Liberated

by Steve Anderson

“Well, if it ain’t Horton and all dolled up again. What are you, some kind of aristocrat?”

  “You like?” Horton tugged on a lapel and smiled. Then he frowned. “You came on the wrong day, Captain. The colonel’s got important meet’uns.”

  “Oh, I’d just like a quick chat. No hurt in that, is there?”

  Horton looked around, one way, then the other—what for I could only guess—and it made him grunt. He was one of those people who didn’t seem to notice they were grunting, belching, whatever. “Well, reckon not,” he said and directed me to a path that led into a stretch of colorless orchards, all the fruit trees black and withered, more victims of the air raids and wild fires the raids had unleashed. I pushed onward alone, crossing a tiny canal bridge, and the dead orchards gave way to a clearing. From all directions, more paths like mine emptied into this plot and for good reason. In the center stood the Amalienburg, a secluded mini palace.

  There Spanner reclined in a wooden fold-up chair, his eyes hidden behind his own flyboy sunglasses so it was impossible to tell if the bastard saw me or not. His skin glowed pale. Only those large teeth bleaching in the sun showed he was enjoying himself.

  No turning back, Harry. I swallowed hard and strolled up, half-smiling, a butt on my lips. Keep it light as ever. Never show your inventory.

  Sensing me, or perhaps seeing me, Spanner cocked his head my way but didn’t appear surprised. He looked indifferent as if tanning was more important. He stood, lazily.

  I put out a hand for shaking. He offered his right hand. I shook it, two pumps—not too servile or too hostile.

  “Captain. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “In Munich, thought I’d stop by. You know, catch up.”

  “I see. Then what are we doing out here frying in the sun?”

  The Amalienburg was the size of a suburban bungalow, but a thousand times grander. Spanner led me inside to its circular, lavishly overdone, Chamber of Mirrors. Glossy sky blue walls and silver gilding twisted and danced among myriad mirrors, in which the opposite walls emerged and scattered, flowing on in a stream of twinkling forever.

  “It’s rococo style. A masterpiece,” Spanner said, rocking on his heels. “Yep, it sure has an intricate charm. Renting her out for a steal.”

  I had pulled off my sunglasses. Spanner kept his on, and in the mirrors I saw droves of those dark green lenses, as if the colonel was multiplying himself into an army as we spoke. I fought off the shiver it gave me. I turned to him and grinned, as wide and long as I could. I put my hand on his shoulder. I said: “You tortured those three men I found in the road. Then you killed them.”

  The colonel faced me, his lenses now reflecting a thousand mirrors. “Who’s asking?”

  “Me. No one else. Just catching up, like I said.” I kept the grin going. “Sure, there was a little civil war going on when you rolled into Heimgau. But the rest of it? It was your big play. Those men you held up at the castle might know where those four freight cars ended up near their town. That’s what you’re thinking. You’re calling yourself CIC so you need the info, the whys and wherefores. The full torture treatment doesn’t help you, though. Oh, they try—they’ll tell you anything so you’ll stop—but they can’t give you anything you can run with because they don’t know. Meanwhile, last minute, those ‘good’ SS officers running the town for you are getting desperate about what’s going to happen to them, what with no more war to play in, so they go and tip you off about the train. They had it all along, I’m guessing. At some point, though, a onetime local Jew named Abraham has the tough luck to come back into town. He knew about the train. So, you kill him too, along with your new SS partners, because no one can know. All have to go, one day only, the final closeout sale. Because, Americans, we don’t torture, and we certainly don’t double-cross.”

  “This is good. Keep going.”

  “Enter Military Government. The occupation. Major Membre is perfect cover for what you’d done. Now here’s a man with a consumption problem—just your kind of CO, right?”

  Spanner shrugged.

  “Maybe you had something big on him, blackmail him if need be. Perfect cover too—with Membre here, your efforts get paved right over. Locals aren’t a problem either; they’re conquered and aren’t talking. But the major, oh our major, he turns into the crazy little tyrant and fast. Napoleon with a kink. All of which threatens those appearances that are so key to you. Maybe you even lay the blackmail on him, but it doesn’t faze our very own megalomaniac, no, not him.” I held up a finger. “Still, none of that is why you erased Major Membre from the board.”

