The Young Lions Part 55

"What?"

"I have remembered our little dinner party again and again. '40?'41?"

"'40."

"I wore a white dress. You looked very handsome. Tall, straight, intelligent, conquering, s.h.i.+ning in your uniform, the young G.o.d of mechanized warfare." She chuckled.

"You are making fun of me again," Christian said. "It is not pleasant."

"I was very much impressed with you." She waved her hand, as though to stop a contradiction that Christian had no idea of voicing. "Honestly, I was. I was very cold to you, wasn't I?" Again the small, remembering chuckle. "You have no idea how difficult it was for me to manage it. I am far from impervious, Sergeant, to the attractions of young men. And you were so beautiful, Sergeant ..." The sleepy, hypnotic voice whispering musically in the darkened, civilized room, seemed remote, unreal. "So ripe with conquest, so arrogant, so beautiful. It took all my enormous powers of self-control. You are less arrogant, now, aren't you, Sergeant?"

"Yes," said Christian, feeling himself between sleeping and waking, rhythmically adrift on a soft, perfumed, subtly dangerous tide. "Not arrogant at all any more."

"You're very tired now," the woman murmured. "A little gray. And I noticed that you limp a bit, too. In '40 it did not seem you could ever grow tired. You might die, then, I thought, in one glorious burst of fire, but never weary, never ... You are very different now, Sergeant, very different. By ordinary standards, one would never say you were beautiful now, with your limp and your graying hair and your thin face ... But I'm going to tell you something, Sergeant. I am a woman of peculiar tastes. Your uniform is no longer s.h.i.+ning. Your face is gray. No one would ever believe that there is a resemblance in you to the young G.o.d of mechanized warfare ..." A final hint of soft laughter echoed in her voice. "But I find you much more attractive tonight, Sergeant, infinitely more ..."

She stopped speaking, her opium-like voice dying among the shadows of the cus.h.i.+oned couch.

Christian stood up. He went over and stared at her for a moment. She looked up at him, her eyes wide, smiling with candor.

He knelt swiftly and kissed her.

He lay beside her in the dark bed. The curtains on the window were open, blowing gently in the summer night wind. A pale silvery wash of moonlight draped and made soft the outlines of the bureau, the vanity table, the chairs with his clothes thrown over them.

It had been a pa.s.sionate, knowing, drowning experience, a sensual milestone in his journey among women, an unreticent flood of desire which had swept away all the hours of flight, all memory of the smells of the broken ambulance convoy, all memory of the marching, the dying French boy, the hateful bicycle, the sandy-eyed groping retreat along the crowded roads in the little stolen automobile. All war had vanished here in the soft bed and the moonlit room. For the first time since his arrival in France so many years ago, and so late in the game, Christian realized, the promise which he had once believed in and finally forgotten, the promise of magnificent and accomplished women, had been fulfilled.

The German-hater ... He grinned and turned his head. Her hair rumbled in a dark, fragrant ma.s.s on the pillow, Franoise was lying beside him, touching his skin lightly with the tips of her fingers, her eyes once more mysterious in the wavering pale light.

She smiled slowly. "See," she said, "you weren't so terribly tired, after all, were you?"

They chuckled together. He moved his head and kissed the smooth, silvery sheet of skin where her throat joined her shoulder, drowsily submerged in the mingled textures of skin and hair, swimming hazily in the living double fragrance of hair and skin.

"There is something to be said," Franoise whispered, "for all retreats."

Through the open window came the sound of soldiers marching, hobnails making a remote military rhythmic clatter, pleasant and meaningless heard this way in a hidden room through the tangled perfumed strands of his mistress' hair.

"I knew it, as soon as I saw you," Franoise said. "The first time, long ago, that it could be like this. Formidable. I could tell."

"Why did you wait so long?" Christian pulled back gently, turning, looking up at the pattern the moonlight, reflected from a mirror, made on the ceiling. "G.o.d, the time we've wasted. Why didn't you do this then?"

"I was not making love to Germans, then," Franoise said coolly. "I did not think it was admirable to surrender everything in the country to the conqueror. You may not believe this, and I don't care whether you do or not, but you are the first German I have permitted to touch me."

