The Wolf's Hour Read online

  Michael looked into the other man’s face. “Sandler was in the company of a Nazi colonel named Jerek Blok, an SS officer, who used to be commandant of Falkenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. So Sandler’s moving in some high circles.”

  “Is Sandler still in Berlin?”

  “We haven’t had word from Echo to indicate otherwise. She’s keeping watch on him for us.”

  Michael grunted softly. He had no idea who Echo was, but he remembered Sandler’s ruddy-cheeked face from a Life magazine photograph, grinning as he rested one booted foot on a dead lion on the Kenya grassland.

  “We can get you dossiers on Sandler and Blok, of course,” Mallory ventured on. “We don’t know what their connection might be. Echo would contact you in Berlin. What you might decide to do from there is up to your own discretion.”

  My discretion, Michael thought. That was a polite way of saying that if he chose to kill Harry Sandler, he would be on his own.

  “Your first mission, however, is to find out what Adam knows.” Mallory let a trail of smoke trickle from his mouth. “That’s imperative. You can relay the information through your French contact.”

  “What about Adam? Don’t you want him out of Paris?”

  “If possible.”

  Michael mulled that over. The man who, in this instance, called himself Mallory was as infamous for what he left unsaid as for what he spelled out.

  “We want to tie up all the loose ends,” Mallory said after a moment’s silence. “I’m intrigued by the same thing you are, Michael: why is an artist involved in this? Von Frankewitz is a nobody, a hack who does sidewalk portraits in Berlin. How is he involved with secrets of state?” Mallory’s eyes found Michael. “Will you do the job?”

  Nyet, he thought. But he felt a pressure in his veins like the power of a steam furnace building heat. In two years he had not gone one day without thinking of how his friend, the Countess Margritta, had died while he slumbered in the embrace of spent passions. Finding Harry Sandler might wipe the slate clean. Probably not, but there would be satisfaction in hunting the hunter. And the situation with Adam and the impending invasion was a vital issue on its own. How might Adam’s information affect D-Day, and the lives of the thousands of soldiers who would storm ashore on a fateful morning in June?

  “Yes,” Michael said, tension in his throat.

  “I knew I could count on you at the eleventh hour,” Mallory said with a faint smile. “The wolf’s hour, isn’t it?”

  “I have one request to make. My parachute training’s rusty. I’d like to go over by submarine.”

  Mallory considered it briefly, then shook his head. “I’m sorry. Too risky with German patrol boats and mines in the Channel. A small transport plane is the safest alternative. We’ll whisk you to a place where you can sharpen your skills, do a few practice jumps. Piece of cake, as the Yanks say.”

  Michael’s palms were wet, and he closed his fists. Only two things frightened him: confinement and heights. He couldn’t stand the roar and sputter of airplanes, and with his feet off the earth he felt diminished and weak. But there was no choice; he would have to bear it and forge ahead, though the parachute training would be sheer torture. “All right.”

  “Splendid.” Mallory’s tone of voice said he’d known all along Michael Gallatin would accept the task. “You’re doing well, aren’t you, Michael? Getting enough sleep? Eating balanced meals? Not too much meat, I hope.”

  “Not too much.” The forest was stocked with a large herd of deer and stags, plus wild boar and hares.

  “I worry about you sometimes. You need a wife.”

  Michael laughed, in spite of Mallory’s well-intentioned seriousness.

  “Well,” Mallory amended, “perhaps not.”

  They talked for a while longer, about the war, of course, because that was their crossroads of interest, and as the fire gnawed quietly on oak logs and the wind keened before dawn, the lycanthrope in service to the king stood up and ascended the stairs to his bedroom. Mallory slept in his chair before the hearth, his face in repose again that of an elderly chauffeur.

  5

  Dawn came gray and stormy as yesterday’s dusk. At six o’clock orchestral music roused Major Shackleton and Captain Humes-Talbot, whose backbones popped and moaned as they pried themselves out of the narrow and wholly uncomfortable dead pastor’s bed. They had slept clothed, to ward off the chill that sneaked in around the stained-glass window, and they went downstairs marked with unmilitary wrinkles.

