by Bill Mesce
“I’ll do it.” I undid the straps, slipped the sleeve from Ricks’ stump, and set the device softly down on the floor by his cot. I hopped back to my own cot while the corporal swung Ricks’ legs onto the canvas and pulled the blankets up to his chin. He stood over the sleeping captain for a moment, looking down on him, his face invisible to me in the darkness, then he neatly re–arranged our bags and quietly closed the door.
I heard the corporal’s cot creak as he climbed back into the bed.
“Andrew?”
He seemed to sense my intention. “I won’t say nothin’, Mr. Owen. I’m not one to judge. I still got all my parts.”
*
“Hey, Andy, do you think there’s one goddamn bump in this road you could not hit?”
I had come to agree with Peter Ricks that in this, his most recent sojurn on the Continent, he did seem condemned to a state of permanent discomfort. He was, again, crowded in the rear seat of the jeep amidst our bulging B–4s and the crate of paperwork, and every jostle and jerk of the jeep set detonations off within his hangover–addled cranium.
Sympathetic though poor Andy Thom might be, he was still faced with navigating the narrow, pitted road poring through a flat, heavy rain. It fell to me to man the hand crank for the windscreen blades, and I’m afraid I was not the tireless automaton the task required.
“Ya can rest yer arms a bit, Mr. Owen,” Thom said as he pulled the jeep to the side of the road. “I don’t know if it was those powdered eggs they served up for breakfast or that goop they give us last night – ”
“Bad mix,” Ricks grumbled from the back seat. “Like nitro and glycerin.”
“Fact is, I’m not gonna make it to the castle. Cap’n, ya wanna reach down there on the floor fer me? There’s a pack of T.P. Thanks.” And then the lad was treading carefully across the snow–turning–to–slush toward the trees bordering the road.
“He’s going to freeze his arse off out there,” Ricks said. “Literally.”
I humphed a half–laugh which was all I could muster against the damp chill.
“For some reason, I think that was what scared me the most when I first went on the line,” Ricks said, “Having to take a crap in the field.”
“Shy?”
“I don’t think it was that. I kept thinking what if Adolph drops an 88 on me while I’m taking a dump? Is that how I want to be found? Face in the mud and bare–arsed? ‘Dear Mr. and Mrs. Ricks, the Secretary of War regrets to inform you that your son was found with his arse in the breeze…’ I couldn’t get myself to go at all the first three days I was on the line.” I heard the crackle of the cellophane on his packet of cigarettes, then the crumpling of the empty packet. “Hey, Mr. Owen, can you butt me?”
I turned half–round. He was slumped in the small rear seat, woolen beanie pulled down over his eyes, arms wrapped round himself, eyes staring at the canvas roof of he jeep. “Peter, I think we’re long past the ‘Mr. Owen’ stage, don’t you?”
A tired grin. “What is it, then? Ed? Eddie?” With a regal flourish: “Ed–ward?”
“Eddie.” I drew my own packet from my windcheater and handed it across. “They’re American. Lucky Strike. Is that all right? Keep the packet. I have another in my bag.”
His Ronson flicked and the jeep soon filled with blue haze eddying along the ribs of the roof. The rain made soft splats on the canvas.
“Eddie, about last night…”
“No need, Peter.”
“I wouldn’t want Harry to think, well, worry or whatever – “
“It’s all right.”
“First time since I left England. Won’t happen again. At least not until this is over.” After a pause, “What about…?” He meant Andy Thom.
“He’s a good lad, Peter. Not to worry. Safe as houses.”
Another pause. I thought Thom was taking a frightfully long time. Maybe he had frozen his arse off.
“You ever dream about…what happened to your leg?”
“I’ve nothing to dream about. Don’t really remember it, actually. Traumatic shock and all that, the old slate of memory gone completely tick, eh? But there is a dream…” I reached for my cigarettes, forgetting I’d turned them over to Ricks. But he sensed my need; a tap on my shoulder and I turned about to find him proffering the packet. I drew one, lit it from his lighter, settled back in my seat.
