Oh, God, Gwendolyn. What have I done to you? The urge to argue left Will, but the heat of anger had left his bones soft as candle wax.
Will sat heavily in his armchair. It rolled backwards, bumping to a stop against his safe. “How does this work?”
“We’ll nab him at your house, when he comes for you.”
“You know, nobody ever thinks to ask the cheese how it feels, after the rat is dead and all is said and done.”
“The cheese doesn’t get a say in the matter,” said Marsh.
“What did your men tell Gwendolyn?”
“That her safety was at stake. Which it is. Because of you.”
Will sighed. “She hasn’t spoken to me.”
“Oh, do stop,” said Marsh. “I’ll surely weep.”
Will glared at him. That was Marsh, self-absorbed to the last. Oblivious of any and all forms of human interaction. Will wondered if the man standing before him knew any emotions aside from the rainbow hues of rage.
“When the circumstances were reversed, I did my best for you,” he said. “I tried to save your marriage. Twice, in point of fact.”
“Save my—?” Marsh paced. He lost the struggle to control his voice. “Save my marriage? You told us to terminate Liv’s pregnancy!”
Will met Marsh’s eyes. Quietly, he said, “Was I wrong?”
The dart flew true.
No, I wasn’t wrong. I see it in your face, Pip. Will shuddered, as much for the unguarded glimpse of Marsh’s despair as for the thought of what it meant. What sort of abomination lives under your roof?
Will remembered his blood dripping to moonlit snow, while men screamed and died around him. Remembered the suffocating stink of cordite and the ground-meat remains of James Lorimer. Remembered trying to concentrate, trying to speak Enochian over the chatter of gunfire. Trying to get home. Trying to save Marsh’s life.
And he remembered how the Eidolons had changed their price for the return trip. Inflated it, like black marketeers flouting the price of rationed sugar.
The soul of an unborn child.
Back in the present, Marsh said with icy calm, “You’d better get your things in order. They’ll come for you soon, and when they do, you’ll have to stay dead until we’ve cleaned every last bit of your mess.”
“Will I be allowed to see Gwendolyn?”
“It’s easier to mind you both if you’re together.”
Will stood. He considered pulling his personal documents from the safe, but decided against it. The bank and his attorney had copies, of course, but walking out with this collection of odd characters and a sheaf of papers under his arm would only raise more questions in Angela’s mind. Better if he went nonchalantly. As though he didn’t know he was toddling off to his own murder. And none of it mattered any longer. All he wanted was to see Gwendolyn.
“I’m ready now,” he said. Marsh followed him out of the office.
Pethick sat under the oil painting of Aubrey, next to Klaus. Marsh joined them. Gretel stood alongside the casement window behind Angela’s desk, her back to the room.
“I’m stepping out for a bit,” said Will.
Angela worked diligently at her desk, acting as if she hadn’t heard every word of what must have been a very perplexing row with Marsh. The epitome of professionalism.
“Sir, I know this isn’t my place,” she said, looking at the men in the corner and briefly over her shoulder at the gypsy woman. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “But your visitors are a bit odd.” She pointed toward where Gretel stood behind her. “Especially that one,” she mouthed.
Bless you, Angela. Faithful and perceptive to the last, thought Will. I’ll miss you. Aubrey will give you good references.
“Nothing to worry about.” Another flash, this time of inspiration. Will resisted the urge to pat himself on the back. “Refugees,” he whispered. “From the European camps.”
Angela raised a hand to her mouth. “Oh, dear.”
“I’ll be out the rest of the day,” he said.
“Very good, sir.” She returned to her typing.
Will rounded the desk and joined Gretel at the window. “I like this city,” she said. She was rather petite, he realized; the top of her head didn’t reach his chin. He’d forgotten that.
He leaned over her. “I don’t know why you’ve taken it upon yourself to ruin him,” he whispered, nodding at Marsh, “but I won’t allow you to do the same to me. I am not your plaything.”
