Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  But every motion he made seemed to him to be a racket. He could feel his pulse racing, and he pivoted his head, searching the darkness for the source of the sounds that trailed them. Every shadow seemed to move, every slice of nighttime held some form that eluded distinction. Each drop of blackness seemed to mask a gesture that threatened them.

  Tommy thought he could hear breathing, then he thought he could hear boots tramping in the nearby exercise yard, then he realized he could hear nothing for real, save the nasty fear-noise of his own heart pounding away within his chest.

  They reached the crawl space and Tommy’s hands started to shake. Acid bile filled his dry throat and he wasn’t certain that he could speak.

  Scott paused, bending toward Tommy, cupping his hand around his ear and whispering. “I’m pretty damn sure someone’s back there following us. If it’s a Kraut, we can’t show him the passageway beneath the hut. They figure out that kriegies are using the crawl space and they’ll dump concrete in there tomorrow. Can’t do that. We’re gonna have to try to make it around the front. Dodge the searchlight.”

  Tommy nodded, an odd wave of relief coursing through him as he recognized he wouldn’t have to traverse the passageway again. And with that relief came the understanding that Scott’s observation was correct. Tommy thought that at least Scott was still thinking like a soldier. But at that moment, he didn’t know what frightened him more: being forced to crawl beneath Hut 102 or trying to elude the searchlight or waiting for whoever was following them through the darkness to emerge. They all seemed equally evil.

  “But maybe it’s one of our guys,” Scott whispered. “And maybe that’s worse. . . .” He let his words trail off into the slippery cool air.

  With a single glance backward into the void behind them, Scott crept forward to the front edge of Hut 102. Tommy followed on his heels, tossing his own gaze backward once or twice, imagining forms darting through the black night behind them. At the front of the hut, Scott bent down and peered around the edge.

  Almost immediately, the black flier pivoted toward Tommy.

  “The light’s pointing away!” he said, his voice still barely above a whisper but with the demands of a shout. “We go, now!”

  Without hesitating, Scott burst around the corner, dodging the stairs to Hut 102, arms pumping, flat out sprinting for the door to Hut 101, like a halfback who spots a hole in the line. Tommy had launched himself directly behind Scott, moving rapidly, although not quite able to keep pace with the black flier. He saw the searchlight’s beam cutting through the night away from them, blessing them with the same darkness that had seemed a moment earlier to be filled with terrors. Then he saw Scott take the steps up to their barracks in a single leap, grabbing at the door handle and jerking the door open. As the searchlight abruptly changed direction, and began to race across the dirt ground and wooden huts toward him, Tommy pushed himself forward, flying the last few feet through the air a step ahead of the light, tumbling through the open door. Scott dragged the door closed as he fell to the floor inside the hut, next to Tommy. There was an instant halo of light that passed over the exterior of Hut 101, then proceeded on, oblivious to their presence inside the door.

  Both men were quiet, their breath coming in rapid, spasmodic bursts. After close to a minute, Scott lifted himself up on one elbow. At the same time, Tommy felt around for the candle he’d left behind, then found a match in his shirt pocket. The match flickered as he struck it against the wall and the candle threw weak light on the black airman’s grin.

  “Any more adventures planned for this evening, Hart?”

  Tommy shook his head. “Enough for tonight.”

  Scott nodded, still grinning. “Well, then, I’ll see you in the morning, counselor.”

  He laughed. His teeth flashed as they reflected the candlelight.

  “I wonder who it was that was out there with us? A Kraut? Or maybe someone else?” Scott snorted. “Kinda makes one wonder, don’t it?” Then he shrugged, rose to his feet so that he loomed up over Tommy and, slipping out of his flight boots, padded off down the corridor without speaking another word.

  Tommy reached down to pull his own boots off, wondering the same thing. Friend or foe? And which was which? As he tried to unlace the shoes, he discovered his hands were still quivering, and he had to take a minute to get them under control.

