Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  It was Skorzeny who rescued Mussolini from La Maddalena, an obscure island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, with his own company of gliders and SS paratroopers. The gliders swooped down on La Maddalena. Skorzeny’s commandos marched into Mussolini’s hotel and brought him to Berlin without having to fire a shot. Skorzeny himself had planned every detail of the rescue mission.

  Now Hitler relied on Scarface to infiltrate the Allies in the Ardennes. He gave the giant his own castle in Oranienburg, Schloss Friedenthal, outside Berlin, where Otto could train his volunteers and recruits in Kommando tactics. They all had some basic skill in English, and a few of them were actual linguists. Schloss Friedenthal seemed like the Kraut equivalent of Fort Holabird, where Sonny himself had trained after joining the CIC. But these commandos had much of Scarface’s own mischief in their blood. They were murderers as much as counter-intelligence agents and spies. They would become the heart and soul of Operation Greif—or Grab—an attempt to destabilize the Americans in the Ardennes. As such, they were given captured American uniforms and jeeps. They spent hours watching Hollywood films, such as My Friend Flicka and Sergeant York, to learn the American idiom and use of slang. And they were smuggled across the border, four commandos to a jeep, as the Kraut panzer divisions advanced into a salient of the Ardennes, creating an ominous wrinkle in the American lines.

  The havoc was immediate. These commandos cut telephone wires, slaughtered MPs, led Allied convoys astray, and stalled military traffic, until Lieutenant Colonel Blunt himself made the connection between such mishaps and Otto Skorzeny.

  “It’s the giant. I’m convinced of it. It’s a Skorzeny trick. It has all his fingerprints.”

  Forty jeeps had slipped through, at least forty. They seemed to know the current passwords. But none of these commandos had mastered the idiom of baseball. And that’s how Sonny and his mates at the CIC tripped them up, though it took persistent cunning. The CIC established checkpoints, manned them day and night. But Sonny couldn’t stop every damn bird colonel and his retinue in a jeep. He would have caused havoc of his own. And some of these colonels didn’t know their baseball any better than the Krauts. So he had to look for a suspicious flick of an eye, or a mismatched uniform on the driver. And then he would pull the jeep over to the side of the road, with Corporal Benson and some other CIC man clutching a submachine gun.

  His first catch is what stuck in his mind—four overconfident Krauts.

  “The Brownies of St. Louis, yes,” said the trick lieutenant who sat next to the driver. This one, it seems, had memorized whatever baseball he could at Schloss Friedenthal. “Georgie McQuinn at first base.”

  “And who’s on second?”

  The trick lieutenant pawed his chin. “On the second base sits someone I can’t recall, Sergeant. But I am not such an addict.”

  “Get out of the jeep,” Sonny said, with his .45 in the trick lieutenant’s face. “And no fancy moves.”

  Of course, they were a little foolish, Skorzeny’s commandos. The lieutenant wore an armband with a swastika beneath his field jacket. Perhaps it was to convince his brothers that he was a genuine commando once he crossed the German lines again—after all, the CIC could have played the same trick. They knew their Deutsch. They could have pretended to be Skorzeny’s fellow commandos, members of Operation Greif. And so the Greifers needed some sign of certainty. And that’s what betrayed them.

  Even while the Krauts advanced deeper into the Ardennes, and the Allies were in disarray, Major Oliver mocked Skorzeny. He had to give up his flamethrower. He couldn’t command a company in the middle of a retreat while he had a hose in his hands and that metal hump on his back.

  “The giant’s a joke. Do ya know how many of his missions misfired? That Greifer didn’t really grab Mussolini. The Guineas gave him away. The soldiers guarding Mussolini were on Hitler’s payroll—pure fascists. We’ll catch every Kraut jeep that got through the lines. And we’ll also catch the giant. I hear he’s in the Ardennes.”

  And while Sonny stumbled in the snow, during the worst December in recorded history, as the temperature dropped to ten below, he was on the lookout for the big prize—Otto Skorzeny, who might have obscured his scar with a muffler, but not his gargantuan height. The CIC had the best spotters on the western front, hawkeyes, every one, yet Skorzeny couldn’t be found—not in a jeep, not on the battlefield, with all its violent tugs and pulls.