  “You wanted the major out. You are implicated.”

  I had been expecting this part. I made myself laugh. “Implicated? Who’s talking implicated? I know what I have done. Hell, I wrote you that letter. Way I see it, we’re limited partners now. So why not come clean, now that we’re working together, put it all out there, you know?”

  “Sure. Understand.”

  I slapped Spanner on the shoulder. “Hey. Don’t I even get a drink?”

  “Sorry. No time.”

  I shrugged it off. “So, a lot must have happened right before I got here. You had your crew keep those civs up at the castle until right after Major Membre arrived, so as to make the major look bad—implicated, if you will. And the major, he’s too hopped up on his castle treasures to care who you’re holding there. Figures it was Nazis. Leave it at that. Why question the area CIC agent? You even repainted your torture room up there, all nice and clean in gray and smelling like paint instead of blood and retching, and lo and behold it ends up being the major’s so-called second office. Still, he has no clue. And later, he doesn’t want to know. He’s got such a swell throne.”

  Spanner’s lips had constricted and pulled back from his big teeth, as if dissolving, and he grinned now too. “War will do that. A little chaos, mayhem, suddenly once discordant interests find harmony.” He pulled off the sunglasses, and I wished he still had them on. “You got it all figured,” he said. “You have been using your noodle.”

  “Hey. Use it or lose it, I say. That’s why you never came around town, stayed in the open for long. You didn’t want Heimgauers seeing the Ami mucky muck who took the ball from the SS and kept on running with it. Didn’t want them spooked or fingering you for that matter while things were still hot. Same reason you holed up in the courthouse till I found you that Sunday afternoon—let me find you, I should say. And left as soon as you came, once you gave me the answers I needed.” I made myself shrug again, the casual Yank operator. “Now, all along Major Membre hardly knows you. You’re the silent benefactor. But later, the major develops a kink you don’t like so well. His investigation. It’s heading straight for you at top speed. Membre can’t believe what he’s seeing. He wants it, mind you, but he hesitates. Not sure how to proceed with this beast. He could trump you with it or get dumped on all the same.”

  “What exactly does he know?”

  “Did know. He found out that you are not CIC. You’re not even in the Army. You left the front lines months ago, if not years. Any old part of the ETO you pick is your territory. Sure, lots of Joes go AWOL, desert for good, on the lam, get a racket going. But they weren’t thinking big enough. Why Paris and Brussels when the front is what you know? You were never an officer, though they might have thrown you a field commission for all your sweat and blood. You saw horrible shit up on the line, I’m guessing. Things I’ll never know and couldn’t take and I won’t ask. Whatever you went through, it only prepared you better for when it came to busting up other Joes.”

  As I spoke, Spanner squeezed his deformed left hand into a fist, ratcheting it down, ever smaller but denser. He stepped toward me. “Don’t you ever, ever tell me what made me. Never do that. Didn’t you hear me the first time?”

  “No, and I should have. It’s simple. You had a way, some way, of keeping clear of CID. Never tell when the real CIC might show, but maybe you had someone letting you know that too. Meanwhile, Military
Government in general is gaining more pull all the time. So, what’s a Joe to do?”

  Spanner nodded. “How do you think I found out about the major’s investigation?”

  “Yours truly.” I pointed to my chest, stabbing at it. “He was using up all my energy and my effort, the major. Me, I was eager to prove something, on account of who I am. Where I come from.”

  Spanner shrugged again. We were having ourselves a real fine shrugging contest, the more sad truths, the better the shrugs got.

  Spanner said: “There’s no proof. Never was.”

  “No. You’re right. I checked Membre’s files, reports, everything. You, or Horton, got all that out of him before you took him to the butcher’s.”

  “This isn’t about cold feet. You’re still on the train job. Correct?”

  “Of course. I’m just learning the ropes here, seeing how I’m your new CO. Wouldn’t want to make the same mistakes. Want to know just where I stand.” I moved to a window, giving my sick grin a break. “You never pulled any strings to get the Red Cross here, with their food and meds. They showed up on their own accord.”

  “If anything, it was the major who made it happen. As for you, you believed what you wanted to believe. It was better for you that way. I knew they’d show eventually.”

