Michelangelo_s Notebook

18

He entered the room and went through his ritual with the uniform. Naked, he crossed the room to his chair and sat down. He examined the leather cover of the book as he always did when he came here and then opened it carefully, turning the pages filled with minute but perfectly clear script, pausing every now and again to whisper the words like hateful prayers: “Genus humanum quod constat stirpibus tantopere inter se diferentibus non est origine unum descendus a protoparentibus numero iisdem.”

For it was true: all men were different, their origins different, some base, some blessed, some damned from birth. Some were born as demons, others as saints. Since the words were immutable and divine they could not be argued with and so, by their very nature, following those words would be the act of a divine. It was all so simple when the order of it all could be seen.

He turned the page and the farm stood before him as it had been, the photographs fading now, the faces gray, but full of life in memory. He knew each one like a brother. Patterson in his glasses like that Beatle who was shot wore, Dorm, the guy they called Dormouse, Winetka, Bosnic, Teitelbaum and Reid. Pixie Mortimer, Hayes, Terhune, Dickie Biearsto. He could see them all, cold in the late winter chill, slipping up through the forest, ten guys from the forty-four playing baby-sitter to a bunch of art freaks from back home. But in the end they all smartened up, didn’t they? They were spies first and art types second and they’d all been in the fucking war long enough to know that war was for what you could get out of it once you got by the survival part. War was a game of bullies and bastards, not heroes.

There it was, right in front of him, the Altenburg farm and beyond it the little tumbledown Benedictine abbey called the Althof, long abandoned for want of monks or nuns in a part of the world that had forgotten that God had ever existed. Rain was coming down, cold and thin, the way his blood felt and he dropped his neck a little farther down into the collar of his jacket, not that it did much good. He was soaked through, his nose was running and he couldn’t keep a cigarette lit for more than a few seconds before it fizzled out on him.

They’d come down out of the mountains at last, moving through the trees down whatever goat paths they could find. There had been no way to stick together, and eventually the squad had come apart like a crumbling piece of old stone. There were ten noncoms, all with Garands and.45s; Pixie, the skinny fruit from Jersey City carrying a thirty-cal. across his back like he was Christ, and Dick Hayes, the wild-hair bald guy carrying the mortar and talking about what he’d really like to do-and I mean really like to do would be to slllide it into that Greer Garson babe-and he’d felt that way ever since he saw her in Mrs. Miniver. When Pixie told him she’d married the guy who played her son in the movie he almost shit and told Pixie that before the war was over he’d find an excuse to cut his fuckin’ good-for-nothing nuts off. Ten right guys and the three spooks from the ALIU, the Art Looting Investigation Unit, which everybody knew was part of the OSS and all they really wanted to do was catch Nazis with their hands in the cookie jar. McPhail, Taggart and Cornwall. McPhail thought he was some kind of big shit with his Boston accent and that funny Skull and Bones signet ring he wore; Taggart talked to himself, and Cornwall didn’t talk to anyone, he just had that notebook of his out all the time, writing. Altogether a weird crew.

Dick Hayes, the bald guy with the mortar took the first hit. It was one of those Russian SVT-40s the Germans liked so much; it had that flat, slap-in-the-face sound that hardly left an echo, even in that kind of countryside. Hayes was just ahead of him and to the right and the sergeant saw his whole right arm blown off at the shoulder leaving nothing but some blood and bone and some white twisted things he figured were tendons. Then that sound like someone dropping the lid on a child’s desk in grade school and then Hayes just dropped and the way he was lying you could look into his rib cage and see his lung and his heart swimming around in a lot of blood and purple stuff. One shot and he was gone and that was it for him and any chance with Greer Garson.

Everybody hit the dirt, and it seemed like everyone but Hayes made it to the ditch that ran at an angle across the meadow, more like it had been some kind of earthworks defense a few hundred years ago when they were fighting some other stupid war. Anyway they all got down behind it. The three guys from the ALIU were all lieutenants except for Cornwall, who was a captain, but none of the three of them knew shit about how to fight a fucking war, so they left it up to him because he was a sergeant and he’d also managed to keep from getting killed over here for the last few years and he didn’t think any of them had been here longer than since Christmas.

The sergeant looked up for a second to get his bearings and the Kraut with the SVT took another shot, knocking out a groove in the dirt about three inches to the left of his head. He got what he wanted, though-the lay of the land.

The farm looked more French than German: half a dozen buildings including a barrackslike barn probably used for cows, a big house-low, two stories, the thatched roof like a hat pulled low, heavy linteled window with the glass shot out long ago leaving black holes like dead eyes. All of this surrounded by a stone wall about five feet high and three feet wide and covered with half a dozen generations of blackberry and bramble-more effective than barbed wire. The wall ran off to the left and connected with the old abbey, two stories high like the farmhouse, the roof slate looking very dark in the light rain. The windows on the second floor of the abbey were very narrow and most of them were covered by wooden shutters. Some of them hung on one hinge, letting you look into the blackness beyond. Almost certainly where the firing had come from.

The sergeant got out the little pair of caramel-colored binoculars he’d traded a Canadian for and took a closer look at everything. They were on the upslope of the meadow that went down to the road so from where they were they could see over the wall and even over the roofs of the farm buildings. That’s when he started figuring something was different about this whole thing because behind the barracks-type building, the big low barn, he could see half a dozen of those three-tonner Opel Blitzes the Krauts used for just about everything. These ones were closed with canvas backs. They didn’t have any unit designations that the sergeant could see except for the bumper plate on the one closest to the edge of the building. The number plate had SS lightning bolts on it but the metal pennant plugged into the passenger side ferrule was orange, which meant they were feldjager-military police. Six three-ton trucks capable of carrying maybe a hundred men out in the middle of nowhere? It didn’t make any sense at all.

“What we got, Sarge?” It was Dormouse. He had snot running down both sides of his fat lips like a little kid and his eyes blinked all the time.

“Wipe your fucking nose, Dormouse.”

“Sure, Sarge.” He did, but his nose continued to run. “That Hayes who got hit?”

“Yeah, sniper in the old church place there-the abbey, I guess you’d call it.”

“What’s the fucking point of defending an old ruin? And if this is a bunch of Krauts on the run what are they doing with a sniper?”

“You ask too many questions, Dormouse. One of these days it’s going to get you in the shit. And wipe your nose again. You look fucking disgusting.”

The sergeant stared through the binoculars, looking at the trucks, wondering what the hell was inside them. It was a funny war now. Time was you picked up a gun and got moving and shot Germans and they shot back at you. Now it seemed like they were all in some kind of secret maze, looking for secrets and things that properly didn’t have a fuckin’ thing to do with fighting any war he’d ever heard of. He picked up the binoculars again and looked down at the farm. Military police?