The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
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I had hidden a motorbike a short distance away. The American lines were almost three hundred kilometers to the west, halted by Eisenhower’s order to allow the Russians to take Prague. To avoid SS patrols, I rode at night, mostly cross-country, and without lights. 1 detoured south of Prague, where a savage battle was in progress between the SS and a popular uprising. The next day I surrendered to a unit of Bradley’s Third Army near Pilsen. Three days later, the war ended.
Like Clausewitz, who was captured at the Battle of Auerstädt in 1805, I was sent to a POW camp in France. All the prisoners were Wehrmacht. There were no SS; the Allies had declared the entire SS war criminals, and they were imprisoned in separate camps. I had managed to conceal a small amount of gold on my person, and I used some of this to bribe other men to take my place whenever there was a physical inspection that would have revealed my SS tattoo. Years later, I had the tattoo removed by a surgeon in Brazil.
I kept my distance from most of my fellow prisoners, especially any from Saxony. There were almost no veterans of Army Group Center; its remnants had been surrounded and captured by the Soviets outside Prague. I spent much of my time learning English. As soon as I was released, I registered at the University of Stuttgart. I studied incessantly, and was viewed as a recluse, traumatized by the war and separation from my home and family, which were now in East Germany. My single aim was to get either to Australia or to the United States. One of the many foundations that came to Germany with the Marshall Plan offered me a graduate scholarship at the University of Wisconsin. I completed my doctorate in three years, obtained residence status, and got a tenure-track position at O’Connell State.
The day after the president announced my appointment as department head, the phone rang in my office.
“You son of a bitch!” Through the static on the line from Germany, Doug Wisnesky’s voice rang in my ear. His former student and lover, Belinda Segal, had just left my office.
“I’m sorry you’re taking it that way, Doug,” I said.
“How could you do that to Anna Scheinberg?”
“You must be misinformed, Doug. It wasn’t I—”
“Don’t try to tell me you didn’t put Jonas up to it! Listen, Landsberger, your troubles haven’t even begun. I’m going to make your life hell on earth. You’re going to wish you’d never seen O’Connell State.”
“I don’t think so, Doug. I don’t think so at all. By the way, Belinda Segal sends her regards.”
There was a momentary pause. Then, “You bastard!” and the line went dead.
The axioms of von Clausewitz continued to guide me as I rose through the administrative ranks of academe: It is the destiny of the weak to serve the will of the powerful, and war is the means by which we compel them to do so. Strike only when you have the probabilities on your side. Surprise is the most powerful element in victory. The best strategy is always to be very strong. I ended, as I had planned, as a university president. Von Clausewitz spent most of his later years as director of the Prussian Military Academy in Berlin, and I like to think that his reflections on war came out of his experiences in the academy as well as from his military service. For what is academic life, after all, but a continuation of war by other means?
Joseph Raiche
One Mississippi
From The Baltimore Review
if fired correctly, a bullet can instantly kill whatever it is intended to kill. When fired incorrectly, it can still kill quite handily, it just takes a little longer. Sometimes it can take a lot longer. It can take days and even weeks to achieve its full potential. Truthfully, there are those bullets that are fired with no intention of coming into contact with a living thing. A firing range might be a good example. Yet, when we examine it further, we see that the targets are silhouettes with the highest points awarded, of course, for a shot to the heart, or the head.
I try not to watch the news. There are only cosmetic differences from one night to the next. “A shot B! Tonight at seven” or “A arrested in connection with whatever! Tonight at seven.” The radio or local paper isn’t much better, but a person needs to stay current. I usually skip the front page or tune out the late-breaking stories. The fringe is where most of what I need to know is anyway. I never thought that I would be part of the news. Not the “tonight at seven” part anyway, but then there I was on a subway car that had come to an unexpected stop.
It seems a twenty-four-year-old man named Mathew Hunstad filed a grievance at his job stating that he wasn’t adequately compensated for his travel expenses to get to and from certain job sites. This forced him to take all of his materials with him on the crowded subway rather than allowing him to drive his own car. Oftentimes the subway would be too full for him and all of his things, requiring him to wait for later runs. This caused him to be late for jobs, costing him money, and as the grievance stated, credibility. Well, his employer told him that if he wanted the luxury of driving his own car then he would have to pay for it, either that, or he would just have to make more space on the subway.
It couldn’t have been eight o’clock yet when the subway appeared from the tunnel and breathed to a halt, pushing me back a step. It was already crowded from the stops that it made further out in the city on its way in. My wife, Jennifer, and I went to work together every day except Thursdays, when I have the day off. We stepped onto the near full car and luckily found seats next to each other. Usually one of us ends up standing so that we can talk. Usually that person is me. That day we were just lucky.
The doors closed and the engine started to pull us forward to the heart of the city. Then, halfway through a rather long tunnel the whole subway came to a stop. Since most people riding were regulars like Jenny and me, a few people stumbled, not expecting the stop. The lights in the car stayed on, helping people to stay calm. One other time I had been stuck on a subway car. The lights went out, though, and people started to panic. A few individuals had cigarette lighters that they would flick on from time to time just to make sure nothing was going on until we started moving again. This time the lights stayed on. Besides the slight irritation of possibly being late for work, no one complained very much.
From the front of the train we heard a single shot. I dismissed it as something else, but it was quite clearly a gun being fired. No more than ten seconds later, the sound of a second gunshot popped into my ears, followed by a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. Excluding the first shot, the subsequent ones were very rhythmic. I counted to myself: “one mississippi, two mississippi, three.” Each time I got to three, the gun would go off. Each time the gun went off, it got louder. People started to panic. Looking through the window at the end of the car into the next, I could see a man walking down the center isle. Every few steps he turned and fired a shot at one of the passengers. He wasn’t doing it randomly though. After watching for only a few seconds, I could see he was shooting every other passenger.
He made his way into the car next to ours and began his routine. “One mississippi, two mississippi, three.” Of course, a few people tried to stop him. They would come at him from behind and try and wrestle one of his guns away. They tried, and failed. Every other person, “one mississippi, two mississippi, three.” He was almost to the end. The doors slid open and he stepped onto our car. He would reload in the short time it took the doors to close behind him and open in front of him. Some people tried to escape, but the door to the next car was barricaded and the walls of the tunnel were too close to escape out the window. The people in the next car had taken an old man’s cane and wedged it so that the door wouldn’t automatically slide open.