Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  There’s not much straight poop to dig up on Lt Col Wilton Cary Edghill The files are still off limits, and this has been Edghill’s Post of Command since before most everybody else got here so nobody remembers the hows, whens and whatevers of him coming on. But this guy’s none too shy showing off his college ring — Harvard class of ‘37. Whoop dee doo. From what I hear he lets you know that Harvard is the brain factory of the world and no matter what school anybody else went to if they didn’t go to Harvard you’re some kind of 4-F moron (I seem to remember YOU didn’t go to Harvard, ha-ha). What I find out from calling around at Harvard is Edghill’s pop is good pals with guess who? Forget it; you won’t guess — Joe Kennedy. Yeah, THAT Joe Kennedy! Edghill Sr. is some kind of big deal $$$$$ guy up in Boston so he deals a lot with old Joe, and they’re both supposed to be big with the local Dem machine. Edghill Jr. was some kind of fellow dorm rat at Hah-vahd with Joe K. Junior. Edghill Jr. even took time off from school to work for old Joe when he was working for FDR in ‘36.

  This is the kind of b.s. artist Little Wilton is — ask anybody in his area and they’ll tell you he’s always going on about how the limeys and the commies played FDR for a sucker getting him into a war that’s none of our business. And then he goes and works The Chief’s campaign.

  Edghill came out of H with a business degree, which people tell me is some kind of license to steal so with old Joe as a pal he’s keeping the right company. The poop at Hah-vahd is Little Wilton’s aiming for a political career and figures a few years in uniform won’t hurt, or showing the Dem party bosses what a good boy he can be (which explains him working for FDR). Now here’s where it gets REAL curious —

  Little Wilton comes out of OCS and in a couple months he’s got his captain’s ladders and a special job at G-l here in D.C. Two bars, his own Department, and nobody gets to ask him BOO about what he does. And this is AFTER he was investigated by CID and Army Intel as a possible security risk because of all that prop wash he dished out about Roosevelt and the war.

  The rumor mill says old Joe pulled a lot of strings with his Dem party chums to get Edghill into G-l, a favor to Wilton Sr. keeping his son from ending up someplace where he can get his head blown off. It’s also old Joe doing a favor for himself by putting Little Wilton where he can see Joe still gets all his little treats while he’s serving the flag at Prince’s Gate, even when the rest of England is starving. This last part isn’t a guess — there was flak about old Joe using military transports — or I should say Misusing them. FDR gave old Joe the sack in ‘40 but funny enough Little Wilton doesn’t lose his job. Here it gets REAL curious AGAIN —

  Old Joe is back in the States, Wilton Jr.’s enlistment is almost up, everybody’s smelling a war, so when the kid’s hitch is up he should head for the hills, but the kid re-ups. Go figure.

  And while you’re figuring, figure why he’s still got this office nobody’s supposed to stick their nose in, and he gets bucked to major and a year later he makes light colonel. You sniff around you get the impression Joe K is still pushing Little Wilton, but I can’t dig up a WHY.

  But I’ll let you worry about that. I eagerly await your return, the opening of O Blessed Black Book, and the deliverance of a few numbers and addresses.

  The jeep drew to a stop in front of the G-2 building. Harry shoved the pages at Kneece. “Do some cramming while I’m inside.”

  “You want me to wait —”

  “Right here. I’ll be out as soon as I can.”

  “It’s cold out here! Can’t I wait in —”

  “No!”

  And Harry was gone.

  *

  “I’m real curious about just what in the hell you’ve gotten yourself into, Voss.” Christian Van Damm closed the door of his smoky kingdom behind Harry and went round the windowed cubicle drawing each set of blinds.

  “I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into,” Harry replied honestly. “You’re supposed to tell me what I’ve gotten myself into.”

  “I don’t know exactly what it all means, but 1 don’t like any of it.” Harry couldn’t remember ever seeing the G-2 man’s eyes so awake. “Remember before you left, I said the circumstances didn’t scream, but justified a voice raised in concern? I’m thinking about letting out a scream.” Van Damm sat in his throne behind his desk and reached for one of his rancid cigars.

