The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
“Okay, fellows,” said Fielding, calling them in.
They sat down to towel off as Fielding, to a surge of applause that grew and grew, lifting swiftly in passion as he moved out to the center of the court, stood to face the crowd, a microphone in hand. He smiled sharkishly.
“Hi, guys,” he said, voice echoing back in amplification.
“Bill, Bill, Bill,” they called, though most were too young to have remembered with clarity the three years, ’27, ’28 and ’29, when he’d dominated tennis—and the larger world—like a god.
“Fellas,” Bill allowed, “I know all this is kinda new to some of ya,” a Midwestern accent, Kansas corn belt, flattened out the great man’s Princeton voice, “but let me tell ya the truth: tennis is a game of skill, guts and endurance; it’s like war … only tougher.”
The soldiers howled in glee. Roger sat mesmerized by their pulsating animation: one mass, seething, galvanized by the star’s charisma.
“Now today, we’re going to show you how the big boys play. You’ve seen DiMage and the Splendid Splinter? Well you’re going to see the DiMage and Ted Williams of tennis.”
Fielding spoke for about ten minutes, a polished little speech in which he explained the rules, showed them the strokes as demonstrated by the blankly flawless Frank Benson, worked in a few amusing anecdotes and continually compared tennis—flatteringly—to other sports, emphasizing its demands of stamina, strength and courage, the savagery of its competition, the psychological violence between its opponents.
And then he was done.
“And now fellows,” cheer-led Fielding, “the big boys: Captain Frank Benson, Stanford, ’41, currently of the Eighth Air Force, twenty-three trips over Germany; and Technical Sergeant Five Roger Evans, Harvard, ’46, now of the United States Army, attached to the Office of Strategic Services, veteran of several behind-the-lines missions—”
Yeah, our lines though. Good thing Leets wasn’t around to hear that little fib.
“—and now,” continued Fielding, mocking another game’s traditions, “play ball!”
They’d already spun, Benson winning and electing to serve, but still he came to net and sought out Roger’s eyes as Roger had guessed he would.
“Good luck, Sergeant,” he said to Roger.
“Same to you, Chief,” said Roger.
Roger was an excellent tennis player, definite national-ranking material, and though he’d not played hard and regularly in the year he’d been in the Army, he’d worked to maintain his edge, drilling when he couldn’t find a partner, staying in shape, pursuing excellence in the limited ways available to him. But in the first seconds he knew he was seriously overmatched: it was the difference between skill and genius. Benson hit out at everything, fiery and hard: the white ball dipped violently as it neared the baseline and its spin caught up to and overpowered its velocity, pulling it down, making it come crazily off the court at him, faster than sin. Benson’s forehand especially was a killer, white smoke, but when Roger, learning that lesson fast, tried to attack the backhand, deep, Benson rammed slices by him. He felt immediately that he couldn’t stand and hit with the bastard from the backcourt and so at 1–1, after squeaking out a lucky win on his serve, which the Californian hadn’t pressed seriously, he decided to angle dinks wide to the corner—now they are called approach shots but the terminology then was “forcing shots”—and come in behind them. Catastrophe followed thereupon: he didn’t have enough punch on the ball to hold it deep and as he dashed in to net, Benson, anticipating beautifully, seemed to catch each shot as it dropped and hit some dead-run beauties that eluded Roger’s lunge to volley by a hair.
Roger stood after fifteen minutes at 3–3, only because his own serve had finally loosened and was ticking and because the toasty composition scoured the balls, fluffing them up heavy and dull, letting Rog reach two shots on big points he never would have under normal conditions, American conditions, and he put both away insolently for winners, his two best strokes of the match.
But this equilibrium could not last and no one knew it better than Roger, who sensed his confidence begin to slide away. He felt a tide of self-pity start to rise through him.
On serve, with new balls, he fell behind fast on two backhand returns that Benson blew by him like rockets. He was looking at love-30, felt his heart thundering in his ribs.
He served a fault, just long, ball sliced wickedly but just off the back line.
He glanced about, a bad sign, for it meant his concentration was evaporating. The ranks of soldiers seemed to be glaring at him. A pretty nurse looked viciously unimpressed. Fielding, on a lawn chair just behind the umpire’s seat, had a blank expression.
Roger felt the vise screwing in on the sides of his body. He could hardly breathe.
He double-faulted, going to add out, and quickly double-faulted again, down one, serve lost.
He sat on the bench during the change, toweling off, feeling sick. Humiliation lay ahead. He felt sick out there, knowing he’d quit. Dog, pig, skunk, jerk. He deserved to lose. Self-loathing raced through him like a drug, knocking the world to whirl and blur. He almost wanted to cry. Exhaustion crowded in.
Someone was near him. Roger couldn’t care less. The unfairness of it all was overwhelming. The stands, the court, the net all shimmered in his rage. But through this rage, there came a voice, low and insistent. At first he thought it was his conscience, Jiminy Cricket-style, but …
“Kid,” the voice whispered, “you don’t belong out there. I’m carrying you.”
