"Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper (1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hunter Stephen)

The Master Sniper
by
Steven Hunter Stephen Hunter -- author of Point of Impact and the Day Before
Midnight -- does it again with a world War II thriller about a Master
sniper and the men who try to stop him!!

Books by
Stephen Hunter
FICTION
Time to Hunt Black Light Dirty White Boys Point of Impact The Day
Before Midnight Tapestry of Spies The Second Saladin The Master Sniper
nonfiction Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of
Movie Mayhem
STEPHEN HUNTER
THE
MASTER
SNIPER
ISLAND BOOKS
Published by Dell Publishing a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway New York, New York 10036
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher
has received any payment for this "stripped book."
Copyright 1980 by Stephen C. Hunter
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher,
except where permitted by law.
The trademark Dell* is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office.
ISBN: 0440221870
Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in
Canada July 1996 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
OPM
For Jake Hunter and Tolka Zhitomir
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A good many friends and colleagues assisted the author in the
preparation of this manuscript, though they are in no way responsible
for its excesses. But they should be thanked nevertheless. They are
James H. Bready, Curtis Carroll Davis, Gerri Kobren, Henry J. Knoch,
Frederic N. Rasmussen, Michael Hill, Binnie Syril Braunstein, Bill
Auerbach, Joseph Fanzone, Jr." Richard C. Hageman, Lenne P. Miller,
Bruce Bortz, Carleton Jones and Dr. John D. Bullock. Two special
friends deserve their own sentence: Brian Hayes and Wayne J. Henkel.
Lastly, the author would like to pay tribute to two extraordinary
people: his wife, Lucy, and his editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, of William
Morrow, without whom all this would not have happened.
Marksmen are not limited to the location of their unit and are free to
move anywhere they can see a valuable target.. ..
--Instructions for use of S.m.K.
cartridges and rifles with telescopic sights, 1915
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue he hits you with
leaden bullets his aim is true --paul celan, "A Death Fugue"
THE
PART ONE
Schiitzenhaus (Shooting Gallery) January-April 1945 The guards in the
new camp were kinder.
No, Shmuel thought, not kinder. Be precise. Even after many years of
rough treatment he took pride in the exactness of his insights. The
guards were not kinder, they were merely indifferent. Unlike the pigs
in the East, these fellows were blank and efficient. They wore their
uniforms with more pride and stood straighter and were cleaner. Scum,
but proud scum; a higher form of scum.
In the East, the guards had been grotesque. It was a death factory,
lurid, unbelievable, even now eroding into fantastic nightmare. It
manufactured extermination, the sky above it blazed orange in the night
for the burning of corpses in the thousands. You breathed your
brothers. And if not selected out in the first minutes, you were kept
caked in your own filth. You were Untermensch, subhuman. He had
survived in that place for over a year and a half and if a large part
of his survival was luck, a large part also was not.
Shmuel came by the skills of survival naturally, without prior
training. He had not lived a hardy physical life in the time he
thought of as Before. He had in fact been a literary type, full of
words and ideas, a poet, and R
believed someday he would write a novel. He had written bold
commentaries for Nasz Przeglad, Warsaw's most influential Yiddish
newspaper. He'd been the friend of some real dazzlers too, Mendl
Elkin, Peretz Hirschbein, the radical Zionist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg,
Melekn Ravitch, to name but a few. They were great fellows, talkers,
laughers, great lovers of women, and they were probably all dead now.
Shmuel had not thought of literature since 1939. He rarely thought at
all of Before, knowing it the first sign of surrender. There was only
now, today. Perhaps tomorrow as well, but one could never be too sure.
But he persisted in his literary habits in just one way: he insisted on
looking into the center of things. And he'd been puzzling over this
strange new place for days now, ever since he'd arrived.
They'd been trucked in; that in itself was an astonishment, for the
German way was to herd Jews through forests and if some--or many--died
along the way, well, that was too bad. But a truck had bounced them in
cold darkness for hours, and Shmuel and the others had sat, huddled and
patient, until it halted and the canvas blanketing its back was ripped
off.
"Out, Jews, out! Fast, fast, boys!"
They spilled into snowy glare. Shmuel, blinking in the whiteness of
it, saw immediately he was at no Konzentrationslager. He knew no
German word for what he saw: a desolate forest setting, walls of pine
and fir, sheathed in snow, looming beyond the wire; and within the
compound just three or four low wooden buildings around a larger one of
concrete. There were no dogs or watch 5
towers either, just laconic SS boys dressed in some kind of forester's
outfit, dappled in the patterns and shadows of deep trees, with
automatic guns.
More curiosities became evident shortly and if the other prisoners
cared merely for the ample bread, the soup, the occasional piece of
sausage that it had become their incredible good fortune to enjoy,
Shmuel at least would keep track.
In fact he and his comrades, he quickly came to realize, were still
another oddity of the place. Why had the Germans bothered to gather
such a shabby crew of victims?
What do we have in common, Shmuel often wondered, we Jews and Russians
and Slavic types? There were twenty-five others and in looking at them
he saw only the outer aspects of himself in reflection: small, wiry
men, youngsters many of them, with that furtive look that living on the
edge of extinction seems to confer.
Though now it was a fact they lived as well as any German soldier.
Besides the food, the barrack was warm. Other small privileges were
granted: they were allowed to wash, to use latrines. They were given
the field gray flannels of old Wehrmacht uniforms to wear and even
issued the great woolen field coats from the Russian front. Here
Shmuel experienced his first setback.
He had the bad fortune to receive one that had been hacked with a
bayonet. Its lining was ripped out.
Until he solved this problem, he'd be cold.
And then the labor. Shmuel had had the SS for an employer before at
the I. G. Farben synthetic fuel factory--the rule was double-time or
die. Here, by contrast, the work was mostly listless digging of
defensive positions and the excavation of foundations for concrete
blockhouses under the less-than-attentive eye of a pipe-smoking SS
sergeant, an amiable sort who didn't seem to care if they progressed or
not, just as long as he had his tobacco and a warm coat and no officers
yelling at him. Once a prisoner had dropped his shovel in a fit of
coughing. The sergeant looked at him, bent over and picked it up. He
didn't even shoot him.
One day, as the group fussed in the snow, a young corporal came out to
the detail.
"Got two strong ones for me? Some heavy business in Shed Four," Shmuel
heard the young man ask.
"Hans the Kike."
The sergeant sucked reflectively on his pipe, belched out an aromatic
cloud of smoke, and said, "Take the two on the end. The Russian works
like a horse and the little Jew keeps moving to stay warm." And he
laughed.
Shmuel was surprised to discover himself "the little Jew."
They were taken over to some kind of warehouse or supply shed just
beyond the main building. Boxes were everywhere, vials, cans. A
laboratory? wondered Shmuel uneasily. A small man in civilian clothes
was already there. He did not glance at them at all, but turned to the
corporal and said, "Here, those, have them load them up and get them
over to the Main Center at once."
"Yes, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor," said the corporal, and when the civilian
fellow left, the corporal turned to Shmuel and said quite
conversationally, "Another Jew, you know. They'll come for him one
day." Then he took them to the corner of the room, where two wooden
crates were stacked, and with a wave of the hand indicated to the
prisoners to load them onto a dolly.
Each crate weighed around seventy-five kilos and the prisoners strained
to get them down and across the room to the dolly. Shmuel had the
impression of liquid sloshing weightily as he and the Russian
crab-walked the first one over, yet there was nothing loose about the
contents. The twin runes of the SS flashed melodramatically in stencil
across the lid, and next to them, also stamped, was the mighty German
eagle, clutching a swastika. The designation WVHA also stood out on
the wood and Shmuel wondered what it could mean, but he should not have
been wondering, he should have been carrying, for the heel of his boot
slipped and he felt the crate begin to tear loose from his fingers. He
groped in panic, but it really got away from him and his eyes met the
Russian's in terror as the box fell.
It hit the cement floor with a thud and broke apart.
The Russian dropped to his knees and began to weep piteously. Shmuel
stood in fear. The room blurred in the urgency of his situation. Askew
on the cement, a great fluffy pile of excelsior spewing out of it like
guts, the box lay broken on the floor. An evil-smelling fluid spread
smoothly into a puddle.
The civilian returned swiftly.
"You idiots," he said to them.
"And where were you while these fools were destroying valuable
chemicals?
Snoozing in the corner?"
"No, sir, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor," lied the young corporal.
"I was watching closely. But these Eastern Jews are shifty. I just
wasn't fast enough to prevent--" The civilian cut him off with a
laugh.
"That's all I get from the Waffen SS is excuses. Have them clean it up
and try not to drop the other crates, all right?"
"Yes, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. My apologies for failing at--" "All
right, all right," said the civilian disgustedly, turning.
When the civilian left, the SS corporal hit Shmuel across the neck,
just above the shoulder, with his fist, a downward blow. It drove him
to the floor. The boy kicked him, hard, in the ribs. He knew he was
in a desperately dangerous situation. He'd seen a KZ guard in '44
knock down an elderly rabbi in much the same way.
The man, baffled, glasses twisted, raised his hands to ward off other
blows; this insolence so enraged the stupid young soldier that he
snatched out his pistol and shot the man through the forehead. The
body lay in the square for three days, head split apart, until they'd
removed it with tongs.
"You stinking kike pig," screamed the boy. He kicked Shmuel again. He
was almost out of control.
"You piece of Jew shit." Shmuel could hear him sobbing in anger.
He bent over and grabbed Shmuel by the throat, twisting him upward so
that their faces were inches apart.
"Surprises ahead for you, Jew-shit. Der Meisterschuster, the Master
Shoemaker, has a nice candy delight for you." His face livid and
contorted, he drew back.
"That's right, Jew-shit, a real surprise for you."
He spoke in a clipped Prussian accent hard and quick, that Shmuel,
whose basic Yiddish was a derivation of the more languid Bavarian
German, had difficulty understanding when spoken so quickly.
The corporal backed off, color returning to his face.
"All right, up! Up!" he shouted.
Shmuel climbed up quickly. He was trembling badly.
"Now get this mess cleaned up."
Shmuel and the Russian gathered the excelsior into a wad of newspaper
and mopped the floor dry. They also retrieved the broken glass and
then, carefully, finished loading the cart.
"Bravo! Fine! What heroes!" said the boy sarcastically.
"Now get your asses out of here before I kick them again!"
Shmuel had been playing for this second for quite some time. He'd seen
it from the very first moments.
He'd thought about how he'd do it and resolved to act quickly and with
courage. He took a deep breath, reached down and picked up the wad of
newspaper and stuffed it into his coat.
With the bundle pressing against his stomach, he stepped into the cold.
He waited for a call to return; it didn't come. Keeping his eyes
straight ahead, he rejoined the labor detail.
Not until late that night did Shmuel risk examining his treasure. He
could hear steady, heavy breathing; at last he felt safe. You never
knew who'd sell you for a cigarette, a sliver of cheese. In the
darkness, he opened the paper carefully, trying to keep it from
rattling. Inside, now matted and balled, the clump of excelsior was
still damp from the fluid. The stuff was like mattress ticking, or
horsehair, thick and knotted. Eagerly, his fingers pulled tufts out
and kneaded them, until he could feel the individual strands.
There was no question of knitting; he had no loom and no skill. But he
spread it out and, working quietly and quickly in the dark, began to
thread it into the lining of the greatcoat. He kept at it until nearly
dawn, inserting the bunches of packing into the coat. When at last
there was no more, he examined what he had made.
It was lumpy and uneven, no masterpiece; but what did that matter? It
was, he knew, significantly warmer.
Shmuel lay back and felt a curious thing move through his body, a
feeling long dead to his bones. At first he thought he might be coming
down with a sickness and the feeling might be fever spreading through
his body. But then he recognized it: pleasure.
For the first time in years he began to think he might beat them. But
when he slept, his nightmares had a new demon in them: a master
shoemaker, driving hobnails into his flesh.
A week or so later, he was in the trench, digging, when he heard voices
above him. Obeying an exceedingly stupid impulse, he looked up.
Standing on the edge, their features blanked out by the winter sun, two
officers chatted. A younger one was familiar, a somewhat older one
not. Or was he? Shmuel had been dreaming all these nights of the
Master Shoemaker and his candy delight. This man? No, ridiculous, not
this bland fellow standing easily with a cigarette, discussing
technical matters. He wore the same faded camouflage jackets they all
had, and baggy green trousers, boots with leggings and a squashed cap
with a skull on it. Quickly Shmuel turned back to his shovel, but as
he dropped his face, he felt the man's eyes snap onto him.
"Einer Jud?" Shmuel heard the man ask.
The younger fellow called to the sergeant. The sergeant answered
Yes.
Now I'm in for it, Shmuel thought.
"Bring him up," said the officer.
Strong hands clapped onto Shmuel instantly. He was dragged out of the
trench and made to stand before the officer. He grabbed his hat and
looked at his feet, waiting for the worst.
"Look at me," said the officer.
Shmuel looked up. He had the impression of pale eyes in a weathered
face which, beneath the imprint of great strain, was far younger than
he expected.
"You are one of the chosen people?"
"Y-yes, sir, your excellency."
"From out East?"
"Warsaw, your excellency."
"You are an intellectual. A lawyer, a teacher?"
"A writer, most honored sir."
"Well, you'll have plenty to write about after the war, won't you?" The
other Germans laughed.
"Yes, sir. Y-yes, sir."
"But for now, you're not used to this hard work?"
"N-no, sir," he replied. He could not stop stuttering.
His heart pounded in his chest. He'd never been so close to a German
big shot before.
"Everybody must work here. That is the German way." He had lightless
eyes. He didn't look as if he'd ever cried.
"Yes, most honored sir."
"All right," the officer said.
"Put him back. I just wanted the novel experience of taking one of
them out of a pit."
After the laughter, the sergeant said, "Yes, Herr
Obersturmbannfrihrer," and he knocked Shmuel sprawling into the
trench.
"Back to work, Jew. Hurry, hurry."
The officer was gone quickly, moving off with the younger chap. Shmuel
stole a glimpse of the man striding off, calm and full of decisiveness.
Could this simple soldier be the Master Shoemaker? The face: not
remotely unusual, a trifle long, the eyes quick but drab, the nose
bony, the lips thin. The overall aspect perfunctorily military. Not,
Shmuel concluded, an unusual fellow to find in the middle of a war.
And yet because he seemed so easily in command and it was so clear that
the others deferred to him, Shmuel took to thinking of the man as the
Shoemaker.
Then a day came when the Germans did not fetch them for work. Shmuel
awoke at his leisure, in light. As he blinked in it, he was filled
with dread. The prisoners lived so much by routine that a single
variation terrified them. The others felt it too.
Finally the sergeant came by.
"Stay inside today, boys, take a holiday. The Reich is rewarding you
for your loyal service." He grinned at his joke.
"Important people crawling about today." And then he was gone.
Late in the afternoon, two heavy trucks pulled into the yard. They
halted next to the concrete building and hard-looking men with
automatic guns dismounted and deployed around the entrance. Shmuel
caught a glimpse and stepped away from the window. He'd seen their
type before: police commandos who shot Jews in pits.
"Look," said a Pole, in wonder.
"A big boss."
Shmuel looked again, and saw a large black sedan parked next to the
truck; pennants hung off it limply; it was spotted with mud, yet shiny
and huge.
A prisoner said, "I heard who it is. I heard them talking.
They were very nervous, very excited."
"Hitler himself?"
"Not that big. But a big one still."
"Who, damn you? Tell."
"The Man of Oak."
"What? What did you say?"
"Man of Oak. I heard him say it. And the other--" "It's crazy. You
misunderstood."
"It's the truth."
"You shtetl Jews. You'll believe anything. Go on, get out of here.
Leave me in peace."
The car and the police commandos remained until after dark, and later
that night, a crackling rang in the distance.
"Somebody's shooting," said a man.
"Look! A battle."
In the distance, light sprayed through the night.
Flames glowed. The reports came in the hundreds. It didn't look like
a battle to Shmuel. He recalled the sky over the crematorium, shot
with sparks and licks of flame. The SS was feeding the Hungarian Jews
into the ovens. The smell of ash and shit filled the sky. No bird
would fly through it.
Abruptly the shooting stopped.
* * *
In the morning the fancy vehicles were gone. But things did not return
to normal. The prisoners were formed into a column and marched off
along a heavily rutted road through the forest. It was February now,
and much of the snow had melted, but patches of it remained; in the
meantime there had been rain, and the road was mud which congealed on
Shmuel's boots. The woods on either side of the road loomed up, dense
and chilly. To Shmuel they were the woods of an ugly German Undrchen,
full of trolls and dwarves and witches, into which children
disappeared. He shivered, colder than he should have been. These
people loved their dark forests, the shadows, the intricate webs of
dark and light.
A mile or so away, the woods yielded to a broad field, yellow and scaly
with snow. At one end of it, the earth mounted into a wall and at the
other, the nearer, a concrete walkway lay and a few huts huddled in the
trees.
"Boys," said the sergeant, "we had a little show out here last night
for our visitor and we'd like your help in cleaning up."
The guards handed out wooden crates and directed the prisoners to
harvest the bits of brass that showed in the mud alongside the walkway.
Shmuel, prying the grimy things out--they were, it turned out, used
cartridge cases--felt his knees beginning to go numb in the cold, his
fingers beginning to sting. He noted the Gothic printing running
across the box in his hand. Again, the melodramatic bird and the
double flashes of the SS. He wondered idly what the next gibberish
meant: "7.92mm X 33 (Kurz)" read one line; under it "G. C. HAENEL,
SUHL," and under it still a third, "STG-44." The 5
Germans were rationalists in everything; they wanted to stick a
designation on every object in the universe.
Maybe that's why he'd walked around marked jud the last year or so.
"He certainly fired enough of the stuff," said the pipe smoker to one
of the other guards.
"We could have used some at Kursk," said another man bitterly.
"Now they shoot it off for big shots. It's crazy. No wonder the
Americans are on the Rhine."
This exercise was repeated several times in the next few weeks. Once,
several prisoners were jerked from their sleep and marched out. The
story they told the next morning was an interesting one. After they'd
picked up the spent shells, the Germans had been especially hearty to
them, treated them like comrades. A bottle had even been passed around
to them.
"German stuff."
"Schnapps?"
"That's it. Fiery. An instant overcoat. Takes the chill out of your
bones."
The Big Boss--Shmuel knew it was the Shoemaker-was there too, the man
said. He'd walked among them, asking them if they were getting enough
to eat. He handed out cigarettes, Russian ones, and chocolates.
"Friendly fellow, not like some I've seen," said the man.
"Looked me square in the eye too."
But Shmuel wondered why they'd need the shells back in the night.
A week, perhaps two, passed, though without reference to clock or
calendar it was hard to tell. Rain, sun, a little snow one night. Was
there more activity around the concrete building? More night firings?
The Shoemaker seemed everywhere, almost always with the young officer.
Shmuel had never seen the civilian--the one they said was a
kike--again. Had he been taken away like the boy said? And he began
to worry about this "Man of Oak." What could it mean? Shmuel started
to feel especially uneasy, if only because the others were so pleased
with the way things were going.
"Plenty to eat, work's not so bad, and one day, you'll see, the
Americans'll show up and it'll be all over."
But Shmuel began to worry. He trusted his feelings.
He worried especially about the night. It was the night that
frightened him. Bad things happened in the night, especially to Jews.
The night held special terrors for Jews; the Germans were drawn to it
unhealthily. What was their phrase? Nacht und Nebel. Night and fog,
the components of obliteration.
Light flashed through the barrack. Shmuel, dazed out of his sleep, saw
torch beams in the darkness, and shadows.
The SS men got them awake roughly.
"Boys," the pipe smoker crooned in the dark, "work to do. Have to earn
our bread. It's the German way."
Shmuel pulled the field coat around him and filed out with the others.
His pupils were slow in adjusting and he had trouble making out what
was occurring. The guards trudged them through the mud. They had left
the compound.
Guards with automatic guns prowled on either side of the column. Shmuel
peered up through the fir canopy. Cold light from dead stars reached
his eyes. The dark was satiny, alluring, the stars abundant. A wind
howled. He pulled the coat tighter. Thank God for it.
They reached the firing range. Fellows were all about, a crowd.
Everybody was there. Shmuel could sense their warmth, hear them
breathing. All the SS boys; the Shoemaker himself, smoking a
cigarette. Shmuel thought he saw the civilian too, standing a little
apart with two or three other men.
"This way, lads," said the sergeant, leading them into the field.
"Brass all over the place. Can't leave it here, the General Staff'd
kick our ass for sure. Hot coffee, schnapps, cigarettes for all when
the job's done, just like before."
There was no moon. The night was dark and pure, pressing down. The
prisoners spread out in a line and faced back toward the Germans.
"It's in front of you boys, brass, tons of it. Have to get it up
before the snow."
Snow? It was clear tonight.
Shmuel obediently worked his fingers over the frozen ground, found a
shell. He found another. It was so cold out. He looked around. The
guards had left. The prisoners were alone in the field. The trees
were a dark blur in the far distance. Stars towered above them, dust
and freezing gas and spinning fire wheels Far off, unreachable.
The field was another infinity. It seemed to stretch forever. They
were all alone.
"Hey, he's sleeping," said someone, laughing.
Another man slid himself carefully on the ground, shoulders flat to the
earth.
"You jokers are going to get us all in trouble." The same voice
laughed.
Another lay down.
Another.
They fell relaxed, turned in slightly, tucking the knees under, seeming
to pause at the waist then gently lurching forward.
Shmuel stood.
"They're shooting us," somebody said quite prosaically.
"They're shoo--" The sentence stopped on a bullet.
Prayers disturbed the night; there was no other sound.
A bullet struck the man closest to him in the throat, driving him
backward. Another, slumping, began to gurgle and gasp as his lungs
flooded. But most perished quickly and silently, struck dead center,
brain or heart.
It is here. The night has come, Shmuel thought.
Nacht, nacht, pressing in, claiming him. He always knew it would come
and now it was here. He knew it would be better to close his eyes but
could not.
A man ran until a bullet found him and punched him to the ground. A
man on his knees had the top of his head blown off. Drops landed wet
and hot on Shmuel.
He alone was standing. He looked around. Someone was moaning. He
thought he heard some breathing. It had taken less than thirty
seconds. The shooting was all over now.
He stood in the middle of the field, surrounded by corpses. Now he was
really alone.
A shape in the dark moved. Then others. Shmuel could see soldiers
picking their way toward him in the darkness. He stood very still. The
Germans began to kneel at the bodies.
"Right in the heart!"
"This one in the head. That Repp fellow really can shoot, eh?"
"Hold that noise down, damn you," cried a voice Shmuel recognized as
the pipe smoker's.
"The officers will be out here soon."
A soldier was standing six feet from him.
"What? Say, who's that?" the man said in bewilderment.
"Hauser, I said keep the noise down. The offi--" "He's alive!"
bellowed the soldier, and began to tear at his gun.
Shmuel willed himself to run. But he couldn't.
Then he was fleeing blindly across the field.
"Damn, I saw a prisoner."
"Where?"
"Stop that fellow. Stop that man."
"Shoot him. Shoot him."
"Where, I don't see a damned thing."
Other voices mingled in confusion. A shot rang out, loud because it
was so close. More shouts.
Shmuel had just made it into the trees when the lights came on. The
Germans were pinned in a harsh, white glare, losing more seconds.
Shmuel caught a glimpse of the Shoemaker moving fast into the light,
automatic gun in one hand. A whistle shrilled. More lights flickered
on.
There was a siren.
It was at this moment, as he seized a moment's rest, that a revelation
hit him. A moment of perfect, shimmering lucidity enveloped him and a
truth that had these many months been just beyond knowing at last stood
revealed. His heart tripped in excitement.
But no time now. He turned and lurched into the forest. He began to
run. Branches cut at him like sabers.
Once he tripped. He could hear Germans behind him, much commotion and
light; the glare of heavy arc lamps filled the sky. He thought he
heard airplanes too, at any rate some kind of heavy engine, trucks
perhaps or motorcycles.
Then the lights were out, or gone. He was utterly confused and quite
frightened. How long had he been gone and how far had he traveled? And
where was he going? And, would he be caught? Miraculously, his feet
seemed to have found a path in the heavy undergrowth.
He wanted badly to rest but knew he couldn't. Thank God the food and
labor had given him strength for all this, and the coat the warmth. He
was a lucky fellow. He plunged on.
The sun was just up when Shmuel finally lay down in the silence of the
great forest. He lay shuddering convulsively.
He seemed to have come to a vault in the trees, a cathedral of space
formed by interlocking branches. The silence was thunderous in here;
he interrupted it only with his breathing. He felt himself at last
escaping into sleep.
His final thought was not for his deliverance--who could question such
caprices?--but for his discovery.
Meisterschuster, master shoemaker, he heard, or thought he'd heard. But
the boy was a North German, he spoke fast and clipped and the
circumstances of the moment were intense. Now Shmuel realized the
fellow had said something just a syllable shy of Meisterschuster.
He'd said der Meisterschiitze.
 Caparisoned in elegant damp Burberry, imperially slim, impossibly
dapper, with just the faintest smudge of ginger moustache to set off
his boyish though firm features, a British major named Antony
Outhwaithe bore down on a large target that hunched behind a typewriter
in an upper-story office.
"Hello, chum," called the major, knowing the American hated the chum
business, which by now, winter of '45, had in London become quite
tiresome, "greetings from Twelveland."
The American looked up; a bafflement fell across his open features,
just the merest foreboding of confusion.
His name was Leets and he was a captain in the Office of Strategic
Services. He wore olive drab wool and silver bars and looked unhappy.
His crew cut had grown out thatchily and his face had accumulated
pockets and wattles of fat. He had just been typing the final draft of
what was certain to be the most unread document in London that month, a
report on the new grip configuration of the Falschinnjaeger-42, the
German short-stroke paratroop carbine.
"Something right up your alley," the major sang out gleefully, and
without fear of retribution. He enjoyed considerable advantage over
the bloke: he was smaller and a few years older to begin with, cut on
roughly half the scale. He was quicker, wittier, more ironic, better
connected. His employers, the Special Operation Executive of MI-6,
were a better bunch than Leets's; and finally, he'd once upon a time
saved the American's life.
That was back in the shooting war, in June of '44.
Leets, a beat behind already, queried in his reedy Midwestern voice,
"Small arms, you mean?"
"That is what you do in the war, is it not?" asked Tony.
Leets ignored the sarcasm and received from Tony's briefcase a
tatty-looking scrap of yellow paper, almost the texture of parchment,
as though it had passed through many hands.
"Been around, huh?" Leets said.
"Yes, lots of chaps have seen it. It's not terribly interesting.
Still, since it is guns and bullets, I thought you might care to have a
look."
"Thanks. Looks like a--" "It's a telex."
"Yeah, some kind of shipping order or something."
He scanned the thing.
"Haenel, eh? Funny. STG forty-fours."
"Funny, yes. But significant? Or not? You'll give us your
evaluation, of course."
"I may have some things to say about it."
"Good."
"How fast?"
"No rush, chum. By eight tonight."
Swell, Leets thought. But he had nothing to do anyway.
"Okay, let me dig out the specs on the thing and--" But he was talking
to air. Outhwaithe had vanished.
Leets slowly drew out a Lucky, lit it off his Zippo and went to work.
Leets was a biggish man, not slob by fat, but ample, with a pleasantly
open American face. He was far into his twenties, which was old for
the rank of captain he wore in two bars on his collar, especially in a
war in which twenty-two-year-old brigadier generals led thousands of
airplanes deep into enemy territory.
He looked like a studious athlete or an athletic scholar and now that
he limped, compliments of the Third Reich, and occasionally went white
as the pain flashed unexpectedly across him, he'd acquired a grave,
almost desperate air. His many nervous habits--unpleasant ones,
licking his lips, muttering, gesturing over theatrically blinking
constantly--half suggested dissipation or indolence, though by nature
he was an austere man, a Midwesterner, not given to moodiness or
mopery. Yet lately, as the war roared by him, someone else's
invention, he'd been both moody and mopey.
Now, alone in the office--another source of bitterness, for he'd been
assigned a sergeant, but the kid, an energetic young beast, had a
tendency to disappear on him at key moments such as this one--he
brought the telex close to his eyes in an unselfconscious parody of
bookish intellectual and, squinting melodramatically, attempted to
master its secrets.
It was a pale carbon of a shipping order out of the Reich Rail Office,
a part of the Wehrmacht Transport Command, authorizing the G. K. Haenel
Fabrik, or factory, near Suhl, in northern Germany, to ship a batch of
twelve Sturmgewehr-44's, formerly called Maschinenpistole-44's,
cross-country to something called, if Leets understood the nomenclature
of the form, Aniage Elf, or Installation 11. The 44 was a hot assault
rifle, tested in Russia, that had lately been turning up on the Western
front in the hands of Waffen SS troops, paratroopers, armored-vehicle
commanders--glory boys, hard cores, professionals. Leets had a memory
of the thing too-he'd lain in high grass on a ridge above a burning
tank convoy while Waffen SS kids from an armored division called "Das
Reich" had poured heavy STG-44 fire into the area. He could still hear
the cracks as the slugs broke the sound barrier just above his head. It
fired a smaller bullet than the standard rifle--it hadn't the
range--but at higher velocity; and it was lighter and tougher and could
pump out rounds at full automatic.
Leets shivered in the memory: lying there, his leg bleeding like sin
all over the place, the men near him dead or dying, the smell of
burning gas and summer flowers heavy in his nose and the thatchy
figures of the camouflaged SS men moving up the slope, firing as they
came.
His throat was dry.
Leets lit a butt. He had one going, but what the hell?
It was another habit gone totally out of control.
Okay, where was I?
Curious, yes, quite curious. STG-44's went out from Haenel all the
time, but in larger quantities. They came off the assembly line in the
hundreds, the thousands, but distribution was always through normal
channels, ultimately in the hands of local commanders. Why bother to
make a big deal of shipping rifles across a
Germany whose railway network was one huge target of opportunity for
fighter-bombers? What's more, he realized that the form had the top
rail priority, DE, and Geheime Stadatten, top secret, and the magenta
eagle of state secrecy pounded onto it.
Wasn't that an odd one?
They were cranking these things out by the thousands--that was one of
the charms of the 44, for unlike the MP-40 or the Gew-41, it could be
quickly assembled from pre stamped parts, without any time-consuming
milling. Their ease of manufacture was part of their appeal.
So all of a sudden they were top secret? God-damnedest thing.
Leets drew back from the yellow sheet and squirmed at the effort of
trying to apply his thoughts to these matters. It was a big mistake,
because a chip of German metal deep in the core of his leg rubbed the
wrong way, nicking against a nerve.
Pain jacked up through his body.
Leets rocketed out of his seat and yelped. He felt free to let it take
him because he was alone. Among others, he simply clenched and clammed
up, whitening, looking at his feet.
The pain finally passed, as it always did. He limped back to his chair
and gingerly reclaimed it. But his concentration had been seriously
damaged, more and more of a problem these recent days, and he knew if
he didn't act fast the whole fucked-up scenario of that one battle
would unreel before his eyes. It was no favorite of his.
So Leets grabbed back into his mind for something to put between
himself and the day Jedburgh Team Casey caught it. He came up with
football, which he'd played at Northwestern, '38, '39 and '40. He had
been an end, and ends didn't do much except knock people down, a task
made significantly easier because he'd played next to NU's all-American
tackle Roy Reed, and Reed, in the '40 season, had picked up the
nickname "Nazi" after the Blitzkrieg of the spring, because of the way
he crashed through and laid people out. But Leets had once caught a
touchdown pass--perhaps the happiest moment of his life--and now he
resurrected the glory of that moment as a shield against the panic of
this one.
He remembered an object coming wobbling out of the dusk of a Dyche
Stadium afternoon; it was way off the true, a lumbering, ungainly thing
that seemed far gone if it could reach him at all through the gauntlet
of nailing arms he saw it must travel. The only reason the ball was
coming at Leets was that a hand-off to the right halfback who was
supposed to follow Reed into the end zone for a winning touchdown had
somehow missed connections, and the quarterback, a big, stupid boy
named Lindemeyer, a Phi Delt, had taken his only available option,
which was to toss the thing to the first guy in purple he saw.
Leets saw it bending toward the earth, miraculously untouched by the
half a dozen hands that had had a shot at it, and he had no memory of
catching, only the sensation of clasping it to his chest while people
jumped on him. Later, he'd figured that he must have been in midair
when he made the grab, defying gravity, and that his normally unwilling
fingers, clumsy, blunt things, had acquired in the urgency of the
instant a physical genius almost beyond his imagination. But in the
exultation,
none of this was clear: only sensation, as joy flooded through him, and
people pounded him on the back.
Leets took another stab on the Lucky. He readjusted his reading
lamp--he must have knocked it askew when he popped up--and looked for
an ashtray amid a clutter of pencils, curling German weapons
instruction charts, sticks of gum, assorted breech parts, cups of cold
tea, and cough drops--Roger, his sergeant, had had a cold a few weeks
back. What was I looking for? Ashtray, ashtray.
He slid it out from the pile that had absorbed it just as a worm of ash
on the end of his cigarette toppled off into gray haze and settled
across the table.
The office was on the upper floor of an undistinguished building on
Ford's Place near Bloomsbury Square, a cold-water flat converted to
commercial use sometime in the Twenties by knocking down most of the
interior walls and adding an elevator--lift, lift, lift!" he was
always forgetting--which never worked anyway.
The roof leaked. There was no central heating and Roger never
remembered to keep the coal heater stoked so it was always cold, and
every time a V-2 or a doodle touched down anywhere within ten square
miles, which was frequent these days, a pall of dust drifted down to
coat everything.
Leets squinted again at the German document, as if drawing a bead on
it. Its bland surface revealed nothing new. Or did it? Holding it at
an angle into the light, he could make out two faint impressions on the
paper.
Someone had stamped the original with a great deal of zeal; down here
on the bottom carbon only a trace of the stamper's enthusiasm remained,
fainter than a watermark.
Surely the Brits would have some sort of Scot land Yard hocus-pocus for
bringing up the impressions.
Still, he laid the thing out and, remembering some Boy Scout stuff, ran
the flat of a soft lead pencil across the ridges just as gently as he
knew how, as if he were stroking the inside of a woman's thigh. Susan's
thigh, to be exact, though thoughts of her were of no use now--but that
was another problem.
Two images revealed themselves in the gray sheen of the rubbed lead,
one familiar, one not. The old friend read simply WaPriif2, which
Leets knew to be the infantry weapons department of the Heereswaffenamt
Prufwesson, the Army testing office. These were the boys who'd cooked
up the little surprises of late that had made his job so interesting:
that junky little people's machine pistol, the Volksturmgewehr,
manufactured for a couple of dimes' worth of junk metal, it fired 300
nine-mills a minute; and they also had an imitation Sten out, for
behind-the-lines operations, or after the war; and a final dizziness,
something called a Krummlauf modification, a barrel-deflection device
mounted on the STG-44, which enabled it to fire around corners. The
line on German engineering had always been that it was pedantic and
thorough; but Leets didn't think so. A wild strain of genius ran
through it. They were miles ahead in most things, the rockets, the
jets, the guns. It made him uneasy.
If they could come up with stuff like that (a gun for shooting round
corners!), who knew what else they were capable of?
Leets was by profession an intelligence officer; his specialty was
German firearms. He ran an office--obscure to be sure, not found in
any of the mighty eight-hundred-page histories--called the Small
Weapons
Evaluation Team, which in turn was part of a larger outfit, a Joint
Anglo-American Technical Intelligence Committee, sponsored in its
American half by Leets's OSS and in its Anglo half by Major
Outhwaithe's SOE.
So SWET worked for JAATIC, and Leets for Outhwaithe. That was Leets's
war now: an office full of dusty blueprints. It was no-SWET, as Roger
was so fond of pointing out (Leets's joke actually; Roger was a great
borrower).
But here was Wa Pruf 2 involved in a shipment of twelve rifles across
Germany. Now what could be so fascinating about those particular
twelve rifles? It bothered him, because it was so un-German.
Twelveland, as the Brits called the place in their intelligence jargon,
was a maze of intricacies: bureaus, departments--Amis, the Germans
called them--desks, sub desks--not at all unlike London in this
respect--but the place was in its way always tidy, ordered. Even with
the bombs raining down, most of her cities wrecked, millions dead,
Russian armies squeezing in from the East, American and British ones
poised in the West, no food, no fuel, still the paper work moved like
clockwork. Except, all of a sudden, here was this obscure little
agency that nobody except himself probably and some two or three others
in this town had ever even heard of, involved in some goofy business.
It bothered him; but what bothered him more was the other stamp he'd
brought out: WVHA.
Now what the hell was WVHA?
Another bureau presumably, but one he'd never heard of; another tidy
little office buried away in downtown Berlin.
An idea was beginning to grow in Leets's mind, dangerously.
He lit another cigarette. He knew somewhere in the files he had a real
good breakdown on the STG-44. It was an ingenious weapon, a
Stunngewehr, assault rifle, cross between the best parts of a
submachine gun, firepower and lightness, and a rifle, accuracy, range.
He supposed he'd have to dig the goddamned stuff out himself; he
remembered how when they'd gotten their hands on one they'd broken it
down to the pins and put it together again, taken it out to the range
and shot up a battalion of targets, and put together an absolutely
brilliant technical profile which had been shipped up to JAATIC and
routinely ignored.
Leets went over to the files and began to prowl. But just as he got
the report out, another thought came flooding over him.
Serial numbers.
Goddamn, serial numbers.
He rushed back to the telex. Now where the hell was it?
A stab of panic but then he saw the yellow corner sticking out from
under a dog-eared copy of Bill Fielding's Tournament Tennis and the
Spin of the Ball-Roger's bible--and he knocked the book aside and
seized the telex.
Serial numbers.
Serial numbers.
Leets stood at the window with the lights out, even though the blackout
was officially over and London was now into a phase called dim-out. He
looked over the skyline, drawn not long ago by the impact of a V-2.
Sometimes they burned, sometimes they didn't. This one had come down
to the north a half a mile or so, beyond, Leets hoped, the Hospital for
Sick Children on Great Ormond Street, maybe as far off as Coram
Fields.
But there'd be nothing to burn if it went down in that rolling meadow
and he could see a smudge--orange thumbprint--on the horizon; so
clearly there was fire.
Thing must have hit even farther out, beyond Gray's Inn Road and the
Royal Free Hospital. He'd have to walk out there sometime and see.
The rockets were a curious phenomenon for Leets.
They were big bullets really; even the Germans acknowledged this. The
V-2, technical designation A4, was a Wehrmacht project, administered by
the SS, interpreted as artillery. A bullet, in other words. The
doodles, V-l's, were Luftwaffe, aircraft.
Consider: a bullet as big as a building fired from a rifle in Holland
or Twelveland itself at a target in London.
Jesus; Leets felt a shiver run through him. It was different from
being bombed or shelled randomly; some fucking Kraut sniper was scoping
in on you through the dark and the distance, this feeling of being
watched, strange; a weirdness traveled his spine, a chill, but he
realized that it was only a draft and a split second later that the
door had been opened.
"Should have knocked, sorry," said Tony.
"I wanted to see where they parked their freight tonight.
Looked like it went down near the hospital, the one for kids."
"Actually, it went down much farther out, in Islington.
Could we, chum, do you mind?" Gesturing Close-the-curtains while he
turned on the switch.
"You're early," said Leets. It was half past seven.
"Bit ahead of schedule, yes."
"Okay," Leets said, taking his seat and pulling out the telex and
assorted other items, "this is funny."
"Make me laugh."
"They're shipping a special consignment of rifles across Germany. Now
our best estimate is that maybe eighty thousand of the things have been
built since Hitler gave 'em the green light in '43. Most of the eighty
thousand came off the Haenel line at Suhl, although the Mauser works at
Oberndorf did a run of ten thousand before we bombed out the line. The
markings are different, and the plastic in the grip was cheaper,
chipped more easily."
Outhwaithe, in Burberry, collar upturned, hair slicked wetly back, face
calm, eyes dead-fish cold, studied him in a way his class of Briton had
been perfecting for seven hundred years.
Leets absorbed the glare unshaken, and went on.
"The serial numbers run eight digits, plus the manufacturing
designation. Do you follow?"
"Perfectly, dear fellow."
"Now they always use two dummy numbers. So you've got two dummy
numbers, then the five viable ones which indicate which part of the run
it was, then another dummy, then the manufacturing code. The point of
the dummy integers is to make us think they're manufacturing them in
the millions. They do it on all their small stuff, it's so stupid. Are
you with me? Am I going too fast?"
"I'm making a manful effort to stay abreast."
"According to this order"--he held up the telex' here you've got no
digits at all. The serial-number blank has been crossed out."
"If that is supposed to be a Major Intelligence Breakthrough, I'm
afraid I rather miss the thrust of it."
"The Germans keep records. Always. I can show you orders on stuff
going back to the Franco-Prussian War.
The whole stamping process is built into their manufacturing system, in
their assembly lines. You see it everywhere, Krupp, Mauser, ERMA,
Walther, Haenel. It's part of their mentality, the way they organize
the world."
"Yes, I quite agree. But you were going to explain to me the
significance of all this." Tony did not at all look impressed.
"These twelve rifles: they're handmade. There is no serial number. Or
at least the barrel and breech, the key components, the numbered
parts."
"Which means?"
"For a production-line piece, the forty-four is great.
Best gun in the war. Can cut a horse in two at four hundred meters. In
Russia you could get three PPSH's for a forty-four. But because it's a
production-line piece, you can't get a real tight group. You're
shooting a small seven-point-nine-two-millimeter bullet, kurz, their
word for short. It's not a rifle that offers a great deal in the way
of precision."
"Until now."
"Until now. Taking into consideration this is a high-priority project,
taking into consideration WaPriif 2 is cooperating with this outfit
WVHA that I've never heard of, and taking into consideration they're
shipping the guns to some secret location down south, this Anlage Elf,
I would say it's obvious."
"I see," said Tony, but Leets could tell his presentation was not
having the desired effect.
He played his trump card.
"They're going to try and kill someone. Someone big, I'd say. They're
going to snipe him."
But Tony, once again, topped him.
"Rubbish," he said.
 Shmuel was totally of the forest now. He was part of it, a sly,
filthy animal, nocturnal, quick to panic, impelled into motion by
ravenous hunger, shivering himself to sleep each morning in small
caves, tufts of brush, against rocks. He ate roots and berries and
wandered almost helplessly through the deep stillness, guided by only a
primitive sense of direction. His journey was bounded by mountains. He
was terrified of their bare slopes. What would he do up there on those
rounded humps, except die? So he skirted them, threading his way
through the densely wooded highlands at their base.
Ten days now, twelve, maybe two weeks.
But it was a losing proposition and he knew it. He lost too much each
day and the disgusting stuff he made himself eat could never replace
it. He was running down, the fat and fiber and muscle he'd picked up
in the camp melting away. The forest would win. He'd known it always.
He'd pass out from weakness, die in wet leaves next to an obscure
German stream.
His clothes had shredded, though into German tatters, not Jewish ones.
The boots had disintegrated partially.
The trousers were frayed and shiny. The coat was the only thing left.
Stuffed with excelsior, it kept enough of the cold out and enough of
the wet off. It forestalled sickness. Sickness was death. If you
were too weak to move, you died. Motion was life, that was the lesson
here. You kept moving. God would show you no pity.
One night rain came, a full storm. Shmuel cowered and could not move.
Lightning bounded across the horizon behind the screen of trees, and
the thunder was mighty, a roar that rose and fell and never went wholly
away.
The next day, and the next, he smelled a tang to the air, sulfurous
almost. And once he came upon an opening in the trees, where the open
space seemed to fill with light; but this abundance of perspective
filled him with horror and he lurched ahead, deeper into the wet
trees.
I hope it doesn't freeze, he thought. If it freezes I die.
If I run into soldiers, I die. If I sleep too long, I die.
There were many, many ways to die, and he could not think of a single
one to survive.
Several times he crossed roads and once he found himself on the grounds
of some hotel or inn or something, but the thought of a caretaker or
soldiers terrified him, and again he ran deeper into the forest.
But his strength was fleeing quickly now. It had held for so long,
augmented by berries and roots and lichens, but in the last day or two
his weakness seemed to have increased enormously.
Finally he crawled from sleep knowing he was doomed. He was too weak.
There'd been no food he could hold down, the forest here was a thicket
of old bones, clacking in the wind. Leafless trees white and knuckled
like gripping hands, millions of them.
I am the last, he thought, the last Jew.
The ground here was matted with dead leaves into a kind of cold scum;
it was not even dirt.
He lay on his back and looked up into the trees.
Through the canopy he could make out chinks of blue.
He tried to crawl, but could not.
At last they got me. How long did I last? Almost three weeks. I'll
bet that German would never have thought I could last three weeks. I
must have come nearly a hundred kilometers. He tried to think of a
death prayer to say, but he had not said prayers in years and could
think of none. He tried to think of some poetry to recite. This was a
monumental occasion, was it not? Certainly a poem was called for. But
his mind was empty of words. Words were no good, that was their
trouble. He knew lots of words, how to string them together and make
them do all kinds of fancy tricks, and they had not done him one bit of
good since 1939 and now, when he needed them most, they let him down.
He was at last in extremis, a matter of great curiosity to all writers.
It was said that if you had the answers to certain questions posed by
these final moments, you could write a great book. Conrad for one had
tried; no surprise it was a Polish specialty. But Shmuel did not find
his own imminent destruction particularly interesting.
As a phenomenon it lacked resonance. The sensations, though extreme,
proved predictable; almost anybody could imagine them. A great
melancholy, chiefly;
and pain, much pain, though not so bad now as earlier, pushing ahead
though hungry and exhausted. Indeed, this last aspect of the ritual
was proving quite pleasant.
He at last began to feel warm, though perhaps it was rather more numb.
It occurred to him that the body died in degrees, limbs first, mind
last; and how horrible to lie alive in brain but dead in body for days
and days.
But the mind would be kind; it would fog and blur, sink into a kind of
haze. He'd seen it at the camps.
He began to hallucinate.
He saw a man of oak, giant, sprouts and twigs and green fronds
springing from a wooden face, old and desiccated.
Something pagan, loamy, fairy-tale quality. The fantastic was
everywhere. Imps and goblins whirred about. And he saw the head
German, the big shot, the Master Sniper: yet it was any face, tired,
altogether uninteresting. He tried to conjure up his own past, but
lacked the energy. What of the people he loved? They were gone
anyway; if he regretted his death, it was only that their memories
would no longer live. But certain things could not be helped. He
thought maybe God had had a purpose in sparing him by miracle back
there in the black field when the shooting happened. But this was
another jest.
As if to drive home this idea, the last seconds of the scene of the
death he should have had began to unreel before his eyes. He could
almost see soldiers moving toward him, out of the shadows. They came
with great caution, without rush.
An image filled the sky above him.
A man stood with a rifle.
Shmuel waited for the bullet.
Instead, he heard words in a language he knew: English.
"Freeze, fuck face
Other forms swirled above him.
"Jesus, pitiful," somebody said.
"Hey, Lieutenant. Nelson caught the sorriest-looking Kraut I ever
saw."
And someone else said, "Another fucking mouth to feed."
 Roger Evans, Leets's nominal assistant, counseled practicality.
"Forget it," he advised. He was an insouciantly handsome teenager who
quite naturally assumed arrogant postures and spoke in a voice cold
with an authority he in no way possessed. The kid also knew how to
dress: his shiny paratrooper boots rested against an edge of a table,
propelling him outward, on the back two legs of a chair, delicately
poised. His Ike jacket, cut tight, emphasized his athletic frame, and
his service cap perched snidely on an angle down across his forehead.
Leets had loathed him at once but in the months they'd worked
together--"work" was an entirely inaccurate word, in Roger's case--he'd
come finally to accept the kid as basically harmless.
Rug threaded his hands together on the back of his neck, and continued
in his instruction, bobbing all the while.
"That's all, Captain. Forget it. No skin off your nose."
Nothing was ever skin off Roger's nose. What Leets found especially
irritating this midwinter morning was that Roger was probably right.
Leets said nothing. He fiddled with some papers at his desk: a field
report on the double-magazine feed system Wa Pruf 2 had improvised for
the MP-40 submachine gun, giving it a sixty-round capacity, to match
the Soviet PPSH's seventy-one-round drum. Now these gadgets were
showing up in the West.
What irked Leets was Tony Outhwaithe's--and, by extension, all official
London's--rejection of his brainstorm.
"I do not think," Tony had said imperially, "our analysts--yours, for
that matter, although they are quite the junior at the game--will agree
with you, chum. Frankly, it's not the Nazi style. They tend to kill
in larger numbers, and are quite proud of it."
"We got Yamamoto in the Pacific, '44," Leets argued.
"You guys sent some commandos after Rommel. There were rumors the
Krauts had a mission on Roosevelt in Casablanca. And just a couple of
months ago, when the Bulge started, that stuff about Skorzeny going
after Eisenhower."
"Exactly. An unpleasant rumor that caused a great deal of discomfort
in all kinds of circles in this town.
Which is precisely why we'll not be calling up the guards on the basis
of a scrap of paper. No, it's this simple:
you're wrong."
"Sir," Leets had pulled himself to full attention, "may I
respectfully--" "No, you may not. Our intent in handing you this
slight job was to take advantage of your somewhat specialized knowledge
of German small arms technology.
We thought you might provide some insight as to what pressures their
industrial nut was undergoing. Instead you check in with a rather odd
tale out of James Hadley Chase. Very disappointing."
And he was dismissed.
But Leets let his enthusiasm get the best of him. In a frenzy of zeal,
he dashed off a batch of memos one afternoon to various bodies whose
support he hoped to enlist in his crusade--SHAEF, CIC, Army
Intelligence, the OSS counterintelligence outfit called X-2, OSS German
Desk over at Grosvenor Square, and so forth. The results were
depressing.
"It's 'cause I don't know anybody. They're all buddy-buddy, Eastern.
Clubby. Harvard-Oxford-Yale," he claimed.
Rug, old Harvard man at nineteen, tried to dissuade him from this
concept.
"It's not like that up at Harvard, Captain. It's just a bunch of guys
having a good time, like anywhere. Reason you're not getting anywhere
is simply that the clowns running the show don't know what they're
doing, no matter what school they went to. This war's the best thing
they've got going; it sure beats working for a living.
Once it's over, they're back jerking sodas." Rug spoke with the
brilliant assurance of a man who'd never jerk a soda in his life. His
education entitled him to sit in the office with his paratroop boots on
the table and dispense homilies of sociology to Leets.
"Aren't you supposed to be doing something?" Leets said.
Airily, Roger continued with his analysis, now reaching
cross-discipline into psychology.
"I know what's eating you, Jim. You want back in it." He was
genuinely amazed at this.
"Boy, between us we got this war solved.
Now why you'd want to--" Leets knew in many ways he baffled the young
tennis player. He of late had been baffling himself. Now why, all of
a sudden, was he off on a crusade? Upstairs had said No; then No it
would be.
But Leets kept thinking: Yes. It's got to be Yes.
Several days later, Leets appeared at Tony's office.
"Back again?" Tony asked.
"Yes," Leets replied, unsmilingly.
"And so soon."
"I was trying to sell it around town. No takers."
"No. Thought not. Simply won't wash, is why. Surely you can see
that. No convincing dope."
Leets concentrated on remaining pleasant. He explained politely, "The
reason there's no convincing dope is that I can't get any. I can't get
any because the word's out."
"Whatever can you mean?"
Leets explained as if to a schoolboy: "Someone's stamped me "Crank,"
"Nut." I dropped in on some of the other sections, thinking maybe I
could round up some help, and suddenly I'm getting pitched in the
street. You can tell from the way they look at you and whisper.
You're out, you're dead."
"I'm sure," Tony said primly, "you exaggerate."
"I figure it was you put the word out. Sir."
Tony did not look away. There was not a fiber in his body capable of
showing embarrassment. He looked at Leets evenly, his gaze richly
amused, and said, "I'll allow that's a possibility. Even a
probability."
"I thought so," said Leets.
"Nothing personal. I'm quite fond of you. You're my favorite
American. Unlike most of them, you are not madly obsessed with
yourself. You do not tell me stories of growing up on a farm in Kansas
and the name of your wife and children. Still, there are limits."
"Major Outhwaithe."
"Please. Tony is fine."
"Major Outhwaithe, I'm asking you to take me out of the freezer."
"Absolutely not." He gazed calmly at him. Pity registered in his
eyes; he was about to reveal a Major Truth, some elemental rule of the
game that the thick Yank hadn't caught on to.
"Because you've got a real job to do. I know, I gave it to you. I'm
responsible for it. I am exec officer of this little clown show
JAATIC; directly under which is your little clown show, SWET. Not
everybody can have a big job in the war. Captain Leets. Some of
us--you, me--must do the little jobs, the boring jobs in safe offices
five hundred miles from the front."
Leets sighed.
"Sir, it's not a question of--" "I shall tell you what it's a question
of. It's a question of maturity. You had your time playing Indian, so
did I. All over now. We're desk chaps, you and I. See that attractive
girl. Enjoy the flicks. Do your job. Thank God you didn't get your
nose or jaw shot off. Rejoice in the coming Triumph of Our Way of
Life. The war's almost over. Weeks, months perhaps. Unless a rocket
lands on your skull, you've made it. See that girl. Her name--"
"Susan. I don't. See her, that is. Anymore."
"Pity. But the town's full of them. Find another."
"Sir. A few words from you and--"
"You mad fool. Go back to guns, to blueprints. Forget murder plots,
assassinations. It's London, February, 1945, not Chicago, 1926."
Leets couldn't afford anger and anyway wasn't sure he had the strength;
and he knew the Brits hated scenes.
It's what they hated most about Americans. And what he needed he'd
have to get from Tony Outhwaithe sooner or later, one way or the other,
for in this town Tony knew all the right ears to whisper into. If
Tony'd frozen him, then only Tony could unfreeze him.
"Major Outhwaithe," Leets began again, in a voice he imagined was sweet
with reason, "I'd merely like an opportunity to locate additional
intelligence. I need more evidence than a Wehrmacht Transpoor Command
order, even a damned strange one. I need access to other sources,
other distributions. The archives, the reading lists. Your technical
people. The--" "Leets, old man, I'm quite busy. We all are, except
you. You're becoming dreadful, you and that bratty boy of yours.
You're turning into Jews, with your own private patch of persecution,
as though the war was a special theater for you and you alone. Who
chose you, old man? Eh? Who chose you?"
Leets had no answer. The British major glared at him, ginger moustache
bristling. The eyes were cold as dead glass.
"Be off!" He flicked insolently with his wrist, Noel Coward in the
khaki of King and country, and brushed Leets, the bug, out.
Leets found himself exiled into the streets, disappointed.
He stood a second on the pavement in front of the Baker Street
headquarters, a nondescript joint called St. Michael House, No. 82.
He was one American among crowds of the brutes on the sidewalks of the
old city, all of them healthy, shoving, yak ky types, many squiring
girls. It was chilly and gray--typical London midwinter--but the fresh
American flesh seemed to warm the old city's streets and fill them with
human color and motion. Next to the ruddy Yanks, the Brits were pale
and thin, but not too many of them were in evidence. Whose city was
this, anyway? Leets felt as if he were lost in a football
crowd--Homecoming perhaps, some kind of rite. Everybody seemed happy,
pink, party-bound. London was a party if you were American, had
reasonable chances at survival and pounds in your pocket.
Triumph was in the air, self-congratulation. The soon-to-come victory
would be moral as well as tactical. A way of life, a civilization, had
been tested and vindicated.
Looking about, Leets saw how glad these guys all were to be American,
and how glad, in turn, the pale girls were to have latched onto them.
The war was almost all gone. It was feeble and far off. Only the
bomber crews, by their paradoxical youth, called it up.
They were all over the place now, Eighth Air Force teenagers in for a
desperate day or two between missions, recognizable by their three
gunner's chevrons on their Air Corps sleeves, unable yet to shave,
toting guidebooks and cameras and asking stupid questions in loud
voices. They were too young to be scared, Leets thought.
He shivered, pulling his coat tighter. Not a Chicago winter, but cold,
just the same. It had the subsidiary effect of drying out London's
normally damp air and this in turn seemed to prevent his wound from
suppurating painfully.
He went down Baker Street until it became Orchard Street--crazy Brit
streets, they just turned into other streets on the next block without
warning and if you had to ask you were dumb--and took a left up Oxford
Street toward Bloomsbury. He walked with no particular hurry, knowing
nothing urgent awaited him in the office.
It did occur to him he was just a block or two off Grosvenor
Square--all he had to do was follow Duke Street, upcoming here--where
the OSS headquarters were. A fleeting thought sped through his head of
crashing the place, making a scene, demanding to see Somebody
Important.
It was said Donovan bought anything presented with enthusiasm; he could
sell Wild Bill Donovan. But more likely he'd run into the patrician
colonel who ran the place, the OSS head of London Station, prime
Eastern snoot, or one of his neck less nameless Brit-licking assistant
heads of Station, sure conspirators with Tony 0.
Leets reached Oxford Circus, way past Duke Street, and realized he'd
given up on Somebody Important.
Not his style, after all.
At the Circus, the traffic whirled about, small, strange black cars,
like planets out of control, headed for doom.
Shouts, honks, the bleat of motors, blue fumes from their exhaust
pipes, rose and enveloped him. Where'd they get the fuel? In the
mechanical whirligig he insisted on seeing a metaphor of futility: all
the metal going round and round and nowhere.
Forget it, okay?
They're right.
You're wrong.
An American sergeant--B-17 gunner, probably-walked by drunkenly,
throwing him a wobbly salute.
"Sir." The boy grinned brokenly. His arm lay across the shoulder of a
tart, a shriveled, frizzy, tit less tough-looking girl; quite a
picture, the two of them.
Leets answered the kid's salute with one equally limp and watched him
and his cutie stagger away. Night was falling. Leets felt none of the
triumph of the streets.
These crowds of corn-fed heroes, of whom the boy and girl were prime
examples, so sure, so full of life, so ready for the next day.
Heroes.
Yet the Germans were going to kill one of them.
Leets knew it. There was a man, perhaps in this city, who right now,
four hundred miles to the east, in a shattered Germany, sinister minds
were planning to kill. He alone knew it.
Who would the Germans kill? And why was it so different?
A V-2 might land that second and turn out the lights on three hundred:
pure random stroke, an accident, a function of applying so much
industrial power to such and such a technological problem.
The sniping was different. They knew a man, a special man, so vile to
them, such an insult to their imaginations, that even as they were
themselves about to become extinct, they would kill.
Churchill? Had the speeches angered them so much?
Ike? That smiling Kansas face, bland and seemingly guileless. Patton,
for beating the Panzer geniuses at their own game? Montgomery, who was
as ruthless as any of them?
Leets knew it didn't add up. Maybe Tony was right:
maybe the freeze was good and just.
He felt drained of energy. A soft dark had fallen on Oxford Circus.
There was not so much traffic, and now the cars moved more slowly. What
am I going to do? he wondered.
He wished he weren't so far from his office or billet;
he wished he weren't so tired; he wished there was a little piece of
the war left over for him; he wished he could get somebody to listen to
him. But chiefly he wished he could park his ass someplace soft, hoist
a mug of that thin stuff the Brits called beer, and forget 1945 for a
while.
Even as he walked through the anonymous maze of the city in the
deepening dark, he knew he'd secretly changed course several blocks
back, though he'd lied to himself, refused to acknowledge it at the
moment of decision.
But when he reached the flats in which she was quartered, he was unable
to maintain the fiction of coincidence.
He was going to see Susan.
She was not there, of course; Mildred, one of the roommates, was vague
but remotely optimistic about her return, and so Leets sat idiotically
in the living room and waited, passing the time with Mildred's date for
the evening, a B-24 pilot, another captain, while Mildred made ready in
the John.
The pilot was not so friendly.
"One of my buddies got killed in some crazy OSS thing," he told
Leets.
"Sorry," Leets said mildly, hoping to end the conversation there.
"Low-level agent drop, nobody came back at all," the pilot declared,
fixing Leets in the black light of a glare.
And what about all the agents spread to hell and gone by panicked
pilots who dumped them like freight twenty miles off the drop zone? His
own operational jump had been handled by a British crew, who'd been in
the business since 1941; they'd put him and his two companions right on
the mark. But he'd heard horror stories of poor guys coming down in
enemy territory miles from their contacts, to wander about stupidly
until nabbed.
"People get killed in a war," Leets said.
"Even Air Force pilots."
"Yeah, sure, in the war," the pilot said.
"What I want to know, is that crazy stuff you do, is it part of the
war?
Or is it some game for rich kids? Is it real?"
An interesting question. Leets had no answer. He looked steadily at
the other man and saw that the fellow wasn't really angry with him but
at the war and its waste and stupidity and ignorance.
"It varies," he finally said, and as he spoke he heard the door opening
in the hallway.
Mildred, coming out of the John, ran into her first.
"Suse, guess who's back?"
"Oh, Christ," Leets heard Susan say.
He felt himself rising as she came into the room.
Her starches were wilted and her hair was a mess. She held her white
shoes in her hand. Her face was tired and plain.
"Well, here I am again, ha, ha," Leets said, grinning sheepishly,
uncomfortably aware of the hostile bomber pilot watching him.
"Suse, we're going now," Mildred called, as she and the grumpy pilot
got ready to leave.
Susan still had not said anything. She looked him over, ruthlessly, as
if he were another patient on the triage list. She was a first
lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps, in plastic surgery; she was a pale,
bright, pretty girl from Baltimore; Leets had known her forever,
meaning from that magical period only remotely remembered as Before the
War. She'd gone to Northwestern too, where she'd dated and,
incidentally, married a friend of his who was now on a ship in the
Pacific. Leets had run into her six months earlier in the hospital,
where his leg had put him.
"Guess I can't stay away," he confessed.
"I had my mind all made up; it was set. No more Susan. Best for her.
Best for me. Best for Phil. But here I am again."
"This must be the twentieth time you've pulled this routine. When you
get it just right, you can do it on "Jack Benny."
" "It is pretty funny, I admit."
"You don't look so hot," she said.
"I'm not. You don't have a date, or anything?"
"Date? I'm married, remember."
"You know I do."
"But I do have something later. I said I'd--" "Still going?"
"Still."
"They give the Nobel peace prize during a war? You deserve one."
"How's the leg, Jim?"
"I should love it; it brought us together." He'd first seen her with
his leg hanging on a line off the ceiling like a prize fish.
"But it's not so good," he said to her now, "the goddamn thing still
leaks and when it leaks, it really aches."
"There's still metal in there, right?"
"Real small stuff."
"Too small for the X-rays. And they keep infecting on you. They've
got you on penicillin, right?"
"A ton a day."
"Nobody'll catch the clap from you, that's for sure."
"Hear from Phil?"
"His ship took one of those crazy Jap kamikazes in the bridge. Fifteen
guys got killed. He's all right. He made lieutenant commander."
"Phil'll do fine. I know he will. He'll come out an admiral."
"Hear from Reed?"
"No, but I got a note from Stan Carter. He's still in Washington. He
says Reed's a major, shooting down Japs left and right. Major! Christ,
and look at me."
"You never were the ambitious one."
"Say, let's go get something to eat. I need something to cheer me up.
Tough one at the office. They've all decided I'm a crank. The jerks.
So anyway, okay?"
"Jim, I don't have time. Really. Not tonight."
"Oh. Yeah, sure, I see. Well, listen, I just stopped by to see how
you were, you know, see if you'd heard from anybody."
"Don't go. Did I say go?"
"No, not in so many words. But--"
"Damn you. I wish you'd make up your goddamned mind."
"Susan," he said.
"Oh, Leets," she said.
"What are we going to do?
What in hell are we going to do?"
"I don't know. I really have no idea."
She stood up and began to unbutton her uniform.
Later, in the dark, he lit a cigarette.
"Listen, darling, put that cigarette out. It's time to go," she
said.
"The Center."
"Yes. Walk me over, all right? It's not far."
"Okay. You sure know how to keep yourself depressed."
"Somebody's got to go. From our side, I mean. I promised my father--"
She turned on the light.
"I know. I know all that. But it's such a waste of time.
They don't own the war, you know. We get part of it too, you know."
"I'm sure there's enough to go around," Susan said.
Naked, she walked to the dresser. She was beautiful to him. Her hips
were slim and he could see her ribs. She had small, fine breasts, with
just enough a sense of density to them, roundness without bulk. He
felt another erection begin to swell. The center of his body warmed.
He reached and turned out the light.
"No," she said, disinterestedly.
"Not now. Please.
Come on."
He turned it on again, and climbed out of bed into his GI underwear.
The Jews. The fucking Jews came first.
"They're a pain in the ass," he said.
"The Jews."
"Their part of the war is special."
"Special! Listen, let me tell you something. Everybody who somebody's
trying to kill is special. When I was in France getting shot at, was I
ever special!"
"No, it's different. Please, let's not go over this again, all right?
We always come back to it. Always."
She was right. They always did. Sooner or later.
He grunted, putting on his uniform. Susan, meanwhile, stepped into a
civilian dress, a shapeless, flowered thing, dowdy. It made her look
forty and domestic.
"Look," he suddenly said, tightening his tie, "I'll tell you who's
special. Who's really special."
"Who? Reed?"
"No. You. Divorce Phil. Marry me. All right?"
"No," she said, trying to get a necklace fastened.
"First, you don't mean it. You're just a lonely boy from the Midwest
in a big European city. You think you love me. You love my--well, we
both know what you love. Second, / don't love you. I love Phil
Isaacson, which is why I married him, even if he is six thousand miles
away on a ship and I feel guilty as hell. Third, you're what we call a
Goy. No offense. It doesn't mean inferior, but it means different. It
would make all kinds of problems. All kinds. And fourth--well, I
don't remember number four." She smiled.
"But I'm sure it's a great one."
"They're all great," he said, smiling himself.
"I ask you every time. When we started you had ten reasons.
Then eight. Now it's down to four, three really, because you don't
remember the last one. I feel like I'm making some kind of progress."
He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
* * *
"Turn here?" Leets thought he remembered, even in the fog.
"Right. Good memory," she said.
He'd been there once before and was not overwhelmed at the prospect of
returning. He knew he didn't belong.
"Funny the stuff that sticks in your mind. I remember the kid."
"The kid?"
"The little boy. You know, the one in the picture they've got
there."
"Oh, yes. That's Michael Hirsczowicz. At fifteen months. In pleas
anter times. Warsaw, August, 1939. Just before it all began."
"You'll laugh at this. Tony called me a Jew today."
"That's not very funny."
"No, I suppose it's not. Here, right?"
"Yes."
They turned in a dark doorway and began to climb some dim stairs.
"You don't think of the Jews having a government in exile," Leets
said.
"It's not a government in exile. It's a refugee agency."
"Everybody knows it's political."
"It's powerless. How can that be political? It's to try and keep
people alive. How can that be political? It's funded by little old
ladies in Philadelphia. How can that be political?"
The sign on the door said something in that squiggly funny writing and
beneath it zionist re leif agency.
"Jesus, they can't even spell."
"It is pitiful, isn't it," Susan said bitterly.
She'd been coming for months now, three, four nights a week. First it
was a joke: her father had instructed her in a letter not to forget who
she was, what she came from, and though she blithely said she was an
American, from Baltimore, she dropped in that first time only because
she recognized Yiddish on the door. But gradually, it began to get
under her skin.
"What the hell do you get out of it?" Leets had wondered.
"Nothing," she said.
Still, she kept it up, until it became almost obsessive.
But it wasn't as if she could do any good, any real good. That was the
bitter joke beneath it all, though for Leets it wasn't a joke anymore,
merely a bitterness.
They were so pathetic: from the old man Fischelson on down, the girls
in the office, all hysterics, scared, most of them. They needed so
much help and Susan did what she could, with paper work, and
telephones, small things like dealing with the landlord, making sure
the place stayed heated, proof-reading the news releases, even in their
fractured, East Side Yiddish-English. She knew all along that nobody
was listening.
"It's Communist, isn't it?" he said.
"It's Jewish. Not quite the same thing. Anyway, the man whose money
started it was a rich, conservative land and factory-owning aristocrat.
A banker. What could be further from communism?"
Still, Leets had his doubts.
"I don't know," he said.
"It's his kid. In the hall. Josef Hirsczowicz: he's the father. One
of the richest men in Europe. That's his child. Or was."
"They're dead?"
"They didn't get out. That little boy, Jim. Think of that. The
Germans killed him, because he's Jewish."
"They're trying to kill a lot of little boys. They tried to kill this
little boy. Religion has nothing--" but he stopped. He didn't want to
get back into it.
They reached the door at the end of the stairway.
"You're wasting your time," he cautioned.
"Of course I am," she said. The Zionists hoped to communicate to the
indifferent Western world what they maintained was happening in
Occupied Europe.
Susan had monstrous tales, of mass executions and death camps. Leets
told her it was propaganda. She said she had proof. Pictures.
"Pictures don't mean a thing," he'd instructed her brutally weeks
ago.
"Pictures can be faked. You need a goddamned witness, someone who's
been there. That's the only way you'll get anybody to listen to your
stuff.
Listen, you're going to get in trouble. You're an officer in the
United States Army. Now you're hanging around with a group of--" She'd
put a finger to his lip, ending his sentence. But later she talked of
it. Nobody would believe, she said.
The Zionist leaders sat in the offices of great men in London, she
explained with great bitterness, who'd listen earnestly, then shoo them
out after a polite moment or two.
Now, standing in the outer office, about to lose her, Leets felt the
beginning of a headache. The headaches always ended in rage.
Christ, what a hole! All that peeling paint and those blinky, low-watt
bulbs that almost looked like candles. It smelled like a basement up
here, and was always chilly, and all the other people seemed pallid and
underfed and would not look at him in his uniform.
"Thanks for walking me over, Jim," she said.
"I appreciate it. I really do." She smiled, and stepped away.
"Susan." He grabbed her arm.
"Susan, not tonight.
Come on, we'll do the town."
"Thanks, Jim, but we had our fun."
He didn't mind losing her to Phil--he knew he would in the end
anyway--but he hated losing her to this.
"Please," he said.
"I can't. I've got to go."
"It's just--" "Just Jews, Leets," she said.
"Me too." She smiled.
"Believe it or not."
"I believe, I believe," he protested. But he did not believe. She was
just an American girl, who'd invented her membership in this fossil
race.
"No, you don't," she said.
"But sometimes, I love you anyway."
And she disappeared behind the door.
The next morning, in the office, Leets's headache still banged away. He
stood looking across the gray skyline.
And where was Roger? Late as usual, he came crashing in, uniform a
mess.
"Had trouble finding a cab," he said. He'd once pointed out that he
was probably the only enlisted man in any army who took a cab to World
War II each morning.
"Sorry," he continued.
Leets said nothing. He stared grumpily out the window.
"Guess who I met last night? Go on. Guess, Captain."
Leets complained instead.
"Rug, you didn't sweep up last night. This place isn't the Savoy, but
it doesn't have to look like Hell's Kitchen either."
"Hemingway."
"You could at least -empty the wastebaskets once in a while."
"Hemingway. The writer. Over from Paris, from the Ritz. Met him at a
party."
"The writer?"
"Himself. In the flesh. Big guy, mustache, steel glasses. You should
have seen him pour the booze down."
"You travel in flashy circles."
"Only the best. I go to all the good parties. Don't let my stripes
keep me out of anything. After Bill Fielding, he's about the most
famous man in the world."
The door flew open; Tony Outhwaithe swirled in as if the star of the
play.
"Captain Leets, send this boy out to hit balls against a wall or
something," he commanded.
"Roger, out."
Roger was off in a flash.
"I'll be at the squash club, you need me."
Tony turned to Leets.
"The news is bad. Bad for you.
Rather good for me." He smiled with great satisfaction.
"You love to top me, don't you?" Leets said.
"Yes, but there are tops and tops, and this is a true top."
Leets braced; was he being shipped to Burma to hunt Japs in jungles?
"Are you still banging away on that assassin matter?"
"Sort of. Not getting any--" "Excellent. I can now prove you wrong.
New data."
"What?" Leets sat up, his heart beginning to excite a bit.
"My, interested so soon."
"What?"
"All right. Last night I happened to run into a donnish sort from PWE.
Know what that is?"
"Your Political Warfare Executive. Sort of like--" "Yes. Anyway, it
seems he can identify your phantom acronym. WVHA."
"Yeah?"
"Yes." Tony was richly satisfied. He was enjoying every minute of all
this.
"It has nothing to do with us. It doesn't even concern the war. It's
not related to intelligence or espionage or the racket at all. You're
out of luck, I'm afraid."
"What is it?" Leets demanded. Why was his heart going, why did he
have so much trouble breathing?
"It's a part of the administrative section of dear old SS. Wirtschafts
und Verwaltungshauptamt. Obscure, easy to miss among the more
flamboyant organizations in Twelveland."
Leets translated prosaically.
"Economic and Administrative Department," he said glumly, "that's all.
They do the payrolls. Clerks."
"Yes. Not the sort of lads to go gunning after generals, eh?"
"No, no, suppose not."
"They've got other concerns at the moment. Those clerks run one of the
more interesting phenomena of the Third Reich, old bun," Tony said,
smiling brightly.
"They run the concentration camps."
 Vollmerhausen not only knew that it wasn't his fault the prisoner had
escaped, he knew whose fault it was. It was Captain Schaeffer's fault.
The man was incompetent.
Schaeffer was involved in most things that went wrong at Aniage Elf.
He'd seen the type before, a real SS fanatic, sullen and stupid, a
brutal, suspicious Nazi peasant. Vollmerhausen had explained this very
carefully to anybody who cared to listen, though not many of them
did.
Now he was going to explain it to Repp.
"If," he began, "if Captain Schaeffer's men had been adequately
trained, had reacted quickly, had treated this whole enterprise as
something other than a holiday rest camp, then the prisoner could never
have escaped. Instead they blunder about like comedians in a farce,
shooting at each other, screaming, turning on lights, hooting and
tooting. A disaster. I thought the Waffen SS, especially the famed
Totenkopfdivision, had a reputation for efficiency. Why, the most
inept conscriptees-old men and youngsters--could have performed
better."
He sat back smugly. He'd really told them. He'd really let them have
it.
Repp sat, toying with something at his desk. He did not appear
particularly impressed. He certainly could be a cold chap.
But Schaeffer, there too, rose to his own defense.
"If," he replied, talking straight to Repp, "there had been no"--he
pronounced the next words with special precision, knowing how they
hurt--"machine failure, if Herr Ingenieur-Doktor had been able to get
his gadget to do its job--" Gadget?
"Slander! Slander! I will not be slandered! I will not be
slandered." He rose, red-faced, from the chair.
Repp waved him down.
"So that the Obersturmbannfrihrer had been able to take out his targets
as the mission specifications call for--" "There was no machine
failure," screamed Vollmerhausen hysterically. He was always being
slandered, lied about. He knew people called him a kike behind his
back.
"I deny, deny, deny. We checked the equipment until we were blue in
the face. It had integrity.
Integrity. Yes, problems, we work around the clock, the Waffen SS
should work half so hard, problems with weight, but the machine works.
Vampir works."
"The fact remains," insisted the young captain--some men just could not
accept defeat gracefully--"the fact remains, and no Yid argument is
going to change it, that Vampir displayed twenty-five targets and there
were twenty-six subhumans out there."
It was obvious.
"He slipped away before, don't you see?" said Vollmerhausen.
"He slipped out on your men before. I'm told he was a Jew, an educated
fellow. He must have realized something was up and in the moments--"
"He was seen leaving the field, Herr IngenieurDoktor," Repp said
quietly.
"And fired upon."
"Yes, well," Vollmerhausen sputtered, "he'd obviously, well, it's clear
that he separated himself before and so he wasn't within the range of
the mechanism."
"Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, the men swear he was standing among the
corpses."
"The main question must be," Vollmerhausen bellowed, cork-screwing
insanely out of his seat, "why wasn't the area fenced? My people slave
into the night over Vampir, yet the Waffen SS is unable to construct a
simple fence to hold a Jew in."
"All right, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor," said Repp.
"A simple fence to stop a Jew who--" Repp said, "Please."
Vollmerhausen had several points yet to make and he'd just thought of
five or six of them when Repp's stare fell across him. Something quite
frosty in it. Extraordinary.
The eyes cool, almost blank. The demeanor so perfectly calm, almost
unnaturally calm. Repp had an incredible talent for stillness.
"I was simply--but no matter," Vollmerhausen said.
"Thank you," said Repp.
Another silence. Repp was masterful with silences, and he let this one
drag on for several seconds. The air in the room was dead.
Vollmerhausen shifted in his chair uneasily. Repp kept it so hot in
here; in the corner the stove blazed away merrily. Repp, in faded
camouflages, made them wait while he took out and, with elaborate
ceremony, lit one of those Russian cigarettes he smoked.
Then finally he said, "Of the Jew, I have decided to let the matter
drop. He's somewhere in the forest, dead.
They are not a hearty, physical race. They have no will to survive.
Doom is their natural fate, and in the forest he'll locate his own
quickly. Therefore, I'm recalling the patrols."
"Yes, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer," said Captain Schaeffer.
"Immediately."
"Good. Now as for Vampir." He turned to Vollmerhausen.
Vollmerhausen licked his lips. They were dry. His mouth was dry. He
returned to a familiar, discomfiting litany: What am I doing here,
locked up in a wild forest with SS lunatics? It was a long way from
the WaPriif 2 testing ground outside Berlin.
"As for Vampir, I'm afraid I must require another test, Herr
IngenieurDoktor."
Vollmerhausen swallowed. So that was it, then. Another load of Jews
would be brought in, fattened up, shot down.
"More prisoners, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer?" he asked.
"That's all finished, I'm afraid," said Repp.
"Which I'm sure makes you happy, Herr IngenieurDoktor."
"It was unpleasant, yes, killing--" "You must have a hard heart for
these hard times," said Repp.
"You'd lose your uneasiness around death in a day in the East. But the
Reichsfrihrer informs me that the camps are no longer in the disposal
business."
"Animals, then," said Vollmerhausen.
"Pigs would do it. Or cows. About the--" "I think not. Vampir must
locate people, not animals, at four hundred meters' range. And it must
not weigh more than forty kilos. Those are the limits."
Vollmerhausen moaned. Back to weight again.
"I
don't know where I'm going to get ten more kilos.
We've taken off all the insulation, we've got the lead sulfide down to
a minimum without sacrificing resolution."
He looked desperate.
"It's that damn battery."
"I'm sure you'll find a way. After all, you've got the best men and
equipment in the Reich. Far better than up at Kummersdorf." As he
spoke he'd begun to tinker again with a piece of metal or something on
his desk, an innocent, entirely reflexive habit.
"We've tried everything. A smaller battery won't put out the necessary
current. A--" "I'm sure a great miracle will happen here," Repp said,
taking great pleasure in the phrase.
Vollmerhausen, fascinated, could see the thing he worked in his
fingers. It was a small black cube, metallic, with a spindle through
it. But that's all.
"Miracles cannot be requisitioned like machine pistols, Herr
Obersturmbannfuhrer."
"You'll do your best, I'm certain."
"Of course, sir. But forty kilos is so little."
"I just want to explain the importance here. I want to emphasize it.
Our actions are only part of a larger campaign, involving agents in
other countries even. Still, we are the most important; we are the
fulcrum. Do you understand? Great and heavy responsibilities have
7
descended upon us. This is a privilege rarely given soldiers. Think
about it."
He paused, to let the grave information sink in.
"And so for the test," he said.
"Yes, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer," Vollmerhausen said.
"I think I've found an unlimited supply of targets for you. A whole
world full of targets. I've just had word from Berlin. One hundred
miles north of here, the Americans have crossed the Rhine. They're on
our soil, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. It seems that I must demand that you
quickly find a way to knock those ten kilos off Vampir. And then you
and I are going hunting."
The ass head Schaeffer snickered.
Repp was smiling.
After they were gone. Repp reached into his desk and removed a silver
flask. He was not a drinking fellow by habit but this night he felt a
need. He unscrewed the cap and poured a few ounces of schnapps into a
glass, and sipped it. He savored the fiery fluid.
The hour was late, time was slipping away, time, time, time the real
enemy. Pressures from Berlin were mounting, that crazy goose the
Reichsfrihrer himself calling twice a day, babbling of what his
astrologer and his masseur and his secretary and the little birdies in
the sky were telling him. What had General Haussner said?
"He has both feet planted firmly three feet above the ground."
Something like that.
Repp first met the Reichsfrihrer in the 1942 season in Berlin, shortly
after Demyansk, when he was the hero of the hour. Himmler had worn
cologne that smelled like mashed plums and wanted to know about Repp's
ancestors.
Repp knew what to say.
"Common people, Reichsfrihrer."
"Very good. Our strength, the common people. Our mystic bond with the
soil, the earth." These words were delivered with unblinking sincerity
in the middle of an opulent party in an industrialist's mansion.
Beautiful women swirled about--Margareta was one, he remembered.
The room was filled with warmth and light. Sex was in the air and
wealth and power and not seventy-two hours earlier Repp had been in the
tower.
"Yes, the people," the Reichsfrihrer had said. He looked like an
eggplant wearing glasses.
But Repp didn't want to think about the Reichsfrihrer right now. He
took another sip of the schnapps and called Margareta up into his
mind.
She'd been so beautiful that year. He was not moved by many things but
he'd allowed himself to be moved by her. How had she ended up there?
Oh, yes, she'd come with some theatrical people. He'd seen her before,
back when he was a young lieutenant and too frightened to speak. But
this time he walked up boldly and took her hand. He saw her eyes go to
the Iron Cross he now wore.
"I'm Repp," he said, bowing slightly.
"At least you didn't snap your heels together like so many of them."
He smiled.
"I've been told anything in the city is mine. I choose you."
"They meant hotel rooms. Restaurant tables. Seats at the opera.
Invitations to parties."
"But I don't want those things. I want you."
"You're very forward. You're the fellow in the tower, is that it? It
seems I read something."
"Three days ago I killed three hundred and forty-five Russians in the
span of eight hours. Now doesn't that make me rather special?"
"Yes, I suppose it does."
"May I present you to the Reichsfuhrer? He's now a patron of mine, I
believe."
"I know him. He's dreadful."
"A little pig. But a powerful patron. Come, let's leave.
I was in a very pleasant restaurant last night. I believe they'll
treat me nicely if I return. I even have a car and driver."
"My first lover was killed in Poland. My next died in an air fight
over London. Another was captured in the Western Desert."
"Nothing will happen to me. I promise. Come, let's go."
She looked at him narrowly.
"I came with a fellow, you know."
"A general in the Waffen SS?"
"No, an actor."
"Then he's nothing. Please. I insist."
She'd paused just a second, then said, "All right. But, please. No
talk of war, Captain Repp."
Pleasant. Yes, pleasant.
Repp finished the schnapps. He was tempted to take another, but a
principle of his was to never yield to temptations.
He knew the Reichsfuhrer could call at any moment;
and he knew he needed his strength for what lay ahead.
He sealed the bottle.
 Susan and Leets were wedged tight against the Caridge bar. It was
late on a Friday night in mid-March, wall-to-wall uniforms, no V-2's
had fallen for a couple of days, and after a lot of trying he'd finally
talked her into an actual date. They'd had dinner at the Hungaria and,
on Roger's recommendation, had dropped by this bright spot, where all
the London beauties and big shots were said to camp out. So far Susan
had seen two movie stars and a famous radio broadcaster. Leets had
noticed instead other OSS officers in the smoky crowd and had fancied
himself already slighted a couple of times, and once had even made a
move toward one snide aristocratic profile, but Susan had tugged him
back.
"No trouble. Remember. You promised."
"Yeah, yeah," he mumbled.
Now, several whiskies down him, he was feeling sweeter, the friend to
all men. He had her to himself: no Phil, no Jews.
"Barkeep," he hailed, trolling in one of the red-jacketed boys behind
the mahogany bar, "two here, old bun."
"No wonder they hate us," she said.
Around them the talk was of the new offensive.
Beyond the Rhine! It would be over by the blooming of the flowers, the
coming of spring. This optimism had the effect of depressing Leets.
"You're supposed to be enjoying yourself," she said.
"For God's sakes, smile a little. Relax."
"You're damned cheerful," he said with surprise. It was true. The
whole evening, she'd bubbled. She was especially beautiful, even in
the severe cut of the brown uniform; some women looked good in
anything. But it was something else. Susan seemed to be her old self:
sly, mocking, mildly sarcastic, full of mischief.
"You've decided to make a career of Army nursing.
Congrats!" he said.
She laughed.
"You're divorcing Phil. Right? Am I right?"
Again, laughter.
"It's a long story," she said.
"A long story."
But before she could tell it, an elegant Brit voice crooned to them.
"Darlings."
It was Leets's turn to make a face.
But Tony came ahead confidently, until he seemed to embrace the two
Americans.
"One more of what these chaps are having," Tony commanded the barman,
and turned to press an icy smile on Leets.
"Sir," Leets said evenly.
"Rather a long Thursday, eh?" Tony asked.
Leets didn't say a thing.
"What, three, four hours? Or was it five?"
"Jim? What--" Susan said.
Leets looked bleakly off into the crowd.
"The captain had a rough go of it, I hear. Trying to get in to
see--ah, who was it this time? Yours or ours?"
"Yours," Leets finally admitted.
"Of course. Knew it all the time. Major General Sir Colin Gubbins,
was it not?"
"Yes."
"Thought so. Head of SOE. Pity he couldn't see you."
"I'm on the list for Monday, the girl said."
"I'll put in a good word for you tomorrow at lunch," Tony said, smiling
maliciously.
"You bastard," Leets said.
"Now stop that kind of talk," Susan commanded.
"Susan, would you care to accompany me to lunch with General Sir Colin
Gubbins tom or--" "Goddamn it, Major, knock it off," Leets said.
Tony laughed.
"You're getting a rather peculiar reputation in certain circles," he
cautioned.
"You know, he tells anyone this mad scheme he's dreamed up. Jerry
snipers. Quite strange."
Leets now felt fully miserable.
"It wouldn't hurt a bit to listen to him," Susan said.
"You people have been told things all during the war you wouldn't
listen to. You never listen until it's too late."
Tony stepped back, made a big show of shock.
"Dear girl," he said theatrically, "of course we make mistakes.
Of course we're old fuddy-dud dies That's what we're paid for. Think
how dangerous we'd be if we knew what we were doing." He threw back
his head and brayed.
Leets realized the man was quite drunk and beyond caring what he said,
and to whom. But, surprisingly,
there seemed to be in his act some affection for the miserable American
and his girl.
"Listen, I know where there are some marvelous gatherings tonight. Care
to come along? Really, I can offer Indian nabobs, Communist poets,
homosexual generals, Egyptian white slavers. The relics of our late
empire. It's quite a show. Do come."
"Thanks, Major," Leets said.
"I'd really rather--" "Tony. Tony. I've taken to the American habit.
You call me Tony and /'// call you Jim. First names are such fun."
"Major, I--" "Jim, it might be kind of fun," Susan said.
"What the hell," Leets said.
Presently, they found themselves in a cavernous flat in a splendidly
fashionable section of London, along with a whole zoo of curiosities
from all the friendly nations of World War II. Leets, pinned in a
corner of the room, drank someone's wonderful whisky and exchanged
primitive pleasantries with a Greek diplomat, while he watched as
across the room Susan deflected, in rapid succession, an R.A.F group
captain, a young dandy in a suit and tie, and a huge Russian in some
sort of Ruritanian clown suit.
"She's smashing," Tony said to him.
"Yes, she's fine, just fine," Leets agreed.
"Is good very, no?" the Greek said, somewhat confusingly to Leets, but
he merely nodded, as though he understood.
But after a while he went and got her, fighting his way through the
mob.
"Hello, it's me," he said.
"Oh, Jim, isn't it wonderful? It's so interesting," she said,
beaming.
"It's just a party, for Christ's sake," he said.
"Darling, the most wonderful thing happened today. I can't wait to
tell you about it."
"So tell."
"I say, guess who's here now?" Tony said suddenly, at his ear.
"It's Roger," shrieked Susan.
"My God, look who he's got with him!"
"Indeed," said Tony.
"An authentic Great Man! That is the hairy-chested novel writer who
kills animals for amusement, is it not? Thought so."
"All we need is Phil," said Susan.
"Phil who?" said Leets, as his young sergeant drew near, his eyes
crazy with glee, pulling in drunken tow the great writer himself. The
two of them weaved brokenly across the crowded floor, Roger guiding the
blandly smiling bigger man along. The fellow wore some kind of
safari-inspired variation on the Air Corps uniform, open wide at the
collar so that a thatch of iron-gray hair unfurled.
"The famous chest, for all to see," said Tony.
The writer had a pugnacious mustache and steel-frame glasses. He was
big, Leets could see, big enough for Big Ten ball, but now he had a
kind of drunken, horny benevolence, dispensing good fortune on all who
passed before him. Several times in his journey, the writer stopped,
as though to establish camp, but at each spot, Roger'd give a yank and
unstick the fellow and pull him yet closer.
"Mr. Hem," Roger declared when he got the big fellow near enough,
"Mr. Hem, I want ya ta meet the two best friggin' officers in World
War Two."
"Dr. Hemorrhoid, the poor man's piles," the writer said, extending a
paw.
Leets shook it.
"I adored The Sun Actually Rises," said Tony.
"Really your best. So feminine. So wonderfully feminine. Delicate,
pastel. As though written by a very sweet lady."
The writer grinned drunkenly.
"The Brits all hate me," he explained to Susan.
"But I don't let it bother me. What the hell. Major, go ahead and
hate me. It's your bloody country, you can hate anybody you
god-damnwellfucking choose. Nurse, you're beautiful."
"She's married," Leets said.
"Easy, Captain, I'm not moving in. Easy. You guys, do the fighting,
you have my respect. No problems, no sweat. Nurse, you are truly
beautiful. Are you married to this fellow?"
Susan giggled.
"She's married to a guy on a ship. In the Pacific," said Rug.
"My, my," said the writer.
"Hem, there's some people over here," Rug said.
"Not so fast, Junior. This looks like a most promising engagement,"
the writer said, grinning lustfully, putting a hand on Susan's
shoulder.
"Hey, pal," said Leets.
"No fighting," Susan said.
"I hate fighting. Mr. Hemingway, please take your hand off my
shoulder."
"Darling, I'll put my hand anywhere you tell me to put it," Hemingway
said, removing his hand.
"Put it up your ass," said Leets.
"Captain, really, I have nothing but respect. You're the guy putting
the him in his grave. Putting Jerry to ground, eh, Maj? Any day now.
Any bloody day. Junior, how 'bout getting Papa a drink? A couple
fingers whisky. No ice. Warm and smooth."
"War is hell," Leets said.
"How many Krauts you kill?" Hemingway asked Leets.
Leets said nothing.
"Huh, sonny? Fifty? A hundred? Two thousand?"
"This is a terrible conversation," Susan said.
"Jim, let's get out of here."
"How many, Cap? Many as the major here? Bet he's killed jill ions
That Brit special-ops group, goes behind the lines. Gets 'em with
knives, fucking knives, right in the gizzard. Blood all over
everything. But how many, Captain? Huh?"
Leets said he didn't know, but not many.
"You just fired at vehicles," he explained, "until they exploded. So
there was no sense of killing."
"Could we change the subject, please," Susan said.
"All this talk of killing is giving me a headache."
"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted
armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else
thereafter," recited Hemingway.
"I wouldn't know about that," said Leets. He remembered bitterly: the
tracers spraying through the grass, kicking spurts out of the earth,
the sounds of the STG-44's, the universe-shattering detonations of the
75's on the Panzers.
"It was just a fucking mess. It wasn't like hunting at all."
"Really, I'm not going to let this nonsense ruin my evening. Come on,
Jim, let's get out of here," Susan said, and hauled him away.
They walked the cold, wet London streets, in the hours near dawn. An
icy light began to seep over the horizon, above the blank rows of
buildings that formed the walls of their particular corridor. Again,
fog. The streets were empty now, except for occasional cruising jeeps
of MP's and now and then a single black taxi.
"They say at High Blitz Hitler never even stopped the cabs," Leets said
abstractedly.
"Do you believe in miracles?" Susan, who'd been silent for a while,
suddenly said.
Leets considered. Then he said, "No."
"I don't either," she said.
"Because a miracle has to be sheer luck. But I believe certain things
are meant to happen. Meant, planned, predestined."
"Our meeting again in the hospital?" he said, only half a joke.
"No, this is serious," she said.
He looked at her. How she'd changed!
"You're generating enough heat to light this quarter of the city. I
hope there're no Kraut planes up there."
"Do you want to hear about this, or not?"
"Of course I do," he said.
"Oh, Jim, I'm sorry," she said.
"I know you're feeling awful. Outhwaithe was very cruel."
"Outhwaithe I can handle. I just know something and I can't get anyone
to believe me. But don't let my troubles wreck your party. Really,
Susan. I'm very happy for you. Please, tell me all about it."
"We have one. Finally. One got out. A miracle."
"Have one what? What are you--" "A witness."
"I don't--" "From the camps. An incredible story. But finally, now,
in March of 1945, a man has reached the West who was in a place called
Auschwitz. In Poland. A murder camp."
"Susan, you hear all kinds of--" "No. He was there. He identified
pictures. He described the locations, the plants, the processes. It
all jibes with reports we've been getting. It's all true. And now we
can prove it. He's all they have. The Jews of the East. He's their
testament, their witness. Their voice, finally. It's very moving. I
find it--" "Now just a minute. You say this camp was in Poland?
Now, how the hell did this guy make it across Poland and Germany to us?
Really, that's a little hard to believe.
It all sounds to me like some kind of story."
"The Germans moved him to some special camp in a forest in Germany.
It's a funny story. It makes no sense at all. They moved him there
with a bunch of other people, and fed them--fattened them up, almost
like pigs. Then one night they took him to a field and .. ."
"It was some kind of execution?"
"A test. He said it was a test."
And Susan told Leets the story of Shmuel.
And after a while Leets began to listen with great intensity.

V.,
rampir would work; of that Vollmerhausen had little doubt. He had been
there, after all, at the beginning, at the University of Berlin lab in
1933 when Herr Doktor Edgar Kutzcher, working under the considerable
latitude of a large Heereswaffenamt contract, had made the breakthrough
discovery that lead sulfide was photoconductive and had a useful
response to about three microns, putting him years ahead of the
Americans and the British, who were still tinkering with thallous
sulfide.
The equation, chalked across a university blackboard, which expressed
the breakthrough Herr Doktor had achieved, realized its final practical
form in the instrument on which Vollmerhausen now labored in the
research shed at Aniage Elf, under increasing pressure and
difficulty.
It was a business of sorting out dozens of details, of burrowing
through the thickets of technical confusions that each tiny decision
led them to. But this is what Vollmerhausen, a failed physicist, liked
about engineering:
making things work. Function was all. Vampir would work.
But would Vampir work at forty kilos?
That was another question altogether, and although his position
officially demanded optimism, privately his doubts were deep and
painful.
Under forty kilos?
Insane. Not without radically compromising on performance.
But of course one didn't argue with the SS.
One smiled and did one's best and hoped for luck.
But forty kilos? Why? Did they plan on dropping it from a plane? It
would shatter anyway, and shock absorption hadn't been tied into the
specifications. He'd gone to Repp privately:
"Surely, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, if you could just give me some
reason for this arbitrary weight limit."
Repp, frosty, had replied, "Sorry, Herr IngenieurDoktor.
Tactical requirements, that's all. Someone's going to have to carry
the damned thing."
"But certainly there are vehicles that--" "Herr Ingenieur-Doktor: forty
kilos."
Lately Hans the Kike had been having nightmares.
His food bubbled and heaved in his stomach. He worked obsessively,
driving his staff like a tyrant, demanding the impossible.
"Hans the Kike," he heard one of them joke, "rather more like Attila
the Hun."
But he had come so far since 1933, and the journey was so complex, so
full of wrong starts, missed signs, betrayals, disappointments, unfair
accusations, plots against him, credit due him going to others. More
than ever now, 1933 came to haunt him. The last year I was ever truly
happy, he told himself, before all this.
A year of beginnings--for Vampir, for Kutzcher, for Germany. But also
one of endings. It had been Vollmerhausen's last year with physics,
and he'd loved physics, had a great brain for physics. But by the next
year, '34, physics was officially regarded as a Jewish science, a
demi-religion like Freudianism, full of kabala and ritual and
pentagram, and bright young Aryans like Vollmerhausen were pressured
into other areas. Many left Germany, and not just Jews either; they
were the lucky ones. For the ones who stayed, like Vollmerhausen, only
melancholy choices remained. Dietzl went into aerodynamics, Stossel
back to chemistry;
Lange gave up science altogether and became a party intellectual.
Vollmerhausen too felt himself pressed into an extraordinary career
shift, a daring, uncharacteristically bold one--and one he hated. He
returned to the Technological Institute and became a ballistics
engineer, rather than an exalted Doktor of Science. It hadn't the
challenge of physics, the sense of unlocking the universe, but
everybody knew there'd be a war sooner or later, and wars meant guns
and guns meant jobs. He threw himself into it with a terror,
succeeding on sheer determination where once there'd been talent. It
began to look as though he'd made the right decision when he was
invited to join Berthold Giepel's ERMA design team. ERMA, the acronym
for Erfurter Maschinenfabrik B. Giepel GmbH, Erfurt, was at that moment
in history the most fertile spot in the world in arms design, and from
all over the world acolytes swarmed, young engineers out of the
technical institutes, or off apprenticeships at the Waffenfabrik Mauser
at Oberndorf, or for Walther AGin Munich, even a Swiss lad from SIG and
an American from Winchester. All were turned down.
For the brilliant team that Giepel had assembled was up to nothing less
than revolutionizing automatic weapons theory by building a
Maschinenpistole off the radical open-bolt straight-blowback principle,
which made for greater manufacturing simplicity, lightness and
reliability, yet at the same time permitted air circulation through
breech and barrel between rounds with subsequent temperature reduction,
jacking the rate of fire up to about 540 per minute cyclical. They
were inventing, in short, the best submachine gun in the world, the
MP-40, until it became better known under a different name.
These should have been extraordinary days for Vollmerhausen, and in a
way they were. But his physics background, like a whiff of the Yid,
clung to him. He could never shake it; the others gossiped behind his
back, played small pranks, teased him unmercifully.
They hated him because he'd once aspired to be a scientist;
what scientists he now came in contact with hated him because he was an
engineer. He grew into a somewhat twisted personality, with a tendency
toward surliness, bitterness, self-pity. He was grumpy, gloomy, a
great self-justifier and blamer of others. His head was full of
imaginary compliments that he felt he deserved but that he never
received, because of course the others were jealous of his brilliance.
Out of all this was born the name Hans the Kike.
So when in 1943 he was offered a position at the WaPriif 2 testing
facility at Kummersdorf, he jumped at it. A new project was under way.
The army had learned in Russia of the terrors of the night and had let
a contract for Vampir 1229 Zeilgerdt, the Vampire sighting device,
Model 1229, based on the data that Herr Doktor Kutzcher, now dead, had
developed back in '33.
Vollmerhausen had an extraordinary background for the undertaking: he
knew both the physics of the project and the ballistics. It was a job
made for him.
In its wisdom, Waffenamt had decided that the weapon best suited to
mount Vampir was none other than the prototype Sturmgwehr on which Hugo
Schmeisser was so furiously laboring, then designated the MP-43. Thus
Ingenieur-Doktor Vollmerhausen and Herr Schmeisser (for old Hugo had no
degrees) found themselves uneasily collaborating on the project at the
dictates of the Army bureaucracy.
From the start, Hugo was undercutting him.
"Too bulky," the old fool claimed.
"Too sensitive. Too complicated."
"Herr Schmeisser," Hans began, suffering the immense strain of having
to deal politely with a fool, "a few design modifications and we can
join your assault rifle and my optics system and achieve the most
modern device of the war. No, it'll never be an assault weapon, or for
the parachutists, but in the years ahead will come battles of a
primarily defensive nature. The great days of rapid expansion are
over. It's time to concentrate on protecting what we've got. In any
kind of stable night tactical situation, Vampir will make our enemies
totally vulnerable." And as he spoke, he could watch the old man's
eyes frost over with indifference. It was a most difficult situation,
especially since in the background was another undercurrent: Hans the
Kike was from the ERMA team that had built the wonderful MP-40; but,
strangely, that weapon had picked up the nickname "Schmeisser," though
the old goat had had nothing to do with it. But he'd never disavowed
the connection either, mad as he was for fame and glory.
With Schmeisser against him, he was doomed. The STG modifications were
never approved, funds began to vanish, technicians were siphoned off to
other projects, the Opticotechna people had difficulty with the
lenses-Schmeisser's influence?--and much gossip and vicious humor raged
behind Hans the Kike's back. He had no connections, nothing to match
the might of the adroit Schmeisser, who didn't want his assault rifle
associated with some strange "wish-machine" invented by an obscure
scientist and supervised by a disreputable ERMA veteran.
Vollmerhausen, under pressure, felt himself becoming more repellent.
Whatever chances he had as an advocate for Vampir disappeared when he
ceased shaving and bathing regularly, when he began denouncing the
secret cabal that conspired behind his back. Vampir never went beyond
prototype, despite some promising initial test results. It failed to
meet certain specifications in its field trial, though Vollmerhausen
asserted that "the cabal" had stacked the test against him. In May of
'44 the Waffenamt contract was canceled, and Vollmerhausen was ordered
sharply back to Kummersdorf to a meaningless job. He was let go
shortly afterward.
They let him dangle for a bit, nudging him closer and closer to
despair. Worries on top of worries. His career in total collapse.
Questions were asked. People began to avoid him. Nobody would look
him in the eye. He thought he was being watched. The Army called him
up for a physical exam and pronounced him fit for combat duty, despite
fallen arches, a bronchial infection, bad ears and severe
nearsightedness. He was advised to get his affairs in order, for the
notice would arrive any day.
It appeared his final fate might be to carry a "Schmeisser" on the
Ostfront.
One day he happened to run into a friend in a disreputable cafe where
he'd taken to spending his days.
"Have you heard, is Haenel still taking on people? I'd do anything.
Draftsmanship, apprentice work, modeling."
"Hans, I don't think so. Old Hugo, you know. He'd stand in your
way."
"That old fool."
"But, Hans, I did hear of something." The friend was extremely
nervous. It was the first time Vollmerhausen had seen him since he'd
been fired. Hans had in fact been startled to see him in this place.
"Eh, what?" Vollmerhausen squinted, rubbed his hands through his hair
and across his face, noticing for the first time that he hadn't shaved
in quite some time.
"Well, they say some fellows in the SS are going to let a big contract
soon. For Vampir. They may revive Vampir."
"The SS. What do they care about--" "Hans, I didn't ask. I-I just
didn't ask. But I hear it has to do with .. He trailed off.
"What? Come on now. Dieter. What on earth? I've never seen you
quite so--" "Hans. It's just another job. Perhaps the Waffen SS wants
to put Vampir into production. I don't--" "What did you hear?"
"It's a special thing. A special mission. A special most secret, most
important effort. That's all. It's said to originate from--from high
quarters."
Vollmerhausen pursed his lips disgustingly, puzzled.
"I think they're interested in you. I think they're quite interested
in you. Would you be willing? Hans, think about it. Please."
The SS filled him with dread. You heard so much. But a job was a job,
especially when the alternative was the Ostfront.
"Yes. Yes, I suppose I--" A day or so later he found himself in
conversation with a pale officer at Unter den Eichen, the underground
headquarters of the SS administrative and economic section, in
Berlin.
"The Reichsfrihrer is anxious to let a contract on an engineering
project, sited down in the Schwarzwald. Actually, I may as well be
frank with you, he believes this Vampir thing you worked on might have
applications with regard to the duties of the SS and he's anxious to
pursue them."
"Interesting," said Vollmerhausen.
The man then proceeded to discuss with surprising precision the history
and technology of Vampir, especially as linked to the STG-44.
Vollmerhausen was stunned to realize how carefully the project had been
examined by--what was it?--WVHA, of which up until a day or so ago he'd
not even heard.
"There's no question of funding," the man explained, "we have access to
adequate monies. A subsidiary called Ostindustrie GmbH produces quite
a lot of income.
Cheap labor from the East."
"Well, the budget would certainly be a factor in such a project," said
Vollmerhausen noncommittally.
"Do you know this fellow Repp?"
"The great Waffen SS hero?"
"Yes, him. He's a part of it too. He'll be joining the project
shortly. We've given it a code name, Nibelungen.
Operation Nibelungen."
"What on earth--" "The Reichsfuhrer's idea. He likes those little
touches.
It's a joke, actually. Surely you can see that?"
But Vollmerhausen was baffled. Joke?
The officer continued.
"Now, Herr IngenieurDoktor, here"--he shuffled some papers--"Vampir's
chief liability, according to the field results--" "The test was
planned for failure. They treated it like a piece of cookware. It's a
sophisticated--" "Yes, yes. Well, from our point of view, the problem
is weight."
"With batteries, insulation, wiring, precision equipment, a lens
system, energy conversion facilities, what do you expect?"
"What does the Vampir weigh?"
Vollmerhausen was silent. The answer was an embarrassment.
"Seventy kilos." The man answered his own question.
"At the very limits of movability."
"A strong man--" "A man at the front, in the rain, the cold, hungry,
exhausted, is not strong."
Vollmerhausen was again silent. He glared off into space. It was not
safe to show anger toward the SS; yet he felt himself scowling.
"Herr Doktor, our specifications call for forty kilos."
Vollmerhausen thought he had misheard.
"Eh? I'm not sure I--" "Forty kilos."
"That's insane! Is this a joke? That's preposterous!"
"It can't be done?"
"Not without compromising Vampir out of existence.
This is no toy. Perhaps in the future, when new miniaturization
technologies become available. But not now, not--" "In three months.
Perhaps four, even five, difficult to say at this point."
Vollmerhausen almost leaped from his chair again;
but he saw the man fixing him with a cool, steady glare.
"I--I don't know," he stammered.
"You'll have the best facilities, the top people, the absolute green
light from all cooperating agencies.
You'll have the total resources of the SS at your disposal, from the
Reichsfrihrer on down. I think you know the kind of weight that
carries these days."
"Well, I--" "We're prepared to go all the way on this. We believe it
to be of the utmost importance to our Fuhrer, our Fatherland and our
Racial Peoples. I don't see how you can say No to the Reichsfrihrer.
It's an honor to be chosen for this job. A fitting climax to your
service to the Reich."
Vollmerhausen deciphered the threat in this, more vivid for remaining
unspecified.
"Of course," he finally ventured, with a weak kike smile, "it would be
an honor," thinking all the time, What am I doing? Forty kilos?
* * *
The forty kilos now, months later, were within ten kilos; they'd picked
and peeled and compromised and teased and improvised their way down,
gram by painful gram. Vollmerhausen could almost measure the past days
in terms of grams trimmed here and there, but these last ten kilos
seemed impossible to find. After steady progress, the staff had
stalled badly and another of Vollmerhausen's concerns was whether or
not Repp had noticed this.
It was a typical career development for him, he thought. He'd done so
much good work, so much brilliant work, and never gotten any real
credit for it. Meanwhile, once again, everything was coming unraveled
over some nonsense that he had no control over.
Tears of black bitterness welled up in his eyes. Bad luck, unfair
persecution, unlucky coincidences seemed to haunt him.
For example, for example, what thanks, what respect, had he gotten for
his modifications thus far to the STG-44? He'd taken a clever, sound
production rifle, albeit one with a hand-tooled breech and barrel, but
still just another automatic gun, and turned it into a firstclass
sniper's weapon. He solved the two most pressing problems--noise and
accuracy at long range--in one stroke, devising a whole new concept of
ballistics. The mission specs called for thirty rounds to be delivered
silently and devastatingly to a target 400 meters out. So be it: now
Repp had his thirty chances, where before he had nothing.
And what had been the response?
Repp had merely fixed those cold eyes on him and inquired, "But,
Ingenieur-Doktor, how much does it weigh?"
Today's meeting was not going well: a bitter squabble between the
optics group, most of them from the Munich Technological Institute, and
the power group, the battery people: natural antagonists in the weight
business.
Meanwhile, the people from Energy Conversion remained silent, sullen.
All at once the complexities seemed overwhelming.
An incredible restlessness stirred through his limbs, as the eyes of
his staff pressed into him, demanding answers, guidance, adjudication.
Beyond them, more threatening, he could see Repp. His misery was
intense, fiery.
"Gentlemen, please. I believe--" He halted, absolutely no idea what
he'd meant to say when he began to speak. That had been happening
often too, sentences that began in confidence, then somewhere in the
middle veered out of control and trailed off into silence, the ideas
they had sought to express vanishing. He felt the impulse to flee
mounting in him; it fluttered in his chest like a live thing.
"I believe," he continued, and was as amazed as they at the finish,
"that I'm going to go for a walk."
They looked at him in bafflement. He'd always been so driven, trying
to beat the problem down by sheer intensity of will, flatten it with
his energy, his doggedness.
He read in several sets of eyes the suspicion that Hans the Kike was
finally cracking on them.
"It'll do us all some good," he argued.
"Get away from the problem for a few hours, get a fresh perspective on
it. We'll meet again at one."
He rushed from them into the out-of-doors and felt a burst of clean
spring air and the heat of the sun. It's spring, he thought with
surprise. He'd lost all sense of time and season, shut off in his
exotic world of microns and heat curves and power sequences. Then he
noticed how the installation had changed, having become now almost a
fortification. He nearly stumbled into a trench that ran between
cement blockhouses that were surely new since the last time he'd come
this way. He picked out a path around sand-bagged gun emplacements and
maneuvered through trellises of barbed wire. Were the Americans close
by? It frightened him suddenly. Must remember to ask Repp.
But he wanted green silence, blue sky, the touch of the sun; not this
vista of war, which merely stressed his problems. He rushed through
the gate and headed down the road to the range a mile or so away; it
was the only available openness in the surrounding woods. The journey
wasn't pleasing; the trees loomed in on him darkly, sealing off the
sky, and there were spots after an initial turn where he felt
completely isolated in the forest as the road wound through it. Not
another living creature seemed to stir; no breeze nudged the dense
overhead branches, which sliced the sun into splashes at his feet. But
then a patch of yellow appeared at the end of the corridor after
another turn. He almost ran the remaining distance.
The range was empty, a yellow field banked on four sides by the trees.
He walked to the center of it, felt the sun's warmth again build on his
neck. It was March,
after all, April next, then May, and May was said to be especially nice
in these parts, on a clear day one could make out the Alps one hundred
kilometers or so away to the south. He twisted suddenly in that
direction, seeking them as one would seek a hope. Above the trees was
only haze and blur. He looked about for symbols of life reviving, for
buds or birds or bees, and shortly picked out a flower, a yellow
thing.
He bent to it. An early fellow, eh? It was a spiky, not too
healthy-looking creature, stained faintly brown.
Vollmerhausen had never felt much for such displays, had never had the
time for them, but now he thought he had a glimmer into the simple
pleasures so many of his countrymen had crooned about over the years.
He plucked the flower from the soil and held it close to study it: an
interesting design, the petals really slivers of a disk sectioned to
facilitate easy opening and closing, a clever notion for capturing
maximum sunlight, yet not sacrificing protection from the night cold. A
little sun machine composed of concentric circles, efficient, elegant,
precise. Now there was engineering! As if to confirm this judgment,
the sun seemed to beat harder on the back of his neck.
He felt extraordinarily pleasant. He really felt as though he'd
discovered something. He must remember to find a book on flowers. He
knew nothing about them but was filled with a sudden overwhelming
curiosity.
These soothing thoughts deserted him abruptly when he realized he stood
in the middle of the killing ground.
A memory of that night came quickly over him. When had he known they
were going to shoot them? He couldn't remember exactly, the knowledge
evolved slowly, over the first few months. He could not identify an
actual moment of awareness. It just seemed they all knew and didn't
find it remarkable. Nobody was upset.
Repp seemed to think it quite unexceptional. He had no involvement in
it in any way; it would simply happen, that's all, when the prototype
Vampir reached a certain stage. But the whole business left
Vollmerhausen queasy, uncomfortable.
He remembered the beginning best, the double line of men standing
listlessly in the dark cold. He could hear them breathing. They
seemed so alive. He was wildly excited, nervous, his stomach so
agitated that it actually hurt. The Jews stood in their ranks, waiting
to die. He could see no faces; but he noticed at this penultimate
moment a curious thing.
They were so small.
They were all small. Some mere boys, even the older men wiry and
short.
After that, it moved clinically. The Jews were marched away and when
he could not see them he no longer thought of them.
The preparations were laconic, calm. Repp fussed with the weapon, then
dropped behind it and drew it to him, arranging himself into a strained
pose, all bone beneath the rifle, no flesh, no muscle, nothing but a
structure of bone to hold the weight.
"You have power, sir," someone said.
"Ah, yes," said Repp, his voice somewhat muffled in the gunstock,
"quite nice, quite nice."
"Sir, the guards are clear," somebody called.
"The targets are at four fifty."
"Yes, yes," said Repp, and then his words vanished in the thumping of
the burst, one fast, slithering drum roll, the individual reports
fusing in their rush.
It was just seconds later they realized a man had survived, and just
seconds after that that all hell broke loose, the lights flashed on,
two American fighter-bombers roaring down into the bright zone,
spitting bullets into the field, running their earth-splitting
hemstitches across the field, and the lights flashed out.
"Fuckers," somebody said, "where the hell did they come from?"
Vollmerhausen shuddered. He stood now in the grass where the mangled
bodies had lain. The Vampir rifle's slugs had torn huge chunks in the
flesh. Blood had soaked the earth that night, but now there was only
grass, and sun, blue sky, a little breeze.
Vollmerhausen began to walk toward the trees. He realized the sun was
behind a cloud. No wonder it felt cool all of a sudden.
The sun came out; he felt its heat across his neck again.
Yes, warm me.
Soothe me.
Clean me.
Yes, purify me.
Forgive me.
Then he knew where his ten kilos were coming from.
They made an odd pair: Susan in her dumpy civilian dress, and Dr.
Fischelson, dressed in the fashion of the last century, fussy and
ancient in wing collar, spats, a striped suit, goatee and pince-nez. We
look like a picture of my grandparents, she thought.
She had him calmer now, but still was uncertain. He could go off
dottily at any moment, ranting in an odd mixture of Polish, Yiddish,
German and English, his eyes watering, licking his dry lips, talking
crazily of obscure events and people. He was not an effective man, she
knew; but when it came to one thing, his will was iron: the fate of the
Jews. He seemed to carry it around with him, an imaginary weight,
bending him closer to earth each day, making him more insane.
But now he was calmer. She'd soothed him, listening, nodding,
cajoling, whispering. They sat on two uncomfortable chairs in an
antiseptic corridor of a private clinic in Kilburn, a London suburb,
outside the door behind which the Man from the East--Fischelson's
portentous phrase--rested.
The crisis of the evening was now over. It seemed that late in the
afternoon some investigators had shown up at the clinic and asked rude
questions. Fischelson had panicked. A rough scene had ensued. In
frenzy, he'd called her. She'd begged off late duty and gotten out
there as fast as she could--only to find them gone and Fischelson
shaking and incoherent.
"Now, now," she calmed.
"I'm sure it was nothing.
Emigration people probably, or security. That's all.
They have to check these things."
"Rude. So rude they was. No respect." How could she make this man
see how armies--modern nations, for that matter--worked?
"It's nothing. Dr. Fischelson. Nothing at all. They have to check
these things." She stole a glance at her watch. Christ, it was
getting late: near midnight. She'd been here with the old bird since
eight. She was due in at six tomorrow.
"Perhaps we ought to leave. Everything's quiet now."
"Sure, leave. You leave. Me, an old man, I'll stay here." The old
Jews; they were all alike. Now he sounded like her mother.
Manipulation with guilt. Most effective. Jesus, how long would this
go on?
"All right. We'll stay a little longer." How could you get rough with
Fischelson? He wasn't some jerk who was pawing at you. But she was
exhausted. They had the witness, curious man in the back room--an
incredible story. A story that would be told now, at last. Even if it
was too late. No, it wasn't too late. In the camps were still many,
near death. If the authorities could at last be convinced, who knew
what was possible? Armored attacks driving toward the KZ's, with
doctors and medicine:
thousands could be saved. If only the proper people could be
convinced.
The doctor sat with hands folded, breathing heavily.
Then he took off his pince-nez and began to polish the lenses in his
lapel. He had long, bony fingers. In the yellow light of the
corridor, he looked as if he were made of old paper, parchment. Our
Jewish general, she thought: half insane, half senile, furiously
indignant. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Fischelson had been here since '39. When the philanthropist
Hirsczowicz had converted to Zionism late in that year, his first act
had been to establish a voice in the West. He was very shrewd,
Hirsczowicz: he knew the fate of the Jews rested in the hands of the
West. He'd sent Fischelson over first, a kind of advance guard, to set
things up. But Fischelson became the whole show when the war broke out
and Hirsczowicz disappeared in a Nazi execution operation. The old man
proved to be horribly unsuited to the task: he was not delicate, he had
no tact, no political sensibility; he could only whine and rant.
"His papers is good," Dr. Fischelson said, in his heavy accent.
"Pardon?" she said.
"His papers is good. I guarantee. I guarantee. He has release from
prison war camp. Our peoples find him in DP hospital. Sick, very
sick. They get him visa. Jews help Jews. Across France he comes by
train. Then the last by ship. Lawyers draw up papers. All good, all
legal.
This I tell you. So why investigators? So why now investigators?"
"Please, please," she said, for the old man had begun to rise and
declaim. A vein pulsed beneath the dry skin of his throat.
"It's some kind of mistake, I'm sure. Or a part of the routine. That's
all. Look, I have a friend in the intelligence service, a captain."
"A Jew?"
"No. But a good man, basically. A decent man. I'll call him and--"
She heard the doors at the end of the corridor swing open and at first
could not recognize them. They were not particularly impressive men:
just big, burly, a little embarrassed. Susan's sentence stopped in her
mouth.
Who were they? Dr. Fischelson, following the confusion in her eyes,
looked over.
They came silently, without talking, four of them, and the fifth, a
leader, a way back. They passed Susan and Fischelson and stepped into
Shmuel's room.
My God, she thought.
"What's this, what's going on?" shouted Fischelson.
Susan felt her heart begin to accelerate and her hands begin to
tremble. She had trouble breathing.
"Easy," said the leader, not brutally at all.
"Miss Susan, what's going on?" Fischelson demanded.
Say something, you idiot, Susan thought.
"Hey, what are you guys doing?" she said, her voice breaking.
"Special Branch, miss. Sorry. Just be a moment."
"Miss Susan, Miss Susan," the old man stood, panic wild in his eyes. He
began to lapse into Yiddish.
"What's going on?" she shouted.
"Goddamn you, what's going on?"
"Easy, miss," he said. He was not a brutal man.
"Nothing to concern yourself with. Special Branch."
The first four came out of the room. On a stretcher was the swaddled
form of the survivor. He looked around dazedly.
"I'm an American officer," she said, fumbling for identification.
"For God's sake, that man is ill. What is going on? Where are you
taking that man?"
"Now, now, miss," the leader soothed. It would have been easier to
hate him if he hadn't been quite so mild.
"He's ill."
The doctor was denouncing them in Polish.
"Please don't get excited," the man said.
"Where is your authority?" she shouted, because it was the only thing
she could think of.
"Sorry, miss. You're a Yank, wouldn't know, would you? Of course not.
Special Branch. Don't need an authority.
Special Branch. That's all."
"He's gone, mein Gott, is gone, is gone." The doctor sat down.
Susan stared down the hall at the swinging doors through which they'd
taken the Jew.
The leader turned to go, and Susan grabbed him.
"What is happening? My God, this is a nightmare.
What are you doing, what is going on?" Her eyes felt big and she was
terrified. They had merely come in and taken him and nothing on earth
could stop them. There was nothing she could do. She and an old man
alone in a corridor.
"Miss," the leader said, "please. You are supposed to be in uniform.
The regulations. Now I haven't taken any names. We've been quite
pleasant. Best advice is to go away, take the old man, get him some
tea, and put him to bed. Forget all this. It's a government matter.
Now I
haven't taken any names. Please, miss, let go. I don't want to take
any names."
He stood back. He was ill at ease, a big, strong type, with police or
military written all over him. He was trying to be kind. It was a
distasteful business for him.
"Who can I see?" she said.
"Jesus, tell me who I can see?"
The man took a nervous look around. Outside, a horn honked. Quickly,
his hand dipped into his coat, came out with a paper. He unfolded it,
looked it over.
"See a Captain Leets," he said.
"American, like you.
Or a Major Outhwaithe. They're behind it all." And he was gone.
"The Jews," Dr. Fischelson was saying, over on the chair, looking
bleakly at nothing, "who'll tell about the Jews? Who'll witness the
fate of the Jews?"
But Susan knew nobody cared about the Jews.
Leets, alone in the office, waited for her. He knew she'd come. He
felt nervous. He smoked. His leg ached.
He'd sent Roger out on errands, for now there was much to do; and once
Tony had called, urgent with a dozen ideas, with several subsidiary
leads from the first great windfall. But Leets had pushed him off.
"I have to get through the business with Susan."
Tony's voice turned cold.
"There is no business with Susan. You owe her nothing. You owe the
Jews nothing.
You owe the operation everything."
"I have to try and explain it," he said, knowing this would never do
for a man of Tony's hardness.
"Then get it over with quick, chum, and be ready for business tomorrow.
It's first day on the new job, all right?"
Leets envied the major: war was simple for the Brits--they waged it
flat out, and counted costs later.
He heard something in the hall. Susan? No, something in this ancient
building settling with a groan.
But presently the door opened, and she came in.
He could see her in the shadows.
"I thought you'd be out celebrating," she said.
"It's not a triumph. It's a beginning."
"Can we have some light, please, goddamn it."
He snapped on his desk lamp, a brass fixture with an opaque green
cowl.
Because he knew he was dead to her, she seemed very beautiful. He
could feel his cock tighten and grow. He felt a desperate need to
return to the past: before all this business, when the Jews were little
people in the background whom she went to see occasionally, and his job
was simple, meaningless, and London a party. For just a second he felt
he'd do anything to have all that back, but mainly what he wanted back
was her. Just her.
He wanted to know her again, all of her--skin, her hands and legs. Her
mouth. Her laugh. Her breasts, cunt.
She wore full uniform, as if at a review. Army brown, which turned
most women shapeless and sexless, made Susan wonderful. Her brass
buttons shone in the flickery English light. A few ribbons were pinned
across the left breast of her jacket. A bar glittered on her lapels,
and a SHAEF patch, a sword, up-thrust, stood out on her shoulder. One
of those little caps tilted across her hair. She was carrying a purse
or something.
"I tried to stop you, you know," she said.
"I tried. I went to see people. People I know. Officers I'd met in
the wards. Generals even. I even tried to see Hemingway, but he's
gone. That's how desperate I was."
"But you didn't get anywhere?"
"No. Of course not."
"It's very big. Or, we think it's big. You can't stop it.
Ike himself couldn't stop it."
"You bastard."
"Do you want a cigarette?"
"No."
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"I was there when they came and took him.
"Special Branch." There was nothing we could do."
"I know. I read the report. Sorry. I didn't know it would work out
that way."
"Would it have made any difference?"
"No," Leets said.
"No, it wouldn't have, Susan."
"You filthy bastard."
She seemed almost about to break down. But her eyes, which had for
just a flash welled with tears, returned quickly to their hard
brilliance.
"Susan--" "Where is he?"
"In another hospital. A British one. He'll be fine there. He'll be
all right. If it's a matter of worrying about him, then please don't.
We'll take good care of him. He's quite important."
"You have no idea what that man's been through."
"I think perhaps I do. It's been very rough on him, sure, we
realize--" "You have no idea, Jim. You can't possibly begin to
imagine. If you think you can, then you're fooling yourself.
Believe me."
Leets said nothing.
"Why? For Christ's sakes, why? You kidnap a poor Jew. Like Cossacks,
you come in and just take him.
Why?"
"He's an intelligence source. An extraordinary one.
We believe he's the key to a high-priority German operation.
We believe we can work backward from the information he gives us and
track it down. And stop it."
"You bastard. You have no idea of the stakes involved, of what he
means to those people."
"Susan, believe me: I had no choice. I was walking down a London
street a few nights ago with a woman I love. All of a sudden she
unreels a story that struck right at the heart of something I'd been
working on since January. You needed a witness? Well, I needed one
too.
I had no way of knowing they'd turn out to be the same man."
"You and that bastard Englishman. You were the officers that came by
the clinic yesterday. I should have known. Dr. Fischelson said
investigators. I thought of cops. But no, it was you and that Oxford
creep. You'd do anything for them, won't you, Jim? Anything! To get
in with the Oxford boys, the Harvard boys. You've come a long way from
Northwestern, goddamn you."
"I'm sorry. I didn't send the Jew to Aniage Elf in the Schwarzwald. I
didn't set him among the Waffen SS and the Man of Oak and
Obersturmbannfrihrer Repp. The Germans did that. I've got to find out
why."
"You bastard."
"Please. Be reasonable."
"That's what you people always say. That's what we've been hearing
since 1939. Be reasonable. Don't exaggerate. Stay calm. Keep your
voice down."
"Yell then, if it makes you feel better."
"You're all the same. You and the Germans. You're all--" "Shut up,
Susan. You've got no call to say that."
She stared at him in black fury. He'd never seen so much rage on a
human face. He swallowed uncomfortably, lit a cigarette. His hands
were shaking.
"Here, I brought you something." She reached into her purse.
"Go ahead. Look. Go ahead, you're brave. I insist."
It was a selection of photographs. Blurry, pornographic things. Naked
women in fields, standing among German soldiers. Pits jammed with
corpses. One, particularly horrible, showed a German soldier in full
combat gear, holding a rifle up against the head of a woman who held a
child.
"It's awful," he said.
"Jesus, of course it's awful. What do you expect me to say? It's
awful, all of it. All right?
Goddamn it, what do you want? I had a fucking job to do. I didn't ask
for it, it just came along. So get off my back, goddamn it."
"Dr. Fischelson has an interesting theory. Would you like to hear it?
It's that the Gentiles are still punishing us for inventing the
conscience five thousand years ago.
But what they don't realize is that when they kill us, they kill
themselves."
"Is that a theory or a curse?"
"If it's a curse, Jim, I extend it to you. From the got 5
torn of my heart, I hope this thing kills you. I hope it does. I hope
it kills you."
"I think you'd better go now. I've still got work to do."
She left him, alone in the office. The pictures lay before him on the
desk. After a while, he ripped them up and threw them into the
wastebasket.
Early the next morning, before the interrogations began, Leets composed
the following request and with Outhwaithe's considerable juice got it
priority circulation as an addendum to the weekly Intelligence Sitrep,
which bucked it down as far as battalion-level G-2's and their British
counterparts ETO-wide.
JOINT ANGLO-AMERICAN TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
PRIORITY ONE
REQUEST ALL-LEVEL G-2/CIC STAFFS FORWARD THIS HDQ
ANY INFO IN RE FOLLOWING FASTEST REPEAT FASTEST
FASTEST
1. UNUSUAL ENEMY SMALL ARMS PROFICIENCY, ESP INVOLVING
WAFF EN SS UNITS
2. HEAVILY DEFENDED TEST INSTALLATIONS ENCOMPASSING
FIRING RANGE FACILITIES
3. RUMORS, UNCONFIRMED STORIES, INVOLVING SAME
4. PW INTERROGATION REPORTS INVOLVING SAME
"Jesus, the crap we're going to get out of that," complained Roger.
 It was clear the Jew was trying to accommodate them.
He answered patiently their many questions, though he thought them
stupid. They kept asking him the same ones again and again and each
time he answered. But he could only tell them what he knew. He knew
that Repp had killed twenty-five men at long distance--400 meters Leets
had figured--in pitch dark, without sound.
He knew that a mysterious Man of Oak had come to visit the project at
one point or other during his time there. He knew that he'd been
picked up near Karlsruhe, which meant he'd traveled the length of the
Black Forest massif, a distance of one hundred or so kilometers, which
would put the location of Aniage Elf at somewhere in that massive
forest's southern quadrant.