  The Greifers had had their little victory. You couldn’t always trust a GI guarding some gate. He could have been one of Skorzeny’s men planted there. If he stuttered over the current password—Quicksilver or Big Blue—Sonny had to arrest the poor guy and take him behind the lines to an interrogation center. It took valuable time when they had none to give. And so this battle in the Ardennes had become Skorzeny’s war, no matter what the major said.

  “We have to catch the fat fuck,” Sonny muttered, but he couldn’t. Skorzeny had become more than a myth. He was as relentless and mysterious as a snowdrift in the Ardennes.

  And then a huge lump of a man with a scar on his left cheek wandered out of the snow.

  “I’m lost, son,” he said as he tottered about. Schnapps, Sonny told himself. Scarface was a notorious tippler. He didn’t have the slightest German accent, but he must have been schooled by half a dozen linguists.

  “What’s the password for this sector, sir?”

  “How the fuck would I know?” the giant grumbled. “I’m Colonel Darl from Division.”

  “And I’m Minnie Mouse. You’ll have to come with me.”

  They were challenged half a dozen times as they marched into a blizzard. But Sonny had the password for each sector. The big guy cursed and complained.

  “Can’t help you, buddy,” said one of the military policemen. “This boy is with counterintel.”

  But it was quite different when they arrived at CIC. Major Oliver happened to be inside the center, and he saluted the big guy. “Sorry, sir, the sergeant is overzealous at times.” And he whispered in Sonny’s ear. “That’s Darl of Division, you idiot.” And then he went back to Darl.

  “Would you care for a snifter, sir? It’s cold as a witch’s tit in this damn sector.”

  He handed Colonel Darl a bit of brandy in a paper cup. Darl tossed back the brandy, shook his head, cried “Hiyaaaah!” and stared at Sonny.

  “Our lines are crumbling everywhere,” he said, “and I have to deal with shit like this.”

  Then he wandered out of the center and into the blizzard, as lost as he’d ever been.

  “Salinger,” the major said, “you don’t arrest a guy like that. He could wreck our entire company with one command.”

  “But isn’t he Skorzeny’s double … with that scar?”

  “No,” the major said. “He doesn’t look like Skorzeny at all.”

  3.

  THEY WERE STRANDED, ISOLATED IN THE SNOW, company separated from company; the Twelfth could not hold its ragged, invisible line. E Company was all alone. The Krauts advanced into the woods in their snow-white battle suits like a band of sleepwalking ghosts. Some of them were children. Sonny was amazed. There were boys of fourteen and fifteen, and they looked like pitted old men. They were marching to Antwerp, an Antwerp of the mind. Hitler threw his last resource at the Allies—his Children’s Brigade. He’d nurtured them for this battle, fed them, outfitted them in wool and white fur. Children and old men, with two divisions of seasoned warriors and seven rocket brigades, had created a wedge in the Allies’ imaginary wall on either side of Echternach. The so-called battle lines were “fluid.”

  You couldn’t afford to fall asleep in your foxhole. Without some movement, some scrambling about, you’d freeze to death in this subzero weather. The wounded didn’t survive. Sonny had gone from interrogator to rifleman in a wisp. He knew that some of his buddies were trapped inside the walls of Echternach. It had become a German stronghold, or “iron fist,” as they liked to call it. But the Allies bombarded Echternach until the ramparts no longer stood—there were great w
ounds in the outer wall. The watchtower was gone. The house on the rue des Ramparts where Sonny and the corporal had stayed was now a tiny hill of rubble. Sonny hoped that Frau Schmit and her husband had survived. He’d promised the couple that he’d come back for them…. It had become a battleground of hallucinations—soldiers sighted who were never there. Entire columns seemed to drift out of the snowfall and then vanish in a blink. The boys of E Company, whatever was left of them, those who hadn’t succumbed to trench foot and frostbite, celebrated Christmas in their foxholes—with K rations they were lucky to have. Sonny thought of the Christmases he’d had at Schrafft’s with Miriam, Sol, and his big sister, Doris, who hadn’t been married at the time. Doris despaired of ever finding a husband.

  “I’m twenty-one,” she said, “and have a look. Not even an engagement ring.”

  “You’re a child,” Miriam muttered. “Eat your turkey leg.”

