by James R Benn
“I thought you might want to tell Julian about Kurt Gerstein and the camps,” I said.
“I’d rather be with you. He’s not a bad sort, really, but it would be beyond his grasp.”
“What do you think Kim will do?”
“About Gerstein’s information? I don’t know. He seemed at a loss, which is unusual. I want him to send me back, but I think he’s upset about me coming out for this. He’d rather have hard information about troop movements, that sort of thing.”
“Be careful,” I said. “Of him and the Germans.”
“Good advice. It’s not bad, you know, inside the Vatican. We’re safe there.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing that anything else would only get Diana angry and me worried.
“You be careful, too. This seems like an odd business, with the playing cards. What do you suppose the killer is up to?”
“Sowing confusion? Or maybe it all makes sense to him. Or them. I’ll be careful, I promise.”
“Okay,” she said, echoing my own words, and probably my thoughts, as we leaned into each other. “I’ll only ask one thing.”
“What’s that?”
She stopped and turned to face me. “That whatever happens, to either of us, you keep a place in your heart for me. Always. Don’t ever forget I love you.”
I couldn’t speak. I held her close. I stared into the blue sky, drinking in the distant and near beauty, filling that space in my heart that was already feeling the claim of the war on it, the draw of the dead waiting for me, their stories, their desires, their final moments. I felt Diana’s cheek, her skin cold in the mountain air, like the sheen of ice on a pond in December.
CHAPTER FOUR
I shed my civilian clothes in Gibraltar, and transformed from an Irish businessman into a piece of military cargo. I was tossed in the back of a B-24 Liberator making an early morning run to Naples, carrying mail, a couple of war correspondents, a congressman, and me. A supply sergeant had met me at the airfield with a duffle bag full of government-issue duds and a. 45 automatic. The congressman had come on board with a fifth of bourbon, and shared it with the reporters in hopes they’d mention his name. I didn’t work for anyone who bought ink by the gallon, and he wasn’t from Massachusetts, so the bottle didn’t come my way often. I settled in on some mail sacks. B-24s weren’t built for passengers, and there was damn little room in the narrow fuselage.
As they boozed it up, I read through the file Julian had given me. The initial report about Lieutenant Norman Landry was brief, the kind of cop shorthand I was used to. Perfunctory, describing the physical condition of the body, but little else. The kind of report a patrolman might write up after finding a drunk knifed in a doorway off Scollay Square at three in the morning. Dutiful scribbling doomed to the unsolved file, unless the victim turned out to be a Cambridge boy or a Beacon Hill gent.
Landry’s death was attributed to the usual “person or persons unknown” with no speculation as to why someone had snapped his neck. A doctor from the 32nd Station Hospital had listed cervical fracture as the cause of death. I could tell as much from the angle at which Landry’s head canted on the ground. He had been killed in a bivouac area near San Felice, a small village about five miles from headquarters. His regiment was resting and refitting there after being pulled out of the fighting along the Volturno Line, where he was one of thousands of GIs. A report from the MP noted that Landry had been popular with his men, a platoon he’d led at Salerno and on the road to Cassino before they were pulled off the line for rest outside of Naples. The fact that he’d survived, and that his men liked him, told me two things: he was a good soldier, and he led from the front. Lots of platoon leaders get killed quickly. Others who survive do it by staying behind their men. If Landry’s men, especially the veterans, liked him, then he wasn’t one of those.
The last person to see him alive, other than his killer, was Lieutenant Kenneth Dare, the chaplain attached to Landry’s battalion. I wondered if it had been a social call or if something more serious was bothering Landry.
The photographs showed the ten of hearts clearly. In the closeup, it was easy to see the card was brand new, clean and crisp. It must have come out of a new deck and gone straight into Landry’s pocket. Maybe the ten of hearts was his good-luck charm, who knew?
