The Cruelty, page 20
Another of his confident laughs. “With what? I’m the one with the gun, and even if you had one, there’s two centimeters of steel between me and you. Besides, you’re not a killer, Mädchen. You’ve got tits but no balls.”
I think of the crates of Brens. Can I even get the crates open? Do they come with bullets, or are they sold separately, like batteries? Not that it matters because I have something else in mind anyway.
“Very solidly built, this cell of yours,” I say. “So if I plug up this pipe, how long do you think your oxygen will last?”
He’s quiet for a moment, absorbing the prospect of suffocating, calculating the cell’s volume, his rate of breathing, dividing it all by the number of hours. “At least a day or two,” he says finally.
“See, I was thinking a few hours, but then again I’m just a Mädchen with tits and math is so very hard for us,” I say. “Which is why I thought—let’s add fire to the mix. Old building, oily old timbers, lots of shit that can burn. Mind passing me your cigarette lighter through the vent?”
“My friends will be here any minute.”
“Your friends love you enough to save you from a burning building, Paulus?” I pick up his jacket and start rifling through it, removing a wallet and a nasty-looking folding knife, both of which go in my pocket. Then I find a pack of gum, car keys, and finally exactly what I was looking for. “Never mind about the lighter. I found matches.”
I grab a piece of paper from the floor, a shipping manifest, and twist it into a torch. “Auf wiedersehen, Paulus,” I say, then light the end and stuff the torch into the pipe.
A muffled scream, terrible and high-pitched, comes out through the pipe. I remove the torch and stamp it out on the floor. “What did you say?”
“It wasn’t true,” Paulus shouts. “The story about killing him. He’s alive. Or he might be.”
I freeze in place. A stretched and contorted fool’s grin breaks across my face, and I rest my forehead against the wall of the cell. But then, of course that’s what he would say. What choice does he have now? I make my voice calm. “What did you do with him?”
“We traded him,” he says instantly. “For some guns, other things.”
I look at the crates. “What kind of guns? What kind of other things?”
Silence for a moment, then, “Why do you ask this?”
“Paulus, answer me or I’ll burn you alive.”
“Brens. And an explosive called Semtex.”
And there it is. The note. The pistol. Christian’s words—some shit for some Czech. All of it makes sense now. “Thank you, Paulus.”
“Excuse me?” he says. “I cannot hear you.”
I stand on my tiptoes and repeat what I just said closer to the vent.
“Again, please? I’m having trouble hearing you. Speak directly into the pipe if you would.”
As I move in front of the vent, an explosion of heat and the roar of ripping air rushes past my left cheek. I topple backward off the chair and land hard on my back. The reek of cordite and sulfur from the gunpowder singes my nostrils.
I raise a trembling hand to my face and find that the bullet didn’t touch me. He missed blowing my brains out by millimeters. I pull myself to my feet and take up Paulus’s jacket again.
A trickle of smoke like from the burning tip of a cigarette is still curling from the end of the pipe as I climb back onto the chair. He’s swearing at me in German, screaming Fotze this, Schlampe that. He’s probably deaf now from firing the gun in such a confined space, so I don’t bother saying good-bye as I stuff the jacket into the vent as tightly as I can.
* * *
The glass boxes of the Hauptbahnhof glow from within, suggesting less a train station than the X-ray of one. It’s transparent except for a steel grid skeleton. All the rest is clear, and I can see the people circulating through it like blood cells.
I am calm as I enter, walking only as fast as the other Berliners—observe, Polizei, how very ordinary and un-murderer-like I am. Inside, it’s the sort of calm anarchy that must be unique to Germany, everyone in a polite, sober rush. I mimic the others as closely as I can: moving quickly but not in haste, not smiling but not glowering, either.
An orderly queue for the ticket counter: a Muslim woman with a little boy ahead of me, a college kid with bad acne behind me. Two cops with submachine guns under their arms walk by slowly, eyes on faces. I try not to look away, thinking it will look suspicious if I do, but in the end, I can’t help it.
