Louise's Chance

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘Investigate it?’ I said. ‘Why? He tried to escape.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that. You’ll understand when I show you the scene.’

  ‘How can we help?’ Miss Osborne asked.

  ‘You know these prisoners probably better than anyone else in the camp,’ he said. ‘You’ve interviewed some of them already. I’d like you to come examine the scene of Marek’s death with me, talk to some of the prisoners. Maybe you’ll pick something up I might miss.’

  ‘Mrs Pearlie, I need you to go with Agent Williams, please? You are just as able as I to assist him. And Merle, they’ll need you to translate,’ Miss Osborne continued. ‘Since we can’t conduct interviews I must review some documents I received yesterday from our office in Washington so I can get them on the plane back to DC this afternoon. I can deal with those while you two are with Agent Williams.’

  I was elated that Miss Osborne trusted me enough to send me with Williams to examine the scene of Marek’s death without her. This job was the chance to prove I could do more than type and file, my ticket to a post-war career. I had to prove my worth. Which was one reason I wanted my first assignment to succeed.

  As we left the mess tent I noticed the young MP who’d shot Marek alone at a table in a corner, both hands encircling an empty coffee cup, deep circles ringing his eyes. It couldn’t be easy to shoot a man you knew, even slightly.

  Chantal, the Swiss Red Cross representative, was waiting for us at a narrow gate in the stockade fence that led into the no man’s land where Marek had died last night. Williams unlocked the gate and ushered us in before closing it behind us with a clang and locking it again. The yellow line, which was the last visual warning given to a prisoner of war trying to escape, stretched ahead of us between two watchtowers, each manned by two MPs with rifles at the ready.

  Marek’s body was gone. The FBI photographer had finished his business as soon as the sun was high enough to provide sufficient light and the body had been taken away to the camp morgue.

  We stood over the patch of dirt where Marek’s blood had leaked into the ground, marring the yellow line’s neat progress. None of us said anything until Chantal spoke.

  ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ Chantal said. ‘I don’t think Marek would have done this. He thought of more imaginative ways to escape. Why would he risk his life?’

  ‘What do you think, Mrs Pearlie?’ Williams asked me. ‘You interviewed him.’

  ‘He wasn’t a man who wanted to die,’ I said. ‘He was simple and fun-loving, not suicidal.’

  ‘I agree,’ Merle said. ‘He was most interested in selling his souvenirs so he could get cash to spend when he broke out of here.’

  ‘He craved a few hours of freedom,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think he would have risked his life for them.’

  ‘He came back without resistance both times,’ Williams said. ‘Almost cheerfully, in fact. Tell me, did he make your list of possible recruits for your mission?’

  Merle and I glanced at each other, wondering if we should answer him. I decided we should. We needed to know what had happened to Marek, for the sake of our operation. I nodded slightly at Merle and then answered Williams.

  ‘Marek was a maybe,’ I said. ‘After we pointed out to him that if Germany lost the war Poland might be an independent country again, he seemed to consider it.’

  ‘We sure would have spoken to him again,’ Merle said. ‘Whether or not he would have made the cut, I don’t know.’

  ‘I thought that might be the case,’ Williams said. ‘Come with me. I need to show you something else before we talk to any of the prisoners.’

  Williams opened another gate between the no man’s land and the stockade itself. The German POW tents stood directly opposite. The area was empty since all the prisoners had been confined to quarters. Military police, some with war dogs on leashes, stood guard around the tents.

  ‘Look at this,’ Williams said, leading us to the stockade fence.

  Ranged along it, where Marek must have climbed over and dropped into no man’s land, was a row of debris. Rocks, chunks of wood, tent pole stakes, tin cups and dishes, even stools from the tents lined the fence.

  ‘What is this?’ Merle asked.

  ‘Think about it,’ Williams answered. ‘It’s dreadful.’

  ‘He was stoned,’ I said. ‘Driven over the fence.’ Marek must have been pulled off his cot, forced out of his tent and bullied over the stockade fence. I had a sudden vision of him climbing desperately to escape the projectiles crashing into his body, ripping his flesh on razor wire, praying that the sentry would be reluctant to shoot him.

  ‘My God,’ Merle said.

