John Hawks - The Dark River

After walking down a wide avenue that bordered the Tiergarten, they reached the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The Holocaust memorial was a large, sloping grid covered with concrete slabs of different heights. Hollis thought they looked like thousands of gray coffins. Tristan explained that the antigraffiti chemical painted on the slabs was provided by an affiliate of the company that had manufactured the Zyklon-B used in the death chambers.

“For war, they made poison gas. For peace, they fight taggers.” Tristan shrugged. “It’s all part of the Vast Machine.”

A row of souvenir shops and cafés was directly across the street from the memorial. The building looked like a flimsy structure created with plywood and a few pieces of glass. Kröte ran past a Dunkin’ Donuts shop and disappeared around the corner of the building. They found the boy unlocking a padlock on a steel hatch cover set flush to the concrete.

“Where’d you get the key?” Mother Blessing asked.

“We cut the city lock a year ago and put on a substitute.”

Kröte opened his knapsack and took out three flashlights. For his own use, he slipped on a headlamp with a high-intensity lightbulb.

They pulled open the hatch and hurried down a steel ladder. Hollis climbed with one hand on the rungs while he held the equipment bag to his chest. They reached a maintenance tunnel filled with communications cables, and Kröte unfastened another padlock on an unmarked steel door.

“Why hasn’t anybody noticed that you changed the locks?” Hollis asked.

“Nobody official wants to enter this place-just explorers like us. It’s dark and scary down here. It’s altes Deutschland . The past.”

One by one, they passed through the doorway to a corridor with a concrete floor. Now they were directly below the memorial, standing in the bunker used by Joseph Goebbels and his staff during the bombing raids. Hollis had been expecting something a bit more impressive-dust-covered office furniture and a Nazi banner hanging on the wall. Instead, their little pool of light illuminated concrete-block walls coated with a grayish-white paint and the words Rauchen Verboten . No smoking.

“The paint is fluorescent. After all these years, it still works.”

Kröte paced slowly down the corridor with his light beam focused on the wall. “ Licht ,” he said in a faint voice.

Tristan told Hollis and Mother Blessing to turn off their flashlights. In the dark they saw that Kröte’s movements had created a bright green line on the wall that glowed for three or four seconds before fading.

They switched on the flashlights again and continued through the bunker. In one room there was an old bed frame, stripped of its mattress. Another room looked like a small clinic, with a white examination table and an empty glass cabinet.

“The Russians raped the women of Berlin and looted almost everything,” Tristan said. “They stayed away from only one place in this bunker. Maybe they were too lazy or it was too horrible to see.”

“What are you talking about?” Mother Blessing asked.

“Thousands of Germans killed themselves when the Russians arrived. And where did they do it? In the toilet. It was one of the few places where you could be alone.”

Kröte was standing beside an open doorway with the word Waschraum painted on the wall. Arrows pointed in two directions: Männer and Frauen . “The bones are still in the toilet stalls,” Tristan announced. “You can see them-if you’re not frightened.”

Mother Blessing shook her head. “A waste of time.”

But Hollis was compelled to follow the boy up three steps and through a door that led to the women’s washroom. The two light beams revealed a row of wooden toilet cabinets. Their doors were closed, and Hollis felt as if they concealed the remains of more than one suicide. Kröte took a few steps forward and pointed. Near the end of the room one of the wooden doors was slightly open. A mummified hand, looking like a black claw, pushed through the gap. Hollis felt as if he had been guided into the land of the dead. His entire body shivered and he hurried back to the main corridor.

“Did you see the hand?”

“Yeah. I saw it.”

“And all Berlin is built on top of this,” Tristan said. “Built on the dead.”

“I don’t give a damn,” Mother Blessing snapped. “Let’s go.”

At the end of the corridor was another steel hatch, but this one was unlocked. Tristan grabbed the handle and pulled it open. “Now we enter the old sewage system. Because this area was near the wall, both East and West Germany left it alone.”

They climbed beneath the bunker into a drainage pipe about eight feet in diameter. Water trickled along the floor of the pipe. Their flashlights touched the surface and made it gleam. Salt stalactites came down from the top of the pipe like pieces of white string. There were white mushrooms and a strange-looking fungus that resembled yellowish globs of fat. Splashing through the water, Kröte guided them forward. When he reached a juncture and turned to wait, the light jiggled like a firefly.

Eventually they reached a much smaller pipe that emptied into the larger system. Kröte began chattering in German to his cousin, pointing at the pipe and gesturing with his hands.

“This is it. Crawl about ten meters down the drain and force your way in.”

“What are you talking about?” Mother Blessing glared at Tristan. “You promised to take us all the way.”

“We’re not going into a Tabula computer center,” Tristan said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“The real danger is in front of you, young man. I dislike people who don’t deliver what they promise…”

“But we’re doing you a favor!”

“That’s your interpretation, not mine. All I know is that you accepted an obligation .”

The coldness in the Harlequin’s eyes and the precise way she spoke were intimidating. Tristan stopped dancing around, frozen in the middle of the tunnel. Kröte glanced at his cousin and looked frightened.

Hollis stepped forward. “Let me go in first. I’ll check things out.”

“I will wait for ten minutes, Mr. Wilson. If you’re not back, there will be consequences.”

Hollis crawled through the horizontal pipe toward a distant patch of light. The pipe was narrow and his hands touched a slimy liquid that felt like motor oil mixed with water. Quickly, he reached a steel drainage grate set in a frame at the top of the pipe. The light from the room above him was divided into little squares by the grate, and he lay directly beneath a grid of lines.

He bent his head so that his chin was touching his chest, and then he came up so that his upper back was in contact with the grate. The steel rectangle was about three inches thick and very heavy, but his legs were strong and the grate didn’t appear to be bolted in place. Hollis pushed upward until the rectangle broke out of its frame. He raised his hands and shifted the grate a few inches to the right. When a four-inch gap appeared, he changed his position and pushed the grate sideways across the floor.

Hollis pulled himself out of the drainage pipe and immediately drew his handgun. He found himself in an underground corridor lined with electric cable and water pipes. When nothing happened, he returned to the drainage pipe and crawled back to Mother Blessing and the two Free Runners.

“This pipe takes us to a maintenance area. It looks like a safe entry point. There’s no one there.”

Tristan looked relieved. “You see?” he asked Mother Blessing. “Everything is perfect.”

“I doubt that,” she said, and handed the equipment bag to Hollis.