David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  ‘Who am I, Alain?’

  ‘You... you are Chien Blanc.’

  ‘And who is Chien Blanc, Alain?’

  ‘Number two in ... in the Acier gang.’

  The wife whimpered, terrified her husband had given the wrong answer. White Dog pressed his own belly into the man’s undershirt, laying on him like a scorpion. He raised the gun to shoot straight down into the eye.

  ‘Exactly. Number two.’

  White Dog eased off. The sweaty oil of Alain’s undershirt clung to his own black coat and silk tunic. White Dog would have them laundered when this night was done.

  ‘I see that the number two does not get an invitation into your home.’

  He put away the Luger under the hem of his coat. Alain remained jammed against the wall, unsure if White Dog’s distemper had passed.

  White Dog lifted one hand to the wife on the stairs.

  ‘Come, cher. I want to talk with you, too.’

  White Dog made room for the wife to descend. She clung to her husband. White Dog followed them into the parlor.

  A lantern yellowed the room, the wick turned low. Doilies splashed every table, spread under cheap glassware, pastel collectibles. White Dog pointed at a sofa of worn ruby fabric. The man and woman sat close. White Dog studied the sepia photos of relatives before he asked:

  ‘Alain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is your wife’s name? I forgot.’ White Dog planted himself on a tasseled hassock.

  ‘Marie.’

  ‘Good. Marie? Alain?’

  The couple looked at each other, frightened by the change in White Dog’s tone. She gripped her husband’s heavy arm.

  ‘I understand you are both Communists.’

  Neither on the sofa moved or spoke.

  ‘I don’t care one way or another. It’s just that I don’t have to shoot either of you to get what I want. All I have to do is put a whisper in the wrong ear. If you get me.’

  ‘We get you,’ Alain said.

  ‘Good.’ White Dog set his elbows on his knees and steepled his fingers. ‘Now, you and Monsieur Acier. You have made an arrangement, yes?’

  Both heads bobbed. Under the shortages, the woman’s figure had gone gaunt, this was visible in her slip and brassiere. The man’s waist and bullfrog neck had not suffered, though. And both rings on his mitt were gold.

  ‘The arrangement was pretty clear, I believe. You steal. We buy from you. We sell to others. Is this right?’

  The man raised a palm. ‘Chien Blanc, wait. I didn’t -’

  White Dog countered with his own raised palm.

  ‘Yes, you did, Alain. And Marie, you, too.’

  The man dropped his protesting hand. He looked to his wife with surprise, that she, too, had tried to swindle the biggest black market gang in Montparnasse.

  ‘Marie?’ Alain asked.

  She lowered her eyes. ‘For the cause, Alain.’

  ‘Marie.’ White Dog insisted both keep their eyes and attention on him.

  She shifted her gaze to him.

  In English, he said, ‘The fuck do I care.’

  ‘Qu’avez-vous dit?’

  ‘I said I don’t care. We pay you to go out to the country and smuggle vegetables into the city through the train station. We don’t expect to see you selling them yourself. We call that competition. We don’t like competition.’

  ‘No,’ she said, scolded, though she was at least twenty years older than White Dog.

  ‘Alain. Where are the cigarettes?’

  ‘I have only a few. For myself, for my own smoking.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘In the kitchen, Chien Blanc.’

  White Dog stood. The big man rose from the tatty sofa. Marie stayed put. White Dog drew his Luger and laid it to the man’s nape, in case he had more than cigarettes in the cupboard. White Dog hated this errand, putting the squeeze on two small-time scammers, for cigarettes and cabbage.

  Alain opened a cabinet door. Inside, with very few cans of food and a mouse trap, was a knapsack.

  ‘Alain,’ White Dog said, still behind the big man, ‘the next time you bring us a light load of anything—cigarettes, candy, socks, anything at all—this will not be what I give you.’

