A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

“You going to put that in your report?”

  “In a low-key way, just in case we need it.”

  “Good thinking, son. Good thinking. . . . All right, you look dead tired. Take the rest of the weekend off and do your report on Monday.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Then, exhausted as I was, I saw a solution to the black-market mystery. I saw it clearly and in most of its details, at least as they affected us.

  “One more thing, sir,” I said at the door. “I think I know why all our attempts to get the black-market ring have failed.”

  “Oh?” The general seemed startled.

  “With the general’s permission, I’d like to work on it next week. I’ve got to think it through because it’s complicated and potentially dangerous. I’ll have to interview some people. I don’t want to make charges till I can back them up. I’m afraid I’ll need a car too.”

  General Meade considered me carefully. This was a change in our relationship for which he was not quite prepared: I was in effect telling him that I would not disclose my suspicions to him just yet, and he was not sure he liked that.

  Then he must have decided. “What the hell, no harm done.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have Polly arrange for the car.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “I’ll need the car next week,” I told Captain Polly. “Don’t worry, it’s a completely different operation.”

  “Do you want it for the weekend?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” I had no one to take for a ride in the country this weekend.

  “Easier that way. How long? Indefinite?”

  “You could spoil me, Captain Polly, ma’am.”

  She scribbled the required number on the form. “Just so long as I meet this Clancy kid someday.”

  “In the mysterious designs of Providence, as the nuns used to tell us, anything can happen. And the two of you will compare notes like all Irish biddies and I’ll be in worse troubles than ever.”

  “It will serve you right.” She smiled at me and gave me the form.

  I picked up the stuff at my desk and stopped to talk to Brigie on the way out.

  “It all worked out,” I said. “Close at times, but we made it.”

  She nodded. “I am so glad.”

  “Thanks for the help.”

  “Bitte. Why don’t you go home and have a long nap. You look exhausted.”

  “Yes, Mommy.”

  I walked outside into the clear sunlight of the Domplatz. It was a pleasant day. Despite the fog there was not as much heat or humidity as last night. So, it was all over.

  I felt nothing at all, no elation, no satisfaction, only a kind of dull numbness, like the man who is told that he won’t need surgery yet. They were safe despite all my mistakes.

  I was lonely, however, terribly lonely; and I had not been separated from my beloved for more than a few hours. I would see her in a couple of weeks and all would be well. We could begin our preparations for marriage and America.

  Even then, however, I wondered. I had deliberately not asked the names of their friends in Stuttgart. I didn’t want to know those names if I should be asked. However, I would not be able to get in touch with them until Trudi contacted me.

  Would she?

  Crowds of people were pouring into the Dom. August 15. Mary’s Day in Harvest time. Holy day of obligation. I might as well go over there and say thank-you. It never hurts when you’re dealing with General Officers.

  The Mary portal was banked with flowers. Inside the Dom flowers were everywhere. The congregation were wearing their best clothes, which were not necessarily all that good. The choir was singing a Palestrina kyrie. It was clearly a big feast in Bamberg. Probably some holdover from an ancient Teutonic harvest festival.

  “Thanks for helping,” I whispered to the one we were honoring. “Do you play the same role for Himself that Captain Polly plays for General Meade? If you do, that means you’re the one who is really in charge. I guess Jewish mothers are not all that different from Irish mothers.”

  Several times during mass I found myself looking for Trudi and her family.

  The ceremonies improved my morale. At the end of mass they sang the glorious Marian Easter hymn “Regina Coeli Laetare Alleluia.” I joined in at the top of my voice, though my Italianate American Latin was pronounced differently from the Teutonic version. I sang loudly, but on key. Some of my neighbors in the pew looked at me with disapproval.

  Fuck ’em all. I was happy again, at least for a few days.

  I decided that, despite Jimmy Randolph’s calm faith, I’d stay Catholic. Messy, confused, unpredictable, Catholicism still had the best images and stories.

  My long nap, which lasted well into Saturday morning, was untroubled by dream terrors. When I finally did wake up, I felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

  26

  On Monday morning I refueled my Buick—never make the same mistake twice in a row—and drove up to the border post where we had “liberated” the beluga caviar. I took a chance that the same sergeant was on duty. I asked him some questions (once I had explained why a noncom like me had led the mission), showed him a picture, and asked him to fill out and sign an affidavit.

  When I returned to HQ, I made a phone call to the hospital. The answer to my questions were what I had thought they would be.

  On Thursday afternoon while it was still bright, I steered the car onto the autobahn and headed for Nürnberg. I timed the drive so that I would find the approximate place where the heavy convoy had turned off the road. It must have been where there was a crossover pavement because they had exited on the left side of the highway, and the big trucks and tankers would have a more difficult time than my Buick if they tried to cross the median strip. After a couple of misses I found the place, a forested area between Büttenheim and Forchheim, a little less than halfway to Nürnberg from Bamberg—the railroad and the Regens to the right of the highway. Sure enough, there was not only a crossover but also a graded dirt road coming out of the forest. The trees were so close to the autobahn in that spot that you would hardly notice the dirt road unless you were looking for it.

