Frank was a four-year-old black-and-tan bloodhound who had been specially trained for me in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, by the man-trailing expert Roger Du Croix. Actually Frank’s saddle spread so far over his body that he was almost entirely black, but Roger had explained to me that he was still officially a black-and-tan.
In Belgium, they called him a “St. Hubert hound,” after the monk who had first trained bloodhounds in the seventh century, the patron saint of hunters. Frank’s real name was Pride of Ponchatoula but I had re-christened him in honor of Frank Sinatra, who happened to be my hero at the time. When I walked along De Keyserlei, with my greatcoat collar turned up, I liked to think that I looked as cool and edgy as Frank Sinatra did.
“How’s it going, Frank?” I asked him. “Hope you’ve been conducting yourself with decorum.”
Frank was a pretty obedient dog but now and again he had a fit of the loonies, which Roger Du Croix said was brought on by him picking up the smell of dead rats.
Corporal Little said, “He’s been fine, sir. I fed him those marrowbones and then he took a dump around the corner.”
“Well, thanks so much for the update,” I said. “Listen—we’ll be going out tonight, soon as it gets dark.”
Corporal Little looked up at the flat, narrow front of No. 5 Markgravestraat and said, “Screechers?”
“No question about it. They split her open like a herring.”
“Holy Christ. Did you find out who she was?”
“Ann De Wouters, aged twenty-eight or thereabouts. I don’t know why they specifically came looking for her, but her landlady seemed to think that she might have had some connection to the White Brigade. Could have been a revenge killing, who knows? Maybe they were just thirsty.”
Corporal Little looked around, his eyes narrowed against the bright gray October light. “Think they’ve gotten far?”
“I don’t think so. By the time they finished with her it must have been nearly daylight, and this whole area was heaving with Canucks by oh-four-thirty. My guess is that they’ve gone to ground someplace close by.”
Corporal Little reached down and tugged Frank’s ears. “Hear that, boy? We’re going to go Screecher-hunting!”
Corporal Henry Little was an amiable, wide-shouldered young man with a red crew cut and a face covered in mustard-colored freckles. He had a snub nose and bright blue eyes that looked permanently surprised, although I had never yet known him to be surprised by anything. Even when it was first explained to him what his duties would be, he did nothing but nod and say, “OK, sure,” as if hunting vampires through the shattered cities of France and Belgium was no more unusual than chasing rabbits through the underbrush. Corporal Little’s family had bred pedigree tracking dogs in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which was why the detachment had enlisted him to help me. If Bloodhoundese had been a language, Corporal Little would have been word-perfect. Frank had only to lift up his head and stare at Corporal Little with those mournful, hung-over eyes, and Corporal Little would know exactly what he wanted. “Cookie, Frank?” Frank had a thing for speculoos, those ginger-and-spice cookies they bake in Belgium, preferably dipped into Corporal Little’s coffee to make them soft.
We climbed into my Jeep and Corporal Little drove us back through the narrow sewage-smelling streets, jolting over the cobbles until I felt that my teeth were going to shatter. We passed a dead horse lying on the sidewalk. A German shell had landed in the square two days ago and torn open a big triangular flap in its stomach, so a passerby had killed it with a hammer.
Somewhere off to the northwest, from the direction of the Walcheren peninsula, I could hear artillery fire, like somebody banging encyclopedias shut.
We turned into Keizerstraat and stopped outside De Witte Lelie Hotel. It was a small, old-style building with a sixteenth-century facade. The lobby had oak-paneled walls and a brown marble floor and it was milling with officers from the British 11th Armored Division, as well as an argumentative crowd of Belgian politicians, waving their arms and pushing each other and shouting in French. The British officers looked too tired to care. One of them was sleeping in an armchair with his mouth wide open.
I went to the desk where the deputy manager was trying to rub soup from the front of his shirt with spit.
“I need to talk to Leo Coopman.”
