look like it, but there's a big difference, see?'
'Sure, I understand. It's what the shrinks call a gestalt.'
'Yeah, well, you'd know more about that than me, Gunther. From what I've heard so far, you probably want your head examined.'
'We all do, Faxon, my boy. We all do. Haven't you heard of collective guilt? You're as bad as Joseph Goebbels, and me, I'm just as bad as Reinhard Heydrich.'
'Reinhard who?'
I smiled. It was true, Heydrich had been dead for more than seven years. But it was just a little disconcerting to discover Stuber had never heard of him. Maybe he was younger than I had supposed.
Either that or I was a lot older than I felt. Which hardly seemed possible.
TWENTY
The ox-blood in my veins left me feeling like it was my twenty-first birthday. It was plain to see why they'd given the stuff to Luftwaffe pilots. With enough of that whiz-juice in your blood you wouldn't have thought twice about landing a Messerschmitt on the roof of the Reichstag. I felt better than I looked, of course. And I knew I wasn't nearly as vigorous as the dope told me I was. I walked like someone learning to walk again. My legs and hands felt as if I had borrowed them from one of Geppetto's rejected puppets. With my pale face, dirty ill-fitting black overalls, sweaty hair, and unaccountably heavy shoes, I told myself I lacked only a bolt through my neck to make the final casting in a Frankenstein movie. It was worse when I spoke. My voice made the monster sound like Marlene Dietrich.
I walked as far as the elevator and then sat in a wheelchair. The hospital was full of visitors and no one paid me or Stuber any attention, least of all the doctors and nurses who commonly took advantage of visiting time to have a break or catch up with some paperwork. All of them were overworked and underpaid.
Stuber wheeled me quickly to his Volkswagen taxi. I got into the passenger seat and, conserving my energy, let him close the door. He ran around the front, jumped inside, and was already revving the garden-mower engine before I had told him where we were going. He lit two cigarettes, fed one between my lips, let out the clutch, and then drove quickly onto the Maximilianstrasse roundabout, from where we could have gone in any direction. 'So where to?' he asked, holding the steering wheel hard to the left so that we kept on going round and round.
'Across the bridge,' I said. 'West along Maximilianstrasse and then down Hildegard Strasse, onto Hochbruchen.'
'Just tell me where we're going,' he growled. 'I'm a taxi driver, remember? That little license you see there from the Municipal Transport Office means I know this city like I know your wife's pussy.'
My ox-blood let that one go. Besides, I preferred him like this. An apology or embarrassment might have slowed him down. Speed and efficiency were what was required, before the whizz-juice and my malice gave out. 'The Holy Ghost Church, on Tal,' I said.
'A church?' he exclaimed. 'What do you want to go to a church for?' He thought about that for a moment as we raced across the bridge. 'Or are you having second thoughts about this? Is that it? Because if you are, then Saint Anna's is nearer.'
'So much for your knowledge of gynecology,' I said. 'Saint Anna's is still closed.' As we came through the Forum, I caught sight of the street corner where the comrades had given me an early taste of the blackjack before bundling me into their car. 'And I'm not having second thoughts. Besides, didn't you tell me I wasn't to get gabby? What do you care what I want in a church? It's none of your business. You don't want to know. That's what you said.'
He shrugged. 'I just thought you was having second thoughts about this. That's all.'
'When I have second thoughts, you'll be the first to know,' I said. 'Now, where's the rattle?'
'Down there.' He nodded at my feet. There was a leather tool bag on the floor. I was so ragged up I hadn't noticed it. 'In the bag. There are some spanners and screwdrivers in there to give it some respectable company. Just in case anyone gets nosy.'
I leaned slowly forward and lifted the bag into my lap. On the side of the bag was the city coat of arms and 'Post Office Motorbus Services, Luisenstrasse.'
'It belonged to a bus mechanic, I figure,' he said. 'Someone left it in the cab.'
'Since when did bus mechanics start taking export taxis?' I asked.
'Since they started screwing American nurses,' he said. 'She was a real peach, too. I'm not surprised he forgot his tools. They couldn't keep their faces off each other.' He shook his head. 'I was watching them in the rearview mirror. It was like her tongue was looking for her door key inside his flap.'
'You paint a very romantic picture,' I said and opened the bag. Among all the tools was a U.S. government- issue Colt automatic. A nice pre-Great War .45. The sound suppressor attached to the muzzle was homemade but most of them were. And the Colt was the ideal gun for a silencer. The only trouble was its length. Wearing the pipe the whole thing was almost eighteen inches long. It was as well Stuber had thought to supply a tool bag. A rig like that might sound quiet but to look at was about as inconspicuous in your hand as Excalibur.
'That gun is as cold as Christmas,' he said. 'I got it off a shit-skin sergeant who does guard duty at the American Officers' Club in the Art House. He swears on his black momma's life that the gun and the pipe were last used by a U.S. Army Ranger to assassinate an SS general.'
'So it's a lucky gun, then,' I said.
Stuber gave me a sideways look. 'You're a strange one, Gunther,' he said.
'I doubt it.'
We drove down Hochbruchen in sight of the Hofbrauhaus, which, unusually for that time of day, was doing brisk business. A man wearing lederhosen staggered drunkenly along the pavement and narrowly avoided colliding with a pretzel cart. The smell of beer was in the air--more so than seemed normal, even for Munich. A posse of American soldiers ambled along Brauhstrasse with a proprietorial swagger, turning the air blue with their sweet Virginia tobacco. They looked too large for their uniforms, and their boozy laughter echoed down the street like small-arms fire. One of them started to dance a buck-and-wing as, somewhere, a brass band began to play 'The Old Comrades March.' The tune seemed appropriate for what I had in mind. 'What's all the fuss about?' I growled.
'It's the first day of Oktoberfest,' said Stuber. 'Lots of Amis wanting taxis and here I am driving you around.'
'You've been paid very handsomely for the privilege.'
'I'm not complaining,' he said. 'It just sounded that way. Me using the wrong tense to tell you what I was thinking. The present progressive, I think.'
'When I want you to tell me what you're thinking, sonny, I'll twist your ear. Future conditional.' We reached the church. 'Turn left toward Viktualienmarkt and pull up at the side door. Then you can help me get out of this walnut shell. I feel like a pea in a street game of three-card monte.'
'That's the sucker move you're describing, Gunther,' he said. 'Where I get the pea out and nobody notices me doing it.'
'Shut up and get the door, beetle jockey.'
Stuber stopped the car, jumped out, ran around the front, and threw open the door. It exhausted me just watching him.
'Thanks.'
I sniffed the air like a hungry dog. Down on the market square they were roasting almonds and warming pretzels. Another brass band was launching into 'The Clarinet Polka.' If I'd had one leg I couldn't have felt less like dancing a polka. Listening to it made me want to sit down and take a breather. Over at the festival meadow on Theresienwiese, the revels would be in full swing. Big-breasted girls in dirndls would be demonstrating the Charles Atlas course by lifting four beer steins in each hand. Brewers would be parading with their usual mix of bombast and vulgarity. Small children would be eating their way through gingerbread hearts. Fat stomachs would be filling up with beer as people tried to forget all about the war and others tried, sentimentally, to remember it.
I remembered the war only too well. That was why I was here. Mostly, I remembered that awful summer of 1941. I remembered Operation Barbarossa, when three million German soldiers, myself included, and more than three thousand tanks had crossed into the Soviet Union. I remembered with an all-too-painful clarity the city of Minsk. I remembered Lutsk. I remembered everything that had happened there. Despite all my best efforts, it
