The Wolf's Hour (17 page)

Mikhail spat the severed head onto his palm. He watched as Wiktor approached him, outlined in luminescence. It was good manners to offer the best portion of any meal to Wiktor, and Mikhail lifted his palm.

“It’s yours,” Wiktor told him, and took the warm dead carcass.

Mikhail worked the skull between his teeth, finally breaking it open. The brains reminded him of a sweet-potato pie he’d eaten, in another world.

Wiktor ripped the carcass open from stub of neck to tail. He inhaled the heady fragrance of blood and fresh meat, and then scooped the intestines out with his fingers and pulled pieces of fat and flesh away from the bones. He offered a portion to Mikhail, who took his share gratefully.

The man and boy ate their rat in the dark chamber, with the echoes of civilized minds in the shelves all around them.

4

The golden weave of days became tinged with silver. Frost gleamed in the forest, and the hardwoods stood naked before the bitter wind. It was going to be a bad winter, Renati had said as she watched the bark thicken on the trees. The first snow fell in early October, and covered the white palace with white.

As the winds of November shrieked and the snow blew like scattershot, the pack huddled together in the depths of the palace, around a fire that was never allowed to burn too high or completely extinguish. Mikhail’s body felt sluggish, and he wanted to sleep a lot, though Wiktor kept his head filled with questions from the books; Mikhail had never known there were so many questions, and even in his sleep he dreamed of question marks. Before very long, he began to dream in foreign languages: German and English, in which Wiktor drilled him with merciless repetition. But Mikhail’s mind had sharpened, as well as his instincts, and he was learning.

Alekza’s stomach swelled. She stayed curled up a lot, and the others always gave her extra portions of the kill. They never changed within sight of Mikhail; they always went up the stairway and into the corridors on two legs before they left the white palace to hunt on four. Sometimes they brought back fresh, dripping meat, sometimes they returned sullen and empty-handed. But there were a lot of rats around, drawn to the heat of the fire, and those were easily caught. Mikhail knew he was one of the pack now, and accepted as such, but he still felt like what he was: a cold, often miserably uncomfortable human boy. His bones and brain still sometimes ached with a ferocity that almost drove him to tears. Almost. He sniffled in pain a few times, and the stares he received from Wiktor and Renati told him crying was not tolerated from someone who didn’t suffer gut worms.

But the change remained a mystery to him. It was one thing to live with the pack, and quite something else to fully join them. How did they change? Mikhail wondered, adding to his burden of questions. Did they take a deep breath, as if about to leap into dark and icy water? Did they stretch their bodies until the human skin split open and the wolves burst free? How did they do it? No one offered to tell him, and Mikhail-the runt of the pack-was too skittish to ask. He only knew that when he heard them howl after a kill, their voices echoing over the snowy woods, there was a burning in his blood.

A blizzard swept down from the north. As it raged beyond the walls Pauli sang in a high, frail voice a folk song about a bird who flew amid the stars, while her brother, red-haired Belyi, kept time with the clicking of sticks. The blizzard settled in, and roared its own music day after day. The fire lost its heat, and the food was gnawed away. Stomachs began to sing. Wiktor, Nikita, and Belyi had to go out into the blizzard to hunt. They were gone for three days and nights, and when Wiktor and Nikita returned, they brought back the half-frozen carcass of a stag. Belyi did not return; he’d gone after a caribou, and the last Wiktor and Nikita had seen of him he’d been zigzagging through the storm after his prey.

Pauli cried for a while, and the others left her alone. She didn’t cry so much, though, that she didn’t eat. She accepted the bloody meat with the same hunger as the others, including Mikhail. And Mikhail learned a new lesson: whatever tragedy might happen, whatever torment should befall, life went on.

Mikhail awakened one morning and listened to silence. The storm had ceased. He followed the others up the stairway and through the chambers, where snow lay in drifts on the stones and ice-covered tree limbs stretched overhead. The sun was shining outside, the sky azure over a world of dazzling white. Wiktor, Nikita, and Franco burrowed a path through the snow into the palace courtyard, and Mikhail walked outside with the others to feast on fresh, frosty air.

