a kite flier fell down in this arena!” the officer went on, mangling the French language as he spoke. “We shall now wish to grasp that intruder in our gloves! I ask you, humans of Bazancourt, where is the man we wish to cage?”
Like hell you will, Michael thought, and cocked the.45.
He went back to the knothole. The tank crew was lounging around their machine, talking and laughing boisterously: a boys’ night out. Could he take them? Michael wondered. He could shoot the ones with the submachine guns first, then the one nearest the hatch so the bastard wouldn’t jump down it and slam-
He heard the low growl of another engine and more clanking treads. The tank crew shouted and waved, and Michael watched as a second tank stopped on the dusty road. Two men came out of the hatch and started a conversation about the parachutist that had been reported on the radio. “We’ll make a quick sausage out of him,” promised one of the men on the first tank, waving his cigarette like a saber.
The barn-door latch scraped. Michael crouched where he was, against the hayloft’s rear wall, as the door swung open and the beams of two or three flashlights probed around. “You go first!” he heard one of the soldiers say. Another voice: “Quiet, you ass!” The men came into the barn, following their lights. Michael stayed still, a dark form in shadow, his finger resting lightly on the automatic’s trigger.
In another few seconds Michael realized that they didn’t know if he was hiding here or not. Out in the village square the officer was shouting, “There will be severe penetrations for all those cohabitating with the enemy!” The three soldiers were looking around beneath the hayloft, kicking cans and equipment over to prove they were really doing a thorough job. Then one of them stopped and lifted his flashlight toward the loft.
Michael felt his shoulder prickle as the light grazed it and swung to the right. Toward the hole in the roof.
He smelled scared sweat, and didn’t know if it was the Germans’ or his own.
The beam hit the roof, began to move steadily toward the hole.
Closer. Closer.
“My God!” one of the others said. “Look at this, Rudy!”
The flashlight stopped, less than three feet from the hole’s edge.
“What is it?”
“Here.” There was the noise of bottles clinking. “Calvados! Somebody’s stocked the stuff away in here!”
“Probably some damned officer. The pigs!” The flashlight beam moved, this time away from the hole; it grazed Michael’s knees, but Rudy was already walking toward the bottles of apple brandy the other man had uncovered from their hiding place. “Don’t let Harzer see you taking them!” warned the third soldier, a frightened and boyish voice. Couldn’t be more than seventeen, Michael thought. “No telling what that damned Boots would do to you!”
“Right. Let’s get out of here.” The second soldier speaking again. Bottles clinked. “Wait. Got to finish it up before we leave.”
A bolt drew back; not the door this time, but the mechanism of a submachine gun.
Michael squeezed his body against the wall, cold sweat on his face.
The weapon fired, chattering holes through the wall below the hayloft. Then a second gun spoke in a surly rasp, sending slugs up through the hayloft floor. Hay and bits of wood spun into the air. The third soldier fired up into the hayloft, too, zigzagging a spray of bullets that knocked chunks out of the boards two feet to Michael’s right.
“Hey, you idiots!” shouted one of the tank crewmen when the noise of firing had died. “Stop that target practice through the barn! We’ve got gasoline tins out here!”
“Screw those SS bastards,” Rudy said, in a quiet voice, and then he and the other two soldiers left the barn with their booty of Calvados bottles. The barn door remained ajar.
“Who’s the mayor here?” the officer-Harzer?-was shouting, his voice edgy and enraged. “Who’s in charge? Step forward immediately!”
Michael checked the knothole once more, searching for a way out. He caught a whiff of gasoline; one of the men on the second tank, parked in the road, was pouring fuel from a can into the gasoline portal. Two more cans stood ready for use.
“Now we can converse,” someone said, from beneath the hayloft.
Michael silently turned, crouched down, and waited. Lamplight filled the barn.
“My title is Captain Harzer,” the voice said. “This is my companion, Boots. You’ll notice he’s well clothed to the name.”
“Yes, sir,” an old man answered fearfully.
Michael brushed hay away from bullet holes in the floor and peered down.
Five Germans and an elderly, white-haired Frenchman had entered the barn. Three of the Germans were troopers, wearing field-gray uniforms and their coal-scuttle helmets; they stood near the door, and all of them carried deadly black Schmeisser submachine guns. Harzer was a lean man who held himself in that strict rigidity that Michael associated with devout Nazism: as if the man had an iron bar up his ass all the way to his shoulder blades. Near him stood the man called Boots-the hulking, thick-legged figure Michael had seen in the flare light. Boots was perhaps six three, and weighed in the neighborhood of two hundred sixty or seventy pounds. He wore an aide’s uniform, a gray cap on his sandy-stubbled scalp, and on his feet were polished black leather boots with soles at least two inches thick. In the ruddy glow of the lamps two of the troopers held, the broad, square face of Boots was serene and confident: the face of a killer who enjoys his work.
“Now we’re solitary, Monsieur Gervaise. You don’t have to fear any of the others. We’ll take care of them.” Hay crunched as Harzer paced the floor, continuing to mangle his French. “We know the kite flier fell down near here. We believe someone in your village must be his touch… uh… agent. Monsieur Gervaise, who might that someone be?”
“Please, sir… I don’t… I can’t tell you anything.”
“Oh, don’t be so absolute. What’s your Christian name?”
“Hen… Henri.” The old man was trembling; Michael could hear his teeth clicking.
“Henri,” Harzer repeated. “I want you to think before you answer, Henri: do you know where the kite flier fell down, and who here is helping him?”
“No. Please, Captain. I swear I don’t!”
“Oh, my.” Harzer sighed, and Michael saw him jerk a finger at Boots.
The big man took one step forward, and kicked Gervaise in the left kneecap. Bones crunched, and the Frenchman screamed as he fell into the hay. Michael saw metal cleats glint on the killer’s boot soles.
Gervaise clutched his broken knee and moaned. Harzer leaned down. “You didn’t think, did you?” He tapped the white-haired skull. “Use the brain! Where did the kite flier fall down?”
“I can’t… oh my God… I can’t…”
Harzer said, “Shit,” and stepped back.
Boots slammed his foot down on the old man’s right knee. The bones broke with pistolshot cracks, and Gervaise howled in agony.
“Are we teaching you how to think yet?” Harzer inquired.
Michael smelled urine. The old man’s bladder had let go. The smell of pain was in the air, too, like the bitter tang before a brutal thunderstorm. He felt his muscles moving and bunching under his flesh, and a sheen of sweat had begun to slick his body under his camouflage clothes. The change would be on him, if he wanted it. But he stopped himself on the wild edge; what good would it do? The Schmeissers would cut a wolf to pieces as easily as a human, and the way those troopers were spaced apart there would be no way to get all three of them and the tanks. No, no; there were some things a man was better at dealing with, and one of them was knowing his limits. He eased back from the change, felt it move over and away from him like a mist of needles.
The old man was sobbing and begging for mercy. Harzer said, “We’ve suspected for some time that Bazancourt is a center of spies. My job is ferreting them out. You understand that this is my job?”
“Please… don’t hurt me anymore,” Gervaise whispered.
“We’re going to kill you.” It was a statement of fact, without emotion. “We’re going to drag your corpse out to show the others. Then we’ll ask our questions again. You see, your death will actually be saving lives, because someone will speak up. If no one speaks, we’ll burn your village to the ground.” Harzer shrugged. “You won’t care, anyway.” He nodded at Boots.
