by Dean Koontz
"Hagendorf says you did."
"Let's go talk to Emil about this," Kelly said.
Thirty French men and women and a dozen of Kelly's men were clustered in the late morning sunshine outside the open machinery shed door. The noise and stench of perspiration were unendurable. Kelly and Tooley pushed through the crowd into the cool, dark, empty, and comparatively quiet interior which had been gutted for demolition. "Why aren't these people working?" Kelly asked.
Tooley shrugged. "They're Angelli's people, and they aren't worth a damn when he's not egging them on. Of course, he's up at the hospital bunker."
Kelly stopped just inside the door. "Is Vito hurt?" He hoped not. Angelli was essential. No one could handle the Frenchmen like he could. Besides Maurice, he was their only real contact with the French.
"It's not that," Tooley said. "He's okay. He's just up there romancing Nurse Pullit."
"Romancing Nurse Pullit?" Kelly was not certain he had heard right.
"Well sure. The nurse is attractive. Sooner or later, someone was bound to fall for her."
"Fall for her?" He felt as if he were Tooley's echo." Not that too!"
The pacifist did not seem to see anything strange in the Angelli-Pullit romance. "There's the box," he said, pointing across the room. "Hadn't we better get Hagendorf out of it?"
The only thing remaining in the large, main room of the shed, besides Sergeant Coombs and Lieutenant Beame, was an unpainted crate near the far wall. It was eight feet long, four deep, and four wide. It looked like a natural pine coffin. Standing at the foot of it, Coombs might have been a mourner. A disgruntled and angry mourner. "Hagendorf won't get out of this box you put him in," Coombs said, as Kelly approached.
"He's not in there to guard it," Tooley told Coombs.
"Then why'd you put him in there?" Coombs asked Kelly.
"I didn't put him in there." Kelly reached the crate and peered inside.
Hagendorf, the chief surveyor, was lying in the box on a bed of his own clothes, naked as the day he was born. If he had been born. Kelly was not sure about that. Naked, pale, chubby, Hagendorf looked more like something which had been hatched. "You put me in here," he told Kelly.
Kelly looked at the two dozen wine bottles which surrounded the surveyor. More than half were empty. "You got wine from Maurice, and now you're drunk, Emil."
"This is my coffin," Hagendorf said. "You put me in it. You made me get out my theodolite and survey your crazy village. You're the one who gave me a glimpse of the order and purpose I once knew and can never know again." Hagendorfs voice had grown quavery. Now, he started to cry. "You destroyed me. You put me in this coffin-you and no one else."
"Get out of the box," Kelly said. "It's heavy enough without you in it."
"I'm dead," Hagendorf said. "I can't get out."
Kelly sighed, looked at the others. "Let's get him out of there."
"No you don't!" Hagendorf screamed as they reached in for him. He spread his legs, braced his knees against the side of the box, his feet against the bottom. There was a supporting frame holding the sides of the crate together, and the surveyor gripped this with fingers like chitinous claws. Though Coombs pulled at his legs, Tooley at his left arm, Beame at his right arm, and Kelly at his head, all of them grunting and putting their backs into it, Hagendorf would not be moved. He was the most tenacious corpse they had ever seen.
"Look here, Emil," Major Kelly said, letting go of Hagendorf's head and wiping the chief surveyor's spittle off his hand, "we don't have time to fool with you. The goddamned Panzers are coming, Emil. We have a whole town to build before they get here. This shed has to come down and fast. This site has to be made ready for another building. These walls have to be torn up so we can reuse the wood and metal. Now, you come out of that fucking box, or I won't be responsible for what happens to you."
Hagendorf began to blubber again, and when he spoke his voice was, once more, the 78 rpm record played at an eternal 60 rpm. "I'm dead and rotting... What more can happen?" He held on to his coffin, his soft pudgy body now lumpy with muscles that had not been flexed near the surface of Hagendorf s body for as long as ten years.
Kelly picked up an empty wine bottle, and held it like a club. "Emil..."
"You destroyed me," Hagendorf said, tears running down his face.
"No violence, please," Tooley said, rubbing his hands together as he watched the scene leading inevitably to spilled blood.
