Deal with the Devil Page 2

  “Progress.” The German nodded once. He ground the butt of his cigarette underfoot without ever showing the fire edge to the valley. “Three days ago, Greis — the pig back there — ”

  “I know who he is.”

  “ — murdered thirty British officers at Guise. He didn’t have facilities to hold them; he didn’t want to spare the troops to guard them. He claimed he had orders and it was in retaliation for the officers he’d lost in combat. So he ordered them shot.”

  “I know.” An admission of knowledge seemed to be the only intelligent thing he’d said all day. He dropped his own cigarette and asked the question that mattered most to him. “Did he make them dig their own graves?”

  “French privates,” the German said, his tone cool but not as cool as it sounded. “The mass grave was multinational. I heard him give the order, I saw the massacre, and I saw the grave filled. Well, the situation hasn’t changed. He’s amassed British officer prisoners, whom he particularly hates because you didn’t flock en masse to the Anglo-Saxon banner Hitler waved. He doesn’t have facilities prepared for you, and he doesn’t want to spare the troops to guard you or move you to the rear. He still claims he’s under orders, although I let him know I couldn’t find any reference to them at headquarters. And nothing else I said made any difference, either.”

  Clarke fought his mulishness. His decency won. “Thank you for trying.”

  The German gave him a puzzled glance, then pulled a penknife from his pocket and sliced through the cord binding Clarke’s wrists. As he folded the blade away, he nodded toward the distant glint of water. “That’s the Aa Canal.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “Just checking. We have orders to stop there.”

  Clarke stared. “Can’t imagine why.”

  “Neither can I.” The German shrugged. “It’s a mistake, of course. If we truly wanted to destroy you, we should keep going all the way to the beach and drive you into the water.” His sideways glance this time was a curious mixture of pride, shame, and defiance. “You and I both know the B.E.F. doesn’t have the firepower left to stop us.”

  Just another German after all. “That’s your opinion and not any sort of fact.”

  The German grinned. In the shadows and gloom beneath the trees, his face lightened as if by magic. They had to be close in age. A vague tremor of unease made Clarke’s fingers tingle; he refused to call it envy. While he had frittered away his — and his wife’s — youth in an all-out assault upon law-court silks, this German had learned how to live. While he had developed a career, this man had developed his character.

  “I expected no less from you,” the German said. “Our orders come from the highest. They say stop at the Aa Canal — so no matter what we think, we’ll stop at the Aa Canal. And that means — ”

  “ — that means,” Clarke interrupted, “anyone down on the beach will be out of range of your artillery.”

  The German nodded. “So long as the brass band reaches the canal before, oh, five o’clock tomorrow morning. That’s about how long it will take us.”

  So there it was. This German major offered life and freedom — for him. Not for Brownell, nor the colonel with the drooping shoulders, nor the weeping subaltern or anonymous lieutenants squatting on the scuffed turf. Clarke tried to harden his heart. He couldn’t.

  He cleared his throat. “Why are you doing this?”

  This time, the German’s sideways stare was compounded of equal parts derision and hilarity. He shook out two more cigarettes, passed one to Clarke, and lit both behind the cover of his turned shoulder. As an afterthought he handed over the remainder of the pack and the matches.

  “Do you remember the cricket match against Cambridge?” he asked.

  Clarke forgot the landscape and even the doomed prisoners. He stared at the German officer and it was as if a spotlight slowly illuminated the man within his memory.

  “Of course,” the German continued, “I couldn’t follow cricket in those days. For that matter, I still can’t. But even I knew we were in deep trouble. We were so far behind we could barely see daylight.”

  The face in Clarke’s memory wasn’t sophisticated or battle-hardened. It was a younger face, uncertain, wide-eyed, softer about the edges, but nevertheless the same. The body was more slender, bulked out by a cheap, rusty-black academical robe, the thinner arms juggling an armload of used poetry textbooks. Even the memory made Clarke sneer. And in a heartbeat he was ashamed of the sneer and of himself.

