A Good Clean Fight (35 page)

Mix nodded. “Also cuff-links, contraceptives, collars, flies, and corkscrews.”

“I suppose your batman helps.”

“Not with the contraceptives. He's Catholic.”

Schramm laughed, and drank his coffee. “So was I, once,” he remarked.

Mix waited. “God let you down?”

“I'd always been obedient, faithful, pure—well, fairly pure—and year after year I'd prayed and confessed, and I'd felt properly humble and contrite, as ordered, and then out of the blue a burst of machine-gun fire ruined an ankle and I was lopsided forever.”

“Not the eternal reward you had been hoping for,” Mix said. “Protestant bullets too, probably.”

“How about you? What's your faith?”

“I believe in luck. I tell people I lost my arm in Russia. Well, I didn't completely lose it. It got blown off and it ended up a tree. Froze solid. Like iron. Then one windy day by enormous good luck it fell off and hit one of our intelligence officers on the head. Knocked him silly. Or even sillier. Sorry, you're in intelligence, aren't you? Well, if they send you to Russia don't stand under any trees. If a breeze gets up, it rains frozen limbs. Arms are dangerous enough. Imagine the leg of a Prussian grenadier, hard as ice, whistling down—”

“Your telephone's ringing,” Schramm said.

In fact its red light was blinking. Mix answered it, listened, hung up. “Visitors,” he said.

There was a trench from the back of the bunker to the nearest gun-pit. The night was utterly black and silent. Schramm's eyes were so useless that they kept blinking for fear he might walk into something. Eventually the captain stopped him. He heard some soft shuffling. Schramm flinched when Mix put his lips to his ear and whispered: “They've crossed the perimeter.” He moved away.

Schramm breathed deeply and smelt the oil of the weapon. It tasted sweet and sharp, and reminded him of his mother's sewing-machine. That was very unmilitary, and he suppressed the memory. Mix took his arm and
steered him onto some duckboards. Schramm realized that he must be looking out at the airfield. It was like having a bucket over his head. Trust Africa to overdo everything. His eyes began to ache with blackness. Nobody was out there. Even the SAS couldn't move without light, could they? It was probably a herd of wild goats. Goats were nocturnal animals. Well-known fact. Or was that foxes?

“They've arrived,” Mix whispered. “Just squeeze.”

Schramm's right hand was lifted and placed on the pistol grip of the machine gun. The wood was smooth and shapely and warm: another man's hand had been there. Schramm knew that what he was about to do was forbidden and delightful, the greatest sin and the hugest pleasure, and so he did it, he squeezed the trigger and the night was ripped apart by flame and fury. Everything was a triumph of excess: the racket deafened, the stabbing flames dazzled, cordite fumes swamped the air. After a couple of seconds, Schramm became aware that somebody else was gently swinging the gun through a narrow arc, scything the night.

At last the weapon exhausted itself and he released the trigger. Elsewhere other machine guns ceased their rattling. High overhead, a flare burst, radiantly white, bleaching the ground, and hung on its tiny parachute.

“Wait here,” Mix said.

Schramm looked hard and saw nothing, but his vision was still imprinted with blossoms of red and yellow and green.

He sat on an ammunition box. It was the first time he had consciously tried to kill someone who was not actively trying to kill him. He held out his hands and stretched his fingers. Not a tremor.

Nerves of steel. Guts of putty, but nerves of steel.

Mix and his men came back. The men looked pleased. Mix seemed detached, almost remote. “We got them all,” he said. “Four. Want to see?”

The flare was fading, but a truck had been brought up and its unmasked headlights lit the bodies. They did not look comfortable in death. Limbs and heads were twisted into the kind of wrong and painful attitudes that can be achieved only by severing tendons and shattering bones and chopping ligaments. “Not like the cinema, is it?” Schramm said. “You can't pay actors to look like that.”

Mix said nothing.

Schramm moved closer to the nearest body. He wanted to know if Lampard was here; but this body was too short. Half the man's face was missing: another truth you didn't see in war films. Schramm looked elsewhere and noticed the badges on the tattered tunic. “German uniform!” he exclaimed. “That's damn dangerous. They could have been shot for that.” Mix cleared his throat. “Well, you know what I mean,” Schramm said impatiently. He went to the next body. It lay on its back, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, like a ten-year-old boy who has just seen his first naked lady. “This one isn't SAS,” Schramm declared. “Too small, too young. I mean, just look.”

