Hanging on

Rotenhausen to take a fancy to some building which had no floors inside and no inner walls or furniture… The rectory had to outshine all the others, make a quick and obvious impression.
        The second block of Y ended at A Street, which was four blocks long and ran north-south. The first block contained a nunnery and two houses. Kelly shined the flashlight over these, then turned south.
        "One thing bothers me," Beame said.
        "What's that?"
        "Why hasn't the bridge been bombed since we put it up?"
        "Well… the Allies think they've already knocked it out with that B-17," Major Kelly said. "And the Stukas won't touch it now that they know the Wehrmacht wants to use it."
        Beame frowned. "If the German air force knows the Wehrmacht wants to use the bridge and is cooperating by not bombing us-won't it also have told the convoy to expect to find us here?"
        "Maybe not," Kelly said. "There's something strange about the Stuka attacks."
        "Strange, sir?"
        "Remember," Kelly said, "they never bombed us, just the bridge. And they always knew when we'd rebuilt it. I don't know what's going on here, but it isn't all jake."
        "Jake who?" Beame asked.
        "Jake nobody. Just jake."
        "He doesn't have a last name?" Beame asked, puzzled.
        "Jake is an expression," Major Kelly said. "I meant that everything about those Stukas is somehow not right. It's all false."
        "Oh," Beame said. "I see. It's not jake."
        "Just like General Blade isn't all jake," Kelly said. "At first, I thought he sent us here because he was senile. Lately, I've realized there's got to be more to it than that. I don't know what, though. I wish I did."
        The next block of A Street contained a stone well, a sixty-by-forty-foot school for the deaf and, on the east, the fourth wall of the convent yard fence which several workmen were still nailing in place.
        And then they reached the bridge road again. To the east was the church and rectory. One block to the west was the bridge. Only three structures fronted the bridge road on that last block: two houses and the church-owned store in which the products and handicrafts of the deaf-mutes were sold to tourists and those in nearby villages. The store was fully completed and stocked with quilts, canned goods, jewelry, clothing, carpentry, and other items which had been taken from Eisenhower and which would be foisted on the Germans as produce of the deaf-mutes if any krauts wandered into the place.
        The third block of A, the first south of the bridge road, was faced by two one-story houses on the west. Beneath the first of these was the hospital bunker in which Tooley, Kowalski, Liverwright, and Emil Hagendorf would pass the tense night. Hagendorf would pass the tense night as a prisoner. They had purchased a great deal of wine from Maurice to keep Hagendorf drunk and docile.
        On the other side of the block was the churchyard. It was dark and quiet. Kelly could see half a dozen rounded tombstones and the vague outlines of others lying in the deeper shadows. Altogether, Maurice had provided forty-five grave markers which he had borrowed from church and family plots in and around Eisenhower. These had all been set in fresh concrete, over nonexistent graves. More than anything else that had been done, these gave the town a past, an illusion of age and endurance. When Kelly directed the flashlight beam in among them, the sandstone and granite markers gleamed and rose up in chalky skirts from the pools of blue-black shadows on the ground.
        The final block of A Street, the southwest corner of the town, held platform houses, sheds, and outhouses. Kelly played his light back there, and he suddenly thought that he and Beame seemed like two watchmen examining a movie lot on their late rounds. They went no farther south.
        Z Street was the third east-west lane, south of and parallel to the bridge road and the northernmost Y Street. Z was two blocks long, like Y. On its south side rose a school for normal and deaf-mute children, a stone well, several platform houses built together over what had once been the unit's main bunker. On the north side of Z, the churchyard occupied the first block. The second block contained an open-air shrine to the Virgin Mary, complete with statue and encircling flagstone walkway. Then came three single-story dwellings, all shabby, all with broken-down