Germanica (22 page)

He had to admit that she looked lovely, radiant. The bruises were almost all gone, or at least covered by makeup. She had been shocked and saddened by his appearance after Sam Valenti had let her into his quarters the first time and this second time wasn’t much better.

“I didn’t know you cared. I hoped you did.”

Winnie smiled. “Of course I care. You’re like a puppy that needs lots of training.”

“I was hoping for more than that.”

“Oh yes, you stink. When was the last time you took a shower or did anything to clean yourself?”

“I believe it was the morning before I got my butt kicked by those two Nazis. Is it that bad?”

“Worse. I am now going to help you get out of bed and go down the hallway to the showers. You will clean up and you will put on fresh clothing. Then maybe we will go out in the sunshine.”

“Will you shower with me?”

“Not in this lifetime,” she said with a disarming smile that seemed to indicate that perhaps she didn’t totally mean it. “I may pretend I’m a nurse and assist you but nothing more is going to happen. And I won’t be shocked by what I see. I did have a brother. Actually, I’m afraid I might be disappointed.”

“That hurts.”

Winnie helped him to his feet. He was wearing GI boxer shorts and a T-shirt. She found clean clothing and helped him to the shower where he managed to undress himself. She did not leave as the hot water cascaded down his body. “You could change your mind and join me,” he said.

“Not a chance. Sam might come in, and a couple of Dulles’ guys are still staying here. Anybody could come in at any time. I like my privacy, thank you. Now, if you can manage to wash up without hurting yourself, I’ll go and find you some clean sheets.”

“Will you wash my back? I can’t quite twist my arm around. It hurts too much.”

She sighed. “That’s the most original excuse I’ve ever heard.” She took the washcloth and soap and leaned over far enough so she could do his back and the back of his legs without getting herself wet. He had a nice hard butt, which didn’t surprise her. She realized that something else was getting hard.

“I see you’re beginning to feel a whole lot better, so I’ll leave you to your own devices.”

“Wait just one minute,” he said. He faced her and handed her the washcloth. “It won’t take long.”

She grinned wickedly and lathered the front of his body, taking special care to stroke his manhood. She hadn’t played scrub-a-dub with a guy since her sophomore year in college with one of her brother’s friends. Her brother had been really angry when he found out. The young man she’d cleansed had joined the Marines and gone on to fight on Guadalcanal. He’d come back with his body intact but his mind totally and horribly vacant. She’d gone to see him at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and been horrified. Her once vibrant friend who might have been a lover and even a serious suitor was nothing more than a vacant shell. His eyes were focused on something distant. Winnie had stayed for only a few minutes before leaving in tears. It was all the more reason to do what she could to end this damn war.

Ah well. It didn’t take more than a minute or two before Ernie gasped and climaxed.

“I owe you,” he said.

“And maybe someday I’ll let you pay me back,” she said. She was realizing that she was reconsidering Ernie and their relationship. So what if he was a puppy that needed a lot of training? She was a good trainer. She realized that she had compared Ernie to her brother and brought up his memory without feeling like crying. Maybe Ernie was good for her. “Now finish up and get out of there. You can buy me dinner.”

* * *

Wally Oster had been as surprised as anyone when he’d been reclassified from 4-F to 1-A. His 4-F classification meant he had been rejected for military service because of his mental deficiencies. Even his grandfather said the boy was dumber than a stone. His family felt that his reclassification to 1-A, ready and eligible to be drafted, was due to several circumstances. First, the local draft board in their small west Texas town was under pressure to supply more warm bodies for the military. Thus, they had revisited a number of people whom they had deemed unqualified in the past. The second reason was that Wally had been caught vandalizing some of farms in the area that were owned by prominent citizens and even members of the board.

After being drafted, Wally had somehow muddled through basic training. The normally harsh and often brutal drill sergeants recognized that the lost and ignorant boy was a hopeless case, so they gave up trying and just passed him through. It was much like his teacher in the one-room schoolhouse out on the west Texas flatlands. She’d promoted him through to eighth grade and then he’d dropped out of school to work and earn pennies an hour as a laborer.