“Aye, well, you see I’m swimming in a sort of cellar, jolly big place, labyrinth, corridors running this way and that. The sort of cellar you’d see beneath a place like the chateau. There’s an odd light, like that queer light you see in a swimming pool at night. I’m swimming along, and there’s a hole in the stone wall, large enough for a man to pass through. It’s quite dark on the other side, completely black.
“I swim to the hole to look in, can’t see a bloody thing… Then there’s a tug at my leg. I turn and this shark has me. Bites right here – ” my hand hovered about the end of my stump “ – where it ends. You know, I’ve never seen a shark in real life, only in the cine. But there it is. I can see the white teeth sunk into my flesh, his head turned a bit so I’m looking into his eye. Black. Utterly, utterly black.
“The water starts filling with blood. It’s gushing from where he has me, all round the leg, the way you’d see steam jetting from a separated line. I’m punching at him, pounding his head, trying to hit that cold eye of his, but he doesn’t let go. I can barely see him through all the blood…”
I shrugged and turned back round to Ricks. “That’s it. Peter, the drinking… It won’t help. I know. Was that what last night was about? Your arm?”
A bitter ghost of a smile. “Eddie, if you asked, I couldn’t even keep track of my different nightmares. You never forget the first man you kill. Or the first of your own men you lost. But the rest…” He closed his eyes. Not out of pain, but fatigue. Not the sort that tires the body, but the kind that drags at the heart. “It’s just an army of people without faces.” His eyes crawled slowly open. “Except…”
Somehow, I knew. “Canterbury.”
Why, of all the men in the faceless army which marched through Peter Ricks’ troubled slumbers, had the two men slain in Canterbury retained their identity enough to haunt him? Theirs had been an unlawful execution, aye, but one rightly done. But before I could ask the question, a shivering Andy Thom had clambered back behind the wheel of the jeep and had us heading northwards, back to the Chateau d’Audran and Harry.
CHAPTER FIVE: Dayspring
HARRY WAS WAITING FOR US in the shelter of the arch of the chateau’s main gate. “C’mon in!” he yelled over the rain, waving us toward the keep. “The MP’s’ll park the jeep and bring the bags in.”
Andy Thom stayed behind to insure that the paperwork made it inside intact and dry, while Ricks and I hurried through the rain after Harry. The shivery entry hall was an improvement over the outside only by virtue of being dryer. “Let’s go up to my room,” Harry said, leading us up the staircase curving out of the entry foyer. “I’ve got a fire going.”
“I see a lot more transport parked out front,” Ricks noted. “Would that herald the return of Captain Courie? And his entourage?”
“He brought a mess crew back with him – ”
“Thank the good Christ,” I said.
“ – along with a pile of groceries. Real food!”
“Thank the good Christ!”
“He got back the morning you left. You might’ve passed him on the road.”
“I wished I’d known,” Ricks said. “I would’ve waved.”
“I wished you’d known, too,” Harry said. “You could’ve run him off the road.”
Harry opened the door to his quarters and ushered us in.
“Grates on one’s nerves, does he, eh?” I suggested.
Harry grinned wryly. “Oh, I think you’ll find him a joy; an absolute joy. You’ll see for yourself,” and he closed the door behind us, beckoning us to take the seats he’d arranged by the welcoming flames in his hearth. “He’s
got a meet–and–greet arranged for tonight. A chance for the respectful opposition to shake before fighting like gentlemen.”
“Appropriately chivalric under the circumstances,” I commented.
I quickly noted that Harry had certainly been busy in our absence. There were ubiquitous foolscap pads covered with jottings and diagrams scattered here and there about the room, blue–covered depositions spread on the rumpled bed along with those damnable index cards of his.
He could irritate one to distraction with those cards, flipping them endlessly in his hands. It was an old school trick of his. As a way of cogitating on a problem, Harry would boil each element down to a simple phrase – maybe just a few words – jotted on a single card. He would then take his deck of cards, like some legalistic Tarot deck, and spread them on a table top, now able to see the entire issue and its component parts at a glance. Then would come the mixing and matching as he moved this card there, and that one there, and somewhere in the process, if there was enough data on that table top, there would come a Gestalt moment, the gaps between the cards would mentally fill in, and there’d be a solution. Or at least an answer.
