Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  “My chariot awaits,” Felton said.

  Then, turning back to Harkins, “He’s going to get rid of anybody who can uncover him as the shitty commander he is.” She hefted the duffle bag onto her shoulder, and it pushed her helmet to one side, left it cockeyed, like a newsboy’s cap.

  “I think it’s your move, Lieutenant.”

  8

  2 August 1943

  1600 hours

  After Felton left, Kathleen Donnelly watched Harkins and Colianno drive off. She was truly happy to see Harkins, whom she had always liked. She wasn’t all that surprised that he didn’t want to talk about his brother’s death—lots of people handled their grief by throwing themselves into work. She hoped, for his sake, that would be enough for a while. Eventually, she knew, it would all come crashing back down on him.

  The question Donnelly had to answer was: Could she trust Eddie Harkins? She didn’t doubt his sincerity or integrity; it was his competence as an investigator that she wondered about. Because Kathleen Donnelly had a secret, and if she shared it with Harkins and her cop friend was careless with it, Donnelly would end her brief military career in front of a court-martial.

  By the time Donnelly learned that Whitman was dead, the nurses were already talking about how she’d choked on her own vomit while blind drunk. There’d been a couple of nurses who didn’t like Whitman, and the story fit their idea of the young woman: naïve, irresponsible in the way she flirted with the doctors.

  Then there were the nurses who hated Stephenson, Whitman’s drinking partner that night. For this gang, the whole incident was more evidence for what they already believed: that Stephenson was to blame for just about everything that was off-kilter at the Eleventh Field Hospital. He’d gotten her drunk; he’d left her alone when he shouldn’t have.

  Even Captain Palmer, the head nurse, had latched on to the storyline that Whitman had choked to death. All Palmer wanted was a cautionary tale she could use to berate the other nurses: This is what happens when you don’t behave like a lady, when you don’t control yourself.

  But the story didn’t make sense to Kathleen. By the time she got off shift that morning, poor Whitman’s remains had already been moved to the morgue. Donnelly walked in just as two orderlies were slipping a mattress cover over the corpse, pulling it up toward her head.

  “Hang on, guys,” Donnelly had asked.

  She recognized one of the men, a corporal named Barton. The two soldiers paused, quiet and respectful.

  “Can I have a few minutes with her? She was my friend.”

  “Sure thing, ma’am,” Barton, the older of the GIs, said. The men had plenty of other work, and they left Donnelly alone.

  The morgue didn’t occupy a big tent. It could hold about a half-dozen litters set on spindly-legged stands. Whitman had been the only occupant that morning. Since army field hospitals did not routinely do autopsies—the cause of death for most of their patients was sadly and sometimes horrifically obvious—the morgue was just a way station, a place to make sure the records were updated before a body was picked up by graves registration soldiers and taken to the big temporary cemetery near Gela, on the southwest coast of Sicily.

  Donnelly stood looking at her friend, a slight twenty-year-old with corn-silk hair. Kathleen brushed her fingers across Whitman’s forehead, already cool to the touch. Then she put her hand on the dead woman’s stomach, imagined the tiny fetus there.

  Donnelly didn’t buy that Whitman had been so drunk that she couldn’t wake up when she vomited. She knew lots of women drank during pregnancy, but attitudes had been changing in the medical community. The most progressive thinkers now held that a mother’s drinking was bad for the baby. Whitman, who’d studied nursing in Saint Paul, had been a well-educated and well-informed professional. Was it possible that she had a drink with Stephenson? Donnelly supposed so. Did it seem likely that she guzzled ten or fifteen drinks until she blacked out? That she drank until the alcohol defeated the reflex action that would have saved her from choking? Donnelly had a hard time believing that.

  There was a chart hanging from the end of the stretcher, and Donnelly picked it up. Cause of death was listed as Asphyxiation. Choked on vomitus.

  It was signed by Colonel Boone.

