A church, its gutted interior starkly laid open, the large crucifix at the altar standing alone amid the rubble, the cross and the left arm of Christ sheared away, leaving the scarred right arm raised in a macabre Nazi salute…
Dirk was forced to slow his headlong rush. The street was fast becoming impassable. They were racing into the target area of the last attack….
Fires were raging, flames shooting from buildings showered with incendiaries, acrid smoke billowing from the intense magnesium incandescence. Rescue workers, firemen and civilians were desperately fighting to quell the holocaust. Trucks and fire engines blocked the rubble-strewn street.
Dirk sent the ambulance flying into the havoc. He hit the Klaxon horn. Its wail was hardly audible in the din. He glanced in the rearview mirror.
The staff car was catching up.
He skidded around a fire engine. A bomb had blasted the sidewalk open. Water from a broken main was gushing out into the street to form a shallow, muddy stream. Dirk hit the slippery muck at full speed. The ambulance slid and began to spin. He fought the wheel. The vehicle slammed against the paint-blistered hulk of a burned-out truck lying overturned in the gutter. Metal crunched and screeched against metal. The ambulance caromed off, out of control. Dirk struggled to straighten it as it plunged forward directly toward a gaping, still smoking bomb crater. He stomped on the brake. He tore at the wheel, swinging it about. The ambulance slewed. Grating and grinding in protest, it reared over on two wheels before crashing down to fling itself around a pile of rubble and careen down the street.
They were bearing down on a large apartment building blazing with incendiary fires. Several injured people were lying on the sidewalk. A man wearing the green armband of the Hilfspolizei, the auxiliary police, ran into the street, frantically trying to flag them down. Veering crazily, they shot by him. Outraged, he shook his fist after them, barely managing to scramble out of the way of the staff car roaring after….
The ambulance barreled wildly into a park area. Huge mounds of debris. Broken tree trunks, their splintered tips pointing accusingly into the night sky, their crushed and withered crowns lying scattered on the rubble-covered ground…
Ahead, bathed by the fire from several blazing houses, loomed two large buildings, one squat and stark, the other ornate and baroque. With a strangely unattached part of his mind, Sig recognized them. The Altes Schloss and the Neues Schloss — The Old and the New Castle. The middle of the broad avenue between them had been cleared, and it snaked between piles of broken masonry. They raced past. From the decorated façade of the New Castle, rows of mutilated stone figures kept a ghastly vigil. Armless, legless, headless they stood, grotesquely guarding windows gaping on gutted emptiness within.
The Old Castle squatted in a nest of rubble. Goethe had once panned the building, Sig remembered irrelevantly. “Hardly fit even to be a stage set,” he'd written. It was now. It would make a splendid medieval ruin….
Dirk braked violently. The street ahead was completely blocked. A building hit by a bomb had collapsed across the roadway. Along the ground, gasoline from a wrecked fire truck flowed in a river of flame.
Quickly he made a sharp right turn, tires squealing, and careened into a narrow path that had been cleared through piles of rubble.
With piercing suddenness, a siren began to wail. And another. Until the smoky, dirty haze shrouding the city was filled with urgent alarm. A distant crisscross of blue-bright searchlights stabbed into the red-tinged night sky, reaching for the deep-throated drone rumbling steadily high above.
The bombers were returning!
Gisela was chilled by anxiety. She knew where Dirk was headed. Straight for Theaterplatz—Theater Square. Immediately bordering the Central Railroad Station, always the target of the bombers! Should she warn him? But where would he go? She turned to him….
Suddenly the earth erupted in front of them. Chunks of masonry ripped through the air. Huge slabs of concrete shot high before smashing down into their path. A hurricane of dust and grit swirled around them. Noise slammed into their minds. The ambulance was lifted into the air. It crashed back with a bone-breaking jar and shuddered to a stop against the mass of rubble.
They were out of the disabled vehicle in seconds. Dirk looked around.
The bombers were raining new death and destruction on the already mortally wounded town. Ground-shaking explosions drowned out the constant noises of roaring fires, crashing buildings, the ululating wails and whines of sirens and horns….
Far to the right, the sky was bright with flame. That would be the Daimler-Benz factories, Dirk thought. On the Neckar River…
They were at the edge of a huge field of rubble hillocks. Ahead the whole ragged skyline seemed ablaze. The Central Railroad Station was being showered with high explosives and incendiaries. A large and still solid building loomed close by. Two massive structures at each end of a long gallery. Dirk whirled on Gisela.
“What's in there?” he shouted.
“Das Stadttheater!” she shouted back. “The State Theater!” Her eyes grew round with alarm. Dirk followed her frightened gaze.
The staff car was tearing into the square.
Quickly he grabbed Gisela's arm.
All three sprinted for the theater.
The main entrance was blocked by rubble. They ran around the corner. The explosions of the bombs blasting the railroad junction tore asunder the air around them; the falling incendiaries were like giant, fiery hailstones. A side door came into view. It had been cleared of rubble. Dirk rushed up to it and pushed. It gave way. They ran into the building.
Scrambling around a cracked wall that was leaning precariously, they found themselves at the edge of a huge, empty stage.
The theatre had been badly hit in an earlier air raid. Beyond the bare proscenium arch the auditorium was gutted. The entire roof had collapsed and the floor had caved in, plunging seats and flooring into a basement two stories deep. The walls, shorn of their décor, were raw and scorched, exposing chipped and pitted bricks. At the far wall was a jumble of blackened timbers. Ringing the space halfway up the walls, steel rods that had been sheared off when the balcony had been torn from their grip still grasped chunks of concrete as if loath to let go completely. Moments before, incendiary bombs had hurtled through the gaping roof into the yawning auditorium pit, and the rubble and debris in the basement far below were blazing fiercely.
The stage itself was bare. Cracks and gashes had been gouged out of the wooden floorboards by falling masonry, especially in the large center trap area. From the steel-pipe gridiron high above in the fly loft hung a jumble of set pieces, flats, lighting equipment and catwalks. Smoke curled over the lip of the proscenium from the blazing auditorium on the other side.
Dirk ran out onto the stage. Sig and Gisela followed. They raced across to the far side. Along the wall a massive, long pinrail was mounted. The tangle of ropes and heavy counterweights needed to hoist scenery and equipment up into the fly loft ran from the rail to the gridiron above. On the stage side, next to the proscenium, torn and twisted wiring hung from a mangled switchboard. A door between the pinrail and the board stood a couple of inches ajar. Dirk ran to it at once. He pushed against it. Hard. It did not budge.
He looked around quickly. Another door farther upstage, at the far end of the pinrail, was completely obstructed by rubble and broken scenery cleared off the stage at some time past. In the rear of the stage was a small opening in the bare brick wall where a breach had been blown by a bomb exploding outside.