This whole place is going up in flames, they whispered. You going with it?
A real man could do something about it, they hissed. What can you do?
And so it was with a clouded mind and an uncertain heart that Jim turned the car onto Föhrenweg, hoping to get a few hours of work in before he had to sleep, when he saw Bill Holland stumbling down the side of the road.
TWELVE
Karen jerked up at the sound. For an instant, she was hyperaware of the gurgling pipes that ran across the ceiling of her office, of the stillness that had settled over BOB, of the tiny dark pool of drool that had accumulated on her notes while she napped. She dragged an awkward hand across her mouth. How long had she been asleep? It had to have been only a few minutes. Then why did her watch say over an hour had passed? Maybe it was lying. Maybe it was working for the Communists. The second hand was red, after all . . .
The room was thankfully empty; only the books stared at her in silent judgment. They had proven mostly useless anyway, so who cared what they thought?
Focus, Karen. Words . . . think words. Think anything. She rubbed her eyes. For just a moment, just a flash, she remembered screaming. In anger? In fear? A dream, already fading, already gone. Just the echo of the kind of scream that you can feel clawing violence in your throat, an ancestral, animal sound that requires a whole body to produce.
She blinked. Where was she? Right, her notes. She dabbed away the puddle and stared hard at her own handwriting. The last line started strong but had trailed off by the end into a drooping scrawl of fatigue’s design. Something about the source . . . calculations about how the magic was working against itself . . .
Her conclusions, such as they were, didn’t make any more sense after a nap. From her best calculations, the source of the Wall’s magic remained strong. But the spell itself . . . it was almost like it was moving in reverse. Could a magic spell commit suicide? She suspected that somewhere in the pages and pages of her calculations, there was a mistake. Or ten.
Then she heard voices. That must have been what interrupted her impromptu nap. She checked the clock; it was late, too late for anyone to still be down here. The voices were too far away to make out what was being said. There was a spell she’d read about that supposedly increased one’s hearing, but in testing back at the OMRD, it had usually just left her with ringing ears and an odd fruity taste in her mouth. So rather than risk a brain tumor, she got up, straightened her blouse, and went to eavesdrop the old-fashioned way.
The voices were coming from an empty conference room down the hall. As she neared, they became clearer. And more familiar.
“. . . a plan, pal?”
“. . . get him sober, fast.”
“Before Garriety finds him.”
“Before Garriety finds all of us.”
She nudged the door open. It looked like a meeting room, with a few metal chairs and a sagging table pushed against one wall. Jim and Dennis were standing with their backs to her, jackets long since tossed aside, shirtsleeves rolled up. In front of them was another man, poured like lumpy gravy into a chair.
“Rough night?” she asked, and the two men almost hit the low ceiling.
When he saw who was standing in the doorway, Jim blew out a long sigh of relief. “Sorry,” Jim said. “We thought you were someone else.”
“What’s . . . going . . . who’s . . . where am I?” said the gravy puddle in a rumpled suit.
“Ol’ Bill here just needs a minute to gather his thoughts,” Jim said.
Karen came closer. She could smell the reek of alcohol even at a distance. “He’s the one who went missing, right?”
“The prodigal returns,” Dennis said. He was still watching the door. “Only slightly worse for wear.”
Bill’s eyes roved the room. He looked like she felt coming out of her nap: desperate to have a coherent thought, utterly unable to, and a little angry about it. She had her own fair share of experiences with alcohol at the university and they usually turned out alright in the end, but Bill seemed to be having a particularly tough time of it.
“This normal behavior for him?” she asked.
“Not really,” Jim said as he pressed a mug of coffee to the patient’s lips. “Bill’s usually on the straight and narrow, aren’t you, pal? But today you decided to go nuts on us, right in the middle of crisis time. Drink up, before I pour this over your head.”
Her brain was finally shaking off the postnap muddle and was telling her something wasn’t right. She knelt down in front of Bill. His eyes looked everywhere else and then settled for a moment on her face.
“You’re . . . pretty,” he said with a sloppy smile.
“Thank you, Bill,” she said. She held up a finger. “Look here.” He did, or at least attempted to, and she spoke the words to one of the first spells she’d ever learned: To Illuminate Magic. Magic could be subtle, but almost always left footprints behind, like an arrogant thief who just couldn’t resist leaving a calling card. Magic, Karen always liked to think, was a bit of a show-off.
Bill’s eyes, still vodka glazed, crackled brightly.
And then the door to the conference room slammed open the rest of the way.
“What is going on in here?” demanded Milton Garriety.
“Milt, calm down,” Jim was saying, holding up the coffee mug like a shield. “We found him wandering on the side of the road. We were going to get him a little sobered up then bring him straight to you.”
“Like hell you were,” Garriety said. He pushed past Jim but stopped when he saw Karen. “What is she doing here?”
“I think,” Karen said, her mind racing at the possibilities, “that he’s been enchanted.”
The room was silent for a moment. “What?” Jim asked.
“I’m not saying he doesn’t smell like the bottom of a bottle,” she said, standing up, “but there’s magic at work here.”
