by James R Benn
"You got hit on the head too hard, Lieutenant. You have to stay there!"
Jay scurried off. At least he looked more scared of me than of the other casualties now. My head was beginning to clear a little, and the ringing racket going on between my ears was down a few notches. With no help available, it was time to either lay back and forget about Kaz, or get up by myself. I wondered what an X Ray would find. I touched the side of my head again and felt a crusty patch of matted hair and dried blood. I realized my shirt was gone. I found the blood-soaked pieces on the stretcher beside me. They must have cut it off, looking for other wounds. I did a quick check and couldn't find any other sharp pains anywhere. I knew I could move my legs and arms, even if not real well. Screw the X Ray. I just needed a shirt so I could walk around without being put back on a stretcher.
I looked up and down the hall. No Jay, no doctors. I took a deep breath and rolled off the stretcher, onto my knees and elbows. Oh boy. The bells started ringing louder, my skull was pounding, but I stayed steady on all fours. Good so far. I got up on one knee. Still no one in the hallway. I had to stand upright now, while I had the time. Push, I ordered myself.
I was up. My legs were shaking. I rested my hands on my knees while my stomach decided if it was coming with me or not. The hallway started to spin but it slowed to a stop, like a top on its last few turns. My stomach stayed put and I managed to stand up straight. That lasted two seconds, but long enough for me to get one hand to the wall and that was enough to keep me vertical. I took a couple of deep breaths and let my hand fall to my side. Not bad. Who needs an X-Ray anyway?
I took slow steps until I was sure my legs remembered how to work together. They did and I kept going, aiming for the open door on my right. I passed one guy on his stretcher who had his leg in a splint. He smiled and gave me the V for victory sign. I nodded like I was out for a walk in the park. The next guy was unconscious. His chest was taped up and he had a gauze bandage on his head. His breathing was ragged, bubbles of blood popping out of his mouth when he exhaled. If this was the area for guys who weren't hurt too badly and could wait, I didn't want to see the others.
I made it to a door. I went in. No one was inside. Just what I wanted. A supply closet with a sink, soap, and shelves full of bandages, towels, all sorts of medical supplies. I ran the water and stuck my head underneath the spigot. It felt like an ice pick. I gasped but made myself stay under. I had to look presentable, and that meant no dried blood. I washed my face and toweled off, carefully dabbing around the wound above my ear. I had a big goose egg, and a long cut still oozing blood after I cleaned it out. I went through the bandages, found a gauze pad, and wrapped a bandage around it, ripped the ends and tied them off. There wasn't a mirror and I hoped I looked like a discharged walking wounded, not an escaped madman.
Clothes. I needed a shirt. The shelves were stacked with operating gowns but I didn't think I could pass for a doctor. I looked around and saw khaki shirts and pants hanging on the back of the door. Perfect. I checked the shirts. There was one with lieutenant's bars and one with captain's. I decided against adding impersonating a senior office to whatever regulations I was breaking already and took the second louie's shirt.
My hands rested on the sink for a minute. The cold water had cleared my head some. I was still dizzy and things were a bit blurry, but I was ready. I was even getting used to the ringing in my ears. Time to find Kaz.
I moved down the hallway, and recognized where I was. This was a wing off the main hospital. I walked past a double door with X-Ray painted on it. I couldn't bust in to see if Kaz was there, but I checked the stretchers lining the hall. Mostly GIs with broken bones or cracked skulls. A few sailors, maybe from the air raid on the harbor. I was almost to the end of the corridor when a nurse turned the corner and walked toward me.
"Are you all right, Lieutenant?" she asked, concern and confusion wrinkling her brow.
"Yeah, they checked me out and said I was fine, told me to get out of the way," I said, as cheerfully as I could, hooking a thumb back in the general direction of the X-Ray room.
"Well, this is your lucky day, Lieutenant," she said, and hustled by me to kneel down and check one of the sailors. I wanted to tell her if I was really lucky I wouldn't have had this knock on the head, but thought better of it and turned left, toward the main emergency room.
