“Yes, sir. At seven-forty this evening, we’ll be accompanying the field marshal by plane to the coast of Normandy,” Bormann continued. “Then on to Rotterdam.”
“Rotterdam.” Hitler nodded, putting his box of paints into the safe. “I trust that work is going on schedule? That’s vital.”
“Yes sir. After a day in Rotterdam, we’ll be flying back to the Berghof for a week.”
“The Berghof! Yes, I’d forgotten!” Hitler smiled, dark circles under his eyes. The Berghof, Hitler’s mansion in the Bavarian Alps above the village of Berchtesgaden, had been his only true home since the summer of 1928. It was a place of bracing wind, vistas that would have stunned the sight of Odin, and memories that lay easy on the mind. Except for Geli, of course. He’d met Geli Raubal there, his one true love. Geli, dear Geli with blond hair and laughing eyes. Why did dear Geli burst her heart with a single shot? I loved you, Geli, he thought. Wasn’t that enough? Eva would be waiting for him at the Berghof, and sometimes when the light was just so and Eva’s hair was brushed back, Hitler could squint his eyes and see the face of Geli, his lost love and niece, twenty-three years old when she committed suicide in 1931.
His head hurt. He looked at the calendar, the days of March, on his desk amid the clutter.
“It’s springtime,” Hitler realized.
From beyond the walls, out over the blacked-out city of Berlin, came a howling. The wolf! Hitler thought, his mouth opening in a gasp. No, no ... an air-raid siren.
The noise built and moaned, felt more than heard behind the walls of the Reich Chancellery. In the distance there was the sound of a bomb exploding, a crunching noise like the smashing of a heavy ax against a tree trunk. Then another bomb, two more, a fifth and sixth in rapid succession. “Call someone!” Hitler commanded, cold sweat sparkling on his cheeks.
Martin picked up the desk telephone and dialed a number.
More bombs fell, the noise of destruction swelling and waning. Hitler’s fingers gripped the desk’s edge. The bombs were falling to the south, he believed. Down near Tempelhof airport. Not close enough to fear, but still ...
The crack and boom of distant explosions ceased. Now there was only the wolf howl of the air-raid siren and more answering around the city.
“A nuisance raid,” Martin said after he’d spoken with the chief of Berlin security. “A few craters on the airfield and some row houses on fire. The bombers have gone.”
“Damn the swine!” Hitler stood up, trembling. “Damn them to hell! Where are the Luftwaffe night fighters when we need them? Isn’t anyone awake?” He strode to one of the maps that showed the defensive fortifications, the mine fields and concrete bunkers, on the Normandy coast. “Thank the fates that Rommel is. Churchill and that Jew Roosevelt are going to come to France, sooner or later. They’ll find a warm reception, won’t they?”
Martin agreed that they would.
“And when they send their cannon fodder, they’ll be sitting in London at their polished desks drinking English tea and eating those ... what do they call those biscuit things?”
“Crumpets,” Martin said.
“Drinking tea and eating crumpets!” Hitler steamrolled on. “But we’ll give them something special to chew on, won’t we, Martin?”
“Yes, mein Führer,” Martin said.
Hitler grunted and moved to another map. This one was of more immediate concern; it showed the route of the Slavic wave threatening to burst the banks of Russia and flood their filth into German-occupied Poland and Romania. Small red circles showed pockets of trapped German divisions, each fifteen thousand men, slowly dwindling away.
“I want two more armored divisions right here.” Hitler touched one of the pressure points, where at this moment, hundreds of miles away, German soldiers fought for their lives against the Russian onslaught. “I want them ready to fight within twenty-four hours.”
“Yes, mein Führer.” Thirty thousand men and almost three hundred tanks, Martin thought. Where would they come from? The generals in the west would bellow if they lost any more of their troops, and those in the east were too busy for additional paperwork. Well, the men and tanks would be found. It was the Führer’s will. Period.
“I’m tired,” Hitler said. “I think I can sleep now. Lock up, will you?” He trudged out of the office and down the long hallway outside, a small man in a bathrobe.
