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body for days and days. But the mind would be kind; it would fog and blur, sink into a kind of haze. He’d seen it at the camps.
    He began to hallucinate.
    He saw a man of oak, giant, sprouts and twigs and green fronds springing from a wooden face, old and desiccated. Something pagan, loamy, fairy-tale quality. The fantastic was everywhere. Imps and goblins whirred about. And he saw the head German, the big shot, the Master Sniper: yet it was any face, tired, altogether uninteresting. He tried to conjure up his own past, but lacked the energy. What of the people he loved? They were gone anyway; if he regretted his death, it was only that their memories would no longer live. But certain things could not be helped. He thought maybe God had had a purpose in sparing him by miracle back there in the black field when the shooting happened. But this was another jest.
    As if to drive home this idea, the last seconds of the scene of the death he should have had began to unreel before his eyes. He could almost see soldiers moving toward him, out of the shadows. They came with great caution, without rush.
    An image filled the sky above him.
    A man stood with a rifle.
    Shmuel waited for the bullet.
    Instead, he heard words in a language he knew: English.
    “Freeze, fuckface.”
    Other forms swirled above him.
    “Jesus, pitiful,” somebody said.
    “Hey, Lieutenant. Nelson caught the sorriest-looking Kraut I ever saw.”
    And someone else said, “Another fucking mouth to feed.”

4
    T -5 Roger Evans, Leets’s nominal assistant, counseled practicality.
    “Forget it,” he advised. He was an insouciantly handsome teenager who quite naturally assumed arrogant postures and spoke in a voice cold with an authority he in no way possessed. The kid also knew how to dress: his shiny paratrooper boots rested against an edge of a table, propelling him outward, on the back two legs of a chair, delicately poised. His Ike jacket, cut tight, emphasized his athletic frame, and his service cap perched snidely on an angle down across his forehead. Leets had loathed him at once but in the months they’d worked together—“work” was an entirely inaccurate word, in Roger’s case—he’d come finally to accept the kid as basically harmless.
    Rog threaded his hands together on the back of his neck, and continued in his instruction, bobbing all the while.
    “That’s all, Captain. Forget it. No skin off your nose.” Nothing was ever skin off Roger’s nose. What Leets found especially irritating this midwinter morning was that Roger was probably right.
    Leets said nothing. He fiddled with some papers athis desk: a field report on the double-magazine feed system
WaPrüf 2
had improvised for the MP-40 submachine gun, giving it a sixty-round capacity, to match the Soviet PPSH’s seventy-one-round drum. Now these gadgets were showing up in the West.
    What irked Leets was Tony Outhwaithe’s—and, by extension, all official London’s—rejection of his brainstorm.
    “I do not think,” Tony had said imperially, “our analysts—yours, for that matter, although they are quite the junior at the game—will agree with you, chum. Frankly, it’s not the Nazi style. They tend to kill in larger numbers, and are quite proud of it.”
    “We got Yamamoto in the Pacific, ’44,” Leets argued. “You guys sent some commandos after Rommel. There were rumors the Krauts had a mission on Roosevelt in Casablanca. And just a couple of months ago, when the Bulge started, that stuff about Skorzeny going after Eisenhower.”
    “Exactly. An unpleasant rumor that caused a great deal of discomfort in all kinds of circles in this town. Which is precisely why we’ll not be calling up the guards on the basis of a scrap of paper. No, it’s this simple: you’re wrong.”
    “Sir,” Leets had pulled himself to full attention, “may I respectfully—”
    “No, you may not. Our intent in handing you this slight job was to take advantage of your somewhat specialized