Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [120]
Hegel pushed his hands through the mud, first in front of him, then to both sides. "Where's my rifle?"
"Under the water, probably."
"And my grenades? Where are they?"
They searched for several minutes, feeling their way through the mud. Then they climbed out of the crater, shivering, their uniforms dripping steadily, to search the edge of the range.
After a moment of looking through the brush and around the trees, Hegel said darkly, "My rifle is gone. And my sticks."
"It can't be." Pohl brushed mud from his sleeves.
"Someone stole my rifle. Knocked me in the head and took my rifle and grenades."
"We'd better go tell the sergeant." Pohl carried his muddy Mauser by the stock.
"The sergeant is going to kill me," Hegel said in a rough voice.
They walked back the way they had come.
"He's going to kill me," Hegel repeated.
"Well," Pohl replied, "it'll save the Russians the chore."
8
"EVERY TIME you show up here, you've got more holes in you." The countess chuckled, staring down at her knitting. The needles clicked together rhythmically. "You're like a big pincushion."
Cray was sitting on a hooked rug, leaning hack on his elbows. Ka- trin was bent over his punctured foot. A bowl of reddened water and a bottle of iodine were at his right hand. She held the foot up for better light, and probed a wound with a cotton swab dipped in the antiseptic. Cray's pant leg was rolled up. His right foot had six wounds. He looked at Katrin, not his foot. Her ebony hair framed her face. Her features were delicate without being weak. Her mouth was pursed as she concentrated. In the dim light her eyes were wine-dark. Her brows approached each other a trifle.
She said, "I'm surprised you can even walk."
He bit his lip as she dug the cotton into another perforation in his foot.
She looked up. "Where did you learn to walk like you do?"
"One day when I was a baby I got tired of crawling."
She slapped the bottom of his foot. "That's not what I mean, and you know it. I saw you sneak up on that man, the one who told you he was a detective. You didn't seem connected with the ground. You were as quiet as growing grass. And moving fast."
"I learned it in Wenatchee." Cray's mouth pulled back with pain. "You're killing me with that swab. It feels like you've got barbed wire wrapped around it."
"I'll be gentle," she said. "They walk differently in Wenatchee?"
"My mother and father and I lived in the Columbia River valley, north of town. For those years between planting our first apple trees and harvesting our first apples, we were poor." He hesitated, his eyes distant, settled now on a scarf hanging on the back of the door. "I don't know how my parents made it through those years. No money, little food, never anything store-bought." He looked back at her. "Have you ever been poor, Katrin?"
"One winter we didn't go to the south of France because our villa near Cannes had been damaged in a storm. Is that poor?"
"How you must have suffered." Cray stared at her. "One Christmas I received an orange and a pair of work gloves, my mother weeping that it couldn't be more. That's poor." He bunched an edge of the rug in his hand, fighting down a bolt of pain. After a moment he added, "Because we didn't have any other food, I learned to hunt. We ate venison, pheasant, even bobcats, anything I could shoot. But I was still a kid. Eleven, twelve years old. So I'd also play games."
The countess looked up from her knitting. "I remember that winter. You and the family went to Danzig instead, isn't that right? Visited Baron Esten at his estate?"
"Games out in the wilderness?" Katrin asked.
"I taught myself to sneak up on animals. I'd move through the brush, testing the ground with each step, rolling my feet, crouched, utterly silent. I'd often get close enough to a deer to tap it on its flank." Cray laughed lightly. "You've never seen anything as startled as a deer that's been snuck up on. They don't like it. It offends their sense of how things should work in the woods. They'd bolt away and I swear I could see them blushing."