Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  Tommy felt a sudden twinge of sadness. “I do, too,” he said.

  Hugh Renaday had died a decade earlier. A week after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and well before the inevitable progression of the disease could rob his limbs and heart of strength, the hulking hockey player had taken down a favorite hunting rifle, gathered up snowshoes, tent, sleeping bag, and a portable backpacker’s stove, and after writing a series of unequivocal farewell notes to his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and one to Tommy, he had loaded everything into the back of his four-wheel-drive truck and driven deep into the cold wilderness of the Canadian Rockies. It was January, the dead of winter, and when his car would go no farther through the piled snow of an old, abandoned logging trail, Hugh Renaday had started to hike in. When his legs tired of fighting through the northern Alberta drifts, he had stopped, made a modest camp, cooked himself one last meal, then patiently waited for nighttime’s falling temperatures, plummeting far below the freezing point, to kill him.

  Tommy understood later from one of Hugh’s fellow Mounties that freezing to death was not considered a terrible way to die in the North country. One shivered a few times, then eventually slipped into an unconsciousness that mimicked a deep and restful sleep, the years’ memories sliding away slowly along with the final breaths of life. It was a sturdy and efficient way to die, Tommy had always thought, as organized and steady and dependable as the longtime policeman had been every second of his life.

  He did not like to think of Hugh’s death much, though once, when he and Lydia had taken a cruise ship to Alaska and he’d stayed up late into the night mesmerized by the aurora borealis, he’d hoped that the great sheet of colorful lights startling the black sky had been the last thing that Hugh Renaday had seen of this world.

  Instead, when he remembered his friend, he preferred to think of a moment the two men had shared, fishing not far from Tommy’s retirement home in the Florida Keys. Tommy had spotted a huge barracuda, a torpedolike brute, lurking on the edge of a flat, just hanging in a few clear feet of water waiting in ambush for some unsuspecting jack crevalle or needlefish to wander by. Tommy had rigged up a spinning rod with a fluorescent red tube lure and a wire leader. Hugh had thrown the lure just a few feet from the ’cuda’s gaping mouth. The fish had surged forward without hesitation, and then, once hooked, had cartwheeled and exploded, its long silver sides tearing free from the water’s surface, blasting immense white sheets across the waves. Hugh had landed the fish, and while posing for the obligatory photographs to send home, had taken a moment to stare at the great rows of almost translucent razor-sharp canine teeth in the massive jaws of the fish.

  “The business end of a barracuda,” Tommy had said. “Reminds me of some of my honorable fellow members of the bar.”

  But Hugh Renaday had shaken his head.

  “Visser,” the Canadian had replied. “Hauptmann Heinrich Visser. And this is a Visser-fish.”

  Tommy glanced down at his hand again. Visserfish, he thought.

  He must have mumbled the word out loud, because Lydia asked from the bathroom, “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” Tommy replied. “Just wondering. Do you think the red tie is too bright for a funeral?”

  “No,” his wife said. “It’s just right.”

  He guessed that the morning’s gathering would be a little like Phillip Pryce’s funeral, which had been held in one of London’s finer cathedrals a dozen years after the war had ended. Phillip had had many prominent friends from both the military and the legal profession, and they had crowded into the pews while a boys’ choir sang in high-pitched and pristine Latin. Tommy and Hugh often later joked that undoubtedly many of the barristers who’d occupied the opposite side of some issue had attended only to make absolutely certain that Phillip was indeed dead.

  Phillip Pryce had died, both Tommy and Hugh had agreed, most wondrously.