  Donnelly stood in the dark and stifling tent, chewing the inside of her lip. The physician’s signature was supposed to be the last word, was meant to stay unchallenged. There was a caste system in the medical profession, and ever since she put on her first white cap, Kathleen Donnelly had been reminded where she ranked. If she’d stayed at Pennsylvania Hospital she might never have questioned the status quo. But over the last year she’d been asked to do difficult, frightening things that were far beyond her station, beyond her training. She’d been bombed and strafed and seasick, she’d been hot and tired and dirty, but she had done what was asked of her and more. She had saved lives. She was bigger than she’d been.

  And she was sick and goddamned tired of deferring.

  Something told her there was more to her friend’s death. Boone’s signature on the chart was a signpost telling her to let it go; that her hunches didn’t matter; that smarter, better-qualified people were on top of things and she should go back to whatever duties were entrusted to nurses by the powers that be.

  “Screw it,” she said.

  She left the morgue and walked to a supply tent a few yards away, where she picked up a canvas-wrapped bundle of sterilized instruments no bigger than a woman’s clutch. No one paid her any special attention as she walked back to the morgue.

  She went back inside, unrolled the instrument package, and took out a scalpel.

  “I’m sorry, Whit,” she whispered. She put the instrument bundle under Whitman’s neck at the base of her skull, so that the dead woman’s head was tilted back, her throat exposed despite the onset of rigor mortis. And before she could change her mind or think about the implications of what she was about to do, Donnelly put her thumb and two first two fingers of her left hand on Whitman’s throat. She found the thyroid cartilage, moved her hand down just the width of two fingers, then used the scalpel to incise the skin just above the sternal notch. She cut through and pushed aside the thyroid to get at the trachea, which she opened with a single smooth incision, like a fleshy pipe sliced lengthwise. She held it open with two fingers while she fumbled for the small flashlight she kept in a pocket on her left sleeve. She clicked the light on and looked inside.

  There was no sign of any vomitus in Whitman’s airway. No chunks of food, no excess fluids, just some that she expected to see. She inserted her index finger upward and felt no obstruction of the larynx between the vocal cords.

  It didn’t look to her that Whitman had choked to death. And Donnelly didn’t believe the pregnant woman would have drunk enough alcohol to poison herself, like some ignorant moonshiner.

  Something else had killed her.

  Donnelly had been standing there, looking at her friend’s flayed throat, when the two orderlies came back in.

  “You, OK, ma’am?” Barton asked. They stopped just inside the door, courteous enough to give Donnelly time to be with her friend.

  “I’m almost done,” Donnelly had said. She reached down and tugged the edge of the mattress cover to Whitman’s chin, hiding this new violation, the incision that would never be closed.

  “Help me, would you?” she asked.

  Barton stepped to the other side of the litter and lifted Whitman’s shoulders so they could pull the canvas over the top of her head.

  “She goes to the cemetery from here, right?” Donnelly asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Barton said. “The graves registration guys are already outside. I had them wait, you know, in case you needed more time.”

  “Thanks, Barton.” She looked at the other soldier, a young private she’d seen around. “Thanks,” she said.

  Donnelly had almost reached the door to the tent when Barton called her. “Lieutenant Donnelly?”

  She turned around and sa
w him holding the instrument bundle she’d used to prop Whitman’s head.

  “You leave this here, ma’am?”

  She didn’t answer, just smiled, took the bundle, and walked out. If Barton wondered what she’d been doing, he didn’t say.

  Two weeks later, Eddie Harkins shows up and suddenly she’s talking about Whitman again. Everyone is talking about Whitman. But only Donnelly knew the truth.

  9

  2 August 1943

  2050 hours

  “I spent some time in the motor pool while you were with your old girlfriend,” Colianno said.

  “I wish. What were you doing?”

  “Thought I’d nose around a bit, see what I could learn that might help.”

  Harkins studied Colianno’s profile. He hadn’t asked the private to do anything; on the other hand, Harkins believed the kid when he said that the enlisted men know a lot more than officers usually gave them credit for.

  “What’d you learn?”

