A Mortal Terror

by James R Benn

  “The colonel sent for him, sent runners everywhere. To his quarters, back to the bivouac area, but nobody could find him. Colonel Schleck is a man of little patience.”

  “Did he have much patience for Max Galante?”

  “At first, he tolerated him ’cause he was a good doctor and he worked right up front. But when he started pestering the colonel about nervous exhaustion or whatever, that did it. Colonel Schleck does not believe in it, therefore it doesn’t exist, so Galante got his walking papers.”

  “What was Major Arnold’s opinion of Galante?”

  “His opinion was that his immediate superior is correct in all things. Makes it easier to get through the day around here. Which reminds me, I got to get everything packed and shipped to Naples. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Where is Major Arnold?” I asked, one hand on his shoulder in a fatherly gesture, the other hand on the butt of my .45 automatic.

  “Honest, I don’t know, Lieutenant. He should have been back long ago.”

  “Is there something about the major you’re not telling us?” Kaz asked. “Some place he might go? A woman, perhaps?”

  “No, he wouldn’t disappear for a dame. The only thing I can think of is that he’s a real souvenir hound. He’s always trading with the dogfaces. Nazi knives, pistols, flags, all that junk. He’s a teetotaler, so he has his officer’s liquor ration to swap with. The boys love that.”

  “So he’s off hunting souvenirs?”

  “No need to, the guys come to him. But he might be packing them up and shipping them home. Check the field post office. It’s a busy place, he might have gotten held up.”

  “You didn’t mention this possibility to Colonel Schleck?”

  “The major and I get along. I’m no snitch.”

  “Okay, just tell me this. Who might get a pass today to go into Acerra? Or have business there?”

  “All passes were cancelled last night, and I don’t know of any official reason for anyone under the rank of general to go to Acerra. That’s AMGOT territory. We got guys going to Caserta all the time, but that’s usually for headquarters errands. No one minds a quick stop once business is taken care of, since it’s so close, but for Acerra you’d need a pass, and there ain’t none.”

  The corporal gave us a description of Major Arnold and we headed to the field post office, looking for a short, wiry officer with curly brown hair and parcels tucked under each arm. He wasn’t there, and no one remembered him coming in. We decided to check his tent, and if we didn’t find him there we’d move on. Where to, exactly, I wasn’t sure.

  Officers’ tents were pitched in a field behind headquarters. It was high ground, free of mud, a good deal for guys who didn’t rate a real roof over their heads. There were four rows, each marked with the occupant’s names and a wood-slat walkway.

  I opened the flap and called the major’s name, but no one was home. He kept the place neat, his cot made, books and papers stacked on a small folding table. His gear was all there. Footlocker, carbine, field pack. The insert tray from the footlocker was on the cot, shirts precisely folded. In one corner sat two wooden boxes, a hammer and nails and a roll of twine perched on top of them.

  “Souvenirs?” Kaz asked, testing one of the lids. It came up, and revealed Nazi daggers, belt buckles, a black SS officer’s cap, iron crosses, and other medals.

  “Check the other,” I said, studying the rest of the area. There had to be some clue as to where Arnold was. It looked like he had stepped out in the midst of packing and never returned.

  “It says fragile,” Kaz said. Arnold had marked the contents as china. Kaz opened it, and there were four plates, wrapped in newspaper. Beneath them was a Nazi flag, the black swastika on a field of blood red. “What’s this?” He unfolded the flag and a Walther P38 pistol fell out.

  “Major Arnold could get himself in trouble. It’s against regulations to mail weapons home.”

  “There are two magazines as well,” Kaz said. “But at least the pistol isn’t loaded.”

  “He was probably banking on the post office being too busy to ask questions, with everyone pulling out. I don’t even know how much attention they pay anyway. I heard a story about a sergeant shipping a jeep home, one part at a time.”

  “Impressive,” Kaz said. “Should we look further for the major, or is this a dead end?”

  A dead end. A missing major. I looked again at the footlocker, and pushed it with my boot. It was heavy, and I had that real bad feeling again. I’d been sidetracked by the fire, and hadn’t thought about the next victim since then. There was a padlock in the latch.

