The Coldest War

by Ian Tregillis

  She’d given him the last of their money, but Klaus was too preoccupied to object. He had figured out what struck him as odd about the scene in the park: no guards.

  The people in the park weren’t the subjects in a vast experiment, weren’t training for combat, weren’t prisoners of war. They were doing things—painting, feeding ducks, flying kites—merely because they wanted to. It was a revelation, a color-blind man’s first glimpse of a rainbow. He had never truly understood what freedom meant. Now he did. It made him want to grieve for himself.

  Gretel interrupted his ruminations. “Coming?” She’d already exited the taxi. The driver glared at him. Klaus climbed out. The cab sped away, leaving them standing on the pavement in a cloud of exhaust.

  They stood on a neatly trimmed lawn. The adjoining cemetery wasn’t so well tended; irregular rows of crooked, cracked, and weather-stained gravestones dotted the grass inside a low, wrought iron fence. A few graves had fresh flowers upon them. Rows of folding metal tables had been arranged on the church lawn. The tables contained all manner of odds and ends: lamps, books, old radios, salt and pepper shakers, jigsaw puzzles, candy dishes, wooden toys, half-used tubes of wrapping paper, clothing, and shelves and boxes of the same. People milled in the aisles between the tables. Browsing, haggling, chatting about the weather. It was difficult to distinguish the vendors from the customers.

  Klaus looked at Gretel. “What are we looking for?”

  “You’ll know when you find it.” She shooed him away. “Go have fun. I’ll be nearby.” She wandered off into the sparse crowd.

  He didn’t move. There he was, recently escaped after two decades in captivity, on his first day in a free country, and what was he doing? Perusing a church fund-raiser without a penny to his name. Why? Because Gretel wanted it that way.

  Still, without her, he never would have escaped.

  Without her, he wouldn’t have been captured in the first place.

  Over by the cemetery, Gretel kicked off her shoes. She hiked up her dress, hopped the fence, and strolled barefoot through the graves.

  Klaus sighed. He went up and down the aisles, studying the assembled goods for something significant. Reich memorabilia, perhaps? A photograph? Another piece of Heike? Nothing leapt out at him. It was all junk.

  He turned the corner at the end of an aisle and almost bumped into another shopper.

  “Pardon me,” said Klaus, making to move aside.

  But the other fellow didn’t move. His eyes widened. An icy blue gaze bored into Klaus, sharp as twinned icicles.… Klaus looked closer.

  The stranger’s scraggly beard hid his face. But when Klaus noticed the trilby hat, the long hair, and the high collar, he knew what lay beneath.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Klaus. He took a half step backwards, dumbfounded.

  The other man stared at him just as intensely.

  Several moments passed while they gaped at each other, motionless like stones inside a stream of penny-ante commerce. Other shoppers stepped around the two men.

  Klaus recovered first. “What are you doing here?”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I thought you were dead,” said Klaus.

  “I thought you were dead,” said Reinhardt. “I thought I was the last of us.”

  “Hello, Reinhardt,” said Gretel.

  Reinhardt took one look at her and rolled his eyes. “I should have known.”

  “Lovely to see you again.” She carried a handful of golden and lavender lilies. “These are for you.”

  Raised voices caught Klaus’s attention. Over by the church, a gray-haired lady spoke urgently with the vicar. She pointed at the cemetery, then at Gretel. The vicar looked upset.

  Klaus said, “Maybe we should have this reunion somewhere else.”

  Reinhardt saw the matron and the vicar walking in their direction. “I can’t believe this,” he muttered. “Twenty years I’ve been living here. Twenty years. Quiet, unnoticed. You two show up, and inside two minutes, you’ve blown my goddamn cover. Why don’t you go rot in hell?”

  Gretel twirled a finger through one braid, pointedly tugging on a wire. “I think you’ve missed us. And I think you’ll want to hear what we have to say.”

  Reinhardt mulled this over. He looked from Gretel to Klaus to the vicar, and back to Gretel’s wire.

  “I have a car. Follow me.”

  * * *

  Reinhardt lived in a shithole.

  It was a large, ugly housing development, gray and blocky. If anything, it reminded Klaus of Soviet architecture. Sarov was a rarity; much of the Union looked like this, and probably for the same reasons. Quickly built and utilitarian, with no attention to aesthetics.

