Children of the Dusk (30 page)

The other Kalanaro, apparently sensing a drama developing, drew back. Stamping their feet and spear hafts against the ground, they hooted in derision at their comrade. The guards joined in, pointing and laughing.

When the one at the wire again tentatively stuck his spear between the strands, hesitant to draw closer to the lethal fence, two others rushed toward the wire, spears uplifted and faces contorted, only to retreat as quickly and burst into renewed mirth.

The Kalanaro lunged.

With an athleticism Erich would have thought impossible, Solomon dodged the speartip and grabbed the haft. The Kalanaro tried pulling back, but Solomon clung on and, for a moment, despite the wire between them, Jew and African were pitted like two children playing tug-of-war. The guards and the other Kalanaro roared with delight.
 

The spearman looked around. His grin remained, but his eyes filled with desperation, making everyone laugh the louder at his predicament.

Erich sighted on Solomon's tormentor. He knew that killing the pygmy would give Hempel an instant to react, but Solomon was one Jew who would not be destroyed unless
he
, Erich, said so.

They were
his
Jews.

Right! And this one fucked my wife, he thought.

His finger tightened on the trigger and he swung the barrel from the Kalanaro to Solomon. He was suddenly stone cold sober.

He fucked my wife, he thought again. Not only that, but she loves the son of a bitch.

Normally an expert and steady marksman, even when drunk, he was trembling. He imagined Miriam arched like a bow, face distorted with passion.

The barrel wavered. He fought to control his aim.

Trying to downthrust, the Kalanaro leaped onto the fence as Solomon let go of the spear.

Sparks jumped from the African's hair, hands, and feet as he hung twitching and spasming, eyes rolled up and head jerking. The acrid odor of burnt flesh mingled with the compound's other scents. With a loud pop, the cable from the generator to the fence exploded. The African's body dropped from the fence and lay tremoring. Erich swung the barrel back toward Hempel, only to find guards standing in the line of fire. Silently cursing his lapse of concentration, he forced himself to relax. And wait.

The camp fell silent. The dogs quieted, noses lifted and sniffing the unfamiliar scent of burnt flesh and hair. As the guards and other Kalanaro approached the body, Sol's face took on a look of disgust mixed with pity. He shook his head once, then turned and walked beneath the canopy.

One of the Africans stooped, ran a finger along a smoldering burn on the body, looked up--and grinned. "
Minihana!
"
 
Light laughter rippled among the guards. Like a master of ceremonies, the black man responded to his audience. "
Minihana! Minihana!
" He looked up again, showing filed teeth as his grin widened. He leapt like a monkey around the body, motioning for the others to do the same. They finally did so, dancing and jumping, racing to the fence and prodding it with their spears as if to re-enact the event.

The Zana-Malata laughed, apparently much amused. Dousing his flames, he padded over to stand near the dead man's head. Hempel joined him, Mann pointed carelessly at the ground. The guards gathered behind him. Like Hitler Youth around a campfire, Erich thought with contempt.

In what appeared to be a benign moment, Hempel bent down and released Misha. The boy sat there, apparently not knowing quite what it was he was supposed to do. Hempel nudged him with his foot and Misha scampered away, out of Erich's line of sight.

More fortunately, Erich thought, out of the line of fire.

He turned to the trainers.

"Zodiac," he said softly.

"Sir?" Fermi had to tug his pawing dog sideways to get close enough to hear.

"Zodiac," Erich repeated, suddenly relieved that he had not executed Hempel...yet. He would send the dogs in; Zodiac was not only their best, and favorite, attack formation, it involved the trainers more than any other maneuver. Unless all the trainers were part of his putdown of Hempel's insubordination, killing the major might prove meaningless. Life after Hempel would never run smoothly as long as the Totenkopfverbände were in the majority, and to rectify that would require all the help he could get.
 

"Against our own, sir?"

"You call that rabble your own?"
 
Erich eyed each trainer in turn, trying to draw them one by one back into his emotional camp.

"Killing the monkeys is one thing," Holten-Pflug whispered.
 
"But other Germans..."

Erich knew that he could order the trainers to do his will and they almost certainly would comply, but he needed more than that. He needed to be sure of their loyalty.

"You all know that Müller's dead," he said quickly.
 
"The guards killed him, and they're planning the same for the rest of us. Don't you know what's been going on in that goddamned hut over there?"

Though his mouth was open, he stopped speaking. The men would never believe the truth even if he could explain it. He put a hand on Taurus to calm his frustration. When she looked back at him, straining and whining for the kill, he knew what he must say.

"I have known for some time that Sturmbannführer Hempel is a proven collaborator. During the Great War, he collaborated with the Senegalese."

The lie contained enough truth to be believable. The African blacks had been among France's fiercest fighters. After the war, the French had looked the other way when the Senegalese, and doubtless others, raped German girls in the Saar, the region both countries claimed. Hempel
had
, as the trainers knew, been drummed from the army under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps there was a connection....

The trainers' gazes flicked toward the major, and Erich saw that he had touched a nerve. "Goebbels found out the whole truth about Hempel's past a few months ago, and now Berlin wants Hempel forgotten. That's why we were all sent here...to be forgotten."

Anger, shock and despair registered on the trainers' faces.

"Now Hempel's collaborating with French Africans. You know what a pervert he is. He'll kill you and let his little black boyfriends feast on your shepherds."

Fermi's dark brows tugged down in concern, and for a moment Erich wondered if the trainers might also mutiny--in an effort to save their dogs. Then, with pleasure, he saw their faces harden like those of their shepherds.

"Zodiac!" Fermi uttered, and everyone murmured in assent.

