Blackbone (14 page)

Loats scratched his chin. “I don’t know, sir. What if he escapes and we can’t show anybody what he looks like?”

“That’s why he’s not staying here.” Gilman looked down at Kirst. “If he’s sucking us into a game, then he’d better find other players. Major Borden, have him sent back to camp and placed on sick call.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hopkins, have you done anything about moving that fence yet?”

“Uh, no, sir—haven’t received the materials from supply”

“Why don’t you give them a nudge?”

Hopkins glared once more at Kirst then left. Borden followed Gilman to the door. “You’re the commandant, sir, but medically speaking, I think we ought to keep this man under observation. He might have an aggravated condition that we don’t know about.”

Gilman nodded. “We’ve all got aggravated conditions, Borden—some medical, some psychological If he knows what it is and it bothers him enough, he’ll say something about it.”

“That’s a kind of cold-blooded way to look at it. Suppose he’s got a tumor or a growth or something, and he’s just not aware of it.”

“He’s not going to tell us the truth. He’s not obliged to. He’s a prisoner of war. The only way he can continue fighting in this camp is to lie, disrupt and confound us, the enemy. If he’s hurting, let him convince his own people first. Send him back.”

“Yes, sir.”

Borden opened the door. Gilman hunched his jacket tighter and marched out into the cold. Borden closed the door and paused to light a cigarette, reflecting on the exigencies of command. If he were in Gilman’s shoes, would he behave the same way? Probably. The greater good. When you’re dealing with the enemy, assume deceit until proved otherwise. Drawing deeply on the cigarette, Borden strolled back to the ward and stopped at the first bed.

Kirst was sitting up on the cot, watching him.

“So, Gebhard, what were you
pulling
in the shower, eh?” Snickers ran round the rec hut as Dortmunder fixed Gebhard with a prissy grin. “Now we learn the truth, eh? Secrets of submarine life.”

Open guffaws.

Dortmunder was Luftwaffe, though how anyone so huge and brawny could ever have squeezed himself into the cockpit of a fighter was a subject of bored speculation among many of his comrades. He sat at a card table with his ever-present crony, Hoffman, another pilot—short and wiry. They were the camp needlers, and they kept their sanity by picking on everyone’s Achilles heel.

Gebhard ignored them and stayed where he was, stretched out on one of the two ratty sofas. Hut 10 was the prisoners’ day room, their recreation center, as large as a barracks hut but without the dividing partitions. It was a long single room supplied with card tables, busted- down chairs, a windup phonograph, and a stack of 78s that dated from the early 1930s. There were Spanish- language magazines, children’s books, and even some tattered restaurant menus to read—all courtesy of Hopkins and his perverse sense of humor. Mostly it was a place for the prisoners to hang out, smoke, chat, play cards, and trade lies.

“I saw a cock that big once,” said Hoffman, “on a bull in a French pasture. We cut it off and had it stuffed. I had it with me when I was shot down. An American officer took it. God knows what he did with it.”

Dortmunder snorted. “What’s Kirst going to do with his? There isn’t an asshole in this camp big enough for
that.”

Hoffman grinned. “Yes, there is. Hopkins.”

Gebhard tuned them out, staring at the ceiling with his hands tucked behind his head, filled with anger—not so much at Dortmunder and Hoffman because their behavior was normal, but very much at Kirst. Running out of the shower hut exposing himself, he had set everyone to speculating: Had he and Gebhard been engaged in a little meat-flashing? Embarrassing to Kirst but more so to Gebhard. And why? Why run out there with his maypole waving? To deliberately cast Gebhard in a bad light?

Gebhard ruminated on that and saw a pattern emerging. Frightened by Gebhard’s questioning his miraculous rescue at sea, Kirst flees to the compound, displays himself, and is conveniently picked up by the MPs and escorted out the gate. What for?

Cause and effect. Gebhard reached a simple conclusion: Kirst was not what he appeared to be.

