Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  “My driver,” Sonny said.

  “That’s peculiar. How many other sergeants have their own drivers? You’ve come to arrest me.”

  Damn Captain Blunt and his nonchalant orders—arrest this one and that one, Papa at the Ritz and a maquereau in a velvet suit. Sonny wanted to leave the Sphinx alive, and he had to deal with that militia behind the baron’s throne. And so he bargained as best he could. “I need some information. And you’re a perfect repository.”

  “Why is that?” the baron asked.

  “Because you’ve played both sides to perfection.”

  “Talk, talk, talk,” said one of the poules, who had silver hair. “Talk will get us nowhere. It’s time for an execution—a double execution, if you ask me.”

  “Raymonde, don’t be so impetuous. Give the sergeant and his companion a chance to plead for their lives.”

  Sonny had to rely on all the conniving, sinister, meddlesome little gods of the CIC to get him out of this mess. Still, it comforted him to have Papa’s inscribed stories in his pocket, almost like a talisman, the stories he would mail to Sottotenente Tropea if he ever survived Le Sphinx.

  “Boldy, my sudden disappearance won’t help you one bit. Other agents will come. Le Sphinx has been marked. And so are you.”

  “Ah, but I don’t intend to stay here forever,” the baron said.

  “Why not … if we make a deal?”

  “And what kind of deal can I make with the Americans? You’ll sing like a canary to save your life.”

  “I don’t have to sing,” Sonny said. “It should be obvious to you.”

  The baron clapped his hands. His fingers were long and thin. “Bravo. What a performance. I’m safe here, Sergeant. All I have to do is survive this ridiculous day, and then we’re gone, with new identities….”

  “Shame on you,” Sonny said. “They’ll track your ass wherever you go. You’re a fugitive. But there’s no reason to leave. You can stay at Le Sphinx in your golden chair…. Business as usual.”

  The baron leaned toward Sonny. “And whom do I have to betray?”

  “No one,” Sonny said, improvising as fast as he could while the corporal shivered at his side.

  “Will I get assurances? From General Patton? … I don’t believe your lies. Why would the Americans help me?”

  “Because we have no other conduit to the black market. And we have to feed a starving town. You can unblock the traffic of merchandise and produce. No one else can. You’re the caïd.”

  Sonny was thinking of Pépé le Moko, a film with Jean Gabin, who was the caïd of the casbah—the king of crime—in Algiers. Pépé was safe as long as he kept to the walls of the casbah. And Le Sphinx was Boldy’s casbah … while the Krauts occupied Paris.

  “Caïd,” the baron muttered. “That’s true. But de Gaulle is back, and I’ll get the guillotine.”

  “Can de Gaulle feed Paris?”

  “No,” the baron said. “But he’s an uncompromising prick.”

  “He’ll have to compromise,” Sonny said. “Does he control the warehouses?”

  “I’m not a magician,” the baron said.

  “Yes, you are. Nothing moves without a nod from you.”

  Sonny had enraptured this traitorous king of crime. “Will I meet with the great Eisenhower?”

  Sonny smiled like a jackal. He didn’t even have to pounce. “Boldy, Ike can’t be seen with the likes of you.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to meet with other vermin from your own branch of counterspies and crooks. Have you taken over that German palace of spies on the avenue Foch?”

  “Yes. But the Krauts still have a toehold in Paris.”

  “A tiny one,” the baron said. “Let’s drink to our success.”

  “Chef,” said Raymonde, who was savvier than the rest. “You aren’t going to trust this canaille, are you? The madmen will come, hang you from a hook, and burn swastikas into our tits. Don’t trust him.”

  “Why not?” the baron said. “He might do us a small favor and keep the maquis from the boulevard Edgar-Quinet for a little while longer…. Pierrot, what do you say?”

  “I agree with Raymonde,” the dwarf said. “Kill them—right now.”

  “And have other visitors? Other armies at our door? The sergeant can help us. He’s a genuine trickster.”

  The baron opened a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild that he had stolen from one of the Ritz’s secret cellars on the Left Bank, somewhere on the rue Lecourbe. He sniffed the cork and let the bottle breathe for a moment while the dwarf searched for two glasses. Then he poured a glass of Château Lafite for Sonny and himself, and nothing for the corporal, or Pierrot and Raymonde and the rest of his militia.

  “Santé!” he said.

