“Why do you pretend to be feeble-minded?”
“It helps keep me out of the army. Even with my leg, they might take me for clerical work or a flak battery, but since I seem so stupid, they consider me unsuitable. So I worked on the docks at Lubeck, and got married there. For mutual convenience; there was no love involved.”
Berta told herself it would be easy to love a man who could screw like this one. “Lubeck is a long way from here,” she said. “Why did you come so far?”
“My wife is from Kempten. We came here so she could care for her grandparents.”
“I suppose you want to get back to her.”
“Not necessarily. As I said, it was a marriage of convenience. She was a barmaid and party girl. There were men who threatened her, for part of the money she made. I protected her, and we shared a place to live.”
Berta traced the large scars on his leg with a finger. “And this?”
“An air raid on Lubeck, the same as my other scars. I would be much more crippled than I am, if I weren’t a healer.” Her aura indicated acceptance of his lies. Her reading of auras seemed less acute than his. And that was a dozen years past, a dozen years of observing people.
“If we go to Switzerland together,” Berta said, “we can do very well as healers. We can rent a nice apartment and live like real people.”
Her fingers had moved from his knee upward. Now she fondled him, felt him swell. After a little loveplay, they went back to the mattress.
Later they dressed, and returned to their rooms without incident. For a bit, Macurdy lay in bed contemplating. What had he accomplished, beyond adultery? He’d learned something, he answered, learned he could move around the building at night. The next time he’d go alone and find out what the locked rooms had in them.
Meanwhile he’d avoid further trysts with Berta, so far as possible. He’d enjoyed it too much. Adultery as an espionage tool was bad enough; pleasure made it worse.
That night he dreamed of Mary. They were in Fritzi’s getaway shack in the mountains, although in the dream, the shack wasn’t really the shack. He told her about Berta, and they’d wept together. Then her lips moved, but there was no longer any sound, and he wanted so terribly to hear her words. Then Sarkia was there from his past, seeming ancient, and told him he was deaf from syphilis he’d gotten in his adultery.
Mary wasn’t there any longer, and he was looking for her in the cellar of the schloss-heard sounds from the party room and was afraid to look in-when he was wakened by a hand on his shoulder. “Montag! Montag! Wake up!” The whisper was Schurz’s. Macurdy raised himself on an elbow, shaking the cobwebs from his mind. “Come to the washroom with me!” Schurz’s aura glittered with vivid anger.
In the latrine, the man gripped Macurdy’s shoulders and tried to shake him. “You were talking in your sleep!” Macurdy stared, confused.
“In English!” The words, though little more than a whisper, were almost. hissed. “If you must talk in your sleep, do it in German) Do you understand? It can mean your life!”
Then Schurz left the latrine, an astonished Macurdy staring after him. After a minute he followed, but it was a couple of hours before he slept again.
25
Sorcery
The next time Berta and Macurdy managed to speak privately was on Sunday, during the group walk. The air was thick with snowflakes, blurring vision and muffling sounds.
“Kurt,” she said, “let’s go to the party room tonight. You are good, darling, the best ever. I ache to have you again.” He touched her mittened hand. “It is too dangerous now. Schurz discovered me gone. He was angry, demanding to know where I’d been. I told him to your room, and that you’d rejected me. I’m sure he didn’t believe me though. He said if it happens again, he’ll report me. He peered earnestly at her; again her aura reflected-not belief, but not disbelief. His story had a major element of truth, he told himself” he had been discovered. “Maybe in a week or two,” he added, “the Herr Doktor Professor won’t be so alert.”