  Sleet slashed at the windows, and Shackleton thought he might scream. “Good morning,” Michael Gallatin said, sitting in the black leather chair before a newly built fire, a mug of hot Twinings Earl Grey tea in his hand. He wore a dark blue flannel robe and no shoes. “There’s coffee and tea in the kitchen. Also some scrambled eggs and local sausage, if you want any breakfast.”

  “If that sausage is as strong as the local whiskey, I think I’ll pass,” Shackleton said, with a frown of distaste.

  “No, it’s very mild. Help yourselves.”

  “Where’s Mallory?” Humes-Talbot asked, looking around.

  “Oh, he had his breakfast and went out to change the oil in the car. I let him use the garage.”

  “What’s that racket?” Shackleton thought the music sounded like armies of demons clashing in hell. He walked to the Victrola and saw the record spinning around.

  “Stravinsky, isn’t it?” Humes-Talbot inquired.

  “Yes. The Rite of Spring. It’s my favorite composition. This is the part, Major Shackleton, where the village elders stand in a circle and watch a young girl dance herself to death in a pagan ritual of sacrifice.” Michael closed his eyes for a few seconds, seeing the dark purple and crimson of the leaping, frenzied notes. He opened them again, and stared at the major. “Sacrifice seems to be a particularly popular topic these days.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Gallatin’s eyes made Shackleton nervous; they were steady and piercing, and they held a power that made the major feel as boneless as a washrag. “I’m a Benny Goodman fan.”

  “Oh yes, I know his work.” Michael listened to the thunderous, pounding music for another moment; in it was the image of a world at war, fighting against its own barbarity and the barbarity clearly winning. Then he stood up, lifted the needle without scratching the 78 rpm disk and let the Victrola wind down. “I accept the mission, gentlemen,” he said. “I’ll find out what you want to know.”

  “You will? I mean…” Humes-Talbot stumbled over his words. “I thought you’d made up your mind already.”

  “I had. I changed it.”

  “Oh, I see.” He didn’t really, but he wasn’t going to question the man’s motives any further. “Well, that’s good to hear, sir. Very good. We’ll put you in a week of training, of course. Give you a few practice parachute jumps and some linguistic work, though I doubt you’ll need it. And we’ll put together all the information you’ll need as soon as we get back to London.”

  “Yes, you do that.” The thought of the flight over the Channel into France made the skin crawl at the back of his neck, but that would have to be dealt with at the proper time. He drew a deep breath, glad now that his decision was final. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going for my morning run.”

  “I knew you were a runner!” Shackleton said. “I am, too. How far do you go?”

  “Five miles, more or less.”

  “I’ve gone seven miles before. Loaded down with field gear. Listen, if you’ve got an extra warm-up suit and a sweater, I’ll go with you. I wouldn’t mind gettin’ the blood movin’ again.” Especially after trying to sleep in that torture rack, he thought.

  “I don’t wear a warm-up suit,” Michael told him, and removed his robe. He was naked underneath. He folded the robe over the chairback. “It’s almost springtime. And thank you, Major, but I always run alone.” He walked past Shackleton and Humes-Talbot, who were both too shocked to move or speak, and went out the door and into the cold, sleety morning light.


  Shackleton caught the door before it closed. He watched, incredulous, as the naked man began to run with long, purposeful strides down the driveway, then across the grassy field toward the woods. “Hey!” he shouted. “What about the wolves?” Michael Gallatin didn’t look back, and in another moment he vanished into the line of trees.

  “He’s an odd chap, don’t you think?” Humes-Talbot asked, peering over the other man’s shoulder.

  “Odd or not,” Shackleton said, “I believe Major Gallatin can get the job done.” Sleet dashed him in the face, and he shivered in spite of his uniform and shut the door against the wind.

  6

  “Martin? Come here and look at this!”

  The man whose name had been called stood up from his desk immediately and walked into the inner office, his shoes clacking on the concrete floor. He was heavyset and broad-shouldered, and he wore an expensive brown suit, a spotless white shirt, and black necktie. His graying hair was combed back from his forehead. He had the soft, fleshy features of a child’s favorite uncle, a man who liked to tell bedtime stories.