  White Dog swung the butt of the pistol into the man’s temple. Alain crumpled, clawing the icebox on his way down. White Dog hit him again to drive him to the floor. This man worked in a warehouse for the Krauts. He was thick and strong, with sticky fingers, likely a bully to others; he had that ugliness. He ate well while his wife starved for the Red cause she thought was her husband’s, too. He stole crates from the Krauts in the warehouse and the rail yards and sold them to the Acier gang, skimming what he thought he could get away with. He was part of his own little gang in Montparnasse, just a source, one of hundreds Acier had cultivated. Alain was a bastard and a cheat. White Dog had been dispatched to the man’s home to show him a more dangerous bastard and cheat.

  White Dog spoke to the cowering man on the floor. Blood dribbled between Alain’s fingers.

  ‘The next time I knock on your goddam door, Alain, open it.’

  White Dog lifted the knapsack out of the cupboard. Its weight told him what he knew already. Marie stood in the kitchen doorway, her hands again masking her mouth.

  White Dog shouldered the pack, tucking the pistol into his belt. He brushed the woman aside.

  Closing the front door behind him with a soft touch—a quiet counterpoint to the sobbing couple on the other side—White Dog looked left and right. The narrow street was empty. He set out over the cobbles, waiting, tensed. Eyes locked ahead, he walked half the murky block. He made sure his pistol was well jammed in his belt, then slid the knapsack off his shoulder, into his hand.

  A whistle blew, high-pitched and two-toned, a police whistle. The stones of the street clacked with running boots. White Dog leaped to the sidewalk and ran, tracing the blackened shops and curtained homes. He ran on his toes to mute his footfalls.

  The police whistles blared for a time, swirling echoes on all sides. The running boots spread into the alleys. German shouts barked in quick staccato. The language was perfect for pursuit; it was fearsome to hear such a bitten, snarling tongue in the twisting warren of Montparnasse’s streets. White Dog ran in the alleys through a night that seemed to grow blacker; Parisians did not look outside when the Gestapo pounced, they shut their curtains and retreated into obscurity, trusting it as their only protection.

  The curfew was not in effect yet. Others were on the streets with White Dog. He heard the Gestapo grab someone behind him, then let him go. White Dog dodged in and out of the jumbles of fire escapes, trash bins, inky stoops, and cars that had not moved from the curb in years. When he slowed, he was far from Alain’s front door and breathing hard. He ducked through a wooden gate between two row houses and sideslipped down the narrow crevice. He stopped before emerging into another dark side street, then set the heavy sack of cigarettes down. Alain had grifted maybe a dozen cartons. At street value, one hundred fifty francs a pack, which was about fourteen thousand francs for a guy who probably made twelve hundred francs a week humping for the Krauts and another thousand stealing for Acier.

  White Dog sucked his teeth at the profits. Paris, he thought. What’s not for sale? Pretty soon, when the GIs get here and the Krauts are replaced by America, it’s only going to get better.

  He pulled a wad of francs from his pocket, three thousand in cash, and stuffed it into the sack.

  He waited minutes, pressed between the walls of the alley. He disturbed nothing of the night, with shallow breaths and not a creak of his shoes.

  White Dog heard what he waited for. More Gestapo whistles blared, like little trains in the tunnels of the alleys of Montparnasse. Boots and guns clattered, hobnails and metal rattles hustled, more whistles blurted. The sounds all herded to a spot two blocks away, right where they were supposed to be. Shouts rose. Even the hard sounds of rifle bolts raced over the cobbles to White Dog’s hid
ing place. He poked his head out of the alley. A few windows in the upper stories awoke in tilted curtains and slivers of curious light, then blinked out.

  No shots were fired, a disappointment for White Dog. It would have been easier, for everyone, if there had been shooting.

  The tumult up the dark street subsided slowly. The Gestapo always liked to make a show, a statement that they remained a force in the occupied city. White Dog faded into the black embrace of the alley. One set of boots came his way. He crouched and took his pistol in hand.

  A figure halted at the head of the alley.

  ‘Is this the way you wanted it to go?’

  The question came in English.

  White Dog rose and hid the Luger. He tossed the sack of cigarettes through the darkness at the feet of the man who’d spoken.

