CHAPTER 18
As instrumentality,” said Dr. Groedl, “I find it uninteresting. Guns have never particularly inflamed my imagination. I suppose the meaning is that she is now unarmed, she will need to seek another rifle, and this might be used against her, is that so?”
“Yes sir,” said Captain Salid.
The senior group leader — SS was holding the Model 91 rifle with the PU sight affixed by means of a solid steel frame that held the optic tube to the axis of the bore.
“I would imagine ours are more graceful, more modern. It is my understanding that this weapon is over fifty years beyond its design, is that true?”
“Yes sir. It was adopted by them in 1891.”
“So it was already fourteen years old at the time of the RussoJapanese war,” said Groedl. “Please explain to me why we are losing to people as technologically inferior as these.”
“There are so many more of them, sir. That’s all.”
“All right, good point. We have the best machine guns in the world, and we can’t kill them fast enough even then.”
As happened so frequently, Salid was not sure if a response was required; he didn’t know the etiquette here, another function of his exoticism among the rigorously rational, cold-blooded Aryans.
“All right,” said the doctor, having lost all interest in the rifle, “data. Numbers. Please, precision in all, as I have said to you before.”
“Yes, Dr. Groedl. In the ambush, twenty-four male and eleven female bandits. Then in six villages, ten hostages apiece. The villages were those along the Yaremche road through the mountains that have trails leading up to our ambush zone. We believe there were several survivors who would naturally turn to the villages for some kind of shelter. We further believe that we arrived before any survivor and established by example a serious argument against assisting them.”
Captain Salid was nervous. He was positive his ambush had been a success, but he was afraid the escape of Die weisse Hexe would count against him, when clearly it was not his fault. It wasn’t even certain the woman was in the column, and no witnesses were alive to testify. Alas, none of the female corpses suggested unusual beauty.
The doctor of economics wrote down Salid’s figures in a little book, his concentration complete. After a bit, he turned from his desk and slid his roller-borne chair a bit to the right, turned to a calculating machine on a worktable. He bent over it, punching the keys, and finally cranked the lever, unspooling, accompanied by a drama of clackity-clacking, a long strip of paper, covered with blue figures. He tore it off and examined it closely. Data, data.
“You are like a lion who feeds off the fringes of the herd,” he said. “As long as he doesn’t take above a certain replaceable level, his attacks are fundamentally meaningless and the herd hardly notices him. At some level, instinctual I am sure, every social unit, man or animal, fears its own extinction. That is, it fears reaching a level where there are not enough surplus females to renew at a certain predictable rate that year; at that point, the tribe, the pride, the swarm, the herd, the platoon, ceases to exist conceptually. Thus it cannot cohere, thus anarchy, dissipation, abandonment, and abrogation of the natural impulse. Anomaly.”
Salid nodded.
“The smaller village, Yasinia, is of no concern,” continued Dr. Groedl. “But the other five, especially Yaremche, are of concern because they are large enough, theoretically, to harbor secret sympathizers for the bandits. Are you following me, Captain Salid?”
“Yes sir. But what I do not understand is whether you are pleased with my first operation or if you believe I have failed. I have to know what attitude to convey to my men, and I need to have a feel for what satisfies you.”
“What is ‘pleased’? Who is to say what is pleasing and what is not? How does one distinguish the threshold between that which is pleasing and that which is not? I have no idea. I prefer to deal in data. It’s pure and clean.”
“Yes,” said the captain.
“It’s all science, math. That is the scientific basis of our race purification philosophy and it is moral, therefore, because it is mathematically — that is, scientifically — based. We do what the data commands. Do you see?”
Salid did not, even if he smiled contritely, trying to make some sort of human contact with the little adding machine in a fat man’s body that sat across from him in his office at the Town Hall, beneath some rather gaudy Reich banners.
“Now,” Groedl said, “I want you to go back to your quarters and have a nice rest.”
“Sir, our quarters are not—”
“I know, I know. But that will be changed. You and your men need more space, more comfort, as an indication of your importance to the overall aims of our policy. For you, the Andrewski Palace.”
This was an aristocratic manse dating from half a dozen or so centuries ago, a vast, crenellated, walled castle built not to withstand war but to withstand envy, in its way as destructive as war. A line of Polish dukes had lived there, controlling all of South Ukraine. Some may have lived there as penniless and pathetic wards of the state after the revolution, until The Boss hauled them off to the camps during his occupation of 1939 to 1941, ending the six-hundred-year-old Andrewski line in the form of a ninety-three-pound zek. But the Russians hadn’t controlled the palace long enough to destroy its grandeur, and it remained the showplace of Stanislav.
“I know, I know,” continued Dr. Groedl, “the Andrewski Palace is currently occupied by parachutists, a specialist unit once a part of the 2nd Parachute Infantry Division, now in Normandy, called Regiment 21. It no longer exists. Its survivors are called Battlegroup Von Drehle. They have uniforms and helmets like no others. Not Waffen-SS, not even army. Rather, Luftwaffe. A thorn in my side. They’re much favored by that damned Von Bink. These fellows are out on some sort of job now, but when they return, I will order Von Bink to requarter them in a field adjacent to Fourteenth Panzergrenadier. Digging their own latrines and pitching their own tents and unspooling their own K-wire will do them some good, I think. Meanwhile, Police Battalion goes into Duke Andrewski’s house and is to enjoy the comfort it offers. They will need the rest for the days ahead.”
“That is very good news, Dr. Groedl.”
There was, it could not be denied, something rather impressive about Dr. Groedl. Max Weber called it charisma, a certain aura that all who came in contact with him felt and responded to. It was his utter seriousness, his utter belief, his uncanny gift for memorizing vast amounts of data. When he spoke, it was as if he were inviting you into an elite circle who knew vastly more than others. It was said that when he taught economics in Munich in the twenties, a young artist named Schicklgruber used to hear his lectures and leave, inspired. Later, that young man was able to reward the professor with a position of power in the government and crusade he had begun.
“Tomorrow, I am giving a dinner party in my suite at the hotel. Seven P.M. You have dress uniform?” he said to Salid.
“Of course.”
“Seven P.M., bathed, shaved, dress uniform. Meet the generals and the department heads who control what is left of German Ukraine. Impress them, they will give you everything, put you at the head of every line. Tomorrow night I will introduce you to an officer, and if you charm him, those three panzerwagens will be permanently assigned to Police Battalion, no waiting, no explanation, no competing interests in the dispatch pool. They are simply yours, with endless fuel and ammunition, so that you may operate with impunity.”