Laughter trailed off around him and he looked at what everybody else was looking at: Kirst—standing motionless in the doorway with nothing to indicate life other than his eyes, which fixed on Gebhard liquidly—and sent a chill up his spine.

Borden sat at the staff table, picking at his evening meal. Blish tore into a steak, Cosco carefully arranged peas on the edge of his plate before tackling his meat, and Gilman ate efficiently. Hopkins was trying to convince Gilman of the merits of rousting prisoners at odd hours. Gilman listened but kept shaking his head.

Borden kept seeing Kirst sitting up on the cot in the dispensary, eyeing him like an amoeba under a microscope. There was something about the man that gave Borden the willies. He searched his mind, sure that he had seen that look before, in another war....

“Major, I have been dealing with these krauts a long time,” Hopkins insisted, “and I know all their tricks. Take this new guy, Kirst.”

“What about him?”

“An actor. A performer, a phony-baloney. I’ll give you hundred-to-one odds this is just the beginning with him. He’s going to pull every gag in the book until we don’t know what he’ll try next, then all of a sudden—wham!”

“Wham?”

Hopkins made a burrowing gesture. “Right through the gate and out of sight. And what will we be able to say about him? Not one single consistent thing, that’s what.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing, sir. You don’t have to do a thing. Just let me get him alone for a little bit and I’ll find out what he’s up to. Use a little muscle, that’s all. Not much, just enough to make him squirm.”

Gilman put down his fork and glared at Hopkins. “What were you in your previous life, Hopkins? The Grand Inquisitor?”

Hopkins shrugged.

“I told you before—we’re not going to torture those men. If they start trouble, we’ll stop it. But we’re not going to provoke them. Do you understand?”

Hopkins grudgingly nodded. Gilman picked up his fork and resumed eating. Borden thought of Kirst, lying like a sack of potatoes up against one of the huts after a little of Hopkins’ treatment... eyes open and staring, half dead.

And then he remembered where he had seen that look before. On the face of a German soldier whom he had just bayoneted, lying spread-eagled over the edge of a trench on the last day of the Great War. No hatred in his eyes, only a dull surprise.

On the cot this afternoon, Kirst had given him that dull surprised look, but only in the position of his features, slack-jawed and pained. The eyes. The eyes had flashed something else: cold, calculated something...

Something what?

Then Borden realized why he couldn’t eat, and what he had seen in Kirst’s eyes.

Cold, calculated
hunger.

During the prisoners’ evening mess, Kirst sat surrounded by Naval, Luftwaffe, and Army officers downing lentil soup and bread. In response to their questions, the djinn had him painting a picture of war-ravaged Germany vainly trying to stave off the inevitable. As they listened to him, they grew increasingly depressed, which delighted the djinn as it fed on their emotions. Kirst was conscious only of being a conduit—out went the words, in came the emotions, which in turn assaulted him and supplied the djinn with added sustenance.

He still knew it only as a blackness that now and then obscured his vision, that raised dark walls in his mind, that flooded throughout his system and could settle anywhere and everywhere—now as a tight, weighted ball in the pit of his stomach—now as a churning fire—now as a freezing numbness—now as an aching hunger. He called it the “imp” when he could barely tolerate it. At other times it had other names—foul, disgusting names that hardly came close to describing what he felt about it. But mostly he felt only helplessness, and a slow drain on his emotions that he knew in the end would leave him a desiccated husk. Now, while it was active, he had an overriding sense that it was no longer the tenant in his body, but that he was. Rolf Kirst was trapped inside a body no longer his own, and all he wanted now was to be out and gone. Leave it behind, leave it to the imp.

Kirst tried to eat his soup, but there was something in it the imp didn’t like, so it would only let him munch on bread. In their mutual silence, he screamed at it that he had to have food, that if he didn’t eat he would die.
Then what would happen to you?
he asked the imp. It never answered.

