The Coldest War

by Ian Tregillis

  What will it be, Sam? Will you set fire to somebody’s house? Cut the brake lines on an omnibus? Or perhaps you can arrange for a piece of masonry, a molded cornice, to topple loose and smash into the flow of pedestrians along Shaftesbury. A well-aimed corbel could easily take out a couple strolling hand in hand.

  All for the greater good of the British Empire.

  Will drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped long arms around his legs. But hugging himself didn’t chase the chill away, didn’t lessen his shivering.

  He sat that way until the Eidolon departed. Pethick appeared to thank the children. The children resumed the activities they’d been pursuing when the adults had arrived. As though the past half hour hadn’t happened at all.

  Pethick entered the viewing gallery. “Well?”

  “Your problem isn’t the children. It’s the Eidolons. Something has worked them into a frenzy.”

  2 June 1963

  Croydon, London, England

  It surprised Klaus that Gwendolyn would choose to converse with him at all, much less be pleasant about it. He knew little about her. Only that she was married to Will, that she now lived in hiding, and that she shared a bathroom with Gretel.

  But she didn’t mention any of that. She complimented his painting. (She wasn’t a convincing liar.) When he asked, she explained the upcoming celebration of the Queen’s Birthday, which he had seen mentioned on the television. (A strange thing, that television. Klaus had known of the idea, but he’d never actually seen one until his arrival in Britain.) And she surprised him by revealing a passing familiarity with the German philosophers: Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche.

  Klaus had been exposed to quite enough of Nietzsche in his youth. He felt no desire to spend another minute ruminating over Zarathustra or The Gay Science. But Schiller! Doctor von Westarp had included Schiller in the reading curriculum at the farm, though he hadn’t pounded the point home as obsessively as he had with Nietzsche. The doctor had emphasized Schiller’s notion of Pflicht und Neigung, the harmony of duty and inclination.

  Those lessons had returned to Klaus over the past few weeks. Schiller had much to say about beauty and freedom.

  Do you have a beautiful soul, Gwendolyn? Do I? Does any living person?

  Gretel didn’t. That he knew for certain.

  Gwendolyn broke off in midsentence when Will leaned outside. He smiled at Klaus, pronounced another well-meaning lie about his painting ability. Klaus understood Will’s overtures; he had, after all, participated in saving the man’s life. But the platitudes grated on him.

  For one thing, he wished he could be alone, to paint in solitude. But more maddening was how nobody said a word about the agreement he’d made with Marsh prior to the battle with Will’s would-be assassin. Neither Pethick nor Pembroke had shown any indication that they even knew of the deal, much less that they’d honor it. Once again, Klaus had chosen to trust the wrong person. Marsh has used him just as efficiently as Gretel might. Klaus’s one attempt to inform his own destiny had been a pointless failure. He’d never be free.

  He gave Will a polite nod, then rinsed his brush in a jar while Will and Gwendolyn had a brief awkward exchange. Madeleine had cleaned the empty marmalade jar before presenting it to him as a supplement to his painting supplies. It was useful.

  Will departed. The closing door sent a gust of air across the garden, rattling the easel. Klaus lunged for the canvas, which sent his disconnected wires flying in a wild arc about his head. It made him feel conspicuous. Vulnerable. Especially in front of a stranger.

  After steadying the easel, he turned his back to Gwendolyn. Then he moved the wires so that the bundle dangled down his chest, where she wouldn’t see them.

  “You needn’t be ashamed.”

  Klaus concentrated on painting. Clean, steady strokes.

  Gwendolyn said, “You weren’t a victim of the camps, were you? You were part of that project, during the war. William explained it to me.”

  Her voice carried a tremor of wistfulness. He glanced over his shoulder to study her face. There was, around her eyes, a minute crack in her façade. Gwendolyn put up a good front, but it was just that. A front.

  “He told me all about the war,” she continued. “About Milkweed. About the Reichsbehörde.”

  Ah. So that was why she had come outside.

  He told you about it, but you’ve never seen it. And you want to. You want to understand the incomprehensible things that have brought you here. To witness firsthand the things that ripped your life apart.

