“Take care of her. For God’s sake, keep her safe.”
“I will do everything I can, Robert.”
And Conti turned and hobbled back toward the house.
“Into the cave, then, shall we?” Cartwright prompted, eager to get as far away from his cell as possible.
Gabrielle looked back at him with a blank face, uncomprehending.
“You don’t speak English, do you?”
“Non.”
Cartwright studied the girl’s face for a moment. Now that she was this close to him, standing under his arm, he couldn’t get over how gorgeous she was. She seemed like the prettiest thing he had ever laid eyes on. Somehow, despite the absurdity of a crippled man trying to escape from armed soldiers, he felt empowered to make a go at it simply because she was there to help him.
“That’s all right, love, we’ll figure it out. Let’s go. That way,” Cartwright said. He started shuffling into the barrel cave.
The air temperature instantly dropped as they entered the cave. Rows of great oaken casks stacked three high formed long walls to partition the great open space. Here was the lifetime work of the Conti family, years of labor and carefully cultivated product combined through secret processes that produced some of the best wine in Burgundy. Cartwright grimaced. Sometime in the future, their wine would be sitting in a glass at some fine restaurant to be enjoyed by some absolute wanker.
Gabrielle pulled his arm tightly over her shoulder and helped him hobble past the barrels. Cartwright barely noticed his surroundings because of the overriding pain that shot through his leg. His knee pushed mercilessly against the tightly wrapped bandages, and while the splint kept him from being unable to use his injured leg it left his gait far from graceful. Yet Cartwright became aware of how strong the girl was in being able to support his weight. For a petite girl, she was as steady as a rock. Perhaps her strength came from years growing up on a farm.
They managed to make it ten meters or so before Cartwright could go no further. “Wait, wait,” he gasped. Gabrielle leaned him against one of the barrels and watched expectantly, urgently.
Panting, Cartwright tried to let his eyes adjust to the dim light. The sporadic light bulbs wired in at various intervals along the walls didn’t do much to illuminate anything, but they were enough to reveal an enormity of the place that was overwhelming. How could such a giant cave exist under the house? He didn’t know much about limestone but apparently this could happen. Great pockets of open space trapped in the earth. Amazing.
“Looks different than I remember,” Cartwright said. “Didn’t seem so dark when we dragged those drop canisters down from the barn. But I suppose this time darkness is our friend, right?”
Gabby stared at him. He had forgotten she only spoke French. She was so pretty that he wondered if it even really mattered.
“I could gawk at you all day, but we should keep moving.”
Cartwright’s push off of the nearest barrel sent bits of dust and dirt falling from the top. Gabrielle staggered for a second and then continued to help him along. Each barrel was a good three feet in diameter and rested on a metal frame to square up the curves so that they would remain stable when stacked. It was very difficult if not impossible to see through to the other side of a given stack. The barrels formed long rows perhaps sixty to seventy feet long before there came any sort of lateral break through which one might move to another lane.
They continued hurriedly until Cartwright again had to stop. If Gabrielle hadn’t remained under his arm he knew he’d fall over. The pain throbbed through his leg so strongly that his knee was surely going to explode any moment and shower them all with blood and guts.
Gabby continued to prop him up as he regained his composure. Their faces were close. Cartwright watched her eyes as he gritted his teeth.
“Gabrielle.”
“Oui?” the girl whispered back.
“Do you know what ammonal is?”
“Je ne comprends pas.”
“Ammonal. It’s an explosive. You can make it from things you use in farming. Your grandfather’s been busy helping out the local hooligans.”
“Je ne comprends pas, Stefan.”
He thought of a different way to explain.
“We’re going to give old Adolf’s men a little surprise. Le Boom,” Cartwright said in a parody of a French accent.
“Le Boom?”
“That’s right.”
Cartwright had no idea if that was a French word, but the smile Gabby flashed him indicated she seemed to understand. Which was good, because if the level of pain he was dealing with got worse, or even remained the same, he was going to need some assistance.
With another heave, Cartwright stood himself up and leaned heavily on his female companion. His mind was starting to click, to think through what he had to do. The focus on his upcoming task helped him push out the pain a little. On the other side of this vast storeroom was a ramp that led up into the barn. They would climb up the ramp—that would hurt—and find the boxes of bottles that contained not wine but the homemade explosive the Conti’s had been brewing up. The blasting caps were in the glass cabinet full of chemistry equipment. A quick setup and the barn would be smashed into smithereens, drawing every Goon from miles to investigate while the Contis and Cartwright went in the other direction.
Crack.
Cartwright and Gabrielle froze. Was that a gunshot?
Had their chances ended already?
Without waiting to find out more, the Englishman started hobbling towards the end of the row of barrels with renewed vigor, half dragging Gabrielle with him, half pushing off of her to provide locomotion in the absence of one of his legs. The lane they were in right now had full visibility back to the corridor leading underneath the house and to the cellar. They had to get to the end of that row of barrels. They had to find something behind which to hide.
26
Tiedemann was feeling good.
