Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(73)
No one has to tell the GIs to be alert, the air practically vibrates with menace. They near what has been described to them as the town center. Lieutenant Waterstone consults his map again, and sends half his force, including Pal Lipton’s squad, down an alley, intending to flank what they believe is the German position.
Silence but for the sound of boots on cobblestones. Every rifle at the ready. Eyes searching, searching every doorway, balcony, window, and roofline.
A sudden loud, braying laugh and out of a doorway steps a German soldier. He has a slice of pizza in one hand, a bottle of white wine in the other, his Schmeisser slung over his shoulder.
The German freezes. Gapes. Reaches for his weapon. Thinks better of it, turns to run, and Walter Green, late of Iowa, takes quick steps, runs, grabs, and hauls him backward, off-balance, by his uniform collar. Green has his knife. There’s a blur, a pitiful yelp that becomes a gurgling sound, and a fountain of blood. The blood sprays across the cobbles and up the wall beneath a defaced picture of Mussolini.
Green bears the man’s weight for a moment and lowers him almost kindly to the ground, where the rest of the German’s blood fills the gaps between cobblestones, first spraying, then pulsating, then trickling.
But a second German has escaped, disappearing at a run up steep, narrow steps.
Frangie steps around the dying German, forcing herself to look down at him, trying not to step in his blood, and that’s when the firing starts. There’s a loud bang, and Frangie Marr suddenly sits down.
Noise everywhere, guns firing, yelling, the rush of men toward cover. Frangie feels stupid sitting, ridiculous, gotta get up, and Lipton twists and collapses. The wall behind Frangie is chewed by machine gun fire while other bullets spark as they strike the hard cobbles to go singing away.
Frangie tries to stand, but her legs aren’t working quite right, and neither is her mind, which is not making sense of things, not quite figuring anything out. She knows she should try to help Lipton, who is bellowing in pain and being dragged off the middle of the street by Jelly, who trips, slips, turns to get back to his sergeant but is scared off by bullets everywhere, everywhere. It’s like someone kicked over a bee’s hive, zipping and buzzing. And now Frangie’s crawling toward Lipton, hands slipping in the dead German’s blood. No, no, can’t be, he’s way back there, but her hands are definitely red with blood.
Can’t even crawl, stupid leg.
Lipton is yelling, “Get back, goddammit!”
Well, he doesn’t mean her, he wouldn’t blaspheme that way at her, so she crawls on, fuzzy in her mind, until she reaches him. On automatic, without a conscious plan, she yanks up his shirt and sees the brutal belly wound, blood seeping, not spurting. Nothing to do but bandage him up, and she sets about this task with rote movements, movements that are muscle memory now, the pinching out of bits of uniform cloth, the sulfa, the careful folding of . . .
Very tired, that’s what she is, very tired.
And now a bullet wound that’s taken off a chunk of a man’s shoulder, and then . . . and a bleeder . . . pressure . . .
A little rest.
Just a little rest.
Frangie means to lie back, but she falls and her helmet smacks the cobbles, jarring her so she tries to . . .
Can’t . . . arms . . . Can’t . . . um . . . Should . . .
The sky is a narrow band of royal blue, late afternoon shifting toward evening’s navy blue.
Frangie closes her eyes.
23
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—POSITANO, ITALY
The Italians dine late, eight o’clock, as Rainy knows from her own study. So at eight o’clock she goes out looking for a meal and the instant she steps out on the street, she notices a man with a round, pockmarked face following her.
She is stared at a bit in the trattoria she chooses—unaccompanied women are even rarer in Italy than in the States—but as a tourist this eccentricity is passed off with a shrug by the locals who, after all, can’t expect foreigners to understand anything, really. Harder to explain are the obvious bruises on her head and face, but perhaps her rumored ex-beau is the sort to slap a woman around a bit, hardly unusual.
She eats a small green salad, a dish of ravioli, an excellent piece of fish—she is unable to translate the species name—and a small dish of intensely flavored berry gelato.
This takes two hours, during which she pretends to read a book she found in the hotel lobby, Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death. It is not a reassuring title.
After dinner she walks down through the town, paying particular attention to the church. Her watcher will expect that. Then she makes the steep climb back to the hotel, retrieves her key at the front desk, and returns to her room. She leaves the light on for twenty minutes, then turns it off.
Darkness.
She stands listening at the window. Water drips in the little sink. Someone in the room to her right is humming. Hooves clatter on cobblestones. The wind rises, singing through the ironwork of her balcony railing. A truck. The buzz of flies or mosquitoes, hopefully not the latter. A quick, flitting sound as a bat zooms past, banking sharply.
And far deeper, way down at the threshold of hearing, so it’s more a feeling than a sound, the slow, inexorable rhythm of the sea trying with infinite patience to swallow the land.
Midnight.
Rainy sits in the dark, waiting. Waiting for every light to go out in the town below. Waiting and thinking. About her father, who, without meaning to, has basically gotten her into this fix; her mother, who Rainy imagines haranguing her postmortem after she’s killed by the Gestapo, telling her in Yiddish-English-Polish that she brought this on herself; Aryeh, a million miles away on the other side of the world on God knows what hellish island.