An image filled the sky above him.
A man stood with a rifle.
Shmuel waited for the bullet.
Instead, he heard words in a language he knew: English.
“Freeze, fuckface.”
Other forms swirled above him.
“Jesus, pitiful,” somebody said.
“Hey, Lieutenant. Nelson caught the sorriest-looking Kraut I ever saw.”
And someone else said, “Another fucking mouth to feed.”
4
T-5 Roger Evans, Leets’s nominal assistant, counseled practicality.
“Forget it,” he advised. He was an insouciantly handsome teenager who quite naturally assumed arrogant postures and spoke in a voice cold with an authority he in no way possessed. The kid also knew how to dress: his shiny paratrooper boots rested against an edge of a table, propelling him outward, on the back two legs of a chair, delicately poised. His Ike jacket, cut tight, emphasized his athletic frame, and his service cap perched snidely on an angle down across his forehead. Leets had loathed him at once but in the months they’d worked together—“work” was an entirely inaccurate word, in Roger’s case—he’d come finally to accept the kid as basically harmless.
Rog threaded his hands together on the back of his neck, and continued in his instruction, bobbing all the while.
“That’s all, Captain. Forget it. No skin off your nose.” Nothing was ever skin off Roger’s nose. What Leets found especially irritating this midwinter morning was that Roger was probably right.
Leets said nothing. He fiddled with some papers at his desk: a field report on the double-magazine feed system WaPrüf 2 had improvised for the MP-40 submachine gun, giving it a sixty-round capacity, to match the Soviet PPSH’s seventy-one-round drum. Now these gadgets were showing up in the West.
What irked Leets was Tony Outhwaithe’s—and, by extension, all official London’s—rejection of his brainstorm.
“I do not think,” Tony had said imperially, “our analysts—yours, for that matter, although they are quite the junior at the game—will agree with you, chum. Frankly, it’s not the Nazi style. They tend to kill in larger numbers, and are quite proud of it.”
“We got Yamamoto in the Pacific, ’44,” Leets argued. “You guys sent some commandos after Rommel. There were rumors the Krauts had a mission on Roosevelt in Casablanca. And just a couple of months ago, when the Bulge started, that stuff about Skorzeny going after Eisenhower.”
“Exactly. An unpleasant rumor that caused a great deal of discomfort in all kinds of circles in this town. Which is precisely why we’ll not be calling up the guards on the basis of a scrap of paper. No, it’s this simple: you’re wrong.”
“Sir,” Leets had pulled himself to full attention, “may I respectfully—”
“No, you may not. Our intent in handing you this slight job was to take advantage of your somewhat specialized knowledge of German small arms technology. We thought you might provide some insight as to what pressures their industrial nut was undergoing. Instead you check in with a rather odd tale out of James Hadley Chase. Very disappointing.”
And he was dismissed.
But Leets let his enthusiasm get the best of him. In a frenzy of zeal, he dashed off a batch of memos one afternoon to various bodies whose support he hoped to enlist in his crusade—SHAEF, CIC, Army Intelligence, the OSS counterintelligence outfit called X-2, OSS German Desk over at Grosvenor Square, and so forth. The results were depressing.
“It’s ’cause I don’t know anybody. They’re all buddy-buddy, Eastern. Clubby. Harvard-Oxford-Yale,” he claimed.
Rog, old Harvard man at nineteen, tried to dissuade him from this concept.
“It’s not like that up at Harvard, Captain. It’s just a bunch of guys having a good time, like anywhere. Reason you’re not getting anywhere is simply that the clowns running the show don’t know what they’re doing, no matter what school they went to. This war’s the best thing they’ve got going; it sure beats working for a living. Once it’s over, they’re back jerking sodas.” Rog spoke with the brilliant assurance of a man who’d never jerk a soda in his life. His education entitled him to sit in the office with his paratroop boots on the table and dispense homilies of sociology to Leets.
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing something?” Leets said.