  ‘That’s my conclusion too,’ Williams said. ‘The camp medical officer told me that the condition of the body was consistent with Marek being hit with rocks and other objects before he died. Stoned is a good word to describe it.’

  ‘But why?’ Chantal asked. ‘And why didn’t he stop running once he got over the fence, where the rocks couldn’t reach him?’

  ‘Look,’ Williams said, ‘there are a few rocks on the other side too. I think the prisoners stood on each other’s shoulders so they could keep pelting him. But I’m more interested in who did this. Most of the prisoners had to be a part of it, but the question is who is the ringleader? We have to find him or we’ll lose what control of the camp we have.’

  And I feared we could never recruit any prisoners for our mission under these circumstances. They would be afraid for their lives. All our work for nothing!

  Kapp was seated at the table in his tent with Thomas Hanzi playing cards.

  ‘Good morning. I suppose you’ve come to question me about the sad death of Hans Marek.’ He dealt a few cards to Thomas. ‘I’m teaching Private Hanzi to play Skat, although I’ve had to modify your American deck of cards.’

  Williams offered me the only other chair in the room, at the table with the two Germans, and I took it. I wanted to be close enough to Hanzi to watch his body language as Kapp spoke.

  ‘We believe that Marek’s death was a homicide,’ Williams said.

  Kapp scoffed. ‘How absurd. The man was shot trying to escape. He’d escaped twice before, but of course you know that.’

  ‘We don’t think he would have risked his life for a few hours of freedom,’ Williams said. ‘He was driven over the fence by the rocks and other objects we found near the base of the stockade fence.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Kapp said. Then he spoke sharply to Hanzi, who picked up a card he had thrown down and exchanged it for another. Hanzi glared at Kapp before he made his move, but I didn’t see fear in his eyes; it was more of an angry stoicism. ‘We had played a game after dinner, throwing rocks at a target we leaned up against the fence, that’s all,’ Kapp continued. ‘Look, there’s the target.’ He nodded at a tabletop torn from its legs with a target roughly painted on it that leaned against one of the tent poles.

  ‘You could have built that five minutes ago,’ Williams said. ‘Besides, the guards would have seen you at your so-called target practice.’

  Kapp shrugged. ‘You assume that the guards were actually doing their jobs,’ he said. ‘Instead of playing poker in the mess tent.’

  ‘Let me ask him a question,’ I said to Williams.

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  I turned to Kapp. ‘Why is Thomas Hanzi here with you?’ I asked. ‘All the prisoners should be confined to quarters.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Kapp said. ‘Since I am the senior officer here, I am permitted to have a servant. I have selected Private Hanzi. Not that there’s much for him to do. Taking care of my clothes, shining my shoes and running my little errands takes maybe twenty minutes a day. Which is why I am teaching him to play Skat. He’s learning surprisingly quickly.’ Hanzi could sense what Kapp was saying about him in English from the tone of his voice. His jaw clenched at Kapp’s words, but he just picked up the cards he had been dealt and began to sort them.

  As we left Kapp’s tent Hanzi turned
to watch us go, and I was struck again by his looks. The young gypsy was stunning, if you could use that word to describe a man. He reminded me of a young Clark Gable. Except for his bright blue eyes.

  The four of us huddled outside Kapp’s tent.

  ‘I don’t see any point in interviewing the other prisoners,’ Williams said. ‘Kapp controls them all. And after what happened to Marek they’ll all be terrified.’

  ‘If we could protect Lt Bahnsen I think he might tell us what happened,’ I said.

  ‘The Lutheran almost-priest? We can’t protect him,’ Chantal said. ‘Kapp would know immediately if we questioned him, and there’s nowhere to put him where he’d be safe.’

  ‘We could confine him to the infirmary,’ Williams said. ‘I’m sure Lt Rawlins could arrange that. We could tell the other prisoners he has the flu.’

  ‘Kapp would never buy that,’ Chantal said.

  Bringing any attention to Bahnsen would ruin his effectiveness to us as a possible operative. A coded letter from Kapp, protected by the Red Cross, could get to the Reich in a week. Bahnsen knew that too.