  It was a fine morning, warm, filled with springtime promises, with only a few billowy white clouds scudding across the distant horizon like sailboats on a faraway sea—the sort of morning that made the war seem distant and illusory. It seemed to affect the Germans, as well; they completed the morning count rapidly, dismissing the men with more than the usual quick efficiency. The kriegies dispersed throughout the camp lazily, some men gathering into knots and just idly standing about smoking in the assembly yard discussing the latest war rumors, gossiping, and telling the same jokes they had already told day in and day out for months and sometimes years. Others picked up and formed the ubiquitous baseball game. A number of men stripped off their shirts and moved chairs out into the sunshine to bathe in the warmth, and others started walking the wire, like strolling through a park, although the sun glistened off the barbed wire to remind them where they were.

  As he expected, Tommy Hart saw Lincoln Scott quick-marching from the assembly ground and entering Hut 101 alone, looking neither to right nor left, to return to his room, his Bible, and his solitude. Then Tommy started to retrace their steps from the midnight before.

  He tried not to attract any attention to himself, though he realized, ruefully, that by behaving in such an obviously nonchalant manner he was undoubtedly more noticeable rather than less. But there was nothing he could do about this. He moved slowly, almost as if absentmindedly. He ignored the crawl space under the fourth window of Hut 102, fighting off the urge to inspect it during the daytime. He had a lingering question or two about that passageway, but he had not fully formulated the questions in his mind. Only that, like so many things, something struck him as oddly out of place. There was some connection, some linkage that he didn’t fully comprehend, he thought. In addition, he did not want anyone to know that he and Scott had located this route beneath the huts.

  So he made his way slowly around the front of Hut 102, scuffling his feet in the dirt, occasionally pausing to lean up against the building and smoke, turning his head toward the sunshine. In the daytime, the distance seemed benign. He swallowed hard against a chill that passed through him as he remembered the race against the searchlight from the previous night.

  It took a few lazy minutes before he turned and started to travel quickly down the alleyway formed by the juncture of the two barracks. In the daytime, the V caused by the tree stump was even more pronounced, and he was surprised that he’d never noticed it before.

  Tommy paused before approaching the spot at the end of the two huts. He turned around sharply, trying to see if he was being watched, but it was impossible to tell: There was a kriegie on a stoop, darning socks, the needle reflecting the sunlight as he pulled it through the wool; another was leaning in a spot of sunshine, reading a tattered paperback book with seeming intensity. Two men near the front of Hut 103 were idly tossing a softball back and forth, and three other men a few feet distant were engaged in some debate that seemed to require much gesturing and laughter. Other men wandered past, some moving slowly, others rapidly, as if they had some pressing engagement; it was impossible to tell if any one of them was inspecting him. Leaning back against the wall of the hut, he lit another cigarette, trying to blend in with the camp routine as unobtrusively as possible. He smoked slowly, his eyes darting about, surveying the other men, and when he finished, he flicked the butt away. Then he abruptly turned and headed to the juncture of the two huts.

  The small garden that he had just been able to make out in the dark seemed desultory and almost abandoned. There were some potatoes and some greens struggling to take root. This was unusual: Most prisoner-of-war gardens were tended with extraord
inary care and single-minded dedication; the men who tilled them were devoted to their tiny patches of dirt, not merely for the food they created, which helped supplement the meager rations culled from Red Cross parcels, but because of the great morsels of time they occupied.

  This garden was different. It had a shadowy, neglected air to it. The earth was turned, but clumps of dirt hadn’t been broken up. Some of the plants needed trimming. Tommy bent down, kneeling, and felt the ground. It was damp and moist, which was what he would have expected, given the lack of sunshine that filtered into the spot. There was a slight musty and rotten smell to the ground.

  He stared at the brown dirt. If there had been any blood spilled here, he thought, it would have been a simple matter for the killer to return the following day and simply cultivate it into the earth. Still, he let his eyes move slowly across the plain, right to the edge of Hut 103.

  Then he stopped, his heart quickening.

  His eyes fixed upon a faded gray, worn wooden board, just above the ground. There was a small but substantial streak of dark brown clearly marring the wall. Almost maroon colored. Dry, flaky.

