A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Again I checked to make sure there were no guns. A thought ran through my mind. Let’s say there were fifty pounds of caviar. That would cost them twenty-five bucks. They were expecting to increase that threefold: one hundred Yankee dollars. Risk your lives for that? These guys must really be hungry. Okay. Our guys sell it for ten dollars a pound. Chicken feed. Would the fabulously wealthy ring bother with such trivial stuff? Or was this a small-time exercise in greed by some marginal guys?

  Yep, a feint, a distraction.

  I waved at my men and put my finger over my mouth. They made as much noise as a P-47. But the shivering and frightened Russians did not hear them. I waited till everyone was in position.

  More comedy.

  I rose unsteadily, almost slipped down the hill, steadied myself, and yelled, “Polizei.”

  My mouth was bone dry so the word came out as a croak. My men rose to the top of the hill—except those who slipped back down the slope. They pointed their guns in several directions, including at me. A few of them managed to aim at the Russians, who had fallen to their knees with their hands in the air.

  Then there was a burst of automatic weapons fire on my right. The Russians fell on their faces.

  “Who the hell fired that weapon?”

  “I did, sir,” said one of my guys. “I thought the safety was on and I squeezed the trigger too hard.”

  “You’ve started World War Three, asshole!”

  “No, sir,” he said miserably, “the ordnance went that way.”

  “Fucking asshole,” I shouted at him.

  I looked back at the Russians, who were kneeling again, surprised that they were still alive.

  I sighed with relief. “Connors, Kean, Hoffman, Randolph, go down there and confiscate that contraband and put it in the back of my jeep. Hop to it.”

  The Russkies crawled away in terror as my guys slid and slipped down the inner lip of the saucer and began to collect the caviar, their weapons pointing in all sorts of dangerous directions.

  Damn! I should have inspected the safeties before I left.

  Comic-opera uniforms for a comic-opera bunch of clowns. It would make a funny movie. Was war always like this, except that people got killed?

  “What’s in those boxes, Sarge? Ammo?”

  “No, soldier, caviar.”

  “What’s caviar?”

  “Fish eggs.”

  “What do you do with it?”

  “Eat it.”

  “Who wants to eat fish eggs?” he asked in disbelief. The other guys laughed.

  “People that want to get sick the next morning.”

  They laughed again.

  “It’s all in your jeep, Sarge,” Jim Randolph told me. “What’s the matter with those guys?”

  The Russkies were begging for something, their lives no doubt.

  “They think we’re going to blow them away.”

  “Why do they think that?”

  “Because that’s what their officers would do to us if the same thing happened on the other side of that fence. Poor kids.”

  “Yes, Sarge. We’re not going to blow them away, are we?”

  “We’re Americans, aren’t we? Here, take this weapon”—I gave him mine—“and cover me while I go down and tell them to go home.”

  I palmed twenty-five bucks and tried to walk with some dignity down the hill. Naturally, I slipped and fell on my face; naturally, my men laughed; naturally, I turned on them and shouted, “Shut up, assholes, if you don’t want to spend time in a disciplinary barracks.”

  They shut up. I struggled to my feet, gathered the remnants of my dignity together, and strode, or to be more precise, stumbled toward them. Their pleas for mercy became yelps like those from an injured dog.

  I helped each of them to his feet and shook hands with them. I slipped the three bills into the hand of the guy who seemed to be in charge. Then I pointed toward the north. “Get the hell out of here!”

  They bowed and scraped in gratitude and turned and ran quickly over the far rim of the saucer.

  At least they had not lost their capital, poor guys. How long had they schemed and worked to assemble twenty-five Yankee dollars? I couldn’t in good conscience take it away from them. More to the point, in a certain sense I could claim to be the owner of the caviar, bought at a fair-market price. The way I figured it, I had broken no American laws as I would have if I had bought it from American soldiers. Maybe I broke some Russian laws, but that was their problem. Moreover, I remembered a Latin dictum from Fenwick: Res nullius fit primi occupantis. Freely translated it meant “Finders keepers.” If you come upon something that belongs to no one anymore, it’s yours.

  “Okay, guys, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Why did you let them go, Sarge?”

  “We were supposed to apprehend GI criminals, not Russkie criminals. They’ll go back and tell their buddies that this place is closed. Besides, what are we supposed to do with them?”

  There were murmurs of agreement.

  We stopped at the border post. “Give me three of those things,” I said to Randolph.

  “Yes, Sarge. What you gonna do?”

  “Watch.”

  I hid the caviar under my poncho and signaled the border guard to hide behind the hut where the Russkie field glasses could not pick him up.

  I pulled out the three caviar containers.

  “You guys send these home to your wives or mothers or sisters or girlfriends. And don’t let the Russkies see you carrying them.”

  “Thank you, sir. . . . What about the smugglers?”

  “I sent them home. They’re more use to us alive. They’ll tell the other jokers that this placed is closed down.”

  “Yeah, good thinking, sir.”

  “Thank you.” I walked back into the open, saluted the Russians again, and got into my jeep and told Jimmy Randolph to get us the hell out of there. Let the Russkies try to figure out what we were doing.

