by James R Benn
Mathenet saw me then. With a startled glance of recognition, he leveled his revolver straight at my chest and pulled the trigger. Click Click again. I launched myself at him as he raised the revolver, then felt it smash down on my head. I fell to my knees, intense vivid pain spreading through my skull. I grabbed at his right leg, feeling myself fading away. I held onto it and he had to turn to kick at me with his left. Then I saw her face. It was Diana. She looked down at me, but her eyes were empty. A smile partially lifted her lips. She looked as though she was surprised to see me but couldn't quite place my face, or didn't really care. Then Mathenet's heel connected with the side of my head and it was lights out.
Chapter Twenty-two
I felt something damp and cool on my forehead and almost woke up.
"What a lump…"
"Careful, he's burned…"
"… more soot than burn…"
"… damn fool."
I wondered who they were talking about. Then I wondered who they were and tried to wake up to find out. I felt water on my face and hands and managed to get both eyes open. My head hurt. Twice in one week. It wasn't a record for me, but it was enough.
I was in a bar. I looked around and noticed I was actually on the bar. A couple of commandos had my medical kit spread out between my legs and were washing my face and hands with a bar rag.
"Thought you was burned right good, sir," one of them said. "But it's mostly soot from the fire, especially them tires. You're a bit red in the face and hands, but it ain't half as bad as it looks. Course, that knot on your head is as bad as it looks, if not worse."
"How's Harry?"
"You mean that RN bloke what got 'imself shot?" the other Commando said. "Just fine. An in and out it was, no bones nicked and no 'eavy bleedin'. If 'e was in the Commandos we'd be asking 'im what the bother was. Seeing as 'ow 'e's Royal Navy, well 'e's entitled to a bit of complaining. Them boys ain't used to using their legs, not like us, right Rodney?"
"Right as rain you are, Corporal."
I thought I understood most of what he said. Harry was okay, but wounded.
"Thanks, guys," I said as I sat up. I fought to stay up as someone pounded my head with a sledgehammer. Rodney grabbed me by the shoulders.
"Hold on, sir, you're going to be a bit woozy for a while. You might have a concussion."
"Are you guys doctors in your spare time?"
"Spare time, that's a good one, sir. We're all trained as medics in the Royal Commandos."
With Rodney's help, I stayed up this time. He was just a skinny kid, but he had a good grip and the kind of confidence that comes from knowing how to maim people twenty different ways, and then bind up their wounds. I looked at the other commando, an older guy, mid thirties maybe, stocky, with a broken nose and hams for hands.
"Corporal…?"
"Corporal Peter Duxbury, at your service, sir. And this is Lance Corporal Rodney Longsmith."
"Well, Corporal Duxbury, help me down and tell me what happened."
I got down from the bar. When my feet hit the floor the shock went through my body and rattled my head. I took a couple of deep breaths and looked at myself. My hands were black, rubbed clean in a few places where they had checked for burns, but otherwise caked with soot. My uniform had scorch marks on it and my web belt was charred in a couple of places. I realized I didn't know how much time had passed since I'd blacked out.
"How long has it been?"
"Since what, sir?"
"Since I got knocked out!"
"Oh, you've been out about 'alf an 'our, sir."
"Jesus Christ! Where are Banville and Harry?"
"The Chief is in there with his Captain, finishing up the bandaging. We figured you was worse off than he was, so we left 'im to start on you."
Rodney pointed to a side room off the bar. I started walking, staggered, and had to hold onto the wall to stay upright. It was cool to the touch, rough stucco with little framed pictures at eye level. The first one was Petain, then some other old guys I didn't recognize: this may have been the French Fascist Hall of Fame. A small archway, complete with those hanging strands of beads you always see in the movies, framed the entrance to a cafe restaurant. Inside, Banville was sitting at a table with Harry, who had his leg propped up on a chair. Banville was ripping the end of the bandage down the middle and bringing one end around to tie it off. There was a bottle of brandy, a revolver, and a couple of empty glasses on the table. A cigarette dangled from Harry's lips. They looked like gangsters in a B movie set in the Kasbah.
