§ CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE §
As it turned out, the barge did not even make it down the Havel as far as the Elbe.
At the pilot wheel, Duke knew it wouldn’t be long before the SS patrols boats were running the river in both directions, stopping every similar barge. In addition, a ferocious storm was brewing on the western horizon.
He was powerfully aware of Romy, scrunched in the deck chair against the chilly wind coming off the water and already asleep. He hadn’t wanted to disturb her by moving her to the deckhouse, so he had draped his heavy suede jacket over her, huddled as she was in her too thin, bloodied lab coat.
Occasionally, he heard her whimper. For the loss of Goldman? For the clan left behind? For the dangerous journey ahead?
Toward noon, he anchored off an isolated and tree-sheltered cove in the bend of the Havel not far from the village of Babelsberg. His plans were to hide out, catch maybe a couple of hours’ sleep, then, if weather permitted, travel at nightfall, which came early with late autumn. While darkness meant less risk of being caught, it also meant higher risk of running afoul of sandbars, drifting debris, and snags.
He slid an arm beneath her shoulders and under her knees, cradling her against his rib cage. Her eyes opened, and from beneath damp lashes she peered up at him questioningly. He grimaced and shifted his gaze ahead, careful to step over the coils of rope and duck the deck house’s lintel.
Smelling of mildew and diesel, the deckhouse was banked on both sides by dust-coated windows and, under them, benches wide enough to snooze. The cabin contained a dimly-glowing, pot-bellied stove and, beneath the forward’s bank of windows, a central counter with storage units for provisions.
He lowered her small, shivering body onto one of the bench’s frayed cushions and tucked his jacket flaps around the curves of her small shoulders. Gently, he removed her clubbed heels. Then, he knelt to stoke the stove’s fire. Not that much wood remained.
“Ye’re angry,” lilted that soft brogue from behind him.
His hunkered body swiveled on its boot heels. She was propped on a forearm, her expression beseeching. What did she want from him? “Hell, yes, I’m angry. I am angrier than I have ever been.” And sadder. And elated and deflated. “Hell’s bells, Romy, you’ve busted me every which way but loose of you.”
She held up an arm, slender as a flower stem where the lab coat sleeve had slipped down, and his jacket slid off onto the deck. “Warm meself, Duke.”
He knew they were both in a very dangerous state, not only physically but emotionally. They were both inclined to recklessness and could easily tune out the rest of life and everything that had been important to them.
And, of course, Ireland was important to her. As were her own people. These damned gypsy tinkers and Traveller horse traders.
For him, well, hadn’t he always wanted, desperately wanted it seemed to him, a family . . . wife and children. And, at last, he had found all that in Charlotte.
In sight was a respectability that had not been accorded his battered mom and psycho pops.
Romy fit nowhere in that scheme.
And yet he had thrown away all sound planning based on his hopes and wishes and dreams in trade for this one burning desire that transcended everything. With every pore of his body, with every aspect of his soul, blemished as it was, he was afire and yet at peace, all because of this ridiculous morsel of humanity hovering ever nearby.
He rose, carefully stooping once more, and moved the few steps to the bench and her open arms. Her lab coat joined his suede jacket on the floor. His boots mingled with her matronly heels.
A sweet delirious hunger conquered his caution and mind’s lecturing. A ravenous hunger it was becoming.
He hauled her beneath him. All he wanted to do was hold her forever, but both knew that would never happen. He let himself sink into her, between her slender, welcoming thighs, so there was nothing but her sweet mouth, her warming body. When she reached below for his denim’s placket, he stared down at her. “This is what you want?”
“Aye. Today, I ask for no more for meself but this. And yuirself? Am I enough?”
He silenced her fearful question with his ravaging mouth. Her arms slipped up over his shoulders and around his neck, holding him tightly to her. At that moment, despite the howling of the storm outside, barreling down on the barge, and the danger of discovery by the SS, he wanted her above all else, all other consideration.
“But what about later?” he asked himself – and realized he had voiced aloud that nagging doubt.
The green pools of her eyes pleaded with him. “There is no later for the likes of me, Duke.”
