Jake looked back through the dust. The other Horch had started after them, jouncing over the same rough ground. Farther behind, a jeep, presumably Shaeffer, was tearing away from the crowd that had formed around the dead Russian. Through the open window, bizarrely, came trumpets and the steady thump of drums, the world of five minutes ago.
“I tried to delay them,” Gunther said. “The wrong time. I thought you would be gone, know something was wrong.”
“Why you?”
“You were expecting me. I would lead you to the car, for the per-mits. But he saw Brandt. Running. So. An impulsive people,” he said tersely, holding the wheel as they bounced over another hole in the pitted field.
“You were pretty impulsive yourself. Why you and not the American?”
“He couldn’t come.”
Jake glanced back. Gaining a little. “He did, though. In fact, he’s coming now.”
Gunther grunted, trying to work this out. “A test maybe, then. Can they trust a German?”
“They got their answer.” Jake looked over at him. “But I should have. I should have known.”
Gunther shrugged, focused on driving. “Who knows anyone in Berlin?” He jerked the wheel, skirting a Hohenzollern statue that had somehow survived, only the face chipped away by blast. “Are they still there?” he said, not trusting himself to look away to the rearview mirror. Jake turned.
“Yes.”
“We need a road. We can’t go faster like this.” The traffic circle at the Grosser Stern was now in sight, a bottleneck jammed with marchers. “If we can cut across-hold on.” Another swerve to the left, jolting the car away from the parade, deeper into the battered park. In the back Emil groaned.
Jake knew that Gunther was taking them south, toward the American zone, but all the landmarks he had known were gone, the stretch ahead of them desolate, broken by stumps and twisted scraps of lampposts. Ron’s lunar landscape. The ground was even rougher, not as cleared as the border of the chausee, the earth thrown up here and there in mounds.
“Not far,” Gunther said, rising out of his seat over a bump, even the solid Horch springs pounded flat, and for a moment, looking behind at the dust, the cars coming after them, Jake realized, an unexpected thought, that Gunther finally had his Wild West, stagecoach bucking across the badlands at a gallop. And then, eerily, the other Horch entered the Karl May dream too, firing at them from behind. A firecracker sound of shots, then a shattering pop at the back window.
“My god, they’re shooting at us,” Emil yelled, his voice jagged with fear. “Stop. It’s madness. What are you doing? They’ll kill us.”
“Keep flat,” Gunther said, hunching a little farther over the wheel.
Jake crouched and peered back over the edge of the seat. Both vehicles firing now, an aimless volley of stray shots.
“Come on, Gunther,” Jake said, a jockey to a horse.
“It’s there, it’s there.” A clear space of asphalt in the distance. He steered right, as if he were heading back to the Grosser Stern, then sharply left, dodging a fallen limb not yet scavenged for firewood, confusing the two cars behind. More shots, one grazing the back fender.
“Please stop,” Emil said, almost hysterical on the back floor. “You’ll kill us.”
But they were there, crashing over a mound of broken pavement piled up at the edge of Hofjagerallee and landing with a loud thunk on the cleared avenue. Improbably, there was traffic-two convoy trucks, grinding toward them on their way to the traffic circle. Gunther shot out in front of them and wrenched the wheel left, tires squealing, so close there was an angry blast of horn.
“Christ, Gunther,” Jake said, breathless.
“Police driving,” he said, the car still shuddering from the skid.
“Let’s not have a police death.”
“No. That’s a bullet.”
Jake looked back. The others weren’t as lucky, stuck at the side of the road until the trucks lumbered past. Gunther opened up the engine, speeding toward the bridge into Liitzowplatz. If they could make it to the bridge, they’d be back in town, a maze of streets and pedestrians where at least the shooting would stop. But why had the
Russians fired in the first place, risking Emil? A desperate logic__ better dead than with the Americans? Which meant they thought they might lose after all.
