Blood of Vipers

by Michael Wallace

  Cal glanced at the SS officer still suffering his abuse. “They’re eating right now.”

  “A snack. They’ll eat those other men, too, but that won’t be enough. The pretty women are the main course.”

  “You can’t let them do it.”

  “Why do you care? Is one of these girls your lover? Did she promise you something if you would keep her safe?”

  “Damn you, Osimov. Are you some kind of monster?”

  “I have something to show you, Lieutenant, as soon as my sergeants arrive, and I’m no longer afraid of losing control of these men. Once I show you, you’ll be happy to feed these pretty Germans to my dogs.”

  12.

  When Osimov’s sergeants arrived and the initial terror faded, Cal began to struggle with exhaustion and hunger. Osimov gathered the prisoners and more than a dozen guards and set them off on a cross-country march that ate up most of the afternoon. By the time they walked the two hours to the village where the Russian had set up his headquarters, Cal could barely stay on his feet.

  The entire company of German prisoners completed the march behind him, and many of them showed fatigue from the beginning. One elderly woman collapsed, and no amount of shouting would get her to her feet. Cal feared they would shoot her in the head and be done with it, but the Russians threw her in the back of a cart pulled by a shaggy pony.

  The village was filled with these pony-pulled carts when they arrived, interspersed among men on horses, squatting T-34 tanks, and American-built Jeeps, painted with red Soviet stars. Troops with mobile artillery, Katyusha rocket launchers on trucks, and everywhere the ponies and carts, carrying rations, clothing, canisters of ammunition.

  No German civilians on the street, but faces appeared in windows, peering through glass filthy with ash and mud, and once Cal heard a woman’s high-pitched scream that carried on for several minutes before it came to an abrupt halt. Two Russian soldiers staggered out of the house that was the origin of the screaming. One carried a clear bottle of liquor, and the other was buttoning up his pants. They spotted the marching prisoners, and poked and pinched Greta and the other women as they passed, and then said something to the soldiers guarding them, who laughed.

  Osimov ordered the prisoners into a house and set guards at the door. He kept Cal standing in the street, while he consulted with a pair of officers, who directed them to a second house, across the street. Osimov moved Cal into the house, down the hallway to the kitchen, and then kept him standing while two soldiers swept up smashed crockery, broken furniture, and torn and soiled clothing. Two men emerged from a bathroom with their shirts untucked and held in front of them like aprons and full of potatoes. Osimov yelled at them and they scurried from the house.

  “Damn peasants. They shit in the streets and wash potatoes in the toilet.” He walked over to the kitchen sink. “Yet this German house still has running water. Imagine.”

  He took a seat at the table and gestured for Cal to sit across from him.

  “You marched us east,” Cal said as he reluctantly obeyed. “Away from American lines. I demand that you make contact with the U.S. Army liaison so I can turn over my prisoners and rejoin my unit.”

  “You don’t want to march west. Heavy fighting that way, even though the bastard is finally dead. Still, they fight on.”

  “Who is dead? You mean Hitler?”

  “Didn’t you hear? Shot himself in his bunker yesterday. Berlin is in Soviet hands.”

  Cal didn’t know if this was true or not, but he didn’t see how that mattered at this point. “Where is the American liaison? I know your army has one to deal with situations like this.”

  “And anyway, I am not a combat officer,” Osimov continued, as if he hadn’t heard Cal’s question. “I am a political officer, in spite of where you found me. It’s my job to bring order to this mess, and to organize committees for the de-Nazification of Germany.”

  “So you can turn the Germans into good little communists. Yes, I understand. Did you forget we’re allies? Or are you trying to start another war?” When Osimov didn’t answer, Cal added, “I demand to speak with the American liaison.”

  Osimov said nothing, but peered at him through his eyeglasses. Cal refused to be intimidated. After several minutes, the Russian pushed away from the table and rose to his feet. He called out and two soldiers appeared from the opposite doors of the kitchen. They were armed with rifles, expressions hard, but were relatively clean and with only a day or two of stubble. Professionals. Osimov brushed past them and into the front room of the house.

