Breit had to yank to turn him. ‘Captain, why are your men not spraying this building?’ He pointed at the house next to the one burning faster now. ‘It’s not on fire yet. You can save it.’
The officer shook his head, his mouth curled in a rebuke. ‘This was a Jew house, Colonel. Jews lived there.’
Breit stared. The captain must have figured he did not understand.
‘We’ll let it burn.’
‘Put your hoses on it,’ Breit ordered.
‘No,’ the officer answered. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, Colonel.’
With this the captain turned away and trod forward, pointing and bellowing at the firefighters under his command. Breit was left standing behind, gazing up at the face of the Jew house. It was big, all the houses on this block were sizable, these were the homes of the well-to-do. He wondered if the Jews of this home on this street had owned paintings.
He turned from the fire and walked to a policeman.
He held out his hand.
‘Officer, give me your sidearm.’
The policeman, seeing Breit’s black and silver uniform, did as he was ordered. Breit took the pistol.
He came up behind the fire captain.
He pushed the barrel of the pistol into the shoulder of the fire captain’s tunic.
Breit repeated his command. ‘Put your hoses on that house.’
‘Look,’ the captain, starting to turn, said, ‘I told you…’
Breit fired.
The man jolted and spun from the gun. The report of the shot was devoured in the roar of flames and water. No one moved toward Breit to disarm him, no one heard or perhaps even saw what he’d done. The captain doubled over. When he came up, his hand was clamped over the hole drilled clean through his shoulder. Breit let the gun hang. The fire captain had a new look on his face.
‘Put your hoses on that building, captain. And when you’ve put out these fires, Berlin will have one more building instead of one less.’
The fire captain glared. He was a tough man, but not so much that he dared another word. He straightened, his eyes fixed on Breit, he did not wince. Breit had no idea what to do with the pistol now, he had no holster for it, and he did not want to tuck it in his belt like a tough guy or the partisans. He walked back to the policeman and returned it. He would not need it again. The fire captain turned his water on the Jew house and soaked it, saving it from the gobbling flames of its burning German neighbor.
Breit stayed for an hour, retiring into the crowd until all the fires on this block were extinguished. He walked fifteen minutes more to his own street, arriving just before midnight. His boarding house was fine, the bombs had missed his neighborhood. No one was outside, no one saw him come home.
* * * *
CHAPTER 32
July 16
2240 hours
German troop train
five kilometers south of Belgorod
Luis set another cracker on his tongue. He closed his lips around it and sucked, waiting for the wafer to become mush. He gazed out his window at the vast plains and swallowed salty pulp.
With his left hand he raised a glass of water. Even the glass was a misery to lift, the broken ribs on his left side stabbed him. His right arm was no use to him, it was wrapped in a heavy plaster cast, limp in a black sling. He chased the cracker down his throat with little gulps, the five stitches in his chin bleated every time he stretched his jaw to eat or speak. Because of the stitches and the gauze around his head to hold the bandage in place, he ate little. This kept his appetite inflamed. The busted ribs made it hard to drink. Luis stayed hungry and thirsty every waking second now. He made no conversation with the other soldiers in the passenger car who passed his seat, men who saw his wincing efforts to move and offered to help in some way. He grunted in Spanish at the doctor who checked on him and the porter who brought him baskets of bread that went stale waiting for him to eat; the hard mouthings of German made his head hurt, so he stuck to his smoother mother tongue and didn’t care if they understood.
The man across from him had sat down only a minute ago and already prattled on. He’d put on such a happy face at seeing Luis on this train leaving Belgorod. Luis answered him with a nod at the padded seat across from him and regretted the offer within seconds. He let the man’s words flow past, like the night steppe outside the train, going by and going by, with no more meaning than that, just lost things. He did not turn his head to the fat officer sweating in the seat, the man’s knees were too close, they knocked Luis’s sore shins whenever the train rattled. Luis laid one more cracker on his tongue and closed his eyes.
‘I’ll tell you, I’m not sorry to see the last of Belgorod,’ Major Grimm said. ‘I think I must have smoked two packs a day without ever lighting one cigarette, being cooped up with Colonel Breit like that. Oh! Did you hear about his adventure with the partisans… ?’
Luis did not need to look at the chatty man, he smelled the perspiration, could hear the officer’s hands run over his belly across the stale cloth of his uniform, even through the torrent of talk. In the imposed stillness of his injuries, Luis was turning inward. He found a soothing darkness there, the darkness that first came to him bleeding in the snow at Leningrad and came again beside his burning Tiger at Prokhorovka, and now on his way out of Russia, headed south for Italy, it seemed not to leave.
‘… meant to check on you in the hospital at Belgorod when I heard you’d been brought in,’ the major rambled, ‘but there was so much to do in the last several days, you understand, Captain. Besides, I’m sure you were in a great deal of pain and needed…’
Luis had made himself stand on the battlefield. He’d been thwarted in Russia but he would not lie like a skewered bull in his own blood. He’d survived the destruction of his tank, a fantastic blast when the Red shooter’s shell pierced his Tiger’s side armor; a secondary explosion ignited when all the stored rounds went off in the Tiger and the T-34. Everyone died instantly, except Luis. He’d been blown into the air on top of the Tiger’s flying turret. When he landed he was somehow alive.
