"I thought that was you!" she said happily, o fe ring her hand.
"Doing your bit for the fatherland, I see," Fulmar replied.
"Isn't this uniform dreadful?" she asked.
"I didn't recognize you at first," Furmar said.
"When did you go into the SS?"
"March 12, 1942," he said without thinking. That date had been drilled into his memory, as had the particulars of his service since then--until his detail to the staff of the Reichsfuhrer SS--with Waffen-SS units that had been conveniently wiped out in Russia or captured in North Africa.
"You look very nice in your uniform," she said. "And please don't say so do you. "' "All right," he said. "I won't."
"I always wondered what happened to you," Elizabeth said. "I didn't have an address, so I couldn't write."
"The last time I saw you, you slapped my face," he said, and was a little proud of himself. The way to handle this situation was not to stick the baby Fairbairn into her skull and scramble her brains, but to get her mad.
She flushed, but she met his eyes.
"I was young, Eric," she said, "and you had no right to expect from me what you did." When he did not respond, she smiled and cocked her head, a gesture he found very attractive.
"I'm working for your father," she said. "What about that?"
"Working for my father?"
"At the FEG office in Hoescht," she said.
"I'm a secretary." "Oh," he said.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Berlin," he said.
"Oh, good," she said. "There's a two-hour wait for the Berlin train.
We can have a nice visit." He nodded.
She cocked her head again and looked at him intently. And then she took his arm and led him out of the aisle onto the connecting platform between cars.
"What's this?" he asked.
"I don't know how to begin... There's an interesting story going around about you, Eric," she said evenly.
"Is that so?" "My father told my mother," she said. "I overheard them. I didn't hear it all. And when I asked him, he wouldn't tell me."
"Wouldn't tell you what?"
"What I did hear was that a friend of his, a Minister in the Foreign Ministry, had told him that you were seen in Casablanca."
"I was in Morocco, of course," he said. "You remember el Ferruch?"
"In the uniform of an American officer," Elizabeth von Handlemanbitburg said.
She was looking into his eyes now. As he was trying to frame a reply, she said, "Oh, my God, it's true!"
"What I'm supposed to do now," Eric said, almost conversationally, "is kill you." Her face went white, and her tongue came out and licked nervously at her lips.
"And I suppose what I'm supposed to do is scream," she said, very softly.
Then she met his eyes again. "Are you going to kill me?"
"Shit!" Fulmar groaned.
The door to the car started to open.
He quickly put his arms around her. There was a moment's resistance, and then she understood what he was doing. Whoever was passing between cars would see a young officer kissing a young woman.
She raised her face to his.
It was the two border policemen passing between cars with the conductor. "Guten Tag, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer," one of them said. One of the others chuckled.
They remained in an embrace until the three had entered the next car.
Fulmar was aware of two physical sensations, the hilt of the baby Fairbairn under the balls of fingers and the pressure of Elizabeth von Handlemanbitburg's breasts and legs against his body. And then there was a third sensation. Her tongue came out, and for the briefest moment went between his lips and found his.
Then she pushed him away.
"Now they've seen you with me," she said. "Now you can't kill me."
"You should have called for help," he said.
"Why? I knew you weren't going to kill me."
"You seem pretty goddamned sure," he said.
"If you were going to kill me," she said reasonably, "you wouldn't have talked about it first. And then I looked in your eyes."
"Jesus H. Christ!"
"Wasn't it nice to be given a kiss, instead of the other way?"
"You're out of your goddamned mind, you know that?"
"My father told my mother that when the Russians come, life won't be worth living," she said. "I've changed since the last time I saw you. If you're going to die, you might as well take as much of life as you can before that happens."
"He could be shot for saying things like that, " Fulmar said.
"No," she said calmly. "That is now the official position of the Propaganda Ministry." She quoted, ""The German people must come to understand that if the war is lost, Germany as we know it will disappear from the face of the earth. That came straight from Dr. Goebbels."
"The operative words are if' and when, "' he heard himself say.
" If' is not defeatism. When' is." She shrugged.
"Where are you really going?" she asked.
"I can't tell you that," he said.
"I'm not going to turn you in, Eric," she said.
