“I see nothing wrong with that, except that if I give him Krulov to investigate, he will divorce me. He does have a real job, you know.”
“He’s a pro. Won’t faze him in the least.”
“I’ll point that out to him tonight in an e-mail.”
They paid and got up and headed down the street toward the Nadia. The town was pleasant, pinkish Georgian buildings, dapples of light overhanging the street of walkers, the cafés abustle. He thought of beer. Not a good idea. He turned elsewhere in his ruminations.
It was a blur, the rush of darkness, maybe a little noise announcing acceleration, but somehow he picked it up in his peripheral, got a hand on her to pull her back and pivoted, all this in some kind of supertime where he hadn’t been in years, and then the car hit him.
CHAPTER 18
Town Hall
Stanislav
JULY 1944
As instrumentality,” said Dr. Groedl, “I find it uninteresting. Guns have never particularly inflamed my imagination. I suppose the meaning is that she is now unarmed, she will need to seek another rifle, and this might be used against her, is that so?”
“Yes sir,” said Captain Salid.
The senior group leader–SS was holding the Model 91 rifle with the PU sight affixed by means of a solid steel frame that held the optic tube to the axis of the bore.
“I would imagine ours are more graceful, more modern. It is my understanding that this weapon is over fifty years beyond its design, is that true?”
“Yes sir. It was adopted by them in 1891.”
“So it was already fourteen years old at the time of the RussoJapanese war,” said Groedl. “Please explain to me why we are losing to people as technologically inferior as these.”
“There are so many more of them, sir. That’s all.”
“All right, good point. We have the best machine guns in the world, and we can’t kill them fast enough even then.”
As happened so frequently, Salid was not sure if a response was required; he didn’t know the etiquette here, another function of his exoticism among the rigorously rational, cold-blooded Aryans.
“All right,” said the doctor, having lost all interest in the rifle, “data. Numbers. Please, precision in all, as I have said to you before.”
“Yes, Dr. Groedl. In the ambush, twenty-four male and eleven female bandits. Then in six villages, ten hostages apiece. The villages were those along the Yaremche road through the mountains that have trails leading up to our ambush zone. We believe there were several survivors who would naturally turn to the villages for some kind of shelter. We further believe that we arrived before any survivor and established by example a serious argument against assisting them.”
Captain Salid was nervous. He was positive his ambush had been a success, but he was afraid the escape of Die weisse Hexe would count against him, when clearly it was not his fault. It wasn’t even certain the woman was in the column, and no witnesses were alive to testify. Alas, none of the female corpses suggested unusual beauty.
The doctor of economics wrote down Salid’s figures in a little book, his concentration complete. After a bit, he turned from his desk and slid his roller-borne chair a bit to the right, turned to a calculating machine on a worktable. He bent over it, punching the keys, and finally cranked the lever, unspooling, accompanied by a drama of clackity-clacking, a long strip of paper, covered with blue figures. He tore it off and examined it closely. Data, data.
“You are like a lion who feeds off the fringes of the herd,” he said. “As long as he doesn’t take above a certain replaceable level, his attacks are fundamentally meaningless and the herd hardly notices him. At some level, instinctual I am sure, every social unit, man or animal, fears its own extinction. That is, it fears reaching a level where there are not enough surplus females to renew at a certain predictable rate that year; at that point, the tribe, the pride, the swarm, the herd, the platoon, ceases to exist conceptually. Thus it cannot cohere, thus anarchy, dissipation, abandonment, and abrogation of the natural impulse. Anomaly.”
Salid nodded.
“The smaller village, Yasinia, is of no concern,” continued Dr. Groedl. “But the other five, especially Yaremche, are of concern because they are large enough, theoretically, to harbor secret sympathizers for the bandits. Are you following me, Captain Salid?”
“Yes sir. But what I do not understand is whether you are pleased with my first operation or if you believe I have failed. I have to know what attitude to convey to my men, and I need to have a feel for what satisfies you.”
“What is ‘pleased’? Who is to say what is pleasing and what is not? How does one distinguish the threshold between that which is pleasing and that which is not? I have no idea. I prefer to deal in data. It’s pure and clean.”