by Irwin Shaw
The SS Lieutenant was very hearty. He had come over from Headquarters in a big staff car. He smoked little Cuban cigars one after another and had a bright, mechanical smile, like a beer salesman entering a rathskeller. There was also a smell of brandy about him. He sat back in the comfortable rear compartment of the car, with Christian beside him, as they sped along the beach road to the next little village, where a suspect was being detained for Christian to identify.
“You got a good look at the two men, Sergeant?” the SS Lieutenant said, nibbling at his cigar, smiling mechanically as he peered at Christian. “You could identify them easily?”
“Yes, Sir,” said Christian.
“Good.” The Lieutenant beamed at Christian. “This will be very simple. I like a simple case. Some of the others, the other investigators, grow melancholy when they are in an open-and-shut case. They like to pretend they are great detectives. They like to have everything complicated, obscure, so that they can show how brilliant they are. Not me. Oh no, not me.” He beamed warmly at Christian. “Yes or no, this is the man, this is not the man, that is the way I like it. Leave the rest of it to the intellectuals. I was a machine operator in a leather-goods factory in Regensburg before the war, I do not pretend to be profound. I have a simple philosophy for dealing with the French. I am direct with them, and I expect them to be direct with me.” He looked at his watch, “It is now three-thirty P.M. You will be back at your Company by five o’clock. I promise you. I make it fast. Yes or no. One way or another. Good-bye. Would you like a cigar?”
“No, Sir,” said Christian.
“Other officers,” said the Lieutenant, “would not sit in the back like this with a Sergeant, offering him cigars. Not me. I never forget that I worked in a leather-goods factory. That is one of the faults of the German Army. They all forget they ever were civilians or ever will be civilians again. They are all Caesars and Bismarcks. Not me. Plain, open and shut, you do business with me and I’ll do business with you.”
By the time the big car drove up to the town hall, in the basement of which the suspect was locked up, Christian had decided that the SS Lieutenant, whose name was Reichburger, was a complete idiot, and Christian would not have trusted him to conduct an investigation of a missing fountain pen.
The Lieutenant sprang out of the car and strode briskly and cheerfully into the ugly stone building, smiling his beer salesman’s smile. Christian followed him into a bare, dirty-walled room, whose only adornment, besides a clerk and three peeling café chairs, was a caricature of Winston Churchill, naked, which was tacked on a piece of cardboard and used by the local SS headquarters detachment as a dart board.
“Sit down, sit down.” The Lieutenant waved to a chair. “Might as well make yourself comfortable. After all, you must not forget, you have been recently wounded.”
“Yes, Sir.” Christian sat down. He was sorry he had told the Lieutenant he could recognize the two Frenchmen. He detested the Lieutenant and didn’t want to have anything more to do with him.
“Have you been wounded before?” The Lieutenant smiled at him fondly.
“Yes,” said Christian. “Once. Twice really. Once badly, in Africa. Then I was scratched in the head outside Paris in 1940.”
“Wounded three times.” The Lieutenant grew sober for a moment. “You are a lucky man. You will never be killed. Obviously, there is something watching over you. I do not look it, I know, but I am a fatalist. There are some men who are born to be merely wounded, others to be killed. Myself, I have not been touched so far. But I know I shall be killed before the war is over.” He shrugged and smiled widely. “I am that type. So I enjoy myself. I live with a woman who is one of the best cooks in France, and on the side, she also has two sisters.” He winked at Christian and chuckled. “The bullet will hit a well-satisfied man.”
The door opened and an SS Private brought in a man in manacles. The man was tall and weather-beaten, and he was trying very hard to show that he was not afraid. He stood at the door, his hands locked behind him, and, by an obvious effort of the muscles of his face, wrestled a trembling look of disdain to his lips.
The Lieutenant smiled fondly at him. “Well.” the Lieutenant said, in thick French, “we will not waste your time, Monsieur.” He turned to Christian. “Is this one of the men, Sergeant?”
