Read Online The Folks at Fifty-Eight by Michael Patrick Clark - Free Book Online Page A

missed it by now. We could wait for the next one.”
    She had a sense of humour. That was good. He smiled again and returned his attention to the road below.
    “Tell me about your wife,’ she asked. ‘What’s she like? Is she beautiful?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you live in New York?”
    “No.”
    “One day I’d like to go to New York. I want to climb right to the top of the Empire State Building. They say it’s over a hundred stories high and you can see all over the city.”
    As he listened to the lilting voice, speaking English with the merest hint of an accent, he found it enchanting. Her constant chattering was obviously an unconscious release of nervous tension, and that was good too. Victims of brutal interrogation sometimes found it difficult to conduct even the most basic conversation. She had obviously suffered no such trauma. Hammond knew something of Soviet interrogation techniques. She had been lucky.
    She continued chattering. He happily indulged it.
    “And I want to go to Los Angeles. I want to see Hollywood and all those famous film stars. I want to see Ray Milland and Clark Gable and William Holden. Oh, and especially Cary Grant; he’s lovely.” She paused for a well-earned breath, and then began again. “Oh yes, I want to go to Chicago, too. I want to see where all those gangsters live. Do you live in Chicago?”
    “No.”
    “So, where do you live?”
    “Washington.”
    “State or D.C.?”
    “D.C.”
    “Have you ever met the President?”
    “No.”
    “I met the Führer once, when I was a little girl. We were invited to Berchtesgaden. Everybody there was very important. He came across to us and asked my name, and then he gave me a kiss and said I was very pretty. Everybody was looking at me and smiling. I’ll always remember that. Have you ever met anyone really famous?”
    “No.”
    “You don’t say much, do you?”
    He smiled a smile of warmth, and gently chided her youthful garrulity.
    “I think you say enough for both of us. C’mon, let’s move.”
    They left the copse, climbed over a wire fence and scrambled down to the road. He crouched by a drainage ditch at the roadside. She crouched alongside and continued firing questions.
    “Back there on the train, when you said ‘they’ sent you, did you mean the Americans?”
    “Yes.”
    “So why did they. . . ?”
    “Be quiet.”
    Hammond had just seen a convoy. It was still some way in the distance, but travelling quickly and heading straight for them.
    He shoved her into the ditch, and followed immediately after, then pulled her against the roadside bank and crouched beside her in the stagnant water. When she tried to peep over the top, he pulled her down and held her close, then clamped a hand over her mouth and hissed a second instruction for her to be quiet.
    He peered out from behind a convenient tuft of grass as the convoy neared and then rumbled on by. There were four Opel Blitzes, commandeered from a defeated German army. Stragglers, he guessed, from the larger convoy that had passed by a few minutes earlier. Each was straining to make up time, and each was packed with Russian troops.
    He again scanned the road to Jessnitz, or he hoped it was the road to Jessnitz. It was a tactically poor position, but they’d had little choice. They had to get to Dessau before dark. That meant leaving cover and negotiating a large expanse of open farmland.
    Hammond cast his gaze over the road and across the farmland to the safety of the woods on the far side. He calculated they could make it in eight or ten minutes, but that meant eight or ten minutes of exposure to prying eyes.
    He looked again. The Russian convoy had gone. Now there was nothing moving for miles. He thought of making a dash for it, but caution told him to wait a little longer. From where they crouched, the flat and uninspiring terrain allowed them an advantage. They could see the enemy from distance. However, once they left the safety of cover and started running across