The report on Captain Max Galante was more detailed, not surprisingly. Even before the MPs got the playing-card connection, this murder had been a priority. Captain Galante was a medical doctor assigned to the Fifth Army headquarters staff at Caserta. He got noticed, if not for his rank, for his proximity to the high and mighty. General Mark Clark, commander of Fifth Army, and his boss, British General Harold Alexander, of Fifteenth Army Group, both called Caserta Palace home, along with a passel of rear-area brass.
The MP’s report included the duty roster from the 32nd Station Hospital, where Galante worked. He’d gone off duty at 1800 hours, and planned to meet two other doctors for dinner two hours later, at eight o’clock civilian time. The other doctors rented an apartment in town and paid their rent in rations, which their landlady cooked for them. Galante never showed.
The hospital and the apartment were on the south side of the palace. A hand-drawn map was paper-clipped to two photographs; the first showed the hospital and the tree-lined boulevard with the palace at the end. The second photo, according to the map, was taken from the opposite side of the palace. Gardens and walkways sloped gently downward, over a mile of it all, leading to the end where the statues of Actaeon and Diana stood against the backdrop of a waterfall. That gave me the basic layout, but no answers about why Galante ended up at the far end of the gardens.
I went through the photographs again studying the position of the body. While it appeared that Landry had been left where he fell, Galante’s body looked like it had been laid out, tucked alongside the rocks that bordered the pond fed by the waterfall. Had he even been killed there? From what I could tell from the photos, there were no scuff marks in the grass, no telltale gouges of earth where a heel dug in during a struggle. But I had no way of knowing for sure; whoever took the shots hadn’t bothered to show the surrounding area, away from the body and the pond. Within the pond were the two sculptures, one of Diana and her maidens, all aflutter at Actaeon seeing her naked, and opposite was poor Actaeon with the head of a stag, being killed by his own hounds. Death and beauty sharing the same tranquil spot. Was Galante killed by one of his own? Had this spot been chosen for some reason other than its seclusion?
The jack of hearts stuck out of Galante’s pocket, just as the ten was positioned in Landry’s. Side-by-side shots of the two cards, front and back, showed that they were from the same pack-or at least the same kind of pack-and apparently unused. Probably no fingerprints. Maybe Galante and Landry had been in a card game together and kept souvenirs. Maybe they’d won big, and a killer, or killers, had decided to grab their cash.
All I knew for sure was that I had two stiffs waiting for me at Caserta, not to mention all the self-important brass throwing their weight around, demanding protection. The two cards were a flimsy connection, and the different ways the bodies had been left to be found didn’t seem like the work of the same killer. I gave up thinking about it, and wished I had a drink.
The plane lurched as we hit some turbulence, and the file containing the photographs fell to the deck. A close-up of Galante’s head and neck sailed farthest, ending up on the congressman’s toes.
“What the hell is this?”
“A guy who didn’t share his booze,” I said, grabbing it from him before the reporters got too interested. The aircraft shifted sideways in heavy winds as the pilot descended.
“It’s all gone,” he said, slurring it into one barely understandable word. The newspapermen moved away from him as he swayed in his seat, his face gone pale. I grabbed the files and moved as far away as I could just as the bomber hit another pocket of turbulence and the congressman vomited his share of the bottle into a bucket.
A few hou
rs ago, I’d been looking forward to a day with Diana, strolling down a peaceful country road, and hoping for at least one more night together. Now, here I was, the stink of bile and whiskey in the air, hoping this crate would land in one piece so I could search for a card-carrying killer. The air had grown colder, and I shivered as one of the reporters made his way over to me, balancing on the narrow gangplank.
“Phil Einsmann,” he said as he sat. “International News Service.”
“Lieutenant Billy Boyle.” We shook hands. “You’re not going to be sick, are you, Phil?”
“No worries. I’ve flown worse than this. Combat mission over Germany a few months back, and I wish I’d had a bottle for that one.”
“I didn’t know correspondents went on bombing raids,” I said.
