“That’s right.”
He admired her for not expressing any contrition. “How’s your side?” he asked.
“The bleeding’s stopped, I think.”
“Give me the map,” he said, “and try and get some sleep.”
She passed it over and leaned back in the seat, a faint smile on her lips.
Ten
The road unfolded before Gerd Breitner, an endless pool of lighted asphalt slipping under the camper’s wheels. It was the first time in many weeks that he’d felt alone, the first time since that afternoon he’d spent mourning — yes, that was the word — mourning Johanna on that fence outside Beresino. And for some reason he felt strangely at peace with the world. Happy just to be alive, perhaps, but he thought it was more than that. The boy’s face, the death grin. It had ended in that moment, he realized. The war was over for him.
He was thirty-five years old, and he’d seen a lot of men die younger. He’d loved and been loved, always had friends. He’d seen four continents. And here he was, driving down a foreign highway on a moonlit night, a lovely woman asleep beside him, two wounded comrades in the back. Who could ask for more?
He grinned and lit another cigarette. Paul would ask for more. They were so alike in some ways, yet deep down they were so different. Yin and yang, the Buddhists called it. Paul would always look back, regretting, or at least reexamining his choices, imagining that things could have been different. It might be illusion, but it gave him his strength, that crazy refusal to bow down before what others considered inevitable. Paul didn’t believe in fate, it was as simple as that. For Paul there would always be choice, and so there could never be total satisfaction — the future would always be open, uncertain.
Gerd had no regrets. Sadnesses, yes, but the good had gone with the bad. Johanna and little Paul were dead, and so were those Russians in the little village outside Vitebsk. It was funny how the two always went together in his mind, as if the one had been a punishment for the other. Perhaps it had. They’d gone mad that day with blood lust — three years ago now, though sometimes it seemed like a century, sometimes like yesterday. The war had done away with coherent time, broken it up and thrown it together. It was all part of the same madness.
He remembered the conversation with the Arab in that room in Tobruk. A sufi, that’s what the man had said he was, some kind of holy man. They’d talked for hours in broken English, but all he could remember was the one proverb: People fall in love with each other because of what time has made of them both; tribes fall in madness with a moment, because of what time has made of them. He and Johanna. Germany and the twentieth century.
Gerd thought about what the woman had told him. They should have expected the deception, or something like it. It made perfect sense, provided you didn’t mind sacrificing a U-boat full of boys and a couple of soldiers. And who would? The Russians, the British, all of them would have accepted the same logic without batting an eye. If you were prepared to kill thirty million people, what difference did a few more make?
The camper rolled on, climbing and descending ridge after ridge, swooping across fast-running streams that glittered in the moonlight, tunneling through pine forests, rumbling through one-street towns where no lights shone. It was in one of these that the front tire went flat, jerking Gerd from his reverie and slewing the vehicle across the street.
Amy woke with a start and gingerly climbed down from the cab. Gerd was already unbolting the spare tire from the chassis, letting out a long and imaginative string of German profanities. She looked up and down the street, lit only by the now-sinking moon, which threw shadows across the silver-gray surface. No lights had gone on in the houses.
“How long?” she asked.
“About twenty minutes.”
As he answered they both heard footsteps, way down the street but coming in their direction. Two people, she thought. He put a finger to his lips and gestured her back into the camper, but before she had moved more than a few paces, the footsteps stopped. They heard a door close, distant voices, saw a faint glow that indicated a light had been turned on.
“Is there any way I can help speed it up?” she asked.
“No.”
She leaned against the hood, listening for any further activity while he finished taking off the punctured tire. The glow down the street seemed to be brightening as the moon shadows lengthened, then suddenly it blazed and a door slammed and there was laughter. More doors, car doors this time, and then two headlights were shining straight at them, illuminating the whole street. The car, a convertible, rolled toward them and stopped alongside the camper, its headlights now pointing away, down the street.
“Trouble, folks?” the man sitting next to the driver asked.
“Just a flat,” Gerd replied.
“You folks from up North?”
“Yep. Just tourin’. Saved up our coupons a year for this trip.”
At that moment a flashlight beam stabbed out of the convertible’s rear seat, flooding Gerd and the camper cab with light.
“Turn that off, Jesse,” the man said. “Sorry…” he started to say, but the driver was whispering something to him, and suddenly he was out of the car, a rifle in his hand, the glint of a badge on his shirt.
“Put your hands in the air, mister,” he told Gerd. “And you, too, ma’am.”
The one called Jesse and the driver were both out of the car now, and they both had rifles too. “Cover them, Jake,” the man with the badge said, reaching into the cab and unslinging the tommy gun from its place on the back of the driver’s seat.
“Duane, the woman’s bleeding,” Jake said, excitement in his voice.
“Make sure you don’t get any on you,” the sheriff said, moving around to the camper’s rear. They heard him open the doors. “There’s a dead man in here. No, he’s breathing. Sonovabitch.”
Amy and Gerd exchanged glances. Where was the other man?
The sheriff came back. “Jesse, bring that guy in the back down to the jail. Be careful with him.” Jesse giggled, and went to do it. “Okay, you two,” the sheriff said, “walk.”
They walked, a hundreds yards or so, down to where they’d first seen the glow of light. “Blount County Sheriff’s Office, Locust Forks” it said above the door. The man called Jake opened the door, took off the “Gone Fishing” sign, and preceded them in. The sheriff brought up the rear and, still holding his gun on them, took two pairs of handcuffs from his desk drawer. He threw them to Jake.
“Behind the back,” he said, watching while the cuffs were snapped on. He lit a cigarette and sat down behind his desk. “So what have we got here?” he asked dryly. “Bonnie and Clyde?”
Amy examined the two men; it was the first chance she’d had to see their faces. The sheriff was a man in his forties, thickset with a round head and cropped blond hair. Jake was his opposite, wiry and dark with a lugubrious face.
“What’s your name, lady?” the sheriff asked her.
“Bonnie,” she said.
He didn’t smile. “Bonnie,” he repeated softly. “Yeah.”
The one called Jesse dragged Kuznetsky across the threshold and let him down, with surprising gentleness, on the wooden floor. “Duane, there’s two more machine guns in the back and some big crates with weird markings on them.”
“Is there now? Take him through to the cells and then go get the guns.”
Jesse turned to obey like an obedient dog. His face, Amy noticed, was too young for his body, much too young. There was something wrong with him.
“Maybe I’d better look at those crates,” the sheriff mused. “Watch ’em, Jake.”