Benson, close by, seemingly tightening his laces, was talking in a low voice, face down and hidden from the crowd.
“It ought to be done now, at love.”
Roger didn’t say anything. He stared bleakly ahead, letting the man mock him. He felt the sweat peel down his body inside his shirt. He knew it was the truth.
“But Christmas comes early this year,” Benson said.
The oblique statement, it turned out, referred to a present: the match.
Roger ran the next three games for the set, Benson holding them close, but crapping out at key points. He could hit it an inch outside the line as well as an inch inside. Then Roger ran five more into the second set until Benson, still playing the feeb, broke through, but Roger triumphed in the seventh game for the set and the match, and the noise of the crowd, their adoration, broke over him like a wave, though he knew it was a joke, a prank, that he was unworthy, and he felt curiously ashamed.
“Congratulations,” said Benson, his calm gray eyes full of malice and sarcasm. “Just stay out of California till you learn to volley”—with a most sincere, humble smile on his face—“and have fun with your new buddy.”
Eh? What could—?
Benson, eyes down, pushed his way past Fielding.
“Frankie, Frankie,” implored the old star.
Benson sat down disgustedly.
Fielding turned: his face was a mass of wrinkles beneath the lurid tan. He smiled broadly at Roger, eyes dancing, a leathery, horrible old lizard, with yellow eyes and greedy lips.
“My boy!” he said. “You did it. You did it.” He clapped an arm around Roger, squeezing so that Roger could feel each of the fingers press knowingly into the fibers of muscle under his skin, kneading, urging.
“You’ll be my champion,” said Fielding, “my star,” he whispered hoarsely into Roger’s ear.
Oh, Christ, thought Roger.
19
Shmuel led, for he was in his own territory.
There was only one way to penetrate the barbed wire and the moat that formed the perimeter, and that was through the guardhouse. This took them under a famous German slogan, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, work makes one free.
“The Germans like slogans,” Shmuel explained.
Once beyond the guardhouse, they arrived in the roll-call plaza, traversed it quickly and turned down the main camp road. On either side stood the barracks, fifteen of them, as well as additional structures such as the infirmary, the morgu
Finally, they reached their destination, the eleventh barrack on the right-hand side. In it, once near death but now much improved, was one Eisner. Shmuel had gone in alone the first day and found him. Eisner was important because Eisner was a tailor; Eisner had worked in the SS uniform workshops just beyond the prison compound. Eisner alone knew of the SS Tiger jackets; Eisner alone might help them penetrate the mysteries of the last shipment to Anlage Elf.
They went in and got the man. It was not at all pleasant. They took him from the foul-smelling barrack to an office outside the compound in one of the SS administrative buildings.
Eisner was somewhat better today. His body was beginning to hold a little weight and his gestures had lost that slow-motion vagueness. He was finding words again and was at last strong enough to talk.
However he was not much interested in Dachau, or Tiger coats, or the year 1945. He preferred Heidelberg, 1938, before Kristallnacht, where he’d had a wonderful shop and a wife and three children, all of whom had been sent Ost. East.
“That means dead, of course,” explained Shmuel.
Leets nodded. In all this he felt extremely dumb. This was their third day in the camp and he was getting a little bit more used to it. The first day had nearly wrecked him. He tried not to think about it.
Shmuel began slowly, with great patience. He had cautioned them, “It will be very difficult to earn this man’s trust. He is frightened of everything, of everyone. He does not even realize the war is nearly over.”
“Fine, go ahead,” Leets said. “He’s all we’ve got.”
Shmuel spoke Yiddish, translating after each exchange.
“Mr. Eisner, you worked on uniforms for the German soldiers, is this not right?”
The old man blinked. He looked at them stupidly. He swallowed. His eyes seemed to fall out of focus.
“He’s very frightened,” Shmuel said. The old man was trembling.
“Coats,” Shmuel said. “Coats. Garments. For the German soldiers. Coats like the color of the forest.”
“Coats?” said Eisner.
He was trembling quite visibly. Leets lit a cigarette and handed it to the old man. He took it but his eyes would not meet Leets’s.
“Mr. Eisner, can you remember, please. These coats?” Shmuel tried again.
Eisner muttered something.
“He says he’s done nothing wrong. He says he’s sorry. He says to tell the authorities he’s sorry,” Shmuel reported.
“At least he’s talking,” said Leets, for yesterday the man had simply stared at them.
“Here,” Shmuel said. He’d taken from his field jacket a patch of the SS camouflage material, out of which the coats had been made.
But Eisner just stared at it as if it came from another planet.
Leets realized how Shmuel had been like this too, in the first days. It had taken weeks before Shmuel had talked in anything beyond grunts. And Shmuel had been younger, and stronger, and probably smarter. Tougher, certainly.
It seemed to go for hours, Shmuel nudging, poking gently, the old man resisting, looking terrified the whole time.