  “Why is this locked, if he hadn’t finished packing?” The tray, its compartments filled with shirts, sat on the cot.

  “Perhaps he has his valuables inside?” Kaz sounded hopeful, but it was that false hope, the hope you feel when you go for an inside straight. Brief, insubstantial, useless. I took the dagger from Arnold’s souvenir box and began working the latch. The footlocker was plywood, not built to withstand a steel blade. I dug around the top latch, loosening the screws until I could pull the latch free. I hoped that all I’d end up with was a chewing out from a superior officer for destroying his footlocker, but that was inside-straight thinking. I lifted the top, and the only card I saw was the queen of hearts, stuck between the dead fingers of Major Matthew Arnold.

  He was short, which was a good thing. He was on his side, knees to his chest, hands up to his face, as if at prayer. The card stuck out from between two fingers, the red heart at odds with the pale face of the dead major.

  “Strangled,” I said. “Strangled and stuffed in a box. Why?” His neck was bruised and the blood vessels in his eyes had burst.

  “It had to be a major,” Kaz said. “The odds were it would be one from the Third Division, since the first two victims had been.”

  “No, I mean why stuffed in a box? The killer didn’t hide either of the first two bodies. Galante was tucked against a wall, but he was in plain sight. Why hide the third victim? It’s not the same pattern.”

  “To delay his being discovered?”

  “Has to be. In order to give the killer time to get away. Which means he was seen by someone, and he needed to put time between that and the discovery of the body.”

  “We should go back to division headquarters,” Kaz said. “Report and contact CID.”

  “Not yet,” I said, shutting the footlocker. “Let’s go.”

  “It’s more important that we find out where the GIs in Landry’s platoon have been today,” I said as I gunned the jeep down the muddy road to the bivouac area. “It all started with him and it has to go back to him. Galante, Cole, Inzerillo, they all connect to Landry and his men. If we reported the body now, we’d be tied up for hours with CID and filling out reports. We’ll go back as soon as we talk to Sergeant Gates and get an accounting of where his men have been.”

  “I suppose Major Arnold is in no hurry,” Kaz said. Traffic was light, and I was glad we hadn’t stumbled straight into the entire Third Division pulling out. I turned into the churned-up, muddy field and drove to the same small rise I had before, claiming what dry ground I could. Before us was the bivouac, rows of olive-drab tents of all sizes, with vehicles loading and unloading supplies around the perimeter, just as before. But there was something different.

  “Those are British trucks,” I said. The men unloading them were British. Not a Yank in sight. As we drew closer, I noticed a pile of white-painted signs at the end of each row of tents. Signs for units of the 3rd Division, no longer needed.

  “Has the Third Division pulled out?” I asked a British sergeant leading a work detail of Italian civilians. Brooms, shovels, garbage cans, wheelbarrows. I guess more than ten thousand GIs can leave a fair-sized mess.

  “Whoever the Yanks were, they’ve gone,” he said. “Got to clean up for our lot to move in tomorrow. Can I help you, Lieutenant?”

  “No,” I said. “I doubt it.”

  I walked along the perimete
r until I saw the signpost, lying on the muddy ground. 2nd Battalion, Easy Company. Soon I found the tent where the poker game had been in session. Third Platoon territory. Everything was cleared out, nothing but folded cots and the debris of a departing unit. Empty wine bottles, mostly. Crumpled paper, odds and ends that men had accumulated when in camp but tossed out as unnecessary when they were on the move, back to the sharp end.

  Garbage cans had been placed along the wooden walkway, but not enough to handle the last-minute discards. The one in front of the poker tent was overflowing with bottles, broken crates, and other indefinable rubbish. On top was a single tan leather glove, holes worn through the fingertips, the kind the wire crews had been wearing when I first came here.

  “This is what he wore,” I said to Kaz. “Leather gloves. A new pair would give enough protection.”

  “You mean whoever beat Inzerillo?”

  “Yeah. I wanted to check the knuckles to see who’d been using their fists. But leather work gloves would do the trick.” I tossed the glove back on the pile, and wondered if that new pair, complete with bloodstains, might be at the bottom of the can. It would prove the connection I was certain of, so I tipped the can over, glad that the British sergeant and his work crew weren’t in sight.

