Leets threaded the new barrel down the socket guides, and locked it. Then he closed the vent, heard the barrel snap into place. He turned the weapon over. Dirt jammed the breech. He pried the feed cover open, brushed the bigger curds out of the oily action.
“Are there any bullets?” he asked.
“Here,” someone said, handing over a bunched-up belt.
Leets fed it into the mechanism and closed the feed cover. Then he drew back the operating handle and shoved it forward.
“I’m going to do some shooting,” he said. “How about one of you guys come and feed me the belt?”
They looked at him. Finally, a kid said. “Yeah, okay. But could I shoot it a little?”
“Sure,” Leets said.
They squirmed forward until they came against the lip of a ridge. Peering ahead, Leets saw the SS barrack looming like a ship. Flashes leapt out from it. Bullets whined above.
“There’s some still in there,” a sergeant said. “They pushed us out. I don’t have enough men or firepower to get back inside.”
“Isn’t there supposed to be a lieutenant around here?” Leets asked.
“He got it.”
“Oh. Okay, I’ve got a German gun here. I’m going to shoot the place up.”
“Go ahead. Goose ’em good. Really spray ’em.”
Leets pushed the gun on its bipod out beyond him, and drew it into his shoulder. He could feel the young soldier warm next to him.
“Don’t let the belt get tangled, now,” he said.
“I won’t. But you said I could shoot.”
“You can have the goddamn thing when I’m done. Okay?”
“Hey, super,” said the kid.
The building was a black bulk against a pinker sky.
“You in there, Repp? Repp, it’s me out here. I hope you’re in there. I’ve got five hundred rounds of 7.92 mill out here and I’m hoping one of them’s for you. And what about you, Man of Oak, you bastard?”
“Who are you talking to?” the kid wanted to know.
“Nobody,” said Leets. “I’m aiming.”
He fired. Each third round was a tracer. He saw them looping out, bending ever so slightly, sinking into the building. Occasionally one would jag off something hard, and prance into the sky. It seemed a neon jamboree, a curtain of dazzle, the chains of light rattling through the dark. Cordite rose to Leets’s nose as he kept feeding twenty-round bursts into the building and as the empty shells piled, they’d sometimes topple, cascades of used brass, warm and dirty, rolling down the slope, clinking.
“Goose it again,” said the sergeant.
Leets stitched another burst into the place. He had no trouble holding the rounds into the target. He took them from one end of the building to another, chest-high. The building accepted them stoically, until at last a tracer lit it off and it began to burn. A man inside waited until he ignited before coming out and Leets fired into him, cutting him in two. The flames were quite bright by that time, and there was not much more shooting.
Shmuel lay on his belly among strangers for the whole night. Nobody paid him any attention, but nearby the parachutists established their aid station, and besides the flashes of the battle, he’d seen the wounded drifting back, ones and twos, an occasional man carried by buddies who’d drop him and always return to the fighting. There was much screaming.
With dawn, fires arose from Anlage — Shmuel knew the buildings were burning. And then in the morning, the tanks had come down the road, clanking, sheathed in dust. The wounded cheered as best they could but the vehicles which looked so potent when first he glimpsed them seemed sad and beaten-up as they rumbled by. He could imagine better saviors than this ragged caravan of smoking creatures, leaking oil, scarred. Major Outhwaithe perched behind the turret of the first one, black and grimy, like a chimney sweep.
The tanks rolled into Anlage and Shmuel lost sight of them in the pall of smoke. Then explosions, fierce as any he’d heard.
“They must be blowing ’em out of that last pillbox,” one hurt boy said to another.
Then a soldier came for him.
“Sir, Captain Leets wants you.”
“Ah,” said Shmuel, embarrassed to be so clean among the dirty bleeding soldiers.
But soon his discomfort replaced itself with a sensation of befuddlement. He found it hard to relate what he encountered to what he remembered. He was appalled at the destruction. He saw a world literally eviscerated, ruin, smoky timbers, gouged earth, bullet-riddled buildings, all the more unbelievable for the small scenes of domestic tranquillity enacted against it by surviving American soldiers, lying about in the sun, cigarettes lazy in their mouths, writing letters, reading Westerns, eating cold breakfasts.
His guide took him to a pit, where the German dead lay in rows, flies collecting busily in black clouds on them. He’d seen corpses before, but a corpse was a certain thing: first, it was Jewish, but more importantly it was very skinny, white, shrunken, its terror contained in the fact that it looked so unreal, a puppet or chunk of wood. Here, reality was inescapable: bones and brains and guts, blue-black, black-red, green-yellow, ripe and full of gore. Shmuel could think only of meat shops and the ritual slaughterers on the days before holidays — hanging slabs of beef, steamy piles of vitals, tripe white and cold. Yet in the butcher shops there was neatness, order, purpose: this was all spillage, sloppy and accidental.
“Not pretty. Even when it’s them,” said Leets, standing glumly on the brink. “These are the soldiers, the Totenkopfdivision people. All of them, or what’s left of them. Sorry. But it’s time to go looking.”
“Of course. How else?” said Shmuel.
He walked the ranks. Dead, the Germans were only their flesh: hard to hate. He felt nothing but his own discomfort at the revolting details of violent death; the odor of emptying colons and the swarming flies. It became easy after a while, walking among them. They were arrayed in their brightly vivid camouflage jackets, the pattern precise and inappropriately colorful, gay almost, brown-green dappling dun. Soon he saw an old friend.
Hello, Pipe Smoker. You’ve a hole the size of a bucket mouth at your center and you don’t look happy about it. This is how the Gentiles kilclass="underline" completely, totally. A serious business, the manufacture of death. Us, they starve, or gas, saving bullets. They tried bullets on us, but considered the practice wasteful. Their own they kill with bullets and explosives, Pipe Smoker, spend millions.
Next came the boy who’d struck him in the storeroom. You were a mean one, called me Jew-shit, kicked me. The boy lay blue and halved on the ground, legs, trunk missing. What could have done such a dreadful thing? He was surely the most mutilated. You struck me, boy, and in that instant if this scene could have been projected to you, Shmuel the Jew in an American uniform, all warm and whole, standing dumbly over only half your body, you’d have thought it a joke, a laugh. Yet there you are and here I am and by the furious way your eyes stare, I believe you know. Ah, and Schaeffer, Hauptsturmführer Schaeffer, almost untouched, certainly unmussed, did you die of fright there in your crisp and bright camouflage coat; no, there’s a tiny black hole drilled into your upper lip.
“No,” he said, after the last, “he’s not here.”
Leets nodded and then took him to the bullet-riddled hulk of barrack that had once housed Vollmerhausen’s researchers. The door was off its hinges and the roof had fallen in at one end, but Shmuel could see the bodies in the blood-soaked sheets in the cots.
“The civilians,” Shmuel said. “A shame you had to kill them.”
“It wasn’t us,” Leets said. “And it wasn’t by accident either.” He bent to the floor and came up with a handful of empty shells.
“These are all over the place in there. Nine-millimeter. MP-forty cases. The SS did it. The ultimate security. Now, one more stop. This way, please.”