“Look, this just isn’t getting us anywhere,” Leets said.
“I agree,” Shmuel said. “Too many strong young men in uniforms. Too many Gentiles.”
“I think he’s telling us to go for a stroll,” said Tony. “Not a bad idea, actually. Leave the two of them alone.”
“All right,” said Leets. “Sure, fine. But remember: records. It’s records we’re after. There’s got to be some paper work or something, some orders, packing manifests, I don’t know, something to—”
“I know,” said Shmuel.
Tony said he had a report to file with JAATIC, and so Leets found himself alone at Dachau. Unsure of what to do, too agitated to return to his billet in the town for sleep, he decided to head over to the warehouse and workshop complex, to the tailor’s shop. He walked through the buildings outside the prison compound; here there was no squalor. It could have been any military installation, shabby brick buildings, scruffily landscaped, mostly deserted, except for guards here and there. Litter and debris lay about.
After a bit he reached his destination. The place was off limits of course, for the liberators had seen immediately that such a spot would become a souvenir hunter’s paradise and in fact some elementary looting had occurred, but Leets had a necessary-duty pass that got him by the glum sentry standing with carbine outside the building.
It was a popular stop on the Dachau tour, a must along with the gas chambers and the crematorium and the pits of corpses and the labs where the grisly human experiments had been performed. Usually it was crowded with open-mouthed field-grade officers, reporters, VIP’s, of one sort or another, all eager for a glimpse into the abyss—somebody else’s abyss, as a matter of fact—but today the shop was empty. Leets stood silent at one end of the room, a long dim chamber lined with mirrors. Bolt on bolt of the finest gray-green material lay about and bundles of silk for flags and banners and wads of gold cord for embroidering, and reels of piping in all colors and spool on spool of gold thread. Tailor’s dummies, their postures mocking the decaying dead outdoors, were scattered about, knocked down in the first frenzy of liberation. The odor was musty—all the heavy wool absorbed the peculiar tang of dust and blood and the atmosphere was tomb-like, still.
Leets found himself troubled here. The tailor’s workshop was packed with the pomp of ideology, the quasi-religious grandeur of it all: swastika, slashing SS collar tabs, flags, vivid unit patches, the stylized Deco Nazi eagle, wings flared taut, preying, on shoulder tabs. Leets prowled edgily through this museum, trying to master its lesson, but could not. At one point he came upon a boxful of the silver death’s-head badges that went on SS caps. He jammed his hand in, feeling them heavy and shifty and cool, running out from between his fingers. They felt in fact like quarters. He looked at one closely: skull, leering theatrically, carnivorous, laughing, chilling. Yet the skull was no pure Nazi invention; it was not even German. The British 17th Lancers had worn them on their trip to the Russian guns at Balaklava, last century.
He moved on to a bench on which the tailors had abandoned their last day’s work, the sleeve bands worn on dress uniforms. These, strips of heavy black felt, had been painfully and beautifully embroidered in heavy gold thread, Gothic letters an inch high, with the names of various Nazi celebrities or more ancient Teutonic heroes; it was a German fashion to commemorate a man or a legend by naming a division after him or it: REINHARD HEYDRICH, THEODOR EICKE, FLORIAN GEYER, SS POLIZEI DIVISION, DANMARK, and so forth. The workmanship was exquisite, but by one of history’s crueler ironies, this delicate work had been performed by Jewish hands. They’d sewed for their own murderers in order to live. A few, like Eisner, actually had survived.
Leets passed to a final exhibit—a long rack on which hung five uniforms for pickup. He hoped their owners had no need of them now. But they loved uniforms, that was certain. Perhaps here was a lesson, the very core of the thing. Perhaps the uniforms were not symbolic of National Socialism, but somehow were National Socialism. Leets paused with this concept for several seconds, pursuing it; a religion of decorations and melodrama, theater, the rampant effect, the stunning. But only a surface, no depth, no meaning. There were four of the gray-green Waffen SS dress uniforms, basically Wehrmacht tunics and trousers, dolled up with a little extra flash to make them stand out. The fifth was different, jet black, the uniform of RSHA, the terror boys. It was a racy t
Yet the uniform signified only one face of it. He’d seen the other elsewhere. Another spectacle was intractably bound up with this one. Standing there alone in the dim stuffy room, the black uniform before him, he remembered.
The weather had turned cold, this three days earlier, but the gulf between then and now seemed like a geological epoch.
They were in an open Jeep. He sat in back with Shmuel, and pulled the field jacket tighter about himself. Tony was up front, and where Roger should have been, behind the wheel, another glum boy sat, borrowed from Seventh Army. They’d just bucked their way through the crowded streets of the thousand-year-old town of Dachau, quaint place, full of American vehicles and German charms, among the latter cobblestones, high-roofed stone houses, gilt metalwork, flower beds, tidy churches. Civilians stood about and American soldiers and even a few clusters of surrendered feldgraus.