Descendant

Ground Zero

I slept until well past oh-seven-hundred hours, which I hadn’t done for months. Most nights I had terrifying dreams about shadows chasing after me, and I woke up with a jolt while it was still dark. One of the hotel maids tapped on my door and came in with a pot of coffee and two bread rolls with red plum preserve. She was a shy young girl, plump, with a pattern of moles on her cheek.

“What’s your name?” I asked her. I could see myself in the closet mirror and my hair was sticking up like a cockatoo.

“Hilda,” she whispered.

“Well, Hilda, maybe you could open the drapes for me so that I can see what kind of a day it is.”

“It’s raining, sir. It’s a bad-luck day.”

“A bad-luck day? What makes you say that?”

“It’s Friday the thirteenth.”

“You’re not superstitious, are you?”

She shook her head, but then she said, “One of the girls downstairs thinks that you’re a tovenaar.”

Tovenaar is Flemish for a black magician. The girl must have seen my Bibles and my crucifixes and all the paraphernalia of Screecher-hunting.

“No, I’m not a tovenaar. Tell her I’m a goochelaar.” A goochelaar is a conjuror, the kind who pulls rabbits out of opera hats and strings of colored bunting out of his ears.

“Yes, sir.” She tugged back the heavy velvet curtains and she was right. The sky was gloomy and the window was speckled with raindrops. “You should be careful today, sir.”

“I’m always careful. Here.” I reached over to the ashtray on my night-table and fished out a couple of francs to give her a tip.

I met up with Corporal Little and Frank in the lobby downstairs. The hotel was bustling with activity because some of the British were leaving. Outside, Keizerstraat was crowded with Jeeps and trucks and British Tommies wearing raincapes.

“You had something to eat, Henry?” I asked Corporal Little.

“Sure thing. Frank and I shared some sausage.”

“You know what the Belgians put in those sausages?”

“Hate to think, sir.”

“Reconstituted Nazis, with additional cereal.”

Corporal Little had parked around the corner. We climbed into the Jeep and maneuvered our way toward Schildersstraat. Frank took the rain as a personal insult and kept shaking himself impatiently.

No. 71 was a tall gray building right on the corner of Karel Rogierstraat. The downstairs windows were covered with grimy lace curtains and all of the upstairs windows were shuttered. Corporal Little parked halfway up the curb and we went to the brown-painted front door and knocked. The knocker was cast in bronze, in the shape of a snarling wolf. A knocker like that was supposed to keep demons out of the house, but if Ernst Hauser had been telling us the truth, it certainly hadn’t worked here.

We knocked three times before the door was opened. A plain young woman in a white muslin cap and a plain brown dress stood in front of us, holding a mop. From inside the house, I could smell bleach and fish boiling.

“We’re looking for three men,” I told her, holding out my identity card. “Do you have anybody staying here?”

“Nobody now. Only my grandfather.”

“How about before?”

“Before? Yes. We had five Germans here before the Allies came, and another man, but they’re all gone now.”

“Another man?”

“I don’t know what he was. He didn’t speak German. I don’t know what language it was. He used to talk to us sometimes and I think he was asking us questions but we didn’t understand.”

“Maybe he said something like buna dimineatza? Or noapte buna? Or multzumesc?”

“Yes, that word multzumesc. He was always saying that.”

“Can you tell me what he looked like, this man?”

The girl looked embarrassed. “He was tall, taller than you. With dark hair combed straight back.”

“What else you can tell me about him? I mean, if I were to see him in the street, how would I recognize him?”

She lowered her eyes. “He was very handsome. My mother’s friends used to come round for tea in the hope that he would be here.”

“Really?”

“If he passed them in the hallway they would start to giggle.”

“What kind of handsome, would you say? Did he remind you of anybody? A movie star, maybe?”

“Well, I know it sounds funny, but if you can imagine Marlene Dietrich as a man instead of a woman. High cheeks, very proud-looking. Also, he spoke very warm, if you understand me, always looking you right in your eyes, so you didn’t mind if you didn’t know what he was saying. His eyes were green like the sea and he had a scar on the side of his forehead. like a V-shape.”

