Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  Nine

  McKechnie and his number one man were on the steps outside the ARC club, lounging like lizards. Bassett Major, as I had started to think of him, showed me his teeth. They weren’t very good teeth. McKechnie smiled and said, ‘Hi,’ holding out his soft pink and brown hand for a shake. ‘I thought that maybe you weren’t coming back.’ There was a worry line behind the smile.

  Bassett Major didn’t smile. There were bruises on his face: smiling probably hurt him.

  ‘Is it late?’ I asked him.

  ‘Chow’s long gone. But we didn’t set a time, did we?’

  ‘I didn’t think so. Does your man have anything for me?’

  ‘Search me, bud. The Lieutenant don’t tell the hired help nothing. Just to show you in when you gets here.’

  My instinct was to make some excuse and walk away: I still wasn’t set up for verbal arm wrestling with an American intelligence officer. I needed a cup of char and a wad to set me up. Instead I followed the black policeman into the ARC, wondering when Emily Rea, the woman I knew, was due back.

  The lobby was polished brown marble; as old as Napoleon and as big as the Albert Hall. A huge, wide staircase on my left spiralled flatly upwards to the next floors. Joe Loss walked down it, and past me. I think that my mouth must have dropped open. I asked, ‘Was that who I think it was?’

  ‘Yeah. His band is at the hop around the corner tomorrow. The tickets all went a month ago.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. We go up there?’

  ‘No: us nasties live beneath.’

  He nodded to the right. The wide stair swung away, and down into the gloom of a false dusk. He led off, and I followed him after Bruised Bassett gave my elbow a little steer. He trundled behind us: presumably it took the pair of them to make sure I didn’t get lost. I’d noticed the music as I had stood in the hall; now it followed us down the stairs into a wide, badly lit corridor. Hutch was singing ‘Deep Purple’ on some old record from some radio station. I said, ‘That’s neat. How do you do that?’

  ‘Speakers every twenny feet. It’s a club, after all. Folks are supposed to enjoy themselves.’

  ‘That’s Emily’s speciality. She makes people forget the war for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Maybe she’s too good at that. The whole fucking American Army forgot the war on New Year’s Day, an’ the Kraut flung his whole fucking Army right back at us, didn’t he?’

  ‘Did he? I missed it. I was in a hospital bed counting my burns.’

  ‘The Battle of the Bulge. It was just a B feature, unless you happened to be in it. Don’t worry, Mr Bassett, you’ll still be in time for the main picture.’

  ‘You still think he’ll fight?’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t you?’

  There were enough shadows for a Boris Karloff film. I didn’t like that. We were walking along a corridor of offices with steel doors. Most of the doors were open, but it still looked like a fucking prison. I didn’t like that either.

  ‘Kraut had it before we did,’ was the only thing McKechnie would tell me.

  Kilduff had a small office. There was no window, and just enough room for a desk, two chairs and a tall filing cabinet with a combination lock. He’d tacked a Coca-Cola calendar on the wall. Rosie the Riveter was bursting out of an improbably clean boiler suit: she had muscles like Joe Louis. He must have only just moved in, because another officer’s name was on the door. The neat notice said Lt Vallance. You remember things like that. Kilduff was my size of officer – about five four. He pulled the door closed behind me to shut out the music.

  The Intelligence Officer was one of those competent little men you take an instant dislike to and don’t know why. He looked you in the eye when he talked, and from time to time touched a small dark Führer moustache which hung below a broken nose. His hair was salt and pepper, and his eyes brown. Everything about him shouted Trust me! Even his handshake was firm and dry, the way a man’s is expected to be. Everything about me shouted back Like hell!

  ‘I’m Kilduff. The men call me Binkie behind my back, but I don’t mind that.’

  ‘Hello. It could be worse, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. That’s the way I see it. You’re Charlie Bassett. Pilot Officer Charles Bassett of the RAF?’

  ‘Yes: pleased to meet you.’