Christian peered at the Frenchman. The Frenchman took a deep breath, and stared back at Christian, his face a dumb combination of puzzlement and controlled hatred. Christian felt a small, violent tick of anger pulling at his brain. In this face, laid bare by stupidity and courage, there was the whole history of the cunning and malice and stubbornness of the French—the mocking silence in the trains when they rode in the same compartments with you, the derisive, scarcely stifled laughter when you walked out of a café in which there were two or more of them drinking at a corner table, the 1918 scrawled arrogantly on the church wall the very first night in Paris … The man scowled at Christian, and even in the sour grimace there was a hint of dry laughter at the corners of his mouth. It would be most satisfactory, Christian thought, to knock in those raw, yellow teeth with the butt of a rifle. He thought of Behr, so reasonable and decent, who had hoped to work with people like this. Now Behr was dead and this man was still alive, grinning and triumphant.
“Yes,” Christian said. “That’s the man.”
“What?” the man said stupidly. “What? He’s crazy.”
The Lieutenant reached out with a swiftness that his rather chubby, soft body gave no evidence of possessing, and clubbed the heel of his hand across the man’s chin. “My dear friend,” the Lieutenant said, “you will speak only when spoken to.” He stood above the Frenchman, who looked more puzzled than ever, and who kept working his lips over his teeth and sucking in the little trickles of blood from the bruised mouth. “Now,” the Lieutenant said, in French, “this is established—yesterday afternoon you cut the throat of a German soldier on the beach six kilometers north of this village.”
“Please,” the Frenchman said dazedly.
“Now, it only remains to hear from you one more fact …” the Lieutenant paused. “The name of the man who was with you.”
“Please,” the man said. “I can prove I did not leave the village all afternoon.”
“Of course,” the Lieutenant said amiably, “you can prove anything, with a hundred signatures an hour. We are not interested.”
“Please,” said the Frenchman.
“We are only interested in one thing,” said the Lieutenant. “The name of the man who was with you when you got off your bicycle to murder a helpless German soldier.”
“Please,” said the Frenchman. “I do not own a bicycle.”
The Lieutenant nodded to the SS Private. The soldier tied the Frenchman into one of the chairs, not roughly.
“We are very direct,” said the Lieutenant. “I have promised the Sergeant he will get back to his Company for dinner and I intend to keep my promise. I merely promise you that if you do not tell me, you will regret it later. Now …”
“I do not even own a bicycle,” the Frenchman mumbled.
The Lieutenant went over to the desk and opened a drawer. He took out a pair of pliers and walked slowly, opening and closing the pliers, with a squeaking, homely sound, behind the chair in which the Frenchman was tied. The Lieutenant bent over briskly, and seized the Frenchman’s right hand in one of his own. Then, quite briskly, and carelessly, with a sharp, professional jerk, he pulled out the fingernail of the man’s thumb.
The scream had no connection with anything that Christian had ever heard before.
“As I told you,” the Lieutenant said, standing behind the Frenchman, “I am very direct. We have a long war to fight, and I do not believe in wasting time.”
“Please …” moaned the Frenchman.
The Lieutenant bent over again, and again there was the scream. The Lieutenant’s face was quiet and almost bored, as though he were working the machine back at the leather-goods factory in Regensburg.
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The Frenchman sagged forward against the ropes that bound him to the chair, but he was fully conscious.
“This is merely standard procedure, my friend,” the Lieutenant said, coming around in front of the Frenchman, “merely to give you some idea that we are in earnest about this matter. Now, will you kindly give me the name of your friend?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the man moaned. The sweat was streaming off his face, and all expression had left it, save the reflection of pain.
As Christian watched, he could not help feeling a little weak, a little dizzy, and the screams seemed insupportable in the small, bare room, with the cartoon of Winston Churchill, naked and porcine, adorned with feathered darts in his private sections, on the wall.
