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

ago when he had been too sick to fight, appeared in the corridor. She stopped, doe-eyed, on the verge of scurrying away, but then she managed a very slight smile.

“All but two went out early this morning,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

“Was there any trouble?” Dannsiger asked.

Marti cocked her head, as if she were trying to listen for some faint far-off sound, and then she shrugged. “There was shooting.

But we don’t know what it was. Karl went out, but he said he saw nothing. He was gone for nearly an hour.”

“I see,” Dannsiger said. “Where is Karl now?”

Deland felt somewhat uncomfortable around the girl. There was no one else here in the shelter even remotely her own age, except for him and, of course, some of the fliers. She was very lonely. It made him nervous.

“He is with the others.”

“Are the new workbooks completed?”

“They are just finishing them now,” the girl said.

“I’ll go downstairs and check on their progress,” Dannsiger said. He turned to Deland. “In the meantime, find out what is needed in the way of supplies. We’ll have to take care of it this evening or first thing in the morning.”

“Of course,” Deland said, and Dannsiger went down the corridor and down the stairs to the basement where most of the shelter’s work was done.

The remaining two fliers were both Americans from a B17 shot down five days ago. They were bunked in the basement in a room adjacent to the opening into the sewer. If all else failed and the building did come under attack, they would at least have a chance of escape.

Deland had talked at length to both of them, as he had with many of the Americans who came through, getting news from home.

He could not identify himself, of course, or send messages back home. If the escapees were picked up and interrogated, it would give him away. For the same reason the downed airmen were brought into the shelter only in the middle of the night, and they were sent out in darkness as well. They’d never be able to find their way back—or lead their captors back here.

Marti turned and started up the corridor. “Come,” she said.

Deland followed her to her office-bedroom. She had become the requisitions and supply officer for the shelter. It was she who figured out what they needed to continue their work: everything from ink and pen-nibs to material for clothes and the sewing machines to make them with.

The room smelled of lilacs. There were three large bunches of them in vases around the large room. Tall windows overlooked the river. From here the Spree was pretty.

Deland went to one of the windows and looked outside. Several children were playing some game in a large bomb crater in the narrow strip of yard between the backs of the apartment building and the muddy river banks. A lot of debris was laying around.

“I watch them often from here,” Marti said.

Deland turned to her. She stood in front of her desk. The room was furnished with a bed and a small Schrank. A tattered old throw rug lay in the middle of the spotlessly clean wooden floor.

A bullfight poster from Spain was tacked on the wall. On the opposite wall was the standard-issue photograph of Adolph Hitler.

“For inspiration,” she always said. “He is what we are fighting against.”

“It always make me nervous,” Deland said.

“What, the children?” she asked in surprise.

He nodded. “I’m afraid there will be an unexploded bomb. Or some glass, or something that they might hurt themselves on.”

Marti laughed. “You Americans are all alike.”

He smiled with her, although he wasn’t quite sure he understood, or even liked, the inflection of her remark.

“You’re all little boys. The bombs are raining down every day and every night, and yet you are worried about the children playing in the leftovers.”

She had been working with a German first aid unit outside of Paris until nine months ago when a group of French Resistance fighters had ambushed her one night. Five of them had raped her and had left her for dead.

The German command had returned her home, and then she had come here to Berlin after she had recovered. Instead of turning her against the Resistance, it had opened her eyes to what war was doing to people. She was on a pension now for full disability. As far as the German military was concerned, she was above suspicion, although Dannsiger was her uncle.

“It doesn’t make any sense, does it?” Deland said looking again down at the children. An overwhelming sense of frustration and sadness welled up inside of him.

“It won’t last much longer, Helmut,” she said. “And then we will be able to begin rebuilding our lives. All of us will be able to pick up the threads that were torn from us.”

“We’ll never be the same.”

Marti laughed again, the sound light, almost musical. “No, of course not, but maybe we’ll be able to get sane again.”

“In the meantime …“he began.

“In the meantime we live our lives. At the moment we need India ink. Black and blue.”

“India ink?”

She nodded, then picked up a piece of paper and held it out to him. “Along with a few other things.”

Deland took the list from her. It was long, and included everything from buttons (all sizes) to wallets, eyeglasses, and German Reich marks.

Deland chuckled at the last. “We should have gold.”

“That, too, if you can come up with it.”

He looked up. She was smiling at him. Whereas Katrina was short and full-bodied, Marti was tall and somewhat willowy for a German. But her hair was blonde, her eyes blue and her manner very Nordic. She was definitely German or Dutch.

She came around her desk, but stopped in the middle of the room. She was wearing wool trousers and a thick, long-sleeved flannel shirt. “We shouldn’t be fighting this war, you know.”

It was his turn to smile. “No.”

“It’s turned everything upside down.”

“I’m sorry … about your husband.” Deland said. Dannsiger told him that