Eighty euros gets me a one-way ticket on the next train to Prague, leaving in twenty minutes from track 14. Once the train leaves, all I have to do is keep to myself for about four hours until we cross the Czech border and I’ll be safe, or at least safer than I am here.
But that’s still twenty minutes away. And tonight the Hauptbahnhof is Cop Land. They’re everywhere. Mean-looking guys in dark blue jumpsuits with machine guns and dogs, as well as smart-looking guys in suits with badges around their necks. I doubt the American teenager wanted for questioning in a murder is putting the city on lockdown, but I have to assume they’ve heard my name, and it’s a good bet they’ve seen my picture.
The bathroom stall reeks, but at least it’s out of anyone’s sight. I lean against the door and go through Paulus’s wallet. There’s a condom, an ID card, and a sheaf of almost a thousand euros.
I know I’m going to regret leaving Paulus alive. Yael would have had me kill him, no question. She would have had me burn the warehouse down around him and not give it a second thought. And I wanted to. As badly as I’ve ever wanted anything. I was even going to do it. But Paulus was right about me at least in that sense: I’m no killer. Not because I can’t, not because the thing inside me won’t let me, but because it’s the one barrier I haven’t yet vaulted over on my way to the abyss. I will preserve that little corner of my seventeen-year-old self, that narrow slice of Gwendolyn Bloom, for as long as I’m able.
After fifteen minutes, I leave the stall and head toward track 14. Everything I took from Paulus’s jacket except the cash and the folding knife lands in a trash can on the way.
The cops are out in force in the bowels of the station, too, measuring up everyone on the platform, letting their dogs sniff around the luggage. Is it possible they have my scent?
The whoosh of the train approaches like a descending angel, and I hang back a little until the angel issues an electronic chime and the doors slide open. I step through the doors two seconds before they close. There’s a hiss of brakes, another chime, and a muffled announcement. Then we start moving.
I find an empty second-class compartment and drop into one of the window seats. Outside the platform is streaking by, cops heading for the stairs, a few latecomers throwing up their arms in fury for being latecomers.
There’s no one else in the compartment, but I raise my hand to hide my smile as I lean back and put my boots up on the seat across from me. The platform becomes a dark tunnel, which becomes a weedy urban neighborhood, which becomes the suburbs, which becomes the countryside.
I’ve escaped.
PRAGUE
Eighteen
I sleep a little, the dense, frosting-covered sleep of the victorious. There was a ticket check a few minutes after we left the station in Berlin, but no one’s bothered me since. And so, after victory comes the reward. In this case, a dream. It’s one of those dreams you know is a dream from the very first, and so you shush the voice that says none of it is real in the hope that the dream will go on and on and on.
I am on a train just like this train, riding through countryside just like this countryside. The announcements come over a staticky loudspeaker: Queensboro Plaza, Thirty-Ninth Avenue, Thirty-Sixth Avenue. The N train as it jostles and wobbles and rockets through a version of Queens replaced by rural Germany. At the Broadway and Thirty-First Street stop I am joined in my little compartment by Terrance.
“Is this seat taken?” he says, indicating the one next to me. He’s wearing the pressed khakis and turtleneck sweater from the day I saw him in the record shop. I open my mouth to speak, to tell him it’s me, Gwendolyn, but no words come out.
He doesn’t seem to recognize me and at first I’m alarmed, but then I understand. How could he? I’m no longer the same girl he knew in New York. Just as my voice is about to come back, he puts on a pair of headphones. But because it’s a dream, I hear the music, too. It’s a slow, sad, lovely piece by Miles Davis. Just trumpet and a scratchy drum at first, then a polite, unobtrusive piano, then a saxophone starts in.
Then we’re not on the train anymore, but behind the steamy windows of that bar at the Waldorf Astoria, the one I’ve only ever seen from the sidewalk. The saxophone hands off the melody to the trumpet and picks up the harmony, like a conversation between the two: warm, civilized, the saxophone nodding to the trumpet, I understand, I understand.