Airily, Roger continued with his analysis, now reaching cross-discipline into psychology. “I know what’s eating you, Jim. You want back in it.” He was genuinely amazed at this. “Boy, between us we got this war solved. Now why you’d want to—”
Leets knew in many ways he baffled the young tennis player. He of late had been baffling himself. Now why, all of a sudden, was he off on a crusade? Upstairs had said No; then No it would be.
But Leets kept thinking: Yes. It’s got to be Yes.
Several days later, Leets appeared at Tony’s office.
“Back again?” Tony asked.
“Yes,” Leets replied, unsmilingly.
“And so soon.”
“I was trying to sell it around town. No takers.”
“No. Thought not. Simply won’t wash, is why. Surely you can see that. No convincing dope.”
Leets concentrated on remaining pleasant. He explained politely, “The reason there’s no convincing dope is that I can’t get any. I can’t get any because the word’s out.”
“Whatever can you mean?”
Leets explained as if to a schoolboy: “Someone’s stamped me ‘Crank,’ ‘Nut.’ I dropped in on some of the other sections, thinking maybe I could round up some help, and suddenly I’m getting pitched in the street. You can tell from the way they look at you and whisper. You’re out, you’re dead.”
“I’m sure,” Tony said primly, “you exaggerate.”
“I figure it was you put the word out. Sir.”
Tony did not look away. There was not a fiber in his body capable of showing embarrassment. He looked at Leets evenly, his gaze richly amused, and said, “I’ll allow that’s a possibility. Even a probability.”
“I thought so,” said Leets.
“Nothing personal. I’m quite fond of you. You’re my favorite American. Unlike most of them, you are not madly obsessed with yourself. You do not tell me stories of growing up on a farm in Kansas and the name of your wife and children. Still, there are limits.”
“Major Outhwaithe.”
“Please. Tony is fine.”
“Major Outhwaithe, I’m asking you to take me out of the freezer.”
“Absolutely not.” He gazed calmly at him. Pity registered in his eyes; he was about to reveal a Major Truth, some elemental rule of the game that the thick Yank hadn’t caught on to. “Because you’ve got a real job to do. I know, I gave it to you. I’m responsible for it. I am exec officer of this little clown show JAATIC; directly under which is your little clown show, SWET. Not everybody can have a big job in the war, Captain Leets. Some of us—you, me—must do the little jobs, the boring jobs in safe offices five hundred miles from the front.”
Leets sighed. “Sir, it’s not a question of—”
“I shall tell you what it’s a question of. It’s a question of maturity. You had your time playing Indian, so did I. All over now. We’re desk chaps, you and I. See that attractive girl. Enjoy the flicks. Do your job. Thank God you didn’t get your nose or jaw shot off. Rejoice in the coming Triumph of Our Way of Life. The war’s almost over. Weeks, months perhaps. Unless a rocket lands on your skull, you’ve made it. See that girl. Her name—”
“Susan. I don’t. See her, that is. Anymore.”
“Pity. But the town’s full of them. Find another.”
“Sir. A few words from you and—”
“You mad fool. Go back to guns, to blueprints. Forget murder plots, assassinations. It’s London, February, 1945, not Chicago, 1926.”
Leets couldn’t afford anger and anyway wasn’t sure he had the strength; and he knew the Brits hated scenes. It’s what they hated most about Americans. And what he needed
he’d have to get from Tony Outhwaithe sooner or later, one way or the other, for in this town Tony knew all the right ears to whisper into. If Tony’d frozen him, then only Tony could unfreeze him.
“Major Outhwaithe,” Leets began again, in a voice he imagined was sweet with reason, “I’d merely like an opportunity to locate additional intelligence. I need more evidence than a Wehrmacht Transpo Command order, even a damned strange one. I need access to other sources, other distributions. The archives, the reading lists. Your technical people. The—”
“Leets, old man, I’m quite busy. We all are, except you. You’re becoming dreadful, you and that bratty boy of yours. You’re turning into Jews, with your own private patch of persecution, as though the war was a special theater for you and you alone. Who chose you, old man? Eh? Who chose you?”
Leets had no answer. The British major glared at him, ginger moustache bristling. The eyes were cold as dead glass.
