“But …”
“Now.”
In the back of the car Doesburg held his wife’s hand, trying to communicate the need for silence. There were tears in her eyes and he realized, with something of a shock, that he had no idea how she’d react under pressure. She didn’t know everything, but she knew enough.
They were separated the moment they arrived, and Doesburg was led to a small windowless interview room. He was left on his own for several minutes, then Kowalski came in with an older, gray-haired man who didn’t bother to introduce himself.
“I’d like to see my lawyer,” Doesburg said immediately.
“Bullshit,” the man said, in a quiet voice that somehow seemed full of menace. “I’m not going to play games with you, Herr Doesburg. You know what this is about and I know what this is about. You’re thinking that we have no proof, and you’re quite right. But we’ll find some, starting with a trace on that money and finishing by taking your house apart brick by brick. We may find it too late, but not as far as you’re concerned. For you, there’s a straightforward choice. You talk now and you get fifteen years. You don’t talk now and you go to the chair. Which is it to be?”
Could they trace the money? Perhaps. He wouldn’t want to stake his life on it. And if they had Markham, he was done anyway. But that, he realized with a flash of insight, was all irrelevant. The only one who knew his address was Kroeger, and if Kroeger had talked, then he must too. He sighed, looked across into the man’s blue eyes.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
For a few seconds Amy was conscious of bumping up and down, but it was the cessation of motion that finally woke her. They seemed to be in the middle of a forest, and the sun shining down through the yellow-green foliage invested everything with amber light.
“We’ve been driving through this for about ten miles,” Gerd said, “so I thought it was time to get off the road.” He yawned, stretching out his arms above his head. “And I was having trouble keeping my eyes open,” he added.
“Where’s Paul?” she asked, noticing the empty convertible in her side-view mirror.
“Call of nature, I expect,” he murmured, his eyes already closed. “Wake me when the war’s over.”
She was extremely hungry. In the back of the camper Kuznetsky seemed much the same, though perhaps there was more color in his face. She took a can opener and a tin of peaches from the supply box and opened it on the camper’s hood.
Paul reappeared, his face and hair glistening with water. “Stream over there,” he explained, leaning across her and digging a hand into the tin.
The consciousness of his body forced her to move away. “You can get some sleep too,” she said.
“Someone’ll have to stay awake.”
“I’m not driving,” she said levelly.
But there must have been something else in her voice. “Are you okay?” he asked, touching her lightly on the shoulder.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” She walked off toward the stream.
Benton and Mitchell arrived in Savannah early in the afternoon. There was no fresh news from Huntsville or New York. Benton called New York and was told that they were bringing Doesburg in now. “Half an hour,” the voice promised.
It was an hour before the call came through. Benton listened, moved his finger down the coastline on the map in front of him. “Got it,” he said into the phone. “Anything more precise?”
“Where the road hits the sea,” New York told him. “There’s only one, according to our German friend here.”
“We’re on our way.” He put down the phone, showed Mitchell Ossabaw Island on the map. “Everything set?” he asked.
“The troops are lined up for inspection outside.”
The phone rang again, Washington this time. “Benton? Charleston just called us. They’ve had a reported sighting of a U-boat. Someone called in from Folly Beach – place just outside the city – said it was heading south about a half mile out.”
“Anything else?”
“No, the caller got hysterical after that, started screaming about a German invasion, and then hung up.”
“I take it the Navy’s on the way.”
“And how.”
“Right.” He hung up, clapped Mitchell on the shoulder. “Let’s go get ’em.”
Ten minutes later they were sitting in the cab of an army troop transport, the first in a column of ten rumbling south along the Jacksonville road.
* * *
Kuznetsky emerged into consciousness, seemed to be looking through a large glassless window at angular beams of sunlight shining down through strange tall trees. Was it the forest, a dream of the forest … heaven perhaps, old Father McIlroy’s paradise situated somewhere high in the sky above St. Cloud …?
A figure blocked the window. Could it be hanging in midair?
“Jack … Yakov,” it whispered. Yes, they were him. How could he have two names? “Don’t be greedy, Jack.” “But …” The trees were so beautiful – why was this person blocking them out, coming closer, feeling his forehead, a cool hand, the smell of clean hair. Nadezhda? No, it was someone else, he knew that. Nadezhda was far away. Who was it then? It was important he know, but his head hurt, felt like cold fire.
“Try to sleep. Everything’s fine.” He obediently closed his eyes. The story must be finished, he thought. Good night, Mama.
Amy pulled the blanket up to his chin and walked back to the others, feeling the wound in her side. Paul was sitting against a tree, trying to flick a cigarette into his mouth. Like a little boy again, she thought. A little boy who cut throats.
“How do you think Smith is?” she asked Gerd. “Will he come through?”
“There’s no way of knowing. He’s a strong man, but head wounds …” He shrugged. “I’d better look at you,” he said, getting to his feet. She held the blouse up across her breasts as he carefully inspected the wound. The blood had clotted in the gash, a brown groove in a patch of blue flesh. “How’s it feel?” he asked.
“Stiff. And it itches.”