Harry had an electric ring set on a small table warming a pot of coffee. He poured steaming mugs and distributed them about before sitting with us by the fire. “So, how’d it go?”
“Fine,” Ricks said.
Harry studied the wan captain for a moment. “You all right, Pete?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t look that well.”
“Long hours, Harry,” I said. “We were all putting in long hours. And I’m afraid we’ve all paid a price for the hospital cuisine. What was last night’s offering, Peter? Some peculiarly American devising called ‘meat loaf.’ Wait until Andy Thom comes up; he can tell you his own very special horror story in that regard, providing that tales of the gastrointestinal tract are your cup of tea. Suffice to say I advise against standing to his rear.”
I saw a brief flash of gratitude from Ricks. Harry grinned at the remark because he knew he was supposed to. But he looked the captain over closely, again, then me, as if evaluating the validity of my story. Then, indicating that whether he believed it or not, it was a story he would accept, he nodded and asked for a report on the Wiltz interviews.
“We got through everybody on the list,” Ricks said. “Quite a pile of material. I don’t know what the probative courtroom value of any of it is; you’ll have to figure that out. But if I might offer a strategic analysis from the view of a doughfoot, let me say that if we’d fucked up like this on D–Day, I’d be boning up on my German phrasebook by now.”
Harry nodded glumly, evidently unsurprised.
Ricks explained to Harry about the as yet unidentified wireless operator.
Harry responded with a puzzled shake of his head. “Dominick didn’t say anything about him. Then again, he hasn’t been saying much...period.” He saw the quizzical looks on our faces and responded by saying, “It’s been like pulling teeth. He doesn’t want to talk about the case; he doesn’t want to talk about what happened at the hill. All he does want to do is tell stories about ‘the old days,’ which for him is just a couple of years ago when he was still in school.” A musing pause: “It does feel like a long time ago.” A sigh, and back to business. “I’ll bring this thing about the radioman up with him, but I have a feeling Andy is heading back down to Wiltz tomorrow. I hope he doesn’t mind.”
“Och, you’ll not get a word of complaint out of that one, Harry,” I pronounced.
“He’s a good kid,” Ricks seconded.
Something there touched Harry deep inside, a mordant button momentarily pushed, but then it quickly passed. He went on to explain the program he had outlined for the coming days, ruing – as he would, many times – that Dominick Sisto had waited so long to reach out to him. Once the schedule for the next few days was outlined (which, actually, gave me very little to do) he offered us a sampling of the new luncheon menu being provided in the dining hall.
“You up for a hot lunch, Eddie?” Ricks beckoned.
“Just a moment behind you, Peter. I need to wait for the bags, there’s something I need to get.”
“Go ahead on down, Pete,” Harry said. “I want to get a quick look at what you guys brought back before I go down.”
Ricks stood a moment at the door, not quite convinced our reasons for staying behind were as innocuous as we hoped they sounded, before exiting.
After the door closed, Harry turned to me grinning, already anticipating – with a certain amount of mean glee – the discomfort his next remarks would cause. “You have a fan.”
“Oh?”
“She asked every day if we had any word about when you were coming back.”
In my middle years I was surprised I still had the capacity to blush. I harrumphed, unable to think of anything inappropriate to reply that wouldn’t give Harry even more enjoyment.
But then his face grew serious and his voice lowered: “Do I need to worry about him?” and he nodded after Peter Ricks’ point of exit.
“He’ll be fine, Harry. But I’m sure you recognize…he’s changed.”
He nodded sympathetically. “That’s to be expected, right? Didn’t…didn’t it change you?”
As per usual, Harry grew shy discussing the matter of my leg.
“It’s not just that, Harry. Canterbury bothers him.”
He seemed surprised.
“It occurs to me,” I continued, “that you’re not as bothered by it as he is. I find that odd, Harry. I always thought of you as a proper letter–of–the–law sort.”
“So did I,” he said, grunting to his feet and beckoning me toward the door.
