“Probably,” the morale officer said. “And they’ve got-how many of ’em?”
“Too many, that’s for sure,” Frank said gloomily. “Could’ve been in the woods, could’ve been inside Frankfurt somewhere, could’ve been…any place at all, near enough. Gevalt!”
“Brass’re gonna spit rivets when they see this,” Lou said.
“Now tell me one I don’t know,” his superior replied. “Half of me thinks we just ought to ditch this film, pretend we never got it.”
“Except that’d be curtains for Cunningham,” Lou said.
“Yeah.” Captain Frank sighed heavily. “But it’s curtains for him anyway, if those Nazi shitheads follow through. You think we’ll get out of Germany to keep them from shooting a hostage? Don’t make me laugh.”
Lou didn’t think so, not for a minute. But something else occurred to him. “If Bruce here is right-and I bet he is-this isn’t the only copy around. If another surfaces after we make this one disappear, we’ll spend the rest of our days in Leavenworth, making big ones into little ones.”
Frank sighed again. “Well, you ain’t wrong. I wish like hell you were. All right, already. I’ll kick it up the line. Somebody with more rank than me can figure out where we go from here.” He paused to light a cigarette and smoked half of it in short, savage puffs. “And you’re right about something else, too, goddammit.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Any which way, poor Cunningham’s fucked.”
Fraternizing remained against regulations for GIs. THAT didn’t mean as much as the brass wished it did. The Americans occupying Germany were as horny as any other young men. They had a prostrate nation at their feet. And plenty of Frauleins were cute and persuadable. Quite a few didn’t need much persuading. They figured lying down with one of the conquerors was the best way to land on their feet. More often than not, they turned out to be right.
The same held true for American reporters, only more so. The occupying authorities couldn’t give them orders against fraternizing. Some had wives back home but didn’t care. Tom Schmidt was single and thirty-two. Sometimes he felt like a kid in a candy store. Sometimes he was a lot happier than that.
His latest flame, Ilse, was small and dark and slim-skinny, if you wanted to get right down to it. There weren’t many fat Germans these days, and a lot of the ones who were fat had been Party Bonzen and weren’t to be trusted. Ilse was close to his age. She didn’t wear a ring, but a pale circlet on the third finger of her left hand said she had. Had Fritz or Karl gone to the Eastern Front and not come home? Or did he lie in or under some field in Normandy? Ilse hadn’t volunteered answers, and Tom hadn’t gone looking for them. As long as she said yes often enough, he didn’t require anything else.
She lived in a cellar. Most surviving Nurembergers did, because so much above ground was only wreckage. She had a couple of lanterns and a little coal stove that kept the place warm enough. Thanks to Tom, she had plenty of fuel for them, and plenty to cook on the little stove.
He sometimes wondered whether one person could eat that much and stay that skinny. But if she had kids, he never saw them. He never saw their clothes or toys when he came to call. Again, he didn’t push it. No, answers weren’t what he wanted from her.
There weren’t many places to take a girl for a date. No movie houses, except the ones for American soldiers. No fancy restaurants. The only public eateries open were soup kitchen-style places that served potatoes and cabbage and U.S. Army rations to keep people from starving. You could walk in the parks, if you didn’t mind bomb craters and shattered trees and a reek of death whenever the wind swung the wrong way.
Or you could get down to basics and go to bed. Tom didn’t mind. If that wasn’t a guy’s idea of heaven, he didn’t know what would be. Ilse never complained. If she had, he would have looked for someone else. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have other choices. Oh, no.
One evening, he brought her a carton of K-rations-less romantic than long-stemmed roses, maybe, but the way to a girl’s heart in occupied Germany. She received them with hugs and kisses and promises of even better things later on. Then she surprised him, saying, “And I have for you also etwas… something.” She’d learned some English in school before the war, then forgotten most of it till she turned out to need it again. Tom had about that much German. They managed.
“What is it, babe?” he asked now.
“I know not.” She gave him a small parcel wrapped in old newspapers.
He frowned. “Where’d you get it?”
“A man give it to me.” He knew what the look on his face must have said, because even by the light of two kerosene lanterns he could see her flush. Hastily, she went on, “Not that kind of man. Not a man I ever see before. He give. He say, ‘Give to the Amerikaner.’ He go.”
“Hah.” Tom wondered if he ought to open it. It was small for a bomb, but you never could tell. “What did he look like?”
“A man.” Ilse shrugged. “Not big. Not small. Like a man who go through the Krieg… the war.” That meant almost every male here from fourteen to sixty.
“Okay.” Tom wasn’t sure it was, but what else could he say? He pulled out a pocket knife to cut the string holding the parcel together, then tore the newspaper. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but a reel of movie film wasn’t it. “Huh!” He couldn’t do anything with it till he found somebody with a projector-probably somebody from the Army. “Would you recognize this guy if you saw him again?”
“What is ‘recognize’?” Ilse asked.
“Know. Uh, kennen.”
She thought. “Vielleicht. Um, it might be. Or it might not.”
He could watch the gears turning in her head. She was no dope. Who would give her something to give to an American reporter? Well, anybody might, but the best bet was one of Reinhard Heydrich’s merry men. And if you admitted to recognizing one of those bastards, you were much too likely to die before your time. No wonder she stayed cagey.
And a lot of her mind was on other things: “Shall I make for us supper?”
“Sure, babe. Go ahead,” Tom answered.
Ilse could do things with K-rats to turn Army cooks green with envy-Army cooks who didn’t just want to get the hell out of Germany and go home, that is, assuming there were any such animals. And Tom was able to show his appreciation in a way much more enjoyable than helping with the dishes (he’d done that once, but only once-having a man volunteer help with housework bewildered her).
Afterwards, sprawled over him warm and naked under the covers, Ilse said, “You will with this Kino-this film-careful be?”
“You betcha, sweetheart,” Tom assured her.
“Das ist gut.” She nodded seriously. “I do not want you to lose.”
Was that because he made a good meal ticket, or did she actually fancy him between the sheets? One more question Tom was liable to be better off not asking. Tom ran a hand along her slim curves and let it rest on her backside: almost like a boy’s but not quite. No, not quite. Let’s hear it for the difference, he thought. Aloud, he said, “Don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll be fine.”
One of the lanterns had gone out. The other was guttering low. Even in the dim red light remaining, he could read her expression: she thought she’d just heard something really and truly dumb. “Always I worry,” she said.
Tom needed a couple of days to track down a corporal whose duties included running movies to keep the GIs happy-well, happier. “Yeah, I can show you that,” the two-striper said, eyeing the reel. “What is it? Stag film?” The idea perked him up. “I can sure as hell show you that, buddy.”
And watch it yourself, too, Tom thought, amused. “I don’t know what it is. I got it in town.” He didn’t say anything about Ilse. “Run it and we’ll both find out.”