Martin was tired, too; it had been a long day. All of them were. Before he turned out the desk lamp, he went around and picked up the farmhouse painting with its dark smear of shadow. He looked long and hard into that darkness. Maybe ... just maybe ... that was a wolf, creeping around the farmhouse’s corner. Yes, Martin could see it now. It was right there, where the Führer had said it was. A portent. Martin put the painting back on its easel. Hitler would probably never touch it again, and who knew where all these pictures would end up?
The wolf was there. The more Martin looked, the clearer it became.
The Führer always saw these portents first, and that of course was part of his magic.
Martin Bormann switched off the lamp, locked the office door, and walked down the long corridor to his apartment. In the bedroom, his wife Gerda slept soundly, a picture of Hitler on the wall above her head.
7
“MAJOR GALLATIN?” the dark-haired copilot said over the muffled roar of the propellers. “Six minutes to the drop zone!”
Michael nodded and stood up, grim-lipped. He hooked his ripcord’s clamp around the brace that ran overhead the length of the transport aircraft’s spine and walked to the closed door. Above it was a dim red warning light, suffusing the plane’s interior with crimson.
It was the twenty-sixth of March, and the time on Michael’s wristwatch was nineteen minutes after two. He closed his mind to the lurch and sway of the C-47 and began to inspect the parachute pack’s straps, making sure they were hooked with equal pressure on either side of his groin. A strap tightening across the testicles almost a thousand feet in the air would not be his idea of a pleasant experience.
He checked the buckles of the chest straps and then the top fold of the pack itself, making sure nothing would foul the lines as the chute billowed out. It was supposed to be a black chute, because there was a half-moon.
“Three minutes, Major,” the polite copilot, a kid from New Jersey, said.
“Thank you.” Michael felt the airplane veer slightly to starboard, the pilot correcting course either to avoid searchlights or an anti-aircraft emplacement. Michael breathed slowly and deeply, watching the red bulb above the doorway. His heart was beating hard, and sweat had dampened the inside of his dark green jumpsuit. He wore a black knit cap and his face was daubed with black and green camouflage paint. He hoped it would wash off easily, because it might draw a bit of unwanted attention on the Avenue des Champs Èlysèes.
Strapped to his body was a short shovel with a folding blade, a knife with a serrated edge, a .45 automatic, and a pack of bullets. Also a little box, zipped into his jacket, that contained two chocolate bars and some salted beef jerky. He figured the heat of his body would have melted the chocolate bars by now.
“One minute.” The red light went out. The New Jersey kid pulled a latch and the C-47’s doorway slid open, letting in a scream of wind. Michael immediately stepped into position, his boot tips on the edge and his arms braced against the doorway’s sides. Below him was a black plain that just as well could have been dense forest or fathomless ocean. “Thirty seconds!” the copilot shouted against the wind and props noise.
Something glinted, far below. Michael’s breath snagged. Another glint: a finger of light, rising from the earth, searching the sky.
“Oh Jeez,” the other man said.
The searchlight angled upward. They’ve heard our engines, Michael realized. Now they’re hunting. The light swung around, and its beam knifed through the dark less than a hundred feet below Michael’s boots. He stood steady, but his gut twisted. There was a burst of red off to the left of the searchlight, f
ollowed by a thunderous boom and a white flash about five or six hundred feet over the C-47. The plane trembled from the shock wave, but stayed on course. A second anti-aircraft shell exploded higher up and more to the right, but the searchlight was coming around again for another sweep. The New Jersey kid, his face pallid, grasped Michael’s shoulder. “Major, we’re screwed!” he shouted. “You want to scrub the drop?”
The aircraft was picking up speed, about to make a violent turn away from the drop zone. Michael knew there was no time for deliberation. “I’m going,” he answered, and he jumped through the doorway with sweat on his face.
He fell into darkness, his heart swelling and his stomach rising up in his abdomen. He clenched his teeth, his arms crossed and gripping his elbows. He heard the high whine of the plane passing on and then there was a bone-wrenching shock as the rip cord pulled and the chute trailed out of its pack with a soft, almost gentle pop.
