The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,151

part of his mind that still didn’t believe Leibnitz had picked the lock on the door. It had to have been jammed, or not caught in the first place—Jesus, what an idiot he’d been for testing all the window bars six times and not thinking to check whether the lock on the door had really caught! But he was positive he had checked. Anyway, they could have been in Danzig by this time.

Across—what?—thirty feet of open ground and under the wire?

The insanity around here must be contagious. Rebbe Leibnitz certainly seemed to believe he’d received instructions for invisibility through a two-by-three-inch chunk of broken mirror, but Saltwood was still wondering how he’d gotten talked into making a break for it under those circumstances.

Perhaps, he thought, as Sara opened the door to the lightless and mildew-stinking pit of the backstairs, because they had no choice. If they stuck around they were dead meat anyway, and being the only three people in the history of Naziism who actually were shot while trying to escape beat hell out of getting asked questions by the Gestapo. So in the long run it probably didn’t matter.

And just as they reached the end door of the old service wing, a fight broke out on the other side of the Schloss.

The noise was unmistakable—from the Tulsa oil fields to the West Virginia mines, in the migrant camps of California and every dockside bar from New York to San Francisco, it was the same—the way every Storm Trooper, whether von Rath’s black-uniformed goons or the gray-clothed stooges from Kegenwald, dropped whatever they were doing and ran around the corner of the building. God knew what it was about, Saltwood thought—Cigarettes, at a guess, since there’re no women around.

It’s damn convenient, he reflected as the three of them walked rapidly across to the wire and Tom held it up for Sara and her father to slip under, then rolled through the little gully himself. But it ain’t magic.

They crossed the open ground and disappeared into the woods beyond.

“There’s a big farm about three miles this side of Kegenwald where they’ve got a Hillman Minx up on blocks,” Sara panted, striding as rapidly as she could under the added burden of helping her father. “The owner’s one of the local Party bosses. He used to see me when I was—ah—tending bar in town...”

“Kayn aynhoreh,” Leibnitz groaned. “You lay on top of the piano and sang songs, too?”

“Don’t gripe, Papa, it’s how I found you. Anyhow,” she went on hastily, “once they find out we’re gone, they’ll sure as hell guard the camp and may be able to spare a patrol or two in town, but they can’t cover all the farms.”

“A Minx is a trashcan!”

“It’s the newest car in the neighborhood—besides, the Nazi chozzer’s got a tractor, too, we can steal the battery out of, and there’ll be petrol. He wangles the rationing.”

“Let’s hope he wangles oil and grease, as well,” Tom grumbled, wading ahead through a waist-deep pocket of soft autumn bracken. “Minxes eat grease—if we can’t get some we’re gonna be walking to Danzig.”

“Danzig, shmanzig,” Leibnitz muttered, balking as his daughter tried to hurry him over the uneven ground. “If we don’t go back and destroy that Resonator this whole thing is pointless.”

“When we radio for a pickup in Danzig, I’ll ask for an air strike, how’s that?” Saltwood said, more to pacify him than because he had any intention of demanding bombers that would, he suspected, be desperately needed on the southern beaches by morning.

“And what makes you think they’ll be able to find it?” the rabbi demanded, limping heavily, his dark eyes grim in the shadow of his billed cap. “What makes you think they won’t crash on the way, the same way they’re going to crash when they come against the Luftwaffe over the Channel?”

“Oh, hell, Papa, if they’ve got the device out at the Channel they can’t use it to guard the Resonator here, can they?” added Sara.

“You don’t understand! The Resonator—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Saltwood snapped, feeling like he was in an argument with a six-year-old about where the Lone Ranger got his silver bullets from. “Let’s take first things first.”

“The car,” Sara said.

“No—food.”

“Destroying the Resonator should be the first thing.”

Saltwood sighed. It was going to be a long, long way to Tipperary.

It had been a number of years since Saltwood had had occasion to live entirely off the countryside. In Spain he and his mates had usually been able to scrounge a