ground, eh, Maj? Any day now. Any bloody day. Junior, how ’bout getting Papa a drink? A couple fingers whisky. No ice. Warm and smooth.”
“War is hell,” Leets said.
“How many Krauts you kill?” Hemingway asked Leets.
Leets said nothing.
“Huh, sonny? Fifty? A hundred? Two thousand?”
“This is a terrible conversation,” Susan said. “Jim, let’s get out of here.”
“How many, Cap? Many as the major here? Bet he’s killed jillions. That Brit special-ops group, goes behind the lines. Gets ’em with knives, fucking
Leets said he didn’t know, but not many. “You just fired at vehicles,” he explained, “until they exploded. So there was no sense of
“Could we change the subject, please,” Susan said. “All this talk of killing is giving me a headache.”
“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter,” recited Hemingway.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Leets. He remembered bitterly: the tracers spraying through the grass, kicking spurts out of the earth, the sounds of the STG-44’s, the universe-shattering detonations of the 75’s on the Panzers. “It was just a fucking mess. It wasn’t like hunting at all.”
“Really, I’m not going to let this nonsense ruin my evening. Come on, Jim, let’s get out of here,” Susan said, and hauled him away.
They walked the cold, wet London streets, in the hours near dawn. An icy light began to seep over the horizon, above the blank rows of buildings that formed the walls of their particular corridor. Again, fog. The streets were empty now, except for occasional cruising jeeps of MP’s and now and then a single black taxi.
“They say at High Blitz Hitler never even stopped the cabs,” Leets said abstractedly.
“Do you believe in miracles?” Susan, who’d been silent for a while, suddenly said.
Leets considered. Then he said, “No.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “Because a miracle has to be sheer luck. But I believe certain things are meant to happen. Meant, planned, predestined.”
“Our meeting again in the hospital?” he said, only half a joke.
“No, this is serious,” she said.
He looked at her. How she’d changed!
“You’re generating enough heat to light this quarter of the city. I hope there’re no Kraut planes up there.”
“Do you want to hear about this, or not?”
“Of course I do,” he said.
“Oh, Jim, I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re feeling awful. Outhwaithe was very cruel.”
“Outhwaithe I can handle. I just know something and I can’t get anyone to believe me. But don’t let my troubles wreck your party. Really, Susan. I’m very happy for you. Please, tell me all about it.”
“We have one. Finally. One got out. A miracle.”
“Have one what? What are you—”
“A witness.”
“I don’t—”
“From the camps. An incredible story. But finally, now, in March of 1945, a man has reached the West who was in a place called Auschwitz. In Poland. A murder camp.”
“Susan, you hear all kinds of—”
“No. He was there. He identified pictures. He described the locations, the plants, the processes. It all jibes with reports we’ve been getting. It’s all true. And now we can prove it. He’s all they have. The Jews of the East. He’s their testament, their witness. Their voice, finally. It’s very moving. I find it—”
“Now just a minute. You say this camp was in Poland? Now, how the hell did this guy make it across Poland and Germany to us? Really, that’s a little hard to believe. It all sounds to me like some kind of story.”
“The Germans moved him to some special camp in a forest in Germany. It’s a funny story. It makes no sense at all. They moved him there with a bunch of other people, and fed them — fattened them up, almost like pigs. Then one night they took him to a field and …”
“It was some kind of execution?”
“A test. He said it was a test.”
And Susan told Leets the story of Shmuel.
And after a while Leets began to listen with great intensity.
7
Vampir would work; of that Vollmerhausen had little doubt. He had been there, after all, at the beginning, at the University of Berlin lab in 1933 when Herr Doktor Edgar Kutzcher, working under the considerable latitude of a large
It was a business of sorting out dozens of details, of burrowing through the thickets of technical confusions that each tiny decision led them to. But this is what Vollmerhausen, a failed physicist, liked about engineering: making things work. Function was all. Vampir would work.
But would Vampir work at forty kilos?
That was another question altogether, and although his position officially demanded optimism, privately his doubts were deep and painful.
Under forty kilos?
Insane. Not without radically compromising on performance. But of course one didn’t argue with the SS. One smiled and did one’s best and hoped for luck.
“Surely, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, if you could just give me some reason for this arbitrary weight limit.”
Repp, frosty, had replied, “Sorry, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. Tactical requirements, that’s all. Someone’s going to have to carry the damned thing.”
“But certainly there are vehicles that—”
“Herr Ingenieur-Doktor: forty kilos.”
Lately Hans the Kike had been having nightmares. His food bubbled and heaved in his stomach. He worked obsessively, driving his staff like a tyrant, demanding the impossible.
“Hans the Kike,” he heard one of them joke, “rather more like Attila the Hun.”
But he had come so far since 1933, and the journey was so complex, so full of wrong starts, missed signs, betrayals, disappointments, unfair accusations, plots against him, credit due him going to others. More than ever now, 1933 came to haunt him. The last year I was ever truly happy, he told himself, before all this.
A year of beginnings — for Vampir, for Kutzcher, for Germany. But also one of endings. It had been Vollmerhausen’s last year with physics, and he’d loved physics, had a great brain for physics. But by the next year, ’34, physics was officially regarded as a
