A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I wished I were home with all the crazy O’Malleys. But, since I wasn’t, I had no choice but to continue with my plan, come what may. After all, they wouldn’t keep me in Fort Leavenworth for the rest of my life.

  I crossed the town-hall bridge to the Bishop’s City, on the way asking St. Cunnegunda to help me. Even if I didn’t believe she was a virgin wife, I still believed she was a saint. Having separated temporarily to create an island, the river roared together in waterfalls beneath the bridge. Then the water swirled around the toy town hall, which as always was spectacular. With so much beauty in the world, how could there be so much evil? In the Domplatz, I pondered the Alte Hofaltung, the old medieval seat of government, some of it built out of wood. How much good and evil had those walls witnessed? Who was I to think that I had any more right to miraculous protection than those who had once lived there?

  So, I decided that the only thing to do was to go on with the plan. Die with your boots. Hail, Caesar, those about to die salute you!

  I wandered into our office as serenely as if it were eight-thirty instead of eleven-thirty.

  “Captain Nettleton, ma’am. Sgt. Charles C. O’Malley requests a few brief words with General Meade, ma’am.”

  “Chuck”—she grinned at me—“you look like you have a hangover!”

  “I was at a party last night in the house of the Borgias. They poisoned me.”

  She guffawed. “Too much caviar!”

  “Yes, ma’am. If you say so, ma’am.”

  She continued to laugh. “Might you be able to tell me what you wish to discuss with himself?”

  “I might.”

  “So?”

  “Special Agent Clarke of the FBI.”

  “Pig,” she snapped. “Okay, I’ll tell himself.”

  It was, I conceded, a grand party, despite my poisoning.

  A moment later she was back and nodded me into the inner sanctum.

  “Chucky,” General Meade began, “you look like hell!”

  “Sir, I was poisoned last night!”

  He thought that was hilarious. “You know, I can’t wait to get out of this place. It’s an impossible job for a career officer, but I’ll miss Polly’s parties.”

  “They won’t be here too long either, sir.”

  “I guess that’s right. Well, nostalgia for what used to be is part of the fun of life.”

  “Especially if you’re Irish, sir.”

  “So I’m told.” He smiled thoughtfully. “Now, what’s this about Special Agent Clarke?”

  “I thought I should report, sir, that he’s very difficult to work with. I reported to him this morning at the Bambergerhof at ten hundred hours and requested the documents on the Wülfe case that he possesses—pictures, descriptions, fingerprints. He responded, sir, that they were up in his room and he was not willing at that time to return to his room to retrieve them. He stated that he would deliver them here tomorrow at fourteen-thirty, sir.”

  General Meade’s brow furrowed in displeasure. “You found him in the dining room, son?”

  “No, sir.”

  “In the bar?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.”

  “He was drinking?”

  “Gin, sir.”

  “Drinking or drunk?”

  “I’m unable to make a judgment on that, sir. However in the brief time I was present with him, sir, he emptied two glasses of gin.”

  “I thought so.” The general pounded his baroque oak desk with his fist. “I order you, Sergeant O’Malley, off this case until he begins to cooperate.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I want to make it clear that General Meade was a distinguished soldier, a commander of an armored brigade in Patton’s Third Army with a deserved reputation for tactical brilliance. He would not under other circumstances permit himself to be so adroitly taken in by a punk sergeant. But his present command was boring. He had been appointed CO of the Constabulary out here, Polly had told me, so the Luce publications could reassure their readers that a tough, smart, battle-hardened veteran was responsible for defeating the werewolves.

  “There was a guy from the Bureau at Polly’s party last night,” he said.

  “I trust he was not poisoned like I was, sir?”

  “He was uninvited. Showed up at the door claiming to be an old friend of mine who was in Bamberg for just a few days and wanted to pay his respects. I guess I met him once or twice, but he had to introduce himself to me.”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “Wanted to talk to me about Agent Clarke. Seemed to be a good man who went sour a few years back and turned to the drink. Very good at the job he does.”

  “Bounty hunter, sir.”

  “Good description. . . . Anyway, he said the director, old J. Edgar, wanted him protected and helped and would consider it a favor to him if we did everything we could to facilitate the search for these . . . Damn it, what are their names anyway?”

  “Wülfe, sir. The Gunther Wülfe family.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I had a conversation with him too, sir; he didn’t mention the director to me.”

  “What do you think his message was, son?”

  “Put up with Rednose Clarke, as I think your old friend called him, no matter how much of a drunk he is and no matter how difficult he is to work with.”

  “Sounds exactly right to me.” The general leaned back against his vast, thronelike chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “What do you think we should do?”

  “I’m inclined, sir, to believe that we should certainly give the impression of accepting the director’s advice.”

  “And?” He glared at me, unhappy that I seemed to be going along with J. Edgar.

  “And keep a careful record of his behavior so that when and if he goofs up, we can say we tried.”

  “Ever read Machiavelli, Chuck?” The general leaned forward, elbows resting on his desk.

  “No, sir. Didn’t he play shortstop for the St. Louis Browns?”

