The Constant Man

by Peter Steiner

  Soon enough it was time for the crew to move to a different part of the road. They got into formation. Reinhard stood up then. He was unsteady on his feet. He got in line at the back of the formation. As they started to march, Reinhard spun around suddenly and started running. He charged with surprising speed, given his injuries, toward the death zone and the fence beyond it, screaming incoherently as he ran. By the time the guards in the tower could swivel their machine gun around and point it in his direction, he had reached the zone and was only steps from the fence. They began shooting, splattering the ground with raking fire. Reinhard was hit several times, but somehow kept moving forward, jerking and convulsing with each step, almost as though the bullets were carrying him to his destination. His arms were stretched out in front of him as though he wanted to, he had to reach that fence. No one knew whether he was still alive when he did. The fence’s barbs caught his clothes and his flesh and held him upright while the electricity crackled and flamed around him.

  There was a hum from the west that grew into a roar as a squadron of Stuka dive bombers passed overhead on their way to Warsaw. There seemed to be hundreds of them. Reinhard’s body smoked and smoldered. It remained hanging there on the fence until the prisoners were back in their barracks and the electricity running through the fence could be turned off.

  Table of Contents

  Contents

  Also by Peter Steiner

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One Willi

  Schloß Barzelhof

  The First Kiss

  Operation Hummingbird

  And It Didn’t Stop There

  Tullemannstraße 54

  Heinz Schleiffer

  The First Report

  The Gestapo

  The Blood Flag

  The Second Report

  Frau Schimmel

  Detective Sergeant Hermann Gruber

  The Steins

  Lili Marlene

  The Logbooks

  Corpus Delicti

  Erna Raczynski

  Briennerstraße 20

  The Green Dress

  Degenerate Art

  The Ninth Victim

  The Mind of a Killer

  The Third Report

  The Lion and the Hyenas

  Part Two Dachau

  Outside

  Schleiffer in Trouble

  The Sudetenland

  Hard Labor

  The First Interrogation

  The Riegsee

  Frau Schimmel Again

  The Second and Third Interrogations

  Kristallnacht

  Friedrich Grosz

  Escape

  The Man Who Loved Women

  Altdorfer Investigates

  The Bavarian Forest

  Heinz Schleiffer Gets a Letter

  The Evidence

  The Arrest

  The Woodcutter

  The Holy Fire