Her hands released his neck and gripped his hips to mold with hers. His hands easily aligned her face, searching it for what he knew not, then plowed into her wealth of hair, holding her his captive in that tiny cell.
While the wind buffeted the barge, she trembled beneath him, her rapture fusing with his. Rain roared on the deckhouse’s tin roof. The storm’s fury only served to reinforce their intimacy. Preliminaries were needless. They made love as if it were the first time – and would be the last.
Life rushed through his veins, finally. After years of dormancy. And she answered that questing life, kiss for desperate kiss, thrust for life-giving thrust.
With wonder in her eyes, she first shattered with their lovemaking. He followed all too quickly with a groaning outpour that seemed to vibrate that small cabin.
In spite of the cold seeping inside it, they lay nude, with their sweating limbs meshed. Cradling her against him, he leaned partially over her.
As if his hand could heal, it cupped the left side of her head, his palm mounding the maimed shell of her ear. His other palmed her concave stomach. “Did the lab doctor, the man you killed . . . was he responsible . . . for sterilizing you.?” He was surprised to find his voice raw with another kind of passion. Rage.
“Aye,” she verified softly. “The Angel of Death. He and Klauffen, the two haunt me down in me dreams . . . ye know, the kind of stuff nightmares are made of.”
“Klauffen?”
“Colonel Klauffen.” She shuddered, and her small, trembling hand alit on the back of his, splayed across the narrow span of her belly. “He was a captain then. Set his German Shepherds loose on Luca and meself. We ran like the Hounds of Hell were after us. And they were – they picked up our scents twenty minutes later and several miles away. Trapped us in a Prague alleyway, Klauffen did.”
So, that was the reason for her fear of dogs, she who feared nothing else. “Then it was he who delivered you over to the Angel of Death,” he concluded.
A small grin curved that mouth he took such delight in. “Not afore I blinded one of Klauffen’s eyes with me bare two fingers.”
Imagining her gutsy spirit, he had to smile.
Her grin faded. “Klauffen, he is commandant now at Sachsenhausen. The bastard never goes anywhere without his beasts – and he never gives up till he has ye groveling. Me prayers are that one day those bloody dogs of his will turn on him and rip off his bollocks.”
He chuckled. “You are, without a doubt, the young woman with the fiery spirt you predicted for me in the card layout.”
She peered up at him from beneath lashes that carefully guarded the expression in her eyes, then she ducked her head. “Do ye ever get over yuir first time with someone?” she whispered against the heated skin cresting his collarbones. Her fingertips rubbed the damp hair haloing one of his nipples.
He might be dazed by their lovemaking, yet he knew enough to tread carefully. He knew he was her first. But, most likely, he wouldn’t be her last. If she was lucky. And if he was lucky enough to get her out of this grisly fiasco.
“The first time with anything is always unforgettable . . . whether it’s your first bronco ride or first taste of ice cream or first taste of a woman.” He hiked the long pleats on either side of his mouth to form a wicked grin. “And that reminds me of what I have been overlooking . . . . ”
And with that he went back to pleasuring her, his mustache abrading a trail with his kisses. She, in turn, entertained him with her freshness and earnestness of love play.
At one point, sitting astraddle his lap, her fingers latched onto both ends of his mustache and jiggled them. “I have not made up me mind, Duke, exactly what spot I like yuir broom of a mustache tickling me most.”
“Let me help you,” he said with his own brand of amused earnestness.
Later that afternoon, after the storm had passed, she rose, his bite marks tattooing her neck and her lab coat’s sleeves tied modestly around her naked midsection. She slipped her feet into his boots that nearly topped her knobby knees and clunked across to the provisions counter.
Completely entranced, his head propped on one fist, he lay nude and flaccid, watching her as she knelt to open one cabinet door. The slipping lab coat did little to hide her sylphlike beauty.
“Well, look at this, will ye – a tin of smoked sardines and a bottle of Polish vodka.” Good humor overflowed to her eyes, and she held the bottle aloft like a trophy. “Wyborowa will disinfect the scabbiest of wounds.”