  ‘The feeling’s mutual, you’re under arrest . . . although I fail to see why you’re being so fucking dumb, Charlie.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Granted. You’re under arrest. But I expect you knew that.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  He uncapped a nice Swan pen – everyone seemed to have them – and pulled a several-leafed form to him. It had a lot of blanks waiting to be filled in. He sighed.

  ‘I hope that you’ve more than I beg your pardon in your vocabulary, Charlie, or it’s going to be a long day.’

  ‘I . . .’ I started, but then thought better of it. ‘What for?’ I asked him. I’ve told you about me and obvious questions before.

  ‘AWOL. You did a runner, Charlie. The RAF put you on the wires a couple of days ago. They want you back. They don’t like people borrowing seats on aeroplanes for free.’

  ‘That’s silly, Lieutenant.’

  ‘No. You’re silly, Charlie. You could have stayed out of sight until the war was over, instead of walking up to our policemen and giving yourself up. What’s the matter; war get too much for you?’

  ‘How could it? I wasn’t fighting it. I’d done my trips, and was in a training section.’

  ‘In Tempsford? Setting up the spooks and assassins for their flights into Europe?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound to me as if your War had ended, Charlie: it was just a bit more sneaky than before. SOE and OSS and that sort of thing.’

  ‘What’s OSS?’

  ‘Like your SOE. Our agents instead of yours. You worked at Tempsford. The Funny Farm.’

  ‘How did you know that.’

  ‘I told you. The RAF told us. Look at this.’ He gave me a typed-out two-page flimsy from an American signal pad. I felt my face going red as I read it. It was headed up with my name, service number and date of birth. It asked for me to be apprehended on sight. Then it contained a précis of my training and service details, including the fact that I had witnessed our Polish gunner shoot someone dead, and that I had conspired to smuggle a woman onto an aircraft for flights over Germany. It also said that I was believed to be involved in the black market, politically unreliable – whatever that meant – and implicated in the theft of an aircraft: to whit, one Stirling bomber. The last paragraph but one described me as AWOL after discharge from hospital, having smuggled myself onto an aircraft at Croydon. I was now thought to be on the run in France. The last paragraph asked again for my detention and return to the UK, and warned that I could be dangerous.

  Little Charlie?

  ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ Kilduff asked me. ‘I can get a photograph brought over from your service police HQ.’

  ‘It’s me.’ I told him, ‘but I’m buggered if I understand it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m on a mission. Something special; it’s all been officially arranged.’

  ‘On a mission for whom? The Pope? Tell me please, Charlie.’

  ‘I don’t think I can. I’ve probably told too many people already.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That means I have a two-page signal from your people saying that you’re a really bad man, whilst you tell me it’s cool; you’re on a mission; but you can’t tell me anything about it. Right?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Yes. That’s about it. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Not waste any more time until you begin to whistle in tune, Charlie. Welcome to Paris.’

  He must have had a method of signalling outside because the door opened behind me, and Bassett Major dragged me off my chair backwards by my collar, and tossed me into the corridor as i
f I was a bantamweight. He probably enjoyed doing that. He kicked and pushed me about two doors along, and through one of those open steel doors. I was right the first time: it was a bloody prison. The big bastard tripped me as he pushed me into the cell, and then set about me with his nightstick. He beat me carefully on my burned shoulders. He knew exactly what he was doing. Bastard. The pain was exquisite. My lights went out after about the fifth blow. The music from the speaker just outside my cell door was ‘You Are My Sunshine’. That was Harry Roy. What had the black, McKechnie, told me about the music? – ‘It’s a club, after all. People are supposed to enjoy themselves.’ Well, Bassett Major did.

  When I opened my eyes again I was flat on my back on a thin pallet mattress on the raised concrete ledge that was the cell’s bed. A black man in a white coat was bending over me. He said, ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor.’

  The wheels upstairs began moving. I tried the cynical grin (it probably looked like a rictus), and said, ‘McKechnie says that there aren’t any black doctors in the US.’

  ‘He tells lies. All coloureds do. You speak very good English.’

  ‘Of course I do, I am English. RAF.’

  ‘Lordy! In that ragtag mixture of a uniform you’re in I thought you were a Kraut stay-behind, trying to evade. What did you do to annoy Uncle Sam?’

