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“Where is Anny?” he asked.
“Anny is dead. Put your arm over my shoulder. I’ll help you to a hospital.”
“Are you crazy? Wounds will tell them who we are.”
“Where is Zolner?”
Valtin was struggling to breathe. “If the Central Committee sent him, I didn’t see him.”
“What’s his first name?”
“Why do you keep . . . Oh yes, your poor betrayed brother.”
“What’s his first name?”
“Marat. Marat Zolner.”
“Marat Zolner.”
“It’s only his nom de guerre.”
“What’s his real name?”
Valtin closed his eyes. “Sometimes he is Dima Smirnov, spelled with a v. Sometimes Dmitri Smirnoff spelled with fs. Sometimes . . . Who knows? Who cares?” He sagged against the door. His chin slumped to his chest. His feet skidded out from under him. Pauline knelt beside him. When he opened his eyes, what she saw there told her that nothing would save him. He whispered something she couldn’t hear. A bubble of blood swelled on his lips. She leaned closer.
“What?”
The bubble made a wet Pop! against her ear. “Run!”
His hat had fallen beside him. Pauline laid it over his face and hurried away.
Looters were battering open shops and running from them with bread and milk and beer and coats and hats. Now it was the police who were erecting barricades, stringing barbed wire across the larger streets. She pressed into a doorway to wait for an armored car to creep past on an intersecting street. The men inside flung open their hatches and stood in the open, no longer afraid. It passed from her view.
An empty bottle smashed at her feet. Two looters lurched toward her. Before she could move, they had cornered her in the doorway. They were drunk, reeking of schnapps.
One grabbed her from behind, the other reached for her legs. She kicked out, knowing her only chance was to get to her gun before they found it. He caught her ankles. The man behind squeezed tighter. She went limp.
“Right,” he laughed. “Might as well enjoy it.”
He let go of her arms to turn her toward him and as he bent and pressed his reeking mouth to hers, she reached under her skirt with both hands, pulled her Mann, and cocked the slide. She shot the one who was holding her ankles first. He fell backwards with an expression of surprise. The other, oblivious because of gunfire ringing in the streets, kept trying to kiss her. She twisted the gun between them and pulled the trigger and he dropped to the cobbles, wounded, though not mortally, by the small-caliber gun.
Before Pauline could move ten feet, steel-helmeted cops stopped her and saw the gun she was trying to hide in her skirt. They shouted that she was under arrest.
“They tried to rape me,” she protested. “I had to protect myself.”
“Death is the penalty for weapons.”
“I have a license.” She showed them her genuine Ausweiskarte and a Van Dorn business card. She took the time they read her papers to calm herself.
“What in the name of God are you doing in Hamburg in the middle of a riot, Fräulein Privatdetektive?”
Pauline affected the confident manner of a Prussian aristocrat. “The Van Dorn Detective Agency intends to establish a field office in Germany’s second-largest city.”
“Take my advice. Wait until we’ve exterminated the rabble.”
She aimed a curt nod in the direction of the looters she had shot. “I would appreciate it if you accept these two as my contribution to the effort and escort me to Central Station.”
Startled by her audacity, the police officer looked down at the woman. She was small and slight and uncommonly pretty. But she had a field marshal’s icy eyes. He returned her pistol, offered his arm, and walked her to the station.