"I'm sorry, Emil," Kelly said. He swung the bottle at Hagendorf s head.
The surveyor jerked out of the way. The bottle missed him, shattered on the side of the crate.
"Hold him down," Kelly told the others.
Coombs grabbed the surveyor's legs, while Beame stood across the box from Kelly and pressed down on Hagendorf s chest. Tooley wanted no part of it.
Kelly picked up another bottle and raised it over Hagendorf's head. "We haven't any time to waste, Emil. But I'll try to make this just a tap," he said when he saw Hagendorf was watching him intently through a veil of tears.
Then he swung the bottle.
Hagendorf let go of the box, grabbed Beame and pulled him in as a shield. The bottle smashed on Beame's golden head, spraying glass and dark wine.
"Ugh," Beame said, and passed out. Blood trickled out of his scalp.
"You killed Beame," Tooley said, stunned, hugging himself.
"It's just a tiny cut," Kelly said. "I didn't swing hard enough to kill him."
Coombs was disgusted. "Now you've got two of them in there."
Kelly considered the crate for a while. "Maybe we could get a bunch of men in here and carry the box out with Hagendorf still inside."
"With Hagendorf and Beame inside," Tooley said. He had stopped hugging himself, but he looked at Beame out of the corner of his eye as if he remained unconvinced that the lieutenant was alive.
Kelly saw that getting Beame out of the box was going to be every bit as difficult as getting Emil Hagendorf out of the box, because Hagendorf was holding tightly to Beame to shield himself from further violence. Kelly could almost hear the clatter of Panzer tread, louder by the second... "We'll get a dozen men-"
"No," Coombs said. "If we lift that box and Hagendorf starts jumping up and down or rocking in it, we'll fall with it. Someone'll break a leg. Or worse."
"Worse-like Beame," Tooley said.
"Beame's okay," Kelly said. He ignored the two of them and searched desperately for a solution. He could not leave the crate here and order the shed's demolition, for Hagendorf would probably be killed by collapsing walls. Major Kelly did not want to kill anyone. Petey Danielson had been enough... "I've got it!" he said, suddenly turning from the crate and crossing the musty room to the doorway where the workers stood in the sunlight and squinted curiously at him. He located one of his own men, Private Lyle Park, and spoke to him for a minute or two.
Park was a tall, angular Tennessean, all bone and gristle, with a surprisingly gentle face as fine as water-carved, sun-bleached sandstone. He nodded vigorously as Kelly talked, then turned and disappeared through the press of jabbering villagers.
"What's that cocksucking bastard up to now?" Coombs wanted to know.
"I've always sort of liked Fark," Tooley said.
"Not Fark. Kelly."
"Oh, you're right about him!" Hagendorf cried from inside the crate. He had pulled the unconscious lieutenant over him like a coverlet, and he peered up at Coombs from the hollow of Beame's right armpit. "Kelly's a bastard. He-"
"Oh, shut the fuck up," Sergeant Coombs said.
A few minutes later, Private Park pushed back through the crowd and handed something to Kelly. The major took it, nodded, came back across the room. He walked straight up to the crate, holding a small object in one hand which was pressed flat against his thigh. He looked at Hagendorf who was still peeking at the world through the curious perspective of Beame's armpit. "Last chance."
"You put me in here!" Hagendorf cried. "You did it!"
Kelly sighed. He picked up a
wine bottle, raised it, faked a swing.
Hagendorf rolled the hapless lieutenant into the blow- and unwittingly bared one of his own pale, hammy, naked thighs.
Raising the object Fark had fetched for him and which Tooley and Coombs now saw to be a hypodermic syringe from the hospital, Kelly plunged it into the surveyor's thigh just as he checked the downswing of the empty bottle and spared the unconscious Beame another wound.
Hagendorf screamed, tried to throw off Beame. He scrabbled at the sides of the box, desperate to get up. The needle broke in his flesh. It dangled from his leg, focal point of a spreading circle of blood. In seconds, Hagendorf was fast asleep.
Private Tooley shook his head admiringly. "You'd make a good pacifist. That was very clever. That puts an end to the Hagendorf crisis."