"I believe you," Christian said. And he did, because whatever else her faults might be, dishonesty was certainly not one of them.

"Don't think it was easy," Franoise said. "I am not a nun."

"Oh, no," said Christian gravely. "I will put that in writing." Franoise did not laugh. "You were not the only one," she said. "So many magnificent young men, such a pleasant variety of young men ... But, not one of them, not one ... The conquerors did not get anything ... Not until tonight ..."

Christian hesitated, vaguely troubled. "Why," he asked, "why have you changed now?"

"Oh, it's all right now." Franoise laughed, a sly, sleepy, satisfied, womanly laugh. "It's perfectly all right now. You're not a conqueror any more, darling, you're a refugee ..." She twisted over to him and kissed him. "Now," she said, "it is time to sleep...."

She moved over to her side of the bed. Lying flat on her back, with her arms chastely at her side, her long body sweepingly outlined under the white blur of the sheet, she dropped off to slumber. Her breath came in an even, healthy rhythm in the quiet room.

Christian did not sleep. He lay uncomfortably, with growing rigidity, listening to the breathing of the woman beside him, staring at the moon and mirror-flecked ceiling. Outside, there was the noise of the hobnailed patrol again, increasing and receding on the silent pavement. It did not sound remote any more, or pleasant, or meaningless.

Refugee, Christian remembered, and remembered the low, mocking laugh that accompanied it. He turned his head a little and looked at Franoise. Even as she slept, he imagined seeing a tiny, superior, victorious smile at the corner of the long, pa.s.sionate mouth. Christian Diestl, the non-conquering refugee, finally given the franchise of the Parisienne's bed. The French, he remembered, they will beat us all yet. And, what's worse, they know it.

With growing rage, staring at the long, beautiful face on the pillow beside him, he felt used, seduced, and for what an ironic and superior purpose! And Brandt, drunk and hopeful and exhausted in the next room, caught by another trap, with the trademark, "Made in France," also on it.

Lying there he began to hate Brandt for being so willingly trapped. Christian thought of all the men he had touched and who had died. Hardenburg, Kraus, Behr, the brave, hopeless little Frenchman on the road to Paris, the boy on the bicycle, the farmer in the town-hall cellar next to the open yellow coffin, the men in his platoon in Normandy, the American firing up, half-naked and crazily courageous, from the mined bridge in Italy. It is unjust, he thought, for the soft ones to survive where the hard ones die. Brandt, with his civilian cunning, luxurious in the silk Parisian bed, was a sick rebuke to them all. There were too many men, as it was, who knew on which doors to knock and what to say when they were opened. The good had fallen, should the weak now luxuriate? Death was the best cure for luxury, and easily applied. Better friends than Brandt had. died beside him for four years; should Brandt be left alive to suck on Hardenburg's bones? The end justifies the means-and after the geometric slaughter, was the end to be Civilian Brandt, after three or four easy months in an American stockade, returning to his soft French wife, painting his silly, piddling pictures, apologizing for the next twenty years to the victors for the hard, dead men he had betrayed? Death had been in Christian's touch from the beginning-now, at the end, out of a sentimental notion of friends.h.i.+p, was he to spare only the least deserving? Was that all he had learned in four years of killing?

Suddenly it was intolerable to think of Brandt snoring softly in the next room, intolerable for himself to remain in bed next to the handsome woman who had used him so comfortably and mercilessly. He slid noiselessly onto the floor and walked barefooted and naked over to the window. He stared out over the roofs of the sleeping city, the chimneys s.h.i.+ning under the moon, the pale streets winding away narrowly with their memories of other centuries, the river s.h.i.+ning under its bridges in the distance. He could hear the patrol from the window, faint and brave across the still dark air, and he got a glimpse of it as it crossed an intersection. Five men walking deliberately and cautiously down the night-time streets of the enemy, vulnerable, stolid, pathetic, friends ...

Swiftly and soundlessly, Christian dressed himself. Franoise stirred once, threw her arm out languidly toward the other side of the bed, but she did not awake. Her arm looked white and snakelike stretched into the warm emptiness beside her.

