Heroes by David Hagberg (reading cloud ebooks TXT) 📗

“He’s a highly decorated Nazi. He’s killed a lot of people.”

“I’ve killed a couple.”

Donovan turned back. “It’s different, David,” he snapped.

“Vastly different, and don’t you ever think differently. We’re talking about freedom now, democracy versus a terrible regime that thinks nothing of murdering innocent women and children.

Gassing them to death and then incinerating their bodies in ovens. My God, the difference, staggers the imagination.”

It was Deland’s turn to loot away. Schey was a German. But he was not a killer of women and children. In fact, from what he had read, Schey had killed only in self-defense.

“If you’re not one-hundred-percent sure about this, we will find someone else.”

Deland looked back. “I’ll go. I’ll do the job,” he said. He glanced down at the files. “It says here he has a son. In Knoxville.”

“He abandoned the boy.”

After we killed his son’s mother, Deland thought. But he didn’t say it aloud.

The day was very gray and chilly. Canaris was feeling weak this morning. It was a Thursday, he thought. It had been four days since the corporal had damaged his nose. He had not been questioned again, but the corporal had kept up his relentless pressure. These days his rations had been cut to a bowl of coffee and only one slice of bread and jam, morning and night, although [ he still received a small bowl of thin soup at noon.

He hunched into his overcoat as he sniffed the air, then stepped out into the exercise yard.

His SS guards stepped out of the bunker behind him but remained by the door. One of them lit a cigarette and told some joke. Canaris didn’t hear it.

The Kommandantur Arrest was a long, low stone building. It contained forty cells, and even from the outside the building looked ominous. There were times when he was absolutely cer-i tain that he would die here. But there were other times when his natural optimism soared, and he knew he would survive. It was at those times that he would cock an ear to listen for the sounds of distant gunfire signifying that the Americans would soon be t crashing through the camp gates. I The exercise yard for the bunker was on the south side of the camp. The execution yard and crematoria were on the north. Last night he had been awake, looking out his open window, when he * realized that a soft gray ash was falling from the sky.

For a long time he had watched the falling ash, and then he stuck out his hand to catch some of it. Suddenly he realized what it was. The crematorium was working. The ash was … He had fallen back inside with revulsion and thrown himself on his bunk, his spirits lower than they had been since his arrest.

There was still a slight odor in the air this morning, a disagreeably sweet, burned odor that turned his stomach when he stopped to think about it.

He walked directly away from the building toward the stone fence. He was not allowed to come within five meters of it, but he always went as close as he could, merely to keep his guards on their toes. It had become a game with him, whose meaning he could no longer remember. But he played it anyway, mostly out of habit.

He had looked closely at his face this morning while shaving.

The swelling around his broken nose had already started to go down, but a terrible gray pallor had come to his slack skin. He had lost too much weight. His health would suffer permanently if his conditions did not change soon, he decided, the irony of the thought escaping him at the moment.

His thoughts flitted randomly from his face to his rations, then to the falling ash, but always they dwelled around the same theme: the physical discomforts of his imprisonment. No longer was he so concerned about his defense strategy. Stawitzky was not the ignorant buffoon he had let on to be. He did not yet have enough evidence for a conviction; it was the only reason Canaris was still alive. But he was a skillful Kriminalrat who knew how to use fear to break a man’s will.

Canaris stopped and looked above the fence, across the stark no-man’s land up the hill, to the guard towers fifty meters to the east and thirty meters to the west, and beyond, to the inviting forests of the Oberpfalzer Wald.

Freedom, he thought. The term had never sounded so sweet.

Yet he understood that no one in Germany today was free. They were all prisoners caught between the Americans to the west and the Russians to the east, held here by Hitler’s madness. The end would be horrible. No better than in here.

He also thought about his career, which had spanned so many years and two world wars—from Kaiser Wilhelm to Adolph Hitler. Were they such different entities?

Someone called his name from the bunker, but he pretended he did not hear. He knew damned well what they wanted. He had come too near the fence, and he was close to the limit he was supposed to walk within the exercise yard.

“Herr Admiral,” they called again. They usually called him sailor boy, these days. The rat-faced corporal called him Schweinhund.

And his official prisoner code name was Caesar. (Stawitzky had let that slip out a week ago.) No one called him Hen Admiral any longer.

He turned, finally, out of curiosity as a Wehrmacht officer, a colonel, his boots gleaming, his cap low, hurried across the exercise yard. The SS guards by the door stood at attention now.

“Meiner Admiral,” the officer said, and suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightning, and nearly as painful, Canaris recognized the man.

“Hans Meitner,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“Gott in Himmel,” Meitner said, taking off his hat.

Canaris reached out to touch his old friend, but Meitner stepped back a half of a pace and glanced nervously over his shoulder.

“I am sorry, meiner Admiral, but the camp commandant, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Kogl