“Colonel, Father Juneau’s truth has a way of changing, depending on whether he’s talking to members of the Resistance or German soldiers.”
“Why would he lie when the truth is so easily proven?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Why would a priest lie when a lie is a sin against God and everything he professes to believe? Didn’t you ever discuss such things at your school in Berlin?”
“Those matters have nothing to do with warfare... I was taught to use guns and tanks, and to obey orders. But I learned what lies sound like, and I know Father Juneau was telling the truth.” He studied the briar pipe, then put it away in a pocket of his greatcoat. “Do you deny there’s a Jewish child here?”
“Yes, I do.”
“She’s your brother’s daughter. Was Father Juneau lying when he told me that?”
“As you said, the truth can be easily proven. Why not smash this house down and see for yourself?” She savored the reckless anger in her voice. “And if you find a Jewish child here, will it save your world and your soul to stand her up in front of a firing squad and kill her?”
“You can’t say things like that to me.” A tightness in the muscles of his throat made it difficult for him to speak. He began to pound his fist against the wall. “You can’t pretend you’re all saints and angels. Too late for that—”
The panel shattered under his blows. He hammered at the carved angel’s head and when the bolts broke free the tiny figure fell to the floor and rolled onto the hearthstone, where it rocked back and forth, its blank eyes glittering in the firelight.
Jaeger was so agitated he felt beads of sweat gathering on his forehead, prickling the backs of his hands... “Who betrayed you, fräulein? And the Americans and the Jewish child? It was the priest who wants to be safe and comfortable, with a warm fire on winter nights. Those are his eternal verities, a good meal and a bottle of wine, not the truth of God he pretends to live with. Yet you accuse me of being a monster, of lusting to execute a helpless child. I have children of my own, did you know that? Two little daughters in Dresden...” The constriction in his throat worsened; his voice was high and straining, as if the words were being squeezed past his corded neck muscles. “I’ve disobeyed my orders, fräulein. Do you think that’s easy for a soldier? I was told to destroy every member of the American gun crew on your Mont Reynard. Instead I’ve offered them honorable terms of surrender. But will they accept? Will they trust me? No, because their sergeant is a madman, too stubborn and stupid to distinguish between reality and appearance.”... Jaeger raised a booted foot and slammed it against the wall, and the boards broke and fell with a crash into the stairwell leading to the cellar. Taking a flashlight from his overcoat pocket, he snapped it on and went quickly down the narrow flight of stairs.
As he did so Denise ran to the wooden bureau on the opposite side of the room, jerked open the top drawer and lifted out the bolstered automatic. She tried to open the holster flap, but her fingers were too cold and stiff as they tugged clumsily against the leather strap locked in a metal clasp. She could hear the German in the cellar shouting something she couldn’t understand, but the wildness in his voice intensified her fear. Somehow, the strap did come free and she pulled the gun from the holster, trying to remember what the American sergeant had told her... “Move the safety lever toward the red metal dot.” She tried to do that now but the lever was jammed or broken and would not budge. When she heard him clattering up the wooden stairs, she put the gun behind her back and turned quickly to face him.
“Where is she?”
“I told you, I’m alone here.”
“That’s not what I asked you. She was here, the child was here.” He thrust a sheaf of papers in front of her and pointed at them with an accusing finger. “Look! Pictures of birds, a child’s drawings. Where is she?”
There was such bewilderment, despair, in his expression that she suddenly realized she had the power to hurt him.
“We knew you were coming back, we knew the child wasn’t safe. The American soldiers have taken her to a place she’ll be cared for.”
His reaction was not what she’d expected; she had been braced for blows or an angry, defensive outburst but instead he dropped the drawings to the floor and turned slowly from her, almost as if he had forgot her presence, and walked to the fireplace and picked up the splintered angel’s head.
The ornament was painted a glossy blue and white, the ringlets of hair blond, the innocent mouth a rosy pink. A crack showed in one of the blank eyes; in the shifting light the small figurehead seemed to be winking at him... “You must understand, fräulein, that what was done to many children, to many of the innocent—” He stopped because he couldn’t find the words. And then to his relief he realized that the crippling duality no longer seemed to be cracking his mind; he could isolate his thoughts now, examine them clearly.
“What was done,” he said, speaking carefully and precisely, “was not done by soldiers. So you see, fräulein” — Jaeger smiled at the blank but strangely intimate eyes of the angel — “your alarm for the Jewish child wasn’t necessary. No one would have harmed her. I wouldn’t have permitted it. It would have been a simple matter to arrange papers, to provide her with an escort...” Yes, he thought, a simple matter indeed to save the child as he tried to save the Americans. Still, he remembered again, with an empty feeling, someone else he had forsaken. And again he found it difficult to speak... “I came here to tell you the child would be safe. I’ve assured Father Juneau of that. And I will not violate the cease-fire and terms of surrender I gave the Americans. I am a soldier, I have daughters of my own, I’ll show you their pictures if you like...”
He turned from the fireplace, saw the slim Belgian woman was pointing a gun at him, holding it inexpertly in both hands, but his reflexes took over and he hurled the angel’s head at her face an instant before she pulled the trigger. As the blast filled the room, the bullet ricocheting from the stone chimney like a furious metallic wasp — in that finger-snap of time Jaeger struck the gun from her hand and knocked her sprawling with a backhanded slap that sounded like a second pistol shot on the cold air.
The blood on her cheek was as red as the lips of the angel head lying on the floor beside her. He picked it up and was relieved to see that it had suffered no further damage. Putting it under his arm, he knelt and collected the drawings of birds and went back down into the cellar. Someone had drawn more pictures on the white walls there — a child to judge from the wavering strokes of the crayon — birds in flight soaring over sketches of woods and lakes.
Jaeger tore up the papers with the birds on them and dropped them on the floor. He took the letter and the photographs of Rudi Geldman from inside his greatcoat and, after studying them for a moment or so, ripped them into dozens of pieces which he allowed to fall slowly and deliberately from his hands, watching them with frowning attention as they fluttered in circles and drifted at last to the floor to mingle there with the tattered scraps of childish drawings.
The stir and drift of paper kindled a memory neither welcome or unwelcome, of the death of Cornet Rilke: “Eine lachende Wasserkunst”... “a laughing fountain.” It had been Rudi’s own fantasy of death. To die saving one’s country’s flag... “The sixteen curved sabres that leap upon him, flash on flash, are a festival.”
“A laughing fountain.”
Jaeger went upstairs and knelt beside the schoolteacher. He felt for her pulse; it was slow but firm. Lifting her slight body, he carried her into a bedroom and placed her on a bed covered by the same sort of hand-knitted coverlet he remembered from his grandmother’s home in Bavaria.