  “But then the coach sent you in to bat,” the German rambled on, oblivious, “and it was as if the whole field came alive, the spectators, the team, everyone. You strode onto the pitch with your head in the air, the bat in your hand, a swagger in your step, and for one shining moment there was no doubt within the entire of Oxfordshire that you could do it.” He shrugged and flicked ash. “We still lost the match, of course, but I have to admit you looked magnificent just walking onto the field.” No sideways stare this time; the German turned to face him squarely. “Do you recognize me yet?”

  “You’re — ”

  “ — yes, that grubby foreign exchange student, the one who was too poor to buy a sweater for the winter.” He dropped his half-smoked cigarette onto the verge and stepped on it. “I never forgot you, Clarke. Of course, there’s a world of difference between the upper classes laughing, and the lower- and middle-class sources of their amusement.”

  “Look — ”

  “Don’t bother.” The German turned and strode back to his car.

  Clarke thrashed his memory and dredged up a name. “Faust — your name’s Faust.”

  “Really.” Major Faust retrieved his pistol from the dashboard of the staff car and handed it butt-first to Clarke, his left hand hurling the loaded magazine into the deepest grass within the shadows of the forest. “I don’t have anything heavier with me, so that’s the best I can do for you. The evacuating British troops are massing on the beach outside Dunkirk. I suggest you get down there as soon as it’s dark. There should be enough soldiers who haven’t lost their Lee Enfields to make a raiding party and rescue the encampment. Who knows, they might even have some ammunition.”

  Clarke ignored the pistol in his hand and stared at Faust. It was an insane risk, the sort taken by the legendary Dr. Faustus — a practitioner of dark, mysterious metaphysical arts, someone who commanded the sun and the moon, the winds and tides, the forces of Mars, with utter disregard for his own future safety.

  Clarke shuddered.

  Still oblivious, Faust opened the car door and paused, one foot on the running board. “At Guise, Greis waited until a few minutes before midnight before opening fire. But there’s no guarantee he’ll be so patient this time. He thinks I’m taking you to headquarters for interrogation, so they won’t expect you back and they won’t wait. Wear something over your face, and I might get away with this.” He stepped into the staff car. “Good luck, Clarke. My regards to Brownell after you rescue him.”

  “Wait.” Clarke didn’t recognize his own throttled voice. “Why are you doing this?” Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t the best way of asking his question, it wasn’t even the proper question and in his current agitation, he didn’t know how to rephrase it. But Faust was pressing the starter and his moment was over.

  Faust rolled his eyes. “You don’t have time for this. Oh, and if you get a chance, put a bullet through Greis for me, would you?” He shifted gears and the car rolled forward. “Pigs like him give all us Germans a bad name.”

  The staff car disappeared around the next bend, leaving Clarke standing in the middle of the shadowy road. He desperately wanted the answer to his question. He’d never hear it now, and that bothered him most of all.

  He fell to his knees in the long grass, scrabbling for the loaded magazine.

  Chapter One

  late evening, Saturday, 24 August 1940

  over the village of Patchbourne, England

  Something soft and annoying whooshed past his fac
e. Faust brushed at it, but it was already gone and he was too fragging sleepy to care. He dropped his arm to the bed.

  There was no bed.

  There wasn’t anything. His arm was dangling out in space. So was the rest of him. Faust snapped his eyes open. A strong wind pummeled him, tumbled him head over turkey. The ground was a long way down. He was falling and it was real, not some stupid nightmare.

  Panic leapt like a predator through his veins. He twisted, fighting against gravity. An icicle of light from the distant ground stabbed at his eyes, swept past him, and several red flashes popped in quick succession. A rumbling vibrated the air, something sounding like an artillery round exploded nearby, and sharp chemical smoke scoured his nostrils.

  Tight cords wrapped about his body, between his legs, jerking him upright and throwing him higher, dangling him across the light-slashed night sky. The rumbling intensified. His head snapped back. Above him, a parachute canopy blazed white in the spotlight from below. Beyond it loomed a huge dark beast, moving past in impossible slow motion. It towered over him. The parachute danced closer, second by drawn-out second; then it bowed, canted, and slid away, laying Faust on his back as it hauled him aside.