  ‘I haven’t worked that out yet. I came in here to ask some questions about a missing Englishwoman, and your Lieutenant arrested me for things I hadn’t done.’ I looked instinctively at my watch, and saw the wrist where it usually lived. ‘What’s the time?’ I asked him.

  ‘ ’bout 1430.’

  I was also missing my flying jacket, which contained my pay-book; and my ID tags. I was nobody.

  ‘I had a flying jacket on when they threw me in here.’

  ‘You won’t see that again.’

  ‘My watch . . .’

  ‘Nor that.’

  ‘Can I see the Lieutenant who arrested me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I gave you a shot to knock you out, which you already can’t remember. It will keep those bastards off your back for a few hours, and give me the opportunity to examine those shoulders of yours. What did you do to them?’

  ‘Burned in an air crash. Your shot wasn’t much good,’ I told him.

  ‘How come, Mister?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s wor . . .’

  There was a small piece of graffiti scratched into the plaster at my eye level. The initials read AGM, and a date which had been scratched out, but might have been January 1945. Maybe that was why I dreamed about a girl I had met in a post office in England. Don’t worry; you’ll work out the connection. She was still in my head when I opened my eyes.

  They call it déjà vu, don’t they? I woke up in a bed in a hospital room. Now I was in pyjamas, and from shoulder level a faint smell of something aromatic was emanating. My shoulders tingled, but weren’t painful. I could move them about. Maybe the black man’s medicine worked after all. This differed from the hospital ward at Bedford in two ways: there were bars on the window, and I was handcuffed to the bed frame by my left wrist. Kilduff sat on a chair near the foot of the iron bed, reading a paperback novel. It was the same Zane Grey I had started out with. He put it down when he sensed me stir.

  ‘That doctor had me over. I brought him down to see that you weren’t dead, and he slips you something to buy you a few hours.’

  ‘Arrest him then.’ Whatever was in the shot had dried me out. My mouth was parched and stiff, like the first time.

  ‘I can’t. He’s a Captain. We’re very rank-conscious in the US Army. You gonna talk to me now?’

  ‘I always was. This wasn’t necessary. If I get out of here there’ll be an official complaint that will tie you up in paperwork until the day you draw your pension. I’ll have your arse. Bassett’s too.’

  ‘I’m very scared. Terrified. I guess Bassett will shit himself. Now; what was your mission again?’ He added, ‘What’s so funny?’ after I laughed. So I did it again, and then:

  ‘I was in an air smash last year; November, I think. I woke up in hospital, days later. One day I woke up and there was an RAF officer sitting in a chair where you’re sitting. He was a creep like you. He arranged all this, and now, before the ink’s dried on the orders he gave me, here I am back in hospital again and the job is all fucked up before it’s started.’

  ‘He gave you written orders then? This officer?’

  ‘No. It was just a figure of speech. Forget it. This is a cock-up: situation normal.’

  ‘Snafu.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We turn it into a noun in my army: a snafu. It says Situation Normal All Fucked Up. Who was this officer?’

  I saw no reason not to tell him; after all the bastards had dropped me in it.

  ‘Clifford. David Clifford. He even looks like you, except he has a fiddly Douglas Fairbanks moustache.’

  ‘Never heard of him, but there’s no reason why I should. You told McKechnie that you were over here looking for some English girl who may have taken a Cook’s tour of the war zone. Is she important?’

  ‘To me, yes. I made her some promises once. To her folks, yes. They have influence. That’s why we’re trying to get her back.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you any more. Not until I’ve spoken to the woman you were supposed to let me meet.’

  ‘Emily?’

  ‘Yes. I met her in Bedford. She knows the woman too.’

  ‘Emily’s further forward. I won’t bullshit you: I don’t know exactly where she is, or when she’s due back. She makes the arrangements for the visiting artists who entertain the grunts. Oils the wheels for them. Meets the generals, and kisses arse. We are all very fond of her.’

  ‘Does that mean you believe me?’