  Sonny’s head throbbed with the first sip of wine. He was being outmaneuvered, even while the baron saved his own skin.

  “How is the bearded one—Papa?”

  “He shaved his beard,” Sonny said. “And he’s holed up at the Ritz for the duration. The provost won’t let him travel with a gun, and his army of Irregulars.”

  “He’ll find a way—he always does…. Who told you to arrest me?”

  “The order might have come from Patton. I’m just a clerk.”

  The baron laughed. “That’s what the Gestapo call themselves. Hitler’s clerks. You’re not a clerk…. They’ll have to kill me. I know too much.”

  Sonny had to keep dancing in some private landscape while his mind was mottled with Château Lafite. “But that’s your wild card, Baron. That’s your letter of transit. You know all the compromises that were made, all the deals. If they harm you, who can tell what will surface, what will pop up?”

  The baron tucked on his foulard. “So I should sit here and wait until they burn off my fingers one at a time.”

  “No,” Sonny said. “Unleash the food supply. Make whatever deals you have to make, and you’ll be indispensable.”

  “Pierrot,” the baron said, “I like this mec. We’ll give him our own laissez-passer.”

  “Chef,” the dwarf said. “That’s foolish. He’ll squawk the moment he’s free.”

  “And what about us?” Raymonde asked, with the red luster of rage in her eyes. “Don’t we have a vote?”

  “Vote your head off,” the baron said. “It’s overrated, this voting business…. Pierrot, let him take another sip of wine and escort him to the door—with his driver.”

  Sonny took a second sip. He mind wandered for a moment and he could swear that he saw Oona among all the poules, Oona with pink lipstick and a bandolier of ammunition.

  “Jerry,” she said, “my poor little Jerry of the CIC.”

  Where’s Chaplin? he wanted to ask. Where’s the Tramp?

  But he couldn’t even hold on to that image of her. The trickster had tricked himself.

  Pierrot led them out of that labyrinth of rooms. Sonny had to clutch the walls. “He’s foolish, that commander of ours,” Pierrot said. “He’s a child. He believed your bullshit.”

  Pierrot unlocked the front door, shoved Sonny and the corporal out onto the boulevard, and locked Le Sphinx again. Sonny stared at that emblem of the sphinx as a man—a pharaoh—on the front wall.

  The corporal was shaking. He had to sit at the edge of the sidewalk. “Jesus, I nearly crapped in my pants. But you bluffed your way out of there, Sarge.”

  “It wasn’t a bluff,” Sonny said.

  “You mean we aren’t gonna send for the commandos? What will we say to Captain Blunt?”

  “Nothing,” Sonny said. “Not a word.”

  “And Boldy continues his career as the fucking king of crime?”

  “He has no career. Someone will finish him. It doesn’t have to be us.”

  The corporal rose up from the curb, and they both got back into the jeep, with that continual crack of sniper fire in the air.

  “Where to now, Sarge? The avenue Foch?”

  “No,” Sonny said. “Fuck the avenue Foch.”

  And they drove down
the boulevard, into the turmoil of a town that was still caught in the charged dream of its new American Allies and former conquerors, the Krauts.

  Sonny couldn’t keep awake. Boeldieu must have drugged him with the Château Lafite. He had a nightmare during this afternoon of celebration and random attacks. He found himself at 84, on the avenue Foch, in one of the interrogation rooms. But he wasn’t being grilled by the Krauts. The entire setup parodied the Cub Room at the Stork, with its banquettes and little parliament of mirrors, suddenly festooned with swastikas and bloodred Nazi banners. Oona sat in front of him at Table 50. She was the torturer, Sonny could tell, though time had curled backward in his favor. She wasn’t Mrs. Charlie Chaplin of Hollywood. She was wearing her gym suit from Brearley, with the sweep of her bosoms accented by the harsh light of the interrogation lamp.

  “Jerry,” she whispered, “still love me?”

  “More than ever.”

  Oona leaned over and kissed him on the mouth with a passionate suck of her lips as her tongue roamed like a salamander.

  “Then tell us the Allied invasion plans.”

  “Oona,” he muttered the moment that salamander fled, “I ain’t Ike.”