We are sitting in a tufted banquette, alone amid a crowd of rich people. It’s late. I’m tired. I lean into him. He smells of cologne and normalcy.
A waiter approaches—bow tie, white shirt, vest. “Dresden,” the waiter says, and I wake up.
We’re pulling into the Dresden station, and a few people shuffle off and on. Newcomers scan across each compartment, looking for someone quiet or chatty or nice or worth hitting on. I scowl and spread out, trying to look as hostile and unappealing as possible, and mostly it works. A thin guy with brown hair pulled into a greasy ponytail pauses in the doorway, studying my face before moving on. He seems to be looking for someone specific, and I’m not her.
The train chuffs and begins moving again, the homes and graffiti-covered buildings of Dresden’s bad part of town slipping by. I heard it had been a gorgeous place before World War II—like Florence, Italy, except in Germany. Beautiful, medieval, irreplaceable. But a few months before the war ended, the Yanks and Brits firebombed the whole thing, burned it to the ground, boiling tens of thousands of soldiers and workers and mothers and children alive in their own skins. I read about it once in a book by Kurt Vonnegut.
I pull out my phone and send a text to Terrance: On a train and fell asleep. Had a dream about you.
A reply comes back exactly twenty-seven seconds later. O rly? What about?
Miles Davis was playing, I write back. We were at Waldorf. The bar.
A longer wait for a reply this time. It’s afternoon in New York. I picture him sitting in class, thumbing his response under the desk. I think abt u a lot.
I smile, blink a few times. I think abt u too.
Anything u need. Im here.
Strangely, I believe it. It’s an absolute in my mind, an axiom, that though I hardly know the guy, he means what he says. Then, as if reading my thoughts, a follow-up:
I can come and b with u. Help u. I’ll get on a plane. B there tomorrow.
Even though I’m alone in the compartment, I spread my hand across my face so no one can see the expression on it, which is mine and mine alone, torture and gratitude all at once.
Thank u. Maybe soon. Not now.
The truth is, I want him here desperately, but I know better. I know that what’s coming next will be infinitely harder than what’s come before and a soft Upper East Side kid won’t last a second. The help he could provide—his skills, his resources, his kindness—would all be squandered here.
I start to type something back, but it’s too long and too sincere. It’s the kind of thing that should only be said face-to-face. So I delete it. Damn my luck, having to go off to war when all I want to do is run away with that beautiful boy and live off wild berries and love.
* * *
The train moves past the outskirts of Dresden, picking up speed, the buildings becoming a blur. Close to the border now. We’ll be in Prague in an hour. The conductor comes through again, and I can hear the clicking of his ticket puncher as he works his way through the new passengers who just got on.
I grab my backpack and head to the restroom, where I wash my face, cleaning off the dried Berlin sweat.
A knock on the bathroom door: polite, inquiring.
“Einen Moment,” I say.
Another knock, more insistent.
“Einen Moment!”
And one more knock, just to piss me off.
I yank the door open to find the guy with the ponytail who got on at Dresden. There’s maybe three or four days’ worth of stubble on his face and a small pistol in his hand.
“Step back,” he says in English.
I try to slam the door shut, but he shoulders it open again.
“Get the fuck against the wall,” he seethes, one hand gripping me by my jacket lapel, the other leveling the pistol at my face. He squeezes himself into the tiny bathroom and kicks the door closed behind him.
The man’s English isn’t native, and his accent isn’t German. Still, I have to assume this is a gift from Paulus, which means Paulus has somehow gotten free. It wasn’t all that hard to figure out where I’d be headed, so one phone call later a friend meets the train in Dresden. I should have burned the fucker alive.
“Here’s what will happen,” the guy says. “We will soon cross the border into Czech. At the first stop, you and I will get off the train. We will do this quietly, and without making trouble. Clear?” His left hand paws over my body and through each pocket in a quick frisk for weapons. The knife I took from Paulus—where is it? The backpack. Sitting next to the sink.
