Paired, the travel had improved; already they had crossed the sandy Pücklerstrasse and the apartment houses of Argentinische Allee lay in the field of vision.
Schild said: “The knights of Cornwall are no men of worship, as other knights are. And because of that, they hate all men of worship.”
“What is that?”
“From King Arthur. You put me onto him with your ‘Ritter, Tod, und Teufel.’ ” Schild slowed. “Here, let’s have the last two of your Fleetwoods. ... You think a lot, don’t you?”
“Too much,” Reinhart complained with a mouthful of smoke. “Indeed I am a drone. However, I don’t usually do the talking. By nature I am a listener.”
“Do you ever get any snatch?”
Astounded, Reinhart asked him to come again. The same, and this intellectual was not even grinning.
“Since you ask, Lieutenant, only that little Trudchen—just as you predicted. She was no virgin. She is depraved, in fact, was already, which makes me feel less badly about it.”
“Well,” said Schild, “if she’s old enough to have it, she’s old enough to use it.”
“War is terrible when it corrupts a young kid like that,” Reinhart said piously.
Cigarette in the side of his mouth, head cocked so the smoke could not catch in his glasses, Schild asked: “Are you serious?”
“No.”
They joined in pragmatic, male laughter, the kind that would have stimulated the heroines of those movies Very loved to heat up their castrating irons.
Then it was only fair that Reinhart interrogate Schild. Who confessed to having been a teacher in civil life, specializing in English, in a private school that Reinhart suspected was “progressive,” where the students did whatever they wished and called the instructors by their first names. Was it? In part, Schild admitted, laughing more than ever.
“Frankly, that’s just the kind of thing I would have loathed as a kid. I always got a lot of satisfaction from believing I was more progressive than the school. Your place would take that away. Don’t you think it is better for superiors not to understand the people under them too well? I like a rather stern authority that I can hate and feel morally better than.”
“And overthrow?” Because he had done less talking, Schild’s cigarette was down to a nub carrying a long, quivering ash. A sudden burst of fresh morning wind snowed it across his blouse.
“Sure, sure, but there will always be something else.” Throat parched, Reinhart threw away his half-smoked smoke and said: “I accept life. Some things in it are by nature hateful.”
“You are the most extreme reactionary I have ever met,” said Schild, but pleasantly; almost, one could imagine, with approval.
As they turned into Argentinische they met a light, drifting film of rain, which was refreshing to the warm cheeks but also a douche on Reinhart’s spirit. He had run off at the mouth, revealed the location of his defenses and their strength, while wise Schild had really said nothing. Worse, he could not have faith in his own honesty: in action he had always proved to be the least independent of men, not reactionary at all. This evening, for example, he had needed Schild’s open ear.
They cut through the little woods and came out by quiet detachment headquarters, passed the sleeping hospital, and in the now generous rain took each other’s leave at the corner of officers’ row. Schild dripped water from the end of his obvious nose and smelled of wet wool, even as Reinhart did himself, and had trouble with his spectacles.
“I’m supposed to wear glasses myself,” Reinhart said. “For reading. I am farsighted. But I broke them in England. ... Do you feel all right now, Lieutenant? Frankly, I thought you acted a bit odd early this evening.”
Schild removed his cap and wrung it like a sponge, put it back all wrinkly. Then he saw Reinhart’s frown, took it off again and smoothed it across his knee. “Okay now? Reinhart, you are a fop. Why yes, I feel good. But I thought you were interested only in yourself.”
“Never did I say that,” Reinhart answered dolefully. “You have any idea of how late it is? We must have walked ten or fifteen miles.”
“Three-thirty perhaps, four, who knows? If you get in trouble at your outfit I’ll fix it.” He returned Reinhart’s salute and said: “I never have anybody to talk to, either. Thank you for letting me come along.”
Reinhart watched him all the way to the gate of his billet, thinking, I have done you a favor? His own waterladen cap weighed on his head like a sandbag; he removed and wrung it à la Schild. When he looked again through the rain his friend was stepping safely over the threshold.
