Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition * 1 * they found the train parked on an open spur not far from the station at Werfen. When they pulled up to the siding in their jeeps, Captain Rigsdale jumped out with a show of alacrity, but Jack hung back, eyeing the train. More than forty wagons, both passenger and freight. The nature of the cargo was as yet undetermined, but in this green and mountainous corner of the American Zone, a string of boxcars was never something Jack felt eager to explore. Fencing the train were enemy troops uniformed in ragged khaki. They carried fég 35m rifles, but they had flagged their right sleeves with strips torn from white bedsheets, and they displayed no apparent satisfaction with their prize. By the side of the rails, a woman crouched over a wooden bucket filled with soapy water, wringing out a length of white cotton shirting. Two small boys took turns leaping from the door of one of the passenger cars, marking the lengths of their jumps with pebbles and bickering over who had leaped farther.
They spoke a language unknown to Jack, but he assumed, based on what Rigsdale had told him, that it was Hungarian. "Come on, Wiseman," Rigsdale called over his shoulder. "You''re supposed to be fluent in gibberish." "Yes, sir." Jack climbed down from the jeep and followed Rigsdale toward the train. He had never worked for this particular captain before, but by now he was used to receiving sudden assignments to the command of senior officers tasked with undertaking excursions into obscure and doubtful backwaters of the Occupied Zone. Jack had a gift for topography and a photographic memory for maps. He had a feel for landscape and a true inner compass, and in his imagination the most cursory and vague of descriptions, a two-dimensional scrawl on a scrap of paper, took on depth and accuracy.
This aptitude, which in civilian life had meant little more than always knowing whether he was facing uptown or downtown when he came up out of the subway, had found its perfect application in the war. Even during the confusion of battle, command had always been able to rely on Wiseman''s company to be where it was supposed to be and, even more important, to be moving in the right direction, something not always true of the rest of the division. This spatial acuity, along with his fluency in German, French, Italian, and (less usefully) Latin and ancient Greek, kept him in demand with the brass, who contended among themselves to have him attached to their commands. "What''re they saying?" Rigsdale said. "I don''t know, sir." "Well, figure it out, goddamn it." "Yes, sir." One of the enemy soldiers ducked back into the passenger car from which the boys were leaping.
Jack lifted his rifle. A moment later, a portly little man in a gray suit, complete with vest and watch fob, emerged from the same carriage and stepped down, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, still chewing a mouthful of something. Like the guards, he had tied a scrap of white fabric around his upper arm. The man hurried over to the half-dozen American soldiers standing by their two jeeps, his expression at once servile and calculating, as if they were potential customers of undetermined means. He extended his hand to shake Captain Rigsdale''s, seemed to think the better of it, and instead gave him a crisp, theatrical salute. Rigsdale kept his own hands tucked by the thumbs into the webbed belt at his hips. "Captain John F. Rigsdale, U.
S. Army, Forty-Second Division. You the conductor of this choo-choo?" The man shook his head, frowning. "No English. Deutsch? Français?" "Go ahead, Lieutenant," Rigsdale said, motioning Jack forward. "Deutsch," Jack said. The man''s German was fluent, although the Hungarian accent made the language sound softer, mellifluous, the r''s rolled on the tongue rather than the back of the throat, the emphasis placed on the beginning of the words. Jack''s accent had its own peculiarities.
Beneath the elegant High German cultivated by the Berliner refugee who had taught his German classes at Columbia University, Jack spoke with a touch of the Galicianer Yiddish of his maternal grandparents. His father''s parents, of authentic German Jewish stock, had never to his knowledge uttered a word in that language. "His name is Avar László," Jack told Rigsdale. "He''s in charge of the train." "Ask him if he''s a military officer, and if so why he''s not in uniform." He was, Avar said, a civil servant, the former mayor of the town of Zenta, currently working for something he called the Property Office. "Ask Mr. László why the hell his men haven''t turned their arms over to the U.
