The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,139
bottled beer as he could cram into his pockets. He left the late Corporal Deitmarr’s money in a pile on the counter and, as an afterthought, helped himself to a cheap cloth laborer’s cap, which he presented to Rebbe Leibnitz on his return to the car. There was nothing resembling a blanket or jacket in the ranks of tinned food, cheap galoshes, and clothespins, or he would have taken that, too, but the old man greeted the gift of the cap with startled joy, and with thanks and a murmured benediction immediately put it on.
There were, of course, a number of SS uniform caps in the back of the car—Saltwood had needed one, as well as a tie and a belt and various odds and ends to complete his disguise—but he’d guessed the old Jew would rather go bareheaded and disrespectful in the eyes of the Lord than wear one, and no wonder. “I didn’t think you cowboys knew about things like that,” Sara said softly in English as they pulled away from the darkened store and once more into the sandy pine barrens.
“What’s not to know?” Tom shrugged. “Half the agitators in the union were Jewish. We had this Trotskyite Chassidic rabbi who used to come in to play chess with me and argue politics with old Stegler every Saturday as soon as it got dark enough so you couldn’t tell a black thread from a white one. He told me that a man of your people would no more walk around without his head covered than he’d walk around without pants.” And, seeing how she still looked at him, half unbelieving, like men he’d seen when a woman turned out to know what a manifold was, he added with a grin, “You been hanging around with Nazis too long.”
She smiled back slowly. “I guess I have.”
“Chas vesholem.”
Even asleep—if the restless doze in which he drifted could be so termed—Saltwood heard the shock in the old man’s voice and felt him startle through the worn leather of the Packard’s lumpy seats. He came awake at once. Dark pines still flashed past the car’s windows, as they had when he’d given the wheel to Sara and tried to get some rest. The rattle in the engine was worse—Just what we need. A ring job in the middle of Germany. The windows were fogged with the outer cold, save for long smears on the front where Sara had wiped them with her sleeve. It was too dark to see his watch—or, more accurately, the late Corporal Dietmarr’s watch.
“What’s up?”
Leibnitz shook his head. He, too, had clearly been asleep, blinking and startled, like a man waked by an evil dream. “I don’t know.” He lifted his cap enough to smooth his rumpled hair and replaced it, looking around him, disoriented, shaken. “Something—some feel in the air. Can’t you feel?”
Saltwood shook his head but said softly, “Pull over, Sara, and cut the lights.”
She obeyed. They all had far too much respect for instinct to quibble over the delay. Without asking she got out, and Tom behind her. For a moment they stood listening, the air like bitter steel on their faces, their breath a steam of diamonds in the moonlight filtering down through the black pine branches above. The weeds on the banks above the road were stiff with frost like a white salt rime that would show the smallest track. On such a night noise would carry. But Saltwood heard nothing: no rustle of bracken in the woods all around, no crunch of tires on the ill-tended asphalt. He checked his watch by the moonlight—quarter past two.
Uneasily he got back into the car, taking the wheel once more. Irritated as he had once been by the hooded headlights that kept their speed down in the flat stretches, now they made him feel safer.
“Where are we?” he asked quietly.
“About twenty miles from Kegenwald.”
“We pass anyone?”
“Not since that motorcyclist an hour ago... What’s that?” He felt the jerk of her body as she slewed around in the seat. At the same moment light flicked in the corner of his vision and, a second later, gleamed in his rearview mirror. Leibnitz and Sara were both pressed to the side window, their breath misting it again, peering tensely into the dark. “Cut the lights,” Sara ordered hoarsely, and Tom obeyed. With the strength of the moonlight there wasn’t much difference, except where the pines overgrew the road in pockets of inky shadow. “There,” she breathed. “See?”