Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  “Can you imagine partnering with a loose cannon like Stephenson?” Harkins said. “That’s the craziest thing about this whole mess. But finally Stephenson got too out of control, and Boone felt threatened. Stephenson could blow it all up. That’s certainly motivation for Boone to kill Stephenson, enough for him to want to make Lindner disappear into a POW camp in the States.”

  “I don’t know,” Colianno said. “I still think Boone is too much of a milquetoast to shoot Stephenson. My money’s on the Nazi.”

  “Boone shot Drake,” Harkins said. “And Kathleen thinks he was somehow involved in Whitman’s death.”

  “I thought she was the one choked to death.”

  “Maybe. We don’t have anything solid enough for charges on that. Not yet.”

  Colianno just nodded, like he was turning the problem over in his head. Harkins felt like he was finally getting some clarity on who’d done what and why.

  “Anyway, that was quite a story you came up with back there, Lieutenant. Scared the shit out of ol’ Sergeant Trunk.”

  Harkins looked over at Colianno. He felt like something was about to click into place, but he wasn’t sure what.

  “About Stephenson and the mattress cover, you mean?” Harkins said. “Yeah, I guess that was a nice touch. I even gave myself the heebie-jeebies.

  “Now let’s see how far we can run with it.”

  40

  5 August 1943

  1515 hours

  Harkins and Colianno skirted the edge of the Riserva di Capo Gallo, the rock-strewn nature preserve on the coast north of Palermo; the hills looked like California in fire season. Harkins had spent five weeks there in the summer of 1942.

  “This whole island is a giant sunburn,” Harkins said.

  “You should hear my parents talk about their first winters in the States,” Colianno said. “Like they’d moved to the North Pole.”

  Thirty minutes later they were back in the city proper, where they’d left Ronan at Giovanna’s place.

  “After we pick her up we’ll go get Captain Adams at the provost marshal headquarters,” Harkins said. “He’s the lead investigator now; he’ll have to be in on everything. I want to bring him up to speed with what we learned at the airfield.”

  When they parked in front of the house where Giovanna rented some rooms, Colianno jumped out of the jeep, and Harkins followed. Best to let Colianno make the case for her coming with them.

  The paratrooper went in the door without knocking, calling for his cousin and Ronan, but there was no answer.

  By the time Harkins entered, Colianno had already looked in the other two rooms and was wide-eyed.

  “She’s not here!” Colianno said, looking at Harkins as if for an explanation.

  “She was supposed to wait here,” Harkins said. “I told her I’d be back for her.”

  “Fucking Boone!”

  “I don’t think so. Boone didn’t know where this place is, and he was busy with the provost marshal when you and I came here. He wasn’t available to follow us.”

  “Couldn’t he have had someone else follow us?”

  Harkins thought it was possible—Boone was proving a resourceful enemy—but he didn’t want to say as much to Colianno.

  “Where would Giovanna be if she’s not here?” Harkins asked.

  “There are a couple of places, a couple of people she’d go to.”

  “OK, let’s take a look around at those places.”

  “Giovanna will stick with her,” Colianno said. Harkins thought the paratrooper was giving himself a pep talk.

  Colianno raced out to the jeep, started the engine, pulled Harkins’ map from the lieutenant’s musette bag.

  “Shit,” he said. “I keep thinking about Boone. He came to get her once.”

  “We’ll look for her, and if we can’t find her we’ll get Adams and then have him pick up Boone.”

  Harkins was barely in his seat when Colianno jammed the accelerator, spinning gravel from under the rear tires.

  They sped toward the waterfront, barely missed clipping a donkey cart, whose owner cursed at them in English. As they got closer, they heard the distinctive sound of a hand-cranked siren, which some MP vehicles mounted on the front fender. They turned a corner and were forced to stop at the intersection near the university, where an MP jeep blocked the road so that a couple of trucks could race by. A dozen or more soldiers crowded the back of each, hanging on as the drivers took the turns quickly. When they’d passed, an MP sergeant in the jeep looked at them.