  ‘Yes. Here’s a present for you.’

  ‘Another present tonight? Vielen Dank.’

  The man knelt to lift the knapsack. He asked, ‘Did we give you good chase?’

  ‘Good enough.’

  ‘I think it was believable, ja?’

  ‘Sure.’

  White Dog heard the rustle of the backpack hoisted to the man’s shoulder.

  ‘We have him. He was exactly where you said.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Gut. Then our business is concluded. We will not speak again.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘The Americans are gonna kick your ass.’

  ‘Ja. We know. But I think this is a problem for you when they get here.’

  ‘Not me. I got big plans.’

  The dark figure chuckled, an admiring smirk daggered in the laughter, and walked off.

  ~ * ~

  D+9

  June 15

  Joe Amos stared into the bottom of his truck. Enough starlight glanced off the ocean and sand to see the Jimmy’s makings, the transmission linkage, brake cables, springs. He touched the long exhaust pipe: still warm. The Jimmy had run twenty of the last twenty-four hours.

  Beside him in the sand, Boogie John snored and pitched to his shoulder. They and the rest of the hundreds of drivers awaiting cargo on OMAHA slept beneath their trucks. This was safer than lying in the open and risking being hit by falling American rounds after one of Bed-check Charlie’s low, spoiling runs. Joe Amos did not sleep at all this morning. He could not rid the tremble of the wheel from his hands. Even behind closed eyes, the landscape of Normandy roiled and rolled. For three days now, he’d driven or rode while the sands became brush and the brush became trees, the trees mounted on hedges around fields that rose to the south in a green tide. He and Boogie found their combat depots, drank coffee while fast hands off-loaded their cargos, then ran back to OMAHA for a fresh load, and the land changed back, from bocage to beach. That was all Joe Amos did, all day, until he was given a few hours to lie beneath his track, hours this morning he could not spend emptied enough to rest.

  The sounds across the beach were incessant, mechanical, despite the early hour. Landing craft ferried supplies from the ships offshore, deep grindings bounced over the water from the assembly of the titanic Mulberry harbor. Closer to his truck on the beach, the noises turned human. Soldiers grunted unloading rhino ferries and amphibious DUKWs, the waiting wounded moaned. Some of the chatter was laughter, more was curses. Joe Amos lay motionless, and this was not what he wanted.

  He scooted from beneath the truck. Boogie didn’t wake. Joe Amos took a seat on the Jimmy’s tailgate, dangling his boots. He struck up a cigarette. All the activity on the beach worked in a narrow sliver close to the bluffs, away from the ebbing water. Joe Amos imagined himself in the assault that had swept over these dunes. He saw himself rush them, take them, do some hard killing, join men doing the same, and share with them those frightening, vulgar, grandest moments in war. High behind the dunes, the morning flashed an orange dome, then another, then the grumble of artillery.

  Joe Amos blew plumes of smoke. He watched the sparking sky and thought about what he knew, what he’d learned in his three college years at Virginia Union. Black men had fought for America. Black men were heroes. They were in books and newspapers. Crispus Attucks, the first man killed in the Revolution, a former slave who in a crowd outside a Boston customs house swung a cordwood stick at a redcoat. Attucks knocked the soldier’s gun away and shouted, ‘Kill the dogs, knock them over!’ and was plugged with a musket ball, a shot heard around the world. In the Civil War, 200,000 blacks fought for the north, 38,000 of them died. In the Wild West, the 10th Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers, galloped the plains, Indian fighters to beat the band. In World War I, regiments of black soldiers fought, the 369th even won a Croix de Guerre. And everyone had heard about the Tuskegee Airmen, the 99th Pursuit Squadron. They’d shot down German planes over North Africa and Italy, and hadn’t yet lost one bomber they escorted.

  Joe Amos tossed his cigarette. It landed in the sand and snuffed. The sky shook again, a passel of trucks somewhere close revved. A quartermaster soldier jogged up, bone-colored like the sand, with a clipboard in his hand. He saw Joe Amos seated on the tail of the Jimmy. He stopped long enough to motion beneath the truck.

