Astronomy(29)

Susan was feeling maybe a little rueful herself. A few minutes ago, she’d been ready to question Malmagden, one kneecap at a time.

But in the banked embers of deferred action, she had begun to doubt. She wondered if she had embarrassed herself. Pointing guns at unarmed prisoners. Swearing, making death threats. One simply didn’t do that sort of thing in Boston. No doubt it was frowned upon in Berlin as well.

She made some excuse about going to the ladies’ room and fled out the door. She found Shrieve leaning over the railing, staring into the courtyard below.

“That’s one chatty Kraut,” he said as she came up behind him.

“He was like that when I met him in Berlin. Mr. Personality.”

Shrieve was a thumb-chewer. She noticed it now. He worried at a cuticle on the edge of his thumbnail with a vacant-eyed obsession.

“You know we’re riding up with him to see this Faulkenberg Reservoir. I’ve got somebody downstairs getting us clearance from Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s office to go through the Russian sector. You going to be all right with that?”

She nodded. “I’m all right with it.” She was looking forward to Malmagden’s escape attempt. She had half a mind to shoot him in the back if the opportunity presented itself.

“I know what you did was hard in there,” Shrieve said. “But we’re close. I can feel it.”

“Christ,” she said. “You know we’re practically working for him.”

“That’s not how I see it.”

“He’s given us nothing he couldn’t bear to give up.”

“He’s given us the store. He’s given us the history of Das Unternehmen.”

“He gave us a list of his personal enemies.”

“Before Malmagden, Das Unternehmen was just a rumor. Now we know it’s real.”

“What’s real? What has he told us? He told us this Jürgen Kriene was a bad sort and needed to be stopped. He hasn’t even told us exactly what they were doing up on Faulkenberg Reservoir.”

This was what Shrieve had been chewing his thumbnail over. She could see the doubt in the back of his eyes.

A young private from the steno pool brushed past her looking for Major Malmagden.

Susan pointed thataway, toward the cell door. The girl smiled and nodded, and then looked toward Shrieve to confirm Susan’s directions.

Susan sighed. She would have given anything to be that little steno-pool warrior—young and snotty and dumb, out to see Europe, trade in a bedroom in her parents’ house for an apartment full of girlfriends. Maybe meet some dark European, ooooh.

She felt a migraine winding up at the base of her skull.

“You think all this stuff about the reservoir project is a ghost story?” Shrieve looked at her. This was not a rhetorical question.

“No,” she said. “I think something’s waiting up there for us. Maybe something important. That would fit with how Malmagden operates—he’s a minelayer. He’ll take us up there to see something spectacular. But he’s planning to come back alone.”

“He’s one man. He’s going to be in handcuffs the whole time. You can hold the Thompson.”

“Well,” she said. “This is serious.”

“I’ve got to get back,” he said. “Bogen will be trading baseball cards with him if I leave them together too long.”

“One thing before you head back.” Susan caught his elbow as he turned away. “That old good cop-bad cop routine, that wasn’t going to work on crafty Major Malmagden, was it? Not unless you had some way to really sell it—some crazy witch with a grudge and a gun in her purse?”

Shrieve didn’t answer right off. But that cheek muscle Susan had found so adorable, that was working like a shock absorber on a bad road.

“Dammit, Charley—”

“I hear you, I hear you.” Quietly, as if he were saying it to himself. “What do you want me to say?”

“Don’t ever use me like that again. You hear me? Not even to save the world.”

He looked away. The harsh prison light hooded his eyes, cast his gaunt features in a distant penumbra.

“Funny thing about being a quiet man,” he said finally. His voice was gasoline on an open wound. “You find people make presumptions about you. They presume that you are nice. They presume that you are polite. They presume you are fair-minded to a fault.”

Susan thought back to their first meeting, in the warehouse off of Münterstrasse. All right, she had assumed a few things.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but all of the nice, polite, fair-minded men we both know are gone. Most of the people they cared about are gone. I’m not going to disappear like everyone else I know, and neither is anyone I care about. That means I don’t apologize for business. No matter how much I regret it.”