Liberated

by Steve Anderson

  Then, suitcases and travel bags, still bearing the owners’ names in white chalk.

  Next, toys. Dolls and tiny teacups, airplanes and trucks, dreidels.

  At the end stood a pile of metal ware, place settings and such all mixed together, most well tarnished and some made of tin. Votives, bowls and jugs with handles so worn they glistened. Battered old goblets, candlesticks, and menorahs, naturally.

  And another tear rolled down my cheek, splashing on my wrist. I ran and stomped outside, my elbows cocked and my fists set like some hell-bent Marine.

  Outside the camp, Emil stood between our two motorcycles and drank from a canteen. He pointed to the road. Katarina was a quarter-mile down talking to refugees with a cart. A skinny dog and three puppies circled the scene, sniffing each other and wagging their tails.

  “Always getting her nose in things, that girl,” Emil said.

  My limbs were heavy, tired. I had sat on the ground and slouched, my hands limp in my lap. “She’s good, I’ll give her that. She made short work out of me,” I muttered.

  “Say again?”

  “Forget it. Just forget it. Maybe I better take a finger or two of that hooch.”

  “Of course.” Emil handed down the canteen.

  The sky had cleared in the center, leaving clouds only along the horizon. Emil sat in his saddle and leaned back in the sun. He pulled off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt, his skin glowing white, his cheekbones, knuckles, and the knobs of his collarbone wanting to poke through his skin. Meanwhile, I stayed down on the ground and scratched at the dirt like some lonesome boy in a sandbox as if some answer to my feelings lay just beneath the surface. Unknowingly, I was drawing a rough layout of the camp.

  “You killed him,” I said. “You killed Henk. Good for you. But, still he lives in your head.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Just like that, Dachau stopped plaguing me. Heimgau replaced it. I had to be dead honest with myself. I had started wanting Major Membre’s head on a platter more than I was hoping to make a clear-cut example out of the torture-murderer of Heimgau. The major seemed to be—had to be—my culprit, but did I really know it? Did I really want to understand, really grasp what had happened? One very can-do colonel named Spanner had showed me not to muck things up too much with pondering like I was doing now. The only thing to understand was action, he was saying. Yet here came Kat to remind me I shouldn’t let brains and drive defeat heart and soul, otherwise I’d be just another sucker for power like the rest of them. I didn’t know if that was what she meant to show me, but that was the way I saw it.

  We passed the canteen. The whiskey was smoother. I was coming around. I stood. “Funny thing. I’m the Ami here. Your big liberator. I should be the one taking her in there.”

  Emil looked at me, cupping a hand over his eyes.

  “I’m just realizing something,” I added. “When I was heading into Germany with the army? We never passed a concentration camp. Not a one. And I never even thought of visiting one. It didn’t even occur to me. Tricky thing, sympathy. I’ve been to more zoos here. I wanted to throw up back in there, but I couldn’t.”

  “The tears can be worse. They weigh on you. You were gone awhile.”

  “Yeah. That GI guard calmed me down, lit me up. We were watching a crew of SS POWs pass by. And you know what this Joe says? ‘Sir,’ he says, ‘you wanna go take one of them Heini bastards aside and give em a good licking, go right ahead. Makes me feel better …’ And you know, that was the first time I didn’t take offense to that—to the word Heini.”

  “I don’t blame Germans,” Emil said. “I don’t even blame Nazis. I blame people who want to live at the expense of others.”

  “I’ll try and remember that.”

  “You will. That’s your real name—Heinrich?”

  “Yeah.”

  Emil nodded. He handed me the canteen but I waved it away.

  “In any case. I didn’t take the GI up on his offer.” I knew why. Emil probably knew. I was scared I would not be able to stop what I started.

  We heard far away shouts, popping sounds. A black plume was rising from the compound—another cellblock being torched. A bitter grit tickled our noses.

  “We buy weapons,” Emil said in German.

  “Come again?”

  “We buy weapons.”

  “Your racket, you mean. Should I be hearing this?”

  “Yes.”

  “You deal in weapons?”

