Christian looked once more at the ranks of soldiers. They stood drearily, the rain soaking through their synthetic rubber capes, their boots sinking slowly into the French mud.
"This Sergeant," the Captain gestured dramatically to the open grave, "will not be with us in the flesh on the great day, but his spirit will be with us, buoying us up, crying to us to stand firm when we begin to falter."
The Captain wiped his face and then made place for the Chaplain, who rattled through the prayer. The Chaplain had a bad cold and wanted, before it turned into pneumonia, to get in from the rain.
The two men with spades came up and started shovelling in the dripping fresh mud piled to one side.
The Captain shouted an order, and marching erect, trying to keep his behind from waggling too much under his coat, he led his Company out of the small cemetery, which had only eight other graves in it, through the stone-flagged main street of the village. There were no civilians in the street, and the shutters of all the houses were closed against the rain, the Germans and the war.
The SS Lieutenant was very hearty. He had come over from Headquarters in a big staff car. He smoked little Cuban cigars one after another and had a bright, mechanical smile, like a beer salesman entering a rathskeller. There was also a smell of brandy about him. He sat back in the comfortable rear compartment of the car, with Christian beside him, as they sped along the beach road to the next little village, where a suspect was being detained for Christian to identify.
"You got a good look at the two men, Sergeant?" the SS Lieutenant said, nibbling at his cigar, smiling mechanically as he peered at Christian. "You could identify them easily?"
"Yes, Sir," said Christian.
"Good." The Lieutenant beamed at Christian. "This will be very simple. I like a simple case. Some of the others, the other investigators, grow melancholy when they are in an open-and-shut case. They like to pretend they are great detectives. They like to have everything complicated, obscure, so that they can show how brilliant they are. Not me. Oh, no, not me." He beamed warmly at Christian. "Yes or no, this is me man, this is not the man, that is the way I like it. Leave the rest of it to the intellectuals. I was a machine operator in a leather-goods factory in Regensburg before the war, I do not pretend to be profound. I have a simple philosophy for dealing with the French. I am direct with them, and I expect them to be direct with me." He looked at his watch. "It is now three-thirty pm. You will be back at your Company by five o'clock. I promise you. I make it fast. Yes or no. One way or another. Goodbye. Would you like a cigar?"
"No, Sir," said Christian.
"Other officers," said the Lieutenant, "would not sit in the back like this with a Sergeant, offering him cigars. Not me. I never forget that I worked in a leather-goods factory. That is one of the faults of the German Army. They all forget they ever were civilians or ever will be civilians again. They are all Caesars and Bismarcks. Not me. Plain, open and shut, you do business with me and I'll do business with you."
By the time the big car drove up to the town hall, in the basement of which the suspect was locked up, Christian had decided that the SS Lieutenant, whose name was Reichburger, was a complete idiot, and Christian would not have trusted him to conduct an investigation of a missing fountain pen.
The Lieutenant sprang out of the car and strode briskly and cheerfully into the ugly stone building, smiling his beer salesman's smile. Christian followed him into a bare, dirty-walled room, whose only adornment, besides a clerk and three peeling cafe chairs, was a caricature of Winston Churchill, naked, which was tacked on a piece of cardboard and used by the local SS headquarters detachments as a dart board.
"Sit down, sit down." The Lieutenant waved to a chair.
"Might as well make yourself comfortable. After all, you must not forget, you have been recently wounded."
"Yes, Sir." Christian sat down. He was sorry he had told the Lieutenant he could recognize the two Frenchmen. He detested the Lieutenant and didn't want to have anything more to do with him.
"Have you been wounded before?" The Lieutenant smiled at him fondly.
"Yes," said Christian. "Once. Twice really. Once badly, in Africa. Then I was scratched in the head outside Paris in 1940."
"Wounded three times." The Lieutenant grew sober for a moment. "You are a lucky man. You will never be killed. Obviously, there is something watching over you. I do not look it, I know, but I am a fatalist. There are some men who are born to be merely wounded, others to be killed. Myself, I have not been touched so far. But I know I shall be killed before the war is over." He shrugged his shoulders and smiled widely. "I am that type. So I enjoy myself. I live with a woman who is one of the best cooks in France, and on the side, she also has two sisters." He winked at Christian and chuckled. "The bullet will hit a well-satisfied man."
The door opened and an SS private brought in a man in manacles. The man was tall and weatherbeaten, and he was trying very hard to show that he was not afraid. He stood at the door, his hands locked behind him, and, by an obvious effort of the muscles of his face, wrestled a trembling look of disdain to his lips.
The Lieutenant smiled fondly at him. "Well," the Lieutenant said, in thick French, "we will not waste your time, Monsieur." He turned to Christian. "Is this one of the men, Sergeant?"
Christian peered at the Frenchman. The Frenchman took a deep breath, and stared back at Christian, his face a dumb combination of puzzlement and controlled hatred. Christian felt a small, violent tick of anger pulling at his brain. In this face, laid bare by stupidity and courage, there was the whole history of the cunning and malice and stubbornness of the French – the mocking silence in the trains when they rode in the same compartments with you, the derisive, scarcely stifled laughter when you walked out of a cafe in which there were two or more of them drinking at a corner table, the 1918 scrawled arrogantly on the church wall the very first night in Paris… The man scowled at Christian, and even in the sour grimace there was a hint of dry laughter at the corners of his mouth. It would be most satisfactory, Christian thought, to knock in those raw, yellow teeth with the butt of a rifle. He thought of Behr, so reasonable and decent, who had hoped to work with people like this. Now Behr was dead and this man was still alive, grinning and triumphant.
"Yes," Christian said. "That's the man."
"What?" the man said stupidly. "What? He's crazy."
The Lieutenant reached out with a swiftness that his rather chubby, soft body gave no evidence of possessing and clubbed the heel of his hand across the man's chin. "My dear friend," the Lieutenant said, "you will speak only when spoken to." He stood above the Frenchman, who looked more puzzled than ever, and who kept working his lips over his teeth and sucking in the little trickles of blood from the bruised mouth. "Now," the Lieutenant said, in French, "this is established – yesterday afternoon you cut the throat of a German soldier on the beach six kilometres north of this village."
"Please," the Frenchman said dazedly.
"Now, it only remains to hear from you one more fact…" the Lieutenant paused. "The name of the man who was with you."
"Please," the man said. "I can prove I did not leave the village all the afternoon."
"Of course," the Lieutenant said amiably, "you can prove anything, with a hundred signatures an hour. We are not interested."
"Please," said the Frenchman.
"We are only interested in one thing," said the Lieutenant.