by James Frey
He, however, is still holding a weapon. He straddles me and points it at my face. “Who are you?” he asks in German.
I take inventory, trying to figure out who he might be. He’s wearing the uniform of an American soldier. Then, as I look up at his face, an odd thought passes through my mind: his eyes are the same blue color as the cornflowers that grow in the fields around my grandparents’ house outside Kamilari. The same color as the Aegean Sea in summer. I feel a pang of homesickness, and I’m so shocked that this is what I’m thinking about in this situation that I don’t say anything for a moment. He mistakes my silence for not understanding and tries again in Russian.
“The only reason for you to know my name,” I say in English, “is so you know who it is who has killed you.”
I thrust up hard with my hips, trying to throw him off. I am surprised when it doesn’t work.
“I’ve been riding horses bareback since I was four,” he says, grinning down at me. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“Or what?” I ask. “You’ll shoot me? You should have done that when you had the chance. You won’t get a second one.”
Before he can answer, I lift my torso and grasp him around the chest, pulling him down toward me. My right leg traps his left foot while I hook my right arm over his shoulder. Then I push up on my left foot while swinging my left arm over. The next moment, our positions are reversed and I’m the one on top.
“I guess you were too busy riding horses to get in many street fights,” I say.
He surprises—and annoys—me by laughing. Then he says, “You’d better hurry up and decide what you’re going to do next, because those people you want so badly are getting away.”
That’s when I realize that Sauer and the girl have disappeared. I can hear their footsteps in the hallway, so I know I still have time to catch them. But only if I go now. I look down at the man—a boy, really, or at least not much older than me. I don’t know what he’s doing here. Is he working with Sauer? Do the Americans (I assume he’s American because of his uniform and accent) want the man too? Or is he somehow connected to the girl?
“What’s the matter?” the soldier says. “You trying to decide whether to kiss me or kill me?”
I pick up his gun, which is on the floor beside us. “I’ve decided,” I say, pointing the pistol at him.
He doesn’t flinch. “Come on,” he says. “You wouldn’t shoot a guy on Christmas Eve, would you?” Then his eyes flick to the bodies already on the floor. “Actually, I guess you would.”
I probably should kill him, just to be safe. Unlike the MGB agents, however, I don’t think he’s a real threat, just an inconvenience. A GI who happens to be in the wrong place. Besides, there are those blue eyes that make me think of a place I love. For this small gift, I will spare him. “Merry Christmas,” I say, and bring the gun down on his temple. His body slumps beneath me as he passes out.
I scramble to my feet and run after Sauer and the girl, who are trying their best to get away from me. They’ve already reached the first floor. But they don’t run out the now-open front door. Instead, they run for the kitchen at the rear of the house. I assume that they’re going to try to escape through a back entrance. They won’t.
What they don’t know is that I don’t want to have to kill them.
They’re worth much more to me alive. To me and my entire line. If Sauer really has the information that we believe he does, it could change everything about how Endgame is played—that is, when it finally begins. And whoever controls that information might just be unstoppable.
The MGB agents were not lying when they said that Sauer used to work for the Nazis. Whether he agreed with their politics or not is another story, but that doesn’t concern me. I’m only interested in what he knows. The Minoans don’t believe other lines are aware of Sauer and what he might have discovered while working for the Nazis. But they could be. After all, we aren’t the only ones with agents planted in strategic places. And the American solider I just ran into suggests that some world powers might be interested as well. I obviously know the Soviets want him. Multiple parties looking for him makes sense.
Of course, none of this matters if I can’t get Sauer to cooperate. I was hoping that my killing the MGB agents who came for him would be proof enough that I’m one of the good guys. Then again, maybe I’m not. At least not in Sauer’s eyes. It’s funny how your perspective changes depending on which end of a gun you’re on.
I reach the kitchen in time to see Sauer step through a door to a pantry. The girl is ahead of him. “Run, Lottie,” he shouts as he pulls the door closed. “Go now!”
