Leibnitz were conferring quietly, heads together. She glanced back at the two shadowy forms and her dark brows pulled down over her nose. “Sometimes it’s like he’s just another of Papa’s harmless lunatics,” she said softly. “Other times...”
She held out the lighter. When Saltwood touched her hand to steady it, she flinched very slightly, but consciousness of her fingers’ touch went through him like a swig of brandy, warming even when he took his hand away.
It seemed impossible to him that, when he’d waked up that morning, he hadn’t known her. In a way he had, he thought... He’d seen the scratches she’d made on the inside of the dresser drawer, marking off days in defiance of captivity, in defiance of helplessness. And he grinned to himself. Now there’s a step better than those heroes of legend who fall in love with a lady’s portrait...
And now it was as if he’d known her for years.
“You figured out where we are?” she asked, her scratchy Brooklyn accent breaking into reveries he knew he had no business having until they were safely back in England—or at least safe on the submarine.
“Uh—I think so.” There had been half a dozen maps in the glove box, but only this one had shown the countryside around Berlin in any kind of detail. “That T-fork we just passed must be this one here.” He pointed on the map. Around them the thin woods of birch and elm were silent, save where, not too far in the distance—probably at the end of this twisting, weed-choked lane—a wireless chattered in some farmhouse in the cold stillness of the night. “Which means that has to be the road to Rathenow. Even if we keep to the side roads, we can make Hamburg easy by midnight. The people I know can get in touch with the patrol boat...”
“That’s in the wrong direction.”
Saltwood looked up, startled. Rhion and Rebbe Leibnitz had gotten quietly out of the car and were standing behind him in the deep, dew-soaked grass that clogged the lane. Rhion wore the black greatcoat of an SS officer that reached nearly to his ankles, starshine glimmering faintly in the round lenses of his glasses and in the irregular pentangle of crystals on the head of his staff. Leibnitz, still in shirt sleeves, was hugging himself and shivering with cold.
“Papa, for Chrissake put on a jacket...” Sara began, exasperated, and Leibnitz shook his head stubbornly.
“I wear what they give me because I will not go naked like Noah before the eyes of the Lord, but before I put on their damn Todten Kopf uniform I will freeze.”
“What do you mean,” Saltwood asked wearily, “the wrong direction?” He stood up out of the dingy pool of headlight glow, a powerful bulk towering over the smaller Professor. Weariness, hunger, and the exertions of the day were catching up with him. His left arm still hurt damnably, as if the monster head that had ripped his flesh and the fire that had seared it had been real, and the manacle of the sawed-off handcuff chafed painfully at the wristbones. The last thing he needed, he reflected irritably, was another of Rhion’s meaningless quibbles about where they should and shouldn’t go. “It’s the only direction there is, pal, if we want to get to England.”
“But I don’t,” Rhion said. “Where the hell is England, anyway?”
He really IS nuts, Saltwood thought, exhaling a thin trail of cigarette smoke that shimmered white in the icy dark. Not that I had any question about it before... “You want to stay in Germany, maybe? I guarantee you won’t like it.”
The Professor shook his head. Starlight caught the silver bevel of his spectacle edge, the cold double-Sieg-rune on the collar of his coat. He gestured with the staff he held, and the Spiracle’s crystals winked frostily, an all-seeing, faceted eye. “I didn’t take this back from von Rath—I didn’t risk what’s going to happen to me if he catches me this time—to go to work for the people who were dropping those bombs this afternoon.” He nodded back toward the glowing red stain in the sky.
Saltwood began, outraged, “Do you know what the Nazi bombers have been doing to London...?”
“And what would you people do if you had magic?” Rhion asked quietly. “If you could use the powers channeled through the Spiracle? Pulp Berlin, maybe, to convince Hitler to withdraw from the war?”
Saltwood hesitated. Later he supposed he shouldn’t have. But he remembered Spain—that war of freedom against facism