The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
“But it’s not so good,” he said to her now, “the goddamn thing still leaks and when it leaks, it really aches.”
“There’s still metal in there, right?”
“Real small stuff.”
“Too small for the X-rays. And they keep infecting on you. They’ve got you on penicillin, right?”
“A ton a day.”
“Nobody’ll catch the clap from you, that’s for sure.”
“Hear from Phil?”
“His ship took one of those crazy Jap kamikazes in the bridge. Fifteen guys got killed. He’s all right. He made lieutenant commander.”
“Phil’ll do fine. I know he will. He’ll come out an admiral.”
“Hear from Reed?”
“No, but I got a note from Stan Carter. He’s still in Washington. He says Reed’s a major, shooting down Japs left and right. Major! Christ, and look at me.”
“You never were the ambitious one.”
“Say, let’s go get something to eat. I need something to cheer me up. Tough one at the office. They’ve all decided I’m a crank. The jerks. So anyway, okay?”
“Jim, I don’t have time. Really. Not tonight.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure, I see. Well, listen, I just stopped by to see how you were, you know, see if you’d heard from anybody.”
“Don’t go. Did I say go?”
“No, not in so many words. But—”
“Damn you. I wish you’d make up your goddamned mind.”
“Susan,” he said.
“Oh, Leets,” she said. “What are we going to do? What in hell are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. I really have no idea.”
She stood up and began to unbutton her uniform.
Later, in the dark, he lit a cigarette.
“Listen, darling, put that cigarette out. It’s time to go,” she said.
“The Center.”
“Yes. Walk me over, all right? It’s not far.”
“Okay. You sure know how to keep yourself depressed.”
“Somebody’s got to go. From our side, I mean. I promised my father—” She turned on the light.
“I know. I know all that. But it’s such a waste of time. They don’t own the war, you know. We get part of it too, you know.”
“I’m sure there’s enough to go around,” Susan said. Naked, she walked to the dresser. She was beautiful to him. Her hips were slim and he could see her ribs. She had small, fine breasts, with just enough a sense of density to them, roundness without bulk. He felt another erection begin to swell. The center of his body warmed. He reached and turned out the light.
“No,” she said, disinterestedly. “Not now. Please. Come on.”
He turned it on again, and climbed out of bed into his GI underwear. The Jews. The fucking Jews came first.
“They’re a pain in the ass,” he said. “The Jews.”
“Their part of the war is special.”
“Special! Listen, let me tell you something. Everybody who somebody’s trying to kill is special. When I was in France getting shot at, was I ever special!”
“No, it’s different. Please, let’s not go over this again, all right? We always come back to it. Always.”
She was right. They always did. Sooner or later.
He grunted, putting on his uniform. Susan, meanwhile, stepped into a civilian dress, a shapeless, flowered thing, dowdy. It made her look forty and domestic.
“Look,” he suddenly said, tightening his tie, “I’ll tell you who’s special. Who’s really special.”
“Who? Reed?”
“No. You. Divorce Phil. Marry me. All right?”
“No,” she said, trying to get a necklace fastened. “First, you don’t mean it. You’re just a lonely boy from the Midwest in a big European city. You think you love me. You love my—well, we both know what you love. Second, I don’t love you. I love Phil Isaacson, which is why I married him, even if he is six thousand miles away on a ship and I feel guilty as hell. Third, you’re what we call a Goy. No offense. It doesn’t mean inferior, but it means different. It would make all kinds of problems. All kinds. And fourth—well, I don’t remember number four.” She smiled. “But I’m sure it’s a great one.”
“They’re all great,” he said, smiling himself. “I ask you every time. When we started you had ten reasons. Then eight. Now it’s down to four, three really, because you don’t remember the last one. I feel like I’m making some kind of progress.” He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
* * *
“Turn here?” Leets thought he remembered, even in the fog.
“Right. Good memory,” she said.
He’d been there once before and was not overwhelmed at the prospect of returning. He knew he didn’t belong.
“Funny the stuff that sticks in your mind. I remember the kid.”
“The kid?”
“The little boy. You know, the one in the picture they’ve got there.”
“Oh, yes. That’s Michael Hirsczowicz. At fifteen months. In pleasanter times. Warsaw, August, 1939. Just before it all began.”
“You’ll laugh at this. Tony called me a Jew today.”
“That’s not very funny.”
“No, I suppose it’s not. Here, right?”
“Yes.”
They turned in a dark doorway and began to climb some dim stairs.
“You don’t think of the Jews having a government in exile,” Leets said.
“It’s not a government in exile. It’s a refugee agency.”
“Everybody knows it’s political.”
“It’s powerless. How can that be political? It’s to try and keep people alive. How can that be political? It’s funded by little old ladies in Philadelphia. How can that be political?”
The sign on the door said something in that squiggly funny writing and beneath it ZIONIST RELEIF AGENCY.
“Jesus, they can’t even spell.”
“It is pitiful, isn’t it,” Susan said bitterly.
She’d been coming for months now, three, four nights a week. First it was a joke: her father had instructed her in a letter not to forget who she was, what she came from, and though she blithely said she was an American, from Baltimore, she dropped in that first time only because she recognized Yiddish on the door. But gradually, it began to get under her skin.