“Be off!” He flicked insolently with his wrist, Noel Coward in the khaki of King and country, and brushed Leets, the bug, out.
Leets found himself exiled into the streets, disappointed. He stood a second on the pavement in front of the Baker Street headquarters, a nondescript joint called St. Michael House, No. 82. He was one American among crowds of the brutes on the sidewalks of the old city, all of them healthy, shoving, yakky types, many squiring girls. It was chilly and gray—typical London midwinter—but the fresh American flesh seemed to warm the old city’s streets and fill them with human color and motion. Next to the ruddy Yanks, the Brits were pale and thin, but not too many of them were in evidence. Whose city was this, anyway? Leets felt as if he were lost in a football crowd—Homecoming perhaps, some kind of rite. Everybody seemed happy, pink, party-bound. London was a party if you were American, had reasonable chances at survival and pounds in your pocket.
Triumph was in the air, self-congratulation. The soon-to-come victory would be moral as well as tactical. A way of life, a civilization, had been tested and vindicated. Looking about, Leets saw how glad these guys all were to be American, and how glad, in turn, the pale girls were to have latched onto them. The war was almost all gone. It was feeble and far off. Only the bomber crews, by their paradoxical youth, called it up. They were all over the place now, Eighth Air Force teen-agers, in for a desperate day or two between missions, recognizable by their three gunner’s chevrons on their Air Corps sleeves, unable yet to shave, toting guidebooks and cameras and asking stupid questions in loud voices. They were too young to be scared, Leets thought.
He shivered, pulling his coat tighter. Not a Chicago winter, but cold, just the same. It had the subsidiary effect of drying out London’s normally damp air and this in turn seemed to prevent his wound from suppurating painfully.
He went down Baker Street until it became Orchard Street—crazy Brit streets, they just turned into other streets on the next block without warning and if you had to ask you were dumb—and took a left up Oxford Street toward Bloomsbury. He walked with no particular hurry, knowing nothing urgent awaited him in the office. It did occur to him he was just a block or two off Grosvenor Square—all he had to do was follow Duke Street, upcoming here—where the OSS headquarters were. A fleeting thought sped through his head of crashing the place, making a scene, demanding to see Somebody Important. It was said Donovan bought anything presented with enthusiasm; he could sell Wild Bill Donovan. But more likely he’d run into the patrician colonel who ran the place, the OSS head of London Station, prime Eastern snoot, or one of his neckless, nameless Brit-licking assistant heads of Station, sure conspirators with Tony O.
Leets reached Oxford Circus, way past Duke Street, and realized he’d given up on Somebody Important. Not his style, after all.
At the Circus, the traffic whirled about, small, strange black cars, like planets out of control, headed for doom. Shouts, honks, the bleat of motors, blue fumes from their exhaust pipes, rose and enveloped him. Where’d they get the fuel? In the mechanical whirligig he insisted on seeing a metaphor of futility: all the metal going round and round and nowhere.
Forget it, okay?
They’re right.
You’re wrong.
An American sergeant—B-17 gunner, probably—walked by drunkenly, throwing him a wobbly salute.
“Sir.” The boy grinned brokenly. His arm lay across the shoulder of a tart, a shriveled, frizzy, titless, tough-looking girl; quite a picture, the two of them.
Leets answered the kid’s salute with one equally limp and watched him and his cutie stagger away. Night was falling. Leets felt none of the triumph of the streets. These crowds of corn-fed heroes, of whom the boy and girl were prime examples, so sure, so full of life, so ready for the next day. Heroes.
Yet the Germans were going to kill one of them. Leets knew it. There was a man, perhaps in this city, who right now, four hundred miles to the east, in a shattered Germany, sinister minds were planning to kill. He alone knew it.
Who would the Germans kill? And why was it so different? A V-2 might land that second and turn out the lights on three hundred: pure random stroke, an accident, a function of applying so much industrial power to such and such a technological problem.
The sniping was different. They knew a man, a special man, so vile to them, such an insult to their imaginations, that even as they were themselves about to become extinct, they would kill.
