The Master Sniper

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-