Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  “You know the way, Doctor,” Cohen said. “We’ll be here when you’re finished.”

  Lindner walked into the cool lobby, with its giant marble tiles and iron-railing staircase. On the second floor he walked past an office marked G4 and entered the door to an adjacent, private office. Brigadier General Truman Glass was huddled over a map, standing amid piles and rolls of papers and maps. He was surrounded, in fact, by a sea of planning documents. Lindner stood quietly until Glass acknowledged him.

  “Herr Doktor Lindner,” Glass said. He walked to the door that led to an adjacent room, which Lindner knew contained a half-dozen desks and twice that number of scribbling clerks and junior officers. Glass locked the door.

  “I don’t mind telling you that I’ll be glad when our little meetings are over,” Glass said.

  Lindner smiled, set his medical bag on the table, walked to a sink in the corner, and washed his hands. By the time he turned around, Glass had removed his pants, was standing in only his boxer shorts. The general was a big man, with a bald head and exceptionally hairy chest, back, and arms. He’d once told Lindner that he could have gone to medical school, but decided on business instead. Wanted to make “a whole shitload of money,” an American expression Lindner had never heard before. When the war came along, Glass volunteered his service and expertise in logistics.

  “You know what the GIs call this?”

  Lindner was confused. “This?”

  “This routine. Having a doctor or medic check your pecker. They call it a short-arm inspection. Ha ha ha!”

  Lindner wasn’t sure what that meant, then figured out that the penis was the “short arm.” He still did not find it funny.

  Lindner went to a closet and dragged out a red case marked VENEREAL PROPHYLACTIC UNIT, MEDICAL DEPARTMENT, UNITED STATES ARMY.

  Glass, one of the senior American supply officers on Sicily, kept for himself a kit designed to treat scores of men. Lindner wondered if any GIs were going without.

  He pulled out a white basin, two small towels, and a bar of soap, and handed them to Glass. There was a large pitcher of water on the floor, which the doctor used to half fill the basin. “Wash first,” he said.

  Glass soaped his penis, his pubic hair, his lower abdomen.

  Lindner put on the rubber gloves, got out the syringe and jar of ointment. He filled the syringe, then set it aside. “OK then,” he said. “Let me take a look.”

  Glass still had some yellow discharge from the end of his penis. Lindner handed Glass a small gauze. “Wipe. Gently.”

  “It’s sore. Hurts like hell when I piss,” Glass said. He grabbed himself with one hand, leaned forward to see over the bulge of his stomach. “But some days are better than others. Doesn’t hurt as much. Means I’m getting better, right?”

  “Yes, sir, I suppose.”

  Lindner had heard that the Allies had a new drug that fought infection, penicillin, but it was still hard to come by. He wasn’t sure he’d use it on Glass anyway, since he wanted to treat the general over a number of visits.

  Glass was careless in leaving papers lying about.

  Lindner took the general’s penis in his gloved hand, inserted the syringe into his urethra and pushed the plunger. Glass’ knees buckled, but he was too proud to cringe.

  “Holy fucking Christ!” he said, his teeth clamped shut so they wouldn’t hear him in the next office.

  Lindner handed him a clean gauze. “Hold this on the tip. Blot, but don’t wipe.”

  While Glass was focused on his penis, Lindner looked up. There was a rollaway blackboard against one wall, with columns of numbers marked with designations starting at D − 20 on one side to D + 20 on the other. The horizontal rows were marked with Roman numerals, which is how the Americans categorized classes of supply.

  “Are you using the condoms I gave you, General?” Lindner asked. It turned out that Glass, like Stephenson, had an appetite for prostitutes. No doubt he’d caught his disease that way; Lindner was concerned he was spreading it to other unfortunate women.

  “I hate those fucking things,” Glass said. “They ruin every good sensation.”

  “And so it burns when you urinate. How is that sensation?”

  “I’m going to start hiring virgins,” Glass said. “So I can’t get anything.”