  On the night he’d managed to extricate a conservative member of Parliament from a messy entanglement with a woman half his age plying the most ancient of traditions, Pryce had allowed the junior members of his firm to take him out for a lengthy, elegant dinner in celebration. Afterward, he’d stopped off at his private club for a late-night brandy. Napoleon. Over a hundred years old. One of the butlers had assumed that Phillip had fallen asleep, resting deep in the overstuffed leather of a wing chair, snifter in his hand, only to discover that Pryce had actually died quite quietly of sudden heart failure. The old barrister was smiling ear-to-ear, as if someone familiar and beloved had been at Death’s side when he came beckoning. At Phillip’s funeral, his entire law firm, from most senior to most junior, had marched into the cathedral, shoulder to shoulder, like a Roman cohort, tears filling their eyes.

  Phillip Pryce had left a will that asked Tommy to read something at the service. Tommy had spent a restless night in the Strand Hotel, frantically flipping through passage after passage of both the Old and New Testaments, unable to find words large enough to honor his friend. Anxious, he’d risen shortly after dawn and taken a cab over to Phillip’s Grosvenor Square town house, where the manservant had let him inside.

  At the table beside Phillip’s modest bed, Tommy had noticed an old, dog-eared, much-read, first edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. On the flyleaf Phillip had written an inscription, and Tommy had understood instantly that the book had been a gift for Phillip Junior. The message read simply: My darling boy, no matter how old and wise one struggles to become, it is always important to remember the joys of youth. Here is a book that should help you to remember in years to come. With greatest love on the wondrous occasion of your ninth birthday from your devoted father . . .

  Tommy discovered two sections of the book that were both underlined and faded, as if worn thin by the repeated passing of a child’s eyes over the words. The first was in the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and read: “For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful rememberance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before. . . .”

  The second of the underlined passages was almost the entirety of the final chapter, where the faithful Mole, Rat, Badger, and the irrepressible Mr. Toad arm themselves and attack the vastly superior force of weasels occupying Toad Hall, overwhelming the interlopers through their righteousness and daring.

  And so, later that afternoon, disdaining the Bible and Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More and Keats, Shelley, Byron, and all the other famous poets who so frequently lend their words to solemn occasions, Tommy had risen and read to the distinguished assembly the passages from the children’s book. This, he thought afterward, and Hugh Renaday had mightily agreed, was a little unexpected and more than a touch outrageous and also precisely what Phillip would have most enjoyed.

  “I’m ready,” Lydia said, finally emerging from the bathroom.

  “You look quite exquisite,” Tommy said admiringly.

  “I would rather we were going to a wedding,” Lydia replied, shaking her head a little bit disarmingly. “Or a christening.”

  Tommy stood up and his wife straightened the tie at his neck that did not need straightening. The gift of forgetfulness, he thought. So we can all be as happy and lighthearted as before.

  It was the finest of days, bright, warm. The sort of day that seems misplaced at a funeral. Shafts of vibrant summer light eagerly pierced the stained-glass windows of the cathedral, delivering odd sheets of reds, greens, and golds in wide splashes onto the gray stone floor.

  The rows of pews were packed with mourners. The vice president and his wife were there, representing the administration. They were joined by both senators from Illinois, a gaggle of congressmen, dozens of state officials, and at least one Supreme Court Justice that Tommy had once a
rgued a case before. Eulogies were delivered by prominent men in the field of education, and there was a lengthy, excited, and almost musical reading from the Scriptures by a very young and probably slightly nervous Baptist preacher from Lincoln Scott’s father’s old church.

  A flag draped the casket at the front of the church. In front of the casket were three enlarged photographs. On the right was a picture of Lincoln Scott as an old man, in his flowing academic robes, giving a rousing speech to university graduates. On the left was a newspaper photo from the 1960s of Scott, arm in arm with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, leading a march down some unidentifiable southern street. But in the center, the largest picture of the three, was a young Lincoln Scott, eyes turned skyward, mounting the wing of his Mustang before flying a mission in German skies. Tommy stared at the portrait and thought that whoever took the snapshot had probably mainly by luck managed to capture much about Lincoln Scott, just in the eagerness of his step and the ferocity in his eyes.

  Tommy sat in the middle of the church, his wife at his side. He was unable to listen to all the fine words of praise ringing out above his head from speaker after speaker who rose to the pulpit.

