The Master Sniper (22 page)

Repp stood back, the weapon hot in his hand. The whole thing had taken less than five seconds. He waited,
ready to shoot at any sign of motion, but there was none.

What waste, what sheer waste! Good men, loyal men, doing their jobs. Dead in a freak battleground accident. He was profoundly depressed.

Blood everywhere. It speckled the skin of the self-propelled gun, swerving jaggedly down to the fender, where it collected in a black pool. It soaked the uniforms of the two men who lay before the big vehicle, and puddles of it gathered around the three he’d taken in the last long burst. Repp turned. The boy he’d shot in the throat lay breathing raspily.

Repp knelt and lifted the boy’s head gently. Blood coursed in torrents from the throat wound, disappearing inside the collar of his jacket. He was all but finished, his eyes blank, his face gray and calm.

“Father. Father, please,” he said.

Repp reached and took his hand and held it until the boy was gone.

He stood. He was alone in the road, and disgusted. The engineers had fled.

Goddamn! Goddamn!

It made him sick. He wanted to vomit.

They would pay. The Jews would pay. In blood and money.

U
gh!

Roger sat in his Class A’s on the terrace of the Ritz. Before him was a recent edition of the New York
Herald Tribune
, the first page given to a story by a woman named Marguerite Higgins, who had arrived with the 22d Regiment, some motorized hot shots, at the concentration camp of Dachau.

Roger almost gagged. The bodies heaped like garbage, skinny sacks, ribs stark. The contrast between that place and this, Paris, Place Vendôme, the ritzy Ritz, the city shoring up for an imminent VE-Day, girls all over the place, was almost more than he could take.

Leets and Outhwaithe were there, poking about. Roger was due back in a day or so.

But he had come to a decision: he would not go.

I will not go
.

No matter what.

He shivered, thinking of the slime at Dachau. He imagined the smell. He shivered again.

“Cold?”

“Huh? Oh!”

Roger looked up into the face of the most famous tennis player of all time.

“You’re Evans?” asked Bill Fielding.

“Ulp,” Roger gulped spastically, shooting to his feet. “Yes, sir, yes, sir, I’m Roger Evans, Harvard, ’47, sir, probably ’49 now, with this little
interruption
, heh, heh, number-one singles there my
freshman
year.”

The great man was a head taller than Roger, still thin as an icicle, dressed in immaculate white that made his tan seem deeper than burnished oak; he was in his late forties but looked an easy thirty-five.

Roger was aware that all commerce on the busy terrace had stopped; they were looking at Bill Fielding, all of them—generals, newspapermen, beautiful women, aristocrats, gangsters. Fielding was a star even in the exotic confines of the Ritz. And Roger knew they were also looking at
him
.

“Well, let me tell you how this works. You’ve played at Roland Garros?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, we’ll be on the
Cour Centrale
of course—”

Of course, thought Roger.

“—a clay surface, in an amphitheater, about eight thousand wounded boys, I’m told, plus the usual brass—you’ve played in front of crowds, no nerve problems or anything?”

Roger? Nervous?

“No, sir,” he said. “I played in the finals of the Ivies and I made it to the second round at Forest Hills in ’44.”

Fielding was not impressed.

“Yes, well, I hope not. Anyway, I usually give the boys a little talk, using Frank as a model, show them the fundamentals of the game. The idea is first to entertain
these poor wounded kids but also to sell tennis. You know, it’s a chance to introduce the game to a whole new class of fan.”

Yeah, some class, most of ’em just glad they didn’t get their balls blown off in the fighting, but he nodded intently.

“Then you and Frank will go two sets, three maybe, depends on you.” Roger did not like
at all
the assumption here that he was the sacrificial goat in all this. “Then you and I, Frank and Major Miles, our regular Army liaison, will go a set of doubles, just to introduce them to that. Agreeable?”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Fielding. Uh, I saw you at Forest Hills in ’31. I was just a kid—” Oops, that was a wrong thing to say.

Fielding glowered. “Not a good tournament for me.”

“Quarters. You played Maurice McLaughlin.”

Fielding’s face lit up at the memory of the long-ago match; he was just coming off his prime then, his golden years, and still had great reserves of the good stuff, the high-octane tennis, left. “Oh, yes, Maurie. Lots of power, strength. But somehow lacking … Three and love, right?”