After basic, he’d been shipped directly to Europe where he’d wound up in the 105th Infantry Division. He didn’t realize it, but there were a number of former rejects like him in it and other divisions as the army began to scrape the bottom of the barrel and beneath.

Wally did like carrying a rifle. It made him feel powerful. So, when someone asked for a volunteer to take a German prisoner back to the stockade, he’d jumped at the chance. When he saw the scrawny young boy he was supposed to guard, he’d been disappointed. The boy was just a little smaller than he, scared, and not a threat and certainly not a superman. He’d giggled. The boy wasn’t even Clark Kent. Wally liked the Superman stories. They were even better than Batman.

Someone had worked the kid over pretty thoroughly. His face was red and bruised, his eyes were swollen and his lower lip was split. Tough shit, thought Wally. He was a Nazi.

His orders were simple. Take him directly to the stockade and do not let him escape. Wally was given an M1 carbine and a fifteen round clip of ammunition. He loaded the carbine but was careful not to release the safety.

The prisoner was handcuffed with his hands to his front. He wondered why the people from Seventh Army who had come to interrogate him had waited until it was almost dark to send him back. Wally thought that they must know what they were doing since they were officers. His real concern was that he might miss dinner. He was one of a number who actually liked army food since it was so much better than what families back home had been able to afford. He’d gained weight on mess hall chow and even liked chipped beef on toast, which was always called shit on a shingle. Some of his friends laughed at him, but he didn’t notice any of them skipping a meal. Since he spent much of his work day doing menial chores at the mess hall, he thought he could probably manage to scrounge up a meal.

They had gone about halfway when the boy announced that he had to pee. Wally had come from a German enclave in Texas and understood. “Why didn’t you go before we started out?”

“I have to pee now,” the boy announced and abruptly turned into an alleyway between several large tents.

Wally swore. He had no choice but to follow him. With astonishing quickness, the boy wheeled and yanked the carbine from Wally’s grip and pointed it at him.

“Take off your uniform and boots.”

Wally whimpered and complied. He had heard the slight click of the safety releasing. He was in grave danger. He also realized that the boy had somehow gotten out of his handcuffs. Damn. The boy had said they were too tight and one of the officers had loosened them. Damn.

“Lie down,” Wally was ordered, and now crying openly, he obeyed.

“I don’t want to die,” he sobbed. “I want my mother.”

“Coward,” Hans Gruber said as he hit Wally in the head with the stock of his carbine. Wally tried to speak, but his world had become dark.

* * *

“Captain Tanner I presume.”

Tanner laughed. They were outside a former school that had been designated as a hospital. “Doctor Hagerman, are you following me? Are you that concerned about my keeping my feet dry that you came all this way?”

The two men shook hands warmly. “No, I did not travel all the way from Belgium to see how your feet are doing. I got tired of treating GIs with penicillin for the clap and wanted to do some real doctoring.”

Tanner pretended to be puzzled. “Clap? How on earth could our innocent soldiers get the clap since Ike has forbidden any contact between our horny GIs and equally horny German women?”

“Ike is doing as well with his nonfraternization rule as King Cnut did in trying to keep the tide from coming in. There are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of German women who would like to make an arrangement with an American to provide them with food, shelter, and other basics. And so what if it means having sex with a stranger, or even several strangers? Does desperation make a woman a prostitute? I don’t know. I’m not terribly religious, but I think I’ll let God figure that out. Talk to a woman who would otherwise starve or her child would die if she didn’t have sex with a GI, and then try to judge. I don’t think anyone has a real idea how destitute the German people are, and many who do just don’t give a damn.”

“Obviously, you really feel strongly about this.”

“Yes, and one last thing—When the savages from Russia rolled in, they gang-raped several million women. Most were German but the Reds really didn’t care where they were from. Now, many of them are suffering from venereal diseases or unwanted pregnancies. I don’t do abortions myself; they are illegal after all. But some of my associates do, and I’m not going to turn them in or criticize them.”

Hagerman took a deep breath and smiled sheepishly. “Sometimes I get worked up and I shouldn’t. I understand that Ike is going to rescind that stupid and unenforceable nonfraternization policy. At any rate, you came here to see Private Oster, didn’t you?”

