Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

No, he thought, I could never write that. I simply am not good enough. Face it, as a writer you weren’t much, a few pitiful essays in long-forgotten Yiddish journals in a city that no longer existed. What positions had he attacked, what had he defended? He could not even remember.

Had he been a Marxist, a poet, a historian, a novelist, a philosopher, a Zionist? No, not a Zionist, not even in the last days before the war had come, that hot August of ’39 when Zionism flared like a contagion through the Quarter, and even the richest of them, the most assimilated, had been consumed in its vision. But that had been dreams, absurd, out of scale, the problems so immense. Next year in Jerusalem! Insane! The British, the Arabs, thousands of miles to travel. He hadn’t bought it then—just more dreamy Jews getting on with their own destruction.

But now he saw the dream wasn’t so outsized. It was prosaic, a necessity. For where else was there to go? Eretz Yisrael , the land of Israel. Home of the Jews. Now that would be something, wouldn’t it? That would be worth—

An immense pleasure spread through him. Look at me , he thought, I am thinking again .

He did not see them until they were quite close and then he had not time to display surprise. They seemed to materialize from nowhere, though in a splinter of a second he realized he hadn’t been able to make them out against the looming bulk of the guardhouse. And yet there was a familiarity about them, as though old fears had taken on a familiar guise, and so he absurdly was not frightened and if there was to be any mercy in the next several seconds it was that one: that Shmuel was not frightened as the rushing forms closed on him and held him down.

“SS shit,” he heard in Polish, “SS shit.”

“I—” Shmuel started and then something enormous crashed into his skull. He felt his head inflate in pain and it seemed the abundance of stars had come down to crush him and they hit him again and again and again.

He expected trouble at the Rheinbrücke and hid in a stand of trees a few hundred yards down the road. The guards on the bridge appeared to be regular Army troops, not Waffen SS men, loafing in the sun. Repp studied them for some time, wishing he had binoculars to bring them up, see their procedures and moods. He tried to keep himself calm and his mind clear: only the bridge, its sentry post, and three lazy soldiers stood between him and safety. Once across, he had only a few blocks or so through the city to negotiate.

He’d feared a massive jam-up here, a refugee column, farmers’ carts heaped with furniture, frightened children; officers’ staff cars honking, the wounded hanging desperately on the backs of tanks; grim SS men patrolling for deserters. Instead, only this pleasant still scene, almost traffickless—occasionally a truck crossed, and once a sedan, but mostly farmers’ wagons heaped with hay, not furniture, and pedestrians. From his vantage point, Repp could also see the Bodensee over the rail of the bridge, stretching away, glinting in the May sun, its horizon lost in a haze: the Lake of Konstanz, a true inland sea. There seemed no war here at all. Was he too late? Since Tuttlingen, he’d traveled mostly by night, staying away from main roads, moving south, always south, across fields and through scraggly forests: out of touch, on his own, fugitive from his friends now as well as his enemies.

The sergeant in the sentry booth watched him come, but said nothing. Repp recognized the type, tired veteran, laconic of speech, economical of gesture, face seamed with hard knowledge. No need to yell when Repp was already approaching.

“Say, friend,” the sergeant finally said, unlimbering himself from the stool on which he sat. He picked up his MP by the sling, toting it with the easy motions of over-familiarity.

“And where might you be headed? Switzerland, I suppose. Don’t you know that’s for big shots, not little fishies like you or me?”

Repp smiled weakly. “No, sir,” he said.

“Then what’s your sorry story? Running to , or running from?”

Repp handed him his papers.

“I was separated from my unit,” he explained as the sergeant scanned them. “A big American attack. Worse than Russia.”

“And I suppose you think your unit’s on the other side of the bridge?” the sergeant asked.

Repp had no answer. But then he said, “No, sir. But my mother is.”

“You’ve decided to go on home then, have you?”

“I’ll find an officer to report to after I’ve seen my mother,” Repp said.

The sergeant chuckled. “I doubt there’s a sober one left. And if you find one, I doubt he’ll give a damn about you. Go on, damn you. To mother. Tell her you’re home from the wars.”

Repp drew in a deep gulp of the cool air and tried to keep himself calm as he walked across the great Romanesque bridge between the Lake of Konstanz’s two basins, the vast Bodensee to the east, and the Untersee, the more picturesque with its steep wooded shores, to the west. At the end of the structure, he passed under a medieval tower and stepped into the old city. It was a holiday town, cobbled and quaint, exactly the kind of place Repp didn’t care for. It had no purpose beyond pleasure, with its casino and boat tours and green lakeside park. It had never even been bombed and seemed uneasy in a military role, as if it were wearing an outlandish costume. The soldiers who clustered in its narrow streets seemed wildly out of place against the cobbles and arches and turrets and timbers and spires. Repp slid anonymously among them; they paid him no attention, shouting instead at women, or lounging about drunk before the Basilica of the Münsterplatz. Even the officers were in bad shape, a sullen, loutish crew; clearly they’d already surrendered. Kübels and trucks had been abandoned around the Platz and Repp saw rifles already piled in the square. Repp felt himself filling with anger as he pushed through them but he kept it to himself, one straggler adrift in a crowd of stragglers.

Repp turned off the Münsterplatz and headed down Wessenbergerstrasse. Here, in the residential sector, there were no soldiers, only an occasional old woman or man whose questioning eyes he would not meet. He turned up Neugasse, where the houses were shabbier still, looking for No. 14. He found it soon, a two-story dwelling, dirty stucco, shuttered. Quickly, without looking up or down the street of almost identical houses, and without hesitating, he knocked.

After a time, the door opened a sliver.

“Yes?”

He could not see her in the shadow. But he knew the voice quite well. She sounded tired. Unlike the other times.

“It’s me.”

The door closed, a chain was freed, and then it opened.

He stepped into the shadowy foyer, but she was not there. He went into the living room beyond. She stood against the wall, in the dark.

“Well, at last I’m here,” he said.

“So I see. They said a man. I should have known.”

“Ah,” he said, haltingly. The truth was, he felt a little unsure of himself.

“Sit down, sit down,” she urged.

“I’m filthy. I’ve been sleeping in barns, swimming rivers. I need a bath.”

“The same Repp: so fastidious.”

“Please—a bath.”

“Yes. Of course.” She led him through a shabby living room, hushed in draperies and blinds, flowers grimy on the wallpaper, and up some decrepit stairs. The house stank mildly of must and disinfectant.

“I’m sorry it’s so awful. But they said it had to be a house, definitely a house and this is all that was available. It’s outrageously expensive. I rented it from a widow who’s said to be the richest woman in Konstanz. It’s also said she’s a Jew. But how can that be? I thought they took all the Jews away a long time ago.”