The lights above the mirror flicker with the motion of the train, which is slowing down. I feel myself tilting toward the back of the car and suppose we’re climbing a hill. My new friend with the gun shifts his weight to brace himself.
“How much is Paulus paying you?” I ask.
“What?”
“How much is Paulus paying you? Maybe I can top it.”
“Who’s Paulus?”
I make a calm assessment of the situation and try to think of what Yael would advise. As I was so many times in training, I seem to be in a position of absolute disadvantage. He has a gun; I have nothing.
I eye my backpack and nod in its direction. “Do you mind if I get something out of there?”
“No.”
“No you don’t mind, or no I can’t get something out of there?”
His eyes narrow with confusion. “No—you cannot.”
“I need a tampon,” I say in English, then with the German pronunciation, “Tahm-pohn.”
He gets the gist of it and grimaces. “You wait.”
“Not the way it works. I need it quick. Right now. Otherwise it’s going to be very gross for both of us.”
He hoists the backpack and starts rifling through it.
“Make sure it’s not one of the used ones.”
He blinks at me in confusion, shuffling through whatever notecards he has in his mind on the topic of women and tampons. Then he shoves the backpack at me and brings the muzzle of the gun close to my face. “You get it,” he says. “But do not try anything.”
I take up the backpack—heavy with clothes, toiletries, everything I own—and give him a submissive, reassuring smile. We never break eye contact, my new friend and I, as I dig through it and find what I’m looking for, Paulus’s knife. “Thanks,” I say.
As he starts reaching for the bag, I thrust it hard at his face. His gun hand swings toward me, but I grab the pistol and twist it away, snapping his trigger finger all the way back. The shout of pain is nearly deafening.
Somehow he finds space to swing his left fist, and it lands on the side of my head as I reach for the door. The pistol tumbles from my hand and into the space beside the toilet. I lash out with the knife, but he dodges it easily and sends his knee into my stomach.
I get the door open, snatch my backpack, and stumble into the train’s corridor, but he’s right there, attached like a shadow. I slash at him with the knife again, but he dodges it and grabs me from behind, circling an arm around my neck while his other hand, the one with the broken trigger finger, takes hold of my right wrist. He twists my hand so that the knife is pointing at my chest, and he begins the slow work of bringing the blade closer and closer. I resist him the whole way, but with his arm still tight around my neck, my oxygen is dwindling.
The train rattles and screeches around a curve. Outside, I see lights from a few houses blur past. We’re picking up speed again as we head out onto what I presume is a straightaway.
The knife is just a few centimeters from my chest now. My oxygen is gone, and so is my strength. With everything I have left, I fire my left elbow back into his side where his kidney is and bring the heel of my boot onto his toes. He flinches, and for just a quarter of a second, releases the pressure on my hand and neck long enough for me to break free. I pivot around and slam the sole of my boot into his stomach. The air rushes from his lungs as his body closes up around itself.
I dash along the train’s corridor toward the front of the car and pull desperately on the lever of the door, but it’s stuck or I’m too panicked to figure out how to open it. I glance behind me and see my friend moving toward me. He’s retrieved the pistol and is aiming it at me in his outstretched left hand.
“Drop the knife,” he says.
I look down at the useless knife in my hand, and hear Yael’s words from my training: run from the knife, rush toward a gun.
On the wall next to me is a metal hatch with EMERGENCY BRAKE written on it in Czech, German, and English. I open the hatch, grip the red handle, and pull as hard as I can.
The power and speed of it shocks me. The air is filled with a terrible squeal of steel biting into steel as the wheels lock up on the tracks, and everything seems to bend forward. I’m pressed into the car’s door and see the gunman careening toward me at the same speed the train was going a moment before.
He slams into me with the force of a truck, and my knife plunges deep into his chest. Then the gunman’s body slips to the floor, his last emotion, utter surprise, painted on his face. Through the windows in the doorway between cars, I see a pair of what I assume are Czech border cops rushing toward me.
