Dark Benediction

The colonel betrayed no impatience with her, although he had gone over it twice before. “This morning you tried to leap off the bridge. It is such a shame to die without purpose, dushka. I offer you a purpose. Do you love the Fatherland?”

“I am not a Party member, Tovarish Polkovnik.”

“I did not ask if you love the Party, my dear. However, you should say ‘parties,’ now that we are tolerating those accursed Menshevist deviationists again. Bah! They even name members of the Gorodskoi Soviets these days. We are becoming a two party republic. How sickening! Where are the old warrior Bolsheviks? It makes one weep…. But that is not the question. I asked if you love the Fatherland.”

She gave a hesitant nod.

“Then think of the Fatherland, think of vengeance for Nikolai. Would you trade your life for that? I know you would. You were ready to fling it away.”

She stirred a little; her mind seemed to re-enter the room. “This Ami Gyenyeral. Why do you wish him dead?”

“He is the genius behind this assault, my child. Who would have thought the Americans would have chosen such an unlikely place for an invasion? And the manner of it! They parachuted an army ninety miles inland, instead of assaulting the fortified coastline: He committed half a million troops to deliberate encirclement. Do you understand what this means? If they had been unable to drive to the coast, they would have been cut off, and the war would very likely be over. With our victory. As it was, the coast defenders panicked. The airborne army swept to the sea to capture their beachhead without need of a landing by sea, and now there are two million enemy troops on our soil, and we are in full retreat. Flight is a better word. General Rufus MacAmsward gambled his country’s entire future on one operation, and he won. If he had lost, they would likely have shot him. Such a man is necessarily mad. A megalomaniac, an evil genius.

Oh, I admire him very much! He reminds me of one of their earlier generals, thirty years ago. But that was before their Fascism, before their Blue Shirts.

“And if he is killed?”

The colonel sighed. He seemed to listen for a time to the distant shellfire. “We are all a little superstitious in wartime,” he said at last. “Perhaps we attach too much significance to this one man. But they have no other generals like him. He will be replaced by a competent man. We would rather fight competent men than fight an unpredictable devil. He keeps his own counsels, that is so. We know he does not rely heavily upon his staff. His will rules the operation. He accepts intelligence but not advice. If he is struck dead—well, we shall see.”

“And I am to kill him. It seems unthinkable. Now do you know I can?”

The colonel waved a sheaf of papers. “Only a woman can get to him. We have his character clearly defined. Here is his psychoanalytic biography. We have photostats of medical records taken from Washington. We have interviews with his ex-wife and his mother. Our psychologists have studied every inch of him. Here, I’ll read you—but no, it is very dry, full of psychiatric jargon. I’ll boil it down.

“MacAmsward is a champion of the purity of woman-hood, and yet he is a vile old lecher. He is at once a baby and an old man. He will kneel and kiss your hand—yes, really. He is a worshipper of womanhood. He will court you, convert you, pay you homage, and then expect you to—forgive me—to take him to bed. He could not possibly make advances on you uninvited, but he expects you—as a goddess rewarding a worshipper—to make advances on him. He will be your abject servant, but with courtly dignity. His life is full of breast symbols. He clucks in his sleep. He has visited every volcano in the world. He collects anatomical photographs; his women have all been bosomy brunettes. He is still in what the Freudians call the oral stage of emotional development—emotionally a two-year-old. I know Freud is bad politics, but for the Ami, it is sometimes so.”

The colonel stopped. There was a sudden tremor in the earth. The colonel lurched, lost his balance. The floor heaved him against the wall. The girl sat still, hands in her lap, face very white. The air shock followed the earth shock, but the thunder clap was muted by six feet of concrete and steel. The ceiling leaked dust.