Delusion (18 page)

“Of course he’s antiwar,” she murmured as she ran her hand under the hot water. “Who wants war? But he has to see that when someone attacks, you defend, and not only defend, but crush them. What rot about a tennis match! You don’t keep the game going forever—you win it, as fast and as hard as you can, and do your best never to play another. Oh, thank goodness they haven’t heard of the five-inch rule here,” she added, guiltily filling the tub with scalding water to the rim.

The rest of the country was urged to take infrequent, shallow baths, to save on fuel and water. She’d meant to comply, even when not compelled, but “Oh, how heavenly!” she sighed as she sank to her chin. Steam rose from her skin, and she closed her eyes, thinking about Arden.

For the life of her, she couldn’t figure him out. Did he hate her or not? And if so, was it because she couldn’t feel the Essence, or because she was a woman, or because she was a troublemaker? It was as if he were an actor who kept slipping out of character, being kind, honest, even sentimental for minutes at a time, then remembering his role and putting his mask back on.

Or was the cold arrogance his real self, and the warmth no more than an act?

She was glad she’d have ample time to find out for herself.

“And if I don’t like what I find,” she whispered, her lips, just above the water line, making ripples, “then I can always claim his life.” Not that she ever would, but she rather enjoyed the idea that she could hold it over his head like the sword of Damocles.

The bathroom had no window, so she was permitted the luxury of light at nighttime without any fear of alerting overhead planes with the slightest glimmer. Suddenly, the room went black.

She sat up and heard the door open. “Damn fuses,” she said. “Fetch a candle, Fee, and I’ll get out. It’s still piping hot, and I didn’t do anything unpleasant in it, I swear.” She started to stand but slipped on the soap and splashed down on her backside just as the room seemed to explode around her. By the flare of muzzle-flash, she saw a hulking form in an olive field tunic reacquire its target: her.

She screamed, and since there was no retreating, she slithered out of the tub, clumsy as a seal on land, and tried to lunge past her attacker to the door. She hit his knees in the darkness, and they both went down, tangled, on the slippery floor. Another shot went wide, into the ceiling, and in the blaze of gunpowder incandescence she saw a face at least as terrified as her own. In a language she couldn’t understand, he chanted what sounded like a paean of sorrow and resignation. Somewhere in the house, a light flipped on, and as the man hauled himself up and aimed a final shot at her chest, she could see tears streaming down his face.

“Es tut mir bahng,”
he wept.
“Es tut mir vai.”

She tried to push herself into the hall, but her bare feet skidded on the pooled water, and she squeezed her eyes shut as a gunshot filled her ears.

She opened them a moment later to see Uncle Walter clad only in a pair of boxers standing over her, a pistol in his hand. Her attacker bled out on the tile, convulsed, and was still. His countenance was oddly calm, as if he had expected no different end.

Uncle Walter stepped over the corpse and handed her a towel, averting his eyes until she was wrapped. She was shaking so badly that she fumbled it, and by the time she was covered, one corner was soaked in blood.

Not quite coherent yet, Phil said weakly, “You’re not chained to the radiator?”

Uncle Walter knew what she meant, though, and said, perfectly steady and sane, “There are times to kill. This was one of them.”

The front door slammed, making Phil take a quick terrified breath. But it was only Fee coming in from her chicken checking. “Oops,” she said softly at the bang, then, as she came into the hall, “Oh no, I woke you all!”

Then—though later she always tried to deny it—Phil succumbed to mild hysterics, babbling incoherently about German assassins.

Mrs. Pippin ran from her room, took one look at the situation, made exactly the same sound she made when a sheep did something foolish and fatal, as sheep so often do, and bustled the girls into their room.

Algernon, cursing profusely at his blindness, stumbled into the hall with a shotgun at his shoulder. “Will someone point me in the right direction!” he shouted.

“You stand guard over the girls,” Mrs. Pippin told her son, figuring a blind man with a shotgun had a reasonable chance of success against a potential enemy trapped in a doorway. “And you, Walter, at the front door. I’ll ring for the constable, and I suppose the doctor, too, though I’ve seen stuffed Christmas geese on the table with more blood left in them than that man. Who is he? Looks a desperate wreck, to be sure.”

