by Bill Mesce
“This isn’t and we don’t. Nobody’s questioned them, nobody’s tried to get them to incriminate themselves. They’re merely confined to quarters pending — ”
“Pending what, Harry?” Ryan’s voice was harsh and demanding. “That’s what I want to know! That’s what General DiGarre wants to know! Give me something I can go to him with! I’m not going in there and say, ‘We’ve got murder suspects concealing evidence and all my guy can do is look at that and go, Hmmmm, interesting.’ I’m not going to do that!”
“There’s something at work here, Joe. It’s like when you know something’s moving around in the shadows. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there.”
“This Markham guy and Anderson, do they know each other?”
“Flew in the Eagle Squadron together, according to their records.”
“Maybe...” Ryan was still hunting for the neat ribbon that would reseal all of the little Pandora beasties Harry seemed to be trying so diligently to stir out of their box. “Maybe Markham’s covering for Anderson.”
“But we’ve got Anderson’s film. That clears him.”
“Only if it is Anderson’s film. Harry, the G-2 guys go out there to pick up these films, they don’t know whose is whose; just what they’re told. Maybe it’s Markham’s film we have, and Anderson is the one short of an alibi. Markham wants to bail his buddy out, so he says the film we have belongs to Anderson.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. That’s a possibility.”
“Either way, that’s no reason to drag your feet,” Ryan said with finality. “Scotland Yard should have at least the prelim ballistics and autopsy reports for you tomorrow. That’ll decide who did what to who. But you have enough on hand not to have to wait that long. Unless there’s something else...”
The business with the missing gun film still nagged at Harry. But he knew Ryan was right in saying that it represented no substantive reason not to move forward; at least none that would sit well with generals. Harry slid from the windowsill to his escritoire, picked up the telephone there, and dialed the Provost Marshals office. “Major Posner? This is Major Voss at the JAG’s office...Yes, it’s about those two men you have under guard out at Donophan. I’m issuing the order to place them under arrest...Yes, bring them in. The charges are murder and attempted murder.” He ticked off the necessary particulars, then hung up and turned to Ryan. “Happy now?”
“Very.”
“I should be here when they bring them in. In case they want to make any kind of statement or — ”
“It’ll wait till tomorrow. They’re not going anywhere. Now, fix your hair, Harry-boy. Tonight, we dine with the nobility.”
*
I happened to have been on station at the Annex that evening, idling across the street from the Court gates from where I could see Harry’s chuffy figure follow Ryan’s across the cobbles to the butter-colored Rolls-Royce that had been sent for them. Ryan’s head was jauntily cocked; his stride was a broad, aristocratic swagger. As he approached the aged chauffeur standing by the open passenger door, Ryan touched his finger to the brim of his cap, accompanying the gesture with a superior sniff and an unbelievably bad House of Lords accent as he called over his shoulder, “Do huddy along, Haddold.” Then, to the chauffeur, “What am I to do with him?” The chauffeur, being a properly bred British servant, betrayed no more emotion than a slight flaring of his pinched nostrils. Harry’s smiled apology on behalf of his commander was ignored with equal stoicism.
Then off they went to dine — as Ryan had said — with the nobility. I assumed the day’s actions were probably over at that point, and headed home to a somewhat less soigné evening of my own: a tin of Spam warmed over a gas ring, a bracing dose of scotch, and a few hours of pondering.
I’d sit on my windowsill, watching the coming night, nurse my glass of harder-and-harder-to-find good scotch, and wonder about that unexplained cordon down in East Sussex, all the related fuss among the Allied senior ranks and Scotland Yard, about the waddling little man I’d followed to Grosvenor Square that morning.
And maybe by the second or third glass, I’d ponder that insulting little stump peeking out beneath my robe.
All I ever remember is a flash, a concussion, then blackness, until that moment days later when I could lift my head from the hospital pillow and see the ridge of blanket that was my right leg, and the flat expanse where my left should have been.
After another drink, I’d wonder how Cathryn made her nights pass.
