On 21 July a soldier (Subject C) executed a group of Roma Gypsies engaged in sexually deviant behavior in a special facility we have had constructed at Waltham College. Carbon monoxide gas from vehicle exhaust was the means of death. Like Subject B, this soldier never conversed with the victims, but, unlike him, he did not witness their actual deaths.

Paul Schumann gasped in shock. He looked again at the first letter. Why, these people killed were innocent, by Ernst’s own admission. Jewish families, Polish workers… He read the passages again to make sure he’d seen correctly. He thought he must have mistranslated the words. But, no, there wasn’t any doubt. He looked across the dusty field at the black Mercedes, which still sheltered Ernst. He glanced down at the letter to Hitler and continued.

On 26 July a soldier (Subject D) executed a dozen political dissidents at the Waltham facility. The variation in this case was that these particular convicts were of Aryan extraction, and Subject D spent an hour or more conversing and playing sports with them immediately before he executed them, getting to know some of them by name. He was further instructed to observe them die.

Oh, Christ… that’s here, today!

Paul leaned forward, squinting over the field. The gray-uniformed German soldier who’d been playing soccer with the boys gave a stiff-arm salute to the balding man in brown then he hooked a thick hose from the tailpipe of the bus into a fixture on the outside wall of the classroom.

We are presently compiling the responses provided by all of these Subject soldiers. Several dozen other executions are planned, each one a variation intended to provide us with as much helpful data as possible. The results of the first four tests are attached hereto.

Please be assured we reject out of hand the tainted Jew-thinking of traitors like Dr. Freud but feel that solid National Socialist philosophy and science will allow us to match the personality types of soldiers with the means of death, the nature of the victims and the relationship between them to more efficiently achieve the goals you have set forth for our great nation.

We will be submitting the complete report to you within two months.

With all humble respect,

Col. Reinhard Ernst,

Plenipotentiary

for Domestic Stability

Paul looked up, across the field, to see the soldier glance into the classroom at the young men, close the door, then walk calmly to the bus and turn on the engine.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

When the door to the classroom closed, the students looked around them. It was Kurt Fischer who got out of his seat and walked to the window. He rapped on it.

“You’ve forgotten the pencils,” he called.

“There are some in the back,” someone called.

Kurt found three stubby pencils sitting on a chalkboard ledge. “But not enough for us all.”

“How can we take a test without pencils?”

“Open a window!” somebody called. “My God, it’s hot in here.”

A tall blond boy, jailed because he’d written a poem ridiculing the Hitler Youth, walked to the windows. He struggled to undo the latch.

Kurt returned to his seat and tore open his envelope. He pulled out the sheets of paper to see what sort of personal information they wanted and if there would be any questions about their parents’ pacifism. But he laughed in surprise.

“Look at this,” he said. “The printing didn’t come out on mine.”

“No, mine too.”

“It’s all of them! They’re blank!”

“This is absurd.”

The blond boy at the window called, “They don’t open.” He looked around the stifling room at the others. “None of them. The windows. They don’t open.”

“I can do it,” said a huge young man. But the locks defeated him too. “They’re sealed shut. Why would that be?…” Then he squinted at the window. “It’s not normal glass, either. It’s thick.”

It was then that Kurt smelled the sweet, strong aroma of petrol exhaust flooding into the room from a vent above the door.

“What’s that? Something’s wrong!”

“They’re killing us!” a boy shrieked. “Look outside!”

“A hose. Look!”

“Break out. Break the glass!”

The large boy who’d tried to open the windows looked around. “A chair, table, anything!”

But the tables and benches were bolted to the floor. And although the room had seemed to be a regular classroom, there were no pointers, no globes, not even ink bottles in the wells they might try to shatter the glass with. Several students tried to shoulder down the door but it was thick oak and barred from the outside. The faint blue cloud of exhaust smoke streamed steadily into the room.

Kurt and two other boys tried to kick the windows out. But the glass was indeed thick – far too strong to break without heavy tools. There was a second door but that too was securely closed and locked.

“Stuff something in the vents.”

Two boys stripped off their shirts and Kurt and another student boosted them up. But their murderers, Keitel and Ernst, had anticipated everything. The vents were thick screening, a half meter by a meter in size. There was no way to block the smooth surface.

The boys began to choke. Everyone scrabbled away from the vent, into the corners of the room, some crying, some praying.

Kurt Fischer looked outside. The “recruitment” officer, who’d scored a goal against him just minutes earlier, stood with his arms crossed, gazing at them calmly, the same way someone might watch bears frolic in their pen at the Zoological Garden on Budapest Street.

Paul Schumann saw before him the black Mercedes, still protecting his prey.

He saw the SS guard looking around vigilantly.

He saw the balding man walk up to the soldier who’d fitted the hose to the classroom building, speaking to him, then jotting on a sheet of paper.

He saw an empty field where a dozen young men had just played a soccer game in their last minutes on earth.

And above all of these discrete images he saw what linked them: the appalling specter of indifferent evil. Reinhard Ernst was not simply Hitler’s architect of war, he was a murderer of the innocent. And his motive: the handy collection of information.

The whole goddamn world here was out of kilter.

Paul swung the Mauser to the right, toward the bald man and the soldier. The second gray-uniformed trooper leaned against the van, smoking a cigarette. The two soldiers were some distance apart but Paul could probably touch them both off. The balding man – maybe the professor mentioned in the letter to Hitler – was probably not armed and would most likely flee at the first shot. Paul could then sprint to the classroom, open the door and give covering fire so the boys could get away to safety.

Ernst and his guard would escape or hunker down behind the car until help arrived. But how could Paul let these young men die?

The sights of the Mauser centered on the soldier’s chest. Paul began applying pressure to the trigger.

Then he sighed angrily and swung the muzzle of the rifle back to the Mercedes.

No, he had come here for one purpose. To kill Reinhard Ernst. The young people in the classroom were not his concern. They’d have to be sacrificed. Once he shot Ernst the other soldiers would take cover and return fire, forcing Paul to escape back into the woods, while the boys suffocated.

Trying not to imagine the horror in the room, what those young men would be going through, Paul Schumann touched the ice once more. He steadied his breathing.