With his boots in his hand, Christian padded over to the door. He opened the door gently, without noise. Standing there, he Jooked back for a last moment. Franoise was lying as he had left her, one arm extended in dreamlike satiety and invitation to her conquered lover. On her face Christian imagined he saw a new, satisfied smile of sensuality and victory.

Christian stole through the door and closed it softly behind him.

Fifteen minutes later he was standing before the desk of a Colonel in the SS. In the sleeping city, the SS offices did not sleep. The rooms were brilliantly lighted, men came and went in an endless bustle, there was the clatter of typewriters and teletype machines, and it had the unreal, hectic air of a factory going full blast during an overtime night-s.h.i.+ft.

The Colonel behind the desk was wide awake. He was short and he wore heavy horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, but there was no air of clerkishness about him. He had a thin gash for a mouth, and his magnified pale eyes were coldly probing behind their gla.s.ses. He held himself like a weapon always in readiness to strike.

"Very good, Sergeant," the Colonel was saying. "You will go with Lieutenant von Schlain and point out the house and identify the deserter and the women who are hiding him."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"You are right in supposing that your organization no longer exists as a military unit," the Colonel said dispa.s.sionately. "It was overrun and destroyed five days ago. You have displayed considerable courage and ingenuity in saving yourself ..." Christian could not tell whether the Colonel was being ironic or not, and he felt a twinge of uneasiness. The Colonel, he realized, made a technique out of making other people uneasy, but there was always the chance this was something special. "I shall have orders made out for you," the Colonel went on, his eyes glinting behind the thick lenses, "to be returned to Germany for a short leave, and a.s.signed to a new unit there. In a very short time, Sergeant," the Colonel said, without expression in his voice, "we will need men like you on the soil of the Fatherland. That is all. Heil Hitler."

Christian saluted and went out of the room with Lieutenant von Schlain, who also wore gla.s.ses.

In the small car with Lieutenant von Schlain, which preceeded the open truck with the soldiers, Christian asked, "What will happen to him?"

"Oh," said von Schlain, yawning, taking off his gla.s.ses, "we'll shoot him tomorrow. We shoot a dozen deserters a day, and now, with the retreat, business will be better than ever." He put his gla.s.ses back and peered out. "Is this the street?"

"This is the street," Christian said. "Stop here."

The small car stopped in front of the well-remembered door. The truck clanged to a halt behind it and the soldiers jumped out.

"No need for you to go up with us," von Schlain said. "Might make it unpleasant. Just tell me which floor and which door and I'll handle it in no time."

"Top floor," said Christian, "the first door to the right of the stairway."

"Good," said von Schlain. He had a lordly, disdainful way of speaking, as though he felt that the Army was making poor use of his great talents, and he wished the world to understand that immediately. He gestured languidly to the four soldiers who had come in the truck, and went up the steps and rang the bell very loudly.

Standing on the curb, leaning against the car in which he had come from SS Headquarters, Christian could hear the bell wailing mournfully away in the concierge's quarters deep in the sleeping fastnesses of the house. Von Schlain never took his finger off the bell, and the ringing persisted in a hollow, nervous crescendo. Christian lit a cigarette and pulled at it hard. They'll hear it upstairs, he thought. That von Schlain is an idiot.

Finally there was a clanking at the door and Christian heard the irritable, sleepy voice of the concierge. Von Schlain barked at her in rapid French and the door swung open. Von Schlain and the four soldiers went in and the door closed behind them.

Christian paced slowly up and down alongside the car, puffing on the cigarette. Dawn was beginning to break and a pearly light, mingled with secret blues and silvery lavenders, was drifting across the streets and buildings of Paris. It was very beautiful and Christian hated it. Soon, that day perhaps, he would leave Paris, and probably never see it again in his whole life, and he was glad. Leave it to the French, to the supple, cheating, everlastingly victorious French ... He was well rid of it. It looked like a fair meadow and it turned out to be slippery swampland. It seemed full of beauty and promise and it turned out to be a sordid trap, well-baited and fatal to a man's dignity and honor. Deceptively soft, it blunted all weapons that attacked it. Deceptively gay, it lured its conquerors into a bottomless melancholy. Long ago, the Medical Corps had been right. The cynical men of science had supplied the Army with the only proper equipment for the conquest of Paris ... three tubes of Salvarsan ...

