Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(98)
“Ah! Ah!” the German cries, and staggers back, blood staining his uniform. But he is far from dead and brings his rifle up to aim as Rio, summoning a last, desperate measure of strength, pushes herself up, throws a stiff left arm to push the muzzle away, and stabs him again.
This time the blade stops short on ribs, so she twists it and leans into it, using her weight to force the point through cartilage and into the vulnerable organs beyond. Too close, too close to avoid seeing his face, the surprise, the hurt as if she’s betrayed him, the incomprehension, that moment of no, not me, not me! And then the dawning fear as he begins to understand that he is dying, dying right here, right now.
Rio cannot twist the koummya, trapped as it is between ribs, but she saws it back and forth as his blood pours over her hand. She sees the light in his eyes go out.
He falls, and she has to put a boot on his chest and pull hard and work the handle back and forth to get the knife out of him.
When she looks up she sees Jack watching her. She meets his gaze, unflinching, and wipes the blood on the German’s uniform. She rifles through the dead man’s pockets. A letter received. A letter in progress, unfinished. A photo of a wife and child, a girl Rio thinks, a daughter, though it’s a very formal pose and the baby is all in white lace without obvious signs of gender.
She takes the German’s canteen and drains half of it before offering it to Jack. She takes the German’s Schmeisser submachine gun, checks the safety, works the bolt, and slings it over her shoulder.
“What now?” Jack asks.
“I guess we swim back across or spend the war in a POW camp.”
“Swim it is,” he says.
31
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—FIFTH ARMY HEADQUARTERS, NAPLES, ITALY
Rainy sits in a uniform that is her proper size but which now hangs loose on her. Her head is shaved bald. In fact, all the hair on her body has been shaved to get at the lice and bedbugs and scabies that are part of the legacy of her imprisonment.
She is in a waiting room, ready to be called in for her first real debriefing.
They have given her forty-eight hours before being asked to recount her . . . what to call it? Adventure? Ordeal? In that time she has showered and showered again, eaten, drunk, slept . . . and awakened screaming in a voice filled with rage.
She’s seen doctors and psychiatrists and ignored their questions, questions that, it seems to her, are impossible to answer.
How do you feel? they want to know.
Is she supposed to give a one-word answer? How does she feel? She feels as if she’s a lump of slow-burning coal. As if she might start crying and never be able to stop. As if she would gladly dig her fingernails into the throat of the first German she came across and choke the life from him. As if she’s not real, that she’s a Rainy puppet, a hollow, lifeless thing being dragged along by strings.
She feels brittle, as if her skin is a hard candy shell and the slightest tapping might break her open.
She feels inexpressibly sad, though sad for what, exactly, she could not possibly say.
But it has begun to dawn on Rainy that the questions have a single purpose: to discover whether she is fit for duty, will soon be fit for duty, or will simply never be fit. The wrong answers will send her home, back to some safe, stateside billet. Unless . . . unless those are actually the right answers, the answers she should be giving.
You’ve done your part, she tells herself.
More than your part.
Home to her mother and father. Home to New York. Home to life and ease and safety and maybe romance and . . . But it’s all sour, all of it impossible, there is no going home, there is no going home until . . .
Until what, Rainy?
Until what?
Until she no longer feels empty? Until she is herself again? Because she can’t go home yet, not like this, not as this person.
She can’t go home, because there are no Krauts in New York. The Krauts are here. The Gestapo is here.
A staff sergeant calls her name and holds a door open for her before hurrying past her to turn a plush wingback chair that slides easily on the polished parquet floor.
The ceiling, far above her, is an arch painted with cherubs and men and women in Renaissance clothing. No doubt it is a scene from the Christian Bible, but she cannot decipher the symbology and doesn’t care to try. The headquarters is in a seized villa of some magnificence, and this is but one of the many floridly decorated rooms.
A captain sits to her left, a colonel sits behind the desk, and it takes her a few beats before she realizes he is her former captain and now Lieutenant Colonel Herkemeier. He still checks his creases compulsively, but his eyes are full of compassion and . . . and respect? Regret? Pity?
What is clever, kind, decent Jon Herkemeier seeing when he looks at her?
There is also a female corporal taking notes, seated tactfully off to Rainy’s right and slightly behind. All three are Army Intelligence, but Rainy quickly intuits from the start that her mission is seen differently from here than it was from Colonel Corelli’s office in New York.
She gives a stripped-down account of her mission, her escape from Positano, her flight from Rome, her time in Genazzano. She takes a pause before going on. She wants to give a controlled, professional account, knowing that if she lets herself become emotional she may be unable to go on.
Even the barest retelling takes her thirty minutes, all accompanied by the scratch of pencil on paper from the corporal stenographer. The questions begin.