He’s holding the door shut from the other side. Or trying to. I step back and aim a kick at the handle. The wood splinters as Sauer cries out. I kick it again, and it flies open. Inside the pantry, Sauer stands staring at me as, behind him, the girl disappears through another door that was hidden by shelves filled with jarred foods. A secret passage.
Sauer turns, grabs a jar of pickled beets, and hurls it at me. I dodge, and it hits the wall behind me, shattering and staining the wallpaper with red juice. He grabs another jar, and another. He’s panicking. This gives me an advantage over him.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I tell him, keeping my voice low and calm, as if I’m speaking to a frightened animal. I set the American’s gun on a nearby tabletop and hold my hands up to show him that I’m now unarmed, at least as far as he knows. In reality, I remain as deadly as ever. “I want to help you,” I continue. “I can get you out of Berlin. You and the girl. To safety.”
He pauses, a jar in his hand. “Who are you?” he asks.
“A friend,” I tell him.
“Some friend,” says a voice from the hallway.
I turn and see GI Joe standing there. He’s holding my own gun, and it’s pointed at me.
“I figured since you coldcocked me with mine, you wouldn’t mind if I borrowed yours,” he says. Then, addressing Sauer, he says, “She’s going to turn you over to the Soviets. They have a bounty on your head, and she plans to collect it.”
I see Sauer’s face contort in fear. Then, with a glance at the American, he throws the jar of sauerkraut in his hand at my head. I duck. Sauer turns and darts into the opening behind him. He pulls the shelves shut with a bang. I start to run after him, but a bullet whizzing past my head stops me. It just misses, and inside the pantry, several jars of pickles meet their deaths.
“I missed on purpose,” the soldier says. “Next time I won’t. Now turn around.”
I do as he says. But even as I do, my mind is working out my options, formulating a plan. “He’s getting away,” I say.
“That’s kind of the idea,” he tells me. “Well, the idea is for him to get away from you. I can find him again.”
He sounds sure of this, and I wonder why. Was he assigned to protect Sauer and the girl? But then why did they run away when we were fighting? If they were so sure of him, wouldn’t they stay? Maybe, I think, he wasn’t protecting them; maybe he was waiting to claim them for himself. Still, I can’t help but be impressed by his confidence. Also by the fact that he came to much sooner than most people would have after I’ve hit them.
“Why don’t we start by you telling me exactly who you are?” he says. “I made up that stuff about the Soviets, although it’s obviously true that they want him, right?”
There’s no point in lying about this because he’s going to be dead in a minute, so I nod.
“But you’re not Russian, are you?”
“No,” I tell him. “I’m not.”
“And I don’t think you’re German,” he says. “So what are you? French?”
I snort. I wonder what he would say if I told him I was Minoan. Would he even know what that means? Instead, I say, “I’m Greek.”
“Greek?” he repeats. “How about that. Well, I guess Greece has no love for the Nazis either.”
This is true. Hitler’s army did untold damage to my country and killed many of
our people. But I’m not here to discuss history with an American soldier, and with every second we spend talking, Sauer is getting farther and farther away. I say nothing.
The soldier waves the gun at me, as if this will encourage me to answer him. “What’s your business with Sauer?”
Does he really not know? I don’t see how this is possible. Anyone who would take the time to find Evrard Sauer would have to know who he is. For one thing, he’s been living under a different name.
Maybe, I think, the American is testing me to see what I know. Since he’s wasting my time, I decide to play with him. “The Nazis took many things from my country. Including works of art from our museums. They’ve been hidden somewhere and haven’t been found. Sauer knows where they are.”
He looks puzzled. “You just killed two people so you could kidnap a . . . museum director?”
“An art historian,” I lie. “And what was taken from us is priceless. It’s our history. Your country is young, so perhaps you don’t understand.”