He breathed deeply until his lungs burned. The sun was fierce, but it made not a dent in the smooth snow. Mikhail was thoroughly enraptured by the beauty of the winter forest by the time a snowball blasted against the side of his head.

“Good shot!” Wiktor shouted. “Give him another one!” Nikita was smiling, already cupping more snow. Nikita reared his arm back to throw it, but at the last second he whirled and flung it into the face of Franco, standing about twenty feet away.

“You ass!” Franco yelled as he dug for a snowball. Renati flung one that grazed Nikita’s head, and Pauli threw a snowball with deadly accuracy into Alekza’s face. Alekza, laughing and sputtering snow, went down on her rear end, her hands pressed to her pregnant belly.

“You want a war?” Nikita hollered, grinning at Renati. “I’ll give you a war!” He threw a snowball that clipped Renati’s shoulder, and then Mikhail stood in Renati’s shadow and threw one that burst between Franco’s eyes and staggered him back. “You… little… beast!” Franco shouted, and Wiktor smiled and calmly dodged a snowball that sailed over his head. Renati was hit by two at once, from Franco and Pauli. Mikhail plunged his numb hands into the snow for another barrage. Nikita ducked Renati’s salvo and scrambled to a place where the snow was fresh and unmarked. He dug both hands deeply into it for double snowballs.

And he came up with something quite different. Something frozen, red, and mangled.

Renati’s laughter ended on a strangled note. A last snowball thrown by Franco exploded off her shoulder, but she stared at what Nikita held. Mikhail let the snow slither to the ground. Pauli gasped, her face and hair dripping.

Nikita had brought a severed, mutiliated hand up from the snow. It was as blue as polished marble, and two fingers had been torn away. The thumb and forefinger were shrunken and curved inward-the last vestiges of a paw-and fine red hair covered the back of the hand.

Pauli took a step forward. Then another, up to her knees in snow. She blinked, stunned, and then moaned the name: “Belyi…”

“Take her inside,” Wiktor said to Renati. Instantly she took Pauli’s arm and tried to guide her back to the palace, but Pauli jerked free. “Go inside,” Wiktor told her, stepping in front of her so she couldn’t see what Nikita and Franco were uncovering from the drift. “Now.”

Pauli wavered on her feet. Alekza caught her other arm, and between them she and Renati led Pauli into the palace like a hollow-eyed sleepwalker.

Mikhail started to follow them, but Wiktor’s voice lashed him: “Where do you think you’re going? Come here and help us with this!” Wiktor knelt down to push aside the snow with Nikita and Franco, and Mikhail came over to add his shivering strength.

It was a mass of crimson, blood-crusted bones. Most of the meat had been ripped off, but a few shreds of muscle remained. Some of the bones were human and some were wolf, Wiktor quickly saw; Belyi’s body, in death, had warred between its poles. “Look at this,” Franco said, and held up part of a shoulder blade. Across it were deep scrapes.

Wiktor nodded. “Fangs.” There was more evidence of powerful jaws at work: furrows on an arm bone, the jagged edges of the broken spine.

And then, at last, Nikita brushed away some hard-crusted snow and found the head.

The scalp was gone, the skull crushed and the brains scooped out, but Belyi’s face remained. Minus the lower jaw, which had been torn away. The tongue, too, had been wrenched from its roots. Belyi’s eyes were open, and the red hairs covered his cheeks and forehead. The eyes were directed for a few seconds right at Mikhail, until Nikita moved the head again, and in them Mikhail saw a glassy shine of pure terror. He looked away, shivering but not with the cold this time, and retreated a few paces. Franco picked up a leg bone that still held a few fragments of frozen red muscle, and examined the bone’s splintered edges. “Great strength in the bite,” Franco said quietly. “The leg was broken with a single crunch.”

“So were both the arms,” Nikita said. He sat on his haunches, looking at the bones arranged around him in the snow. A patchwork of shadows and sunlight lay on Belyi’s face, and the ice in the single remaining eyelid was beginning to melt. Mikhail watched with dreadful fascination as a drop of water trickled down Belyi’s blue cheek like a tear.

