“Jen! Help me bail!” Rio cries. Jenou is pulling something from inside Jillion’s coat and stuffing it in her own.
Jack yelps, “Shit!” and a red stain appears below the unit patch on his shoulder.
Jenou and Rio use their helmets as buckets, throwing water as fast as they can, and with Jack now cutting away his sleeve to get at the wound, they are down to just two oars actively slapping at the water. The boat, caught in an eddy, twirls a complete 360-degree turn before machine gun bullets turn the bow to kindling. The boat slides almost gratefully below the water.
“Get your gear off!” Rio yells, and every hand is busy shedding packs and ammo belts and coats as the water comes swiftly up over their laps.
Rio plows through to Jack and says, “Is it bad?”
His face is pale and his eyes wide, but he says, “Just a flesh wound,” like some British cowboy in the wrong movie.
Then the boat disappears beneath them, and they are swimming, though most of their motion is a result of the current, which carries them along like flotsam.
They are past the town when at last Rio feels ground under her feet and drags herself up the far bank.
She looks around. She is alone.
A voice barks an order in German, and she sees two gray uniforms and two leveled rifles.
Rio raises her hands. One of the Germans rushes off upstream, presumably to seize another prisoner of war, leaving Rio under the puzzled eyes of just one soldier. She is exhausted beyond all caring and sits straight down in the mud, showing every sign of being defeated, but also sitting sideways so her right leg is hidden from his view. She twines her fingers and holds them on her helmet, the universal sign of submission.
The German seems quite unconcerned, not at all the attitude of a soldier who believes he is in danger. He’s a medium-sized fellow in his twenties, his uniform clean, though wet, and his boots only slightly marred by mud.
The river rushes by, and Rio sees the debris of failure: boats, half-constructed segments of a pontoon bridge, and American bodies float past. No wonder the German is relaxed; it must have all seemed a pitiful effort to them.
The full weight of it descends on Rio. The assault has failed. GIs are dead and all for nothing. And she is a prisoner.
“Zigarette?” the German asks, advancing toward her, lulled by her passivity and no doubt by her gender.
Rio nods wearily. The German taps one out of his pack, hands it to her, and leans close with a lighter.
The koummya slides easily out of its scabbard. Rio stabs upward, right into his belly.
“Ah! Ah!” the German cries, and staggers back, blood staining his uniform. But he is far from dead and brings his rifle up to aim as Rio, summoning a last, desperate measure of strength, pushes herself up, throws a stiff left arm to push the muzzle away, and stabs him again.
This time the blade stops short on ribs, so she twists it and leans into it, using her weight to force the point through cartilage and into the vulnerable organs beyond. Too close, too close to avoid seeing his face, the surprise, the hurt as if she’s betrayed him, the incomprehension, that moment of no, not me, not me! And then the dawning fear as he begins to understand that he is dying, dying right here, right now.
Rio cannot twist the koummya, trapped as it is between ribs, but she saws it back and forth as his blood pours over her hand. She sees the light in his eyes go out.
He falls, and she has to put a boot on his chest and pull hard and work the handle back and forth to get the knife out of him.
When she looks up she sees Jack watching her. She meets his gaze, unflinching, and wipes the blood on the German’s uniform. She rifles through the dead man’s pockets. A letter received. A letter in progress, unfinished. A photo of a wife and child, a girl Rio thinks, a daughter, though it’s a very formal pose and the baby is all in white lace without obvious signs of gender.
She takes the German’s canteen and drains half of it before offering it to Jack. She takes the German’s Schmeisser submachine gun, checks the safety, works the bolt, and slings it over her shoulder.
“What now?” Jack asks.
“I guess we swim back across or spend the war in a POW camp.”
“Swim it is,” he says.
31
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—FIFTH ARMY HEADQUARTERS, NAPLES, ITALY
Rainy sits in a uniform that is her proper size but which now hangs loose on her. Her head is shaved bald. In fact, all the hair on her body has been shaved to get at the lice and bedbugs and scabies that are part of the legacy of her imprisonment.