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Van Damm studied Harry: his drawn face, his mud-splattered combat kit. With a nod that betokened respectful deference, he set down the cigar. “We went back a month to see if there was some kind of immigration record on an Erik Sommer. Nothing. How long can he have been here, I’m wondering? So we went back two months. Nothing.”

  “How far back did you go?”

  “A year.”

  “And still nothing?”

  Van Damm grinned slyly. “I didn’t say that.” He flipped open a file folder. “Take notes, Voss, because you don’t walk out of here with this. I don’t need black-and-white proof floating around that I’ve been doing something I shouldn’t be doing. OK. Keep in mind, the Brits keep a pretty close eye on whoever comes into the country these days, neutral or not. But going backward from December, they don’t have anything on an Erik Sommer until July of this year: coming into England by air — via Lisbon.”

  “Portugal?”

  “How many Lisbons do you know? A Swede coming into England via Portugal — that’s a hell of a long way around. And Sommer’s not alone. You go back over the rest of the year and five names — all supposedly Swedish nationals — keep showing up on the flight manifests, over and over, the same bunch of names: Sommer, a guy named Bjorg” — he pronounced it Ba-jorg — “another guy named Thulin, and a husband-and-wife number. The Nykvists. Maybe these little jaunts go back further than a year, but we had to back off because people are starting to nose around wondering why we’re nosing around. The Lisbon joyrides stop in August. You remember that civilian passenger plane the krauts shot down in August? Flying up from Lisbon?”

  “I remember.”

  “That actor was on it, Leslie Howard. You like him? He was a little too Englishy for my taste.”

  “He was no Hoot Gibson.”

  “Down into the drink goes Leslie Howard and everybody on the plane with him, including Mr. You-Don’t-Really-Believe-I’m-Swedish Thulin.”

  “You think Thulin’s why the Germans shot that plane down.”

  “Maybe they just didn’t like Leslie Howard a whole lot. But, like I said, that ol’ gang o’ mine stops taking the plane after that. I had our people in Stockholm do some snooping. They may not have been coming in by plane, but they were still coming. Once each month since August, one or another of these question marks has been coming to Merry Old England by boat.”

  “I thought you said there was no immigration record —”

  Van Damm sat back in his plush chair, a smug look-at-the-magic-I-can-do smile on his face, his fingers laced across the front of his stained shirt. “They didn’t come in by commercial ship. They applied to the Swedish government for permission to travel here by private vessel —”

  “A yacht,” Harry said. “It wouldn’t happen to be called the Rascal, would it?”

  “Maybe in England it is,” Van Damm mused. “In Sweden it’s the Bifrost.”

  “The what?”

  “That’s Swedish.”

  “For what? Twice as icy?”

  “Damn, you’re an uncultured son of a gun, Voss.” Harry glared. “OK, I looked it up. The Bifrost is the rainbow bridge between Asgard — that’s where all the Viking gods are supposed to live — and the earth, which ain’t as nice a neighborhood. Especially lately.”

  “Wait a minute, you did say there was no immigration —”

  “I said there’s no record of them coming into this country. But there are records of them leaving Sweden. There’s no record of the Bifrost coming into any port in the U.K. But the harbormaster at Goteborg records the Bifrost leaving Sweden for England four time
s since August, the last time being a week ago: December seventeenth. You want to hear something else that’ll put your eyebrows up around your hairline? Our people did some peeping into Swedish shipping registries —”

  “No Bifrost.”

  “We’re not talking about some six-foot rowboat, either, Voss, not if this thing can handle open water from Goteborg to someplace down here. That’s the North Sea you’re crossing there, my friend. The Swedish shipping registry should have it listed. Now let me put your eyebrows up behind your ears. The Swedish state Department has no record of issuing a passport or any kind of travel papers to Sommer, Thulin, Ba-jorg-whatever-the-hell-his-name-is, or Mr. and Mrs. Nykvist.”

  Van Damm again reached for his cigar, and, again, Harry dissuaded him with a look. “You’re killing me, Voss.”

  “Better you than me.”

  “You know what I’m thinking, and if you’re half as smart as I like to think you are, you should be thinking the same thing.”

  “They’re Germans.”