  Actually, the Florentine pol was on my reading list for the next semester. But I understood then what General Meade had meant. I later read Il principe with some interest, but he taught me little that I didn’t already know.

  “Well, we’ll follow your plan. But we’ll keep the pace slow until he becomes more cooperative and shows some signs of urgency.”

  “Great tactics, General, sir.”

  He beamed at my compliment, perhaps forgetting that they were my tactics.

  Good, there was no hurry about Agent Clarke. We had perhaps a day or two more of grace. Yet, unless I misjudged the man, he was capable, like a rattlesnake, of swinging into action just when you least expected it—with only a few warning shakes from his rattle.

  As I left the general’s office, Captain Polly handed me four pages of rough draft. “Do you think, Chucky, you could squeeze into your convalescent time a little work?”

  “Me, work?”

  “Do your typewriter magic on these things for us.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am. I must give some instructions downstairs for the general, ma’am, and then I’ll get right to work.”

  “Don’t work too hard!”

  “No, ma’am.”

  I found three of our guys sitting around in the bull pen that used to be the entrance lobby—half a football field long. They were killing time, which was most of what the Army of Occupation did.

  “Hiyah, Sarge.”

  “Hi, guys. . . . Hey, guys, I don’t want to disturb your work. There is a guy we’re kind of looking for. Name’s Gunther Wülfe. Some kind of Nazi from Dresden. FBI wants him. When you feel like some fresh air, would you mind going around town to see if you can find him.”

  “Sure, Sarge. What’s he look like?”

  “Would the Bureau tell a mere sergeant—”

  “Staff sergeant.”

  “Right. Would they tell me what he looks like?”

  “How are we supposed to find him?”

  “Ask around
for him.”

  “Yeah, Sarge, you bet. How long are we supposed to look?”

  “Until you find him. Or until the general calls off the search.”

  “We got you, Sarge.”

  They got it all right. They were supposed to go through the motions of a search for a while. Typical Army order of which they had heard many others in their careers: look like you’re doing something when in fact you’re doing nothing.

  Tomorrow, if Agent Clarke showed up at fourteen-thirty, I’d give them more details about what Trudi’s father looked like. They would never find him because he was dead. I could say that there were a wife and two daughters but they weren’t the ones the Bureau was really after.

  All bases covered.

  I went back up to my typewriter. I glanced around our office. Brig, who had been hard at work when I showed up, was gone. I glanced at my watch. Probably off to the Bahnhof. Doubtless she had shown up at eight-thirty that morning, despite the party last night. She always showed up at eight-thirty—the only hardworking person in our office, probably in the whole building.

  I sat at my typewriter and began to grind out the stuff Polly wanted.

  A cracker voice bellowed, “O’Malley, what the hell are you up to?”

  My heart and stomach dropped through the floor and my mouth went instantly dry.

  Maj. Sam Houston Carpenter.

  There were some misleading aspects of his image, which I dug up by getting a peek at his records and had not yet passed on to General Meade. His ring was from Texas A&M, not the Point, though it had been subtly altered to give the impression of being a Point ring. He had been an officer in the reserves in his state and had served after being called up at the time of Pearl Harbor. Son of an old political family and a lawyer, he had ambitions for the statehouse and beyond. Yet, when his outfit was sent overseas to New Guinea, he remained behind. He was transferred to Europe in 1943 when London seemed to be a reasonably safe place. Somehow he had managed to get himself assigned to the supply unit of the Screaming Eagles—as the Eighty-second is called—but he never once parachuted out of a plane. When, two days after D day, the supply unit brought in equipment for ground war to what was left of the Eighty-second, Sam had remained behind in London, for reasons unexplained.

  There was no explanation for why he did not return to cracker land after the war. Perhaps he volunteered for the Army of Occupation rather than ending up in the planned invasion of Japan.

  That was, I thought, our Sam: a fraud through and through, not a smart fraud, not clever enough, it seemed to me, to be in the black market, but a threat to every woman in Bamberg he wanted and a real pain in the ass to the rest of us.

  I didn’t like him much, you see. I had not turned his record over to the general because I was waiting for just the right time to do so.

  “Pardon me, sir?” I looked up at Carpenter as if he were a lamentable distraction to my work. He leaned over and jerked me to my feet. “Stand at attention in the presence of an officer, you fucking son of a bitch!”

  I looked for Captain Polly, but she was nowhere to be seen. Mommy, where are you when I really need you?

  “Are you physically assaulting me, sir?”

  A couple of other Constabs were still in the office, watching in astonishment.

  “I’ll assault you, you shit-faced fucker.”

  But he let go of me because he knew that I was just nasty enough to bring charges against him. I stood at something that might remotely have resembled attention. I was never good at that sort of thing, but I was particularly slovenly that day to show my contempt for him—and to perhaps trick him into saying more than he wanted.

  “Is there some problem, sir?”

  “You’re the problem, you disgraceful excuse for a soldier.”

  “Perhaps I should go to A & M, when I go home, sir, and learn what a real soldier is.”

  His face twisted with anger, he pulled back his fist to hit me, then controlled himself.

  “Don’t try to smart-ass me, you yellow-livered punk.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That was an original and creative insult, wasn’t it?