  “I know you’re in a hurry. But help me with one more thing. Those corpses? Where did they go?”

  Another contest-winning shrug. “I don’t manage every detail. You figure it out.”

  “You were mopping up the last of your tracks. So I can guess where they came from. You dropped them along the road that first day.”

  “Not me. Horton, goddamn Horton. He had himself a three-quarter-ton truck and he took them along—killing two chores with one stone. Said he got rid of them. Along the road? That was sloppy. Lazy. And don’t think I didn’t kick the sergeant around for it after I found out from you. Up there. It was foolish. Might as well put up a billboard.”

  “Someone took them away,” I said. “You don’t know where they disappeared to?”

  “No. That part I do not know. I really don’t. All this newfound knowledge of yours, I was thinking you were going to tell me.”

  “What can I say? You know me all too well.”

  I had turned to Spanner. Our grins had faded to grimaces.

  He moved to a window, just behind me. I stood with him and we stared out at the lines of skinny and bare black trees.

  “Not much fruit in your orchard,” I said.

  “Any left wouldn’t be worth saving. Look: The major, he was an imbecile. Thought he had friends. But you must not think—you must have. So you keep playing it smart, Captain.”

  “Oh, I will, sir.”

  “You have to be prepared to take this all the way. Whatever the assault demands. It might be a meat grinder. Are you ready, soldier? Are you steeled? The hard charger?”

  “You bet I am.”

  “But you don’t fucking know. Do you? No. You don’t know till you spent the night in an OP foxhole, the krauts in their holes just feet away, taunting you, some of the sick fuckers slinking over to slit throats in the night … And then, you learn how to know.” Spanner added a smirk, his lips surged back over his teeth and he said nothing more about that or any of it. Subject over. He didn’t even show me the other rooms. Back in the foyer, he turned to me. “Okay? We done here? You got what you wanted …” And his words trailed off.

  He peered out the doorway. A man in a gray double-breasted suit was approaching from within the dead trees, toting a shiny black briefcase. The man’s hair was bright white, his face was pink and he might have been an albino.

  “Swiss,” I said.

  “Right again. You’re on one hell of a streak.” Spanner turned to me. “You edgy, kid? What? That it?”

  “Maybe a little. Maybe I just want to do this job right.”

  “That’s fine. Come to see your Fräulein one more time?”

  “Why I’m here. Just for the night. Acting COs don’t get much leave. By the way, she knows nothing about this and never will.”

  “About what parts of this?”

  “All of it. Her family buying it like that, from us. The Jew. The train. Membre. All of it. War’s war, right? And it’s too damn bad. That’s my policy.”

  “Then there’s no problem. Go on, git. Nice piece of ass like that, keeps the nerves steady.”

  Spanner had said that before, and just to get rid of me. Go and grab some Gretchen and get out of my face.

  “Yeah, that’s a damn good idea,” I said, and I strolled off.

  I took a different path out, way wide of the Swiss, and before I reached the front gate, I’d gone over our ten-minute meeting three times.

  Spanner had just admitted all of it, but he’d done it with the same feeling others used to tell a man the time of day. It was why he had shown me his deformed hand back in Heimgau.

  He didn’t seem to care what I knew now. It was academic to him.

  And he didn’t even bother to say good luck for the train job.

  I marched past the sentry, grinding my teeth. The least Spanner could’ve done was suspect me, or threaten me. At least that was respect. But indifference?

  As I mounted the Harley and pulled on my goggles, I imagined Spanner hovering like a ghost in those stunning mirrors. The image stayed with me. Spinning in my head. My heart seemed to skip a beat and then started in again, racing.

  “Like a ghost,” I muttered, “like a ghost.”