Beyond that, only details emerged. One day he identified the collar
patches of the SS soldiers at the installation:
they were from III Waffen SS Panzergrenadierdivision Totenkopf, the
Death's Head division, a group of men originally drawn from the pre-war
concentration camp guard personnel that had since 1939 fought in
Poland, France, Russia and was now thought to be in Hungary.
Another day he identified the kind of automobile the mysterious Man of
Oak had arrived in: a Mercedes Benz twelve-cylinder limousine, thought
to be issued only to Amt leaders, or department heads, in the SS
bureaucracy. But as to the meaning or identity of this strange
phantom, he had no idea. He did not even have much curiosity.
"He was a German. That's all. A German big shot," he said laconically
in his oddly accented English.
Another day he correctly identified the STG-44 as the basic weapon of
the Totenkopf complement. Another day he discussed the installation
layout, fortifications and so forth. Another day he created to the
best of his ability a word-picture of the unfortunate civilian called
Hans the Kike, whose chemicals he'd tried to move.
Leets smiled at how far they'd come and how fast.
From that first meeting in the hospital to now, no more than a week had
passed. Yet a whole counterespionage operation had been mounted. SWET
effectively no longer existed; it had been given over entirely to the
business of catching Repp .. . and he, Leets, would run the show,
reporting only to Tony. He would have first priority in all matters of
technical support: he could go anywhere anytime, spend any amount of
money, as long as Tony didn't scream too loud, and Tony wouldn't scream
at all. He had the highest security clearance.
More people in this town knew of him than ever before, and he'd been
asked to three parties. He had a car, though only Rug as driver. There
was talk of a Majority.
He knew he could get on the phone and call up anybody short of Ike; and
maybe even Ike.
Yes, it was quite a lot.
But it was also very little.
"He can only get us so far. We are helpless until we find this place,"
Tony said.
But Leets pressed ahead. It was his hope that somewhere in the Jew's
testimony a hidden clue would be uncovered, yielding up the secrets of
Repp and his operation.
Black Forest? Then consult with botanists, hikers, foresters,
geographers, vacationers. Look at recon photos.
Check out library books--Tramping the German Forests, by Maj. H. W. O.
Stovall (Ret.), D.F.C, Faber and Faber; The Shadowy World of the
Deciduous Forest, by Dr. William Blinkall-Apney. And do not forget
that trove of intelligence: Baedeker.
Man of Oak? Scan the British Intelligence files for German officers
with wooden arms or legs or even jaws--it had happened to Freud, had it
not? Check out reputations, rumors, absurd possibilities. Could a
fellow walk stiffly? Could he be extremely orthodox? Very
conservative?
Slow-moving, losing his leaves, deep-rooted, dispensing acorns?
"It's rather ridiculous," Tony said.
"It sounds like something out of one of your Red Indian movies."
Leets grunted. Man-of-Oak? Jesus Christ, he moaned in disgust.
And what about equipment?
Hitting twenty-five targets dead center from 400 meters in the dark?
Impossible. Yet here was the crucial element that had convinced Tony
to call upstairs and make noise. For in a mob of dead Jews he could
easily see dead generals or dead ministers or dead kings.
But ballistics people said it was impossible. No man could shoot so
well without being able to see. There must have been some kind of
secret illumination. Radar?
Unlikely, for radar, though still primitive, worked best in the air,
where it could see only airplanes and space. There was some kind of
sound business the Navy had--sonar, someone said. Perhaps the Germans
had worked out a way to hear the targets. Supersensitive
microphones.
"Maybe the guy can just see in the dark," Rug suggested.
"Thanks, Rug. You're a big help," Leets said.
But even if he could see, how could he hit? Four hundred meters was a
long way. If he was going to hit at that range, he had to be putting
out a high-velocity round. And when it sliced through the sound
barrier, krak! Leets could himself remember. And he knew the guy was
firing a very quick 7.92-millimeter round. Could they silence it?
Sure, silence the gun, no problem; but not the bullet! The bullet made
the noise.
How the hell were they doing it?
It terrified him.
Who was the target?
Now there was the big one. With the who, everything else would come
unraveled. Leets's guesses went only to one conclusion: it had to be a
group. Else why would this Repp practice up on a group, and why would
he use a weapon like the thirty-shot STG-44, as opposed to a nice
five-shot Kar '98 rifle, the bolt-action, long-range instrument the
Germans had been building in the millions since the last century?
Yet killing anyone would not seem to gain them much, except some hollow
vengeance. Sure, kill Churchill, kill Stalin. But it wouldn't change
the outcome of the war.
Kill the two houses of Parliament, the Congress and the Senate, the
Presidium and the Politburo: it wouldn't change a thing. Germany would
be squashed at the same rate. The big shots still rode the rope.
Yet, goddamn it, not only were they going to kill someone, the SS was
going to an immense effort, an effort that must have strained every
resource in these desperate days, to kill a few more.
What could it matter? Millions were already dead, already wasted. Who
did they hate enough to kill even as they were dying?
Who were they trying to reach out of the grave to get?
And that is where Shmuel's information left them.
Except for one thing.
Leets was alone in the office, working late into the night. That day's
work with the Jew had not gone well.
He was beginning to balk. He did not seem to care for his new allies.
He was a grim little mutt, grumpy, short of temper, looking absurd in
new American clothes.
He'd been returned to the hospital now, and Tony was off in conference
and Rug was hitting balls against a wall and Leets sat there, nursing
the ache in his leg amid crumpled-up balls of paper, books, junk,
photos, maps, and tried not to think of Susan. He knew one thing that
could drive Susan from his mind.
Leets opened the drawer and drew out a file. It was marked "repp,
first name ?" German SS officer, Le Paradis suspect," and though its
contents were necessarily sketchy, it did contain one bonafide
treasure.
Leets opened it and there, staring back at him through lightless eyes,
was this Repp. It was a blow-up of a 1936
newspaper photo: a long young face, not in any way extraordinary, hair
dark and close-cropped, cheekbones high.
The Master Sniper, the Jew had called him.
Leets rationed himself in looking at the picture. He didn't want to
stare it into banality, become overfamiliar with it. He wanted to feel
a rush of breath every time he saw it, never take it for granted. To
take this guy for granted, Leets knew, would be to make a big
mistake.
They'd showed the picture to Shmuel.
He'd looked at it, given it back.
"Yes. It's him."
"Repp?"
"Yes. Younger, of course."
"We think he was involved in a war-crimes action against British
prisoners in 1940 in France," explained Outhwaithe, who'd brought the
file by.
"A wounded survivor gave two names. Repp was one of them. A
researcher then went through the British Museum's back files and came
up with this. It's from the sporting-news section of Illustrierter
Beobachter, the pre-war Nazi picture rag. It seems this young fellow
was a member of the German small-bore rifle team. The survivor
identified him from it. So we've a long-standing interest in Herr
Repp."
"I hope you arrest him, or whatever," Shmuel had said. He had to be
pressed into pursuing the topic of Repp, but finally said only, "A
soldier. Rather calm man, quite in control of himself and others. I
have no insights into him. Jews have never understood that sort.
I can't begin to imagine what he's like, how his mind works, how he
sees the world. He frightens me. Then.
And now, in this room. He has no grief."
Though Shmuel had no interest in knowing Repp, that was now Leets's
job. He stared hard at the photo.
Its caption simply said, "Kadett Repp, one of our exemplary German
sportsmen, has a fine future in shooting competitions."
Another day passed, another interrogation spun itself listlessly out.
Leets felt especially sluggish, having spent so much time the night
previous with the picture of the German. Another researcher had been
dispatched at Tony's behest through the back issues of all German
periodicals at the British Museum; perhaps something new would surface
there. Whatever, that aspect had passed momentarily out of Leets's
hands; before him now, instead, sat the Jew, looking even worse than
usual. He had rallied in his first days among the Allies, bloated with
bland food, treated with unctuous enthusiasm;
perhaps he'd even been flattered. But as the time wore on, Leets felt
they were losing him. Lately he'd been a clam, talking in grunts,
groans. Leets had heard he sometimes had nightmares and would scream
in the night--"Ost! Ost!" east, east; and from this the American
concluded things had been rough for him. But what the hell, he'd made
it, hadn't he? Leets hadn't been raised to appreciate what he took to
be moodiness. He had no patience for a tragic view of life and when he
himself got to feeling low, it was with an intense accompanying sense
of self-loathing.
Anyway, not only was the Jew somewhat hostile, he was sick. With a
cold, no less.
"You look pretty awful," said Rug, in a rare display of human sympathy,
though on the subject of another man's misfortune he was hardly
convincing.
"The English keep their rooms so chilly," the man said.
"Roger, stoke the heater," Leets said irritably, anxious to return to
the matter at hand, which this day was another runaround on the topic
of the Man of Oak.
Roger muttered something and moped over to the heater, giving it a
rattle.
"A hundred and two in here," he said to nobody.
Shmuel sniffled again, emptied his sinuses through enflamed nostrils
into a tissue, and tossed it into a wastebasket.
"I wish I had my coat. The German thing. They make them warm at
least. The wind gets through this." He yanked on his American
jacket.
"That old thing? Smelled like a chem lab," Roger said.
"Now," Leets said, "could there be some double meaning in this Oak
business? A pun, a symbol, something out of Teutonic mythology--"
Leets halted.
"Hey," he said, turning rudely, "what did you mean, chem lab?"
"Uh." Roger looked up in surprise.
"I said, what did you mean--" "I heard what you said. I meant, it
smelled like a chem lab." It was as close as he could get.
"I had a year of organic in high school, that's all."
"Where is it?"
"Um," Roger grunted.
"It was just an old Kraut coat.
How was I to know it was anything special? I uh .. . I threw it
out."
"Oh, Jesus," said Leets.
"Where?"
"Hey, Captain, it was just this crappy old--" "Where, Sergeant,
where!
Leets usually didn't use that tone with him, and Rug didn't like it a
bit.
"In the can, for Christ's sake. Behind the hospital.
After we got him his new clothes. I mean I--" "All right," said Leets,
trying to remain calm.
"When?"
"About a week ago."
"Oh, hell." He tried to think.
"We've got to get that thing back." And he picked up the phone and
began to search for whoever was in charge of garbage pickup from
American installations in London.
The coat was found in a pit near St. Saviour's Dock on the far side of
the Thames from the Tower of London. It was found by Roger and it did
smell--of paint, toast, used rubbers, burnt papers, paste, rust, oil,
wood shavings and a dozen other substances with which it had lain
intimately.
"And lead sulfide," Leets said, reading the report from the OSS
Research and Development office the next day.
"What the hell is that?" Roger wanted to know.
Shmuel did not appear to care.
"It's a stuff out of which infrared components are built. It's how
they could see, how Repp could see. I find out now we're working hard
on it in ultra secrecy, and the English as well. But this would tend
to suggest the
Germans are at the head of the class. They've got a field model ready,
which means they're years ahead of us.
See, the thing converts heat energy to light energy: it sees heat. A
man is a certain temperature. Repp's gadget was set in that range. He
could see the heat and shoot into it. He could see them all. Except--"
he paused-"for him."
He turned to Shmuel.
"You were right," he said.
"God did not save you. It was no miracle at all: The stuff absorbs
heat: that's why it's photo-conductive. And that's why it's such a
great insulator. It's why the thing kept you so warm, got you through
the Schwarzwald. And why Repp couldn't see you. You were just enough
different in temperature from the others. You were invisible."
Shmuel did not appear to care.
"I knew God had other worries that night," he said.
"But the next time he shoots," Leets said, "the guys on the other side
of the scope won't be so lucky."
 Vollmerhausen is visibly nervous, Repp noticed with irritation. Now
why should that be? It won't be his neck on the line out there, it'll
be mine.
It was still light enough to smoke, a pleasant twilight, mid-April.
Repp lit one of his Siberias, shaggy Ivan cigarettes, loosely packed,
twigs in them, and they sometimes popped when they burned, but it was a
habit he'd picked up in the Demyansk encirclement.
"Smoke, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor?" he inquired.
"No. No. Never have. Thanks."
"Certainly. The night will come soon."
"Are you sure it's safe here? I mean, what if--" "Hard heart, Herr
Ingenieur-Doktor, hard heart. All sorts of things can happen, and
usually do. But not here, not tonight. There'll only be a patrol, not
a full attack.
Not this late. These Americans are in no hurry to die."
He smiled, looked through the glassless farm window at the tidy fields
that offered no suggestion of war.
"But we are surrounded," said Vollmerhausen. It was true. American
elements were on all sides of them, though not aggressive. They were
near the town of Alfeld, on the Swabian plain, in a last pocket of
resistance.
"We got in, didn't we? We'll get back to our quiet little corner,
don't worry." He chuckled.
An SS sergeant, in camouflage tunic, carrying an MP-40, came through
the door.
"Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer," he said in great breathless respect,
"Captain Weber sent me. The ambush team will be moving out in fifteen
minutes."
"Ah. Thank you, Sergeant," said Repp affably.
"Well," turning to the engineer, "time to go, eh?"
But Vollmerhausen just stood there, peering through the window into the
twilight. His face was drawn and he seemed colorless. The man had
never been in a combat zone before.
Repp hoisted the electro-optical pack onto his back, struggling under
the weight, and got the harness buckled.
Vollmerhausen made no move to help. Repp lifted the rifle itself off
its bipod--it rested on the table--and stepped into the sling, which
had been rigged to take most of the weight, made an adjustment here and
there and declared himself ready. He wore both pieces of camouflage
gear tonight, the baggy tiger trousers along with the tunic, and the
standard infantry harness with webbed belt and six canvas magazine
pouches and, naturally, his squashed cap with the death's-head.
"Care to come?" he asked lightly.
"Thanks, no," said Vollmerhausen, uneasy at the jest, "it's so damned
cold." He swallowed, clapped his hands around himself in pantomimed
shiver.
"Cold? It's in the forties. The tropics. This is spring.
See you soon. Hope your gadget works."
"Remember, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, you've only got three
minutes--"
"--in the on-phase. I remember. I shall make the most of them," Repp
replied.
Repp left the farmhouse and under his heavy load walked stiffly to a
copse of trees where the others had gathered. Frankly, he felt
ridiculous in this outlandish rig, the bulky box strapped to his back,
the rifle linked to it by wire hose, the sighting apparatus itself
bulky and absurd on top of the weapon, which itself was exaggerated
with the extended magazine, the altered pistol grip and the bipod. But
he knew they wouldn't smirk at him.
Tonight it was Captain Weber's show. It was his sector anyway, he knew
the American patrol patterns. Repp was along merely to shoot, as if on
safari.
"Sir," said Weber.
"Heil Hitler!"
"Heil, Schutzstaffel," responded Repp, tossing up a flamboyantly casual
salute. The young men of XII Panzergrenadierdivision "Hitlerjugend"
jostled with respect, though the circumstances seemed to prevent more
elaborate courtesies. This pleased Repp. He'd never been much for
ceremony.
"Ah, Weber, hello. Boys," nodding to them, common touch, nice, they
could talk about it after the war.
"Sir," one of the worshipers said, "that damned thing looks heavy. Do
you need a man--" It was heavy. Even with Vollmerhausen's last stroke
of genius, the one he'd been laboring on like a maniac these last few
days, Vampir, the whole system, gun, rack, scope, light source, weighed
in at over forty kilos, 41.2, to be exact, still 1.2 kilos over, but
closer to the specs than Repp ever thought they'd get.
"Thanks, but no. That's part of the test, you see, to see how well a
fellow can do with one of these on his back. Even an old gent like
me."
Repp was thirty-one, but the others were younger;
they laughed.
Repp grinned in the laughter: he liked to make them happy. After it
had died, he said, "After you, Captain."
There was a last-second ritual of equipment checks to be performed,
MP-40 bolts dropped from safe into engagement, feeder tabs locked into
the machine gun, harnesses shifted, helmet straps tightened; then,
Weber leading, Repp somewhere in the center, they filed out, crouched
low, into the fields.
Vollmerhausen watched them go, silent line of the ambush team edging
cautiously into the dark. He wondered how long he'd have to wait until
Repp returned with the happy news that it had gone well and they could
leave. Hours probably. It had already been a terrible day; first the
terrifying flight in from Aniage Elf in the Stork, bobbing and
skimming, over the trees. Then the long time among the soldiers, the
desultory shellings, and the worry about the weather.
Would the sun hold till twilight?
If it didn't they'd have to stay another day. And another.
And another.. ..
But it had held.
"There, see: your prayers have been answered, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,"
Repp had chided him.
Vollmerhausen smiled weakly. Yes, he had prayed.
Displaying a dexterity that might have astounded his many detractors,
Hans the Kike had prepared Vampir for its field test. He quickly
mounted the scope and the energy conversion unit with its
parabola-shaped infrared lamp to the modified STG receiver, using a
special wrench and screwdriver. He locked in the power line and
checked the connections. Intact. He opened the box and gave it a
quick rundown, tracing the complex circuitry for faulty wiring, loose
connections, foreign objects.
"Best hurry," Repp said, leaning intently over the engineer's shoulder,
watching and recording his rundown, "we're losing it."
Vollmerhausen explained for what must have been the thousandth time,
"The later we charge, the later it lasts."
Finally, he was finished. Sun remained, in traces: not a fiery
noontime's blaze--of furnaces or battles--but a fleeting
late-afternoon's version, pale and low and thin, but enough.
"It's not the heat, it's the light," he pointed out.
Vollmerhausen yanked a metal slide off a thick metal disk spot-welded
crudely to the top of the cathode chamber, revealing a glass face,
opaque and dense. Its facets sparkled in the sunlight.
"Fifteen minutes is all we need; that gives us eight hours of potency
for an on-phase of three minutes," he said, as if he were convincing
himself.
The problem with infrared rays, Vollmerhausen had tried to explain to
Repp, was that they were lower in energy than visible light--how then
could they be made to emit light rays of a higher value, so that images
might be identified and, in this case, fired upon? Dr. Kutzcher had
found a part of the answer at the University of Berlin those many years
ago: by feeding high-tension electricity across a cathode tube, he'd
caused the desired rise in energy level, producing the requisite
visibility.
But Vollmerhausen, improvising desperately at Anlage, had not the
latitude of Kutzcher. His problem was narrowly military--he was
limited by weight, the amount a man could carry efficiently on his back
over rough terrain. When all the skimming and paring and snipping was
done, he found himself a full ten kilos distant from that optimum
weight; no further reduction was possible without radically
compromising Vampir's performance. And the mass of the unbudgeable ten
kilos lay in the battery pack and its heavy shielding, the source of
the high-tension electricity.
His stroke of inspiration--it took the form of the blister like dial
welded to the scope, no, not pretty at all-was a solar unit. No less a
power than the sun itself would provide Vampir with its energy; not an
inexhaustible supply, but enough for a few minutes of artificial,
invisible daylight at high midnight. Vollmerhausen could not totally
abandon a battery, of course; one was still needed to provide juice for
the cathode ray tube, but not nearly so much juice, for the phosphors
in the chamber had been selected for their special property to absorb
energy from sunlight and then, when bombarded by infrared rays, to
release it. Thus instead of a 10-kilo 30-volt battery, Vampir could
make do with a 1.3-kilo 3-volt battery, a net savings of 8.7 kilos
while maintaining the intensity and brilliance of image within the
specified limits. But not for long: for the phosphors had a very brief
life in their charged state, and once exposed to the infrared lost
their powers quickly. But for a good three minutes, Repp could peer
through the eyepiece and there, wobbling greenly before him, magnified
tenfold by a specially ground Opticotechna lens, undulated targets,
visible, distinct, available, 400 meters out.
Vollmerhausen had checked his watch, snapped the face of the solar disk
closed.
"There. It's done. You've got your power now, until midnight."
"Just like a fairy tale," Repp had said merrily.
"And you've got the special ammunition?"
"Of course, of course," and he had clapped the magazine pouch on his
belt.
Now, in the farmhouse, Vollmerhausen looked out into a darkness that
was total. Repp was somewhere out there, in his element. The night
belonged to him.
/ gave it to him, Vollmerhausen thought.
Repp slid into position behind the rifle, which rested on its bipod.
His shoulders and arms ached, and the strap had cut deeply across his
collarbone. The damned thing was heavy, and he'd come but three or
four kilometers, not the twenty-three kilometers he'd be traveling the
day of Nibelungen. He felt his breath coming unevenly, in sobs and
gasps, and fought to control it.
Calm was the sniper's great ally, you had to will yourself into a
serenity, a wholeness of spirit and task. He tried hard to relax.
Four hundred meters beyond him the tidy fields fell away into a stream
bed, where a stand of trees and thicker vegetation grew, and here the
land delivered up a kind of fold, a natural funnel that men moving over
unfamiliar territory, scared probably, wishing themselves elsewhere,
would be surely drawn to.
"There, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, do you see it?"
asked Weber, crouching beside him in the darkness.
"Yes. Fine."
"Four nights out of five they come through there."
"Fine."
Weber was nervous in the great man's presence, talked too much.
"We could move closer."
"I make it four hundred meters, about right."
"Now we've flares if you--" "Captain, no flares."
"I've the machine-gun team over on the right for suppressing fire if
you need it, and my squad leader, a sound man, is on the left with the
rest of the patrol."
"I can see you learned your trade in the East."
"Yes, sir." The young captain's face, like Repp's own, was dabbed with
oily combat paint. His eyes shone whitely in the starlight.
"They usually come about eleven, a few hours off.
They think this is the great weakness in our lines. We've let them
through."
"Tomorrow they'll stay away!" Repp laughed.
"Now tell your fellows to hold still. No firing. My operation, all
right?"
"Yes, sir." He was gone.
Good, so much the better. Repp liked to spend these moments alone, if
possible. He considered them very much his own minutes, a time for
clearing the head and loosening the muscles and indulging in a dozen
semiconscious eccentricities that got him feeling in touch with the
rifle and his targets and himself.
Repp lay very still and warm, feeling the wind, the rifle against his
hands, studying the dark landscape before him. He felt rather good, at
the same time remembering that things had not always been so pleasant.
A frozen February's memory floated up before him, a desperate month of
a desperate year, '42.
Totenkopfdivision had been pushed into a few square miles of a
pulverized city named Demyansk, in the Valdai Hills between Lake Ilmen
and Lake Seliger in northern Russia--the Winter War, they later called
it. In the city, all rudiments of military organization had broken
down: the battle had become one huge alley fight, a small-unit action
repeated on a vast scale, as groups of men stalked each other through
the ruins. Young Repp, a Hauptsturmfrihrer, as the Waffen SS
designated its captains, was the champion stalker. With his
MannlicherSchoenauer 6.5-millimeter mounting the 10X Unerti scope, he
wandered from gunfight to gunfight, dropping five, ten, fifteen men at
a throw. He was a brilliant shot, and about to become famous.
The morning of the twenty-third found him squatting wearily in the
ruins of a factory, the Red Tractor Plant, sipping tepid ersatz,
listening to the soldiers around him grouse. He didn't blame them. The
night had been one long fruitless counter sniper operation: the Popovs
were curiously silent. He was tired, tired down to his fingers;
his eyes were swollen and they ached. As he examined the thin swirl of
liquid in the tin cup, it was not hard for him to imagine other places
he'd rather be.
Yawning, he glanced around the interior of the factory, a maze of
wreckage, twisted girders, heaps of brick, a skeletal outline showing
against a gray sky that promised more snow; the damned stuff had fallen
again yesterday, must be six feet of it now, and all about the factory
fresh white piles of it gleamed brightly against the blackened walls,
giving the place a strange purity. It was cold, below zero; but Repp
was past caring of cold.
He'd gotten used to it. He wanted sleep, that was all.
The firing opened gradually. Shots always rattled around the city as
patrols bumped into each other in alleyways; one grew accustomed and
did not even hear them, or the explosions either, but as the intensity
seemed to mount after several minutes, when contact might ordinarily be
measured in seconds, some of the men around him perked up out of their
whiny conversations.
"Ivan's knocking again," someone said.
"Shit. The bastards. Don't they sleep?"
"Don't get excited," someone cautioned, "probably some kid with an
automatic."
"That's more than one automatic," another said. And indeed it was,
Repp could tell too, for the firing then churned like a thunderstorm.
"All right, people," said a calm sergeant, "let's cut the shit and wait
for the officers." He hadn't seen Repp, who continued to lie there.
After several minutes a lieutenant came in, fast, looked about for the
sergeant.
"Let's get them out, huh? A big one, I'm afraid," he said laconically.
Then he saw Repp, was taken aback by another officer.
"Oh? Say, what the hell, who the hell are--" "Repp," said Repp.
"Damn! I needed sleep bad. How many? Big, you say."
"It's not clear yet. Too much smoke and dust at the end of Groski
Prospekt. But it sounds big."
"All right," said Repp, "these are your boys, you know what to do."
"Yes, sir."
Repp picked himself up wearily. He nicked the ersatz out and paused
for a moment. Men scurried by, clapping helmets on, drawing parkas
tighter, throwing Kar '98 bolts, rushing into the street. Repp checked
the pocket of his snow smock, then tightened it. He was loaded with
ammo, not having fired a round the night before. The
Mannlicher-Schoenauer fired from a clever spool magazine, almost like
the cylinder of a revolver, and Repp had a pouchful of the things.
He stepped into the street finally, with the rifle. Outside, the glare
was fierce and the panic unleashed. He felt at storm center. At the
end of Groski Prospekt an armored car blazed. Small-arms fire kicked
up spurts of dust and snow along the pavement. The noise was ugly,
careening. SS Panzergrenadiers came racing down the corridor from the
wall of smoke, one of them dropping when a shot took him. As they fled
by, Repp snagged one.
"No use. No use. They've broken through. Hundreds, thousands, oh,
Christ, only a block--" A blast drowned him out and a wall went down
nearby, filling the air with smoke and dust. The panicked man squirmed
away and disappeared. Repp saw the young lieutenant placing his men in
the wreckage along the street. They all looked scared but somehow
resigned. Totenkopfdivision had a reputation for staying put. Repp
knew that reputation was to be tested again.
Smoke shielded the end of the street from his eyes.
Nothing down there but haze.
"Herr Repp," someone yelled, for he already had a reputation, "kill a
batch of the fuckers for us, it looks like we won't be around to do it
ourselves."
Repp laughed. Now that was a man with spirit.
"Kill them yourself, sonny. I'm off duty."
More laughter.
Repp turned, headed back into the factory. He was tired of Ivans and
wreckage and filth from blown-up sewers and rats the size of cats that
prowled the ruins and crawled across your belly while you slept and he
never expected to survive anyway, so why not go out today? It was as
good as any day. A stairway left freakishly standing in one corner of
the room caught his eye.
He followed it up through the deserted upper floors of the factory. He
heard men crashing in below. Totenkopf people, falling back on the
factory. So that was it then, the Red Tractor Plant. He was
twenty-eight years old and he'd never be another day older and he'd
spend his last one here in a place where Bolshevik peasants built
tractors and, more recently, tanks. Not the end he'd have picked, but
as numbness settled over him, he began to feel it wouldn't be so bad at
all. He was in a hurry to be done.
At the top he found himself in a clock tower of some kind, shot out, of
course, nothing up there but snow and old timbers, bricks, half a wall
blown away, other gaps from rogue artillery rounds. Yet one large hole
opened up a marvelous view of the Groski Prospekt--a canyon of ragged
walls buried in smoke. Even as he scanned this landscape of
devastation, it seemed to come alive before him. He could see them,
swarming now, Popovs, in those white snowsuits, domed brown helmets,
carrying submachine guns.
Repp delicately brought the rifle to his shoulder and braced it on a
ledge of brick. The scope yielded a Russian, scurrying ratlike from
obstacle to obstacle. He lifted his head warily and nicked his eyes
about and Repp shot him in the throat, a spew of crimson foaming down
across his front in the split second before he dropped. The man was
about 400 meters out. Repp tossed the bolt--a butter knife handle, not
knobby like the Kar '98--through the Mannlicher's split bridge, keeping
his eye pinned against the cup of the absurd Unerti ten-power scope,
which threw up images big and clear as a Berlin cinema. Its reticule
was three converging lines, from left, right and bottom, which almost
but did not quite meet, creating a tiny circle of space.
Repp's trick was to keep the circle filled; he laid it now against
another Red, an officer. He killed him.
He was shooting faster, there seemed to be so many of them. He was
wedged into the bricks of the tower, rather comfortably, and at each
shot, the rifle reported sharply with a slight jar, not like the
bone-bruising buck of the Kar '98, but gentle and dry. When he hit
them, they slid into the rubble, stained but not shattered. A
6.5-millimeter killed with velocity, not impact; it drilled them and,
failing deflection at bone or spine, flew on.
Repp was even convinced they felt no pain from the way they relaxed. He
didn't even have to move the rifle much, he could just leave it where
it was, they were swarming so thickly. He'd fired five magazines now,
twenty-five rounds. He'd killed twenty-five men. Some looked
stupefied when he took them; others angry; still others oblivious. Repp
shot for the chest. He took no chances. Nothing fancy.
They had spotted him of course. Their bullets thunked and cracked
around him, chipping at the bricks, filling the air with fine dust or
snow, but he felt magical. He kept dropping them. The white bodies
were piling up.
Behind him now sprang a noise, and Repp whirled. A boy crouched at the
head of the stairs with a pack.
"Your kit, sir. You left it down below."
"Ah." Yes, someone'd thought to bring it to him. It was packed with
ammunition, six more boxes, in each fifty specially loaded rounds, 180
grains behind a nickle-tip slug. Berdan primers--the best--with twin
flash holes.
"Can you load those for me? It works same as with your rifle, off the
charger," Repp said mildly as a Degtyarev tracer winked through and
buried itself in the wall. He pointed to the litter of empty spool
magazines lying amid spent shells at his boots.
"But stay low, those fellows are really angry now."
Repp fired all that morning. The Russian attack had broken down,
bottled up at Groski Prospekt. He'd killed all their officers and was
quite sure that had been a colonel he'd put down just an instant ago.
He thought he'd killed almost a hundred. Nineteen magazines, and three
rounds left in this one; he'd killed, so far, ninety-eight men in just
over two hours. The rifle had grown hot, and he'd stopped once or
twice to squirt a drop or so of oil down its barrel. In one two-minute
period, he ran his ramrod with patch vigorously in the barrel and the
patch came up black with gunk. The boy crouched at his feet, and every
time an empty spool dropped out, he picked it up and carefully threaded
the brass cartridges in.
The Popovs were now coming from other directions;
evidently, they'd sent flanking parties around. But these men ran into
heavy fire from down below, and those that survived, Repp took. Still,
the volume of fire against the Red Tractor Plant was building; Repp
could sense the battle rising again in pitch. These things had their
melodies too, and he fancied he could hear it.
The grimy lieutenant from that morning appeared in the stairwell.
"You still alive?" Repp asked.
But the fellow was in no mood for Repp's jokes.
"They're breaking through. We haven't the firepower to hold them off
much longer. They're already in a wing of the factory. Come on, get
out, Repp. There's still a chance to make it out on foot."
"Thanks, old man, think I'll stay," Repp said merrily.
He felt schuss fest bulletproof, but with deeper resonations in the
German, connoting magic, a charmed state.
"Repp, there's nothing here but death."
"Go on yourself," said Repp.
"I'm having too much fun to leave."
He was hitting at longer ranges now; through the drifting pall of smoke
he made out small figures several blocks away. Magnified tenfold by
the Unerti, two Russian officers conferred in a doorway over a map. The
scene was astonishingly intimate, he could almost see the hair in their
ears. Repp took one through the heart and the other, who turned away
when his comrade was hit, as if in hiding his eyes he was protecting
himself, through the neck.
Repp killed a sniper seven blocks away.
In another street Repp took the driver of a truck, splattering the
windscreen into a galaxy of fractures.
The vehicle bumped aimlessly against a rubble pile and men spilled out
and scrambled for cover. Of seven he took three.
Down below, grenades detonated in a cluster, machine pistols ripped in
a closed space which caught and multiplied their noise.
"I think they're in the building," Repp said.
"I've loaded all the rounds left in the magazines now," the trooper
said.
"Nine of them. That's forty-five more bullets."
"You'd best be getting on then. And thanks."
The boy blushed sheepishly. Maybe eighteen or nineteen, handsome, thin
face.
"If I see you afterward, I'll write a nice note to your officer," Repp
said, an absurdly civil moment in the heat of a great modern battle.
Bullets were banging into the tower from all angles now, rattling and
popping. The boy raced down the stairs.
At the end of Groski Prospekt, the Ivans were organizing for another
push before nightfall. Repp killed one who stupidly peeked out from
behind the smoldering armored car. The rifle was hot as a stove and he
had to be careful to keep his fingers off the metal of the barrel. He
had touched it once and could feel a blister on his skin. But the
rifle held to the true; those Austrians really could build them. It
was from the Steyr works near Vienna, double trigger, scrollwork in the
metal,
something from the old Empire, hunting schlosses in the Tyrolean
foothills, and woodsmen in green lederhosen and high socks who'd take
you to the best bucks in the forest.
Blobs of light floated up to smash him. Tracers uncoiled like flung
ropes, drifting lazily. Some rounds trailed tendrils of smoke. The
bullets went into the brick with an odd sound, a kind of clang. He
knew it was a matter of time and that his survival this far, with every
Russian gun in the city banging away, was a kind of statistical
incredibility that was bound to end shortly.
Did it matter? Perhaps this moment of pure sniper war was worth his
life. He'd been able to hit, hit, hit for most of the day now, over
three hundred times, from clear, protected shooting, four streets like
channels to fire down, plenty of ammunition, a boy to load spools for
him, targets everywhere, massing in the streets, crawling through the
ruins, edging up the gutters, but if he could see them he could take
them.
Repp killed a man with a flamethrower on his back.
Forty-four bullets.
By thirty-six, it had become clear that the men below had either fallen
back or been killed. He heard a lot of scuffling around below. The
Russians must have crept through the sewers to get in; they certainly
hadn't come down the street.
Twenty-seven.
Just a second before, someone at the foot of the stairs had emptied a
seventy-one-round drum upward. Repp happened to be shielded, he was
standing in a recess in the brick wall, but the slatted floor of the
tower was ripped almost to slivers as the slugs jumped through it.
Wood dust flew in the air. Repp had a grenade. He pulled the lanyard
out the handle and tossed the thing into the stairwell, heard it
bouncing down the steps. He was back on the scope when the blast and
the screams came.
Eighteen.
Tanks. He saw one scuttle through a gap between buildings several
blocks away. Why didn't they think of that earlier, save themselves
trouble and people? Then he realized the Stalins had the same trouble
the Panzers had had negotiating the wreckage-jammed streets. To get
this far into the ruins at all, Russian engineers must have been
working frantically, blowing a path through to him.
Eleven.
Repp heard voices below. They were trying to be silent but a stair
gave. He stepped back, took out his P-38 and leaned into the
stairwell. He killed them all.
Five.
One magazine. The first tank came into view, lurching from around the
corner at the Groski intersection. Yes, hello. Big fellow, aren't
you? A few soldiers crept behind it. Repp, very calm and steady,
dropped one, missed one. He saw a man in a window, shot him, high in
the throat. One of the men he'd dropped behind the tank attempted to
crawl into cover. Repp finished him.
One.
The turret was revolving. Not a Stalin at all, a KV-1 with a
76-millimeter. He fixed with fascination on the monster, watching as
the mouth of the gun lazed over, seeming almost to open wider as it
drew toward him.
They certainly were taking their time lining up the shot.
The tank paused, gun set just right. Repp would have liked at least to
get rid of his last bullet. He didn't feel particularly bad about all
this. The hatch popped on the tank, someone inside wanted a better
look, and the lid rose maybe an inch or two. Repp took him, center
forehead, last bullet.
There was nothing to do. He set the rifle down. This was an
execution. As if by signal, Russian troops began to file down Groski
Prospekt. Repp, firing since 0930, checked his watch. 1650. An
eight-hour day, and not a bad one. He chalked up the score in the
seconds left him. Three hundred and fifty rounds he had fired,
couldn't have missed more than a few times. Make it ten, just to be
fair. That was 340 men. Then the three on the stairway with the
pistol. Perhaps two more in the grenade blast. Three hundred and
forty-five kills, 345.
Three hundred and fo--.
The shell went into the tower forty feet below Repp.
The Russians had gotten fancy, they wanted to bring the tower down with
Repp inside it, poetic justice or some such melodramatic conceit. The
universe tilted as the tower folded. The line of the horizon broke
askew and dust rose chokingly. Repp grabbed something as gravity
accelerated the drop.
The tower toppled thunderously into Groski Prospekt in a storm of dust
and snow. But its top caught on the roof of the building across the
way and was sheared neatly off. Repp found himself in a capsule of
broken brick deposited there, untouched, baffled. It was as if he'd
walked away from a plane crash.
He walked across the flat roof of the building, waiting to get nailed.
Artillery started up but the shells landed beyond him. There was smoke
everywhere but he was alone. Across the roof, a shell had blown open a
hole.
He looked down into almost a museum specimen of the Soviet Worker's
apartment, and leapt down into it. He opened the door and headed down
a dark hallway.
Stairs. He climbed down them, and left through a front door. There
were no Russians anywhere, though far off, he could make out small
figures. Taking no chances, he headed down an alley.
That night he had schnapps with a general.
"The world," the sentimental old man intoned, "will know you now." Dr.
Goebbels stood ready to make this dream come true.
"Sir," somebody whispered.
"I see them," said Repp.
Scope on. The screen lights. He saw the first one, a wobbling
man-shaped blotch of light, against green darkness. Then another,
behind him, and still another.
Germs, Repp thought. They are germs, bacilli, disease.
They are filth.
He drew back the bolt and squirmed the black cross of Vampir's reticule
against the first of the shapes.
"Filth," he repeated.
He took them.
 "Vampir did quite well, I thought," said Repp. He abstractedly
counted off the reasons for his pleasure, each to a finger.
"No sight picture breakup, good distinct images, weight not a factor.
In all, easy shooting."
Vollmerhausen was astonished. He certainly wasn't expecting praise.
Though he knew the shooting had gone well, for he'd heard two enlisted
men chattering excitedly over it.
But Repp was not yet finished.
"In fact," he elaborated, "you've performed extraordinarily well under
great pressure. I wish it were possible to arrange for some kind of
official recognition. But at least accept my congratulations." He was
toying with the blackened metal cube Vollmerhausen had noticed earlier,
a charm or something.
"A great miracle has happened here." He smiled.
"I--I am honored," stuttered Hans the Kike. They were back at Aniage
Elf, in the research facility, safe in the Schwarzwald after another
harrowing flight.
"But then sometimes the most important assignments are those nobody
ever knows about, eh?" said Repp.
Vollmerhausen felt this was a strange comment for a famous man, but
merely nodded, for he was still stunned at Repp's sudden burst of
enthusiasm. And a sudden, still-resentful part of him wished that the
ass head Schaeffer were here to listen to Der Meisterschutze himself
heap on the praise. Yet, he acknowledged, he deserved it. Vampir
represented an astonishing feat in so small a time, under such
desperate pressure. Though even now it was hard to believe and take
real pleasure in: he'd done it.
Still, certain details and refinements remained to be mastered, as well
as some after-mission checks and some maintenance, and it was this
problem he now addressed, aware at the same time how modest he must
have seemed.
"May I ask, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, how soon you expect to go
operational? And what preparations will be necessary on my part?"
"Of course," Repp said smartly.
"Certain aspects of the mission remain problematical. I've got to wait
on intelligence reports: target confirmations, strategic developments,
political considerations. I would say another week. Perhaps even
more: a delicate job. It depends on factors even I can't control."
"I see," said Vollmerhausen.
"I should tell you two things further. The weapon and I will leave
separately. Vampir will be taken out of here by another team. They
are responsible for delivery to target area. Good people, I've been
assured."
"Yes, sir."
"So you'll have to prepare a travel kit. Boxes, a trunk, I don't know.
Everything should be lashed down and protected against jolts. It
needn't be fancy. After what you've handled, I shouldn't think it
would be a problem."
"Not at all."
"Now, secondly--look, relax. You look so stiff."
It was true. Though seated, Vollmerhausen had assumed the posture of a
Prussian Kadett.
"I've noticed that I make people nervous," Repp said philosophically.
"Why, I wonder? I'm no secret policeman.
Just a soldier."
Vollmerhausen forced himself to relax.
"Smoke, if you care to."
"I don't."
"No, that's right. I think I will." He drew and lit one of the
Russian things. He certainly was chipper this morning, all gaudy in
his camouflages.
"Now, may I be frank with you?" He toyed again with the black cube
Vollmerhausen had noticed earlier.
"Germany is going to lose the war. And soon too. It's the third week
in April now; certainly it'll all be over by the middle of May. You're
not one of those fools who thinks victory is still possible. Go ahead,
speak out."
Again, Repp had astonished him. He realized it showed on his face and
hurriedly snapped his mouth shut.
"Yes, I suppose. Deep down. We all know," Vollmerhausen confirmed.
"Of course. It's quite obvious. They know in Berlin too, the smart
ones. You're a practical man, a realist, that's why we chose you. But
I tell you this because of the following: Operation Nibelungen
proceeds. No matter what happens in Berlin. No matter that English
commandos and American tanks are inside the wire here. In fact
especially in those cases. You weren't in Russia?"
"No, I--"
"No matter. That's where the real war is. This business here with the
Americans and the British, just a sideshow. Now, in Russia, four
million fell. The figure is almost too vast to be believed. That's
sacrifice on a scale the world's never seen before. That's why the
mission will go on. It's all that generation will ever have. No
statues, no monuments, no proud chapters in history books. Others will
write the history; we will be its villains.
Think of it, Vollmerhausen! Repp, a villain! Incredible, isp't it?"
He looked directly at the engineer.
"Unbelievable," said the engineer.
Vollmerhausen realized Repp was not giving a speech. He had none of
the orator's gifts and little of his zeal; he spoke tiredly,
laconically, only in facts, as if an engineer himself, reading off a
blueprint.
Another thought occurred to Vollmerhausen: the man is quite insane. He
is out of his mind. It's all over, still he talks of monuments, of
consecrations. It's not survival for him, as it is for me. There is
no after-the-war for Repp; for Repp, there'll always be a war. If not
in a shell hole or on a front line, then in a park somewhere, at a
pleasant crossroads, in a barn or an office building.
"Y-yes, unbelievable," Vollmerhausen repeated nervously, for he was
just beginning to realize how dangerous Repp was.
 They're calling him, even here, right afterward, der Meisterschutze,
not, I say again, not der Scharfschiitze, the technical German for
sniper. Which of you brilliant Americans will now explain the
significance of this?"
Tony held in hand his scoop of the week: the March 5, 1942, issue of
Das Schwarze Korps, the SS picture magazine, which the burrower who'd
been sent to the British Museum's collection of back-issue German
periodicals had uncovered. Its lead story was Repp at Demyansk.
Leets cleared his throat.
"Meisterschiitze: master shot. Literally."
"Ah, see, chum, you haven't entered it. You don't feel it. However
can you hope to track a man whose nickname you cannot fathom?"
"I wasn't finished, goddamn it," Leets snarled.
"Meisterschutze, yes, master shot, and since the context is clearly
military, one may indeed say, as did the Jew, master sniper. A nice
turn of phrase: the man has some talent. He is a writer though, is he
not? At any rate, it's a higher form of rhetoric, more formal, playing
on the long Germanic tradition of guilds, apprentices and journeymen.
It's more, shall we say, resonant."
His cold smile drove the heat from the room. Clever bastard: a
Bloomsbury wag, only-mygeniusto-declare amusement smug on his face.
But the lesson was unfinished.
"It's not hard to see why they made such a hero of him, is it?"
"It's part of another war," Leets explained. He was ready for this
one.
"Waffen SS against the Wehrmacht.
Nazis against the old boys, the Prussians who run the army. Repp is
perfect. No aristo, just a country boy who can kill anything he can
see. The prize is first place in line--Hitler's line--for the
new-model Panzers coming out of the shops, the Tigers. They were in
the market for heroes, right?"
"Right, indeed," admitted Tony.
"But more to the point: from this we can see how important Repp will be
to the SS. That is to say, from here on in, he's not just one of them.
He is them. That is to say, he becomes their official instrument, the
embodiment of their will. He's--" he struggled for language in which
to make this concept felt, "--he's an idea."
Tony scowled.
"You're talking like a don. Dons don't win wars."
"You've got to see in this a higher reality. A symbolic reality."
Leets himself wasn't sure what he was saying. A voice from inside was
doing the talking; somewhere a part of his mind had made a leap, a
breakthrough.
"When we crack it, I can guarantee you this: it will be pure Nazi, pure
SS. Their philosophy, given flesh, set to walking."
"Wow, Frankenstein," called Roger, across the room.
"You Americans have too much imagination for anybody's good. You go to
too many films."
But Tony had more.
"I have found," he announced, "the Man of Oak."
Leets turned. He could not read the Englishman's face. It was
impassive, imperial.
"Who?" Leets demanded.
"It occurs to me that we knew all along. We knew, did we not, that our
phantom WVHA has an address in eastern Berlin. A suburb called
Lichtenfelde; but the place itself goes by an older, more traditional
name. It is called Unter den Eichen."
He paused, allowing the information its impact.
"Translate it literally," he advised some seconds later when he saw the
befuddlement on Leets's face.
Leets worked it out into English.
"
"Under the Oaks,"
" he said.
"Yes."
"Goddamn it!," Leets said.
"Yes. And this Jewish chap presumably heard reference to a man from
"Under the Oaks," as one would say "A Man from Washington," or "A Man
from London," meaning a man of authority. But his knowledge of the
language was imperfect, since his Yiddish only allowed him access to
the most basic German. He garbled it, perhaps inflated it somewhat for
rhetorical effect. Thus, Man of Oak, as Shmuel overheard him say."
"Goddamn it," Leets said again.
"It must have been some officer, some supervisor. But it tells us
nothing."
"No, nothing: Another disappointment. It tells us only what we
know."
It was true. During the hot week with Shmuel, information had seemed
to surge in on them. There had been so much to do. A powerful
illusion of progress made itself felt. But in the very act of
mounting, it had peaked. Leets saw this rather sooner than the
others;
now Tony had caught on: that, though all kinds of context and
background were being assembled, the real nut of the problem had not
yet been cracked. They knew Repp, and of his rifle, rudimentary facts,
but compelling nonetheless. But they had no idea of more crucial
matters.
Who would the German shoot? When? Why?
"Your idea that somewhere in his testimony was a clue has gone up in
smoke," Tony said.
"We've got to find Aniage Elf, that's all. Could we increase air recon
of that area? Aren't there French armored units closing in? Could
they be directed to penetrate the forest, in hopes of--" "No. Of
course not. It's huge, over and over we've remarked on how huge it
is."
"Goddamn it. We need something. A break."
It arrived the next morning.
IN REF JAATIC REQUEST 11 MAR 45 THIS HQ ADVISES 3D SQD
2ND BN 45 INF DIV TOOK HEAVY CASUALTIES ON RECON
PATROL 15 APRIL APPX 2200 HRS VICINITY AL FELD IN TELL
SUGGEST 11 ROUNDS 11 HITS IN DARK AND SILENCE ARMY
GRP G-2 CONFIRMS WAFF EN SS UNIT HITLER-JUG END THIS
AREA PLS ADVISE
ryan maj inf 2ND bn G-2
"Well," said Leets, ending the silence, "the fucking thing's
operational. They've worked out the bugs."
"Rather," said Tony.
"They can go anytime they want."
Leets and Outhwaithe flew into the 45th Division's sector early the
next morning, landing in a Piper Cub not far from Alfeld, the
divisional headquarters. Ryan's shop, though, was farther toward the
front. And here there was a front, in the classical sense: two armies
facing each other warily across a bleak, crater-sc aped gulf of
no-man's land, after the configuration of the last war.
The Americans had gone across this raw gap many times, and each time,
bitterly, they were driven back by the Panzergrenadiers of "Hitler-jug
end So when Leets and Outhwaithe, in strange new combat gear they'd
picked up for their trip to the line, approached the blown-out
farmhouse in which Ryan's G-2 outfit hung out, they were not surprised
by the sullenness with which they were greeted. Outsiders, fresh,
strange officers, one a foreigner, an exotic Brit, rear-echelon types:
they expected to be hated, in the way locals always hate tourists; and
they were.
"I never saw anything like it," Major Ryan, a sandy-haired freckled man
whose nose ran constantly, told them.
"Center chest, one shot each. No blood. Patrol that found them
thought they were sleeping."
"And at night? Definitely at night?" Leets pushed.
"I said at night, didn't I, Captain?"
"Yes, sir, it's just that--" "Goddamn it, if I say at night, I mean at
night."
"Yes, sir. Can we get up there?"
"This is a combat zone, Captain. I don't have time to take people on
trips."
"Just point us in the right direction. We'll find it."
"Jesus, you guys are eager. All right, but goddamn it, get yourselves
a helmet. It's right smack in Kraut country."
The Jeep could only get them so close; after that it was a walk in the
sun. A sign in a shattered tree announced the sudden change in climate
tersely and without fanfare: "You are under observed artillery fire the
next 5,00 yards" in standard GI stenciling, all the letters split
neatly in two; but a wit had edited an improvement into the copy,
replacing the word "artillery" with "sniper" in bold child's scrawl.
The war was everywhere up here, in the wary quick stares of the men who
were fighting it, the hulks of burnt-out armor that littered the
landscape, in the haze of smoke, heavy and lazy, that adhered to
everything, and beneath it another odor that infiltrated the
nostrils.
Leets sniffed.
"Ever been in a combat zone, Captain?" asked Ryan.
"Nothing stable like this. I did some running around behind the lines
last summer."
"I recognize the odor," said Tony.
"Bodies out there.
Beyond the wire."
"Yeah," confirmed Major Ryan.
"Theirs. Just let 'em try and come out and bury 'em."
"My father," said Outhwaithe, "mentioned it in his letters. The Somme,
all that, '14 to '18. I read them later."
They began to encounter the infantrymen here, just behind the line,
relaxing around cooking fires, or simply dozing in the shadows of
half-tracks and Jeeps. The still landscape actually teemed with men,
though if there was a principle of organization behind all this casual
cluster, Leets missed it. Who was in charge? Nobody.
Who knew what they were doing? Everybody. But Leets did not feel
himself the object of curiosity as he scurried along, self-consciously
clean and unaccustomed to the crack of bullets aimed his way. Nobody
cared. He was not German; he was not an officer who could send anybody
out on patrol or launch an attack; therefore he was not significant. A
couple of tired-looking teenagers with bar's twice their size looked at
him stupidly. It did not occur to them to salute, or to him to require
it.
Farther on, some wise man cautioned, "Keep your asses low."
A final hundred yards had to be covered belly-down, without dignity,
across a bare ridge, through a farmyard, to a low stone wall.
Here, settled in cozy domesticity, had gathered still more GI's.
Weapons poked through holes punched in the wall or rested on sandbags
in the gaps of the wall, and a scroll of barbed wire, jagged and
surreal, unreeled across the stones; yet for all these symbols of the
soldier's trade, Leets still felt more as if he'd crashed a hobo's
convention. Unshaven men, grousing and farting, clothes fetid, toes
popping hugely out of blackish OD socks, lay sprawled about in assorted
poses of languor.
A few peered intently out through gaps in the wall or Y-shaped
periscopes at what lay beyond; but most just loafed, cheerful and
uncomplicated, enjoying the bright moment for what it was.
The platoon leader, a young lieutenant who looked tireder than Ryan,
crawled over, and a meeting convened in the lee of the wall.
"Tom," said Ryan, "these fine gents flew in special from London;
they're after a big story." Newspaper lingo seemed to be Ryan's stock
in trade.
"Not their usual beat at all, but here they are. And the story, in
time for the late editions, is Third Squad."
"Never knew who turned the lights out on 'em," said Tom.
More precisely, thought Leets, who turned the lights on.
A sergeant was soon summoned who'd been at the wall the night of the
patrol, evidently pulled from sleep, for the flecks of crud still
clotted in his eyes. He affected the winter-issue wool-helmet cap,
called a beanie and useless except for decoration in this warm weather,
and he yanked hard on a dead cigar. All these men who lived in the
very smile of extinction insisted on being characters, vivid and
astonishing, rather than mere soldiers. They looked alike only for the
second it took to categorize their eccentricities.
"Not much to tell, sir," he said, not knowing which of the four
officers to address.
"You can see if you're careful."
He gestured.
Leets took off his borrowed helmet, and eased a dangerous half a head
up over the wall. Germany, tidy and ripening in the spring, spilled
away.
"Just to the left of those trees, sir."
Leets saw a stand of poplars.
"We sent 'em out looking for iron," explained Ryan, not bothering to
explain that in the patois, iron meant armor. "
"Hitlerjugend' is technically a Panzer division,
though we're not sure if they've got any operational stuff. We didn't
run into it on our trips over there, but who had time to look? I just
didn't want any Bulge-type surprises coming into the middle of my
sector."
"Sir," the young sergeant continued.
"Lieutenant Uckley, new guy, he took 'em down that hill, then across
the field, long way to crawl. They were okay there, we found chewing
gum wrappers. When they got to those trees, they went up that little
draw."
Leets could see a fold in the earth, a kind of gully between two
vaguely rising land forms
"But you didn't hear anything? Or see anything?"
"No, sir. Nothing. They just didn't come back."
"Did you recover Third Squad's bodies?" asked Outhwaithe.
"Yes, sir," piped the lieutenant.
"Next day. We called in smoke and heavy Willie Peter. Went out myself
with another patrol. They'd been dropped in their tracks.
Right in the ticker, every last one. Even the last guy. He didn't
have time to run, that's how fast it was."
Leets turned to Ryan.
"The bodies. They'd be at Graves Registration?"
Ryan nodded.
"If they haven't been shipped out to cemeteries yet."
"I think we ought to check it out."
"Fine."
"Sir," asked the sergeant.
Leets turned.
"Yeah."
"What did he hit 'em with?"
"Some kind of night vision gear. It was broad daylight for him."
"You're looking for this guy, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well," said the sergeant, "I went looking for him too." A tough kid,
made his stripes at what, eighteen, nineteen? Good man in a fire
fight, natural talent for it.
"Had me a BAR and twenty clips."
"But no luck," said Leets.
"Nah, uh-uh."
You did have luck, kid: you didn't run into Repp;
you're still alive.
"I had friends in that squad, good people. When you catch this guy,
burn him. Huh? Burn him."
The Graves Registration section took the form of a forty-cot hospital
tent some miles behind the front lines, and into this tent sane men
seldom ventured. Leets, Outhwaithe, Major Ryan and an Army doctor
stood in the dank space with the dead, rank on rank of them, in proper
order, awaiting shipment, neatly pine-boxed. Everything possible had
been done to make the location pleasant, yet everything had failed and
the odor that had paused at Leets's nostrils on the line hung here
pungent and tangible, though one adjusted to it quickly.
"Thank God it's still coolish," said Outhwaithe.
The first boy was no good to them. Repp had hit him squarely in the
sternum, that cup of bone shielding, however ineffectively, the heart,
shattering it, heart behind and assorted other items, but also
shattering, most probably, the bullet.
"Nah," said the doc, "I'm not cracking this guy. You won't find a
thing in there except tiny flakes cutting every which way. Tell 'em to
look some more."
And so the Graves Registration clerks prowled again through the stacked
corridors of the dead, hunting, by name off the list 45th Division HQ
had provided, another candidate.
The second boy too disappointed. Repp was less precise in his
placement, but the physician, looking into the opened body bag in the
coffin, judged it no go.
"Nicked a rib; that'll skew the thing off. No telling where it'll end
up--foot or hip. We don't have time to play hide-and-seek."
A success was finally achieved on a third try. The doctor, a stocky,
blunt Dartmouth grad with thick clean hands and the mannerisms of an
irritated bear, announced, "Jackpot--between the third and fourth
ribs.
This guy's worth the effort."
The box was dollied into the mortuary tent.
The doctor said, "Okay, now. We're gonna take him out of the bag and
cut him open. I can get an orderly over here in an hour or so. Or I
can do it now, this minute. The catch is, if I do it now, somebody
here'll have to help. You've seen battle casualties before?
You've seen nothing. This kid's been in the bag a week.
You won't recognize him as human."
The doctor looked briefly at each of them. He had hard eyes. How old?
Leets's age, twenty-seven maybe, but with a flinty glare to his face,
pugnacious and challenging.
Guy must be good, Leets thought, realizing the doctor was daring one of
them to stay.
"I'll do it," he said.
"Fine. Rest of you guys, out." The others left. Leets and the doctor
were alone with the bagged form in the box.
"You'd best put something on," the doc said, "it's going to be
messy."
Leets took his coat off and threw on a surgical gown.
"The mask. The mask is most important," the doctor said.
He tied the green mask over his nose and mouth, thinking again of
Susan. She lives in one of these things, he thought.
"Okay," the doctor said, "let's get him onto the mortuary table."?
They reached in and lifted the bagged thing to the table.
"Hang on," the doctor said, "I'm opening it."
He threw the bag open.
"You'll note," he said, "the characteristics of the cadaver in the
advanced state of decomposition."
Leets, in the mask, made a small, weak sound. No words formed in his
brain. The cadaver lay in rotten splendor in its peeled-back body bag
on the table.
"There it is. The hole. Nice and neat, like a rivet, just left of
center chest."
Swiftly, with sure strokes, the doctor inscribed a Y across the chest,
from shoulder down to pit of stomach and then down to pubis. He cut
through the subcutaneous tissue and the cartilage holding skin and ribs
together.
Then he lifted the central piece of the chest away and reflected the
excess skin to reveal the contents.
"Clinically speaking," the doctor said, looking into the neat
arrangement, "the slug passed to the right of the sternum at a roughly
seventy-five-degree angle, through the anterior aspect of the right
lung"--he was sorting through the boy's inner chest with his gloved
fingers shiny--"through the pericardial sac, the heart, rupturing it,
the aorta, the right pulmonary artery-right main-stem bronchus, to be
exact--the esophagus, taking out the thoracic duct and finally--ah,
here we are," cheerful, reaching the end of his long shuffle, "reaching
the vertebral column, transecting the spinal cord."
"You got it?"
The doctor was deep inside the boy, going through the shattered organs.
Leets, next to him, thought he was going to be sick. The smell rose
through the mask to his nostrils, and pain bounded through his head. He
felt he was hallucinating this: a fever dream of elemental gore.
"Here, Captain. Your souvenir."
Leets's treasure was a wad of mashed lead, caked with brown gristle. It
looked like a fist.
"They usually open up like that?"
"Usually they break apart if they hit something, or they pass on
through. What you've got there is a hollow nose or soft point or
something like that. Something that inflates or expands inside, I
think they're illegal."
The doctor wrapped the slug in a gauze patch and handed it over to
Leets.
"There, Captain. I hope you can read the message in it."
Eager now with his treasure, Leets insisted on adding one last stop to
the tour of the combat zone. He'd learned from Ryan that the
divisional weapons maintenance section had set up shop in the town of
Alfeld proper, not far from Graves Registration, and they headed for
it.
Leets entered to find himself in a low dark room lined with
workbenches. Injured American weapons lay in parts around the place, a
brace of .30-caliber air-cooled perforated jacket sleeves, several BAR
receivers, Garand ejector rods, Thompson sling swivels, carbine bolts,
even a new grease gun or two. Two privates struggled to dismantle a
.50-caliber on a tripod, no easy task, and in the back another fellow,
a T-5, hunched over a small piece, grinding it with a file.
Leets, ignored, finally said, "Pardon," and eventually the tech looked
up.
"Sir?"
"The CO around?"
"Caught some junk last week. Back in the States by now. I'm pulling
the strings for now. Sir."
"I see," said Leets.
"You any good on the German stuff?"
"Meaning, Can I get you a Luger? The answer is, Can you get me
thirty-five bucks?"
"No, meaning. What's this?"
He held out the mashed slug.
"Outta you, sir?" asked the tech.
"No. Out of a kid up on the line."
"Okay. That's that new machine carbine they've got, the forty-four
model. You catch SS boys with 'em, right?"
"Right."
"Seven point nine-two millimeter kurz. Short. Like our carbine
round."
He took it from Leets and held it close.
"All right," he said.
"A hundred for the forty-four, five bucks apiece for any spare
magazines you can get me."
Oh, Christ, Leets thought.
"One fifty," the tech upped his bid, "provided it's in good condition,
operational, no bad dents or bends. You get me one with the
barrel-deflection device, the Krummiauf, and I'll jump to two bills.
That's top dollar."
"No, no," said Leets, patiently, "all I'm interested in is this
slug."
"That's not worth a goddamned penny, sir," said the sergeant,
offended.
"Information, not dollars, goddamn it!"
"Jesus, I'm only talking business," said the sergeant.
"I thought you was a client, is all, sir."
"Okay, okay. Just look at the fucking bullet and tell me about it."
"Frank, c'mere, willya? Frank's our expert."
Frank untangled himself from the struggle with the50 and loped over.
Leets saw that if the tech was the business brain, Frank was the
esthete. He had the intellectual's look of scorn; this was too low for
him, he was surrounded by fools, more worthy ways of spending one's
life could certainly be found.
He picked the piece up, looked at it quickly.
"Let's weigh it," he said. He took it over to the bench and balanced
it on the pan of a micro scale fussed with the balances and finally
announced, "My, my, ain't we got fun." He rummaged around on the bench
and produced a greasy pamphlet, pale green, that read
OR DANCE SPECIFICATIONS AXIS POWERS ETO 1944" and pawed through it.
"Yes, sir," he finally said, "usually goes one hundred and twenty
grains, gilding metal over a soft steel jacket.
Inside this jacket is a lead sleeve surrounding a steel core. A newer
type of powder is used. But this here mother weighs in at one
forty-three grains. And there ain't no steel in it at all. Too soft.
Just plain old lead.
Now that's no good against things. Won't penetrate, just splatter. But
into something soft, meaning people, you got maximum damage."
"Why would they build a bullet out of pure lead in wonderful modern
1945?" Leets asked.
"If you're putting this wad through a barrel with real deep grooves,
real biters, you can get a hell of a lot of revs, even on something
moving slow. Which means--" "Accuracy?"
"Yes, sir. The guy on the gun can put them on fucking dimes from way
out if he knows what he's doing. Even if the bullet's moving real
slow, no velocity at all. The revs hold her on, not the speed."
"So it's moving under seven hundred feet per second?
That's slow, slower than our forty-five."
"Right. And at seven hundred fps or less, you're under the sound
barrier."
"No pop. It's better than a silencer, isn't it?" Leets wanted to
know.
"Yes, sir. Because any baffle system cuts down on feet per second, so
you get a drop off in accuracy and range.
Someone real smart figured all this out. I've never seen anything like
it."
So that's how they did it, Leets thought.
"Hey, Captain, you get a line on this gun, you let me know," said the
tech.
"It sounds nice. I'd go a thousand for it."
When they got back to Ryan's shop to wait for the plane that would take
them back to London, the major asked an innocent question.
"Hey," he said, "by the way, what's Aniage Elf?"
That got Leets's attention. He yanked up, staring hard, feeling the
breath sucked from him.
"Your CO," said Ryan, baffled by the intense reaction, "he bumped a
high-priority telex through. It's just down from Division."
"CO?" said Leets.
"Colonel Evans."
That son of a-"He wants you back fastest. He says he found Aniage
Elf."
PART TWO
Gesamtlosimg (General Solution) April-May 1945 Repp had a special
request.
"Now, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor, if all goes well," he said one morning,
"all your inventions will work wonderfully.
It'll be like the tests, the targets out front, I'm shooting from a
clear lane, protected. Eh? But suppose things get a little mixed
up?"
"I'm not sure I--" "Well, old friend, it's possible"--Repp was
smiling-"there'll be some boys interested in stopping me. I might find
myself in a ruckus with them, a close-in thing.
Have you ever been in a fire fight?"
"No. Of course not," said Vollmerhausen.
Again Repp smiled.
"The weapon you've given me is superb for distance and dark. But fire
fights take place where you can see the other fellow's dental work,
tell if he's still got milk on his tongue from breakfast."
Vollmerhausen saw immediately what Repp was driving at. Repp, equipped
as no man ever had been for the special requirements of the mission,
was in a more conventional engagement as good as unarmed. The heavy
scope, with its cathode tube, energy converter and infrared light
blocked out his view of the standard iron battle-sights.
"I can hit a germ at four hundred meters," Repp said, "at midnight. Yet
a man with a fowling piece has the advantage at fifty meters. Can you
help me out? I'd hate to have all this end up in disappointment
because of some accident."
Vollmerhausen puzzled over the problem, and soon concluded that he
could spot-weld still another piece, a tube or something, under Vampir,
to serve crudely as a sight. It wouldn't be on the weapon's axis,
however, but rather parallel to it, and thus it would have to be
adjusted in its placement to account for this difference. He chose the
carrying case of a K-43 scope, a nicely milled bit of tubing of
acceptable weight and length; and he mounted at its rear rim a peephole
just a trifle right of center and at its front rim a blade just a
trifle left of center. Repp, his head a little out of position, would
line the blade in the center of the peephole, and find himself locked
into a target 100 meters out where the line of his vision intersected
the flight of the bullet. Nothing fancy;
crude in fact, and certainly ugly, grotesque.
The original outlines of the once sleek STG-44 were barely visible
under the many modifications, the cluster of tubes up top, a reshaped
pistol grip, the conical flash hider, and the bipod.
"It's truly an ugly thing," said Repp finally, shaking his head.
"Or truly beautiful. The modern architects--not thought highly of by
certain powerful people, I admit--" Vollmerhausen was taking a real
risk but he felt his new kinship with Repp would allow such a radical
statement--"say beauty is form following function. There's nothing
very pretty about Vampir, which makes it beautiful indeed. Not a
wasted line, not an artificial embellishment."
"Form follows function, you say. Tell me, a Jew said that, didn't he?"
He was fiddling again with that curious black thing, that little metal
cube.
Vollmerhausen wasn't really sure.
"Probably," he admitted.
"Yes, they are very clever. A clever race. That was their problem."
It was not long after this unsettling conversation that another curious
thing began to happen. Or rather: not to happen. Vollmerhausen began
to realize with a distinct sensation of reluctance that he was done.
Not merely done with this last modification, but done completely.
Done with Vampir.
There was simply nothing to do until the team came for the gun.
In this involuntary holiday, Vollmerhausen took to strolling the
compound or the nearby woods, while his staff fiddled away their time
improving their quarters-technical people love to tinker, and they'd
worked out a more efficient hot water system, bettered the ventilation
in the canteen, turned their barrack into a two-star facility (a joke
was making the rounds: after the war they'd open a spa here called Bad
Aniage). Now that the pressure was off, their morale rose remarkably;
the prospect of leaving filled them with joy, and Vollmerhausen himself
planned to check with Repp as soon as possible about the evacuation.
Once, in his strollings, he even passed his old antagonist Schaeffer,
resplendent in the new camouflage tunic all the soldiers had brought
back from a tank-warfare course they'd gone to for two days, but the SS
captain hardly noticed him.
Meanwhile, rumors fluttered nervously through the air, some clearly
ridiculous, some just logical enough to be true: the Fuhrer was dead,
Berlin Red except for three blocks in the city center; the Americans
and English would sign a separate peace with the Reich and together
they would fight the Russians; Vienna had fallen, Munich was about to;
fresh troops were collecting in the Alps for a final stand; the Reich
would invade Switzerland and make a last stand there; a vast
underground had been set up to wage war after surrender; all the Jews
had been freed from the KZ's, or all had been killed. Vollmerhausen
had heard them all before, but now new ones reached him: of Repp. Repp
would kill the Pope, for not granting the Fuhrer sanctuary in the
Vatican. Absurd! Repp was after a special group that Himmler had
singled out as having betrayed the SS.
Repp would kill the English king in special retribution;
or the Russian man of steel. Even more insane! Where could Repp get
from here? Nowhere, except south, to the border. No, Vollmerhausen
had no ideas. He'd given up wondering. He'd always known that
curiosity is dangerous around the SS, and doubly dangerous around Repp.
Repp was going to a mountain, that's all he knew.
It occurred then to Vollmerhausen, with a sudden jolt of discomfort:
Berchtesgaden was on a mountain. And not far. Yet the Fuhrer was
supposedly in Berlin. The reports all said he was in Berlin.
The engineer suddenly felt chilly. He vowed not to think on the topic
again.
Vollmerhausen was out of the compound--a beautiful spring day,
unseasonably warm, the forest swarming green, buzzing with life, the
sky clear as diamond and just as rare, spruce and linden in the
air--when the weapon team arrived. He did not see them, but upon his
return noticed immediately the battered civilian Opel, pre-war, parked
in front of Repp's. Later he saw the men himself, from far off,
civilians, but of a type: the overcoats, the frumpy hats, the calm,
unimpressed faces concealing, but just barely, the tendency toward
violence.
He'd seen Gestapo before, or perhaps they were Ausland SD or any of a
dozen other kinds of secret policemen; whatever, they had an ugly sort
of weariness that frightened him.
In the morning they were gone, and that meant the rifle too,
Vollmerhausen felt. Twice before breakfast staff members had
approached.
"Herr Ingenieur-Doktor? Does it mean we'll be able to go?"
"I don't know," he'd answered.
"I just don't know."
Not needing to add, Only Repp knows.
And shortly then, a man came for him, from Repp.
"Ah, Hans," said Repp warmly, when he arrived.
"Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer," Vollmerhausen replied.
"You saw of course our visitors last night?"
"I caught a glimpse across the yard at them."
"Toughies, no? But sound men, just right for the job."
"They've taken Vampir?"
"Yes. No reason not to tell you. It's gone. All packed up. Carted
away."
"I see," said Vollmerhausen.
"And they brought information, some last-second target confirmations,
some technical data. And news."
Vollmerhausen brightened.
"News?"
"Yes. The war is nearly finished. But you knew that."
"Yes."
"Yes. And my part of the journey begins tonight."
"So soon. A long journey?"
"Not far, but complicated. On foot, most of it. Rather drab actually.
I won't bore you with details. Not like climbing aboard a Hamburg
tram."
"No, of course not."
"But I wanted to talk to you about your evacuation."
"Evac--" "Yes, yes. Here's the good news." He smiled.
"I know how eager your people are to get back to the human race. This
can't have been pleasant for them."
"It was their duty," said Vollmerhausen.
"Perhaps. Anyway, you'll be moving out tomorrow.
After I've gone. Sorry it's so rushed. But now it's felt the longer
this place stays, the bigger the chance of discovery.
You may have seen my men planting charges."
"Yes."
"There'll be nothing left of this place. Nothing for our friends. No
clues, no traces. Your people will return as if from holiday. Captain
Schaeffer's men will return to the Hungarian front. And I will cease
to exist: officially, at any rate. Repp is dead. I'll be a new man.
An old mission but a new man."
"Sounds very romantic."
"Silly business, changing identities, pretending to be what one's not.
But still necessary."
"My people will be very excited!"
"Of course. One more night, and it's all over. Your part, Totenkopf
division's part. Only my part remains.
One last campaign."
"Yes, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer."
"The details: have them packed up tonight. Tomorrow at ten hundred
hours a bus will arrive. It's several hours to Dachau. From there
your people will be given travel permits, and back pay, and be
permitted to make their way to destinations of choice. Though I can't
imagine many of them will head east. By the way, the Allies aren't
reported within a hundred kilometers of this place. So the travel
should be easy."
"Good. Ah, thanks. My thanks, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer."
He reached over and on impulse seized Repp's hand.
"Go on. Tell them," Repp commanded.
"Yes, sir, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer," Hans shouted, and lurched out.
Tomorrow! So soon. Back into the world, the real world. Vollmerhausen
felt a surge of joy as if he'd just glimpsed the sea after a trek
across the Sahara.
It was in the general confusion of preparing for the evacuation that
night that a thought came to him. He tried to quell it, found this not
difficult at first, with the technicians rushing merrily about him,
dismantling their elaborate comfort systems in the barrack, storing
personal belongings in trunks, even singing--a bottle, no, several
bottles appeared and while Vollmerhausen, teetotaler, couldn't approve,
neither could he prevent them--as if the war were officially and
finally over and
Germany had somehow won. But later, in the night, in the dark, it
returned to him. He tried to flatten it, drive it out, found a hundred
ways to dispel it. But he could not. Vollmerhausen had thought of a
last detail.
He pulled himself out of bed and heard his people breathing
heavily--drunkenly?--around him. He checked his watch. After four,
damn! Had Repp left already? Perhaps. But perhaps there was still
time.
It had occurred to Vollmerhausen that he might not have warned Repp
about the barrel residue problem. So many details, he'd forgotten just
this one! Or had he?
But he could not picture a conversation in which he properly explained
this eccentricity of the weapon: that after firing fifty or so of the
specially built rounds, the residue in the barrel accumulated to such
an extent that it greatly affected accuracy. Though Repp would know,
probably: he made it his business to know such things.
Still .. .
Vollmerhausen drew a bathrobe around himself and hurried out. It was a
warm night, he noticed, as he hurried across the compound to the SS
barrack and Repp's quarters. But what's this? Stirrings filled the
dark--a squad of SS troopers moving about, night maneuvers, a drill or
something.
"Sergeant?"
The man's pipe flared briefly in the dark.
"Yes, sir," he responded.
"Is Obersturmbannfuhrer around? Has he left yet?"
"Ah--no, sir. I believe he's still in his quarters."
"Excellent. Thank you." Ebullient, Vollmerhausen rushed on to the
barrack. It was empty, though a light burned behind the door of Repp's
room. He walked among the dark, neat bunks and rapped at the wood.
No answer.
Was Repp off after all?
"Herr Oberstunnbannfuhrer?"
Vollmerhausen felt edgy, restless with indecision. Forget the whole
silly thing? Go on in, be a bulldog, wait, make sure? Ach!
Hans the Kike pushed through the door. Room was empty. But then he
noticed an old greatcoat with private's chevron across a chair. Part
of Repp's "new identity"?
He entered. On the desk lay a heap of field gear:
the rumpled blanket, the six Kar '98 packs on the harness, the fluted
gas-mask cylinder, a helmet, in the corner a rifle. Repp clearly
hadn't left yet. Vollmerhausen began to wait.
But he again began to feel restless and uncomfortable.
You didn't want to stand in a man's room uninvited.
Perhaps he should slip out, wait by the door. Ah, what a dilemma. He
did not want to do the wrong thing.
He turned to stride out, but his sudden spin sent a spurt of commotion
into the still air, and a single paper, as though magically, peeled
itself off the desk and zigzagged dramatically to the floor.
Vollmerhausen hurried over and picked it up to replace it.
It was hotly uncomfortable in the room. A fire blazed in Repp's stove
and the smell of his Russian cigarettes filled the air. Vollmerhausen's
eyes hooked on the GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE stamped haphazardly across the
page top. The title read "N I B E L U N G E N," the exotic spacing
for emphasis, and R
beneath the subtitle "LATEST INTELLIGENCE SITUATION 27
APR 45."
He read the first line. The language of the report was military, dry,
rather abstract, ostentatiously formal. He had trouble understanding
exactly what they were saying.
Vollmerhausen was completely lost. Nuns? A convent?
He couldn't make it out. His heart was pounding so hard he was having
trouble focusing. So damned hot in here. Sweat oozed from his
hairline. He knew he must put the report down instantly, but he could
not.
He read on, the last paragraph.
He felt a growth of pain in his stomach. I am part of this? How?
Why?
Repp asked, "Find it interesting?"
Vollmerhausen turned. He was not even surprised.
"You simply can't. We don't make war on--" "We make war on our
enemies," said Repp, "wherever we find them. In whatever form. The
East would make you strong for such a thing."
"You could bring yourself to do this?" Vollmerhausen wanted to cry. He
was afraid he was going to be sick.
"With honor," Repp said. He stood there in the dirty tunic of a
private soldier, hatless.
"You can't," Vollmerhausen said. It seemed to him a most cogent
argument.
Repp brought up the Walther P-38 and shot him beneath the left eye. The
bullet kicked the engineer's head back violently. Most of the face was
knocked in. He fell onto Repp's desk, crashing with it to the floor.
Repp put the automatic back into the shoulder holster under the tunic.
He didn't look at the body. He picked the report up from the floor--it
had fluttered free from Vollmerhausen's fingers at the moment of
death--and walked to the small stove. He opened the door, inserted it
and watched the flames consume it.
He heard a machine pistol. Schaeffer and his people were bumping off
Vollmerhausen's staff.
It occurred to Repp after several seconds that Schaeffer was doing the
job quite poorly. He would have to speak to the man. The firing had
not let up.
A bullet fractured one of Repp's windows. Firing leapt up from a dozen
points on the perimeter. Repp had an impression of tracers floating
in.
Repp hit the floor, for he knew in that second that the Americans had
come.
 Roger played hard to get at first, demanding wooing, but after five
minutes Leets was ready to woo him with a fist, and Roger shifted gears
fast. Now it was a production, starring himself, directed by himself,
produced by himself, the Orson Welles, tyro genius, of American
Intelligence.
"Get on with it, man," said Outhwaithe.
"Okay, okay." He smiled smugly, and then wiped it off, leaving a
smirk, like a child's moustache of milk.
"Simple. In two words. You'll kick yourself." A grin split his
pleasant young face.
"The planes."
"Uh--" "Yeah," he amplified.
"So much on the route he took, so much on tracing it back, following it
back to its source--all wrong. He said he thought he heard planes.
Or maybe trucks or motorcycles. But maybe planes.
Now--" he paused dramatically, letting an imitation of wisdom, solemn,
furrow-browed, surface on his face, "I give this Air Corps guy lessons,
colonel in Fighter Ops, once a week, little walking-around money.
Anyway, I asked him if some guys bounced some weird kind of night
action--under lights, middle of wilderness--say in
March sometime, maybe late February, any chance you'd have it on
paper?"
Leets was struck by the simple brilliance of it.
"That's really good, Roger," he said, at the same time thinking that he
himself ought to be shot for not coming up with it.
Roger smiled at the compliment.
"Anyway," he said, handing over a photostatic copy of a document
entitled "after action report, Fighter Operations, 1033d Tactical
Fighter Group, 8th Air Force, ChaloissurMarne."
Leets tore into the pilot's prosaic account of his adventures:
two fighter-bombers, angling toward the marshaling yards at Munich for
a dawn strike, find themselves above a lit field in the middle of what
is on the maps pure wilderness. In it German soldiers scurry about.
They peel off for one run, after which the lights go away.
"Can we track this?"
"Those numbers--that's the pilot's estimated position," Roger said.
"Thirty-two min southeast Saar, one eighty-six?"
"Thirty-two minutes southeast of the Saarbriicken Initial Point, on a
compass heading of one eighty-six degrees."
"Can we get pictures?"
"Well, sir, I'm no expert but--" "I can have an R.A.F photo Spitfire in
an hour," said Tony.
"Roger, get over to R and D and pick up those mockups of Aniage Elf
they were building, okay?"
"Check," said Roger.
"Jesus," said Leets.
"If this is--"
"Big if, chum."
"Yeah, but if, if we can get a positive ID, we can .. ." He let the
sentence trail off.
"Yes, of course," said Tony.
"But first, the Spit. You'll see the Jew. He'll be important in this
too, of course.
He'll have to come in at some point. He's necessary."
"Yes, I'll see him."
"Then I'm off," Tony said.
"Hey," wondered Roger, disappointed that his brief instant in the
spotlight had so soon vanished, "what are you guys talking about?"
Leets didn't seem to hear him. He looked strangely excited, and he was
muttering distractedly to himself.
He rubbed his lips, which had dried in the excitement, and for just one
second Roger had the impression the captain was near breakdown, madly
muttering to himself, full of private visions and prophecies.
"Sir," Roger repeated, louder, "what's going to happen now?"
"Well," said Leets, "I guess we have to close them down. Put some
people in there."
People, thought Roger, swallowing dryly. He had to stop himself from
asking, Me too?
The Gentile women treated him like some dreadful little wog, foreign
and stinky, that they were helping out of great pity. In return they
expected his love and when he would not give it they were enraged. They
resented the private room when down the hall their own boys, wounded
gallantly in battle, lay festering in huge public bays. He was not
truly hurt either; he insisted on heathen protocols, the removal of the
crucifix, for example;
but most contemptibly of all, Somebody Important had an interest in
him.
Shmuel lay back, alone. His head buzzed with pain.
Luminous shapes entwined on the ceiling. A film of sweat covered him.
He closed his eyes and saw smokestacks belching flame and human ash on
the horizon, the glow orange and lurid. He opened them to an equally
unsatisfactory reality: the English hospital room to which he'd been
removed, a blank green chamber, pitiless, the odors of disinfectants
rising. There were screams in the night. He knew people looked in on
him at all hours. And the hospital merely symbolized a whole Western
world he'd fled into--where else had there been to go, what other
direction for a poor Jew?
But in many ways it was as dreadful a place as the one from which he'd
just escaped. There, at least, there were other Jews, a sense of
community. Here, nobody cared, or would even listen. The Gentiles
wanted him for something strange; he was not sure he trusted them.
It didn't matter. He knew he was nearing the end of the journey and he
didn't mean the geographic journey from Warsaw to the death camp to
Aniage Elf to the forest to London, but rather its inner
representation-as though each step was a philosophical position that
must be mastered, its truth grasped, before moving on.
At last he was turning into one of the Mussulmen, the living dead who
roamed the camps as pariahs, having accepted doom and therefore no
longer suited for human contact. Death was no longer meaningful; it
was mere biology, a final technical detail to be adjusted.
He accepted death; therefore he accepted the dead;
therefore he preferred the dead.
"Big if, chum."
"Yeah, but if, if we can get a positive ID, we can .. ." He let the
sentence trail off.
"Yes, of course," said Tony.
"But first, the Spit. You'll see the Jew. He'll be important in this
too, of course.
He'll have to come in at some point. He's necessary."
"Yes, I'll see him."
"Then I'm off," Tony said.
"Hey," wondered Roger, disappointed that his brief instant in the
spotlight had so soon vanished, "what are you guys talking about?"
Leets didn't seem to hear him. He looked strangely excited, and he was
muttering distractedly to himself.
He rubbed his lips, which had dried in the excitement, and for just one
second Roger had the impression the captain was near breakdown, madly
muttering to himself, full of private visions and prophecies.
"Sir," Roger repeated, louder, "what's going to happen now?"
"Well," said Leets, "I guess we have to close them down. Put some
people in there."
People, thought Roger, swallowing dryly. He had to stop himself from
asking, Me too?
The Gentile women treated him like some dreadful little wog, foreign
and stinky, that they were helping out of great pity. In return they
expected his love and when he would not give it they were enraged. They
resented the private room when down the hall their own boys, wounded
gallantly in battle, lay festering in huge public bays. He was not
truly hurt either; he insisted on heathen protocols, the removal of the
crucifix, for example;
but most contemptibly of all, Somebody Important had an interest in
him.
Shmuel lay back, alone. His head buzzed with pain.
Luminous shapes entwined on the ceiling. A film of sweat covered him.
He closed his eyes and saw smokestacks belching flame and human ash on
the horizon, the glow orange and lurid. He opened them to an equally
unsatisfactory reality: the English hospital room to which he'd been
removed, a blank green chamber, pitiless, the odors of disinfectants
rising. There were screams in the night. He knew people looked in on
him at all hours. And the hospital merely symbolized a whole Western
world he'd fled into--where else had there been to go, what other
direction for a poor Jew?
But in many ways it was as dreadful a place as the one from which he'd
just escaped. There, at least, there were other Jews, a sense of
community. Here, nobody cared, or would even listen. The Gentiles
wanted him for something strange; he was not sure he trusted them.
It didn't matter. He knew he was nearing the end of the journey and he
didn't mean the geographic journey from Warsaw to the death camp to
Aniage Elf to the forest to London, but rather its inner
representation-as though each step was a philosophical position that
must be mastered, its truth grasped, before moving on.
At last he was turning into one of the Mussulmen, the living dead who
roamed the camps as pariahs, having accepted doom and therefore no
longer suited for human contact. Death was no longer meaningful; it
was mere biology, a final technical detail to be adjusted.
He accepted death; therefore he accepted the dead;
therefore he preferred the dead.
For everyone was dead. Bruno Schuiz was dead, killed in '42, in
Drohobicz. Janucz Korczak was dead;
Auschwitz. Perie, Warsaw. Gebirtig, Cracow. Katzenelson, the Vittel
camp. Glick, Vilna. Shaievitz, Lodz. Ulianover, also Lodz.
The list was longer of course, longer a million times.
The last Jew longed for a ghetto, kerosene lamps, crooked streets,
difficult lessons.
Good night, electrified, arrogant world.
He walked gladly to the window.
He was four stories up.
Shmuel stood at the window in bedclothes, looking out. His features,
even in the dim light, seemed remote.
"Nothing much to see, huh?" called Leets as he swept in.
The man turned quickly, fixing a stare on Leets. He looked badly
spooked.
"You okay?" Leets wanted to know.
He seemed to grab hold. He nodded.
Leets was running late. He knew he was coming on all wrong but he was
nervous and he could never control how he acted when he was nervous.
Also, he hated hospitals, even more now because they reminded him so of
Susan.
"Well, good, it's good you're okay."
He paused, stalling. Only one way to do this. Only one way to do
anything. He kept having to remind himself:
full out.
"Look, we need more help. Big help."
He waited for the Jew to respond. The man just sat on his bed and
looked back. He seemed quite calm and disinterested. He looked tired
also.
"Two days from now--it would be sooner, but the logistics are complex,
forty-eight hours is the dead minimum--a battalion of American airborne
troops is going into the Black Forest. We found it--Aniage Elf, Repp,
the whole shooting gallery. We'll go in a little after midnight.
I'll tag along with the airborne people; meanwhile Major Outhwaithe
will come up on the ground in a column of tanks from a French armored
division operating in the area."
Leets paused.
"We're going to try and kill Repp. That's what it gets down to. But
only one man has seen him. Sure, we've got that old picture. But
we've got to be sure. So it would help if--if you came along." He was
troubled over all this.
"This is how I figure it. Nobody's asking you to go into battle;
you're not a soldier, it's what we get paid for. No, after we take the
place, we'll get a message out fast. You'll be in a forward area with
Roger, I suppose.
We can get you in fast in a light plane, have you there in an hour or
two. It's our best shot at him, only way to be sure." He paused
again.
"Well, that's it. Your part will be risky, but a good, safe calculated
risk. What do you think?" He looked up at Shmuel and had the
discomfiting sensation the man hadn't understood a word he'd said.
"Are you all right? Do you have a fever or something?"
"You'll jump out of an airplane? In a parachute, in the night? And
attack the camp?" Shmuel asked.
"Yeah," said Leets.
"It's not so hard as it sounds.
We've got some good pictures. We plan to go down on the target range,
where you escaped. We make it three miles back to--" But again he saw
Shmuel's eyes glaze over, disinterested.
"Hey, you okay?" he said, and almost snapped his fingers.
"Take me," Shmuel said suddenly.
"What? Take you? In the air--" "You said you needed me there. Fine,
I'll go. With you. From the plane in the parachute. Yes, I'll do
it."
"You got any idea what you're letting yourself in for?
I mean, there'll be a battle, people getting blown up."
"I don't care. That's not the point."
"What is the point?"
"The point is--you'd never understand. But I must go. It's either
that or nothing. You've never understood.
But I must go. It's either that or nothing. You've got to do this for
me. I'm clever, I can learn the techniques.
Two days, you say? Plenty of time."
Leets was all mixed up, tried to run through a dozen motives. Finally
he just asked, "Why?"
"Old friends then. I'll have the best chance to meet old friends."
A screwy answer, Leets thought. But he said, not quite knowing why,
"All right."
The paratroopers all seemed husky boys in their teens, dumbly, crazily
eager, full of bravado and violence.
They worked hard at glamour and costumed themselves after lessons
they'd learned in movie theaters.
They blackened their faces with burnt cork until they gleamed like
minstrels with mad white eyes and pink tongues; they dangled junk from
themselves until they clanked like men in armor, but not just any
junk:
pistols in shoulder holsters were first-prize items, symbols of special
pizazz; another melodramatic improvisation was the knife and sheath
taped upside down along the boot; then too pouches, grenades, tightly
wound ropes, ammo packs, canteens beside the two lumpy chutes; and on
their helmets most taped first-aid kits and many of them still wore,
though nonregulation now, the D-Day American flag patch on their
shoulders.
A few of the really demented boasted Mohawk haircuts.
Leets, sitting mildly among them, felt he'd wandered into someone's
high school pep rally. The varsity was revving itself up before the
game. As an ex-football player himself, ex-Wildcat, he could
appreciate and almost savor that feeling of hate and fear and sheer
shit-thinning excitement that coursed savagely through these nervous
boys. The paratroopers shoved and joshed, even sang now as they
relaxed in the airfield staging area in these last minutes before
embarkation. Earlier someone had even produced a football, and Leets
had watched an exuberant game of touch unfold before his eyes. The
officers had seemed not to mind this extravaganza of energy: they were
slightly older men, but all had that same thick-wristed blunt
athleticism that Leets recognized immediately, heavy bones and
close-cropped hair and flat faces. And while all this was familiar to
him, it was at the same time strange; for Leets associated war with
lonely men climbing into Lysanders or huddling in empty bays of big
British bombers, drinking coffee. That had been his war anyway, not
this festival of the locker room.
He turned his wrist over. Twenty-two hundred hours, his Bulova
announced in iridescent hands. Another fifteen, twenty minutes to go.
He snapped out and lit a Lucky, and did another--about the
fiftieth--rundown on his own collection of junk. Canteen for thirst,
compass for direction, shovel for digging, chute for jumping and the
rest for killing: three fragmentation grenades, a bayonet, ten 30-round
magazines in pouches on a belt stiffly around his middle and, thrust at
an awkward diagonal down across his belly under the reserve chute, a
Thompson submachine gun, the Army model designated M-1, standard issue
for a paratroop officer. He must have weighed five hundred pounds;
perhaps like a medieval knight he'd need a crane to get him off his ass
when, so shortly now, the jousting hour arrived.
Leets ran his tongue over dry lips. If I'm scared, he wondered, what
about him!
Shmuel lounged on the grass next to him, similarly encumbered, yet
lacking weapons, which he did not know how to operate anyway and which
by principle he would not have, though Leets had tried to argue him
into carrying at least a pistol.
Yet Shmuel seemed strangely composed.
"How are you doing?" Leets inquired, with effort, for all the stuff
pressing into his gut.
No expression showed beneath the blackface; he could have been any
other paratrooper, counting out the final quiet minutes of the night,
eyes showing white against the darkness of face, mouth grim, nostrils
flaring slightly in the effort of breathing.
He nodded briskly in reply to the question.
"I'm fine," he said.
"Good, good," Leets said, wishing he could make the same claim. He
himself was exhausted, while at the same confusing time churning with
energy and dread. A most curious state; it had the one benefit of
quieting his leg, which with fatigue tended to throb and leak. A man
leaned over, too dark to recognize, and said, "Sir, Colonel says
planes'll be cranking up in five, we'll be loading in ten."
"Gotcha, thanks," said Leets, and the trooper was gone.
Leets looked nervously around him. It was warm and dark and the men
were lying about on the grass of the airfield, though they'd been
organized into their Dakota groups three hours ago. Those three hours
had dragged by, as the light faded to twilight and then darkness, the
soft English fields beyond the air base perimeter growing hazier. The
men were Second Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, a part of
the more widely known 82d Airborne Division. Tough boys with drops in
Italy and Normandy, a long bad spell in the Bulge and most
recently--March--an op named Varsity in which they'd jumped beyond the
Rhine behind them. They'd been off the line a month, growing fat and
sluggish here at the rest camp in southern England, and when Tony
Outhwaithe had convinced the right parties that a batch of hell raisers
was needed for a night of close-in dirty work in south Twelveland,
Second of the 501st got the word.
It was cold in the airplane. Shmuel sat in the chill, his back against
the slope of the fuselage, shivering. Yet he felt quite wonderful. His
journey was finally nearing its completion. A matter of hours now. He
was one of two dozen men in the under lit darkness of the airplane, and
he was as isolated from any of them as they were from each other, cut
off by the noise from the engines that made human contact, now that
they needed it most, impossible. Shmuel could sense the tension,
especially in Captain Leets, and he pitied him for it. A Mussulman
need feel nothing. A Mussulman was cut off from human sensation,
complete within himself. Yet he looked over at Leets and saw him
hunched and absorbed, filthy face glowing orangely over the tip of a
cigarette. The layer of cork had dried crustily on his skin, making
the features abstract, unreadable. But the eyes, staring blankly at
nothing, had a message: fear.
Yet it was a fear Shmuel refused to accept. He was all through with
fear, he had discovered a new territory.
Having accepted and even welcomed his death, nothing mattered, not even
preposterous things like the half-a-day session at the American
parachute school with the boy Evans, performing feats of athleticism,
jumping off of ten-foot platforms into sawdust pits, rolling when he
hit; or hanging fifty feet up from risers, the straps nipping into his
limbs while someone yelled at him about adjustments he didn't
understand and the ground rushed up to hit him.
"You'll be all right," Evans had said.
"The static line'll pull the chute open for you. Really, it's easy.
When you hit the ground, the captain'll come by for you. He'll take
good care of you." The boy had grinned optimistically. He could
afford optimism because he wasn't going.
Then they took him to a supply depot and issued him equipment. It
occurred to him that he'd never been so well dressed though he felt
like an impostor. The clothes were all big, but looking around he saw
that bagginess was the American style. It seemed to symbolize their
wealth, huge napping garments made from endless bolts of material. In
the warehouse they peeled these items off from huge piles, piles of
pants that reached the sky! The crowning monstrosity was the helmet,
shaped like a Moscow dome, weighing six tons, pulling him, left or
right unless he fought against it.
He examined himself. Third uniform of the war and what a peculiar
journey they charted: inmate's ticking to Wehrmacht flannels to thick
crinkly American cotton, crowned in steel like a bell.
Now, sitting in the airplane that drew ever closer to Germany, Shmuel
had to wonder at the jokes of fate.
I had to find a special way to die, the ovens weren't good enough for
me, no, I had to jump out of an airplane with teen-age cowboys and
Indians and gangsters from America.
He glanced over at Leets, and noticed the way he was sitting, one leg
pushed out straight, his face tight, eyes still distant, whole being
focused on deriving maximum pleasure from the cigarette.
Leets saw the ready light come on. He smashed out his cigarette with
the foot of his good leg. The bad one ached dully. Motionless,
stretched, stiff in the cold plane, it had cramped on him. He massaged
it, kneading it nervously with his fingers, working some life back into
it. A touch to the knee came back wet. Leakage.
You fucker, he thought.
Just when I need you.
He thought of his first jump, first real jump, that is, with live
Germans and guns and real bullets down below:
completely different. A Lancaster, though bigger, felt less solid than
a C-47, and there was a sense of actual loneliness in the big bomber's
bay, with just the three of them besides the sullen jumpmaster. Here,
a crowd, two whole football teams and change. And a door, a wonderful
American door, triumph of Yank ingenuity.
The Brits leaped out of a hatch in the bomber floor for some absurd
reason, a public school sort of ordeal that had to be got through like
a cold bath or fagging for the older boys. Leets focused all his
terrors on getting through without breaking his head. For some
baffling reason. Yanks had a peculiar tendency to look down as they
stepped out, see where they were headed, and catch a faceful of hatch.
Leets had seen it happen at one of the British secret training schools
where he'd learned to jump Brit-style preparatory for going to war for
the OSS. There was a saying at the place: you could always tell a Yank
by the broken jaw.
Another light flicked on, red. Three minutes. Time to hook up.
Shmuel was standing now in the aisle. It reminded him of a crowded
Warsaw trolley, the one that traveled Glinka Street, near the jewelry
shops. He even had a strap to hang onto in the closeness and he could
feel other men's breath washing over him. A moment of unexpected
terror had just passed: the plane had yawed to the left; Shmuel,
awkward in all the new gear, almost fell. He felt his balance and,
with it, his control draining away. Nothing to grab for; he
surrendered to the fall;
then Leets had him.
"Easy," he muttered. A breeze pummeled through the corridor of the
airplane, fresh and savage. A glint of natural light, not much,
illuminated the end of the darkness.
Door opened.
Then, like a theater queue at last admitted to the big show, the line
began to move. It moved with great swiftness, almost as if some
reasonable destination lay ahead. < Shmuel faced sky. An American
strapped by the doorway hit him in the shoulder without warning and,
surprised at his own lack of respect, he snarled at the man, a
stranger, and as if to insult him, stepped out.
Gravity sucked the dignity from his limbs and he napped like a scrawny
shtetl chicken. The face of the tailplane, rivets and all, sailed by a
few inches beyond him. He fell, screaming, in the great cold dark
silence, the engines now mercifully gone, the noise too, only himself,
beginning to tumble until--Ah! Oh! something snapped him hard and he
found himself floating under a great white parasol. He looked about
and noticed first that the sky was full of apparitions--jellyfish,
moving with underwater slowness, silky petticoats under a young girl's
skirts, pillowcases and sheets billowing on a wash line--and secondly
that for all the majesty of the spectacle the ground was coming up
fast. He'd expected a serene descent, thinking himself thousands of
feet up.
Of course they'd jump at minimum height, less time in the air, less
time to scatter, and already Shmuel felt below the horizon. The
ground, huge and black, smashed up at him. Wasn't he supposed to be
doing something? He didn't care. He saw in the rushing wall of
darkness, coming now like an express train, his fate.
He reached to embrace it, expecting no pain, only release, and he hit
with stunning impact, knocking a bolt of light through his head and all
his sense out of him.
I'm dead, he thought with relief.
But then a sergeant stood over him, cursing hotly in English.
"C'mon, Jack, off yer butt, move it," and sprinted on.
Shmuel got up, feeling sore in a dozen places but broken in none. His
legs wobbled under his weight, his brain still resonated with echoes of
the landing. Gradually he realized the field was very busy. Men
rushed about, seemingly without order. Shmuel tried to figure out what
to do and it occurred to him that he was supposed to free himself from
the chute harness. Suddenly a man materialized next to him.
"You okay? Nothing busted?"
"What? Ah. No. No. What a sensation."
"Great."
Shmuel tugged feebly with the harness, couldn't get his fingers to work
and wasn't exactly sure what it was he was supposed to do, and then
felt Leets grab the heavy clip that seemed to be the nexus of the
network of straps that held him, and in the next second the straps
unleashed him.
Shmuel took a quick look around. He made out men scattered across the
dark field, and, beyond, a looming bank of pines. All was silence
under the towers of stars.
It was so different now. He looked for landmarks, for clues, for help.
He felt suddenly useless.
"This way, c'mon," hissed Leets, unlimbering his automatic gun,
trotting off. Shmuel ran after.
Yes, yes, it really was the firing range. The shed bobbed up ahead,
and he reached the concrete walkway.
Then he saw the lamps in the trees; he remembered:
they'd almost killed him.
Leets joined a crowd of whispering men, while Shmuel stood off to one
side. Other shapes rushed by.
Groups were forming up, leaders gesturing to unattached people. Shmuel
could hear guns being checked and cocked, equipment adjusted.
Then Leets returned.
"You feel okay?"
"It's so strange," Shmuel said. A half-smile creased his face.
"You stick with me. Don't get separated. Don't wander off or
anything."
"Of Course not."
"Any shooting, down you go, flat. Got it?"
"Yes, Mr. Leets."
"Okay, we're moving out."
The soldiers began to move down the road.
It looked familiar, like something luminous from childhood that, seen
finally through an adult's eyes, revealed itself tawdry, fraudulent. A
spring camouflage pattern had been added to the buildings so that now
they showed the shadowy patterns of the forest, but otherwise Aniage
Elf looked unchanged.
He was amazed more at the stillness of the composition than the
composition itself: hard to believe those dark trees that circled the
place concealed hundreds of squirming men.
Leets, beside him, whispered, "Research? The big one in the middle?"
"Yes."
"And SS to the left?"
"Yes." Shmuel realized Leets knew all this, they'd gone over it a
hundred times; Leets was talking out of his own nervous energy or
excitement.
"Any second now," Leets said, looking at his watch.
Shmuel guessed that meant any second till a circle was closed around
the place, like a noose. All exits cut off, all guns in place.
Leets was rubbing his hands in excitement, peering into the dark.
Shmuel could see the fellow fight hard to restrain himself.
The report of the first shot was so abrupt that it shocked Shmuel. He
flinched at it. Or was it a shot? It sounded muffled and indistinct.
Yes, shot, for Leets's intake of breath was sudden and almost painful,
pulled in, the air held. Then came a clatter of reports, more shots.
They all seemed to come from inside Aniage and Shmuel did not see why.
Glancing around at the others in the trees, he made out baffled faces,
men searching each other's eyes for answers. Curses rose, and someone
whispered hoarsely, "Hold it, hold--!" cut by a loud krak} from
nearby.
"Goddamn it, hold your--" someone shouted, but the voice was lost in
the tide of fire that rose.
All wrong. Even Shmuel, not by furthest reach of imagination a
military man, could tell: volley all ragged and patchy, tentative.
Bullets just streaking out into the dark, unaimed.
Yet it was beautiful. He was dazzled by the beauty in it. In the
dark, the gun flashes unfolded like exotic orchids, more precious for
their briefness at the moment of blossom. They danced and flickered in
the trees and as they rose in intensity, pulling a roar from the ground
itself, the air seemed to fill with a sleet of light, free-floating
streaks of sheer color that wobbled and splashed through the night. He
felt his mouth hang dumbly open in wonder.
Leets turned to him.
"All fucked up," he said darkly.
"Some bastard let go too early."
Nearby, an older man shouted into a telephone, "Crank 'em up, all
sections, get those people in the assault teams in there!"
Shmuel understood that the battle had prematurely begun, and reached
its moment of equipoise in the very first seconds.
Leets turned to him again.
"I'm going in there. Stay here. Wait for Tony."
The American raced off, into the blizzard.
Leets rushed in, not out of courage so much as to escape the rage and
frustration. He ran out of sheer physical need because in not running
there was more pain, because the neat surgical operation that he had
envisioned as the fitting end to this drama, to Aniage Elf, to Repp, to
the Man of Oak, was now lost forever, dissolving into a pell-mell of
indiscriminate fire. Susan had wished him dead; he'd risk it then, her
curse echoing in his mind.
He entered a terrible world, its imagery made even keener by the gush
of his own adrenaline. He ran into a riot of angry pulsing light and
cruel sounds and hot gusts of air and needles of stirred dust. His
lungs soon ached from the effort of breathing, he began to lose control
of the visions that came his way: it was all pure sensation,
overwhelming. It made no sense at all. Smoke billowed, tracers hopped
insolently around, screams and thumps filled the air without revealing
their sources. He felt as if he were in the middle of a panoramic
vista of despair, a huge painting comprised of individual scenes each
quite exact, yet overall meaningless in their pattern.
He found himself hunching behind a coil of barbed wire, watching a
German MG-42--that high, ripping sound as the double-feed pawls and
rollers in the breech-lock mechanism really chewed through the
belt--knock down Americans. They just fell, lazily, slumping sleepily
to the ground; you had to concentrate to remember that death was at the
end of the tumble.
He became aware of the taste and texture of the dirt on his tongue and
lips as he tried to press even closer into the loam, tracers pumping
overhead. He saw running Germans flattened one-two-three by teenagers
with wild haircuts and tommy guns. Men in flames rigged in their own
terrible light, frenzied, from a burning building.
He crawled frantically over cratered terrain, sprawling comically in a
pit for safety and there found another sanctum-seeker, half a grin
spilling ludicrously across half a face. If this battle had a
narrative, or a point of view, he was not a reader of it. In fact, he
really didn't take part in it. He hadn't fired his weapon, the only
Germans he saw close up were dead ones and nobody paid him any
attention. Again, he was a visitor. For him it was mostly rolling
around in the dirt, hoping he didn't get killed. He did nothing
especially brave, except not run.
At one point, after what seemed hours of aimless crawling, he found
himself crouching with a group of shivering paratroopers in the shelter
of a shot-out blockhouse. Fire clattered and jounced hotly off the
wall, and from somewhere up ahead, an insane sergeant howled at them to
come on up and do some shooting.
"You go," a boy near him said.
"No, you go," said his friend.
"Hey, loo kit this neat German gun," someone said.
"Hey, that's worth some money."
"Fuck, yes."
Leets saw the man had an MG-42; he was crawling out of the
blockhouse.
"Hey, it's broke," someone said.
"No," Leets said.
"That gun fires so fast they change barrels on it. They were in the
middle of a change.
That's why it looks all fucked up."
The barrel seemed to be hanging out of a vent in the side of the
cooling sleeve.
"Go on back in. There ought to be a leather case around in there
somewhere. About two feet long, with a big flap."
The kid ducked in and came out again with it.
"Okay," said Leets. He took the barrel pouch and drew a new barrel
out.
"Gimme the gun," he said.
"I think I can fix it."
Leets threaded the new barrel down the socket guides, and locked it.
Then he closed the vent, heard the barrel snap into place. He turned
the weapon over. Dirt jammed the breech. He pried the feed cover
open, brushed the bigger curds out of the oily action.
"Are there any bullets?" he asked.
"Here," someone said, handing over a bunched-up belt.
Leets fed it into the mechanism and closed the feed cover. Then he
drew back the operating handle and shoved it forward.
"I'm going to do some shooting," he said.
"How about one of you guys come and feed me the belt?"
They looked at him. Finally, a kid said.
"Yeah, okay.
But could I shoot it a little?"
"Sure," Leets said.
They squirmed forward until they came against the lip of a ridge.
Peering ahead, Leets saw the SS barrack looming like a ship. Flashes
leapt out from it. Bullets whined above.
"There's some still in there," a sergeant said.
"They pushed us out. I don't have enough men or firepower to get back
inside."
"Isn't there supposed to be a lieutenant around here?" Leets asked.
"He got it."
"Oh. Okay, I've got a German gun here. I'm going to shoot the place
up."
"Go ahead. Goose 'em good. Really spray 'em."
Leets pushed the gun on its bipod out beyond him, and drew it into his
shoulder. He could feel the young soldier warm next to him.
"Don't let the belt get tangled, now," he said.
"I won't. But you said I could shoot."
"You can have the goddamn thing when I'm done.
Okay?"
"Hey, super," said the kid.
The building was a black bulk against a pinker sky.
"You in there, Repp? Repp, it's me out here. I hope you're in there.
I've got five hundred rounds of 7.92 mill out here and I'm hoping one
of them's for you. And what about you, Man of Oak, you bastard?"
"Who are you talking to?" the kid wanted to know.
"Nobody/' said Leets.
"I'm aiming."
He fired. Each third round was a tracer. He saw them looping out,
bending ever so slightly, sinking into the building. Occasionally one
would jag off something hard, and prance into the sky. It seemed a
neon jamboree, a curtain of dazzle, the chains of light rattling
through the dark. Cordite rose to Leets's nose as he kept feeding
twenty-round bursts into the building and as the empty shells piled,
they'd sometimes topple, cascades of used brass, warm and dirty,
rolling down the slope, clinking.
"Goose it again," said the sergeant.
Leets stitched another burst into the place. He had no trouble holding
the rounds into the target. He took them from one end of the building
to another, chest-high. The building accepted them stoically, until at
last a tracer lit it off and it began to burn. A man inside waited
until he ignited before coming out and Leets fired into him, cutting
him in two. The flames were quite bright by that time, and there was
not much more shooting.
Shmuel lay on his belly among strangers for the whole night. Nobody
paid him any attention, but nearby the parachutists established their
aid station, and besides the flashes of the battle, he'd seen the
wounded drifting back, ones and twos, an occasional man carried by
buddies who'd drop him and always return to the fighting.
There was much screaming.
With dawn, fires arose from Aniage--Shmuel knew the buildings were
burning. And then in the morning, the tanks had come down the road,
clanking, sheathed in dust. The wounded cheered as best they could but
the vehicles which looked so potent when first he glimpsed them seemed
sad and beaten-up as they rumbled by. He could imagine better saviors
than this ragged caravan of smoking creatures, leaking oil, scarred.
Major Outhwaithe perched behind the turret of the first one, black and
grimy, like a chimney sweep.
The tanks rolled into Aniage and Shmuel lost sight of them in the pall
of smoke. Then explosions, fierce as any he'd heard.
"They must be blowing 'em out of that last pillbox," one hurt boy said
to another.
Then a soldier came for him.
"Sir, Captain Leets wants you."
"Ah," said Shmuel, embarrassed to be so clean among the dirty bleeding
soldiers.
But soon his discomfort replaced itself with a sensation of
befuddlement. He found it hard to relate what he encountered to what
he remembered. He was appalled at the destruction. He saw a world
literally eviscerated, ruin, smoky timbers, gouged earth,
bullet-riddled buildings, all the more unbelievable for the small
scenes of domestic tranquillity enacted against it by surviving
American soldiers, lying about in the sun, cigarettes lazy in their
mouths, writing letters, reading Westerns, eating cold breakfasts.
His guide took him to a pit, where the German dead lay in rows, flies
collecting busily in black clouds on them. He'd seen corpses before,
but a corpse was a certain thing: first, it was Jewish, but more
importantly it was very skinny, white, shrunken, its terror contained
in the fact that, it looked so unreal, a puppet or chunk of wood. Here,
reality was inescapable: bones and brains and guts, blue-black,
black-red, green-yellow, ripe and full of gore. Shmuel could think
only of meat shops and the ritual slaughterers on the days before
holidays-hanging slabs of beef, steamy piles of vitals, tripe white and
cold. Yet in the butcher shops there was neatness, order, purpose:
this was all spillage, sloppy and accidental.
"Not pretty. Even when it's them," said Leets, standing glumly on the
brink.
"These are the soldiers, the Totenkopfdivision people. All of them, or
what's left of them. Sorry. But it's time to go looking."
"Of course. How else?" said Shmuel.
He walked the ranks. Dead, the Germans were only their flesh: hard to
hate. He felt nothing but his own discomfort at the revolting details
of violent death; the odor of emptying colons and the swarming flies.
It became easy after a while, walking among them. They were arrayed in
their brightly vivid camouflage jackets, the pattern precise and
inappropriately colorful, gay almost, brown-green dappling dun. Soon
he saw an old friend.
Hello, Pipe Smoker. You've a hole the size of a bucket mouth at your
center and you don't look happy about it. This is how the Gentiles
kill: completely, totally.
A serious business, the manufacture of death. Us, they starve, or gas,
saving bullets. They tried bullets on us, but considered the practice
wasteful. Their own they kill with bullets and explosives, Pipe
Smoker, spend millions.
Next came the boy who'd struck him in the storeroom.
You were a mean one, called me Jew-shit, kicked me. The boy lay blue
and halved on the ground, legs, trunk missing. What could have done
such a dreadful thing? He was surely the most mutilated. You struck
me, boy, and in that instant if this scene could have been projected to
you, Shmuel the Jew in an American uniform, all warm and whole,
standing dumbly over only half your body, you'd have thought it a joke,
a laugh.
Yet there you are and here I am and by the furious way your eyes stare,
I believe you know. Ah, and Schaeffer, Hauptsturmfuhrer Schaeffer,
almost untouched, certainly unmussed, did you die of fright there in
your crisp and bright camouflage coat; no, there's a tiny black hole
drilled into your upper lip.
"No," he said, after the last, "he's not here."
Leets nodded and then took him to the bullet-riddled hulk of barrack
that had once housed Vollmerhausen's researchers. The door was off its
hinges and the roof had fallen in at one end, but Shmuel could see the
bodies in the blood-soaked sheets in the cots.
"The civilians," Shmuel said.
"A shame you had to kill them."
"It wasn't us," Leets said.
"And it wasn't by accident either." He bent to the floor and came up
with a handful of empty shells.
"These are all over the place in there. Nine-millimeter.
MP-forty cases. The SS did it. The ultimate security.
Now, one more stop. This way, please."
They walked across the compound, avoiding shell craters and piles of
rubble, to the SS barrack. It still smoldered and had fallen in on
itself sometime after sunrise. But one end stood. Leets led him to
the side and pointed through a window that had been shot out.
"Can you see? On the floor. He's burned and most of his face is gone.
He's in a bathrobe. That's not Repp, is it?"
"No."
"No. You'd never catch Repp in a bathrobe. It's the engineer, isn't
it? Vollmerhausen?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's it then."
"You missed him."
"Yeah. He made it out. Somehow. The bastard."
"And the trail ends."
"Maybe. Maybe. We'll see what we can dig out of the rubble. And
there's this." He held something out to Shmuel.
"Do you know what it is?" he asked.
Shmuel looked at the small metal object in Leets's upturned palm. He
almost laughed.
"Yes, of course I know. But what--" "We found it in there. Under
Vollmerhausen. It must have been on the desk, which he seemed to hit
on the way down. That's Yiddish on it, isn't it?"
"Hebrew," Shmuel corrected.
"It's a toy. It's called a draydel. A top, for spinning." He'd done
so a hundred, a thousand times himself when a boy.
"It's for children. You make small wagers, and spin the top. You
gamble on which of the four letters will turn up. Played on Hanukkah
chiefly." It was like a die with an axis through the center, the
inscribed letters almost rubbed out by so many small fingers.
"It's very old," Shmuel said.
"Possibly quite valuable. An heirloom at the very least."
"I see. What is the significance of the letters?"
"They are the first letters of the words in a religious phrase."
"Which is?"
"A Great Miracle Happened Here."
 Repp paused, hungry. Should he eat the bread now, or later? Well,
why not now? He'd been moving hard half the night and most of the day,
pushing himself, and soon he'd be out of forest and onto the Bavarian
plain.
Good progress, he reckoned, ahead of schedule even, a healthy sign
considering the somewhat, ah, hasty mode of his departure.
He sat on a fallen log in a meadow. He was at last out of the
coniferous zone, in a region of elm and poplars.
Repp knew his trees, and poplars were a special favorite of his,
especially on a fine spring afternoon such as this one, when the pale
sun seemed to illuminate them in an almost magical way--they glowed in
the lemon light, translucent, mystical against the darker tracings of
the limbs which displayed them. The still, austere beauty of the day
made the spectacle even more remarkable--a clean beauty, pure,
untainted, un contrived--and Repp smiled at it all, at the same time
pleased that his own sensitivity to such matters hadn't been blunted by
the war. Repp appreciated nature; he felt it important to good health,
soundness of body and clearness of mind.
Nature was particularly meaningful to his higher instincts in hard
times like these, though it was rare that such natural beauty could be
savored in and of itself, without reference to more prosaic
necessities, fields of fire, automatic weapons placement, minefield
patterns and so forth.
He tore into the bread. Dry, tough, it still tasted delicious.
A good thing it had been in the pack when the Americans had come. Time
only to grab the pack, throw it on and head for the tunnel. He'd made
it after a long crawl across the open ground, American fire snapping
into the ground around him. He curled in a gully by the tunnel
entrance.
There were, in fact, six of them. Repp had insisted.
He was a careful man who thought hard about likelihoods, and he knew no
place in Germany in the late spring of 1945 that might not be assaulted
by enemy troops, and if such an assault came, he had no intention of
being trapped in it. He removed the camouflaged cover and squirmed
down into the narrow opening. He slithered along. The space was
close, almost claustrophobic, room for one thin man. Dust showered
down on him as his back scraped the roof and the darkness was
impenetrable. A great loneliness fell over Repp. He knew that even
for a brave man panic was an instant away in a sewer like this. And
who knew what creatures might be using it to nest in? It was damp and
smelled of clay. Vile place: a grave. The world of the corpse.
He warned himself to be careful. Too much imagination could kill you
just as quickly as enemy bullets. But Repp was used to working in the
open, with great reaches beyond him. Here there was nothing except the
dark. He could hold a hand to his face an inch in front of his eyes,
and see nothing, absolute nothingness.
He pulled himself mechanically along, thinking this surely the worst
moment in his long war, yet trying, desperately, to concentrate on the
physical--the thrusts of his arms, the push of his legs, the slide of
his torso. The roof pressed against his shoulders. At any moment it
could come down. Repp wiggled along. Just a few more feet.
After what seemed years in the underground, he'd at last come to the
end. He pulled himself the remaining few feet, but here the panic flap
pity-flapped through him; he thought of it as an owl, its wings
unfurling frenziedly.
The cool air came like a maddening perfume, rich and sensuous. The
temptation to crash from the hole and dance for glee was enormous; he
fought it. He edged back to the surface cautiously, without sudden
movements. He emerged a few feet beyond the tree line. The fight
still raged, mostly indistinct light and sound from here, but Repp
hadn't time to consider it.
He continued his crawl through the trees, dragging the pack and rifle
with him. Once or twice he froze, sensing human activity nearby. When
he was finally certain he was alone, he pulled himself up. He quickly
consulted the compass and set off.
His route took him past the firing range. He skirted it, unwilling to
risk its openness even though it was still dark. A voice came
suddenly, brazen and American. He dived back instantly and lay
breathing hard. Americans?
This far out?
He pushed back the brush and stared into the dark.
He saw men moving vaguely. Must be some kind of patrol, an extra
security measure way out here. But his eyes began to adjust and he
could see the men gathering up long white shrouds. He had trouble
making sense out of this and-Parachutes.
He knew then that this was not some accident of war, an American
reconnaissance in force blundering into his perimeter.
The parachutists had come after a specific objective.
They had come after him.
Repp knew he was being hunted. He felt a weight in his stomach. If it
were just shooting, his skill against theirs, that would be one thing.
But this business was far more complex and his own path only one route
to the center. In at least a thousand other ways he was vulnerable.
He could move perfectly, do all things brilliantly, and still fail.
He was ahead of them, but by what margin? What did they know? What
remained in the ruins of Aniage Elf?
Had they seen the documents from Financial Section?
Had they learned the secret of the meaning of Nibelungen, the
Reichsfuhrer's pet name, the joke he delighted in?
The worst possibility of all was that they had come across Nibelungen's
other half--the Spanish Jew, for whom all these arrangements had been
made.
He stuffed what was left of the bread back into his pack, and walked
on.
 Leets was a man with problems. He had no Repp and not one idea in
hell where the German was headed;
worse, he had no idea where he himself was headed. His archeological
expedition through the ruins of Aniage had come up bust--nothing but
burnt files and shattered, blackened equipment. And corpses. In all
this there was not one shard of pottery, not one scrap, one flake of
debris that pointed to another step. The trail was stone cold.
Now he was reduced to hoping for luck. He sat by himself in front of
an improvised table within the installation compound. Before him were
what remained of several thousand 7.92-mm Kurz cases he'd had the
paratroopers collect before they'd moved out.
Leets picked one up, and examined it with a sublimely ridiculous
Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass.
The shell in his huge grimy fingers glinted like the purest gold; Leets
revolved it, studying its bland, necked surface. He was looking for a
gouge, a fracture mark, indicative of reloading, which in turn would be
indicative of modification into one of the hand-tooled long-range
custom jobs Repp had taken the patrol with. If he can find one, he can
prove at least to himself Repp was here; he is not going insane. But
nope, this shell holds no secrets; disgustedly, he tossed it into the
pile at his feet, and plucked up another. He'd been at it now for
hours, not exactly the sort of thing Army officers are expected to do
at all, but what the hell, somebody's got to do it.
At first it was Roger's job, but the kid began wandering off. Roger
had returned with special orders and presented them to Leets without
one shred of embarrassment.
The great Bill Fielding is putting on an exhibition in Paris ostensibly
for the wounded boys, a morale builder, and Roger'd wangled his way
into it. The OSS Harvard faction was keen to have the outfit
represented, and Roger'd been anointed champion. He'd be taking off
soon, and now he wasn't worth a damn, off screwing around somewhere
with his racquets.
But that left Leets alone with the headache and a tableful of shells
and a sinking conviction he was getting nowhere. It was spring, full
spring now, almost May.
The Black Forest was turning green, and the air was pleasant, even if
still heavy with the tang of ash. Leets returned to another shell. He
was working slowly, because he wasn't sure what the hell he'd do when
he got finished.
A shadow fled across the table, then returned and paused, and Leets
looked up from his collection and saw the Jew, Shmuel.
"Captain Leets?" the man said, looking absurdly American in his
uniform, a white spiffy triangle of cotton undershirt showing above the
top button of his wool OD shirt. Leets didn't have the heart to tell
him he was wearing the undershirt backward.
"A thought came to me. Maybe a help for you.
Maybe not."
Shmuel had never volunteered before, except in that frantic moment in
the hospital when he insisted on making the jump. But now he was calm
and composed. Or maybe it was only the weight he'd picked up since
chowing with the Americans these last weeks.
"So go ahead," Leets said. He still wasn't sure what to call the
man.
"Do you remember the bodies? The SS men? Before they were shoveled
into the pit?"
"Yes, I do," Leets said. Hard to forget.
"Something then bothered me. Now I can say it. It came to me in a
dream."
"Yes," Leets said.
"The jackets. The ones with the spots."
"The Tiger coats. Standard SS issue. You see them all over Europe."
"Yes. Here's the curiosity. They were all new. Every single one of
them. It's what made the dead so vivid. In January the coats were
ragged and faded. Patched."
Leets took all day before cooking up a response.
"So?" he finally asked, confessing, "You've lost me."
"So, nothing. I don't know. But it struck me--strikes me--as
peculiar."
"Yeah, well, the Krauts got a batch of new coats. How about that?
Hmm." He turned it over in his mind several times, slowly, looking
past the Jew, looking hard at nothing as he picked at this curious bit
of info. A truckload of jackets, over one hundred of them: quite a
chunk of weight. Hard to believe the Germans would haul it up from the
plains, over that muddy road. Trucks must have come in there all the
time, of course, keep the place supplied. But all those coats .. .
"Thanks," he eventually said.
"Something to think about, though I'm not just sure what the
significance is."
The more he thought about it the more fascinating it seemed. Here it
was, late in the war, very very late, two minutes to midnight, the
Reich shattered, the supply system, like all systems, broken down. Yet
they were shipping clothes about.
No, a more likely situation would be that the reinforced
Totenkopfdivision company went somewhere to pick up the coats,
someplace where piles and piles of the things were available--these
were the March, 1944, model now, coats, not tunics, camouflaged, the
four-pocket model with the snap buttons and the sniper's epaulets: a
new item in their battle-dress collection.
"Damnedest thing," he said aloud.
The Jew still stood there.
"I happen to know about these coats," he said.
"A little. Not a lot."
"What?" Leets asked.
"One of the other prisoners told me he'd worked on them. In the
factory as a laborer. He'd been a tailor and the SS sent him to work
in their factory. In the plant. It's a place where there'd be a lot
of them. Not so far from here. No rail travel would be involved."
"What place?" asked Leets.
"The SS Konzentrationlager Dachau," said Shmuel.
,n an otherwise quite pleasant ash tree, the deserter swayed heavily
at the end of the rope, face blue, neck grotesquely twisted. He'd been
stripped of gear and boots but boasted a sign: i'm a pig who left my
comrades
"Poor devil," said the man next to Repp.
"Those SS bastards must have caught him."
Repp grunted noncommittally. He'd picked up this platoon of drifting
engineers a few miles back and with them he was making his way across
the Bavarian plateau in the southern lee of the Swabian Jura.
"They get you and your papers are wrong and it's " Lenz made a comical
imitation of a man choking in a noose.
Occasionally a vehicle would roll down the dusty road, a half-track
once, a couple of Opel trucks, finally a staff car with two colonels in
the back.
"They ride, we walk," said Lenz.
"As usual. They'll get away, we'll go to a PW camp. Or Siberia.
That's always the way it is. The little fellow catches " "Lenz, shut
up," called back Gemgoss, the fat Austrian platoon sergeant.
The platoon continued to move down the road,
through an empty landscape. Ostensibly, they were headed for the town
of Tuttlingen, several kilometers ahead, to blow up a bridge before the
Americans arrived.
But Repp knew this was a pretext; actually they were just moping around
enough to pass the time until the Amis showed and they could surrender.
They were not Totenkopfdivision boys, that was for sure.
Repp tuned out the chatter and plowed on. It was farming country,
smoother here west of the River Lech, near the Lake of Konstanz. The
Alps could be seen, especially the 9,000 feet of the Zugspitze, far to
the south, unusual since it was not September or October.
To the west, the Black Forest massif, off of which Repp had come,
glowered smudgily against the horizon.
"Perfect hunting weather for Jabos. You'd think they'd be thick as
flies, the bastards," said Lenz.
"Oh, Christ," said somebody.
Repp looked up.
It was too late to turn back, or fade off into the fields.
They'd just rounded a bend in the road and there in the trees was a
self-propelled antitank gun, huge thing, dragon on treads, riveted
body, dun-colored. SS men in their camouflage tunics lounged about it,
their STG's slung. Repp could tell from the flashes they were from the
Field Police regiment of SS "Das Reich."
"Watch yourselves," muttered Gerngoss, just ahead.
"Don't do anything stupid. These pricks mean business."
The young officer in the open pulpit of the gun mount leaned forward
and with an exaggerated smile said, "You fellows going to Switzerland?"
He wore a metal plaque with an embossed eagle on a chain around his
neck; it hung down on his chest like a medieval breastplate.
"A joker," muttered Lenz.
"No, sir," replied Gerngoss, trying to sound casual but speaking over
dry breaths through a dry mouth, "just going on down the road to a
job."
"Oh, I see," said the young officer affably, though his eyes were
metallic.
"And which one might that be?" As he spoke one of the other SS men
climbed down off the hull, unslinging his rifle.
"We're engineers, Lieutenant," explained Gerngoss, his voice rising
suddenly.
"Headed toward Tuttlingen. A bridge there to be blown before the
Americans get to it.
Then we'll rejoin our unit, Third Brigade of the Eighteenth Motorized
Engineer Battalion, south of Munich.
Here, I have the orders here." He held them out. Repp could see his
hand tremble.
"Bring them here, Sergeant Fatty," the young officer said.
Gerngoss waddled over fretfully. In the shadow of the armored vehicle,
he handed them up to the young officer.
"These orders are dated May first. Two days ago. It says you're
traveling by truck."
"I know, sir," said Gerngoss, a weak smile bobbing on his lips.
"We were hit by Jabos yesterday. A bad day.
The truck was crippled, some people hurt, had to find a field
hospital--" "I think you're stalling." He smiled.
"Dawdling. Waiting for the war to end." The SS lieutenant laid an arm
across the MG-42 mounted before him. In his peripheral vision. Repp
saw the SS man flanking off to the right, STG loose and ready.
"Oh, shit," Lenz muttered tensely next to him.
"S-sir," insisted Gerngoss, "w-we're doing our jobs.
Our duty." His voice was small, coming from such a big man.
"I think," said the lieutenant, "you're a Jew-pig. A deserter. It's
because of swine like you that we lost the war. Fat asshole Austrian,
can't wait to get home and fuck Jew-cunts and eat pastries in the
Vienna cafes with Bolsheviks."
"Please. Please," whimpered Gerngoss.
"Go on. Get out of here, you and your Army scum. I ought to hang you
all." He spoke with angry contempt.
"Drag your fat asses out of here."
"Yes, sir," mumbled Gerngoss, and shambled away.
"Thank Christ," muttered Lenz.
"Sweet Jesus, thank Christ," and the squad began to shuffle forward
humbly under the sullen gaze of the SS men.
"Ah, one second, please," the smiling lieutenant in the turret called
out.
"You, third from the end. Thin fellow."
Repp realized the man was talking to him.
"Lieutenant?" he inquired meekly.
"Say, friend, I just noticed that the piping on your collar is white,"
the smiler announced. He seemed quite joyful.
"White--infantry. The others have black--engineers."
"He's not with us," announced Lenz, stepping away quickly.
"He straggled in yesterday."
"He said he was trying to find his unit," Gerngoss called.
"Second Battalion of Eleventh Infantry. It sounded fishy to me."
"I have papers," Repp said. He realized he was standing alone on the
road.
"Here. Quickly."
Repp scurried over, holding the documents up. The young officer took
them. As he read, his eyebrows rose. He was freckled and fair, about
twenty years old. A lick of blond hair hung down from under his
helmet.
"I was separated from my unit," Repp said, "in a big attack, sir. The
Americans came and bombed us. It was worse than Russia."
The young lieutenant smiled.
"I'm rather afraid these papers aren't any good. Waf-en SS field
regulations supersede OKW forms. As of May first, on the order of the
Reichsfrihrer SS. For the discipline of the troops. You don't have
LA/ fifty-three-oh-four, or its current stamp. A field ID. It has to
be stamped every three days. To keep"--the smile broadened--"deserters
from mingling with loyal troops."
"Most of them just stayed. Waiting for the Americans.