She is in a waiting room, ready to be called in for her first real debriefing.
They have given her forty-eight hours before being asked to recount her . . . what to call it? Adventure? Ordeal? In that time she has showered and showered again, eaten, drunk, slept . . . and awakened screaming in a voice filled with rage.
She’s seen doctors and psychiatrists and ignored their questions, questions that, it seems to her, are impossible to answer.
How do you feel? they want to know.
Is she supposed to give a one-word answer? How does she feel? She feels as if she’s a lump of slow-burning coal. As if she might start crying and never be able to stop. As if she would gladly dig her fingernails into the throat of the first German she came across and choke the life from him. As if she’s not real, that she’s a Rainy puppet, a hollow, lifeless thing being dragged along by strings.
She feels brittle, as if her skin is a hard candy shell and the slightest tapping might break her open.
She feels inexpressibly sad, though sad for what, exactly, she could not possibly say.
But it has begun to dawn on Rainy that the questions have a single purpose: to discover whether she is fit for duty, will soon be fit for duty, or will simply never be fit. The wrong answers will send her home, back to some safe, stateside billet. Unless . . . unless those are actually the right answers, the answers she should be giving.
You’ve done your part, she tells herself.
More than your part.
Home to her mother and father. Home to New York. Home to life and ease and safety and maybe romance and . . . But it’s all sour, all of it impossible, there is no going home, there is no going home until . . .
Until what, Rainy?
Until what?
Until she no longer feels empty? Until she is herself again? Because she can’t go home yet, not like this, not as this person.
She can’t go home, because there are no Krauts in New York. The Krauts are here. The Gestapo is here.
A staff sergeant calls her name and holds a door open for her before hurrying past her to turn a plush wingback chair that slides easily on the polished parquet floor.
The ceiling, far above her, is an arch painted with cherubs and men and women in Renaissance clothing. No doubt it is a scene from the Christian Bible, but she cannot decipher the symbology and doesn’t care to try. The headquarters is in a seized villa of some magnificence, and this is but one of the many floridly decorated rooms.
A captain sits to her left, a colonel sits behind the desk, and it takes her a few beats before she realizes he is her former captain and now Lieutenant Colonel Herkemeier. He still checks his creases compulsively, but his eyes are full of compassion and . . . and respect? Regret? Pity?
What is clever, kind, decent Jon Herkemeier seeing when he looks at her?
There is also a female corporal taking notes, seated tactfully off to Rainy’s right and slightly behind. All three are Army Intelligence, but Rainy quickly intuits from the start that her mission is seen differently from here than it was from Colonel Corelli’s office in New York.
She gives a stripped-down account of her mission, her escape from Positano, her flight from Rome, her time in Genazzano. She takes a pause before going on. She wants to give a controlled, professional account, knowing that if she lets herself become emotional she may be unable to go on.
Even the barest retelling takes her thirty mi
nutes, all accompanied by the scratch of pencil on paper from the corporal stenographer. The questions begin.
“And there was no plan of action, no plan of withdrawal after you completed your mission?” the captain, an older man named Fraser, asks.
“No, sir,” Rainy says tightly.
“I find that hard to believe,” Fraser says, and Rainy’s eyes flare, a warning.
“How then did you decide how to proceed once you had delivered the document? The very useful document,” Herkemeier asks gently, sending a significant look to Fraser, who takes the hint and sits back, looking abashed.
“I started walking. I knew the gangsters might come after me for alerting Father Patrizio. And of course the Krauts. The Germans, sir.” She turns away slightly, and it is only the stenographer who sees her grimace of hatred and for a moment the stenographer is so startled she loses her place. “I walked out of Rome, not knowing where to go, but I figured the countryside would be safer than the city.”
“You simply walked? But surely it was many miles?”