He stopped rubbing his shirt and looked at me with bulging brown eyes.
“It’s important,” I said. “I need to talk to him about Ann De Wouters. Do you think you can get in touch with him?”
The deputy manager pulled a face that could have meant “yes” or “possibly” or “why on earth are you asking me?”
“I’ll be in my room until eight,” I told him. I tapped my wristwatch and said, “Acht uur, understand?”
Corporal Little and I went up in the rickety elevator to the fourth floor. Frank sat staring up at us and panting.
“Ann De Wouter’s children were in the room when they killed her,” I said. “Lucky for the boy he didn’t wake up, but the girl did.” I could see myself in the mirror. I hadn’t realized I looked so haggard. My hair was greasy and flopping over my forehead, and the mottled glass made it appear as if I had some kind of skin disease.
“She give you any idea what they looked like?”
“No. Too dark. But she was pretty sure that there were three of them, and she saw that one of them was wearing the wheel.”
We walked along the long blue-carpeted corridor until we reached 413. Considering there was a war on, my room was surprisingly sumptuous, with a huge four-poster bed covered in a gold-and-cream bedspread, and gilded armchairs upholstered to match. On the walls hung several somber landscapes of Ghent and Louvain, with clouds and canals. A pair of gray riding britches hung from the hook on the back of the door, with dangling suspenders still attached. These had belonged to the German officer who had occupied this room only days before we had arrived. Corporal Little unclipped Frank’s leash and let him trot into the bathroom to lap water out of the toilet.
I went to the windows and closed them. The maid had opened them every morning since we had arrived here last week, even though there was no heat. I opened a fresh pack of cigarettes, lit one and blew smoke out of my nose. Then I unfolded my street map of Antwerp and spread it out over the glass-topped table.
“Here’s Markgravestraat, where Ann De Wouters was killed, and this is the way the Canadian division was coming in, so it’s pretty unlikely that the Screechers would have tried to escape along Martenstraat. I reckon they left the building by the back entrance, which would have taken them out here, onto Kipdorp. That means they had only two options. Either turn left, and head northwest toward the Scheldt; or turn right, and make their way across Kipdorpbrug toward the Centraal Station.”
Corporal Little studied the map carefully. “I don’t reckon they would have headed for the river, sir. Where would they go from there?”
I agreed with him. They couldn’t have escaped north because the Germans had blown all the bridges over the Albert Canal. Besides, the Brits were holding the waterfront area and most of the Brits were untrained conscripts—waiters and bank clerks and greengrocers—and they were even more trigger-happy than the Poles. They would let loose a wild fusillade of poorly aimed rifle-fire and then shout “ ’Oo goes there?” afterward.
I circled a five-block area with my pencil. “We’ll start in this streets around Kipdorp and work our way eastward along Sant Jacobs Markt.”
Corporal Little massaged the back of his prickly neck. “That’s going to be one hell of a job, sir, with respect. Think of all them hundreds of cellars they could be lying low in. Think of all of them hundreds of attics, and all of them hundreds of closets and linen chests and steamer-trunks. It could easy take us days before Frank picks up a sniff of them, and by that time they could be halfway back to wherever they’re headed.”
“We’ll find them, Henry, I promise you. I have a hunch about these particular Screechers.”
“With respect, sir, yo
u had a hunch about those Screechers in Rouen; and you had another hunch about those Screechers in Brionne.”
“I know. But those Screechers we caught in France, they were like cornered rats, weren’t they? They were running and hiding and it took everything we could do to catch up with them.”
“Well, sure. But what makes these guys any different?”
“Think about it. They must have been keeping themselves holed up someplace in the city center for the past five weeks. Either that, or they’ve had the brass cojones to make their way back in. They wanted to have their revenge on Ann De Wouters, and they obviously didn’t care what chances they took. They were German-speaking, right? But they walked through a city crowded with British and Canadian troops, and they cut a woman open in front of her children, and they stayed there long enough to drink ninety percent of her blood.”
