by James R Benn
Dust from the departing column settled around me as I continued the check of our jeep, busying myself so I wouldn’t fly off the handle if Harding came by. Our gas tank was topped off, and we had a spare jerry can of fuel. A SCR-694 radio was installed in the rear seat, which ought to give us a range of fifteen miles on a good day. Rations and water took up the rest of the back, along with a few cartons of Chesterfields, always useful for loosening tongues. Extra ammo and a bag of grenades. Everything we needed for a meaningless yet potentially violent jaunt through the French countryside.
I spotted Big Mike coming my way and pretended to check the radio frequencies.
“Billy, I got something,” he said.
“Spare me,” I said. “I don’t need a pep talk. Let’s just get this charade over with.”
“Hey, don’t take it out on me,” Big Mike said. He stopped short, and moved to check his own jeep, outfitted the same as mine. “Who knew this guy would go nuts and slice up two people? It don’t make sense. How could Fassier, or Faucon, or whatever he calls himself, survive this long as a double agent if he’s that hot-headed?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “It couldn’t have been predicted, but that doesn’t make it right, letting him go like this.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Billy. I might have a line on him,” Big Mike said, his voice nearly a whisper.
“Okay, spill,” I said, leaning against his jeep, on the lookout for Harding.
“Jules was talking with Jarnac when I told him we’d be leaving in a coupla minutes. It looked like Jarnac was puttin’ the screws to the kid, but I couldn’t make out a thing. So, I grabbed Kaz and told him to saunter by for an earful of French,” Big Mike said, his eyes lighting up with the cloak and dagger stuff. It was nice to see someone was enjoying himself. “Turns out, Jarnac was pressing Jules on anything he might remember about Fassier. You know, just like a cop asking for the smallest detail that maybe didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.”
“Standard interrogation stuff,” I said. As a Detroit bluecoat, Big Mike would know that better than most. “He come up with anything?”
“Yeah. Beaulieu. It’s a village due east of here. Jules recalled that Fassier went there twice back when he first became part of his young Commie unit. Never said why, never went with anyone. But the first time he came back with a ham, then a wheel of cheese.”
“The kind of thing you’d bring back from visiting family in the country,” I said.
“That’s what we’re thinking,” Big Mike said. “Of course, it could be he met his Kraut contact, and came away with chow for his troubles, but there’s one way to find out.”
“I’ll check the map,” I said, glad to have any kind of clue, and wondering what I’d do if it panned out.
“Thought you might,” Big Mike said. “I don’t like this any better than you do, Billy, but we can’t let Sam know what we’re up to. The brass is pressuring him for results on this one, and I don’t want to get him into hot water.”
“No reason to worry him,” I said, giving Big Mike a wink. “And if Fassier disappears without a trace, the brass couldn’t blame the colonel. It’s a dangerous world out there.”
“We’re on the same page,” he said. “One other thing. When I asked Jules what he and Jarnac were going on about, he didn’t give up the story about Beaulieu. He claimed he still didn’t really believe Fassier could be a traitor, and that’s what they were arguing about.”
“Seems like we can’t fully trust him,” I said. “He seems like a decent guy, but his loyalties might be to the FTP first and the rest of us second.”
“Third,” Big Mike said. “I’d put Marie-Claire first. He was upset about her going off with Emilie and la Croix. They had a bit of a fight and then made up with a big smooch.”
“He’s smart to put her in the lead spot,” I said. “How’re you going to handle him as your passenger? He might get suspicious with you not going off on your own after Fassier.”
“I told him it was standard procedure. If the bad guy spots the first vehicle, he might think he outsmarted us and take to the road. Then we come along and have him boxed in.”
“Might actually come to that,” I said, looking around for Kaz and spotting Jules making his way to the jeep. “I’m going to find Kaz, then we’ll head out.”
I checked in the salon, which was empty except for a GI scrubbing blood stains from the tile floor, mopping up red froth mingled with stale coffee.
Something caught my eye. At the corner of the table, one brass thumbtack. It must have fallen from the map when Fassier went after Bernard. It was the same kind of tack as the one still attached to a corner of the map. I picked it up, the GI lazily mopping up the last of the stain. I held it in my palm where it rattled around as the shakes came back to my right hand.
“Can I help you, Captain?” he asked, setting the mop in his bucket.
“No, you go ahead,” I said, distracted as I tried to think through the sequence of events. Was Fassier clutching the map when Dujardin came after him? Or did he drop it so he could use both hands, one for the knife and the other to grab Dujardin and drive him against the wall?
The GI went to lift the coffee urn, the one that hadn’t been overturned. A heavy clunk sounded when he moved it.
“Hold on,” I said, motioning for him to set it down. I lifted the lid and removed the container that held wet coffee grounds. Inside the urn was a dagger. The tip, caked in blood, protruded a few inches above the last of the coffee.
“Holy,” the GI said. “I was gonna drink some of that.”
