Leets envied the major: war was simple for the Brits—they waged it flat out, and counted costs later.
He heard something in the hall. Susan? No, something in this ancient building settling with a groan.
But presently the door opened, and she came in.
He could see her in the shadows.
“I thought you’d be out celebrating,” she said.
“It’s not a triumph. It’s a beginning.”
“Can we have some light, please, goddamn it.”
He snapped on his desk lamp, a brass fixture with an opaque green cowl.
Because he knew he was dead to her, she seemed very beautiful. He could feel his cock tighten and grow. He felt a desperate need to return to the past: before all this business, when the Jews were little people in the background whom she went to see occasionally, and his job was simple, meaningless, and London a party. For just a second he felt he’d do anything to have all that back, but mainly what he wanted back was her. Just her. He wanted to know her again, all of her—skin, her hands and legs. Her mouth. Her laugh. Her breasts, cunt.
She wore full uniform, as if at a review. Army brown, which turned most women shapeless and sexless, made Susan wonderful. Her brass buttons shone in the flickery English light. A few ribbons were pinned across the left breast of her jacket. A bar glittered on her lapels, and a SHAEF patch, a sword, upthrust, stood out on her shoulder. One of those little caps tilted across her hair. She was carrying a purse or something.
“I tried to stop you, you know,” she said. “I tried. I went to see people. People I know. Officers I’d met in the wards. Generals even. I even tried to see Hemingway, but he’s gone. That’s how desperate I was.”
“But you didn’t get anywhere?”
“No. Of course not.”
“It’s very big. Or, we think it’s big. You can’t stop it. Ike himself couldn’t stop it.”
“You bastard.”
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“I was there when they came and took him. ‘Special Branch.’ There was nothing we could do.”
“I know. I read the report. Sorry. I didn’t know it would work out that way.”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“No,” Leets said. “No, it wouldn’t have, Susan.”
“You filthy bastard.”
She seemed almost about to break down. But her eyes, which had for just a flash welled with tears, returned quickly to their hard brilliance.
“Susan—”
“Where is he?”
“In another hospital. A British one. He’ll be fine there. He’ll be all right. If it’s a matter of worrying about him, then please don’t. We’ll take good care of him. He’s quite important.”
“You have no idea what that man’s been through.”
“I think perhaps I do. It’s been very rough on him, sure, we realize—”
“You have no idea, Jim. You can’t possibly begin to imagine. If you think you can, then you’re fooling yourself. Believe me.”
Leets said nothing.
“Why? For Christ’s sakes, why? You kidnap a poor Jew. Like Cossacks, you come in and just take him. Why?”
“He’s an intelligence source. An extraordinary one. We believe he’s the key to a high-priority German operation. We believe we can work backward from the information he gives us and track it down. And stop it.”
“You bastard. You have no idea of the stakes involved, of what he means to those people.”
“Susan, believe me: I had no choice. I was walking down a London street a few nights ago with a woman I love. All of a sudden she unreels a story that struck right at the heart of something I’d been working on since January. You needed a witness? Well, I needed one too. I had no way of knowing they’d turn out to be the same man.”
“You and that bastard Englishman. You were the officers that came by the clinic yesterday. I should have known. Dr. Fischelson said investigators. I thought of cops. But no, it was you and that Oxford creep. You’d do anything for them, won’t you, Jim? Anything! To get in with the Oxford boys, the Harvard boys. You’ve come a long way from Northwestern, goddamn you.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t send the Jew to Anlage Elf in the Schwarzwald. I didn’t set him among the Waffen SS and the Man of Oak and Obersturmbannführer Repp. The Germans did that. I’ve got to find out why.”
“You bastard.”
“Please. Be reasonable.”
“That’s what you people always say. That’s what we’ve been hearing since 1939. Be reasonable. Don’t exaggerate. Stay calm. Keep your voice down.”
“Yell then, if it makes you feel better.”
“You’re all the same. You and the Germans. You’re all—”
“Shut up, Susan. You’ve got no call to say that.”
She stared at him in black fury. He’d never seen so much rage on a human face. He swallowed uncomfortably, lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking.
“Here, I brought you something.” She reached into her purse. “Go ahead. Look. Go ahead, you’re brave. I insist.”
It was a selection of photographs. Blurry, pornographic things. Naked women in fields, standing among German soldiers. Pits jammed with corpses. One, particularly horrible, showed a German soldier in full combat gear, holding a rifle up against the head of a woman who held a child.
“It’s awful,” he said. “Jesus, of course it’s awful. What do you expect me to say? It’s awful, all of it. All right? Goddamn it, what do you want? I had a fucking job to do. I didn’t ask for it, it just came along. So get off my back, goddamn it.”
“Dr. Fischelson has an interesting theory. Would you like to hear it? It’s that the Gentiles are still punishing us for inventing the conscience five thousand years ago. But what they don’t realize is that when they kill us, they kill themselves.”
“Is that a theory or a curse?”
“If it’s a curse, Jim, I extend it to you. From the bottom of my heart, I hope this thing kills you. I hope it does. I hope it kills you.”
“I think you’d better go now. I’ve still got work to do.”
She left him, alone in the office. The pictures lay before him on the desk. After a while, he ripped them up and threw them into the wastebasket.
Early the next morning, before the interrogations began, Leets composed the following request and with Outhwaithe’s considerable juice got it priority circulation as an addendum to the weekly Intelligence Sitrep, which bucked it down as far as battalion-level G-2’s and their British counterparts ETO-wide.
JOINT ANGLO-AMERICAN TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE PRIORITY ONE
REQUEST ALL-LEVEL G-2/CIC STAFFS FORWARD THIS HDQ ANY INFO IN RE FOLLOWING FASTEST REPEAT FASTEST FASTEST
1. UNUSUAL ENEMY SMALL ARMS PROFICIENCY, ESP INVOLVING WAFFEN SS UNITS
2. HEAVILY DEFENDED TEST INSTALLATIONS ENCOMPASSING FIRING RANGE FACILITIES
3. RUMORS, UNCONFIRMED STORIES, INVOLVING SAME
4. PW INTERROGATION REPORTS INVOLVING SAME
“Jesus, the crap we’re going to get out of that,” complained Roger.
9
It was clear the Jew was trying to accommodate them. He answered patiently their many questions, though he thought them stupid. They kept asking him the same ones again and again and each time he answered. But he could only tell them what he knew. He knew that Repp had killed twenty-five men at long distance—400 meters Leets had figured—in pitch dark, without sound. He knew that a mysterious Man of Oak had come to visit the project at one point or other during his time there. He knew that he’d been picked up near Karlsruhe, which meant he’d traveled the length of the Black Forest massif, a distance of one hundred or so kilometers, which would put the location of Anlage Elf at somewhere in that massive forest’s southern quadrant.