Reinhart approached the rear of his apartment building on the alley that was but an unpaved continuation of the officers’ street. He stifled an impulse to climb up and enter his flat through the balcony, which might have incited the half-awakened Marsala to witless mayhem. Similarly, before going around front he took a leak in the bushes lest toilet-flushing would wake his buddy. While in midstream he heard a door down the street and there, inexplicably, came out Schild again, walking to the corner at which they had parted, and then out of sight up Possweg. Cursing the capacity of his bladder, he at length finished. At the corner he saw Schild enter the dark grove where the mess tents were pitched. It’s too early to get coffee! The guard there will shoot him! were among his angry self-expostulations. Reaching there himself, he saw the tents were farther to the left than he had remembered; besides, Schild was fifty yards into the trees and still going.
Like an Iroquois, Reinhart crept silently from pine to pine until there were few left and a plain like a soccer field showed light before him. At the edge of the grove Schild stood with two civilian persons, one of thickset middle height and the other a great lump of fellow larger than Reinhart by three inches in every dimension and, by the set of his massive shoulders, no Bach. Drawn up on the soccer field beyond, a black European sedan.
Perhaps because the wind was wrong—at that moment he realized the rain had stopped and the wind risen, cold against damp clothing—he heard nothing of their speech, knew only that they looked at Schild and Schild at the ground. But the evil voice sounded within him: The black market, how like a Jew. As if upon that signal, the two men seized his friend, each on an arm, and dragged him towards the car.
Fear’s fat serpent squirmed down Reinhart’s throat, circled the belly, and undulated through his intestines. Even the smaller guy looked as if he were built of bricks—the larger one was a monster; he could not have felled him with a baseball bat. They wore cloth caps and neckerchiefs and dark clothing, were some European kind of thugs, ranged against a little Jew and an over-sized boy. Oh, unfair! he whimpered and had every intent to hide, but was too limp to stand still, too weak to walk away, so no choice was left for a coward but to run towards them.
He squished over the wet sand and was nowhere near when they heard him and turned. The large one released Schild and stalked forward.
“Go away, boy,” he growled in German. “This is no affair of yours.”
Reinhart slowed but kept coming, still too scared to stop.
“He means no harm,” said Schild. “Let me talk to him.”
Brick-built, maintaining his hold, answered: “All right, but not in English.” And told Monster to stand aside.
“This is private business,” Schild said harshly. “Intelligence work. I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of it.”
Reinhart stopped three feet from the giant. It was so strange to be addressed in German by his friend. Groping for vocabulary, he said: “What kind of Intelligence needs the capture of an American?”
“Damn you,” Schild yelled furiously, shaking off Bricks’s arm. “Don’t come here with your naïve bungling. I give you a direct order to leave this minute if you value your stripes.”
Planning something, an old trick of movie combat, Reinhart trembled in anticipation—for it never could be worked in real life, on this damp plain, in wet clothing, by a coward who was sure he had misjudged appearances. With relief he hea
rd the threat to his rank. A man in authentic danger would hardly be so precise.
“All right.” Shamefaced, he added: “I forgot to tell you earlier: I have never understood the Jews, but I’m not proud of it.”
Schild answered: “Neither have I, neither am I.” Yet his head rose in pride.
Monster mockingly repeated: “Die Juden habe ich nie verstanden—”
Knowing his fist would shatter, and caring desperately about it—he hated to be hurt—certain that as usual he was wrong and lost and impotent, he released what little reason he had accumulated in twenty-one years, wheeled badly, plunged slippingly, and weakly struck into the giant’s armored belly. Wondrously he felt his hand prevail as if it had punched a cushion. The man’s deep guts wormed against his knuckles. Monster buckled, retching. Reinhart kicked his face.
He turned towards Bricks, just in time to save Schild’s blood, for the man exposed a paratrooper’s gravity knife, dropped the blade, and waded in low.
He screamed: “Get away you fool!” Which brave little Schild ignored, waiting defenseless, calmly, Jewlike, for his fate.
Reinhart sprang, Bricks did quick footwork, Reinhart fell flat in muck and looking up saw Schild professionally elude the blade, simultaneously knee Brick’s groin and chop his neck. Wilting, Bricks cried in pain, to which Schild’s cruel answer was a hacking at his forearm, precision hands above and below, that snapped the bone.
