The Sleepwalkers (26 page)

Seeing him they rose in unison.

Willi had to fight back the burning in his eyes.

Geiger, the old medic, a pediatrician now in Dresden, snapped to attention. “Company K reporting for duty, sir!”

For years after the war they’d made it their business to have reunions. But as time went on, they became harder to arrange. Until 1928, Willi guessed it was, when they’d marked the tenth anniversary of the armistice. So many years . . . Yet what difference did time make to men like these five? The bonds they’d forged were unbreakable. The scars they bore so deep, so vivid still.

Geiger’s ear, hideously cauliflowered by a shell fragment, was the butt of at least a dozen jokes dished up by Geiger himself, so his patients would laugh rather than recoil at it. Richter, the best wire cutter in the kaiser’s army, had lost more than one chunk of skin to those barbed claws. A face like that he had now was a badge of honor in the army. Which is where he’d stayed all these years. Lutz, the old intelligence expert, able to distinguish French infantry units by the curses they used, had done well for himself as an accountant in one of the big Frankfurt banking houses—despite having left three fingers in France. Fritz, too, had suffered nightmares for years, still on occasion leaping up in the
middle of the night drenched in sweat. Willi alone had come out barely scathed. Why, he had no idea. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, fate had saved him for dessert.

“Lutz here took the overnight from Frankfurt.” Fritz beamed. “And Geiger arrived at the Potsdamer Station not twenty minutes ago.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Captain Kraus.” Lutz saluted with his two-fingered hand. “We heard you had a mission.”

Willi felt that awful burning in his eyes again.

Ringleader Hohenzollern submitted his report: “Richter’s based at the Tegel Firing Range now, Willi.”

“Quartermaster.” Richter’s chest puffed out.

“He says there are inflatable rafts up there with outboard motors. Not twenty minutes to Oranienburg. We can take them upriver, turn off the motors, and paddle into the channel, find out what those bastards have going on at the asylum.”

Willi’s throat was so constricted he could barely speak. “It’s too dangerous. Lutz and Geiger—your families. And, Fritz—”

“Never mind.” Fritz’s scar reddened. “It’s all arranged, Willi. Midnight tonight.”

How black the night was. How cold the air. Hope and fear tossed like waves in Willi’s heart. He’d been through such storms of emotion before with these men—in the fields outside Passchendaele, along the banks of the Somme. But this time the stakes felt even higher. They weren’t kids anymore. And not just the fate of the fatherland but the whole civilized world seemed balanced on their shoulders.

Unfortunately, an outsider could easily have mistaken the operation for a Keystone comedy. Five men in their thirties—one earless, one fingerless, one whose arm was in a sling, and one whose face was so mangled he resembled Frankenstein’s monster—tiptoeing from a storehouse at the Tegel army base trying to nip two motorized rafts for the night. It’d been fifteen years since they’d worked as a team, crawling through enemy lines, up to the edges of gun and troop emplacements. Back then
a twitch of an eyebrow said enough. Now, trying to reach the waterfront perhaps a hundred yards away, all their frantic gesturing couldn’t keep them from knocking into each other and colliding with trees, practically puncturing the rafts. Richter, his monster-face stiff with anxiety, kept motioning to the nearby barracks, begging them to keep silent. His quartermaster duties included overseeing these patrol craft, but taking them without authorization would land him in the brig.

Toiling to uphold his end of a boat, Willi found himself increasingly irritated by the sensation that he’d been here before. Not once but many times. Until, like a howitzer shell, it hit him. Of course . . . the zeppelin field. This firing range was where the lighter-than-air ships used to take off and land. How in love with them he’d been as a boy. He used to cajole his parents all the time to take him here. That image of the LZ6—three city blocks long—floating into the cloudless sky like a giant white cigar was seared into his memory. Thousands had filled these fields that day in 1906 to witness its inaugural flight. And not only nine-year-old Willi, he was sure, but all of them firmly believed Count Zeppelin’s marvel symbolized Germany itself—rising to take her place in the world. It would have been preposterous for them to imagine that less than a decade later the very same zeppelins would be dropping bombs on London. That anything that occurred after 1914 could ever have come true. Which it all did.