I went on. To find the rest of my unit. I was wounded in Russia. I
have the Knight's Cross."
"A piece of shit," the officer said.
"I have a note from my captain. It's here, somewhere."
"You're a deserter. A swine. We've run into others like you. You're
going where they are now. To a dance in midair. Take the pig."
Repp felt the muzzle of the STG pressing hard into his back and at the
same moment his own rifle was yanked off his back. Someone shoved him
and he fell oafishly to the ground.
"You stinking fucker," a teen-aged voice behind him cursed.
"We'll hang you till your tongue's blue." He hit Repp in the lower
spine with his rifle butt. The pain almost crippled Repp. He yelped,
lurching forward, and lay in agony, rubbing the bruise through his
greatcoat.
The young soldier grabbed him roughly by the arm, pulling him up with
great disgust, the STG momentarily lowered in the effort, and as Repp
was twisted upward he laid the P-38 barrel against the youth's throat
and shot it out; then, as the boy fell back, very calmly Repp pivoted,
steadying the pistol with the other hand under the butt, and shot the
young officer in the face, disintegrating it. He shot two other men
off the hull of the self-propelled gun where they sat, paralyzed, and
dropped the pistol. He stood and pried the STG from the tight fingers
of the first soldier, who lay back behind sightless eyes, slipping into
coma, his throat spasming empty of blood. He wouldn't last long.
Repp's finger found the fire-selector rod of the assault rifle just
above the trigger guard and he rammed it to full automatic, at the same
time palming back the bolt. Three more SS men careered from behind the
vehicle.
He shot from the hip without thinking, one long burst, half the
magazine, knocking them flat in a commotion of dust spurts. He ran
another burst across the bodies just in case, the earth puffing and
fanning from the strike of the bullets.
Repp stood back, the weapon hot in his hand. The whole thing had taken
less than five seconds. He waited,
ready to shoot at any sign of motion, but there was none.
What waste, what sheer waste! Good men, loyal men, doing their jobs.
Dead in a freak battleground accident.
He was profoundly depressed.
Blood everywhere. It speckled the skin of the self-propelled gun,
swerving jaggedly down to the fender, where it collected in a black
pool. It soaked the uniforms of the two men who lay before the big
vehicle, and puddles of it gathered around the three he'd taken in the
last long burst. Repp turned. The boy he'd shot in the throat lay
breathing raspily.
Repp knelt and lifted the boy's head gently. Blood coursed in torrents
from the throat wound, disappearing inside the collar of his jacket. He
was all but finished, his eyes blank, his face gray and calm.
"Father. Father, please," he said.
Repp reached and took his hand and held it until the boy was gone.
He stood. He was alone in the road, and disgusted.
The engineers had fled.
Goddamn! Goddamn!
It made him sick. He wanted to vomit.
They would pay. The Jews would pay. In blood and money.
 Roger sat in his Class A's on the terrace of the Ritz.
Before him was a recent edition of the New York Herald Tribune, the
first page given to a story by a woman named Marguerite Higgins, who
had arrived with the 22d Regiment, some motorized hot shots, at the
concentration camp of Dachau.
Roger almost gagged. The bodies heaped like garbage, skinny sacks,
ribs stark. The contrast between that place and this, Paris, Place
Vendome, the ritzy Ritz, the city shoring up for an imminent VE-Day,
girls all over the place, was almost more than he could take.
Leets and Outhwaithe were there, poking about.
Roger was due back in a day or so.
But he had come to a decision: he would not go.
/ will not go.
No matter what.
He shivered, thinking of the slime at Dachau. He imagined the smell.
He shivered again.
"Cold?"
"Huh? Oh!"
Roger looked up into the face of the most famous tennis player of all
time.
"You're Evans?" asked Bill Fielding.
"Ulp," Roger gulped spastically, shooting to his feet.
"Yes, sir, yes, sir, I'm Roger Evans, Harvard, '47, sir, probably '49
now, with this little interruption, hell, hell, number-one singles
there ray freshman year."
The great man was a head taller than Roger, still thin as an icicle,
dressed in immaculate white that made his tan seem deeper than
burnished oak; he was in his late forties but looked an easy
thirty-five.
Roger was aware that all commerce on the busy terrace had stopped; they
were looking at Bill Fielding, all of them--generals, newspapermen,
beautiful women, aristocrats, gangsters. Fielding was a star even in
the exotic confines of the Ritz. And Roger knew they were also looking
at him.
"Well, let me tell you how this works. You've played at Roland
Garros?"
"No, sir."
"Well, we'll be on the Cow Centrale of course--" Of course, thought
Roger.
"--a clay surface, in an amphitheater, about eight thousand wounded
boys, I'm told, plus the usual brass-you've played in front of crowds,
no nerve problems or anything?"
Roger? Nervous?
"No, sir," he said.
"I played in the finals of the Ivies and I made it to the second round
at Forest Hills in '44."
Fielding was not impressed.
"Yes, well, I hope not. Anyway, I usually give the boys a little talk,
using Frank as a model, show them the fundamentals of the game. The
idea is first to entertain these poor wounded kids but also to sell
tennis. You know, it's a chance to introduce the game to a whole new
class of fan."
Yeah, some class, most of 'em just glad they didn't get their balls
blown off in the fighting, but he nodded intently.
"Then you and Frank will go two sets, three maybe, depends on you."
Roger did not like at all the assumption here that he was the
sacrificial goat in all this.
"Then you and I, Frank and Major Miles, our regular Army liaison, will
go a set of doubles, just to introduce them to that. Agreeable?"
"Whatever you say, Mr. Fielding. Uh, I saw you at Forest Hills in
'31. I was just a kid--" Oops, that was a wrong thing to say.
Fielding glowered.
"Not a good tournament for me."
"Quarters. You played Maurice McLaughlin."
Fielding's face lit up at the memory of the long-ago match; he was just
coming off his prime then, his golden years, and still had great
reserves of the good stuff, the high-octane tennis, left.
"Oh, yes, Maurie. Lots of power, strength. But somehow lacking .. .
Three and love, right?"
He remembers?
"That's right, sir."
"Yes, well, I hope you've got more out there than poor Maurie," said
Fielding disgustedly.
"Uh, I'll sure try," said Roger. Fielding was certainly blunt.
"All right. You've got transportation out to Auteuil, I assume."
"Yes, sir, the Special Services people have a car and--" Fielding was
not interested in the details.
"Fine, Sergeant, see you at one," and he turned and began to stride
forcefully away, the circle opening in awe.
"Uh. Mr. Fielding," said Roger, racing after. His heart was pounding
but once out at the Stade, he'd never have a chance.
"Yes?" said Fielding, a trifle annoyed. He had a long nose that he
aimed down almost like the barrel of a rifle. His eyes were blue and
pale and unwavering.
"Frank Benson. He's good, I hear."
"My protege. A future world champion, I hope. Now if--" "I'm better,"
blurted Roger. There. He'd said it.
Fielding's face lengthened in contempt. He seemed to be turning purple
under the tan. He was known for his towering rages at incompetence,
lack of concentration, quitters, the over brash the slow, the blind,
the halt and the lame. Roger smiled bravely and forged ahead. He knew
that here, as on the court, to plant your sneakers was to die. Attack,
attack: close to the net, volley away for a kill.
"I can beat him. And will, this afternoon. Now I just want you to
think about this. Continuing this tour with someone second-best is
gonna kinda take the fun out of it, I'd say."
The silence was ferocious.
Roger thrust on.
"Now if I bury him, if I pound him, if I shellac him--" He was prepared
to continue with colorful metaphors for destruction for quite some
time, but Fielding cut him off.
"What is it you want?"
"Simple. In. In fast."
"The tour?"
"Yes, sir."
Fielding's face confessed puzzlement.
"The shooting's over. Why now, all of a sudden?"
Roger could not explain--maybe even to himself-about the bodies at
Dachau, the vista of wormy stiffs.
"Just fed up, is all, sir. Like you, I was put on this earth to hit a
tennis ball. Anything else is just time misspent.
I did my duty. In fact my unit just took part in what will probably be
the last airborne operation in the ETO, a night drop and a son of a
bitch, you'll pardon me." And it had been, sitting back at 82d
Airborne Ops, running low on coffee and doughnuts. Roger tried to look
modest.
"And finally, well"--tricky this, he'd heard Fielding couldn't abide
boot lickers--"finally there's you:
a chance to apprentice under Fielding, under the best. I knew I'd
better give it my best serve, flat out, go for the line, or always
wonder about it." He looked modestly-or what he presumed to be
modestly--at his jump boots.
"You're not shy, are you?" Fielding finally said.
"No, sir," admitted Roger, "I believe in myself. Here, and on the
court." Roger realized with a start. He hasn't said No.
"Words before a match are cheap. That's why I never had any. Frank is
my protege. Ever since I discovered him at that air base in England,
I've believed he had it in him to be the world's best, as I was. You
want in, do you? Well, this afternoon we'll see if your game is as big
as your ego. Or your mouth."
He turned and walked out off the terrace.
Roger thought, Almost there.
But before Roger could insert Dachau into his file of might-have-be ens
there was Benson to play, Benson to beat, thinking positively, and
Roger knew this would not be so easy. He'd done a little research on
the guy, No. at Stanford, '39 and '40, made the third round at Forest
Hills in '41, a Californian with that Westerner's game, coming off
those hard concrete courts, serve and volley, Patton-style tennis,
always on the attack. But he'd shelved the tennis for four years, Air
Corps, done twenty-three trips over Germany as a B-17 bombardier
(D.F.C. even! another hero like Leets), survived the slaughterhouse
over Schweinfurt the second time somehow, and only picked the game back
up as a way of relaxing, cooling down near the end of his tour, when
the reflexes go bad, the nerves sticky, the mind filling with
hobgoblins and sirens and flak puffs and other terrors.
When Fielding came to the air base in the fall of '44, first stop on
his first tour, somehow Benson had been urged on him. It was love at
first sight, love, 6-love, for Benson. Fielding, whose game was off
but not that off, saw in the thin swift Californian something sweet and
pure and deadly and knew that here was himself twenty years ago, poised
on the edge of greatness.
Fielding wanted Benson right away; he got him, even two missions short
of twenty-five.
Benson was tall, thin, a ropy blond with calm gray eyes and marvelous
form. He moved fast slowly, meaning that he had such effortless grace
that he never seemed to lunge or lurch, rather glided about the court
in his white flannels--for his eccentricity was to stick to the pleated
flannel trousers of the Twenties and early Thirties, unlike the more
stylish Rug, who'd been wearing shorts a la Riggs and Budge since he
was a kid.
Benson hit leapers, all that tops ping causing the ball to hiss and
pop, even though the Cow Centrale was a porous clay-type composition,
not quite en-tout-cas, but very, very slow. It was like playing on
toast. The surface sucked the oomph from those slammed Western forehand
drives, but to Roger, across from him, hitting in warm-up, the guy
looked like seven skinny feet of white death, methodical, unflappable,
unstoppable.
Still, Roger specialized in confidence, and his had not dropped a notch
since his get-together with the Great Man this morning. He'd taken on
big hitters before: it demanded patience, guile and plenty of nerve.
Mainly you had to hold together on the big points, perform when the
weight of the match squashed down on you. If you could run down their
hottest stuff, these big hitters would blow up on you, get wilder and
fiercer and crazier.
He'd seen plenty like that, who fell apart, quit, hadn't that hard,
bitter kernel of self-righteousness inside that made victory usual.
The Cour Centrale at Roland Garros sat in the center of a steeply
tiered cement amphitheater which was now jamming up with uniforms. A
flower bed along one side of the court, under the boxes where Important
Brass now gathered, showed bright and cheerful, new to spring--the
orderly German officers who'd played here during the Occupation had
kept them up. Lacoste had owned this place with its soft, gritty-brown
surface, along with his equally merciless sidekicks Borotra and
Cochet; they'd called them the Three Musketeers back during their
heyday, and only Fielding, with his power and control and, most of all,
his guts, had been able to stand up to them here. So Roger wasn't just
a player; he was a part of history, a part of tradition. He felt
absorbed into it, taken with it, warmed by it, and now the ball seemed
to crack cleanly off the center of strings.
Was it his imagination or was even this audience of shot-up youngsters
beginning to throb with enthusiasm? Pennants snapped in the wind. The
shadows became distinct.
The lines of the court were precise and beautiful.
The balls were white and pure. Rug felt like a million bucks. This
was where he belonged.
"Okay, fellows," said Fielding, calling them in.
They sat down to towel off as Fielding, to a surge of applause that
grew and grew, lifting swiftly in passion as he moved out to the center
of the court, stood to face the crowd, a microphone in hand. He smiled
sharkishly.
"Hi, guys," he said, voice echoing back in amplification.
"Bill, Bill, Bill," they called, though most were too young to have
remembered with clarity the three years, '27, '28 and '29, when he'd
dominated tennis--and the larger world--like a god.
"Fellas," Bill allowed, "I know all this is kinda new to some of ya," a
Midwestern accent, Kansas corn belt, flattened out the great man's
Princeton voice, "but let me tell ya the truth: tennis is a game of
skill, guts and endurance; it's like war .. . only tougher."
The soldiers howled in glee. Roger sat mesmerized by their pulsating
animation: one mass, seething, galvanized by the star's charisma.
"Now today, we're going to show you how the big boys play. You've seen
DiM age and the Splendid Splinter?
Well you're going to see the DiM age and Ted Williams of tennis."
Fielding spoke for about ten minutes, a polished little speech in which
he explained the rules, showed them the strokes as demonstrated by the
blankly flawless Frank Benson, worked in a few amusing anecdotes and
continually compared tennis--flatteringly--to other sports, emphasizing
its demands of stamina, strength and courage, the savagery of its
competition, the psychological violence between its opponents.
And then he was done.
"And now fellows," cheer-led Fielding, "the big boys:
Captain Frank Benson, Stanford, '41, currently of the Eighth Air Force,
twenty-three trips over Germany; and Technical Sergeant Five Roger
Evans, Harvard, '46, now of the United States Army, attached to the
Office of Strategic Services, veteran of several behind-the-lines
missions--" Yeah, our lines though. Good thing Leets wasn't around to
hear that little fib.
"--and now," continued Fielding, mocking another game's traditions,
"play ball!"
They'd already spun, Benson winning and electing to serve, but still he
came to net and sought out Roger's eyes as Roger had guessed he
would.
"Good luck, Sergeant," he said to Roger.
"Same to you, Chief," said Roger.
Roger was an excellent tennis player, definite national-ranking
material, and though he'd not played hard and regularly in the year
he'd been in the Army, he'd worked to maintain his edge, drilling when
he couldn't find a partner, staying in shape, pursuing excellence in
the limited ways available to him. But in the first seconds he knew he
was seriously overmatched: it was the difference between skill and
genius. Benson hit out at everything, fiery and hard: the white ball
dipped violently as it neared the baseline and its spin caught up to
and overpowered its velocity, pulling it down, making it come crazily
off the court at him, faster than sin. Benson's forehand especially
was a killer, white smoke, but when Roger, learning that lesson fast,
tried to attack the backhand, deep, Benson rammed slices by him. He
felt immediately that he couldn't stand and hit with the bastard from
the backcourt and so at 1-1, after squeaking out a lucky win on his
serve, which the Californian hadn't pressed seriously, he decided to
angle dinks wide to the corner--now they are called approach shots but
the terminology then was "forcing shots"--and come in behind them.
Catastrophe followed thereupon: he didn't have enough punch on the ball
to hold it deep and as he dashed in to net, Benson, anticipating
beautifully, seemed to catch each shot as it dropped and hit some
dead-run beauties that eluded Roger's lunge to volley by a hair.
Roger stood after fifteen minutes at 3-3, only because his own serve
had finally loosened and was ticking and because the toasty composition
scoured the balls, fluffing them up heavy and dull, letting Rug reach
two shots on big points he never would have under normal conditions,
American conditions, and he put both away insolently for winners, his
two best strokes of the match.
But this equilibrium could not last and no one knew it better than
Roger, who sensed his confidence begin to slide away. He felt a tide
of self-pity start to rise through him.
On serve, with new balls, he fell behind fast on two backhand returns
that Benson blew by him like rockets.
He was looking at love-30, felt his heart thundering in his ribs.
He served a fault, just long, ball sliced wickedly but just off the
back line.
He glanced about, a bad sign, for it meant his concentration was
evaporating. The ranks of soldiers seemed to be glaring at him. A
pretty nurse looked viciously unimpressed. Fielding, on a lawn chair
just behind the umpire's seat, had a blank expression.
Roger felt the vise screwing in on the sides of his body. He could
hardly breathe.
He double-faulted, going to add out, and quickly double-faulted again,
down one, serve lost.
He sat on the bench during the change, toweling off, feeling sick.
Humiliation lay ahead. He felt sick out there, knowing he'd quit. Dog,
pig, skunk, jerk. He deserved to lose. Self-loathing raced through
him like a drug, knocking the world to whirl and blur. He almost
wanted to cry. Exhaustion crowded in.
Someone was near him. Roger couldn't care less. The unfairness of it
all was overwhelming. The stands, the court, the net all shimmered in
his rage. But through this rage, there came a voice, low and
insistent. At first he thought it was his conscience, Jiminy
Cricket-style, but ... "Kid," the voice whispered, "you don't belong
out there. I'm carrying you."
Benson, close by, seemingly tightening his laces, was talking in a low
voice, face down and hidden from the crowd.
"It ought to be done now, at love."
Roger didn't say anything. He stared bleakly ahead, letting the man
mock him. He felt the sweat peel down his body inside his shirt. He
knew it was the truth.
"But Christmas comes early this year," Benson said.
The oblique statement, it turned out, referred to a present: the
match.
Roger ran the next three games for the set, Benson holding them close,
but crapping out at key points. He could hit it an inch outside the
line as well as an inch inside. Then Roger ran five more into the
second set until Benson, still playing the feeb, broke through, but
Roger triumphed in the seventh game for the set and the match, and the
noise of the crowd, their adoration, broke over him like a wave, though
he knew it was a joke, a prank, that he was unworthy, and he felt
curiously ashamed.
"Congratulations," said Benson, his calm gray eyes full of malice and
sarcasm.
"Just stay out of California till you learn to volley"--with a most
sincere, humble smile on his face--"and have fun with your new
buddy."
Eh? What could--?
Benson, eyes down, pushed his way past Fielding.
"Frankie, Frankie," implored the old star.
Benson sat down disgustedly, Fielding turned: his face was a mass of
wrinkles beneath the lurid tan. He smiled broadly at Roger, eyes
But this equilibrium could not last and no one knew it better than
Roger, who sensed his confidence begin to slide away. He felt a tide
of self-pity start to rise through him.
On serve, with new balls, he fell behind fast on two backhand returns
that Benson blew by him like rockets.
He was looking at love-30, felt his heart thundering in his ribs.
He served a fault, just long, ball sliced wickedly but just off the
back line.
He glanced about, a bad sign, for it meant his concentration was
evaporating. The ranks of soldiers seemed to be glaring at him. A
pretty nurse looked viciously unimpressed. Fielding, on a lawn chair
just behind the umpire's seat, had a blank expression.
Roger felt the vise screwing in on the sides of his body. He could
hardly breathe.
He double-faulted, going to add out, and quickly double-faulted again,
down one, serve lost.
He sat on the bench during the change, toweling off, feeling sick.
Humiliation lay ahead. He felt sick out there, knowing he'd quit. Dog,
pig, skunk, jerk. He deserved to lose. Self-loathing raced through
him like a drug, knocking the world to whirl and blur. He almost
wanted to cry. Exhaustion crowded in.
Someone was near him. Roger couldn't care less. The unfairness of it
all was overwhelming. The stands, the court, the net all shimmered in
his rage. But through this rage, there came a voice, low and
insistent. At first he thought it was his conscience, Jiminy
Cricket-style, but ... "Kid," the voice whispered, "you don't belong
out there. I'm carrying you."
Benson, close by, seemingly tightening his laces, was talking in a low
voice, face down and hidden from the crowd.
"It ought to be done now, at love."
Roger didn't say anything. He stared bleakly ahead, letting the man
mock him. He felt the sweat peel down his body inside his shirt. He
knew it was the truth.
"But Christmas comes early this year," Benson said.
The oblique statement, it turned out, referred to a present: the
match.
Roger ran the next three games for the set, Benson holding them close,
but crapping out at key points. He could hit it an inch outside the
line as well as an inch inside. Then Roger ran five more into the
second set until Benson, still playing the feeb, broke through, but
Roger triumphed in the seventh game for the set and the match, and the
noise of the crowd, their adoration, broke over him like a wave, though
he knew it was a joke, a prank, that he was unworthy, and he felt
curiously ashamed.
"Congratulations," said Benson, his calm gray eyes full of malice and
sarcasm.
"Just stay out of California till you learn to volley"--with a most
sincere, humble smile on his face--"and have fun with your new
buddy."
Eh? What could--?
Benson, eyes down, pushed his way past Fielding.
"Frankie, Frankie," implored the old star.
Benson sat down disgustedly.
Fielding turned: his face was a mass of wrinkles beneath the lurid tan.
He smiled broadly at Roger, eyes dancing, a leathery, horrible old
lizard, with yellow eyes and greedy lips.
"My boy!" he said.
"You did it. You did it." He clapped an arm around Roger, squeezing
so that Roger could feel each of the fingers press knowingly into the
fibers of muscle under his skin, kneading, urging.
"You'll be my champion," said Fielding, "my star," he whispered
hoarsely into Roger's ear.
Oh, Christ, thought Roger.
 Shmuel led, for he was in his own territory.
There was only one way to penetrate the barbed wire and the moat that
formed the perimeter, and that was through the guardhouse. This took
them under a famous German slogan, arbeit macht frei, work makes one
free.
"The Germans like slogans," Shmuel explained.
Once beyond the guardhouse, they arrived in the roll-call plaza,
traversed it quickly and turned down the main camp road. On either
side stood the barracks, fifteen of them, as well as additional
structures such as the infirmary, the morgue and the penal blocks. Into
each had been crammed two thousand men in the last days before the
liberation. There had been corpses everywhere, and though they had now
been gathered by the hygiene-minded American administrators, the smell
remained awesome. Leets, with Shmuel and Tony, kept his eyes straight
ahead as they walked the avenue. Prisoners milled about, the gaunt,
skeletal almost-corpses in their rotten inmate's ticking. Though
massive amounts of food and medical supplies had been convoyed in, the
aid had yet to make much impression on the prison population.
Finally, they reached their destination, the eleventh barrack on the
right-hand side. In it, once near death but now much improved, was one
Eisner. Shmuel had gone in alone the first day and found him. Eisner
was important because Eisner was a tailor; Eisner had worked in the SS
uniform workshops just beyond the prison compound. Eisner alone knew
of the SS Tiger jackets; Eisner alone might help them penetrate the
mysteries of the last shipment to Aniage Elf.
They went in and got the man. It was not at all pleasant.
They took him from the foul-smelling barrack to an office outside the
compound in one of the SS administrative buildings.
Eisner was somewhat better today. His body was beginning to hold a
little weight and his gestures had lost that slow-motion vagueness. He
was finding words again and was at last strong enough to talk.
However he was not much interested in Dachau, or Tiger coats, or the
year 1945. He preferred Heidelberg, 1938, before Kristallnacht, where
he'd had a wonderful shop and a wife and three children, all of whom
had been sent Ost. East.
"That means dead, of course," explained Shmuel.
Leets nodded. In all this he felt extremely dumb. This was their
third day in the camp and he was getting a little bit more used to it.
The first day had nearly wrecked him. He tried not to think about
it.
Shmuel began slowly, with great patience. He had cautioned them, "It
will be very difficult to earn this man's trust. He is frightened of
everything, of everyone.
He does not even realize the war is nearly over."
"Fine, go ahead," Leets said.
"He's all we've got."
Shmuel spoke Yiddish, translating after each exchange.
"Mr. Eisner, you worked on uniforms for the German soldiers, is this
not right?"
The old man blinked. He looked at them stupidly. He swallowed. His
eyes seemed to fall out of focus.
"He's very frightened," Shmuel said. The old man was trembling.
"Coats," Shmuel said.
"Coats. Garments. For the German soldiers. Coats like the color of
the forest."
"Coats?" said Eisner.
He was trembling quite visibly. Leets lit a cigarette and handed it to
the old man. He took it but his eyes would not meet Leets's.
"Mr. Eisner, can you remember, please. These coats?" Shmuel tried
again.
Eisner muttered something.
"He says he's done nothing wrong. He says he's sorry.
He says to tell the authorities he's sorry," Shmuel reported.
"At least he's talking," said Leets, for yesterday the man had simply
stared at them.
"Here," Shmuel said. He'd taken from his field jacket a patch of the
SS camouflage material, out of which the coats had been made.
But Eisner just stared at it as if it came from another planet.
Leets realized how Shmuel had been like this too, in the first days. It
had taken weeks before Shmuel had talked in anything beyond grunts. And
Shmuel had been younger, and stronger, and probably smarter. Tougher,
certainly.
It seemed to go for hours, Shmuel nudging, poking gently, the old man
resisting, looking terrified the whole time.
"Look, this just isn't getting us anywhere," Leets said.
"I agree," Shmuel said.
"Too many strong young men in uniforms. Too many Gentiles."
"I think he's telling us to go for a stroll," said Tony.
"Not a bad idea, actually. Leave the two of them alone."
"All right," said Leets.
"Sure, fine. But remember:
records. It's records we're after. There's got to be some paper work
or something, some orders, packing manifests, I don't know, something
to--" "I know," said Shmuel.
Tony said he had a report to file with JAATIC, and so Leets found
himself alone at Dachau. Unsure of what to do, too agitated to return
to his billet in the town for sleep, he decided to head over to the
warehouse and workshop complex, to the tailor's shop. He walked
through the buildings outside the prison compound;
here there was no squalor. It could have been any military
installation, shabby brick buildings, scruffily landscaped, mostly
deserted, except for guards here and there. Litter and debris lay
about.
After a bit he reached his destination. The place was off limits of
course, for the liberators had seen immediately that such a spot would
become a souvenir hunter's paradise and in fact some elementary looting
had occurred, but Leets had a necessary-duty pass that got him by the
glum sentry standing with carbine outside the building.
It was a popular stop on the Dachau tour, a must along with the gas
chambers and the crematorium and the pits of corpses and the labs where
the grisly human experiments had been performed. Usually it was
crowded with open-mouthed field-grade officers, reporters, V.I.P's, of
one sort or another, all eager for a glimpse into the abyss--somebody
else's abyss, as a matter of fact--but today the shop was empty. Leets
stood silent at one end of the room, a long dim chamber lined with
mirrors. Bolt on bolt of the finest gray-green material lay about and
bundles of silk for flags and banners and wads of gold cord for
embroidering, and reels of piping in all colors and spool on spool of
gold thread. Tailor's dummies, their postures mocking the decaying
dead outdoors, were scattered about, knocked down in the first frenzy
of liberation. The odor was musty--all the heavy wool absorbed the
peculiar tang of dust and blood and the atmosphere was tomb-like,
still.
Leets found himself troubled here. The tailor's workshop was packed
with the pomp of ideology, the quasi-religious grandeur of it all:
swastika, slashing SS collar tabs, flags, vivid unit patches, the
stylized Deco Nazi eagle, wings flared taut, preying, on shoulder tabs.
Leets prowled edgily through this museum, trying to master its lesson,
but could not. At one point he came upon a boxful of the silver
death's-head badges that went on SS caps. He jammed his hand in,
feeling them heavy and shifty and cool, running out from between his
fingers.
They felt in fact like quarters. He looked at one closely:
skull, leering theatrically, carnivorous, laughing, chilling.
Yet the skull was no pure Nazi invention; it was not even German. The
British 17th Lancers had worn them on their trip to the Russian guns at
Balaklava, last century.
He moved on to a bench on which the tailors had abandoned their last
day's work, the sleeve bands worn on dress uniforms. These, strips of
heavy black felt, had been painfully and beautifully embroidered in
heavy gold thread, Gothic letters an inch high, with the names of
various Nazi celebrities or more ancient Teutonic heroes;
it was a German fashion to commemorate a man or a legend by naming a
division after him or it: rein-hard HEYDRICH, THE ODOR EICKE, FLORIAN
GEYER, SS POLIZEI division, dan mark and so forth. The workmanship was
exquisite, but by one of history's crueler ironies, this delicate work
had been performed by Jewish hands.
They'd sewed for their own murderers in order to live.
A few, like Eisner, actually had survived.
Leets passed to a final exhibit--a long rack on which hung five
uniforms for pickup. He hoped their owners had no need of them now.
But they loved uniforms, that was certain. Perhaps here was a lesson,
the very core of the thing. Perhaps the uniforms were not symbolic of
National Socialism, but somehow were National Socialism.
Leets paused with this concept for several seconds, pursuing it; a
religion of decorations and melodrama, theater, the rampant effect, the
stunning. But only a surface, no depth, no meaning. There were four
of the gray-green Waffen SS dress uniforms, basically Wehrmacht tunics
and trousers, dolled up with a little extra flash to make them stand
out. The fifth was different, jet black, the uniform of RSHA, the
terror boys. It was a racy thing, the uniform Himmler himself
preferred, cut tight and elegant, with jodhpurs that laced up the
legs.
With shiny boots and arm band it would form just about the most
pristine statement of the theology of Nazism available. Hitler had
been right about one terrible thing:
it would live for a thousand years, if only in the imagination.
Leets felt its numbing power to fascinate and not a little shame. He
was embarrassed that it mesmerized him so. He could not look away from
the black uniform hanging on the rack.
Yet the uniform signified only one face of it. He'd seen the other
elsewhere. Another spectacle was in tractably bound up with this one.
Standing there alone in the dim stuffy room, the black uniform before
him, he remembered.
The weather had turned cold, this three days earlier, but the gulf
between then and now seemed like a geological epoch.
They were in an open Jeep. He sat in back with Shmuel, and pulled the
field jacket tighter about himself.
Tony was up front, and where Roger should have been, behind the wheel,
another glum boy sat, borrowed from Seventh Army. They'd just bucked
their way through the crowded streets of the thousand-year-old town of
Dachau, quaint place, full of American vehicles and German charms,
among the latter cobblestones, high-roofed stone houses, gilt
metalwork, flower beds, tidy churches. Civilians stood about and
American soldiers and even a few clusters of surrendered feldgraus.
And then they were beyond and then they had stopped. But feeling the
Jeep bump to a halt, he looked up.
"Hey, what's going on?" he asked.
"Welcome to KZ Dachau," said Shmuel.
Seemed to be outside a yard of some sort. A wall of barbed wire closed
it off, filthy place, heaps of garbage strewn all over, smelled to the
heavens. Had some toilets backed up? He couldn't figure it out. The
Germans were usually so tidy.
A rail yard, was that it? Yes, tracks and boxcars and flatcars
standing idle, abandoned, their contents probably looted, tufts of hay
and straw and the cars seemed full of ... what, he couldn't tell. Logs?
Pieces of wood perhaps? The thought of puppets came suddenly to mind,
for in a peculiar way some of the forms seemed almost shaped like small
humans.
He finally recognized it. In the picture Susan had forced him to look
at in London so long ago, it had all been blurred, out of focus. Here,
nothing was out of focus. Most of them were naked and hideously gaunt,
but modesty and nutrition were merely the first and least of the laws
of civilization violated in the rail yard.
The corpses seemed endless, they spilled everywhere, tangled and
knitted together in a great fabric. The food spasmed up Leets's throat
and he fought against the gag reflex that choked him at that instant.
An overwhelming odor, decomposition shot with excretion, those two
great components of the Teutonic imagination--death and shit--blurred
the air.
"You think you've seen it all," said Tony.
The driver was out vomiting by the tire of the Jeep.
He was sobbing.
Leets tried to soothe him.
"Okay, okay, you'll be okay."
"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," said the boy.
"That's okay," Leets said. But he felt like crying himself.
Now he'd seen what they were doing. You could look at it in pictures
and then look away and it was all gone. But here you could not look
away.
Leets in the tailor's shop reached out and touched the black uniform.
It was only cloth.
"Jim?"
He turned.
It was Susan.
Repp awoke when the sun struck his eyes. The sudden dazzle decreed
into his head an edict of confusion: all he could feel was the raw
scratch of straw against his skin. As he moved a leg experimentally, a
high-pitched piping protested; he felt the scurry of something warm and
living nestled in close to him.
Rat.
He coiled in disgust, rolling away. The rat had gotten under him,
attracted by the warmth, and worked its way into his pack. He stared
at it. A bold droll creature, cosmopolitan and fearless, it stood its
ground, climbing even to its haunches, eyes peeping with glittery
intelligence, whiskers absorbing information from the air, pink tongue
animate and ceaseless. There had been rats in Russia, huge things, big
as cows; but this sophisticated creature was Swabian and sly and
mocking. Repp threw his rifle at it, missing, but the clatter sent the
rat scampering deeper into the barn.
Repp pulled himself out of the straw and collected his equipment. The
rat had gnawed through the canvas and gotten to the bread. A chunk was
left, moist and germy, but Repp could not bring himself to put it to
his lips.
Revolted, he tossed it into the shadows of the barn.
He'd come upon this place late last night, an empty farm, fields
fallow, house deserted and stripped, livestock vanished. Yet it had
not been burned--no scorched earth in the path of the advancing
Americans--and, desperately tired, he'd chosen the barn for refuge.
Repp had decided to move across country these days, avoiding the roads
until he was as far from the site of the unpleasantness with the "Das
Reich" Field Police as possible. In, the desolate countryside, along
muddy farm lanes, there was less chance of apprehension--either by SS
or, worse, by the Americans.
Yet now, thinking of them, he became nervous. How close were they, how
long had he slept? He checked his watch: not yet seven. Looking
outside, he saw nothing but a quiet rural landscape. He'd heard cannon
and seen flashes last night after dark: the bastards had to be close.
In the barnyard, Repp took a compass reading, and set himself a
southward course. He knew he was already below Haigerloch, but just
how far he wasn't sure. But south would take him to the great natural
obstacle of the Danube, and he thought he'd cross at the little
industrial town of Tuttlingen. Though the prospect of a bridge
frightened him as well: for bridges were the natural site for the SS to
establish checkpoints.
The fields were deserted under a bright sun, though it remained chilly.
No planting had been done and the careful plots of farmland in the
rolling land lay before him dark and muddy. He strode on, alone in the
world, though keeping alert. At one point he made out two fast-moving
low shapes off the horizon and got into some trees before they saw him,
two big American fighter-bombers, out hunting this spring morning.
Their white stars flashed as they roared overhead and not long
afterward he heard them pounce, some miles off to the east. Presently
a lazy stain of smoke rose to mark their success.
But Repp moved on, uncurious, and did not see another human form until
late that afternoon. He came suddenly to a concrete road that headed
south. He paused for a moment, wishing he had a map. There were no
road signs. The landscape was flat and empty.
He vacillated, fearing he hadn't made enough distance on his slog
through the mud. Either way, the road looked deserted. Finally, he
decided to risk it for a few miles, ready to drop off and disappear at
the first sign of danger.
This damned job is making a coward of me, he thought.
The freedom of the road filled him with a kind of liberation: after the
mud that sucked at his boots, clotting heavily, this firm-packed
surface seemed a paradise.
He plunged on at a furious pace.
He heard the Kubelwagen before he saw it; turning, he was astonished at
how close the small dun-colored car was.
Now where did that bastard come from? he wondered.
The damned thing was too close for him to hide from;
they'd seen him but the first thing he noticed as the car drew closer
was that it was jammed with a pack of sorry-looking regulars, as gray
in the face as in their greatcoats.
The car didn't even slow up for him. It barreled by, its sullen cargo
uninterested in one more fleeing soldier.
Repp, emboldened, hurried on. Several more vehicles passed, some even
with officers, but all jammed with men. There wasn't room for him if
they'd tried--and they were all regulars too, no SS men.
One of them slowed.
"Better get a move on, brother. Americans aren't too far behind."
"I'm fine, thanks," Repp said.
"Sure. You've got surrender written all over you.
Well, good luck, all's lost anyway."
The car sped up and soon was gone.
Just at sunset Repp came upon some old friends. Sergeant Gerngoss and
the whiner Lenz and the others of the engineer platoon waited by the
road.
They hung neatly from branches in a copse of trees.
Gerngoss looked especially apoplectic, outraged, his immense form
bowing the limb almost to the snapping point. His face was purple and
white spittle ringed his lips. Eyes open, booming out of the fat face.
The sign on him read: "this is what happens to scum." Lenz, nearby,
was merely melancholy.
The spectacle had drawn a small crowd of other stragglers.
They stood in awe of the bodies.
"The SS did it to 'em," somebody explained.
"The fat one there really put up a fight. The SS boys said they'd shot
some of their pals up near Haigerloch."
"The SS shits only knew it was an engineer platoon, and here was an
engineer platoon."
Repp slipped away; he was working on the next problem:
the bridge. The Danube here was young, formed not fifty kilometers to
the west at Donaueschingen, from two converging Schwarzwald streams,
the Breg and Brigach, but still it moved with considerable force
through a picturesque but enclosed defile of steep cliffs.
He could not swim it this time of year, for it was swollen with winter
meltings; he didn't think he had time to hunt up a boat. He walked on
down the road and went around the few houses--an unnamed hamlet--that
stood on this side of the Danube from Tuttlingen. Cutting through
backyards and over stone walls, he came soon to a road and beyond it a
stand of trees. He penetrated this growth and found himself staring
shortly into yawning space. He was at cliffs edge. He wished he had
binoculars.
Still, below, he could make out the ribbon of water, smooth and flat
and dark, bisected neatly by a six-arched stone bridge. A road led
down the cliff to it and, looking carefully in the falling darkness, he
was able to detect two Mark IV Panthers dug in next to the bridge.
Dappled Kubelwagens and a few motorcycles were ranged along it. He
thought he could see men laboring just beyond the bridge to dig
defensive positions. And wasn't that a raft of some sort moored to one
of the center arches, and two soldiers struggling to plant
explosives?
Repp realized the mess in a flash. Of course. The engineers who'd
been sent south to blow the thing had been executed.
He knew that if he headed down there with his vague story and obsolete
papers, he'd either be shot out of hand as a deserter or thrown into
the perimeter. These boys were sure to make a fight of it when the
Americans arrived, have some fun with their antitank gear, and then
fall back across the bridge and blow it to pebbles in the Ami faces. He
envied the fellow whose job it was--a real war to fight, not these
games--and briefly wondered about him; an old hand, probably, from the
cleverness of the arrangement, not one to panic in the face of fire. He
wished him luck, but it wasn't his business.
His job was merely to get beyond, to keep moving south.
But how to get beyond?
He felt the press of time. How soon would the Americans arrive? Damn,
he had to get across before they showed. He didn't want to give them
another crack at him: one had been enough. Yet to head farther east
along this bank was no solution; if anything the river became more of
an obstacle. There were certain to be other bridges and other
battles.
Repp pondered, crouched at the edge of the cliff.
"Enjoying the scenery, soldier?" a harsh voice demanded.
Repp turned; the man had approached quietly. He knew what he was
doing. In the fading light, Repp recognized tough features and
unsympathetic eyes: an SS sergeant in camouflage tunic, cradling an
STG, stood before him. Over the sergeant's shoulder back through the
trees, Repp could see a half-track out on the road, its cargo a crowd
of soldiers.
"Yes, Sergeant," Repp replied. His hand had edged cautiously inside
his tunic.
"You're another wanderer, I suppose. Separated, but still trying to
join up, eh?" Rich amusement showed in his eyes.
"I have papers," Repp explained.
"Well, damn your papers. Wipe your ass with them! I
don't care if you've got a note from the Fuhrer himself, excusing you
from heavy duty. We're preparing a little festival for the Americans
down at the bridge and I'm sure you'll be happy to join us. Everybody's
invited.
You'll fight one more battle and fight it as an SS man, or you'll taste
this," the STG.
Repp stood. Should he shoot the man? If he did, the only way out was
down, fifty meters, the face of the cliff.
"Yes, sir," he said reluctantly.
Goddamn! he thought. What now?
He bent to pick up the rifle.
"Leave that, my friend," the sergeant said sweetly, as if he were
delivering a death sentence.
"It's no good against tanks and tanks are on the menu tonight. Or had
you thought I'd turn my back and you'd let me have it?"
"No, Sergeant."
"Major Buchner said round up bodies, and by God I've done it. Sorry,
stinking cowardly bodies, but bodies just the same. Now move your
butt," and he grabbed Repp and threw him forward contemptuously.
Repp landed in the dirt, scraping his elbow; as he rose, the sergeant
kicked him in the buttocks, driving him ahead oafishly, a clown. Repp
stood, rubbing his pain--some of the men in the half-track laughed--and
ran forward like a fool, the sergeant chasing and hooting.
"Run, skinny, run, the Americans are coming."
Repp scurried to the half-track. Hands drew him in and he found
himself in a miserable group of disarmed Wehrmacht soldiers, perhaps
ten in all, over whom sat like lords two SS corporals with machine
pistols.
"Another volunteer," said the sergeant, climbing into the cab of the
vehicle.
"Now let's get moving."
That Repp had been taken again and was about to fight in what must
certainly be counted a suicidal engagement was one of his great
concerns; but another, more immediate one was this Major Buchner, who,
if his first name was Wilhelm, had served with Repp at Kursk.
"Okay, boys," the sergeant yelled when the half-track, after a descent,
halted, "time to work for your suppers.
Sir," he called, "ten more, shirkers the lot, but charmed to join us
just the same."
"Good, they're still trying to get this damned thing mined," replied a
loud voice from ahead somewhere in the dark--Willi Buchner's voice?
"Now get 'em digging.
Our friends will be here, you can bet on it." His voice seemed to come
from above and Repp realized, as his eyes adjusted in the night, that
the officer stood atop the turret of one of the Panthers.
He turned to his fellows, who lounged around the informal barricade of
vehicles at the bridge.
"I promise you some fun before sunrise, boys, party favors and all."
A chorus of laughter rose from around him but someone close to Repp
muttered, "Christ, another crazy hero."
"Here, friend," someone said without troubling to veil his hostility to
Repp, "your weapon for the evening."
It was a shovel.
"Now come on, ladies, let's get moving. You're SS men now and the SS
always stays busy." Repp and the other new arrivals were directed to
the approach where others were already digging under the machine
pistols of patrolling SS troopers.
"I'd dig if I were you. When the Americans come in their big green
tanks, you'll want a place to stay."
Repp saw the implication of the arrangement in a fraction of a second.
The SS men would be clustered around the dug-in vehicles at the
barricade with the heavier weapons--he'd seen a 75-millimeter gun as
well as the two tanks, and several MG-42's; the rest of them, the new
recruits rounded up at gunpoint, would be out here in the open in
holes. At the last moment they'd be armed with
something--Panzerfausts, Repp supposed, but their main job was merely
to die--to attract some fire, knock out a tank or two, confuse the
invaders, impede their progress for just a moment while the Panthers
and the gun took their bearings to fire. Then the SS boys would fall
back across the bridge on the time bought by the conscriptees, and blow
it, and wait out the end of the war in Tuttlingen; for the Wehrmacht
there'd be no retreat, only another Stalingrad.
"Herr Sergeant," a man next to Repp protested, "this is a mistake. I've
got leave papers. Here. I was in the hospital--Field Number Nine, up
near Stuttgart--and they let me out, just before the Americans came.
I'm no good anymore. Blown up twice in Russia and once in--" "Shut
up," said the SS man.
"I don't give a shit what your papers say. Here you are and by God
here you stay. I hope you can work a Panzerfaust as well as you do
that tongue of yours." He stalked away from the fellow.
"It's no fair," said the man bitterly, hunkering down next to Repp to
dig.
"I've got the papers. I'm out of it. I did my part. Pain in my head,
bad, all the damn time.
Headaches just won't stop. Shake so bad sometimes I can hardly
piss."
"Best dig for now," Repp cautioned.
"That doesn't count a bit with these shits. They'd just as soon shoot
you as the Americans. They hanged a bunch of engineers back a way."
"It's just no fair. I'm out of it, out of the whole thing.
I never thought I'd get out of Russia but somehow--" "Keep down," Repp
whispered, "that sergeant just looked over here." He threw himself
into the shoveling.
"You know what this is about, don't you?" the man said.
"I don't know anything except a man with a gun says dig, so I dig."
"Well, it's nothing to do with the war. The war's over.
What I hear is the big shots are escaping with the Jews' gold. That's
right, all the gold they stole from the Jews.
But the Americans want it. They're going for the Jews' gold too.
Everybody wants it, now the Jews are finished. And we're caught right
in the middle. That's what it's--" "To hell with fancy talk.
Professor," Repp said.
"You can't argue with a man with an automatic."
They dug together in silence for a while. Repp working hard, finding a
release in the effort. He squared his part of the pit off, packing the
dirt into a rampart on the lip, sculpting a firing notch. Around him
he could hear the clink of shovels going into earth and men quietly
groaning, resigned. SS troopers prowled among them.
Meanwhile, back among the vehicles on the bridge, other SS men moved
about, arranging sandbags, tinker Ring with their weapons, uncrating
ammunition. Now and then a single detonation sounded in the distance,
and once a long sputter of automatic weapon fire clattered out.
"We ought to build a grenade trap," said Repp, sweating profusely in
his labor, his skin warm in the cool night air. He was half worried
about blisters that might throw off his shooting, but he couldn't take
the possibility too seriously. If he didn't get through tonight
somehow, there'd be no shooting.
"Yeah, you're right," said the professor.
"In case the bastards get in close."
They bent to the bottom of the pit to scour out an angled hole into
which to kick grenades to contain their blast, and suddenly the
professor whispered into Repp's ear, "I think we ought to make a break
for it. Not now, but later, when the holes are all dug and the SS
bastards are back by their tanks. We can move on down the river, get
away from the fighting. When the Americans wipe out this bunch, we
can--" "Never make it," Repp said.
"Man on the turret has a machine gun. He'd have us cold unless we
could fly like one of those fancy jets. I checked it out, first
thing."
"Damn! Come on, friend. It's death here for sure.
That's what they got us here for--to die. They don't care a shit for
us; in fact they never did. They just want to take a few more Ameri--"
But Repp was listening to the officer--Buchner? perhaps--as he said to
the sergeant, "Get me a driver and a machine gunner. I'm going to take
a Kubel up the hill and see what's keeping our visitors."
"Sir, I could get some of the fellows--"
"I'll do it myself," said Buchner, typically. Yes, it was Buchner. In
the East he'd quickly picked up a reputation for exposing himself
unnecessarily to fire.
"I'll blink my lights when I'm coming in. Got it?"
"Yes, Herr Major."
He was gone then, and Repp waited with the professor in the trench.
"We can't wait until the fight begins. We'll never get out then. We'll
just get the Amis good and mad and they'll blow our brains out," the
professor said.
"They smell that gold."
Heavy firing broke out ahead. The American column must have run into
some resistance in the hamlet. Repp could hear machine guns and tank
cannon. Whoever was left up there was putting up quite a fight.
"We're right in the zone of that gun," Repp replied.
"He'd just chop us down. He'd make sausage of us.
There's no point to it. Relax for now. Do you have a cigarette?"
"I don't smoke. I was hit in the throat and lost my taste for it."
"Okay, you men," the sergeant called out.
"Be alert.
Any minute the show begins."
"I can't see a goddamned thing," said the professor.
"They must really want that gold. They usually don't like to advance
in the dark."
"Now don't get excited, fellows," crooned the sergeant from back at the
vehicles, low and gentle, "just take it easy."
"We don't have any guns, you bastards," someone yelled from nearby.
"Oh, we haven't forgotten the Wehrmacht."
Repp could hear MP-40 bolts snapping. A report almost made him
flinch--one of the Panthers kicking into life so there'd be power for
its turret. The other joined and the smell of exhaust floated down,
and over the engine purr came a deeper moan as the turrets tracked,
aligning their long 75-millimeter barrels down the approach.
A man suddenly leaned over the edge of their hole.
"Here," he said, his breath billowing foggily in the cool, "ever use
one of these rocket things? Line up the target through the rear sight
against the pin on the warhead.
Trigger's up top, the lever, crank it back to arm it, jam forward to
fire. She'll go like hell and blow anything the Amis make to
smithereens."
"Jesus Christ," moaned the professor, "that's all you're giving us,
PanzerfaustsT' "Sorry, brother. I do what I'm told. Go for the tanks
first, then the half-tracks. But watch them too, they're more than
just troop carriers. Some of them mount four half-inch machine guns on
a kind of wire frame. Devilish things. And remember, no firing till
the major gives the word."
He was gone into another hole.
"We're cooked," said the professor.
"This is suicide."
He held up the Panzerfaust, a thirty-two-inch tube with a swollen
five-inch bulb at one end.
"One shot and it's all over."
The firing up ahead picked up in pitch. Light flashed through the
night.
"Goddamn. I didn't want to end up in a goddamn hole with American
tanks in front and SS tanks in back.
Goddamn, not after what I've been through." He began very softly to
cry, and put his head against his arm at the edge of the trench.
The firing stopped.
"All right," Repp said quietly.
"Here they come. Get ready, old friend."
The professor leaned back in the trench. Repp could see the wet track
of tears running down his face, but he'd come to some arrangement with
himself and looked at least resigned.
"We shquld have at least tried," he said.
"Just to die like this, for nothing, that's what's so shitty about all
this."
"I think I see them," said Repp, peering ahead. He cranked back the
arm on the trigger lever to arm his Panzerfaust, and put it over his
shoulder. It was slightly front-heavy but he braced it through the
notch in the rampart he'd built. The sight was a primitive thing, a
metal ring that lined up with a pin up at the warhead.
"Here they come," he said flatly.
"Jesus Christ, that's the major. He just blinked."
"Easy, men, the major's coming in," the sergeant yelled.
"Here they come," said Repp. He was really concentrating.
His two right fingers tightened on the trigger lever.
"Are you crazy?" the professor whispered harshly.
"That's the major."
"Here they come," said Repp. He could see the Klibelwagen clearly now,
its pale-yellow-and-sand camouflage scheme lighter against the
blackness, as it ripped along the road at them, trailing dust. Its
lights blinked once again. Willi Buchner stood like a yachtsman in the
cockpit of his craft, hands set on the windscreen frame, hair blowing
against the breeze, a bored look on his face.
Repp fired.
The Kubelwagen ruptured into a flash, concussion instantaneous and
enormous. The vehicle veered to rest on its side, flames tumbling out
its gas tank.
"Jesus," said the professor in the moment of silence that followed,
"those poor--" "Who the fuck fired, goddamn I'll kill you!" bellowed
the sergeant. But then everybody opened up. Two or three more
Panzerfausts flashed out and detonated, a machine gun back on the
barricade began to howl, rifles barked up and down the line, and in
exclamation point the Panther 75 boomed, a long gout of flame flaring
out from its barrel.
Repp grabbed the professor savagely and pulled him close.
"Come on! Now's the time. Stay close and you might live."
He flung him back and slithered over the edge of the trench and began
to crawl toward the bridge. The shooting mounted and he could hear the
sergeant arguing with it, yelling, "Goddamn, you fools, cease
firing!"
In the confusion Repp made it to the barricade, feeling the professor
scuttling along behind him. He stood boldly and stepped between a
Klibel and a cycle out onto the bridge itself.
The firing died.
"Who fired? Who fired? Oh, Christ, that was Major
Buchner," yelled the sergeant up front.
"Goddamn, I'll kill all of you pigs if you don't tell me!"
Repp gestured "Come on" with his head and strode forward, bold as the
Reichsfilhrer himself.
A trooper materialized out of the dark, rifle leveled at Repp's
middle.
"Where are you going, friend?" he asked.
Repp hit him with the shaft of his Panzerfaust, a murderous blow
against the side of the head, just under the helmet. The jolt sent
vibrations through his arm, and the trooper fell heavily to one side,
his equipment jangling on the bridge.
"Run," Repp whispered, grabbing the professor and half hurling him down
the bridge.
"Hurry!"
The professor took off in lumbering panic and seemed to gain
distance.
"There he is! There he is!" Repp shouted.
By that time several others had seen him and the firing started almost
immediately.
As the blizzard of lead seemed to tear apart the world through which
the professor fled. Repp eased down the incline under the bridge and
made it to river's edge.
He found the raft the demolitions detail had left tied to one of the
piles, and threw in the pack and helmet, and then slipped into the icy
water and began to drift through the blackness, clinging to the raft.
He was almost across when the Americans arrived and the battle began,
and by the time he got out of the water, shivering and exhausted, the
Ami tanks had gotten the range and began to blow apart the barricade in
earnest.
Repp crawled up the bank. Behind him, multiple small suns descended in
a pinkish haze and tracers flicked across the water. But he knew he
was out of range.
And that he was still on schedule.
 "What are you doing here?" was all he could think to say.
"I work here. I'm with the field hospital."
"Oh, God, Susan. Then you've seen it, seen it all."
"You forget: I knew it all."
"We never believed."
"Now of course it's too late."
"I suppose. How did you end up her eT "A punishment. I made waves. I
made real waves. I got publicly identified with the Zionists. Then
Fischelson died and the Center died and the British made a stink, and
they sent me to a field unit in a DP camp.
British influence. It was said I didn't appreciate London.
And when I heard about Belsen, I tried to get there. But it was in the
British zone and they wouldn't have me.
Then came Dachau, American. And my doc at the DP camp did think highly
of me, and he knew how important it was to me. So he got me the
orders. See? Easy, if you have the right connections."
"It's very bad, isn't it."
"Bad. That's not a terribly eloquent word. But, yes, it is bad. And
Dachau is nothing compared to Belsen. And Belsen is nothing compared
to Sobibor. And Sobibor is nothing compared to Treblinka. And
Treblinka is nothing compared to Auschwitz."
They were strange names to Leets.
"Haven't heard of them. Haven't been reading the papers, I guess."
"I guess not."
"Did you see Shmuel? He's with us. He's still fine. I told you he'd
be fine."
"I heard. An OSS detachment. With a Jew in an American uniform.
That's how I knew."
"We're still after him. After that German. That's what we're here
for."
"One German?"
"Yeah. A special guy. With a special--" "Jim, there were thousands of
them. Thousands.
What's one more or less?"
"No, this one's different."
"No. They're all the same."
But Tony was not filing a report to JAATIC. He was writing a letter to
his older brother, in response to a letter that had finally caught up
with him earlier.
"Dear Randolph," he wrote.
It was of course splendid to hear from you. I am glad Lisbon is
interesting and that Priscilla is well.
Please do not believe any of the rumors, and do not let them upset you.
I realize my behavior has been difficult to fathom of late and that it
must be the subject of much discussion in certain circles. I have not
surrendered to the Americans. I do not flee my own kind. I do not
think myself Robert
Graves. I am not insane, though that was not a question in your note;
I still sensed it beneath your Foreign Office diction.
I am quite well off. I am totally recovered. No, I do not see women.
Perhaps I should, but I do not. I do not see old friends either. They
are rather too kind for my somewhat peculiar tastes. I am among
Americans by choice: because, fools all of them, they talk only of
themselves. Children: they prattle incessantly about self and city,
country, past, future, manufacturing noise from every orifice. They
have no curiosity beyond their own skin. I do not have to make
explanations. I do not get long, sad stares of sympathy. No one
inquires solicitously how I'm getting along In The Aftermath.. ..
Dearest Randolph, others lost children and wives in the bombings.
Jennifer and Tim are quite gone now; I've accepted it and hardly think
of it. I do not, as you suggest, still blame myself. Things are quite
chipper here. We are hunting down a dreadful Jerry. It's great fun,
most fun I've had in the war.. ..
But Tony stopped writing. He felt himself about to begin to cry again.
He crushed the document up into a ball, and hurled it across the room.
He sat back, and pinched the bridge of his nose. The pain would not go
away. He doubted if it would, ever. He wished he had a nip of
something. But he didn't. He thought he might try and get some sleep.
Where was Leets? Should he head back to the office, where the two Jews
were? He had to do something, he knew that for sure.
The old man slept. Shmuel watched him. He lay on the cot, stirring
now and again--the jab of an interior pain. His breath came shallow
and dry, a rattle, and a bubble of drool inflated in one corner of his
slack mouth. His skin was milky and loose and spotted, shot with a
network of subtle blue veins. He'd pulled the blanket around him like
a prayer shawl, though in doing so a foot fell free and it dangled off
the cot. Somehow this old creature had survived, another freak like
Shmuel, a meaningless exception whose only function was to provide a
scale for the larger numbers of extinction.
Why couldn't the Americans have captured some nice plump SS officer? An
eager collaborator, a cynic, a traitor?
Or why couldn't they have arrived just a day earlier, before the
warehouses had been looted? No--again, this Repp had been lucky. He'd
left nothing behind, leaving them to hunt through the pale, pained
memories of Eisner the tailor.
"Remember: the records," Leets had said.
But instead he remembered his own first interrogation with Leets and
Outhwaithe: two hard, glossy Gentiles, eyes blank, faces impassive. Men
in uniforms: was there a difference? Hard men, with guns and jobs to
do, ho time to let human feelings get in the way. The whole world was
wearing a uniform, except for the Jews. No, the Jews had a uniform
too: blue and white stripes, a jagged, dirty star clipped over the
heart. That was old Eisner's uniform, that was the uniform Shmuel
preferred, not this-Startled, he looked at his own clothes. He was
wearing American boots, field pants and a wool OD shirt. To old
Eisner he was an American, the language made no difference.
Eisner the tailor still slept fitfully on the cot as Shmuel slipped
out. He did not have far to go. Of the warehouses there were two
kinds: badly looted and heavily guarded. Soldiers marked the latter,
smashed doors and a litter of debris the former. Shmuel immediately
found the single exception to this rule, a brick building that was not
guarded, and had not been looted.
He stepped inside. It smelled musty and the darkness clamped down on
him. He stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Small chinks of light
glittered in the roof, almost like stars, and slowly in the darkness
shapes appeared.
Pile and pile, rank on rank, neatly arranged after the Teutonic
fashion, were blue-and-white prison uniforms.
"No. This guy is different. I don't know why, but he is.
He's a curious combination of valor and evil. He's very brave. He's
enormously brave. He's much braver than I am. But he's--" He paused,
groping.
She would not help him.
"I can't figure out how they turned out such men," Leets said.
"You see, we always expect them to be cowards.
Or perverts. Or nuts, of some sort. What if they were just like us?
What if some of them were better even? Braver? Tougher? What if some
were heroes. Unbelievable heroes?"
"You melodramatize. I've seen their work. They were grim, seedy
little killers, that's all. Nothing glamorous in it at all. They
killed in the millions. Men, women. The children, especially. At
Auschwitz, at the end, they threw children living into the ovens."
"I asked Tony about all this. He's a very brilliant man, you realize.
Do you know what he said? He said, "Don't get too philosophical, chum.
We're merely here to kill the swine." But that's not enough, don't you
see?"
"You're obsessed with this guy, that's all I see. And he's nothing,
he's no concept, no symbol. He's just a pig with a gun. It's the gun
that makes him special."
Shmuel, back in the office, slipped quickly into the uniform. He felt
nothing; it was only cloth, with a faintly musty smell, from long
storage.
He smoked another cigarette while he waited for Eisner to awake or for
Leets or Outhwaithe to return. He knew better than to jerk the tailor
out of his sleep. Now where were Leets and Outhwaithe? Though perhaps
it was best they were away for so long, it might give him a chance to
finally make contact here.
As he waited, a curious thing began to happen. It occurred to him that
there would in fact be a future. For the first time in years he
allowed himself to think of it. In the camps as an article of faith
one kept one's hopes limited to the next day, not the next year. Yet
in his sudden new leisure, Shmuel began to think of a new way of life.
Certainly he wouldn't stay in Europe. The Christians had tried to kill
him; there was nothing for Jews in Europe now. You'd never know who'd
been a Nazi;
they'd all say it had been others, but each time you heard a German
voice or saw a certain hard set of the eyes or a train of boxcars or
even a cloud of smoke, the sensation would be discomfort. The Zionists
were al 7
ways talking about Palestine. He'd never listened.
Enough to concentrate on without dreams of a desert somewhere, Arabs,
fig trees, whatever. It seemed absurd.
But now--well, it was there, or America.
The old man stirred.
"You are feeling all right, Mr. Eisner, now?"
"Not so bad," said Eisner.
"It's been worse." Then he saw Shmuel.
"A uniform? And whose is that?"
"Mine, believe it or not. I had one like it anyway. At the camp in
the East. Called Auschwitz."
"A terrible place, so I've heard. Still, it's a surprise."
"It's true."
"I thought you were with the Gentiles."
"With, yes. Part of, no. But these fellows are decent, not like the
Germans."
"All Gentiles frighten me."
"That's why I'm here alone."
"Still after the records? I should remember records, all I've been
through. Listen, I'll tell you, I know nothing of records. The
civilian, Kohl, he kept the records. A German."
"Kohl?" said Shmuel, writing it.
"Ferdinand Kohl. I'll spell it if you like. It makes no difference
though. He's dead. Not a bad man, but that's how it goes. The
inmates caught him on liberation day and beat him to death. But
there's too many other sorrows in here"--heart--"to make room for
him."
"Mine's crowded as well," Shmuel said.
"But coats I remember. Battle coats. For the forest.
Very fancy. We made them in the thousands."
"When?"
"Over the years. For four years; then last year we changed the
pattern. First, a kind of smock, a tunic.
Then a real true coat."
"A special demand? For a group. Say, a hundred to a hundred and
twenty-five. Do you remember?"
"I just sewed the buttons on, that's all. A hundred and fifty coats a
day, on went the buttons, that's all. Any fool could have sewn on
buttons."
"But no special demands?"
"No. Only--No, nothing."
"Only what?" He paused.
"Please. Who knows?"
"Kohl in early April I remember complaining about big shots and their
special privileges. A German hero had his men here for special
antitank training and demanded they be refitted with the coats as
theirs had worn thin."
"Hero. His name?"
"If I had it then, it's gone now. So many things I forget. My boy was
named David, my two girls Shuli and Rebecca. Them I remember. David
had blond hair, can you believe it? I know the girls and their mother
are gone. Everybody who went East is gone. But maybe the Germans
spared him because his hair was their color.
We thought it was a curse, his blondness, that they would take him from
us. But maybe a blessing, no? Who could tell such things? A learned
rabbi could maybe expl--" "Mr. Eisner. The coats. The hero."
"Yes, yes, forgive me. Thinking, all the time thinking.
Hard to remember details."
"Kohl. Mr. Kohl. He didn't want to give up the coats."
"Kohl. Yes, old Kohl. Not a bad sort, notions of fairness. He tried
to say No. The boys at the front need the jackets. Not rear-echelon
bastards. But the hero got his way. He had papers from the highest
authority. Herr Kohl thought this ridiculous. From an opera. I heard
him tell Sergeant Luntz that. Heroes from an opera a monkey wrench
throwing into his shop. It was no good.
My David, he'll grow up to be strong. On a farm somewhere, in the
country. He was only three. He hadn't had any instruction. He won't
know he was a Jew. Maybe it's better. Maybe that's the best way to be
a Jew in this world, not to know. He's six now, David, a fine healthy
boy on a farm somewhere in the country."
Shmuel patiently let him lapse into silence. When he was done, Shmuel
saw tears star the old man's eyes and at the same time noticed that the
old man wasn't so old:
he was just a man, a father, who hadn't been able to do anything for
his children. Better maybe that he'd died so he wouldn't have to live
with their accusing ghosts in his head. The Germans: they made you
hate yourself for being too weak to fight them, too civilized to demand
revenge.
"Opera?" Shmuel finally said.
"I missed that."
"What the fellow called it, the hero fellow. His plan.
They name everything, the Gentiles. They have to name things. This
from an opera, by Wagner. Herr Kohl hated Wagner. It made his behind
doze, I heard him tell Luntz."
"What was the name?" Shmuel asked, very carefully.
"Operation Nibelungen," the old man who was not so old replied.
Shmuel wrote it down.
"It's funny. Us. In this place," he said.
She'd lit a cigarette. It had gotten dark now, and in the long still
room with the mirrors and the hanging uniforms, he could see the orange
glow.
"Why?" he asked.
"Why did you come looking for me? You didn't come for my theories on
German evil surely."
"No. I just wanted to tell you something."
"Okay. So shoot. Tell me anything."
"I'm divorcing Phil."
"No kidding?"
"I wrote him. I said I wanted to go to the Middle East. He wrote
back.
"What, are you crazy, you think I spent all this time on a goddamned
tin can to go live in some desert?" So, that was it. I won't see him
again."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Fischelson's dead, I told you?"
"Yes?"
"And the money's gone. It was all set up by this guy, this
Hirsczowicz. A millionaire. But the money ran out.
What little there was, most of it was lost somehow, in the early days
of the war. So there's nothing in London anymore. And there's nothing
back in the States. Not a goddamned thing but people talking about how
they suffered without the meat."
"I'm sorry you're so bitter."
"I'm not bitter at all. I'm going to go to Palestine.
Nothing but Jews there, Jim. It's the only place in the world where
the Jews will be welcomed. That's where I'm going."
"Susan."
"That's where we'll all have to go," she said.
Her cigarette had gone out. Now, in the room, total darkness had
arrived. He could hear her voice, disembodied.
"I'll talk to him. To the Jew. Shmuel. Do you know he had quite a
reputation as a writer in Warsaw? I'll talk to him. He'll go too. He
has nowhere else to go."
"That's all?"
"Yes. I suppose I wanted to tell you I don't hate you. I don't want
you to die. I never did. I remove the curse. I hope you get your
man. The German."
"I will," he said.
"Or he'll get me."
The old man was tired now. Shmuel wanted him to sleep in the room but
he refused.
"A nap, not so bad. But the night? I have nightmares, you see, I wake
up. It helps to know where I am. Besides, the barracks aren't so bad
now. They've moved the sick ones out. It's what I know."
"All right. It's all right with me. You can walk?"
"Not so fast, but I end up where I'm going."
He got the man up, and pulled the blanket around his thin shoulders
against the cold. They walked in the twilight down the street to the
Lager, the prison compound.
It was warm, really too warm for the blanket, yet the old man clutched
it around him with blue-veined fists. He leaned on Shmuel, shuffling
along on frail legs. Shmuel felt the heart pulsing behind the thin
bones of his chest.
A Jew, thought Shmuel. A living European Jew: the first he'd spoken to
in months. It came as a shock. He'd been so long among the Gentiles.
Not Germans, but still Gentiles. They didn't know; they couldn't
share. Earnest, apologetic, efficient men: decent. Intelligent
even,
but it was as if a different kind of brain filled their skulls. They
worshiped a man skewered by his hands on a lumber cross: pain and blood
at the very center of it.
Shmuel preferred this eternal sufferer, pathetic yet dignified, who
leaned on him as they neared the guardhouse, the entrance to the
compound.
When they reached it, a flashlight from an American sentry beamed onto
them. It seemed to halt at their prison stripes as if those said
enough and then blinked out.
"Go on," said a voice.
They walked on through the familiar geography, across the roll-call
plaza, down the street between the barracks.
"It's over there," said the old man, pointing.
"I know," said Shmuel.
Shmuel helped him to the building.
"You needn't come inside."
"No, you helped, now I help you. That's how it should be."
"You, a Jew, a yeshiva boy, you are helping them fight the Germans?"
"A little. There's not much I can do. They've got machines and guns.
They really don't need me. But I can do little things."
"Good. We should have fought. But who knew?"
"Nobody knew. Nobody could have guessed."
"Maybe so," said the old man.
"Maybe so."
They went into the building. Faces peered down from the tiers of bunks
and voices hummed. The smell was almost blinding; Shmuel remembered
through the tears that welled into his eyes. There was room for the
old man near the stove. He took him over and helped him lie down. He
was light and dry and fell quiet quickly.
But his hand groped out once, snatching at Shmuel's wrist.
Shmuel drew back as the man's breathing deepened into regularity. He
was aware that a dozen gaunt faces stared down at him, death masks, and
he didn't care for the sensation. An under tang of DDT, from a recent
delousing, hung heavy and powdery in the close air, causing his
nostrils to flare.
Shmuel stepped to the door and out. Cool air flooded him, smooth and
sweet. Above, an abundance of stars rose in their tiers, like the eyes
of the men in the bunks.
There: a metaphor, drawn from the camps.
"Like the eyes of the men in the bunks." Only a Jew would see stars
blurry and infinite in bands from horizon to horizon and think of the
white eyes of men at the point of death. Would he continue to draw on
the camps for metaphors, was that how deep they'd been driven into him?
Did the Germans own his imagination, a final, subtler purchase, one
that would seal him off from human company, the metaphorical Mussulman,
forever?
Yet as he in despair realized the answer was Yes, he realized also that
the problem was as much literary as psychological. And from that there
followed immediately the recognition that he was, for the first time in
many long years, thinking of literature again. He thought he ought to
write about the camps, and that sometime, perhaps in a year or so, when
one would not confuse zeal with excellence, passion with brilliance, he
might in fact, if only as a private exercise.
As he walked down the street, between the mute rows of barracks, he
realized what an awesome task he'd so slightly just evoked; perhaps
even an impossible one. It was enormous in a thousand ways: had any
man the right to try and spin stories from a tragedy so huge?
What of people of ill spirit who would read such accounts purely for
the extreme sensations they caused, which of course was not the point
at all? What was the artist's responsibility to the gone, the lost,
the unheard, the forgotten? And he saw also that in a certain way the
imagination had been forever altered. The boundary of evil had been
pushed back beyond the horizon on the one hand, but on the other, the
capacity of the individual to withstand and triumph over the murderous
intentions of the State had also been pushed back. A new form would
have to be found, something that would encompass these new boundaries
and at the same time convey the immensities of the act of Murder: a new
esthetic for the post-atrocity world. Again, the problem of metaphor
thrust itself upon him. In the camps, metaphor was everywhere: life
was a metaphor, death was a metaphor. How could art be spun from a
reality already so charged with elemental symbolism, the vision of hell
the Germans had labored so mightily to construct on this earth: satanic
sparks, the flames, the awful stench, the dogs straining on their
leashes, fangs glistening?
Perhaps it was beyond the reach of the artist.
You'd have to concentrate on something small: a parable;
panoramas were incomprehensible. Concentrate on one man: how he lived,
with as much dignity as the times permitted, and how he died, senseless
perhaps, one more sliver of ash in a whirlwind dank with clouds of ash,
but convinced somehow that his life had had some meaning.
No, he thought, I could never write that. I simply am not good enough.
Face it, as a writer you weren't much, a few pitiful essays in
long-forgotten Yiddish journals in a city that no longer existed. What
positions had he attacked, what had he defended? He could not even
remember.
Had he been a Marxist, a poet, a historian, a novelist, a philosopher,
a Zionist? No, not a Zionist, not even in the last days before the war
had come, that hot August of '39 when Zionism flared like a contagion
through the Quarter, and even the richest of them, the most
assimilated, had been consumed in its vision. But that had been
dreams, absurd, out of scale, the problems so immense.
Next year in Jerusalem! Insane! The British, the Arabs, thousands of
miles to travel. He hadn't bought it then--just more dreamy Jews
getting on with their own destruction.
But now he saw the dream wasn't so outsized. It was prosaic, a
necessity. For where else was there to go?
Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. Home of the Jews. Now that would
be something, wouldn't it? That would be worth-An immense pleasure
spread through him. Look at me, he thought, I am thinking again.
He did not see them until they were quite close and then he had not
time to display surprise. They seemed to materialize from nowhere,
though in a splinter of a second he realized he hadn't been able to
make them out against the looming bulk of the guardhouse. And yet
there was a familiarity about them, as though old fears had taken on a
familiar guise, and so he absurdly was not frightened and if there was
to be any mercy in the next several seconds it was that one: that
Shmuel was not frightened as the rushing forms closed on him and held
him down.
"SS shit," he heard in Polish, "SS shit."
"I--" Shmuel started and then something enormous crashed into his
skull. He felt his head innate in pain and it seemed the abundance of
stars had come down to crush him and they hit him again and again and
again.

H.
e expected trouble at the Rheinbrucke and hid in a stand of trees a few
hundred yards down the road. The guards on the bridge appeared to be
regular Army troops, not Waffen SS men, loafing in the sun. Repp
studied them for some time, wishing he had binoculars to bring them up,
see their procedures and moods. He tried to keep himself calm and his
mind clear: only the bridge, its sentry post, and three lazy soldiers
stood between him and safety. Once across, he had only a few blocks or
so through the city to negotiate.
He'd feared a massive jam-up here, a refugee column, farmers' carts
heaped with furniture, frightened children;
officers' staff cars honking, the wounded hanging desperately on the
backs of tanks; grim SS men patrolling for deserters. Instead, only
this pleasant still scene, almost traffickless--occasionally a truck
crossed, and once a sedan, but mostly farmers' wagons heaped with hay,
not furniture, and pedestrians. From his vantage point, Repp could
also see the Bodensee over the rail of the bridge, stretching away,
glinting in the May sun, its horizon lost in a haze: the Lake of
Konstanz, a true inland sea. There seemed no war here at all. Was he
too late? Since Tuttlingen, he'd traveled mostly by night,
staying away from main roads, moving south, always south, across fields
and through scraggly forests: out of touch, on his own, fugitive from
his friends now as well as his enemies.
The sergeant in the sentry booth watched him come, but said nothing.
Repp recognized the type, tired veteran, laconic of speech, economical
of gesture, face seamed with hard knowledge. No need to yell when Repp
was already approaching.
"Say, friend," the sergeant finally said, unlimbering himself from the
stool on which he sat. He picked up his MP by the sling, toting it
with the easy motions of over-familiarity.
"And where might you be headed? Switzerland, I suppose. Don't you
know that's for big shots, not little fishies like you or me?"
Repp smiled weakly.
"No, sir," he said.
"Then what's your sorry story? Running to, or running ^row?"
Repp handed him his papers.
"I was separated from my unit," he explained as the sergeant scanned
them.
"A big American attack. Worse than Russia."
"And I suppose you think your unit's on the other side of the bridge?"
the sergeant asked.
Repp had no answer. But then he said, "No, sir. But my mother is."
"You've decided to go on home then, have you?"
"I'll find an officer to report to after I've seen my mother," Repp
said.
The sergeant chuckled.
"I doubt there's a sober one left. And if you find one, I doubt he'll
give a damn about you. Go on, damn you. 1b mother. Tell her you're
home from the wars."
Repp drew in a deep gulp of the cool air and tried to keep himself calm
as he walked across the great Romanesque bridge between the Lake of
Konstanz's two basins, the vast Bodensee to the east, and the Untersee,
the more picturesque with its steep wooded shores, to the west. At the
end of the structure, he passed under a medieval tower and stepped into
the old city. It was a holiday town, cobbled and quaint, exactly the
kind of place Repp didn't care for. It had no purpose beyond pleasure,
with its casino and boat tours and green lakeside park. It had never
even been bombed and seemed uneasy in a military role, as if it were
wearing an outlandish costume. The soldiers who clustered in its
narrow streets seemed wildly out of place against the cobbles and
arches and turrets and timbers and spires.
Repp slid anonymously among them; they paid him no attention, shouting
instead at women, or lounging about drunk before the Basilica of the
Miinsterplatz. Even the officers were in bad shape, a sullen, loutish
crew; clearly they'd already surrendered. Kubels and trucks had been
abandoned around the PIatz and Repp saw rifles already piled in the
square. Repp felt himself filling with anger as he pushed through them
but he kept it to himself, one straggler adrift in a crowd of
stragglers.
Repp turned off the Miinsterplatz and headed down Wessenbergerstrasse.
Here, in the residential sector, there were no soldiers, only an
occasional old woman or man whose questioning eyes he would not meet.
He turned up Neugasse, where the houses were shabbier still, looking
for No. 14. He found it soon, a two-story dwelling, dirty stucco,
shuttered. Quickly, without looking up or down the street of almost
identical houses, and without hesitating, he knocked.
After a time, the door opened a sliver.
"Yes?"
He could not see her in the shadow. But he knew the voice quite well.
She sounded tired. Unlike the other times.
"It's me."
The door closed, a chain was freed, and then it opened.
He stepped into the shadowy foyer, but she was not there. He went into
the living room beyond. She stood against the wall, in the dark.
"Well, at last I'm here," he said.
"So I see. They said a man. I should have known."
"Ah," he said, haltingly. The truth was, he felt a little unsure of
himself.
"Sit down, sit down," she urged.
"I'm filthy. I've been sleeping in barns, swimming rivers.
I need a bath."
"The same Repp: so fastidious."
"Please--a bath."
"Yes. Of course." She led him through a shabby living room, hushed in
draperies and blinds, flowers grimy on the wallpaper, and up some
decrepit stairs. The house stank mildly of must and disinfectant.
"I'm sorry it's so awful. But they said it had to be a house,
definitely a house and this is all that was available.
It's outrageously expensive. I rented it from a widow who's said to be
the richest woman in Konstanz.
It's also said she's a Jew. But how can that be? I thought they took
all the Jews away a long time ago."
"They did," Repp confirmed.
"You've got the documents?"
"Of course. Everything. You needn't fear. Tickets to Switzerland."
They walked down a short hall into the bathroom.
The tub stood on claws like a beast. The plaster peeled off gray walls
and the plumbing smelled. Also, the mirror was flaking off and there
were water spots on the ceiling.
"Not the Grand, is it?" he said.
But she seemed not to remember.
"No."
She had been ahead of him all this time and now, in the gray bathroom,
she turned and faced him fully.
She searched his eyes for shock.
He kept them clear of it.
"So?" he finally said.
"Do you expect me to say something?"
"My face isn't like it was, is it?" she asked.
"No, but nothing is."
The scar ran vividly from the inside corner of her eye down around her
mouth to her chin, a red furrow of tissue.
"I've seen far worse in the East," he said.
"They'll fix you up after the war. Make you pretty again. Make you
prettier, I should say. You're still quite attractive."
"You're trying to be kind, aren't you?"
Yet to Repp she was still a great beauty. She was the most beautiful
woman he'd ever seen. Her blond hair was short now, but her body had
that same suppleness and grace to it; she was thin, rather unlike the
ideal
Aryan woman, her hips too narrow for easy childbirth, but Repp had
never been interested in children anyhow.
She wore a pinstriped gray skirt and a flower-print blouse and had dark
stockings on, which must have been very old, and high-heeled shoes. Her
neck was long and blue veins pulsed visibly under her fair skin and her
face seemed porcelain or some equally delicate thing, yet fragile
though it appeared her eyes were strong and rather hard.
"I think there's hot water," she said.
"And civilian clothes are in the bureau in the bedroom."
"I must say, Margareta, you don't seem terribly happy about all
this."
"I'll go fix some supper. You must be very hungry."
They ate in awkward silence in the dim, small kitchen, though the food
she fixed was very good--eggs, black bread, cheese--and he felt much
better after the bath.
"That's the best meal I've had in a long time."
"They gave me so much money. Your people. The black market is
extensive here."
"Yes, it certainly must be. So close to Switzerland."
"Sometimes you can get pork and even beef and veal.
And sausage of course."
"Almost as if there's no war."
"Almost. But you always know there's a war. Not from all the soldiers
around, but because there's no music.
No real music. On the radio sometimes they play Wagner and that
terrible fellow Korngold. But no Chopin, no Hindemith, no Mahler. I
wonder what they have against Mahler. Of all our composers, his work
sounds the most like battles. That's what they like, isn't it? Do you
know? Why won't they allow Mahler?"
Repp said he didn't know. But he was glad to see her talking so
animatedly, even if he didn't know anything about music.
"I like Chopin so much," she said.
"He's very good," Repp agreed.
"I should have brought my Gramophone down. Or my piano. But it was
all so rushed. There was no time, even for a Gramophone. The piano,
of course, was out of the question. Even I realized that."
He said nothing.
Then she said, "Whom have you seen recently? Have you seen General
Baum at all? He always made me laugh."
"Dead, I think. In Hungary."
"Oh. A shame. And Colonel Prince von Kiihl? A delightful man."
"Disappeared. In Russia. Dead, I suppose, perhaps taken prisoner."
"And--but I suppose it's useless. Most of them are dead, aren't
they?"
"Many, I suppose. The sacrifice was gigantic."
"Sometimes I feel like a ghost. The only one left. Do you ever think
about it that way?"
"No."
"It's so sad. All those young men. So handsome. Do you remember the
celebration of the Julfest in 1938? I first saw you there. I'm sure
you don't remember. I'd just given up the piano. Anyway, the room was
full of beautiful young people. We sang and danced. It was such a
happy time. But of all those people, almost all are dead, aren't
they?"
"Yes, I suppose."
"But you haven't thought of it?"
"I've been rather busy."
"Yes, of course. But at that party, do you know what I sensed in you?
Spirituality. You have a spiritual dimension.
To be a great killer must take spirituality."
Killer: the word struck him like a blow.
"Did you know how attractive that is? At that party, you were like a
young priest, celibate and beautiful. You were very attractive. You
had a special quality. Repp, Repp was different. I heard others speak
of it too. Some of the women were wild for you. Did you know that?"
"One can sense such things."
"Oh, Repp, we're two peculiar birds, aren't we? I always knew you'd be
one of the survivors. You had that too, even way back then."
"I prefer to think of nicer times we had."
"Berlin, the '42 season? When you were the hero of the hour."
"A pleasant time."
"I suppose you'll want to sleep with me now."
"Yes. Are you turning into a nun? You used to be quite eager, I
recall. Dirty, even. At the restaurant on the Lutherstrasse."
"Horcher's. Yes. I was very evil." She had touched him under the
table, and whispered a suggestion into his ear. They had gone back to
the Grand and done exactly as she had suggested. It was their first
time. It was also before the terror raids had come and Berlin turned
into a ruin, and her face along with it.
"It won't be the way it was though," she said.
"I just know it won't. I don't know why, but I can tell that it won't
be very good. But I suppose it's my duty."
"It's not your duty. It has nothing to do with duty."
Point of honor: she had to want him.
"It's not out of pity though. You can assure me of that?"
"Of course not. I don't need a woman. I need shelter.
I need to rest. I've got important things ahead. But I want you. Do
you see?"
"I suppose. Then, come, let's go."
They went up to the bedroom. Repp made love to her with great energy
and after a while she began to respond.
For a while it was as good as it had been. Repp did most things well,
and this was no exception. He could feel her open to and accept him
and his own ache surprised him, seeming to spring from outside, from
far away.
Afterward, he put on some wool flannel trousers and a white shirt and
some blunt-tipped brown shoes-whose? he wondered--and took his
private's uniform and equipment into the garden out back. There,
working quickly, he buried it all: tunic, boots, trousers, coat, rifle
even. He stood back when he was finished and looked down at the
rectangle of disturbed earth under which his soldier's identity lay. He
felt quite odd. He was out of uniform for the first time since--how
long?
years and years, since '36 at least, that first year in the
Totenkopfverbdnde at Dachau.
"You should have let your hair grow. It's cropped too closely around
your ears," she said in the kitchen, mat R
ter-of-factly, "though since you've the proper papers, I suppose you
could look like the Fuhrer and the Swiss wouldn't care."
"What time is the broadcast?"
"At six. Nearly that now. There used to be music on all the time. Now
there's only announcements."
"There will be music again soon. Don't worry. The Jews will put music
on again."
"Do you know, someone said there were camps out East where we murdered
them. Men, women and children.
That we murdered them in the millions with a kind of gas or something.
Then burned the bodies. Can you imagine that?"
Repp said he couldn't.
"Though they deserve everything they get. They started the whole
thing."
"I hope we did it. I hope it's true. Then we've got nothing to be
ashamed of. We'll have done some good for the world after all."
"But there's always more. No matter how many they got out East,
there's always more."
"Attention. Berlin calling. Berlin calling," a voice crackled through
the radio. Repp fiddled with the dial to bring the signal in better,
but it was never clear.
"The heroic people of the Greater German Reich continue in their
struggle against the monstrous forces of International Jewry which
threaten on all sides. The Red armies have been driven back in flight
to the Baltic by Army Group North. In Hungary, our loyal SS troops
stand fast. Since the death of our leader, we have cont--" Repp turned
the radio off.
"He's gone?"
"Yes. They announced it several days back. Where were you?"
Hiding in a barn. Shooting brave men dead. Murdering them. Blowing
Willi Buchner up.
"I had a hectic time reaching here."
"But it seems to go on. The war. It seems like it's been here
forever. Even now I can't believe it'll be over."
He turned the radio up again. "--in the south, Munich is an
ipspiration to us all, while Vienna continues to--" "Damn them!" he
shouted angrily.
"The Americans walked into Munich days ago. Why don't they tell the
truth?"
"The truth is dreadful," Margareta said.
Another day passed. Repp stayed indoors, although he did go into the
garden around noon. It was beautiful out, though still a bit chilly.
May buds had begun to pop and the sun was bright. But he could take no
joy in it.
She'd told him the neighbors were harmless sorts, a retired grocer on
one side and a widow on the other, but still he worried. Maybe one of
them had seen the scruffy private come hobbling down the Neugasse to
the Berlin lady's. It was the sort of possibility that bothered him
the most because he had absolutely no control over it.
So many of the big problems had been mastered--begin with Vampir
itself, but go on to the escape in the middle of the American attack,
the dangerous hundred kilometers from Aniage Elf to Konstanz across a
wild zone, the final linkup here, not half a kilometer from the Swiss
border. It would be a crime now to fail on a tiny coincidence, the
wagging tongue of a curious neighbor.
"You are like a tiger today," she said.
"You pace about as if caged. Can't you relax?"
"It's very difficult," he said.
"Then let's go out. We can go down to the Stadtgarten.
It's very pretty. They don't rent boats anymore but the swans are back
and so are the ducks. It's May, it's spring."
"My pictures were in Signal and Das Schwarze Korps and Illustrierter
Beobachter. Someone might recognize me."
"It's unlikely."
"I don't care if it's unlikely. I cannot take the chance.
Stop bothering me about this, do you understand?"
"Sorry."
He went up to the bedroom. She was right about one thing. The waiting
was making him crazy. Locked up in a shabby little house on the
outskirts of Konstanz, his whole world a glimpse down a street from an
upper story or a stroll through a tiny garden out back, and the radio,
dying Berlin squawking from its ashes.
Repp was not used to being frightened; it suddenly occurred to him that
he was. In war, in battle, he was always concerned, but never
particularly scared. Now, with the entire heritage of the Waffen SS on
his shoulders, he knew fear. He would not let them down, but it seemed
so far away, so helplessly futile. I will not let you down, he
thought, I swear it. The oath began, however, / swear to you, Adolf
Hitler .. . yet Adolf Hitler was dead. What did that mean now? Was
the oath mere words? Did it die with the man to whom it was
addressed?
Repp knew it did not. He knew his thinking was bad for him. Doubts,
worries, something other than the will to pure action began in
self-indulgent thought. A man was what he did; a man was what he
obeyed.
He went instead to the dresser, yanked open the drawer and pulled out
the Swiss passport, painstakingly doctored, well worn, stamped a dozen
times, identifying him as Dr. Erich Peters, of German-speaking Bern, a
lawyer. All fine. The difficult thing was the story.
He'd rehearsed it like an actor, trying to get the accent right, a
little softer, slower.
"Yes, legal business in Tuttlingen, a client's will named his
half-brother executor and to gain power of attorney we needed the
half-brother's signature. He couldn't come to me!" This had been
designed as a joke, to lessen the tension of the confrontation with a
smile.
"Terrible, the bombing, the devastation, just terrible."
It should work.
He looked at himself in the mirror, searching for one Hen" Doktor
Peters. The dark double-breasted suit certainly would help, as would
the tie and the Homburg and the briefcase. Still, a haggard, desperate
man looked back at him, cheeks sunken, hardly a lawyer who'd lived fat
and smooth these past seven hard years.
His eyes seemed lusterless, his skin pale. Perhaps he ought to give
himself color and health with Margareta's makeup when he tried the
border.
And when would that be? When?
"Repp," she said behind him, scared.
"Yes?" He looked around.
"They're here." She pointed to the window. He peered out. A small
open vehicle moved slowly down the street, four wary infantrymen in
it.
"Damn!" he said.
"We thought they'd pass this place."
For a third time, the Americans had arrived.
 There was no time to mourn. But Leets insisted on something. He
wanted to carve the name into the trunk of a tree, or engrave it on a
stone.
"So that he won't be anonymous. So that he'll have his name, his
identity. Repp couldn't take that from him." For Leets believed that
Repp had done the killing--not literally, of course, but at least on
the metaphorical level. It was a Repp operation: at long distance, in
the dark.
An American doctor less prone to melodrama had another explanation:
"Just before liberation, a few trapped SS men broke into the warehouses
and put on prison jerseys. They tried to mingle with the inmates.
But it didn't work. Because of the faces. That thin, gaunt KZ face.
They didn't have it; they were recognized right away, and beaten to
death. And your friend--well, he'd been among us. All that American
meat and potatoes. He'd filled out. They saw him in the prison
compound and took him for an SS man. Who do you blame? Just one of
those terrible things."
So Leets felt his own emotions sealed up inside himself.
He could not let them escape. He stared at the corpse. The head had
been smashed in, the teeth bro R
ken off. Bright blood lay in the dust of the Appellplatz where he was
found.
"Go with him to the pit or something, if it makes you feel better,"
Tony said coldly.
"Take his hand. Touch him. He's only dead, after all, and you've seen
the dead before."
Leets knelt by the body, feeling a little ridiculous now. In fact he
did take the hand, which felt cold and hard.
He could feel Susan accusing him once again in the dark.
He turned back to the dead Jew.
What did you expect from us? What do you people want, anyway? We had
a war to win, we had to worry about the big picture. I had no idea
this would happen. I had no idea. I didn't know. I didn't kn-Leets
felt the piece of paper in the cold hand. He pried the fingers roughly
apart. Something in Hebrew had been written in pencil on a scrap. He
stuffed it into his pocket.
After a while, two conscripted Germans came by for the body. Leets
would have liked to have hated them, but they were elderly civilians--a
banker and a baker-and the weight of the body was nearly beyond them.
They were apologetic with the stretcher--it was too heavy, they were
too weak, it wasn't their fault. Leets listened to their complaints
impatiently, and then gestured them to get going. After much
melancholy effort they got Shmuel over to the burial ground, a pit that
had been bulldozed out, and there set him down. They would not look
into the wide, shallow hole. The stench of decomposition, though
somewhat controlled by great quantities of quicklime, still
overpowered, an inescapable fact. Delicately the two old men coughed
and averted their eyes from the hundreds of huddled forms resting under
a veil of white on the pit's floor. Leets felt like kicking their
asses.
"Go on, beat it, get the fuck outta here!" he yelled, and they ran
off, terrified.
Awkwardly he got Shmuel up off the stretcher. Once he had him in his
arms, he was astonished at how light he was after the groans of the
pallbearers. He climbed into the pit and a cloud of lime dust swirled
up over his boots, whitening them. The chemical stung his nose and
eyes and he noticed most of the men around had masks on.
"Hey, Captain, you'll want out of there. We're shoveling 'em under
now." It was another officer, calling from the far side. An engine
gunned into life. The bright blade of a bulldozer lurched into view
over the pit's edge, pushing before it a liquid tide of loose earth.
Leets laid Shmuel down. Any place in here was fine.
He put him down in a long row of nearly fleshless forms.
Leets climbed out and brushed himself off and waved all clear. The
dozer began to muscle the earth in and Leets watched for a second as it
rolled over them.
"And that's it? That's all?"
He turned. Susan was standing there.
"Susan, I--it just--" and he ran out of words.
She looked at him blankly. Behind him the dozer lurched and tracked
and flattened the soft earth.
"It just happened," he said.
"I'm so sorry."
She continued to stare.
"There was nothing any of us could do. I feel responsible.
He'd come so far."
In the sunlight, he could see how colorless her face had become. She
looked badly in need of sleep. Her work with the dying, with the
victims, must have been gruesome and dreadful; it must be eating her,
for she looked ill. A fine sheen of bright sweat stood out on her
upper lip.
"Everything you touch," she said, "turns to death, doesn't it?"
Leets had no answer. He watched her walk away.
There was the note, of course.
He had not forgotten it; but it took awhile to find a man among the
prisoners who could read it.
Leets had a headache and Tony was impatient, and the translator, a
bright young Polish Communist, played them for two packs of Luckies
before delivering.
"That's not much," said Leets, handing over the cigarettes, feeling
cheated.
"You asked, I answered," the man said.
"It's not much to die for."
"He didn't die for it. He got caught in a bad accident.
Accidents are a feature of war, don't you see?" Tony said.
"It must be some sort of code name."
Leets tried to clear his head. They were in the office where the
interrogations had taken place. He still saw the rail yard full of
corpses, Shmuel smashed to nothingness in the dust, the huddled forms
laid out under the chemical snow, Susan in her nurse's uniform glaring
at him, eyes vivid with accusation.
He looked again at the word. It had to have some significance, some
double meaning. It wasn't arbitrary.
"Don't they have an SS division called "Nibelungen'?"
"The Thirty-seventh," confirmed Tony.
"A mechanized infantry outfit. Third-rate, conscriptees, the lame, the
halt, somewhere out in Prussia against the Russians.
But that's not it. This has been a Totenkopfdivision operation the
whole way. Repp and the Aniage Elf defenders. Totenkopf is old
Nazi--part of the elite, among the first of the Waffen SS formations.
They go way back, to the camps, to the very beginning. They'd have no
truck with second-raters like the Thirty-seventh."
"No, I suppose not."
"Actually, it's quite a common name in Germany.
The street between this lovely spot and the town of Dachau is in fact
Nibelungenstrasse. Isn't that interesting?"
"I wonder if--" Leets began.
"No: it's nothing to do with that curious coincidence.
I guarantee you. No, there's a joke in this. There's some hammy
German humor. I see the touch of a Great Wit, a jokester."
"I don't follow."
"It's rather too clever, actually," Tony pointed out.
Leets, way behind, requested clarification.
"So what's the punch line?" he demanded.
"It's an opera."
"Oh, yes, Wagnerian, huh? Some huge thing, goes on for hours. Has to
do with a ring."
"Yes. Ring of the Nibelung. A great hero named Siegfried steals it
from them. That's the joke. Repp's Siegfried."
"Who are the Nibelungen?" Leets asked.
"I'm getting to that." He smiled.
"The Nibelungen, my friend, are a tribe of dwarves, in the oldest
stories.
Living underground. Guarding a treasure."

W.
wVhe "here was yhe?
He checked his watch. Two hours, she'd been out two hours!
He was upstairs. He peeled back the curtain from the window and looked
down the street, as far as he could see. Nothing. He'd done this a
dozen times in the past few minutes, and each time his reward had been
the same, nothing.
He felt warmly damp in his civilian clothes. He could not get
comfortable in them. The shoes were no damned good either,
blunt-tipped bluchers, pebble-grained, with cap toes, yet they rubbed a
blister onto his left heel. Now he walked with a limp! Locked in this
stuffy little house, he was falling apart; he hobbled about in another
man's clothes with a headache and digestive problems, and a short
temper and a blister on his heel. He woke up at night in cold sweats.
He heard sounds, jumped at shadows.
He really was not cut out for this sort of business, the polite waiting
in an untouched residential section.
He sat back, pulled out his pack of cigarettes.
He looked again out the window, even though it had been only a few
seconds.
He saw the truck swing around the corner.
It was a military vehicle, moving slowly down the Neugasse toward him.
Big thing, dark green after their fashion, about the size of an Opel
Blitz, a white star bold on its hood. Soldiers seemed crowded in the
back:
he could see their helmets bobbing as the truck rumbled along.
Repp drew back from the window, and had the P38 in his hand.
He threw the slide on the pistol ... he felt very cool all of a sudden.
It seemed a great weight had been drained away. His headache vanished.
He knew he had seven rounds in the pistol. All right, if it was worth
six of them to take him, then six it would be. He'd save the last for
his own temple. Briefly, he wished he had his uniform. Better that
than this silly outfit, banker's pants, white shirt, shoes that did not
fit, like a common gangster.
He was breathing heavily. He crouched at the stairway.
He heard the truck outside, nearly up to the house.
His finger moved the safety on the grip of the pistol to off. The
weapon felt cold and big in his hand. His heart pounded heavily. He
knew the truck would stop shortly, and he'd hear the running feet as
one squad headed out back. He was all ready. He was set.
"ALL CIVILIANS ARE WARNED THAT CURFEW IS 6 P.M. REPEAT
ANNOUNCEMENT: ALL CIVILIANS ARE WARNED THAT CURFEW IS 6
P.M. YOU WILL BE DETAINED IF FOUND OUTSIDE AFTER 6 P.M."
The speaker on the truck boomed like an artillery shell as it drew even
with the house, vibrating through the wood, causing the windows to
rattle. It continued on, growing fainter, until it finally went
away.
 It began appearing in odd places.
"Yes, here, by God," shouted Tony, "mess records.
March eighteenth and nineteenth, meals in the SS canteen, a hundred and
three men, charged not to a unit but to one word: Nibelungen."
Nibelungen: April 11, supplies from the central storage facility at
Dachau dispatched: rations, equipment, replacement, fuel allotments.
February 13: Ammunition requisition; 25 crates 7.92 mm X 33 kurz; 25
crates 7.92 mm belted; Stielhandgranate, Model 44, 3 crates.
March 7: More food, a wire requisition, construction supplies.
The total mounted. A hundred scraps of information providing for the
creation and nurture of Operation Nibelungen, GEHEIME KOMMA NDOSACHEH!
highest Reich secrecy order and priority.
"It was higher than the rocket program even. My God," said Leets.
Roaming through the CIC Documents Center, a clearinghouse the Army
investigative unit had established at Dachau, Leets and Outhwaithe in
one frantic day seemed to succeed wherever they touched. The files
here were jumbled, immense, confusing stacks and tiers of paper; yet
always, on the buff folders, one stamped word, whatever the category:
nibelung en
"We were so lucky," Leets said.
"If Shmuel hadn't gotten to the old man. And if he hadn't written it
down.
And if I hadn't picked up--" "We've been lucky all the way through. And
yet we're still no closer. I find that quite a bothersome thing."
Leets scored.
"Here," he hooted, "under "Construction and Supply," the original site
preparation order.
Sixteenth of November '44, orders here for a construction battalion to
prepare a site for experimental purposes.
In the Schwarzwald. Code name Nibelungen.
Chalked off to WVHA. And a list of specs, required equipment."
"Special transportation orders, these. Moving some solid-state testing
gear down from Kummersdorf, the WaPriif2 testing facility up near
Berlin. These instructions mandate special care to be taken with the
delicate instrumentation. Date fourth of January, the very beginning
of the thing."
"We're really cooking," Leets crowed.
"Goddamn, now we're getting somewhere."
Leets's fingers pawed through the drawers and vaults of the files. He
worked quickly, but with thoroughness, and did not stop for lunch or
dinner. He would have stayed busy late into the night on his prowl
through the paper labyrinths of the Third Reich but there came a moment
when a shadow fell across the face of the document he was examining and
in that same second a mousy voice, full of self-recrimination and
humility, spoke up.
"Uh, sir. Captain Leets. Sir?"
Leets looked up through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
"Gad, he's back," said Outhwaithe.
Roger stood shyly before him.
And Roger was some help, this time. He would not talk of Paris, or
explain; he was not full of his match or himself. He even, for a day
or so, worked hard as they continued their hunt through the paper work.
And he came up with some possibly pertinent material: a
Nibelungen-coded requisition for wind-tunnel data on projectile
performance from the Luftfahrt Forschungsanstal, the Air Force research
establishment at Braunschweig;
and a record of marks for enlisted personnel taking part in the Dachau
antitank course in mid-March, including 103 names identified as
Totenkopfdivision--Nibelungen.
But still piles and piles of material remained to be gone through.
Leets's frustration took the form of a headache, and it increased as
that afternoon wore on.
At one point, late, he looked up and around the Documents Center and
took no pleasure from what he saw:
they were alone in the place, the CIC clerks having taken off for the
day, and all around there seemed to be stacks and cartons of German
documents. It reminded Leets much of the office back in London where,
months ago, this had all begun. From this similarity he extrapolated a
single message: they had not made any progress, any real progress, into
the middle of the thing.
His frustration was amplified by news that Roger had brought from the
outside--that the war seemed finally to be winding down. It was
certainly in its last phase, and this made Leets uncomfortable. He had
decided that Repp's strike was tied to the end of things, somehow, in
some form; it was a part of the process of the death of the Reich. The
Russians were now said to be in Berlin--Berlin!--and German forces had
capitulated up north, in Holland, northeast Germany and Denmark.
Meanwhile Patton's sweep had carried him all the way into
Czechoslovakia--Pilsen, the last reports said.
Everybody was doing so well; he was doing lousy.
He slammed down the sheet he had, some nonsense on Nibelungen-coded
mess receipts. Mess receipts!
Damn it, the Reich should have ground to a halt back in '43, its gears
jammed tight on the tons of paper it produced.
The Germans should have dropped paper bombs which killed by sheer
weight with as much effectiveness as high explosives. They recorded
everything in triplicate and the more they recorded, the more evidence
accumulated, but the harder it was to put one's hand on anything
specific.
"Damn it, this just isn't getting us anywhere," he complained.
Tony, similarly immersed in documents at another table, looked up and
said, "You'd rather be perched on a roadblock somewhere? Or knocking
on doors with the boys in the trench coats?"
Of course not, Leets told himself. But more manpower would have been
some help, to prowl these acres of paper. And even then, would that
have done it? It was clear now that Nibelungen was built, maintained
and controlled out of Dachau; all the documents pointed to it. But
that was it: they pointed to Aniage Elf and Leets already had Aniage
Elf. What he needed was another direction, another step in the chain,
higher up on the ladder. To Berlin, perhaps. To WVHA headquarters at
Unter den Eichen but the Russians were there.
Would they cooperate? How long would it take? What shape were the
WVHA files in anyway?
"Aspirin?" he asked.
"Huh? Oh" I got some in my bag, just a sec," Roger said.
"What's a Schusswundef Gunshot wound, right?"
"Yes," Leets said, but then noted the folder Roger was reading.
"Hey, what the hell is that?" he barked.
It was marked Der Versuch.
"Uh, file I picked up."
Der Versuch meant experiment.
It was at last too much. Leets's headache would not go away and Roger
was pouring time down the drain, and Susan was even more unreachable
than before and Shmuel was dead and Repp was closer to his target.
"Goddamn it, you little son of a bitch, I ought to kick your rich
little ass to Toledo. That has nothing to do with our stuff. What the
fuck, kid, you think this is some kind of reading room, some fucking
Harvard library or something?" he spat out venomously.
Roger looked up in horror. Even Tony was shaken by the black rage in
Leets's words.
"Jesus, Captain, I'm sorry," said Roger.
"I was just--" "Listen, we're all running without a lot of sleep and
these last days have been unpleasant ones," Tony pointed out.
"Perhaps we'd best close down the shop for today."
"Suits me," said Roger sullenly.
"Ah," Leets snorted, but saw at once that Outhwaithe was right.
Roger stood and gathered up his materials wearily and began to stuff
them into a drawer.
But then he paused.
"Look, this is pretty funny here, if I'm reading it right."
Nobody paid any attention. Leets still hadn't taken any aspirin and
Tony was consumed in tidying up. Tony was a tidy sort, always had
been.
Roger lurched on.
"Funny-ugly," he said.
"They used this Dachau as headquarters for a lot of testing. Block
Five, it was called. All kinds of terrible--" "Get to the point,"
Leets said coldly.
"Okay," and Roger held up the bulky file.
"Full of freezing, pressure-chamber stuff, gas, injections,
water--deaths I'm talking about. How people die. How long it takes,
what the signs are, what their brains look like afterward, pictures,
stuff like that. And this--" He pulled a folder out.
"It's not like the others. Different forms entirely.
Didn't come out of Block Five. It's a report on Schusswunde --gunshot
wounds, twenty-five of them, complete with autopsy pictures, the works.
It's been sent down to a Dr. Rauscher--the head SS doctor here. Sent
down for his collection on how people die. It's dated--this is how it
caught my eye--it's dated the eighth of March. A couple of days after
Shmuel made his breakout."
"Let's see," said Leets.
The folder consisted of several typewritten pages of wound descriptions
and several grisly pictures, shot with too much flash, of naked scrawny
men on slabs with great orifices in their chests or portions of their
heads blown away, eyes slotted and blank, feet dirty, joints knobby.
Leets looked away.
"Maybe it is them," he said.
"No way to tell. Shmuel could tell. But even if it is, so what? The
way I make it is they must have autopsied the corpses Repp hit at
Anlage Elf. Wanted to see what that fat slug does, more data to help
him in the shooting. Then they ship those data back to--back to we
don't know where. WVHA, I guess. Or SS HQ, someplace, Berlin.
Then"--he sighed, weary with the effort, for he could see the approach
of another dead end--"someone up there sends it on down to this Dr.
Rauscher. For his collection. And you find it. Looking where you're
not supposed to be. But it doesn't mean a thing. We know they've got
a big, special gun. We know--" "Yet it's not Nibelungen-coded," Tony
said.
"Well, it had really nothing to do with the guts of the mission. It
was just an extra curiosity they'd dug up and thought to send somewhere
it might do some good.
Their idea of 'good."
" "You miss the point," Tony said. He'd ceased tidying and was over at
Roger's, pushing his way through the papers.
"If it hasn't gone out under the code, then it's not top secret. It's
not Geheime Kommandosache. That means it hasn't been combed, scrubbed
free of connections, examined closely from the security point of
view.
It's pure."
Leets wasn't sure what he was getting so excited about.
"Big deal, nothing there to be top secret. We don't even know if those
are the same twenty-five guys. They could be twenty-five guys from any
of the camps."
"Hey," said Roger, off in a corner with one of the sheets.
"There's a tag here. I didn't see it. It's some kind of--" Leets had
it, and took it into the light.
"It's a file report, that's all," he said.
"It says these came from some guy's file, some guy in some department,
Amt Four-B-four, some guy I never heard of.
Jesus, this is nothing, goddamn it, I'm getting tired of all this--"
"Shut up," said Tony.
"Look, Major, this is--" "Shut up," Tony said. He looked hard at the
tag.
Then he looked at Leets, then to Roger, then back to Leets.
"Remember your German, Captain. In German, the word EichT' "Huh?"
"It's oak. Oak Tony said, "Remember: it wasn't Shmuel who heard of the
Man of Oak, but someone else, a shtetl Jew, who spoke Yiddish. He knew
some German words, the common ones, but he was scared and didn't listen
carefully.
He heard "Man of Oak." Mann. And Eich."
Tony continued, "It has nothing to do with UnterdenEichen, Under the
Oaks. We were wrong. We stopped short. We didn't follow it hard
enough. The Jew was right. It was Man of Oak."
Leets looked at the name.
"There's your bloody Man of Oak," said Tony.
The tag said, "Originals on file Amt IV-B-4, Obersturmbannfuhrer
Eichmann."
 "Repp?" He hadn't heard her come in.
"Repp?
Where are you?"
"Here," he said feebly.
"What the hell took you so long?"
She came up the stairs and into the room. Today she wore a smart blue
suit and a hat with a veil.
"My God," she said.
"You look ill. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"You look as if you've seen a ghost."
"It's nothing."
"Do you want something? Brandy? I have some brandy."
"No, no. Stop it, please. Tell me what I sent you out to find."
"I have a surprise for you."
"Margareta. I have a headache. I don't have time for--" She held out
an unopened pack of Siberias.
"Surprise," she said.
"Where on earth did you get those?"
"From a boy. I smiled at him. He was charmed to give them to me. He'd
been in the East, I guess."
Repp opened the pack greedily, and extracted one of the cigarettes. The
paper had begun to turn brown from age and, lighting it quickly, he
realized how stale the thing was. Still: delicious.
"French, incidentally," she said.
"Eh? I'm not sure what--" "It's the French. The French who've
occupied us. In American uniforms with American equipment. But the
French."
"Well, it's the same. Maybe worse. We never took America. We took
France in '40."
"They seem very benign. They sit in the square and whistle at the
women. They drink. The officers are all in the cafe."
"What about ours?"
"Our boys handed in their rifles and were marched away. It was almost
a ceremony, like a changing of the guard. It was all very cheerful. No
shots were fired. The guns weren't even loaded."
"Tell me what I sent you out for. How many are there? What are the
security arrangements? How are they monitoring civilian traffic? Have
they set up border checkpoints? Is there a list that you know of?"
"List?"
"Yes. Of criminals. Am I on it?"
"I don't know anything of any list. I certainly didn't see one. There
are not so many of them. They have put up signs. Regulations. All
remaining German soldiers and military personnel must turn themselves
in by tomorrow noon on the Miinsterplatz. All party uniforms, banners,
flags, standards, regalia, knives--anything with the swastika on it has
been collected and dumped in a big pile. Denazification they call it,
but it's souvenirs they want."
"The border. The border."
"All right. I went there too. Nothing. Some bored men, sitting in a
small open car. They haven't even occupied the blockhouse, though I do
know they removed our Frontier Police detachment. I think the fence is
patrolled too."
"I see. But it's not--" "Repp, the border is not their central concern
right now. Sitting in the sun, looking at women, thinking about what
to do when the war's over: those are their central concerns."
"What travel regulations have they posted?"
"None, yet."
"What about--" "Repp, nothing's changed. Some French soldiers are now
sitting around the Miinsterplatz, where yesterday it was our boys. Our
boys will be back soon. You'll see. It's almost finished. It won't
last much longer."
He sat back.
"Very good," he said.
"You know they offered me an Amt Six-A woman, a professional. But I
insisted on you.
I'm glad. It was too late for strangers. This is too important for
strangers. I'm so glad they convinced you to help."
"It's difficult for a German to say No to the SS."
"It's difficult for a German to say No to duty."
"Repp, I have something I'd like to discuss, please."
"What?"
"A wonderful idea really. It came to me while I was out."
She did seem happier than yesterday. She wasn't so tired for one thing
and she looked better, though maybe he had only grown used to the
imperfectly joined face.
"What?"
"It's simple. I see it now. I knew there was a design in all this.
Don't go."
"What?"
"Don't do it. Whatever it is, don't do it. It can't matter.
Now, so late. Stay here." She paused.
"With me."
"Stay?" A,stupid thing to say. But she had astonished him.
"Yes. Remember Berlin, '42, after Demyansk, how good it was? All the
parties, the operas. Remember, we went riding in the Tiergarten, it
was spring, just like it is now. You were so heroic, I was beautiful.
Berlin was beautiful. Well, it can be like that again. I was
thinking.
It can be just like that, here. Or not far from here, in Zurich.
There's money, you have no idea how much.
You've got your passport. I can get across, I know I can, somehow. All
sorts of things are possible, if you'd only--" "Stop it," he said.
"I don't want to hear this."
He wished she hadn't brought it up; but she had. Now he wished she'd
drop it; but she wouldn't.
"You'll die out there. They'll kill you. For nothing," she said.
"Not for nothing. For everything."
"Repp, God knows I'm not much. But I've survived.
So have you. We can begin with that. I don't expect you to love me as
you loved the pretty idiot in Berlin. But I won't love you the way I
loved the handsome, thickskulled young officer. It'll be fine. It'll
be fine."
"Margareta--" "Nobody cares anymore. I could see it on their faces.
Our boys' faces. They didn't care. They were glad it was over. They
went willingly, happily. To die now is pointless.
My brother and father are dead. All the men I've loved are dead. To
join them would be insane. And you did more than all of them put
together. You've earned your holiday."
"Stop it."
"These French seem all right. They're not evil men, I could tell. Not
Jews, or working for Jews. Just men, just soldiers. They got along
quite well with our boys. It was a touching scene."
"You sound like you're describing some kind of medieval pageant."
"There's no disgrace in having lost a war."
How could he tell her? What words could there be?
That he was part of a crusade, even if no one remembered or would admit
it. He was all that was left of it. If he had to give his life, he'd
give it. That he was a hard man, totally ruthless, and proud. He'd
killed a thousand men in a hundred wrecked towns and snowy forests and
trenches full of lice and shit.
"We lost more than a war," he said.
"We lost a moment in history."
"Forget what's been or what might have been," she said.
"Yes, wonderful, but forget it, it's over. Get ready for the future,
it's here, today."
"There's not even any choice in it. There's no choice at all."
"Repp, I could go to the French. I could explain to their officer. I
could say Repp, of Demyansk, the great hero, is at my house, he'd like
to come in. I could get him to guarantee that--" "He can only
guarantee a rope. They'd hang me.
Don't you see it yet, why I can't turn back? I killed Jews."
He sat down by the table and looked off into the corner of the
kitchen.
"Oh, Repp," she finally said.
"I had no idea." She stepped back from him.
"Oh, Christ, I didn't know.
God, what terrible work. You must have suffered so. It must have been
so hard on you."
She came beside him and touched him gently, put her fingertips against
his lips and looked into his eyes.
"Oh, Repp," she said, and then was crying against him.
"It must have been so hard on you."
 At last it was a simple proposition.
"To get Repp," Leets told them, "we have to find this Eichmann."
"Yeah, but, Captain, if we can't find one Obersturmbannfrihrer in the
SS, how the hell are we going to find another?" Roger wanted to
know.
And Tony said, "The possibilities must be endless.
The man may be dead. He may have made it out of the country. He may
be hiding as a private in a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft battalion. He may
have been captured by the Russians. He may be in Buenos Aires."
"And if he's any of those things, we're out of luck.
But if he's been captured, then maybe we can find him.
Just maybe."
"So I guess we have to go on the assumption he's been taken," said
Roger.
"But still .. ."
"We've got no other choice."
"And if we get him, then we gotta make him talk," Roger said.
"I'll make him talk," said Leets.
"Don't you worry about that."
But Roger did worry; for he did not like the look that crossed the
captain's face when he spoke.
If this Eichmann was a prisoner, then he'd be property of the Army
Counter-intelligence Corps, for interrogation intelligence was a CIC
initiative. So early the next day they took off for Augsburg, where
Seventh Army CIC had decamped at Army Headquarters on an old estate
just beyond the ruined city. Army took up the main house and the CIC
unit one of several hunting bungalows spread over the rolling hills.
It took them quite some time to see a Major Miller, the CIC exec
officer, and Leets found this wait the hardest thing yet, worse even
than rushing into the German fire at Aniage Elf or watching the doctor
open up the week-dead kid at Alfeld, for at least in those episodes
he'd been able to do something. Now he simply sat. The minutes ticked
by and suddenly it turned into nighttime.
Darkness came and sealed off the windows.
"What's the German word for night?" Leets asked Tony.
"Come on, chum. You know it."
"Yeah, Nacht. Sounds like a rifle being cocked."
Presently Miller showed up, dead tired, in his GI overcoat, a pale,
freckled man in his late thirties.
"Jesus, sorry I'm late. How long you guys been waiting?"
he asked by way of introduction.
"Hours, sir," said Leets.
"Look, we need some help, that's why we're here."
"Sure, sure. Listen, if I'd of known--" "German prisoners. SS
prisoners, especially. Over the rank of major. Specifically, the rank
of Obersturmbannfrihrer Eichmann, out of a department called Amt
Four-B-four."
"That's Gestapo."
"Gestapo?" said Leets.
"Under the RSHA. Central Security Department.
Eichmann, huh?"
"You know him?"
"No. But we're beginning to see how RSHA was set up."
"Well, where would he be? I mean, if you had him.
Where would we look for him?"
"Long way off. A castle. Sorry, classified location."
Leets felt his mouth drop open in stupefaction.
"Is it access you want?" the major continued.
"Oh, sure. It can be arranged. Get OSS upstairs to write a fancy
letter to Seventh Army CIC. It'll reach me in a week or two with
twenty-six different qualifications attached from the brass and then--"
"Major," Leets interrupted.
"We need to see this guy tonight. Tomorrow might be too late."
"Look, fellows, if I could help, believe me I would.
But I'm powerless. Look." He held up his hands from underneath his
desk, wrists joined in a pantomime of bondage. He smiled weakly and
said, "They're tied. See, those officers are an intelligence source of
the first magnitude.
We've got 'em at an interrogation center, a castle, like I said. Later,
there's some talk of establishing a Joint Services interrogation
center. But for now, we've got 'em. See, a lot of them operated
against the Russians.
Look, let's face it, this war's over and the next one's about to begin.
And those guys fought its first battle. They've got all kinds of dope
on the Russians, on Communist cells in Europe in Resistance groups, on
hundreds of intelligence operations. They're a treasure.
They're worth their weight in gold. I mean, they are--"
"Major," Leets spoke very quietly, "there's a German operation that's
still hot. So hot it smokes. Now. Today.
There's an officer named Repp, Waffen SS, top man with a rifle. He's
going to put a bullet into someone.
Someone important. This is the last will and testament of the Third
Reich. He's the executor."
"So who?"
"That's the hard part. We don't know. But we believe this Eichmann
must, for we found his name on a crucial file down at the Dachau admin
center."
"I'm sorry. I'd like to help. I just can't. There are channels. It'd
be my ass. You just have to go through channels."
"Look, Major, we may not have time to go through channels. Someone
could be on the fucking bull's-eye while we're filling out forms."
"Captain Leets. There's just no--" "Okay, look. Let me give you the
real reason you ought to give this guy to us: he's simply ours. We
bought him. You didn't. You stumbled onto him and don't even know if
you've got him. But we bought him with lives.
Thirty-four paratroopers checked out on this thing in the Black Forest,
twice as many again wounded. And eleven guys in the Forty-fifth
Division got nailed back in April. Then there were twenty-five KZ
inmates 'this Repp used up for practice. And finally, an operative of
mine, another KZ survivor. He's at Dachau, in a pit full of stiffs and
lime, lovely spot. He deserved better, but that's what he got. So
when I say this Eichmann is mine, because he's going to give me Repp,
then that's what I mean."
"It's not a question of deaths. Men die in this war all the time,
Captain"--but not your sort, Leets thought-"but still we've got to
stick to our procedures. I can't just .. . there's just no way .. .
it's ridiculous.
But--" And then he stopped.
"Oh, hell," he finally said. He looked away and seemed to breathe
deeply.
"How old are you?" he finally said to Roger.
"Nineteen, sir," said Roger.
"A paratrooper. I can see by the boots."
"Uh, yes, sir," said Roger.
"Any combat jumps?"
"Six/' Roger lied.
"Young and crazy. Crazy-reckless. Everybody tried to talk you out of
it, I bet."
"Yes, sir," said Roger.
"But you went anyway, had to show 'em how tough you were, huh?"
"Something like that, sir," said Roger.
"Sicily, the Boot. Into Normandy. The big Holland screw-up. A nasty
spell in Bastogne, the Bulge. Some Christmas. Finally the Rhine drop.
Varsity, they called it. March."
That's only five, Roger, Leets thought. Nobody jumped at Bastogne.
"Oh, and the drop, uh, Captain Leets and Major Outhwaithe mentioned,
um, sir, you know, the one--" "That's quite a record. Nineteen and six
combat drops. What's it like?"
"Oh, well, um, scary, sir. Real scary. Normandy was the bad one. We
came down way off the zone, half the guys in my stick went into water,
Germans, see, had flooded the place, pictures didn't, um, show it, and
they drowned. Anyway, I was one of the lucky ones that hit on high
ground. Then: confusion. Lots of light, flares, tracers. Big stuff
going off. Like the Fourth of July, only prettier, but more
dangerous--" Jesus Christ, thought Leets.
"--but then we got formed up and moved out. First Germans we saw were
so close you could smell them. I mean, there they were, right on top
of us. I had one of those M-threes, you know, sir, the grease gun they
call 'em, and BADDDADDDADDAAADDDAAA! Just knocked 'em down, never knew
what hit 'em."
"You know," the major said, leaning back in his chair, staring absently
off into space, "sometimes I don't feel I've actually been in the war
at all, the real war. I suppose I should be grateful. And yet in ten
years, twenty years, people will talk about it, ask questions, and I
won't have the faintest idea what to say. I don't think I ever even
saw any Germans, except for the prisoners, and they just look like
people or something. I saw some ruins. Once I did take a look through
somebody's binoculars at the Ruhr pocket. Real enemy territory. But
mainly it's been a job or something, paper work, details,
administration, just normal life, except there are no women, the food's
lousy and everybody's dressed the same."
"Major--" started Leets.
"I know, I know. What's your name. Sergeant?"
"Roger Evans."
"Roger. Well, Roger, you've packed a lot into your nineteen years, I
salute you. Anyway, Captain Leets, this is my war. I can see you have
no respect for it. Fine, but still somebody's got to do the paper
business. So while you won't understand and won't respect it, never
R
the less let me tell you I'm about to do a very courageous thing. Fact
is, the CIC brass hates you OSS types. Don't ask me why. So when I
tell you where the officers are, I want you to understand how brave I'm
being. No, it's not a combat jump, but it's a big risk in its own
right.
Name of the place is Pommersfelden Castle, outside Bamberg, another
sixty or so clicks on up the road.
Schloss Pommersfelden, in German. A very ornate place, on Route Three,
south of the city. I'll call them and tell them you've got approval.
If you leave in the morning, you should get there by late afternoon.
The roads are terrible, tanks, men, just a mess. Columns of prisoners.
Terrible."
"Thank you, sir. Would that mean--" "Yes, of course. Eichmann. We
picked him up in Austria last week. If you can get anything out of
him, fine, swell. We tried and came up with nothing except the
remarkable fact he was following orders. Now, please.
Get out of here. Don't hang around. Okay? God help me if they ever
find out about this."
The drive the next morning was murder. The tanks were bad enough, and
the convoys even worse, interminable lines of deuce-and-a-halfs,
sometimes two abreast, struggling southward to keep up with the rapidly
advancing front; but worst of all were the Wehrmacht prisoners.
There were thousands of them, men in Chinese numbers, marching--rather,
meandering sluggishly--to the rear in battalion-sized formations,
usually guarded by one or two MP's at either end in a Jeep. The
Germans were surprisingly rude, considering their position, insolent,
sullen crowds who milled in the road like sheep, stunting progress.
Roger again and again had to slow the Jeep to a crawl, honking and
cursing, while Leets stood in the back shouting "Raus, raus," and
waving madly, and still they refused to part except at the nudge of a
fender. At one point, Leets pulled his Thompson submachine gun from
the scabbard mounted slantwise off the front seat, and made a dramatic
gangster's gesture out of tossing the bolt; they moved for that, all
right.
Finally, beyond Feuchtwangen, the prisoners seemed to thin, and Roger
really belted the Jeep along. Yet Leets was not at all happy. He had
the terrible sensation of heading in the wrong direction, for if, as
they had speculated, Repp's target had to be to the south, beyond the
reach of the Americans, here they were slugging their way north,
putting themselves farther and farther out of the picture.
"I hope this is right," Leets said anxiously to Tony.
Tony, morose lately, only grunted.
"We don't really have a choice, do we?" Leets wanted reassurance.
"Not a bit of it," Tony said, and continued to stare blackly ahead.
They had to swing in a wide arc around the ruined city of Nuremberg and
that ate up more time. It lay in the distance under a pall of smoke,
though it had not been bombed in months. Ruins were not so remarkable,
yet the scope here was awesome. But Leets paid no attention; he used
these hours to meditate on Repp.
"You're talking to yourself," said Tony.
"Huh? Oh. Bad habit."
"You were saying Repp, Repp, Repp over and over again."
At that moment a fighter plane, a P-51, screamed low and suddenly over
them, a hundred or so feet up, almost blowing them off the road, Roger
letting the Jeep slew a bit before regaining control. The plane rolled
over in a lazy corkscrew turn at 380 miles an hour, star white, flaps
trim, bubble sparkly with sunlight, whooping kid like in the pale
German sky.
"Jesus, crazy bastard," yelled Leets.
"He almost strafed us," yelled Roger.
"Bastard, ought to be reported, I just may report him, flying like
that," Leets muttered in heated righteousness.
"Hey: we're here," Roger announced.
"On a wing and prayer," said Tony.
They pulled into the grounds of Schloss Pommersfelden.
At the end of a long road through the trees sat the castle. Even the
American military vehicles parked around it, dingy green with peeling,
muddy stars, could not detract from its eighteenth-century purity.
"Willya look at that," Roger suggested, dumbfounded.
Leets preferred not to, though the thing was impressive:
a fantasy, an elegant stone pastry, foolish, insanely overelaborate,
but proud in its mad grandeur.
Leets and Outhwaithe hurried into the place after Roger stopped, and
found themselves in a theatrical stairwell four stories tall,
embellished with arcaded galleries, stone nude boys holding lanterns,
wide steps of marble that could have led to heaven, all under a painted
ceiling.
Their boots crunched dryly across the tile toward a PFC orderly. MP's
with automatic weapons stood at each of the many doors leading off this
area.
"Leets. Office of Strategic Services." He fished for some ID.
"This is Major Outhwaithe, SOE. A Major Miller of Seventh Army CIC
said he'd call down and set up a chat with a guest you've got here."
"Yes, sir. The Eichmann thing."
"That's it."
A phone call was placed; a captain, in Class A's, appeared.
He looked them over.
"Eichmann, eh?"
"Yes."
"I don't know why. Doesn't know a thing. Most of them are talking
like canaries. Trying out for new jobs.
This guy's the sphinx."
"He'll talk for me," Leets said.
The captain took them up to the second level and down a hall.
Tapestries and portraits of men and women three hundred years dead in
outlandish outfits with fat glossy German faces hung on the walls.
Finally, they reached doors at the end of the hall and stepped through.
The room except for table and three chairs was empty.
"He's in the detention wing. He'll be here soon.
Look, Miller's a buddy of mine, I know this thing's kind of unofficial.
Glad to help out, no problem, no sweat.
But we don't go for any rough stuff, you know. I mean, Leets, it
bothered me what you just said."
"I won't harm a hair on his head," Leets said.
"Neither will the major."
"We British are quite gentle, hadn't you heard?" Tony asked.
A roar rose suddenly; the windows rattled as it mounted.
After it died, the captain said, "That's the fifth one in the last half
an hour. Those guys are really feeling their oats today. There's an
airfield at Nuremberg, not too far. Mosquito squadron there too,
Major, not just our boys going goofy."
"Glad to hear it," Tony said.
"We try and do our bit."
The door opened. Two MP's with grease guns and helmet liners brought a
third man in between them.
Leets was immediately impressed at how unimpressed he was: a wormy
little squirt, pale, watery eyes, thinning hair, late thirties. Glasses
askew, lips thin and dry.
Scrawny body lost in huge American prison fatigues.
"Gentlemen," said the captain, "I give you Obersturmbannfrihrer Karl
Adolf Eichmann, late of Amt Four-B-four, Gestapo, Number One Sixteen,
Kurfrirstenstrasse, Berlin. Herr Eichmann"--the captain switched to
perfect brilliant German--"these fellows need a few moments of your
time."
The Man of Oak sat down across from them. He looked straight ahead and
smelled faintly unpleasant.
"Cigarette, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer?" Leets asked.
The German shook his head almost imperceptibly, clasped his hands
before him on the table. Leets noted he had big hands, and that the
backs of them were spotted with freckles.
Leets lit up.
"I understand, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer," he said, speaking in his slow
German, "you've been uncooperative with our people."
"My duties were routine. I followed them explicitly. I did nothing
except my job. That is all I have to say," the German said.
Leets reached into his pocket, and removed something.
With a flick of his fingers, he set the draydel to spinning acrpss the
surface of the table. Impelled by its own momentum, it described a
lazy progress over the wood. Leets watched the man's eyes follow it.
"Your colleague Herr Repp left that for me at Aniage Elf. Now, dear
friend, you are going to tell me about Operation Nibelungen. When it
started, where it's headed, who its target is. You're going to tell me
the last secret. Or I'll find it out myself, and I'll find Repp. And
when I find Repp, I'll tell him only a little fib: I'll say, Eichmann
betrayed you, and let him go. Then, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, as well
you know, you are a very dead man from that second on. Herr Repp
guarantees
Roger leaned against the fender of the Jeep out in front of the
castle--castle? it was more like a big, fancy house!--enjoying the
freedom of the moment. No fun, the ride down, two raw nerves in back
for cargo. They'd jumped the Jeep while it was still rolling and
headed straight for the great doors, as if there were free money
inside, instead of some Kraut.
