The Red Eagles

by David Downing

  She watched as they hauled the ten crates out of the camper, onto the dock, and across to the boat. “You were always complaining about the lack of exercise on the U-boat,” Paul said as Gerd, the job finished, sat down and wiped his brow.

  “You can unload them all at the other end,” Gerd said. “We’d better find the owner of this pleasure cruiser before the tide turns. No, you stay where you are,” he told the other two. “I need to practice my French.”

  “I’ll take a look at Smith,” she said, not wanting to be left alone with Paul.

  Gerd found Warren, a short, wiry man with a shock of black hair above a crowded face, playing dominoes in the bar. He was about fifty, and judging from the skin on his face, he’d spent a lifetime in the sun. Gerd introduced himself as Jack Smith.

  “You’re early,” Warren said curtly, concentrating on the game.

  “What about the tide?”

  “An authority on the sea, eh? What about the tide?”

  “It’s turning.”

  “Plenty of time. Have a drink.” He passed over the bottle of bourbon, called over his shoulder for another glass.

  It was delicious, but not, Gerd decided reluctantly, the ideal lining for an empty stomach. The game went on, and he fought to restrain his impatience. At last Warren got up, called over a young man who turned out to be his son and crew, and accompanied Gerd back to the boat. Both fishermen were mildly drunk.

  Paul came out of the cabin, and leaned against its side. “Okay?” he asked Gerd.

  “What happened to him?” Warren asked, looking past Paul at the inert Kuznetsky. “Hey, I was told two, not three passengers …”

  “Be more company for you,” Paul said lightly.

  “And it’s four,” Amy said, emerging from the shadows in the bow, her hands behind her back. “You were paid for the journey, not by numbers.”

  “Who the hell are you people?” Warren’s son exclaimed, backing toward the side.

  “Tourists,” Paul said succinctly, bracing himself for a lunge. Why the hell hadn’t he thought to have a gun on him?

  “Hold on,” Warren said calmly. “I’m sure we can agree on something here.”

  “We’ll throw the camper in as extra payment,” Amy said coolly.

  “Okay, I’ll have to move it off the dock.”

  “No.” Her voice was harsher than Paul had ever heard before.

  “Look, lady …”

  She stepped into the light, bringing the Walther out from behind her back as she did so. “Cast off,” she said to Gerd.

  Warren laughed nervously, pushed his son. “Take the wheel. Madame here wants to leave.”

  They were under way in a few minutes, chugging down the bay toward the open sea. “We didn’t stay long,” Paul muttered as he and Gerd watched the last lights of the shoreline slipping past.

  “Long enough. We’ll have to watch them day and night now,” he added, indicating the cabin where the two Warrens were talking softly to each other.

  “How long’s this trip going to take?”

  “Two days,” Amy said, joining them. “It’s over six hundred miles. I don’t think they’ll give us any trouble, but it might be a good idea to throw the tommy guns overboard rather than have to carry them around.”

  “Good idea,” Gerd said. “Let’s do it now.” He disappeared into the crew quarters, took a quick look at Kuznetsky, and returned with the three guns. The men in the wheelhouse had stopped talking, were watching with open mouths as he and Paul sent them arcing over the side.

  “I’ll take first watch,” Paul said. “I’ll wake someone if I feel like collapsing.”

  The others laid out blankets on either side of the foredeck, and Paul sat down with his back against the bow railing, his service revolver in his lap. Amy heard him and Gerd talking about someone called Burdenski, fell asleep wondering when they’d first met each other.

  Twelve

  Paul rearranged his legs to make himself more comfortable, tried to remember which of the stars was which. The sky must be very different this far south, he thought, because he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Warren stood in the wheel-house a few yards away, both hands on the wheel, a pipe in his mouth. His son had bedded down somewhere in the stern.

  He looked at Amy’s upturned, sleeping face, watched her hand brush something from her cheek, felt a lump form in his throat.