He remembers?

“That’s right, sir.”

“Yes, well, I hope you’ve got more out there than poor Maurie,” said Fielding disgustedly.

“Uh, I’ll sure try,” said Roger. Fielding was certainly blunt.

“All right. You’ve got transportation out to Auteuil, I assume.”

“Yes, sir, the Special Services people have a car and—”

Fielding was not interested in the details. “Fine, Sergeant, see you at one,” and he turned and began to stride forcefully away, the circle opening in awe.

“Uh. Mr. Fielding,” said Roger, racing after. His heart was pounding but once out at the Stade, he’d never have a chance.

“Yes?” said Fielding, a trifle annoyed. He had a long nose that he aimed down almost like the barrel of a rifle. His eyes were blue and pale and unwavering.

“Frank Benson. He’s good, I hear.”

“My protégé. A future world champion, I hope. Now if—”

“I’m better,” blurted Roger. There. He’d said it.

Fielding’s face lengthened in contempt. He seemed to be turning purple under the tan. He was known for his towering rages at incompetence, lack of concentration, quitters, the overbrash, the slow, the blind, the halt and the lame. Roger smiled bravely and forged ahead. He knew that here, as on the court, to plant your sneakers was to die. Attack, attack: close to the net, volley away for a kill.

“I can beat him. And will, this afternoon. Now I just want you to think about this. Continuing this tour with someone
second-best
is gonna kinda take the fun out of it, I’d say.”

The silence was ferocious.

Roger thrust on. “Now if I bury him, if I pound him, if I shellac him—” He was prepared to continue with colorful metaphors for destruction for quite some time, but Fielding cut him off.

“What is it you want?”

“Simple. In. In
fast.”

“The tour?”

“Yes, sir.”

Fielding’s face confessed puzzlement. “The shooting’s over. Why now, all of a sudden?”

Roger could not explain—maybe even to himself—about the bodies at Dachau, the vista of wormy stiffs.

“Just fed up, is all, sir. Like you, I was put on this earth to hit a tennis ball. Anything else is just time misspent. I did my duty. In fact my unit just took part in what will probably be the last airborne operation in the ETO, a night drop and a son of a bitch, you’ll pardon me.” And it had been, sitting back at 82d Airborne Ops, running low on coffee and doughnuts. Roger tried to look modest. “And finally, well”—tricky this, he’d heard Fielding couldn’t abide bootlickers—“finally there’s
you:
a chance to apprentice under Fielding, under the best. I knew I’d better give it my best serve, flat out, go for the line, or always wonder about it.” He looked modestly—or what he presumed to be modestly—at his jump boots.

“You’re not shy, are you?” Fielding finally said.

“No, sir,” admitted Roger, “I believe in myself. Here, and on the court.” Roger realized with a start, He hasn’t said No.

“Words before a match are cheap. That’s why I never had any. Frank is my protégé. Ever since I discovered him at that air base in England, I’ve believed he had it in him to be the world’s best, as I was. You want in, do you? Well, this afternoon we’ll see if your game is as big as your ego. Or your mouth.”

He turned and walked out off the terrace.

Roger thought, Almost there.

But before Roger could insert Dachau into his file of might-have-beens there was Benson to play, Benson
to beat
, thinking positively, and Roger knew this would not be so easy. He’d done a little research on the guy, No. 1 at Stanford, ’39 and ’40, made the third round at Forest Hills in ’41, a Californian with that Westerner’s game, coming off those hard concrete courts, serve and volley, Patton-style tennis, always on the attack. But he’d shelved the tennis for four years, Air Corps, done twenty-three trips over Germany as a B-17 bombardier (D.F.C. even! another hero like Leets), survived the slaughterhouse over Schweinfurt the second time somehow, and only picked the game back up as a way of relaxing, cooling down near the end of his tour, when the reflexes go bad, the nerves sticky, the mind filling with hobgoblins and sirens and flak puffs and other terrors. When Fielding came to the air base in the fall of ’44, first stop on his first tour, somehow Benson had been urged on him. It was love at first sight, 6-love, 6-love, for Benson. Fielding, whose game was off but not
that
off, saw in the thin swift Californian something sweet and pure and deadly and knew that here was himself twenty years ago, poised on the edge of greatness.

Fielding wanted Benson right away; he got him, even two missions short of twenty-five.

