The Master Sniper

13

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 Anlage). 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 Führer 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 Führer 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 Führer 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 Obersturmbannführer,” 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, Totenkopfdivision’s part. Only my part remains. One last campaign.”

“Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer.”

“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 Obersturmbannführer.” He reached over and on impulse seized Repp’s hand.

“Go on. Tell them,” Repp commanded.

“Yes, sir, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” 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 Obersturmbannführer 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 Obersturmbannführer?”

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 “NIBELUNGEN,” the exotic spacing for emphasis, and 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.

14

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, Chalois-sur-Marne.”

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 Saarbrücken 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 RAF photo Spitfire in an hour,” said Tony.

“Roger, get over to R and D and pick up those mock-ups of Anlage 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 Anlage 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 Schulz was dead, killed in ’42, in Drohobicz. Janucz Korczak was dead; Auschwitz. Perle, 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 — Anlage 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 non-regulation 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 shitthinning 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 hellraisers 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 underlit 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 flapping 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 flapped 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 Anlage 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 Anlage 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 gunflashes 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 Anlage 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 teen-agers with wild haircuts and tommy guns. Men in flames zigged 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, lookit 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 Anlage — 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 Anlage 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, Hauptsturmführer 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.”

15

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, uncontrived — 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 flappity-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 Anlage Elf? Had they seen the documents from Financial Section? Had they learned the secret of the meaning of Nibelungen, the Reichsführer’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.

16

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 Anlage 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, flecked 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 truck-load 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.

17

In 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 Gerngoss, 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 anushole Austrian, can’t wait to get home and fuck Jew-cunts and eat pastries in the Vienna cafés 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. Waffen SS field regulations supersede OKW forms. As of May first, on the order of the Reichsführer 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.

18

Ugh!

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 Vendôme, 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.

I 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, heh, heh, number-one singles there my 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 Cour 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 protégé. 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 overbrash, 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 bootlickers—“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 protégé. 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-beens 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. 1 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, 6-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 Rog, who’d been wearing shorts à la Riggs and Budge since he was a kid. Benson hit leapers, all that topspin, causing the ball to hiss and pop, even though the Cour 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. Rog 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 DiMage and the Splendid Splinter? Well you’re going to see the DiMage 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 Rog 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 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.

19

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 Anlage 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, VIP’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: REINHARD HEYDRICH, THEODOR EICKE, FLORIAN GEYER, SS POLIZEI DIVISION, DANMARK, 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 armband 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 intractably 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.

20

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 Kübelwagen 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 cliff’s 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 Kübelwagens 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 Führer 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, tinkering 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 Kübel 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, Panzerfausts?”

“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 pry, 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 should 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 Kübelwagen 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 Kübelwagen 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 Kübel 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 Reichsführer 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.

21

“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 here?”

“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 Sobibór. And Sobibór 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, no 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 always 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 undertang of DDT, from a recent de-lousing, 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 inflate in pain and it seemed the abundance of stars had come down to crush him and they hit him again and again and again.

22

He expected trouble at the Rheinbrücke 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 from?”

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. To 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 Münsterplatz. Even the officers were in bad shape, a sullen, loutish crew; clearly they’d already surrendered. Kübels and trucks had been abandoned around the Platz 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 Münsterplatz 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 Kühl? 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 Totenkopfverbände at Dachau.

“You should have let your hair grow. It’s cropped too closely around your ears,” she said in the kitchen, matter-of-factly, “though since you’ve the proper papers, I suppose you could look like the Führer 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 inspiration 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 Anlage 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, I 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 Herr 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.

23

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 broken 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 Anlage 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.”

24

Where was she?

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 P-38 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.

25

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 KOMMANDOSACHE!!! 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: NIBELUNGEN.

“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 WaPrüf 2 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 Anlage Elf and Leets already had Anlage 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 Schusswunde? 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 Eich?”

“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 Unterden-Eichen, 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, Obersturmbannführer Eichmann.”

26

“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 café.”

“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 Münsterplatz. 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 Münsterplatz, 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, thick-skulled 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.”

27

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 Obersturmbannführer 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 Anlage 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 Obersturmbannführer 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, nevertheless 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, dumb-founded.

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 Obersturmbannführer Karl Adolf Eichmann, late of Amt Four-B-four, Gestapo, Number One Sixteen, Kurfürstenstrasse, 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 Obersturmbannführer?” 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 Obersturmbannführer,” 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 across 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 Anlage 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 Obersturmbannführer, as well you know, you are a very dead man from that second on. Herr Repp guarantees it.”

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 topspin 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 Götterdämmerung, 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? Rog 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 Reichsführer. 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 Obersturmbannführer 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. Heh, heh. My name’s Rog, Rog 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’m OSS — 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 this?”

“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 zlotys. 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. Obergruppenführer 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 Reichsführer’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 half 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 Reichsführer 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 countermoves 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.

28

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 Deutschland. 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 breast-pocket 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 retreated 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 Sturmbannführer, 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 shopwindows, 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 Herr? 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 Café München.

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, then pfft, 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 Sturmbannführer 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 firebreather. Still trying to make Standartenführer, eh? But this way.”

Repp did not at all like to hear the word Standartenführer 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, Münsterlingen 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 Obersturmbannführer, 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 Obersturmbannführer, Herr Obersturmbannführer.”

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, flecked 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 Obersturmbannführer?” 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 camming 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 Fräuleins,” said the irritating Felix.

Repp left the barn, into the sunlight, blinking. Already 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 purposefulness. 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. Wir fahren 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 fishlike: 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 Generalgouvernement. 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, checkerboarded, 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, Obersturmbannführer 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.

29

“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 Anlage 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 possibly 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, RAF, 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 coxswain 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 demobbed, 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 Reichsführer, 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 communiqué 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 VE night and someone 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 nonfraternization 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 fulcrum 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 burn 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 shoeshine boy. He was also jammed with equipment which made the small space harder to bear, the parachute for one, a supremely ridiculous M-1 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 Rog 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.

“Rog, 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 camming 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.