  A group of children playing football in a field adjacent to the car park stopped to stare as they pulled up. When Klaus and Gretel emerged from Reinhardt’s car—a battered 1938 Vauxhall—one of the children called to the others, “Lookee this! Junkman got hisself some mates!”

  The children took up a chant. “Junkman! Rubbish bin man!” Gretel seemed amused by this; she rewarded the kids with her little smile. She still carried the flowers.

  “Ignore them,” said Reinhardt. He set off at a quick pace down the pavement, head low.

  Klaus caught up to him. “Junkman? That’s your cover?”

  Reinhardt muttered something that Klaus didn’t hear.

  “What, Reinhardt?”

  The other man wheeled on him. In a harsh whisper, he said, “Never call me that! I’m Richard now.”

  “Oh, yes. Richard the Junkman.” Klaus couldn’t resist.

  “Eat. Shit.”

  Behind them, Gretel sighed. “Poor Junkman.”

  “Both of you.”

  Reinhardt set off again, leading the siblings toward the lift. The lift had a mildewy smell, like damp carpet that never had a chance to air out properly.

  When they got to Reinhardt’s flat, it took no imagination to understand how he’d gained his nickname. Piles of junk filled the place almost to the ceiling in places; mostly electronics, from the look of it. It was dim, too; Reinhardt’s collection obscured most of the windows. Insects scuttled in the shadows. A musty scent tickled his nose, though not so bad as that in the lift.

  Reinhardt locked the door. He tossed his hat onto the back of a chair (the only chair, it seemed) and peeled off his wig. His wires, Klaus noticed, were badly frayed.

  Gretel headed straight to the kitchen. She rummaged through Reinhardt’s cabinets.

  “Hey! Hands off my things, you crazy bitch.” Reinhardt took the chair.

  Klaus looked around the flat again, and then at Reinhardt’s wires. “What happened to you?”

  “Oh, no. No, no, no,” said Reinhardt, slipping into German. “Skip the bullshit. After all these years, you assholes show up on my doorstep expecting me to take it in stride? Expecting a happy reunion? Mere coincidence?” He pointed at Gretel. “It hasn’t been so long that I’ve forgotten there’s no such thing with her. So what the hell are you doing here, and what the fuck do you want from me?”

  Similar questions had been nagging at Klaus. Reinhardt had expressed their essence.

  “Yes,” said Klaus. He turned to stare at Gretel, who had found an empty milk bottle. “Why are we here, Gretel?”

  “Wait—you don’t know either?” Reinhardt laughed. “Have you ever done anything she didn’t tell you to do? They made a mistake when they put Kammler on a leash. It should have been you, lapdog.”

  Klaus struggled to find a response. He failed. Reinhardt’s barbs had struck true. They hit the bull’s-eye of a target Klaus hadn’t known existed. It deflated his anger as quickly as a burst balloon. Reinhardt’s ridicule filled him with shame. Damn him, but the man was right.

  “Kammler’s dead,” said Gretel conversationally, while filling the bottle at the sink.

  Reinhardt said, “I can’t believe you expect me to—wait, what happened to Kammler?”

  “Spalcke shot him,” she said. She s
et the churchyard lilies in the milk bottle. While arranging them, she added, “As per his orders, one must assume. So that the Communists couldn’t take Kammler alive, to study him.” Gretel took a step back, cocked her head, then altered the flower arrangement. She made a little hmph sound of satisfaction. Carrying the makeshift vase to Reinhardt’s table, she concluded, “But they did study his corpse.”

  Reinhardt raised an eyebrow and looked at Klaus. “We heard about it later,” Klaus said.

  “Heard about it?” Reinhardt narrowed his eyes. He glared at Gretel warily. “And how exactly did that happen?” He turned back to Klaus. “What happened to you? Let’s start there.”

  Klaus remembered the last time he’d seen Reinhardt. They had been traveling together during the most hellish winter on record. People had gone mad that winter, driven insane by the preternatural weather while their children spoke in tongues. Word came that the Red Army had crossed Poland and was plunging deep into the Reich, which had been rendered defenseless by the malevolent cold. Their rivalry had simmered over as they debated what to do: Should they return to the REGP and defend Doctor von Westarp’s legacy from the Communists? Or should they race to Berlin and confront the invaders head-on?

