The Ragged Edge of Night(50)

“Seeing as how you’ve given me your solemn vow never to do it again, I think this time we can leave her in blessed ignorance.” It’s a mercy to poor Elisabeth; she would take sick with fright at the mere thought of her boys meddling with a grenade. “But if it happens again, you won’t be so lucky.”

As he turns to go, he says, “I like your fortress. You’ve done well with it. Don’t stay out too long; it will be cold this evening, and your mother will be worried.”

The sun has nearly set by the time he finds his way out of the woods. He eases through the gap in the hedge, and there is the grenade, lying mute and small in its furrow. He stands frozen, half crouched, his blood humming with a tight, uncomfortable energy, half expecting the damnable thing to explode unprovoked, like a curse. When he can relax by inches, he steps around it, cautiously, slowly, circling and staring like a skittish dog. He can see now that the boys were right: it’s only an empty shell. Someone has disarmed it; the steel plug is gone from one end, the pin from the other. There is nothing inside but a void.

He lets his breath out slowly. He picks it up, feeling the cold of its metal skin in his colder hand. This grenade will harm no one, but it’s still a hateful thing, a tool of destruction. He turns it over in his hands, rolls it between his palms. Its size baffles him. How can something so small contain such deadly force? How can so simple an object unmake a body, a life, the world? He looks down the hole in the grenade’s tapered end into its hollow heart. Light shines through the other side. Then he whips back his arm and throws the thing hard, as hard and far as he can. It lands with a small, insignificant splash in the irrigation canal that runs along the edge of the Kopp field. The water, flowing high and fast with spring’s thaw, takes the grenade and pulls it under. In moments it is buried, vanished into soft and fertile silt.





18

Spring slips rapidly away into summer. Anton would be glad of the change of seasons, the lengthening light and the growing warmth, if not for this persistent feeling—a kind of whispering dread, always murmuring behind his thoughts—that he has accomplished nothing since taking up with the resistance. Father Emil has told him, “Be patient. We can’t change the world overnight.” But still, he expected by now to hear some news from Berlin or from the Prussian outpost where the Führer often goes to ground. Our cities, our citizens, face bombardment nearly every day. But when the assaults prove too much for our great leader to bear, he tucks himself away in his Wolf’s Lair and shelters from the storm.

On a blue day in May, when the air is sweet with the perfume of flowers, he meets his contact in Wernau. Anton sees the man reading an NSDAP paper on a bench near the bus stop—gray suit, blue tie, spats covering his shoes. This is the very man he was told to find.

He passes the bench, muttering the key phrase as he goes. “Do you smell rain coming?” Without looking up from his paper, the man in the gray suit gives the expected response. “No one can keep the rain away forever.” Anton circles the block, taking his time, lingering at shop windows and lifting his hat to the women he meets. He flashes his charming grin. He makes as if he has nothing but time, as if his only concern is whether the sun will pink the tops of his ears.

When he returns to the bus stop bench, the man in the gray suit is still there. He has finished his paper—it’s only one long sheet, printed front and back, as are all papers now—and he sits gazing down the street, as if searching for his bus. He has folded the paper into a perfect square. It lies on the bench, forgotten.

Anton looks the contact over more carefully. Of course, the man declines to meet Anton’s eye; that much he expects. But the fellow waits patiently, allowing Anton to study his face while he scans the long street. Anton has seen him before. This is not the first time he has exchanged messages with this man. He is, in fact, the first man Anton ever met in the secret work, the one who told him the story of Rudolf von Gersdorff frantically defusing his bomb in the museum bathroom. He is glad to see Herr Pohl again. It’s always a pleasure, to know someone you admire has survived.

As he sits, Anton lets the folded message drop from his hand onto the bench. A moment later, Pohl uncrosses his legs, recrosses them. He shifts, he sighs; distracted, he picks up his folded newspaper and the message with it. Anton’s note tucks into the paper square and slides between its overlapping leaves. The message has vanished.

“A beautiful day,” Anton says. “Any news from Berlin?”

Pohl gives the briefest of smiles. “Not the kind of news you and I are looking for.”

“Soon, though. I can feel it in my bones.”

“You are a tireless one. And optimistic.”

“My faith in God compels me. I believe in the work God has given me, and I believe in His power to right all wrongs.”

“A Christian,” says Herr Pohl. He sounds amused.

“You’re not?”

“If I say I’m not, will you stop coming to speak with me?”

Anton searches the street, too, gazing in the opposite direction, never meeting Herr Pohl’s eye. “Not in a thousand years. I believe too strongly in my mission.”

“More strongly than you believe in God?” There is no sting in the man’s voice. In fact, there is something of a chuckle. It’s a boyish game, this teasing, but Anton feels compelled to answer forthrightly.