As I got closer I understood why there were so many stretcher cases lined up outside. The place was packed. Nurses and doctors were running back and forth, threading their way between gurneys as orderlies shifted the wounded from waiting areas into treatment rooms or surgery. Some of the doctors had on their white operating gowns, splashed with blood, while others were working on guys right in the hall, doing God knows what. One GI was screaming bloody murder as two nurses held him down while Perrini worked on his leg. I didn't interrupt.
I remembered Gloria had told me they had new doctors coming in, and I figured they got here just in time. The 21st was a General Hospital, not a Field Hospital. They were supposed to get cases sent up the line from the Field Hospitals, not fresh casualties. No one expected the Luftwaffe to be this active so far in our rear. The staff looked a little overwhelmed, and a lot scared.
As I approached the operating theaters, the odors got worse. Antiseptic, dried blood, the smell of shit and piss mixed with the smoky burned smells of fabric and flesh, all blending into the gut- wrenching stink of the ass-end of war, a military hospital under siege by the wounded and dying.
"Outta the way, outta the way!" An orderly ran by pushing a gurney with a still form on it, a white sheet over his body, soaking up blood wherever it touched him. His eyes were open and staring at the ceding as I stumbled back, out of the way, wondering if a dirty brown ceiling in a makeshift Algiers hospital was going to be the last thing that kid ever saw.
I had to back up to lean against the wall or fall down. The smells were getting to me and I needed to catch my breath. I moved on, checking the conscious and unconscious wounded on either side of me. No British uniforms, not that I could tell anyway, as most had been cut away.
I began to be able to tell the difference between the GIs who ran into the Germans at the front, and those in the convoy who'd been bombed and strafed just outside of town. The convoy GIs wore clean uniforms. They were dressed in herringbone twill coveralls, with the American flag patch sewn on the shoulder. Their woolen clothes were probably in their duffle bags, blown to hell on some deserted stretch of Algerian highway, with whatever wasn't burned or looted by Arabs. The GIs from the front were dressed in filthy, dirty wool pants, shirts, and twill coveralls in all sorts of combinations. They looked like they had been wearing everything they owned, dressed for cold nights in the desert. As their clothes were cut away by orderlies searching for secondary wounds, each layer would cover another shirt, or long johns, or whatever they had piled on for warmth. I wondered about the cold-weather gear stacked up in the warehouses down by the harbor. Had the army a clue how damn cold it got in the desert?
I passed a hallway leading to another wing of the budding, this one also stacked up with wounded on stretchers or sitting on crates. It looked like another holding area for those who could wait for treatment.
I walked the corridor searching for Kaz, hoping to see him sitting there with a big grin on his face.
There was some yelling going on. "You get the fuck out of here," hollered a GI, a huge bandage wrapped around one shoulder. It didn't stop him from jabbing a finger on his good side at the guy across from him.
"Shut up, dogface. Don't they teach you not to talk to an officer that way?" This from a guy in a leather jacket, an Army Air Corps pilot, a lieutenant with his trousers ripped open and bandages on both legs.
"Don't they teach you not to shoot up your own troops? Yesterday two P-38s killed four of our guys, and it wasn't the first time. I'm getting sick of it!" The GI tried to get up but winced at the effort and sat back down.
"You tell him, Morrie," said another GI. There were murmur
s of assent and anger, but not one of them seemed to be as willing as Morrie to take on an officer, even if he was Air Corps.
"Listen, Private, it works both ways. You guys are supposed to know aircraft recognition, right? They ever teach you WEFT procedures? Wings, Engine, Fuselage, Tail?"
"Kinda hard to pick out that WEFT bullshit when half a dozen P- 38s are blazing away at you with their.50 calibers," Morrie said.
"You probably fired on them first. You know what WEFT really stands for in the infantry? Wrong Every Fucking Time!"
This time Morrie stood up. "Yeah, well you murdering bastard, we have a saying too. If it flies, it dies!" Morrie raised his one good arm in a fist and advanced on the pilot, who lay immobile on his stretcher. Three guys who could get up did and pulled Morrie back. Words continued to fly, but not fists.