"Give me a hand, I've got to search this place," I said, and tried to turn around. It didn't go well. Rodney, who had followed me in, caught me before I fell.
"Have a seat, Billy. Have a drink for that matter," said Harry. "I certainly needed one. Never having been shot before, I wasn't quite prepared for it. Not to mention watching you walk through fire." He looked at me with a question in his eyes, as if he were considering my sanity and coming up a few marbles short.
I ended up in the seat next to Harry, with Rodney pushing, or guiding, me down. I didn't have time to deal with a concussion, but standing up seemed a bit of an ordeal, so I decided sitting was enough of an improvement over being unconscious, for now. Trying to think through everything that happened and get moving at the same time, was too much. My head was pounding and thinking was like slogging uphill through molasses. Seeing Diana like that was way too much. I didn't understand it. What was wrong with her? It was as if she didn't care that I was right in front of her.
I became dimly aware that I didn't know everything that had happened. Where had that machine gun fire come from? What were these two commandos doing here? I looked around at Rodney and into the bur at Corporal Duxbury packing up my medical gear. I turned to Banville and tried to form a question.
"The cavalry," said Banville before I could ask. "I was watching the corner when they came by. Said they were doing some recon, but it seemed to me they were just out looking for a fight."
"Well, the landing was unopposed, sir," said Rodney, rather apologetically.
"They drove up in a jeep with a mounted. 30 caliber machine gun," continued Banville, "and we saw those chaps with the black armbands…"
"Service d'Order Legionnaire," I said, trying to make it sound French. "SOL."
"… ah, the French Fascists," said Harry, nodding as if now being shot made sense.
"As soon as we got close," Banville said as he gave Harry's bandage a tug, "they started firing at us. You must've been near the rear entrance. I thought you could use a diversion, so the corporal opened up with the. 30 caliber. That sent them scrambling. All right, Captain, try that leg now." Banville patted Harry on the shoulder. He grimaced as he swung his leg off the chair.
"Did anyone look around here yet?" I asked, trying to stand. I made it but I had to grip the edge of the chair. My legs were wobbly, the room spun a bit, but I stayed vertical.
"I've been too busy bleeding," said Harry, who was putting weight on his wounded leg, taking little gingerly half steps across the floor.
"We checked out the rooms upstairs, sir," chimed in Rodney. "No one up there, but we didn't have time to search 'em proper."
"Okay, let's start down here," I said. "Look for any paperwork and any mention of U.S. Army supplies. Harry, take a seat in the bar where you can watch the front and rear entrances. We don't want any surprises."
With Harry in the main barroom, seated at a table with a view front and back, we split up and went through the ground floor. Banville took the restaurant, searching a chest of drawers and a couple of packing crates. Nothing but cutlery and wine bottles. Duxbury and Longsmith eagerly pulled out bottles and the drinking debris that tends to gather on bar shelves. Tankards, playing cards, stacks of matchbooks just like the one I had, a billy club, and a set of brass knuckles were all tossed onto the top of the bar. I checked out a door to the right of the bar, just before a stairway that went up to the second floor. It was the most disgusting bathroom I'd ever
seen. There was a hole in the floor and a place for your feet. They could've hidden a fortune in diamonds down there and I'd have passed it up. I held my breath and looked around for a couple of seconds to be sure I didn't miss anything. Nothing but dead flies on the floor. Even they couldn't live in this stench. I shut the door and stumbled backward into the barroom, almost colliding with Duxbury as I let out my breath.
"That place almost made me 'omesick for the old East End, it did," laughed Duxbury, enjoying my discomfort. "Four families sharing one loo, and that backed up often as she flushed. One of the reasons I love the Army. The loo is always scrubbed down nice!"