The trenches. The tanks. The poison gas.

For a moment, the cloud cover opened overhead. A single star shone down. At last the wide Havel River appeared before them. Willi’s spirit inflated as they got the rafts in. Climbing aboard and turning on the motors, all the pent-up anxiety he’d been dragging around churned into determination. Across that darkness was Sachsenhausen. He knew exactly where it was this time.

Geiger, Richter, and Lutz set off in one boat, he and Fritz in the other. Icy spray hit their faces as they roared across the water. At least he was better prepared this time. Fleece-lined jacket, leather gloves. His stomach completely empty. All of them were
dressed in black, their faces darkened to blend with the night. The old reconnaissance team on the move. But how choppy it was. Each time they hit a wave, Willi’s bones rattled like dice. It wouldn’t be long though, according to the maps, before they reached their turnoff.

When the little inlet finally loomed, his heart began to race. They cut the motors. Swift were the currents they had to paddle against to enter the channel. Having all but memorized the maps, he knew that around the next bend would be a thin spit of land, then the island with the potter’s field. Farther upstream there’d be a dock where the ferries carrying the dead used to arrive. They could pull up there, hide the rafts, and set out by foot to the bridge that crossed to Asylum Island.

Everything was as it should be. The thin spit of land, and then straight ahead . . . the Island of the Dead. Completely overgrown now, a dull, flat panorama of weeds. No sign at all of the countless thousands interred there. Nearing the docks, however, a chill slithered up his spine. In the gray, frigid water, a skeleton—a half-sunk ferryboat stripped of everything from bell to wheel. Still visible across the bones of her hull, the name
River Styx.
What had once been the pier hadn’t fared much better. Climbing onto it, they had to be careful not to fall through gaping holes. They dragged the rafts out of the water and camouflaged them in some bushes.

The waist-high grass rustled as it yielded beneath their feet. The air was thick with marshy odors. Every step, Willi knew, was over the final resting place of some impoverished soul. For half a century the indigent from across Berlin/Brandenburg had been buried in this muddy wasteland. What misfortunes each must have endured to wind up here, where for all eternity they lay unacknowledged like beasts instead of humans. Abruptly the high grass ended and they found themselves staring at something not marked on the maps. A slow-growing horror enveloped them. At their feet lay two parallel trenches, maybe six feet wide and at least fifty feet in length, covered with fresh black
earth. There was no mistaking what they were. People were getting buried out here again on the Island of the Dead. A lot of them.

“Mein Gott,”
Gieger stammered. “What’s going on at that asylum?”

Grim with silence, Willi took a long breath. The stiff wind blowing from the north carried only a dank scent of soil. No rotting flesh.

That stench plaguing Oranienburg wasn’t from here.

It had to come from farther south . . . from the asylum side.

How grateful he was to find not a single SS man guarding the footbridge. No lights. No warning signs about mines. Only dark, heavy clouds and rustling leaves.

“Forward!” he whispered, not even embarrassed when his voice cracked with emotion. He was so relieved finally to have reached this place.

The cost had been too high.

He had the whole route, the whole mission, painstakingly mapped in his mind. To cover as much ground as possible, they’d circumambulate Asylum Island northeast to southwest, scouting the installations, the disposition of the prisoners, and the exact number of guards. He could only hope there weren’t too many SS. In the worst case he imagined a full-scale battle erupting Thurseblot night between army troops and Nazis. God knew . . . it could spark a real civil war. Yet tonight as they crept along the island’s northeast shore, not so much as a bird chirped. Just the gentle slapping of water against rocks.

When the compass fell due north, they reached the bridge to the mainland, the one planted with live mines. He steered the squad away from it and onto the approach to the old asylum, the dark silhouette of which was growing visible on the hilltop. The gravel road heading to it was flanked by rows of gnarled trees, beyond which opened vast lawns, riotous with weeds. These same lawns, Willi knew, had once upon a time been tended to by legions of patients. Now the sense of abandon, the
emptiness, was overwhelming. Not a flicker of light traveled the darkness. Not a voice on the wind. As if the whole island were deserted. Which it wasn’t.

