The Master Sniper (8 page)

“No trouble. Remember. You promised.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled.

Now, several whiskies down him, he was feeling sweeter, the friend to all men. He had her to himself: no Phil, no Jews.

“Barkeep,” he hailed, trolling in one of the red-jacketed boys behind the mahogany bar, “two here, old bun.”

“No wonder they hate us,” she said.

Around them the talk was of the new offensive. Beyond
the Rhine! It would be over by the blooming of the flowers, the coming of spring. This optimism had the effect of depressing Leets.

“You’re supposed to be enjoying yourself,” she said. “For God’s sakes, smile a little. Relax.”

“You’re damned cheerful,” he said with surprise. It was true. The whole evening, she’d bubbled. She was especially beautiful, even in the severe cut of the brown uniform; some women looked good in anything. But it was something else. Susan seemed to be her old self: sly, mocking, mildly sarcastic, full of mischief.

“You’ve decided to make a career of Army nursing. Congrats!” he said.

She laughed.

“You’re divorcing Phil. Right? Am I right?”

Again, laughter. “It’s a long story,” she said. “A long story.”

But before she could tell it, an elegant Brit voice crooned to them. “Darlings.”

It was Leets’s turn to make a face.

But Tony came ahead confidently, until he seemed to embrace the two Americans.

“One more of what these chaps are having,” Tony commanded the barman, and turned to press an icy smile on Leets.

“Sir,” Leets said evenly.

“Rather a long Thursday, eh?” Tony asked.

Leets didn’t say a thing.

“What, three, four hours? Or was it five?”

“Jim? What—” Susan said.

Leets looked bleakly off into the crowd.

“The captain had a rough go of it, I hear. Trying to get in to see—ah, who was it this time? Yours or ours?”

“Yours,” Leets finally admitted.

“Of course. Knew it all the time. Major General Sir Colin Gubbins, was it not?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. Head of SOE. Pity he couldn’t see you.”

“I’m on the list for Monday, the girl said.”

“I’ll put in a good word for you tomorrow at lunch,” Tony said, smiling maliciously.

“You bastard,” Leets said.

“Now stop that kind of talk,” Susan commanded.

“Susan, would you care to accompany me to lunch with General Sir Colin Gubbins tomor—”

“Goddamn it, Major, knock it off,” Leets said.

Tony laughed. “You’re getting a rather peculiar reputation in certain circles,” he cautioned. “You know, he tells anyone this mad scheme he’s dreamed up. Jerry snipers. Quite strange.”

Leets now felt fully miserable.

“It wouldn’t hurt a bit to listen to him,” Susan said. “You people have been told things all during the war you wouldn’t listen to. You never listen until it’s too late.”

Tony stepped back, made a big show of shock. “Dear girl,” he said theatrically, “of course we make mistakes. Of course we’re old fuddy-duddies. That’s what we’re paid for. Think how dangerous we’d be if we knew what we were doing.” He threw back his head and brayed.

Leets realized the man was quite drunk and beyond caring what he said, and to whom. But, surprisingly,
there seemed to be in his act some affection for the miserable American and his girl.

“Listen, I know where there are some marvelous gatherings tonight. Care to come along? Really, I can offer Indian nabobs, Communist poets, homosexual generals, Egyptian white slavers. The relics of our late empire. It’s quite a show. Do come.”

“Thanks, Major,” Leets said. “I’d really rather—”

“Tony.
Tony
. I’ve taken to the American habit.
You
call
me
Tony and
I’ll
call
you
Jim. First names are such fun.”

“Major, I—”

“Jim, it might be kind of fun,” Susan said.

“What the hell,” Leets said.

Presently, they found themselves in a cavernous flat in a splendidly fashionable section of London, along with a whole zoo of curiosities from all the friendly nations of World War II. Leets, pinned in a corner of the room, drank someone’s wonderful whisky and exchanged primitive pleasantries with a Greek diplomat, while he watched as across the room Susan deflected, in rapid succession, an RAF group captain, a young dandy in a suit and tie, and a huge Russian in some sort of Ruritanian clown suit.

“She’s smashing,” Tony said to him.

“Yes, she’s fine, just fine,” Leets agreed.

“Is good very, no?” the Greek said, somewhat confusingly to Leets, but he merely nodded, as though he understood.