  It was their annual feast—almost a ritual. Sonny was wearing his bar mitzvah suit on this occasion—slate gray. Yes, he’d been bar mitzvahed in this half-Jewish world of the Salingers. His father, the seller of pork and ham, had read bits and pieces of the Torah with him.

  Doris had dark eyes and looked a lot like Sonny’s older twin. She was morose as she watched Miriam devour her lobster New-burg and creamed cauliflower.

  “But that isn’t kosher, Mother dear. And you’re at the same table with the bar mitzvah boy.”

  “Doris,” Sol said, gritting his teeth, “stop making a nuisance of yourself.” He wore a Swank tiepin and cuff links made of solid silver. He had a silver mustache, and his hair was silver, too. That’s how Sonny recalled him—Sol, the silvery man.

  “Then tell Sonny to strip and take off that morbid undertaker’s suit. We are a wonderful family of Gentile Jews.”

  Sonny adored his sister, but Doris’ dark eyes had all the menace of harpoons. No one was safe around Doris Salinger, not even Sonny, and she adored him, too.

  “Jesus, Sonny, don’t just sit there. Take off that damn gray rag.”

  “Rag?” Sol repeated. “Rag? That suit didn’t come off any rack. It was handmade. Cost me a fortune. Goldfine’s a genius.”

  “Who’s Goldfine?” Doris asked.

  “My tailor,” Sol said. And he appealed to the bar mitzvah boy. “Get up, son, and slap your sister in the face.”

  Sonny didn’t move. He’d finished his main course—chicken à la king—and was digging into his butterscotch sundae with a very long spoon. He stopped eating and stared at the enormous spiraling S stitched onto his napkin, which was the hallmark of Schrafft’s. The immaculate marble floor had a black-and-white-checkerboard pattern. The lamp on the table had a blue shade.

  “Papa dear,” Doris said, “why didn’t you invite the rabbi to join us? He can recite the Torah while we devour the family Christmas feast.”

  “Sonny,” Sol said, “slap your sister in the face.”

  Sonny stood up and slapped Doris with his partially cupped hand to soften the blow. Then he returned to the table and finished his butterscotch sundae, while Doris sat there like a mute. But all the relish was gone. His hand was shaking. He couldn’t spoon the butterscotch properly. The sundae was sickeningly sweet.

  He still had the taste in his mouth, inside a foxhole in the Ardennes. He’d always remember the defeated look on his sister’s face, that sense of eternal doom.

  A man with a blanket over his head moved all along the crooked line of foxholes. It was Oliver himself, with snowflakes on his lip. “Saddle up, you guys.”

  “Where are we going, Fireboy?” asked one of the newbies.

  Oliver grimaced at him from under the blanket. “Shut your mouth and saddle up, soldier.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Oliver, sir.”

  But Sonny knew where they were going—back to Echternach to flush out whatever Krauts were left. The Wehrmacht lacked a Schwerpunkt in their own military parlance—an attainable goal, as Sonny had been taught by his CIC instructors. The Krauts couldn’t get to Antwerp with their rockets, their bicycle boys, and their baby shock troops; they couldn’t cut off Ike’s main source of supply. No longer the invincibles of 1940, they didn’t have a real destination in 1944. By Christmas, they were floundering in the forest they had owned these past four years.

  “And don’t forget to piss on your rifles, or they’ll never thaw,” the major growled, an icicle forming on his chin.

  And so Sonny stood there with the rest of his buddies, unbuttoned his fly in the numbing cold, and peed on his M1. Not even the stoutest of them could form a steady stream in this bewildering weather.

  They packed their gear and climbed out of the foxholes, one by one, following the major, who led the attack. They discovered a few shadows in the thick strings of fog.

  “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” the major shouted. They’d stumbled upon several scouts who’d lost touch with their own company. And these scouts attached themselves to the major and his men. Like the rest of them, they’d ripped off the inner lining of their helmets and used it as a mask with eyeholes. But Sonny had ice on his eyebrows, and his cheeks burned from the blasts of cold.