  I crossed the median and headed down the dirt road. I was so despondent about the loss of Trudi, a temporary loss I kept telling myself, that I wasn’t afraid of anything anymore.

  About a quarter mile in I found a large meadow where the vegetation had been trampled by truck tracks. The Bavarian Outfit’s trucks came here on Thursday night, one convoy from Bamberg, the other probably from Nürnberg, to exchange goodies, most likely around midnight, the goodies having been stolen from PX supplies, hospitals, and shipments from America arriving at the Rhine-Main airport up at Frankfurt. The thefts must be massive and brazen to require an exchange each week.

  The rendezvous was also brazen: same place, same time every week. They must have felt confident that no one was looking for them or that no one cared. Most of the goodies belonged to the government one way or another. No one, they must have told themselves, objected to a little larceny if the victim was the government.

  I would stay and watch the rendezvous tonight and get some pictures of it on Trudi’s Leica. Where should I park my car?

  I found a small dirt road, barely two tracks through the forest, which led out of the meadow in the opposite direction (east). Sorry, old girl, I said to my chariot and turned into the road. I was well into it before I realized that I would have to back up to get out. I had no skills at all in the difficult matter of driving in reverse.

  About a half mile down the path, because that was all it was, I stopped the car and checked my map. The dirt road was not marked, but it seemed that a couple of hundred meters in the direction I had come there was a paved road leading to Büttenheim, where I could get back on the autobahn. When it was time for me to redeploy that night, I could poke my way down the dirt road, find the highway, and be home free. This route might also be useful when we came back to pick up the g
ang.

  I would have to do my poking in the dark and without headlights. I sat and thought about that for a while. Then I realized that it would be at least an hour and a half before the convoy from Bamberg showed up. Probably the arrival times of both convoys would be synchronized; no point in wasting too much time in the exchange, even if you didn’t feel in too much danger.

  So in the dusk, I picked my way through the underbrush and the mud—forest floors are always muddy for some reason I could never understand—scared a few squirrels and a few quail, and bumbled down the path.

  I was never a Boy Scout, never went to a marshmallow roast in Thatcher Woods, a Chicago forest preserve west of us, don’t like hiking or (God save us all) camping, and deplore poking around in forests as if we are Neolithic hunter-gatherers (a line I use frequently on my children and grandchildren, some of whom fancy that the Neolithic times might have been more “natural”). So, I did not enjoy my romp through the Bavarian woods. But finally I came upon a two-lane highway with a sign indicating that the next town was Büttenheim.

  Proud of my performance as a woodsman, I struggled back to the Buick as darkness settled in. Clouds had drifted across the darkening sky. It would be a black, black night.

  I waited until the blackness was total, reached for my flashlight, and flicked it on for a quick look at my watch.

  The light didn’t work. I tried it again; it still didn’t work. The batteries were dead. A great Dick Tracy I was. First no gasoline in the car and then no batteries in the flashlight. So here I was on a dark night, in the middle of a German forest, and I would not be able to see two feet in front of me.

  I’d make enough noise blundering through the forest to wake up Frederick Barbarossa from his grave. The smart thing to do would be to get back to the edge of the meadow before the Outfit guys arrived. So I fumbled for Trudi’s Leica (which I had loaded before I left), the car keys, and a couple of more rolls of film, then climbed out of the car.

  Should I bring my weapon?

  What good would it do? If I was caught, I’d be outnumbered and I probably couldn’t fire the thing right anyway. Besides, the safety catch could always slip off as I tried to get through the forest in the dark and I might literally shoot myself in the foot.

  That would be typical of my behavior so far.

  I can often cause great laughter among my descendants by describing how I lurched through the forest that night, often on my hands and knees, as I tried to find the road. It was so dark that I had actually entered the meadow before I knew I was there. The only way to tell it was the meadow was that it was a little less dark and no brambles were biting at my ankles. I felt my way back into the edge of the woods, groped for a safe place to sit, eased myself onto the ground, removed the cover from my Leica, and waited for them to come.

  In those days we did not have wide enough lens apertures to do much night photography without a flash or a tripod, which would have permitted a long exposure. I was hoping that they would need a lot of lights to exchange their goodies. If they didn’t, they’d have to work in the dark just like me. The best I could hope for were dim shapes. But that would be all I needed.

  I waited forever, periodically shifting my weight in search of a more comfortable position. There weren’t any.

  Finally two headlights cut the dark and moved slowly into the meadow—toward me. The truck parked only a few feet from my hiding place and turned off its lights. Some ten others followed, including two tankers. So, black-market gasoline. I heard people complaining about the convoy from Nürnberg. So I had guessed that right.

  This crowd was therefore from Bamberg. I strained for voices and heard the one I expected I would hear.

  I thought about moving farther back into the trees, but was afraid to risk making noise. So I curled up and pretended that I was a woodchuck—one with a camera in his little front paws.

  After a couple of eternities, another set of lights emerged from the forest and bumped across the meadow. The lights from the Bamberg crowd flicked on and off. The Nürnberg bunch moved slowly across the meadow until they had formed a tight semicircle. Then all the lights went on.

  “Where were you guys?” someone shouted.