But Monster, face of gore, had meanwhile lumbered over. With his hobnailed sole he opened Reinhart’s cheek as you would boot a melon. On all fours, Reinhart took another, ill aimed; still, his cropped skull was grooved from fore to aft and red fluid flowed out and blinded him. A third and he would be dead. It was all very real.
Unseeing, he crabbed as Monster swung again; he tumbled over, cleared his eyes. His life’s dear blood left gout on gout; his bare cheekbone sorely caught the wind; but he got up. He stalked Monster, who great as he was now retreated; who could not have been an ex-SS man, for they were not craven. He caught him, took the battering of the leaden fists, bore in inexorably, embraced him in murderous love. Monster’s hands belabored his kidneys, tried for his neck, but he was now in too close; therefore they tightened around his own small-of-back and sought to break it.
His head within the hollow of Monster’s neck, he bit for the jugular. The skin was tough as chain mail, and besides he could not close his jaws, having an obsession this would push his senses through that cranial wound which Monster was opening further with each chin-stab. Then did he turn his face sidewise, upon the good cheek, and join his hands—he could just barely, around that iron barrel—and compressed, and it was hopeless.
From his good eye he saw Schild leave the fallen, whining Bricks and come to punish Monster’s back, futilely, without a weapon. The rabbit punches which felled Bricks bounced harmlessly from Monster’s invulnerable nape. Slowly Reinhart’s spine began to crack. But then within the clasp he believed so weak, so did Monster’s ribs, fibrously, like celery, yet not in sufficient time. For there was Bricks rising from the ground, crippled, twisted, knife in a left hand sufficient for the job on Schild’s unguarded back.
“Lieutenant... behind you,” he panted, his voice loose air and too little of that. At the cost of his life he loosed the hold on Monster that curtailed his own breath, and Monster exploited it. Off his axis now he shouted: “Schild for the love of Christ—” Still was Schild deaf, the bastard; he would give his life for Reinhart’s which was already gone. A last hope was to call the worst he could; to stir his friend, if only by hate, to preserve his own hide. And surely he hated him enough then to frame the cry, as one can only hate him who makes you beneficiary of his total sacrifice. Jew, I want them to kill you.
He never said it aloud; too authentically had it sounded through the chambers of his heart. Rather have him dead than hear that knell.
So, looking into his eyes, he saw Schild get it once, twice, thrice, in terrible thumps up to the knife’s haft, and squint in agony and sink. His thick glasses slid down his thin nose. He fell behind Monster, sparing Reinhart further sight, but his feet were in view and writhing.
Now came Reinhart’s turn. Monster was killing him as it was, but Brick’s dagger were quicker. Yearning for peace he awaited its first nick; getting it, heard a queer noise which he supposed was his heart ticking out. Monster loosed him slightly, turned head to look at Bricks in the sedan, stripping gears, driving off.
Monster roared, and was cut short by the vise of Reinhart’s arms. He pleaded, shedding tears and blood from his raw face, and Reinhart was moved but could not oppose his own awful will. Not even when he heard the tearing of the vertebral column beneath his wrists could he free poor Monster, who thus died in his embrace. Life all gone, he let him fall. He knelt by Schild and searched for a pulse. He found none. He retrieved the spectacles, which were unbroken, and mounted them on his friend: he recognized him again.
He stood up, victor, and surveyed the field. Then jealous Death, who wins all battles, wound him in its dark sheet.
CHAPTER 21
EACH NIGHT AFTER HIS error with the agent Fritz, Major Sergeyev went to bed in his street clothes. Nail file, lighter, toothpicks, etc., remained in the pockets. Checking their location was his first concern on arising, unarrested, in the morning. On the nearby camp table, a foxed and worn edition of The Foundations of Leninism, by J. V. Stalin, lay ready to be seized as one went to answer the knock upon the door. Beside it, a toothbrush, a bit of salt twisted in a paper, a safety razor, a sliver of soap, and a hand towel, in a small cloth bag.
