The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
“They did,” Repp confirmed. “You’ve got the documents?”
“Of course. Everything. You needn’t fear. Tickets to Switzerland.”
They walked down a short hall into the bathroom. The tub stood on claws like a beast. The plaster peeled off gray walls and the plumbing smelled. Also, the mirror was flaking off and there were water spots on the ceiling.
“Not the Grand, is it?” he said.
But she seemed not to remember. “No.”
She had been ahead of him all this time and now, in the gray bathroom, she turned and faced him fully.
She searched his eyes for shock.
He kept them clear of it.
“So?” he finally said. “Do you expect me to say something?”
“My face isn’t like it was, is it?” she asked.
“No, but nothing is.”
The scar ran vividly from the inside corner of her eye down around her mouth to her chin, a red furrow of tissue.
“I’ve seen far worse in the East,” he said. “They’ll fix you up after the war. Make you pretty again. Make you prettier, I should say. You’re still quite attractive.”
“You’re trying to be kind, aren’t you?”
Yet to Repp she was still a great beauty. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Her blond hair was short now, but her body had that same suppleness and grace to it; she was thin, rather unlike the ideal Aryan woman, her hips too narrow for easy childbirth, but Repp had never been interested in children anyhow. She wore a pinstriped gray skirt and a flower-print blouse and had dark stockings on, which must have been very old, and high-heeled shoes. Her neck was long and blue veins pulsed visibly under her fair skin and her face seemed porcelain or some equally delicate thing, yet fragile though it appeared her eyes were strong and rather hard.
“I think there’s hot water,” she said. “And civilian clothes are in the bureau in the bedroom.”
“I must say, Margareta, you don’t seem terribly happy about all this.”
“I’ll go fix some supper. You must be very hungry.”
They ate in awkward silence in the dim, small kitchen, though the food she fixed was very good—eggs, black bread, cheese—and he felt much better after the bath.
“That’s the best meal I’ve had in a long time.”
“They gave me so much money. Your people. The black market is extensive here.”
“Yes, it certainly must be. So close to Switzerland.”
“Sometimes you can get pork and even beef and veal. And sausage of course.”
“Almost as if there’s no war.”
“Almost. But you always know there’s a war. Not from all the soldiers around, but because there’s no music. No real music. On the radio sometimes they play Wagner and that terrible fellow Korngold. But no Chopin, no Hindemith, no Mahler. I wonder what they have against Mahler. Of all our composers, his work sounds the most like battles. That’s what they like, isn’t it? Do you know? Why won’t they allow Mahler?”
Repp said he didn’t know. But he was glad to see her talking so animatedly, even if he didn’t know anything about music.
“I like Chopin so much,” she said.
“He’s very good,” Repp agreed.
“I should have brought my Gramophone down. Or my piano. But it was all so rushed. There was no time, even for a Gramophone. The piano, of course, was out of the question. Even I realized that.”
He said nothing.
Then she said, “Whom have you seen recently? Have you seen General Baum at all? He always made me laugh.”
“Dead, I think. In Hungary.”
“Oh. A shame. And Colonel Prince von Kühl? A delightful man.”
“Disappeared. In Russia. Dead, I suppose, perhaps taken prisoner.”
“And—but I suppose it’s useless. Most of them are dead, aren’t they?”
“Many, I suppose. The sacrifice was gigantic.”
“Sometimes I feel like a ghost. The only one left. Do you ever think about it that way?”
“No.”
“It’s so sad. All those young men. So handsome. Do you remember the celebration of the Julfest in 1938? I first saw you there. I’m sure you don’t remember. I’d just given up the piano. Anyway, the room was full of beautiful young people. We sang and danced. It was such a happy time. But of all those people, almost all are dead, aren’t they?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“But you haven’t thought of it?”
“I’ve been rather busy.”
“Yes, of course. But at that party, do you know what I sensed in you? Spirituality. You have a spiritual dimension. To be a great killer must take spirituality.”
Killer: the word struck him like a blow.
“Did you know how attractive that is? At that party, you were like a young priest, celibate and beautiful. You were very attractive. You had a special quality. Repp, Repp was different. I heard others speak of it too. Some of the women were wild for you. Did you know that?”
“One can sense such things.”
“Oh, Repp, we’re two peculiar birds, aren’t we? I always knew you’d be one of the survivors. You had that too, even way back then.”
“I prefer to think of nicer times we had.”
“Berlin, the ’42 season? When you were the hero of the hour.”
“A pleasant time.”
“I suppose you’ll want to sleep with me now.”
“Yes. Are you turning into a nun? You used to be quite eager, I recall. Dirty, even. At the restaurant on the Lutherstrasse.”
“Horcher’s. Yes. I was very evil.” She had touched him under the table, and whispered a suggestion into his ear. They had gone back to the Grand and done exactly as she had suggested. It was their first time. It was also before the terror raids had come and Berlin turned into a ruin, and her face along with it.
“It won’t be the way it was though,” she said. “I just know it won’t. I don’t know why, but I can tell that it won’t be very good. But I suppose it’s my duty.”