The door was flung open and Brandt, with a civilian coat thrown over pajamas, came out between two soldiers. Right after him came Franoise and Simone, in robes and slippers. Simone was sobbing, in a childish, strangled, tearing convulsion, but Franoise looked out at the soldiers with calm derision.

Christian stared at Brandt, who looked painfully back at him in the half-light. There was no expression on Brandt's face, s.n.a.t.c.hed out of its deep, secure sleep, only dull exhaustion. Christian hated the lined, over-delicate, compromising, losing face. Why, he thought with surprise, he doesn't even look like a German!

"That's the man," Christian said to von Schlain, "and those're the two women."

The soldiers pushed Brandt up into the truck, and rather gently lifted Simone, now lost in a tangled wet marsh of tears. Helplessly, Simone, once she was in the truck, stretched out her hand toward Brandt. Christian despised Brandt for the soft, tragic way in which, without shame, in front of the comrades he would have deserted, he put out his hand to take Simone's and carry it up to his cheek.

Franoise refused to allow the soldiers to help her climb into the truck. She stared for a moment with harsh intensity at Christian, then shook her head gently in a gesture of numb bewilderment, and climbed heavily up by herself.

There, Christian thought, watching her, there, you see, it is not all over yet. Even now, there are still some victories to be won- The truck started down the street. Christian got into the small car with Lieutenant von Schlain and followed it through the lavender streets of dawning Paris toward SS Headquarters.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

THERE WAS something wrong about the town. There were no flags hanging out of the windows, as there had been in all the towns along the way from Coutances. There were no improvised signs welcoming the Americans, and two Frenchmen who saw the jeep ducked into houses when Michael called to them.

"Stop the jeep," Michael said to Stellevato. "There's something fishy here."

They were on the outskirts of the town, at a wide intersection of roads. The roads, stretching bleakly away in the gray morning, were cold and empty. There was no movement to be seen anywhere, just the shuttered windows of the stone houses, and the vacant roads with nothing stirring on them. After the crowded month, in which almost every road in France had seemed to be jammed with tanks and half-tracks and gasoline trucks and artillery pieces and marching men, in which every town had been crowded with cheering Frenchmen and women in their brightest clothes, waving flags hidden through all the years of the Occupation, and singing the Ma.r.s.eillaise, there was something threatening and baleful about the dead silence around them.

"What's the matter, Bo?" Keane said from the back seat. "Did we get on the wrong train?"

"I don't know," Michael said, annoyed at Keane. Pavone had told him to pick up Keane three days ago and bring him along, and Keane had spent the three days in mournful chatter about how timidly the war was being run, and how his wife kept writing him that the money she was getting was not enough to keep a family alive with prices going up the way they were back home. By now, the prices of chopped meat, b.u.t.ter, bread and children's shoes were indelibly engraved in Michael's brain, thanks to Keane. In 1970, if somebody asks me how much hamburger cost in the summer of 1944, Michael thought irritably, I'll answer, sixty-five cents a pound, without thinking for a second.

He got out the map and opened it on his knees. Behind him he heard Keane snapping the safety off his carbine. A cowboy, Michael thought, staring at the map, a brainless, bloodthirsty cowboy ...

Stellevato, slouched in the front seat beside him, smoking a cigarette, his helmet tipped far back on his head, said, "Do you know what I could use now? One bottle of wine and one French dame." Stellevato was either too young, too brave, or too stupid to be affected by the autumnal, dangerous morning, and by the unusual, unliberated aspect of the buildings in front of them.

"This is the place, all right," Michael said, "but it certainly doesn't look good to me." Four days before, Pavone had sent him back to Twelfth Army Group with a bagful of reports on a dozen towns they had inspected, reports on the public-utility situations, the food reserves, the number of denunciations of the inc.u.mbent civil officials, that had been made by the local people. After that, he had ordered Michael to report back to him at the Infantry Division's Headquarters, but the G3 there had told Michael that Pavone had left the day before, leaving instructions for Michael to meet him in this town the next morning. A combined armored and mechanized task force was to have reached the town by ten hundred hours and Pavone was to be with them.

