Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  “I guess, then, Lieutenant Grassi didn’t share any confidences with you about what he was going down to the Cape for?” Kneece asked.

  “The lieutenant didn’t share confidences with me ’bout nothin’, sir. I didn’t even know he was goin’ down there ’til he stuck his head in the office, said he was flyin’ out in ten minutes ’n’ for me to watch the fort for him. ‘Watch the fort.’ I was always watchin’ that guy’s fort.”

  “Had you heard anything about what happened at the Cape?”

  “I heard what everybody else heard. Some flyboy crunched a C-47. You seen what this place is like: it’s not like that don’t happen. I just figgered this was another one of those things where the lieutenant was gonna try to turn it into a big deal. When you sirs want me to come wake you up tomorrow?”

  “When’s reveille?”

  “The cap’n doesn’t go for an official reveille. They keep the kitchen open for breakfast from 0630 to 0830.”

  “Split the difference and make it 0730.”

  Olinsky said good night and left.

  Kneece surveyed the debris, kicked at a pair of wrinkled pants, and stood over the brazier, stripping off his arctic mittens and warming his hands over the coals. “What was that word, Major? That Jew word? For pig?”

  “Chozzer.”

  “Yeah. Chozzer.”

  Harry, still wrapped in his parka, settled on his bunk, back to the wall, notepad propped against his upraised knees. He was making notes not only of the conversation with Olinsky, but from the earlier interrogatory with Captain Blume.

  “We should go through this crap,” Kneece said. “Maybe there’s something here.” He knelt by the footlocker and started sifting through the mishmash of contents. “Hey, who do you think this is?”

  Harry looked over his reading glasses at Kneece, who was holding up a small photograph in a simple oval frame. Kneece tossed it and it landed on the mattress close to Harry A broad-shouldered, plain-faced woman sat in a chair in a high-necked dress that ran to the floor, her hair pinned up round her head. Standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder, was a slight, small-eyed man, his hair greased flat and parted razor-straight down the center of his head. From the woman’s dress and the man’s vested suit and celluloid collar, Harry guessed the date of the photo as being from the 19-teens. In the fashion of the time, both man and woman wore stony expressions.

  “What do you think?” Kneece asked. “Dear old Mom and Dad?”

  Harry nodded.

  “Here’s some more.” Kneece tossed over an envelope filled with small Brownie box photos of more recent vintage.

  Harry thumbed through them, careful to hold them only by the white-framed edges. There was the man from the framed photo, now paunchy and gray-haired, sitting at the end of a table, a cake lost in the glare of a host of birthday candles in front of him. Crowded about him were smiling faces and at his shoulder, the broad-shouldered woman who was his wife, heavier and grayer, her cheek held close to his as he prepared to blow out the candles. Then another photo of the woman, older still, holding some kind of small dog up to her face, laughing, the dog squirming so much as to be nothing more than a toothy blur in her hands. Another picture of the man and woman seated at the same table, dressed in what were probably their only good sets of clothes, once again surrounded by well-wishers. Above their heads the photographer had caught the tail of a hand-painted banner:

  PY

  SARY

  Harry didn’t look at the rest of the photos. He slid them back into their envelope and tossed it back to Kneece. “Do you know if the War Department has notified his folks yet?”

  “You know, I don’t know.”

  “I wonder how that telegram’s going to read.”

  “Hey, I got some letters here!” Kneece sat near Harry on his bunk and began working through a bundle of V-mail envelopes, maybe two dozen in all. “All from the same address in Chicago. Is this Eye-talian?” He turned the first mail piece over to Harry “You live with those folk, Major. Can you savvy any of that?”

  “A little.” Harry skipped quickly through the first small piece of paper, then the next V-mail piece. “They all look like letters from his folks.”

  “What do they say?”

  “The usual stuff. ‘How are you?’ ‘We’re worried about you, hoping you’ll come home soon.’ ‘Do you need anything?’” Harry felt a heaviness in his chest, the same heaviness he’d felt days before when he’d first seen Grassi’s ID photo lying on his kitchen table. Only now the feeling had more to it, a tangible oppressiveness.