  Still, they marched through the white pines. Some of them disappeared into a snowdrift and had to be carried out feetfirst. They couldn’t afford to stop and stand in place. The terrain was much too treacherous. They found frozen dogfaces sitting in a disabled jeep; the dogfaces had all turned blue, with blue beards and blue mustaches. One of the major’s men wanted to take a mitten off a frozen GI.

  “Soldier,” the major said, “that’s sacrilege. Leave the dead in peace.”

  “But he won’t miss that mitten, sir, and I will.”

  “We’re not grave robbers,” the major said.

  “But it ain’t a grave, sir. It’s a jeep. And Graves Registration hasn’t gotten to ’em yet.”

  “Leave that mitten, soldier,” the major said, “or I’ll have you guard the jeep until Graves Registration comes.”

  The wind whipped them along. The major had his compass, but the needle froze.

  “First damn time that’s ever happened.”

  “It’s the Ardennes, sir,” said another newbie.

  Then they saw Echternach. It could have been a miniature Pompeii, a city in ruin, buried in dust, bits of mortar, and black snow rather than volcanic ash. The ramparts looked like rows of rotten teeth. Sonny wondered how many aerial raids Echternach had endured, how many bombardments, how many tons of TNT. All within a swirl of snow and soot.

  They could have been wandering into a pillaged graveyard. The ground itself seemed molten. They marched across a great gap in the outer wall, as if they were jumping off into another world. Whatever buildings still stood were wrapped in the charred remains of Nazi banners. This little town had been the Wehrmacht’s nerve center until a few days ago, where the Nazi warlords had assembled to plot out the details of Hitler’s grand disillusion, that the Allies could be kept forever on the far side of German soil.

  But Sonny did not feel like a conqueror; more like a living shadow—dangerous as ever—that had intruded upon a tiny town and a country caught between bigger, fatter nations with a host of killers and killing machines. Sonny was a killer, too, a reluctant one perhaps, but a killer nonetheless. He did not have Major Oliver’s sense of being on a religious crusade. He hated the Krauts as much as the Krauts hated him. But he mourned the dead fifteen-year-old boys who lay all curled up in mounds of rubble along the rue de la Montagne in their soiled snow-white battle suits, though they had once been as fierce as any soldier and would have ripped out Sonny’s guts if they’d ever had half a chance.

  Their bodies were strewn everywhere, mittenless hands outstretched like broken claws, with filthy fingernails. There was no longer a hospital on the rue de l’Hôpital, nothing but snowdrifts and rubble. The inner walls of the old Echternach abbey had been bombed and fire-burnt to the ground. The basilica had been dynamited by the Krauts themselves while they withdrew, yet parts of it remained untouched—it h
ad two arched steeples rather than four. Half the basilica stood. Sonny did not believe in miracles. P-47s flew right past the basilica and didn’t strafe a single window, though Reich commandants and their aides had probably been hiding under the pews before they ran from Echternach.

  The Allies had bombed the old Echternach bridge; it sat half-sunk in the water, like some gnarled monument that reminded Sonny of a monstrous lion’s paw. Where were the inhabitants? They couldn’t be hiding in the rubble. The major and his men had come to a flattened town. Yet Sonny could have sworn that he heard the faint thread of a chant coming from inside this basilica with pieces bitten off.

  He didn’t believe in ghost choirs.

  He stepped across the charred lintel. All the pews had vanished and had been replaced by an entire country of desks and chairs, with wrecked typewriters and Teletype machines with humped backs that reminded Sonny of the fuel tank that Fireboy carried with his flamethrower. This ancient abbey had been the command post of Hitler’s generals until a few days ago. It was overrun with rats. They squealed and ran under the desks with their whiskers and long tails. And still Sonny heard the sound of that choir. It bewildered him. E Company had run out of morphine and he’d taken none for his little wounds and cuts. He’d seen hallucinations in the forest, had conjured up children in their snow-white battle suits, had shot at them a couple of times. But there were no monks or priests in this broken basilica, nothing but gutted Teletype machines and an invasion of rats.

  Yet the chant continued, faint as it was, like a prolonged musical whisper. And it startled him when he said to himself, I’m in Jehovah’s house.

  He walked out onto the grim gray streets of Echternach, with bits of slate on the ground. He could hear the calm wake of the water. It couldn’t reassure him, bring him back to his own destiny as Sargeant Salinger of CIC. The chant was still there.