“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.

7

Vampir 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.