  “Where are you going?” Cal tried to rise to his feet, but the guards lowered their weapons at him and shook their heads. He sat back down to wait.

  As night fell, it grew dark in the room. There may have been running water, but the electricity was out. Just when Cal thought he’d continue to sit there while the room turned black, another soldier appeared with a lantern, which he lit and placed in the center of the table.

  Light or no, the exhaustion was catching up with Cal, overwhelming even his hunger. After nodding twice, he crossed his arms on the table and leaned his head down.

  One of the soldiers jabbed him in the ribs with his gun. “Prosnis!”

  “Lay off, I’m awake.”

  He sat up, blinking, but the nodding started a moment later. Unable to rest his head on the table, he thought he could tuck his chin to his chest and drift off, but before he could steal more than a second or two, the guard was jabbing him again and shouting for him to wake up. A few minutes later, the same thing. Finally, he didn’t care and ignored the jab.

  The guard yanked his chair out and he sprawled to the ground. After that, they didn’t let him sit down, but kept him standing in the center of the room until Osimov returned. That was at least an hour later.

  Cal’s temper was shot by then. “What the hell is your problem? I’m an American—you can’t do this to me.”

  Osimov looked surprised. “What, have these men been mistreating you?”

  “You know damn well what they’ve been doing.”

  “Keeping you awake?” He shook his head, and smiled as if at the petty nature of Cal’s complaint. “Lieutenant Jameson, do you typically fall asleep during debriefings?”

  “You bastard, what do you want?”

  Osimov picked up the chair where it lay sprawled to one side. He held it out and gestured. “Please, sit down.”

  When Cal complied, he took his place on the opposite side of the kitchen table, and slid across a large brown envelope. “These were taken in February, at Auschwitz. Go ahead, look. There is nothing secret here. Soon enough everyone will see.”

  Cal unwound the string and slid the photographs out. He didn’t know what the man was playing at, but his irritation grew as he set the stack in front of him. He’d heard about the atrocities—by now, everyone knew—and so what good would come of this?

  “What are you playing at, Osimov?”

  “Look.”

  The first photograph was a row of men standing in front of a brick building. They were skeletally thin, faces slack with hunger and exhaustion, and wore gray striped prison garb with six pointed stars sewn to their shirts.

  “Go ahead, look at the next one,” Osimov said.

  “I’d prefer not to.”

  His voice hardened. “I insist.” When Cal still didn’t move, he slapped his hand on the top photograph, and shoved it to the side. The one underneath showed a pit filled to overflowing with dead, naked women. More bodies lay on wheelbarrows and in piles in front of the pit.

  “Look at them!” Osimov said when Cal turned away. “You will look or I will order your prisoners shot, do you understand?”

  Cal looked. Each photograph was more awful than the next. The dead stacked like cords of wood. Big ovens for what? Roasting dead bodies? A pile of eyeglasses higher than a man’s head. Thousands of shoes. Bunkers with row after row after row of cots, each one filled with a weak, emaciated man who stared with dead eyes at the camera.
Another pile of dead bodies. And another. And now children. Dear God, children.

  “Now have you seen enough?” Osimov asked.

  Cal’s throat felt tight. “Yes.”

  “There were places for sorting, places for holding, for dispossessing, for punishing, for killing. Think of it. A entire factory compound. Like your abattoirs in Chicago, only the American slaughterhouses process pork, the German ones process human flesh. Look. This building is for gassing prisoners, and this one for cremating them. How many thousands has this factory devoured? How many hundreds of thousands?”

  Cal didn’t answer.

  “It is industry, that is what the Germans have done, they have industrialized evil. What is the punishment fitting this crime?” Osimov was breathing heavily now. “I’ll tell you what must be done. Germany has shown itself incapable of sitting with civilized nations, and so it must be removed from the table. Divided among occupying powers, its industry stripped away, its cities burned to the ground, its people removed to the countryside, to villages and farms.”