Her resiliency never failed to amaze him. And he found himself hardening, despite twice in rapid succession having spent himself within her.
“And this!” she hoisted a jar of vaseline jelly.
Used universally by boatmen as a lubricant against cold weather and water, the vaseline was something her wonderfully wet female parts most certainly did not need. “Come here. We have neglected preliminaries to attend to. And before we are through, we both may need the vaseline.
Saucily, coyly, and with complete impunity she sauntered back toward him in his huge clunky boots. Her smile was a simmering tease. She had to know she was enticing, and he chuckled. “Don’t try to ply your gypsy wiles on me, Sunshine.”
She settled her weight onto one knee beside him. “Would they work?” The ends of her lips danced, but her eyes were watching him carefully.
With a silent but visceral groan, he realized he was insanely mad in loving Romy Sonnenschein – unreasonably loving her -- not despite but precisely because of all he had found obnoxiously different in her.
Her annoying messiness, her bewildering off-the-wall logic, her seemingly lackadaisical approach to dire and demanding situations. Which made it all the more maddening, because how could she ever come to love the neurotic, stoved-up, lone wolf that he was, with not a single redeeming feature?
And even more difficult, how would he ever be able to say good-bye? How would he awake in the dawns to come and find her gone . . . absent from the kitchen, the barn, his bed?
“Hell, yeah,” he said, lassoing an arm around her, “your gypsy wiles had me from the git-go.”
And despite his determined resistance to them – or maybe because of the bottle of Wyborowa – she did just that the rest of the afternoon, enchanted him with her mythical gypsy wiles until a lassitude of sensual gratification cocooned their still coupled bodies.
§ § §
In disbelief, Duke stared at the barge’s gauge. Giorgio was to have topped off its tank with diesel. But the gauge needle wavered at less than a quarter of a tank.
Worse, from windows partially steamed with remnants of his and Romy’s recent ardent exertions, he spotted yellow search beams swishing through the outside fog to light up tree limbs overhead.
Shit!
The Gypsy dervish, once more dressed, was standing on one foot like a crane, slipping her raised foot into the other club heeled shoe. He grabbed her arm. “Time to hot foot it, Sunshine.”
She tottered, then caught her balance. “What? Why?”
“Because your esteemed Klauffen is hot on our trail. That’s why.”
In her upturned face, her freckles were diluted by fear. “Then so are his beastly pets,” she got out on a gasping breath.
“In that case . . .” Taking only long enough to pocket the vaseline tube, he jerked her toward the door. Outside on deck, the bone-chilling cold front had rolled in, frosting the bank’s reeds and sheltering trees. Her thin lab coat would not be enough. Quickly, he tugged her arms into his jacket sleeves. They draped nearly a foot beyond her hands.
The intermittent, sonorous blast that seemed to shudder the barge was no fog horn but a SS siren of alert. Their presence had been located!
From a nearby cleat, he grabbed a rope coil, slinging it across his shoulder. “Time is on our side,” he reassured her. “Klauffen’ll have to get a tracking team to shore, first. And it’ll have to move somewhat slower, if he hopes for their dogs to continue to stay on our scent.”
Military tracking dogs were trained to detect mines, booby traps, and nearby snipers. But a plain old hound could track a wild boar through remote wilderness better than those canine teams – and especially, track a human fleeing through it.
And that was what he would be doing. Running full throttle. But he wasn’t so sure about Romy. Pleasure had leached both their bodies. Not a good time for making an escape afoot.
He leaped into the ankle-deep water and then, turning to lift her by the waist, swung her ashore.
“Babelsberg,” she said urgently, “the village, it is only a few miles down the river road. I know the highways and byways around here. We can –”
“Nope. In the open is not where we want to be right now, Sunshine. We want the dark to work in our favor.” He fished out the vaseline tube and, squeezing out some ointment into his fingertips, began smearing it on her cheeks.
“What are ye doing?” She twisted within his hold, unsuccessfully dodging his determined hand. “We need to be on our way, Duke!”
Ignoring her, he next knelt before her and ran his fingers beneath her skirt up her calf.