  “You guys better get back to your unit,” he said, reaching for the hand crank of the siren.

  “What’s going on?” Harkins asked.

  “Big Kraut attack, or counterattack, I guess. We got sent into the city to round up anybody who’s on pass, especially the hospital people. That’s what all the noise is about. You guys with any of the hospital units?”

  “Eleventh Field Hospital,” Harkins said.

  “Better get up there, then. Casualties are already starting to come in, and they need everybody.”

  The MP sergeant tapped his driver on the shoulder and the jeep pulled out, chasing the trucks, the sergeant leaning out to turn the siren’s handle.

  “I’ll bet that’s where she went,” Colianno said. “Back to the hospital. Right back to Boone.”

  “You’re probably right,” Harkins said. “She was already itching to get back to work. If she heard she was needed…”

  Colianno put the jeep in gear and raced off after the MPs and their siren. As they moved out of the residential neighborhood it became obvious that something big was going on. Clusters of American vehicles spilled out of the city, east toward the front and south toward the hospital and supply staging areas. For the first time in weeks there was almost no military traffic headed into Palermo; it was all outbound. Everyone moved too fast, the drivers wide-eyed and leaning on their horns and accelerators. A wrecker had crashed into a sidewalk stall; a dozen or so ducks, their cages scattered around the vehicle’s bumper, squawked in panic.

  “Jesus,” Colianno said. “You’d think the Krauts were at the gates.”

  From the hills above them to the south, Harkins could hear the crump of outgoing artillery.

  The headquarters of Patton’s Seventh Army had jumped forward at least a week earlier, but the provost marshal had kept a presence in the city, where most of the interaction—legal and otherwise—between GIs and civilians was likely to take place. The provost had taken over a primary school, and a dirt courtyard that was probably a playground in happier days was jammed with American jeeps and trucks. There was a fuel point—a thousand-gallon tanker set up as a gas station—that had leaked gasoline and oil onto the ground. Harkins wondered when the children would be able to return, and what they’d find.

  They located Captain Adams in what had been a classroom, standing and bent over a desk, writing something on a tablet. Above his head, a crucifix hung on the wall beside a roll-down map of South America. Some GI wag had written on the map, “Wish I was here,” with an arrow pointing to Rio de Janeiro.

  “Captain Adams,” Harkins called as he entered the room.

  Adams looked up, raised a hand in greeting. He opened his mouth to speak but went silent when he saw Colianno come in behind Harkins.

  “What’s he doing here? He’s supposed to be in the stockade.”

  More surprised than angry, Adams spoke directly to Colianno. “You’re supposed to be in the stockade.”

  “He’s out for a medical procedure,” Harkins said.

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” Adams said. “Are you trying to get me fired, too? Isn’t it enough that your ass is in a sling with my boss?”

  Colianno started to speak, but Adams cut him off. “Wait outside.”

  Then, to Harkins, “This better be good.”

  Harkins filled him in on everything that had happened since the meeting with Colonel Meigs: his discovery of looted church gold at the apartment, Lindner’s connection w
ith someone who had a wireless set, Stephenson’s shipments back to the U.S. His theory about Boone and Stephenson being partners. When Harkins finished, Adams fell back into his chair.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Exactly,” Harkins said. “Now it’s time to move on Boone.”

  “Wait. There are a lot of loose ends here. You’ve seen gold in the apartment, but you never saw Lindner there. He was on his way there, right, when he spotted Colianno’s cousins? Do you have any way to connect the gold directly to Lindner, or to Stephenson, or, for that matter, Boone?”

  “The sergeant at the airfield, the loadmaster. He was taking payments from Stephenson to load the crates on the plane, make sure they got to the right person in the States. It’s a guy at a hospital back in Chicago; I think Boone used to work there. At any rate, I’ll bet the guy on the other end talks when the FBI knocks on his door.”

