The Ragged Edge of Night(80)

“You aren’t going to see Father Emil like that, are you?” Al says.

Anton takes stock of himself—saturated shirt, carelessly rolled sleeves, face and trousers streaked with grime.

“No time to change,” Gei?ler says. “The father wants you straightaway, mein Herr.”

“Then I must go to him straightaway. I hope he’ll forgive my bad manners.”

Anton sets off down the lane with the Gei?ler boy. The young man leads him at a rapid pace, almost a jog. The afternoon’s work has worn Anton thin; he would beg Gei?ler to slow down, but quiet dread makes him push on, despite the trembling of his limbs.

“Have you any idea what this is about?”

“None,” Gei?ler says. “The father said nothing to me.”

“But you’re certain no one unusual had come to the church?”

“No one whatsoever. I’m afraid I can’t tell you more than that, mein Herr.”

A host of possibilities tumbles through Anton’s head, each grimmer than the last. Something has gone wrong within the ranks of the Red Orchestra. One of the other messengers has been taken. Someone has proven a traitor to the cause. Or the National Socialist rats have sniffed out Anton and Emil, and the gray bus is coming for them, headed this very moment toward Unterboihingen. By the time he reaches the church, Anton is sick with anxiety, and he has begun to sweat all over again.

Young Gei?ler leads him to Emil’s side door. “I’ll leave you here. The father is expecting you; he told me to send you straight in as soon as we arrived.”

Anton shakes his hand and prays Gei?ler can’t feel his shivering, the weakness of his bones. Then he lets himself into Father Emil’s small private sanctuary.

The room is simple and spare, as one would expect of a priest’s quarters. Emil is waiting for Anton, seated on the edge of a narrow bed. The only other furnishings are a small writing desk and an iron woodstove. Emil’s hands are folded in his lap, his back straight and resolute. He looks at Anton, graying brows raised, but Anton can’t read the priest’s expression.

“What is it, Emil? What has gone wrong?”

“Close the door,” Emil says softly. “These young fellows from Egerland—one would expect refugees to harbor no great love for the Party, but one can never be too careful. I’ve been shocked and dismayed more times than I can count, when someone I’d previously thought fine and sensible professed admiration for the Führer.”

That’s true enough. Anton hasn’t forgotten how many people rose in opposition when he and Emil proposed sheltering the refugees. Even in Unterboihingen, there are loyalists. Sympathizers. Why not among the Egerlanders?

When the door is shut, Emil whispers, “What has gone wrong, Anton, is nothing you could have imagined. And yet, it’s no cause for us to fear.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll tell you. You know we work in a chain of sorts, we who do… this work. The man I report to—the one from whom I receive my orders, and your orders—he received a telegram this morning. Yesterday there was an attempt.”

The wet shirt turns to ice against his skin. He takes Father Emil’s meaning at once. No need to clarify; there is only one end we are working toward, we who resist.

“Only an attempt? It wasn’t successful, then.”

“No. Not this time.”

Not this time, or any time before. They have tried it in beer halls and museums, on parade routes and in the air while the Führer flew back from Smolensk. Tried and failed, again and again. The beast will not lie down and die.

“What happened?” Anton says.

“It was at his stronghold in Prussia—the one he calls the Wolf’s Lair. A briefcase, stuffed with explosives—carried in, would you believe it, by one of his own colonels.”

“Did the colonel know what he was carrying?”

“Oh yes. He was quite complicit. No one is certain, yet, just what went wrong. The bomb exploded. Four men died, but not the fellow we want dead—not the one who counts. Though I dare say he was somewhat surprised. His trousers were ripped to shreds, I hear—he can’t have escaped without injury. But he is as stubbornly alive as ever. Showing off his torn-up trousers, by my friend’s account, and bragging that he is invincible.”

Anton sighs. He can see what will unfold next. The SS won’t hesitate to track down those directly responsible—surely they have names already. Soon enough, they will sing. And everything Anton and Emil have worked for—all they’ve built, one scrap of paper at a time—will crumble.

“It’s over, then,” Anton says. “We’ve failed. If it hadn’t happened in the Wolf’s Lair—if it had been a crowd on some city street, there might be some question of who was responsible. But now—”

“We?” Emil says. “No, not we. This was not our resistance, but another—one I didn’t even know existed until I read the telegram. And, Anton, this resistance came from inside the Wehrmacht. It’s no mistake, and no coincidence, that a colonel was involved.”

Slowly, Anton sinks onto the stool at the writing desk. He’d had no idea there was resistance among the military. Nothing in his experience, his short but memorable service with the Wehrmacht, has led him to expect resistance. And to hear that senior officers are involved… The news robs him of sense for a long moment. He paws at his trouser pocket, searching for his pipe, before he recalls that he is in his shirtsleeves, drenched in sweat and stained with grime—and at any rate, he is in Father Emil’s private residence. He can’t smoke here.