“What the hell do you get out of it?” Leets had wondered.
“Nothing,” she said.
Still, she kept it up, until it became almost obsessive.
But it wasn’t as if she could do any good, any real good. That was the bitter joke beneath it all, though for Leets it wasn’t a joke anymore, merely a bitterness. They were so pathetic: from the old man Fischelson on down, the girls in the office, all hysterics, scared, most of them. They needed so much help and Susan did what she could, with paper work, and telephones, small things like dealing with the landlord, making sure the place stayed heated, proof-reading the news releases, even in their fractured, East Side Yiddish-English. She knew all along that nobody was listening.
“It’s Communist, isn’t it?” he said.
“It’s Jewish. Not quite the same thing. Anyway, the man whose money started it was a rich, conservative land- and factory-owning aristocrat. A banker. What could be further from communism?”
Still, Leets had his doubts. “I don’t know,” he said.
“It’s his kid. In the hall. Josef Hirsczowicz: he’s the father. One of the richest men in Europe. That’s his child. Or was.”
“They’re dead?”
“They didn’t get out. That little boy, Jim. Think of that. The Germans killed him, because he’s Jewish.”
“They’re trying to kill a lot of little boys. They tried to kill this little boy. Religion has nothing—” but he stopped. He didn’t want to get back into it.
They reached the door at the end of the stairway.
“You’re wasting your time,” he cautioned.
“Of course I am,” she said. T
“Pictures don’t mean a thing,” he’d instructed her brutally weeks ago. “Pictures can be faked. You need a goddamned witness, someone who’s been there. That’s the only way you’ll get anybody to listen to your stuff. Listen, you’re going to get in trouble. You’re an officer in the United States Army. Now you’re hanging around with a group of—”
She’d put a finger to his lip, ending his sentence. But later she talked of it. Nobody would believe, she said. The Zionist leaders sat in the offices of great men in London, she explained with great bitterness, who’d listen earnestly, then shoo them out after a polite moment or two.
Now, standing in the outer office, about to lose her, Leets felt the beginning of a headache. The headaches always ended in rage.
Christ, what a hole! All that peeling paint and those blinky, low-watt bulbs that almost looked like candles. It smelled like a basement up here, and was always chilly, and all the other people seemed pallid and underfed and would not look at him in his uniform.
“Thanks for walking me over, Jim,” she said. “I appreciate it. I really do.” She smiled, and stepped away.
“Susan.” He grabbed her arm. “Susan, not tonight. Come on, we’ll do the town.”
“Thanks, Jim, but we had our fun.”
He didn’t mind losing her to Phil—he knew he would in the end anyway—but he hated losing her to this.
“Please,” he said.
“I can’t. I’ve got to go.”
“It’s just—”
“Just Jews, Leets,” she said. “Me too.” She smiled. “Believe it or not.”
“I believe, I believe,” he protested. But he did not believe. She was just an American girl, who’d invented her membership in this fossil race.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “But sometimes, I love you anyway.”
And she disappeared behind the door.
The next morning, in the office, Leets’s headache still banged away. He stood looking across the gray skyline.
And where was Roger? Late as usual, he came crashing in, uniform a mess.
“Had trouble finding a cab,” he said. He’d once pointed out that he was probably the only enlisted man in any army who took a cab to World War II each morning.
“Sorry,” he continued.
Leets said nothing. He stared grumpily out the window.
“Guess who I met last night? Go on. Guess, Captain.”
Leets complained instead. “Rog, you didn’t sweep up last night. This place isn’t the Savoy, but it doesn’t have to look like Hell’s Kitchen either.”
“Hemingway.”
“You could at least empty the wastebaskets once in a while.”
“Hemingway. The writer. Over from Paris, from the Ritz. Met him at a party.”
“The writer?”
“Himself. In the flesh. Big guy, mustache, steel glasses. You should have seen him pour the booze down.”
“You travel in flashy circles.”
“Only the best. I go to all the good parties. Don’t let my stripes keep me out of anything. After Bill Fielding, he’s about the most famous man in the world.”
The door flew open; Tony Outhwaithe swirled in as if the star of the play.
“Captain Leets, send this boy out to hit balls against a wall or something,” he commanded.
“Roger, out.”
Roger was off in a flash. “I’ll be at the squash club, you need me.”
Tony turned to Leets. “The news is bad. Bad for you. Rather good for me.” He smiled with great satisfaction.
“You love to top me, don’t you?” Leets said.
“Yes, but there are tops and tops, and this is a true top.”
Leets braced; was he being shipped to Burma to hunt Japs in jungles?
“Are you still banging away on that assassin matter?”
“Sort of. Not getting any—”
“Excellent. I can now prove you wrong. New data.”
“What?” Leets sat up, his heart beginning to excite a bit.
“My, interested so soon.”
“What?”
“All right. Last night I happened to run into a donnish sort from PWE. Know what that is?”