  I moved stuff around with my boot, but didn’t see another glove, bloodstained or not. Out of the corner of my eye, I did catch something red poking out of the mess. It looked familiar, as if I ought to know what it was.

  “What is it, Billy?” As soon as Kaz spoke, I knew exactly what it was. A rag doll in a red dress.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I WATCHED AS CID agents searched Arnold’s tent, knowing they’d come up empty. I had. The rag doll was in my jacket pocket, and I was keeping quiet about it for now. Without Gates and the others to confirm it was the same doll from the girl in the basement, it didn’t mean much as evidence. Even then, it was only my word that Cole had said he’d seen the doll, in his dreams and while awake. I had thought he meant he saw it in his mind’s eye, but now I knew different. Someone had kept that rag doll from Campozillone, someone who wanted to spook Cole, to terrify him, to push him over the edge. Or was it to control him, keep him dependent?

  He was my friend, Cole had said. I see it in his face, see everything all over again.

  A friend, a buddy from 3rd Platoon, who kept the memory fresh, the wound open. Manipulating Cole, keeping him under control. For the pearls? Were they wound up in the killings, or was it something less sinister? Looting went on all the time; maybe this was just a higher class of loot. Who wouldn’t scoop up a pearl necklace found hidden behind a wall or in a drawer with a false bottom? It was like the house on Mattapan Square. Original owner long gone, no questions would be asked. But had Cole stumbled on it, or had someone told him where to look? What difference would it make? Maybe a life-and-death difference. I tried to make sense of what I knew for certain.

  Cole and Inzerillo, dead. No evidence they knew each other. One a suicide, the other beaten up and then burned. His death could have been a Mafia hit for all I knew.

  Landry, Galante, Arnold, dead. Ten, jack, queen. All killed up close, the same calling card left on their corpses. They all knew each other to some extent. Arnold must have processed Cole’s transfer at Galante’s request; I doubted Colonel Schleck would have approved it.

  The rag doll bothered me. Or was I reading too much into it? Maybe Cole just couldn’t take it anymore. Maybe seeing his pal, whoever it was, was too much of a reminder. Maybe the pain was too much to bear. Maybe Inzerillo antagonized a mafioso, or didn’t pay a debt. First a warning, then the torch. Maybe Cole found the pearls on his own, by accident, and had no idea of the story behind them. Maybe. But the rag doll was real, in a place where it shouldn’t have been.

  If all those maybes held water, then I had less to go on than I thought. Three dead officers, with the king and ace waiting to be dealt. A colonel and a general. Did the killer have them picked out already? Or was it simply a target of opportunity? If the killer was in the 3rd Division, it made sense that he’d have more contact with 3rd Division officers than anyone else.

  If, maybe. I didn’t have much to go on. The only good news was that colonels were not as easy to come by as more junior officers.

  Arnold’s body was carried out on a stretcher. Luckily rigor mortis wasn’t fully established yet, probably due to the warmth in the closed footlocker.

  “We have to find out where Third Division is headed,” I said to Kaz as the stretcher passed us. They loaded it into an ambulance, which drove off at a sedate pace, no sirens, no rush for the late Major Arnold.

  “No one knows, or admits to knowing,” Kaz said. “I found several officers packing their gear, and they all claim ignorance.”

  “It shouldn’t be hard to find an entire division. The front line is about thirty miles north. If we follow the main road, we should catch their tail soon.”

  “But Colonel Schleck said they were staging to Naples. That’s due south.”

  “That might mean the coast road north from Naples, or the harbor. They could be shipping out to England for all we know.”

  “We should report to Major Kearns,” Kaz said. “He may be able to tell us.”

  “Not that we have much to report. I’m sure he’s heard about Arnold by now. I’m sure every colonel and general at the palace has.”

  We made a stop in San Felice, figuring it might be worth it to search Arnold’s office desk and files, unless his corporal had packed everything up and shipped out too. We were in luck. There was still a skeleton staff at 3rd Division headquarters, the corporal included. Most of his crates and boxes were gone, but he was still on duty, clacking away on his typewriter.

  “You’ve heard about Major Arnold?” I said.