“In my opinion,” Mix said, “none of them is from the enemy. I think they are all deserters. Two German, two Italian. They've been living in the Jebel and tonight they came down to see what they could steal.”

Schramm knew that he was right. “It was all too easy, wasn't it?” he said flatly. “Far, far too easy.”

“Well, killing people
is
easy,” Mix told him. “Any fool can do it. I did it all the time in Russia.”

Schramm drove himself back to Barce and slept until ten. He showered and shaved, went to his office and slogged through the heap of files that had come in from Tunis and Benghazi. It was weeks since there had been any real fighting on the ground, but the enemy was intensely busy, preparing for the next battle. New squadrons had reached Egypt, with new types of aircraft. Technically, the
Luftwaffe was still superior; the enemy still had no fighter to match the performance of the Me 109G. Come to that, the Macchi 200 and 202 could outfly any Hurricane, Tomahawk or Kittyhawk, but the Italians never got enough of them in the air. Italian servicing was diabolical.

As usual, there was a sheaf of reports about SAS movements. Luftwaffe Intelligence had plenty of informants, both in Cairo and in the desert. The problem lay in deciding what to believe. Schramm disbelieved almost everything, although he looked long and hard at a report that Captain Lampard's patrol had left Cairo. It might be true. If true, the patrol might be in the Jebel al Akhdar in two or three days (allowing for some delay in receiving the report). But there were already several patrols allegedly operating in the desert—more patrols than actually existed. So this report could be bogus. Or perhaps a decoy. There was a risk of making the airfield defense units jittery with warnings of raiders who never turned up. That was bad for morale; and the SAS had frayed enough German nerves already.

It was lunchtime. Schramm had not eaten breakfast; in fact he had taken no food since the previous afternoon, except for coffee in the bunker. He felt empty, but not hungry. The Officers' Mess was a block away, full of hot food and cheerful colleagues. He-put his cap on and glanced at a mirror. It reflected a pair of bleak and deeply distrustful eyes. “Don't give me that look,” he said aloud. “I've never done you any harm, have I?” The eyes did not change.

He drove to Benghazi.

It was a slow, sweaty drive: army convoys everywhere; military policemen who ignored his rank and shouted about unexploded bombs and forced him to make detours along potholed lanes; dust; marching troops; security checks; dust, dust, dust. Finally he had to park a long way from the hospital because the streets around it were clogged
with ambulances. And when he got to Dr. Grandinetti's office the door was shut and a bald-headed orderly was sitting in front of it, reading a very old newspaper stained with what looked like very old blood. “Come back tomorrow,” he said before Schramm could speak.

“I have an appointment.”

“Not so loud.” The man frowned severely. “All appointments canceled.”

“Why? What's wrong?” Fear shocked him wide awake. The orderly was waving him down to quieten him. Schramm grabbed the newspaper and flung it behind him. “If she's dead I'll kill you,” he snarled. “Let me in.” His pulse was hammering and he felt faint. He staggered slightly. He was too weak to kill anyone, even himself. The orderly saw him differently. The orderly saw a madman and so he picked up his chair to fend him off. Schramm seized its legs. A feeble struggle began. People came running. The door opened and Dr. Grandinetti appeared, wearing only her slip. “Stop, stop, stop,” she said. “One war at a time.”

“Thank God,” Schramm said. “I thought—”

“No, you didn't. Men never think.” She kissed the orderly on the forehead, took Schramm by the necktie, towed him into her office and kicked the door shut. “Sit down.”

She took his pulse, stared into his eyes, went away and came back with a stethoscope. While she was leaning over him he found that by tipping his head he could see much of her breasts. “Do you like them?” she asked softly. He was so startled that he could only grunt. The stethoscope slid. “Would you like to touch them?” she asked, smooth as steel.

“Not at the moment, thank you.” He regretted his refusal as soon as he heard it. “Perhaps some other time,” he added.

“You're not completely dead, then. Wash your face.”

