Tuttle leaned across the steaming kettle. “I don't like doing this,” he whispered.
“We need Maurice's help,” Kelly whispered back at him. “Without it, we all die. These bastards have to be made to sign.”
“I know,” Tuttle said, looking back at the line of impatient men.
“Two more came across. Kasabian and Pike. You can treat them like you normally would,” Kelly said.
“But the others—”
“You know what to do with the others.”
Kelly got the rest of his breakfast and sat down at one of the crude tables. He toyed with his cereal, but his attention was riveted on the men in the breakfast line who had not cooperated in the matter of the credit contracts.
Private Armento was the tenth man in line, first of the troublemakers to reach Tuttle. The cook looked over Armento's shoulder, silently pleading with Kelly. The major turned his thumbs down. Reluctantly, Tuttle “misjudged” the position of Armento's plate and poured a ladle of hot cereal all over his hands.
Quite a lot of commotion followed.
Then, Private Aaron Lange, another holdout who was immediately behind Armento, got the hot-cereal treatment when he held out his tin. When he and Armento finished dancing around the room and blowing on their reddened fingers, they came over to Major Kelly and signed their credit contracts.
“I'm glad you men have finally seen where your best interests lie,” Kelly told them, putting their contracts with the others that had been signed.
All morning, one by one, the holdouts began to see the same light which Armento and Lange had seen. Private Garnett put his signature on his contract after he tripped and fell with his second full mess tin. He had also tripped and fallen with the first. Private John Flounders signed up when, after waiting in the serving line for twenty minutes, he discovered that, curiously, Sergeant Tuttle ran out of hot cereal just before Flounders was to be given his. When the morning's work assignments were read and Private Paul Akers learned he had been assigned to that detail which would shovel out the old latrine ditch and carry the stinking contents into the woods, Akers came around to Kelly's way of thinking. Private Vinney, who was also assigned to the latrine job, lasted for less than five minutes before throwing away his shovel and signing up. And three other men stayed with it until they were accidentally bumped into that vile trench by two workmen who were trying to jostle past them with a heavy length of pine planking…
At 9:15 that same morning, Kelly went over to the hospital bunker and waved the completed forms at Lily Kain. “When they ask for their tents back, you can tell them we found a crate of bandage materials that we'd overlooked. Tell them we won't have to cut up their tents after all.”
“They signed?” she asked.
“All but Slade.”
“But will Maurice be willing to overlook Slade?”
“Sure,” Kelly said. “If I sign a second confession and guarantee to pay Slade's two hundred bucks, why should Maurice be upset?”
“You'd do that?” she asked.
“Do I have any choice?”
“I guess not.” She brightened, smiled, puffed out her wonderful chest. “Well! Now that this is settled, everything should run pretty smoothly.”
“No,” Kelly said. “This is only a reprieve. We have Maurice's help now, but that won't matter. Something worse will come up. We'll be delayed a few more minutes or hours. We can never get this finished in time. We're all doomed.”
In the next two hours, the race against time was begun in earnest. All over camp, projects were launched. Thanks to Angelli's ability to cross all language barriers, the Americans and the French worked fairly well together. Ditch-like foundations for the walls of the fake buildings were marked and cut. A few outhouses, were framed and erected. In the midst of all this, Danny Dew roared around the clearing on his virility symbol, scraping out the streets which Hagendorf had surveyed yesterday.
The demolition of the HQ building was quick and dangerous. Headquarters had to come down, because it was obviously a temporary structure and military in origin. It would not have fooled the Germans for a minute. Therefore, after breakfast, the shortwave radio and the furniture were moved out of HQ, and a crew of workmen dismantled the corrugated metal roof. An hour later, the roof was gone, and the walls began to fall, slamming the earth like a series of angrily closed doors, casting up obfuscating clouds of dust. Armed with hammers and pry-bars, goaded on by Major Kelly—"Faster, faster, faster, for Christ's sake!" — Maurice's laborers swarmed over the thin partitions. They separated metal from wood, tore one plank from the next, stacked the materials where they could later be used in the construction of the village.
The Frenchmen, Kelly thought, were like Eskimos stripping the carcass of a huge old walrus, leaving behind them nothing of value.
It was a pleasant thought, and he was still thinking it when Tooley came running over from the machinery shed waving his arms and shouting. “Major Kelly! Major Kelly, why did you put Hagendorf in the box, sir?”
“Hagendorf?” Kelly knew it was a bad idea to ask for an explanation. He sensed another crisis that would waste precious minutes. But he also knew that if he ran away, Tooley would only run after him. “Hagendorf? In the box?”
“Yes, sir. In the box, sir.”
“What box?”
“In the machinery shed, sir. Don't you remember which box you put him in?”
“I didn't put him in any box,” Kelly said, feeling not unlike a character in a Lewis Carroll fantasy.
Tooley wiped his broad face with one hand, pressed the hand on his shirt, and left a huge wet palm print. “We were clearing out the machinery shed so it can be knocked down. The last thing we came to was this big crate Sergeant Coombs has been meaning to convert into a tool chest for several weeks. The crate was supposed to be empty; but Hagendorf was inside. With maybe twenty bottles of wine. He's naked and drunk, and he insists you put him in the box.” While he talked, Tooley unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. His thick weight-lifter's torso was shiny with sweat and alive with muscles.
“I didn't put Hagendorf in the box,” Kelly said.
“We didn't force him out, because we didn't know why you put him there.”
“I didn't put him there.”
“We didn't want to interfere in whatever you were doing. We thought maybe you put Hagendorf in there to guard the box.”
“Hagendorf isn't guarding the box,” Kelly said, wiping sweat from his own face.
“That's what I said. I said you must have put him in the box for some other reason.” Tooley spat on the dry earth.
“I didn't put Hagendorf anywhere,” Kelly said.
“Hagendorf says you did.”
“Let's go talk to Emil about this,” Kelly said.
Thirty French men and women and a dozen of Kelly's men were clustered in the late morning sunshine outside the open machinery shed door. The noise and stench of perspiration were unendurable. Kelly and Tooley pushed through the crowd into the cool, dark, empty, and comparatively quiet interior which had been gutted for demolition. “Why aren't these people working?” Kelly asked.
Tooley shrugged. “They're Angelli's people, and they aren't worth a damn when he's not egging them on. Of course, he's up at the hospital bunker.”
Kelly stopped just inside the door. “Is Vito hurt?” He hoped not. Angelli was essential. No one could handle the Frenchmen like he could. Besides Maurice, he was their only real contact with the French.
“It's not that,” Tooley said. “He's okay. He's just up there romancing Nurse Pullit.”
“Romancing Nurse Pullit?” Kelly was not certain he had heard right.