  Tommy stood up sharply. He had the presence of mind to spin about, once again checking to see if he was being observed. His eyes inspected each of the men lingering within his sight line. It was possible, he realized, that none of them, or all of them, were keeping watch over what he was doing. He calculated in his head rapidly, as he turned back to the small stain he’d noticed. He took a deep breath. If it was what he thought it was, and if he approached it, he knew he would be signaling something to the man who had killed Vincent Bedford, and it was not a signal, he was certain, he wanted anyone to read. There is a fine line, he thought, between defending a man by denial—by attacking the evidence against him and offering different explanations for actions—and the moment that the defense takes a different tack. Shifts its sails and sets off on the more dangerous course, where the finger of accusation is pointed at someone new. Tommy knew there were risks in stepping forward.

  He glanced about, once again.

  Then, shrugging inwardly, he picked his way amid the ill-tended rows of vegetables to the side of Hut 103. He knelt down, reaching for the wooden wallboard, touching the smear of dark with his fingertips.

  His first touch persuaded him that it was dried blood.

  Looking down, he ran his fingers through the dirt. Any other signs of death would have been absorbed, but this board had captured some. Not much, but some, nonetheless. He tried to picture the sequence at night. The man with the blade. Vic’s back turned. The swift jab, delivered assassination-style.

  He thought: Vic must have jerked about and fallen, slumping in the arms of the man who killed him, bending just slightly, dripping his life away for a moment, unconscious, death hurrying to take possession of his heart.

  Shuddering, Tommy turned once again to the wallboard. He realized that the same angles that had created the darkness in the spot had also prevented the recent rain from washing away the bloodstain. This was, he thought, nastily ironic, and it filled him with a cold, harsh amusement.

  For an instant, he was unsure what to do. If he’d had the Irish artist with him, he would tell him to sketch the spot. But he realized that the likelihood of him going and finding Colin Sullivan in the North Compound and then returning through the gate and finding the bloodstain untouched were slim. It was smarter to presume that someone was watching him.

  So, instead, he reached down and seized hold of the board, and tugged hard. There was a cracking sound as the flimsy wood gave way.

  He rose up, with the broken hunk of wood. The bloodstain was captured in the center of the board. He looked down and saw that the damage done to the wall of Hut 103 was minimal, but noticeable. He turned away, and realized that at least a dozen kriegies had stopped whatever they were doing and were regarding him intently. He hoped the curiosity in their faces was typical kriegie curiosity, driven by a fascination with anything that was even the slightest bit unusual or different, anything that might break the tedious routines of Stalag Luft Thirteen.

  He shouldered the board, like a rifle, and wondered whether he had just done something terribly foolhardy and eminently dangerous. Of course, he thought to himself, that was what the war was all about: putting oneself at risk. That was what was easy. The tricky part was surviving all the chances one took.

  He marched to the end of the hut and saw that one of the men playing catch with the softball was Captain Walker Townsend. The Virginian nodded at Tommy, took in the section of board slung over Tommy’s shoulder, but did not interrupt his game. Instead, he reached up and plucked the softball from the air with a graceful, practiced motion. The ball made a sharp, slapping sound as it stuck in the pocket of the captain’s faded leather baseball glove.

  He delivered the blood-marked board to Lincoln Scott, who had looked up from his bunk with surprise and some enjoyment when Tommy entered the room.

  “Hello, counselor,” he said. “More excursions?”

  “I retraced our steps from last night and I found this,” Tommy replied. “Can you keep it safe?” he asked. Scott reached out and took the board out of his hands and turned it over, inspecting it.

  “I guess so. But what the hell is it?”

  “Proof that Trader Vic was killed between Huts 102 and 103, right where we thought. I believe that’s dried blood.”

  Scott smiled, but shook his head negatively. “It might be. It might also be mud. Or paint. Or lord knows what. I don’t suppose we have any way of testing it?”

  “No. But neither does the opposition.”

