“I don’t know.”
“The women’s bodies.”
“Exactly,” said the Teacher. “Yes, it has to be.”
“They knew there’d be women. In the confusion of the fight, they couldn’t possibly take time to discriminate in their targeting. It’s hard to discriminate with an MG-42 roaring through a belt at a thousand rounds a minute. So they’d have to collect the women. Why?”
She already knew the answer.
The bodies were damaged by blast and burn and bullet strike. The features were blurred or uncertain. They had to examine them carefully, scientifically.
She understood: They didn’t just know. They were looking for me.
CHAPTER 15
This isn’t right,” said Swagger.
It was somehow fraudulent. The buildings were all Ukraine mountain-style homes where wood was the prevailing element, the roofs pitched high to shed snow, the houses themselves of stoutly jointed logs, all of it festooned with expressions of the self and clan in bright ornamentation, fences separating neighbor from neighbors quite sensibly, and the yards well tended. The culture was called Hutsulian, and this was Hutsulianism at its purest. Flowers were abundant, spilling every which way out of boxes at the windows, in beds along the sidewalks, climbing up trellises, but it all looked as if it had been built last week.
“Are we in the Wisconsin Dells?” asked Reilly.
Before them stood another iron man on a marble pedestal, not as big as several others they had seen, but again in ruffled greatcoat, heroic, holding a stylized Red tommy gun above his head and waving his unseen iron men forward. It said simply “Bak,” and under that “1905–1944.”
“No,” said Swagger. “All this is recent-built. But this ain’t the Yaremche we came to see.”
“How can you tell?” asked Reilly.
“Well, we know the Germans burned the place down. So when they rebuilt it, I guess they rebuilt here much farther down the main road. The people who moved in probably weren’t the original people, who were all dead. So the new Yaremche is built for the convenience of everybody who don’t remember, not for the convenience of anybody who does. But the old Yaremche was built, what, a thousand years ago? In those days, they built the village near a river — no river here — and near the woods and the foothills, so if attacked, the villagers could get into the woods and escape or hide out, as well as see their enemy coming down the valley beforehand. So the Yaremche we’re talking about, it had to be a mile or so farther down the valley, toward the mountains.”
He squinted, looking around. “See, it ain’t just that. It’s the land itself. The valley is wide here. She had to be within five hundred yards, and the nearest crests are half a mile to a mile away.”
It was true. The town was situated on a series of valleys that ran along the River Prut, and at this spot, the valley had opened up.
“We don’t know it happened here. We don’t even know it happened, period.”
“She was a sniper. If it happened, she sniped him. Long shot, take the man down. He’s probably guarded, there’s no way she gets close enough to use a tommy gun or a grenade if he’s here. There was an atrocity here on the twenty-eighth, something set it off, there was a sniper in the area, there was an ambush, it all pretty much adds up. Except this place doesn’t add up.”
“And the fact that the Germans recovered her sniper rifle so she didn’t have one makes it even more difficult to understand.”
“I know, I know, but I can only figure out one damn thing at a time. Today I am figuring out where it happened. Maybe tomorrow I figure out where she got the rifle.”
“Okay, how about this: I will feed you stupid questions. So stupid they get you even crankier. Maybe that way, you’ll stumble on a better idea.”
“Go ahead.”
“Okay,” she said. “If it was your shot, how would you do it?”
“I’d be in trees, overlooking. I could infiltrate through forest, find a lane through the leaves, look down, read the wind, build a position against a trunk, take the shot, then exfiltrate under the same tree cover. The Krauts couldn’t get their vehicles up the slope and through the trees, and I’d be gone by the time they climbed up with dog teams to track me.”
“So it’s got to be somewhere else. Somewhere with high hills within five hundred yards, lots of forest cover.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” she said. “Follow me.”
They crossed into a souvenir shop — textiles, ceramic figures, photo albums, socks in bright patterns — and Reilly spoke to the lady behind the desk.
After a while, she said to Swagger, “You were right. It’s up the road a bit. By the bridge over the waterfall. That’s where the village was until the Germans burned it down.”
They stood on the bridge. Fifty yards farther on, the River Prut pounded down a twenty-foot drop, throwing up a mist and creating a pulsing, wet roar. White foam burst from the wet rocks, and tumult ripped across the surface of the Prut where it settled. Ukrainians, in underwear, shorts, and swimsuits, sat on the rocks, enjoying the cooling spray. On either side of this picturesque little spot, at high ground along the banks, entrepreneurs had built more touristy bric-a-brac, a mock village of wooden booths where the usual crap — the same ceramic figures, the same textiles, the same socks, the same photo albums — was hawked at competitive prices. It seemed somewhat blasphemous, as it also marked the site of a massacre, but business was business, and the Ukrainians had a hard head for what was now as opposed to what was then. How much nicer if it had been a fallow field where high ragged grass blew in the breeze, the trees nearby also animated and rustling, their leaves shimmering in the sun, maybe a nice plaque commemorating the spot. But there were plenty of those, and the real estate here was too beautiful for a somber intrusion. Just stalls selling stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff, the universal stuff. A bluff carpeted in high pines loomed in one direction, but it was really the only elevation within shooting distance, except for, a thousand yards off, a mountainside, itself covered in the pines. It was too far.
He stood, he looked up, down, sideways, front, and back. “She’d shoot from up there,” he said, pointing at the bluff. “He was down here, maybe on this bridge. The bridge would isolate him from his bodyguard. The range is no more than four hundred yards.”
He stood, he looked at the trees on the bluff for a long time. “Okay,” he said, “I’m getting something.”
“I just see trees.”
“Yeah, just trees, but — but look at the colors. Do you see?”
“Uh, green, followed by green, then more green, and finally some green. Is that it?”
“Different tones of green.”
She was silent. After a bit she said, “Yes. It’s like…”
“Go on,” said Swagger.
“What I’m seeing,” she said, “is that the green of these pines across the closest half of the bluff is somehow different. It’s almost like a line, bright one side, dull the other.”
“That’s it. What I’m seeing is that the trees on roughly half the bluff are somehow, uh, lighter. They’re not the dark forest green, they’ve got less density to the color, there’s more light, they seem almost lit up.”
“That’s it. It signifies something. Newer, older, I don’t know, closer to water, in more sun, in more shade, something like that.”
They completed the trek across the bridge, then took some wood-hewn steps down to the water’s edge and drew nearer to the Ukrainians in the water, whose children ran about eagerly, lost in games.