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Halstead walked through the streets with his bandages and his bags, attracting very little attention in a town used to the sight of maimed and scarred veterans recuperating before either heading back to the fronts, or, now that the war was over for the time being, either back home or to new posts throughout the German Empire. Halstead himself was headed to Munich that day, but his feet would first take him to the front entrance of the hospital, where he would stand outside and play the role of a recently-discharged patient chain-smoking cigarettes as he waited for one real patient, easily recognizable from the tens of thousands of photographs published in thousands of biographies and history books, to walk out the front doors and catch the next train for Berlin. It was after the third filterless cigarette, stale and foul even though its smoker had paid a bellhop ten marks for the pack, that Halstead spied the little man in a corporal’s uniform march jauntily out of the hospital and swivel ninety degrees, in the direction of the train station. The colonel stubbed his last cigarette out on the sidewalk, resolving to never smoke again, and followed the other man down the street while being careful to keep a discrete distance.
############The train from Pasewalk, one of four dailies that were always filled with wounded soldiers returning from the hospital there, arrived in Berlin with German precision, and both the corporal and the lieutenant colonel calmly walked across the station to their next destination, the express train for Munich. Halstead, who had taken a seat in the same car as the corporal on the first train, followed the other man more closely in the bustling crowds. The little corporal from Austria, described by historians as the perfect soldier, as perfect as only a man with a few screws loose could be, marched to his next train without dallying (except to buy a newspaper from a kiosk in an action that Halstead copied moments later), and stepped up into the third passenger car several minutes before the train’s scheduled departure. Halstead boarded the train in the car behind, so as not to arouse suspicion through recognition, and walked forward between the two cars to take a seat several rows behind the man who had now settled in with his newspaper. |