by Bill Mesce
Don’t say this, Harry was thinking. Please…
“Some of them were talking about sending you to the Pacific. One of them said Burma. Burma, Harry! ‘Let’s see how he does out in that shithole!’ How’d you think you would’ve done, Harry? Malaria put a nice yellow color in your cheeks? Maybe a little dysentery7 take something off that waistline of yours? No. You got to go home.”
Oh, God…
“I told them, I said, ‘Look, trust me, right now nobody wants this done with more than Harry Voss does. Send him home, he’ll be so happy he won’t be any trouble. And that’s how it’s been, hasn’t it, Harry? You didn’t get home and go squawking to some inspector general down in Washington about what happened, did you? You didn’t go running down to the Newark News and spill it, did you? No.”
Harry pushed himself from his chair and started moving toward the door. His face felt hot, he could feel himself sweating inside his tunic. His head was throbbing, harder than when it had rebounded off the side of Jim Doheeny’s aeroplane back at Kap Farvel.
“Jesus,” Ryan muttered. “You did know!” The colonel bolted from his chair to grab Harry by the arm. “That’s why you came here, isn’t it? That’s why you came back?”
Harry snarled, “If you want to find out how Armando Grassi got his jaw broken, leave your hand right where it is.” Joe Ryan let go of his friend’s arm. Harry left, not bothering to close the door behind him.
*
“It doesn’t make sense,” Woody Kneece muttered into his cup of coffee.
“From where they’re sitting, I’m sure it makes perfect sense.” Peter Ricks poured a quick splash from his flask into his cup. “What was it they told you, Kneece?”
“You want it again?”
“And again and again.”
“I feel like I’m being interrogated.”
“You are.”
The tones were getting sharper.
“Behave,” Harry said, without looking up from his work. “And keep your voices down.”
Harry had taken several mimeographed copies of the canteen’s daily menu, tom them into index-card-sized pieces, and now sat at the far end of a table in a comer of the dining hall notating the blank rear sides of the paper sections. Woody Kneece and Peter Ricks sat at the other end of the table. Whatever collegial sense had developed between them over the course of the day was swiftly evaporating.
“They told you what?” Ricks pressed.
“I was given authorization to go wherever I thought I had to go, to talk to whoever I felt I needed to talk to, in order to find out —”
“To find out who killed a third-rate second looey that nobody liked! That’s what makes shit sense, Kneece.”
“They said they were worried about the security angle.”
“That’s complete crap! Security is counterintelligence’s territory.”
“CI was already on it!”
“Then why bother with you? Why’d they pick you, Kneece? What’s so special about you they came to you for this?”
“How the hell do I know? Maybe they like my smile.”
“What’re you not telling us, Kneece!”
“It’s Captain Kneece, Lieutenant, and before you go sticking that finger in my face again, you better remember who’s got the most brass on his collar.”
Harry Voss put down his pen and began to set down his scribbled-upon pieces of paper, slowly, like a pensioner at the solitaire table. “What’re you so hot about, Pete?” he said calmly. “As I recall, you’re not in the JAG anymore.” His eyes flicked over to Kneece. “Can I ask a question, Woody? When you came to see me at my home, one of the first things you asked me about was what happened here in London last summer. You thought maybe it might have something to do with Grassi’s death.”
“And I was wrong. We already know that, right?”
“What I want to know is, how did you know Pete and Grassi worked with me on that case? The only people who knew they did — along with all the paperwork on the case — are here in London. But you knew a week ago in New Jersey. How is that?”
“It was part of my briefing when they assigned me the case.”
“What did they say to you at that briefing?”
“About what you’d expect —”
“What exactly did they say to you at that briefing?” Harry insisted.
“They told me Grassi had been killed in the Orkneys. It was an evident homicide but we had no real details, no ballistics or autopsy report, just word of a gunshot wound to the head. They told me he’d been last assigned to a post fifteen hundred miles from where he was found. They went over his personnel file with me. They told me the word was this was a guy who made a lot of enemies.”