  “Do you think he might’ve said anything to his folks about what he was doing out here?”

  “He was enough of a blabbermouth, I wouldn’t put it past him. But the latest one here is from November. That’s weeks before the crash down at the Cape.”

  “We should go through all these letters just in case.”

  “All?”

  “At least the last couple of months.”

  “You mean at least as far back as August.”

  Kneece said nothing, but returned to poking round the footlocker’s interior. “I was right to ask you to come along. Like the way you handled that Blume fella…”

  “I didn’t ‘handle’ him, Woody. I just talked to him.”

  “But the way you talked to him… Was all that true? About you having this Jew neighbor?”

  “Friend, Woody. An old friend. He runs one of the stores on my street.”

  “I don’t know any Jews, not personally. I couldn’t even tell you if we have any in Charleston. When I was a kid, all I knew about ’em was what my daddy had to say. You remember that newspaper Henry Ford used to put out? Mr. Ford was always running those pieces about the ‘International Jewish Conspiracy,’ and how they were all commies? Well, Daddy was very big on that stuff. He was all with Mr. Ford when Mr. Ford’s paper was saying how jazz was some kind of Jew plot to make all the niggers crazy and make ’em make trouble. When he found out I was going down to the juke joints at night, I don’t know what he was more worried about: that I’d wind up with some colored gal, or that I’d go commie.”

  “Did you go down to those places because you didn’t believe your daddy and Mr. Henry Ford? Or did you do it just to aggravate him?”

  Kneece smiled slyly. “At this point, I couldn’t factually tell you. Now, can I get you to help me with the rest of these letters?”

  “Woody, there’s nothing in those letters for us.”

  “I’d still like to —”

  “I’m pretty tired. I’m turning in.”

  *

  When Olinsky awakened Harry and Kneece, it was as dark outside as when they’d arrived. The blizzard continued unabated, and the temperature had dropped far enough below zero that even with the brazier aglow their quarters remained frigid. “You fellas bein’ first-timers, I figgered you’re probably short on what you need,” Olinsky said as Harry and Kneece wriggled into the cold-weather garments he’d brought.

  There were long woolen underwear and woolen socks, woolen shirts and trousers, armored-force coveralls, and woolen pullovers. Over these, Harry and Kneece tugged the flight jackets and woolen caps given them by Doheenys flight mechanic, scarves to cover the lower portion of their faces, goggles, then their hooded parkas. On their hands they wore woolen gloves inside mittens.

  “You can’t see nothin’ out there,” the corporal warned before escorting them to the mess hall. “There’s guide ropes tied from one building to the next. Hold on to them and don’t let go. Not even to scratch your nose. The rope breaks, you just follow it back to where it’s tied on. If it’s broke at both ends, don’t move. I’ll come get you. Please, sirs, don’t go off on your own. There was this guy last year thought he was a real arctic explorer. He let go. I guess he figgered he was gonna shortcut his way somewhere. We didn’t find his body ’til spring.”

  After breakfast, they settled in Grassi’s office, a suffocatingly minute cubicle squeezed among others in the Quonset serving as pos
t HQ. As Blume had promised, the office was immaculate, a startling contrast to Grassi’s living quarters. Yet the Grassi touch manifested itself nonetheless. Although there were few dossiers in the one stack of drawers, they had been filed in no particular order, lacking any identifying tabs. Their respective contents had been laid out in similarly haphazard fashion. Paradoxically, the handwritten notes within those files were succinct, followed orderly progressions, and were written in a brilliantly clear hand.

  “He might’ve been 4-F on personal hygiene,” Kneece commented, “but I give him an A for penmanship.”

  “Remember the other officer who worked with me on that case in August?” Harry asked.

  “That Ricks fella?”

  “Peter Ricks. He and Grassi were such opposites you’d think they’d burst into flame just being in the same room. Ricks was one of those clean-cut types that looked like he’d stepped off a recruiting poster. Very big on good manners, the kind of young fellow mothers hope their daughters are going to bring home. But his notes…” Harry took a blank piece of paper from the desk, made some scribbled lines representing writing, then made more scribbles jammed in the margins. He drew a dizzying series of writhing arrows whirling among the scribbles. “That’s what a page of Ricks’s notes looked like.”