I told him to dump the joe before anyone else had the same idea. I dried off the knife on the tablecloth as I considered what this meant about the sequence of events. I’d assumed McKuras had seen Dujardin being killed and ran to alert us, with the killer catching up and silencing him. But the blade had been cleaned on McKuras’s sleeve, and there wasn’t much blood on him anyway. So why would the killer go back and hide the knife near Dujardin’s body?
McKuras had to have been first. He saw Fassier taking the map. Fassier ran him down and went out through the salon, encountering Dujardin. Did Dujardin see the map? His killing was bloodier. Fassier was about to go out the front door to his vehicle, and didn’t have time to clean the knife, so he just popped it into the coffee urn.
But why?
At that point, he was almost home free. He could have dropped it and walked out.
Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe he’d tried to clean the blade on McKuras, but it was too bloody. By this time, he’d be panicked. He’d thought all he had to do was swipe a map, but a few seconds later he’d killed two guys up close. That’s enough to shake anyone. For whatever reason, he stashed the blade in the urn on his way out. It didn’t make sense, but people do strange things during an unintended double homicide.
I left the odor of coppery blood and soured coffee behind and searched for Kaz. I spotted Harding in an office, field telephone to his ear. I ignored him, or he ignored me, it was hard to tell. I turned down a corridor and nearly bumped into Kaz, who quickly stuffed something in his pocket.
“Hey, where’ve you been?” I said. “We’re ready to hit the road.”
“I was visiting the medical section,” Kaz said. “I wanted some aspirin.” He patted his pocket, setting off a rattle of pills in tin.
“You feeling okay?” I asked, as we walked through the maze of hallways filled with scurrying clerks and earnest officers.
“A headache is all,” Kaz said. “I’ve been tired as well. A rest would do us both good, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. A soft bed and the absence of corpses would be a nice start,” I said. “But are you sure you’re up to this?”
“Certainly,” Kaz said, as we stepped out onto the terrace washed with the summer sun. “It is not as if we will be exerting ourselves, after all.”
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p; “Big Mike told me about Beaulieu,” I said, stopping to raise my face to the sun, letting the warmth wash over me.
“There may be some exertion then,” Kaz said, a sighing weariness hanging off each word.
“We could accidently run into Fassier,” I said.
“And not let him go,” Kaz said. “That would give up the game. Big Mike agrees?”
“As long as it doesn’t put Colonel Harding in the hot seat,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I have managed to develop a callousness about death I never considered possible,” Kaz said. “Having seen so much of it. But that does not hold true for murder. It is a crime against nature to murder a man in wartime. It robs him of the chance of surviving it.”
“Okay. So, we roll into Beaulieu and see what happens. But if you’re sick, maybe you should rest up. I could go out with Big Mike and Jules. Now that we have a lead, one jeep is as good as two.”
“Just try to leave me behind,” Kaz said, slapping me on the arm and giving me a crooked grin, the scar that split his face anchored in despair. It had been more than two years since the explosion that opened his face down to the cheekbone and killed his one true love. Daphne Seaton was never far from his mind, and some days it seemed he ached to join her. Less so now that he had hopes of finding his sister alive, but I’d grown so used to worrying about his hold on living and breathing that I was always on the lookout for the black dog of depression. Ordering him to stay behind and rest up was an option, but I preferred to keep my eye on him. The hope of his sister’s survival was a damn fine thread to hold his life together. That had been my job since Daphne’s death, and I wasn’t about to relinquish it over a headache.
“Then take your aspirin. And you might want to hold on to this,” I said. I gave him the dagger I’d discovered. “We might actually run into the guy who owns it.”
I gave him the rundown on finding the knife on the way to the jeep and Big Mike’s story for Jules about them tailing us.
“We may well run into Monsieur Jarnac and his men,” Kaz said. “He was pressing poor Jules about any clue he might have.”
“Well, poor Jules failed to tell Big Mike about Beaulieu, so we need to watch out for him,” I said. “There might be something else he isn’t telling us, which worries me.” Right now, everything worried me. I worried about two dead bodies, a phony mission that might get us killed, acres of rotting corpses out in the Falaise Pocket, and my right hand, which quivered like the last leaf in a stiff autumn breeze.
We walked around the corner of the château to find the drive crowded with men and machinery. Staff cars and other vehicles were pulled in around our jeeps, and a crowd of enlisted men had gathered around a gaggle of officers on the steps to the entrance.
“It’s General Eisenhower,” one of the GIs said to us, a look of awe plastered over his face.
I spotted the general, standing near his car, hands in his pockets, chatting with Colonel Harding. He caught my eye and gave the smallest of nods. I stood back, waiting for him to move through the crowd, leaving the officers behind, giving the GIs his trademark Ike grin, asking where they were from, and getting a laugh when he asked if Georgie Patton was treating them well.
It was pure Uncle Ike.
He finally made it over to us, the rest of the men sensing he was done gabbing. He returned a sharp salute from Big Mike and asked him if he was having any trouble keeping me and Kaz in line.
“These guys? No problem, General,” Big Mike said. He introduced Jules, whose eyes grew wide as Uncle Ike shook his hand and praised the work of the Resistance.
