I didn’t ask him what his good cause might be. Was I not after all trading in forgeries for a good cause?
Yet my stubborn idealism said that, apart perhaps from the occasional good cause, Americans should not do those things.
They shouldn’t sleep with defenseless eighteen-year-old girls either.
I wondered if he knew who the bosses were in the local black-market outfit. He was a smart man. Probably he did. I didn’t ask him because I didn’t want to know.
The next morning I went to the noon mass at the Pfarrkirche, although the Martinkirche was much closer to the Vinehaus. I met Brigie and her family going in. The kids, like good little kraut kids, thanked me politely for my gifts, as did Frau Klein, Brigitta’s mother. A nice, decent German family going to church on Sunday as they had all through the Hitler years.
I wasn’t being fair. Bamberg had voted for the Center Party, not the Nazis. And Brig and her husband were involved with the group that had tried to kill Hitler. If there was any hope for the future of German democracy, it would be in people like them. How would I have behaved if there were a Nazi-like government in America?
During mass, I spotted Trudi and her family on the other side of the aisle. They also looked pious and devout. Well, who was I to claim anymore that I was a good Catholic?
I turned off the sermon not only because it was in German, at which I was getting better, but because I knew enough German to know that it was pious tripe, the kind that I had often heard at St. Ursula when I was growing up, especially by “missionary” priests who had come around to stir up scruples in the people—as John Raven had bitterly informed me.
At Communion time, all three of the Wülfes went up to the rail as did about a quarter of the people in the relatively full church. What the hell! Didn’t she know she was in the state of mortal sin because of what we had been doing? The good April had warned me that Europeans were “lax” in their morality. This was solid proof that she was right.
I was angry. How dare she not feel guilty when I did!
Well, maybe she’d made an act of Perfect Contrition.
Yeah, but that wouldn’t do any good unless she had promised God to give me up and that was most unlikely.
I’m afraid that despite my (moderately) good intentions I didn’t do much praying at mass.
After mass, when I had slipped away from a possible meeting, I realized that I was a hypocrite and that I would never dare ask her why she felt free to receive—not till after we were married anyway.
As John Raven would remark when I showed him my journal as part of my “general confession,” maybe the woman understood God better than I did.
I guess she did. Heaven knows we’d need a lot of God’s help in the next few days.
I spent the rest of the day in the PX darkroom working on shots that I would send home to the family on Monday with a letter telling how wonderful my summer life was here in friendly old Bamberg.
Nothing happened on Monday except that it started to rain and the temperature fell into the sixties, too much like autumn already. But next August I would be home, thanks be to God. I went over my plan repeatedly, picturing exactly what each move would look like. If only we had the papers now.
“Did it go well?” Brig asked me.
“I guess. He’s an odd one.”
“He is that. . . . Wasn’t his room cute?”
“That’s not the word I’d use.”
“Be careful, Chuck. You are in grave danger.”
“I don’t really think so.”
I also tried in my head to clear my friends the Nettletons from all suspicion. Couldn’t do it.
I wrote the letter to my family.
Trudi phoned from the hotel saying she had to work nights that day and the next. So we could not meet each other. Possibly Wednesday too.
I finished up the few manuscripts that Captain Polly asked me to type—with her usual charming smile. How could I possibly suspect such an appealing woman?
I glanced over the schedule for the new course in American fiction and then picked up Arrowsmith and deepened my dislike for Sinclair Lewis. How could he ever have been so popular? Then I turned to Dante, which was much more to my taste though I figured I’d have to learn Italian to really enjoy it. It’d be much easier to pick up after four years of Latin than German was.
Fourteen-thirty passed and no Agent Clarke. However at sixteen hundred he finally showed up, weaving uncertainly across the floor of the old ballroom.
“Here’s the stuff you been bugging me for, sport.”
“Thank you, sir. I didn’t mean to appear to bug you, but we need to have this material to focus our search properly.”
“Well,” he sneered, “now you’ll be able to properly focus it.”
“Split infinitive, sir.”
I glanced over the documents. Not much in it that I had not already seen. I tapped my fingers on my desk. I could give the men just the material on Gunther Wülfe and hold back the descriptions of the others. But that might catch up with me. Better that I give them everything now. If we got the materials tomorrow from the elf with the cold eyes, we could move out on Tuesday night. So the men would have only part of Monday and Tuesday to search. Moreover the kids in the picture didn’t look much like Trudi and Erika, and Magda had aged so much as to be hardly recognizable.
I told Captain Polly to inform the general, ma’am, that Agent Clarke had finally turned over the promised papers.
“Was that creep drunk, Chucky?”
“He sure was.”
“Should I tell General Meade that?”
“Great idea.”
Then I went downstairs to give the stuff to my “lads.”
“Here are pictures of the family we’re searching for and descriptions. Make copies and spread out in town and look for them.”
“Sarge, how old is this picture?”
“Six, seven years maybe.”
“Then the kids would be in their teens now?”
“Probably.”
“Girls change in those years.”
“Yeah, now that you mention it, I think I have noticed it too.”
“So?”
“So you have to take that into account in your search.”
Groans.