He popped a piece of spearmint into his mouth. He had no dreams of the
future and no memories of the past; he was determined to extract the
maximum pleasure of that exact instant. He worked the gum into
something soft. Sure was a nice day out. He assumed a Continental
grip on an imaginary racquet and slow-motioned through a dozen tops
ping approach shots to the background corner. The trick was to keep
your head down and follow through high. It was a shot he'd need to
own, lock, stock and barrel, if he hoped to stay with the Frank Bensons
of the world in the years to come.
And then he saw a woman.
She was just a silhouette preserved momentarily between the window
through which he glimpsed her and what must have been another window or
set of doors behind her. Just a profile, blurred, moving down a
corridor between wings of the castle, gone in a second.
Women! Here? It had been weeks since he'd pulled out of London and
that mix-up in Paris hadn't amounted to anything. Women. He explored
facets of the problem. Now what would women be doing here?
Wasn't this some kind of prison or something?
Still, that had definitely been-Jesus Christ!
The roar seemed to flatten him. He fell back in momentary confusion,
looking for the source of this outrage, to see a P-47 maybe fifty feet
above him flash past, more shadow than substance at over 400 miles an
hour.
He could see its prop wash suck at the trees, pulling a cloud of leaves
off them in its wake. It rolled majestically as it yanked its nose
up--crazy bastard, he was going to get in real trouble that way, Roger
thought-and he followed the fighter-bomber as it climbed.
He was dumb struck. The sky was jammed with planes. He'd noticed
contrails earlier, but the sky was always full of contrails on the
rare, clear European days.
Now, staring, he saw them jumbled, tangled, knotted even, tracing
corkscrews and barrels and loops and Immelmanns and stall-outs. He
could make out the planes themselves, fighters mostly, specks at the
head of each furry, swooping track. Must have been fifty, sixty. What
a show.
One last giant dogfight? Maybe the Germans had saved up for an aerial
Bulge, a last go, all their stuff in the air, jets, rockets, ME's,
Focke-Wulfs, and a Stuka or two if any were left, and all the
experimental stuff everybody said they were working on. One last
shoot-out at 25,000 feet: all guns blazing, take on the entire Eighth
Air Force, some kind of Gotterddmmerung, or maybe a crazy kamikaze
thing, like Japs, just crashing into their targets?
But if this were a battle, wouldn't there be puffs of flame up there,
and long jags of smoke from crashing ships, and wouldn't there be other
columns of smoke on the horizon from planes that had already gone
down?
Yes, there would.
This was--fun!
Another plane, a two-engine British job, howled overhead, slightly
higher than the Jug but just as loud. He ducked.
What the hell's going on? Rug wondered.
He looked about and saw nobody in the house. No guards, no officers,
nothing. He did notice a path off to one side in the trees and thought
to head out back, dig somebody up. The path turned quickly into a kind
of sidewalk, though of fine, tiny pebbles set between metal rails of
some sort. Very fancy, it reminded him of the kind of arrangements
he'd seen in Newport. He followed it through some tricky turns, and at
last found himself in some sort of garden, low hedges arranged like a
geometry problem around flower beds that were beginning to show signs
of waking up. Beyond lay a vast rolling carpet of grass and behind,
though shielded by a screen of tall, thin trees, was the castle. But
Roger picked up something more interesting immediately:
standing on the grass, by a bench of some sort, back turned, looking up
at the aerial circus, was a girl. A WAC or something.
He advanced warily, unsure whether she was an officer.
She was in some kind of uniform all right, but not an officer, for
there was no gleam at her collar. He stepped forward.
"Uh, pardon me, have you got any idea what's going on, miss?"
The girl turned. One of those clear, guileless Midwestern faces
organized around big eyes, blue, a pert nose and even freckles. A kind
of strawberry complexion, hues of pinkness, and it all made him think
of freshness, a kind of innocence.
Hey, would I like to pork that} he decided.
Then he noticed she was crying.
"Gee, what's wrong? Bad news, huh?"
She came into his arms--he could not believe his famous luck again--and
began to sob against his shoulder.
He held her close and tight, muttering, "Now, now," stroking her
hair.
She looked up, soft and blurred, and he thought she wanted a kiss and
so he pressed his lips into hers.
* * *
At last Eichmann spoke.
"What guarantees can you offer? Repp is very dangerous.
You insist that I betray him, or you'll let it be known I betrayed him.
Yet without a guarantee, the first possibility does not exist."
"We have a way of remembering our friends. We've that reputation,
don't we? Give us a chance to live up to it. That's all I can say."
"I'd need to disappear. Understand, it's not the Americans who
frighten me. It's Repp."
"I understand," said Leets.
"All right. I'll see what I can do."
"A bargain then, Eichmann for Repp?"
"I said I'd see."
"Eichmann for Repp. How that would sicken him."
He laughed.
"Herr Eichmann," Tony said, in better German than Leets's, "let us
proceed with our business."
The draydel had run out of energy, and sputtered to a stop, lurching
spastically on the table. Eichmann picked it up in his blunt
fingers--an anatomical oddity, hands so big on such a skinny man--and
began to talk.
"Operation Nibelungen: I was in on it from the beginning.
It was Pohl's actually, Pohl, of the Economic and Financial Office,
WVHA, but he brought me into it, and together we sold the Reichsfuhrer.
It was nothing personal, the business with the Jews, you understand
that.
It was just our way, our job. We had to do it. The policies were set
from the very top. We only did what we were--" "Get to the point,"
Leets instructed.
"Operation Nibelungen. The point of Operation Nibelungen is a Special
Action."
"A "Special Action'?"
"With a rifle."
"Special Action means murder."
"Call it what you will. It can be justified morally from a World
Historical perspective which--" "Who?" said Leets, surprising even
himself at how uninterested he sounded after so many months of sawing
on the same question.
"You must realize. I am not against the Jews. I respect and
understand them. I myself am a Zionist. I believe it would be best
for them to have their own country. All this was forced upon us by our
superiors--" "Who? When?"
"When, I cannot say. I was taken off the project and sent to Hungary
on special emergency assignment before the final planning took place.
But soon. If not already."
Leets said, "Who, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann?
For the last time, WHO?"
His yell seemed to startle the little man.
"No need to yell. Captain. I'm about to tell you."
"Who?"
"A child," Eichmann said.
"A six-year-old boy.
Named Michael Hirsczowicz. Now I think I might have one of those
cigarettes."
Roger put the tip of his tongue through the girl's lips.
She smashed him in the face, open hand.
"What?" he said.
"Hey, I don't get it."
"Fresh," she said.
"You kissed me} I just walked around the corner and here's these
lips."
"You made it dirty. You spoiled it."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She was knocking him out. He was in love, or
half in love at any rate.
"Look, I really didn't mean anything bad. It was just a friendly
gesture."
"Tongues are more than just friends," she said.
"Oh, well, you get carried away, is all. Hell, hell. My name's Rug,
Rug Evans. What's yours?"
"Nora."
"Well, Nora, how are you? Nice to meet you. Do you play tennis, by
any chance? Where'd you go to school?"
"Prairie View."
"Prairie View, yeah, think I heard of it. Women's school out west,
California, isn't it? A real good school, I hear."
"It's a high school in Des Moines. I doubt if you've heard of it. I
didn't even go to a college yet."
"Oh, yeah, well, college is pretty much a waste of time. Even Harvard,
where I go, is not really for serious people. Are you a WAC?"
"The Red Cross Women's Auxiliary."
"A civilian?"
"Yeah. But we're still supposed to call officers sir and all."
"Must be real interesting," he said.
"I hate it. It stinks. They watch you like a hawk. You never get to
do anything."
"Yeah, well, that's the service. Speaking of doing something, I was
wondering, you tied up or anything tonight?" Get the date first, then
worry about dumping
Leets and Outhwaithe.
"See, I don't know the area too well. I'mOSS--Office of Strategic
Services .. . high-level intelligence, that sort of thing. Anywhere
it's hot, that's where you'll find us. But I was wondering if you
could sort of--" "How can you think of that on a day like thist" "And
what's this day?" he finally asked her.
Eichmann smoked and explained.
"In the last days before the war, a wealthy, assimilated Warsaw Jew
named Josef Hirsczowicz seemed to convert to Zionism. Naturally, there
were ramifications."
Leets thought of just one of them: the shabby little office in London,
the old man Fischelson, and all the grim, dark, weeping women. And
Susan Isaacson, American, from Baltimore, Maryland, who'd lost her soul
there, or perhaps found it.
"We viewed this with some concern. First, we felt the Hirsczowicz
fortune to be ours, by right of biological superiority. Second, an
accumulation of capital such as this fellow's is not without its
influence. And that much money in the hands of Zionist agitators,
anarchists. Socialists, Communists, what have you, could create
considerable problems for us. Incidentally, Major, in this respect we
are not so much different from your own government, which, in the
Mideast at any rate, recognizes the World Jewish Conspir--" "Get on
with it," Tony said.
"Thus it was imperative that the man Hirsczowicz and his family and
heirs be added to the list of Warsaw intelligentsia marked for special
handling. And so it happened Eichmann left to their imaginations the
full meaning of the euphemism.
"But imagine our dismay and surprise," and here the German allowed
himself a prim, wicked smile, "when our accountants discovered in an
audit of the Bank Hirsczowicz that his fortune had disappeared.
Disappeared!
Vanished! A billion ziotys. Five hundred million Reichsmarks."
One hundred million bucks, thought Leets.
"Discreet inquiries were made. Naturally so large a sum cannot simply
become invisible. A hundred rumors were tracked, a thousand
interrogations launched.
Obergruppenfrihrer Pohl made it his special project. He was
experienced in financial matters and saw the power of the fortune. He
scoured Europe, when he was not busy running his concentration camp
empire. And finally, he had success. In the middle of 1944, a source
in Zurich was able to prove that the Jew had actually gotten his funds
into the country, to the Schweizerschaft Banksellschaft. And that he
had gotten something else out."
"The boy. The heir," said Tony.
"Yes and no. Again the Jew had been clever, very clever. The boy was
not the heir. The boy was to be provided for, of course, but the
fortune would not be his."
"Who would get it?" Leets asked.
"The Jews," said Eichmann.
"The Jews?"
"Yes. I told you the man was a Zionist. He had decided that his
people's only salvation lay in a Jewish state, an Israel. Privately, I
agree with him. Thus the money was held in escrow for several groups.
Zionist groups. Refugee groups. Propaganda outlets. All dedicated to
this idea of a new country."
"I see."
"But he was too clever, this Jew. Too clever by half.
He of course worried about the son."
"Any father would."
"And so he made an arrangement with one of the fiery young Zionists.
That the boy should be raised as one of them, as a first-generation
Israelite. And know nothing of the fortune. But the father was
terrified for the boy. And so he had written into the document for the
transfer of the money a special complication. He did it on the last
day, in an emotional state. We believe it to be a reenactment of one
of their rituals. Pidyon Haben.
The redemption of the firstborn son. May I have another cigarette,
please? Thank you. What does that say?
A Lucky Strike? Finding me has indeed been a lucky strike for you,
hasn't it?"
"Get on with it."
"The arrangement holds that the boy must survive the war. He is to be
delivered to the bank and identified by fingerprints. It made sense,
because the boy would be raised in Palestine, far from any battles. It
was only to make sure the boy didn't get somehow lost in a shuffle."
"But the war broke out," Leets added. In his mind he could see the
Zionists stuck in the middle of Switzerland, in the middle of Nazi
territory, with the boy who was the key to their future.
"And so they left him there."
"You have grasped the essence."
"Kill him and there's no money for the Jews."
"No. And this is how I was brought into it. I was considered an
expert in finding Jews."
"I see."
"I supervised the search team. It was not easy. It was very
difficult. An agent of ours, one Felix, operated under my direct
control. Painstakingly we tracked the rumors, the lies, the missing
trails."
"And again, success."
"He heard of a place, a convent, the Order of Saint Teresa, in the
canton of Appenzell in the foothills of the Alps, in northeastern
Switzerland. There were said to be Jews there, Jew children, whose
parents had somehow gotten them out. But the nuns were very
frightened.
Very secretive. It took us more weeks until .. . until this."
He held up the draydel.
"Felix got it from the caretaker, an alcoholic old man.
In exchange for a small sum of money. It's very old, unique. It had
been passed down in their family for generations, father to son. It
was identified by an inmate in the concentration establishment
Auschwitz, a former member of the Hirsczowicz household. It proved to
us the child was there. It made our operations feasible.
Both of them."
"Both?" said Leets, feeling his stomach begin to grow cold. Was there
some aspect they had no idea of, some part of it they'd not come
across, that was this very second beginning?
"There is another man, a German agent in Spain. A long-term chap. He
has wonderful papers. Authentic papers, in fact, and neighbors to
vouch for him and a whole set of references, a most impressive
documentation. All identifying him as Stepan Hirsczowicz. A cousin.
Long lost. The papers are quite real; they were taken from a real
Stepan Hirsczowicz, who died at Mauthausen."
Leets saw it now: the final twist.
"And so you get the money."
"Yes. Early on, the plan was to bring it straight into the Reich, a
matter of simple transfer, no difficulties.
But then we began to see how the war would turn out. It was the
Reichsfrihrer's idea, quite brilliant. All that money, clean,
untouched, money that had never been in the Reich, never been
associated with it. And he knew that after the war it could have its
uses. All kinds of uses. It would be for the SS men who had gotten
out, or were in hiding, or for this, or for that. It was a wonderful
opportunity. It was really wonderful."
And Leets understood how important it was to them:
he saw now how a modern state, as it died, could totally invest its
resources into the murder of one child. It wasn't astounding at all,
really; he felt no sense of anticlimax, of being let down.
He fingered the draydel: what a route it had traveled, what a long, sad
journey. From the father, Josef, to the boy, Michael: a symbol of a
father's love. It's all I can give you. I have no other, here. I
would give anything, everything, to save you, but I have only this.
Then it had gone to the caretaker, and then to the killers. To Felix
and then to this smarmy creep here in the room with them and then to
the big cheese Himmler, and Pohl's greasy little fingers had probably
gotten onto it. Then, finally, to Repp's cold hands. A great miracle
has happened.
"A bomb would be chancy, I suppose," said Outhwaithe.
"Any kind of elaborate commando mission difficult to mount in a neutral
country. Thus it's got to be one man, one good man."
"And there was a special problem that made Repp the inevitable
selection," Eichmann explained bloodlessly.
"The nuns keep the children in the cellar all the time."
"They must bring them out at night."
"For hal an hour in the courtyard at midnight.. ..
It's behind a wall. But a man with a rifle could reach it from the
mountain.
"There would be twenty-six of them, right? In all?"
"Yes, Captain."
"So he doesn't have to worry about hitting the right one."
"No, Major. That's the beauty of it. He doesn't have to know. He'll
kill them all."
"What do they call it? The gun, I mean."
"Vampir."
"Vampire," Leets said in English.
"They had great trouble with the weight. Vollmerhausen worked very
hard on the weight. It had to be light, because Repp had to carry it
around the mountain.
There were no roads."
"How did they solve it?"
"The technical aspects I'm not sure of. It has to do with the sun. He
exposes a plate to sunlight, and it makes the light-sensitive elements
more potent. Thus he needs less power, and can carry a smaller
battery. It's very ingenious."
"How much money will Repp get?" Tony asked.
"How did you know?" Eichmann said.
"Come now, we're not that stupid. If there's all that money at stake,
he's not going to be the only chap risking his neck and do it for the
pure ideological pleasure."
"He was coy. He pretended not to be interested. He said it was his
bequest to the fallen. The German fallen.
And so the Reichsfrihrer pressed him. He did not have to press
hard."
"How much?"
"A million. Million, U.S. If he succeeds, he gains the world."
He sat back.
"There. That's it. I sold you Repp. That's everything."
"Not quite. When?"
"I said I didn't know."
"You know," said Leets.
"Everything you've told us is meaningless unless you tell us when."
"I have violated every oath I ever took this afternoon."
"I don't give a fuck for your oaths. When? When?"
"It's a trump card. I want a letter, saying how helpful I've been.
Address it to the commandant here. Already, certain groups have been
sent back to a large PW camp, where surely they will be set free at
first convenience. I only want to go there. I've done no wrong."
"You were playing for this. To bring us all the way, except for this,
weren't you?"
The German officer gazed at him levelly.
"I'm not a stupid fellow either." He even had a pen and paper ready.
"I wouldn't," Tony said.
"We don't know what this bird's up to. We'll find out soon enough.
There's got to be records--" But Leets scrawled a brief note To Whom It
Concerned, testifying to the German's outstanding moral character. He
handed it over, signed, dated.
"Thank you," said Eichmann.
"Now: when?"
"A night when he can move with absolute freedom. A night when counter
moves are impossible. A night when nobody is thinking of war."
Leets stared at him.
Roger burst in, shrieking. He danced past the German, knocking him to
one side, and grabbed Leets up in a wild do-si-do and in a croaking
babble informed them the sky was full of airplanes, the booze was
gurgling, the laughter building.
"Reams. Reams," he cried.
Reams of what? Paper? Leets thought in confusion.
"I got a date," Roger shouted, "a real pretty girl."
"Roger," Leets yelled.
"It's over, fucking World War Number Two, over, they signed the
surrender at Rheims, we missed it on the road."
Leets looked beyond the boy to Eichmann, who sat, composed and grim,
and then beyond Eichmann, and out the door, and in the wall there was a
window. Tony was rising beside him urgently, calling for the MP to
take the German back, and Roger said he was in love, he was in love,
and out the window Leets noted the setting of the sun and the coming of
the German night.
 Repp came out of sleep fast: gunfire.
He rolled from the bed and moved quickly to the window. A glance at
his watch told him it was still before nine. Margareta, her blond hair
unkempt, one thin bare leg hanging out, stirred grumpily under the
covers.
Repp could see nothing in the bright light. The crackle of guns rubbed
raggedly against his ears again, a messy volley. A battle? He
recalled something about the German soldiers turning themselves in
today. Perhaps a few had decided on more honorable action, and war had
come at last to Konstanz. But then he realized what must be happening:
a cold finger pressed for just a second against his heart.
He snapped on the radio. Nothing on Radio Deutsch-land. Broadcast not
scheduled till noon. He fiddled with the dial, picking up excited
jabber in English and Italian, which he didn't understand.
Finally, he encountered a French-speaking station.
He knew the phrase from 1940. He'd seen it chalked on walls then, a
fantasy, a dream.
A nous la victoire.
To us, victory.
They were playing "The Marseillaise." He turned it off as Margareta
lifted her head, face splotchy from sleep. A breast, pink-tipped and
vague, swung free as she rose from the covers.
"What is it?" she asked.
"It's time to go," he said.
He was eight hours ahead of Leets.
Repp checked the mirror once again. Gazing back at him was a
prosperous, sleek civilian, freshly bathed and shaved, hair
brilliantined back, crisp carnation of breastpocket handkerchief, neat
tie on glossy white shirt under exquisitely tailored suit coat. He had
trouble recognizing this image as his own, the cheeks so rosy, the eyes
set in a pink bland face.
"You look like a cinema star," she said.
"I didn't realize how handsome you were."
Yet he could see the lights playing off his forehead where the sweat
had begun to accumulate in beads, high and moist. The border was
coming up, the nightmare passage.
"Repp. One last time," she said.
"Stay. Or get across and go somewhere safe. But best, stay with me.
There's some kind of future here, somewhere, I know there is.
Children even."
He sat down on the bed. He felt exhausted. He tried to press images
of prying border guards and intensive interrogations out of his mind.
He noted that his hands were trembling. He knew he had to go to the
toilet.
"Please, Repp. It's all over now. It's done, finished."
"All right," he said weakly.
"You'll stay?" she said.
"It's just too much. I'm not meant for this kind of thing, for playing
other people. I'm a soldier, not an actor."
"Oh, Repp. You make me so happy."
"There, there," he said.
"So gallant. So damned gallant, your generation. You had so much
responsibility, and you carried it so well.
Oh, God, I think I'm going to start crying again. Oh, Repp, I also
feel like laughing. It'll be fine, I know it will, it'll work out for
the best."
"I know it will too, Margareta," he said.
"Of course I do. It'll all be fine."
He went to her.
"I want you to know," he said, "I want you to know an extraordinary
thing. The most extraordinary thing in my life: that I love you."
She smiled, though crying.
She dabbed at her messy face.
"I look so awful. All wet, hair a mess. Please, this is so wonderful.
I've got to clean up. I don't want you to see me like this."
"You are beautiful," he said.
"I must clean up," she said, and turned and stepped for the door.
He shot her in the base of the skull and she pitched forward into the
hall. He himself felt awful, and he was trying to be kind.
She didn't know, he told himself. Not for one second did she know.
Now all the trails were dead and there were no links between Repp and
the private and Herr Peters.
Repp moved her to the bed and delicately put the sheets over her. He
threw the pistol in the cellar and washed his hands. He checked his
watch. It was almost nine.
He stepped bravely out, blinking in the sun.
The French private, glum because his comrades were drunkenly shooting
up central Konstanz, demanded Repp's passport. Repp could see the boy
was sullen, presumably stupid, and would therefore be inclined to
mistakes. He handed over the document, smiling mildly.
The boy recreated to a table where a sergeant sat while Repp waited
near the gate. Here, the German side, the arrangements were more
imposing, a concrete blockhouse, gun emplacements and sandbags. But
this formal military layout seemed a little idiotic now that it was
manned only by a few Frenchies rather than a platoon of German frontier
policemen.
"Mein Herr?"
Repp looked up. A French officer stood there.
"Yes? What is it?" Repp demanded.
"Could you step over here, please?" The man spoke bad German.
"Is something the matter?"
"This way, please."
Repp took a deep breath and followed him over.
"I have a train to catch. The noon train. To Zurich," he said.
"This will only take a moment."
"I'm a Swiss citizen. You have my passport."
"Yes. The first I've seen. What business did you have in Germany?"
"I'm a lawyer. It was a matter of getting a fellow's signature on a
document. In Tuttlingen."
"And how was Tuttlingen?"
"Loud. The Americans came. There was a battle."
"At the bridge, yes."
"It was very frightening."
"How did you get from Konstanz to Tuttlingen?"
"I hired a private car."
"I thought petrol was all but impossible to find."
"The man I hired took care of that. I paid a fortune, but I don't know
anything about it."
"Why do you look so uneasy?"
Repp realized he wasn't doing well. He thought his heart would burst
or shatter in his chest. He tried not to swallow or blink.
"I don't care to miss my train, Herr Hauptmann."
"Use the French, please. Capitaine."
Repp said the French word awkwardly.
"Yes, thanks."
Repp knew he'd been a hair from calling the man Sturmbannfrihrer, the
SS word.
"May I go now?"
"And what's your rush? Hurrying to get to the wonderful Swiss
climbing?"
"There are avalanches this time of year, Captain."
The captain smiled.
"One other thing. I notice a curious designation on your passport.
It's the first Swiss one I've seen. Here, it says "R-A." What can
that mean?"
Repp swallowed.
"It's an administrative category. I know nothing about it."
"It means "Race--Aryan," doesn't it?"
"Yes."
"I didn't know you Swiss went in for that sort of thing."
"When you are a little country next to a big country, you try and make
the big country happy."
"Yes. Well, the big country is not too happy these days."
How much longer would this last?
"But the Swiss are. The Swiss win every war, don't they?"
"I suppose so, sir," said Repp. His mouth tasted sour.
"Go on. This is ridiculous. Pass, get out of here."
"Yes, sir," Repp said, and scurried off.
It was like a sudden transit to wonderland: People pink and gay,
crowding, chunky, prosperous. Just a few miles, a fence, a bitter
officer overzealously guarding his gate and this, a whole other
world--Kreuzlingen, Konstanz's Swiss suburb. Repp struggled in the
dangerous intoxication of it. He tried to locate deep within himself a
primordial sense of righteousness, or abiding moral discontent. But he
was too bedazzled by surface charms:
goods brightly wrapped in shop windows, chocolates and all kinds of
foods, beautifully dressed women who were totally oblivious of their
appearance, fat kiddies, banners flapping out of windows, private autos
purring down the street. A holiday air prevailed: had he blundered
into some quaint Swiss festival?
No, the Swiss were celebrating war's end too. Repp darkened as this
knowledge made itself clear to him. A fat mama with two children
seemed to materialize out of the crowd along the sidewalk.
"Isn't it wonderful, mein Herri No more killing. The war is finally
done."
"Yes, wonderful," he agreed.
They had no right. They weren't a part of it. They had not won a
victory, they had not suffered a defeat. They had merely profited. It
made him sick, but though he felt like a pariah among them, he pressed
ahead, several blocks down the Hauptstrasse, into Kreuzlingen's
commercial center, then took the Bahnhofstrasse toward the station. He
could see it ahead, not a huge place like the Berlin or the Munich
monstrosities before the war, but prepossessing on its own scale, with
glassed-in roof.
Glass!
All that unbroken glass, glittering whitely among the metal girders,
acres of it. He blinked stupidly. Were there trains there that
actually chugged through a placid countryside without fear of American
or English gangsters swooping down to rain death from the sky? Almost
in answer to this question, a whistle shrieked and a puff of white
smoke rose.
A block yet from the Bahnhof itself, he arrived at an open-air cafe,
the Cafe Munchen.
They'll change that name by noon, he thought.
A few tables were unoccupied. Repp chose one and sat down.
A waiter appeared, a man in white smock with attentive eyes.
"Mein Herr?"
"Ah," a little startled, "coffee, I think," almost having said "real
coffee." The man withdrew instantly and reappeared in seconds with a
small steamy cup.
Repp sat with it, letting it cool. He wished he could stop feeling
nervous. He wished he could stop thinking about Margareta. All the
hard business was over, why couldn't he relax? Yet he could not seem
to settle down.
So many of the little things of the world seemed off: the
Swiss were fatter, cheerier, their streets cleaner, their cars shinier.
It was impossible to believe that with the money he'd be a part of all
this. He could have a black shiny car and dress in a suit like this
and have a thousand white shirts. He could have ten Homburgs, two
hundred ties, a place in the country. He could have all that. What
lay ahead was only the operation itself, and that was what he was best
at.
He tried not to think of After. It would come when it came. If you
looked too far ahead you got in trouble, he knew for a fact. Now,
there was only room for the operation.
Across the street, he saw a small park, green under arched elms, and in
it benches and gym apparatus for children. Strange that it was so
green so early; but then, was it early? What was the date? He'd been
keyed to the surrender, not the date. He thought hard: he knew he'd
crossed the bridge into Konstanz May 4; then he'd been sealed up with
Margareta--how long? It seemed a month. No, only three days; today
then was May 7. Yet the pale sun had urged bud growth out of the trees
and lay in pools on the grass, which itself was green and not the
thatchy stuff of earlier.
In the park, two blond children played on the teeter-totter. Repp
watched them idly. Surely they were Swiss:
but for just a moment he saw them as German. Uncharacteristically, he
began to feel morbid and sentimental about children. Today of all
days. Yet these two beauties--real Aryan stock, chubby,
red-cheeked--really represented something to him: they were what might
have been. We tried to give you a clean, perfect world, he told them.
That awesome responsibility--a major cleaning action,
Grossauberungsaktionen--had fallen to his generation. Hard, difficult
work. But necessary. And so close, so damned close! It filled him
with bitterness.
So much accomplished, thenpffi, gone up in smoke. The big Jews had
probably finally stopped it. Repp almost wept.
"A pretty boy and girl, eh, Herr Peters?"
Repp turned. Was this Felix? He hadn't used the approach code. Repp
looked at a man about his own age, with acne-pitted face, in a
pinstriped suit. Felix? Yes, Repp had been shown a picture of the
same fellow in Berlin. Felix was just the code name; he was really a
Sturmbannfuhrer Ernst Dorfman of Amt Via, SD Foreign Intelligence.
"Hansel and Gretel," said Felix.
"A fairy tale."
"Yes, beauties," agreed Repp.
"May I sit?"
Repp nodded coldly.
"Oh. Forgive my manners: did you get the Tuttlingen Signature?"
"Without difficulty."
"Excellent." Felix smiled, and then confided, "A silly game, no? Like
a novel. In Berlin, they think business like that is important." His
cool eyes showed amusement.
But the man's cavalier attitude bothered Repp.
"And how was the trip?"
"Not without difficulties."
"Yet you made good time."
"The schedule was designed around maximum time allowances. I came
through in minimum."
"And how was the woman?"
"Fine," he said.
"Yes, I'll bet you had pleasant hours with that one.
She was pointed out to me once. You aces, you always get to go
first-class, don't you?"
"The car?" Repp asked.
"Christ, you're a fire breather Still trying to make Standartenfuhrer,
eh? But this way."
Repp did not at all like to hear the word Standartenfuhrer thrown so
casually into a public conversation, but there were in fact no other
customers within earshot of the table. He stood with Felix and pulled
some money out of his pocket. But he had no idea how much to leave.
"Two francs would do nicely, Herr Peters," Felix said.
Repp stared stupidly at the strange coins in his hand.
Now what the hell? Finally, he dumped two of the big ones on the table
and followed Felix.
"That's quite a tip you left the fellow, Herr Peters," said Felix.
"He can send a son to Kadettenanstalt on it."
They crossed the street and walked along some shop fronts and then
turned down a smaller street. An Opel, black, pre-war, gunned into
life. Its driver turned as they approached.
Repp got in the back.
"Herr Peters, my associate, Herr Schultz."
He was a young man, early twenties, with eager eyes and an open
smile.
"Hello, hello," said Repp.
"Sir, I was with SS-Wiking in Russia before I was wounded. We all
heard about you."
"Thanks," said Repp.
"How far to Appenzell?"
"Three hours. We've got plenty of time. You'd best try and relax."
They pulled from the curb and in minutes Schultz had them out of the
town. They took Road No. 13 south, following the coast of the
Bodensee. It shimmered off to the left, its horizon lost in haze,
while on the right tidy farms were set far back from the road on
rolling hills.
Occasionally Repp would see a vineyard or a neatly tended orchard. They
soon began to pass through little coastal towns, Miinsterlingen with
its Benedictine nunnery, and Romanshorn, a larger place, with a ferry
and boatyards; beyond, a fine view of the Appenzell Alps, blue and
brooding, was disclosed; and then Arbon, which boasted a castle and a
fancy old church-"The Swiss could do with an autobahn," said Felix.
"Eh?" said Repp, blinking.
"An autobahn. These roads are too narrow. Very funny, the Swiss, they
won't spend a penny unless they have to. No grand public buildings.
Not interested in politics at all, or philosophy."
"I saw them dancing in the streets," said Repp, "because the war was
over."
"Because the markets will be open, rather," said Felix, "and they can
go back to being the clearinghouse of nations. They do not believe in
anything except francs.
Not idealists like us."
"I assume we can chat as if we are at a reception following a piano
concert because all the necessary details have been attended to," Repp
said.
"Of course, Herr Peters," said Felix.
"The weapon is--" "Still in its case. Unopened. As per
instructions."
"You're not known to British or American Intelligence?"
"Oh, I'm known. Everybody in Switzerland knows everybody else. But as
of the thirtieth I became uninteresting to them. They expected me to
politely put a bullet through my skull. They'd rather pay attention to
their new enemies, the Russians. That's where all the activity is now.
I'm a free man."
"But you were nevertheless cautious in your preparations?"
"Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, an incautious man does not last any longer
in my profession than in yours. And I've lasted since 1935. Here,
Lisbon, Madrid during the Civil War, a time in Dublin. Buenos Aires.
I'm quite skilled. Do you want details? None of our part of the
operation was set up through code channels; rather it was all done via
hand-carried instructions, different couriers, different routes.
Lately, I haven't trusted the code machines. And I had a ticket to
B.A. out of Zurich last Saturday. Which I took. I got as far as
Lisbon, where another agent took my place. I returned, via plane to
Italy and then train through the Brenner Pass. I haven't been in
Zurich for nearly a week. We've been staying in the Hotel Helvetia in
Kreuzlingen, on Swiss passports such as yours. All right?"
"My apologies," said Repp.
Repp lit a cigarette. He noticed that they'd turned inland. There was
no more water to be seen and now, ahead through the windshield, the
Alps seemed to bulk up majestically, much nearer than when first he'd
observed them.
"The last town was Rorschach, Herr Peters," said the young driver.
"Now we're headed toward St. Gallen, and then to Appenzell."
"I see," said Repp.
"Pretty, the mountains, no?" said Felix.
"Yes. Though I'm not from mountainous territory. I prefer the woods.
How much further in time?"
"Two hours, sir," said the driver. Repp saw his warm eyes in the
mirror as the young man peeked at him.
"I think I ought to grab some sleep. Tonight'll be a long one."
"A good idea," said Felix, but Repp had already dozed off into quick
and dreamless sleep.
"Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer."
He awakened roughly. The driver was shaking him.
He could see that the car was inside something.
"We're here. We're here."
Repp came fully awake. He felt much better now.
The car was in a barn--he smelled hay and cows and manure. Felix, in
the corner, labored over something, a trunk, Repp thought.
"Vampir?"
"Yes."
"Good."
Repp walked to the barn door, which was ajar, and looked out. They
were partially up a mountain, at the very highest level of cultivation.
He looked down across a slope of carefully tended fields and meadows
and could see the main road several miles away.
"It seems desolate enough," he said.
"Yes, owned by an old couple. We bought it from them at an outrageous
price. I tell you, I never worked an operation with such a budget. We
used to have to account for every paper clip. Now: you need a farm,
you buy a farm! Somebody sure wants those little Jew babies dead."
Repp walked out of the barn and around its corner, to follow the slope
upward. The fields ended abruptly a few hundred meters beyond, giving
way to forest, which mantled the rest of the bulk of the mountain,
softening its steepness and size. Yet he still knew he was in for some
exercise. The best estimates, based on aerial survey photos, put the
distance between himself and the valley of the Appenzell convent
roughly twenty kilometers, rough ground through mountain forest the
whole way, up one side of it, around, and then down the other.
He flipped his wrist over to check his watch: 2:35 p.m.
Another six or seven hours till nightfall.
Repp shook the lethargy out of his bones. He had some walking to do,
with Vampir along for the ride. He calculated at least five hours on
the march, which would get him to his shooting position by twilight:
vitally important.
He needed at least a glimpse of the buildings in the light so that he
could orient himself and calculate allowances on his field of fire, the
limits to his killing zone.
Repp stabbed out his cigarette and returned inside.
He took off the tie, threw it in the car, and peeled off the jacket,
folding it neatly. He changed into his mountain boots, a pair of
green-twill drill trousers and a khaki shirt. Then he put on the Tiger
jacket, the new one, from the workshops at Dachau, its crisp patterns,
green on paler green, necked with brown and black. But Repp had vanity
too: against regulations, he'd indulged in one of the traditions of the
Waffen SS and had the German eagle and swastika sewn onto his left
sleeve.
Against whose regulations? he wondered. For now not only did he
represent the Waffen SS, he was the Waffen SS: he was what remained of
thirty-eight divisions and nearly half a million men, heroes like Max
Seela and Panzer Meyer and Max Simon and Fritz Christen and Sepp
Dietrich and Theodor Eicke; and Totenkopf, and Das Reich and Polzei and
Liebstandarte and Wiking and Germania and Hohenstauffen and Nord and
Prinz Eugen, the divisions themselves, Frundsberg and Hitlerjugend:
gone, all gone, under the earth or in cages waiting to be hanged by
Russians or Americans:
he alone was left of this army of crusaders, he was chief of staff and
intelligence and logistics and, most important, the men, the dead men.
It was an immense legacy, yet its heaviness pleased him. Better me
than most. I can do it. A simple thing now, move and shoot.
After Russia all things have seemed easy, and this last mission will be
easiest of all.
"Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer?" The young driver stood looking at him as
he snapped the last of the buttons.
"Yes?"
"Sir, wouldn't it be safer to travel in civilian clothes, in hiker's
kit? That way, if--" "No matter what I'm wearing, I'll have that"--he
pointed to a table, on which Felix now had arranged the weapon
components, gleaming with oil--"which no hiker would carry. But I
won't run into anybody. Dense forest, high in the mountains, far from
climbing and hiking trails. And this is a day of celebration, people
everywhere are dancing, drinking, making love. They won't be poking
about."
"But the boy has a good point," called Felix, "after all--" "And
finally, this is no SD operation. It's the last job of
Totenkopfdivision, of the Waffen SS. I'm no assassin, gone to murder.
I'm an officer, a soldier. This is a battle.
And so I'll wear my uniform."
"Well," said Felix wearily, "it's your funeral, not ours."
"No," said Repp.
"It won't be my funeral."
He went over; he could see smudge marks from Felix's fingers on the
sheen of the cool, oily metal of the rifle components; these somehow
bothered him.
"Of course it has not been opened until just now?"
He knew Felix was giving the driver a look of disbelief, but he heard
the voice ring out, though without conviction, "Just as we were
instructed."
Repp assembled the rifle quickly, threading the gas piston, operating
handle and spring guide into the receiver, inserting the bolt cam ming
and locking units, forcing the pin into the hinge at the trigger unit
pivot, and locking the whole together. It took seconds. Then, without
ceremony, he loaded each of the six magazines, thirty rounds apiece,
with the special subsonic ammunition with the spherical bullet heads.
He set the rifle and clips aside, and checked off the connections and
wiring in the electro-optical pack. Finally, after examining it
closely for defects and finding none, he locked the night scope itself
with its infrared lamp to the zf.4 mount on the receiver of the STG-44,
using the special wrench.
Turning the bulky weapon sideways, he edged a magazine into the
housing, feeling it fit into the tolerances;
then with a sharp slap from the heel of his palm he drove the magazine
home, hearing it snap in as the spring catch hooked.
"You look like a doctor getting ready to operate," said Felix.
"It's just a tool, that's all, a modified rifle," Repp responded,
uneasy at the man's apparent awe of the equipment.
"Now help me with this damned thing."
He put on the battle harness, with canteen and pouches for the
magazines, and over that fitted the instrument rack. Felix and the
youngster helped lift the thing into position, and he stepped into it
like a coat, pulling the straps tight. He stepped away from them,
taking the full weight.
"Christ, that's a heavy bastard. Will you make it?"
asked Felix.
"I'll make it all right," said Repp grimly, as he looped the sling on
the rifle over his shoulder. One last glance at his watch; it was 2:45
p.m.
"Sir?" The driver. He held something bright out.
"For you. For afterward."
Repp took it: Swiss chocolate, wrapped in green foil.
"Thanks. Breakfast. A good idea." He dropped it in the pocket of the
Tiger coat, then stepped away from the table, taking the full heft of
the rifle for the first time. He felt the blood drain from his face
with the effort. A hand touched his shoulder.
"Are you all right?" Felix asked.
"And if I'm not, you'll go?" Repp said.
"No, I'm fine, just have to get used to the weight. I've been living
too soft lately."
"Too many Frauleins," said the irritating Felix.
Repp left the barn, into the sunlight, blinking. Al 7
ready he could sense his body growing used to the weight.
Quickly the trees swallowed Repp. He moved among them in plunging,
deliberate strides, a manifesto of purposeful ness
But already the straps cut into him. Sweat broke out on his skin. His
muscles became warm and fluid in the effort and he knew--from
Russia--that if one pushed hard enough, if one had enough resolve,
enough need, enough concentration, one reached a stage beyond pain,
where great feats of endurance and stamina were possible. Repp knew he
needed greatness today; he needed everything he had, and then more, and
he was prepared to offer it. He was quite cheerful at this stage, full
of confidence, hungry for the test, alert and content.
He forced his way through the underbrush, not looking back at all. He
knew that higher, where the air was thinner, this rough new forest of
elm and oak and a thousand tangles would give way to an ancient one of
virgin pine, somewhat like the interior of the Schwarzwald.
The travel would be much easier then, through solemn ranks of trees on
pine-needle-packed dust which would billow up in great clouds, catching
in the slanting sunlight as he rushed along. But that was hours away
still; now, only this thick green stuff, sticky with sap and gum, every
step of the way urging him to slow. He felt himself moving through
screens and curtains, each one yielding finally to another; the
visibility was limited and the air moist and close. The leaves were
all wet; steam seemed to rise here and there. He felt he was in
jungle.
But he knew he'd be all right if he just stuck to his compass bearing,
ignoring the paths he now and then passed, leaping over them, feeling
clean each time he avoided their temptation. He aimed to reach the
spine of the mountain and there stick to it for a long session of
even-keel walking, before dipping down on the other side. He'd begin
the descent long before reaching the severe peak that loomed above the
timberline 5,000 meters or more.
He forged ahead, fighting the increase in the incline, sidestepping
where possible, climbing over where not, the clumps of rocks that began
to sprout in his way. As he rose along the mountain the forest began a
gradual change; he almost didn't notice it and could pick no one moment
when it had one character and another when it had a different one; or
perhaps a cloud, far above, had sealed off the sun. At any rate, it
ceased soon to be a jungle; the trees, though more majestic, were
farther apart; denseness gave way to longer, gloomier perspectives;
that sense of tropical green light, opaque chlorophyll in the sun,
vanished in a darker pall. He felt as if he were in a cellar, clammy
cool, tubed and catacombed, a jumble of ambiguous shadows, pools of
abstract blackness, sheer thrusts of light at unexpected points where a
gap in the canopy admitted the sun. The trees grew huge and gnarled.
The undergrowth remained but now it fought its way through a carpet of
decomposition, matted leaves, vegetable matter returning to the gunk of
creation. There was a splendor in this dark vision, but Repp was in no
frame of mind to enjoy it. He concentrated on movement, on pace,
though once in a while reached with relief a flatter place where the
mountain itself seemed to pause in its race upward.
In one such he himself seized a moment for rest. He was alone in the
trees. He could hear his own breathing, ragged and forced, in the
gloom. He was uncomfortably warm. He still hadn't reached pines.
Nothing seemed familiar; it was like no forest he knew and he knew
plenty of forests. He actually wished he'd hear a bird hoot or an
animal cry: sign of some animate thing. His eyes scanned ahead: only
massed-together trunks, white or gray scars of rocks standing out among
them, some mossy and dull, and utter silence. The rifle sling was taut
against his shoulder and the straps from the pack knifed deeply into
him. He ignored a dozen or so other small agonies--scratches, a
twisted ankle, sore joints, the beginnings of a cramp--but the straps
really bothered him. Yet he knew to fuss with the damned thing now
would be a mistake. He bent and tried to get the thing higher on him,
so as to carry it more with body than with shoulders. Painful as it
was, he took some sustenance in remembering how close they'd been to
going operational at over fifty kilos. Under those conditions he'd be
exhausted now. That strange little geek Hans the Kike really got the
job done: the man deserved a medal. Right now Hans the Kike was a
bigger hero to Repp than any of them. Thank God the Germans could
produce men like him.
Wearily, he began his march again. The rocks had become quite
troublesome by now, and he had to pick his way through defiles and up
sudden smooth slopes.
At one point he came even with a break in the trees and could see out:
in the far distance a kind of blue haze.
Actually, since he was facing north, and visibility was good, it might
actually be Germany he could see. But what difference did it make? He
pushed himself on.
Ahead, nothing but the steady rise of the mountain, blanketed in trees
and dead leaves and scrawny bracken and thistles. No pines yet, not
easy travel. He feared he was losing time. He didn't even want to
stop for water, though his throat was parched. His boots occasionally
slipped in the treacherous footing and once he went down, badly banging
a knee on a stone. It throbbed steadily. He felt also as though he
had a fever. He felt unnaturally hot. He'd imagined it would be much
cooler up here. Why was it so warm?
Where was he going? Did he even know? Yes, he knew. Wirfahren nach
Polen um Juden zu verschlen. He was going to Poland to beat up the
Jews. He'd seen it chalked on the sides of the troop trains in 1939,
next to grotesque profiles of heavy kike faces, beaked nose, primitive
jaws, almost fish like a horrible image. He was going to Switzerland
to beat up the Jews: it was the same thing, the same process, the same
war. He was going to beat up Jews.
The pain in his shoulders increased. He ought to slow or even rest,
but he knew he couldn't. He was obsessed with failing light. If he
didn't get there before dark he was lost.
He was going to beat up some Jews.
Jews.
You killed them. Messy, disturbing work. No one liked it, and in
Berlin they were wise enough to see that those few who did should not
have been on the firing line. It was a responsibility, a trust, a
commitment to the future.
Repp had asked for the special duty.
He'd been wounded after Demyansk and though the wound wasn!t serious--a
crease across the thigh, healing quickly--his blood count was so low,
they had wanted to put him on less rigorous duty. But Repp wanted to
be a part of the other business, the other war.
It was simple duty: no one forced him, and he did not enjoy it. It was
simply part of the job, a bad part, but one had to get through the bad
parts too.
The day that swam to his mind now was in October, 1942, at Dubno
Airport in Volhynian Province in the Generalgou'vernement. Why this
day? It was not so terribly different from most days. Perhaps it was
the cigarette and the girl, or more precisely the odd congruence of the
cigarette and the girl.
It was a Siberia. It tasted wonderful, filling his head with a most
pleasant buzz. He was only then learning of the joys of these fierce
Russian things that tasted like burning villages and left him just a
bit dizzy. He sat at the edge of a pit on a cool sunny day. Everybody
was being very kind, because the business could get messy and difficult
and hard on everyone. But today things were going quite nicely. A lot
of people were around, civilians, relaxing soldiers, some with cameras,
smiling, security policemen.
The gun across his legs was a Steyr-Solothurn, designated an MP-34. It
was a wonderful old weapon, beautifully crafted though quite heavy. It
had a fine wood stock and a perforated barrel and a horizontal magazine
feed system. Repp loved it: the Mercedes-Benz of machine pistols, too
elegant and precise for wartime production.
The barrel had finally cooled. He nodded to a black-uniformed security
policeman. The man disappeared behind a bulwark of earth that had been
gouged out to form the pit, and Repp for just a second was alone with
his morning's work: there must have been five hundred of them by that
time, filling half the excavation, most of them lifeless, though a cry
would now and then rise. They did not look so bad; he'd seen many
worse bodies on the Eastern front, their guts blown out, shit and legs
and shattered skulls all over the place;
these people were neatly slumbering, though there was a great deal of
blood.
The policemen got another group into the pit. An old man with a child,
a mother and father and several young children. The mother was
crooning to them, but the father did not seem to be much help. He
looked terribly scared and could hardly walk. The children were
confused.
They were talking that infernal language of theirs, almost a German
dialect, yet hideously deformed, like so many things German they
touched. Yet Repp could not hate them, naked women and men and
children, walking daintily into the mud, as though they wanted to keep
their feet clean. There were several other women, the last of them a
girl in her twenties, young and dark and quite pretty.
As Repp wearily stood, hoisting the gun up with him, he heard the young
girl say, to no one in particular, "Twenty-three years old."
What a remarkable thing to say! He thought about it later. Curious:
what had she meant? I'm too young to die? Well, everybody's too young
to die, miss.
Repp engaged the bolt, braced the weapon tightly against his ribs, and
fired. The bullets thudded neatly across the bare backs and they fell
quivering. They lay,
one or two convulsing. It was odd: you never saw the bullets hit or
the blood spurt and yet before they were still they seemed doused with
it, red, thin, pouring from every orifice. A child moved again,
moaned. Repp fingered the selection switch back to single shot and
fired, once, into the skull, which broke apart.
Then he changed magazines.
Everybody was happy when Repp did the shooting.
He was quick and efficient. He didn't make mistakes or become morose
after a while as so many of the others did. He even came to believe
that it was best for the Jews too.
"Better me," he said later that day, drinking coffee, "than some
butcher."
Repp saw light ahead. At that same moment a new sensation became
apparent to him. He was moving without trouble, through clean, flat
forest floor. He'd reached the high virgin forest. He rushed on to
the light.
He stood at the crest, amid pine and fir, in cool air. He looked
about, his eyes tracing the ridge he was on to a peak, stony and
remote. Across the way, he could see other mountains, their shapes
softened in trees, and beyond that the true Alps, snowy and heroic.
But Repp's vision was drawn downward. His eyes followed the carpet of
forest sliding away for thousands of feet down the slope of the
mountain, until finally it gave way to cultivated land, checker boarded
but much of it green, the Sitter Valley in the Canton of Appenzell. He
could not see the town--it was in another leg of the valley--but there
was the convent, a medieval church, high-roofed with two domed steeples
and a jumble of other subsidiary buildings, walled off from the
world.
He could see the courtyard from here too.
He knelt swiftly and peeled the rifle from his shoulder.
He braced it on the bipod and stood for just a moment, freed at last
from a part of the burden, though of course the bulky pack on his
shoulders still hurt. But then he was back down, sliding the hatch off
the opaque face of the Vampir apparatus. He saw the light strike it.
Did it glitter, seem to come alive; or was that his imagination?
Whatever, Obersturmbannfrihrer Repp allowed himself a smile. He had
quite a distance still to go, but downhill, through the virgin pine,
and he knew he'd make a shooting position well before dark.
 He's already there," said Tony.
"On the mountain.
Over the convent. With Vampir."
"Yeah," said Leets, tiredly. He sat back, put his feet up on the table
and with two fingers pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Christ, I've got a headache," he said.
Beyond, music lifted, American, popular, from off the Armed Forces net.
He could hear laughter, the sound of women's voices. Women? Here?
Laying it on a bit thick, weren't they?
"We could call the Swiss police," said Roger brightly.
"They could get some people out there and warn the--" "No lines," said
Tony, "not in the middle of a war.
End of a war. Whatever. You can't just ring up the operator, eh?"
"Okay, okay," said Roger quickly, "here's what, I got it, I got it,
we'll radio OSS in Bern or Zurich. They could get in contact with the
Swiss police. There's just a chance that--" "There's no chance at
all," said Leets.
"We are now in the middle of the biggest celebration in three
thousand-odd years of European history. They knew all along."
"I suppose we can rationalize our failure," said Tony.
"We could argue that it's really none of our business:
one lone German criminal and some stateless Jews in neutral territory.
We did give it a very good effort. Nobody can say we didn't try."
"Anybody got any aspirin?" Leets asked grumpily.
"Jesus, it sounds like a goddamned party out there. I keep hearing
women. Are there women out there, Roger?"
"Some Red Cross girls," Roger said.
"Look, another thing we could try is the legation. There's bound to be
a night duty officer. Now he could--" "I sure could stand to get
laid," Leets said.
"I haven't gotten laid since--" he trailed off.
"And of course there's a political dimension to be considered too,"
said Tony.
"All that money going to Zionists. It seems quite possible that some
of those funds might be diverted into ends other than those best for
King and country, eh? Let's fold up here and go find ourselves a pint,
and enjoy the celebration."
"Captain, we--" "All right, Roger."
"Captain, we can't just--" "All right, Roger," he said.
"Boy, do I have a headache.
I always knew this would happen. Right from the start. I could feel
it, I knew it was in the cards. Goddamn it."
"I suppose I did too," said Tony, rising wearily.
"It certainly has got dark fast, hasn't it?"
"What're you guys talking about?" Roger asked, fearing the answer.
"Roger, go get the Jeep," said Tony.
"And tell me please where the bloody phone is in this mausoleum."
"Hey, what--" "Roger," Leets finally explained, "it's come down to us.
You, me. Tony. Only way. Go get the Jeep."
"We can never drive there," said Roger.
"We're hundreds of miles away. It's almost eight. Not that far in so
short--" "We can probably make it to Nuremberg in two hours. Then, if
we're lucky, real lucky, we can promote an airplane. Then--" "Jesus,
what is this, dreamland? We'd have to get landing clearances, visas,
stuff like that. Permission from the Swiss. Find another car on the
ground. Drive to, what was it, Applewell or whatever, then find this
place.
Before midnight. That's the craziest thing I--" "No," Leets said, "no
cars, no visas, no maps. We jump in. Like Normandy, like Varsity,
like Aniage Elf."
"Where is that damned telephone?" said Tony.
Tony found his phone--a whole abandoned switchboard full of them, in
fact--in the great monumental stairwell around which Schloss
Pommersfelden was built. But the space began to fill with people,
drawn out of offices and billets, or drawn off the road by the blazing
lights. It was one of those rare nights when no one wanted to be
alone; no one was moody or unhappy. A future had just opened up for
them.
Women began to appear. From where? Wasn't this place really a kind of
prison? Red Cross girls, newspaper correspondents, WAC's, a few
British nurses, some German women even. The stairwell jammed up with
flesh. Everybody was rubbing, grinding, bumping, stroking.
Liquor, looted from somewhere in the castle, began to appear in heroic
quantities. Nobody had time for glasses; one-hundred-year-old Rhine
wines in black dusty bottles were sucked down like Cokes by GI's. A
radio provided music. Dog-faces and generals rubbed shoulders in
crowded orbits around the girls. Leets thought he heard the German
officers singing in the detention wing--something schmaltzy and
sentimental in counterpoint to the Big Band jangle from the radio.
A girl kissed Leets. He could feel her tits squash flat against his
chest. She put a boozy tongue in his ear and whispered something
specific and began to tug at him, and then someone ripped her away.
Meanwhile, Tony worked the phone. Leets could not help but hear.
"I say." Tony especially the stage Englishman^ David Niven, for
Christ's sake.
"Major Outhwaithe here, his Majesty's Royal Fusiliers, hello, hello, is
this Nuremberg, Signal Corps, could you talk up, please, yes, much
better, I'm told a British Mosquito squadron is about, at the airfield
of course, can you <Msibly buzz me through, old fellow, must be an Air
Officer Commanding about, no, no, English chap, funny talker like me,
right, Limey, at least a group captain, what you chaps would call a
colonel, yes, it sounds like a lovely party, we're having quite a one
at this end ourselves, but do you think you could arouse Group Captain
Manville? I see, yes, pity, then is it possible you could patch me
through to that bunch then, yes, R.A.F, yes, hello, hello, are you
there, Group Captain Manville? Yes, another Brit, Outhwaithe, of
Mi-six, or SOE actually, you're not Sara Finchley's cousin, ah, yes,
thought so, believe I laid eyes on you in '37 at Henley, the regatta,
you were the cox 9
swam in the number-two boat, yes, bit of a hero, weren't you, Magdalen
man, eh? and didn't you football as well, thought so, no, not
Magdalen, Christ Church, '30, languages, got me into this spy business,
yes, cushy, I agree, a few times, France, scratches though, yes,
wonderful it's over, but I've heard Labour will win the next general,
boot poor Winston out on his arse, yes, drinks awfully, heard the same
myself, stay in? Good God, now?
done my bit, time to get back though it'll be all different, every
little thing'll have changed for the worse though I fancy in a year or
so or ten or twenty, we'll look back on all this and think it great
fun, highlight of our days, though right now it seems bleak enough,
yes, sad in a way that it's over, they were mighty days, weren't they?
and how is dear Sara, really, that common little Welshman Jones, Ives,
Ives, both legs, she's marrying him anyway? why, how splendid, sounds
like a novel, Arnhem, heard it was a throw of the dice all the way, Red
Devil, those were brave lads, those were, make the rest of us look like
sodders, quite a show, quite a show, Frost's adjutant? and how is
Johnny? glad to be free, I'll bet, now, by the way, Group Captain,
Tom, Tom is it? Tony here, yes, Antony, a major, they weren't so
generous with the rank in our backwash department of the war, hope it
doesn't hold me back after I'm de mobbed no telling how the records
will count, yes, anyway, now, Tom, dear fellow, I'm in a bit of a
pinch, yes, not a real bother, but time-consuming nevertheless, need an
airplane, a Mosquito actually, yes, good ship, the Mossie--" Tony
looked up at Leets, covered the speaker and said, "The beggar's
completely sozzled," and returned without missing a beat. "--all wood,
I know, I
always wondered how they stood up to Jerry flak, flew between it, ho ho
ho ho, very good, Tom, now, Tom, we've got to get to Switzerland in
rather a dash, I know it's the best party since Kitchener reached
Khartoum and God knows we've all earned it, and it's rather a chunk of
a favor I'm asking, but it seems to be on the urgent side, a loose
Jerry end we need to tie down, time's a-wasting and I haven't got time
to call the right people upstairs, and of course the Yanks, as usual,
would rather play rub-my-bum with the Russians than listen to us, but
as I say, it would be awfully nice if I could hitch a ride to, well,
I'm glad you realize the importance, yes, Tom, yes, yes, about two
hours, yes, I understand, yes, quite, quite, of course, best to Sara,
best to her fellow Jones, Ives, sorry, Ives, wonderful girl, so brave,
tally-ho," and at last he laid the phone down in its cradle.
"He said No?"
"He said Yes. I think. So drunk he could hardly speak, the music was
quite loud. But there'll be a Mosquito on the field at ten at
Grossreuth Flughafen. God."
He stood. ^ Leets and Outhwaithe pushed their way through the
celebrants, and out into the night, where Roger waited with the Jeep
and the Thompson submachine guns.
Repp, at 400 meters out, had an angle of about 30 degrees to the target
zone. It was his best compromise, close enough to put his rounds in
with authority, yet high enough to clear the wall. He half crouched
now behind an outcrop of rock. The Vampir rifle lay before him on the
stone, on its bipod, the bulky optics skewing it to one side. Repp had
removed the pack and set it next to the rifle so that its weight
wouldn't pull his shooting off.
Enough light lingered to let him examine the buildings beneath and
beyond him. Built five hundred years ago by fierce Jesuits, the
buildings had been walled and somewhat modernized early in the century
when the order of Mother Teresa took them over as a convent. It looked
like a prison. The chapel, the oldest building, was not impressive,
certainly nothing on the scale of the Frauenkirche in Munich, a true
monument to papism; it was a utilitarian stone thing with a steeply
pitched roof, two domed steeples with grim little crosses atop them.
But Repp steadied his binoculars against the other, larger edifice, the
living quarters of the order that fronted on a courtyard. Patiently in
the fading light he explored it until he found, not far from the main
entrance with stairway and imposing arches, an obscure wooden door,
heavily bolted. The children would spring from there.
There would be twenty-six of them, and he had to take them all:
twenty-four, twenty-five even, simply wasn't good enough. The SD
report said they came out every night at midnight and played in the
yard for about forty minutes. Repp calculated that they'd be bunched
in the killing zone, that is, outside the door but not yet dispersed
enough to prevent a clean sweep of the job, for about five seconds.
He'd take them when the last one had stepped out the door. Fantastic
shooting, to be sure, but well within his--and
Vampir's--capabilities.
And what if twenty-seven targets came out, or twenty-eight, or
twenty-nine, meaning a nun or a novitiate or two had come along to
watch and help? It was entirely possible, even probable. In Berlin
they'd been vague and half-apologetic. Perhaps even the Reichsfuhrer,
who'd sent millions East, felt queasy about ordering him to shoot a
Swiss nun. Yet they chose Repp for his strength as well as his skill
and he'd resolved to make the difficult decisions. If a nun had to die
in the cause of making the world Judenrein, clean of Jews, then so be
it.
He'd kill everything on the scope.
Repp laid down the binoculars as the last of the light died. He
clapped his hands, and pulled his jacket tighter. He was cold and
afraid of fatigue, which could take his edge. And he was strangely
uneasy about all this: so simple, everything had whirred into place. He
knew enough to distrust such ease. He shifted an arm and looked at his
watch. Almost nine.
Three more hours.
It was almost nine. The drunken lieutenant was explaining but his
words kept dissolving into giggles. He was under the impression Roger
was an officer and he seemed to think the more he giggled the more
trouble he was in, which meant that he giggled even harder.
"The tank carrier, sir, uh, he stripped his gears trying to get her
outta the mud, uh, or he thought he would, uh, sir, he put her in
reverse and she jumped the road and--" The remainder of the communique
was lost in a seethe of giggles. The lieutenant was trying to explain
why the flatbed truck, designed to transport tanks, lay angled across
the road ahead, garish in the light of a dozen purple flares. Around
it clustered a group of Americans--they'd drawn duty on WE night and
some 3
one had a bottle and whatever they were supposed to do just wasn't
going to get done.
It had been like this most of the way since Schloss Pommersfelden.
Nuremberg still lay somewhere in the distance, mythical like Camelot,
and to get there they'd have to pass through more of what they'd
already seen:
drunken joyous men of all nationalities, accidents, honking horns,
flares, small-arms fire. And women. In the small town of
Forchheim--"Fuck-him," in GI argot--through which they'd just pushed
their way, the nonfrateriiization law had broken down totally, and
young officers were the most audacious offenders. College boys mostly,
with no real military careers on the line, they'd turned the town into
a fraternity party or prom night. The Jeep had been laid up at a
corner behind a column of stalled vehicles before Leets, in a frenzy of
rage, had gone forward to find two staff cars hung up on each other in
a minor crash, and in the back seat of each a couple necking hotly
while around them MP's argued and screamed. Leets went back and they'd
pulled out of line to try an alternate route, but almost ended up in
the Regnitz River and did in fact become lost until a studiously
inebriated British major of the Guards, elaborately polite, had pointed
them back in the right direction.
"Well, Jesus, how long, Lieutenant?" Leets demanded, leaning across
Roger. Something in his voice must have startled the youngster. He
stepped back abruptly and began to speak in an oppressive imitation of
sobriety.
"There's a maintenance vehicle from the motor pool in Nuremberg on the
way, uh, sir."
"Christ," said Leets in disgust.
He climbed out of the Jeep and pushed by the lieutenant to the truck.
The fucking thing was hopelessly locked in, its double-axled set of
rear tires having slipped off the roadway into a culvert, hooking
there, and as the driver had pulled to free himself, he'd actually
twisted the huge flatbed up and out into the air; it looked like a
drawbridge stuck halfway, blocking the road completely. It would take
a heavy tow truck or perhaps a crane to move the thing.
Up ahead loud voices clashed off one another. Leets looked into the
circle of vivid pink light from the flare and saw two men facing each
other. They were about to begin throwing punches.
"Hey, what's going on here?" he yelled.
"Asshole here dumped his fucking truck in the middle of the road, now
he won't move it so I'm gonna move him," said one.
"You just go on and try it, sucker," said the other.
"Knock it off, goddamn it," Leets ordered.
"There's broads up in that Fuck-him place," said the first man, "and
goddamn I mean to get a piece of ass tonight."
"All right," said Leets.
This son of a bitch and his fuckin' tru--" "Knock it off, goddamn it!"
Leets shouted.
"Captain," said Roger.
"Shut up, Roger, goddamn it, I got enough--" "Captain. Let them have
our Jeep. We'll take their car. Everybody's happy."
"What are you driving?" Leets asked.
"Ford staff car," the man said sullenly.
"I'm General
Taplow's driver. But, hey, I can't let anything happen to that car."
"More pussy in Fuck-him than you ever saw in one place in your life,"
said Roger.
"Some of them German women are walking around bare-tit."
"Oh, Christ," said the man weakly.
"Harry, you're gonna get us all in a lot of trouble."
"Bare-tit?"
"Some of 'em even have these little pasty things on."
"Oh, Jesus. That I gotta see."
"Harry." ' "Look, you'll take real good care of that car, won't
you?"
"You know where the Nuremberg airport is, Grossreuth Flughafen?"
"Yeah, sure."
"That's where the car'll be. All locked up."
"Fine," the man said, "fine and fine again." Then his excitement
beached itself.
"Uh. Didn't see you was an officer. Uh, sir."
"Forget it. No rules tonight, that's the only rule."
"Yes, sir."
"Get the major and our stuff," Leets told Roger, who'd already
started.
The two groups of men filed by each other in the fading light of the
flares. One of the drunken GI's suddenly looked up at the three
fellows passing him, and saw them grave-faced, a trifle solemn, grumpy
with their automatic weapons.
"Jesus," he said, stunned at the vision, "you guys know where there's a
war or something?"
But he got no answer.
As Leets climbed into the Ford staff car, he forced himself to check
his Bulova. He didn't want to but there were a lot of things he didn't
want to do that night that he knew he was going to have to do anyway,
and the easiest of them all was to look at the watch.
It was almost ten.
It was almost eleven. Repp felt sluggish from his long wait in the
cold rocks. During this time he had closed his mind down with his
extraordinary self-control: he had willed out unpleasant thoughts,
doubts, twinges of regret. He'd put his mind in a great dead cold
place, letting it purify itself in the emptiness. He wasn't exactly
sure what happened in this trancelike state and he'd never spoken of it
to others. He simply knew that such an exercise in will seemed to do
him a great deal of good, to generate that icy, eerie calm that was the
bedrock of the great shooting, the really fantastic shooting.
It was something he'd learned in Russia.
But now it was time to bring himself up, out of the cold. He began
with exercises, pedantic physical preparations.
He rolled to his belly and entwined his fingers, clamping them behind
his neck, elbows straining outward.
Then, slowly, he lifted his torso from the ground, chin thrusting high
on the strength of his stomach. He rocked, stretching, feeling the
pain scald as the muscle tension rose; then, sweetly, he relaxed. Up,
hold and relax: three sets, ten each. Then the shoulders and upper
chest: this was difficult--he didn't want to do a classic press-up
because he didn't want to deaden his touch by putting his weight on his
palms. He'd therefore evolved an elbow press-up, planting them on the
ground, gathering his fists before his eyes. Then he'd force the fists
down, levering his body on the frilcrum of his elbows--a painful trick
that soon had the girdle of muscles around his shoulders, chest and
upper body singing. But he was hard on himself and pushed on, feeling
at last the sweat break from his body and its warmth come bursting out
his tunic collar.
He lay on his back and thrust his arms out above him;
he twisted them, clockwise, then back, each as far as he could, forcing
the bones another millimeter or more in their casings of gristle and
meat. He could feel his forearms begin to throb as the blood pulsed
through and enlarged his veins. He struggled against the pain, knowing
it to be good for him. His hands he opened and closed rapidly,
splaying them like claws until he felt them begin to bum and tremble.
Repp lay back, at last still. His body felt warm and loose. He knew
it would build now in strength and that when his heart settled down it
would be deadly calm. He stared up through the canopy of firs at the
stars blinking coldly in the dead night. He stared hard at the
blackness above him. It was impenetrable, mysterious, huge. Repp
listened for forest sounds. He heard the hiss of the wind among the
needles, forcing them to rub dryly against themselves. He felt it to
be an extraordinary moment:
he felt he'd actually become a part of the night, a force in it. A
sensation of power unfolded in him like a spasm.
He felt himself flooding with confidence. Nothing could stop him now.
He envisioned the next few minutes. In the scope, the buildings would
be cold and blank. Then, a moment of blur, of blitz almost, as the
warmth from the door opening dissipated in the cool night air,
molecules in the trillions swirling as they spread. A shape,
shivering, iridescent, would tumble across the screen, almost like a
one-celled creature, a germ, a bacillus, a phenomenon of biology. And
another, and another, out they'd tumble, buzzing, swarming, throbbing
in the inky-green color Vampir gave them, far away, and Repp would
count .. . three, four, five .. . and with his thumb slip off the STG's
safety and begin tracking .. .
thirteen, fourteen, fifteen .. . Vampir's reticule was a black cross, a
modified cross hair, and he'd hold it on the lead shape .. .
twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six ... And then he'd fire.
The sound of an airplane rubbed the image from Repp's eyes. He rolled
over to his stomach and slithered up the rock to the rifle. He felt
calm and purposeful, a force of will. He did not want to draw the
rifle to him yet and have to hold the shooting position too long.
The airplane had faded.
He glanced at his watch.
It was almost midnight.
Plenty of time.
It was almost midnight. They'd been in the air nearly an hour now and
Roger may have been more miserable in his life but he wasn't sure when.
In the first place, he was scared. He'd never been scared like this
before because he'd never jumped into battle before. He was so scared
it hurt to breathe.
Following close upon this terror, indeed making it keener, richer, was
his bitterness. He was ferociously bitter. The war was over! That
fact linked up with the other one: he was going into combat!
Next, working down his taxonomy of misfortune, he was uncomfortable. He
squatted in the hull of the Mosquito, which was rocketing along at
about 408 miles an hour but a Mosquito, a twin-engine fighter-bomber
noted for speed and maneuverability, was a three-man kite, and Roger,
after the pilot and Outhwaithe beside him in the bubble cockpit up top
and Leets forward in the Perspex nose cone, was the fourth man. All
they had for him was a crappy little seat, typical British junk, wedged
into the tunnel between nose and cockpit, and he had to squat like some
nigger shoe shine boy. He was also jammed with equipment which made
the small space harder to bear, the parachute for one, a supremely
ridiculous M-l Thompson submachine gun, eleven pounds of gangster's
buddy, for another. Worst of all, the hatch, through which, sometime
soon, they'd all take the Big Step, didn't seem sealed too well and
rattled around loosely just a foot away from him, cold air just
crashing through. But then what didn't rattle in this crate? It
really was wood--plywood, glue and canvas, just like the Wright
Brothers' Dayton Flyer or a Spad. And just as cold. And it smelled of
gas, and the engines, big enough to drive a fucking PT boat, were hung
off the wings just outside the hull on either side, Rolls-Royce 1680's,
and they pulsated crazily, filling Roger's young bones with dread. He
had a headache and no aspirin. He felt a little sick and not too long
ago he'd peered down the tunnel to Leets--it wasn't far, six feet--and
seen, over Leets's hunched shoulder, white.
White? Snow, you dope. Then he'd felt the plane banking and sinking,
his stomach floating for just a second,
and he'd realized they were in the Alps. They were knifing through the
Alps.
Suddenly, Tony hung down and then was beside him, having descended from
his perch in the bubble. He roughly butted young Rug aside as though
he didn't count for bloody much, and sprang the hatch. Cold night air
rushed in, inflating under Roger's coat. Goose pimples blossomed on
his pale skin and he began to shake.
What's going on? he wondered.
His nigger's place in the aircraft wasn't even equipped with an
intercom jack. The three big shots must have been merrily chatting
away all this time, and here he was in this dark tunnel in the guts of
the plane, unable to see, not knowing what was going on, and suddenly
this: hatch open, Outhwaithe checking his gear. Roger realized they
must have found it. He felt Leets, who'd crawled down his tunnel, next
to him. Leets gestured wildly. He seemed unhealthily excited. Roger
felt numb, even tired, under his fear, disgust and chills.
Leets pressed Tony's earphones onto Roger and spoke into his own throat
mike.
"Rug, we think we've found it. We're going around again, he's going to
try and put us down in a field just west of the place. Tony first,
then me, then you. When you land, you'll see it off behind a wall,
very ornate, four stories--" "Chickies, chickies, Mama Hen here, thirty
seconds off your drop," said the pilot, a calm steady young voice, over
Leets.
"He'll be shooting from the mountain beyond, down into the courtyard.
Around back from where we're coming in. Thing to do is to get into
that courtyard before those kids get there. Got that?"
Roger nodded weakly.
"We'll be going out at six hundred. And don't forget you gotta pull
the rip cord on that chute, no static lines."
Roger, in horror, realized that though he was jump-qualified he'd never
pulled a rip cord in his life, there'd always been a nice panic-proof
static line to pop the chute for him. Suppose he froze?
"Ten seconds, chickies."
Tony looked at them. His face was smeared with paint. His wool
commando watch cap was pulled low over his ears. He gave them a
thumbs-up, a very WWII gesture. But WWII was over.
"Go, chickies, go!"
Tony pitched forward. Leets followed.
Roger stole a glimpse at his watch. It was still almost midnight. It
occurred to him for just a fraction of a second that he could sit tight
and go back to Nuremberg with the guy up there. But even as he was
considering this delicious alternative, his legs seemed to acquire a
heroic will of their own and they drove him to the hole in the bottom
of the plane. He fell into silence.
It was time to shoot.
Repp was very calm, as always, now when it was only himself and the
rifle. Its slightly oily tang, familiar amid the odor of the forest,
rose to meet his nose, and he took the sensation as reassurance. His
breath came evenly, smooth as soft music, feeding his body a steady
flow of oxygen. He felt marvelously alive, focused, his nerves
tingling with joy. A great yearning had passed.
He set himself on his elbows, belly, loins pressing against the rock,
legs splayed for support, and drew the rifle to him. He laid the
butt-stock against his shoulder.
He palmed the pistol grip; the metal and plastic, cold as bone, heated
quickly in his hand.
He rocked the weapon on its bipod, feeling its quick response to his
guidance. It seemed alive, obedient.
Repp had a special feeling for weapons; in his hands they were animate,
almost enchanted. With his other hand, he reached up and plucked the
lens cap off Vampir. He clicked on the auxiliary battery. He let his
trigger finger search the curve of the trigger; then, finding it, drop
away.
Repp eased the bolt back. It slid through oily stiffness, making a
show of resistance; then he felt it yield with a snap and he freed it
to glide home, having taken the first of the subsonic rounds off the
magazine and seated it in the firing chamber, simultaneously springing
open the dust cover on the breech. A whole system orchestrated itself
to Repp's will--gas piston, operating rod and handle, bolt cam ming and
locking units, pieces moving and adjusting within the weapon
itself--and he took great pleasure in this, seeing the parts slide and
click and lock. He checked the fire-control switch: semiautomatic.
He thumbed off the safety.
A kind wind took Tony. Leets felt like he was descending in molasses
and could see the Englishman a hundred feet below and three hundred
feet away, his white canopy undulating in the wind, and he could see
nothing else. The Mosquito drone was a memory. Leets fell in heavy
silence, still a minute from touchdown when he saw Tony's chute
collapse as it hit the ground.
Leets landed in a bundle of pain. Lights flashed behind his eyes on
impact and his leg began to throb. He'd tried to favor it, a mistake,
throwing himself off, and he hit on his butt and shoulder and lay there
for a second in confusion, senses shaken by the hit. He could make out
Tony's silk flapping loosely across the field, unconnected to any other
thing. Climbing to his feet--leg hurt like hell but seemed to work
okay--he popped his own harness toggle, and felt it fall away. He
shook himself loose of it.
"Shit!" someone said close by, concurrent with the thud of meat and
earth colliding. He looked and could see Roger scrambling up,
struggling with his shrouds.
Leets unslung his Thompson. He could see he was in a meadow in a
valley, ankle-deep in grass, low hills looming around. A quarter-mile
or so away he thought he could see a building and a wall closing it
off.
"This way," he hissed at the still befuddled young sergeant, and began,
in his slow and painful way, to run.
He could not see Tony.
Tony ran. He seemed to be closing the distance fast.
There was some pain, but not so much. He wasn't sure about the gun,
he'd lost that when he hit. Still, the place seemed a long way off.
He just kept running. Someone else in his body was breathing hard. He
wanted to cough or stop. A footrace.
Didn't they realize a certain type of gent doesn't run vulgarly and
blindly across fields, almost to the point of vomiting, his own sweat
burning hotly on his skin? A gentleman never sweats. The boots were
impossibly heavy and the grass slowed him. He felt perfectly lucid.
Repp flicked on the scope and finally, last step, braced his free hand
on the stock, just behind the receiver.
He fit his shooting eye against the soft rubber cup of the scope.
The world according to Vampir was green and silent.
He felt very patient and helpful almost. He felt not that he was a
part of history, but that he was History, a raw force, reaching out of
the night to twist the present into the future. Savage, perhaps, in
immediate application, but in a much longer run Good and Just and
Fair.
A smear of light radiated across the scope as a trillion trillion
swirling molecules spilled out the opening door.
Right on time for their appointment with destiny, Repp thought.
A blurry splotch of light jiggled out, barely recognizable as a human
shape. And another.
Repp tracked it against the reticule of the sight, as other splotches
paraded helpfully along behind.
"There, there, my babies, my fine babies, come to Papa," Repp began to
croon.
Leets was almost dead with exhaustion. He was no runner. He wanted to
throw himself onto the grass and suck in great quarts of cool oxygen.
Roger was running next to him. He'd caught up, all that idiotic tennis
making him strong and fast, but Leets wouldn't let him get beyond.
Wasn't that Tony ahead at the gate?
The gate!
A sick feeling burned through Leets, almost a sob.
How could they get through the gate?
Tony hit the door in the wall. It didn't budge.
Repp had nineteen, now twenty.
Repp's finger was on the trigger, taking the slack out.
Repp had twenty-one, twenty-two.
Leets tried to get there. He'd never make it. He had a terrible
premonition of the next several seconds.
"Tony!" someone screamed, himself.
Old Inverailor House gimmick, from the first days of SOE training up in
Scotland. The man was an ex-Hong Kong police inspector, knew all kinds
of tricks of the trade, of which this was but one:
"Now if you've got a lock in a door and you want in and you're in a bit
of a hurry, say Jerry's coming along, take your revolver, just like a
chap in a Hollywood cowboy picture, and shoot--but not into the lock,
flicks are all wrong about that. You'll just catch the slug on the
bounce in your own middle. Rather, at an angle, into the wood, behind
the bloody lock. That big four fifty-five makes a wonderful wrench."
Funny how it came back, swimming up through five years of complicated
past, just when he needed it.
Carefully, holding the Webley snout at an angle two inches from the
ancient brass lock plate. Tony fired. The flash spurted white and
blinding.
* * *
Repp had twenty-five. There was no slack in the trigger.
But what was going on?
"Kinder," yelled Tony, German perfect, "the bad man can see in the
dark, the bad man can see in the dark."
He could see their white faces stark in the night, and eyes white as
they fled. They were apparitions. He heard the scuffle of panicked
feet across the pavement. He heard squeals and yelps. He must have
seemed a giant to them, a nightmare creation. They must have thought
he was the bad man who could see in the dark, running through the yard,
breathing hard, face blackened, gigantic pistol in one hand. Another
irony for his collection.
How quickly they vanished. Several brushed against his leg in their
flight and yet it seemed to take only a second. They scurried like
small animals. He could not see them anymore.
A woman was crying. Terrified. She didn't know.
We're good fellows, madame, he wanted to explain.
He heard Leets yelling. What did the man want?
Repp fired.
Leets reached the gate. He heard them screaming and running. He fixed
on fleeing figures that seemed to career through the darkness. Someone
was crying. A woman's voice, pitched high in uncontrollable fear,
unfurled.
"Bitte, bitte," please, please.
"Go away, dearest God, go away."
The bullet had taken most of Tony's head. He was on the ground in the
middle of the courtyard, in a dark pool spilling out across the
pavement.
Then Repp shot him again.
PART THREE
Endlosung (Final Solution) Dawn, May 8, 1945 Leets finally stopped
being insane near dawn. He'd really gone nuts there for a while,
yelling up at the mountain after Repp shot Tony. Leets even fired off
a magazine, spraying tracers hopelessly up to disappear into the dark
bank of the hillside. Roger had hit Leets with his shoulder behind
both knees, and Leets screamed at the blow and went down; then Roger
pinned him flat in the arch of the open gate and, using every fiber of
strength he had, dragged him back into the protection of the wall.
"Jesus," Roger yelled in outrage, "tryin' to get yourself
A:;7/^?"
Leets looked at him sullenly, but Roger saw a mad glint, the beam of
secret insane conviction spark in his irises, were wolflike and when
Leets twisted savagely for the gun, Rug was ready and really hit him
hard in the neck with his right forearm, his tennis arm, big as an oak
limb, stunning him.
"Out there it's death," he bellowed, deeply offended.
Then Leets had insisted on recovering the body.
"We can't leave him out there. We can't leave him out there."
"Forget it," Roger said.
"He doesn't care. I don't care. Those children don't care. Repp
doesn't care. Listen, you need a vacation or something. Don't you
see?
You won!"
No, Leets didn't see. He looked across the courtyard to Outhwaithe. A
hundred streams of blood ran out of him, across the stones of the yard,
catching in cracks and hollows. His head and face were smashed, an eye
blown out, entrails erupting with gas, spilling out. Repp, in
uncharacteristic rage, had fired a whole magazine into him. Then he'd
turned his weapon on inanimate things and in a spooky display of the
power of Vampir he'd shredded the door through which some few of the
children had disappeared, then methodically snapped out windows, sent a
burst of automatic across a plaster saint in a niche in the church, and
finally, in a moment of inspired symbolism, shot the crosses off the
two domed steeples. A real screwball, thought Roger.
Now, hours later, a chilly edge of dawn had begun to show to the east.
Leets had been still, resigned finally, Roger figured. He himself was
quite pleased with his coolness under fire. His friend Ernest
Hemingway would have been impressed. He'd even saved the captain's
life. You saved your CO, you got a medal or something, didn't you?
What's a captain worth? A Silver Star? At least a Bronze Star. For
sure a Bronze.
Roger was wondering which medal he'd get--which to ask for,
actually--when Leets said, quite calmly, "Okay, Rug. Let's take
him."
Repp would have to train himself to live with failure.
It was another test of will, of commitment; and the way to win it was
to close out, ruthlessly, the past. Put it all behind. Speculation as
to how and why he had failed were clearly counterproductive.
He explained all this to himself in the dark sometime in the long hours
of the night after the shooting. Still, he was bitter: it had been so
close.
Repp had killed one, he knew. Now the question was, How many remained?
And would they come after him?
And other questions, nearly as intriguing. Who were they? Should he
flee now?
He'd already rejected the last. His one advantage right now lay in
Vampir. It had run out, but they didn't know that. They only knew he
could hit targets in the dark and they couldn't. It would be foolish
to surrender that advantage by racing off into the dark, up a steep
incline, through rough forest with which he was unfamiliar.
A misstep could be disastrous, even fatal.
They wouldn't come, of course, in the dark. They'd come in the light,
at dawn, when they could see him.
They'd come when the odds were better.
// they came.
Would they? That was the real question. They'd won, after all, they'd
stopped him, they'd saved the Jewish swine boy and the money and
perhaps even the Jews, if there were any left. Sensible men,
professionals, would most certainly not come. They'd be pleased in
their victory and sit back against unnecessary risks. In their
position, he'd make the same decision. Go up a strange mountain after
a concealed marksman with one of the most sophisticated weapons in the
world? Foolish. Ridiculous.
Insane. Impractical.
And that's when he knew they'd come.
Repp felt himself smile in the dark. He felt happy.
He'd reached the last step in his long stalk through the mind of his
enemies; and he'd realized just how much now, when it was all over, all
finished, when as a species the SS man was about to disappear from the
earth, he realized how much he wanted to kill the American.
Roger blinked twice. His mouth felt parched dry.
"Now just a sec," he said.
"We'll never have a better chance. We can do it. I guarantee it."
"Money back?" was all Roger could think to say.
"Money back." Leets was dead serious.
"H-h-h-h-he's long gone." Damn the stutter.
"No. Not Repp. In the night he thinks he's king."
"I'm no hero," Roger confessed. He felt a tremor flap through him.
"Who is?" Leets wanted to know.
"Listen close, okay?"
Roger was silent.
"He can see in the dark, right?"
"Man, it's daytime out there for him."
"No. Wrong. Eichmann said they thought they were trying to work out a
way to make this Vampire gadget lighter. So Repp could carry it."
"Yeah."
"He said it was some kind of solar-assist unit. The thing would take
some of its power from the sun."
"Yeah."
"You see any sun around here?"
"No."
"It's run-down. It's out of juice. It's empty. He's blind."
Oh, Christ, thought Roger.
"You want us to go out there and--" "No." Leets was very close, though
Rug could not see him. But he could feel the heat.
"I want you to go out there."
Repp was blind now. These were rough hours; lesser men, alone in the
night and silence, might have yielded to the temptations of flight.
He was thinking, marvelously alive, taking sustenance from the
Intricacies of the problem that now faced him.
The chief dilemma was Vampir itself. Now that it was dead, it was
forty kilos of uselessness. In a fire fight, things happened fast. You
needed to be able to move and shoot in fractions of seconds. Should he
remove the device?
On the other hand, it was unique. It might be worth millions to the
proper parties--perhaps even the Americans.
It also might make a certain kind of future more feasible than
others.
A running gunfight, if such a thing were to occur in the next few
hours, might push him all over the face of this mountain. If he
dismounted Vampir and hid it, he might never find it again, or he might
be hit and unable to get back to it.
The decision then came down to his confidence.
He decided for Vampir.
"No, Roger," the captain repeated.
"You. You're going out there."
"I, uh--" "Here's how I've got it doped out. He doesn't know how many
we are. But mainly he doesn't know we know Vampire's out of juice. So
he's got to figure that if we come, we come at first light. So this is
how I figure it. A two-step operation. Step one: Rug goes fast and
hard for the mountain. You've got nearly an hour till light.
Work your way up, keeping out of gullies, moving quietly.
Nothing fancy. Just go up. His range at Aniage Elf was four hundred
meters. So to get in range with your Thompson you've got to get at
least two hundred, two hundred fifty meters up the slope. You got
it?"
Roger couldn't think of a thing to say.
"Step two: at seven-thirty a.m. on the fucking dot, I'm coming up the
stairs. Wide open, flat out."
Roger, for one second, stopped thinking about himself.
"You're dead," he said.
"You're flat cold dead. He'll drill you after the first step."
"Then you kill him, Rug. You're close enough so when that subsonic
round goes off you can get a fix on it. He doesn't know you're there.
Now the key point in all this is wait. Wait! As long as you're still,
you're fine.
You start moving around and he'll take you. It's how these guys work,
patience. After he fires, there'll be at least half an hour, maybe an
hour. It'll be rough. But just wait him out. He'll get up, Roger.
You may be surprised at how close he is. He'll probably be wearing one
of those camouflage suits, spotted brown and green.
Now, aim low, let the rise of the gun carry the rounds into him. Five-,
six-round bursts, don't risk a jam. Even when he's down, keep
shooting. When you use up that first magazine, put another in. Shoot
him some more.
Don't fuck around. Try and get some slugs into the brains. Really
blow them all over the place."
Roger made a small noise.
Leets had taken the boy's weapon and was checking it over.
"You've fired a Thompson, I suppose? Okay, that's a thirty-round mag
in there. I've set it on full auto, but no round in the chamber. Now
this is the M-one, the Army model. The bolt's on the side, not on the
top like the ones you see in-the gangster movies. Just draw it back^
it locks; you don't have to let it go forward again, it fires off the
open bolt."
He handed the weapon back.
"Remember, wait him out. That's the most important thing. And that
shot of his, it won't sound like a shot. It won't be as loud, like a
thud or something. But you'll hear it. Then wait, goddamn it, how
many times do I have to say this? Wait! Wait all day, if you've got
to, okay?"
Roger stared at him, openmouthed.
"Your move, Rug. Match point coming up."
He wants me to go out there? Roger thought in horror.
The distance from the corner of the wall to the mountain seemed
immense.
"Remember, Rug. It all starts happening at seven-thirty."
Leets clapped the boy on his shoulder and whispered into his ear, "Now
go!" and sent him on his way.
The light was growing. He could see the convent seem to solidify
magically before and below him out of gray blur. Quiet down there, a
body in the courtyard, otherwise empty.
Repp pressed the magazine release catch and a half-empty magazine slid
out. He reached into his pouch, got out a full one, and eased it into
the magazine housing.
He cocked the rifle and, leaning over it, peered down the slope through
the trees. The light was rising now, increasing steadily; and birds
were beginning to sing. Repp could smell the forest now, cool and
moist.
The night was ending.
If there was a man, he would come soon.
Repp waited with great, calm patience.
Leets knew it was nearly his turn.
He crouched in the shadow of the wall of the convent, breathing
uneasily, trying to conjure up new reasons for not going. It was quite
light by now and the second hand of his Bulova persisted in its sweep,
pulling the two larger hands along with it. Roger had made it but
Leets couldn't think about Roger. He was thinking about the long one
hundred yards he had to cross before he reached the cover of the trees.
A fast man could make it in twelve seconds. Leets was not fast. He'd
be out there at least fifteen. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three
Mississippi .. . out there forever, fifteen Mississippis, which was
nearly forever. He figured he'd catch it about the sixth or seventh
Mississippi.
He'd peeled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, but he was still
hot. He'd checked the laces and straps of his boots--tight--and tossed
aside his cap and taken the bars off his collar. There wasn't much
else to do.
He checked his watch again. The seconds seemed to drain away. They
seemed to fall off the Bulova and rattle to the grass. He tried to
feel good about what would probably happen next. Instead he felt puke
in the bottom of his throat. His breathing came hard and his legs were
cold and stiff and his mouth was dry.
He glanced about and saw the day opening pleasantly, a pale sun
beginning to show over the mountain, a pure sky. A few fleecy clouds
unraveled overhead. He knew he could catalog natural phenomena until
the year 1957 if he didn't watch himself. Goddamn it, he was
thirsty.
He looked at the Bulova again and it gave him the bad news: almost time
to go. Seconds to go.
He eased his way up to a crouch, checking for the thousandth time the
tommy gun: magazine locked, full auto, safety off, bolt back. The
forest was a long way off.
Don't blow it, Roger, goddamn you, he thought.
And he thought of Susan once again.
"Everything you touch turns to death," she'd said. Susan. Susan, I
didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't mean it. He did not hate her.
He wished she were here and he could talk to her.
And he thought of Repp, behind his rifle in the trees.
The Bulova said it was time and Leets ran.
Repp watched the American break from the wall.
He'd picked him up minutes ago--the fool kept peering out, then
withdrawing. He couldn't make his mind up, or perhaps he was enchanted
with the view.
It didn't matter. Repp tracked him lazily--such an easy shot--holding
the sight blade just a touch up, leading him, drawing the slack out of
the trigger. A big, healthy specimen, unruly hair, out of uniform: was
this the chap that had been hunting him these months? He wobbled when
he ran, bad leg or something.
Repp felt the trigger strain against his finger.
He let the fat American live.
He did not like it. Too easy. He felt he could down this fat huffing
fellow anytime. He owned him. The man still had 400 meters of rough
forest climb ahead of him, and Repp knew he'd come like a buffalo,
bulky and desperate, crashing noisily through the brush. At any moment
in the process, Repp could have him.
But as the American perched at his mercy on the sight blade, it
occurred to him that he'd been blind for hours. Suppose in that time
another American had moved into the trees? It turned on their
knowledge of the flaw in Vampir. But they had consistently turned out
to know just a touch more than he expected them to.
Thus: another man.
A theoretical enemy such as that could be anywhere down the slope, well
within machine-pistol range, grenade range, waiting for him to fire.
Once he fired, he was vulnerable. So he recommitted himself to
patience.
He had the fat one off on his left, coming laboriously up the hill. He
could wait.
Now, as for another fellow. Where would he be? It seemed to him that
if such a fellow in fact existed, then he and the fat one would
certainly make arrangements between themselves, so as not to fall into
each other's fire. So if the big one was to his left, then wouldn't
this theoretical other chap be on the right? He knew he had four or
five minutes before the big man got dangerously close.
He began methodically to search his right front.
* * *
What now? wondered Roger.
Guy must be gone. He would have plugged the captain for sure.
From where he was, he'd had a good view of slow, lumbering run. He'd
seen him go and turned back quickly but couldn't see much, the dense
trees fighting their way up the slope, stone outcroppings, thick
brush.
Leets had been so positive the German would fire.
But nothing. Roger scanned the abstractions before him. Sweat ran
down his arms. A bug whined in his ears.
Looking into a forest was like trying to count the stars.
You'd go nuts pretty soon. The patterns seemed to whisper and dazzle
and flicker before his eyes. Shapes lost their edges and melted into
other shapes. Fantastic forms leapt out of Roger's imagination and
took substance in the woods. Stones poked him, filling him with
restlessness.
Should he move or stay put? Leets hadn't said. He'd said wait, wait,
but he hadn't said anything about if there was no shot. He probably
ought to still wait. But Leets hadn't said a thing. Repp was probably
gone.
What the hell would he be hanging around for? He was no dope. He was
a tough, shrewd guy.
On the other hand, why would he have taken off when he held all the
aces in the dark?
Roger didn't have any idea what to do.
Leets had gotten well into the trees, deep into the gloom. He rested
for a moment, crouching behind a trunk. The slope here was gentle, but
he could see that ahead it reared up. The footing would be
treacherous.
Squatting, he tried to peer through the trees. His vi R
sion seemed to end a few dozen feet up: just trees woven together,
trees and slope, a few rocks.
He hoped Roger had the sense to stay put. Surely he'd see that the
game hadn't changed, that it was still up to Leets to draw fire.
Don't blow it, Roger.
He'll kill you.
Leets gathered his strength again. He wasn't sure there'd be any left,
but he did locate some somewhere.
He began to move up the slope, tree to tree, rock to rock, dashing,
duck-walking, slithering, making more noise than he ought to.
Roger looked around. A few shafts of sunlight cut through the
overhanging canopy. He felt like he was in an old church or something,
and light was slipping in the chinks in the roof. He still couldn't
see anything. He imagined Repp sitting in a cafe in Buenos Aires.
Meanwhile, here I sit, breaking a sweat.
If only I could see!
If only someone would tell me what to do!
Cautiously, he began to edge his way up.
The other American was perhaps 150 meters downslope, rising from behind
a swell in the ground, half obscured in shadow. But the movement had
caught Repp's experienced eye.
He felt no elation, merely lifted the rifle and replanted it on its
bipod and drew it quickly to him.
The American was just a boy--even from this distance, Repp could make
out the callow, unformed features, the face tawny with youth. He rose
like a nervous young lizard, eyes flicking about, motions tentative,
deeply frightened.
Repp knew the big man would be up the slope in seconds. He even
thought he could hear him battering through the brush. Too bad they
hadn't climbed closer together, so that he could take them in the same
arc of the bipod, not having to move it at all.
Repp pressed the blade of the front sight, on the young man's chest.
The boy bobbed down.
Damn!
Only seconds till the big one was in range.
Come on, boy, come on, damn you.
Should he move the gun for the big one?
Come on, boy. Come on!
Helpfully the boy appeared again, cupping his hands to shade his eyes,
his face a stupid scowl of concentration.
He rose right into the already planted blade of the sight, his chest
seeming to disappear behind the blurred wedge of metal.
Repp fired.
A split second may have passed between the sound of the shot and
Leets's identification of it: he rose then, hauling the Thompson to his
shoulder, and had an image of Roger--Roger hit--and fired.
Fire again, you idiot, he told himself.
He burned through the clip. The weapon pumped and he held the rounds
into that sector of the forest his ears told him Repp's shot had come
from. He could see the burst kicking up the dust where it hit.
Gun empty, he dropped back fast to the forest floor, hands shaking,
heart thumping, still hearing the gun's roar, and fumbled through a
magazine change. Dust or smoke--something heavy and seething--seemed
to fill the air, drifting in clouds. But he could see nothing human in
the confusion.
Leets knew he had to attack, press on under the cover of his own fire.
He scrambled upward, pausing only to waste a five-round burst up the
slope on stupid instinct, and twice he slipped in the loose ground
cover, dried pine needles woven with sprigs of dead fern, but he stayed
low and kept moving.
A burst of automatic fire broke through the limbs over his head, and he
flattened as the bullets tore through, spraying him with chips and
splinters. Again bringing his submachine gun up, he fired a short
burst at the sound, then rolled daintily to the right, fast for a big
man, as the German, firing also at sound and flash, sent a spurt of
fire pecking through the dust. Leets thought he saw flash and threw
the gun back to his shoulder but before he could fire it vanished.
Then seconds later, to the left and above, his eyes caught just the
barest flicker of human motion behind a tangle of interfering pines,
and he brought the gun to bear, but it too vanished and he found
himself staring over his barrel at nothing but space and green light
and dust in the air.
But he'd seen him. At last, he'd seen the sniper.
Repp changed magazines quickly. He was breathing hard and had fallen
in his dash. Blood ran down the side of his face; one of the
machine-pistol slugs had fragmented on a stone near him and
something--a tiny piece of lead, a pebble, a stone chip--had stung him
badly above the eye.
Now he knew safety lay in distance. The machine pistol had an
effective range of 100 meters, his STG 400. It would be ridiculous to
blaze away at close range like a gangster. Too many things could
happen, too many twists of luck, freaks of chance, a bullet careening
off a rock. Repp thought for just a second of the Jewish toy he'd
played with back at Aniage Elf: you set it spinning and when finally it
stopped a certain letter turned up.
Nothing could change the letter that showed. Nothing.
That was the purest luck. He wanted no part of it.
He'd get higher and take the man from afar.
The sniper climbed.
Leets too knew the importance of distance. He pushed his way through
the trees, forcing himself on. In close he had a chance. He knew the
Vampire outfit had to be heavy and Repp would have no easy time of it
going uphill fast. He'd stay as close as he could to the sniper,
hoping for a clear shot. If he hung back, he knew Repp would execute
him at leisure.
The incline had steepened considerably. He drove himself forward,
pawing at the trees with his free hand.
Loose glass clattered in his stomach and he could feel the sweat
washing off him in torrents. Dust seemed to have been pasted over his
lips and his leg hurt a lot.
Several times he dropped to peer up under the canopy of the forest,
hoping to see the sniper, but nothing moved before him except the
undulating green of the trees.
* * *
Vampir was impossibly heavy. If he'd had the time, Repp would have
peeled the thing off his back and flung it away. But it would take
minutes to get the scope unhitched from the rifle, minutes he didn't
have.
He paused in his climb, looked back.
Nothing.
Where was the man?
Who'd have thought he could come on like that?
Must be an athlete to press ahead like that.
Repp looked up. It was quite steep here. He wished he had some water.
He was breathing hard and the straps pinched the feeling out of the
upper part of his body.
He and this other fellow, alone on a mountain in Switzerland.
It occurred to him for the first time that he might die.
Goddamn it, goddamn it, why hadn't he ditched Vampir? To hell with
Vampir. To hell with them all, the Reichsfrihrer, the Fuhrer himself,
the little Jew babies, all the Jews he'd killed, all the Russians, the
Americans, the English, the Poles. To hell with them all. He pushed
himself on, breathing hard.
A stone outcrop loomed ahead. Leets paused as he came to it. It
looked dangerous. He peeped over it, upward.
Nothing. Go on, go on.
He was almost over, slithering, straining his right leg to purchase
another few inches.
Here I am, a fat man perched on a rock in a neutral country, so scared
I can hardly see.
He had the inches and then he didn't; for the leg, pushed to its limit,
finally went, as Leets all along knew it must. One of the last pieces
of German steel that neither doctors nor leakage had been able to
dislodge ticked a nerve. The fat man fell, as pain spasmed through
him. He thought of it as blue, like electricity, and he corkscrewed
out of balance, biting the scream, but then he felt himself clawing at
the air as he tumbled backward.
He twisted as he fell and hit on his shoulder, mind filling with a
spray of light and confusion. His mouth tasted dust. He rolled
frantically, groping for his weapon, which was somewhere else, flung
far in the panic of his fall.
He saw it and he saw Repp.
The sniper was 200 meters up, calm as a statue.
He'd never make the gun.
Leets pulled his feet under him, to dive for the Thompson.
Repp shot him and then had no curiosity. He didn't care about the
American. He knew he was dead and that made him uninteresting.
He set the rifle down, peeled the pack off his back.
His shoulder ached like hell, but seemed to sing in the freedom of
release. He was surprised to notice that he was shaking. He wanted to
laugh or cry. It had seemed seconds between first shot and last;
clearly it had been minutes.
It had been extremely close. Big fellow, coming on like a bull. You
and I, we spun the draydel, friend. I won.
You lost. But so close, so close. That bullet that spattered on the
rock near his head, what, an inch or so away? He shivered at the
thought. He touched the wound. The blood had dried into a scab. He
rubbed it gently.
He wished he had a cigarette, but he didn't so that was that.
The chocolate.
The driver had given him a piece of chocolate.
Suddenly his whole survival seemed a question of finding it. His
fingers prowled through pouches and pockets and at last closed on
something small and hard.
He removed it: the green foil blinked in the sun. Funny, you could go
through all kinds of things, running, climbing, shooting, and here
would be a perfect little square of green foil, oblivious, unaffected.
He unwrapped it.
Delicious.
Repp at once began to feel better. He had settled down and was again
under control. He did not feel good that Nibelungen had failed but
some things simply weren't to be. He hadn't failed; his skills hadn't
fumbled at a crucial moment.
And pleasures were available: he'd been magnificent in the fight,
considering how hard he'd pressed to make the shooting position, the
long sleepless night that followed.
For a short action, it had been enormously intense.
Repp noticed for the first time where he was. Around him, the Alps
rose in tribute to him. Solemn, awesome, like old men, their faces
aged with snow, they seemed especially grave in their silence. Far
below, the valley looked soft and green.
He realized suddenly he had a future to face. It frightened him a
little. And yet he had a Swiss passport,
he had money, he had Vampir. There were things one could do with all
three.
Smiling, Repp stood. His last duty was now to return.
He pulled the pack again onto his back. It did not hurt nearly so much
now. Thank God for Hans the Kike and his last ten kilos. He swung the
rifle over his shoulder.
He pushed on for several minutes through the forest, not unaware of the
beauty and serenity around him.
After a time he came out of the trees into a high Alpine meadow,
several dozen acres of grassland. The grass rolled shadowless in the
sun.
Above, clouds lapped and hurled against diamond blue, hard and pure.
The sun was a cleansing flare. A cool wind pressed against his face.
Repp walked across the meadow. He took off his scrunched feldgrau cap
and rubbed a sleeve absently across his forehead, where it felt a
prickle of heat.
He walked on, coming at last to the end of the meadow. Here the grass
bulked up into a ridge before yielding again to the trees. The ridge
stood like a low wall before him, unruly with thistle and bracken and
even a few yellow wild flowers.
He turned back to the field. It was empty and clean. It was so clean.
It had been scoured clean and pure. It looked wonderful to him. A
vision of paradise. Its grass stirred in the breeze.
This is where the war ends for me, he thought.
He knew he had a few more kilometers of virgin pine;
then he'd be up top for a long, flat walk; then finally, that last
plunge through the gloomy newer trees.
It was only a matter of hours.
Repp turned back to his route and started to trudge up the ridge. More
yellow buds--dozens, hundreds-opened their faces to him. He paused
again, dazzled.
They seemed to pick the light out of the air and throw it back at him
in a burst of burning energy. The day stalled, calm and private. Each
mote of dust, each fleck of pollen, each particle of life seemed to
freeze in the bright air. The sky screamed blue, its mounting cumulus
fat and oily white. Repp felt giddy in the beauty of it. He seemed to
hear a musical chord, lustrous, rich, held, held, ever so long.
Strange energies had been released; they bobbed and sprang and coiled
about him, invisible. He felt transfigured.
He felt connected with the order of the cosmos.
He turned to the sun which lay above the ridge and from its pulsing
glare he sought confirmation, and when two figures rose above him, on
the crest line, drenched in light, he took it at first for the
benediction he'd demanded.
He could not see them clearly.
He blocked the sun with one hand.
The big one looked at him gravely and the boy had no expression on his
pretty face at all. Their machine pistols were level.
Repp opened his mouth to speak, but the big one cut him off.
"Herr Repp," he explained in a mild voice, "du hast das Ziel Night
getroffen," using the familiar du form as though addressing an old and
dear friend, "you missed."
Repp saw that he was in the pit at last.
They shot him down.
* * *
Roger edged down the ridge, changing magazines as he went. The German
lay face up, eyes black. He'd been opened up badly in the crossfire.
Blood everywhere. He was an anatomy lesson. Still, Roger crouched and
touched the muzzle of his tommy gun gently as a kiss against the skull
and jack hammered a five-round burst into it, blowing it apart.
"That's enough, for Christ's sake," Leets called from the ridge. Roger
rose, spattered with blood and tissue.
Leets came tiredly down the slope and over to the body.
"Congratulations," said Roger.
"You get both ears and the tail."
Leets bent and heaved the body to its belly. He pried the rifle off
the shoulder, working the sling down the arm, at the same time being
careful not to break the cord to the power pack.
"Here it is," he said.
"Bravo," said Roger.
Leets pulled out the receiver lock ping and the trigger housing pin.
Taking the butt off and holding the action open, he held the barrel up
to the sun and looked through it.
"See any naked girls?" Roger asked.
"All I see is dirt. It's a mess. All those rounds he ran through it.
All that pure, greasy lead. Each one left its residue. The grooves
jammed. It's smooth as the inside of a shot glass in there."
"Yeah, well, he nearly threaded my needle."
"Must have been your imagination," Leets said.
"At the end the rounds were veering off crazily as they came out the
muzzle. No, the Vampire rifle was useless in the end. It amounted to
nothing. A man with a flintlock would have had a better chance this
morning."
Roger was silent.
But something still nagged Leets.
"One thing I can't figure out. Why didn't Vollmerhausen tell him? They
were so good at the small stuff. The details. Why didn't
Vollmerhausen tell him?"
Roger knitted his features into what he imagined was an expression of
puzzlement the equal of Leets's. But he really didn't give a damn and
a more rewarding thought presently occurred to him.
"Hey!" he said in sudden glee.
"Uh, Captain. Sir?"
"Yeah?"
"Hey, uh, I did okay, huh?"
"You did swell. You were a hero." But he had other heroes in his mind
at that second, dead ones. Shmuel the Jew and Tony Outhwaithe,
Oxonian. Here was a moment they might have enjoyed. No, not really.
Shmuel hated the violence; no joy in this for him. And Tony. Who ever
knew about Tony? Susan? No, not Susan either. Susan would see only
two beasts with the blood of a third all over them.
"Well, now," said Roger, grinning, "you think I'll get a medal?" He
was supremely confident.
"I mean it was kind of brave what I did, wasn't it? It would be for my
folks mainly."
Leets said he'd think it over.
Special Preview from the Stephen Hunter title
BLACK LIGHT
Available from Bantam Dell
Red didn't like what came next. This business was tricky, and always
involved the immutable law of unintended consequences, but thank God
he'd thought ahead and had good people in place and it could be done
neatly and professionally, with maximized chances of success. He
thought his father would be proud, for this was an old Ray Bama trick:
Avoid violence, avoid force, always negotiate. But when violence is
unavoidable, strike fast, unexpectedly, and with total commitment and
willpower.
He dialed a number. A man answered.
"Yeah?"
"Do you know who this is?"
"Yes sir." The voice had a familiar Spanish accent to it, Cuban
probably.
"The team is ready?"
"The guys are all in. It's a good team. Steady guys. Been around.
Solid, tough, know their stuff. Some are--" "I don't want names or
details. But it has to be done. You do it. I'll get you the
intelligence, the routes, and you clear everything through this number.
When you're ready to move, you let me know. I'll want a look at the
plan, I'll want onsite reports. No slip-ups. You're being paid too
much, all of you, for slipups."
"There won't be no slip-ups," the man said.
The man on the other end of the phone, in a farmhouse just outside of
Greenwood in far Sebastian County, let the dial tone come up and then
he consulted a card and began to dial pager numbers.
Nine pagers rang. Two, one right after another, went off at the Blood,
Sweat and Tears Gymnasium on Griffin Park Road in Fort Smith, where
two immense men with necks the size of lampshades were hoisting what
appeared to be tons of dead weight at separate Nautilus stations. Each
was olive in skin tone, with glistening black hair and dark, deep,
watchful eyes, identical even to the tattoos that festooned their
gigantic arms, though one had a crescent of puckered, bruise-purple
scar tissue that ran halfway around his neck, evidence of some
grotesque encounter about which it would probably be better not to ask.
They had bodies of truly immense mass, not the beautifully
proportioned, narcissistic sculptured flesh of body builders but the
huge, densely muscled bodies of men who needed strength professionally,
like interior linemen or New Orleans mob drug enforcers and hit men.
Another pager rang in the back room of a crib just across the state
line in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, where a sleek black man was enjoying
an act of oral sex being performed on him by a blond-haired woman of
about thirty. He knew that she was really a man, but he didn't really
care; a mouth was a mouth.
Another pager buzzed on the firing line at the On-Target Indoor
Firearms Range over in Van Buren, as its owner stood with a customized
Para-Ordnance P16 in .40 S&W, calm and steady as a rock, blowing an
ever-widening tattery hole in the head of a B-27 silhouette hanging
from a pulley-mounted wire twenty-five yards out. He finished the
sixteen-round clip, pulled in the target, and examined the orifice he'd
opened.
Then he smiled, returned the gun to its case, and checked out.
In the parking lot he made a show of putting the case in the trunk, but
adeptly slid the .40 into an Alessi inside-the-pants holster, after, of
course, inserting a fresh sixteen-round clip and cocking and locking.
Other sites: Ben & Jackie's Harley-Davidson shop, on 271 South, where a
huge man in black leathers and the lush hair of a rock singer, drawn
into a ponytail, contemplated a chrome-plated extended muffler; the
Central Mall Trio Theaters, on Rogers Avenue, where two rangy men who
could have been ballplayers but weren't sat watching an extremely
violent and idiotic movie; Nick's Chicken Shack on Route 71, where a
large, pie-faced black man with a great many rings and necklaces ate a
second extra-spicy breast, and finally at the Vietnam Market on
Rogers, where a snake-thin Asian, also with a ponytail and a webbing of
tattoos that ran from his neck down one arm (and scared the hell out of
the proprietors) was trying to decide between diced mushroom and dried
asparagus for the three-color vegetable salad he was contemplating for
that night. He was a vegetarian.
The team leader, a Marisol Cuban with a gaudy career in Miami behind
him, was named Jorge de la Rivera. He was an exceptionally handsome
man and spoke in his vaguely Spanish accent to the assembled unit
before him.
"We're thinking mainly of going for the kill from cars. Not a
drive-by, not this guy, but a set-up assault off a highway ambush,
coordinated and choreographed, with good command and control. Three
cars, a driver, two shooters in each car.
Body armor. Lots of firepower up front. You want to go at this guy
behind a fucking wall of nine millimeter."
He waited. They were assembling their weapons, a selection of
submachine guns stolen in a raid three weeks earlier from the New
Orleans Metropolitan Police Property Room. He saw a couple of shorty
M-16s, three MP-5s, one with a silencer, another with a laser sighting
device, a Smith & Wesson M76 with a foot of silencer, and the rest that
universal soldier of the drug wars, ugly and reliable as an old whore,
the Israeli Uzi.
Those who had satisfied themselves with their weapons loaded ammunition
into clips: Federal hardball, 115 grain, slick and gold for the subs;
or Winchester ball .223 for the 16s.
"You been paid very very well. If you die, money goes to your families
you got families, your girlfriends otherwise. You get caught, you get
good lawyers. You do time, it's good time, no hassle from screws or
niggers or dirty white boys, depending on which color you are. Good
time, smooth time.
"That's 'cause you the best. Why do we need the best?
"Cause this fucking guy, he's the best."
He handed a photo around: It passed from shooter to shooter. It showed
a thin man who might have been handsome if he hadn't been so grim,
leathery-faced, with thin eyes, squirrel shooter's eyes.
"This guy was a big fucking hero in that little war they had over in
fucking gook country."
"Hey, Hor-hey, you not be talking about my country that way, man," said
the ponytailed Asian as he popped the bolt on a sixteen and it slammed
shut.
"Hey, we can be friends, no? No bullshit. I'm telling you good, you
listen. Nigger, spic, cowboy, motorcycle fuck, wops, slope, fucking
southern white boy ass kickers we got to work together on this. We're
a fucking World War Two movie. We're America, the melting pot. Nobody
got no problem with nobody else, right, am I right? I know you guys
have worked alone mainly or in small teams. If you want to go home in
one piece, take it from Jorge, you do this my way."
"I don't like the gook shit."
"Then take it out on this boy. He killed eighty-seven of you guys.
That was back in '72. They even got a nickname for him;
they call him "Bob the Nailer," 'cause he nails you but good.
You think he forget how? In 1992, bunch of fucking Salvadorian
commandos, trained by Green Berets even, think they got his ass fried
on the top of a little hill? He kills forty-four of 'em. He shoots
down a fucking chopper. He sends them crying home to mama cito This
guy is good. They say he's the best shot this great country ever
produced. And when it gets all shitty brown in your underpants 'cause
the lead is flying, they say this guy just gets cooler and cooler until
he's ice. Ain't no brown in his pants. His heart don't even beat
fast. Part fucking Indian, maybe, only Indians are like that."
"He's a old man," said the lanky cowboy.
"His time has passed. He ain't as fast or as smart as he once was. I
heard about him in the Corps, where they thought he was a god. He
wasn't no god. He was a man."
"Were you in "Nam?" asked Jorge. "Desert Storm, man. Same fucking
thing."
"Yeah, well," said Jorge, "whatever. Anyhow, we tie the whole thing
together on secure cellulars. We move south this afternoon, as I say,
three cars, three men in a car, and me, I'll be in a pickup, I'll hold
the goddamned thing together while I'm talking to the boss. We know
where he lives, but I don't want to do it there. We hunt him on the
roads. We move in hunter-killer teams. You get a sighting, we work
the maps, we plot his course, we pick him up. Very professional. Like
we are the fucking FBI. We get him and his pal on a goddamned country
road, and then it'a World War Three. We'll show this cabrone something
about shooting."
Bob stopped talking.
A plane. That was it. The sound of an airplane engine, steady, not
increasing in speed, just low enough and far enough away, almost a
fly's buzz.
"Go on," said Russ.
"Just shut up," Bob said.
"What is--" "Don't look around, don't speed up, don't slow down, you
just-stay very calm now," Bob said.
He himself didn't look around. Instead, he closed his eyes and
listened, trying hard to isolate the airplane engine from the roar of
his own truck, the buffeting of the wind, the vibrations of the road.
In time, he had it.
Very slowly he turned his head, yawning languidly as he went along.
Off a mile on the right, a white twin-engine job, maybe a Cessna. Those
babies went 240 miles per hour. Either there was a terrific head wind
howling out of the east, or the pilot was hovering right at the stall
speed to stay roughly parallel and in the same speed zone with the
truck.
He glanced quickly out the window. The plane was turning lazily
away.
"Everything okay? I mean, you tensed up there, now you're relaxed.
Everything's okay, right?"
"Oh, every goddamn thing's just super fine," said Bob, yawning again,
"except, of course, we are about to git ambushed."
"Air to Alpha and Baker," said Red, holding steady at 2,500 feet,
running east, loafing again, dangerously near stall.
"Alpha here," came a voice.
"What about Baker?"
"Oh, yeah, uh, I'm here too. I figured he said he was here, you'd know
I was here."
"Forget figuring. Tell me exactly what I ask you. Got that?"
"Yes sir," said Baker contritely.
"Okay, I want you in pursuit. He's about four miles ahead of you,
traveling around fifty miles an hour. No Smokeys, no other traffic on
the road. You go into maximum pursuit. But I am watching you and on
my signal you drop down to fifty-five.
I don't want him seeing you move super fast, do you read?"
"Yes sir."
"Then step on it, goddammit."
"Yes sir."
"You hang steady there, Mike and Charlie. No need you racing anywhere,
they are coming to you. I see intercept in about four minutes. I'm
going to let Alpha and Baker close in, then I'll bring you and Baker
into play, Mike? You read?"
"Yes sir."
He looked back along the road and out of the distance watched as two
large sedans roared along the highway at over one hundred miles an
hour, trailing dust and closing fast with the much slower moving
truck.
"Oh, I smell blood. I smell the kill. It's looking very good.
Alpha, I see you and your buddy closing. You just keep closing, you're
getting close, okay now, slow way down. Mike, you and Charlie now,
okay, you start moving out, nice gentle pace, about fifty-five, we are
two minutes away, I got you both in play."
Someone inadvertently held a mike button down and Red heard strange
things over the radio--some harsh, tense scraping and what sounded like
someone systematically turning a television set on and off. Then he
realized: That was the dry breathing of men about to go into a shooting
war and they were cocking and locking their weapons for it.
Words poured out of Russ as if he'd lost control of them, and he could
not control their tone: They sounded high, tinny, almost girlish.
"Should we stop?" he moaned.
"Should we pull off and call the police? Is there a turnoff? Should
we--" "You just sit tight, don't speed up, don't slow down. We got two
cars behind us. I bet we got some traffic ahead of us. And we got a
plane off on the right coordinating it. We are about to get bounced
and bounced hard."
Russ saw Bob shimmy in the seat, but he could tell he was reaching to
get something behind the seat without disturbing his upright profile.
He looked into the rearview mirror and saw two cars appear from behind
a bend in the road.
"Here's the first and only rule," said Bob steadily.
"Cover, not concealment. I want you out of the truck with the front
wheel well and the engine block between you and them. Their rounds
will tear right through the truck and get to you otherwise."
Russ's mind became a cascade of silvery bubbles; he fought to breathe.
His heart weighed a ton and was banging out of control. There was no
air.
"I can't do it," he said.
"I'm so scared."
"You'll be all right," Bob said calmly.
"We're in better shape than you think. They have men and they think
they have surprise, but we've got the edge. The way out of this is the
way out of any scrape: We hit 'em so hard so fast with so much stuff
they wish they chose another line of work."
Ahead, one and then a second vehicle emerged from the shimmery mirage.
The first was another pickup, black and beat up, and behind it, keeping
a steady rate fifty yards behind, another sedan. Russ checked the
rearview: The two cars were drawing closer, but not speeding wildly. He
made out four big profiles, sitting rigidly in the lead car.
"Don't stare at 'em, boy," said Bob as he overcame the last impediment
and got free what he was pulling at. In his peripheral vision Russ saw
that it was the Ruger Mini-14 and the paper bag. He pulled something
compact from the bag; Russ realized it was the short .45 automatic,
which he quickly stuffed into his belt on his right side, behind his
kidney. He groped for something else.
Russ looked up. The truck drew nearer. It was less than a quarter of
a mile away. It would be on them in seconds now.
"Where is it?" demanded Bob of himself harshly, fear large and raspy
in his voice as he clawed through the bag. His fear terrified Russ
more powerfully than the approaching vehicles.
What is he looking for? Russ wondered desperately.
Red watched as his masterpiece unfolded beneath him with such solemn
splendor. It was all in the timing and the timing
was exquisite. De la Rivera in the Mike truck, followed by the four
men in Charlie, closed from the front at around forty miles per hour.
Meanwhile, the Alpha and Baker vehicles, moving at the speed limit,
steadily narrowed the distance between themselves and Swagger. They
would be fifty or so yards behind him when de la Rivera hit Swagger's
truck and blew it off the road.
"You're closing nicely, Alpha and Baker," he crooned.
"You're looking good there, Mike."
They had him!
It would work!
Red pulled in his breath, felt his heart inflate and his blood pressure
spiral.
De la Rivera was now taking over.
"Okay, muchachos, is so very muy bueno, let's be very very calm now,
let's stay calm and cool, I see you. Alpha, you're so very fine, let's
do a quick double check on our pieces, make sure we got our mags
seated, our bolts locked, our safeties in the red zone, let's stay muy
glace, icy, icy, very icy, very cool, it's happening, oh, it's gonna be
so good for all of us."
The vehicles were' closing
They had reached a flat, high section of the road, where the dwarf,
ice-pruned white oak lay gnarled and stunted on either side, yielding
swiftly to vistas on either side of other ranges.
"Now, you listen," said Bob fiercely.
"This truck's going to try and whack you. The split second before you
pull even to him, I want you to drop to second and gun this
motherfucker.
That should carry us by his lunge and cut the two boys off behind us.
Then I want a hard left, you rap the rear of his follow car, really
mess him up, shake up the boys inside; you continue from that into a
hard left panic stop, we skid across the road and come to rest in the
shoulder on that side so's we can fall back and get into them trees and
down the side of the mountain if need be. Okay, you're coming out my
side of the vehicle and you're breaking left to the front wheel well
where you're going to cover. You take the bag. Your job is going to
be to feed me magazines from the bag as I need them. You watch; when I
pop a mag, you hand me the next one, bullets out, so's I can slap her
in and get back to rock and roll."
"Yes sir," said Russ, trying to remember it all, desperate that he
would forget it, but amazed somehow that already there was a plan, and
somehow also calmed by it. And Bob seemed calm too.
"You gotta stay calm, you gotta stay cool," said Bob.
"I'm okay," Russ said, and he was.
"Ah," said Bob, "here the goddamn thing is." And with that he withdrew
something from the bag and Russ could see that it was a long, curved
magazine, different from the others, with a red-tipped cartridge seated
in its lips.
The truck was on them. It was happening right now.
"What's that?" Russ had time to ask as the universe unlatched from
reality and fell into dreamlike slow motion. He heard Bob seat the
magazine and with a dak! let the bolt fly home.
"Forty rounds M-196 ball tracer," said Bob.
"We're going to light these boys up."
Red watched in full anticipation of his precisely choreographed
envelopment, simultaneously banking to the left and adding power so
that he could hold the spectacle beneath him as he circled around it,
gull-like. He watched as the vehicles seemed to combine and it was
almost magical the way he'd seen it in his mind and it was working out
in reality.
But there seemed to be something .. .
It was happening so fast, there was dust, so much dust, he couldn't ..
.
Confusion. He'd never seen a battle before except in the movies, but
in the movies everything was clear. That was the point of movies. Here
nothing was clear, it was a helter skelter some new dance, a
reinvention.
He heard them on the radio as it unfolded in mircrotime.
"Ah, no, goddamn--" WHANG! the jarring bang of metal on metal.
"Jesus, what is--" "Look out, he's firing, he's--" "Oh, fuck, we're on
fire. Christ, we're burning'" "I'm hit, I'm hit, oh, shit, I'm hit--"
"The flames, the flames."
BEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
A high-pitched scream pierced Red's ears as he banked around; he
winced, shuddered, wondering what the hell that was, and when he saw
the geyser like surge of blazing gasoline, he knew the microphone had
melted.
It was happening. The truck's fender with its cyclops like headlight
was as big as a house falling on him, but at that second Russ slammed
the gearshift, punched the pedal, and with a surprising giddy
lightness, his own vehicle shot ahead and the oafish rammer missed,
veered to correct, and jacked out of control, tumbling savagely
backwards amid a sudden huge blast of dust. Bob's left hand reached
for the wheel and wrenched it to the left. With a tremendous jolt the
pickup slammed into the follow car, rocked crazily, and continued to
spin around, hauling up a shroud of dust as it fishtailed, then came to
a rest, crazily canted to one side, half in and half out of the
roadside gully.
Through it all, Russ had the ghastly sensation of ghosts, as faces lit
up by rage and surprise floated by in the follow car, so close yet so
far away. He felt that he was looking at men under ice, in a different
world, their mouths working madly, their eyes swollen like his mother's
deviled eggs from so long ago.
Then it all went to swirl and blur and vanished in the weird
perspective of the canted windshield and the cloud of rolling dust.
He blinked.
Wasn't he supposed to be doing something?
"Out, goddammit," barked Bob, and Russ clawed at his safety belt, glad
that he'd had it on, felt it fall away and began to slither across the
seat after already-vanished Bob and out the door. He remembered the
bag, and felt the loaded mags rattling around inside as he disengaged
from the vehicle, slid fast down the front fender of the truck to the
wheel well where Bob had already set up in a taut, hunched shooter's
position.
Russ couldn't dive for cover. He had to see.
When he looked over the hood, the spectacle stunned him.
Upside down, the black pickup had cantilevered onto the shoulder on the
other side of the road in its own cloud of dust, cutting off that lane.
The two cars following Bob and Russ had slewed to a halt behind it,
just coming out of their own panic stops and skids. They appeared to
have collided themselves, the rear one smashing into the front one.
The truck's follower had also slewed to a halt to avoid smashing into
the destroyed truck. It was almost directly across the road from Russ.
There was a moment of horrified silence. Inside the cars, men fumbled
in confusion, trying not to shoot each other, trying to locate their
target which wasn't where it should have been.
Then, from just behind Russ, Bob fired.
Even in the bright light of day the tracers leaked radiance to mark
their passage as they flew across the narrow distance.
They were like phenomena in a physics experiment, ropes of
incandescence as straight as if drawn by a ruler, unbearably quick,
quick pr than a heartbeat or a blink, illusions possibly.
Bob fired three rounds inside a second low into the car directly across
from him; what was he shooting for? Not men, for he was shooting not
into the passenger compartment but above the rear tire and Russ Then
the car was gone in a huge flash as the tracers lit up its fuel tank.
The noise was a thunderclap, throwing feathers of flame everywhere as
it seemed for one delirious second it was raining flame. All around
them the world caught fire, and a wave of crushing heat rolled against
Russ. He heard screams in the roar, and a flaming phantasm ran at him
but fell under the weight of its own destruction into the roadway.
Motion struck at Russ's peripheral vision, and he saw that one of the
follow cars had gunned from behind the tipsy-turvy truck.
"Coming around, coming around," he screamed.
But Bob was shooting even as Russ yelled and the tracers flicked quick
and nasty like a whip-crack and seemed to liquify the on comer
windshield; it dissolved into a sleet of jewels as the car lost control
and went hard into the gully, kicking up a gout of dirt.
"Magazine! magazine!" Bob screamed, and Russ slapped a
twenty-rounder, bullets outward, into his palm and he sunk it into the
rifle, freed the bolt to slam forward just as the third car came
around, bristling with guns. But Bob took it cleanly, riddling its
windshield with a burst of ball ammunition, and then held fire,
emptying what remained of the magazine into the windows and doors as
the car went by. The car never deviated, but sped by furiously, more
as if it hoped to get away than do them any harm, and a hundred yards
down the road it noticed that its cargo was dead men and it veered into
a gully, lurched out, surfing a wave of dirt and grass, and came to a
broken ending amid splintered white oaks.
And suddenly it was quiet except for the dry cracking of the wind and
the hiss of the flames.
"Jesus, you got them all," Russ said in utter astonishment and
devotion, but Bob was by him, .45 in hand. He'd seen something. Two
men with submachine guns had extricated themselves from the wreckage in
the gully just before them, and started up the little embankment. But
Bob stood above them and got his pistol into play so fast, it was a
blur. Did they see him yet? One did, and tried to get his weapon on
target, but Bob fired so quickly, Russ thought for a second he had some
kind of machine gun, floating six empties in the air and the two
shooters went down like rag dolls. One was an immense man in an
expensive jump suit with gold chains on. He lay flat, eyes blink less
and vacant as the blood turned his sweatshirt strawberry and an odd
detail leaped out at Russ:
He had a necklace of scar tissue as if someone had gone to work on his
throat with a chain saw but got only halfway around before thinking the
better of it.
Another moment of silence. Bob used it to change magazines.
Russ looked around.
"Jesus Christ," he said. It reminded him of TV coverage of the Highway
of Death out of Kuwait City after the Warthogs and the Blackhawks
finished a good day's killing. Four wrecked vehicles, one on its back,
one boiling with black, oily flame of petroleum products oxidizing into
the sky, bodies and blood pools and shards of glass and discarded
weapons everywhere.
"What do you think of that, you motherfucker!" Bob suddenly shouted,
and Russ saw that he was screaming at a white airplane a half mile out,
low and banking away to the south.
"You got them all," said Russ.
"You must have killed twenty men."
"More like ten. They were professionals. They took their chances.
Now let's see if we done bagged a trophy."
Then he strode across the littered roadway to the ramming truck, upside
down and half in the gully. The odor of gasoline was everywhere.
He opened the door and peered in. Russ looked over his shoulder.
Inside, in a posture of unbearable discomfort that signaled something
important had broken, was a tough-looking His panic with creamy silver
hair and an expensive suit over an open silk shirt. The angle of his
neck suggested that it was broken. Pain lay across his handsome face
like a blanket, turning him gray under the olive tones of his skin. His
eyes were glazing and his breath was labored.
Bob pointed the .45.
The man laughed and his eyes came back into focus. He held a lighter
in his left hand.
"Fuck you, man," he said.
"I'm already dead, you cracker motherfucker." His voice was a little
lilting with a Cubano accent, an odd play of chs through it.
"I flick my Bic and we all going to heaven."
"It won't blow, partner, it'll only burn."
"Fuck you," said the Cubano.
"Who's the man in the plane?" Bob demanded.
The man laughed again; his teeth were blinding white. He made a little
move with his free hand and Russ flinched, but Bob didn't shoot.
Instead, both watched as the hand reached his shirt and, pausing only
once or twice in pain, ripped it open. The brown chest was latticed
with extravagant tattoos.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Bob said.
"I'm Marisol Cubano, you norteamericano cabrone. You puta} Fucking
Castro couldn't break me in his prisons, man, you think I'm going to
talk to some hillbilly homeboy?" He laughed.
"You are one tough customer," said Bob, "that I give you."
He bolstered the .45.
"Let's go," he said to Russ.
"Hey," screamed the man in the truck.
"I say this to you, motherfucker, you got some balls on you, my friend.
You cubanol Maybe Desi Arnaz done fucked your mama when your daddy was
out fucking the goats."
"I don't think so," said Bob.
"We didn't have no TV."
They turned and were back at their own truck when the Cubano ended his
misery; the truck flared as it went and the heat reached Bob and
Russ.
 the author of the acclaimed novel Dirty White Boys, was born in
Kansas City, Missouri, in 1946. He graduated from Northwestern
University in 1960, spent two years in the United States Army, and
since 1971 has been on the staff of The Baltimore Sun, where he is now
film critic. He is the father of two children, and lives in Baltimore,
Maryland.