I close the slippery folding blade, slide it into my pocket, and pull the train doors open. The cool air of the Czech night hits my face and invites me into the darkness.
I think of the crates of Brens. Can I even get the crates open? Do they come with bullets, or are they sold separately, like batteries? Not that it matters because I have something else in mind anyway.
“Very solidly built, this cell of yours,” I say. “So if I plug up this pipe, how long do you think your oxygen will last?”
He’s quiet for a moment, absorbing the prospect of suffocating, calculating the cell’s volume, his rate of breathing, dividing it all by the number of hours. “At least a day or two,” he says finally.
“See, I was thinking a few hours, but then again I’m just a Mädchen with tits and math is so very hard for us,” I say. “Which is why I thought—let’s add fire to the mix. Old building, oily old timbers, lots of shit that can burn. Mind passing me your cigarette lighter through the vent?”
“My friends will be here any minute.”
“Your friends love you enough to save you from a burning building, Paulus?” I pick up his jacket and start rifling through it, removing a wallet and a nasty-looking folding knife, both of which go in my pocket. Then I find a pack of gum, car keys, and finally exactly what I was looking for. “Never mind about the lighter. I found matches.”
I grab a piece of paper from the floor, a shipping manifest, and twist it into a torch. “Auf wiedersehen, Paulus,” I say, then light the end and stuff the torch into the pipe.
A muffled scream, terrible and high-pitched, comes out through the pipe. I remove the torch and stamp it out on the floor. “What did you say?”
“It wasn’t true,” Paulus shouts. “The story about killing him. He’s alive. Or he might be.”
I freeze in place. A stretched and contorted fool’s grin breaks across my face, and I rest my forehead against the wall of the cell. But then, of course that’s what he would say. What choice does he have now? I make my voice calm. “What did you do with him?”
“We traded him,” he says instantly. “For some guns, other things.”
I look at the crates. “What kind of guns? What kind of other things?”
Silence for a moment, then, “Why do you ask this?”
“Paulus, answer me or I’ll burn you alive.”
“Brens. And an explosive called Semtex.”
And there it is. The note. The pistol. Christian’s words—some shit for some Czech. All of it makes sense now. “Thank you, Paulus.”
“Excuse me?” he says. “I cannot hear you.”
I stand on my tiptoes and repeat what I just said closer to the vent.
“Again, please? I’m having trouble hearing you. Speak directly into the pipe if you would.”
As I move in front of the vent, an explosion of heat and the roar of ripping air rushes past my left cheek. I topple backward off the chair and land hard on my back. The reek of cordite and sulfur from the gunpowder singes my nostrils.
I raise a trembling hand to my face and find that the bullet didn’t touch me. He missed blowing my brains out by millimeters. I pull myself to my feet and take up Paulus’s jacket again.
A trickle of smoke like from the burning tip of a cigarette is still curling from the end of the pipe as I climb back onto the chair. He’s swearing at me in German, screaming Fotze this, Schlampe that. He’s probably deaf now from firing the gun in such a confined space, so I don’t bother saying good-bye as I stuff the jacket into the vent as tightly as I can.
* * *
The glass boxes of the Hauptbahnhof glow from within, suggesting less a train station than the X-ray of one. It’s transparent except for a steel grid skeleton. All the rest is clear, and I can see the people circulating through it like blood cells.
I am calm as I enter, walking only as fast as the other Berliners—observe, Polizei, how very ordinary and un-murderer-like I am. Inside, it’s the sort of calm anarchy that must be unique to Germany, everyone in a polite, sober rush. I mimic the others as closely as I can: moving quickly but not in haste, not smiling but not glowering, either.
An orderly queue for the ticket counter: a Muslim woman with a little boy ahead of me, a college kid with bad acne behind me. Two cops with submachine guns under their arms walk by slowly, eyes on faces. I try not to look away, thinking it will look suspicious if I do, but in the end, I can’t help it.