  Lindner looked up at his patient, the man’s eyes like dark marbles beneath a single thick brow that stretched from one side of his face to the other. Could the American be so naïve as to think that the women offered as virgins really were virginal?

  “Or maybe I’ll just get a Frenchie,” Glass said.

  The GIs Lindner treated were all obsessed with what they called “Frenchies,” being pleasured orally. In his time studying in Boston, he’d been surprised to learn that the act was considered so exotic that the Americans gave it what they thought of as the ultimate libertine designation, ascribing it, as they did all things sexually exotic, to the French.

  Lindner’s father, also a surgeon, had never understood the son’s selection of urology as a specialty. Some of his medical school classmates had ridiculed him, and he knew the Americans regularly referred to him as the “dick doctor.” But the fact was that he could help men who had suffered life-altering wounds. Of course, there were the patients he could not help, for whom no minor skin graft would replace what they’d lost. They committed suicide in staggering numbers.

  “Stop daydreaming,” Glass said. “You can fucking do that when I’m not standing here with my dick in my hand.”

  Glass held out the gauze, soiled with his discharge, to Lindner. The doctor, still sitting and, unfortunately, at eye level with Glass’ diseased member, knew there was a trash can right behind the general. This was part of Glass’ way of showing who was boss, even though he was the patient. Lindner held out his gloved hand and took the gauze, then dropped it in the rubbish.

  “How many more visits?”

  “Three or four, I think, depending on how you progress.”

  “I’m going to be a little harder to reach next month. The war goes on, you know.”

  Lindner said nothing, hoped his expression did not betray that this is what he was interested in, was the reason he was willing to endure Glass’ pettiness.

  “Did your hospital lose a lot of supplies to theft?” Glass asked. He often posed questions about the German services of supply, bragged about everything the Allies had at their disposal, as if he had created it all himself.

  “Yes, General. The Sicilians were mostly interested in gasoline, it seemed. The garrison commander here in Palermo made an example of one young man who was caught stealing food from an officers’ mess.”

  Glass was intrigued now, as Lindner expected. “What did they do?”

  “Shot him on the street in front of the palace. They displayed his body with a sign around the neck. ‘Thief’ in German and Italian.”

  Lindner had concocted the story because it confirmed Glass’ opinion of the Germans: that they were both ruthless and admirably direct.

  “Hah,” Glass said. “We should do that. We’re hemorrhaging supplies on this goddamn island. Stuff gets stolen from right under our goddamn noses. You can buy it back on the street from those black market fuckers.”

  Lindner emptied the basin in the sink, spilling some on the floor. He felt a queasy excitement. He was about to push Glass as far as he ever had, perhaps coming close to asking one question too many.

  “It was worse in Naples,” Lindner said. “Those people stole everything. Our police units rounded up thieves by the dozens.”

  “Shoot them, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Lindner said. “I think they put them in prison. Probably still there.”

  “I’ll deal with that when I get there,” Glass said.

  Lindner waited, but Glass said nothing else. Lindner could see that the general’s attention was being drawn back to the papers on his desk. Soon he would dismiss the doctor. Lindner needed more time.

  “Can I put my pants on
now?”

  “Not quite, General,” Lindner said. He looked inside his medical bag, spotted a small glass jar. “I need a urine sample.”

  He was improvising now, sloppily. The conversation with Harkins had thrown him. Of course the urine sample should have been taken before the medicine went in, but maybe Glass wouldn’t notice. The general looked at him for a moment—Lindner had never asked for a sample before—but finally he took the bottle and retreated to a water closet in the corner of the room.

  Lindner stood and walked to the general’s desk, where Glass had left papers and maps and notebooks scattered about. He was queasy with fear as he reached out and turned over a thick stack of papers bound with a metal clip.

  The title read Fuel Handling to D+10.

  “Goddamn it to hell!”

  Lindner dropped the papers, expecting to see Glass storming from the closet, but the general was only complaining about the pain of urination.

  “Sonofabitch!”