  “The name of the driver who took Stephenson into Palermo on at least one of his trips. Pritchard. James Pritchard. I thought you’d want to talk to him.”

  “Good thinking. So why are we heading into the city?”

  “Because that’s where his buddies think we’ll find him.”

  “Jesus,” Harkins said. “I’m going on forty hours straight duty; everybody else has time to sightsee.”

  “And visit whorehouses. That’s where this guy’s supposed to be. And it’s where he took Stephenson.”

  Colianno drove them north out of the hills, the sun rolling behind the ridges to their left. Below them, Palermo’s waterfront curved into a blue distance. They dropped down onto a main east-west road that some GIs had renamed with a large hand-painted sign that said SACRAMENTO HIGHWAY. Easier to understand, especially on a radio, than some soldier’s attempt at pronouncing “Via Villagrazia.”

  When they turned a corner, Harkins’ copy of Sandburg’s poetry slid out from under his seat. He picked it up and opened it to a random page.

  Colianno glanced over. “What’s that?”

  “Poetry book. Carl Sandburg. Ever hear of him?”

  “Sure, my family sits around and reads his poems to each other every night after dinner.”

  Before he could catch himself, Harkins said, “Really?”

  Colianno laughed. “No, not really. What the hell kind of family you think I have?” The paratrooper shook his head. “Poetry. Jesus.”

  Harkins laughed. “Yeah, well, keep your fucking opinions to yourself.”

  They were almost at the botanical garden when the air-raid sirens began their low whine.

  Colianno gripped the steering wheel hard, voice tense, no trace of panic. “Where do you want me to go?”

  “Let’s get away from the waterfront,” Harkins said.

  The harbor was thick with Allied ships, mostly small craft hauling supplies ashore. If the Luftwaffe were looking for targets, this would be the place, and Harkins and Colianno were only a few hundred yards from the water’s edge.

  The paratrooper did a three-point turn, bumping over a median lined with dust-dry, weed-choked flower beds. The jeep was pointed away from the docks when the antiaircraft fire began, long bright bands of tracers arcing up at planes Harkins couldn’t see. Something heavy banged off the hood of their vehicle.

  “What the hell was that?” Colianno asked.

  “Expended rounds. What goes up gotta come down.”

  Harkins saw a stone arch entrance with a wooden gate fronting the road. There was enough room under the barrel-shaped vault for their vehicle.

  “Pull in there.”

  Colianno tucked the jeep under the stone canopy. Out in the street just a few feet away, another spray of expended antiaircraft rounds slammed to the pavement.

  Harkins left the protective cover of the archway and, staying pressed to the wall, inched to the street corner to get a view of the harbor.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Colianno called to him. The paratrooper stayed between the jeep and the big wooden door inside the arch.

  Harkins could not see the harbor; the trees in the arboretum blocked his view, but the sky above that was scarred with bright outgoing fire.

  Harkins called back to Colianno. “You should see this!”

  He doubted the driver could hear him. He turned back toward the harbor in time to see a German bomber shudder as it was a hit, flames trailing from its left wing. The Kraut was already low and dipped even more as jagged fragments of the fuselage tore away. Then the whole aircraft flipped upside down, tearing itself apart in the dive.

  Harkins was mesmerized.

  And just like that, the dying plane was headed for him.

  For the longest two seconds of his life, Harkins was unable to move, his feet rooted as if in a nightmare, the aircraft headed straight for his nose. Then he dove to the ground, pressing himself to the foot of the wall.

  And it missed him.

  The tail of the plane crushed the top of a building behind him, the street flashed white and orange as the wreck set fire to something in the next block.

  By the time Harkins found his feet, Colianno had pulled the jeep out from its cover and had raced up to retrieve Harkins. They sped to the waterfront, then Colianno cracked a sharp right, scraping the wall of a house with the jeep’s side. Neither man spoke until they had reached a hill about a half mile from the harbor, where Colianno parked on a sidewalk.

  “What the fuck was that about back there?” Colianno asked, eyes wide.