The point seemed to trouble him enough for me to let it be. He held the door for me but as I passed he said, almost in an embarrassed whisper, “I just keep remembering how close I came to doing the same thing myself.”
*
“You know, I never went into private practice,” Captain Leonard Terhune Courie said. I should say he “narrated,” for even in his most innocuous statements, at his most conversational, there was an air of the practiced performance to him. Like an emotive actor, he would talk at his cast mate, but play to the crowd. “Never interested me for some reason. Even when I was still thinking about law school…Oh, it’s very necessary, don’t get me wrong. I suppose on a sheer tonnage scale, most of the legal paperwork in a given year comes from that side of the fence,” this last coming as the duke professing admiration of the serfs. “It’s not like the district attorney’s office is all glamor and headlines. Most of the work can be pretty mundane. In that respect, it’s no different than Judge Advocate work. The interesting cases – ”
“Such as…?” A motion of Ryan’s head indicating the case at hand.
“Well, yes, of course, like this one; that’s the rarity.”
As befitting a bloke with visions of dukedom, Courie had laid on his gentlemen’s soirée in the main dining hall. As a nod to our de facto hostess, he had invited la comtesse though I admit to being surprised that she’d accepted. She was installed at the head of the long table, with Ryan to her right, then Courie and Lieutenant Alth arranged alongside. Courie had been indicating for Harry to sit to the chatelaine’s left, but the lady had risen from her chair, taken me by the elbow and escorted me to that seat, much to the befuddlement of Courie and the amusement of Harry, Peter Ricks and Andy Thom who ranged along my side of the table. But despite the gesture of invitation, once at dinner she’d seemed oblivious to all; in the way she silently attended to her plate she could very well have been sitting alone.
On meeting the 35–year–old Leonard Courie, what could not help but first be struck by that outsized head. The rest of him was rather slender, except for a slight protuberance round the waist, so much so that one wondered how his pipette–like neck could hold up that bulbish cranium. His features were squeezed down in the narrow, lower portion, seemingly pressed down by the sizable dome of his forehead, which was m
ade to look even larger by a vastly recessed hairline, and thinning strands vainly stretched across the wide pate in a feeble effort to reach the far side.
Despite the tone of polite conversation, the gracious comportment and deference, the detestation between he and Ryan was almost palpable. I found this particularly ironic in that, as my later researches would reveal, they had much in common. Both came from somewhat impoverished circumstances; both pursued their profession as much for the status and cachet it endowed than for the personal fulfilment it could provide; both had made rapid progress through their respective ranks as much through clever maneuvering as through accomplishment.
I had always bridled at Ryan’s practiced bonhomie, his too dexterous ability – and I dare say enjoyment – at navigating the shoals of headquarters politics. But in those days in Belgium, there were times when the façade would drop and I would see that there was a real charm buried deep beneath the unctuous maneuverings, and still a few flickers of real feeling – at least when it came to his friend Harry Voss. I even began to feel a certain sympathy toward him, sensing that as he approached his later years he was unimpressed with the sum total of his gains. I venture to say that perhaps what annoyed him most about Leonard Courie was what he’d come to be most unhappy about within himself.
“Did you specialize, Colonel?” Courie asked Harry. “What was it? Family law? Contracts?”
In some ways, Harry’s conduct echoed that of la comtesse. Though he responded when spoken to, he volunteered nothing and he, too, seemed focused on his dining rather than the skillfully condescending opponent across from him.
“A little bit of everything,” Harry replied.
“Good old–fashioned general practice!” Courie effused. “Good for you! You don’t see much of that in the cities these days. In the cities, it’s all law firms and there’s something missing in that kind of practice; some kind of heart. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Harry shrugged. “You’d have to work in a firm to know.”
“My compliments on the food, Captain,” Andy Thom chimed in. “Back home, we used to be real proud of the beeves we raised on our spread. When I got in the Army and got my first taste of Army chow, I used to wonder what bad thing happened to those poor cows ‘tween the time we sold ‘em off ‘n’ the time the Army got its mitts on ‘em.”