The GI sped my jeep off the tracks and slammed to a halt.
“Stay with me,” the colonel said and strolled off. I followed. What else could I do? The colonel smacked gum and waved at the GIs now sitting under the trees as he walked me down the tracks to the rail shelter. I carried my helmet by a strap and it knocked at my thigh. The sun had reached high sky, and my wool shirt itched under my Ike jacket.
“Wait here,” the colonel said and headed into the shelter where it was darker. I stood out in the sun, itching, watching. The four freight cars were a mix of types and sizes—gray-green, rusty red, camouflage, yet all were stenciled with Nazi eagles and the words Deutsche Reichsbahn. The colonel heaved open the door of each, checked inside, and then shoved each door shut. I craned my neck but could make out little but the corners of crates and trunks.
GI thick-face was slogging his big wrestler’s body up the tracks to us, his gear jangling. He was a sergeant. He and the colonel met where I stood, the sergeant eyeing me like I was Hitler’s own brother.
“Ease up, Sergeant,” the colonel said. “Our man here is the local MG. Captain, Sergeant Horton.”
Sergeant Horton only nodded, no salute. I could overlook it, assuming he’d been a front-line Joe. I faced the colonel. “Sir, about those corpses.”
“You’re jumping the gun, son. First rule of investigation: verify. They have name tags on them? You don’t know who the hell they are, what they are.”
“True, sir. I was just about to get on that when I heard your locomotive here.”
The colonel had stopped listening. He’d turned to Sergeant Horton. They whispered, Horton nodding along, and I studied the colonel’s ruddy skin and sunken cheeks, his bulky jaw with a mouth of thick teeth. Only the strong nose and alert blue-gray eyes could save a mug like that from a life of increasing ugliness, I thought. The man had poise. Yet he wasn’t swaggering around like some MG officers did. I knew enough not to get an old hand like this on my bad side. And he was right. Those corpses could have been Bavaria’s worst Nazis, for all I knew—except for one, that was. I wouldn’t be able to get them in the jeep on my own. I could come back with locals, haul in the bodies, follow up. Improvise when required was the drill.
The locomotive’s clang had risen to a hard clatter. “Hear that?” the colonel said to me. “Do that when they’re just dying to go. She really is a fine lady. Borsig BR 52, best German engine running.”
“And those freight cars?” I pulled out my notepad, flipping it open with a flourish. I couldn’t help myself. I had to show CIC that Heimgau MG was no lamb.
“You taking notes. That’s what you’re doing? For a report or some such?”
“Just doing the job they give me, sir.”
The colonel had dropped the smile. He stared down at my brown, non regulation wingtip brogues. “College boy?” he said.
I nodded.
“You’re curious. You anticipate. That’s good,” the colonel said.
“Ready!” someone yelled, and the colonel turned and pumped a fist in the air. A grimy glove waved from the locomotive cab. Black smoke flowed out the stacks, and the three of us stood back to watch the loco pass through the compound, a rolling black wall that shaded us from the sun, its giant black wheels and pistons pounding, punching automatons. It backed onto one sidetrack, and then it went into the rail shelter for coupling to the four freight cars.
Sergeant Horton stood like the colonel, his arms folded and feet wide. He belched and said to the colonel, “What’s next move, reckon?”
The colonel spat out his gum and worked it into the dirt with his heel. He turned to me. “Here’s the way I see it. You’re dying to work all the angles, that right? Despite all this by-the-book? Want to know what can-do really means.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“And you know German? Like a native.”
I nodded again.
“You said CO. But you’re not, not anymore. You’re nodding like you got a sour deal,” the colonel said.
“No. I do the job they give me.”
“And you make the most of it. The lowly immigrant makes it into a college, first one in his family line going back to some peasant hut in Old Prussia. That about right?”
“Something like that.”
“Listen. In this war I did my time unraveling the German character. It’s no different than anyone else’s, just a little more tragic, and far more unlucky.”
“You can say that for them.”