*
When Harry told me the story of that evening, he told of how out of place he’d felt on the Roller’s plush rear bench, the passenger compartment smelling of venerable leather, aged tobacco, and the brandy Joe Ryan had found tucked in the fold-out bar Behind the thick window’ glass, the ride was smooth and the only sound that of the traditional Rolls purr. Below the rim of his window; Harry saw the swept lines of the automobile gleaming like freshly poured steel in the red of the late day sun.
On the other side of the glass, pasty-faced women in faded dresses, squalling infants in their arms, waited in line for a ration of water from lorries stationed in neighborhoods where the water lines had been lost in some past bombing. Ragged children scampered about the debris of bombed-out buildings, shouting at the long, humming limousine as it passed. Constables, wrinkled and past the age of military service, touched the brim of their helmets, and workmen in threadbare trousers doffed their caps.
Harry was struck by the lack of rancor or jealousy afforded their way as the Rolls passed. Centuries of rank and order had done their job, and instead of anger and envy Harry saw eyes dipped in conditioned respect. He hoped the people outside could not see who it really was they were saluting.
Ryan suffered no such pang. His attention focused almost exclusively on the brandy nipperkin and neat little snifters in their velour-cushioned niches in the bar. He dipped into that bar more than once while he briefed Harry on the evening’s program.
Sir Whosis — as Ryan enjoyed calling him — was one of those wealthy emeritus types who owned a stretch of land in the downs, south of London. The Grosvenor Square brass had decided that despite the acreage already at their disposal, this particular lot was indispensable for some upcoming maneuvers. Sir Whosis was not averse to granting use of the land, but felt, by virtue of his title, that a little fawning and groveling was due first. Ryan and Harry were to do the fawning and groveling.
The Rolls took them to a neighborhood in Bloomsbury scarred by a few sticks of bombs (strays, presumably, unless Jerry had gotten the idea that giving a few quaint restaurants the chop was the way to undermine British determination). The limo drew to a stop in front of a nondescript building on one of the quiet, narrow streets near the British Museum. The building’s lower windows were filled with sandbags, and the upper storys were planked over. Chunks of plaster were chipped off the facade, and a tattered awning proclaimed the name of the restaurant in gold lettering too faded to decipher. The chauffeur held the limousine’s door for them, and the restaurant door was tended by a stooped-over old gent dressed in ill-fitting livery as something vaguely akin to an eighteenth-century chasseur.
The deferential maître d’ led them through the dark, heavily draped foyer into the high-ceilinged dining room. This, in surprising contrast to the scarred exterior, glittered: crystal chandeliers, golden sconces on the walls, brass serving carts, waiters in gold-braided dinner jackets, flashing silverware. All about were carts laden with marbled slabs of beef, dripping poultry, steaming vegetables, and squat pastries on engraved silver trays.
Harry was about to make some wry comment about what kind of coupon book was required for such sumptuous rations, but Ryan was already smiling and waving at a diminutive figure in evening dress. Sir Whosis had pink, watery eyes, very little hair, not all the best teeth, and a handshake that was scarcely a squeeze.
The gents lady was a mousy, unprepossessing woman, coated in a veneer of silk and quite a few sparkling stones. She acknowledged th
e Americans with a tight-lipped smile, but held Harry’s hand in a way that seemed — particularly after her husband’s brief touch-and-go — improperly long and firm.
Sir Whosis proved to be an inveterate — and horrible — storyteller, with an inexhaustible fund of meaningless, humorless anecdotes. Harry listened to the knight’s babble and Ryan’s murmurs of interest the way he listened to the radio, just enough to provide an occasional nod when called upon.
As course after course of food piled on their table, and the wine steward ensured their glasses were always fueled, Harry felt a twinge, remembering his wife’s letters and tales of waiting in long lines for her ration of beef. Here was enough meat, vegetables, sugar, butter, bread, fruit, and biscuits laid on to get Cynthia and the boys through a month.
His guilty reverie was broken by a grinning Sir Whosis, gesturing at him with his long-stemmed glass of Baccarat crystal, drunkenly saying, “The fox, yes? The fox?”
