Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (19 page)

She glanced at Marsh. He did a double take, tried to get a better look at her eyes, but she was already past them on her way outside.

Mismatched eyes. One blue, one brown. A Twin.

The commander had mentioned the Twins in his summary of the farm and its inhabitants. Twin psychics forever linked, forever seeing through each other’s eyes. Ideal for secure communications.

Klaus went up first. Gretel followed, then Marsh. He caught her arm and spoke into her ear as softly as he could, so that Klaus wouldn’t hear over the creaking of the stairs.

“What is she doing here?” he breathed. “I thought they were both deployed.”

Gretel patted his hand. “They were. But I suggested she be temporarily moved from the OKW back here.”

Well. That addressed one of the commander’s concerns.

Klaus waited for them on the landing. Gretel trotted up the stairs. Marsh hurried after her. She said, “These are our quarters. The doctor likes to keep his children close at hand.” She pointed back and forth across the corridor to each in a series of doors, rattling off names as she did so. “Heike. Rudolf. Brother. Me. Reinhardt. Kammler. Oskar.” The last room at the end of the corridor had housed both Twins, before they were deployed. “They’ll give you Rudolf’s room. He doesn’t need it any longer.” She squeezed his arm. “I’ll be right next door.”

Liddell-Stewart hadn’t mentioned a Rudolf or Oskar. Marsh wondered what had happened to them.

Klaus made to climb the narrow stairs to the top floor, but scowled and reluctantly stepped aside as somebody stomped down from above. They were joined by one of the uniformed men that Marsh had seen in the window. The unhappy one. He wore the same rank of SS-Obersturmführer as Klaus and Gretel, and a similar battery harness. Marsh recognized his face from the Tarragona filmstrip. This man had melted an anvil with his bare hands.

If looks could murder (and couldn’t they, here of all places?) the newcomer’s contempt would have made a corpse of Klaus. He sighed theatrically when he saw Gretel.

“Hello, Reinhardt,” she said. “Did you miss us?”

“I’d hoped I’d endured the last of your company. I should have known better.” Reinhardt turned to Klaus. “And where the hell have you been the past few days?”

Klaus smiled. “Serving the Reich,” he said. “Carrying out my orders.” Klaus said it with obvious relish. Prior to that moment, Marsh had doubted Klaus was capable of smiling at all.

Reinhardt stared. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

“It’s true.” Gretel toyed with a braid. “The doctor will be
most
pleased with my brother.”

Little tendrils of smoke curled up from the wooden boards beneath Reinhardt’s boots. Marsh stepped back. A floorboard creaked. It caught Reinhardt’s attention. He finally noticed Marsh, tossing contempt in his direction as he looked him up and down.

Reinhardt’s eyes were the palest blue that Marsh had ever seen. This was the man who had murdered Krasnopolsky. Did that mean he’d seen Marsh in the Alexandria’s bar? A bead of sweat trickled down Marsh’s brow.

“Who is this?”

Gretel said, “This is Raybould Marsh. He’s come from England to join us.”

Reinhardt asked, in perfect English, “You’re British?”

Marsh responded in accentless German. “Yes. I grew up in London. St. Pancras, mostly.”

“How fortunate for you to be here now. It won’t be long before we unleash our Willenskräfte upon Britain. And when we do, there will be nothing left of your home but smoking rubble. How does that make you feel, Englishman?”

“Our Raybould is the future of the farm,” said Gretel. “We mustn’t keep the doctor waiting.”

Reinhardt’s bored expression suggested he either disregarded or distrusted most everything she said. He pushed past Marsh to descend the stairs. “If you should see Heike,” he said over his shoulder, “tell her I wish to speak with her. Privately.”

“Pig,” said Klaus.

Marsh muttered, “Thanks for the support.”

“Reinhardt’s attitude is your problem. Not mine.”

Klaus followed Marsh and Gretel up the second flight of stairs. It ended at a narrow landing and a closed door with a peephole. A pair of Wellington boots stood on the landing beside the door. They had been covered with mud, but it had since dried and cracked away. The landing was covered with clods of dirt.

“Those,” said Gretel, “are the doctor’s galoshes. And this is the doctor’s study.” She knocked.

Somebody said, “Enter!”

The Reichsbehörde’s inner sanctum was part antiquarian bookshop, part sunroom, and one hundred percent Mad Hatter. Sunlight flooded through the east-facing windows to illuminate bookshelves packed to bulging. They occupied much of the wall space not devoted to windows, except for a pair of closed doors and where a gramophone rested on a sideboard. Loose papers, covered in handwritten notes, peeked from between the pages of many books, or even from the spaces between the books on the shelves. It looked like a cyclone had ripped through a book bindery.