“That country road down below?” the colonel said. “You were almost in the next county, then it’s on to Munich. You’re not decamping so soon, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“Your first day here then? I never saw you before.”
“That’s right.”
“Fine. Now listen here, that major of yours will need some GIs to keep an eye. I’m loaning you Horton’s team.” The colonel offered a hand. “Name’s Spanner. Eugene.”
We shook hands. “Kaspar. Harry. Thank you. Use all the help we can get, I’m sure.”
The colonel named Spanner laughed. “It’s damn unreal, isn’t it, Kaspar? Americans taking control in every cursed corner of this fubar snake pit that used to be Germany. A paradox, I say. Here we fight and kill enemy, and we lose plenty friends along the way. Go to a hell of a place that no one’s ever been. Then you MG swoop on in and you go and help the enemy.”
“It’s not like that, sir. We’re here to help the refugees, the victims. Children. Germans, they do what we tell them.”
“That true? Then be sure to remember that, son.” Spanner said this lightly, as if he should be smiling. He was not. His mouth had curled down like he needed to spit. He paused a moment, but it wasn’t the type of pause I could wedge a word into.
I might have put it all in my next weekly report, and I could have, but I was no dope. Those freight cars were CIC’s domain. They well could have held important documents and plans useful for the war effort, or secret weapons’ parts to be studied, or anything that could prevent more of the sick misadventures men had unleashed in these last few years. As for the corpses, this colonel didn’t need to hear it, not with that grave stare he was giving me—a stare that was saying, whose side are you on exactly? This is no way to make a name, son.
So, I smiled for the colonel. I stuffed my notebook back in my back pocket. His eyes followed my hand until it returned to my side, and I showed him a thumbs-up, ready for take off. “Will do, sir,” I said.
“Good. Well done. Then goodbye for now,” Colonel Spanner said and strolled off, adding, “Swell shoes, kid.”
I fired up my Zippo with a clank, lit up a Lucky and strolled back to the jeep. Telling myself, I’ll have to be more like that colonel when I get back to Heimgau. “Can do,” he called it and I’m the same. Always take the straightest line. That was how the front-line types handled it. If I didn’t, someone else will make me compromise, set rules for me. Funny thing though—I was thinking all this in German even though these were such American thoughts to me.
The GIs were slinging their guns back on and, led by Sergeant Horton, heading back into the woods the way they had come. I wheeled the jeep around and, as I hit the road back downhill, glanced over my shoulder to see Colonel Spanner climbing up and into that juggernaut of a loco.
I drove fast and hard, the wind blurring my eyes, the ruts knocking the chassis and tossing my briefcase, thermos and helmet around like so much popcorn in the pot.
Down on the main road I turned back the way I had come, heading back for the corpses and on back toward Heimgau. As I neared the bend I slowed, and then I had to squint, just to make myself believe what I now saw.
THREE
The three corpses were gone. Dark blood stains glistened on the pavement and gravel, coagulating like smashed black cherries. But that was it. For a moment I suspected Abraham himself, as if the lifeless hooded man had been able to recover somehow and haul his dead friends off into the woods. What a frantic notion. I had witnessed the
man dying. So I parked on the shoulder and stood in the road, hands on my hips, checking things out. The road was clear either way, and I smelled no exhaust. I paused to listen and heard only the pings and trickles of my overworked jeep. The woods around me were all shadow and murk, a permanent dusk inside there for who knew how far. I entered the woods and stomped around in the underbrush but found nothing, not one clue. I didn’t go far though. I’d already lost the corpses and didn’t want to leave the jeep, since I had no chain to lock up the steering wheel.
I drove back to Heimgau, making myself chuckle at the insanity this war brought and would bring. MG Joes like me were supposed to cure the slow-acting poisons of madmen, but who’d ever clinched such a deal? I wanted to go back and tell that Colonel Spanner the corpses had disappeared, but the man had his own concerns. I had given him a thumbs-up as if he were the gladiator to be spared, but the truth was he was the Roman tribune with the final say. As far as his operation went, I really had no recourse back there even if I did think the colonel was crossing some sort of line. As our CIC agent, he would see any report I could file. I had to assume that. It was his job to know everything. He could have dossiers on any MG officer.