“It’s not your duty. It has nothing to do with duty.” Point of honor: she had to want him.
“It’s not out of pity though. You can assure me of that?”
“Of course not. I don’t need a woman. I need shelter. I need to rest. I’ve got important things ahead. But I want you. Do you see?”
“I suppose. Then, come, let’s go.”
They went up to the bedroom. Repp made love to her with great energy and after a while she began to respond. For a while it was as good as it had been. Repp did most things well, and this was no exception. He could feel her open to and accept him and his own ache surprised him, seeming to spring from outside, from far away.
Afterward, he put on some wool flannel trousers and a white shirt and some blunt-tipped brown shoes—whose? he wondered—and took his private’s uniform and equipment into the garden out back. There, working quickly, he buried it all: tunic, boots, trousers, coat, rifle even. He stood back when he was finished and looked down at the rectangle of disturbed earth under which his soldier’s identity lay. He felt quite odd. He was out of uniform for the first time since—how long? years and years, since ’36 at least, that first year in the Totenkopfverbände at Dachau.
“You should have let your hair grow. It’s cropped too closely around your ears,” she said in the kitchen, matter-of-factly, “though since you’ve the proper papers, I suppose you could look like the Führer and the Swiss wouldn’t care.”
“What time is the broadcast?”
“At six. Nearly that now. There used to be music on all the time. Now there’s only announcements.”
“There will be music again soon. Don’t worry. The Jews will put music on again.”
“Do you know, someone said there were camps out East where we murdered them. Men, women and children. That we murdered them in the millions with a kind of gas or something. Then burned the bodies. Can you imagine that?”
Repp said he couldn’t. “Though
“I hope we did it. I hope it’s true. Then we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. We’ll have done some good for the world after all.”
“But there’s always more. No matter how many they got out East, there’s always more.”
“Attention. Berlin calling. Berlin calling,” a voice crackled through the radio. Repp fiddled with the dial to bring the signal in better, but it was never clear. “The heroic people of the Greater German Reich continue in their struggle against the monstrous forces of International Jewry which threaten on all sides. The Red armies have been driven back in flight to the Baltic by Army Group North. In Hungary, our loyal SS troops stand fast. Since the death of our leader, we have cont—”
Repp turned the radio off.
“He’s gone?”
“Yes. They announced it several days back. Where were you?”
Hiding in a barn. Shooting brave men dead. Murdering them. Blowing Willi Buchner up.
“I had a hectic time reaching here.”
“But it seems to go on. The war. It seems like it’s been here forever. Even now I can’t believe it’ll be over.”
He turned the radio up again. “—in the south, Munich is an inspiration to us all, while Vienna continues to—”
“Damn them!” he shouted angrily. “The Americans walked into Munich days ago. Why don’t they tell the truth?”
“The truth is dreadful,” Margareta said.
Another day passed. Repp stayed indoors, although he did go into the garden around noon. It was beautiful out, though still a bit chilly. May buds had begun to pop and the sun was bright. But he could take no joy in it. She’d told him the neighbors were harmless sorts, a retired grocer on one side and a widow on the other, but still he worried. Maybe one of them had seen the scruffy private come hobbling down the Neugasse to the Berlin lady’s. It was the sort of possibility that bothered him the most because he had absolutely no control over it. So many of the big problems had been mastered—begin with Vampir itself, but go on to the escape in the middle of the American attack, the dangerous hundred kilometers from Anlage Elf to Konstanz across a wild zone, the final linkup here, not half a kilometer from the Swiss border. It would be a crime now to fail on a tiny coincidence, the wagging tongue of a curious neighbor.
“You are like a tiger today,” she said. “You pace about as if caged. Can’t you relax?”
“It’s very difficult,” he said.
“Then let’s go out. We can go down to the Stadtgarten. It’s very pretty. They don’t rent boats anymore but the swans are back and so are the ducks. It’s May, it’s spring.”
“My pictures were in Signal and Das Schwarze Korps and Illustrierter Beobachter. Someone might recognize me.”
“It’s unlikely.”
“I don’t care if it’s unlikely. I cannot take the chance. Stop bothering me about this, do you understand?”
“Sorry.”
He went up to the bedroom. She was right about one thing. The waiting was making him crazy. Locked up in a shabby little house on the outskirts of Konstanz, his whole world a glimpse down a street from an upper story or a stroll through a tiny garden out back, and the radio, dying Berlin squawking from its ashes.
Repp was not used to being frightened; it suddenly occurred to him that he was. In war, in battle, he was always concerned, but never particularly scared. Now, with the entire heritage of the Waffen SS on his shoulders, he knew fear. He would not let them down, but it seemed so far away, so helplessly futile. I will not let you down, he thought, I swear it. The oath began, however, I swear to you, Adolf Hitler … yet Adolf Hitler was dead. What did that mean now? Was the oath mere words? Did it die with the man to whom it was addressed?
Repp knew it did not. He knew his thinking was bad for him. Doubts, worries, something other than the will to pure action began in self-indulgent thought. A man was what he did; a man was what he obeyed.
