“That’s it,” he says. “Come to Johannes.”
He scans the street.
Too dark to see much.
Couldn’t bear to fit a modern night-vision scope to his vintage rifle.
Doesn’t actually believe there’s a problem—he’s very much playing a game. Lots of people shoot things around here; it’s just on the edge of farm country. He waits for a moment. Watches. Gets bored. Decides to go back downstairs and see about his hot dogs.
The light comes on.
He didn’t flip the switch.
Someone else.
“Hunh!” he says, reaching for the pistol, drops it.
He hops a little, as if he expects it to go off.
Like in Band of Brothers when the guy shot himself in the leg.
Two highly authentic-looking Soviet soldiers stand before him, one in a sapper’s steel breastplate. Both of them dirty and stinking of cigarettes. And gasoline? And lots and lots of sour sweat. One carries a Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle. The engineer a Tokarev pistol and a handheld bayonet.
A very sharp-looking bayonet dark from scrubbed-off rust.
Is that snow on their shoulders?
“Very funny,” he says, thinking at first it’s two guys from the Soviet team in his reenactor group. Then he’s not so sure.
He’s never seen these guys.
The one with the rifle looks rough.
Like he hasn’t been eating so well.
And like he’s shot people.
The one in the sapper’s plate looks around at the room, enjoying himself. Smiling beneath his walrusy mustache.
Something catches his eye.
“Shto eta?” he says.
Dawes doesn’t speak Russian, but the meaning is clear enough.
The man is tickling a poster with the edge of his bayonet.
What’s this?
John Dawes has a lot of posters, and they’ve been hanging so long he doesn’t much see them anymore. He sees this one now. The bayonet traces a blown-up cover of a Hitler Youth propaganda magazine called Der Pimpf, showing a German tank running over Polish cavalry.
Next the walrus-man looks at the poster next to it, a homoerotic masterpiece showing a brown-shirted, black-tied bohunk with blond televangelist hair and a swastika flag smiling unrepentantly, the legend reading Der Deutsche Student kämpft für Führer und Volk!
John hopes they don’t look at the Russian-language poster showing a huge Jew leading Stalin and a Soviet soldier on a rope.
They do.
“Ti shto fashistskoe gavno?”
Dawes picks out the word fascist.
Correctly guesses the uncomplimentary nature of the second bit.
“Ti anti-semit?”
Remembers that nobody on the Soviet reenactor squad actually speaks Russian.
Some kind of fucking communists for real.
The snow on their helmets and coats has melted.
That was real snow what the fuck?
He looks at the only anachronistic poster in the room, a signed and framed poster of Rush Limbaugh wearing a powdered wig and tri-cornered hat.
Two if by Tea!
From Tea to shining Tea!
Original sweet tea.
No help.
Shakedown keeps barking.
Far, far away.
Like the pistol he dropped.
Now walrus picks up John’s rifle.
John’s Nazi rifle.
Nods and looks up at John Dawes.
Grins.
John pisses his pants.
103
Another gunshot.
This one from the west side of the house.
The high chipping sound of a bullet hitting glass.
“Salvador! Get away from the window.”
Salvador does as he is told, but the bullet already hit its mark.
A perfect hole has appeared in the canvas, just over Dalí’s left eye.
The automaton is unaffected, but the hole will have to be fixed before he takes dog form again.
“Go patch yourself.”
Sal heads for the stairs, another bullet sailing through the window, hitting the wall near the stuffed owl.
Michael hunkers down, sweating despite the chill in the air.
Andrew pops up, steals another glance through his night-vision binocs.
“We’ve got three on this side.”
Two muzzles flash in the darkness.
The bullets turn, striking bricks and plaster elsewhere in the room.
The Brazilian pendant around Andrew’s neck glows warm.
He knows the charm can be overwhelmed if it’s worked too hard; it has already saved him from at least four bullets.
“Let’s wake up Buttercup.”
Michael nods.
“Take cover.”
Michael takes cover.
Andrew hunches low, goes to the window overlooking the front yard.
He stands erect now, well back from the window, in the shadows, but still they see him.
Bullets punch through the window, making the awful pvvvvvt! sound one hears when being shot at, a sound Andrew had been lucky enough never to hear before now. He counts two men in the tree line. Holds up two fingers at Michael, who has scooted himself behind an old plow blade.
It sparks once with a loud P-TANG.
Michael says two paragraphs in the Greek of Archimedes.
Andrew says a sentence in old French.
The vacuum-cleaner beast rears the roosterish brass head at the end of its tube neck, flaps its vulture wings, knocking off its covering sheet. Flexes its chimpanzee arms. Its neck turns, letting it focus its eyes at Andrew.
The lenses rotate.
Shit, is it going to attack?
No, just looking at its master.
“Allez!”
It flaps harder.
Its vacuum motor runs.
It lurches forward, busts out the north window, toward the lake, then turns. Bullets strike it, do it little harm.
Snow blows into the attic behind it.
It steers toward the shooter.
Its eyes flash and something in the tree line bursts into flames.
Screams.
The screaming stops.
Three more bullets whine toward Andrew, one of them from the Dawes house across the street, and all three are turned.
The chain holding the pendant breaks; the pendant falls off, its magic exhausted.
Andrew drops to the floor as the fourth bullet hits brick behind him.
Michael finishes another verse in Greek.
Andrew adds a verse in German to this.
In the front yard, the sound of a long-dead Mustang’s engine turning over.
Now the ground rumbles.
The stuffed birds on their shelf and the terrarium with the replica house shudder, too.
The magi have started a small earthquake.
Buttercup is waking up.
104
Kolya and Vanya kneel in the snowy patch of woods near the house.
The woman came to them as they drew playing cards against each other in an improvised game involving making up insults for each other’s mother and sisters (“My king of spades says your three of clubs was poked down your mother’s throat by the lieutenant’s cock.”) while the tanks took fuel. She sat next to them, shared vodka with them. Told them if they would come with her, they could get out of the coming fight with the Germans. All they would have to do is to kill an American for her.