  ‘Thanks to the Geneva Convention we don’t have options,’ Williams said. ‘Unless we can prove Kapp murdered Marek, or had him murdered. That’s a felony and we could arrest him and transfer him to a federal prison. The Geneva Convention doesn’t protect him from that.’

  ‘Who is the next senior officer in the camp, the person who would take Kapp’s place?’ I asked. ‘Steiner?’

  ‘No, it’s Hauptmann Beck.’

  We hadn’t interviewed him yet, and I couldn’t remember anything about him from our prisoner summaries.

  ‘Is he SS?’ Merle asked.

  Williams shook his head. ‘No, he commanded a Transport Division. Steiner is the next ranking SS officer, but he’s a lieutenant.’

  ‘So if we could get rid of Kapp,’ Merle said, ‘the next camp commander wouldn’t be so hardline.’

  ‘Yes, but we can’t get rid of him, unless we can prove he orchestrated Marek’s death,’ Chantal said. ‘Besides, we don’t know how effective Beck might be. Steiner might control him.’

  ‘We’re done here for now,’ Williams said. ‘I’m going to tell Lt Rawlins so that he can let the krauts out of their tents.’

  ‘I’ve got to get to a telephone,’ Chantal said, moving toward the stockade gate. ‘I need to report Marek’s death to my superiors so his family in Germany can be notified.’

  Merle and I started to follow him, but Williams stopped us.

  ‘I’d like your help with one more thing,’ he said. ‘Can you come look at Marek’s body with me? I’d like a witness to its condition.’

  Merle blanched. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Is that really necessary? Hasn’t the medical officer done an examination?’

  I wasn’t squeamish, having spent much of my life gutting bluefish as long as my forearm. ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

  ‘Fine,’ Williams said. ‘The morgue is at the back of one of the infirmaries, across the stockade.’

  The infirmary was in a modified Quonset hut. The front half held six empty beds and the usual medical equipment. A medic wearing a white armband with a red cross emblazoned on it sat at a desk with his feet up, reading the Stars and Stripes. When he saw us he leapt to his feet and saluted, then realized we weren’t soldiers and dropped his hand.

  ‘Not too busy today, Corporal?’ Williams asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ he said, grinning. ‘We have one patient, but he’s no trouble at all.’

  ‘We need to see him,’ Williams said.

  The medic gave our IDs a quick glance and then led us to the back of the Quonset hut. Pulling back a curtain that stretched the width of the space he revealed a wheeled portable field morgue. It looked like a big refrigerator, but had three cadaver-sized drawers. A compressor mounted on top hummed softly.

  The medic opened the morgue door and pulled out the middle drawer. Marek lay there on his back, naked except for a towel thrown across his privates. His corpse was clean, but his chest clearly showed the two entrance wounds from the bullets that killed him.

  ‘Turn him over, please,’ Williams said.

  The medic complied. Marek’s back was deeply marked, bruised and scored by the projectiles thrown at him by his fellow prisoners as he fled from them. I felt ill, not from viewing Marek’s body as much as at the idea of what had been done to him. Yes, he was a Wehrmacht soldier, my sworn enemy, but in captivity he’d been harmless. I couldn’t imagine why he’d been tortured like this.

  The medic slid Hanzi’s body back into the morgue and closed the door.

  ‘What will happen to his remains?’ I asked.

  ‘In a couple of days we’ll release the body to camp Mortuary Services and he’ll be buried in the Fort Meade graveyard,’ the medic said.

  ‘There will be a funeral and prisoners can attend if they wish,’ Williams said to me.

  At least Marek would have a decent burial, I thought. I wondered how long it would take for news of his death to reach his family, and if the Red Cross would tell them how he’d died.

  ‘We need to see Marek’s personal effects too,’ Williams said.

  The medic lifted a locked metal footlocker, painted olive drab and about the size of a suitcase, off a shelf and toted it into the main part of the infirmary, closing the curtain in front of the morgue.

  Williams and I unlocked the box with a key the medic gave us and proceeded to sort Marek’s meager possessions, spreading them out on one of the infirmary beds. His filthy bloody pajamas, wrapped in brown paper, came out of the box first. The rest of the items had been assigned to him by the quartermaster when Marek first arrived at the camp – clothing, underwear, shoes, socks and a wool coat – and there were a few personal possessions he’d brought across the ocean with him. These included a canvas wallet that contained dingy photographs of what must have been his family and home, and a group shot of his army buddies. I looked at that photograph closely. I didn’t recognize anyone else in the picture.