“And that maybe he’d made some in London. In August.”
“Nobody pointed me in that direction. Hell, Major, you know the file on that case is sealed.”
“But they did mention that two other officers, along with Grassi, had been expressed out of England at the same time. From that you drew an obvious conclusion that something must have gone bad on that case.”
“It was obviously suspect —”
“It was never an investigation.” Harry sighed, scooping up his note cards and shuffling them into a neat pile.
“Oh, really?” Kneece was riled now “Just what was it, then?”
“They sent out a plumber with a mop and bucket to check for leaks.”
“Come again, Major?”
Ricks nodded, understanding. “You were suckered, Captain. They knew Grassi’s murder didn’t have anything to do with August.”
Harry slipped his notes and reading glasses inside his tunic. “What they were worried about was that poking into Grassi’s murder, somebody might butt into the August case. Or maybe they were worried that once Pete and I heard about Grassi, we might think it had something to do with August and that might push us to say things they didn’t want said to people they didn’t want us talking to. Or maybe it just gave them a cover to check whether any of us had let anything slip about it since they’d sent us on our separate ways.” Harry rubbed tired eyes. “But they didn’t give a damn about you finding Grassi’s killer.”
“Now you’re the one who’s reaching,” Kneece snapped.
Harry put an elbow on the table and parked his chin in the palm of his hand. He seemed almost reluctant to give Kneece the bad news. “What did you say in that report you turned over to McCutcheon last night?”
“I sealed it before I gave it to him.”
“I hope he didn’t cut his finger breaking that seal,” Peter Ricks muttered, and took a deep swig of his laced coffee.
“You think everybody’s in on this?”
“What did you say in your report?” Harry repeated. “Did you say anything about —”
“I never mentioned your August case,” Kneece said adamantly. “That was a suspicion I had, but I had nothing to tell them.”
“What did you tell them? What did you say about Duff?”
“I never mentioned his name.”
“But you did report what you found up in Orkney?” Peter Ricks asked.
“The major here’s always telling me we don’t know who back in the States might be involved, so I song-and-danced. Even though I agree with the major that this probably isn’t some black-market thing, I used that as a cover. I said we found signs in Orkney that maybe Grassi had stumbled across some smuggling thing —”
“Which,” Ricks interrupted, “if somebody at CIC-Washington is in on this, would’ve been enough for him to figure out you meant Duff.”
“Even if they’re not,” Harry said, “and their interest is more parochial, it still would’ve been enough for them to know it had nothing to do with the August case. Don’t you see, Woody? The minute you put down on paper that they were clear on the August incident they closed you down. They don’t give a damn about a third-rate second looey that nobody likes.”
“You know,” Peter Ricks mused, “maybe McCutcheon isn’t the one
who finked. Maybe this whole thing was about putting somebody they could trust on the scene.”
Woody Kneece was a rather quick-witted fellow, and Peter Ricks did not even have to finish his thought before Kneece rose in his seat, snarling: “Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute! Major, you’ve seen the way I’ve been pushing this all along! Do you —”
“Watch your tone, Woody. Sit down.”
Kneece blinked self-consciously, noticing the eyes of the other officers in the canteen swinging his way. He forced himself back into his chair and his tone into more moderate registers. “Do you really think —” He fell silent. Then he said, “You fellas are really something.”
“I don’t doubt you, Woody,” Harry said serenely “I’m just looking for any sign as to whether or not I should.”
“Like what kind of sign?”
“Until you get orders from your immediate superior terminating your investigation, that heavy-caliber travel authorization of yours is still in effect. Get us on the first, fastest transportation to find Coster.”
“Coster? Major, by now you know I don’t have a problem bending a rule or tiptoeing over a line here and there. But now you’re talking about straight-out disobeying orders, and before I get my ass hide nailed to the bam door —”
“You wouldn’t be disobeying orders, Woody. Not if you move fast.”