I kept checking for Kaz. As I did, on the stretcher to my right, I saw a Luftwaffe pilot, an amused look on his face. His blue tunic displayed the Luftwaffe eagle, grasping a swastika in its claws. I don't know if he spoke English, but he seemed to understand exactly what was going on. Our eyes met and he smiled. His entire left leg was swathed in bandages, and from what was left of his pants, it looked like he'd been burned. He must have been pretty doped up; I doubted he'd be smiling tomorrow.
I wandered back down the hall, feeling weak in the knees, went through the emergency entrance and checked the casualties stacked up there. No Kaz. I went through the treatment rooms, all filled with patients, doctors, and nurses. Everyone was too busy, or in too much pain to notice me. I began to wonder if this was a dream. I seemed to be invisible when I was close to the worst casualties. Whenever I was outside the main treatment area, some nurse or orderly would stop and check me out. I didn't know if I could convince the next one that I was okay. My head was swimming, and although the ringing was down to a reasonable volume, I was feeling more wobbly and I had to keep reminding myself what, or rather who, I was looking for.
Then I saw him. Kaz, on a gurney, being pushed down the hall. A nurse was doing the pushing. I tried to call to her, but I couldn't get my voice to work. My yell came out as a croak, and my head rebelled against the effort. She turned a corner and disappeared down another hallway. I forced myself down the hall after her, stumbling against an orderly carrying a tray of instruments. He and the tray went down with a crash, the noise in my ears ratcheting up the ringing up even worse.
"Hey, those were sterile! Watch it!"
The floor seemed to tilt. I had to swing my arms to keep my balance. I knew I looked like a drunk but I had to catch up. I couldn't hold onto the wall without stepping on the guys lined up alongside it. I focused on the floor in front of me, placing one foot in front of the other, turning the corner just in time to see the back of a nurse leave a patient's room. She was headed down the hall away from me. Had she seen me? I couldn't tell, but this time I managed to call her name out.
"Stop," I called once, and heads turned. I couldn't tell how loudly I'd said it with all the noise in my head, but I must've yelled pretty loud. Maybe she didn't hear me because she disappeared, her green fatigues blending into a crowd of nurses, orderlies, and wounded. There were three doors on the right but I couldn't remember which one she had walked out of. I looked in the first room, and it was full, three hospital beds and two gurneys crowded in together. I went into the middle room.
Kaz was there, lying on a gurney pushed next to two others. A young nurse was tending to a patient in one of the beds. She was trying to get him to take a pill and he was shaking his head back and forth, mumbling. The others were all asleep or unconscious, nicely cleaned up and bandaged. The sign on the door said Post-Op.
I went over to Kaz. He hadn't been cleaned up, and it didn't look like he had just been operated on. His breathing was harsh, small gasps followed by gulps for air. There was a fresh bandage on his arm, he had a black eye, a cut on his eyebrow, and a serious welt on his forehead. Other than that he looked okay. But why was he in Post-Op?
"Kaz," I said. "Can you hear me?"
"What are you doing in here?" the nurse asked, glancing at me before she turned back to her patient. She put a pill in his mouth and held his chin as she lifted a glass of water to his lips.
"Just checking on my friend-"
"Out," she said, pointing to the door. "I'll take good care of him."
"What's wrong with him?" I asked. "Why is he here? In Post-Op I mean."
That question delayed her for a second. She looked at me as she went to check the chart hanging on the end of the gurney.
"What's wrong with you?" she asked. "You look like you should be lying down."
"Can't disagree," I said, trying to smile. "Will you just check his chart and tell me what's wrong with him? His breathing doesn't sound right."
She seemed exasperated, but relented, putting a hand on Kaz's chest. His uniform blouse and shirt were open, but not cut away like the others. She frowned as she read the chart. I checked the front pocket on his blouse where Kaz had kept the notebook. It was unbuttoned, and empty. I checked his other pockets. Nothing. It was gone.
"Probable concussion, X-Rayed, no visible fractures. No subdermal bleeding, re-dressed existing wound. Patient was conscious upon admission," she said, summarizing the information on the chart.
"In other words, he was fine except for a bump on the head," I said. She didn't say anything. She checked his pulse.
"It's weak," she said.
"He has a bad heart," I said.
"Billy," Kaz said weakly. He half opened his eyes. "How are you?" He sounded almost giddy.
