Hart's War
Page 33
There was a small crack in Lincoln Scott’s voice when he added, “I don’t know if they’ve been told I’m alive. It’s a very hard thing, Hart, to imagine someone you love thinks you dead. . . .” He stopped.
Tommy returned the picture to Scott. “Beautiful,” he said. This was the obligatory response, but a truthful one, nonetheless. “I’m sure the army has informed them you’re a prisoner.”
Scott nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. But then, you might suspect I would have received a letter or a package or something from home, and I haven’t. Not a word.” He took another long look at the photograph before returning it slowly to his pocket. “I’ve never seen the baby. He was born after I was shipped overseas. Makes it hard to imagine he’s real. But he is. Probably cries a lot. I did when I was little, or so my mother likes to tell me. I suppose I’d like to live to see him, if only just one time. And I’d like to see my wife again, too.” He hesitated, then added, “Of course, that’s no different for you, or MacNamara or Clark or Captain Townsend or the Krauts or anyone else in this damn place. Even Trader Vic. He probably wanted to go back to Mississippi as bad as anyone. I wonder who he had waiting for him back home?”
“His boss at the used-car dealership,” Tommy said.
There was a bridge game going on in one bunk room, with as many kibitzers following the play as there were players. Unlike poker, or Hearts, both of which lent themselves to more rowdy levels of participation and overflow crowds of observers, the bridge game flowed quietly until the last few tricks of the hand, which prompted intense and raucous discussion about the precise manner in which the cards were played. Kriegies loved the arguments as much as they loved the games; it was another way that something modest was exaggerated, stretched out to consume more of the frustrating minutes of imprisonment.
The door to Scott’s room, with its offensive carving, had been replaced, just as the Germans had promised. But as the two men approached, they saw that it was ajar. Tommy might have been surprised, but he immediately heard loud humming and snatches of song coming from the bunk room, and he recognized Hugh Renaday’s rough voice amid the mingled off-key tunes and lavishly obscene lyrics.
They stepped in, and saw the Canadian in the process of making up his sleeping area. Tommy’s modest accommodations were pushed to the wall, his law books stacked beneath the bunk, some spare clothes hung from a string between two nails. It wasn’t much, but some of the starkness and painful isolation of the room had been diminished. Hugh was tacking an out-of-date calendar to the wall. The year-old date was less significant than the portrait of the scantily clad and significantly endowed, doe-eyed young woman that graced the month of February 1942.
“Can’t be without February,” Hugh said, as he stepped back, admiring the picture. “She cost me two packs of smokes. I fully intend to find her after the war and propose to her perhaps ten seconds after we’ve been introduced. And I won’t be taking no for an answer.”
“Funny,” Tommy said, staring attentively and admiringly at the pin-up. “She doesn’t look very Canadian. I doubt she’s ever chewed on a piece of blubber or even harpooned a seal. And her outfit, well, it doesn’t look like it would be terribly effective in the northern wintertime. . . .”
“Tommy, my friend, I do believe you’re missing the point here entirely.” He laughed, and so did Tommy. Then Hugh reached out and grasped the black flier’s hand, shaking it hard. “Glad to be here, mate,” he said.
Scott replied, “Welcome to the Titanic.” He turned and started toward his bunk, but then stopped abruptly. For an instant, he remained rigid, then he pivoted back toward Hugh.
“How long have you been here?” Scott abruptly demanded.
The Canadian looked surprised, then shrugged. “Half hour, maybe. Didn’t take too long to unpack and stow my things. Fritz Number One brought me over, after the South Compound’s Appell. We had to stop and check something with Visser, and then with one of Von Reiter’s adjutants. Numbers stuff mainly. Paperwork. I guess they want to make sure they get the count straight in both camps. Don’t want to go chasing about, sounding off all their whistles and alarms, looking for someone who’s merely switched compounds.”
“Did you see anyone when you arrived?” Scott questioned sharply.
“See anyone? Sure, there were kriegies all over the place.”