But after a while he went and got her, fighting his way through the mob.

“Hello, it’s me,” he said.

“Oh, Jim, isn’t it wonderful? It’s so interesting,” she said, beaming.

“It’s just a party, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

“Darling, the most wonderful thing happened today. I can’t wait to tell you about it.”

“So tell.”

“I say, guess who’s here now?” Tony said suddenly, at his ear.

“It’s Roger,” shrieked Susan. “My God, look who he’s got with him!”

“Indeed,” said Tony. “An authentic Great Man! That is the hairy-chested novel writer who kills animals for amusement, is it not? Thought so.”

“All we need is Phil,” said Susan.

“Phil who?” said Leets, as his young sergeant drew near, his eyes crazy with glee, pulling in drunken tow the great writer himself. The two of them weaved brokenly across the crowded floor, Roger guiding the blandly smiling bigger man along. The fellow wore some kind of safari-inspired variation on the Air Corps uniform, open wide at the collar so that a thatch of iron-gray hair unfurled.

“The famous chest, for all to see,” said Tony.

The writer had a pugnacious mustache and steel-frame glasses. He was big, Leets could see, big enough for Big Ten ball, but now he had a kind of drunken, horny benevolence, dispensing good fortune on all who passed before him. Several times in his journey, the writer stopped, as though to establish camp, but at each spot, Roger’d give a yank and unstick the fellow and pull him yet closer.

“Mr. Hem,” Roger declared when he got the big fellow
near enough, “Mr. Hem, I want ya ta meet the two best friggin’ officers in World War Two.”

“Dr. Hemorrhoid, the poor man’s piles,” the writer said, extending a paw.

Leets shook it.

“I adored
The Sun Actually Rises”
said Tony. “Really your best. So
feminine
. So wonderfully
feminine
. Delicate, pastel. As though written by a very sweet lady.”

The writer grinned drunkenly. “The Brits all hate me,” he explained to Susan. “But I don’t let it bother me. What the hell, Major, go ahead and hate me. It’s your bloody country, you can hate anybody you goddamnwellfucking choose. Nurse, you’re beautiful.”

“She’s married,” Leets said.

“Easy, Captain, I’m not moving in. Easy. You guys, do the fighting, you have my respect. No problems, no sweat. Nurse, you are truly beautiful. Are you married to this fellow?”

Susan giggled.

“She’s married to a guy on a
ship
. In the
Pacific,”
said Rog.

“My, my,” said the writer.

“Hem, there’s some people over here,” Rog said.

“Not so fast, Junior. This looks like a most promising engagement,” the writer said, grinning lustfully, putting a hand on Susan’s shoulder.

“Hey, pal,” said Leets.

“No fighting,” Susan said. “I hate fighting. Mr. Hemingway, please take your hand off my shoulder.”

“Darling, I’ll put my hand anywhere you
tell
me to put it,” Hemingway said, removing his hand.

“Put it up your ass,” said Leets.

“Captain, really, I have nothing but respect. You’re the guy putting the hun in his grave. Putting Jerry to ground, eh, Maj? Any day now. Any bloody day. Junior, how ’bout getting Papa a drink? A couple fingers whisky. No ice. Warm and smooth.”

“War is hell,” Leets said.

“How many Krauts you kill?” Hemingway asked Leets.

Leets said nothing.

“Huh, sonny? Fifty? A hundred? Two thousand?”

“This is a terrible conversation,” Susan said. “Jim, let’s get out of here.”

“How many, Cap? Many as the major here? Bet he’s killed jillions. That Brit special-ops group, goes behind the lines. Gets ’em with knives, fucking
knives
, right in the gizzard. Blood all over everything. But how many, Captain? Huh?”

Leets said he didn’t know, but not many. “You just fired at vehicles,” he explained, “until they exploded. So there was no sense of
killing.”

“Could we change the subject, please,” Susan said. “All this talk of killing is giving me a headache.”

“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter,” recited Hemingway.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Leets. He remembered bitterly: the tracers spraying through the grass, kicking spurts out of the earth, the sounds of the STG-44’s, the universe-shattering detonations of the 75’s on the Panzers. “It was just a fucking mess. It wasn’t like hunting at all.”

