The Second Objective (18 page)

On the left, a steep flight of open stairs without a banister led up to the first floor and ended at a door. A second door was straight ahead of him at the end of the hall he was in. In the gloom of the basement he could see at least one other door, possibly to a closet. He started up the stairs. They creaked loudly under his feet. As he was about to reach the door at the top, he heard something move in the room at the end of the hallway down below.

Bernie stopped midstep, held his breath, and listened. A few moments later he heard the sound again. A slight rustling, some substantial mass shifting in place against the floor. It sounded heavy and alive. An animal most likely. Maybe she kept livestock down here. He remembered the unidentifiable carcass he’d seen earlier hanging in the woman’s abattoir. He tried to erase that picture from his mind as he reached for the doorknob.

A low, keening moan issued from the room down below and sent chills crawling across the back of his neck. Startled, Bernie turned toward the sound; the flame wavered in the air, burning his hand, and he dropped the lighter. It clattered through the gap between the stairs; the flame went out as it fell from sight, and the basement plunged into absolute darkness.

The sound again. He realized that his first instinct had been wrong; it wasn’t an animal. A terrible sound of pain and despair—only a human voice could express such suffering.

Bernie stopped in place, trying to orient himself in the darkness. He turned carefully and reached his hands ahead of him for the door at the top of the steps, located the knob, and turned it. Locked. He leaned forward and pressed his full weight against it. The door felt substantial, unyielding. He wouldn’t be able to attack it successfully in the dark.

Another pitiable moan issued from the room below.

Despite the cold, he felt sweat break out all along his brow. He felt his hands shaking. Afraid he might lose his balance, he turned and sat down on a step below him, trying to settle his nerves.

Who was in that room? The woman, Frau Escher? Maybe the SS had come through and injured her, or worse, then left her to die.

He used both hands and feet to slide down one step, then another, and work his way back down to the floor. On his hands and knees, he felt his way around the stairs, to the back of the risers, heading toward the spot in his mind’s eye where he’d watched the lighter fall from sight. He spread his hands out ahead on the floor as he edged forward, trying to cover every inch of ground.

One of his hands came in contact with something smooth and fleshy and he scuttled back away from it, grunting in disgust. Another moan issued from the room behind the door at the end of the hall. Much louder and closer, and in the deep darkness the sound cut right through him.

What had he touched? He waited, but sensed nothing moving toward him. He reached out his hands again, angling in another direction, slowly at first, then more frantically as fear wormed deeper into his mind, until his thumb grazed something metallic on the floor. He chased after it with clawing fingers and finally got his hands around the lighter. Trying to stave off panic, he flicked it once, twice, but got no spark. He shook the lighter in his hand, breathed deeply, waited, then tried again. The small flame sprouted into the air and held, a pinpoint of light in a sea of black.

The geography of where he was faded back into view. His eyes took in everything in snapshots, turning to look in each direction until he fixed his position.

The stairs. The short hallway. The door from which he’d entered from the storage room. The second door at the end of the hall.

Under the stairs near where he was crouched, a pile of gnawed and weathered bones.

Lying next to them, the object he’d grazed in the dark—a human hand.

Bernie scrambled backward across the floor, away from the thing, until his back collided with a wall. His heart thumped in his chest; adrenaline pumped through his gut. He stood up without realizing it. As his back bumped against the wall again, the door behind him swung open. Bernie turned when he heard the hinges yawn.

He stepped back from the open door and held the lighter out in front of him, waiting for the flame to penetrate the gloom inside. Two long shapes lay on the floor inside the small space. He took a step closer and saw that they wore olive green field uniforms. One rested motionless, and he knew on instinct the body had no life in it. The other moved slightly, seemed to sense his presence, then moaned again and feebly raised an arm in his direction. The arm ended in a bloody black stump.

Bernie heard the sharp bang of a door slamming shut upstairs, followed by heavy, shuffling footsteps crossing the room directly over his head, and the sound of something heavy dragging across the floor. Keys rattled in the lock of the door at the head of the stairs. Bernie killed the lighter, left the small room where the two bodies lay, and retreated back down the hall to the storage room. Hiding behind the closed door, he eased it open a crack and looked out.

The door at the top of the stairs swung open and a wedge of yellow light sliced down into the basement hallway. He saw her shadow first, then the woman’s bulk appeared on the landing, almost obliterating the light. She clumped down two steps, then turned and reached back for something. She proceeded to back down the stairs, dragging a body behind her feet first, face up. Bernie saw black boots and the green field jacket of a GI. The head bounced heavily on each step as she yanked the body after her like a sack of cement. She was wheezing with effort, and muttering under her breath in German.

“Sehen Sie, Amis, wie Sie es jetzt mögen.”

When the body hit the basement floor, she turned and noticed the open door behind her to the room with the other soldiers. She dropped the feet of the body she’d just dragged down and entered the smaller room. She pulled a string to turn on a naked overhead bulb, setting it swinging. Bernie saw a concrete floor with a drain in the middle, dried blood on the walls. Hanging from a line, apparently to dry, he saw what looked like a stretched, mottled sheet of skin. The woman leaned down over the soldier who was still alive and viciously kicked him with her boot, prompting another moan.

“You open this door,
Ami
? You open this door? What I tell you? Maybe now I took your other hand, yes?”

She marched back into the hall. Bernie shut the door quietly and leaned back, feeling ill and weak. He thought about trying to identify himself, in the hope she’d remember him from the other day, but what he’d seen in that room made that unthinkable. Not in the dark hell of that basement, not in an American uniform. She’d crossed a border human beings never came back from. He heard the woman’s weight burden the stairs as she made her way back up.

