had no effect. Besides, they were already working as fast as they possibly could.
At ten minutes of eleven, Lyle Fark said, “The roofs almost done. We have to put the windows in, then clean up the place. But we can do it. I told you we could do it.”
Kelly shrugged. “It doesn't matter. We're all dead anyway. The krauts will see through this in ten minutes. Or less.”
A window frame was raised to a precut hole in the prefabricated wall, nailed into place.
“You keep saying we haven't a chance,” Fark said. “If you really believe that we're doomed to fail — why have you worked us so hard to get the village done?”
“What else was there to do?” Kelly asked.
10
Major Kelly thought he looked like a genuine priest. He was wearing sturdy, well-kept black shoes with extra-thick wartime rubber soles and heels. His black trousers were worn but dignified, cut full in the legs and generously cuffed. An almost perfect match for the pants, his black cotton suit jacket was worn at the elbows but was otherwise quite impressive. The vest and clerical collar had been made especially for him, sewn by a woman in Eisenhower, and did most to confirm his image. A black felt hat with a shiny black ribbon band covered his balding head; it was creased and looked fairly old, but it was clearly not the hat of a laborer or farmer. The hat was a size too large for him and came down almost to the tops of his ears, but that only made him look more genuine: a backwoods priest, a man not much of this world.
Yesterday, Kelly had laughed at Maurice's suggestion that he play the town's ranking priest. “My French isn't good enough,” Kelly had said.
“At one time,” Maurice admitted, “it would not have passed. But in the weeks you have been here, you have recalled your schoolboy French and have learned even more. Naturally, your French would not impress one of my countrymen. He would spot you for a foreigner. But it will sound fine to General Rotenhausen, because his own command of the language is far worse than yours.”
“And if one of the other krauts speaks French?”
“Several might,” Maurice said. “But none will be fluent in it. Only the German military's elite officers are well enough educated to speak it fluently. And none of them will be in a convoy moving toward the front.”
“I don't know… ”
Maurice was adamant. “I cannot pretend to be the priest, because Rotenhausen knows me. He knows this is not my village and that I am no holy man. I must not even show my face so long as he is here. And which other of my people would you trust in such a crucial, sensitive role?”
“None,” Kelly admitted, glumly.
“Whoever plays the town priest must be able to soothe Rotenhausen and the other German officers. He must make them believe at once that they face no danger in this place, and he must do everything to dissuade them from holding a building-to-building search before they settle in for the night. I believe you can do all of this,” Maurice had said. “As head of the parish and chief resident of the rectory, you will be at the center of the German command the whole night long, where you can discover and eliminate any potential danger to your men.”
Reluctantly, Kelly had agreed that he would be the priest. But he had been sure that they were all doomed.
Now, at 11:05 on the night of July 21, shortly before the German force was scheduled to arrive, Kelly looked into the streaked mirror which hung on the wall of the town priest's bedroom, and he decided there was at least a minute chance he would pass. He
He turned away from the mirror and surveyed the second-floor back bedchamber of the only fully completed house in the entire village. The room was not large, but comfortable. The walls were roughly plastered, white and pleasant except for finger smudges near the door and by the head of the bed, the signs of use which Kelly's men had so meticulously applied only a few hours ago. The bed was full size, the mattress sagging in the middle, framed with a brass headboard and brass posts at the foot. Beside the bed stood a squat nightstand with a chipped enamel knob on its shallow drawer. On the stand was a washbasin and a walnut-encased heirloom clock. The big mahogany dresser stood by the room's only window, the streaked mirror rising from the back of it. The window was tightly covered by a blackout blind which had been taped to the sill. On the wall by the door, a crucifix hung over a religious calendar. The room was simple, neat, lived in.
Too bad, Kelly thought, that the whole village was not this carefully structured and detailed. But that was wishful thinking. Hell, he could even now hear hammers hammering and saws sawing as the workers tried frantically to get the last of the fake houses in shape.
Kelly stepped into the hall and let the bedroom door remain ajar. He went past the other three upstairs rooms, all larger than the one he had left but otherwise identical. At the head of the stairs, he stood in the center of a hand-woven rag rug and looked at the rectory altar: two crucifixes, a small plaster statue of the Virgin, a red satin cloth with white lace trim covering the slim pine table on which all these artifacts stood. It was an excellent touch. He even crossed himself, though he was an atheist.
The steps squeaked realistically as he went down to the first floor. Considerable effort had been expended to get the proper noise into them.
The banister along which his hand slid during his descent was worn with use, the grain sharply raised by decades of unconscious polishing. Like all the furniture in the house, the banister came from Eisenhower. Maurice had uprooted it — and other paraphernalia — from his own home, where it had been for sixty years. As payment for this extra service, The Frog wanted nothing more than every item in the unit's possession which he had not already obtained: Sergeant Tuttle's field kitchen and all the cooking utensils; the men's personal revolvers; the tents… Major Kelly had been relieved by the reasonableness of this demand, and he had readily agreed. He had been certain that, at the very least, half a dozen of his men would have to be contracted to Maurice as indentured servants for the rest of their natural lives.
Downstairs, there were more white walls, handmade rugs, religious pictures, and crucifixes. The front room off the porch contained several comfortable chairs, a bench sofa with scattered cushions, a knickknack stand full of more religious articles, a stool by the only window — the glass for which had come from Eisenhower — and a fireplace with logs and tools stacked on the hearth.
The dining room-study combination was half the size of the front room, dark and cloistered. The two narrow windows were covered with blackout blinds as were the windows elsewhere in the house, and the floor was covered by a deep maroon carpet. The furniture was heavy, and there was too much of it. The air here was stuffy. It reminded Kelly of a funeral parlor. Lately, though,
The downstairs bedroom was small and neat, quite like his room upstairs, except that the bed was not brass. Quite out of character for a priest, he suddenly wondered if he would ever get to put it to Lily Kain on a brass bed.
The kitchen, behind the dining room and bedroom, was large and airy, full of heavy old cabinets, a worktable, and a second dining table with four high-backed chairs.
Kelly walked over to the porcelain sink, which had also come from Maurice's house in Eisenhower, and he worked the handle of the green iron pump. On the sixth stroke, water gushed into the sink.
“Fantastic!” Lieutenant Beame said. He was dressed in coarse gray trousers and shirt with green suspenders and a dirty brown fedora worn back on his head. He was playing a deaf-mute tonight. It was a ludicrous thought. “How can you get water out of a pump when there isn't any well for it to be drawn from?” Beame had not been assigned to the building of the rectory.
“We put a six-foot pit directly under the sink,” Kelly explained, watching the last of the short burst of water as it swirled down the drain. The drain fed into a second pit so that the dirty water would not mix with the clean. “Then we lined the pit with concrete, put a tin lid on top, and ran the pump line into the pit.”
“And filled the pit with clean river-water,” Beame said, smiling appreciatively at Kelly's ingenuity. “But what