“McCutcheon stood right in front of me while he made me read that memo from —”
“You don’t report to McCutcheon. You don’t report to the Embassy Your direct superior is at CIC-Washington. It even says in that memo that your orders haven’t come through yet. Until they do —”
“That’s thin, Major. Real thin.”
Harry leaned forward, his voice low and even. “You almost got Jim Doheeny and his crew killed back in Greenland because you were so goddamned good and determined to find out who murdered Armando Grassi.”
Kneece stared. Then he shook his head, smiling, partly in resentment, partly in admiration. “Beautiful.” He turned to Ricks. “Was he always this good?”
“He seems to have gotten better.”
“You in for the ride, Lieutenant Ricks?”
“In for a penny…”
Woody Kneece sat silently for a moment, watching a pair of mess boys working their way round the dining room stringing Christmas garland along the walls. With a deep, sighing breath he rose. “Let me see what I can get us,” and he walked out of the canteen.
“You have gotten better at this,” Ricks told Harry.
“You don’t have to be a part of this, Pete.”
“Like I said, old habits die hard. Besides, you’re going to need a guide out there.”
“OK.” Harry stood to leave. “There’s something I’ve got to do before we go. And I’ve got another little chore for you. Do you know anybody you can ask about Kneece?”
Ricks pondered a moment, both the gravity of the request as well as the possibilities. “I don’t know how fast we’ll hear back. It won’t be before we leave.”
“Do it,” Harry said.
*
Not far from Rosewood Court, buried deep in the earth under the Georgian grace of Grosvenor Square, was the shadowy labyrinth of linked cellars and newly dug tunnels that was home to the Americans’ military intelligence unit; what the arcane system of U.S. military designations had labeled “G-2.” Imperator over this half-lit world of maps and charts, light tables and reconnaissance photographs, files and telewire machines was Christian Van Damm, who ruled from a glass-walled sanctum deep within the maze.
Those who had attended press briefings conducted by Van Damm usually saw a spindly underfed young man possessed of a death’s-door pallor, looking barely capable of rising to speak, let alone lord over the acutely analytical minds of the American military’s London staff. To underestimate Van Damm was fatal; inside that funereal body was a keenly vital and droll tongue that showed little mercy on those too slow-witted or protocol-bound to keep up with his own sharp directness.
Nonetheless, there was nothing at this particular moment that seemed vital or sharp-witted about Christian Van Damm. The sergeant escorting Harry through the underground complex had bade him wait outside the sanctum. The sergeant knocked gingerly on the door, then with equal caution opened it and entered. In the triangle of light through the open door Harry saw a litter of papers, and the midriff of a blanketed form draped across five wooden chairs lined up to form a functional if uncomfortable bed.
He heard the deferential mumble of the sergeant, then a sleepy grumble of response. More mumbling, then, more piercingly, “Who? Jesus, well yeah, show him on in!”
The lights flicked on in the cubicle; the sergeant beckoned Harry in.
The office was a blizzard of maps, paper, memos, and photographs tacked to walls, strewn across the floor, blanketing the desk. The stale air in the room was heavily flavored with body odor and the rank perfume of bad cigars. Christian Van Damm had thrown off his blanket and was sitting upright, clad in a rumpled uniform but shoe-and stocking-less. His bleary eyes squinting against the glare of the overhead light, he scratched at his unshaven chin, and pulled his mouth into a sleepy smile. “Like I told the man; Jesus! Voss! What’re you? The Ghost of Christmas Past?”
“Major Van Damm.”
Van Damm flicked at the silver oak leaves on his collar tab. “That’s ‘Lieutenant Colonel, sir, may I kiss your ring, sir,’ you peon.”
“Santa came early for you.”
Van Damm held out a hand. “Don’t just shake it, Voss, haul my ass up!”