Gretel stared up at him, her blank face wide-eyed. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder. Then, seeing that the others were momentarily occupied, she quirked up the corner of her mouth. Her eyes shed their innocent quality, leaving in its place something that chilled him.
“Hop, little bunny.”
She plucked the nasturtium blossom from her hair and tucked the stem into Will’s breast pocket. It snagged on the silk he’d arranged there. He caught a whiff of the scent.
She reached up, gently laid her hand on his face. Her skin, Will noticed, felt warm. Almost feverish.
Gretel patted his cheek. “Hop, hop, hop.”
eight
28 May 1963
Croydon, London, England
Klaus knew he was veering into foolishness. Refusing to interact with his sister? Pretending she didn’t exist? They lived in the same space; rode in the same vehicles. It was pointless but, more frankly, childish. And so it would be while the British practically treated them as a single entity. He’d never be free of Gretel on his own.
Thus had the seed of an idea taken root while he sat in the foyer of the North Atlantic Cross-Cultural Foundation, waiting for Will and Marsh to finish their argument. It sprouted during the return drive across London. And by the time they returned to the safe house, it had borne fruit.
Everything hinged on Marsh’s plan to use Will as bait. If it failed, Klaus’s chance at a normal life would die on the vine. But if the plan succeeded with his help … Well, then it depended on whether or not Marsh was a man of his word.
Klaus tapped Marsh on the arm as everybody emerged from the Morris. “May I speak with you? Privately?”
He followed Marsh through the house to the garden, leaving Pethick to deal with Gretel. An empty planter stood where Marsh had identified the diseased maple. It had been transplanted, Klaus saw, into the south corner of the garden, in a niche where the walls met. He wondered if Marsh had done that.
Once they were outside, with the rear door firmly closed behind them, Marsh crossed his arms. “Well?”
“The plan you’ve hatched. You intend to trap the assassin by using a pixie.”
Marsh hesitated, just long enough to signify his surprise. He recovered, shrugging noncommittally. “Perhaps.”
He doesn’t trust me. Nor do I trust him entirely.
“They’re aware of that vulnerability,” said Klaus. “The Soviets. They used it against us when they occupied the Reichsbehörde. It’s how they captured us.” He pointed at the house, a vague gesture to imply “us” meant him and his sister.
“We know that. What are you saying?”
“When you captured my sister during the war, you took her battery, yes? Studied it? And from that you derived a design for the pixies.”
Marsh frowned. “Is that why she came here? Why she let herself be captured? To give us a battery?”
Klaus had never considered this, but it was plausible. He reappraised Marsh; the man seemed to have given much thought to the complexity of Gretel’s machinations. It bordered on an obsession.
“I don’t know. But…” Klaus trailed off, shaking his head.
“… It sounds like something she might do?”
“Yes. The purpose of her trip to England was never clear to the rest of us. It served no … strategic purpose.”
“Hmm.” Marsh held his frown, contemplating this. Then he said, “I derailed you. What point were you trying to make regarding the pixies?”
Klaus said, “I understand how the Soviet engineers think. The
y have anticipated such countermeasures. They have—” He paused, grasping for the right word. “—reinforced the battery and its circuitry.” He touched his scalp, where the wires emerged.
“Damn,” Marsh whispered. He ran a hand over his face. “I’d feared that was the case.” He sighed, shook his head. “What would you have me do, Klaus? It’s the only tool at our disposal.”
“You’re wrong about that. You have another.”
“What?”
Klaus took a deep breath. How long until I regret this? Five years? Five minutes? But this was a rare opportunity. Better to chart one’s own course than to have it dictated by others. How many times in life did Klaus have the opportunity to alter the course of his life? Few indeed.
And so he said: “You have me.”
“What?” The sound of Marsh’s surprise echoed from the garden walls. It alarmed the handful of blackbirds perched on the eaves of the safe house. They responded with a shrill chorus. “Let me get this clear. Are you volunteering to help us?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Klaus hesitated, choosing his words carefully. But he knew that only full candor would suffice. “When this is over, I want to have a normal life.”
