Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  “They’re trying to save a guy’s life right there. You’ve got to stop.”

  “And I’ve got four tanks and twenty guys I’m trying to save, so get the fuck out of my way!”

  Harkins pulled his .45, thought about shoving it in the commander’s face. Instead he put it back in the holster and said, “Get down with me and we’ll find a way around.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” the tanker said, but he pulled himself out of the hatch, tapped the driver on the head as he climbed down. “Hold right here.”

  Harkins and the other man jogged forward, looking for a place his platoon could squeeze past both the burning wreckage and the spot where Donnelly was trying to save a soldier’s life, but the gap was too narrow. Then the tanker saw Donnelly and Ronan. In the firelight their bloody hands and arms looked black.

  “How long before she can move him?” the tanker asked. He still had his goggles on; the firelight made them shine. It was like looking in a mirror.

  Harkins had no idea, but he said, “Couple of minutes, tops.”

  The tank commander held up three fingers. “After that, I’m rolling.” Then he jogged back to brief the others in his column.

  Harkins hurried back to where Donnelly and Ronan worked on the wounded man. He arrived in the circle of light just as Boone, shoving Lindner ahead of him, stepped out of the darkness. Boone still had his pistol, holding it low and loose near his thigh. The side of his face was scraped, bleeding slightly. Lindner held his left arm with his right hand.

  Harkins didn’t even have time to think about disarming Boone before Donnelly snapped them all back to the situation.

  “He’s still losing blood!” She shoved a hand under the patient’s lower back, moved it down toward his buttocks.

  Ronan was doing the same exam from the opposite side. “I feel it. Lower right. Above the sacrum. Puncture wound.”

  “Pack it with gauze,” Lindner said.

  The German looked over his shoulder at Boone, then knelt next to the nurses. “Turn him over,” he said. “Pull out rolled gauze.”

  He looked up at Harkins. “Lieutenant, there should be a flashlight in the medical kit,” he said. Calm, like he was teaching in a classroom somewhere. “Please take it out and point it here.”

  Harkins found the flashlight, pointed it at the nurses’ hands. His .45 was in its holster. Boone was a few feet away, pistol still low at his side, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He looked dazed. The rollover had rattled him, banged him up. Harkins wondered if he’d figured out yet that he was trapped.

  The driver and noncom from the flipped ambulance were treating a couple of other injured GIs fifteen yards away; Harkins could see the soles of their shoes as they knelt beside the road. He looked over his shoulder for the tank commander, saw Colianno forcing the jeep between an abandoned truck and the lead tank.

  After a few minutes, Donnelly said, “OK, I think we’ve stopped the major bleeding.”

  She stood, arching to stretch her back. When she saw Colianno, she said, “Moira, help me get a stretcher out of the ambulance and we’ll load this guy onto the jeep. Get him out of here.”

  In the few minutes it took the women to get the stretcher, Boone came around.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “We’re loading this patient onto this jeep,” Donnelly said. “Get him back to an aid station.”

  “Yes,” Boone said. “Yes, I want you to do that. You two nurses get into the jeep and accompany that man back.” He was animated now, gesturing with the pistol but not pointing it at anyone.

  Behind him, Harkins heard the first Sherman start to move forward, into the circle of firelight.

  “All right, people,” the tank commander called down. “Let me through.”

  Colianno and Ronan lifted the stretcher, securing it behind the front seats. The tank approached slowly, its engine noise making it difficult to hear.

  “You’re going back, too,” Harkins shouted at Lindner.

  The German checked the patient, leaning over until his ear was on the wounded man’s chest. Searching for breath.

  Everything that’s happening, and he’s still a doctor, Harkins thought.

  Ronan fashioned a sling from a green kerchief, wrapped Lindner’s broken arm, and tied the ends behind his neck. She touched his cheek, then Lindner stepped close to Harkins. With the tanks close by, they still had to yell.

  “You found…?”

  “Everything,” Harkins said.

  Lindner got in the front seat. Donnelly and Ronan perched in the back. Donnelly put gauze on the soldier’s shattered eye, taped it in place.