  Klaus focused his attention on the easel. “It wasn’t a wartime project. The war was only the end of it.”

  “The incredible things he told me. They’re all true, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know what he told you,” said Klaus. He chose a finer brush and moistened its tip in a tin of ivory black.

  “He described a group of Germans who could … do things. Things that other people couldn’t.”

  “Did he confess that he also belonged to such a group? A group of men capable of unnatural things?”

  She answered with a slow, melancholy nod. “And that they did wretched things for the sake of this country. Of that I have no doubt.” She paused, choosing her words. “William was ill for a long time after the war. I knew he meant the things he said. He believed every incredible word of it. But it was so incredible, the entire story. I’ve always wondered if parts of it had perhaps been the illness speaking.”

  “You want to see a demonstration.”

  Gwendolyn drew a long, shuddery breath. “Yes.”

  Klaus shook his head. “I have no battery.”

  “Oh,” she said. One syllable fraught with so much disappointment. “I very much would have liked.…” She trailed off.

  “I cannot help you,” he said.

  She fell silent after that. The wind picked up. Open blue sky retreated before a line of ash gray clouds that came scudding from the west. The wind smelled of summer rain. Diffuse sunlight brightened and dimmed through the shifting cloud cover. It made it difficult to gauge colors correctly. What was meant to be purple black became jet black one moment, midnight blue the next.

  Klaus tore the sheet from the canvas. His painted ravens lacked the dark iridescence of the real birds. Pathetic imitations. Wet watercolors trickled down his fingers when he crumpled the paper.

  “What a shame,” said Gwendolyn. “I wanted to see the finished product.”

  “It’s nothing. An image from an old dream.”

  The first misty raindrops fell while Klaus assembled his painting supplies. Gwendolyn held the door while he carried them inside.

  “I understand you were part of the group that saved my husband. Thank you,” she said.

  She retired to her room. The mist became a summer shower. Klaus washed his hands at the kitchen sink while rain sluiced between the paving stones of the garden.

  He could hear the television in the next room. Something about the United States. Klaus peeked from the kitchen. Gretel sat on the floor, braiding her hair while the screen showed images of tatterdemalion men and women standing in long lines for bread, or pleading for work. The American Depression was well into its fourth decade. The scene changed to New York, where vast crowds of people jostled for a rare spot in the emigration lottery.

  Klaus stowed his supplies a few minutes before Pembroke arrived for the next debriefing session. Normally he left the questioning to Pethick and Marsh. Pethick alone had run the previous session, since Marsh was incapacitated. The other Milkweed agents, Roger and deceased Anthony, had been excluded from the sessions from the beginning.

  Madeleine had set a tea service, a plate of finger sandwiches, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder on the low walnut table in the den. She pointed at Klaus’s hand and winked before closing the paneled door behind herself, leaving the two men to their conversation. He’d missed a spot; his damaged ring finger was stained a muddy brown. The stain felt slick on his rough skin.

  Would Pembroke b
elieve him if he explained the deal he’d made with Marsh? Cooperation in the ambush for a new identity? No. The only witness to their agreement was in the hospital, maimed and unconscious.

  “Let’s begin, shall we?” Pembroke activated the recorder. Clunk. He opened his ledger, uncapped a fountain pen. The scent of sweet pipe tobacco wafted out of his clothing.

  Klaus nibbled on a sandwich. It was damp and salty.

  Pembroke’s opening question was an abrupt departure from the line of investigation built over previous sessions. That questioning had been focused on the work at Arzamas-16.

  “Tell me, Klaus. On the day the Red Army occupied the REGP, in 1941, where were the Twins?”

  3 June 1963

  Lambeth, London, England

  Consciousness returned slowly. The struggle to become alert felt like swimming up for air after a deep plunge in a lake of treacle. Gradually, the haze of fever dreams and painkillers receded, replaced by something that might have been awareness. Moments of lucidity came and went, punctuated by sleep, sedation, fire, pain.

  Shadows. Sounds. Textures. Smells. Perceptions of the outside world flickered through Marsh’s awareness like fragments of a burnt and broken filmstrip.