  The truth was, I was that ghost. To Spanner, I didn’t exist anymore. I was a goner, a dead man for sure and stiff already, my throat slit in the night. Who knew what Spanner planned for me? Maybe he’ll dump me in the road, sure, wouldn’t that be fitting? Or out on train tracks somewhere remote, where the next train would come and chew me up good. I imagined Spanner out in the sun, chuckling about it, even boasting about it to albino bankers …

  My mind ran away from me. These were like those middle-of-the-night horrors, the sham kind that hit a man at three a.m. as rash elaborate worries I couldn’t do a thing about yet I lay there anyway and went over them, again, again, hoping those three hours awake had only been one. Only problem was, these horrors were no sham and I had so little time left. My odds were zilch. So I had an idea, despite what he said. This was what it must have been like to be a replacement arriving on the line for the first time, hearing the screams and shrieks between the shelling and tracer fire, knowing you were done for.

  I pulled off my goggles, ripped open my overcoat. I wanted to head back in and take out Spanner right then. I wore my Colt. I had a US Army pocket knife stuffed down a sock. Yet I couldn’t pull myself from the saddle. Paralyzed by it all, the bleak certainty of it. The baron could falter or cave, Swiss don’t talk, and I was to be silenced under six feet of Bavarian soil and worms. Any way I looked at it, that cursed plunder was his. I slumped in the saddle. Get it together, Harry. The only thing to fear is fear.

  I banged on the handlebars. I fired up my bike and shot off for Schwabing as fast as I could, charging down the clogged streets, kicking up pebbles and dust and people jumped from my path scolding me, just another crazy Ami buckeroo. At Schellingstrasse 35, I found no one. Katarina was out and Emil was out and I’d just have to hunker down. I sat tight by inhaling six Luckies and a half bottle of whiskey, and still I was shaking.

  Twenty-Four

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1ST. EVENING. I went and led the way, remembering to step around any crunchy underbrush and crouching whenever we passed through a clearing. My fingers cramped tight around binoculars. Dusk had hit us and all had gone dim. The trees were iron pillars, our trail a winding black alley, and the humid summer air lacked smell, save a hint of charcoal. Checking behind me, I watched the Baron Mayor von Maulendorff play catch-up in his floppy felt mountaineer’s hat, knee-high socks with knickers and suede jacket with more pockets than I cared to count. Flanking the baron were the sisters Bärbel and Brigitta, who kept their heads down and tried not to giggle bec
ause in their ears the baron kept whispering lewd jokes a decade or five old.

  The trees thinned out up ahead. The baron pointed that way and the giggles ceased. We squatted at a thick oak trunk, the baron wheezing and leaning on his alpenstock, wiping at the back of his neck. Brigitta panted and Bärbel huffed.

  “I know it’s a tough hike,” I whispered, “and I know you want a smoke.” Brigitta pouted at her sister, who pouted back. I added: “Tell you what, I’ll throw in another pack of Chesterfields for when you can. And the good baron here, he will now spring for your train tickets to Vienna.” The baron shook his head, but Brigitta’s eyes sparkled and Bärbel cooed. “Won’t you, Freddy?”

  “Yes, fine, all right, yes,” the baron said in English, losing the wheeze. “But you must be sure to secure them the papers, Harry. They are quite worried about it.”

  “They can quit worrying. They do their job, they’re home free.”

  The girls had on shabby smocks, splitting boots bundled with rags, babushka kerchiefs. Yet underneath? Puckered-up skirts and taut skimpy bodices embellished with wanton reds, ripe greens, tiny flirty flowers and all-time low necklines. I’d had the sisters wear their traditional dirndl dresses, which, according to a trend of high style that I could not fathom, had been all the rage in Hollywood and thus America. Pin-ups wore them and every GI wanted to see them come off.

  The baron peered around the trunk, getting our bearings. “The road up must be over here to the right. And before us, the brighter path through the trees there, that would be it.”

  “Listening, gals?” I said. Brigitta nodded. “Baron’s talking about the abandoned tractor factory. You should see a sign, a rail sign: Dollendorf—Traktorwerk it should say. Once you’re there, find the tracks and stay on them, you’ll pass through a rail shed at the far end. It heads back into the woods. Just follow those tracks, and be sure to make it loud at that point.”

  The baron shook his head again, this time in wonder. “It’s brilliant,” he said in English. “A salt mine? A whole shaft inside that hill? The exterior woodwork must have rotted away long, long ago. I never knew. Although it’s bound to be in the family ledgers somewhere. We probably owned it. Yes. In a just world I would have claim to this train as it sits on my property, my very property—”