Chapter 7: The Apple Cart
The fourteen days had passed in a blur of silent dread and mechanical preparation.
For Jennie, they were measured in the clicks of a telegraph key in a soundproofed basement room, in the careful encoding of phrases about “apple harvests” and “family visits.” The information about the motor pool routes, the shifting train schedules, the narrowed window for the speech—it had all gone out, dissected and analyzed by unseen minds across the Channel. She had done her part. She was a good spy.
For Leonid, the days were a growing fog of disquiet. The memory of that evening in her apartment was fractured, softened at the edges by the whiskey. He remembered the warmth, her hands, the dream of a garden spoken aloud. He remembered a deep, profound sleep, the kind he hadn’t known since childhood. But beneath it, a dissonant hum. A feeling of something vital slipping through his fingers, of words spoken that should have been kept behind his teeth. The officers were sharper now, barking orders, their nerves frayed wire. The movements of troops were constant, a swarm repositioning itself around a hidden, trembling core.
The day of the speech dawned cold and iron-gray. A slicing wind scoured the ruins of Berlin, carrying the ever-present taste of ash and powdered brick. Leonid stood at Checkpoint Sigma, a miserable outpost on a road leading to the now-cordoned-off government quarter. His feet were blocks of ice in his boots. His hands, stuffed in his coat pockets, were numb. He hated this duty—the boredom punctuated by spikes of raw terror, the power to ruin a stranger’s day, or life, on a whim.
He watched a filthy sparrow peck at something frozen in the mud. He thought of Jennie. She would be at the factory now, he told himself. Her fingers guiding gray thread through gray wool, head bent under the weak electric lights. Safe. Away from this.
A sound cut the wind—the grind of a laboring engine. A flatbed truck approached, slowing as it neared the jagged stone barricade. It was an old thing, once maybe green, now the color of grime. The back was piled high with lumpy burlap sacks. A man drove, his face gaunt and shadowed under a cap. Beside him sat a woman, a scarf wrapped tightly around her head and lower face.
Something prickled at the base of Leonid’s skull.
His corporal, a man named Becker with watery eyes and a perpetual sniffle, stepped forward, raising a hand. The truck wheezed to a halt. Becker walked around to the driver’s side.
“Papers,” Becker barked.
Leonid’s gaze drifted to the woman. She was looking straight ahead, her posture stiff. The way she held her shoulders—perfectly straight, unnaturally still. A cold trickle, unrelated to the weather, traced his spine.
The driver handed down documents. Becker scanned them, his lips moving. “Maximilian Müller. Freight: apples. Destination?”
“Market square, south quarter,” the driver said, his voice flat. “Before they rot.”
“Apples in January?” Becker snorted. “A miracle.” He walked to the back of the truck, gesturing for Leonid to follow. “Check it.”
Leonid moved, his legs feeling leaden. The woman’s head turned slightly, just enough for her profile to be visible against the gray sky. The arch of her brow. The set of her jaw.
His heart stopped.
It was Jennie.
Time fractured. The wind vanished. The distant thump of artillery was a heartbeat in his ears. What was she doing here? On this road, today of all days? The factory was in the opposite direction. A wild, desperate hope flared: she was lost. She was bringing food to a relative. There was an explanation.
Becker was already at the back of the truck, pulling his bayonet from its scabbard. He jabbed it casually into one of the burlap sacks. The sound was wrong. It wasn’t the soft, yielding puncture of fruit. It was a dull thunk, followed by a faint, metallic rattle from within.
Becker froze. His watery eyes widened. He pulled the blade out, looked at the tip, then at Leonid.
In that suspended second, Leonid’s training—the brutal, ingrained instinct of a war machine—collided with the entirety of his being. He saw Becker’s mouth open to shout. He saw the driver’s hands tighten on the wheel. He saw Jennie, through the cab’s grimy window, finally turn her head and look directly at him.
Her eyes were not the soft, feline pools he knew. They were dark, hard, bottomless pits of sheer terror. And resolution. She didn’t look away. She held his gaze, and in it, he saw the truth he had been too love-blind to glimpse. The accidental meeting. The keen questions. The eager listening. The vial of something in his whiskey that led to the deepest sleep of his life. The secret he had whispered against her neck.