  Kneece looked from the faux Ricks page to the Grassi file open on the desk. The captain smiled slowly, tapping the Ricks page. “Nothing got by him.”

  “Ricks was like a net. He grabbed everything, every connection, every possibility.”

  Kneece nodded at the Grassi folder. “This guy just went straight for the jugular.”

  “Right instincts, I guess. But lousy lawyering.”

  They went through each of the few files, breaking up their reading by interviewing post personnel who’d had contact with Grassi. Recalling those interviews later, Harry shook his head. “The polite ones tried to say as little as they could. A lot of them weren’t polite.”

  “Armando Grassi had me thinking they must be giving away lieutenant’s bars with a tank of gas back home,” said one of the other headquarters officers.

  And from another: “After Grassi, I guess next they’ll be drafting monkeys.”

  By afternoon’s end, they’d questioned everyone there was to question, and had exhausted the scant paperwork Grassi had left behind. Blume, shaking snow off his parka, found them working out the cricks in their backs from hours in wooden chairs. “Productive day?”

  “As one of my relations might say,” Kneece replied, “we got us a whole lotta not much.”

  “That wouldn’t be your Uncle Ray, would it?” Harry asked.

  Kneece laughed. “I guess you get an ear for him after a bit.”

  Blume reached inside his parka for a crumpled piece of paper: a message from the outpost’s wireless shack. “Captain, last night you were saying something about going down to the Cape? This blizzard is part of a storm blanket running from here nearly all the way to Bluie-West-Eight. According to this — and the analysis of my weather team — it’s really two storms dovetailing. The storm centers seem to be pulling apart, and the prediction is for a gap to open wide enough to give us a couple hours’ flying weather. That might be long enough to get you two down there. This is not a thing I would recommend. That air’s going to be pretty rough and we’re talking about a pretty tight hole. But if badly is how you want to get down there —”

  “When would we have to leave?” Kneece asked.

  “The weather guys are ball-parking we could get you airborne by 0400 tomorrow morning. That is if you’re done here.”

  “How about it, Major? You game?”

  “I don’t like the way these early wake-ups are getting to be a habit,” Harry said. “Is ‘badly’ how we want to get down there?”

  “The trail gets colder every day. No pun intended. You can stay, Major, but if I read Captain Blume right, if you do there’s no telling when you’ll be able to get a ride out. That about the size of it, Blume?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Blume said.

  “What about Doheeny?” Harry asked.

  “This window won’t open until the seam between the fronts passes Strømfjord,” Blume replied. “They won’t be able to take advantage of it. But I’ll pass the word to them to rendezvous with you —”

  “Rendezvous earliest possible,” Kneece said. “How about it, Major?”

  “I have a feeling it’s not going to be the smartest thing I ever do.” But Harry sighed and nodded his acquiescence.

  Kneece smiled, pleased. “Blume, do you have communications with the States? Can you reach D.C.?”

  “We have to relay through Goose Bay.”

  “I’m going to code a transmission for you, Captain. As soon as you can get through…”

  “Sure.” Blume looked at his watch. “If I were you two, I’d get some chow and see if I could grab some snooze time.” “What about Grassi’s effects?” Harry asked Kneece. “All that stuff in his quarters? Are you done going through it?” Kneece nodded. “I guess Captain Blume here can pack it all up and send it to Grassi’s folks.”

  “Before you do… That message you’re going to send out…”

  “Just a routine status report for my CO.”

  “Could you ask your CO to check and see if Grassi’s next of kin have been notified? The first word they get that their son is dead shouldn’t be his things showing up on their doorstep,” Harry said.

  *

  “Well,” Lieutenant Commander George Zagottis said with a certain resignation. Harry could see the Navy officer steel himself inside the deep layers of his arctic gear before pulling away from their warm huddle and hauling himself above the rim of the half-track’s rear compartment. Zagottis lit up the vehicle’s mounted searchlight and swiveled it face forward. “There it is.”