“I am going to do something you won’t believe,” the Lieutenant was saying, speaking a little louder than ordinary, as though the Frenchman’s agony had built a wall that was hard to pierce. “I told you I was a direct man, and I am going to prove it. I have no patience for slow examinations. I go from one step to another promptly. You may not believe this, as I said, when I tell you, but unless you name the man who was with you, I am going to tear out your right eye. Now, my friend, this minute, in the room, with my own hands.”
Involuntarily, the Frenchman closed his eyes, and a low, gasping sigh crackled through his dry lips.
“No,” he whispered. “It is a terrible mistake. I don’t know.” Then, with a crazy logic, “I do not even own a bicycle.”
“Sergeant,” the Lieutenant said to Christian, “there is no need for you to remain.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Christian said. His voice was not steady. He went out, closing the door carefully behind him, and leaned against the corridor wall. There was an SS Private with a rifle, standing expressionlessly near the door.
The scream, after thirty seconds, made the back of Christian’s throat ache and seemed to be heard and collected in his lungs. He closed his eyes, pressing the back of his head against the wall.
He knew that things like this happened from time to time, but it seemed impossible that it could happen here, on a sunny afternoon, in a dusty, plain room, in a small, run-down village, across the street from a grocery shop in the window of which hung loops of sausage, in a room in which a cartoon of a fat man with a bare, ruddy behind was hanging …
After a while the door opened and the Lieutenant came out. He was smiling. “It worked,” he said. “Direct. It is the best way. Stay here,” he told Christian. “I will be back very soon.” He disappeared into another room.
Christian and the other soldier leaned against the wall. The Private lit a cigarette, without offering one to Christian. He smoked, closing his eyes, as though he were trying to sleep, standing up, leaning against the cracked stone wall of the old town hall. Christian saw two soldiers come out of the room that the Lieutenant had entered, and start down the street. From behind the door against which he was leaning, Christian heard a whispering, sobbing, rising and falling, wordless praying noise.
Five minutes later, the two soldiers came into the town hall, with a small, round hatless bald man, whose eyes kept sweeping in an ecstasy of fear from side to side. The soldiers took him, holding his elbows, into the room in which the Lieutenant was waiting. A moment later one of the soldiers came out into the hall. “He wants you,” the soldier said to Christian.
Christian walked slowly down the hall and into the other room. The little fat Frenchman was sitting on the floor, his head in his hands, weeping. There was a dark puddle around him, to show that his bladder had failed him in his hour of trouble. The Lieutenant was sitting at a desk, typing a letter. There was a clerk in the room, making out a payroll, and another soldier standing easily near the window, looking out at a young mother carrying a blonde child into the épicerie.
The Lieutenant looked up as Christian entered. He nodded in the direction of the Frenchman on the floor. “Is this the other one?” he asked. Christian stared at the Frenchman, sitting in the middle of his own water on the dusty wood floor.
“Yes,” he said.
“Take him away,” the Lieutenant said.
The soldier left the window and went over to the Frenchman, who was staring dazedly up at Christian. “I have never seen him,” the man said, as the soldier grabbed his collar and pulled him limply to his feet. “As God is my judge, I have never seen this man before …”
The soldier dragged him out.
“Now,” said the Lieutenant, smiling cheerfully, “that is finished. Now … the papers will go to the Colonel in the next half hour, and it will be out of my hands. Now … do you wish to go back to your Company immediately, or would you like to stay here tonight—we have a fine sergeant’s mess—and see the execution tomorrow. It will be at six tomorrow morning. Whatever you say.”
“I would like to stay,” Christian said.
“Good,” said the Lieutenant. “Sergeant Decher is next door. Go to him and tell him I sent you and that he’s to make arrangements for you. I will see you here at five forty-five tomorrow morning.” He turned back to his letter as Christian went out the door.