“Your Political Warfare Executive. Sort of like—”
“Yes. Anyway, it seems he can identify your phantom acronym. WVHA.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” Tony was richly satisfied. He was enjoying every minute of all this. “It has nothing to do with us. It doesn’t even concern the war. It’s not related to intelligence or espionage or the racket at all. You’re out of luck, I’m afraid.”
“What is it?” Leets demanded. Why was his heart going, why did he have so much trouble breathing?
“It’s a part of the administrative section of dear old SS. Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt Obscure, easy to miss among the more flamboyant organizations in Twelveland.”
Leets translated prosaically. “Economic and Administrative Department,” he said glumly, “that’s all. They do the payrolls. Clerks.”
“Yes. Not the sort of lads to go gunning after generals, eh?”
“No, no, suppose not.”
“They’ve got other concerns at the moment. Those clerks run one of the more interesting phenomena of the Third Reich, old bun,” Tony said, smiling brightly. “They run the concentration camps.”
5
Vollmerhausen not only knew that it wasn’t his fault the prisoner had escaped, he knew whose fault it was. It was Captain Schaeffer’s fault. The man was incompetent. Schaeffer was involved in most things that went wrong at Anlage Elf. He’d seen the type before, a real SS fanatic, sullen and stupid, a brutal, suspicious Nazi peasant. Vollmerhausen had explained this very carefully to anybody who cared to listen, though not many of them did.
Now he was going to explain it to Repp.
“If,” he began, “if Captain Schaeffer’s men had been adequately trained, had reacted quickly, had treated this whole enterprise as something other than a holiday rest camp, then the prisoner could never have escaped. Instead they blunder about like comedians in a farce, shooting at each other, screaming, turning on lights, hooting and tooting. A disaster. I thought the Waffen SS, especially the famed Totenkopfdivision, had a reputation for efficiency. Why, the most inept conscriptees—old men and youngsters—could have performed better.” He sat back smugly. He’d really told them. He’d really let them have it.
Repp sat, toying with something at his desk. He did not appear particularly impressed. He certainly could be a cold chap.
But Schaeffer, there too, rose to his own defense.
“If,” he replied, talking straight to Repp, “there had been no”—he pronounced the next words with special precision, knowing how they hurt—“machine failure, if Herr Ingenieur-Doktor had been able to get his gadget to do its job—”
Gadget?
“Slander! Slander! I will not be slandered! I will not be slandered.” He rose, red-faced, from the chair.
Repp waved him down.
“So that the Obersturmbannführer had been able to take out his targets as the mission specifications call for—”
“There was no machine failure,” screamed Vollmerhausen hysterically. He was always being slandered, lied about. He knew people called him a kike behind his back. “I deny, deny, deny. We checked the equipment until we were blue in the face. It had integrity. Integrity. Yes, problems, we work around the clock, the Waffen SS should work half so hard, problems with weight, but the machine works. Vampir works.”
“The fact remains,” insisted the young captain—some men just could not accept defeat gracefully—“the fact remains, and no Yid argument is going to change it, that Vampir displayed twenty-five targets and there were twenty-six subhumans out there.??
It was obvious. “He slipped away before, don’t you see?” said Vollmerhausen. “He slipped out on your men before. I’m told he was a Jew, an educated fellow. He must have realized something was up and in the moments—”
“He was seen leaving the field, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” Repp said quietly. “And fired upon.”
“Yes, well,” Vollmerhausen sputtered, “he’d obviously, well, it’s clear that he separated himself before and so he wasn’t within the range of the mechanism.”
“Herr Obersturmbannführer, the men swear he was standing among the corpses.”
“The main question must be,” Vollmerhausen bellowed, cork-screwing insanely out of his seat, “why wasn’t the area fenced? My people slave into the night over Vampir, yet the Waffen SS is unable to construct a simple fence to hold a Jew in.”
“All right, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” said Repp.
“A simple fence to stop a Jew who—”
Repp said, “Please.”
Vollmerhausen had several points yet to make and he’d just thought of five or six of them when Repp’s stare fell across him. Something quite frosty in it. Extraordinary. The eyes cool, almost blank. The demeanor so perfectly calm, almost unnaturally calm. Repp had an incredible talent for stillness.
“I was simply—but no matter,” Vollmerhausen said.
“Thank you,” said Repp.
Another silence. Repp was masterful with silences, and he let this one drag on for several seconds. The air in the room was dead. Vollmerhausen shifted in his chair uneasily. Repp kept it so hot in here; in the corner the stove blazed away merrily. Repp, in faded camouflages, made them wait while he took out and, with elaborate ceremony, lit one of those Russian cigarettes he smoked.
Then finally he said, “Of the Jew, I have decided to let the matter drop. He’s somewhere in the forest, dead. They are not a hearty, physical race. They have no will to survive. Doom is their natural fate, and in the forest he’ll locate his own quickly. Therefore, I’m recalling the patrols.”
“Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” said Captain Schaeffer. “Immediately.”
“Good. Now as for Vampir.” He turned to Vollmerhausen.
Vollmerhausen licked his lips. They were dry. His mouth was dry. He returned to a familiar, discomfiting litany: What am I doing here, locked up in a wild forest with SS lunatics? It was a long way from the WaPrüf 2 testing ground outside Berlin.