Corporal Little looked impressed but still slightly mystified. “So what does this specifically lead you to conclude, sir?”
“Don’t you get it, Henry? They’re not scared of us. They’re not frightened to come out in the open. That’s why I think that we’ll find them. The only trouble is, when we do find them, they’re not going to go down without one hell of a fight.”
Corporal Little gave me a smile of growing understanding. “In that case, sir—we’d better double the watch on our rear ends, wouldn’t you say?”
“Go get the kit, will you?” I told him. Most of the time I couldn’t work out if he was a genius or an idiot savant.
The Kit
The Kit was contained in a khaki tin box about the size of a briefcase. It was scratched and dented, but then we had been carrying it with us ever since we had landed in Normandy in June, and we had used it five times since then.
Corporal Little opened it up and together we inspected the contents. A large Bible, with a polished cover carved out of ash-wood and a silver crucifix mounted on the front. A large glass flask of holy oil, from St. Basil’s Romanian Orthodox church in New York. A pair of silver thumbscrews and a pair of silver toescrews. A silver compass, about five inches across, with a base that was filled with the dried petals of wild roses. A thirty-foot whip made of braided silver wire. A surgical saw. A small silver pot filled with black mustard seeds. Two small pots of paint, one white and one black.
I lifted out a roll of greasy chamois leather and unwrapped it. Inside were three iron nails, about nine inches long. They were black and corroded and each had been fashioned by hand. I had no proof that they were genuine, but if the price that the detachment had paid for them was anything to go by, they should have been. These were supposed to be the nails that had been pulled out of Christ’s wrists and ankles when he was taken down from the cross.
At the bottom of the tin box there was a circular mirror, made of highly polished silver, a large pair of dental forceps and a sculptor’s mallet. Hunting Screechers was always a combination of science, religion, common sense and magic, so you needed the apparatus that went with each. You also needed a willingness to believe that a human being can defy gravity.
“Running kind of low on garlic,” said Corporal Little, lifting up a bunch of papery-covered cloves. Frank came sniffing around, his pendulous jowls swaying. “See?” said Corporal Little. “Frank knows that we’re going out tonight, don’t you, boy?”
Frank gave one of those barks that can deafen you in one ear.
An Oblique Conversation
Just after six o’clock the deputy manager rang up to my room to say that Leo Coopman had been “unavoidably detained” on the northeast side of the city. However somebody in the lobby called Paul Hankar would be privileged to talk to me. I went down in the elevator alone and met him in the small dark bar at the back of the hotel.
Paul Hankar was a short, thickset man with a lumpy face like one of the peasants in a Brueghel painting, and rimless spectacles. He was wearing a black roll-neck sweater and a black suit with shiny elbows. I would have guessed that he was a schoolmaster in another life.
He stood up and shook hands. “Aangename kennismaking, Colonel. Pleased to meet you.”
“Actually it’s captain. Captain James Falcon Junior, 101 Counterintelligence Detachment.”
We sat down and I offered him a cigarette. He took one and tapped it on his thumbnail. “I heard you were looking for some special information,” he said. His English was flat but barely accented.
“You think you can help me?” I asked him.
“It’s something we’ve been trying to keep quiet. Mainly because we didn’t want the Germans to know that we knew. And because we didn’t want to cause any panic. And because we didn’t want to look like fools, in case we were wrong.”
“Do you know a young woman called Ann De Wouters? She rents an apartment on Markgravestraat.”
Paul Hankar looked at me acutely. “I know the name, yes.”
“You can’t do her any harm by telling me about her. She was murdered last night.”
He flinched, as if I had reached across the table and tried to slap his cheek. But then he recovered himself and said, “I’m very shocked to hear that.”
“Her landlady said it was mensen van de nacht. Do you have any idea what she was talking about?”