  Reinhardt, ever the glory hound, had insisted upon the latter. Klaus chose instead to return to the farm, hoping to find Gretel and escape west before the Reichsbehörde fell. But the Soviets were there, pixies at the ready.

  And so they had spent two decades as war prisoners and test subjects, the foundation of an immense research program in a secret city in the depths of the Soviet Union.

  Reinhardt smirked as Klaus wrapped up his summary. “I told you going to the farm was a mistake. Captured, eh?” He stared at Gretel, who had perched on a stack of crates. Quietly, he mused, “Now, I wonder why she let that happen. Seems to me she might have warned you.”

  Klaus’s former comrade in arms was a self-aggrandizing braggart, a narcissist, and, among other things, a necrophiliac. Still, the man had a point. How unsettling.

  “So you’ve escaped after all this time,” Reinhardt continued. “Why now, I wonder?”

  A cold tingle leached into Klaus’s spine, his gut. Questions like these forced him to confront unpleasant truths about his own foolishness. He changed the subject.

  “How did you end up here?”

  Reinhardt fell quiet. At last he said, “I engaged the Soviets northeast of Berlin. An armored column. I fought them alone, fought them to a standstill! I melted their tanks, incinerated their troops, reduced their artillery to slag. And when they shot at me, I laughed. It was glorious. I was magnificent! Finally, I had become the instrument the doctor had intended.” He fell silent again. “But there were more Communists than batteries. Many more.”

  Klaus said, “I warned you about that.”

  “I had to retreat while I still had the Götterelektron.”

  “I’m sure it was a glorious retreat, too,” Klaus said. “Or were you running for your life?”

  Reinhardt made a crude gesture. “I returned to the farm for more batteries, but it had already fallen. It was obvious that you and the other cowards had rolled over the moment the Red Army arrived.”

  Klaus crossed his arms. “They had pixies. Dozens of them. There was nothing we could do.”

  “I spent my last battery staying ahead of the advanced forces. I crossed the Pyrenees on foot, and made it out of Spain about a year later. Canada was my destination. They had an open-door policy for former Schutzstaffel, like us. Too terrified of the Red Menace to turn away a potential ally, I suppose. This dirty, dinky island was supposed to be just a stop along the way … but I ran out of cash.”

  “Poor Junkman,” Gretel repeated.

  Reinhardt jumped out of his chair. “I swear to God, if you say that one more time, I’ll strangle you on the spot.”

  “No, you won’t.” Klaus leapt between them, seized his Willenskräfte, and put a fingertip through Reinhardt’s sternum. A warning.

  Reinhardt staggered backwards, looking dumbfounded. “My God,” he whispered. “My God.” He fell into his chair, still staring at Klaus in his ghost form. A shaking hand touched his scalp. “You have batteries?”

  “Of course,” said Gretel.

  “My God … I thought, I, I thought you were like me.…” Reinhardt shook his head, as if dazed. “How many?”

  Klaus became substantial again. “We left Arzamas with eight,” he said. He unbuttoned his shirt and peered at the gauge on his harness. Defusing Reinhardt’s threat hadn’t taken much charge, but the old battery had seen better days. They all had. “We have a few left.”

  Reinhardt’s pale eyes shone with a strange reverence when he saw Klaus’s harness. Almost unconsciously, his hand went up to touch the battery. The reverence became hunger. Lust. “Give them to me.”

  And then Klaus knew, knew beyond any possibility of doubt, why they had come here. Why Gretel had engineered this reunion. He saw the piles of electronics, heard the desperation in the other man’s voice, and knew.

  Gretel had come here to make Reinhardt dance.

  “We need them,” Klaus said.

  Reinhardt leapt from his chair again. “Do you even realize what you have? Have you forgotten the meaning of that harness? How can you appreciate what you’ve never missed? Without those batteries, you, and me, and her—” Reinhardt jabbed a finger toward Gretel. “—are nothing. But with them, we are gods.”

  The passage of time had transformed this once-fearsome weapon of the Reich into a desperate, pitiable man. If Klaus didn’t loathe Reinhardt so much, he might have felt sorry for the fellow. Maybe he did anyway. “We’re not gods, Reinhardt. We never were.”