Wiktor stood up, his eyes blazing, and slowly turned his gaze through all points of the compass. His fists clenched at his sides. Mikhail knew what he must be thinking: they were no longer the only killers in the forest. Something had been watching them, and knew where their den was. It had crushed Belyi’s bones, torn out his tongue, and scooped the brains from his skull. Then it had brought the broken skeleton back here like a taunt. Or a challenge.

“Wrap him in this.” Wiktor removed his deerskin cloak and gave it to Franco. “Don’t let Pauli see him.” He began to walk, naked and with a purposeful stride, away from the white palace.

“Where’re you going?” Nikita asked him.

“Tracking,” Wiktor answered, his feet crunching in the snow. Then he began to run, casting a long shadow. Mikhail watched him weave through the tangle of surrounding trees and spiky undergrowth; he saw gray hair ripple across Wiktor’s broad white back, saw his spine start to contort, and then Wiktor vanished into the forest.

Nikita and Franco put Belyi’s bones in the robe. The head, with its silent jawless shriek, was the last to go in. Franco stood up, the folded robe clutched in his arms and his face gaunt and gray. He looked at Mikhail, and his lip curled. “You carry them, rabbit,” he said in a tone of derision, and he put the sack of remains in Mikhail’s arms. Their weight instantly dropped the boy to his knees.

Nikita started to help him, but Franco caught the Mongol’s arm. “Let the rabbit do it alone, if he wants to be one of us so much!”

Mikhail stared into Franco’s eyes; they laughed at him, and wanted him to fail. He felt a spark leap inside him. It exploded into incandescent fire, and the heat of anger made Mikhail strain to stand with the sack of bones in his arms. He got halfway up before his feet slipped out from under him. Franco walked on a few paces. “Come on!” he said impatiently, and Nikita reluctantly followed. Mikhail struggled, his teeth gritted and his arms aching. But he had known pain before, and this was nothing. He would not let Franco see him beaten; he would let no one see him beaten, not ever. He got all the way up, and then walked with unsteady steps, his arms full of what used to be Belyi.

“A good rabbit always does as he’s told,” Franco said. Nikita reached out to carry the bones the rest of the way, but Mikhail said, “No,” and carried his burden toward the white palace. He smelled the coppery aroma of icy blood from Belyi’s remains. The deerskin had its own smell-higher, sweeter-and Wiktor’s sweat smelled of salt and musk. But there was another odor in the chill air, and it drifted past Mikhail’s nostrils as he reached the doorway. This odor was wild and rank, a smell of brutality and cunning. The smell of an animal, and as different from the odors of Mikhail’s pack as black differs from red. It was wafting, he realized, from Belyi’s bones: the spoor of the beast that had slaughtered him. The same odor that Wiktor was now tracking across the smooth, blizzard-sculpted snow.

The promise of violence hung in the air. Mikhail felt it like the slide of claws down his spine. Franco and Nikita felt it, too, as they gazed around through the forest, their senses questing, collecting, evaluating with a speed that was now their second nature. Belyi had not been the strongest of the pack, but he’d been very quick and smart. Whatever had torn him to pieces had been quicker and smarter. It was out there now, somewhere in the forest, waiting and watching to see what would be the response to its gift of death.

Mikhail staggered across the threshold into the palace and saw Pauli standing there with Renati and Alekza, her mouth gasping wordlessly as she stared at the folded robe in his arms. Renati quickly stepped forward and took the robe from him, carrying it away.

The sun went down. The stars emerged, shimmering against the blackness. A small fire crackled in the depths of the white palace as Mikhail and the rest of his pack huddled in the circle of its heat. They waited as the wind began to rise outside and shrill through the corridors. And waited. But Wiktor did not come home.