As the parachute bloomed, Michael Gallatin’s hurtling descent was braked. He felt as if his internal organs, muscles, and bones were in brutal collision, his kneecaps jerking up so high they almost smashed into his chin. Then he got his legs straightened out and he grasped the chute’s guidelines, his heart still racing from the impact with air. He heard another blast from the anti-aircraft cannon, but it was high and to the right and he was in no danger of being shredded by shrapnel. The searchlight veered toward him, stopped, and began to rotate in the other direction again, hunting the intruder. Michael gazed around at the dark earth below, looking for the sign he’d been told to expect. It should be from the east, he remembered. The half-moon was over his left shoulder. He turned slowly under the expanded silk and searched the ground.
There! A green light. A blinker, flashing out a quick tattoo.
Then darkness again.
He guided the chute toward the light and looked up to make sure the lines were all clear.
The parachute was white.
Damn it! he thought. Trust the supply service to screw things up! If a German soldier on the ground saw the white chute, there was going to be hell to pay. The searchlight crew had probably already radioed for a scout car or motorcycle team. Now not only was he in danger, but so was the person with the green blinker. Whoever that might be.
The anti-aircraft cannon spoke again, a knell of distant thunder. But the C-47 was long gone, heading back across the Channel to England. Michael wished the two Americans good luck, and turned his attention to his own difficulties. There was nothing to do at the moment but fall. When he touched ground, he’d be ready for action, but right now he was dangling at the mercy of a white parachute.
Michael looked up, listening to the wind hiss in the silk folds. It stirred a memory. So long ago … a world and a lifetime … so long ago, when he knew innocence.
And suddenly, in a flash of memory, the sky was bright blue and there was not a white parachute over his head, but instead a white silk kite, unreeling from his hand to catch the breeze of Russia.
“Mikhail! Mikhail!” a woman’s voice called, over a field full of yellow flowers.
And Mikhail Gallatinov, all of eight years old and still fully human, smiled with the May sun on his face.
TWO
The White Palace
1
“MIKHAIL!” THE WOMAN CALLED, across time and distance. “Mikhail, where are you?” In another moment Elana Gallatinov saw the kite, and then her green-eyed gaze found her son, standing out at the far edge of the field almost to the deep woods. On this day, the twenty-first of May in the year 1918, the breeze blew from the east, and brought with it a faint smell of gunpowder.
“Come home!” she told the little boy, and watched as he waved and began to reel the kite’s line in. The kite dipped like a white fish. Behind the tall, black-haired woman whose skin was the shade of porcelain stood the Gallatinov manor, a two-storied house of brown Russian stones with a red, sharply angled roof and chimneys. Large sunflowers grew around the house, and there was a gravel driveway that went from the house through the iron gates and connected with the dirt road to the nearest village, Moroc, six miles to the south. The closest town of any size was Minsk, over fifty miles north on bad roads.
Russia was a huge country, and the house of General Fyodor Gallatinov was a mote of dust on the head of a pin. But the fourteen acres of meadow and woods was the Gallatinov world, and had been so since Czar Nicholas II had abdicated his throne on March 2, 1917. And with the Czar’s final words in his signed statement of abdication—“May the Lord God help Russia!”—the motherland had turned into a killer of her children.
But the young Mikhail knew nothing of politics, of Red Russians fighting White Russians and cold-minded men named Lenin and Trotsky. He knew nothing, mercifully, of whole villages razed to the ground by rival factions less than a hundred miles from where he stood reeling in a silken kite; he knew nothing of famine, and women and children twitching as they were hanged from trees, and pistol barrels splattered with brains. He knew his father was a hero in a war, that his mother was beautiful, that his sister sometimes pinched his cheeks and called him a ragamuffin, and that today was the day of a long-anticipated picnic. He got the kite down, wrestling with the wind, and then he clasped it gently in his arms and ran across the field toward his mother.