The two men went down a hallway and into a ward where a curtain had been drawn around a bed. “Is he going to make it?” Tanner asked, suddenly worried. He’d been told that Oster had been wounded, but giving him such a degree of privacy was unusual if the wounds weren’t grievous.

“He should recover nicely. His physical wounds aren’t that serious. He’s got a mildly fractured skull, if there is such a thing and, ah, one other problem.”

Hagerman pulled the curtain and the two men stepped in. Oster was awake and looked at them in confusion. “Why are you here now? Did I do something else?”

There was a bandage wrapped around Oster’s skull. “He doesn’t need all this bandaging, but we’re going to keep his head wrapped until we solve his problem. Private, I am now going to shift the bandage so Captain Tanner can see.”

“No, I mean, no sir,” Oster said.

“Yes you will,” said Tanner, “but first tell me what happened.”

Oster started to tear up. “I don’t really know. One minute I’m walking with the prisoner and the next he’s got my rifle and I’m on the ground. Then he hits me and then I wake up here and I’ve been cut.”

Tanner thought he understood. The young Werewolf was still a Nazi fanatic. He either changed his mind, or something had changed it for him, or he’d been lying all along. Lena would not be happy at this turn of events. She had put so much emotion into changing the boy.

Of course, a big mistake had been made in giving this slow-witted American soldier any responsibility whatsoever. Now the Werewolves had an American uniform and an M1 Carbine along with at least one clip of ammunition.

Hagerman put his hand on Wally’s shoulder. “Private Oster,” he said firmly, “I am now going to pull off the bandage and show Captain Tanner what happened.”

“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

They two men solemnly assured Wally that they wouldn’t. Hagerman carefully pulled back the first bandage and exposed a second one covering a large patch of Oster’s forehead. The young private was whimpering and not from pain. Tanner thought he knew what was coming next.

The second bandage was carefully pulled back, exposing a neatly gouged swastika in the middle of Wally Oster’s forehead. Neither man said a thing. After a few seconds, Hagerman replaced the bandage. He thanked Wally, and the two men went outside where Hagerman lit a cigarette.

“Jesus, Doc, how are you going to get rid of that ugly thing? He can’t go back with that obscene badge in the middle of his forehead.”

“He won’t have to. There’s such a thing as plastic surgery. Good techniques were introduced in World War I, and there have been many improvements since then. He’ll have a couple of minor operations to remove the swastika and then he’ll have a small scar in the middle of his forehead that he can wear as a badge of honor showing that he’d been wounded in action. He’s going to get a Purple Heart and maybe a trip home. I think I can convince some people that retarded boys who can barely read and write their own name should not be drafted and get him sent back home to West Crotch Rot, Texas. Who knows, maybe he’ll thank me. What I would like to do is find out just who beat the crap out of the German.”

“What?”

“Ah, something else you didn’t know. Two guys came down from Seventh Army with permission from General Patch to question the prisoner after you were through with him. I understand that the questioning turned into interrogation and then torture to get him to give them information a fourteen-year-old kid probably didn’t know in the first place. General Evans is absolutely livid and has complained upstream to Patch. It won’t make a bit of difference since Patch is sick and going to be replaced. But at least we have some idea why our Werewolf recanted.”

* * *

Staff Sergeant Billy Hill loved hunting. As a kid back home in Alabama, he’d take a rifle and hunt squirrels or rabbits. Back then he had a .22, and killing a squirrel was about all it would do. When he joined the army as a young adult he was already a highly skilled shooter with just about any kind of rifle or shotgun made.

Now what he really liked to do was hunt Germans. He had his own modified Garand M1 and it was fitted with a telescopic sight. He showed up at Sergeant Higgins’ outpost unannounced but not unexpected. The two men had been friends for years and, since Hill’s elevation to division staff, Higgins had extended an open invitation for Hill to go Nazi-hunting.

The crafty Higgins had his men build him a bunker that was well sited and camouflaged. “Do the Germans know about this place?” Hill asked.