  “You know, Sarge,” Jimmy said, “you’re just a little crazy.”

  “I know what you mean, son.”

  I looked at my watch. Fifteen hundred. We’d be home by five o’clock.

  It was a little bit before six when, weary and aching from our long drive, but happy to be alive, we bounced into the Domplatz and up to the entrance of the Residenz. I was sure my back would ache for the rest of my life. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still gray and the clouds almost over our heads. We were in for a lot of humidity tonight.

  I dismounted from the jeep and tried to straighten my back. The men cheered and swarmed around me with congratulations for my brilliant tactics.

  What they really meant was that they were happy I had brought them back alive. But I shook hands warmly with each of them. They’d have a story to tell their grandchildren that doubtless would grow in the telling and I’d be the hero.

  Once again.

  “Sorry about my weapon, Sarge,” said the asshole who had fired his automatic pistol.

  “Forget it, soldier. What counts is we’re home.”

  “And haven’t started World War Three!”

  “Don’t seem to have.” I patted him on the back. And thought to myself that the whole event was a triumph for a slapstick comedy in which I was the biggest clown—either Larry or Curly or Moe.

  “Okay, Randolph, Kean, Rubens, pick up these boxes of fish eggs and carry them to the general’s office. Maybe he wants to start an aquarium!”

  They howled at that. “He’ll need something more, Sarge.”

  “That stuff is cheap. . . . The rest of you, dismissed!”

  We carried the boxes up the vast staircase and marched the full length of the ballroom. The new Wac was still at the desk. She didn’t try to stop us but favored me with a dirty look. I’d have to take care of that.

  “General, sir, Sergeant O’Malley and team reporting with contraband. Excuse the interruption, sir, but our hands are filled.”

  “Any prisoners, Sergeant?”

  “No,
sir, it would appear there was another tip-off!”

  “Damn,” he exploded.

  The other men, never having heard a general officer explode, jumped.

  “Not your fault, Sergeant, nor your men. Who, I’m sure, performed brilliantly.”

  “Flawlessly, sir.”

  One of the guys sniggered softly.

  “Thank you, men. Well done. Why don’t you put the contraband here on this table by the window. O’Malley, you stay here and give a full report. The rest of you are dismissed and thanks again for your fine soldiering.”

  They left, half-persuaded that they were indeed fine soldiers.

  “Well, Chuck?” The general waved me to a vast chair across the desk from his throne.

  I told him the story, concisely enough and with no mention of the automatic weapon fire, but I did mention that I had fallen on my face. I also recommended more protection at the border post.

  He nodded and jotted it down. “I’ll take care of it, but I think you’re right. The raid closed that exchange point down. Also you did the right thing with the Russkie kids. Their government would have accused us of kidnapping them.”

  “Thank you, sir. There’s a couple of more things, sir.”

  “Shoot.”

  “First of all, doesn’t it seem to you to be curious that the ring would go to so much trouble for a mere five-hundred-dollar profit? Much ado about nothing.”

  “How much caviar?” He paced up and down by the large windows of his office, staring grimly at the Domplatz and the gray sky above.

  “Four boxes of twelve cases. Forty-eight pounds altogether.”

  “Odd.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Damn odd.”

  Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Or had he? Did he know that he was sending us not on a dangerous mission but a silly one?

  “So this probably was some small fringe element in the ring, doing a little of its own on the side.”

  “Very likely.” He nodded as if he had already figured it out.

  “You may remember what the Outfit in Chicago does to people like that?”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “So, sir, if the ring, the Bavarian Outfit, knew about this raid, why would they have tipped the punks off?”

  “Maybe they were afraid they would talk.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more likely they didn’t know about it? Do you think the locals would want the Outfit to know?”

  He turned around and stared at me. “So you think the link is local?”

  “I’m not sure, sir, obviously. But that might be the case, might it not? When did the call from Ninth Corps come in?”

  “Less than a half minute before I called you.”

  “Right.”

  That made it look good for Captain Polly, who had not been present to answer the phone. But not for John Nettleton.

  “And I told no one in this office what was happening. They might have seen your jeeps pull away, but they’d have to guess where you were going.”

  “And make a quick call to their friends.”

  “Very quick.” He sank as one exhausted into his throne. “Very quick. . . . Another dead end.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. A vague idea was forming in my head. Not clear yet. It would emerge eventually—once I got the idea of our escape, maybe tomorrow night, out of my head.

  “What should we do with the contraband, sir?”

  “Send it back to headquarters in Nürnberg, I suppose.”

  “It will never get there, sir.”

  “Someone will steal it.”

  “That would upset me, sir, because in a manner of speaking, it’s my property.”

  “Your property!”

  “In a manner of speaking, sir. You see, I gave the Russkie GIs twenty-five dollars to cover their expenses. They were so bedraggled and sad that I didn’t want them to lose what was a hell of a lot of money to them.”

  “Encouraging them to more smuggling?” he asked skeptically.

  “No fear of that, sir. They were too scared ever to try it again. Maybe I was only encouraging them not to give up completely on capitalism.”

  “You felt compassion for them, huh?”