With the same efficiency with which she coordinated a harvest or butchered a rabbit, she marshaled the household into action.

She should be the one leading the Home Guard,
Phil thought in admiration when she’d calmed down.
And how is it that everyone seems to have a gun? No one volunteered theirs when I was looking for some to train with.
It never occurred to her that people, well-trained soldiers in particular, might not trust teenage girls with their weapons.

The constable arrived, bleary-eyed and mussed. “A stranger to these parts,” he said when he’d examined the body. “Any of you know him?” No one did. “Perhaps he’s some disgruntled city boyfriend?”

“Phil said she’d never seen him,” Algernon told him. “She thinks he’s . . .” It was almost too silly to say aloud.

“Out with it,” the constable said.

“She thinks it’s a German assassin.”

“Why on earth would a German assassin be here, and if he was, why come after a girl in her bath? Did he offer her insult?”

“Aside from trying to shoot her? No.”

“Then he must be a lunatic who broke into this house at random,” the constable theorized. This was his first deadly crime, and he wanted it wrapped up swiftly and neatly.

“I think she believes he was trying to stop her from organizing the local Home Guard,” Algernon said. “She was a bit beside herself, but she went on about her being the only one who could fight them.”

“Germans on the brain,” Mrs. Pippin said dismissively. “As if any would come here.”

“He
is
German,” Uncle Walter said, coming out of the girls’ room. “A German Jew. I heard him speak. We had several Yiddish-speaking German Jews working as agents for us in the”—he gulped, and steadied himself—“in the last war.”

“What did he say?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Are we sure the girl doesn’t recognize him? Let’s bring her out for another look.”

“That wouldn’t be wise,” said the doctor. He’d just come from the girls’ room. “She’s had quite a shock and is still overwrought. It will do her no good to see a bloody corpse again.”

But the constable, sensing his authority was being undermined, insisted, and Phil was brought out without much resistance. Truth be told, she wanted to see the man again. Something about him was bothering her.

“You don’t have to go with me,” Phil told Fee. “I can manage, and you don’t want to see him.”

“I
do
have to. What happens to you happens to me, too. You know that. If I see it, I can share it, and then it will be it easier for you. You shouldn’t be alone in this pain.”

It
is
a pain,
Phil thought.
How well Fee understands. I ought to feel frightened, or panicked, or relieved, or angry, but somehow I’m only sad. Why is that?
she wondered.

One look at her attacker, and she understood. She’d been in no condition to notice before, in the flash and thunder and terror of the gunshots, but now, in the deathly quiet of the crime scene, she finally got a good look at the man who had tried to kill her.

Looming in the darkness in his baggy fatigues, he’d seemed a giant, as big as Orion in the sky. But in death, it seemed as if he’d hastened the transformation into skeleton. His face was gaunt, with deep-sunken eyes and dry white lips. His wrist looked too fragile to bear the weight of his gun. She could just barely see something moving in his hair: lice.

“He’s starving,” Phil said.

“If it’s food he wanted, why ever didn’t he steal it from the pantry?” Mrs. Pippin wondered. “There’s a wheel of cheddar on the table that would have fed him for a week.”

And suddenly Phil knew, with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, why this man had been sent to kill her. With the realization fled the last remnants of terror, replaced by a seething fury she’d never felt before, not even when the bombs fell on London.

“Is it all right if I go to sleep now?” she asked, her voice trembling.

“Of course, poor child,” the constable said. “I have enough for my report.”

The doctor fetched something from his black bag. “Here,” he said, slipping two pills into her palm. “Take these, one for each of you, and you’ll be out until noon tomorrow. Best thing for you.”

Phil nodded, and the girls went to their room.

As soon as the door closed, Phil pounced on Fee in a flurry of furious tears. “He’s a prisoner!” she said. “A German Jew, Uncle Walter said. He’s from a forced labor camp, I know he is! Oh, the beasts, the filthy, filthy brutes! I could see it in his face, how much he hated what he was doing. He was weeping, Fee—weeping! The Dresden magicians must have threatened him, or his family...or promised him freedom if he did what they ordered. The poor man. They work them to death in those camps. He was no more than bones.”

“You can’t be sure,” Fee began.

