Heroes by David Hagberg (books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

longer than I will,” Deland said. It was time to get out. Something at the back of his head had been telling him that for weeks now.

Dannsiger stopped him at the corner. “Don’t you think I know ‘what you are going through?”

“I want to go home. I’m tired, Bernard.”

“We’re all tired, Helmut,” Dannsiger said reasonably. (Deland’s cover name here in Berlin was Helmut Schmidt. He posed as a voice teacher. At home he had been on the church choir and had a surprisingly good tenor voice.)

“None of this matters to me anymore. I find I don’t give a damn.”

Dannsiger smiled indulgently, like a father might with a son who was trying to find his way. “Don’t you think we know?”

“About what?”

“Katrina Mueller, of course. Up in Wolgast.”

Deland could feel the blood rush to his ears. “How?” he managed.

“Before anyone joins us, we must know their background.

Everything about their past. But if that wasn’t enough, you talk in your sleep very often.”

They went across the street, then started across the wide square in the middle of which stood the Brandenburg Gate, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rushing off the top of the arch.

“I’ll come back when it’s over.”

Dannsiger looked at him not unkindly. “I keep forgetting that you’re not a German. You are so very much like my …”

“Don’t say that,” Deland snapped. Dannsiger’s son had been killed in France.

They had to wait for half a dozen trucks to pass, then they went through the gate, and headed up Chausse Strasse. There was a lot of bomb damage just here. Many craters pockmarked the street; many buildings were down, rubble piled very high, some of it still smoking.

Deland was perspiring. He didn’t feel well. “I could just go.”

“The frontier is not particularly safe at this moment, so if that is what you really want to do, and intend doing it, please let me know.” “Yes?” Deland said hopefully.

Dannsiger smiled and nodded. “Yes. I will see what I can do for you, although it will not be much.”

“I’m not looking for a first-class ticket out.”

“No. But what about Fraulein Mueller?”

That really hurt. “I’m coming back for her as soon as hostilities cease.”

“Do you think she will be there, waiting for you?”

Deland stopped the older man. “Do you know something?

Have you heard some news?” His heart was hammering.

At length Dannsiger shook his head. “No, Helmut, I know nothing about the girl, except that she is there in Wolgast.

Nothing more. There are other things more important at the moment. I just wondered if you were disgusted with all Germans, or just those of us here in Berlin.” Deland said nothing. He was visualizing Katrina the last time he had seen her in Maria Quelle’s apartment. Rudy and Maria were both lying dead on the floor, blood everywhere. That memory, that vision, had stayed with him day and night through five months. More than once he had almost gotten on a train and gone back up there. Daily he reached out for the telephone to call her where she worked. He’d pretend he was an official from Berlin.

He needed information.

Each time, of course, his own better sense stayed his hand.

Something so reckless would endanger not only himself and the underground here in Berlin; it would place her in grave danger as well.

But he did not know if she had survived the suspicion that must have fallen on her. Did she still hold her job? Was she still living in her own apartment or had she moved back with her parents?

They got on a trolley and rode the rest of the way down to Berliner Strasse in the vicinity of the Forschungsamt building, where they got off and walked a half-dozen blocks north into a rundown, all but bomb-destroyed neighborhood of three-and four-story apartment buildings. The Spree River, stinking like the open sewer it had become, was directly behind the row of buildings that they approached by a circuitous route.

They did not speak. Each was alert to their surroundings. Each building, each burned-out car or truck, each overturned handcart, each pile of rubble could possibly present a grave danger. Each could conceal a watcher. Someone who would turn them in to the Gestapo for nothing more than suspicious behavior, for a reward of food. Perhaps two eggs. Perhaps a quarter kilo of pork or a small chicken.

They ducked through the gate of what once had been a girls’ finishing school, then in to the burned-out building. The top three floors were gone. But the first floor and the basement were more or less intact.

This building had been selected because of its room—it was a very wide and long building—and because of the fact that a storm sewer emptying directly into the Spree ran beneath the building.

A hole had been punched through the concrete floor in the basement, and through to the eight-foot-diameter sewer pipe. It provided an escape route for Allied fliers dressed in civilian clothing, with Polish worker identification, to relative safety outside the city.

From there they were on their own, with sketch maps, counterfeit money, and ration coupons sufficient to last them until they reached the frontier where the fighting was going on. From there it was anyone’s guess how many got through. They were never officially informed, although some of the fliers they interviewed seemed to think the underground system in Berlin was very good.

There were no guards or even lookouts on the entrances to the building. They would have been a useless waste of time and manpower. If the authorities came, there would be little any of them could do to save themselves. It would mean that they had been observed. Their faces and their methods of operation would be known.

Besides, in Berlin these days, no one strayed into strange places. It simply was not healthy. So there was little risk that they would be discovered by accident.

Marti Zimmer, a young woman from Westphalia, with the pale look of the Dutch, whose husband had been shot as a deserter one year