Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (38 page)

Sara scooped it from the floor with a blistering oath in Polish and fired down the stairwell, ducked a returning burst, then fired again, her grip steady as if on a range. There was the sound of something falling at the bottom, then silence and the stench of cordite. She started to move, and Rhion shook his head violently, waving her back. Distantly, over the long, continuous ululation of the air-raid sirens, another siren could be heard, the grating two-note seesaw of the police.

Rhion made a gesture with his fingers.

There was a clattering below and Saltwood saw, past Sara’s shoulder and down the stairs, a Storm Trooper leap out of hiding behind a door in the hall, spinning to point his gun away from them, toward the front door, as if startled by something there. Sara fired. The man flung out his arms as the bullets smashed through his rib cage, and went sprawling. The four of them barreled down the stairs. Oddly enough, Saltwood could see nothing in the downstairs hall that might have startled that last Trooper into exposing himself to Sara’s fire.

“Check the shed out back for a car,” he ordered, and Sara vanished through the rear door under the stairs while Saltwood methodically stripped every body he could find of weapons, spare clips, money, and papers. The police sirens were getting closer. Von Rath must have got to a phone. Rhion and Sara appeared at the back door again at the same moment Sara’s father emerged from another door, carrying the sort of string shopping bag German housewives took to market, bulging with bread, cheese, bottled water, and beer.

“Car out back,” Sara yelled. “We threw two spare gas cans in the trunk.”

Tires crunched in the gravel out front. Saltwood made a dash for the back, hoping against hope they’d make it out of the alley before the inevitable flanking parties blocked both ends. Rhion paused in the doorway and made a gesture of some kind with his staff. From the front drive there was a shattering explosion, yellow and white light stabbing through the gathering twilight.

So there was some kind of radio-controlled bomb in the truck after all
, Saltwood thought, as the Professor dashed to join them, the crystals in the staff head winking sharply in the reflected light of the fires.
So much for Goering’s expertise
.

The car was an open staff Mercedes, gray, sleek, and well cared for. Despite the fact there were no keys in the fascia board, it was running. Somehow it was no surprise to Saltwood to learn that Sara could hot-wire cars. The fugitives piled in over the doors with their gear, guns, magic wand, and picnic lunch. Then Tom had it in motion, roaring out into the narrow, moss-cobbled alley in time to see two motorcyclists and half a dozen running Storm Troopers appear around the corner to their left and a earful of machine-gun-brandishing Luftwaffe to their right.

“Right!” Rhion yelled, half standing in the front seat and raising the gleaming Spiracle against the evening light.

“We’ll have a better chance—” began Saltwood, jamming into first.

“RIGHT, goddammit!”

Not quite knowing why, but figuring the odds were really pretty much the same, Saltwood swung the wheel right and floored it.

For a second Tom thought the bang he heard was a bullet—single-shot auto—but then realized it had been the sound of the oncoming Luftwaffemobile’s right front tire blowing out. The big car jumped, swerved frenziedly, then slewed sidelong into the brick wall of the alley. Saltwood scraped paint from his own right-hand door on the stone alley wall as he barely avoided the still-bounding vehicle and gunned on up the alleyway while the other car caromed into the foremost of the motorcycle’s brigade, coming to a stop with one bumper against the alley wall and the other braced on the corner of the shed, effectively blocking all further pursuit from that direction.

“Well, I’ll be—go to hell,” Tom said, his eyes on the rearview mirror.

The flames rising from the front courtyard seemed awfully comprehensive for just one car, and there was no pursuit from that direction, either. If the pursuit cars were parked close around the truck, a spark could have jumped…

“We’ve got to switch cars.” Sara leaned forward over the back of the seat. “They’ll know we’ve got a staff Mercedes. Turn that way, down that alley…”

“You know Berlin?” Tom demanded, obeying.

“Don’t you?”

“Just the main streets, from the maps.”

In the gathering twilight it was growing hard to see, for every house was blacked out, every street lamp in this quiet suburb unlit, and Tom kept the Mercedes’ lights off. No sense getting stopped for violating blackout regulations. Overhead, the droning of the bombers still filled the sky; the far-off thunder of explosions and glare of fire to the southwest marked where the RAF was still taking its revenge.