  Cal pushed the photographs away. “And this is why you want my prisoners? You are going to punish them for what you saw at this death camp?”

  “The girl is named Greta Voss.”

  He tried not to show his alarm. “What’s that?”

  “Your girlfriend. One of the other prisoners gave us her name, and she readily confessed.”

  “You mean the blond girl with the buns? She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Oh?”

  “She speaks English. I used her to translate with the others. Useful, too, when my mates went for help and that SS bastard tried to kill me.”

  “Ah, your mates. Tell me about them. What did you say? A co-pilot and an engineer?”

  “Gunner and navigator.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Clyde and Simpson.”

  He gave the first names he could think of, two fellows he’d met on leave last fall in New York before his deployment to France. On his first day in the city, he’d explored Central Park, where he stopped to listen to a Navy band play “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in a bandstand next to an improbably placed Egyptian obelisk. It was here that he bumped into a pair of Navy Seabees named Clyde and Simpson from his home state of Utah. Clyde was a tall, serious man, already married with children, and Simpson young and garrulous, but like Cal, they had no use for the usual nonsense of soldiers and sailors on leave—the go-go bars, tattoo parlors, and brothels at Times Square, or the illicit gambling dens in Hell’s Kitchen. They had differed from Cal in that they were Mormons from highly religious families, but they welcomed him into their company, and the three men visited the Statue of Liberty and the Bronx Zoo and rode the Cyclone at Coney Island.

  “Clyde and Simpson,” Osimov said. “Tell me about them.”

  He described their characters exactly, but put himself in the fictional pilot’s seat of a B-27, and described the harrowing final flight of their imaginary airplane. Osimov listened with his face unreadable. Was he buying it?

  “Hmm,” Osimov said after Cal finished weaving his tale. “Back to this young Fräulein. When did she become your lover?”

  “That’s baloney, and I already told you that. Maybe she got some ideas, I don’t know. You saw, she’s just a kid. Anyway, I’ve got a girl back home.”

  “Then you won’t mind if we send her off with the other pretty women.”

  “What is the point of that? Revenge?”

  “It will give comfort to the front-line troops.”

  “You’re from New York, right?” Cal said. “You’re Russian, but you’re American, too. Is that what they taught you in the U.S.? To behave like a pig? Or did you learn that when you threw in with Stalin?”

  If the insults ruffled Osimov, he didn’t show it. “You must understand, these soldiers are not officers, men of sophistication, like you and I. They are villagers and nomads. They cling to superstitions and hold to traditional values, such as ‘an eye for an eye,’ or whatever it says in the Koran for the Mohammedans. They are prone to excess.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard the Germans talk about them. Frontschweine. Combat swine.”

  “Do they?” Osimov raised his eyebrows. “I suppose that’s an appropriate nickname. They are not refined, I’ll grant you that. But these men have suffered in defense of Mother Russia. Their families fell to the butchery of Nazi Einsatzgruppen. Who am I to tell them no? Who are you?”

  “Not with my prisoners they don’t.”

  “You may keep the girl. And her mother.”

  “I’m not keeping anything. As soon as we reach American lines, I’ll turn them over—all of them—to the MPs and be done with it.”

  “We’ll load you in the car with these two women and drive you to the American base outside Leipzig. I will personally guarantee your safety.”

  “And if I say no?”

  Osimov’s expression hardened. “Then it goes badly.”

  Cal turned it over. What were these prisoners to him? Two days ago he’d been flying over the North German Plain, shooting and killing. The Germans were his enemies, and his hatred of the Nazi regime had grown year by year. Nothing in the past two days had lessened that loathing. On the contrary.

  But it was one thing to hate Germany as an enemy, and another to consider individual Germans. Greta and her hopeful, earnest expressions. Her mother, Helgard, and Hans-Peter, who had shouldered his panzerfaust and marched grimly to his death. The baby girl Cal scooped up from the field, and the nursing mother without a child who took the girl in to feed and comfort. The Wehrmacht soldiers. The woman reunited with her son in the cellar. The minister trying to save the Bible and the silver cross from his church. And poor Karl, who watched his parents, his sisters, his grandparents—his entire extended family—jump into the firestorm.