“There are plenty of refugees on the roads, sir, some fleeing Rome in expectation of our arrival. I kept to myself, spoke as little as possible, slept at night in barns or under bridges. Three days and I reached a little village called Genazzano.”
Herkemeier snaps his fingers, and Fraser unfolds a map. “Here it is, sir, almost due east of Rome.” The captain points.
“My God, that must be forty miles!” Herkemeier says.
“Yes, sir. I hadn’t eaten much, and the countryside was picked bare. I had to steal a chicken from a farmer. Then I found a cave. And I got sick, and some children found me . . .” Her voice trails away as she remembers the chicken. She’d wrung its neck, a far more difficult task than she’d imagined. Then she’d made a mess of butchering it, using a sharp-edged piece of tin roofing as a knife.
“Anyway, some sisters, some nuns, took me in for a while until I was better. But I couldn’t stay there without endangering them, so I walked until I found an abandoned farm. I meant to wait there until our forces arrived.”
“Yes, well, our forces are all hurry-up and very little planning, I’m afraid,” Herkemeier says with savage disapproval. “Rather like your mission.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Please go on, Sergeant,” Herkemeier says with a frown of worry.
“I guess someone gave me up,” Rainy says. “One night a staff car pulled up. I ran, but . . . but not fast enough.” Then, feeling obscurely as if this was disappointing, added, “I shot at one of them. But I missed, at least I think I did.”
Should she tell them that her last conscious act had been to reach for her suicide pill? Would that help or hurt? Would she seem mad? Unstable? Unreliable?
Was that what she wanted?
Home to New York. Home to my father and mother. Home to see Aryeh and Jane’s baby, my niece. Home to Halev. Food. Warmth. Safety.
“What happened next?”
“Well, sir, I wasn’t raped at least, but they beat me. Fists and rifle butts that first time. I think it went on for a while. They were angry. Very angry.” She shook her head, trying to refocus. “I woke up in the cell where the soldiers found me.”
“You were weeks in Gestapo headquarters,” Herkemeier says softly.
It’s his kindness that sets Rainy’s chin to quivering. Tears flood her eyes and spill down her cheeks. At the same time her hands are clenched painfully and her teeth grind together and her breathing becomes ragged as she fights down the urge to sob openly.
“Yes, sir,” she manages to say.
“They questioned you—”
“I gave them nothing!” It’s a scream, a scream of rage, mountainous, vast, impossible rage. Fraser jumps in his chair, but Herkemeier never takes his soft, concerned eyes from her.
“Name, rank, and serial number?” the captain suggests.
“No.” Rainy stretches the word into an animal growl. “They’d have known Schulterman is a Jewish name and then . . . I guess I thought things would be even worse then, but also they didn’t expect it. See, they thought I told them the truth, and I didn’t, you see, I held it back, and I held it all back, I lied and lied, and it is so hard to keep the lies straight, see, Colonel, keep the fugging lies straight—that was the hard part, because you can’t sleep and you just hear the screams and you see the men shot down, bleeding, and . . .” She brings herself up short, painfully aware that she sounds crazy, that she sounds . . . emotional.
With great effort Rainy finds a version of herself, an earlier copy of Rainy Schulterman, a calmer, dispassionate, self-controlled version. As if she is an actress playing a role, she steadies herself and says, “I had no useful information I could give them. I fabricated things to let them think they were getting somewhere.”
“I believe that’s enough for now, Sergeant,” Herkemeier says gently.
Rainy shoots to her feet, wincing at the innumerable bruises that stiffen her body. She salutes and prepares to about-face, but Herkemeier says, “Just one moment, Sergeant Schulterman.” He stands. “I will tell you that I have had and still have many doubts about the part I played in getting you into this. But by God, Rainy, I have no such doubts about you. Well done. Damned well done.” He returns her salute sharply, and she flees the room as sobs take hold.
32
RIO RICHLIN—RAPIDO RIVER, ITALY
“I want you to know, I’m relieved you’re not suggesting we stay on this side of the river.”
“The Krauts are on this side,” Rio points out.