  Lindner said something to Harkins as the first tank rolled by just a few feet away. Harkins had to lean close.

  “What?”

  “I never sent a single message,” Lindner yelled. “Can you believe that?”

  Colianno climbed into the driver’s seat, and that’s when Boone stepped up to the hood of the vehicle, raised his pistol, and shot Lindner twice in the chest.

  “Shit!” Harkins said.

  He drew his weapon, held it in two hands, point of aim on Boone’s torso. Colianno jumped out of the vehicle, pulling his Garand and taking up a standing firing position, leaning forward slightly at the hips. Donnelly and Ronan moved too, covering the patient with their bodies.

  Boone spoke first. “He was a spy! He used me, used us all! He killed Stephenson when Stephenson found out.”

  Harkins raised his hands, arms like a cactus, pointed his pistol to the sky. “I know he was a spy. We found the wireless.”

  Harkins slowing everything down. He took a step away from the jeep to get Boone’s weapon and attention aimed away from the nurses and their patient. On the other side of the vehicle, Colianno did the same, sliding to his left.

  When the colonel looked at him, Harkins said, “We also found the gold, and the name of the guy Stephenson shipped it to. What will he say when the FBI picks him up back in the States? Is he going to know your name, Colonel?”

  Boone’s eyes were wide, clicking back and forth from Harkins to Colianno to the nurses. Harkins had seen the look before. A jumper he’d tried to talk off a bridge, same big eyes, openmouthed breathing right before he stepped into space.

  Harkins was startled when Ronan got out of the jeep.

  “Sonofabitch,” she said, climbing from the back of the vehicle, squaring off with Boone, who was still in front of the hood.

  “That’s why you didn’t do anything about Stephenson, about the rape,” she said. “He was right. You were never going to touch him. But he was out of control, was going to blow the lid off. So you killed him.”

  Donnelly got out of the jeep, came around to the passenger side, where Lindner had slumped halfway out of the vehicle. She checked the pulse on his throat, looked at Harkins, shook her head.

  Boone jumped around the front of the jeep and grabbed Donnelly by the hair. She yelped, swung a fist at him. Boone hit her on the side of the face with the pistol, pulled her back a few steps, his left arm now around her throat, her heels dragging.

  Harkins took two steps toward Boone, crowding him. “Hurt her and you’re a dead man,” he said.

  From the other side of the vehicle, Colianno yelled, “I have the shot,” his rifle pointed at Boone’s head. But Donnelly was too close.

  “No!” Harkins said. “Hold your goddamned fire.”

  “I didn’t kill Stephenson!” Boone said.

  There was a crash; Harkins thought it was Colianno’s rifle. But then another, a flowering of white light and dust in the ravine below them, the German artillery back again and trying to find the road.

  The lead tank was past, but the second in line gunned its engine and came on them out of the dark, a nightmare rush of black steel. Everyone hunched, except Ronan, who took a step toward Boone.

  “Don’t come any closer!” he said, backing. Donnelly’s hands were on his forearm, trying to break his grip. When he slipped, she tried raking her
fingers across his eyes.

  A third tank roared up, forced them all to the edge of the road. In the ravine below them, trees crackled and burned. Another burst shell, a bit farther away, but Harkins heard something sing by his head. Shredded steel moving at a hundred miles an hour.

  To his left, Colianno walked forward slowly, rifle butt tucked into his shoulder, face pressed to the stock, desperate to shoot Boone.

  To his right, Ronan advancing, not willing to let Boone drag her friend into the darkness beyond the firelight.

  “You got nowhere to go, Boone!” Colianno said. “Let her go and I won’t shoot.”

  Ronan was almost beside Boone now. She’d reached the spot in the road where she and Donnelly had worked to save the soldier’s life. A pile of bloody bandages, paper wrappers from the gauze, at least two steel instruments winking firelight from the dirt. Parts of the man’s uniform, a pistol belt and holster.

  “Careful, Moira,” Harkins said. When she looked at him, he glanced down at the discarded equipment, waggled his own .45.