Guided by their battery lights, a short hike uphill brought them to the granite gatehouse, its walls an idyll of chiseled lambs and saintly faces, a bold slogan engraved across the top:
Work Is Therapy.
The iron gates, long ago reduced to war matériel, had more recently been replaced with scrolls of barbed wire extending on either side into the darkness. An unmistakable perimeter fence. Willi was prepared. Under conditions considerably better than they’d been on the Western Front, Richter not only cut a fine passage through but reconnected the wire behind them. At all costs they couldn’t let anyone know they’d been here.

Past the gatehouse the road continued to climb, curving around a grassy oval that had been a duck pond. Willi could see the remains of an Egyptian-style obelisk and the statue of a goddess strumming a harp, strangled up to her neck now in vines. Then in a sudden burst of theatricality the cloud curtain gave way, and a shimmering spotlight fell onto the old asylum itself. All of them froze, staring at it—a mile-long monastery for the mad. Straight on, the imposing administration building—a neo-Gothic castle with half a dozen spires lancing the sky. Right and left, the endless three-story redbrick wings receding at right angles to form their giant V. Turret after turret. Window after window—each with iron bars fixed in cement. If ever a building were haunted, Willi thought, this was it. Grimy curtains flapping in the wind. Whole sections of roofing collapsed. Bats flying in and out. But how clearly he could still see figures . . . peering from barred windows . . . walking the wards . . . tending the lawns. Not a speck of light. Not a trace of the living. But ghosts everywhere.

Sticking to the high grass, they kept a good fifty yards between themselves and the derelict monster, prudently circling it wing by wing, ward by ward, searching for signs of life. Kirkbride’s model had called for a highly stratified organization of
patients by age, gender, class, and diagnosis. The less disturbed were kept nearer the center, the more violent in the most distant wings. As they neared the last corner of the last wing, number 27, Willi felt about ready to check himself in with the most deranged. The building was empty. How could anyone perform medical procedures in a place like this anyway? It didn’t make sense. Did he get this wrong?

He couldn’t have. Could he?

An arm in a sling stopped him. Fritz motioned ahead. Just around the corner . . . an unmistakable glow.

Shrinking farther back, they crept through the high grass to the rear of the building. The light grew distinct. Willi could see it wasn’t coming from inside the asylum but from several arc lamps affixed to an outside wall. They illuminated a guardhouse below. Inside were two men in black uniform. Focusing in with his binoculars, he made out silver skulls and crossbones on their caps. The section of building they guarded had definitely been renovated. New windows. A new roof. His throat parched when he saw sleek modern lettering across the main entrance:
Institute for Racial Hygiene—Camp Sachsenhausen.

Fritz slapped his shoulder. “You’re a genius, Willi! But how to get inside?”

He wasn’t a genius. Just a hard worker. For hours he’d studied the asylum maps, and according to his calculations there ought to be a power-generating plant precisely to their west. He aimed the binoculars; it was there all right. Its tall smokestack not a hundred yards away. For half a century the brawny building had fed the entire facility with steam, delivering it by tunnel through huge copper pipes. The pipes had of course fallen in the war. But the tunnels still had to be there.

The rotting wood of the old plant door gave way with a good swift kick. A hundred bats flapped up, rushing to escape through holes in the roof. The place was cavernous. He’d seen pictures of the house-size generators and block-long fan belts that had once labored here day and night. The equipment was gone, but a few
minutes’ search uncovered a dark, winding staircase to the basement. Here they found themselves confronted by half a dozen man-size tunnels, each leading in a different direction.

The men looked at Willi.

Tunnel 15-27 was pitch-black, a cramped confines of brick and cobwebs, barely breathable inside. Stiflingly hot. Crouching through, they had only flashlights and rats to escort them. It seemed to take forever. As claustrophobia was about to set in, a passage to the right appeared, stamped
27.
They crept through and found themselves emerging onto a clean cement floor with newly wallboarded walls. A shiny boiler giving off heat. They’d reached the institute’s basement.

He hadn’t seen any lights from outside, so Willi doubted there were people up there. The windows weren’t barred. And there were only two guards. It could just be laboratories, he figured. Nobody’d be around at this hour. He’d take Geiger . . . with his medical knowledge. The rest could stay here, nice and cozy with the boiler.