  He forced his gaze back to the sky, made out the veil of the Milky Way draped across the heavens. What the hell had happened by the train? Gerd still hadn’t told him the full story. The image of Smith shooting the injured man in the back of the head kept flashing into his mind, and the feeling of revulsion that had accompanied it. Why? he wondered. Why was it worse to kill people in cold blood than to kill like an animal? The man had known nothing; it had been almost merciful. Because we are animals, he answered himself, and we fear machines.

  He found himself staring at Amy again, remembering kissing those gray eyes, feeling those legs that now shifted under the blanket shifting then against his own … Damnit, that had been someone else, not this woman with a gun and a voice that could turn you to stone. But sleeping, she seemed …

  He’d read the paper while Gerd had been looking for Warren back in Mon Louis. Russians outside Warsaw, Americans all over Normandy. It wouldn’t be long now. He might yet outlive the war. And then what? The farm? It would be like Russia again, a life dictated by the seasons. He never wanted to see snow again; he still had the snow dream, as Gerd did, and probably thousands of others: the beautiful white blanket, white velvet sewn with silver sequins, so lovely … suddenly thawing into mud and flesh, as if a face had been pulled away to reveal the pulsing muscles and pumping blood …

  Stop it, he told himself, you’re not asleep now. He wouldn’t go back to the farm, the country. A city then, full of new buildings, living people, endless activity.

  “Life in the country is just like life in the city – a hundred years earlier.” He could still hear Uncle Berndt say it, the droll inflection, the malicious twinkle in his eye. Well, his uncle had died in his beloved Bremen, had stubbornly sat in his fourth-floor office, probably with cigar in hand, as everyone else crouched in the shelters and the RAF opened their bomb-bay doors.

  He wouldn’t mind losing the last hundred years. What had been happening in 1844? They’d been building railways, exploring Africa, looking at steel mills as if they were magic creations. People had been optimistic then, one way or another. Hadn’t Marx written the Communist Manifesto that year? Now there was optimism for you. And Germany hadn’t even existed then, not as a unified state. Perhaps it would be that way after the war: a hundred small states within a civilization, just getting on with existence, making watches and toys like the Swiss.

  It was one in the morning, time for something to eat. He raised himself gingerly to his feet and walked back to the cabin.

  * * *

  The first thing Kuznetsky noticed was the movement of the floor, the easy rocking motion of a buoy on water. Either he was being rowed across the Hesperus or they’d made it to the Gulf. The latter, he guessed, wincing as the muscle movement of a smile shot up the side of his face. He carefully felt for the wound, found his head swathed in bandages.

  Someone came in, a man to judge from the footfall. He closed his eyes and played unconscious as the visitor rummaged around at the far end of the cabin, then observed the man’s back through slitted eyes. It was the younger German, Paul. He closed his eyes again as the man walked back past him.

  Alone again, he tried to remember what had happened. The train, the rush of feet in the darkness, the blow on the side of the head. How long ago had it been? At least twenty-four hours if they were now at sea, which they were – he could smell the salt.

  So what was the German doing here? She must have brought them – no one else knew. But why? It couldn’t be betrayal or he wouldn’t still be alive. And if it wasn’t betrayal, then what had she told them? Christ, his head hurt. She’d have to do t
he thinking for a bit longer yet. He drifted back into sleep, the throbbing in his skull keeping time with the throbbing of the engines.

  When Amy woke it was light, the first flash of the sun glinting on the eastern horizon. The boat was chugging through an empty sea, deep blue and calm, beneath an empty sky that seemed to lighten as she watched. She stood up and stretched, forgetting for a moment the wound in her side. The sharp pain pulled her up short, but the scab tissue stayed closed.

  Gerd was huddled in the wheelhouse with Warren, who appeared to be explaining the controls. She joined them. Warren seemed almost asleep on his feet, but at least daylight gave his face a basic friendliness that she hadn’t suspected the night before. Perhaps she’d overreacted by pulling a gun on him, perhaps he really had only wanted to move the camper. He looked at her now with something approaching awe. He finished with Gerd and went to lie down in the stern next to his snoring son.