"Kaz," I said, "what happened to you?"
"I feel much better now…" I swear he smiled, then closed his eyes. I opened one with my fingers. His face swam back and forth in front of me. The ringing grew louder and the floor started shifting from under me again. I held onto the gurney with one hand, trying to get his face to hold still.
For just one second it did. I saw it, a tiny, contracted pupil, just like Jerome's, only he had already been dead, and Kaz wasn't. Other images popped up in my mind, Kaz in the jeep waiting to go back to the hotel the first time he was admitted here. Dunbar giving him the okay to leave. Rita kissing him goodbye. Gloria and Harding having a heart- to-heart before he got into the jeep for the drive back to the hotel. Jerome. Harry's grandmother. Click, click. Things fell into place and I had to tell this nurse before the floor came up and whacked me.
"Nalorphine," I said. Both hands were on the gurney now and my legs were shaking. "Nalorphine, now! Hurry!"
I turned to look at her and try to explain, but all I saw were her eyes; wide with a fear of me, a raving lunatic. I tried to step forward and tell her something but I couldn't remember what. And why was I thinking about Harry's grandmother? I couldn't remember what was so important and then the goddamn bells drove everything else out of my head and all I felt was the gritty concrete floor slam into my cheekbone as someone picked up the floor and hit me with it.
* * *
Chapter Thirty-four
IT WAS DARK WHEN I awoke. There was a light on a small table next to a window. A dark blackout curtain was drawn over the glass panes, the light from the gooseneck lamp lost in the black fabric. It was quiet. No bells rung. A figure was slumped in a chair next to the light, in shadow. I turned to my right and in the half darkness I could see two other beds with sleeping forms lying on them. I lay there, eyes adjusting to the darkness, trying to remember how I'd gotten here. The train. Bombers. The jeep. Ambulance. Kaz.
"Kaz!" I said out loud, and sat up as memory flooded into my waking mind.
"Billy, it's all right," said the form in the chair, getting up and limping over to me.
"Harry? Is that you?" He came closer and I saw that it was. Dressed in U.S. Army fatigues and sporting a.45 automatic in a holster. "Kaz, is he…"
"He is fine, sleeping right over there, thanks to you."
"Where's Major Harding?"
"Right here, Boyle," said Harding as he sat up on the
bed facing me and swung around. He had been sleeping with his boots and gun belt on, ready for anything. He spoke in a soft voice. "Lieutenant
Kazimierz is fine. He's in the last bed against the wall. I don't know how you knew, but you were right. He'd been overdosed with morphine. They administered the antidote to him just in time. You nearly scared that poor nurse to death, but as soon as you fainted, she checked on him. Doc Perrini figures Kaz had about ten minutes left before it would've been too late."
"Is he going to recover?" I had visions of paralysis, brain damage, all sorts of terrible things to add to the agonies Kaz already had to bear.
"According to the doctor, he has recovered. He'll have a headache from that knock on the head, but that's it. You were X-Rayed, too. You have a very slight fracture of the skull and a moderate concussion. You should be fine if you can avoid getting hit on the head for a while."
"The penicillin shipment?"
"It's safe, under heavy guard at the train station. No one is going to get within fifty yards of it and live."
"Have you seen Diana?"
"Miss Seaton is fine. The young French girl Lieutenant Kazimierz hired is with her, and there's a guard on their room. No need to worry, everything's fine."
It was too much good news, it just couldn't be all true.
"Are we going to pick up Villard?" I asked.
"We'll talk about that later," Harding said. "Lieutenant Kazimierz was awake for a while, and said you had evidence Colonel Walton was involved in these murders?"
"I thought I did, sir, but now I think I was wrong. I need to talk to you about that."
I didn't know how to tell Harding what I had to say. Or what he would do when I told him. I changed the subject quickly to give myself a few minutes grace.
"What time is it anyway?" I asked.
"Just past five-thirty," said Harry Dickinson, glancing at his watch. It was nice to hear a military type tell time the old fashioned way. He pulled the blackout curtain aside. The sky was lit up by a red dawn. "No need for this," he said as he pulled the curtain aside.