  Van Damm nodded gravely. Unconsciously, he reached for his cigar, caught himself, and jammed it in a desk drawer out of tempting sight. “That explains why they were coming through Lisbon. Franco may like to call himself neutral, but Spain’s the friendliest — and fastest — route out of occupied Europe: to Lisbon, and then to England. And you’d have to be a German — and a well-thought-of German to boot — to move around as freely as these guys seem to.”

  “If they started by coming through Lisbon, wouldn’t it have been a better cover for them to pretend to be Portuguese?”

  “My guess is they figured their Aryan good looks wouldn’t’ve mixed too well with Portuguese names. What’s keeping me up nights is trying to figure out what they’re up to. They’re not refugees: They keep going back and forth. And they’re not agents.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Unless they’re the dumbest spies Admiral Canaris has ever put in the field. Their covers are rank amateur and I mean rank as in stink — that’s why it was so easy to pick ’em apart. But here’s the real kick-you-out-of-bed-at-night: The Brits know about ’em.”

  Harry blinked. “You’re talking about the British authorities. British Intelligence, British immigration, British —! How do you know?”

  “Thulin died in that plane crash. It wouldn’t’ve taken much homework at all to figure out he wasn’t who his ID said he was. So, you know who went to the Brit Foreign Office and said ‘if you find the body I want it’? Your pal Sir John Duff. Here’s a guy who’s a big shot in British arms, he’s got a tie to a dead somebody who ain’t the nice, safe neutral he says he was, and the Brits just let it go. No follow-up, no nothing. There’s more.” Van Damm paused, shaking his head, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. “The different Intelligence groups don’t always know what all the other groups are doing. Every once in a while, maybe one of our operations bumps into one of theirs. But we’re a pretty collegial bunch. Something like that happens, I get asked over to MI 6 for tea, I sit with my opposite number, and it’s all, ‘Pip pip, old bean, good show, but you’re treading on our toes, eh? That’s our joe you’re poking at with a stick, so be a good chap and back off, eh? Good fellow, pip pip!’ So I asked around over there. Don’t get your shorts in a bunch, Voss, it was all real informal, real friendly, off-the-record, and your name didn’t come up once. But I didn’t get my cup of tea this time, Voss. What I got was a real informal, real friendly ‘Butt the hell out, Yank!’ No explanation, no nothing, just a big, blank wall with ‘Do Not Enter’ all over it.”

  “Have you ever come up against something like that?”

  “It happens. Maybe something is so classified only the big mucky-mucks know about it. But I don’t like this, Voss. Four krauts having tea and biscuits with a wheeler-dealer in British armaments is what I do call a screaming security risk. Listen, Voss — I know this started out as a favor, but it just turned into something else. This is bad with a capital B, understand? What I should do is go up the T.O., flag my senior at SHAEE Even if this is some tip-top-secret classified job, him they’ll tell, at least enough for him to feel safe and happy and come back to me with something to make me feel —”

  “Safe and happy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait on that.”

  “Why?”

  “A day. Eighteen hours. Just until tomorrow morning.”

  “Voss, let me repeat: Why?”

  Harry flipped his notebook closed and slipped it into his breast pocket, then folded his reading glasses. “I have a chance to find out what this is all about.”

  “And if I make noise, everybody goes to ground, is that it?”

  “Tomorrow morning, I don’t care if you stand out in front of Buckingham Palace and tell the world that Sir John Duff and Fatso Goering double-date. Just give me until 0600. By that time, this may all be academic… and you’ll be kept clear of this, which, I’m starting to feel, will be a very good place to be.”

  “For me,” Van Damm agreed with a certain amount of unease. “But what about you?”

  Harry was already on his feet. “I am touched by your concern, Colonel. Give me until tomorrow and I’ll buy you a box of those filthy weeds you smoke myself.”

  Van Damm closed his eyes, shook his head. “I’m gonna hate myself in the morning, but how can I refuse an offer like that? By the way: How was Italy?”

  “See Rome and die.”

  *

  “Where’s Peter Ricks?”

  “Don’t you want to get in out of the rain?” Kneece asked.

  Harry remained standing by the driver’s door of the jeep. “Where is Ricks?”

