Michelangelo_s Notebook

38

He stared down at the tiny figures on the page, ranged through the trees, drawn and inked and colored so carefully like miniature signposts indicating the spinning out of time from the single frozen moment they represented: here they were safe and alive, without the knowledge that some of them would soon be dead, as carefully erased as they had once been drawn. He stared at them and at the bloody page and suddenly he was in another world, one that had never really been and if it had existed, it existed in a time that had long since vanished.

At six a.m. the attack began. Dawn was a faint purple line and the men moved like dark insubstantial ghosts through the slow, seething mist that rose up off the dew-wet fields. Watching through the gunnery slot of the ruined Panzer, the sergeant saw the blossoming of the first bazooka round and a few seconds later heard the heavy thump of its projectile. Almost instantly the air was full of sound. The first round from the bazooka took out a large section of the abbey tower, but not enough to silence the sniper. The sergeant could hear the flat sound of the high-powered rifle as it searched for a target in the thick screen of trees on the far side of the road. Then the bazooka announced itself again, this time shattering the upper section of the tower, spraying crumbling masonry and roofing tiles in all directions. The tower must have been built of wood originally, wood that was now tinder-dry after centuries of curing. A moment after the second shot from the bazooka, it was a blazing torch. So much for the sniper.

Following the second round from the bazooka, the sergeant could now hear the steady, rhythmic pounding of the mortar as it lobbed its two pound bombs into the entranceway. He pulled back the cranks on both machine guns, manhandled the traverse so the guns both lined up roughly with the barely visible roof of the granary and the main house and opened fire, hot shell casings spewing down around his ankles as the belts emptied in time to his ragged bursts of fire. Every few seconds he paused, traversed the guns a little and then fired again, watching the movements of Reid’s five-man squad as they spread out to flank the farmyard enclosure.

Reid and Pixie Mortimer moved first, slipping out of the woods and running across the dark road at the first shot from Terhune’s bazooka. From the far side ditch they managed to get to the big boulder halfway down the sloping field. The other three, Patterson, Dorm and Teitelbaum, followed on their heels, dropping down into the first of the shallow depressions that looked as though they might once have been drainage ditches or perhaps the ancient remains of some sort of weeping tile bed for sewage.

Not for the first time the sergeant found himself almost dumbfounded by the amount of crap the ordinary foot soldier was supposed to carry. Teitelbaum, the BAR gunner, for instance, carried the gun, sling, cleaning kit, twelve twenty-round mags in a webbing belt, a trench knife, frag grenade, hatchet, sidearm, regulation boots and clothing, plus personal gear amounting to almost exactly a hundred pounds. Even a lily-white officer like Cornwall carried the same as a grunt and more: ammo pouches, clips, binoculars, map case and anything else specific to the mission. In addition to that Cornwall and his arty pals were carrying Thompson submachine guns and the requisite loads for them. It was a wonder any of them could move at all.

Teitelbaum and Dorm set up the BAR on the edge of the ditch, Patterson covering them with booming rounds from his Russkie 71. So far the sergeant had only seen small movements in the front yard of the farm below, but by the time the abbey tower was alight there was a full range of fire from the house and outbuildings. Pausing to listen, the sergeant heard nothing but rifle fire and scattered bursts from some sort of light machine gun, probably an MP43 or the larger M34. With Terhune and the others pounding it in from the front it looked as though it was going to be easy pickings unless the Krauts had some kind of secret weapon in those trucks.

With covering fire from the BAR, Reid and Mortimer moved out from behind the boulder. There was a burst of fire from the upper floor of the farmhouse and suddenly Pixie was down, his legs cut out from beneath him as though he’d stumbled over a wire, his chest torn open by a stitch of rounds, half of his forehead and most of his brain demolished by a second firecracker string of shots from somewhere else. Reid didn’t pause even for a second. As Mortimer went down the Indian threw himself forward into the grass and rolled his way under the old battered farmhouse wall. The BAR swept over the upper floor of the house and the sergeant could see Reid pulling out a boxlike Russian M28 mine and smashing down the arming fuse. He scuttled away to the left, keeping to the wall but putting as much distance between himself and the demolition charge as he could. There was a heavy crumping noise, a blast of dirty brown smoke and masonry from the wall and then a hole the size of a pair of barn doors appeared.

The sergeant pulled back on the traverse handles of the twin machine guns and watched as the smoke cleared. Through the newly exploded opening he could see into the farmyard, the trucks visible and unharmed in the shadow of the main barn and the winter livestock shelter beside it. To the right of the shelter there was a wagon shed and from the dark doorway he could see bursts of fire. Three, maybe four men in Wehrmacht uniforms went running across the cobbled courtyard, trying to reach the safety of the house. There was the chattering roar of the BAR, the Russian 71 and the Pah-pah-shah in unison and the Germans went down in a sliding heap like someone running a scythe through wheat. From somewhere closer in there was the sound of Terhune’s bazooka and the crack of the two-inch mortar, rounds going into the roof of the livestock shelter and the wagon shed. The sound of cracking timber, fire and exploding glass was added to the general thunder. The sergeant could feel the taut flesh of his cheeks, pulled back into a deathly smile. Letting the barrels of the twin machine guns cool for a moment he glanced down at the radium dial of his Grana Dienstuhr service watch, taken off the wrist of a dead Kraut on D-day in the town of Courseulles-sur-Mer. It wasn’t quite five past. The whole thing had taken less than four minutes. As the sounds of the fighting faded the sergeant could hear the faint sighing in the branches of the trees off to his left. A last round from the mortar went off and something rattled deep in the guts of the old dead tank. Distantly he could hear the sound of someone weeping. It was done. The sergeant boosted himself out of the tank, sat on the edge of the turret and lit a cigarette. There was a little pause as people gathered themselves together and then a man wearing a distinctive black SS uniform stepped out into the gap in the wall carrying a scrap of white rag on the end of a splintered stick of wood. The man hesitated and began walking forward. Cornwall and Taggart, the tall skinny officer who served as Cornwall’s second-in-command, came out from behind the boulder and began walking down the hill toward the German.

The sergeant thought about things for a moment, then dropped down off the tank and headed toward the SS man, cutting off Cornwall’s approach and meeting the man first, the Colt automatic heavy in his hand. The German was short, pale, and wore steel-rimmed glasses. There was a smear of ash on his cheek. The holster on his belt was unsnapped and empty. He was wearing the single oak leaf collar tabs and three green stripes of a Standartenfuhrer, a colonel. He looked more like a bank clerk.

“You speak English?”

“Yes.”

“What’s in the trucks?”

“They are paintings there. Artworks of value.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Dr. Eduard Ploetzsch. I am an art curator.”

“No.”

“What, please?”

“You’re nothing. You’re dead.” The sergeant raised his automatic and shot him in the face for no real reason at all.