Churchill? Had the speeches angered them so much? Ike? That smiling Kansas face, bland and seemingly guileless. Patton, for beating the Panzer geniuses at their own game? Montgomery, who was as ruthless as any of them?
Leets knew it didn’t add up. Maybe Tony was right: maybe the freeze was good and just.
He felt drained of energy. A soft dark had fallen on Oxford Circus. There was not so much traffic, and now the cars moved more slowly. What am I going to do? he wondered.
He wished he weren’t so far from his office or billet; he wished he weren’t so tired; he wished there was a little piece of the war left over for him; he wished he could get somebody to listen to him. But chiefly he wished he could park his ass someplace soft, hoist a mug of that thin stuff the Brits called beer, and forget 1945 for a while.
Even as he walked through the anonymous maze of the city in the deepening dark, he knew he’d secretly changed course several blocks back, though he’d lied to himself, refused to acknowledge it at the moment of decision.
But when he reached the flats in which she was quartered, he was unable to maintain the fiction of coincidence. He was going to see Susan.
She was not there, of course; Mildred, one of the roommates, was vague but remotely optimistic about her return, and so Leets sat idiotically in the living room and waited, passing the time with Mildred’s date for the evening, a B-24 pilot, another captain, while Mildred made ready in the john.
The pilot was not so friendly.
“One of my buddies got killed in some crazy OSS thing,” he told Leets.
“Sorry,” Leets said mildly, hoping to end the conversation there.
“Low-level agent drop, nobody came back at all,” the pilot declared, fixing Leets in the black light of a glare.
And what about all the agents spread to hell and gone by panicked pilots who dumped them like freight twenty miles off the drop zone? His own operational jump had been handled by a British crew, who’d been in the business since 1941; they’d put him and his two companions right on the mark. But he’d heard horror stories of poor guys coming down in enemy territory miles from their contacts, to wander about stupidly until nabbed.
“People get killed in a war,” Leets said. “Even Air Force pilots.”
“Yeah, sure, in the war,” the pilot said. “What I want to know, is that crazy stuff you do, is it part of the war? Or is it some game for rich kids? Is it real?”
An interesting question. Leets had no answer. He looked steadily at the other man and saw that the fellow wasn’t really angry with him but at the war and its waste and stupidity and ignorance.
“It varies,” he finally said, and as he spoke he heard the door opening in the hallway.
Mildred, coming out of the john, ran into her first.
“Suse, guess who’s back?”
“Oh, Christ,” Leets heard Susan say.
He felt himself rising as she came into the room.
Her starches were wilted and her hair was a mess. She held her white shoes in her hand. Her face was tired and plain.
“Well, here I am again, ha, ha,” Leets said, grinning sheepishly, uncomfortably aware of the hostile bomber pilot watching him.
“Suse, we’re going now,” Mildred called, as she and the grumpy pilot got ready to leave.
Susan still had not said anything. She looked him over, ruthlessly, as if he were another patient on the triage list. She was a first lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps, in plastic surgery; she was a pale, bright, pretty girl from Baltimore; Leets had known her forever, meaning from that magical period only remotely remembered as Before the War. She’d gone to Northwestern too, where she’d dated and, incidentally, married a friend of his who was now on a ship in the Pacific. Leets had run into her six months earlier in the hospital, where his leg had put him.
“Guess I can’t stay away,” he confessed. “I had my mind all made up; it was set. No more Susan. Best for her. Best for me. Best for Phil. But here I am again.”
“This must be the twentieth time you’ve pulled this routine. When you get it just right, you can do it on ‘Jack Benny.’”
“It is pretty funny, I admit.”
“You don’t look so hot,” she said.
“I’m not. You don’t have a date, or anything?”
“Date? I’m married, remember.”
“You know I do.”
“But I do have something later. I said I’d—”
“Still going?”
“Still.”
“They give the Nobel peace prize during a war? You deserve one.”
“How’s the leg, Jim?”
“I should love it; it brought us together.” He’d first seen her with his leg hanging on a line off the ceiling like a prize fish.