  He gripped the harness shroud lines, chest and belly flinching. It was the bomber, the one he’d been riding in. The belly hatch framed Erhard’s laughing face, lit from below by a spotlight. With one hand, Erhard clutched the rubber coaming, cupping the other about his mouth. He yelled something — something short — which was overwhelmed by the racket and growing distance.

  Maybe the plane was having mechanical problems — but they and the mechanics had tuned the Heinkel’s twin engines all afternoon. No one else was bailing out.

  Erhard had thrown him overboard.

  It didn’t matter how much schnapps he’d slugged nor how drunk he remained. When Faust hit the ground, Erhard was toast.

  The spotlight’s cone slid from the front half of the bomber to the tail fin, the glare flashing across the metal and leaving a dark, mysterious line at the rudder’s hinge. The line and the glare slid across the matte metal, twisting and writhing, finally falling off the back edge. The bomber was turning from the light. It pirouetted in a slow, graceful curtsy like a prancing warhorse and plowed into the side of the neighboring plane. Metal screeched and crumpled. The two bombers hung motionless, pinned to the night sky by the fingers of light from below. Then Erhard’s plane rolled the other one over. Flames spiraled from the mass of cartwheeling metal.

  From between the bombers fell a squirming, thrashing human. Another white canopy blossomed above it. But within moments the parachute silk convulsed in scarlet flames, melted to flaring sparks of gold and orange, and crumpled to nothingness. In a clear, bizarre second, Faust again glimpsed Erhard’s face, no longer laughing but mouth open in a scream not drowned by the clamor as he fell beyond the reach of the spotlights.

  The entwined bombers exploded. Faust twisted, wrapping his elbows about his face, hands clutching the shroud lines. Something sharp and hot punched his right shoulder. Heat flared across his back. But when he twisted back around, the night sky was empty. The droning engines ebbed away and the searchlights vanished one by one. A final, embarrassingly late flak round exploded well behind the departing squadron and black smoke drifted through the remaining searchlight finger.

  The light fastened onto him and his slaloming parachute, tracking his descent. He exhaled with one relieved whoosh. He’d been trained on parachutes before the invasion of Norway, months ago, but this was his first real jump. Okay, it wasn’t so bad. But he couldn’t wait for the ground crews to find him so he could scramble back to Paris, and if he never flew again, it would be too soon.

  His breath caught. German ground-fire had no reason to shoot at German planes.

  Where the heck was he?

  The spotlight vanished, leaving him blind upon his stage. He glanced down just as his feet slammed into something solid. His knees buckled, tumbling him backward into stubbly stalks. The scent of fresh-mown grass was overlaid with the acrid tang of burning metal. Clouds lowered the night sky until he could reach up and grab a handful. Shoot, he didn’t want to deal with Erhard’s mess tonight, no matter where he was. Faust lay on his back and closed his eyes, letting the alcohol fuzz take over again. The klaxon of the air-raid alarm seemed to fade, not to silence but to an incomprehensible distance, like waves creaming over a remote Dover beach. Matthew Arnold wrote that one, about pebbles being drawn back then flung ashore by waves on the Sea of Faith. Ah, love, let us be true to one another...

  But the unpoetical parachute harness tugged at his torso and groin, jerking him awake and dragging him prone across the field. The canopy billowed about. Sharp stubble poked his shoulders and back. He grunted, eyes jolting open.

  There was a quick release snap somewhere. He fumbled with the harness, found something, and pressed it. It clicked and the pressure about his chest released, letting him twist from the harness. Any possibility of carefully gathering the miles of cloth into a manageable bundle was swept away when the rousing breeze yanked the ’chute right out of his hands. Crouched on his knees, he watched the white silk sail away, like some demented specter, toward a distant stand of dark waving trees, and tried to decide if it mattered a whit. Parachutes were reusable, weren’t they? Should he try to chase the thing down? He closed his eyes and rubbed his face. Nope, he was still drunk, worrying about a frigging parachute when he should be worrying about himself.

  A quivering voice blew with the breeze across the dark void surrounding him. “Jake, you sure he came down out here? I thought he was heading nearer town.”

