The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter

Author:Stephen Hunter [Hunter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction / Thrillers
ISBN: 9780440221876
Google: uqix0BegQMAC
Amazon: 0440221870
Barnesnoble: 0440221870
Publisher: Island Books
Published: 1996-06-02T05:00:00+00:00

18

Ugh!

Roger sat in his Class A’s on the terrace of the Ritz. Before him was a recent edition of the New York Herald Tribune, the first page given to a story by a woman named Marguerite Higgins, who had arrived with the 22d Regiment, some motorized hot shots, at the concentration camp of Dachau.

Roger almost gagged. The bodies heaped like garbage, skinny sacks, ribs stark. The contrast between that place and this, Paris, Place Vendôme, the ritzy Ritz, the city shoring up for an imminent VE-Day, girls all over the place, was almost more than he could take.

Leets and Outhwaithe were there, poking about. Roger was due back in a day or so.

But he had come to a decision: he would not go.

I will not go.

No matter what.

He shivered, thinking of the slime at Dachau. He imagined the smell. He shivered again.

“Cold?”

“Huh? Oh!”

Roger looked up into the face of the most famous tennis player of all time.

“You’re Evans?” asked Bill Fielding.

“Ulp,” Roger gulped spastically, shooting to his feet. “Yes, sir, yes, sir, I’m Roger Evans, Harvard, ’47, sir, probably ’49 now, with this little interruption, heh, heh, number-one singles there my freshman year.”

The great man was a head taller than Roger, still thin as an icicle, dressed in immaculate white that made his tan seem deeper than burnished oak; he was in his late forties but looked an easy thirty-five.

Roger was aware that all commerce on the busy terrace had stopped; they were looking at Bill Fielding, all of them—generals, newspapermen, beautiful women, aristocrats, gangsters. Fielding was a star even in the exotic confines of the Ritz. And Roger knew they were also looking at him.

“Well, let me tell you how this works. You’ve played at Roland Garros?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, we’ll be on the Cour Centrale of course—”

Of course, thought Roger.

“—a clay surface, in an amphitheater, about eight thousand wounded boys, I’m told, plus the usual brass—you’ve played in front of crowds, no nerve problems or anything?”

Roger? Nervous?

“No, sir,” he said. “I played in the finals of the Ivies and I made it to the second round at Forest Hills in ’44.”

Fielding was not impressed.

“Yes, well, I hope not. Anyway, I usually give the boys a little talk, using Frank as a model, show them the fundamentals of the game. The idea is first to entertain these poor wounded kids but also to sell tennis. You know, it’s a chance to introduce the game to a whole new class of fan.”

Yeah, some class, most of ’em just glad they didn’t get their balls blown off in the fighting, but he nodded intently.

“Then you and Frank will go two sets, three maybe, depends on you.” Roger did not like at all the assumption here that he was the sacrificial goat in all this. “Then you and I, Frank and Major Miles, our regular Army liaison, will go a set of doubles, just to introduce them to that. Agreeable?”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Fielding. Uh, I saw you at Forest Hills in ’31. I was just a kid—” Oops, that was a wrong thing to say.

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