Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Startled, he looked at his own clothes. He was wearing American boots, field pants and a wool OD shirt. To old Eisner he was an American, the language made no difference.

Eisner the tailor still slept fitfully on the cot as Shmuel slipped out. He did not have far to go. Of the warehouses there were two kinds: badly looted and heavily guarded. Soldiers marked the latter, smashed doors and a litter of debris the former. Shmuel immediately found the single exception to this rule, a brick building that was not guarded, and had not been looted.

He stepped inside. It smelled musty and the darkness clamped down on him. He stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Small chinks of light glittered in the roof, almost like stars, and slowly in the darkness shapes appeared. Pile and pile, rank on rank, neatly arranged after the Teutonic fashion, were blue-and-white prison uniforms.

“No. This guy is different. I don’t know why, but he is. He’s a curious combination of valor and evil. He’s very brave. He’s enormously brave. He’s much braver than I am. But he’s—” He paused, groping.

She would not help him.

“I can’t figure out how they turned out such men,” Leets said. “You see, we always expect them to be cowards. Or perverts. Or nuts, of some sort. What if they were just like us? What if some of them were better even? Braver? Tougher? What if some were heroes. Unbelievable heroes?”

“You melodramatize. I’ve seen their work. They were grim, seedy little killers, that’s all. Nothing glamorous in it at all. They killed in the millions. Men, women. The children, especially. At Auschwitz, at the end, they threw children living into the ovens.”

“I asked Tony about all this. He’s a very brilliant man, you realize. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘Don’t get too philosophical, chum. We’re merely here to kill the swine.’ But that’s not enough, don’t you see?”

“You’re obsessed with this guy, that’s all I see. And he’s nothing, he’s no concept, no symbol. He’s just a pig with a gun. It’s the gun that makes him special.”

Shmuel, back in the office, slipped quickly into the uniform. He felt nothing; it was only cloth, with a faintly musty smell, from long storage.

He smoked another cigarette while he waited for Eisner to awake or for Leets or Outhwaithe to return. He knew better than to jerk the tailor out of his sleep. Now where were Leets and Outhwaithe? Though perhaps it was best they were away for so long, it might give him a chance to finally make contact here.

As he waited, a curious thing began to happen. It occurred to him that there would in fact be a future. For the first time in years he allowed himself to think of it. In the camps as an article of faith one kept one’s hopes limited to the next day, not the next year. Yet in his sudden new leisure, Shmuel began to think of a new way of life. Certainly he wouldn’t stay in Europe. The Christians had tried to kill him; there was nothing for Jews in Europe now. You’d never know who’d been a Nazi; they’d all say it had been others, but each time you heard a German voice or saw a certain hard set of the eyes or a train of boxcars or even a cloud of smoke, the sensation would be discomfort. The Zionists were always talking about Palestine. He’d never listened. Enough to concentrate on without dreams of a desert somewhere, Arabs, fig trees, whatever. It seemed absurd. But now—well, it was there, or America.

The old man stirred.

“You are feeling all right, Mr. Eisner, now?”

“Not so bad,” said Eisner. “It’s been worse.” Then he saw Shmuel. “A uniform? And whose is that?”

“Mine, believe it or not. I had one like it anyway. At the camp in the East. Called Auschwitz.”

“A terrible place, so I’ve heard. Still, it’s a surprise.”

“It’s true.”

“I thought you were with the Gentiles.”

“With, yes. Part of , no. But these fellows are decent, not like the Germans.”

“All Gentiles frighten me.”

“That’s why I’m here alone.”

“Still after the records? I should remember records, all I’ve been through. Listen, I’ll tell you, I know nothing of records. The civilian, Kohl, he kept the records. A German.”

“Kohl?” said Shmuel, writing it.

“Ferdinand Kohl. I’ll spell it if you like. It makes no difference though. He’s dead. Not a bad man, but that’s how it goes. The inmates caught him on liberation day and beat him to death. But there’s too many other sorrows in here”—heart—“to make room for him.”

“Mine’s crowded as well,” Shmuel said.

“But coats I remember. Battle coats. For the forest. Very fancy. We made them in the thousands.”

“When?”

“Over the years. For four years; then last year we changed the pattern. First, a kind of smock, a tunic. Then a real true coat.”

“A special demand? For a group. Say, a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five. Do you remember?”

“I just sewed the buttons on, that’s all. A hundred and fifty coats a day, on went the buttons, that’s all. Any fool could have sewn on buttons.”

“But no special demands?”

“No. Only—No, nothing.”

“Only what?” He paused. “Please. Who knows?”

“Kohl in early April I remember complaining about big shots and their special privileges. A German hero had his men here for special antitank training and demanded they be refitted with the coats as theirs had worn thin.”

“Hero. His name?”

“If I had it then, it’s gone now. So many things I forget. My boy was named David, my two girls Shuli and Rebecca. Them I remember. David had blond hair, can you believe it? I know the girls and their mother are gone. Everybody who went East is gone. But maybe the Germans spared him because his hair was their color. We thought it was a curse, his blondness, that they would take him from us. But maybe a blessing, no? Who could tell such things? A learned rabbi could maybe expl—”

“Mr. Eisner. The coats. The hero.”

“Yes, yes, forgive me. Thinking, all the time thinking. Hard to remember details.”

“Kohl. Mr. Kohl. He didn’t want to give up the coats.”

“Kohl. Yes, old Kohl. Not a bad sort, notions of fairness. He tried to say No. The boys at the front need the jackets. Not rear-echelon bastards. But the hero got his way. He had papers from the highest authority. Herr Kohl thought this ridiculous. From an opera. I heard him tell Sergeant Luntz that. Heroes from an opera a monkey wrench throwing into his shop. It was no good. My David, he’ll grow up to be strong. On a farm somewhere, in the country. He was only three. He hadn’t had any instruction. He won’t know he was a Jew. Maybe it’s better. Maybe that’s the best way to be a Jew in this world, not to know. He’s six now, David, a fine healthy boy on a farm somewhere in the country.”

Shmuel patiently let him lapse into silence. When he was done, Shmuel saw tears star the old man’s eyes and at the same time noticed that the old man wasn’t so old: he was just a man, a father, who hadn’t been able to do anything for his children. Better maybe that he’d died so he wouldn’t have to live with their accusing ghosts in his head. The Germans: they made you hate yourself for being too weak to fight them, too civilized to demand revenge.

“Opera?” Shmuel finally said. “I missed that.”

“What the fellow called it, the hero fellow. His plan. They name everything, the Gentiles. They have to name things. This from an opera, by Wagner. Herr Kohl hated Wagner. It made his behind doze, I heard him tell Luntz.”

“What was the name?” Shmuel asked, very carefully.

“Operation Nibelungen,” the old man who was not so old replied.

Shmuel wrote it down.