Benson was tall, thin, a ropy blond with calm gray eyes and marvelous form. He moved fast slowly, meaning that he had such effortless grace that he never seemed to lunge or lurch, rather glided about the court
in his white flannels—for his eccentricity was to stick to the pleated flannel trousers of the Twenties and early Thirties, unlike the more stylish Rog, who’d been wearing shorts à la Riggs and Budge since he was a kid. Benson hit leapers, all that topspin, causing the ball to hiss and pop, even though the
Cour Centrale
was a porous clay-type composition, not quite en-tout-cas, but very, very slow. It was like playing on toast. The surface sucked the
oomph
from those slammed Western forehand drives, but to Roger, across from him, hitting in warm-up, the guy looked like seven skinny feet of white death, methodical, unflappable, unstoppable.

Still, Roger specialized in confidence, and his had not dropped a notch since his get-together with the Great Man this morning. He’d taken on big hitters before: it demanded patience, guile and plenty of nerve. Mainly you had to hold together on the big points, perform when the weight of the match squashed down on you. If you could run down their hottest stuff, these big hitters would blow up on you, get wilder and fiercer and crazier. He’d seen plenty like that, who fell apart, quit, hadn’t that hard, bitter kernel of self-righteousness inside that made victory usual.

The
Cour Centrale
at Roland Garros sat in the center of a steeply tiered cement amphitheater which was now jamming up with uniforms. A flower bed along one side of the court, under the boxes where Important Brass now gathered, showed bright and cheerful, new to spring—the orderly German officers who’d played here during the Occupation had kept them up. Lacoste had owned this place with its soft, gritty-brown surface, along with his equally merciless sidekicks Borotra and
Cochet; they’d called them the Three Musketeers back during their heyday, and only Fielding, with his power and control and, most of all, his guts, had been able to stand up to them here. So Roger wasn’t just a player; he was a part of history, a part of tradition. He felt absorbed into it, taken with it, warmed by it, and now the ball seemed to crack cleanly off the center of strings. Was it his imagination or was even this audience of shot-up youngsters beginning to throb with enthusiasm? Pennants snapped in the wind. The shadows became distinct. The lines of the court were precise and beautiful. The balls were white and pure. Rog felt like a million bucks. This was where he belonged.

“Okay, fellows,” said Fielding, calling them in.

They sat down to towel off as Fielding, to a surge of applause that grew and grew, lifting swiftly in passion as he moved out to the center of the court, stood to face the crowd, a microphone in hand. He smiled sharkishly.

“Hi, guys,” he said, voice echoing back in amplification.

“Bill, Bill, Bill,” they called, though most were too young to have remembered with clarity the three years, ’27, ’28 and ’29, when he’d dominated tennis—and the larger world—like a god.

“Fellas,” Bill allowed, “I know all this is kinda new to some of ya,” a Midwestern accent, Kansas corn belt, flattened out the great man’s Princeton voice, “but let me tell ya the truth: tennis is a game of skill, guts and endurance; it’s like war … only tougher.”

The soldiers howled in glee. Roger sat mesmerized by their pulsating animation: one mass, seething, galvanized by the star’s charisma.

“Now today, we’re going to show you how the big boys play. You’ve seen DiMage and the Splendid Splinter? Well you’re going to see the DiMage and Ted Williams of tennis.”

Fielding spoke for about ten minutes, a polished little speech in which he explained the rules, showed them the strokes as demonstrated by the blankly flawless Frank Benson, worked in a few amusing anecdotes and continually compared tennis—flatteringly—to other sports, emphasizing its demands of stamina, strength and courage, the savagery of its competition, the psychological violence between its opponents.

And then he was done.

“And now fellows,” cheer-led Fielding, “the big boys: Captain Frank Benson, Stanford, ’41, currently of the Eighth Air Force, twenty-three trips over Germany; and Technical Sergeant Five Roger Evans, Harvard, ’46, now of the United States Army, attached to the Office of Strategic Services, veteran of several behind-the-lines missions—”

Yeah,
our
lines though. Good thing Leets wasn’t around to hear that little fib.

“—and now,” continued Fielding, mocking another game’s traditions, “play ball!”

They’d already spun, Benson winning and electing to serve, but still he came to net and sought out Roger’s eyes as Roger had guessed he would.