“No, I mean in here.”
“In here? Not a soul,” Hugh replied. “Door was shut tight. New door, too, I noticed. But what’s eating you, mate?”
“That,” Scott said, suddenly pointing to a corner of the room.
Tommy pushed to Scott’s side. He saw what the black airman was pointing toward instantly. Resting upright in the far corner of the bunk room was the missing wooden board that had been marked with Trader Vic’s blood.
He covered the distance in a single stride, grabbing at the hunk of wood, quickly turning it over, back and forth, in his hands, examining it. Then Tommy looked up at Lincoln Scott, who remained in the center of the small space.
“See for yourself,” he said bitterly.
Tommy pitched the board to Scott, who seized it from the air. He turned it over once or twice, just as Tommy had.
But Hugh was the first to speak. “Tommy, lad, what the hell’s the matter? Scott, what’s with the hunk of wood?”
Scott shook his head and muttered an obscenity. Tommy answered the question. “That’s all it is, now,” he said. “Might as well toss it in the stove. This morning, it was a critical piece of evidence. Now, it’s nothing. Just firewood.”
“I don’t get it,” Hugh said. He took the board from Scott.
It was Scott who explained, as he handed it over. “A little while ago, it was a board that Tommy discovered right outside Hut 105, covered with Trader Vic’s blood. Proof in our hands that he was killed someplace other than where his body was found. But someone has gone to considerable trouble in the last few hours to steal the board from this room and then clean it of any traces of Vic’s blood. Probably poured boiling water all over it, right into every little crack and splinter, and then scrubbed it with disinfectant.”
Hugh lifted the board to his nose, sniffing. “You’re right about that. Smells of lye and suds . . .”
“Just as if it came from the Abort,” Tommy said. “And I’ll wager you a carton of smokes that we could go over to Hut 105 and find that someone has cut in a different piece of wood at the spot where I ripped this out.”
Scott nodded. “No bet,” he said. “Damn.”
He smiled wryly. “They’re not stupid,” he added cautiously, sadness filling every sound he spoke. “Stupid would have been just to steal the damn board. But stealing it, cleaning it of all traces, and then returning it to this room, now, that’s clever, isn’t it, Mr. Policeman?”
He looked over at Hugh, who nodded and continued to inspect the board. “If I had a microscope,” he said slowly, “maybe even just a magnifying glass, I could probably find traces that the cleaning job left behind.”
Tommy gestured widely. “A microscope? Here?” he asked cynically.
Hugh shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Might as well ask for a winged chariot to carry us home.”
“They’re very damn clever,” Scott continued, pivoting toward Tommy. “This morning we had a piece of hard evidence. Now we have nothing. Less than nothing. And poof! There goes tomorrow morning’s arguments, counselor. And right alongside any hope of delaying the trial.”
Tommy didn’t at first reply. No sense in adding words to the simple truth.
“Actually,” Hugh was quick to interject, “now you’ve got a problem. You told MacNamara about this theft?”
Tommy instantly saw where the onetime policeman was heading. “Yes. Damn. And now we’ve got a board that doesn’t show what we claimed it did. That hunk of useless wood is as dangerous now as any of the evidence the prosecution does have. We damn well can’t hold it up and say it used to have Vic’s blood on it. Nobody would believe that for a second.”
Hugh smiled. “But they just still might believe you if you continue to say it was stolen.”
As he spoke, Hugh took the board and carefully propped it up against the edge of his bunk. Then, as his words dwindled into the air of the bunk room, he suddenly lifted his right leg and slammed it against the board. The savage kick splintered the board into two pieces. A second, equally hard kick turned it into kindling.
Tommy grimaced, shrugged, and said, “The cooking stove is down the corridor.”
“Then I need to cook something,” Renaday replied. He gathered the chunks of wood in his arms and exited the room.
“I guess that board is still stolen,” Scott said. “I wonder if the bastards who stole it in the first place thought ahead far enough.”