He went instead to the dresser, yanked open the drawer and pulled out the Swiss passport, painstakingly doctored, well worn, stamped a dozen times, identifying him as Dr. Erich Peters, of German-speaking Bern, a lawyer. All fine. The difficult thing was the story.
He’d rehearsed it like an actor, trying to get the accent right, a little softer, slower. “Yes, legal business in Tuttlingen, a client’s will named his half-brother executor and to gain power of attorney we needed the half-brother’s signature. He couldn’t come to me!” This had been designed as a joke, to lessen the tension of the confrontation with a smile. “Terrible, the bombing, the devastation, just terrible.”
It should work.
He looked at himself in the mirror, searching for one Herr Doktor Peters. The dark double-breasted suit certainly would help, as would the tie and the Homburg and the briefcase. Still, a haggard, desperate man looked back at him, cheeks sunken, hardly a lawyer who’d lived fat and smooth these past seven hard years. His eyes seemed lusterless, his skin pale. Perhaps he ought to give himself color and health with Margareta’s makeup when he tried the border.
And when would that be? When?
“Repp,” she said behind him, scared.
“Yes?” He looked around.
“They’re here.” She pointed to the window. He peered out. A small open vehicle moved slowly down the street, four wary infantrymen in it.
“Damn!” he said. “We thought they’d pass this place.”
For a third time, the Americans had arrived.
23
There was no time to mourn. But Leets insisted on something. He wanted to carve the name into the trunk of a tree, or engrave it on a stone.
“So that he won’t be anonymous. So that he’ll have his name, his identity. Repp couldn’t take that from him.” For Leets believed that Repp had done the killing—not literally, of course, but at least on the metaphorical level. It was a Repp operation: at long distance, in the dark.
An American doctor less prone to melodrama had another explanation: “Just before liberation, a few trapped SS men broke into the warehouses and put on prison jerseys. They tried to mingle with the inmates. But it didn’t work. Because of the faces. That thin, gaunt KZ face. They didn’t have it; they were recognized right away, and beaten to death. And your friend—well, he’d been among us. All that American meat and potatoes. He’d filled out. They saw him in the prison compound and took him for an SS man. Who do you blame? Just one of those terrible things.”
So Leets felt his own emotions sealed up inside himself. He could not let them escape. He stared at the corpse. The head had been smashed in, the teeth broken off. Bright blood lay in the dust of the Appellplatz where he was found.
“Go with him to the pit or something, if it makes you feel better,” Tony said coldly. “Take his hand. Touch him. He’s only dead, after all, and you’ve seen the dead before.”
Leets knelt by the body, feeling a little ridiculous now. In fact he did take the hand, which felt cold and hard.
He could feel Susan accusing him once again in the dark.
He turned back to the dead Jew.
What did you expect from us? What do you people want, anyway? We had a war to win, we had to worry about the big picture. I had no idea this would happen. I had no idea. I didn’t know. I didn’t kn—
Leets felt the piece of paper in the cold hand. He pried the fingers roughly apart. Something in Hebrew had been written in pencil on a scrap. He stuffed it into his pocket.
After a while, two conscripted Germans came by for the body. Leets would have liked to have hated them, but they were elderly civilians—a banker and a baker—and the weight of the body was nearly beyond them. They were apologetic with the stretcher—it was too heavy, they were too weak, it wasn’t their fault. Leets listened to their complaints impatiently, and then gestured them to get going. After much melancholy effort they got Shmuel over to the burial ground, a pit that had been bulldozed out, and there set him down. They would not look into the wide, sha
“Go on, beat it, get the fuck outta here!” he yelled, and they ran off, terrified.
Awkwardly he got Shmuel up off the stretcher. Once he had him in his arms, he was astonished at how light he was after the groans of the pallbearers. He climbed into the pit and a cloud of lime dust swirled up over his boots, whitening them. The chemical stung his nose and eyes and he noticed most of the men around had masks on.
“Hey, Captain, you’ll want out of there. We’re shoveling ’em under now.” It was another officer, calling from the far side. An engine gunned into life. The bright blade of a bulldozer lurched into view over the pit’s edge, pushing before it a liquid tide of loose earth.
Leets laid Shmuel down. Any place in here was fine. He put him down in a long row of nearly fleshless forms.
Leets climbed out and brushed himself off and waved all clear. The dozer began to muscle the earth in and Leets watched for a second as it rolled over them.
“And that’s it? That’s all?”
He turned. Susan was standing there.
“Susan, I—it just—” and he ran out of words.
She looked at him blankly. Behind him the dozer lurched and tracked and flattened the soft earth.
“It just happened,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
She continued to stare.
“There was nothing any of us could do. I feel responsible. He’d come so far.”
In the sunlight, he could see how colorless her face had become. She looked badly in need of sleep. Her work with the dying, with the victims, must have been gruesome and dreadful; it must be eating her, for she looked ill. A fine sheen of bright sweat stood out on her upper lip.
“Everything you touch,” she said, “turns to death, doesn’t it?”