“Magic,” Garriety said. “You expect me to . . . no.” He shook his head as if trying to dislodge some unacceptable thought. He grabbed Bill’s arm and forced him to his feet. “Come on, you coward. Time to face the firing squad.”
“Milt,” Jim said, trying to keep Bill from collapsing, “he can barely stand.”
Garriety let Bill slump back to the chair and spun on Jim. “At the very least, this fool is guilty of dereliction of his duty. He might be guilty of treason. His career is over. You want to join him? Or is that what this is, you take him out on the town and get him drunk then try to get your little magician in a skirt to convince me, ‘Oh, this isn’t rank insubordination and stupidity; it’s magic!’”
“Milt, it’s like I said,” Jim said. “We found him like this. Karen was just trying to—”
“I don’t give a damn what ‘Karen’ was trying to do. What she is doing is interfering with Agency business.” Now those baleful eyes fell on her. “I don’t know what you are hoping to do here, but this is no place for you. Men are putting their lives on the line to defend their country and you’re playing with your little magic tricks and trying to tell me what’s going on with my agents. I think it’s time you do everybody a favor and get on the next flight back home before your daddy realizes you’re gone.”
Then he was back on Jim, a finger thrust into his chest. “And if you call me ‘Milt’ one more time, you pathetic excuse for a man, I’ll have Arthur sign your discharge order so fast it’ll make your tiny head spin. In fact, why don’t I just call him down right now?”
“There’s no need,” Arthur said from the doorway.
“Sir,” Garriety said, his bluster deflated, but only for a moment. “I’ve found our missing agent. I was just about to bring him upstairs.”
“I heard,” Arthur said. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “What’s this about magic?”
Karen had barely been listening; it was taking all her willpower to fight back the stupid, u
nwanted tears Garriety’s rant had summoned. She hated them, hated herself for being so weak, hated Garriety for knowing exactly what to say, like he’d been reciting a spell to rip her guts out.
“Magic,” she said, before taking in a sharp breath. The sting behind her eyes was fading. “I detected magic on him. In him.”
“What exactly,” Arthur said slowly, “does that mean?”
Focus, Karen. Be the one adult in the room. “There are spells,” she said carefully, “that affect our minds. I’m not talking about simple illusions. These spells work into your brain, harvesting or changing your memories, your personality. This magic is dangerous, even deadly. It is also illegal in the United States and banned by the Geneva Convention for the Use of Magic in War.”
“So you are saying Bill isn’t drunk; he’s had his brain addled by magic?”
“He may be drunk,” Karen said. “Or someone may have poured a bottle over his head. But before that someone definitely cast a spell over his mind.”
No one said anything. This was a common reaction. Everyone knew that magic was serious, but for the non-magically-trained, it was also foreign. Sure, magic could make someone’s head explode, but that could never happen to me. It was like the fear of the atomic bomb or of God: too terrifying to be anything other than abstract. So when people had to stare real magic in the face, they usually fell silent.
“Can you do anything for him?” Jim asked softly.
“No,” Karen said. She wished for a different answer, but it was the only truthful one. She hadn’t been trained to combat or reverse mental magic.
“Then what good are you?” Garriety asked.
“Milton,” Arthur said, “get one of your boys to take Bill home. Get him cleaned up. And make sure someone stays with him.”
“Arthur, I—”
“Just do it, Milton.”
Garriety helped Bill to his feet, somewhat more gently this time, and walked him out the door toward the stairs.
“This magic,” Arthur said when they were gone, “what else can you tell me?”
“It is difficult. Master-level magic. Stuff of legends more than reality.”
“And who in the world knows how to use it?”
Karen shook her head. “I . . . I don’t know.”
“The Germans?”
“Possibly,” she said. “But the Soviets are better magicians.”
Arthur seemed to accept that, however reluctantly. He rasped a callused hand over his sandpaper cheek. To Karen, he looked dried out and worn thin, like he was in desperate need of a nap or a drink.
“What’re you thinking, Chief?” Jim asked.
Arthur pulled at the discolored collar of his shirt and looked at Jim as if surprised to find him there. “See that Miss O’Neil gets some rest,” he said. “Something we could all use a little more of.” Then he ambled out, fists pushed halfway into his pockets.
“Well,” Dennis said when the footsteps faded, “that could have gone worse.”
“Don’t mind Milt,” Jim said. It took Karen a while to realize he was talking to her. “He’s an ass. Can’t help it. He comes from a long line of asses.”
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice sounded very far away in her head.
“I mean it,” Jim said. He was staring at her. Could he see that she’d nearly been crying? “It’s nice having you here. Good, I mean. Whatever’s going on, I know we wouldn’t want to deal with it without you. Without you we’d never have known what happened to Bill. Maybe it pays to have a magical expert around after all.”
He was trying to be kind; she knew that. And Garriety was trying to be condescending and mean. It certainly wasn’t her first encounter with men like that. She knew how to handle them, knew when to be mean right back. But when you took away the motivations, good or bad, and just looked at the facts, either the nice guy or the mean guy was right.