  Harkins knew what the lawyer’s next question would be, and he was ready for it.

  “This sergeant…”

  “Trunk.”

  “Right, Trunk. He saw the gold? He opened the crates?”

  Harkins did not miss a beat, but lied straight-faced. He could always go back to Patrick for another confession. “Yes.”

  Adams stood. “Well, this will make a great story someday. My big war novel, maybe a movie.”

  The captain picked up his canvas briefcase, led Harkins out of the office to where Colianno was pacing the hallway outside a row of classrooms.

  “Sir, we have to make sure Moira, Nurse Ronan, is OK,” Colianno said to Adams.

  “We will.”

  Adams stopped, went back inside his office. When he came out, he’d left the briefcase behind and was buckling on a pistol belt. He unbuttoned the flap on the holster, checked the action on the .45, tucked it back in its place.

  “OK, let’s go get this bastard.”

  41

  5 August 1943

  1630 hours

  The first waves of casualties started arriving two hours after the hospital began breaking down operations for the move forward. Sleeping tents, mess tents, supply tents already flattened and rolled by details of enlisted men, sweating in the heat and squinting against the glare. The most seriously injured patients had been moved to a general hospital being set up in Palermo, in what had been a civilian facility. Advance parties had gone ahead to scout locations closer to the front, leaving the staff short-handed on doctors, nurses, and orderlies.

  So when the ambulances and jeeps and trucks arrived with their loads of bloodied young men, the doctors and nurses of the Eleventh Field Hospital were halfway on the road, bandages and linens stored in crates, light stands folded, generators silenced, stretchers collapsed and stacked, surgical teams scattered.

  Oberstleutnant Matthias Lindner watched with admiration as the Americans adjusted to the chaos. One of the surgical tents had already been broken down, but a team of nurses and orderlies yanked the operating tables from the back of a truck and set up a theater in the open air.

  He watched three orderlies wrestle an X-ray machine off the back of a deuce-and-a-half and connect it to a generator that was still on board another truck so the surgeons could plan their campaign against the broken limbs, embedded shrapnel, crushed pelvises, shattered faces.

  There were stretchers on the ground, wounded men being shunted to various places on the footprints of the hospital tents that had been packed up. And just as he had observed with even the most grievously wounded German soldiers, these patients waited without complaint, trying their best to keep quiet, to be stoic and strong as they waited for the teams to reach them.

  “Let’s go, let’s go!”

  An American MP was herding Lindner and the other German POWs, some of whom had been patients, some of whom had been working as medical orderlies tending to other prisoners. Colonel Boone had ordered them all away. Even if he’d wanted to try, there was no way for Lindner to get back into Palermo to pass along his information.

  Most of his comrades were jaunty, healthy, and well fed on American food, happily moving away from the battle zone. Some were anxious about making the crossing to the United States on a troopship; they’d been raised on a diet of Nazi propaganda about how the Atlantic was a killing zone for the all-seeing U-boats. How would the Kriegsmarine know an American-flagged ship had German POWs aboard?

  “What will they do with us when we get to America?” a sergeant named Bottcher asked Lindner. All his comrades knew Lindner had lived in the States.

  “We will be prisoners there, too, of course. Though I think the conditions won’t be too bad. They’re not worried about us escaping to swim back across the Atlantic.”

  “Will we get letters, do you think? Any mail?”

  Lindner studied Bottcher, who had family in Dresden. His wife drove an ambulance, and he worried constantly about Allied bombing.

  “I’m sure the International Red Cross will help us communicate with our families,” Lindner said, though he had no reason to think this would actually happen.

  Lindner wondered if what General Glass’ aide and driver said were true, that they might be shipped to someplace like Texas to work on government projects, building training camps and airfields. Lindner, who had once taken a train from New Orleans to Los Angeles, hoped to be swallowed up somewhere in the vastness of the United States. He wanted to become anonymous, just another POW. The alternative, he feared, was a firing squad.