“Good signs.” He went to the camper, got a roll of bandage, and replaced the dressing she’d lost in Locust Forks. “You’ll be okay in a few days.” He smiled at her.
“Thanks,” she said. His kindness was almost unbearable. “I’m going to wash my face.”
She walked off toward the stream, feeling close to despair. If Kuznetsky died, what could she do? Even with him they’d never have gotten this far without the two Germans. And what would she do with them? With Paul? They might reach the coast, they might reach Cuba, they might even reach Sweden. And then? At some point Paul and Gerd had to be silenced, had to be, or it was all for nothing. And she didn’t know if she could kill them.
“Where exactly are we headed?” Paul asked when she returned, his gaze fixed on the map that he’d spread out on the convertible’s hood. “Mon Louis,” she said, pointing it out and moving away. “It’s a small fishing port. French-speaking. There’s a shrimp boat waiting to take us to Cuba.”
“Hired?”
“Yes. No questions asked, a nice big fee.”
“When?”
“We’re supposed to sail at midnight.” She looked at her watch. “We should be leaving soon.”
“The U-boat’s been sighted by now, hasn’t it?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” she said coldly. “I expect it has.”
Sam Benton stood at the top of the path that led down to the rocky beach. It was a damn shame in some ways, a damn shame. They’d come for a battle and found nothing but one empty and broken crate and a dead man in a car. The Navy had gotten all the glory. Well, almost all of it – the Bureau had nabbed the big wheel in New York.
“It’s Markham all right,” Mitchell said, joining him. “Found a book under the front seat – Civil War battlefields, something like that – got his name inside the front.”
“That’s that then.”
“Well …”
Benton looked at his partner. “Well what?�
�� he asked irritably.
“I don’t get it,” Mitchell said. “It doesn’t add up.”
“It doesn’t add up,” Benton repeated sarcastically. “We’ve got this empty crate, we’ve got Markham’s body, we’ve matched the car left by the train with the one those kids saw here on Wednesday night. Markham hired the lodge. The German in New York, the guy who arranged the whole goddamn spree – he told us this was the pickup point …”
“He said the pickup was supposed to be at ten p.m.”
“So they got here early.”
“Why was it traveling on the surface? That doesn’t make sense. They’d be dead ducks.”
“How d’you know it was?”
“The sighting.”
“Hell, I don’t know.”
“And why was it moving south when they got it?” Mitchell went on doggedly.
“Oh Christ, that doesn’t mean anything. It had seen our boats, and was making a run for it.”
Mitchell sighed. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But why did they shoot Markham?”
The “probably” irritated Benton still further. “How should I know? They must have fallen out among themselves …”
“The moment they arrived?”
“Orders from Berlin, then. He knew too much. Christ, what does it matter now?”
“Yeah. Okay.” There must have been a reason. “We’d better unblock the highways,” he said. “And I’m hungry.”
Paul had seen the roadblock when he was still half a mile away, but there’d been no way to avoid it. In the mirror he could see the camper pulling up two cars behind him.
The state troopers finished with the truck in front and one of them waved him forward, a bored expression on his face. As the truck picked up speed Paul accelerated the convertible through the space between it and the troopers’ car. A burst of gunfire would have been nice, but he had only two hands and he wanted to stay on the road.
Looking back, he could see that gunfire hadn’t been necessary; the troopers were already pulling their car around and giving chase, the siren beginning to wail. He rammed his foot down, feeling an exhilaration as the wind swept past him.
The first thing was to get off the highway and clear it for the others, but at the moment he had a river on one side, railroad tracks and a forest on the other. And the troopers were slowly reducing the distance between them.
He was at the turnoff almost before he realized it, and the wheels screeched and squealed as he swung into the side road, bouncing across the inlaid tracks and climbing sharply upward through the trees. For a few seconds the pursuit vanished, then reappeared in his mirror about a hundred yards behind as the road straightened out. He could see the officer in the passenger seat talking into a radio. That was bad news.
For a mile ahead the road was straight and empty. Paul unfastened the door beside him so only the car’s motion kept it closed, checked the position of the tommy gun on the seat, then skidded the car to a halt with his door broadside on to the pursuit. Kicking the door open with his foot as he picked up the gun, he raked the oncoming car before the dust thrown up by his skid had begun to settle. Through it he saw the windshield explode into fragments, two heads thrown back, the car careening sideways off the road to glance off one tree and into another.
He walked across to the wreck, tommy gun at the ready, and stood there listening to the voice shouting, “Hal, what the fuck’s happening, come in …” Both men were dead. “Hal died in the war,” Paul murmured to himself and the trees.
He got back behind the wheel, leaned over and examined the map Amy had given him. The road he was on wasn’t marked, but with any luck it should join up with one that was.
After about ten minutes he reached an east–west highway and turned west. Almost immediately he passed a truck stop, a long one-story café with a dozen or so vehicles parked in the lot. He drove on until he was well out of sight, then pulled the convertible off the highway and drove it deep into the trees. There he examined the map again, measuring distances against the scale with the barrel of the Walther. He was about 120 miles from Mon Louis, which didn’t seem far. But then they’d been only ten miles from the Kremlin.