The Master Sniper
by
Steven Hunter Stephen Hunter -- author of Point of Impact and the Day Before
Midnight -- does it again with a world War II thriller about a Master
sniper and the men who try to stop him!!

Books by
Stephen Hunter
FICTION
Time to Hunt Black Light Dirty White Boys Point of Impact The Day
Before Midnight Tapestry of Spies The Second Saladin The Master Sniper
nonfiction Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of
Movie Mayhem
STEPHEN HUNTER
THE
MASTER
SNIPER
ISLAND BOOKS
Published by Dell Publishing a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway New York, New York 10036
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher
has received any payment for this "stripped book."
Copyright 1980 by Stephen C. Hunter
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher,
except where permitted by law.
The trademark Dell* is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office.
ISBN: 0440221870
Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in
Canada July 1996 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
OPM
For Jake Hunter and Tolka Zhitomir
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A good many friends and colleagues assisted the author in the
preparation of this manuscript, though they are in no way responsible
for its excesses. But they should be thanked nevertheless. They are
James H. Bready, Curtis Carroll Davis, Gerri Kobren, Henry J. Knoch,
Frederic N. Rasmussen, Michael Hill, Binnie Syril Braunstein, Bill
Auerbach, Joseph Fanzone, Jr." Richard C. Hageman, Lenne P. Miller,
Bruce Bortz, Carleton Jones and Dr. John D. Bullock. Two special
friends deserve their own sentence: Brian Hayes and Wayne J. Henkel.
Lastly, the author would like to pay tribute to two extraordinary
people: his wife, Lucy, and his editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, of William
Morrow, without whom all this would not have happened.
Marksmen are not limited to the location of their unit and are free to
move anywhere they can see a valuable target.. ..
--Instructions for use of S.m.K.
cartridges and rifles with telescopic sights, 1915
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue he hits you with
leaden bullets his aim is true --paul celan, "A Death Fugue"
THE
PART ONE
Schiitzenhaus (Shooting Gallery) January-April 1945 The guards in the
new camp were kinder.
No, Shmuel thought, not kinder. Be precise. Even after many years of
rough treatment he took pride in the exactness of his insights. The
guards were not kinder, they were merely indifferent. Unlike the pigs
in the East, these fellows were blank and efficient. They wore their
uniforms with more pride and stood straighter and were cleaner. Scum,
but proud scum; a higher form of scum.
In the East, the guards had been grotesque. It was a death factory,
lurid, unbelievable, even now eroding into fantastic nightmare. It
manufactured extermination, the sky above it blazed orange in the night
for the burning of corpses in the thousands. You breathed your
brothers. And if not selected out in the first minutes, you were kept
caked in your own filth. You were Untermensch, subhuman. He had
survived in that place for over a year and a half and if a large part
of his survival was luck, a large part also was not.
Shmuel came by the skills of survival naturally, without prior
training. He had not lived a hardy physical life in the time he
thought of as Before. He had in fact been a literary type, full of
words and ideas, a poet, and R
believed someday he would write a novel. He had written bold
commentaries for Nasz Przeglad, Warsaw's most influential Yiddish
newspaper. He'd been the friend of some real dazzlers too, Mendl
Elkin, Peretz Hirschbein, the radical Zionist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg,
Melekn Ravitch, to name but a few. They were great fellows, talkers,
laughers, great lovers of women, and they were probably all dead now.
Shmuel had not thought of literature since 1939. He rarely thought at
all of Before, knowing it the first sign of surrender. There was only
now, today. Perhaps tomorrow as well, but one could never be too sure.
But he persisted in his literary habits in just one way: he insisted on
looking into the center of things. And he'd been puzzling over this
strange new place for days now, ever since he'd arrived.
They'd been trucked in; that in itself was an astonishment, for the
German way was to herd Jews through forests and if some--or many--died
along the way, well, that was too bad. But a truck had bounced them in
cold darkness for hours, and Shmuel and the others had sat, huddled and
patient, until it halted and the canvas blanketing its back was ripped
off.
"Out, Jews, out! Fast, fast, boys!"
They spilled into snowy glare. Shmuel, blinking in the whiteness of
it, saw immediately he was at no Konzentrationslager. He knew no
German word for what he saw: a desolate forest setting, walls of pine
and fir, sheathed in snow, looming beyond the wire; and within the
compound just three or four low wooden buildings around a larger one of
concrete. There were no dogs or watch 5
towers either, just laconic SS boys dressed in some kind of forester's
outfit, dappled in the patterns and shadows of deep trees, with
automatic guns.
More curiosities became evident shortly and if the other prisoners
cared merely for the ample bread, the soup, the occasional piece of
sausage that it had become their incredible good fortune to enjoy,
Shmuel at least would keep track.
In fact he and his comrades, he quickly came to realize, were still
another oddity of the place. Why had the Germans bothered to gather
such a shabby crew of victims?
What do we have in common, Shmuel often wondered, we Jews and Russians
and Slavic types? There were twenty-five others and in looking at them
he saw only the outer aspects of himself in reflection: small, wiry
men, youngsters many of them, with that furtive look that living on the
edge of extinction seems to confer.
Though now it was a fact they lived as well as any German soldier.
Besides the food, the barrack was warm. Other small privileges were
granted: they were allowed to wash, to use latrines. They were given
the field gray flannels of old Wehrmacht uniforms to wear and even
issued the great woolen field coats from the Russian front. Here
Shmuel experienced his first setback.
He had the bad fortune to receive one that had been hacked with a
bayonet. Its lining was ripped out.
Until he solved this problem, he'd be cold.
And then the labor. Shmuel had had the SS for an employer before at
the I. G. Farben synthetic fuel factory--the rule was double-time or
die. Here, by contrast, the work was mostly listless digging of
defensive positions and the excavation of foundations for concrete
blockhouses under the less-than-attentive eye of a pipe-smoking SS
sergeant, an amiable sort who didn't seem to care if they progressed or
not, just as long as he had his tobacco and a warm coat and no officers
yelling at him. Once a prisoner had dropped his shovel in a fit of
coughing. The sergeant looked at him, bent over and picked it up. He
didn't even shoot him.
One day, as the group fussed in the snow, a young corporal came out to
the detail.
"Got two strong ones for me? Some heavy business in Shed Four," Shmuel
heard the young man ask.
"Hans the Kike."
The sergeant sucked reflectively on his pipe, belched out an aromatic
cloud of smoke, and said, "Take the two on the end. The Russian works
like a horse and the little Jew keeps moving to stay warm." And he
laughed.
Shmuel was surprised to discover himself "the little Jew."
They were taken over to some kind of warehouse or supply shed just
beyond the main building. Boxes were everywhere, vials, cans. A
laboratory? wondered Shmuel uneasily. A small man in civilian clothes
was already there. He did not glance at them at all, but turned to the
corporal and said, "Here, those, have them load them up and get them
over to the Main Center at once."
"Yes, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor," said the corporal, and when the civilian
fellow left, the corporal turned to Shmuel and said quite
conversationally, "Another Jew, you know. They'll come for him one
day." Then he took them to the corner of the room, where two wooden
crates were stacked, and with a wave of the hand indicated to the
prisoners to load them onto a dolly.
Each crate weighed around seventy-five kilos and the prisoners strained
to get them down and across the room to the dolly. Shmuel had the
impression of liquid sloshing weightily as he and the Russian
crab-walked the first one over, yet there was nothing loose about the
contents. The twin runes of the SS flashed melodramatically in stencil
across the lid, and next to them, also stamped, was the mighty German
eagle, clutching a swastika. The designation WVHA also stood out on
the wood and Shmuel wondered what it could mean, but he should not have
been wondering, he should have been carrying, for the heel of his boot
slipped and he felt the crate begin to tear loose from his fingers. He
groped in panic, but it really got away from him and his eyes met the
Russian's in terror as the box fell.
It hit the cement floor with a thud and broke apart.
The Russian dropped to his knees and began to weep piteously. Shmuel
stood in fear. The room blurred in the urgency of his situation. Askew
on the cement, a great fluffy pile of excelsior spewing out of it like
guts, the box lay broken on the floor. An evil-smelling fluid spread
smoothly into a puddle.
The civilian returned swiftly.
"You idiots," he said to them.
"And where were you while these fools were destroying valuable
chemicals?
Snoozing in the corner?"
"No, sir, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor," lied the young corporal.
"I was watching closely. But these Eastern Jews are shifty. I just
wasn't fast enough to prevent--" The civilian cut him off with a
laugh.
"That's all I get from the Waffen SS is excuses. Have them clean it up
and try not to drop the other crates, all right?"
"Yes, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. My apologies for failing at--" "All
right, all right," said the civilian disgustedly, turning.
When the civilian left, the SS corporal hit Shmuel across the neck,
just above the shoulder, with his fist, a downward blow. It drove him
to the floor. The boy kicked him, hard, in the ribs. He knew he was
in a desperately dangerous situation. He'd seen a KZ guard in '44
knock down an elderly rabbi in much the same way.
The man, baffled, glasses twisted, raised his hands to ward off other
blows; this insolence so enraged the stupid young soldier that he
snatched out his pistol and shot the man through the forehead. The
body lay in the square for three days, head split apart, until they'd
removed it with tongs.
"You stinking kike pig," screamed the boy. He kicked Shmuel again. He
was almost out of control.
"You piece of Jew shit." Shmuel could hear him sobbing in anger.
He bent over and grabbed Shmuel by the throat, twisting him upward so
that their faces were inches apart.
"Surprises ahead for you, Jew-shit. Der Meisterschuster, the Master
Shoemaker, has a nice candy delight for you." His face livid and
contorted, he drew back.
"That's right, Jew-shit, a real surprise for you."
He spoke in a clipped Prussian accent hard and quick, that Shmuel,
whose basic Yiddish was a derivation of the more languid Bavarian
German, had difficulty understanding when spoken so quickly.
The corporal backed off, color returning to his face.
"All right, up! Up!" he shouted.
Shmuel climbed up quickly. He was trembling badly.
"Now get this mess cleaned up."
Shmuel and the Russian gathered the excelsior into a wad of newspaper
and mopped the floor dry. They also retrieved the broken glass and
then, carefully, finished loading the cart.
"Bravo! Fine! What heroes!" said the boy sarcastically.
"Now get your asses out of here before I kick them again!"
Shmuel had been playing for this second for quite some time. He'd seen
it from the very first moments.
He'd thought about how he'd do it and resolved to act quickly and with
courage. He took a deep breath, reached down and picked up the wad of
newspaper and stuffed it into his coat.
With the bundle pressing against his stomach, he stepped into the cold.
He waited for a call to return; it didn't come. Keeping his eyes
straight ahead, he rejoined the labor detail.
Not until late that night did Shmuel risk examining his treasure. He
could hear steady, heavy breathing; at last he felt safe. You never
knew who'd sell you for a cigarette, a sliver of cheese. In the
darkness, he opened the paper carefully, trying to keep it from
rattling. Inside, now matted and balled, the clump of excelsior was
still damp from the fluid. The stuff was like mattress ticking, or
horsehair, thick and knotted. Eagerly, his fingers pulled tufts out
and kneaded them, until he could feel the individual strands.
There was no question of knitting; he had no loom and no skill. But he
spread it out and, working quietly and quickly in the dark, began to
thread it into the lining of the greatcoat. He kept at it until nearly
dawn, inserting the bunches of packing into the coat. When at last
there was no more, he examined what he had made.
It was lumpy and uneven, no masterpiece; but what did that matter? It
was, he knew, significantly warmer.
Shmuel lay back and felt a curious thing move through his body, a
feeling long dead to his bones. At first he thought he might be coming
down with a sickness and the feeling might be fever spreading through
his body. But then he recognized it: pleasure.
For the first time in years he began to think he might beat them. But
when he slept, his nightmares had a new demon in them: a master
shoemaker, driving hobnails into his flesh.
A week or so later, he was in the trench, digging, when he heard voices
above him. Obeying an exceedingly stupid impulse, he looked up.
Standing on the edge, their features blanked out by the winter sun, two
officers chatted. A younger one was familiar, a somewhat older one
not. Or was he? Shmuel had been dreaming all these nights of the
Master Shoemaker and his candy delight. This man? No, ridiculous, not
this bland fellow standing easily with a cigarette, discussing
technical matters. He wore the same faded camouflage jackets they all
had, and baggy green trousers, boots with leggings and a squashed cap
with a skull on it. Quickly Shmuel turned back to his shovel, but as
he dropped his face, he felt the man's eyes snap onto him.
"Einer Jud?" Shmuel heard the man ask.
The younger fellow called to the sergeant. The sergeant answered
Yes.
Now I'm in for it, Shmuel thought.
"Bring him up," said the officer.
Strong hands clapped onto Shmuel instantly. He was dragged out of the
trench and made to stand before the officer. He grabbed his hat and
looked at his feet, waiting for the worst.
"Look at me," said the officer.
Shmuel looked up. He had the impression of pale eyes in a weathered
face which, beneath the imprint of great strain, was far younger than
he expected.
"You are one of the chosen people?"
"Y-yes, sir, your excellency."
"From out East?"
"Warsaw, your excellency."
"You are an intellectual. A lawyer, a teacher?"
"A writer, most honored sir."
"Well, you'll have plenty to write about after the war, won't you?" The
other Germans laughed.
"Yes, sir. Y-yes, sir."
"But for now, you're not used to this hard work?"
"N-no, sir," he replied. He could not stop stuttering.
His heart pounded in his chest. He'd never been so close to a German
big shot before.
"Everybody must work here. That is the German way." He had lightless
eyes. He didn't look as if he'd ever cried.
"Yes, most honored sir."
"All right," the officer said.
"Put him back. I just wanted the novel experience of taking one of
them out of a pit."
After the laughter, the sergeant said, "Yes, Herr
Obersturmbannfrihrer," and he knocked Shmuel sprawling into the
trench.
"Back to work, Jew. Hurry, hurry."
The officer was gone quickly, moving off with the younger chap. Shmuel
stole a glimpse of the man striding off, calm and full of decisiveness.
Could this simple soldier be the Master Shoemaker? The face: not
remotely unusual, a trifle long, the eyes quick but drab, the nose
bony, the lips thin. The overall aspect perfunctorily military. Not,
Shmuel concluded, an unusual fellow to find in the middle of a war.
And yet because he seemed so easily in command and it was so clear that
the others deferred to him, Shmuel took to thinking of the man as the
Shoemaker.
Then a day came when the Germans did not fetch them for work. Shmuel
awoke at his leisure, in light. As he blinked in it, he was filled
with dread. The prisoners lived so much by routine that a single
variation terrified them. The others felt it too.
Finally the sergeant came by.
"Stay inside today, boys, take a holiday. The Reich is rewarding you
for your loyal service." He grinned at his joke.
"Important people crawling about today." And then he was gone.
Late in the afternoon, two heavy trucks pulled into the yard. They
halted next to the concrete building and hard-looking men with
automatic guns dismounted and deployed around the entrance. Shmuel
caught a glimpse and stepped away from the window. He'd seen their
type before: police commandos who shot Jews in pits.
"Look," said a Pole, in wonder.
"A big boss."
Shmuel looked again, and saw a large black sedan parked next to the
truck; pennants hung off it limply; it was spotted with mud, yet shiny
and huge.
A prisoner said, "I heard who it is. I heard them talking.
They were very nervous, very excited."
"Hitler himself?"
"Not that big. But a big one still."
"Who, damn you? Tell."
"The Man of Oak."
"What? What did you say?"
"Man of Oak. I heard him say it. And the other--" "It's crazy. You
misunderstood."
"It's the truth."
"You shtetl Jews. You'll believe anything. Go on, get out of here.
Leave me in peace."
The car and the police commandos remained until after dark, and later
that night, a crackling rang in the distance.
"Somebody's shooting," said a man.
"Look! A battle."
In the distance, light sprayed through the night.
Flames glowed. The reports came in the hundreds. It didn't look like
a battle to Shmuel. He recalled the sky over the crematorium, shot
with sparks and licks of flame. The SS was feeding the Hungarian Jews
into the ovens. The smell of ash and shit filled the sky. No bird
would fly through it.
Abruptly the shooting stopped.
* * *
In the morning the fancy vehicles were gone. But things did not return
to normal. The prisoners were formed into a column and marched off
along a heavily rutted road through the forest. It was February now,
and much of the snow had melted, but patches of it remained; in the
meantime there had been rain, and the road was mud which congealed on
Shmuel's boots. The woods on either side of the road loomed up, dense
and chilly. To Shmuel they were the woods of an ugly German Undrchen,
full of trolls and dwarves and witches, into which children
disappeared. He shivered, colder than he should have been. These
people loved their dark forests, the shadows, the intricate webs of
dark and light.
A mile or so away, the woods yielded to a broad field, yellow and scaly
with snow. At one end of it, the earth mounted into a wall and at the
other, the nearer, a concrete walkway lay and a few huts huddled in the
trees.
"Boys," said the sergeant, "we had a little show out here last night
for our visitor and we'd like your help in cleaning up."
The guards handed out wooden crates and directed the prisoners to
harvest the bits of brass that showed in the mud alongside the walkway.
Shmuel, prying the grimy things out--they were, it turned out, used
cartridge cases--felt his knees beginning to go numb in the cold, his
fingers beginning to sting. He noted the Gothic printing running
across the box in his hand. Again, the melodramatic bird and the
double flashes of the SS. He wondered idly what the next gibberish
meant: "7.92mm X 33 (Kurz)" read one line; under it "G. C. HAENEL,
SUHL," and under it still a third, "STG-44." The 5
Germans were rationalists in everything; they wanted to stick a
designation on every object in the universe.
Maybe that's why he'd walked around marked jud the last year or so.
"He certainly fired enough of the stuff," said the pipe smoker to one
of the other guards.
"We could have used some at Kursk," said another man bitterly.
"Now they shoot it off for big shots. It's crazy. No wonder the
Americans are on the Rhine."
This exercise was repeated several times in the next few weeks. Once,
several prisoners were jerked from their sleep and marched out. The
story they told the next morning was an interesting one. After they'd
picked up the spent shells, the Germans had been especially hearty to
them, treated them like comrades. A bottle had even been passed around
to them.
"German stuff."
"Schnapps?"
"That's it. Fiery. An instant overcoat. Takes the chill out of your
bones."
The Big Boss--Shmuel knew it was the Shoemaker-was there too, the man
said. He'd walked among them, asking them if they were getting enough
to eat. He handed out cigarettes, Russian ones, and chocolates.
"Friendly fellow, not like some I've seen," said the man.
"Looked me square in the eye too."
But Shmuel wondered why they'd need the shells back in the night.
A week, perhaps two, passed, though without reference to clock or
calendar it was hard to tell. Rain, sun, a little snow one night. Was
there more activity around the concrete building? More night firings?
The Shoemaker seemed everywhere, almost always with the young officer.
Shmuel had never seen the civilian--the one they said was a
kike--again. Had he been taken away like the boy said? And he began
to worry about this "Man of Oak." What could it mean? Shmuel started
to feel especially uneasy, if only because the others were so pleased
with the way things were going.
"Plenty to eat, work's not so bad, and one day, you'll see, the
Americans'll show up and it'll be all over."
But Shmuel began to worry. He trusted his feelings.
He worried especially about the night. It was the night that
frightened him. Bad things happened in the night, especially to Jews.
The night held special terrors for Jews; the Germans were drawn to it
unhealthily. What was their phrase? Nacht und Nebel. Night and fog,
the components of obliteration.
Light flashed through the barrack. Shmuel, dazed out of his sleep, saw
torch beams in the darkness, and shadows.
The SS men got them awake roughly.
"Boys," the pipe smoker crooned in the dark, "work to do. Have to earn
our bread. It's the German way."
Shmuel pulled the field coat around him and filed out with the others.
His pupils were slow in adjusting and he had trouble making out what
was occurring. The guards trudged them through the mud. They had left
the compound.
Guards with automatic guns prowled on either side of the column. Shmuel
peered up through the fir canopy. Cold light from dead stars reached
his eyes. The dark was satiny, alluring, the stars abundant. A wind
howled. He pulled the coat tighter. Thank God for it.
They reached the firing range. Fellows were all about, a crowd.
Everybody was there. Shmuel could sense their warmth, hear them
breathing. All the SS boys; the Shoemaker himself, smoking a
cigarette. Shmuel thought he saw the civilian too, standing a little
apart with two or three other men.
"This way, lads," said the sergeant, leading them into the field.
"Brass all over the place. Can't leave it here, the General Staff'd
kick our ass for sure. Hot coffee, schnapps, cigarettes for all when
the job's done, just like before."
There was no moon. The night was dark and pure, pressing down. The
prisoners spread out in a line and faced back toward the Germans.
"It's in front of you boys, brass, tons of it. Have to get it up
before the snow."
Snow? It was clear tonight.
Shmuel obediently worked his fingers over the frozen ground, found a
shell. He found another. It was so cold out. He looked around. The
guards had left. The prisoners were alone in the field. The trees
were a dark blur in the far distance. Stars towered above them, dust
and freezing gas and spinning fire wheels Far off, unreachable.
The field was another infinity. It seemed to stretch forever. They
were all alone.
"Hey, he's sleeping," said someone, laughing.
Another man slid himself carefully on the ground, shoulders flat to the
earth.
"You jokers are going to get us all in trouble." The same voice
laughed.
Another lay down.
Another.
They fell relaxed, turned in slightly, tucking the knees under, seeming
to pause at the waist then gently lurching forward.
Shmuel stood.
"They're shooting us," somebody said quite prosaically.
"They're shoo--" The sentence stopped on a bullet.
Prayers disturbed the night; there was no other sound.
A bullet struck the man closest to him in the throat, driving him
backward. Another, slumping, began to gurgle and gasp as his lungs
flooded. But most perished quickly and silently, struck dead center,
brain or heart.
It is here. The night has come, Shmuel thought.
Nacht, nacht, pressing in, claiming him. He always knew it would come
and now it was here. He knew it would be better to close his eyes but
could not.
A man ran until a bullet found him and punched him to the ground. A
man on his knees had the top of his head blown off. Drops landed wet
and hot on Shmuel.
He alone was standing. He looked around. Someone was moaning. He
thought he heard some breathing. It had taken less than thirty
seconds. The shooting was all over now.
He stood in the middle of the field, surrounded by corpses. Now he was
really alone.
A shape in the dark moved. Then others. Shmuel could see soldiers
picking their way toward him in the darkness. He stood very still. The
Germans began to kneel at the bodies.
"Right in the heart!"
"This one in the head. That Repp fellow really can shoot, eh?"
"Hold that noise down, damn you," cried a voice Shmuel recognized as
the pipe smoker's.
"The officers will be out here soon."
A soldier was standing six feet from him.
"What? Say, who's that?" the man said in bewilderment.
"Hauser, I said keep the noise down. The offi--" "He's alive!"
bellowed the soldier, and began to tear at his gun.
Shmuel willed himself to run. But he couldn't.
Then he was fleeing blindly across the field.
"Damn, I saw a prisoner."
"Where?"
"Stop that fellow. Stop that man."
"Shoot him. Shoot him."
"Where, I don't see a damned thing."
Other voices mingled in confusion. A shot rang out, loud because it
was so close. More shouts.
Shmuel had just made it into the trees when the lights came on. The
Germans were pinned in a harsh, white glare, losing more seconds.
Shmuel caught a glimpse of the Shoemaker moving fast into the light,
automatic gun in one hand. A whistle shrilled. More lights flickered
on.
There was a siren.
It was at this moment, as he seized a moment's rest, that a revelation
hit him. A moment of perfect, shimmering lucidity enveloped him and a
truth that had these many months been just beyond knowing at last stood
revealed. His heart tripped in excitement.
But no time now. He turned and lurched into the forest. He began to
run. Branches cut at him like sabers.
Once he tripped. He could hear Germans behind him, much commotion and
light; the glare of heavy arc lamps filled the sky. He thought he
heard airplanes too, at any rate some kind of heavy engine, trucks
perhaps or motorcycles.
Then the lights were out, or gone. He was utterly confused and quite
frightened. How long had he been gone and how far had he traveled? And
where was he going? And, would he be caught? Miraculously, his feet
seemed to have found a path in the heavy undergrowth.
He wanted badly to rest but knew he couldn't. Thank God the food and
labor had given him strength for all this, and the coat the warmth. He
was a lucky fellow. He plunged on.
The sun was just up when Shmuel finally lay down in the silence of the
great forest. He lay shuddering convulsively.
He seemed to have come to a vault in the trees, a cathedral of space
formed by interlocking branches. The silence was thunderous in here;
he interrupted it only with his breathing. He felt himself at last
escaping into sleep.
His final thought was not for his deliverance--who could question such
caprices?--but for his discovery.
Meisterschuster, master shoemaker, he heard, or thought he'd heard. But
the boy was a North German, he spoke fast and clipped and the
circumstances of the moment were intense. Now Shmuel realized the
fellow had said something just a syllable shy of Meisterschuster.
He'd said der Meisterschiitze.
 Caparisoned in elegant damp Burberry, imperially slim, impossibly
dapper, with just the faintest smudge of ginger moustache to set off
his boyish though firm features, a British major named Antony
Outhwaithe bore down on a large target that hunched behind a typewriter
in an upper-story office.
"Hello, chum," called the major, knowing the American hated the chum
business, which by now, winter of '45, had in London become quite
tiresome, "greetings from Twelveland."
The American looked up; a bafflement fell across his open features,
just the merest foreboding of confusion.
His name was Leets and he was a captain in the Office of Strategic
Services. He wore olive drab wool and silver bars and looked unhappy.
His crew cut had grown out thatchily and his face had accumulated
pockets and wattles of fat. He had just been typing the final draft of
what was certain to be the most unread document in London that month, a
report on the new grip configuration of the Falschinnjaeger-42, the
German short-stroke paratroop carbine.
"Something right up your alley," the major sang out gleefully, and
without fear of retribution. He enjoyed considerable advantage over
the bloke: he was smaller and a few years older to begin with, cut on
roughly half the scale. He was quicker, wittier, more ironic, better
connected. His employers, the Special Operation Executive of MI-6,
were a better bunch than Leets's; and finally, he'd once upon a time
saved the American's life.
That was back in the shooting war, in June of '44.
Leets, a beat behind already, queried in his reedy Midwestern voice,
"Small arms, you mean?"
"That is what you do in the war, is it not?" asked Tony.
Leets ignored the sarcasm and received from Tony's briefcase a
tatty-looking scrap of yellow paper, almost the texture of parchment,
as though it had passed through many hands.
"Been around, huh?" Leets said.
"Yes, lots of chaps have seen it. It's not terribly interesting.
Still, since it is guns and bullets, I thought you might care to have a
look."
"Thanks. Looks like a--" "It's a telex."
"Yeah, some kind of shipping order or something."
He scanned the thing.
"Haenel, eh? Funny. STG forty-fours."
"Funny, yes. But significant? Or not? You'll give us your
evaluation, of course."
"I may have some things to say about it."
"Good."
"How fast?"
"No rush, chum. By eight tonight."
Swell, Leets thought. But he had nothing to do anyway.
"Okay, let me dig out the specs on the thing and--" But he was talking
to air. Outhwaithe had vanished.
Leets slowly drew out a Lucky, lit it off his Zippo and went to work.
Leets was a biggish man, not slob by fat, but ample, with a pleasantly
open American face. He was far into his twenties, which was old for
the rank of captain he wore in two bars on his collar, especially in a
war in which twenty-two-year-old brigadier generals led thousands of
airplanes deep into enemy territory.
He looked like a studious athlete or an athletic scholar and now that
he limped, compliments of the Third Reich, and occasionally went white
as the pain flashed unexpectedly across him, he'd acquired a grave,
almost desperate air. His many nervous habits--unpleasant ones,
licking his lips, muttering, gesturing over theatrically blinking
constantly--half suggested dissipation or indolence, though by nature
he was an austere man, a Midwesterner, not given to moodiness or
mopery. Yet lately, as the war roared by him, someone else's
invention, he'd been both moody and mopey.
Now, alone in the office--another source of bitterness, for he'd been
assigned a sergeant, but the kid, an energetic young beast, had a
tendency to disappear on him at key moments such as this one--he
brought the telex close to his eyes in an unselfconscious parody of
bookish intellectual and, squinting melodramatically, attempted to
master its secrets.
It was a pale carbon of a shipping order out of the Reich Rail Office,
a part of the Wehrmacht Transport Command, authorizing the G. K. Haenel
Fabrik, or factory, near Suhl, in northern Germany, to ship a batch of
twelve Sturmgewehr-44's, formerly called Maschinenpistole-44's,
cross-country to something called, if Leets understood the nomenclature
of the form, Aniage Elf, or Installation 11. The 44 was a hot assault
rifle, tested in Russia, that had lately been turning up on the Western
front in the hands of Waffen SS troops, paratroopers, armored-vehicle
commanders--glory boys, hard cores, professionals. Leets had a memory
of the thing too-he'd lain in high grass on a ridge above a burning
tank convoy while Waffen SS kids from an armored division called "Das
Reich" had poured heavy STG-44 fire into the area. He could still hear
the cracks as the slugs broke the sound barrier just above his head. It
fired a smaller bullet than the standard rifle--it hadn't the
range--but at higher velocity; and it was lighter and tougher and could
pump out rounds at full automatic.
Leets shivered in the memory: lying there, his leg bleeding like sin
all over the place, the men near him dead or dying, the smell of
burning gas and summer flowers heavy in his nose and the thatchy
figures of the camouflaged SS men moving up the slope, firing as they
came.
His throat was dry.
Leets lit a butt. He had one going, but what the hell?
It was another habit gone totally out of control.
Okay, where was I?
Curious, yes, quite curious. STG-44's went out from Haenel all the
time, but in larger quantities. They came off the assembly line in the
hundreds, the thousands, but distribution was always through normal
channels, ultimately in the hands of local commanders. Why bother to
make a big deal of shipping rifles across a
Germany whose railway network was one huge target of opportunity for
fighter-bombers? What's more, he realized that the form had the top
rail priority, DE, and Geheime Stadatten, top secret, and the magenta
eagle of state secrecy pounded onto it.
Wasn't that an odd one?
They were cranking these things out by the thousands--that was one of
the charms of the 44, for unlike the MP-40 or the Gew-41, it could be
quickly assembled from pre stamped parts, without any time-consuming
milling. Their ease of manufacture was part of their appeal.
So all of a sudden they were top secret? God-damnedest thing.
Leets drew back from the yellow sheet and squirmed at the effort of
trying to apply his thoughts to these matters. It was a big mistake,
because a chip of German metal deep in the core of his leg rubbed the
wrong way, nicking against a nerve.
Pain jacked up through his body.
Leets rocketed out of his seat and yelped. He felt free to let it take
him because he was alone. Among others, he simply clenched and clammed
up, whitening, looking at his feet.
The pain finally passed, as it always did. He limped back to his chair
and gingerly reclaimed it. But his concentration had been seriously
damaged, more and more of a problem these recent days, and he knew if
he didn't act fast the whole fucked-up scenario of that one battle
would unreel before his eyes. It was no favorite of his.
So Leets grabbed back into his mind for something to put between
himself and the day Jedburgh Team Casey caught it. He came up with
football, which he'd played at Northwestern, '38, '39 and '40. He had
been an end, and ends didn't do much except knock people down, a task
made significantly easier because he'd played next to NU's all-American
tackle Roy Reed, and Reed, in the '40 season, had picked up the
nickname "Nazi" after the Blitzkrieg of the spring, because of the way
he crashed through and laid people out. But Leets had once caught a
touchdown pass--perhaps the happiest moment of his life--and now he
resurrected the glory of that moment as a shield against the panic of
this one.
He remembered an object coming wobbling out of the dusk of a Dyche
Stadium afternoon; it was way off the true, a lumbering, ungainly thing
that seemed far gone if it could reach him at all through the gauntlet
of nailing arms he saw it must travel. The only reason the ball was
coming at Leets was that a hand-off to the right halfback who was
supposed to follow Reed into the end zone for a winning touchdown had
somehow missed connections, and the quarterback, a big, stupid boy
named Lindemeyer, a Phi Delt, had taken his only available option,
which was to toss the thing to the first guy in purple he saw.
Leets saw it bending toward the earth, miraculously untouched by the
half a dozen hands that had had a shot at it, and he had no memory of
catching, only the sensation of clasping it to his chest while people
jumped on him. Later, he'd figured that he must have been in midair
when he made the grab, defying gravity, and that his normally unwilling
fingers, clumsy, blunt things, had acquired in the urgency of the
instant a physical genius almost beyond his imagination. But in the
exultation,
none of this was clear: only sensation, as joy flooded through him, and
people pounded him on the back.
Leets took another stab on the Lucky. He readjusted his reading
lamp--he must have knocked it askew when he popped up--and looked for
an ashtray amid a clutter of pencils, curling German weapons
instruction charts, sticks of gum, assorted breech parts, cups of cold
tea, and cough drops--Roger, his sergeant, had had a cold a few weeks
back. What was I looking for? Ashtray, ashtray.
He slid it out from the pile that had absorbed it just as a worm of ash
on the end of his cigarette toppled off into gray haze and settled
across the table.
The office was on the upper floor of an undistinguished building on
Ford's Place near Bloomsbury Square, a cold-water flat converted to
commercial use sometime in the Twenties by knocking down most of the
interior walls and adding an elevator--lift, lift, lift!" he was
always forgetting--which never worked anyway.
The roof leaked. There was no central heating and Roger never
remembered to keep the coal heater stoked so it was always cold, and
every time a V-2 or a doodle touched down anywhere within ten square
miles, which was frequent these days, a pall of dust drifted down to
coat everything.
Leets squinted again at the German document, as if drawing a bead on
it. Its bland surface revealed nothing new. Or did it? Holding it at
an angle into the light, he could make out two faint impressions on the
paper.
Someone had stamped the original with a great deal of zeal; down here
on the bottom carbon only a trace of the stamper's enthusiasm remained,
fainter than a watermark.
Surely the Brits would have some sort of Scot land Yard hocus-pocus for
bringing up the impressions.
Still, he laid the thing out and, remembering some Boy Scout stuff, ran
the flat of a soft lead pencil across the ridges just as gently as he
knew how, as if he were stroking the inside of a woman's thigh. Susan's
thigh, to be exact, though thoughts of her were of no use now--but that
was another problem.
Two images revealed themselves in the gray sheen of the rubbed lead,
one familiar, one not. The old friend read simply WaPriif2, which
Leets knew to be the infantry weapons department of the Heereswaffenamt
Prufwesson, the Army testing office. These were the boys who'd cooked
up the little surprises of late that had made his job so interesting:
that junky little people's machine pistol, the Volksturmgewehr,
manufactured for a couple of dimes' worth of junk metal, it fired 300
nine-mills a minute; and they also had an imitation Sten out, for
behind-the-lines operations, or after the war; and a final dizziness,
something called a Krummlauf modification, a barrel-deflection device
mounted on the STG-44, which enabled it to fire around corners. The
line on German engineering had always been that it was pedantic and
thorough; but Leets didn't think so. A wild strain of genius ran
through it. They were miles ahead in most things, the rockets, the
jets, the guns. It made him uneasy.
If they could come up with stuff like that (a gun for shooting round
corners!), who knew what else they were capable of?
Leets was by profession an intelligence officer; his specialty was
German firearms. He ran an office--obscure to be sure, not found in
any of the mighty eight-hundred-page histories--called the Small
Weapons
Evaluation Team, which in turn was part of a larger outfit, a Joint
Anglo-American Technical Intelligence Committee, sponsored in its
American half by Leets's OSS and in its Anglo half by Major
Outhwaithe's SOE.
So SWET worked for JAATIC, and Leets for Outhwaithe. That was Leets's
war now: an office full of dusty blueprints. It was no-SWET, as Roger
was so fond of pointing out (Leets's joke actually; Roger was a great
borrower).
But here was Wa Pruf 2 involved in a shipment of twelve rifles across
Germany. Now what could be so fascinating about those particular
twelve rifles? It bothered him, because it was so un-German.
Twelveland, as the Brits called the place in their intelligence jargon,
was a maze of intricacies: bureaus, departments--Amis, the Germans
called them--desks, sub desks--not at all unlike London in this
respect--but the place was in its way always tidy, ordered. Even with
the bombs raining down, most of her cities wrecked, millions dead,
Russian armies squeezing in from the East, American and British ones
poised in the West, no food, no fuel, still the paper work moved like
clockwork. Except, all of a sudden, here was this obscure little
agency that nobody except himself probably and some two or three others
in this town had ever even heard of, involved in some goofy business.
It bothered him; but what bothered him more was the other stamp he'd
brought out: WVHA.
Now what the hell was WVHA?
Another bureau presumably, but one he'd never heard of; another tidy
little office buried away in downtown Berlin.
An idea was beginning to grow in Leets's mind, dangerously.
He lit another cigarette. He knew somewhere in the files he had a real
good breakdown on the STG-44. It was an ingenious weapon, a
Stunngewehr, assault rifle, cross between the best parts of a
submachine gun, firepower and lightness, and a rifle, accuracy, range.
He supposed he'd have to dig the goddamned stuff out himself; he
remembered how when they'd gotten their hands on one they'd broken it
down to the pins and put it together again, taken it out to the range
and shot up a battalion of targets, and put together an absolutely
brilliant technical profile which had been shipped up to JAATIC and
routinely ignored.
Leets went over to the files and began to prowl. But just as he got
the report out, another thought came flooding over him.
Serial numbers.
Goddamn, serial numbers.
He rushed back to the telex. Now where the hell was it?
A stab of panic but then he saw the yellow corner sticking out from
under a dog-eared copy of Bill Fielding's Tournament Tennis and the
Spin of the Ball-Roger's bible--and he knocked the book aside and
seized the telex.
Serial numbers.
Serial numbers.
Leets stood at the window with the lights out, even though the blackout
was officially over and London was now into a phase called dim-out. He
looked over the skyline, drawn not long ago by the impact of a V-2.
Sometimes they burned, sometimes they didn't. This one had come down
to the north a half a mile or so, beyond, Leets hoped, the Hospital for
Sick Children on Great Ormond Street, maybe as far off as Coram
Fields.
But there'd be nothing to burn if it went down in that rolling meadow
and he could see a smudge--orange thumbprint--on the horizon; so
clearly there was fire.
Thing must have hit even farther out, beyond Gray's Inn Road and the
Royal Free Hospital. He'd have to walk out there sometime and see.
The rockets were a curious phenomenon for Leets.
They were big bullets really; even the Germans acknowledged this. The
V-2, technical designation A4, was a Wehrmacht project, administered by
the SS, interpreted as artillery. A bullet, in other words. The
doodles, V-l's, were Luftwaffe, aircraft.
Consider: a bullet as big as a building fired from a rifle in Holland
or Twelveland itself at a target in London.
Jesus; Leets felt a shiver run through him. It was different from
being bombed or shelled randomly; some fucking Kraut sniper was scoping
in on you through the dark and the distance, this feeling of being
watched, strange; a weirdness traveled his spine, a chill, but he
realized that it was only a draft and a split second later that the
door had been opened.
"Should have knocked, sorry," said Tony.
"I wanted to see where they parked their freight tonight.
Looked like it went down near the hospital, the one for kids."
"Actually, it went down much farther out, in Islington.
Could we, chum, do you mind?" Gesturing Close-the-curtains while he
turned on the switch.
"You're early," said Leets. It was half past seven.
"Bit ahead of schedule, yes."
"Okay," Leets said, taking his seat and pulling out the telex and
assorted other items, "this is funny."
"Make me laugh."
"They're shipping a special consignment of rifles across Germany. Now
our best estimate is that maybe eighty thousand of the things have been
built since Hitler gave 'em the green light in '43. Most of the eighty
thousand came off the Haenel line at Suhl, although the Mauser works at
Oberndorf did a run of ten thousand before we bombed out the line. The
markings are different, and the plastic in the grip was cheaper,
chipped more easily."
Outhwaithe, in Burberry, collar upturned, hair slicked wetly back, face
calm, eyes dead-fish cold, studied him in a way his class of Briton had
been perfecting for seven hundred years.
Leets absorbed the glare unshaken, and went on.
"The serial numbers run eight digits, plus the manufacturing
designation. Do you follow?"
"Perfectly, dear fellow."
"Now they always use two dummy numbers. So you've got two dummy
numbers, then the five viable ones which indicate which part of the run
it was, then another dummy, then the manufacturing code. The point of
the dummy integers is to make us think they're manufacturing them in
the millions. They do it on all their small stuff, it's so stupid. Are
you with me? Am I going too fast?"
"I'm making a manful effort to stay abreast."
"According to this order"--he held up the telex' here you've got no
digits at all. The serial-number blank has been crossed out."
"If that is supposed to be a Major Intelligence Breakthrough, I'm
afraid I rather miss the thrust of it."
"The Germans keep records. Always. I can show you orders on stuff
going back to the Franco-Prussian War.
The whole stamping process is built into their manufacturing system, in
their assembly lines. You see it everywhere, Krupp, Mauser, ERMA,
Walther, Haenel. It's part of their mentality, the way they organize
the world."
"Yes, I quite agree. But you were going to explain to me the
significance of all this." Tony did not at all look impressed.
"These twelve rifles: they're handmade. There is no serial number. Or
at least the barrel and breech, the key components, the numbered
parts."
"Which means?"
"For a production-line piece, the forty-four is great.
Best gun in the war. Can cut a horse in two at four hundred meters. In
Russia you could get three PPSH's for a forty-four. But because it's a
production-line piece, you can't get a real tight group. You're
shooting a small seven-point-nine-two-millimeter bullet, kurz, their
word for short. It's not a rifle that offers a great deal in the way
of precision."
"Until now."
"Until now. Taking into consideration this is a high-priority project,
taking into consideration WaPriif 2 is cooperating with this outfit
WVHA that I've never heard of, and taking into consideration they're
shipping the guns to some secret location down south, this Anlage Elf,
I would say it's obvious."
"I see," said Tony, but Leets could tell his presentation was not
having the desired effect.
He played his trump card.
"They're going to try and kill someone. Someone big, I'd say. They're
going to snipe him."
But Tony, once again, topped him.
"Rubbish," he said.
 Shmuel was totally of the forest now. He was part of it, a sly,
filthy animal, nocturnal, quick to panic, impelled into motion by
ravenous hunger, shivering himself to sleep each morning in small
caves, tufts of brush, against rocks. He ate roots and berries and
wandered almost helplessly through the deep stillness, guided by only a
primitive sense of direction. His journey was bounded by mountains. He
was terrified of their bare slopes. What would he do up there on those
rounded humps, except die? So he skirted them, threading his way
through the densely wooded highlands at their base.
Ten days now, twelve, maybe two weeks.
But it was a losing proposition and he knew it. He lost too much each
day and the disgusting stuff he made himself eat could never replace
it. He was running down, the fat and fiber and muscle he'd picked up
in the camp melting away. The forest would win. He'd known it always.
He'd pass out from weakness, die in wet leaves next to an obscure
German stream.
His clothes had shredded, though into German tatters, not Jewish ones.
The boots had disintegrated partially.
The trousers were frayed and shiny. The coat was the only thing left.
Stuffed with excelsior, it kept enough of the cold out and enough of
the wet off. It forestalled sickness. Sickness was death. If you
were too weak to move, you died. Motion was life, that was the lesson
here. You kept moving. God would show you no pity.
One night rain came, a full storm. Shmuel cowered and could not move.
Lightning bounded across the horizon behind the screen of trees, and
the thunder was mighty, a roar that rose and fell and never went wholly
away.
The next day, and the next, he smelled a tang to the air, sulfurous
almost. And once he came upon an opening in the trees, where the open
space seemed to fill with light; but this abundance of perspective
filled him with horror and he lurched ahead, deeper into the wet
trees.
I hope it doesn't freeze, he thought. If it freezes I die.
If I run into soldiers, I die. If I sleep too long, I die.
There were many, many ways to die, and he could not think of a single
one to survive.
Several times he crossed roads and once he found himself on the grounds
of some hotel or inn or something, but the thought of a caretaker or
soldiers terrified him, and again he ran deeper into the forest.
But his strength was fleeing quickly now. It had held for so long,
augmented by berries and roots and lichens, but in the last day or two
his weakness seemed to have increased enormously.
Finally he crawled from sleep knowing he was doomed. He was too weak.
There'd been no food he could hold down, the forest here was a thicket
of old bones, clacking in the wind. Leafless trees white and knuckled
like gripping hands, millions of them.
I am the last, he thought, the last Jew.
The ground here was matted with dead leaves into a kind of cold scum;
it was not even dirt.
He lay on his back and looked up into the trees.
Through the canopy he could make out chinks of blue.
He tried to crawl, but could not.
At last they got me. How long did I last? Almost three weeks. I'll
bet that German would never have thought I could last three weeks. I
must have come nearly a hundred kilometers. He tried to think of a
death prayer to say, but he had not said prayers in years and could
think of none. He tried to think of some poetry to recite. This was a
monumental occasion, was it not? Certainly a poem was called for. But
his mind was empty of words. Words were no good, that was their
trouble. He knew lots of words, how to string them together and make
them do all kinds of fancy tricks, and they had not done him one bit of
good since 1939 and now, when he needed them most, they let him down.
He was at last in extremis, a matter of great curiosity to all writers.
It was said that if you had the answers to certain questions posed by
these final moments, you could write a great book. Conrad for one had
tried; no surprise it was a Polish specialty. But Shmuel did not find
his own imminent destruction particularly interesting.
As a phenomenon it lacked resonance. The sensations, though extreme,
proved predictable; almost anybody could imagine them. A great
melancholy, chiefly;
and pain, much pain, though not so bad now as earlier, pushing ahead
though hungry and exhausted. Indeed, this last aspect of the ritual
was proving quite pleasant.
He at last began to feel warm, though perhaps it was rather more numb.
It occurred to him that the body died in degrees, limbs first, mind
last; and how horrible to lie alive in brain but dead in body for days
and days.
But the mind would be kind; it would fog and blur, sink into a kind of
haze. He'd seen it at the camps.
He began to hallucinate.
He saw a man of oak, giant, sprouts and twigs and green fronds
springing from a wooden face, old and desiccated.
Something pagan, loamy, fairy-tale quality. The fantastic was
everywhere. Imps and goblins whirred about. And he saw the head
German, the big shot, the Master Sniper: yet it was any face, tired,
altogether uninteresting. He tried to conjure up his own past, but
lacked the energy. What of the people he loved? They were gone
anyway; if he regretted his death, it was only that their memories
would no longer live. But certain things could not be helped. He
thought maybe God had had a purpose in sparing him by miracle back
there in the black field when the shooting happened. But this was
another jest.
As if to drive home this idea, the last seconds of the scene of the
death he should have had began to unreel before his eyes. He could
almost see soldiers moving toward him, out of the shadows. They came
with great caution, without rush.
An image filled the sky above him.
A man stood with a rifle.
Shmuel waited for the bullet.
Instead, he heard words in a language he knew: English.
"Freeze, fuck face
Other forms swirled above him.
"Jesus, pitiful," somebody said.
"Hey, Lieutenant. Nelson caught the sorriest-looking Kraut I ever
saw."
And someone else said, "Another fucking mouth to feed."
 Roger Evans, Leets's nominal assistant, counseled practicality.
"Forget it," he advised. He was an insouciantly handsome teenager who
quite naturally assumed arrogant postures and spoke in a voice cold
with an authority he in no way possessed. The kid also knew how to
dress: his shiny paratrooper boots rested against an edge of a table,
propelling him outward, on the back two legs of a chair, delicately
poised. His Ike jacket, cut tight, emphasized his athletic frame, and
his service cap perched snidely on an angle down across his forehead.
Leets had loathed him at once but in the months they'd worked
together--"work" was an entirely inaccurate word, in Roger's case--he'd
come finally to accept the kid as basically harmless.
Rug threaded his hands together on the back of his neck, and continued
in his instruction, bobbing all the while.
"That's all, Captain. Forget it. No skin off your nose."
Nothing was ever skin off Roger's nose. What Leets found especially
irritating this midwinter morning was that Roger was probably right.
Leets said nothing. He fiddled with some papers at his desk: a field
report on the double-magazine feed system Wa Pruf 2 had improvised for
the MP-40 submachine gun, giving it a sixty-round capacity, to match
the Soviet PPSH's seventy-one-round drum. Now these gadgets were
showing up in the West.
What irked Leets was Tony Outhwaithe's--and, by extension, all official
London's--rejection of his brainstorm.
"I do not think," Tony had said imperially, "our analysts--yours, for
that matter, although they are quite the junior at the game--will agree
with you, chum. Frankly, it's not the Nazi style. They tend to kill
in larger numbers, and are quite proud of it."
"We got Yamamoto in the Pacific, '44," Leets argued.
"You guys sent some commandos after Rommel. There were rumors the
Krauts had a mission on Roosevelt in Casablanca. And just a couple of
months ago, when the Bulge started, that stuff about Skorzeny going
after Eisenhower."
"Exactly. An unpleasant rumor that caused a great deal of discomfort
in all kinds of circles in this town.
Which is precisely why we'll not be calling up the guards on the basis
of a scrap of paper. No, it's this simple:
you're wrong."
"Sir," Leets had pulled himself to full attention, "may I
respectfully--" "No, you may not. Our intent in handing you this
slight job was to take advantage of your somewhat specialized knowledge
of German small arms technology.
We thought you might provide some insight as to what pressures their
industrial nut was undergoing. Instead you check in with a rather odd
tale out of James Hadley Chase. Very disappointing."
And he was dismissed.
But Leets let his enthusiasm get the best of him. In a frenzy of zeal,
he dashed off a batch of memos one afternoon to various bodies whose
support he hoped to enlist in his crusade--SHAEF, CIC, Army
Intelligence, the OSS counterintelligence outfit called X-2, OSS German
Desk over at Grosvenor Square, and so forth. The results were
depressing.
"It's 'cause I don't know anybody. They're all buddy-buddy, Eastern.
Clubby. Harvard-Oxford-Yale," he claimed.
Rug, old Harvard man at nineteen, tried to dissuade him from this
concept.
"It's not like that up at Harvard, Captain. It's just a bunch of guys
having a good time, like anywhere. Reason you're not getting anywhere
is simply that the clowns running the show don't know what they're
doing, no matter what school they went to. This war's the best thing
they've got going; it sure beats working for a living.
Once it's over, they're back jerking sodas." Rug spoke with the
brilliant assurance of a man who'd never jerk a soda in his life. His
education entitled him to sit in the office with his paratroop boots on
the table and dispense homilies of sociology to Leets.
"Aren't you supposed to be doing something?" Leets said.
Airily, Roger continued with his analysis, now reaching
cross-discipline into psychology.
"I know what's eating you, Jim. You want back in it." He was
genuinely amazed at this.
"Boy, between us we got this war solved.
Now why you'd want to--" Leets knew in many ways he baffled the young
tennis player. He of late had been baffling himself. Now why, all of
a sudden, was he off on a crusade? Upstairs had said No; then No it
would be.
But Leets kept thinking: Yes. It's got to be Yes.
Several days later, Leets appeared at Tony's office.
"Back again?" Tony asked.
"Yes," Leets replied, unsmilingly.
"And so soon."
"I was trying to sell it around town. No takers."
"No. Thought not. Simply won't wash, is why. Surely you can see
that. No convincing dope."
Leets concentrated on remaining pleasant. He explained politely, "The
reason there's no convincing dope is that I can't get any. I can't get
any because the word's out."
"Whatever can you mean?"
Leets explained as if to a schoolboy: "Someone's stamped me "Crank,"
"Nut." I dropped in on some of the other sections, thinking maybe I
could round up some help, and suddenly I'm getting pitched in the
street. You can tell from the way they look at you and whisper.
You're out, you're dead."
"I'm sure," Tony said primly, "you exaggerate."
"I figure it was you put the word out. Sir."
Tony did not look away. There was not a fiber in his body capable of
showing embarrassment. He looked at Leets evenly, his gaze richly
amused, and said, "I'll allow that's a possibility. Even a
probability."
"I thought so," said Leets.
"Nothing personal. I'm quite fond of you. You're my favorite
American. Unlike most of them, you are not madly obsessed with
yourself. You do not tell me stories of growing up on a farm in Kansas
and the name of your wife and children. Still, there are limits."
"Major Outhwaithe."
"Please. Tony is fine."
"Major Outhwaithe, I'm asking you to take me out of the freezer."
"Absolutely not." He gazed calmly at him. Pity registered in his
eyes; he was about to reveal a Major Truth, some elemental rule of the
game that the thick Yank hadn't caught on to.
"Because you've got a real job to do. I know, I gave it to you. I'm
responsible for it. I am exec officer of this little clown show
JAATIC; directly under which is your little clown show, SWET. Not
everybody can have a big job in the war. Captain Leets. Some of
us--you, me--must do the little jobs, the boring jobs in safe offices
five hundred miles from the front."
Leets sighed.
"Sir, it's not a question of--" "I shall tell you what it's a question
of. It's a question of maturity. You had your time playing Indian, so
did I. All over now. We're desk chaps, you and I. See that attractive
girl. Enjoy the flicks. Do your job. Thank God you didn't get your
nose or jaw shot off. Rejoice in the coming Triumph of Our Way of
Life. The war's almost over. Weeks, months perhaps. Unless a rocket
lands on your skull, you've made it. See that girl. Her name--"
"Susan. I don't. See her, that is. Anymore."
"Pity. But the town's full of them. Find another."
"Sir. A few words from you and--"
"You mad fool. Go back to guns, to blueprints. Forget murder plots,
assassinations. It's London, February, 1945, not Chicago, 1926."
Leets couldn't afford anger and anyway wasn't sure he had the strength;
and he knew the Brits hated scenes.
It's what they hated most about Americans. And what he needed he'd
have to get from Tony Outhwaithe sooner or later, one way or the other,
for in this town Tony knew all the right ears to whisper into. If
Tony'd frozen him, then only Tony could unfreeze him.
"Major Outhwaithe," Leets began again, in a voice he imagined was sweet
with reason, "I'd merely like an opportunity to locate additional
intelligence. I need more evidence than a Wehrmacht Transpoor Command
order, even a damned strange one. I need access to other sources,
other distributions. The archives, the reading lists. Your technical
people. The--" "Leets, old man, I'm quite busy. We all are, except
you. You're becoming dreadful, you and that bratty boy of yours.
You're turning into Jews, with your own private patch of persecution,
as though the war was a special theater for you and you alone. Who
chose you, old man? Eh? Who chose you?"
Leets had no answer. The British major glared at him, ginger moustache
bristling. The eyes were cold as dead glass.
"Be off!" He flicked insolently with his wrist, Noel Coward in the
khaki of King and country, and brushed Leets, the bug, out.
Leets found himself exiled into the streets, disappointed.
He stood a second on the pavement in front of the Baker Street
headquarters, a nondescript joint called St. Michael House, No. 82.
He was one American among crowds of the brutes on the sidewalks of the
old city, all of them healthy, shoving, yak ky types, many squiring
girls. It was chilly and gray--typical London midwinter--but the fresh
American flesh seemed to warm the old city's streets and fill them with
human color and motion. Next to the ruddy Yanks, the Brits were pale
and thin, but not too many of them were in evidence. Whose city was
this, anyway? Leets felt as if he were lost in a football
crowd--Homecoming perhaps, some kind of rite. Everybody seemed happy,
pink, party-bound. London was a party if you were American, had
reasonable chances at survival and pounds in your pocket.
Triumph was in the air, self-congratulation. The soon-to-come victory
would be moral as well as tactical. A way of life, a civilization, had
been tested and vindicated.
Looking about, Leets saw how glad these guys all were to be American,
and how glad, in turn, the pale girls were to have latched onto them.
The war was almost all gone. It was feeble and far off. Only the
bomber crews, by their paradoxical youth, called it up.
They were all over the place now, Eighth Air Force teenagers in for a
desperate day or two between missions, recognizable by their three
gunner's chevrons on their Air Corps sleeves, unable yet to shave,
toting guidebooks and cameras and asking stupid questions in loud
voices. They were too young to be scared, Leets thought.
He shivered, pulling his coat tighter. Not a Chicago winter, but cold,
just the same. It had the subsidiary effect of drying out London's
normally damp air and this in turn seemed to prevent his wound from
suppurating painfully.
He went down Baker Street until it became Orchard Street--crazy Brit
streets, they just turned into other streets on the next block without
warning and if you had to ask you were dumb--and took a left up Oxford
Street toward Bloomsbury. He walked with no particular hurry, knowing
nothing urgent awaited him in the office.
It did occur to him he was just a block or two off Grosvenor
Square--all he had to do was follow Duke Street, upcoming here--where
the OSS headquarters were. A fleeting thought sped through his head of
crashing the place, making a scene, demanding to see Somebody
Important.
It was said Donovan bought anything presented with enthusiasm; he could
sell Wild Bill Donovan. But more likely he'd run into the patrician
colonel who ran the place, the OSS head of London Station, prime
Eastern snoot, or one of his neck less nameless Brit-licking assistant
heads of Station, sure conspirators with Tony 0.
Leets reached Oxford Circus, way past Duke Street, and realized he'd
given up on Somebody Important.
Not his style, after all.
At the Circus, the traffic whirled about, small, strange black cars,
like planets out of control, headed for doom.
Shouts, honks, the bleat of motors, blue fumes from their exhaust
pipes, rose and enveloped him. Where'd they get the fuel? In the
mechanical whirligig he insisted on seeing a metaphor of futility: all
the metal going round and round and nowhere.
Forget it, okay?
They're right.
You're wrong.
An American sergeant--B-17 gunner, probably-walked by drunkenly,
throwing him a wobbly salute.
"Sir." The boy grinned brokenly. His arm lay across the shoulder of a
tart, a shriveled, frizzy, tit less tough-looking girl; quite a
picture, the two of them.
Leets answered the kid's salute with one equally limp and watched him
and his cutie stagger away. Night was falling. Leets felt none of the
triumph of the streets.
These crowds of corn-fed heroes, of whom the boy and girl were prime
examples, so sure, so full of life, so ready for the next day.
Heroes.
Yet the Germans were going to kill one of them.
Leets knew it. There was a man, perhaps in this city, who right now,
four hundred miles to the east, in a shattered Germany, sinister minds
were planning to kill. He alone knew it.
Who would the Germans kill? And why was it so different?
A V-2 might land that second and turn out the lights on three hundred:
pure random stroke, an accident, a function of applying so much
industrial power to such and such a technological problem.
The sniping was different. They knew a man, a special man, so vile to
them, such an insult to their imaginations, that even as they were
themselves about to become extinct, they would kill.
Churchill? Had the speeches angered them so much?
Ike? That smiling Kansas face, bland and seemingly guileless. Patton,
for beating the Panzer geniuses at their own game? Montgomery, who was
as ruthless as any of them?
Leets knew it didn't add up. Maybe Tony was right:
maybe the freeze was good and just.
He felt drained of energy. A soft dark had fallen on Oxford Circus.
There was not so much traffic, and now the cars moved more slowly. What
am I going to do? he wondered.
He wished he weren't so far from his office or billet;
he wished he weren't so tired; he wished there was a little piece of
the war left over for him; he wished he could get somebody to listen to
him. But chiefly he wished he could park his ass someplace soft, hoist
a mug of that thin stuff the Brits called beer, and forget 1945 for a
while.
Even as he walked through the anonymous maze of the city in the
deepening dark, he knew he'd secretly changed course several blocks
back, though he'd lied to himself, refused to acknowledge it at the
moment of decision.
But when he reached the flats in which she was quartered, he was unable
to maintain the fiction of coincidence.
He was going to see Susan.
She was not there, of course; Mildred, one of the roommates, was vague
but remotely optimistic about her return, and so Leets sat idiotically
in the living room and waited, passing the time with Mildred's date for
the evening, a B-24 pilot, another captain, while Mildred made ready in
the John.
The pilot was not so friendly.
"One of my buddies got killed in some crazy OSS thing," he told
Leets.
"Sorry," Leets said mildly, hoping to end the conversation there.
"Low-level agent drop, nobody came back at all," the pilot declared,
fixing Leets in the black light of a glare.
And what about all the agents spread to hell and gone by panicked
pilots who dumped them like freight twenty miles off the drop zone? His
own operational jump had been handled by a British crew, who'd been in
the business since 1941; they'd put him and his two companions right on
the mark. But he'd heard horror stories of poor guys coming down in
enemy territory miles from their contacts, to wander about stupidly
until nabbed.
"People get killed in a war," Leets said.
"Even Air Force pilots."
"Yeah, sure, in the war," the pilot said.
"What I want to know, is that crazy stuff you do, is it part of the
war?
Or is it some game for rich kids? Is it real?"
An interesting question. Leets had no answer. He looked steadily at
the other man and saw that the fellow wasn't really angry with him but
at the war and its waste and stupidity and ignorance.
"It varies," he finally said, and as he spoke he heard the door opening
in the hallway.
Mildred, coming out of the John, ran into her first.
"Suse, guess who's back?"
"Oh, Christ," Leets heard Susan say.
He felt himself rising as she came into the room.
Her starches were wilted and her hair was a mess. She held her white
shoes in her hand. Her face was tired and plain.
"Well, here I am again, ha, ha," Leets said, grinning sheepishly,
uncomfortably aware of the hostile bomber pilot watching him.
"Suse, we're going now," Mildred called, as she and the grumpy pilot
got ready to leave.
Susan still had not said anything. She looked him over, ruthlessly, as
if he were another patient on the triage list. She was a first
lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps, in plastic surgery; she was a pale,
bright, pretty girl from Baltimore; Leets had known her forever,
meaning from that magical period only remotely remembered as Before the
War. She'd gone to Northwestern too, where she'd dated and,
incidentally, married a friend of his who was now on a ship in the
Pacific. Leets had run into her six months earlier in the hospital,
where his leg had put him.
"Guess I can't stay away," he confessed.
"I had my mind all made up; it was set. No more Susan. Best for her.
Best for me. Best for Phil. But here I am again."
"This must be the twentieth time you've pulled this routine. When you
get it just right, you can do it on "Jack Benny."
" "It is pretty funny, I admit."
"You don't look so hot," she said.
"I'm not. You don't have a date, or anything?"
"Date? I'm married, remember."
"You know I do."
"But I do have something later. I said I'd--" "Still going?"
"Still."
"They give the Nobel peace prize during a war? You deserve one."
"How's the leg, Jim?"
"I should love it; it brought us together." He'd first seen her with
his leg hanging on a line off the ceiling like a prize fish.
"But it's not so good," he said to her now, "the goddamn thing still
leaks and when it leaks, it really aches."
"There's still metal in there, right?"
"Real small stuff."
"Too small for the X-rays. And they keep infecting on you. They've
got you on penicillin, right?"
"A ton a day."
"Nobody'll catch the clap from you, that's for sure."
"Hear from Phil?"
"His ship took one of those crazy Jap kamikazes in the bridge. Fifteen
guys got killed. He's all right. He made lieutenant commander."
"Phil'll do fine. I know he will. He'll come out an admiral."
"Hear from Reed?"
"No, but I got a note from Stan Carter. He's still in Washington. He
says Reed's a major, shooting down Japs left and right. Major! Christ,
and look at me."
"You never were the ambitious one."
"Say, let's go get something to eat. I need something to cheer me up.
Tough one at the office. They've all decided I'm a crank. The jerks.
So anyway, okay?"
"Jim, I don't have time. Really. Not tonight."
"Oh. Yeah, sure, I see. Well, listen, I just stopped by to see how
you were, you know, see if you'd heard from anybody."
"Don't go. Did I say go?"
"No, not in so many words. But--"
"Damn you. I wish you'd make up your goddamned mind."
"Susan," he said.
"Oh, Leets," she said.
"What are we going to do?
What in hell are we going to do?"
"I don't know. I really have no idea."
She stood up and began to unbutton her uniform.
Later, in the dark, he lit a cigarette.
"Listen, darling, put that cigarette out. It's time to go," she
said.
"The Center."
"Yes. Walk me over, all right? It's not far."
"Okay. You sure know how to keep yourself depressed."
"Somebody's got to go. From our side, I mean. I promised my father--"
She turned on the light.
"I know. I know all that. But it's such a waste of time.
They don't own the war, you know. We get part of it too, you know."
"I'm sure there's enough to go around," Susan said.
Naked, she walked to the dresser. She was beautiful to him. Her hips
were slim and he could see her ribs. She had small, fine breasts, with
just enough a sense of density to them, roundness without bulk. He
felt another erection begin to swell. The center of his body warmed.
He reached and turned out the light.
"No," she said, disinterestedly.
"Not now. Please.
Come on."
He turned it on again, and climbed out of bed into his GI underwear.
The Jews. The fucking Jews came first.
"They're a pain in the ass," he said.
"The Jews."
"Their part of the war is special."
"Special! Listen, let me tell you something. Everybody who somebody's
trying to kill is special. When I was in France getting shot at, was I
ever special!"
"No, it's different. Please, let's not go over this again, all right?
We always come back to it. Always."
She was right. They always did. Sooner or later.
He grunted, putting on his uniform. Susan, meanwhile, stepped into a
civilian dress, a shapeless, flowered thing, dowdy. It made her look
forty and domestic.
"Look," he suddenly said, tightening his tie, "I'll tell you who's
special. Who's really special."
"Who? Reed?"
"No. You. Divorce Phil. Marry me. All right?"
"No," she said, trying to get a necklace fastened.
"First, you don't mean it. You're just a lonely boy from the Midwest
in a big European city. You think you love me. You love my--well, we
both know what you love. Second, / don't love you. I love Phil
Isaacson, which is why I married him, even if he is six thousand miles
away on a ship and I feel guilty as hell. Third, you're what we call a
Goy. No offense. It doesn't mean inferior, but it means different. It
would make all kinds of problems. All kinds. And fourth--well, I
don't remember number four." She smiled.
"But I'm sure it's a great one."
"They're all great," he said, smiling himself.
"I ask you every time. When we started you had ten reasons.
Then eight. Now it's down to four, three really, because you don't
remember the last one. I feel like I'm making some kind of progress."
He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
* * *
"Turn here?" Leets thought he remembered, even in the fog.
"Right. Good memory," she said.
He'd been there once before and was not overwhelmed at the prospect of
returning. He knew he didn't belong.
"Funny the stuff that sticks in your mind. I remember the kid."
"The kid?"
"The little boy. You know, the one in the picture they've got
there."
"Oh, yes. That's Michael Hirsczowicz. At fifteen months. In pleas
anter times. Warsaw, August, 1939. Just before it all began."
"You'll laugh at this. Tony called me a Jew today."
"That's not very funny."
"No, I suppose it's not. Here, right?"
"Yes."
They turned in a dark doorway and began to climb some dim stairs.
"You don't think of the Jews having a government in exile," Leets
said.
"It's not a government in exile. It's a refugee agency."
"Everybody knows it's political."
"It's powerless. How can that be political? It's to try and keep
people alive. How can that be political? It's funded by little old
ladies in Philadelphia. How can that be political?"
The sign on the door said something in that squiggly funny writing and
beneath it zionist re leif agency.
"Jesus, they can't even spell."
"It is pitiful, isn't it," Susan said bitterly.
She'd been coming for months now, three, four nights a week. First it
was a joke: her father had instructed her in a letter not to forget who
she was, what she came from, and though she blithely said she was an
American, from Baltimore, she dropped in that first time only because
she recognized Yiddish on the door. But gradually, it began to get
under her skin.
"What the hell do you get out of it?" Leets had wondered.
"Nothing," she said.
Still, she kept it up, until it became almost obsessive.
But it wasn't as if she could do any good, any real good. That was the
bitter joke beneath it all, though for Leets it wasn't a joke anymore,
merely a bitterness.
They were so pathetic: from the old man Fischelson on down, the girls
in the office, all hysterics, scared, most of them. They needed so
much help and Susan did what she could, with paper work, and
telephones, small things like dealing with the landlord, making sure
the place stayed heated, proof-reading the news releases, even in their
fractured, East Side Yiddish-English. She knew all along that nobody
was listening.
"It's Communist, isn't it?" he said.
"It's Jewish. Not quite the same thing. Anyway, the man whose money
started it was a rich, conservative land and factory-owning aristocrat.
A banker. What could be further from communism?"
Still, Leets had his doubts.
"I don't know," he said.
"It's his kid. In the hall. Josef Hirsczowicz: he's the father. One
of the richest men in Europe. That's his child. Or was."
"They're dead?"
"They didn't get out. That little boy, Jim. Think of that. The
Germans killed him, because he's Jewish."
"They're trying to kill a lot of little boys. They tried to kill this
little boy. Religion has nothing--" but he stopped. He didn't want to
get back into it.
They reached the door at the end of the stairway.
"You're wasting your time," he cautioned.
"Of course I am," she said. The Zionists hoped to communicate to the
indifferent Western world what they maintained was happening in
Occupied Europe.
Susan had monstrous tales, of mass executions and death camps. Leets
told her it was propaganda. She said she had proof. Pictures.
"Pictures don't mean a thing," he'd instructed her brutally weeks
ago.
"Pictures can be faked. You need a goddamned witness, someone who's
been there. That's the only way you'll get anybody to listen to your
stuff.
Listen, you're going to get in trouble. You're an officer in the
United States Army. Now you're hanging around with a group of--" She'd
put a finger to his lip, ending his sentence. But later she talked of
it. Nobody would believe, she said.
The Zionist leaders sat in the offices of great men in London, she
explained with great bitterness, who'd listen earnestly, then shoo them
out after a polite moment or two.
Now, standing in the outer office, about to lose her, Leets felt the
beginning of a headache. The headaches always ended in rage.
Christ, what a hole! All that peeling paint and those blinky, low-watt
bulbs that almost looked like candles. It smelled like a basement up
here, and was always chilly, and all the other people seemed pallid and
underfed and would not look at him in his uniform.
"Thanks for walking me over, Jim," she said.
"I appreciate it. I really do." She smiled, and stepped away.
"Susan." He grabbed her arm.
"Susan, not tonight.
Come on, we'll do the town."
"Thanks, Jim, but we had our fun."
He didn't mind losing her to Phil--he knew he would in the end
anyway--but he hated losing her to this.
"Please," he said.
"I can't. I've got to go."
"It's just--" "Just Jews, Leets," she said.
"Me too." She smiled.
"Believe it or not."
"I believe, I believe," he protested. But he did not believe. She was
just an American girl, who'd invented her membership in this fossil
race.
"No, you don't," she said.
"But sometimes, I love you anyway."
And she disappeared behind the door.
The next morning, in the office, Leets's headache still banged away. He
stood looking across the gray skyline.
And where was Roger? Late as usual, he came crashing in, uniform a
mess.
"Had trouble finding a cab," he said. He'd once pointed out that he
was probably the only enlisted man in any army who took a cab to World
War II each morning.
"Sorry," he continued.
Leets said nothing. He stared grumpily out the window.
"Guess who I met last night? Go on. Guess, Captain."
Leets complained instead.
"Rug, you didn't sweep up last night. This place isn't the Savoy, but
it doesn't have to look like Hell's Kitchen either."
"Hemingway."
"You could at least -empty the wastebaskets once in a while."
"Hemingway. The writer. Over from Paris, from the Ritz. Met him at a
party."
"The writer?"
"Himself. In the flesh. Big guy, mustache, steel glasses. You should
have seen him pour the booze down."
"You travel in flashy circles."
"Only the best. I go to all the good parties. Don't let my stripes
keep me out of anything. After Bill Fielding, he's about the most
famous man in the world."
The door flew open; Tony Outhwaithe swirled in as if the star of the
play.
"Captain Leets, send this boy out to hit balls against a wall or
something," he commanded.
"Roger, out."
Roger was off in a flash.
"I'll be at the squash club, you need me."
Tony turned to Leets.
"The news is bad. Bad for you.
Rather good for me." He smiled with great satisfaction.
"You love to top me, don't you?" Leets said.
"Yes, but there are tops and tops, and this is a true top."
Leets braced; was he being shipped to Burma to hunt Japs in jungles?
"Are you still banging away on that assassin matter?"
"Sort of. Not getting any--" "Excellent. I can now prove you wrong.
New data."
"What?" Leets sat up, his heart beginning to excite a bit.
"My, interested so soon."
"What?"
"All right. Last night I happened to run into a donnish sort from PWE.
Know what that is?"
"Your Political Warfare Executive. Sort of like--" "Yes. Anyway, it
seems he can identify your phantom acronym. WVHA."
"Yeah?"
"Yes." Tony was richly satisfied. He was enjoying every minute of all
this.
"It has nothing to do with us. It doesn't even concern the war. It's
not related to intelligence or espionage or the racket at all. You're
out of luck, I'm afraid."
"What is it?" Leets demanded. Why was his heart going, why did he
have so much trouble breathing?
"It's a part of the administrative section of dear old SS. Wirtschafts
und Verwaltungshauptamt. Obscure, easy to miss among the more
flamboyant organizations in Twelveland."
Leets translated prosaically.
"Economic and Administrative Department," he said glumly, "that's all.
They do the payrolls. Clerks."
"Yes. Not the sort of lads to go gunning after generals, eh?"
"No, no, suppose not."
"They've got other concerns at the moment. Those clerks run one of the
more interesting phenomena of the Third Reich, old bun," Tony said,
smiling brightly.
"They run the concentration camps."
 Vollmerhausen not only knew that it wasn't his fault the prisoner had
escaped, he knew whose fault it was. It was Captain Schaeffer's fault.
The man was incompetent.
Schaeffer was involved in most things that went wrong at Aniage Elf.
He'd seen the type before, a real SS fanatic, sullen and stupid, a
brutal, suspicious Nazi peasant. Vollmerhausen had explained this very
carefully to anybody who cared to listen, though not many of them
did.
Now he was going to explain it to Repp.
"If," he began, "if Captain Schaeffer's men had been adequately
trained, had reacted quickly, had treated this whole enterprise as
something other than a holiday rest camp, then the prisoner could never
have escaped. Instead they blunder about like comedians in a farce,
shooting at each other, screaming, turning on lights, hooting and
tooting. A disaster. I thought the Waffen SS, especially the famed
Totenkopfdivision, had a reputation for efficiency. Why, the most
inept conscriptees-old men and youngsters--could have performed
better."
He sat back smugly. He'd really told them. He'd really let them have
it.
Repp sat, toying with something at his desk. He did not appear
particularly impressed. He certainly could be a cold chap.
But Schaeffer, there too, rose to his own defense.
"If," he replied, talking straight to Repp, "there had been no"--he
pronounced the next words with special precision, knowing how they
hurt--"machine failure, if Herr Ingenieur-Doktor had been able to get
his gadget to do its job--" Gadget?
"Slander! Slander! I will not be slandered! I will not be
slandered." He rose, red-faced, from the chair.
Repp waved him down.
"So that the Obersturmbannfrihrer had been able to take out his targets
as the mission specifications call for--" "There was no machine
failure," screamed Vollmerhausen hysterically. He was always being
slandered, lied about. He knew people called him a kike behind his
back.
"I deny, deny, deny. We checked the equipment until we were blue in
the face. It had integrity.
Integrity. Yes, problems, we work around the clock, the Waffen SS
should work half so hard, problems with weight, but the machine works.
Vampir works."
"The fact remains," insisted the young captain--some men just could not
accept defeat gracefully--"the fact remains, and no Yid argument is
going to change it, that Vampir displayed twenty-five targets and there
were twenty-six subhumans out there."
It was obvious.
"He slipped away before, don't you see?" said Vollmerhausen.
"He slipped out on your men before. I'm told he was a Jew, an educated
fellow. He must have realized something was up and in the moments--"
"He was seen leaving the field, Herr IngenieurDoktor," Repp said
quietly.
"And fired upon."
"Yes, well," Vollmerhausen sputtered, "he'd obviously, well, it's clear
that he separated himself before and so he wasn't within the range of
the mechanism."
"Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, the men swear he was standing among the
corpses."
"The main question must be," Vollmerhausen bellowed, cork-screwing
insanely out of his seat, "why wasn't the area fenced? My people slave
into the night over Vampir, yet the Waffen SS is unable to construct a
simple fence to hold a Jew in."
"All right, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor," said Repp.
"A simple fence to stop a Jew who--" Repp said, "Please."
Vollmerhausen had several points yet to make and he'd just thought of
five or six of them when Repp's stare fell across him. Something quite
frosty in it. Extraordinary.
The eyes cool, almost blank. The demeanor so perfectly calm, almost
unnaturally calm. Repp had an incredible talent for stillness.
"I was simply--but no matter," Vollmerhausen said.
"Thank you," said Repp.
Another silence. Repp was masterful with silences, and he let this one
drag on for several seconds. The air in the room was dead.
Vollmerhausen shifted in his chair uneasily. Repp kept it so hot in
here; in the corner the stove blazed away merrily. Repp, in faded
camouflages, made them wait while he took out and, with elaborate
ceremony, lit one of those Russian cigarettes he smoked.
Then finally he said, "Of the Jew, I have decided to let the matter
drop. He's somewhere in the forest, dead.
They are not a hearty, physical race. They have no will to survive.
Doom is their natural fate, and in the forest he'll locate his own
quickly. Therefore, I'm recalling the patrols."
"Yes, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer," said Captain Schaeffer.
"Immediately."
"Good. Now as for Vampir." He turned to Vollmerhausen.
Vollmerhausen licked his lips. They were dry. His mouth was dry. He
returned to a familiar, discomfiting litany: What am I doing here,
locked up in a wild forest with SS lunatics? It was a long way from
the WaPriif 2 testing ground outside Berlin.
"As for Vampir, I'm afraid I must require another test, Herr
IngenieurDoktor."
Vollmerhausen swallowed. So that was it, then. Another load of Jews
would be brought in, fattened up, shot down.
"More prisoners, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer?" he asked.
"That's all finished, I'm afraid," said Repp.
"Which I'm sure makes you happy, Herr IngenieurDoktor."
"It was unpleasant, yes, killing--" "You must have a hard heart for
these hard times," said Repp.
"You'd lose your uneasiness around death in a day in the East. But the
Reichsfrihrer informs me that the camps are no longer in the disposal
business."
"Animals, then," said Vollmerhausen.
"Pigs would do it. Or cows. About the--" "I think not. Vampir must
locate people, not animals, at four hundred meters' range. And it must
not weigh more than forty kilos. Those are the limits."
Vollmerhausen moaned. Back to weight again.
"I
don't know where I'm going to get ten more kilos.
We've taken off all the insulation, we've got the lead sulfide down to
a minimum without sacrificing resolution."
He looked desperate.
"It's that damn battery."
"I'm sure you'll find a way. After all, you've got the best men and
equipment in the Reich. Far better than up at Kummersdorf." As he
spoke he'd begun to tinker again with a piece of metal or something on
his desk, an innocent, entirely reflexive habit.
"We've tried everything. A smaller battery won't put out the necessary
current. A--" "I'm sure a great miracle will happen here," Repp said,
taking great pleasure in the phrase.
Vollmerhausen, fascinated, could see the thing he worked in his
fingers. It was a small black cube, metallic, with a spindle through
it. But that's all.
"Miracles cannot be requisitioned like machine pistols, Herr
Obersturmbannfuhrer."
"You'll do your best, I'm certain."
"Of course, sir. But forty kilos is so little."
"I just want to explain the importance here. I want to emphasize it.
Our actions are only part of a larger campaign, involving agents in
other countries even. Still, we are the most important; we are the
fulcrum. Do you understand? Great and heavy responsibilities have
7
descended upon us. This is a privilege rarely given soldiers. Think
about it."
He paused, to let the grave information sink in.
"And so for the test," he said.
"Yes, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer," Vollmerhausen said.
"I think I've found an unlimited supply of targets for you. A whole
world full of targets. I've just had word from Berlin. One hundred
miles north of here, the Americans have crossed the Rhine. They're on
our soil, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. It seems that I must demand that you
quickly find a way to knock those ten kilos off Vampir. And then you
and I are going hunting."
The ass head Schaeffer snickered.
Repp was smiling.
After they were gone. Repp reached into his desk and removed a silver
flask. He was not a drinking fellow by habit but this night he felt a
need. He unscrewed the cap and poured a few ounces of schnapps into a
glass, and sipped it. He savored the fiery fluid.
The hour was late, time was slipping away, time, time, time the real
enemy. Pressures from Berlin were mounting, that crazy goose the
Reichsfrihrer himself calling twice a day, babbling of what his
astrologer and his masseur and his secretary and the little birdies in
the sky were telling him. What had General Haussner said?
"He has both feet planted firmly three feet above the ground."
Something like that.
Repp first met the Reichsfrihrer in the 1942 season in Berlin, shortly
after Demyansk, when he was the hero of the hour. Himmler had worn
cologne that smelled like mashed plums and wanted to know about Repp's
ancestors.
Repp knew what to say.
"Common people, Reichsfrihrer."
"Very good. Our strength, the common people. Our mystic bond with the
soil, the earth." These words were delivered with unblinking sincerity
in the middle of an opulent party in an industrialist's mansion.
Beautiful women swirled about--Margareta was one, he remembered.
The room was filled with warmth and light. Sex was in the air and
wealth and power and not seventy-two hours earlier Repp had been in the
tower.
"Yes, the people," the Reichsfrihrer had said. He looked like an
eggplant wearing glasses.
But Repp didn't want to think about the Reichsfrihrer right now. He
took another sip of the schnapps and called Margareta up into his
mind.
She'd been so beautiful that year. He was not moved by many things but
he'd allowed himself to be moved by her. How had she ended up there?
Oh, yes, she'd come with some theatrical people. He'd seen her before,
back when he was a young lieutenant and too frightened to speak. But
this time he walked up boldly and took her hand. He saw her eyes go to
the Iron Cross he now wore.
"I'm Repp," he said, bowing slightly.
"At least you didn't snap your heels together like so many of them."
He smiled.
"I've been told anything in the city is mine. I choose you."
"They meant hotel rooms. Restaurant tables. Seats at the opera.
Invitations to parties."
"But I don't want those things. I want you."
"You're very forward. You're the fellow in the tower, is that it? It
seems I read something."
"Three days ago I killed three hundred and forty-five Russians in the
span of eight hours. Now doesn't that make me rather special?"
"Yes, I suppose it does."
"May I present you to the Reichsfuhrer? He's now a patron of mine, I
believe."
"I know him. He's dreadful."
"A little pig. But a powerful patron. Come, let's leave.
I was in a very pleasant restaurant last night. I believe they'll
treat me nicely if I return. I even have a car and driver."
"My first lover was killed in Poland. My next died in an air fight
over London. Another was captured in the Western Desert."
"Nothing will happen to me. I promise. Come, let's go."
She looked at him narrowly.
"I came with a fellow, you know."
"A general in the Waffen SS?"
"No, an actor."
"Then he's nothing. Please. I insist."
She'd paused just a second, then said, "All right. But, please. No
talk of war, Captain Repp."
Pleasant. Yes, pleasant.
Repp finished the schnapps. He was tempted to take another, but a
principle of his was to never yield to temptations.
He knew the Reichsfuhrer could call at any moment;
and he knew he needed his strength for what lay ahead.
He sealed the bottle.
 Susan and Leets were wedged tight against the Caridge bar. It was
late on a Friday night in mid-March, wall-to-wall uniforms, no V-2's
had fallen for a couple of days, and after a lot of trying he'd finally
talked her into an actual date. They'd had dinner at the Hungaria and,
on Roger's recommendation, had dropped by this bright spot, where all
the London beauties and big shots were said to camp out. So far Susan
had seen two movie stars and a famous radio broadcaster. Leets had
noticed instead other OSS officers in the smoky crowd and had fancied
himself already slighted a couple of times, and once had even made a
move toward one snide aristocratic profile, but Susan had tugged him
back.
"No trouble. Remember. You promised."
"Yeah, yeah," he mumbled.
Now, several whiskies down him, he was feeling sweeter, the friend to
all men. He had her to himself: no Phil, no Jews.
"Barkeep," he hailed, trolling in one of the red-jacketed boys behind
the mahogany bar, "two here, old bun."
"No wonder they hate us," she said.
Around them the talk was of the new offensive.
Beyond the Rhine! It would be over by the blooming of the flowers, the
coming of spring. This optimism had the effect of depressing Leets.
"You're supposed to be enjoying yourself," she said.
"For God's sakes, smile a little. Relax."
"You're damned cheerful," he said with surprise. It was true. The
whole evening, she'd bubbled. She was especially beautiful, even in
the severe cut of the brown uniform; some women looked good in
anything. But it was something else. Susan seemed to be her old self:
sly, mocking, mildly sarcastic, full of mischief.
"You've decided to make a career of Army nursing.
Congrats!" he said.
She laughed.
"You're divorcing Phil. Right? Am I right?"
Again, laughter.
"It's a long story," she said.
"A long story."
But before she could tell it, an elegant Brit voice crooned to them.
"Darlings."
It was Leets's turn to make a face.
But Tony came ahead confidently, until he seemed to embrace the two
Americans.
"One more of what these chaps are having," Tony commanded the barman,
and turned to press an icy smile on Leets.
"Sir," Leets said evenly.
"Rather a long Thursday, eh?" Tony asked.
Leets didn't say a thing.
"What, three, four hours? Or was it five?"
"Jim? What--" Susan said.
Leets looked bleakly off into the crowd.
"The captain had a rough go of it, I hear. Trying to get in to
see--ah, who was it this time? Yours or ours?"
"Yours," Leets finally admitted.
"Of course. Knew it all the time. Major General Sir Colin Gubbins,
was it not?"
"Yes."
"Thought so. Head of SOE. Pity he couldn't see you."
"I'm on the list for Monday, the girl said."
"I'll put in a good word for you tomorrow at lunch," Tony said, smiling
maliciously.
"You bastard," Leets said.
"Now stop that kind of talk," Susan commanded.
"Susan, would you care to accompany me to lunch with General Sir Colin
Gubbins tom or--" "Goddamn it, Major, knock it off," Leets said.
Tony laughed.
"You're getting a rather peculiar reputation in certain circles," he
cautioned.
"You know, he tells anyone this mad scheme he's dreamed up. Jerry
snipers. Quite strange."
Leets now felt fully miserable.
"It wouldn't hurt a bit to listen to him," Susan said.
"You people have been told things all during the war you wouldn't
listen to. You never listen until it's too late."
Tony stepped back, made a big show of shock.
"Dear girl," he said theatrically, "of course we make mistakes.
Of course we're old fuddy-dud dies That's what we're paid for. Think
how dangerous we'd be if we knew what we were doing." He threw back
his head and brayed.
Leets realized the man was quite drunk and beyond caring what he said,
and to whom. But, surprisingly,
there seemed to be in his act some affection for the miserable American
and his girl.
"Listen, I know where there are some marvelous gatherings tonight. Care
to come along? Really, I can offer Indian nabobs, Communist poets,
homosexual generals, Egyptian white slavers. The relics of our late
empire. It's quite a show. Do come."
"Thanks, Major," Leets said.
"I'd really rather--" "Tony. Tony. I've taken to the American habit.
You call me Tony and /'// call you Jim. First names are such fun."
"Major, I--" "Jim, it might be kind of fun," Susan said.
"What the hell," Leets said.
Presently, they found themselves in a cavernous flat in a splendidly
fashionable section of London, along with a whole zoo of curiosities
from all the friendly nations of World War II. Leets, pinned in a
corner of the room, drank someone's wonderful whisky and exchanged
primitive pleasantries with a Greek diplomat, while he watched as
across the room Susan deflected, in rapid succession, an R.A.F group
captain, a young dandy in a suit and tie, and a huge Russian in some
sort of Ruritanian clown suit.
"She's smashing," Tony said to him.
"Yes, she's fine, just fine," Leets agreed.
"Is good very, no?" the Greek said, somewhat confusingly to Leets, but
he merely nodded, as though he understood.
But after a while he went and got her, fighting his way through the
mob.
"Hello, it's me," he said.
"Oh, Jim, isn't it wonderful? It's so interesting," she said,
beaming.
"It's just a party, for Christ's sake," he said.
"Darling, the most wonderful thing happened today. I can't wait to
tell you about it."
"So tell."
"I say, guess who's here now?" Tony said suddenly, at his ear.
"It's Roger," shrieked Susan.
"My God, look who he's got with him!"
"Indeed," said Tony.
"An authentic Great Man! That is the hairy-chested novel writer who
kills animals for amusement, is it not? Thought so."
"All we need is Phil," said Susan.
"Phil who?" said Leets, as his young sergeant drew near, his eyes
crazy with glee, pulling in drunken tow the great writer himself. The
two of them weaved brokenly across the crowded floor, Roger guiding the
blandly smiling bigger man along. The fellow wore some kind of
safari-inspired variation on the Air Corps uniform, open wide at the
collar so that a thatch of iron-gray hair unfurled.
"The famous chest, for all to see," said Tony.
The writer had a pugnacious mustache and steel-frame glasses. He was
big, Leets could see, big enough for Big Ten ball, but now he had a
kind of drunken, horny benevolence, dispensing good fortune on all who
passed before him. Several times in his journey, the writer stopped,
as though to establish camp, but at each spot, Roger'd give a yank and
unstick the fellow and pull him yet closer.
"Mr. Hem," Roger declared when he got the big fellow near enough,
"Mr. Hem, I want ya ta meet the two best friggin' officers in World
War Two."
"Dr. Hemorrhoid, the poor man's piles," the writer said, extending a
paw.
Leets shook it.
"I adored The Sun Actually Rises," said Tony.
"Really your best. So feminine. So wonderfully feminine. Delicate,
pastel. As though written by a very sweet lady."
The writer grinned drunkenly.
"The Brits all hate me," he explained to Susan.
"But I don't let it bother me. What the hell. Major, go ahead and
hate me. It's your bloody country, you can hate anybody you
god-damnwellfucking choose. Nurse, you're beautiful."
"She's married," Leets said.
"Easy, Captain, I'm not moving in. Easy. You guys, do the fighting,
you have my respect. No problems, no sweat. Nurse, you are truly
beautiful. Are you married to this fellow?"
Susan giggled.
"She's married to a guy on a ship. In the Pacific," said Rug.
"My, my," said the writer.
"Hem, there's some people over here," Rug said.
"Not so fast, Junior. This looks like a most promising engagement,"
the writer said, grinning lustfully, putting a hand on Susan's
shoulder.
"Hey, pal," said Leets.
"No fighting," Susan said.
"I hate fighting. Mr. Hemingway, please take your hand off my
shoulder."
"Darling, I'll put my hand anywhere you tell me to put it," Hemingway
said, removing his hand.
"Put it up your ass," said Leets.
"Captain, really, I have nothing but respect. You're the guy putting
the him in his grave. Putting Jerry to ground, eh, Maj? Any day now.
Any bloody day. Junior, how 'bout getting Papa a drink? A couple
fingers whisky. No ice. Warm and smooth."
"War is hell," Leets said.
"How many Krauts you kill?" Hemingway asked Leets.
Leets said nothing.
"Huh, sonny? Fifty? A hundred? Two thousand?"
"This is a terrible conversation," Susan said.
"Jim, let's get out of here."
"How many, Cap? Many as the major here? Bet he's killed jill ions
That Brit special-ops group, goes behind the lines. Gets 'em with
knives, fucking knives, right in the gizzard. Blood all over
everything. But how many, Captain? Huh?"
Leets said he didn't know, but not many.
"You just fired at vehicles," he explained, "until they exploded. So
there was no sense of killing."
"Could we change the subject, please," Susan said.
"All this talk of killing is giving me a headache."
"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted
armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else
thereafter," recited Hemingway.
"I wouldn't know about that," said Leets. He remembered bitterly: the
tracers spraying through the grass, kicking spurts out of the earth,
the sounds of the STG-44's, the universe-shattering detonations of the
75's on the Panzers.
"It was just a fucking mess. It wasn't like hunting at all."
"Really, I'm not going to let this nonsense ruin my evening. Come on,
Jim, let's get out of here," Susan said, and hauled him away.
They walked the cold, wet London streets, in the hours near dawn. An
icy light began to seep over the horizon, above the blank rows of
buildings that formed the walls of their particular corridor. Again,
fog. The streets were empty now, except for occasional cruising jeeps
of MP's and now and then a single black taxi.
"They say at High Blitz Hitler never even stopped the cabs," Leets said
abstractedly.
"Do you believe in miracles?" Susan, who'd been silent for a while,
suddenly said.
Leets considered. Then he said, "No."
"I don't either," she said.
"Because a miracle has to be sheer luck. But I believe certain things
are meant to happen. Meant, planned, predestined."
"Our meeting again in the hospital?" he said, only half a joke.
"No, this is serious," she said.
He looked at her. How she'd changed!
"You're generating enough heat to light this quarter of the city. I
hope there're no Kraut planes up there."
"Do you want to hear about this, or not?"
"Of course I do," he said.
"Oh, Jim, I'm sorry," she said.
"I know you're feeling awful. Outhwaithe was very cruel."
"Outhwaithe I can handle. I just know something and I can't get anyone
to believe me. But don't let my troubles wreck your party. Really,
Susan. I'm very happy for you. Please, tell me all about it."
"We have one. Finally. One got out. A miracle."
"Have one what? What are you--" "A witness."
"I don't--" "From the camps. An incredible story. But finally, now,
in March of 1945, a man has reached the West who was in a place called
Auschwitz. In Poland. A murder camp."
"Susan, you hear all kinds of--" "No. He was there. He identified
pictures. He described the locations, the plants, the processes. It
all jibes with reports we've been getting. It's all true. And now we
can prove it. He's all they have. The Jews of the East. He's their
testament, their witness. Their voice, finally. It's very moving. I
find it--" "Now just a minute. You say this camp was in Poland?
Now, how the hell did this guy make it across Poland and Germany to us?
Really, that's a little hard to believe.
It all sounds to me like some kind of story."
"The Germans moved him to some special camp in a forest in Germany.
It's a funny story. It makes no sense at all. They moved him there
with a bunch of other people, and fed them--fattened them up, almost
like pigs. Then one night they took him to a field and .. ."
"It was some kind of execution?"
"A test. He said it was a test."
And Susan told Leets the story of Shmuel.
And after a while Leets began to listen with great intensity.

V.,
rampir would work; of that Vollmerhausen had little doubt. He had been
there, after all, at the beginning, at the University of Berlin lab in
1933 when Herr Doktor Edgar Kutzcher, working under the considerable
latitude of a large Heereswaffenamt contract, had made the breakthrough
discovery that lead sulfide was photoconductive and had a useful
response to about three microns, putting him years ahead of the
Americans and the British, who were still tinkering with thallous
sulfide.
The equation, chalked across a university blackboard, which expressed
the breakthrough Herr Doktor had achieved, realized its final practical
form in the instrument on which Vollmerhausen now labored in the
research shed at Aniage Elf, under increasing pressure and
difficulty.
It was a business of sorting out dozens of details, of burrowing
through the thickets of technical confusions that each tiny decision
led them to. But this is what Vollmerhausen, a failed physicist, liked
about engineering:
making things work. Function was all. Vampir would work.
But would Vampir work at forty kilos?
That was another question altogether, and although his position
officially demanded optimism, privately his doubts were deep and
painful.
Under forty kilos?
Insane. Not without radically compromising on performance.
But of course one didn't argue with the SS.
One smiled and did one's best and hoped for luck.
But forty kilos? Why? Did they plan on dropping it from a plane? It
would shatter anyway, and shock absorption hadn't been tied into the
specifications. He'd gone to Repp privately:
"Surely, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, if you could just give me some
reason for this arbitrary weight limit."
Repp, frosty, had replied, "Sorry, Herr IngenieurDoktor.
Tactical requirements, that's all. Someone's going to have to carry
the damned thing."
"But certainly there are vehicles that--" "Herr Ingenieur-Doktor: forty
kilos."
Lately Hans the Kike had been having nightmares.
His food bubbled and heaved in his stomach. He worked obsessively,
driving his staff like a tyrant, demanding the impossible.
"Hans the Kike," he heard one of them joke, "rather more like Attila
the Hun."
But he had come so far since 1933, and the journey was so complex, so
full of wrong starts, missed signs, betrayals, disappointments, unfair
accusations, plots against him, credit due him going to others. More
than ever now, 1933 came to haunt him. The last year I was ever truly
happy, he told himself, before all this.
A year of beginnings--for Vampir, for Kutzcher, for Germany. But also
one of endings. It had been Vollmerhausen's last year with physics,
and he'd loved physics, had a great brain for physics. But by the next
year, '34, physics was officially regarded as a Jewish science, a
demi-religion like Freudianism, full of kabala and ritual and
pentagram, and bright young Aryans like Vollmerhausen were pressured
into other areas. Many left Germany, and not just Jews either; they
were the lucky ones. For the ones who stayed, like Vollmerhausen, only
melancholy choices remained. Dietzl went into aerodynamics, Stossel
back to chemistry;
Lange gave up science altogether and became a party intellectual.
Vollmerhausen too felt himself pressed into an extraordinary career
shift, a daring, uncharacteristically bold one--and one he hated. He
returned to the Technological Institute and became a ballistics
engineer, rather than an exalted Doktor of Science. It hadn't the
challenge of physics, the sense of unlocking the universe, but
everybody knew there'd be a war sooner or later, and wars meant guns
and guns meant jobs. He threw himself into it with a terror,
succeeding on sheer determination where once there'd been talent. It
began to look as though he'd made the right decision when he was
invited to join Berthold Giepel's ERMA design team. ERMA, the acronym
for Erfurter Maschinenfabrik B. Giepel GmbH, Erfurt, was at that moment
in history the most fertile spot in the world in arms design, and from
all over the world acolytes swarmed, young engineers out of the
technical institutes, or off apprenticeships at the Waffenfabrik Mauser
at Oberndorf, or for Walther AGin Munich, even a Swiss lad from SIG and
an American from Winchester. All were turned down.
For the brilliant team that Giepel had assembled was up to nothing less
than revolutionizing automatic weapons theory by building a
Maschinenpistole off the radical open-bolt straight-blowback principle,
which made for greater manufacturing simplicity, lightness and
reliability, yet at the same time permitted air circulation through
breech and barrel between rounds with subsequent temperature reduction,
jacking the rate of fire up to about 540 per minute cyclical. They
were inventing, in short, the best submachine gun in the world, the
MP-40, until it became better known under a different name.
These should have been extraordinary days for Vollmerhausen, and in a
way they were. But his physics background, like a whiff of the Yid,
clung to him. He could never shake it; the others gossiped behind his
back, played small pranks, teased him unmercifully.
They hated him because he'd once aspired to be a scientist;
what scientists he now came in contact with hated him because he was an
engineer. He grew into a somewhat twisted personality, with a tendency
toward surliness, bitterness, self-pity. He was grumpy, gloomy, a
great self-justifier and blamer of others. His head was full of
imaginary compliments that he felt he deserved but that he never
received, because of course the others were jealous of his brilliance.
Out of all this was born the name Hans the Kike.
So when in 1943 he was offered a position at the WaPriif 2 testing
facility at Kummersdorf, he jumped at it. A new project was under way.
The army had learned in Russia of the terrors of the night and had let
a contract for Vampir 1229 Zeilgerdt, the Vampire sighting device,
Model 1229, based on the data that Herr Doktor Kutzcher, now dead, had
developed back in '33.
Vollmerhausen had an extraordinary background for the undertaking: he
knew both the physics of the project and the ballistics. It was a job
made for him.
In its wisdom, Waffenamt had decided that the weapon best suited to
mount Vampir was none other than the prototype Sturmgwehr on which Hugo
Schmeisser was so furiously laboring, then designated the MP-43. Thus
Ingenieur-Doktor Vollmerhausen and Herr Schmeisser (for old Hugo had no
degrees) found themselves uneasily collaborating on the project at the
dictates of the Army bureaucracy.
From the start, Hugo was undercutting him.
"Too bulky," the old fool claimed.
"Too sensitive. Too complicated."
"Herr Schmeisser," Hans began, suffering the immense strain of having
to deal politely with a fool, "a few design modifications and we can
join your assault rifle and my optics system and achieve the most
modern device of the war. No, it'll never be an assault weapon, or for
the parachutists, but in the years ahead will come battles of a
primarily defensive nature. The great days of rapid expansion are
over. It's time to concentrate on protecting what we've got. In any
kind of stable night tactical situation, Vampir will make our enemies
totally vulnerable." And as he spoke, he could watch the old man's
eyes frost over with indifference. It was a most difficult situation,
especially since in the background was another undercurrent: Hans the
Kike was from the ERMA team that had built the wonderful MP-40; but,
strangely, that weapon had picked up the nickname "Schmeisser," though
the old goat had had nothing to do with it. But he'd never disavowed
the connection either, mad as he was for fame and glory.
With Schmeisser against him, he was doomed. The STG modifications were
never approved, funds began to vanish, technicians were siphoned off to
other projects, the Opticotechna people had difficulty with the
lenses-Schmeisser's influence?--and much gossip and vicious humor raged
behind Hans the Kike's back. He had no connections, nothing to match
the might of the adroit Schmeisser, who didn't want his assault rifle
associated with some strange "wish-machine" invented by an obscure
scientist and supervised by a disreputable ERMA veteran.
Vollmerhausen, under pressure, felt himself becoming more repellent.
Whatever chances he had as an advocate for Vampir disappeared when he
ceased shaving and bathing regularly, when he began denouncing the
secret cabal that conspired behind his back. Vampir never went beyond
prototype, despite some promising initial test results. It failed to
meet certain specifications in its field trial, though Vollmerhausen
asserted that "the cabal" had stacked the test against him. In May of
'44 the Waffenamt contract was canceled, and Vollmerhausen was ordered
sharply back to Kummersdorf to a meaningless job. He was let go
shortly afterward.
They let him dangle for a bit, nudging him closer and closer to
despair. Worries on top of worries. His career in total collapse.
Questions were asked. People began to avoid him. Nobody would look
him in the eye. He thought he was being watched. The Army called him
up for a physical exam and pronounced him fit for combat duty, despite
fallen arches, a bronchial infection, bad ears and severe
nearsightedness. He was advised to get his affairs in order, for the
notice would arrive any day.
It appeared his final fate might be to carry a "Schmeisser" on the
Ostfront.
One day he happened to run into a friend in a disreputable cafe where
he'd taken to spending his days.
"Have you heard, is Haenel still taking on people? I'd do anything.
Draftsmanship, apprentice work, modeling."
"Hans, I don't think so. Old Hugo, you know. He'd stand in your
way."
"That old fool."
"But, Hans, I did hear of something." The friend was extremely
nervous. It was the first time Vollmerhausen had seen him since he'd
been fired. Hans had in fact been startled to see him in this place.
"Eh, what?" Vollmerhausen squinted, rubbed his hands through his hair
and across his face, noticing for the first time that he hadn't shaved
in quite some time.
"Well, they say some fellows in the SS are going to let a big contract
soon. For Vampir. They may revive Vampir."
"The SS. What do they care about--" "Hans, I didn't ask. I-I just
didn't ask. But I hear it has to do with .. He trailed off.
"What? Come on now. Dieter. What on earth? I've never seen you
quite so--" "Hans. It's just another job. Perhaps the Waffen SS wants
to put Vampir into production. I don't--" "What did you hear?"
"It's a special thing. A special mission. A special most secret, most
important effort. That's all. It's said to originate from--from high
quarters."
Vollmerhausen pursed his lips disgustingly, puzzled.
"I think they're interested in you. I think they're quite interested
in you. Would you be willing? Hans, think about it. Please."
The SS filled him with dread. You heard so much. But a job was a job,
especially when the alternative was the Ostfront.
"Yes. Yes, I suppose I--" A day or so later he found himself in
conversation with a pale officer at Unter den Eichen, the underground
headquarters of the SS administrative and economic section, in
Berlin.
"The Reichsfrihrer is anxious to let a contract on an engineering
project, sited down in the Schwarzwald. Actually, I may as well be
frank with you, he believes this Vampir thing you worked on might have
applications with regard to the duties of the SS and he's anxious to
pursue them."
"Interesting," said Vollmerhausen.
The man then proceeded to discuss with surprising precision the history
and technology of Vampir, especially as linked to the STG-44.
Vollmerhausen was stunned to realize how carefully the project had been
examined by--what was it?--WVHA, of which up until a day or so ago he'd
not even heard.
"There's no question of funding," the man explained, "we have access to
adequate monies. A subsidiary called Ostindustrie GmbH produces quite
a lot of income.
Cheap labor from the East."
"Well, the budget would certainly be a factor in such a project," said
Vollmerhausen noncommittally.
"Do you know this fellow Repp?"
"The great Waffen SS hero?"
"Yes, him. He's a part of it too. He'll be joining the project
shortly. We've given it a code name, Nibelungen.
Operation Nibelungen."
"What on earth--" "The Reichsfuhrer's idea. He likes those little
touches.
It's a joke, actually. Surely you can see that?"
But Vollmerhausen was baffled. Joke?
The officer continued.
"Now, Herr IngenieurDoktor, here"--he shuffled some papers--"Vampir's
chief liability, according to the field results--" "The test was
planned for failure. They treated it like a piece of cookware. It's a
sophisticated--" "Yes, yes. Well, from our point of view, the problem
is weight."
"With batteries, insulation, wiring, precision equipment, a lens
system, energy conversion facilities, what do you expect?"
"What does the Vampir weigh?"
Vollmerhausen was silent. The answer was an embarrassment.
"Seventy kilos." The man answered his own question.
"At the very limits of movability."
"A strong man--" "A man at the front, in the rain, the cold, hungry,
exhausted, is not strong."
Vollmerhausen was again silent. He glared off into space. It was not
safe to show anger toward the SS; yet he felt himself scowling.
"Herr Doktor, our specifications call for forty kilos."
Vollmerhausen thought he had misheard.
"Eh? I'm not sure I--" "Forty kilos."
"That's insane! Is this a joke? That's preposterous!"
"It can't be done?"
"Not without compromising Vampir out of existence.
This is no toy. Perhaps in the future, when new miniaturization
technologies become available. But not now, not--" "In three months.
Perhaps four, even five, difficult to say at this point."
Vollmerhausen almost leaped from his chair again;
but he saw the man fixing him with a cool, steady glare.
"I--I don't know," he stammered.
"You'll have the best facilities, the top people, the absolute green
light from all cooperating agencies.
You'll have the total resources of the SS at your disposal, from the
Reichsfrihrer on down. I think you know the kind of weight that
carries these days."
"Well, I--" "We're prepared to go all the way on this. We believe it
to be of the utmost importance to our Fuhrer, our Fatherland and our
Racial Peoples. I don't see how you can say No to the Reichsfrihrer.
It's an honor to be chosen for this job. A fitting climax to your
service to the Reich."
Vollmerhausen deciphered the threat in this, more vivid for remaining
unspecified.
"Of course," he finally ventured, with a weak kike smile, "it would be
an honor," thinking all the time, What am I doing? Forty kilos?
* * *
The forty kilos now, months later, were within ten kilos; they'd picked
and peeled and compromised and teased and improvised their way down,
gram by painful gram. Vollmerhausen could almost measure the past days
in terms of grams trimmed here and there, but these last ten kilos
seemed impossible to find. After steady progress, the staff had
stalled badly and another of Vollmerhausen's concerns was whether or
not Repp had noticed this.
It was a typical career development for him, he thought. He'd done so
much good work, so much brilliant work, and never gotten any real
credit for it. Meanwhile, once again, everything was coming unraveled
over some nonsense that he had no control over.
Tears of black bitterness welled up in his eyes. Bad luck, unfair
persecution, unlucky coincidences seemed to haunt him.
For example, for example, what thanks, what respect, had he gotten for
his modifications thus far to the STG-44? He'd taken a clever, sound
production rifle, albeit one with a hand-tooled breech and barrel, but
still just another automatic gun, and turned it into a firstclass
sniper's weapon. He solved the two most pressing problems--noise and
accuracy at long range--in one stroke, devising a whole new concept of
ballistics. The mission specs called for thirty rounds to be delivered
silently and devastatingly to a target 400 meters out. So be it: now
Repp had his thirty chances, where before he had nothing.
And what had been the response?
Repp had merely fixed those cold eyes on him and inquired, "But,
Ingenieur-Doktor, how much does it weigh?"
Today's meeting was not going well: a bitter squabble between the
optics group, most of them from the Munich Technological Institute, and
the power group, the battery people: natural antagonists in the weight
business.
Meanwhile, the people from Energy Conversion remained silent, sullen.
All at once the complexities seemed overwhelming.
An incredible restlessness stirred through his limbs, as the eyes of
his staff pressed into him, demanding answers, guidance, adjudication.
Beyond them, more threatening, he could see Repp. His misery was
intense, fiery.
"Gentlemen, please. I believe--" He halted, absolutely no idea what
he'd meant to say when he began to speak. That had been happening
often too, sentences that began in confidence, then somewhere in the
middle veered out of control and trailed off into silence, the ideas
they had sought to express vanishing. He felt the impulse to flee
mounting in him; it fluttered in his chest like a live thing.
"I believe," he continued, and was as amazed as they at the finish,
"that I'm going to go for a walk."
They looked at him in bafflement. He'd always been so driven, trying
to beat the problem down by sheer intensity of will, flatten it with
his energy, his doggedness.
He read in several sets of eyes the suspicion that Hans the Kike was
finally cracking on them.
"It'll do us all some good," he argued.
"Get away from the problem for a few hours, get a fresh perspective on
it. We'll meet again at one."
He rushed from them into the out-of-doors and felt a burst of clean
spring air and the heat of the sun. It's spring, he thought with
surprise. He'd lost all sense of time and season, shut off in his
exotic world of microns and heat curves and power sequences. Then he
noticed how the installation had changed, having become now almost a
fortification. He nearly stumbled into a trench that ran between
cement blockhouses that were surely new since the last time he'd come
this way. He picked out a path around sand-bagged gun emplacements and
maneuvered through trellises of barbed wire. Were the Americans close
by? It frightened him suddenly. Must remember to ask Repp.
But he wanted green silence, blue sky, the touch of the sun; not this
vista of war, which merely stressed his problems. He rushed through
the gate and headed down the road to the range a mile or so away; it
was the only available openness in the surrounding woods. The journey
wasn't pleasing; the trees loomed in on him darkly, sealing off the
sky, and there were spots after an initial turn where he felt
completely isolated in the forest as the road wound through it. Not
another living creature seemed to stir; no breeze nudged the dense
overhead branches, which sliced the sun into splashes at his feet. But
then a patch of yellow appeared at the end of the corridor after
another turn. He almost ran the remaining distance.
The range was empty, a yellow field banked on four sides by the trees.
He walked to the center of it, felt the sun's warmth again build on his
neck. It was March,
after all, April next, then May, and May was said to be especially nice
in these parts, on a clear day one could make out the Alps one hundred
kilometers or so away to the south. He twisted suddenly in that
direction, seeking them as one would seek a hope. Above the trees was
only haze and blur. He looked about for symbols of life reviving, for
buds or birds or bees, and shortly picked out a flower, a yellow
thing.
He bent to it. An early fellow, eh? It was a spiky, not too
healthy-looking creature, stained faintly brown.
Vollmerhausen had never felt much for such displays, had never had the
time for them, but now he thought he had a glimmer into the simple
pleasures so many of his countrymen had crooned about over the years.
He plucked the flower from the soil and held it close to study it: an
interesting design, the petals really slivers of a disk sectioned to
facilitate easy opening and closing, a clever notion for capturing
maximum sunlight, yet not sacrificing protection from the night cold. A
little sun machine composed of concentric circles, efficient, elegant,
precise. Now there was engineering! As if to confirm this judgment,
the sun seemed to beat harder on the back of his neck.
He felt extraordinarily pleasant. He really felt as though he'd
discovered something. He must remember to find a book on flowers. He
knew nothing about them but was filled with a sudden overwhelming
curiosity.
These soothing thoughts deserted him abruptly when he realized he stood
in the middle of the killing ground.
A memory of that night came quickly over him. When had he known they
were going to shoot them? He couldn't remember exactly, the knowledge
evolved slowly, over the first few months. He could not identify an
actual moment of awareness. It just seemed they all knew and didn't
find it remarkable. Nobody was upset.
Repp seemed to think it quite unexceptional. He had no involvement in
it in any way; it would simply happen, that's all, when the prototype
Vampir reached a certain stage. But the whole business left
Vollmerhausen queasy, uncomfortable.
He remembered the beginning best, the double line of men standing
listlessly in the dark cold. He could hear them breathing. They
seemed so alive. He was wildly excited, nervous, his stomach so
agitated that it actually hurt. The Jews stood in their ranks, waiting
to die. He could see no faces; but he noticed at this penultimate
moment a curious thing.
They were so small.
They were all small. Some mere boys, even the older men wiry and
short.
After that, it moved clinically. The Jews were marched away and when
he could not see them he no longer thought of them.
The preparations were laconic, calm. Repp fussed with the weapon, then
dropped behind it and drew it to him, arranging himself into a strained
pose, all bone beneath the rifle, no flesh, no muscle, nothing but a
structure of bone to hold the weight.
"You have power, sir," someone said.
"Ah, yes," said Repp, his voice somewhat muffled in the gunstock,
"quite nice, quite nice."
"Sir, the guards are clear," somebody called.
"The targets are at four fifty."
"Yes, yes," said Repp, and then his words vanished in the thumping of
the burst, one fast, slithering drum roll, the individual reports
fusing in their rush.
It was just seconds later they realized a man had survived, and just
seconds after that that all hell broke loose, the lights flashed on,
two American fighter-bombers roaring down into the bright zone,
spitting bullets into the field, running their earth-splitting
hemstitches across the field, and the lights flashed out.
"Fuckers," somebody said, "where the hell did they come from?"
Vollmerhausen shuddered. He stood now in the grass where the mangled
bodies had lain. The Vampir rifle's slugs had torn huge chunks in the
flesh. Blood had soaked the earth that night, but now there was only
grass, and sun, blue sky, a little breeze.
Vollmerhausen began to walk toward the trees. He realized the sun was
behind a cloud. No wonder it felt cool all of a sudden.
The sun came out; he felt its heat across his neck again.
Yes, warm me.
Soothe me.
Clean me.
Yes, purify me.
Forgive me.
Then he knew where his ten kilos were coming from.
They made an odd pair: Susan in her dumpy civilian dress, and Dr.
Fischelson, dressed in the fashion of the last century, fussy and
ancient in wing collar, spats, a striped suit, goatee and pince-nez. We
look like a picture of my grandparents, she thought.
She had him calmer now, but still was uncertain. He could go off
dottily at any moment, ranting in an odd mixture of Polish, Yiddish,
German and English, his eyes watering, licking his dry lips, talking
crazily of obscure events and people. He was not an effective man, she
knew; but when it came to one thing, his will was iron: the fate of the
Jews. He seemed to carry it around with him, an imaginary weight,
bending him closer to earth each day, making him more insane.
But now he was calmer. She'd soothed him, listening, nodding,
cajoling, whispering. They sat on two uncomfortable chairs in an
antiseptic corridor of a private clinic in Kilburn, a London suburb,
outside the door behind which the Man from the East--Fischelson's
portentous phrase--rested.
The crisis of the evening was now over. It seemed that late in the
afternoon some investigators had shown up at the clinic and asked rude
questions. Fischelson had panicked. A rough scene had ensued. In
frenzy, he'd called her. She'd begged off late duty and gotten out
there as fast as she could--only to find them gone and Fischelson
shaking and incoherent.
"Now, now," she calmed.
"I'm sure it was nothing.
Emigration people probably, or security. That's all.
They have to check these things."
"Rude. So rude they was. No respect." How could she make this man
see how armies--modern nations, for that matter--worked?
"It's nothing. Dr. Fischelson. Nothing at all. They have to check
these things." She stole a glance at her watch. Christ, it was
getting late: near midnight. She'd been here with the old bird since
eight. She was due in at six tomorrow.
"Perhaps we ought to leave. Everything's quiet now."
"Sure, leave. You leave. Me, an old man, I'll stay here." The old
Jews; they were all alike. Now he sounded like her mother.
Manipulation with guilt. Most effective. Jesus, how long would this
go on?
"All right. We'll stay a little longer." How could you get rough with
Fischelson? He wasn't some jerk who was pawing at you. But she was
exhausted. They had the witness, curious man in the back room--an
incredible story. A story that would be told now, at last. Even if it
was too late. No, it wasn't too late. In the camps were still many,
near death. If the authorities could at last be convinced, who knew
what was possible? Armored attacks driving toward the KZ's, with
doctors and medicine:
thousands could be saved. If only the proper people could be
convinced.
The doctor sat with hands folded, breathing heavily.
Then he took off his pince-nez and began to polish the lenses in his
lapel. He had long, bony fingers. In the yellow light of the
corridor, he looked as if he were made of old paper, parchment. Our
Jewish general, she thought: half insane, half senile, furiously
indignant. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Fischelson had been here since '39. When the philanthropist
Hirsczowicz had converted to Zionism late in that year, his first act
had been to establish a voice in the West. He was very shrewd,
Hirsczowicz: he knew the fate of the Jews rested in the hands of the
West. He'd sent Fischelson over first, a kind of advance guard, to set
things up. But Fischelson became the whole show when the war broke out
and Hirsczowicz disappeared in a Nazi execution operation. The old man
proved to be horribly unsuited to the task: he was not delicate, he had
no tact, no political sensibility; he could only whine and rant.
"His papers is good," Dr. Fischelson said, in his heavy accent.
"Pardon?" she said.
"His papers is good. I guarantee. I guarantee. He has release from
prison war camp. Our peoples find him in DP hospital. Sick, very
sick. They get him visa. Jews help Jews. Across France he comes by
train. Then the last by ship. Lawyers draw up papers. All good, all
legal.
This I tell you. So why investigators? So why now investigators?"
"Please, please," she said, for the old man had begun to rise and
declaim. A vein pulsed beneath the dry skin of his throat.
"It's some kind of mistake, I'm sure. Or a part of the routine. That's
all. Look, I have a friend in the intelligence service, a captain."
"A Jew?"
"No. But a good man, basically. A decent man. I'll call him and--"
She heard the doors at the end of the corridor swing open and at first
could not recognize them. They were not particularly impressive men:
just big, burly, a little embarrassed. Susan's sentence stopped in her
mouth.
Who were they? Dr. Fischelson, following the confusion in her eyes,
looked over.
They came silently, without talking, four of them, and the fifth, a
leader, a way back. They passed Susan and Fischelson and stepped into
Shmuel's room.
My God, she thought.
"What's this, what's going on?" shouted Fischelson.
Susan felt her heart begin to accelerate and her hands begin to
tremble. She had trouble breathing.
"Easy," said the leader, not brutally at all.
"Miss Susan, what's going on?" Fischelson demanded.
Say something, you idiot, Susan thought.
"Hey, what are you guys doing?" she said, her voice breaking.
"Special Branch, miss. Sorry. Just be a moment."
"Miss Susan, Miss Susan," the old man stood, panic wild in his eyes. He
began to lapse into Yiddish.
"What's going on?" she shouted.
"Goddamn you, what's going on?"
"Easy, miss," he said. He was not a brutal man.
"Nothing to concern yourself with. Special Branch."
The first four came out of the room. On a stretcher was the swaddled
form of the survivor. He looked around dazedly.
"I'm an American officer," she said, fumbling for identification.
"For God's sake, that man is ill. What is going on? Where are you
taking that man?"
"Now, now, miss," the leader soothed. It would have been easier to
hate him if he hadn't been quite so mild.
"He's ill."
The doctor was denouncing them in Polish.
"Please don't get excited," the man said.
"Where is your authority?" she shouted, because it was the only thing
she could think of.
"Sorry, miss. You're a Yank, wouldn't know, would you? Of course not.
Special Branch. Don't need an authority.
Special Branch. That's all."
"He's gone, mein Gott, is gone, is gone." The doctor sat down.
Susan stared down the hall at the swinging doors through which they'd
taken the Jew.
The leader turned to go, and Susan grabbed him.
"What is happening? My God, this is a nightmare.
What are you doing, what is going on?" Her eyes felt big and she was
terrified. They had merely come in and taken him and nothing on earth
could stop them. There was nothing she could do. She and an old man
alone in a corridor.
"Miss," the leader said, "please. You are supposed to be in uniform.
The regulations. Now I haven't taken any names. We've been quite
pleasant. Best advice is to go away, take the old man, get him some
tea, and put him to bed. Forget all this. It's a government matter.
Now I
haven't taken any names. Please, miss, let go. I don't want to take
any names."
He stood back. He was ill at ease, a big, strong type, with police or
military written all over him. He was trying to be kind. It was a
distasteful business for him.
"Who can I see?" she said.
"Jesus, tell me who I can see?"
The man took a nervous look around. Outside, a horn honked. Quickly,
his hand dipped into his coat, came out with a paper. He unfolded it,
looked it over.
"See a Captain Leets," he said.
"American, like you.
Or a Major Outhwaithe. They're behind it all." And he was gone.
"The Jews," Dr. Fischelson was saying, over on the chair, looking
bleakly at nothing, "who'll tell about the Jews? Who'll witness the
fate of the Jews?"
But Susan knew nobody cared about the Jews.
Leets, alone in the office, waited for her. He knew she'd come. He
felt nervous. He smoked. His leg ached.
He'd sent Roger out on errands, for now there was much to do; and once
Tony had called, urgent with a dozen ideas, with several subsidiary
leads from the first great windfall. But Leets had pushed him off.
"I have to get through the business with Susan."
Tony's voice turned cold.
"There is no business with Susan. You owe her nothing. You owe the
Jews nothing.
You owe the operation everything."
"I have to try and explain it," he said, knowing this would never do
for a man of Tony's hardness.
"Then get it over with quick, chum, and be ready for business tomorrow.
It's first day on the new job, all right?"
Leets envied the major: war was simple for the Brits--they waged it
flat out, and counted costs later.
He heard something in the hall. Susan? No, something in this ancient
building settling with a groan.
But presently the door opened, and she came in.
He could see her in the shadows.
"I thought you'd be out celebrating," she said.
"It's not a triumph. It's a beginning."
"Can we have some light, please, goddamn it."
He snapped on his desk lamp, a brass fixture with an opaque green
cowl.
Because he knew he was dead to her, she seemed very beautiful. He
could feel his cock tighten and grow. He felt a desperate need to
return to the past: before all this business, when the Jews were little
people in the background whom she went to see occasionally, and his job
was simple, meaningless, and London a party. For just a second he felt
he'd do anything to have all that back, but mainly what he wanted back
was her. Just her.
He wanted to know her again, all of her--skin, her hands and legs. Her
mouth. Her laugh. Her breasts, cunt.
She wore full uniform, as if at a review. Army brown, which turned
most women shapeless and sexless, made Susan wonderful. Her brass
buttons shone in the flickery English light. A few ribbons were pinned
across the left breast of her jacket. A bar glittered on her lapels,
and a SHAEF patch, a sword, up-thrust, stood out on her shoulder. One
of those little caps tilted across her hair. She was carrying a purse
or something.
"I tried to stop you, you know," she said.
"I tried. I went to see people. People I know. Officers I'd met in
the wards. Generals even. I even tried to see Hemingway, but he's
gone. That's how desperate I was."
"But you didn't get anywhere?"
"No. Of course not."
"It's very big. Or, we think it's big. You can't stop it.
Ike himself couldn't stop it."
"You bastard."
"Do you want a cigarette?"
"No."
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"I was there when they came and took him.
"Special Branch." There was nothing we could do."
"I know. I read the report. Sorry. I didn't know it would work out
that way."
"Would it have made any difference?"
"No," Leets said.
"No, it wouldn't have, Susan."
"You filthy bastard."
She seemed almost about to break down. But her eyes, which had for
just a flash welled with tears, returned quickly to their hard
brilliance.
"Susan--" "Where is he?"
"In another hospital. A British one. He'll be fine there. He'll be
all right. If it's a matter of worrying about him, then please don't.
We'll take good care of him. He's quite important."
"You have no idea what that man's been through."
"I think perhaps I do. It's been very rough on him, sure, we
realize--" "You have no idea, Jim. You can't possibly begin to
imagine. If you think you can, then you're fooling yourself.
Believe me."
Leets said nothing.
"Why? For Christ's sakes, why? You kidnap a poor Jew. Like Cossacks,
you come in and just take him.
Why?"
"He's an intelligence source. An extraordinary one.
We believe he's the key to a high-priority German operation.
We believe we can work backward from the information he gives us and
track it down. And stop it."
"You bastard. You have no idea of the stakes involved, of what he
means to those people."
"Susan, believe me: I had no choice. I was walking down a London
street a few nights ago with a woman I love. All of a sudden she
unreels a story that struck right at the heart of something I'd been
working on since January. You needed a witness? Well, I needed one
too.
I had no way of knowing they'd turn out to be the same man."
"You and that bastard Englishman. You were the officers that came by
the clinic yesterday. I should have known. Dr. Fischelson said
investigators. I thought of cops. But no, it was you and that Oxford
creep. You'd do anything for them, won't you, Jim? Anything! To get
in with the Oxford boys, the Harvard boys. You've come a long way from
Northwestern, goddamn you."
"I'm sorry. I didn't send the Jew to Aniage Elf in the Schwarzwald. I
didn't set him among the Waffen SS and the Man of Oak and
Obersturmbannfrihrer Repp. The Germans did that. I've got to find out
why."
"You bastard."
"Please. Be reasonable."
"That's what you people always say. That's what we've been hearing
since 1939. Be reasonable. Don't exaggerate. Stay calm. Keep your
voice down."
"Yell then, if it makes you feel better."
"You're all the same. You and the Germans. You're all--" "Shut up,
Susan. You've got no call to say that."
She stared at him in black fury. He'd never seen so much rage on a
human face. He swallowed uncomfortably, lit a cigarette. His hands
were shaking.
"Here, I brought you something." She reached into her purse.
"Go ahead. Look. Go ahead, you're brave. I insist."
It was a selection of photographs. Blurry, pornographic things. Naked
women in fields, standing among German soldiers. Pits jammed with
corpses. One, particularly horrible, showed a German soldier in full
combat gear, holding a rifle up against the head of a woman who held a
child.
"It's awful," he said.
"Jesus, of course it's awful. What do you expect me to say? It's
awful, all of it. All right?
Goddamn it, what do you want? I had a fucking job to do. I didn't ask
for it, it just came along. So get off my back, goddamn it."
"Dr. Fischelson has an interesting theory. Would you like to hear it?
It's that the Gentiles are still punishing us for inventing the
conscience five thousand years ago.
But what they don't realize is that when they kill us, they kill
themselves."
"Is that a theory or a curse?"
"If it's a curse, Jim, I extend it to you. From the got 5
torn of my heart, I hope this thing kills you. I hope it does. I hope
it kills you."
"I think you'd better go now. I've still got work to do."
She left him, alone in the office. The pictures lay before him on the
desk. After a while, he ripped them up and threw them into the
wastebasket.
Early the next morning, before the interrogations began, Leets composed
the following request and with Outhwaithe's considerable juice got it
priority circulation as an addendum to the weekly Intelligence Sitrep,
which bucked it down as far as battalion-level G-2's and their British
counterparts ETO-wide.
JOINT ANGLO-AMERICAN TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
PRIORITY ONE
REQUEST ALL-LEVEL G-2/CIC STAFFS FORWARD THIS HDQ
ANY INFO IN RE FOLLOWING FASTEST REPEAT FASTEST
FASTEST
1. UNUSUAL ENEMY SMALL ARMS PROFICIENCY, ESP INVOLVING
WAFF EN SS UNITS
2. HEAVILY DEFENDED TEST INSTALLATIONS ENCOMPASSING
FIRING RANGE FACILITIES
3. RUMORS, UNCONFIRMED STORIES, INVOLVING SAME
4. PW INTERROGATION REPORTS INVOLVING SAME
"Jesus, the crap we're going to get out of that," complained Roger.
 It was clear the Jew was trying to accommodate them.
He answered patiently their many questions, though he thought them
stupid. They kept asking him the same ones again and again and each
time he answered. But he could only tell them what he knew. He knew
that Repp had killed twenty-five men at long distance--400 meters Leets
had figured--in pitch dark, without sound.
He knew that a mysterious Man of Oak had come to visit the project at
one point or other during his time there. He knew that he'd been
picked up near Karlsruhe, which meant he'd traveled the length of the
Black Forest massif, a distance of one hundred or so kilometers, which
would put the location of Aniage Elf at somewhere in that massive
forest's southern quadrant.