  What he heard, instead, was the long-forgotten sound of engines howling in attack, the staccato racheting noise of machine guns mingling with the thuds of flak exploding outside, raining metal against the exterior of the bomber. For the longest of moments, he felt his throat growing dry, and sweat starting to form beneath his arms. He could hear the cries and calls of men racing into battle and the screams of men embraced by death. The noise threatened to overcome the cool interior of the cathedral where he sat. Tommy breathed out sharply, and then shook his head slightly, as if he could shake away all the memories like a dog shaking water from his fur. Three hundred miles per hour, twenty feet above the water, and the whole world shooting at you. How did you ever live? He couldn’t answer his own question, but he could the one that followed: Twenty feet beneath the ground, bleeding and trapped, and no way out. How did you ever live? He took another deep breath. I lived because of the man in the casket.

  At a signal from the priest, the mourners all rose and sang the first and third verses of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” The strongest voices, Tommy thought, thundered from his left, from the first two pews of the cathedral, where Lincoln Scott’s extended family was gathered, surrounding a small, coffee-colored elderly black woman.

  The priest at the pulpit shut his hymnal with a snap and launched into another reading from the Bible. How David fought great Goliath armed with nothing save his shepherd’s sling and came away victorious.

  Tommy leaned back, feeling the unforgiving wood of the bench against his bones. In a way, he thought, they were all in that cavernous room, listening to the priest. MacNamara and Clark, who’d both received medals and promotions for their command of the escape from Stalag Luft Thirteen, although Tommy had always thought that it was only that true rat-bastard Clark, who had contradicted everything Tommy had believed about him by ordering the unarmed kriegies of Hut 107 to attack the approaching Germans and buy Scott some extra time in the collapsed tunnel, who deserved the honors. Fenelli, who’d gone on to become a cardiovascular surgeon in Cleveland. Tommy had run into him once, when he was staying at a hotel that was also hosting a medical convention, and he’d spotted the onetime medic’s name on a list of speakers. They’d had drinks in the lounge and some moments of alcohol-aided laughter. Fenelli had admired the work of the Swiss surgeons who’d cut up his hand, but Tommy had told him that Phillip Pryce had threatened to shoot any doctor who dared to mess up, which, Fenelli had agreed, had probably encouraged attentiveness.

  Fenelli had asked him if he’d stayed friends with Scott after the war, but Tommy had told him no, which surprised the doctor.

  It was the only time he’d seen Fenelli, and he halfway hoped that when he scanned the faces of the mourners at the church he would spot the medic from Cleveland. But he did not. He’d partially expected, as well, that Fritz Number One might have flown in for the services from Stuttgart, because the former ferret owed a significant debt to Lincoln Scott. Eight months after Tommy’s repatriation, when elements of General Omar Bradley’s Fifth Army had liberated the airmen of Stalag Luft Thirteen, it had been Scott who told army debriefers of Fritz’s language skills and helpfulness. This had led to a position helping U.S. military police interrogate captured German soldiers, as they searched for Gestapo trying to hide among the rank and file. And Fritz later used these same skills to rise to an executive position with Porsche-Audi A.G. in postwar Germany.

  Tommy knew all this from the letters Fritz sent at Christmas time. The first of these had been sent to: T. Hart, Famous Lawyer, Harvard University, Harvard, Massachusetts. How the postal service managed to get it to the law school in Cambridge, which subsequently sent it to Tommy at his firm’s Boston office, had always been something of a mystery to him. Other letters over the years, always containing photographs, had shown the lean ferret growing considerably thicker around the middle, with wife and then children and grandchildren and a selection of different dogs at his side. Fritz had only sent Tommy one unhappy letter in all the years after the war, a short note that arrived not long after the reunification of Germany, when the automobile executive had finally learned from declassified East German documents that Commandant Von Reiter had been shot in early 1945. In the confused days following the fall of the German Reich, Von Reiter had been captured by the Russians. He did not survive his first interrogation.