  The man who’d followed him to the apartment was a local, and could just as easily have been after the gold that his Abwehr contact had stashed there. But what if he’d been working for the Americans? What if Glass’ aide, Cohen, had followed up on his suspicions? He’d made a comment about shooting spies when he thought Lindner had been looking at the papers on Glass’ desk. And Glass might enjoy having Lindner shot: it would reduce the number of people who knew about his medical condition, about his predilection for whores.

  “Right down there, Doc,” one of the MPs told him, pointing to a line of six trucks parked on the side of the road outside the hospital gate.

  The trucks were to take them south to Gela, where they would board ships for the crossing, for the opportunity to hide.

  Lindner had not slept the previous night, and he imagined every set of footfalls would be that policeman, Harkins, come to drag him away. Awake, he spent the long hours on the wards, tending to patients and chatting with nurses and orderlies who were, as always, full of gossip. That’s where he learned that the patrolman-turned-detective had argued with Boone. He heard about the arrest of Harkins’ driver, the Italian-American paratrooper, though Lindner believed Boone had killed the big first sergeant, Drake. It was all coming apart, and, to make it worse, Boone was in a panic. If Harkins connected Boone and Stephenson to the gold, well, it would be bad for Boone.

  But it was the wireless he worried about, and whether Harkins would find it. Because the wireless identified Herr Doktor Lindner as the Third Reich’s most inept spy.

  Lindner could see, up ahead, that the column of German POWs had reached the trucks. The orderlies who were not carrying stretchers, who were not weighed down with canvas bags full of the supplies he’d requisitioned to take care of their patients, were marching in a neat column. Good German soldiers. Disciplined.

  The sergeant at the head reached the lead truck.

  “Halt!”

  He sounded almost happy, like they were loading for a holiday drive.

  Lindner, the only officer in the group, lagged behind, staying out of the way of the sergeants. He had changed back into his own uniform, the clean but worn lightweight shirt and trousers of a lieutenant colonel in the Afrika Corps. The American uniform, the one with the tiny P above the breast pocket that had so infuriated the American first sergeant, Drake, was gone. Lindner no longer wanted to be easily identifiable. He wanted to be just another POW, among the thousands the Allies had captured. The truck that would move him closer to that goal was only a few yards away now.

  “Doc
tor!”

  It was Bottcher, calling him from the front of the column, where three American MPs, one of them a captain, stood with the German sergeants.

  “We need your help translating,” Bottcher called.

  Lindner squeezed between the line of trucks and his own men, who made room for him. When he reached the little group, he tossed his duffle bag into the back of the lead truck, greeted the Americans.

  “Hello, Captain. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Lindner. How can I help?”

  The two enlisted MPs looked at each other, a reaction Lindner often elicited with his near-perfect English.

  “I’m afraid we got a change of plans, Colonel,” the American said. He was tall, at least six foot, with blond hair and blue eyes. He could have modeled for an SS recruiting poster, the Aryan supersoldier.

  “There’s some stuff going on at the front, and I’m supposed to hold these trucks here, see if they’re needed for another mission.”

  Lindner tried to smile. Of course plans changed all the time, and of course these trucks were probably always in great demand. Still, he felt a flutter behind his heart.

  “I see,” he said. “Do you have any idea of how long we might wait?”

  “Wish I did, Colonel. I’ve got to run back to my headquarters, see what’s going on. I’ll either send someone to get the trucks, or send someone to tell you guys to load up and move out.”

  Lindner looked around. There was an olive orchard beside the road, about two hundred meters up ahead and on the side of a low ridge.

  “We’ll move to the shade and wait there,” Lindner said.

  “Sounds good, Colonel. I’ll kick some C-rations off for your guys. No telling how long you’ll be here. And of course I have to leave a couple of MPs to babysit.”

  “Babysit?”

  “Guard you. Not that I think you’re going anywhere, but I gotta have a guard with you.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lindner said. He turned to Bottcher, gave him the orders in German.