Harry looked helplessly at Ryan, who semaphored that Harry should respond with humor, and Harry mustered a “Ha ha!”
Perhaps it was the rich food, or the wine, or both, but Harry’s stomach began to churn. He turned to excuse himself to Dame Whosis, but she had already vanished.
The restaurant was crowded, each table a replica of his own with a mix of swank evening clothes and uniforms of all sorts in attendance. A hallway took him off the main dining room. He padded down thick carpet and tried a few likely-looking doors, discovering an office and a broom closet. He turned round back the way he thought he’d come, pushed through a door he didn’t remember passing, and found himself in another dining room, this one quiet, dark, and empty, apparently reserved for private affairs. A couple stood across the room in the shadows, embracing. The man was young, mustachioed, and striking in his RAF uniform. Most striking of all about him was that the woman in his arms was the much older Dame Whosis. Harry took an involuntary step backward and bumped into a table. Crystal and silver rattled, and the woman turned. Her jewels sparkled, even in the darkness, and her diadem swam loosely in her unraveling coif. She gave Harry a conspiratorial look, a smile that frightened him with its knowledge that he’d never tell.
He fumbled his way back through the door, hurrying until he finally collared a busboy who directed him to the nearest toilet, the staff loo in the basement. Harry relieved himself among mops and cans of disinfectant, then sat for a long while enjoying the cool of the little room. When the rebellious movements of his stomach ceased, he wound his way back to his table where Sir Whosis’s wife was already seated, composed and smiling collegially at Harry.
In the Rolls, Dame Whosis clung to the arm of her husband, who had sunk into a wine-induced snooze, and chatted charmingly as if nothing were amiss. “Naturally, there will be no problem with your maneuvers,” the lady said graciously as Harry and Ryan were dropped at the Annex gate. “Just ring first.” She smiled, and her mousy features receded into the darkness of the passenger compartment as the Rolls purred off.
They were tired and sotted and their path past the gate sentries and across the Court wavered, taking them into several near-collisions with parked vehicles. They tossed off buoyant good-evenings to the men in the orderly room of their BOQ as they headed for the stairs. But one of the orderlies stopped them with news that the Provost Marshal had rung for Colonel Ryan and urgently needed the call returned. Repeat: urgently.
Ryan made the call from the orderly room and Harry, not sure he could make the stairs without Ryan’s assistance, and certain Ryan could not make them without his assistance, parked himself on a nearby bench. At that late hour, filled with wine and heavy food, it was all he could do to keep an eye open. He wasn’t even aware that the call had finished and Ryan was standing over him, weaving on his own unsteady legs, until Ryan poked him in the shoulder.
“Wake up, Harry. That was Posner.”
Harry forced his eyes open.
“C’mon, Harry. Up! Get on the horn and tell those two beauties working for you to meet us over at the Provost. I’ll see what I can do about scrounging up a steno”
“You mean now?” Harry’s eyes were finally open, but he was hardly fully awake.
“Now.”
“Why?”
Ryan dropped onto the bench next to him. Harry tried to force himself completely alert and to focus on Ryan’s face and its mix of fatigue, puzzlement, and even a little pleasure.
“Major Markham has decided to make everybody’s life a little simpler,” Ryan said. “He told Major Posner he wants to confess.”
Chapter Five – In Hoc Signo Vinces
Himself — The Old Boss, the Lord and Master — had been the only familiar face waiting on the dock when my hospital ship pulled into Southampton. He was — as I’d fully expected — untouched by the sight of me hobbling down the gangway on my new crutches, the left trouser leg of my pajamas neatly pinned up behind what remained of my leg. He had spent thirty years chronicling the human race’s catalog of incivilities. Next to famine, massacre, and the hangings of deranged sex criminals, a lost leg deserved little note. In fact, I was surprised — and even a bit touched — that Himself had seen it worthy enough to show up at all.