Marsh scoffed at that. “Normal.”
Klaus touched his wires, self-consciously aware of the irony. “As normal as possible for somebody in my position.”
“You want SIS to furnish you with a cover identity, so that you may live quietly forevermore in the countryside. Is that it?”
“Yes,” said Klaus. “A quiet life by myself.” He looked at the ground between his feet. “Far away from Gretel. Will you help me have that? In exchange for my aid? I’ll never have that quiet future if this country falls.”
Marsh cracked his knuckles, wincing as he did so. It seemed to be an unconscious habit. He peered at Klaus through eyes narrowed in thought. “Tell me more about this aid you’re offering.”
“Every ability requires specialized training. I can’t tell you what the man you seek will be able to do. But I can tell you that he’ll have been trained to fight against firearms, explosives, mortars, tanks, airplanes, knives, mines, mundane soldiers.” Klaus looked at Marsh, to emphasize his point. “I am familiar with the training he’ll have received.”
“You were part of it.”
“Yes.”
A notable number of the fatalities at Doctor von Westarp’s farm happened in the first weeks, or hours, or moments of a subject’s first tentative embrace of the Willenskräfte. The boy who had slightly preceded Klaus in developing the ability to pass through solid objects died soon after its first manifestation, before everybody understood the implications of the ability. He dematerialized, fell through the earth, and presumably suffocated somewhere deep underground. Nobody, not even the doctor, had considered that transparency to matter required careful attention to gravity as well.
The technicians never succeeded in recovering the boy’s body. Klaus remembered his name was Oskar.
The men and women who ran Arzamas-16 had made it very clear to Klaus that it was in his best interests to foresee any such mishaps, to warn the technicians and subjects.
Marsh said, “And?”
“He won’t have been trained to fight his comrades. He won’t know how to fight somebody like me.”
Marsh looked skeptical. “And you do?”
“I don’t know how much you understand about the atmosphere at the Reichsbehörde. It was not a convivial place. There was much friction between us. All of us.”
It felt so wrong, discussing such personal issues with this former enemy. The details of his formative years, the influences that molded his psyche, his relationship to the Götterelektron … these were the most intimate details of Klaus’s life. The flames in which he had been forged. Telling Madeleine about his sex life—from the prescribed couplings at the farm to the institutionalized prostitution at Arzamas and every shameful fantasy he’d ever entertained in between—would have been less uncomfortable. Less soul baring.
Yet he’d never become the man he wanted to be, living the life he wanted to have, if he continued to guard himself so rabidly. Klaus forced himself to endure the self-humiliation. Extending this trust to Marsh was the price for escaping Gretel.
A potential reward well worth the effort. So he plunged forward.
“And when I was young, when I believed in Doctor von Westarp without reservation, I was determined to rise to the top. I spent much time devising tactics for battling with Reinhardt, Rudolf, Kammler, and the rest. So that I would be prepared, if and when the moment came.
“Everybody did it. We evaluated each other, measured each other. Thought about how to fight one another, how to kill one another.
“Except my sister. There’s no fighting her.”
At this, Marsh bristled. “Nobody is invincible.”
Perhaps your understanding of Gretel doesn’t run as deeply as I had thought.
A flash of chestnut caught Klaus’s eye. Madeleine stood at the kitchen window, her attention focused on the sink. She looked up and treated him to a moment’s smile before returning to her task. He thought he smelled dish soap. She spoke with a woman Klaus didn’t recognize.
Klaus said, “Have I once again made a fool of myself? Or will you help me?”
“I’ll never believe your sister hasn’t arranged this.”
“Whether she has or not is irrelevant,” said Klaus. “I’m not doing this for her. I’m doing this in spite of her.”
A raven perched on the sundial, cawing loudly. Its talons scraped along the pitted bronze. The sight of the raven dislodged a dreamy image from the recesses of Klaus’s memory. Something about a hay wagon, in a forest.