Elana, though, knew the things that her son did not. She was thirty-seven years old, wearing a long white dress of springtime linen, and gray had begun to creep back from her forehead and at her temples. Lines had etched deeply around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth; not age lines, but the lines of constant inner turmoil. Fyodor had been away at war too long, and gravely wounded at a marshy slaughter hole called Kowel. Gone were the operas and brightly lit festivals of St. Petersburg; gone were the noisy street markets of Moscow; gone were the banquets and royal garden parties of Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra, and left in their shadows were the skeletons of the future.
“I flew it, Mother!” Mikhail shouted when he got closer. “Did you see how high?”
“Oh, that was your kite?” she asked, with feigned surprise. “I thought it was a cloud tied to a string!”
He saw she was teasing him. “It was my kite!” he insisted, and she took his hand and said, “You’d better come down to earth now, my little cloud. We have a picnic to go on.” She squeezed his hand—he was as excited as a candle flame—and led him toward the house. In the driveway the hired man Dimitri had brought the carriage and two horses from the barn, and twelve-year-old Alizia was carrying one of the wicker baskets for their picnic from the front door. The maid and Elana’s sewing companion Sophie brought the other basket out, and helped Alizia pack them into the back of the carriage.
And then Fyodor emerged from the house, carrying a brown blanket rolled up under one arm and the other hand steadying himself on his eagle-crested cane. His right leg, mauled by machine-gun bullets, was stiff and noticeably thinner than the left leg; but he had learned to move with grace, and as he brought the blanket to the rear of the carriage he lifted his gray-bearded face to the sun.
Elana, after all these years, could still feel her heartbeat quicken as she looked at him. He was tall and lean, with the figure of a swordsman, and though he was forty-six years old and his body bore the scars of rapier and bullet wounds, he yet had a youthful quality, a curiosity and power of life that sometimes made her feel ancient. His face, with its long slender nose, square jaw, and deep-set brown eyes, used to be hard and bitter, the face of a man who has crashed into the ceiling of his limitations. Now, though, it had softened with the reality of his situation: he was retired from the service of the motherland, and would live out the rest of his years here, on this plot of land far from the center of tumult. His forced retirement, after the abdication of the czar, had not been an easy pill to swallow, but now that it was dissolved he felt numb, like an amputated relic.
“What a beautiful day,” he said, and watched the wind blowing through the trees. He wore his brown, carefully ironed uniform with its chest
ful of medals and ribbons, and on his head was his black-visored cap, still bearing the seal of Czar Nicholas II.
“I flew the kite!” Mikhail said eagerly to his father. “I got it up almost to the sky!”
“Good for you,” Gallatinov answered, and reached out to Alizia. “My golden angel. Help me inside, will you?”
Elana watched as Alizia helped her father into the carriage while Mikhail stood with his kite in his arms. She touched her son’s shoulder. “Come on, Mikhail. Let’s make sure everything’s packed.”
They put the kite into the back of the carriage, too, and Dimitri closed and latched the trunk’s lid. Then Elana and Mikhail sat across from Fyodor and Alizia in the red velvet interior, and they waved goodbye to Sophie as Dimitri popped the reins and the two chestnut horses began their journey.
Mikhail looked out the oval window as Alizia drew a picture and their mother and father talked about things that he barely remembered: the spring festival in St. Petersburg, the estate where they’d lived when he was born, people whose names were familiar only because he’d heard them before. He watched the gently rolling land give way to forests of towering oaks and evergreens, listened to the creak of the wheels and the crisp jingling of the horses’ traces. The sweet scent of wildflowers drifted into the carriage as they passed a blossoming meadow, and Alizia perked up from her drawing when Mikhail sighted a herd of deer on the edge of the woods. He’d been cooped up in the house from the middle of October until the end of April, patiently doing the schoolwork lessons that Magda, his and Alizia’s tutor, taught him. Now, Mikhail’s senses rioted under the heady onslaught of springtime. Winter’s pewter had been banished from the land, for a time at least, and Mikhail’s world wore fine green robes.
Their May picnic was an annual excursion, a ritual that connected them to their lives in St. Petersburg. This year Dimitri had found a good place for them, on the shore of a lake about an hour’s leisurely drive from the Gallatinov house.