Bernie glanced around the room in the dim light from the broken window. The line of tools against the wall. A shovel. A pickax. A hatchet planted in a small stack of cut wood under the window. He moved over to pick up the hatchet and caught movement out of the corner of his eye.

Her bright, vacant blue eyes were staring down at him through the broken window. Then, in an instant, she was gone.

Bernie tried to pull out the hatchet, but it was wedged so deeply into the wood that he couldn’t dislodge it. The woodpile collapsed around him, sending logs rolling across the room. He stepped over them, his hands found the shovel, and he threw open the storage room door. He heard her footsteps stomping across the floor above. He closed the door behind him, ran underneath the staircase, and planted his back against the wall.

He saw her shadow first, thrown down against the basement floor by the sharp yellow light as she stood at the top of the stairs. She held a meat cleaver in her hand.

“You come to steal my food again,
Ami
?” she called toward the closed storage room door. “Like those other boys?”

Bernie didn’t move. He wasn’t even sure he was breathing.

“Maybe I lock you in down here. See how you like that for a week, yes? No food? No water? You like that,
Ami
? With your friends here?”

She waited, then took a step down onto the first riser. Bernie heard the nails groan above him as they held her weight.

“They all lying in a meadow,
Ami
. All dead. All your friends. We take care of them good, huh? Like I take care of you. You come into our village. You kill my livestock. Take my food. We see how you like it.”

She stepped down to the next riser. Now Bernie could see the back of her feet and thick, booted ankles through the open stairs.

“Come out,
Ami.
I have something for you,” she said, her tone changing to a playful sing-song. “You must be hungry, yes? Come here, boy, I fix you something nice.”

As she stepped down onto the third stair, Bernie reached both hands in from behind, grabbed her fat right ankle and yanked it toward him with all his strength. Her left foot lifted off the stair, and she struggled to maintain her balance. She planted her left leg and nearly pulled her right foot out of his hand. Leaning forward, she made a small hop to the left, then tried to skip down to the next stair onto her left foot. Bernie twisted the foot he still held in his grasp and felt it turn her body in midair. She toppled forward, arms extended, landing heavily on her left side down the rest of the stairs with a loud yelp. She slid the rest of the way, then rolled onto the floor on top of the dead soldier.

Bernie gripped the handle of the shovel, leaned out from under the stairs, and waited. The woman groaned, her breath rising and falling in a ragged rasp. He edged forward until he caught sight of her heaped form in the edge of the light. Bernie took a deep breath.

The woman jolted to life, scrabbling along the ground at him like a rabid dog, the cleaver in her hand, gibbering incoherently. Bernie stumbled away from her until he slammed into another door. It crashed open behind him and he fell back into a narrow room lined with shelves on either side. The woman crawled after him. He kicked the door shut with his foot; it slammed into her face and bounced off, but she kept coming. Bernie crabbed backward, pulling down shelving between them. Glass jars exploded on and around her as she advanced. The room filled with noxious smells; he didn’t want to know what was in those jars. He jumped to his feet, made his way around the shelving to the right, saw another door ahead, and threw himself at it. The door flew open. He slammed it shut and bolted it just as she drew herself up and threw her mass at the other side. The entire wall shuddered. She shrieked and hit it again, then went quiet.

Bernie looked around. He was back in the first room he’d entered. He peered through the door to the hallway. He could see the stairs. He glanced at the casement window he had broken, but didn’t think he could climb through it in time.

Bernie made a break for the stairs, and she came running out of the darkness, cutting off his angle. He tried to leap up to the third stair, caught his toe on the edge, and landed hard, facedown on the stairs. She closed in behind him, the cleaver going up in her hand. Bernie turned, whipped the shovel around, and the cleaver scraped down along its shaft, sparks flying, metal ringing on metal. He swung the shovel back the other way and struck a glancing blow to the side of her head, but she shook it off and kept after him.

Bernie pulled himself up onto the next riser, parried another blow from the cleaver, then jabbed the blade at her fleshy mass to keep her at bay. She knocked the shovel aside and brought the cleaver down again, missing Bernie’s hip by two inches, splintering the wood of the riser as he rolled out of its way.

Bernie swung the shovel again, but couldn’t put much weight behind it. The blow struck her in the ribs and she hardly seemed to notice. She pinned the handle under one arm, turned her body, and wrenched the shovel out of his hands, letting it fall. Bernie turned and crawled frantically up the stairs.

Someone stood in the open doorway at the top, silhouetted. He saw an arm point toward him, holding a pistol. Bernie threw himself flat on the stairs, turning his head away, and from the corner of his eye he saw her nightmare figure lurching up the stairs behind him, the cleaver high in the air. Then came the sharp report of the gun, twice, three, four shots, echoing harshly.

The bullets stopped the woman on the stairs, blossoms of blood spreading across her chest. She looked at Bernie in disbelief, wobbled in place, gave a soft, low groan, crumpled, and collapsed off the side of the staircase, hitting the concrete floor with a heavy crunch.

Bernie felt a hand on his shoulder. He raised his head up to look.

“Jesus Christ, Brooklyn,” said Von Leinsdorf. “I leave you alone for a minute, look what you get yourself into.”

“What the fuck. What the fuck.”

Von Leinsdorf continued down the stairs. He walked into the room at the end of the hall where she’d stashed the bodies. Moments later, Bernie heard another shot.

16

The Bridge at Amay

DECEMBER 17, 4:30
P.M.

G
rannit downshifted sharply, the gearbox of the Willys grinding in protest, fishtailing the rear tires around the hairpin turns. They’d taken ten minutes to drive up the hill. Going down, they reached the river road in five.

As they accelerated toward the bridgehead, they could see the other jeep parked alongside the checkpoint. All four passengers were still in their seats. An officer in the back was talking with the sergeant in charge of the bridge.