which housed von Westarp’s sanctuary. But Gretel entered the corridor that led to her quarters, and those of the doctor’s other “children.”

“Not yet,” he whispered. “I’m paying a visit to the doctor first.”

Gretel shook her head. “We need Kammler.”

“I can’t bloody well pinch the doctor’s journals with Kammler in tow. Your stepbrother isn’t particularly quiet, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Her eyes were darker than the surrounding shadows. “You weren’t ordered to take his journals.”

“I’m not leaving here without them.”

Silence fell. A faint
click
echoed across the landing, louder than a gunshot in the quiet farmhouse. Gretel closed her eyes.

Something about this wasn’t sitting well. Even by her standards, Gretel was acting oddly. But he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. When he tried, it slipped away, like the name of an old acquaintance who bumps into you at a Tube stop. And since when did she entertain suggestions?

She opened her eyes. “Kammler first. And hurry.”

*

I killed the headlamps once I blew into the outskirts of Coventry. Last thing I wanted was to make it easier for the Luftwaffe to find the damn place. I didn’t slow down until I nearly embedded a postbox into the grille of Stephenson’s car. And so I prowled through sprawling Coventry by the light of a full moon.

I’d never been here before, and hadn’t realized the extent of my task. Liv had left an address in Stoke Aldermoor, which I reckoned to be part of the residential ring around the city. But I knew little more than that. And Coventry was a damn sight larger than Williton.

I had no hope of finding her address on my own. Had to find somebody who knew the city. Probably a succession of somebodies. That meant either stopping at a pub or flagging down an ARP warden. But, just like a copper, neither was there when I needed it.

Moonlight shone on the corrugated metal roof of a long, tall building that loomed over the street. Factory or warehouse, I reckoned. No sounds of industrial machinery greeted me when I lowered the window. But the fence, the sandbag revetments, and the army sentries suggested either an aircraft factory or a munitions plant. It wasn’t the only shadow factory I passed.

Coventry’s industrial base would provide Gretel a convenient excuse.

Factories meant men thirsty for a drink. There had to be a pub in the area. But damned if I could find it. I chose another street at random, wending toward the city’s medieval heart.

Sod it all,
I decided.
Let the wardens come to me.

I leaned on the horn.

*

Kammler recoiled from Gretel when she woke him. But he let out a cry—half squeal, half grunt—when he finally recognized Marsh.

“Shhh!” Marsh snatched the peppermint stick from Gretel’s mouth and waved it under Kammler’s nose. The large man took it in his fist, shoved it in his mouth. He rubbed his head on Marsh’s arm, chewing and drooling. The candy didn’t silence him, but it did reduce the volume of his utterances to a low murmur.

A sour milk odor wafted from Kammler. The room smelled of peppermint and shit. Kammler had soiled his sheets.

Kammler slept in his underclothes. There wasn’t time to dress him fully, much less to clean him. Gretel fetched his empty battery harness from its hook behind the door. Kammler again recoiled from her. She shot a look at Marsh.

Marsh whispered in his ear. “Easy, son. I’m glad you remember me. I was gone for a time, but I thought about you quite a lot while I was away.” He did his best to keep up the soothing patter while Gretel buckled the harness around Kammler’s waist. Marsh eased a battery into place. He endured a rib-bruising embrace from Kammler when he fished around for the man’s wires. They’d worked their way down the back of his nightshirt. Poor fellow had been sleeping on them. The bare copper connectors were damp, though whether with sweat or urine, Marsh couldn’t tell. He ran a fold of the cloth flour sack over the connectors to give them a cursory drying, then plugged them into the battery at Kammler’s waist.

The large man shuddered. “T-t-t! G-g-g-guh…”

“For Christ’s sake,” Marsh whispered. “You insisted on getting him first, so you keep him quiet.”

She waved another sweet before Kammler’s face. And nearly lost a finger when he chomped at it. But she didn’t flinch.

“Stay here,” said Marsh. “I have to do something.”

He crept into the corridor and shut Kammler’s door. In moments he was back inside the room they’d assigned him, the one Gretel had said once belonged to a man named Rudolf. Silver moonlight streamed through the window. Marsh pulled the cot away from the wall that separated this room from Gretel’s. He felt along the floor for the loose segment of trim, pulled it aside, reached into the hollow.

The rag was still there. Still stiff with what he hoped was a Twin’s menstrual blood.

With Kammler in tow, Marsh and Gretel crept past the other occupied rooms—Heike snored—to the servants’ stair. The width of the stair forced them to go single file. Marsh went first. Behind Gretel, Kammler emitted a low whimper that grew in pitch and volume as Marsh ascended. The only way to mollify him was to send Gretel up first, followed by Marsh, then Kammler. In that order, they climbed to von Westarp’s study. Gretel opened the door. Marsh gave Kammler another peppermint stick, then handed him back to Gretel.