  Scott still regarded the board with skepticism, but at least nodded his head slightly in agreement. “Even if it is blood, how do we prove it belonged to Bedford?”

  Tommy smiled. “Thinking like a lawyer, lieutenant,” he said. “Well, I don’t know that we have to. We merely suggest it. The idea is to create enough doubt about each aspect of the case against you that the whole of their picture crumbles. This is an important piece.”

  Scott still looked askance. “I wonder whose garden that is?” Scott asked, as he gingerly fingered the ripped piece of wood, turning it over and over in his hands. “Might say something.”

  “It might,” Tommy acknowledged. “Though my guess is that I probably should have found that out before drawing attention to the spot. Not a helluva big chance anyone will volunteer that information now, I would think.”

  Scott nodded, turned, and placed the board beneath his bunk.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Why should anyone help me?”

  The black flier straightened up, and without warning, his jocularity fled. It was as if he’d suddenly been ripped from the abstract of his situation, back to its reality. He quickly spun his eyes around the bunk room, past Tommy, examining each of the stolid wooden walls, his prison within a prison. Tommy could sense that Scott had traveled somewhere within his head, and when he’d returned, he’d also returned to his sullen, angry, the-world-against-him attitude. Tommy did not point out that it seemed that a number of people were already helping the black flier. Instead, he turned toward the door to exit the room, but before he could step in that direction, Scott stopped him with a fierce glance and a bitter question: “So what’s next, counselor?”

  Tommy paused before replying. “Well, drudge-work mostly. I’m going to interview some of the prosecution witnesses and find out what the hell they’re going to say and then go and talk strategy with Phillip Pryce and Hugh Renaday. Thank God for Phillip. He’s the one putting us ahead, I think. Anyway, once I’ve done that, then you and I will start preparing hard for Monday morning because I’m sure Phillip is already outlining a scenario he’ll want us to follow precisely.”

  Scott nodded, snorting slightly. “Somehow,” he said quietly, “I don’t think that it’s going to work out quite as theatrically as all that.”

  Tommy had turned and was halfway through the door, but there was so much frustration in Scott’s words that h
e turned and asked, “What’s the problem?”

  “You don’t see the problem? What, are you blind, Hart?”

  Tommy hesitated, stepping back into the small bunk room. “I see that we’re accumulating evidence and information that should show the prosecution’s efforts to be so many lies. . . .”

  Scott shook his head.

  “You’d think the truth would be enough.”

  “We’ve gone over that,” Tommy said with brisk finality. “It rarely is. Not merely in a court, but in life.”

  Scott sighed, and drummed his fingers against the leather jacket of the Bible.

  “So, we can show that Bedford wasn’t killed in the Abort. We can suggest that he was killed in a fashion resembling an assassination. We can argue the actual murder weapon wasn’t the knife that was so damn conveniently planted here—although we can’t really explain why Bedford’s or somebody else’s blood was all over it. We can claim that my boots and my jacket were stolen on the night in question by the real murderer—but that particular truth is going to be a hard one for any judge to swallow, huh? We can attack every aspect of the prosecution’s case, I suppose. And what good does it do us? They still have the strongest piece of evidence available to them. The evidence that’s going to put me in front of that firing squad.”

  Scott shook his head sharply from side to side.

  Tommy stared at the mercurial fighter pilot and for the first time since meeting him in the cooler cell thought him to be a truly complicated man. Scott had returned to his bed, hunkered down, shoulders slumped forward. It was like the portrait of an athlete who knows that the game is lost although there is still time remaining on the clock. The score insurmountable no matter what occurs. He lifted his massive right fist and rubbed it hard against his temples. The confident adventurer of the night before, the man who rose to the hunt in the darkness and danger of the camp at night, had disappeared. The fighter pilot who had led the mission of the midnight past seemed to evaporate, replaced by a resigned, discouraged man; a man filled with strength and speed but shackled by his situation. Tommy was struck by the thought that it seemed at least in part that history was as much a part of the case against him as was any morsel of evidence.