“Thank you,” Karen said. “You’ve been great. You both have. But he wasn’t wrong.” Karen’s thoughts turned on her, twisting in her head: You knew it would end this way. You knew before you even got on the plane that you’d never see this through to the end. “I’m not the right person for this job. I think it is time for me to go home.”
THIRTEEN
It seemed that no one wanted her.
The other girls, ones whose faces she knew if not their names, were nearly all gone. Some in fact had come back and left again while she just stood and shivered. The men who came down to the streets near Oranienburgerstraße were usually not so picky. They came to get what they wanted and did not bother to waste precious time deciding; making carefully considered decisions was not a core virtue among the men of the German Democratic Republic.
She pulled her red scarf tighter around her neck. Winter was insistent this year, unwilling to wait its turn. She tapped out a cigarette, her last. Another disappointment, though hardly surprising; life had taught her that the good things always left too soon.
A car drove past, headlights leaving embers in her vision. The driver was alone, older, well dressed but not that well. She struggled to smile, but the car didn’t slow.
The men who came to Oranienburgerstraße often reminded her of her father. It was a perverse thought, especially in the creaking, grunting dark of her apartment, but she could not help it. She wondered if he had ever come to such a place, looked at the women the way these men did, made a faceless choice in the middle of a desperate night. Maybe he never had the chance, before the war carried him away and never brought him back.
It was bad now in the city: no money, no freedom, no hope. But it had been worse. Much worse. And she’d seen it. Felt it. Been scarred by it. The damned war. Hitler’s war. The politicians’ war. The rich men’s war. They said it was against Europe, against Soviet Russia, against impurity. Lies. She knew better. It had been a war waged by Germany against Germany. A suicide. It would have been more efficient if the Chancellor had just lined up the German people in front of his tanks and kept the rest of the world out of it. Just a flash and then nothing, a clean death. Not like this.
In the past, she had told some of the other girls she was helping the Americans. She had not meant to, but when so much is taken from you without your consent, you had to choose to share something of yourself or you would go mad. Some called her a hero; the rest called her a fool. She no longer believed there was a distinction. They asked what the Americans gave her, or what she told them, or if they would take her to the West.
But they never asked her why she did it.
Because they all knew there was no Germany left to betray.
Another car was coming. She sucked the last smoke out of her cigarette and let it fall. The car was slowing down, pulling close to the side of the street. Just one tonight, she told herself. Maybe just one.
The headlights made it hard to see, but the man behind the wheel was big. He was stooped to fit inside the cabin. Big men came in two extremes: those who reveled in towering over the rest of humanity and those who apologized for it. When the car stopped in front of her and she could better see his face, with its large red scar, she knew he was one of the former. She also knew, even before he spoke, that he was Russian.
“Get in,” he said. She had seen enough dead men to recognize the look in his eyes.
“No,” she said, shocked to hear the sound of her own voice, let alone the word.
“Get,” the scarred Russian said, his voice somehow completely empty of all tone, like it was the echo of some other man’s voice, “in.”
She started moving. Her shoes clicked on the chilly concrete. It was hard to walk fast and she doubted she even remembered how to run. A block away, she finally dared look back. The car had not moved. The man’s silhouette still filled the space behind the window, impossibly large. She could not see his face but felt those awful corpse eyes crawling on her skin.
She reached her apartme
nt in half the normal time. Her heart protested. Her lungs burned in defiance. But the car had not followed. The street was empty.
It felt somewhat odd to climb the stairs without the scrape of heavy boots behind her, like she was a ghost hovering over what had once been her life. Her fingers struggled with the key, scoring the metal as it fit into the old lock. She pushed the door open and then closed, the world and all its woe held at bay by that simple piece of wood.
It was when she unwound her scarf to hang it on a peg by the door that she realized she was not alone.
He sat on the far side of the little room. He was thin, with light hair, and a Soviet officer’s uniform. He had been checking the time on a battered brass pocket watch. When he looked up, he did not seem pleased to see her, as though he were already anticipating some deep regret.
“Who are you?” Her voice felt as weak as her legs. “Why are you in my home?”
“I recently met an acquaintance of yours,” the man said in precise German. “An American. A spy.” His fingers rubbed the face of his pocket watch. “Please,” the man said, “come and sit a moment with me.”
FOURTEEN
The specter of George’s smirking face kept Karen from sleeping. He wouldn’t even have to say anything; he’d already said it, after all. He could just sit there and smirk while she explained to everyone back home how the Berlin mission had been just too complicated. Too difficult. Too real.
The only thing worse than the thought of George was Dr. Haupt. He’d taken a risk sending her, and she’d let him down.
Before she’d left to catch her flight to Berlin, she’d gone back to Dr. Haupt’s office to thank him again for this opportunity. She knew it was a risk, sending a young woman on such a significant mission, but Dr. Haupt had never been one to care much for the politics of his job. He did what he thought was right and had the ability and seniority to get away with it.
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