  The walls of the inner office were covered with maps, marked with red arrows and circles. Some of the arrows had been scratched out, drawn and redrawn, and many of the circles had been crossed out with angry lines. More maps lay on the office’s large desk, along with piles of papers that needed signatures. A small metal box had been opened, and in it were carefully organized vials of watercolors and horsehair brushes of various sizes. The man behind the desk had pulled his stiff-backed chair to an easel in the corner of the windowless room, and on that easel was a painting in progress: a watercolor of a white farmhouse and behind it the purple rise of jagged mountain peaks. On the floor around the artist’s feet were other paintings of houses and the countryside, all of them put aside before they were finished.

  “Here. Right here. Do you see it?” The artist wore glasses, and he tapped his paintbrush against a smeared shadow at the farmhouse’s edge.

  “I see… a shadow,” Martin answered.

  “In the shadow. Right there!” He tapped it again, harder. “Look close!” He picked up the painting, getting water-colors on his fingers, and thrust it in Martin’s face.

  Martin swallowed thickly. He saw a shadow, and only that. This seemed to be important, and should be handled carefully. “Yes,” he answered. “I think… I do see it.”

  “Ah!” the other man said, smiling. “Ah! So there it is!” He spoke German with a heavy—some might think clumsy—Austrian accent. “The wolf, right there in the shadow!” He pointed the brush’s wooden end at a dark scrawl that Martin couldn’t make heads or tails of. “The wolf on the prowl. And look here!” He picked up another painting, badly done, of a winding mountain stream. “See it? Behind that rock?”

  “Yes, mein Ffchrer,” Martin Bormann said, staring at a rock and a misshapen line or two.

  “And here, in this one!” Hitler offered a third painting, of a field of white eidelweiss. He pointed his crimson-smeared finger at two dark dots amid the sunny flowers. “The eyes of the wolf! You see, he’s creeping closer! You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Martin hesitated, then slowly shook his head.

  “The wolf is my lucky symbol!” Hitler said, with a hint of agitation. “Everyone knows that! And here’s the wolf, appearing in my paintings with a will of its own! Do you need a clearer portent than that?”

  Here we go, Hitler’s secretary thought. Now we descend into the maelstrom of signs and symbols.

  “I’m the wolf, don’t you understand?” Hitler took off his glasses, which few but the inner circle ever saw him wearing, snapped them shut, and slid them into their leather case. “This is a portent of the future. My future.” His intense blue eyes blinked. “The future of the Reich, I should say of course. This only tells me again what I already know to be true.”

  Martin waited without speaking, staring at the farmhouse picture with its unintelligible scribble in the shadows.

  “We’re going to smash the Slavs and drive them back into their rat holes,” Hitler went on. “Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk… names on a map.” He grasped a map, leaving red fingerprints on it, and pushed it disdainfully off the desk. “Frederick the Great never considered defeat. Never considered it! He had loyal generals, yes. He had a staff who obeyed orders. Never in my life have I seen such willful disobedience! If they want to hurt me, why don’t they just put a gun to my head?”

  Martin said nothing. Hitler’s cheeks were growing red and his eyes looked yellow and moist, a bad sign. “I said we need larger tanks,” the Ffchrer continued, “and you know what I heard in return? Larger tanks use more fuel. That’s their excuse. They think of every possible way to hobble me. Larger tanks use more fuel. Well, what is the whole of Russia but a vast pit of petroleum? And my officers tumble back from the Slavs in terror and refuse to fight for the lifeblood of Germany! How can we hope to hold the Slavs back without fuel? Not to speak of the air raids destroying the ball-bearing plants! You know what they say to that? Mein Ffchrer—they always say mein Ffchrer in those voices that make you sick as if you’d eaten too much sugar—our anti-aircraft guns need more shells. Our trucks that haul the anti-aircraft guns need more fuel. You see how their minds work?” He blinked again, and the other man saw the understanding settle back in like cold light. “Oh, yes. You were with us at the meeting this afternoon, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, mein… Yes,” he answered. “Yesterday afternoon.” He glanced at his pocket watch. “It’s almost one-thirty.”