“Are ye daft?” she screeched, trying to thrust off his frisking hand.
“Dogs don’t track human scents as much as they do our skin cells.” With a modicum of motion, he finished lathering both her slender legs. “The vaseline’ll keep us from shedding those skin cells – for a while, at least – and it’ll, also, protect our skin against the brush.”
He began smudging his own exposed skin, and she asked dubiously, “Brush?”
Rapidly, he slipped the rope from his shoulder and looped one end around his waist. “You may know the highways and byways, but I know the backways of any woods.”
With eyes wide, she stared at his fingers as they quickly, efficiently, knotted the rope’s other end in a bowline around her waist before she could wriggle from him.
“This way we don’t lose each other in the dark. If you start to wear out, hang on and let me haul you along.” Which meant his taking the brunt of the whipping branches and bushes. “Try and watch where you plant your feet.”
With that, he plunged into the shoreline’s dark forest. He ran with a lengthy, striding gait, its pace punishing. Up a steep slope, across the narrow river road, and back into the forest on the other side. Through a clawing thicket, over a fallen tree. Once the rope jerked, and he turned and retraced his steps to find she had fallen.
“No time to be lollygagging,” he chided.
“Gobshite,” she muttered.
He heaved her upright, and set out again, not breaking his pace. The sound of dogs’ excited barking came now from behind. Far behind but drawing ever nearer.
He was dragging Romy, like it or not. At another jerk on the rope, indicating a probably stumble, came her yelped, “Fockin’ ballsch!”
Fortunately, after that the rope maintained its slack. Amazingly, she was making an as good as could be expected attempt at keeping up with his lengthy strides and sprinting pace.
While dogs were good sprinters and could travel for hours at a walking pace, they were not good long distance runners and would tire and overheat before he and Romy did.
He hoped.
Most fortuitously, his blue eyes gave him better night vision – which was why he hunted feral hogs best at night. Nonetheless, a straggling thicket clutched at his Levi’s, bringing him into a tumbling roll.
Seconds later, Romy was there, squatting over him with both concern and humor lighting her eyes. “Tis not the time to be a lazybones, me luv.”
He had to give it to her, that she could manage a sense of humor, when all the horrors of her past cohered now into demon dogs hunting her down. She was emotionally reckless. An out of control train barreling down upon some poor unsuspecting male
And she was a paradox – a free-spirited Gypsy seesawing with a mystic-martyr in a hair shirt. Therein was in his romantic delirium.
Throughout the night, he and Romy ran through forests reminiscent of Grimm’s awful fairy tales. But running in cowboy boots and club heels gave the advantage to the dogs and their handlers in flat-soled military boots.
The baying of the canines grew ever closer. Just as he was about to call a halt for shucking their foot gear, he burst out of the forest into a fading, starlit sky – and a river as formidable as China’s Great Wall.
Romy almost bumped into him, and he noted she had already lost one shoe. She leaned over, hands on her knees to catch her breath. Despite the cold, sweat sheened her face. “A tributary of the Havel,” she wheezed. “Brandenburg is not too far on the other side.”
Thirty feet wide at the most and probably no more than hip deep, but rampant with rapids, the river was banked on either side by three to four-foot rock bluffs – and tree-lined on its far side. He shoved his leaf-tangled hair from his forehead and stared at the impassable river. “Sunnufabitch.”
At that expletive, she straightened, hands on hips. Her hair was a rat’s nest, dirt was plastered to the vaseline coating her face, and his filthy jacket would better dress a scarecrow.
No woman had ever looked more beautiful.
One of her hands slipped beneath his rawhide jacket to the pocket of her blood-smeared lab coat and dragged forth his derringer. “I’ll shoot meself, Duke, afore I allow Klauffen to make me a Nazi guinea pig again.”
Breaking dawn showed the desperation in her pixie’s face, and his gut wrenched at her soul’s awful pain he was witnessing. “Put it away! He’s not taking you on my watch.”
Dangerous rapids offered a means of slowing down a dog team – but also meant the very real probability of his and Romy’s being swept away and drowning or being bashed against a boulder. But what other choice was there?
