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“I’m not going to Berlin,” Fulmar blurted. “I’m going to Marburg.”
“Not on this train, you’re not,” she said. “The first stop after Frankfurt is Kassel.”
“How do you know that?”
“I go to Marburg all the time,” she said. “I know the schedule. The first train you can catch to Marburg will put you in there at half past three in the morning. Do you want to arrive at half past three in the morning?”
“And the one after that?”
“Arrives in Marburg a little after nine,” she said.
“Maybe the thing to do is get a hotel room,” he thought aloud. “Then you could go.”
“What have you done,” she asked, “changed your mind? Lost interest?”
He looked down at her.
She raised her hand and put it on his cheek.
“I told you,” she said,“I’ve changed. I want what I can get now before it’s too late.”
Then she pulled his face down to hers. And she did to him what she would not let him do to her in the backseat of el Ferruch’s Delahaye in Paris.
XV
Chapter ONE
Hauptbahnhof
Marburg an der Lahn, Germany
0920 Hours 30 January 1943
The train from Frankfurt am Main to Kassel, with stops at Bad Homburg, Bad Nauheim, Giessen, and Marburg, did not run on Saturday. It was necessary for Fulmar to take the Kassel express, and to change at Giessen.
He absolutely forbade Elizabeth to return to the Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt with him. She was hurt. She was crazy, was what she was. The way she’d talked, he had naturally decided that she had been fucking all comers, since she was convinced she was going to die.
That had not turned out to be the case. In the Bahnhof hotel, after the first time—which did not turn out to be terrific for either of them—she had come out and admitted that she had tried “it” three times before, because everybody seemed to make so much of it, and those times, too, had been disappointing.
But something happened when they tried it again in the morning. He did it then more or less because he thought she expected him to, and he imagined it would turn out no better than it had the night before. But it really turned out to be not only better, but different. He had no explanation why. It had just happened. It had, as a matter of fact, happened twice. And it would have happened a third time if he hadn’t had to catch the goddamned train.
And she said something else crazy just before he put her on the bus to Hoescht.
“Take care of yourself, Eric,” she said.
“You, too,” he replied.
“Ich liebe dich,” she said.
"You’re crazy,” he said.
“And you, too,” she said, still shaking his hand. “Why else?”
And then she blew him a kiss and stepped on the bus. He stood there on the curb, looking for her in the window. When he found her, just before the bus pulled away, she blew him another kiss.
He thought about—even mentioned—taking her out with him. She’d laughed at him, said he wasn’t very smart. Didn’t he know what they did to the families of people who just disappeared?
“Let ’em think you got killed in a bombing raid,” he had argued. “Blown away.”
