Liberated

by Steve Anderson

  “A salt mine? Inside there?”

  “Yes, Captain, we got ourselves a big ole mine tunnel that no one’s been in for at least fifty years.” Spanner held a finger to his lips. “Now let’s do stay quiet about it, shall we?”

  I nodded. I held up my glass and swirled it, so I could think. Ask all the right questions, Harry. Information was key from here on out. “Should I see these freight cars?”

  “It can’t hurt,” Spanner said. “Tell you what. I’ll have Horton show you one of these days. He’ll come find you.”

  “Great. What about your locomotive?”

  “As I said. You’ll ride it. Get us westward to the French Zone, through any checkpoints. CIC doesn’t have much authority over transport anymore, but for MG? Should be a breeze.”

  “‘Like shooting fish in a barrel,’ you said.” I lit up a Lucky, sat up and took another drink. My mind was buzzing, coming back to life. “What about the diversion?”

  “That’s in the East, of course, seeing how it’s a diversion. I got it all figured. A Red Army patrol crosses over Bavaria’s international border, seizes two German border officials and a ranking US officer. Wounding a GI for proper effect, mind you. The hostages get taken back to the Russian Zone into Czechoslovakia.”

  “Only the Red Army aren’t Russians. They’re yours.”

  Spanner wagged a finger. “Oh, they are Russkies, I can assure you. After a fashion, speak the tongue. They just ain’t Red Army. They’re Russian DPs—confederates of mine. Next morning, one German hostage gets released after being questioned at length about precise strength, armament, and location of US Zone troops by Moscow mucky-mucks the Germans and US officers will believe to be Red Army staff officers. Russians also send back with the freed German a message warning they’ll move across the border in force if demands for further info on US forces are not met. So there you are. Such incidents are happening, mind you, but nothing this severe. It should provoke Tactical to transfer troops eastward to shore up that border stretch, leaving the harmless points out west near the Frog Zone thinner than they already are.”

  “Sounds like so much hoopla just for one stray train.”

  Spanner smiled. “Suckers need the hoopla.”

  I made my shoulders shrug. “Well, it sounds like a joyride for me.”

  “Yes. And, you’ll have ample notice. Though you will not see me beforehand.”

  I fought another sudden urge to run right out and keep running, back to my villa and jump on my motorbike, but even that was the colonel’s. I went back to swirling my drink. I lifted a cashew and stared at it. Tossed it toward the bar.

  “So, keep laying low for now,” Spanner added. “Just don’t get in the way. Right?”

  “Right. Of course not. Thanks for the motorbike, by the way.”

  “I told you: There’s nothing to thank.” Spanner sat back again. He whistled through teeth. “So you pin the tail on Hammerstein. That was brilliant, I got to say.”

  “He had a girlfriend there, in the Hof. He had lipstick on his collar. I didn’t tell them that.”

  “And they didn’t ask. Who cares? Probably some hick whore. Yes, son, that sure was brilliant. Now you got all the more reason to clean house.”

  “Clean house?”

  “You are certain to be named CO.”

  He was right. I was getting what I wanted. So show it. I smiled, nice and big with lots of teeth—a jumbo, smug, turd-eating grin that Eugene Spanner aka Virgil Tercel could lick all he wanted. “Which reminds me,” I said. “All this time on my hands, I been thinking. That VIP party of Major Membre’s, at the Hof? I didn’t see you there. But then, you probably didn’t need to be.”

  Spanner set down his drink.

  I continued. “You’re involved with that plunder network they’ve built up, I’m guessing. And you didn’t like Major Membre and Company getting too high and mighty. Why else give the baron a black eye like that?”

  “Well deduced, son. I told you we think alike. Yes. Let’s say, I’m a benefactor. The silent partner. But let’s not call it plunder, shall we? The war’s over. We can go back to killing for money, instead of for some fucking flags owned by old men and blessed by priests.”

  “All right. So what happens to it now? I take it over. That’s your plan.”

  “I told you, you are next in command. You inherit all that comes with it. We’ll see about the why and the how.”