  And Oona started to peel off her gym suit in a calculated tease to bewilder Sonny and make him confess secrets he didn’t have. But he couldn’t even summon up the aroma of her armpits, as the rapid report of a machine pistol jolted him out of this Nazi Cub Room. He and Corporal Benson didn’t have to bother with any Krauts. A cadre of Free French militia careened around them on the boulevard Edgar-Quinet in a prewar Citroën. There were eight or nine men and women in that little car, with their legs dangling out the windows and a truculent look on their faces. It reminded Sonny of a willful circus troupe.

  “Hey, Amerloques,” shouted the driver, “we have work to do. Get out of the way.”

  And for a moment Sonny wished he could summon up 84 again, no matter the consequences, and what his fate would be.

  PART FIVE

  The Green Hell

  October–November 1944

  1.

  PAPA’S STORIES NEVER GOT TO THE sottotenente. The parcel was returned to Sonny’s regiment with two words stamped on it in blue ink:

  ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN

  The blue ink baffled Sonny. Had that tiny camp for Italian prisoners of war disappeared from Devon? Had it taken flight on some magic carpet from the Bolham Road in Tiverton to another town? Or had the sottotenente gone berserk and been banished to Wormwood Scrubs? How would Sonny ever know?

  He was stuck with his regiment in the Hürtgen Forest. There wasn’t a glimmer of sun in this “Green Hell.” The Twelfth endured perpetual darkness in a landscape of tree trunks often a hundred feet high, with foliage that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Sonny had marched into a monstrous fairy tale close to the German border. There wasn’t enough space between tree trunks for a tank, a jeep, or a Dirty Gertie to get through, except on the rough forest roads and fire trails, which were all booby-trapped and a sniper’s paradise, a perfect “serenade” for an ambush. Sonny’s headquarters was a farmer’s hut at the edge of Hürtgen, on the Belgian side of the border.

  The Krauts had pillboxes planted everywhere in the foliage, and the forest floor was perilous ground, seeded with land mines known as “Bouncing Bettys,” that could rip your balls right off. And that’s why dogfaces of Sonny’s division walked about with their helmets cupped between their legs. But the treetops in Hürtgen were just as vicious. German artillery exploding in a treetop would rain down shards of wood as nasty as razor blades and hot scraps of metal that could dig into a dogface’s belly, arms, and back, and ruin him for life.

  The Allied advance had been stopped in this fairy-tale forest of Hansel and Gretel. Sonny didn’t have one prisoner of war to interrogate, one Belgian Nazi, or fascist banker from Luxembourg. The well was dry. All he had was the constant hoot of night owls. He sat near a hooded hurricane lamp and worked on his Holden Caulfield novel. It was like raising the dead, since he had already established in an earlier tale that Holden Caulfield didn’t survive one of the Allied assaults in the Pacific. And then a creature in camouflage green and gray entered the hut with skeletal eyes and a skeletal face. It was Blunt, whom Sonny hadn’t seen since Paris. Blunt had navigated the secret corridors of the CIC, and was a lieutenant colonel now, with a light colonel’s oak leaf on his shoulder. And Sonny had thought he’d never last, ever since that first day on Utah Beach.

  Blunt was staring at the returned packet on Sonny’s writing table. “Salinger, it never even crossed the Channel.”

  “What do ya mean? It has ‘Addressee Unknown’ marked all over it.”

  “I inked that myself, kid. You’re CIC. You can’t send a package to a prisoner of war. It could be encrypted.”

  Sonny’s mouth twitched. “Encrypted with what? It has Hemingway’s signature.”

  Blunt laughed with a mouthful of crooked teeth. “That blusterer with his fake militia? You couldn’t even deliver him from the goddamn Ritz.”

  “Come on, Colonel. Hem is out of your hair.”

  But the skeleton in his camouflage suit wasn’t satisfied. “He’s an insult to the CIC…. And you had baron de Boeldieu slip away from the Sphinx.”

  “Slip away? I’ll bet he’s still there with his little army of poules.”

  The skeleton smiled. There wasn’t a pinch of fat on his face. “The baron’s with us now. We purchased all his rights and privileges. I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have at my table. We couldn’t have fed Paris without Boeldieu.”

  “That’s grand,” Sonny said. “How did you enjoy your torture table on the avenue Foch?”

  Blunt revealed his crooked teeth again. “Don’t knock it, kid. The SS will soon be working for us.”

  Sonny looked up from his manuscript. He wanted to rip off the oak leaf and have Blunt swallow it. “Is that what this war is all about? A horse race between opposing counterintelligence teams?”