Beyond that, only details emerged. One day he identified the collar
patches of the SS soldiers at the installation:
they were from III Waffen SS Panzergrenadierdivision Totenkopf, the
Death's Head division, a group of men originally drawn from the pre-war
concentration camp guard personnel that had since 1939 fought in
Poland, France, Russia and was now thought to be in Hungary.
Another day he identified the kind of automobile the mysterious Man of
Oak had arrived in: a Mercedes Benz twelve-cylinder limousine, thought
to be issued only to Amt leaders, or department heads, in the SS
bureaucracy. But as to the meaning or identity of this strange
phantom, he had no idea. He did not even have much curiosity.
"He was a German. That's all. A German big shot," he said laconically
in his oddly accented English.
Another day he correctly identified the STG-44 as the basic weapon of
the Totenkopf complement. Another day he discussed the installation
layout, fortifications and so forth. Another day he created to the
best of his ability a word-picture of the unfortunate civilian called
Hans the Kike, whose chemicals he'd tried to move.
Leets smiled at how far they'd come and how fast.
From that first meeting in the hospital to now, no more than a week had
passed. Yet a whole counterespionage operation had been mounted. SWET
effectively no longer existed; it had been given over entirely to the
business of catching Repp .. . and he, Leets, would run the show,
reporting only to Tony. He would have first priority in all matters of
technical support: he could go anywhere anytime, spend any amount of
money, as long as Tony didn't scream too loud, and Tony wouldn't scream
at all. He had the highest security clearance.
More people in this town knew of him than ever before, and he'd been
asked to three parties. He had a car, though only Rug as driver. There
was talk of a Majority.
He knew he could get on the phone and call up anybody short of Ike; and
maybe even Ike.
Yes, it was quite a lot.
But it was also very little.
"He can only get us so far. We are helpless until we find this place,"
Tony said.
But Leets pressed ahead. It was his hope that somewhere in the Jew's
testimony a hidden clue would be uncovered, yielding up the secrets of
Repp and his operation.
Black Forest? Then consult with botanists, hikers, foresters,
geographers, vacationers. Look at recon photos.
Check out library books--Tramping the German Forests, by Maj. H. W. O.
Stovall (Ret.), D.F.C, Faber and Faber; The Shadowy World of the
Deciduous Forest, by Dr. William Blinkall-Apney. And do not forget
that trove of intelligence: Baedeker.
Man of Oak? Scan the British Intelligence files for German officers
with wooden arms or legs or even jaws--it had happened to Freud, had it
not? Check out reputations, rumors, absurd possibilities. Could a
fellow walk stiffly? Could he be extremely orthodox? Very
conservative?
Slow-moving, losing his leaves, deep-rooted, dispensing acorns?
"It's rather ridiculous," Tony said.
"It sounds like something out of one of your Red Indian movies."
Leets grunted. Man-of-Oak? Jesus Christ, he moaned in disgust.
And what about equipment?
Hitting twenty-five targets dead center from 400 meters in the dark?
Impossible. Yet here was the crucial element that had convinced Tony
to call upstairs and make noise. For in a mob of dead Jews he could
easily see dead generals or dead ministers or dead kings.
But ballistics people said it was impossible. No man could shoot so
well without being able to see. There must have been some kind of
secret illumination. Radar?
Unlikely, for radar, though still primitive, worked best in the air,
where it could see only airplanes and space. There was some kind of
sound business the Navy had--sonar, someone said. Perhaps the Germans
had worked out a way to hear the targets. Supersensitive
microphones.
"Maybe the guy can just see in the dark," Rug suggested.
"Thanks, Rug. You're a big help," Leets said.
But even if he could see, how could he hit? Four hundred meters was a
long way. If he was going to hit at that range, he had to be putting
out a high-velocity round. And when it sliced through the sound
barrier, krak! Leets could himself remember. And he knew the guy was
firing a very quick 7.92-millimeter round. Could they silence it?
Sure, silence the gun, no problem; but not the bullet! The bullet made
the noise.
How the hell were they doing it?
It terrified him.
Who was the target?
Now there was the big one. With the who, everything else would come
unraveled. Leets's guesses went only to one conclusion: it had to be a
group. Else why would this Repp practice up on a group, and why would
he use a weapon like the thirty-shot STG-44, as opposed to a nice
five-shot Kar '98 rifle, the bolt-action, long-range instrument the
Germans had been building in the millions since the last century?
Yet killing anyone would not seem to gain them much, except some hollow
vengeance. Sure, kill Churchill, kill Stalin. But it wouldn't change
the outcome of the war.
Kill the two houses of Parliament, the Congress and the Senate, the
Presidium and the Politburo: it wouldn't change a thing. Germany would
be squashed at the same rate. The big shots still rode the rope.
Yet, goddamn it, not only were they going to kill someone, the SS was
going to an immense effort, an effort that must have strained every
resource in these desperate days, to kill a few more.
What could it matter? Millions were already dead, already wasted. Who
did they hate enough to kill even as they were dying?
Who were they trying to reach out of the grave to get?
And that is where Shmuel's information left them.
Except for one thing.
Leets was alone in the office, working late into the night. That day's
work with the Jew had not gone well.
He was beginning to balk. He did not seem to care for his new allies.
He was a grim little mutt, grumpy, short of temper, looking absurd in
new American clothes.
He'd been returned to the hospital now, and Tony was off in conference
and Rug was hitting balls against a wall and Leets sat there, nursing
the ache in his leg amid crumpled-up balls of paper, books, junk,
photos, maps, and tried not to think of Susan. He knew one thing that
could drive Susan from his mind.
Leets opened the drawer and drew out a file. It was marked "repp,
first name ?" German SS officer, Le Paradis suspect," and though its
contents were necessarily sketchy, it did contain one bonafide
treasure.
Leets opened it and there, staring back at him through lightless eyes,
was this Repp. It was a blow-up of a 1936
newspaper photo: a long young face, not in any way extraordinary, hair
dark and close-cropped, cheekbones high.
The Master Sniper, the Jew had called him.
Leets rationed himself in looking at the picture. He didn't want to
stare it into banality, become overfamiliar with it. He wanted to feel
a rush of breath every time he saw it, never take it for granted. To
take this guy for granted, Leets knew, would be to make a big
mistake.
They'd showed the picture to Shmuel.
He'd looked at it, given it back.
"Yes. It's him."
"Repp?"
"Yes. Younger, of course."
"We think he was involved in a war-crimes action against British
prisoners in 1940 in France," explained Outhwaithe, who'd brought the
file by.
"A wounded survivor gave two names. Repp was one of them. A
researcher then went through the British Museum's back files and came
up with this. It's from the sporting-news section of Illustrierter
Beobachter, the pre-war Nazi picture rag. It seems this young fellow
was a member of the German small-bore rifle team. The survivor
identified him from it. So we've a long-standing interest in Herr
Repp."
"I hope you arrest him, or whatever," Shmuel had said. He had to be
pressed into pursuing the topic of Repp, but finally said only, "A
soldier. Rather calm man, quite in control of himself and others. I
have no insights into him. Jews have never understood that sort.
I can't begin to imagine what he's like, how his mind works, how he
sees the world. He frightens me. Then.
And now, in this room. He has no grief."
Though Shmuel had no interest in knowing Repp, that was now Leets's
job. He stared hard at the photo.
Its caption simply said, "Kadett Repp, one of our exemplary German
sportsmen, has a fine future in shooting competitions."
Another day passed, another interrogation spun itself listlessly out.
Leets felt especially sluggish, having spent so much time the night
previous with the picture of the German. Another researcher had been
dispatched at Tony's behest through the back issues of all German
periodicals at the British Museum; perhaps something new would surface
there. Whatever, that aspect had passed momentarily out of Leets's
hands; before him now, instead, sat the Jew, looking even worse than
usual. He had rallied in his first days among the Allies, bloated with
bland food, treated with unctuous enthusiasm;
perhaps he'd even been flattered. But as the time wore on, Leets felt
they were losing him. Lately he'd been a clam, talking in grunts,
groans. Leets had heard he sometimes had nightmares and would scream
in the night--"Ost! Ost!" east, east; and from this the American
concluded things had been rough for him. But what the hell, he'd made
it, hadn't he? Leets hadn't been raised to appreciate what he took to
be moodiness. He had no patience for a tragic view of life and when he
himself got to feeling low, it was with an intense accompanying sense
of self-loathing.
Anyway, not only was the Jew somewhat hostile, he was sick. With a
cold, no less.
"You look pretty awful," said Rug, in a rare display of human sympathy,
though on the subject of another man's misfortune he was hardly
convincing.
"The English keep their rooms so chilly," the man said.
"Roger, stoke the heater," Leets said irritably, anxious to return to
the matter at hand, which this day was another runaround on the topic
of the Man of Oak.
Roger muttered something and moped over to the heater, giving it a
rattle.
"A hundred and two in here," he said to nobody.
Shmuel sniffled again, emptied his sinuses through enflamed nostrils
into a tissue, and tossed it into a wastebasket.
"I wish I had my coat. The German thing. They make them warm at
least. The wind gets through this." He yanked on his American
jacket.
"That old thing? Smelled like a chem lab," Roger said.
"Now," Leets said, "could there be some double meaning in this Oak
business? A pun, a symbol, something out of Teutonic mythology--"
Leets halted.
"Hey," he said, turning rudely, "what did you mean, chem lab?"
"Uh." Roger looked up in surprise.
"I said, what did you mean--" "I heard what you said. I meant, it
smelled like a chem lab." It was as close as he could get.
"I had a year of organic in high school, that's all."
"Where is it?"
"Um," Roger grunted.
"It was just an old Kraut coat.
How was I to know it was anything special? I uh .. . I threw it
out."
"Oh, Jesus," said Leets.
"Where?"
"Hey, Captain, it was just this crappy old--" "Where, Sergeant,
where!
Leets usually didn't use that tone with him, and Rug didn't like it a
bit.
"In the can, for Christ's sake. Behind the hospital.
After we got him his new clothes. I mean I--" "All right," said Leets,
trying to remain calm.
"When?"
"About a week ago."
"Oh, hell." He tried to think.
"We've got to get that thing back." And he picked up the phone and
began to search for whoever was in charge of garbage pickup from
American installations in London.
The coat was found in a pit near St. Saviour's Dock on the far side of
the Thames from the Tower of London. It was found by Roger and it did
smell--of paint, toast, used rubbers, burnt papers, paste, rust, oil,
wood shavings and a dozen other substances with which it had lain
intimately.
"And lead sulfide," Leets said, reading the report from the OSS
Research and Development office the next day.
"What the hell is that?" Roger wanted to know.
Shmuel did not appear to care.
"It's a stuff out of which infrared components are built. It's how
they could see, how Repp could see. I find out now we're working hard
on it in ultra secrecy, and the English as well. But this would tend
to suggest the
Germans are at the head of the class. They've got a field model ready,
which means they're years ahead of us.
See, the thing converts heat energy to light energy: it sees heat. A
man is a certain temperature. Repp's gadget was set in that range. He
could see the heat and shoot into it. He could see them all. Except--"
he paused-"for him."
He turned to Shmuel.
"You were right," he said.
"God did not save you. It was no miracle at all: The stuff absorbs
heat: that's why it's photo-conductive. And that's why it's such a
great insulator. It's why the thing kept you so warm, got you through
the Schwarzwald. And why Repp couldn't see you. You were just enough
different in temperature from the others. You were invisible."
Shmuel did not appear to care.
"I knew God had other worries that night," he said.
"But the next time he shoots," Leets said, "the guys on the other side
of the scope won't be so lucky."
 Vollmerhausen is visibly nervous, Repp noticed with irritation. Now
why should that be? It won't be his neck on the line out there, it'll
be mine.
It was still light enough to smoke, a pleasant twilight, mid-April.
Repp lit one of his Siberias, shaggy Ivan cigarettes, loosely packed,
twigs in them, and they sometimes popped when they burned, but it was a
habit he'd picked up in the Demyansk encirclement.
"Smoke, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor?" he inquired.
"No. No. Never have. Thanks."
"Certainly. The night will come soon."
"Are you sure it's safe here? I mean, what if--" "Hard heart, Herr
Ingenieur-Doktor, hard heart. All sorts of things can happen, and
usually do. But not here, not tonight. There'll only be a patrol, not
a full attack.
Not this late. These Americans are in no hurry to die."
He smiled, looked through the glassless farm window at the tidy fields
that offered no suggestion of war.
"But we are surrounded," said Vollmerhausen. It was true. American
elements were on all sides of them, though not aggressive. They were
near the town of Alfeld, on the Swabian plain, in a last pocket of
resistance.
"We got in, didn't we? We'll get back to our quiet little corner,
don't worry." He chuckled.
An SS sergeant, in camouflage tunic, carrying an MP-40, came through
the door.
"Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer," he said in great breathless respect,
"Captain Weber sent me. The ambush team will be moving out in fifteen
minutes."
"Ah. Thank you, Sergeant," said Repp affably.
"Well," turning to the engineer, "time to go, eh?"
But Vollmerhausen just stood there, peering through the window into the
twilight. His face was drawn and he seemed colorless. The man had
never been in a combat zone before.
Repp hoisted the electro-optical pack onto his back, struggling under
the weight, and got the harness buckled.
Vollmerhausen made no move to help. Repp lifted the rifle itself off
its bipod--it rested on the table--and stepped into the sling, which
had been rigged to take most of the weight, made an adjustment here and
there and declared himself ready. He wore both pieces of camouflage
gear tonight, the baggy tiger trousers along with the tunic, and the
standard infantry harness with webbed belt and six canvas magazine
pouches and, naturally, his squashed cap with the death's-head.
"Care to come?" he asked lightly.
"Thanks, no," said Vollmerhausen, uneasy at the jest, "it's so damned
cold." He swallowed, clapped his hands around himself in pantomimed
shiver.
"Cold? It's in the forties. The tropics. This is spring.
See you soon. Hope your gadget works."
"Remember, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, you've only got three
minutes--"
"--in the on-phase. I remember. I shall make the most of them," Repp
replied.
Repp left the farmhouse and under his heavy load walked stiffly to a
copse of trees where the others had gathered. Frankly, he felt
ridiculous in this outlandish rig, the bulky box strapped to his back,
the rifle linked to it by wire hose, the sighting apparatus itself
bulky and absurd on top of the weapon, which itself was exaggerated
with the extended magazine, the altered pistol grip and the bipod. But
he knew they wouldn't smirk at him.
Tonight it was Captain Weber's show. It was his sector anyway, he knew
the American patrol patterns. Repp was along merely to shoot, as if on
safari.
"Sir," said Weber.
"Heil Hitler!"
"Heil, Schutzstaffel," responded Repp, tossing up a flamboyantly casual
salute. The young men of XII Panzergrenadierdivision "Hitlerjugend"
jostled with respect, though the circumstances seemed to prevent more
elaborate courtesies. This pleased Repp. He'd never been much for
ceremony.
"Ah, Weber, hello. Boys," nodding to them, common touch, nice, they
could talk about it after the war.
"Sir," one of the worshipers said, "that damned thing looks heavy. Do
you need a man--" It was heavy. Even with Vollmerhausen's last stroke
of genius, the one he'd been laboring on like a maniac these last few
days, Vampir, the whole system, gun, rack, scope, light source, weighed
in at over forty kilos, 41.2, to be exact, still 1.2 kilos over, but
closer to the specs than Repp ever thought they'd get.
"Thanks, but no. That's part of the test, you see, to see how well a
fellow can do with one of these on his back. Even an old gent like
me."
Repp was thirty-one, but the others were younger;
they laughed.
Repp grinned in the laughter: he liked to make them happy. After it
had died, he said, "After you, Captain."
There was a last-second ritual of equipment checks to be performed,
MP-40 bolts dropped from safe into engagement, feeder tabs locked into
the machine gun, harnesses shifted, helmet straps tightened; then,
Weber leading, Repp somewhere in the center, they filed out, crouched
low, into the fields.
Vollmerhausen watched them go, silent line of the ambush team edging
cautiously into the dark. He wondered how long he'd have to wait until
Repp returned with the happy news that it had gone well and they could
leave. Hours probably. It had already been a terrible day; first the
terrifying flight in from Aniage Elf in the Stork, bobbing and
skimming, over the trees. Then the long time among the soldiers, the
desultory shellings, and the worry about the weather.
Would the sun hold till twilight?
If it didn't they'd have to stay another day. And another.
And another.. ..
But it had held.
"There, see: your prayers have been answered, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,"
Repp had chided him.
Vollmerhausen smiled weakly. Yes, he had prayed.
Displaying a dexterity that might have astounded his many detractors,
Hans the Kike had prepared Vampir for its field test. He quickly
mounted the scope and the energy conversion unit with its
parabola-shaped infrared lamp to the modified STG receiver, using a
special wrench and screwdriver. He locked in the power line and
checked the connections. Intact. He opened the box and gave it a
quick rundown, tracing the complex circuitry for faulty wiring, loose
connections, foreign objects.
"Best hurry," Repp said, leaning intently over the engineer's shoulder,
watching and recording his rundown, "we're losing it."
Vollmerhausen explained for what must have been the thousandth time,
"The later we charge, the later it lasts."
Finally, he was finished. Sun remained, in traces: not a fiery
noontime's blaze--of furnaces or battles--but a fleeting
late-afternoon's version, pale and low and thin, but enough.
"It's not the heat, it's the light," he pointed out.
Vollmerhausen yanked a metal slide off a thick metal disk spot-welded
crudely to the top of the cathode chamber, revealing a glass face,
opaque and dense. Its facets sparkled in the sunlight.
"Fifteen minutes is all we need; that gives us eight hours of potency
for an on-phase of three minutes," he said, as if he were convincing
himself.
The problem with infrared rays, Vollmerhausen had tried to explain to
Repp, was that they were lower in energy than visible light--how then
could they be made to emit light rays of a higher value, so that images
might be identified and, in this case, fired upon? Dr. Kutzcher had
found a part of the answer at the University of Berlin those many years
ago: by feeding high-tension electricity across a cathode tube, he'd
caused the desired rise in energy level, producing the requisite
visibility.
But Vollmerhausen, improvising desperately at Anlage, had not the
latitude of Kutzcher. His problem was narrowly military--he was
limited by weight, the amount a man could carry efficiently on his back
over rough terrain. When all the skimming and paring and snipping was
done, he found himself a full ten kilos distant from that optimum
weight; no further reduction was possible without radically
compromising Vampir's performance. And the mass of the unbudgeable ten
kilos lay in the battery pack and its heavy shielding, the source of
the high-tension electricity.
His stroke of inspiration--it took the form of the blister like dial
welded to the scope, no, not pretty at all-was a solar unit. No less a
power than the sun itself would provide Vampir with its energy; not an
inexhaustible supply, but enough for a few minutes of artificial,
invisible daylight at high midnight. Vollmerhausen could not totally
abandon a battery, of course; one was still needed to provide juice for
the cathode ray tube, but not nearly so much juice, for the phosphors
in the chamber had been selected for their special property to absorb
energy from sunlight and then, when bombarded by infrared rays, to
release it. Thus instead of a 10-kilo 30-volt battery, Vampir could
make do with a 1.3-kilo 3-volt battery, a net savings of 8.7 kilos
while maintaining the intensity and brilliance of image within the
specified limits. But not for long: for the phosphors had a very brief
life in their charged state, and once exposed to the infrared lost
their powers quickly. But for a good three minutes, Repp could peer
through the eyepiece and there, wobbling greenly before him, magnified
tenfold by a specially ground Opticotechna lens, undulated targets,
visible, distinct, available, 400 meters out.
Vollmerhausen had checked his watch, snapped the face of the solar disk
closed.
"There. It's done. You've got your power now, until midnight."
"Just like a fairy tale," Repp had said merrily.
"And you've got the special ammunition?"
"Of course, of course," and he had clapped the magazine pouch on his
belt.
Now, in the farmhouse, Vollmerhausen looked out into a darkness that
was total. Repp was somewhere out there, in his element. The night
belonged to him.
/ gave it to him, Vollmerhausen thought.
Repp slid into position behind the rifle, which rested on its bipod.
His shoulders and arms ached, and the strap had cut deeply across his
collarbone. The damned thing was heavy, and he'd come but three or
four kilometers, not the twenty-three kilometers he'd be traveling the
day of Nibelungen. He felt his breath coming unevenly, in sobs and
gasps, and fought to control it.
Calm was the sniper's great ally, you had to will yourself into a
serenity, a wholeness of spirit and task. He tried hard to relax.
Four hundred meters beyond him the tidy fields fell away into a stream
bed, where a stand of trees and thicker vegetation grew, and here the
land delivered up a kind of fold, a natural funnel that men moving over
unfamiliar territory, scared probably, wishing themselves elsewhere,
would be surely drawn to.
"There, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, do you see it?"
asked Weber, crouching beside him in the darkness.
"Yes. Fine."
"Four nights out of five they come through there."
"Fine."
Weber was nervous in the great man's presence, talked too much.
"We could move closer."
"I make it four hundred meters, about right."
"Now we've flares if you--" "Captain, no flares."
"I've the machine-gun team over on the right for suppressing fire if
you need it, and my squad leader, a sound man, is on the left with the
rest of the patrol."
"I can see you learned your trade in the East."
"Yes, sir." The young captain's face, like Repp's own, was dabbed with
oily combat paint. His eyes shone whitely in the starlight.
"They usually come about eleven, a few hours off.
They think this is the great weakness in our lines. We've let them
through."
"Tomorrow they'll stay away!" Repp laughed.
"Now tell your fellows to hold still. No firing. My operation, all
right?"
"Yes, sir." He was gone.
Good, so much the better. Repp liked to spend these moments alone, if
possible. He considered them very much his own minutes, a time for
clearing the head and loosening the muscles and indulging in a dozen
semiconscious eccentricities that got him feeling in touch with the
rifle and his targets and himself.
Repp lay very still and warm, feeling the wind, the rifle against his
hands, studying the dark landscape before him. He felt rather good, at
the same time remembering that things had not always been so pleasant.
A frozen February's memory floated up before him, a desperate month of
a desperate year, '42.
Totenkopfdivision had been pushed into a few square miles of a
pulverized city named Demyansk, in the Valdai Hills between Lake Ilmen
and Lake Seliger in northern Russia--the Winter War, they later called
it. In the city, all rudiments of military organization had broken
down: the battle had become one huge alley fight, a small-unit action
repeated on a vast scale, as groups of men stalked each other through
the ruins. Young Repp, a Hauptsturmfrihrer, as the Waffen SS
designated its captains, was the champion stalker. With his
MannlicherSchoenauer 6.5-millimeter mounting the 10X Unerti scope, he
wandered from gunfight to gunfight, dropping five, ten, fifteen men at
a throw. He was a brilliant shot, and about to become famous.
The morning of the twenty-third found him squatting wearily in the
ruins of a factory, the Red Tractor Plant, sipping tepid ersatz,
listening to the soldiers around him grouse. He didn't blame them. The
night had been one long fruitless counter sniper operation: the Popovs
were curiously silent. He was tired, tired down to his fingers;
his eyes were swollen and they ached. As he examined the thin swirl of
liquid in the tin cup, it was not hard for him to imagine other places
he'd rather be.
Yawning, he glanced around the interior of the factory, a maze of
wreckage, twisted girders, heaps of brick, a skeletal outline showing
against a gray sky that promised more snow; the damned stuff had fallen
again yesterday, must be six feet of it now, and all about the factory
fresh white piles of it gleamed brightly against the blackened walls,
giving the place a strange purity. It was cold, below zero; but Repp
was past caring of cold.
He'd gotten used to it. He wanted sleep, that was all.
The firing opened gradually. Shots always rattled around the city as
patrols bumped into each other in alleyways; one grew accustomed and
did not even hear them, or the explosions either, but as the intensity
seemed to mount after several minutes, when contact might ordinarily be
measured in seconds, some of the men around him perked up out of their
whiny conversations.
"Ivan's knocking again," someone said.
"Shit. The bastards. Don't they sleep?"
"Don't get excited," someone cautioned, "probably some kid with an
automatic."
"That's more than one automatic," another said. And indeed it was,
Repp could tell too, for the firing then churned like a thunderstorm.
"All right, people," said a calm sergeant, "let's cut the shit and wait
for the officers." He hadn't seen Repp, who continued to lie there.
After several minutes a lieutenant came in, fast, looked about for the
sergeant.
"Let's get them out, huh? A big one, I'm afraid," he said laconically.
Then he saw Repp, was taken aback by another officer.
"Oh? Say, what the hell, who the hell are--" "Repp," said Repp.
"Damn! I needed sleep bad. How many? Big, you say."
"It's not clear yet. Too much smoke and dust at the end of Groski
Prospekt. But it sounds big."
"All right," said Repp, "these are your boys, you know what to do."
"Yes, sir."
Repp picked himself up wearily. He nicked the ersatz out and paused
for a moment. Men scurried by, clapping helmets on, drawing parkas
tighter, throwing Kar '98 bolts, rushing into the street. Repp checked
the pocket of his snow smock, then tightened it. He was loaded with
ammo, not having fired a round the night before. The
Mannlicher-Schoenauer fired from a clever spool magazine, almost like
the cylinder of a revolver, and Repp had a pouchful of the things.
He stepped into the street finally, with the rifle. Outside, the glare
was fierce and the panic unleashed. He felt at storm center. At the
end of Groski Prospekt an armored car blazed. Small-arms fire kicked
up spurts of dust and snow along the pavement. The noise was ugly,
careening. SS Panzergrenadiers came racing down the corridor from the
wall of smoke, one of them dropping when a shot took him. As they fled
by, Repp snagged one.
"No use. No use. They've broken through. Hundreds, thousands, oh,
Christ, only a block--" A blast drowned him out and a wall went down
nearby, filling the air with smoke and dust. The panicked man squirmed
away and disappeared. Repp saw the young lieutenant placing his men in
the wreckage along the street. They all looked scared but somehow
resigned. Totenkopfdivision had a reputation for staying put. Repp
knew that reputation was to be tested again.
Smoke shielded the end of the street from his eyes.
Nothing down there but haze.
"Herr Repp," someone yelled, for he already had a reputation, "kill a
batch of the fuckers for us, it looks like we won't be around to do it
ourselves."
Repp laughed. Now that was a man with spirit.
"Kill them yourself, sonny. I'm off duty."
More laughter.
Repp turned, headed back into the factory. He was tired of Ivans and
wreckage and filth from blown-up sewers and rats the size of cats that
prowled the ruins and crawled across your belly while you slept and he
never expected to survive anyway, so why not go out today? It was as
good as any day. A stairway left freakishly standing in one corner of
the room caught his eye.
He followed it up through the deserted upper floors of the factory. He
heard men crashing in below. Totenkopf people, falling back on the
factory. So that was it then, the Red Tractor Plant. He was
twenty-eight years old and he'd never be another day older and he'd
spend his last one here in a place where Bolshevik peasants built
tractors and, more recently, tanks. Not the end he'd have picked, but
as numbness settled over him, he began to feel it wouldn't be so bad at
all. He was in a hurry to be done.
At the top he found himself in a clock tower of some kind, shot out, of
course, nothing up there but snow and old timbers, bricks, half a wall
blown away, other gaps from rogue artillery rounds. Yet one large hole
opened up a marvelous view of the Groski Prospekt--a canyon of ragged
walls buried in smoke. Even as he scanned this landscape of
devastation, it seemed to come alive before him. He could see them,
swarming now, Popovs, in those white snowsuits, domed brown helmets,
carrying submachine guns.
Repp delicately brought the rifle to his shoulder and braced it on a
ledge of brick. The scope yielded a Russian, scurrying ratlike from
obstacle to obstacle. He lifted his head warily and nicked his eyes
about and Repp shot him in the throat, a spew of crimson foaming down
across his front in the split second before he dropped. The man was
about 400 meters out. Repp tossed the bolt--a butter knife handle, not
knobby like the Kar '98--through the Mannlicher's split bridge, keeping
his eye pinned against the cup of the absurd Unerti ten-power scope,
which threw up images big and clear as a Berlin cinema. Its reticule
was three converging lines, from left, right and bottom, which almost
but did not quite meet, creating a tiny circle of space.
Repp's trick was to keep the circle filled; he laid it now against
another Red, an officer. He killed him.
He was shooting faster, there seemed to be so many of them. He was
wedged into the bricks of the tower, rather comfortably, and at each
shot, the rifle reported sharply with a slight jar, not like the
bone-bruising buck of the Kar '98, but gentle and dry. When he hit
them, they slid into the rubble, stained but not shattered. A
6.5-millimeter killed with velocity, not impact; it drilled them and,
failing deflection at bone or spine, flew on.
Repp was even convinced they felt no pain from the way they relaxed. He
didn't even have to move the rifle much, he could just leave it where
it was, they were swarming so thickly. He'd fired five magazines now,
twenty-five rounds. He'd killed twenty-five men. Some looked
stupefied when he took them; others angry; still others oblivious. Repp
shot for the chest. He took no chances. Nothing fancy.
They had spotted him of course. Their bullets thunked and cracked
around him, chipping at the bricks, filling the air with fine dust or
snow, but he felt magical. He kept dropping them. The white bodies
were piling up.
Behind him now sprang a noise, and Repp whirled. A boy crouched at the
head of the stairs with a pack.
"Your kit, sir. You left it down below."
"Ah." Yes, someone'd thought to bring it to him. It was packed with
ammunition, six more boxes, in each fifty specially loaded rounds, 180
grains behind a nickle-tip slug. Berdan primers--the best--with twin
flash holes.
"Can you load those for me? It works same as with your rifle, off the
charger," Repp said mildly as a Degtyarev tracer winked through and
buried itself in the wall. He pointed to the litter of empty spool
magazines lying amid spent shells at his boots.
"But stay low, those fellows are really angry now."
Repp fired all that morning. The Russian attack had broken down,
bottled up at Groski Prospekt. He'd killed all their officers and was
quite sure that had been a colonel he'd put down just an instant ago.
He thought he'd killed almost a hundred. Nineteen magazines, and three
rounds left in this one; he'd killed, so far, ninety-eight men in just
over two hours. The rifle had grown hot, and he'd stopped once or
twice to squirt a drop or so of oil down its barrel. In one two-minute
period, he ran his ramrod with patch vigorously in the barrel and the
patch came up black with gunk. The boy crouched at his feet, and every
time an empty spool dropped out, he picked it up and carefully threaded
the brass cartridges in.
The Popovs were now coming from other directions;
evidently, they'd sent flanking parties around. But these men ran into
heavy fire from down below, and those that survived, Repp took. Still,
the volume of fire against the Red Tractor Plant was building; Repp
could sense the battle rising again in pitch. These things had their
melodies too, and he fancied he could hear it.
The grimy lieutenant from that morning appeared in the stairwell.
"You still alive?" Repp asked.
But the fellow was in no mood for Repp's jokes.
"They're breaking through. We haven't the firepower to hold them off
much longer. They're already in a wing of the factory. Come on, get
out, Repp. There's still a chance to make it out on foot."
"Thanks, old man, think I'll stay," Repp said merrily.
He felt schuss fest bulletproof, but with deeper resonations in the
German, connoting magic, a charmed state.
"Repp, there's nothing here but death."
"Go on yourself," said Repp.
"I'm having too much fun to leave."
He was hitting at longer ranges now; through the drifting pall of smoke
he made out small figures several blocks away. Magnified tenfold by
the Unerti, two Russian officers conferred in a doorway over a map. The
scene was astonishingly intimate, he could almost see the hair in their
ears. Repp took one through the heart and the other, who turned away
when his comrade was hit, as if in hiding his eyes he was protecting
himself, through the neck.
Repp killed a sniper seven blocks away.
In another street Repp took the driver of a truck, splattering the
windscreen into a galaxy of fractures.
The vehicle bumped aimlessly against a rubble pile and men spilled out
and scrambled for cover. Of seven he took three.
Down below, grenades detonated in a cluster, machine pistols ripped in
a closed space which caught and multiplied their noise.
"I think they're in the building," Repp said.
"I've loaded all the rounds left in the magazines now," the trooper
said.
"Nine of them. That's forty-five more bullets."
"You'd best be getting on then. And thanks."
The boy blushed sheepishly. Maybe eighteen or nineteen, handsome, thin
face.
"If I see you afterward, I'll write a nice note to your officer," Repp
said, an absurdly civil moment in the heat of a great modern battle.
Bullets were banging into the tower from all angles now, rattling and
popping. The boy raced down the stairs.
At the end of Groski Prospekt, the Ivans were organizing for another
push before nightfall. Repp killed one who stupidly peeked out from
behind the smoldering armored car. The rifle was hot as a stove and he
had to be careful to keep his fingers off the metal of the barrel. He
had touched it once and could feel a blister on his skin. But the
rifle held to the true; those Austrians really could build them. It
was from the Steyr works near Vienna, double trigger, scrollwork in the
metal,
something from the old Empire, hunting schlosses in the Tyrolean
foothills, and woodsmen in green lederhosen and high socks who'd take
you to the best bucks in the forest.
Blobs of light floated up to smash him. Tracers uncoiled like flung
ropes, drifting lazily. Some rounds trailed tendrils of smoke. The
bullets went into the brick with an odd sound, a kind of clang. He
knew it was a matter of time and that his survival this far, with every
Russian gun in the city banging away, was a kind of statistical
incredibility that was bound to end shortly.
Did it matter? Perhaps this moment of pure sniper war was worth his
life. He'd been able to hit, hit, hit for most of the day now, over
three hundred times, from clear, protected shooting, four streets like
channels to fire down, plenty of ammunition, a boy to load spools for
him, targets everywhere, massing in the streets, crawling through the
ruins, edging up the gutters, but if he could see them he could take
them.
Repp killed a man with a flamethrower on his back.
Forty-four bullets.
By thirty-six, it had become clear that the men below had either fallen
back or been killed. He heard a lot of scuffling around below. The
Russians must have crept through the sewers to get in; they certainly
hadn't come down the street.
Twenty-seven.
Just a second before, someone at the foot of the stairs had emptied a
seventy-one-round drum upward. Repp happened to be shielded, he was
standing in a recess in the brick wall, but the slatted floor of the
tower was ripped almost to slivers as the slugs jumped through it.
Wood dust flew in the air. Repp had a grenade. He pulled the lanyard
out the handle and tossed the thing into the stairwell, heard it
bouncing down the steps. He was back on the scope when the blast and
the screams came.
Eighteen.
Tanks. He saw one scuttle through a gap between buildings several
blocks away. Why didn't they think of that earlier, save themselves
trouble and people? Then he realized the Stalins had the same trouble
the Panzers had had negotiating the wreckage-jammed streets. To get
this far into the ruins at all, Russian engineers must have been
working frantically, blowing a path through to him.
Eleven.
Repp heard voices below. They were trying to be silent but a stair
gave. He stepped back, took out his P-38 and leaned into the
stairwell. He killed them all.
Five.
One magazine. The first tank came into view, lurching from around the
corner at the Groski intersection. Yes, hello. Big fellow, aren't
you? A few soldiers crept behind it. Repp, very calm and steady,
dropped one, missed one. He saw a man in a window, shot him, high in
the throat. One of the men he'd dropped behind the tank attempted to
crawl into cover. Repp finished him.
One.
The turret was revolving. Not a Stalin at all, a KV-1 with a
76-millimeter. He fixed with fascination on the monster, watching as
the mouth of the gun lazed over, seeming almost to open wider as it
drew toward him.
They certainly were taking their time lining up the shot.
The tank paused, gun set just right. Repp would have liked at least to
get rid of his last bullet. He didn't feel particularly bad about all
this. The hatch popped on the tank, someone inside wanted a better
look, and the lid rose maybe an inch or two. Repp took him, center
forehead, last bullet.
There was nothing to do. He set the rifle down. This was an
execution. As if by signal, Russian troops began to file down Groski
Prospekt. Repp, firing since 0930, checked his watch. 1650. An
eight-hour day, and not a bad one. He chalked up the score in the
seconds left him. Three hundred and fifty rounds he had fired,
couldn't have missed more than a few times. Make it ten, just to be
fair. That was 340 men. Then the three on the stairway with the
pistol. Perhaps two more in the grenade blast. Three hundred and
forty-five kills, 345.
Three hundred and fo--.
The shell went into the tower forty feet below Repp.
The Russians had gotten fancy, they wanted to bring the tower down with
Repp inside it, poetic justice or some such melodramatic conceit. The
universe tilted as the tower folded. The line of the horizon broke
askew and dust rose chokingly. Repp grabbed something as gravity
accelerated the drop.
The tower toppled thunderously into Groski Prospekt in a storm of dust
and snow. But its top caught on the roof of the building across the
way and was sheared neatly off. Repp found himself in a capsule of
broken brick deposited there, untouched, baffled. It was as if he'd
walked away from a plane crash.
He walked across the flat roof of the building, waiting to get nailed.
Artillery started up but the shells landed beyond him. There was smoke
everywhere but he was alone. Across the roof, a shell had blown open a
hole.
He looked down into almost a museum specimen of the Soviet Worker's
apartment, and leapt down into it. He opened the door and headed down
a dark hallway.
Stairs. He climbed down them, and left through a front door. There
were no Russians anywhere, though far off, he could make out small
figures. Taking no chances, he headed down an alley.
That night he had schnapps with a general.
"The world," the sentimental old man intoned, "will know you now." Dr.
Goebbels stood ready to make this dream come true.
"Sir," somebody whispered.
"I see them," said Repp.
Scope on. The screen lights. He saw the first one, a wobbling
man-shaped blotch of light, against green darkness. Then another,
behind him, and still another.
Germs, Repp thought. They are germs, bacilli, disease.
They are filth.
He drew back the bolt and squirmed the black cross of Vampir's reticule
against the first of the shapes.
"Filth," he repeated.
He took them.
 "Vampir did quite well, I thought," said Repp. He abstractedly
counted off the reasons for his pleasure, each to a finger.
"No sight picture breakup, good distinct images, weight not a factor.
In all, easy shooting."
Vollmerhausen was astonished. He certainly wasn't expecting praise.
Though he knew the shooting had gone well, for he'd heard two enlisted
men chattering excitedly over it.
But Repp was not yet finished.
"In fact," he elaborated, "you've performed extraordinarily well under
great pressure. I wish it were possible to arrange for some kind of
official recognition. But at least accept my congratulations." He was
toying with the blackened metal cube Vollmerhausen had noticed earlier,
a charm or something.
"A great miracle has happened here." He smiled.
"I--I am honored," stuttered Hans the Kike. They were back at Aniage
Elf, in the research facility, safe in the Schwarzwald after another
harrowing flight.
"But then sometimes the most important assignments are those nobody
ever knows about, eh?" said Repp.
Vollmerhausen felt this was a strange comment for a famous man, but
merely nodded, for he was still stunned at Repp's sudden burst of
enthusiasm. And a sudden, still-resentful part of him wished that the
ass head Schaeffer were here to listen to Der Meisterschutze himself
heap on the praise. Yet, he acknowledged, he deserved it. Vampir
represented an astonishing feat in so small a time, under such
desperate pressure. Though even now it was hard to believe and take
real pleasure in: he'd done it.
Still, certain details and refinements remained to be mastered, as well
as some after-mission checks and some maintenance, and it was this
problem he now addressed, aware at the same time how modest he must
have seemed.
"May I ask, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, how soon you expect to go
operational? And what preparations will be necessary on my part?"
"Of course," Repp said smartly.
"Certain aspects of the mission remain problematical. I've got to wait
on intelligence reports: target confirmations, strategic developments,
political considerations. I would say another week. Perhaps even
more: a delicate job. It depends on factors even I can't control."
"I see," said Vollmerhausen.
"I should tell you two things further. The weapon and I will leave
separately. Vampir will be taken out of here by another team. They
are responsible for delivery to target area. Good people, I've been
assured."
"Yes, sir."
"So you'll have to prepare a travel kit. Boxes, a trunk, I don't know.
Everything should be lashed down and protected against jolts. It
needn't be fancy. After what you've handled, I shouldn't think it
would be a problem."
"Not at all."
"Now, secondly--look, relax. You look so stiff."
It was true. Though seated, Vollmerhausen had assumed the posture of a
Prussian Kadett.
"I've noticed that I make people nervous," Repp said philosophically.
"Why, I wonder? I'm no secret policeman.
Just a soldier."
Vollmerhausen forced himself to relax.
"Smoke, if you care to."
"I don't."
"No, that's right. I think I will." He drew and lit one of the
Russian things. He certainly was chipper this morning, all gaudy in
his camouflages.
"Now, may I be frank with you?" He toyed again with the black cube
Vollmerhausen had noticed earlier.
"Germany is going to lose the war. And soon too. It's the third week
in April now; certainly it'll all be over by the middle of May. You're
not one of those fools who thinks victory is still possible. Go ahead,
speak out."
Again, Repp had astonished him. He realized it showed on his face and
hurriedly snapped his mouth shut.
"Yes, I suppose. Deep down. We all know," Vollmerhausen confirmed.
"Of course. It's quite obvious. They know in Berlin too, the smart
ones. You're a practical man, a realist, that's why we chose you. But
I tell you this because of the following: Operation Nibelungen
proceeds. No matter what happens in Berlin. No matter that English
commandos and American tanks are inside the wire here. In fact
especially in those cases. You weren't in Russia?"
"No, I--"
"No matter. That's where the real war is. This business here with the
Americans and the British, just a sideshow. Now, in Russia, four
million fell. The figure is almost too vast to be believed. That's
sacrifice on a scale the world's never seen before. That's why the
mission will go on. It's all that generation will ever have. No
statues, no monuments, no proud chapters in history books. Others will
write the history; we will be its villains.
Think of it, Vollmerhausen! Repp, a villain! Incredible, isp't it?"
He looked directly at the engineer.
"Unbelievable," said the engineer.
Vollmerhausen realized Repp was not giving a speech. He had none of
the orator's gifts and little of his zeal; he spoke tiredly,
laconically, only in facts, as if an engineer himself, reading off a
blueprint.
Another thought occurred to Vollmerhausen: the man is quite insane. He
is out of his mind. It's all over, still he talks of monuments, of
consecrations. It's not survival for him, as it is for me. There is
no after-the-war for Repp; for Repp, there'll always be a war. If not
in a shell hole or on a front line, then in a park somewhere, at a
pleasant crossroads, in a barn or an office building.
"Y-yes, unbelievable," Vollmerhausen repeated nervously, for he was
just beginning to realize how dangerous Repp was.
 They're calling him, even here, right afterward, der Meisterschutze,
not, I say again, not der Scharfschiitze, the technical German for
sniper. Which of you brilliant Americans will now explain the
significance of this?"
Tony held in hand his scoop of the week: the March 5, 1942, issue of
Das Schwarze Korps, the SS picture magazine, which the burrower who'd
been sent to the British Museum's collection of back-issue German
periodicals had uncovered. Its lead story was Repp at Demyansk.
Leets cleared his throat.
"Meisterschiitze: master shot. Literally."
"Ah, see, chum, you haven't entered it. You don't feel it. However
can you hope to track a man whose nickname you cannot fathom?"
"I wasn't finished, goddamn it," Leets snarled.
"Meisterschutze, yes, master shot, and since the context is clearly
military, one may indeed say, as did the Jew, master sniper. A nice
turn of phrase: the man has some talent. He is a writer though, is he
not? At any rate, it's a higher form of rhetoric, more formal, playing
on the long Germanic tradition of guilds, apprentices and journeymen.
It's more, shall we say, resonant."
His cold smile drove the heat from the room. Clever bastard: a
Bloomsbury wag, only-mygeniusto-declare amusement smug on his face.
But the lesson was unfinished.
"It's not hard to see why they made such a hero of him, is it?"
"It's part of another war," Leets explained. He was ready for this
one.
"Waffen SS against the Wehrmacht.
Nazis against the old boys, the Prussians who run the army. Repp is
perfect. No aristo, just a country boy who can kill anything he can
see. The prize is first place in line--Hitler's line--for the
new-model Panzers coming out of the shops, the Tigers. They were in
the market for heroes, right?"
"Right, indeed," admitted Tony.
"But more to the point: from this we can see how important Repp will be
to the SS. That is to say, from here on in, he's not just one of them.
He is them. That is to say, he becomes their official instrument, the
embodiment of their will. He's--" he struggled for language in which
to make this concept felt, "--he's an idea."
Tony scowled.
"You're talking like a don. Dons don't win wars."
"You've got to see in this a higher reality. A symbolic reality."
Leets himself wasn't sure what he was saying. A voice from inside was
doing the talking; somewhere a part of his mind had made a leap, a
breakthrough.
"When we crack it, I can guarantee you this: it will be pure Nazi, pure
SS. Their philosophy, given flesh, set to walking."
"Wow, Frankenstein," called Roger, across the room.
"You Americans have too much imagination for anybody's good. You go to
too many films."
But Tony had more.
"I have found," he announced, "the Man of Oak."
Leets turned. He could not read the Englishman's face. It was
impassive, imperial.
"Who?" Leets demanded.
"It occurs to me that we knew all along. We knew, did we not, that our
phantom WVHA has an address in eastern Berlin. A suburb called
Lichtenfelde; but the place itself goes by an older, more traditional
name. It is called Unter den Eichen."
He paused, allowing the information its impact.
"Translate it literally," he advised some seconds later when he saw the
befuddlement on Leets's face.
Leets worked it out into English.
"
"Under the Oaks,"
" he said.
"Yes."
"Goddamn it!," Leets said.
"Yes. And this Jewish chap presumably heard reference to a man from
"Under the Oaks," as one would say "A Man from Washington," or "A Man
from London," meaning a man of authority. But his knowledge of the
language was imperfect, since his Yiddish only allowed him access to
the most basic German. He garbled it, perhaps inflated it somewhat for
rhetorical effect. Thus, Man of Oak, as Shmuel overheard him say."
"Goddamn it," Leets said again.
"It must have been some officer, some supervisor. But it tells us
nothing."
"No, nothing: Another disappointment. It tells us only what we
know."
It was true. During the hot week with Shmuel, information had seemed
to surge in on them. There had been so much to do. A powerful
illusion of progress made itself felt. But in the very act of
mounting, it had peaked. Leets saw this rather sooner than the
others;
now Tony had caught on: that, though all kinds of context and
background were being assembled, the real nut of the problem had not
yet been cracked. They knew Repp, and of his rifle, rudimentary facts,
but compelling nonetheless. But they had no idea of more crucial
matters.
Who would the German shoot? When? Why?
"Your idea that somewhere in his testimony was a clue has gone up in
smoke," Tony said.
"We've got to find Aniage Elf, that's all. Could we increase air recon
of that area? Aren't there French armored units closing in? Could
they be directed to penetrate the forest, in hopes of--" "No. Of
course not. It's huge, over and over we've remarked on how huge it
is."
"Goddamn it. We need something. A break."
It arrived the next morning.
IN REF JAATIC REQUEST 11 MAR 45 THIS HQ ADVISES 3D SQD
2ND BN 45 INF DIV TOOK HEAVY CASUALTIES ON RECON
PATROL 15 APRIL APPX 2200 HRS VICINITY AL FELD IN TELL
SUGGEST 11 ROUNDS 11 HITS IN DARK AND SILENCE ARMY
GRP G-2 CONFIRMS WAFF EN SS UNIT HITLER-JUG END THIS
AREA PLS ADVISE
ryan maj inf 2ND bn G-2
"Well," said Leets, ending the silence, "the fucking thing's
operational. They've worked out the bugs."
"Rather," said Tony.
"They can go anytime they want."
Leets and Outhwaithe flew into the 45th Division's sector early the
next morning, landing in a Piper Cub not far from Alfeld, the
divisional headquarters. Ryan's shop, though, was farther toward the
front. And here there was a front, in the classical sense: two armies
facing each other warily across a bleak, crater-sc aped gulf of
no-man's land, after the configuration of the last war.
The Americans had gone across this raw gap many times, and each time,
bitterly, they were driven back by the Panzergrenadiers of "Hitler-jug
end So when Leets and Outhwaithe, in strange new combat gear they'd
picked up for their trip to the line, approached the blown-out
farmhouse in which Ryan's G-2 outfit hung out, they were not surprised
by the sullenness with which they were greeted. Outsiders, fresh,
strange officers, one a foreigner, an exotic Brit, rear-echelon types:
they expected to be hated, in the way locals always hate tourists; and
they were.
"I never saw anything like it," Major Ryan, a sandy-haired freckled man
whose nose ran constantly, told them.
"Center chest, one shot each. No blood. Patrol that found them
thought they were sleeping."
"And at night? Definitely at night?" Leets pushed.
"I said at night, didn't I, Captain?"
"Yes, sir, it's just that--" "Goddamn it, if I say at night, I mean at
night."
"Yes, sir. Can we get up there?"
"This is a combat zone, Captain. I don't have time to take people on
trips."
"Just point us in the right direction. We'll find it."
"Jesus, you guys are eager. All right, but goddamn it, get yourselves
a helmet. It's right smack in Kraut country."
The Jeep could only get them so close; after that it was a walk in the
sun. A sign in a shattered tree announced the sudden change in climate
tersely and without fanfare: "You are under observed artillery fire the
next 5,00 yards" in standard GI stenciling, all the letters split
neatly in two; but a wit had edited an improvement into the copy,
replacing the word "artillery" with "sniper" in bold child's scrawl.
The war was everywhere up here, in the wary quick stares of the men who
were fighting it, the hulks of burnt-out armor that littered the
landscape, in the haze of smoke, heavy and lazy, that adhered to
everything, and beneath it another odor that infiltrated the
nostrils.
Leets sniffed.
"Ever been in a combat zone, Captain?" asked Ryan.
"Nothing stable like this. I did some running around behind the lines
last summer."
"I recognize the odor," said Tony.
"Bodies out there.
Beyond the wire."
"Yeah," confirmed Major Ryan.
"Theirs. Just let 'em try and come out and bury 'em."
"My father," said Outhwaithe, "mentioned it in his letters. The Somme,
all that, '14 to '18. I read them later."
They began to encounter the infantrymen here, just behind the line,
relaxing around cooking fires, or simply dozing in the shadows of
half-tracks and Jeeps. The still landscape actually teemed with men,
though if there was a principle of organization behind all this casual
cluster, Leets missed it. Who was in charge? Nobody.
Who knew what they were doing? Everybody. But Leets did not feel
himself the object of curiosity as he scurried along, self-consciously
clean and unaccustomed to the crack of bullets aimed his way. Nobody
cared. He was not German; he was not an officer who could send anybody
out on patrol or launch an attack; therefore he was not significant. A
couple of tired-looking teenagers with bar's twice their size looked at
him stupidly. It did not occur to them to salute, or to him to require
it.
Farther on, some wise man cautioned, "Keep your asses low."
A final hundred yards had to be covered belly-down, without dignity,
across a bare ridge, through a farmyard, to a low stone wall.
Here, settled in cozy domesticity, had gathered still more GI's.
Weapons poked through holes punched in the wall or rested on sandbags
in the gaps of the wall, and a scroll of barbed wire, jagged and
surreal, unreeled across the stones; yet for all these symbols of the
soldier's trade, Leets still felt more as if he'd crashed a hobo's
convention. Unshaven men, grousing and farting, clothes fetid, toes
popping hugely out of blackish OD socks, lay sprawled about in assorted
poses of languor.
A few peered intently out through gaps in the wall or Y-shaped
periscopes at what lay beyond; but most just loafed, cheerful and
uncomplicated, enjoying the bright moment for what it was.
The platoon leader, a young lieutenant who looked tireder than Ryan,
crawled over, and a meeting convened in the lee of the wall.
"Tom," said Ryan, "these fine gents flew in special from London;
they're after a big story." Newspaper lingo seemed to be Ryan's stock
in trade.
"Not their usual beat at all, but here they are. And the story, in
time for the late editions, is Third Squad."
"Never knew who turned the lights out on 'em," said Tom.
More precisely, thought Leets, who turned the lights on.
A sergeant was soon summoned who'd been at the wall the night of the
patrol, evidently pulled from sleep, for the flecks of crud still
clotted in his eyes. He affected the winter-issue wool-helmet cap,
called a beanie and useless except for decoration in this warm weather,
and he yanked hard on a dead cigar. All these men who lived in the
very smile of extinction insisted on being characters, vivid and
astonishing, rather than mere soldiers. They looked alike only for the
second it took to categorize their eccentricities.
"Not much to tell, sir," he said, not knowing which of the four
officers to address.
"You can see if you're careful."
He gestured.
Leets took off his borrowed helmet, and eased a dangerous half a head
up over the wall. Germany, tidy and ripening in the spring, spilled
away.
"Just to the left of those trees, sir."
Leets saw a stand of poplars.
"We sent 'em out looking for iron," explained Ryan, not bothering to
explain that in the patois, iron meant armor. "
"Hitlerjugend' is technically a Panzer division,
though we're not sure if they've got any operational stuff. We didn't
run into it on our trips over there, but who had time to look? I just
didn't want any Bulge-type surprises coming into the middle of my
sector."
"Sir," the young sergeant continued.
"Lieutenant Uckley, new guy, he took 'em down that hill, then across
the field, long way to crawl. They were okay there, we found chewing
gum wrappers. When they got to those trees, they went up that little
draw."
Leets could see a fold in the earth, a kind of gully between two
vaguely rising land forms
"But you didn't hear anything? Or see anything?"
"No, sir. Nothing. They just didn't come back."
"Did you recover Third Squad's bodies?" asked Outhwaithe.
"Yes, sir," piped the lieutenant.
"Next day. We called in smoke and heavy Willie Peter. Went out myself
with another patrol. They'd been dropped in their tracks.
Right in the ticker, every last one. Even the last guy. He didn't
have time to run, that's how fast it was."
Leets turned to Ryan.
"The bodies. They'd be at Graves Registration?"
Ryan nodded.
"If they haven't been shipped out to cemeteries yet."
"I think we ought to check it out."
"Fine."
"Sir," asked the sergeant.
Leets turned.
"Yeah."
"What did he hit 'em with?"
"Some kind of night vision gear. It was broad daylight for him."
"You're looking for this guy, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well," said the sergeant, "I went looking for him too." A tough kid,
made his stripes at what, eighteen, nineteen? Good man in a fire
fight, natural talent for it.
"Had me a BAR and twenty clips."
"But no luck," said Leets.
"Nah, uh-uh."
You did have luck, kid: you didn't run into Repp;
you're still alive.
"I had friends in that squad, good people. When you catch this guy,
burn him. Huh? Burn him."
The Graves Registration section took the form of a forty-cot hospital
tent some miles behind the front lines, and into this tent sane men
seldom ventured. Leets, Outhwaithe, Major Ryan and an Army doctor
stood in the dank space with the dead, rank on rank of them, in proper
order, awaiting shipment, neatly pine-boxed. Everything possible had
been done to make the location pleasant, yet everything had failed and
the odor that had paused at Leets's nostrils on the line hung here
pungent and tangible, though one adjusted to it quickly.
"Thank God it's still coolish," said Outhwaithe.
The first boy was no good to them. Repp had hit him squarely in the
sternum, that cup of bone shielding, however ineffectively, the heart,
shattering it, heart behind and assorted other items, but also
shattering, most probably, the bullet.
"Nah," said the doc, "I'm not cracking this guy. You won't find a
thing in there except tiny flakes cutting every which way. Tell 'em to
look some more."
And so the Graves Registration clerks prowled again through the stacked
corridors of the dead, hunting, by name off the list 45th Division HQ
had provided, another candidate.
The second boy too disappointed. Repp was less precise in his
placement, but the physician, looking into the opened body bag in the
coffin, judged it no go.
"Nicked a rib; that'll skew the thing off. No telling where it'll end
up--foot or hip. We don't have time to play hide-and-seek."
A success was finally achieved on a third try. The doctor, a stocky,
blunt Dartmouth grad with thick clean hands and the mannerisms of an
irritated bear, announced, "Jackpot--between the third and fourth
ribs.
This guy's worth the effort."
The box was dollied into the mortuary tent.
The doctor said, "Okay, now. We're gonna take him out of the bag and
cut him open. I can get an orderly over here in an hour or so. Or I
can do it now, this minute. The catch is, if I do it now, somebody
here'll have to help. You've seen battle casualties before?
You've seen nothing. This kid's been in the bag a week.
You won't recognize him as human."
The doctor looked briefly at each of them. He had hard eyes. How old?
Leets's age, twenty-seven maybe, but with a flinty glare to his face,
pugnacious and challenging.
Guy must be good, Leets thought, realizing the doctor was daring one of
them to stay.
"I'll do it," he said.
"Fine. Rest of you guys, out." The others left. Leets and the doctor
were alone with the bagged form in the box.
"You'd best put something on," the doc said, "it's going to be
messy."
Leets took his coat off and threw on a surgical gown.
"The mask. The mask is most important," the doctor said.
He tied the green mask over his nose and mouth, thinking again of
Susan. She lives in one of these things, he thought.
"Okay," the doctor said, "let's get him onto the mortuary table."?
They reached in and lifted the bagged thing to the table.
"Hang on," the doctor said, "I'm opening it."
He threw the bag open.
"You'll note," he said, "the characteristics of the cadaver in the
advanced state of decomposition."
Leets, in the mask, made a small, weak sound. No words formed in his
brain. The cadaver lay in rotten splendor in its peeled-back body bag
on the table.
"There it is. The hole. Nice and neat, like a rivet, just left of
center chest."
Swiftly, with sure strokes, the doctor inscribed a Y across the chest,
from shoulder down to pit of stomach and then down to pubis. He cut
through the subcutaneous tissue and the cartilage holding skin and ribs
together.
Then he lifted the central piece of the chest away and reflected the
excess skin to reveal the contents.
"Clinically speaking," the doctor said, looking into the neat
arrangement, "the slug passed to the right of the sternum at a roughly
seventy-five-degree angle, through the anterior aspect of the right
lung"--he was sorting through the boy's inner chest with his gloved
fingers shiny--"through the pericardial sac, the heart, rupturing it,
the aorta, the right pulmonary artery-right main-stem bronchus, to be
exact--the esophagus, taking out the thoracic duct and finally--ah,
here we are," cheerful, reaching the end of his long shuffle, "reaching
the vertebral column, transecting the spinal cord."
"You got it?"
The doctor was deep inside the boy, going through the shattered organs.
Leets, next to him, thought he was going to be sick. The smell rose
through the mask to his nostrils, and pain bounded through his head. He
felt he was hallucinating this: a fever dream of elemental gore.
"Here, Captain. Your souvenir."
Leets's treasure was a wad of mashed lead, caked with brown gristle. It
looked like a fist.
"They usually open up like that?"
"Usually they break apart if they hit something, or they pass on
through. What you've got there is a hollow nose or soft point or
something like that. Something that inflates or expands inside, I
think they're illegal."
The doctor wrapped the slug in a gauze patch and handed it over to
Leets.
"There, Captain. I hope you can read the message in it."
Eager now with his treasure, Leets insisted on adding one last stop to
the tour of the combat zone. He'd learned from Ryan that the
divisional weapons maintenance section had set up shop in the town of
Alfeld proper, not far from Graves Registration, and they headed for
it.
Leets entered to find himself in a low dark room lined with
workbenches. Injured American weapons lay in parts around the place, a
brace of .30-caliber air-cooled perforated jacket sleeves, several BAR
receivers, Garand ejector rods, Thompson sling swivels, carbine bolts,
even a new grease gun or two. Two privates struggled to dismantle a
.50-caliber on a tripod, no easy task, and in the back another fellow,
a T-5, hunched over a small piece, grinding it with a file.
Leets, ignored, finally said, "Pardon," and eventually the tech looked
up.
"Sir?"
"The CO around?"
"Caught some junk last week. Back in the States by now. I'm pulling
the strings for now. Sir."
"I see," said Leets.
"You any good on the German stuff?"
"Meaning, Can I get you a Luger? The answer is, Can you get me
thirty-five bucks?"
"No, meaning. What's this?"
He held out the mashed slug.
"Outta you, sir?" asked the tech.
"No. Out of a kid up on the line."
"Okay. That's that new machine carbine they've got, the forty-four
model. You catch SS boys with 'em, right?"
"Right."
"Seven point nine-two millimeter kurz. Short. Like our carbine
round."
He took it from Leets and held it close.
"All right," he said.
"A hundred for the forty-four, five bucks apiece for any spare
magazines you can get me."
Oh, Christ, Leets thought.
"One fifty," the tech upped his bid, "provided it's in good condition,
operational, no bad dents or bends. You get me one with the
barrel-deflection device, the Krummiauf, and I'll jump to two bills.
That's top dollar."
"No, no," said Leets, patiently, "all I'm interested in is this
slug."
"That's not worth a goddamned penny, sir," said the sergeant,
offended.
"Information, not dollars, goddamn it!"
"Jesus, I'm only talking business," said the sergeant.
"I thought you was a client, is all, sir."
"Okay, okay. Just look at the fucking bullet and tell me about it."
"Frank, c'mere, willya? Frank's our expert."
Frank untangled himself from the struggle with the50 and loped over.
Leets saw that if the tech was the business brain, Frank was the
esthete. He had the intellectual's look of scorn; this was too low for
him, he was surrounded by fools, more worthy ways of spending one's
life could certainly be found.
He picked the piece up, looked at it quickly.
"Let's weigh it," he said. He took it over to the bench and balanced
it on the pan of a micro scale fussed with the balances and finally
announced, "My, my, ain't we got fun." He rummaged around on the bench
and produced a greasy pamphlet, pale green, that read
OR DANCE SPECIFICATIONS AXIS POWERS ETO 1944" and pawed through it.
"Yes, sir," he finally said, "usually goes one hundred and twenty
grains, gilding metal over a soft steel jacket.
Inside this jacket is a lead sleeve surrounding a steel core. A newer
type of powder is used. But this here mother weighs in at one
forty-three grains. And there ain't no steel in it at all. Too soft.
Just plain old lead.
Now that's no good against things. Won't penetrate, just splatter. But
into something soft, meaning people, you got maximum damage."
"Why would they build a bullet out of pure lead in wonderful modern
1945?" Leets asked.
"If you're putting this wad through a barrel with real deep grooves,
real biters, you can get a hell of a lot of revs, even on something
moving slow. Which means--" "Accuracy?"
"Yes, sir. The guy on the gun can put them on fucking dimes from way
out if he knows what he's doing. Even if the bullet's moving real
slow, no velocity at all. The revs hold her on, not the speed."
"So it's moving under seven hundred feet per second?
That's slow, slower than our forty-five."
"Right. And at seven hundred fps or less, you're under the sound
barrier."
"No pop. It's better than a silencer, isn't it?" Leets wanted to
know.
"Yes, sir. Because any baffle system cuts down on feet per second, so
you get a drop off in accuracy and range.
Someone real smart figured all this out. I've never seen anything like
it."
So that's how they did it, Leets thought.
"Hey, Captain, you get a line on this gun, you let me know," said the
tech.
"It sounds nice. I'd go a thousand for it."
When they got back to Ryan's shop to wait for the plane that would take
them back to London, the major asked an innocent question.
"Hey," he said, "by the way, what's Aniage Elf?"
That got Leets's attention. He yanked up, staring hard, feeling the
breath sucked from him.
"Your CO," said Ryan, baffled by the intense reaction, "he bumped a
high-priority telex through. It's just down from Division."
"CO?" said Leets.
"Colonel Evans."
That son of a-"He wants you back fastest. He says he found Aniage
Elf."
PART TWO
Gesamtlosimg (General Solution) April-May 1945 Repp had a special
request.
"Now, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor, if all goes well," he said one morning,
"all your inventions will work wonderfully.
It'll be like the tests, the targets out front, I'm shooting from a
clear lane, protected. Eh? But suppose things get a little mixed
up?"
"I'm not sure I--" "Well, old friend, it's possible"--Repp was
smiling-"there'll be some boys interested in stopping me. I might find
myself in a ruckus with them, a close-in thing.
Have you ever been in a fire fight?"
"No. Of course not," said Vollmerhausen.
Again Repp smiled.
"The weapon you've given me is superb for distance and dark. But fire
fights take place where you can see the other fellow's dental work,
tell if he's still got milk on his tongue from breakfast."
Vollmerhausen saw immediately what Repp was driving at. Repp, equipped
as no man ever had been for the special requirements of the mission,
was in a more conventional engagement as good as unarmed. The heavy
scope, with its cathode tube, energy converter and infrared light
blocked out his view of the standard iron battle-sights.
"I can hit a germ at four hundred meters," Repp said, "at midnight. Yet
a man with a fowling piece has the advantage at fifty meters. Can you
help me out? I'd hate to have all this end up in disappointment
because of some accident."
Vollmerhausen puzzled over the problem, and soon concluded that he
could spot-weld still another piece, a tube or something, under Vampir,
to serve crudely as a sight. It wouldn't be on the weapon's axis,
however, but rather parallel to it, and thus it would have to be
adjusted in its placement to account for this difference. He chose the
carrying case of a K-43 scope, a nicely milled bit of tubing of
acceptable weight and length; and he mounted at its rear rim a peephole
just a trifle right of center and at its front rim a blade just a
trifle left of center. Repp, his head a little out of position, would
line the blade in the center of the peephole, and find himself locked
into a target 100 meters out where the line of his vision intersected
the flight of the bullet. Nothing fancy;
crude in fact, and certainly ugly, grotesque.
The original outlines of the once sleek STG-44 were barely visible
under the many modifications, the cluster of tubes up top, a reshaped
pistol grip, the conical flash hider, and the bipod.
"It's truly an ugly thing," said Repp finally, shaking his head.
"Or truly beautiful. The modern architects--not thought highly of by
certain powerful people, I admit--" Vollmerhausen was taking a real
risk but he felt his new kinship with Repp would allow such a radical
statement--"say beauty is form following function. There's nothing
very pretty about Vampir, which makes it beautiful indeed. Not a
wasted line, not an artificial embellishment."
"Form follows function, you say. Tell me, a Jew said that, didn't he?"
He was fiddling again with that curious black thing, that little metal
cube.
Vollmerhausen wasn't really sure.
"Probably," he admitted.
"Yes, they are very clever. A clever race. That was their problem."
It was not long after this unsettling conversation that another curious
thing began to happen. Or rather: not to happen. Vollmerhausen began
to realize with a distinct sensation of reluctance that he was done.
Not merely done with this last modification, but done completely.
Done with Vampir.
There was simply nothing to do until the team came for the gun.
In this involuntary holiday, Vollmerhausen took to strolling the
compound or the nearby woods, while his staff fiddled away their time
improving their quarters-technical people love to tinker, and they'd
worked out a more efficient hot water system, bettered the ventilation
in the canteen, turned their barrack into a two-star facility (a joke
was making the rounds: after the war they'd open a spa here called Bad
Aniage). Now that the pressure was off, their morale rose remarkably;
the prospect of leaving filled them with joy, and Vollmerhausen himself
planned to check with Repp as soon as possible about the evacuation.
Once, in his strollings, he even passed his old antagonist Schaeffer,
resplendent in the new camouflage tunic all the soldiers had brought
back from a tank-warfare course they'd gone to for two days, but the SS
captain hardly noticed him.
Meanwhile, rumors fluttered nervously through the air, some clearly
ridiculous, some just logical enough to be true: the Fuhrer was dead,
Berlin Red except for three blocks in the city center; the Americans
and English would sign a separate peace with the Reich and together
they would fight the Russians; Vienna had fallen, Munich was about to;
fresh troops were collecting in the Alps for a final stand; the Reich
would invade Switzerland and make a last stand there; a vast
underground had been set up to wage war after surrender; all the Jews
had been freed from the KZ's, or all had been killed. Vollmerhausen
had heard them all before, but now new ones reached him: of Repp. Repp
would kill the Pope, for not granting the Fuhrer sanctuary in the
Vatican. Absurd! Repp was after a special group that Himmler had
singled out as having betrayed the SS.
Repp would kill the English king in special retribution;
or the Russian man of steel. Even more insane! Where could Repp get
from here? Nowhere, except south, to the border. No, Vollmerhausen
had no ideas. He'd given up wondering. He'd always known that
curiosity is dangerous around the SS, and doubly dangerous around Repp.
Repp was going to a mountain, that's all he knew.
It occurred then to Vollmerhausen, with a sudden jolt of discomfort:
Berchtesgaden was on a mountain. And not far. Yet the Fuhrer was
supposedly in Berlin. The reports all said he was in Berlin.
The engineer suddenly felt chilly. He vowed not to think on the topic
again.
Vollmerhausen was out of the compound--a beautiful spring day,
unseasonably warm, the forest swarming green, buzzing with life, the
sky clear as diamond and just as rare, spruce and linden in the
air--when the weapon team arrived. He did not see them, but upon his
return noticed immediately the battered civilian Opel, pre-war, parked
in front of Repp's. Later he saw the men himself, from far off,
civilians, but of a type: the overcoats, the frumpy hats, the calm,
unimpressed faces concealing, but just barely, the tendency toward
violence.
He'd seen Gestapo before, or perhaps they were Ausland SD or any of a
dozen other kinds of secret policemen; whatever, they had an ugly sort
of weariness that frightened him.
In the morning they were gone, and that meant the rifle too,
Vollmerhausen felt. Twice before breakfast staff members had
approached.
"Herr Ingenieur-Doktor? Does it mean we'll be able to go?"
"I don't know," he'd answered.
"I just don't know."
Not needing to add, Only Repp knows.
And shortly then, a man came for him, from Repp.
"Ah, Hans," said Repp warmly, when he arrived.
"Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer," Vollmerhausen replied.
"You saw of course our visitors last night?"
"I caught a glimpse across the yard at them."
"Toughies, no? But sound men, just right for the job."
"They've taken Vampir?"
"Yes. No reason not to tell you. It's gone. All packed up. Carted
away."
"I see," said Vollmerhausen.
"And they brought information, some last-second target confirmations,
some technical data. And news."
Vollmerhausen brightened.
"News?"
"Yes. The war is nearly finished. But you knew that."
"Yes."
"Yes. And my part of the journey begins tonight."
"So soon. A long journey?"
"Not far, but complicated. On foot, most of it. Rather drab actually.
I won't bore you with details. Not like climbing aboard a Hamburg
tram."
"No, of course not."
"But I wanted to talk to you about your evacuation."
"Evac--" "Yes, yes. Here's the good news." He smiled.
"I know how eager your people are to get back to the human race. This
can't have been pleasant for them."
"It was their duty," said Vollmerhausen.
"Perhaps. Anyway, you'll be moving out tomorrow.
After I've gone. Sorry it's so rushed. But now it's felt the longer
this place stays, the bigger the chance of discovery.
You may have seen my men planting charges."
"Yes."
"There'll be nothing left of this place. Nothing for our friends. No
clues, no traces. Your people will return as if from holiday. Captain
Schaeffer's men will return to the Hungarian front. And I will cease
to exist: officially, at any rate. Repp is dead. I'll be a new man.
An old mission but a new man."
"Sounds very romantic."
"Silly business, changing identities, pretending to be what one's not.
But still necessary."
"My people will be very excited!"
"Of course. One more night, and it's all over. Your part, Totenkopf
division's part. Only my part remains.
One last campaign."
"Yes, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer."
"The details: have them packed up tonight. Tomorrow at ten hundred
hours a bus will arrive. It's several hours to Dachau. From there
your people will be given travel permits, and back pay, and be
permitted to make their way to destinations of choice. Though I can't
imagine many of them will head east. By the way, the Allies aren't
reported within a hundred kilometers of this place. So the travel
should be easy."
"Good. Ah, thanks. My thanks, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer."
He reached over and on impulse seized Repp's hand.
"Go on. Tell them," Repp commanded.
"Yes, sir, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer," Hans shouted, and lurched out.
Tomorrow! So soon. Back into the world, the real world. Vollmerhausen
felt a surge of joy as if he'd just glimpsed the sea after a trek
across the Sahara.
It was in the general confusion of preparing for the evacuation that
night that a thought came to him. He tried to quell it, found this not
difficult at first, with the technicians rushing merrily about him,
dismantling their elaborate comfort systems in the barrack, storing
personal belongings in trunks, even singing--a bottle, no, several
bottles appeared and while Vollmerhausen, teetotaler, couldn't approve,
neither could he prevent them--as if the war were officially and
finally over and
Germany had somehow won. But later, in the night, in the dark, it
returned to him. He tried to flatten it, drive it out, found a hundred
ways to dispel it. But he could not. Vollmerhausen had thought of a
last detail.
He pulled himself out of bed and heard his people breathing
heavily--drunkenly?--around him. He checked his watch. After four,
damn! Had Repp left already? Perhaps. But perhaps there was still
time.
It had occurred to Vollmerhausen that he might not have warned Repp
about the barrel residue problem. So many details, he'd forgotten just
this one! Or had he?
But he could not picture a conversation in which he properly explained
this eccentricity of the weapon: that after firing fifty or so of the
specially built rounds, the residue in the barrel accumulated to such
an extent that it greatly affected accuracy. Though Repp would know,
probably: he made it his business to know such things.
Still .. .
Vollmerhausen drew a bathrobe around himself and hurried out. It was a
warm night, he noticed, as he hurried across the compound to the SS
barrack and Repp's quarters. But what's this? Stirrings filled the
dark--a squad of SS troopers moving about, night maneuvers, a drill or
something.
"Sergeant?"
The man's pipe flared briefly in the dark.
"Yes, sir," he responded.
"Is Obersturmbannfuhrer around? Has he left yet?"
"Ah--no, sir. I believe he's still in his quarters."
"Excellent. Thank you." Ebullient, Vollmerhausen rushed on to the
barrack. It was empty, though a light burned behind the door of Repp's
room. He walked among the dark, neat bunks and rapped at the wood.
No answer.
Was Repp off after all?
"Herr Oberstunnbannfuhrer?"
Vollmerhausen felt edgy, restless with indecision. Forget the whole
silly thing? Go on in, be a bulldog, wait, make sure? Ach!
Hans the Kike pushed through the door. Room was empty. But then he
noticed an old greatcoat with private's chevron across a chair. Part
of Repp's "new identity"?
He entered. On the desk lay a heap of field gear:
the rumpled blanket, the six Kar '98 packs on the harness, the fluted
gas-mask cylinder, a helmet, in the corner a rifle. Repp clearly
hadn't left yet. Vollmerhausen began to wait.
But he again began to feel restless and uncomfortable.
You didn't want to stand in a man's room uninvited.
Perhaps he should slip out, wait by the door. Ah, what a dilemma. He
did not want to do the wrong thing.
He turned to stride out, but his sudden spin sent a spurt of commotion
into the still air, and a single paper, as though magically, peeled
itself off the desk and zigzagged dramatically to the floor.
Vollmerhausen hurried over and picked it up to replace it.
It was hotly uncomfortable in the room. A fire blazed in Repp's stove
and the smell of his Russian cigarettes filled the air. Vollmerhausen's
eyes hooked on the GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE stamped haphazardly across the
page top. The title read "N I B E L U N G E N," the exotic spacing
for emphasis, and R
beneath the subtitle "LATEST INTELLIGENCE SITUATION 27
APR 45."
He read the first line. The language of the report was military, dry,
rather abstract, ostentatiously formal. He had trouble understanding
exactly what they were saying.
Vollmerhausen was completely lost. Nuns? A convent?
He couldn't make it out. His heart was pounding so hard he was having
trouble focusing. So damned hot in here. Sweat oozed from his
hairline. He knew he must put the report down instantly, but he could
not.
He read on, the last paragraph.
He felt a growth of pain in his stomach. I am part of this? How?
Why?
Repp asked, "Find it interesting?"
Vollmerhausen turned. He was not even surprised.
"You simply can't. We don't make war on--" "We make war on our
enemies," said Repp, "wherever we find them. In whatever form. The
East would make you strong for such a thing."
"You could bring yourself to do this?" Vollmerhausen wanted to cry. He
was afraid he was going to be sick.
"With honor," Repp said. He stood there in the dirty tunic of a
private soldier, hatless.
"You can't," Vollmerhausen said. It seemed to him a most cogent
argument.
Repp brought up the Walther P-38 and shot him beneath the left eye. The
bullet kicked the engineer's head back violently. Most of the face was
knocked in. He fell onto Repp's desk, crashing with it to the floor.
Repp put the automatic back into the shoulder holster under the tunic.
He didn't look at the body. He picked the report up from the floor--it
had fluttered free from Vollmerhausen's fingers at the moment of
death--and walked to the small stove. He opened the door, inserted it
and watched the flames consume it.
He heard a machine pistol. Schaeffer and his people were bumping off
Vollmerhausen's staff.
It occurred to Repp after several seconds that Schaeffer was doing the
job quite poorly. He would have to speak to the man. The firing had
not let up.
A bullet fractured one of Repp's windows. Firing leapt up from a dozen
points on the perimeter. Repp had an impression of tracers floating
in.
Repp hit the floor, for he knew in that second that the Americans had
come.
 Roger played hard to get at first, demanding wooing, but after five
minutes Leets was ready to woo him with a fist, and Roger shifted gears
fast. Now it was a production, starring himself, directed by himself,
produced by himself, the Orson Welles, tyro genius, of American
Intelligence.
"Get on with it, man," said Outhwaithe.
"Okay, okay." He smiled smugly, and then wiped it off, leaving a
smirk, like a child's moustache of milk.
"Simple. In two words. You'll kick yourself." A grin split his
pleasant young face.
"The planes."
"Uh--" "Yeah," he amplified.
"So much on the route he took, so much on tracing it back, following it
back to its source--all wrong. He said he thought he heard planes.
Or maybe trucks or motorcycles. But maybe planes.
Now--" he paused dramatically, letting an imitation of wisdom, solemn,
furrow-browed, surface on his face, "I give this Air Corps guy lessons,
colonel in Fighter Ops, once a week, little walking-around money.
Anyway, I asked him if some guys bounced some weird kind of night
action--under lights, middle of wilderness--say in
March sometime, maybe late February, any chance you'd have it on
paper?"
Leets was struck by the simple brilliance of it.
"That's really good, Roger," he said, at the same time thinking that he
himself ought to be shot for not coming up with it.
Roger smiled at the compliment.
"Anyway," he said, handing over a photostatic copy of a document
entitled "after action report, Fighter Operations, 1033d Tactical
Fighter Group, 8th Air Force, ChaloissurMarne."
Leets tore into the pilot's prosaic account of his adventures:
two fighter-bombers, angling toward the marshaling yards at Munich for
a dawn strike, find themselves above a lit field in the middle of what
is on the maps pure wilderness. In it German soldiers scurry about.
They peel off for one run, after which the lights go away.
"Can we track this?"
"Those numbers--that's the pilot's estimated position," Roger said.
"Thirty-two min southeast Saar, one eighty-six?"
"Thirty-two minutes southeast of the Saarbriicken Initial Point, on a
compass heading of one eighty-six degrees."
"Can we get pictures?"
"Well, sir, I'm no expert but--" "I can have an R.A.F photo Spitfire in
an hour," said Tony.
"Roger, get over to R and D and pick up those mockups of Aniage Elf
they were building, okay?"
"Check," said Roger.
"Jesus," said Leets.
"If this is--"
"Big if, chum."
"Yeah, but if, if we can get a positive ID, we can .. ." He let the
sentence trail off.
"Yes, of course," said Tony.
"But first, the Spit. You'll see the Jew. He'll be important in this
too, of course.
He'll have to come in at some point. He's necessary."
"Yes, I'll see him."
"Then I'm off," Tony said.
"Hey," wondered Roger, disappointed that his brief instant in the
spotlight had so soon vanished, "what are you guys talking about?"
Leets didn't seem to hear him. He looked strangely excited, and he was
muttering distractedly to himself.
He rubbed his lips, which had dried in the excitement, and for just one
second Roger had the impression the captain was near breakdown, madly
muttering to himself, full of private visions and prophecies.
"Sir," Roger repeated, louder, "what's going to happen now?"
"Well," said Leets, "I guess we have to close them down. Put some
people in there."
People, thought Roger, swallowing dryly. He had to stop himself from
asking, Me too?
The Gentile women treated him like some dreadful little wog, foreign
and stinky, that they were helping out of great pity. In return they
expected his love and when he would not give it they were enraged. They
resented the private room when down the hall their own boys, wounded
gallantly in battle, lay festering in huge public bays. He was not
truly hurt either; he insisted on heathen protocols, the removal of the
crucifix, for example;
but most contemptibly of all, Somebody Important had an interest in
him.
Shmuel lay back, alone. His head buzzed with pain.
Luminous shapes entwined on the ceiling. A film of sweat covered him.
He closed his eyes and saw smokestacks belching flame and human ash on
the horizon, the glow orange and lurid. He opened them to an equally
unsatisfactory reality: the English hospital room to which he'd been
removed, a blank green chamber, pitiless, the odors of disinfectants
rising. There were screams in the night. He knew people looked in on
him at all hours. And the hospital merely symbolized a whole Western
world he'd fled into--where else had there been to go, what other
direction for a poor Jew?
But in many ways it was as dreadful a place as the one from which he'd
just escaped. There, at least, there were other Jews, a sense of
community. Here, nobody cared, or would even listen. The Gentiles
wanted him for something strange; he was not sure he trusted them.
It didn't matter. He knew he was nearing the end of the journey and he
didn't mean the geographic journey from Warsaw to the death camp to
Aniage Elf to the forest to London, but rather its inner
representation-as though each step was a philosophical position that
must be mastered, its truth grasped, before moving on.
At last he was turning into one of the Mussulmen, the living dead who
roamed the camps as pariahs, having accepted doom and therefore no
longer suited for human contact. Death was no longer meaningful; it
was mere biology, a final technical detail to be adjusted.
He accepted death; therefore he accepted the dead;
therefore he preferred the dead.
"Big if, chum."
"Yeah, but if, if we can get a positive ID, we can .. ." He let the
sentence trail off.
"Yes, of course," said Tony.
"But first, the Spit. You'll see the Jew. He'll be important in this
too, of course.
He'll have to come in at some point. He's necessary."
"Yes, I'll see him."
"Then I'm off," Tony said.
"Hey," wondered Roger, disappointed that his brief instant in the
spotlight had so soon vanished, "what are you guys talking about?"
Leets didn't seem to hear him. He looked strangely excited, and he was
muttering distractedly to himself.
He rubbed his lips, which had dried in the excitement, and for just one
second Roger had the impression the captain was near breakdown, madly
muttering to himself, full of private visions and prophecies.
"Sir," Roger repeated, louder, "what's going to happen now?"
"Well," said Leets, "I guess we have to close them down. Put some
people in there."
People, thought Roger, swallowing dryly. He had to stop himself from
asking, Me too?
The Gentile women treated him like some dreadful little wog, foreign
and stinky, that they were helping out of great pity. In return they
expected his love and when he would not give it they were enraged. They
resented the private room when down the hall their own boys, wounded
gallantly in battle, lay festering in huge public bays. He was not
truly hurt either; he insisted on heathen protocols, the removal of the
crucifix, for example;
but most contemptibly of all, Somebody Important had an interest in
him.
Shmuel lay back, alone. His head buzzed with pain.
Luminous shapes entwined on the ceiling. A film of sweat covered him.
He closed his eyes and saw smokestacks belching flame and human ash on
the horizon, the glow orange and lurid. He opened them to an equally
unsatisfactory reality: the English hospital room to which he'd been
removed, a blank green chamber, pitiless, the odors of disinfectants
rising. There were screams in the night. He knew people looked in on
him at all hours. And the hospital merely symbolized a whole Western
world he'd fled into--where else had there been to go, what other
direction for a poor Jew?
But in many ways it was as dreadful a place as the one from which he'd
just escaped. There, at least, there were other Jews, a sense of
community. Here, nobody cared, or would even listen. The Gentiles
wanted him for something strange; he was not sure he trusted them.
It didn't matter. He knew he was nearing the end of the journey and he
didn't mean the geographic journey from Warsaw to the death camp to
Aniage Elf to the forest to London, but rather its inner
representation-as though each step was a philosophical position that
must be mastered, its truth grasped, before moving on.
At last he was turning into one of the Mussulmen, the living dead who
roamed the camps as pariahs, having accepted doom and therefore no
longer suited for human contact. Death was no longer meaningful; it
was mere biology, a final technical detail to be adjusted.
He accepted death; therefore he accepted the dead;
therefore he preferred the dead.
For everyone was dead. Bruno Schuiz was dead, killed in '42, in
Drohobicz. Janucz Korczak was dead;
Auschwitz. Perie, Warsaw. Gebirtig, Cracow. Katzenelson, the Vittel
camp. Glick, Vilna. Shaievitz, Lodz. Ulianover, also Lodz.
The list was longer of course, longer a million times.
The last Jew longed for a ghetto, kerosene lamps, crooked streets,
difficult lessons.
Good night, electrified, arrogant world.
He walked gladly to the window.
He was four stories up.
Shmuel stood at the window in bedclothes, looking out. His features,
even in the dim light, seemed remote.
"Nothing much to see, huh?" called Leets as he swept in.
The man turned quickly, fixing a stare on Leets. He looked badly
spooked.
"You okay?" Leets wanted to know.
He seemed to grab hold. He nodded.
Leets was running late. He knew he was coming on all wrong but he was
nervous and he could never control how he acted when he was nervous.
Also, he hated hospitals, even more now because they reminded him so of
Susan.
"Well, good, it's good you're okay."
He paused, stalling. Only one way to do this. Only one way to do
anything. He kept having to remind himself:
full out.
"Look, we need more help. Big help."
He waited for the Jew to respond. The man just sat on his bed and
looked back. He seemed quite calm and disinterested. He looked tired
also.
"Two days from now--it would be sooner, but the logistics are complex,
forty-eight hours is the dead minimum--a battalion of American airborne
troops is going into the Black Forest. We found it--Aniage Elf, Repp,
the whole shooting gallery. We'll go in a little after midnight.
I'll tag along with the airborne people; meanwhile Major Outhwaithe
will come up on the ground in a column of tanks from a French armored
division operating in the area."
Leets paused.
"We're going to try and kill Repp. That's what it gets down to. But
only one man has seen him. Sure, we've got that old picture. But
we've got to be sure. So it would help if--if you came along." He was
troubled over all this.
"This is how I figure it. Nobody's asking you to go into battle;
you're not a soldier, it's what we get paid for. No, after we take the
place, we'll get a message out fast. You'll be in a forward area with
Roger, I suppose.
We can get you in fast in a light plane, have you there in an hour or
two. It's our best shot at him, only way to be sure." He paused
again.
"Well, that's it. Your part will be risky, but a good, safe calculated
risk. What do you think?" He looked up at Shmuel and had the
discomfiting sensation the man hadn't understood a word he'd said.
"Are you all right? Do you have a fever or something?"
"You'll jump out of an airplane? In a parachute, in the night? And
attack the camp?" Shmuel asked.
"Yeah," said Leets.
"It's not so hard as it sounds.
We've got some good pictures. We plan to go down on the target range,
where you escaped. We make it three miles back to--" But again he saw
Shmuel's eyes glaze over, disinterested.
"Hey, you okay?" he said, and almost snapped his fingers.
"Take me," Shmuel said suddenly.
"What? Take you? In the air--" "You said you needed me there. Fine,
I'll go. With you. From the plane in the parachute. Yes, I'll do
it."
"You got any idea what you're letting yourself in for?
I mean, there'll be a battle, people getting blown up."
"I don't care. That's not the point."
"What is the point?"
"The point is--you'd never understand. But I must go. It's either
that or nothing. You've never understood.
But I must go. It's either that or nothing. You've got to do this for
me. I'm clever, I can learn the techniques.
Two days, you say? Plenty of time."
Leets was all mixed up, tried to run through a dozen motives. Finally
he just asked, "Why?"
"Old friends then. I'll have the best chance to meet old friends."
A screwy answer, Leets thought. But he said, not quite knowing why,
"All right."
The paratroopers all seemed husky boys in their teens, dumbly, crazily
eager, full of bravado and violence.
They worked hard at glamour and costumed themselves after lessons
they'd learned in movie theaters.
They blackened their faces with burnt cork until they gleamed like
minstrels with mad white eyes and pink tongues; they dangled junk from
themselves until they clanked like men in armor, but not just any
junk:
pistols in shoulder holsters were first-prize items, symbols of special
pizazz; another melodramatic improvisation was the knife and sheath
taped upside down along the boot; then too pouches, grenades, tightly
wound ropes, ammo packs, canteens beside the two lumpy chutes; and on
their helmets most taped first-aid kits and many of them still wore,
though nonregulation now, the D-Day American flag patch on their
shoulders.
A few of the really demented boasted Mohawk haircuts.
Leets, sitting mildly among them, felt he'd wandered into someone's
high school pep rally. The varsity was revving itself up before the
game. As an ex-football player himself, ex-Wildcat, he could
appreciate and almost savor that feeling of hate and fear and sheer
shit-thinning excitement that coursed savagely through these nervous
boys. The paratroopers shoved and joshed, even sang now as they
relaxed in the airfield staging area in these last minutes before
embarkation. Earlier someone had even produced a football, and Leets
had watched an exuberant game of touch unfold before his eyes. The
officers had seemed not to mind this extravaganza of energy: they were
slightly older men, but all had that same thick-wristed blunt
athleticism that Leets recognized immediately, heavy bones and
close-cropped hair and flat faces. And while all this was familiar to
him, it was at the same time strange; for Leets associated war with
lonely men climbing into Lysanders or huddling in empty bays of big
British bombers, drinking coffee. That had been his war anyway, not
this festival of the locker room.
He turned his wrist over. Twenty-two hundred hours, his Bulova
announced in iridescent hands. Another fifteen, twenty minutes to go.
He snapped out and lit a Lucky, and did another--about the
fiftieth--rundown on his own collection of junk. Canteen for thirst,
compass for direction, shovel for digging, chute for jumping and the
rest for killing: three fragmentation grenades, a bayonet, ten 30-round
magazines in pouches on a belt stiffly around his middle and, thrust at
an awkward diagonal down across his belly under the reserve chute, a
Thompson submachine gun, the Army model designated M-1, standard issue
for a paratroop officer. He must have weighed five hundred pounds;
perhaps like a medieval knight he'd need a crane to get him off his ass
when, so shortly now, the jousting hour arrived.
Leets ran his tongue over dry lips. If I'm scared, he wondered, what
about him!
Shmuel lounged on the grass next to him, similarly encumbered, yet
lacking weapons, which he did not know how to operate anyway and which
by principle he would not have, though Leets had tried to argue him
into carrying at least a pistol.
Yet Shmuel seemed strangely composed.
"How are you doing?" Leets inquired, with effort, for all the stuff
pressing into his gut.
No expression showed beneath the blackface; he could have been any
other paratrooper, counting out the final quiet minutes of the night,
eyes showing white against the darkness of face, mouth grim, nostrils
flaring slightly in the effort of breathing.
He nodded briskly in reply to the question.
"I'm fine," he said.
"Good, good," Leets said, wishing he could make the same claim. He
himself was exhausted, while at the same confusing time churning with
energy and dread. A most curious state; it had the one benefit of
quieting his leg, which with fatigue tended to throb and leak. A man
leaned over, too dark to recognize, and said, "Sir, Colonel says
planes'll be cranking up in five, we'll be loading in ten."
"Gotcha, thanks," said Leets, and the trooper was gone.
Leets looked nervously around him. It was warm and dark and the men
were lying about on the grass of the airfield, though they'd been
organized into their Dakota groups three hours ago. Those three hours
had dragged by, as the light faded to twilight and then darkness, the
soft English fields beyond the air base perimeter growing hazier. The
men were Second Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, a part of
the more widely known 82d Airborne Division. Tough boys with drops in
Italy and Normandy, a long bad spell in the Bulge and most
recently--March--an op named Varsity in which they'd jumped beyond the
Rhine behind them. They'd been off the line a month, growing fat and
sluggish here at the rest camp in southern England, and when Tony
Outhwaithe had convinced the right parties that a batch of hell raisers
was needed for a night of close-in dirty work in south Twelveland,
Second of the 501st got the word.
It was cold in the airplane. Shmuel sat in the chill, his back against
the slope of the fuselage, shivering. Yet he felt quite wonderful. His
journey was finally nearing its completion. A matter of hours now. He
was one of two dozen men in the under lit darkness of the airplane, and
he was as isolated from any of them as they were from each other, cut
off by the noise from the engines that made human contact, now that
they needed it most, impossible. Shmuel could sense the tension,
especially in Captain Leets, and he pitied him for it. A Mussulman
need feel nothing. A Mussulman was cut off from human sensation,
complete within himself. Yet he looked over at Leets and saw him
hunched and absorbed, filthy face glowing orangely over the tip of a
cigarette. The layer of cork had dried crustily on his skin, making
the features abstract, unreadable. But the eyes, staring blankly at
nothing, had a message: fear.
Yet it was a fear Shmuel refused to accept. He was all through with
fear, he had discovered a new territory.
Having accepted and even welcomed his death, nothing mattered, not even
preposterous things like the half-a-day session at the American
parachute school with the boy Evans, performing feats of athleticism,
jumping off of ten-foot platforms into sawdust pits, rolling when he
hit; or hanging fifty feet up from risers, the straps nipping into his
limbs while someone yelled at him about adjustments he didn't
understand and the ground rushed up to hit him.
"You'll be all right," Evans had said.
"The static line'll pull the chute open for you. Really, it's easy.
When you hit the ground, the captain'll come by for you. He'll take
good care of you." The boy had grinned optimistically. He could
afford optimism because he wasn't going.
Then they took him to a supply depot and issued him equipment. It
occurred to him that he'd never been so well dressed though he felt
like an impostor. The clothes were all big, but looking around he saw
that bagginess was the American style. It seemed to symbolize their
wealth, huge napping garments made from endless bolts of material. In
the warehouse they peeled these items off from huge piles, piles of
pants that reached the sky! The crowning monstrosity was the helmet,
shaped like a Moscow dome, weighing six tons, pulling him, left or
right unless he fought against it.
He examined himself. Third uniform of the war and what a peculiar
journey they charted: inmate's ticking to Wehrmacht flannels to thick
crinkly American cotton, crowned in steel like a bell.
Now, sitting in the airplane that drew ever closer to Germany, Shmuel
had to wonder at the jokes of fate.
I had to find a special way to die, the ovens weren't good enough for
me, no, I had to jump out of an airplane with teen-age cowboys and
Indians and gangsters from America.
He glanced over at Leets, and noticed the way he was sitting, one leg
pushed out straight, his face tight, eyes still distant, whole being
focused on deriving maximum pleasure from the cigarette.
Leets saw the ready light come on. He smashed out his cigarette with
the foot of his good leg. The bad one ached dully. Motionless,
stretched, stiff in the cold plane, it had cramped on him. He massaged
it, kneading it nervously with his fingers, working some life back into
it. A touch to the knee came back wet. Leakage.
You fucker, he thought.
Just when I need you.
He thought of his first jump, first real jump, that is, with live
Germans and guns and real bullets down below:
completely different. A Lancaster, though bigger, felt less solid than
a C-47, and there was a sense of actual loneliness in the big bomber's
bay, with just the three of them besides the sullen jumpmaster. Here,
a crowd, two whole football teams and change. And a door, a wonderful
American door, triumph of Yank ingenuity.
The Brits leaped out of a hatch in the bomber floor for some absurd
reason, a public school sort of ordeal that had to be got through like
a cold bath or fagging for the older boys. Leets focused all his
terrors on getting through without breaking his head. For some
baffling reason. Yanks had a peculiar tendency to look down as they
stepped out, see where they were headed, and catch a faceful of hatch.
Leets had seen it happen at one of the British secret training schools
where he'd learned to jump Brit-style preparatory for going to war for
the OSS. There was a saying at the place: you could always tell a Yank
by the broken jaw.
Another light flicked on, red. Three minutes. Time to hook up.
Shmuel was standing now in the aisle. It reminded him of a crowded
Warsaw trolley, the one that traveled Glinka Street, near the jewelry
shops. He even had a strap to hang onto in the closeness and he could
feel other men's breath washing over him. A moment of unexpected
terror had just passed: the plane had yawed to the left; Shmuel,
awkward in all the new gear, almost fell. He felt his balance and,
with it, his control draining away. Nothing to grab for; he
surrendered to the fall;
then Leets had him.
"Easy," he muttered. A breeze pummeled through the corridor of the
airplane, fresh and savage. A glint of natural light, not much,
illuminated the end of the darkness.
Door opened.
Then, like a theater queue at last admitted to the big show, the line
began to move. It moved with great swiftness, almost as if some
reasonable destination lay ahead. < Shmuel faced sky. An American
strapped by the doorway hit him in the shoulder without warning and,
surprised at his own lack of respect, he snarled at the man, a
stranger, and as if to insult him, stepped out.
Gravity sucked the dignity from his limbs and he napped like a scrawny
shtetl chicken. The face of the tailplane, rivets and all, sailed by a
few inches beyond him. He fell, screaming, in the great cold dark
silence, the engines now mercifully gone, the noise too, only himself,
beginning to tumble until--Ah! Oh! something snapped him hard and he
found himself floating under a great white parasol. He looked about
and noticed first that the sky was full of apparitions--jellyfish,
moving with underwater slowness, silky petticoats under a young girl's
skirts, pillowcases and sheets billowing on a wash line--and secondly
that for all the majesty of the spectacle the ground was coming up
fast. He'd expected a serene descent, thinking himself thousands of
feet up.
Of course they'd jump at minimum height, less time in the air, less
time to scatter, and already Shmuel felt below the horizon. The
ground, huge and black, smashed up at him. Wasn't he supposed to be
doing something? He didn't care. He saw in the rushing wall of
darkness, coming now like an express train, his fate.
He reached to embrace it, expecting no pain, only release, and he hit
with stunning impact, knocking a bolt of light through his head and all
his sense out of him.
I'm dead, he thought with relief.
But then a sergeant stood over him, cursing hotly in English.
"C'mon, Jack, off yer butt, move it," and sprinted on.
Shmuel got up, feeling sore in a dozen places but broken in none. His
legs wobbled under his weight, his brain still resonated with echoes of
the landing. Gradually he realized the field was very busy. Men
rushed about, seemingly without order. Shmuel tried to figure out what
to do and it occurred to him that he was supposed to free himself from
the chute harness. Suddenly a man materialized next to him.
"You okay? Nothing busted?"
"What? Ah. No. No. What a sensation."
"Great."
Shmuel tugged feebly with the harness, couldn't get his fingers to work
and wasn't exactly sure what it was he was supposed to do, and then
felt Leets grab the heavy clip that seemed to be the nexus of the
network of straps that held him, and in the next second the straps
unleashed him.
Shmuel took a quick look around. He made out men scattered across the
dark field, and, beyond, a looming bank of pines. All was silence
under the towers of stars.
It was so different now. He looked for landmarks, for clues, for help.
He felt suddenly useless.
"This way, c'mon," hissed Leets, unlimbering his automatic gun,
trotting off. Shmuel ran after.
Yes, yes, it really was the firing range. The shed bobbed up ahead,
and he reached the concrete walkway.
Then he saw the lamps in the trees; he remembered:
they'd almost killed him.
Leets joined a crowd of whispering men, while Shmuel stood off to one
side. Other shapes rushed by.
Groups were forming up, leaders gesturing to unattached people. Shmuel
could hear guns being checked and cocked, equipment adjusted.
Then Leets returned.
"You feel okay?"
"It's so strange," Shmuel said. A half-smile creased his face.
"You stick with me. Don't get separated. Don't wander off or
anything."
"Of Course not."
"Any shooting, down you go, flat. Got it?"
"Yes, Mr. Leets."
"Okay, we're moving out."
The soldiers began to move down the road.
It looked familiar, like something luminous from childhood that, seen
finally through an adult's eyes, revealed itself tawdry, fraudulent. A
spring camouflage pattern had been added to the buildings so that now
they showed the shadowy patterns of the forest, but otherwise Aniage
Elf looked unchanged.
He was amazed more at the stillness of the composition than the
composition itself: hard to believe those dark trees that circled the
place concealed hundreds of squirming men.
Leets, beside him, whispered, "Research? The big one in the middle?"
"Yes."
"And SS to the left?"
"Yes." Shmuel realized Leets knew all this, they'd gone over it a
hundred times; Leets was talking out of his own nervous energy or
excitement.
"Any second now," Leets said, looking at his watch.
Shmuel guessed that meant any second till a circle was closed around
the place, like a noose. All exits cut off, all guns in place.
Leets was rubbing his hands in excitement, peering into the dark.
Shmuel could see the fellow fight hard to restrain himself.
The report of the first shot was so abrupt that it shocked Shmuel. He
flinched at it. Or was it a shot? It sounded muffled and indistinct.
Yes, shot, for Leets's intake of breath was sudden and almost painful,
pulled in, the air held. Then came a clatter of reports, more shots.
They all seemed to come from inside Aniage and Shmuel did not see why.
Glancing around at the others in the trees, he made out baffled faces,
men searching each other's eyes for answers. Curses rose, and someone
whispered hoarsely, "Hold it, hold--!" cut by a loud krak} from
nearby.
"Goddamn it, hold your--" someone shouted, but the voice was lost in
the tide of fire that rose.
All wrong. Even Shmuel, not by furthest reach of imagination a
military man, could tell: volley all ragged and patchy, tentative.
Bullets just streaking out into the dark, unaimed.
Yet it was beautiful. He was dazzled by the beauty in it. In the
dark, the gun flashes unfolded like exotic orchids, more precious for
their briefness at the moment of blossom. They danced and flickered in
the trees and as they rose in intensity, pulling a roar from the ground
itself, the air seemed to fill with a sleet of light, free-floating
streaks of sheer color that wobbled and splashed through the night. He
felt his mouth hang dumbly open in wonder.
Leets turned to him.
"All fucked up," he said darkly.
"Some bastard let go too early."
Nearby, an older man shouted into a telephone, "Crank 'em up, all
sections, get those people in the assault teams in there!"
Shmuel understood that the battle had prematurely begun, and reached
its moment of equipoise in the very first seconds.
Leets turned to him again.
"I'm going in there. Stay here. Wait for Tony."
The American raced off, into the blizzard.
Leets rushed in, not out of courage so much as to escape the rage and
frustration. He ran out of sheer physical need because in not running
there was more pain, because the neat surgical operation that he had
envisioned as the fitting end to this drama, to Aniage Elf, to Repp, to
the Man of Oak, was now lost forever, dissolving into a pell-mell of
indiscriminate fire. Susan had wished him dead; he'd risk it then, her
curse echoing in his mind.
He entered a terrible world, its imagery made even keener by the gush
of his own adrenaline. He ran into a riot of angry pulsing light and
cruel sounds and hot gusts of air and needles of stirred dust. His
lungs soon ached from the effort of breathing, he began to lose control
of the visions that came his way: it was all pure sensation,
overwhelming. It made no sense at all. Smoke billowed, tracers hopped
insolently around, screams and thumps filled the air without revealing
their sources. He felt as if he were in the middle of a panoramic
vista of despair, a huge painting comprised of individual scenes each
quite exact, yet overall meaningless in their pattern.
He found himself hunching behind a coil of barbed wire, watching a
German MG-42--that high, ripping sound as the double-feed pawls and
rollers in the breech-lock mechanism really chewed through the
belt--knock down Americans. They just fell, lazily, slumping sleepily
to the ground; you had to concentrate to remember that death was at the
end of the tumble.
He became aware of the taste and texture of the dirt on his tongue and
lips as he tried to press even closer into the loam, tracers pumping
overhead. He saw running Germans flattened one-two-three by teenagers
with wild haircuts and tommy guns. Men in flames rigged in their own
terrible light, frenzied, from a burning building.
He crawled frantically over cratered terrain, sprawling comically in a
pit for safety and there found another sanctum-seeker, half a grin
spilling ludicrously across half a face. If this battle had a
narrative, or a point of view, he was not a reader of it. In fact, he
really didn't take part in it. He hadn't fired his weapon, the only
Germans he saw close up were dead ones and nobody paid him any
attention. Again, he was a visitor. For him it was mostly rolling
around in the dirt, hoping he didn't get killed. He did nothing
especially brave, except not run.
At one point, after what seemed hours of aimless crawling, he found
himself crouching with a group of shivering paratroopers in the shelter
of a shot-out blockhouse. Fire clattered and jounced hotly off the
wall, and from somewhere up ahead, an insane sergeant howled at them to
come on up and do some shooting.
"You go," a boy near him said.
"No, you go," said his friend.
"Hey, loo kit this neat German gun," someone said.
"Hey, that's worth some money."
"Fuck, yes."
Leets saw the man had an MG-42; he was crawling out of the
blockhouse.
"Hey, it's broke," someone said.
"No," Leets said.
"That gun fires so fast they change barrels on it. They were in the
middle of a change.
That's why it looks all fucked up."
The barrel seemed to be hanging out of a vent in the side of the
cooling sleeve.
"Go on back in. There ought to be a leather case around in there
somewhere. About two feet long, with a big flap."
The kid ducked in and came out again with it.
"Okay," said Leets. He took the barrel pouch and drew a new barrel
out.
"Gimme the gun," he said.
"I think I can fix it."
Leets threaded the new barrel down the socket guides, and locked it.
Then he closed the vent, heard the barrel snap into place. He turned
the weapon over. Dirt jammed the breech. He pried the feed cover
open, brushed the bigger curds out of the oily action.
"Are there any bullets?" he asked.
"Here," someone said, handing over a bunched-up belt.
Leets fed it into the mechanism and closed the feed cover. Then he
drew back the operating handle and shoved it forward.
"I'm going to do some shooting," he said.
"How about one of you guys come and feed me the belt?"
They looked at him. Finally, a kid said.
"Yeah, okay.
But could I shoot it a little?"
"Sure," Leets said.
They squirmed forward until they came against the lip of a ridge.
Peering ahead, Leets saw the SS barrack looming like a ship. Flashes
leapt out from it. Bullets whined above.
"There's some still in there," a sergeant said.
"They pushed us out. I don't have enough men or firepower to get back
inside."
"Isn't there supposed to be a lieutenant around here?" Leets asked.
"He got it."
"Oh. Okay, I've got a German gun here. I'm going to shoot the place
up."
"Go ahead. Goose 'em good. Really spray 'em."
Leets pushed the gun on its bipod out beyond him, and drew it into his
shoulder. He could feel the young soldier warm next to him.
"Don't let the belt get tangled, now," he said.
"I won't. But you said I could shoot."
"You can have the goddamn thing when I'm done.
Okay?"
"Hey, super," said the kid.
The building was a black bulk against a pinker sky.
"You in there, Repp? Repp, it's me out here. I hope you're in there.
I've got five hundred rounds of 7.92 mill out here and I'm hoping one
of them's for you. And what about you, Man of Oak, you bastard?"
"Who are you talking to?" the kid wanted to know.
"Nobody/' said Leets.
"I'm aiming."
He fired. Each third round was a tracer. He saw them looping out,
bending ever so slightly, sinking into the building. Occasionally one
would jag off something hard, and prance into the sky. It seemed a
neon jamboree, a curtain of dazzle, the chains of light rattling
through the dark. Cordite rose to Leets's nose as he kept feeding
twenty-round bursts into the building and as the empty shells piled,
they'd sometimes topple, cascades of used brass, warm and dirty,
rolling down the slope, clinking.
"Goose it again," said the sergeant.
Leets stitched another burst into the place. He had no trouble holding
the rounds into the target. He took them from one end of the building
to another, chest-high. The building accepted them stoically, until at
last a tracer lit it off and it began to burn. A man inside waited
until he ignited before coming out and Leets fired into him, cutting
him in two. The flames were quite bright by that time, and there was
not much more shooting.
Shmuel lay on his belly among strangers for the whole night. Nobody
paid him any attention, but nearby the parachutists established their
aid station, and besides the flashes of the battle, he'd seen the
wounded drifting back, ones and twos, an occasional man carried by
buddies who'd drop him and always return to the fighting.
There was much screaming.
With dawn, fires arose from Aniage--Shmuel knew the buildings were
burning. And then in the morning, the tanks had come down the road,
clanking, sheathed in dust. The wounded cheered as best they could but
the vehicles which looked so potent when first he glimpsed them seemed
sad and beaten-up as they rumbled by. He could imagine better saviors
than this ragged caravan of smoking creatures, leaking oil, scarred.
Major Outhwaithe perched behind the turret of the first one, black and
grimy, like a chimney sweep.
The tanks rolled into Aniage and Shmuel lost sight of them in the pall
of smoke. Then explosions, fierce as any he'd heard.
"They must be blowing 'em out of that last pillbox," one hurt boy said
to another.
Then a soldier came for him.
"Sir, Captain Leets wants you."
"Ah," said Shmuel, embarrassed to be so clean among the dirty bleeding
soldiers.
But soon his discomfort replaced itself with a sensation of
befuddlement. He found it hard to relate what he encountered to what
he remembered. He was appalled at the destruction. He saw a world
literally eviscerated, ruin, smoky timbers, gouged earth,
bullet-riddled buildings, all the more unbelievable for the small
scenes of domestic tranquillity enacted against it by surviving
American soldiers, lying about in the sun, cigarettes lazy in their
mouths, writing letters, reading Westerns, eating cold breakfasts.
His guide took him to a pit, where the German dead lay in rows, flies
collecting busily in black clouds on them. He'd seen corpses before,
but a corpse was a certain thing: first, it was Jewish, but more
importantly it was very skinny, white, shrunken, its terror contained
in the fact that, it looked so unreal, a puppet or chunk of wood. Here,
reality was inescapable: bones and brains and guts, blue-black,
black-red, green-yellow, ripe and full of gore. Shmuel could think
only of meat shops and the ritual slaughterers on the days before
holidays-hanging slabs of beef, steamy piles of vitals, tripe white and
cold. Yet in the butcher shops there was neatness, order, purpose:
this was all spillage, sloppy and accidental.
"Not pretty. Even when it's them," said Leets, standing glumly on the
brink.
"These are the soldiers, the Totenkopfdivision people. All of them, or
what's left of them. Sorry. But it's time to go looking."
"Of course. How else?" said Shmuel.
He walked the ranks. Dead, the Germans were only their flesh: hard to
hate. He felt nothing but his own discomfort at the revolting details
of violent death; the odor of emptying colons and the swarming flies.
It became easy after a while, walking among them. They were arrayed in
their brightly vivid camouflage jackets, the pattern precise and
inappropriately colorful, gay almost, brown-green dappling dun. Soon
he saw an old friend.
Hello, Pipe Smoker. You've a hole the size of a bucket mouth at your
center and you don't look happy about it. This is how the Gentiles
kill: completely, totally.
A serious business, the manufacture of death. Us, they starve, or gas,
saving bullets. They tried bullets on us, but considered the practice
wasteful. Their own they kill with bullets and explosives, Pipe
Smoker, spend millions.
Next came the boy who'd struck him in the storeroom.
You were a mean one, called me Jew-shit, kicked me. The boy lay blue
and halved on the ground, legs, trunk missing. What could have done
such a dreadful thing? He was surely the most mutilated. You struck
me, boy, and in that instant if this scene could have been projected to
you, Shmuel the Jew in an American uniform, all warm and whole,
standing dumbly over only half your body, you'd have thought it a joke,
a laugh.
Yet there you are and here I am and by the furious way your eyes stare,
I believe you know. Ah, and Schaeffer, Hauptsturmfuhrer Schaeffer,
almost untouched, certainly unmussed, did you die of fright there in
your crisp and bright camouflage coat; no, there's a tiny black hole
drilled into your upper lip.
"No," he said, after the last, "he's not here."
Leets nodded and then took him to the bullet-riddled hulk of barrack
that had once housed Vollmerhausen's researchers. The door was off its
hinges and the roof had fallen in at one end, but Shmuel could see the
bodies in the blood-soaked sheets in the cots.
"The civilians," Shmuel said.
"A shame you had to kill them."
"It wasn't us," Leets said.
"And it wasn't by accident either." He bent to the floor and came up
with a handful of empty shells.
"These are all over the place in there. Nine-millimeter.
MP-forty cases. The SS did it. The ultimate security.
Now, one more stop. This way, please."
They walked across the compound, avoiding shell craters and piles of
rubble, to the SS barrack. It still smoldered and had fallen in on
itself sometime after sunrise. But one end stood. Leets led him to
the side and pointed through a window that had been shot out.
"Can you see? On the floor. He's burned and most of his face is gone.
He's in a bathrobe. That's not Repp, is it?"
"No."
"No. You'd never catch Repp in a bathrobe. It's the engineer, isn't
it? Vollmerhausen?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's it then."
"You missed him."
"Yeah. He made it out. Somehow. The bastard."
"And the trail ends."
"Maybe. Maybe. We'll see what we can dig out of the rubble. And
there's this." He held something out to Shmuel.
"Do you know what it is?" he asked.
Shmuel looked at the small metal object in Leets's upturned palm. He
almost laughed.
"Yes, of course I know. But what--" "We found it in there. Under
Vollmerhausen. It must have been on the desk, which he seemed to hit
on the way down. That's Yiddish on it, isn't it?"
"Hebrew," Shmuel corrected.
"It's a toy. It's called a draydel. A top, for spinning." He'd done
so a hundred, a thousand times himself when a boy.
"It's for children. You make small wagers, and spin the top. You
gamble on which of the four letters will turn up. Played on Hanukkah
chiefly." It was like a die with an axis through the center, the
inscribed letters almost rubbed out by so many small fingers.
"It's very old," Shmuel said.
"Possibly quite valuable. An heirloom at the very least."
"I see. What is the significance of the letters?"
"They are the first letters of the words in a religious phrase."
"Which is?"
"A Great Miracle Happened Here."
 Repp paused, hungry. Should he eat the bread now, or later? Well,
why not now? He'd been moving hard half the night and most of the day,
pushing himself, and soon he'd be out of forest and onto the Bavarian
plain.
Good progress, he reckoned, ahead of schedule even, a healthy sign
considering the somewhat, ah, hasty mode of his departure.
He sat on a fallen log in a meadow. He was at last out of the
coniferous zone, in a region of elm and poplars.
Repp knew his trees, and poplars were a special favorite of his,
especially on a fine spring afternoon such as this one, when the pale
sun seemed to illuminate them in an almost magical way--they glowed in
the lemon light, translucent, mystical against the darker tracings of
the limbs which displayed them. The still, austere beauty of the day
made the spectacle even more remarkable--a clean beauty, pure,
untainted, un contrived--and Repp smiled at it all, at the same time
pleased that his own sensitivity to such matters hadn't been blunted by
the war. Repp appreciated nature; he felt it important to good health,
soundness of body and clearness of mind.
Nature was particularly meaningful to his higher instincts in hard
times like these, though it was rare that such natural beauty could be
savored in and of itself, without reference to more prosaic
necessities, fields of fire, automatic weapons placement, minefield
patterns and so forth.
He tore into the bread. Dry, tough, it still tasted delicious.
A good thing it had been in the pack when the Americans had come. Time
only to grab the pack, throw it on and head for the tunnel. He'd made
it after a long crawl across the open ground, American fire snapping
into the ground around him. He curled in a gully by the tunnel
entrance.
There were, in fact, six of them. Repp had insisted.
He was a careful man who thought hard about likelihoods, and he knew no
place in Germany in the late spring of 1945 that might not be assaulted
by enemy troops, and if such an assault came, he had no intention of
being trapped in it. He removed the camouflaged cover and squirmed
down into the narrow opening. He slithered along. The space was
close, almost claustrophobic, room for one thin man. Dust showered
down on him as his back scraped the roof and the darkness was
impenetrable. A great loneliness fell over Repp. He knew that even
for a brave man panic was an instant away in a sewer like this. And
who knew what creatures might be using it to nest in? It was damp and
smelled of clay. Vile place: a grave. The world of the corpse.
He warned himself to be careful. Too much imagination could kill you
just as quickly as enemy bullets. But Repp was used to working in the
open, with great reaches beyond him. Here there was nothing except the
dark. He could hold a hand to his face an inch in front of his eyes,
and see nothing, absolute nothingness.
He pulled himself mechanically along, thinking this surely the worst
moment in his long war, yet trying, desperately, to concentrate on the
physical--the thrusts of his arms, the push of his legs, the slide of
his torso. The roof pressed against his shoulders. At any moment it
could come down. Repp wiggled along. Just a few more feet.
After what seemed years in the underground, he'd at last come to the
end. He pulled himself the remaining few feet, but here the panic flap
pity-flapped through him; he thought of it as an owl, its wings
unfurling frenziedly.
The cool air came like a maddening perfume, rich and sensuous. The
temptation to crash from the hole and dance for glee was enormous; he
fought it. He edged back to the surface cautiously, without sudden
movements. He emerged a few feet beyond the tree line. The fight
still raged, mostly indistinct light and sound from here, but Repp
hadn't time to consider it.
He continued his crawl through the trees, dragging the pack and rifle
with him. Once or twice he froze, sensing human activity nearby. When
he was finally certain he was alone, he pulled himself up. He quickly
consulted the compass and set off.
His route took him past the firing range. He skirted it, unwilling to
risk its openness even though it was still dark. A voice came
suddenly, brazen and American. He dived back instantly and lay
breathing hard. Americans?
This far out?
He pushed back the brush and stared into the dark.
He saw men moving vaguely. Must be some kind of patrol, an extra
security measure way out here. But his eyes began to adjust and he
could see the men gathering up long white shrouds. He had trouble
making sense out of this and-Parachutes.
He knew then that this was not some accident of war, an American
reconnaissance in force blundering into his perimeter.
The parachutists had come after a specific objective.
They had come after him.
Repp knew he was being hunted. He felt a weight in his stomach. If it
were just shooting, his skill against theirs, that would be one thing.
But this business was far more complex and his own path only one route
to the center. In at least a thousand other ways he was vulnerable.
He could move perfectly, do all things brilliantly, and still fail.
He was ahead of them, but by what margin? What did they know? What
remained in the ruins of Aniage Elf?
Had they seen the documents from Financial Section?
Had they learned the secret of the meaning of Nibelungen, the
Reichsfuhrer's pet name, the joke he delighted in?
The worst possibility of all was that they had come across Nibelungen's
other half--the Spanish Jew, for whom all these arrangements had been
made.
He stuffed what was left of the bread back into his pack, and walked
on.
 Leets was a man with problems. He had no Repp and not one idea in
hell where the German was headed;
worse, he had no idea where he himself was headed. His archeological
expedition through the ruins of Aniage had come up bust--nothing but
burnt files and shattered, blackened equipment. And corpses. In all
this there was not one shard of pottery, not one scrap, one flake of
debris that pointed to another step. The trail was stone cold.
Now he was reduced to hoping for luck. He sat by himself in front of
an improvised table within the installation compound. Before him were
what remained of several thousand 7.92-mm Kurz cases he'd had the
paratroopers collect before they'd moved out.
Leets picked one up, and examined it with a sublimely ridiculous
Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass.
The shell in his huge grimy fingers glinted like the purest gold; Leets
revolved it, studying its bland, necked surface. He was looking for a
gouge, a fracture mark, indicative of reloading, which in turn would be
indicative of modification into one of the hand-tooled long-range
custom jobs Repp had taken the patrol with. If he can find one, he can
prove at least to himself Repp was here; he is not going insane. But
nope, this shell holds no secrets; disgustedly, he tossed it into the
pile at his feet, and plucked up another. He'd been at it now for
hours, not exactly the sort of thing Army officers are expected to do
at all, but what the hell, somebody's got to do it.
At first it was Roger's job, but the kid began wandering off. Roger
had returned with special orders and presented them to Leets without
one shred of embarrassment.
The great Bill Fielding is putting on an exhibition in Paris ostensibly
for the wounded boys, a morale builder, and Roger'd wangled his way
into it. The OSS Harvard faction was keen to have the outfit
represented, and Roger'd been anointed champion. He'd be taking off
soon, and now he wasn't worth a damn, off screwing around somewhere
with his racquets.
But that left Leets alone with the headache and a tableful of shells
and a sinking conviction he was getting nowhere. It was spring, full
spring now, almost May.
The Black Forest was turning green, and the air was pleasant, even if
still heavy with the tang of ash. Leets returned to another shell. He
was working slowly, because he wasn't sure what the hell he'd do when
he got finished.
A shadow fled across the table, then returned and paused, and Leets
looked up from his collection and saw the Jew, Shmuel.
"Captain Leets?" the man said, looking absurdly American in his
uniform, a white spiffy triangle of cotton undershirt showing above the
top button of his wool OD shirt. Leets didn't have the heart to tell
him he was wearing the undershirt backward.
"A thought came to me. Maybe a help for you.
Maybe not."
Shmuel had never volunteered before, except in that frantic moment in
the hospital when he insisted on making the jump. But now he was calm
and composed. Or maybe it was only the weight he'd picked up since
chowing with the Americans these last weeks.
"So go ahead," Leets said. He still wasn't sure what to call the
man.
"Do you remember the bodies? The SS men? Before they were shoveled
into the pit?"
"Yes, I do," Leets said. Hard to forget.
"Something then bothered me. Now I can say it. It came to me in a
dream."
"Yes," Leets said.
"The jackets. The ones with the spots."
"The Tiger coats. Standard SS issue. You see them all over Europe."
"Yes. Here's the curiosity. They were all new. Every single one of
them. It's what made the dead so vivid. In January the coats were
ragged and faded. Patched."
Leets took all day before cooking up a response.
"So?" he finally asked, confessing, "You've lost me."
"So, nothing. I don't know. But it struck me--strikes me--as
peculiar."
"Yeah, well, the Krauts got a batch of new coats. How about that?
Hmm." He turned it over in his mind several times, slowly, looking
past the Jew, looking hard at nothing as he picked at this curious bit
of info. A truckload of jackets, over one hundred of them: quite a
chunk of weight. Hard to believe the Germans would haul it up from the
plains, over that muddy road. Trucks must have come in there all the
time, of course, keep the place supplied. But all those coats .. .
"Thanks," he eventually said.
"Something to think about, though I'm not just sure what the
significance is."
The more he thought about it the more fascinating it seemed. Here it
was, late in the war, very very late, two minutes to midnight, the
Reich shattered, the supply system, like all systems, broken down. Yet
they were shipping clothes about.
No, a more likely situation would be that the reinforced
Totenkopfdivision company went somewhere to pick up the coats,
someplace where piles and piles of the things were available--these
were the March, 1944, model now, coats, not tunics, camouflaged, the
four-pocket model with the snap buttons and the sniper's epaulets: a
new item in their battle-dress collection.
"Damnedest thing," he said aloud.
The Jew still stood there.
"I happen to know about these coats," he said.
"A little. Not a lot."
"What?" Leets asked.
"One of the other prisoners told me he'd worked on them. In the
factory as a laborer. He'd been a tailor and the SS sent him to work
in their factory. In the plant. It's a place where there'd be a lot
of them. Not so far from here. No rail travel would be involved."
"What place?" asked Leets.
"The SS Konzentrationlager Dachau," said Shmuel.
,n an otherwise quite pleasant ash tree, the deserter swayed heavily
at the end of the rope, face blue, neck grotesquely twisted. He'd been
stripped of gear and boots but boasted a sign: i'm a pig who left my
comrades
"Poor devil," said the man next to Repp.
"Those SS bastards must have caught him."
Repp grunted noncommittally. He'd picked up this platoon of drifting
engineers a few miles back and with them he was making his way across
the Bavarian plateau in the southern lee of the Swabian Jura.
"They get you and your papers are wrong and it's " Lenz made a comical
imitation of a man choking in a noose.
Occasionally a vehicle would roll down the dusty road, a half-track
once, a couple of Opel trucks, finally a staff car with two colonels in
the back.
"They ride, we walk," said Lenz.
"As usual. They'll get away, we'll go to a PW camp. Or Siberia.
That's always the way it is. The little fellow catches " "Lenz, shut
up," called back Gemgoss, the fat Austrian platoon sergeant.
The platoon continued to move down the road,
through an empty landscape. Ostensibly, they were headed for the town
of Tuttlingen, several kilometers ahead, to blow up a bridge before the
Americans arrived.
But Repp knew this was a pretext; actually they were just moping around
enough to pass the time until the Amis showed and they could surrender.
They were not Totenkopfdivision boys, that was for sure.
Repp tuned out the chatter and plowed on. It was farming country,
smoother here west of the River Lech, near the Lake of Konstanz. The
Alps could be seen, especially the 9,000 feet of the Zugspitze, far to
the south, unusual since it was not September or October.
To the west, the Black Forest massif, off of which Repp had come,
glowered smudgily against the horizon.
"Perfect hunting weather for Jabos. You'd think they'd be thick as
flies, the bastards," said Lenz.
"Oh, Christ," said somebody.
Repp looked up.
It was too late to turn back, or fade off into the fields.
They'd just rounded a bend in the road and there in the trees was a
self-propelled antitank gun, huge thing, dragon on treads, riveted
body, dun-colored. SS men in their camouflage tunics lounged about it,
their STG's slung. Repp could tell from the flashes they were from the
Field Police regiment of SS "Das Reich."
"Watch yourselves," muttered Gerngoss, just ahead.
"Don't do anything stupid. These pricks mean business."
The young officer in the open pulpit of the gun mount leaned forward
and with an exaggerated smile said, "You fellows going to Switzerland?"
He wore a metal plaque with an embossed eagle on a chain around his
neck; it hung down on his chest like a medieval breastplate.
"A joker," muttered Lenz.
"No, sir," replied Gerngoss, trying to sound casual but speaking over
dry breaths through a dry mouth, "just going on down the road to a
job."
"Oh, I see," said the young officer affably, though his eyes were
metallic.
"And which one might that be?" As he spoke one of the other SS men
climbed down off the hull, unslinging his rifle.
"We're engineers, Lieutenant," explained Gerngoss, his voice rising
suddenly.
"Headed toward Tuttlingen. A bridge there to be blown before the
Americans get to it.
Then we'll rejoin our unit, Third Brigade of the Eighteenth Motorized
Engineer Battalion, south of Munich.
Here, I have the orders here." He held them out. Repp could see his
hand tremble.
"Bring them here, Sergeant Fatty," the young officer said.
Gerngoss waddled over fretfully. In the shadow of the armored vehicle,
he handed them up to the young officer.
"These orders are dated May first. Two days ago. It says you're
traveling by truck."
"I know, sir," said Gerngoss, a weak smile bobbing on his lips.
"We were hit by Jabos yesterday. A bad day.
The truck was crippled, some people hurt, had to find a field
hospital--" "I think you're stalling." He smiled.
"Dawdling. Waiting for the war to end." The SS lieutenant laid an arm
across the MG-42 mounted before him. In his peripheral vision. Repp
saw the SS man flanking off to the right, STG loose and ready.
"Oh, shit," Lenz muttered tensely next to him.
"S-sir," insisted Gerngoss, "w-we're doing our jobs.
Our duty." His voice was small, coming from such a big man.
"I think," said the lieutenant, "you're a Jew-pig. A deserter. It's
because of swine like you that we lost the war. Fat asshole Austrian,
can't wait to get home and fuck Jew-cunts and eat pastries in the
Vienna cafes with Bolsheviks."
"Please. Please," whimpered Gerngoss.
"Go on. Get out of here, you and your Army scum. I ought to hang you
all." He spoke with angry contempt.
"Drag your fat asses out of here."
"Yes, sir," mumbled Gerngoss, and shambled away.
"Thank Christ," muttered Lenz.
"Sweet Jesus, thank Christ," and the squad began to shuffle forward
humbly under the sullen gaze of the SS men.
"Ah, one second, please," the smiling lieutenant in the turret called
out.
"You, third from the end. Thin fellow."
Repp realized the man was talking to him.
"Lieutenant?" he inquired meekly.
"Say, friend, I just noticed that the piping on your collar is white,"
the smiler announced. He seemed quite joyful.
"White--infantry. The others have black--engineers."
"He's not with us," announced Lenz, stepping away quickly.
"He straggled in yesterday."
"He said he was trying to find his unit," Gerngoss called.
"Second Battalion of Eleventh Infantry. It sounded fishy to me."
"I have papers," Repp said. He realized he was standing alone on the
road.
"Here. Quickly."
Repp scurried over, holding the documents up. The young officer took
them. As he read, his eyebrows rose. He was freckled and fair, about
twenty years old. A lick of blond hair hung down from under his
helmet.
"I was separated from my unit," Repp said, "in a big attack, sir. The
Americans came and bombed us. It was worse than Russia."
The young lieutenant smiled.
"I'm rather afraid these papers aren't any good. Waf-en SS field
regulations supersede OKW forms. As of May first, on the order of the
Reichsfrihrer SS. For the discipline of the troops. You don't have
LA/ fifty-three-oh-four, or its current stamp. A field ID. It has to
be stamped every three days. To keep"--the smile broadened--"deserters
from mingling with loyal troops."
"Most of them just stayed. Waiting for the Americans.
