Page 65 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Oil!” someone shouted, discovering the remains of the Escape. “The Jews were going to burn the library!”

Anne tore herself free of the woman, but two new people seized her, one a large man with an unbreakable grip.

The crowd at the front parted, shouts falling silent, as someone new arrived. A tall man in a black leather coat and military cap strode in. Four other men in black uniform followed, all of them bearing the swastika in black and white on a red armband. “Secret police,” he announced unnecessarily.

Anne fought a hysterical urge to ask how they could be secret if they marched in and told everyone who they were.

The officer hooked leather-gloved fingers into the collar of a beefy fellow with an old-fashioned lantern who was leaning curiously over the “oil” pool. “Do not.” He hauled the man back roughly and strode past. He glanced Anne’s way but walked past her to come to a halt in front of the pile of people beneath which Kerrol had disappeared. “Get them up!”

People had already been disentangling themselves from the heap. Now, with the secret police looking on, they leapt clear, not wanting to be confused for one of the suspects.

Gasps went up as the last few men removed themselves and Kerrol was exposed. A few of the more stupid among the crowd muttered “Russian,” a few of the more imaginative muttered “werewolf,” most just took a couple of steps backwards and looked shocked. The lead officer drew his pistol and levelled it at Kerrol, who lay where he was, teeth bloody, watching with his overlarge, liquid-dark eyes. Two of the man’s subordinates also drew their pistols and trained them on the canith. Yute, seemingly not worthy of a weapon pointing his way, sat up, rubbing his forehead with both hands.

“Secure this one.” The officer flicked the muzzle of his handgun towards Yute. “Commissar Jung will wish to interrogate him at headquarters. Turn the Jew out into the streets. Let her take her chances there. This one”—he returned his aim to Kerrol—“is an abomination, and I am torn between shooting him between the eyes, or letting the German people exact their own justice.” He looked around. “If they can find a streetlamp tall enough to hang him from!”

A cheer went up at that, as if the officer had suddenly handed them back their right to be a mob rather than a collection of scared individuals.

Yute stood as the first of the crowd moved in to take hold of the battered canith. Something in his strangeness gave the men pause. Perhaps they thought his paleness a contagion that might spread by touch. None made to lay hands on him. A new hush spread.

“I appeal for calm,” Yute said in perfectly accented German, not raising his voice but somehow being heard. He turned his pink eyes on the pistol-carrying officer. “You serve the laws of this land? What crime are we accused of? To whom will we be given an opportunity to state our case?”

The captain—Anne could see he was a captain now—manufactured an ugly smile, showing small white teeth behind bloodless lips. He leaned in as if about to share a confidence but didn’t lower his voice. “Commissar Jung employs men who will enjoy breaking you. Communist, Jew, spy, all of them break, and broken men are so much more agreeable.”

“I’m sure we don’t need to—”

The captain’s fist landed in Yute’s stomach, doubling him over. Laughter spread through the crowd. The woman who had first grabbed Anne sneered and called out to ask how “Whitey” liked that?

Among the jeering, the larger of the two men holding Anne leaned forward and hissed into her ear, “I don’t think you’re even going to make it to the streets, little Jew-rat.” His breath smelled of sour beer and he twisted her arm behind her, making her cry out.

Somehow Kerrol seemed to hear her amid the laughing and catcalls. But when he tried to get up, ignoring the guns trained on him, the men around him started to kick him on all sides, heavy work-boots thudding in. Already injured, he seemed unable to rise.

The captain, warming to his audience, folded his arms and waited for Yute to finish retching. When Yute straightened, wiping his oddly pearlescent blood from his mouth, his eyes held a dazed look. His wandering gaze fixed on one of the few sets of shelves that remained standing. His eyes widened and a look of resignation entered them that was so profound that Anne followed the line of his stare.

Incongruously, a large cat had somehow found its way onto the top of the unit and was busy washing itself, licking a paw then rubbing behind its ear with the paw. Anne had never seen a cat so big. More than twice the size of Mrs. Schreiber’s tom. Almost three times.

In the rowdy throng within the now-smoky library, not one other person had seen the animal, though now with both Yute and Anne staring, several other people exclaimed above the thuds of the kicking being delivered to Kerrol and the jeering.

At last, the captain glanced back.

Anne couldn’t give a proper account of the events that followed. Not even a few minutes later when Kerrol was back on his feet, hunched around his injuries, and the cat was sitting peaceably at Yute’s feet licking blood from its paws. The key moment. The moment that would stay with her for the whole of her life, however much was left to her, was that the cat had bitten off a man’s head. And not just any man—the captain who had struck Yute. She could see it in her mind’s eye: the captain’s head, complete with his black captain’s hat, framed by many sharp teeth, almost seeming to look back at her with those pale blue eyes in the instant it was swallowed away. But ask her how a cat, even one almost as big as three normal cats, could bite the head off a grown man, and she had no answer.

Similarly, she had no idea how the animal had clawed officers of thesecret police from face to foot with single swipes of its paws, or pursued half a hundred previously bloodthirsty citizens from the library while yowling like all the souls of the damned. The cat hadn’t simply grown bigger. It had somehow been all manner of different sizes at once, even in different places at once, before somehow collapsing back into one single, big cat.

“That was unfortunate.” Yute looked out across the fallen shelves, now blood-spattered, with three corpses and an unclaimed arm strewn across them. An injured officer was dragging himself slowly away, focused on nothing but the distant exit.

“They’ll come back.” Kerrol spat crimson onto the headless body by his feet.

“They will,” Anne said, aware that her voice was an octave higher than normal and quavering. Several shots had gone off during the chaos and her ears still rang with them.

“You’ll have to come with us,” Yute said.

“Come where?” Anne looked around again in case some other miracle had presented itself.

“I thought if we followed the library’s currents it might wash us up on the shores of an answer.” Yute bowed his head.

“I don’t think this place is an answer.” Kerrol wiggled one of his teeth. “Or at least not an answer either of us wanted to hear.”

“I thought…” Yute looked at the blood on his hands. “I thought there was something. The corner of something.” He slumped. “We’d better go.”

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