“Well sure. The nurse is attractive. Sooner or later, someone was bound to fall for her.”
“Fall for her?” He felt as if he were Tooley's echo.” Not that too!”
The pacifist did not seem to see anything strange in the Angelli-Pullit romance. “There's the box,” he said, pointing across the room. “Hadn't we better get Hagendorf out of it?”
The only thing remaining in the large, main room of the shed, besides Sergeant Coombs and Lieutenant Beame, was an unpainted crate near the far wall. It was eight feet long, four deep, and four wide. It looked like a natural pine coffin. Standing at the foot of it, Coombs might have been a mourner. A disgruntled and angry mourner. “Hagendorf won't get out of this box you put him in,” Coombs said, as Kelly approached.
“He's not in there to guard it,” Tooley told Coombs.
“Then why'd you put him in there?” Coombs asked Kelly.
“I didn't put him in there.” Kelly reached the crate and peered inside.
Hagendorf, the chief surveyor, was lying in the box on a bed of his own clothes, naked as the day he was born. If he had been born. Kelly was not sure about that. Naked, pale, chubby, Hagendorf looked more like something which had been hatched. “You put me in here,” he told Kelly.
Kelly looked at the two dozen wine bottles which surrounded the surveyor. More than half were empty. “You got wine from Maurice, and now you're drunk, Emil.”
“This is my coffin,” Hagendorf said. “You put me in it. You made me get out my theodolite and survey your crazy village. You're the one who gave me a glimpse of the order and purpose I once knew and can never know again.” Hagendorfs voice had grown quavery. Now, he started to cry. “You destroyed me. You put me in this coffin — you and no one else.”
“Get out of the box,” Kelly said. “It's heavy enough without you in it.”
“I'm dead,” Hagendorf said. “I can't get out.”
Kelly sighed, looked at the others. “Let's get him out of there.”
“No you don't!” Hagendorf screamed as they reached in for him. He spread his legs, braced his knees against the side of the box, his feet against the bottom. There was a supporting frame holding the sides of the crate together, and the surveyor gripped this with fingers like chitinous claws. Though Coombs pulled at his legs, Tooley at his left arm, Beame at his right arm, and Kelly at his head, all of them grunting and putting their backs into it, Hagendorf would not be moved. He was the most tenacious corpse they had ever seen.
“Look here, Emil,” Major Kelly said, letting go of Hagendorf's head and wiping the chief surveyor's spittle off his hand, “we don't have time to fool with you. The goddamned Panzers are coming, Emil. We have a whole town to build before they get here. This shed has to come down and fast. This site has to be made ready for another building. These walls have to be torn up so we can reuse the wood and metal. Now, you come out of that fucking box, or I won't be responsible for what happens to you.”
Hagendorf began to blubber again, and when he spoke his voice was, once more, the 78 rpm record played at an eternal 60 rpm. “I'm dead and rotting… What more can happen?” He held on to his coffin, his soft pudgy body now lumpy with muscles that had not been flexed near the surface of Hagendorf s body for as long as ten years.
Kelly picked up an empty wine bottle, and held it like a club. “Emil…”
“You destroyed me,” Hagendorf said, tears running down his face.
“No violence, please,” Tooley said, rubbing his hands together as he watched the scene leading inevitably to spilled blood.
“I'm sorry, Emil,” Kelly said. He swung the bottle at Hagendorf s head.
The surveyor jerked out of the way. The bottle missed him, shattered on the side of the crate.
“Hold him down,” Kelly told the others.
Coombs grabbed the surveyor's legs, while Beame stood across the box from Kelly and pressed down on Hagendorf s chest. Tooley wanted no part of it.
Kelly picked up another bottle and raised it over Hagendorf's head. “We haven't any time to waste, Emil. But I'll try to make this just a tap,” he said when he saw Hagendorf was watching him intently through a veil of tears.
Then he swung the bottle.
Hagendorf let go of the box, grabbed Beame and pulled him in as a shield. The bottle smashed on Beame's golden head, spraying glass and dark wine.
“Ugh,” Beame said, and passed out. Blood trickled out of his scalp.
“You killed Beame,” Tooley said, stunned, hugging himself.
“It's just a tiny cut,” Kelly said. “I didn't swing hard enough to kill him.”
Coombs was disgusted. “Now you've got two of them in there.”
Kelly considered the crate for a while. “Maybe we could get a bunch of men in here and carry the box out with Hagendorf still inside.”
“With Hagendorf and Beame inside,” Tooley said. He had stopped hugging himself, but he looked at Beame out of the corner of his eye as if he remained unconvinced that the lieutenant was alive.
Kelly saw that getting Beame out of the box was going to be every bit as difficult as getting Emil Hagendorf out of the box, because Hagendorf was holding tightly to Beame to shield himself from further violence. Kelly could almost hear the clatter of Panzer tread, louder by the second… “We'll get a dozen men—”
“No,” Coombs said. “If we lift that box and Hagendorf starts jumping up and down or rocking in it, we'll fall with it. Someone'll break a leg. Or worse.”
“Worse — like Beame,” Tooley said.
“Beame's okay,” Kelly said. He ignored the two of them and searched desperately for a solution. He could not leave the crate here and order the shed's demolition, for Hagendorf would probably be killed by collapsing walls. Major Kelly did not want to kill anyone. Petey Danielson had been enough… “I've got it!” he said, suddenly turning from the crate and crossing the musty room to the doorway where the workers stood in the sunlight and squinted curiously at him. He located one of his own men, Private Lyle Park, and spoke to him for a minute or two.
Park was a tall, angular Tennessean, all bone and gristle, with a surprisingly gentle face as fine as water-carved, sun-bleached sandstone. He nodded vigorously as Kelly talked, then turned and disappeared through the press of jabbering villagers.
“What's that cocksucking bastard up to now?” Coombs wanted to know.
“I've always sort of liked Fark,” Tooley said.
“Not Fark. Kelly.”
“Oh, you're right about him!” Hagendorf cried from inside the crate. He had pulled the unconscious lieutenant over him like a coverlet, and he peered up at Coombs from the hollow of Beame's right armpit. “Kelly's a bastard. He—”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Sergeant Coombs said.
A few minutes later, Private Park pushed back through the crowd and handed something to Kelly. The major took it, nodded, came back across the room. He walked straight up to the crate, holding a small object in one hand which was pressed flat against his thigh. He looked at Hagendorf who was still peeking at the world through the curious perspective of Beame's armpit. “Last chance.”
“You put me in here!” Hagendorf cried. “You did it!”
Kelly sighed. He picked up a wine bottle, raised it, faked a swing.
Hagendorf rolled the hapless lieutenant into the blow— and unwittingly bared one of his own pale, hammy, naked thighs.
Raising the object Fark had fetched for him and which Tooley and Coombs now saw to be a hypodermic syringe from the hospital, Kelly plunged it into the surveyor's thigh just as he checked the downswing of the empty bottle and spared the unconscious Beame another wound.
Hagendorf screamed, tried to throw off Beame. He scrabbled at the sides of the box, desperate to get up. The needle broke in his flesh. It dangled from his leg, focal point of a spreading circle of blood. In seconds, Hagendorf was fast asleep.