I went on. To find the rest of my unit. I was wounded in Russia. I
have the Knight's Cross."
"A piece of shit," the officer said.
"I have a note from my captain. It's here, somewhere."
"You're a deserter. A swine. We've run into others like you. You're
going where they are now. To a dance in midair. Take the pig."
Repp felt the muzzle of the STG pressing hard into his back and at the
same moment his own rifle was yanked off his back. Someone shoved him
and he fell oafishly to the ground.
"You stinking fucker," a teen-aged voice behind him cursed.
"We'll hang you till your tongue's blue." He hit Repp in the lower
spine with his rifle butt. The pain almost crippled Repp. He yelped,
lurching forward, and lay in agony, rubbing the bruise through his
greatcoat.
The young soldier grabbed him roughly by the arm, pulling him up with
great disgust, the STG momentarily lowered in the effort, and as Repp
was twisted upward he laid the P-38 barrel against the youth's throat
and shot it out; then, as the boy fell back, very calmly Repp pivoted,
steadying the pistol with the other hand under the butt, and shot the
young officer in the face, disintegrating it. He shot two other men
off the hull of the self-propelled gun where they sat, paralyzed, and
dropped the pistol. He stood and pried the STG from the tight fingers
of the first soldier, who lay back behind sightless eyes, slipping into
coma, his throat spasming empty of blood. He wouldn't last long.
Repp's finger found the fire-selector rod of the assault rifle just
above the trigger guard and he rammed it to full automatic, at the same
time palming back the bolt. Three more SS men careered from behind the
vehicle.
He shot from the hip without thinking, one long burst, half the
magazine, knocking them flat in a commotion of dust spurts. He ran
another burst across the bodies just in case, the earth puffing and
fanning from the strike of the bullets.
Repp stood back, the weapon hot in his hand. The whole thing had taken
less than five seconds. He waited,
ready to shoot at any sign of motion, but there was none.
What waste, what sheer waste! Good men, loyal men, doing their jobs.
Dead in a freak battleground accident.
He was profoundly depressed.
Blood everywhere. It speckled the skin of the self-propelled gun,
swerving jaggedly down to the fender, where it collected in a black
pool. It soaked the uniforms of the two men who lay before the big
vehicle, and puddles of it gathered around the three he'd taken in the
last long burst. Repp turned. The boy he'd shot in the throat lay
breathing raspily.
Repp knelt and lifted the boy's head gently. Blood coursed in torrents
from the throat wound, disappearing inside the collar of his jacket. He
was all but finished, his eyes blank, his face gray and calm.
"Father. Father, please," he said.
Repp reached and took his hand and held it until the boy was gone.
He stood. He was alone in the road, and disgusted.
The engineers had fled.
Goddamn! Goddamn!
It made him sick. He wanted to vomit.
They would pay. The Jews would pay. In blood and money.
 Roger sat in his Class A's on the terrace of the Ritz.
Before him was a recent edition of the New York Herald Tribune, the
first page given to a story by a woman named Marguerite Higgins, who
had arrived with the 22d Regiment, some motorized hot shots, at the
concentration camp of Dachau.
Roger almost gagged. The bodies heaped like garbage, skinny sacks,
ribs stark. The contrast between that place and this, Paris, Place
Vendome, the ritzy Ritz, the city shoring up for an imminent VE-Day,
girls all over the place, was almost more than he could take.
Leets and Outhwaithe were there, poking about.
Roger was due back in a day or so.
But he had come to a decision: he would not go.
/ will not go.
No matter what.
He shivered, thinking of the slime at Dachau. He imagined the smell.
He shivered again.
"Cold?"
"Huh? Oh!"
Roger looked up into the face of the most famous tennis player of all
time.
"You're Evans?" asked Bill Fielding.
"Ulp," Roger gulped spastically, shooting to his feet.
"Yes, sir, yes, sir, I'm Roger Evans, Harvard, '47, sir, probably '49
now, with this little interruption, hell, hell, number-one singles
there ray freshman year."
The great man was a head taller than Roger, still thin as an icicle,
dressed in immaculate white that made his tan seem deeper than
burnished oak; he was in his late forties but looked an easy
thirty-five.
Roger was aware that all commerce on the busy terrace had stopped; they
were looking at Bill Fielding, all of them--generals, newspapermen,
beautiful women, aristocrats, gangsters. Fielding was a star even in
the exotic confines of the Ritz. And Roger knew they were also looking
at him.
"Well, let me tell you how this works. You've played at Roland
Garros?"
"No, sir."
"Well, we'll be on the Cow Centrale of course--" Of course, thought
Roger.
"--a clay surface, in an amphitheater, about eight thousand wounded
boys, I'm told, plus the usual brass-you've played in front of crowds,
no nerve problems or anything?"
Roger? Nervous?
"No, sir," he said.
"I played in the finals of the Ivies and I made it to the second round
at Forest Hills in '44."
Fielding was not impressed.
"Yes, well, I hope not. Anyway, I usually give the boys a little talk,
using Frank as a model, show them the fundamentals of the game. The
idea is first to entertain these poor wounded kids but also to sell
tennis. You know, it's a chance to introduce the game to a whole new
class of fan."
Yeah, some class, most of 'em just glad they didn't get their balls
blown off in the fighting, but he nodded intently.
"Then you and Frank will go two sets, three maybe, depends on you."
Roger did not like at all the assumption here that he was the
sacrificial goat in all this.
"Then you and I, Frank and Major Miles, our regular Army liaison, will
go a set of doubles, just to introduce them to that. Agreeable?"
"Whatever you say, Mr. Fielding. Uh, I saw you at Forest Hills in
'31. I was just a kid--" Oops, that was a wrong thing to say.
Fielding glowered.
"Not a good tournament for me."
"Quarters. You played Maurice McLaughlin."
Fielding's face lit up at the memory of the long-ago match; he was just
coming off his prime then, his golden years, and still had great
reserves of the good stuff, the high-octane tennis, left.
"Oh, yes, Maurie. Lots of power, strength. But somehow lacking .. .
Three and love, right?"
He remembers?
"That's right, sir."
"Yes, well, I hope you've got more out there than poor Maurie," said
Fielding disgustedly.
"Uh, I'll sure try," said Roger. Fielding was certainly blunt.
"All right. You've got transportation out to Auteuil, I assume."
"Yes, sir, the Special Services people have a car and--" Fielding was
not interested in the details.
"Fine, Sergeant, see you at one," and he turned and began to stride
forcefully away, the circle opening in awe.
"Uh. Mr. Fielding," said Roger, racing after. His heart was pounding
but once out at the Stade, he'd never have a chance.
"Yes?" said Fielding, a trifle annoyed. He had a long nose that he
aimed down almost like the barrel of a rifle. His eyes were blue and
pale and unwavering.
"Frank Benson. He's good, I hear."
"My protege. A future world champion, I hope. Now if--" "I'm better,"
blurted Roger. There. He'd said it.
Fielding's face lengthened in contempt. He seemed to be turning purple
under the tan. He was known for his towering rages at incompetence,
lack of concentration, quitters, the over brash the slow, the blind,
the halt and the lame. Roger smiled bravely and forged ahead. He knew
that here, as on the court, to plant your sneakers was to die. Attack,
attack: close to the net, volley away for a kill.
"I can beat him. And will, this afternoon. Now I just want you to
think about this. Continuing this tour with someone second-best is
gonna kinda take the fun out of it, I'd say."
The silence was ferocious.
Roger thrust on.
"Now if I bury him, if I pound him, if I shellac him--" He was prepared
to continue with colorful metaphors for destruction for quite some
time, but Fielding cut him off.
"What is it you want?"
"Simple. In. In fast."
"The tour?"
"Yes, sir."
Fielding's face confessed puzzlement.
"The shooting's over. Why now, all of a sudden?"
Roger could not explain--maybe even to himself-about the bodies at
Dachau, the vista of wormy stiffs.
"Just fed up, is all, sir. Like you, I was put on this earth to hit a
tennis ball. Anything else is just time misspent.
I did my duty. In fact my unit just took part in what will probably be
the last airborne operation in the ETO, a night drop and a son of a
bitch, you'll pardon me." And it had been, sitting back at 82d
Airborne Ops, running low on coffee and doughnuts. Roger tried to look
modest.
"And finally, well"--tricky this, he'd heard Fielding couldn't abide
boot lickers--"finally there's you:
a chance to apprentice under Fielding, under the best. I knew I'd
better give it my best serve, flat out, go for the line, or always
wonder about it." He looked modestly-or what he presumed to be
modestly--at his jump boots.
"You're not shy, are you?" Fielding finally said.
"No, sir," admitted Roger, "I believe in myself. Here, and on the
court." Roger realized with a start. He hasn't said No.
"Words before a match are cheap. That's why I never had any. Frank is
my protege. Ever since I discovered him at that air base in England,
I've believed he had it in him to be the world's best, as I was. You
want in, do you? Well, this afternoon we'll see if your game is as big
as your ego. Or your mouth."
He turned and walked out off the terrace.
Roger thought, Almost there.
But before Roger could insert Dachau into his file of might-have-be ens
there was Benson to play, Benson to beat, thinking positively, and
Roger knew this would not be so easy. He'd done a little research on
the guy, No. at Stanford, '39 and '40, made the third round at Forest
Hills in '41, a Californian with that Westerner's game, coming off
those hard concrete courts, serve and volley, Patton-style tennis,
always on the attack. But he'd shelved the tennis for four years, Air
Corps, done twenty-three trips over Germany as a B-17 bombardier
(D.F.C. even! another hero like Leets), survived the slaughterhouse
over Schweinfurt the second time somehow, and only picked the game back
up as a way of relaxing, cooling down near the end of his tour, when
the reflexes go bad, the nerves sticky, the mind filling with
hobgoblins and sirens and flak puffs and other terrors.
When Fielding came to the air base in the fall of '44, first stop on
his first tour, somehow Benson had been urged on him. It was love at
first sight, love, 6-love, for Benson. Fielding, whose game was off
but not that off, saw in the thin swift Californian something sweet and
pure and deadly and knew that here was himself twenty years ago, poised
on the edge of greatness.
Fielding wanted Benson right away; he got him, even two missions short
of twenty-five.
Benson was tall, thin, a ropy blond with calm gray eyes and marvelous
form. He moved fast slowly, meaning that he had such effortless grace
that he never seemed to lunge or lurch, rather glided about the court
in his white flannels--for his eccentricity was to stick to the pleated
flannel trousers of the Twenties and early Thirties, unlike the more
stylish Rug, who'd been wearing shorts a la Riggs and Budge since he
was a kid.
Benson hit leapers, all that tops ping causing the ball to hiss and
pop, even though the Cow Centrale was a porous clay-type composition,
not quite en-tout-cas, but very, very slow. It was like playing on
toast. The surface sucked the oomph from those slammed Western forehand
drives, but to Roger, across from him, hitting in warm-up, the guy
looked like seven skinny feet of white death, methodical, unflappable,
unstoppable.
Still, Roger specialized in confidence, and his had not dropped a notch
since his get-together with the Great Man this morning. He'd taken on
big hitters before: it demanded patience, guile and plenty of nerve.
Mainly you had to hold together on the big points, perform when the
weight of the match squashed down on you. If you could run down their
hottest stuff, these big hitters would blow up on you, get wilder and
fiercer and crazier.
He'd seen plenty like that, who fell apart, quit, hadn't that hard,
bitter kernel of self-righteousness inside that made victory usual.
The Cour Centrale at Roland Garros sat in the center of a steeply
tiered cement amphitheater which was now jamming up with uniforms. A
flower bed along one side of the court, under the boxes where Important
Brass now gathered, showed bright and cheerful, new to spring--the
orderly German officers who'd played here during the Occupation had
kept them up. Lacoste had owned this place with its soft, gritty-brown
surface, along with his equally merciless sidekicks Borotra and
Cochet; they'd called them the Three Musketeers back during their
heyday, and only Fielding, with his power and control and, most of all,
his guts, had been able to stand up to them here. So Roger wasn't just
a player; he was a part of history, a part of tradition. He felt
absorbed into it, taken with it, warmed by it, and now the ball seemed
to crack cleanly off the center of strings.
Was it his imagination or was even this audience of shot-up youngsters
beginning to throb with enthusiasm? Pennants snapped in the wind. The
shadows became distinct.
The lines of the court were precise and beautiful.
The balls were white and pure. Rug felt like a million bucks. This
was where he belonged.
"Okay, fellows," said Fielding, calling them in.
They sat down to towel off as Fielding, to a surge of applause that
grew and grew, lifting swiftly in passion as he moved out to the center
of the court, stood to face the crowd, a microphone in hand. He smiled
sharkishly.
"Hi, guys," he said, voice echoing back in amplification.
"Bill, Bill, Bill," they called, though most were too young to have
remembered with clarity the three years, '27, '28 and '29, when he'd
dominated tennis--and the larger world--like a god.
"Fellas," Bill allowed, "I know all this is kinda new to some of ya," a
Midwestern accent, Kansas corn belt, flattened out the great man's
Princeton voice, "but let me tell ya the truth: tennis is a game of
skill, guts and endurance; it's like war .. . only tougher."
The soldiers howled in glee. Roger sat mesmerized by their pulsating
animation: one mass, seething, galvanized by the star's charisma.
"Now today, we're going to show you how the big boys play. You've seen
DiM age and the Splendid Splinter?
Well you're going to see the DiM age and Ted Williams of tennis."
Fielding spoke for about ten minutes, a polished little speech in which
he explained the rules, showed them the strokes as demonstrated by the
blankly flawless Frank Benson, worked in a few amusing anecdotes and
continually compared tennis--flatteringly--to other sports, emphasizing
its demands of stamina, strength and courage, the savagery of its
competition, the psychological violence between its opponents.
And then he was done.
"And now fellows," cheer-led Fielding, "the big boys:
Captain Frank Benson, Stanford, '41, currently of the Eighth Air Force,
twenty-three trips over Germany; and Technical Sergeant Five Roger
Evans, Harvard, '46, now of the United States Army, attached to the
Office of Strategic Services, veteran of several behind-the-lines
missions--" Yeah, our lines though. Good thing Leets wasn't around to
hear that little fib.
"--and now," continued Fielding, mocking another game's traditions,
"play ball!"
They'd already spun, Benson winning and electing to serve, but still he
came to net and sought out Roger's eyes as Roger had guessed he
would.
"Good luck, Sergeant," he said to Roger.
"Same to you, Chief," said Roger.
Roger was an excellent tennis player, definite national-ranking
material, and though he'd not played hard and regularly in the year
he'd been in the Army, he'd worked to maintain his edge, drilling when
he couldn't find a partner, staying in shape, pursuing excellence in
the limited ways available to him. But in the first seconds he knew he
was seriously overmatched: it was the difference between skill and
genius. Benson hit out at everything, fiery and hard: the white ball
dipped violently as it neared the baseline and its spin caught up to
and overpowered its velocity, pulling it down, making it come crazily
off the court at him, faster than sin. Benson's forehand especially
was a killer, white smoke, but when Roger, learning that lesson fast,
tried to attack the backhand, deep, Benson rammed slices by him. He
felt immediately that he couldn't stand and hit with the bastard from
the backcourt and so at 1-1, after squeaking out a lucky win on his
serve, which the Californian hadn't pressed seriously, he decided to
angle dinks wide to the corner--now they are called approach shots but
the terminology then was "forcing shots"--and come in behind them.
Catastrophe followed thereupon: he didn't have enough punch on the ball
to hold it deep and as he dashed in to net, Benson, anticipating
beautifully, seemed to catch each shot as it dropped and hit some
dead-run beauties that eluded Roger's lunge to volley by a hair.
Roger stood after fifteen minutes at 3-3, only because his own serve
had finally loosened and was ticking and because the toasty composition
scoured the balls, fluffing them up heavy and dull, letting Rug reach
two shots on big points he never would have under normal conditions,
American conditions, and he put both away insolently for winners, his
two best strokes of the match.
But this equilibrium could not last and no one knew it better than
Roger, who sensed his confidence begin to slide away. He felt a tide
of self-pity start to rise through him.
On serve, with new balls, he fell behind fast on two backhand returns
that Benson blew by him like rockets.
He was looking at love-30, felt his heart thundering in his ribs.
He served a fault, just long, ball sliced wickedly but just off the
back line.
He glanced about, a bad sign, for it meant his concentration was
evaporating. The ranks of soldiers seemed to be glaring at him. A
pretty nurse looked viciously unimpressed. Fielding, on a lawn chair
just behind the umpire's seat, had a blank expression.
Roger felt the vise screwing in on the sides of his body. He could
hardly breathe.
He double-faulted, going to add out, and quickly double-faulted again,
down one, serve lost.
He sat on the bench during the change, toweling off, feeling sick.
Humiliation lay ahead. He felt sick out there, knowing he'd quit. Dog,
pig, skunk, jerk. He deserved to lose. Self-loathing raced through
him like a drug, knocking the world to whirl and blur. He almost
wanted to cry. Exhaustion crowded in.
Someone was near him. Roger couldn't care less. The unfairness of it
all was overwhelming. The stands, the court, the net all shimmered in
his rage. But through this rage, there came a voice, low and
insistent. At first he thought it was his conscience, Jiminy
Cricket-style, but ... "Kid," the voice whispered, "you don't belong
out there. I'm carrying you."
Benson, close by, seemingly tightening his laces, was talking in a low
voice, face down and hidden from the crowd.
"It ought to be done now, at love."
Roger didn't say anything. He stared bleakly ahead, letting the man
mock him. He felt the sweat peel down his body inside his shirt. He
knew it was the truth.
"But Christmas comes early this year," Benson said.
The oblique statement, it turned out, referred to a present: the
match.
Roger ran the next three games for the set, Benson holding them close,
but crapping out at key points. He could hit it an inch outside the
line as well as an inch inside. Then Roger ran five more into the
second set until Benson, still playing the feeb, broke through, but
Roger triumphed in the seventh game for the set and the match, and the
noise of the crowd, their adoration, broke over him like a wave, though
he knew it was a joke, a prank, that he was unworthy, and he felt
curiously ashamed.
"Congratulations," said Benson, his calm gray eyes full of malice and
sarcasm.
"Just stay out of California till you learn to volley"--with a most
sincere, humble smile on his face--"and have fun with your new
buddy."
Eh? What could--?
Benson, eyes down, pushed his way past Fielding.
"Frankie, Frankie," implored the old star.
Benson sat down disgustedly, Fielding turned: his face was a mass of
wrinkles beneath the lurid tan. He smiled broadly at Roger, eyes
But this equilibrium could not last and no one knew it better than
Roger, who sensed his confidence begin to slide away. He felt a tide
of self-pity start to rise through him.
On serve, with new balls, he fell behind fast on two backhand returns
that Benson blew by him like rockets.
He was looking at love-30, felt his heart thundering in his ribs.
He served a fault, just long, ball sliced wickedly but just off the
back line.
He glanced about, a bad sign, for it meant his concentration was
evaporating. The ranks of soldiers seemed to be glaring at him. A
pretty nurse looked viciously unimpressed. Fielding, on a lawn chair
just behind the umpire's seat, had a blank expression.
Roger felt the vise screwing in on the sides of his body. He could
hardly breathe.
He double-faulted, going to add out, and quickly double-faulted again,
down one, serve lost.
He sat on the bench during the change, toweling off, feeling sick.
Humiliation lay ahead. He felt sick out there, knowing he'd quit. Dog,
pig, skunk, jerk. He deserved to lose. Self-loathing raced through
him like a drug, knocking the world to whirl and blur. He almost
wanted to cry. Exhaustion crowded in.
Someone was near him. Roger couldn't care less. The unfairness of it
all was overwhelming. The stands, the court, the net all shimmered in
his rage. But through this rage, there came a voice, low and
insistent. At first he thought it was his conscience, Jiminy
Cricket-style, but ... "Kid," the voice whispered, "you don't belong
out there. I'm carrying you."
Benson, close by, seemingly tightening his laces, was talking in a low
voice, face down and hidden from the crowd.
"It ought to be done now, at love."
Roger didn't say anything. He stared bleakly ahead, letting the man
mock him. He felt the sweat peel down his body inside his shirt. He
knew it was the truth.
"But Christmas comes early this year," Benson said.
The oblique statement, it turned out, referred to a present: the
match.
Roger ran the next three games for the set, Benson holding them close,
but crapping out at key points. He could hit it an inch outside the
line as well as an inch inside. Then Roger ran five more into the
second set until Benson, still playing the feeb, broke through, but
Roger triumphed in the seventh game for the set and the match, and the
noise of the crowd, their adoration, broke over him like a wave, though
he knew it was a joke, a prank, that he was unworthy, and he felt
curiously ashamed.
"Congratulations," said Benson, his calm gray eyes full of malice and
sarcasm.
"Just stay out of California till you learn to volley"--with a most
sincere, humble smile on his face--"and have fun with your new
buddy."
Eh? What could--?
Benson, eyes down, pushed his way past Fielding.
"Frankie, Frankie," implored the old star.
Benson sat down disgustedly.
Fielding turned: his face was a mass of wrinkles beneath the lurid tan.
He smiled broadly at Roger, eyes dancing, a leathery, horrible old
lizard, with yellow eyes and greedy lips.
"My boy!" he said.
"You did it. You did it." He clapped an arm around Roger, squeezing
so that Roger could feel each of the fingers press knowingly into the
fibers of muscle under his skin, kneading, urging.
"You'll be my champion," said Fielding, "my star," he whispered
hoarsely into Roger's ear.
Oh, Christ, thought Roger.
 Shmuel led, for he was in his own territory.
There was only one way to penetrate the barbed wire and the moat that
formed the perimeter, and that was through the guardhouse. This took
them under a famous German slogan, arbeit macht frei, work makes one
free.
"The Germans like slogans," Shmuel explained.
Once beyond the guardhouse, they arrived in the roll-call plaza,
traversed it quickly and turned down the main camp road. On either
side stood the barracks, fifteen of them, as well as additional
structures such as the infirmary, the morgue and the penal blocks. Into
each had been crammed two thousand men in the last days before the
liberation. There had been corpses everywhere, and though they had now
been gathered by the hygiene-minded American administrators, the smell
remained awesome. Leets, with Shmuel and Tony, kept his eyes straight
ahead as they walked the avenue. Prisoners milled about, the gaunt,
skeletal almost-corpses in their rotten inmate's ticking. Though
massive amounts of food and medical supplies had been convoyed in, the
aid had yet to make much impression on the prison population.
Finally, they reached their destination, the eleventh barrack on the
right-hand side. In it, once near death but now much improved, was one
Eisner. Shmuel had gone in alone the first day and found him. Eisner
was important because Eisner was a tailor; Eisner had worked in the SS
uniform workshops just beyond the prison compound. Eisner alone knew
of the SS Tiger jackets; Eisner alone might help them penetrate the
mysteries of the last shipment to Aniage Elf.
They went in and got the man. It was not at all pleasant.
They took him from the foul-smelling barrack to an office outside the
compound in one of the SS administrative buildings.
Eisner was somewhat better today. His body was beginning to hold a
little weight and his gestures had lost that slow-motion vagueness. He
was finding words again and was at last strong enough to talk.
However he was not much interested in Dachau, or Tiger coats, or the
year 1945. He preferred Heidelberg, 1938, before Kristallnacht, where
he'd had a wonderful shop and a wife and three children, all of whom
had been sent Ost. East.
"That means dead, of course," explained Shmuel.
Leets nodded. In all this he felt extremely dumb. This was their
third day in the camp and he was getting a little bit more used to it.
The first day had nearly wrecked him. He tried not to think about
it.
Shmuel began slowly, with great patience. He had cautioned them, "It
will be very difficult to earn this man's trust. He is frightened of
everything, of everyone.
He does not even realize the war is nearly over."
"Fine, go ahead," Leets said.
"He's all we've got."
Shmuel spoke Yiddish, translating after each exchange.
"Mr. Eisner, you worked on uniforms for the German soldiers, is this
not right?"
The old man blinked. He looked at them stupidly. He swallowed. His
eyes seemed to fall out of focus.
"He's very frightened," Shmuel said. The old man was trembling.
"Coats," Shmuel said.
"Coats. Garments. For the German soldiers. Coats like the color of
the forest."
"Coats?" said Eisner.
He was trembling quite visibly. Leets lit a cigarette and handed it to
the old man. He took it but his eyes would not meet Leets's.
"Mr. Eisner, can you remember, please. These coats?" Shmuel tried
again.
Eisner muttered something.
"He says he's done nothing wrong. He says he's sorry.
He says to tell the authorities he's sorry," Shmuel reported.
"At least he's talking," said Leets, for yesterday the man had simply
stared at them.
"Here," Shmuel said. He'd taken from his field jacket a patch of the
SS camouflage material, out of which the coats had been made.
But Eisner just stared at it as if it came from another planet.
Leets realized how Shmuel had been like this too, in the first days. It
had taken weeks before Shmuel had talked in anything beyond grunts. And
Shmuel had been younger, and stronger, and probably smarter. Tougher,
certainly.
It seemed to go for hours, Shmuel nudging, poking gently, the old man
resisting, looking terrified the whole time.
"Look, this just isn't getting us anywhere," Leets said.
"I agree," Shmuel said.
"Too many strong young men in uniforms. Too many Gentiles."
"I think he's telling us to go for a stroll," said Tony.
"Not a bad idea, actually. Leave the two of them alone."
"All right," said Leets.
"Sure, fine. But remember:
records. It's records we're after. There's got to be some paper work
or something, some orders, packing manifests, I don't know, something
to--" "I know," said Shmuel.
Tony said he had a report to file with JAATIC, and so Leets found
himself alone at Dachau. Unsure of what to do, too agitated to return
to his billet in the town for sleep, he decided to head over to the
warehouse and workshop complex, to the tailor's shop. He walked
through the buildings outside the prison compound;
here there was no squalor. It could have been any military
installation, shabby brick buildings, scruffily landscaped, mostly
deserted, except for guards here and there. Litter and debris lay
about.
After a bit he reached his destination. The place was off limits of
course, for the liberators had seen immediately that such a spot would
become a souvenir hunter's paradise and in fact some elementary looting
had occurred, but Leets had a necessary-duty pass that got him by the
glum sentry standing with carbine outside the building.
It was a popular stop on the Dachau tour, a must along with the gas
chambers and the crematorium and the pits of corpses and the labs where
the grisly human experiments had been performed. Usually it was
crowded with open-mouthed field-grade officers, reporters, V.I.P's, of
one sort or another, all eager for a glimpse into the abyss--somebody
else's abyss, as a matter of fact--but today the shop was empty. Leets
stood silent at one end of the room, a long dim chamber lined with
mirrors. Bolt on bolt of the finest gray-green material lay about and
bundles of silk for flags and banners and wads of gold cord for
embroidering, and reels of piping in all colors and spool on spool of
gold thread. Tailor's dummies, their postures mocking the decaying
dead outdoors, were scattered about, knocked down in the first frenzy
of liberation. The odor was musty--all the heavy wool absorbed the
peculiar tang of dust and blood and the atmosphere was tomb-like,
still.
Leets found himself troubled here. The tailor's workshop was packed
with the pomp of ideology, the quasi-religious grandeur of it all:
swastika, slashing SS collar tabs, flags, vivid unit patches, the
stylized Deco Nazi eagle, wings flared taut, preying, on shoulder tabs.
Leets prowled edgily through this museum, trying to master its lesson,
but could not. At one point he came upon a boxful of the silver
death's-head badges that went on SS caps. He jammed his hand in,
feeling them heavy and shifty and cool, running out from between his
fingers.
They felt in fact like quarters. He looked at one closely:
skull, leering theatrically, carnivorous, laughing, chilling.
Yet the skull was no pure Nazi invention; it was not even German. The
British 17th Lancers had worn them on their trip to the Russian guns at
Balaklava, last century.
He moved on to a bench on which the tailors had abandoned their last
day's work, the sleeve bands worn on dress uniforms. These, strips of
heavy black felt, had been painfully and beautifully embroidered in
heavy gold thread, Gothic letters an inch high, with the names of
various Nazi celebrities or more ancient Teutonic heroes;
it was a German fashion to commemorate a man or a legend by naming a
division after him or it: rein-hard HEYDRICH, THE ODOR EICKE, FLORIAN
GEYER, SS POLIZEI division, dan mark and so forth. The workmanship was
exquisite, but by one of history's crueler ironies, this delicate work
had been performed by Jewish hands.
They'd sewed for their own murderers in order to live.
A few, like Eisner, actually had survived.
Leets passed to a final exhibit--a long rack on which hung five
uniforms for pickup. He hoped their owners had no need of them now.
But they loved uniforms, that was certain. Perhaps here was a lesson,
the very core of the thing. Perhaps the uniforms were not symbolic of
National Socialism, but somehow were National Socialism.
Leets paused with this concept for several seconds, pursuing it; a
religion of decorations and melodrama, theater, the rampant effect, the
stunning. But only a surface, no depth, no meaning. There were four
of the gray-green Waffen SS dress uniforms, basically Wehrmacht tunics
and trousers, dolled up with a little extra flash to make them stand
out. The fifth was different, jet black, the uniform of RSHA, the
terror boys. It was a racy thing, the uniform Himmler himself
preferred, cut tight and elegant, with jodhpurs that laced up the
legs.
With shiny boots and arm band it would form just about the most
pristine statement of the theology of Nazism available. Hitler had
been right about one terrible thing:
it would live for a thousand years, if only in the imagination.
Leets felt its numbing power to fascinate and not a little shame. He
was embarrassed that it mesmerized him so. He could not look away from
the black uniform hanging on the rack.
Yet the uniform signified only one face of it. He'd seen the other
elsewhere. Another spectacle was in tractably bound up with this one.
Standing there alone in the dim stuffy room, the black uniform before
him, he remembered.
The weather had turned cold, this three days earlier, but the gulf
between then and now seemed like a geological epoch.
They were in an open Jeep. He sat in back with Shmuel, and pulled the
field jacket tighter about himself.
Tony was up front, and where Roger should have been, behind the wheel,
another glum boy sat, borrowed from Seventh Army. They'd just bucked
their way through the crowded streets of the thousand-year-old town of
Dachau, quaint place, full of American vehicles and German charms,
among the latter cobblestones, high-roofed stone houses, gilt
metalwork, flower beds, tidy churches. Civilians stood about and
American soldiers and even a few clusters of surrendered feldgraus.
And then they were beyond and then they had stopped. But feeling the
Jeep bump to a halt, he looked up.
"Hey, what's going on?" he asked.
"Welcome to KZ Dachau," said Shmuel.
Seemed to be outside a yard of some sort. A wall of barbed wire closed
it off, filthy place, heaps of garbage strewn all over, smelled to the
heavens. Had some toilets backed up? He couldn't figure it out. The
Germans were usually so tidy.
A rail yard, was that it? Yes, tracks and boxcars and flatcars
standing idle, abandoned, their contents probably looted, tufts of hay
and straw and the cars seemed full of ... what, he couldn't tell. Logs?
Pieces of wood perhaps? The thought of puppets came suddenly to mind,
for in a peculiar way some of the forms seemed almost shaped like small
humans.
He finally recognized it. In the picture Susan had forced him to look
at in London so long ago, it had all been blurred, out of focus. Here,
nothing was out of focus. Most of them were naked and hideously gaunt,
but modesty and nutrition were merely the first and least of the laws
of civilization violated in the rail yard.
The corpses seemed endless, they spilled everywhere, tangled and
knitted together in a great fabric. The food spasmed up Leets's throat
and he fought against the gag reflex that choked him at that instant.
An overwhelming odor, decomposition shot with excretion, those two
great components of the Teutonic imagination--death and shit--blurred
the air.
"You think you've seen it all," said Tony.
The driver was out vomiting by the tire of the Jeep.
He was sobbing.
Leets tried to soothe him.
"Okay, okay, you'll be okay."
"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," said the boy.
"That's okay," Leets said. But he felt like crying himself.
Now he'd seen what they were doing. You could look at it in pictures
and then look away and it was all gone. But here you could not look
away.
Leets in the tailor's shop reached out and touched the black uniform.
It was only cloth.
"Jim?"
He turned.
It was Susan.
Repp awoke when the sun struck his eyes. The sudden dazzle decreed
into his head an edict of confusion: all he could feel was the raw
scratch of straw against his skin. As he moved a leg experimentally, a
high-pitched piping protested; he felt the scurry of something warm and
living nestled in close to him.
Rat.
He coiled in disgust, rolling away. The rat had gotten under him,
attracted by the warmth, and worked its way into his pack. He stared
at it. A bold droll creature, cosmopolitan and fearless, it stood its
ground, climbing even to its haunches, eyes peeping with glittery
intelligence, whiskers absorbing information from the air, pink tongue
animate and ceaseless. There had been rats in Russia, huge things, big
as cows; but this sophisticated creature was Swabian and sly and
mocking. Repp threw his rifle at it, missing, but the clatter sent the
rat scampering deeper into the barn.
Repp pulled himself out of the straw and collected his equipment. The
rat had gnawed through the canvas and gotten to the bread. A chunk was
left, moist and germy, but Repp could not bring himself to put it to
his lips.
Revolted, he tossed it into the shadows of the barn.
He'd come upon this place late last night, an empty farm, fields
fallow, house deserted and stripped, livestock vanished. Yet it had
not been burned--no scorched earth in the path of the advancing
Americans--and, desperately tired, he'd chosen the barn for refuge.
Repp had decided to move across country these days, avoiding the roads
until he was as far from the site of the unpleasantness with the "Das
Reich" Field Police as possible. In, the desolate countryside, along
muddy farm lanes, there was less chance of apprehension--either by SS
or, worse, by the Americans.
Yet now, thinking of them, he became nervous. How close were they, how
long had he slept? He checked his watch: not yet seven. Looking
outside, he saw nothing but a quiet rural landscape. He'd heard cannon
and seen flashes last night after dark: the bastards had to be close.
In the barnyard, Repp took a compass reading, and set himself a
southward course. He knew he was already below Haigerloch, but just
how far he wasn't sure. But south would take him to the great natural
obstacle of the Danube, and he thought he'd cross at the little
industrial town of Tuttlingen. Though the prospect of a bridge
frightened him as well: for bridges were the natural site for the SS to
establish checkpoints.
The fields were deserted under a bright sun, though it remained chilly.
No planting had been done and the careful plots of farmland in the
rolling land lay before him dark and muddy. He strode on, alone in the
world, though keeping alert. At one point he made out two fast-moving
low shapes off the horizon and got into some trees before they saw him,
two big American fighter-bombers, out hunting this spring morning.
Their white stars flashed as they roared overhead and not long
afterward he heard them pounce, some miles off to the east. Presently
a lazy stain of smoke rose to mark their success.
But Repp moved on, uncurious, and did not see another human form until
late that afternoon. He came suddenly to a concrete road that headed
south. He paused for a moment, wishing he had a map. There were no
road signs. The landscape was flat and empty.
He vacillated, fearing he hadn't made enough distance on his slog
through the mud. Either way, the road looked deserted. Finally, he
decided to risk it for a few miles, ready to drop off and disappear at
the first sign of danger.
This damned job is making a coward of me, he thought.
The freedom of the road filled him with a kind of liberation: after the
mud that sucked at his boots, clotting heavily, this firm-packed
surface seemed a paradise.
He plunged on at a furious pace.
He heard the Kubelwagen before he saw it; turning, he was astonished at
how close the small dun-colored car was.
Now where did that bastard come from? he wondered.
The damned thing was too close for him to hide from;
they'd seen him but the first thing he noticed as the car drew closer
was that it was jammed with a pack of sorry-looking regulars, as gray
in the face as in their greatcoats.
The car didn't even slow up for him. It barreled by, its sullen cargo
uninterested in one more fleeing soldier.
Repp, emboldened, hurried on. Several more vehicles passed, some even
with officers, but all jammed with men. There wasn't room for him if
they'd tried--and they were all regulars too, no SS men.
One of them slowed.
"Better get a move on, brother. Americans aren't too far behind."
"I'm fine, thanks," Repp said.
"Sure. You've got surrender written all over you.
Well, good luck, all's lost anyway."
The car sped up and soon was gone.
Just at sunset Repp came upon some old friends. Sergeant Gerngoss and
the whiner Lenz and the others of the engineer platoon waited by the
road.
They hung neatly from branches in a copse of trees.
Gerngoss looked especially apoplectic, outraged, his immense form
bowing the limb almost to the snapping point. His face was purple and
white spittle ringed his lips. Eyes open, booming out of the fat face.
The sign on him read: "this is what happens to scum." Lenz, nearby,
was merely melancholy.
The spectacle had drawn a small crowd of other stragglers.
They stood in awe of the bodies.
"The SS did it to 'em," somebody explained.
"The fat one there really put up a fight. The SS boys said they'd shot
some of their pals up near Haigerloch."
"The SS shits only knew it was an engineer platoon, and here was an
engineer platoon."
Repp slipped away; he was working on the next problem:
the bridge. The Danube here was young, formed not fifty kilometers to
the west at Donaueschingen, from two converging Schwarzwald streams,
the Breg and Brigach, but still it moved with considerable force
through a picturesque but enclosed defile of steep cliffs.
He could not swim it this time of year, for it was swollen with winter
meltings; he didn't think he had time to hunt up a boat. He walked on
down the road and went around the few houses--an unnamed hamlet--that
stood on this side of the Danube from Tuttlingen. Cutting through
backyards and over stone walls, he came soon to a road and beyond it a
stand of trees. He penetrated this growth and found himself staring
shortly into yawning space. He was at cliffs edge. He wished he had
binoculars.
Still, below, he could make out the ribbon of water, smooth and flat
and dark, bisected neatly by a six-arched stone bridge. A road led
down the cliff to it and, looking carefully in the falling darkness, he
was able to detect two Mark IV Panthers dug in next to the bridge.
Dappled Kubelwagens and a few motorcycles were ranged along it. He
thought he could see men laboring just beyond the bridge to dig
defensive positions. And wasn't that a raft of some sort moored to one
of the center arches, and two soldiers struggling to plant
explosives?
Repp realized the mess in a flash. Of course. The engineers who'd
been sent south to blow the thing had been executed.
He knew that if he headed down there with his vague story and obsolete
papers, he'd either be shot out of hand as a deserter or thrown into
the perimeter. These boys were sure to make a fight of it when the
Americans arrived, have some fun with their antitank gear, and then
fall back across the bridge and blow it to pebbles in the Ami faces. He
envied the fellow whose job it was--a real war to fight, not these
games--and briefly wondered about him; an old hand, probably, from the
cleverness of the arrangement, not one to panic in the face of fire. He
wished him luck, but it wasn't his business.
His job was merely to get beyond, to keep moving south.
But how to get beyond?
He felt the press of time. How soon would the Americans arrive? Damn,
he had to get across before they showed. He didn't want to give them
another crack at him: one had been enough. Yet to head farther east
along this bank was no solution; if anything the river became more of
an obstacle. There were certain to be other bridges and other
battles.
Repp pondered, crouched at the edge of the cliff.
"Enjoying the scenery, soldier?" a harsh voice demanded.
Repp turned; the man had approached quietly. He knew what he was
doing. In the fading light, Repp recognized tough features and
unsympathetic eyes: an SS sergeant in camouflage tunic, cradling an
STG, stood before him. Over the sergeant's shoulder back through the
trees, Repp could see a half-track out on the road, its cargo a crowd
of soldiers.
"Yes, Sergeant," Repp replied. His hand had edged cautiously inside
his tunic.
"You're another wanderer, I suppose. Separated, but still trying to
join up, eh?" Rich amusement showed in his eyes.
"I have papers," Repp explained.
"Well, damn your papers. Wipe your ass with them! I
don't care if you've got a note from the Fuhrer himself, excusing you
from heavy duty. We're preparing a little festival for the Americans
down at the bridge and I'm sure you'll be happy to join us. Everybody's
invited.
You'll fight one more battle and fight it as an SS man, or you'll taste
this," the STG.
Repp stood. Should he shoot the man? If he did, the only way out was
down, fifty meters, the face of the cliff.
"Yes, sir," he said reluctantly.
Goddamn! he thought. What now?
He bent to pick up the rifle.
"Leave that, my friend," the sergeant said sweetly, as if he were
delivering a death sentence.
"It's no good against tanks and tanks are on the menu tonight. Or had
you thought I'd turn my back and you'd let me have it?"
"No, Sergeant."
"Major Buchner said round up bodies, and by God I've done it. Sorry,
stinking cowardly bodies, but bodies just the same. Now move your
butt," and he grabbed Repp and threw him forward contemptuously.
Repp landed in the dirt, scraping his elbow; as he rose, the sergeant
kicked him in the buttocks, driving him ahead oafishly, a clown. Repp
stood, rubbing his pain--some of the men in the half-track laughed--and
ran forward like a fool, the sergeant chasing and hooting.
"Run, skinny, run, the Americans are coming."
Repp scurried to the half-track. Hands drew him in and he found
himself in a miserable group of disarmed Wehrmacht soldiers, perhaps
ten in all, over whom sat like lords two SS corporals with machine
pistols.
"Another volunteer," said the sergeant, climbing into the cab of the
vehicle.
"Now let's get moving."
That Repp had been taken again and was about to fight in what must
certainly be counted a suicidal engagement was one of his great
concerns; but another, more immediate one was this Major Buchner, who,
if his first name was Wilhelm, had served with Repp at Kursk.
"Okay, boys," the sergeant yelled when the half-track, after a descent,
halted, "time to work for your suppers.
Sir," he called, "ten more, shirkers the lot, but charmed to join us
just the same."
"Good, they're still trying to get this damned thing mined," replied a
loud voice from ahead somewhere in the dark--Willi Buchner's voice?
"Now get 'em digging.
Our friends will be here, you can bet on it." His voice seemed to come
from above and Repp realized, as his eyes adjusted in the night, that
the officer stood atop the turret of one of the Panthers.
He turned to his fellows, who lounged around the informal barricade of
vehicles at the bridge.
"I promise you some fun before sunrise, boys, party favors and all."
A chorus of laughter rose from around him but someone close to Repp
muttered, "Christ, another crazy hero."
"Here, friend," someone said without troubling to veil his hostility to
Repp, "your weapon for the evening."
It was a shovel.
"Now come on, ladies, let's get moving. You're SS men now and the SS
always stays busy." Repp and the other new arrivals were directed to
the approach where others were already digging under the machine
pistols of patrolling SS troopers.
"I'd dig if I were you. When the Americans come in their big green
tanks, you'll want a place to stay."
Repp saw the implication of the arrangement in a fraction of a second.
The SS men would be clustered around the dug-in vehicles at the
barricade with the heavier weapons--he'd seen a 75-millimeter gun as
well as the two tanks, and several MG-42's; the rest of them, the new
recruits rounded up at gunpoint, would be out here in the open in
holes. At the last moment they'd be armed with
something--Panzerfausts, Repp supposed, but their main job was merely
to die--to attract some fire, knock out a tank or two, confuse the
invaders, impede their progress for just a moment while the Panthers
and the gun took their bearings to fire. Then the SS boys would fall
back across the bridge on the time bought by the conscriptees, and blow
it, and wait out the end of the war in Tuttlingen; for the Wehrmacht
there'd be no retreat, only another Stalingrad.
"Herr Sergeant," a man next to Repp protested, "this is a mistake. I've
got leave papers. Here. I was in the hospital--Field Number Nine, up
near Stuttgart--and they let me out, just before the Americans came.
I'm no good anymore. Blown up twice in Russia and once in--" "Shut
up," said the SS man.
"I don't give a shit what your papers say. Here you are and by God
here you stay. I hope you can work a Panzerfaust as well as you do
that tongue of yours." He stalked away from the fellow.
"It's no fair," said the man bitterly, hunkering down next to Repp to
dig.
"I've got the papers. I'm out of it. I did my part. Pain in my head,
bad, all the damn time.
Headaches just won't stop. Shake so bad sometimes I can hardly
piss."
"Best dig for now," Repp cautioned.
"That doesn't count a bit with these shits. They'd just as soon shoot
you as the Americans. They hanged a bunch of engineers back a way."
"It's just no fair. I'm out of it, out of the whole thing.
I never thought I'd get out of Russia but somehow--" "Keep down," Repp
whispered, "that sergeant just looked over here." He threw himself
into the shoveling.
"You know what this is about, don't you?" the man said.
"I don't know anything except a man with a gun says dig, so I dig."
"Well, it's nothing to do with the war. The war's over.
What I hear is the big shots are escaping with the Jews' gold. That's
right, all the gold they stole from the Jews.
But the Americans want it. They're going for the Jews' gold too.
Everybody wants it, now the Jews are finished. And we're caught right
in the middle. That's what it's--" "To hell with fancy talk.
Professor," Repp said.
"You can't argue with a man with an automatic."
They dug together in silence for a while. Repp working hard, finding a
release in the effort. He squared his part of the pit off, packing the
dirt into a rampart on the lip, sculpting a firing notch. Around him
he could hear the clink of shovels going into earth and men quietly
groaning, resigned. SS troopers prowled among them.
Meanwhile, back among the vehicles on the bridge, other SS men moved
about, arranging sandbags, tinker Ring with their weapons, uncrating
ammunition. Now and then a single detonation sounded in the distance,
and once a long sputter of automatic weapon fire clattered out.
"We ought to build a grenade trap," said Repp, sweating profusely in
his labor, his skin warm in the cool night air. He was half worried
about blisters that might throw off his shooting, but he couldn't take
the possibility too seriously. If he didn't get through tonight
somehow, there'd be no shooting.
"Yeah, you're right," said the professor.
"In case the bastards get in close."
They bent to the bottom of the pit to scour out an angled hole into
which to kick grenades to contain their blast, and suddenly the
professor whispered into Repp's ear, "I think we ought to make a break
for it. Not now, but later, when the holes are all dug and the SS
bastards are back by their tanks. We can move on down the river, get
away from the fighting. When the Americans wipe out this bunch, we
can--" "Never make it," Repp said.
"Man on the turret has a machine gun. He'd have us cold unless we
could fly like one of those fancy jets. I checked it out, first
thing."
"Damn! Come on, friend. It's death here for sure.
That's what they got us here for--to die. They don't care a shit for
us; in fact they never did. They just want to take a few more Ameri--"
But Repp was listening to the officer--Buchner? perhaps--as he said to
the sergeant, "Get me a driver and a machine gunner. I'm going to take
a Kubel up the hill and see what's keeping our visitors."
"Sir, I could get some of the fellows--"
"I'll do it myself," said Buchner, typically. Yes, it was Buchner. In
the East he'd quickly picked up a reputation for exposing himself
unnecessarily to fire.
"I'll blink my lights when I'm coming in. Got it?"
"Yes, Herr Major."
He was gone then, and Repp waited with the professor in the trench.
"We can't wait until the fight begins. We'll never get out then. We'll
just get the Amis good and mad and they'll blow our brains out," the
professor said.
"They smell that gold."
Heavy firing broke out ahead. The American column must have run into
some resistance in the hamlet. Repp could hear machine guns and tank
cannon. Whoever was left up there was putting up quite a fight.
"We're right in the zone of that gun," Repp replied.
"He'd just chop us down. He'd make sausage of us.
There's no point to it. Relax for now. Do you have a cigarette?"
"I don't smoke. I was hit in the throat and lost my taste for it."
"Okay, you men," the sergeant called out.
"Be alert.
Any minute the show begins."
"I can't see a goddamned thing," said the professor.
"They must really want that gold. They usually don't like to advance
in the dark."
"Now don't get excited, fellows," crooned the sergeant from back at the
vehicles, low and gentle, "just take it easy."
"We don't have any guns, you bastards," someone yelled from nearby.
"Oh, we haven't forgotten the Wehrmacht."
Repp could hear MP-40 bolts snapping. A report almost made him
flinch--one of the Panthers kicking into life so there'd be power for
its turret. The other joined and the smell of exhaust floated down,
and over the engine purr came a deeper moan as the turrets tracked,
aligning their long 75-millimeter barrels down the approach.
A man suddenly leaned over the edge of their hole.
"Here," he said, his breath billowing foggily in the cool, "ever use
one of these rocket things? Line up the target through the rear sight
against the pin on the warhead.
Trigger's up top, the lever, crank it back to arm it, jam forward to
fire. She'll go like hell and blow anything the Amis make to
smithereens."
"Jesus Christ," moaned the professor, "that's all you're giving us,
PanzerfaustsT' "Sorry, brother. I do what I'm told. Go for the tanks
first, then the half-tracks. But watch them too, they're more than
just troop carriers. Some of them mount four half-inch machine guns on
a kind of wire frame. Devilish things. And remember, no firing till
the major gives the word."
He was gone into another hole.
"We're cooked," said the professor.
"This is suicide."
He held up the Panzerfaust, a thirty-two-inch tube with a swollen
five-inch bulb at one end.
"One shot and it's all over."
The firing up ahead picked up in pitch. Light flashed through the
night.
"Goddamn. I didn't want to end up in a goddamn hole with American
tanks in front and SS tanks in back.
Goddamn, not after what I've been through." He began very softly to
cry, and put his head against his arm at the edge of the trench.
The firing stopped.
"All right," Repp said quietly.
"Here they come. Get ready, old friend."
The professor leaned back in the trench. Repp could see the wet track
of tears running down his face, but he'd come to some arrangement with
himself and looked at least resigned.
"We shquld have at least tried," he said.
"Just to die like this, for nothing, that's what's so shitty about all
this."
"I think I see them," said Repp, peering ahead. He cranked back the
arm on the trigger lever to arm his Panzerfaust, and put it over his
shoulder. It was slightly front-heavy but he braced it through the
notch in the rampart he'd built. The sight was a primitive thing, a
metal ring that lined up with a pin up at the warhead.
"Here they come," he said flatly.
"Jesus Christ, that's the major. He just blinked."
"Easy, men, the major's coming in," the sergeant yelled.
"Here they come," said Repp. He was really concentrating.
His two right fingers tightened on the trigger lever.
"Are you crazy?" the professor whispered harshly.
"That's the major."
"Here they come," said Repp. He could see the Klibelwagen clearly now,
its pale-yellow-and-sand camouflage scheme lighter against the
blackness, as it ripped along the road at them, trailing dust. Its
lights blinked once again. Willi Buchner stood like a yachtsman in the
cockpit of his craft, hands set on the windscreen frame, hair blowing
against the breeze, a bored look on his face.
Repp fired.
The Kubelwagen ruptured into a flash, concussion instantaneous and
enormous. The vehicle veered to rest on its side, flames tumbling out
its gas tank.
"Jesus," said the professor in the moment of silence that followed,
"those poor--" "Who the fuck fired, goddamn I'll kill you!" bellowed
the sergeant. But then everybody opened up. Two or three more
Panzerfausts flashed out and detonated, a machine gun back on the
barricade began to howl, rifles barked up and down the line, and in
exclamation point the Panther 75 boomed, a long gout of flame flaring
out from its barrel.
Repp grabbed the professor savagely and pulled him close.
"Come on! Now's the time. Stay close and you might live."
He flung him back and slithered over the edge of the trench and began
to crawl toward the bridge. The shooting mounted and he could hear the
sergeant arguing with it, yelling, "Goddamn, you fools, cease
firing!"
In the confusion Repp made it to the barricade, feeling the professor
scuttling along behind him. He stood boldly and stepped between a
Klibel and a cycle out onto the bridge itself.
The firing died.
"Who fired? Who fired? Oh, Christ, that was Major
Buchner," yelled the sergeant up front.
"Goddamn, I'll kill all of you pigs if you don't tell me!"
Repp gestured "Come on" with his head and strode forward, bold as the
Reichsfilhrer himself.
A trooper materialized out of the dark, rifle leveled at Repp's
middle.
"Where are you going, friend?" he asked.
Repp hit him with the shaft of his Panzerfaust, a murderous blow
against the side of the head, just under the helmet. The jolt sent
vibrations through his arm, and the trooper fell heavily to one side,
his equipment jangling on the bridge.
"Run," Repp whispered, grabbing the professor and half hurling him down
the bridge.
"Hurry!"
The professor took off in lumbering panic and seemed to gain
distance.
"There he is! There he is!" Repp shouted.
By that time several others had seen him and the firing started almost
immediately.
As the blizzard of lead seemed to tear apart the world through which
the professor fled. Repp eased down the incline under the bridge and
made it to river's edge.
He found the raft the demolitions detail had left tied to one of the
piles, and threw in the pack and helmet, and then slipped into the icy
water and began to drift through the blackness, clinging to the raft.
He was almost across when the Americans arrived and the battle began,
and by the time he got out of the water, shivering and exhausted, the
Ami tanks had gotten the range and began to blow apart the barricade in
earnest.
Repp crawled up the bank. Behind him, multiple small suns descended in
a pinkish haze and tracers flicked across the water. But he knew he
was out of range.
And that he was still on schedule.
 "What are you doing here?" was all he could think to say.
"I work here. I'm with the field hospital."
"Oh, God, Susan. Then you've seen it, seen it all."
"You forget: I knew it all."
"We never believed."
"Now of course it's too late."
"I suppose. How did you end up her eT "A punishment. I made waves. I
made real waves. I got publicly identified with the Zionists. Then
Fischelson died and the Center died and the British made a stink, and
they sent me to a field unit in a DP camp.
British influence. It was said I didn't appreciate London.
And when I heard about Belsen, I tried to get there. But it was in the
British zone and they wouldn't have me.
Then came Dachau, American. And my doc at the DP camp did think highly
of me, and he knew how important it was to me. So he got me the
orders. See? Easy, if you have the right connections."
"It's very bad, isn't it."
"Bad. That's not a terribly eloquent word. But, yes, it is bad. And
Dachau is nothing compared to Belsen. And Belsen is nothing compared
to Sobibor. And Sobibor is nothing compared to Treblinka. And
Treblinka is nothing compared to Auschwitz."
They were strange names to Leets.
"Haven't heard of them. Haven't been reading the papers, I guess."
"I guess not."
"Did you see Shmuel? He's with us. He's still fine. I told you he'd
be fine."
"I heard. An OSS detachment. With a Jew in an American uniform.
That's how I knew."
"We're still after him. After that German. That's what we're here
for."
"One German?"
"Yeah. A special guy. With a special--" "Jim, there were thousands of
them. Thousands.
What's one more or less?"
"No, this one's different."
"No. They're all the same."
But Tony was not filing a report to JAATIC. He was writing a letter to
his older brother, in response to a letter that had finally caught up
with him earlier.
"Dear Randolph," he wrote.
It was of course splendid to hear from you. I am glad Lisbon is
interesting and that Priscilla is well.
Please do not believe any of the rumors, and do not let them upset you.
I realize my behavior has been difficult to fathom of late and that it
must be the subject of much discussion in certain circles. I have not
surrendered to the Americans. I do not flee my own kind. I do not
think myself Robert
Graves. I am not insane, though that was not a question in your note;
I still sensed it beneath your Foreign Office diction.
I am quite well off. I am totally recovered. No, I do not see women.
Perhaps I should, but I do not. I do not see old friends either. They
are rather too kind for my somewhat peculiar tastes. I am among
Americans by choice: because, fools all of them, they talk only of
themselves. Children: they prattle incessantly about self and city,
country, past, future, manufacturing noise from every orifice. They
have no curiosity beyond their own skin. I do not have to make
explanations. I do not get long, sad stares of sympathy. No one
inquires solicitously how I'm getting along In The Aftermath.. ..
Dearest Randolph, others lost children and wives in the bombings.
Jennifer and Tim are quite gone now; I've accepted it and hardly think
of it. I do not, as you suggest, still blame myself. Things are quite
chipper here. We are hunting down a dreadful Jerry. It's great fun,
most fun I've had in the war.. ..
But Tony stopped writing. He felt himself about to begin to cry again.
He crushed the document up into a ball, and hurled it across the room.
He sat back, and pinched the bridge of his nose. The pain would not go
away. He doubted if it would, ever. He wished he had a nip of
something. But he didn't. He thought he might try and get some sleep.
Where was Leets? Should he head back to the office, where the two Jews
were? He had to do something, he knew that for sure.
The old man slept. Shmuel watched him. He lay on the cot, stirring
now and again--the jab of an interior pain. His breath came shallow
and dry, a rattle, and a bubble of drool inflated in one corner of his
slack mouth. His skin was milky and loose and spotted, shot with a
network of subtle blue veins. He'd pulled the blanket around him like
a prayer shawl, though in doing so a foot fell free and it dangled off
the cot. Somehow this old creature had survived, another freak like
Shmuel, a meaningless exception whose only function was to provide a
scale for the larger numbers of extinction.
Why couldn't the Americans have captured some nice plump SS officer? An
eager collaborator, a cynic, a traitor?
Or why couldn't they have arrived just a day earlier, before the
warehouses had been looted? No--again, this Repp had been lucky. He'd
left nothing behind, leaving them to hunt through the pale, pained
memories of Eisner the tailor.
"Remember: the records," Leets had said.
But instead he remembered his own first interrogation with Leets and
Outhwaithe: two hard, glossy Gentiles, eyes blank, faces impassive. Men
in uniforms: was there a difference? Hard men, with guns and jobs to
do, ho time to let human feelings get in the way. The whole world was
wearing a uniform, except for the Jews. No, the Jews had a uniform
too: blue and white stripes, a jagged, dirty star clipped over the
heart. That was old Eisner's uniform, that was the uniform Shmuel
preferred, not this-Startled, he looked at his own clothes. He was
wearing American boots, field pants and a wool OD shirt. To old
Eisner he was an American, the language made no difference.
Eisner the tailor still slept fitfully on the cot as Shmuel slipped
out. He did not have far to go. Of the warehouses there were two
kinds: badly looted and heavily guarded. Soldiers marked the latter,
smashed doors and a litter of debris the former. Shmuel immediately
found the single exception to this rule, a brick building that was not
guarded, and had not been looted.
He stepped inside. It smelled musty and the darkness clamped down on
him. He stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Small chinks of light
glittered in the roof, almost like stars, and slowly in the darkness
shapes appeared.
Pile and pile, rank on rank, neatly arranged after the Teutonic
fashion, were blue-and-white prison uniforms.
"No. This guy is different. I don't know why, but he is.
He's a curious combination of valor and evil. He's very brave. He's
enormously brave. He's much braver than I am. But he's--" He paused,
groping.
She would not help him.
"I can't figure out how they turned out such men," Leets said.
"You see, we always expect them to be cowards.
Or perverts. Or nuts, of some sort. What if they were just like us?
What if some of them were better even? Braver? Tougher? What if some
were heroes. Unbelievable heroes?"
"You melodramatize. I've seen their work. They were grim, seedy
little killers, that's all. Nothing glamorous in it at all. They
killed in the millions. Men, women. The children, especially. At
Auschwitz, at the end, they threw children living into the ovens."
"I asked Tony about all this. He's a very brilliant man, you realize.
Do you know what he said? He said, "Don't get too philosophical, chum.
We're merely here to kill the swine." But that's not enough, don't you
see?"
"You're obsessed with this guy, that's all I see. And he's nothing,
he's no concept, no symbol. He's just a pig with a gun. It's the gun
that makes him special."
Shmuel, back in the office, slipped quickly into the uniform. He felt
nothing; it was only cloth, with a faintly musty smell, from long
storage.
He smoked another cigarette while he waited for Eisner to awake or for
Leets or Outhwaithe to return. He knew better than to jerk the tailor
out of his sleep. Now where were Leets and Outhwaithe? Though perhaps
it was best they were away for so long, it might give him a chance to
finally make contact here.
As he waited, a curious thing began to happen. It occurred to him that
there would in fact be a future. For the first time in years he
allowed himself to think of it. In the camps as an article of faith
one kept one's hopes limited to the next day, not the next year. Yet
in his sudden new leisure, Shmuel began to think of a new way of life.
Certainly he wouldn't stay in Europe. The Christians had tried to kill
him; there was nothing for Jews in Europe now. You'd never know who'd
been a Nazi;
they'd all say it had been others, but each time you heard a German
voice or saw a certain hard set of the eyes or a train of boxcars or
even a cloud of smoke, the sensation would be discomfort. The Zionists
were al 7
ways talking about Palestine. He'd never listened.
Enough to concentrate on without dreams of a desert somewhere, Arabs,
fig trees, whatever. It seemed absurd.
But now--well, it was there, or America.
The old man stirred.
"You are feeling all right, Mr. Eisner, now?"
"Not so bad," said Eisner.
"It's been worse." Then he saw Shmuel.
"A uniform? And whose is that?"
"Mine, believe it or not. I had one like it anyway. At the camp in
the East. Called Auschwitz."
"A terrible place, so I've heard. Still, it's a surprise."
"It's true."
"I thought you were with the Gentiles."
"With, yes. Part of, no. But these fellows are decent, not like the
Germans."
"All Gentiles frighten me."
"That's why I'm here alone."
"Still after the records? I should remember records, all I've been
through. Listen, I'll tell you, I know nothing of records. The
civilian, Kohl, he kept the records. A German."
"Kohl?" said Shmuel, writing it.
"Ferdinand Kohl. I'll spell it if you like. It makes no difference
though. He's dead. Not a bad man, but that's how it goes. The
inmates caught him on liberation day and beat him to death. But
there's too many other sorrows in here"--heart--"to make room for
him."
"Mine's crowded as well," Shmuel said.
"But coats I remember. Battle coats. For the forest.
Very fancy. We made them in the thousands."
"When?"
"Over the years. For four years; then last year we changed the
pattern. First, a kind of smock, a tunic.
Then a real true coat."
"A special demand? For a group. Say, a hundred to a hundred and
twenty-five. Do you remember?"
"I just sewed the buttons on, that's all. A hundred and fifty coats a
day, on went the buttons, that's all. Any fool could have sewn on
buttons."
"But no special demands?"
"No. Only--No, nothing."
"Only what?" He paused.
"Please. Who knows?"
"Kohl in early April I remember complaining about big shots and their
special privileges. A German hero had his men here for special
antitank training and demanded they be refitted with the coats as
theirs had worn thin."
"Hero. His name?"
"If I had it then, it's gone now. So many things I forget. My boy was
named David, my two girls Shuli and Rebecca. Them I remember. David
had blond hair, can you believe it? I know the girls and their mother
are gone. Everybody who went East is gone. But maybe the Germans
spared him because his hair was their color.
We thought it was a curse, his blondness, that they would take him from
us. But maybe a blessing, no? Who could tell such things? A learned
rabbi could maybe expl--" "Mr. Eisner. The coats. The hero."
"Yes, yes, forgive me. Thinking, all the time thinking.
Hard to remember details."
"Kohl. Mr. Kohl. He didn't want to give up the coats."
"Kohl. Yes, old Kohl. Not a bad sort, notions of fairness. He tried
to say No. The boys at the front need the jackets. Not rear-echelon
bastards. But the hero got his way. He had papers from the highest
authority. Herr Kohl thought this ridiculous. From an opera. I heard
him tell Sergeant Luntz that. Heroes from an opera a monkey wrench
throwing into his shop. It was no good.
My David, he'll grow up to be strong. On a farm somewhere, in the
country. He was only three. He hadn't had any instruction. He won't
know he was a Jew. Maybe it's better. Maybe that's the best way to be
a Jew in this world, not to know. He's six now, David, a fine healthy
boy on a farm somewhere in the country."
Shmuel patiently let him lapse into silence. When he was done, Shmuel
saw tears star the old man's eyes and at the same time noticed that the
old man wasn't so old:
he was just a man, a father, who hadn't been able to do anything for
his children. Better maybe that he'd died so he wouldn't have to live
with their accusing ghosts in his head. The Germans: they made you
hate yourself for being too weak to fight them, too civilized to demand
revenge.
"Opera?" Shmuel finally said.
"I missed that."
"What the fellow called it, the hero fellow. His plan.
They name everything, the Gentiles. They have to name things. This
from an opera, by Wagner. Herr Kohl hated Wagner. It made his behind
doze, I heard him tell Luntz."
"What was the name?" Shmuel asked, very carefully.
"Operation Nibelungen," the old man who was not so old replied.
Shmuel wrote it down.
"It's funny. Us. In this place," he said.
She'd lit a cigarette. It had gotten dark now, and in the long still
room with the mirrors and the hanging uniforms, he could see the orange
glow.
"Why?" he asked.
"Why did you come looking for me? You didn't come for my theories on
German evil surely."
"No. I just wanted to tell you something."
"Okay. So shoot. Tell me anything."
"I'm divorcing Phil."
"No kidding?"
"I wrote him. I said I wanted to go to the Middle East. He wrote
back.
"What, are you crazy, you think I spent all this time on a goddamned
tin can to go live in some desert?" So, that was it. I won't see him
again."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Fischelson's dead, I told you?"
"Yes?"
"And the money's gone. It was all set up by this guy, this
Hirsczowicz. A millionaire. But the money ran out.
What little there was, most of it was lost somehow, in the early days
of the war. So there's nothing in London anymore. And there's nothing
back in the States. Not a goddamned thing but people talking about how
they suffered without the meat."
"I'm sorry you're so bitter."
"I'm not bitter at all. I'm going to go to Palestine.
Nothing but Jews there, Jim. It's the only place in the world where
the Jews will be welcomed. That's where I'm going."
"Susan."
"That's where we'll all have to go," she said.
Her cigarette had gone out. Now, in the room, total darkness had
arrived. He could hear her voice, disembodied.
"I'll talk to him. To the Jew. Shmuel. Do you know he had quite a
reputation as a writer in Warsaw? I'll talk to him. He'll go too. He
has nowhere else to go."
"That's all?"
"Yes. I suppose I wanted to tell you I don't hate you. I don't want
you to die. I never did. I remove the curse. I hope you get your
man. The German."
"I will," he said.
"Or he'll get me."
The old man was tired now. Shmuel wanted him to sleep in the room but
he refused.
"A nap, not so bad. But the night? I have nightmares, you see, I wake
up. It helps to know where I am. Besides, the barracks aren't so bad
now. They've moved the sick ones out. It's what I know."
"All right. It's all right with me. You can walk?"
"Not so fast, but I end up where I'm going."
He got the man up, and pulled the blanket around his thin shoulders
against the cold. They walked in the twilight down the street to the
Lager, the prison compound.
It was warm, really too warm for the blanket, yet the old man clutched
it around him with blue-veined fists. He leaned on Shmuel, shuffling
along on frail legs. Shmuel felt the heart pulsing behind the thin
bones of his chest.
A Jew, thought Shmuel. A living European Jew: the first he'd spoken to
in months. It came as a shock. He'd been so long among the Gentiles.
Not Germans, but still Gentiles. They didn't know; they couldn't
share. Earnest, apologetic, efficient men: decent. Intelligent
even,
but it was as if a different kind of brain filled their skulls. They
worshiped a man skewered by his hands on a lumber cross: pain and blood
at the very center of it.
Shmuel preferred this eternal sufferer, pathetic yet dignified, who
leaned on him as they neared the guardhouse, the entrance to the
compound.
When they reached it, a flashlight from an American sentry beamed onto
them. It seemed to halt at their prison stripes as if those said
enough and then blinked out.
"Go on," said a voice.
They walked on through the familiar geography, across the roll-call
plaza, down the street between the barracks.
"It's over there," said the old man, pointing.
"I know," said Shmuel.
Shmuel helped him to the building.
"You needn't come inside."
"No, you helped, now I help you. That's how it should be."
"You, a Jew, a yeshiva boy, you are helping them fight the Germans?"
"A little. There's not much I can do. They've got machines and guns.
They really don't need me. But I can do little things."
"Good. We should have fought. But who knew?"
"Nobody knew. Nobody could have guessed."
"Maybe so," said the old man.
"Maybe so."
They went into the building. Faces peered down from the tiers of bunks
and voices hummed. The smell was almost blinding; Shmuel remembered
through the tears that welled into his eyes. There was room for the
old man near the stove. He took him over and helped him lie down. He
was light and dry and fell quiet quickly.
But his hand groped out once, snatching at Shmuel's wrist.
Shmuel drew back as the man's breathing deepened into regularity. He
was aware that a dozen gaunt faces stared down at him, death masks, and
he didn't care for the sensation. An under tang of DDT, from a recent
delousing, hung heavy and powdery in the close air, causing his
nostrils to flare.
Shmuel stepped to the door and out. Cool air flooded him, smooth and
sweet. Above, an abundance of stars rose in their tiers, like the eyes
of the men in the bunks.
There: a metaphor, drawn from the camps.
"Like the eyes of the men in the bunks." Only a Jew would see stars
blurry and infinite in bands from horizon to horizon and think of the
white eyes of men at the point of death. Would he continue to draw on
the camps for metaphors, was that how deep they'd been driven into him?
Did the Germans own his imagination, a final, subtler purchase, one
that would seal him off from human company, the metaphorical Mussulman,
forever?
Yet as he in despair realized the answer was Yes, he realized also that
the problem was as much literary as psychological. And from that there
followed immediately the recognition that he was, for the first time in
many long years, thinking of literature again. He thought he ought to
write about the camps, and that sometime, perhaps in a year or so, when
one would not confuse zeal with excellence, passion with brilliance, he
might in fact, if only as a private exercise.
As he walked down the street, between the mute rows of barracks, he
realized what an awesome task he'd so slightly just evoked; perhaps
even an impossible one. It was enormous in a thousand ways: had any
man the right to try and spin stories from a tragedy so huge?
What of people of ill spirit who would read such accounts purely for
the extreme sensations they caused, which of course was not the point
at all? What was the artist's responsibility to the gone, the lost,
the unheard, the forgotten? And he saw also that in a certain way the
imagination had been forever altered. The boundary of evil had been
pushed back beyond the horizon on the one hand, but on the other, the
capacity of the individual to withstand and triumph over the murderous
intentions of the State had also been pushed back. A new form would
have to be found, something that would encompass these new boundaries
and at the same time convey the immensities of the act of Murder: a new
esthetic for the post-atrocity world. Again, the problem of metaphor
thrust itself upon him. In the camps, metaphor was everywhere: life
was a metaphor, death was a metaphor. How could art be spun from a
reality already so charged with elemental symbolism, the vision of hell
the Germans had labored so mightily to construct on this earth: satanic
sparks, the flames, the awful stench, the dogs straining on their
leashes, fangs glistening?
Perhaps it was beyond the reach of the artist.
You'd have to concentrate on something small: a parable;
panoramas were incomprehensible. Concentrate on one man: how he lived,
with as much dignity as the times permitted, and how he died, senseless
perhaps, one more sliver of ash in a whirlwind dank with clouds of ash,
but convinced somehow that his life had had some meaning.
No, he thought, I could never write that. I simply am not good enough.
Face it, as a writer you weren't much, a few pitiful essays in
long-forgotten Yiddish journals in a city that no longer existed. What
positions had he attacked, what had he defended? He could not even
remember.
Had he been a Marxist, a poet, a historian, a novelist, a philosopher,
a Zionist? No, not a Zionist, not even in the last days before the war
had come, that hot August of '39 when Zionism flared like a contagion
through the Quarter, and even the richest of them, the most
assimilated, had been consumed in its vision. But that had been
dreams, absurd, out of scale, the problems so immense.
Next year in Jerusalem! Insane! The British, the Arabs, thousands of
miles to travel. He hadn't bought it then--just more dreamy Jews
getting on with their own destruction.
But now he saw the dream wasn't so outsized. It was prosaic, a
necessity. For where else was there to go?
Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. Home of the Jews. Now that would
be something, wouldn't it? That would be worth-An immense pleasure
spread through him. Look at me, he thought, I am thinking again.
He did not see them until they were quite close and then he had not
time to display surprise. They seemed to materialize from nowhere,
though in a splinter of a second he realized he hadn't been able to
make them out against the looming bulk of the guardhouse. And yet
there was a familiarity about them, as though old fears had taken on a
familiar guise, and so he absurdly was not frightened and if there was
to be any mercy in the next several seconds it was that one: that
Shmuel was not frightened as the rushing forms closed on him and held
him down.
"SS shit," he heard in Polish, "SS shit."
"I--" Shmuel started and then something enormous crashed into his
skull. He felt his head innate in pain and it seemed the abundance of
stars had come down to crush him and they hit him again and again and
again.

H.
e expected trouble at the Rheinbrucke and hid in a stand of trees a few
hundred yards down the road. The guards on the bridge appeared to be
regular Army troops, not Waffen SS men, loafing in the sun. Repp
studied them for some time, wishing he had binoculars to bring them up,
see their procedures and moods. He tried to keep himself calm and his
mind clear: only the bridge, its sentry post, and three lazy soldiers
stood between him and safety. Once across, he had only a few blocks or
so through the city to negotiate.
He'd feared a massive jam-up here, a refugee column, farmers' carts
heaped with furniture, frightened children;
officers' staff cars honking, the wounded hanging desperately on the
backs of tanks; grim SS men patrolling for deserters. Instead, only
this pleasant still scene, almost traffickless--occasionally a truck
crossed, and once a sedan, but mostly farmers' wagons heaped with hay,
not furniture, and pedestrians. From his vantage point, Repp could
also see the Bodensee over the rail of the bridge, stretching away,
glinting in the May sun, its horizon lost in a haze: the Lake of
Konstanz, a true inland sea. There seemed no war here at all. Was he
too late? Since Tuttlingen, he'd traveled mostly by night,
staying away from main roads, moving south, always south, across fields
and through scraggly forests: out of touch, on his own, fugitive from
his friends now as well as his enemies.
The sergeant in the sentry booth watched him come, but said nothing.
Repp recognized the type, tired veteran, laconic of speech, economical
of gesture, face seamed with hard knowledge. No need to yell when Repp
was already approaching.
"Say, friend," the sergeant finally said, unlimbering himself from the
stool on which he sat. He picked up his MP by the sling, toting it
with the easy motions of over-familiarity.
"And where might you be headed? Switzerland, I suppose. Don't you
know that's for big shots, not little fishies like you or me?"
Repp smiled weakly.
"No, sir," he said.
"Then what's your sorry story? Running to, or running ^row?"
Repp handed him his papers.
"I was separated from my unit," he explained as the sergeant scanned
them.
"A big American attack. Worse than Russia."
"And I suppose you think your unit's on the other side of the bridge?"
the sergeant asked.
Repp had no answer. But then he said, "No, sir. But my mother is."
"You've decided to go on home then, have you?"
"I'll find an officer to report to after I've seen my mother," Repp
said.
The sergeant chuckled.
"I doubt there's a sober one left. And if you find one, I doubt he'll
give a damn about you. Go on, damn you. 1b mother. Tell her you're
home from the wars."
Repp drew in a deep gulp of the cool air and tried to keep himself calm
as he walked across the great Romanesque bridge between the Lake of
Konstanz's two basins, the vast Bodensee to the east, and the Untersee,
the more picturesque with its steep wooded shores, to the west. At the
end of the structure, he passed under a medieval tower and stepped into
the old city. It was a holiday town, cobbled and quaint, exactly the
kind of place Repp didn't care for. It had no purpose beyond pleasure,
with its casino and boat tours and green lakeside park. It had never
even been bombed and seemed uneasy in a military role, as if it were
wearing an outlandish costume. The soldiers who clustered in its
narrow streets seemed wildly out of place against the cobbles and
arches and turrets and timbers and spires.
Repp slid anonymously among them; they paid him no attention, shouting
instead at women, or lounging about drunk before the Basilica of the
Miinsterplatz. Even the officers were in bad shape, a sullen, loutish
crew; clearly they'd already surrendered. Kubels and trucks had been
abandoned around the PIatz and Repp saw rifles already piled in the
square. Repp felt himself filling with anger as he pushed through them
but he kept it to himself, one straggler adrift in a crowd of
stragglers.
Repp turned off the Miinsterplatz and headed down Wessenbergerstrasse.
Here, in the residential sector, there were no soldiers, only an
occasional old woman or man whose questioning eyes he would not meet.
He turned up Neugasse, where the houses were shabbier still, looking
for No. 14. He found it soon, a two-story dwelling, dirty stucco,
shuttered. Quickly, without looking up or down the street of almost
identical houses, and without hesitating, he knocked.
After a time, the door opened a sliver.
"Yes?"
He could not see her in the shadow. But he knew the voice quite well.
She sounded tired. Unlike the other times.
"It's me."
The door closed, a chain was freed, and then it opened.
He stepped into the shadowy foyer, but she was not there. He went into
the living room beyond. She stood against the wall, in the dark.
"Well, at last I'm here," he said.
"So I see. They said a man. I should have known."
"Ah," he said, haltingly. The truth was, he felt a little unsure of
himself.
"Sit down, sit down," she urged.
"I'm filthy. I've been sleeping in barns, swimming rivers.
I need a bath."
"The same Repp: so fastidious."
"Please--a bath."
"Yes. Of course." She led him through a shabby living room, hushed in
draperies and blinds, flowers grimy on the wallpaper, and up some
decrepit stairs. The house stank mildly of must and disinfectant.
"I'm sorry it's so awful. But they said it had to be a house,
definitely a house and this is all that was available.
It's outrageously expensive. I rented it from a widow who's said to be
the richest woman in Konstanz.
It's also said she's a Jew. But how can that be? I thought they took
all the Jews away a long time ago."
"They did," Repp confirmed.
"You've got the documents?"
"Of course. Everything. You needn't fear. Tickets to Switzerland."
They walked down a short hall into the bathroom.
The tub stood on claws like a beast. The plaster peeled off gray walls
and the plumbing smelled. Also, the mirror was flaking off and there
were water spots on the ceiling.
"Not the Grand, is it?" he said.
But she seemed not to remember.
"No."
She had been ahead of him all this time and now, in the gray bathroom,
she turned and faced him fully.
She searched his eyes for shock.
He kept them clear of it.
"So?" he finally said.
"Do you expect me to say something?"
"My face isn't like it was, is it?" she asked.
"No, but nothing is."
The scar ran vividly from the inside corner of her eye down around her
mouth to her chin, a red furrow of tissue.
"I've seen far worse in the East," he said.
"They'll fix you up after the war. Make you pretty again. Make you
prettier, I should say. You're still quite attractive."
"You're trying to be kind, aren't you?"
Yet to Repp she was still a great beauty. She was the most beautiful
woman he'd ever seen. Her blond hair was short now, but her body had
that same suppleness and grace to it; she was thin, rather unlike the
ideal
Aryan woman, her hips too narrow for easy childbirth, but Repp had
never been interested in children anyhow.
She wore a pinstriped gray skirt and a flower-print blouse and had dark
stockings on, which must have been very old, and high-heeled shoes. Her
neck was long and blue veins pulsed visibly under her fair skin and her
face seemed porcelain or some equally delicate thing, yet fragile
though it appeared her eyes were strong and rather hard.
"I think there's hot water," she said.
"And civilian clothes are in the bureau in the bedroom."
"I must say, Margareta, you don't seem terribly happy about all
this."
"I'll go fix some supper. You must be very hungry."
They ate in awkward silence in the dim, small kitchen, though the food
she fixed was very good--eggs, black bread, cheese--and he felt much
better after the bath.
"That's the best meal I've had in a long time."
"They gave me so much money. Your people. The black market is
extensive here."
"Yes, it certainly must be. So close to Switzerland."
"Sometimes you can get pork and even beef and veal.
And sausage of course."
"Almost as if there's no war."
"Almost. But you always know there's a war. Not from all the soldiers
around, but because there's no music.
No real music. On the radio sometimes they play Wagner and that
terrible fellow Korngold. But no Chopin, no Hindemith, no Mahler. I
wonder what they have against Mahler. Of all our composers, his work
sounds the most like battles. That's what they like, isn't it? Do you
know? Why won't they allow Mahler?"
Repp said he didn't know. But he was glad to see her talking so
animatedly, even if he didn't know anything about music.
"I like Chopin so much," she said.
"He's very good," Repp agreed.
"I should have brought my Gramophone down. Or my piano. But it was
all so rushed. There was no time, even for a Gramophone. The piano,
of course, was out of the question. Even I realized that."
He said nothing.
Then she said, "Whom have you seen recently? Have you seen General
Baum at all? He always made me laugh."
"Dead, I think. In Hungary."
"Oh. A shame. And Colonel Prince von Kiihl? A delightful man."
"Disappeared. In Russia. Dead, I suppose, perhaps taken prisoner."
"And--but I suppose it's useless. Most of them are dead, aren't
they?"
"Many, I suppose. The sacrifice was gigantic."
"Sometimes I feel like a ghost. The only one left. Do you ever think
about it that way?"
"No."
"It's so sad. All those young men. So handsome. Do you remember the
celebration of the Julfest in 1938? I first saw you there. I'm sure
you don't remember. I'd just given up the piano. Anyway, the room was
full of beautiful young people. We sang and danced. It was such a
happy time. But of all those people, almost all are dead, aren't
they?"
"Yes, I suppose."
"But you haven't thought of it?"
"I've been rather busy."
"Yes, of course. But at that party, do you know what I sensed in you?
Spirituality. You have a spiritual dimension.
To be a great killer must take spirituality."
Killer: the word struck him like a blow.
"Did you know how attractive that is? At that party, you were like a
young priest, celibate and beautiful. You were very attractive. You
had a special quality. Repp, Repp was different. I heard others speak
of it too. Some of the women were wild for you. Did you know that?"
"One can sense such things."
"Oh, Repp, we're two peculiar birds, aren't we? I always knew you'd be
one of the survivors. You had that too, even way back then."
"I prefer to think of nicer times we had."
"Berlin, the '42 season? When you were the hero of the hour."
"A pleasant time."
"I suppose you'll want to sleep with me now."
"Yes. Are you turning into a nun? You used to be quite eager, I
recall. Dirty, even. At the restaurant on the Lutherstrasse."
"Horcher's. Yes. I was very evil." She had touched him under the
table, and whispered a suggestion into his ear. They had gone back to
the Grand and done exactly as she had suggested. It was their first
time. It was also before the terror raids had come and Berlin turned
into a ruin, and her face along with it.
"It won't be the way it was though," she said.
"I just know it won't. I don't know why, but I can tell that it won't
be very good. But I suppose it's my duty."
"It's not your duty. It has nothing to do with duty."
Point of honor: she had to want him.
"It's not out of pity though. You can assure me of that?"
"Of course not. I don't need a woman. I need shelter.
I need to rest. I've got important things ahead. But I want you. Do
you see?"
"I suppose. Then, come, let's go."
They went up to the bedroom. Repp made love to her with great energy
and after a while she began to respond.
For a while it was as good as it had been. Repp did most things well,
and this was no exception. He could feel her open to and accept him
and his own ache surprised him, seeming to spring from outside, from
far away.
Afterward, he put on some wool flannel trousers and a white shirt and
some blunt-tipped brown shoes-whose? he wondered--and took his
private's uniform and equipment into the garden out back. There,
working quickly, he buried it all: tunic, boots, trousers, coat, rifle
even. He stood back when he was finished and looked down at the
rectangle of disturbed earth under which his soldier's identity lay. He
felt quite odd. He was out of uniform for the first time since--how
long?
years and years, since '36 at least, that first year in the
Totenkopfverbdnde at Dachau.
"You should have let your hair grow. It's cropped too closely around
your ears," she said in the kitchen, mat R
ter-of-factly, "though since you've the proper papers, I suppose you
could look like the Fuhrer and the Swiss wouldn't care."
"What time is the broadcast?"
"At six. Nearly that now. There used to be music on all the time. Now
there's only announcements."
"There will be music again soon. Don't worry. The Jews will put music
on again."
"Do you know, someone said there were camps out East where we murdered
them. Men, women and children.
That we murdered them in the millions with a kind of gas or something.
Then burned the bodies. Can you imagine that?"
Repp said he couldn't.
"Though they deserve everything they get. They started the whole
thing."
"I hope we did it. I hope it's true. Then we've got nothing to be
ashamed of. We'll have done some good for the world after all."
"But there's always more. No matter how many they got out East,
there's always more."
"Attention. Berlin calling. Berlin calling," a voice crackled through
the radio. Repp fiddled with the dial to bring the signal in better,
but it was never clear.
"The heroic people of the Greater German Reich continue in their
struggle against the monstrous forces of International Jewry which
threaten on all sides. The Red armies have been driven back in flight
to the Baltic by Army Group North. In Hungary, our loyal SS troops
stand fast. Since the death of our leader, we have cont--" Repp turned
the radio off.
"He's gone?"
"Yes. They announced it several days back. Where were you?"
Hiding in a barn. Shooting brave men dead. Murdering them. Blowing
Willi Buchner up.
"I had a hectic time reaching here."
"But it seems to go on. The war. It seems like it's been here
forever. Even now I can't believe it'll be over."
He turned the radio up again. "--in the south, Munich is an
ipspiration to us all, while Vienna continues to--" "Damn them!" he
shouted angrily.
"The Americans walked into Munich days ago. Why don't they tell the
truth?"
"The truth is dreadful," Margareta said.
Another day passed. Repp stayed indoors, although he did go into the
garden around noon. It was beautiful out, though still a bit chilly.
May buds had begun to pop and the sun was bright. But he could take no
joy in it.
She'd told him the neighbors were harmless sorts, a retired grocer on
one side and a widow on the other, but still he worried. Maybe one of
them had seen the scruffy private come hobbling down the Neugasse to
the Berlin lady's. It was the sort of possibility that bothered him
the most because he had absolutely no control over it.
So many of the big problems had been mastered--begin with Vampir
itself, but go on to the escape in the middle of the American attack,
the dangerous hundred kilometers from Aniage Elf to Konstanz across a
wild zone, the final linkup here, not half a kilometer from the Swiss
border. It would be a crime now to fail on a tiny coincidence, the
wagging tongue of a curious neighbor.
"You are like a tiger today," she said.
"You pace about as if caged. Can't you relax?"
"It's very difficult," he said.
"Then let's go out. We can go down to the Stadtgarten.
It's very pretty. They don't rent boats anymore but the swans are back
and so are the ducks. It's May, it's spring."
"My pictures were in Signal and Das Schwarze Korps and Illustrierter
Beobachter. Someone might recognize me."
"It's unlikely."
"I don't care if it's unlikely. I cannot take the chance.
Stop bothering me about this, do you understand?"
"Sorry."
He went up to the bedroom. She was right about one thing. The waiting
was making him crazy. Locked up in a shabby little house on the
outskirts of Konstanz, his whole world a glimpse down a street from an
upper story or a stroll through a tiny garden out back, and the radio,
dying Berlin squawking from its ashes.
Repp was not used to being frightened; it suddenly occurred to him that
he was. In war, in battle, he was always concerned, but never
particularly scared. Now, with the entire heritage of the Waffen SS on
his shoulders, he knew fear. He would not let them down, but it seemed
so far away, so helplessly futile. I will not let you down, he
thought, I swear it. The oath began, however, / swear to you, Adolf
Hitler .. . yet Adolf Hitler was dead. What did that mean now? Was
the oath mere words? Did it die with the man to whom it was
addressed?
Repp knew it did not. He knew his thinking was bad for him. Doubts,
worries, something other than the will to pure action began in
self-indulgent thought. A man was what he did; a man was what he
obeyed.
He went instead to the dresser, yanked open the drawer and pulled out
the Swiss passport, painstakingly doctored, well worn, stamped a dozen
times, identifying him as Dr. Erich Peters, of German-speaking Bern, a
lawyer. All fine. The difficult thing was the story.
He'd rehearsed it like an actor, trying to get the accent right, a
little softer, slower.
"Yes, legal business in Tuttlingen, a client's will named his
half-brother executor and to gain power of attorney we needed the
half-brother's signature. He couldn't come to me!" This had been
designed as a joke, to lessen the tension of the confrontation with a
smile.
"Terrible, the bombing, the devastation, just terrible."
It should work.
He looked at himself in the mirror, searching for one Hen" Doktor
Peters. The dark double-breasted suit certainly would help, as would
the tie and the Homburg and the briefcase. Still, a haggard, desperate
man looked back at him, cheeks sunken, hardly a lawyer who'd lived fat
and smooth these past seven hard years.
His eyes seemed lusterless, his skin pale. Perhaps he ought to give
himself color and health with Margareta's makeup when he tried the
border.
And when would that be? When?
"Repp," she said behind him, scared.
"Yes?" He looked around.
"They're here." She pointed to the window. He peered out. A small
open vehicle moved slowly down the street, four wary infantrymen in
it.
"Damn!" he said.
"We thought they'd pass this place."
For a third time, the Americans had arrived.
 There was no time to mourn. But Leets insisted on something. He
wanted to carve the name into the trunk of a tree, or engrave it on a
stone.
"So that he won't be anonymous. So that he'll have his name, his
identity. Repp couldn't take that from him." For Leets believed that
Repp had done the killing--not literally, of course, but at least on
the metaphorical level. It was a Repp operation: at long distance, in
the dark.
An American doctor less prone to melodrama had another explanation:
"Just before liberation, a few trapped SS men broke into the warehouses
and put on prison jerseys. They tried to mingle with the inmates.
But it didn't work. Because of the faces. That thin, gaunt KZ face.
They didn't have it; they were recognized right away, and beaten to
death. And your friend--well, he'd been among us. All that American
meat and potatoes. He'd filled out. They saw him in the prison
compound and took him for an SS man. Who do you blame? Just one of
those terrible things."
So Leets felt his own emotions sealed up inside himself.
He could not let them escape. He stared at the corpse. The head had
been smashed in, the teeth bro R
ken off. Bright blood lay in the dust of the Appellplatz where he was
found.
"Go with him to the pit or something, if it makes you feel better,"
Tony said coldly.
"Take his hand. Touch him. He's only dead, after all, and you've seen
the dead before."
Leets knelt by the body, feeling a little ridiculous now. In fact he
did take the hand, which felt cold and hard.
He could feel Susan accusing him once again in the dark.
He turned back to the dead Jew.
What did you expect from us? What do you people want, anyway? We had
a war to win, we had to worry about the big picture. I had no idea
this would happen. I had no idea. I didn't know. I didn't kn-Leets
felt the piece of paper in the cold hand. He pried the fingers roughly
apart. Something in Hebrew had been written in pencil on a scrap. He
stuffed it into his pocket.
After a while, two conscripted Germans came by for the body. Leets
would have liked to have hated them, but they were elderly civilians--a
banker and a baker-and the weight of the body was nearly beyond them.
They were apologetic with the stretcher--it was too heavy, they were
too weak, it wasn't their fault. Leets listened to their complaints
impatiently, and then gestured them to get going. After much
melancholy effort they got Shmuel over to the burial ground, a pit that
had been bulldozed out, and there set him down. They would not look
into the wide, shallow hole. The stench of decomposition, though
somewhat controlled by great quantities of quicklime, still
overpowered, an inescapable fact. Delicately the two old men coughed
and averted their eyes from the hundreds of huddled forms resting under
a veil of white on the pit's floor. Leets felt like kicking their
asses.
"Go on, beat it, get the fuck outta here!" he yelled, and they ran
off, terrified.
Awkwardly he got Shmuel up off the stretcher. Once he had him in his
arms, he was astonished at how light he was after the groans of the
pallbearers. He climbed into the pit and a cloud of lime dust swirled
up over his boots, whitening them. The chemical stung his nose and
eyes and he noticed most of the men around had masks on.
"Hey, Captain, you'll want out of there. We're shoveling 'em under
now." It was another officer, calling from the far side. An engine
gunned into life. The bright blade of a bulldozer lurched into view
over the pit's edge, pushing before it a liquid tide of loose earth.
Leets laid Shmuel down. Any place in here was fine.
He put him down in a long row of nearly fleshless forms.
Leets climbed out and brushed himself off and waved all clear. The
dozer began to muscle the earth in and Leets watched for a second as it
rolled over them.
"And that's it? That's all?"
He turned. Susan was standing there.
"Susan, I--it just--" and he ran out of words.
She looked at him blankly. Behind him the dozer lurched and tracked
and flattened the soft earth.
"It just happened," he said.
"I'm so sorry."
She continued to stare.
"There was nothing any of us could do. I feel responsible.
He'd come so far."
In the sunlight, he could see how colorless her face had become. She
looked badly in need of sleep. Her work with the dying, with the
victims, must have been gruesome and dreadful; it must be eating her,
for she looked ill. A fine sheen of bright sweat stood out on her
upper lip.
"Everything you touch," she said, "turns to death, doesn't it?"
Leets had no answer. He watched her walk away.
There was the note, of course.
He had not forgotten it; but it took awhile to find a man among the
prisoners who could read it.
Leets had a headache and Tony was impatient, and the translator, a
bright young Polish Communist, played them for two packs of Luckies
before delivering.
"That's not much," said Leets, handing over the cigarettes, feeling
cheated.
"You asked, I answered," the man said.
"It's not much to die for."
"He didn't die for it. He got caught in a bad accident.
Accidents are a feature of war, don't you see?" Tony said.
"It must be some sort of code name."
Leets tried to clear his head. They were in the office where the
interrogations had taken place. He still saw the rail yard full of
corpses, Shmuel smashed to nothingness in the dust, the huddled forms
laid out under the chemical snow, Susan in her nurse's uniform glaring
at him, eyes vivid with accusation.
He looked again at the word. It had to have some significance, some
double meaning. It wasn't arbitrary.
"Don't they have an SS division called "Nibelungen'?"
"The Thirty-seventh," confirmed Tony.
"A mechanized infantry outfit. Third-rate, conscriptees, the lame, the
halt, somewhere out in Prussia against the Russians.
But that's not it. This has been a Totenkopfdivision operation the
whole way. Repp and the Aniage Elf defenders. Totenkopf is old
Nazi--part of the elite, among the first of the Waffen SS formations.
They go way back, to the camps, to the very beginning. They'd have no
truck with second-raters like the Thirty-seventh."
"No, I suppose not."
"Actually, it's quite a common name in Germany.
The street between this lovely spot and the town of Dachau is in fact
Nibelungenstrasse. Isn't that interesting?"
"I wonder if--" Leets began.
"No: it's nothing to do with that curious coincidence.
I guarantee you. No, there's a joke in this. There's some hammy
German humor. I see the touch of a Great Wit, a jokester."
"I don't follow."
"It's rather too clever, actually," Tony pointed out.
Leets, way behind, requested clarification.
"So what's the punch line?" he demanded.
"It's an opera."
"Oh, yes, Wagnerian, huh? Some huge thing, goes on for hours. Has to
do with a ring."
"Yes. Ring of the Nibelung. A great hero named Siegfried steals it
from them. That's the joke. Repp's Siegfried."
"Who are the Nibelungen?" Leets asked.
"I'm getting to that." He smiled.
"The Nibelungen, my friend, are a tribe of dwarves, in the oldest
stories.
Living underground. Guarding a treasure."

W.
wVhe "here was yhe?
He checked his watch. Two hours, she'd been out two hours!
He was upstairs. He peeled back the curtain from the window and looked
down the street, as far as he could see. Nothing. He'd done this a
dozen times in the past few minutes, and each time his reward had been
the same, nothing.
He felt warmly damp in his civilian clothes. He could not get
comfortable in them. The shoes were no damned good either,
blunt-tipped bluchers, pebble-grained, with cap toes, yet they rubbed a
blister onto his left heel. Now he walked with a limp! Locked in this
stuffy little house, he was falling apart; he hobbled about in another
man's clothes with a headache and digestive problems, and a short
temper and a blister on his heel. He woke up at night in cold sweats.
He heard sounds, jumped at shadows.
He really was not cut out for this sort of business, the polite waiting
in an untouched residential section.
He sat back, pulled out his pack of cigarettes.
He looked again out the window, even though it had been only a few
seconds.
He saw the truck swing around the corner.
It was a military vehicle, moving slowly down the Neugasse toward him.
Big thing, dark green after their fashion, about the size of an Opel
Blitz, a white star bold on its hood. Soldiers seemed crowded in the
back:
he could see their helmets bobbing as the truck rumbled along.
Repp drew back from the window, and had the P38 in his hand.
He threw the slide on the pistol ... he felt very cool all of a sudden.
It seemed a great weight had been drained away. His headache vanished.
He knew he had seven rounds in the pistol. All right, if it was worth
six of them to take him, then six it would be. He'd save the last for
his own temple. Briefly, he wished he had his uniform. Better that
than this silly outfit, banker's pants, white shirt, shoes that did not
fit, like a common gangster.
He was breathing heavily. He crouched at the stairway.
He heard the truck outside, nearly up to the house.
His finger moved the safety on the grip of the pistol to off. The
weapon felt cold and big in his hand. His heart pounded heavily. He
knew the truck would stop shortly, and he'd hear the running feet as
one squad headed out back. He was all ready. He was set.
"ALL CIVILIANS ARE WARNED THAT CURFEW IS 6 P.M. REPEAT
ANNOUNCEMENT: ALL CIVILIANS ARE WARNED THAT CURFEW IS 6
P.M. YOU WILL BE DETAINED IF FOUND OUTSIDE AFTER 6 P.M."
The speaker on the truck boomed like an artillery shell as it drew even
with the house, vibrating through the wood, causing the windows to
rattle. It continued on, growing fainter, until it finally went
away.
 It began appearing in odd places.
"Yes, here, by God," shouted Tony, "mess records.
March eighteenth and nineteenth, meals in the SS canteen, a hundred and
three men, charged not to a unit but to one word: Nibelungen."
Nibelungen: April 11, supplies from the central storage facility at
Dachau dispatched: rations, equipment, replacement, fuel allotments.
February 13: Ammunition requisition; 25 crates 7.92 mm X 33 kurz; 25
crates 7.92 mm belted; Stielhandgranate, Model 44, 3 crates.
March 7: More food, a wire requisition, construction supplies.
The total mounted. A hundred scraps of information providing for the
creation and nurture of Operation Nibelungen, GEHEIME KOMMA NDOSACHEH!
highest Reich secrecy order and priority.
"It was higher than the rocket program even. My God," said Leets.
Roaming through the CIC Documents Center, a clearinghouse the Army
investigative unit had established at Dachau, Leets and Outhwaithe in
one frantic day seemed to succeed wherever they touched. The files
here were jumbled, immense, confusing stacks and tiers of paper; yet
always, on the buff folders, one stamped word, whatever the category:
nibelung en
"We were so lucky," Leets said.
"If Shmuel hadn't gotten to the old man. And if he hadn't written it
down.
And if I hadn't picked up--" "We've been lucky all the way through. And
yet we're still no closer. I find that quite a bothersome thing."
Leets scored.
"Here," he hooted, "under "Construction and Supply," the original site
preparation order.
Sixteenth of November '44, orders here for a construction battalion to
prepare a site for experimental purposes.
In the Schwarzwald. Code name Nibelungen.
Chalked off to WVHA. And a list of specs, required equipment."
"Special transportation orders, these. Moving some solid-state testing
gear down from Kummersdorf, the WaPriif2 testing facility up near
Berlin. These instructions mandate special care to be taken with the
delicate instrumentation. Date fourth of January, the very beginning
of the thing."
"We're really cooking," Leets crowed.
"Goddamn, now we're getting somewhere."
Leets's fingers pawed through the drawers and vaults of the files. He
worked quickly, but with thoroughness, and did not stop for lunch or
dinner. He would have stayed busy late into the night on his prowl
through the paper labyrinths of the Third Reich but there came a moment
when a shadow fell across the face of the document he was examining and
in that same second a mousy voice, full of self-recrimination and
humility, spoke up.
"Uh, sir. Captain Leets. Sir?"
Leets looked up through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
"Gad, he's back," said Outhwaithe.
Roger stood shyly before him.
And Roger was some help, this time. He would not talk of Paris, or
explain; he was not full of his match or himself. He even, for a day
or so, worked hard as they continued their hunt through the paper work.
And he came up with some possibly pertinent material: a
Nibelungen-coded requisition for wind-tunnel data on projectile
performance from the Luftfahrt Forschungsanstal, the Air Force research
establishment at Braunschweig;
and a record of marks for enlisted personnel taking part in the Dachau
antitank course in mid-March, including 103 names identified as
Totenkopfdivision--Nibelungen.
But still piles and piles of material remained to be gone through.
Leets's frustration took the form of a headache, and it increased as
that afternoon wore on.
At one point, late, he looked up and around the Documents Center and
took no pleasure from what he saw:
they were alone in the place, the CIC clerks having taken off for the
day, and all around there seemed to be stacks and cartons of German
documents. It reminded Leets much of the office back in London where,
months ago, this had all begun. From this similarity he extrapolated a
single message: they had not made any progress, any real progress, into
the middle of the thing.
His frustration was amplified by news that Roger had brought from the
outside--that the war seemed finally to be winding down. It was
certainly in its last phase, and this made Leets uncomfortable. He had
decided that Repp's strike was tied to the end of things, somehow, in
some form; it was a part of the process of the death of the Reich. The
Russians were now said to be in Berlin--Berlin!--and German forces had
capitulated up north, in Holland, northeast Germany and Denmark.
Meanwhile Patton's sweep had carried him all the way into
Czechoslovakia--Pilsen, the last reports said.
Everybody was doing so well; he was doing lousy.
He slammed down the sheet he had, some nonsense on Nibelungen-coded
mess receipts. Mess receipts!
Damn it, the Reich should have ground to a halt back in '43, its gears
jammed tight on the tons of paper it produced.
The Germans should have dropped paper bombs which killed by sheer
weight with as much effectiveness as high explosives. They recorded
everything in triplicate and the more they recorded, the more evidence
accumulated, but the harder it was to put one's hand on anything
specific.
"Damn it, this just isn't getting us anywhere," he complained.
Tony, similarly immersed in documents at another table, looked up and
said, "You'd rather be perched on a roadblock somewhere? Or knocking
on doors with the boys in the trench coats?"
Of course not, Leets told himself. But more manpower would have been
some help, to prowl these acres of paper. And even then, would that
have done it? It was clear now that Nibelungen was built, maintained
and controlled out of Dachau; all the documents pointed to it. But
that was it: they pointed to Aniage Elf and Leets already had Aniage
Elf. What he needed was another direction, another step in the chain,
higher up on the ladder. To Berlin, perhaps. To WVHA headquarters at
Unter den Eichen but the Russians were there.
Would they cooperate? How long would it take? What shape were the
WVHA files in anyway?
"Aspirin?" he asked.
"Huh? Oh" I got some in my bag, just a sec," Roger said.
"What's a Schusswundef Gunshot wound, right?"
"Yes," Leets said, but then noted the folder Roger was reading.
"Hey, what the hell is that?" he barked.
It was marked Der Versuch.
"Uh, file I picked up."
Der Versuch meant experiment.
It was at last too much. Leets's headache would not go away and Roger
was pouring time down the drain, and Susan was even more unreachable
than before and Shmuel was dead and Repp was closer to his target.
"Goddamn it, you little son of a bitch, I ought to kick your rich
little ass to Toledo. That has nothing to do with our stuff. What the
fuck, kid, you think this is some kind of reading room, some fucking
Harvard library or something?" he spat out venomously.
Roger looked up in horror. Even Tony was shaken by the black rage in
Leets's words.
"Jesus, Captain, I'm sorry," said Roger.
"I was just--" "Listen, we're all running without a lot of sleep and
these last days have been unpleasant ones," Tony pointed out.
"Perhaps we'd best close down the shop for today."
"Suits me," said Roger sullenly.
"Ah," Leets snorted, but saw at once that Outhwaithe was right.
Roger stood and gathered up his materials wearily and began to stuff
them into a drawer.
But then he paused.
"Look, this is pretty funny here, if I'm reading it right."
Nobody paid any attention. Leets still hadn't taken any aspirin and
Tony was consumed in tidying up. Tony was a tidy sort, always had
been.
Roger lurched on.
"Funny-ugly," he said.
"They used this Dachau as headquarters for a lot of testing. Block
Five, it was called. All kinds of terrible--" "Get to the point,"
Leets said coldly.
"Okay," and Roger held up the bulky file.
"Full of freezing, pressure-chamber stuff, gas, injections,
water--deaths I'm talking about. How people die. How long it takes,
what the signs are, what their brains look like afterward, pictures,
stuff like that. And this--" He pulled a folder out.
"It's not like the others. Different forms entirely.
Didn't come out of Block Five. It's a report on Schusswunde --gunshot
wounds, twenty-five of them, complete with autopsy pictures, the works.
It's been sent down to a Dr. Rauscher--the head SS doctor here. Sent
down for his collection on how people die. It's dated--this is how it
caught my eye--it's dated the eighth of March. A couple of days after
Shmuel made his breakout."
"Let's see," said Leets.
The folder consisted of several typewritten pages of wound descriptions
and several grisly pictures, shot with too much flash, of naked scrawny
men on slabs with great orifices in their chests or portions of their
heads blown away, eyes slotted and blank, feet dirty, joints knobby.
Leets looked away.
"Maybe it is them," he said.
"No way to tell. Shmuel could tell. But even if it is, so what? The
way I make it is they must have autopsied the corpses Repp hit at
Anlage Elf. Wanted to see what that fat slug does, more data to help
him in the shooting. Then they ship those data back to--back to we
don't know where. WVHA, I guess. Or SS HQ, someplace, Berlin.
Then"--he sighed, weary with the effort, for he could see the approach
of another dead end--"someone up there sends it on down to this Dr.
Rauscher. For his collection. And you find it. Looking where you're
not supposed to be. But it doesn't mean a thing. We know they've got
a big, special gun. We know--" "Yet it's not Nibelungen-coded," Tony
said.
"Well, it had really nothing to do with the guts of the mission. It
was just an extra curiosity they'd dug up and thought to send somewhere
it might do some good.
Their idea of 'good."
" "You miss the point," Tony said. He'd ceased tidying and was over at
Roger's, pushing his way through the papers.
"If it hasn't gone out under the code, then it's not top secret. It's
not Geheime Kommandosache. That means it hasn't been combed, scrubbed
free of connections, examined closely from the security point of
view.
It's pure."
Leets wasn't sure what he was getting so excited about.
"Big deal, nothing there to be top secret. We don't even know if those
are the same twenty-five guys. They could be twenty-five guys from any
of the camps."
"Hey," said Roger, off in a corner with one of the sheets.
"There's a tag here. I didn't see it. It's some kind of--" Leets had
it, and took it into the light.
"It's a file report, that's all," he said.
"It says these came from some guy's file, some guy in some department,
Amt Four-B-four, some guy I never heard of.
Jesus, this is nothing, goddamn it, I'm getting tired of all this--"
"Shut up," said Tony.
"Look, Major, this is--" "Shut up," Tony said. He looked hard at the
tag.
Then he looked at Leets, then to Roger, then back to Leets.
"Remember your German, Captain. In German, the word EichT' "Huh?"
"It's oak. Oak Tony said, "Remember: it wasn't Shmuel who heard of the
Man of Oak, but someone else, a shtetl Jew, who spoke Yiddish. He knew
some German words, the common ones, but he was scared and didn't listen
carefully.
He heard "Man of Oak." Mann. And Eich."
Tony continued, "It has nothing to do with UnterdenEichen, Under the
Oaks. We were wrong. We stopped short. We didn't follow it hard
enough. The Jew was right. It was Man of Oak."
Leets looked at the name.
"There's your bloody Man of Oak," said Tony.
The tag said, "Originals on file Amt IV-B-4, Obersturmbannfuhrer
Eichmann."
 "Repp?" He hadn't heard her come in.
"Repp?
Where are you?"
"Here," he said feebly.
"What the hell took you so long?"
She came up the stairs and into the room. Today she wore a smart blue
suit and a hat with a veil.
"My God," she said.
"You look ill. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"You look as if you've seen a ghost."
"It's nothing."
"Do you want something? Brandy? I have some brandy."
"No, no. Stop it, please. Tell me what I sent you out to find."
"I have a surprise for you."
"Margareta. I have a headache. I don't have time for--" She held out
an unopened pack of Siberias.
"Surprise," she said.
"Where on earth did you get those?"
"From a boy. I smiled at him. He was charmed to give them to me. He'd
been in the East, I guess."
Repp opened the pack greedily, and extracted one of the cigarettes. The
paper had begun to turn brown from age and, lighting it quickly, he
realized how stale the thing was. Still: delicious.
"French, incidentally," she said.
"Eh? I'm not sure what--" "It's the French. The French who've
occupied us. In American uniforms with American equipment. But the
French."
"Well, it's the same. Maybe worse. We never took America. We took
France in '40."
"They seem very benign. They sit in the square and whistle at the
women. They drink. The officers are all in the cafe."
"What about ours?"
"Our boys handed in their rifles and were marched away. It was almost
a ceremony, like a changing of the guard. It was all very cheerful. No
shots were fired. The guns weren't even loaded."
"Tell me what I sent you out for. How many are there? What are the
security arrangements? How are they monitoring civilian traffic? Have
they set up border checkpoints? Is there a list that you know of?"
"List?"
"Yes. Of criminals. Am I on it?"
"I don't know anything of any list. I certainly didn't see one. There
are not so many of them. They have put up signs. Regulations. All
remaining German soldiers and military personnel must turn themselves
in by tomorrow noon on the Miinsterplatz. All party uniforms, banners,
flags, standards, regalia, knives--anything with the swastika on it has
been collected and dumped in a big pile. Denazification they call it,
but it's souvenirs they want."
"The border. The border."
"All right. I went there too. Nothing. Some bored men, sitting in a
small open car. They haven't even occupied the blockhouse, though I do
know they removed our Frontier Police detachment. I think the fence is
patrolled too."
"I see. But it's not--" "Repp, the border is not their central concern
right now. Sitting in the sun, looking at women, thinking about what
to do when the war's over: those are their central concerns."
"What travel regulations have they posted?"
"None, yet."
"What about--" "Repp, nothing's changed. Some French soldiers are now
sitting around the Miinsterplatz, where yesterday it was our boys. Our
boys will be back soon. You'll see. It's almost finished. It won't
last much longer."
He sat back.
"Very good," he said.
"You know they offered me an Amt Six-A woman, a professional. But I
insisted on you.
I'm glad. It was too late for strangers. This is too important for
strangers. I'm so glad they convinced you to help."
"It's difficult for a German to say No to the SS."
"It's difficult for a German to say No to duty."
"Repp, I have something I'd like to discuss, please."
"What?"
"A wonderful idea really. It came to me while I was out."
She did seem happier than yesterday. She wasn't so tired for one thing
and she looked better, though maybe he had only grown used to the
imperfectly joined face.
"What?"
"It's simple. I see it now. I knew there was a design in all this.
Don't go."
"What?"
"Don't do it. Whatever it is, don't do it. It can't matter.
Now, so late. Stay here." She paused.
"With me."
"Stay?" A,stupid thing to say. But she had astonished him.
"Yes. Remember Berlin, '42, after Demyansk, how good it was? All the
parties, the operas. Remember, we went riding in the Tiergarten, it
was spring, just like it is now. You were so heroic, I was beautiful.
Berlin was beautiful. Well, it can be like that again. I was
thinking.
It can be just like that, here. Or not far from here, in Zurich.
There's money, you have no idea how much.
You've got your passport. I can get across, I know I can, somehow. All
sorts of things are possible, if you'd only--" "Stop it," he said.
"I don't want to hear this."
He wished she hadn't brought it up; but she had. Now he wished she'd
drop it; but she wouldn't.
"You'll die out there. They'll kill you. For nothing," she said.
"Not for nothing. For everything."
"Repp, God knows I'm not much. But I've survived.
So have you. We can begin with that. I don't expect you to love me as
you loved the pretty idiot in Berlin. But I won't love you the way I
loved the handsome, thickskulled young officer. It'll be fine. It'll
be fine."
"Margareta--" "Nobody cares anymore. I could see it on their faces.
Our boys' faces. They didn't care. They were glad it was over. They
went willingly, happily. To die now is pointless.
My brother and father are dead. All the men I've loved are dead. To
join them would be insane. And you did more than all of them put
together. You've earned your holiday."
"Stop it."
"These French seem all right. They're not evil men, I could tell. Not
Jews, or working for Jews. Just men, just soldiers. They got along
quite well with our boys. It was a touching scene."
"You sound like you're describing some kind of medieval pageant."
"There's no disgrace in having lost a war."
How could he tell her? What words could there be?
That he was part of a crusade, even if no one remembered or would admit
it. He was all that was left of it. If he had to give his life, he'd
give it. That he was a hard man, totally ruthless, and proud. He'd
killed a thousand men in a hundred wrecked towns and snowy forests and
trenches full of lice and shit.
"We lost more than a war," he said.
"We lost a moment in history."
"Forget what's been or what might have been," she said.
"Yes, wonderful, but forget it, it's over. Get ready for the future,
it's here, today."
"There's not even any choice in it. There's no choice at all."
"Repp, I could go to the French. I could explain to their officer. I
could say Repp, of Demyansk, the great hero, is at my house, he'd like
to come in. I could get him to guarantee that--" "He can only
guarantee a rope. They'd hang me.
Don't you see it yet, why I can't turn back? I killed Jews."
He sat down by the table and looked off into the corner of the
kitchen.
"Oh, Repp," she finally said.
"I had no idea." She stepped back from him.
"Oh, Christ, I didn't know.
God, what terrible work. You must have suffered so. It must have been
so hard on you."
She came beside him and touched him gently, put her fingertips against
his lips and looked into his eyes.
"Oh, Repp," she said, and then was crying against him.
"It must have been so hard on you."
 At last it was a simple proposition.
"To get Repp," Leets told them, "we have to find this Eichmann."
"Yeah, but, Captain, if we can't find one Obersturmbannfrihrer in the
SS, how the hell are we going to find another?" Roger wanted to
know.
And Tony said, "The possibilities must be endless.
The man may be dead. He may have made it out of the country. He may
be hiding as a private in a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft battalion. He may
have been captured by the Russians. He may be in Buenos Aires."
"And if he's any of those things, we're out of luck.
But if he's been captured, then maybe we can find him.
Just maybe."
"So I guess we have to go on the assumption he's been taken," said
Roger.
"But still .. ."
"We've got no other choice."
"And if we get him, then we gotta make him talk," Roger said.
"I'll make him talk," said Leets.
"Don't you worry about that."
But Roger did worry; for he did not like the look that crossed the
captain's face when he spoke.
If this Eichmann was a prisoner, then he'd be property of the Army
Counter-intelligence Corps, for interrogation intelligence was a CIC
initiative. So early the next day they took off for Augsburg, where
Seventh Army CIC had decamped at Army Headquarters on an old estate
just beyond the ruined city. Army took up the main house and the CIC
unit one of several hunting bungalows spread over the rolling hills.
It took them quite some time to see a Major Miller, the CIC exec
officer, and Leets found this wait the hardest thing yet, worse even
than rushing into the German fire at Aniage Elf or watching the doctor
open up the week-dead kid at Alfeld, for at least in those episodes
he'd been able to do something. Now he simply sat. The minutes ticked
by and suddenly it turned into nighttime.
Darkness came and sealed off the windows.
"What's the German word for night?" Leets asked Tony.
"Come on, chum. You know it."
"Yeah, Nacht. Sounds like a rifle being cocked."
Presently Miller showed up, dead tired, in his GI overcoat, a pale,
freckled man in his late thirties.
"Jesus, sorry I'm late. How long you guys been waiting?"
he asked by way of introduction.
"Hours, sir," said Leets.
"Look, we need some help, that's why we're here."
"Sure, sure. Listen, if I'd of known--" "German prisoners. SS
prisoners, especially. Over the rank of major. Specifically, the rank
of Obersturmbannfrihrer Eichmann, out of a department called Amt
Four-B-four."
"That's Gestapo."
"Gestapo?" said Leets.
"Under the RSHA. Central Security Department.
Eichmann, huh?"
"You know him?"
"No. But we're beginning to see how RSHA was set up."
"Well, where would he be? I mean, if you had him.
Where would we look for him?"
"Long way off. A castle. Sorry, classified location."
Leets felt his mouth drop open in stupefaction.
"Is it access you want?" the major continued.
"Oh, sure. It can be arranged. Get OSS upstairs to write a fancy
letter to Seventh Army CIC. It'll reach me in a week or two with
twenty-six different qualifications attached from the brass and then--"
"Major," Leets interrupted.
"We need to see this guy tonight. Tomorrow might be too late."
"Look, fellows, if I could help, believe me I would.
But I'm powerless. Look." He held up his hands from underneath his
desk, wrists joined in a pantomime of bondage. He smiled weakly and
said, "They're tied. See, those officers are an intelligence source of
the first magnitude.
We've got 'em at an interrogation center, a castle, like I said. Later,
there's some talk of establishing a Joint Services interrogation
center. But for now, we've got 'em. See, a lot of them operated
against the Russians.
Look, let's face it, this war's over and the next one's about to begin.
And those guys fought its first battle. They've got all kinds of dope
on the Russians, on Communist cells in Europe in Resistance groups, on
hundreds of intelligence operations. They're a treasure.
They're worth their weight in gold. I mean, they are--"
"Major," Leets spoke very quietly, "there's a German operation that's
still hot. So hot it smokes. Now. Today.
There's an officer named Repp, Waffen SS, top man with a rifle. He's
going to put a bullet into someone.
Someone important. This is the last will and testament of the Third
Reich. He's the executor."
"So who?"
"That's the hard part. We don't know. But we believe this Eichmann
must, for we found his name on a crucial file down at the Dachau admin
center."
"I'm sorry. I'd like to help. I just can't. There are channels. It'd
be my ass. You just have to go through channels."
"Look, Major, we may not have time to go through channels. Someone
could be on the fucking bull's-eye while we're filling out forms."
"Captain Leets. There's just no--" "Okay, look. Let me give you the
real reason you ought to give this guy to us: he's simply ours. We
bought him. You didn't. You stumbled onto him and don't even know if
you've got him. But we bought him with lives.
Thirty-four paratroopers checked out on this thing in the Black Forest,
twice as many again wounded. And eleven guys in the Forty-fifth
Division got nailed back in April. Then there were twenty-five KZ
inmates 'this Repp used up for practice. And finally, an operative of
mine, another KZ survivor. He's at Dachau, in a pit full of stiffs and
lime, lovely spot. He deserved better, but that's what he got. So
when I say this Eichmann is mine, because he's going to give me Repp,
then that's what I mean."
"It's not a question of deaths. Men die in this war all the time,
Captain"--but not your sort, Leets thought-"but still we've got to
stick to our procedures. I can't just .. . there's just no way .. .
it's ridiculous.
But--" And then he stopped.
"Oh, hell," he finally said. He looked away and seemed to breathe
deeply.
"How old are you?" he finally said to Roger.
"Nineteen, sir," said Roger.
"A paratrooper. I can see by the boots."
"Uh, yes, sir," said Roger.
"Any combat jumps?"
"Six/' Roger lied.
"Young and crazy. Crazy-reckless. Everybody tried to talk you out of
it, I bet."
"Yes, sir," said Roger.
"But you went anyway, had to show 'em how tough you were, huh?"
"Something like that, sir," said Roger.
"Sicily, the Boot. Into Normandy. The big Holland screw-up. A nasty
spell in Bastogne, the Bulge. Some Christmas. Finally the Rhine drop.
Varsity, they called it. March."
That's only five, Roger, Leets thought. Nobody jumped at Bastogne.
"Oh, and the drop, uh, Captain Leets and Major Outhwaithe mentioned,
um, sir, you know, the one--" "That's quite a record. Nineteen and six
combat drops. What's it like?"
"Oh, well, um, scary, sir. Real scary. Normandy was the bad one. We
came down way off the zone, half the guys in my stick went into water,
Germans, see, had flooded the place, pictures didn't, um, show it, and
they drowned. Anyway, I was one of the lucky ones that hit on high
ground. Then: confusion. Lots of light, flares, tracers. Big stuff
going off. Like the Fourth of July, only prettier, but more
dangerous--" Jesus Christ, thought Leets.
"--but then we got formed up and moved out. First Germans we saw were
so close you could smell them. I mean, there they were, right on top
of us. I had one of those M-threes, you know, sir, the grease gun they
call 'em, and BADDDADDDADDAAADDDAAA! Just knocked 'em down, never knew
what hit 'em."
"You know," the major said, leaning back in his chair, staring absently
off into space, "sometimes I don't feel I've actually been in the war
at all, the real war. I suppose I should be grateful. And yet in ten
years, twenty years, people will talk about it, ask questions, and I
won't have the faintest idea what to say. I don't think I ever even
saw any Germans, except for the prisoners, and they just look like
people or something. I saw some ruins. Once I did take a look through
somebody's binoculars at the Ruhr pocket. Real enemy territory. But
mainly it's been a job or something, paper work, details,
administration, just normal life, except there are no women, the food's
lousy and everybody's dressed the same."
"Major--" started Leets.
"I know, I know. What's your name. Sergeant?"
"Roger Evans."
"Roger. Well, Roger, you've packed a lot into your nineteen years, I
salute you. Anyway, Captain Leets, this is my war. I can see you have
no respect for it. Fine, but still somebody's got to do the paper
business. So while you won't understand and won't respect it, never
R
the less let me tell you I'm about to do a very courageous thing. Fact
is, the CIC brass hates you OSS types. Don't ask me why. So when I
tell you where the officers are, I want you to understand how brave I'm
being. No, it's not a combat jump, but it's a big risk in its own
right.
Name of the place is Pommersfelden Castle, outside Bamberg, another
sixty or so clicks on up the road.
Schloss Pommersfelden, in German. A very ornate place, on Route Three,
south of the city. I'll call them and tell them you've got approval.
If you leave in the morning, you should get there by late afternoon.
The roads are terrible, tanks, men, just a mess. Columns of prisoners.
Terrible."
"Thank you, sir. Would that mean--" "Yes, of course. Eichmann. We
picked him up in Austria last week. If you can get anything out of
him, fine, swell. We tried and came up with nothing except the
remarkable fact he was following orders. Now, please.
Get out of here. Don't hang around. Okay? God help me if they ever
find out about this."
The drive the next morning was murder. The tanks were bad enough, and
the convoys even worse, interminable lines of deuce-and-a-halfs,
sometimes two abreast, struggling southward to keep up with the rapidly
advancing front; but worst of all were the Wehrmacht prisoners.
There were thousands of them, men in Chinese numbers, marching--rather,
meandering sluggishly--to the rear in battalion-sized formations,
usually guarded by one or two MP's at either end in a Jeep. The
Germans were surprisingly rude, considering their position, insolent,
sullen crowds who milled in the road like sheep, stunting progress.
Roger again and again had to slow the Jeep to a crawl, honking and
cursing, while Leets stood in the back shouting "Raus, raus," and
waving madly, and still they refused to part except at the nudge of a
fender. At one point, Leets pulled his Thompson submachine gun from
the scabbard mounted slantwise off the front seat, and made a dramatic
gangster's gesture out of tossing the bolt; they moved for that, all
right.
Finally, beyond Feuchtwangen, the prisoners seemed to thin, and Roger
really belted the Jeep along. Yet Leets was not at all happy. He had
the terrible sensation of heading in the wrong direction, for if, as
they had speculated, Repp's target had to be to the south, beyond the
reach of the Americans, here they were slugging their way north,
putting themselves farther and farther out of the picture.
"I hope this is right," Leets said anxiously to Tony.
Tony, morose lately, only grunted.
"We don't really have a choice, do we?" Leets wanted reassurance.
"Not a bit of it," Tony said, and continued to stare blackly ahead.
They had to swing in a wide arc around the ruined city of Nuremberg and
that ate up more time. It lay in the distance under a pall of smoke,
though it had not been bombed in months. Ruins were not so remarkable,
yet the scope here was awesome. But Leets paid no attention; he used
these hours to meditate on Repp.
"You're talking to yourself," said Tony.
"Huh? Oh. Bad habit."
"You were saying Repp, Repp, Repp over and over again."
At that moment a fighter plane, a P-51, screamed low and suddenly over
them, a hundred or so feet up, almost blowing them off the road, Roger
letting the Jeep slew a bit before regaining control. The plane rolled
over in a lazy corkscrew turn at 380 miles an hour, star white, flaps
trim, bubble sparkly with sunlight, whooping kid like in the pale
German sky.
"Jesus, crazy bastard," yelled Leets.
"He almost strafed us," yelled Roger.
"Bastard, ought to be reported, I just may report him, flying like
that," Leets muttered in heated righteousness.
"Hey: we're here," Roger announced.
"On a wing and prayer," said Tony.
They pulled into the grounds of Schloss Pommersfelden.
At the end of a long road through the trees sat the castle. Even the
American military vehicles parked around it, dingy green with peeling,
muddy stars, could not detract from its eighteenth-century purity.
"Willya look at that," Roger suggested, dumbfounded.
Leets preferred not to, though the thing was impressive:
a fantasy, an elegant stone pastry, foolish, insanely overelaborate,
but proud in its mad grandeur.
Leets and Outhwaithe hurried into the place after Roger stopped, and
found themselves in a theatrical stairwell four stories tall,
embellished with arcaded galleries, stone nude boys holding lanterns,
wide steps of marble that could have led to heaven, all under a painted
ceiling.
Their boots crunched dryly across the tile toward a PFC orderly. MP's
with automatic weapons stood at each of the many doors leading off this
area.
"Leets. Office of Strategic Services." He fished for some ID.
"This is Major Outhwaithe, SOE. A Major Miller of Seventh Army CIC
said he'd call down and set up a chat with a guest you've got here."
"Yes, sir. The Eichmann thing."
"That's it."
A phone call was placed; a captain, in Class A's, appeared.
He looked them over.
"Eichmann, eh?"
"Yes."
"I don't know why. Doesn't know a thing. Most of them are talking
like canaries. Trying out for new jobs.
This guy's the sphinx."
"He'll talk for me," Leets said.
The captain took them up to the second level and down a hall.
Tapestries and portraits of men and women three hundred years dead in
outlandish outfits with fat glossy German faces hung on the walls.
Finally, they reached doors at the end of the hall and stepped through.
The room except for table and three chairs was empty.
"He's in the detention wing. He'll be here soon.
Look, Miller's a buddy of mine, I know this thing's kind of unofficial.
Glad to help out, no problem, no sweat.
But we don't go for any rough stuff, you know. I mean, Leets, it
bothered me what you just said."
"I won't harm a hair on his head," Leets said.
"Neither will the major."
"We British are quite gentle, hadn't you heard?" Tony asked.
A roar rose suddenly; the windows rattled as it mounted.
After it died, the captain said, "That's the fifth one in the last half
an hour. Those guys are really feeling their oats today. There's an
airfield at Nuremberg, not too far. Mosquito squadron there too,
Major, not just our boys going goofy."
"Glad to hear it," Tony said.
"We try and do our bit."
The door opened. Two MP's with grease guns and helmet liners brought a
third man in between them.
Leets was immediately impressed at how unimpressed he was: a wormy
little squirt, pale, watery eyes, thinning hair, late thirties. Glasses
askew, lips thin and dry.
Scrawny body lost in huge American prison fatigues.
"Gentlemen," said the captain, "I give you Obersturmbannfrihrer Karl
Adolf Eichmann, late of Amt Four-B-four, Gestapo, Number One Sixteen,
Kurfrirstenstrasse, Berlin. Herr Eichmann"--the captain switched to
perfect brilliant German--"these fellows need a few moments of your
time."
The Man of Oak sat down across from them. He looked straight ahead and
smelled faintly unpleasant.
"Cigarette, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer?" Leets asked.
The German shook his head almost imperceptibly, clasped his hands
before him on the table. Leets noted he had big hands, and that the
backs of them were spotted with freckles.
Leets lit up.
"I understand, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer," he said, speaking in his slow
German, "you've been uncooperative with our people."
"My duties were routine. I followed them explicitly. I did nothing
except my job. That is all I have to say," the German said.
Leets reached into his pocket, and removed something.
With a flick of his fingers, he set the draydel to spinning acrpss the
surface of the table. Impelled by its own momentum, it described a
lazy progress over the wood. Leets watched the man's eyes follow it.
"Your colleague Herr Repp left that for me at Aniage Elf. Now, dear
friend, you are going to tell me about Operation Nibelungen. When it
started, where it's headed, who its target is. You're going to tell me
the last secret. Or I'll find it out myself, and I'll find Repp. And
when I find Repp, I'll tell him only a little fib: I'll say, Eichmann
betrayed you, and let him go. Then, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, as well
you know, you are a very dead man from that second on. Herr Repp
guarantees
Roger leaned against the fender of the Jeep out in front of the
castle--castle? it was more like a big, fancy house!--enjoying the
freedom of the moment. No fun, the ride down, two raw nerves in back
for cargo. They'd jumped the Jeep while it was still rolling and
headed straight for the great doors, as if there were free money
inside, instead of some Kraut.
He popped a piece of spearmint into his mouth. He had no dreams of the
future and no memories of the past; he was determined to extract the
maximum pleasure of that exact instant. He worked the gum into
something soft. Sure was a nice day out. He assumed a Continental
grip on an imaginary racquet and slow-motioned through a dozen tops
ping approach shots to the background corner. The trick was to keep
your head down and follow through high. It was a shot he'd need to
own, lock, stock and barrel, if he hoped to stay with the Frank Bensons
of the world in the years to come.