It was eleven o'clock now, and aside from a small sign that read "Water Point," in English, with an arrow, there was no hint that any Americans had been here since 1919.

"Come on, Bo," Keane said. "What're we waiting for? I want to see Paris."

"We don't have Paris," Michael said, putting the map away, and trying to make some sense out of the empty streets before him.

"I heard over the BBC this morning," Keane said, "that the Germans've asked for an armistice in Paris."

"Well, they haven't asked me," Michael said, sorry that Pavone wasn't with him at this moment to take on the burden of responsibility. The last three days had been pleasant, riding around the celebrating French countryside as commander of his own movements, with no one to order him about But there was no celebrating going on here this morning, that was certain, and he had an uneasy sensation that if he guessed wrong in the next fifteen minutes, they might all be dead by noon.

"The h.e.l.l with it." Michael nudged Stellevato. "Let's see what's happening at the Water Point."

Stellevato started the jeep and they went slowly down a side street toward a bridge they could see in the distance, crossing a small stream. There was another sign there, and a big canvas tank and pumping apparatus. For a moment, Michael thought that the Water Point, along with the rest of the town, was deserted, but he saw a helmet sticking cautiously up from a foxhole covered with branches.

"We heard the motor," said the soldier under the helmet. He was pale and weary-eyed, young and, as far as Michael could tell, frightened. Another soldier stood up next to him and came over to the jeep.

"What's going on here?" Michael asked.

"You tell us," said the first soldier.

"Did a task force go through here at ten o'clock this morning?"

"Nothing's been through here," the second soldier volunteered. He was a pudgy little man, nearly forty, who needed a shave badly, and he spoke with a hint of a Swedish singsong in his voice. "Fourth Armored Headquarters went through last night and dropped us off here and turned south. Since then it's been mighty lonesome. There was some shooting near dawn from the middle of the town ..."

"What was it?" Michael asked.

"Don't ask me, Brother," said the pudgy man. "They put me here to pump water out of this creek, not conduct private investigations. These woods're full of Krauts and they shoot the Frogs and the Frogs shoot them. Me, I'm waiting for reinforcements."

"Let's go into the middle of the town and look around," Keane said eagerly.

"Will you' shut up?" Michael swung around and spoke as sharply as he could to Keane. Keane, behind his thick gla.s.ses, grinned unhappily.

"Me and my buddy here," the pudgy soldier said, "have been debating whether maybe we ought to pull out altogether. We ain't doing anybody any good sitting here like ducks on a pond. A Frog came by this morning, he spoke some English, and he said there was 800 Krauts with three tanks on the other side of town, and they was going to come in here and take the town some time this morning."

"Happy days," Michael said. That was why there had been no flags.

"Eight hundred Krauts," Stellevato said. "Let's go home."

"Do you think it's safe here?" the pale-faced young soldier asked Michael.

"Just like your own living room," said Michael. "How the h.e.l.l would I know?"

"I was just asking a question," the young soldier said reproachfully.

"I don't like it," said the man with the Swedish accent, peering down the street. "I don't like it one bit. They got no right leaving us like this, all by ourselves, sitting next to this G.o.dd.a.m.n creek."

"Nikki," Michael said to Stellevato. "Turn the jeep around and leave it on the road, so we can get away from here fast if we have to."

"What's the matter?" Keane asked, leaning toward Michael. "Got your wind up?"

"Listen, General Patton," Michael said, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice, "when we need a hero, we'll call on you. Nikki, turn that jeep around."

"I wish I was home," Stellevato said. But he got into the jeep and turned it around. He unhooked his tommygun from under the winds.h.i.+eld and blew vaguely on it. It was coated with dust.

"What're we going to do, Bo?" Keane asked. His big blotched hands moved eagerly on his carbine. Michael looked at him with distaste. Is it possible, Michael thought, that his brother won the Congressional Medal of Honor out of sheer stupidity?

"We're going to sit ourselves down here for awhile," Michael said, "and wait."

"For what?" Keane demanded.

"For Colonel Pavone."