“Can you remember your last shot, Michel? Do you remember when and where you last felt the recoil of your Flock in your wrist?”
I think of the bad guys in the training yard. Funny characters, short and stocky, some of them wearing large flat caps. The mothers with babies in their arms. I hear the quick, high song of the springs pulling on the iron weights, the dry hinges, the clang.
“Wasn’t that bliss?” Harry pulls his pistol out of its holster and turns it around dreamily in his hands, looking at it from all sides. “Isn’t it a magnificent thing? Look at it.” He lays the grip on the palm of his hand then wraps his fingers around it and extends his arm.
For a few seconds the Flock doesn’t move.
You could hear a pin drop.
“My last shot of significance,” Harry whispers, “was a steel bolt between the eyes of a stupid cow. ‘Bang!’” His arm swings up. He looks at me with a melancholy sneer. “Hardly a challenge… Shooting a fly out of the air would be a harder task. A test of our ability, you could say. With a bit of luck anyone could hit a stray dog or a bird. But a fly? Wouldn’t it be fantastic practice? We slide my cap over to a section with better light. Then we kneel down with our pistols at the ready, lift the cap slowly and wait until the fly has calmed down and takes off again to hover in the air. One shot each. You first.”
What happens to a fly that gets struck by a bullet in midair? A bullet that, in terms of size, is more or less of the same order of magnitude as the fly? The impact of a direct hit must be similar to that of a fly crashing into a wall with the speed of a bullet.
Since being detached here, we haven’t fired a single shot. Harry’s always been proud of that; it’s proof of our value as the ultimate deterrent, our cold-bloodedness. The organization will be sure to appreciate a remarkable achievement like that and it could very well be the deciding factor that leads to us being promoted.
Unauthorized use of ammunition is an offense of the first degree.
I rub my hands up and down over my face, tracing circles in my forehead with my fingertips. Then I tell him we can’t do it. I tell him we can’t shoot at the fly.
“Of course not,” Harry says, smiling. “You crazy? We’re not going to waste bullets on a fly.”
He struggles up onto his feet, his night has been long and intense. He collects the case with the brass rods and cleaning cloths.
What would have happened if I’d agreed?
Who would have heard anything?
We have 2,250 cartridges in stock, plus two times fifteen. Winchester, 9mm Luger (Parabellum). The cardboard of the boxes has grown velvety and slack from constant handling and opening. Soon the bottoms will tear off or give way, leaving the cartridges standing on the shelf in protest at their lack of employment, while I hold a tattered scrap of paper in my hand.
“But wouldn’t it be fantastic,” Harry says. “To take aim, pull the trigger and hit a fly?”
“Yes,” I say. “That would be a real experience.”
“Imagine the bang. In here!”
“We’d be deaf for a while…”
“Cover me.”
Harry opens the case and clicks in the safety catch of his Flock 28. I keep my arms stretched out in the direction of the entrance gate, finger on the trigger. In a flash the fifteen cartridges are in the pocket of Harry’s jacket and the stripped pistol is spread out on a cloth on his lap. Slide, barrel with chamber, recoil spring guide. The magazine tube, the feeder.
“What do we do with the fly?”
“Kill it,” says Harry.
82
Harry and I shake hands, exchange cursory New Year’s greetings and fall silent again.
We’re sitting at the entrance gate with a tin of corned beef each. We’ve saved up the last three days’ meat ration. It’s a moment we’ve keenly anticipated.
I stand up and listen at the crack. I listen for a minute, two. After about five minutes, my left leg starts to quiver. Just like last year, I can’t hear any fireworks going off, neither close by nor in the distance. I don’t hear any singing or cheering. I don’t hear any guns being fired in celebration. I don’t hear anything.
A quarter of an hour later I sit down on the stool. We stay silent, listening attentively to the world beyond the basement. Harry scoops up the meat with the teaspoon. I’ve cut mine into cubes.
At one o’clock, I stand up again. You never know.
At ten past one, Harry asks if I’m absolutely certain.
I don’t answer. I can’t be any clearer than that. He always ignores my date-keeping. Except for New Year’s Eve, or rather, New Year’s Day, a good hour after midnight.
Harry can go to sleep now but stays sitting.
He says we mustn’t fixate on the fireworks, they’re meaningless. It’s quite possible that the city is still partly populated. Fireworks have been banned for ages and they’re very hard to come by…
I lean my head back on the entrance gate.
The New Year starts with its slowest minutes.
Shortly after two Harry says that the front, if ever there was such a thing, must be quite far from the city by now. Anyone who stayed and survived would be in hiding.
After another ten minutes of despondent silence, Harry says that we can assume that the situation outside has changed. That the situation must have stabilized. That the unrest, the menace, may have passed… I feel his gaze on my face. Do I understand what he’s getting at?
I understand what he’s getting at.
I ask, “You think so?”
He nods. “I think so. Yes.”
I want to make him say it. He brought it up himself. I want us both to hear it from his mouth. I say, “We are talking about the same thing, aren’t we?”
“The guard,” Harry says.
“The guard.”
“We have to take it into account, Michel. The plan for a third guard might have been dropped a while ago… The organization is an efficient company, they’d never station a superfluous guard somewhere, even if they’ve announced it. And they don’t make those kind of announcements without a reason, I can assure you of that. But that reason can grow less compelling. That’s possible… They have to constantly assess things and weigh them up. Just like the best guards do too.”
He takes off his cap and holds it two-handed in front of his stomach as if it’s a book. He gazes into the cap for a while, staring at the dark-blue satin.
“Of course it doesn’t mean there’s no danger at all.”
Harry stands up, pulls his cap down over the top of his head, picks up his empty tin and holds out a hand for mine. “That’s why,” he says, “the organization decided not to inform us about the cancelation. Subconsciously that could give an illusion of the danger having passed. Which isn’t the case.”
I watch as Harry marches off to the crusher and disappears around the corner of Garage 34, accompanying him in my thoughts. Along with the new evaluation of our situation, which feels like a change in itself, there’s something soothing about the simple fact that his moving has ended our hours of keeping vigil at the entrance. The shrill bang of the tins flashes in two sensitive teeth on my lower right, but the sound I always associate with starving to death is less frightening this time. I hope that Harry will soon whistle, rub his stomach and tell me that no one can take that away from us now.
“Don’t forget, Michel,” he starts in the distance, “that canceling the guard does not reflect on our qualities at all. It doesn’t change our record of service either, so it can’t affect our prospects of making the elite.”
He’s right. We haven’t discredited ourselves in any way.
“What we need,” Harry says, after rejoining me at the gate, standing there with one hand on the back of the chair and the other on his hip. “What we need…”