For a moment he bowed his head as though in prayer, and then, silent as the very darkness of night itself, he moved out of his place of hiding and started across the street to the other side. When but halfway across the street he heard a faint sound ahead of him that made his heart stop beating, and his hair practically stand up on end. It was just a sound, one of a million different kinds of sounds that anybody might have heard. Maybe it was a door closing, or someone taking a step, or knocking against something accidentally in the dark.
The sound had come and gone before he could even begin to figure what it might have been. But as he froze motionless in the street, with his service Luger clutched tightly in his free hand, he was convinced beyond all doubt that the sound had been made by a human being. There were no stray dogs or cats in Duisburg to go around nights making sounds. They had long since disappeared, and no doubt more than one German housewife, who had stood in front of the butcher shop all day only to learn that there wasn't a scrap of meat left, could tell where those stray dogs and cats had "gone"!
No, the sound had been made by a human form, a human being. And in a crazy sort of way Dawson expected to see the night spurt flame, and to hear the bark of a gun in his ears, expected his body to feel the sting of a bullet from the gun of some Gestapo killer who had mistaken him for one Heinrich Weiden. It was perhaps a completely mad thought, but in that instant Dawson experienced more cold fear than he had in all his life before.
However, no unseen gun spat flame and sound, and presently Dawson got his pounding heart and jangled nerves under control and started moving forward silently again. Then presently he had reached the opposite sidewalk, and the front door of Number One Fifty-Six was not over fifteen feet away. He could actually see the little metal frames made to hold name cards, but there were only the frames, and no name cards. It was obvious that if anybody did reside at Number One Fifty-Six he was not announcing it to the chance passer-by.
And then suddenly, as Dawson moved toward a little clump of scrub bushes that had been planted to take the place of the iron fence that had long since gone into Hitler's melting pot, he sensed rather than heard movement. Movement came from the other side of the bushes. For a fleeting instant his keyed up nerves snapped, and he was undecided whether to take to his heels as fast as he could go, or to jerk up his gun and pump bullets through the clump of bushes.
He didn't do either, however, because in the next moment there was swift movement right behind him and the muzzle of a gun was jammed into his back.
"Not a move, not a sound!" a whispered voice told him. "Just stand perfectly still if you don't want to die!"
The inside of Dawson's head seemed to explode. He went hot and cold all over, and it was all he could do not to spin around. But he didn't move a muscle even though he recognized the voice instantly.
"Freddy!" he said in a soft whisper. "Freddy, boy! For heaven's sake don't shoot!"
There were tears in Dawson's voice as he whispered. And there were real tears in his eyes, too. Like a man in a dream he felt the gun muzzle being removed from the middle of his back; then strong fingers grasped his arm and turned him around.