I’d lied to them about the girl in the tent. We hadn’t talked for three hours. More like one. Because I had been otherwise occupied for a couple. Somewhere around 2300 McKechnie had found me alone at a table. I was glad that Albie and Gumshield had scarpered back into the fray. I was just beginning to want to kill the little boxer anyway. McKechnie said, ‘Crack your face and smile, bud: I’ve got the night rounds to do. Have you seen the inside of one of our butcher’s shops yet?’
‘I was in that one where that fellow Arnold was sticking up the medical crew with a .45, remember?’
‘No. I didn’t know that. He wasn’t one of mine. You comin’?’
I saw another side of the black bastard as he moved from cot to cot. His words were firm, and his hands were gentle. He said some of the guys were dying. I sat and held the hand of one. He was an older man about thirty-five: a Scot from Peterhead who had got his bullet pointlessly assaulting that bloody castle. He asked me, ‘Will you hear my confession, Father?’
‘I’m not a Catholic. I wouldn’t properly know how to. I don’t think that the Pope would pay that much attention to me.’
‘That’s OK. Will you say something?’
‘If it helps.’
‘Do you know the Pilgrim’s Hymn then? You should know it; it’s a good Proddy hymn.’
‘I think so.’
For once my blessed memory worked. I murmured the old, cracked words to him. He held on tight to my hand. Then he turned his head away from me and said, ‘I confess that I’m feeling unco wearied tonight, Father.’ Then he said very distinctly, ‘Goodnight Jenny.’ Then he died, and as he exhaled it seemed as if his soul went out of him with the breath. Just like that.
I hadn’t been aware of McKechnie standing over me. He put his hand on my shoulder. He had spoken two sentences, which were, ‘Nicely done, Charlie.’ And, ‘Thank you.’
So you can see that I was a bit choked as I walked away from that small graveyard in that small town in Germany and our boots slipped on the cobbles. Same words, and James shouldn’t have said them. It may have been Goch, or it may have been Cleve. I never did find out what the name of the town was. Never asked James the name of it later, and I never did go back to look. I hated the fucking place.
That was something to do with the way we left.
I told you that the gun I bought in Laon was a Jerry Luger? It had a long butt. That made it easy to go to sleep hanging on to, without pulling the trigger and shooting your foot off: make no mistake about it, that 9mm ammo was serious stuff. When I awoke there was a hand between my hand and the gun butt, and another over my mouth. Neither was mine. I could see a face close to me. Unsurprisingly it wasn’t mine either. Kilduff.
He whispered, ‘C’mon Charlie: time to go.’
Downstairs, by the light of a small kerosene pressure lamp on the table, I met the Bürgermeister, who looked worried, and James, who looked tied up. His wrists were tied together with bootlaces. Les’s feet stuck out behind the settle he had been kipping on. James said, ‘He’s not dead. I don’t know what the bastards did to him, but he’s not dead.’
The big soldier we’d met before, also called Bassett, cuffed James around the ear hard enough to move him a foot sideways. I guess that that meant Shut up until someone asks you to speak, but Kilduff hadn’t liked it. He shook his head. He told me, ‘It was the Princeton squeeze. You just put a bit of pressure on the carotid and they go down like busted horses.’
‘Do they wake up?’
‘Most times. Usually with a headache afterwards.’ I could have told them that leaving Les lying about and about to wake up with a headache wasn’t their best option. But I didn’t. They could make their own fucking mistakes. Kilduff added, ‘And before you ask me anything else I gotta tell you again: it’s time we were going.’ He had an automatic pistol in his hand. I couldn’t think of a good counter-argument to that.
The Bürgermeister still looked worried, but he managed to slip me a little smile that the others didn’t see. I saw Les’s foot twitch. No one else did: I steeled myself not to react, and didn’t. The two Yanks pushed us outside, and carried the kero lamp with them. There was another on the bonnet of one of those ugly little 4x4 trucks the Yanks ran around in, in ’45, and another American leaning against the truck. He had one of those light machine pistols around his neck on a webbing strap. He was smoking a fag which stuck to his lower lip. Between James and me and Kilduff’s truck was a heap of rubble in the road. It had once been a weaver’s cottage. Now it was just a low pyramid of seventeenth-century stone rubble. It didn’t obscure our view. I just wanted to give you the picture the way we saw it.