The execution was in the cellar of the town hall. There was a long, damp basement, lit by two bare, bright bulbs. The floor was made out of hard-packed earth and there were two stakes knocked into it near the wall at one end. There were two shallow coffins, made out of unpainted wood, that gleamed rawly in the harsh light, lying behind the stakes. The cellar was used as a prison, too, and other condemned men had written their final words to the living world in chalk and charcoal on the sweating walls.
“There is no God,” Christian read, standing behind the six soldiers who were to do the shooting, and “Merde, Merde, Merde,” and, “My name is Jacques. My father’s name was Raoul. My mother’s name was Clarisse. My sister’s name was Simone. My uncle’s name was Etienne. My son’s name was …” The man had never finished that.
The two condemned men shuffled in, each between two soldiers. They moved as though their legs had not been used for a long time. When he saw the stakes, the smaller man made a low, whimpering sound, but the man with one eye, although he could not make the proper movements with his legs, tried to remember how to pull the muscles of his jaw to fashion an expression of scorn. He was almost successful, Christian noticed, as the soldiers quickly tied him to the stake.
The Sergeant in command of the squad gave the first order. His voice sounded strange, too parade-like and official for the shabby cellar.
“Never,” the one-eyed man shouted from behind his bandage, “you will never …”
But the volley cut him short. The shots cut the small man’s cords and he toppled forward. The Sergeant ran up hurriedly and put the coup de grâce in, first to the small man’s head, then to the other man’s. The smell of the powder for a moment obscured the other, damp, corrupt smells of the cellar.
The Lieutenant nodded to Christian. Christian followed him upstairs and out into the foggy gray light, his ears still ringing from the rifles.
The Lieutenant smiled faintly. “How did you like it?” he asked.
“All right,” said Christian, evenly. “I didn’t mind it.”
“Excellent,” said the Lieutenant. “Have you had your breakfast?”
“No.”
“Come along with me,” the Lieutenant said. “I have breakfast waiting. It’s only five doors up.”
They walked side by side, their footsteps muffled in the pearly fog off the ocean.
“The first one,” the Lieutenant said, “the one with one eye, he didn’t like the German Army at all, did he?”
“No, Sir,” said Christian.
“We’re well rid of him.”
“Yes, Sir.”
The Lieutenant stopped and faced Christian, smiling a little. “They weren’t the men at all, were they?” he said.
Christian hesitated, but only for a moment. “Frankly, Sir,” he said, “I am not sure.”
The Lieutenant smiled more broadly. “You’re an int
elligent man,” he said lightly. “The effect is the same. It proves to them that we are serious.” He patted Christian on the shoulder. “Go around to the kitchen and tell Renée I told you she’s to feed you well, the same breakfast she brings me. You speak French well enough for that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Sir,” Christian said.
“Good.” The Lieutenant gave Christian’s shoulder a final pat and went in through the large solid door in the gray house with the geranium pots at the windows and in the garden in front. Christian went around to the back door. He had a large breakfast, with eggs and sausage and real cream.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SMOKE from crashed and burned gliders stained the wet dawn sky to the east. There was small-arms fire all around the compass and more planes kept coming over, and more gliders, and everyone fired at them with all types of weapons, anti-aircraft cannon, machine guns, rifles, and Christian thought he remembered seeing Captain Penschwitz standing on a fence firing with a pistol at a glider that crashed right in front of the Company in a poplar tree and broke into flames, with men screaming in it, and leaping in veils of flame through the canvas sides to the ground.
It was very confusing, with everyone shooting at everyone else. It had been going on now for four hours, and Penschwitz had panicked and had marched the Company down a road toward the coast for three kilometers, where they had been fired upon, and had lost eight men, then marched the Company back, with men being picked off in the dark and straggling away into farmhouses. Then, at around seven in the morning, Penschwitz had been shot by a nervous sentry at an anti-aircraft battery, and the Company had melted away, until, in a momentary lull, behind the wall of a huge old Norman stone barn, among a herd of fat black and white cows who stared suspiciously at them, Christian counted the men around him and saw that there were only twelve left, and that there were no officers at all.