  “It would be,” Blunt said, “if we didn’t have the Hürtgen Forest in our fucking way. All our intelligence is crap. We’re dug in for the duration. And you won’t have this hut much longer. Some general has fancied it for himself and his staff.”

  Sonny wore a mask of dismay. “I didn’t know we had any generals in the Hürtgen. I thought they’re in Paris with Ike and the rest of the high command.”

  “Don’t get cute,” Blunt said. “And give me your Hemingway.”

  Sonny’s mask of bewilderment was genuine now.

  “The book, the book—the GI paperback,” said Blunt. “I’ll send it off in one of my own pouches and it will get to your Italian prisoner of war.”

  The CIC lieutenant colonel plucked the parcel off Sonny’s writing table and left the hut, a haunted creature in his camouflage suit. Sonny couldn’t get back to his novel. He listened to the owls and pretended that the eerie space between every hoot was the halting rhythm of his sentences. But he still couldn’t get back to Holden Caulfield, dead or alive.

  2.

  THE ALLIES HAD TO TAKE ONE TREE AT A TIME, one machine-gun nest, one German bunker. The Krauts had been here before—they withdrew from the forest and then returned. They recognized every inch of the terrain. They were dug in on the hilltops, and could read every one of the Allied positions, even in the thick foliage. It was like a bunch of belligerent boys battling a band of wandering, footloose children. That’s what the Twelfth had become in the Hürtgen Forest—children.

  Sonny lived in a foxhole now, nearby Corporal Benson and several newbies, since the Twelfth had nothing but raw recruits. Most of the regiment had been wiped out in this Green Hell. Sonny survived because of the woolen socks his mother knit for him every week. The weather had gone fierce by the middle of November. There was a whipping rain that left mountains of mud, and not a single pair of overshoes had arrived from the Quartermaster Corps. Sonny shared whatever woolen socks he had left with the corporal and the newbies in their foxholes.

 
; “Sarge,” the newbies said, “your mom’s a saint.”

  “Not at all, but she does knit a mean pair of woolen socks.”

  Some of the newbies didn’t make it. The constant mortar attacks and flying shrapnel and shards of wood from the treetops drove them half insane. They sat shivering in Miriam Salinger’s socks, their heads under a blanket.

  “I can’t cut it, Sarge. The pounding never stops.”

  Sonny had grown deaf in one ear from the constant barrage, and though he was now his squad leader, he still didn’t have the authority to send a dogface back to the rear lines with a bad case of the shivers. There were no more medics in this part of the forest. They’d all been wiped out by enemy fire, since they had to move around a lot, seeking out the wounded and dogfaces who had grown hysterical and had lost their senses under attack. Sonny had to soothe them back to sanity.

  “You’ll be all right, soldier. Just breathe hard and think of Betty Grable.”

  Sonny and the corporal were in a parade of foxholes for misfits. Somehow they had to survive.

  “Private Markowitz, you’ll do fine.”

  He peeked under the blanket and saw the glaze in the boy’s eyes. He didn’t have much choice. He slapped the private twice, and that glaze vanished.

  “If you sit there like that, soldier, you’ll die.”

  “But I’m scared, Sarge, I’m so scared.”

  “We’re all scared,” Sonny said. “This is the Green Hell. The Krauts own this forest. And we have to take it back.”

  They’d become a bunch of tree huggers. That was the only way to defend themselves against the flying debris, or else they built a log roof over their foxholes. But the Krauts had their own spotters, and such roofs were easy to find. Major Oliver, the boy wonder from the Citadel, was still commander of E Company. He’d put Sonny in charge of a rifle platoon, since Sonny and Corporal Benson were the only noncoms he had left. He had no medics, no scouts, no artillery forward observer, just dogfaces with swollen feet, their M1s, and a few rifle grenades. And he was always eager to jump off with his ragged riflemen and overrun some Kraut entrenchment. But the problem was that half his boys were retreads, rear-echelon clerks who’d been sent to the front and could barely fire an M1. And such retreads were utterly unreliable under fire. They were liable to shoot up their own squad. And so Sonny had a double burden—the retreads and the seasoned Krauts, with their own forward observers, who could spot every rifleman in E Company, even in that dense wilderness. They could observe them through the damn needles of the white pines.