Here and there, a gap had been pried between the books; the doctor used those spaces to store what appeared to be specimen jars. Pale tissues floated in murky solutions. Marsh couldn’t begin to identify them. Part of him desperately didn’t want to.

The doctor’s desk was situated before one of the wide windows that overlooked the training field. The books and loose papers were more orderly here. There was also a battery similar to the ones Klaus and Gretel wore, but bulkier, as if an older model. For a paperweight, the doctor used a human skull; several long wires had been riveted to the cranium.

A small skull. Not an adult’s.

The wires made for a convenient placeholder. They had been draped across the open pages of a leather-bound journal. The doctor’s notes covered one page. Marsh spied a stack of similar volumes under the skull.

Dust eddies glittered like powdered silver in the sunlight. It wasn’t hard to find the source of the dust: the doctor’s chalkboard looked as though it hadn’t been properly washed down since Marsh had been a schoolboy. Which, given the long history of the doctor’s orphanage, might not have been far from the truth. It was difficult to gauge the original color of the board because attempts at erasure had merely smeared the chalk rather than removed it. Chalk dust lay so thick in the tray that the felt eraser lay half buried in it. The doctor’s peculiar crabbed handwriting scrawled over earlier passages and across old sketches. It wasn’t a chalkboard so much as a palimpsest documenting multiple phases of the doctor’s investigations. But one corner of the board had been kept clean and legible; the diagram within appeared to be half human anatomy, half circuit diagram.

A dining-room table stood alone in an island of order. The table could have accommodated six. It was bare except for a single place setting.

Another muffled explosion rattled the china.

Doctor Karl Heinrich von Westarp stood alongside his desk, gazing across the training field. The doctor wore a gown over the uniform and twin oak leaves of an Oberführer. The senior colonel wore slippers in lieu of boots.

The third man Marsh had glimpsed wore the uniform of an SS-Standartenführer. Only a single oak leave adorned his collar tabs. His name was Pabst, according to Liddell-Stewart, and he was in charge of training and discipline at the REGP. Pabst was the equivalent of a colonel. Quite a high rank for such lowly responsibility. Odd.

Klaus saluted. “Herr Doktor! Standartenführer!”

Gretel followed suit more casually.

Von Westarp turned to face the new arrivals. He was bald but for a graying tonsure. The lenses of his eyeglasses were round as marbles. The waist sash of his gown hung to the floor. A tattered fringe traced curlicues in the chalk dust on the floor.

The doctor looked at Klaus, then to Gretel, then back to Klaus. He didn’t appear to notice Marsh standing between them. He might have been gazing into a microscope, studying a specimen, for all the emotion he showed.

He said, “You were successful.”

Klaus said, “Yes, Herr Doktor.”

“That pleases me. You will breakfast with me on Sunday.”

Klaus stood even straighter. “It will be an honor.”

Von Westarp acknowledged this with a dismissive wave. He turned his attention back to the window.

Pabst cleared his throat. He spoke slowly, gently, in measured tones. “Pardon me, Herr Oberführer, but there is still the matter of Gretel’s desertion. And it appears she has brought somebody to meet you.”

Ah. So
that’s
why Pabst is here.

The Schutzstaffel wasn’t stupid. Even Himmler probably recognized that he had a first-class nutter running the asylum here. An indispensible nutter, perhaps even a mad genius, but mad just the same. Pabst’s real assignment was to keep an eye on him.

Any hint of gentleness evaporated from his voice when he addressed Gretel. “You are guilty of dereliction of duty. You disregarded your orders, abandoned your station, and willfully surrendered to the enemy.” He crossed the study, came closer. “A mundane soldier would be executed for that.”

Gretel said, “The invasion was destined for success. My guidance was immaterial. France will fall. I had more important issues to attend to.”

“More important than doing as you are told?” Pabst spun her around with a vicious backhand. The breeze ruffled Marsh’s hair. She’d have a terrible bruise tomorrow. Marsh started to intercede, but caught himself before he moved to her defense. When Gretel straightened, she was smiling.

“Please meet Lieutenant-Commander Raybould Marsh. Raybould was a key member of the British intelligence unit monitoring the Reichsbehörde until he decided to join us.”

Pabst glared at Marsh. “Is that what he told you? Absurd. He’s a spy.”