  “Please,” said Reinhardt, his voice barely a whisper. “Just one.” He stared through the one unobstructed window, down to where the children played. Klaus could imagine what he had in mind. It was sickening.

  “We can give you more than that,” said Gretel.

  The two men looked at her. She leaned back on the crate, legs kicked forward, stretching. The hem of her stolen skirt revealed her ankles, bony as always but now dark-veined with age. With two fingers she reached into her blouse and produced a folded piece of dark blue paper.

  Reinhardt whispered, “Is that what I think it is?”

  Gretel unfolded the paper and held it up for them both to see. It was a blueprint, a jumble of spidery white lines. One of the secrets of the old Reichsbehörde, rendered as cobwebs on cobalt.

  “Annotated in the doctor’s own hand,” she said.

  “Now I understand.” Reinhardt stepped forward, hand outstretched. His old swagger had returned. “You want me to build replacements for you.” He wiggled his fingers.

  “No.” Gretel tore the battery blueprint in half.

  “What are you doing?” Reinhardt clutched his head in dismay. “God damn you mongrel whore! I need that!”

  “Now, now,” said Gretel, wagging a finger at Reinhardt. “Don’t be greedy.” She tore the blueprint again, oblivious of his cries of rage and despair. He fell to his knees. A neighbor pounded on the adjoining wall.

  “Relax,” she said. “Have you forgotten how in the past I delivered your heart’s darkest desire?”

  Klaus thought back to poor dead Heike. He shuddered.

  “But this you’ll get in pieces,” she continued, fluttering the blueprint scraps. “In the meantime … I need two favors. Little things. You might even enjoy them. Each errand will earn a piece of the blueprint in the post.”

  Reinhardt stared up at her. “I hate you.”

  She stood. “Where do you keep your stationery? I need a pen, paper, postage stamps, and a pair of envelopes.” Gretel gestured at the piles of discarded equipment crowding the flat. “And, Reinhardt? You’ll need a camera.”

  10 May 1963

  Walworth, London, England

  “Another,” said Marsh.

  He rapped his knuckles on the bar. Once, twice. The boards were damp with liquor he’d spilled; his
fingers came back smelling of whiskey. Circlets of condensation riddled the bar. Like the rings of a tree telling the story of winters and summers and floods and fires, these rings spoke of a long afternoon.

  “You been here all day, mate. Why don’t you get along now?” The proprietor was a short, pale man with tattoos on the knuckles of his left hand.

  Marsh fixed him with an angry stare. Partially to make a point, and partially to focus on something while the room swayed. “Another,” he managed.

  The barman shrugged. “Your funeral, mate.” He refilled the shot glass. While drawing another pint, he said, “If I came ’ome that pissed, the missus would cut me bollocks off.”

  “Liv wouldn’t notice. Not today.” Marsh tossed back the shot. He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. Speaking past the fire in his throat, he added, “We have an agreement.”

  “You’re a lucky man, then.”

  “Lucky.” Marsh spat, wiped his hand across his mouth.

  “Oy! I’ll have none o’ that in here!”

  A few of the closer patrons paused in their conversations and domino games to stare at the barman and his unruly patron. The black-and-white television in the corner shouted a shaving cream jingle into the silence.

  One by one, they shook their heads and returned to their own lives. The regulars recognized Marsh, though nobody knew his name. And vice versa. He knew what they saw when they bothered to notice him: a graying man with the craggy face of an unsuccessful boxer, with dirt under his nails and holes in his denim coveralls, well into the pudgy years of late middle age. A pathetic fellow even by the standards of a low-class establishment in a down-on-its-luck neighborhood like this.

  The barman shook his head at somebody behind Marsh, made a placating gesture. He pulled a towel from beneath the bar and cleaned the spot where Marsh had spat. In a more moderate tone, he said, “You’re havin’ a bad day, I respect that. But pull that again and you’ll be out on the street with that shot glass up your arse.”

  An odd thought flickered through Marsh’s head, tempered by anger and alcohol and memory. The barman was shorter than he; garroting him wouldn’t be hard. He knew from experience that taller men made for longer, more dangerous, less silent kills. But Marsh didn’t have a garrote. And he’d prefer to keep drinking.