FIVE – The Mouse Trap

1

At six o’clock on the morning of March 29, Michael Gallatin dressed in a field-gray German uniform, with jackboots, a cap bearing a communications-company insignia, and the proper service medals-Norway, the Leningrad Front, and Stalingrad-on his chest. He shrugged into a field-gray overcoat. On his person were papers-an expert job had been done in acid aging the new photograph and yellowing the documentation, Michael noted-identifying him as an oberst-a colonel-in charge of coordinating the signal lines and relays between Paris and the units scattered along the coast of Normandy. He had been born in a village in southern Austria called Braugdonau. He had a wife named Lana and two sons. His politics were adamantly pro-Hitler, and he was loyal to the Reich’s service, if not necessarily in awe of Nazism. He had been wounded once, by a fragment of shrapnel from a grenade thrown by a Russian partisan in 1942, and he had the scar under his eye to prove it. Under his coat he wore a leather holster with a well-used but perfectly clean Luger in it, and two extra clips of bullets in his pocket, near his heart. He carried a silver Swiss pocket watch, engraved with figures of hunters shooting stags, and nothing-not even his socks-had a trace of British wool. The rest of what he needed to know was in his head: the roads in and out of Paris, the maze of streets around Adam’s apartment and the building where Adam worked, and Adam’s nondescript, accountant’s face. He had a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs with Pearly McCarren, washed down with strong black French coffee, and it was time to go.

McCarren, a craggy mountain in a Black Watch kilt, and a young dark-haired Frenchman Pearly referred to as André led Michael through a long, damp corridor. His jackboots, the footwear of a dead German officer, clattered on the stones. McCarren talked quietly as they went along the corridor, filling in last-minute details; the Scotsman’s voice was nervous, and Michael listened intently but said nothing. The details were already in his head, and he was satisfied that everything was planned. From here on, it was a walk on the razor’s edge.

The silver pocket watch was an interesting invention. Two clicks on the winding stem popped open the false back, and inside was a little compartment that held a single gray capsule. The capsule was small to be so deadly, but cyanide was a potent and fast-acting poison. Michael had agreed to carry the poison capsule simply because it was one of the unwritten regulations of the secret service, but he never intended the Gestapo to take him alive. Still, his carrying it seemed to make McCarren feel better. Actually, Michael and McCarren had become good companions in the last two days; McCarren was a tough poker player, and when he wasn’t drilling Michael on the details of his new identity, he was winning hand after hand of five-card draw. Michael was disappointed in one thing, though; he hadn’t seen Gaby today, and because McCarren hadn’t mentioned her he assumed she had gone back to an assignment in the field. Au revoir, he thought. And good luck to you.

The Scotsman and the young French partisan led Michael up a set of stone steps, and into a small cave lit by green-shaded lamps. The illumination gleamed on a long, black, hard-topped Mercedes-Benz touring car. It was a beautiful machine, and Michael couldn’t even tell where the bullet holes had been patched and repainted. “Fine machine, eh?” McCarren asked, reading Michael’s mind as Michael ran a gloved hand across a fender. “The Germans know how to build ’em, that’s for sure. Well, the bastards have got cogs and gears in their heads instead of brains anyway, so what can you expect.” He motioned toward the driver’s seat, where a uniformed figure sat behind the wheel. “André there’s a good driver. He knows Paris about as well as anybody, seein’ as he was born there.” He tapped on the glass, and the driver nodded and started the engine; it responded with a low, throaty growl. McCarren opened the rear door for Michael as the young Frenchman unlatched two doors that covered the cave entrance. The doors were thrown open, letting in a glare of morning sunlight, and then the young Frenchman began to quickly clear brush away from in front of the Mercedes.

McCarren held out his hand, and Michael gripped it. “You take care of yourself, laddie,” the Scotsman said. “Give ’em hell out there for the Black Watch, eh?”

“Jawohl.” Michael eased into the backseat, a luxury of black leather, and the driver released the hand brake and drove through the cave entrance. As soon as the car was clear, the brush was put back into place, the green-and-brown-camouflage-painted doors were sealed, and it looked like a rugged hillside again. The Mercedes wound through a patch of dense woods, met a rutted country road, and turned left on it.

