All at once the complexities seemed overwhelming. An incredible restlessness stirred through his limbs, as the eyes of his staff pressed into him, demanding answers, guidance, adjudication. Beyond them, more threatening, he could see Repp. His misery was intense, fiery.

“Gentlemen, please. I believe—” He halted, absolutely no idea what he’d meant to say when he began to speak. That had been happening often too, sentences that began in confidence, then somewhere in the middle veered out of control and trailed off into silence, the ideas they had sought to express vanishing. He felt the impulse to flee mounting in him; it fluttered in his chest like a live thing.

“I believe,” he continued, and was as amazed as they at the finish, “that I’m going to go for a walk.”

They looked at him in bafflement. He’d always been so driven, trying to beat the problem down by sheer intensity of will, flatten it with his energy, his doggedness. He read in several sets of eyes the suspicion that Hans the Kike was finally cracking on them.

“It’ll do us all some good,” he argued. “Get away from the problem for a few hours, get a fresh perspective on it. We’ll meet again at one.”

He rushed from them into the out-of-doors and felt a burst of clean spring air and the heat of the sun. It’s spring, he thought with surprise. He’d lost all sense of time and season, shut off in his exotic world of microns and heat curves and power sequences. Then he noticed how the installation had changed, having become now almost a fortification. He nearly stumbled into a trench that ran between cement blockhouses that were surely new since the last time he’d come this way. He picked out a path around sand-bagged gun emplacements and maneuvered through trellises of barbed wire. Were the Americans close by? It frightened him suddenly. Must remember to ask Repp.

But he wanted green silence, blue sky, the touch of the sun; not this vista of war, which merely stressed his problems. He rushed through the gate and headed down the road to the range a mile or so away; it was the only available openness in the surrounding woods. The journey wasn’t pleasing; the trees loomed in on him darkly, sealing off the sky, and there were spots after an initial turn where he felt completely isolated in the forest as the road wound through it. Not another living creature seemed to stir; no breeze nudged the dense overhead branches, which sliced the sun into splashes at his feet. But then a patch of yellow appeared at the end of the corridor after another turn. He almost ran the remaining distance.

The range was empty, a yellow field banked on four sides by the trees. He walked to the center of it, felt the sun’s warmth again build on his neck. It was March, after all, April next, then May, and May was said to be especially nice in these parts, on a clear day one could make out the Alps one hundred kilometers or so away to the south. He twisted suddenly in that direction, seeking them as one would seek a hope. Above the trees was only haze and blur. He looked about for symbols of life reviving, for buds or birds or bees, and shortly picked out a flower, a yellow thing.

He bent to it. An early fellow, eh? It was a spiky, not too healthy-looking creature, stained faintly brown. Vollmerhausen had never felt much for such displays, had never had the time for them, but now he thought he had a glimmer into the simple pleasures so many of his countrymen had crooned about over the years. He plucked the flower from the soil and held it close to study it: an interesting design, the petals really slivers of a disk sectioned to facilitate easy opening and closing, a clever notion for capturing maximum sunlight, yet not sacrificing protection from the night cold. A little sun machine composed of concentric circles, efficient, elegant, precise. Now there was engineering! As if to confirm this judgment, the sun seemed to beat harder on the back of his neck.

He felt extraordinarily pleasant. He really felt as though he’d discovered something. He must remember to find a book on flowers. He knew nothing about them but was filled with a sudden overwhelming curiosity.

These soothing thoughts deserted him abruptly when he realized he stood in the middle of the killing ground.

A memory of that night came quickly over him. When had he known they were going to shoot them? He couldn’t remember exactly, the knowledge evolved slowly, over the first few months. He could not identify an actual moment of awareness. It just seemed they all knew and didn’t find it remarkable. Nobody was upset. Repp seemed to think it quite unexceptional. He had no involvement in it in any way; it would simply happen, that’s all, when the prototype Vampir reached a certain stage. But the whole business left Vollmerhausen queasy, uncomfortable.

He remembered the beginning best, the double line of men standing listlessly in the dark cold. He could hear them breathing. They seemed so alive. He was wildly excited, nervous, his stomach so agitated that it actually hurt. The Jews stood in their ranks, waiting to die. He could see no faces; but he noticed at this penultimate moment a curious thing.

They were so small.

They were all small. Some mere boys, even the older men wiry and short.

After that, it moved clinically. The Jews were marched away and when he could not see them he no longer thought of them.

The preparations were laconic, calm. Repp fussed with the weapon, then dropped behind it and drew it to him, arranging himself into a strained pose, all bone beneath the rifle, no flesh, no muscle, nothing but a structure of bone to hold the weight.

“You have power, sir,” someone said.

“Ah, yes,” said Repp, his voice somewhat muffled in the gunstock, “quite nice, quite nice.”

“Sir, the guards are clear,” somebody called. “The targets are at four fifty.”

“Yes, yes,” said Repp, and then his words vanished in the thumping of the burst, one fast, slithering drum roll, the individual reports fusing in their rush.

It was just seconds later they realized a man had survived, and just seconds after that that all hell broke loose, the lights flashed on, two American fighter-bombers roaring down into the bright zone, spitting bullets into the field, running their earth-splitting hemstitches across the field, and the lights flashed out.

“Fuckers,” somebody said, “where the hell did they come from?”

Vollmerhausen shuddered. He stood now in the grass where the mangled bodies had lain. The Vampir rifle’s slugs had torn huge chunks in the flesh. Blood had soaked the earth that night, but now there was only grass, and sun, blue sky, a little breeze.

Vollmerhausen began to walk toward the trees. He realized the sun was behind a cloud. No wonder it felt cool all of a sudden.

The sun came out; he felt its heat across his neck again.

Yes, warm me.

Soothe me.

Clean me.

Yes, purify me.

Forgive me.

Then he knew where his ten kilos were coming from.

8

They made an odd pair: Susan in her dumpy civilian dress, and Dr. Fischelson, dressed in the fashion of the last century, fussy and ancient in wing collar, spats, a striped suit, goatee and pince-nez. We look like a picture of my grandparents, she thought.

She had him calmer now, but still was uncertain. He could go off dottily at any moment, ranting in an odd mixture of Polish, Yiddish, German and English, his eyes watering, licking his dry lips, talking crazily of obscure events and people. He was not an effective man, she knew; but when it came to one thing, his will was iron: the fate of the Jews. He seemed to carry it around with him, an imaginary weight, bending him closer to earth each day, making him more insane.