  Hitler nodded absently. He wore his brocaded cashmere robe, a gift from Mussolini, and leather slippers, and he and Bormann were alone in the administrative wing of his Berlin headquarters. He stared at his handiwork, at the houses built of unsteady lines and the landscapes with false perspectives, and he dipped his brush into a cupful of water and let the colors bleed out. “It’s a portent,” he said, “that I’m drawing a wolf without even knowing it. That means victory, Martin. The utter and total destruction of the Reich’s enemies. From without and within,” he said, with a meaningful glance at his secretary.

  “You should know by now, mein Ffchrer, that no one can defy your will.”

  Hitler didn’t seem to hear. He was busy returning all his paints and brushes to the metal box, which he kept locked in his safe. “What’s my schedule for today, Martin?”

  “At eight o’clock, a breakfast meeting with Colonel Blok and Dr. Hildebrand. Then a staff meeting from nine o’clock to ten-thirty. Field Marshal Rommel is due in at one o’clock for a briefing on the Atlantic Wall fortifications.”

  “Ah.” Hitler’s eyes lit up again. “Rommel. Now there’s a man with a good mind. I forgave him for North Africa. Everything’s fine now.”

  “Yes, sir. At seven-forty this evening, we’ll be accompanying the field marshal by plane to the coast of Normandy,” Bormann continued. “Then on to Rotterdam.”

  “Rotterdam.” Hitler nodded, putting his box of paints into the safe. “I trust that work is going on schedule? That’s vital.”

  “Yes sir. After a day in Rotterdam, we’ll be flying back to the Berghof for a week.”

  “The Berghof! Yes, I’d forgotten!” Hitler smiled, dark circles under his eyes. The Berghof, Hitler’s mansion in the Bavarian Alps above the village of Berchtesgaden, had been his only true home since the summer of 1928. It was a place of bracing wind, vistas that would have stunned the sight of Odin, and memories that lay easy on the mind. Except for Geli, of course. He’d met Geli Raubal there, his one true love. Geli, dear Geli with blond hair and laughing eyes. Why did dear Geli burst her heart with a single shot? I loved you, Geli, he thought. Wasn’t that enough? Eva would be waiting for him at the Berghof, and sometimes when the light was just so and Eva’s hair was brushed back, Hitler could squint his eyes and see the face of Geli, his lost love and niece, twenty-three years old when she committed suicide in 1931.

  His head hurt. He looked at the calendar, the days of March,
on his desk amid the clutter.

  “It’s springtime,” Hitler realized.

  From beyond the walls, out over the blacked-out city of Berlin, came a howling. The wolf! Hitler thought, his mouth opening in a gasp. No, no… an air-raid siren.

  The noise built and moaned, felt more than heard behind the walls of the Reich Chancellery. In the distance there was the sound of a bomb exploding, a crunching noise like the smashing of a heavy ax against a tree trunk. Then another bomb, two more, a fifth and sixth in rapid succession. “Call someone!” Hitler commanded, cold sweat sparkling on his cheeks.

  Martin picked up the desk telephone and dialed a number.

  More bombs fell, the noise of destruction swelling and waning. Hitler’s fingers gripped the desk’s edge. The bombs were falling to the south, he believed. Down near Tempelhof airport. Not close enough to fear, but still…

  The crack and boom of distant explosions ceased. Now there was only the wolf howl of the air-raid siren and more answering around the city.

  “A nuisance raid,” Martin said after he’d spoken with the chief of Berlin security. “A few craters on the airfield and some row houses on fire. The bombers have gone.”

  “Damn the swine!” Hitler stood up, trembling. “Damn them to hell! Where are the Luftwaffe night fighters when we need them? Isn’t anyone awake?” He strode to one of the maps that showed the defensive fortifications, the mine fields and concrete bunkers, on the Normandy coast. “Thank the fates that Rommel is. Churchill and that Jew Roosevelt are going to come to France, sooner or later. They’ll find a warm reception, won’t they?”

  Martin agreed that they would.

  “And when they send their cannon fodder, they’ll be sitting in London at their polished desks drinking English tea and eating those… what do they call those biscuit things?”

  “Crumpets,” Martin said.

  “Drinking tea and eating crumpets!” Hitler steamrolled on. “But we’ll give them something special to chew on, won’t we, Martin?”