“The committee has found a new meeting place,” he said.
“And the voice, do we know who?”
“No, but I suspect an amputee who ran into Corporal Boehm’s patrol about twenty minutes later. I’ll find out. Come along. Careful. There are six steps down, then a gap to hop over, it’s got water in it. Hold on to my arm, we can’t use the light.”
Conrad did not switch on his flashlight until they were crawling over a rubble of cement dust and burned paper. The candlelit vault was genuinely pleasant and clean, though chill as the grave. Erna shook hands with Bartek the Polish delegate, Alain from France, and the Spaniard Ignacio before glancing around her. There were separate piles of weapons, canned food, and clothes. More surprising was the presence of a pair of massive strongboxes, tilted toward each other, intact.
“How about it, we’ve infiltrated the very foundations of capitalism,” said Conrad, the German delegate. “Now for the super-structure!”
He went straight on to the technical specifications.
“The volume of air and the seriously inadequate ventilation limit us to a maximum of ten people staying here. There’s a risk of flooding if bombed. Extremely unlikely to be detected, though, save through our own carelessness. The two schoolboys who found it have been evacuated to Thuringia. They used it for hiding potatoes…”
Bartek the shoemaker, based on his experience as a staff officer, predicted that the Americans would capture the city within the week; much given to making solemn prognostications, his rate of accuracy was as high as fifty percent, if he said so himself — a not dishonorable record for a tactician trained by ignoramuses who understood nothing of warfare… Apart from two groups of armaments workers, his Polish contingent was proving hard to discipline. They got into fights every night: yesterday, seven were shot! Alain reported the formation of a tolerable resistance committee within the most privileged — that is, the most corrupt — French commando. Alain was afraid of gangsters, informers, anti-Semitism, the radio, dirty deals. He asked for two guys with guts, dressed as petty bourgeois, to carry out a delicate assignment. “Got them for you,” Ignacio said. “Myself and a Trotskyite from Madrid I know…” Erna shot him an arch look. “You heard right, dear lady,” Ignacio said teasingly. “Right,” said Alain.
Conrad briefed them on the latest developments. The elite division — it was discussed all over the town — had melted away under a storm of sulfurous bombs and the like, ground into pulp by the Shermans, the last survivors machine-gunned from the air by well-targeted fire, for lack of air cover. Formed of veterans and recently drafted young replacements, half fanatics and the other half chickenshits, marching toward the firing line like condemned men to the scaffold, encouraged by summary executions. The division was not at its full complement, either. “So which half were chicken?” Bartek wanted to know, moved by a professional interest in the behavior of fighters under pressure. “Both,” smiled Conrad. As for the population, it was on its knees. “The petty bourgeois is skidding on the vomit of its own abjectness…” “Ugh!” Ignacio winced. “Nobly put!” “Factual. They’ve always been that way.” The Volkssturm was thoroughly demoralized, save for one ravening company of Young Wolves packed with the teenage scions of Nazi families. “So anyone who hasn’t deserted already will be chopped into little pieces, which is fine by me. Good riddance. Seventeen-year-old brain matter is so damn malleable, it’s enough to put one off youth forever…” A surprisingly healthy black market, Gott sei Dank!, kept supplied by the quartermaster general. Prices for civilian clothing rising, identity papers, ration cards, and certificates declining: the colossal demand stimulated wholesale production, and the supply of forgeries nearly outstripped the demand. The Party was on its last legs. The hard-line faction was contemplating suicide or possible resistance from mountain redoubts (“That’s a laugh!” said Bartek). There was some acknowledgment of ideological and political blunders; the military caste ought to have been purged long ago. The hard-liners, though numerically insignificant, might still pull off some desperate coup. The bulk of the Party, stupefied and discouraged; but there’s no shortage of smart thinkers discreetly getting rid of their Führer portraits, calf-bound Mein Kampfs, uniforms, and armbands, which means we can get hold of some. Those rats think only about leaving the ship, the trouble is they have a deadly fear of salt water! As for the old working class, all but a handful of true stalwarts have become disoriented by the bitterness they feel. “You can see their point. Two wars, a revolution, waves of inflation, crises, persecutions, unemployment, demagogy, anti-Bolshevism, pact with Bolshevism, war on Bolshevism, a whirlwind of traumatic events, all in one generation! The worst of it is, these used to be men with sound heads on their shoulders…” “Come to the point,” said Alain. “Right. The Communists are more active than the Social Democrats, the Social Democrats more reliable…”
Erna cut in, her voice leveclass="underline" “In the interests of unity, best to abstain from political psychologizing. Broadly, what do people think?”
“They think they’re in hell, that tomorrow will be worse than today, that there’s nothing left to believe in or to hope for, but still, they’d rather not all be wiped out just yet…”
Ignacio remarked fliply, “They do display a healthy philosophy of nature. Lacking a political psychology they have a zoological mentality… And I couldn’t agree with you more, Erna, providing we could forget an awful lot of things… I’m all for unity, no one keener, but I won’t hide from you that if I were in the east and the CP took over, I would adopt a few personal precautions pronto: Underground zwei, number two!”
Bartek concurred, with a pained grimace. Alain shrugged grumpily. The Pole distracted the committee by tiptoeing up to one of the safes and gluing his ear to the side. “Something is up,” he said. “I have had eighteen long hours to study the hard heart of these financial idols, and I’ve found it reacts to the great emotions of the earth. My reading is, major artillery offensive west by northwest…”
Conrad led Erna out by the other exit: a good meeting place must have two exits. The pair of them emerged on what used to be a commercial thoroughfare, strangely well preserved and animated. Large clumps of splintered buildings remained upright around their blacked-out display windows and vacant interiors; this architecture was vaguely reminiscent of the badlands of Colorado or Afghanistan as seen in geography books: vertical mountains chiseled into castles… A procession of trucks straggled down the cleared roadway like a giant snake of black vehicles, hissing and growling, guided onward by obscure glimmers of light. A youth tightly belted into leathers checked Erna’s pass and Conrad’s registration card, zealous enough to play his flashlight over their faces. “Where have you come from?”
“Bed,” answered Erna, smiling. “Does that tempt you?”
“No thanks, Fraülein, move along. No loitering in this zone.”
The last motorized infantry were crammed into the squat personnel carriers — a conglomeration of heads massed together with slim barrels. All of a sudden, one hundred yards ahead, a white star was born in the inky sky releasing an unbearable brilliance floating to the ground among the convulsed buildings, highlighting the marquee of a cinema… The fez, thick mustache, and smoke rings of Khedive cigarettes loomed over the startled convoy from the center of this inhuman glare.
“Precise targeting,” muttered Conrad. “Let’s hurry.”
The star faded, having broken the silence of the sky where now a hum of engines could be heard far above. The star flared once more in the form of a scream, a sudden demented howl that rippled heavily over the convoy, echoing through a thousand thunderstruck spines. The human mass smothered the cry beneath its weight as one smothers remorse, as one would want to smother fear…