Kilduff and big Bassett were behind us; prodding. It was slow going because we had to avoid the bricks and tiles, which were strewn around the slippery, cobbled road as if a child had just scattered his play set in anger. The idea for Lego probably came from things we did to houses in the 1940s.
I think that we were still about forty feet away when Kilduff’s driver suddenly straightened up, and grunted. From the light on the truck’s bonnet I could see that he had an odd expression on his face. Something between surprise and a bad attack of heartburn. Then he collapsed to his knees, and his chin came to rest on his chest. He explosively spat his cigarette away: it dropped onto the road, and winked out. It was all very sudden. I was also aware of movement in the houses and ruins on either side of us, as if a pack of animals was moving through them in the dark. It’s plain that Kilduff and Bassett Major hadn’t spent time as front-line soldiers, because their reactions were a long way behind everything that happened next.
James was on my left, with Kilduff behind him. Bassett was behind me, enjoying prodding the small of my back with a machine pistol. They called them Burp Guns or something. I knew that he’d make me take off my jacket if he shot me, because he’d had his eye on it as soon as I came down the stairs. When their man went down, and the rustling started, they moved outside of us: Kilduff to the left and Big B out to my right. Then someone stepped into the road in front of Kilduff, and a church bell went off in my right ear.
There was some movement down by the cab of the truck, and its narrow beamed lights came on, giving us some weak illumination. The church bell was someone belting the other Bassett over the helmet with the full flat of a long-handled spade. It must have melted his brains, because he sat down immediately, with his feet splayed out in front of him. He dropped his MP, and made funny little gurgling noises. I immediately cringed, waiting for the spade to swing on me. The figure confronting Kilduff was the little girl I had seen earlier. She had her hand back over her head with half a brick in it. I suppose that it could have been something nastier. He swung his pistol her way, but he was going to be a loser all along. England slammed into him with his shoulder, and Kilduff started to stumble sideways among the bricks. The girl was good. She would have been a bloody good point fielder if Jerry ever played cricket. She could even hit a moving target. Her brick piece caught him on the forehead, under the rim of his helmet, which tipped forwards across his face as he fell. James threw himself across the body to pin it down, and when the Bürgermeister’s wife stepped up to put another spade against Kilduff’s neck, with her foot on the blade’s shoulder, that was it, really. Les slammed Bassett’s helmet sideways with another mighty, ringing blow of his spade, and the policeman slipped sideways to lie on the road as if he was asleep. Although his eyes were open, and he was still alive. His right hand twitched spasmodically as if it had a life of its own.
Les said, ‘My effing head aches. What did they do to it?’
I told him. He massaged his brow vigorously, and cut James’s wrist cords with that horrible black-bladed knife of his. They should have taken that away from him.
From James there was, ‘Thank you that man: I’d say Many thanks, Raffles; but how the hell did you let them creep up on us in the first place?’
There was this thing about Les: honesty, and syllable-specific accuracy when you needed it most.
‘I was a prat,’ he said, and, ‘It won’t happen again, sir.’
James wouldn’t let him take it all on his own.
‘I suppose it would have helped if Charlie and I had managed to keep our wits about us for a change?’
‘No call for that, sir. You’re officers.’
Kilduff made a little gurgling noise, quite similar to Bassett’s sound effects soon after Les gonged him. Mrs Bürgermeister’s leg was getting tired, and her weight was beginning to bear on the spade, which was beginning to bear on Kilduff’s throat. James waved her away. He had taken Kilduff’s pistol, and Les had Bassett’s submachine gun. He kicked Kilduff to his feet, stuck his pistol in his ear, and cocked it.
‘After you, Captain America,’ he told him.
