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.
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, Obersturmbannfuhrer 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