Seven mornings he arose in a Soviet officers’ billet in Lichtenberg, ate breakfast at a mess in the basement of a commandeered factory, was driven to his office in a confiscated German Opel sedan.
Emerging from the messhall on the eighth morning, he saw, ten yards away, that his driver not only had a different profile from his usual but wore a blue cap. The man got out and politely opened the rear door of the automobile. His trousers were piped in red and blue. Within were two more bluecaps. Silently they cleared a space for Sergeyev to sit between them. He said: “Spasibo, thanks.”
They drove for a time on the wide thoroughfare which when he had first come to Berlin as an agent in the Thirties was called Frankfurter Allee, but now he understood was to be renamed for Stalin. It had been badly bombed. He tried to go to sleep, but whenever the bluecaps saw his eyelids droop they jolted him with their elbows, in silence and without malice. Thereafter he slept with his eyes open, a technique he had developed while interrogating Social Fascists, Trotskyists, members of the POUM, and other mad-dog wreckers and counterrevolutionary jackals in Spain.
He awoke as the car stopped before a prison in Pankow. The bluecaps accompanied him to the gate house, where they signed him over and he was searched. Two prison guards, also in blue caps, were his companions on a walk of moderate length inside the building, down a damp corridor, into a bare room with a boarded window. Before they gave him the order he had begun to disrobe. Naked, he pressed himself against the concrete wall. The guards examined the seams of his garments, looked between his toes, searched the hair of armpits and pubis, peered into his mouth, probed his anus. They confiscated the pocket articles.
He dressed. They conducted him to a small cell four floors above the ground. Its window was boarded; in its iron door, a spyhole and a letter-sized slot. After some time a pan of gruel was passed through the latter. He wished he had his packet of salt. To keep fit he strolled occasionally from the door to the slop bucket at the back wall of the cell, three steps, then from his bunk to the other wall, one step. He wished he had his Foundations of Leninism. The ceiling bulb burned all night.
Next day he got a boiled potato, and at another meal found a bubble of fat in his hot-water soup. He wished he had his manual for espionage agents, but it was at the office. The toilet articles he did not yearn for, not having been permitted to wash.
On what he estimated, by the number of times he had been fed, seve
n, to be the fourth day—not having seen the sky since he entered, he did not try to fix the hour—the guards took him to a room containing a desk, one empty chair and one filled one. In the latter, behind the desk, sat a uniformed man, lean and elegant, drinking from a china cup. He wore long hair, graying at the temples. He motioned Sergeyev to sit.
Having swallowed, he said pleasantly: “My name is Chepurnik. Of course you can see my rank.”
“Yes, Comrade Major.”
“You yourself were once a major, were you not? Of course you were!” He poured himself another cup of water from the glass carafe, drank it off, and said: “Now Sergeyev, tell me like a good fellow, have you been fed decently here?”
“Excellently, Comrade Major.”
“And have you been given something to read, to put in the hours profitably?”
“I made no request, sir. My book was left at the billet.”
Chepurnik opened a drawer. “I believe I have it just here. ... Ah yes, The Foundations of Leninism. Splendid.” He leafed through the pages. “I see you follow the practice of placing little brackets about certain passages that you should like to turn to again. Here is something: ‘the proletariat cannot and ought not to seize power if it does not itself constitute a majority in the country.’ ”
“Yes, sir. But you have not read what comes just before: ‘The opportunists assert that the proletariat, etc.’ ”
With no change in his expression of encouragement Chepurnik half-rose and threw the contents of the carafe in Sergeyev’s face. “You see,” he said, with fox-bark laughter, “it is not vodka, but pure water!”
Reaching for his handkerchief, Sergeyev remembered it had been taken from him in the search; no doubt, so that he could not knot it about his neck and hang himself. He wished he had his towel. He was surprised by Chepurnik’s sudden offer.
“Go on, use it!” The major tossed a handkerchief at him, which floated just out of reach. As he bent to fetch it, Chepurnik rose again and, leaning across the desk, with an inexorable meter-stick pushed the chair-edge slowly backward: Sergeyev fell to his rump. Chepurnik came around and helped him up.