  In a movement so smooth she might have practiced it, Ronan reached into the pile of gear, came up with the patient’s pistol, and shot Boone in the leg.

  Harkins jumped forward as Boone fell, kicked away the doctor’s dropped weapon, then grabbed Kathleen by the arm, pulling her behind him.

  Boone was on his side in the dirt, breathing hard through his mouth. Both hands were on his left leg, where blood came through his fingers.

  In two quick steps Ronan was straddling Boone, pressing the muzzle of the pistol to his head, shoving his face to the road. A fourth tank charged by, impossibly loud and just a few feet away. When Harkins glanced up, he saw the commander, his torso sticking out of the hatch, wide-eyed at the scene.

  “You let Stephenson get away with rape,” Ronan spat. “At least until it wasn’t convenient for you.” She reached back and slammed the pistol on Boone’s wounded leg, two sharp blows. Then she jammed the muzzle back into his cheek.

  Boone grimaced, lips back over his teeth. “Oh, fuck!”

  “He did awful things to us!” she said, screaming to be heard above the tanks. “To me!”

  Boone looked defeated, his face suddenly wet with tears. “Go ahead and shoot me,” he said. “Just kill me.”

  Ronan looked at Harkins, who holstered his own weapon, stepped up to her, and gently took the pistol from her hand.

  After a few seconds, Ronan stood, and in a different voice said, “Dominic, hand me that medical bag, would you?”

  As Colianno brought the kit to her, Ronan knelt to dress Boone’s leg.

  Harkins squatted next to her. “We’re not going to kill you, Colonel, but I wouldn’t bet against you winding up at the end of a rope.”

  45

  8 August 1943

  1030 hours

  Eddie Harkins sat in the front seat of his jeep in Palermo, just outside the headquarters of the Seventh Army chaplain, waiting for his brother. He’d managed to scrounge a clean envelope from a mail clerk, and he held it on his knee as he wrote Kathleen Donnelly’s name, rank, and unit on the front. He put his name and unit on the upper left and, in the upper right-hand corner, where a stamp would normally go, he wrote “Free.” A small benefit of being in a war zone.

  He reached under his seat and pulled out the book of poems one of his MPs had given him on the day he’d learned that his kid brother had been lost in the vast Pacific. Carl Sandburg. He found the poem he wanted and tore out the page, then wrote in the margin.

  Kathleen, you asked me what I want after the war. It looks something like this.

  He thought about signing it “Love, Eddie,” but left it alone. He stuffed the sheet into the envelope and went back inside, handed it to the mail clerk.

  A little while later Patrick came out and the two of them drove to the newly established station hospital in Palermo to visit Captain Adams, who had not yet been cleared for release. Patrick Harkins had three hours left on Sicily. Then he’d board a plane for North Africa, where his regiment was already training for the next invasion.

  Harkins tried not to think about the last time he saw Michael, a cavalier, joking good-bye in front of their parents’ home. What, he wondered, makes for a good farewell?

  The roads were full again; it seemed every American on the island was headed east.

  “Big push over there to break the line the Krauts have in front of Messina,” Patrick said.

  “I’ll bet they’re scrambling to get as many as possible off the island,” Harkins added. “Right across the Strait of Messina, which means we’ll have to face those same bastards if we go to the mainland from here.”

  “The Strait of Messina, where Odysseus sails in The Odyssey,” Patrick said.

  Harkins looked over at his brother. “Look at you, all caught up on your classics.”

  They parked across a busy street from the hospital. An orderly at a makeshift desk in the lobby told them where to find Adams.

  “You hear about your boy Georgie Patton?” the lawyer asked as soon as the brothers entered the hospital room. The deputy provost sat on the edge of his cot, his head still wrapped in gauze where Boone had hit him with an oak chair. He was dressed, but in his stocking feet.

  “What’s he up to now?” Harkins asked.

  “Scuttlebutt here is that a couple of days ago he walked into a field hospital in Second Corps area, up near Nicosia,” Adams said. “Found a guy whose nerves were shot. Battle fatigue, I guess. Shaking, could barely talk.”