He finally had some closure. Hoffman’s murderer had confessed and received a just punishment. His men had captured an enemy supply of ordnance for covert use against the Reich. And while he didn’t necessarily buy the line that the rest of the family’s hands were clean, Tiedemann felt it was plausible enough that he had decided not to shoot them all on the spot. He’d simply turn them over to the SD for interrogation; with vengeance enacted and a pile of explosives confiscated, what could have been an embarrassment would instead be a coup.
When all was said and done, Tiedemann would still be behind schedule by a good two days, but now things could progress again and the limits had been established as to how much this side journey would impact the Reich’s timetables. All they needed was for the rain to hold off a little longer. With a little luck, Tiedemann might actually receive a commendation instead of a reprimand.
Tiedemann sat at the table in the library that had become his de facto center of operations during the investigation. His officers were arrayed around the room, each of them now joking around in a moment’s respite from the difficulties of war. Eppler was standing with his hands on one of the chair backrests and rocking it back and forth, eyeing what was left of the small bowl of fruit Tiedemann had found in the kitchen. Krauss had his nose buried in his little leather-bound notebook. Springer was telling war stories as he sat across the table from Tiedemann and next to Gohler, whom he periodically tried to get to drink more from the open wine bottles on the table. More wine, even now. What an evil bastard.
Tiedemann contented himself with following the small talk. Once they reached southern France the day would be consumed with fortifying, planning, and training, and this would likely be the last chance they’d have to simply relax. The maps of the region were arranged on the top of the table, a forgotten sprawl left to be resolved later.
Springer was far more interesting.
“It was freezing, and the snow made it difficult to see anything,” he said, his blond hair falling into his eyes. The story was about a troop movement Springer
had been involved in back in Poland, shortly after Germany had blitzkrieged its way to victory. “We were marching about twenty meters behind the panzer and men were slipping in the ice on the road if they weren’t careful, falling flat on their asses. Sometimes they would take out the man next to him as well and both would go down.”
“Sounds like outside here,” Tiedemann noted. All the rain.
“Not far off, but the frozen ground hurt worse when you fell. Here, the mud feels a lot softer,” Springer shot back with a smile.
Gohler looked puzzled. “Wasn’t anyone riding on the tank?”
“Of course. But that wasn’t any better. Either you became frozen solid sitting on that mound of metal, high up off the ground where the wind got you, or you kept yourself moving on foot and hopefully stayed active. There wasn’t any escape from the conditions.
“So anyway, we’re all miserable, the wind is blowing straight into our faces, and we can’t see very well. And we get to edge of the downward slope of this hill, and all of a sudden the panzer is just gone.”
Eppler snorted. “What do you mean, just gone?” He was digging through the fruit bowl, looking for the best piece.
“I mean, whoosh, gone, disappeared,” Springer replied. “I ran with Von Braun to the edge to see what had happened. And all we could make out were all of these soldiers jumping off as fast as they could while the panzer turned around sideways and slid down the hill. People were diving off all over the place, rolling off the side of the road if they were lucky, or down the hill behind the tank if they weren’t. So we stopped the column behind us and started rushing down the hill as fast as we could, trying to catch up to the tank.
“It’s snowing like crazy, and I’m dodging all these bodies underneath my feet running on this sheet of ice down the hill with Von Braun right behind me. Half the time we’re falling on the ground ourselves. And we get to the bottom of the hill and see that the panzer has crashed straight through the side of this stone farmhouse. Knocked a holed in the side so that all we see is this rear end of a tank sticking out of a building.”
“Was the crew okay?” Gohler asked.
“Well, we didn’t know yet. But that’s what we needed to find out, if the driver and commander got banged up or not, so we’re looking for the door to this farmhouse to get inside because the turret and the hatch are on the other side of the wall.”
Tiedemann listened to the story and watched the starving Eppler fidget with the fruit. He pulled out a bright green apple with his heavily tanned hand. Juice and saliva sprayed over the table when he bit into it.
“So we find the front door and Von Braun knocks it in with a couple kicks,” Springer said, fighting to keep a straight face. “And we rush in and just burst out laughing. Von Braun even fell over backwards. Because the whole front of the panzer had gone through the wall and come up right to the edge of the kitchen table where this Polish family had just sat down to eat supper, and they were absolutely motionless with shock. I mean, they had forks and spoons half raised to their mouths, you name it, and they were just frozen solid looking at this tank that had just came crashing into their home.”
The guffaws were starting to build in the room as Tiedemann and his men reflected on the thought of such a rude interruption. It wasn’t every day that a Polish farmer would have seen a tank. Especially one so up close and personal.
“And wait, I haven’t told you the best part yet. The gun barrel of the turret was right over the kitchen table, perfectly aligned down the center. It was hanging right over their bowls of porridge and loaves of bread and whatever else they were eating, and the farmer’s wife was looking up at it like this.” Springer demonstrated the old woman’s expression and it was hilarious, with a pretend spoon halfway raised to his mouth and wide, disbelieving eyes staring up at an imaginary tank barrel.
Everyone was laughing now at the idea of an old country woman struggling to comprehend why there would be such a thing suddenly invited to supper. Even Krauss looked up from his little notebook and was chuckling. Springer went on to explain that the panzer captain was quite apologetic about the uninvited entry, though he immediately inquired in a very polite tone about whether there might be any food the family would be willing to share with him, given that it appeared they had lost their appetite. Gohler and Eppler traded some cracks about what an appropriate reply might be, all of them quite rude.