It wasn’t an accident. She wasn’t a factory worker.
She was the enemy.
And she was carrying something under those apples that wasn’t apples.
Becker sucked in a sharp breath to yell.
“Corporal,” Leonid said. His own voice sounded alien, calm.
Becker looked at him, confused.
Leonid walked past him, towards the back of the truck. He reached out, not with his bayonet, but with his bare hand. He pushed it deep into the slit Becker had made, past the cold, hard spheres of apples. His fingers brushed rough burlap, then something else. Cold. Cylindrical. Seamed. His fingertips traced a familiar shape—a rifle barrel. He pushed further, felt the wooden stock, the curve of a trigger guard. Not one. A nest of them. And beneath, hard, brick-like packages wrapped in oilcloth.
His hand rested on the hidden metal. He looked up, through the window, and locked eyes with Jennie again. Her face was a mask of pure white. Her knuckles were bone where she gripped the seat. She was waiting for the world to end.
He saw the garden. He heard his own voice, slurred with love and drugs: I marry you. Yes?
He pulled his hand from the sack, wiping it slowly on his coat. He turned to Becker. The corporal’s face was a question mark.
“Well?” Becker prompted.
Leonid made a small show of peering into the sack. He reached in again, this time pulling out a single, bruised apple. He held it up. It was red, a shocking blot of color in the monochrome hellscape. He took a deliberate bite. The flesh was mealy and sour. He chewed, swallowed.
“Apples,” he said, his voice carrying a flat, final authority. “Rotten, mostly. As he said.” He dropped the apple into the mud. “Alles in Ordnung. Sie können weiterfahren.”
Everything is in order. They can proceed.
Becker stared. The order was clear, but the procedure was not. He opened his mouth again, a protest forming.
Leonid took a step closer to him, looming over the smaller man. He let everything he felt—the grief, the rage, the shattered love—compress into a single, glacial stare. “I have inspected it. It is cleared. Open the barrier.”
The unspoken threat in his tone was more effective than any regulation. Becker flinched. He nodded, scurrying back to the wooden pole that served as the gate. He heaved it up.
Leonid stepped back to the driver’s side window. He did not look at the driver. He looked only at Jennie. Her eyes were wide, glistening now. A single tear escaped, tracing a path through the dust on her cheek. He saw her lips form a single, silent word. Why?
He had no answer he could give. He just gave a short, sharp nod toward the road ahead.
The driver didn’t need encouragement. The engine roared as he shoved it into gear. The truck lurched forward, bouncing over the ruts, moving past the barricade, past Leonid, who stood like a statue carved from salt.
He watched it go, shrinking in the distance. He watched until it was a speck, then nothing. The wind returned, howling now, filling the void where his heart had been.
“Manoban?” Becker asked tentatively. “Should I have logged the—”
“Log it as a routine agricultural pass,” Leonid interrupted, his voice hollow. “One truck, apples. Driver and… his wife.” The word was acid on his tongue.
He walked back to his post, his body moving on autopilot. The numbness in his feet had spread upward, encasing his limbs, his chest, his skull. He had just committed treason. He had let a truckload of weapons, almost certainly bound for an attempt on the Führer’s life, pass through his checkpoint. He had signed his own death warrant. For a lie. For a woman who had looked at him and seen only a tool, a source, a stupid, lovestruck fool.
The image of her face, in that final second, wouldn't leave him. The terror. The tear.
He had seen the truth, and in seeing it, he had chosen her truth over his own. He had chosen the dream of the garden over the reality of the wasteland. He was damned.
A different engine sound approached, this one deeper, a convoy of sleek black cars flanked by motorcycles. The real security, sweeping the route one final time. They sped through the checkpoint without stopping, the men inside mere glimpses of dark coats and peaked caps. The procession moved toward the heart of the city, where soon, a man would stand on a podium and shout into a microphone.
Leonid lit a cigarette, his hands perfectly steady. He exhaled smoke into the Berlin wind. He would wait for the sound. He would wait for the world to explode.