  Bedside whispers. Footsteps echoing on a hard floor. The odor of antiseptic.

  Something rough and wet on his face. Itching. Cloth?

  Something sharp in his arm. Stabbing. Needle?

  Something warm, almost hot, in his hand. Holding it. Soft fingers, caressing his.

  Liv.

  His mouth was a desert. He worked up enough saliva to wet his tongue. He swallowed.

  The saliva became sandpaper. Worse. Liquid fire trickled down his throat. He coughed. A bomb went off in his esophagus. Raked his windpipe with shrapnel.

  A whisper tickled his ear. “Don’t try to speak, darling. You’ve been badly injured.”

  Gretel.

  Marsh ripped his hand out of her grasp. The needles in his arm pinched him, punished him for moving. He sank back into the pillows, still groggy from sedation.

  “The doctors thought you might not recover,” Gretel said. “But I assured them you would.”

  He remembered the fight at Will’s town house. Remembered how their plan had failed. Remembered the Soviet agent killing Anthony, beating seven shades of shit out of them. Remembered boosting a car, driving it at a man who blazed like the sun. Nothing after that.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been under. A day? Felt like longer.

  He cracked his eyes open. His right eye opened freely. Cold, sterile hospital light flooded painfully into his blurry, dark-adapted vision. Opening the left was more difficult. It creaked open, pushing against inflexible tissue and stiff adhesive. A swath of gauze bandages traced the side of his face and neck.

  He was in a private room, with a window looking out on the corridor. A lady strode past the window too quickly for him to see her properly. A nurse, or a perhaps a nun.

  “How long?” His voice came out in an unrecognizable rasp. He coughed again. The pain made his head swim. He nearly blacked out. A fingertip brushed his lips.

  Gretel said, “You’ve burned your throat. Use this.” She held up a writing slate, like the kind he’d used as a schoolboy. A dusty, gray black writing surface in a wooden frame, with a moist sponge hanging from one corner and a piece of chalk from another. She placed it on his stomach.

  The door opened. Roger peeked inside. He frowned at Gretel, suspicious of her. “Thought I heard something.” His expression brightened when he saw Marsh. “Ho! Welcome back, boss. I figured you’d gone for a Burton.”

  Marsh tipped his head in Gretel’s direction, then frowned at Roger, shrugging.

  “She said you’d be comin’ round today. Said she oughta be here.”

  You don’t work for her. Marsh underlined it. Twice.

  At least Roger had the grace to look sheepish. “The boss wanted me keeping an eye on you. So I was comin’ here anyway.”

  How long? he wrote.

  Gretel said, “Four days.”

  Four days!

  Wife? he wrote.

  “Don’t worry,” said Roger. “She knows you’re here. We notified her, uh, when we thought you’d kick. She’s been stopping by every day.”

  “Poor Liv,” said Gretel.

  Tap, tap, tap went the chalk: Where?

  “St. Thomas’s,” said Roger.

  “He needs rest,” said Gretel. She took the slate, hooked it over the railing of his hospital bed. To Roger’s questioning glance, Marsh closed his eyes and nodded.

  * * *

  Marsh woke an indeterminate time later, again with somebody’s fingers twined in his.

  He opened his eyes. The room was dark; somebody had turned off the overhead lights. The corridor lights had been dimmed as well. Night, then. The gauze on his face was cool and moist; it had been replaced while he slept.

  Liv sat alongside his bed, silhouetted by the soft glow through the window. Her eyes glimmered. Her face was puffy from crying, milky skin slackened by age; wisps of auburn hair had escaped from where she’d pulled it back. Liv dropped his hand and pushed away, retreating into her chair, when she saw his open eyes studying her.

  “Liv,” he managed. The blackness almost took him again.

  “They say you’ve scarred your vocal cords. That your voice will sound like that from now on.” She raised one hand hesitantly, as if to touch him again. “And your face…” She pulled her hand back, let it drop to her lap.

  “Liv,” he croaked again. The world went purple around the edges.