  “Yeah, word travels fast. You really find him in a trunk?”

  “We did. In his tent. Did he mention meeting anyone there?”

  “Nope. But if it was souvenir trading, he wouldn’t have. He made it clear he preferred things on the QT.”

  “We found two boxes of souvenirs, ready to be shipped home. Including a Walther P38.”

  “Jeez. You ain’t supposed to send Kraut pistols to the States, are you? Where is it now?”

  “It’s evidence, sorry.”

  “What a waste. The major, I mean.”

  “Yeah. It’s important that we find out where the division is going. Do you know, or can you find out?”

  “You think the Red Heart Killer is one of us? That’s what they’re calling him, I heard.”

  “Yeah, catchy. I asked you a question.”

  “Sure. I mean, no, I can’t. They got this thing locked down tight. If we were going back up on the line, we’d all be there by now. But they’re staging everyone on a staggered schedule. Naples is all I know. Maybe we’re going to be garrison troops, that’d be nice.”

  “I don’t think that’s in the cards,” I said, disappointed that no one laughed. “Tell me, do you remember paperwork on Sergeant Jim Cole, transferring him to CID?”

  “Sure I do. Doc Galante came in, waited until the colonel was gone, and spoke to Major Arnold. He knew Schleck would never go for it.”

  “But Major Arnold did?”

  “Yeah, no problem. Routine stuff.”

  “We’re going to search the major’s desk, okay?”

  “Be my guest,” he said, pointing to the far corner. “I ain’t packed it up yet.”

  I sat at Arnold’s desk as Kaz wandered about the room, looking through paperwork stacked up on a table, ignoring the corporal’s stares. There were half a dozen personnel files on top of the desk, all new second lieutenants who had just transferred in from stateside. They weren’t suspects, and they were safe, at least from the carddealing murderer. The Germans would probably get half of them within days, most of the rest within weeks. I put the files aside.

  Mimeographed orders from the division chief of staff were stacked by date, the latest directing Arnold to await transpor
t to Naples until the rest of the headquarters unit arrived there. All the others had to do with the mundane daily routine of any HQ. Boring, repetitive, useless.

  I went through two drawers and found nothing of interest. Forms in file folders, lined up alphabetically. In a bottom drawer, under a copy of Stars and Stripes, was something more interesting: a Luftwaffe forage cap, filled with wristwatches, rings, and a few German pay books. Soldbuch, they called it. It contained a photograph of the soldier, his unit, rank, that sort of thing. I dumped the lot onto the desk.

  “The major collected those books,” the corporal said.

  “And he had a nice sideline in watches too. Taken from the dead, stripped from POWs. Interesting guy.” I flipped through one Soldbuch, looking at the photo of a young kid who could have been wearing any uniform. I didn’t like looking at war souvenirs. It made me think of some fat Kraut pulling my wristwatch off.

  “I’m not seeing anything here but evidence of a tidy mind and an acquisitive nature,” I said.

  “Billy,” Kaz said. “You should look at this.” He held a clipboard, one of six hung from nails on the wall.

  “Those are replacement lists,” the corporal said, “the latest batch. I ain’t had time to file them away yet.”

  “What?” I asked Kaz. His finger pointed to a list of names, and traveled down three from the top. A column of serial numbers and names.

  BOYLE, DANIEL P., PVT.

  “What is your brother’s middle name?” Kaz asked.

  “Patrick,” I said. I felt sick as I said it, and leaned on the table for support. “Daniel Patrick Boyle.”

  “Hey, you found a relative?” the corporal asked. “Lucky guy.”

  “Is this the ASTP group you were telling us about?” I pointed to the clipboard.

  “Yeah. Those are the replacements Major Arnold brought out. Before he got it.”

  I’d been hoping for that inside straight to come along, and how did I finally manage to beat the odds? By having my kid brother show up and join a division about to end up in combat, if my guess was right. Replacements were flowing in to Caserta, filling the ranks after other replacements had been killed, wounded, or captured. I traced the line with his name on it to the right, past numbers that meant something to the army and nothing to me, until I came to his unit. Private Daniel P. Boyle had been assigned to the 3rd Division, 7th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, Easy Company, 3rd Platoon.