into the throat of a man, commando-style, severing the larynx on the path to the brainpan. He shuddered. It was a type of killing that seemed hard and unfamiliar; though had he really considered it, he would have seen that in a war there was truly little difference between forcing the dagger into a man's neck and skipping a five-hundred- pound bomb across the waves toward him. But Tommy was trapped with the vision of Trader Vic's last seconds, and he wondered if the Mississippian had felt any pain, or if he was merely surprised and slightly confused as he felt the knife slide home.
Tommy shuddered. Scott was right, he thought. It was an evil thing.
He realized right then that when he produced it at the trial in the morning, right before Hauptmann Visser's eyes, it would probably cost Fritz Number One his life, and perhaps demand a similar price of Commandant Von Reiter.
At the least, the two men would soon be heading east to the Russian front, which was more or less the same thing.
Tommy knew that Fritz had been telling the truth about that, at least.
Visser also would know that there was only one way that knife came into the camp. Tommy had the odd thought that the blade resting on his thin gray blanket was capable of killing the two Germans without even piercing their skin.
He wondered whether the person who had delivered the blade to Tommy's bunk room knew the same. He was abruptly filled with suspicions. For a second, he glanced at Lincoln Scott, and thought to himself that the black airman was more right than wrong. The sudden appearance of the knife at this late hour might not be of help. He had the same sensation he'd experienced in the courtroom, when he'd stopped himself from launching questions like bombs at Fenelli. A trap? he wondered to himself.
But a trap for whom?
He shook his head.
'Screw it,' he said.
'I think it's time that I go and have a little talk with our ex-witness,' he said.
'The one on whom we had so much riding. Maybe it's time to ask him, privately, why he changed his tale.'
'I wonder what the hell they promised him,' Lincoln Scott said.
'What can you bribe a man with here?'
Tommy did not answer this, though he thought it an extremely good question. He reached over and took the knife and wrapped it in one of the few relatively intact pairs of woolen olive drab socks that he owned. Then he stuffed it into the interior pocket of his flight jacket.
'You're taking it?' Lincoln Scott asked.
'Why?'
'Because,' Tommy replied quietly, 'it does occur to me that this is the real murder weapon we're holding, and what's to prevent Major Clark and Captain Townsend from sauntering in here in the next few minutes, just like they did before, and performing one of their little illegal searches and claiming in court tomorrow that we've had the damn thing in our possession for days? That maybe the only person who ever had possession of this knife was Lincoln Scott?'
Neither of the others had seen this possibility. Lincoln Scott smiled sadly.
'You've become a suspicious type, Tommy,' he said.
'With good reason,' Tommy replied. He watched as Scott turned, his shoulders slumped by the weight of what was happening to him, and threw himself onto his bunk, where he rested immobile.
He seems resigned. Tommy thought. Perhaps for the first time, he thought he saw some defeat in the shadows beneath the black flier's eyes, and thought he'd heard failure in the tone of each word he spoke.
He tried not to think about this as he headed out into the early evening, searching for Fenelli, the lying medic, who, he thought, in his own way, might be every bit as dangerous as the knife concealed next to his breast.
The light was fading quickly as Tommy made his way across the camp to the medical services hut. It was that indistinct time of day when the sky only remembers the sunlight and insists on the promise of night.
Most of the kriegies were inside already, many engaged in the elaborate and inadequate preparation of dinner. The more conscientious and deliberate a kriegie cook was in assembling the modest foodstuffs and organizing the evening meal, generally spoke to how little there was at that moment to eat. As he passed one hut, Tommy could smell the ubiquitous odor of processed meat being fried. It gnawed at his stomach in typical prisoner-of-war fashion. He desperately would have liked a slice, wet with greasy drippings, on top of a fresh hunk of kriegsbrot, yet at the same time he vowed that if he ever got home, he'd never touch a piece of processed meat again.
There was a single light shining in the dirty window of the medical services hut, which he spotted as he came around the corner of Hut 119.
For a second, he looked past the buildings, out through the wire to the modest cemetery. He thought that it was a particular cruelty of the Germans that they had allowed the men who died to be buried outside the wire. It made a mockery of every kriegie's yearning for freedom and home. The only men no longer in prison were six feet beneath the ground.
Tommy scowled, took an angry deep breath of the cooling air surrounding him, and jogged up the wooden steps to the small clinic-hut, grabbing at the door, and surging inside.
There was a solitary kriegie sitting behind the desk, in the same position where Tommy had first met Nicholas Fenelli.
The man looked up sharply.
'What's the problem, buddy?' he asked.
'Gonna be dark soon, need to be in your hut.'
Tommy stepped forward, out of the shadows by the door, into the light.
He saw the captain's bars on the man's jacket, and so he threw a lazy salute in the officer's direction. He did not recognize the man. But the reverse wasn't true.
'You're Hart, ain't you?'
'Right. I'm looking for-' 'I know who you're looking for. But I was there today, and I heard Colonel MacNamara's orders-' 'You got a name, captain?' Tommy interrupted.
The officer hesitated, shrugged, then replied, 'Sure.
Carson. Like the scout.' He held out a hand, and Tommy shook it.
'Okay, Captain Carson, let me try again. Where's Fenelli?'
'Not here. And he has orders not to speak with you or anyone else. And you have orders not to try to talk to him.'
'You been in the bag long, captain? I don't recognize you.'
'Couple of months. Came in right before Scott, actually.'
'Okay then, captain, let me clue you on something. We may still be in the army, and we may still have uniforms and salute and call everybody by their rank and all, but you know what? It ain't the same thing. Now, where's Fenelli?'
Carson shook his head.
'He was moved out. They told me if you came looking not to tell you.'
'I can go from hut to hut…'
'And maybe get shot by some goon in the towers for your troubles.'
Tommy nodded. The captain was right. There was no way, without being told where to go, for Tommy to go from room to room, searching for Fenelli. Not in the short amount of evening left before the lights went out.
'You know where he is?'
The captain shook his head.
'This they who told you what to say if I came looking, this would be
Major Clark and Captain Townsend, right?'
