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
“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
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
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.