Hastily, he loosed the rope’s knot at her waist, then at his own. “I sure as hell hope some of your circus experiences will serve you now.”
Puzzled, she stared up at him.
He tied a strong enough lasso to take down a bull. With that, he swung the rope as he would any lariat and released it to capture his target – a lightning-struck tree on the river’s far side, where most people with any brain matter would not be willing to make a crossing.
He missed. Damn’t. Time was wasting.
He reined in the rope, its lasso bobbing against the rushing water. Once again, he twirled the lasso over his head to release it as the momentum swung the loop forward. Bingo. The lasso looped the tree high up its trunk. He followed through, grabbing the rope’s slack and drawing it tight against his hip, which would have to do, since there was nowhere to anchor it on their side’s shale shoreline.
“All right, you first. Grab hold.”
The ends of her mouth dipped. “I’m not so good a swimmer.”
“Then don’t let go of the rope. It’s not like you’re walking a circus tightrope. When you get to the far side, it’ll be a bit of a drop, what with the rocky outcrop below. Swing and aim for that yonder mossy patch.”
She gulped, but she gamely latched hold of the rope, at that point eye level. She spared him one parting glance, and he forced a grin. “May you be lucky, Sunshine!”
She grinned back. Then, knees jacked up, she began a hand over hand crossing that sloped upwards. Getting midway across the thunderous river took a good three minutes. Three long, arm-muscle straining minutes. And all the while the baying of the dogs grew louder.
Suddenly, her arms, bent at the elbows, gave way, and her body sagged. Perilously, she dangled just inches above the thrashing water. Her other shoe dropped into the river and bobbed from sight in the dawn-lit foam. Her clenched fingers held fast.
She managed to release one hand and quickly shoot it forward along the rope he yanked taut. Inch by heart-throbbing inch, she caterpillared her way. Her journey’s last half took much longer than they had left timewise before their pursuers would arrive.
He did not realize he had been breathing so shallowly until she reached the far side, swung, and heaved herself onto the cushioning thatch of moss.
Now it was his turn. Admittedly more dangerous, as he would be wading, hauling on the rope with each precarious step. Turbulent water flooded his boots, making each next step herculean. Well, that was smart, Duke. Forgetting to remove your boots.
A small boulder afforded him momentary respite from the swirling water. Within mere yards of safety, he heard behind the victorious shouts of the trackers and canines’ ferocious barking. Shit! He risked a glance over his shoulder.
Four Nazi handlers struggled to hold the leashes of their straining dogs. Frothing, they were eager to dash into the water.
Jackboots planted in a firing stance, an officer stood in their midst. He sported an eyepatch. That had to be Klauffen. At his shoulder, he braced a Mauser, its sight homed in on Duke, his red cable-knit sweater a perfect bull’s eye.
A split-second decision. Death by a bullet – or – let go of the rope and be brain-bashed against one of the boulders.
Above the roar of the rapids resounded the firing of a bullet. Stunned – he felt nothing! A blink of an eyelid later, he was equally stunned to watch Klauffen topple over the three-foot bluff like a statue with a crack through its granite forehead.
Wasting not a second in questioning, Duke swung his attention back to the shore ahead – and Romy, shivering in the crisp dawn air. Derringer still upraised, she had an unrepentant smile on her sprite’s face. “Two out of two Angels,” she hollered. “Not a bad day’s work.”
He could not imagine why he had ever sought respectability, because it was a sham compared to reliability, compared to someone who had another’s back. Swinging ashore, he said, “The danger isn’t over, Annie Oakley.”
“What?”
He didn’t have time to explain who Annie Oakley was. Before more shots could ring out, he hustled her forward into the concealment of the trees. “Those mastiffs could still find a way to circle round to this side and pick up our scent.”
She rolled her eyes and huffed, “We wash it off, Duke.”
“Nope,” he said, tugging off with effort one of his boots and dumped the water from it. “Dripping water from our bodies contains our skin cells.”
She blinked. Gulped her fear. “Oh.”
He emptied the other boot before replying with a grim smile, “Time to hot foot it again – this time to Brandenburg.”