Gebhard now dominated the conversation and was bombarding Kirst with technical questions about the U-boats, trying to trip him up. The djinn fed on Gebhard’s suspicions and mocked him by pouring answers through Kirst’s lips as if by rote. Torpedo range variations, characteristics of the magnetic exploder, advantages of electric drive...

Kirst was fascinated by what came out of him, only vaguely recalling learning all of this, realizing it must have been buried somewhere in his mind and the imp had unlocked it.

Across the mess hall, he glimpsed Steuben watching him sternly. Kirst tried to warn the imp to shut up, but it was having too much fun. It kept him chattering like a magpie. On his right, von Lechterhoeven ladled himself a second helping of lentil soup, then picked up a salt cellar and began liberally shaking its contents into his bowl.

Kirst’s flow of words instantly stopped. He froze in his seat as the imp retreated into the farthest corner of his body, away from this maniac with his salt shaker. This was all lost on Kirst, who was only conscious of two things: one, a thick dark ache in his foot where the imp had gone, and two, he was once again in control of himself.

In surprise, Kirst dropped his bread. It splashed into his soup. Von Lechterhoeven glanced at him. They all looked at him, Gebhard intently. Kirst felt a sudden, tremendous, wonderful exhilaration, as if an incredible weight had been lifted from his shoulders, as if the cloud that had muddled his thinking for days had suddenly vanished and left him with a clarity he had never experienced before, as if all at once he knew the secret of the universe, that life was grand and wonderful and the greatest gift of all—

He opened his mouth to proclaim his freedom in his own voice, but before he could form the words, the ache in his foot tore up the length of his leg and shot into his crotch. He turned pale. Blackness spread upward and robbed him of his great discovery, as the imp took him back. It lifted his arm and worked his hand and made him fish the bread out of his soup and drop it on a napkin. Then it made him look at the officers around him sheepishly. It made him apologize.

And he heard himself tell them, “Seizures. I get them now and then. Not very painful, but... momentary blackouts.”

A few of the officers nodded. They had heard of such things.

“How did you get into submarines with
that?”
Gebhard asked coldly.

The imp locked gazes with Gebhard. “I only began to get them during this last patrol,” it said through Kirst.

The men were getting up around them, taking their plates to the washtubs outside the kitchen. Kirst ignored them. The imp had him take another slice of bread and work on that while everyone else cleared out.

Gebhard was the last to leave.

Chapter 12

A thick, low-hanging fog obscured Blackbone Mountain and covered the roofs of the huts. Gebhard walked the fence perimeter with Steuben and voiced his suspicions of Kirst.

“Most of the time you can hardly get two words out of him but, when he does talk, he sounds like a walking textbook. He’s soulless.”

“That’s not enough to condemn a man,” said Steuben.

“Did you see him at dinner? Seizures indeed. Every time it gets a little hot, he pulls a stunt.”

Steuben pursed his lips. “There’s a story going around that you attacked him in the shower.”

Gebhard laughed bitterly. “I asked him to explain how he survived at sea for two days, and he ran like he’d seen a ghost. A few minutes later, I heard he had sprouted a bone in front of twenty of our men. Are the two things connected? I think so, but not the way he led everyone to believe. He’s trying to discredit me—make me out to be a pervert, when he’s—”

“What?”

“Major, he was blown off a U-boat. He’s supposed to have survived two days’ exposure to freezing water and air temperatures before he was rescued. But that’s just not possible!”
 

“No?”

“Not in the Atlantic. Not at this time of year. I’m a submariner! He knows damned well I wouldn’t believe that story! That I’d question it and eventually voice my doubts to the others. So he undercut me. He plays the victim, and I’m the goat!”

“If he didn’t survive that ordeal, then how do you account for the fact that he’s here?”

“Because he was never
there!
He was never rescued at sea! He’s a spy!”

“A spy?”

“Planted by the Americans.”

Steuben lapsed into silence. Gebhard stared into space and continued walking, mentally writing the scenario of Kirst’s recruitment by the Americans to go to Blackbone and play ferret among his countrymen.