  “At the hospital, I guess. That’s still his billet. What’d you find out?”

  “Later,” Harry said, “helping” Kneece out of his seat into the rain by tugging on his elbow.

  “What’re you doing?” the captain asked unhappily, hunching up his shoulders as rain splashed down his collar.

  “Go find Ricks,” Harry replied, climbing behind the wheel. “You both go to the Rose and Crown and wait for me. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Did you happen to notice all this rain coming down on my head?”

  “Don’t whine, Woody.” And Harry sped off.

  *

  I’d been finishing one of those airy-fairy items Himself referred to as a Stiff Upper Lip piece: one of these bits of morale-propping propaganda masquerading as an anecdotal bit of color. This particular column featured a dotty old bird living alone in a row house in the Blitz-savaged South End, eccentric in an adorably English way She talked to her cats, set tea for them in the overgrown garden in her yard. The garden, a tangle of brambles and untamed flowers, had gotten quite out of hand (“I keep meaning to get to it,” she apologized in her birdlike little chirp — or so I wrote), but finally the yard was tackled by sympathetic neighbors who chipped in — also, in that adorably English way — and put her garden straight for her. Lo and behold, as they hacked away at the brambles, they found a 230-pound German bomb buried in the dirt up to its stabilizing fins. The UXB squad that came in to remove the bomb guessed it was a stray that had been sitting there since the Blitz. The moral of the story is — so I wrote — “Tend your gardens regularly!!” (I knew Himself would never tolerate that second exclamation point; I added it just to taunt him.)

  The only undoctored truth to the tale was the bit about the bomb. The facts were that she was a sour old spinster who had let her garden fall into the same state of disregard as her seedy little home. She had a “bugger ’em all” attitude regarding the sensibilities of her neighbors, smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish, swore like a sailor, and dressed like a ragpicker. The huggable pack of kitties were actually feral felines feasting on the horde of field mice that had found a home in the tangles of brambles. The generous neighbors had been moved less by sympathy than by the health threat posed by the zoo garden next door. I doubt many a tear would’ve been shed along that street had that 250 pounds
of TNT detonated square on the old bird’s noggin.

  I was just finishing my rewrite, trying to incorporate Himself’s one-word editorial comment — “Soften!!!” (only He was licensed to indulge in superfluous exclamation points) — when my phone rang. “Can you get out for an early lunch?”

  “Who is — Harry? Harry!”

  “How’s the Rose and Crown sound?”

  “By Jesus, where are you?”

  “In a jeep out in front. Hurry up. I’ll treat.”

  “Good Christ, mate, you’ve touched my flinty Scot’s soul.” I grabbed my hat and coat, and in a minute I was hobbling as fast as I could to the jeep at the curb. I stopped halfway through the door, frozen by the sight of Harry in his mud-daubed kit, his eyes ember red and sitting atop gray pouches. “New uniform?”

  “All the kids are wearing them.”

  I slid in and the jeep lurched off. “Harry, it’s good to see you, and intact, more or less. I was worried. Your friend Doheeny — who strikes me as a royally decent sort — that visit of his, that business of The Last Letter… That was a bit of melodrama I could have well done without, mate.”

  “Do you know where I was?”

  “Doheeny guessed Italy, which made me guess you’ve seen Coster.”

  “Yeah. I saw Coster.”

  There was a heaviness to the way he said it, not just in his voice, but in the haunted look behind his eyes, and it pained me to see it. What pained most was that, by experience, I knew what it was. There’s a bit from Ecclesiastes, I think: “In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

  Like all the other public houses in England at the time, the Rose & Crown was open only a few hours in the afternoon and then again in the evening, as a means of stretching rationed liquor supplies. It was still an hour from the afternoon opening, but for the fiver Harry supplied Lil, she gave us run of the room, and for another few quid from Woody Kneece provided a piping pot of tea and a plate of nibbles. Harry ensconced himself in a booth alone. He laid out his little pieces of paper — wrinkled and dog-eared veterans from the trek across the North Atlantic; new ones made on a borrowed bar tablet. He made his notes, shifting the pieces of paper this way and that, peering hard at them through his reading spectacles. I sat over my cup of tea, fascinated.