K Jeter: The Kingdom of Shadows

“Try! You must try!” Her hands stayed locked upon his arm. “I was dead… I was… and then… you did that…” She glanced down at Goebbels’ sightless visage. “Even for a moment… a few seconds, anything… that’s all it would take…”

“All right -” His will left him, sapped away by the angel’s tear-wet face and her pleading words. How could he refuse her, when her mere image had kept him alive for so long at the asylum? He sank down beside her. “I’ll try.”

He had no knife with him; Ritter’s SS dagger had been left behind on the floor of the shelter. But none was needed. With his thumbnail, he broke a line through the charred undersides of the corpse’s wrists, then along the ribs of the exposed torso. Flakes of black ash clung to his hand; he shook them away before going any further.

Again, he heard his brother’s voice whispering at his ear, the pale thing upon the makeshift crucifix imparting the secrets of the Lazarene faith. A sacrament to be administered to the dying, not to the dead. To take the skin of death away…

But here there was no skin, no life inside the husk of ash and cinder. This was sacrilege; he knew that even as he obeyed the angel’s command and set his palms beneath the withered form’s shoulderblades. He drew his hands apart, away from the spine, feeling a crumbling, mortal substance peel away and gather against his fingertips.

His brother had given him his inheritance, given him the power to take away death, bestow life. He closed his eyes and let the sacrament move inside his arms, down to his own unscarred wrists. Without Christ’s stigmata, the emblems of sacrifice that had brought the ancient craft into the light; darkness welled up inside his head, pushing away all thought, even the memory of his own name…

The weight against his hands shifted. He heard something tearing, like fire-blackened paper.

“Joseph…”

Her whisper brought Pavli’s eyes open. He looked down at what he held, saw the corpse’s chest swell, a white angle of breastbone protruding through the charred flesh, vertebrae cracking as the spine arched into a bow.

Marte reached past him, trying to touch the corpse’s face. A spark moved inside the blind sockets; the lipless mouth opened wider, the black tongue thrusting against the splintered teeth. A hissing sound came from deep inside the throat. Pavli watched as its left hand rose, brushing against his own chest, the fingers like a withered tree branch as they tightened into claws, struggling to touch the hand of the woman above.

The hissing changed, the remains of lips and tongue pressing against each other, to form a single word.

Her name…

She screamed and pushed Pavli away from the corpse; she screamed the dead man’s name as he fell back, twisting onto his side.

“Joseph!” She gathered the corpse into her arms, her face close to its sharp-edged mask. “Tell me… tell me where he is… my baby…”

On his hands and knees, Pavli saw the last ember die in the hollows of its skull. The hissing noise stopped, the clawing hand frozen an inch from touching her.

The last of its death; he knew that. He got to his feet and stood behind Marte, reaching down to pull her away from the lifeless form. “Don’t… it’s no use…”

She knew it as well. The corpse slid from her hands. It lay with the one hand still raised, the fingers curved toward the palm, the thing it had desired now beyond its grasp.

With his arm around her shoulders to hold her upright, Pavli turned and looked behind himself. In the distance, he heard the sound of artillery fire. In a few seconds, the ground beneath them would tremble and split open beneath the force of the bombardment. And after that, a matter of hours, the Russian soldiers would stream across the ruins of their enemy’s capital.

“Come.” He guided her out of the rubble-strewn garden, toward the narrow passage that opened onto the broken streets. “I think I remember the way.” He wondered if they would be able to reach the shelter before the last tide of the war surged over them.

It didn’t matter. The angel wept against his neck as he led her through the dark.

Herr Wise found him poking through the ruins of the studio. I must look so shabby to him – von Behren’s coat was grey with dust from crumbling plaster and concrete. As the American picked his way over the slabs of broken walls and fire-twisted window frames, he spotted the director through the open doorway of one of the still-standing buildings, prodding the debris with the point of his cane, then bending down and picking up some small glittering object.

“Ah, Herr Wise -” Von Behren turned and smiled, as if caught in some mildly embarrassing folly. He held up a framing viewfinder, the enameled metal scratched, but the lens still intact. Its glass shone in the sunlight piercing the soundstage’s damaged roof. “You see? Who knows how many more treasures are waiting here to be discovered?”

He had his reasons for being in a good mood. Wise had been with him the day before, when the film salvaged from the studio’s underground storage vault had been screened, for the first time since the end of the fighting in Berlin. Wise had commandeered an editing suite over at the UFA complex in Babelsberg, at the edge of the city, just for that purpose. All the reels that had been shot of Der Rote Jager, his work in progress, had survived in good enough shape to be used. The artillery shells that had hit the studio during the last days of the battle for the city – he had told Wise about getting the actors and crew out to the nearest shelter – had buried the vault in layers of brick and plaster, keeping the fires away from the irreplaceable celluloid. Von Behren’s cameraman had died there, skull and spine broken by the walls collapsing just moments after he had secured the film canisters; that sacrifice had been the somber edge to the director’s relief at finding the film intact.

“You must excuse me.” Von Behren made a formal nod of his head. “I keep forgetting your exalted rank – I see you always as when we were in Hollywood. Is it a colonel you are now? Or general?”

Wise smiled at the joke. “Hardly. Believe me, it’s not going to be much longer for this get-up.” He brushed his hand across the front of his uniform. “My head’s already a civilian. When we get back to the States, I’m planting myself behind my studio desk for good.”

“Oh?” Von Behren raised an eyebrow. “When we get back? What do you mean?”

“That’s why I came out here. Got some more good news for you.” Wise took off his cap and wiped his brow. Summer had made the rubble-filled streets hot and even dustier, the humid air buzzing with midges breeding in the craters filled with stagnant water. Outside, the studio’s wreckage made a mound of broken concrete high enough to climb upon and look down the surrounding streets. A few blocks away, a line of Trummerfrauen, ragged figures with their hair covered in kerchiefs, shuffled bricks from one woman’s hands to another’s, slowly clearing one of the bombsites. “I’ve been pulling some pretty big strings in Washington on your behalf. But then, those people owe me a lot of favors for all the fund-raising I did during the war.”

Only a small lie, thought von Behren. He knew that the American film producer’s favors weren’t being called in for his sake, but for Marte Helle’s.

“Everything’s settled,” continued Wise. “We got the okay to ship you out of here. Final stop on your itinerary will be Los Angeles.”

“Indeed.” Von Behren watched the point of his cane knock aside a few more bits of plaster. “And will I be unaccompanied on this voyage?”

“Of course not. We talked about this already, Ernst. It’ll be you and Marte and this kid you told me about -”