“Precisely,” Jack says.
It’s easy enough to say swim, but it turns out to be rather more difficult. The current is powerful, and the river bends in places so it threatens to bear them right back to the same shore farther downstream. They walk in silence, searching for a place to cross, creeping through the night, guided by the sound of water on their left and the frenzied sounds of battle and machine gun fire behind them.
The squad may be back there fighting, if any of them made it ashore, but Rio and Jack tacitly acknowledge that they will search for a ford farther from the battle, not closer to it.
He thinks I’m crazy.
No, Rio, he thinks you’re “splendid.”
At times the stumps of burned trees and the tangle of blasted shrubbery obscure their view of the river, which in any case can be better heard than seen in the deep darkness. This is a blessing because from time to time a boat or a body comes floating by. None of the bodies are German.
Rio fears looking over and seeing Jillion’s body . . . or Cat’s . . . or Stick’s.
Or Jenou’s.
She pushes that thought away as far as she can, but it doesn’t work. Jenou was in the water, the water that boiled with machine gun bullets.
Not Jenou, please, God, not Jenou. I told her she would be okay.
Rio and Jack walk for perhaps a half mile, creeping silently, alert to possible German patrols, before coming to a place where they can get at the river and where the bend ahead is toward the right, which should help them to land on the opposite shore. They fashion a sort of tiny raft out of small branches woven together and buoy it by draining their canteens and sealing them tight to act as floats. Weapons and gear, excess clothing and boots are all piled onto the raft, which rides way too low in the water to keep anything dry, but is better than nothing.
Jack strips down to just his boxer shorts, and Rio down to her identical pair plus her army bra. The night is cold, and they are shivering violently before they even touch the icy water.
“Nothing for it but to j-j-jump in,” Jack says, his teeth chattering.
“Yep,” Rio acknowledges with equal dread.
They hesitate at the water’s edge, but a machine gun opens up just fifty yards upstream and that motivates them. The water is brutally cold, just short of turning solid. They each keep a hand on the soggy raft and paddle with the other hand, but it is soon clear that paddling is irrelevant—the river will decide where they go. So t
hey roll onto their backs, extend their legs downstream, and are carried along, pushing water rather than paddling, pushing themselves, willing themselves out of the faster current toward the onrushing far bank.
They land, teeth chattering so badly neither can speak. They empty the raft, put soaking-wet uniforms on over soaking-wet bodies, fill their canteens from the river, drop in water purification tablets, send up silent prayers that their ammo is not all waterlogged. Then they head back east, back toward the sound of guns.
Rio’s watch has stopped, and she sees condensation under the crystal. “W-w-what time you th-think?”
Jack shakes his head violently. “No idea.” His face is as white as a cotton sheet, his lips blue. Rio imagines she looks much the same—like a walking corpse.
Ahead they see distant orange and yellow flashes and hear the short, sharp explosions, the sound flattened by distance.
“That way,” Jack says, and chops the air. “If we d-d-don’t f-f-f-f, shit. Can’t t-t-alk.”
They set off across a plowed field, furrows all but invisible underfoot so they must step high and heel first or else trip.
“Fug!” Jack yells. “Freeze!”
“Already freezing,” Rio snaps in a cold-rattled voice.
“Mines.”
“What?”
“My foot hit something metal.”
The cold is forgotten. Rio looks around, considers where they are, considers that the engineers have cleared only those minefields along the main line of attack—which will not include this field—and says, “Bad.”
Jack, about ten paces ahead, kneels slowly and feels in the dark. “Yeah. Bloody hell, we’re in a minefield.”
They can try to perfectly retrace their steps—not likely to work in the dark—or sit still and hope for help when the sun comes up.
“Stay there,” Rio says. “I’ll feel my way to you.” She, too, squats down and begins to feel through the mud for the telltale touch of steel. Once her immediate circle is cleared, she sets off crawling toward Jack, who has likewise cleared his immediate area—except for the mine he’s already found.