  ‘Wake that other boy up, y’all got drivin’ to do. Let’s go, Sambo!’

  The man loped away. He did not stay to see Joe Amos’s raised middle finger.

  Joe Amos shook his head and spit into the sand. A hundred yards away, little waves stepped ashore, inevitable and tireless as history. He kept his seat on the tailgate, a defiance, but he knew it was small.

  Silly, Joe Amos thought. Silly as hell to try and ignore it, even for a moment.

  After the Civil War, all the Negro troops were disarmed, including the blacks in the Yankee states; reunited America didn’t want thousands of Negroes carrying guns. The Buffalo Soldiers got their nickname because their nappy hair reminded the Indians of the nape of a buffalo. In World War I, colored soldiers had to fight under the French, the United States didn’t want them as combatants. No matter how successful they are, the Tuskegee Airmen get called ‘the Spook-waffe.’ Only Crispus Attucks has been left a hero, and he was a mulatto.

  Boogie stirred and woke.

  ~ * ~

  Dawn dribbled gray over the hedgerows and hills. Boogie spoke to his rearview mirror.

  ‘Come on, boys. You wanna keep up.’

  Joe Amos moved his head to see in his passenger-side mirror. He faintly made out the single blackout slit light of the truck next in line. The light struggled a hundred yards back, a low star. Then like a star it blinked out, disappearing behind a bend. Joe Amos felt the Jimmy heave to one side, then balance. Boogie John gunned the motor.

  ‘I never told you I was gonna be a shitty driver. This stuff’s got to get to the front and that’s where it’s going. Who’s behind us?’

  ‘Grove, I think.’

  ‘Old lady,’ said Boogie John.

  ‘Maybe you want to slow down.’

  ‘Naw. I’m good and damn tired of driving like molasses. I got an open road and a heavy load and I’m gone. Grandma Grove and the rest can keep up.’

  The road ran narrow and winding, cloistered by hedges left and right. Overhead, branches wove to form a cathedral. The trunks and shrubs went zinging by, ghosts of abandoned tanks scabbed darkly in some fields, but there was no time to imagine the fights that had left them behind, Boogie drove so fast. Straight off the beach big Boog impelled the deuce-and-a-half like a scalded dog, bolting far out front. There was no jeep in the lead on this run; the convoy was small, only ten vehicles loaded with clothes and rations. Boogie got to drive the lead truck this morning. This was their first time at number one, and Boogie was making it memorable. The manifest had them hauling due south, their target was a town named Ste. Marguerite d’Elle, where the 29th Division’s 115th Infantry had set up a depot on their way to take on the massive Kraut garrison around St. Lô. Joe Amos held a map in his lap under a flashlight. He was afraid that at this pace Boogie would drive them right past Ste. Marguerite
d’Elle and into a German mess tent.

  Boogie slowed. Joe Amos looked up from his map. They’d entered the outskirts of one more Norman village, ramshackle and busted by American guns. The name was another tongue twister: Cartigny-l’Épinay. Joe Amos checked it off on his map. Ste. Marguerite was next, about a mile and a half. Cartigny stood like fifty other burgs Joe Amos had seen in five days of bouncing around the tight American beachhead. Even without the destruction, Joe Amos could tell the town was dull, as country and simple in its way as anything in rural Virginia. He had come to Europe thinking of the French as elegant, somehow his betters. That was just how they always got played back home, with talk about Joan of Arc, Paris, wines, Napoleon, and perfume. But not anymore, he thought, not after seeing how the French lived, just like anyone else, on farms, with cattle, orchards, barns, and fences. Behind the villages, dirt paths led to the same kind of bare fields Joe Amos had run mules over beside the Dan River. Apparently the GIs fighting the Krauts through these dumpy towns felt the same way. They didn’t give two shits in a handcart for the old buildings, stone fences, or for perfume or fancy snails. There wasn’t one Frenchman anywhere better than an American soldier. The holes in the buildings and the bricks blown into the streets of Cartigny showed that to be the truth.