  Lindner reached over the desk with two hands, picked up another stack of unruly papers to see a map buried beneath. A quick glance to the corner told him Glass was not finished yet.

  He was looking at Sicily, the island marked with red and blue phase lines that marched from Palermo toward Messina, nearest the boot of the mainland. A date scrawled in the corner told him the map was already four days old. Lindner reached to see what was below it when a drop of sweat rolled down his nose and splattered on Sicily. He tried blotting the moisture, but his fingers were damp, too. Lindner quickly brushed his sleeve across his face.

  “Lindner! You Kraut bastard!”

  Lindner looked up. Glass was still behind the thin door.

  “How much do you need in this goddamn jar?”

  “Up to the line, General.”

  Lindner peeled back the map of Sicily. Below it was a nearly transparent overlay, a smaller scale map rendered in pencil, with no names or cities, no named rivers or roads. It was a sketch of military symbols to be placed over a map, like tracing paper. Without the map below it, Lindner wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

  “Lindner!” Glass screamed. “Goddamn. You can make do with less than that, right? I’m not quite up to the line. I just took a piss right before you showed up.”

  Lindner did not want to release the general just yet.

  He turned his head, looked at the map overlay from a different angle. Suddenly the shape made sense. A bay of some sort, with a jagged beak of land on the north end jutting into the sea; a long, nearly straight stretch of coast, divided into segments by hashed lines. An invasion beach and its sectors for side-by-side assault units. A curly line running from the mountains—a river? But where was it? Had he even seen it before? The overlay was not marked with a name, but merely with a number. Copy 12 of 50. It was like trying to identify a person you’d seen once or twice in your lifetime from a line drawing of a silhouette.

  “Lindner, you Nazi sonofabitch! Are you out there?”

  “I can make do, General.”

  “Thank God almighty. I feel like I’m pissing fire ants.”

  Lindner moved the papers back in place. There was the damp spot where his sweat had dripped on the map. Glass still had not come out from the water closet.

  Then Lindner knew.

  The Gulf of Salerno. South of Naples, where Glass promised he’d deal with thieves and black marketers.

  The Allies were going to invade the mainland at Salerno.

  Of course! It made sense. The Germans and those Italians who had not surrendered were escaping Sicily across the narrow Strait of Messina, right onto the toe of the Italian boot. It would not make sense for the Allies to plunge across at such an obvious place. They would try to deceive the Germans as to where the inevitable assault would be. Salerno, some four or five hundred kilometers north along the coast, would be a surprise, and it would save the Allies from having to fight their way up the entire length of mainland Italy.

  Just as Lindner was admiring the simplicity of the plan, Glass banged open the thin water closet door with his shoulder, head down, pulling up his undershorts. Lindner took a quick step away from the desk and nearly bumped into Cohen, the aide, who had appeared behind him.

  “Can I help you with anything, Doctor?”

  Lindner’s breath left him. How long had Cohen been there?

  “No,” he managed. “No, thank you.”

  Lindner turned back to Glass. “Will you be around for another week, General?” he asked.

  Cohen stepped around to the desk, straightened the papers there as he studied Lindner.

  Glass, his eyes marked with pain, looked hard at the two men. “Why?”

  “I can set up the last two treatments for you, hand it off to an American doctor if you prefer. But you don’t want to stop now. You’ll want to finish.”

  “I don’t trust the American doctors to keep their goddamned yaps shut,” Glass said. “Whereas if you talk, I’ll slap you into the hold of one of those POW ships. You’ll wind up in East Jesus, Idaho, or some goddamn place. Besides, we don’t have time for that. I need to be finished by September first, because I don’t want to go through this horseshit again, that’s for sure.”

  When Glass mentioned the date, Cohen looked from his boss to Lindner, as if trying to see if the date had registered with the German.

  “I’ll bet if you put a German general through this bullshit,” Glass said, handing the jar of urine to Lindner, “he’d have you shot for making him piss lightning into a bottle.”

  “Quite possibly,” Lindner said. His hands shook; he gripped the bottle to steady them.

