The Keep

"Morbidity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder."

But Kaempffer's mind was already moving elsewhere. "It's lucky for you the painting's finished, Klaus. After I've moved in, I'll be much too busy to allow you to come up here and fiddle with it. But you can resume after I'm on my way to Ploiesti."

Woerma

"Correction: my quarters. You seem to forget that I outrank you, Captain."

Woerma

"Be careful, Captain. That Iron Cross you received in the last war will carry you only so far!"

Woerma

"Enough!"

"No, not enough! Your SS kills helpless civilians—women, children! I earned this medal Fighting men who were able to shoot back. And we both know," Woerma

Kaempffer leaned forward until his nose was barely an inch from Woerma

Woerma

"I'm warning you," Kaempffer said. "I'll have you—" And then he closed his mouth with an audible snap.

For Woerma

"Get out."

"You can't do this!"

"Out."

They stared at each other for a long time. For a moment he thought Kaempffer might actually challenge him. Woerma

He stood still for a moment. He had let Kaempffer get to him. His control used to be better. He walked over to the easel and stared at his canvas. The more he looked at the shadow he had painted on the wall, the more it looked like a hanging corpse. It gave him a queasy feeling and a

He tore himself away and returned to his desk, staring again at the photograph of Fritz. The more he saw of men like Kaempffer, the more he worried about Fritz. He hadn't worried this much when Kurt, the older boy, had been in combat in France last year. Kurt was nineteen, a corporal already. A man now.

But Fritz—they were doing things to Fritz, those Nazis. The boy had somehow been induced to join the local Jugendführer, the Hitler Youth. When Woerma

There didn't seem to be anything he could do about Kaempffer either. He had no control over the SS officer. If Kaempffer decided to shoot Romanian peasants, there was no way to stop him, other than to arrest him. And he could not do that. Kaempffer was here by authority of the High Command. To arrest him would be insubordination, an act of brazen defiance. His Prussian heritage rebelled at the thought. The army was his career, his home ... it had been good to him for a quarter century. To challenge it now...

Helpless. That was how he felt. It brought him back to a clearing outside Posnan, Poland, a year and a half ago, shortly after the fighting had ended. His men had been setting up bivouac when the sound of automatic gunfire came from over the next rise, about a mile away. He had gone to investigate. Einsatzkommandos were lining up Jews—men and women of all ages, children—and systematically slaughtering them with fusillades of bullets. After the bodies had been rolled into the ditch behind them, more were lined up and shot. The ground had turned muddy with blood and the air had been full of the reek of cordite and the cries of those who were still alive and in agony, and to whom no one would bother to administer a coup de grâce.

He had been helpless then, and he was helpless now. Helpless to make this war into one of soldier against soldier, helpless to stop the thing that was killing his men, helpless to stop Kaempffer from slaughtering those Romanian villagers.

He slumped into the chair. What was the use? Why even try anymore? Everything was changing for the worse. He had been born with the century, a century of hope and promise. Yet he was fighting in his second war, a war he could not understand.

And yet he had wanted this war. He had yearned for a chance to strike back at the vultures who had settled upon the Fatherland after the last war, saddling it with impossible reparations, grinding its face into the dirt year after year after year. His chance had come, and he had participated in some of the great German victories. The Wehrmacht was unstoppable.

Why, then, did he feel such malaise? It seemed wrong for him to want to be out of it all and back in Rathenow with Helga. It seemed wrong to be glad that his father, also a career officer, had died in the Great War and could not see what atrocities were being done today in the name of the Fatherland.

And still, with everything so wrong, he held on to his commission. Why? The answer to that one, he told himself for the hundredth—possibly the thousandth—time, was that in his heart he believed the German Army would outlast the Nazis. Politicians came and went, but the army would always be the army. If he could just hold on, the German Army would be victorious, and Hitler and his gangsters would fade from power. He believed that. He had to.

Against all reason, he prayed that Kaempffer's threat against the villagers would have the desired effect—that there would be no more deaths. But if it didn't work ... if another German was to die tonight, Woerma

TEN

The Keep

Tuesday, 29 April

0118 hours

Major Kaempffer lay awake in his bedroll, still rankling at Woerma

The sergeant had readily found quarters for the two squads of einsatzkommandos and had suggested a dead-end corridor at the rear of the keep as a compound for the prisoners from the village. An excellent choice: The corridor had been carved into the stone of the mountain itself and provided entry to four large rooms. Sole access to the retention area was through another long corridor ru