In War Times (18 page)

“She says—”

“If DNA does exist, and if it can be changed, and if it can be changed by her device, and if we can figure out exactly what needs to be changed—just the implications of DNA are staggering, never mind all the other stuff—I guess that’s all just great. Unfortunately, our interpretation is a mess—”

“But it did
something
,” said Wink, in his best come-on-let’s-go voice. “The British looked for it, remember? It does emit some kind of signal. Or did, for a while. That’s a start, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“We’ve just got to keep trying. We have to make another one.”

Sam laughed softly. “She’s got you hooked, doesn’t she?”

“You need to understand a problem before you can solve it. So—why take you over there?”

“It was a deal. She wanted British Intelligence to provide her with the necessary forged papers and transportation, and was willing to take the risk that she might be caught. I was too; it was voluntary. They gave me a choice. She was searching for her daughter in these camps. And she found her. The deal was that they would help her if she would take a witness they could debrief.”

“Which was you.”

“Which was me. I didn’t find out anything specific from her about the device, anything we can use. She said she had nothing new, that the microfilm was still the latest version.” Sam fell silent.

“You’re tired.” Wink clapped him on the back. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

I
T WAS JUNE 6, 1944
. The sky over England was dark with planes and had been for twenty-four hours. Artillery Hill, where Sam and Wink stood during a brief break, itself rumbled, the very deep ground of it, with the steady, droning roar. “Where are they all coming from?” marveled Wink.

Sam had been an integral part of Overlord. All these planes, DUKS—ungainly-looking boats-on-wheels—mortars, and guns had passed through ordnance, assembled by them and those beneath them. Nevertheless, it was a wonder to see such concentrated power as the entire American force was mobilized and moved toward the coast.

They worked round the clock once the invasion began. Red Cross ships brought back horribly injured men, landing craft came back full of bullet holes, and planes ripped by big guns limped home.

The German defense of Normandy was more vigorous than expected. German Tigers were superior to Shermans; German equipment in general was better.

The war continued. But the Allies were, at last, on the continent.

The V-l attacks started soon thereafter.

After ten weeks of bitter and costly fighting, Paris was taken. The Germans pulled back and sent forces east. The flow of new ordnance being sent over the Channel ceased; instead, it was sent directly to the front. While troops celebrated in Paris, and despite Allied defeats, the generals decided that the war would end in December.

But there was no dancing in London.

The doodlebugs, essentially drone airplanes, could be intercepted by a plane flying close and creating turbulence, which caused the drones to crash. But that was risky. Still, the RAF were sent in great numbers to do just that.

“Where are we going?” Sam had to shout to make himself heard over the roar of the jeep he had borrowed, after repeated requests from Elsinore that he find one, as well as petrol. While that was a small enough task for him, he was beginning to regret letting her drive it. But he loved just being with her. She was always so strongly present, and he missed her terribly when he was not able to see her for a few days.

She barreled down tiny dark lanes as if by touch. Even though the three-quarters moon was out, they were in pure darkness once they were enclosed beneath a canopy of trees.

“Slow down! We might hit a cow.”

She wrenched the steering wheel left, and he braced for the smash into the hedgerow. But miraculously branches just slapped the windshield and they bounced down a way which could not have been more than a cowpath through the forest.

Then they were in a field. Dark buildings loomed ahead. He heard the roar of an airplane engine. She pulled round to the side of a hangar and stopped with a jerk. “I hope I’m not too late.”

Elsinore swung herself out of the jeep, combed her long, snarled hair in vain with one hand, and patted the pocket of her slacks. “Damn, forgot my lipstick.”

Sam sensed someone behind them and turned, braced for a fight.

But the man’s face bore a glad smile. “You came!”

A flyboy grabbed her round the shoulders, and Elsinore was enveloped in a crushing hug and what looked like an equally crushing kiss. “I told you I would.”

“Who’s this?”

“My friend. Sam Dance. Sam, meet Will Mitland.”

“Pleased to meet you. Yank, are you?”

“Oversexed, overpaid, and over here. And after that ride, glad to still be here.”

“She drives like a maniac.”

“Like a man, you mean,” Elsinore said.

“Oh, nothing at all like a man,” said Mitland. They kissed again, this time more passionately, and Sam was thrown into a dark funk.

He was sure they did not hear him as he said, “I’ll be at the hangar.”

Walking toward the huge metal building, he hoped he wouldn’t be taken for a German spy. But other than a terse nod or a “Yank,” he was ignored.

Inside, crews crawled over the Spitfires, fueling up, testing engines, replacing spark plugs. The men were covered with oil and their faces were utterly serious.

The signal to scramble sounded.

Within minutes, the planes were in the air and engaged.

Suddenly Elsinore was beside him, gripping his arm with both hands, as they stood in a field in England and watched the warriors play out their roles. The night sky was illuminated by sudden fires that plummeted like falling meteors, explosions, and the far-away, almost imagined
aack-aack
of machine guns. It was a low, close fight as the RAF tried to wipe out the Messerschmitts guarding the heavy German bomber on its way to London so they could take it down.

As soon as the battle commenced, four meat wagons sped off down dark lanes to search out the fallen.

Will Mitland was brought back, less than an hour after he had left, retrieved from his burning plane, dead.

Elsinore, fighting her way through medical personnel at the ambulance, would not stop screaming. She was pulled away and handed to Sam.

Sam settled her in the jeep as best he could, after she scrambled out twice. He took the wheel. Bereft, now, of even the light of the moon, he turned on his slit headlights and retraced their route through ancient fields and battlegrounds.

