“We’ll take you to a different valley tomorrow,” Lou said. “Maybe this will be the one where they made you dig.”
Maybe, nothing. Alevai this will be the one where they made you dig, Lou thought. The U.S. Army had been giving Birnbaum a guided tour of all the Alpine valleys in southern Germany. So far, he hadn’t found the right one. Lou hoped there was a right one. You never could tell what you’d get when you dealt with the Russians. He’d wanted to for a long time. Now that he had…
Would Captain Bokov of the NKVD sit in his Berlin office and laugh his ass off because a no-account DP was getting fat on U.S. Army chow? Had Birnbaum ever been in one of these valleys? No doubt he’d been in Auschwitz; Lou had seen too many of those tattoos to doubt that this one was authentic. But that wasn’t reason enough-the Army in its infinite wisdom had decided it wasn’t reason enough-to be especially nice to him.
If he didn’t come through…Well, what’s the worst they can do to me? Discharge me and ship me home to Jersey. Which, when you got right down to it, would be a hell of a lot more fun than what he was doing here.
But he hated getting played for a sucker. He didn’t want the NKVD to do it, and he didn’t want a no-account Jew who said he hadn’t had a square meal since 1914 to do it, either. He wanted…“Heydrich’s head on a plate,” he muttered.
“I hope I can give him to you,” Shmuel Birnbaum said. “They didn’t tell us what we were doing. They just told us to dig, and they got rid of anybody who didn’t dig fast enough to suit ’em. Then they sent the rest of us to Auschwitz, also for disposal. Just dumb luck they didn’t get around to me before the Red Army came.”
“Sure,” Lou said. Birnbaum’s story sounded good. It felt good, which might have counted for even more. Lou had heard a lot of bullshit since he got to the Continent. He didn’t think this was more of the same piled higher and deeper. But he’d never know for sure unless the DP delivered.
Birnbaum looked at him. “You don’t think I can do it.”
“I hope you can do it. I hope like anything you can,” Lou said.
“Heydrich…” Birnbaum tasted the name. “It wouldn’t be enough. There’s no such thing as enough, not for that. But it would be something, anyway. And after so much nothing, something’s not too bad.”
“Yeah.” Lou nodded. “You’re right.” He was sure what Germany would be like if Heydrich and his pals took over: the way it had been when Hitler was running it, only trying to find a place in a new, tougher, more suspicious world. That was…about as bad as things could get, as far as he was concerned.
Suppose they squashed the Heydrichites. What would Germany turn into then? Lou had no idea. That politician-Adenauer-had thought it could turn into a civilized democracy like England and France and America. Maybe. But Lou had trouble believing it. If Germany could turn into a democracy like that, wouldn’t Adenauer still be alive?
Shmuel Birnbaum stopped shoveling food into his face. “Let’s go,” he said.
It wasn’t so simple, of course. One jeep could rattle along the winding roads that slid through valleys and climbed the passes between them. It might get through. If Heydrich’s goons decided it looked harmless, or if they were off making pests of themselves somewhere else, it would. But there was no guarantee-not even close.
And in these parts, it wasn’t just Heydrich’s goons you needed to worry about. Deserters and brigands and bandits prowled the mountainside, sometimes singly, sometimes in platoon strength. You wanted to show enough firepower to make them decide not to bother you.
Three jeeps with.50-caliber machine guns, two M8 armored cars with 37mm guns. With luck, that kind of convoy would be enough to persuade Werewolves and freelance brigands to leave them alone. The heavy machine guns and the cannon outranged anything the Jerries were likely to pack themselves. All the soldiers had Garands or M2 carbines or grease guns, too.
And so did Shmuel Birnbaum. When Lou first gave him the submachine gun, he asked if Birnbaum knew how to use it. The DP gave back a lizard’s stare. “I point. I pull the trigger. If it doesn’t shoot, I fiddle with the safety till it does.”
“It doesn’t even have a safety,” Lou said.
“All right, then. So I shoot. What else do I need to know? Anything?” Birnbaum asked. For the kind of fighting he’d need to do-if he needed to do any-he didn’t need to know anything else. Lou shut up.
They rolled past a monument to American ineptitude, a burnt-out ammo dump. It had gone up in fire and smoke a couple of months earlier, and taken half a dozen GIs with it. Back home, it probably hadn’t made more than page four, except in the dead men’s home towns. Too many other things were going on in Germany-this was just small change from a guerrilla war.
Birnbaum’s gaze flicked to the sooty craters and scattered shell casings that marked the remains of the dump. “How’d they do it?” he asked.
“If I knew, I would tell you,” Lou answered. “If we’d known ahead of time, we might have stopped them.”
The DP grunted. “They need stopping. Not just for this. For everything.”
“You’re right. They do,” Lou agreed.
“Do I hear straight? Are you Americans really starting to go home from Germany?” Birnbaum asked.
“You hear straight. I wish you didn’t, but you do.”
“Meshigge,” Birnbaum said, and Lou smiled in spite of himself. The DP spoke the same funny Yiddish dialect he did himself, with most of the vowels shifted forward in the mouth. It still meant crazy, however you pronounced it.
“And if I don’t come through?” the DP asked bleakly. “What happens then? You give me a kigel?” Most people would have pronounced that kugel. It meant, literally, a noodle. To German guards, slave laborers, and camp inmates, it also meant a bullet in the back of the neck.
“No. We don’t do that. We won’t give you back to the Russians, either.” Lou sighed. “But vey iz mir, I want Heydrich dead. If anything will show the folks back home what we’re doing here is worthwhile, that’s it.”
“Me, I just want Heydrich dead, and all the rest of those….” Shmuel Birnbaum broke off, shaking his head. “I can’t find a word bad enough. Pogroms? Purges? I didn’t know what trouble was till the Nazis came though. That camp…What I saw there…” He rubbed at the place where the tattooed number he would wear the rest of his life lay under his sleeve. Whatever his eyes were looking at, it wasn’t the latest Alpine valley.
Hesitantly, Lou said, “I saw Dachau and Belsen.”
“Practice,” Birnbaum said scornfully. “The shitheads did those for practice. Once they got it figured out…Fuck. What do you know? What can you know? Don’t expect me to tell you. Like I say, there are no words.”
“What’s the old fart going on about, sir?” asked the driver, who couldn’t have been over nineteen. “Sounds nasty, whatever it is.”
Hearing English jolted Lou halfway out of helpless horror. “The murder camps the Nazis built in Poland,” he answered. “He lived through one.”
“They really did that shit?”
“They really did,” Lou said solemnly. “You would’ve come over here after the surrender, wouldn’t you?”
“Uh, yes, sir. All I wanna do is get my ass back to Dayton in one piece, too.”
“Right.” Lou couldn’t talk to the driver, any more than Birnbaum could talk to him. No reason for the kid to have visited any of the camps in Germany. He wouldn’t have seen the corpses and the shambling, diseased living skeletons. He wouldn’t have smelled what a place like that was like. And he probably wouldn’t believe there were worse places. How could you believe that, in a world where God had anything to do with anything?
And if this guy had trouble believing it over here, what about all the safe tens of millions across the Atlantic? What was Reinhard Heydrich to them but a name? What were Dachau and Belsen and Auschwitz and all the others but names? Lou shivered. If the Army did punch Heydrich’s ticket, would the folks back home decide the job was really done now and figure it was one more reason to yank the boys out of there and forget the nasty mess ever happened?