  “So what do you think you’re up to?”

  “I’m typing some material at Captain Nettleton’s request, sir.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” he snarled.

  Did he have the pictures or did he not?

  “Sir, at the risk of repeating myself, what seems to be the problem?”

  “We’re keeping an eye on you, O’Malley, a close eye on you.”

  A threatening revelation. Why were they keeping an eye on me? Because I was General Meade’s favorite? Or because I didn’t like his pursuit of Brigitta?

  Strange.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We saw you going into that camera shop this morning, don’t deny it.”

  “I was unaware that the store was off-limits, sir.”

  “You deny you were there?”

  “I can hardly deny that, sir. Two of your agents entered the shop while I was there.”

  “Damn right. I said we were keeping a close eye on you. What were you doing in that shop?”

  “Sir, unless you furnish me some explanation for this encounter, I will respectfully decline to tell you.”

  “Do you know what that place is?” he exploded.

  “A camera shop, I believe.”

  “The guy is a forger. He makes false papers.”

  “I had not been aware of that, sir.”

  Until last night.

  “We know about him but we’re leaving him alone till we can use him to haul in a really big fish.”

  I took that to mean until they had enough evidence to convict him.

  “Am I a really big fish, sir? I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  I was enjoying this too much. I had better be careful.

  “What have we got here?” He grabbed for my print of the Me 262 and tore the newspaper off it.

  “Don’t damage it, sir,” I said in an ice-cold voice. “It’s an expensive print.”

  He was more careful. “What the fuck is this, O’Malley? A fucking kraut plane? They’re our enemies!”

  “I don’t think that’s the proper term anymore, sir. . . . The plane is a Messerschmitt 262, the first jet ever to be used in combat. It was developed at the same time as our XP-59, but they went into production with it and we didn’t.”

  If he was going for my print, he didn’t have the papers. I relaxed a little, but he was still dangerous. Why was I being hounded by his gumshoes? Or had they just come into Albrecht’s store by chance?

  “It’s fucking disloyal to have something like that.”

  “If you believe so, sir, you should bring charges against me.”

  “Why did you buy this?”

  “I’m not sure that’s a proper question, sir, but I happen to be a photographer and that’s an excellent print. In ten years as perhaps the only color picture remaining of the Messerschmitt it will be a collector’s item.”

  “What else did you buy?”

  “Sir, I will answer your question under protest, if only to terminate this discussion quickly. As your agents doubtless told you, I purchased this print and four rolls of Agfachrome film.”

  I poured the rolls out of the paper bag in which they had nestled on my desk and dumped them on my blotter.

  “American film not good enough for you?”

  “Kodachrome is excellent, sir. But under some circumstances, such as those prevailing at the present, Agfachrome gives somewhat warmer colors.”

  “Hot shit!”

  “Yes, sir. Will there be anything else, sir?”

  “Yeah,” he growled. “You just be goddamn careful. I intend to nail your ass to the highest flagpole in Bavaria.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll inform General Meade, sir.”

  He strode away in a precise military gait, doubtless practiced many times.

  I sank into my chair, drained and sick to my stomach. Well, at least I d
idn’t have to run to the jakes. Absently, I rewrapped the print and returned the film to the bag.

  He probably did not have the pictures. Still, maybe he did and was holding back on them for his own purposes. Should I assume that he had them or that he did not have them? Perhaps he would pass them on to Agent Clarke, with whom he might be in cahoots. Where were the pictures now? But would Clarke recognize them when he compared them with his photo? Would he not wonder where Gunther Wülfe was? Clarke was not so dumb as not to suspect a connection.

  Did Albrecht still have them? Would I dare go over there and talk to him again? Maybe Brig could, but that would put her in jeopardy. I had other pictures. Perhaps the best strategy would be to wait a day or two, make sure the clumsy gumshoes were not in sight, and then sneak over in the early morning to Albrecht’s. Obviously he lived in the back of the store.

  Or maybe I should give up on that source and find another counterfeiter. Where? I’d have to ask Brig. I couldn’t ask her today. That would make her suspicious of what I was doing. She would want to be involved because of her sense of loyalty. We could be running out of time. Yet I did not want to endanger Brig. I’d wait till tomorrow to ask her.

  I walked up to Captain Polly’s desk. No sign of her. I laid the drafts and my retyped version on her desk. Should I go in and complain to the general about Sam Houston Carpenter? I put my hand on the door to knock and then thought better of it. Radford Meade, who detested Carpenter, would be furious. But he was no fool. A slight little doubt about me would remain in his head. Might I have been looking for forged papers after all? The doubt wouldn’t mean much now, but other and later events could make it dangerous for me.

  I had an accounting exam that night, for which I had already studied and in which I would surely gain my usual A. Even if I had not studied, I also would get an A. The stuff was disgustingly easy. American Fiction 101 was a lot harder and more interesting. So, I was going to be an accountant.

  Trudi was still at work. What should I do?

  I had better reply to Rosemarie. I had a hunch my letters to her were even more important to her than hers were to me—and the latter were pretty damn important. So I put a sheet of paper, a carbon, and another sheet in my machine and began.