“Really, I’m not going to let this nonsense ruin my evening. Come on, Jim, let’s get out of here,” Susan said, and hauled him away.

They walked the cold, wet London streets, in the hours near dawn. An icy light began to seep over the horizon, above the blank rows of buildings that formed the walls of their particular corridor. Again, fog. The streets were empty now, except for occasional cruising jeeps of MP’s and now and then a single black taxi.

“They say at High Blitz Hitler never even stopped the cabs,” Leets said abstractedly.

“Do you believe in miracles?” Susan, who’d been silent for a while, suddenly said.

Leets considered. Then he said, “No.”

“I don’t either,” she said. “Because a miracle has to be sheer luck. But I believe certain things are meant to happen. Meant, planned, predestined.”

“Our meeting again in the hospital?” he said, only half a joke.

“No, this is serious,” she said.

He looked at her. How she’d changed!

“You’re generating enough heat to light this quarter of the city. I hope there’re no Kraut planes up there.”

“Do you want to hear about this, or not?”

“Of course I do,” he said.

“Oh, Jim, I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re feeling awful. Outhwaithe was very cruel.”

“Outhwaithe I can handle. I just know something and I can’t get anyone to believe me. But don’t let my troubles wreck your party. Really, Susan. I’m very happy for you. Please, tell me all about it.”

“We have one. Finally. One got out. A miracle.”

“Have one what? What are you—”

“A witness.”

“I don’t—”

“From the camps. An incredible story. But finally, now, in March of 1945, a man has reached the West who was in a place called Auschwitz. In Poland. A murder camp.”

“Susan, you hear all kinds of—”

“No. He was there. He identified pictures. He described the locations, the plants, the processes. It all jibes with reports we’ve been getting. It’s all true. And now we can prove it. He’s all they have. The Jews of the East. He’s their testament, their witness. Their voice, finally. It’s very moving. I find it—”

“Now just a minute. You say this camp was in Poland? Now, how the hell did this guy make it across Poland and Germany to us? Really, that’s a little hard to believe. It all sounds to me like some kind of story.”

“The Germans moved him to some special camp in a forest in Germany. It’s a funny story. It makes no sense at all. They moved him there with a bunch of other people, and fed them—fattened them up, almost like pigs. Then one night they took him to a field and …”

“It was some kind of execution?”

“A test. He said it was a test.”

And Susan told Leets the story of Shmuel.

And after a while Leets began to listen with great intensity.

V
ampir would work; of that Vollmerhausen had little doubt. He had been there, after all, at the beginning, at the University of Berlin lab in 1933 when Herr Doktor Edgar Kutzcher, working under the considerable latitude of a large
Heereswaffenamt
contract, had made the breakthrough discovery that lead sulfide was photoconductive and had a useful response to about three microns, putting him years ahead of the Americans and the British, who were still tinkering with thallous sulfide. The equation, chalked across a university blackboard, which expressed the breakthrough Herr Doktor had achieved, realized its final practical form in the instrument on which Vollmerhausen now labored in the research shed at Anlage Elf, under increasing pressure and difficulty.

It was a business of sorting out dozens of details, of burrowing through the thickets of technical confusions that each tiny decision led them to. But this is what Vollmerhausen, a failed physicist, liked about engineering: making things work. Function was all. Vampir would work.

But would Vampir work at forty kilos?

That was another question altogether, and although
his position officially demanded optimism, privately his doubts were deep and painful.

Under forty kilos?

Insane. Not without radically compromising on performance. But of course one didn’t argue with the SS. One smiled and did one’s best and hoped for luck.

But forty kilos?
Why? Did they plan on dropping it from a plane? It would shatter anyway, and shock absorption hadn’t been tied into the specifications. He’d gone to Repp privately:

“Surely, Herr Obersturmbannführer, if you could just give me some reason for this arbitrary weight limit.”

Repp, frosty, had replied, “Sorry, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. Tactical requirements, that’s all. Someone’s going to have to carry the damned thing.”

“But certainly there are vehicles that—”

“Herr Ingenieur-Doktor: forty kilos.”

Lately Hans the Kike had been having nightmares. His food bubbled and heaved in his stomach. He worked obsessively, driving his staff like a tyrant, demanding the impossible.

“Hans the Kike,” he heard one of them joke, “rather more like Attila the Hun.”