  “And, you get a better straw man.” I couldn’t help saying it. I gave Spanner a long hard look when I said it, holding it as long as I dared. Then, to cement the effect: “The price isn’t so bad, either, is it? One dipso dope fiend major done for, and one sorry kraut to blame it on.”

  Spanner brushed lint off a trouser leg, shaking his head. He spoke low, and slowly, leaving equal pause between words. “Listen. I want you to listen. Do not get any hopped-up ideas. You asked me to rein in the major, and I did.”

  “I was thinking more like a transfer for him. Promotion, need be. Section Eight even. But what’s the difference? That’s what you’re saying.”

  Spanner nodded. “They’re hauling Hammerstein up to Frankfurt for the official MP firing squad. So that makes two dead men. But you are alive. We call the shots. And that’s what matters.” He tried a smile. “Though you been cooped up in here too long, I’d say. You should get outside. It’s high summer out there, hot and fine. All right? CID and the Legal boys have all gone by now. You are free to go.”

  I couldn’t lose the hard look. I set my glass on the table, but it slammed down.

  Spanner’s eyes narrowed. “Son, it is far too late to bear regrets. Play scoutmaster. This could be reopened. You wanted that CO spot. You threatened Major Membre. You wanted strings pulled, hatchets lowered. You even sent a letter about it.”

  He attached another smile. He stood.

  I stood, did my jumbo smug grin again and placed a hand on Spanner’s bony shoulder. Then I forced out a sleazy booming laugh that made Major Membre’s cocksure bellow seem like a newborn’s titter. “Hell, sir! Don’t you worry so much. I’m not going true blue on you. I was just thinking out loud. Calling out the score. I did come to you, right?”

  “Right, yes. Good. Amen, said the preacher man.”

  “Amen.” I choked down the last of my brandy. “And thank you, Colonel. Thank you for paving my way.”

  Twenty-One

  I HAD PLANNED MY PERFORMANCE in the Amerika Klub to keep Spanner believing I was none the wiser. His lackey Captain Kaspar still assumed he was in the Army, still supposed he was just a CIC operator making his big play. As for the CID, I couldn’t assume what they knew and did not. Whom they trusted. They might not know Spanner was involved, but I had to suspect someone was pulling the wool over their eyes at the least. At the worst, they’d been bought and paid for.

  By the time Spanner released me from the AK, the clouds had returned and it rained and rained. The next day, two actual agents from Counter Intelligence Corps showed up at my billet. One was Jewish-American, the other German-Jewish and now American. Both sounded well educated, and more so than Spanner, I could see now. They were passing through, they said, and wanted to introduce themselves to the local MG Public Safety man. They showed CIC ID cards of the type Spanner carried, presumably—I had never even thought to ask him for a look. They asked if I was doing okay, considering what had happened to my CO, yet trusted that CID would get to the bottom of it. These were the real CIC agents pinpointed for the area and for much of the region south of Munich as it turned out. They apologized for not coming around sooner as they had bypassed this county along with our advancing troops. In the preceding months of war and peace, they had surely performed splendid feats, persuading trigger-happy German units to surrender, hunting down sly Nazis, sniffing out dungeons and concentration camps. In the days to come, as they told it to me, they would do a thorough job tracking down war criminals still on the lam and monitoring suspicious communists. One smoked a pipe. The other wore a non regulation wool cap. A
s CIC agents, they, of course, wore no officer insignia, unlike Spanner, who’d made sure to show off that silver oak leaf for me. I had known this about CIC agents, that they shunned rank, but I had let myself overlook that too. I guessed they were captains. Just for kicks, I asked them if they had ever heard of an agent named Spanner. They only shrugged at the name.

  The day after that, on a Friday, a telegraph from Frankfurt named me Acting CO of Heimgau detachment. And the rain kept coming, on through the weekend. Come Tuesday the rain was still streaming down, the downpour making two sounds inside my requisitioned villa—a thousand taps at the roof, and that constant rush down the gutters.

  I hadn’t left my villa much. I was having trouble seeing the point.