“We’ll get in a lot of trouble if we ogle every blond adolescent in Bamberg.”
“How will that differ from your ordinary behavior?”
Laughs.
“Is the guy still the important one?”
“So I’m told by the Bureau.”
“Then maybe we should concentrate on looking for him.”
“Good thinking, Ken.”
“Do we have to start today?”
I glanced at my watch. “It’s pretty late now.”
“So we’ll start tomorrow, eh, Sarge?”
“I imagine that will be all right. We received these materials too late to start today.”
Tomorrow meant around noontime.
The conversation had gone better than I had hoped. Feeling more confident of what I was doing, I went back and made a note in the record I was keeping of the case.
“You may tell General Meade, Captain Polly, that my men have begun the search for our targets with the new material I have given them.”
“It will begin tomorrow morning, you mean, Chucky?”
“That may be a correct interpretation, Captain, ma’am, but let the general make it for himself.”
Polly chuckled at that. “Okay, Chuck. I’ll let him use the intelligence that God gave him. . . . This is the case about people the Russkies want, isn’t it? Who are they?”
“Alleged Nazis.”
“Men?”
“A man and three women, his wife and two daughters.”
“Are they really Nazis?”
“The man was a government functionary in Dresden so he had to belong to the party. So too apparently did the wife. The kids were in the Hider Jugend.”
“Any crimes charged?”
&
nbsp; “Nothing specific.”
“How old are the kids?”
“Middle teens.”
“What will the Russians do to them?”
“Shoot the man, rape the three women to death. Turn them over to a battalion of sex-starved troops.”
“My God, Chuck!” she gasped.
“That’s the way they do things over there. And it’s what we get into when we deal with them.”
“Are we trying really hard to find them?” Captain Polly’s usually bright face had turned pale.
I shrugged. “When do we try really hard at anything? Let’s say that our main goal in this operation is to appear to have obeyed orders.”
She nodded solemnly.
Maybe I had found an ally to whom I might turn in time of desperate need. Even if she and her husband were involved in the damn black market.
Obsession!
Then I did my journal for the day, in an obscure code that I had made up so no one would know what was going on. When I finished that, I gathered my books and left for the classroom and the darkroom. As I crossed the town-hall bridge, I noticed that a couple of Carpenter’s gumshoes—a different pair this time—were dogging me. What was going on? Was Carpenter getting even with me because he imagined me standing between him and Brigitta?
When I left class, they had vanished. In the darkroom nothing worked the way it should. I gave up after a couple of hours.
My two roommates appeared for the first time in several days, harmless noncoms from Seventh Army whose only concerns were babes and beer. I suppose their intelligence level was a little higher than that of congenital morons, but sometimes it was hard to tell. I listened to them for a while and answered their questions about my own activities with polite caution. Then I sought solace in Main Street.
That night my dreams were filled with images of hundreds of Sam Houston Carpenters chasing me down the main street of Gopher Prairie.
21
“O’Malley, where the fuck are you?” General Meade emerged from his office shouting.
“The game’s afoot, Brig,” I said as my mouth went dry.
I had shown up at the Residenz at nine on Tuesday morning because I had hoped that Brigitta might have the papers for me.
“Not yet, Chuck.” She shook her head as I was shedding my raincoat. “It’s still too early. Maybe tomorrow or Thursday.”
“I hope not any later.”
“I hope so too.”
“Where’s Captain Nettleton this morning?” I had glanced up at that worthy’s desk at the end of the ballroom. “She’s almost as compulsive about work as you are.”
“Out sick,” Brigitta had replied with a complacent grin.
“Our Polly sick? That paragon of Irish New England sturdiness sick?”
I was pretty sure I knew what was coming.
“Morning sickness, Chuck. I’m so happy for them. They’ve been trying for some time. They will go home in December. We will all miss her. She is a wonderful woman.”
Before I could agree, the general had emerged from his office, bellowing for me.
“Coming, sir.”
But I did wonder if that might happen with Trudi. We had never spoken about it. Good Catholic that I was, I couldn’t possibly practice birth control.
Fornication, not birth control.
“We’ve got another tip from Ninth Corps.” The general waved me into his office. “A smuggling operation. Russian caviar coming across the border up in their sector.”
“Up near Coburg?”
“East of there; place called Walldenburg.”
I picked it up on General Meade’s huge wall map before he did. “That’s above the Lichtensteinerwald, sir. A peninsula surrounded by the Russian zone.”
“Salient, son,” he corrected me.
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
“How long to get up there?”
“It’s about sixty kilometers, sir. Thirty-five miles or so. One could take Highway 279 up to 303 and turn right. Then we’d have to ride into the mountains. Those roads might be pretty muddy with this storm on our hands. At least an hour, maybe closer to two.”
To emphasize my point a jagged burst of lightning cut the sky just outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the throne room. The thunder came a second after, seeming right above the roof of the Residenz. General Meade, who had heard plenty of 88mm rounds coming in, winced.
“We have a border post up there,” he said. “That’s where the tip came from. They’ll give us the location in which these exchanges usually occur.”
“Yes, sir.” Who was this “us”? I was afraid I knew. “Black-market operation?”
