The Mercedes was intact. a.k
Klaus Richter opened the driver’s door, and the smell of leather, oil, and hot metal hit him like a reminder of a world that was already falling apart. He sat down, yanked the door shut, and for a second let his hands rest on the steering wheel.
Outside, Berlin was dying.
Inside, there was still order.
The suitcase with the forged documents was in the back seat. The gold, wrapped in a military canvas sack, was under the gray blanket. The spare uniform, neatly folded, waited in a wooden box next to a Walther pistol and a black-covered diary that Richter had been writing in since February, when defeat ceased to be a possibility and became a certainty.
He turned the key.
The engine responded with a deep, elegant, obscene roar in the middle of hell.
Richter smiled for the first time in days.
There was still a way out.
He drove slowly at first, weaving his way through rubble, smashed bicycles, corpses, and burning trucks. He wore a uniform without insignia, his cap pulled down to his eyebrows, his jaw clenched with the discipline of someone who had survived too long to believe in chance. His route was calculated: avoid the city center, find a gap to the northwest, reach the woods before dawn, and from there, head towards Schleswig, hoping to surrender to the British or disappear among the thousands of defeated soldiers attempting the same thing.
It didn’t work.
Two blocks from the garage, a Soviet battery opened fire on the parallel avenue. The Mercedes lurched from the blast wave. The armored windshield held, but the street he intended to take was buried under a cloud of brick and fire. Richter swerved, cursed, and turned onto a narrower road where a destroyed streetcar blocked half the way.
Then he saw the girl.
She couldn’t have been more than nine years old. She was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, covered in white dust, clutching a headless doll. She stared at the burning facade of a building as if she still expected to see someone emerge from it.
Richter braked purely out of reflex.
The girl didn’t move.
For a single absurd second, he thought of his daughter. Lotte. She died of diphtheria in 1938, before the war could finish rotting her soul. He remembered her braids, her cough, the way she would grab his uniform sleeve every time he came home on leave. He hadn’t thought of her in months. Maybe years.
He honked the horn.
The girl slowly raised her head. There was a trickle of dried blood at her temple.
“Get out of there,” he growled, rolling down the window.