  I had put myself here, right in this spot. Spanner had been prepared to remove Major Membre for me and remove the major he did. I was the one who’d misjudged the man. I thought I was being the persistent one, but I was really only a desperate chump and the so-called colonel’s brazen accomplice at that. Some might call me brilliant—the consummate Machiavellian vigilante criminal. I wasn’t seeing it that way, not at all.

  I heard a pounding on my front door. Reaching the foyer, I heard shouting: “Open up, Captain, open up if you please.” It was Uli Winkl.

  I opened my door to the hiss of rain and the humid air that smelled like mud itself. Winkl was shaking water beads off his Loden-cloth raincoat. “So, you are here,” he said in his new English.

  “Sure I’m in,” I said. I hadn’t reported to City Hall. I had, however, relayed my one major order as the new CO through the detachment’s other captain, Wilks: All available local domiciles and premises were to be again made available as an extra shelter for all refugees, whether Displaced Persons or ethnic Germans. It was noble enough of me, but only went so far. The castle didn’t count because its vast rooms still held the Baron Mayor von Maulendorff’s bloated stocks. As for the baron’s surviving monkeys? Police Chief Jenke, and the innkeepers? They remained in place. It was part of the deal, this hand I’d dealt myself.

  “I was worried you had left,” Winkl said.

  “Left where? I’m CO now. What? Don’t tell me you forgive me.”

  “I meant what I said that day.”

  “As you should.”

  “But this is not about that. Or, perhaps it is,” Winkl said.

  I had shut the door behind him. He stayed in the foyer, his squishing wet boots planted wide apart.

  “Well? What is it?” I said.

  “I’ve come to fetch you.”

  “Fetch? Sounds ominous. Better get warm first. Dry off.”

  “No. We really should leave. It’s urgent, you see, and we have a long drive. In secret. I think it best if we take your motorcycle for this, so you don’t have to use your motor pool and leave a record.”

  He meant my Army Harley that Spanner surely had stolen, permits and trip tickets and all. “Hold on. What’s urgent? What’s secret?”

  “That is all I can say now. He’s waiting for us so we must go.”

  “Who’s waiting, Winkl?”

  Winkl kept his eyes steady on me. “Von Maulendorff.”

  “I don’t think I heard you so well. I thought you just said, Maulendorff.”

  “Herr Kaspar, please do not be difficult. I promised I’d bring you.”

  “Oh, you can break a promise to him. They come cheap in his book.”

  “Sir, please, he says he must tell you something, immediately.”

  “I don’t need this. Not now. Get me?” I wandered off, back down the hall.

  I didn’t need Winkl and certainly not my baron mayor. I needed to figure my way out of this surefire trap I’d set for myself.

  Winkl followed me, which left streaks of brown water on my marble floor—on the Beckstein family’s floor. I faced him. “A janitor tracking mud. This must be serious.”

  “This is no time for humor,” Winkl said.

  “I’ll deal with civil matters when I’m good and ready.”

  “This doesn’t concern town administration. It concerns you. He has faith in you, as I do. As I still do.”

  “Ever occur to you that your baron mayor might be pulling a fast one on you? On us. He was in Major Membre’s pocket, but that got a little cold didn’t it? Sure. Freezing even. So now he’s looking to cozy up in mine.”

  Winkl was shaking his head. “If the baron wanted to pull a fast one on you, why would he come to me? I have no power. I trust him and, odd as it may sound, I believe you can trust him too.”

  “Trust,” I said as if recalling the title of a movie I’d forgotten.

  Winkl seemed to complete my thoughts. “Maulendorff is a survivor. This does not make him evil,” he said, and began marching back down the hallway to the foyer. Shaking his head again. One of these days he was going to pull a muscle doing that.

  And there I was, following him. I grabbed my rubber riding coat, gloves, and goggles on the way out.

  Baron Mayor von Maulendorff was waiting over 40 kilometers south within the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The rain had given way to wind. Mud and washouts clogged roads. I dumped the Harley once and threatened to turn back, but Winkl insisted. The baron’s summer home sat at the end of a twisting high road passable only because thick overlapping fir boughs sheltered it from the weather. It was a one-story, one third-sized copy of his Heimgau mansion. The front door knocker, a brass Bavarian lion head. Winkl banged it and stared at me.