  Gerd didn’t look much livelier. She made herself some coffee and asked him to go through what Warren had shown him. There was nothing to it.

  “Go to sleep,” she said, “I’ll be fine.”

  “Smith’s better,” he told her, “he’s sleeping now.”

  “Good,” she said automatically, and watched him slump wearily down onto the foredeck beside the sleeping Paul. She supposed she was glad, but she’d never really doubted that he’d pull through. His sort always did.

  She knew what they had to do with Paul and Gerd. It was obvious – they’d leave them in Cuba. There was no reason for them to go back to Europe, and after what she’d made up about their being Berlin’s sacrificial lambs, surely they wouldn’t feel duty-bound to carry on fighting the Führer’s war. It was simple. No need for Kuznetsky to kill them. No need for her to worry. Paul would soon be gone again, pushed safely back into the past.

  She gripped the wheel, checked the compass heading, pushed her hair back from her eyes. Another thirty-six hours. She didn’t want to think about anything else, just to get it over, come through to the other side. There must be other things she could occupy her mind with … But there weren’t – everything in her life seemed to return to the same place, the same feelings, the same knot of experiences she couldn’t untie …

  The rasp of a match being struck on the wheelhouse door spun her head round. It was Paul.

  “Sorry,” he said, lighting the cigarette. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  She turned her face back to the sea. “It’s just weariness,” she said. There was no hostility in his face, which somehow made it worse. Go away, the voice in her head screamed.

  “Amy,” he said quietly, almost gently, “I’ve something to tell you. It doesn’t make any difference now, but I want to tell you anyway.”

  “Yes?” she said in a small voice, but her eyes still would not meet his.

  “I never got your letters. I would have answered them, the way I felt then.”

  “Then how—”

  “They came to my family’s farm. My mother read them and destroyed them. She was afraid I’d leave, go back to America. I would have. But … my father had just died, and I don’t think she’d yet come out of shock. Anyway, I never saw them. She told me about your letters years later, in 1939. Thought she was dying, wanted to confess her sins. She didn’t die, of course. She’s still alive now as far as I know.” He stopped, and she could feel his gaze on her face. “I just wanted you to know,” he said.

  “As you said, it doesn’t make any difference now.” Her voice felt like it belonged to someone else. “But thank you for telling me.”

  “Well, life is full of might-have-beens.” His cheerfulness sounded forced. She turned to face him and saw, for the first time, the strain behind his eyes, the toll the last eleven years had taken. She wondered if he saw the same in her.

  “You’ve hardly changed at all,” he replied to the unspoken question.

  “Perhaps not on the outside.” She wanted this conversation to end, to have never been. “Smith’s better,” she said desperately.

  “Wonderful,” he said with all the old irony. “He’ll be up and executing people before we know it.”

  “It was necessary,” she said fiercely, “you know it was.”

  “It always is,” he replied coldly.

  “Anyway, you’ll have his company for only another thirty-six hours.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s no need for you and Gerd to go home, back to the war. Especially after the way Berlin’s treated you. And they’re expecting only two passengers on the freighter.”

  He digested this information for a minute or more, lighting another cigarette. “Are you and Smith … more than partners?” he asked.

  “No.” The question hurt. She wondered if it was meant to.

  “And what are we supposed to do in Cuba – beg?”

  She felt like screaming. “There’s more than fifteen hundred dollars left from the expenses,” she said with a calmness that seemed to tax every nerve in her body. “The war will be over in six months.”

  Silence.

  “Amy …”

  “What?” she asked sharply.

  He sighed, ground out the cigarette. “Nothing. I’ll talk it over with Gerd. Give me a turn at the wheel.” He almost pushed her aside, took the wheel, and stared straight ahead.

  “South southeast,” she said, moving away toward the stern.

  “Yes, Paul,” he muttered to himself after she’d gone, “it pays to know which way you’re going.”