Kelly looked down at the chalky, chubby man who was half-concealed by Lieutenant Beame. "Maybe not. If Hagendorf has gone over the edge-and if he hates me as much as he seems to, maybe he deliberately did a bad surveying job for the village. Maybe he sabotaged it."
"Hagendorf wouldn't do that," Tooley said.
"Hagendorf is crazy," Kelly said, dropping the ruined syringe. It clinked when it hit the packed-earth floor. "He was driven crazy by his own sanity. Before he came into the Army, he was too sane for his own good. His sanity drove him out of his mind. He saw everything in blacks and whites. When it came time for him to test his philosophy, Hagendorf could either be wholly sane or wholly insane. He was already wholly sane. So he had to become wholly insane." He looked at Tooley and Coombs and saw that they did not understand a word of it. They were looking at him as if he were wholly insane. "Hagendorf is a crazy wino," Kelly said, simplifying it for them. "He'll do anything. I'll have to check up on the work he finished yesterday before we go on with too much more of the building."
On his way out of the shed, Kelly looked at his watch. How much time had he wasted with Hagendorf? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Too much.
Suffering from a severe headache, traces of blood still crusted in his yellow hair, Lieutenant Beame went straight from the hospital bunker to the secluded knoll in the woods where he and Nathalie had secretly planned to have lunch together. He was very circumspect about leaving the camp, and he was sure no one saw him go. He crept cautiously through the woods, took a circuitous route to the knoll through blackberry brambles and treacherous ground vines.
Natalie was waiting for him.
But so was her father.
"You are scum!" Maurice said, advancing on Beame as the lieutenant backed off the knoll and into the trees again. "My daughter will not be brought to ruin by a quick-handed soldier. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir," Beame said, backing into an oak tree. "But-"
"She will be courted openly, not behind my back. And she will not be made a fool of by some carousing GI. Need I say more?" He loomed over Beame, his big belly perfect for intimidating anyone he could back against a wall.
"Father-" Nathalie began, behind the old man.
"Do not interrupt your father," Maurice said, without turning back to her. He pushed at Beame with his belly, crushing the lieutenant against the oak.
"Sir," Beame said, "you don't seem to realize-"
"I do not wish to become violent," Maurice said. "But I can if I must." As example, he clenched his fist and thumped Beame once, on top of the head, right on the spot where the bottle had broken. "Understand?"
Through tears, Beame said, "Uh... yeah. Yes, sir."
Maurice turned away from him. "Come on, my dear," he told the girl, in French. "And in the future you must respect your father more."
Major Kelly ate lunch while riding around on the D-7 dozer with Danny Dew. He had to stand up, wedged between the open dash and the roll-bar behind Dew's chair- which was a tight fit and only crucial inches from the churning tread. That made for a messy lunch, but not merely because the dozer shimmied and bounced so much. It was messy chiefly because Kelly was eating a stewed-tomato sandwich.
"Is that a stewed-tomato sandwich?" Danny asked when Kelly climbed on the dozer, holding the oversized sandwich in one hand. Red juice and slimy seeds dripped from Kelly's fingers, ran down his wrist and under his cuff.
"Yeah," Kelly said. "Because of my hair." He bit the sandwich, and juice sprayed all over his face.
"A stewed-tomato sandwich is good for your hair?" Dew asked.
"No. It's not good for my hair. But it isn't bad, either. It's neutral. It's meat that's bad for hair growth, you see."
"Meat?" Dew asked.
"Meat. So I eat vegetable sandwiches." He took another bite. "Can we get going? I want to see the whole camp. I want to be certain that Hagendorf designed the streets the way I laid them out. I don't trust the crazy drunken bastard."
Dew started the D-7, taking his eyes from Major Kelly's disgusting repast only with the greatest effort.
They roared away from the riverbank and circled the camp on the service road that edged the forest. Clouds of dust sprayed up behind them; and because the dozer could not proceed with any real speed, the dust often caught up with them, swept past, bringing temporary blindness and laying a soft, golden-brown patina over them, a sheath which darkened Kelly and lightened Danny Dew.
