The third block of A, the first south of the bridge road, was faced by two one-story houses on the west. Beneath the first of these was the hospital bunker in which Tooley, Kowalski, Liverwright, and Emil Hagendorf would pass the tense night. Hagendorf would pass the tense night as a prisoner. They had purchased a great deal of wine from Maurice to keep Hagendorf drunk and docile.
On the other side of the block was the churchyard. It was dark and quiet. Kelly could see half a dozen rounded tombstones and the vague outlines of others lying in the deeper shadows. Altogether, Maurice had provided forty-five grave markers which he had borrowed from church and family plots in and around Eisenhower. These had all been set in fresh concrete, over nonexistent graves. More than anything else that had been done, these gave the town a past, an illusion of age and endurance. When Kelly directed the flashlight beam in among them, the sandstone and granite markers gleamed and rose up in chalky skirts from the pools of blue-black shadows on the ground.
The final block of A Street, the southwest corner of the town, held platform houses, sheds, and outhouses. Kelly played his light back there, and he suddenly thought that he and Beame seemed like two watchmen examining a movie lot on their late rounds. They went no farther south.
Z Street was the third east-west lane, south of and parallel to the bridge road and the northernmost Y Street. Z was two blocks long, like Y. On its south side rose a school for normal and deaf-mute children, a stone well, several platform houses built together over what had once been the unit's main bunker. On the north side of Z, the churchyard occupied the first block. The second block contained an open-air shrine to the Virgin Mary, complete with statue and encircling flagstone walkway. Then came three single-story dwellings, all shabby, all with broken-down porches, one with a slightly sagging roof.
“I've been thinking about Blade,” Beame said, stopping in the middle of the street. “About his not being all jake. Do you think his being involved in the black market has anything to do with our being sent here?”
Kelly stopped and turned. “Blade's in the black market? How do you know?”
“I don't know,” the lieutenant said. “But when we were in Britain waiting for D-Day, I heard rumors. I got friendly with junior officers on Blade's staff.”
“And they said he dealt in the black market?”
“Implied. They implied it.”
Kelly thought about that a moment, then shrugged. “I didn't think Blade was smart enough to play that game. But even if he is, what could that have to do with our being sent here?”
“Nothing, I guess. It was just a thought.”
They turned from Z into B Street, into the only block they had not yet inspected. On their left was the churchyard and church. On the right was a one-story house with a ratty front lawn, a fence running eastward, and then the rectory and the rectory lawn.
“Back to Square One,” Kelly said.
Kelly was impressed with himself and his men, even if all of this had been for nothing, even if they were doomed. In little more than four days, they had constructed the shells of twenty-five single-story and three two-story houses. They had built one two-story house complete: the rectory. The thirty-foot convent walls had been nailed up, as had the high board fence that surrounded that whole block, and the convent's entrance foyer had been fully finished to provide a place for the German general to pay his respects if he should take it in his head to do so. The shells of two large schools and two nunneries had been thrown up. The church had been built in full, except for the bell tower, which had no stairs or bell… and except for the pews which had been borrowed from a country church near Eisenhower. The forty-by-twenty-foot town store had been finished inside and out. They had built another house which Hagendorf had bulldozed to the ground. In addition, they had put up three stone wells, eighteen sheds, twenty-eight outhouses… There were three stables tucked near the woods, horses in each. In some ways, of course, the town was atypical of a French country village. There were no barns in sight, for one thing. And there were no structures made completely of stone. But this was, after all, supposed to be mainly a Catholic retreat, a church facility; the Germans could not expect it to look like just any other town. All in all, the accomplishment was enormous, and the patina of reality just thick enough to hoax the Germans. Though, naturally, the Germans would not be hoaxed. They would see through it sometime before dawn. They would kill everyone. Even though he knew he was dead, Major Kelly, alias Father Picard, was impressed with himself and his men.
“It's perfect,” Beame said.
“So long as no one goes inside an unfinished building. If anyone does—”
He stopped in midsentence as a sixteen-year-old French boy, Maurice's nephew, roared out of the night on a stolen German motorcycle. The boy came down the bridge road from the east, past the fake houses, his hair streaming in the wind. He had been standing watch on the road, and now there was no doubt what he was shouting above the cycle's chattering engine. “They come! Germans! They come!”
Someone screamed in terror.
Only after the scream died away did Kelly realize it was his own. Get hold of yourself, he thought. It's a fairy tale. Face up to your role. There isn't anything else for you to do.
11
The German convoy's advance motorcycle escort shot out of the trees to the east, doing better than forty miles an hour, heading straight for Major Kelly and the people behind him. It slewed to the right in a puff of dust and gravel, turned broadside in the road, and came to a tire-scorching stop in a cloud of blue smoke. The young Wehrmacht soldier driving the cycle and the second man in the sidecar looked stupidly at each other, brows beetled under their pot helmets. They slowly examined the houses and the crowd of French villagers, priests, and nuns which filled the lane only twenty feet ahead.
Kelly almost began to pray, cracked his knuckles instead.
A few of Kelly's people waved. Most remained still and silent, uncommitted to this violent presence.
The soldier in the sidecar pulled a map from between his legs, unfolded it in the light of a hand torch which the driver held for him. A few lanterns burned by the church and rectory, but not enough to help the two Germans. The soldier traced their route with one thick finger on the map, talking to the cyclist as he did so. The driver nodded impatiently and pointed to the crowd in front of them as if to say that the senses could not be denied and the map, therefore, must be all wrong. There was a town by the river, despite what the cartographers had drawn.
We're dead, Kelly thought. One of them will be unable to believe the map makers were wrong. That's the German way. Believe the printed word before you believe what the eye shows…
Suddenly, behind the motorcycle, dwarfing it and the houses on the north side of the bridge road, a Panzer jerked forward from the deep forest shadows like a prehistoric sawtoothed reptile smashing its way out of an egg. The wicked black muzzle hole came first, a round mouth in the vaguely illuminated neck of the barrel, a death-spitting orifice that riveted every man's eye. Then came the churning treads, great clattering, banging bands of pitted, bluntly bladed steel that ripped up the broken macadam roadbed and tossed it out behind in fist-sized chunks. Heavy, downsloped tread fenders, thickly coated with mud, shielded most of the tracks from sight but did nothing to soften the terrifying sound of them. The brutally insistent parallel treads snapped and crunched the ground beneath them as a beast might grind up a man's fragile bones in its teeth. Abruptly, the entire tank hove into view: an armadillolike bow with a dragon's middle and stern, scaly and muddy, covered with curious protuberances, green-gray, scarred. The side-hung head lamps had been fitted with blackout caps, permitting only a thin slot of light to lance out from the bottom half of the lenses; the effect was that of a dragon with its eyes slitted while cautiously stalking prey.