  “Not deal. We buy them, and we keep them. Rifles, handguns, mortars if we can find them, German or American, it doesn’t matter. Any and all ammunition. It’s all very illegal.”

  “Very illegal? It’s the most illegal, more illegal than meds.” I raised the canteen. “Well, good for you. Keep at it.”

  “Thanks. Bread and produce, GI coffee and chocolate, this is all very well, but it only buys so much, you know?”

  “I do. I mean, I can imagine.” I broke open a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes. Down the road, the refugees were laughing with Katarina, who was lifting a jug to her mouth with both hands. The dogs slept in a pile at her feet. I lit up. “I’ll do what I can for you. If I can.”

  “Fine.” Emil patted me on the shoulder.

  I hopped on my saddle. “Now come on, let’s grab Kat before she trades for those pups.”

  As if hearing me, Katarina turned and made her way back up the road. Emil and I waited for her, slumped in our saddles like weary cowboys admiring a carefree young prairie wife, just watching her walk and watching the refugees watch her walk.

  “I’m sorry, I have to get back,” I told her.

  “Well, did you tell him?” she said to Emil. “It doesn’t look like you told him.”

  “He told me,” I said. “They’re looking for goods they can fight with.”

  “Not that,” Katarina said.

  Emil nodded. He turned to me. “Your house, in Heimgau. Your requisitioned billet? It last belonged to a Nazi who’s dead as you know—the brother of that brown priest, Father Plant. But before that, it belonged to the family Beckstein. To Abraham.”

  Nineteen

  KATARINA AND EMIL AND DACHAU had really done a number on me, really shook me, and it stayed with me. I wasn’t that itching to get back to Heimgau anymore, back to my haunted billet. I’d known the villa had belonged to a dead Nazi, so be it. But I finally got my third man identified, and it turned out that me and one Abraham Beckstein had shared the same roof. It only reminded me that I really knew so little about what had gone down in Heimgau. I made it back early the next day. Even the clouds from Dachau had followed me to Heimgau and stayed, hovering low and dense, bringing a cold that sunk the temperature almost twenty degrees even though this was the first Wednesday in July.

  I walked to City Hall. A rain had passed through Old Town and the wet cobbled lanes smelled like charcoal. Then the wind picked up and sent a chill up my trousers and shirt, where it clung in the folds, and I had to huddle in a doorway.

  I heard footsteps. Shuffling steps. Major Membre himself came my way, sauntering along, hands flapping and head rolling. I moved to salute, but the major didn’t break stride. He moseyed right on by and said over his shoulder: “Captain, there you are. I knew you’d show.” Then he halted. He turned and faced me, scratching at his temple as if he’d just remembered something. His face was bloated and crimson, his eyeballs the same color. The morning light revealed a patchy blonde beard forming. “You were on leave? Yes, that’s where you were. You were on leave.”

  “I was, sir. Just heading back to the office now.”

  We were alone here and I was relieved for the major, given his appearance. His uniform was rumpled and soiled, his shirt unbuttoned. He didn’t smell bad, but then I wasn’t standing so close. He stared at me and closed one eye to do so, swaying now. “Cap-a-tain,” he said, “I wonder … I think … I know I haven’t given you much good duty. I know, I do, I know that. But that will change.” He lost his train of thought. He staggered a little.
He held up a finger, and I saw that those normally neat pink fingers looked jaundiced, with grime under his nails. “Yes, well, carry on, on to City Hall, onward and upward you go,” he said, clenching his hand in a salute as if it was the first time he’d ever done so.

  “Yes, sir, will do.”

  “And, do be sure to check your inbox.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I watched the major stumble around the next corner. Sure, I had wanted to see the major squirm. This was far beyond that. A rash skid right off the road is what it was. I lit up and walked on and recounted the vices that may have contributed to it. There was his binging on absinthe, and his juicy new morphine allotment. An ample dose of opium suited the major, its beatific and benumbing calm just the thing for those damning burdens of responsibility, those delusions of grandeur, his bankrupt dreams of priesthood, and I couldn’t forget his odd way with children. A thick-witted and devious despot, your average dipso or dope fiend—those I could handle. But Major Membre was looking distraught, almost brain-sick.

