in the darkness, or could the man really somehow see without light?
Muffled from the floor behind him, Sara’s voice said, “Trust him, cowboy. He got Papa out of the camp at Kegenwald in the weirdest cockamamie way I’ve ever seen.”
After one last agonizing waver Tom eased on the brake. “If this goes wrong I’ll kill you.”
“You do that,” Rhion mumbled. He sounded half asleep.
A flashlight slammed its beam into Saltwood’s eyes, and he squinted against it and wondered if they noticed the sweat that prickled his hair and every inch of his backbone. “Name?” a voice demanded from behind the light.
“Deitmarr, and get that bloody light out of my eyes!” Saltwood snapped furiously.
The light moved aside as he thrust the late Corporal Deitmarr’s identity card up at the SS lieutenant in charge of the barrier. “I’m taking this heap through to Kesselring at Ostend,” he added, jerking his hand to indicate the shiny length of the Packard. “And a damned cow it is, too, but he says he wants it.”
The flashlight beam flicked over Rhion’s still, dozing form, swished the backseat mechanically while the lieutenant was still studying Saltwood’s pass. “You seen any sign of a gray open Mercedes, four passengers, bearded man, red-haired girl, blond man in part of an SS uniform...” He rattled the words off mechanically, as if his mind were on something else.
“Crucifix, no! I’ve spent all afternoon in the damn garage trying to get this expletive deleted bastard of a bloody car to start. “Aren’t you going to ask me about those people crouched down in the backseat? Or this handcuff manacle on my left wrist?”
“You taking it all the way to Ostend?”
“If the thing doesn’t effing die on me on the way.” It was impossible that the man didn’t hear the slamming of Saltwood’s heart.
“Good luck, then.”
He thumped the roof of the car. Saltwood drove on, wondering if he’d somehow been shot without noticing it and this was delirium. He forced himself not to pat the dried blood on his uniform jacket, the bullet holes that had finished off its last occupant. Dammit, they HAVE to have shown up that close, the guard HAS to have seen them! The headlights flashed across lines of armed shadows, massed in the darkness behind the trucks. Tom wondered how Rhion had known that.
“Nobody get up,” Rhion mumbled into his beard, the iron circlet still cradled between thumb and middle finger, almost out of sight against his side. “There’ll be more. Tell me when the next one’s coming up, please, Tom.”
Saltwood swore, quietly but with considerable feeling, through the next three miles of street, pausing only long enough to repeat the entire performance at the next roadblock. When he glanced beside him he could see in the gleam of the receding flashlights that sweat trickled down the sides of the Professor’s forehead and matted the long strings of his hair. As they drove on into the blackness of the countryside, Saltwood was quiet for a long time.
“He did that getting Papa out of the camp.” Sara fished in the pocket of the SS field jacket she wore over her somewhat grubby BDM uniform and produced a couple of cigarettes that she must have looted from the dead guards on Teglerstrasse. Crouched by the dim glow of the hooded headlight with a local map, Saltwood grinned—he hadn’t thought of looking for cigarettes himself, but the woman didn’t miss a trick.
Behind them, above the dark blur of half-naked trees, Berlin was a smear of smoke, lit from beneath by the fevered glare of fires still burning out of control in every industrial district in the city and from above by ice-hard diamond stars. Sara’s breath puffed in the deepening cold as she went on, “He told me to go up and cut my way through the wire in full sight of two guard towers, with every floodlight in the place on... He’d told Papa just to walk out the door and over to the fence to meet me. And all the time he just sat there at the edge of the woods, like he did in the car tonight, with his eyes shut, meditating.” She pulled a lighter out of another pocket, steel with the wreathed Deaths-Head of the SS embossed upon it. The bright leaf of flame called reddish echoes from even the dusky hair that framed her face and picked sharp little shadows from the corners of her eyes. In the car behind her the Professor and Rebbe