“Father Picard,” Beckmann said. “Your hat.”
“My what?” What was a hat? The word seemed familiar. Hat? Hat?
Standartenführer Conrad Beckmann bent down, picked up the shapeless black hat, and brought it over to the steps. He handed it to Kelly. “You twist, tear, and rumple it so fiercely, Father. I hope we have not made you nervous?” He smiled.
Was it just an ordinary smile? Kelly wondered. Or was there something sinister behind it? Had Beckmann become suspicious?
“Nervous?” Kelly asked. “Oh, not me.” He looked at the ruined hat in his hands. “I twist it up because — well, because it is only a hat. It is only the hat which I have worn on my head for years. It cannot hurt me no matter how much I twist it up.” He gripped the lump of felt in both hands and wrenched it violently. He grinned weakly at Beckmann. “You see? I twist it, but it cannot hurt me. Just like the chair, eh?” He laughed nervously. Babbling, babbling…
“Goodnight, Father,” Beckmann said.
“Goodnight, sir. Goodnight, General Rotenhausen.” He turned and fairly ran up the steps to the second floor, past the house altar, down the short corridor, and into his room, closing the door behind.
“Why are priests all such idiots?” Beckmann asked Rotenhausen, as the door closed overhead.
In his room, Kelly collapsed on the mattress and hugged himself. He was shaking so badly that the brass bed vibrated under him like a drumhead. His hands were so cold he could feel the chilly outline of his fingers through his suit coat and clerical vest. Yet he was slimy with perspiration.
Don't pray, don't pray, don't pray, he told himself. He was so terrified that he was on the brink of prayer, and he knew that weakness would be the end of him. He hugged himself until the tremors gradually seeped away.
The room was blacker than Danny Dew. The sound of booted feet, foreign voices, and banging pans echoed up from downstairs, but this room itself was quiet. In a while, the darkness and silence soothed Kelly and restored a bit of his self-confidence.
Thus far, the ruse was working. Thanks to an unknown and unforeseeable personal clash between Beckmann and Rotenhausen, and thanks to their interservice rivalry, and thanks also to the Third Reich's favored treatment of the Catholic Church, nothing would be searched. The bulk of the convoy would not even spend the night in St. Ignatius, but would bivouac along the highway to the east. The long night was still ahead, and the crossing of the bridge in the morning, but it was beginning to look as if there were a good chance…
No! that was the wrong way to think. Optimism was foolish. It was dangerous at best. At worst: deadly. Don't hatch your chickens before they're counted, he told himself. And don't put all their baskets in one egg. The thing was not to hope, but to let the fairy tale carry you. Drift along, play the role, hang on.
Fifteen minutes after he had flopped on the bed with a severe case of the shakes, Kelly heard boots echo on the stairs. The officers' aides carried up two bathtubs and put them in the large bedrooms. A minute later, the first of the boiling water was brought up in heavy pails, with the general and the colonel directing their subordinates. Kelly heard water splashing. More orders in German. The sound of booted feet thumping down the stairs. Boots coming back up again. More water. More orders given. Two young aides thumping down the steps again. And then right back up, clump-clump-clump, this time with buckets of cold water to temper the baths.
Finally, the only sound on the second floor was a faint musical splashing as the men soaped and rinsed in the privacy of their rooms, skinning off the film of dust that coated them after a long day on the road. The splashing slowly increased in volume, as if the officers were becoming intoxicated with cleanliness and were jumping about in drunken exuberance, then gradually began to decrease in volume, and faded out altogether. The second floor was silent. Downstairs, two German voices were raised in conversation as Beckmann's aides prepared for bed in the room by the kitchen. In a few seconds, even that noise was stilled.
Kelly waited.
Ten minutes later, when neither Beckmann nor Rotenhausen had made a sound since abandoning their tubs, the major was confident that they had retired for the night. They would both be sleeping contentedly. They would pose no real threat until dawn. Until the convoy began moving through St. Ignatius and across the bridge, Beckmann and Rotenhausen were the least of Kelly's worries.
The most of his worries, until the sun rose, were his own men. He did not trust them for a minute. They were crazy. You could not trust lunatics. In the hours before dawn, as the tensions grew more severe, one of those men would do something idiotic, childish, dangerous, and perhaps deadly. Instead of staying in his assigned building where he could not get into trouble, one of those men— maybe dozens of them — would venture out under the misapprehension that he was safer beyond the limitations imposed by four walls. When that happened, Major Kelly wanted to be there to salvage the hoax — and their lives. His duty, then, was not to remain in the rectory and listen to the officers snoring their heads off. Instead, he had to be outside in the fake town, troubleshooting.
Careful not to make a sound, Kelly got off the feather mattress. His back ached from the base of his spine to his neck, and he was glad he did not have to sleep in a bed with so little support. If this madman Beckmann discovered the hoax, he would probably make Kelly sleep on a bed like this for several days and then shoot his head off.
When he was certain no one had heard the readjustment of the goose and chicken feathers inside the coarse mattress case, Kelly walked quietly to the room's only window, which was discernible against the dark wall despite the blackout blind that was taped to the window frame. He peeled the tape away. He lifted the blind without rattling it, and slid noiselessly underneath.
Beyond the glass, at the back of the rectory, lay a quiet French religious community: small houses, a dusty street, a nunnery, a churchyard… Kelly smiled, fond of his creation.
The window was well greased. It slid up with only a faint rasp of wood on wood. Slight though it was, that whispered reluctance seemed like a scream on the calm night air.
Kelly froze, holding up the bottom half of the window, listening for the thud of jackboots in the hall outside his room.
Two minutes later, when no one had stirred, Kelly squeezed through the window and stepped onto the board-shingled roof over the back porch. He eased the window down, not quite closing it. Stepping softly to the corner of the roof where a rose-vine lattice had been built to serve as his ladder, he climbed down to the ground.
He crouched at the edge of the porch. The night wind chilled the back of his neck as he surveyed the rear lawn.
He was alone.
Aware that the rectory windows were covered by blackout blinds, convinced that the night was dark enough to hide him from any German soldier patrolling the streets, Kelly ran to the fence that marked the, southern perimeter of the rectory property. A three-foot section of this shoulder-high barrier served as a hidden door. Kelly found the key panel, pressed on it, walked through. On the other side, he pushed the boards back into place and winced at the protracted squeak they made.
He was now on the southern half of the block. Four fake houses, a shrine to the Virgin, four outhouses, and one elm tree offered hiding places. He crept eastward along the fence, then left it for the less promising shelter of the second in a row of three outhouses. He pressed his back against the rough wall of the tiny building and tried to melt back into the purple-black shadows.