The boy smirked up at her.
She heard the motor come closer, and rubber wheels on cold concrete. Light from the desk lamp passed across the lower part of his face as he turned his head around to look up into her eyes.
“How is your appreciation of fine reflecting telescopes now?”
“All right,” she guessed. “How is your appreciation of dancing shoes?”
Oh, she would have paid money to get that one back. As the man’s face darkened, Susan recalled a word of advice from her cotillion of 1938: One occasionally speaks out of turn, and invariably rues the moment.
No hammer this time. Ralf Koehler simply kicked the phone book away so that she hung in mid-air, listening to the ratcheting sounds of her shoulders, trying to adjust to a whole new geometry.
The kid with the blue eyes made popping noises at her. He grinned. He bugged his eyes out this big, and pressed his lips together as if he were trying to keep himself from screaming in pain.
Something really fatal needed to happen to this kid.
Kriene looked a little awkward. He tsked, shook his head.
“Any other time, we could simply have you shot.” He sounded almost apologetic. “But the time is too close and your associates can undo a lot of hard work. You see? I cannot afford to let my natural sympathy interfere with the demands of destiny.”
“It’s all right,” she said when she could speak. “Moral ambiguity is the opiate of the starving class.”
“Excuse me?” Kriene frowned up at her intently.
“Advice from a friend of a friend.”
“You wouldn’t . . .” Kriene laughed at the very preposterous reach of the idea. “You wouldn’t know a colleague of mine?”
“I don’t think we hang in the same circles.”
The kid snickered at her little joke. “She is funny.”
We share the same sense of humor, she realized. That’s nice.
Kriene leaned forward.
“Ha!” he cried. “You’re the Allied agent we draped about Malmagden’s neck.” He banged his knee. His mouth opened to an aspirated rasp, like a barking corgi. He might have been laughing.
“You were supposed to be arrested by the Gestapo,” he said. “You were supposed to give up Malmagden’s name to them, so that they might shoot him as a traitor.” A disappointed sigh. “You never were, were you.” It was a statement.
“Sorry.”
“It should have worked. Lenz assured me we could use one of you Watermark people to get rid of Malmagden forever . . . Phahhh.” He made a face of distaste. “Lenz.”
This, she realized, was the same Jürgen Kriene that Malmagden had spoken of hanging from a lamppost by his testicles. Susan could see where he might have that effect on people.
“No matter. We have much to talk about, you and I. We know the same people.” Kriene seemed genuinely pleased to make her acquaintance. He ordered Florian to let her down. “We will be friends for a little while, yes?”
Florian did not try to hide his disappointment. He dropped her from the hoist unceremoniously. For a few moments, the release was almost worse than the tension. Her muscles finally relented. Florian unlocked the handcuffs and went back to his desk, twirling them around his finger like he’d no doubt seen Gary Cooper do with his six-guns.
Jürgen Kriene smiled at her indulgently. “Was Malmagden the one who sent you to me now?”
She rubbed her arms until the cramping ebbed a bit, and then tried out a story she’d been working on for the past twenty minutes—the U.S. Navy had sent her. In fact, they were out there in the fog right this minute, making fifteen knots to the point of her last transmission. This transmission would be what she was doing in the observatory as they broke in on her.
Kriene smiled, amazed. “How did such a terrible liar ever qualify for intelligence fieldwork?”
How could she answer? This was a question she had asked herself with ever more urgency for the last few years.
“Herr Malmagden told you something about saving the world?”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Something like that.”
“We play this game, Herr Malmagden and myself. Malmagden denigrates my research before Reichsführer Himmler. I use an American agent to plant the idea that Malmagden is a traitor looking to defect. Herr Malmagden returns the favor—”
Kriene became emotional. “Herr Malmagden returns the favor by sabotaging certain indicia necessary for the summoning of Great Azathoth, leaving myself and twenty-two of the Reich’s finest scientists at the mercy of the Daemon Sultan.” He took a moment to steady himself. He waved his hand across his lap, indicating his useless knees, his wheelchair, his shattered life. “As you see, leaving me ruined.”