Tiedemann shook his head with a smile, tipped forward in his chair, and placed both elbows on the table to bury his face in his hands in response to such buffoonery. What a bunch of characters. Gohler was laughing so hard now that his face was turning bright red.
The apple went again to Eppler’s mouth with a loud crunch. Tiedemann glanced over at the Afrika Korps veteran. It was so remarkable, here in the wet and dreary countryside, how bronzed the man’s skin was. That spoke of long, idle hours spent in the desert waiting for an engagement with an enemy that often did not come. Tiedemann wondered if Perpignan would be like that. What if the Americans didn’t mean to invade the south of France? What if they intended to hit Tunisia and Libya? Would Tiedemann and his men end up whiling away the days on the coast, waiting for an invasion that would never come? That might not be such a bad proposition. Tiedemann could work on a tan of his own in the hot Mediterranean sun.
Deep down, however, he knew that such hopes were fleeting. Once it was more apparent what the Allied forces were going to do, if an invasion into Europe was not likely then Totenkopf would undoubtedly be sent back to the East to fight the Russians. That was the life of a professional soldier, to go where the conflict was found. At least Tiedemann would be commanding a Kompanie of men that were strong, tough, and ready to drive out the enemy no matter how much resistance was met.
Eppler was holding the apple core against the backrest of the chair while he joked with Springer. Tiedemann studied the dark and rough hands, the bruised thumbnail that stood out in blackened splendor more than even the pale band of skin that remained untanned around Eppler’s fourth finger. White skin that had once been shielded from the North African sun by a ring.
A ring.
Tiedemann blinked. Where was the ring?
Had Eppler ever worn a ring?
It was the ring finger of his left hand.
It was not there now.
Tiedemann wrinkled his forehead in thought as the others continued to laugh and joke. This was very odd. Quickly, frantically, Tiedemann relayed through his head everything that had happened over the past two days. What did it mean?
No…
As Tiedemann came to his conclusion, the smile slid off his face despite the joking of his comrades. All he felt now was a knot in his stomach.
The German captain slowly pulled his elbows off the table until his hands were out of view.
27
Eppler was holding the apple core and trying to decide what to do with it before he just settled on flinging it into the corner. Satisfied, he glanced about the room to see with whom he should plug himself back into conversation. As luck would have it, he settled on his captain.
“Herr Hauptsturmführer?”
Tiedemann blinked in the realization that he had been staring at Eppler. “Yes?”
“You look troubled. Is something the matter?”
Tiedemann took a deep breath. “Nothing. A random thought. But it doesn’t matter now.”
Eppler nodded and began to switch his attention to his peers.
“Ah, I almost forgot,” Tiedemann said. “I think I found something of yours. It was outside in the dirt. Quite lucky I noticed it.” He pulled out the gold wedding ring from his coat pocket and tossed it across the table. It spiraled around in a circle before finally coming to rest near Eppler.
Eppler looked surprised at the ring. “You found…?”
“Yes, by the front door to the estate,” Tiedemann said. He was watching his lieutenant carefully. “Almost didn’t see it, but there was a break in the rain and somehow it caught the light just the right
way.”
Eppler was staring at him uncertainly.
“It is yours, isn’t it? Something had to cause that tan line on your finger. Why don’t you try it on?”
Tiedemann’s voice had cut through the other conversations and all eyes were focused now on them. Eppler seemed to be fighting a subconscious urge to cover up his hands, that somehow the question of the ring made him uncomfortable. Not the normal, gratified reaction one would expect upon the return of lost property.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Eppler said at last. “You must be mistaken. I lost my wedding band back in Tunisia. That’s not mine.”
“Then perhaps you need a replacement. Put it on.”
“Herr Hauptsturmführer, with all due respect, that wouldn’t be proper.”
Tiedemann’s voice was cold. “Put it on.”
Eppler looked down at the ring as if it were a ticking hand grenade. Then, after resigning himself to the inevitable, he tried as casually as possible to pick up the ring and slide it on his finger.
It fit perfectly.
With one smooth motion, Tiedemann stood up and pointed his Luger at his subordinate.
“Herr Obersturmführer!” Springer cried. He stood up, alarmed.
It was as if a bomb had gone off. The jovial atmosphere had stopped so abruptly that there was a deafening silence in the room. Krauss’s eyes flicked between Tiedemann and Eppler with growing alarm as it dawned on him what was happening. Only Gohler remained inconspicuously frozen, watching. Tiedemann could feel the sergeant’s eyes burning into them.
He understood everything now, and the reality of it was beyond hurtful. It was shameful. He was disappointed in himself that he hadn’t seen it before, but the fact of the matter was that he never should have had to see any of it at all.
“All this time. All this time!” Tiedemann hissed. He was finding it difficult to control his anger. “I thought the ring I found in the cellar was Hoffman’s. No wonder it didn’t fit. It was yours. You are the killer.”
The Hazards of War Page 18