The truck’s lights were killed just as we reached it. The boy with wire-rimmed specs was sitting behind the wheel. He had lit a cigarette from a packet on the dash. The American driver was on his knees with his hands in his lap. Like he was praying. His eyes were open, like Bassett’s, but unlike him, he wasn’t breathing heavily. He wasn’t doing much breathing at all. To be frank, he wasn’t doing any. There was a little trickle of blood from his mouth to his chin, and a little grin on his face. It was self deprecating; as if acknowledging that he’d done a stupid thing. I could go along with that: dying uncalled for is often a stupid thing. Kilduff gawked, and then he turned his head away.
He said, ‘Aw shit; they killed him with a garden fork.’ He retched, but nothing came up.
It was why he was still kneeling. The fork had slammed into him from the back. As he had sunk to his knees and then fallen back, its handle had lodged against the road, keeping him upright. The boy winked at me from behind the wheel. Then he blew on his fingers, the way you see the hero blow on his knuckles after a fist fight in a gangster film. I could have retched myself, except that it would have been impolite. I could still sense the people moving in the shadows on either side of the street. It was like hearing waves lapping on a shoreline you couldn’t see.
I asked James, ‘You think we’re all right now?’ When he didn’t answer I added, ‘Sir.’
I don’t think that it was that. I think that he was pausing to gather his thoughts.
‘I’m not sure I’d say that. I think that we’re better off than we were half an hour ago when these bastards caught up with you.’
We were back sitting near the stove in the Bürgermeister’s kitchen. The American Private Bassett was sitting awkwardly at our feet, his legs crossed. His arms were bound uncomfortably behind him: wrist to wrist, elbow to elbow. He was sweating like Niagara, which either meant concussion or a fractured skull. Or that he was too hot. His helmet was on the kitchen table: one side of it had been flattened by the power of the first blow he had been given, so I wasn’t surprised that he still wasn’t saying much. James tied Kilduff the same way. Then his wrists were tied to his ankles. I think that the Yanks call that hog-tying. Then they sat him in one of the upright kitchen chairs. I had this thought that Germany, despite its other problems, clearly wasn’t short of rope. The Bürgermeister hustled his wife out of the kitchen with him, leaving the victorious Allies to discuss their differences. The kid walked in with three canvas rolls like sleeping bags, and dropped them on the floor.
He said, ‘They were in their lorry.’
James sighed, and asked Kilduff, ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’
The American looked wary, but he nodded. James said, ‘Then we’ll begin. Were you going to kidnap Charlie again, or simply kill him this time?’
‘He’s wanted.’
‘By whom?’
‘I don’t know; the Brits anyway.’
‘An Intelligence Officer named David Clifford is pulling the strings, isn’t he?’
‘You mean the tricky bastard from Tempsford? No; he’s fucking well not. No, sir. If he hadn’t interfered we would have kept Charlie first time round: I would have let you shoot that cat-house Colonel you found.’
‘Try me again, Lieutenant. What’s so important about Charlie that you follow him around with body bags?’
‘. . . and I’ll tell you again. The Brits want him stopped.’
‘Stopped from what?’
‘Doing whatever he’s doing.’
‘. . . and what is he doing?’
‘He thinks he’s chasing around the War Zone looking for some female who’s run off with some doctors.’
‘And isn’t he?’
‘Search me, bud. If that’s not enough reason to off him, then he must be doing something else: something he hasn’t told us about.’
Either Kilduff was never too bright, or he was in shock. But he couldn’t take it back once he’d said it. There was a silence, but I’d hardly call it golden. That was my cue: it was time to take part in the conversation.
I said, ‘Off him. Does that mean . . .?’
‘Yes.’ That was Les. He didn’t want to be left out, either. ‘It means that this time you can forget about that gentlemanly You’re under arrest crap: the bastard was going to take you round the corner and slit your throat for you.’
It was very odd. I actually broke out in a sweat, like the other Bassett.
The smashed-up house next door still had a cellar with a heavy wooden door in the pavement outside. Les dragged the Private to it, whilst James and I manoeuvred Kilduff. Kilduff swore a lot. When I held the lantern over the gaping door the first thing I saw was the other soldier’s body sprawled at the foot of the ladder. Somebody had used their initiative. Both the others went in on top of it with sibilant thumps that were somehow more sinister for their lack of drama. Les said that there was no other entrance. He must have checked up when I wasn’t looking. Back in the Bürgermeister’s house there was a damp spot in front of the stove, which rapidly dried.
