I look at the crates. “What kind of guns? What kind of other things?”
Silence for a moment, then, “Why do you ask this?”
“Paulus, answer me or I’ll burn you alive.”
“Brens. And an explosive called Semtex.”
And there it is. The note. The pistol. Christian’s words—some shit for some Czech. All of it makes sense now. “Thank you, Paulus.”
“Excuse me?” he says. “I cannot hear you.”
I stand on my tiptoes and repeat what I just said closer to the vent.
“Again, please? I’m having trouble hearing you. Speak directly into the pipe if you would.”
As I move in front of the vent, an explosion of heat and the roar of ripping air rushes past my left cheek. I topple backward off the chair and land hard on my back. The reek of cordite and sulfur from the gunpowder singes my nostrils.
I raise a trembling hand to my face and find that the bullet didn’t touch me. He missed blowing my brains out by millimeters. I pull myself to my feet and take up Paulus’s jacket again.
A trickle of smoke like from the burning tip of a cigarette is still curling from the end of the pipe as I climb back onto the chair. He’s swearing at me in German, screaming Fotze this, Schlampe that. He’s probably deaf now from firing the gun in such a confined space, so I don’t bother saying good-bye as I stuff the jacket into the vent as tightly as I can.
*
The glass boxes of the Hauptbahnhof glow from within, suggesting less a train station than the X-ray of one. It’s transparent except for a steel grid skeleton. All the rest is clear, and I can see the people circulating through it like blood cells.
I am calm as I enter, walking only as fast as the other Berliners—observe, Polizei, how very ordinary and un-murderer-like I am. Inside, it’s the sort of calm anarchy that must be unique to Germany, everyone in a polite, sober rush. I mimic the others as closely as I can: moving quickly but not in haste, not smiling but not glowering, either.
An orderly queue for the ticket counter: a Muslim woman with a little boy ahead of me, a college kid with bad acne behind me. Two cops with submachine guns under their arms walk by slowly, eyes on faces. I try not to look away, thinking it will look suspicious if I do, but in the end, I can’t help it.
Eighty euros gets me a one-way ticket on the next train to Prague, leaving in twenty minutes from track 14. Once the train leaves, all I have to do is keep to myself for about four hours until we cross the Czech border and I’ll be safe, or at least safer than I am here.
But that’s still twenty minutes away. And tonight the Hauptbahnhof is Cop Land. They’re everywhere. Mean-looking guys in dark blue jumpsuits with machine guns and dogs, as well as smart-looking guys in suits with badges around their necks. I doubt the American teenager wanted for questioning in a murder is putting the city on lockdown, but I have to assume they’ve heard my name, and it’s a good bet they’ve seen my picture.
The bathroom stall reeks, but at least it’s out of anyone’s sight. I lean against the door and go through Paulus’s wallet. There’s a condom, an ID card, and a sheaf of almost a thousand euros.
I know I’m going to regret leaving Paulus alive. Yael would have had me kill him, no question. She would have had me burn the warehouse down around him and not give it a second thought. And I wanted to. As badly as I’ve ever wanted anything. I was even going to do it. But Paulus was right about me at least in that sense: I’m no killer. Not because I can’t, not because the thing inside me won’t let me, but because it’s the one barrier I haven’t yet vaulted over on my way to the abyss. I will preserve that little corner of my seventeen-year-old self, that narrow slice of Gwendolyn Bloom, for as long as I’m able.
After fifteen minutes, I leave the stall and head toward track 14. Everything I took from Paulus’s jacket except the cash and the folding knife lands in a trash can on the way.
The cops are out in force in the bowels of the station, too, measuring up everyone on the platform, letting their dogs sniff around the luggage. Is it possible they have my scent?
The whoosh of the train approaches like a descending angel, and I hang back a little until the angel issues an electronic chime and the doors slide open. I step through the doors two seconds before they close. There’s a hiss of brakes, another chime, and a muffled announcement. Then we start moving.
I find an empty second-class compartment and drop into one of the window seats. Outside the platform is streaking by, cops heading for the stairs, a few latecomers throwing up their arms in fury for being latecomers.
There’s no one else in the compartment, but I raise my hand to hide my smile as I lean back and put my boots up on the seat across from me. The platform becomes a dark tunnel, which becomes a weedy urban neighborhood, which becomes the suburbs, which becomes the countryside.
I’ve escaped.
PRAGUE
Eighteen
I sleep a little, the dense, frosting-covered sleep of the victorious. There was a ticket check a few minutes after we left the station in Berlin, but no one’s bothered me since. And so, after victory comes the reward. In this case, a dream. It’s one of those dreams you know is a dream from the very first, and so you shush the voice that says none of it is real in the hope that the dream will go on and on and on.
I am on a train just like this train, riding through countryside just like this countryside. The announcements come over a staticky loudspeaker: Queensboro Plaza, Thirty-Ninth Avenue, Thirty-Sixth Avenue. The N train as it jostles and wobbles and rockets through a version of Queens replaced by rural Germany. At the Broadway and Thirty-First Street stop I am joined in my little compartment by Terrance.
“Is this seat taken?” he says, indicating the one next to me. He’s wearing the pressed khakis and turtleneck sweater from the day I saw him in the record shop. I open my mouth to speak, to tell him it’s me, Gwendolyn, but no words come out.
He doesn’t seem to recognize me and at first I’m alarmed, but then I understand. How could he? I’m no longer the same girl he knew in New York. Just as my voice is about to come back, he puts on a pair of headphones. But because it’s a dream, I hear the music, too. It’s a slow, sad, lovely piece by Miles Davis. Just trumpet and a scratchy drum at first, then a polite, unobtrusive piano, then a saxophone starts in.
Then we’re not on the train anymore, but behind the steamy windows of that bar at the Waldorf Astoria, the one I’ve only ever seen from the sidewalk. The saxophone hands off the melody to the trumpet and picks up the harmony, like a conversation between the two: warm, civilized, the saxophone nodding to the trumpet, I understand, I understand.
We are sitting in a tufted banquette, alone amid a crowd of rich people. It’s late. I’m tired. I lean into him. He smells of cologne and normalcy.