Текст книги "The Master Sniper"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

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.