  ‘Nope. Jest keeping the conversation ticking over.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Eventually I turned away from him, and said something like, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ and stared out of the window. The bars spoiled the view. I asked him, ‘Are we still at the ARC?’

  ‘No. I talked to someone who told me the same story about you that I already knew, so I moved you. We’re in a military hospital in the suburbs. This is the security wing where they keep the suicides, nutcases and murderers. They let me use two or three rooms here if my customers have accidents. They often have accidents. Sometimes they even have accidents after they arrive here. Now, tell me about Frank and Jesse – the two desperadoes you’re travelling with. There’s a tripartite agreement between the occupying forces that we tell each other whenever we deploy that sort of officer in the field. Your guys turned up a week early: kinda spooked us.’

  There was something too casual about the way he slipped them into the conversation. I bought time with, ‘What does tri-partite mean?’

  ‘Three-way. Us, your people and the Frogs.’ After a respectable pause he prompted me again. ‘Major England and Private Finnigan. That’s not their real names, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Lieutenant, and I don’t care. The bastards have apparently abandoned me, haven’t they? Even so, I know hardly anything about them, and even if I did I wouldn’t feel inclined to tell you.’

  ‘That’s a pity, Mr Bassett. I might be instructed to send McKechnie and the Thing back to ask you the same questions. They can be particularly insistent.’

  ‘If my people have asked you to send me back to England, Lieutenant, then bloody do it. I’d be better off sorting this out with them, anyway.’

  He got up; left me a deck of cheap Gauloises, and one of those French books of paper matches. He said, ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ and left me wondering how I was supposed to perform natural functions chained to the fucking bed.

  There were white orderlies and black orderlies. I noticed the difference. The black ones were the ones who talked to me. Life wasn’t too bad for twenty-four hours if you call being ch
ained to a bed not too bad. Then there was Kilduff peeking in through the wired glass window of the door periodically. I was an exhibit in a sodding zoo. Eventually he was there showing me to a tall, concerned-looking Bird Colonel with a sad face. I thought that I had seen him in the flicks. About fifteen minutes later McKechnie breezed in doing the Ostrich Walk, with my clothes over an arm. He was the all-over-happy man. He said, ‘Hi, Brother. You OK?’

  ‘Brother?’

  ‘Jive talk. All black folks talks jive talk.’

  ‘Stop taking the piss and talk normally, McKechnie, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Just trying to keep things light. It’s show time. Time to go visiting. I’ll get your cuffs; then you can get dressed. I threw that old shirt away. I got one of Binkie’s for you, from the laundry. He don’t know that yet.’

  ‘Can I get a wash?’

  ‘No time.’

  He took the handcuff off. I rubbed my wrist where it had chafed. Although my clothes hadn’t been washed or pressed, my cap had been brushed: that was the American way.

  ‘Where’s my namesake?’

  ‘We gave him time off. Guessed it wouldn’t have been a fond farewell between you two.’

  ‘Right.’

  McKechnie laughed.

  ‘I’m almost sorry to be giving you back.’

  He left me to get dressed. The shirt was a good fit. In the institution’s main corridor I looked around for my minders. My legs didn’t feel too strong – but that was a combination of the beating, the dope and a day’s enforced bedrest. McKechnie was standing with Colonel Film Star and Kilduff, down by a set of double doors. Binkie’s lips were set hard and white: he no longer loved me.

  McKechnie beckoned me to them using only his right forefinger. All he said to me was, ‘Walkies.’

  They put me in the back of an olive drab Chevrolet staff car. I sat alongside the Bird Colonel, who offered me a cigar. Kilduff sat up front; McKechnie drove. The Colonel’s drawl was melodious and home-spun; just like he sounds in films.

  ‘Sometimes they pull me in when there’s a snafu to be sorted out. You jest sit there, son, and don’t worry; the Air Force is on your case now. The other fellahs . . . aargh, that is the United States Army, are mighty . . . sorry they made this mistake over you.’ Then he said, ‘Aargh’ again. It was a quiet, meditative sound. At first I thought that maybe he was in pain, then I worked out that that was the noise with which he finished most sentences. We both lit up. I asked, ‘Where are we going?’