“Lieutenant Kazimierz,” Uncle Ike said, grasping Kaz’s hand. “I understand you were with the Poles on Hill 262. You must be tremendously proud of the stand they made.”
“Yes, General. No disrespect meant, but it was good to fight with my own people,” Kaz said, standing a little straighter. “And of course, Billy was with me.”
“As I’ve been informed. I’m inclined to overlook your liberal interpretation of orders, Lieutenant, given the fight was being waged by your countrymen. But your captain here has no such excuse,” he said, his eyes narrowing as he took in mine. “I need the both of you. You’re vital to the war effort.”
“Sorry, General,” I said. “I honestly didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re both unhurt,” Uncle Ike said, shaking a Lucky out of a pack and lighting up. “Walk with me a moment, William.”
Uncle Ike had a way of being open with everyone and at ease in a crowd. As they did today, I’ve seen GIs gather around him, all laughs and delight, totally at ease with the most senior American officer in the European Theater of Operations. Even the way he stuck his hands in his pockets, in violation of strict army regulations on the subject, let guys know he wasn’t about to go chickenshit on them.
But he could also close himself off. Like now, with his shoulders hunched and a smoke between his fingers, strolling beside me. Men melted away, sensing the public appearance was over and probably wondering who the hell this captain was whispering with Ike.
“I came through Falaise,” he said. “I wanted to see Hill 262 for myself. On the way here, we stopped to walk through parts of the pocket. My God, William, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Me either, Uncle Ike.” I watched him draw on his Lucky like it held an elixir which might soothe his senses after the madness he’d witnessed.
“It was something out of Dante,” he said. “It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.”
He ground out the cigarette on the crushed stone driveway and immediately lit up another. I couldn’t bear to tell him we’d driven over those bodies.
“We should be celebrating a victory,” I said. “But it doesn’t seem right somehow.”
“If that scene is what our victories will look like, we need to end this war as soon as possible,” he said. “Otherwise the entire continent will be laid waste. I shudder to think how many innocent French civilians were caught up in that slaughter. Whole villages were shattered and burned. I don’t even know how we can clean up that battlefield before disease takes over.”
“How many dead?” I asked, unable to put a number to the carnage I’d seen.
“Intelligence estimates from ten to fifteen thousand Germans killed in that valley of death,” he said. “Perhaps up to fifty thousand captured. Massive losses in equipment. Those troops who did escape the pocket made it out mostly on foot, a demoralized, exhausted mass of men.”
“Good. I hope they don’t have a chance to regroup,” I said.
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you, William. I’m aware of the deception campaign Colonel Harding has put together. It’s a nice little charade, and it may lead the Germans away from our intended line of advance.”
“Around Paris,” I said.
“Yes. Everyone and his brother wants us to take Paris. General de Gaulle insists upon it. But I’m not going there simply to satisfy French honor. If we can sweep around the city and smash the German forces before they regroup, it may hasten the end of the war. And if they retreat into Paris, then they’ll have created their own POW camp for the next few months.”
“But what about the civilians in Paris, Uncle Ike?”
“You saw what happened to civilians in the Falaise Gap, William! My God, they were wiped out. If we can avoid another scene like that on French ground, I’m all for it. The French in Paris may suffer hunger, but they won’t be living in ruins, at least. There are no easy answers in this war, believe me.”
I did.
“We’ll do our best, Uncle Ike.”
What else could I say?
“I know you will, William. It may seem a bit foolish to go after a spy not to catch him, but do your best to fail at it very visibly, okay?”
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“Well, Uncle Ike, then I won’t do my best,” I said, giving the Supreme Commander a quick wink.
“That’s the spirit, William. Now I’ve got to see Georgie Patton. Is my tie on straight?”
I wasn’t in the mood for jokes, but I did laugh out loud at that one.
Uncle Ike and his entourage had gone into the château. Big Mike and Jules went in search of coffee and doughnuts to kill some time while we got a head start. That left me and Kaz.
Me, Kaz, and my guilty conscience.
Now I’d promised Uncle Ike I’d do my best to carry out the deception plan. I didn’t have the guts to tell Kaz, so I had no idea what the hell was going to happen.
“Are we going anywhere, Billy?” Kaz asked from the passenger seat.
“Yeah,” I said, giving him a glance. He rubbed his eyes and pulled down the brim of his service cap. His skin was pale, paler than usual. Out of the sunlight, ashen would have been the perfect description. “You ready?”
He waved a hand toward the road. I took that as a yes.
I started the jeep, noticing my right hand tremble as I took the wheel.
“We make the perfect pair for a false mission,” Kaz said, looking at my hand, which I kept firmly clasped on the wheel. “You’ve had a shaky hand since we came off that hill.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Like your headache. Forget about it. We’re heading out on the road, like the Cisco Kid and Pancho.”
“Who?”
“Western caballeros,” I said, easing the jeep down the long driveway. “Didn’t you ever go to the Saturday matinees as a kid?”
“My aunt took me to the opera in Warsaw often,” Kaz said. “I don’t recall any Spanish cowboys onstage.”