  Lydia nudged Tommy, holding open the printed funeral program. Belatedly, Tommy joined in as the gathered mourners recited a Psalm in unison. “For they that carried us away captive required of us a song . . .”

  Of the three men who made it through the tunnel and onto the first train that morning, two managed to return home. Murphy, the meatpacker from Springfield, had disappeared, presumed dead.

  In New Orleans once, fifteen years after the war ended, Tommy had won a death penalty case. It was something that he insisted his firm let him do. The bulk of their business was moneymaking corporate law, but every so often he very quietly took on some seemingly hopeless criminal case in some distant part of the nation, charging no fee and working late hours. It was a task he did not require of the associates he hired, or the partners he formed, though more than one of them did precisely the same. Winning these cases was hard, and when he did, there was always a celebratory air.

  On this occasion, long after midnight, he’d found himself in a small jazz club, listening to a particularly good trumpet player. The musician had spotted Tommy, sitting near the front, and almost stumbled on a note. But he’d recovered, smiled, faced the audience, and told them all that sometimes on some nights, he found himself remembering the war, and that this caused him to play something more reflective. He’d then launched into a solo version of “Amazing Grace,” turning the hymn into rhythm and blues, striking long trilling notes that filled the entire room with a plaintive urgency. Tommy had been sure that the musician would come over to speak with him, but instead the bandleader had sent over a bottle of the club’s best champagne, and the note: Better to leave some things unsaid. Here’s that drink I promised you. Glad you made it home, too. When Tommy asked the club manager if he could thank the musician in person, he was told that the trumpet player had already left.

  As best as Tommy could figure, the truth about the murder of Captain Vincent Bedford and Lincoln Scott’s trial and the escape from Stalag Luft Thirteen never really was written, which, he thought, was probably an acceptable thing. He had spent many hours, after he finally returned home to Vermont, thinking about Trader Vic, trying to discover for himself some sort of reconciliation with Bedford’s death. He was not convinced that Vic deserved to die, not even for the mistake of trading information that inadvertently caused the deaths of men and turned him into a threat to the escape plans of others. But then again, he sometimes also thought that Vic’s murder was the only just thing that had ha
ppened in the camp. As the years had passed, Tommy came to understand that, ultimately, the most complicated man, and the hardest of them all to fathom, had been the used-car salesman from Mississippi. He might have been the bravest of them all, the stupidest, the most evil, and the most clever, because, for every single aspect of Vic’s personality, Tommy could find a contradiction. And, finally, he supposed it was all those contradictions that had killed Trader Vic just as surely as that ceremonial SS dagger did.

  Tommy glanced down at the watch he still wore on his wrist, not because he was curious about the time, but more about the memories it held, deep within its mechanical gears and levers. He followed the second hand creeping around the watch face and he thought: We were all heroes once, even the worst of us. The watch no longer kept good time, and more than one repairman had examined it with dismay, suggesting that keeping it running was far more expensive than the watch was worth. But Tommy always paid the bill, because none of the repairmen had even the vaguest idea what its true value was.

  Lydia nudged Tommy again, and they rose.

  Lincoln Scott’s casket was being wheeled down the center of the cathedral while the organ resounded with “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” The most prominent of the dignitaries formed an honorary squad of pallbearers directly behind the vibrant colors of the American flag. And just behind them followed Lincoln Scott’s family. They moved slowly, their pace set by the small, silver-haired, delicate form of the black airman’s widow. Her step had the patience of age.

  The pews emptied out behind the procession. Tommy waited his turn, then stepped out into the aisle. He found Lydia’s arm, and the two of them walked out of the cathedral together.

  Tommy blinked for a moment, when the warm sun hit his face. He heard a familiar twangy voice speaking in his own ear say, Find us the way home, Tommy, willya? and he answered to his own heart, I suppose I did find the way home. For as many of us as I could.