He’d rolled over on his back and raised a hand to God, one last prayer, certain he was about to die. When he did not, there was no more reason to lie there, nothing to wait for. The pain propelled him to his feet. He was in awe again of his flimsy body, what it could endure. Even more than the burning Tiger, it seemed. A Mark IV in his company spotted him and ferried him out of the valley.
‘… you were fighting at Prokhorovka, the Americans landed 160,000 men on Sicily, and six hundred tanks. That, of course, changed everything. Hitler’s obsessed that Mussolini is going to be overthrown. He summoned von Manstein and Kluge to Rastenburg for a meeting. And on the thirteenth, of course, while you were in the hospital, Hitler called off Citadel.’
Yes, Luis thought, Hitler has taken Russia from me. With it, he’s taken Spain. I can’t go home.
Tomorrow Hitler will order the rest of Leibstandarte out of Russia. So I am to be given Italy next. And the Americans for an enemy. Bueno. What do I care? What hasn’t been taken from me?
‘… Papa Hoth, as you can imagine, was furious and wanted to keep up the attack. Hitler agreed to let the battle in the south go on for a few more days, you know, to try and siphon off the last of the Russians’ reserves. But that was destined to be no good at all, you see. And then today, the Russians started their counteroffensive in the north against Orel. Early reports have the Reds already across poor Model’s first defense lines…’
Luis had begun to mutter curt replies, ‘Yes,’ ‘Hmm,’ ‘Really?’ He issued these like boulders or downed trees to try and stem the flow of the major, wanting to dam him up with a blunt, final word.
The porter walked by with a pitcher of water swathed in a white kerchief, the thing looked as bandaged as Luis. He refilled Luis’s glass and handed Grimm a full glass. The major downed the water with one swift raise of his arm, the arm that did nothing at Kursk but push toy blocks and lift sheets of paper. Grimm swallowed an
d said, ‘Ahhh,’ with satisfaction. Under his tunic Luis’s rib cage was wrapped tight. Every breath for him was a task. He glowered at the officer. The fat man would not be plugged.
‘… problems began with Totenkopf on your left flank. The hope was they would advance far enough to threaten Prokhorovka from the northwest. But the rain made a mess of their river crossings, and resupplying the division across the Psel became impossible. Totenkopf couldn’t hold their beachhead and had to fall back.’
Luis imagined Grimm in the map room sliding the black blocks backward. He wondered how long until the glass of water Grimm had just gulped ran down his forehead as sweat. The darkness outside his window and inside him was emptiness. Luis looked at this man, his opposite, and considered how full Grimm was, how bursting with noise and memory and need. Look at him, swollen with it all, talking just to keep from popping. The dark required none of this from Luis. The dark was pain, and if you embraced the dark’s pain you felt nothing of the world’s. That was real power.
‘… Kempf, but too little too late. Kempf’s linkup with Das Reich didn’t come until the fifteenth. By then, for all intents and purposes, the battle was over. Oh, you SS chaps might have made a go of it, certainly, but with due respect, Captain, Leibstandarte’s inability to take Oktyabrski state farm in the center doomed the attack. Neither Totenkopf nor Das Reich could defend their flanks after that. By the night of the thirteenth, Prokhorovka was a stalemate. That’s when Hitler called it off. And now the damn Ivans are hitting back. Well, it’s to be expected. It’s what I’d do. It’s only a matter of time, I’m afraid…’
Late that afternoon a nurse had come to Luis’s bedside. She’d handed him orders to report to this train at the Belgorod station. Apparently Grimm got the same orders. Luis was being sent to defend another yappy fat man, Mussolini. Luis would recuperate in Rome, then take over a panzer company. He would get another Tiger in the sunny south, in a coastal town named Anzio.
‘… put you in for a medal, you know. The Iron Cross Second Class. I heard about all the Red tanks you knocked out in that damn sunflower field. Splendid, Captain. You deserve it! And since this is the second time you’ve been wounded in battle, you’ll be getting your silver wound badge…’
Luis heard the talk of medals the way a man listens to the plops of stones landing at the darkness of a well. He dropped the medals into the darkness, plop, plop. They were not enough to give him back Barcelona, the Ramblas, his father. He was starting over. In Italy.
He watched Russia recede in his window. Adios. The moonlit flats were heaped with Grimm’s assessments of failure here, describing the expanse as impregnable, no one had ever conquered it for long. Maybe he’s right, Luis thought. Perhaps it was better to get out of here and head south. He thought about Prokhorovka. What had happened? What in hell was that old T-34 driver screaming at the end? What was he saying? What did he want?
Luis licked his dry lips. A dart of pain pricked in his stitched chin. The pain swept the Red driver out of his head, out into the bland deluge of Major Grimm’s monologue. Luis didn’t care what the crazy old Russian had been yelling. Whatever it was, Death had answered him. The Russian was not going to haunt Luis, there would be no more throbs in his hand like the partisan or the bulls, no. The darkness in Luis left no room for the weakness of curiosity, no dilution of the mind or will, no pride, and certainly no ghosts.