"Who'll take one o'clock?" Holten-Pflug asked.

Erich patted his MP38. "
This
," he said, "will take Aquarius' place."

"And the center position?"

"We are all the center. Or else there is no center."

Glancing toward the ghetto, he saw that the Zana-Malata was in that sector, and Hempel was at five o'clock--Taurus' area. How serendipitous, he thought, his excitement growing.

"Spread the dogs wide and let them ease in close so they can attack before too many guards can raise their weapons. When I signal, use your pistols to take out anyone else in your sector."

To hell with saving some of these Kalanaro, he told himself. There was a compound to control. If all the pygmies in the compound got killed, he would find some other way to acquire the pitchblende. Find other Kalanaro.

"Ready?"

The guards nodded. Erich could feel their resolve and the dogs' sense of battle. Just like during those early days at the estate. Unified.

He counted Mausers. Only ten guards were holding weapons, plus Hempel with his Mann. Perfect. Eleven dogs, eleven deaths. Glancing up anxiously toward the sentries in the towers, he saw that they too were watching the Kalanaro sideshow. Once the attack began they would initially withhold fire, he figured, to avoid hitting their comrades.

Taurus would tear out Hempel's throat before the major had time to utter much more than a strangled scream.

Erich smiled to himself as the trainers and dogs moved into position. It was going to be like wolves slaughtering sheep.

He made a small, circular motion with his hand, signaling the trainers to release their charges, then unhooked and patted Taurus. She perked up her ears when he unobtrusively pointed toward Hempel.
 
Good girl
, he said silently.
Kill him. Kill him for Papa.

Their muzzles removed, the dogs hunkered down as they spread silently out along the edges of the light. Each is an extension of its trainer, Erich thought proudly, the culmination of years of effort and drill.

He lay down and, savoring the moment as the dogs closed upon the guards and Kalanaro, rested the submachine gun on a hillock of dirt and took aim on the syphilitic. He would shoot the bastard right in that stinking vagina he called a mouth.

He raised his left hand in signal and, as he jerked it down, felt a sense of power surge through him as he squeezed the trigger.

The gun did not fire.

The dogs did not move.

He swore under his breath and worked the action, but no round ejected. He heard another round chamber. If he fired now, the weapon was likely to explode.
Go!
he desperately, soundlessly commanded the dogs as he lurched to his knees and fought with the gun.

Around him, the trainers wrestled with their pistols. Somewhere inside his head he heard the Zana-Malata's raucous laughter, and the gunmetal began to heat in his hands.

"Kill them!" he cried. "Kill them, Taurus!"

He thought he could smell the pungent odor of burnt flesh. He dropped the machine pistol and stared, stupefied, at his palms. The skin was severely burned, yet in his state of somnipathy he felt neither pain nor anxiety.
 
Then he lifted his head and saw the dogs ease down from a crouch to their bellies, tails ticking as they crawled at an oblique angle away from the guards and Kalanaro and toward the ghetto. He tried to call the animals back, but no words formed. There was nothing: not hate or anger or sound, nothing within him save emptiness and a giddy sense of the searchlight's glow.

Taurus and the other dogs rose, shook themselves as if they had been swimming in the Wannsee. Heads down, they meandered around the outer fence until each stopped and lay down, facing the ghetto rather than the guards.

Each in its respective position on the clock. A Zodiac position, with the wrong targets. Watching the Jews.

"
Vahilo minihana
," his mind whispered. His mouth tasted the way it had after Taurus' surgery, of vomit and flour gruel.

"
Vahilo minihana
." Softer still. From deep inside. An animal hunger that he could not appease, like the throbbing pain of the dysplasia, somehow transferred to his hip after the surgery.

Slope-shouldered as a dullard, he started forward, holding the MP38 by its sling while the butt bounced along the ground. Grasshoppers sprayed up before him. He thought of stew made of dog meat, fruit bats, insects.

Hunger.

"Sagi?" he heard one of the trainers plead. The man had reached the dog, but the animal, watching the Jews, did not appear to notice. It eyed a prisoner who stepped forth from behind the mosquito netting.

The dog's tongue moved. Two licks, each beginning at the back end of the mouth and moving to the front.

Hunger.

The Kalanaro who had been killed struggled to his feet and steadied himself with his spear. He glanced at the burn stripes across his flesh, and managed a small, crooked grin as Erich strode past him.
 

Erich kept walking, eyes averted from the Kalanaro. He did not want to continue looking at the pygmy. Did not want to know that the dead had risen.

He reached the ghetto gate. The guard opened it for him. He stood at the entrance, staring, asking himself how he could have been so stupid as to want to save these wretches. He had lost his wife's love, almost lost Taurus, and now he was losing what shred of sanity he had left. And for what?

For
them
?

If they were so important to Hempel that the major would instigate mutiny, then Hempel could have them. He, Erich, would show them--show them all--just how little the Jews meant to him.

"Guard the prisoners!" he shouted at the dogs. "Kill any one of them that moves!"

Head held high, Solomon moved toward him.

Erich shouted again, and pointed, but the shepherds continued to mill, whining impatiently, looking toward the Zana-Malata.

At last, Erich realized his mistake. It was all so simple, that he almost smiled at his own naïveté.

The dogs had never been his. Never been chattels of civilization. They belonged to themselves--and to the syphilitic, who demanded that the only law they or anything else adhere to was that of the jungle.

They too hungered as Erich did. They too felt an anger in the pit of their bellies that made them want to devour their enemies.

The Totenkopfverbände took positions around the ghetto, equidistant from one another, maddeningly precise in their deployment.

As a single being, the guards snapped their Mausers to their shoulders and sighted on the Jews.