  Girding themselves as Zagottis had, Harry and Kneece likewise pulled themselves up.

  The snow was coming down steadily, but without the fierce winds they had experienced in their stay two hundred and fifty miles north at Godthåb. Caught in the searchlight, the snowflakes glittered against the darkness of the arctic morning. Harry squinted beyond the glare of the beam to the oblong mound where Zagottis directed his light.

  At first it appeared no different from the other piles of snow plowed clear of the metal matting and left alongside the runway of the naval air station. But then Zagottis’s light found bits of a C-47’s charred fuselage. One of the horizontal stabilizers jutted at an angle up through the snow. The Dakota had come to rest belly-up; the rudder was invisible, crushed beneath the inverted tail.

  Zagottis was a short, bandy-legged fellow, stout like a wrestler. He had jet-black hair molded into a helmet by long hours inside a parka’s hood, and a broad, pleasant face creased by weather lines and reddened and chapped by a cold replete with watery eyes, sneezing, and hacking cough. He had been waiting for them in the half-track at the Nars-sarssuaq runway. No sooner had introductions been made when Kneece announced he’d like to visit the site of the crash that had drawn Armando Grassi to this place.

  Zagottis had snuffled and sighed. “Then we need to go now. If we don’t, by the end of this storm, it’s gonna be a chore just to find the damn thing.”

  Now, peering at the wreck, Zagottis’s illness-soured mood turned still more bitter. “The pilot, this rooster of a first looey named McKesson, he figures he’s a real Mr. Hotshot. He’s practically fresh from ninety days of flight school so now he thinks he’s a regular Lindbergh. I see him, his whole crew, they got eyes red like stoplights, they been flyin’ all night, probably more. They’re runnin’ on pep pills. I tell him’s a squall comin’ up from the south off the water, got these leading gusts o’ wind tunneling through the offshore islands. I tell Lindbergh, Mr. Hotshot, I say, why not stand down a day or two, let it blow by, catch some sack time? Doesn’t listen, says this is a red-ball priority. Snaps his gum, says, ‘Gas me up and get me outta here, pal,’ thinks he can beat the storm outta here. My pilots,
Navy combat flyers, I got them standin’ down, but Mr. Hotshot —”

  “Doesn’t listen,” Kneece said.

  “I even put it down in the tower log, which I’m not supposed to, but I see this is a disaster comin’ and I want it on the record I talked to this McKesson, that it was Mr. Hotshot’s call not to sit it out. His wheels just clear the mat two hundred yards that way” — Zagottis pointed into the darkness past the C-47’s tail —”and that bitch-evil wind gets up under his starboard wing. Mr. Hotshot can’t bring ’er back, she flips, lands on ’er head. She tears up a nice stretch of my runway, skids off, her tanks go up, and here she sits.”

  “When was this?” Harry asked.

  “Two weeks yesterday. December first.”

  “Can we get inside?” Kneece asked. “I’m going to want a look.”

  “I was afraid you were gonna say that.” Zagottis sneezed, then instructed the half-track driver to keep the engine running so it wouldn’t freeze up, and to leave the vehicle’s headlamps and searchlight directed at the wreckage.

  They clambered out the rear door, then waded through the powdery snow. The walk became a struggle as they neared the aeroplane and the drifts grew waist-deep. The lieutenant commander floundered about until he managed to push through the snow and past the ajar fuselage door. He reached back to help pull a gasping Harry and Kneece clear of the snow. “Watch your step, fellas. Watch your head, too: low bridge.”

  With the plane on its back, the door sat high above the curved “floor” of the cabin, making for a long step down. The force of the impact had buckled most of the fuselage ribs.

  Its windows covered by banked snow, the C-47’s cabin was pitch dark except for the column of light through the door from the half-track. In that narrow swath Harry could see the interior of the cabin was as fire-blackened as the outside of the ship. Two weeks in Greenland’s winter gales hadn’t purged the interior of the reek of burnt petrol, charred wood, and scorched metal. The stench set Harry’s always problematic stomach roiling.