  ‘Look at this,’ I said to Williams, holding out the wallet with the photograph exposed. ‘Do you recognize anyone? Anyone in the camp?’

  Williams examined the photograph intently. ‘No one,’ he said.

  The rest of Marek’s effects were items from the PX.

  ‘Four packs of Luckies,’ Williams said.

  ‘He told us in his interview he didn’t smoke, but he’d pick up his ration anyway and sell them.’

  ‘Probably to the guards,’ Williams said. ‘The prisoners are rationed more cigarettes than most of them can use.’

  Marek also owned a deck of ‘V for Victory’ cards, a tube of M&Ms, a can of Planters peanuts, razor blades, shaving cream, a razor, a toothbrush and a tube of Colgate toothpaste. Williams picked up a pink-and-black Lava soap box. When he handled it, it rattled, so he opened it and dumped the contents on the white sheet of the bed.

  German militaria spilled out. The box held a colorful three-inch-long ribbon bar and a few metal badges and fabric patches.

  ‘This must be all that’s left of Marek’s merchandise,’ I said. ‘The stuff he sold for the cash he spent when he escaped. Merle bought a cigarette lighter from him. It had the SS emblem on it. Disgusting.’

  I nudged the objects with my finger, then picked up a fabric patch of a skull and crossbones, the SS emblem, which had been torn from black fabric. ‘I’ll bet this came off Steiner’s Panzer black beret,’ I said. ‘He wears it all the time, but he wouldn’t be allowed to with this patch still on it. He must have given it to Marek to sell.’

  Williams picked up a wound badge and rubbed his thumb over the raised surface. ‘They give these out like candy,’ he said. ‘Like our Purple Hearts. We can’t trace it to an individual.’

  ‘Now this,’ I said, picking up an ornate silver-and-bronze badge embossed with a tank and the eagle and swastika of the Reich, ‘is a tank battle badge. It could be Major Kapp’s.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Williams said. ‘But there are ot
her prisoners here who were with the Panzer divisions. Like Lieutenant Steiner.’

  I picked up the ribbon bar. We had ribbon bars in our military too. We called them chest hardware or fruit salad. They were narrow metal bars upholstered with small square ribbons of different colors and color combinations, some embossed with tiny metal emblems. They represented the wearer’s medals and campaigns; he wouldn’t want to wear any of these on an everyday uniform.

  ‘Now this,’ I said, showing Williams the ribbon bar in the palm of my hand, ‘could be traced to an individual. Let me take the ribbon bar with me. I’d like to try to match it with someone in the camp.’

  Williams shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not. How would you manage that? And why do it anyway?’

  ‘We can use the paybooks and the summaries we prepared,’ I said. ‘Match the lists of decorations and such with the ribbon bar. Marek also had an SS lighter he sold to Merle. What if most of this stuff corresponds with Major Kapp’s career? That would show a relationship with Marek.’

  ‘There’s Steiner too, he’s an SS officer. Or Marek could have picked up some of this stuff from other Germans at a prisoner holding area in North Africa. It could belong to anyone.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Do you want to find Marek’s killer and or not? You said yourself it would take a powerful leader to force all those prisoners to stone Marek.’

  ‘OK,’ Williams said. ‘See what you can find out.’

  I scooped up the militaria and dumped it back into the soap box. It was all we had to go on that linked Kapp directly with Marek. I couldn’t think of another German in the camp who would be able to force the prisoners to stone Hans Marek until he scaled the stockade fence.

  I found Lt Rawlins in his office doing paperwork. He stood when I came into the room.

  ‘Mrs Pearlie,’ he said, ‘what can I help you with?’

  He indicated a chair opposite his desk and I sat down. He followed suit.

  ‘I need some reference materials from you, if you have them,’ I said. ‘We’re helping Agent Williams with his investigation of Hans Marek’s death. Our team can hardly interview any prisoners of war until the camp settles down again.’