  “I’ve never been on the front lines,” Harkins said. His breath was shallow; he felt light-headed. “I’ve heard stuff, artillery—theirs and ours—but the only Germans I’ve ever seen were already prisoners. I’ve never seen—you know—live shooting. A real battle.”

  Colianno, clearly puzzled, just looked at him. “OK,” the paratrooper said, nodding slowly. “OK. Well, I hope that satisfied your curiosity, ’cause I’ve already seen enough shooting to last me a lifetime. I’m sure I’ll see more, but I ain’t going looking for it.”

  They rested there for a half hour without talking. A few civilians came out of their homes to look around, but no one approached them. Harkins wanted to ask Colianno about his first fight, his reaction, but he didn’t.

  Finally, Colianno said, “I gotta take a leak.” He left Harkins and the jeep and stepped into an alley.

  Harkins felt an urge to laugh, though at what, he wasn’t sure. He was smiling when Colianno returned. The young private looked at him, then shook his head.

  “And they say I’m the nutcase,” he said, starting the engine.

  * * *

  Minutes later they were in the city proper, three- and four-story apartment blocks above shops shuttered for the night.

  “Not a lot of love for Il Duce here,” Colianno said, pointing at some of the anti-Fascist slogans painted on the walls.

  “I wonder how many of those were painted after we showed up?” Harkins said. “Seems to me the smart thing for the locals to do is to get along with whoever’s in power.”

  “So you think they covered up the anti-American stuff right before we got here?” Colianno said. That chip on his shoulder again. Colianno wanted to defend the Sicilians, but he was also an American soldier.

  “What do I know?” Harkins said.

  Harkins looked at his watch. Nearly nine thirty. Twenty-one thirty in army-speak. Harkins had not eaten all day, meaning his sunstroke headache would not go away at nightfall.

  They did not know the exact location of the bordello, but when they pulled over near a church with an elegant blue sign that said SAN CATALDO, they saw three young women in white cotton shifts perched on the sill of a second-floor window in an apartment a few doors away. One woman, who looked to be about twenty, waved at them; Harkins waved back. When she smiled, he could see a black gap where she was missing a tooth.

  “My keen detective skills tell me we found the place,” Harkins said.

  “Hang on,�
� Colianno said, reaching into a cloth sack on the floor of the jeep. He pulled out some cured meat wrapped in brown paper and a small loaf of bread. He broke the loaf, gave half to Harkins, then pulled a wicked fighting knife from a sheath strapped to his boot and cut the meat in two quick strokes. Harkins wondered if he’d had the knife with him at the hospital. Most patients had to give up their weapons.

  “I’m starving,” Colianno said.

  “Hope there’s no Kraut blood on your knife,” Harkins said. He’d meant it as a joke, but Colianno looked at him without smiling.

  Harkins chewed on the salami, which was salty but delicious, and studied Colianno.

  Harkins was twenty-six; he figured Colianno for twenty or twenty-one. The paratrooper was along to drive and translate, but he’d also thought to go to the motor pool, had even found them some food. Colianno had been in at least one hard fight, had apparently seen some things that changed him. For all the ugliness Harkins saw as a cop, he doubted it compared to what Colianno had been through.

  Harkins was a few big bites into the salami when three GIs strolled off the Via Maqueda and onto the side street where they were parked. The men turned into a small courtyard below the window where the women sat.

  “Bun-jerr-no,” one of the men called up to the women.

  “Let’s go,” Harkins said, stuffing the uneaten bread into his musette bag. “Before our boy slips out another door.”

  Colianno got out of the jeep, pulled a carbine out of the back, and slung it on his shoulder.

  “Where’d you get the peashooter?”

  “It’s a war zone, Lieutenant. I don’t like to go around naked.”

  Colianno bent over, dragged a chain and a heavy padlock from under the back bench seat.

  “And the chain?” Harkins asked.

  “Motor pool,” Colianno said. “Same place I got the chow. I figured you’d need me to go into these places with you, and we want the jeep to be here when we come out, right?”