Eighty euros gets me a one-way ticket on the next train to Prague, leaving in twenty minutes from track 14. Once the train leaves, all I have to do is keep to myself for about four hours until we cross the Czech border and I’ll be safe, or at least safer than I am here.
But that’s still twenty minutes away. And tonight the Hauptbahnhof is Cop Land. They’re everywhere. Mean-looking guys in dark blue jumpsuits with machine guns and dogs, as well as smart-looking guys in suits with badges around their necks. I doubt the American teenager wanted for questioning in a murder is putting the city on lockdown, but I have to assume they’ve heard my name, and it’s a good bet they’ve seen my picture.
The bathroom stall reeks, but at least it’s out of anyone’s sight. I lean against the door and go through Paulus’s wallet. There’s a condom, an ID card, and a sheaf of almost a thousand euros.
I know I’m going to regret leaving Paulus alive. Yael would have had me kill him, no question. She would have had me burn the warehouse down around him and not give it a second thought. And I wanted to. As badly as I’ve ever wanted anything. I was even going to do it. But Paulus was right about me at least in that sense: I’m no killer. Not because I can’t, not because the thing inside me won’t let me, but because it’s the one barrier I haven’t yet vaulted over on my way to the abyss. I will preserve that little corner of my seventeen-year-old self, that narrow slice of Gwendolyn Bloom, for as long as I’m able.
After fifteen minutes, I leave the stall and head toward track 14. Everything I took from Paulus’s jacket except the cash and the folding knife lands in a trash can on the way.
The cops are out in force in the bowels of the station, too, measuring up everyone on the platform, letting their dogs sniff around the luggage. Is it possible they have my scent?
The whoosh of the train approaches like a descending angel, and I hang back a little until the angel issues an electronic chime and the doors slide open. I step through the doors two seconds before they close. There’s a hiss of brakes, another chime, and a muffled announcement. Then we start moving.
I find an empty second-class compartment and drop into one of the window seats. Outside the platform is streaking by, cops heading for the stairs, a few latecomers throwing up their arms in fury for being latecomers.
There’s no one else in the compartment, but I raise my hand to hide my smile as I lean back and put my boots up on the seat across from me. The platform becomes a dark tunnel, which becomes a weedy urban neighborhood, which becomes the suburbs, which becomes the countryside.
I’ve escaped.
PRAGUE
Eighteen
I sleep a little, the dense, frosting-covered sleep of the victorious. There was a ticket check a few minutes after we left the station in Berlin, but no one’s bothered me since. And so, after victory comes the reward. In this case, a dream. It’s one of those dreams you know is a dream from the very first, and so you shush the voice that says none of it is real in the hope that the dream will go on and on and on.
I am on a train just like this train, riding through countryside just like this countryside. The announcements come over a staticky loudspeaker: Queensboro Plaza, Thirty-Ninth Avenue, Thirty-Sixth Avenue. The N train as it jostles and wobbles and rockets through a version of Queens replaced by rural Germany. At the Broadway and Thirty-First Street stop I am joined in my little compartment by Terrance.
“Is this seat taken?” he says, indicating the one next to me. He’s wearing the pressed khakis and turtleneck sweater from the day I saw him in the record shop. I open my mouth to speak, to tell him it’s me, Gwendolyn, but no words come out.
He doesn’t seem to recognize me and at first I’m alarmed, but then I understand. How could he? I’m no longer the same girl he knew in New York. Just as my voice is about to come back, he puts on a pair of headphones. But because it’s a dream, I hear the music, too. It’s a slow, sad, lovely piece by Miles Davis. Just trumpet and a scratchy drum at first, then a polite, unobtrusive piano, then a saxophone starts in.
Then we’re not on the train anymore, but behind the steamy windows of that bar at the Waldorf Astoria, the one I’ve only ever seen from the sidewalk. The saxophone hands off the melody to the trumpet and picks up the harmony, like a conversation between the two: warm, civilized, the saxophone nodding to the trumpet, I understand, I understand.
We are sitting in a tufted banquette, alone amid a crowd of rich people. It’s late. I’m tired. I lean into him. He smells of cologne and normalcy.
