bounced, watch where you put your clodhoppers.”
With so much free and almost-free pussy over here, Bernie took good care of his balls. He raised and lowered his booted feet with utmost caution. The Germans used a trip wire so thin you could barely see it even when you were looking for it.
The fanatic was still twitching when Bernie came up to him, but he wouldn’t last. He’d caught the whole burst: one in the lower left part of his back, one as near dead center as made no difference, and one just below the right shoulderblade. He turned his head to look at the American.
“Your mama ain’t gonna help you now, kid,” Bernie said roughly. The other two GIs came up behind him. He bit down on the inside of his lower lip, hoping he wouldn’t heave. The diehard was a kid: with those smooth cheeks, he couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Well, he wouldn’t see sixteen now.
“Fuckin’ good shooting, Cobb,” Sergeant Corvo said. “They’re all the same size when they pick up a gun.” Just to be on the safe side, he grabbed the fanatic’s piece. Sure as hell, it was one of those nasty new automatic rifles. It looked ugly as sin, all plastic and rough metal, but it was very bad news. That big, banana-shaped clip held what looked like a week’s worth of ammo.
Bernie spat in the snow. “I don’t like shooting kids, goddammit,” he said. “And those Nazi cocksuckers are using more of them all the time.”
“Sure they are,” Walt said. “Kids don’t mind shooting you, not even a little bit. It’s cowboys and Indians for them-a game, like.”
“Sure-that’s what bothers me,” Bernie said. “They don’t even know the score. Doesn’t seem fair to point ’em at us. This little asshole probably didn’t even figure he could get hurt-”
“Till you put three in his ten-ring,” Corvo broke in. “Get it through your head, man-fair went out the window as soon as these guys didn’t come out with their hands up after the surrender. They catch you, you ain’t goin’ into no POW camp. They catch you, they’ll cut your cock off and shove it down your throat. You think this half-grown fucker wasn’t playin’ for keeps?”
“Unh-unh.” Bernie didn’t hesitate there. He’d come too close to getting ventilated.
“Okay. Maybe you ain’t as dumb as you look. Maybe.” Corvo turned the kid over. That seemed to finish killing him-close enough, anyway. Bernie didn’t notice exactly when he quit breathing for good. The sergeant went on, “We’ll go through his pockets. Maybe he’s stupid-maybe he carried something the CIC guys can do something with.”
But he didn’t. About the most interesting things on the kid’s corpse were three or four little one-pfennig coins: cheap zinc, dark with corrosion, but still displaying the Nazi eagle and swastika. They weren’t legal tender any more. The occupation authorities had come down like a ton of bricks on symbols of the old regime. Well, maybe even a fanatic needed to remind himself what he was fighting for.
Mournfully, Walt said, “Now we’ll have to search this whole goddamn wood, see if there’s a bunker hidden here somewhere. Boy, I’m really looking forward to that.”
“Gotta be done,” Sergeant Corvo said.
Lefevre didn’t argue with him. Neither did Bernie Cobb. The noncom wouldn’t be down on his belly probing. He wouldn’t be doing pick-and-shovel work, either. Bernie knew he and Walt damn well would. No wonder Corvo didn’t mind the prospect so much. Who ever minded the hard work somebody else was doing?
Captain Howard Frank slapped a film canister down on Lou Weissberg’s desk. Lou eyed it as if wondering if it had an explosive charge inside. Truth to tell, that wouldn’t have much surprised him.
Lou could have done with a Bromo-Seltzer. He tried to make light of it: “I thought you were going to appoint me morale officer and have me show the troops the latest Western.”
“Ha. Funny,” his superior said-about as much as the joke deserved. “I had to rout out a morale officer, ’cause I needed a projector to run this
“What…exactly is it?” Lou wondered if he wanted to know. A photo lab? What the hell were the fanatics doing now?
“It’s trouble, that’s what. Come see it. I’ll watch it again, too. Maybe one of us’ll spot something I missed the first time. I can hope so, anyway.”
“Okay.” Lou got up. Captain Frank grabbed the canister and carried it off.
The morale officer actually had rigged a screen and a projector in one room of the rambling Nuremberg hotel the CIC had taken for its own. “Why’d you have me take it out of the machine if you want me to run it again?” he asked Captain Frank.
“’Cause I’m dumb, Bruce,” the captain answered. “Do it anyway, okay?”
“Sure.” Bruce was a ninety-day wonder with one gold bar on each shoulder. He wasn’t about to argue. He threaded the film through the projector. He did that very well. For all Lou knew, he was a morale officer because he’d been a projectionist before Uncle Sam grabbed him. As he turned on the machine, he said, “Hit the lights, will you?”
Lou stood closest to the switch, so he flicked it. Squiggles and scribbles filled the screen as leader ran through. Then, without warning, a scared-looking young man stared out at him. The man wore U.S. uniform and looked as if he’d been worked over. His eyes kept sliding to the left, toward something off-camera.
“My name is Matthew Cunningham, private, U.S. Army.” He paused to lick his lips and glance left again. Then he rattled off his serial number and went on, “I am a prisoner of the German Freedom Front. They say they will, uh, execute me if U.S. authorities don’t meet their, uh, just demands. For now, I’m being well treated.” The mouse under one eye, the split lip, and the fear all over his face gave the lie to that.
“U.S. forces are to leave Germany at once. Germany is to be free to determine its own destiny like any other nation. The struggle for national liberation will go on until victory is won, no matter what. You cannot hope to outlast the aroused German folk. So-called prisoners of war must also be released to return to their loved ones. Germany demands peace and justice.” Cunningham gulped, then whispered one more word: “Please.”
He disappeared. More squiggles flashed across the screen. Then it showed pure white, which faded as Bruce turned off the projector. Lou turned on the room lights. “Jesus,” he said.
“You betcha,” Captain Frank agreed: a slightly chubby, fundamentally decent man in a hell of an unpleasant place. “How’d you like to get one of those every week, or maybe every day?”
“Jesus!” This time, Bruce beat Lou to the punch.
“Is he really a GI?” Lou asked. “Not just a kraut who speaks good English?”
“A Matthew Cunningham was reported as AWOL in Frankfurt last week,” Frank answered. “We’re bringing in some of his buddies to make sure this is really him, but for now it’s a pretty good bet.”
“Yeah.” Lou nodded. The kid on the screen sounded just like a Yank. “Shit. What do we do next?”
“That isn’t for the likes of you or me to decide,” Captain Frank said. “But you can bet your last dime we won’t pack up and go home. You can bet we won’t turn all the Jerry POWs loose, either. How many divisions’ worth of new recruits would we give Heydrich if we did?”
“What about the chuckleheads back home?” Bruce said. “What’ll they do when they see this thing? How loud will they squawk?”
“We ain’t gonna show it to ’em,” Frank said. “We ain’t gonna say boo about it. You want to spend the next twenty years in the Aleutians, son? You’ll be lucky to get off that easy if you open your big yap where a reporter can hear. Got it?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Bruce said solemnly. “But how do you know this is the only print those Nazi bastards made?”
“Fuck,” Captain Frank whispered. “I didn’t even think of that.”
Lou hadn’t thought of it, either. He realized he should have. Maybe Bruce really had worked in a movie theater. That would have got him used to thinking about more than one copy of a film at a time. To Lou, a movie was a movie. But how many people, in how many theaters all over the country, could watch the same movie at the