  “This is the sort of thing that happens to bureaucrats at the Foreign Office, is it? Occupational hazard? Is that what I’m to believe?”

  How could he explain this to her? Perhaps it was a side effect of the painkillers, but he couldn’t see a way to reconcile this with his cover. He’d been a better liar in his youth.

  “I’m not a fool, Raybould. First you turn up in the hospital, burned and dying. And then I hear on the telly that poor Will is dead, killed in a gas main explosion.”

  They didn’t own a television. He wondered where she had heard this.

  Well. At least Milkweed had managed to construct a suitable cover story for the events in Knightsbridge.

  “You’ve always been so angry. Did you…” Liv’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “Did you murder Will? Did you burn his house down?”

  “No!” The shout tore something. Marsh coughed on the hot, salty trickle in the back of his throat. Next came a chunk of something soft and bitter. He struggled to swallow it without sicking up. Time passed while he rallied the strength to open his eyes again.

  Liv stood. “I thought I was a widow.” She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, as if hugging herself. She paced, down one side of his bed and up the other. “I’ve told you, Raybould. I won’t let you abandon me with John. I can’t care for him by myself. I won’t.”

  She paused in the shadows at the foot of his bed. “Don’t you dare leave me. Not with John.”

  He tried to say, “I wouldn’t if I could.” But the agony of speech overwhelmed him.

  He didn’t recognize his own voice. He couldn’t tell if Liv understood him. But her bottom lip trembled, there in the half light at the end of the bed.

  Only now, when he couldn’t speak, did he long for a real conversation with Liv. So many things he wanted to say, needed to say … The look on her face, the tremor in her voice, her footsteps when she paced all told him she felt the same need. Things left long unsaid had almost become forever unsaid. He wondered if things would change between them.

  She sniffled. “They had me do up the forms for my widow’s pension.”

  Marsh nodded. He had negotiated that into his deal with Pembroke, as a precaution in case something happened to him while unraveling Gretel’s web. As it very nearly had.

  Liv perched on the edge of the chair at Marsh’s bedside, like a bird ready to take flight. She didn’t hold his hand.

&nb
sp; * * *

  Marsh’s attending physician was a tall and amiable Irishman named Butler, whose frequent smiling revealed a gap between his front teeth. Butler’s medical career had begun during the war, treating downed RAF pilots. Those few who survived the Luftwaffe and the crashes often suffered from massive second- and third-degree burns over much of their bodies. Marsh’s injuries, he insisted, were petty in comparison.

  They didn’t feel petty. Particularly after Butler dialed back the morphine dosage. The boric acid in Marsh’s bandages went from hardly noticeable to a minor itch to pins and needles raging across half his face. Swallowing became painful enough to make him wince. Sleep became difficult.

  * * *

  Pembroke placed a small potted fern on the bedside stand; the long, feathery leaves drooped over the edge of the table. Marsh watched through his eyelashes while Pembroke stood hesitantly alongside the bed, unsure of whether he ought to stay or leave. Marsh opened his eyes and motioned for him to sit.

  Pembroke said, “Your doctor tells me you’re a ‘right tough bastard.’” He cracked a smile. “I’d have to agree with his diagnosis. Though I’m not a physician.”

  Marsh’s shrug tugged on the sutures beneath the bandages along his neck. It hurt.

  “It was touch and go for a bit, but you’ll be out of here before long. I must say, I’m glad for that. You’ve done a remarkable job.” He laid a hand on Marsh’s shoulder. “Quick thinking, using the water main. The lot of us would be nothing but ash now if not for your resourcefulness.” He took his hand back. “We were grossly unprepared for Cherkashin’s man. And for that, I apologize.”

  Marsh lifted the slate from its resting place on his bed rail. Will? he wrote.

  “Safe,” said Pembroke. “Officially he’s dead, of course. The fire provided a convenient cover story.”

  The sponge had dried out. Marsh moistened it in the cup of water on the bedside stand before wiping the slate clean. Klaus?

  “He came through without a scratch. I’ve thanked him as well.”

  Next to Klaus’s name, Marsh added, Arrangement?