  Osimov offered him an out. His own safety. The lives of two women. But all those other people...

  “I’m sorry,” Cal said. “They’re my prisoners and my responsibility. I can’t let you have them.”

  “You can and you will.”

  “We’re done here.” Cal rose to his feet. “Find me the American liaison.”

  “Sit down!”

  “Go to hell.”

  The soldiers came at him. A rifle butt smashed into the small of his back. He doubled over in pain. The two men shoved him back into the chair.

  “Now you listen to me,” Osimov said. He rose and leaned over the table, eyes flashing. “Nobody knows you’re alive except your hypothetical gunner and navigator. They may have been killed in the battle. They may not exist. And even if they tell, what then? Who knows that you are in my hands? Nobody. Do you hear that? Nobody. The Americans will make an official inquiry, we will profess ignorance, and you will join the vast ranks of people who disappeared into the mouth of this war.”

  “I won’t let you kill those people.”

  “This is a command post of the Soviet Union. I have absolute power here.”

  “So long as you keep your pigs fed. Otherwise, they eat you.”

  Osimov sat back down and gave orders. One of the soldiers left. He came back moments later with two other soldiers, who dragged Little Hitler between them. At least Cal assumed it was the SS officer because of the uniform, with the lightning bolts on the collar. Otherwise, his face was unrecognizable, with one eye swollen shut, teeth missing, lower jaw a ruin. A deep, shuddering sob came up from the man’s chest.

  Osimov had his men throw the prisoner to his knees. He walked up to the SS officer, drew his sidearm, and placed the barrel against the back of the man’s head. The gun roared. Blood and brains came out the front of his skull and the German fell face down, motionless.

  Cal lifted his gaze from the shocking violence to see Osimov watching him, nostrils flaring, a vein pulsing on the side of his head. All but one of the other soldiers retreated from the room. Osimov stared at Cal.

  After a long moment, Cal said, “You’ve had your revenge. I will be responsible
for the others. Take me to American lines and you can wash your hands of the whole mess.”

  Osimov said nothing. He glanced toward the kitchen door as his men returned with two more prisoners. They were the Wehrmacht soldiers who had surrendered to Cal in the cellar of the ruined farmhouse. Their hands were bound behind their backs. The Russians shoved the men face down on the plank floor.

  One of the men stayed above the Germans with his rifle pointed at their backs, while the other two left, and returned a moment later with the German pastor and the woman and her son who had reunited in the cellar. They pushed these to the ground as well, and then fetched the woman who had taken—and still held—the baby Cal rescued from the field. The woman cradled the girl beneath her as she went down. Finally, they came back with Helgard and Greta.

  Osimov looked down at the prisoners, who now covered most of the kitchen floor, shoulder to shoulder in the midst of the pool of blood still spreading from the dead SS officer’s head. “You force me to do this.”

  “Don’t, please.”

  “I’ll shoot the soldiers first. The old man dies next. If you continue to resist, the woman with the baby dies. It would be cruel to leave the infant without her mother, so I’ll kill her, too.”

  You already killed her mother. Don’t you see that?

  “After that,” Osimov continued, “the older child and his mother will die.”

  The German soldier who had resisted Little Hitler gave Cal a side glance from where he lay with his face pressed into the ground. Cal met his gaze and then looked away.

  “But not these two,” Osimov said with a nod at Greta and Helgard. “They are here to watch, like you. So they’ll remember your cowardice when I send them off with the others. So they’ll think about you when my frontline troops take their pleasures. Unless....”

  “It’s not enough,” Cal said. “You have to give me more.”

  “That’s a more reasonable tone. Yes, I’ll drive you to the American headquarters myself. In fact, if you’ll agree now, I’ll tell you what. You can take these others, too. The woman with the baby and the woman with the boy.”