Michael sniffed the air: leather and new paint, the faint whiff of gunpowder, engine oil, and an apple-wine fragrance. Ah, yes, he thought, and smiled faintly. He looked out through a window, studying the blue sky full of lacy, billowing clouds. “Does McCarren know?” he asked Gaby.

She glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Her black hair was pinned up under her German staff driver’s cap, and she wore a shapeless coat over her uniform. His gaze, that piercing glare of green, met hers. “No,” she said. “He thinks I went back to the field last night.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She thought about it for a moment as she jockeyed the car over a rough section of road. “My assignment was to get you where you want to go,” she answered.

“Your assignment ended when you got me to McCarren.”

“Your interpretation. Not mine.”

“McCarren had a driver for me. What happened to him?”

Gaby shrugged. “He decided… the job was too dangerous.”

“Do you know Paris?”

“Well enough. What I didn’t know I learned from the map.” Another glance in the rearview mirror; his eyes were still on her. “I haven’t spent all my life in the country.”

“What’ll the Germans think if we run into a roadblock?” he asked her. “1 imagine a beautiful girl driving a staff car isn’t a common sight.”

“Many of the officers have female drivers.” She concentrated her attention back on the road. “Either secretaries or mistresses. French girls, too. You’ll get more respect with a female driver.”

He wondered when she’d decided to do this. She certainly didn’t need to; her part of the mission was over. Had it been the night of their chilly bath? Or later, as Michael and Gaby had shared a stale loaf of bread and some musky red wine? Well, she was a professional; she knew what kind of dangers lay ahead, and what would happen to her if she were captured. He looked out the window, at the greening countryside, and wondered where her cyanide capsule was hidden.

Gaby reached an intersection, where the rutted dirt road connected with a road of tarred gravel: the route to the City of Light. She turned right and passed a field where farmers stood baling hay. The Frenchmen stopped their work, leaning on their pitchforks as they watched the black German car glide past. Gaby was a good driver. She kept a constant speed, her gaze darting to the rear view mirror and then back to the road again. She was driving as if the German colonel in the backseat had somewhere to go, but was in no hurry to get there.

“I’m not beautiful,” she said quietly, about six or seven minutes later.

Michael smiled behind his gloved hand, and he settled back into his seat to enjoy the journey.

They went on in silence, the Mercedes’s engine a polite, well-oiled purr. Gaby glanced back at him occasionally, trying to figure out what it was about him that had made her want to-no, no, need to be with him. Yes, that ought to be admitted. Not to him, of course, but in the chapel of secrets. It was most probably, she reasoned, that the action against the Nazi tank had fired her blood and passions in a way she hadn’t been flamed in a long while. Oh, there had been other cinders, but this was a bonfire. It was just the nearness of a man who craved action, she thought. A man who was good at his job. A man… who was good. She hadn’t lived so long to be a poor judge of character; the man in the backseat was special. Something about him was cruel and… beastly, perhaps. That was part of the nature of his occupation. But she’d seen kindness in his eyes, there in the chilly water. A sense of grace, a purpose. He was a gentleman, she thought, if there were indeed any of those left on this earth. Anyway, he needed her help. She could get him in and out of Paris, and that was the important thing. Wasn’t it?

She glanced in the sideview mirror, and her heart stuttered.

Coming up behind them, very quickly, was a German BMW motorcycle and sidecar.

Her hands tightened on the wheel, and the motion made the Mercedes swerve slightly.

Michael sat upright with the jerk of the car, and caught the high whine of the motorcycle’s engine: a familiar noise, last heard in the desert of North Africa. “Behind us,” Gaby said tautly, but Michael had already glanced back and seen the vehicle overtaking them. His hand went to the Luger. No, not yet, he decided. Stay calm.

Gaby didn’t slow down, nor did she speed up. She kept her speed steady, an admirable accomplishment when her pulse was beating so fast. She could see the tinted goggles of the helmeted driver and the sidecar’s passenger. They seemed to be fixed on her with murderous intent. On the floorboard at her feet was a loaded Luger. She could pick it up and fire out the window in an instant, if need be.