(Not long after, I called his attention to what I thought to be a rising tide of sentimentality in him. I twitted him then, wondering if perhaps his new softness was a product of advancing senility, bolstering my case by pointing to the touching little tribute he himself had penned for the paper, welcoming me home. With typical sangfroid, he shrugged me off and pointed to how the notice was buried near the end of the first section. “Hardly room for it at all, my son. Lucky we could fit it anywhere.”)
Later, fitted with my contraption and back in the office, he sat across from me for “a bit of chat about your future, my son.” He dipped into his bottom desk drawer for the bottle of twelve-year-old he saved for notable occasions and splashed some into a pair of chipped teacups he kept on hand (to this day I have no idea what pretense about his fairly regular nips the teacups were there to maintain).
“Eh, Ahab, if you think you’re for being some old pensioner feeding the pigeons in Hyde Park, you’ve got it wrong,” he informed me. “We’re not done wi’ you yet, my son. Soon’s you’re up to it, you buff up yer new pin and hop on back to work.” The caustic insensitivity was calculated to confer a sense of business as usual. But both he and I were aware that the game had changed irrevocably for me. I knew, and he knew I knew, that he would look at me adjusting my squeaking new limb and decide my globe-trotting days were fini.
I was retained with all the honors and respect due my long tenure, and there was a form of work for me, though my new provenance was the local scene: the bores of Parliament, a coven of old biddies commemorating the Duchess of Bedford’s inception of afternoon tea, and the like. I’m sure Himself considered it a favor that there was any work at all for me, but for me it was a form of slow suffocation.
On that morning when Dennis O’Connell was pulled dripping wet and dead from his aeroplane off the English coast — Monday, 15 August — I was, in fact, typing up just one of a series of airy-fairy pieces Himself had dubbed Stiff Upper Lips: items that showed English fortitude at its best. This particular piece concerned an elderly pub four some in the South End who had kept blithely at their best-of-nine-frames snooker match during the last air raid. A stick of near misses served only to spark a debate among the geezers on whether movement of the balls by the nearby explosions constituted some sort of foul. (In the spirit of its being a Stiff Upper Lip piece, I discreetly neglected mentioning that at least part of the quartets nerve in the face of enemy fire seemed to have come from the half-dozen or so pints of ale each had downed before the raid.)
Listlessly pecking out the prose, I overheard word buzzing about the office of the affair on the Sussex coast. I had lost my leg, but not my instinct for the hunt, so, along with the other Fleet Street hounds, I was quickly off to find out what I could. I was back at it the next day as well and had fully intended to g
o it again a third day, but on that day Himself saw fit to push another view.
I had meant to breeze through the office that morning, just long enough to check for messages and then be off.
“Could I trouble you?” he called from the doorway of his office. He had the gift of making requests sound like commands.
In his office he sat back in the cracked leather of his chair, his stubby fingers laced across the protruding crest of his substantial stomach, and smiled at me, his eyes crinkling behind his bottle-thick glasses. Though the clock had yet to strike nine, the twelve-year-old was already on the desk and the teacups had been dosed. He nodded for me to close the door behind me.
“Getting on all right then, my son? Been having fun stalking about, have you?”
“I’ve kept meself busy.”
“All good things must come to an end.”
“And I’m more than happy to let them come to their natural end,” and I raised my cup in salute to the sentiment.
“I’ve got a box to fill and that snooker bit’d see it right.”
“Won’t take but a minute.”
“And I’ve got another box for tomorrow — ”
I held up a hand. “Shall we...?” I made a twirling motion of my finger indicating an interest in leaping ahead.
He seemed genuinely pleased. “Oh, let’s do.”
“Something happened down at the coast on Monday.”
“Old Rob the janitor knows as much.”
“I checked with the locals, and the only human inhabitants in the area are an old spotter and his wife. Now, either this spotter saw something, or something happened to him, and it involves the Americans because within hours the Yanks were a-swarming out there. And whatever happened wasn’t strictly within bounds, because they’ve put their legal apparatus into high gear, from the little snowdrops to dapper Joe Ryan.”