"What are they saying?" Nehru asked.
"Hush," Gandhi said absently, not from ill manners, but out of the concentration he needed to follow German at all. After a moment he resumed, "They are swearing at a black-bearded man, asking why he flagged them down."
"Why would anyone flag down German sol?" Nehru began, then stopped in abrupt dismay. The fellow who had burst into their hiding place wore a bushy black beard. "We had better get out of?" Again Nehru broke off in midsentence, this time because the oxcart driver was throwing off the coverings that concealed his two passengers.
Nehru started to get to his feet so he could try to scramble out and run. Too late?a rifle barrel that looked wide as a tunnel was shoved in his face as a German came dashing up to the cart. The big curved magazine said the gun was one of the automatic assault rifles that had wreaked such havoc among the British infantry. A burst would turn a man into bloody hash. Nehru sank back in despair.
Gandhi, less spry than his friend, had only sat up in the bottom of the cart. "Good day, gentlemen," he said to the Germans peering down at him. His tone took no notice of their weapons.
"Down." The word was in such gutturally accented Hindi that Gandhi hardly understood it, but the accompanying gesture with a rifle was unmistakable.
Face a mask of misery, Nehru got out of the cart. A German helped Gandhi descend. "Danke," he said. The soldier nodded gruffly. He pointed with the barrel of his rifle?toward the armored personnel carrier.
"My rupees!" the black-bearded man shouted.
Nehru turned on him, so quickly he almost got shot for it. "Your thirty pieces of silver, you mean," he cried.
"Ah, a British education," Gandhi murmured. No one was listening to him.
"My rupees," the man repeated. He did not understand Nehru; so often, Gandhi thought sadly, that was at the root of everything.
"You'll get them," promised the sergeant leading the German squad. Gandhi wondered if he was telling the truth. Probably so, he decided. The British had had centuries to build a network of Indian clients. Here but a matter of months, the Germans would need all they could find.
"In." The soldier with a few words of Hindi nodded to the back of the armored personnel carrier. Up close, the vehicle took on a war-battered individuality its kind had lacked when they were just big, intimidating shapes rumbling down the highway. It was bullet-scarred and patched in a couple of places, with sheets of steel crudely welded on.
Inside, the jagged lips of the bullet holes had been hammered down so they did not gouge a man's back. The carrier smelled of leather, sweat, tobacco, smokeless powder, and exhaust fumes. It was crowded, all the more so with the two Indians added to its usual contingent. The motor's roar when it started up challenged even Gandhi's equanimity.
Not, he thought with uncharacteristic bitterness, that that equanimity had done him much good.
"They are here, sir," Lasch told Model, then, at the field marshal's blank look, amplified: "Gandhi and Nehru."
Model's eyebrow came down toward his monocle. "I won't bother with Nehru. Now that we have him, take him out and give him a noodle"?army slang for a bullet in the back of the neck?"but don't waste my time over him. Gandhi, now, is interesting. Fetch him in."
"Yes, sir." The major sighed. Model smiled. Lasch did not find Gandhi interesting. Lasch would never carry a field marshal's baton, not if he lived to be ninety.
Model waved away the soldiers who escorted Gandhi into his office. Either of them could have broken the little Indian like a stick. "Have a care," Gandhi said. "If I am the desperate criminal bandit you have styled me, I may overpower you and escape."
"If you do, you will have earned it," Model retorted. "Sit, if you care to."
"Thank you." Gandhi sat. "They took Jawaharlal away. Why have you summoned me instead?"
"To talk for a while, before you join him." Model saw that Gandhi knew what he meant, and that the old man remained unafraid. Not that that would change anything, Model thought, although he respected his opponent's courage the more for his keeping it in the last extremity.
"I will talk, in the hope of persuading you to have mercy on my people. For myself I ask nothing."
Model shrugged. "I was as merciful as the circumstances of war allowed, until you began your campaign against us. Since then, I have done what I needed to restore order. When it returns, I may be milder again."
"You seem a decent man," Gandhi said, puzzlement in his voice. "How can you so callously massacre people who have done you no harm?"
"I never would have, had you not urged them to folly."
"Seeking freedom is not folly."
"It is when you cannot gain it?and you cannot. Already your people are losing their stomach for?what do you call it? Passive resistance? A silly notion. A passive resister simply ends up dead, with no chance to hit back at his foe."
That hit a nerve, Model thought. Gandhi's voice was less detached as he answered, "Satyagraha strikes the oppressor's soul, not his body. You must be without honor or conscience, to fail to feel your victim's anguish."
Nettled in turn, the field marshal snapped, "I have honor. I follow the oath of obedience I swore with the army to the F?hrer and through him to the Reich. I need consider nothing past that."
Now Gandhi's calm was gone. "But he is a madman! What has he done to the Jews of Europe?"
"Removed them," Model said matter-of-factly; Einsatzgruppe B had followed Army Group Central to Moscow and beyond. "They were capitalists or Bolsheviks, and either way enemies of the Reich. When an enemy falls into a man's hands, what else is there to do but destroy him, lest he revive to turn the tables one day?"
Gandhi had buried his face in his hands. Without looking at Model, he said, "Make him a friend."
"Even the British knew better than that, or they would not have held India as long as they did," the field marshal snorted. "They must have begun to forget, though, or your movement would have got what it deserves long ago. You first made the mistake of confusing us with them long ago, by the way." He touched a fat dossier on his desk.
"When was that?" Gandhi asked indifferently. The man was beaten now, Model thought with a touch of pride: he had succeeded where a generation of degenerate, decadent Englishmen had failed. Of course, the field marshal told himself, he had beaten the British too.
He opened the dossier, riffled through it. "Here we are," he said, nodding in satisfaction. "It was after Kristallnacht, eh, in 1938, when you urged the German Jews to play at the same game of passive resistance you were using here. Had they been fools enough to try it, we would have thanked you, you know: it would have let us bag the enemies of the Reich all the more easily."
"Yes, I made a mistake," Gandhi said. Now he was looking at the field marshal, looking at him with such fierceness that for a moment Model thought he would attack him despite advanced age and effete philosophy. But Gandhi only continued sorrowfully, "I made the mistake of thinking I faced a regime ruled by conscience, one that could at the very least be shamed into doing that which is right."
Model refused to be baited. "We do what is right for our Volk, for our Reich. We are meant to rule, and rule we do?as you see." The field marshal tapped the dossier again. "You could be sentenced to death for this earlier meddling in the affairs of the Fatherland, you know, even without these later acts of insane defiance you have caused."