  I made my return to City Hall, asked around. No one had seen Major Membre in three, four days. The major had reported ill, was the word, but the medical clerk hadn’t seen or tended to him. I got into my office, shut the door, and tried to tackle my overflowing inbox, get at all the memos and requests, orders, and reports—yet the words and lists only blurred, made no sense. Despite the weather my office was warm, too warm. I cracked a window, but still I was hot. I looked for the radiator and realized I didn’t even have one. Was the heat broken? I wanted Winkl, who was back to being janitor again, but I didn’t know where to find him now. I stood to go open the door, look for someone to find him.

  At that moment, I remembered the last thing the major had said: Check your inbox.

  I sat back at my desk, erect, as if trying to look normal for some suspecting fellow not actually there. I sifted back through my inbox piles, my usual crisp focus taking over. I recognized the usual paperwork. One envelope stood out. It was blank on the outside and letter size, tied off with red string. I opened it. It contained one page. It was from CID, from Criminal Investigation Division.

  “Wanted Report,” it read at the top in bold capital letters. I’d seen a couple of these bulletins, for GIs on the lam mostly, of which there had been thousands upon thousands, especially after the slaughter-battles men like that had seen in the Hürtgen and the Bulge. Some GIs had simply walked away while others turned to crime because they had nothing else. Few had made it this far south yet. Why follow the war when the trick was to escape it? But this report was also stamped “Confidential” in red at the top. I’d never seen one like this, not lowly me. A middle section contained boxes for various physical traits, such as Hair, Eyes, Complexion, Characteristics, with sub-boxes for further defining traits that could be circled or described in the briefest shorthand. The bottom section had a heading: “Particulars of Crime or Reason for Which Wanted.”

  My eyes were darting around the page, checking, cross-referencing, discovering. My nerves had tensed up like steel cables, torquing up my muscles into clamps on my bones, squeezing, wanting to crush them.

  The top left had a box for a small ID-sized photo and to the right names and aliases.

  His real name was Virgil Eugene Tercel. Aliases included Virgil Jones, Terence Eugene, Gene Smith. His Civil Occupation was left blank. The various characteristics matched him, such as the ruddy, pocked complexion, protruding jaw and large teeth and nose, and those gray eyes. Apparently he had shrapnel scars on his back and legs and a bullet scar somewhere under his hair. Other battles had left him with a deformed left thumb, and he was missing the middle left finger. I had not even noticed this. It did not mention him having Southern speech. The list of crimes, typed in abbreviations so they all fit, included desertion, fraternization, treason, looting, theft, extortion, racketeering, rape, and murder … separate sheets with the details had been attached at one point, but the left corner of this one page bore only a ragged staple hole where there must have been many of these attachments, and who knew how many paper-clipped too, all gone now, possibly destroyed.

  I had to assume that someone in Frankfurt or Munich or even Washington had gotten this one page to Major Membre, in a hushed and frantic hurry.

  The sweat itched under my hair. It rolled down my face, neck, down along my spine. Wide wet drops of it blotted my neat stacks of quadruplicate forms under my elbows. My eyes moved back to the photo, one last time. Of course it was him. He wore a civilian jacket and tie in the photo, smiling right into the camera. He looked younger, with a glimmer in his eyes, and I wondered if this was him before the war. Before North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and on up Southern France, all the holy shit he had seen and done and they made him do, he had said it himself. I wondered when he had started veering off, carving out his own route. He might have been this way since North Africa even. And that was the cruelest notion of all. Your regular deserter had one trick: They escaped from war. They did not run toward it, chase after it, feed off its blood.

  Three scribbles filled the right margin. It was Major Membre’s handwriting. These read:

  Spanner was never in CIC. Never!

  Spanner knows them. Checkmate

  Help me, Harry Kaspar

  My throat wanted to swell up like from an allergic bee sting. I let my mouth hang open just to get any air down there, drool and all. And I had thought the major was just babbling, trying to mimic everyday reality by having me check my inbox. But, who was “them”? Friends up high? The major’s cohorts? Abraham and the Buchholz men? I gasped, choking on the air. These were like a child’s scrawl, an imagination getting away from itself after too many hours left alone. But Major Membre was not playing, not any more. He had gotten curious about Spanner, and used his contacts to find the truth. Maybe now he wished he hadn’t.

