He wasn’t as fast as he had been then. He’d frozen his feet in the Battle of the Bulge, and they still weren’t back to a hundred percent. Instead of short or center, he played third in the pickup game outside of Erlangen.
The town, northwest of Nuremberg, had come through the war pretty well. The way it looked to Bernie, it wasn’t big enough to plaster. Maybe it had a few more people than Albuquerque-which ran about 35,000-but that didn’t make it any threat to New York City, or even Munich.
They played on a more or less mowed meadow just outside of town. The pitcher on the other side claimed he’d spent three years in the low minors. He could throw hard, but he needed a road map and a compass to find the plate. Maybe that was why he never got to the high minors. Or maybe he was talking through his hat.
A fastball at Bernie’s ribs made him spin out of the box. “Ball four! Take your base!” the ump bawled. He was a first sergeant with a face like a clenched fist. He wasn’t much of an umpire, but nobody had the nerve to tell him so.
Tossing the bat aside, Bernie trotted down to first. “Way to go, man!” one of his teammates yelled. Bernie was just glad he hadn’t got drilled. A couple of GIs clapped. They weren’t buddies of his; maybe they had money on his team.
Along with the American soldiers were a few Germans: mostly kids out for candy or gum or C-rats or women out for whatever they could get. Fraternizing with them was against regulations, which didn’t stop it. Bernie hadn’t come down venereal, but not from lack of effort. He knew half a dozen guys who had. They hardly cared-not the way they would have while the war was on. They only wanted to go home. If they couldn’t do that, they wanted to fuck. Well, so did Bernie. Why not? Even if you caught something, pills or shots could cure you quick nowadays.
No more than three or four German men watched the game. One was an old fart in a suit, a town councillor out to see what the conquerors did in their spare time. Another was talking to a GI Bernie knew, a guy who spoke no German. Maybe the kraut had spent time in the States before the war.
“Strike!” the ump yelled. Bernie thought the pitch was high by six inches, but what could you do?
The pitcher threw over to first. Bernie dove back to the bag. You stupid asshole, he thought as he picked himself up. With my bad feet, am I gonna run on you?
“Ball!”
To Bernie, that pitch looked better than the one before. If he said so, the umpire would probably rip out his spleen.
He took a very modest lead. The pitcher stared over at him anyway. Bernie ignored the big dumb rube. There was one other German guy in the crowd. He was the same age as most of the GIs, which meant he’d likely been a soldier himself, but he wore baggy, nondescript civvies. They weren’t what made Bernie notice him as he pressed his way in among the soldiers back of third base. The guy had the worst thousand-yard stare Bernie’d ever seen, and he’d seen some lulus.
“Ball!” the ump said. And it was a ball-it sent the batter staggering away from the plate like the last one to Bernie a couple of minutes before.
Blam! Bernie flattened out before he knew he’d done it. It might be July, but he still had his combat reflexes. An explosion made him hit the dirt faster than a high hard one at his ear.
“What the fuck?” That was the first baseman, sprawled a few feet away from him. “Christ, we playin’ on a goddamn minefield?”
Bernie cautiously raised his head. He didn’t have a sidearm, let alone his M1. The war was over, dammit.
It was sure over for some of the guys who’d been watching behind third. Over permanently. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay everywhere. Half of somebody’s left leg bled ten feet in front of the low mound. Other gruesome souvenirs spattered the left side of the infield.
Screams rose from wounded American soldiers. So did cries for a medic. Bernie ran over to do what he could for the injured men. It wasn’t much. He didn’t carry wound dressings or a morphine syrette, the way he would have while the war was still cooking. By the helpless looks and muffled profanity that came from the other unhurt GIs, neither did anybody else.
Bernie crouched by a guy who was clutching at a bloody leg. “You want a tourniquet on that?” Bernie asked him. He could improvise one with a shoelace and a stick. When the hell would an ambulance show up?
“I don’t think so. I ain’t bleedin’ that bad,” the other answered. In a wondering voice, he added, “He blew himself up.”
“Huh?” Bernie said brilliantly. “Who?”
“That fuckin’ kraut. He blew himself to kingdom come. Blew half of us with him, too, the goddamn son of a bitch.”
“He didn’t step on a mine? Somebody didn’t step on a mine?”
A siren warbled, approaching from the direction of downtown Erlangen. The warble meant it was a German vehicle. Bernie wasn’t inclined to be fussy, not right now. The guy with the gash in his leg went on, “Nah, not a chance. Look at what’s left of the asshole.”
Not much was, and even less between the knees and the neck. Bernie gulped and looked away in a hurry. He’d hoped he would never see shit like that again. No such luck.
Just as the ambulance pulled up, the wounded GI yanked what looked like a tenpenny nail out of his leg. “Jesus!” he said, staring at three inches of pointed iron. “The mother didn’t just have explosives. He had his own fuckin’ shrapnel!”
“That’s nuts,” Bernie said. “Who ever heard of a kamikaze Nazi?”
“Maybe you better put somethin’ around my leg,” the other guy said. “It’s bleeding more now that I pulled that sucker out.”
“Okay.” Bernie sacrificed a leather shoelace to the tourniquet.
Three krauts hopped out of the ambulance. They stared at the carnage in disbelief. “Der Herr Jesus!” one of them blurted. Another one crossed himself. Then they got to work. Their unflustered competence made Bernie guess they’d been Wehrmacht medics up till a few weeks earlier.
One Jerry spoke some English. Unhurt and slightly wounded men followed his orders as if he were an American officer. He plainly knew what he was doing.
But when he started to pick up the remains of the fellow who’d blown himself up, the sergeant who’d been doing umpire duty pushed him away. “Leave what’s left of that bastard right where he’s at,” the noncom said.
“Warum?” the German asked, startled out of his English. He got it back a moment later: “Why?”
“On account of our guys are gonna have to try and figure out how come the shithead went kablooie,” the sergeant said. “It’s a murder, right? You don’t fuck around with the scene of a crime.” More to himself than to the guy from the ambulance, he added, “The stuff you pick up from mystery stories.”
How much of what he said did the German get? Enough so he didn’t go near what was left of the human bomb, anyhow. Bernie Cobb understood all of it. It made much more sense than he wished it did.
Lou Weissberg wanted to go back to the States. He didn’t want to examine any more mangled flesh. He didn’t want to smell the sick-sweet stench of death any more, either. (Not that you could avoid it in Germany, not in towns where the Army Air Force or the RAF had come to call…and in a lot of places the Army’d gone through, too.)
That stench was mild here, two days after the bombing with most of the dead meat taken away. Mild or not, it was there, and it made his stomach want to turn over. Toby Benton’s mouth twisted, too. “Hell of a thing-uh, sir,” the sergeant said.
“You better believe it.” Lou’s nod was jerky. “Twenty-three dead, they’re saying now. And almost twice that many wounded bad enough to need treatment.”
“Shit.” Benton’s drawl almost turned it into a two-syllable word. “Good thing the Jerries didn’t get so many of our guys for every one of theirs while the fighting was still going on. We had more people than they did-more stuff too-but not that much more.”