“I doubt they’d anticipate us destroying it,” Tommy replied. He felt slightly uneasy at what they’d done. My first real case, he thought, and I destroy evidence. But before he had the chance to temporize about the morality of what they’d accomplished with two well-placed kicks, Lincoln Scott was speaking.
“Yeah. They were probably counting on us being honest and playing by the rules, because that’s what we’ve been doing, right up to now. The problem is, Hart, no one else seems to be. Think about it: the carving on the door. Somebody knew that would bring me out of the room. Somebody knew I’d react the damn fool way I did, challenging everybody to a fight. KKK and nigger. Like waving a red flag in front of a bull. And I fell for it, went dashing out front, ready to fight the whole damn camp if necessary. And, right as I’m making a fool out of myself, someone sneaks in here and lifts the only solid piece of evidence we’ve got. And then, as soon as my back was turned again, zip, they brought it back. But ruined as evidence. And worse, because with that board sitting in the corner, we’re going to appear to MacNamara and the entire camp to be a pair of liars.”
Something frightening occurred to Tommy at that moment. He slowly inhaled, staring across at Lincoln Scott, who was continuing to speak.
The black flier sighed deeply. “Our expert barrister is suddenly removed. Our pathetic evidence is destroyed. All the lies make sense. All the truths seem nonsense.”
What Tommy saw, in that moment, was that slowly but surely they were being squeezed into a location where all that remained of their defense was Scott’s denials. He suddenly saw that no matter how forceful they were, they were still exceedingly fragile. And any discrepancy, any inconsistency, might turn the strength of those denials into ammunition against him.
He started to say this, but stopped when he saw the stricken look on Lincoln Scott’s face. It seemed to him, in that second, that much of Scott’s rage and frustration slid away from him, leaving behind nothing except a great, ineffable sadness. Scott’s shoulders slumped forward. He put a hand to his eyes, rubbing hard. Tommy looked across the small room at Scott and realized, in that precise second, why the black flier had greeted everyone with distance and standoffishness from his first minute in the captivity of Stalag Luft Thirteen. What he saw was that there is nothing more hurtful and lonely in the world than to be different and isolated, and that Scott’s only defense against the jealousy and racism he knew would be waiting for him had been to fire his own anger first, like the fighter pilot he was.
Tommy realized that everything in the case was a trap. But the worst of the traps was the one Scott had inadvertently created for himself. By not allowing anyone to know who he really was, he had made it easy for them to kill him. Because they would not care. No one knew about the wife, the child, waiting at home, nor did they know about the preacher father who urged him forward to advanced degrees or the mother who made him read the classics. Lincoln Scott had made it seem to all the other kriegies that he wasn’t like them, when, in truth, he was no different, not in the slightest.
It must be a terrible thing, Tommy guessed, to believe that the nails and wood that you purchased yourself to build walls were now being used to fashion your own coffin.
“So, counselor, what’s left? Not much, is there?”
Tommy didn’t reply. He watched Scott put a hand to his forehead, as if in pain. When he pulled it away, he looked over at Tommy. There was anguish in his words, and Tommy abruptly realized how hard it must be for those who are accustomed to staring across the ring or through the sky and seeing their enemy clearly arrayed before them to be suddenly trying to fight against something as elusive and vaporous as the hatred Scott was now up against. “Some people seem to be going to a whole lot of trouble just to make absolutely damn for certain sure that this poor old nigger gets shot. And they sure as hell seem to have some damn fast timetable, too.”
Then without another word, Lincoln Scott threw himself down on his bunk, tossing his thick forearm over his eyes, blocking out the unrelenting light from the single overhead bulb. He remained in that position, motionless, not even looking up, when Hugh reentered the bunk room. He stayed that way, not moving, like a man on a slab, right to the moment that the Germans cut the electric power to the huts, plunging all three men into the usual complete darkness of prisoner-of-war camp.