"Clean toilets, three squares, and new threads. I guess it could be worse," I admitted.
"Square what, sir, if you don't mind me asking?" said Duxbury.
"Meals. Square meals, and threads are clothes." I was glad he had as hard a time understanding me as I did him.
I checked the cash register behind the bar. Lots of francs and notes that looked like IOUs. I lifted up the cash drawer.
"Well, I'll be damned," I muttered. "Wonder who's been drinking their schnapps here?" I held up two fifty Reichsmark notes.
"Blimey," said Duxbury. "Bleedin' Jerries get drinks and we get shot at!"
"Don't seem right, do it?" asked Rodney, shaking his head slowly at the injustice of it all, eyeing the array of bottles stacked up on the wall behind the bar.
"Gentlemen," I said, "it hurts me to say this, but we have to stay sober. We're going to need you to drive us somewhere after we finish here."
"Yes, back to the boat," Harry said, his eyes on the open front door, where a dead SOL guy was doing double duty as a doorstop.
"No, to the French Army supply depot," I corrected.
"Billy, I've taken a bullet in the leg on this little expedition of yours, and now it's time to get back. I need to have this taken care of."
"Well, sir," Rodney said carefully, "it was an in and out. Keep the flies off of it, change that bandage tonight, and you'll be just fine."
Harry didn't look pleased. He frowned and turned to check the rear door. I reached into the cash drawer and counted out the francs into three equal piles. I gave one each to the Commandos and the third to Banville as he came in from checking the kitchen.
"No use in letting collaborators and smugglers keep their profits, boys. Sorry, Harry, but officers aren't supposed to loot."
"No one is supposed to loot," Harry answered, but he didn't say anything when Banville rolled his francs into a wad and stuffed it into his pocket. The Reichsmarks went into my pocket, but not as loot, since I didn't plan on being anywhere where they'd be valid currency in the near future. Just souvenirs.
"Let's go upstairs," I suggested, and took the narrow stairway from a little nook to the right of the bar, my paid assistants following me while Harry stayed below on guard, a sour look on his face. There was something bothering him, and it wasn't having been shot. I wondered about what had happened to him, and his boat, back in England. I didn't know why he was here, but I knew he wasn't in the Mediterranean for his health. Something had brought him-or chased him-here. But that was a problem for another day.
The landing on the second floor was a big room, a loft with bare wooden beams at angles on either side, forming part of the roofline. There were open windows under the beams, letting a breeze flow through and displaying a view of the rooftops of the mostly single- story buildings below. Orange tiles, rounded white stucco, and tarpaper mingled together in a combination of European, North African, and shantytown architecture.
Against the far wall was a door, and I could tell there was a small room tucked away behind an interior wall. We spread out, walking through the large room, shuffling aside crumpled newspapers with our feet. Other than scattered papers and a few empty cardboard boxes, the space was empty. It had the feel of a place that had been cleared out. The papers and boxes weren't stacked and covered in dust. They looked as if recently they had been tossed aside by someone in a hurry. There were ground-out cigarette butts on the hardwood floor, the paper still white, the ash smudged across the floorboards. My guess was, this is where they had kept the drugs and other stolen supplies. When they heard about the commandos landing at the dock they'd started clearing out, and we'd hurried them along when we showed up.
But what had Diana been doing here? This whole place was a big waste of time so far as I was concerned if there was nothing to tell us why Diana had been here. As I approached the door to the small room I was itching to blow this joint. I turned the doorknob and kicked it open, standing back in case someone was hiding inside. It was empty. The door slammed against the wall and bounced back, almost shut, startling me as I started to enter the room. Peeling paint the color of pea soup cracked and flaked off on my palm as I held the door open. It was a narrow, long room, created by throwing up a wall across the end of the loft as cheaply as possible. The interior wall wasn't finished off, and sharp points of nails showed where they had broken through the thin wood slats. Through an open double window the warm breeze blew the dirty, stained curtains up from the floor, where they fluttered lazily for a second before falling flat, waiting for the next little gust to start. Always moving, going nowhere.