“It was my understanding,” Marsh said, “that it’s impossible to deceive Gretel.”

Pabst couldn’t argue that point without calling the doctor’s success into question. “Why are you here?”

The question had come from Pabst. But Marsh addressed his answer to von Westarp. “Once I came to terms with the true nature of the work carried out here, I knew, beyond any doubt, that this was the future.”

Pabst looked extremely skeptical. He started to counter, but the doctor interjected. “How did you learn of my work?”

“We were contacted last February by a man named Krasnopolsky. MI6 sent me to Spain to collect him and the information he carried.”

Von Westarp said, “The turncoat was silenced. He gave you nothing.” He turned his back to Marsh, once again putting his attention on the training field. “My children saw to that.”

Krasnopolsky had refused to hand over anything until he was safely off the Continent. Reinhardt had torched him a few minutes later. Marsh had been lucky to escape the conflagration with a few charred fragments. But this was an opportunity to bolster Klaus’s position against Reinhardt. It was clear the two had a powerful rivalry. Keeping Klaus on top of the pile was in Marsh’s best interests.

Marsh answered, “Krasnopolsky burned to death. But not before he passed everything to me.” He had to raise his voice to be heard above the chatter of a machine gun. “The filmstrip, in particular, has been invaluable.”

Silence fell over von Westarp. Then he began to tremble. Quietly, almost to himself, he said, “Reinhardt deceived me. He claimed to have carried out his orders successfully. But that was not the truth.” A bit more loudly, he added, “My own son has lied to me.” His anger hit a crescendo: “Humiliated me!”

“Have Reinhardt punished,” he snapped to Pabst. “Make it known my disappointment is profound.”

“And the newcomer? I strongly suggest he be removed. He’s seen more than he should.”

The colonel was absolutely correct. But von Westarp outranked him, and Gretel knew how to play the doctor’s ego.

She said, “The British are in a panic over this farm. You’ll want to hear what Raybould has to say. They’re embracing desperate measures.”

The doctor considered this. He muttered to himself. Then he said, “Board him downstairs. Find him work.”

Pabst’s eyes hardened, but he saluted. He paused beside Marsh on the way out. “I will know the truth of you,” he said quietly. “She won’t protect you forever.”

Gretel took Marsh’s arm again. Her jaw had already begun to swell. “Hungry?”

23 May 1940

Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials

Again and again during Marsh’s first week at the Reichsbehörde, Commander Liddell-Stewart’s analysis proved correct. Gretel was an invaluable ally.

The information Marsh carried about British intelligence efforts was deemed too important to lose to a momentary lapse of discipline like that on U-115. So, rather than bunking him in the barracks occupied by the mundane soldiers, he was assigned to Rudolf’s room in the farmhouse. As Gretel had foreseen.

And, two nights after their arrival, she helped him sneak in and out of Pabst’s quarters. He used the colonel’s transmitter to send a terse volley of dots and dashes into the ether: “Sailing monarch.”

The first word flagged the message for Liddell-Stewart. The second verified the association with Milkweed. If the commander was listening, he’d know Marsh had arrived.

Of course, nobody trusted Marsh. His credentials consisted of Gretel’s say-so, but it quickly became clear that Pabst and von Westarp had problems of their own with her. And the mundane soldiers went out of their way to avoid her. Even the other members of the Götterelektrongruppe regarded her with emotions ranging from outright hostility (Reinhardt) to fear (Heike).

Marsh didn’t have many opportunities to observe training sessions. Pabst and von Westarp kept his interactions with the others to a minimum. The exception was Kammler, who was profoundly mentally deficient. They didn’t want him interacting with the technicians, either. Nor did they want him handling sensitive equipment, such as the batteries. So, when they weren’t debriefing Marsh, they assigned him the most demeaning tasks they could find short of cleaning latrines.

Minding Kammler occasionally involved latrine duty.

Hauptsturmführer Buhler, Kammler’s handler, was the only person at the REGP who welcomed Marsh’s arrival. Not Marsh himself—Buhler didn’t trust him more than anybody else did. But he welcomed an extra pair of hands. It freed him from the tedium of dressing, feeding, and cleaning the muscle-bound imbecile. Were he a regular citizen of the Reich, an unfortunate fellow like Kammler would have been a candidate for sterilization or euthanasia. But he was also the farm’s resident telekinetic, capable of crushing a tank as though the steel were beeswax, or hurling an antiaircraft gun as easily as a snowball.