“They don’t, anymore. A few months ago, the Eighth Air Force decided to train a handful of reporters and send them on a few missions, to get the story out for the folks back home. We’ve been in ground combat, so they figured why not? Be good press for the flyboys. So they train about a dozen of us. How to adjust to high altitudes, parachuting, even weapons.”
“You actually volunteered?” I asked, thinking that air travel was bad enough without flak and tracer rounds shredding the aircraft.
“Yeah, crazy, huh? Some joker starting calling us the Writing 69th, and it stuck. They chose a few of us for the first mission. Me, Walter Cronkite from United Press, this kid Andy Rooney from Stars and Stripes, Bob Post from the New York Times.”
“I think I remember hearing about Post,” I said.
“Yeah,” Einsmann said. “The one thing they didn’t think through was the bad press if one of us got it. Post was killed over Germany. His B-17 blew up midair. Our first mission was our last. I’ll tell you, if Bob hadn’t been killed, I don’t know if I could’ve gone back up there. I’ve never been so scared.”
“Get a good story?”
“Best thing I ever wrote. Making it back in one piece focuses the mind wonderfully.”
“You and your pal headed to Naples?”
“I’m going back, believe or not. I was supposed to go to London. I left last night, and when I got to Gibraltar there was a cable from the home office. Return to Naples. Caserta, actually. I was billeted near Fifth Army headquarters. Something must be brewing.”
“News to me,” I said, and we both laughed at the unintended joke.
“Does that photograph have anything to do with why you’re headed to Naples, Lieutenant Boyle?”
“Call me Billy, everyone does. And I’m going to Caserta, too. Maybe I can give you a lift. You and your pal.”
“He’s the competition, Reuters, and he’s on his own. You’re pretty good at not answering a question.”
“Used to be a cop, so it’s second nature to ignore reporters.”
“Hmm. An ex-cop, first lieutenant, traveling way above his pay grade, with pictures of what looks like a strangled officer. You know they bumped a colonel to make room for the congressman?”
“How come they didn’t throw you off instead?”
“Billy, I’ve found that the promise of a mention in a news story works wonders with all sorts of people.”
“Including the noncom in charge of the flight manifest,” I guessed.
“Sergeant Randolph Campbell, of Casper, Wyoming, soon to be mentioned in a little piece about Americans stationed at Gibraltar.”
“Based on your extensive research there.”
“Yep. Two hours on the ground. Talked to Randolph and a bunch of other guys. Dateline Gibraltar: the unsung heroes who keep men and material moving in the Mediterranean Theater. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, and I’m sure Randolph’s mom will think so, too.”
“See, you can answer a question! So fill me in on the dead guy.”
“I can’t, Phil, sorry.”
“Listen, Billy. You’re headed to Caserta, so that’s obviously where the killing took place. I’ve been there more than a month, I know the place inside out. Odds are I’ll get the dope on this guy before I change my socks. And I really need a clean pair.”
“Okay,” I said, deciding he had a point. It had been a while since I’d been to Caserta, and Galante’s death was probably the main topic of discussion at the palace anyway. It might be interesting to hear what Einsmann had to say about it. Plus, there was no reason to mention Landry. “The name is Captain Max Galante, M.D. He was strangled two days ago-no, three days ago-his body was found two mornings ago.”
“Where was he killed?”
“Not sure, but his body was found next to that pool with the statue of Diana and the guy who got eaten by his dogs. You know it?”
“Actaeon. That’s a ritzy neighborhood,” Einsmann said.
“How so?”
“Engineers just finished building bungalows for generals, pretty close to that fountain. Tennis court and dance hall too. Seems like the palace is too run-down and drafty for the big brass, so they ordered up a little complex for themselves. The CO of the engineer unit wrote up an official complaint, saying his men came over here to win a war, not build vacation homes for generals.”
“You gotta love an idealist. How close to the fountain?”
“A stone’s throw if you have a good arm, but there’s trees and shrubs bordering the place.”
“You didn’t hear anything about this? You were still there when the body was discovered.” It was odd that a newsman wouldn’t be all over a juicy story like this, even if the censors would probably keep it under wraps.