“I
am
sure,” she said, pounding her fist on the bed. “And I swear to you, I will make them pay!” Her face was a mask of animal rage.

“Maybe you should take a sleeping pill,” Fee said.

“No, there’s no way I can sleep,” Phil said, tucking the pills into a pocket of her gas mask satchel. “I have to talk to Uncle Walter.”

“You’re not going to tell him about the magicians, are you?”

“I might.”

“He’ll think you’re as crazy as he is.”

“He’s not crazy,” she said. “He proved that tonight. He just thinks war is the most inhumane thing in the world. After he hears this, he’ll know there’s something worse than mere war. People just need a good reason to fight. I was his reason tonight. When he knows about that poor man, he’ll have another.”

She slipped out, and before long Uncle Walter heard urgent knuckles rapping at his door.

Phil, with the resilience of youth, really did sleep until noon, even without the pills. When she woke, the corpse was gone, the bathroom scrubbed clean, and the bullet holes were patched. Soon the only sign of the fray was the fresh, slightly damp plaster at the level where Phil’s head had been.

“Did you have any luck with Uncle Walter?” Fee asked over tea and oatcakes. She’d been asleep by the time Phil returned.

“Yes and no.”

“Don’t tell me he believed you?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think he particularly cares whether it’s true or not. I think the idea that it
could
be true is enough.”

“Like when I read about bamboo slivers under the fingernails— ugh!”

“Er, yes, something like that. What he actually said was, ‘It’s a crime against nature to shoot pretty girls. Any reasonable civilization tosses ’em in the harem. These Germans must be worse than I thought.’ In any event, he offered a compromise. He agreed to train me, but not the Home Guard or the magicians. I was a little vague, and I think he prefers to believe they’re an academy of stage magicians like us.”

“Good thing you didn’t press it. I don’t think his sanity could take it. I know mine hardly can. When do you start?”

“After tea I have my first shooting lesson.”

“Then you’ll train the rest?”

“I’ll do my best. Do you suppose our teachers did it this way —cramming the night before to stay just one step ahead of their students? I wish I’d known. I wouldn’t have felt so stupid all those years. Are you coming to Stour with me?” She was going to collect more guns, teach a passel of pacifists how to make their very first fist, and of course tell them about the attempt on her life.

“Naturally,” Fee said, and to Phil’s disgust, she simpered.

“Are you aware that you look like an utter nincompoop every time you so much as think of Thomas? If I ever fall in love, I promise I’m going to be sensible about it.”

“Speaking of which, heard from Hector?”

“Bugger all,” Phil said, and ran to her room to dig through her pile of dirty clothes. She emerged, a bit disheveled, a moment later with the letter she’d received two days ago and promptly forgotten amid all the bustle and excitement and danger.

Guiltily, she tore it open.

“What does he say?” Fee asked.

Phil skimmed through. “Training is going well. He gave his sergeant a black eye during hand-to-hand combat training, but he didn’t get disciplined because the sergeant said it was better than a bayonet in the gut, and he might get a medal out of it, or a pension. The sergeant, not Hector. Let’s see...he doesn’t know where they’ll be posted to, and he couldn’t tell me anyway, but he has a feeling those French lessons might pay off. Hopes to go to Poland, though, to...oh!” She bit her lip. “To see if he can find any of Stan’s Romany relatives and let them know what happened. I didn’t write to tell him yet, did you? I’ll do that right away, and Mum and Dad, too. It’s inexcusable of me—and of you, too, so that makes me feel a bit better. Love to you, of course, and that’s it.”

Fee deftly plucked it out of her hand.

“Here! Give that back!”

“If that’s all there is to it, why not let me read it,” Fee said, dancing out of the way. “Oh ho!” She read aloud as Phil chased her around the table. “‘One of the lads from Shropshire, who I don’t think ever saw the inside of a schoolroom, asked Sarge if he could have three days of “passionate leave” because his sister was sick. Sarge said if he needed passionate leave for his sister, then everything he heard about Shropshire was true. Tell me, Phil, are you missing me too terribly? Should I ask my sergeant for passionate leave to visit you?’ Oh, Phil! If you really don’t care for him, you have to tell him.” She sniggered. “Before he requests passionate leave.”