The Knife-Edge Path (WWII Historical Fiction) by Leahy Patrick T

Author:Leahy, Patrick T.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
Published: 2019-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

16

Kurt was gone when she woke up in the hotel. She had to catch a later train back to Berlin alone. He hadn’t left a note, and that worried her. She hoped he’d read the one she’d left in plain sight on the chair where he had draped his tunic: her exact address in Lichterfelde, adding ‘In case anything goes wrong…’

There were delays along the line and it was nightfall by the time the train pulled into Berlin, and through the window she could see the thin blue lights at the tunnel exits, the zinc sculptures standing their massive ground as they were left behind, and they wound past the sidings and the freight yards toward a shift onto the track that soon would straighten through the city toward the great domed hub of Anhalter Bahnhof and the walkways winding round the fountain in Potsdamer Platz, no longer spouting water.

The platform swarmed with people waiting for a train – any train, as long as it was going westward. She caught a tram to her Lichterfelde stop and hurried up the stairs. She didn’t see the man bounding downward until he clipped her with his bag and kept on going. Dressed in mufti, now, whereas she’d seen him once in uniform, his long unbuttoned overcoat flying like limp wings behind him. The corridor was messy – scraps of paper, a rumpled tunic, empty bottles. Doors on both sides stood ajar and everything was quiet. Eerily quiet, as if everybody had gone except her. Stumpff’s letterbox, she’d noticed in the vestibule, was empty. The Russians could be here within a week. Why should he stay behind? Why bother with her anymore, if everybody else was getting out?

Her flat smelled of damp wallpaper. She turned on the steam heater, lit one lamp. There was a flash against the curtains and she went over, parted them and looked down. Rain flittered in the headlight beams from a long black staff car. Behind it, the young man she’d passed on the stairway was cramming bags into the open trunk. Another car splashed past. She let the curtain fall. There was no use trying to sleep, she knew, and paced the floor from room to room, smoking up her cigarettes. She wouldn’t go upstairs to see if Stumpff was gone. She couldn’t face him now. Those bulging eyes of his would get her in their sights and she would crack, she knew. She was afraid that Kurt would come and Stumpff would catch them here, together. She’d been too full of love for him last night, too quick to pour it out into the note she’d left: ‘If anything goes wrong. Second floor, number 211.’ The only other thing to do was run, or watch the walls close in. Whenever they made up their minds it was time to come for her, Kurt would never know and she would disappear. One thing they didn’t have and couldn’t do without before they killed her: all she now knew about Kurt that they didn’t.

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