  “Constabulary at our end was watching us.”

  Laughter. “We don’t have that problem at our end. . . . Come on, let’s get this shit moving.”

  The crowd worked efficiently, moving stuff back and forth. On the other end of the meadow they were transferring gas from one tanker to another—from Bamberg to Nürnberg it looked to me, but then that figured. There was enough light in the circle where they were working for some shots that would not be impossibly bad. They probably did not know each other very well since they always met in the dark. I was wearing fatigues just as they were.

  So I canceled the woodchuck act and became one of them. I didn’t move anything or talk to anybody but was just sort of there, walking around as if I knew what I was doing, and covertly shooting a roll of twenty shots. No one seemed to notice me. I was one more slightly dishonest GI wandering in the semidarkness.

  Madness, absolute madness. I wasn’t even scared—though heaven knows I should have been. The dice were falling my way and I’d keep playing them. Leaning against the side of a tanker, I got one first-rate shot of the suspect. I sort of edged away from them when the roll of film came to an end and slipped back into the woods to reload. I discovered that my hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t reload. The woodchuck returned and told me that I had more than enough shots.

  A real photographer never has enough shots, right? Still, the woodchuck won that argument.

  I waited till all the vehicles had returned to the autobahn, wished I were in bed with some woman’s comforting arms around me, and generally felt cold and sorry for myself.

  I forced myself to get up and struggle back through the forest to my Buick—which I discovered simply by banging into it, and hurting my knee. It was as if someone had attacked me with a baseball bat. Pain exploded from my scalp to my toes. I screamed loud enough to wake up not only Barbarossa, but also Arthur Pendragon and the combined forces of the Teutonic knights and the knights of the Round Table. I fell into the car and began to rub my knee. I’d have to find an ice pack as soon as I could. Fortunately I was less than a half hour from the Army Hospital in Bamberg.

  I reached for the ignition key. It wasn’t there. Of course not, I had put it in my pocket. I searched my left pocket and found the Leica case and nothing else. In my right pocket I found the Leica and nothing else. In my hip pocket were my wallet and some change. In my shirt pocket, more change, extra film, and rosary beads.

  I panicked and went through everything again. I felt on the floorboard. I opened the door and grubbed around in the leaves. No keys. I was stuck here till the sun came out. Even then I would have to creep down the path and scour it on my hands and knees. Proverbial needle in a haystack.

  I controlled the panic as best I could. I had to remember what had happened. I had certainly put the keys in my left pocket. Maybe when I stuffed the Leica case into my pocket up by the meadow, curled up in my woodchuck persona, I had accidentally jerked the keys out of my pocket. Jerk was the appropriate word.

  So all I had to do in the morning was find my woodchuck hole and mess around among the worms and the molds looking for a Buick car key. If I didn’t find it, I would have to limp back to Büttenheim and call Captain Polly.

  “Ma, it hurts!”

  I didn’t want anyone to know I was anywhere near Büttenheim, though it was not certain that the men in either convoy would know where Büttenheim was. They were creatures of the autobahn and probably never left it.

  Still I had better find the key.

  For lack of something better to do, I said the rosary. Despite my aching knee, I slipped into fitful sleep. Each time I woke up, I moved my knee, hoping it would feel better. Each time it felt worse. Finally, the sun awakened me—strong, bright, and already warm. I wondered where I was. Then I remember
ed where I was and groaned. I tried to move my leg and groaned again. Louder.

  I had to find the key, absolutely had to.

  Charles Cronin O’Malley, boy detective.

  If only there were a spare key.

  Wait a minute, what had shithead at the motor pool told me? In the glove compartment?

  Desperately I groped through the glove compartment. Yep, there it was!

  I threw back my head and laughed (maybe cried a little too). Perhaps I was the best operative in Bamberg, but that only proved how bad the others were!

  I found my rosary on the floorboard, said a decade in quick gratitude, started the car, and headed for the two-lane highway, faster than I should have, but I knew that my white hat was deservedly white and nothing could go wrong.

  I slowed down. That sounded like Jimmy Randolph and I had decided that it was better to be Catholic.

  I limped into the hospital, though just barely, and immediately became the center of attention. Like most of the Seventh Army it wasn’t very busy—babies, clap, and depression being its principal problems. A red-haired punk with a gimpy leg offered a little bit of variety.

  “What happened, son?” the doctor asked.

  “Bumped my knee.”

  “Been drinking?” He started to press the knee.

  “No, sir. I don’t drink. . . . Ouch!”

  “Looks like nothing worse than a bad bruise. You should have put an ice pack on it.”

  “I know, sir. I played football in high school. But where I was there wasn’t any ice.”

  “And where were you?”

  “Classified, sir.”

  “What’s your outfit?”

  “Constabs, HQ company. I’m kind of an investigator, which means I gotta poke around in the dark at night.”

  The two nurses, both kind of pretty, giggled, which they did for the rest of my treatment.

  “We’ll take an X ray just to be sure.”

  So they took an X ray just to be sure and I was told that no serious harm had been done, that I should stay off my feet for a few days, and that by the end of the week I’d be fine. However, it would be necessary to drain some fluid away from the bruise.