He shakes his head. “This doesn’t make any sense.” He sounds as if he’s speaking to himself, not to me. I take the opportunity while his attention is elsewhere to look around the kitchen. I see a knife on the counter beside the sink. I could use that, if I could get to it. But even closer is a bag of flour.
I snatch the bag and hurl it at the soldier’s head. He reacts immediately, bringing the pistol up and firing, exactly as I’d hoped he would. The bullet hits the bag, and the paper wrapper explodes. A cloud of flour erupts, filling the air like a snowstorm. The soldier is completely hidden from view, which means he can’t see me either.
I run into the pantry and pull on the shelf hiding the secret entrance. Luckily, there’s no trick to it, and it flies open. A set of stairs leads down into a brick-lined tunnel. I step inside, pull the shelves closed, and look for a way to secure it so the soldier can’t follow me, at least not easily. I’m surprised to discover that the back of the door is covered in metal sheeting, and that there’s actually a very solid bolting mechanism attached to it, making it easy to secure from this side and virtually impossible to open from the other. Sauer must have been in too much of a panic to bother with it. Or he hoped that I wouldn’t be in any condition to chase him.
I lock the door. A moment later, the pounding begins.
I ignore it, knowing that the American can’t get through, at least not for a while. Now it’s time to turn my attention back to Sauer. I wonder how far he’s gotten and if I can catch up with him. Everything is now in question. At least the American is no longer in my way. I run down the tunnel I now find myself in, leaving him to whatever the Fates have in store for him. My own destiny lies ahead of me in the darkness, and I rush to meet it.
CHAPTER THREE
Boone
It becomes clear pretty quickly that I’m not going to be able to open the door. From this side it looks like an ordinary door, one I should be able to kick down, or at least shoot my way through. But as my aching foot and the bullets lodged in the wood prove, this isn’t the case. This door has been designed to keep anyone from getting through it. Whoever installed it meant business.
Berlin is riddled with former safe houses, places where people who might have reason to hide could hole up and wait until the coast was clear. My line has a safe house here as well. I’m supposed to take Sauer to it and await extraction instructions. Now, unless I can get through this door and catch up to him, I’ll be waiting in that house alone, trying to figure out how to explain to my council how I let a girl get away with my prize. An amazingly smart girl, and one who was able to knock me out, but nobody’s going to care about that part. All they’ll care about is that she took what should be mine.
I stare at the door, trying to figure out a way through it, my frustration growing. Then I hear my trainer’s voice in my head. If you can’t go through, then go around, go under, or go over. He used to put me in seemingly impossible situations and make me figure a way out. A nine-foot wall I had to scale. A rushing river to get across. A trap to get out of. Anything to force me to think differently. There’s always a way. Always.
I start by asking myself what’s behind the door. While it’s possible that the door leads to just another room, it’s more likely that it leads to some kind of an exit. And if there’s an exit, I should be able to find it. But I’ve already lost a lot of time trying to get through. I have to hurry.
The kitchen has another door leading to the backyard, but it’s boarded up, and there’s no time to pry the boards off. So I run back down the hallway and out of the house, a cloud of flour flying around me. I have to admit, the girl’s trick was pretty clever, even if she has made me look like a fool twice now. And I still don’t know who she is or what she’s doing here. She’s become a mystery that I’m determined to solve. First, I have to catch her.
Getting into the backyard of Sauer’s house is as simple as running through the downstairs of the deserted house next door and climbing over a fence into the small yard. I stop and survey, sketching a map in my head. There is a set of steps leading down to a cellar, but I know this isn’t where the secret passage comes out. The whole point is to get as far away from the house as possible before you have to come up into the open. Most likely, it runs the length of the yard, then opens up into a sewer system or some other network of already-established tunnels.
I cross the yard and climb over yet another fence. This street looks much like the one I’ve just left, a row of town houses, many of them bombed out and empty. The tunnel could lead to, or pass under, any of them. With each second taking Sauer farther away from me, I run in one direction, hoping to find something that will provide a clue.