  I burst out my door and, so that no one saw me, took the service stairs out. It was late afternoon now, but the sky still gray and dim. The fresh air helped. Major Membre had changed his billet from the castle to the Heimgauer Hof, and had a crew remodeling an old wing on the far side of the inn. Today it was mayhem back there. Bricks were dumped and toppled and cracked like a thousand bowling pins struck; mallets drubbed and hammers knocked; picks clanged and shovels scraped. Hazes of dust and grit rose and fell back into it all.

  As I neared the square before the inn, I saw a man leaning against a streetlight. He was dressed like no local I’d ever seen in his pale custard yellow suit, possibly a zoot suit with its wide padded shoulders and hat brim so wide it looked like a serving platter. He held a newspaper high and close to his face, as if he were far-sighted or half-witted, that or some dum dum private dick. Either a goon, or a goof.

  I lit up and walked the edge of the square, flanking the man for a frontal look. He had a mint green pocket square, brown and white two-tone shoes, and not a zoot suit at all, I realized, rather a swanky summer suit. The zooty cut was an optical illusion—this lug was so large he looked gargantuan in his custard getup. I couldn’t get a look at the man’s face behind the newspaper. I passed him, and then doubled back. The newspaper was in German.

  The man lowered the page, showing his meaty brow and those eyes a little too close together. I started a moment but had to play it cool despite the sweat chilling my skin under my summer wool. I tossed my butt, marched over. “Horton? That you?”

  Sergeant Horton stared, a homemade toothpick between his teeth.

  “Thought it was you. Long time,” I said and offered my hand.

  Playing the calm operator. After all, we were more or less partners now.

  Horton kept staring. “Captain Kaspar. How do.”

  “Just fine. So what gives?”

  “Not a lot, Cap’n.”

  “That newspaper there. Didn’t know you read German.”

  Horton blinked, but that was it. Old stone face. The construction racket had eased, leaving only a shout here and there, a truck engine revving. Horton gazed off as if listening for
something.

  “Still working for the colonel?” I added.

  “Yeah.”

  “So, the colonel around? He come with you? I was hoping to hear from him.”

  “No, not today.” Horton blinked again. “Where you headin’ to?”

  “Major Membre’s, believe it or not. Thought I’d visit him in his new suite.”

  Horton smirked and held it, as if waiting for someone to take a photo, but a mug like this one wouldn’t make the cut. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Seems like as good a time as any.”

  “Word is, you two haven’t always seen eye to eye.”

  “No. I don’t know. So maybe I’ll try and patch things up a little, you know, smoke the peace pipe.”

  “Bury the hatchet. Heh. You want to bury that hatchet.”

  “That’s it. Things’ll be changing around here and, well, it’s just better that way.”

  “Sure. Sure.” Grunting, Horton heaved himself from the light post. He walked around me and the post as if he had a rope and was tying me up. Then he stopped, tipped his hat back like a gumshoe in the pictures and said: “Me, I’m just passing through, see, heading to the mountains for the fresh air, and I have only been here about ten minutes, no more. But I’ll see ya again.”

  And he wandered off.

  “All right.” I turned and faced the three-story, block-sized inn. Plain white bedding hung from the windows, airing out despite a threat of dust.

  I started up the main steps, thinking how this was going to play out. I’d make the major a stiff drink if he needed it, get him into a chair. I’d get right to it. I’d say that we had to do something about this Virgil Eugene Tercel, even if it endangered all that the major had.

  Deputy Mayor Hammerstein exited the inn, humming and skipping down the steps. I slowed for the usual bow, for a nod, but Hammerstein just breezed on by swaggering his narrow shoulders, his shiny little mustache. I glared, ready to dress Hammerstein down, this cheap stooge for Major Membre, but then I saw lipstick on the back of the man’s thin neck. The man was giddy. He’d put up his own Fräulein in the inn, I recalled. So let it go, for now.