S. government," Rigsdale said. "Avar," the Hungarian said in German. "My surname is Avar. Dr. Avar. László is my first name." Jack asked Dr.
Avar if he was aware that the terms of surrender required that enemy soldiers turn over their weapons. Avar said that he was aware of the order, but regrettably the guns were necessary to protect the train''s cargo. He said his men had been fighting off looters since the train''s departure from Hungary. In May they''d been in a shoot-out with a group of German soldiers, and recently they''d been dealing with increasing problems from the local population, whose greed was inflamed by rumors of what was held in the wagons. "Tell him I''m deeply sorry to hear how hard his life has been lately and that the U.S. Army is here to unburden him of all his sorrows," Captain Rigsdale said. "And his guns, too.
" By now a small group of civilians had descended from the passenger carriages. One of them stepped forward and conferred with Avar, who nodded vigorously. Jack translated. "They want us to know that nobody''s given them any provisions. Avar says they''ve been starving." Jack looked doubtfully at the vigorous guards, the men in their neat suits, the plump-cheeked children. "Starving," he supposed, was a relative term. The captain said, "Tell him they''ll all be fed once they get to the DP camps.
Now I want to have a look inside the cars. See what all the fuss is about." Avar led them to the first of the cargo wagons, its doors officially sealed with bureaucratic wallpaper bearing an elaborate pattern of stamps and insignia. Jack looked down the row of boxcars. Some of the seals along the train remained intact. Others looked tattered, torn away. What that proved or didn''t prove, he wasn''t sure. There was no way of knowing whether the seals had been put there six months or six hours before.
At the door of the first cargo wagon, Avar hesitated. He conferred in Hungarian with one of his colleagues, a lanky, elderly gentleman with extravagant mustaches waxed to points, before making his wishes known to Jack. "What now?" Rigsdale said. "He''s asking for a receipt." "The fuck he is." "To show that we assume protection of this property on behalf of the Hungarian government." Avar didn''t need Jack to translate the look on the captain''s face. Puffing up his chest, the little man asked Jack to remind his commanding officer that the cargo of the train was Hungarian state property, and therefore he, Avar, with all due respect, could only turn over the custody of said cargo if assurances were made that it would, in due time, be returned to the government of Hungary.
"Lieutenant, please remind Mr. Avar that the government of Hungary just got its ass handed to it, and suggest to him, if you would be so kind, that he, his men, and his whole damn country are now under the authority of the Allied forces. I am not going to give him a goddamn receipt, and he should please open this motherfucking door now, before I use his fat head as a battering ram." In as formal a German as he could muster, Jack said, "Captain Rigsdale reminds you that he speaks with the full authority of the United States Army, and requests that you delay opening the boxcar no longer." Avar glanced at his guards, and Jack silently cursed the military command that had sent six men to disarm sixty. Though he never made vocal his disapproval, he had learned by hard experience that a soldier rarely lost money betting against the wisdom of his superior officers. The institutionalized idiocy was one of the many reasons that for nearly all of the past year and a half since his enlistment Jack had hated the war, hated the army, hated even the civilians who all too often seemed to despise their American liberators far more than they had their German conquerors. The only people he didn''t hate were the men with whom he served in the 222nd Battalion of the 42nd Infantry, the Rainbow Division, none of whom he''d known for longer than a year and all of whom he loved with a devotion he had never felt before for anyone, not even the girlfriend who had predictably broken his heart in a letter a mere three weeks after he received his commission.
He was especially fond of the men of H Company, whose dwindling ranks he had led on a relentless slog through the torn-up landscape, through France and across the Siegfried line until they reached Fürth, where the battalion commanding officer, after a grueling exchange with a recalcitrant local farmer, had decided that he needed the assistance of an aide conversant in German and transferred Jack away from the men who were all that he cared about in this miserable war. His many attempts to return to his company defeated, Jack was left stewing in his loathing and waiting to earn enough points for a discharge. Even considering the ba.