  She leaned against the stern rail for several minutes, the two snoring Warrens behind her, then ducked inside the cabin. Kuznetsky was awake, half out of the bunk. She pushed him back and sat down beside him. “Everything’s under control,” she told him in a whisper. “The Germans still think we’re all on the same side, and we’re leaving them in Cuba.”

  “Well done,” he murmured. “Now tell me how.”

  She explained what had happened, what she’d told them, then got him something to drink. “They’re good soldiers,” he said, apparently to himself. But before she could ask him what he meant, he’d drifted back into sleep.

  The rest of the day dragged by, each of them taking turns at the wheel as the Lafayette carved its passage through the blue-green sea. By noon the heat was becoming unbearable, and with Warren’s help Paul and Gerd rigged up a makeshift awning on the foredeck. Amy spent the hours either sitting with the sleeping Kuznetsky or talking with Warren in the wheelhouse; even his inexhaustible stream of tall stories was preferable to another conversation with Paul.

  He and Gerd had found a pack of cards and were playing under the awning, though neither of them looked as if he had his heart in the game. She studied Paul’s profile, remembering the very first time she’d seen him, playing chess in the lounge on the Bremen. She loved him – there was no harm in admitting it to herself. It didn’t make any difference now. There were more important things than love.

  The sun went down in a golden burst, the twilight seemed over as soon as it came, the stars grew sharp in the sky. Amy went back to see Kuznetsky, found him sitting in the stern, the Walther beside him, staring into space. He smiled at her, a distant smile, said nothing. She had the fleeting impression that he was absorbing energy from the sea, like some mythical monster, somehow both benign and terrible, and in that moment felt almost resentful at how easy it seemed for him, how hard it was for mere mortals like herself.

  The next day seemed to pass more quickly. The Lafayette, growing lighter as its engines consumed the drums of fuel, seemed to pick up speed, almost to skim across the water. Amy seemed more relaxed after their announcement, and Paul wondered if their reunion had caused as much turmoil in her heart as it had in his. He would soon know.

  By noon the Cuban shore was visible on the horizon, and two hours later they were passing beneath the sullen remains of Morro Castle and threading their way into Havana harbour. The MV Balboa, flying the Swedish flag, was anchored in the reach, a squat freighter with three masts a
nd an incongruously small funnel. Gerd hailed the lookout, who disappeared to find the captain. They tied up against the ship’s side.

  “Well, this is good-bye,” Amy said to Gerd.

  He looked over his shoulder at Paul, who was standing with his hands in his pockets in the stern, and received a nod. Kuznetsky was sitting on the wheelhouse steps staring into space.

  “We’re coming with you,” Gerd said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  He saw what looked like panic flash across her face. “Why?” she asked, a hint of supplication in her voice. He looked at her, failed to catch her eyes. Was she that desperate to leave Paul behind? It seemed ridiculous.

  “We’re going home,” he said gruffly, watching Kuznetsky, who was now fully alert, glancing first at him and then at Paul. “There’s plenty of room,” he continued, nodding at the bulk of the freighter towering above them.

  Kuznetsky relaxed, leaned back on his elbows. “It’s up to you,” he said offhandedly. Life or death, he thought to himself. He felt sorry for Amy.

  “Ahoy there,” a voice shouted from above. “I’ll throw down a ladder.”

  “I’ll go,” Kuznetsky said as the rope ladder snaked down out of the sky. “Get the crates untied,” he said over his shoulder as he began to climb.

  Amy watched the sling descend, watched Gerd maneuver the first crate into it and wave it back up. Why, why, why? The word kept echoing in her brain.

  “You might as well give Warren the fifteen hundred dollars,” Paul said, suddenly appearing at her side.

  “Yes, I might as well,” she said, and went to do so, feeling utterly numb.

  The Balboa sailed on the evening tide, and it was hardly out of the harbour before Kuznetsky, sitting alone in the bow, was approached by one of the Swedish crew.

  “Bjorn Sjoberg, Comrade,” the man said in a low voice. “Do you have any instructions for me?”

  “None for now.”

  “Who are the other two men?”

  Kuznetsky grinned. “Two serving German officers.”