“I’m sure they’re involved. The Russian soldiers can buy the caviar on their black market for the equivalent of fifty cents a pound. They sell it to our people for two dollars—three hundred percent profit and in American dollars, which are worth even more on their currency black market. Then our people turn around and sell it for ten dollars a pound. Profit for everyone.”
“Nice markup, sir.”
“What platoon is on duty today, son?”
“Second Platoon, C Company, sir.”
I made it a point to keep track of the duty register. Prompt information on that subject could always be useful, especially since no one else in the HQ company was likely to know it.
“Hmm. How many men in three of their squads?”
“Theoretically thirty-six, but under the present circumstances, we’d be lucky to find twenty-five live ones.”
He nodded grimly. “All right, O’Malley, you take those three squads up there and find out what the hell is happening.”
“Yes, sir. Why three squads, if I may ask?”
“If I give you more, the CO of the platoon and probably the CO of the company will have to go along. I want you to be in charge.”
“Yes, sir. But why, sir?”
The Residenz was crawling with captains, majors, and colonels with nothing to do. Why turn the operation over to an eighteen-year-old sergeant?
“Why what?” He frowned at me.
“Why me instead of one of the officers?”
“That should be obvious, son. You’re smarter than they are, smarter than any two or three of them put together. Also sneakier, which is what a police unit needs in their leaders.”
“No, sir.”
“Pardon?” His face turned purple.
“With respect, sir, I may be sneakier than anyone in this outfit, sir. But I’m not smarter.”
“Yes, you are. Sometimes I think I should urge you to go to the Point, but then I reason that you’re too smart to make it in the Army. You’re dangerously smart, O’Malley. I don’t know what the hell shit is going on in your head most of the time. I’m not fooled by that polite respect you pretend to have. You’re always thinking two steps ahead of me. But as long as you’re under my command, I might as well make use of you.”
“No, sir, that’s not true. But, yes, sir, I will organize and take charge of the operation.”
Dangerously smart! Ridiculous!
“Good. Here’s a note to Lieutenant Martin, detaching three squads temporarily from his command. He won’t like it but fuck him. . . . How long will it take before you’re on the road?”
I glanced at my watch. “Ten-thirty, sir.”
“All right, get it rolling.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, Chuck . . .”
“Yes, sir.”
“Be careful.”
“Yes, sir.”
As I left, he shouted after me, “Don’t get too wet.”
“No, sir,” I muttered through clenched teeth.
We would all get very wet. Jeep covers always leak. It was a wild-goose chase. The sort of thing a good CO does when he’s bored silly and nothing seems to work right. We’d come home with empty hands.
Nonetheless, my mouth was sandpaper dry. Moreover the whole operation was trivial—a few hundred dollars’ worth of caviar, hardly enough to justify the c
ost of gasoline for our ride in the rain. A feint, a distraction, a piece of meat thrown to the hungry Constabulary animals.
It was not Lieutenant Martin’s fault that we were able to leave the Domplatz at ten forty-five. A sawed-off (which is to say, shorter than me) recent graduate of the Point with a brush haircut and watery eyes, he absolutely refused to release his three squads to me.
“But, sir, this is an order from General Meade.”
“The general must inform me personally of such a diminution of my command. It’s regulations.”
“May I use your phone to call the general.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Very well, sir.”
I ran back to the Residenz in the driving rain and dashed by the young (but not unattractive) Wac second lieutenant who was Polly’s temporary sub and into the general’s office. “General Meade, sir,” I said breathlessly, “Lieutenant Martin refuses to release the three squads without a personal order from you. He says it’s regulations.”
“You can’t go in there,” the Wac shouted as she rushed after me. A tiny woman, she had the audacity to try to shove me out. The terrible thing was that she could probably do it.
“Get the hell out of here, Lieutenant,” the red-faced general bellowed.
Crushed, she withdrew quietly, but not without a venomous look at me.
“Martin, you fucking asshole,” the general shouted into his phone. “If this operation is fucked up because of you, I’ll hang your ass on the highest fucking flagpole in Germany. . . . Regulations? Look, jag-off, get out of my way or you’re headed for a court-martial. Understand? . . . All right, O’Malley, move your ass.”
Army foul language is not creative, though I am told it improved notably after racial integration. But in the mouth of an angry general officer it can be quite effective. Martin was nowhere to be seen when I returned to the duty room, and the three squads had already assembled. I had been overoptimistic. Only about twenty men were huddled outside the Residenz, all carrying weapons, though most of them awkwardly. Five jeeps with the covers on were lined up on the cobblestones of the Domplatz. The covers were white like the jeeps with elaborate blue trim and looked like some sort of tarted-up carnival vehicle. Well, it told people we were cops anyway.
“Men,” I said, “we are assigned to intercept a smuggling operation up near the Russian zone. Russian soldiers are bringing contraband across the border to sell to our troops who are part of the black market. It is our job to stop them. There’s an American border post near the site of the suspected exchange. They will direct us to that site. I will explain our tactics at that time. I want you to make sure that the safeties are on all your weapons. Do not take them off until I tell you to do so.”
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