“I don’t need a map to tell me this is a neighborhood where people can afford cars,” Sara returned, gesturing to the monotonous brick villas, the occasional cottages, and countrified houses whose rooflines loomed against the flame-lit sky. “Most people put their cars up on blocks because of the gas rationing… We’ve got ten gallons in back and whatever I can siphon out of the tank, and I hope to hell you got ration cards.”

“Do I look like an idiot?” Tom retorted.

She poked him in the back. “You’re wearing an SS uniform, cowboy—what do you think?”

Then she leaned over to Rhion, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him a little awkwardly on his untidy brown curls. “God, am I glad to see you safe.” She turned back to Tom. “Thank you.” The gruff uncertainty in her voice was odd, considering her earlier sophisticated calm. “I—I don’t know how the hell you managed to escape and get Rhion out of there, but thank you.”

“It was an allied effort,” Tom replied with a grin. “The Prof managed to break up their demo, and after that they were too busy dodging the bombs to follow us too hard. Once we switch cars we can head for Hamburg. There’s enough farm tracks and country roads that run parallel to the autobahn that we shouldn’t get too lost.”

“As long as we don’t get too found, we’ll be fine. Down that alley there…” She nodded toward a deep gap between two gray-stuccoed walls—a line of sheds and garages loomed dimly out of the darkness as they turned, and beyond them were the roofs of a line of semiattached houses, eloquent of the hopes of real-estate developers, the pretentions of well-to-do shopowners, and the managers of banks. “That looks promising.”

Several of the doors stood agape, revealing an assortment of garden tools and broken furniture—one or two were locked.

“My daughter the car thief,” Rebbe Leibnitz sighed, as Sara crowbarred the padlock hasp free of the nearest door’s brittle wood with a screwdriver from the Mercedes’ tool kit and, a moment later, pushed it back to reveal a massive green American Packard saloon.

“Better your daughter the car thief than your daughter the deceased former hostage of the Reich,” she muttered, opening the car door and perching on the seat with one graceful white leg dangling out the door for Saltwood to admire. “This heap still got its batteries or are we gonna have to jump it?” A moment later the engine coughed into life. The leg retreated into the car, and the Packard itself grumbled out into the narrow lane, shuddering with the effort of its long-silenced motor to stay awake. “Got a piece of tubing? Some hose?” She leaned out the door again. “What is this, the minor leagues?” she added, getting out and leaving the car to idle as she darted back into the utter blackness of the garage.

She emerged a moment later with her stolen SS dagger in one hand and a piece of rubber garden hose in the other, with which she siphoned most of the gasoline from the gray car’s tank to the green’s. “Which way are we heading?” she asked as she worked. “I’ll drive ahead and you follow me for a couple miles, so they won’t connect finding this buggy—” she kicked the Mercedes’ tire, “—with the report of a stolen car and know what to start looking for.”

“You used to do this for a living or something?” Tom inquired, closing the door once more and maneuvering the lock back into a semblance of its former appearance, while Rhion and Rebbe Leibnitz transferred their belongings from one vehicle to the other.

“Just brains, cowboy.”

“And dating every gangster on the East Side,” her father added glumly. “ ‘A tree shall be known by the fruit it bears…’ And what’s the date of your birth, by the way, Captain Saltwood?”

“Down this alley,” Saltwood replied to Sara’s earlier question, “two rights should get us back onto See Strasse. We can cut back to the Alt-Moabitstrasse and head for Hamburg that way.”

“No!” Rhion said sharply.

The others looked at him, baffled.

“We can’t go back the way we came! I left the Resonator in the temple at von Rath’s headquarters. If we get too close, we risk it picking up the Void energies of the Spiracle and reestablishing the field.”

“Dammit,” Saltwood snapped, “I’m not taking a fifteen-mile detour around the other side of Berlin because you don’t want to step on the cracks of the sidewalk! They’re gonna have the dogs on us fast enough! Now get in the car!”

Rhion balked. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand we haven’t got the time or the gas to waste. We’ve only got a couple hours’ lead, if that, before they figure out where we’re headed and get the whole SS on our butts, and I for one would rather risk all the wicked wizards in the world than half a squad of sore-assed Deaths-Heads, so get in the car and quit arguing!”

