Armageddon - Leon Uris

He spat upon his wife.

“Now, Emma Stoll. Do not wipe the spit. Let it run down your face and into your mouth. Spit on your husband!”

She spat twice.

He ordered them to spit again and again and again until their mouths ran dry, and they were given water and made to spit again.

“Now, Klaus Stoll, slap your wife until her face bleeds.”

“Here, Emma Stoll. Take this stick and beat the face of your husband.”

And they beat on each other with sickening thuds. The prisoners of Schwabenwald shrunk back from the scene in revulsion. They beat upon each other until Emma Stoll slumped, semiconscious. The Nazi stood over her gasping and weeping and babbling to God for understanding.

“Klaus Stoll!” Falkenstein roared. “Call for your dog!”

“Mercy!”

“Call for your dog, I say!”

“Messer,” the Nazi voice whimpered, “Messer.”

“Tell Messer to kill! Tell him to go for the throat!”

“Kill ...” Klaus Stoll choked.

“Aha! Messer does not answer his master’s call. Get on your hands and knees and bark like Messer. Bark at your wife.”

Klaus Stoll grotesquely groveled about on all fours and barked and snapped at his wife.

Ulrich Falkenstein faced the others, and they knew that he had deliberately made them disgusted with themselves.

“It is enough!” Hoffman cried, dropping his weapon. “Make him stop!”

Klaus Stoll fell exhausted and Ulrich Falkenstein stood over him. “Why didn’t you have the decency to kill yourself? ... Hoffman ... call the Americans.”

Chapter Twenty-three

THE SHEETS WERE SOGGY with sweat. Dante pushed off the bed on rubbery legs, groped for matches, lit the kerosene lamp, turned the wick up. It flickered shadows about the war-battered room.

The shadows played over Marla’s glistening body. She lay on her side, her face buried in the pillow, her hair in disarray on the shambled bed. She was motionless except for the exhaling of deep sensuous groans.

Dante’s fuzzy mind tried to work. He washed himself as best he could in the single bucket of water, and then he dressed.

The numbness caused by her bites began to wear off and hurt. Crazy! It’s all plain crazy!

The rendezvous had been kept in a bombed-out apartment that her father once used for a mistress in the old days. When Dante arrived, Marla had been waiting in the darkness for well over an hour. They had both reached a kind of madness.

Marla had once been a passive lover. With Wilhelm Frick love-making was an accommodation incidentally enjoyed when times in between were long. With her lovers she asserted a sophisticated superiority which “took care of them.”

When her father told her what she must do with Dante Arosa there began an excited anticipation which she had known but once, with the boy in the medical school. For that she had been beaten. And now, she avenged that beating.

The game of bringing Dante Arosa to this moment reminded her how long she had been without a man. Dante’s body was hard. He was strong, terribly strong.

From the instant they felt for each other in the blackness of that shabby place Marla burst out with a sweet, brutal, surging power that wouldn’t let her stop making love. It happened over and over and over again to her in a quickening succession that drove her beyond control, and it kept happening until she collapsed.

For Dante it was a wildness he had never known, draining him to exhaustion; and then Marla revived and returned to a calm and deadly sophistication. Dante had never known a woman to make love this way. Her calculated calm drew the strength of resistance from his body and his mind with each touch and stroke. These were the victorious moments for Marla, when she had a man helpless.... It was the kill!

Dante stood over the bed and lit a cigar. “You’ll have to stay till morning. It’s past curfew.”

Marla rolled over on her back slowly revealing her magnificent body. “Kiss me good night, Dante.”

“I’d like to break your goddamned neck,” Dante said.

She rolled back again and did not move when his hand traced the line of her hips and thighs. She did not move when the door closed or at the sound of the jeep motor starting.

Dante wove through the rubble-strewn, quiet streets in a stupor. An occasional Polish or American guard stopped him, let him pass.

Oh God! What have I done! Fool! Goddamned stupid fool, Dante! Stupid son of a bitch, Dante!

All the traps she had set blurred: the sweet smell, the brushing past, the half-revealed bosom.

Keep your mind on your interrogation. Be careful of her eyes. She plays the eyes like a virtuoso. Be careful ... careful ...

A long halting silence between questions; he had never met nobility before.

The third and fourth time she was called to his office ... questions ... more questions. The time of day stood still until she was brought in ...

Why don’t I continue this at your home, tomorrow ...

As you wish, Lieutenant ...

Touching of hands ... a kiss ...

Marla, I’ve got to see you alone ...

We could both get into serious trouble...

To hell with it. ...

Dante reached the square. The light was on in Sean’s office. The light always seemed to be on there. He was filled with an impulse to drive to the City Hall and tell Sean about it there and then. Sean would understand, cover for him, help him. He drove to the place where the statue of Berwin and Helga stood before the entrance and stopped the jeep. They are all killers ... all of them ... love and death.

Dante started the motor and sped toward the pontoon bridge and his quarters on the south bank. Go back, Dante! Damned fool, go back! Now! Now! See Sean, now!

In the three tormented days that passed Dante Arosa relived the orgy minute by minute, again and again. Neither rationalization nor self-pity nor mortification helped any longer.

On the fourth day he called in one of his MP’s. “Sergeant, drive over to Marla Frick and bring her back here for questioning.”

“Yes, sir.”

Marla and Dante’s eyes met. There was mutual hatred in both, and mutual desire. Wordlessly they both said, “Yes, tonight and every night.”

Chapter Twenty-four

EXCEPT FOR A SINGLE mansion occupied by Ulrich Falkenstein and his deputies the balance of the south-bank estates had been requisitioned for American personnel. However, many members of Pilot Team G-5 rarely saw their luxurious accommodations for their working hours in those first days were as staggering as the task.

One home, formerly belonging to the owner of the riverboat and barge yard, was named the “old people’s home,” a dubious honor to its occupants, the senior members of the team: Tidings, the banker, Trueblood, the curator, Hickman, the agricultural economist, Sam Alterman, the communications expert, Maurice Duquesne, and Dr. Geoffrey Grimwood.

No one worked, or was expected to, the hours of the commander, except for Geoffrey Grimwood, who never saw his suite or, for that matter, bothered to move into it.

Grimwood took a room in the hospital so that he might have constant command of the hourless struggle to save the lives of the Schwabenwald inmates. Most of the 3000 patients in the hospital and cathedral were on the brink of death, with few resources to combat the effects of starvation and a half-dozen other death-bearing diseases.

Grimwood waged tireless battle for every life. With but marginal knowledge of starvation and its side effects he had kept the death rate under 10 per cent There was a direct line open to a camp called Bergen-Belsen, where the British Army had run into another and larger situation much like Schwabenwald.

It was long past midnight when Sean called it quits in his office. He drove down the square to the hospital and found Grimwood bleary-eyed at his desk. They revived themselves with a transfusion of coffee.