Harry tugged and Van Damm rose. The younger man brought his blanket up with him and tossed it over a map propped on an easel in a comer. Before the blanket came down Harry had a glimpse of the Italian boot, and marker-drawn arrows indicating some force in the Tyrrhenian Sea aimed at a point on the west coast between Naples and Rome. “Not for public consumption,” Van Damm said.
“I remembered you keeping odd hours,” Harry told him, “but this is pretty odd even for you. Is this a matter of early to bed, or late to rise?”
Van Damm dropped into his desk chair, a ridiculously plush thing — wing-backed and covered with embroidered greenery — Harry guessed had been commandeered from one of the Georgian town houses above. “It’s our busy season.” Van Damm reached into a desk drawer and came up with a cellophane-wrapped cigar, a Tampa Nugget. He started to unwrap the cigar, then stopped. “I seem to remember you’re not too keen on these. You gotta forgive me, Voss, they’re like coffee for me. Tell you what; join me outside? I haven’t had a breath of outside air in two days.”
They found a bench on the green of the square. For a time they said nothing, looking out on the hushed island of withered shrubs and dry grass surrounded by blacked-out buildings. Though it was barely eight o’clock, the streets round the square were quiet and empty.
“It’s almost going to be a shame when the lights come back on and there’s enough gas for all the cars.” Van Damm lit his cigar and took a deep drag that spurred a deep, rasping cough.
Harry made a face at the rank odor of the Tampa Nugget.
“It’s this fresh air that’ll kill you, Voss. Didn’t you know that?”
“I was surprised to find you here. The last time I saw you, you said you were scouting a location — Where was it? Kensington, I think it was.”
“Eisenhower thinks a headquarters staff goes stale if they get too comfortable. Now he’s off in Algeria, wants to be close to Italy.”
“How’d you miss out on that move?”
“I explained to my good friend Ike —”
“Oh, he’s your good friend?”
Van Damm held up two intertwined fingers. “We’re like this. ‘Ike,’ I said, ‘you’re in the commanding-general racket; you have to go where the action is. Me, well, I’m in the intelligence racket. It’s kind of hard to make critical intelligence evaluations when all your background information is constantly in a file cabinet on a truck going somewhere.’ So, we agreed
we’d send some G-2 people along with him as liaison with the home office. We drew straws to see who’d get to live with the sand fleas.”
“And you drew long straw?”
“Voss, I am now a lieutenant colonel! I do not draw straws! I rig the drawing!”
They laughed, then fell quiet again.
“I never got a chance to say to you I was sorry about how that business turned out last summer,” Van Damm said.
“You’ve got nothing to apologize for. You did your job. The case wouldn’t’ve gotten as far as it did without you.” “And why is that a good thing?”
Harry shrugged.
“Well, it worked out, anyway,” Van Damm said.
“How do you mean?”
“They got what was coming to ’em, right? That way or the gallows, what’s the dif?”
“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.”
“And you, I heard you got to go home.”
“Yup. I got to go home.”
“You must be here about Grassi.”
Harry smiled. “How’d you…? What was it you used to call this? The Spy Brigade?”
“I was always telling you, Voss: it’s our job to know what’s going on. Although I’ll tell you the truth — there was no Spy Brigade stuff to it. It was more like the grapevine passed the word. I can’t believe they dragged you all the way back here for Grassi.”
“Actually, it’s not my case. I was just asked to come along and help out.”
“Who’s doing the snooping? CIC?”
Harry nodded.
“Not that it’s not nice to see you again, but what have I got to do with Grassi? I’m not a suspect or something, am I? I only met the guy that one time with you. That was enough to tell me I didn’t ever want to take a long car ride with him.” “You’re not a suspect. You know where they found him?”
“Orkneys. What was he doing up there?”
“That’s one of the things we were looking into.”
“‘Were’?”
“They’re going to turn the investigation over to the British.”