Rhion opened his mouth to protest further, but Sara reached out, grabbed the Professor by the arm, and dragged him into the Packard with her and set off down the lane. Muttering to himself, Saltwood slammed into the Mercedes and followed, hoping they wouldn’t encounter any unscheduled pedestrians in the utter darkness to complicate matters still further. As they neared Berlin again the red light of fires illuminated their way, burning out of control among the endless blocks of workers’ flats. Smoke stung Saltwood’s eyes as he drove.

“Friggin’ crazy—loony,” he muttered to Leibnitz, who sat in the backseat of the open Mercedes like a king en route to his coronation. “When I tried to get him to let go of that silly stick I thought he was going to tear into me! He may be some kind of genius, but…”

“He surrendered it once three months ago,” the old scholar said softly, “and has regretted it since. I think he would die rather than let von Rath have it again.” The wind flicked back his silky white hair and the ragged strands of his grizzled beard. In spite of the plain gray Labor Service uniform he wore—like Sara’s and Rhion’s, stripped of all its emblems—he reminded Tom strongly of the old Jewish men who’d argue
pilpul
and politics on the stoops of Yorkville, thrashing the easy theories of communism and socialism and the Industrial Workers of the World into their component atoms and examining them one by one, as was the fashion of Talmudic scholars everywhere. “So what did he mean, field? What Resonator was he talking about?”

“Christ knows.” Saltwood frowned, concentrating on keeping the Packard in sight. Its taillights had been removed to comply with blackout regulations, and, in blocks where intact buildings shielded them from the glare of the fires, it was difficult to see anything at all. The night was getting cold, too. In spite of having stripped a uniform jacket from one of the less gory corpses Saltwood felt chilled, driving in the open car. “He made this widget out of wire and glass and claims it lets him do magic if it gets within a couple miles of that—that Spiracle of von Rath’s.”

He heard Leibnitz gasp. The old man leaned forward sharply, white hair fluttering back over his shoulders. “Did he say how?”

The desperate earnestness in his voice made Tom remember Sara had described her father as being as crazy as Sligo.
Just what I need—TWO of them
! “I don’t know. Some
boruyo
about drawing energy through the Spiracle and setting up a resonating field.”

“
Kayn aynhoreh
,” Leibnitz whispered in horror. “
Chas vesholem
, he can’t have.”

“He sure as hell thinks he has.” And yet, unbidden, there rose again to his mind that half-obliterated fragment of memory: Rhion Sligo with one hand on that tangle of wire and crystal in the dim candlelight of his prison room, and the bluish drift of ball lightning floating upward from his other—empty—palm.

Hallucination
, he thought, made uncomfortable at some deep level by the thought, as if, back in his socialist days, he’d stumbled across conclusive evidence that it was not economics but women’s fashions—or sunspots—or maybe even God—that ruled history.
Maybe some kind of electrical byproduct of the device, whatever it is, like the St. Elmo’s Fire that burned on the horns of the cattle on the nights of thunderstorms, when they were thinking about stampeding
…

“Stop them,” Leibnitz ordered. His long, blue-veined hands, resting on the seat back beside Tom’s head, were shaking. “He’s right, we’ll have to detour through the center of the city.”

“Down Prinzalbertstrasse past SS headquarters? Don’t you start!”

“You don’t understand! We can’t risk…”

They rounded a corner, and Saltwood jammed on the brakes just in time to prevent a collision with the Packard in front of him. They were in among the narrow streets of tenement warrens now, pitch dark save where they were lit by the yellow glare of fires. A bombed building had disgorged a vast talus spill of debris across the road before them. Beyond, the street was a chaos of flames, of firemen and tangled hoses, of brown water trickling down the broken asphalt glittering hotly in the reflections of the blaze. Men and women crowded around them, dazed and quiet. A little boy in the brown uniform of the Hitler Youth stood alone, sobbing in helpless pain and terror with blood running down the side of his face from a huge cut in his scalp. Above them loomed what was left of the tenement, the rooms ripped open as if by a giant knife, shabby wallpaper, dirty old furniture, and cramped, tiny chambers laid bare to the glaring orange inferno.

Saltwood set the brake and got out of the car. Rhion and Sara had already debarked. For a few moments the four of them stood together on the fringe of the ruin, unnoticed by the people coming dazedly from the shelter across the across the road or stumbling, bleeding and covered with filth and a hundred years’ worth of coal and plaster dust, from the cellars of the buildings all around.