A waiter approaches—bow tie, white shirt, vest. “Dresden,” the waiter says, and I wake up.
We’re pulling into the Dresden station, and a few people shuffle off and on. Newcomers scan across each compartment, looking for someone quiet or chatty or nice or worth hitting on. I scowl and spread out, trying to look as hostile and unappealing as possible, and mostly it works. A thin guy with brown hair pulled into a greasy ponytail pauses in the doorway, studying my face before moving on. He seems to be looking for someone specific, and I’m not her.
The train chuffs and begins moving again, the homes and graffiti-covered buildings of Dresden’s bad part of town slipping by. I heard it had been a gorgeous place before World War II—like Florence, Italy, except in Germany. Beautiful, medieval, irreplaceable. But a few months before the war ended, the Yanks and Brits firebombed the whole thing, burned it to the ground, boiling tens of thousands of soldiers and workers and mothers and children alive in their own skins. I read about it once in a book by Kurt Vonnegut.
I pull out my phone and send a text to Terrance: On a train and fell asleep. Had a dream about you.
A reply comes back exactly twenty-seven seconds later. O rly? What about?
Miles Davis was playing, I write back. We were at Waldorf. The bar.
A longer wait for a reply this time. It’s afternoon in New York. I picture him sitting in class, thumbing his response under the desk. I think abt u a lot.
I smile, blink a few times. I think abt u too.
Anything u need. Im here.
Strangely, I believe it. It’s an absolute in my mind, an axiom, that though I hardly know the guy, he means what he says. Then, as if reading my thoughts, a follow-up:
I can come and b with u. Help u. I’ll get on a plane. B there tomorrow.
Even though I’m alone in the compartment, I spread my hand across my face so no one can see the expression on it, which is mine and mine alone, torture and gratitude all at once.
Thank u. Maybe soon. Not now.
The truth is, I want him here desperately, but I know better. I know that what’s coming next will be infinitely harder than what’s come before and a soft Upper East Side kid won’t last a second. The help he could provide—his skills, his resources, his kindness—would all be squandered here.
I start to type something back, but it’s too long and too sincere. It’s the kind of thing that should only be said face-to-face. So I delete it. Damn my luck, having to go off to war when all I want to do is run away with that beautiful boy and live off wild berries and love.
* * *
The train moves past the outskirts of Dresden, picking up speed, the buildings becoming a blur. Close to the border now. We’ll be in Prague in an hour. The conductor comes through again, and I can hear the clicking of his ticket puncher as he works his way through the new passengers who just got on.
I grab my backpack and head to the restroom, where I wash my face, cleaning off the dried Berlin sweat.
A knock on the bathroom door: polite, inquiring.
“Einen Moment,” I say.
Another knock, more insistent.
“Einen Moment!”
And one more knock, just to piss me off.
I yank the door open to find the guy with the ponytail who got on at Dresden. There’s maybe three or four days’ worth of stubble on his face and a small pistol in his hand.
“Step back,” he says in English.
I try to slam the door shut, but he shoulders it open again.
“Get the fuck against the wall,” he seethes, one hand gripping me by my jacket lapel, the other leveling the pistol at my face. He squeezes himself into the tiny bathroom and kicks the door closed behind him.
The man’s English isn’t native, and his accent isn’t German. Still, I have to assume this is a gift from Paulus, which means Paulus has somehow gotten free. It wasn’t all that hard to figure out where I’d be headed, so one phone call later a friend meets the train in Dresden. I should have burned the fucker alive.
“Here’s what will happen,” the guy says. “We will soon cross the border into Czech. At the first stop, you and I will get off the train. We will do this quietly, and without making trouble. Clear?” His left hand paws over my body and through each pocket in a quick frisk for weapons. The knife I took from Paulus—where is it? The backpack. Sitting next to the sink.
The lights above the mirror flicker with the motion of the train, which is slowing down. I feel myself tilting toward the back of the car and suppose we’re climbing a hill. My new friend with the gun shifts his weight to brace himself.