A young boy in a long white apron came over to us and asked us what we wanted to drink. “What do you have?” asked Paul Hankar.
“Apple schnapps.”
“Anything else?”
The boy shook his head.
“In that case, we’ll have two apple schnapps.”
“One schnapps, one lemonade,” I corrected him. “I need to keep a clear head tonight, and I know what that goddamned schnapps is like. My corporal calls it ‘nuts-water.’ ”
Paul Hankar lit his cigarette and I noticed that his hand was trembling. “Mensen van de nacht?” he said, wryly. “That’s one explanation, if you believe in such things.”
“But you don’t?”
“I keep an open mind, Captain.”
“So tell me what’s been happening.”
He coughed and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “It started in August last year. We were having many successes against the Germans. We had infiltrated many of their administrative offices and also the power company and the water company. In July we were able to sink five barges on the Albert Canal which took them weeks to clear away.
“But then everything seemed to turn around. The Germans began to raid our hiding places and arrest our people by the dozen. Every time we planned to sabotage the docks, they would catch us before we had the chance to plant any explosives. They found our weapons and our wireless sets and our safe houses. It became clear to us that some of our own people must be betraying us.”
I didn’t say anything. Behind him, there was an oval window with crimson glass in it, and the branch of a tree was tapping against it as if some beggar were trying to catch our attention.
Paul Hankar said, “We noticed that some of our people were acting differently. They started to look ill, and to keep themselves to themselves. Also, they smelled. It’s very hard to describe. Not altogether unpleasant, but musty, like the inside of a closet in which a dead man’s clothes have been hanging.
“Gradually it became clear to us that every operation which was betrayed to the Germans was connected with one or more of these sick people.”
“What did you do about it?”
“Of course, we immediately isolated any of our people who showed any signs of illness or behaving in a strange way, and allowed them no contact with the rest of us. But even this didn’t stop the infection from spreading among us, and we couldn’t understand how this could happen. We have doctors who help us, but even they were mystified.
“It was Ann De Wouters who first discovered what the Germans had done. She had spent many months becoming close friends with a young German officer from the 136th Special Employment Division, who administered Antwerp during the occupation. When I say ‘close friends,’ you understand what I am saying to you.”
> He paused, and took a deep breath, as if he were trying to stop himself from sounding too emotional.
“She is, she was, a very moral young woman. But her husband Jan was arrested and shot by the Germans in 1942, and I think she believed that this was the best way she could take her revenge.
“Anyway—one night this young German officer invited Ann to a party at Major General Stolberg-Stolberg’s house—he was the commanding officer of the 136th Special Employment Division. Some of the German officers got drunk and started boasting that they would soon exterminate all of the resistance in Antwerp.”
He turned around in his seat to make sure that nobody else was listening, and then he leaned forward and said, “They claimed they had brought in some kind of infection from Eastern Europe which would spread among the White Brigade and within six weeks it would kill us all.”
Still I didn’t reply. And still the branch kept tapping at the window. It sounded as if the wind was rising, and I prayed that it wouldn’t start to rain. The scent of Screechers was so much harder to follow in the wet.
Paul Hankar said, “They didn’t seem to know exactly what this infection was, but they were very excited about it. Apparently they had used it against the resistance in Poland and also in France. They said that it had come from Romania.”
“I see. Any mention of mensen van de nacht?”
“The night people? As far as I’m concerned, that was only a hysterical rumor. It started to spread when people were discovered around the city with all of the blood drained out of them. Sometimes a whole family would be found in their apartment, grandparents, mothers and fathers, even babies . . . cut open, and their hearts pulled out. But in many cases their doors were locked on the inside and nobody could work out how anybody could have gotten in or out.”
“How do you think they were killed?”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe in anything supernatural. Once or twice, some of our people who had gotten sick were seen by witnesses in the vicinity of these tragedies, but we never found any conclusive evidence that they were responsible.”
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