It gave him a sense of what he wanted to capture in watercolor. Not the image, yet, but the feeling. Something foreboding. Portentous. He couldn’t quite articulate it to himself, but he knew it would come in time.
“How can I know you won’t run off the moment we return your battery?”
“You can’t.”
Marsh thought about this. Then he said, “I can’t promise anything, Klaus.”
“I know.”
“In that case,” said Marsh, “I accept your offer. Thank you.”
He extended his hand. They shook.
28 May 1963
Knightsbridge, London, England
It amounted to house arrest, the interminable wait for Will’s murderer to arrive.
Echoes and shadows filled the hole left by Gwendolyn’s absence. The house, once modest by the standards of Will’s peers, now felt cavernous. Cold. Empty. Sepulchral. Like a mausoleum waiting for its unruly resident to settle down.
All this in spite of the handful of workers who passed through the passage that had been cut through the west wall of the dining room, to the adjoining residence. The neighbors on that side, the Ashton-Clarkes, had been quietly evacuated before sunrise. As had the rest of the crescent, on the pretense of a gas leak. Will had given the same explanation to Mrs. Toomre when he sent her home.
By late afternoon, it looked as though Will and Gwendolyn had hired Genghis Khan to remodel the house. Milkweed men tore into every wall to dig out the electrical mains. The silk wallpaper, carefully chosen by Gwendolyn, hung in tatters. Fine tufts of green and silver thread bobbed on imperceptible drafts. Plaster dust caked the floors like wheat flour in the kitchen of a hyperactive baker; it crunched underfoot, ground itself into the rugs. Even the pantry had suffered. Long, rippled gouges revealed the pale heart of oaken floorboards, tracing the path where the Milkweed boffins had dragged their crates into place. The crates contained coils, wires, and electrical equipment with names and purposes unknown to Will. Equipment they assembled and spliced into the exposed electrical mains. Where once the house had carried the earthy scent of Gwendolyn’s potting clay, now it stank of sawdust and plaster.
And the physical destruction of their home was a bellwether for the condition of their marriage. Every broken floorboard
symbolized the broken trust; every grenade a manifestation of the bomb he’d dropped by not confessing to Gwendolyn. Yes, Marsh’s chums had destroyed the house, but Will himself had gutted the marriage.
He sat in the shadows of a reading alcove, hugging his knees in the recess of a bay window that overlooked the green space enclosed by the crescent. It was the only spot in the house where he didn’t have to dance aside, or offer apologies every few moments. Gwendolyn had selected thick, French-pleated curtains for this window. They did an excellent job hiding the dismantlement of their home.
He remembered the pixies Lorimer had built. Presumably, the gutting of Will’s house served a similar purpose.
Who, Will wondered, would pay to rehabilitate the house after Marsh caught his man? To whom did the house belong? Would Milkweed allow his wife to keep it, or had the title been requisitioned for purposes of national security?
Will’s tea had gone lukewarm beneath a faint dusting of plaster. He drank it anyway. The plaster made it chalky. The cup rattled against the saucer when he set it down, like a burst of Morse code telegraphing his anxiety to the world.
The workmen cleared out near sunset, hastily disappearing back through their hole like the March Hare. The last two maneuvered a teakwood credenza into place behind them, hiding their escape route. Three men stayed behind: Marsh, of course; a Milkweed agent named Anthony, a large man with acne scars on his face; and, most surprisingly, Klaus.
“What happens now?”
“You keep to your bloody routine,” said Marsh from the shadows of the dining room. “Eat as you normally do, when you normally do, and retire likewise.”
“You want me to eat dinner and put myself to bed?”
“Yes. Cherkashin’s man will be watching your windows, watching the lights come on and off as you move through the house. Been doing it for days or even weeks, if he’s good.”
Will suppressed a shiver. How many times had this phantom killer watched Gwendolyn come and go?
“He may come to the front door, posing as a visitor,” said another voice from the shadows. This voice carried a German accent.
The Coldest War Page 19