There was a table to the right, and a mattress on the floor to the left. I went to the table first, and pushed aside a plate of stale bread, black olives dripping in green oil, and a piece of hard, yellowed cheese. This disturbed a couple of fat, slow moving flies at their feast and they halfheartedly lifted off to buzz my face. An open bottle of brandy stood on the desk and a couple of empties had rolled into a corner of the floor. I pushed around a stack of newspapers, yellowed sheets that looked like invoices for liquor shipments, and old magazines. Nothing. An ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and burned out matches sat on top of a small metal box. I moved it and coughed as I waved away the cloud of ashes that drifted for a moment in the stagnant air when I set it down. The room felt close and airless, even with the windows open. The air had nowhere to go and all the old smells of food, dust and cigarettes had settled, coating every surface with their odors. Something else, too. Sweat?
Banville was somewhere behind me and I could hear Rodney and Duxbury chatting outside the room, in accents so thick that it seemed like a foreign language, different enough that unless I concentrated, they could've been speaking Chinese for all the sense it made to me. I opened the box.
"Jesus," said Banville in a half whisper, as I looked inside.
"Lieutenant, you should see this," Banville said, standing over the mattress.
"In a second," I told him.
The box held writing paper, envelopes, stamps, and a couple of pens. I dumped the contents out. All blank, except for one page. It was the start of a letter, addressed to a Monsieur Baudouin in Algiers. It went on but the address was all I could make out. I turned to give it to Banville.
"Can you translate…?" I stopped. He had pulled back the rough brown blanket that covered the mattress. I glimpsed a bit of blue fabric caught up in the folds of the blanket. There was no sheet. The mattress was stained rust red with dried blood, not a lot, just enough to show that someone had been beaten and left there. On the floor next to the mattress were a couple of small tubes. They looked familiar. I felt sick. My face went white-hot and my hands started trembling. It seemed I was watching myself, looking down on this other guy who was starting to fall apart.
"Solution of Morphine, one half Grain, Syrette. Warning: May Be Habit Forming," I said, from memory. I didn't need to read the label on the used-up tube.
Banville nodded and motioned with his thumb toward a big tin can, like those big tins of peas they use in the mess hall. It was empty, the label long gone, doing service as a trash can. Inside were a half- dozen empty syrettes. And a couple of used condoms.
I wanted to turn and run and keep going until I hit the boat, take off, and leave this goddamned country behind. Instead, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I opened them, turned around, and knelt
down by the mattress. Now I knew what that other smell was. Not just sweat, but the musky smell of sex and fear. I shook the blanket until the piece of light blue fabric fell out. Sky blue, to match her eyes. A four- inch ragged strip with lace along the collar, delicate and feminine, but the dark splotches of dried blood were horrible and masculine, as were the ripped buttons and torn stitching. I laid it down gently on the floor, and tried to remember for certain if that was the blouse I had seen Diana wearing a few days ago. Nothing came to me, no image of her, Just him.
"Here," I said, handing the unfinished letter to Banville. "Tell me what this says later. Now get out of here."
"What do you mean? I can translate it now if you want."
I went over to the table, gathered up the blank papers, and old newspapers and magazines, and threw them on top of the mattress. I grabbed the bottle of brandy and shook it out over the paper-strewn mattress.
"What the hell are you doing, sir?" asked Banville, his voice rising with every word. I could sense Rodney and Duxbury in the doorway, attracted by his tone of voice. I dropped the empty bottle, knelt down, and picked up the torn blouse. I brought it up to my nose to try to recapture her scent, to feel a connection with Diana. The ruined cloth gave back nothing but the dull metallic smell of dried blood and the thin feathery feel of torn stitching.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the matchbook. Le Bar Bleu.