Joseph Kanon - A Good German

Emil started up from the floor, then heard another shot and fell back again. Jake looked through the shattered window. Shaeffer, blowing his horn now, signaling them to stop.

“Grab the fucking wheel!” Jake yelled. Another truck appeared in the oncoming lane. Now there wasn’t even the option of spinning in circles, hands slipping around the bloody wheel, trying to keep a grip. The bridge ahead, then people. Get the brake. With one hand he pushed hard against Gunther’s leg, a cement weight, but moving, sliding back from the gas pedal, wedged now at the bottom. A little more and the car would slow. Only a matter of seconds before something gave.

It was the tire. A stopping shot from Shaeffer, more effective than a horn blast. The Horch careened wildly, as if Jake’s hands had left the wheel. Heading straight for the truck. Jake wrenched the wheel back hard, swerving right, missing the truck, heading off the road in the other direction, but after that lost all control, plunging past some piles of rubble, bouncing furiously, the wheel meaningless. He shoved at Gunther’s leg again, dislodging it from the pedal. But the car was moving on its own now, a last surge of momentum that carried it away from the bridge, over the embankment, only choking to a stop in midair. Nothing beneath them, a giddy suspension. Not even a full second at the top of a roller coaster, an impossible floating through nothing. Then the car pitched down.

Jake crouched lower, bracing himself against Gunther, so that he didn’t see the water as they plunged into the canal, just felt the shock of the crash, throwing him forward against the dash with a crunch, a sick snapping sound at his shoulder, his head bumping hard against the wheel, a sharp pain that blotted out everything but the last instinct, to take a deep gulp of air as the water rushed in to flood around him.

He opened his eyes. Murky, almost viscous water, too cloudy to see far. Not a canal anymore, a sewer. Absurdly, he thought of infection. But there wasn’t time to think about anything. He lifted himself, shoulder throbbing in a spasm, and reached over the seat with his good hand, grabbing Emil’s shirt and pulling at it. Emil was moving, not dead, squirming up off the floor. Jake yanked the shirt, lifting him over the seat and pushing him toward the window. Buoyant, floating weight, just a matter of steering him out, but the front was crowded, Gunther taking up precious space.

Jake leaned back, twisting Emil’s body so that he could shove it head first, watching Emil’s feet flailing as he kicked his way out. Hurry. The canal wasn’t deep; enough time to get to the surface if his air held. He began to follow through the window, bumping his head again on the frame, pulling himself with one arm, the other useless. Halfway out, Emil’s shoe caught his shoulder, kicking, the pain so startling he thought he might black out and sink, the way rescuers were accidentally taken down by the thrashing of the people they were trying to save. His legs were now through the frame. He began to stroke up to the surface but the shoe struck him again, a strong kick, catching him now at the side of the head, a solid running pain to his shoulder. Don’t gasp. For Christ’s sake, Emil, move away. Then another kick, downward, not flailing this time, deliberate, intended to connect. Another. One more and he might be knocked out, bubbles rising to the surface, not a weapon in sight. No more air. He swam sideways with his good arm, only one effort left, and pushed up. Gentle Emil. What would you do to survive?

As he broke the surface, he barely got a gulp of air before the hand caught his throat and started to push his head back under. A squeal of tires and shouts from the bank. The hand came away. Jake pulled his head up, sputtering.

“Emil.”

Emil had turned to look at the bank, once a solid wall, now bombed in places to slopes of rubble. Shaeffer and his man were picking their way down, their attention on the awkward footing, away from the water. A minute, maybe. Emil looked back at Jake, still gasping, his shoulder now an agony.

“It’s over,” Jake said.

“No.” Barely a whisper, his eyes on Jake. Not like Shaeffer’s, a hunter’s, but something more desperate. What would you do? Emil reached for him and caught his throat again, and as Jake’s head went under, he saw, with a sinking feeling worse than drowning, that he was losing the wrong war-not Shaeffer’s, the one he hadn’t even known he was fighting. A kick to the stomach now, forcing out air, as the hand gripped his hair, holding him under. Losing. Another kick. He’d die, the kick marks no more suspicious than crash bruises. Emil getting away with it again.

He yanked his head down, pulling Emil with him, scratching at his fingers. No good punching through water. He’d have to claw the fingers off. Another kick, below his stomach, but the hand was letting go, afraid perhaps of being dragged under with his victim. Do what he expects. Die. Jake sank lower. Emil couldn’t see through the thick water. Would he follow? Let him think it had worked. He felt a final kick, the shoulder again, and for a moment he was no longer pretending, sinking deeper, without the strength to pull himself back up, the dizziness before a blackout. His feet hit the roof of the car. Below, he could see Gunther’s head lolling out of the car window, floating like kelp. The way he’d look. Bastards. He dropped, bending his knees, no breath left at all, then pushed away with a last heave, away from Emil, toward the bank.

“Here he is!” Shaeffer shouted as his head bobbed up. He sucked in air, choking, spitting the water that came with it.

The other soldier had waded in to get Emil, who gazed at Jake in shock, then dropped his head, looking down at his hand, where the scratches were welling with blood.

“You all right?” Shaeffer was saying. “Why the hell didn’t you stop?”

Jake kept gasping, drifting toward the bank. Nowhere else to go now. Then he felt Shaeffer’s hand on his collar, dragging him onto the bank, struggling, then gripping his belt and yanking, like Tully being fished out of the Jungfernsee. He fell back against the broken concrete, looking up at Shaeffer. A splash, the sound of water dripping as Emil came out a few yards away.

He closed his eyes, fighting a wave of nausea from the pain, then opened them again to Shaeffer. “You going to finish me off here?”

Shaeffer looked at him, confused. “Don’t be an asshole. Here, let me give you a hand,” he said, reaching for him.

But he grabbed the wrong arm. As Shaeffer pulled him up, Jake’s shoulder went hot with pain and he couldn’t stop the scream, the last thing he heard before everything finally, almost a relief, did go black. Contents — Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

They set his shoulder at the officers’ infirmary near Onkel Tom’s Hutte, or at least he was told they did, a day later, when he lay with a morphine hangover under the pink chenille spread at Gelferstrasse. People had drifted in and out, Ron to check, the old woman from downstairs playing nurse, none of them quite real, just figures in a haze, like his arm, white with gauze and adhesive, hanging in a sling, not his at all, someone else’s. Who were they all? When the old woman came back, recognizable now, the billet’s owner, he realized, embarrassed, that he didn’t even know her name. Then the stranger with her, an American uniform, gave him a shot, and they disappeared too. What he saw instead was Gunther’s face, floating in the water. No more points. And later, awake, the face still in his mind, he knew the haze was not just the drugs but a deeper exhaustion, a giving up, because he had done everything wrong.

He was sitting by the window, looking down on the garden where the old woman had snipped parsley, when Lena finally came.