  “Yes, sir. Also, I figured that I could argue that the saucer was a marketplace and they were offering goods for sale and they offered them to me at a discount price. I could not be sure that they came by the goods illegally.”

  “You are dangerous. . . . Well, what do you intend to do with your property?”

  “Our primary obligation is to see that it is used wisely and that no one profits from it. Therefore, I propose we give it away. I already gave three cans to the border guards—who, by the way, will be able to identify pictures of suspects, should we have any, and far more reliably than the Russian kids.”

  “Smart move.”

  “Then, sir, I’m giving you three cans.” I lifted them out and put them on his desk. “One for you and one for your wife and one for your daughter; and I’m taking three cans, one for myself, one for my mom, and one for my girl.”

  “You have a girl, Chuck?” He looked surprised.

  “Oh, yes, sir, indeed I do.”

  “You have her picture?”

  “No, sir, we are both very young.”

  “She may be, but you sure as hell aren’t. . . . What should we do with the rest?”

  “I thought we might give them to herself, in honor of her good news.”

  “She’ll certainly know how to use the stuff. Won’t have to borrow it from the PX. And she’ll need it as long as certain noncoms consume half a pound a sitting.”

  “Only a third, sir.”

  So everything had gone well.

  I have never understood why I wanted to help those Russian kids. We were not going to shoot them. It would have been crazy to bring them back, because their government would have shouted kidnapping just as the general had said. But why give them twenty-five bucks?

  “Because you have a soft heart, damn it,” John Raven would bellow at me when I went home.

  I laughed at him again.

  In the outer office, I set about repairing the damage done with the Wac lieutenant. “Staff Sgt. Charles Cronin O’Malley offers his apologies for rude behavior of this morning, ma’am. Military necessity compelled it, but I regret if I showed any disrespect.”

  My salute was one of the better that I have ever attempted.

  She glared at me for a moment and then laughed. “Nan Wynn, Sergeant.” She extended her hand. “You are the one they call Chucky, aren’t you?”

  She was really cute, a shapely little blond doll.

  “Yes, ma’am. I prefer Chuck.”

  “They said that too. I’m sorry I didn’t figure out this morning who you really were. But you were wearing your helmet liner.”

  “Who did they say I really was?”

  “General Meade’s smartest agent!” Her eyes widened in respect. “I hope we can be friends.”

  “I’m sure we can, Lieutenant, ma’am.”

  “Nan.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Nan.”

  “Very good, Sergeant Chucky.”

  Her smile was bewitching. She was not wearing a ring. Probably too young to marry. My adolescent-male imagination began to indulge in lascivious fantasies. Still I hoped that Captain Polly would be back in the morning. If Brigitta brought me the papers in the morning, I’d need to requisition a car.

  I returned to my desk. Nothing to type. I should go home and sleep, but I didn’t like to miss the first couple of days of class. Besides, I was too keyed up from the day’s adventures to sleep. Trudi phoned to say that she would be free at noon tomorrow and might we go for a ride in the country, if the weather improved? Why not?

  Two new gumshoes followed me away from the Residenz, guys who were more professional than the previous two, but still easy to pick out in the crowd if you were looking for them. I glanced into the bar of the Bambergerhof, looking for Agent Clarke. He was slumped over a table, not only drunk but
asleep. I also saw Sam Houston Carpenter and Brigitta at another table. She saw me and looked away.

  None of my business.

  The clouds had broken up when I came out of American Fiction with a stack of books by a new find, William Faulkner, a crazy Celt too.

  I chose him and early sleep instead of the darkroom. I was going to do what I was going to do and no rabbinic arguments would make me hesitate.

  I had delightful dreams about Nan Wynn; and worrisome dreams about whether Trudi was pregnant.

  22

  “I was only having a drink with him, Chucky,” Brig said the next morning. She held an envelope in her hand. “I won’t do it again. I promise.”

  “It’s none of my business, Brigie. I’m not your father or your confessor.”

  “Of course, it is your business. I’m sorry.” Brig laid the envelope solemnly on my desk like a priest putting a pall on the altar. “Here they are, Chuck. He finished them early because he liked you.”

  I picked up the envelope, old, thick, and brown at the edges, an old-fashioned, prewar, maybe pre-Depression, formal envelope.

  “Have you looked at what’s inside?”

  “Of course not.”

  Glancing around to make sure that no one was watching, I opened the envelope. Papers for Maria, Anna, and Frieda Schultz, born in Hanover. Perfect in every detail. Tomorrow night we’d do the run to Stuttgart. My stomach turned over a couple of times and my throat turned dry. Driest yet.

  “Perfect,” I said hoarsely.

  “I know you’re tired of me saying it, but do be careful.”

  “I’m never tired of your concern, Brigitta.”

  “How long?”

  “The operation will be over by the weekend.”

  She nodded. “I will pray.”

  “That will be a big help.”

  She turned to go to her desk. Then she turned back to me. “I love you, Chuck. I hope you know that. Not the way I love Kurt, but more than the way I loved my father. But not quite that way either. You do know that, don’t you?”

  Now what does an eighteen-year-old say to that, especially an eighteen-year-old who wished he could collapse into her (quasi) maternal arms so that all the bad things would go away?