"If those border policemen remember the Sturmbannfuhrer kissing the girl, and if they remember your face, the Gestapo will come after you and question you. And if you knew, you would tell them."
"Are they looking for you now?" she asked.
"Yes, but don't ask why." "Maybe I can help," she said.
"The best thing you can do is go back to your compartment and forget you ever saw me," he said.
"That in itself would be suspicious," she said. "And maybe I can help you.
When they ask for my identification, which says that my father is a Generaloberst, they generally stop right there." He looked at her.
"And besides, if we went to the Bahnhof Hotel in Frankfurt and took a room while you're waiting for the Berln train, there would be less chance of you being asked questions than if you stood around the Bahnhof waiting."
"I'm not going to Berlin," Fulmar blurted. "I'm going to Marburg."
"Not on this train, you're not," she said. "The first stop after Frankfurt is Kassel."
"How do you know that?"
"I go to Marburg all the time," she said. "I know the schedule.
The first train you can catch to Marburg will put you in there at half past three in the morning. Do you want to arrive at half past three in the morning?"
"And the one after that?"
"Arrives in Marburg a little after nine," she said.
"Maybe the thing to do is get a hotel room," he thought aloud.
"Then you could go."
"What have you done," she asked, "changed your mind? Lost interest?" He looked down at her.
She raised her hand and put it on his cheek.
"I told you," she said, "I've changed. I want what I can get now before it's too late." Then she pulled his face down to hers. And she did to him what she would not let him do to her in the backseat of el Ferruch's Delahaye in Paris.
XV [OXE] Haupebahnhof Marburganderlahn, Oermany 0920 Hours 301 January 1943 The train from Frankfurt am Main to Kassel, with stops at Bad Homburg, Bad Nauheim, Giessen, and Marburg, did not run on Saturday.
It was necessary for Fulmar to take the Kassel express, and to change at Giessen.
He absolutely forbade Elizabeth to return to the Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt with him. She was hurt. She was crazy, was what she was.
The way she'd talked, he had naturally decided that she had been fucking all comers, since she was convinced she was going to die.
That had not turned out to be the case. In the Bahnhof hotel, after the first time--which did not turn out to be terrific for either of them--she had come out and admitted that she had tried -it" three times before, because everybody seemed to make so much of it, and those times, too, had been disappointing.
But something happened when they tried it again in the morning.
He did it then more or less because he thought she expected him to, and he imagined it would turn out no better than it had the night before.
But it really turned out to be not only better, but different. He had no explanation why.
It had just happened. It had, as a matter of fact, happened twice.
And it would have happened a third time if he hadn't had to catch the goddamned train.
And she said something else crazy just before he put her on the bus to Hoescht.
"Take care of yourself, Eric," she said.
"You, too," he replied.
"Which lie be dich," she said.
"You're crazy," he said.
"And you, too," she said, still shaking his hand. "Why else?" And then she blew him a kiss and stepped on the bus. He stood there on the curh, looking for her in the window. When he found her, just before the bus pulled away, she blew him another kiss.
He thought about--even mentioned--taking her out with him. She'd laughed at him, said he wasn't very smart. Didn't he know what they did to the families of people who just disappeared?
Let em think you got killed in a bombing raid," he had argued.
"Blown away."
"Have you got a passport for me? Travel authority?" she asked, and made him feel like a damned fool.
She hadn't gotten into that "which lie be dich" crap, however, until the last minute.
By the time he got off the train in Giessen, he'd thought some more about her. Maybe there was something special between them. He had certainly never felt better screwing than the last couple of times.
There had to be an explanation for that. He had done a lot of plain and fancy fucking in his time, and it had never been like that.
He had a couple of really wild, childish thoughts. When this fucking war was over, he would look her up. Maybe he could even get her out before it was over.
Giessen brought him to his senses. The place was in ruins. The moment they opened the doors of the train, he could smell burned wood, and the more pervasive smell of decaying human flesh.
Giessen had been hit and hit hard. He wondered why. As far as he could remember, there were no factories of any importance here, certainly nothing worth all the effort it had taken to bomb the shit out of the place. Could it have been bombed by mistake? He had heard Canidy and Whittaker joking about their astonishment that B-17 pilots with 200 hours total flying experience could find Germany, much less a particular city in Germany.