It was almost seven o’clock, and the sun was sinking fast. It would be worth waiting for dark, he decided. Paul sat there for half an hour and let his mind rest.
When the last glint of orange had gone from the sky, he put the map inside his shirt, the Walther in his jacket pocket, and with the tommy gun slung over his shoulder walked back to the highway. It was lighter outside the trees and he waited another ten minutes before making his way to the truck stop.
There were about twenty people inside, and the smell of frying meat made his mouth water. All those years ago the one thing he’d loved about America was the hamburgers. He flattened himself against the side wall and, reaching up on tiptoe, cut through the telephone line where it entered the café, then walked stealthily around the back to the parking lot on the far side. The car closest to the highway was another convertible, so he decided on the one parked next to it, a black Pontiac. The door wasn’t locked. He took off the brake and pushed it into motion with his shoulder, finding it easier as the slope took over. He jumped in, letting in the clutch a hundred yards or so down the highway.
He traveled east, toward Selma, and a few miles farther on he saw a police car coming toward him, its siren wailing. The tommy gun was ready, but the cruiser just sailed past, ignoring him. So far so good. But in fifteen minutes they’d be at the truck stop, and the car’s disappearance might have been noticed. The troopers would radio Selma and … at this rate he’d have to change cars every ten miles to Mon Louis, and leave a trail that any fool could follow in the process. He needed a car whose theft wouldn’t be noticed for several hours.
He put his foot down harder on the gas, and within ten minutes he entered a town alongside a railroad track. He was running parallel with a train. Now if it was going south … He stopped to look at the map, and found that it must have come from the south. A pity, but the station would be a good place to dump the car he was in. The police didn’t know in what direction he was headed.
He followed the train into town, keeping the orange glare of the locomotive in sight between the buildings, and reached the station only a minute or so behind it. After parking the car away from the single streetlight, he sat there wondering what to do. He’d have to leave the tommy gun, that seemed certain. He pushed it under the front seat and was opening the door to get out when another car almost hurtled into the yard. A man leaped out and raced to the train platform just as it was pulling out.
Paul smiled beatifically. A third piece of luck in twenty-four hours; someone somewhere liked them. He watched the train clank out of the station, waited to check that there were no arriving passengers, then recovered the tommy gun from its hiding place and strolled calmly across to the man’s car. The key was still in the ignition.
They drove south through the cotton fields, through ramshackle settlements full of black children and small towns that all looked the same, through Megargel, Uriah, Bay Minette, strange names for a strange land of bright colors and fading endeavor. As the sun went down it seemed to Amy as if the golden light transformed each vista into a sepia photograph, pushing time backward a century and more. And then, with darkness having fallen, the movie screens, set high in the fields, their flickering images reflecting from the roofs of their wheeled congregations, seemed only to emphasize the point, to offer a present that was too unreal to hold back the past.
It was past ten when they crossed the bay bridges and drove into Mobile, a larger version of the same picket and neon mélange. Amy bought a newspaper while they were stopped at a city intersection. There was no mention of train holdups, no mention of U-boats. “Nothing,” she told Gerd. “But I wouldn’t expect anything, not with our cargo.”
“Perhaps we imagined it all,” he said, swerving to avoid a cab that had cut across him. “Christ, don’t they teach Americans to drive?”
“You’re in the wrong lane,” she told him sweetly.
“And what happens when we get there?”
“The boat should be waiting. The Lafayette. Captain’s name is Warren. He lives on the boat.”
“I thought you said it was French-speaking.”
“Not completely.”
“What’s he know?”
“Nothing. As far as he’s concerned, we just want a ride to Cuba – one that doesn’t involve customs inspection. But he’s expecting only two people.”
“Hmm. People who haven’t been shot up, presumably.”
“I thought we’d imagined all that.”
Mon Louis looked French. It was a small fishing community built on a narrow peninsula between the bay and an inlet, with wooden houses and a long, sheltered anchorage crammed with shrimp boats. The first two people they stopped spoke a French that neither could understand, the third, on hearing the name Lafayette, spat a long stream of tobacco juice between his feet and gestured them toward the end of the dock. There they found the boat, one of the least prepossessing in sight, faded paint from the deck down, rust from the deck up. But it was floating.
There was no one aboard. “I’ll start loading,” Gerd said. “The invalid first.” He glanced up and down the waterfront, but there was no one in sight; all the noise seemed to be coming from a bar about two hundred yards away.
Gerd had lifted Kuznetsky down onto the dock when the car arrived. It was Paul. His eyes had lost the bitter expression she’d seen in the forest, but he avoided looking at Amy. “A frog among princes,” he murmured, looking at the Lafayette. “Nothing’s too good for us eagles, eh?”
He and Gerd carried Kuznetsky along to the boat, then lifted him across and onto the deck. Gerd noticed that the tide was in – either good planning or luck. Probably the former, he thought. But for the kid everything would have gone like clockwork.
“You’d better sit down,” he told Amy, noticing how unsteady she looked. “I said you’d be better in a couple of days, not hours.”
The Red Eagles Page 19
