“Ah.”
“I’m afraid we also burned the rope.”
My grandfather had Gatto back the jeep through the churchyard gate and around the edge of the burial ground. Gatto threaded the gaps among headstones until he was alongside the hole. Outside Bonn, Aughenbaugh and my grandfather had come upon the wingless but otherwise intact fuselage of a small flying bomb—a guided missile, we would call it today—jammed into a frozen pond like a cigar butt into the sand of an ashtray. It was of a design no one had ever seen. It was stuck fast in the ice. So Aughenbaugh and my grandfather had gotten hold of a welding torch and improvised a winch out of salvage, spare parts, and a length of chain. They freed the Enzian—as it later would turn out to have been code-named—packed it up, and shipped it back to Wright Field.
Now my grandfather paid ten feet of chain from the drum mounted to the front of the jeep. He tossed it over the limb of a bare chestnut tree that must shade the church wonderfully in summer, then passed it around Gatto’s waist a few times. He cinched it at the back, leaving about seven feet free at the end. He tied a piece of stiff fence wire to the loose end of the chain and gave it to Gatto. He and Diddens picked up Gatto and turned him upside down so that he dangled headfirst from the branch of the chestnut.
A dagger trimmed in nickel with a black scabbard fell out of Gatto’s pocket and hit the ground with a thump. It was decorated with a silver eagle. Diddens got in the jeep and backed it up a little closer to the tree. Gatto swung over the hole. A silver ring ornamented with a death’s-head fell out of his pocket, and then a wristwatch whose face, when my grandfather retrieved it, had a pair of lightning bolts in the twelve spot.
“I’m sorry,” Gatto said. “Tell him I’m sorry.”
Father Nickel said that it was nothing, but my grandfather thought the old priest looked scandalized. My grandfather wrapped his arms around Gatto’s hips and aimed him. Diddens paid out more chain, and Gatto’s head went into the hole.
“No,” Gatto said. “No, god damn it. I can’t do it. Take me out!”
They winched Gatto back up out of the hole. He was crying. My grandfather took his place. Diddens and Gatto turned him upside down and fed him down into the hole. His shoulders barely cleared the sides and his body blocked most of the light. My grandfather thought he could smell spring stirring in the darkness of the hole. It was a meaty odor, a smell of worms. He dangled from the taut end of the chain. He put out his hands. His fingers touched the cold zinc that clad the chest. He braced himself with his left hand and, with the right hand, fed the wire through the groove in the right wall of the shaft. He poked it through the underside of the chest and then kept pushing until the tip of it emerged through the groove in the left-hand wall. He tied a knot in the chain and called out that he was ready.
Nothing happened. He called out again, louder. He kicked with his heels at the chain that held him suspended. It thrummed meaningfully. Still he dangled, a Jew on a chain sharing a strait grave with the bone of a saint. The smell of worms began to cloy. It had the wet-blanket heaviness of his own exhalations. He was suffocating. The Luftwaffe had been all but knocked out of the fight, but every once in a while a stray Messer would fly overhead with its MG-131s chattering and flashing. Maybe Diddens, Gatto, and Father Nickel had been strafed. Maybe the old priest had decided to punish him for killing Alois, and Gatto for looting the corpses of dead SS men.
But as blood filled his head, it seemed to bring an odd tranquility. Suffocation was reputedly gentle and quick so long as you did not struggle against it. He thought about the sense of profound relief that had spread across Alois’s face as he was dying in the street. Then he felt a painful jerk at his waist.
In under a minute he was out and on his feet. The evening was upon them in the west. In the east the sky was going from gray to black.
*
The jeep hit a pothole. My grandfather’s head jolted against something metal. In his dream he was a boy knocking a soup can off a fence post with a brickbat. He woke up. The tires were spattering fresh mud onto the old snow along the roadside. The road skirted a broad stream or narrow stretch of river. Call it the Ruhr. On the opposite bank of the stream, my grandfather could make out the remnant of a railway line. The tracks had been raked up badly by ordnance: artillery, bombs, or both. They would need to be repaired. That was something for the engineers to tackle once they had resolved the road-mining conundrum.
My grandfather had not eaten in nearly three days. He had not slept more than four hours at a stretch since leaving London. He was dehydrated. Likely he was in a kind of delayed or ever compounding shock. The idea that the 53rd Engineers would soon be called upon to repair that stretch of track on the opposite bank of the Ruhr became confused in my grandfather’s mind with memories of the Corps of Engineers training camp in Illinois long ago. The thought that he was going to be handed a maul or a mattock and put to work was more than he could face just then. There was so much torn-up track, and Berlin was still so far away.
He went back to sleep. When he woke up the second time, he was sitting propped in the softest bed in Germany, on the cleanest sheets. Father Nickel was at his bedside, smoking a GI cigarette. The heavenly bed was built in to an alcove of a candlelit room that turned out to be the only room in the house. The bed alcove took up a quarter of the premises. The kitchen and hearth, with a wooden table and dining chairs, took up another quarter. The rest was books in crates and piles. A refugee kingdom of books hastily evacuated after the collapse of St. Dominic’s, a library in exile.
“Ah,” Father Nickel said when he saw that my grandfather was awake again. “Here he is.”
“Hey!” A chair leg scraped. Diddens loomed out of the flickering shadows. His face was veiled in steam from a bowl of chicken stew that he held in his palm. In his other hand he gripped a steel spoon. The stew smelled leafy, a meadow smell, almost like mint. When my grandfather encountered it again in my grandmother’s cooking, it turned out to be an herb called summer savory.
“You okay, Rico?” Diddens said.
“Fine,” my grandfather said. “How’s the foot?”
“The old lady patched me up.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, her name’s Fr?ulein Judit.”
My grandfather nodded at the stew. “Pretty good?”
“Oh, yes,” Diddens said. He went a bit teary-eyed.
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant, we left you plenty,” Gatto said. He was hunched over his own bowl at the table. “Have some.”
A smaller, stouter, older version of Father Nickel rose up from the darkness beyond Gatto, her head wrapped in a dark kerchief. She was reaching toward my grandfather, holding out a bowl and a spoon.
“Perhaps in a minute, ma’am,” my grandfather said, nodding to the old woman. Her nose and ears were pinches of bread dough, her dark eyes two currants in poked holes. “Thank you.”
“Yes, in a minute,” Father Nickel snapped. His tone softened as he turned back to my grandfather. “First a little of something very nice.”
The old priest had been sitting on the chest from the churchyard. Now he crouched beside it the way he had crouched beside Alois dying in the street. With an air of tenderness, he lifted the lid on the crate. He took stock of the situation within. When he emerged from behind the lid, he was holding a big green bottle with a long neck and a squat bottom.
“It is cognac,” Father Nickel said. He pronounced the word with reverence and a French accent. “Very wonderful cognac.”