Private Tooley shook his head admiringly. “You'd make a good pacifist. That was very clever. That puts an end to the Hagendorf crisis.”
Kelly looked down at the chalky, chubby man who was half-concealed by Lieutenant Beame. “Maybe not. If Hagendorf has gone over the edge — and if he hates me as much as he seems to, maybe he deliberately did a bad surveying job for the village. Maybe he sabotaged it.”
“Hagendorf wouldn't do that,” Tooley said.
“Hagendorf is crazy,” Kelly said, dropping the ruined syringe. It clinked when it hit the packed-earth floor. “He was driven crazy by his own sanity. Before he came into the Army, he was too sane for his own good. His sanity drove him out of his mind. He saw everything in blacks and whites. When it came time for him to test his philosophy, Hagendorf could either be wholly sane or wholly insane. He was already wholly sane. So he had to become wholly insane.” He looked at Tooley and Coombs and saw that they did not understand a word of it. They were looking at him as if he were wholly insane. “Hagendorf is a crazy wino,” Kelly said, simplifying it for them. “He'll do anything. I'll have to check up on the work he finished yesterday before we go on with too much more of the building.”
On his way out of the shed, Kelly looked at his watch. How much time had he wasted with Hagendorf? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Too much.
Suffering from a severe headache, traces of blood still crusted in his yellow hair, Lieutenant Beame went straight from the hospital bunker to the secluded knoll in the woods where he and Nathalie had secretly planned to have lunch together. He was very circumspect about leaving the camp, and he was sure no one saw him go. He crept cautiously through the woods, took a circuitous route to the knoll through blackberry brambles and treacherous ground vines.
Natalie was waiting for him.
But so was her father.
“You are scum!” Maurice said, advancing on Beame as the lieutenant backed off the knoll and into the trees again. “My daughter will not be brought to ruin by a quick-handed soldier. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Beame said, backing into an oak tree. “But—”
“She will be courted openly, not behind my back. And she will not be made a fool of by some carousing GI. Need I say more?” He loomed over Beame, his big belly perfect for intimidating anyone he could back against a wall.
“Father—” Nathalie began, behind the old man.
“Do not interrupt your father,” Maurice said, without turning back to her. He pushed at Beame with his belly, crushing the lieutenant against the oak.
“Sir,” Beame said, “you don't seem to realize—”
“I do not wish to become violent,” Maurice said. “But I can if I must.” As example, he clenched his fist and thumped Beame once, on top of the head, right on the spot where the bottle had broken. “Understand?”
Through tears, Beame said, “Uh… yeah. Yes, sir.”
Maurice turned away from him. “Come on, my dear,” he told the girl, in French. “And in the future you must respect your father more.”
Major Kelly ate lunch while riding around on the D-7 dozer with Danny Dew. He had to stand up, wedged between the open dash and the roll-bar behind Dew's chair— which was a tight fit and only crucial inches from the churning tread. That made for a messy lunch, but not merely because the dozer shimmied and bounced so much. It was messy chiefly because Kelly was eating a stewed-tomato sandwich.
“Is that a stewed-tomato sandwich?” Danny asked when Kelly climbed on the dozer, holding the oversized sandwich in one hand. Red juice and slimy seeds dripped from Kelly's fingers, ran down his wrist and under his cuff.
“Yeah,” Kelly said. “Because of my hair.” He bit the sandwich, and juice sprayed all over his face.
“A stewed-tomato sandwich is good for your hair?” Dew asked.
“No. It's not good for my hair. But it isn't bad, either. It's neutral. It's meat that's bad for hair growth, you see.”
“Meat?” Dew asked.
“Meat. So I eat vegetable sandwiches.” He took another bite. “Can we get going? I want to see the whole camp. I want to be certain that Hagendorf designed the streets the way I laid them out. I don't trust the crazy drunken bastard.”
Dew started the D-7, taking his eyes from Major Kelly's disgusting repast only with the greatest effort.
They roared away from the riverbank and circled the camp on the service road that edged the forest. Clouds of dust sprayed up behind them; and because the dozer could not proceed with any real speed, the dust often caught up with them, swept past, bringing temporary blindness and laying a soft, golden-brown patina over them, a sheath which darkened Kelly and lightened Danny Dew.
Already, Danny had finished most of the work on the streets. With the dozer's monstrous blade barely scraping the surface, he had smoothed the land which Kelly had charted and which Hagendorf had staked. He had plowed off four inches of topsoil, then rolled back and forth over the streets to compact and harden the well-aerated earth which lay beneath the sod. This made the fake village's streets lower than its houses, conveyed an impression of much use, years of wear.
“Looks pretty good, doesn't it?” Danny Dew shouted above the engine noise.
“Not good enough!” Kelly shouted.
“Looks like we're going to build a village in four days, doesn't it?”
“No,” Kelly said. “Never.”
The major was not the least bit pleased by any of the pleasant things he saw. The streets had been marked off just as he had planned them. All that remained to be done to them was the removal of the ridges of dirt which the plow had built up on both sides of the street, and the smoothing out of the dozer's tread imprints from the hard dry earth.
Already, half the convent's foundation was up: a low stone wall that was to be the base for the enormous building. Last night, there had been no stones here, just the shallow trench in which the wall would be erected. Now, two sides of the convent's square underpinning — each a-hundred-twenty feet long — were up, and the other two sections had been started at trench bottom. Well before the Germans arrived, the convent would stand complete, looming on the north side of the bridge road, in the heart of town. Ideally, the entire convent would be of stone. But they had neither the time nor the cement to put up anything so elaborate. As is was, the mortar between the fieldstones had been poorly portioned out; and the stones had been so hastily laid that, to the professional eye, they looked like the obvious short-term hodgepodge they were. Fortunately, none of the Germans would be architects. The size of the convent, the forbidding design, would convince them that it was as real inside as out. But inside, of course, there would be nothing at all. Except the big machines.
“We sure will fox them!” Danny Dew shouted, grinning, looking a little bit like Stepin Fetchit.
“Not for a minute,” Kelly said.
The dozer rumbled down the bridge road, moving slowly eastward.
Across the road from the convent, a work crew had dug sixteen postholes, filled them with concrete, and anchored one four-by-six pine beam in each pit. These thrust up in a rectangular pattern, rustic columns with nothing to support. They were joined at the ground by flanking beams to help brace them. This afternoon, perpendicular beams would be fitted at the top to support the floor of the second story. The walls would go up tomorrow, both exterior and interior, and the finishing touches could be applied even while the roof was going on. This was to be the only fully built structure in the church-oriented town, the only one with a second level inside as well as out, the only one that might fool a carpenter or architect — for it was, if they had any say in it, where the German commander would make his temporary headquarters for the bridge crossing. It was the rectory.