They are past the town when at last Rio feels ground under her feet and drags herself up the far bank.
She looks around. She is alone.
A voice barks an order in German, and she sees two gray uniforms and two leveled rifles.
Rio raises her hands. One of the Germans rushes off upstream, presumably to seize another prisoner of war, leaving Rio under the puzzled eyes of just one soldier. She is exhausted beyond all caring and sits straight down in the mud, showing every sign of being defeated, but also sitting sideways so her right leg is hidden from his view. She twines her fingers and holds them on her helmet, the universal sign of submission.
The German seems quite unconcerned, not at all the attitude of a soldier who believes he is in danger. He’s a medium-sized fellow in his twenties, his uniform clean, though wet, and his boots only slightly marred by mud.
The river rushes by, and Rio sees the debris of failure: boats, half-constructed segments of a pontoon bridge, and American bodies float past. No wonder the German is relaxed; it must have all seemed a pitiful effort to them.
The full weight of it descends on Rio. The assault has failed. GIs are dead and all for nothing. And she is a prisoner.
“Zigarette?” the German asks, advancing toward her, lulled by her passivity and no doubt by her gender.
Rio nods wearily. The German taps one out of his pack, hands it to her, and leans close with a lighter.
The koummya slides easily out of its scabbard. Rio stabs upward, right into his belly.
“Ah! Ah!” the German cries, and staggers back, blood staining his uniform. But he is far from dead and brings his rifle up to aim as Rio, summoning a last, desperate measure of strength, pushes herself up, throws a stiff left arm to push the muzzle away, and stabs him again.
This time the blade stops short on ribs, so she twists it and leans into it, using her weight to force the point through cartilage and into the vulnerable organs beyond. Too close, too close to avoid seeing his face, the surprise, the hurt as if she’s betrayed him, the incomprehension, that moment of no, not me, not me! And then the dawning fear as he begins to understand that he is dying, dying right here, right now.
Rio cannot twist the koummya, trapped as it is between ribs, but she saws it back and forth as his blood pours over her hand. She sees the light in his eyes go out.
He falls, and she has to put a boot on his chest and pull hard and work the handle back and forth to get the knife out of him.
When she looks up she sees Jack watching her. She meets his gaze, unflinching, and wipes the blood on the German’s uniform. She rifles through the dead man’s pockets. A letter received. A letter in progress, unfinished. A photo of a wife and child, a girl Rio thinks, a daughter, though it’s a very formal pose and the baby is all in white lace without obvious signs of gender.
She takes the German’s canteen and drains half of it before offering it to Jack. She takes the German’s Schmeisser submachine gun, checks the safety, works the bolt, and slings it over her shoulder.
“What now?” Jack asks.
“I guess we swim back across or spend the war in a POW camp.”
“Swim it is,” he says.
31
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—FIFTH ARMY HEADQUARTERS, NAPLES, ITALY
Rainy sits in a uniform that is her proper size but which now hangs loose on her. Her head is shaved bald. In fact, all the hair on her body has been shaved to get at the lice and bedbugs and scabies that are part of the legacy of her imprisonment.
She is in a waiting room, ready to be called in for her first real debriefing.
They have given her forty-eight hours before being asked to recount her . . . what to call it? Adventure? Ordeal? In that time she has showered and showered again, eaten, drunk, slept . . . and awakened screaming in a voice filled with rage.
She’s seen doctors and psychiatrists and ignored their questions, questions that, it seems to her, are impossible to answer.
How do you feel? they want to know.
Is she supposed to give a one-word answer? How does she feel? She feels as if she’s a lump of slow-burning coal. As if she might start crying and never be able to stop. As if she would gladly dig her fingernails into the throat of the first German she came across and choke the life from him. As if she’s not real, that she’s a Rainy puppet, a hollow, lifeless thing being dragged along by strings.
She feels brittle, as if her skin is a hard candy shell and the slightest tapping might break her open.
She feels inexpressibly sad, though sad for what, exactly, she could not possibly say.
But it has begun to dawn on Rainy that the questions have a single purpose: to discover whether she is fit for duty, will soon be fit for duty, or will simply never be fit. The wrong answers will send her home, back to some safe, stateside billet. Unless . . . unless those are actually the right answers, the answers she should be giving.