As he was drying himself he saw a folding bed with the sheets thrown back. “Were you asleep?” he asked. “I'm sorry if I woke you.”

“Don't concern yourself. I had to get up to open the door. Old joke. Old and tired and not very funny.” She was in her favorite place, on the windowsill that caught the breeze. “You look terrible. What's wrong?”

“This war is what's wrong,” he said without thinking. “I can't do it. I can't go on with it.” He sat on the floor and rested against the wall. He was as far from her as he could get. “Waste and suffering and pointless death. I hate it. Can't eat, can't sleep. It's just . . .” He shrugged. “You know.”

“Not me. I'm involved in more pointless death than you are, and I eat like a horse and sleep like a baby.”

“That's different. You clean it up. You don't inflict it.”

“Neither do you.”

“I did once.”

“Why?”

“Because he was trying to kill me. And he was half my age and twice as strong, and well armed while I wasn't armed at all.” Schramm was cracking his knuckles; he tugged too hard and hurt himself. He sat on his hands. “Damn,” he said miserably, “I suppose you might as well know everything.”

“That would make an interesting change.”

He did not tell her everything. He told her about his escape from Lampard's patrol, about running painfully down the wadi until he was too exhausted to go on, about hiding and throwing himself at Corporal Harris's legs and then jumping up and smacking Harris on the back of the head with a rock. He made his account as objective and unemotional as possible, but he included every relevant detail and by the end his voice was trembling and tears were sabotaging his eyes.

“So he is dead and you are not,” she said. Sitting on the
windowsill, one knee up and one leg hanging down, she looked as relaxed as a tigress in a tree. “What next?”

Schramm blew his nose. “I took his weapons and one of his boots. Also his socks, because his feet were bigger than mine. And I ran like hell.” His voice was firm and steady again: the crisis was over. “Night fell, which helped. Then it was just a long, long walk over the Jebel.”

The leg that was hanging swung gently, as if blown by the breeze, and her sandal swung by its toe-strap.

“Now you know,” he said. He felt hugely relieved that he had told her all about the killing of Harris. All the tension had drained out of him. He was pleasantly tired.

“You sleep badly,” she said. “Poor appetite.” She was watching something happening in the street. “You feel . . . how?”

“Oh . . . Weary. Depressed. No energy.”

“Why do you think that is?”

Schramm didn't want to think. He had worked hard; now he deserved to rest. She knew he was weary and depressed, yet she kept making him work. Why didn't she have pity on him? He groaned quietly. She ignored it.

“I can't forget the sound that lump of rock made,” he said. “It was a kind of a thick
crack
, like what you hear when a golf ball gets hit just right . . . It was a terrible noise, horrible, sickening. And I can't forget the way he fell. One second he was an elite British soldier running like a stag, the next second he was flat on his face, and an instant later he was dead. Stone dead. The whole bloody business goes through my brain again and again. Here he comes, I kill him, here he comes again, I kill him again . . . It never stops. I hate it. Look at me: I'm no soldier. I'm supposed to be intelligent, civilized, all that nonsense, and I'm really prehistoric. Give me a rock and I'll smash a skull. It disgusts me. Best thing I can do is smash my own skull. I thought I was clever and I'm stupid. Primitive. Brutish. That killing makes me despise myself. I don't want
to go on living with the person who could do that sort of thing. I hate it.”

At last she turned her head from whatever it was in the street she had been watching. “You're lying,” she said, quite evenly. “You don't hate it. You enjoyed it. Killing that man gave you pleasure, great pleasure. That is what you hate to admit. That is why you sleep so badly and eat so little. You tell lies to yourself, but they are not believed.”

Schramm stumbled to his feet. He knew that his face was stiff with rage, but he could do nothing to change it. “Goodbye,” he said.

“Come back tomorrow.”

“Why should I?”

“I like you,” she said, “and you need me.”

It was another dreary, sweaty drive back to Barce.

When he got out of the car, the station commander was standing talking to a tall, thin Italian officer. Hoffmann beckoned Schramm over. “You know Captain di Marco, don't you? He tells me that something peculiar is happening to Jakowski's desert force. They've split up, and it seems they're all over the place.”