You know German like a native, he had said to me. Yet he didn’t sneer when he said it, or call me Heini or kraut while slapping me on the back. That’s what most of them did and I’d grown accustomed to it, sure I did, in the same way a fellow gets used to a case of the pox.
Then I got to thinking about my sudden new post. I was now playing John Law. As horrific as those corpses were, my find did keep me close to the action. I could show the Germans how their new liberators delivered Justice compared to the thugs and racketeers who’d been conning them the last twelve years. I definitely needed a leg up. This could be it.
I was back up in Major Membre’s new office within a half hour.
“Find anyone?” the major said from his desk as if I’d only popped out to check the mail.
“I came across three corpses. Out where the Heimgauer Strasse hits the woods. Fresh, sir.”
I might as well have told him no mail had come. He appeared to be reading, but his eyes had not moved. He turned the page, his mouth formed that O again, and he muttered, “Oh?”
“One passed away right when I got there. I think he’d been in one of the concentration camps.”
“Passed away? Oh dear, that’s grim. Could he say anything?”
“It didn’t make sense, I’m afraid. He gave me a name. So, from here? My first task is to verify, identify—try to find out if any were German locals, soldiers, even Nazis. If any are local civs or had been then it’s definitely our jurisdiction.”
The major nodded. He turned another page.
“They looked like they were tortured,” I added. “Not a pretty sight.”
“Dreadful. Well, bring them in and ID them. We’ll get some locals to do the lifting.”
“That’s just the problem, sir. They’re not there anymore. The corpses, I mean. I left for help but decided to turn back for them and they were gone.”
Membre looked up, grinning. He slapped at the desk. “See, now there you go! That’s the way it’s going to be here. Could have been anyone, those corpses. Could’ve been refugees did it.”
“Refugees? They’re too weak, hungry to do that kind of work.”
“Fine, but, the sad fact is we just don’t know what these people are capable of, and I mean any of them.”
What had I expected? A shiny metal? A shot of CO wisdom? I wanted to leave, but I kept my feet planted. “Also, I met the CIC agent on the way in, sir. A lieutenant colonel name of Spanner.”
Membre’s head popped up. “Oh? Right. We wouldn’t be here nice and safe if it weren’t for CIC. That’s my feeling.”
Did he even have a feeling? He hadn’t even asked what Abraham’s name was. So I didn’t mention the train. Why bother? The major knew nothing about it, I was guessing. He certainly didn’t ask. He went back to turning his pages and his face slackened, all serious now like it should’ve been when I told him about the corpses. His eyes darted along and glittered. “I’m reading up on church matters. Fine church here, they say. Sure was a handsome sight coming in, I tell you that. Just glorious. Bet they have a fine display chamber here somewhere. They all have those here. Know that? I did. Brocade vestments, jeweled chalices and such, maybe even a reliquary. Yes, that really would fortify a man, don’t you think?”
I was raised Lutheran and could give a hoot if this was Catholic country. Yet here we were taking over an enemy town and all my new CO wants to do is go tour the old church? He could tour all he wanted. The parish priest, Father Plant, was one of the “brown priests.” He had kissed up to the Nazis and even flew the swastika at mass. So it wasn’t surprising that the brown Father Plant and his curates and whole rotten retinue had fled the coop weeks ago.
Meanwhile, three poor souls had been tortured to death, and this major was blaming refugees?
I didn’t need the CO. I needed to know what made this Heimgau burg tick, and that meant knowing the people. My historical backgrounders, typed by an anonymous German émigré in some faceless MG bureau, had given me a decent start: “Heimgau Town survives as one of many rural townships within the Alpenvorland, that green wonderland north of the Bavarian Alps. The town prevails as theKreisstadt (county seat) of the Landkreis (surrounding county), which is also named Heimgau. The town houses the offices and courts, churches and schools, and main merchants. Though one must not forget the local artisans. Long ago the area profited from the traffic of a major Roman road. Ever since, through strife, and famine, and scandal, the artisan industry and the handicrafts have thrived here, producing such varied pieces as painted toys and figurines, fine art recreations, furniture . . . to observers, Heimgau is exactly what it appears to be: smallish and isolated, devout and conservative.”