  “Why you looking at me like that?” I said.

  “Sometimes, it’s hard to tell when you Americans are ready for anything.”

  “Oh, so now I’m an American suddenly?”

  Deadbolts clanked, the door swung open with a whoosh of warm air. “Ah, there you are, gentlemen.” Maulendorff stepped back to let us in wearing a wide-brimmed hat with hunting jacket and striped tie, looking more like a renowned botanist than our cagey middleman of a mayor. He removed the hat and held it to his chest as if at a funeral. “Do come in. How very nice. Please, do have a seat in the study, just straight ahead, I’ll take your coats and be right in, please, please.”

  I said nothing. He gave me an antsy pat on my back—too antsy for my liking.

  The study was small but grand in a provincial way, the walls cluttered with trophy game heads and horns, shields and flags. I smelled freshly cut firewood. A fire crackled in a stone fireplace—a fire in July, and it made me shake my head in disgust at all the pageantry that was ever created. I took a green wing chair with black fringe, only because I assumed it was the baron’s favorite. Winkl chose a cushion on the fireplace hearth and stared at the floor. Above us hung a candelabrum of black wrought iron; the thing was heavy and sprawling and its candles were missing, which made it look like a giant looming spider.

  The baron came back and gave a nervous chuckle that could’ve been a horn screeching. He sat on a satiny yellow settee, the fire reflecting carrot orange on his pasty face. We sat across from each other, facing each other, only a lush brown animal rug between us. Winkl, excluded now, stoked the fire.

  The baron smiled and his jowl scar shined. “Captain Kaspar. How very nice.”

  “So you said.”

  “I say, that’s some sturdy motorcycle you ride. A Harley-Davidson, I suspect?”

  “Sure.”

  The baron wiped at his neck. “So. I want to express my condolences. I’m sorry you were the one to find Major Membre, how ghastly, so horrible—”

  “Forget about it. I see your black eye’s gone.”

  “Yes.” The baron smiled again. Chuckled again. “Strange, is it not? You and I, here like this …”

  I turned to Winkl: “You know what? Suddenly I don’t like being here, don’t like being treated like one of his caste or what have you and having my ass kissed in just the right way.”

  Winkl only frowned.

  “You did not come for a social visit,” the baron said. “All very well, but …” He took a deep breath. “I should also appreciate some understandi
ng on your part. No, I demand it for what I am about to tell you. Yes. I demand it.”

  “You got it.” I checked my watch. “You got a full sixty seconds of understanding.”

  “Do keep in mind, I am very distraught.” Eyes wide, the baron looked around at the shields, stuffed heads, iron chandelier and timbered ceiling as if noticing the power and sinew of it all for the first time. Tears swelled at the rims of his eyes. From his breast pocket, he produced an envelope. “My world crashed with this letter, Mein Herr. You must be prepared to believe that if you believe anything I will tell you.”

  “So try me.”

  “You are aware of my monarchist leanings. This, it’s a touchy, tricky calling.” As the baron unfolded the letter, the corners of his mouth curled downward as if a fishhook hung from each. “About a week ago, this missive arrived from Northern Italy by special emissary of his majesty, Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.”

  “Correction: his ex-majesty.”

  “Yes, that is correct. Since 1918. Here.” The baron held out the letter.

  “I don’t want to read it. Just tell me.”

  The baron sighed and lay the letter across his thighs. “In this letter, Prince Rupprecht says he wants nothing to do with me or my movement. Nothing.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “I wish it were so. Unfortunately, it has everything to do with you. Everything.” The baron drew closer, barely on the edge of the settee. “Especially, because, I was also seeking a train like the train Colonel Spanner holds. This train that involves the both of us now. Me and you.”

  I turned again. Winkl was staring into the crackling fire. “You shouldn’t be talking about this,” I whispered to the baron.

  Maulendorff didn’t whisper. “Well, I’m afraid I must. So why don’t you listen now, eh? Instead of sulking? Because what I have learned about this train affects you most directly.”