“How much is Paulus paying you?” I ask.
“What?”
“How much is Paulus paying you? Maybe I can top it.”
“Who’s Paulus?”
I make a calm assessment of the situation and try to think of what Yael would advise. As I was so many times in training, I seem to be in a position of absolute disadvantage. He has a gun; I have nothing.
I eye my backpack and nod in its direction. “Do you mind if I get something out of there?”
“No.”
“No you don’t mind, or no I can’t get something out of there?”
His eyes narrow with confusion. “No—you cannot.”
“I need a tampon,” I say in English, then with the German pronunciation, “Tahm-pohn.”
He gets the gist of it and grimaces. “You wait.”
“Not the way it works. I need it quick. Right now. Otherwise it’s going to be very gross for both of us.”
He hoists the backpack and starts rifling through it.
“Make sure it’s not one of the used ones.”
He blinks at me in confusion, shuffling through whatever notecards he has in his mind on the topic of women and tampons. Then he shoves the backpack at me and brings the muzzle of the gun close to my face. “You get it,” he says. “But do not try anything.”
I take up the backpack—heavy with clothes, toiletries, everything I own—and give him a submissive, reassuring smile. We never break eye contact, my new friend and I, as I dig through it and find what I’m looking for, Paulus’s knife. “Thanks,” I say.
As he starts reaching for the bag, I thrust it hard at his face. His gun hand swings toward me, but I grab the pistol and twist it away, snapping his trigger finger all the way back. The shout of pain is nearly deafening.
Somehow he finds space to swing his left fist, and it lands on the side of my head as I reach for the door. The pistol tumbles from my hand and into the space beside the toilet. I lash out with the knife, but he dodges it easily and sends his knee into my stomach.
I get the door open, snatch my backpack, and stumble into the train’s corridor, but he’s right there, attached like a shadow. I slash at him with the knife again, but he dodges it and grabs me from behind, circling an arm around my neck while his other hand, the one with the broken trigger finger, takes hold of my right wrist. He twists my hand so that the knife is pointing at my chest, and he begins the slow work of bringing the blade closer and closer. I resist him the whole way, but with his arm still tight around my neck, my oxygen is dwindling.
The train rattles and screeches around a curve. Outside, I see lights from a few houses blur past. We’re picking up speed again as we head out onto what I presume is a straightaway.
The knife is just a few centimeters from my chest now. My oxygen is gone, and so is my strength. With everything I have left, I fire my left elbow back into his side where his kidney is and bring the heel of my boot onto his toes. He flinches, and for just a quarter of a second, releases the pressure on my hand and neck long enough for me to break free. I pivot around and slam the sole of my boot into his stomach. The air rushes from his lungs as his body closes up around itself.
I dash along the train’s corridor toward the front of the car and pull desperately on the lever of the door, but it’s stuck or I’m too panicked to figure out how to open it. I glance behind me and see my friend moving toward me. He’s retrieved the pistol and is aiming it at me in his outstretched left hand.
“Drop the knife,” he says.
I look down at the useless knife in my hand, and hear Yael’s words from my training: run from the knife, rush toward a gun.
On the wall next to me is a metal hatch with EMERGENCY BRAKE written on it in Czech, German, and English. I open the hatch, grip the red handle, and pull as hard as I can.
The power and speed of it shocks me. The air is filled with a terrible squeal of steel biting into steel as the wheels lock up on the tracks, and everything seems to bend forward. I’m pressed into the car’s door and see the gunman careening toward me at the same speed the train was going a moment before.
He slams into me with the force of a truck, and my knife plunges deep into his chest. Then the gunman’s body slips to the floor, his last emotion, utter surprise, painted on his face. Through the windows in the doorway between cars, I see a pair of what I assume are Czech border cops rushing toward me.
I close the slippery folding blade, slide it into my pocket, and pull the train doors open. The cool air of the Czech night hits my face and invites me into the darkness.
