The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,99
unguarded chain-link gate where the drive entered this outer perimeter. He said it in German. He had been speaking in German, even to himself, since he’d paddled ashore the night before last in Hamburg.
The villa wall was eight feet high, blocks of the same dreary gray granite from which most of Berlin’s overpoweringly heavy public buildings were made. The wrought-iron gate had recently been backed by sheet steel; on either side of it, cut stumps and a litter of twigs, chips, and rotting berries marked where two beautiful old rowan trees had flourished. Blocked the field of fire from the gate, Tom thought, looking regretfully down at the raw, foot-wide stumps. Damn Nazis.
In a way he was a little surprised actually to be here. The confusion of an impending invasion that had followed Dunkirk had put off his errand; the chaos of German bombs hammering London—invariably pulping those East End neighborhoods whose inhabitants were only trying to make ends meet on two pounds a week, he added to himself—had put it off again. Hillyard had departed for a Commando base in Scotland, taking Tom with him, and though Tom had ultimately spent an energetic summer, he hadn’t really expected to get any closer to the SS’s tame magicians than Boulogne.
He scratched his unshaven jaw, checked his watch, and turned back to survey the line of telephone poles that ran from the villa back to the drive’s junction with the main road. Acid-drip devices were accurate to within ten minutes or so. He was burdened with a heavy tool kit and a massive orthopedic boot that not only made him limp whether he remembered to or not but that provided—along with the patch over his left eye—a visible reason why a man of good health and military age was wearing no uniform more formidable than that of the telephone company. It had taken him at least that long to walk this far.
He rang the bell by the gate. “Telephone company,” he said to the young Storm Trooper who appeared, speaking in the slangy Berlin dialect he’d picked up from old Stegler in the Wobblies. “We had half a dozen complaints this morning; we’re tryin’ to trace a fault in the line. You having trouble?”
“No,” the young man said, regarding the orthopedic boot with unconcealed distaste and starting to shut the gate again.
Tom pulled out two cigarettes and offered one to the sentry, who hesitated, then pushed the heavy gate back. “’Preciate it if you’d check,” Tom said, ignoring as best as he could the derision in the young man’s eye. “We’re short on petrol this month and it’s a bitch of a hike.”
“Do you good,” the guard said coolly, taking a lungful of smoke. “It is better to strengthen feeble muscles than to pamper them.”
Saltwood made himself laugh heartily. “I keep tellin’ myself that.” He grinned, thinking, I hope you draw guard duty tonight, creep.
But the guard, clearly mollified by this gesture of submissiveness, stepped back and opened the gate. Mentally thanking the encyclopedia salesman he’d once ridden the rails with, who’d taught him the value of agreeing with insults, Saltwood limped in, gazing around him incuriously at the house and outbuildings while the young man went into a small wooden gate lodge and picked up the telephone. By the way he slammed it down again Tom knew the acid drip he’d rigged in the main junction box had worked.
The Storm Trooper emerged from the lodge looking at Saltwood as if the crippled telephone repairman had been personally responsible for the nuisance—which was, in fact, the case—and said, “I’ll take you in.”
Saltwood shook his head sympathetically and stubbed his cigarette out against the granite of the gatepost, carefully stowing the butt behind one ear. “Bitched-up Jew wiring, that’s what it is.” He followed the young man across the yard.
From atop the telephone pole while installing the drip, Tom had gotten a fair look at the house already. In a way, he was glad of the summer’s delays—it would be a hell of a lot easier to disappear into Berlin once the job was done than to escape the hue and cry in the wilds of the Prussian woods. He guessed this house at ten rooms exclusive of attics, completely surrounded by the wall. The old coach house and a servants’ cottage had been converted to quarters for half a dozen guards, Deaths-Head SS, not Wehrmacht—not an army project, then. The shrubbery all around the inside of the wall was badly overgrown,