Stay empty, the dark told him. See how powerful you have become. It’s simple: first the bullet outside Leningrad, then that crazy old Russian at Prokhorovka. They were sent to you, to change you and make you stronger.
You have nothing.
You are nothing, nothing but la Daga.
It will take something stronger than Russia to kill you.
* * * *
CHAPTER 33
July 16
2350 hours
fifty kilometers north of Khar’kov
Ukraine/Russian border
Colonel Plokhoi was first out of the bushes. A moment after the blast on the rail mound, before the echo was gone from the trees where they hid, he ran from cover with his submachine-gun braced at the hip, chasing his bullets over the open ground. Katya leaped out with the waves of dark partisans, following Colonel Bad, shouting and shooting their weapons into the roofs and sides of the tipping train.
The locomotive careened off the splintered rails and continued on, teetering on its betrayed wheels until it crashed over. Momentum carried it another twenty meters on its side until it plowed to a halt in the scarred earth. The locomotive lay on its side steaming and hot, a ridiculous posture for a great machine. There it lay dying in gushes. It was ignored by Plokhoi and his swarming partisans, who dashed for the five passenger cars. The locomotive had dragged each of the cars off the blown tracks, so that the entire train spilled down the rail mound into a heaped jumble. Smoke roiled from the C-3 explosion and the dirt spewed into the night air, and now the barrels of many weapons added their gunsmoke. Bullets punched holes in the cars’ thin frames, paint chipped and bare metal halos showed around every puncture. Partisans ran close and tossed grenades into the shattered windows. The blasts shook the downed cars again, fabric inside began to burn. The partisans stepped back and fired, fired, fired into the cars. Katya lowered her rifle. She hadn’t shot it more than twice, she’d seen little need to add her small bark to the furious baying of Plokhoi’s men.
Three machine-guns were hustled forward and flung down on tripods. When they opened up the sound was like hail, ting ting ting ting, faster than a drum roll. The machine-guns shredded everything in front of them, the shooters swiveled the barrels back and forth without aim, loaders lavished them with belts of ammunition. The partisans emptied their guns into the German train. The night glimmered to the constellation of muzzle flashes, all else was black and grisly. Nothing answered from the cars themselves, not even screams. Where was the time to scream or shout to surrender? The soldiers who’d been asleep awoke to the shock of their world tilting, they tumbled off their seats and benches, dashed against shifting walls and railings, then danced on the strings of these ten thousand bullets fired by a hundred angry fighters who had no interest in taking prisoners.
Katya ran close to Plokhoi. The partisan leader shouted with his trigger pressed, until his magazine was emptied. He dropped the spent gun on the ground and stood spent as well, out of breath and bullets at the same time, a perfection for him.
Plokhoi fired a flare pistol into the air. When the green light struck, everyone quit shooting. Katya gazed into the rent darkness of the besieged cars. Nothing came from them, no light or sound, not even a creak. They were dead, when seconds before they’d been steaming past, headed out of Russia. Now they would stay. The only noise left to the night was the locomotive sighing, sounding sad for this carnage. Katya stepped forward, past Plokhoi, to do her job. She was joined by Ivan, Josef, and Leonid.
The rest of the partisans receded into the trees without a word. This massacre required nothing more from them. The three machine-guns were lifted off their tripods and hauled back. Plokhoi held his ground, standing over the cooling weapon at his feet.
‘You’ve got five minutes.’
Josef answered, ‘Yes, sir,’ into the darkness feathering around the partisan leader.
Katya slipped her hand under Leonid’s elbow. ‘You shouldn’t be here, Leonya. It’s too soon.’
‘Shit,’ he grunted, leaning on her arm to keep up. ‘So this is what fighting on your feet is like. No wonder we became pilots.’ A rifle hung in his free hand. She’d never seen him carry a gun before.
Katya hurried Leonid as much as his healing injuries allowed over the last of the open ground. Ivan and Josef went ahead, reaching the first of the passenger cars. Josef peeked inside through the sieve that was made of the roof, then moved to the second fallen car. When Katya and Leonid caught up at the third car, Ivan had boosted Josef over the perforated roof onto the tilted side. The old man walked along the row of blasted-out windows, peering down
into the shambles inside, gripping a ready pistol. Katya gaped at the number of holes in the car, amazed that the remaining metal did not buckle under his weight.
‘Alright,’ Josef said to the three of them waiting. ‘This one will do.’
With that, he disappeared, lowering himself into the bowels of the car. Katya would not let herself imagine what he landed on, what he walked among.
Josef’s voice strained through the perforations in the roof.
‘Someone get up on top. Let’s go!’
Ivan pulled from his ever-present backpack four muslin sacks. He tossed them to Leonid, then moved close to the car. He linked the fingers of both hands to make a step.
‘Up, Witch,’ the big soldier said to her.
Katya jerked back at the notion. ‘Me? No. Ivan, you go. We’ll stay down here. No.’
‘And who’s going to give me a boost? You? Maybe Lumanov? Come on. Up.’
Last Citadel Page 51