I said, ‘We’ll have to decide what to do with them. If their orders to kill me are legitimate – I mean legal – they haven’t technically done anything wrong. If they’re not they should be arrested and court-martialled.’
Les said, ‘You’re beginning to sound like a nance, Charlie.’
‘Leave it out, Les.’
James showed us a rare sad smile. He said, ‘Sorry, chaps: not your business . . .’
I said, ‘I . . .’
And he cut me off with, ‘I mean it, Charlie. This is where I pull rank. Not . . . your . . . business. OK?’
‘Thank God for that, sir,’ Les told him. ‘I thought that you were losing your touch.’
Then James asked me, ‘Would you mind getting the radio in here from Kate, Charlie, and rigging it up? I might as well make my daily report early. At least for the civilians here, the war is over, thank God.’ I was sure that they just wanted me out of the way.
The settee that Les had slept on was big enough for five. After I had rigged the radio for them, running the aerial to an outside drainpipe, I dozed there. Les and James muttered to one another across James’s little notebook, and then James hunched over the set and punched out his tunes for at least an hour. His Morse hand was far better than the airmen’s I’d trained. He was quick and clear. He used his one-time code, so it was all meaningless crap as far as I was concerned. Les left him to it, and took the other end of the settee: soon he was snoring. His Sten was in his lap, and a spare mag on the arm alongside him. I took care not to move snappily. Finally James yawned, and stopped rattling the Morse key. He asked me, ‘Have you realized yet that the people here are two days from beginning to starve? If we don’t get the basics up here, malnutrition, typhoid and cholera will do in four months what your lot couldn’t in six years.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Push the German race to the edge of extinction.’
This was too much to get around that early in the morning. I told him, ‘I’m not sure that I agree with that. I mean, I’m not sure that I want that to happen.’
‘Nor do I, Charlie, which is why I’m in the right job. Unless there’s a problem, half a dozen lorries will roll in here
tomorrow with enough to keep everyone going for the best part of a week. They will be headed up by a Quartermaster Sergeant who will take up residence, probably with the prettiest girl in the place. After that it will all be routine. The Bürgermeister will still be the Bürgermeister. Some of the policemen who ran away will return. Normality. None of them will ever have been Nazis; not even the English Quartermaster Sergeant.’
‘Where will we be in two days’ time, then?’
‘We will have moved on. To the next town. Les will be worried about keeping me alive . . .’
Les snorted, and mumbled, ‘Don’t count on that.’ Then he started snoring lightly again.
‘. . . and you will be closer to your pretty lady. Is she pretty, by the way?’
‘Sometimes. There’s something special about her: like an It girl.’
When I had opened my eyes James was still asleep. He had joined us, and was slumped sideways, his head resting on Les’s shoulder. When he sat up I asked him, ‘What are you going to do about Kilduff?’
James yawned. Les and I copied him. It’s catching: I just yawned again as I wrote that.
‘See if he tells us who wants you chopped, if he knows, and then I suppose it’s old Hammurabi’s Hypothesis. Have you heard of that, Charlie?’
‘I heard all this cock before,’ Les said to neither of us in particular. ‘All it means is that we’re going to have to kill the beggars.’
That seemed sad, this close to the end of the war. It was another of the things you didn’t say.
They must have been waiting to hear us stir. Mrs Bürgermeister busied in with something approximating breakfast. It was potato soup, and potato bread. When we finished James gave the Bürgermeister a form he had filled in for him. It came from a small loose-leafed pad, and the Bürgermeister had to sign it as well. James kept a carbon copy. Then he took the Bürgermeister outside. They walked up and down in animated private conversation.
Les said to me, ‘The Major has just given him his appointment as a military-approved Mayor. It will probably last until they get round to proper elections; could be a couple of years. It’s a very important piece of paper. It means that he stays top dog. If he’s a good man we benefit from that.’
Charlie's War Page 24