Michael said, “Keep driving.” He settled back in his seat again, waiting.

The motorcycle and sidecar pulled up behind them, perhaps six feet from their bumper. Gaby looked in the rearview mirror and saw the sidecar’s passenger motioning them over. “They’re telling us to pull off,” she said. “Shall I?”

Michael paused only a few seconds. “Yes.” If it wasn’t the right decision, he’d know very soon.

Gaby slowed the Mercedes. The motorcycle and sidecar slowed as well. Then Gaby pulled the heavy car off the road, and the motorcycle came abreast with them before its driver cut the engine. Michael said, “Say nothing,” and furiously rolled down his window. The sidecar’s passenger, a lieutenant from the markings on his dusty uniform, was already pulling his long legs out of the vehicle and standing up. Michael stuck his head out the rolled-down window and shouted in German, “What the hell are you trying to do, you idiot? Run us off the road?”

The lieutenant froze. “No, sir. I’m sorry, sir,” the man babbled as he recognized a colonel’s insignia.

“Well, don’t just stand there! What do you want?” Michael’s hand rested on the Luger’s grip.

“I apologize, sir. Heil Hitler.” He made a weak Nazi salute that Michael didn’t even bother to return. “Where are you going, sir?”

“Who wants to know? Lieutenant, are you wishing a tour with a ditch-digging battalion?”

“No, sir!” The young man’s face was gaunt and chalky under a mask of dust. The dark goggles gave his eyes a bulging, insectlike appearance. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir, but I thought it my duty-”

“Your duty? To what? Act like an ass?” Michael was looking for guns. The young lieutenant didn’t have a holster. His weapon was probably in the sidecar. The motorcycle’s driver had no visible weapon, either. So much the better.

“No, sir.” The young man trembled a bit, and Michael felt a little pang of pity for him. “To warn you that there were air attacks on the road to Amiens before dawn. I didn’t know if you’d heard or not.”

“I’ve heard,” Michael said, deciding to chance it.

“They got a few supply trucks. Nothing vital,” the young lieutenant went on. “But the word’s out: with this weather so clear, there are bound to be more air attacks. Your car… well, it’s very shiny, sir. A very nice target.”

“Shall I throw mud on it? Or pig shit?” He kept his tone icy.

“No, sir. I don’t mean to be out of line, sir, but… those American fighter planes… they swoop down very fast.”

Michael stared at him for a moment. The young man stood rigid, like a commoner in the presence of royalty. The boy couldn’t be more than twenty years old, Michael figured. Damn bastards were robbing the cradles now for their cannon fodder. He removed his hand from the Luger. “Yes, you’re right, of course. I appreciate your concern, Lieutenant…?” He let it hang.

“Krabell, sir!” the young man-so close to death, without knowing it-said proudly.

“Thank you, Lieutenant Krabell. I’ll remember the name.” It would wind up scrawled on a wooden cross, stuck on a mound of French earth after the invasion swept through, he thought.

“Yes, sir. Good day, sir.” The young man saluted again-the salute of a puppet-then returned to his sidecar. The motorcycle driver started the engine, and the vehicle pulled away. “Wait,” Michael said to Gaby. He let the motorcycle get out of sight, and then he touched Gaby’s shoulder. “All right, let’s go.”

She started off again, driving at the same steady speed, frequently checking not only the mirrors but also the sky for a hint of silver that would be diving upon them, machine guns blazing. The Allied fighters commonly strafed the roads, supply dumps, and any troops they could find; on a clear day such as this, it was reasonable to believe the fighters were prowling for targets-including shiny black German staff cars. Tension knotted her stomach and made her feel slightly sick. They swept past a group of hay wagons, farmers at work, and saw the first sign that pointed to Paris. About four miles east of that sign they came around a curve and found themselves confronted with a roadblock.

“Easy,” Michael said quietly. “Don’t slow down too soon.” He saw perhaps eight or nine soldiers with rifles and a couple of security officers with machine guns. Again, his hand was on the Luger. He rolled down his window once more and prepared to act indignant.