I find it in the form of a garden. It appears as a small break in the line of houses, really just an empty space where normally another building would have been. Instead, there’s a gated fence behind that sits on a lot that contains a small fountain, a bench, and a toolshed.
It’s the shed that interests me. It’s the perfect spot for an underground tunnel to come out. Then, as I peer through the bars, I see something else: footprints coming out of the shed. Everything in the garden is covered in snow, so the footsteps are easy to see. And there’s more than one set of them. They lead to the opposite side of the lot, where another gate opens onto another street. The gate is open, and the footsteps continue through it. My guess is that the girl has recently passed through there with Sauer and Lottie.
The gate on my side is locked, but it’s easy enough to scale the fence and get inside the garden. I run to the other side and follow the footprints. The street is deserted, so it’s easy to see them. But then they turn onto another street filled with people and disappear into the crowd. I scan the block for the mystery girl, Sauer, or Lottie, but there are too many bodies, and everyone seems to be wearing heavy coats that look the same. Between that, the dark, and the snow, my chances of finding them are almost nonexistent.
Then something crunches under my foot. Curious, I bend down to see what it is. It’s a candy. A toffee, wrapped in cellophane. I think back to the gift that Sauer gave the girl. It can’t be a coincidence. Candy is heavily rationed, and it’s unlikely someone would just drop one by accident.
I start walking and find another about 20 feet farther on, then another. Now I’m certain that they weren’t dropped by accident. Someone has left me a trail to follow.
It’s not easy searching for them in the snow, and I’d look crazy shining my flashlight around, but the light from the streetlamps helps. I see a sparkle and find another candy. I pick it up and add it to the growing lump in my coat pocket. Approximately every 20 feet, I find another one, although sometimes there are gaps where either the candy has been kicked away or perhaps picked up by somebody else.
The trail of toffees leads down the street and around a corner, where it comes to an end. Then I notice a child, a little boy of about four or five. He and his mother are standing together. He’s holding something in his hand. As I watch, he u
nwraps it and puts it into his mouth.
“What is that?” his mother asks.
The boy shrugs. “Candy?” he says doubtfully.
His mother, clearly alarmed, snatches the wrapper from his hand and looks at it. “Where did you get this?”
The boy points. “A man gave it to me,” he said. “As he was getting on that streetcar.”
I turn my head just in time to see a streetcar rounding a corner at the end of the street, tethered to the electric line above it. I run to the boy and his mother. “Where does that streetcar go?”
The woman puts her arm around the boy and draws him closer to her. “To the Soviet sector.”
I thank her and take off after the streetcar. It’s not going very fast, but it’s difficult to keep pace running on the slippery pavement. Also, if the mystery girl is keeping an eye out for me, I don’t want her to see me running behind the streetcar like a madman. I still don’t know if she’s caught up with Sauer and Lottie, or if she’s trying to follow them too. Until I can figure out which of them—or any of them—is on the streetcar, I need to be careful.
Fortunately, the streetcar makes frequent stops to let people on and off, which gives me a chance both to rest and to try to get a glimpse inside. Unfortunately, the cold has made the windows frosty, and I can’t see through them. And if the girl is with Sauer and Lottie, I don’t want to get on and risk a confrontation in front of so many people. So I watch to see if Sauer or either woman gets off, but they don’t. I can only hope that I’m right about them being on it.
Once again I wonder who the girl is. Twice now I’ve had the chance to kill her, and twice I haven’t. I can’t explain why, except that, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, I want to know who she is. And it’s not just that she’s undeniably beautiful. It’s more than that. There’s something about her that at the same time feels both very familiar and completely foreign. For one thing, she also could have killed me but didn’t. And I know she has no problem killing. She took down the two MGB agents without blinking. No ordinary soldier would do that—or even be able to. You have to be a certain kind of person to kill so easily, or at least to make it look so easy.
