Five Past Midnight Read Online Free PDF

bathtub was perched in the air, attached to a pipe above a mountain of shattered masonry.
    Katrin saw no one, so she briskly crossed the street. She had developed the Berliner Bhck (the Berliner look), the habit of glancing over her shoulder for the Gestapo. She wore a gabardine coat with the collars pulled up against the wind. On her feet were "Goebbels shoes," flats with pressed-cardboard soles. They were sodden with rainwater. Most of Katrin's high heels had been broken on Berlin's perilous sidewalks and streets. Hats had not been rationed, and so had come into their own. Hers was green felt, peaked in two ridges, approximating a hat she had seen on Vivien Leigh in an English movie before the war.
    Again Katrin surveyed the dark street. Still no one. She pushed against the bakery's shattered door. Her coat brushed against the bomb warning, and she stepped inside. Glass shards snapped under her shoes.
    The darkness was thick; black shadows on shadows. She held her hand up to ward off hanging wires and timbers. Her fingers found an oven built into a wall, and she barked her shin on an overturned chair.
    She vaguely saw another warning poster tacked to a wall at the back of the bakery. The bomb lay under the pile of wreckage. A ragged hole had been punched through the ceiling above the mound of debris. She stepped around support pillars that gleamed like oilskins, damp from the rain dripping from the floor above. She felt along a wall of the room until she came to a stairway. She was met with the scent of corroding flesh. The Rescue Squad had missed a body somewhere under the rubble.
    She climbed the stairs, splintering clumps of plaster with her shoes. The second floor was open to the sky. Rain had dampened beams and the floor. She stepped on a broken mirror, cracking it further. Moving slowly, she crossed the room to the window, which had only slivers of glass sticking up from the frame. No one was on the street below.
    Katrin found a barrel chair and placed her suitcase on it. She flipped the clasps. Inside was her radio, a pack wireless once used by a Wehr- macht infantry squad for unit messages. A powerful amplifier and frequency multiplier had been installed. She pulled a small compass from her pocket. It had been a toy, issued to a member of the Deutsche Jungvolk, the branch of the Hitler Youth for len- to fourteen-year-olds, but it worked well enough.
    Before Allied bombing had begun in earnest, she would have known which direction was northwest, but most of Berlin's landmarks had been toppled, and it was dark. She squinted at the compass's tiny needle, then squared herself to the northwest, toward another smashed window.
    Unrolling one of the wire antennas, she picked her way across the room to the window's fractured casing. She retrieved a thumbtack from her coat pocket. The end of the antenna had a tiny loop. Bending close to the casing, she pressed the tack through the wire circle and into the wood. She did the same with the second wire antenna.
    The rwu wires made a broadside array antenna, boosting the transmitter's radiation along the plane of the wires toward London. In directions lateral to the plane the broadcast waves largely canceled themselves out. Each half-wave wire was a precise length, and they ran to the window exactly three feet apart, all to put the radiation waves in phase.
    She brought up her wristwatch. Still five minutes to go. She righted a captain's chair, brushed dampness from the seat, and lowered herself into it. She turned her head to gather in the wrecked and black room. Through the gaping holes in the ceiling, she could see the red night sky, colored by the fires set by American bombs that day. She wanted to grin at fate's irony but she lacked the energy.
    Katrin von Tornitz had not visited Berlin until her twenty-third birthday, seven years ago. In 1902 her grandmother, Countess Voss- Hillebrand, had been one of the Ladies of the Palace. When the kaiser changed the title Lady of the