“I went down to Naples for a couple of days there before flying out. Painted the town red with a couple of guys from the BBC. You said Galante was a doctor?”
“Yeah, he worked out of the hospital near the palace.”
“Must be the 32nd Station Hospital. I’ve interviewed lots of boys there. Nurses, too,” he said with a raise of the eyebrows.
“I bet. Ever run into Captain Galante?”
“Name doesn’t ring a bell, but I paid more attention to the female staff. CID, that’s the new Criminal Investigation Division, right? Are you CID?”
“No.”
“Who do you work for, then?”
“Listen, this has to be all off the record, okay?”
“Sure, Billy. If there is any news in this, I might follow up with you, but that’s got nothing to do with this conversation. Strictly background.”
“Okay. I work for General Eisenhower. Actually, I work for Colonel Sam Harding, who works for the general. He sent me down here to investigate.”
“Well, well. My boss turns me around and sends me back to Italy, and your boss sends you down here to check on a dead doctor. There’s more to this story, Billy. I mean, it’s terrible that Captain Galante was killed, but people are killed every day in this war.”
“Where is your boss?”
“London.”
“I can’t see how he found out, or even if he did, why he’d send you back. This is small potatoes, Phil.”
“Maybe,” he said, eyeing me. “Are you Ike’s personal cop?”
“Sort of,” I said. “It’s a long story.” I told him the whole thing, about how the Boyles viewed this war as another alliance with the British, who were seen as the real enemy in my strongly Irish Republican household. About Uncle Frank, the oldest of the Boyle brothers, who was killed in the Great War, and how Dad and Uncle Dan didn’t want to lose another Boyle in the second round. A few political strings were pulled, and after Officer Candidate School I was sent down to Washington D.C., where I was supposed to sit out the war in safety, on the staff of an obscure general laboring in the War Plans Department.
It had been a great idea. Mom was related to the general’s wife, and we’d met him a few times at family events. So it was Uncle Ike whom I went to work for, and he jumped at the chance to have an experienced investigator on his team when he was chosen to head U.S. Army forces in Europe, back in 1942. It had been quite a surprise to us all.
I left out t
he part about my not being all that experienced. I’d been promoted to detective, sure, but with the Boyles, the Boston Police Department was sort of a family business. Especially when Uncle Dan sat on the promotions board and Dad was a lead homicide detective.
Of course I made detective; I’d just needed a little more time to actually learn the ins and outs of detecting. A little more on-the-job training with Dad would have gone a long way. But Emperor Hirohito had other ideas, and I ended up on Uncle Ike’s staff, trying not to make a fool of myself. Because if I did, I knew I’d end up as one of those lieutenants leading an infantry platoon with a life expectancy of weeks, if not days.
Some things are better left unsaid.
PART TWO
CASERTA, ITALY
CHAPTER FIVE
We’d landed at Marcinese airport, between Naples and Caserta, where a jeep and driver were waiting. I’d let Einsmann tag along, leaving the drunken congressman and the Reuters reporter on the tarmac looking lonely and confused. We dropped Einsmann off at a cluster of tents pitched on the south lawn of the palace, and he and I agreed to meet up later at the officer’s bar.
The driver parked near the side entrance, had me sign for the jeep, and took off. A light mist began to fall and the palace loomed against the gray sky, large and formidable. I could see the gardens descending on the north side, but the rain obscured the distant fountains. I turned up the collar on my mackinaw and ran inside.
When I’d last been here, the town had just been captured. The palace was a mess, everything of value looted or destroyed. Now it hummed with activity, spruced up as purposeful men and women in the uniforms of half a dozen nations and services scurried along, a few like me pausing to gape at the high gilt ceilings. I worked my way to a desk at the base of the main staircase, where a corporal sat at a desk, directing traffic. I asked him where I could find Major John Kearns, and he pointed to a chart behind him, which contained a layout of the building.