It was nearly midnight by the luminous dial on the watch that Lydia had given him and Tommy found himself unable to sleep, filled with an unruly nervousness that was not dissimilar to the anxiety he felt on the eve of his first combat mission. Within himself, he could sense some doubt, some fear, some frustration at the capriciousness of the world that had put him in this situation. He sometimes thought that true bravery was merely acquiring the ability to act, to do what needed to be done, in the face of all these emotions that urged him to find someplace safer and hide. He listened to the light sounds of sleep coming from the two other men in the room, wondering for a moment why they were not equally energized and didn’t find sleep equally elusive. He supposed there was resignation in Lincoln Scott’s breathing, and acceptance in Hugh Renaday’s.
He felt neither of these emotions.
What he thought was that nothing had gone right in the camp from the moment Fritz Number One found Trader Vic’s body. The steady routine of camp life—critical to both captors and captured—had been disturbed profoundly, and promised to be further disrupted when the black airman’s trial started in the morning.
He mentally chewed on this idea for a moment, but it only led him to more confusion. There seemed to him to be so many layers of hatred at work, and for an instant he felt despair at ever sorting all of them out. Who was hated the most? Scott? The Germans? The camp? The war? And who was doing the hating?
Tommy slowly exhaled, and thought that questions made for poor armor, but they were all he had. His eyes open to the night, he stared up toward the ceiling of the bunk room, wishing that he could look up into the stars at home, and find the same comforting trail through the blinking celestial canopy that he’d always sought out when he was younger. It was an odd thing, he realized, to go through life believing that if a person could find one familiar route through the distant heavens, then they would believe that a similar course could be charted through the nearby swamps and shoals of earth.
This thought made him smile bitterly to himself, because in it he recognized Phillip Pryce’s handiwork. What made Phillip such a fine barrister, Tommy thought, was that he was psychologically always a step or two ahead. Where others saw mere facts stiffly arrayed, Phillip saw huge canvases, drawn to the edge in nuance and subtlety. He did not know that he could ever fully achieve Pryce’s capabilities, but he thought achieving some would be far better than none.
Tommy asked himself: What would Phillip have said about the disappearance and sudden reappearance of the crucial wooden board? Tommy breathed slowly. Phillip would say to look to who gains what. The prosecution gains, Tommy considered. But then Phillip would ask: Who else? The men who hate Scott for his skin, they too gained. The real killer of Vincent Bedford, he gained as well. The people who didn’t gain
were the defense, and the Germans.
He continued to breathe in and out, slowly.
That was an odd combination, Tommy thought. Then he asked himself: How are these others aligned?
He did not know the answer to that question.
Like a sudden storm surge ripping across a cold mountain lake, driving whitecaps onto still waters, Tommy danced amid all the conflicting ideas within him. Some men wanted Scott executed because he was black. Some men wanted Scott executed because he was a murderer. Some men wanted Scott executed for revenge.
He inhaled sharply, holding his breath.
Phillip was right, he thought suddenly. I’m looking at it all backward. The real question is: Who wanted Vincent Bedford dead?
He did not know. But someone did, and he still hadn’t any idea who.
Questions made a racket in his head, so that when the soft sound of feet outside the closed bunk room door finally penetrated to his ear, he was startled. It was a padding sound, men in their stockings, moving carefully to conceal their travel.
He felt his throat abruptly constrict, his heart begin to race.
For an instant, he thought they were about to be attacked, and he pushed himself up onto an elbow, about to whisper an alarm to Scott and Renaday. His hand reached out in the darkness, seeking some kind of weapon. But in that momentary hesitation, the footsteps seemed to fade. He bent forward, listening hard, and heard them rapidly disappear down the central corridor. He took another deep breath, trying to calm himself. He insisted in that second that it had just been an ordinary kriegie, forced to use the solitary indoor toilet late at night. The same toilet that had caused so much trouble.
Then he stopped, and told himself that was wrong. There were two, and more probably three, sets of footsteps outside the door. Three men trying to move silently with a single purpose. Not a lonesome flier feeling ill. And then he realized there was no accompanying sound of rushing water coming from the toilet.