  “Sounds like me on the morning after Saint Patty’s Day,” Harkins said.

  “Yeah. Anyway, Patton slapped the guy. Hit him with his gloves.”

  “I heard he hit the guy with his fist,” Patrick said.

  “Either way, the docs weren’t happy about it, since the guy was their patient. And Patton walked out yelling that there’s no such thing as battle fatigue, that the guy was just yellow.”

  “Orderly downstairs was saying Patton threatened to shoot the guy himself,” Patrick added.

  “You sure are up on the gossip, brother,” Harkins said.

  “Gossip is like air to GIs,” Patrick said. “When they get bored, even when they’re not bored, it’s how they entertain themselves. They make shit up.”

  “So he slapped a guy,” Harkins said to Adams. “So what?”

  “I’m not sure that’ll play well with Mom and Dad back home. Nobody likes a bully.”

  “Hell, I’ll bet poor ol’ First Sergeant Drake kicked ten asses a day,” Harkins said. “It’ll blow over.”

  “Poor Drake is right,” Adams said.

  “He got stuck with a helluva commander, that’s for sure,” Harkins said. “An all-around strange guy. Know what I learned when I looked at Boone’s records? He isn’t married.”

  “He had that picture of himself and some woman, right there on his desk,” Adams said. “I saw it.”

  “He did have a picture, even told people it was his wife. But his personnel file said he was unmarried. His pay was sent to an orphanage in Des Moines.”

  “He was an orphan?” Patrick asked.

  “Don’t know,” Harkins said.

  “Well, whatever else he was, he was an odd duck,” Adams said.

  He stood, wobbled a bit. Harkins put his hand out, braced the lawyer’s arm.

  “You OK?” Harkins asked.

  “Just a little light-headed, that’s all.”

  “What did the docs say about your head?”

  “They say Boone hit me twice.” He lifted his hand, touched himself above his left ear. “Once here, then again on the crown, up here.”

  “We should tack on attempted murder,” Harkins said. “You went down with the first shot. The second one, he was trying to do you in. Keep you quiet for good.”

  Adams thought about it a moment. “We might get that to stick. It’s still not a complete packet of charges.”

  “Is it true that he confessed to another murder?” Patrick asked.

  “
Yeah,” Harkins said. “Once he folded, he folded big time. Turns out he killed a nurse a few weeks ago. Used morphine but signed a chart said she choked on her own vomit.”

  “Good Lord,” Patrick said. “Why?”

  “She was pregnant with his baby, and seems like she knew he was sending stolen gold back to the States.”

  The three men were quiet for a moment.

  “I’m not finished yet either,” Harkins said. “I’ve got at least one more conversation.”

  “What’s going to happen to Colianno?” Patrick asked.

  Adams shook his head; Harkins told his brother what he could. Colonel Meigs—from whom Harkins had kept a few details—had interceded for the paratrooper.

  “Right now he’s scheduled to be on the same plane you’re taking to North Africa,” Harkins said. “Back to the regiment.”

  “You sound kind of tentative,” Patrick said.

  “We have a couple of things to tie up.” Then, to Adams, “What about you, Counselor? What happens with you after your noggin clears?”

  “Colonel Meigs is moving from Seventh Army to Ike’s staff,” Adams said. “Wants me to go with him.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Yeah. Meigs is old-fashioned, but he’s all for a square deal. He’s predictable that way.”

  “My brother thinks predictable is boring,” Patrick said.

  “I’d like you to consider coming with me as an investigator,” Adams said to Harkins.

  “After the way I screwed up this one?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure many people would have been able to find everything you did.”

  Harkins shook his head. “I don’t see it.”

  “You told me you were bored breaking up traffic jams and whorehouse fights,” Patrick said.

  “That was before I realized how easy that stuff was compared to all the other shit that goes on.”

  “Take some time to think about it,” Adams said.

  “You going to see Kathleen again?” Patrick asked his brother.