  Faust’s eyes flew open. The wind gusting over his exposed skin, face and hands, was suddenly chill. He shivered and hugged himself. The twisting in the pit of his stomach was more than just alcohol coming back to haunt him. Some deep part of his soul, something as primeval as the night itself, quaked beneath his skin. But his conscious mind hadn’t yet figured out why.

  A second voice spoke, more quietly than the first, and steadier. “Be quiet, you daft bugger.”

  Another gust of cold air splashed across his face, reaching through his skin into his heart and brain and being. Faust heard his breath rasping in the night’s quiet and tried to still it. But the beating of his heart was just as loud and would not be calmed.

  They spoke in English.

  He wanted to be still so his unseen visitors wouldn’t detect his presence, but he had to admit he froze because he was too scared to move. It took long moments before he could convince his body to curl over and duck his head down between his shoulders to hide his face. And no matter what he did, his lungs demanded oxygen and sounded like a bellows working it.

  “Jake, there’s something moving over by the trees.”

  He was beginning to sympathize with poor Jake. The daft bugger wouldn’t shut up.

  “Yeah, I see it. Let’s work our way over there, quietly, now.”

  Faust tensed every muscle he possessed, ready to run or fight for it. But he wasn’t near any trees. His nerves quivered as the wind danced over his skin. It might be a small animal, shaking the branches at the far end of the field — then he remembered how his parachute had billowed about like a live thing and blown away toward those trees. He stuffed his hand into his mouth to stifle a giggle.

  He held himself still, breathing more easily, until the discreet footfalls waned in the night. Then he scrambled up, balanced a moment to make certain he’d stay that way, and staggered in the opposite direction. A hedgerow bordered the field at the foot of a small hill, and a white-painted gate partway along glowed like a beacon. He scuttled toward it. There had to be somewhere he could hide.

  Chapter Two

  the same evening

  near Patchbourne

  The gate emptied onto a rutted dirt lane, barely wide enough for a small tractor or team. Faust hid behind the hedgerow, listening until he was certain the lane was deserted, then he clambered over the gate. He stumbled across t
he ruts, missed his step at the edge, and rolled down a steep bank, flailing and scrabbling at passing bushes, until he fetched up with a grunt against something harder and much more stable than himself.

  Through the pounding of his heart he listened without moving. Water chattered nearby. The freshening breeze gossiped through leaves. But no human voices spoke, in English or any other language. The ground beneath his aching body was hard and knobbly, sharp rocks and pebbles which shifted when he flexed his legs. His racing pulse eased and he lifted his head.

  He’d rolled down a slope too steep to be plowed and fetched up against the scattered scree of a rockslide. Just below his landing site, a lively stream danced in rills down a gentler slope. Bracken and juvenile beeches crowded both banks, imparting a musky, heathery scent to the gusting wind. Overhead, the clouds were lifting; soon, he’d have the moon to guide him.

  Ignoring the growing pain in his right arm, he used the rocks to push himself up, then leaned over the stream. Into its dancing midst he deposited the remains of his dinner, hanging onto the slender trunk of a young beech and retching until his stomach ached. Cripes, how much had he drunk?

  He remembered wine with dinner — in the beachfront café with Erhard, that had been. Then there’d been brandy afterwards, and then schnapps on the flightline, the two of them sitting on folding chairs beneath the bomber’s wing and passing a bottle, maybe two, back and forth, just talking. They’d been there for hours before the Staffel had flown out. What the heck had they found to talk about for so long? If Erhard, too, had been drunk, it could explain what he’d done and how he’d crashed the bomber.

  The mess he’d made smelled like vinegar, bitter and rancid, as it flowed downstream. No wonder his stomach had wanted to be rid of it. He stumbled into the night, beside the stream down this gentler slope, and took inventory.

  He knew he hadn’t imagined what he’d heard. Those two men, Jake and the daft bugger, had spoken English. Their accents had been rough, working class — farmers or laborers, probably — which made it highly unlikely they’d been practicing a foreign language while out scouring the fields for his parachuted self during a wartime bombing mission. And the places in mainland Europe over which said bombing mission might be flown, where the working-class inhabitants might casually converse in the English language, were few to none. The conclusion was inescapable.