And then he saw a woman.
She was just a silhouette preserved momentarily between the window
through which he glimpsed her and what must have been another window or
set of doors behind her. Just a profile, blurred, moving down a
corridor between wings of the castle, gone in a second.
Women! Here? It had been weeks since he'd pulled out of London and
that mix-up in Paris hadn't amounted to anything. Women. He explored
facets of the problem. Now what would women be doing here?
Wasn't this some kind of prison or something?
Still, that had definitely been-Jesus Christ!
The roar seemed to flatten him. He fell back in momentary confusion,
looking for the source of this outrage, to see a P-47 maybe fifty feet
above him flash past, more shadow than substance at over 400 miles an
hour.
He could see its prop wash suck at the trees, pulling a cloud of leaves
off them in its wake. It rolled majestically as it yanked its nose
up--crazy bastard, he was going to get in real trouble that way, Roger
thought-and he followed the fighter-bomber as it climbed.
He was dumb struck. The sky was jammed with planes. He'd noticed
contrails earlier, but the sky was always full of contrails on the
rare, clear European days.
Now, staring, he saw them jumbled, tangled, knotted even, tracing
corkscrews and barrels and loops and Immelmanns and stall-outs. He
could make out the planes themselves, fighters mostly, specks at the
head of each furry, swooping track. Must have been fifty, sixty. What
a show.
One last giant dogfight? Maybe the Germans had saved up for an aerial
Bulge, a last go, all their stuff in the air, jets, rockets, ME's,
Focke-Wulfs, and a Stuka or two if any were left, and all the
experimental stuff everybody said they were working on. One last
shoot-out at 25,000 feet: all guns blazing, take on the entire Eighth
Air Force, some kind of Gotterddmmerung, or maybe a crazy kamikaze
thing, like Japs, just crashing into their targets?
But if this were a battle, wouldn't there be puffs of flame up there,
and long jags of smoke from crashing ships, and wouldn't there be other
columns of smoke on the horizon from planes that had already gone
down?
Yes, there would.
This was--fun!
Another plane, a two-engine British job, howled overhead, slightly
higher than the Jug but just as loud. He ducked.
What the hell's going on? Rug wondered.
He looked about and saw nobody in the house. No guards, no officers,
nothing. He did notice a path off to one side in the trees and thought
to head out back, dig somebody up. The path turned quickly into a kind
of sidewalk, though of fine, tiny pebbles set between metal rails of
some sort. Very fancy, it reminded him of the kind of arrangements
he'd seen in Newport. He followed it through some tricky turns, and at
last found himself in some sort of garden, low hedges arranged like a
geometry problem around flower beds that were beginning to show signs
of waking up. Beyond lay a vast rolling carpet of grass and behind,
though shielded by a screen of tall, thin trees, was the castle. But
Roger picked up something more interesting immediately:
standing on the grass, by a bench of some sort, back turned, looking up
at the aerial circus, was a girl. A WAC or something.
He advanced warily, unsure whether she was an officer.
She was in some kind of uniform all right, but not an officer, for
there was no gleam at her collar. He stepped forward.
"Uh, pardon me, have you got any idea what's going on, miss?"
The girl turned. One of those clear, guileless Midwestern faces
organized around big eyes, blue, a pert nose and even freckles. A kind
of strawberry complexion, hues of pinkness, and it all made him think
of freshness, a kind of innocence.
Hey, would I like to pork that} he decided.
Then he noticed she was crying.
"Gee, what's wrong? Bad news, huh?"
She came into his arms--he could not believe his famous luck again--and
began to sob against his shoulder.
He held her close and tight, muttering, "Now, now," stroking her
hair.
She looked up, soft and blurred, and he thought she wanted a kiss and
so he pressed his lips into hers.
* * *
At last Eichmann spoke.
"What guarantees can you offer? Repp is very dangerous.
You insist that I betray him, or you'll let it be known I betrayed him.
Yet without a guarantee, the first possibility does not exist."
"We have a way of remembering our friends. We've that reputation,
don't we? Give us a chance to live up to it. That's all I can say."
"I'd need to disappear. Understand, it's not the Americans who
frighten me. It's Repp."
"I understand," said Leets.
"All right. I'll see what I can do."
"A bargain then, Eichmann for Repp?"
"I said I'd see."
"Eichmann for Repp. How that would sicken him."
He laughed.
"Herr Eichmann," Tony said, in better German than Leets's, "let us
proceed with our business."
The draydel had run out of energy, and sputtered to a stop, lurching
spastically on the table. Eichmann picked it up in his blunt
fingers--an anatomical oddity, hands so big on such a skinny man--and
began to talk.
"Operation Nibelungen: I was in on it from the beginning.
It was Pohl's actually, Pohl, of the Economic and Financial Office,
WVHA, but he brought me into it, and together we sold the Reichsfuhrer.
It was nothing personal, the business with the Jews, you understand
that.
It was just our way, our job. We had to do it. The policies were set
from the very top. We only did what we were--" "Get to the point,"
Leets instructed.
"Operation Nibelungen. The point of Operation Nibelungen is a Special
Action."
"A "Special Action'?"
"With a rifle."
"Special Action means murder."
"Call it what you will. It can be justified morally from a World
Historical perspective which--" "Who?" said Leets, surprising even
himself at how uninterested he sounded after so many months of sawing
on the same question.
"You must realize. I am not against the Jews. I respect and
understand them. I myself am a Zionist. I believe it would be best
for them to have their own country. All this was forced upon us by our
superiors--" "Who? When?"
"When, I cannot say. I was taken off the project and sent to Hungary
on special emergency assignment before the final planning took place.
But soon. If not already."
Leets said, "Who, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann?
For the last time, WHO?"
His yell seemed to startle the little man.
"No need to yell. Captain. I'm about to tell you."
"Who?"
"A child," Eichmann said.
"A six-year-old boy.
Named Michael Hirsczowicz. Now I think I might have one of those
cigarettes."
Roger put the tip of his tongue through the girl's lips.
She smashed him in the face, open hand.
"What?" he said.
"Hey, I don't get it."
"Fresh," she said.
"You kissed me} I just walked around the corner and here's these
lips."
"You made it dirty. You spoiled it."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She was knocking him out. He was in love, or
half in love at any rate.
"Look, I really didn't mean anything bad. It was just a friendly
gesture."
"Tongues are more than just friends," she said.
"Oh, well, you get carried away, is all. Hell, hell. My name's Rug,
Rug Evans. What's yours?"
"Nora."
"Well, Nora, how are you? Nice to meet you. Do you play tennis, by
any chance? Where'd you go to school?"
"Prairie View."
"Prairie View, yeah, think I heard of it. Women's school out west,
California, isn't it? A real good school, I hear."
"It's a high school in Des Moines. I doubt if you've heard of it. I
didn't even go to a college yet."
"Oh, yeah, well, college is pretty much a waste of time. Even Harvard,
where I go, is not really for serious people. Are you a WAC?"
"The Red Cross Women's Auxiliary."
"A civilian?"
"Yeah. But we're still supposed to call officers sir and all."
"Must be real interesting," he said.
"I hate it. It stinks. They watch you like a hawk. You never get to
do anything."
"Yeah, well, that's the service. Speaking of doing something, I was
wondering, you tied up or anything tonight?" Get the date first, then
worry about dumping
Leets and Outhwaithe.
"See, I don't know the area too well. I'mOSS--Office of Strategic
Services .. . high-level intelligence, that sort of thing. Anywhere
it's hot, that's where you'll find us. But I was wondering if you
could sort of--" "How can you think of that on a day like thist" "And
what's this day?" he finally asked her.
Eichmann smoked and explained.
"In the last days before the war, a wealthy, assimilated Warsaw Jew
named Josef Hirsczowicz seemed to convert to Zionism. Naturally, there
were ramifications."
Leets thought of just one of them: the shabby little office in London,
the old man Fischelson, and all the grim, dark, weeping women. And
Susan Isaacson, American, from Baltimore, Maryland, who'd lost her soul
there, or perhaps found it.
"We viewed this with some concern. First, we felt the Hirsczowicz
fortune to be ours, by right of biological superiority. Second, an
accumulation of capital such as this fellow's is not without its
influence. And that much money in the hands of Zionist agitators,
anarchists. Socialists, Communists, what have you, could create
considerable problems for us. Incidentally, Major, in this respect we
are not so much different from your own government, which, in the
Mideast at any rate, recognizes the World Jewish Conspir--" "Get on
with it," Tony said.
"Thus it was imperative that the man Hirsczowicz and his family and
heirs be added to the list of Warsaw intelligentsia marked for special
handling. And so it happened Eichmann left to their imaginations the
full meaning of the euphemism.
"But imagine our dismay and surprise," and here the German allowed
himself a prim, wicked smile, "when our accountants discovered in an
audit of the Bank Hirsczowicz that his fortune had disappeared.
Disappeared!
Vanished! A billion ziotys. Five hundred million Reichsmarks."
One hundred million bucks, thought Leets.
"Discreet inquiries were made. Naturally so large a sum cannot simply
become invisible. A hundred rumors were tracked, a thousand
interrogations launched.
Obergruppenfrihrer Pohl made it his special project. He was
experienced in financial matters and saw the power of the fortune. He
scoured Europe, when he was not busy running his concentration camp
empire. And finally, he had success. In the middle of 1944, a source
in Zurich was able to prove that the Jew had actually gotten his funds
into the country, to the Schweizerschaft Banksellschaft. And that he
had gotten something else out."
"The boy. The heir," said Tony.
"Yes and no. Again the Jew had been clever, very clever. The boy was
not the heir. The boy was to be provided for, of course, but the
fortune would not be his."
"Who would get it?" Leets asked.
"The Jews," said Eichmann.
"The Jews?"
"Yes. I told you the man was a Zionist. He had decided that his
people's only salvation lay in a Jewish state, an Israel. Privately, I
agree with him. Thus the money was held in escrow for several groups.
Zionist groups. Refugee groups. Propaganda outlets. All dedicated to
this idea of a new country."
"I see."
"But he was too clever, this Jew. Too clever by half.
He of course worried about the son."
"Any father would."
"And so he made an arrangement with one of the fiery young Zionists.
That the boy should be raised as one of them, as a first-generation
Israelite. And know nothing of the fortune. But the father was
terrified for the boy. And so he had written into the document for the
transfer of the money a special complication. He did it on the last
day, in an emotional state. We believe it to be a reenactment of one
of their rituals. Pidyon Haben.
The redemption of the firstborn son. May I have another cigarette,
please? Thank you. What does that say?
A Lucky Strike? Finding me has indeed been a lucky strike for you,
hasn't it?"
"Get on with it."
"The arrangement holds that the boy must survive the war. He is to be
delivered to the bank and identified by fingerprints. It made sense,
because the boy would be raised in Palestine, far from any battles. It
was only to make sure the boy didn't get somehow lost in a shuffle."
"But the war broke out," Leets added. In his mind he could see the
Zionists stuck in the middle of Switzerland, in the middle of Nazi
territory, with the boy who was the key to their future.
"And so they left him there."
"You have grasped the essence."
"Kill him and there's no money for the Jews."
"No. And this is how I was brought into it. I was considered an
expert in finding Jews."
"I see."
"I supervised the search team. It was not easy. It was very
difficult. An agent of ours, one Felix, operated under my direct
control. Painstakingly we tracked the rumors, the lies, the missing
trails."
"And again, success."
"He heard of a place, a convent, the Order of Saint Teresa, in the
canton of Appenzell in the foothills of the Alps, in northeastern
Switzerland. There were said to be Jews there, Jew children, whose
parents had somehow gotten them out. But the nuns were very
frightened.
Very secretive. It took us more weeks until .. . until this."
He held up the draydel.
"Felix got it from the caretaker, an alcoholic old man.
In exchange for a small sum of money. It's very old, unique. It had
been passed down in their family for generations, father to son. It
was identified by an inmate in the concentration establishment
Auschwitz, a former member of the Hirsczowicz household. It proved to
us the child was there. It made our operations feasible.
Both of them."
"Both?" said Leets, feeling his stomach begin to grow cold. Was there
some aspect they had no idea of, some part of it they'd not come
across, that was this very second beginning?
"There is another man, a German agent in Spain. A long-term chap. He
has wonderful papers. Authentic papers, in fact, and neighbors to
vouch for him and a whole set of references, a most impressive
documentation. All identifying him as Stepan Hirsczowicz. A cousin.
Long lost. The papers are quite real; they were taken from a real
Stepan Hirsczowicz, who died at Mauthausen."
Leets saw it now: the final twist.
"And so you get the money."
"Yes. Early on, the plan was to bring it straight into the Reich, a
matter of simple transfer, no difficulties.
But then we began to see how the war would turn out. It was the
Reichsfrihrer's idea, quite brilliant. All that money, clean,
untouched, money that had never been in the Reich, never been
associated with it. And he knew that after the war it could have its
uses. All kinds of uses. It would be for the SS men who had gotten
out, or were in hiding, or for this, or for that. It was a wonderful
opportunity. It was really wonderful."
And Leets understood how important it was to them:
he saw now how a modern state, as it died, could totally invest its
resources into the murder of one child. It wasn't astounding at all,
really; he felt no sense of anticlimax, of being let down.
He fingered the draydel: what a route it had traveled, what a long, sad
journey. From the father, Josef, to the boy, Michael: a symbol of a
father's love. It's all I can give you. I have no other, here. I
would give anything, everything, to save you, but I have only this.
Then it had gone to the caretaker, and then to the killers. To Felix
and then to this smarmy creep here in the room with them and then to
the big cheese Himmler, and Pohl's greasy little fingers had probably
gotten onto it. Then, finally, to Repp's cold hands. A great miracle
has happened.
"A bomb would be chancy, I suppose," said Outhwaithe.
"Any kind of elaborate commando mission difficult to mount in a neutral
country. Thus it's got to be one man, one good man."
"And there was a special problem that made Repp the inevitable
selection," Eichmann explained bloodlessly.
"The nuns keep the children in the cellar all the time."
"They must bring them out at night."
"For hal an hour in the courtyard at midnight.. ..
It's behind a wall. But a man with a rifle could reach it from the
mountain.
"There would be twenty-six of them, right? In all?"
"Yes, Captain."
"So he doesn't have to worry about hitting the right one."
"No, Major. That's the beauty of it. He doesn't have to know. He'll
kill them all."
"What do they call it? The gun, I mean."
"Vampir."
"Vampire," Leets said in English.
"They had great trouble with the weight. Vollmerhausen worked very
hard on the weight. It had to be light, because Repp had to carry it
around the mountain.
There were no roads."
"How did they solve it?"
"The technical aspects I'm not sure of. It has to do with the sun. He
exposes a plate to sunlight, and it makes the light-sensitive elements
more potent. Thus he needs less power, and can carry a smaller
battery. It's very ingenious."
"How much money will Repp get?" Tony asked.
"How did you know?" Eichmann said.
"Come now, we're not that stupid. If there's all that money at stake,
he's not going to be the only chap risking his neck and do it for the
pure ideological pleasure."
"He was coy. He pretended not to be interested. He said it was his
bequest to the fallen. The German fallen.
And so the Reichsfrihrer pressed him. He did not have to press
hard."
"How much?"
"A million. Million, U.S. If he succeeds, he gains the world."
He sat back.
"There. That's it. I sold you Repp. That's everything."
"Not quite. When?"
"I said I didn't know."
"You know," said Leets.
"Everything you've told us is meaningless unless you tell us when."
"I have violated every oath I ever took this afternoon."
"I don't give a fuck for your oaths. When? When?"
"It's a trump card. I want a letter, saying how helpful I've been.
Address it to the commandant here. Already, certain groups have been
sent back to a large PW camp, where surely they will be set free at
first convenience. I only want to go there. I've done no wrong."
"You were playing for this. To bring us all the way, except for this,
weren't you?"
The German officer gazed at him levelly.
"I'm not a stupid fellow either." He even had a pen and paper ready.
"I wouldn't," Tony said.
"We don't know what this bird's up to. We'll find out soon enough.
There's got to be records--" But Leets scrawled a brief note To Whom It
Concerned, testifying to the German's outstanding moral character. He
handed it over, signed, dated.
"Thank you," said Eichmann.
"Now: when?"
"A night when he can move with absolute freedom. A night when counter
moves are impossible. A night when nobody is thinking of war."
Leets stared at him.
Roger burst in, shrieking. He danced past the German, knocking him to
one side, and grabbed Leets up in a wild do-si-do and in a croaking
babble informed them the sky was full of airplanes, the booze was
gurgling, the laughter building.
"Reams. Reams," he cried.
Reams of what? Paper? Leets thought in confusion.
"I got a date," Roger shouted, "a real pretty girl."
"Roger," Leets yelled.
"It's over, fucking World War Number Two, over, they signed the
surrender at Rheims, we missed it on the road."
Leets looked beyond the boy to Eichmann, who sat, composed and grim,
and then beyond Eichmann, and out the door, and in the wall there was a
window. Tony was rising beside him urgently, calling for the MP to
take the German back, and Roger said he was in love, he was in love,
and out the window Leets noted the setting of the sun and the coming of
the German night.
 Repp came out of sleep fast: gunfire.
He rolled from the bed and moved quickly to the window. A glance at
his watch told him it was still before nine. Margareta, her blond hair
unkempt, one thin bare leg hanging out, stirred grumpily under the
covers.
Repp could see nothing in the bright light. The crackle of guns rubbed
raggedly against his ears again, a messy volley. A battle? He
recalled something about the German soldiers turning themselves in
today. Perhaps a few had decided on more honorable action, and war had
come at last to Konstanz. But then he realized what must be happening:
a cold finger pressed for just a second against his heart.
He snapped on the radio. Nothing on Radio Deutsch-land. Broadcast not
scheduled till noon. He fiddled with the dial, picking up excited
jabber in English and Italian, which he didn't understand.
Finally, he encountered a French-speaking station.
He knew the phrase from 1940. He'd seen it chalked on walls then, a
fantasy, a dream.
A nous la victoire.
To us, victory.
They were playing "The Marseillaise." He turned it off as Margareta
lifted her head, face splotchy from sleep. A breast, pink-tipped and
vague, swung free as she rose from the covers.
"What is it?" she asked.
"It's time to go," he said.
He was eight hours ahead of Leets.
Repp checked the mirror once again. Gazing back at him was a
prosperous, sleek civilian, freshly bathed and shaved, hair
brilliantined back, crisp carnation of breastpocket handkerchief, neat
tie on glossy white shirt under exquisitely tailored suit coat. He had
trouble recognizing this image as his own, the cheeks so rosy, the eyes
set in a pink bland face.
"You look like a cinema star," she said.
"I didn't realize how handsome you were."
Yet he could see the lights playing off his forehead where the sweat
had begun to accumulate in beads, high and moist. The border was
coming up, the nightmare passage.
"Repp. One last time," she said.
"Stay. Or get across and go somewhere safe. But best, stay with me.
There's some kind of future here, somewhere, I know there is.
Children even."
He sat down on the bed. He felt exhausted. He tried to press images
of prying border guards and intensive interrogations out of his mind.
He noted that his hands were trembling. He knew he had to go to the
toilet.
"Please, Repp. It's all over now. It's done, finished."
"All right," he said weakly.
"You'll stay?" she said.
"It's just too much. I'm not meant for this kind of thing, for playing
other people. I'm a soldier, not an actor."
"Oh, Repp. You make me so happy."
"There, there," he said.
"So gallant. So damned gallant, your generation. You had so much
responsibility, and you carried it so well.
Oh, God, I think I'm going to start crying again. Oh, Repp, I also
feel like laughing. It'll be fine, I know it will, it'll work out for
the best."
"I know it will too, Margareta," he said.
"Of course I do. It'll all be fine."
He went to her.
"I want you to know," he said, "I want you to know an extraordinary
thing. The most extraordinary thing in my life: that I love you."
She smiled, though crying.
She dabbed at her messy face.
"I look so awful. All wet, hair a mess. Please, this is so wonderful.
I've got to clean up. I don't want you to see me like this."
"You are beautiful," he said.
"I must clean up," she said, and turned and stepped for the door.
He shot her in the base of the skull and she pitched forward into the
hall. He himself felt awful, and he was trying to be kind.
She didn't know, he told himself. Not for one second did she know.
Now all the trails were dead and there were no links between Repp and
the private and Herr Peters.
Repp moved her to the bed and delicately put the sheets over her. He
threw the pistol in the cellar and washed his hands. He checked his
watch. It was almost nine.
He stepped bravely out, blinking in the sun.
The French private, glum because his comrades were drunkenly shooting
up central Konstanz, demanded Repp's passport. Repp could see the boy
was sullen, presumably stupid, and would therefore be inclined to
mistakes. He handed over the document, smiling mildly.
The boy recreated to a table where a sergeant sat while Repp waited
near the gate. Here, the German side, the arrangements were more
imposing, a concrete blockhouse, gun emplacements and sandbags. But
this formal military layout seemed a little idiotic now that it was
manned only by a few Frenchies rather than a platoon of German frontier
policemen.
"Mein Herr?"
Repp looked up. A French officer stood there.
"Yes? What is it?" Repp demanded.
"Could you step over here, please?" The man spoke bad German.
"Is something the matter?"
"This way, please."
Repp took a deep breath and followed him over.
"I have a train to catch. The noon train. To Zurich," he said.
"This will only take a moment."
"I'm a Swiss citizen. You have my passport."
"Yes. The first I've seen. What business did you have in Germany?"
"I'm a lawyer. It was a matter of getting a fellow's signature on a
document. In Tuttlingen."
"And how was Tuttlingen?"
"Loud. The Americans came. There was a battle."
"At the bridge, yes."
"It was very frightening."
"How did you get from Konstanz to Tuttlingen?"
"I hired a private car."
"I thought petrol was all but impossible to find."
"The man I hired took care of that. I paid a fortune, but I don't know
anything about it."
"Why do you look so uneasy?"
Repp realized he wasn't doing well. He thought his heart would burst
or shatter in his chest. He tried not to swallow or blink.
"I don't care to miss my train, Herr Hauptmann."
"Use the French, please. Capitaine."
Repp said the French word awkwardly.
"Yes, thanks."
Repp knew he'd been a hair from calling the man Sturmbannfrihrer, the
SS word.
"May I go now?"
"And what's your rush? Hurrying to get to the wonderful Swiss
climbing?"
"There are avalanches this time of year, Captain."
The captain smiled.
"One other thing. I notice a curious designation on your passport.
It's the first Swiss one I've seen. Here, it says "R-A." What can
that mean?"
Repp swallowed.
"It's an administrative category. I know nothing about it."
"It means "Race--Aryan," doesn't it?"
"Yes."
"I didn't know you Swiss went in for that sort of thing."
"When you are a little country next to a big country, you try and make
the big country happy."
"Yes. Well, the big country is not too happy these days."
How much longer would this last?
"But the Swiss are. The Swiss win every war, don't they?"
"I suppose so, sir," said Repp. His mouth tasted sour.
"Go on. This is ridiculous. Pass, get out of here."
"Yes, sir," Repp said, and scurried off.
It was like a sudden transit to wonderland: People pink and gay,
crowding, chunky, prosperous. Just a few miles, a fence, a bitter
officer overzealously guarding his gate and this, a whole other
world--Kreuzlingen, Konstanz's Swiss suburb. Repp struggled in the
dangerous intoxication of it. He tried to locate deep within himself a
primordial sense of righteousness, or abiding moral discontent. But he
was too bedazzled by surface charms:
goods brightly wrapped in shop windows, chocolates and all kinds of
foods, beautifully dressed women who were totally oblivious of their
appearance, fat kiddies, banners flapping out of windows, private autos
purring down the street. A holiday air prevailed: had he blundered
into some quaint Swiss festival?
No, the Swiss were celebrating war's end too. Repp darkened as this
knowledge made itself clear to him. A fat mama with two children
seemed to materialize out of the crowd along the sidewalk.
"Isn't it wonderful, mein Herri No more killing. The war is finally
done."
"Yes, wonderful," he agreed.
They had no right. They weren't a part of it. They had not won a
victory, they had not suffered a defeat. They had merely profited. It
made him sick, but though he felt like a pariah among them, he pressed
ahead, several blocks down the Hauptstrasse, into Kreuzlingen's
commercial center, then took the Bahnhofstrasse toward the station. He
could see it ahead, not a huge place like the Berlin or the Munich
monstrosities before the war, but prepossessing on its own scale, with
glassed-in roof.
Glass!
All that unbroken glass, glittering whitely among the metal girders,
acres of it. He blinked stupidly. Were there trains there that
actually chugged through a placid countryside without fear of American
or English gangsters swooping down to rain death from the sky? Almost
in answer to this question, a whistle shrieked and a puff of white
smoke rose.
A block yet from the Bahnhof itself, he arrived at an open-air cafe,
the Cafe Munchen.
They'll change that name by noon, he thought.
A few tables were unoccupied. Repp chose one and sat down.
A waiter appeared, a man in white smock with attentive eyes.
"Mein Herr?"
"Ah," a little startled, "coffee, I think," almost having said "real
coffee." The man withdrew instantly and reappeared in seconds with a
small steamy cup.
Repp sat with it, letting it cool. He wished he could stop feeling
nervous. He wished he could stop thinking about Margareta. All the
hard business was over, why couldn't he relax? Yet he could not seem
to settle down.
So many of the little things of the world seemed off: the
Swiss were fatter, cheerier, their streets cleaner, their cars shinier.
It was impossible to believe that with the money he'd be a part of all
this. He could have a black shiny car and dress in a suit like this
and have a thousand white shirts. He could have ten Homburgs, two
hundred ties, a place in the country. He could have all that. What
lay ahead was only the operation itself, and that was what he was best
at.
He tried not to think of After. It would come when it came. If you
looked too far ahead you got in trouble, he knew for a fact. Now,
there was only room for the operation.
Across the street, he saw a small park, green under arched elms, and in
it benches and gym apparatus for children. Strange that it was so
green so early; but then, was it early? What was the date? He'd been
keyed to the surrender, not the date. He thought hard: he knew he'd
crossed the bridge into Konstanz May 4; then he'd been sealed up with
Margareta--how long? It seemed a month. No, only three days; today
then was May 7. Yet the pale sun had urged bud growth out of the trees
and lay in pools on the grass, which itself was green and not the
thatchy stuff of earlier.
In the park, two blond children played on the teeter-totter. Repp
watched them idly. Surely they were Swiss:
but for just a moment he saw them as German. Uncharacteristically, he
began to feel morbid and sentimental about children. Today of all
days. Yet these two beauties--real Aryan stock, chubby,
red-cheeked--really represented something to him: they were what might
have been. We tried to give you a clean, perfect world, he told them.
That awesome responsibility--a major cleaning action,
Grossauberungsaktionen--had fallen to his generation. Hard, difficult
work. But necessary. And so close, so damned close! It filled him
with bitterness.
So much accomplished, thenpffi, gone up in smoke. The big Jews had
probably finally stopped it. Repp almost wept.
"A pretty boy and girl, eh, Herr Peters?"
Repp turned. Was this Felix? He hadn't used the approach code. Repp
looked at a man about his own age, with acne-pitted face, in a
pinstriped suit. Felix? Yes, Repp had been shown a picture of the
same fellow in Berlin. Felix was just the code name; he was really a
Sturmbannfuhrer Ernst Dorfman of Amt Via, SD Foreign Intelligence.
"Hansel and Gretel," said Felix.
"A fairy tale."
"Yes, beauties," agreed Repp.
"May I sit?"
Repp nodded coldly.
"Oh. Forgive my manners: did you get the Tuttlingen Signature?"
"Without difficulty."
"Excellent." Felix smiled, and then confided, "A silly game, no? Like
a novel. In Berlin, they think business like that is important." His
cool eyes showed amusement.
But the man's cavalier attitude bothered Repp.
"And how was the trip?"
"Not without difficulties."
"Yet you made good time."
"The schedule was designed around maximum time allowances. I came
through in minimum."
"And how was the woman?"
"Fine," he said.
"Yes, I'll bet you had pleasant hours with that one.
She was pointed out to me once. You aces, you always get to go
first-class, don't you?"
"The car?" Repp asked.
"Christ, you're a fire breather Still trying to make Standartenfuhrer,
eh? But this way."
Repp did not at all like to hear the word Standartenfuhrer thrown so
casually into a public conversation, but there were in fact no other
customers within earshot of the table. He stood with Felix and pulled
some money out of his pocket. But he had no idea how much to leave.
"Two francs would do nicely, Herr Peters," Felix said.
Repp stared stupidly at the strange coins in his hand.
Now what the hell? Finally, he dumped two of the big ones on the table
and followed Felix.
"That's quite a tip you left the fellow, Herr Peters," said Felix.
"He can send a son to Kadettenanstalt on it."
They crossed the street and walked along some shop fronts and then
turned down a smaller street. An Opel, black, pre-war, gunned into
life. Its driver turned as they approached.
Repp got in the back.
"Herr Peters, my associate, Herr Schultz."
He was a young man, early twenties, with eager eyes and an open
smile.
"Hello, hello," said Repp.
"Sir, I was with SS-Wiking in Russia before I was wounded. We all
heard about you."
"Thanks," said Repp.
"How far to Appenzell?"
"Three hours. We've got plenty of time. You'd best try and relax."
They pulled from the curb and in minutes Schultz had them out of the
town. They took Road No. 13 south, following the coast of the
Bodensee. It shimmered off to the left, its horizon lost in haze,
while on the right tidy farms were set far back from the road on
rolling hills.
Occasionally Repp would see a vineyard or a neatly tended orchard. They
soon began to pass through little coastal towns, Miinsterlingen with
its Benedictine nunnery, and Romanshorn, a larger place, with a ferry
and boatyards; beyond, a fine view of the Appenzell Alps, blue and
brooding, was disclosed; and then Arbon, which boasted a castle and a
fancy old church-"The Swiss could do with an autobahn," said Felix.
"Eh?" said Repp, blinking.
"An autobahn. These roads are too narrow. Very funny, the Swiss, they
won't spend a penny unless they have to. No grand public buildings.
Not interested in politics at all, or philosophy."
"I saw them dancing in the streets," said Repp, "because the war was
over."
"Because the markets will be open, rather," said Felix, "and they can
go back to being the clearinghouse of nations. They do not believe in
anything except francs.
Not idealists like us."
"I assume we can chat as if we are at a reception following a piano
concert because all the necessary details have been attended to," Repp
said.
"Of course, Herr Peters," said Felix.
"The weapon is--" "Still in its case. Unopened. As per
instructions."
"You're not known to British or American Intelligence?"
"Oh, I'm known. Everybody in Switzerland knows everybody else. But as
of the thirtieth I became uninteresting to them. They expected me to
politely put a bullet through my skull. They'd rather pay attention to
their new enemies, the Russians. That's where all the activity is now.
I'm a free man."
"But you were nevertheless cautious in your preparations?"
"Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer, an incautious man does not last any longer
in my profession than in yours. And I've lasted since 1935. Here,
Lisbon, Madrid during the Civil War, a time in Dublin. Buenos Aires.
I'm quite skilled. Do you want details? None of our part of the
operation was set up through code channels; rather it was all done via
hand-carried instructions, different couriers, different routes.
Lately, I haven't trusted the code machines. And I had a ticket to
B.A. out of Zurich last Saturday. Which I took. I got as far as
Lisbon, where another agent took my place. I returned, via plane to
Italy and then train through the Brenner Pass. I haven't been in
Zurich for nearly a week. We've been staying in the Hotel Helvetia in
Kreuzlingen, on Swiss passports such as yours. All right?"
"My apologies," said Repp.
Repp lit a cigarette. He noticed that they'd turned inland. There was
no more water to be seen and now, ahead through the windshield, the
Alps seemed to bulk up majestically, much nearer than when first he'd
observed them.
"The last town was Rorschach, Herr Peters," said the young driver.
"Now we're headed toward St. Gallen, and then to Appenzell."
"I see," said Repp.
"Pretty, the mountains, no?" said Felix.
"Yes. Though I'm not from mountainous territory. I prefer the woods.
How much further in time?"
"Two hours, sir," said the driver. Repp saw his warm eyes in the
mirror as the young man peeked at him.
"I think I ought to grab some sleep. Tonight'll be a long one."
"A good idea," said Felix, but Repp had already dozed off into quick
and dreamless sleep.
"Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer."
He awakened roughly. The driver was shaking him.
He could see that the car was inside something.
"We're here. We're here."
Repp came fully awake. He felt much better now.
The car was in a barn--he smelled hay and cows and manure. Felix, in
the corner, labored over something, a trunk, Repp thought.
"Vampir?"
"Yes."
"Good."
Repp walked to the barn door, which was ajar, and looked out. They
were partially up a mountain, at the very highest level of cultivation.
He looked down across a slope of carefully tended fields and meadows
and could see the main road several miles away.
"It seems desolate enough," he said.
"Yes, owned by an old couple. We bought it from them at an outrageous
price. I tell you, I never worked an operation with such a budget. We
used to have to account for every paper clip. Now: you need a farm,
you buy a farm! Somebody sure wants those little Jew babies dead."
Repp walked out of the barn and around its corner, to follow the slope
upward. The fields ended abruptly a few hundred meters beyond, giving
way to forest, which mantled the rest of the bulk of the mountain,
softening its steepness and size. Yet he still knew he was in for some
exercise. The best estimates, based on aerial survey photos, put the
distance between himself and the valley of the Appenzell convent
roughly twenty kilometers, rough ground through mountain forest the
whole way, up one side of it, around, and then down the other.
He flipped his wrist over to check his watch: 2:35 p.m.
Another six or seven hours till nightfall.
Repp shook the lethargy out of his bones. He had some walking to do,
with Vampir along for the ride. He calculated at least five hours on
the march, which would get him to his shooting position by twilight:
vitally important.
He needed at least a glimpse of the buildings in the light so that he
could orient himself and calculate allowances on his field of fire, the
limits to his killing zone.
Repp stabbed out his cigarette and returned inside.
He took off the tie, threw it in the car, and peeled off the jacket,
folding it neatly. He changed into his mountain boots, a pair of
green-twill drill trousers and a khaki shirt. Then he put on the Tiger
jacket, the new one, from the workshops at Dachau, its crisp patterns,
green on paler green, necked with brown and black. But Repp had vanity
too: against regulations, he'd indulged in one of the traditions of the
Waffen SS and had the German eagle and swastika sewn onto his left
sleeve.
Against whose regulations? he wondered. For now not only did he
represent the Waffen SS, he was the Waffen SS: he was what remained of
thirty-eight divisions and nearly half a million men, heroes like Max
Seela and Panzer Meyer and Max Simon and Fritz Christen and Sepp
Dietrich and Theodor Eicke; and Totenkopf, and Das Reich and Polzei and
Liebstandarte and Wiking and Germania and Hohenstauffen and Nord and
Prinz Eugen, the divisions themselves, Frundsberg and Hitlerjugend:
gone, all gone, under the earth or in cages waiting to be hanged by
Russians or Americans:
he alone was left of this army of crusaders, he was chief of staff and
intelligence and logistics and, most important, the men, the dead men.
It was an immense legacy, yet its heaviness pleased him. Better me
than most. I can do it. A simple thing now, move and shoot.
After Russia all things have seemed easy, and this last mission will be
easiest of all.
"Herr Obersturmbannfrihrer?" The young driver stood looking at him as
he snapped the last of the buttons.
"Yes?"
"Sir, wouldn't it be safer to travel in civilian clothes, in hiker's
kit? That way, if--" "No matter what I'm wearing, I'll have that"--he
pointed to a table, on which Felix now had arranged the weapon
components, gleaming with oil--"which no hiker would carry. But I
won't run into anybody. Dense forest, high in the mountains, far from
climbing and hiking trails. And this is a day of celebration, people
everywhere are dancing, drinking, making love. They won't be poking
about."
"But the boy has a good point," called Felix, "after all--" "And
finally, this is no SD operation. It's the last job of
Totenkopfdivision, of the Waffen SS. I'm no assassin, gone to murder.
I'm an officer, a soldier. This is a battle.
And so I'll wear my uniform."
"Well," said Felix wearily, "it's your funeral, not ours."
"No," said Repp.
"It won't be my funeral."
He went over; he could see smudge marks from Felix's fingers on the
sheen of the cool, oily metal of the rifle components; these somehow
bothered him.
"Of course it has not been opened until just now?"
He knew Felix was giving the driver a look of disbelief, but he heard
the voice ring out, though without conviction, "Just as we were
instructed."
Repp assembled the rifle quickly, threading the gas piston, operating
handle and spring guide into the receiver, inserting the bolt cam ming
and locking units, forcing the pin into the hinge at the trigger unit
pivot, and locking the whole together. It took seconds. Then, without
ceremony, he loaded each of the six magazines, thirty rounds apiece,
with the special subsonic ammunition with the spherical bullet heads.
He set the rifle and clips aside, and checked off the connections and
wiring in the electro-optical pack. Finally, after examining it
closely for defects and finding none, he locked the night scope itself
with its infrared lamp to the zf.4 mount on the receiver of the STG-44,
using the special wrench.
Turning the bulky weapon sideways, he edged a magazine into the
housing, feeling it fit into the tolerances;
then with a sharp slap from the heel of his palm he drove the magazine
home, hearing it snap in as the spring catch hooked.
"You look like a doctor getting ready to operate," said Felix.
"It's just a tool, that's all, a modified rifle," Repp responded,
uneasy at the man's apparent awe of the equipment.
"Now help me with this damned thing."
He put on the battle harness, with canteen and pouches for the
magazines, and over that fitted the instrument rack. Felix and the
youngster helped lift the thing into position, and he stepped into it
like a coat, pulling the straps tight. He stepped away from them,
taking the full weight.
"Christ, that's a heavy bastard. Will you make it?"
asked Felix.
"I'll make it all right," said Repp grimly, as he looped the sling on
the rifle over his shoulder. One last glance at his watch; it was 2:45
p.m.
"Sir?" The driver. He held something bright out.
"For you. For afterward."
Repp took it: Swiss chocolate, wrapped in green foil.
"Thanks. Breakfast. A good idea." He dropped it in the pocket of the
Tiger coat, then stepped away from the table, taking the full heft of
the rifle for the first time. He felt the blood drain from his face
with the effort. A hand touched his shoulder.
"Are you all right?" Felix asked.
"And if I'm not, you'll go?" Repp said.
"No, I'm fine, just have to get used to the weight. I've been living
too soft lately."
"Too many Frauleins," said the irritating Felix.
Repp left the barn, into the sunlight, blinking. Al 7
ready he could sense his body growing used to the weight.
Quickly the trees swallowed Repp. He moved among them in plunging,
deliberate strides, a manifesto of purposeful ness
But already the straps cut into him. Sweat broke out on his skin. His
muscles became warm and fluid in the effort and he knew--from
Russia--that if one pushed hard enough, if one had enough resolve,
enough need, enough concentration, one reached a stage beyond pain,
where great feats of endurance and stamina were possible. Repp knew he
needed greatness today; he needed everything he had, and then more, and
he was prepared to offer it. He was quite cheerful at this stage, full
of confidence, hungry for the test, alert and content.
He forced his way through the underbrush, not looking back at all. He
knew that higher, where the air was thinner, this rough new forest of
elm and oak and a thousand tangles would give way to an ancient one of
virgin pine, somewhat like the interior of the Schwarzwald.
The travel would be much easier then, through solemn ranks of trees on
pine-needle-packed dust which would billow up in great clouds, catching
in the slanting sunlight as he rushed along. But that was hours away
still; now, only this thick green stuff, sticky with sap and gum, every
step of the way urging him to slow. He felt himself moving through
screens and curtains, each one yielding finally to another; the
visibility was limited and the air moist and close. The leaves were
all wet; steam seemed to rise here and there. He felt he was in
jungle.
But he knew he'd be all right if he just stuck to his compass bearing,
ignoring the paths he now and then passed, leaping over them, feeling
clean each time he avoided their temptation. He aimed to reach the
spine of the mountain and there stick to it for a long session of
even-keel walking, before dipping down on the other side. He'd begin
the descent long before reaching the severe peak that loomed above the
timberline 5,000 meters or more.
He forged ahead, fighting the increase in the incline, sidestepping
where possible, climbing over where not, the clumps of rocks that began
to sprout in his way. As he rose along the mountain the forest began a
gradual change; he almost didn't notice it and could pick no one moment
when it had one character and another when it had a different one; or
perhaps a cloud, far above, had sealed off the sun. At any rate, it
ceased soon to be a jungle; the trees, though more majestic, were
farther apart; denseness gave way to longer, gloomier perspectives;
that sense of tropical green light, opaque chlorophyll in the sun,
vanished in a darker pall. He felt as if he were in a cellar, clammy
cool, tubed and catacombed, a jumble of ambiguous shadows, pools of
abstract blackness, sheer thrusts of light at unexpected points where a
gap in the canopy admitted the sun. The trees grew huge and gnarled.
The undergrowth remained but now it fought its way through a carpet of
decomposition, matted leaves, vegetable matter returning to the gunk of
creation. There was a splendor in this dark vision, but Repp was in no
frame of mind to enjoy it. He concentrated on movement, on pace,
though once in a while reached with relief a flatter place where the
mountain itself seemed to pause in its race upward.
In one such he himself seized a moment for rest. He was alone in the
trees. He could hear his own breathing, ragged and forced, in the
gloom. He was uncomfortably warm. He still hadn't reached pines.
Nothing seemed familiar; it was like no forest he knew and he knew
plenty of forests. He actually wished he'd hear a bird hoot or an
animal cry: sign of some animate thing. His eyes scanned ahead: only
massed-together trunks, white or gray scars of rocks standing out among
them, some mossy and dull, and utter silence. The rifle sling was taut
against his shoulder and the straps from the pack knifed deeply into
him. He ignored a dozen or so other small agonies--scratches, a
twisted ankle, sore joints, the beginnings of a cramp--but the straps
really bothered him. Yet he knew to fuss with the damned thing now
would be a mistake. He bent and tried to get the thing higher on him,
so as to carry it more with body than with shoulders. Painful as it
was, he took some sustenance in remembering how close they'd been to
going operational at over fifty kilos. Under those conditions he'd be
exhausted now. That strange little geek Hans the Kike really got the
job done: the man deserved a medal. Right now Hans the Kike was a
bigger hero to Repp than any of them. Thank God the Germans could
produce men like him.
Wearily, he began his march again. The rocks had become quite
troublesome by now, and he had to pick his way through defiles and up
sudden smooth slopes.
At one point he came even with a break in the trees and could see out:
in the far distance a kind of blue haze.
Actually, since he was facing north, and visibility was good, it might
actually be Germany he could see. But what difference did it make? He
pushed himself on.
Ahead, nothing but the steady rise of the mountain, blanketed in trees
and dead leaves and scrawny bracken and thistles. No pines yet, not
easy travel. He feared he was losing time. He didn't even want to
stop for water, though his throat was parched. His boots occasionally
slipped in the treacherous footing and once he went down, badly banging
a knee on a stone. It throbbed steadily. He felt also as though he
had a fever. He felt unnaturally hot. He'd imagined it would be much
cooler up here. Why was it so warm?
Where was he going? Did he even know? Yes, he knew. Wirfahren nach
Polen um Juden zu verschlen. He was going to Poland to beat up the
Jews. He'd seen it chalked on the sides of the troop trains in 1939,
next to grotesque profiles of heavy kike faces, beaked nose, primitive
jaws, almost fish like a horrible image. He was going to Switzerland
to beat up the Jews: it was the same thing, the same process, the same
war. He was going to beat up Jews.
The pain in his shoulders increased. He ought to slow or even rest,
but he knew he couldn't. He was obsessed with failing light. If he
didn't get there before dark he was lost.
He was going to beat up some Jews.
Jews.
You killed them. Messy, disturbing work. No one liked it, and in
Berlin they were wise enough to see that those few who did should not
have been on the firing line. It was a responsibility, a trust, a
commitment to the future.
Repp had asked for the special duty.
He'd been wounded after Demyansk and though the wound wasn!t serious--a
crease across the thigh, healing quickly--his blood count was so low,
they had wanted to put him on less rigorous duty. But Repp wanted to
be a part of the other business, the other war.
It was simple duty: no one forced him, and he did not enjoy it. It was
simply part of the job, a bad part, but one had to get through the bad
parts too.
The day that swam to his mind now was in October, 1942, at Dubno
Airport in Volhynian Province in the Generalgou'vernement. Why this
day? It was not so terribly different from most days. Perhaps it was
the cigarette and the girl, or more precisely the odd congruence of the
cigarette and the girl.
It was a Siberia. It tasted wonderful, filling his head with a most
pleasant buzz. He was only then learning of the joys of these fierce
Russian things that tasted like burning villages and left him just a
bit dizzy. He sat at the edge of a pit on a cool sunny day. Everybody
was being very kind, because the business could get messy and difficult
and hard on everyone. But today things were going quite nicely. A lot
of people were around, civilians, relaxing soldiers, some with cameras,
smiling, security policemen.
The gun across his legs was a Steyr-Solothurn, designated an MP-34. It
was a wonderful old weapon, beautifully crafted though quite heavy. It
had a fine wood stock and a perforated barrel and a horizontal magazine
feed system. Repp loved it: the Mercedes-Benz of machine pistols, too
elegant and precise for wartime production.
The barrel had finally cooled. He nodded to a black-uniformed security
policeman. The man disappeared behind a bulwark of earth that had been
gouged out to form the pit, and Repp for just a second was alone with
his morning's work: there must have been five hundred of them by that
time, filling half the excavation, most of them lifeless, though a cry
would now and then rise. They did not look so bad; he'd seen many
worse bodies on the Eastern front, their guts blown out, shit and legs
and shattered skulls all over the place;
these people were neatly slumbering, though there was a great deal of
blood.
The policemen got another group into the pit. An old man with a child,
a mother and father and several young children. The mother was
crooning to them, but the father did not seem to be much help. He
looked terribly scared and could hardly walk. The children were
confused.
They were talking that infernal language of theirs, almost a German
dialect, yet hideously deformed, like so many things German they
touched. Yet Repp could not hate them, naked women and men and
children, walking daintily into the mud, as though they wanted to keep
their feet clean. There were several other women, the last of them a
girl in her twenties, young and dark and quite pretty.
As Repp wearily stood, hoisting the gun up with him, he heard the young
girl say, to no one in particular, "Twenty-three years old."
What a remarkable thing to say! He thought about it later. Curious:
what had she meant? I'm too young to die? Well, everybody's too young
to die, miss.
Repp engaged the bolt, braced the weapon tightly against his ribs, and
fired. The bullets thudded neatly across the bare backs and they fell
quivering. They lay,
one or two convulsing. It was odd: you never saw the bullets hit or
the blood spurt and yet before they were still they seemed doused with
it, red, thin, pouring from every orifice. A child moved again,
moaned. Repp fingered the selection switch back to single shot and
fired, once, into the skull, which broke apart.
Then he changed magazines.
Everybody was happy when Repp did the shooting.
He was quick and efficient. He didn't make mistakes or become morose
after a while as so many of the others did. He even came to believe
that it was best for the Jews too.
"Better me," he said later that day, drinking coffee, "than some
butcher."
Repp saw light ahead. At that same moment a new sensation became
apparent to him. He was moving without trouble, through clean, flat
forest floor. He'd reached the high virgin forest. He rushed on to
the light.
He stood at the crest, amid pine and fir, in cool air. He looked
about, his eyes tracing the ridge he was on to a peak, stony and
remote. Across the way, he could see other mountains, their shapes
softened in trees, and beyond that the true Alps, snowy and heroic.
But Repp's vision was drawn downward. His eyes followed the carpet of
forest sliding away for thousands of feet down the slope of the
mountain, until finally it gave way to cultivated land, checker boarded
but much of it green, the Sitter Valley in the Canton of Appenzell. He
could not see the town--it was in another leg of the valley--but there
was the convent, a medieval church, high-roofed with two domed steeples
and a jumble of other subsidiary buildings, walled off from the
world.
He could see the courtyard from here too.
He knelt swiftly and peeled the rifle from his shoulder.
He braced it on the bipod and stood for just a moment, freed at last
from a part of the burden, though of course the bulky pack on his
shoulders still hurt. But then he was back down, sliding the hatch off
the opaque face of the Vampir apparatus. He saw the light strike it.
Did it glitter, seem to come alive; or was that his imagination?
Whatever, Obersturmbannfrihrer Repp allowed himself a smile. He had
quite a distance still to go, but downhill, through the virgin pine,
and he knew he'd make a shooting position well before dark.
 He's already there," said Tony.
"On the mountain.
Over the convent. With Vampir."
"Yeah," said Leets, tiredly. He sat back, put his feet up on the table
and with two fingers pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Christ, I've got a headache," he said.
Beyond, music lifted, American, popular, from off the Armed Forces net.
He could hear laughter, the sound of women's voices. Women? Here?
Laying it on a bit thick, weren't they?
"We could call the Swiss police," said Roger brightly.
"They could get some people out there and warn the--" "No lines," said
Tony, "not in the middle of a war.
End of a war. Whatever. You can't just ring up the operator, eh?"
"Okay, okay," said Roger quickly, "here's what, I got it, I got it,
we'll radio OSS in Bern or Zurich. They could get in contact with the
Swiss police. There's just a chance that--" "There's no chance at
all," said Leets.
"We are now in the middle of the biggest celebration in three
thousand-odd years of European history. They knew all along."
"I suppose we can rationalize our failure," said Tony.
"We could argue that it's really none of our business:
one lone German criminal and some stateless Jews in neutral territory.
We did give it a very good effort. Nobody can say we didn't try."
"Anybody got any aspirin?" Leets asked grumpily.
"Jesus, it sounds like a goddamned party out there. I keep hearing
women. Are there women out there, Roger?"
"Some Red Cross girls," Roger said.
"Look, another thing we could try is the legation. There's bound to be
a night duty officer. Now he could--" "I sure could stand to get
laid," Leets said.
"I haven't gotten laid since--" he trailed off.
"And of course there's a political dimension to be considered too,"
said Tony.
"All that money going to Zionists. It seems quite possible that some
of those funds might be diverted into ends other than those best for
King and country, eh? Let's fold up here and go find ourselves a pint,
and enjoy the celebration."
"Captain, we--" "All right, Roger."
"Captain, we can't just--" "All right, Roger," he said.
"Boy, do I have a headache.
I always knew this would happen. Right from the start. I could feel
it, I knew it was in the cards. Goddamn it."
"I suppose I did too," said Tony, rising wearily.
"It certainly has got dark fast, hasn't it?"
"What're you guys talking about?" Roger asked, fearing the answer.
"Roger, go get the Jeep," said Tony.
"And tell me please where the bloody phone is in this mausoleum."
"Hey, what--" "Roger," Leets finally explained, "it's come down to us.
You, me. Tony. Only way. Go get the Jeep."
"We can never drive there," said Roger.
"We're hundreds of miles away. It's almost eight. Not that far in so
short--" "We can probably make it to Nuremberg in two hours. Then, if
we're lucky, real lucky, we can promote an airplane. Then--" "Jesus,
what is this, dreamland? We'd have to get landing clearances, visas,
stuff like that. Permission from the Swiss. Find another car on the
ground. Drive to, what was it, Applewell or whatever, then find this
place.
Before midnight. That's the craziest thing I--" "No," Leets said, "no
cars, no visas, no maps. We jump in. Like Normandy, like Varsity,
like Aniage Elf."
"Where is that damned telephone?" said Tony.
Tony found his phone--a whole abandoned switchboard full of them, in
fact--in the great monumental stairwell around which Schloss
Pommersfelden was built. But the space began to fill with people,
drawn out of offices and billets, or drawn off the road by the blazing
lights. It was one of those rare nights when no one wanted to be
alone; no one was moody or unhappy. A future had just opened up for
them.
Women began to appear. From where? Wasn't this place really a kind of
prison? Red Cross girls, newspaper correspondents, WAC's, a few
British nurses, some German women even. The stairwell jammed up with
flesh. Everybody was rubbing, grinding, bumping, stroking.
Liquor, looted from somewhere in the castle, began to appear in heroic
quantities. Nobody had time for glasses; one-hundred-year-old Rhine
wines in black dusty bottles were sucked down like Cokes by GI's. A
radio provided music. Dog-faces and generals rubbed shoulders in
crowded orbits around the girls. Leets thought he heard the German
officers singing in the detention wing--something schmaltzy and
sentimental in counterpoint to the Big Band jangle from the radio.
A girl kissed Leets. He could feel her tits squash flat against his
chest. She put a boozy tongue in his ear and whispered something
specific and began to tug at him, and then someone ripped her away.
Meanwhile, Tony worked the phone. Leets could not help but hear.
"I say." Tony especially the stage Englishman^ David Niven, for
Christ's sake.
"Major Outhwaithe here, his Majesty's Royal Fusiliers, hello, hello, is
this Nuremberg, Signal Corps, could you talk up, please, yes, much
better, I'm told a British Mosquito squadron is about, at the airfield
of course, can you <Msibly buzz me through, old fellow, must be an Air
Officer Commanding about, no, no, English chap, funny talker like me,
right, Limey, at least a group captain, what you chaps would call a
colonel, yes, it sounds like a lovely party, we're having quite a one
at this end ourselves, but do you think you could arouse Group Captain
Manville? I see, yes, pity, then is it possible you could patch me
through to that bunch then, yes, R.A.F, yes, hello, hello, are you
there, Group Captain Manville? Yes, another Brit, Outhwaithe, of
Mi-six, or SOE actually, you're not Sara Finchley's cousin, ah, yes,
thought so, believe I laid eyes on you in '37 at Henley, the regatta,
you were the cox 9
swam in the number-two boat, yes, bit of a hero, weren't you, Magdalen
man, eh? and didn't you football as well, thought so, no, not
Magdalen, Christ Church, '30, languages, got me into this spy business,
yes, cushy, I agree, a few times, France, scratches though, yes,
wonderful it's over, but I've heard Labour will win the next general,
boot poor Winston out on his arse, yes, drinks awfully, heard the same
myself, stay in? Good God, now?
done my bit, time to get back though it'll be all different, every
little thing'll have changed for the worse though I fancy in a year or
so or ten or twenty, we'll look back on all this and think it great
fun, highlight of our days, though right now it seems bleak enough,
yes, sad in a way that it's over, they were mighty days, weren't they?
and how is dear Sara, really, that common little Welshman Jones, Ives,
Ives, both legs, she's marrying him anyway? why, how splendid, sounds
like a novel, Arnhem, heard it was a throw of the dice all the way, Red
Devil, those were brave lads, those were, make the rest of us look like
sodders, quite a show, quite a show, Frost's adjutant? and how is
Johnny? glad to be free, I'll bet, now, by the way, Group Captain,
Tom, Tom is it? Tony here, yes, Antony, a major, they weren't so
generous with the rank in our backwash department of the war, hope it
doesn't hold me back after I'm de mobbed no telling how the records
will count, yes, anyway, now, Tom, dear fellow, I'm in a bit of a
pinch, yes, not a real bother, but time-consuming nevertheless, need an
airplane, a Mosquito actually, yes, good ship, the Mossie--" Tony
looked up at Leets, covered the speaker and said, "The beggar's
completely sozzled," and returned without missing a beat. "--all wood,
I know, I
always wondered how they stood up to Jerry flak, flew between it, ho ho
ho ho, very good, Tom, now, Tom, we've got to get to Switzerland in
rather a dash, I know it's the best party since Kitchener reached
Khartoum and God knows we've all earned it, and it's rather a chunk of
a favor I'm asking, but it seems to be on the urgent side, a loose
Jerry end we need to tie down, time's a-wasting and I haven't got time
to call the right people upstairs, and of course the Yanks, as usual,
would rather play rub-my-bum with the Russians than listen to us, but
as I say, it would be awfully nice if I could hitch a ride to, well,
I'm glad you realize the importance, yes, Tom, yes, yes, about two
hours, yes, I understand, yes, quite, quite, of course, best to Sara,
best to her fellow Jones, Ives, sorry, Ives, wonderful girl, so brave,
tally-ho," and at last he laid the phone down in its cradle.
"He said No?"
"He said Yes. I think. So drunk he could hardly speak, the music was
quite loud. But there'll be a Mosquito on the field at ten at
Grossreuth Flughafen. God."
He stood. ^ Leets and Outhwaithe pushed their way through the
celebrants, and out into the night, where Roger waited with the Jeep
and the Thompson submachine guns.
Repp, at 400 meters out, had an angle of about 30 degrees to the target
zone. It was his best compromise, close enough to put his rounds in
with authority, yet high enough to clear the wall. He half crouched
now behind an outcrop of rock. The Vampir rifle lay before him on the
stone, on its bipod, the bulky optics skewing it to one side. Repp had
removed the pack and set it next to the rifle so that its weight
wouldn't pull his shooting off.
Enough light lingered to let him examine the buildings beneath and
beyond him. Built five hundred years ago by fierce Jesuits, the
buildings had been walled and somewhat modernized early in the century
when the order of Mother Teresa took them over as a convent. It looked
like a prison. The chapel, the oldest building, was not impressive,
certainly nothing on the scale of the Frauenkirche in Munich, a true
monument to papism; it was a utilitarian stone thing with a steeply
pitched roof, two domed steeples with grim little crosses atop them.
But Repp steadied his binoculars against the other, larger edifice, the
living quarters of the order that fronted on a courtyard. Patiently in
the fading light he explored it until he found, not far from the main
entrance with stairway and imposing arches, an obscure wooden door,
heavily bolted. The children would spring from there.
There would be twenty-six of them, and he had to take them all:
twenty-four, twenty-five even, simply wasn't good enough. The SD
report said they came out every night at midnight and played in the
yard for about forty minutes. Repp calculated that they'd be bunched
in the killing zone, that is, outside the door but not yet dispersed
enough to prevent a clean sweep of the job, for about five seconds.
He'd take them when the last one had stepped out the door. Fantastic
shooting, to be sure, but well within his--and
Vampir's--capabilities.
And what if twenty-seven targets came out, or twenty-eight, or
twenty-nine, meaning a nun or a novitiate or two had come along to
watch and help? It was entirely possible, even probable. In Berlin
they'd been vague and half-apologetic. Perhaps even the Reichsfuhrer,
who'd sent millions East, felt queasy about ordering him to shoot a
Swiss nun. Yet they chose Repp for his strength as well as his skill
and he'd resolved to make the difficult decisions. If a nun had to die
in the cause of making the world Judenrein, clean of Jews, then so be
it.
He'd kill everything on the scope.
Repp laid down the binoculars as the last of the light died. He
clapped his hands, and pulled his jacket tighter. He was cold and
afraid of fatigue, which could take his edge. And he was strangely
uneasy about all this: so simple, everything had whirred into place. He
knew enough to distrust such ease. He shifted an arm and looked at his
watch. Almost nine.
Three more hours.
It was almost nine. The drunken lieutenant was explaining but his
words kept dissolving into giggles. He was under the impression Roger
was an officer and he seemed to think the more he giggled the more
trouble he was in, which meant that he giggled even harder.
"The tank carrier, sir, uh, he stripped his gears trying to get her
outta the mud, uh, or he thought he would, uh, sir, he put her in
reverse and she jumped the road and--" The remainder of the communique
was lost in a seethe of giggles. The lieutenant was trying to explain
why the flatbed truck, designed to transport tanks, lay angled across
the road ahead, garish in the light of a dozen purple flares. Around
it clustered a group of Americans--they'd drawn duty on WE night and
some 3
one had a bottle and whatever they were supposed to do just wasn't
going to get done.
It had been like this most of the way since Schloss Pommersfelden.
Nuremberg still lay somewhere in the distance, mythical like Camelot,
and to get there they'd have to pass through more of what they'd
already seen:
drunken joyous men of all nationalities, accidents, honking horns,
flares, small-arms fire. And women. In the small town of
Forchheim--"Fuck-him," in GI argot--through which they'd just pushed
their way, the nonfrateriiization law had broken down totally, and
young officers were the most audacious offenders. College boys mostly,
with no real military careers on the line, they'd turned the town into
a fraternity party or prom night. The Jeep had been laid up at a
corner behind a column of stalled vehicles before Leets, in a frenzy of
rage, had gone forward to find two staff cars hung up on each other in
a minor crash, and in the back seat of each a couple necking hotly
while around them MP's argued and screamed. Leets went back and they'd
pulled out of line to try an alternate route, but almost ended up in
the Regnitz River and did in fact become lost until a studiously
inebriated British major of the Guards, elaborately polite, had pointed
them back in the right direction.
"Well, Jesus, how long, Lieutenant?" Leets demanded, leaning across
Roger. Something in his voice must have startled the youngster. He
stepped back abruptly and began to speak in an oppressive imitation of
sobriety.
"There's a maintenance vehicle from the motor pool in Nuremberg on the
way, uh, sir."
"Christ," said Leets in disgust.
He climbed out of the Jeep and pushed by the lieutenant to the truck.
The fucking thing was hopelessly locked in, its double-axled set of
rear tires having slipped off the roadway into a culvert, hooking
there, and as the driver had pulled to free himself, he'd actually
twisted the huge flatbed up and out into the air; it looked like a
drawbridge stuck halfway, blocking the road completely. It would take
a heavy tow truck or perhaps a crane to move the thing.
Up ahead loud voices clashed off one another. Leets looked into the
circle of vivid pink light from the flare and saw two men facing each
other. They were about to begin throwing punches.
"Hey, what's going on here?" he yelled.
"Asshole here dumped his fucking truck in the middle of the road, now
he won't move it so I'm gonna move him," said one.
"You just go on and try it, sucker," said the other.
"Knock it off, goddamn it," Leets ordered.
"There's broads up in that Fuck-him place," said the first man, "and
goddamn I mean to get a piece of ass tonight."
"All right," said Leets.
This son of a bitch and his fuckin' tru--" "Knock it off, goddamn it!"
Leets shouted.
"Captain," said Roger.
"Shut up, Roger, goddamn it, I got enough--" "Captain. Let them have
our Jeep. We'll take their car. Everybody's happy."
"What are you driving?" Leets asked.
"Ford staff car," the man said sullenly.
"I'm General
Taplow's driver. But, hey, I can't let anything happen to that car."
"More pussy in Fuck-him than you ever saw in one place in your life,"
said Roger.
"Some of them German women are walking around bare-tit."
"Oh, Christ," said the man weakly.
"Harry, you're gonna get us all in a lot of trouble."
"Bare-tit?"
"Some of 'em even have these little pasty things on."
"Oh, Jesus. That I gotta see."
"Harry." ' "Look, you'll take real good care of that car, won't
you?"
"You know where the Nuremberg airport is, Grossreuth Flughafen?"
"Yeah, sure."
"That's where the car'll be. All locked up."
"Fine," the man said, "fine and fine again." Then his excitement
beached itself.
"Uh. Didn't see you was an officer. Uh, sir."
"Forget it. No rules tonight, that's the only rule."
"Yes, sir."
"Get the major and our stuff," Leets told Roger, who'd already
started.
The two groups of men filed by each other in the fading light of the
flares. One of the drunken GI's suddenly looked up at the three
fellows passing him, and saw them grave-faced, a trifle solemn, grumpy
with their automatic weapons.
"Jesus," he said, stunned at the vision, "you guys know where there's a
war or something?"
But he got no answer.
As Leets climbed into the Ford staff car, he forced himself to check
his Bulova. He didn't want to but there were a lot of things he didn't
want to do that night that he knew he was going to have to do anyway,
and the easiest of them all was to look at the watch.
It was almost ten.
It was almost eleven. Repp felt sluggish from his long wait in the
cold rocks. During this time he had closed his mind down with his
extraordinary self-control: he had willed out unpleasant thoughts,
doubts, twinges of regret. He'd put his mind in a great dead cold
place, letting it purify itself in the emptiness. He wasn't exactly
sure what happened in this trancelike state and he'd never spoken of it
to others. He simply knew that such an exercise in will seemed to do
him a great deal of good, to generate that icy, eerie calm that was the
bedrock of the great shooting, the really fantastic shooting.
It was something he'd learned in Russia.
But now it was time to bring himself up, out of the cold. He began
with exercises, pedantic physical preparations.
He rolled to his belly and entwined his fingers, clamping them behind
his neck, elbows straining outward.
Then, slowly, he lifted his torso from the ground, chin thrusting high
on the strength of his stomach. He rocked, stretching, feeling the
pain scald as the muscle tension rose; then, sweetly, he relaxed. Up,
hold and relax: three sets, ten each. Then the shoulders and upper
chest: this was difficult--he didn't want to do a classic press-up
because he didn't want to deaden his touch by putting his weight on his
palms. He'd therefore evolved an elbow press-up, planting them on the
ground, gathering his fists before his eyes. Then he'd force the fists
down, levering his body on the frilcrum of his elbows--a painful trick
that soon had the girdle of muscles around his shoulders, chest and
upper body singing. But he was hard on himself and pushed on, feeling
at last the sweat break from his body and its warmth come bursting out
his tunic collar.
He lay on his back and thrust his arms out above him;
he twisted them, clockwise, then back, each as far as he could, forcing
the bones another millimeter or more in their casings of gristle and
meat. He could feel his forearms begin to throb as the blood pulsed
through and enlarged his veins. He struggled against the pain, knowing
it to be good for him. His hands he opened and closed rapidly,
splaying them like claws until he felt them begin to bum and tremble.
Repp lay back, at last still. His body felt warm and loose. He knew
it would build now in strength and that when his heart settled down it
would be deadly calm. He stared up through the canopy of firs at the
stars blinking coldly in the dead night. He stared hard at the
blackness above him. It was impenetrable, mysterious, huge. Repp
listened for forest sounds. He heard the hiss of the wind among the
needles, forcing them to rub dryly against themselves. He felt it to
be an extraordinary moment:
he felt he'd actually become a part of the night, a force in it. A
sensation of power unfolded in him like a spasm.
He felt himself flooding with confidence. Nothing could stop him now.
He envisioned the next few minutes. In the scope, the buildings would
be cold and blank. Then, a moment of blur, of blitz almost, as the
warmth from the door opening dissipated in the cool night air,
molecules in the trillions swirling as they spread. A shape,
shivering, iridescent, would tumble across the screen, almost like a
one-celled creature, a germ, a bacillus, a phenomenon of biology. And
another, and another, out they'd tumble, buzzing, swarming, throbbing
in the inky-green color Vampir gave them, far away, and Repp would
count .. . three, four, five .. . and with his thumb slip off the STG's
safety and begin tracking .. .
thirteen, fourteen, fifteen .. . Vampir's reticule was a black cross, a
modified cross hair, and he'd hold it on the lead shape .. .
twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six ... And then he'd fire.
The sound of an airplane rubbed the image from Repp's eyes. He rolled
over to his stomach and slithered up the rock to the rifle. He felt
calm and purposeful, a force of will. He did not want to draw the
rifle to him yet and have to hold the shooting position too long.
The airplane had faded.
He glanced at his watch.
It was almost midnight.
Plenty of time.
It was almost midnight. They'd been in the air nearly an hour now and
Roger may have been more miserable in his life but he wasn't sure when.
In the first place, he was scared. He'd never been scared like this
before because he'd never jumped into battle before. He was so scared
it hurt to breathe.
Following close upon this terror, indeed making it keener, richer, was
his bitterness. He was ferociously bitter. The war was over! That
fact linked up with the other one: he was going into combat!
Next, working down his taxonomy of misfortune, he was uncomfortable. He
squatted in the hull of the Mosquito, which was rocketing along at
about 408 miles an hour but a Mosquito, a twin-engine fighter-bomber
noted for speed and maneuverability, was a three-man kite, and Roger,
after the pilot and Outhwaithe beside him in the bubble cockpit up top
and Leets forward in the Perspex nose cone, was the fourth man. All
they had for him was a crappy little seat, typical British junk, wedged
into the tunnel between nose and cockpit, and he had to squat like some
nigger shoe shine boy. He was also jammed with equipment which made
the small space harder to bear, the parachute for one, a supremely
ridiculous M-l Thompson submachine gun, eleven pounds of gangster's
buddy, for another. Worst of all, the hatch, through which, sometime
soon, they'd all take the Big Step, didn't seem sealed too well and
rattled around loosely just a foot away from him, cold air just
crashing through. But then what didn't rattle in this crate? It
really was wood--plywood, glue and canvas, just like the Wright
Brothers' Dayton Flyer or a Spad. And just as cold. And it smelled of
gas, and the engines, big enough to drive a fucking PT boat, were hung
off the wings just outside the hull on either side, Rolls-Royce 1680's,
and they pulsated crazily, filling Roger's young bones with dread. He
had a headache and no aspirin. He felt a little sick and not too long
ago he'd peered down the tunnel to Leets--it wasn't far, six feet--and
seen, over Leets's hunched shoulder, white.
White? Snow, you dope. Then he'd felt the plane banking and sinking,
his stomach floating for just a second,
and he'd realized they were in the Alps. They were knifing through the
Alps.
Suddenly, Tony hung down and then was beside him, having descended from
his perch in the bubble. He roughly butted young Rug aside as though
he didn't count for bloody much, and sprang the hatch. Cold night air
rushed in, inflating under Roger's coat. Goose pimples blossomed on
his pale skin and he began to shake.
What's going on? he wondered.
His nigger's place in the aircraft wasn't even equipped with an
intercom jack. The three big shots must have been merrily chatting
away all this time, and here he was in this dark tunnel in the guts of
the plane, unable to see, not knowing what was going on, and suddenly
this: hatch open, Outhwaithe checking his gear. Roger realized they
must have found it. He felt Leets, who'd crawled down his tunnel, next
to him. Leets gestured wildly. He seemed unhealthily excited. Roger
felt numb, even tired, under his fear, disgust and chills.
Leets pressed Tony's earphones onto Roger and spoke into his own throat
mike.
"Rug, we think we've found it. We're going around again, he's going to
try and put us down in a field just west of the place. Tony first,
then me, then you. When you land, you'll see it off behind a wall,
very ornate, four stories--" "Chickies, chickies, Mama Hen here, thirty
seconds off your drop," said the pilot, a calm steady young voice, over
Leets.
"He'll be shooting from the mountain beyond, down into the courtyard.
Around back from where we're coming in. Thing to do is to get into
that courtyard before those kids get there. Got that?"
Roger nodded weakly.
"We'll be going out at six hundred. And don't forget you gotta pull
the rip cord on that chute, no static lines."
Roger, in horror, realized that though he was jump-qualified he'd never
pulled a rip cord in his life, there'd always been a nice panic-proof
static line to pop the chute for him. Suppose he froze?
"Ten seconds, chickies."
Tony looked at them. His face was smeared with paint. His wool
commando watch cap was pulled low over his ears. He gave them a
thumbs-up, a very WWII gesture. But WWII was over.
"Go, chickies, go!"
Tony pitched forward. Leets followed.
Roger stole a glimpse at his watch. It was still almost midnight. It
occurred to him for just a fraction of a second that he could sit tight
and go back to Nuremberg with the guy up there. But even as he was
considering this delicious alternative, his legs seemed to acquire a
heroic will of their own and they drove him to the hole in the bottom
of the plane. He fell into silence.
It was time to shoot.
Repp was very calm, as always, now when it was only himself and the
rifle. Its slightly oily tang, familiar amid the odor of the forest,
rose to meet his nose, and he took the sensation as reassurance. His
breath came evenly, smooth as soft music, feeding his body a steady
flow of oxygen. He felt marvelously alive, focused, his nerves
tingling with joy. A great yearning had passed.
He set himself on his elbows, belly, loins pressing against the rock,
legs splayed for support, and drew the rifle to him. He laid the
butt-stock against his shoulder.
He palmed the pistol grip; the metal and plastic, cold as bone, heated
quickly in his hand.
He rocked the weapon on its bipod, feeling its quick response to his
guidance. It seemed alive, obedient.
Repp had a special feeling for weapons; in his hands they were animate,
almost enchanted. With his other hand, he reached up and plucked the
lens cap off Vampir. He clicked on the auxiliary battery. He let his
trigger finger search the curve of the trigger; then, finding it, drop
away.
Repp eased the bolt back. It slid through oily stiffness, making a
show of resistance; then he felt it yield with a snap and he freed it
to glide home, having taken the first of the subsonic rounds off the
magazine and seated it in the firing chamber, simultaneously springing
open the dust cover on the breech. A whole system orchestrated itself
to Repp's will--gas piston, operating rod and handle, bolt cam ming and
locking units, pieces moving and adjusting within the weapon
itself--and he took great pleasure in this, seeing the parts slide and
click and lock. He checked the fire-control switch: semiautomatic.
He thumbed off the safety.
A kind wind took Tony. Leets felt like he was descending in molasses
and could see the Englishman a hundred feet below and three hundred
feet away, his white canopy undulating in the wind, and he could see
nothing else. The Mosquito drone was a memory. Leets fell in heavy
silence, still a minute from touchdown when he saw Tony's chute
collapse as it hit the ground.
Leets landed in a bundle of pain. Lights flashed behind his eyes on
impact and his leg began to throb. He'd tried to favor it, a mistake,
throwing himself off, and he hit on his butt and shoulder and lay there
for a second in confusion, senses shaken by the hit. He could make out
Tony's silk flapping loosely across the field, unconnected to any other
thing. Climbing to his feet--leg hurt like hell but seemed to work
okay--he popped his own harness toggle, and felt it fall away. He
shook himself loose of it.
"Shit!" someone said close by, concurrent with the thud of meat and
earth colliding. He looked and could see Roger scrambling up,
struggling with his shrouds.
Leets unslung his Thompson. He could see he was in a meadow in a
valley, ankle-deep in grass, low hills looming around. A quarter-mile
or so away he thought he could see a building and a wall closing it
off.
"This way," he hissed at the still befuddled young sergeant, and began,
in his slow and painful way, to run.
He could not see Tony.
Tony ran. He seemed to be closing the distance fast.
There was some pain, but not so much. He wasn't sure about the gun,
he'd lost that when he hit. Still, the place seemed a long way off.
He just kept running. Someone else in his body was breathing hard. He
wanted to cough or stop. A footrace.
Didn't they realize a certain type of gent doesn't run vulgarly and
blindly across fields, almost to the point of vomiting, his own sweat
burning hotly on his skin? A gentleman never sweats. The boots were
impossibly heavy and the grass slowed him. He felt perfectly lucid.
Repp flicked on the scope and finally, last step, braced his free hand
on the stock, just behind the receiver.
He fit his shooting eye against the soft rubber cup of the scope.
The world according to Vampir was green and silent.
He felt very patient and helpful almost. He felt not that he was a
part of history, but that he was History, a raw force, reaching out of
the night to twist the present into the future. Savage, perhaps, in
immediate application, but in a much longer run Good and Just and
Fair.
A smear of light radiated across the scope as a trillion trillion
swirling molecules spilled out the opening door.
Right on time for their appointment with destiny, Repp thought.
A blurry splotch of light jiggled out, barely recognizable as a human
shape. And another.
Repp tracked it against the reticule of the sight, as other splotches
paraded helpfully along behind.
"There, there, my babies, my fine babies, come to Papa," Repp began to
croon.
Leets was almost dead with exhaustion. He was no runner. He wanted to
throw himself onto the grass and suck in great quarts of cool oxygen.
Roger was running next to him. He'd caught up, all that idiotic tennis
making him strong and fast, but Leets wouldn't let him get beyond.
Wasn't that Tony ahead at the gate?
The gate!
A sick feeling burned through Leets, almost a sob.
How could they get through the gate?
Tony hit the door in the wall. It didn't budge.
Repp had nineteen, now twenty.
Repp's finger was on the trigger, taking the slack out.
Repp had twenty-one, twenty-two.
Leets tried to get there. He'd never make it. He had a terrible
premonition of the next several seconds.
"Tony!" someone screamed, himself.
Old Inverailor House gimmick, from the first days of SOE training up in
Scotland. The man was an ex-Hong Kong police inspector, knew all kinds
of tricks of the trade, of which this was but one:
"Now if you've got a lock in a door and you want in and you're in a bit
of a hurry, say Jerry's coming along, take your revolver, just like a
chap in a Hollywood cowboy picture, and shoot--but not into the lock,
flicks are all wrong about that. You'll just catch the slug on the
bounce in your own middle. Rather, at an angle, into the wood, behind
the bloody lock. That big four fifty-five makes a wonderful wrench."
Funny how it came back, swimming up through five years of complicated
past, just when he needed it.
Carefully, holding the Webley snout at an angle two inches from the
ancient brass lock plate. Tony fired. The flash spurted white and
blinding.
* * *
Repp had twenty-five. There was no slack in the trigger.
But what was going on?
"Kinder," yelled Tony, German perfect, "the bad man can see in the
dark, the bad man can see in the dark."
He could see their white faces stark in the night, and eyes white as
they fled. They were apparitions. He heard the scuffle of panicked
feet across the pavement. He heard squeals and yelps. He must have
seemed a giant to them, a nightmare creation. They must have thought
he was the bad man who could see in the dark, running through the yard,
breathing hard, face blackened, gigantic pistol in one hand. Another
irony for his collection.
How quickly they vanished. Several brushed against his leg in their
flight and yet it seemed to take only a second. They scurried like
small animals. He could not see them anymore.
A woman was crying. Terrified. She didn't know.
We're good fellows, madame, he wanted to explain.
He heard Leets yelling. What did the man want?
Repp fired.
Leets reached the gate. He heard them screaming and running. He fixed
on fleeing figures that seemed to career through the darkness. Someone
was crying. A woman's voice, pitched high in uncontrollable fear,
unfurled.
"Bitte, bitte," please, please.
"Go away, dearest God, go away."
The bullet had taken most of Tony's head. He was on the ground in the
middle of the courtyard, in a dark pool spilling out across the
pavement.
Then Repp shot him again.
PART THREE
Endlosung (Final Solution) Dawn, May 8, 1945 Leets finally stopped
being insane near dawn. He'd really gone nuts there for a while,
yelling up at the mountain after Repp shot Tony. Leets even fired off
a magazine, spraying tracers hopelessly up to disappear into the dark
bank of the hillside. Roger had hit Leets with his shoulder behind
both knees, and Leets screamed at the blow and went down; then Roger
pinned him flat in the arch of the open gate and, using every fiber of
strength he had, dragged him back into the protection of the wall.
"Jesus," Roger yelled in outrage, "tryin' to get yourself
A:;7/^?"
Leets looked at him sullenly, but Roger saw a mad glint, the beam of
secret insane conviction spark in his irises, were wolflike and when
Leets twisted savagely for the gun, Rug was ready and really hit him
hard in the neck with his right forearm, his tennis arm, big as an oak
limb, stunning him.
"Out there it's death," he bellowed, deeply offended.
Then Leets had insisted on recovering the body.
"We can't leave him out there. We can't leave him out there."
"Forget it," Roger said.
"He doesn't care. I don't care. Those children don't care. Repp
doesn't care. Listen, you need a vacation or something. Don't you
see?
You won!"
No, Leets didn't see. He looked across the courtyard to Outhwaithe. A
hundred streams of blood ran out of him, across the stones of the yard,
catching in cracks and hollows. His head and face were smashed, an eye
blown out, entrails erupting with gas, spilling out. Repp, in
uncharacteristic rage, had fired a whole magazine into him. Then he'd
turned his weapon on inanimate things and in a spooky display of the
power of Vampir he'd shredded the door through which some few of the
children had disappeared, then methodically snapped out windows, sent a
burst of automatic across a plaster saint in a niche in the church, and
finally, in a moment of inspired symbolism, shot the crosses off the
two domed steeples. A real screwball, thought Roger.
Now, hours later, a chilly edge of dawn had begun to show to the east.
Leets had been still, resigned finally, Roger figured. He himself was
quite pleased with his coolness under fire. His friend Ernest
Hemingway would have been impressed. He'd even saved the captain's
life. You saved your CO, you got a medal or something, didn't you?
What's a captain worth? A Silver Star? At least a Bronze Star. For
sure a Bronze.
Roger was wondering which medal he'd get--which to ask for,
actually--when Leets said, quite calmly, "Okay, Rug. Let's take
him."
Repp would have to train himself to live with failure.
It was another test of will, of commitment; and the way to win it was
to close out, ruthlessly, the past. Put it all behind. Speculation as
to how and why he had failed were clearly counterproductive.
He explained all this to himself in the dark sometime in the long hours
of the night after the shooting. Still, he was bitter: it had been so
close.
Repp had killed one, he knew. Now the question was, How many remained?
And would they come after him?
And other questions, nearly as intriguing. Who were they? Should he
flee now?
He'd already rejected the last. His one advantage right now lay in
Vampir. It had run out, but they didn't know that. They only knew he
could hit targets in the dark and they couldn't. It would be foolish
to surrender that advantage by racing off into the dark, up a steep
incline, through rough forest with which he was unfamiliar.
A misstep could be disastrous, even fatal.
They wouldn't come, of course, in the dark. They'd come in the light,
at dawn, when they could see him.
They'd come when the odds were better.
// they came.
Would they? That was the real question. They'd won, after all, they'd
stopped him, they'd saved the Jewish swine boy and the money and
perhaps even the Jews, if there were any left. Sensible men,
professionals, would most certainly not come. They'd be pleased in
their victory and sit back against unnecessary risks. In their
position, he'd make the same decision. Go up a strange mountain after
a concealed marksman with one of the most sophisticated weapons in the
world? Foolish. Ridiculous.
Insane. Impractical.
And that's when he knew they'd come.
Repp felt himself smile in the dark. He felt happy.
He'd reached the last step in his long stalk through the mind of his
enemies; and he'd realized just how much now, when it was all over, all
finished, when as a species the SS man was about to disappear from the
earth, he realized how much he wanted to kill the American.
Roger blinked twice. His mouth felt parched dry.
"Now just a sec," he said.
"We'll never have a better chance. We can do it. I guarantee it."
"Money back?" was all Roger could think to say.
"Money back." Leets was dead serious.
"H-h-h-h-he's long gone." Damn the stutter.
"No. Not Repp. In the night he thinks he's king."
"I'm no hero," Roger confessed. He felt a tremor flap through him.
"Who is?" Leets wanted to know.
"Listen close, okay?"
Roger was silent.
"He can see in the dark, right?"
"Man, it's daytime out there for him."
"No. Wrong. Eichmann said they thought they were trying to work out a
way to make this Vampire gadget lighter. So Repp could carry it."
"Yeah."
"He said it was some kind of solar-assist unit. The thing would take
some of its power from the sun."
"Yeah."
"You see any sun around here?"
"No."
"It's run-down. It's out of juice. It's empty. He's blind."
Oh, Christ, thought Roger.
"You want us to go out there and--" "No." Leets was very close, though
Rug could not see him. But he could feel the heat.
"I want you to go out there."
Repp was blind now. These were rough hours; lesser men, alone in the
night and silence, might have yielded to the temptations of flight.
He was thinking, marvelously alive, taking sustenance from the
Intricacies of the problem that now faced him.
The chief dilemma was Vampir itself. Now that it was dead, it was
forty kilos of uselessness. In a fire fight, things happened fast. You
needed to be able to move and shoot in fractions of seconds. Should he
remove the device?
On the other hand, it was unique. It might be worth millions to the
proper parties--perhaps even the Americans.
It also might make a certain kind of future more feasible than
others.
A running gunfight, if such a thing were to occur in the next few
hours, might push him all over the face of this mountain. If he
dismounted Vampir and hid it, he might never find it again, or he might
be hit and unable to get back to it.
The decision then came down to his confidence.
He decided for Vampir.
"No, Roger," the captain repeated.
"You. You're going out there."
"I, uh--" "Here's how I've got it doped out. He doesn't know how many
we are. But mainly he doesn't know we know Vampire's out of juice. So
he's got to figure that if we come, we come at first light. So this is
how I figure it. A two-step operation. Step one: Rug goes fast and
hard for the mountain. You've got nearly an hour till light.
Work your way up, keeping out of gullies, moving quietly.
Nothing fancy. Just go up. His range at Aniage Elf was four hundred
meters. So to get in range with your Thompson you've got to get at
least two hundred, two hundred fifty meters up the slope. You got
it?"
Roger couldn't think of a thing to say.
"Step two: at seven-thirty a.m. on the fucking dot, I'm coming up the
stairs. Wide open, flat out."
Roger, for one second, stopped thinking about himself.
"You're dead," he said.
"You're flat cold dead. He'll drill you after the first step."
"Then you kill him, Rug. You're close enough so when that subsonic
round goes off you can get a fix on it. He doesn't know you're there.
Now the key point in all this is wait. Wait! As long as you're still,
you're fine.
You start moving around and he'll take you. It's how these guys work,
patience. After he fires, there'll be at least half an hour, maybe an
hour. It'll be rough. But just wait him out. He'll get up, Roger.
You may be surprised at how close he is. He'll probably be wearing one
of those camouflage suits, spotted brown and green.
Now, aim low, let the rise of the gun carry the rounds into him. Five-,
six-round bursts, don't risk a jam. Even when he's down, keep
shooting. When you use up that first magazine, put another in. Shoot
him some more.
Don't fuck around. Try and get some slugs into the brains. Really
blow them all over the place."
Roger made a small noise.
Leets had taken the boy's weapon and was checking it over.
"You've fired a Thompson, I suppose? Okay, that's a thirty-round mag
in there. I've set it on full auto, but no round in the chamber. Now
this is the M-one, the Army model. The bolt's on the side, not on the
top like the ones you see in-the gangster movies. Just draw it back^
it locks; you don't have to let it go forward again, it fires off the
open bolt."
He handed the weapon back.
"Remember, wait him out. That's the most important thing. And that
shot of his, it won't sound like a shot. It won't be as loud, like a
thud or something. But you'll hear it. Then wait, goddamn it, how
many times do I have to say this? Wait! Wait all day, if you've got
to, okay?"
Roger stared at him, openmouthed.
"Your move, Rug. Match point coming up."
He wants me to go out there? Roger thought in horror.
The distance from the corner of the wall to the mountain seemed
immense.
"Remember, Rug. It all starts happening at seven-thirty."
Leets clapped the boy on his shoulder and whispered into his ear, "Now
go!" and sent him on his way.
The light was growing. He could see the convent seem to solidify
magically before and below him out of gray blur. Quiet down there, a
body in the courtyard, otherwise empty.
Repp pressed the magazine release catch and a half-empty magazine slid
out. He reached into his pouch, got out a full one, and eased it into
the magazine housing.
He cocked the rifle and, leaning over it, peered down the slope through
the trees. The light was rising now, increasing steadily; and birds
were beginning to sing. Repp could smell the forest now, cool and
moist.
The night was ending.
If there was a man, he would come soon.
Repp waited with great, calm patience.
Leets knew it was nearly his turn.
He crouched in the shadow of the wall of the convent, breathing
uneasily, trying to conjure up new reasons for not going. It was quite
light by now and the second hand of his Bulova persisted in its sweep,
pulling the two larger hands along with it. Roger had made it but
Leets couldn't think about Roger. He was thinking about the long one
hundred yards he had to cross before he reached the cover of the trees.
A fast man could make it in twelve seconds. Leets was not fast. He'd
be out there at least fifteen. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three
Mississippi .. . out there forever, fifteen Mississippis, which was
nearly forever. He figured he'd catch it about the sixth or seventh
Mississippi.
He'd peeled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, but he was still
hot. He'd checked the laces and straps of his boots--tight--and tossed
aside his cap and taken the bars off his collar. There wasn't much
else to do.
He checked his watch again. The seconds seemed to drain away. They
seemed to fall off the Bulova and rattle to the grass. He tried to
feel good about what would probably happen next. Instead he felt puke
in the bottom of his throat. His breathing came hard and his legs were
cold and stiff and his mouth was dry.
He glanced about and saw the day opening pleasantly, a pale sun
beginning to show over the mountain, a pure sky. A few fleecy clouds
unraveled overhead. He knew he could catalog natural phenomena until
the year 1957 if he didn't watch himself. Goddamn it, he was
thirsty.
He looked at the Bulova again and it gave him the bad news: almost time
to go. Seconds to go.
He eased his way up to a crouch, checking for the thousandth time the
tommy gun: magazine locked, full auto, safety off, bolt back. The
forest was a long way off.
Don't blow it, Roger, goddamn you, he thought.
And he thought of Susan once again.
"Everything you touch turns to death," she'd said. Susan. Susan, I
didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't mean it. He did not hate her.
He wished she were here and he could talk to her.
And he thought of Repp, behind his rifle in the trees.
The Bulova said it was time and Leets ran.
Repp watched the American break from the wall.
He'd picked him up minutes ago--the fool kept peering out, then
withdrawing. He couldn't make his mind up, or perhaps he was enchanted
with the view.
It didn't matter. Repp tracked him lazily--such an easy shot--holding
the sight blade just a touch up, leading him, drawing the slack out of
the trigger. A big, healthy specimen, unruly hair, out of uniform: was
this the chap that had been hunting him these months? He wobbled when
he ran, bad leg or something.
Repp felt the trigger strain against his finger.
He let the fat American live.
He did not like it. Too easy. He felt he could down this fat huffing
fellow anytime. He owned him. The man still had 400 meters of rough
forest climb ahead of him, and Repp knew he'd come like a buffalo,
bulky and desperate, crashing noisily through the brush. At any moment
in the process, Repp could have him.
But as the American perched at his mercy on the sight blade, it
occurred to him that he'd been blind for hours. Suppose in that time
another American had moved into the trees? It turned on their
knowledge of the flaw in Vampir. But they had consistently turned out
to know just a touch more than he expected them to.
Thus: another man.
A theoretical enemy such as that could be anywhere down the slope, well
within machine-pistol range, grenade range, waiting for him to fire.
Once he fired, he was vulnerable. So he recommitted himself to
patience.
He had the fat one off on his left, coming laboriously up the hill. He
could wait.
Now, as for another fellow. Where would he be? It seemed to him that
if such a fellow in fact existed, then he and the fat one would
certainly make arrangements between themselves, so as not to fall into
each other's fire. So if the big one was to his left, then wouldn't
this theoretical other chap be on the right? He knew he had four or
five minutes before the big man got dangerously close.
He began methodically to search his right front.
* * *
What now? wondered Roger.
Guy must be gone. He would have plugged the captain for sure.
From where he was, he'd had a good view of slow, lumbering run. He'd
seen him go and turned back quickly but couldn't see much, the dense
trees fighting their way up the slope, stone outcroppings, thick
brush.
Leets had been so positive the German would fire.
But nothing. Roger scanned the abstractions before him. Sweat ran
down his arms. A bug whined in his ears.
Looking into a forest was like trying to count the stars.
You'd go nuts pretty soon. The patterns seemed to whisper and dazzle
and flicker before his eyes. Shapes lost their edges and melted into
other shapes. Fantastic forms leapt out of Roger's imagination and
took substance in the woods. Stones poked him, filling him with
restlessness.
Should he move or stay put? Leets hadn't said. He'd said wait, wait,
but he hadn't said anything about if there was no shot. He probably
ought to still wait. But Leets hadn't said a thing. Repp was probably
gone.
What the hell would he be hanging around for? He was no dope. He was
a tough, shrewd guy.
On the other hand, why would he have taken off when he held all the
aces in the dark?
Roger didn't have any idea what to do.
Leets had gotten well into the trees, deep into the gloom. He rested
for a moment, crouching behind a trunk. The slope here was gentle, but
he could see that ahead it reared up. The footing would be
treacherous.
Squatting, he tried to peer through the trees. His vi R
sion seemed to end a few dozen feet up: just trees woven together,
trees and slope, a few rocks.
He hoped Roger had the sense to stay put. Surely he'd see that the
game hadn't changed, that it was still up to Leets to draw fire.
Don't blow it, Roger.
He'll kill you.
Leets gathered his strength again. He wasn't sure there'd be any left,
but he did locate some somewhere.
He began to move up the slope, tree to tree, rock to rock, dashing,
duck-walking, slithering, making more noise than he ought to.
Roger looked around. A few shafts of sunlight cut through the
overhanging canopy. He felt like he was in an old church or something,
and light was slipping in the chinks in the roof. He still couldn't
see anything. He imagined Repp sitting in a cafe in Buenos Aires.
Meanwhile, here I sit, breaking a sweat.
If only I could see!
If only someone would tell me what to do!
Cautiously, he began to edge his way up.
The other American was perhaps 150 meters downslope, rising from behind
a swell in the ground, half obscured in shadow. But the movement had
caught Repp's experienced eye.
He felt no elation, merely lifted the rifle and replanted it on its
bipod and drew it quickly to him.
The American was just a boy--even from this distance, Repp could make
out the callow, unformed features, the face tawny with youth. He rose
like a nervous young lizard, eyes flicking about, motions tentative,
deeply frightened.
Repp knew the big man would be up the slope in seconds. He even
thought he could hear him battering through the brush. Too bad they
hadn't climbed closer together, so that he could take them in the same
arc of the bipod, not having to move it at all.
Repp pressed the blade of the front sight, on the young man's chest.
The boy bobbed down.
Damn!
Only seconds till the big one was in range.
Come on, boy, come on, damn you.
Should he move the gun for the big one?
Come on, boy. Come on!
Helpfully the boy appeared again, cupping his hands to shade his eyes,
his face a stupid scowl of concentration.
He rose right into the already planted blade of the sight, his chest
seeming to disappear behind the blurred wedge of metal.
Repp fired.
A split second may have passed between the sound of the shot and
Leets's identification of it: he rose then, hauling the Thompson to his
shoulder, and had an image of Roger--Roger hit--and fired.
Fire again, you idiot, he told himself.
He burned through the clip. The weapon pumped and he held the rounds
into that sector of the forest his ears told him Repp's shot had come
from. He could see the burst kicking up the dust where it hit.
Gun empty, he dropped back fast to the forest floor, hands shaking,
heart thumping, still hearing the gun's roar, and fumbled through a
magazine change. Dust or smoke--something heavy and seething--seemed
to fill the air, drifting in clouds. But he could see nothing human in
the confusion.
Leets knew he had to attack, press on under the cover of his own fire.
He scrambled upward, pausing only to waste a five-round burst up the
slope on stupid instinct, and twice he slipped in the loose ground
cover, dried pine needles woven with sprigs of dead fern, but he stayed
low and kept moving.
A burst of automatic fire broke through the limbs over his head, and he
flattened as the bullets tore through, spraying him with chips and
splinters. Again bringing his submachine gun up, he fired a short
burst at the sound, then rolled daintily to the right, fast for a big
man, as the German, firing also at sound and flash, sent a spurt of
fire pecking through the dust. Leets thought he saw flash and threw
the gun back to his shoulder but before he could fire it vanished.
Then seconds later, to the left and above, his eyes caught just the
barest flicker of human motion behind a tangle of interfering pines,
and he brought the gun to bear, but it too vanished and he found
himself staring over his barrel at nothing but space and green light
and dust in the air.
But he'd seen him. At last, he'd seen the sniper.
Repp changed magazines quickly. He was breathing hard and had fallen
in his dash. Blood ran down the side of his face; one of the
machine-pistol slugs had fragmented on a stone near him and
something--a tiny piece of lead, a pebble, a stone chip--had stung him
badly above the eye.
Now he knew safety lay in distance. The machine pistol had an
effective range of 100 meters, his STG 400. It would be ridiculous to
blaze away at close range like a gangster. Too many things could
happen, too many twists of luck, freaks of chance, a bullet careening
off a rock. Repp thought for just a second of the Jewish toy he'd
played with back at Aniage Elf: you set it spinning and when finally it
stopped a certain letter turned up.
Nothing could change the letter that showed. Nothing.
That was the purest luck. He wanted no part of it.
He'd get higher and take the man from afar.
The sniper climbed.
Leets too knew the importance of distance. He pushed his way through
the trees, forcing himself on. In close he had a chance. He knew the
Vampire outfit had to be heavy and Repp would have no easy time of it
going uphill fast. He'd stay as close as he could to the sniper,
hoping for a clear shot. If he hung back, he knew Repp would execute
him at leisure.
The incline had steepened considerably. He drove himself forward,
pawing at the trees with his free hand.
Loose glass clattered in his stomach and he could feel the sweat
washing off him in torrents. Dust seemed to have been pasted over his
lips and his leg hurt a lot.
Several times he dropped to peer up under the canopy of the forest,
hoping to see the sniper, but nothing moved before him except the
undulating green of the trees.
* * *
Vampir was impossibly heavy. If he'd had the time, Repp would have
peeled the thing off his back and flung it away. But it would take
minutes to get the scope unhitched from the rifle, minutes he didn't
have.
He paused in his climb, looked back.
Nothing.
Where was the man?
Who'd have thought he could come on like that?
Must be an athlete to press ahead like that.
Repp looked up. It was quite steep here. He wished he had some water.
He was breathing hard and the straps pinched the feeling out of the
upper part of his body.
He and this other fellow, alone on a mountain in Switzerland.
It occurred to him for the first time that he might die.
Goddamn it, goddamn it, why hadn't he ditched Vampir? To hell with
Vampir. To hell with them all, the Reichsfrihrer, the Fuhrer himself,
the little Jew babies, all the Jews he'd killed, all the Russians, the
Americans, the English, the Poles. To hell with them all. He pushed
himself on, breathing hard.
A stone outcrop loomed ahead. Leets paused as he came to it. It
looked dangerous. He peeped over it, upward.
Nothing. Go on, go on.
He was almost over, slithering, straining his right leg to purchase
another few inches.
Here I am, a fat man perched on a rock in a neutral country, so scared
I can hardly see.
He had the inches and then he didn't; for the leg, pushed to its limit,
finally went, as Leets all along knew it must. One of the last pieces
of German steel that neither doctors nor leakage had been able to
dislodge ticked a nerve. The fat man fell, as pain spasmed through
him. He thought of it as blue, like electricity, and he corkscrewed
out of balance, biting the scream, but then he felt himself clawing at
the air as he tumbled backward.
He twisted as he fell and hit on his shoulder, mind filling with a
spray of light and confusion. His mouth tasted dust. He rolled
frantically, groping for his weapon, which was somewhere else, flung
far in the panic of his fall.
He saw it and he saw Repp.
The sniper was 200 meters up, calm as a statue.
He'd never make the gun.
Leets pulled his feet under him, to dive for the Thompson.
Repp shot him and then had no curiosity. He didn't care about the
American. He knew he was dead and that made him uninteresting.
He set the rifle down, peeled the pack off his back.
His shoulder ached like hell, but seemed to sing in the freedom of
release. He was surprised to notice that he was shaking. He wanted to
laugh or cry. It had seemed seconds between first shot and last;
clearly it had been minutes.
It had been extremely close. Big fellow, coming on like a bull. You
and I, we spun the draydel, friend. I won.
You lost. But so close, so close. That bullet that spattered on the
rock near his head, what, an inch or so away? He shivered at the
thought. He touched the wound. The blood had dried into a scab. He
rubbed it gently.
He wished he had a cigarette, but he didn't so that was that.
The chocolate.
The driver had given him a piece of chocolate.
Suddenly his whole survival seemed a question of finding it. His
fingers prowled through pouches and pockets and at last closed on
something small and hard.
He removed it: the green foil blinked in the sun. Funny, you could go
through all kinds of things, running, climbing, shooting, and here
would be a perfect little square of green foil, oblivious, unaffected.
He unwrapped it.
Delicious.
Repp at once began to feel better. He had settled down and was again
under control. He did not feel good that Nibelungen had failed but
some things simply weren't to be. He hadn't failed; his skills hadn't
fumbled at a crucial moment.
And pleasures were available: he'd been magnificent in the fight,
considering how hard he'd pressed to make the shooting position, the
long sleepless night that followed.
For a short action, it had been enormously intense.
Repp noticed for the first time where he was. Around him, the Alps
rose in tribute to him. Solemn, awesome, like old men, their faces
aged with snow, they seemed especially grave in their silence. Far
below, the valley looked soft and green.
He realized suddenly he had a future to face. It frightened him a
little. And yet he had a Swiss passport,
he had money, he had Vampir. There were things one could do with all
three.
Smiling, Repp stood. His last duty was now to return.
He pulled the pack again onto his back. It did not hurt nearly so much
now. Thank God for Hans the Kike and his last ten kilos. He swung the
rifle over his shoulder.
He pushed on for several minutes through the forest, not unaware of the
beauty and serenity around him.
After a time he came out of the trees into a high Alpine meadow,
several dozen acres of grassland. The grass rolled shadowless in the
sun.
Above, clouds lapped and hurled against diamond blue, hard and pure.
The sun was a cleansing flare. A cool wind pressed against his face.
Repp walked across the meadow. He took off his scrunched feldgrau cap
and rubbed a sleeve absently across his forehead, where it felt a
prickle of heat.
He walked on, coming at last to the end of the meadow. Here the grass
bulked up into a ridge before yielding again to the trees. The ridge
stood like a low wall before him, unruly with thistle and bracken and
even a few yellow wild flowers.
He turned back to the field. It was empty and clean. It was so clean.
It had been scoured clean and pure. It looked wonderful to him. A
vision of paradise. Its grass stirred in the breeze.
This is where the war ends for me, he thought.
He knew he had a few more kilometers of virgin pine;
then he'd be up top for a long, flat walk; then finally, that last
plunge through the gloomy newer trees.
It was only a matter of hours.
Repp turned back to his route and started to trudge up the ridge. More
yellow buds--dozens, hundreds-opened their faces to him. He paused
again, dazzled.
They seemed to pick the light out of the air and throw it back at him
in a burst of burning energy. The day stalled, calm and private. Each
mote of dust, each fleck of pollen, each particle of life seemed to
freeze in the bright air. The sky screamed blue, its mounting cumulus
fat and oily white. Repp felt giddy in the beauty of it. He seemed to
hear a musical chord, lustrous, rich, held, held, ever so long.
Strange energies had been released; they bobbed and sprang and coiled
about him, invisible. He felt transfigured.
He felt connected with the order of the cosmos.
He turned to the sun which lay above the ridge and from its pulsing
glare he sought confirmation, and when two figures rose above him, on
the crest line, drenched in light, he took it at first for the
benediction he'd demanded.
He could not see them clearly.
He blocked the sun with one hand.
The big one looked at him gravely and the boy had no expression on his
pretty face at all. Their machine pistols were level.
Repp opened his mouth to speak, but the big one cut him off.
"Herr Repp," he explained in a mild voice, "du hast das Ziel Night
getroffen," using the familiar du form as though addressing an old and
dear friend, "you missed."
Repp saw that he was in the pit at last.
They shot him down.
* * *
Roger edged down the ridge, changing magazines as he went. The German
lay face up, eyes black. He'd been opened up badly in the crossfire.
Blood everywhere. He was an anatomy lesson. Still, Roger crouched and
touched the muzzle of his tommy gun gently as a kiss against the skull
and jack hammered a five-round burst into it, blowing it apart.
"That's enough, for Christ's sake," Leets called from the ridge. Roger
rose, spattered with blood and tissue.
Leets came tiredly down the slope and over to the body.
"Congratulations," said Roger.
"You get both ears and the tail."
Leets bent and heaved the body to its belly. He pried the rifle off
the shoulder, working the sling down the arm, at the same time being
careful not to break the cord to the power pack.
"Here it is," he said.
"Bravo," said Roger.
Leets pulled out the receiver lock ping and the trigger housing pin.
Taking the butt off and holding the action open, he held the barrel up
to the sun and looked through it.
"See any naked girls?" Roger asked.
"All I see is dirt. It's a mess. All those rounds he ran through it.
All that pure, greasy lead. Each one left its residue. The grooves
jammed. It's smooth as the inside of a shot glass in there."
"Yeah, well, he nearly threaded my needle."
"Must have been your imagination," Leets said.
"At the end the rounds were veering off crazily as they came out the
muzzle. No, the Vampire rifle was useless in the end. It amounted to
nothing. A man with a flintlock would have had a better chance this
morning."
Roger was silent.
But something still nagged Leets.
"One thing I can't figure out. Why didn't Vollmerhausen tell him? They
were so good at the small stuff. The details. Why didn't
Vollmerhausen tell him?"
Roger knitted his features into what he imagined was an expression of
puzzlement the equal of Leets's. But he really didn't give a damn and
a more rewarding thought presently occurred to him.
"Hey!" he said in sudden glee.
"Uh, Captain. Sir?"
"Yeah?"
"Hey, uh, I did okay, huh?"
"You did swell. You were a hero." But he had other heroes in his mind
at that second, dead ones. Shmuel the Jew and Tony Outhwaithe,
Oxonian. Here was a moment they might have enjoyed. No, not really.
Shmuel hated the violence; no joy in this for him. And Tony. Who ever
knew about Tony? Susan? No, not Susan either. Susan would see only
two beasts with the blood of a third all over them.
"Well, now," said Roger, grinning, "you think I'll get a medal?" He
was supremely confident.
"I mean it was kind of brave what I did, wasn't it? It would be for my
folks mainly."
Leets said he'd think it over.
Special Preview from the Stephen Hunter title
BLACK LIGHT
Available from Bantam Dell
Red didn't like what came next. This business was tricky, and always
involved the immutable law of unintended consequences, but thank God
he'd thought ahead and had good people in place and it could be done
neatly and professionally, with maximized chances of success. He
thought his father would be proud, for this was an old Ray Bama trick:
Avoid violence, avoid force, always negotiate. But when violence is
unavoidable, strike fast, unexpectedly, and with total commitment and
willpower.
He dialed a number. A man answered.
"Yeah?"
"Do you know who this is?"
"Yes sir." The voice had a familiar Spanish accent to it, Cuban
probably.
"The team is ready?"
"The guys are all in. It's a good team. Steady guys. Been around.
Solid, tough, know their stuff. Some are--" "I don't want names or
details. But it has to be done. You do it. I'll get you the
intelligence, the routes, and you clear everything through this number.
When you're ready to move, you let me know. I'll want a look at the
plan, I'll want onsite reports. No slip-ups. You're being paid too
much, all of you, for slipups."
"There won't be no slip-ups," the man said.
The man on the other end of the phone, in a farmhouse just outside of
Greenwood in far Sebastian County, let the dial tone come up and then
he consulted a card and began to dial pager numbers.
Nine pagers rang. Two, one right after another, went off at the Blood,
Sweat and Tears Gymnasium on Griffin Park Road in Fort Smith, where
two immense men with necks the size of lampshades were hoisting what
appeared to be tons of dead weight at separate Nautilus stations. Each
was olive in skin tone, with glistening black hair and dark, deep,
watchful eyes, identical even to the tattoos that festooned their
gigantic arms, though one had a crescent of puckered, bruise-purple
scar tissue that ran halfway around his neck, evidence of some
grotesque encounter about which it would probably be better not to ask.
They had bodies of truly immense mass, not the beautifully
proportioned, narcissistic sculptured flesh of body builders but the
huge, densely muscled bodies of men who needed strength professionally,
like interior linemen or New Orleans mob drug enforcers and hit men.
Another pager rang in the back room of a crib just across the state
line in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, where a sleek black man was enjoying
an act of oral sex being performed on him by a blond-haired woman of
about thirty. He knew that she was really a man, but he didn't really
care; a mouth was a mouth.
Another pager buzzed on the firing line at the On-Target Indoor
Firearms Range over in Van Buren, as its owner stood with a customized
Para-Ordnance P16 in .40 S&W, calm and steady as a rock, blowing an
ever-widening tattery hole in the head of a B-27 silhouette hanging
from a pulley-mounted wire twenty-five yards out. He finished the
sixteen-round clip, pulled in the target, and examined the orifice he'd
opened.
Then he smiled, returned the gun to its case, and checked out.
In the parking lot he made a show of putting the case in the trunk, but
adeptly slid the .40 into an Alessi inside-the-pants holster, after, of
course, inserting a fresh sixteen-round clip and cocking and locking.
Other sites: Ben & Jackie's Harley-Davidson shop, on 271 South, where a
huge man in black leathers and the lush hair of a rock singer, drawn
into a ponytail, contemplated a chrome-plated extended muffler; the
Central Mall Trio Theaters, on Rogers Avenue, where two rangy men who
could have been ballplayers but weren't sat watching an extremely
violent and idiotic movie; Nick's Chicken Shack on Route 71, where a
large, pie-faced black man with a great many rings and necklaces ate a
second extra-spicy breast, and finally at the Vietnam Market on
Rogers, where a snake-thin Asian, also with a ponytail and a webbing of
tattoos that ran from his neck down one arm (and scared the hell out of
the proprietors) was trying to decide between diced mushroom and dried
asparagus for the three-color vegetable salad he was contemplating for
that night. He was a vegetarian.
The team leader, a Marisol Cuban with a gaudy career in Miami behind
him, was named Jorge de la Rivera. He was an exceptionally handsome
man and spoke in his vaguely Spanish accent to the assembled unit
before him.
"We're thinking mainly of going for the kill from cars. Not a
drive-by, not this guy, but a set-up assault off a highway ambush,
coordinated and choreographed, with good command and control. Three
cars, a driver, two shooters in each car.
Body armor. Lots of firepower up front. You want to go at this guy
behind a fucking wall of nine millimeter."
He waited. They were assembling their weapons, a selection of
submachine guns stolen in a raid three weeks earlier from the New
Orleans Metropolitan Police Property Room. He saw a couple of shorty
M-16s, three MP-5s, one with a silencer, another with a laser sighting
device, a Smith & Wesson M76 with a foot of silencer, and the rest that
universal soldier of the drug wars, ugly and reliable as an old whore,
the Israeli Uzi.
Those who had satisfied themselves with their weapons loaded ammunition
into clips: Federal hardball, 115 grain, slick and gold for the subs;
or Winchester ball .223 for the 16s.
"You been paid very very well. If you die, money goes to your families
you got families, your girlfriends otherwise. You get caught, you get
good lawyers. You do time, it's good time, no hassle from screws or
niggers or dirty white boys, depending on which color you are. Good
time, smooth time.
"That's 'cause you the best. Why do we need the best?
"Cause this fucking guy, he's the best."
He handed a photo around: It passed from shooter to shooter. It showed
a thin man who might have been handsome if he hadn't been so grim,
leathery-faced, with thin eyes, squirrel shooter's eyes.
"This guy was a big fucking hero in that little war they had over in
fucking gook country."
"Hey, Hor-hey, you not be talking about my country that way, man," said
the ponytailed Asian as he popped the bolt on a sixteen and it slammed
shut.
"Hey, we can be friends, no? No bullshit. I'm telling you good, you
listen. Nigger, spic, cowboy, motorcycle fuck, wops, slope, fucking
southern white boy ass kickers we got to work together on this. We're
a fucking World War Two movie. We're America, the melting pot. Nobody
got no problem with nobody else, right, am I right? I know you guys
have worked alone mainly or in small teams. If you want to go home in
one piece, take it from Jorge, you do this my way."
"I don't like the gook shit."
"Then take it out on this boy. He killed eighty-seven of you guys.
That was back in '72. They even got a nickname for him;
they call him "Bob the Nailer," 'cause he nails you but good.
You think he forget how? In 1992, bunch of fucking Salvadorian
commandos, trained by Green Berets even, think they got his ass fried
on the top of a little hill? He kills forty-four of 'em. He shoots
down a fucking chopper. He sends them crying home to mama cito This
guy is good. They say he's the best shot this great country ever
produced. And when it gets all shitty brown in your underpants 'cause
the lead is flying, they say this guy just gets cooler and cooler until
he's ice. Ain't no brown in his pants. His heart don't even beat
fast. Part fucking Indian, maybe, only Indians are like that."
"He's a old man," said the lanky cowboy.
"His time has passed. He ain't as fast or as smart as he once was. I
heard about him in the Corps, where they thought he was a god. He
wasn't no god. He was a man."
"Were you in "Nam?" asked Jorge. "Desert Storm, man. Same fucking
thing."
"Yeah, well," said Jorge, "whatever. Anyhow, we tie the whole thing
together on secure cellulars. We move south this afternoon, as I say,
three cars, three men in a car, and me, I'll be in a pickup, I'll hold
the goddamned thing together while I'm talking to the boss. We know
where he lives, but I don't want to do it there. We hunt him on the
roads. We move in hunter-killer teams. You get a sighting, we work
the maps, we plot his course, we pick him up. Very professional. Like
we are the fucking FBI. We get him and his pal on a goddamned country
road, and then it'a World War Three. We'll show this cabrone something
about shooting."
Bob stopped talking.
A plane. That was it. The sound of an airplane engine, steady, not
increasing in speed, just low enough and far enough away, almost a
fly's buzz.
"Go on," said Russ.
"Just shut up," Bob said.
"What is--" "Don't look around, don't speed up, don't slow down, you
just-stay very calm now," Bob said.
He himself didn't look around. Instead, he closed his eyes and
listened, trying hard to isolate the airplane engine from the roar of
his own truck, the buffeting of the wind, the vibrations of the road.
In time, he had it.
Very slowly he turned his head, yawning languidly as he went along.
Off a mile on the right, a white twin-engine job, maybe a Cessna. Those
babies went 240 miles per hour. Either there was a terrific head wind
howling out of the east, or the pilot was hovering right at the stall
speed to stay roughly parallel and in the same speed zone with the
truck.
He glanced quickly out the window. The plane was turning lazily
away.
"Everything okay? I mean, you tensed up there, now you're relaxed.
Everything's okay, right?"
"Oh, every goddamn thing's just super fine," said Bob, yawning again,
"except, of course, we are about to git ambushed."
"Air to Alpha and Baker," said Red, holding steady at 2,500 feet,
running east, loafing again, dangerously near stall.
"Alpha here," came a voice.
"What about Baker?"
"Oh, yeah, uh, I'm here too. I figured he said he was here, you'd know
I was here."
"Forget figuring. Tell me exactly what I ask you. Got that?"
"Yes sir," said Baker contritely.
"Okay, I want you in pursuit. He's about four miles ahead of you,
traveling around fifty miles an hour. No Smokeys, no other traffic on
the road. You go into maximum pursuit. But I am watching you and on
my signal you drop down to fifty-five.
I don't want him seeing you move super fast, do you read?"
"Yes sir."
"Then step on it, goddammit."
"Yes sir."
"You hang steady there, Mike and Charlie. No need you racing anywhere,
they are coming to you. I see intercept in about four minutes. I'm
going to let Alpha and Baker close in, then I'll bring you and Baker
into play, Mike? You read?"
"Yes sir."
He looked back along the road and out of the distance watched as two
large sedans roared along the highway at over one hundred miles an
hour, trailing dust and closing fast with the much slower moving
truck.
"Oh, I smell blood. I smell the kill. It's looking very good.
Alpha, I see you and your buddy closing. You just keep closing, you're
getting close, okay now, slow way down. Mike, you and Charlie now,
okay, you start moving out, nice gentle pace, about fifty-five, we are
two minutes away, I got you both in play."
Someone inadvertently held a mike button down and Red heard strange
things over the radio--some harsh, tense scraping and what sounded like
someone systematically turning a television set on and off. Then he
realized: That was the dry breathing of men about to go into a shooting
war and they were cocking and locking their weapons for it.
Words poured out of Russ as if he'd lost control of them, and he could
not control their tone: They sounded high, tinny, almost girlish.
"Should we stop?" he moaned.
"Should we pull off and call the police? Is there a turnoff? Should
we--" "You just sit tight, don't speed up, don't slow down. We got two
cars behind us. I bet we got some traffic ahead of us. And we got a
plane off on the right coordinating it. We are about to get bounced
and bounced hard."
Russ saw Bob shimmy in the seat, but he could tell he was reaching to
get something behind the seat without disturbing his upright profile.
He looked into the rearview mirror and saw two cars appear from behind
a bend in the road.
"Here's the first and only rule," said Bob steadily.
"Cover, not concealment. I want you out of the truck with the front
wheel well and the engine block between you and them. Their rounds
will tear right through the truck and get to you otherwise."
Russ's mind became a cascade of silvery bubbles; he fought to breathe.
His heart weighed a ton and was banging out of control. There was no
air.
"I can't do it," he said.
"I'm so scared."
"You'll be all right," Bob said calmly.
"We're in better shape than you think. They have men and they think
they have surprise, but we've got the edge. The way out of this is the
way out of any scrape: We hit 'em so hard so fast with so much stuff
they wish they chose another line of work."
Ahead, one and then a second vehicle emerged from the shimmery mirage.
The first was another pickup, black and beat up, and behind it, keeping
a steady rate fifty yards behind, another sedan. Russ checked the
rearview: The two cars were drawing closer, but not speeding wildly. He
made out four big profiles, sitting rigidly in the lead car.
"Don't stare at 'em, boy," said Bob as he overcame the last impediment
and got free what he was pulling at. In his peripheral vision Russ saw
that it was the Ruger Mini-14 and the paper bag. He pulled something
compact from the bag; Russ realized it was the short .45 automatic,
which he quickly stuffed into his belt on his right side, behind his
kidney. He groped for something else.
Russ looked up. The truck drew nearer. It was less than a quarter of
a mile away. It would be on them in seconds now.
"Where is it?" demanded Bob of himself harshly, fear large and raspy
in his voice as he clawed through the bag. His fear terrified Russ
more powerfully than the approaching vehicles.
What is he looking for? Russ wondered desperately.
Red watched as his masterpiece unfolded beneath him with such solemn
splendor. It was all in the timing and the timing
was exquisite. De la Rivera in the Mike truck, followed by the four
men in Charlie, closed from the front at around forty miles per hour.
Meanwhile, the Alpha and Baker vehicles, moving at the speed limit,
steadily narrowed the distance between themselves and Swagger. They
would be fifty or so yards behind him when de la Rivera hit Swagger's
truck and blew it off the road.
"You're closing nicely, Alpha and Baker," he crooned.
"You're looking good there, Mike."
They had him!
It would work!
Red pulled in his breath, felt his heart inflate and his blood pressure
spiral.
De la Rivera was now taking over.
"Okay, muchachos, is so very muy bueno, let's be very very calm now,
let's stay calm and cool, I see you. Alpha, you're so very fine, let's
do a quick double check on our pieces, make sure we got our mags
seated, our bolts locked, our safeties in the red zone, let's stay muy
glace, icy, icy, very icy, very cool, it's happening, oh, it's gonna be
so good for all of us."
The vehicles were' closing
They had reached a flat, high section of the road, where the dwarf,
ice-pruned white oak lay gnarled and stunted on either side, yielding
swiftly to vistas on either side of other ranges.
"Now, you listen," said Bob fiercely.
"This truck's going to try and whack you. The split second before you
pull even to him, I want you to drop to second and gun this
motherfucker.
That should carry us by his lunge and cut the two boys off behind us.
Then I want a hard left, you rap the rear of his follow car, really
mess him up, shake up the boys inside; you continue from that into a
hard left panic stop, we skid across the road and come to rest in the
shoulder on that side so's we can fall back and get into them trees and
down the side of the mountain if need be. Okay, you're coming out my
side of the vehicle and you're breaking left to the front wheel well
where you're going to cover. You take the bag. Your job is going to
be to feed me magazines from the bag as I need them. You watch; when I
pop a mag, you hand me the next one, bullets out, so's I can slap her
in and get back to rock and roll."
"Yes sir," said Russ, trying to remember it all, desperate that he
would forget it, but amazed somehow that already there was a plan, and
somehow also calmed by it. And Bob seemed calm too.
"You gotta stay calm, you gotta stay cool," said Bob.
"I'm okay," Russ said, and he was.
"Ah," said Bob, "here the goddamn thing is." And with that he withdrew
something from the bag and Russ could see that it was a long, curved
magazine, different from the others, with a red-tipped cartridge seated
in its lips.
The truck was on them. It was happening right now.
"What's that?" Russ had time to ask as the universe unlatched from
reality and fell into dreamlike slow motion. He heard Bob seat the
magazine and with a dak! let the bolt fly home.
"Forty rounds M-196 ball tracer," said Bob.
"We're going to light these boys up."
Red watched in full anticipation of his precisely choreographed
envelopment, simultaneously banking to the left and adding power so
that he could hold the spectacle beneath him as he circled around it,
gull-like. He watched as the vehicles seemed to combine and it was
almost magical the way he'd seen it in his mind and it was working out
in reality.
But there seemed to be something .. .
It was happening so fast, there was dust, so much dust, he couldn't ..
.
Confusion. He'd never seen a battle before except in the movies, but
in the movies everything was clear. That was the point of movies. Here
nothing was clear, it was a helter skelter some new dance, a
reinvention.
He heard them on the radio as it unfolded in mircrotime.
"Ah, no, goddamn--" WHANG! the jarring bang of metal on metal.
"Jesus, what is--" "Look out, he's firing, he's--" "Oh, fuck, we're on
fire. Christ, we're burning'" "I'm hit, I'm hit, oh, shit, I'm hit--"
"The flames, the flames."
BEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
A high-pitched scream pierced Red's ears as he banked around; he
winced, shuddered, wondering what the hell that was, and when he saw
the geyser like surge of blazing gasoline, he knew the microphone had
melted.
It was happening. The truck's fender with its cyclops like headlight
was as big as a house falling on him, but at that second Russ slammed
the gearshift, punched the pedal, and with a surprising giddy
lightness, his own vehicle shot ahead and the oafish rammer missed,
veered to correct, and jacked out of control, tumbling savagely
backwards amid a sudden huge blast of dust. Bob's left hand reached
for the wheel and wrenched it to the left. With a tremendous jolt the
pickup slammed into the follow car, rocked crazily, and continued to
spin around, hauling up a shroud of dust as it fishtailed, then came to
a rest, crazily canted to one side, half in and half out of the
roadside gully.
Through it all, Russ had the ghastly sensation of ghosts, as faces lit
up by rage and surprise floated by in the follow car, so close yet so
far away. He felt that he was looking at men under ice, in a different
world, their mouths working madly, their eyes swollen like his mother's
deviled eggs from so long ago.
Then it all went to swirl and blur and vanished in the weird
perspective of the canted windshield and the cloud of rolling dust.
He blinked.
Wasn't he supposed to be doing something?
"Out, goddammit," barked Bob, and Russ clawed at his safety belt, glad
that he'd had it on, felt it fall away and began to slither across the
seat after already-vanished Bob and out the door. He remembered the
bag, and felt the loaded mags rattling around inside as he disengaged
from the vehicle, slid fast down the front fender of the truck to the
wheel well where Bob had already set up in a taut, hunched shooter's
position.
Russ couldn't dive for cover. He had to see.
When he looked over the hood, the spectacle stunned him.
Upside down, the black pickup had cantilevered onto the shoulder on the
other side of the road in its own cloud of dust, cutting off that lane.
The two cars following Bob and Russ had slewed to a halt behind it,
just coming out of their own panic stops and skids. They appeared to
have collided themselves, the rear one smashing into the front one.
The truck's follower had also slewed to a halt to avoid smashing into
the destroyed truck. It was almost directly across the road from Russ.
There was a moment of horrified silence. Inside the cars, men fumbled
in confusion, trying not to shoot each other, trying to locate their
target which wasn't where it should have been.
Then, from just behind Russ, Bob fired.
Even in the bright light of day the tracers leaked radiance to mark
their passage as they flew across the narrow distance.
They were like phenomena in a physics experiment, ropes of
incandescence as straight as if drawn by a ruler, unbearably quick,
quick pr than a heartbeat or a blink, illusions possibly.
Bob fired three rounds inside a second low into the car directly across
from him; what was he shooting for? Not men, for he was shooting not
into the passenger compartment but above the rear tire and Russ Then
the car was gone in a huge flash as the tracers lit up its fuel tank.
The noise was a thunderclap, throwing feathers of flame everywhere as
it seemed for one delirious second it was raining flame. All around
them the world caught fire, and a wave of crushing heat rolled against
Russ. He heard screams in the roar, and a flaming phantasm ran at him
but fell under the weight of its own destruction into the roadway.
Motion struck at Russ's peripheral vision, and he saw that one of the
follow cars had gunned from behind the tipsy-turvy truck.
"Coming around, coming around," he screamed.
But Bob was shooting even as Russ yelled and the tracers flicked quick
and nasty like a whip-crack and seemed to liquify the on comer
windshield; it dissolved into a sleet of jewels as the car lost control
and went hard into the gully, kicking up a gout of dirt.
"Magazine! magazine!" Bob screamed, and Russ slapped a
twenty-rounder, bullets outward, into his palm and he sunk it into the
rifle, freed the bolt to slam forward just as the third car came
around, bristling with guns. But Bob took it cleanly, riddling its
windshield with a burst of ball ammunition, and then held fire,
emptying what remained of the magazine into the windows and doors as
the car went by. The car never deviated, but sped by furiously, more
as if it hoped to get away than do them any harm, and a hundred yards
down the road it noticed that its cargo was dead men and it veered into
a gully, lurched out, surfing a wave of dirt and grass, and came to a
broken ending amid splintered white oaks.
And suddenly it was quiet except for the dry cracking of the wind and
the hiss of the flames.
"Jesus, you got them all," Russ said in utter astonishment and
devotion, but Bob was by him, .45 in hand. He'd seen something. Two
men with submachine guns had extricated themselves from the wreckage in
the gully just before them, and started up the little embankment. But
Bob stood above them and got his pistol into play so fast, it was a
blur. Did they see him yet? One did, and tried to get his weapon on
target, but Bob fired so quickly, Russ thought for a second he had some
kind of machine gun, floating six empties in the air and the two
shooters went down like rag dolls. One was an immense man in an
expensive jump suit with gold chains on. He lay flat, eyes blink less
and vacant as the blood turned his sweatshirt strawberry and an odd
detail leaped out at Russ:
He had a necklace of scar tissue as if someone had gone to work on his
throat with a chain saw but got only halfway around before thinking the
better of it.
Another moment of silence. Bob used it to change magazines.
Russ looked around.
"Jesus Christ," he said. It reminded him of TV coverage of the Highway
of Death out of Kuwait City after the Warthogs and the Blackhawks
finished a good day's killing. Four wrecked vehicles, one on its back,
one boiling with black, oily flame of petroleum products oxidizing into
the sky, bodies and blood pools and shards of glass and discarded
weapons everywhere.
"What do you think of that, you motherfucker!" Bob suddenly shouted,
and Russ saw that he was screaming at a white airplane a half mile out,
low and banking away to the south.
"You got them all," said Russ.
"You must have killed twenty men."
"More like ten. They were professionals. They took their chances.
Now let's see if we done bagged a trophy."
Then he strode across the littered roadway to the ramming truck, upside
down and half in the gully. The odor of gasoline was everywhere.
He opened the door and peered in. Russ looked over his shoulder.
Inside, in a posture of unbearable discomfort that signaled something
important had broken, was a tough-looking His panic with creamy silver
hair and an expensive suit over an open silk shirt. The angle of his
neck suggested that it was broken. Pain lay across his handsome face
like a blanket, turning him gray under the olive tones of his skin. His
eyes were glazing and his breath was labored.
Bob pointed the .45.
The man laughed and his eyes came back into focus. He held a lighter
in his left hand.
"Fuck you, man," he said.
"I'm already dead, you cracker motherfucker." His voice was a little
lilting with a Cubano accent, an odd play of chs through it.
"I flick my Bic and we all going to heaven."
"It won't blow, partner, it'll only burn."
"Fuck you," said the Cubano.
"Who's the man in the plane?" Bob demanded.
The man laughed again; his teeth were blinding white. He made a little
move with his free hand and Russ flinched, but Bob didn't shoot.
Instead, both watched as the hand reached his shirt and, pausing only
once or twice in pain, ripped it open. The brown chest was latticed
with extravagant tattoos.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Bob said.
"I'm Marisol Cubano, you norteamericano cabrone. You puta} Fucking
Castro couldn't break me in his prisons, man, you think I'm going to
talk to some hillbilly homeboy?" He laughed.
"You are one tough customer," said Bob, "that I give you."
He bolstered the .45.
"Let's go," he said to Russ.
"Hey," screamed the man in the truck.
"I say this to you, motherfucker, you got some balls on you, my friend.
You cubanol Maybe Desi Arnaz done fucked your mama when your daddy was
out fucking the goats."
"I don't think so," said Bob.
"We didn't have no TV."
They turned and were back at their own truck when the Cubano ended his
misery; the truck flared as it went and the heat reached Bob and
Russ.
 the author of the acclaimed novel Dirty White Boys, was born in
Kansas City, Missouri, in 1946. He graduated from Northwestern
University in 1960, spent two years in the United States Army, and
since 1971 has been on the staff of The Baltimore Sun, where he is now
film critic. He is the father of two children, and lives in Baltimore,
Maryland.