I gave Corporal Little a brief translation of what the girl had said, and the corporal grinned and shook his head. “Sounds like this young lady didn’t exactly fail to be swept off her feet, either. She didn’t happen to notice his sock size, by any chance?”

I turned back to the girl. “Did this man ever tell you his name?”

“No. But I heard one of the Germans call him Herr Doktor.”

“What were the Germans like?”

“Horrible. I hated both of them. They kept coughing, as if they were ill, and they always smelled bad.”

“Frank picking up anything?” I asked Corporal Little.

“Not so far, sir. But it’s been raining all night.”

“Do you think there’s any possibility that these men may still be here?” I asked the girl.

“What do you mean?”

“Could they still be hiding in the house? In the attic, maybe?”

“Their rooms are empty. I had to clean them after they left.”

“Do you think we could possibly take a look around?”

“I don’t know. My mother isn’t here. She won’t be back for an hour.”

“We wouldn’t disturb anything, I promise you.”

“She doesn’t even like me to answer the door. It was only because you wouldn’t stop knocking.”

“OK, then. we wouldn’t like to get you into any trouble. We’ll go find ourselves a cup of coffee and come back later.”

She smiled, and said, “Dank U.” And I can still see that smile now, and her white linen cap, and her hand holding the mop.

We drove to a café at the far end of Karel Rogierstraat. There were chairs and tables set out on the sidewalk but because it was raining there was nobody sitting there except for one old man. He was sheltering under the dark green awning, smoking a meerschaum pipe.

Corporal Little tied Frank to the cast-iron umbrella stand and we went inside. The interior was very gloomy, even though there were decorative mirrors on every wall. Behind the bar an old Marconi wireless was playing “I’ll Be Seeing You.” We sat down in the corner, lit up cigarettes, and asked for two filter coffees. The proprietor was a fat middle-aged man in a floor-length apron. Every time he turned toward the window the gray morning light reflected from his glasses, so that he looked as if he had pennies on his eyes.

“Do you know what today is?” I asked Corporal Little, breathing smoke.

At that instant there was a deafening bang, louder than a thunderclap, instantly followed by another one. The café windows cracked diagonally from side to side, and everything in the whole place rattled and shook. We both stood up, just as a huge billow of brown smoke came rolling along Karel Rogierstraat, immediately followed by a shower of bricks, chairs, torn fragments of sheet metal, window frames, curtains, roof tiles, and even more bricks.

We hurried to the doorway. Frank was cowering behind a plant pot, his eyes wide, trembling. Debris was still falling from the sky, including a huge metal cylinder that looked like an old-fashioned kitchen stove. It bounced and bounded over the cobbles and slammed into an office doorway across the street.

“Jesus,” said Corporal Little, who never blasphemed. “What the hell was that?”

I looked down toward Schildersstraat. Through the gradually clearing smoke, I could see that No. 71 had been completely demolished, along with three or four houses on other side. The whole intersection had been reduced to mountains of rubble, and bodies were lying everywhere — a young woman in a black coat, with an overturned baby carriage — an elderly couple whose heads had both been blown off — six or seven nuns who must have been walking on the opposite side of the street, lying on top of each other like dead pigeons. The cobbles were strewn with body parts and blown-apart sofas and a black Citroën taxi that looked like some surrealistic panther standing on its hind legs. All of the windows within a hundred-yard radius had been blown out, and in some houses, fires were blazing.

I walked slowly down the street and stood on the edge of the crater that had been No. 71. The crater was almost twenty feet deep, as if the house had been hit by a meteor. I was still deaf from the double-blast, so it was like walking through a silent movie, with the rain falling, and people running in all directions.

I turned around. Corporal Little had been following me, with Frank. He said something, but I couldn’t hear what it was, and then he shrugged. I knew what he was trying to tell me, though. If there had been Screechers hiding in the attic, they had been obliterated, along with the rest of the house, and the young girl’s grandfather, and the young girl herself, with her white linen cap and her mop.

For the first time since we had landed in Normandy, I felt that I wasn’t the sole representative of the Angel of Death.