Mila 18 - Leon Uris [199]
The four men were locked in a lightless coffin. They lay inside a triangle formed by beams, rafters, and the wall. Each man lay on three two-inch boards which supported his body at his calves, thighs, back, and shoulders. Beneath the beams was a rotted floor, part of which extended into the eaves, directly over the street.
The face of one man touched the feet of another end to end. Their movement was limited to a few inches. They could turn over from back to stomach only with a slow effort.
“Everybody all right?” Andrei whispered.
They answered in the affirmative.
“How’s the leg, Chris?”
“Going up like a balloon.”
“Painful?”
“Let me suffer in peace.”
A bug bit Wolf under the eye. “How long did you stay here, Andrei?”
“Once for six hours.”
“Holy Mother.”
“Of course I didn’t have such nice company. Don’t lie on the sub-floor. It’s rotted. Pieces may fall down on the street. And reach up and rub your partner’s feet so his blood will circulate.”
Andrei tucked the Schmeisser firmly into the apex of the joist and beam and saw a slit of light at the extreme end of the eaves. By the most difficult of straining and contortion, he could lift his head and put his eye to it.
“By God. Some boards are split. I can see the pavement.” He worked the blade of a pocketknife back and forth between the boards, separating them a half inch. “I can see Mila 19.”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s swarming with Germans. They must be looking for the bunker.”
Wolf and Simon felt Chris writhe as spears of pain lashed up and down his leg. Chris’s leg twitched against Wolf’s face. Simon handed Chris a handkerchief. “Bite on this,” he said.
Luminous eyes peered at the four strangers who had invaded their home. A scraping of claws.
“Rats!”
“Get out of here, you bastards!”
“Oh God, I hate rats,” Wolf moaned.
“You’ll find them quite friendly in a few hours,” Andrei said. “It’s the bats at night that get you.”
Wolf’s skin crawled as he felt the animal dash over his chest and brush up against his face. “Oh God damn it,” he cried, “I hate rats.”
They became silent. The sound of guttural orders bounced off the deserted houses in the street below and echoed up to them. They had found a Jew on Mila Street and were torturing him for the location of the Mila 19 bunker.
Cries of agony below settled them down to adjust to their own discomfort. And then the automatic silence when one breathes only with controlled quiet, for there was movement on the roof above them.
“No Jews down this way, Sergeant!”
“You can never tell where the vermin hide. Post a guard here and one at the opposite end of the roofs.”
“Yes, sir.”
Andrei calculated that the guards were at that point where the roof began its pitch, some fifteen yards away. From their speech, they were Ukrainians.
The beams cut into their bodies, but no one dared change his position. The slightest sound now could give them away.
They muted themselves into a deeper stillness at the sound of noises in the attic under them. A smashing of glass. The sound of hatchets and sledge hammers bursting the walls and doors. The building was undergoing a dismantling for secret hiding places.
Each of them touched his weapon at the same instant for a comfort which did not really exist.
Curses penetrated their tomb from the frustrated, grunting hunters.
Screaming whistles in the street. Another Jew had been located, cringing in a courtyard sewer.
More men were on the roof above them.
Chris’s body convulsed in pain. His eyes rolled back in his head. He clamped his teeth into the cloth in his mouth. Simon was trying to decide whether or not to knock Chris unconscious with the pistol barrel, but at that moment Chris straightened out and was still.
Chris saw his father kneeling at the altar next to the library in their villa outside Rome. So funny to see his father praying. Poppa was a hypocrite! He drank, he gambled, he was a libertine ... he was a