Already, Danny had finished most of the work on the streets. With the dozer's monstrous blade barely scraping the surface, he had smoothed the land which Kelly had charted and which Hagendorf had staked. He had plowed off four inches of topsoil, then rolled back and forth over the streets to compact and harden the well-aerated earth which lay beneath the sod. This made the fake village's streets lower than its houses, conveyed an impression of much use, years of wear.
"Looks pretty good, doesn't it?" Danny Dew shouted above the engine noise.
"Not good enough!" Kelly shouted.
"Looks like we're going to build a village in four days, doesn't it?"
"No," Kelly said. "Never."
The major was not the least bit pleased by any of the pleasant things he saw. The streets had been marked off just as he had planned them. All that remained to be done to them was the removal of the ridges of dirt which the plow had built up on both sides of the street, and the smoothing out of the dozer's tread imprints from the hard dry earth.
Already, half the convent's foundation was up: a low stone wall that was to be the base for the enormous building. Last night, there had been no stones here, just the shallow trench in which the wall would be erected. Now, two sides of the convent's square underpinning-each a-hundred-twenty feet long-were up, and the other two sections had been started at trench bottom. Well before the Germans arrived, the convent would stand complete, looming on the north side of the bridge road, in the heart of town. Ideally, the entire convent would be of stone. But they had neither the time nor the cement to put up anything so elaborate. As is was, the mortar between the fieldstones had been poorly portioned out; and the stones had been so hastily laid that, to the professional eye, they looked like the obvious short-term hodgepodge they were. Fortunately, none of the Germans would be architects. The size of the convent, the forbidding design, would convince them that it was as real inside as out. But inside, of course, there would be nothing at all. Except the big machines.
"We sure will fox them!" Danny Dew shouted, grinning, looking a little bit like Stepin Fetchit.
"Not for a minute," Kelly said.
The dozer rumbled down the bridge road, moving slowly eastward.
Across the road from the convent, a work crew had dug sixteen postholes, filled them with concrete, and anchored one four-by-six pine beam in each pit. These thrust up in a rectangular pattern, rustic columns with nothing to support. They were joined at the ground by flanking beams to help brace them. This afternoon, perpendicular beams would be fitted at the top to support the floor of the second story. The walls would go up tomorrow, both exterior and interior, and the finishing touches could be applied even while the roof was going on. This was to be the only fully built structure in the church-oriented town, the
only one with a second level inside as well as out, the only one that might fool a carpenter or architect-for it was, if they had any say in it, where the German commander would make his temporary headquarters for the bridge crossing. It was the rectory.
Danny slowed the D-7 as they passed a group of men who were working diligently on another house, one of the many nuns' residences. All of the buildings-aside from the rectory and the church-would be built with more speed than craft on bare wooden platforms. They would have no insides at all. Walking into one would be like walking from one side of a stage setting to the other. In an exceptionally high wind, some of these hollow, flimsy structures might move around like sailing ships on water. With that disasterous prospect in mind, Major Kelly had ordered that nearly all the platform houses would be one story high, which made the village look odd but only slightly out of character.
"You think Hagendorf did it right?" Danny shouted.
"It looks that way," Kelly said. "But we haven't heard the last of Emil. He's still a troublemaker."
As they turned off the bridge road into the service road by the woods, heading back for the southern end of camp, Lieutenant Slade ran in front of them, waving his arms like a railroad signalman. Danny shifted down, braked, the tread clattering and squealing. The dozer stopped five feet in front of The Snot.
"I've seen enough for now!" Kelly shouted. "I'll get off here and see what Slade wants!"
What Slade wanted, Kelly soon discovered, was to complain. "I want to complain," he said as soon as the dozer was far enough away to make conversation possible.
"Well, well," Kelly said. He did not enjoy listening to his men's complaints, though that was one of his functions as commanding officer. He must listen, sympathize, advise... It was unfair. He had no one to whom he could deliver his complaints. This was the worst thing about the war: his helplessness. "Well, well," he repeated, wishing Slade would drop dead.
"Nobody's filled out my traitor questionnaire," Slade said. More than ever, he looked like a wicked choirboy. "You didn't even answer it. It's the worst thing that's ever happened to me." He seemed caught between rage and tears. So he just sulked.