That afternoon I set up an interrogation post in the cellar of City Hall. I was hoping the prospect of thorny questions down in that dank catacomb might help bring out the secrets. I set up a line of empty crates as chairs. I had electricity, so I hung a work lamp above me. Then I called down those few Heimgau officials who hadn’t fled or committed suicide, which was easy enough—they had decided to come out of hiding and were waiting patiently inside an upstairs restroom.
They had on natty dark suits and debriefed me with heads lowered. The big Nazis had hightailed it, they confirmed, the police had done the same, all the schools had been closed for months. Only the train station had been bombed. Water, electricity, and phone lines were a mess—it was true. But they weren’t concerned, because the Amerikaner come well prepared, and they nodded in agreement at that, oh, yes.
“I found corpses. Three. All men. Dumped in the Heimgauer Strasse.” I described them. I didn’t mention Abraham and his number tattoo. That would only spook them, clam them up for now. “Civilians perhaps? Locals gone missing?”
The men exchanged glances. One shook his head, and another shrugged. All studied their feet with the intensity of men counting money.
I offered each a Lucky and then asked again, losing the tough-mug act. Yet I got the same response, this time with smiles. So much for the magic of Virginia tobacco.
“What about recent records? Local loyalists, resisters? Missing persons?”
More shrugs. Records were destroyed, they said, burned on orders of the SS.
“And the morgue?” Though I had already checked that, it was empty and spotless.
This brought a laugh. “Herr Kapitän, surely you know the morgue is now the only place in all of Germany where there are no dead.”
“Then what about a fellow named Abraham?”
That wiped the smiles right off. A name like that could not be explained away. The glances returned, and they went back to getting PhDs in studying their feet. One of them had scrunched up his face in thought. His gray hair had receded to the back half of his head in fluffy plumes that made him look like some ancient record keeper, all that was mi
ssing were the reading glasses on a chain.
“You,” I said to him. “Out with it.”
“There’s nothing to come out with, sir. There may have been such a man, but it would have been years ago.”
“A Jewish man, you mean.”
“Yes. There were some here in the county. It’s been years. You would need a last name. You would need those records, any records. And without seeing a face, who can know?” He held up his hands as if to say, what good was it? For what?
Without a face. Under that hood. What a thorough idiot I was for not looking. “Right. I get you. I’m on my own,” I muttered.
I finished with the town buck passers. I was taking a break out on the square when an unmarked three-quarter ton truck pulled up and unloaded the six CIC GIs from Dollendorf, including Colonel Spanner’s big lug sergeant, Sergeant Horton. Children had gathered and they tugged at the GIs’ trousers and Horton tossed them licorice and Hershey’s. It was good to see someone getting the people to loosen up. If a palooka like that could manage it, so could I.
Colonel Spanner had Horton. I needed my own man, I realized.
Back down in the cellar I read more reports and backgrounders, smoked another butt, and decided on my final interview. It didn’t take long to fetch the man. He worked in the building.
The cellar door screeched open. A stocky fellow in blue worker overalls descended the stone stairs, taking blunt steps that would’ve been a fighter’s jabs had those feet been fists.
“Good day, Herr Winkl,” I said in respectful High German. Uli Winkl was the City Hall Hausmeister, a building master being a cross between a building’s janitor and a super, depending. For every one of these who was a snoop or a toady, a good many more sang their own tunes.
“Servus,” Winkl said, sticking to the Bavarian greeting. He sat on the corner of a crate as if crouching. He had a sturdy face and stout neck that the long shadows of my overhead lamp couldn’t narrow. I offered him a Lucky. He shook his head at it, the first German to do so.
The Losing Role Page 24