  “What’s up?” Glass asked Cohen.

  “Looks like the locals stole a couple of tons of canned food from the depot just above Gela,” Cohen said to Glass, handing over a typed sheet.

  “Bastards!” Glass said. He took the report from Cohen. “Doctor Lindner here tells me the Germans used to shoot thieves. What do you think about that, Lieutenant?”

  Cohen didn’t answer right away. He studied Lindner, who packed his instruments, then looked down at his boss’s desk just a few feet away. He walked over, lifted the report on fuel handling, glanced at the map of Sicily. When he got to the overlay, he yanked it out and rolled it up, turning his back toward Lindner so the German could not see the sheet.

  “I don’t know that we want to be in the business of shooting thieves, General,” Cohen said. “Spies, though. It might be useful to shoot a couple of spies.”

  29

  4 August 1943

  1000 hours

  Boone caught up with Drake’s jeep on the road to Palermo when the first sergeant got stuck behind a convoy of trucks. He kept Drake in sight—without getting too close—and followed him into a dense grid of streets a few blocks west of the waterfront and just south of a patch of green marked with an ancient sign that said VILLA TRABIA.

  Boone watched from an intersection three blocks away while Drake’s jeep pulled onto a sidewalk. The first sergeant’s driver pointed to a building Boone could not see, then Drake got out of the vehicle and, looking at his watch, gave the driver some orders, probably telling him when to come back.

  There was no military traffic in this neighborhood, so Boone was wary of getting too close. He watched Drake through binoculars he’d found in the jeep, and when Drake’s driver pulled away, Boone got out and followed the first sergeant on foot. There was some shade on one side of the street, but otherwise the heat bounced off the stone buildings and ricocheted around the tightly packed space. There was no breeze from the sea, no greenery along the avenue, no one moving outdoors except for Americans; there was just stone and dog shit and the occasional sound of someone speaking inside one of the oven-hot apartments.

  With Drake out of sight, Boone hurried along so as not to lose him, and was soon drenched in sweat, his shirtfront dark. He turned a corner into a residential area and saw Drake step into the street to get a look at the second story of a building. The first sergeant did not see him. Dr
ake entered a courtyard. Boone, after waiting a few seconds, followed.

  On a gatepost were a few brass frames for hand-lettered signs showing the names of the residents. The third one Boone inspected said COLIANNO.

  “Well, that was helpful.”

  Drake was out of sight behind some shrubs in the center of the courtyard. The apartments were arranged around a square, forty or fifty feet to a side, with doors leading directly onto the courtyard from the first-floor flats, and a balcony that led to the second-floor rooms. Boone climbed a staircase to his left, being careful to stay in the shadows. As he’d hoped, he was able to look down on Drake, across the courtyard and standing in front of one of the ground-floor apartments.

  Drake knocked on a door, and Boone heard what sounded like a question in Italian. Almost a minute went by before the door opened, revealing a tiny old woman in a shapeless housedress. The woman looked Drake up and down, then scanned the courtyard before closing the door again, leaving Drake standing there with his helmet under his arm.

  Then Boone heard a woman’s voice with an American accent say, “Dominic?” When the door opened again, Second Lieutenant Moira Ronan, absent without leave in a combat zone and in danger of being declared a deserter, stepped into view.

  “Oh, shit,” she said.

  “I’m glad to see you’re safe,” Drake said. “I was worried.”

  Boone was surprised at how clearly the conversation carried to the second-floor gallery.

  “I don’t want to go back there, First Sergeant,” Ronan said. She wore a GI undershirt and her uniform trousers and shoes. She crossed her arms tightly, which made her look anything but defiant.

  “Look, I’m sorry about what happened with Colonel Boone,” he said. “All those questions, I mean. That was a terrible thing to do.”

  Ronan lifted her chin, wiped a drop of sweat off with the back of her hand. It was desert hot in the courtyard. The old woman stepped out of the apartment and past Ronan, shuffling out of the courtyard to the street.