He had a couple of really wild, childish thoughts. When this fucking war was over, he would look her up. Maybe he could even get her out before it was over.
Giessen brought him to his senses. The place was in ruins. The moment they opened the doors of the train, he could smell burned wood, and the more pervasive smell of decaying human flesh.
Giessen had been hit and hit hard. He wondered why. As far as he could remember, there were no factories of any importance here, certainly nothing worth all the effort it had taken to bomb the shit out of the place. Could it have been bombed by mistake? He had heard Canidy and Whittaker joking about their astonishment that B-17 pilots with 200 hours total flying experience could find Germany, much less a particular city in Germany.
But the bomb destruction reminded him that there was a war, and that neither he nor Elizabeth von Handleman-Bitburg were liable to make it through that war. He certainly wouldn’t, if he kept acting like some high school kid with a bad case of puppy love.
The train from Giessen to Marburg, which stopped at every other crossing, was ancient. It looked as if it belonged under a Christmas tree. There was only one class, un-upholstered benches in unheated coaches, and he rode most of the way beside a fat peasant woman with a potato bag full of cabbages. She told him that her son had been captured by the Americans in North Africa, and asked if he had been stationed there. He told her he had and that he’d almost been captured himself.
He had a mental picture of her son sitting at Fort Dix or someplace, wearing American fatigues with a big P painted on the back, eating three meals a day, and congratulating himself on being alive and out of the war.
When the tnin approached the outskirts of Marburg, he stood up, squeezed past the people in his row of seats, left the car, and stood on the platform, turning the collar of the black overcoat up against the cold wind.
He wanted to see how much damage had been done to Marburg. Aside from what looked like filled-in bomb craters along the roadbed, he could see no evidence of damage. The roadbed reminded him, however, of the Gestapo agent. By now, they must have found the body and started doing whatever they did when somebody stuck a knife in a Gestapo agent.
In just a couple of hours, if they hadn’t found out already, they would learn that Reber was no longer on the train. And they would, if they hadn’t already, start looking for him.
He told himself that if the train stopped at the Sudbahnhof, he would get off there and ride into the center of town on the Strassenbahn.
The train slowed as it went through the Sudbahnhof, but not enough for him to jump off.
Five minutes later, it jerked to a halt in the Hauptbahnhof. The station here was intact, too, just as he remembered it. The one in Frankfurt had some damage, and most of the glass in the arches over the platforms had been blown out. There was no glass roof over tracks in Marburg.
There were just platforms on both sides of both tracks. Steps down from them led to a tunnel under the tracks to the station building itself.
Railroad police were on the platform, but they were just keeping an eye on things, not asking for identification and travel authority.
But there would be a checkpoint somewhere. As soon as he went down the stairs to the tunnel, he found it. It had been set up in the tunnel under the tracks, out of the cold wind. What the railroad police were doing on the platform was making sure everybody went through the tunnel and didn’t take off across the tracks to avoid the checkpoint.
The line moved quickly. It looked as if it were a routine checkpoint, not one set up to catch somebody special. Like whoever had scrambled a Gestapo agent’s brains.
He had almost reached the head of the line when an SS-Unterscharfuhrer Sergeant) standing behind the table the railroad police had set up spotted him and shouldered his way through the crowd to him.