They traversed the Salisbury Plain, where soldiers had massed for centuries, for confrontations and for training. He imagined that he could feel their combined being; all their hopes and wishes and love of family and home set against the vast and unknown darkness through which they crawled; Sam’s speed, unlike Elsinore’s, was limited by what he could actually see with his slitted headlights.

Elsinore beat on the dash of the jeep, sobbing, beyond touch or comfort, her curses rich and strange to him, drawn from deep times and handed down to her, curses of god and of men and of governments and of Germans. All he could think of was getting her home to the manor, home to her children, home to an absence as desolating as that which had informed him since December 7, when his world changed as well.

Sam pulled up in front of the mansion; he jerked the jeep to a stop with the hand brake and jumped out. When he tried to help Elsinore up from the jeep seat, she threw off his arms and got out by herself, very slowly. Then she just stood there, looking around at the moonlit night as if she would never move.

Finally he gently took her arm and led her up the broad stairs and through the wide front door, then toward the exceedingly wide staircase, which had accommodated two horses side by side during a long-ago war, according to Mrs. Applewhist. A crowd of silent children accompanied them.

Elsinore collapsed at the foot of the stairs, moaning “bloody Germans, bloody Germans.” Sam gathered her awkwardly, glad that she was small and light, and this time she did not resist. He trudged upstairs. Charlie watched from the upstairs railing.

“Is she drunk?” he asked.

“No,” said Sam. “A friend of hers just died. Which room is hers?”

More children gathered. They helped pull off her shoes and get her into bed. Mrs. Applewhist stood in the doorway. “What is it?”

“It’s Will,” said Sam.

Some of the children began to cry. Apparently they knew Will.

“Hush now,” said Mrs. Applewhist. “Let’s get the dishes finished. Sarah, you will read a story to the littles. Go on now. Out with you. Elsinore needs to rest.”

At the sound of Mrs. Applewhist’s voice, Elsinore opened her eyes, turned facedown on the bed, and sobbed. The older woman sat next to her, embraced her wordlessly, and smoothed her hair. Elsinore curled up tightly.

“We’ll make do now, Mr. Dance,” said Mrs. Applewhist, with a sigh. “I suppose we must.”

Sam took the jeep and drove back to the base, himself seized with Elsinore’s shivering, wanting, like her, to scream.

But not for Will. For Keenan.

He went to the workshop and threw himself into soldering a damaged M-9 component that had come back today, wishing that there was something, anything, that he could do to work on Hadntz’s Device. The hiss of the blue flame soothed him, but the world around him seemed suddenly darker than ever.

In the following weeks, he gave all his free time to Elsinore, because she seemed to depend on his presence. Mrs. Applewhist reported sleepwalking and fits of hysterical laughing and crying, which his visits seemed to temper somewhat. He read Chinese poetry to her from the book he’d taken from the warehouse, the one that Howie had not claimed, saying that it really had no value, while she sat pensive in a chair next to the fire, and she said that the sound of his voice soothed her. They developed small rituals of tea and weeding the newly sprouted garden, and she did not talk much.

For the time being, he was simply thankful that he could help. Helping her helped him as well, he discovered. His darkness and his feelings of helplessness in the face of evil lifted so gradually he did not realize that it was happening.

Then her mood changed, suddenly. She wanted to get out; had to go to the Hart and Hind every evening. “Good to be among people,” she said, taking his hand as they walked down the road at dusk. “I like a crowd.” Sam learned to brace himself for the downward drunken spiral into which she was more and more prone to fling herself. Laughing all the way. Mrs. Applewhist disapproved, and Sam was worried, but Mrs. Applewhist, after a few long talks with Elsinore, said, “There’s nothing we can do about it. I’m sure that she’ll get better eventually.”

“Maybe she should go to a doctor?” he asked.

“Oh, then maybe we all should,” said Mrs. Applewhist, fine British sarcasm ringing in her voice. “This war is making everyone half-mad.”

On this particular evening, after two ales, Elsinore became quite animated.

“I have a hard time persuading the children to carry their masks with them everywhere.” Elsinore picked her own off the table and examined it. “It does make one look so like an insect.” She donned hers quickly and turned herself into one, goggle-eyed and insect-snouted, eyes glassed-in ciphers, and rotated her head like a praying mantis, a slow, grave swivel. “What’s in this thing, anyhow?”

“A charcoal filter. Takes the chlorine and various other poisons out of the air you breathe.”

“But I hear they have worse. Wonder why they don’t use it. Mow down an entire choking, gagging city. Pump it into the underground.”

“Poison gas was outlawed after the Great War.”

Her laugh a hearty, ironic, “O-HO!” which filled the bar, then trickled away as if it were brilliant sunlit water vanishing over a precipice in a waterfall. “Indeed. Why then, let’s just outlaw the lot of this, say? Bombs and buzz bombs and rockets. Anything the sole purpose of which is to murder.” She raised a glass. “I’ll drink to that!”

They clinked.

He said, “Gasses disperse quickly. They’re subject to things difficult to control, like wind.”

“But, then, poison our water. And we can poison theirs,” she added gaily, that dark bleak sparkle in her eye. “It all makes such sense,” she persisted. “Poison the food! Poison the air! Mass destruction everywhere! A Democracy of Death! O children wear these!” Twirling the mask above her head again, as high as her arm would reach. “They will defend you with an ultimate and magical power. These masks will return your parents to you unharmed! You will walk into a new land to which war has never come!” She leaned forward. “Tell me. I know that you must know. What is the superweapon Germany is working on? The one that will subjugate the world? As if
U
-boats and
V
-rockets and
B
-for Blitzkrieg were not enough? And what will that start with? What letter of the
A
-for Alphabet are they reserving for the worst of the weapons, the A-pex of their ever-flowering creativity?”